Stuttgart confession of guilt

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With the Stuttgart confession of guilt (also a declaration of guilt by Protestant Christianity in Germany ) , the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) formed after the Second World War confessed for the first time that Protestant Christians were complicit in the crimes of National Socialism .

The declaration was drawn up jointly by EKD council members Hans Christian Asmussen , Otto Dibelius and Martin Niemöller at a council meeting in Stuttgart and read there on October 19, 1945. The authors had already held leadership positions in the Confessing Church . The declaration arose from their insights into the failure of the Protestant church leaderships during the National Socialist era , which they had won in the church struggle and after the end of the war. The occasion was the visit of high-ranking representatives of the World Council of Churches(WCC), who showed themselves ready to reconcile with the Germans and to accept the EKD. In addition, they expected their representatives to give a credible admission of guilt . With the declaration, the authors met this expectation and opened the way for the EKD to ecumenical fellowship and increased help for the needy Germans.

The text was a compromise between previous personal declarations of guilt and preliminary drafts by the authors. They wanted to name their own guilt first, then that of the Protestant Christians, then also that of the Germans, but not in the sense of collective guilt . The publication of the text sparked fierce controversy in the EKD and the German population, but in the long term it formed the starting point for a rethinking of German Protestantism .

text

Original excerpt from the Stuttgart confession of guilt,
ordinance and news sheet of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), No. 1, January 1946 in the Tannenberg font

Declaration by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany to the representatives of the World Council of Churches

“The Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany welcomes you at its meeting on 18./19. October 1945 in Stuttgart representative of the World Council of Churches. We are all the more grateful for this visit as we know we are with our people not only in a great community of suffering, but also in a solidarity of guilt. It is with great pain that we say:
Through us, infinite suffering has been brought to many peoples and countries. What we have often witnessed to our congregations, we now express on behalf of the whole Church: For many years we have fought in the name of Jesus Christ against the spirit that found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime; but we accuse ourselves of not confessing more courageously, praying more faithfully, believing more happily, and loving more ardently.
Now a new beginning is to be made in our churches. Based on the Holy Scriptures, with all seriousness directed towards the sole Lord of the Church, they set out to purify themselves from influences foreign to faith and to put themselves in order. We hope to the God of grace and mercy that he will use our churches as his instrument and give them authority to preach his word and to be obedient to his will in ourselves and all of our people.
It fills us with deep joy that we can feel that we are cordially connected to the other churches of the ecumenical fellowship in this new beginning.
We hope to God that through the common service of the churches, the spirit of violence and retribution, which today wants to become powerful again, will be controlled in all the world and that the spirit of peace and love will rule in which only the tortured humanity can find recovery.
So we ask in an hour in which the whole world needs a new beginning: Veni, creator spiritus ! "

Stuttgart, 18./19. October 1945

In addition to the three authors, the signatories were:

prehistory

Church struggle

In 1934, the German Evangelical Church (DEK) did not split over its relationship with National Socialism . Almost all of the later signatories of the Stuttgart Declaration had welcomed Adolf Hitler's chancellorship, remained silent about almost all persecution and terrorist measures by the National Socialists before 1939, supported the wars of conquest of the Nazi regime, beginning with the attack on Poland , and only opposed it in some areas affecting the church Measures taken by the regime. At the same time, the Confessing Church (BK) had constantly demonstrated its fundamental loyalty to the state and tried to assert itself against the German Christians (DC) and government agencies with addresses of allegiance - up to and including a voluntary oath of leadership by the pastors in 1937 .

In the course of the church struggle, however, some BK representatives recognized the unjust character of the regime, which they had affirmed for the sake of the organizational preservation of the church. On September 19, 1938, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, expelled from Germany, called on all Czechs to offer armed resistance to the Hitler regime in the event of an occupation of the Czechoslovak Republic out of Christian responsibility. He concluded this from the Barmer Theological Declaration , the creed he wrote in 1934 , on the basis of which the BK was founded in June 1934. The "preliminary church leadership" of the BK (VKL) immediately distanced itself from these "for them intolerable statements" in which it was no longer the theologian but the politician Barth who spoke.

On September 27, 1938, at the height of the Sudeten crisis , the second VKL under the Dahlem pastor Fritz Müller suggested to their pastors that they read out a confession of guilt against the standard of the Ten Commandments at the following Sunday service :

“We confess the sins of our church, its leadership, its congregations and her shepherds before you… We confess the sins of our people before you:…
Much injustice has been done publicly and in secret. Parents and masters were despised, lives injured and destroyed, marriages broken, property stolen and the honor of one's neighbor compromised ...
Forgive us and spare us your punishments. […]
But if God punishes us with war in his unfathomable counsel:…
We remember all who are tempted to take cruel vengeance and to be overwhelmed by hatred. We remember the people whose lands the war threatens and we pray to God for them all.
You direct the hearts of those who rule in all peoples. "

Two days later, the Munich Agreement seemed to have eliminated the threat of war. Most pastors no longer read the prayer proposal if the Lutheran church leaders had passed it on to them at all.

On October 27th Das Schwarze Korps , the magazine of the SS , attacked the VKL for treason : "Politicizing clerics and their cliques" had put the "struggle for the freedom of millions of blood brothers" against "Bolshevik annihilation" as "God's punishment" and not prayed for the leader but only for foreign governments. That is sabotage of the "united readiness of the people", whose security makes the "extermination of criminals" a state duty. Thereupon Church Minister Hanns Kerrl suspended the VKL members, suspended their salaries and appointed the Lutheran regional bishops, whereupon they all hastily distanced themselves from the VKL for “religious and patriotic reasons” and excluded its members from the church community. Only the regional brother councils showed solidarity with the completely isolated VKL and were then also disciplined under canon law. This ended the previous unification efforts of the so-called “intact” regional churches with state authorities and BK representatives.

Shortly afterwards, their bishops remained silent about the November pogroms . Only a few Christians dared to protest in public, even fewer resisted National Socialism . Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, took part in conspiratorial assassination and putsch plans on his own responsibility as a Christian since 1937. After Hitler's victorious French campaign in 1940, he wrote a substitute confession of guilt for the entire Protestant church in his ethics . He emphasized the silence of the church on state violence against the defenseless Jews and other minorities, so that in the face of Jesus Christ any sideways glance at the guilt of others is forbidden. But after his imprisonment in 1943, the intercessions of the BK Bonhoeffer went unmentioned until after the end of the war in 1945.

Hans Asmussen, who interpreted the Barmer Declaration in the sense of the doctrine of the two kingdoms as a strict separation of faith and politics, sent a letter to the WCC in December 1942 in which, as a representative of the BK, he expressed the “awareness of German guilt”.

Domestic situation

After the end of the war, life was extremely difficult in large parts of Europe. Housing and infrastructure were often destroyed, especially in the major German cities. There was a lack of essential food, medicine, heating, clothing and hospitals everywhere. Hard work in cleaning up debris, high infant mortality, diseases such as dysentery, dismantling , influx of millions of refugees and prisoners of war of millions more loaded the Germans. The food rations were only sufficient to ward off famine.

In this emergency, most Germans focused on survival. A return to one's own behavior during the Nazi era and political rethinking initially hardly took place. With the Jews, the “ Jewish question ” also seemed to have disappeared, so that anti-Semitism was hardly noticeable and was hardly discussed in public until the Federal Republic was founded.

In view of the expulsions, many Germans felt that the Potsdam Agreement was a worse new edition of the Versailles Treaty . The first directives on reeducation and denazification had an unfair effect because of their equal treatment of simple followers and leadership cadres of the NSDAP and resulted in numerous denunciations. The fear of Soviet occupation of all of Germany already played a role, especially since acts of violence by the Red Army were already known and the fear of them systematically stoked in Hitler's Germany was still present in the population.

Against this background, the church leaders, who had already supported Hitler's anti-communism in the Third Reich, hesitated to publicly admit guilt. They feared that this would only provide the occupying powers with arguments in favor of even harsher retaliatory measures, whereby it was believed, among other things, that special consideration should be given to the communities in the Soviet occupation zone.

New formation of the EKD

On Ascension Day 1945 (May 10), two days after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , the first major rally of the Protestant Church took place in Stuttgart. In front of a large crowd, the Württemberg regional bishop Wurm announced as "spokesman for the entire Confessing Church in Germany" in the presence of the general of the French occupation forces:

“The heart of the German people beat for peace, the war was a party war. Precisely for this reason one should not see the entire German people as responsible for the methods of violence and terror in a system that has been internally rejected by a vast majority. "

He blamed the war and genocide on the “godlessness” of the Nazi regime and its “turning away from God and his way of life”. The church has fought this "secularism". In fact, Wurm and the other Lutheran regional bishops had just seen the "order set by God" in the Hitler state and instructed the Christians in May 1939 to "integrate themselves with full devotion into the national and political structure of the Führer." Instead of protests against the war followed Accordingly, the beginning of the war, joint calls by professing Christians and German Christians to be willing to make sacrifices. Since 1941 Wurm, BK, DC, tried to unite "neutrals" and "intact" regional churches under the roof of his "church unification work". He only wanted to exclude the most radical wing of the “neo-pagans”.

So the unresolved conflicts over faith, shape and mission of the Evangelical Church came to the fore again. The first initiative to form a German Lutheran National Church based on the DEK model was taken by August Marahrens , the bishop of the Hanoverian regional church, on May 30, 1945 with a letter to the still existing Luther Council. This sparked violent protests on the part of the WCC, which indicated that Marahrens had signed the Godesberg Theses in 1939 to reconcile National Socialist ideology and Christian faith.

On June 8, 1945, Wurm invited the existing church leaders to Treysa to the founding meeting of a newly formed Evangelical Church, whereby he passed over the Imperial Brother Council of the BK. Thereupon Martin Niemöller, a concentration camp survivor and abroad as a credible representative of the BK, invited the brother councils of the BK to a preparatory meeting for Treysa in Frankfurt am Main . He also wrote to Karl Barth asking for participation and theological advice. Barth immediately agreed and traveled to Germany for the first time since his forced release in 1935.

In his introductory speech in Frankfurt on August 21, Niemöller emphasized the guilt of the whole church for the "development of the last 15 years" and demanded that the Evangelical Church be completely rebuilt with unencumbered forces on the basis of the resolution of the Confessional Synods of Barmen and Dahlem in 1934. As the only one of the brother councils present in Frankfurt, Barth analyzed the political failure of the BK in the Third Reich and attributed it to the long anti-democratic misorientation of German Protestantism:

“ Friedrich , Bismarck and Hitler were people who despised human beings, that's why you cannot do Christian politics with them. The Confessing Church must be released from this ban. "

He only earned outrage among his German friends for this, and there was no discussion of his presentation.

Niemöller's subsequent correspondence with Wurm was only able to partially resolve profound differences of opinion about the future shape of the EKD. Niemöller threw z. B. Dibelius suggested that he illegally acquired the title of bishop in order to make a career in church politics. The state church constitutions are to be repealed, the state bishops are unsuitable as spiritual leaders of Christians.

The meeting for the formation of a provisional church leadership in Treysa from August 27th to 31st was introduced by Niemöller with a lecture in which he first uttered a personal admission of guilt, which he had reached in concentration camp imprisonment. Then he emphasized the special responsibility of the BK for the Nazi catastrophe:

“Here the Confessing Church bears a particularly large amount of guilt; for she saw most clearly what was going on and what was developing; she even talked about it and then got tired and was more afraid of people than of God. [...] She alone knew that the path taken led to ruin, and she did not warn our people. "

Niemöller wanted to bring these insights to all preachers as a “word to the pastors”, but the church leaders who had gathered in Treysa refused. Instead, a “word to the congregations” was passed saying:

“Wherever the church took its responsibility seriously, it called to the commandments of God, named breach of law and outrage, guilt in the concentration camps, the mistreatment and murder of Jews and the sick, and tried to defend against the seduction of the youth. But they were pushed back into the church like a prison. Our people were separated from the Church. The public was no longer allowed to hear her word; what she preached no one knew. And then came the wrath of God. He took from us what people wanted to save. "

So here no particular guilt of the BK was named, but the entire church was presented as a lobby for those disenfranchised by the Nazi regime, whose protests through state persecution could not have become effective. In contradiction to this, the final declaration spoke of the failure of the church due to the traditional Lutheran affirmation of the authoritarian state .

The unity of the EKD was only preserved in Treysa by leaving open the conflict-prone question of the church constitution in accordance with the Barmer Confession. The church external office under Bishop Theodor Heckel , who had represented DC positions, was dissolved and the care of ecumenical relations was entrusted to Niemöller.

Barth was only a guest in Treysa; many church representatives did not see him as a delegate of the BK, but, as in 1938, as a reformed foreigner and in some cases denounced him as "chief inspector of the allied armies". In a letter to Niemöller on September 28, he affirmed what he had publicly requested several times before the meeting: A simple, clear word from all German church leaders about their complicity in the crimes of National Socialism was necessary in order to clear it up without further ado what stands between them and us. In order to accommodate the helpful forces in ecumenism, they should state publicly:

  • the consent of the German people to Hitler's policy was a mistake,
  • the current needs of Germany and Europe are a consequence of this error,
  • the German Evangelical Church had made itself responsible for this error through wrong speech and wrong silence.

First declarations of guilt after 1945

After the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces on May 8, 1945, Pastor Friedrich Bodelschwingh was the first to comment on the question of guilt in a sermon on May 27, 1945:

“Christians are part of the guilt ... neither can we nor will we try to absolve ourselves of responsibility for the guilt and fate of our people. We are still trying to protect ourselves by claiming that we knew nothing of much of what was going on behind the barbed wire of the camps or in Poland and Russia. These crimes were the acts of German people, and we have to face the consequences. "

Asmussen sent a sermon to Anglican Bishop George Bell in early June which said:

“The Church is guilty of ... both denominations. Our guilt is very ancient. It consists in keeping silent where we should have spoken and talking where we should have been silent.
For decades we have tried to make pacts with worldviews for which there is no ultimate truth. Instead of saying 'no', we said 'both-and.' We have disregarded the rock of our salvation and the refuge of truth, the word of God.
We argued where we should have agreed. We debated where we should have prayed. ... We often did not resist where we should have put life and limb. We pushed ourselves into self-importance where we should have suffered in silence. We let ourselves be pushed into the corner where we should have screamed loudly in the foreground. [...]
Guilty is the German citizen ... who has sacrificed the law for the sake of his peace ... who was willing to remain silent until well into the war against all atrocities, if only they were successful.
Yes, we are all guilty, big and small, poor and rich, educated and uneducated. The sword and need do not come upon us without cause. The German subject must plead guilty. ... "

However, that initially remained individual votes. In July, Bishop Wurm drafted a “Word to Christianity Abroad” for the Church as a whole, which was only published months later together with the Stuttgart Declaration. In it, he admitted the Germans to be guilty of the outbreak of war, but at the same time assigned the victorious powers the responsibility for ensuring that Hitler was able to come to power. He saw the church in the role of victim, which could only venture to protest if its life was at risk:

“We particularly condemn the hostage murders and the mass murder of German and Polish Jews. We Christians in Germany have suffered greatly from the fact that things like this desecrated the German name and stained German honor. "

Here three later recurring argumentation patterns became clear:

  • The church was portrayed as if it had protested at least sometimes against injustice but had been prevented from doing so by the state. It was kept secret that mostly only individual Protestants, rarely church leaders, had named a violation of the law and even fewer had stood up against it.
  • The state measures against the church and the curtailment of its public influence were listed in a row with the murder of the Jews. So you saw yourself more as a victim next to victims, not as a contributor to the Holocaust . The word was meant to explain why the church couldn't say anything about it. The fact that the bishops themselves often did not pass on critical statements of the VKL and renounced their authors was not recognized as guilt.
  • There was no specific guilt of the church. Wurm did not reflect on their share in the rise of the National Socialists and the connection between church anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism . Instead, he spoke in traditional solidarity with nationalism about the insults of “German honor”.

This contrasted with the private initiatives of some pastors. Sun sent Gottlieb Funcke to Bishop Wurm a draft for the Stuttgart meeting, which does not relativized German guilt by pointing to Allied guilt and the crimes against the Jews conceded the first and most detailed course:

“The long-deserved criminal court has broken down on the leading offenders. But even the last of the German people must now recognize that our people as a whole have become guilty. "

Then he listed the extermination camps in which Jews were murdered, pointed to "atrocities against German, Polish, Russian and above all Jewish people" and rejected the appeal that they were ignorant of the persecution of the Jews :

“But the inhuman abuse of German Jewry was known. By tolerating them, we have become more or less complicit. "

Funcke addressed the responsibility of the Germans for the survivors of the Holocaust, to whom one owes the promise of a new community among the "guiding stars" of freedom, humanity and justice.

Ecumenical expectations

In the church struggle, the representatives of the ecumenical movement had tried in many ways to help professing Christians and “non-Aryans” and in doing so often incurred the displeasure of their own governments. They now absolutely wanted to prevent the ecumenical church fellowship from ignoring the war guilt issue again as it did in 1918 and thus contributing to its overall political suppression. At the same time, they wanted to help ensure that the populations of the victorious countries would support a new beginning with the Germans.

Bishop George Bell , whose protest in the British House of Lords against the Allied air warfare in 1942/43 cost him the leadership of the Church of England , had listened to Friedrich Bodelschwingh's sermon on May 27, 1945 and welcomed it with joy:

“In Germany conversion and renewal can only take place in German hearts. All we can do is to humbly and without self-righteousness give courage through brotherhood in the gospel and truth of Christ. "

In July 1945 high-ranking representatives of the WCC - Hans Schönfeld , Stewart Herman and the emigrated German pastor Adolf Freudenberg - visited the western occupation zones for the first time to sound out the readiness of German Protestants to join the ecumenical movement. They expected the Evangelical Church to undergo “self-cleaning” and to force church dignitaries such as Marahrens and Heckel, who had made “constant bows to the National Socialists”, to resign. Because the occupation authorities did not exert any pressure in this direction at the time, but viewed Protestant church representatives largely uncritically as representing an internal German opposition to the Hitler regime.

In their reports, the visitors registered the mood among the Protestants: the theologian Paul Althaus, for example, saw the “National Revolution” of 1933 as a legitimate reaction to the “injustice of Versailles”. He wrote in a lecture: "Our leadership has made terrible mistakes", without naming them and without suggesting a church complicity. Then he seamlessly went over to the “Allied eviction injustice”, which he presented in very concrete terms and then the question of whether the Germans had now come under a “curse” comparable to the Jews out of an incomprehensible will of God. That is why the ecumenical representatives saw Christians who, like Niemöller, had publicly and unreservedly confessed their own guilt for months before the Stuttgart meeting , as their primary interlocutors.

On July 24th, the general secretary of the WCC, Willem Adolf Visser 't Hooft , wrote to George Bell asking him to influence the British so that they called on the Marahrens to resign: otherwise the churches abroad would not be able to establish normal relations with the EKD. Bell, reluctant to do so, tried instead to convince Marahrens in a personal visit to Loccum of the necessity of his resignation: in vain. Marahrens remained in office until 1947, but lost his influence on the organization of the EKD.

On July 25th, Visser 't Hooft also wrote to Dibelius asking him for a "brotherly conversation" with the church representatives who had suffered badly under the German occupation and who had to bear its consequences:

“This conversation would be much easier if the Confessing Church of Germany speaks very openly - not only about the misdeeds of the Nazis, but also especially about the sins of omission of the German people, including the Church.
The Christians in the other countries [...] would so much like it to be said openly [...] that the German people and the Church did not speak openly and loudly enough. The statements of Bishop Wurm and von Asmussen [...] are still so 'apologetic' and therefore do not make it easy for the others to confess their own different guilt for the whole event without being a Pharisee. "

He expected this declaration as well as the dismissal of particularly stressed German church leaders as a result of the meeting in Treysa, where neither of these, however, failed. While Dibelius replied evasively, Niemöller invited Visser 't Hooft to Stuttgart on October 10th. Another letter from Ehrenberg to Niemöller unmistakably affirmed the crucial importance of a declaration of guilt at the Stuttgart meeting for the helpfulness of the ecumenical movement and future relations with it. This made it clear to the German church representatives that without a clear confession of guilt no renewed relationship with ecumenism could be achieved.

Course of the Stuttgart meeting

After weeks of efforts to obtain an entry permit, the WCC delegation met on October 15, 1945 in Baden-Baden to prepare for their meeting with the EKD representatives. To her belonged:

The latter noted as the goal of the meeting:

“Our aim was to possibly demand a declaration from the German church that clarified its relationship to the other churches and the ecumenical movement in such a way that a trusting relationship could be established immediately. We hoped, however, that we would not have to demand such a declaration, but rather receive it on the basis of the German Church's own insight. "

On the morning of October 17, the delegates met with Eugen Gerstenmaier in Stuttgart and discussed support programs for the needy German population. In the afternoon they went to see Bishop Wurm. He was surprised, but put the conversation with the guests on the agenda for the following day. In the evening, Martin Niemöller, who had arrived just an hour earlier, preached in St. Mark's Church on the Bible text Jer 14.17-21  EU . He reiterated what he had said in Treysa:

“The German church should repent and stop idling. She should confess and with her the German people that they sinned before God and were caught up in a godless being. "

Not only Germany, but also the neighboring European countries suffered terribly from the German offenses. Only real repentance can bring about real forgiveness from God and thus the necessary political new beginning. Visser 't Hooft recalled Niemöller's sermon in his autobiography:

“The goal, as far as it was clear, had to be the resumption of ecumenical relations. But how should we achieve it? We could not make an admission of guilt as a condition of the community to be restored; Such a profession was only of value if it was made spontaneously. On the other hand, the obstacles to a new community could only be removed if the German side found a clear word. Pierre Maury finally advised us to say to the Germans: 'We have come to ask you to help us, to help you.' When we arrived in the largely destroyed Stuttgart, we heard that a special service would take place in the Markuskirche that evening, at which Bishop Wurm, Pastor Niemöller and Bishop Dibelius would speak. Bishop Wurm greeted the World Council delegation with warm words of welcome. Then Pastor Niemöller preached about Jeremiah 14: 7-11: 'Oh Lord, our iniquities deserve it; but help for your name's sake! ' It was a powerful sermon on the nature of repentance. Niemöller said that even within the church it was not sufficiently understood that the past twelve years had been a visitation of God. It is not enough to blame the Nazis. The church must also confess its guilt. "

The Stuttgart prelate Karl Hartenstein set a different accent in his opening address:

“They [the WCC guests] will speak of the guilt that stands between us and they will confess their own guilt which also rests on the peoples of the victorious powers. [...] That is the power of the unity of the church that no one judges and accuses the other, because we are all complicit before this cross and blessed by him who loved the world. "

So he expected an ecumenical guilty confession analogous to or shared with the German declaration of guilt, which should not contain any concrete statements about the causes of war and genocide.

On Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m., the council discussed the issue of denazification in its own ecclesiastical and social sphere and issued guidelines for the dismissal of DC pastors, which were to be decided on by specially formed ruling chambers made up of two pastors and a lawyer. At the same time, the WCC guests again discussed issues relating to reconstruction. After lunch, Colonel Dawson, US Commander in Chief for Stuttgart, received the German and ecumenical delegates. At around 3:00 p.m. Visser 't Hooft, Asmussen and Niemöller met in a café to discuss the next council meeting. They agreed that a declaration of guilt by the German representatives was inevitable.

At 4 p.m. Asmussen opened the crucial meeting with a personal admission of guilt:

“Dear brothers, I have sinned against you as a member of my people because I did not believe better, because I did not pray more purely, because I did not love more ardently. I don't know if I could have prevented what happened ... Just because I love my people, I can't say that none of this is my business. No, all of this was done in my flesh and blood, and love commands me to say, I stand by it. And now I ask you: forgive me. "

He emphasized that this guilt to the brothers could only be "settled" between the guilty and God, so that the ecumenical brothers could also settle their guilt with God regardless of political effects.

Niemöller stood behind Asmussen's declaration: It expresses the “conscience of our church” and is a sign of a completely new beginning. He emphasized the particular church complicity:

“We know that we have gone the wrong way with our people, a way […] which has made us as a church complicit in the fate of the whole world today. We ask that God will forgive us this guilt and that the guilt, by forgiving it, may become a source of new strength. "

As the third speaker, Niesel emphasized:

"We are not concerned with a general admission of guilt that would be easy to make, but with an admission of our specific guilt."

As the first guest, Hendrik Kraemer answered: The communion in Christ is above everything that divides the nations. Therefore, this separating factor can and must then also be expressed. The German occupation caused his country to suffer badly, and this triggered hatred of the Germans, which he did not want to conceal. Alphons Koechlin asked whether all council members shared the declarations of guilt and whether the EKD would publish them to its member churches. He continued:

“It is not our business to judge: you owe so much, you so much and I have so much. It is not a barter. We stand before God's face openly and honestly with what we say. We have the great desire on both sides […] to be Christians […] as Christians we are then in the second place with our whole being Dutch, German or American. […] We can make it clear from the German Church in our homeland that we will find the way to each other because we want to be soldiers of Christ with all our hearts. "

This willingness to approach each other determined the further discussion. Asmussen then suggested that the EKD Council draw up a public statement "in the spirit of the conversation we just had" that WCC representatives could present to their home churches. Before the council members withdrew to formulate these, they discussed the catastrophic situation in East Germany in the presence of the guests.

The final wording of the Stuttgart Declaration arose from a draft text by Dibelius, in which sentences from Asmussen's personal confession of guilt as well as passages from Niemöller's sermon on Jeremiah 14.17-21 were incorporated. Under the impression of the expulsions, concrete statements about German war guilt were avoided because there was a fear of entering into mutual offsetting of guilt.

Niemöller produced the final version by changing some of Dibelius' formulations. So he replaced the statement, "Now is made in our church a new beginning" with the task: "Now should . Be made in our church a new beginning" He prevailed against the hesitation of Dibelius that a core set of Asmussen's preliminary draft came into the text:

"Through us , infinite suffering has been brought to many countries and peoples ..."

It was not until late in the evening that Bishop Bell, representing the Anglicans of Great Britain, arrived at the meeting, accompanied by Ernest Gordon Rupp , Methodist pastor in England. They visited Wurm in his private apartment and exchanged ideas well into the night. On the morning of October 19, Asmussen handed each ecumenical guest a copy of the typed declaration, read it out and added:

“We tell you as we tell God. Do your part so that this declaration is not misused politically, but serves what we want together. "

After the instrument, signed by all council representatives, was presented to the WCC, Maury thanked it with the words:

“We want to accept it without Pharisaic pride, but also before God. Now it is easier for us to bear that the poison of Hitlerism has flooded the whole world. We were amazed that justice was expected immediately after the occupation in Germany. There are no Christian people. In all countries the church stands in the fight for justice. The Hitler regime has destroyed justice in every country. We particularly suffer from this. [...] Now your word helps us in the struggle for justice everywhere, also for Germany. […] Your declaration will be a call to a Christian life for us too. We have a common duty for the West and the world. Germany should also have its part in this. "

After further words of thanks, Bell gave the speech he had prepared for the flight, in which he paid tribute to the testimony of the BK and named the Nazi crimes, but also the expulsions of Germans from the eastern regions, as "cruel, unjust and inhuman". In order to counteract this, he spoke out passionately for the future realization of a brotherhood of the churches in the ecumenical movement.

effect

Reactions in Germany

The Stuttgart Declaration was first published on October 27, 1945 in Kieler Kurier , a newspaper of the British military government; four days later in the Hamburger Neue Presse . Both articles were headed: Blame for Endless Suffering. Evangelical Church confesses Germany's war guilt. This was followed by the full wording of the declaration, including the names of the signatories and addressees.

The publication caused enormous indignation, incomprehension and violent opposition and only rarely met with approval. Their origins were largely unknown to the population. The wording was often questioned as a forgery, especially since the EKD leadership made it known to the communities much later.

With the “German war guilt”, the newspapers put a key word in the foreground that neither appeared nor was primarily intended in the declaration. According to the first denazification directives of the occupying powers, Protestant Christians in particular feared this public declaration of guilt as a unilateral concession to a victorious justice imposed from abroad and as a further argument for harsh retaliatory measures. These alleged or real allied crimes were countered, according to the Schleswig-Holstein President Wilhelm Halfmann :

“The Polish atrocities, the desecration of women, the destruction of the Central and Eastern European cultural landscape with its abundance of food, the expulsion of the millions - in short, the unprecedented popular murder that is taking place now - isn't it to blame? As long as it is embarrassedly concealed, there is no power over there to speak of German guilt. "

Thus one distanced oneself from the representatives of one's own church as from hostile traitors to the fatherland. The key sentence inserted by Niemöller in particular remained controversial for years and was a stumbling block for many conservative Lutherans who missed the traditional distinction between church and state and wanted to assign responsibility for war and genocide to the state alone . Nobody spoke of anti-Judaism as the root of Nazi ideology anyway; Wurm and Dibelius were anti-Semites and hardly addressed this special responsibility of the church for the Holocaust.

Some Christians from the circle of the Dahlemites , the more radical wing of the BK, criticized the fact that the declaration neither explicitly named the Holocaust nor the causes of war. They contradicted the comparatives adopted by Asmussen ("... not known more courageously ..."), which assumed the positive "we have bravely known". Because the Junge Kirche , a church paper close to the BK, had almost the same formulation in 1939 for the “50. Birthday of the leader "used:

“The Christian, who reverently feels the rule of providence and the step of the Almighty in the changes of the world, hears the call to believe more faithfully in everyday life and on Sundays, to love more deeply, to hope more strongly, to confess more firmly: That alone can be show what is real about the Christian faith ... "

Paul Schempp and Hermann Diem saw the prerequisite that people had confessed courageously, just not courageously enough, as self-praise that was completely inadequate for the facts of the church struggle.

Responses in ecumenism

After the reading it was left to the Anglican Bishop George Bell to indicate the main flaw in the declaration by recalling the resistance of his close friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer and adding:

“No one can shut himself off from this immeasurable cruelty, which was inflicted on the Jews, the displaced persons and the political persons, almost millions of slaves. Even now we are very excited about the expulsions currently taking place from the east. "

Bell did not yet have the extent of the gassings in mind, but highlighted the Jews and addressed the currently necessary solidarity with them. His statement about the “expulsions currently taking place from the East” primarily referred to the expulsion of Jews who had survived the war from Poland after the war , but also to the expulsion of millions of Germans from the Sudetenland and the areas east of Or and Neisse, against whom Bell turned in Great Britain around this time . But he also left it open what the Church had contributed to this cruelty and what special tasks beyond general human concern would be inferred from it in the future.

Reactions in the German regional churches

The council failed to immediately make the text available to the congregations. The authors were all the more surprised by the storm of indignation caused by the publication. Hanns Lilje emphasized that the word was only intended for the addressees of the ecumenical movement. He did not mention that they had been promised publication.

Only four out of 28 Protestant regional churches - Baden, Hanover, Rhineland, Westphalia - and a few district synods expressly adopted the declaration. The other regional churches failed to do this with a view to numerous protest letters from the parishes. These often denied the provisional EKD leadership the right to speak on behalf of all Protestant Christians. Nevertheless, a rethink gradually began: October 31, Reformation Day , and the following November 7, Day of Repentance and Prayer , were used by many pastors as an impetus to deal with the question of guilt.

On November 24th, the EKD leadership sent the declaration together with Hans Asmussen's comment as an official explanation to the regional churches. In it Asmussen emphasized that it was a confession of guilt pronounced only before God. This is valid regardless of what politics make of it. He called on Christians to put all offsetting guilt behind them and turn to God. Then the individual Christian must inevitably turn to the brother, that is, declare solidarity with the guilt of his people and bear its consequences. This priestly attitude is the meaning and expression of true Christian existence. He left open what political consequences this attitude could and must have.

The church historian Martin Greschat explains the reluctance of the council to publish the text itself by saying that the authors were not aware of its scope. In fact, they had assumed political responsibility for the German people and thus initiated a break with the tradition of German national Protestantism that belonged to the authorities. You should have been aware that this first step required follow-up steps and had to be taken as a challenge to all communities.

Continue

In the following years it became apparent that the Stuttgart Declaration was not suitable for promoting the process of coming to terms with the church's failure during the Nazi era in Germany. Initially, it rather contributed to a rapid self-reassurance and turning to restorative tendencies. A clear sign of this was the public relief for numerous former NSDAP members affected by the denazification in the BK, which Hans Meiser gave on March 15, 1947:

“Anyone who belonged to the BK as a member and actively campaigned for it was thus active in a fighting and resistance movement, was in contrast to National Socialism and its worldview and had to face disadvantages as a result. When party members joined the BK, they showed that they were internally far removed from the NS worldview and the DC spirit and that they were loyalty to their church, love for their people and obedience to the divine commandments of law and Place truth higher than party membership. "

This was immediately criticized by members of the BK such as Karl Steinbauer , who, unlike Meiser, Dibelius, Lilje and other authors of the declaration, had been in the concentration camp as a “general persil note”. In view of the then controversial denazification law, the Württemberg theological faculty warned that “the EKiD council may have forgotten that it was a law for liberation from National Socialism and militarism and not a law to purify National Socialism and militarism or even a Law on Moderate Justification ... acts. "

The Darmstädter Wort of 1947 was the first post-war declaration by German Protestants that addressed the long-term historical causes of National Socialism, World War II and the church's shared responsibility for them. The Holocaust and anti-Judaism were not directly mentioned in it either. Decisive impetus for dealing with it was first given by the “Word on the Jewish Question” from the EKD Synod of Berlin-Weißensee in 1950, then the Working Group Jews and Christians at the German Evangelical Church Congress , which was founded in 1961 against the opposition of most of the authors of the Stuttgart Declaration on behalf of the EKD was and still exists today.

See also

literature

  • The Stuttgart Declaration. Ordinance and news sheet of the EKD, No. 1, January 1946
  • Gerhard Besier , Gerhard Sauter : How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1985, ISBN 3-525-52181-2 .
  • Walter Bodenstein: Is Only the Defeated Guilty? The EKD and the Stuttgart confession of guilt from 1945. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main - Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-548-33065-7 .
  • Armin Boyens: Churches in the Post-War Period. Four contemporary historical contributions. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-525-55708-6 .
  • Armin Boyens: The Stuttgart confession of guilt of October 19, 1945 - origin and meaning ; in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19 (1971), pp. 374–397 ( online text (pdf; 5.9 MB) ).
  • Günter Brakelmann : Evangelical Church and the persecution of the Jews. Three insights. In it: Church and the question of complicity, 1945–1950. (Pp. 67-95) Hartmut Spenner Verlag, Waltrop 2001, ISBN 3-933688-53-1 .
  • Wolfgang Gerlach: When the witnesses were silent. Confessing Church and the Jews. Institute Church and Judaism, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-923095-69-4 .
  • Martin Greschat (Ed.): Under the sign of guilt: 40 years Stuttgart confession of guilt, a documentation. Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1985, ISBN 3-7887-0779-8 .
  • Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - Stations after 1945. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1990, ISBN 3-525-55716-7 .
  • Karl Herbert : The church struggle. History or permanent legacy? Evangelisches Verlagswerk, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-7715-0216-0 .
  • Brigitte Hiddemann (ed.): The Stuttgart confession of guilt: 1945–1985. Evangelical Academy, Mülheim / Ruhr 1985.
  • Peter Longerich : “We didn't know anything about it!” The Germans and the persecution of the Jews 1933–1945. Siedler, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88680-843-2 ( reviews ).
  • Hans Prolingheuer : Small political church history. 50 years of Protestant church struggle. Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7609-0870-5 .
  • Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1144-7 .
  • Klauspeter Reumann: Church and National Socialism. Contributions to the history of the church struggle in Schleswig-Holstein. Karl-Wachholz-Verlag, Neumünster 1988, ISBN 3-529-02836-3 .
  • Willem Adolf Visser 't Hooft : The world was my community: autobiography . Munich: Piper 1972 ISBN 3-492-01973-0 .
  • Karl Richard Ziegert: Civil religion - the Protestant betrayal of Luther. How it came about and how it rules. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-7892-8351-2 , Chapter IV / 2: "The Origin of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt" (pp. 187-205).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ first multiplied by the Church Office of ekid on 24 October 1945 version, quoted by Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians confess their guilt , Göttingen 1985, p 62nd
  2. ^ Karl Herbert: Der Kirchenkampf , Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 205f
  3. ↑ Eberhard Bethge: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A biography. Christian Kaiser Verlag, Munich 1967, p. 684ff.
  4. ^ Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - Stations after 1945. Göttingen 1990, p. 48ff.
  5. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 21.
  6. ^ Günter Brakelmann: Evangelical Church and the persecution of the Jews. Three insights. Waltrop 2001, p. 75.
  7. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Cologne 1987, p. 55.
  8. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Cologne 1987, p. 78.
  9. ^ Hans Prolingheuer: Small political church history , Cologne 1984, p. 95.
  10. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 46, note 29.
  11. ^ Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - Stations after 1945. Göttingen 1990, p. 262.
  12. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 13.
  13. ↑ Martin Greschat (ed.): Under the sign of guilt: 40 years of Stuttgart confession of guilt, a documentation. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1985, p. 10.
  14. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 16.
  15. ^ Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - stations after 1945. Göttingen 1990, p. 265.
  16. ^ Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - Stations after 1945. Göttingen 1990, p. 266.
  17. ↑ a b Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 17.
  18. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 24ff
  19. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 53.
  20. ↑ Martin Greschat (ed.): Under the sign of guilt: 40 years of Stuttgart confession of guilt, a documentation. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1985, p. 9.
  21. ↑ Martin Greschat (ed.): Under the sign of guilt: 40 years of Stuttgart confession of guilt, a documentation. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1985, p. 10.
  22. ^ W. Visser 't Hooft: The world was my community , p. 230 f.
  23. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 30.
  24. ^ Klauspeter Reumann: Church and National Socialism. Contributions to the history of the church struggle in Schleswig-Holstein. Neumünster 1988, p. 387.
  25. ↑ Hans Prolingheuer: We went astray. The guilt of the church under the swastika. Cologne 1987, p. 167.
  26. ↑ Gerhard Besier, Gerhard Sauter: How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Göttingen 1985, p. 32.
  27. ^ Klauspeter Reumann: Church and National Socialism. Contributions to the history of the church struggle in Schleswig-Holstein. Neumünster 1988, p. 381.
  28. ↑ Heinz Eduard Tödt: Dealing with guilt in the church confession and in the judiciary after 1945. In: Wolfgang Huber: Positions und Profiles im Nachkriegsdeutschland , S. 123ff.
  29. ^ Klauspeter Reumann: Church and National Socialism. Contributions to the history of the church struggle in Schleswig-Holstein. Neumünster 1988, p. 392.
  30. ^ Hans Prolingheuer: Small political church history , Cologne 1984, p. 94.
  31. ↑ Wolfgang Gerlach: When the witnesses were silent: Confessing Church and the Jews. Institute Church and Judaism, 1987, ISBN 3-923095-60-0 , p. 380.
  32. ↑ Martin Greschat (ed.): Under the sign of guilt: 40 years of Stuttgart confession of guilt, a documentation. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1985, p. 18.
  33. ↑ Harry Noormann (ed.): Protestantism and political mandate 1945-1949: Documents and comments. Volume 2, Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1985, ISBN 3-579-00126-4 , p. 105.
  34. ↑ Harry Noormann (ed.): Protestantism and political mandate 1945–1949: floor plan. Volume 1, Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1985, ISBN 3-579-00125-6 , p. 118; quoted in Hans Prolingheuer: Kleine political church history , Cologne 1984, p. 163.
  35. ^ Siegfried Hermle: Evangelical Church and Judaism - Stations after 1945. 1990, p. 11.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on August 6, 2007 in this version .