Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945

1. German Prelude

5 Chapter 1 German Prelude A Troubling Observation The year was 1936, and Adolf Keller, the Swiss Secretary of the European Central Bureau of Inter-Church Aid, delivered a series of lectures on church and state in Europe. He could not have chosen a more relevant topic. The “church struggle” (Kirchenkampf) between Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist state and the German Evangelical Church was entering its fourth year. Keller knew the German church well and had followed the conflict from its inception, and one aspect particularly troubled him: the willingness of the Lutheran churches “to collaborate with the State and, following Romans 13, to go a long way even with an antagonistic Government.”1 Norwegian church leaders also followed the German Evangelical Church’s confrontation with Nazism and were troubled by it, but they did not expect to find themselves in the same situation. When they did, they drew on the lessons of the German experience. For that reason, the Protestant church struggle in Germany was the prelude to the Church of Norway ’s resistance to Nazism.2 German Protestantism Before 1933 Before 1933, German Protestantism comprised 28 independent Lutheran, Reformed, and United (Lutheran/Reformed) state-supported territorial churches. Since the early nineteenth century they had dreamed of consoli- 6 · Preludes dating into a national church, but numerous political and ecclesiastical obstacles had stood in the way. In spite of their differences, in the early 1920s Protestants agreed that the common purpose of their churches was to mobilize “in behalf of the religious and moral world-view of the German Reformation,” and their moral agenda was “an ever higher, ever more perfect morality” through Christianity. The connection of Christianity to a higher morality held such a “commanding position” in German Protestantism at the time that it can “scarcely be exaggerated.” This point needs emphasizing in order to highlight the revolutionary nature of subsequent developments.3 The context of those developments was the crisis created by World War I, Germany’s military defeat, the collapse of the monarchy, the punitive Treaty of Versailles, the runaway inflation and economic depression of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the Protestant sense of lostness in the democratic but ineffectual Weimar Republic (1919–1933).4 The old was gone, the present was chaotic, and the future was unpredictable. In search of answers, former monarchists and nationalists looked to das Volk, the German people, as an ethnic, racial, and national community . Amidst the forces of destruction, only das Volk seemed to remain, and the völkisch (ethnic German) movement that emerged was thus based on “the unity of blood.”5 National Socialism built on this ethnic base. As the preeminent scholar of the German church struggle, Klaus Scholder, put it, “no one can understand the power which National Socialism achieved without realizing that behind it stood the claim and the conviction to be fighting on the side of good against evil.”6 Chief among the evils to be fought were Communists and Jews, both viewed as direct threats to völkisch identity and culture. In the 1930s, Lutheran theology thought of God’s rule in the world in terms of orders of creation. Within that framework, a younger generation of German Protestants created a new political ethic in the 1920s that can be seen in a lecture on “Church and Volkstum” by Paul Althaus, professor at the University of Erlangen. He elevated the German people as a racial, ethnic, and national community to the preeminent order of creation, which meant that the church had “to be committed to it above all others and to the movement that translated the will of das Volk into political action.”7 The question for Althaus was not the consequences of a totalitarian state, but whether the state served the will of God. If it did, German Prelude · 7 its intervention in all of life was not an issue.8 The movement thus shifted the center of church consciousness from Jesus and his ethical demand to das Volk and their ethical demands, eventually subordinating Jesus and traditional Christianity to Nazism—das Volk in political action. The German Protestant ideology that emerged was thus a fusion of Christianity, ethnicity, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, and it predisposed its adherents to Adolf Hitler’s vision of a new Germany.9 In July 1932, about 38 percent of the Protestant electorate supported the National Socialist German Labor Party, and “the greater the percentage of Protestants in an area, the greater its Nazi vote.” Religion was...