Concerning The Protestant Church in Germany

Extract

I was in 1937 that one of the Gestapo-men who were then questioning me asked whether the Protestant Church was not in full collaboration with the Catholic Church. When I denied this, he insisted that one of our ministers had made that statement at a certain meeting. As I had attended that meeting myself, I pointed out that he had only spoken about the unprecedented friendliness that existed between the Churches, but not about collaboration. ‘And what is the reason for these extraordinary good relations?’ I could not help asking. ‘It is that both Churches to-day have to defend the same thing, v'z. the world beyond.’

I remember another, very different experience. In the winter of 1928-29 I was the only non-Catholic to address a Catholic conference at Boppard, on the Rhine, one of the other speakers being Dr. Briining, shortly to be Chancellor of the Reich.

For two reasons the struggle of the Church of Christ against Nazism has been different from any other. In the first place the Church no longer suffers passively as during the times of persecution even down to that of Bolshevism, but has passed from the defensive to the attack. Secondly, the enemy in so far as he makes his appearance within the Protestant Church itself—the ‘German Christians’—does not represent a new heresy but the old rationalistic ones, though joined to the political power. Thus the Church in Germany is fighting neither against sects nor against the State, but against a combination of both, which we call the ‘heretical State.’