Broadcasting Law and Gospel: Paul Tillich's Wartime Ministry to Nazi Germany

Abstract

During World War II, the German theologian Paul Tillich, then a professor at Union Theological Seminary, partnered with the United States’ organization Voice of America to deliver over 100 religious addresses in the German language into his homeland. In these broadcasts, Tillich utilized the Lutheran categories of Law and Gospel to identify and discuss the sins of the Nazis (and Hitler in particular) and to remind the German population that there was still hope in redemption. Remarkably, well before the war's end, Tillich argued for German collective guilt and the need for the atonement and expiation of the German people. He continually warned them of impending judgment and inescapable punishment – both human and divine – as the Allies advanced on the battlefield in a race toward Berlin. Yet Tillich often tempered this focus on judgment with an emphasis on the Gospel, the certain hope Germans have in God's salvation. This prism of Law and Gospel pervades the religious addresses. I will place these broadcasts in the context of the war, the wartime work of Voice in America, and what we know of other religious addresses delivered over the airwaves to Nazi Germany, to reveal how Tillich preached resistance to Nazi Germany.

Between March 1942 and March 1944, the German Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich partnered with the United States government-sponsored organization Voice of America (VOA) to deliver religious broadcasts straight from his place of exile in New York City to his fellow citizens in Nazi Germany. He utilized the radio, a newly ubiquitous technology by the 1940s, to broadcast messages over the airwaves in the Allied lands. His mission was, on the one hand, to minister to the German people and give them hope, and on the other, to influence their perception and beliefs concerning Adolf Hitler, the Nazi regime, and National Socialism. This chapter of Tillich's extraordinary wartime ministry to the people of Nazi Germany deserves more attention.¹ This article will analyze Tillich's broadcasts with VOA to examine his messages of protest and criticism concerning Hitler and National Socialism, as well as his guidance to the German people to help lead them into an uncertain future.²

Radio in the war years presented pastors and theologians with a unique opportunity to reach a targeted audience for ministry, edification, teaching, and conversion. Tillich's radio addresses were not part of a worship service, nor did they include elements typically associated with sermon delivery, such as prayer and the celebration of the sacraments. Yet many of these broadcasts could be categorized as sermonic addresses in the general sense that they are speeches on religious subjects and are based on biblical texts and principles. Furthermore, many of the speeches include elements associated with sermon delivery, such as the call to confession, repentance, and discipleship, as well as the categories of Law and Gospel. Radio broadcasts allowed pastors and theologians, such as Tillich, to experiment with the delivery of religious messages in new and even controversial ways, such as broadcasting from an enemy territory for the purpose of undermining a nation's will to fight a world war.³ Indeed, this study reveals how the wartime use of radio religious broadcasts stretches and complicates the definition of a sermon. This article will place these broadcasts in the context of the war, in the wartime work of Voice in America, and in relation to what we know of other radio sermons and addresses delivered to Nazi Germany.

Throughout the war churchmen and religious organizations understood the power of the Christian message to convert and reform listeners. Indeed, in times of crisis Christians have often viewed the proclaimed Gospel as a kind of weapon to battle the forces of evil, without and within. To young seminarians studying at the underground Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “As a witness to Christ, the sermon is a struggle with demons. Every sermon must overcome Satan. Every sermon fights a battle.”⁴ In recent years, historians have explored various aspects of how church leaders used sermons to criticize aspects of the Nazi regime and to reach out to the German people living under totalitarianism.⁵ Research is also being conducted on the radio broadcasts of Radio Moscow, Soviet broadcasts of prisoner of war chaplains such as Johannes Schröder.⁶ The examination of wartime religious addresses and sermons is a growing field of research that can help shed light on how pastors continued to serve the German people during the war and how they used scripture and shared the Gospel message to battle Nazi ideology in the public square.

Radio broadcasts present historians with a unique source base from which to understand the evolving ministries of pastors in wartime. Radio revolutionized how Christians and non-Christians alike engaged with religious content. As Tona Hangen has argued, radio broadcasting enabled listeners “to rethink entirely what church was and where worship could take place.”⁷ One did not need to be in the pew of a church to listen to a religious message. One could simply sit in a living room or at the kitchen table and listen to a sermon just as clearly – or nearly so – as if he were sitting in the front row of a neighborhood church. Furthermore, the curious or intrigued non-Christian could also listen in without taking the extra effort to attend a regular church service. Moreover, rather than being one congregant amid a Sunday crowd, the radio sermon “could be experienced by a single listener like a personal chat.”⁸

Tillich took advantage of the medium of the radio to reach as wide a German listenership as possible, all while in New York City.⁹ Tillich spoke on a variety of topics, including justice, guilt, defeatism, tyranny, Nazi atrocities, the nature of community, and redemption, among many others. Each broadcast was set down as a transcript consisting of approximately four or five typed pages, and presumably took around 10–15 minutes to read in the broadcast.¹⁰ The addresses can usefully be categorized into three main groups: speeches that treat a political or theological subject; speeches on a current event; and speeches related to an anniversary.¹¹ Tillich broadcast these messages anonymously so that not even his close friends in the United States knew of his work to undermine the Nazi regime. Throughout these broadcasts Tillich frequently utilized the Lutheran categories of Law and Gospel to clarify the sins of the Nazis and the German public more generally and to remind the German population that it still had hope in redemption. Remarkably, Tillich argued for German collective guilt and the need for the atonement and expiation of the German people (themes Germans heard mostly only after the war). And he continually warned them of impending judgment and inescapable punishment – both human and divine – as the Allies advanced on the battlefield. Yet he often tempered this focus on judgment with an emphasis on the Gospel, the certain hope Germans had in God's salvation. This prism of Law and Gospel pervades the broadcasts.

Tillich often based his broadcasts on biblical principles, such as the following: the Jews are God's chosen people, one must die to oneself to have new life in Christ, the Christian is called to be free, the moral law is written on our hearts, and many others. It appears that Tillich took this approach to appeal to as many Germans as possible, those who may have been Christian, those who were Gottgläubig (believers in God in general), and those who were atheists. Tillich appealed to the German people using biblical language and motifs that he believed would be most effective in stirring the people to action. As will be shown, one of his most pressing concerns was to encourage the German people to stop supporting the Nazi regime and even to work actively to end it. For Tillich it was imperative that the peoples in the Allied nations understood there was a strong German opposition to the Nazi regime, in light of the inevitable Allied post-war engagement with the German people.¹²

In the following analysis I will explore four main themes in Tillich's broadcasts: elucidating the nature of the sins of the German people, describing the persecution of the Jews, exploring the reality of Christian hope and redemption, and arguing for German resistance against the Nazi regime.

This study into Paul Tillich's wartime radio ministry is significant because it contributes to the historiography of the German churches by exploring how Protestant pastors publicly criticized the Nazi regime and attempted to influence public opinion against Hitler through the use of sermons and religious addresses. Tillich's broadcasts reveal a range of dissenting and oppositional messages that he felt free to express in the safety of New York City, well beyond of reach of the Nazi police apparatus. Simply put, he was free to speak his mind over a technology the Gestapo had virtually no ability to effectively police. He was constrained only by the VOA censors. In addition, this study will nuance the historiography of Nazi Germany and the Church Struggle, which often argues that pastors were by and large silent during the Holocaust.¹³ While one can certainly argue that pastors and theologians did not protest the Nazi regime with the zeal and commitment the circumstances clearly warranted in hindsight, this study on Tillich's religious broadcasts helps elucidate how one pastor and theologian vociferously criticized the aggressive militarism and fanatical racism of Nazism using the radio as an instrument of opposition.

I. Exile and Ministry in the United States

Paul Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the Brandenburg village of Starzeddel. His father Johannes was a conservative Lutheran pastor in the Evangelical State Church of Prussia, who, in 1900, became the superintendent of the churches in the district of Berlin. The family relocated to the capital city, where Paul received a liberal arts education. He began his studies at the University of Berlin in 1904 before transferring to the University of Tübingen in 1905, and then matriculated to the University of Halle-Wittenberg later that year, where he studied until 1907. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology back in Halle-Wittenberg a year later. Tillich was ordained a pastor a couple of years prior to World War I, at which point he served as a chaplain in the German Army, earning the Iron Cross for bravery and being wounded three times. After the war ended Tillich became a professor of theology at some of Germany's finest institutions of higher learning, the University of Marburg, the Dresden University of Technology, the University of Leipzig, and the University of Frankfurt, where he served from 1929 to 1933, when Hitler and the National Socialists came to power. His early criticisms of the regime led to his dismissal in 1933, whereupon his contacts in the United States quickly facilitated his appointment as professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City at the age of 47. He and his family moved to New York. He learned English, earned tenure, and established a reputation as a systematic theologian concerned with exploring the meaning of human existence. By the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Tillich was already at work on his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, to be published in three parts from 1951 to 1963.¹⁴

Shortly after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Tillich began working with VOA, a United States government radio broadcasting network that produced programs for the Office of War Information (OWI). The distinguished American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Nazi Germany for her reporting, recommended Tillich specifically to the VOA.¹⁵ Just 6 months prior, the American playwright Robert E. Sherwood was tasked with instituting the Foreign Information Service in July 1941, which a year later became the Overseas Branch of the OWI. Wilfrid Halder argues that the VOA's German-language service had rapidly expanded after the bombing of Pearl Harbor so that in less than a year, approximately 150 well-known German émigrés joined its ranks.¹⁶ Its task was to produce programs to fight Nazi propaganda on foreign soil. As Matthew Lon Weaver writes, “Its goal was to use truth as an element of persuasion in the Allied forces’ psychological warfare against the Axis powers.”¹⁷ In fighting a war and using propaganda as a means in that fight, one could use “black” propaganda, that is, the use of information to deceive an audience by obfuscating the identity of its purveyors.¹⁸ Or, like the OWI, one can use “white” propaganda, in which the source of information transparently identifies itself and does not seek to mislead the audience.¹⁹ “Gray” propaganda does not provide any information to identify the source of information.

VOA established its headquarters on West Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City, and from February 1942 to the end of the war broadcast various information and propaganda programs 24 hours a day. By the end of the war, the VOA broadcast in over 40 languages, employing more than 3,000 men and women in offices worldwide.²⁰ Like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Great Britain or Radio Moscow in the Soviet Union, the VOA broadcast German-language programming to provide the citizens of Nazi Germany with information about the war and to influence their understanding of and behavior toward the regime.²¹ VOA began its German-language broadcasting on February 24, 1942, and Tillich began broadcasting just a couple of weeks later.²² He broadcast more than 100 messages in just over 2 years, delivering around one message per week. As Halder contends, Tillich's full-time teaching duties and service responsibilities as a tenured professor meant that he had to “constantly [fight] for the time and, perhaps more importantly, the space to think about the radio speeches.”²³ Tillich was committed to ministering to the German people. Though an exile and separated by the Atlantic, he found a way through the radio.

II. On the Nature of the Sins of the German People

Tillich spent considerable time in his broadcasts clarifying how the German people had sinned, or how they had failed, and thereby had gotten themselves into the catastrophe of World War II. He held up the standard of the Law to demonstrate just how miserably the German people had failed morally. As Wolbold has shown, Tillich understood the emergence of National Socialism not simply in social terms but in terms of spiritual warfare, describing the movement as a demonic force.²⁴ In these addresses Tillich contends the German people had succumbed to this demonic power. On more than a few occasions, he referred to Germans selling their souls to evil or the devil. For example, in a sermon delivered on November 30, 1943, Tillich argued that the German people had entered into a pact with evil to get everything they wanted from their government: “the end of unemployment, the restoration of the Wehrmacht, the expansion of the German Empire, the rule over Europe.”²⁵ But the devil always calls in his debts, Tillich proclaimed. Evil demands the very lives of the people, and this is why the Germans are suffering so greatly in the war. Tillich specifically described the evil the Germans had committed in league with evil. He refers to the massacres of the Jews: the “desperate voices of hundreds of thousands Jewish old men, women and children” crying out from the grave.²⁶ They are the conscience of Germans. The Germans have turned themselves into “the instrument of the wicked, of the worst of our time.”²⁷ Thus, as he stated in a sermon in December 1942, the German people carried “blood guilt” (Blutschuld) for the crimes of National Socialism that will last for generations.²⁸

Indeed, Tillich did not mince words when describing the sins of the German people. He explored the biblical theme of God's justice and punishment of sin in the story of the Exodus, drawing unmistakable parallels between Pharoah and the Egyptians with Hitler and the Germans. In a remarkable broadcast delivered in September 1943, Tillich argued in no uncertain terms that God was punishing Hitler and the Germans with plagues just as he punished Pharaoh and the Egyptians with plagues. He provided a litany of plagues the Germans faced – seven in total – ranging from the deprivation of the Russian winter on the eastern front to the killing of a generation of German youth on the battlefield. God was unleashing the plagues just as he did in Egypt because of the wickedness of a ruler. Tillich contended that it is a law of history that when a people allow a dictator to reign and flourish, they are guilty and will be held accountable. Not all Germans elected Hitler, but they all tolerated him. He said, “Ask yourself whether once you weren't completely content when he suppressed your political opponents. Ask yourselves whether you didn't feel some satisfaction within you when the Jews were being eliminated.”²⁹ Tillich firmly asserted the collective political guilt of the German people.³⁰ He argued, “That is the bond between ruler and nation [Volk]: the crimes of the ruler are blamed on the nation because the nation is never without guilt when it puts up with a criminal as its leader.”³¹ The point of the plagues is clear: the German people must separate themselves from Hitler, “the leader and seducer, the tyrant and corruptor of Germany,” as well as from his creed, National Socialism.³²

As these broadcasts show, Tillich had no qualms about asserting a form of collective guilt of the German people. Yet talk of the “collective guilt” of the German people by a German speaker was exceedingly rare at this time, and not simply because it could be understood as treasonous. As Matthew Hockenos argues, Germans were slow in coming to terms with guilt immediately after the war, let alone before its end, because some were unrepentant Nazi supporters, the reported Nazi war atrocities were too great to fathom, and Germans were more concerned with clearing the rubble and rebuilding their lives.³³ But Tillich asked Germans to consider their collective guilt well before Germans were forced to confront the reality of the Holocaust or the devastation of the war. Tillich's exile from his homeland after losing his position at the University of Frankfurt in 1933 for criticizing the regime certainly provided distance, literally and metaphorically, that enabled him to see Hitler, the Nazi state, and National Socialism from an angle most Germans simply did not have. After nearly 10 years in exile in New York City, Tillich felt compelled to convict his fellow Germans of their sins so that they might turn from Hitler and to the future God had in store for them.

It would be only after the war that Germans would engage in the questions of collective guilt. Karl Jaspers’ classic The Question of German Guilt (1947) is helpful in situating Tillich's perspective on guilt during the war years, as evidenced in these broadcasts.³⁴ Jasper's work is one example of how Germans were asked to examine themselves and their behavior. He distinguished four types of guilt: criminal guilt, in which an individual violates a societal law; political guilt, which is based on the responsibility citizens have for the actions of their government; moral guilt, which is based on the individual's sense of responsibility for their own actions (as dictated by conscience); and metaphysical guilt, which is based on the co-responsibility each person has for the well-being of other human beings. Jaspers concluded that the Germans share in a “collective political guilt,” as citizens are responsible for the actions of their government. One cannot, he contended, assert the collective moral or metaphysical guilt of the Germans, as these categories are only applicable to individuals. Thus, Tillich's arguments for collective guilt extend beyond the political guilt of a people who are responsible for the actions of their government to the moral and metaphysical guilt of a people who chose to side with the evils of National Socialism.³⁵

A fundamental problem in Nazi Germany, Tillich asserted, was that the German people refused to take responsibility for their choices. In one broadcast, on April 18, 1944, Tillich asked the question, What has gone wrong in German history? His answer cut to the heart of the problem as he saw it: “It is the inability of the German people to tolerate freedom. It had a lot of freedom in the years between the wars. But it didn't know how to use it. The German people didn't know what they should do with their freedom, and they did only one thing with it: they did everything to lose it again.”³⁶ He argued that the Germans have always submitted themselves to the authorities and that they have never taken responsibility for their own freedom, apparently making an argument about German character as a cause of the rise of National Socialism.³⁷ Tillich asked the German people to take responsibility for their freedom, which meant taking action against their government. Freedom requires responsibility. Everything can become right, he argued, “by the German people fighting for freedom, shaking off Nazi tyranny and taking its destiny into its own hand.”³⁸ We will circle around again to this theme of resistance shortly, but it is clear that Tillich sought to diagnose the sins of the German people so as to provide a solution, that is, the end of the war.

III. On the Persecution of the Jews

One sin stands out in Tillich's treatment of the German people's guilt. Tillich referred again and again to the persecution of the Jewish people. His language is very specific in naming the sins committed by and in the name of Germans. Tillich spoke of the “massacres,” the “elimination” and the “extermination” of the Jews, as well as the murder of “hundreds of thousands.”³⁹ He spoke of medical experimentation. He spoke of cattle cars filled with Jews suffocating to death. As far as I have been able to uncover, no other religious radio broadcasts directed toward the German people (e.g., from the BBC or Radio Moscow) come close in describing the persecution and extermination of the Jews as Tillich's sermonic addresses. Indeed, as Halder argues, Tillich may even have “assumed the Germans were at least as well informed” as he was about the atrocities against the Jews.⁴⁰ In an address on August 9, 1943, Tillich said that “All Germans have heard of the horrific crimes that happened in the concentration camps. . . Every German knew of the extermination of the Jewish people.”⁴¹

For those Germans who claimed that they never knew (and thus, by inference, are not culpable), Tillich confronted them with the knowledge to inspire them to action. In a broadcast on April 27, 1943, which focused not on religious but rather on political and moral themes, Tillich proclaimed, “But the shooting of innocent hostages, the extermination of entire locales [Orte] for actions with which they had nothing to do, the mass murder of Jewish old people, children and women, the hells of the concentration camps, all this surpasses the Japanese crimes against international law.”⁴² He spoke not in general terms of “persecutions” or “massacres,” which would leave the audience uncertain about the crimes committed, but he explicitly named specific crimes for which the German people could call their government and each other to account.⁴³

But his main point was not simply to inform his listeners of the ongoing persecution and massacres of Jews but to compel them to action. Tillich emphasized that the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of the Germans. In a broadcast on March 31, 1942, just as he began partnering with VOA, he opened by explicitly stating that this question “is decisive for our spiritual and political destiny.”⁴⁴ He affirmed that Jesus was a Jew, the Old Testament is foundational to the Christian Scripture, and the Protestant Reformers began the process of reform “in the name of Paul.” Placing himself together with his audience, Tillich stated, “We could renounce our claim to being Christians, but as long as we want to remain Christians, we cannot renounce that we live out of the same religious roots from which the religious Jew lives.”⁴⁵ The “Jewish Question” was a question that Christians had to consider because it has led to bloodshed, Tillich argued, and it was tied to the very nature of being a Christian. He continued this line of reasoning, “[We] go against the meaning of our own history when we become guilty in relation to the Jewish people.”⁴⁶ Despite being stateless, Tillich contended, the Jews survive “because they serve God.”⁴⁷ The Nazi persecution of Jews means misery for Jews, shame for Germans, and “hostility against the spirit, against human dignity, and against God.”⁴⁸ In this broadcast, Tillich pled for his German listeners to consider who they are (presumably Christians) in relation to the Jews. He intentionally tried to bind his listeners to the Jews as religious cousins of the same monotheistic tradition. He wanted to open the eyes of the German people, to get them to see that the well-being of Jews directly related to their own well-being, and to act accordingly.

The tone and urgency of Tillich's broadcasts in reference to the news of the persecution of the Jews raise the question of what the German people knew of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. While no one could have put the pieces together to see what we call today “the Holocaust,” the attempted systematic and industrialized murder of all European Jewry, adult Germans certainly knew about the Nazi persecutions. In a broadcast on January 25, 1944, he said, “News of the Nazi atrocities in the conquered territories reached the ears of Germans in a thousand ways.”⁴⁹ Antisemitic laws and measures, such as the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, had excluded Jews from German public life well before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Their businesses had been “Aryanized,” and they had been driven from the professions, again, well before the war broke out. When the war started, the persecution led to ghettoization and deportation. Historians of the Holocaust have argued that by 1942 and 1943, approximately half of German adults were aware of the massacres and mass murder of the Jews.⁵⁰ Soldiers from the front would come home on furlough and tell their families what they had seen or even participated in. The BBC, one of the most important sources of information regarding the persecution of Jews, routinely broadcast news about recent atrocities and massacres against the Jews in Europe.⁵¹ Thus, Tillich was speaking to an audience that had likely already heard of the Jewish massacres. In any case, he clearly and unambiguously asserted that the Nazis were killing Jews in staggering numbers, a crime that demanded acknowledgment and action.

IV. On Hope and Redemption

While Tillich returned again and again to the theme of the German people's guilt for their sins, he also wanted to provide hope, to affirm the possibility of renewal and rebirth of the German nation – thus his emphasis on the Gospel. But rebirth can only come after a kind of death. He argued that the German people must realize the end is near: the Allies are on the march with overwhelming numbers and resources, German defeat is certain, and there will be an inevitable reckoning for the German people.⁵² Nonetheless, for Christians there is always hope. For example, in an Easter season sermon from 1942, Tillich preached on the “death and resurrection of the nations [Völker], and of the German nation [Volkes] in particular.”⁵³ He proclaimed that resurrection is true for all of life, even for nations. He argued, “In Germany, despite many external victories, one knows what the Good Friday of a nation, what the death of a world, means.”⁵⁴ The Nazis taught the German people – even its youth – how to sacrifice and even die for the nation. Tillich asserted, “The symbols of life are interpreted as symbols of death; the community that should bestow life becomes a community that prepares for death in word and song and deed.”⁵⁵ Tillich argued that it was madness for a nation to dwell on death in a permanent “Good Friday” rather than on the resurrection of Easter. But resurrection, he claimed, can only happen after a true death. His call to action was clear: “Break away from these leaders, go down the other path, the path of the spirit and of love, the path through death to resurrection: that is what the Easter bells are calling to you.”⁵⁶ Tillich's major themes turn to a call to action, in this case, resistance. We will return to resistance in a moment.

The theme of resurrection recurs throughout Tillich's broadcasts, and it is always meant to give solace in the face of death and destruction. An example of this approach is a broadcast delivered on March 28, 1944, which was titled “A German Good Friday.” Tillich argued that the German people need to hold tight to the good news of the cross of Christ, which reconciles and brings resurrection. He said that the Germans are on the cross themselves – they are suffering – but they are also crucifying others at the same time. Unlike Christ, they are not innocent. Germany had become the tool of the Nazis to commit the “crimes against the Jewish people” and the “countless atrocities of the Gestapo.”⁵⁷ Through the war Germany is crucifying the peoples of the world. And, he argued, they curse Germans because of it: “From the mouths of most of the victims of the Germans come not the word of forgiveness but the word of curse.”⁵⁸ Tillich confronted his listeners with the reality of their sins, and yet his main point is to look upon the “innocent one” on the cross, a picture that “reveals in perfection the radiating, reconciling power that innocent suffering has when it is borne with inner greatness.”⁵⁹ He asked his listeners to look upon the cross and to die to themselves – for only in this way can they be reconciled to others and God and experience resurrection.

Tillich argued the need for Germany's resurrection, not simply the individual's resurrection. This theme recurs on Easter each year he gave these broadcasts, from 1942 to 1944. In an address on April 4, 1944, he argued that the “actual sound” of Easter bells ringing is “that death is not the end, even when it appears to have triumphed.”⁶⁰ He did not often explicitly name Christ as the resurrected one or the one through whom resurrection comes, but his meaning could not be mistaken. Tillich proclaimed,

The resurrection of such a Germany would be an Easter message for Germany and for the world. And it would be an Easter message even over the death fields in all lands. Admittedly, even a resurrected Germany cannot awaken its dead. But it can give a new meaning to the death of its dead: they died for the sake of the resurrection of their nation, unknowingly or knowingly; and for that reason, they take part in this resurrection. The dead do not appear, but they speak through us. . . We hope that the eternal meaning of the German people and the eternal meaning of its dead will combine into one meaning: the resurrection, the message of Easter.⁶¹

His emphasis on the possibility of resurrection, hope in the midst of destruction was meant to provide solace to Germans in a terrible time of war. But to experience resurrection one must first die to self. This is elemental to his Gospel message and its critical to Tillich's radio addresses.⁶² For Tillich, Germans must “elimin[ate]. . .everything that has seduced Germany and deceived it about itself, and that is embodied in National Socialism.”⁶³ The German nation, Tillich argued, must face its own death. It must accept defeat and come to terms with its role in the current calamity before resurrection is even possible. Nazi Germany must die before the German nation could be born again.

Just as Tillich clarified the nature of the sins of the German people and their guilt for the crimes of the Nazi government in World War II – demonstrating how they have fallen short of God's law – so also does he emphasize that Germans have hope because of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For example, on December 8, 1942, as the battle of Stalingrad raged, Tillich preached a sermon of hope for Advent. He argued that the “turning point has been reached” in the war.⁶⁴ He contended that the Nazi murderers can expect judgment, but the German people can hope for a new beginning. Connecting the birth of Christ with a new German beginning, Tillich stated, “[T]he Advent season proclaims the coming light and not the growing darkness, the coming salvation and not the certain destruction!”⁶⁵ But even for the person who has sinned, even grievously, there is hope: “Advent also gives hope to the evildoer: although not for this life, in which punitive justice hits them; but for eternity, in which there is forgiveness and salvation even for the worst sinner!”⁶⁶ Advent is the coming of God's salvation. There is always hope. While there is no hope for a German victory in the war, no hope for the Nazis to win out in the end, Tillich argued, “The hope that remains for the German people lies beyond the collapse of its false hopes. As it is in the life of the individual, so it is in the life of peoples. Nothing is more difficult and more painful than such catastrophes of hope. But at the same time, nothing is more cleansing.”⁶⁷ The German people can be purified of the National Socialist poison, and it can rise again, just as it has in the past (e.g., after the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century).

Hope in a future without Nazism is a theme that resonates throughout Tillich's broadcasts. On a couple of occasions he drew on the legendary figure of Faust, as told by the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to give hope to Germans in despair. Goethe's Faust tells the story of the eponymous professor who made a pact with Mephistopheles to gain knowledge and temporal pleasures at the cost of his soul. On one occasion, on Easter Sunday, 1943, Tillich broadcast a sermon and recalled how Faust nearly drank from a poisoned cup offered by Mephisto.⁶⁸ With his lips to the cup he suddenly heard the church bells of Easter, and put the cup down. Tillich argued, “Faust is saved by the message of new life! The German people can be saved through the message of its rebirth. This is what the voice of the Easter bells calls out to every German today: rebirth!”⁶⁹ Tillich referenced the Gospel message to remind Germans that Easter has come, that they should not give in and drink from the cup of despair. Hope has dawned and the Easter bells are ringing. He concluded the broadcast with a remarkable call to action:

Allow nothing of the National Socialist decay to penetrate into you; it could become deadly for the resurrected Germany! Don't attempt to avoid the cross where all false, foul, and evil things are being set aright! Don't betray the Germany of the future out of sympathy for the present, decaying Germany! Allow what has to decompose to do so, and prepare yourselves for the new that will come to be, beyond death and despair. Prepare for the Easter of the German people.⁷⁰

Throughout these broadcasts Tillich attempted to get the German people to imagine a Germany without Nazi aggressive militarism, a future without the Nazi moral corruption. Another future is possible, he claimed, one in which Germany is resurrected and flourishes. Yet he asked the German people to do so much more than simply hope.

V. Resisting the Nazi State

While Tillich's broadcasts are remarkable for how he uses the Law and Gospel, on the one hand, to convince Germans of their sin under God's law, and on the other, to offer them hope in the Gospel, they are even more noteworthy for how he continually seeks to encourage Germans to struggle and fight back against the Nazi totalitarian state. They are among the only addresses I have seen delivered within Germany or via the radio airwaves that call for the German people to actively resist Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Before examining the evidence for his work of resistance over the airwaves, it is first necessary to define what the word “resistance” means in the context of Nazi Germany. Historians have hotly contested the definition in the past few decades; after all, an act that may be construed as critical or oppositional to the Nazis, such as a joke at Hitler's expense, may be understood differently if performed by a Jew as opposed to an “Aryan.”⁷¹ Ian Kershaw's definition of “resistance” in his classic study, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, offers an intuitive and reasonable basis to distinguish acts critical of the Nazi regime. In distinguishing between resistance, opposition, and dissent, he acknowledges the motivations of the individual in criticizing the regime as well as the intended consequences for the action itself. “Resistance” refers to the intentional, organized, and active attempt to overturn the Nazi regime or plan for its end.⁷² The attempted assassination of Hitler by Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944 is perhaps the most well-known act of resistance, though there are many others. “Opposition” refers to more limited acts that in some way are meant to challenge the dominance of the Nazi state, such as sabotage, ignoring prohibitions on race relations, and refusing to give the Nazi salute. “Dissent” is a broad category that refers to the “voicing of attitudes, frequently spontaneous and often unrelated to any intended action, which in any way whatsoever ran counter to or were critical of Nazism.”⁷³ Examples of dissent may be a joke at Hitler's expense or a spontaneous comment that demonstrates criticism of the Nazi state. While acknowledging the complexities of responses to the Nazi regime given one's context and standing in Nazi Germany, Kershaw's distinctions are helpful for the purposes of understanding the nature of Tillich's messages.

Tillich's broadcasts contain material that clearly goes beyond simple dissent or opposition. He moved from voicing critical comments about the war or how the Nazis are leading the German people to destruction, to repeated calls for the German people to throw off the domination of the Nazi state and to take control of their own fate, especially given the absolute certitude of Allied victory as the United States entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In addition, his broadcasts were supported, facilitated, and funded by the American government. Tillich worked to inspire Germans to free themselves long before the Allies would conquer Nazi Germany and liberate Germans from totalitarianism. As Halder as shown, Tillich's addresses indicate he believed in the “two-Germany theory,” that is, the “real Germany” hidden in the shadows of the Nazi regime.⁷⁴ He was calling Germans to step out and stand up against Nazi tyranny. In a broadcast on April 20, 1942, just a month after Tillich took to the airwaves, he argued that the spiritual freedom of a Christian is central to their identity, and this has tremendous implications for politics. A Christian cannot consider themselves obedient to God while submitting themselves to diabolical rule. He asked,

Can inner freedom be saved if the bondage is not only external but also the spirits and souls are being split, conquered, and enslaved? Protestant Germans! Free yourselves from the belief that internal and external freedom, that religious and political, can be separated.

. . .

For the sake of this fear [of tyranny], for the sake of this hope [of freedom], enter into this fight to free yourselves. Shake off the tyranny that wants to destroy the internal freedom, the human and the divine in you. Let the Protestant protest become mighty among you, as in your fathers in their time. Internal and external freedom have become one. The fight for both is what your time requires of you.⁷⁵

Tillich recalled the Protestant reformers who struggled for Christian freedom under medieval Roman Catholicism, appealing to Protestant identity to unite his listeners against the Nazi regime. Indeed, he moves beyond the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms, that every person is subject to two kingdoms, the state governing worldly affairs and the church governing spiritual affairs. Tillich does not allow for the Christian to subject himself to an evil secular ruler while also submitting to Christ and his church. His guidance for the Christian is evocative, recalling the memory of the Protestant Reformation and referring to revolution, to “shake off the tyranny” of an unjust and evil regime. He called the Germans to free themselves, to fight for freedom. His language is explicit, with the clear aim to inspire resistance to the Nazi regime.

This call to revolution was not a one-off comment. He said much the same thing on April 6, 1943. In the broadcast, Tillich stated, “The revolution of freedom has begun: go with it, my German friends! Stop being instruments of tyranny! Free yourselves, then you will be free, even when the armies of oppression are routed. The revolution of freedom has begun. Take part in it, you, the first victims of tyranny!”⁷⁶ He said this only after naming resisters to Nazi Germany, from saboteurs to the White Rose group to partisans in the countryside. It is clear that Tillich meant for the Germans themselves, as the Nazis’ first victims, to rise up in a “revolution of freedom” to overthrow the Nazi state.⁷⁷ Again, he repeats the word “free” and its derivatives, encouraging Germans to throw off Nazi domination. Tillich did not simply want to criticize the Nazis to correct their policies, as if they were a just political party that has made some mistakes; rather, he wanted their total removal from power as an evil force that has wrought destruction upon Germany, Europe, and indeed the world.⁷⁸

A consistent theme in these broadcasts is the need to “throw off” the Nazi tyranny, not only to gain freedom, but to end the war and usher in a time of peace. In a broadcast on March 21, 1944, he proclaimed:

It is your responsibility to remove the Nazis for Germany's sake. You who know and yet don't want to know. You are the majority of the people. Its fate depends on you. If you know, then do what must follow from your knowledge. For the sake of your responsibility for Germany, take responsibility upon yourselves against the Nazis. . . Renounce this war. It is no longer yours; it is no longer Germany's war. It is the Nazis’ war, theirs alone, and Germany and you, my German friends, are their tools and their victims.⁷⁹

Tillich asked the German people to accept their responsibility for what Hitler and the Nazis had unleased upon the Germany and the world. Their responsibility demands that they take action. These examples are just a sampling of a major theme in these broadcasts. The calls to action demonstrate one over-arching purpose for these broadcasts: to inspire the German people themselves to actively work to end Nazi regime and thus end the war.

In my work analyzing over 900 sermons preached within Nazi Germany, I have yet to find an example of a pastor who openly and explicitly called the German people to action to overthrow the government.⁸⁰ Tillich's case is certainly unique in that he was far from the reach of the Gestapo. I have also researched radio sermons broadcast from the BBC into Nazi Germany, and likewise, have not found any that call for the overthrow of the Nazi regime.⁸¹

Perhaps the closest comparison to Tillich's activities was one group of resisters who likewise consistently called for German resistance against the Nazi regime through the careful use of words. Working from within Nazi Germany rather than over the radio, the Munich-based student group known as the White Rose, led by the siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, and a professor of philosophy, Kurt Huber, also crafted messages meant to challenge the German people's perception of themselves and the regime. They penned, printed, and distributed six leaflets over approximately 7 months from June 1942 to February 1943, when they were discovered. Like Tillich, they informed the German people of atrocities committed against the Jews, and they called on Germans to rise up and overthrow “National Socialist gangsterism.”⁸² In their fifth broadsheet, distributed in January 1943, they argued that “A criminal regime cannot achieve a German victory” and that Germans must prepare for Allied victory.⁸³ The messaging is quite similar to Tillich's radio broadcasts. But unlike Tillich, the members of the White Rose were within the grasp of the Gestapo, and they were arrested and put to death before they could continue their resistance activities.

Tillich continued broadcasting until the second week of May 1944, a month before D-Day and two months before the Abwehr conspiracy's bomb plot attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944.⁸⁴ Throughout these final months at the microphone, Tillich called on the German people to actively resist and purposefully seek the downfall of the Nazi regime.⁸⁵ His words were not meant simply to console but to stir to action by reminding the German people that their hope now rested with the just conquest of the Allies.⁸⁶

It is unclear precisely why Tillich stopped broadcasting a year before the end of the war, though it is possible that his ongoing involvement with fellow German émigrés in planning for the end of the war had something to do with it.⁸⁷ Tillich joined Bertolt Brecht, Berthold Viertel, and Thomas Mann, among others, in supporting the aims of the National Committee “Free Germany,” an anti-Nazi organization that developed among German prisoners in the Soviet Union in 1943.⁸⁸ Their aims were the return of lands conquered, seized, or annexed by Nazi Germany since 1938; initiating negotiations to end the war; the toppling of Nazi rule, and the establishment of a democratic government.⁸⁹ This group asked Mann to form a Free Germany Committee group in the United States, but Mann declined. They then asked Tillich to organize a group in the United States, and he accepted, calling it the Council for Democratic Germany (CDG), for which he served as chair. His duties with the CDG and his full-time responsibilities as a professor likely made his nearly weekly broadcasts unfeasible.

VI. Conclusions

While it is exceedingly difficult to gauge the reception of Tillich's broadcasts given the paucity of sources indicating listeners’ views of religious radio programming, it is clear that broadcasts like his over VOA, as well as religious broadcasts on the BBC and Radio Moscow, broke the communications monopoly of Joseph Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda.⁹⁰ Tillich and other pastors and theologians were able to offer listeners messages that directly undermined Nazi ideology and the regime. Moreover, Tillich repeatedly challenged the Nazi conception of the Volksgemeinschaft, the “national community,” by beginning his broadcasts with the salutation, “My German Friends,” demonstrating love and concern that transcended Nazi values. He demonstrated through his sermonic addresses that another vision for a German community existed, one that was not bound by Nazi racial ideology and militarism. Religious broadcasts over VOA eluded the Nazi secret police apparatus – as radio broadcasts were nearly impossible to effectively police – giving Germans opportunities to listen to Christians about their mutual concerns in a time of war.

Moreover, the limited evidence available about the reception of Allied broadcasts indicates that they had an impact on the German people, though not enough to inspire them to quit fighting or supporting the Nazi war effort. Based on a survey conducted by the United States Psychological Warfare Branch, Wallace Carroll has argued that American broadcasting “had a surprisingly large and sympathetic audience among German troops in Italy.”⁹¹ With almost 100,000 respondents, 54.5 percent “admitted that they had read Allied leaflets, listened to the Allied radio, or heard front-line loudspeakers,” an astonishing number that illustrates how the Allies undermined the Nazi propaganda machine.⁹² One German soldier stated, “We listened to the Voice of American and gained the conviction more and more that our propaganda and press had misled us for years.”⁹³ The true impact of these broadcasts on the German troops and population may never be fully known, given that we do not have records of listeners recording their thoughts of the broadcasts in diaries, letters, or essays (as this would incriminate them if found). But it is clear that the broadcasts did not inspire the German people to rise up en masse to resist the regime, to oust Hitler and overthrow the National Socialist system. Nevertheless, the American attempt (and Allied, more generally) to encourage and inspire the German people through religious broadcasts is historically significant. Sermonic addresses were used as “white” propaganda in the war effort.

Also, the tone and content of Tillich's broadcasts are dramatically different from sermons and religious addresses typically delivered by pastors in Nazi Germany itself. One reason for the differences in Tillich's broadcasts is that he was not limited by the parameters of a worship service, which would have directed the listener to worship God. Thus, Tillich could condemn National Socialism and the Nazi regime, as well as the Nazi persecution of Jews, because the focus of these broadcasts was not worshiping God, per se, but offering religious and moral instruction to help reorient society to biblical principles. Without the parameters of a worship service, such as confession, the recitation of the ecumenical creeds, and especially the administration of the Eucharist, Tillich had the freedom to encourage his German listeners to actively resist the National Socialist regime. Given the concern many German pastors had about Gestapo spies in church services, we do not find calls to resist in sermons delivered in Nazi Germany. It would have been virtually inconceivable for a pastor to call for revolution from the pulpit, given the likelihood of immediate and severe reprisal. Thus, Tillich's wartime religious broadcasts were exceptional not only in their content but also in their aims.

Comparing Tillich's radio broadcasts to those of other theologians and pastors is challenging, given the lack of scholarship on this topic. I have analyzed the sermons of the German pastor and theologian Franz Hildebrandt, a member of the Confessing Church, a colleague of Martin Niemöller at St. Anne's Church in Dahlem-Berlin, and a close friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.⁹⁴ Hildebrandt preached sermons as part of formal church services through the German Religious Services of the BBC, and he broadcasted his addresses in roughly the same period as Tillich's broadcast. While Hildebrandt's sermons were shaped by the constraints of a worship service (in that the primary purpose was to instruct, edify, and convert the listeners and direct worship to God), Tillich's primary purpose was slightly different. Indeed, he intended to instruct, edify, and convert but politically and socially, not simply religiously. His sermonic addresses must be understood in this general sense, that they were religious and moral speeches to influence his audience to action.

Tillich's wartime broadcasts provide a fascinating glimpse into how Christians waged World War II. While the German opponents of Hitler and the Nazi regime had a variety of weapons to fight back, such as sabotage, conspiracy to overthrow the regime, hiding Jews, and even simply telling jokes at the expense of Nazi leaders to undermine their legitimacy, Christian pastors and theologians used the prophetic word to provide moral clarity, to judge sin, and to offer hope for redemption, no matter the guilt incurred. The categories of Law and Gospel provided a framework for Tillich to show Germans how they had morally failed but also to share “good news” amid the cataclysm of World War II.