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Theologians and Nazis
Christian Century, May 30, 2006 by Jason Byassee
AT A FAMILY gathering I was teased for reading a recondite book titled Theologians Under Hitler. Who but a theological nerd would choose such a book for vacation reading? I could have replied: "I read the book, now you can see the movie."
Directed by Steven D. Martin and produced by Vital Visuals, the one-hour documentary film of the same name follows Robert Ericksen's 1987 book, which details the positive response to Nazism by three of the German church's leading intellectuals. Ericksen, professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University, is one of the film's primary interview subjects. The movie could serve as a useful start to a congregational discussion of war and the church's response to it. (The film is available through amazon.com and vitalvisuals.com.)
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Many discussions of "the good war" redound to America's greatness in taking up the fight against Hitler. In my own preaching on the war, I have naturally gravitated toward those Christians who heroically opposed the Nazis: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Maximilian Kolbe, Corrie ten Boom, and the residents of the mountain village of Le Chambon in France, who hid several thousand Jews. From my preaching one might gather that World War II was a time of heroic Christian resistance to an obviously demonic enemy. Watching Theologians Under Hitler places the war in a more uncomfortable light. The church failed miserably to oppose Hitler and speak up for the Jews. How did this happen? The partial answer is that most of the church's major theologians supported Hitler.
The book and the film detail the views of Gerhard Kittel, Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus. These men were theological giants. Kittel's multi-volume Textual Notes on the New Testament is still the standard reference work on the etymologies of biblical Greek. The Tubingen professor prepared for that masterwork with a career of befriending Jews and learning their literature, as his Hebrew-scholar father had before him. He later clarified (or changed his mind): his love was for biblical Judaism, from which secular contemporary Jews had long since fallen away.
Kittel thought Jews were a problem in Germany, one he addressed in a lecture titled "The Jewish Problem." Why were Jews dominant in such crucial German institutions as the universities, the government and the press? Had this predominance weakened Germany, perhaps fatally? For Kittel the answer was yes, and something had to be done. He ruled out moving the Jews to the Middle East--the Arabs would never allow it. He ruled out annihilating them as "impractical." He also ruled out their assimilation into Germany society--such intermingling was precisely the problem. Therefore the only solution to the Jewish question was to remove them from their employment and separate them from the rest of society. Kittel warned that the world would call Germany's actions "brutal" but insisted that this was "'no one else's concern"--and that God did not call Germans to be weak.
Little wonder that the Nazis avidly reprinted the lecture. Kittel was later employed in the Nazis' Research Section on the Jewish Question which decided that one of his proposed alternatives was not so impractical.
Colleagues and students of Hirsch at Gottingen spoke with wide-eyed amazement about his brilliance, his linguistic proficiency and his prodigious memory. The linchpin of his own theology was the German Volk, or "people," including the whole of Germany's great history in literature, the arts and statecraft. Ericksen describes the concept of Volk as almost untranslatable: a "mystical, transcendent" link that bound Germans to one another and their tradition in a manner "almost beyond description." The Volk was more important to Hirsch than democracy, especially in the wake of the ruining of Germany in World War I and in light of the need to rebuild the country's greatness, which, he insisted, depended on the piety of the Volk.
Indeed, the Volk was for him as essential to God's work as Israel was to any Jew or Christian. "There is absolutely no contradiction to make it difficult as a German to be a Christian or as a Christian to be a German," Hirsch insisted. Little wonder that he greeted Hitler's rise to Germany's chancellorship in 1933 as "a sunrise of divine goodness." While other ecelesial supporters of the Nazis expressed some remorse later in life, Hirsch never did.
Althaus, of Erlangen University, was the public archnemesis of one of the few resistance movements against Nazism in the churches, the Confessing Church, which was made up of pastors and theologians who resisted the Nazis' intrusion into the church's deliberation on doctrinal and moral matters. The Confessing Church studiously avoided direct advocacy for the Jews in its famous Barmen Declaration, wanting to garner as much support for the document as possible. Barmen instead insisted that revelation could come only from Jesus Christ and not from any other source, such as German culture or political leadership.
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