Pastors' Emergency League

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In Pastors founded on 21 September 1933, German Protestant joined theologians , pastors and church officials opposed to the introduction of the Aryan paragraph in the German Protestant Church together (DEK). In doing so, they reacted to Ludwig Müller's election as Reich Bishop on September 27, 1933 and to the attempts by the German Christians (DC), the German Evangelical Church (DEK) , which began in 1933, to establish a " Reich Church " without Christians of Jewish origin, dominated by National Socialist ideology to reshape. This was the beginning of the church struggle in the time of National Socialism , in the course of which the Confessing Church emerged from the Pastors' Emergency League in 1934 .

The Aryan Paragraph

The so-called "Aryan Paragraph" was anchored in the " Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service " on April 7, 1933 . It followed the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1st and banned people of Jewish descent - with a few exceptions - from official status in order to oust them from public office. This was a first state step towards the disenfranchisement of Jews.

To what extent the paragraph also affected church officials of Jewish origin was initially unclear. After the church elections of July 13, 1933, in which the DC achieved a two-thirds majority, the general synod of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union took place in Berlin on September 5 . This was the first particular church controlled by the DC to pass a church law concerning the legal relationships of clergy and church officials . Clergy and ecclesiastical administrators “of non-Aryan origin” were then to be retired, as well as those who lived in mixed marriages with a person of “non-Aryan origin”. The “non-Aryan descent” was defined according to the First Ordinance for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (RGBl. 1933 I, p. 195): It is sufficient if “one parent or one grandparent” is not Aryan.

Foundation and guidelines

The following day, a group of opposition members who had been prevented from discussing the law at the synod met. At the initiative of the Niederlausitz pastors Herbert Goltzen , Günter Jacob and Eugen Weschke , they founded the pastors' emergency association. A few days later, other pastors, including Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer , joined him. These two formulated a letter of protest to the new church government, which also stated the admission requirements for new members:

"1. According to the confession of our church, the church teaching office is only bound to the proper calling. The “Aryan Paragraph” of the new Church Officials Act creates a right that contradicts this fundamental creed. This means that a state of affairs that must be considered injustice after the confession is proclaimed as church law and the confession is violated. "

"2. There can be no doubt that the ordained clergy affected by the Civil Service Act ... continue to have the full right to freely proclaim the word and administer the sacraments in the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union, which is based on the confessions of the Reformation. "

"3. Those who consent to such a breach of the creed exclude themselves from the fellowship of the church. We therefore demand that this law, which separates the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union from the Christian Church, be repealed immediately. "

The fourth point was a promise to help those affected by the law or other violent measures in the church. These four points became the self-commitment of the members of the federal government, which was officially constituted on September 21st .

Brother Council and Membership Development

On October 20, 1933, the first shop stewards' assembly elected a Reich Brotherhood Council to act as a board member and to represent it externally. These included:

  1. Superintendent Hugo Hahn , Dresden
  2. Pastor Gerhard Jacobi , Berlin
  3. Pastor Eberhard Klügel , Hanover
  4. Pastor Karl Lücking , Dortmund
  5. Superintendent Ludolf Müller , Heiligenstadt
  6. Pastor Martin Niemöller , Berlin-Dahlem
  7. Pastor Georg Schulz, Wuppertal-Barmen
  8. Pastor Ludwig Heitmann , Hamburg (elected on November 9, 1933)

In less than four months, the emergency union developed into a mass movement of 7,036 members in January 1934. This number then fell to 3,933 active pastors, 374 retirees, 529 auxiliary preachers and 116 candidates by 1938. According to Wilhelm Niemöller, a little over 20 percent of the active Protestant pastors at the time were members of the Pastors' Emergency League.

Act

The pastors' emergency association was created as a "system of mutual solidarity" ( Klaus Scholder ) to provide ideal and material support for 30–50 pastors of Jewish origin who are affected by the church's Aryan paragraph. A common protest against the state discrimination of the Jews as a whole was completely remote from almost all of its members. These were shaped by anti-Judaism throughout the church and saw the exclusion of Jews from state offices and freelance professions as a necessary state measure in which the church did not have to interfere.

At the beginning of November 1933, Martin Niemöller offered the DC a compromise in his sentences on the Aryan question in the church : In order not to be a "nuisance", pastors of "non- Aryan " descent should not receive any leadership positions in the church. This was in line with the behavior recommended by the theologian Walter Künneth since Pentecost 1933. By strengthening its mission to the Jews, the church can make its own contribution to the state “solution of the Jewish question”, since only Jews converted to Christ are exempt from the “claim to world domination”.

Ludwig Müller, who was unanimously elected Reich Bishop in September, accepted Niemöller's offer and on November 16, 1933 initially suspended the church laws with the church's Aryan paragraphs. On December 8th, he passed a new law on the “Legal Relationships of Clergy and Officials of the Regional Churches”, which no longer contained an Aryan paragraph. This law was expressly approved by Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick : He recognized the protests of the Pastors' Emergency Association as "serious dogmatic concerns". Adolf Hitler himself had decreed on December 2nd that the state governments should not intervene in the purely internal church dispute over the church Aryan paragraph. The proportion of Jewish pastors was considered too insignificant to jeopardize the unity of the Evangelical Church.

After the Reichstag elections on November 12th, the emergency union found itself exposed to increased attacks from the now fragmented DC, which tried to portray it as an organization hostile to the state. In his defense, he then published a leaflet written by the Berlin pastor Friedrich Müller, which was distributed throughout the empire. It said:

“The German people have stood behind the Führer in wonderful unity. What became visible to the outside here is only the result of everyone's actual devotion to the Führer and to National Socialism. We forbid ourselves to doubt it as far as we are concerned. "

“With the lie that every National Socialist was also a German Christian, and that everyone who was not a German Christian was an enemy of National Socialism and its leader, the German Christians won over the masses of their voters. This lie has long since collapsed ... "

“The Fiihrer himself clearly stated that the internal church battles must be carried out without the interference of the state. What goes on in the Protestant Church has nothing to do with the loyalty of each of its members to the state. It still stands unshaken. "

meaning

With its four conditions of admission, the Notbund made it clear for the first time since Hitler came to power : Those who agree to the exclusion of Jews from the Christian Church exclude themselves from it. The church - not the state - Aryan paragraph was thus seen as incompatible with the Christian faith and the church's creed , so that the true evangelical church is not the overwhelming majority, but the small minority of initially a dozen pastors.

This escalation was due to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Hardly any church leader shared his view. Due to the mistakes of the DC and the subsequent withdrawal movement from these, the emergency union quickly found approval from pastors and parishes throughout the empire. He became a forerunner of the Confessing Church, which was founded on May 31, 1934 and understood as a true Protestant church contrary to the “Reich Church”. Their resistance was directed almost exclusively within the church against the behavior of the church authorities directed by DC or adapted church leaders.

On November 10, 1933, the President of the Old Prussian Evangelical Upper Church Council in Berlin, Friedrich Werner , dismissed the first pastor of Jewish origin, Ernst Flatow. The reason was:

"Flatow has in his appearance and his being so obvious those characteristics that the people regard as belonging to the Jewish race that employment in a community is impossible."

By 1941, other particular DEK churches adopted the Aryan paragraph and dismissed pastors of Jewish descent. Neither the emergency union nor the later Confessing Church could prevent this. According to point 4 of the founding declaration, however, the “ Grüber office ” of Pastor Heinrich Grüber was set up in 1937, which helped baptized and non-baptized Jews to hide, find jobs or leave the country illegally until its state closure in 1940.

Only individual members of the Notbund contradicted the anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialists. On November 15, 1933, the theologian Karl Barth emphasized in a lecture to the Pastors' Emergency League:

“The protest against the heresy of the German Christians cannot begin with the Aryan paragraph, with the rejection of the Old Testament , with the Arianism of German-Christian Christology , with the naturalism and Pelagianism of the German-Christian doctrine of justification and sanctification , with the deification of the German state - use Christian ethics. He must fundamentally oppose (...) that the German Christians claim the German people , its history and its political presence as a second source of revelation , alongside Holy Scripture as the only source of revelation , and thus claim to be the believers of an 'other God' give recognition. "

For Barth, the state and the church Aryan paragraph were both an expression of a Christian heresy . For him, the exclusion of Jews from the church was a consequence and partial problem of the worship of a false God, also in politics. He expressed the same thoughts in a sermon on December 10, 1933, which he sent to Adolf Hitler . This view was incorporated into the Barmer Theological Declaration of January 1934, which he formulated , the founding document of the Confessing Church, which proclaimed Jesus Christ as the one word of God over all areas of life and rejected the heresy of a second source of revelation.

Bonhoeffer took part in conspiratorial plans to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime since 1937 and was executed on April 9, 1945 after the failure of the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Klee : "The SA of Jesus Christ". The churches under the spell of Hitler. (= Fischer. 4409). 14.-15. Thousand. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-24409-9 , p. 118.
  2. ↑ Document VEJ 1/75 in: Wolf Gruner (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 (source book): Volume 1: German Empire from 1933 to 1937 , Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3- 486-58480-6 , pp. 239-241.
  3. ^ Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Gesammelte Schriften , Volume 2, C. Kaiser, 1961, page 70 ff
  4. ^ W. Niemöller: Der Pfarrernotbund. 1973.
  5. ↑ Martin Niemöller: Sentences on the Aryan question in the church. In: Young Church. Bi-monthly publication for Reformation Christianity; Volume 1, number 17, November 2, 1933, pp. 269–271
  6. ^ H. Prolingheuer: Small political church history. 1984, p. 71.
  7. ^ H. Prolingheuer: Small political church history. 1984, p. 74.
  8. ^ H. Prolingheuer: Small political church history. 1984, p. 182.
  9. ↑ Eberhard Busch : The Barmer Theses. 1934-2004. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-525-56332-9 , p. 35 .
  10. ↑ Bertold Klappert : The sermon as a service to the word of God. In: Patrik Mähling (Ed.): Orientation for life. Church education and politics in the late Middle Ages, Reformation and modern times. Festschrift for Manfred Schulze on his 65th birthday (= work on historical and systematic theology. 13). Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10092-4 , pp. 288–308, here p. 290 .