And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews

Preface

vii preface How can we reassess what happened, to keep it from poisoning us and setting a pattern for what is yet to come?—Romano Guardini This study was accepted in 1970 as a doctoral dissertation by the Evangelical Theological Faculty at the University of Hamburg. For years it went unpublished since it contradicted much of the accepted thought among veterans of the Kirchenkampf (church struggle) and leading church historians . The issues I examined were considered taboo. My critics accused me of attacking those who had witnessed courageously on behalf of the Christian confessions and principles of faith. Apparently, some time had to pass before a new generation could reexamine the accepted history of the Kirchenkampf. Few people were familiar with the documents that proved that the Evangelical Church’s record under Nazism had been less than heroic. In the early 1980s, friends in Germany, the United States, and Israel persuaded me to update the manuscript. Thanks to the editorial assistance of Professor Peter von der Osten-Sacken, director of the Institute of the Church and Judaism in Berlin, a German edition was published in 1987. A second edition followed in 1993. By the time of its publication, this study was no longer a novelty in the historiography of the Kirchenkampf. My research had long since been confirmed and supplemented by the findings of others. The significance of this volume today rests more in its collection and assessment of the documents themselves than in the intent to present something new. The title of the German edition, Als die Zeugen Schwiegen, underscored the contradictions within this ‘‘confessing’’ church. Publicly and often at great risk, it confessed sterile points of dogma, while remaining silent as Jews and ‘‘non-Aryan’’ Christians were ‘‘eliminated,’’ ‘‘removed,’’ or simply ‘‘disappeared.’’ Yet whoever confesses bears witness, and becomes a witness as well. The contemporary witness who experiences political events differs from the theological witness, who bears witness by confessing faith in word and deed. One of the problems of the church that called itself the ‘‘Confessing Church’’ was that it remained silent when it was confronted with the fate of the Jews. It became a nonconfessing and, in its confessional Preface viii existence, a broken church. This was evident at the very beginning of the Kirchenkampf, when some Protestants attempted to introduce an ‘‘Aryan paragraph’’ into church law and thus ensure the ‘‘racial purity’’ of the clergy. The Pastors’ Emergency League pledge, the 1933 declaration by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller that launched the Kirchenkampf , rejected the Aryan paragraph as contrary to the confessions. Every Confessing pastor was required to sign this pledge. Yet the 1934 Barmen Declaration did not mention Jews or non-Aryan Christians, although it was the founding document for the Confessing Church and, in many churches today, has been granted the same status as the confessional texts of the Reformation. The church’s silence in Barmen characterized most of its subsequent statements as well. Thus, the church remained silent on the witness stand. At a time when the persecuted hoped for its witness, it confessed only on its own behalf. It even spoke out when silence would have been preferable—for example, when it allowed the state to use church records to confirm Aryan ancestry , thereby abetting the racist separation of Jews from non-Jews in society and in the church. Only individuals spoke out, helped and hid Jews, often at the risk of their own lives. The witnesses in the church were silent not only during the Nazi reign of terror but long afterward. Many tried to vindicate themselves by falsifying , omitting, or downplaying the record of their failures. They condemned studies like this one as arrogant, irresponsible attacks, made by people who had no idea of the pressures on Christians during the Nazi era. They argued that an adequate appraisal of the circumstances that had ensnared people under Nazism was impossible. This is a problem that confronts all contemporary historians. Nonetheless , the disadvantages in researching an era not experienced personally are offset—particularly with regard to the Nazi era—by the ability to see some things more clearly from a historical distance. This does not mean that I feel detached from the record of my church under Nazism, as a German or as a Christian. I am obligated to acknowledge the burdens of my German and Christian history—all the more so since I must assume that I, too, probably would have remained a silent witness. I...