the Protestant Churches of Nauen District, Brandenburg
- OPPOSITION TO THE GERMAN-CHRISTIANS
In the first part of this series we looked at the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power that came from many members and pastors of the Protestant churches of the Nauen District near Berlin, an enthusiasm which persisted with some pastors, notably Friedrich Siems at Nauen itself.
However Siems and his ilk were soon not the only voices being heard. In March 1935 six pastors and curates in the District read a statement to their congregations from their pulpits condemning Nazi racial ideology and the growing enthusiasm for ancient German pagan religion, particularly in the German Faith Movement. The six were: Pastors Ulrich Bettac of Beetz, Günther Harder of Fehrbellin, Herbert Posth of Berge, and curates Martin Lehmann of Karwesee, Kurt Fritzsche of Gross Behnitz, and Ewald Rehfeld of Kremmen. They were all arrested (along with 700 other clergy in the Old Prussian Union Church), but were soon released when the leaders of the group issuing the statement assured the authorities that it was directed against the German Faith Movement, not against National Socialism itself.[i]
That group was the “Confessing Church in Prussia”, a branch of the German-wide Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which had been set up in response to the events of 1933, especially to the German-Christian attempt to take over the Church, to integrate Nazi ideology with Christianity, and provide Hitler with a “renewed” Church wholly committed to his Reich. Members of the Confessing Church took their stand on the Barmen Declaration, drawn up largely under the influence of Karl Barth, then Professor of Theology at Bonn, and agreed at their first Synod in May 1934:
“In view of the errors of the ‘German Christians’ and of the present Reich Church Administration, which are ravaging the Church and at the same time also shattering the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths: Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation…… We reject the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords, areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him…… We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day……. Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State….. has the task of maintaining justice and peace…… We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life.”[ii]
They followed this up with a second Synod at Berlin Dahlem in October of the same year. This declared the church authorities which had been taken over in the July 1933 church elections by the German-Christians to be heretical. This included the overwhelming majority of the German churches, with the exception of Bavaria, Wϋrttemberg and Hannover, which then became known as the “intact” churches. Confessing Church members were called upon to repudiate the authority of those “destroyed” churches:
“We declare that the Constitution of the German Evangelical Church has been destroyed. Its legally constituted organs no longer exist. The men who have seized the Church leadership in the Reich and the states have divorced themselves from the Christian Church…… We summon the Christian communities, their pastors and elders, to accept no directives from the present Church Government and its authorities and to decline cooperation with those who wish to remain obedient to this ecclesiastical governance. We summon them to observe the directives of the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church and its recognized organs.”[iii] These Declarations of Barmen and Dahlem formed the basis on which Confessing Church members faced the challenge of Nazism.
One of the six who read the March 1935 statement, Günther Harder of Fehrbellin, was already notorious with local National Socialists for refusing to use the authorised Service of Celebration for the German-Christian take-over of the Prussian and Brandenburg Church. Instead Harder led a service of mourning and repentance, with messages from Otto Dibelius and Friedrich Bodelschwingh in place of that from Joachim Hossenfelder, the German- Christian Bishop of Brandenburg, and preaching a sermon about unity and the supremacy of Christ.[iv]Soon he was to become a leader of the Confessing Church in Brandenburg, charged with the support of their pastors in Nauen and two other districts, and from 1936 he also shared in the training of new candidates for ministry at their illegal seminary at Berlin.[v]
When in March 1935 Harder announced that he would read publicly the Confessing Church statement (after a sleepless night in which he decided to reverse his original announcement not to do so), the local police tried to stop him by locking the church doors. That succeeded only in making the issue a cause celebre in the parish, and even some travelling salesmen lodging in a local inn took a copy of the statement with them when they left the town.[vi] He was in trouble again in the same year for baptising the Jewish wife of a parish member, and permitting their children to sing in the church choir. The Reich Minister for Church Affairs complained that “Harder deemed it necessary to announce the baptism of this Jewish woman from the pulpit on Sunday, 19th July”, whereas he should have kept it as quiet as possible, to avoid causing offence in the local community.[vii]
In May 1937 he preached at the Prussian Confessing Church Synod: “The world simply doesn’t want to know anything of the church, of its service, of its message, of the truth to which it testifies”[viii]– certainly by now true of Hitler, who began to ignore the churches once they had helped him gain power. As Ulrich Bettac put it, the Third Reich had made it clear “that it is not and does not want to be Christian”,[ix] so dashing any naïve hopes people may have had in early 1933. In September Harder was imprisoned for three weeks for refusing to send his parish collections to the Brandenburg church authorities. His congregation supported him, and afterwards he wrote: “They had learned in those years to sacrifice. They had learned that the collection is a real offering of thanks, and until 1945 not once was an offering of thanks from the parish handed over to the Consistory”.[x] A year later, in September 1938, he used a Confessing Church liturgy which mourned the Third Reich’s denial of Christian values, and interpreted the inevitable coming war as God’s judgement on the German people. The Brandenburg Consistory withheld his salary for eight months, and his congregation gave financial support until it was restored.[xi]
In May 1941 he was again arrested again with 22 others involved in the Confessing Church seminary for training ministers in Berlin, which the authorities finally shut down after months of harassment by the Gestapo.[xii] During his eight months’ imprisonment following that arrest, the parish was cared for by his wife, by Martin Lehmann of Karwesee and others.[xiii] The trial took place in December, and Harder kept detailed notes. The way the lawyer engaged by the Confessing Church conducted the defence gave several defendants great concern. He stressed their loyalty to the Fatherland, pointing out that one of them had fought and lost a leg during World War One, and arguing that the women involved had simply followed the instructions of their male colleagues without fully knowing what they were doing. Harder described:“an entire arsenal of German national breast beating….. the only thing that was of use was the amputated leg……[the women] had said, well and plainly, how deeply their commitment to the Confessing Church was founded in [their] parish work and consciousness…… The agonizing question is this: whether we really can continue to say that we have church leadership….. Most of the men and the lawyers….. said again and again that, of course, they hadn’t wanted to violate the Himmler Decree….. Our Confessing Church has become a very poor church, in the form of the lowest, most bitter vassal”.[xiv]
All the defendants were found guilty, but most were released, having already served the sentences they were handed down. The leader of the seminary, however, was sentenced to 18 months, partly for employing Jewish and half-Jewish secretaries in the seminary office. Those secretaries were detained beyond their sentences, to be deported to the east, where only one of them, Charlotte Friedenthal, survived, escaping with the help of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Switzerland.[xv]
When Harder was released just before Christmas he returned to Fehrbellin to lead the Christmas Eve service: “Never before or since were more tears of emotion and joy shed in a Christmas service in the parish as on that December 24, 1941”.[xvi] But the question of how to resist the Nazis continued to haunt him and other members of the Confessing Church. Open defiance, which would demand secret and underground action, might well achieve nothing, and would, he felt, conflict with the need to give pastoral support to the people of the parish. The constant dilemma could lead to some contradictory reactions. When all pastors were required to send evidence from parish records of those whose grandparents were Jewish, he simply replied that there were none, though in at least one case that was clearly untrue.[xvii] But his secretary, Hebe Kohlbrugge, reported later: “When people came to Harder and asked for their ‘Ariernachweis’, I had to look into the church books and give it to them. I did it without thinking….. I didn’t come to the idea that we should never have given any papers at all…. That we should have refused, right from the beginning…. It was, of course, a great mistake. That was a political mistake we made.”[xviii] And when, in July 1944 (after the July 20 1944 bomb attempt on Hitler’s life) the Gestapo arrived at the parsonage asking for her, Harder told them she was there, and later explained “I had to say you were in my house; I’m not allowed to lie.”[xix]
Bonhoeffer could write in his ‘Ethics’ “there are differences, which…. must not be disregarded, between….. the man who becomes a breaker of the law out of a situation of wickedness and the man who does so out of necessity”.[xx] At least in that moment, Harder could not make that distinction. But at other times, he spoke out clearly. When at the end of 1941 the Old Prussian Union Church demanded the exclusion of Jewish Christians from its churches, he joined others in February 1942 to sign a letter of protest: “Together with all Christians in Germany who stand on the ground of the Scripture and the Confession, we are compelled to declare that this request from the Church Chancellery is incompatible with the confession of the church…. By what right do we desire to exclude, for racial reasons, Christian non-Aryans from our worship services? Do we want to be like the Pharisees, who renounced communion with the ‘tax collectors and sinners’ in the worship service and, because of this, reaped Christ’s judgement?”[xxi]
Later that year he chaired a committee of five Confessing Church theologians (including Dietrich Bonhoeffer) to prepare a Synod statement to the churches: “The exclusion of non-Aryan Christians from church fellowship violates Holy Scripture and the Confession and is therefore unacceptable under church law. We exhort pastors and parishes, for Christ’s sake, to maintain church fellowship with them.”[xxii]
Harder and others collected money and food ration cards for Jewish Christians and “helped to hide not a few of the same in our parishes”.[xxiii] The same Synod statement condemned the murder of disabled people and Jews by the Nazi state, and in Autumn 1943, now as a member of the Confessing Church council for Brandenburg, he was on the committee preparing a ‘Word of the Church’: “Throughout our nation and even throughout our Protestant parishes and Christian families passes a great, ever-growing insecurity about whether the holy Ten Commandments are still in effect…… You shall not murder……. Concepts like ‘elimination’, ‘liquidation’ and ‘worthless lives’ are unknown in God’s order……. Woe to us and to our nation when God-given life is despised and the person, created in the image of God, is valued solely according to his utility; when it is considered justified to kill people because they are considered unworthy of life or belong to another race, when hate and mercilessness parade about. Then God speaks: ‘You shall not murder’”.[xxiv]
This ‘Word’ was designed to be read at church services on the annual Day of Repentance and Prayer. Harder was warned several times not to do so, but faced no action from the authorities, perhaps, he surmised, because they were distracted by the now almost continuous bombing of Berlin.[xxv] He faced his final spell of imprisonment under the Nazis in 1945 from January to April[xxvi], and after the War remained as a Professor of Theology in Berlin until his retirement in 1972.[xxvii] In 1970 he was quoted in a Jehovah’s Witness magazine article about the rapid decline in membership experienced in both the Protestant and Catholic churches: “An avalanche is coming that will take away our breath”.[xxviii]
Pastor Herbert Posth of Berge, another Confessing Church member, was as outspoken, and perhaps even more uncompromising and stubborn, than Günther Harder. In his part of the District, west of Nauen, he became involved in disputes over several vacant local parishes. Suffering as he did from chronic lung problems, he was already complaining in August 1933 that his responsibility for two villages, Berge and Lietzow, with a large hemp factory in the parish, was too much,[xxix] but when Pastor Werner retired from nearby Ribbeck in 1934 he reluctantly agreed to take it on, and when Pastor Lux at Gross Behnitz was ill, became temporary pastor there as well. By May 1937 he had led the church councils of both to join the Confessing Church. At Ribbeck he was strongly supported by the patron and most of the parishioners.[xxx] His firm motive was to do all he could to prevent a German Christian being appointed as permanent pastor in either place. He wrote in his parish newsletter in 1935: “One is born into the nation- one belongs to it through blood and race; one is called into the church by the Holy Spirit in the Word of God… independent of blood and race.”[xxxi]
In January 1936 he defended Priester, his vicar (assistant) at Lietzow who had attacked the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ in a sermon. This had been passed in April 1933, part of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”, under which Jews were to be dismissed from all state service (including the church’s ministry). Priester declared that the notion of the racial superiority of Aryans was arrogant and selfish, that every member of his congregation was of Abraham’s seed, and that belittling God’s “chosen people” was wrong. He was forced then to make a public statement that his sermon applied to the church, not to the state (under the 1934 Insidiousness Law open criticism of the state was treason, punishable by death).[xxxii] Also at Lietzow the organist complained that Posth omitted the prayer for the Führer at a service in August 1936 when he read yet another forbidden declaration from the Confessing Church.[xxxiii]Replying to the demand for information from parish records, Posth wrote back: “the pastor is not bound to employ his time [given] for the care of souls and parish visitation in this unheard-of way for paper work that has nothing to do with the parish office”. But it is not clear whether in the end he refused the order.[xxxiv]
He put forward endless schemes to combine nearby parishes, all to keep German-Christians out, but the church authorities cut across them by appointing Walter Pachali to Retzow parish, making him temporary supervisor for Pessin, Ribbeck and Gross Behnitz. Pachali was no German-Christian- he was even sympathetic to the Confessing Church, but to Posth he was a compromiser for recognising the church authorities, instead of utterly repudiating them as did the Confessing Church.[xxxv] He succeded at Gross Behnitz in getting the curate, Kurt Fritzsche (a Confessing Church member) appointed as Pastor in March 1938 (the Berlin authorities only discovered in July that Posth had persuaded them to join the Confessing Church).[xxxvi] But at Ribbeck he had a longer battle, refusing to give up as chair of the parish council (keeping control of parish finances) with Pachali remaining the pastoral supervisor. This impossible situation continued for three and a half years, testing the patience of both Walter Pachali and Posth’s Confessing Church friends, and was only resolved when Pachali was called up for military service and left in early 1941, after which Posth was finally able to hand Ribbeck over to Kurt Fritzsche.[xxxvii]
In all their attempts to wrest control of Ribbeck parish from him, the Berlin authorities constantly distinguished between spiritual and administrative matters, arguing that he was free to preach as his conscience directed him, but finance was their concern. But Posth refused to recognise any such division, and cited Article 28 of the Augsburg Confession to justify his rejection of church government that repudiated Scripture and the Reformation Confessions. Through all this time he engaged in contentious correspondence with the authorities: “The opinion [that] the church should ‘promote the life of faith of the members of the nation’ contradicts the clear Word of God in a dual sense. It amounts to disobedience against the Word of Christ to preach the gospel to all nations- the word ‘member of the nation’ is not a church word at all, but rather a political word.”[xxxviii] “The gospel is no ‘psychological help’ for a naturally pious feeling, but rather it is the preaching of the judgement of the holy God over an entire sinful nature….. and of grace for the sake of Christ. It is unintelligible to me how a church authority can say that the gospel says nothing about what is good and evil, just and unjust.”[xxxix]
Speaking of his vow of ordination he said: “When the state attacks [it] we must go to jail for the sake of this vow. But I consider it a bit much when the church authorities want to cause the pastor to break his vow of ordination…… How am I going to stand in the pulpit then? Either I keep my vow, which I have sworn before God and the parish- as long as God gives me the strength to take upon myself all the trouble that results from that too- or I must resign my pastorate……. I have considered all the consequences, but I must not act in any other way, as I must act in communion to God’s Word.”[xl] The Berlin church authority “seems not to have the faintest idea… what a terrible crisis of conscience now lies upon individual parishioners….. (plunging) daggers into the consciences of the parishioners.”[xli]
And referring to the conflict over where church collections should be sent, he wrote: “The parishioners have learned well in the collection war that they may only give their gifts for the likes of the real gospel….. Shall we really use our money for the enemy of our Protestant faith, for the German Christians?”[xlii]
In 1943 he worked with Günther Harder on the ‘Word of the Church’ document condemning the violation of the 10 Commandments and the murder of non-Aryans. And in December of the same year he spoke out against the use of the Nazi salute in church, though he denied the accusation of the Berge Mayor and schoolteacher that he forbad his confirmation students to use it during classes.[xliii]
Harder and Posth were not alone in their membership of the Confessing Church in the Nauen District, and their rejection of the Brandenburg Church authorities as heretical, having no authority over them. Of the District’s Pastors, eight were full members of the Confessing Church and took the same line: Johannes Engelke at Königshurst, Kurt Fritzsche of Gross Behnitz, Martin Lehmenn of Karwesee, Max Oestreich at Lentzke, Bogumil Rocha of Pessin, and Wiese of Zeestow.[xliv] Seven others were supporters, but not full members. Of the thirty-seven assistants (vicars and curates), twelve were Confessing Church members, with one supporter. Only three are known German-Christians, with two neutral. The affiliations of the other nineteen are not known[xlv] The fact that men with such views as Harder, Posth and the other Confessing Church members survived in their pastorates, was due in no small measure to the efforts of Ulrich Bettac, their Interim District Superintendent from 1936 to 1940, who disagreed with their refusal to recognise and deal with the church authorities, though he fully accepted that they were heretical. And the overwhelming preponderance of Confessing Church assistant vicars and curates (at least among those whose views are known) testifies to his success in securing appointments for them. By contrast he could do little about the parishes where German-Christians were already firmly in post, and did not either move or retire.
In the final section of this series we shall look in more detail at Bettac’s contribution and work, and try to draw some conclusions from the whole story.
This paper depends for most of its
information on Kyle Janzten’s book “Faith and Fatherland: Parish politics in
Hitler’s Germany”, published in 2008 by Fortress Press, Minneapolis, an account
of Protestant churches in three districts of Germany in the 1930s, Pirna in
Saxony, Regensburg in Württemberg, and Nauen in Brandenburg. It is supplemented in this section by
information from Victoria Barnett “For the Soul of the People”, published in 1992
by Oxford University Press on the trial of Gϋnther Harder; from Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s “Ethics”, published by Simon and Schuster, 1955 (translated from
the German of 1949); and from “Germany’s Churches in Trouble”, in the
Watchtower Online Library, 1971.
[i] Jantzen, “Faith and Fatherland: Parish Politics in Hitler’s Germany”, pp115-116
[ii] https://www.spucc.org/sites/default/files/BARMEN%20DECLARATION%20UCC.pdf
[iii] https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1569
[iv] Jantzen, p115
[v] Jantzen, p114
[vi] Jantzen, pp115-6
[vii] Jantzen, p100
[viii] Jantzen, p114
[ix] Jantzen, p39
[x] Jantzen, p116
[xi] Jantzen, p116
[xii] Victoria Barnett, “For the Soul of the People”, p93
[xiii] Jantzen, p117
[xiv] Barnett, pp93-4
[xv] Barnett, pp93, 319n63
[xvi] Jantzen, p117
[xvii] Jantzen, p103
[xviii] Barnett, p200
[xix] Barnett, p203
[xx] Bonhoeffer, “Ethics”, p31
[xxi] Jantzen, pp107-8
[xxii] Jantzen, p108
[xxiii] Jantzen, p108
[xxiv] Jantzen, pp108-9
[xxv] Jantzen, p109
[xxvi] Jantzen, p117
[xxvii] Jantzen, p114 and https://de.linkfang.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Harder_(Theologe) – accessed October 2020
[xxviii] https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101971200#h=3:0-7:154 – accessed October 2020
[xxix] Jantzen, p224n46
[xxx] Jantzen, pp74, 82-4
[xxxi] Jantzen, p39
[xxxii] Jantzen, p95-6
[xxxiii] Jantzen, p118
[xxxiv] Jantzen, p101
[xxxv] Jantzen, pp75-6, 85-5, 118-9
[xxxvi] Jantzen, p76, 84
[xxxvii] Jantzen, pp84-5, 118-9
[xxxviii] Jantzen, p120
[xxxix] Jantzen, pp120-1
[xl] Jantzen, p122
[xli] Jantzen, p123
[xlii] Jantzen, p124
[xliii] Jantzen, p39
[xliv] Jantzen, p114
[xlv] Jantzen, p113