rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH: 1933-37 209a note of satisfaction that the Nazi revolution had finally triumphed and thatit had brought about the ”national revival” for which he himself had fought solong – for a time in the free corps, from which so many Nazi leaders had come.He was soon to experience a terrible disillusionment.The Protestants in Germany, as in the United States, were a divided faith.Only a very few – some 150,000 out of forty-five million of them – belongedto the various Free Churches such as the Baptists and Methodists. The restbelonged to twenty-eight Lutheran and Reformed Churches of which the largestwas the Church of the Old Prussian Union, with eighteen million members.With the rise of National Socialism there came further divisions among theProtestants. The more fanatical Nazis among them organized in 1932 ”TheGerman Christians’ Faith Movement” of which the most vehement leader was acertain Ludwig Mueller, army chaplain of the East Prussian Military District,a devoted follower of Hitler who had first brought the Fuehrer together withGeneral von Blomberg when the latter commanded the district. The ”GermanChristians” ardently supported the Nazi doctrines of race and the leadershipprinciple and wanted them applied to a Reich Church which would bring allProtestants into one all-embracing body. In 1933 the ”German Christians” hadsome three thousand out of a total of seventeen thousand pastors, though theirlay followers probably represented a larger percentage of churchgoers.Opposed to the ”German Christians” was another minority group whichcalled itself the ”Confessional Church.” It had about the same number of pastorsand was eventually led by Niemoeller. It opposed the Nazification of theProtestant churches, rejected the Nazi racial theories and denounced the anti-Christian doctrines of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. In between lay themajority of Protestants, who seemed too timid to join either of the two warringgroups, who sat on the fence and eventually, for the most part, landed in thearms of Hitler, accepting his authority to intervene in church affairs and obeyinghis commands without open protest.It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in thefirst Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influenceof Martin Luther. ∗ The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionateanti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority.He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advisedthat they be deprived of ”all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and,furthermore, ”that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their housesbe broken up and destroyed . . . and they be put under a roof or stable, like thegypsies . . . in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain toGod about us” – advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler,Goering and Himmler. 201In what was perhaps the only popular revolt in German history, the peasantuprising of 1525, Luther advised the princes to adopt the most ruthless measuresagainst the ”mad dogs,” as he called the desperate, downtrodden peasants.Here, as in his utterances about the Jews, Luther employed a coarseness andbrutality of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time. Theinfluence of this towering figure extended down the generations in Germany,especially among the Protestants. Among other results was the ease with which∗ To avoid any misunderstanding, it might be well to point out here that the author is aProtestant.