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  The German Christian Movement spread its views through gatherings and publications of all kinds. Organizers sponsored huge rallies with tens of thousands of the faithful; publicists churned out newspapers, broadsheets, and scholarly monographs. In Sunday-morning sermons all across Germany, pastors preached the movement's call for a church of blood. Lay members propagated antisemitic, chauvinist ideas in the schools, on church councils, and at skat games around the Stammtisch. Through all these efforts, the German Christian Movement both reflected and contributed to the religious and social situation that made the Holocaust possible.

  The German Christians did not merely echo the Nazi assault on Jews and Judaism. Instead they launched their own crusade from within the Protestant churches of Germany. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, they harassed converts from Judaism to Christianity and their families and fought to bar people defined as non-Aryans from the pulpits and pews of German Protestant congregations. In a process that became more brazen as Nazi plans for genocide unfolded, they rejected the canonicity of the Old Testament, denied the Jewish ancestry of Jesus, and expunged Jewish words like hosanna and hallelujah from hymns. As pastors, chaplains, and teachers of religion, they gave their blessing to the German war against the Jews. Instead of a fundamental dichotomy between Christianity and Nazism, German Christians found that components of their religious tradition, even those most closely linked to its Jewish origins, could become weapons in the attack.

  The core ideas of the German Christian Movement remained remarkably constant throughout its years of existence. German Christians aimed to create a Volkskirclic, a "people's church" defined by "blood" that would embrace all "true" Germans and provide a spiritual homeland for the Aryans of the Third Reich. The movement's members considered Jewishness to be a racial category. Baptism, they claimed, could never change the status of a Jew; it only allowed alien elements to enter the Aryan bloodstream. In their efforts to fuse church and nation, the German Christians blurred two contentions: baptism could not make a Jew a German, they argued, and by extension, baptism could not make a Jew a Christian. Just as Jewishness for German Christians was both religious and racial, so German Christianity, its polar opposite, constituted both a religious and a racial category.

  For the German Christians race was a divine command that sanctified their cause. Accordingly, they considered establishment of an anti-Jewish church to be a sacred task. In 1934, Guida Diehl, founder of the nationalist New Land League in Eisenach and an early German Christian enthusiast, pledged commitment to a "renewal of faith." That rejuvenation, Diehl announced, would be based on an understanding of race, together with "the family, Volk, and fatherland," as the first revelation of God.' In July 1939, a German Christian publication declared recognition of the sacred meaning of race to be Germany's gift to the twentieth century. God, the author rejoiced, had called Germany to be a "pathbreaker" to a new age when every race would recognize that it could only accept Christianity "in a way true to its nature."'

  German Christian attempts to create a purely Aryan, anti-Jewish church reflected the fundamental illogic of the Nazi definition of Jewishness. Nazi ideology posited Jewishness as a biological fact; German Christians shared that view. But the Nazi concept of Jewishness had religious dimensions, too; by law, the religion of one's grandparents determined one's race." As German Christians discovered, the religious aspect of the Nazi definition of Jewishness had disadvantages for them. Nazi theorists, neopagans, and anti-church agitators sneered at Christianity as nothing but diluted Judaism. That derision egged on the German Christian offensive against Jewish elements in Christianity while putting German Christians on the defensive against the very Nazi worldview they embraced.

  But the notion of Jewishness as an intangible spiritual force that had infiltrated Christianity also presented opportunities to German Christians. As antisemitic fervor mounted in Nazi Germany, the German Christian attack on Jewish influence in Christianity became immune from open opposition. They could point to their anti-Jewish activities as evidence of their loyalty to the Nazi regime; they could silence critics with accusations of treason. And the notion of Jewishness as both racial and religious lent credence to the German Christians' own conviction that Germanness too comprised both categories of identity; only Christianity, they maintained, could provide the spiritual content of true Germanness.

  The German Christians remained a minority within Germany's Protestant population, but they exerted an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. By 1933, members of the movement occupied key posts all across the country-in national church governing bodies, within theological faculties, as regional bishops, on local church councils. Many remained active in those positions until 1945. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, most of them melted back into the Protestant mainstream. Between 1932 and 1945, the German Christian Movement developed in five identifiable phases: ascendancy, fragmentation, regrouping, ambiguous success, and reintegration. A survey of those stages provides chronological background for this discussion.

  Ascendancy characterized the movement's trajectory from its inception in 1932 to the so-called Sports Palace Affair in November 1933. During that time, German Christians enjoyed open support from Nazi party and state organs. In July 1933 Protestant church elections were held across the country to fill a range of positions, from parish representatives to senior consistorial councilors." Hitler himself endorsed the German Christians in a special radio address, and the movement won two-thirds of the votes cast. Affirmed by the biggest voter turnout ever in a Protestant church election, in the summer of 1933 the German Christians seemed unstoppable. They dominated the historic process that unified Germany's twenty-eight regional Protestant churches into the German Protestant Church; they imposed one of their own, Ludwig Muller, as Germany's first and last national Protestant bishop, or Reichsbishof." German Christians gained control of ecclesiastical government in all but three regions-Bavaria, Hanover, and Wurttemberg-and rode the crest of a wave of religious-nationalist fervor that inspired such spectacles as the mass church weddings of German brides and their storm trooper or SS grooms.`

  The euphoria of ascent proved short-lived. Withdrawal of party support-symbolized in the declaration of neutrality in church affairs by Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, on 13 October 1933-engendered a crisis of identity in the German Christian Movement." Tensions between those who sought only an adjustment of Christianity and others who urged complete overhaul, exploded in the Sports Palace rally on 13 November 1933. To an audience of twenty thousand, the rally's key speaker, Berlin German Christian leader Reinhold Krause, attacked the foundations of Christianity as having unacceptable marks of Jewish influence. Krause vilified the Old Testament, the Apostle Paul, and the cross as a symbol of atonement.'+ His speech incited a wave of departures from the ranks and precipitated a shake-up in the leadership.'' The dramatic response to the Sports Palace Affair ushered in the second phase of German Christian development: fragmentation.

  Throughout 1934 and 1935, the movement's central organization lay in shambles. Initiative passed to the regional and local levels as personal rivalries, disagreements about tactics, and inertia paralyzed the national leadership. Yet the German Christian Movement was by no means defunct; its pastors went on preaching in pulpits across the country; German Christian parish representatives, synodal officers, and regional bishops elected or appointed in 1933 remained in office and continued to propagate the cause."' The frenetic proliferation of splinter groups in this period itself indicates the intense energies bound up in German Christianity.

  In July 1935, Hitler created the new Ministry for Church Affairs under Hanns Kerrl.17 That attempt by Nazi authorities to increase their control of church issues signaled the onset of a new era in German Christianity: regrouping. Initially, Kerrl's personal proclivities and his ministry's efforts favored the German Christians, who exploited the new conditions to expand their activity. Particularly in 1936 and 1937, subgroups of the movement came together, often
under Thuringian leadership." By the time German troops invaded Poland in September 1939, almost the entire spectrum of German Christian splinter groups had reestablished ties."

  The war triggered the fourth phase of German Christian evolution, a period of ambiguous success."' War brought fulfillment of many German Christian aims. The movement had demanded an aggressive Christianity that united the nation against its foes. It claimed to find that spiritual solidarity in the Third Reich under arms. German Christians had insisted on the exclusion of so-called non-Aryans and of Jewish influences from the German religious community. That goal would be realized by default, through the deportation and systematic murder of those defined as Jews. But these successes came at a high price. State and party authorities demonstrated increasingly open hostility to Christianity, even in its pro-Nazi variants. Thus, German Christians discovered that they were both the beneficiaries and targets of National Socialist war aims.

  The final phase of the German Christian odyssey-reintegration-began as the Third Reich crumbled in the spring of 1945. Their movement discredited, German Christians faced the task of justifying their involvement over the past years-to occupation authorities, denazification boards, fellow Germans, and even themselves.2' German Christians used different strategies to try to salvage their positions in the absence of the regime on which they had based their hopes. Many of their efforts focused on their ideal of the people's church in an attempt to prove genuine spiritual motivations. Thus, the ecclesiology that had unified the movement throughout the Nazi years-stripped of its most obvious racist overtones-proved to be an effective tool for reintegrating individual members into the postwar church.

  Continuity and Context: The German Christian Movement within German Culture

  Not mere opportunists, the German Christians were rooted in the culture around them and built their movement on trends familiar to their fellow German Protestants. Three impulses converged in the establishment of the German Christian Movement. In the summer of 1932, a group of politicians, pastors, and party members met in Berlin to discuss how to win the Protestant churches of Germany for National Socialism. They planned to call their association "Protestant National Socialists" but according to their accounts, Hitler vetoed that label and suggested "German Christians" instead." Meanwhile in Thuringia, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, two outspoken young pastors and war veterans, had been preaching religious renewal along National Socialist lines since the late 1920s.23 They also called themselves "German Christians." Soon the two groups began to cooperate.

  A third initiative came from the Protestant, volkisch associations. The 1920s had spawned many such groups, dedicated to the revival of church life through increased emphasis on German culture, antisemitism, and ethnic identity. Some of them merged with the German Christians; others maintained a separate existence but lost members to the new movement or cooperated with it on specific projects.21 Such interchange was eased by the fact that the German Christians as a whole did not break away from the established church. Instead, adherents tried to take over Protestant church government, from the local to the national levels.

  Although members of the clergy remained the movement's main spokesmen, German Christians represented a cross-section of society from every region of the country: women and men, old and young, pastors, teachers, dentists, railroad workers, housewives, and farmers, even some Catholics. Wilhelm Kube, Gauleiter of Brandenburg, chairman of the National Socialist group in the Prussian Landtag, and later Generalkommissar in White Ruthenia, was a German Christian. So were Joachim Hossenfelder, a hotheaded young pastor who became the movement's national leader in 1933, and Dorthe Kisting, a Berlin woman with poetic aspirations who was active in her church community. Respected theologians like Friedrich Gogarten, Gerhard Kittel, and Heinrich Bornkamm spent at least some time in the movement." Laypeople were often more faithful. Eleanor Liebe-Harkort, a Westphalian homemaker and active proponent of women's rights, was an enthusiastic German Christian, even after the end of the war. As leader of the Protestant Women's Service of Westphalia (with twenty-five thousand members) she used her influence to push for exclusion of so-called non-Aryans from the clergy.'" Despite their diversity, members of the German Christian Movement shared allegiance to a vision of the Christian church as the spiritual homeland of the German Volk. Central to that ecclesiology was the quest for an explicitly anti-Jewish Christianity.

  Through their bid to revamp German Protestantism, the German Christians unleashed a fight for control of the church known as the "church struggle" (Kirchenknmpf).27 Their main rival was the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), with its slogan, "Church must remain church." Its name notwithstanding, the Confessing Church, like the German Christian Movement, existed within official Protestantism. The vast majority of Protestant clergy and laypeople remained neutral in the conflict.2' And even the chasm between the two rivals was not always unbridgeable. Some German Christians, like Martin Niemoller's brother Wilhelm, later joined the Confessing Church; other people moved in the opposite direction.-' Division was bitter, but, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out in 1934, factions in the church struggle did not correspond neatly to political Nazi party members and antisemites numbered among the neutrals and could be found in the Confessing Church as well as in the German Christian Movement.

  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, German Christians faced antagonism not only from within Protestant circles but also from neopagan groups outside the church." The German Faith Movement, until 1936 under the leadership of Tubingen professor Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, was a special thorn in the German Christians' side.'' Not only did it maintain the largest and most active membership of the neopagan organizations," but in its beliefs it was closer to Hitler and his inner circle than the German Christians were. Moreover, its name-German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung)was so similar to that used by German Christians throughout 1933-German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen)-that people were forever confusing the two. Such confusion highlights the German Christians' ongoing struggle to differentiate themselves, on the one hand from fellow church people who also showed enthusiasm for Nazism, and on the other hand from racist compatriots who shared their contempt for the Jewish origins of Christianity.

  The German Christians, with their anti-Jewish campaign, represented an extreme position among German Protestants. Yet like National Socialism, the German Christian Movement contained little that was new. Its tenets represented a conglomeration of old and not-so-old ideas drawn from sources that included everything from medieval texts to the racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Adherents of the movement especially liked to cite Luther as a precursor of their attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. With glee they reprinted his essay "Against the Jews and Their Lies" and presented him as a champion of antisemitism. A 1940 religious instruction book quoted Luther's instructions to "set their synagogues and schools on fire, and whatever will not burn, heap dirt upon and cover so that no human ever again will see a stone or a cinder of it."" A German Christian publication from 1943 urged its readers to be hard like Luther in their attitudes toward Jews.35

  German Christians also found forerunners in more recent German history. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, volkisch enthusiasts agitated within Protestant communities to abolish collections for missions to the Jews, to remove Old Testament sayings and stories from religious instruction and the worship service, and to purge hebraisms such as Jehovah, hallelujah, and hosanna from the hymnbook. One of the most active of such groups was the German Church League (Bund fur deutsche Kirche, or Deutschkirche). Founded in 1921, the league existed in some areas alongside the German Christians until at least 1936." Many of its ideas and more than a few of its adherents resurfaced in the German Christian Movement. For example, German Christians recirculated a German Church League publication of 1927 that described Jesus as "the transfiguration of the Siegfried idea," who could "break the neck of the Jewish-Satanic snake with his iron fist."17

  S
ome German Christian ideas about race stemmed from a less obvious source: overseas missions. Since the late nineteenth century, German missions had stressed the need to adapt the Christian message and its presentation to suit each Volk. German Christians took that message as justification for a racially exclusive church. According to one German Christian, missions taught that in "God's order of creation, there is no 'humanity,' rather only German Christians, English Christians, Chinese Christians, and so on."" Another German Christian grumbled in 1935 that, "We allow every Negro and every Indian to have a form of Christianity that fits to the life of his soul; only we Germans are supposed to have a Jewish or a Roman style of Christianity.""'

  In addition to legitimizing the racially exclusive church, the overseas mission experience offered an example of racist thinking that could in turn be applied to the Jews. In order to make concrete their view of Jewishness as a racial category, the German Christians compared Jews to the African and Asian subjects of German missionary efforts. By doing so, they transferred the feelings of superiority, fear, and loathing that they experienced about the foreign "heathens" onto German Jews. In 1932, one German Christian used overseas missions to explain why converts from Judaism could not be part of a German church. Missions, that author intoned, "do not eradicate differences among the races.... Just as a baptized Negro becomes a Negro Christian," he contended, "so the Jew will remain racially a Jew; 'only' from the religious point of view will he become a Jewish Christian.""' Siegfried Knak, a prominent mission leader, summed up his view of proper race relations with the phrase: "What God has put asunder let no man join together.""