![]() The Bekennende Kirche-the "Confessing Church"-emerged in opposition to the “German Christians.” Its founding document, the Barmen Confession of Faith, declared that the church's allegiance was to God and scripture, not a worldly Führer. Once the Nazis came to power, this group sought the creation of a national "Reich Church" and supported a "nazified" version of Christianity. During the 1920s, a movement emerged within the German Evangelical Church called the Deutsche Christen, or "German Christians." The "German Christians" embraced many of the nationalistic and racial aspects of Nazi ideology. Historically the German Evangelical Church viewed itself as one of the pillars of German culture and society, with a theologically grounded tradition of loyalty to the state. Most of Germany's 40 million Protestants were members of this church, although there were smaller so-called "free" Protestant churches, such as Methodist and Baptist churches. The largest Protestant church in Germany in the 1930s was the German Evangelical Church, comprised of 28 regional churches or Landeskirchen that included the three major theological traditions that had emerged from the Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed, and United. ![]() It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved from within on the basis of the common good before individual good."ĭespite the open antisemitism of this statement and its linkage between confessional "freedom" and a nationalistic, racialized understanding of morality, many Christians in Germany at the time read this as an affirmation of Christian values. ![]() The Party as such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without tying itself confessionally to any one confession. "We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. They were also persuaded by the statement on “positive Christianity” in Article 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, which read: These were some of the reasons why most Christians in Germany welcomed the rise of Nazism in 1933. Resentment toward the international community in the wake of World War I, which Germany lost and for which it was forced to pay heavy reparations.Backlash against the Weimar Republic and the political, economic, and social changes in Germany that occurred during the 1920s.The attitudes and actions of German Catholics and Protestants during the Nazi era were shaped not only by their religious beliefs, but by other factors as well, including: For all too many Christians, traditional interpretations of religious scriptures seemed to support these prejudices. How did Christians and their churches in Germany respond to the Nazi regime and its laws, particularly to the persecution of the Jews? The racialized anti-Jewish Nazi ideology converged with antisemitism that was historically widespread throughout Europe at the time and had deep roots in Christian history. The Jewish community in Germany in 1933 was less than 1% of the total population of the country. 20 million members) or the Protestant (ca. Almost all Germans were Christian, belonging either to the Roman Catholic (ca. The population of Germany in 1933 was around 60 million.
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