The German Christians who looked away
The church's failure under Hitler
It is necessary to say this clearly: the majority of the German Protestant church cooperated with the Nazi regime, was silent about the Holocaust, or actively supported National Socialism.
The Deutsche Christen — the German Christians who aligned with Nazism — were a substantial movement. Many ordinary pastors and congregants, who were not enthusiastic Nazis, simply continued doing church while the deportations happened. They heard the trains. They saw the empty synagogues. They did not speak.
The Confessing Church, which did resist, was a minority. Its seminaries were closed. Its pastors were arrested. Bonhoeffer was executed. Martin Niemöller spent seven years in concentration camps. Karl Barth was expelled from Germany.
The church that had sat at the center of German culture for centuries, that had produced Luther and Bach and a thousand years of Christian civilization, was unable to prevent itself from being used as a tool of one of the worst regimes in human history.
The question this raises for every church in every era is not comfortable: what would we have done? The comfortable answer is that we would have been in the Confessing Church, hiding Jews, printing the Barmen Declaration.
Niemöller, who was himself late to resist and spent years in a concentration camp repenting of his earlier silence, is most honest about it:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.”
— Martin Niemöller, c. 1946 AD
“But if the watchman sees the sword come, and doesn't blow the trumpet, and the people aren't warned, and the sword comes, and take any person from among them; he is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand.”
The German church's failure is not a story about monsters. It is a story about ordinary people who made a series of ordinary decisions — to stay quiet, to not get involved, to protect their own community, to wait and see — while the freight cars filled.
Niemöller's confession is the most important piece of self-examination in modern church history because he names the mechanism precisely: I did not speak because it was not yet my concern. And by the time it was my concern, there was no one left.
The silence that enables atrocity is not dramatic. It is incremental — one small accommodation at a time, one avoided conversation, one moment of looking away.
What are you not speaking about because it is not yet your concern? And what is happening while you wait for it to become so?