Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon

22. God and Caesar

CHAPTER 22 God and Caesar Bismarck, who united the German states into an empire after three victorious wars of aggression, suffered one irreparable defeat—his battle with the Catholic Church. Intending to suppress its educational in›uence, he had banned from German soil the Jesuit order, founded to counteract the spreading Reformation. But in the worldwide organization of the Church backed by the Holy See, he had chosen too powerful an opponent. The laws that were to give the Prussian state far-reaching authority over the affairs of the Catholic Church gradually had to be canceled. Hitler, by birth a Catholic but alienated from the Church, apparently thought that he would prove stronger than Bismarck. The Nazis tried to bring Church members into the party fold with insincere and demagogic proclamations, promising both Churches new in›uence and a secure and respected position. In a Reichstag speech in March 1933, Hitler said, “The two Christian Churches are important elements in the preservation of German national individuality, and their rights shall not be touched.” He sought friendly relations with the Holy See, and in a concordat with the Catholic Church he offered guarantees including the preservation of parochial schools and free circulation of pastoral letters. However, a clash with the Protestant and Catholic Churches was unavoidable, considering the avowed Nazi principle that might is right, that the strong must dominate the weak, that men are not of one blood and are not equal before God. The ensuing con›ict, and the peculiar situation of the German Evangelical Church, was of the greatest importance to hundreds of thousands in Germany. Since Luther’s reformation, the Protestant Church had been a constituent part of Prussia, Saxony, and other individual states. It was a state church, protected and supported by the state, whose prince, in 209 each case, was her supreme bishop. The altar was tied to the throne, and it is not surprising under these circumstances that most of the pastors were conservative and many even nationalistic. Church taxes were paid together with other taxes to the state, which was responsible for the salaries of the clergy. The Weimar Republic severed relations between church and state, intending gradually to give the Protestant churches complete self-administration. Their new freedom might have provided new religious impetus if the socialists, who had always insisted that religion led to bigotry, had not favored withdrawal from church membership. Large groups of the working class had been estranged. For many intellectuals, Jews and Gentiles alike, religion was nothing more than a luxury, appropriate for festivals only. Even active church members took Christianity very much for granted. Therefore, Hitler’s promise to the churches raised their hopes, until, only a few weeks later, it was of‹cially announced that the totalitarian slogan was to be “One Nation, One State, One Leader” and that this might include “One Church.” People asked each other, “What does he mean? He can’t possibly try to turn Catholics into Protestants or cancel the Reformation.” There was, at ‹rst, no question of a direct threat to the churches. The only demands were acquiescence to a change in the Creed—only a small change, said the Nazis—and a change in the administration of the Church. Why should the clergy not do what the universities had done? Everything else was coordinated. Why should not the churches, too, become totalitarian? Although the party program stated that the Jews would be driven out of Germany, not even the Jews themselves believed until April 1933 that it could and would be carried out. And yet it was a challenge for the Christian churches. The clergy would betray their mission if they witnessed without protest a persecution in direct contrast to basic Christian principles—the attack on a race in which the New Testament had its origin. Many incidents merged in initiating the clergy’s opposition to Hitler’s church policy: the order to amalgamate the Protestant Churches, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), and “United,” into a “German Christian Church” which was to be an instrument of Nazi propaganda ; Hitler’s order for the elections of a national Church synod, which were held true to Nazi methods, with the looming threat of the concentration camp for those who would not vote “German Chris210 Character Is Destiny tian”; or Hitler’s move in introducing, against all Protestant traditions, the post of a primate (Reichsbischof ). Yielding for the sake of peace...