Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer

his 1937 trial for criticism of the regime, defending converted Jews “was uncongenial to him.” 15 “This perception [that the community of all Christians is a matter to be taken with utter seriousness],” wrote Niemöller in the “Propositions,” “requires of us, who as a people have had to carry a heavy burden as a result of the influence of the Jewish people, a high degree of self-denial, so that the desire to be freed from this demand [to maintain one single community with the converted Jews] is understandable…. The issue can only be dealt with…if we may expect from the officials [of the Church] who are of Jewish origin…that they impose upon themselves the restraint necessary in order to avoid any scandal. It would not be helpful if today a pastor of non-Aryan origin was to fill a position in the government of the church or had a conspicuous function in the mission to the people.” 16
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s attitude changed over the years, but even in him a deep ambivalence about the Jews as such would remain. “The state’s measures against the Jewish people are connected…in a very special way with the Church,” he declared with regard to the April boycott. “In the Church of Christ, we have never lost sight of the idea that the ‘Chosen People,’ who nailed the Saviour of the world to the cross, must bear the curse of the action through a long history of suffering.” 17 Thus it is precisely a theological view of the Jews that seems to have molded some of Bonhoeffer’s pronouncements. Even his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge could not escape the conclusion that in Bonhoeffer’s writings “a theological anti-Judaism is present.” 18 Theological anti-Judaism” was not uncommon within the Confessing Church, and some of its most respected personalities, such as Walter Künneth, did not hesitate to equate Nazi and Jewish interpretations of the “Jewish election,” as based on race, blood, and Volk , in opposition to the Christian view of election by God’s grace. 19 Such comparisons were to reappear in Christian anti-Nazi polemics in the mid-thirties and later.
    The “Aryan paragraph” applied to only twenty-nine pastors out of eighteen thousand; among these, eleven were excluded from the list because they had fought in World War I. To the end of the 1930s the paragraph was not centrally enforced; its application depended on local church authorities and local Gestapo officials. 20 From the churches’ viewpoint, the real debate was about principle and dogma, which excluded unconverted Jews. When, in May 1934, the first national meeting of the Confessing Church took place in Barmen, not a word was uttered about the persecutions: This time not even the converted Jews were mentioned. 21
    On the face of it the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the new regime should have been firmer than that of the Protestants. The Catholic hierarchy had expressed a measure of hostility to Hitler’s movement during the last years of the republic, but this stance was uniquely determined by church interests and by the varying political fortunes of the Catholic Center Party. The position of many German Catholics toward Nazism before 1933 was fundamentally ambiguous: “Many Catholic publicists…pointed to the anti-Christian elements in the Nazi program and declared these incompatible with Catholic teaching. But they went on to speak of the healthy core of Nazism which ought to be appreciated—its reassertion of the values of religion and love of fatherland, its standing as a strong bulwark against atheistic Bolshevism.” 22 The general attitude of the Catholic Church regarding the Jewish issue in Germany and elsewhere can be defined as a “moderate anti-Semitism” that supported the struggle against “undue Jewish influence” in the economy and in cultural life. As Vicar-General Mayer of Mainz expressed it, “Hitler in Mein Kampf had ‘appropriately described’ the bad influence of the Jews in