Betrayal Read online

  Rejection of the Hebrew Bible formed the basis for German Christian repudiation of scriptural authority in general and provided a criterion for selection within the New Testament. In the drama of Christianity's redemption from Jewish influence, as German Christians construed it, the Old Testament played the role of the scapegoat that bore away all traces of Jewishness, and the New Testament would provide marching orders for an anti-Jewish faith.

  Anti-Jewish revision was simplified by the New Testament's focus on the theological foundations of Christianity. Antagonistic to considerations of dogma in any case, the German Christians simply excluded unacceptable portions from their field of vision and concentrated on those features of the Gospel accounts that informed their cultural identity: Jesus, the manger, the cross. Instead of progressive radicalization, as in the case of the Old Testament, they displayed steadfast consistency on two key points, insisting that Jesus was not a Jew and that the essence of the gospel's message was anti-Jewishness.

  The German Christians based negation of Jesus' Jewishness on their own presumption of his antisemitism. Jesus, they asserted, could not have been a Jew because he opposed Judaism. This argument formed the core of their Christology and allowed them to preserve the figure of Jesus in their antiJewish Christianity. In late 1933, one German Christian offered biblical citations that, he claimed, revealed Jesus' attitude toward Judaism: "A 'murderer,' a 'liar,' a 'father of lies.' It is impossible to reject Jehovah and his Old Testament in sharper terms!" In places, he admitted, the gospels seem to suggest the opposite. But those were not the words of Christ, he contended; they were "lies," "Jewishness," the "voice of the Old Testament.""" Another German Christian advised mothers how to respond if children asked whether Jesus was Jewish. They should point out, the author counseled, that "because Christ was the 'opponent' of the Jews, it is impossible that he himself could have been of Jewish blood and spirit.""

  As National Socialist attacks on Jews intensified after 1938, German Christians reduced their assessment of what was genuine in the gospels to those fragments that best served an antisemitic agenda. In March 1939, a German Christian confirmation examination presented the "German Volk" as the "temple of God," Hitler as Jesus the purifier. As the exchange between pastor and candidates reveals, German Christians retained the symbol of Jesus only to use it to sanctify assault on Jews: "[Jesus] is no Jew.... He was persecuted because he said to the people who considered themselves the chosen ones: God calls pagans, not Jews; God is sick of you chosen people! But why did he not come to the Germanic peoples, this God-man? Why precisely in Judea? He appeared where the enemy was strongest: the Jews are children of the devil and so the offensive had to begin there.""

  The heart of the Gospels' message, the German Christians insisted, was a racial struggle. German Christians proffered their reinterpretation of the New Testament as a "purification" and "liberation." Reinhold Krause's 1933 speech had demanded removal from the New Testament of an "exaggerated emphasis on the crucified Christ."'' German Christians took up that challenge, attacking the notion of human sinfulness as a Jewish accretion to the true gospel. In September 1935, a speaker in Kempten, Bavaria, attacked "Jewish-Semitic additions" that "perverted and encrusted" the gospel. The entire "teaching of sin and grace," he insisted, "was a Jewish attitude and only inserted into the New Concern with sin, a German Christian leader concurred in a 1942 address to assembled women's groups, was a Jewish element to be purged from Christianity'

  During the war, the German Christians reduced Jesus to an ally in the campaign against Jews. A 1939 publication used the language of the apocalypse to sound the call to an anti-Jewish crusade: "Christ is the general leading the troops against Jehovah; our age needs him.... Jehovah is a force! The world situation shows just how powerful a one. He was triumphant, not only politically and economically in the old Europe, but above all spiritually.... He must be defeated spiritually. That is only possible if all those striving unite under one name. That name is Christ."" This interpretation continued throughout the war; in 1944, a former Catholic priest and prominent German Christian in the Thuringian group released a brochure titled "The Sermon on the Mount as a Declaration of War against

  The German Christians accompanied their anti-Jewish reading of the gospels with rewriting. The circle around Bishop Heinz Weidemann of Bremen published the first new, anti-Jewish scripture. Titled "The German Gospel of John" ("Das Evangelium Johannes deutsch"), it appeared in 1936.' Weidemann chose to begin "germanization of the New Testament" with the Gospel of John, he explained, because it constituted "the most sharply antiJewish He claimed that fourteen thousand copies were printed.' Weidemann's version presented Jesus' entire mission as an onslaught against Judaism."" Some passages remained virtually unaltered, most notably those that depicted Jesus' conflicts with certain scribes and Pharisees. As part of an explicitly anti-Jewish document, however, those accounts took on new meaning. While preserving many details of the Gospel of John, Weidemann produced a document that presented, not a story of salvation, but a manifesto of hatred toward Jews.

  A more ambitious attempt toward a dejudaized New Testament emerged from the Institute for Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Part one of this work, "The Message of God" ("Die Botschaft Gottes"), was the only portion completed, appearing in December 1939." According to one account, it sold two hundred thousand copies within six months.'2 The ninety-six-page work took a different tack than had Weidemann's project. It drew heavily on the Gospel of Mark. It avoided the word "Jew," opting instead for a vague depiction of Christianity as a mixture of familiar words and pithy sayings. Rather than narrating the life of Jesus, it limited itself to well-known passages like Matthew 6:28: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin." Jesus appeared in a historical and geographic vacuum; the story of his birth contained nothing about Mary and Joseph's roots in "the house and lineage of David," nor did the book mention the resurrection.'

  German Christians reached no final consensus on a text of the New Testament. While some used the new versions, others continued to rely on their old Bibles. Some kept to the Gospels, others drew from the entire New Testament. In any case, since the new scriptures grew out of a denial of canonicity, they could hardly claim to present the definitive message of Christianity. But German Christians did agree on one thing: They all accepted the criterion of anti-Jewishness to decide what to teach from the New Testament and how to understand it.

  On the basis of a racial imperative, the German Christians overturned Scripture. They eschewed doctrinal or ethical considerations, and their understanding of Christianity consisted of attachment to a handful of symbols and rituals they associated with Christian tradition. But even in that limited sphere of Christian culture, German Christians encountered evidence of Jewish influence, most notably in church music. On this front, their offensive was less intense than it had been against the Old and New Testaments. Although German Christians tinkered with the language of hymns, they never transformed church music itself into a weapon in the Nazi war against Jews. This reticence did not reflect any misgivings about their racial vision of Christianity. On the contrary, it illustrates that for the German Christians, the only elements of Christianity worth preserving and defending were the cultural trappings familiar to them from their childhoods: the baby Jesus, the church buildings, beloved hymns.

  Early German Christian events reflected no particular concern about Jewish influence in church music. In June 1933, for example, German Christians met in Dortmund. The program included congregational singing of two familiar hymns that contained what German Christians later would decry as hebraisms: The second stanza of Luther's "A Mighty Fortress" refers to Jesus as "Lord Sabaoth," an ancient title meaning commander of the hosts of heaven; and "Oh Come, My Soul with Singing" mentions "Zion" as well as the "God of Jacob."' The program provided the standard texts of the hymns, complete with those terms.

  Throughout 1933 rumblings about Jewis
h influence in church music suggested potential for a dejudaizing assault. Reinhold Krause, whose Sports Palace proscriptions with regard to the Old and New Testaments proved accurate predictions of subsequent developments, also called for transformation of the worship service, including attention to church music: "We want to worship God in the church, in the congregations, with German words and from a German spirit. We want to sing songs that are free from all Israelite elements. We want to liberate ourselves from the language of Canaan and turn to our German mother tongue. Only in the German mother tongue can humanity express its prayers, praise, and thanks in the most profound way.""s

  But only in late 1935, after propagation of the Nuremberg Laws, did German Christians begin anything approaching a systematic purge of Christian hymns. The impetus originated high in the movement's ranks with a concern for the church's ability to attract an increasingly antisemitic membership. Unlike the purge of the Old Testament, the subjection of traditional hymns to considerations of racial purity brought a sense of loss to German Christians. Nevertheless, the cause demanded self-denial; according to one member, it was "more Christian to make sacrifice in external forms than through them to kill the spirit and life.""

  In 1935, the German Christian Wilhelm Bauer published a liturgical guide called "German Christian Celebrations." Bauer decried Jewish influence in church music, complaining, for example, about a plodding musical style that, in his view, was "borrowed from the synagogue." He saved his most detailed criticism for the texts of hymns, contending that it would hardly "contravene the spirit of the Bible or injure the Confession" if phrases like the "people of Israel" were replaced with the "people of God," or the "cedars of Lebanon" with the "firs of the German forest."" Although Bauer encouraged musical innovation, he did not advocate transforming church music into a weapon against Judaism. His reticence on that score reflected not moral or doctrinal but aesthetic considerations. In the church, he reminded readers, it was "in bad taste" to sing militaristic or folksy music that "clashed" with the solemn tones of the organ and violated the "hallowed stillness" of the house of God."

  Shortly before the war began, the Bishop Weidemann in Bremen coordinated the release of a new German Christian songbook, "Songs of the Coming Church" ("Lieder der kommenden Kirche")." It allegedly sold ten thousand copies in the first weeks. Weidemann considered his hymnbook "truly German," its songs purged of all "Judaisms," including Jewish and foreign words."" Most of the hymns included were traditional, although references to the Old Testament had been expunged. The new additions, while often focused more on Germany than on Christianity, did not express explicitly anti-Jewish sentiments. Even the firebrand Weidemann, who showed no compunction in rewriting the Gospel of John into a tirade of hatred toward Jews, appeared bound by considerations of what was tasteful and appropriate in church music.

  The largest collection of dejudaized hymns assembled by German Christians appeared in a 1941 release named after a familiar hymn: "Holy God We Praise Thy Name" ("Grocer Gott wir loben Dich!"). Containing 339 hymns in a mixture of old and new German material, the book was a product of the Institute for Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life." Here, too, the result was a self-consciously conventional hymnbook minus Old Testament vocabulary, not a declaration of war on Judaism in general.

  It was in the sphere of church music, far from the core of Christian belief, that the German Christians appeared least eager to complete their ecclesiastical final solution. Notions of taste and appropriateness exercised a much more effective brake on the German Christian project of dejudaization than did doctrinal, theological, or ethical considerations.

  Postwar Implications

  In July 1948, a former leading German Christian wrote to church authorities requesting reemployment in the church. In order to forestall charges of antisemitism, he described an encounter during the Nazi years with a non-Aryan colleague. He had tried to comfort the man, the erstwhile German Christian reported, given his "difficult situation" as a Jew in the Third Reich. But the non-Aryan had rebuffed his overtures, "on the basis that he was not Jewish." The German Christian had been astonished, and had explained to his fellow pastor that because he had been "baptized into Christianity as a Jewish child," he remained "purely physically, according to race, Jewish.""' The German Christian had then encouraged his colleague to serve his own Volk through the mission to the Jews. Had he not shown compassion to the Jews, the would-be penitent now asked church authorities?

  For the German Protestant church and former German Christians, 1945 brought much that was new. But as that pastor's letter indicates, it was no "zero hour." Neither the German Christians nor the attitudes that had characterized their movement simply disappeared. Continuities and links to the past remained part of the legacy of the postwar church. Beginning in 1945, the German Christian Movement in general served as a useful red herring in the denazification of both individual lay leaders and of the Protestant church as a whole. Most individual German Christians were reintegrated into the Protestant mainstream. And even some of their racist and antisemitic ideas showed remarkable tenacity.

  The job of rebuilding the Protestant church after the war fell to neutral and Confessing Church clergy. Preoccupied with efforts to restore normalcy amid postwar confusion, many of them preferred to close the book on old churchpolitical struggles. No one seemed enthusiastic about instituting some test of orthodoxy to determine, as one pastor put it, "who still had a Christian basis of faith at all among those who wanted to come back to the church.""'

  The Protestant church faced external pressures as well. American occupation authorities in particular urged the church to purge its leadership or risk imposed denazification." Prominent churchmen-Martin Niemoller and Bishops Meiser and Wurm in Bavaria and Wurttemberg-argued that secular powers had no business determining who was or was not fit to serve the church. That decision, they insisted, had to be based on loyalty to Scripture and the confession of faith."' Their efforts paid off; by 1946, autonomous church boards won control of denazification of the clergy, but the problem of balancing internal demands for stability and external calls to denazify remained.

  For the German Protestant church, the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 constituted an important step toward regaining international credibility. That statement, signed by church leaders on behalf of German Protestantism, acknowledged a "great solidarity of guilt" between the Protestant church and the German people. It expressed repentance "for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently."" Yet while the Stuttgart Declaration bought goodwill abroad, it alienated some of the church's constituency at home. Even though it avoided any reference to specific crimes and noted the church's "long struggle" against Nazi violence, it sparked resentment from Protestants who denounced it as an admission of "war guilt" tantamount to a "second Versailles.""

  In this context, the German Christians provided an ideal target for ecclesiastical denazification efforts. Thanks to foreign press coverage of the church struggle, the movement had gained considerable notoriety abroad. The American Occupation Forces' questionnaire even listed it separately as a Nazi organization."" Censure of German Christian clergy seemed likely to satisfy occupation authorities as an adequate expression of denazifying zeal. At the same time, focus on the movement promised not to disturb most Protestants at home. In the summer of 1945, a former German Christian estimated optimistically that the movement had about fifty thousand adherents in Bavaria and eight thousand in Baden." Clergy made up only a small percentage of those totals. Once labeled the sole Protestant collaborators, a few German Christian pastors could be removed from their positions and the rest of the church could consider its hands clean.

  Accordingly, efforts to denazify the Protestant church zeroed in on German Christian pastors. In September 1945, church leaders from Westphalia and the Rhine Province passed a regulation to discipline clergy compromised by Nazism. They
set up a committee to hear the cases of those who had shown themselves unworthy of their calling or violated Scripture and the confession of the faith.""' But no general investigation of orthodoxy throughout the churches followed. Instead the committee summoned only German Christians for hearings. Other regional churches followed similar patterns. Church authorities then pointed to measures taken against the German Christian Movement to prove that further purges were unnecessary. In late 1947, the central office of the Protestant church in Germany declared the German Christian threat eradicated. This statement announced that even in Thuringia, once a stronghold of the movement, the regional church had cleansed its jurisdiction of "German Christian heresies" and removed German Christians from pastoral office. Denazification of the Protestant church, the report implied, was now complete.""

  Some observers recognized the postwar focus on the German Christian Movement as something of a smoke screen. In October 1945, German Christian pastor Friedrich Buschtons protested that regulations to cleanse the church were aimed not at denazification but at removal of German Christians. "Why," he wanted to know, "were questionnaires about membership in the party and its organizations not sent to all pastors in Westphalia, for example, with the embarrassing questions: Who had been contact men of the Security Service; who had dedicated party flags, held speeches at party events, and baptized under the flag of war?""' The Wurttemberg theologian Hermann Diem, an outspoken opponent of National Socialism, had occupied a position at the opposite end of the church struggle from Buschtons. But he, too, saw ways in which exclusive focus on the German Christians made a sham of ecclesiastical denazification."" It is not surprising that Buschtons, a pugnacious German Christian, found little support. But Diem, whose record as an opponent of National Socialism was spotless, stood equally alone.""