Source: Saul Friedlaender, Chapter 2 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 41-72.
I
About thirty SA men from Heilbronn arrived in Niederstetten, a small town in south-west Germany, on Saturday, March 25, 1933. Breaking into the few Jewish homes in the area, they took the men to the town hall and savagely beat them while local policemen kept watch at the building entrance. The scene was repeated that morning in neighbouring Creglingen, where the eighteen male Jews found in the synagogue were also herded into the town hall. There the beatings led to the deaths of sixty-seven-year-old Hermann Stern and, a few days later, fifty-three-year old Arnold Rosenfeld.
At the Sunday service the next day, Hermann Umfried, pastor of Niederstetten's Lutheran church, spoke up. His sermon was carefully phrased: It began with standard expressions of faith in the new regime and some negative remarks about Jews. But Umfried then turned to what had happened the previous day: Only authorities are allowed to punish, and all authorities lie under divine authority. Punishment can be meted out only against those who are evil and only when a just sentence has been handed down. What happened yesterday in this town was unjust. I call on all of you to help see to it that the German people's shield of honour may remain unsullied!' When the attacks against Pastor Umfried started, no local, regional, or national church institution dared to come to his support or to express even the mildest opposition to violence against Jews. In January 1934 the local district party leader ( Kreisleiter ) ordered Umfried to resign. Increasingly anguished by the possibility that not only he but also his wife and their four daughters would be shipped off to a concentration camp, the pastor committed suicide.
Eight years and eight months later, at 2:04 P.M. on November 28, 1941, the first transport of Jews left the Niederstetten railroad station. A second batch boarded the train in April 1942, and the third and last in August of that year. Of the forty-two Jews deported from Niederstetten, only three survived 1 .
The boycott of Jewish businesses was the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government. In historian Klaus Scholder's words, during the decisive days around the first of April, no bishop, no church dignitaries, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.' 2 In a radio address broadcast to the United States on April 4, 1933, the most prominent German Protestant clergymen, Bishop Otto Dibelius, justified the new regime's actions, denying that there was any brutality even in the concentration camps and asserting that the boycott - which he called a reasonable defensive measure - took its course amid ΓÇ£calm and order.ΓÇ¥ 3 His broadcast was no momentary aberration. A few days later Dibelius sent a confidential Easter message to all the pastors of his province: My dear Brethren! We all not only understand but are fully sympathetic to the recent motivations out of which the voelkisch movement has emerged. Notwithstanding the evil sound that the term has frequently acquired, I have always considered myself an anti-Semite. One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilisation.' 4
The Catholic Church's reaction the boycott was not fundamentally different. On March 31, at the suggestion of the Berlin cleric Bernhard Lichtenberg, the director of the Deutsche Bank in Berlin and president of the Committee for Inter-Confessional Peace, Oskar Wassermann, asked Adolf Johannes Cardinal Bertram, chairman of the German Conference of Bishops, to intervene against the boycott. Himself reticent about intervening, Bertram set about asking other senior German prelates for their opinions by stressing that the boycott was part of an economic battle that had nothing to do with immediate church interests. From Munich, Michael Cardinal Faulhaber wired Bertram: HOPELESS. WOULD MAKE THINGS WORSE. IN ANY CASE ALREADY DYING DOWN. For Archbishop Conrad Groeber of Freiburg, the problem was merely that converted Jews among the boycotted merchants were also being damaged 5 . Nothing was done.
In a letter addressed at approximately the same time to the Vatican's secretary of state, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, Faulhaber wrote: We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows. It is especially unjust and painful that by this action the Jews, even those who have been baptised for ten and twenty years and are good Catholics, indeed even those whose parents were already Catholics, are legally still considered Jews, and as doctors or lawyers are to lose their positions.' 6
To the clergymen Alois Wurm, founder and editor of the periodical Seele (Soul), who asked why the church did not state openly that people could not be persecuted because of their race, the Munich cardinal answered in less guarded terms: For the higher ecclesiastical authorities, there are immediate issues of much greater importance; schools, the maintaining of Catholic associations, sterilisation are more important for Christianity in our homeland. One must assume that the Jews are capable of helping themselves.' There is no reason to give a pretext to the government to turn the incitement against the Jews into incitement against the Jesuits.' 7
Archbishop Groeber was no more forthcoming when he stated to Robert Leiber, a Jesuit who was to become the confessor of Pius XII: I immediately intervened on behalf of the converted Jews, but so far have had no response to my action... I am afraid that the campaign against Judah will prove costly to us.' 8
The main issue for the churches was one of dogma, particularly with regard to the status of converted Jews and to the links between Judaism and Christianity. The debate had become particularly acute within Protestantism, when, in 1932, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement published its ΓÇ£Guidelines.ΓÇ¥ The relevant theme was a sort of race conscious belief in Christ; race, people and nation as part of a God-given ordering of life.' 9 Point 9 of ΓÇ£Guidelines,ΓÇ¥ for example, reads: In the mission to the Jews we see a serious threat to our people [ Volkstum ]. That mission is the entry way for foreign blood into the body of our Volk ... We reject missions to the Jews in Germany as long as Jews possess the right of citizenship and hence the danger of racial fraud and bastardisation exists... Marriage between Germans and Jews particularly is to be forbidden.' 10
The German Christian Movement had grown in nurturing soil, and it was not by chance that, in the 1932 church elections, it received a third of the vote. The traditional alliance between German Protestantism and German nationalist authoritarianism went too deep to allow a decisive and immediately countervailing force to arise against the zealots intent on purifying Christianity of its Jewish heritage. Even those Protestant theologians who, in the 1920s, had been ready to engage in dialogue with Jews - participating, for example, in meetings organised under the aegis of Martin Buber's periodical, Der Jude - now expressed, more virulently than before, the standard accusations of ΓÇ£PharisaicΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£legalisticΓÇ¥ manifestations of the Jewish spirit. As Buber wrote in response to a particularly offensive article by Oskar A. H. Schmitz published in Der Jude in 1925 under the title ΓÇ£Desirable and Undesirable JewsΓÇ¥: I have once again... noted that there is a boundary beyond which the possibility of encounter ceases and only the reporting of factual information remains. I cannot fight against an opponent who stands on a different plane than.' 11 As the years went by, such encounters became less frequent, and German Protestantism increasingly opened itself to the promise of national renewal and positive Christianity heralded by National Socialism.
The German Christian Movement's ideological campaign seemed strongly bolstered by the election, on September 27, 1933, of Ludwig Mueller, a fervent Nazi, as Reich bishop - that is, as some sort of Fuehrer's co-ordinator for all major issues pertaining to the Protestant churches. But precisely this election and a growing controversy regarding pastors and church members of Jewish origin caused a widening rift within the Evangelical Church.
In an implementation of the Civil Service Law, the synod governing the Prussian Evangelical Church demanded the forced retirement of pastors of Jewish origin or married to Jews. This initiative was quickly followed by the synods of Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Braunschweig, Luebeck, Hesse-Nassau, Tuebingen, and Wuerttemberg 12 . By the early fall of 1933, general adoption of the so-called Aryan paragraph throughout the Reich appeared to be a foregone conclusion. A contrary trend, however, simultaneously made its appearance, with a group of leading theologians issuing a statement on ΓÇ£The New Testament and the Race Question,ΓÇ¥ which clearly rejected any theological justification for adoption of the paragraph 13 and, on Christmas 1933, Pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller (a widely admired World War I hero), founded an oppositional organisation, the Pastors' Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund), whose initial thirteen hundred adherents grew within a few months to six thousand. One of the league's first initiatives was to issue a protest against the Aryan paragraph As a matter of duty, I bear witness that with the use of Aryan laws' within the Church of Christ an injury is done to our common confession of faith.' 14 The Confessing Church was born.
But the steadfastness of the Confessing Church regarding the Jewish issue was limited to support of the rights of non-Aryan Christians. And even on this point Martin Niemoeller made it abundantly clear, for example in his ΓÇ£Propositions on the Aryan QuestionΓÇ¥ (ΓÇ£Saetze zur ArierfrageΓÇ¥), published in November 1933, that only theological considerations prompted him to take his position. As he was to state at his 1937 trial for criticism of the regime, defending converted Jews ΓÇ£was uncongenial to him.ΓÇ¥ 15 This perception [that the community of all Christians is a matter to be taken with utter seriousness],' wrote Niemoeller in the ΓÇ£Propositions,ΓÇ¥ requires of us, who as a people have had to carry a heavy burden as a result of the influence of the Jewish people, a high degree of self-denial, so that the desire to be freed from this demand [to maintain one single community with the converted Jews] is understandable... The issue can only be dealt with... if we may expect from the officials [of the Church] who are of Jewish origin... that they impose upon themselves the restraint necessary in order to avoid any scandal. It would not be helpful if today a pastor of non-Aryan origin was to fill a position in the government of the church or had a conspicuous function in the mission to the people.' 16
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's attitude changed over the years, but even in him a deep ambivalence about the Jews as such would remain. The state's measures against the Jewish people are connected... in a very special way with the Church,' he declared with regard to the April boycott. In the Church of Christ, we have never lost sight of the idea that the Chosen People,' who nailed the Saviour of the world to the cross, must bear the curse of the action through a long history of suffering.' 17 Thus it is precisely a theological view of the Jews that seems to have moulded some of Bonhoeffer's pronouncements. Even his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge could not escape the conclusion that in Bonhoeffer's writings a theological anti-Judaism is present.' 18 ΓÇ£Theological anti-JudaismΓÇ¥ was not uncommon within the Confessing Church, and some of its most respected personalities, such as Walter Kuenneth, did not hesitate to equate Nazi and Jewish interpretations of the ΓÇ£Jewish election,ΓÇ¥ as based on race, blood, and Volk , in opposition to the Christian view of election by God's grace 19 . Such comparisons were to reappear in Christian anti-Nazi polemics in the mid-thirties and later.
The ΓÇ£Aryan paragraphΓÇ¥ applied to only twenty-nine pastors out of eighteen thousand; among these, eleven were excluded from the list because they had fought in World War I. The paragraph was never centrally enforced; its application depended on local church authorities and local Gestapo officials 20 . From the churches' viewpoint, the real debate was about principle and dogma, which excluded unconverted Jews. When, in May 1934, the first national meeting of the Confessing Church took place in Barmen, not a word was uttered about the persecutions. This time not even the converted Jews were mentioned 21 .
On the face of it the Catholic Church's attitude toward the new regime should have been firmer than that of the Protestants. The Catholic hierarchy had expressed a measure of hostility to Hitler's movement during the last years of the republic, but this stance was uniquely determined by church interests and by the varying political fortunes of the Catholic Centre Party. The position of many German Catholics toward Nazism before 1933 was fundamentally ambiguous: Many Catholic publicists... pointed to the anti-Christian elements in the Nazi program and declared these incompatible with Catholic teaching. But they went on to speak of the healthy core of Nazism which ought to be appreciated - its reassertion of the values of religion and love of fatherland, its standing as a strong bulwark against atheistic Bolshevism.' 22 The general attitude of the Catholic Church regarding the Jewish issue in Germany and elsewhere can be defined as a ΓÇ£moderate anti-SemitismΓÇ¥ that supported the struggle against ΓÇ£undue Jewish influenceΓÇ¥ in the economy and in cultural life. As Vicar-General Mayer of Mainz expressed it, Hitler in Mein Kampf had appropriately described' the bad influence of the Jews in press, theatre and literature. Still, it was un-Christian to hate other races and to subject the Jews and foreigners to disabilities through discriminatory legislation that would merely bring about reprisals from other countries.' 23
Soon after he took power, and intent on signing a Concordat with the Vatican, Hitler tried to blunt possible Catholic criticism of his anti-Jewish policies an to shift the burden of the arguments onto the church itself. On April 26 he received Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrueck as delegate from the Conference of Bishops, which was meeting at the time. The Jewish issue did not figure on Berning's agenda, but Hitler made sure to raise it on his own. According to a protocol drafted by the bishop's assistant, Hitler spoke warmly and quietly, now and then emotionally, without a word against the church and with recognition of the bishops: I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognised the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognised. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognise the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.' 24 The protocol does not record any response by Bishop Berning.
On the occasion of the ratification of the Concordat, in September 1933, Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli sent a note to the German charge d'affaires defining the church's position of principle: The Holy See takes this occasion to add a word on behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to Christian religion or who are descithe first generation, or more remotely, from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith, and who for reasons known to the Reich government are likewise suffering from social and economic difficulties.' 25 In principle this was to be the consistent position of the Catholic and the Protestant churches, although in practice both submitted to the Nazi : measures against converted Jews when they were racially defined as Jews.
The dogmatic confrontation the Catholic hierarchy took up was mainly related to the religious link between Judaism and Christianity. This position found an early expression in five sermons preached by Cardinal Faulhaber during Advent of 1933. Faulhaber rose above the division between Catholics and Protestants when he declared: We extend our hand to our separated brethren, to defend together with them the holy books of the Old Testament.' In Scholder's words, Faulhaber's sermons were not directed against the practical, political anti-Semitism of the time, but against its principle, the racial anti-Semitism that was attempting to enter the Church.' 26 Undoubtedly this was the intention of the sermons and the main thrust of Faulhaber's argumentation, but the careful distinctions established by the cardinal could mislead his audience about his and the church's attitude toward the Jews living among them.
So that I may be perfectly clear and preclude any possible misunderstanding,' Faulhaber declared, let me begin by making three distinctions. We must first distinguish between the people of Israel before and after the death of Christ. Before the death of Christ, during the period between the calling of Abraham and the fullness of time, the people of Israel were the vehicle of Divine Redemption....It is only with this Israel and the early biblical period that I shall deal in my Advent sermons.' The cardinal then described God's dismissal of Israel after Israel had not recognised Christ, adding words that may have sounded hostile to the Jews who did not recognise Christ's revelation, The daughters of Zion received their bill of divorce and from that time forth, Ahasuerus wanders, forever restless, over the face of the earth.' Faulhaber's second theme now followed:
We must distinguish between the Scriptures of the Old Testament on the one hand and the Talmudic writings of post-Christian Judaism on the other.... The Talmudic writings are the work of man they were not prompted by the spirit of God. It is only the sacred writings of pre-Christian Judaism, not the Talmud that the Church of the New Testament has accepted as her inheritance.
Thirdly, we must distinguish in the Old Testament Bible itself between what had only transitory value and what had permanent value.... For the purpose of our subject, we are concerned only with those religious, ethical and social values of the Old Testament which remain as values also for Christianity.' 27
Cardinal Faulhaber himself later stressed that, in his Advent sermons, he had wished only to defend the Old Testament and not to comment on contemporary aspects of the Jewish issue 28 . In fact, in the sermons he was using some of the most common clichés of traditional religious anti-Semitism. Ironically enough, a report of the security service of the SS interpreted the sermons as an intervention in favour of the Jews, quoting both foreign newspaper comments and the Jewish Central Association's newspaper, in which Rabbi Leo Baerwald of Munich had written: We take most pride that it is through us that revelation was given to the world.' 29
Discussion of the Concordat with the Vatican was item 17 on the agenda of the July 14 cabinet meeting. According to the minutes, the Reich chancellor dismissed any debate about the details of the agreement. He expressed the opinion that one should only consider it as a great achievement. The Concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust which was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.' 30
This remark can hardly be interpreted as merely a political ploy aimed at convincing the other members of the government of the necessity of accepting the Concordat without debate, as the fight against world Jewry was certainly not a priority on the conservative ministers' agenda. Thus a chance remark opens an unusual vista on Hitler's thoughts, again pointing toward the trail of his obsession: the ΓÇ£developing struggleΓÇ¥ against a global danger - world Jewry. Hitler, moreover, did indeed consider the alliance with the Vatican as being of special significance in this battle. Is it not possible that the Nazi leader believed that the traditional anti-Jewish stance of the Christian churches would also allow for a tacit alliance against the common enemy, or at least offer Nazism the advantage of an ΓÇ£area of trustΓÇ¥ in the ΓÇ£developing struggleΓÇ¥? Did Hitler not in fact say as much to Bishop Berning? For a brief instant there appears to be an ominous linkage between the standard procedures of politics and the compulsions of myth.
References:
1. Eberhard Roehm and Joerg Thierfelder, Juden-Christen-Deutsche , vol. 1, 1933ΓÇô1935 (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 120ff.
2. Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich , vol. 1, Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen 1918ΓÇô1934 (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), pp. 338ff.
3. Ibid.
4. Wolfgang Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen: Bekennende Kirche und die Juden (Berlin, 1987), p. 42.
5. Akten deutscher Bischoefe ueber die Lage der Kirche 1933ΓÇô45 , vol. 1: 1933ΓÇô1934 , ed. Bernhard Stasiewski (Mainz, 1968), pp. 42n, 43n.
6. Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue (Detroit, 1979), pp. 276ΓÇô77. For the German original see Akten deutscher Bischoefe , vol. 2, p. 54n.
7. Ernst Klee, ΓÇ£Die SA Jesu ChristiΓÇ¥: Die Kirche im Banne Hitlers (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), p. 30.
8. For the quotations see Helmreich, The German Churches , pp. 276ΓÇô77.
9. Klaus Scholder, ΓÇ£Judaism and Christianity in the Ideology and Politics of National Socialism,ΓÇ¥ in Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds., Judaism and Christianity Under the Impact of National Socialism 1919ΓÇô1945 (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 191ff.
10.Quoted in Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The Geman Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1996), p. 23. On November 13, 1933, the leader of the Berlin district of German Christians, one Dr. Krause, declared at a meeting of the movement at the Sportpalast: What belongs to it [the new Christianity] is the liberation from all that is un-German in the ritual and faith, the liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish retribution morals and its stories of cattle dealers and pimps... In the German Volk Church there is no place for people of foreign blood, either at the pulpit or below the pulpit. All expressions of a foreign spirit which have penetrated it... must be expelled from the German Volk Church.' Ulrich Thuerauf, ed., Schulthess Europaeischer Geschichtskalender 74 (1933), p. 244.
11.Quoted in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, ΓÇ£Ambivalent Dialogue: Jewish-Christian Theological Encounter in the Weimar Republic,ΓÇ¥ in Kulka and Mendes-Flohr, Judaism and Christianity , p. 121.
12.Uriel Tal, ΓÇ£Law and Theology: on the Status of German Jewry at the outset of the Third Reich,ΓÇ¥ in Political Theology and the Third Reich (Tel Aviv, 1989), p. 16. The English version of this text appeared as a brochure published by Tel Aviv University, 1982.
13.For the intense theological debates raised by the introduction of the ΓÇ£Aryan paragraph,ΓÇ¥ see ibid.
14.Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich , pp. 612ff.
15.Robert Michael, ΓÇ£Theological Myth, German Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: The Case of Martin Niemoeller,ΓÇ¥ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2 (1987): 112. (The title ΓÇ£Propositions on the Aryan QuestionΓÇ¥ should be considered a euphemism, in the same way as ΓÇ£Aryan paragraphΓÇ¥ in fact meant ΓÇ£Jewish paragraph.ΓÇ¥)
16.Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen , p. 87.
17.Michael, ΓÇ£Theological Myth,ΓÇ¥ p. 113.
18.Ibid.
19.Quoted in Uriel Tal, ΓÇ£On Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany prior to the Holocaust,ΓÇ¥ in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York, 1981), p. 55.
20.RichardGutteridge, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb! The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879ΓÇô1950 (Oxford, 1976), p. 122.
21.Guenther van Norden, ΓÇ£Die Barmen Theologische Erklaerung und die Judenfrage',ΓÇ¥ in Ursula Buettner et al., eds., Das Unrechtsregime , vol. 1, IdeologieΓÇôHerrschaftssystemΓÇôWirkung in Europa (Hamburg, 1986), pp. 315ff.
22.Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York, 1964), p. 17.
23.Ibid., p. 271.
24. Akten deutscher Bischoefe , vol. 1, pp. 100ΓÇô102.
25.Klee to Foreign Ministry, September 12, 1933, Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C , pp. 793ΓÇô794.
26.Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich , p. 660.
27.His Eminence Cardinal Faulhaber, Judaism, Christianity and Germany: Advent Sermons Preached in St. Michael's, Munich, in 1933 (London, 1934), pp. 5ΓÇô6. Faulhaber's argument reflects a long-standing Christian polemic tradition regarding the Talmud. See in particular Amos Funkenstein, ΓÇ£Changes in Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Twelfth Century,ΓÇ¥ in Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkely, Calif., 1993), pp. 172ΓÇô201 and particularly 189ΓÇô96.
28. Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler , p. 262.
29. H30.einz Boberach, ed., Berichte des SD und der Gestapo ueber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland 1934ΓÇô1944 (Mainz, 1971), p. 7. Although as a rule church dignitaries avoided comments regarding the contemporary aspects of the Jewish issue, some local Catholic newspapers drew the attention of their readers to the brutal treatment of the Jews. For example, on May 23, 1933, the Catholic Bamberger Volksblatt explicitly mentioned the death in Dachau of the young local court clerk, Willy Aron, who was Jewish. For the significance of the case, see Norbert Frei, Nationalsozialistische Eroberung der Provinzpresse: Gleichschaltung, Selbstanpassung und Resistenz in Bayern (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 273ΓÇô75.
30. Quoted in Walter Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933ΓÇô1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1957), p. 130.
