German Christians (movement)
[3] During the period of the German Empire, before the Weimar Republic, the Protestant churches (Landeskirchen) in Germany were divided along state and provincial borders.
In Alsace-Lorraine the Napoleonic system of établissements publics du culte for the Calvinist, Jewish, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic congregations and umbrellas remained in effect.
The "Martin Luther Memorial Church" (Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche), which was built in Berlin from 1933 to 1935 included a pulpit that showed the Sermon on the Mount with a Stahlhelm-wearing Wehrmacht soldier listening to Jesus and a baptismal font which featured an SA stormtrooper.
In 1931, the book Salvation from chaotic madness by Guida Diehl, the first speaker of the National Socialist Women's League, got an admiring review by the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte—she was praised for fighting against the "ridicule of Christ" and "showing the way for German Christians".
By June 1933, the German Christians had gained leadership of some Landeskirchen within the DEK and were, of course, supported by Nazi propaganda in their efforts to reverse the humiliating loss to Bodelschwingh.
They found their model in the Berlin Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker, who was politically active and tried to position the Christian working-classes and lower-middle-classes against what he perceived as Jewish Überfremdung.
For Schemann his legacy consisted largely of his struggle against the Jews: "Not since the days of Schopenhauer and Wagner is the German thinker so mightily opposed this alien people, which desecrates our holy possessions, poisons our people, and seeks to wrest our property from us so as to completely trample on us, as Lagarde has" It was this image of Lagarde, the antisemitic prophet of a purified and heroic Germany, which the political Wagnerites and the Bayreuther Blätter kept alive.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner's son-in-law and intellectual disciple, wrote: "For us, the Deutsche Schriften have for a long time belonged to our most precious books, and we consider Lagarde's unabashed exposure of the inferiority of Semitic religious instincts and the pernicious effects on Christianity as an achievement that deserves our admiration and gratitude.
It stated: The newer racial research has finally opened our eyes to the pernicious effects of the blood mixture between Germanic and un-German peoples and urges us, with all our forces, to strive to keep our Volkstum pure and closed.
Religion is the inner strength and finest flower in the intellectual life of a people, but it can only strongly affect expression in popular culture ... a deep connection between Christianity and Germanness can only be achieved when it is released from this unnatural connection, wherever it stands nakedly approached by the Jewish religion.For the authors of the Thesen, the "angry thunder-god" Jehovah was the same as the "Father" and "[Holy] Ghost", that Christ preached and that the Germans would have guessed.
In 1920 minister Karl Gerecke published Biblical anti-Semitism in the Volksverlag of Ernst Boepple, one of the founders of the German Workers' Party.
In 1921 Andersen wrote Der deutsche Heiland (The German Saviour), in which he opposed Jewish migration as an apocalyptic decision: Who will win, the six-cornered star or the Cross?
Andersen, pastor Ernst Bublitz, and teacher Kurd Joachim Niedlich brought out the twice-monthly The German Church (Die Deutsche Kirche) magazine, which in 12,000 articles advanced the Bund's ideas.
The proposed abolition of the Old Testament was in part fiercely opposed among Christian German nationalists, seeing it as a racist attack on the foundations of their faith from inside and outside.
Theologian Johannes Schneider, a member of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) (a party fairly close to the political aims of the NSDAP), wrote in 1925: Whoever cheapens the Old Testament will soon also lose the New.In 1927 the Protestant Church League (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund) reacted to the growing radicalisation of German Christian groups with a Churches Day in Königsberg, aiming to clarify Christianity's relation to "Fatherland", "Nation", "Volkstum", "Blood", and "Race".
How great the significance of blood might be in intellectual history, but the rule is, even if one is born into a Volkstum, the spirit and not the blood.On this basis, the radical German-Christians' ideas were hardly slowed down.
Marxism and Catholic Internationalism were attacked as two facets of the Jewish spirit, and Rosenberg stated the need for a new national religion to complete the Reformation.
The Associated German Religious Movement (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Glaubensbewegung), founded in Eisenach at the end of 1933, was also an attempt to create a national religion outside and against the churches.
[24] One of its main tasks was to compile a "People's Testament" (Volkstestament) in the sense of what Rosenberg called a "Fifth Gospel", to announce the myth of the "Aryan Jesus".
[citation needed] It became clear in 1994 that the Testament's poetic text was written by the famous ballad-poet and proprietor of the Eugen-Diederichs-Verlag, Lulu von Strauß und Torney [de].
Despite broad church support for it (even many Confessing Christians advocated such an approach, in the hope that the disaffiliation of 1937 to 1940 could be curbed), the first edition of the text did not meet with the expected enthusiastic response.
German Christian-related parties sought to influence the historiography of the Kirchenkampf in the so-called "church-historical working group", but they had little effect from then on in theology and politics.
