The Churches and the Nazis
It is becoming increasingly popular to claim that the churches were leading the resistance against the Nazis. Directly after the war, no one would have ventured to make such outrageous claims, because every body still remembered how they supported the Nazis.
Letter to the Japan Times, written Jan. 23,
1990, published Jan. 31, 1990:
To the Editor:
On Jan. 20, an article by Paul F.M. Zahl from the Washington Post appeared on your Opinion Page with the following statement: "The Lutheran Church emerged from WW II as one of the few elements in German society that had not in the main been compromised by Nazism." Zahl even claims that "the Protestants had provided much of the leadership to the anti-Nazi resistance..."
Zahl's statements surprised me since I know that the Protestant church itself admitted on Oct. 18, 1945, their guilt in supporting the Nazi regime (see e. g., `Chronicle of 20th Century').
After Hitler seized power, the Lutheran church immediately introduced the `Aryan clause', making it impossible for Jewish converts to become clergymen or employees of the church and from 1939 onward they no longer tolerated Jews as members and (like the Catholic church) even helped the Nazis to find Jewish converts.
In 1979 the Lutheran church published a book "Kirche im Krieg" (The Church during the War) that shows with the help of documents the details of how the church supported Hitler's politics. Of course, there were exceptions (like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Immer, Flemming, Martin Niemöller and the Confessional Church who saw unlike Hitler in the war not a heroic act but a scourge of God) but as the preface of the above mentioned book states: "It is unethical to make out of this minority afterwards a majority." That book ends with the statement, that the failure of the Church is "explainable, but not excusable.
Maybe I should mention here that the Catholic church never admitted its guilt in supporting the Nazi regime, but fortunately some church critics (like e.g. Karlheinz Deschner) took the trouble to show us how statements from the Catholic church made after the war contrast with the flattery and even support the Nazis received from the Catholics while in power.
When we talk about resistance against the Nazis, the laurels should go somewhere else: The `Chronic of the 20th Century' states in describing the execution of Bernhard Bästlein, Franz Jacob and Anton Saefkow that in total about 20 000 Communists where executed, more then half of the number of Germans who were executed for political reasons. Also thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses (much despised by the established churches) perished in concentration camps for they unequivocal refusal to become soldiers.
Concerning the recent events in the Communist countries, I do not think that the Christian churches joined the resistance movement because they felt committed to freedom but because the Communist governments did not give them the influence they were seeking. In contrast to the events in the East we could witness, if the newspapers would write about it, a stiffening persecution of church critics in West Germany under the so-called "blasphemy clause" and a severe restriction on the freedom of expression.
Holger Hermann Haupt
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