For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler

by Victoria Barnett and Victoria J. Barnett

Book Overview

This is a study of the Confessing Church, which broke away from the German state church in the 1930s to protest against Nazi interference in church affairs and was consequently labelled a resistance movement. The text contains interviews with 60 Germans who were active in the church. These narrators reflect on their moral and political experiences during the Third Reich and how these experiences affected their values after 1945. The resulting testimony...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195053060
• ISBN13: 9780195053067
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Struggling with the Devil

Struggles of various churches with self styled 'Progressive' movements within their ranks whose Politically Correct beliefs contradict scripture are nothing new. Actually they are common news today. Just as there are moderates who are always willing to compromise scripture in order to get along with the elite of society as well as outsiders with various beliefs and supposed found wisdom desiring to force the churches to change to t heir way. Such struggles have been happening since the Christian Church began. During Hitler's reign in Germany this struggle in the Protestant churches was between the likes of Reverands Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoffer and members of the Confessing Church and the self styled 'progressive' 'German Christian Movement' and their neo-pagen nazi supporters. This book is the story of their struggle.

For the Soul of a People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler

~For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler~ reflects upon the activities of the Christian Protestant resistance to Hitler's Germany. Her book chronicles efforts by the resistance as well as efforts to put the church under the heel of the totalitarian state. The abuses and usurpations by the Nazis are innumerable and the pagan ideology of the Nazi state hoped to supplant the Christian church and herald Hitler as the embodiment of the messiah. The Nazis borrowed Christian concepts of redemption, and promised heaven on earth and a one-thousand year golden age of Nazi rule, and yet they only succeeded in creating its antithesis-a hell on earth. Like the Soviets, the Germans wanted a church they could keep under their thumb and control if they had to tolerate any at all. In the Soviet Union, a few token congregations were 'tolerated' in major cities like Moscow, and the Soviet stooges heading the congregations therein boasted of their religious freedom, which was primarily for outward consumption as religious repression was the norm. Publicly, their messages were distorted by Soviet propagandists. In Nazi Germany, the people were more resistant to marginalization of Christianity, because it was so ingrained in the hearts and minds of many Germans. The Nazis hoped to muzzle nascent Christian resistance, and demarcated the boundaries of a state-tolerated Christian assembly, under two confessional creeds, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. An organized resistance to the Nazi state and state-tolerated church was present in the underground church of Confessing Christians. These protestors objected vehemently to Nazi edicts-the so called Aryan clauses-that forbid non-Germans from being members of the church. The Gestapo counterintelligence had two sections dedicated to domestic monitoring of religious groups and their resistance, and churches were ridden with moles and informants. The Himmler Decree punished the activities of the Confessing Church, effectively outlawing their seminary studies, exam taking, which made them criminal activities. Yet the Confessing Church persisted, but faced persecution. The anger of Nazis was kindled in one locale, as local Christians much preferred the tranquility of Bible studies to being spoon fed by Nazi indoctrinators. One Nazi quipped, "A migration of people occurs when these so-called Bible studies take place..." The pastor soon heard of death threats leaking from the Gestapo. The Confessing Church was bound by a code of ethics, and many refused to turn snitch, as the Berlin Council of Brethren declared: "From the standpoint of honor of a Christian and a German man, it is ruled out absolutely that a pastor of the Confessing Church offer himself to the police as an informer on his colleagues... The honor and fellowship... forbid any pastor to contribute, in any form, to a colleague's imprisonment..." Their constitution and resolve not to cooperate was perhaps much stronger than Soviet resistance.