Speech by the District Leader of the „German Christians“ Faith Movement in Greater Berlin
Dr. [Reinhold] Krause
Delivered in the Sports Palace on November 13, 1933
(Based on a double stenographic report)
One must also confront such repulsive speeches: Reinhold Krause’s antisemitic Sports Palace speech of November 13, 1933, which at the time triggered a storm of outrage in the Protestant churches and their press and led to the decline of the National Socialist-oriented „German Christians“ faith movement.
[3] German Comrades! In the tremendous experience of yesterday, one thing has become clear—what enemies and traitors have most feared, and what the yearning souls of the old and young fighters for a new Germany fervently hoped for: the Germans have become one people. (Applause.) What a thousand years of German history could not achieve, what even Bismarck could not accomplish, God has made a reality through the power of our Führer, Adolf Hitler. Our hearts are proud and filled with gratitude that we are not merely witnessing this becoming of a people, but that we, as fighters over many long years of shame, could gradually help shape it. „One People, One Führer“—so it shone from the banners over the streets and from the faces of our comrades, and we German Christians would have liked to add: one God and one Church! But the path to that is still long, and the Führer has repeatedly declined to be a reformer. Does that mean for us that we should not take this path at all? By no means! Is it not precisely in these days that the figure of the man from Wittenberg stands before us—not a finished saint, whose work can only be viewed historically, but the living Luther, who wants to be our guide on the path to a German God and a German Church; who has left us a precious legacy: the completion of the German Reformation in the Third Reich! (Very strong applause.) If Martin Luther’s successors, in their narrow confessional churchliness, did not understand that his work was a task for his Germans—one he could not solve because he did not yet have a German people—then in these days of our becoming a people, the reformer’s national mission becomes our lived experience. Today we are not interested in Luther the theologian, still less in Luther the theology professor; Luther the German folk preacher stands before us (applause), the man who could call out from the depths of his soul: „For my dear Germans I was born, them will I serve“—the man of God who strove to close the abysmal chasm that the medieval Church had torn open between God and the German man, by [4] returning to the simple joyful message of Jesus and ruthlessly eliminating churchdom as a mediator between God and man. Starting from the German mysticism of Meister Eckehart, Luther arrives at a personal, inner experience of God; he moves from the God-forsakenness of an alien monasticism to the God-connection of the Nordic seeker of God. His religious struggle, of course, was at first his own personal affair. But like Adolf Hitler, he was not satisfied merely to have found the path to freedom for himself; he also had to become a leader for his German comrades, a liberator of the German soul who, beyond all written and taught words, sees the ultimate bond solely in the conscience, in the God within us. The German fighter Luther always stood up for the values of German folkhood in language and custom, in home and family, in poetry and music. All of this, my comrades, was to him, just like nature, God’s work and God’s gift.
But Luther could not complete this national mission. His liberating deed presupposed the law of folkhood; but this very law was—as in the Middle Ages—still unknown in those days as well. Protestantism quickly died out as a movement, hardened in the emerging Lutheran or Reformed churchliness. And because Luther found no unified people, he bound his church to princely power and the state supported by it. Thus this church was tied into every crisis of the state; thus it was always dragged down whenever the state fell into ruin, so that with the decomposition of all community in the liberalist state, it sank to the level of a mere „religious society.“ Marxism, however, had already set about, under the cover of „religion is a private matter,“ to uproot completely every feeling of God-connection among the German people—until the day when Adolf Hitler came and swept away this rubbish of isolation, de-souling, and degeneracy. (Strong applause.)
The storm of the National Socialist Revolution has not stopped at the doors of the church either. Already much that was rotten has broken down in Luther’s church. The people in the making want to shape a new church, and so in these days we call upon the fiery spirit [5] of Dr. Martinus, that he may help us to complete his work—to create not a Lutheran, not a Reformed, not a United, not a synodal or consistorial, not a bishop’s or general superintendent’s church, but this one mighty, all-embracing new thing: the German People’s Church. (Very strong applause.)
This task could only be solved after National Socialism no longer had to wage the struggle for power in Germany, but rather for the soul of the German people. (Applause.) Since this soul belongs completely to the new state, the totalitarian claim of the National Socialist state cannot stop at the church either (applause)—the church which it does not want to destroy, but to renew and reshape out of its own spirit. And this spirit is God’s spirit, if Adolf Hitler is the divinely sent liberator and savior. The new church can never grow alongside the state, but only within it, and the same laws of life apply fully to it. (Applause.)
Still standing aside are the incorrigibles and the half-hearted; and even if we have left the struggle for external power in the church behind us, there lies before us a much harder struggle against these incorrigibles and these half-hearted ones. (Applause.)
When we entered the church-political struggle more than a year ago, my comrades, we quite consciously let confessional matters recede into the background. For we must be quite clear about this today: if we had unleashed the dispute over the confessional form from the start, we would not be sitting here today. (Very strong applause.)
And so it was the right path when we indicated the direction in our guidelines, but did not create a new dogma. We have the direction for marching toward this new church. And in this old program there is much that shines forth even now and can be a torch for us on the path into this new church. I think only of these two things that are to be brought into this church: a heroic piety in the spirit of Luther, and a race-appropriate Christianity.
[6] This church now awaits its completion, awaits its realization in the Reich Church. We all who stood nearby know what difficulties, what birth pangs accompanied the formation of this Reich Church; how the parliamentary-legal path that had been taken was infinitely laborious; and how the beginnings of a quicker solution, which had already existed when the state intervened in the summer, were again stunted as a result. We know today that this Reich Church is only at the beginning of its task; that it has not yet fulfilled the main thing by having a Reich Bishop and a Reich Church Administration; but rather that it must first clearly and distinctly show the direction in which the inner formation of the church must go. (Very true.) But we also know that this Reich Church can never represent a final dogmatic bond for us evangelical Christians, but that it can only be the great space, the great organization and institution that gives the great guidelines. We also know that even its constitution has its weaknesses. It was already mentioned here earlier—the concerns that people outside in the nation have about a new church constitution. The guidelines are not yet public, but I would like here, in the name of our Berlin movement, to express quite clearly one thing vis-à-vis the Reich Church: we cannot use a pastors‘ church. (Very strong applause.) We can only have a church in which the old saying still applies: the church builds itself up from the congregation. (Very strong applause.) And in this congregation the pastor stands; there he is a fellow fighter, there he is a comrade in arms. We cannot recognize any command authority in the church. (Applause.)
Thus the difficulties of this Reich Church show themselves not only in small matters but also in large ones. Furthermore, the thought arises here and there that such command authority is itself doubtful on evangelical principles. But I may well say: the greatest unrest among us was caused by the first official announcement of the Reich Church: the peace decree of the Reich Bishop. (Very true.) It has caused immense uncertainty among us German Christians and a triumph among our opponents (Very true! Strong applause)—a triumph, my comrades, [7] which finds expression in the fact that these people now have the upper hand again (Very true!), and that they believe that if one offers them peace, they can answer with combat. Thus their newspaper, the „Young Church,“ writes: „Our defensive church-political struggle must therefore aim to ensure that the Professional Civil Service Law, including the Aryan Paragraph, which the General Synod resolved, is not put into effect.“ That is the thanks for the peace offer. (Shout: We don’t need any white Jews!) We don’t need any Jews in the church at all. (Strong applause.)
We see quite clearly the danger that the implementation of the leader-principle in our congregations—that is, the unconditional subordination of the congregation to the managing pastor—would mean at this moment. One cannot impose on us—I would like to state this very clearly here—people as leaders whom we must inwardly reject (Very strong applause), because we have neither the proper confidence in their National Socialism nor in their German faith. Evangelical freedom has its ultimate ground in the freedom of conscience. This, my comrades, is not a relapse into liberalism; for we National Socialist fighters feel ourselves bound to our people and bound to our Führer. (Strong applause.) And when it comes to governing: we need only one government—the government of Adolf Hitler and his advisors. (Very strong applause.) We need only one youth education—youth education in the spirit of Adolf Hitler. (Applause.) And most importantly: we now need a mission—and that is to completely transform our German people, down to their very souls, into German National Socialists. (Very strong applause.) Our struggle is about nothing other than the spiritual awakening of our people. Our religion is the honor of the nation in the sense of a fighting, heroic Christianity.
The leaders of the German Christians in the high church offices will have to decide whether they will go with us through this struggle—which I hope—or whether they will let themselves be hindered by their offices. The air up there in the consistories sometimes still seems—all gentlemen present excepted—(laughter)—to have germs from the old days. (Very [8] good! Strong applause.) If they now come to us with the argument that everything cannot go so quickly, then the old bureaucratic horse sticks its head out again (laughter); and perhaps things would go a bit faster if one could overcome those scruples and if one would feel: it is truly five minutes to midnight. It is truly now such a crisis, in this time of renewal, concerning the shaping of the church, that we can only use one thing: absolute clarity of aim and absolute decisive action. (Very strong applause.) It will be—and in this I fully agree with our Reich Leader—sometimes necessary in the struggle to completely break off and separate the movement from the church government. And I say to those who keep coming with reproaches in this regard: our movement is not a pastors‘ association whose members, once they have become bishops, provosts, and consistorial councillors, have forgotten their fighter’s task; on the contrary, they will all stand their ground in our struggle!
The evangelical people were not concerned about a new constitution in the church nor about new church offices, but about the completion of Martin Luther’s national mission in a second German Reformation, whose result cannot be an authoritarian pastors‘ church with confessional ties, but only a German People’s Church that leaves room for the full breadth of a race-appropriate experience of God and that in its external form is built as soundly German as is self-evident in the Third Reich. (Very strong applause.)
Can our Reich Church, can our regional church fulfill that? Only, my evangelical comrades, if it renounces every coercion of religious life, if it abstains from every „Christianity on command.“ The stream of those returning to the church must first be won. For that, a sense of homeland is necessary, and the first step toward becoming at home is liberation from everything un-German in worship and in confessional matters—liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish morality of reward, from these cattle-dealer and pimp stories. Rightly has this book been called one of the most questionable books [9] in world history. It will not do that pastors of the German Christians declare: „We still stand on the ground of the Old Testament,“ while on the other side the guidelines say: „race-appropriate Christianity.“ For us, the one practically excludes the other.
A week ago, a man stood here—Bavarian Minister of Culture Hans Schemm—and said: „For art, the one rule holds: stay in the land of your own German soul!“ and „Spiritual desolation sets in when art and people become estranged.“ My comrades, this saying applies a hundred times more when religion and people become estranged. If today we invoke the spirit of Martin Luther, then we do not want to suppress Luther’s position on the Old Testament and on the Jews, when he writes: „Therefore let Moses be the Saxon mirror of the Jews and leave us heathens untroubled by it! The law of Moses concerns the Jews alone. The Old Testament is not from God’s grace, but stems from human work.“ But the Jews are not God’s people. (Strong applause.)
If we National Socialists are ashamed to buy a tie from a Jew, then we ought to be even more ashamed to accept anything that speaks to our soul, the innermost religious, from a Jew. (Sustained applause.)
To this belongs also that our church may no longer admit into its ranks any people of Jewish blood. We have not only fought against Jewish mission, but we have always emphasized: people of Jewish blood do not belong in the German People’s Church (strong applause)—neither in the pulpit nor under the pulpit. And where they stand in the pulpit, they must disappear as quickly as possible. (Cheers, applause.)
It will also be necessary for our regional church to concern itself with removing all obviously distorted and superstitious reports from the New Testament, and to declare a fundamental renunciation of the whole scapegoat and inferiority theology of the rabbi Paul, who committed a falsification of that message—that simple joyful message: [10] „Love your neighbor as yourself“—hold this neighbor as your brother and God as your Father. It is quite correct that the entire developmental line of dialectical theology from Paul to Barth has made a mental gymnastics exercise out of our God the Father. Theology has always sought to separate God and man; it has always tried to prove its own right to exist through man, burdened with original sin, fallen and therefore to be saved by the church. We know no separation of God and man, so long as man does not separate himself from God through his own will. The Savior showed us this quite clearly in his parable of the prodigal son. When we depart from the Father, then first we have fallen; and when we have the will and resolve within us: I want to return home to my Father, then we are saved. Kant is quite right: man has to answer for himself; no one can take his sins away from him. And it is un-National Socialist to cling to a selfish concern for salvation, when National Socialism says: „You individual are nothing; your people is everything. It is not about your salvation, but about that of your people.“ The pure teaching of Jesus must again form the foundation of the church. When we take out of the Gospels what speaks to our German hearts, then the essential teaching of Jesus appears clearly and radiantly—and it, we may be proud of this, fully coincides with the demands of National Socialism. Let us think—to take one example—of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, which for Jewish historians is a miracle because they cannot understand that through the command „Love your neighbor,“ everything divine in man is released and set free, and that thereby forces arise whose effects border on the miraculous. When National Socialism demands: „If everyone gives, everyone will have something,“ then in our days we also experience the miracle of the feeding of 5,000, 10,000, 100,000, even millions, seemingly out of nothing. (Very strong applause.)
We must demand: return to a heroic Jesus, whose life has exemplary significance for us, and whose death is the seal upon this life—the conclusion of a heroic and fighting life for the task entrusted to him by his Father. [11] We must therefore also beware of overemphasizing the Crucified. We cannot use as a leader a God who sits enthroned in the distance, but only the fearless fighter. Our church needs a leader; it has one in our Savior; it needs leaders in those who must lead us here—not chairmen (that too is a word that fell here weeks ago), not those who possess, but one who himself feels poor, and who out of this need can be a leader to God. Hero-veneration must become God-veneration. Sacred places must arise in our land. Our sacred, blood-fertilized places must mean more to us than distant places in Palestine, because the sacrifices of the German freedom struggle have soaked this native soil with their blood. Therefore we want to praise God here, here we want to feel connected with our God. (Applause.) And therefore, as children of God, we want no doctrine of servitude. This is something that has always been impressed upon me by our old fighters in the Party: we do not want servile people, but proud people, who feel connected and obligated to the Divine. And when the Führer says: man needs trust in himself, we want to take that up in the sense that, when as children of God we feel obligated to the Father and to our people, we perform the right worship of God.
Thus we demand a return to this simple and uncomplicated childlike faith, as proclaimed by the joyful message of Jesus, without all the trappings that men have added. We want to let our worship be service to the people in daily life; we want to hold the celebration of God in the house of God, in community, with German words and from German spirit. We want to sing hymns that are free of all Israelitisms. We want to free ourselves from the language of Canaan and come to the German mother tongue, because only in the German mother tongue can a person most deeply express prayer, praise, and thanks. (Strong applause.)
Thus the Reich Church, thus our regional church can fulfill the tasks that we must expect from a national church. And the Reich Church will have to declare its position on these [12] demands. From that will emerge whether the coming church shall be created with or against the current church government. For the Faith Movement, the existing church cannot represent fulfillment as long as it does not gain the trust of the German people through deeds. As long as that is the case, the Faith Movement remains a National Socialist combat community, even if its leading men have become church officials! (Very good! Strong applause.)
We desire peace, just as Adolf Hitler desires peace with the world; we want peace within our people—but only when our goal is reached, when the struggle for the German soul has found its conclusion in a German folk religion, which, to speak with Lagarde, the great German man of God, shall give to all people of German kind: „homeland air in foreign lands, guarantee of eternal life in time, indestructible community of the children of God amid hatred and vanity, a life on familiar terms with the almighty Creator, kingly glory and ruling power over everything that is not of divine descent.“
If Luther lived today, we may be sure that he would be the champion of this German People’s Church. In the national community of the Third Reich, the community of faith—that is, the community of those who feel connected with God—will grow irresistibly.
Millions of German people stretch out their arms in search of a German church; they strive on the most varied paths, yet all toward the same goal. For us, then, it is a matter not of breaking bridges, but of building bridges; not of pharisaically seeing only sinners in others, but of opening wide, wide the gates of the emerging People’s Church to all seeking and all striving, insofar as it springs from truly German spirit.
And we shall experience how closely the kinship of the Nordic German spirit with the heroic spirit of Jesus then reveals itself. It will then become clear that the completion of Martin Luther’s Reformation means the final victory of the Nordic spirit over Oriental materialism. Heil! (Long sustained applause.)
Source: Volume 1 of the series of publications of the Faith Movement German People’s Church (Schriftenreihe der Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Volkskirche), Berlin 1933.
NAMENSgedächtnis 