Pastors Against Hitler: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany

By Michael S Haggard

How Much of an Impact Can One Person Make?

Can one man make a difference in a nation that denies its citizens basic rights, makes war against its neighbors, uses its power to destroy the Jewish race, tries to control the message of the Christian church, and kills Christian leaders who resist? All of these events occurred in the nation of G

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael S. Haggard
• Release date: Aug 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692172308

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Can history repeat itself? Without a doubt. God has never been without a witness, and in this time in history it’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’m inspired, challenged, and encouraged by this book all at the same time! Read and be informed, convicted, and challenged to greater commitment. What a time—and what a man.

—Dr. Johnny Hunt

Pastor, First Baptist Church, Woodstock, Georgia

Over my forty-three years of full-time pastoring, I have watched the relationship between church and state change dramatically. I have always studied with interest the developments in prewar Germany and the resulting tensions it created with the church. It is sobering to see how easily so many Christians gave allegiance to Hitler—and that there were so few righteous Gentiles. Dr. Mike Haggard’s observations into what shaped Bonhoeffer are insightful. It is a powerful reminder that only consistent spiritual disciplines will guard our hearts and minds. Casual Christianity will not stand such pressure.

—Rev. Geoffrey Gunter

Pastor, Regency Park Church of the Nazarene, Tulsa, Oklahoma

One of the greatest mysteries of the twentieth century has been the church in Germany during the period of Adolph Hitler’s control. With the mind of a scholar and the pen of a sleuth, Dr. Michael Haggard carries us from the intrigue of conspiracy to the shadowy halls of a secret seminary as Dietrich Bonhoeffer battled against the nazification of the church. Haggard gives rare and unusual insight into the life, leadership, and theology of Bonhoeffer during the darkest days of the church in Germany.

—Dr. Mac Brunson

Pastor and author

I was first introduced to the life and ministry of Dietrich Bonhoeffer during my college days. I feel like I have been powerfully reintroduced through this volume. Dr. Haggard writes a profound and thorough overview of a man, a country, and issues created by a season of history. His thoughts are compelling, thought-provoking, and insightful. I’m struck by the wisdom of the presentation. I was also helped in reading it by the insights into leadership and discussion of moral courage. May the Lord continue to be glorified through this endeavor.

—Dr. Bruce Aubrey

Northside Church, Liverpool, NY

Pastors

Against

Hitler

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany

Dr. Michael Haggard

Pastors Against Hitler: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany

Copyright 2018 by Michael Haggard

Published by 5 Fold Media, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise-without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version which is in public domain.

To Barbara, my love and companion through many seasons of life, thank you for your sacrifices imposed by my work on this book

Chapter 1: Introduction

Collisions

Church history holds a vast repository of information describing the frequent collision(s) between the empires of humanity and the kingdom of God. Immediately one thinks of the persecution of the first century church by the Roman Caesars or the migrations of the pagan Gothic tribes that plunged both the church and the Roman Empire into the Dark Ages. During the turbulent second century, Tertullian described Christian blood as a seed, meaning that as Christian blood is shed, the gospel spreads, with more Christians and more churches as a result.

During the twentieth century one such collision occurred between Hitler’s Third Reich and the Protestant Church in Germany. To illustrate this point and to bring this statement into perspective, it’s reported that of the thousands incarcerated and slain at the Dachau Concentration Camp in southern Germany, Christian clergy accounted for 10 percent of the camp population. In Hitler’s blueprint for National Socialism, Mein Kampf [My Struggle], Hitler, a Catholic, wrote very approvingly of the church:

In my free time I practiced singing in the choir of the monastery church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favorable position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendor of ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for….¹

In his comments as to why the Second Reich failed, he writes,

While the two Christian denominations maintained missions in Asia and Africa, for the purpose of securing new adherents to the Faith, these same denominations were losing millions and millions of their adherents at home in Europe. These former adherents either gave up religion wholly as a directive force in their lives or they adopted their own interpretation of it. The consequences of this were specially felt in the moral life of the country.²

Here Hitler laments a weak church and blames it as one of the reasons why the Weimar Republic, the post-World War I German experiment in democracy, failed. Hitler did not want democracy to succeed. As history and Mein Kampf bear witness, Hitler’s vision of the state and church included the preservation and propagation of the pure Aryan race. Hitler desired a strong Christian Church in Germany, but in an ideological, not confessional, sense. This vision set the stage for a collision between the Nazi state and the German Protestant Church.

As the collision occurred, the stage was quickly set: the Nazi state began a systematic infiltration of the church by National Socialists, who drove an ideological paradigm shift toward government sponsored anti-Semitism and leader worship. Immediately, leaders emerged within the Protestant Church and they began to speak out. Swiss Reformed theologian and well-known author Dr. Karl Barth resigned from Bonn University because he refused to swear an oath to Hitler. Pastor Martin Niemöller, a former World War I U-boat captain and pastor, took a stand against the nazification of the German Protestant Church and spent eight years in Hitler’s concentration camps. On April 9, 1945, Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an aspiring young German Protestant theologian and pastor who defended the sanctity of the church with both the spoken and written word, was hanged for treason at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp as an enemy of the state.

This is an example of an empire of humanity colliding with the kingdom of God and claiming another Christian martyr. As this book is being written, the kingdom of God is colliding with the empires of man in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In most cases, the governments in question try to conceal any culpability for the persecution through silence, denial, or suppression of the media. In 1930s Germany, Hitler’s movements to unify and conform the Protestant Church to the tenets of National Socialism were conducted openly and supported by all the government-controlled news media.

Conforming the Protestant Church to National Socialism was just one part of the process Hitler called Gleichschaltung, or coordination, whereby all facets of German society were subordinated under the umbrella of Nazi ideology. As part of Hitler’s coordination he moved to create a unified Protestant Reich Church where all Protestant denominations (Lutheran and Reformed mainly) were consolidated under a central Reich Church banner. Membership in the new Reich Church proposed an ecclesiology based on race and blood instead of the confession of sin and the ordinance of baptism.³ Only true Germans with proven Aryan pedigree might apply. The group that emerged to lead the nazification of the Protestant Church was known as the Deutsche Christen [German Christians].

As the pressure intensified, pastors and other church leaders within the Protestant Church who embraced an orthodox confessional ecclesiology came together and drafted two confessional statements: the Bethel Confession and, later, the Barmen Declaration. Churches and church leaders across the broad spectrum of German Protestant Church life consolidated behind the doctrinal statements and a new organization emerged, the Confessional Church. The Kirchenkampf or Church Struggle achieved a new dimension and the tempo of the conflict accelerated.

Due to the close relationship between the state and church in Germany dating back to Charlemagne, Protestant clergy were endowed with all the rights, privileges, and expectations of government civil servants. Thus, there was a federal (Nazi) expectation of clerical compliance and obedience to all the Aryan-promoting legislation enacted by Hitler.⁴ As the Nazi pressure increased, Protestant clergymen with non-Aryan backgrounds were expelled from the church. The Confessing Church responded with the formation of the Pastor’s Emergency League. A creation of Bonhoeffer and Niemöller, the league members committed to obey the Holy Scriptures and the tenets of the Reformation and to care for those who suffered. Ultimately membership in the League rose to six thousand and provided support for the persecuted Protestant clergymen and their families throughout the Church Struggle.

The year 1933 is noteworthy in terms of investigating a modern Christian response to the meteoric rise of a dictator, and to his efforts to gain the subservience of the Protestant Church in order to control the message and propagate racism. As an empire of man clashed with the kingdom of God, six thousand Protestant clergymen rose to the occasion and closed ranks on Scripture, Reformation orthodoxy, and ministry to those ground down by the momentum of the empire. Unfortunately, persecution and conscription in the armed forces decimated the ranks of the Protestant opposition. However, history proved that the Nazi efforts to transform the Protestant Church through Gleichschaltung [coordination] failed.

From the very beginning of the Church Struggle, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name appears. On February 1, 1933, two days after Hitler’s accession to power, Bonhoeffer gave a radio broadcast in Berlin on the subject, "The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Führer." Always concerned for young people and feeling a need to address the fundamentals of political authority and its limitations, Bonhoeffer’s message was to warn the listeners, especially the youth, against becoming so enamored with a leader that he became an idol, commanding worship. Unfortunately, his microphone was switched off before he finished the broadcast.

It is unknown why Bonhoeffer’s broadcast was cut short. It is doubtful the Nazis could gain control of all the radio waves after enjoying only two days of power. Yet, it is indicative of how Bonhoeffer and the Nazis ran afoul during the next ten years. During the years 1933-1943, Bonhoeffer spoke, wrote, led churches abroad, led an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church, worked as an intelligence agent for the Abwehr, traveled abroad, helped smuggle Jews to freedom in Switzerland, joined the conspiracy to eliminate Hitler, and was finally arrested and remained incarcerated until his death.

Bonhoeffer wrote much and much has been written about him. Much of what was written surrounds some of his fragmented, unfinished theological thoughts, as well as concepts he developed while he was incarcerated. However, between the time of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and Bonhoeffer’s arrest in 1943, one finds Bonhoeffer at the cutting edge of the German Church Struggle preaching, teaching, mentoring, writing, and leading. So what? What was the impact of his leadership during that time? Does it really matter historically? Can a person of faith really make any difference in this world of evil against an empire of man?

Why Another Book about Bonhoeffer?

It is impossible to determine how or if one will give a courageous accounting of one’s Christian faith under the duress of government-sponsored persecution. Bonhoeffer is representative of so many believers who, through the ages, clearly understood both the demands and sacrifices a disciple of Jesus Christ may be called upon to make pursuant to a sincere and obedient Christian faith. Geffrey Kelly wrote, Christian faith, not political expediency, drove Pastor Bonhöffer into the German resistance movement and the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi government.⁵

When tested with a collapsing political and ecclesiological world, Bonhoeffer displayed a reckless abandonment to maintain a confessional church focused on Reformation-centered biblical principles. More importantly, Bonhoeffer expended much of his energy influencing others to do the same. He worked toward a unified confessional church led by unified leaders propagating a unified witness of Jesus Christ with the fortitude to stand between the Nazi state and its victims. As he worked toward this goal, Bonhoeffer became one of its victims.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer wrote, When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.⁶ Here Bonhoeffer exhorts believers to die to the old nature, be totally abandoned to all the attachments to this world, and focus on Christ. During the Church Struggle, Bonhoeffer embraced and propagated a Christ-centered purpose emphasizing Reformation orthodoxy against National Socialism’s efforts at Gleichshaltung. This book examines the impact of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s leadership against the nazification of the German Protestant Church from 1933 to 1943.

Survey of the Sources

Source material for this study included books, journal articles, and electronic documents. One of the great benefits of a study on Bonhoeffer is there is no shortage of materials. He is as popular now as he was during the WWII years and is best known for writing the Christian classic, The Cost of Discipleship. This book is one of several he wrote in addition to lectures, essays, sermons, poems, and personal letters. One of the primary sources for this study is the excellent sixteen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works where all Bonhoeffer’s writings are compiled.

Another primary source is Eberhard Bethge’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Bethge became acquainted with Bonhoeffer as a student at his illegal seminary at Finkenwalde. Bethge became Bonhoeffer’s close friend, performed administrative leadership roles at the seminary, and married Bonhoeffer’s niece. Bethge edited Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison and was an advocate for publishing the sixteen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. This writer considers Bethge’s biography the best and most