Darmstadt word

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "Darmstadt word on the political path of our people" was a commitment by Protestant Christians to the historical co-responsibility of the German Evangelical Church for the causes and consequences of National Socialism . It derived from the Christian belief in God's reconciliation with the world in Jesus Christ a new political behavior of Christians. It was written by the Lutheran theologian Hans Joachim Iwand and the Reformed theologian Karl Barth (the main author of the Barmer Theological Declaration of 1934) and revised by Martin Niemöller and Hermann Diem . The Brother Council of the EKD , the executive body of the Confessing Church (BK) that continued to exist after the end of the war , published the final version on August 8, 1947 as its binding position.

In contrast to the Stuttgart confession of guilt of October 19, 1945, the Darmstadt word named concrete “wrong turns” for Christians who, from the authors' point of view, had blocked the necessary social revolutionary changes in society long before 1933 and thus paved the way for National Socialism to power. It wanted to redefine the relationship between church and state after almost 400 years of Protestant state church tradition. The church, committed only to the gospel , was to become the advocate of the poor and the reconciliation of nations . It was supposed to serve the "building of a better German state system": With this, the authors wanted to establish the goal of an all-German democratic socialism as a future task, which made the Cold War that started at that time unattainable.

The Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) did not adopt the Darmstadt word as its position. From 1969, however, it formed an important theological basis for the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR and for the Evangelical student community in the Federal Republic of Germany .

Preliminary drafts

The nationalistic and militaristic wrong way

Since God's reconciliation with the world (thesis 1) enables and aims at the reconciliation of peoples (thesis 7), Iwand first asked the question in the discussion of Barth's introductory speech (see below): "What does it mean, I am a German?" He believed that the reconciliation of the Germans with the peoples first required a clarification of the relationship to their own German history.

That is why his preliminary draft of July 6, 1947 brought the nationalistic wrong path (thesis 2) to the fore: The “dream of the special German mission”, which has been dreamed of since the anti-Napoleonic wars of liberation and “the unlimited use of political power” in both the German Empire and the Third Reich. had justified, in 1945 the dream was irrevocably over.

Barth's preliminary draft of July 10th added the wrong path of “military power development” to thesis 2: nationalism and militarism formed a unit in the empire, and both together were an essential prerequisite for Hitler's rise.

The feudalist and capitalist wrong way

While this statement initially characterized general political developments, Iwand's thesis 3 turned to the role of the church: He described it as a “Christian front against the necessary social reorganizations” and as an “alliance with the conservative powers”. Here Barth added " Monarchy , nobility , army , large estates , large-scale industry ". This marked the “ Christian West ” as in truth a feudalist and capitalist class society .

Opposite her Iwand emphasized - for the first time in a semi-official church declaration - "the right to revolution". The attitude of the churches in the Empire and in the Weimar Republic was consistently shaped by a deep aversion to left-wing revolutionary changes in society aimed at democracy and socialism . The same representatives who deplored the November Revolution as a catastrophe hailed the “ National Revolution ” of Hitler's rise to power as a redemption . According to Iwand, this "had terrible consequences". However, neither he nor Barth mentioned the Holocaust .

The wrong track of the Cold War

Thesis 4 contrasts the “free offer of God's grace” with the “ideological formation of fronts” that was rampant again at that time. Iwand's preliminary draft specifically named the slogan “Christianity or Marxism ”, which church representatives issued just a few years after the catastrophe, although they had hardly ever said “Christianity or National Socialism” before. He explained the consequences:

"This slogan has seduced us to remain silent when we were called to testify for justice and freedom, and to follow politically those whom we as Christians had to resist."

This sentence on the Christian right of resistance was not included in the final version. Nevertheless, it became clear that Iwand rejected the equation of "brown" and "red" popular in the Church. Especially against the background of the failure to resist the Nazi regime, this meant for him “leaving the world to its self-justification”. In contrast, Iwand and Barth wanted to position the church “between East and West”: as a force for reconciliation between peoples in and against the Cold War that had begun.

The anti-Marxist mistake

Thesis 5, formulated by Barth, came in for this. In his preliminary draft it read:

"We have gone astray by overlooking the economic materialism of Marxist teaching as a light of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and as a light of the comprehensive prophecy of Jesus Christ."

This has often been the misunderstood stumbling block . Barth did not want to preach Marxist doctrine. He only affirmed it as a helpful tool for analyzing society and determining interests, but did not regard it as a sole ideology . Through her he wanted to remind the church of an element of her own message: the "promise for this world", namely the revolution of God for the benefit of the poor, which was promised in the prophecy of Israel and confirmed by the resurrection of Jesus (Mt 5: 3, 5):

“Blessed are you poor, for God's kingdom belongs to you! ... Blessed are you powerless, for you will own the earth! "

For this very reason the church has to understand “the cause of the poor” as its own cause. This, as well as the right to a revolutionary overcoming of class rule and to resist fascist regimes, anticipated the basic concern of later liberation theology .

The designation of economic materialism as a “light” for the resurrection of Jesus was the antithesis of the position that criticized the previous thesis: namely, the self-righteous confrontation of “light” (Christianity, Western freedom) against “darkness” (Marxism, Eastern bondage ). In addition, the formulation refers to Barth's later doctrine of reconciliation, in the third main part of which ( Kirchliche Dogmatik IV / 3) he developed a "doctrine of lights": Figures and powers of this world can become images, analogies of the only true light, Jesus Christ.

Barth saw Marxism as such a light coming from outside that reminded Christians of the hope of the resurrection of all dead: This aroused outrage and incomprehension in church circles then as now. However, Barth only represented a repressed element of biblical theology, according to which the new creation that came with the kingdom of God included the radical overthrow of all relations of rule and the overturning of all property relations.

context

theology

The Darmstädter Wort commented on current developments based on belief in the reconciliation that took place in Jesus Christ (1st sentence). This was preceded by a lecture by Karl Barth at the Darmstadt meeting of the EKD's Brotherhood Council on July 5 and 6, 1947 with the title: The Church - the living community of the living Lord Jesus Christ. In it, Barth developed his theological understanding of the church as a "dynamic reality" that was "placed before the fact that the world was reconciled in Jesus Christ (2 Cor 5:19)". This fact reveals to us humans at the same time the “judgment of God” over our old world, the coming of his new world (2 Cor 5:17).

Barth thus emphasized the close relationship between the reconciliation of God with the world , which has already happened in Jesus Christ, to the coming Kingdom of God , which will overthrow and transform this world. In order to be able to open up to this future, the church is called to perceive God's judgment over this world and to face its own history of guilt. Only in this way can she give the correct answer to the situation in her present.

Back then, Barth saw two main dangers for the church:

  • the tendency to backward-looking preservation of one's own traditions. This threatens precisely where the church invokes the Bible and confessional writings without realizing that these should be updated in the present:

"Christians still honestly affirm their faith, or at least that of their fathers, and God's revelation has already become a ghost world of venerable truths and high moral laws."

  • the alliance of the church with social and state powers. Christians tended to combine their faith with the prevailing religious and political worldview and to offer the world "Christianity" instead of Jesus Christ:

"They say: ' God's word ' and no longer even notice that they mean one of these combinations ..."

Only a church committed exclusively to its message, the gospel , can be free for the world in the sense of Barth and credibly proclaim the hope of the kingdom of God to it.

Barth's theses were based on the thoughts of Hans Joachim Iwand, which he had expressed in the previous Brothers Council meeting (May 7–8, 1947 in Berlin), in a lecture on Barth's new book Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde . There Iwand had argued that it was a mistake for the Church to adopt an ideology based on the motto “The enemy is on the left”. "We do not have to constitute ourselves with an anti-revolution." At the meeting in Darmstadt on July 5 and 6, 1947, Iwand took up this idea again and related it more clearly to social classes:

“The BK must have a political line, we must have a political stance as Christians, we must say today from the fraternal council: we are going a new way. The danger for us today is that the failed estates in Germany are looking for a place to retreat to. The workers do not yet have any real confidence that the church will also take up their concerns sociologically. "

Church post-war development

The Darmstadt word reacted to the restoration of popular church structures and nationalistic tendencies in German Protestantism and marked them as a continuation of old “wrong turns”. After the Second World War, the Protestant officials from the time of National Socialism largely continued to determine church policy and ensured that the church authorities were quickly restored. The chairman of the council of the newly founded EKD, Otto Dibelius , described this endeavor as follows:

“What does new building mean? In 1945 we started again where we had to stop. "

What was meant were the efforts to establish a federal federation of regional churches under a regional bishop and central leadership as the German Evangelical Church before 1933. While the Prussian regional church in particular split in the church struggle, most of the regional churches remained "intact" during the Nazi regime avoided any open break with the state authorities and thus paralyzed the Confessing Church organizationally.

What was also meant was the German-national, authoritarian, anti-democratic and anti-socialist tradition of the DNVP , to which most of the Protestant pastors, Dibelius, had belonged before 1933. After 1945 they mostly joined the newly founded CDU , which the EKD council welcomed benevolently at its founding conference in Treysa (October 1945) as a “party committed to Christian principles”. Critics like Paul Schempp saw it as a theologically and historically resistant politicization of Christianity, which continued seamlessly from the affirmation of “positive Christianity” in the NSDAP's program by a large Protestant majority from 1933 onwards.

Sharp criticism also found apologetic statements of the Stuttgart declaration of guilt such as these:

"For many years we fought in the name of Christ against the spirit that found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regiment of violence ..."

In fact, in 1939 the regional bishops unanimously called on all Christians to “surrender to the Führer” in the impending war, and in some cases expressly asserted that National Socialism and Christianity were compatible. Accordingly, the EKD Council protested violently against the Allied "Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism" of March 5, 1946, which transferred the denazification and demilitarization to German arbors : It contradicts the principle of nulla poena sine lege (without a law, no punishment), da it also criminalizes actions and attitudes that were “judged to be legitimate and good by the legislature of the time”.

The US military government had already recognized Bishop Theophil Wurm as spokesman for the whole of the BK and allowed the EKD to “clean itself”, according to which church officials who had been NSDAP members could be checked by self-determined church rulings. Members of the BK should sit in these, but they were also often NSDAP members or voters.

On October 10, 1946, the EKD council even managed to get the occupation authorities to recognize the BK as a whole as an “ anti-fascist resistance organization”. Two days later, a five-day meeting of the radical BK wing took place in the Christoph Blumhardts Foundation in Bad Boll , which called for an opposition to be formed in the EKD that preserves the traditions of the BK Synods of Barmen and Dahlem in 1934 and new ones Conditions should continue. This resulted in a nationwide church-theological working group (KTA).

Political circumstances of the time

Iwand, the lead author, saw at the council meeting the danger that the church would be used as a "refuge for suppressed nationalism ". This was shown for him in the Good Friday sermon given by Helmut Thielicke in March 1947: In it, he rejected any speech that the Germans were guilty and accused the Allies for this .

Iwand called for the Church to abandon this backward-looking nationalist tradition thoroughly. You have to manage the "revision" of a centuries-old undesirable development on your own and can not look to others. Not the surrounding world, but the tendency to form alliances of convenience with the powers that currently rule society and the state, threatens the church. So it must inevitably owe the world the word of salvation and help. On the other hand, only a real reformation of the church can help . This has absolute priority over the reform of society. If the church wants to contribute to the latter, it must create the former.

Iwand said of these tendencies:

“With this belief in a real Reformation I have the impression that we are not understood by the occupying powers. This leads to the fact that they get along better with the old church forces and that we as the Confessing Church ... have only few friends. "

Against this background, the Darmstädter Wort tried to answer the challenge of the Gospel for the German post-war situation and to tackle the Reformation of the Church despite and against the restoration in the western zones and the threatened division of Germany.

Discussion in the fraternal council

After Iwand had presented his preliminary draft to the Brothers Council, a debate began there on July 6, 1947. Lutheran and southern German members in particular spoke out against a resolution; it was more popular among West German uniate members. Kurt Scharf was the only member from East Germany to emphasize that Bolshevism should not be “trivialized” as the “idolization of the state”. Theodor Dipper , who felt “overwhelmed by the word”, asked whether it was “ripe”. The Lord Mayor of Darmstadt, Ludwig Metzger (SPD), who was present as a guest , welcomed Iwand's draft as a “decision that I have been waiting for a long time. […] It is tragic that Christianity and Marxism were brought into opposition in this way. ”As an SPD representative, he asked:“ When you hear this word, think not only of the people who belong to the community, but also of them who, as proletarians, should also belong to the community [...]. It is fatal that the CDU is equated with the church. "

Only twelve of the invited Brother Council members then took part in the Darmstadt conference. Seven of them prepared the final version of the Darmstadt Word on August 7, 1947, chaired by Hermann Diem, based on Barth and Iwand's preliminary drafts. This was decided on August 8th by all conference participants. Contrary to Niemöller's recommendation to first send the text to the EKD Council and wait for its approval, the text was printed immediately and sent to all Protestant parishes, church authorities and regional church authorities on August 12, 1947 as No. 8 of the leaflets of the Confessing Church .

First reactions

Immediately after the word appeared, a storm of indignation arose, especially among conservative Lutheran theologians. Otto Dibelius wrote in a letter on September 9, 1947 that he found it a "heavy imposition" that "we should confess as our own fault what we have fought all our lives against". Hans Asmussen described the word “socialist decision” as an expression of a “business theology”. He warned against "religious Bolshevism" in the church. Marxism should not gain a foothold among Christians, because it is "not a bit more bearable ... than Rosenberg's teaching ". The critics assumed that the authors had ideological motives in religious disguise.

Asmussen and Dibelius hesitated for a long time in the creation of the Stuttgart declaration of guilt, when Martin Niemöller wanted to make a specific, own confession of guilt binding (" We have brought infinite suffering to many countries and peoples ..."). Now the EKD Council has warned against a “devaluation” of the Stuttgart confession of guilt, which has only now been printed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church Newspaper and distributed to the congregations.

But also some brother councils who were not present at the Darmstadt conference - including Heinrich Albertz and Kurt Scharf - complained internally about the third and fifth theses in particular. These differences were not carried out, because Martin Niemöller was under severe criticism first in the United States, then also in the Federal Republic because of his voluntary enlistment in the Wehrmacht in 1939, and the trust that the Allies had laboriously gained in the representatives of the Confessing Church was not yet retained wanted to damage more.

In view of the events in the Soviet occupation zone, the paper met with outrage, especially in East Germany. Many felt especially the final part as a mockery, in which every German was asked to participate in the "building of a better German state", "which serves the law, the welfare and the inner peace and the reconciliation of the peoples". At the 12th Brothers Council meeting of the Confessing Church in October 1947, President Kurt Scharf declared that whoever wrote this word obviously did not know "what situation we are in". To build a just state, “we are given no opportunities at all under the dictatorship. This word kicks the disenfranchised. [...] We said to ourselves, you can only talk like this if you completely misunderstand the situation as it prevails in our country, if you can't see it or don't want to see it ”. In fact, the writers lived and taught in the West. At its meeting on September 10, 1947, a member of the Brandenburg Brotherhood Council, Otto Perels, demanded that the Darmstadt word be withdrawn, since otherwise the BK's "self-abandonment" would be completed:

"How could it stand before its confessors and martyrs, if it let its name become the disgraceful cover of adaptation to the zeitgeist."

Here again the deep rifts in the interpretation of the Barmer Declaration became apparent, which the BK had already split and paralyzed during the church struggle: Conservative Lutherans like Walter Künneth saw faith in Jesus Christ as an apparently untouchable level by politics, the Christians any concrete interference in the present Prohibit lines of conflict. On the other hand, they in particular did not shy away from preaching total obedience to the injustice state of the Nazi regime, and supporting and justifying war and the persecution of the Jews.

Barth, who much earlier than most of his fellow campaigners had castigated and fought against the worldly and ideological ties of the church as a denial of the gospel, saw in this contradiction a fundamental misunderstanding of the evangelical faith, which the Barmer Declaration wanted to formulate in a contemporary way: precisely who ruled If Christ also takes seriously about the world and politics, must ask for concrete analogies in the world and have the courage to give clear political testimony ( Christian community and civil community 1946).

On October 16, 1947, the EKD's Brotherhood Council commissioned a theological commission to add a detailed commentary to the word in order to explain the meaning and intention of the congregations.

The comment

Since the theologians Joachim Beckmann , Ernst Wolf and Martin Niemöller, commissioned by the Brotherhood Council, were unable to write the commentary due to lack of time, Hermann Diem, appointed by Kurt Scharf, wrote it single-handedly. After four months he presented the result as an "interpretation" and found the unreserved approval of the other commission members, and then also the fraternal council. As No. 9 of the leaflets of the Confessing Church , the Darmstadt word was then published again together with these explanations.

Against the equation of " Bolshevism " and National Socialism favored by the Cold War and popular with German Lutherans , Diem declared:

“Through its alliance with National Socialism that took place on the way through the anti-Bolshevik crusade mood, German Christianity itself brought this nemesis over itself, so that it now has to deal with Bolshevism on its own soil. That is why she can no longer avoid this argument. Of course, she still tries in various ways. "

Looking back at the post-war years, he recognized the liberating effect of the Stuttgart confession of guilt, but also stated:

“She [the Church] allowed herself to be misled into speaking of the injustice of the victorious powers in a way that could make it appear as if she had confessed her own guilt only so that they could speak all the more freely of the guilt of others could. "

Despite a new turn to socio-political issues , the church had not succeeded in breaking through the 100-year-old wall of workers . Instead, they have set up new ideological fronts and let themselves be used by the interest of many Germans in self-justification and shifting guilt.

“This makes the church powerless against the newly emerging nationalism. Our people live with their complaints and accusations like under an iron closed sky and cannot take a free step into the future because they cannot cope with their past. "

In the meantime, the Cold War had intensified: The London conference of the Allied Foreign Ministers at the end of December failed, so that the Western powers in the western zones were increasingly looking for allies for their policy. This means that denazification and the question of guilt took a back seat in the EKD. At the same time, since the publication of Rudolf Bultmann's groundbreaking essay New Testament and Mythology (1941), she was confronted with a new theological ordeal: the program of demythologizing the gospel. This contributed to the fact that the Darmstadt word was quickly overlaid and then forgotten.

Further effect

The Darmstadt word played no role for the majority in the EKD after the division of Germany and was quickly suppressed in general. His intention to position the church as an independent force against both sides in the Cold War was replaced in favor of equating National Socialism and “Bolshevism”. Most saw the preservation of “Christian-Occidental values” against secularization as a church duty . The brother councils, who wanted to continue and update the tradition of the first confessional synods in it, were soon ousted from the church leadership and lost their influence.

For Christian peace groups of the extra-parliamentary movement against rearmament and atomic armament in the Federal Republic ( fight against atomic death ), however, the Darmstadt word remained relevant. With the conclusion of the military chaplaincy contract in 1957 and the Heidelberg theses of 1959, which conditionally affirmed the availability of nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union , the EKD finally established its ties to the West. Thus the perspective of the Darmstadt word, to position the church “between” East and West and to dare a political reorientation based on the message of reconciliation, initially failed.

The Action Reconciliation , founded in 1959 by President Lothar Kreyssig , responded positively to the word, but also criticized the fact that it did not mention an essential wrong path: the church's guilt towards the people of Israel , Christian anti-Judaism .

In the Ostdenkschrift the EKD from 1965 appeared impulses from the Darmstadt word burst upon again without this respect took it. It was prepared by theologians from the school of Iwand from the Beienroder Konvent, who felt particularly committed to reconciliation with the peoples of Eastern Europe - above all Poles and Russians . Like Klaus von Bismarck , Iwand had already campaigned in front of large refugee communities in 1947 for the abandonment of the former German eastern territories that fell to Poles , but at that time remained a lonely shouter in the desert.

In the course of the West German student movement , politically committed Christians rediscovered the Darmstadt word. Evangelical student congregations (ESG) at the universities adopted it as their founding charter and from then on often referred to it to justify their “option for a humane socialism” as a Christian possible decision. They used the word “from below” against the church hierarchy.

In 1969, under political pressure from the SED, the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR was founded. Its chairman, Bishop Albrecht Schönherr , surprisingly placed the Darmstadt Word at the center of his synodal report on June 23, 1970 and declared: "His statements are still surprisingly up-to-date after 23 years." He took above all the 6th thesis as binding for the church mandate in the GDR positively and integrated it into its self-image of "Church in (not: against) socialism".

This opened a new discussion about the Darmstadt word in both parts of Germany. Hermann Diem compared it in an essay for the renowned Evangelical Commentaries with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. The Christian Peace Conference founded in Prague in 1971 developed the theme of "Christians and Revolution" after only individual GDR Christians like Carl had established order:

“Anyone who, as a Christian, took the Darmstadt word seriously, it had to be about a change in the social conditions from which fascism and war were born. In eastern Germany that was initially done almost exclusively by Christian groups outside the church. "

In 1972, the year of the Eastern Treaty , numerous articles were published on the 25th anniversary of the word, including “The Sign of the Times” by Gerhard Bassarak and “Das Darmstädter Wort - noch aktuell” by Renate Riemeck . Only now did an edition of the Voice of the Congregation , a monthly magazine of the Council of Brothers, print the word in full length after it had been completely concealed there in 1947.

In the same year Heino Falcke called on the Christians in the GDR at the Bundessynod in Dresden , referring to the word, not to give up the hope of a “better socialism” and to stand up for it. As a result, the SED forbade the Federation of Churches to think publicly about other and better social concepts. The Eastern CDU, in turn, often used the 5th thesis for its interpretation that the Protestant Church in the GDR allegedly recognized the existing state socialism.

For the 30th anniversary of the Word, Till Wilsdorf , at that time head of the Theological Commission of the ESG, convened an “Assembly of European Christians” from September 7th to 9th, 1977 in Darmstadt. While the leadership of the EKD under Erwin Wilckens immediately distanced itself from this invitation and publicly devalued the Darmstadt word as “private work” and “industrial accident” in post-war history, many Christians from Eastern Europe also took part in the conference. The first impetus for a cross-bloc pan-European Christian peace movement came from this meeting , which then took shape in the 1980s in the context of the new arms build-up by NATO and the Warsaw Pact . While Diether Koch was addressing an “unfinished business with the Darmstädter Wort”, his alleged deviation from Karl Barth's theology, in 1979 Bertold Klappert emphasized his “ ecumenical significance”.

The vicars and Vicar interior in West Berlin now demanded, like so on the Barmen Declaration, on the Darmstadt word ordained to be. This triggered serious conflicts with the church offices there. It was precisely these reactions on both sides of the Iron Curtain that showed the ongoing relevance of the Darmstadt word.

literature

  • Hans Prolingheuer : We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 .
  • Karl Herbert : Church between awakening and tradition. RADIUS-Verlag, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-87173-779-8 .
  • Hartmut Ludwig: Origin, Effect and Topicality of the Darmstadt Word. In: Series of publications by the Institute for Comparative State-Church Research Issue 4: Going astray? The Darmstadt word in the past and present. Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-931232-03-4 .
  • Bertold Klappert : Reconciliation and Liberation. Try to understand Karl Barth contextually. Neukirchener Verlag 1994, ISBN 3-7887-1451-4 .
  • Friedrich-Martin Balzer, Christian Stappenbeck (eds.): You have affirmed the right to revolution: Christians in the GDR: a contribution to 50 years of the “Darmstädter Wort”. Pahl-Rugenstein, 1997, ISBN 3891442254 .
  • Thomas Kluck: We went astray. In: Junge Kirche 58 (1997) 7/8, pp. 404-411, ISSN 0022-6319.
  • Brian Huck: Confessions of the Church: The Political Lessons of the Third Reich for the Bruderrat of the Protestant Church in Germany, 1945-1948. UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, 2002.
  • Herman Düringer (Ed.): The Legacy of the Confessing Church and the "Church of Freedom". 60 years Darmstädter Wort and the EKD impulse paper Church 2030 (= Arnoldshainer texts; vol. 141). Haag + Herchen, Hanau 2010. ISBN 978-3-89846-539-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Herbert : Church between awakening and tradition: decisive years after 1945 . Stuttgart 1989, p. 102.
  2. ↑ ZEKHN 36/5, minutes of the meeting on 7./8. May, p. 11f.
  3. ↑ ZEKHN 36/6, minutes of the meeting on 5./6. July, p. 14.
  4. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 , p. 268.
  5. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 , p. 105.
  6. ↑ ZEKHN 36/6, Protocol 5./6. July, p. 16.
  7. ↑ ZEKHN 36/6, Protocol 5./6. July, p. 23.
  8. ↑ ZEKHN 36/6, Protocol 5./6. July, p. 21f.
  9. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 , pp. 180f.
  10. ↑ See for example Klaus-Dieter Müller, Annegret Stephan (ed.): The past does not let us go. Conditions of detention of political prisoners in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR. With an introduction by Karl Wilhelm Fricke. Berlin 1998.
  11. ↑ Jürgen J. Seidel: God's beloved eastern zone. Status, problems and experiences in researching the history of church-state relations in the GDR in the Swiss horizon. In: Horst Dähn, Joachim Heise (Ed.): State and Churches in the GDR. Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2003, pp. 219-236, here p. 225.
  12. ↑ Minutes of the 12th meeting of the EKD's Brotherhood Council, Detmold, 15./16. October 1947, ZA.EKHN, Best. 36, Vol. 6.
  13. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 , pp. 181-185.


This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 12, 2005 .