Christian Resistance to the Third Reich
In March 1933, less than two months after being sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler made his private opinion of Christianity and its place in his Germany very clear. Nothing would stop him, he declared, 'eradicating Christianity from Germany root and branch. You are either a Christian or a German. You can't be both.'
This was in accord with Hitler's determination to incorporate all elements of the nation into a single body under Nazi leadership. Hitler was concerned with the churches as political agents and organized bodies; he had no interest in questions of religion or faith. Nazism, with its vision of the thousand-year German Reich, was a substitute church that demanded unquestioning adherence to its own dogmas, and would tolerate no rival. Hitler's aim 'was to capture the souls and minds of the German people. Hitler demanded not only obedience but a kind of faith.'
Hitler's privately expressed views on the 'eradication' of Christianity were not the same as his public statements. Officially, the Nazi position since the 1920s had been to attack so-called 'negative' Christianity that weakened the German people, and support 'positive' Christianity, 'which would defend the supremacy of the German people.'
Publicly, Hitler called the churches an integral part of German national life and advocated an agreement between church and state that would allow the two to co-exist and work for the good of Germany. The practical form such policy pronouncements took after 1933 in the field of religion, as in every other department of German life, was a concerted effort to shut the churches out of any form of political activity, to silence any criticism they might offer of the policies of the state, and ideally to bring them under direct Nazi control. The manner in which this policy was applied was different in the case of the Catholic church than it was in the case of the Protestant church, but the aims were the same.
In the case of the Protestant church, the Nazis aimed at the establishment of a Nazified church structure that paralleled the existing churches and was intended ultimately to supplant them. This inevitably placed Protestant Christians in the position of choosing between an understanding of their faith that allowed them to remain within a form of Christianity that was essentially a tool of Nazi purposes, or stand outside any such accommodation and offer resistance. In making that decision individual Christians were in a position in which guidance was available not only from their own consciences and understandings of Christian teachings, but from the official positions of their churches and their leaders. Nazi policies effectively split German Protestantism into a church willing to accept Nazi ideology and become, in effect, a National Socialist State Church, and a shadow church that refused to accept this conclusion. Resistance to the Nazis was inevitably found in the latter group, and it was from their ranks that figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer were to emerge, but this did not equate to the establishment of an anti-Nazi church offering resistance to the regime. The dissident church became the home of the regime's opponents but not an opponent in its own right. Resistance remained an individual matter.
Among the Protestant churches it can be argued that those who looked to their institutional churches for inspiration to resist Hitler and Nazism were disappointed, finding instead compromise and accommodation, and even active support for the regime: 'Hitler did not need to fear any resistance from the Protestant church. It welcomed the "national revolution" all along the line.'
Historians have noted that 'Both historically and theologically the German churches were conditioned to regard themselves as upholders of the established order', that there was a tendency across the churches to speak out in opposition only when the regime directly attacked the churches' own position and a parallel reluctance to speak out on what were seen as issues of secular government, and a widespread approval of the regime among the membership of the churches as well as among their clergy.
As Doris Bergen has pointed out, Hitler and the anti-Nazi pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer were agreed in seeing Christianity and Nazism as profoundly incompatible, but most Christians in Germany did not share this conviction.
The 'Bekennende Kirche' or Confessing Church was founded by Pastor Martin Niemoeller in 1933 under the name Pastors' Emergency League as a direct response to the Nazis' efforts to purge the German Evangelical Church of converted Jews and make the church subservient to the state. It established itself in clear opposition to the...
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