CHURCHES, CHRISTIAN - PROTESTANTISM (Confessing Church) (Lutheranism)
The role played by the Christian churches during the Nazi period is a basic issue in the study of the Holocaust. The destruction of European Jewry occurred on predominantly Christian soil. For the most part, the perpetrators were at least nominally Christian, a great many of the bystanders were practising Christians, and Christian anti-Judaism is a root of the Holocaust.
The Confessing Church
The main branch of Protestantism to support the Nazi persecution of the Jews was the so-called German Christian movement, which formed the radical wing of German Lutheranism. The German Christian movement was soon discredited and was not influential in the implementation of Nazi plans to eradicate Jews. It was condemned by the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which repudiated all Nazi efforts to control its teachings or expel converted Jews from office or membership. Leading figures in the Confessing Church, such as Martin Niemoeller and Otto Dibelius, still maintained the traditional Lutheran antipathy to Jews; and the majority of German Protestants did not challenge the right of the state to discriminate against the Jews, although many shared in the public outrage against the Kristallnacht pogrom. Their illusions about the Nazi regime, and national and political loyalties, meant that protests were made solely in defence of the church's autonomy, or on behalf of Jewish converts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was virtually alone in recognising the centrality of Jewish persecution as an issue for Christians. Although he never abandoned theological anti-Judaism, he was active in organising efforts to enable a limited number of Jews to flee from Germany.
Heinrich Grueber's Rescue Work
The Confessing Church also sponsored the work of Pastor Heinrich Grueber to promote the emigration of Jewish converts to Protestantism. Grueber was sent to a concentration camp in 1940, and further limited rescue efforts moved underground, notably in Wuerttemberg. In 1943, the bishop of Wuerttemberg, Theophil Wurm, made strong, if belated, protests against the mass murder without trial of Jews and others. He urged the abandonment of plans to deport and annihilate those Jews who still remained in Germany. Moral outrage at the murder was a factor in the creation of the German resistance movement (led mainly by Protestants), although the Jews never were a focus of concern for the German churches.
