1. See Haynes, Stephen R., Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Louis-ville: Westminster/John Knox, 1995), 8–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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3. Bergen, Doris L., “Catholics, Protestants, and Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” Central European History 27 (1994), 329–48; 333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Ibid., 336.

5. Ibid., 333.

6. Ibid.

7. Bergen, Doris L., Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 31–32Google Scholar. German Christians associated “Jewishness” with secularism, atheism, Marxism and an international conspiracy against Germany. Yet they also employed the adjective “Jewish” to refer to “legalistic or dogmatic tendencies.”

8. Bergen, , “Catholics, Protestants, and Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” 331.Google Scholar

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11. Ibid., 204. Pastors and theologians such as Ernst Moering, Heinrich Frick, and Willy Stärk connected Jewish nationalism and National Socialism, both of which they contrasted with the spiritual values of Christianity.

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13. Ibid., 209.

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18. In Robertson, Edwin H., ed., No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928–1936, (New York: Harper, 1965), 241–42.Google Scholar

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21. Cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 83.Google Scholar

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24. Cited in Ibid., 85. Meusel seems to have been alone in recognizing the way witness-people thinking justified Jewish suffering. At the conclusion of her memorandum, she wrote: “But we are seized with cold dread when there can be people in the Confessing Church who dare to believe that they are justified, even called, to proclaim to the Jews that God's judgment and grace are present in the current historical events and in the sufferings that we have brought on them. Since when does the evildoer have the right to pass off his crime as the will of God?” (Ibid., 85–86).

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27. In Ibid., 151.

28. The Freiburg Circle Memorandum entitled “Church and World,” cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 211.Google Scholar

29. Cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 216.Google Scholar

30. Cited in Ibid., 228–29.

31. Rose, Paul Lawrence, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5.Google Scholar

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39. Dannenbaum, Hans, in Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, 83.Google Scholar

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41. Ericksen, , Theologians under Hitler, 58Google Scholar. For Kittel, the “Jewish Question” developed with the transition from the Old Testament Israelites to “Jewry” in the post-exilic period.

42. Cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 40–41Google Scholar. Hermann Strathmann, dean of the Erlangen Theological Faculty, noted “the reawakened völkisch self-assurance, which regards Jewry not just as a foreign element in our midst, but also, because of its notoriously corruptive influence on the thought, will, and morale of our Volk, as a danger threatening its very nature and life.”

43. Lecture delivered before the Conference of Brethren in Lippe, 30 Apr. 1933, cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 23.Google Scholar

44. “The Church and the Jewish Question in Germany,” published by the German Church Council. In Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 54.Google Scholar

45. “The Evangelical Church and its Jewish Christians,” published by the regional church of Baden. In Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 54.Google Scholar

46. Walter Michaelis writing in Licht und Leben. Anti-Semitism is justified, the same journal proclaimed in another issue, as long as it remains “within the limits shown in the Bible.” In Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 68.Google Scholar

47. Director of the Protestant Charitable Service in Zehlendorf, cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 83.Google Scholar

48. In Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 65–66.Google Scholar

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50. “Principles Regarding the Aryan Question in the Church” (November, 1933), in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 48.Google Scholar

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52. Ibid., 147, 148–49.

53. Ibid., 155.

54. In Ibid., 195.

55. In Ibid., 197.

56. In Ibid., 223.

57. An official church memorandum from mid-1933 cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 56.Google Scholar

58. Cited in Ibid., 40.

59. See the section of The Bethel Confession entitled “The Church and the Jews,” in Robertson, No Rusty Swords.

60. Mosse, George, Nazi Culture: A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1966), 260.Google Scholar

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64. The Godesberg Declaration of 1939, in Ibid., 179.

65. Ibid., 179, 180, 196.

66. Wilhelm Rehm, cited in Ibid., 113.

67. Ibid., 112. In 1935 Tübingen New Testament professor Adolf Schlatter called Judaism an ally of the Nazi state in its struggle against Christianity. “It cannot be denied,” Schlatter opined, “that, in the German Reich, the situation for his [the Jew's] ideology was never so favorable as now.” Schlatter went on to associate Judaism with both “Nordic racism” and notions of community based in “the compulsion of the blood” (Ibid., 104). The Vienna paper Gerechtigkeit responded to Schlatter's text, asking: “Does he really believe that he can struggle successfully [against the Nazi state] if he mocks, ridicules, and slanders other victims of National Socialism who are persecuted, tormented, and oppressed even more than the Protestants loyal to the confession?” (105).

68. Ibid., 85, 144.

69. Ibid., 68.

70. In Mosse, , Nazi Culture, 258Google Scholar. Cardinal Faulhaber's Advent sermons have been characterized in the recent Catholic document “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah” as “clearly express[ing] rejection of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.” While it is quite true that in these sermons Faulhaber denied the religious significance of racial thinking, reaffirmed Jesus' Jewishness, and defended the Old Testament, Faulhaber's homilies contain the same ambivalence toward Jews that is reflected in early Protestant anti-Nazi writings. Faulhaber is especially careful to distinguish between the people of Israel before the death of Christ and after, when “Israel was dismissed from the service of Revelation”: “She had not known the time of her visitation. She had repudiated and rejected the Lord's Anointed, had driven Him out of the city and nailed Him to the Cross. Then the veil of the Temple was rent, and with it the covenant between the Lord and His people. The daughters of Sion received the bill of divorce, and from that time forth Assueras wanders, forever restless, over the face of the earth. Even after the death of Christ the Jews are still a ‘mystery,’ as St. Paul says (Rom. xi, 25); and one day, at the end of time, for them too the hour of grace will strike (Rom. xi, 26).” Commenting on these sermons, Mosse writes that “these remarks, though they may be well founded from the standpoint of Christian theology, must be read against the accelerating policy of excluding Jews from German life” (Nazi Culture, 239).

71. “Luther und das Alte Testament,” Junge Kirche (1937)Google Scholar, cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 112.Google Scholar

72. See the “principles” drafted in accordance with the 1939 Gotesberg Declaration cited in Ibid., 182.

73. In Ibid., 165.

74. Katharina Staritz, a Confessing Church vicar, writing in 1941. In Ibid., 170.

75. In Ibid., 201, 204.

76. Schwarzschild, Steven S., “Bonhoeffer and the Jews,” Commonweal 50 (26 11. 1965), 253–54; 254.Google Scholar

77. Robertson, , No Rusty Swords, 226.Google Scholar

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81. Ibid.

82. The term “Heimkehr Israels” goes back at least to the seventeenth-century German theologian Spener. I am indebted to Professor Erich Geldbach for this observation.

83. Rose, , German Question/Jewish Question, 23.Google Scholar

84. See Zerner, Ruth, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jews: Thoughts and Actions, 1933–1945,” Jewish Social Studies 37 (1975), 235–50; 240.Google Scholar

85. Robertson, , No Rusty Swords, 223Google Scholar. See also the use of the phrase “Aryan descent” in the chapter of The Bethel Confession on “The Church and the Jews” (No Rusty Swords, 242). In September 1933 New Testament scholars Wilhelm Brandt and Rudolf Bultmann opposed introduction of the Aryan Paragraph in the church while conceding the state's right to do “what it considers proper for the sake of the Volk.” The same year the German Church council published a memorandum entitled “The Church and the Jewish Question in Germany,” probably written by theologian Walter Künneth. The document affirmed that state measures to restrict Jews were necessary “to protect the German people.” See Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 37, 54.Google Scholar

86. Robertson, , No Rusty Swords, 226–27Google Scholar. In section two of the essay, Bonhoeffer writes that “the Jewish problem is not the same for the church as it is for the state.” Bonhoeffer invoked the term Judenfrage again in 1935 in a lecture to members of the Confessing Church. According to surviving notes, Bonhoeffer's lecture on “The Interpretation of the New Testament” included these comments: “The service of the church has to be given to those who suffer violence and injustice. The Old Testament still demands right-dealing of the state, the New Testament no longer does so. Without asking about justice or injustice, the church takes to itself all the sufferers, all the forsaken of every party and of every status. ‘Open your mouth for the dumb’; (Prov. 31.8). Here the decision will really be made whether we are still the church of the present Christ. The Jewish question.” See Robertson, , No Rusty Swords, 325.Google Scholar

87. Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 149.Google Scholar

88. Ericksen, , Theologians under Hitler, 58.Google Scholar

89. Gutachten issued by the theological faculty of the University of Erlangen in September 1933. Cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 40–41.Google Scholar

90. Robertson, , No Rusty Swords, 229.Google Scholar

91. This message is even clearer in The Bethel Confession, which states that God “continues to preserve a ‘holy remnant’ of Israel after the flesh, which can not be absorbed into another nation by emancipation and assimilation.” No Rusty Swords, 241.

92. The only scholar to demonstrate an awareness of this problem is Stephen S. Schwarzchild. See “Bonhoeffer and the Jews,” 254.

93. Bergen, , Twisted Cross, 32.Google Scholar

94. “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in Robertson, , No Rusty Swords, 227–28Google Scholar. In a lecture delivered at the University of Berlin on 22 June 1933 and entitled “The Struggle for the Church,” Bonhoeffer invoked a less troublesome analogy. Citing Romans 14, he argued that “strong is he who ejects no one; weak is he who puts a fence around the congregation. Those today who are weak in faith need a racial law.” In a leaflet drafted that August (“The Aryan Paragraph in the Church”) Bonhoeffer repeated his warning that “the demand of the weak” not become church law. See Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 27, 29.Google Scholar

95. At first glance it appears that this “divine law” refers to Jewish legal stipulations. But as Bonhoeffer's argument develops, it becomes clear that the “divine law” he is thinking of is racial identity. Bonhoeffer writes that something analogous to the Apostolic Council of Acts 10 would occur today if a group within the church were to base membership on “the observance of a divine law, for example the racial unity of the members of the community.” While the law in question in the first century was the law of Moses, for Bonhoeffer's argument to make sense, the “law” he is referring to must be racial identity. Thus, Bonhoeffer's argument seems to require that human racial categories be viewed as reflecting “divine law.” If this is the case, Bonhoeffer implies what many Protestant theologians on the German Christian side were arguing at the time: that race or peoplehood must be regarded as an ordinance of creation.

96. Cited in Gerlach, , And the Witnesses Were Silent, 73Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

97. “Principles of the Rhineland Brotherhood of Pastors against the Twenty-eight Theses,” Junge Kirche (June, 1934). The principles were written in response to “Twenty Eight Theses of the Saxon People's Church on the Internal Organization of the German Evangelical church,” adopted the previous December. In Ibid., 70.

98. This view is taken by Franklin Littell among others. Zerner, Ruth ably argues the case in “German Protestant Responses to Nazi Persecution of the Jews,” in Braham, Randolph L., ed., Perspectives on the Holocaust (Boston: Luwer-Nijhoff, 1983), 64–65.Google Scholar

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