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The Protestant Churches and Totalitarianism (Germany, 1933-1945)*

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The Protestant Churches and Totalitarianism (Germany, 1933-1945)* THE PROTESTANT CHURCHES AND TOTALITARIANISM (GERMANY, 1933-1945)* Three delimitations of this paper are immediately stated, for reasons of clarity in handling a very large and involved subject. In the first place, although the problem of the care and cure of souls is the most acute aspect of church life under Nazism or Communism, this matter has recently been dis­ cussed in a professional paper by the present writer, and it is unnecessary to travel again the same path.1 Second, the more general lines of the relation of the German churches to Nazism have been rather thoroughly exploited, al­ though there is good reason to feel that further research on the ground by a competent professional staff would bring forth additional information.2 Third, this paper will make no attempt to assess the Roman Catholic record during the period treated, although I believe that any attempt to understand postwar Germany will give considerable attention to comparisons and contrasts between the Evangelical and Catholic situations under Hitler and under the occupying powers. This is a neglected factor in most current discussions, yet basic to comprehending the roles of Niemo'ller, Heinemann, Dibelius, Held, Iwand, and others upon whose activities and influence so much now depends.3 The burden of this paper will be to review a matter too little considered outside the theological faculties, yet of basic significance to an understand­ ing of the capacity of religious bodies to resist totalitarianism: the role of dogmatic formulas in laying the grounds for and developing a disciplined community of opposition. This field, a happy hunting ground for professional theologians for some years, deserves more serious attention from social and political scientists than it has yet received. The problem may be bluntly introduced by quoting from one of Hitler's most gallant and persistent opponents on the Continent: "The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed. It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of 'the law of nature'; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the 'Jewish' law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation respectively. It had made all the necessary preparation for the 'Germanization of Christianity' and for a racial Church."14 These are harsh words. But they are no more harsh than the parallel judgment of a distinguished British scholar: "The Protestant Churches also welcomed Hitler. They had steadily been losing ground in the Germany of the Weimar Republic. The Liberal Theology had done much to dis­ integrate the theological integrity of the Protestant Churches. Activity in the field of social reform was { *A paper by Dr. Franklin H. Littell at a Conference on Totalitarianism, held under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston, March 6-8, 1953; subsequently published in Friedrich, Carl J., ed., Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 195*0, pp. 108-19. -2 taking the place of witness to the Gospel of Redemption. And there were those who were willing to fill the void created by their own disbelief by political enthusiasms - enthusiasm for Socialism, or, in the situation of 1933, for National Socialism, It was from these people that the so-called 'German Christians' emerged. "And yet the Protestant Churches were not as weak as they seemed. There were within them strong conservative elements, loyal to the theologies of the Reformation: while, in the dialectical theology, there had emerged a new, post-liberal re-statement of the theology of the Reformation, It was particularly out of this post- liberal reaffirmation of the Gospel that the Confessional Church was born. Ihey very exaggerations of this theology were a source of strength. They made possible a radical­ ism of dogmatic statement that would hardly have been possible within, what we in England would regard as, a more balanced presentation of the Christian Gospel."5 In what respect did the nineteenth century liberal theology of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack fail the church in the middle twentieth century? How were even the exaggerations of the Crisis Theology a source of strength to the centers of resistance? No net for the feet of the unwary was ever more cleverly laid than that hidden in the twenty-fourth article of the NSDAP platform: We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state, in so far as they do not imperil its stability or offend against the ethical and moral senses of the German race. The Party, as such, adopts the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without binding itself confessionally to a particular creed. Certain content-laden word-symbols stand out: "freedom" (plus), "a positive Christianity" (plus), "binding...confessionally" (negative). Here is an obvious appeal to the spiritualizers, the individualists, the emancipated - the "third type" which Ernst Troeltsch mentioned in the Soziallehren, so common in the latter years of the Enlightenment and so resentful of the "offense" and "sectarianism" of fixed belief: "...that third sociological type of Christian thought, which does not depend, like the Church, upon the insti­ tutions, nor like the sect on the liberal interpretation of the Law of God in the Bible, but which is an in­ dividualism which freely combines Christian ideas with all kinds of other elements, and which is entirely un­ recognized, or else exists along side of the Church and assumes its necessity for the mass of mankind. "Full of the sense that today it still does represent the highest ethical ideals of humanity, it is still unable easily to formulate for itself the unwritten social programme which the Gospel contains, nor to apply it clearly to the conditions which oppose it. Gradually, in the Modern World of educated people, the third type has come to predominate. This means, the, that all that is left is voluntary association with the like-minded people, which is equally remote both from Church and sect."6 The millennial age prophesied by Joachim of Fiore,7 when Church and World Should become one in the power of the Spirit, when the divisiveness of ec­ clesiastical institutions and dogma should wither away, was realized for many in the passionate Blut und Volk of the Thousand Years of the Third Reich. What was this "positive Christianity" of which totalitarian party ap­ proved? What were the characteristics which made it appealing to so many sections of German Christendom? (We are not dealing here with the passive nonresistance of the Lutheran leadership which remained reluctantly obedient to state policy, nor with the so-called "intact Churches" who walked a difficult path between resistance and capitulation, but rather with the convinced Deutsche Christen.) 1. It was grounded in a thorough acceptance of the most radical interpretations of textual critics of the Bible and practitioners of the comparative method in the study of religions. This led readily to placing an equal value (Gleichwertung) upon all religious myths. This fact is evident not only in continual attacks on "Christian priestcraft" and "sectarian dogmatics" in popular circles, such as ' Amheiligen Quell Deutscher Kraft: Ludendorffs Halbmonatschrift, but in tracts and monographs by professors and alumni of the leading theological and related faculties,8 An interesting illustration of this point is the book by Professor Wilhelm Vollrath of Erlangen: Houston Stewart Chamberlain und seine Theologie. Under this unlikely title the author demonstrates Chamberlain's dependence on Renan, Wellhausen, and other liberal critics; armed with such references, and making a practical use of scientific knowledge,10 he was able to reduce the Jewish mythology and folk­ lore of the Old Testament to its proper insignificance, defend an instrument­ alist interpretation of the function of the Aryan Jesus of Nazareth, separate the simple teachings of Jesus (best understood, according to Chamberlain, by those good German mystics Eckhart, Tauler, and Bohme) from the accumulated priestcraft and dogmatics of the Christian churches. In Karl Dworski's Die Entdeckung eines arischen Evangeliurns11 Jesus is shown to be not a Jew but of Persian extraction, and a frontal attack is made on all systematic theology which has but obscured the simple Aryan truth which he taught. The author of a popular Deutsche Christen attack on the Confessing Church, Friedrich Murawski, leans heavily upon the radical speculations of such as Professor Lietzmann of Berlin and numerous scholarly articles of liberal persuasion in the second edition of the five-volume Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.i2 His rejection of the Biblical World view is a revealing repudiation of myths, legends, folklore, fairy tales: l -4 "The theological judgment is unanimous and no longer to be put aside. And there remains open only the question: Why is there still taught in the German schools as 'history' that which the theologians themselves term 'lore' and 'fairy tales'? What significance should Jewish myth­ ological stories have for Germans? "When the overwhelming majority of the teachers of the Church repudiate the whole evaluation of the historicity of the Bible as free invention, when they don't pause once before the concepts of the founders of the churches, when they announce the very focus of church life to be untrue, when according to their demonstration the Bible is nothing other than a book of folklore - shouldn't the German man of the twentieth century decisively renounce the myths of Asia Minor and the Jewish Church for himself and his children, in order to choose his own myth, which is part of his blook, his world-view, his feeling for life: The Myth of the Twentieth Century?,f13 At one time it was hotly debated whether there could be traced through the underbrush a road leading from Luther to Hitler.
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