A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past

NOTES

NOTES Introduction 1. Quoted in Reinhard Rürup, ed., Berlin 1945: A Documentation (Berlin: Willmuth Arenh övel, 1995), 62. 2. Ecumenical Press Service 44 (November 1945): 218–19. The Lutherans who issued this statement were members of the Confessing synod of Berlin-Brandenburg. 3. Throughout this study I use the terms “Protestant” and “Evangelical” interchangeably. Some historians writing about German Protestantism in English have chosen to substitute “Protestant” for “Evangelical” in order to distinguish the German Evangelical churches from the Evangelical churches in the United States. Whereas in the United States “Evangelical” usually refers to churches associated with the conservative wing of Protestant Christianity, such as the Church of Christ or the National Baptist Church, in Germany “evangelisch” refers broadly to the three main Protestant traditions or denominations in Germany: Lutheran, Reformed, and United. Since many of the Protestant regional churches in Germany, such as the Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern, as well as the umbrella federation for the nation as a whole, the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, use “evangelisch” in their names, I retain Evangelical for reasons of accuracy and clarity. 4. The most important administrative union of Lutheran and Reformed churches took place in Prussia in 1817 during the reign of Frederick William III. In addition to the influence of Pietism and the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic consolidation of the approximately three hundred German principalities into thirty states with corresponding regional churches contributed to the development of Union churches. Napoleon’s territorial consolidations brought Lutheran subjects under the rule of Reformed leaders, and Reformed subjects under the rule of Lutheran leaders. The easiest solution seemed to be the creation of United churches. Prussia’s union was followed by unions in the Rhenish-Palatinate, Baden, Rhenish Hesse, and Württemberg in the decade from 1817 to 1827. Lutheran confessionalism was too strong elsewhere, especially in Bavaria, Saxony, and Hannover, for unions to take place. See Robert M. Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 37; Daniel R. Borg, The Old-Prussian Church and the Weimar Republic: A Study in Political Adjustment, 1917–1927 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1984), chap. 1; and Eckhard Lessing, Zwischen Bekenntnis und Volkskirche: Der theologische Weg der Evangelischen Kirche der altpreußischen Union (1922–1953) unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer Synoden, ihrer Gruppen und der theologischen Begründungen (Bielefeld: Luther-Verlag, 1992). 5. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (Berlin: R. Hobbing, 1934), 5–6. 6. Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 168 and 233, n. 12. 7. Ibid., 178. 8. Ernst Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 156. 9. Otto Dibelius, In the Service of the Lord: The Autobiography of Bishop Otto Dibelius, trans. Mary Ilford (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 7–8. 10. It is crucial that readers not confuse the terms “reformers,” “reform-minded,” and “reform wing” with the denominational designation “Reformed,” i.e., Calvinist. The former with a small “r” refer to churchmen from Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches in the immediate postwar years in Germany who sought to reform the church’s hierarchical structure and conservative theology in light of its easy accommodation with Nazism from 1933 to 1945. The latter with a capital “R” refers to the Protestant denomination that traces its roots to Martin Bucer (1491–1551), John Calvin (1509–64), and Huldrych Zwingli (1484– 1531), among others. Karl Barth (1886–1968) was both a leader of the reform wing of the Protestant churches in postwar Germany and a Swiss Reformed theologian. 11. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 74–77. 12. Protestants broke their silence regarding the church’s antisemitism and anti-Judaism at the EKD’s Berlin-Weissensee synod of April 1950. They admitted, “We through neglect and silence have been accomplices in the outrages that have been perpetrated by representatives of our people upon the Jews.” Chapters 7 and 8 of this book address in detail the gradual and halting process that led to the Berlin-Weissensee statement. 13. For example, Niemöller collaborated with Bishop Wurm and Prelate Karl Hartenstein of Stuttgart on the “Memorandum by the Evangelical Church in Germany on the Question of War Crimes Trials before American Military Courts” (1949). See Marcuse, Legacies...