Page 178 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The American Diplomats 165

Within the evangelical Church, strong resistance to the government’s
religious policies surfaced immediately after they were announced in 1933.
about three thousand Protestant ministers voiced their opposition to the
reform policies in general, but they were especially troubled by the gov-
ernment’s insistence on enforcing the aryan paragraph. One of the more
outspoken opponents of the Nazi program was a young clergyman, Martin
Niemöller, an interesting and unusually courageous person who rapidly
rose to national and international prominence. But ambassador dodd was
quick to point out—in december 1933—that the opposition to the German
Christians was not necessarily directed against Nazism per se. Quite a few
pastors who joined the opposition, initially including Niemöller, were in
fact sympathetic to many of Hitler’s aims. they were passionately patriotic,
and Niemöller was always proud of his service as an officer on a U-boat
during World War i. When war broke out in 1939, he was in a concentra-
tion camp, and yet he offered to return to duty on a U-boat, only to be
turned down by Hitler. Niemöller and his colleagues objected to the new
tendencies in the evangelical Church primarily on doctrinal grounds; that
is, they believed that sacred Christian doctrines were being wrongfully dis-
carded. indeed, dodd claimed that “a victory by the moderate elements in
the Church over the radicals is not likely to have any perceptibly adverse
effects on the Hitler regime.” 49
Hitler pursued a more moderate policy with regard to the Catholic
Church, which served the spiritual needs of about one-third of the popula-
tion, and the result may have been to his advantage. Prior to 1933, the ro-
man Catholic Church had opposed Nazism more vigorously than the Prot-
estant evangelical Church, but after 1933 the situation changed and became
more complicated. On the whole, German Catholics offered less resistance
as well as less support to Nazism than the Protestants, who contained with-
in their midst both ardent supporters and uncompromising opponents.
Hitler conciliated the Catholics by signing a concordat with the Vatican
on June 30, 1933, that voided all the dissolutions of Catholic organizations
that had taken place during the first months of his rule; the concordat also
committed the government to repealing “all [other] compulsory measures
against priests and other leaders” of the Catholic Church that had been en-
acted. in return, the church agreed to remain aloof from politics. Hitler was
now confident that he would be able to count on “citizens of the roman
Catholic faith” to support the National socialist state. He was not wrong,
50
although some leaders of German Catholicism never became reconciled to
Nazi Germany’s religious policies.