A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past

1. The Church: Struggle Ecclesiastical, Political, and Theological Disunity in the Third Reich

1 The Church Struggle Ecclesiastical, Political, and Theological Disunity in the Third Reich Origins of the Church Struggle and the Formation of the Confessing Church, 1933–34 In the period 1933–45 Protestant responses to National Socialism in Germany ranged from enthusiastic endorsement to active opposition. These reflected the variety of theological and political perspectives of Protestant clergy and laity to the crises that had beset Germany since the First World War. Twelve years of Nazi dictatorship only made these divisions more entrenched and obvious. The divisions among pastors, church leaders, and theologians after the Second World War reflected many of the conflicts that had emerged during the period of Nazi rule, commonly referred to as “the church struggle.” The church struggle involved three interwoven dimensions: the struggle between the Confessing Church and the German Christian movement for control of the Protestant Church; the struggle between the Confessing Church and the Nazi state over spheres of influence; and the conflict within the Confessing Church between the conservative and radical wings over the nature of the church’s opposition to the German Christians and the Nazi state.1 The postwar debates about the Nazi past are an indisputable legacy of this final dimension of the church struggle. The church struggle began as a defensive struggle waged by established church authorities who grouped together loosely in the Confessing Church against the ultranationalist pro-Nazi faction within the church, the German Christians.2 The German Christians sought to incorporate the twenty-seven Protestant regional churches into a united German Evangelical Reich church headed by a Reich bishop with close ties to Hitler. Their goal to integrate Christianity and National Socialism in a racially pure “people’s church” was a direct challenge not only to the autonomy of the regional churches but to Lutheran and Reformed doctrinal principles as well. Thus, in addition to the ecclesiastical dimension of this conflict over who would control the churches administratively, the German Christian and Confessing Church clergy were often tenacious theological antagonists as well. Although there were clear and definite distinctions between the theology of the German Christians and that of the Confessing Church, these distinctions should not overshadow the continuities between the mainstream Protestant theology adhered to by many Confessing clergy and German Christian theology. In fact, the nationalism, antisemitism , and anticommunism at the heart of the German Christian movement were widely accepted and defended by reputable theologians in university faculties across Germany.3 The second dimension to the church struggle—conflict between the Confessing Church and the Nazi state—is often erroneously conceived as the primary (even the only) struggle.4 It is imperative to understand the church’s opposition to the state for what it really was: occasional critiques by a small group of churchmen against particular state policies, such as the Nazi euthanasia program and, most importantly , Nazi church policy. The final dimension of the church struggle, and the one most relevant to the postwar period, was the intense feuding within the Confessing Church itself between its radical and conservative wings. The divisions between these two wings of the Confessing Church became visible in 1934. Whereas the radicals, led by Pastor Martin Niemöller of Berlin-Dahlem, took a firm stand against the German Christians , conservatives, especially in the south German churches, showed a willingness to work alongside the more reputable churchmen in the German Christian movement . The radicals in the Confessing Church, it is important to note, were not socially or politically radical; in social and political matters they diªered very little from the conservatives, most of whom had supported one of the right-wing political parties—the German People’s Party, the German National People’s Party, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)—in Weimar elections. In the context of the persecution of the churches by the Nazi state, however, their opposition to Hitler’s church policy was decidedly radical. After the war the Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church continued to diªerentiate themselves from the conservatives by advocating reform of the church’s strict ecclesiastical hierarchy, dogmatic Lutheran doctrine, and conservative-nationalist political orientation. Although the Communist authorities in the Soviet occupation zone did not make life easy for churchmen after the war, there was little cause in the immediate postwar years for a continuation of radical opposition by Niemöller and his colleagues to the church policies of the new authorities in the eastern or western...