The church to which this paper is devoted was the Unity of Czech Brethren, Unitas Fratrum; the state in which it was founded, in 1457, and existed for some hundred and seventy years, was the kingdom of Bohemia.

In his book, George of Bohemia: King of Heretics, Frederick G. Heymann characterized the early Hussite movement as “the first and thus the most daring and pioneering of the great European revolutions,” “one of the greatest dynamic movements for socio-political and spiritual freedom in all history”

It is a commonplace that the National Socialist assumption of power in Germany in 1933 was to a large extent made possible by a clever manipulation of irrational fears provoked by the economic, social, and political tensions of the time. More than once since the Frankfurt School's famous study on authority and the family it has been suggested that the authoritarianism of the German family contributed to the susceptibility of the population to the siren call of the leadership principle and that threats to the traditional structure of society, especially the family, made people fearful and desperate enough to see a savior in Hitler. Certainly his call for women to return to hearth and home found a responsive audience. The Kinder, Küche, Kirche issue in Nazi propaganda implied that women were deserting their homes, their children, and their morality, challenging men's authority by asserting their independence and by flooding the labor market to such an extent that honest Familienväter found themselves without “work or bread,” to use the compassionate terms of the otherwise dispassionate 1933 census. Carl Gustav Jung, in his pamphlet Die Frau in Europa, was only one of the more distinguished spokesmen for the widely held view that women's emancipation was responsible for endangering not only the institution of marriage but also the whole spiritual balance between the masculine and feminine principles.

Since 1945 and the worldwide revelation of the horrible brutalities culminating in mass murder perpetrated against Europe's Jews and other groups in Nazi camps and by the mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) of Heinrich Himmler's SS, there has been considerable contention regarding the extent to which the German people knew about these crimes while they were being committed. The various responses given to this question, and their implications, have significantly influenced historical interpretations of Nazism and, in turn, popular attitudes among foreigners toward postwar Germans. Although doubtless a definitive answer will never be possible, it is therefore all the more important that the question of general German knowledge and hence at least passive complicity in Hitler's crimes be posed precisely and that all of the surviving documentary evidence bearing upon it be brought to light. A recently uncovered report in the voluminous Records of the Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police offers both an opportunity to redefine the issue and perhaps a partial solution to it.