Preaching in Hitler’s shadow

PREACHING IN HITLER’S SHADOW: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich, Edited by Dean G Stroud (Williams & Eerdemans, 2013). 203pp

Reviewed by Paddy Kearney
This inspiring book is a collection of sermons by ten pastors, including the well-known Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Martin Niem ller, and Rudolf Bultmann.

Editor Dean G Stroud’s magisterial essay on the Historical context of preaching in the Third Reich is an excellent preparation for reading the sermons, together with his informative introduction to each of the preachers in which he details the price they paid for their extraordinary courage.

The author says very simply of these ten men: Each preacher in this collection…deserves our respect and gratitude for his Christian witness and courage in the face of terrible evil. Some of these preachers died because of these sermons; all risked their lives.

Dean Stroud’s historical essay gives remarkable examples of the lengths to which the Nazis went in their attempt to distort the Christian faith so that it could support their poisonous ideology.

They even rewrote that most German of Christmas carols, Silent Night to read:

Silent Night! Holy night! 
All is calm, all is bright
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight
Watches oer Germany by day and by night
Always caring for us.

They didn’t allow the fact that Jesus was a Jew to deter them from asserting that he was an Aryan.

Some went even further, delighting in presenting Adolf Hitler as a Christ-like figure. They worked hard to ensure that ideas, views, beliefs and actions, in fact everyone and everything in the Third Reich would conform to Nazi principles or be destroyed.

A small number of Lutheran pastors publicly rejected this distortion of Christian belief and practice in what became known as the confessional movement. The preachers whose sermons are published in this book painstakingly revealed the truth about Nazi distortions. But the price for such adherence to true Christianity was that: Every confessional sermon left the pastor open to arrest or worse.

All the sermons selected are moving in the light of Stroud’s historical context, but I found myself more moved by the sermons of less well-known pastors in this book, such as Helmut Gollwitzer and Gerhard Ebeling, perhaps because of their less academic and more direct and blunt approach.

Gollwitzer, preaching after the dreadful events of Kristallnacht when Jews and their synagogues were publicly attacked right across Germany, challenged his congregants: Now just outside this church our neighbour is waiting for us waiting for us in his need and lack of protection, disgraced, hungry, hunted and driven by fear for his very existence. That is the one who is waiting to see if today this Christian congregation has really observed this national day of penance. Jesus Christ himself is waiting to see.

Cardinal Clemens von Galen of Munster

Ebeling’s sermon is about Aktion T4, a Nazi programme to get rid of people who were regarded as unproductive or useless mental patients, cripples, wounded soldiers, feeble elderly people. They were transported to killing facilities and gassed in showers.

He uses the text of Matthew 18:10 Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones. Germans should take heed, said Ebeling, Jesus stands for the little ones of our time, the weak, the sick and the vulnerable.

That is also the theme of the sermon by Bishop Clemens von Galen of Munster, the only Catholic included.

He started his ministry off as a conservative pastor who hoped that Hitler would be the leader a defeated and suffering nation needed. Gradually he began to see the awful truth about Hitler’s programme.

In three sermons preached in July and August 1941 he directly confronted particular crimes of Nazism.

In the first he spoke about how no German could be safe from being summarily arrested by the Gestapo and taken to one of their concentration camps.

In the second he encouraged Catholic Christians to stand firm knowing that in their faith and obedience to God they might have to give their very lives because they had become the anvil, not the hammer.

In the third the one included in this book he addressed head-on the horrors of the Aktion T4 killings that were coming to his personal attention. He chose the great prophetic text, Luke 19:44: Behold, the days will come when your enemy dashes you to the ground, you and your children, and no stone will be left on top of another, because you did not recognise the days of your visitation.

Though Nazi leaders called for von Galen’s execution for treason, Hitler feared that this would spark outright revolt in Munster. Instead of execution von Galen was placed under house arrest for the next four years.

In Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow Dean Stroud has produced a fine piece of scholarship on a most relevant topic. This book should be prescribed reading for every seminarian and every scholastic.

If there are book clubs for priests, it would be a most suitable text for study and discussion. Here is no end to the need for prophetic preaching and witness.