Free Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Page B

reads: “In the mission to the Jews we see a serious threat to our people [ Volkstum ]. That mission is the entry way for foreign blood into the body of our Volk…. We reject missions to the Jews in Germany as long as Jews possess the right of citizenship and hence the danger of racial fraud and bastardization exists…. Marriage between Germans and Jews particularly is to be forbidden.” 10
    The German Christian Movement had grown in nurturing soil, and it was not by chance that, in the 1932 church elections, it received a third of the vote. The traditional alliance between German Protestantism and German nationalist authoritarianism went too deep to allow a decisive and immediately countervailing force to arise against the zealots intent on purifying Christianity of its Jewish heritage. Even those Protestant theologians who, in the 1920s, had been ready to engage in dialogue with Jews—participating, for example, in meetings organized under the aegis of Martin Buber’s periodical, Der Jude —now expressed, more virulently than before, the standard accusations of “Pharisaic” and “legalistic” manifestations of the Jewish spirit. As Buber wrote in response to a particularly offensive article by Oskar A. H. Schmitz published in Der Jude in 1925 under the title “Desirable and Undesirable Jews”: “I have once again…noted that there is a boundary beyond which the possibility of encounter ceases and only the reporting of factual information remains. I cannot fight against an opponent who is thoroughly opposed to me, nor can I fight against an opponent who stands on a different plane than I.” 11 As the years went by, such encounters became less frequent, and German Protestantism increasingly opened itself to the promise of national renewal and positive Christianity heralded by National Socialism.
    The German Christian Movement’s ideological campaign seemed strongly bolstered by the election, on September 27, 1933, of Ludwig Müller, a fervent Nazi, as Reich bishop—that is, as some sort of Führer’s coordinator for all major issues pertaining to the Protestant churches. But precisely this election and a growing controversy regarding pastors and church members of Jewish origin caused a widening rift within the Evangelical Church.
    In an implementation of the Civil Service Law, the synod governing the Prussian Evangelical Church demanded the forced retirement of pastors of Jewish origin or married to Jews. This initiative was quickly followed by the synods of Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Braunschweig, Lübeck, Hesse-Nassau, Tübingen, and Württemberg. 12 By the early fall of 1933, general adoption of the so-called Aryan paragraph throughout the Reich appeared to be a foregone conclusion. A contrary trend, however, simultaneously made its appearance, with a group of leading theologians issuing a statement on “The New Testament and the Race Question,” which clearly rejected any theological justification for adoption of the paragraph 13 and, on Christmas 1933, Pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller (a widely admired World War I hero), founded an oppositional organization, the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund), whose initial thirteen hundred adherents grew within a few months to six thousand. One of the league’s first initiatives was to issue a protest against the Aryan paragraph: “As a matter of duty, I bear witness that with the use of ‘Aryan laws’ within the Church of Christ an injury is done to our common confession of faith.” 14 The Confessing Church was born.
    But the steadfastness of the Confessing Church regarding the Jewish issue was limited to support of the rights of non-Aryan Christians. And even on this point Martin Niemöller made it abundantly clear, for example in his “Propositions on the Aryan Question” (“Sätze zur Arierfrage”), published in November 1933, that only theological considerations prompted him to take his position. As he was to state at