Exactly 89 years ago, the
German Christians, Deutsche Christen, won the German church
elections with a clear two-thirds majority. Their victory over the Gospel and Church group (Evangelium und Kirche) meant that representatives of the German Christians movement would hold the most important posts in the newly formed centralised
German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche, DEK, or Reich Church).
Ballot paper for the church elections in Berlin. This voter supported the Gospel and Church.The day before the church election, there was a radio address from Hitler, where he urged his friends and comrades-in-arms to vote for the German Christians. Hitler stressed that the state and the church needed mutual support against Bolshevism and for a united church.
German Christians supported the Nazi thesis of "
Positive Christianity", which denied original human sinfulness and some called for the removal of the Jewish Old Testament from the Bible. German Christians constantly reminded their congregation that it was the Jews who crucified Jesus Christ.
Campaign of German Christians in Berlin.The leader of the German Christians,
Ludwig Müller, who had previously served as military district chaplain in Königsberg and state bishop of East Prussia, argued that Christ was Aryan and demanded that Jewish layers be removed from Church teaching.
Carl Gustav Jung noted:
The spirit of this movement may be contrasted with a sermon preached by Dr. Langmann, an evangelical clergyman and high dignitary of the Church, at the funeral of the late Gustloff. Dr. Langmann gave the address ‘in SA uniform and jackboots.’ He sped the deceased on his journey to Hades, and directed him to Valhalla, to the home of Siegfried and Baldur, the heroes who ‘nourish the life of the German people by the sacrifice of their blood’—like Christ among others. ‘May this god send the nations of the earth clanking on their way through history.’ ‘Lord bless our struggle. Amen.’ Thus the reverend gentleman ended his address, according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (1936, no. 249).
In
Alfred Rosenberg's book "
The Myth of the Twentieth Century", Marxism and Catholic internationalism were attacked as two facets of the Jewish spirit, Rosenberg, who questioned the very doctrine of Christianity, declared the need for a new national religion that would complete the Reformation. The ideas of the German Christians were largely based on the well-established foundations of
Lutheranism and the
Reformation in Germany.
Luther Day celebration in front of the Berlin castle, banners with the inscription DC = German Christians.Luther was the most widely read author of his generation, and within Germany he acquired the status of a prophet.[236] According to the prevailing opinion among historians,[237] his anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the development of antisemitism in Germany,[238] and in the 1930s and 1940s provided an "ideal underpinning" for the Nazis' attacks on Jews.[239] Reinhold Lewin writes that anybody who "wrote against the Jews for whatever reason believed he had the right to justify himself by triumphantly referring to Luther." According to Michael, just about every anti-Jewish book printed in the Nazi Germany contained references to and quotations from Luther. Heinrich Himmler (albeit never a Lutheran, having been brought up Catholic) wrote admiringly of his writings and sermons on the Jews in 1940.[240] The city of Nuremberg presented a first edition of On the Jews and their Lies to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, on his birthday in 1937; the newspaper described it as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published.[241] It was publicly exhibited in a glass case at the Nuremberg rallies and quoted in a 54-page explanation of the Aryan Law by E.H. Schulz and R. Frercks.[242]
On 17 December 1941, seven Protestant regional church confederations issued a statement agreeing with the policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow badge, "since after his bitter experience Luther had already suggested preventive measures against the Jews and their expulsion from German territory." According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Luther's writings shortly after Kristallnacht, for which Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford argued that Luther's writing was a "blueprint."[243] Sasse applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, "On 10 November 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany." The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words "of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews."[244]
An example of German Christian propaganda from the academic article "In the Name of the Cross: Christianity and Anti-Semitic Propaganda in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy".#
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