Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940

Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition

578 563 [1.] 1/2, pp. 20–21. [2.] See the Gesetzblatt der Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (1935), 99. [3.] Regarding the heated disputes within the Confessing Church about the question of possible cooperation with the committees, resulting in a de facto split within the Con­ fessing Church itself in January 1936, see the portrayal in DB-ER, 419–24 and 495–506. Dirk Schulz Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition I In his 1937 Christmas letter to the former Finkenwalde candidates, Die­ trich Bonhoeffer wrote: “The balance sheet for this year is rather clear and unambiguous. Twenty­seven from your circle have been in prison; for some it lasted several months. Some are still detained at present and have spent the entire Advent in prison. Among the others there won’t be a single per­ son who has not experienced the impact, in his work and his personal life, of the increasingly impatient attacks of the anti­Christian forces.”[1] Here Bonhoeffer was succinctly describing the National Socialist regime’s twofold strategy for finally resolving the “church question” in its own favor. On the one hand, the regime had sought quietly to regulate and con­ trol the still intractable circles of the Confessing Church through church administrative and secret police measures. Within the framework of the National Socialist state, these circles continued to represent a disruptive ele­ ment. With the resignation of the Reich Church Committee on February 12, 1937, Reich minister for church affairs Hanns Kerrl’s plan to “restore order in the German Evangelical Church”[2] had finally failed.[3] With the March 20, 1937, “thirteenth implementation decree” of the “Law to Restore Order Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940 564 579 580 [4.] Gesetzblatt der Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (1937), 11. [The so­called muzzling decree.—VB] [5.] According to Kerrl, in a memorandum concerning an edict he wanted Hitler to promulgate for “securing the religious freedom of the Germans”; cited from Baumgärt­ ner, Weltanschauungskampf im Dritten Reich, 79–81. [6.] So the assessment of Klaus Scholder in “Politics and Church Politics,” in Requiem for Hitler, 155; see also 152–56. [7.] Scholder, “The Church Struggle,” in Requiem for Hitler, 117. Cf. also Röhm and Thierfelder, Evangelische Kirche zwischen Kreuz und Hakenkreuz, 122–24, and H. E. Tödt, Komplizen, Opfer und Gegner des Hitlerregimes, 324–32. [8.] Hence the plans for a strict separation of church and state, pursued especially by Bormann, whose goal was to force all the churches into the legal status of private in the German Evangelical Church,” Kerrl appointed the jurist Friedrich Werner, president of the Evangelical High Church Council [Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat] in Berlin, to oversee the ongoing church governance.[4] Werner was now the new strongman intent on realizing Kerrl’s vision of a Reich church loyal to the state in which a state­controlled administration would empower and indeed prompt the “securing of the religious freedom of the Germans.” That meant the cultivation of the “spiritual affairs of the faithful” in a manner that conformed to the regime.[5] On the other hand, one had to contend with “the increasingly impatient attacks of the anti­Christian forces.” This was a reference to the radical pow­ ers hostile to Christianity in the state and party around Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and Martin Bormann, who were increasing the ideo­ logical and administrative pressure on the churches under the guise of a “deconfessionalization of public life.” At the very latest, from the spring of 1937, even Adolf Hitler himself was “finished with the churches.”[6] His hopes of bringing the two great churches into the service of his own goals had come to nothing, eliminating the need for any further constructive pol­ icies concerning those churches. From now on, the determinative strategy became one of a complete exclusion of ecclesiastical influence from public life and the liquidation of Christianity. At the latest, the “deconfessionaliza­ tion of public life” was a decided matter as of October 1937. It was only the preparations for war that made it seem prudent to postpone the final assault on the churches and Christianity until after the war, not least because the more radical powers in the party did not want to discourage the churches’ alliance with the interests of the nation in the event of war. As a result, at the beginning of the war Hitler prohibited “any action against the Catholic and Protestant churches for the duration of the war.”[7] Although this pro­ hibition did...