The Grey Book Part 1

The Grey Book.

by Johan M. Snoek.

INTRODUCTION (by Uriel Tal)

The protests of the non-Roman Catholic Churches against the persecution and extermination of the Jews during the n.a.z.i period, carefully compiled and amply doc.u.mented in this volume, possess a significance that is not confined to the history of Christian-Jewish relations. They const.i.tute an important chapter in the history of Christianity itself in that they reveal the deeper aspects of the Church's antagonism to the anti-religious and hence anti-Christian character of n.a.z.i anti-semitism.

The well-attested facts presented to us in this volume are a clear confirmation of the Church's reputation of n.a.z.i doctrines, not only when these doctrines were directed against the Jews but, first and foremost, when they threatened the very existence of the Church itself, both as a system of theological doctrines and beliefs and as an historical inst.i.tution.

The Church regarded freedom, freedom of man as well as its own, as an inalienable right rooted in the nature of man as a rational being created in G.o.d's image. Hence, when the Church was deprived at the right of self-determination, it felt its very existence endangered, and it was then that it recognized the full symbolic import of Jewish persecution. This view was plainly set forth at the beginning of the persecution of the Jews by the n.a.z.i-regime in Holland, by D. J. Slotemaker de Bruine, Protestant pastor and Minister of State, who declared:

"...Freedom of the spirit is our life-blood. By that I mean freedom in questions of the spirit, freedom of conscience, freedom of the Church, freedom of instruction, freedom of the Word of G.o.d, freedom to bear witness..." [1]

In the light of this statement it is obvious that the Church was provoked to raise its voice in protest chiefly because the n.a.z.is appropriated the messianic structure of religion which they exploited to their own ideological and political ends.

This was made clear already in the early days of the Third Reich by "Die Geistlichen Mitglieder der Vorlaufigen Leitung der Evangelischen Kirche" who, in a memorandum (Denkschrift) addressed to the Fuehrer (May 1936), accuse Hitler of pursuing a policy that is not only directed against the Church but which is designed "to de-Christianize the German people" (das deutsche Volk zu entchristlichen), quoting, among other things, the words of Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Robert Ley:

"The Party lays total claim to the soul of the German people...and hence we demand the last German, whether Protestant or Catholic..." [2]

To those Church circles that raised their voices in protest this totalitarian structure of the n.a.z.i regime presented a double threat to the very existence of the Church. First, the pseudo-religious and pseudomessianic character of n.a.z.ism was calculated to weaken the Church from within and to mislead the Christian community, especially its youth. It became increasingly clear to these circles that the n.a.z.i racial doctrine - which Hitler and also the "Deutsche Christen" had called positive Christianity in their first formulation as early as 5 May 1932 - const.i.tuted a kind of additional gospel of messianic redemption that ostensibly strengthened Christianity as an inst.i.tution and as a religion of revelation. Secondly, this pseudo- messianic and pseudo-religious authority that the n.a.z.i regime arrogated to itself was able by means of its repressive measures to curtail the influence of the Church and even to reduce it to silence. This danger was perceived at an early date by the "Bekenntnissynode der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche" in its Botschaft (Part I, par 2, 5) adopted by the Conference held in Berlin- Dahlem 19-20 October 1934, which stated: "The National Church that the Reich's bishop has in view under the slogan: One State - one People - one Church, simply means that the Gospel is no longer valid for the German Evangelical Church and that the mission of the Church is delivered to the powers of this world.... The introduction of the Fuehrer principle into the Church and the demand of unconditional obedience based upon this principle are contrary to the Word of Scripture and bind the officials of the Church to the Church regiment instead of to Christ... [3]

Towards the end of the period that is dealt with in the sources collected in this volume, in the year 1943, we also meet with a clear expression of the Church's opposition to this pseudo-religious and pseudo-messianic character of n.a.z.ism in the "Pastoral concerning National Socialist Philosophy" that was sent in Holland:

... to parochial church councillors to give them the necessary basis for their opposition in the struggle against National Socialist ideology, and especially against the intangible, but all the more dangerous religious ideas and expressions of National Socialism which will exercise an influence even after the war."

In its penetrating a.n.a.lysis of the totalitarian character of n.a.z.ism this Pastoral observes:

"...It is not surprising that National Socialism has the power to become the religion of the ma.s.ses, and its a.s.semblies to take the form of a kind of popular wors.h.i.+p in which a great deal of latent religious emotion is released.... In carrying out its ministry the Church must therefore make its work in this connection even more definite in character, and must tell its members very clearly and resolutely that what is at stake here is the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other G.o.ds besides me...!" [4]

This pseudo-religious and pseudo-messianic character of n.a.z.ism was by no means accidental or the product of ma.s.s hysteria induced by some skilful propagandists. It was rather an ideological structure that was consciously given definite patterns and developed within a conceptual system in accordance with its own laws of logic. In this development the traditional theological concepts of Christianity were retained but given an altogether different meaning. Values that had previously been regarded as relative in the culture of Christianity and of the West now became absolute; and values that had formerly been considered absolute, being interpreted as metaphorical or visionary, became relative. Phenomena with an imminent historical essence were lifted to a meta-historical plane. Means were converted to ends, and ends were endowed with absolute authority in so far as they sanctified the means.

In this manner the fundamental concepts of religion were not invalidated nor the integrative functions served by these concepts impaired, such as those cohesive factors that hold together the social structure and ensure its normal functioning. The n.a.z.is retained these concepts and their functions as a legitimate part of their racial theory and, after depriving them of their authentic historical content, turned them into political expedients to be used in their attack against humanism, religion and Christian values.

Basic theological concepts such as G.o.d, redemption, sin and revelation were now used as anthropological and political concepts. G.o.d became man, but not in the theological Christian sense of the incarnation of the Word: "...and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us..." (John 1. 14) or in the Pauline conception of the incarnation of G.o.d in Christ in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2. 9).

In the new conception G.o.d becomes man in a political sense as a member of the Aryan race whose highest representative on earth is the Fuehrer.

This change in the essential meaning of the concepts G.o.d-man is, from the standpoint of cognition, effected by converting the relative into the absolute and, from the standpoint of theology, by transferring the Pauline conception (Ephesians 4. 24; Colossians 3. 10) from the plane of metaphysics and eschatology to that of nationality rind politics.

It was this radical change from Christian doctrines to pagan myths that aroused the Churches to express their protest against n.a.z.ism, and also against the persecution of the Jews, in the above Pastoral of the year 1943:

"And there is now a return to the wors.h.i.+p of life and power by accepting and exalting the old Adam as the original and eternal MAN. There is an attempt at self-salvation - the old Adam is not crucified with Christ (Rom. 6. 6) but by his very own inmost strength achieves a new life and a heightened vitality..." [5]

Similarly, the theological concepts of sin and redemption were transferred to a legal category of administrative regulations that demanded outer conformity and inner obedience. The traditional conception of sin and redemption that was common to all currents of Christian thought held that man's redemption, and hence eschatological existence, depends on his faith: "the righteousness of G.o.d through faith in Jesus Christ... since all have sinned and... they are justified by grace... through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus..."(Rom. 3. 22-24). In the totalitarian n.a.z.i regime the concepts sin and redemption were used as means by the State or the Party to convert man into a loyal subject whose allegiance is a.s.sured by his constant fear not only of violating some concrete ordinance or governmental decree but simply of just deviating from the official ideology. The Christian belief that man could be saved through faith in the forgiveness of Jesus who died for his sins, "so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin" (Rom. 6.6), was transferred from the theological to the secular, political plane. Even the comforting a.s.surance of the believer that his sins shall be forgiven and that he shall be found worthy of the purifying influences of grace could now be gained only by the individual's complete identification with the State, the Party and the superior Aryan race.

An instructive ill.u.s.tration of this s.h.i.+ft from theology to ideology is to be found in the circular letters (Rundschreiben) and in the speeches of the Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Robert Ley, for example in his words of 26. June 1935:

"Strength through joy (Kraft durch Freude) is the embodiment of National Socialism.

Over against sin we put discipline, over against penitence pride! Over against the weak and their infirmities we put strength... " [6]

This doctrine was not mere Aryan propaganda; it became an integral part of school studies and was systematically inculcated into the minds of the young.

The following is an example of a dictation given in 1934 to the third grade of an elementary school:

"Just as Jesus redeemed mankind from sin and h.e.l.l, so did Hitler rescue the German people from destruction. Jesus and Hitler were persecuted; but whereas Jesus was crucified, Hitler rose to be Chancellor... Jesus worked for heaven, Hitler for the German soil..." [7]

This same pattern of reversing meanings was also applied by the totalitarian n.a.z.i regime to the basic concepts of western culture. Nationalism as an historical phenomenon of a people with a common language and culture and with the consciousness of a common destiny was raised to a mythical, meta-historical plane. The essence of national unity was discovered to reside in race and soil; the cultural and spiritual creations of the nation were attributed to man's biological resources. Similarly, the State became an end in itself, an ideal meta-historical ent.i.ty that was identical with the national spirit. [8]

This view was critically described by the Dutch Church as follows:

"... The whole cult of National Socialism finds its most powerful manifestation in a State which claims to support, lead and fill in the material and spiritual, educational, cultural and religious spheres, the whole life of its subjects. Not only does the State order the life of the individual, but it takes a creative part in it. It becomes the founder of the true religion and the dispenser of the true philosophy; it furnishes the data for knowledge..." [9]

Mythical nationality in the totalitarian regime thus developed a monolithic structure which functioned as the only ontological framework in which the individual may acquire his own ident.i.ty, his selfknowledge and understanding.

While in a different, non-totalitarian civilization man establishes his inner freedom by means of intellectual autonomy, the n.a.z.i regime made the actual biological belonging to the Aryan race into the ultimate condition for the self-realization of Man.

Hence one who could not belong to the Aryan race, the prototype of whom was the Jew, was doomed to be completely alienated, deprived not only of all rights, but of the very justification to exist. It was this reversal of the status of the individual which prepared the ground for subsequent developments against which the Church protested, such as forced labour, the repression of independent thought, the indoctrination of the young by the State and their estrangement from their parents, teachers and preachers. An example of this tendency towards the total dehumanization of the individual, as reflected in the persecution of the Jews, and that provoked the Church to protest, was the decree authorizing sterilization. The stand of the Church in this matter was stated in the "Letter on the Question of Sterilization"

that was sent in May 1943 by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Holland to the officials of the Reich and in which, among other things, we find the following:

"...In the last few weeks the sterilization of the so-called mixed marriages has begun. But G.o.d, who created heaven and earth and whose commandments are for all men, and to whom even your Excellency will have to give account one day, has said to mankind: 'Be fruitful and multiply' (Gen. 1. 18).

Sterilization is a physical and spiritual mutilation directly at variance with G.o.d's commandment that we shall not dishonour, hate, wound or kill our neighbours. Sterilization const.i.tutes a violation of the divine commandment as well as of human rights. It is the last consequence of an anti-Christian racial doctrine that destroys nations, and of a boundless self-exaltation.

It represents a view of the world and of life which undermines true Christian human life, rendering it ultimately impossible... [10]

The fact that the protest of the Church against the persecution and annihilation of the Jews was an inseparable part of its general protest against the inhuman and anti-Christian character of modern anti-semitism places the doc.u.ments collected in this volume in a broad historical context.

These doc.u.ments offer ample evidence of the Church's opposition to an historical phenomenon rooted long before the n.a.z.is came to power, hence also prior to the rise of modern anti-semitism. The protest of the Church was fundamentally directed against those pagan and mythological elements that had crept into Christianity itself in the course of its historical development among the heathen.

To many of the fathers of modern anti-semitism, which is the racial and political Anti-semitism that arose towards the end of the 19th century and reached its highest stage during the Third Reich, the rejection of Judaism was tantamount to the rejection of religion in general.

This view goes back to Feuerbach's anthropological criticism of religion, to the young Hegelians (Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer) and to the early Romantics who longed to return to the primitive forms of a religion called "vorchristliches Germanenthum". [11] Modern anti-semitism was influenced by these streams of thought through Nietzsche's concept of the 'Antichrist', although Nietzsche himself kept aloof from the more vulgar manifestations of political anti-semitism of his day. In him the anthropological view reaches its culmination - G.o.d, who is nothing more than the deified form of man [12] is finally overthrown by Dionysian man who found courage to a.s.sert his instinctive life and abjure the gross and enslaving notions of Christianity that men are equal and can be redeemed by faith, the gospel of the downtrodden and everything that creeps on earth. [13] These views, inimical to religion and to Christianity, were already being expounded with great vigour towards the end of the 19th century. Christian doctrine was accused of perverting man's instinctive life, vitiating his natural enthusiasm, inflaming his ego, invading his private life over which it declares its dominance only to enslave human nature, to weaken and alienate man, by imposing upon him "un-natural" restraint such as the anguish of his conscience.

Wilhelm Marr, one of the early fathers of modem racial and political Anti-semitism and the man who during the late 70's coined the term 'anti-semitism'[14] included in the rejection of Judaism his critique of Christianity as early as the year 1862. In a polemical work called "Der Christenspiegel von anti-Marr" by Moritz Freystadt, a member of the "Society for History and Theology" in Leipzig, written in answer to Marr's "Judenspiegel", the author interprets Marr's rejection of Judaism as a rejection of monotheism, based on his anthropological view of G.o.d as a subjective product of our conscious life - an antireligious a.n.a.lysis Marr evidently borrowed from Voltaire, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. [15]

With Marr's intensification of anti-Jewish propaganda inspired by the new racial anti-semitism we find increased criticism of Christianity both as a system of beliefs and as an inst.i.tution. In one of his popular books "Religioese Streifzuege eines Philosophischen Touristen" (1876) Marr, relying on theories propounded by Voltaire and Feuerbach, observes that from the atheistic point of view it is evident: "that Christianity, in its dogmas and precepts, is like every religion, a malady of human consciousness. The philosopher explains... every religion as a product of man's conscious life and relegates to the sphere of phantasm the so-called 'revelations' of which all people boast depending on the state of their culture..." [16]

Most additional factors in the rejection of Judaism, Marr continues, go beyond the attack directed against Christianity as a system of beliefs and superst.i.tions that demoralizes man and corrupts his nature. Anti-semitism is not only called to combat religion and Christianity; its chief aim is to save the German nation and the whole world from Jewish domination and from the moral depredation of the Jewish race. Christianity is not yet fully cognizant of the gravity of the problem, and it deceives itself when it thinks that baptism or conversion is a gratuitous deliverance from native corruption, for the Jew's aberrations are not religious but biological and hence incorrigible. The Jewish question, Marr concludes, is a racial question for the infidelity of the Jew is essentially biological, and hence Christianity is in no position to save the world from the perils of the Semitic-Jewish race. [17]

We here encounter a primary distinction between the doctrines of racial anti-semitism and those of the Christian Heilsgeschichte, a contradiction that awoke the Church to the dangers of n.a.z.ism when, in 1933, it opposed the "Arierparagraph". This racial law rejected the notion that the Jews could still hope for redemption, and for a renewed status of election, a.s.sured them in the New Testament (Rom. 9-11) on condition that they acknowledge their error and accept the redeeming truth of Christianity.

Even in the early years of racial anti-semitism, in the seventies and eighties of the last century, we already find this inner contradiction between a racial theory that regards Jews as the ontological embodiment of an ineradicable evil and the views of the Heilgeschichte that believes this evil to be remedial if only the Jews could be persuaded that salvation comes from the Savior who was sent first of all to the Jews themselves, and who atoned for the sins of all mankind.

It is this inner tension between the recalcitrance of the Jew and the incorrigibility of Judaism that refuses to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, already conspicuous in the change that took place in Luther's att.i.tude to the Jews between 1523 and 1543, which charactarizes the theological and political att.i.tude of Adolf Stoecker, court preacher in the Bismarck era and one of the leading figures of modern anti-semitism. Until recently historians concentrated much on his importance in preparing the ground for racial and political anti-semitism. It is true that without his powerful influence during the last decades of the 19th century the rise of modern political anti-semitism would be incomprehensible. A more balanced approach has been taken lately, as may be seen in the instructive study by Walter Holsten on the part played by Stoecker in the rise of modern anti-semitism.

The author shows that many phases of Stoecker's anti-semitism had their roots in the conservative tradition of Lutheranism and at the same time were opposed to the anti-Christian tendencies of racial anti-semitism. [18]

The early phases of Stoecker's activity already reveal the ambivalent nature of his att.i.tude to the Jews and to Judaism, an ambivalency that characterized the anti-Christian elements in antisemitic "Christian"

ideology throughout the days of the Third Reich. In his speeches after the political defeat of his Christian Social Labor Party in the summer of 1878, Stoecker insisted on making a distinction between the anti-Jewish att.i.tude that arises in conjunction with or flows from Christianity and the antisemitic att.i.tude which at the same time also impugns Christian ethics. In his well-known antisemitic speech as early as 19.9.1879 Stoecker warns his listeners:

"We can already detect here and there a hatred directed against the Jews that is contrary to the Gospels". [19]

Even in his most violent speeches against the Jews Stoecker did not draw the extreme biological consequences of his racial theories and continued to maintain that conversion was the only authentic solution to the Jewish question that would complete the universal mission of Christianity and that only baptism could save the Jews from their ignominious belief in the validity of the halacha after the coming of Jesus. The salvation promised to the Jew then is to be saved from his Judaism. The final redemption, however, will not raise the Jews above the nations of the world, as promised in the Old Testament, but this position of eminence and election will pa.s.s, or actually has already pa.s.sed, from the Jews not just to the Christians but to Christian Germany. The redemption promised to the Jews is thus to be attained by way of the baptismal font at the entrance to the Church: "All Israel will be saved when the fullness of the heathen shall have come to an end. This was Paul's promise to his beloved people - final salvation and not a future glory that will raise Israel above the other nations as proclaimed in the Old Testament... and every believing Christian knows well what a rejoicing there will be in the Kingdom of G.o.d when the people of the Old Testament finally acknowledge their sin against Christ and repent. This event will be hailed by all Christendom and by the angelic hosts with paeans of praise, and it will be turned by the Church in the End of Days into glory and renown when Israel will bring to it its uncommon religious talents and intellectual gifts..." [20]

The inner tension between the theological view that sees the solution of the Jewish question in the liquidation of Judaism and the racial view that sees it in the liquidation of the Jews is clearly expressed in an address delivered by Stoecker on 8.2.1882 about the danger to the German Reich from Jews in public life, in which he states:

"We regard the Jewish question not as a religious nor indeed as a racial question. Although it is at bottom both of these, it appears in its external form as a social-ethical question, and is treated by us as such. No people can tolerate the preponderance of an alien spirit without degenerating and being destroyed? We would not solve the Jewish question radically by force, but gradually in a spirit of peace and amity... We must keep the wounds open until they are healed..." [21]

Although Stoecker himself was opposed to the use of force, modern political anti-semitism, which was to no small degree influenced by him, did not shrink from advocating violence in its hostility to Judaism, to religion and finally to Christianity.

A significant contribution in this direction was made by the Darwinian racial doctrines of Eugen Duehring and his antisemitic disciples. Whereas Marr had formulated the anti-religious meaning of modern anti-semitism in ominous terms of the Jewish domination of Europe and especially Germany, Duhring adopted a so-called constructive approach by suggesting an alternative to religion and religious culture, namely, race. In his antisemitic writings after 1880 Judaism serves as the prototype of religion in general, including Christianity. The primary aim of this anti-Christian anti-semitism was for Duehring the struggle against Jews and Judaism, and this also entailed the struggle against the monotheistic religions and all forces that suppressed what he called "the instinct of the free, natural life." In his anti-religious book "Wert des Lebens" (1877), and especially in the third edition issued four years later, he points out that Christianity as a monotheistic religion is opposed to life and that all religious systems are nothing but pathological maladies (ein Stueck weltgeschichtliche Krankheitslehre des Geistes).

Christianity is thus not interested "in enn.o.bling man, but rather in suppressing his natural instincts" as is evident, for example, in the "paradox Christian doctrine" of the crucifixion of the flesh. [22] Hence, it is absurd and hopeless to conduct the struggle against the Jews with Christian theological concepts borrowed from Judaism, and those Christians who attach importance to this only deceive themselves for it is plain that:

"...their anti-semitism lacks the primary truth, namely, that Christianity itself is Semitism, a truth... that must serve as the terminus a quo for all genuine anti-Hebraism..." [23]

As long as the Christians fail to disavow their Jewish source and their Jewishness they themselves will be tainted by its anti-natural influence.

But since Christianity is inextricably bound to its Jewish origins, and even the New Testament is nothing but "a racially Jewish tradition" (eine ra.s.senjuedische Ueberlieferung), the only hope for struggling humanity is to throw off once for all this humiliating yoke, meaning the religious heritage of Jews and Christians alike.

The liberation from the Jewish-Christian heritage, on the one hand, and the strengthening of the Nordic German race on the other cannot be achieved through the process of education or civilization but only by means of racial purity which will cleanse man of religious depravities and restore the vital sources of his instinctive life. Christianity is inadequate for this struggle since it is itself ineradicably debased by its complicity with Judaism: "Those who would cling to Christian tradition are in no position to combat Judaism effectively. ...An understanding Christian cannot be a serious antisemite... The Nordic G.o.ds are rooted in nature itself, and no millennial diversion can eradicate them... We here see a vivid phantasy in operation that is incomparably loftier than the Jewish slave-imagination..." [24]

This basic thesis that racial anti-semitism must also be directed against Christianity continued to be elaborated from the end of the 19th century onwards by Theodor Fritsch as well as in a number of journals: the Antisemit.i.tche Correspondenz, which in 1888 became the official organ of the D.A.P. under the name of Deutsche-Soziale Blaetter, the Antisemiten-Katechismus which was later called Handbuch zur judenfrage and, in the early years of the present century, the influential journal Hammer. The general tendency of this movement was directed against Christianity as an ecclesiastical inst.i.tution, sometimes chiefly against the Catholic Church which was suspected of "ultramontanist" sympathies for a foreign ecclesiastical power. Christianity was also opposed as a system of beliefs and practices that tended to debilitate the German Aryan race in its struggle for existence.

Finally, Christianity was opposed because of its Jewish origins which deteriorate the whole human race by elevating spirit over body, rational thought over the wisdom of the senses, abstract ideas over direct and spontaneous experience, and the discursive intellect over the vital emotions.

In the course of this debate the antisemitic movement displayed a readiness to reconcile itself to the continued existence of Christianity on condition that it subsitute the biological values of the Aryan race for its Jewish origins, as was recommended by the idealogues who made Jesus a member of the Aryan race - Julius Langbehn, Max Bewer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Leopold Werner, and the German Christians in the days of the Third Reich. [25]

We find the same line of thought pursued by the followers of Duehring, such as Prof. Paul Foerster, as well as in those circles connected with the antisemitic journals, such as Heimdall, Freideutschland, Staatsburger Zeitung, also some of the functionaries connected with the imperialist Der Alldeutscher Verband, such as Friedrich Lange, the author of the anti-Christian Reines Deutschtum (1893), and numerous writers, historians, orientalists, scientists and students influenced by anthropology, materialism and Darwinism. A popular exposition that reveals the national and Romantic roots of this ideology appeared in the Hammer (Oct. 1908), and reads in part as follows:

"What shall we do with a Christ whose kingdom is not of this world? A Bluecher, a Gneisenau, a Koerner, an Arndt can always be useful for Germany, but not a Christ. The G.o.d who was called upon at Leuthen, Leipzig and Sedan was not the G.o.d of love, nor the G.o.d of Abraham. Christ comforts the lowly, the weak and the sick. We too are sorry for these poor folk and try to alleviate their condition; but they are of no use to us and to our future.

They only degrade that which we deem to be the highest good - the German character. Strength, health, the joy of life are what we need. The kingdom of Heaven can be left to the lowly and the wretched, as long as we possess the earth. Give the Bible to the sick and the lonely, the shut-ins and the scholars who wear their faces on their backs!..." [26]