An Honourable Defeat (7 page)

Whatever Beck’s personal views, he kept them to himself. In July 1935 he accepted the post of Chief of the General Staff, which represented the zenith of his career. In October he was promoted again, and three years later he retired with the rank of Colonel-General, one step below Field Marshal. But by then he had become a disillusioned man.

Oster and Beck were the two lynchpins of the early Resistance to Hitler, the driving force behind all efforts to remove him in the years immediately before and after the outbreak of war. Neither of them, however, was in command of troops. In the meantime came the reaction to Hitler of another big battalion — far greater in size and potential power than the Army, the Nazi Party, or the SA — the Church.

Chapter Three – A Fortress Strong

In 1931, the Evangelical parish of St Ann’s, Dahlem, in southwest Berlin, welcomed a new pastor. Martin Niemöller, handsome and humorous, was popular from the word go. Now just a year short of forty, he had been one of the most successful submarine commanders of the First World War, but after a brief period as a farmhand after its conclusion, he had entered the Church, and was ordained in 1924. Politically he leant to the Right, and was one of those prominent members of the Resistance who initially supported National Socialism.

Dahlem was the richest parish in Germany. Among his parishioners, Niemöller counted Kurt von Hammerstein, Hans Oster and other members of the future Resistance. It is a feature of the Resistance that many of its members were, or became, devout Christians — and it has been argued that faith was a form of ‘inner emigration’ for some of them,
[22]
though equally it may have been an attestation of their right to think independently. In the latter case, they could not have chosen a better champion than Niemöller.

But Resistance within the Church was not a simple matter; when Niemöller raised his voice against the Nazis, it was not against all aspects of their rule. Nazi anti-Semitism, for example, was no more singled out for initial criticism by the Church than it was by the Army. The Church’s first consideration was its own independent right to exist. Its Resistance, therefore, was against
Gleichschaltung
. For his part, Hitler naturally wanted to bring the Church into line with everything else in his scheme of things. He knew he dare not simply eradicate it: that would not have been possible with such an international organisation, and he would have lost many Christian supporters had he tried to. His principal aim was to unify the German Evangelical Church under a pro-Nazi banner, and to come to an accommodation with the Catholics.

At the time there were three Protestants to every two Catholics in Germany, but the Church was more than a house divided against itself along the main sectarian line, and this was to the Nazis’ advantage.

To take the Evangelical Church first. Every state in post-Reformation Germany had its own sect. In 1919 there were thirty-eight different Calvinist, Lutheran and United Churches under the domination of the Old Prussian Union, though this number was reduced by ten under an amalgamation move in 1922. Although the Church was seen — and saw itself — as apolitical, not interfering in the affairs of state, German Church leaders were conservative at heart and had watched some of the liberal and pro-secular developments of the Weimar Republic with dismay. The new authority, representing as it seemed the solid old values of Imperial Germany, was seen by some as a great opportunity — under
Gleichschaltung
— to unify the disparate sects. Hitler knew this, and exploited it. In doing so he caused the lines of division within the Evangelical Church to be redrawn along political rather than sectarian lines. But also he thus indirectly obliged the Church to look at its own meaning afresh.

Hitler’s supporters within the Church formed the movement of German Christians, which upheld the idea of a Reich bishop and the unification of all sects under him. The movement also sought the nazification of the Church in that the Church would accept all the totalitarian and racist aspects of National Socialist policy. Hitler’s candidate for the bishopric was Ludwig Müller, an Army chaplain whose chief claim to fame (and this is how Hitler must have heard of him) was that he had converted Blomberg to the idea of Nazism. Milner was not a forceful or convincing character, however, and once it was realised that he was a political tool rather than a spiritual leader, many of those who might have supported him in the interests of Church unity withdrew their support despite his Nazi backing. In the elections for Reich bishop, which took place in the spring of 1933, another candidate was elected: Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, a pious and respected churchman from the famous community of Bethel.

The victory was short-lived, for Hitler was not about to let the Church get its own way. To begin with, he tried to put pressure on it through political control. Bodelschwingh, unable to muster wholehearted support in protest at this, resigned, but still the Prussian Church would not accept the commissioner appointed to bring it into line. Hindenburg had to intervene, and Hitler again had to retreat. But not for long. In July 1933 there were fresh elections. This time, with the full force of the Nazi propaganda machine behind him, Ludwig Müller got the job, and the German Christians gained power in terms of important administrative posts. Few leading prelates spoke up against these bulldozer techniques. Among those who did was Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg, who also objected to measures against non-Aryans. He was put under house arrest for a time, but the Nazis never dared move too drastically against dissident Church leaders because they were aware of the power of religion. During the early years of the Third Reich mass protests against the regime often took the form of enormous religious gatherings.

Nevertheless, with Müller’s election Hitler might have thought the battle won. In reality it was only just joined. Two months later, Martin Niemöller and several like-minded clergy men founded the Pastors’ Emergency League. This organisation, though not joined by many Church leaders, was hugely successful: by the beginning of 1934 it had 7036 members — more than one third of all the Protestant pastors in Germany — and though its membership dropped during the following decade, it never went below 3933. Its programme was to abide by the letter of the Christian law as expressed in Christ’s teaching and the Confession of Faith. In this it represented a step forward for the Church. No longer would the Church simply be seeking the right of self-determination, it would be reaching out its hand in true Christianity to support other victims of Nazism. As the regime grew more draconian, so did the Church increase its humanitarian opposition.

Those days, however, were still some time away. Niemöller did object publicly at the end of the year to those ‘Aryan paragraphs’ — measures against the Jews — which had already been ushered in, but for the present there was no active questioning of Hitler’s right to rule as secular head of state. Niemöller even sent him a telegram of congratulation on leaving the League of Nations.

Here one can clearly sense the difficulty and paradox attending the birth of a rebellion stemming from the Establishment, and understand why it was so slow to begin. Niemöller perceived that certain areas of National Socialism were wrong, but he could not see the whole picture, because he was a conservative German patriot and war hero. There is even a story that later, in 1941, when he had already been a prisoner of the Reich for four years, he volunteered for naval service. But he was also a convinced Christian who could not stand by and see the ethical and moral values of his Faith brushed aside. In a confrontation with Niemöller at the beginning of 1934, the Rihrer said, ‘You confine yourself to the Church, I’ll take care of the German people.’ Niemöller replied, ‘We too, as Christians and churchmen, have a responsibility to the German people which was entrusted to us by God. Neither you nor anyone else in the world has the power to take it from us.’
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This retort earned him Hitler’s personal animosity and shortly afterwards he was suspended, but with the backing of his parishioners he was able to continue his work.

Meanwhile, the German Christians had created problems for themselves by being too outspoken in their virulent anti-Semitism and thereby alienating a large number of people who now withdrew their support. The so-called ‘Brown Synod’ of September 1933 had called for the expulsion of all churchmen of impure Aryan origin, together with those married to non-Aryans. In November, at a mass meeting in the Sportpalast in Berlin, there had been a call to abolish the Old Testament as a ‘Jewish script’. Gustav Heinemann, one of the most powerful German industrialists, wrote an outraged personal letter of protest to Hitler.

The Church, as an international organisation with deep roots and commanding profound loyalty, was a dangerous opponent. Further attempts to 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,
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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 consistently opposed to Nazism. Even when they could no longer present a united front, even when they were in a tiny minority, they continued their individual protest. Niemöller recognised that this stance was not enough. Immediately after the war, he convened a meeting at Stuttgart to formulate a Declaration of Guilt by the Church for not having opposed Hitler sooner and more strenuously; but he was being unrealistically harsh.

His own arrest was not far off, and he could no longer rely on his fame and popularity to protect him from it. On the morning of I July 1937 he had a meeting at his house in Dahlem with a group of colleagues.
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Barely had the meeting begun than one of their number saw a column of black Mercedes cars approach and draw up — unmistakably the Gestapo. The whole group, including Frau Niemöller, was placed under house arrest and had to endure an eight-hour-long search of the building, and especially of Niemöller’s study. At the end of it, all save Niemöller himself were free to go. He was not tried until the following year, and then committed to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen as the ‘personal prisoner of the Führer’. He was later transferred to Dachau, and was liberated by American forces in 1945. Niemöller lived to a great age, dying in 1984 after a distinguished postwar career in the course of which he was no less outspoken than he had been against Hitler.

On the evening of her husband’s arrest, alone in the house, Frau Niemöller heard singing outside her window. The women’s choir of St Ann’s had heard of their pastor’s arrest and had come to comfort his wife. Two days later,
The
Times
in London published a letter by the Bishop of Chichester, a friend of the Confessing Church, in which he sounded one of the earliest unequivocal warnings from abroad about the Nazis: ‘This is a critical hour. This is not a question just of the fate of a single vicar; it is a question concerning the whole attitude of the German state to Christianity.’