Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life

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The Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (also: Eisenacher Institute ) was an anti-Semitic establishment of eleven German Protestant regional churches in the era of National Socialism . It was founded on May 6, 1939 in Eisenach at the instigation of the church party German Christians (DC) and existed until 1945.

The NSDAP's Institute for Research into the Jewish Question and the State Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda , which was founded in 1934 and later renamed, pursued similar goals .

Emergence

The church party of the German Christians , founded in 1932, wanted to bring German Protestantism into line with National Socialism , to integrate the German Evangelical Church (DEK) , founded in 1933, into the Nazi state , and to separate and “purify” Christianity from all influences of Judaism . The desired “de-Jewification” included, among other things, the elimination of the Old Testament (OT), the reduction of the New Testament (NT) to the image of an “ Aryan Jesus ” and the reorganization of evangelical services, prayers, songs and theological training according to “racial” criteria . First attempts to do this had triggered the church war in 1933 . The DC had won the leadership of most of the regional evangelical churches, but were divided. Its radical parts united until 1938 to form the National Church Movement or the Unification of German Christians . This gained leadership and influence on some regional churches in the DC spectrum.

The DC-led regional churches founded the Bund für German Christianity on the Wartburg at the beginning of 1938 and discussed an “office for the de-Jewification of the church”. On November 15, 1938 (one week after the November pogroms ), the federal government sent the Thuringian superintendent Hugo Pich's request to all Protestant regional bishops to establish this office in order to “eliminate the Jewish herd in Christianity and the Church”.

On November 21, 1938, the Jena New Testament scholar and NSDAP member, Walter Grundmann, supported Pich's demand and presented a plan for a “central department for the de-Jewification of religious and ecclesiastical life”. The Jewish question had entered its “most acute stage”; the churches must now consistently separate everything that is Jewish in all their areas of activity.

On March 26, 1939, the church government under Hanns Kerrl proposed the Godesberg Declaration to the DEK in order to restore its unity, which had been destroyed by the church struggle, on as broad a basis as possible, to involve the Confessing Church (BK) and to further isolate the Council of Brothers in it. In addition, the declaration described National Socialism as a consistent continuation of Martin Luther's intentions and claimed that the Christian faith was the “unbridgeable religious opposition to Judaism”. On April 4, 1939, eleven Evangelical regional church leaderships approved the proposal, including some BK bishops. In doing so, they also decided on the planned “De-Judgment” institute to implement the principles of the declaration. The decision was published in the DEK's legal gazette and thus achieved canonical status. This was considered a big step towards the implementation of the DC ideology in the DEK. Sections of the BK did not agree to the Godesberg Declaration, but adopted its core anti-Semitic sentence and only changed it to the “irreconcilable religious opposition to Judaism”, which they saw at work in all “national church efforts” of their opponents.

After it was founded, the institute deleted “and elimination” from its name in order not to assume that there was a general Jewish influence on Christianity and to gain broader support.

structure

According to Grundmann's plan, the central department should cover three areas:

  • a research institute in Jena that was supposed to publish a scientific journal,
  • a Bible Society that should review church hymn books and the Bible and prepare and publish a "de-Judged People's Bible",
  • a school for further training for pastors, teachers and church representatives, which should give them the latest knowledge of the other two departments.

The Evangelical Church should this institute in constant close cooperation with the Reich Propaganda Ministry , the Reich Church Ministry , Reich Ministry of Education , the national leadership of the Nazi Party and the Gauleiter Julius Streicher set up.

In addition, 192 bishops, consistorial councils , professors, doctors, pastors, religious educators, artists and government officials were to participate in ten working groups and on 16 research assignments or individual work on the “de-Judgment of theology and church” according to the work structure of the institute . But not all of them came about.

Employee

The head of the institute was the Oberregierungsrat Siegfried Leffler . Full-time employees were:

Walter Grundmann: The de-Jewification of religious life as a task of German theology and the church

As part of its public relations work, the institute published lists of employees in the association's communications . The first of these lists, dated December 30, 1939, named around 90 employees, including the regional bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Schleswig-Holstein, Adalbert Paulsen , and the regional church office president Christian Kinder . The second list, dated December 31, 1940, included around 130 names. Further lists from September 25 and December 15, 1941 named around 33 "new employees of the institute". Only a few of the persons listed wrote their own contributions for the association's communications and publications of the institute; most of them were more like supporters. The lists show a total of 37 people in church leadership positions (bishops, state superintendents, superintendents), 91 pastors and 69 university professors or other academics.

Working groups

Between 1940 and 1942, the institute organized three working conferences with up to 600 participants in Wittenberg, Eisenach and Nuremberg. Some working groups presented the results of their work in the form of practical tools that were intended to shape religious life in the parishes of the regional churches involved in the sense of church anti-Judaism and ethnic anti-Semitism :

  • In 1941, the “People's Testament” working group brought out a “de-Jewish” New Testament under the title The Message of God , in which references and quotations from the Old Testament were deleted. The final poetic version came from Lulu von Strauss and Torney .
  • In the same year, the “Book of Faith” working group published a “Jewish-pure” catechism for schools and church education under the title Germans with God .
  • In 1941, the “Hymnal” working group recommended the hymn book “ Great God we praise you ” published by the “National Church Unity of German Christians” for testing and use in the churches.
  • A “life book” was also planned under the title The Call of Life .

The emergency situation in many regional churches and parishes associated with the Second World War certainly makes it questionable whether these publications have a continuous effect on church life. The institute was also supported by “only a minority in Protestantism”.

Participation in the "final solution"

The institute was closely related to other institutions that were committed to researching the opponents of the racist-oriented National Socialist policy, such as the “ Reich Institute for the History of New Germany ” with a department for Jewish research, in which the Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel and the later Heidelberger New Testament scholar and Qumran researcher Karl Georg Kuhn were actively anti-Semitic, and the “ Institute for Research on the Jewish Question ” in Frankfurt. Walter Grundmann had been Kittel's assistant. The institute saw itself as part of the scientific commitment (" church struggle") against Jews and against the Jewish on an explicitly racial-biological basis. It was under the influence of Hans FK Günther , who had been a professor in Jena since 1930. Grundmann personally prepared reports for the Reich Security Main Office . It was there that the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” was planned and managed. Grundmann and Georg Bertram explicitly shared the goals of the above-mentioned scientific institutions: the “elimination of Judaism” and the “final solution to the Jewish question”.

The extent to which the institute discussed the physical extermination of Jewish children, women and men cannot be determined with certainty. In any case, were the employees about the relevant notices in the journal World Tournament , which was the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question since 1941 the scientific quarterly, in detail about the disenfranchisement through work bans and reduction of food supply, the ghettos, the "relocation" of European Jewry and the Informed about Jewish legislation in the occupied and allied countries. The activities of the Eisenach Institute were again regularly reported in the journal Weltkampf . In the publications of the institute, which belong in this environment, namely the scientific research on opponents, the "final solution to the Jewish question" on a racial-anthropological basis is the focus.

The more ecclesiastical activities cannot be viewed in isolation from the main aim of the institute. For example, Grundmann wrote in the preface to The Religious Face of Judaism (1942): “But one fact will remain immovable through all times: a healthy people must and will reject Judaism in every form. ... Germany nevertheless has the historical justification and the historical justification to fight against Judaism on its side. To prove this proposition is the special concern of this book; and later research will not be able to change anything about this proposition! So this work serves the great fate of the German nation for its political and economic, intellectual and cultural and also for its religious freedom. "At the end of his contribution Grundmann states:" The Jew must be viewed as a hostile and harmful alien and from any influence turned off. In this necessary process, German humanities have the task of clearly recognizing the spiritual and religious face of Judaism ... "

Grundmann's successor, Georg Bertram, wrote in March 1944: “'This war is the fight of Judaism against Europe.' This sentence contains a truth that has been repeatedly confirmed in the research work of the institute. This work is not only geared towards a frontal attack, but also to the consolidation of the inner front for attack and defense against all the secret Judaism and Jewish beings that have seeped into Western culture over the centuries (...) so it has Institute in addition to researching and eliminating Jewish influence, the positive task and knowledge of one's own Germanic Christian character and the shaping of pious German life on the basis of this knowledge. "

In the light of the statements of the scientific institute management, the main objective in association with the other anti-Semitic institutes appears to be the scientific participation in the “final solution to the Jewish question” based on the racial definition of Judaism. The institute contributed to the radicalization of the concepts in dealing with Judaism. One expression of this development is not least the renaming of the series of publications of the Institute of Christianity and Judaism (volumes 1–3, 1940) to Germanism, Christianity and Judaism from 1941. Today we know that this process paralleled the radicalization of the extermination policy of the Reich Security Main Office passed.

Work-up

Unveiling of the memorial to the Entjudungsinstitut, Eisenach, May 6, 2019

The reflection and discussion of this zeitgeist-shaped submission of large sections of the theological and ecclesiastical staff of the German regional churches to the Nazi ideology took place only hesitantly and slowly after 1945. Important protagonists of the institute were also used in the church in the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR :

In the GDR, the then senior church councilor Erich Stegmann pointed out the intended anti-Semitic thrust in the church as early as 1984 with a work on church history. However, a more in-depth historical appraisal only began after the fall of 1989/1990.

In 2019, the processing in the Evangelical Church of Central Germany was so advanced that a memorial could be erected. The larger-than-life memorial to the “Entjudungsinstitut” consists of two rusty metal plaques that are reminiscent of an open book and that read “We went astray”. The place of remembrance is at the beginning of Eisenacher Bornstrasse, a few meters from the former institute building. It was inaugurated on May 6, 2019 in the presence of the regional bishop of the Evangelical Church of Central Germany, Ilse Junkermann , and the chairman of the Jewish state community of Thuringia, Reinhard Schramm .

The Luther House Eisenach since September 2019 a special exhibition on the history, origins, work and after-effect of the "Entjudungsinstituts".

Additional information

literature

  • Jochen Birkenmeier, Michael Weise: Research and Elimination. The church “Entjudungsinstitut” 1939–1945. Accompanying volume for the exhibition. Foundation Lutherhaus Eisenach, Eisenach 2019 (2nd, revised and expanded edition, Eisenach 2020) ISBN 978-3-9818078-3-7 .
  • Dirk Schuster: The doctrine of "Aryan" Christianity: The scientific self-image in the Eisenach "Entjudungsinstitut" (= Church - Denomination - Religion. Volume 70). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8471-0716-3 (dissertation, Free University Berlin, 2016), urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2017061119724 .
  • Elisabeth Lorenz: A picture of Jesus on the horizon of National Socialism. Studies on the New Testament of the "Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life". Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-16-154569-6 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-201804144076 .
  • Oliver Arnhold: “De-Judgment” - Church in the Abyss. The Thuringian Church Movement German Christians 1928–1939 and the “Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life” 1939–1945 (= Studies on Church and Israel. Volume 25). Institute Church and Judaism, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-374-03115-3 .
  • Susannah Heschel : The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-12531-2 .
  • Susannah Heschel: Theologians for Hitler. Walter Grundmann and the "Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life". In: Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz (Ed.): Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism: theological and church programs of German Christians (= Arnoldshainer texts. Volume 85). Haag and Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-86137-187-1 , pp. 125-170.
  • Peter von der Osten-Sacken (Ed.): The misused gospel. Studies on theology and practice of the Thuringian German Christians. Institute Church and Judaism, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-923095-74-0 .
  • Fritz Bauer Institute (Ed.): "Elimination of Jewish Influence ...". Anti-Semitic Research, Elites, and Careers under National Socialism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-593-36098-5 .
  • Hans Prolingheuer : The Lutheran German-Christian Way. Using the example of the Eisenach Entjudungsinstitut. In: Christian Staffa (ed.): From Protestant anti-Judaism and its lies. Attempts to determine the location and sidewalks of the Christian-Jewish dialogue. 3rd, improved edition. Evangelical Academy of Saxony-Anhalt, Wittenberg 1997, ISBN 3-9805749-0-3 , pp. 57–92.
  • Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz (Ed.): Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Theological and church programs of German Christians. Haag and Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-86137-187-1 ; in this:
    • Birgit Jerke: How was the New Testament "de-Judaised" into a so-called People's Testament? From the work of the Eisenach "Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life". Pp. 201-234.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Art. People Nomos theology. In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, Alexander Pinwinkler (eds.): Handbook of Folk Science Volume 1 + 2: Actors - Networks - Research Programs. 2nd Edition. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-043891-8 , p. 1559 ( preview in Google book search).
  2. ↑ Dirk Schuster: The doctrine of "Aryan" Christianity. Göttingen 2017, pp. 48–51 ( preview in Google book search).
  3. ^ Tanja Hetzer: Eisenach Institute. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Volume 5: Organizations, Institutions, Movements. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-598-24078-3 , pp. 230-232 ( preview in Google book search).
  4. ^ Art. Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life. In: Ingo Haar u. a. (Ed.): Handbook of the Volkish Sciences. Berlin / Boston 2017, p. 1787 ( preview in Google book search).
  5. ↑ Dirk Schuster: The doctrine of "Aryan" Christianity. Göttingen 2017, p. 79 ( preview in the Google book search).
  6. ↑ Joachim Beckmann: Hope for the Church at this time. Contributions to contemporary church history 1946–1974. (1981) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-525-55710-8 , p. 289 ( preview in the Google book search).
  7. ^ Art. Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life. In: Ingo Haar u. a. (Ed.): Handbook of the Volkish Sciences. Berlin / Boston 2017, p. 1488 ( preview in Google book search).
  8. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika, according to the confession of the 'Darmstadt Word' of 1947. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 , p. 150 f.
  9. ^ Röhm, Thierfelder (1995), p. 51.
  10. ^ Jan Björn Potthast: The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague. Opponent Research and Genocide under National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main / New York 2002, pp. 31–33.
  11. ↑ Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-930908-75-1 , p. 376 (Zugl .: Hannover, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2001).
  12. ↑ See e.g. B. World struggle. The Jewish question in the past and present. 1/2, April – September 1941.
  13. ^ Walter Grundmann: Germanism, Christianity and Judaism. 1942.
  14. ↑ Walter Grundmann: The religious face of Judaism. Origin and type (= publications of the institute for research into the Jewish influence on German church life ). 1942, p. Preface.
  15. ↑ Walter Grundmann: The religious face of Judaism. Origin and type (= publications of the institute for research into the Jewish influence on German church life ). 1942, p. 161.
  16. ↑ "Elimination of Jewish Influence ..." Anti-Semitic Research, Elites and Careers under National Socialism. Darmstadt 1999. In: Yearbook… on the history and effects of the Holocaust. 1998/99. P. 158.
  17. ↑ Birgit Gregor: On Protestant anti-Semitism. Protestant churches and theologians in the time of National Socialism. In: Yearbook 1998/99 on the history and effects of the Holocaust. Darmstadt 1999, pp. 171–200, here p. 190: Grundmann "postulated in them [the 28 theses] the National Socialist concept of race with which he operated from then on in his theological work."
  18. ^ Session reports of the working conference of the Institute for Research into the Jewish Influence on German Church Life, Leipzig 1940–1943 (1–11). Grundmann explains this in Volume 2: “With the expanded title 'Germanism, Christianity and Judaism', account is taken of the knowledge that research into all, especially Jewish infiltration in German religious life, can only take place from a position that is in reflection insists on the essence of the Christian as well as the Germanic-German kind. "
  19. ↑ Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburg 2002.
  20. ↑ Ernst Klee: Personal Lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 132.
  21. ↑ Erich Stegmann: The church struggle in the Thuringian Protestant Church 1933-1945. Berlin 1984.
  22. ↑ Lutherhaus: Exhibition on "Entjudungsinstitut" in the Nazi era. In: The world . 4th June 2018.
  23. ^ "Entjudungsinstitut" - memorial inaugurated in Eisenach. In: Second German television . May 6, 2019.
  24. ^ Katja Schmidberger: Memorial in Eisenach as a place of learning and a place of repentance. In: Thüringer Allgemeine / Eisenacher Allgemeine. May 7, 2019.
  25. ↑ Lutherhaus Eisenach: Research and Elimination - The Church Entjudungsinstitut 1939-1945. Retrieved September 23, 2019.
  26. ↑ Paul Kahl in Neue Zürcher Zeitung , July 27, 2020 «Jesus cannot have been a Jew!»: How the Protestant Church in the «Third Reich» offered itself to the Nazis