This week, on Saturday, we will have the 80th anniversary of the WWII Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945). There, 8,407 U.S. soldiers lost their lives, 46,170 were wounded and 20,905 declared missing. There were also an estimated 103,900 German casualties.

Next week, on Monday, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation.

On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. Historians estimate that more than a million people were “exterminated” in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jewish. Although most of the prisoners had been killed, about 7,000 had been left behind. The date is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But another commemoration, about which one does not hear much these days, is the 80th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church, which arose in opposition to German government-sponsored efforts to unify all the Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church

When I was a seminary student in Detroit, Michigan, one of my professors introduced me to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, first published in 1951. It was a mind-opening experience, for a very pious seminarian. The book was compiled by Bonhoeffer’s good friend, the German theologian and pastor, Eberhard Bethge (1909 – 2000). It is based on letters and papers that Bonhoeffer had written and received during his imprisonment at Tegel Prison, north of Berlin.

Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for 1½ years. Later, he was moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp, near the German border with what was then Czechoslovakia. At Flossenbürg, on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging.

One year before the Nazis executed him, Bonhoeffer had written to Bethge: “What is bothering me incessantly is the question about what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.”

Bonhoeffer felt that the time had come for a “religionless Christianity,” because so much institutional religion seemed so alien to the Gospel. Today, I would say he was writing about the problem “churchianity.”

“During the last year or so,” Bonhoeffer continued, “I have come to know and understand more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a human person as Jesus was a human person…I am still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith….By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes, failures, and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God. That, I think, is faith. And that is how one becomes a human and a Christian.”

We do not know how Bonhoeffer would have developed these ideas. I wish he could have lived longer. Ironically, he was executed just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the Flossenbürg camp. And a month before the unconditional surrender of the remaining German armed forces on May 8, 1945, ending World War II in Europe.

History does not repeat itself, but some historic mistakes are often ignored and repeated.

We can indeed learn a few lessons from the Bonhoeffer era as we see abuses of power and the betrayals of leadership in our own days — inside and outside of the church.

Bonhoeffer was alarmed that so many Christian church leaders (Protestant and Catholic) openly supported Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945). He was even more alarmed that so many Christian men and women tacitly supported the inhumane Nazi regime through their own silence and inaction.

Adolf Hitler was baptized as a Catholic but was not at all a Christian believer. He and his Nazi party promoted “Positive Christianity,” a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines. His involvement in “Positive Christianity” was driven by opportunism and a pragmatic recognition of the political importance of the Christian churches. It was promoted as well by Nazi Party condemnation of criticism from a “lying press” during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

In Hitler’s “Positive Christianity” and his exaggerated self-pride, Hitler and his Nazi zealots saw the Führer as the herald of a new revelation. He proclaimed Jesus as an “Aryan fighter” who struggled against “the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945), Reich Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, wrote in April 1941, in his diary, that although Hitler was a powerful opponent of the Vatican and Christianity, “…he forbids me to leave the church, for tactical reasons.” In his memoirs, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments Albert Speer (1905 – 1981) wrote that Hitler “…conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him.”

For further reading and reflection, I recommend a book by Doris L. Bergen: Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Bergen’s work contributes to current scholarly inquiry into the behavior of Christian clergy during the Nazi era. How did Christian clergy respond to the persecution of Jews and individuals with disabilities? Bergen shows that the military chaplains were indifferent to their suffering. The desire to avoid opposing Nazi policy prevailed among military chaplains just as it did among most civilian clergy.  

History does not repeat itself, but some historic mistakes are often ignored and repeated….

Jack

Dr. John A. Dick – Historical Theologian

Current Research Focus: Religion and Values in U.S. Society