Free An Honourable Defeat by Anton Gill Page B

muzzle the dissident elements misfired, resulting in huge meetings in Ulm in April 1934, and a month later in Barmen. The Barmen Synod resulted in a Declaration, six points defining the articles of Faith: in sum it asserted that Jesus Christ is the ultimate authority and revealer of God’s mystery; and that the Christian owes his duty first and foremost to God, and his obedience to God’s laws. At the same time the Declaration refuted the doctrines of the German Christians. Its flavour may be sampled by this section of Article 5:
    The Scriptures tell us that the State, by divine decree, is given the task in the as yet unredeemed world, where the Church also has her place, of concerning itself, to the limit of human understanding and human ability, with justice and peace when under the threat and pressure of force...We reject the false doctrine that the State, over and above its special charge, should become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s mission as well . [24]
    It was the work of the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, then a professor at Bonn University, but he spoke with the voice of thousands, and out of the Ulm and Barmen meetings was born the Confessing Church, [25] which united all the dissident Evangelical elements in Germany in a brotherhood dedicated to combating Nazi extremism. It did not stop Hitler’s attempts to take over the Church, but it did permanently frustrate them.
    With the death of Hindenburg, the Church lost a degree of protection. Ludwig Milner, having failed to serve his purpose, was dismissed in July 1935, and replaced by a Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs — Hitler’s aim being to secularise any Party offices that had to do with the Church and thus push it out into the cold. 1935 also saw increased measures against the Jews, and against dissident churchmen, who were at best deprived of their right to work and at worst thrown into the concentration camps. On the eve of a planned condemnation of Nazi ideology from all the pulpits of the Confessing Church, 715 pastors were arrested in Prussia alone. Hitler, impatient as always, wanted to pull out this thorn in his flesh regardless of the impression he might make abroad, and, as with the Army, having cautiously tested the opposition, he continued to push as far as he dared. Karl Barth, who in the autumn of 1934 had made a personal protest in refusing to take the new Oath of Loyalty for Officials unless he could add the rider: ‘Insofar as I can answer for it as an Evangelical Christian’, was expelled from Germany and returned to his native Basle.
    The Confessing Church kept up its fight throughout 1936. In the spring, a memorandum addressed to the Führer and sharply critical of State anti-Semitism was leaked to the foreign press, and reported in the Basler Nachrichten and the Morning Post . As a result the head of the Provisional Central Office of the Confessing Church, Friedrich Weissler, was arrested and flung into Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was murdered early the following year. Undeterred, the Church also raised strong objections to the illegal methods of the Security Service, to an Oath of Loyalty introduced for children, and to the thinly disguised deification of Hitler through Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry.
    After the Olympic Games Hitler had even less reason to put up a front for the benefit of foreign opinion. Progressively, youth organisations connected with churches were banned, and on 1 December membership of the Hitler Youth (or State Youth) became compulsory for girls up to twenty-one and boys up to eighteen. Dissident pastors and (by now) Catholic priests and monks were arraigned on trumped-up charges ranging from embezzlement to paedophilia. Many hundreds were sent to the concentration camps wearing the pink triangle designating homosexuality. Conscription and, subsequently, the war itself, cut great swathes through the ranks of those clergymen who remained