After my Tante Martha turned 95, she finally admitted that Adolph Hitler destroyed Germany and killed millions of Jews. I was visiting my great aunt in her care facility. Half blinded by glaucoma and confined to her recliner, she shook her head and said in her sharp German accent, “It would have been better if he’d never been born.” Her words surprised me. She had not always felt that way.
She had immigrated to the United States from Germany in the early 1920s and remained an outspoken Lutheran German nationalist her entire life. She stayed close to home, never learned to drive, and resisted American culture. She seemed stuck in time, as though everything stopped for her when she stepped onto the ship to America. For Tante Martha, Germany was, and always would be, the pinnacle of world civilization regardless of wartime “mistakes.”
She lived in nostalgia for the glory days of the Weimar Republic of her youth. “When I was young, Germans were the best in everything,” she had often told me. “We had the best universities in the world. We blessed the world with magnificent musicians: Strauss, Wagner, Beethoven, Bach. We had the great poets Goethe, Schiller, and Rilke. The philosopher Kant came from my hometown of Koenigsberg. We were the cultural center of the world. Now everyone puts down the Germans, but it was not always like this.”
Tante Martha was a robust woman with tightly wound pewter Heidi braids encircling her head. She walked around in dark dresses and proudly proclaimed she had never worn pants in her life. She never drank milk but cooked with lots of butter, which she said was the key to long health.
After World War II, she mailed frequent care packages to her struggling German relatives, who sold the coffee, chocolate, and cigarettes on the black market to survive. She admitted Hitler had been a “poor leader,” yet she minimized Nazi atrocities and dismissed the Holocaust as Jewish propaganda.
By the time I was born, she lived in the small town of Paradise in the Sierra foothills with her husband, my Uncle Joe, whom she scolded constantly along with demands and complaints. “Oh woman!” he would exclaim with mock despair, throwing his hands into the air. “Leave me alone,” at which she would crinkle her eyes and chuckle, “I’ll make you a good pork chop dinner.” She mourned mightily when he died, leaving her widowed for 17 years.
My three brothers and I spent many weekends in Paradise visiting Tante Martha, Uncle Joe, and my grandmother Minna. Every afternoon, Tante Martha would stride down a gravel road to her sister Minna’s cottage, where they would sit on the sofa together, sip strong coffee, and chat for an hour in German, which we could not understand. I remember playing silently with wood blocks on the floor as they chatted, dust motes swirling in the afternoon light. Eventually, their conversation would shift into English and toward us boys.
They doted on us as if we were Prussian princes. They loved to hear us sing “The Old Rugged Cross” and advised us on how to live virtuous lives. As we grew to be teens, they would speak of German supremacy and caution us against interracial marriage, sometimes using racial slurs that shocked us, though we did not take their words seriously and would caricature them behind their backs. Sometimes, I would tease them: “I am going to marry a beautiful Jewish girl,” which always got a rise out of Tante Martha. “Oh no, Eddie,” she would admonish. “You marry a German or a Swede. Ja, that’s where the smarts are. You listen to your Tante Martha.”
Now I realize that long before Hitler, my great aunt and grandmother grew up in a culture that assumed racial categories, a caste system that placed Germans at the top and Jews at the bottom. They had most likely assimilated anti-Jewish prejudices from family, Church and school; it had been the air they breathed. Even in their liberal Prussian city of Königsberg, known as a relatively safe place for German Jews, antisemitism flared after World War I.[1] Now, in my sixties, I am starting to understand their “völkisch” worldview—a legacy of unrecognized racism and classism they never entirely abandoned.
I recently thought of my relatives as I studied the Barmen Declaration and the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s. I’m neither a historian nor a scholar, and the Church’s actions under Hitler seem messy and complicated for me to interpret. What I do know, however, is that antisemitism left few Germans of that time untainted—including the most devoted Christians.
THE BARMEN DECLARATION
On a cool May afternoon in Barmen, Germany, in 1934, Swiss theologian Karl Barth sat alone at a wood table revising the first draft of a Christian statement that would come to be known as the Barmen Declaration. Wearing his signature round Oxford glasses and (in his words) “fortified by strong coffee and one or two Brazilian cigars,”[2] Barth worked intently on his draft as his clergy peers took their afternoon nap.
It proved to be a pivotal moment in the history of the German Protestant Church. One-hundred-thirty-nine Lutheran, Reformed, and United Church leaders had gathered in Barmen for the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church. Their purpose was to articulate a clear stance against the pro-Nazi German Christian faction that dominated the religious landscape, which was, in their eyes, “ravaging the Church and…shattering the unity of the German Evangelical Church.”[3]
At just over 1,000 words, Barth’s succinctly crafted draft affirmed the authority of Jesus Christ as “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death,” over and above all earthly powers, fascist or otherwise. It declared Jesus as “God’s vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life” and flatly rejected the subjugation of the Church to the Nazi State. Theologians Hans Asmussen and Thomas Breit contributed to the draft, which the other synod attendees revised. Ultimately, however, the Barmen Declaration was essentially Barth’s work and one of his finest theological achievements.[4] It continues to embolden Christians around the world today, particularly those suffering under authoritarian oppression.
The adoption of the Barmen Declaration marked the rallying of the Confessing Church movement that opposed the Nazification of the German Evangelical Church. The document was initially titled the “Theological Declaration Concerning the Present Situation of the German Evangelical Church.” But what exactly was that “present situation”? What were the Confessing Church members pushing up against?
THE “PRESENT SITUATION” IN 1934 GERMANY
Germany was already a racial terror state when the Barmen Synod met. Clergy attending Barmen would have been required to document their “Aryan” descent to retain their positions. Pastors could no longer baptize or fellowship with Jewish converts. Ministers with even a fraction of Jewish blood could be excommunicated. Opposers of Nazi ideology were routinely rounded up, arrested, and imprisoned at Dachau and other newly built concentration camps. More than 100,000 “enemies of the Reich” had been arrested by the end of 1933; hundreds had died, and tens of thousands, including Jews, had already fled Germany. Jews were frequently bullied and beaten in the streets by Hitler’s paramilitary “brownshirts.” Many of the clergy present at Barmen would have witnessed ruthless, public brutality of their Jewish neighbors and heard rumors of Jewish extermination.[5]
To comprehend the perspectives of Germans at that time, including those of my relatives, I delved into the concept of “Volk” that permeated German culture. The term “Volk,” similar to “folk” in English, encapsulated the notion of proud German identity, emphasizing a connection to “blood and soil” while deliberately excluding Jews and other ethnic groups. Volkism emerged as a 19th-century reactionary movement against the modernity that threatened traditional ways of German life. Rooted in ethnic nationalism, it romanticized Germanic history, mythology, folklore, and pre-Christian pagan traditions. It represented a “back to the earth” and “back to the past” response against Imperial Germany’s rapid industrialization. To be völkisch was to embody a metaphysical ruggedness, tenacity, and noble Nordic essence. Central to völkisch thought was the idea of a pure, homogenous “Volksgemeinschaft”—a national community of the German people.[6]
As early as 1803, intellectuals propagated völkisch ideas throughout German middle-class society. By the early 20th Century, these ideas were widely accepted in churches, schools, and universities. They focused on a national rebirth and opposed liberal capitalism, democratic politics, and socialist concepts. In the aftermath of World War I, völkisch ideology flourished, identifying Jews as the enemies of Volk and saboteurs of German unification.[7]
My grandparents and their family were exposed to these ideas from childhood. “The Jews, they control the newspapers and Hollywood,” Tante Martha told me. “Of course, war is bad, but what they say about six million Jews murdered is exaggerated. Don’t watch those war movies. They don’t tell you the truth. You listen to your Tante Martha.”
ANTISEMITISM IN THE GERMAN PROTESTANT CHURCH
For centuries, antisemitic ideas had so rooted themselves in the European Church that when Nazi leaders blamed the Jews for all that was wrong in Germany, few Protestants objected. After all, they reasoned, even Martin Luther had advised, in a 65,000-word treatise titled “On the Jews and their Lies,” “That their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able to toss in sulfur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire.”[8] German Protestants seized on Luther’s medieval hostility toward Judaism, and—indeed—all hell broke loose.
In the late 1920s, two Völkisch-Nazi pastors, Siegfried Leffler, and Julius Leutheuser, founded a nationalist group called the “German Christians,” a doublespeak title suggested to them by Adolph Hitler himself.[9] As Hitler rose to power in 1933, the German Christians grew in numbers and influence. Their goal was to abolish all denominations and create a single German Christian church imbued with Nazi fervor. They spiritualized National Socialist ideology as the fulfillment of God’s kingdom on earth and believed Hitler was the divinely chosen savior of Germany. A pseudo-revival ensued as tens of thousands converted to what was termed the new “Positive Christianity.”
In September 1933, eight months before the Barmen Synod, German Christian leaders elected chaplain Ludwig Müller Imperial Bishop. Müller, with scant seminary training, was unabashedly völkisch, chauvinistic, and anti-Jewish. Müller challenged the authority of Scripture to accommodate doctrines of German racial superiority. He strongly supported the “Aryan Clause,” a government requirement that excluded “non-Aryans,” particularly Jewish converts, from church fellowship and leadership. Pastors were pressured to affirm loyalty to the Nazi Party and to prove their Nordic racial purity. Some preached a “gospel” of murderous hatred, such as the influential Pastor Siegfried Leffler, who wrote: “As a Christian, I…have to follow the laws of my Volk…Even if I know that ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God, or that ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him. And I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ.”[10]
Such extremist rhetoric was commonplace in 1930s Germany. For German Christians, purity of race was a divine command that sanctified their cause. They considered the establishment of an anti-Jewish church a sacred task. Völkisch theology rejected Biblical ethics of compassion, care for the poor, and love for the outsider and instead promoted Jesus as a strong-armed Jew-hater. In a strident speech at the Berlin Sports Palace rally on November 13, 1933, religious leader Reinhard Krause called for “liberation from the Old Testament with its cheap Jewish morality of exchange and its stories of cattle traders and pimps.” He angrily rejected the portrayal of “a meek and suffering Christ” and excoriated “the teachings of the Rabbi Paul.” He reframed Christ as a manly, aggressive hero and said, “We must be careful not to exaggerate Christ crucified.”[11] German Christians went so far as to assert that Jesus was not a Jew at all, that humanity’s sinfulness was overstated, and that Christ’s death on the cross was meaningless. They either avoided the teaching of the Apostle Paul altogether or selected only those scriptures that would support their ideological ends.
Pastors refused baptism to Jewish converts. “German Christians warned that baptism could become a portal through which alien elements entered the Aryan bloodstream,” writes Doris L. Bergen in her book The Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Congregations abolished missions to Jews, removed Old Testament references from worship services, and purged words such as Jehovah, Hallelujah, and Hosanna from hymn books. Pastors reinterpreted the New Testament gospels, along with Paul’s writings, as condemnations of Judaism and preached that God himself was against the Jews. Parents even stopped giving their children names from the Hebrew Bible.[12]
Benutzer:BrThomasvectored by FOX 52, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
MARTIN NIEMÖLLER AND THE PASTOR’S EMERGENCY LEAGUE
Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, a World War I U-boat war hero, at first supported Hitler but became disillusioned with Nazi attempts to control the Church. Alarmed, he formed the Pastors Emergency League in September 1933 and urged ministers to pledge loyalty to Christ as “the only Word of God” and to preach the gospel of peace as presented in the scriptures. The Pastors Emergency League vehemently opposed the Aryan Clause, defended non-Aryan clergy, and proclaimed that the Holy Scriptures, not National Socialism, held ultimate authority over their lives. By the close of 1933, as swastikas adorned Church walls and Nazi flags fluttered at religious rallies, the Pastors Emergency League expanded from 60 to 6,000 members. Out of that remnant of resistance emerged the Confessing Church, from which the Barmen Declaration was penned.
The Confessing Church contended that the German Christians embodied a false religion that fully embraced National Socialism and rejected the teachings of Christ. Since they could not reconcile, the Confessing Church separated in protest.[13]
The Barmen Declaration, forged in a crucible of frenetic German nationalism, insisted: “We reject the false doctrine that…the Church could…allow itself to be given special leaders [Führer] vested with ruling authority.”
That was a gutsy statement, given the fascist climate. Many historians, however, feel that the Barmen Declaration’s writers fumbled by not directly confronting the Nazi regime’s brutality against Jews. Church leaders worldwide felt that the Declaration’s authors missed a crucial opportunity to shine a spotlight on Nazi abuses.
The Confessional Church identified itself mainly as anti-heresy, not anti-Hitler. It did not overtly criticize state policies outside the Church, including the targeting of Jews. Had its leaders openly opposed Hitler, the repercussions would undoubtedly have been immediate and severe. By their silence, however, resistance to Nazi terror was left to individuals whose subversive activity mainly went undocumented, and Jews had few Christian leaders to speak on their behalf.
It was not just fear that kept Confessional Christians quiet, however. Almost all were political conservatives reluctant to appear unpatriotic. Many also supported Hitler’s nationalistic vision and chose to ignore the horrific expressions of those ideals. Some were even Nazi Party members.
“The Confessional Church as a whole did not offer resistance in a political sense, with the intent of bringing down the National Socialist regime,” writes historian Wolfgang Benz. “It fought first to keep its organizational structures intact, and then to preserve the independence of church doctrine, according to which the Christian commandments were not to be subordinated to Nazi ideology.”[14]
I can’t presume to understand the pressures Confessional Christians felt in Germany under the Nazis. What I do know is that my relatives succumbed to nationalist and racist ideologies long before Hitler came to power simply by coming of age in Germany’s völkisch milieu. Racism can so imbed itself in our worldview that it becomes our default perspective, extremely difficult to shed or even recognize. It happened in Germany, and it certainly happens in the United States today.
I recall that in her 80’s, Tante Martha befriended a Jewish resident in her senior apartment complex. “We have good conversations about all kinds of things,” she told me. “He is a Jew and a good man. I tell him about Jesus and he tells me about Judaism. See, we teach each other.” Later, she moved into a board and care home run by a compassionate Filipino family who cared for her as if she were a member of their own family. My wife told her about a family friend who, as a soldier, had witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald at the war’s end. That shocked and silenced Tante Martha. All of these things brought her to question her racist assumptions.
How difficult it is to separate ourselves from our cultural milieu to discern the “present situation” with clarity and wisdom. Historian Shelley Baranowski writes: “The real lesson of good Germans and bad behavior is the ease with which a commitment to one’s nation, plus some natural bending in the prevailing wind, can blind one to the moral implications of one’s stance. It can blind one to injustice that might find itself condemned by a later generation. We cannot be certain to avoid some future generation condemning us for behavior and ideas we think acceptable—but we can try. The experience and stance of good Germans in Nazi Germany should sharpen our awareness. It should at least show us the danger of rationalizing injustice, even if it cannot show us exactly where our injustices lie.”[15]
Writing on the legacy of the Barmen Declaration, Myles Werntz, Director of Baptist Studies at Abilene Christian University, observes: “In every generation, there is a small contingency—a remnant, as it were—which stands up to the political powers that have colonized Christianity for its own ends, some of which emerge more baldly as anti-Christs in the process. But their numbers are not great, their witness is often unseen, and most of all, there remains confusion as to what counts as a faithful remnant. Divisions among Christians on moral and political questions abound, such that one Church’s martyr is another church’s heretic.”[16]
Would that we have the clarity to see outside of our cultural milieu, the courage to stand for those oppressed and resist nationalist extremists, and the humility to love as Christ would have us do in our own “present situation.”
Ed Aust is a writer, editor, and photographer living in Oakland, CA, and serves as poetry editor for Radix Magazine.
[1] Stefanie Schuler-Springorum, “Assimilation and Community Reconsidered: The Jewish Community in Konigsberg, 1871-1914,” Jewish Social Studies 5, no. 3 (1999): 104–31.
[2] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994), 239.
[3] “The Barmen Declaration.” Accessed May 16, 2024. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/doyle/personal/enters/hermann/declaration.html.
[4] George Harinck, “The Barmen Declaration: Opposed to Hitler and the Nazis?” lecture at Wheaton College, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YciKsq6HMh8.
[5] Victoria J. Barnett, “Barmen, the Ecumenical Movement, and the Jews: The Missing Thesis,” The Ecumenical Review 61, no. 1 (2009): 17–23, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6623.2009.00003.x.
[6] Völkisch ideas continue to influence right-wing nationalist movements, including those in the U.S. In Stephen Wolfe’s bestselling book The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), Wolfe lays out a methodology for Christian Nationalism and asserts that “blood relations matter for your ethnicity, because your kin have belonged to this people on this land–to this nation in this place–and so they bind you to that people and place creating a common Volkgeist” (p 139). In his epilogue, Wolfe writes, “I expect that most committed Christian nationalists will be farmers, homesteaders, and ranchers” (p 461). Also, “Christian nationalism should have a strong and austere aesthetic” (p 469).
[7] D-Lonigin, “Reflections on George Mosse’s ‘The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third…'” Medium (blog), March 15, 2019, https://medium.com/@ligonjd/reflections-on-george-mosses-the-crisis-of-german-ideology-intellectual-origins-of-the-third-689d731a2fd2.
[8] “Martin Luther – ‘The Jews & Their Lies,'” accessed May 16, 2024, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-quot-the-jews-and-their-lies-quot.
[9] Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, repr. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
[10] Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, 3rd print., 1st paperback print. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[11] Nazi German Christian Leaders Reaffirm That Semitic Influences Must Be Kept Out of New Church”, San Antonio Express, November 16, 1933, p1, 3.
[12] Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich.
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kirchenkampf&oldid=1195227767#cite_note-FOOTNOTEBerben1975140-31
[14] Wolfgang Benz, and Thomas Dunlap, A Concise History of the Third Reich, Weimar and Now 39 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
[15] Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999).
[16] “The Legacy of the Barmen Declaration – Center for Barth Studies.” 2020. October 12, 2020. https://barth.ptsem.edu/the-legacy-of-the-barmen-declaration/.