Betrayal Page 8

  Eventually most missionaries parted ways with the German Christians as they came to recognize that the movement's inner logic, with its emphasis on racially and nationally specific religion, doomed overseas outreach. Nevertheless, German Protestant missionaries did contribute to the German Christian theory of race, linking it to familiar stereotypes and giving legitimacy to the acceptance and promotion of racial distinctions within the community of faith.

  Common ideas about gender also helped German Christians bind their efforts to the Nazi cause. According to German Christian publicists, only a church devoid of feminine qualities like compassion and capable of manly resolve could become a frontline fighter against racial impurity. Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller voiced that view in 1939. By keeping their "German blood pure," he argued, and by banning "the Jewish influence that is foreign to our nature from all areas of German life," Germans demonstrated their "love for the German homeland and the German people." Such love, Muller claimed, had a "hard, warrior-like face. It hates everything soft and weak because it knows that all life can only then remain healthy and fit for life when everything antagonistic, the rotten and the indecent, is cleared out of the way and destroyed .1112

  German Christians used divisions between the sexes to justify the introduction of racial distinctions into the church. Just as Christian faith did not eradicate physical differences between male and female, they maintained, it did not negate the "biological fact" of race. Wilhelm Stapel, a prolific German Christian theologian, spelled out this line of thinking in 1934. "In the earthly congregation," he wrote, "one cannot revoke the difference between the sexes, even though, 'in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage' (Matthew 22:30)." It was just as impossible, Stapel went on, "to declare invalid physical, mental, and spiritual differences among peoples, simply because, 'by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles' (I Corinthians 12:13)." Stapel used the analogy between gender and race to justify exclusion of non-Aryans from pastoral office. Just as Paul, "for very earthly reasons" forbade women to speak in the church, he argued, so German Protestants could "forbid the Jews to speak in our German congregations.""

  A German Christian circular from 1935 pointed to Galatians 3:28: "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female." Some people, the publication indicated, tried to use that verse to "deny the validity of the racial idea in the church." But any child, the author scoffed, could see the foolishness of such a claim: "When there is no longer 'man and woman' in the earthly church, then we will also believe that there is no longer any difference between German and Jewish."" By stressing the gap between the visible church where race and gender reigned and the invisible, universal church, German Christians attempted to legitimize the exclusion of people defined as non-Aryans from their spiritual community.

  It is perhaps tempting to dismiss German Christian ideas about race as nothing more than efforts to ingratiate themselves with Nazi authorities. And indeed, while German Christians linked their views of race to God's will, they did consider practical benefits on earth, often offering proof of racist antisemitism in exchange for National Socialist favor. Yet a comparison between members' attitudes toward Jews and non-Aryans and their stance regarding measures against the handicapped reveals the limits of the explanatory power of opportunism.

  In Nazi theory and practice, racial and eugenic doctrines formed related parts of an ideology of the master Aryan race." If opportunism motivated German Christian engagement in Nazi racial policy, one would expect to find members of the movement among the most vocal supporters of the eugenics and so-called euthanasia programs as well. Instead, German Christians generally showed reticence on those subjects.

  The Sterilization Law of 14 July 1933, officially titled the "law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring," provided for the compulsory sterilization of all people afflicted with a wide range of diseases or disabilities, such as deafness, feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and schizophrenia.4' It sparked considerable discussion among Christians, particularly Catholics, but the German Christians remained silent. Nor did they respond with any volume to the euphemistically named Euthanasia Program, initiated in 1939, as Hitler, top aides, scores of doctors, other medical personnel, institutional administrators, and social workers cooperated to murder some seventy thousand Germans deemed "lives unworthy of living.""

  German Christians who publicly addressed issues related to eugenics represented the exception rather than the rule. A few spokespersons for the group paid lip service to Nazi attacks on the handicapped or on alleged carriers of genetic defects, but they lacked the engagement that members of the movement showed in the "Jewish question." Some even apologized for their stance. For example, an article in the 1935 German Christian Reich Calendar admitted that the "race question" made difficult demands in its implications for the handicapped. Of course, it continued, "no reasonable representative of the racial idea would dispute the human obligation and the Christian duty toward the sick, the old, and the weak." But those obligations, it suggested, were only one side of the command to love one's neighbor. After all, the author asked, "Is it not a healthy thought that there, where in accordance with God's will a beautiful flower can bloom, no thistle or nettle is standing?""

  Only one full-length book sought to justify Nazi eugenics in German Christian terms. Titled Genetic Cultivation and Christianity (Erbpflege and Christenturn), this work by the Protestant theologian Wolfgang Stroothenke appeared in 1940. The author posited race consciousness as the core of "positive Christianity," which he defined as "bound to the Volk" and committed to "racial purity."" Yet even he acknowledged the complexity of eugenics issues and rejected coercive measures."' Instead of embracing Nazi policy about eugenics and euthanasia, German Christians seem to have ignored it as much as possible. Eager to assert an anti-Jewish stance, they were much less enthusiastic about measures against the handicapped. The German Christians may have been willing to use their antisemitism in opportunistic ways, but the limits of their support for Nazi policy toward people deemed handicapped suggests that they were not mere mouthpieces for official Nazi views. Instead their opportunism rested on a firm commitment to their project of an antiJewish church.

  De judaizing the Church: The Ecclesiastical Final solution

  The German Christian quest for racial purity in the church was not just an ecclesiological whim or a rhetorical convention. Members of the movement acted on their words, and in the context of a brutal antisemitic state, those actions took on terrible significance. In 1933, while Jewish civil servants lost their jobs, German Christian pastors fought to eject non-Aryans from the Protestant clergy. Two years later, as the Nuremberg Laws deprived German Jews of the rights of citizenship, German Christian parishioners rejected use of Old Testament texts in their worship services. In 1938, Germans torched synagogues all over their country, destroyed Jewish homes and property, and incarcerated thousands of Jewish men. Just months later, German Christians formalized their "dejudaization" of Christianity by founding the Institute for Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence in German Church Life. During the war, while German soldiers, SS, and their henchmen murdered Jews on the eastern front, German Christian church council members expelled nonAryans from their congregations. Through their quest for an anti-Jewish church, the German Christians endorsed, imitated, and profited from the crimes of the Third Reich.

  German Christian goals targeted non-Aryan clergy and laypeople for harassment and exclusion. In 1933, the movement's leadership tried to imitate the state's dismissal of Jewish civil servants by introducing the so-called Aryan Paragraph in the Protestant church. That regulation would have forced all converts from Judaism, as well as their children and in some cases grandchildren, out of church offices. But German Christian efforts foundered as a result of international criticism and opposition mounted by the Pastors' Emergency League, led by Martin Niemoller. Niemoller himself sympathized with the German Christian claim that th
e Aryan Paragraph was a necessary response to congregations' prejudices. That is, he too worried that antisemitic parishioners would be alienated by "Jewish Christian" clergy. But, he argued in 1934, for the sake of the Confession, the church would have to endure the disagreeable racial fact of Jewishness.;'

  Undaunted by the early setbacks, German Christians found less formal ways to attack clergy defined as non-Aryan. In a 1936 case, for example, they mobilized local Nazi Party youth organizations to sabotage a pastor's confirmation ceremony. They circulated fliers denouncing the "Jewish half-breed" to state and church authorities as well as to members of his Berlin congregation. They rallied their followers for a showdown with the pastor's supporters that ended in fisticuffs outside the church."

  German Christians continued to agitate for the introduction of an Aryan Paragraph in the church, even when institutionalized antisemitism in Nazi Germany more or less ensured racial exclusion. In the summer of 1939, church offices in Berlin, under the influence of purportedly moderate German Christians, ordered regional churches to collect proof of "ancestry from German blood" for all pastors and their wives.," Only wartime exigencies led to relaxation of that demand in August 1944.14 Nevertheless, German Christians had achieved their goal: effective exclusion of non-Aryans from pastoral office in the Protestant churches of Germany. Yet the movement could hardly take much credit for that outcome. There had never been more than a few nonAryan pastors; most of those had left on their own.il Nazi policies made sure that people defined as Jews were shut out of German society, while organs of church government-and not only those controlled by German Christianshad added their own administrative measures to restrict non-Aryan clergy.

  The German Christians found their goals of racial exclusion fulfilled by default with regard to non-Aryan laypeople as well. Nonetheless, the movement's members took their own steps to demonstrate hostility toward Jews and so-called non-Aryans. By the early months of 1939, in the wake of Kristallu nclht, German Christian-dominated regional churches began passing regulations to exclude non-Aryans from the religious community. In February 1939, the Thuringian Protestant church decreed that people defined as Jews under the law could not become members. Pastors were not obligated to perform services for "Jews" already in the church; church rooms and equipment were not to be used for services or sacraments for non-Aryans. Non-Aryan Christians were to pay no more church taxes."' The churches in Mecklenburg, Anhalt, Lubeck, and Saxony produced similar legislation.''

  German Christian timing followed the Nazi regime's assault on Jews. As of September 1941, police regulations forced all people defined as Jews to wear the identifying star. General deportations of Jews to the east began a month later." In December 1941, representatives of seven regional churches, all dominated by German Christians, issued their own proclamation to ban "racially Jewish Christians" from the church. Leaders of church government in Saxony, Nassau-Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Anhalt, and Lubeck echoed Nazi charges that Jews had "instigated" the war and placed themselves and their flocks "in the front of this historic defensive struggle." Ever since the crucifixion of Christ, they claimed, Jews had "opposed Christianity." Baptism, they added, changed "nothing about the racial essence of Jews." Therefore, they concluded, "racially Jewish Christians have no room and no rights" in a German church."'

  Having adopted race as the organizing principle of their project of church renewal, German Christians ended up equating the anti-Jewish people's church with the genocidal German nation. An excerpt from a German Christian publication of April 1944 captures that identity: "There is no other solution to the Jewish problem than this: that one day the whole world will rise up and decide either for or against Judaism, and we will keep on struggling with each other until the world is totally judaized or completely purged of Judaism. We can say with an honest, pure conscience that we did not want this war and did not start this war. But we can proudly profess before all the world-the world of today as well as of tomorrow-that we took up the gauntlet with the firm resolve to solve the Jewish question for ever.""

  Much German Christian energy focused on purging Christianity of Jewish influences. The Old Testament provided the most obvious target for that dejudaizing fervor. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, vi lkisch elements within the Protestant church had assaulted the Old Testament as "too Jewish." From 1933 on, German Christians took the lead in that offensive. In November 1933, the German Christian-dominated church government in SchleswigHolstein limited the use of the Old Testament in religious instruction in schools. The binding of Isaac was the first story axed as "un-German.""

  Although adherents of the movement agreed that the Old Testament belonged out of the scriptural canon, they differed as to whether and how portions of it might be retained. Reinhold Krause's speech at the movement's rally at the Berlin Sports Palace on 13 November 1933 exposed the extremist position. Krause, a schoolteacher and leader of Berlin's German Christians, based his attack on the need for the church to appeal to all National Socialists. "Those people need to feel at home in the church," he thundered. To that end, he demanded "liberation from everything un-German in the worship service and the confessions-liberation from the Old Testament with its cheap Jewish morality of exchange and its stories of cattle traders and pimps." If National Socialists refused even to buy a tie from a Jew, he went on, "how much more should we be ashamed to accept from the Jew anything that speaks to our soul, to our most intimate religious essence."" Krause's speech shocked many, but he was no anomaly. To the contrary, his words anticipated the definitive German Christian view of the Old Testament by the late 1930s.

  In the fall of 1935, Hitler's state propagated the Nuremberg Laws, denying citizenship to Jews and codifying a definition of "Jew." Those laws unleashed a new phase in the Nazi onslaught, and German Christians responded with a harsher tone against the Old Testament. In September, a German Christian speaker in Bavaria ridiculed the Old Testament as a saga of racial defilement. His remark that "Moses in his old age had married a Negro woman" drew boisterous laughter and enthusiastic applause from his audience."' A Rhenish pastor quit the movement in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws, appalled by increasing radicalism. The fight against Judaism had gone so far, he protested, that its champions denounced anyone who did not reject the Old Testament as "already 'devoured by

  Public antisemitism encouraged a heightening of German Christian attacks on the Old Testament; in turn, German Christian ideas found resonance in a society that refused membership to those defined as Jews. In late 1936, a Confessing Church pastor described how teenage girls in his confirmation class reacted to a discussion of Jesus' words, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17-19). The girls went wild, denouncing "the Old Testament with its filthy stories," the "Jews as a criminal race.""' It was precisely such attitudes that German Christian pastors and schoolteachers encouraged.

  By late 1938, in the wake of Kristallnacht, leading German Christians decided they needed a more formal organization to express their full participation in Nazi antisemitism and to develop an effective defense of Christianity. On 4 April 1939, they gained such a structure with the founding of the Institute for Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. From then on, the institute orchestrated the attack on the Old Testament and its legacy, finding an especially warm reception during the early years of the war. Propaganda that presented the war as mortal combat against "international Jewry" and, after the fall of 1941, deportations of Jews from the Reich, gave new meaning to German Christian efforts to destroy Jewish influence on the religious front.

  During the war German Christian rhetoric against the Old Testament merged with the language and practice of genocide. In late 1941, the Thuringian German Christian Julius Leutheuser, writing from the eastern front, declared the Old Testament and the religiosity of the past to be foes of German Christianity and Germanness. For Leutheuser, National Socialist war aims promised a ch
ance to realize German Christian goals. He called on his people "to build a National Church, as this final world struggle breaks out, the struggle against Judaism. We now hold the means to strike the weapons from the hands of Judaism for good."^fi From his vantage point in the east, Leutheuser must have known that those "means" involved extermination of the Jews.

  Despite bombardment with anti-Jewish tirades in the 1940s, some German Christians continued to use favorite parts of the Old Testament. In 1942, German Christian pastors in Westphalia circulated a list of Bible readings suitable for wedding ceremonies: one-third came from the Old Testament, all of those from the S.1,7 Even a 1943 circular from the National Church group, reputedly the most radical German Christians, cited cherished bits of the Old Testament. But it emphasized that anti-Jewishness would be the guide in deciding the fate of those Old Testament "gems." "As a code of Jewish ethics," the publication explained, the Old Testament was unacceptable. But as a piece of religious literature, it had redeeming qualities. One needed only to select from it the "numerous religious treasures that ... stem from the best Aryan tradition but have been stolen after the manner of Jewish peddlers." Once freed from that "unworthy context," the German Christians insisted, their "formative power in German popular piety and German, especially Nordic, art and culture" could be celebrated."' Such contorted reasoning suggests that German Christians were both eager to add their weight to the Nazi destruction of Judaism and committed to preserving some cultural vestiges of Christianity.