SO FAR I have attempted to show that Luther certainly did not represent that mythical, better Germany—that Germany which loves peace and tolerance, which really tries to fit into a truly Christian brotherhood of nations. I have tried to prove by many quotations from the mouth of the Reformer that he is more than contradictory, to say the least. I have never denied that he did say many very Christian things about love and peace, against war and persecution; for Christian virtues, and against human vices. All this, indeed, is true.
But he also said, taught, and lived the very opposite. He denied by his own life Christian virtues, he lied, drank, and lived in sin; he disliked and abhorred reason; he praised and advocated war; he encouraged absolutism, and gave the rulers a power they had never enjoyed before; he insisted on a brutal oppression of the common man, and after the liberation of the Renaissance, he produced a slave-mentality among his followers which even the Roman Catholic Church had never forced upon its members; he preached and practised a violent antisemitism and extermination of the Jews which remain unsurpassed even by Hitler; he was the founder not merely of modern nationalism in its most evil form, but of the very nationalism inside Germany which has proved so utterly destructive every since.
These last aspects of Luther seem to me much more important than his more glorified aspect. Moreover, they seem to me to have found many more adherents in the centuries which were to follow Luther than any of his more Christian sayings and doctrines. I know that I must be expected to prove this. It is a task, however, which cannot possibly be undertaken in a small volume. Indeed, many hundreds of pages would be necessary to cover the ground sufficiently. For there are three branches of human thought—closely interconnected as they are—in which we would have to trace the influence from Luther until Hitler. They are the realms of religion, philosophy, and politics.
In the religious sphere I can at least indicate that Lutheran doctrines have been spread from thousands of pulpits inside Germany ever since the day of the Reformer. Not Christianity in our sense has been preached, but that pseudo-political German religion which, as I have tried to show, had its origin in Luther.
Look merely at the last hundred years or so, on the type of clergy Lutheran Germany has produced. There was that notorious preacher Stoecker whose sermons were as eagerly listened to as the speeches by Goebbels or Hitler. He was probably the most popular priest Germany produced during the last century. His nationalism, his vile antisemitism, all his other destructive doctrines, were based, as he said in his many unchristian sermons, on the gospel as explained by Dr. Martin. “Germanisation of Christianity” this period was called, with much justification.
There were many other similar preachers, such as Friedrich Naumann, “an exponent of Prussian militant Protestantism”, who was second in popularity after Stoecker. To discuss in detail the teachings of these evil priests—as so many others—I cannot do now. It all, however, became evident in the last World War. “In the world war, Luther was to be the hero of unadulterated and triumphant German tradition and inspiration,” a German university professor has to admit.
Shortly after the war was declared in 1914, the leaders of the German (Lutheran) clergy wrote a bloodthirsty pamphlet which they entitled: “To the evangelical Christians abroad”. It was full of lies, distortions, mischief—all done in the name of Martin Luther. They explained why they fought, why they had no hesitation in slaying and oppressing their “Christian brothers”.
That was too much even for Oxford professors. They gave the Lutherans the reply they deserved. It was published during the last war as an Oxford Pamphlet, and it is one of the most remarkable and truest documents ever published by English scholars. It was signed by all the Oxford Professors in Theology, people like Bishop Gore, Dr. Spooner, and so forth. In this document the Oxford theologians give a reply to the Lutherans for their condonation of “savage reprisals against the civil population of Belgian towns and villages,” and similar typical German atrocities.
Throughout the World War the German clergy proved to be the Kaiser’s best apologists. “If one fights for one’s life, who cares whether one breaks into the neighbour’s house?” was the typical explanation of a German Lutheran pastor for the invasion of Belgium.
After the war the Lutheran clergy inside Germany opposed every true peace movement, though outside the Reich they pretended to think quite differently in order to mislead foreign Christians. Typical is the answer given by the official organ of the Lutherans when it was suggested that a Sunday should be consecrated to peace and international reconciliation. “A Sunday of peace? In the eyes of simple men that is simply uncleanliness. It is as repulsive as if you were to play cards by a corpse or sing cheap songs to a dying person.”
After the Nazis came to power, the Lutherans supported Hitler. To them the State—as ordained by Luther—was infinitely more important than the Church or Christianity. An English Churchman who went to Germany in order to investigate had to admit that “in no single case could I find any evidence, even when members of the militant Bekenninis-Kirche (Niemoeller movement) were questioned, of any interference on the part of the civil authorities.” (This, in 1938!)
Of course not! For every Lutheran was a strong supporter of Hitler. What could be more typical than Pastor Niemoeller’s confession when he first opposed Hitler: “We are not driven by care for our Church, but by care for the Third Reich!”
These, I would emphasize are merely a few very superficial glimpses at the history of the Lutheran Church from Luther to Hitler. Many volumes would be needed to write the complete shameful history of the last four centuries.
More difficult is it even merely to indicate the Lutheran spirit in German philosophy. Here, Luther’s doctrines were absorbed in a less apparent way. But it always struck me that all of the great German philosophers, Lutherans, such as Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and so forth (with the exception of Nietzsche, of course) produced somewhere or other typical Lutheran doctrines.
When people asked why the German people have never shown any sign of revolt against Hitler and his gang, I have usually referred my questions to Luther, who was the first to say that “even against the most unjust ruler the people have never a right to revolt”—as I explained before. A doctrine of the Reformer which had most disastrous consequences. Since from it springs the evil and dangerous slave-mentality of the Germans. Kant, to give merely one example, takes up the very idea—not to be found in any other philosopher in any other country—when he says:
“Resistance on the part of the people to the supreme legislative power of the State is in no case legitimate. . . There is no right of sedition and still less of rebellion belonging to the people. Least of all, when the supreme power is embodied in an individual monarch is there any justification, under the pretext of his abuse of power, for seizing his person or taking away his life. . . . It is the duty of the people to bear any abuse of the supreme power, even though it should be considered unbearable” (Kant: “Philosophy of Law”, pp. 176-77)
According to Kant—following Luther—“The supreme Power in the State has only rights and no duties towards the subject” (ibid, p. 175).
Fichte, as is well known, in his philosophy foreshadows the States created by Mussolini and Hitler.
Hegel, equally a great Lutheran, pronounced the words, “The State is the march of God in the world” (“Philosophy of Right”, page 247). “The State is the divine will as a present spirit, which unfolds itself in the actual shape of an organised world” (ibid, page 260). The State is the divine idea as it exists on earth” (“Philosophy of History”, page 41). Fatal ideas with fatal consequences—ideas which were first pronounced by Luther.
But to trace the influence of Luther on four centuries of German philosophy would take another ten volumes.
In the political history of Germany, Luther and his influence is perhaps the easiest to trace. The immediate consequences, the Thirty Years War—all this is too well-known to be even indicated. It is in the more modern times, when liberalism began to rise in the civilised world, that we are interested. Here I can do no better than to quote what the great scholar Troeltsch has to say on the influence of Lutheranism: “In the aggressive position which, after the eighteenth century had culminated in the French Revolution, the older spiritual forces again adopted towards the modern world, and in which they, with the union of ideological and practical politico-social powers, advanced victoriously against the new world, the restoration of Prussian-German Lutheranism was one of the most important events in social history. It united with the reactionary movement the monarchical ideas of agrarian patriarchalism, of the militaristic love of power; it gave an ideal to the political restoration and its ethical support. For this reason, then, it was supported, in its turn, by the social and political forces of reaction, by all the means of power at their disposal. Finally, Lutheranism of this type hallowed the realistic sense of power, and the ethical virtues of obedience, reverence, and respect for authority, which are indispensable to Prussian militarism. Thus Christianity and a conservative political attitude became identified with each other, as well as piety and love of power, purity of doctrine and the glorification of war and the aristocratic standpoint. Thus all attempts at Church reform were suppressed along with the world of liberal thought ….Lutheranism played an important part in the political and military development of German Prussia.”
That Bismarck modelled himself upon Luther is well known. “Bismarck’s oppression of the Social-Democrats,” writes Prof. R. Pascal, “was the logical continuation of Luther’s oppression of the peasants.”
During the First World War both Kaiser and people always appealed to Luther’s God, the German God. “God is our ally”, exclaimed Wilhelm II. And the Lutheran clergy found it easy enough to support him in this view. “The old German ally”, “God—whom Zieten called formerly the greatest ally of Frederick the Great”—this is the way in which the Lutheran clergy referred to Him.
It was left to Houston Stewart Chamberlain first to couple the names of Luther and Hitler. Since then whole libraries of books have been published which show how Hitler translated Luther’s ideas into action. “Hitler”, said General Lietzmann in 1933, “is the greatest German, who can only be compared to Luther.”
I know that it is unconvincing to quote, out of context, a number of murderous sayings. But I am not attempting to provide a fool-proof thesis; I am merely trying to suggest a possibility, a line of thought which hitherto has been ignored.
As far as I am concerned, and limited as my own knowledge is, in whatever I have read of Germany’s history of religion, philosophy, and politics, everywhere I have found and encountered, open or in disguise, that evil spirit which we are fighting at the moment: the spirit of immorality, Herrenvolk, irrationalism, antisemitism, mysticism, nationalism, elatism, and so forth—the spirit of Martin Luther.
Let me demonstrate this—since space only allows me to select one single incident—at a topical and relatively unknown point. Let us investigate the true attitude towards political problems of the German Confessional Lutheran Church to-day—that section of German Protestants who, so we are told, are the one only people—Christian people—inside Germany with whom we can and must collaborate after the war—our only hope.
Some time ago the late Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to me on a completely different matter, but in his letter was a sentence which I should like to quote. “I suppose it is always true”, the Primate wrote, “that what war does is to make people more than ever what they were before: the fine characters are refined, and the coarse characters are coarsened.”
Though I do not belong to those who always agreed with the Archbishop, I can think of no truer words. But if his words are really true, and if the German Lutheran Confessional Church really contains the decent element on which we can build our whole future, then they should have come out of this war and of the last with flying colours. Let us see whether this is so.
I have already mentioned the shameful pamphlet which the whole of the Lutheran clergy published early in the last war, and to which the Oxford theologians gave such an admirable reply. One of the first signatures to the German appeal of blood and hatred was that of a certain Professor Adolf Deissmann. His name will be unknown to-day to most people in this country, but it is certainly true to say that he was Germany’s leading theologian. He was Professor of Theology in Heidelberg, and later for very many years Professor of Theology in the University of Berlin—the most important theological Chair in the Reich. Most pastors of some repute had been his pupils; his influence upon Lutheran church life inside Germany was tremendous for many decades.
As soon as the war broke out in 1914 he, together with many others, signed the above-mentioned pamphlet. But a man in his position, the leading light of the Lutheran Church of Germany, had to be more explicit on his views about the war. He was so more than once; and all the writings from which I am going to quote can be found in the library of the British Museum.
On September 12, 1914, he laid down the lines which the German Protestants had to follow during the war. It is published under the title, “The War and Religion”.
Deissmann divides his battle-cry into two parts. First he investigates the problem, “What are the effects of war upon religion”; and then he discusses the opposite, “What are the effects of religion upon war?” He comes to the amazing, very Lutheran result that both are made for each other. “The positive effects of war upon religion are infinitely stronger than its negative ones”.
“The war has steeled our religion”, he tells the Germans. The explanation of this curious statement is simple: “We Germans can’t believe in anything but a German God”. He continues to elaborate the thesis that war is so very beneficial for Lutherans, because especially during the present war (i.e., of 1914-1918) Luther’s ideal has become true. “Our present religion is national and German, and we preach a German God! A German, a national God!” “Christianity is the religion of war,” says the leader of the German Church, repeating what Luther had said four centuries before him. He opposes in the strongest conceivable terms this Lutheran German Christianity to “the sweet-sentimental, and sentimental-weak Christianity” of Germany’s opponents.
“You are the salt upon earth,” he tells his congregation; and he concludes the appeal to the German Lutherans with the truly typical words: “I am proud to preach the religion of might and what our enemies call barbarism.” Throughout the war he, and the whole Lutheran clergy, preached with pride the religion of barbarism. “Only in a German cloak can the real Christ breathe.” All atrocities, all aggression, unrestricted U-boat warfare upon women and children—upon all these Deissmann and his Lutherans bestow their Christian blessing.
But then the war is over. Somehow God, the Lutheran German God, has not proved such a good patriot after all. Then the German Christians began to “organise sympathy”. They turned again into international Christians, whining about the brotherhood of all Christians upon earth—denying their own foul language during the war, putting on the most shameful, anti-Christian hypocrisy.
At that time the Lutheran Stresemann was the most influential man in Germany. “It is the tragedy of our policy”, Stresemann said, “that the Prussian and German army no longer exists. The policy of might (Machtpolitik) will in the end always be the decisive factor. But while we have no might, we have to fight with the idea. We have a right for a powerful Germany.” This, like all the other similar sayings of Hitler’s predecessor, is, strangely enough, only to be found in the original German edition of Stresemann’s speeches. In the English translation—which pretends to be foolproof—it cannot be found. The English public had to be duped—an undertaking in which the Germans succeeded more than they ever dreamt of.
“We have to fight with the idea”: this was the order. The idea was to give in, for the time being, to the “weak-sentimental” attitude of Germany’s former opponents. In politics as in other fields one had to pretend collaboration, friendliness, internationalism. Behind the scenes one had to prepare the very armies which were going to destroy within a decade or two European and Christian values and civilisation.
The Church followed the lead. The German God was put in store; the international God was produced. Professor Deismann in person attended international Christian congresses from 1925 onwards as head of the German section. Here he talked partly about religion, partly tried to impress upon British theologians above all that the peace treaty was unjust and cruel. He played upon the sentiments of true Christianity. The older British theologians remembered his past during the war and were somewhat reticent. But Professor Deissmann shoon made a great and influential friend: the Dean of Canterbury. He has kind words for the Dean, “young G. K. A. Bell,” and soon a British-German theological week is arranged between Dr. Bell and Professor Deissmann—to take place in Canterbury. This was in 1927; in 1930 Professor Deissmann and Dr. Bell, now Bishop of Chichester, published a book together (“Mysterium Christi”) prompted by “a strong and growing feeling of friendship”.
Less than three years later, Hitler came to power. His atrocities against the Jews, his denying of all Christian values, shook the Churches of the civilised world. Above all, people like Deissmann were wholehearted supporters of Hitler. Germany was strong enough; they did not have to play their double-game any longer. The German Lutheran God could again be preached from the theological Chair of the University of Berlin.
It must have been a great and severe shock to people like the Bishop of Chichester. He, I am convinced, is thoroughly faithful to his Christian principles. But, if I may be allowed to criticise a learned and humanitarian dignitary of the Church of England, in his idealism, in his desire to see a truly Christian fellowship of man, he and his followers were too much inclined to ignore the blatant facts, to live in a world of dreams—with fatal consequences for the very cause they are living and working for.
The stock of Deissmann was exhausted. His collapse was too obvious even for the most idealistic dreamers. But in their desire to find some Christians in Germany with whom they could collaborate, they were helped by the sudden appearance of a legend. Hitler put Pastor Niemoeller into a concentration camp, and at once people like the Bishop of Chichester had found just what they wanted. A German Lutheran whose belief in a Christian God was greater than his loyalty to Hitler. Niemoeller and his followers must therefore be the very class of Germans whom we can trust. The Bishop of Chichester was greatly helped in his attempt to work for a not too harsh peace by German refugee-pastors. The Niemoeller-legend spread. The Niemoeller agents worked hard, and—in my opinion—their aim was exactly the same as that of Deissmann.
This, once more, must strike people as an extreme view—a view which is biased and which I cannot possibly prove. I beg them for once to forget again all the propaganda they have heard, all the stories of the great Lutheran Niemoeller they have so far believed. And to look at the Niemoeller such as he really exists. I shall, again, quote. I could show a Niemoeller in a black and horrible light, if I got hold of some of his sermons which are unknown in England. I need not do this. I shall merely quote from books which have been published in England by Niemoeller’s friends.
Niemoeller was brought up in the typical Prussian tradition. “The national idea was always foremost in his upbringing, and by nature he had leanings towards the right. Love of his profession as an officer was a matter of course to him and he was in his element in the war.” During the war of 1914-18 he was a U-boat captain, one of those who did not hesitate to murder women and children. His apologists describe, with a certain perversion it seems to me, how he laid mines in the numerous narrow fairways frequented by enemy shipping. “This is”, says Niemoeller, “how our Christian cruise began.” He shouted himself hoarse by singing the “hate hymn against England”. Touching is the description how Herr Unterseeboot-Kapitän Niemoeller gives orders from his U-boat to fire on shipwrecked sailors. “All we can do”, he complains on another similar occasion, “is to put up our periscope her and there, to prevent the destroyer from picking up too many survivors.”
He has no scruples whatsoever about the atrocities committed by him. War, according to the Lutheran Niemoeller, is “a moratorium of Christianity.” With sincere regret he describes that “the British battleship Britannia is the last ship to be sunk in the war.” He hates the idea of an armistice.
“I have sailed in submarines for three years fighting against England, sir,” he tells his superiors. “I have neither sought nor concluded the armistice.”
He hated the new German democracy. “I could not reconcile myself to the new state.” Then the future priest begins job-hunting. The English edition of his biography—“From U-Boat to Pulpit”—is most illuminating. On page 168 he decides to enter a publishing firm. On the same page he considers emigrating to South America. On page 169 he decides to become a sheep-farmer. Then come some vile attacks on Democrats and Socialists. On page 181 he suddenly states: “I am going into the Church”, but on the next page already he wonders whether it would not be better to take up philosophy.
Thus his calling for the Church does not seem to have been very deep. His studies are equally strange. He joins at once the most reactionary students’ union. Instead of studying he prefers to shoot and attack pacifist and democratic students. “On Thursday of Holy Week the first shots cracked,” we are told. He marries, has a son. He “hoped and prayed that his boy would grow up to be as straight and fine a German as Hans Jochen Emsmann was, the last submarine commander of the last war.”
The Nazi party grew stronger, and Niemoeller became a priest. “He belonged with all his heart to the enemies of the Weimar Republic, and it was only by chance that he, unlike his brother, did not become a member of that Party. Their programme for a national revival was fundamentally his own, with its vehement denial of all that was meant by individualism, parliamentarism, pacifism, Marxism, and Judaism!” (“Niemoeller and his Creed”, page 32).
Another quotation from the same book tells usthat “Niemoeller believed in the old Prussian ideal of honour, an ideal which, of course, also included the belief in might, in a State essentially military, the ideal, in short, of Bismarck and Treitschke. He voted National Socialist in 1924, and in 1933 he still felt great sympathy with the surging up of the forces of hope, confidence, and a renewed self-respect.” “Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich. ““and so Niemoeller welcomed January 30, 1933, from the bottom of his heart as the fulfilment of cherished hopes,” we are told (“Niemoeller and his Creed”, page 33).
In his famous Christian Church in Dahlem, Pastor Niemoeller was preaching. Some, but only the mildest of his sermons under Hitler are available in an English translation. Thousands of Jews and non-Aryans, Socialists and Communists were murdered or committed suicide, more were tortured to death in concentration-camps. The whole of the Christian world outside Germany prayed for the pitiable victims. Not so Pastor Niemoeller. Not one word of protest from him. On the contrary, he thanked the Fuehrer! “We again feel ourselves created beings. Profession and social standing, race and nationality are to-day again being regarded by us as important facts!” He, the true Lutheran, tells his congregation of the “divine call in the (Hitler’s) spiritual revolution which is beginning to take place throughout the whole of our nation” (“First Commandment”, pages 58-59).
Indeed, he does not hesitate to pronounce the words that “the German Luther is more important to Germany than the Jewish Rabbi of Nazareth”.
He, the good Lutheran, did quarrel with Hitler in the end. But it was on no question of religion and fundamental issues. It was a Church conflict—a quarrel about the administration of the Church. In any other country in the world that would have been possible, but Hitler took a somewhat narrow view of Niemoeller’s stubbornness on this question of Church administration and put him into a concentration-camp. This fact has been made the basis of an attempt to make a hero of Niemoeller, a legend. Not one single instance is known of Niemoeller ever objecting to Hitler’s policy, “In opposition”, even his biographers and apologists have to admit, “Niemoeller knew himself to be a better National Socialist than the German Christians” (“Niemoeller and his Creed”, page 30).
“We are not driven by care for our Church,” is his significant saying, quoted already, “but much more by care for the Third Reich.” In this fashion Niemoeller explained his stand to the Fuehrer (op.cit.p.36).
“The name of Martin Niemoeller is a great name in Christendom”, writes the Bishop of Chichester. He sees in Niemoeller a “lovable man”. During the last war his Lordship tried to persuade himself that “to many Christians in Germany the war was a shock, a convulsion, a catastrophe.”
Is that not rather wishful thinking? Is it not further proof of the correctness of my interpretation that Niemoeller wrote from the concentration-camp to Hitler at the outbreak of the present war, asking to be allowed to sail against the enemy of Germany as he did twenty-five years ago? (Emil Ludwig: “The Germans”, page 378).
I am indeed, more than sympathetic towards anybody who is in Hitler’s prisons. But my sympathy goes rather to the Jews and Socialists, Communists and pacifists who suffer for the convictions—and not to people like Niemoeller, who encouraged all these atrocities from the pulpit for many years. Moreover—and this is really the cardinal point—whatever our human sympathy for people like Niemoeller might be, have they really proved by their past that we can trust them, that we can safely collaborate with them and accept their words, their Christian faith in our sense?
Throughout the last war and throughout the present one, the Germans have committed atrocities which are impossible to imagine by those who have merely read or heard about them. This is not teaching hatred, but an undeniable though most unpleasant fact. Not once in either war has any section of the Lutheran clergy protested—such as have the churches of Norway and other occupied countries where the Gestapo is at least as strong as inside Germany. With the exception of a few refugee pastors in Britain, I do not know of any section of the German Protestant Confessional Church whose pastors have refused to preach, to serve, to ordain and bless the atrocities and horrors committed by the German armies and their leaders.
These facts are unpleasant and horrible. I maintain that we can understand them and explain them only if we look at the dark figure from whom the German Lutheran clergy has for four centuries taken their orders: Martin Luther. Do not defy the authorities even if they are unjust, worship war, murder and slay the enemy, pray for a German God, exterminate the Jews, praise the authorities—all this, as I tried to show, was first preached by Luther, and has been propagated ever since from Lutheran pulpits and universities; it is the Gospel of every German Christian. It is, to my mind, the only possible explanation of many tragic happenings which seem otherwise unexplainable. An explanation which, it seems tome, corresponds more to the horrid facts than the noble and Christian hypotheses of the Bishop of Chichester and his followers.
These are my views. Those who disagree with me get more publicity, they are more believed because they are less extreme (and the Englishman hates nothing more than extreme views, even if they are true), because it is more pleasant, because it is easier. There is danger in the views of those who will not face the fact that the Lutheran tradition in Germany has produced barbarians and not Christians in our sense—their wishful thinking produces a world war every twenty-five years and destroys the very values they are fighting to preserve.