But before the synod could meet, resistance began to form. The impetus was provided by the Berlin pastor Martin Niemöller, a former U-boat commander and Freikorps paramilitary, who initially had high hopes for Hitler and the new regime but quickly grew disenchanted. On 21 September 1933, he sent a letter to pastors throughout Germany, calling on them to join together to form a “Pastors’ Emergency League.” The basic principles articulated in the letter included the duty to “perform one’s pastoral duties solely according to the Holy Scripture and the creeds of the Reformation as the correct interpretation of Scripture.” It also clearly rejected the “application of the Aryan paragraphs within the Church of Jesus Christ.” By the end of the year, 6,000 pastors had pledged their support. For that reason, the historian James Bentley has rightly argued that Niemöller laid the cornerstone for Church opposition to Hitler.41 The Pastors’ Emergency League gained valuable momentum after a mass event held by the German Christians in Berlin’s Sportpalast on 13 November turned into a “fiasco beyond compare.”42 To the frenetic applause of an audience of 20,000, the evening’s main speaker, Berlin Gau church administrator Reinhold Krause, demanded nothing less than “the completion of Martin Luther’s ethnic-popular mission with a second German reformation.” This “new ethnic Church” would create space for the entire breadth of ‘racially appropriate spiritual life.” The first step was the “liberation of Church services and confessional matter from everything un-Germanic,” including the Old Testament with its “Jewish profit morality” and its “stories of livestock traders and pimps.” Having picked up a head of steam, Krause went on to insist that the New Testament be cleansed of “all obviously distorted and superstitious anecdotes” and that the faithful reject “the whole scapegoat and inferiority theology of the rabbi Paul.”43 Such ideas barely differed from Rosenberg’s notion of a racial religion, and there was immediate resistance not only from the circles associated with the Emergency League but from moderate German Christians as well. Reich Bishop Müller was forced to remove Krause from his Church office and suspend the implementation of the Aryan paragraph.44
Hitler was extremely irritated at the conflicts following the Sportpalast event, interpreting Müller’s response as a sign of weakness. At a reception on 29 November, the Führer informed Müller that he did not intend to intervene in the Church quarrel: the Reich bishop would have to solve his difficulties on his own.45 It was the first step towards Hitler distancing himself from his former protégé, whom he saw as increasingly ill-suited for achieving the ultimate aim of a unified Protestant Church strictly loyal to the regime. Hitler left no doubt as to where his true sympathies lay at lunch in the Chancellery in early December 1933, where according to Goebbels he “really laid into” the Churches. He said he “now saw through the pasty-faced preachers and Reich Bishop Müller. The most upstanding of the lot is Krause, who at least does not conceal his disgust at the Jewish swindle that is the Old Testament.”46
Müller used draconian methods to defend himself against his critics. In early January 1934, he proclaimed an “Ordinance Concerning the Restoration of Orderly Relations in the German Protestant Church,” which prohibited any mention of conflicts and announcements on political matters pertaining to the Church during religious services. This gagging order was the least-effective means imaginable of silencing dissenting clergymen. Instead, it provoked further passionate protest. The Reich bishop, his detractors claimed, was threatening to bring down violence upon everyone “who for the sake of their conscience and their congregations was unable to keep silent about what the Church is going through at present.”47
Contrary to his previously stated intention to stay out of the internal conflict within the Protestant Church, Hitler now declared himself willing to mediate between the German Christians and their opponents. He received both sides in the Chancellery on the afternoon of 25 January 1934, but the meeting was anything but what the leaders of the Church opposition, which included the bishops Theophil Wurm, August Marahrens and Hans Meiser, had anticipated. Right from the start and to everyone’s surprise, Hitler turned the floor over to Göring, who read out the transcript of a telephone call made by Martin Niemöller that morning, which had been listened in on by the Gestapo. During the call, the Berlin clergyman had made a number of disparaging remarks about a conversation between Hitler and Hindenburg ahead of the meeting of Church leaders. Instead of protesting against such police-state surveillance, the dissenting bishops were utterly cowed. Years later, in his monologues in his military headquarters, Hitler still recalled with glee how the delegates of the Protestant Church had been so terrified by the reading out of the transcript that they “shrunk in terror” until they were barely visible.48
Niemöller kept his cool, however. He confirmed that these had been his words but sought to explain to Hitler that the Pastors’ Emergency League’s struggle was directed not against the Third Reich but rather for its welfare. Visibly irritated, the dictator shot back: “Leave concerns about the Third Reich to me, and focus your concerns on the Church.” In the end, the Church leaders had to swear to Hitler that they would work together with Bishop Müller in the future. In a declaration at the end of the meeting, they reaffirmed their “unconditional loyalty to the Third Reich and its Führer” and their severest condemnation of “all critical machinations directed against the state, the people and the movement.”49 Müller’s position was shored up in the short term, while the Church leaders’ self-abasing declaration weakened the Emergency League. But Hitler never forgot that Niemöller alone dared stand up to him, and the pastor became the object of hateful persecution by the Führer and his henchmen. In a discussion with Himmler and Goebbels in late April, Hitler ordered them to take up battle against the Pastors’ Emergency League. “It’s going to be a witch-hunt,” Goebbels noted. “Poor pastoral scum. We’ll behave like Christians.”50
But even a repressive crackdown could not restore calm within the Protestant Church. Müller’s attempt to employ dictatorial means to Nazify the regional Churches called forth resistance and attracted sympathy to the intra-Church opposition.51 In late May 1934, 139 delegates met for the first “Confessional Synod of the German Protestant Church” in Wuppertal-Barmen. They agreed on a declaration, largely composed by the theologian Karl Barth, whose famous first thesis staked out the greatest imaginable distance from the German Christians: “We reject the false teaching that the Church can and must acknowledge, beyond the word of God, other events and powers, figures and truths as God’s revelation.” The Barmen Declaration of 31 May, as the historian Klaus Scholder has remarked, was without doubt the most significant event in what became known as the “Church Struggle”: “Thanks to its plain language, its biblical reasoning and its unambiguous character as a confession of faith, it did not just reach theologians and pastors, but had a profound effect within congregations. It remained the cantus firmus of the Confessional Church even when its voice was almost drowned out.”52 The first Confessing Synod was followed by a second one in Niemöller’s home district of Berlin-Dahlem in October 1934. It appointed a governing council to direct the activities of the Confessing Church and called upon “Christian congregations, pastors and Church councils” throughout Germany “to refuse to take any further instructions from the leadership of the Reich Church or any of its organs.”53
By the autumn of 1934 it was obvious that Müller had not succeeded in ending the disagreements. In late October, Hitler surprisingly refused to meet him and forgave the southern German bishops Wurm and Meiser, who had been disciplined by the Reich bishop, summoning them to Berlin together with Marahrens, the bishop of Hanover. In a two-hour conversation on 30 October, he told them that he no longer had any interest in Church affairs—an unmistakable signal that Müller had fallen from grace.54 But the three bishops were disappointed by the fact that Hitler did not, as they had expected, make it explicit that the Reich bishop’s time was up. Even though Hitler disparaged Müller privately, saying that “he was neither a tactic
ian nor a man of principles and was soft inside and hard externally, rather than vice versa,”55 the dictator was not prepared to abandon him entirely. For his part, despite his obvious loss of influence, Müller refused to resign. Henceforth his popular nickname “Reibi” (for Reich bishop) became “Bleibi”—he who insists on staying.56
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The Nazi regime’s battle against the Churches caused great unease among Protestants and Catholics alike, but for most religious people it did not result in silent inner rejection of the regime—let alone open political opposition. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that people blamed the regime’s anti-clerical policies and harassment on ideological agitators like Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler’s personal popularity remained unaffected. Here, too, he was a master of disguise, presenting himself as a person and a politician who maintained firm religious beliefs and was committed to defending the values of Christianity against fanatics within his own party. The willingness of the leaders of both confessions to declare their loyalty to and their respect for the Führer also served to divert the dissatisfaction of religious segments of the populace away from the man at the top and onto local party radicals.57
After the attempt to Nazify the Churches and get them to submit to the authority of the regime had failed, the Nazi leadership searched for a new strategy. In July 1935, Hitler put former Prussian Minister of Justice Hanns Kerrl in charge of Church affairs, which had previously been handled by the Ministries of the Interior and Culture. As the director of the newly established Reich Church Ministry, Kerrl had carte blanche to issue decrees affecting religion. He set up a Reich Church committee as well as local committees to act as go-betweens between Church and state and to mediate conflicts within the Protestant Church. It was necessary, Kerrl told the Nazi Gauleiter and Reich governors in early August 1935, “to identify those forces within the Christian Churches which affirmed the state and were permeated by National Socialism, and to preserve them in Church life.”58
Hitler’s goal in changing his policy towards the Churches was twofold. On the one hand, he wanted to remove them as much as possible from public life. On the other, he wished to de-escalate the conflicts or at least to avoid an open confrontation, which would have further depressed the worsening popular mood in the summer and autumn of 1935. “He’s monitoring the decline in mood very carefully,” noted Goebbels on 14 August. “He wants to make peace with the Churches. At least for the time being.”59 Nonetheless, in a pastoral letter read from pulpits only a few days later, Catholic bishops reaffirmed their Church’s claim to have a public role and sharply condemned the regime’s repressive policies. In a memorandum to Hitler, they may have stressed their “affirmative attitude towards the state.” But they also expressed their “deep concerns in the face of the increasingly vocal attacks upon Christianity and the Church.”60
Hitler was enraged and, together with Goebbels, pondered how to respond. “The Führer considers the question of Catholicism as very serious,” Goebbels wrote in early September 1935. “Should he allow it to come to a head right now? I hope not. Later would be better. First we need some foreign-policy successes.”61 In his opening address of the Nuremberg rally on 11 September, Hitler proclaimed that he had “no intention of tolerating the continued or renewed politicisation of the confessions through the back door.” He promised that he would lead a determined battle “to keep our public life free of those priests who took up the wrong jobs, since they should have become politicians and not ministers.”62
In a series of trials in 1935 and 1936, the regime tightened the screws. Catholic priests and members of monastic orders were accused of sexually abusing children and youths and of violating the state’s strict rules concerning foreign currency. The resulting trials before the regional court in Koblenz, which had been prepared with the intensive help of the state police, went on until late July 1936, when Hitler ordered them to be suspended.63 The reason for his change of heart was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which opened up the possibility of the regime and the Catholic Church burying the hatchet and forming a “unified anti-Bolshevist front.” Nonetheless, although German bishops took a clear anti-Bolshevik stance in their pastoral letter of 19 August 1936, they also continued to insist that the “throttling” of Church life in Germany, in violation of the concordat, would have to stop before any agreement could be reached.64
In conversation with Goebbels in late October 1936, Hitler confirmed his intention to reach at least a temporary truce with Catholicism so that he could take on Bolshevism. “He intends to speak to Faulhaber,” noted Goebbels.65 On 4 November, the dictator received the cardinal on the Obersalzberg. Over the course of their three-hour talk, Hitler laid out the nightmare scenario of Bolshevism threatening all of Europe and called upon the Catholic Church to support him in his battle, telling Faulhaber: “Either nationalism and religion will triumph together, or they will both be destroyed.” Hitler promised to “let bygones be bygones” and “get rid of all the minor issues that disrupted our peaceful cooperation.” It was his “deepest wish,” he said, to reach agreement with the Church. And once again Hitler’s combination of the carrot and the stick had its desired effect. “The Führer has command over diplomatic and social formalities like a born sovereign,” Faulhaber wrote in a confidential report about the meeting. “Without doubt the Reich chancellor lives a life of faith. He recognises Christianity as the architect of Western culture.”66
For his part, Hitler told Goebbels that he had “really lit a fire” under the cardinal. Faulhaber, he said, had been “quite puny, babbling about dogma or something.” Hitler had presented him with a clear choice: “War or reconciliation. There is nothing else. The Church has to come out in support of us, without reservations.”67 But Germany’s Catholic bishops were not about to subjugate themselves unconditionally. In their pastoral letter at Christmas 1936, they declared themselves willing to support the regime in its “historic fight to defend us against Bolshevism,” but repeated their demand that the rights given to them by the concordat be respected. Hitler vented his irritation at the bishops’ intransigence during a long conversation about religion over lunch on the Obersalzberg in early January 1937. “Once again, the Catholic bishops have attacked us in a pastoral letter,” he complained. “If the gods want to punish someone, they first blind him.” Hitler also made it unmistakably clear that his public declarations concerning the value of the Christian Churches were mere lip service. “The Führer thinks Christianity is ripe for demise,” Goebbels noted. “It may take a long time, but it will come.”68
Hitler’s anti-Catholicism was only reinforced on 30 January 1937 when, as we have seen, the strictly Catholic Postal and Transport Minister Paul von Eltz-Rübenach refused to accept the Golden Party Badge or be inducted into the NSDAP, with the explanation that the Nazis were “repressing the Church.” Hitler and Goebbels were outraged. “That’s the Catholics for you,” the propaganda minister fumed. “They take orders from somewhere higher than the fatherland—the only, truly saving Church.”69 In the days that followed, Hitler also raved against the Churches: “They have learned nothing and will never learn. The most terrible institution imaginable. Without mercy and justice. You cannot make any compromises with them. If you do you are lost.”70 After Faulhaber delivered another critical sermon in Munich, Goebbels demanded: “We have to read these preachers the Riot Act. They have to be made to bend under the power of the state. Before that happens, there’ll be no peace.”71
Conferring with a small circle about the issue in late February 1937, Hitler delivered a fundamental philippic against Christianity and the Churches. Goebbels summed up the Führer’s views:
The Führer explained Christianity and Christ. Christ, too, was against global Jewish dominance. The Jews crucified him for that. But Paul falsified his teachings and in so doing undermined Ancient Rome. The Jew in Christianity. Marx used socialism to do the same to the German idea of community. But that does not mean that we should not be socialists.72
The idea of Jesus as Aryan and Paul as a Jewish agent who falsified Christ’s teaching and diverted Christianity down a disastrous path was by no means original. It was an amalgamation of notions long current among ethnic-chauvinist circles. Hitler seems to have adopted them less from Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century than from Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.73
But Hitler’s relationship towards such ideas was purely opportunistic. “We do not want to battle against Christianity—on the contrary, we have to declare ourselves to be the only true Christians,” Goebbels recorded him saying. “This means that we have to throw the entire weight of the party at the saboteurs. Christianity is the slogan under which we will eradicate the preachers, just as socialism was the one under which we destroyed the Marxist bigwigs.”74 Although Hitler allowed his followers to worship him in cultish fashion, and although he enjoyed playing the high priest at the Nuremberg rallies, he consistently refused to portray himself as the founder of a religion. In a speech to the Gauleiter on 12 March 1937, he spoke out against the notion of “forming new religions,” stating that National Socialism was “still too young.” This was a clear rejection of Rosenberg’s ideas. Moreover, he still wanted to avoid an open break with the Catholic Church. “In the battle against the Churches he quotes Schlieffen: ‘victories with great dimensions or small victories,’ ” Goebbels noted. “And with good reason he does not want any ordinary victories. You can kill an adversary with silence or with blows. Onwards!”75
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