That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole church: We did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.The Declaration makes no mention of any particular atrocities committed during the Third Reich or of the church's support for Hitler during the early years of the regime.
Robert Murphy, a career diplomat in the US State Department, commented: There is little evidence that the German Protestant church repented Germany's war of aggression or the cruelties visited upon other peoples and countries.
The representatives believed that any relationship would fall apart in the absence of a statement by the German churchmen, due to the hatred felt in their home countries toward Germany in 1945.
One prepared a draft laying blame on "our fellow citizens" in Germany, thus implicitly denying or diffusing the responsibility of the church.
...Hans Asmussen, Martin Niemöller... and Wilhelm Niesel ... needed no prodding to express lament over their own and the church's failure to speak out loudly and clearly against Nazism.
They feared that, once again, the victors would use such logic to impose punishment upon Germany, as Versailles had widely been viewed after the conclusion of World War I.
[1] Niesel, a former student of Karl Barth and one of the signatories of the Declaration, concluded that there was a general unwillingness by the German people to accept responsibility for the Nazi rule.
As Hockenos puts it: The righteous intermingling of self-justification and self-pity was as important a factor in creating a hostile environment for a public confession as were postwar fears of another Versailles or Allied charges of collective guilt.