German Christians movement


German Christians were a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church that existed between 1933 and 1945, aligned towards the antisemitic, racist, and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal of aligning German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles. Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism within 23 of the initially 28 regional church bodies in Germany and the attendant foundation of the opposing Confessing Church in 1934. was a co-founder of the German Christians movement.

History

Antecedents

Lutheranism

Imperial Germany

During the period of the German Empire, before the Weimar Republic, the Protestant churches in Germany were divided along state and provincial borders. Each state or provincial church was supported by and affiliated with the regnal house—if it was Protestant—in its particular region; the crown provided financial and institutional support to its church. Church and state were therefore, to a large extent, combined on a regional basis. Monarchies of Roman Catholic dynasties also organised church bodies that were territorially defined by their state borders. The same was true for the three republican German states within the pre-1918 Empire. In Alsace-Lorraine the Napoleonic system of établissements publics du culte for the Calvinist, Jewish, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic congregations and umbrellas remained in effect.

Austria-Hungary

's antisemitic Christian Social Party is sometimes viewed as a model for Adolf Hitler's Nazism. Hitler praised Lueger in his book Mein Kampf as an inspiration. In 1943, Nazi Germany produced the biographical film Vienna 1910 about Lueger; the film was awarded the standing of "special political value".
File:Antisemitisches Wahlplakat CSP 1920.jpg|right|thumb|170px|Antisemitic Christian Social Party poster of 1920, depicting a Judeo-Bolshevik serpent choking the Austrian eagle; Text: "German Christians – Save Austria!"

Weimar Republic

With the end of World War I and the resulting political and social turmoil, the regional churches lost their secular rulers. With revolutionary fervor in the air, the conservative church leaders had to contend with socialists who favoured disestablishment.
After considerable political maneuvering, state churches were abolished under the new Weimar government, but the anti-disestablishmentarians prevailed in substance: churches remained public corporations and retained their subsidies from the government. Religious instruction in the schools continued, as did the theological faculties in the universities. The rights formerly held by the princes in the German Empire simply devolved to church councils.
Accordingly, in this initial period of the Weimar Republic, the Protestant Church in Germany now operated as a federation of 28 regional churches. The federation operated officially through the representative German Evangelical Church Confederation ; the League was itself established in 1922 by the rather loose annual convention called Church General Assembly, which was composed of the members of the various regional churches. The League was governed and administered by a 36-member Executive Committee which was responsible for ongoing governance between the annual conventions of the Kirchentag.
Save for the organisational matters under the jurisdiction of the national League, the regional churches remained independent in other matters, including theology, and the federal system allowed for a great deal of regional autonomy.

Nazi Germany

Ideology

The German Christians were, for the most part, a "group of fanatically Nazi Protestants." They began as an interest group and eventually came to represent one of the schismatic factions of German Protestantism.
Their movement was sustained and encouraged by factors such as:
  • the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther's publication of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517, an event which endorsed German nationalism, stoked hostility toward foreign peoples, granted Germany a preferred place in the Protestant tradition, and legitimised antisemitism;
  • the antisemitic writings of Martin Luther ;
  • the Luther Renaissance Movement of Professor Emmanuel Hirsch; supported by publications by Guida Diehl, the first speaker of the National Socialist Women's League;
  • the revival of völkisch traditions;
  • the de-emphasis of the Old Testament in Lutheran theology, and the partial or total removal of Jewishness from the Bible;
  • the respect for temporal authority, which had been emphasised by Luther. The movement used scriptural support to justify this position.
The German Christians were sympathetic to the Nazi regime's goal of "co-ordinating" the individual Protestant churches into a single and uniform Reich church, consistent with the Volk ethos and the Führerprinzip.
The editor Professor Wilhelm Knevels of the journal Christentum und Leben also worked for the "Institute for Research and the Elimination of Jewish influence on German Church Life"—and his journal published articles like "Heroic Christianity" and "Why not only God? Why Jesus?".
The "Martin Luther Memorial Church", which was built in Berlin from 1933 to 1935 included a pulpit that showed the Sermon on the Mount with a Stahlhelm-wearing Wehrmacht soldier listening to Jesus and a baptismal font which featured an SA stormtrooper. The swastikas were removed after the war and the former church has been reconstructed as a memorial to Nazi crimes against humanity.
Under the authority of Alfred Rosenberg and his religious theories, the Protestant minister established an Institute of Religious Studies as part of the Advanced School of the NSDAP.

Formation

The German Christians were organised as a Kirchenpartei in 1931 to help win elections of presbyteries and synods in the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, the largest of the independent Landeskirchen. They were led by Ludwig Müller, a rather incompetent "old fighter" who had no particular leadership skills or qualifications, except having been a longtime faithful Nazi. He was advised by Emanuel Hirsch. In 1931, the book Salvation from chaotic madness by Guida Diehl, the first speaker of the National Socialist Women's League, got an admiring review by the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte—she was praised for fighting against the "ridicule of Christ" and "showing the way for German Christians". The Berlin section was founded by Wilhelm Kube in 1932. The group achieved no particular notoriety before the Nazi assumption of political power in January 1933. In the Prussian church elections of November 1932, German Christians won one-third of the vote.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and the process of Gleichschaltung was in its full sway in the first few months of the regime. In late April 1933, the leadership of the 1922-founded German Evangelical Church Confederation, in the spirit of the new regime, agreed to write a new constitution for a brand new, unitary, "national" church, which would be called the German Evangelical Church. The new and unified national DEK would completely replace and supersede the old federated church with its representative league.
This church reorganisation had been a goal of the German Christians for some time, as such a centralisation would enhance the coordination of Church and State, as a part of the overall Nazi process of Gleichschaltung. The German Christians agitated for Müller to be elected as the new Church's bishop.

Bishopric

Müller had poor political skills, little political support within the Church, and no real qualifications for the job, other than his commitment to Nazism and a desire to exercise power. When the federation council met in May 1933 to approve the new constitution, it elected Friedrich von Bodelschwingh as Reichsbischof of the new Protestant Reich Church by a wide margin, largely on the advice and support of the church leadership.
Hitler was infuriated with the rejection of his candidate, and things began to change. By June 1933, the German Christians had gained leadership of some Landeskirchen within the DEK and were, of course, supported by Nazi propaganda in their efforts to reverse the humiliating loss to Bodelschwingh. After a series of Nazi-directed political maneuvers, Bodelschwingh resigned and Müller was appointed as the new Reichsbischof in July 1933.

Aryan paragraph

Further pro-Nazi developments followed the elevation of Müller to the DEK bishopric: In late summer, the old-Prussian general synod adopted the Aryan paragraph, effectively defrocking clergy of Jewish descent and even clergy married to non-Aryans.
With their Gleichschaltungspolitik and their attempts to incorporate the Aryan paragraph into the church constitution so as to exclude Jewish Christians, the German Christians entered into a Kirchenkampf with other evangelical Christians. Their opponents founded the Confessing Church in 1934, which condemned the German Christians as heretics and claimed to be the true German Protestant Church.

Impact

The Nazis found the German Christians useful during the initial consolidation of power, but removed most of its leaders from their posts shortly afterwards; Reichsbischof Müller continued until 1945, but his power was effectively removed in favor of a government agency as a result of his obvious incompetence.
The German Christians were supportive of the Nazi Party's ideas about race. They issued public statements in which they claimed that Christians in Germany with Jewish ancestors "remain Christians in a New Testament sense, but they are not German Christians." They also supported the Nazi Party platform's advocacy of "Positive Christianity", a form of Christianity that did not stress the belief in human sinfulness. Some of them went so far as to call for the total removal of all Jewish elements from the Bible, including the Old Testament. Their symbol was a traditional Christian cross with a swastika in the middle and the group's German initials "D" and "C".
It was claimed and remembered by the German Christians, as a "fact", that the Jews had killed Christ, which appealed to and actively encouraged existing antisemitic sentiments among Christians in Nazi Germany.