1 

SCJR 11, no. 1 (2016): 1-29   

 

 

“The Bearers of Unholy Potential”: 

Confessing Church Sermons  

on the Jews and Judaism  
 

WILLIAM SKILES 
wskiles@regent.edu  

Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA 23464 

 

As moral and spiritual guides, clergymen in Nazi Germany had a unique op-

portunity to influence and inform Germans under the domination of the Nazi 

regime. If an ordinary German were to step inside a church, sit in the pew, and 

listen attentively to the pastor, what would he or she hear about the Jews and Ju-

daism in this period of extraordinary exclusion and persecution?  

The German Protestant churches fractured along theological fault lines when 

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime came to power in January 1933. The popularity 

of a pro-Nazi faction within the German Protestant churches, the German Chris-

tian movement, encouraged Hitler to create a Reichskirche (Reich Church) to 

unite all Protestant churches under German-Christian leadership in the summer of 

1933. This religious movement sought to align Christianity with National Social-

ist principles, to praise Hitler as Germany’s savior, to strip Christianity of its 

Jewish elements, to apply racialist ideology to Christianity, and to deny leader-

ship or even membership in the church to Christians of Jewish descent.
1
 For 

many, the German Christian movement went too far, and in September 1933, the 

Berlin-Dahlem pastor Martin Niemöller organized the Pfarrernotbund (Pastors’ 

Emergency League), which not a year later would become the Confessing Church 

with a membership of 7,000 pastors (of a total of 18,000 Protestant pastors).
2
 The 

                                                            
William Skiles is an Assistant Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences at Regent 

University, Virginia Beach, Virginia. 

 

This article is adapted from a chapter in my doctoral dissertation, Preaching to Nazi Germany: The 
Confessing Church on National Socialism, the Jews, and the Question of Opposition. I would like to 

thank Frank Biess, Deborah Hertz, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this 

article.  Thanks also to Robert Ellison and the panel at the American Society of Church History Con-
ference in Edmonton, in April 2016, for helpful critiques of the paper. 

 
1
 See Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: 

North Carolina Press, 1996); Kurt Meier, Die Deutschen Christen: Das Bild einer Bewegng im 
Kirchenkampf des Dritten Reiches (Göttigen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964); and Hans-Joachim 

Sonne, Die politische Theologie der Deutschen Christen (Göttigen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). 
2
 Ernst Christian Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue 

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 156; Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: 

Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 63. See also Gerlach, 
who reports that 6,000 joined by the end of 1933. Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            2 
 

 

                   

single issue that united members of the Confessing Church was simply that they 

wanted to halt any National Socialist infringements—whether by the regime or 

German-Christians—into Christian theology and practice.
3
 This division was 

about the identity of the Protestant churches in Nazi Germany. The Confessing 

Church claimed that the Reichskirche had become a corrupted church, and subse-

quently named itself as the “true” Protestant Church of Germany, faithful to the 

Reformation confessions. Along with the German-Christians and the Confessing 

Church members, there were also “neutrals” who simply wished to stay out of the 

fray and not take a stand one way or the other in relation to the Nazi regime. 

Conflict within the German Protestant churches played out in the pulpits. 

German-Christian pastors preached on themes consonant with National Socialist 

principles, such as the racial superiority of the “Aryan” race, the destiny of the 

German nation, the greatness of Germany’s “savior,” Adolf Hitler, and the perni-

ciousness of the Jewish people. Confessing Church pastors responded to these 

assertions by looking to the Christian scriptures: Christ is the only savior; the 

gospel is a universal message, for all people regardless of race or ethnicity; Chris-

tians and Jews are spiritual cousins, who share values, traditions, and sacred texts; 

and Judaism and its scripture are the foundation of Christianity and thus cannot 

be excised from the German churches.  

Despite these differences, historians have demonstrated the pervasiveness of 

anti-Jewish prejudice in all segments of the German population, including pastors 

affiliated with the German Christian movement, the Confessing Church, and 

those who remained “neutral” regarding the Nazi state.
4
 Wolfgang Gerlach has 

convincingly argued that “Most Christians [in Nazi Germany] saw the Jews as 

objects of either damnation or evangelization,” a position that drastically limited 

their concern for and actions in support of non-Christian Jews in Germany.
5
 His-

torians have demonstrated the virtual silence of the German Churches, and the 

Confessing Church as well, in coming to the aid of European Jewry caught in Na-

zi persecutions—a silence resulting from ingrained anti-Jewish prejudice.
6
 

                                                                                                                                         
The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, translated and edited by Victoria J. Barnett 
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000), 33. 
3
 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 5. 

4
 Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New 

Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Raul Hillberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New 
York: Holmes & Meier, 1985); Robert Michael, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the 

Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Christopher Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther 

and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012); and 
Saul Friedländer, who speaks of the “omnipresence of anti-Semitism in most of the Evangelical Lu-

theran Church,” in Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 2 (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007), 56. 
5
 Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, 7. 

6
 Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent; Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (New 

York: Harper & Row, 1975); Franklin Hamlin Littell and Hubert Locke, eds., The German Church 

Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974); Eberhard Röhm and Jörg 

Thierfelder, Juden-Christen-Deutsche 1933-1945, Vols 1 & 2 (Stuttgart , 1990); and Marijke Smid, 
Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/1933 (Munich, 1990). More recently, Peter Fritzsche 

has argued that there was “general silence about the fate of the German Jews” in the German church-

es. See Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 119. 



             

              3                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

Furthermore, Victoria Barnett has revealed the great complexity and heterogenei-

ty among Confessing Church members; the movement included moderates and 

radicals, nationalists and antisemites, and even Nazi Party members. The only 

thing they had in common “was their opposition to the absolute demands of Nazi 

ideology on their religious faith.”
7
 

If we widen the scope of those who opposed the regime to resisters of the 

Nazi regime and rescuers of Jews, again, anti-Jewish prejudice was widespread.
8
 

Historians have demonstrated the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism among the of-

ficer’s corps in the German military, even among those in the resistance who 

would conspire against the Nazi regime to end the war and Nazi policies of Jew-

ish persecution.
9
 Among Christians who actively resisted the Nazis and rescued 

Jews, we find the same prejudice prevalent.
10

 Yet for rescuers and resisters, their 

sense of honor, duty, and concern and care for their country and the oppressed 

outweighed traditions of anti-Jewish prejudice, compelling them to act and speak 

out against the Nazi regime. I will demonstrate that Confessing Church pastors, as 

citizens who wanted to limit Nazi infringements in the German Protestant 

churches, also expressed anti-Judaic prejudices, even in criticizing the Nazi re-

gime at the same time. 

Regardless of the pervasive anti-Jewish prejudice in the German churches, a 

nuanced picture emerges if we examine the sermons of the Confessing Church, a 

vastly underutilized source base. To better understand the pastors’ perspectives 

about Jews and Judaism, historians have long called for a thorough examination 

of sermons preached to the German masses.
11

 Even though Gerlach’s argument 

about the silence of the Confessing Church in response to Nazi persecution of 

Jews has found support in the historiography, in my judgment it is impossible to 

answer the question of silence without first exploring the historical record of cler-

gymen’s speech in the pulpit.
12

 This article fills a gap in the historiography, and 

                                                            
7
 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 5. 

8
 See Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death: The Story of the German Resistance, translated by Bruce 

Little (New York: Metropolitan, 1996), 150; Theodore Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair: 
German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 226; Peter Hoff-

mann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945, Third Edition (Montreal and Kingston: 

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 318; Robert Michael, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemi-

tism, and the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 165; and Louis Eltscher, Traitors or 

Patriots? A Story of the German Anti-Nazi Resistance (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse: 2013), 64-66. 
9
 See for example, Eltscher, Traitors or Patriots? 64-66; and Hoffman, History of the German Re-

sistance, 318. 
10

 See for example, David Gushee, Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: Genocide and Moral Obliga-

tion, 2
nd

 Edition (St. Paul, MN: Paragon, 2003); and Nechama Tec’s two superb books, When Light 

Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1986), and Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (New York: 

Oxford University Press, 2013).  
11

 See Arthur Cochrane, The Church’s Confession under Hitler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 

1962); Walter Zvi Bacharach, Anti-Jewish Prejudices in German-Catholic Sermons, translated by 

Chaya Galai (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1993); and Robert Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, 
“The German Churches Face Hitler,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 23 (1994). 
12

 Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent; Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews; 
Franklin Hamlin Littell and Hubert Locke, eds., The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust; 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            4 
 

 

                   

aims to explore the messages about Jews and Judaism preached to the German 

people. My research indicates that Confessing Church pastors occasionally ex-

pressed comments either in support of or critical of the Jews and Judaism from 

the pulpit.   

I wish not simply to examine what the pastors said; instead, I wish to explore 

the reasons why they expressed these views. The motives for these expressions 

often served a broader purpose than simply relating personal views of Jews and 

Judaism. These comments from the pulpit reveal that the pastors sometimes 

wished to connect Christians to the history, traditions, and values of Jews. They 

sought to preserve the identity and theology of the German churches in the con-

text of Nazi persecution and the German-Christian “Nazification” or 

“dejudaization” of the Protestant churches. Most surprisingly, the pastors also 

used anti-Judaic statements as a way to criticize the Nazi regime and its leader-

ship for espousing a racial ideology of “chosen-ness” that undermined basic 

Christian beliefs. Thus, the pastors’ comments about Jews and Judaism most of-

ten had a clear purpose that in some way served the interests of the Confessing 

Church. Furthermore, as will become evident, the prejudice expressed by Con-

fessing Church pastors was predominantly religious in nature, using anti-Judaic 

tropes to characterize the Jewish people and their religion. Yet the explicit reli-

gious prejudice at times incorporates implicit antisemitic expressions, revealing 

the blurred boundaries between anti-Judaic religious prejudice and racial antisem-

itism. Lastly, my analysis corroborates the research by Peter Hoffmann and Ian 

Kershaw, among others, in demonstrating that the German churches were among 

the only institutions in Germany able to withstand Nazi “coordination” to the re-

gime and its values, thus giving them a degree of freedom to publicly criticize the 

Nazi regime and its ideology.
13

 

After searching archives, libraries, and used bookstores throughout Germany, 

I analyzed 910 sermons by ninety-five Confessing Church pastors—all the ser-

mons I could confirm were delivered by Confessing Church members.
14

 While 

some sermons do not clearly identify the location in which they were delivered, 

we can determine that the sermons were preached throughout Nazi Germany, in 

small towns and large cities throughout the various regions, from Schleswig-

Holstein in the north, to Bavaria in the south; from Westphalia in the west, to 

Saxony in the east. Of all the sermons, 717 were found in book or pamphlet col-

lections published either during or shortly after the Nazi dictatorship. The 

                                                                                                                                         
Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Juden-Christen-Deutsche 1933-1945, Vols. 1 & 2; and Marijke 

Smid, Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/1933. 
13

 See Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 181-185; Hoffmann, The History of German Resistance, 

13; Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 

2008), 166. 
14

 The sermons were all delivered by members of the Confessing Church, from a variety of positions, 

including newly ordained pastors, superintendents, and theologians. Many well-known Confessing 
Church leaders contributed sermons to the source base for this research, such as Hans Asmussen (fif-

ty-eight sermons), Karl Barth (thirty), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (fifty-six), Friedrich von Bodelschwingh 

(thirty-nine), Helmut Gollwitzer (nine), and Hans Iwand (eighteen). 



             

              5                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

remaining 211 were unpublished sermons found in archives.
15

 Some of the ser-

mons are dated, while others lack dating or time references. Many can only be 

categorized generally as pre-war, or within a certain time frame (e.g. 1941-1943). 

So it is virtually impossible to determine how many sermons were delivered in 

any given year or month. However, I have determined that only 255 of the 910 

sermons were delivered during World War II. When war broke out, pastors began 

to leave the pulpits and join the war, either voluntarily or involuntarily through 

the draft. For example, Christian Helmreich argues that by 1941, 40% of 

Protestant pastors were mobilized in the army or navy. By October 1944, 45% of 

all Protestant pastors and 98% of non-ordained vicars and candidates for ministry 

were mobilized for war. This mean fewer qualified pastors to preach on the home 

front, and thus fewer sermons in the historical record.
16

  

I have found that seventy sermons of the 910 in the collection expressed 

views that contributed to how their congregations perceived Judaism and the Jews 

of Nazi Germany. The expressions were evenly divided in support of and against 

the Jewish people. In forty sermons, Confessing Church pastors made anti-Judaic 

statements that corroborated the Nazi antisemitic narrative that the Jews and their 

religion are inferior. At the same time, in another forty sermons, pastors ex-

pressed support and solidarity with the Jewish people, honored Judaism as a 

foundation of the Christian religion, and even spoke out against the Nazi persecu-

tion of the Jews (ten sermons included both comments supportive and critical of 

Jews, and thus were only counted once in the total of seventy sermons). These 

sermons reveal not only ambivalence among Confessing Church pastors about 

Judaism and the Jewish people, but a millennia-long ingrained prejudice that of-

ten came to the surface. As some of these sermons demonstrate, even when a 

pastor supported the Jewish people or affirmed the value of Judaism as a basis of 

Christianity, anti-Judaic comments undermine these messages. 

My research is significant, first, because it is the only study to extensively 

treat expressions of support for Jews as well as the nature of anti-Jewish prejudice 

expressed from the Christian pulpits in Nazi Germany. In short, my analysis treats 

seriously sermons as a source base for understanding Christians’ perceptions of 

Jews and Judaism in Nazi Germany. To underscore how unique this approach is, I 

have found only one monograph to treat the sermons of German churches, the Is-

raeli historian Walter Zvi Bacharach’s Anti-Jewish Prejudices in German-

Catholic Sermons (2000).
17

 While Bacharach examines Catholic sermons of the 

nineteenth century, and not Protestant sermons from 1933-1945, he concludes 

                                                            
15

 The archives I utilized were the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin, the Landeskirchliches Ar-

chiv der Evangelischen Kirche von Westfalen in Bielefeld, the Archiv der Evangelischen Kirchen im 

Rheinland in Düsseldorf, the archive of the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Uni-
versity of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections in Iowa City. 
16

 But we should add to this also that sermons were likely destroyed in the war. As I learned conduct-
ing my research, the war might have led to the destruction of sermons by leading figures, such as 

Gerhard Jacobi of the Gedenkniskirche in Berlin. These sermons may have been lost from the histori-

cal record. 
17

 Bacharach, Walter Zvi. Anti-Jewish Prejudices in German-Catholic Sermons, Translated by Chaya 

Galai. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1993. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            6 
 

 

                   

that Catholic theology as expressed and disseminated in sermons throughout 

Germany greatly contributed to the prevailing view that Jews were inferior, crim-

inal, spiritually corrupt, and thus deserving of divine punishment.
18

 However, 

more scholarship needs to be done to judge whether the Nazi era marks a shift in 

the expressions about Jews and Judaism in the Protestant churches from the 

Weimar or Imperial eras. 

Second, this research is significant because it fills a lacuna in the historiog-

raphy by clarifying the nature of anti-Jewish prejudice in Confessing Church 

pulpits, and demonstrates that it was predominantly religious in nature (though at 

times racial prejudice comes to the surface as well), in stark contrast to the viru-

lent antisemitism espoused by pastors in the German Christian movement or by 

members of the Nazi regime and its propaganda machine. Third, this research re-

veals that Confessing Church pastors employed anti-Jewish prejudice, not simply 

to denigrate the Jews, but to purposely challenge the Nazi regime and its racial 

policies and ideology. And fourth, this research challenges, or rather nuances, the 

common argument that pastors of the German churches remained silent as their 

Jewish neighbors faced unprecedented persecution by the Nazi regime. While the 

support of the Confessing Church pastors for Jews was admittedly meager, we 

now have a greater understanding of what they actually said from the pulpit in 

support of the Jews and Judaism in Nazi Germany.  

 

1. Confessing Church Expressions of Anti-Judaism 

 

After analyzing 910 sermons of the Confessing Church, I found that forty 

contain messages that express prejudice against the Jewish people or Judaism, 

voiced by fifteen of the ninety-five Confessing Church pastors examined for this 

study.
19

 While the number of sermons may be small, they are significant to our 

understanding of the messages Confessing Church pastors delivered publicly 

about the Jews and Judaism. 

All forty sermons that express prejudice against the Jewish people or Judaism 

reflect traditional Christian anti-Judaism, specifically the following six elements: 

first, the general view that the Jews are a stubborn or wayward people; second, 

the view that Christianity is superior because it emphasizes grace and freedom 

over Judaism’s purported emphasis on law and works; third, the claim that the 

Jews are a stubborn people for rejecting Jesus, or that they are actually responsi-

ble for putting him to death (and thus, the charge of deicide); fourth, the 

perception that God has or is currently punishing the Jews for the rejection of Je-

                                                            
18

 Bacharach, Anti-Jewish Prejudices in German-Catholic Sermons, 130-133. 
19

 The names of the pastors are as follows: Karl Barth (2 times); Friedrich von Bodelschwingh (3); 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1); Friedrich Delekat (1); Otto Dibelius (1); Hermann Diem (1); Robert Frick 

(1) Heinrich Grüber (1); Hanns Lilje (1); Paul Hinz (4); Martin Niemöller (7); Julius Sammentreuther 

(8); Hermann Sasse (1); Karl von Schwartz (4); Hans von Soden (1). Of the forty sermons that ex-
pressed anti-Judaic sentiments, thirty-one (76%) were based on New Testament texts. As we will see 

later, pastors who expressed support for the Jews and Judaism used the Hebrew Bible much more of-

ten (47%). 



             

              7                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

sus; fifth, the belief that upon the rejection of Jesus and the establishment of the 

Church, the Jews have ceased to be the people of God; and sixth, a generalized 

sentiment that hopes for the mass conversion of the Jews, reflecting a belief in the 

inferiority of Judaism and the lack of salvation for the Jewish people.
 20

 The ser-

mons of Confessing Church pastors reveal anti-Judaism or non-rational religious 

prejudice, which is based on religious convictions or interpretations of scripture 

and history.
21

  

Yet at times pastors used anti-Judaic tropes that implicitly reference anti-

semitism, an ideology that asserts the racial inferiority or perniciousness of the 

Jewish people.
22

 For example, the assertion that the Jews have a history of “way-

wardness” in rejecting Christ from the first century to the twentieth presumes not 

simply a religious denial of Christ, but implies a biological predisposition that 

passes from one generation to the next. Thus, these sermons reveal that the line 

between anti-Judaism and antisemitism can easily become blurred. A faith-based 

anti-Judaism can easily become a racially-based antisemitism.
23

 

Nevertheless, I have found no evidence of antisemitic expressions that stand 

alone without mention of religious prejudice. In other words, the primary basis of 

the anti-Jewish prejudice is religious conviction, which at times implicitly draws 

on antisemitic tropes. The basis of the prejudice is not racial ideology. These 

sermons reveal continuity in the anti-Judaic prejudice expressed by clergymen 

throughout the history of the Christianity. Thus, in the interests of efficiency and 

precision in examining specifically religious primary sources, it is important to 

maintain a distinction between centuries-old religious anti-Judaism and modern 

racial antisemitism. I will use the terms “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” as two 

forms of prejudice, though forms that can and often do interact. 

We must also keep in mind the larger context in which anti-Jewish prejudice 

was expressed in the German Protestant churches. From the start, the main con-

cern of the Confessing Church was to oppose the attempts of the German 

Christian movement to “Nazify” the churches by attempting to institutionalize a 

racial criterion, stipulated in an “Aryan paragraph,” to be adopted into church law 

throughout the German states, thus limiting church leadership, ordination, and 

even membership to “Aryan” Germans only.
24

 The German Protestant churches 

                                                            
20

 See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 
2001); Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Vol. 1, From the Time of Christ to the Court of 

the Jews, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Vanguard, 1965); Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Cru-

cified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).  
21

 See Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, 152, 252-255; and Michael, Holy Hatred, 82-

84. 
22

 See Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cam-

bridge University Press, 1991); and John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in 
Germany (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). 
23

 Michael, Holy Hatred, 5-6. See also Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 22; and Daniel Goldhagen, A 
Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Re-

pair (New York: Knopf, 2002), 78-9. 
24

 See Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 128-129; Bergen, Twisted Cross, 88-93; Gutteridge, Ger-

man Evangelical Church and the Jews, 91-96; and Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 144-

147. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            8 
 

 

                   

vigorously debated the “Aryan paragraph” and they took various positions, which 

at times reveal anti-Jewish prejudice. Regional churches sought the advice of the-

ological faculty, and two of the more well-known responses were from the 

theological faculty at the universities of Marburg and Erlangen. The Marburg 

faculty explicitly and unambiguously opposed the “Aryan paragraph”: any person 

of Jewish descent, who accepts Christianity and is baptized, is a full-fledged 

member of the Church.
25

 In contrast, the Erlangen faculty’s response was ambig-

uous and equivocal in its answer: historically the church has required biological 

requirements of faculty (e.g. age, sex, and physical capabilities), so the church 

could add other biological requirements; at the same time, for a church to prosper, 

it would help for a pastor to be of the same people as his congregation (a Bavari-

an leading Bavarians, for example); perhaps separate churches for Jewish 

Christians might be the answer.
26

  

One of the very few times that the Confessing Church leadership stridently 

condemned the antisemitism of the Nazi regime is the memorandum of May 28, 

1936, issued by the Provisional Church Government and sent directly to Adolf 

Hitler. Though meant to be a private memorandum for Hitler, the press got its 

hands on it and published it at home and abroad.
27

 The letter criticized the regime 

on a range of issues, including the problems of disunity among the Protestant 

churches, the deification of the Nazi state and Hitler himself, and concerns about 

de-Christianization in Nazi Germany.
28

 But its condemnation of antisemitism was 

especially striking, if only because it was so rare a criticism delivered directly to 

Hitler: “when within the concepts of National Socialist Weltanschauung 

(worldview) an anti-Semitism is forced on Christians which demands hatred of 

the Jews (Judenhaas), there stands opposed to this the Christian command of love 

your neighbor.”
29

 The Nazi regime reacted with vehemence, arresting several pas-

tors and theologians responsible for the letter, including a Jewish man, Friedrich 

Weissler, an attorney who worked with the Provisional Church Government, and 

who was sent to Sachsenhausen and murdered. The Nazi reaction reveals the re-

percussions of speaking out publicly against the Nazi regime, especially against 

its persecution of the Jews. 

Nevertheless, the consensus among historians is that throughout the Third 

Reich, Confessing Church pastors limited their concerns about Nazi racial poli-

cies to their impact on Jewish Christians—to Christians of Jewish descent within 

the churches—and failed to concern themselves about the persecution of Jews as 

Jews under the Nazi regime.
30

 In the context of Nazi Germany, one could argue 

                                                            
25

 Barnet, For the Soul of the People, 129; and Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 145. 
26

 Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, 39-41; Green, Lutherans against Hitler, 133-142; and 

Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 145-146. 
27

 Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 200-201. 
28

 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 83-84; Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 199. 
29

 Quoted in Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 200. 
30

 See Kenneth C. Barnes, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hitler’s Persecution of the Jews,” in Betrayal: 

German Churches and the Holocaust, edited by Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel (Minneap-
olis: Fortress Press, 1999), 128; Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 142; Robert P. Ericksen, 



             

              9                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

that anti-Jewish expressions from the pulpit indirectly serve to support Nazi racial 

policies because they are clearly aimed at criticizing the Jewish community.  

It is striking to note that the religious prejudice expressed from the Confess-

ing Church pulpits often serve a specific purpose, whether to demonstrate the 

spiritual or moral superiority of Christians to Jews, or remarkably, to criticize Na-

zis and National Socialism. Let us start with the former, sermons that demonstrate 

the superiority of Christianity and the inferiority of Judaism, a common theme not 

only in the history of the Nazi era, but in the history of Christian anti-Jewish prej-

udice through the centuries.
31

 

A sermon by Pastor Paul Hinz of Kolberg illustrates this theme well. Hinz 

was a leading member of the Confessing Church in Pomerania, even serving as a 

leader on the Pomeranian Provincial Council of Brethren (Bruderrat, or govern-

ing council). On June 20, 1935, Hinz delivered a sermon that uses a Christian 

interpretation of history to criticize Jews and Judaism. Keep in mind, this sermon 

comes after the Nazi regime already began its persecutions against German Jews, 

such as the Nazi-sponsored boycott of all Jewish shops on April 1, 1933, and the 

passage of the Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933, effectively prohibiting Jews 

and socialists from national, state, and local civil service employment, including 

for example, school teachers, professors, and government officials and employ-

ees.
32

  

Hinz took as his biblical passage Romans 10:1-5, wherein the Apostle Paul 

both expresses his displeasure with the Jews’ “ignorance of the righteousness that 

comes from God,” and also his hope that they will one day experience salvation 

in Christ. But Hinz takes Paul’s criticism even further, and argues that because Is-

rael rejected Christ in “stubborn blindness” to God, Israel was no longer God’s 

chosen people, but instead “under the judgment of God’s wrath.”
33

 He contends 

that God cast the Jews aside and welcomed all peoples throughout the world into 

the Church. Furthermore, he contends that the Jews trust in their own descent, in 

blood and race, and in their own chosen-ness—perhaps indirectly comparing 

                                                                                                                                         
Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 2012), 106; and Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, 7. 
31

 My analysis follows the work of historians such as Baranowski, Ericksen, Hayes, among others, 

that anti-Judaism was a widespread characteristic of early 20
th
 century German Protestantism. See 

Shelley Baranowski, “The Confessing Church and Antisemitism: Protestant Identity, German Nation-
hood, and the Exclusion of the Jews,” in Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, eds., Betrayal: 

German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); Kenneth Barnes, Nazism, 

Liberalism, and Christianity: Protestant Social Thought in Germany and Great Britain 1925-1937 
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 140-141; Doris Bergen, “Catholics, 

Protestants, and Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” Central European History 27 (1994): 329-348; 

Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the 
Jews, translated and edited by Victoria Barnett (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 

236; Stephen R. Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies? Jews and Judaism in Anti-Nazi Religious Dis-

course,” Church History 71:2 (June 2002), 341-367; and Uriel Tal, “On Modern Lutheranism and 
Jews,” in Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 203-213.  
32

 Kirk, Nazi Germany, 41-42. 
33

 Paul Hinz, Sermon manuscript on Romans 10:1-15, 30 June 1935, Collected Sermons of Paul Hinz, 

Evangelisches Zentralarchiv, Berlin (EZA) 766/38. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            10 
 

 

                   

them to Nazis (more of this to come). But Hinz does not stop here. He reminds 

his congregation of the anti-Judaic theme of the Jews’ curse in Matthew 27:25. 

According to the gospel writer, “the Jews” demanded that Pilate crucify Jesus and 

free Barabbas: “[Jesus’] blood be on us and on our children!” This curse, Hinz 

contends, has “uncannily” been accomplished throughout history and even until 

this day.
34

 The sermon takes a biblical text that is critical of Jews, and adds layer 

upon layer of traditional Christian anti-Judaic theology that ends with a “proof” 

for all to see and verify—the punishment of the Jews in history. These comments 

are also a good example of how religious anti-Judaic prejudice can imply racial 

antisemitism: Jewish “stubborn blindness” has been passed down biologically 

from one generation to the next; the “blood guilt” carries on to the modern age re-

sulting in God’s continued punishment. 

Just as concerning are expressions that blame “the Jews” for rejecting or kill-

ing Christ because of their supposed hatred, revealing their spiritual or moral 

inferiority. I have found fourteen examples of this trope by nine different pas-

tors.
35

 These expressions vary widely in judgment and blame. Many of these refer 

simply and as a matter of fact to the Jews’ hatred of Jesus. Four of these retell the 

trial and crucifixion of Jesus and in so doing argue that “the Jews” hated Jesus 

and rejected him. For example, in a sermon during the Second World War, Pastor 

Otto Dibelius, the general superintendent of the Brandenburg Land church, calls 

the crucifixion a “great [attempt] of human hatred,” and Pastor Bodelschwingh 

said in 1944 that “Jewish hatred of Christ is a contagious force.”
36

 Other pastors 

were more explicit that the Jews actually killed Christ. This point is tremendously 

significant as the charge of deicide was often used during the Holocaust to justify 

violence against the Jewish people.
37

 The historian Irving Greenberg has noted 

“literally hundreds” of instances where this kind of statement was made to justify 

antisemitic violence.
38

  

The sermons that express Jewish hatred for Jesus do not aim for historical 

accuracy, but paint the entire Jewish population as opponents if not outright ene-

mies of Christ and Christianity. While these statements about Jewish hatred for 

Jesus may suggest to Christians listening in Nazi Germany that their Jewish 

neighbors still harbor this hatred, the implication may not have been intended. 

Nevertheless, we should remember the context in which these sermons were de-

livered. As Nazi persecutions changed from public policies of exclusion from 

                                                            
34

 Hinz, Sermon manuscript on Romans 10:1-15, EZA 766/38. 
35

 Thirteen of the 14 sermons were based on New Testament texts, while only one was based on the 

Hebrew Bible (from the book of Micah). At the same time, eleven of the fourteen were based on the 
gospels (and five from the book of Matthew). This evidence suggests that Confessing Church pastors 

interpreted the New Testament, and especially the gospels, in a way conducive to the most destructive 

of anti-Judaic tropes, that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and that God 
had cursed them as a punishment. 
36

 Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Lebendig und Frei: Predigten, 2. Folge (Bielefeld: Verlagshandlung 
der Anstalt Bethel, 1947), 170. 
37

 Michael, Holy Hatred, 182. 
38

 Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Edited 

by Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV, 1997), 308. 



             

              11                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

German social and civil life, to the increasing “Aryanization” of Jewish property 

and businesses in 1937, to the ghettoization and finally extermination of Jews 

during World War II, the effects of these sermons on the German public could 

only have legitimated Nazi oppression and perhaps even cooled the consciences 

of Christians who may have been concerned for their Jewish neighbors. Christian 

anti-Judaic theology served to “numb” Christians to the suffering and persecution 

of their Jewish neighbors, and it became a hindrance for them to stand up and 

protest the Nazi dictatorship, to act on behalf of their Jewish neighbors. 

Moreover, anti-Jewish sentiments fractured relationships even within con-

gregations. Robert Gellately’s study of the attitudes of Germans throughout the 

Nazi period concerning the regime and its treatment of Jews reveals that many 

“ordinary” Christians supported Nazi measures, such as the decree of 15 Septem-

ber 1941 forcing Jews aged seven and older to wear the yellow star.
39

 Gellately 

writes of the consternation of many Christians when the yellow star revealed just 

how many Christians of Jewish descent attended church services: “In some parts 

of the country, Protestant churchgoers were displeased to note how many (con-

verted) Jews went to church, and demanded of their ministers that they should not 

be asked to take communion next to these Jews, whom they wanted forbidden to 

attend common services.”
40

 Anti-Jewish beliefs resulted in the “shunning” of 

Christians of Jewish descent, the loss of fellowship and mutual support, and the 

restriction of rites and sacraments, including communion.
 41

 

If we break down the years in which Confessing Church pastors expressed 

these anti-Judaic comments, several important observations can be made. First, 

twenty-eight of the thirty-five sermons, whose dates are known, were expressed 

between 1933 and 1939, prior to the outbreak of World War II. Also, more than 

half of the expressions were given between 1933 and 1936. Given the low figures 

we are working with, we cannot claim that these percentages are representative of 

all Confessing Church sermons. Yet they indicate a decrease in the frequency of 

anti-Judaic expressions from 1936 until the end of the war, suggesting that pas-

tors may have wanted to “tone down” criticisms of Jews as Nazi persecutions 

increased. 

Furthermore, most of the sermons that speak of “the Jews’” rejection or kill-

ing of Christ were delivered before the start of World War II. Nine of the fourteen 

occurred between 1933 and the outbreak of war, while four occurred during the 

                                                            
39

 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 2001), Kindle edition, location 3387. 
40

 Gellately, Backing Hitler, Kindle edition, location 3387. In addition, Helmreich reports that in 1939 

“non-Aryan” Christians totaled about 14,000 people – the largest number being Lutheran at 10,461. 

Add to this number approximately 5,000 “Mischlinge,” and the result is a small but significant group. 
See Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 329-330. 
41

 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 132. See also Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution, 124-
125. Bankier contends that even in 1941, upon the introduction of the yellow star in Germany, many 

were “surprised how many Jews still lived in Germany, and praised the labeling, which brought them 

into the open.” 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            12 
 

 

                   

war itself.
42

 Given the general decrease in the 910 extant sermons we have that 

were delivered during the war compared to the pre-war period, this proportion 

may not be surprising. However, eight of the sermons occur in just the first few 

years of the Nazi regime, into 1936, just after the Nazi persecution of the Jewish 

people reached a new stage in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which provided a le-

gal basis for legal discrimination throughout the Nazi dictatorship.
43

 The 

Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship, prohibited sexual relations and 

marriage with “Aryans,” and further restricted the rights of Jews, such as the pro-

hibition of Jews to fly the German flag. The laws represent another step in the 

permanent exclusion of Jews from German public life.  

The fact that about two-thirds of the sermons that contain anti-Judaic expres-

sions were delivered in 1939 or earlier, may reflect a growing awareness of the 

Nazi persecution of the Jews and a subsequent desire to limit criticism toward 

them, or it may simply reflect a desire among pastors to adjust the content of their 

sermons in wartime.    

Let us look at another example of a sermon that expresses criticism for Jew-

ish hatred of Jesus, this one from the preeminent leader of the Confessing Church, 

Martin Niemöller. In a Passion Service only three Sundays before Easter in 1937, 

he preached a sermon on Pilate’s question to “the masses” at the Passover cele-

bration, would they rather free “Christ or Barabbas?” (Mt 27:17). The first 

paragraph is striking because of the nonchalance with which Niemöller expresses 

what he considers a commonplace perception: 

 

[W]hen we hear the story of Christ’s Passion we have a feeling of sympa-

thy… with the figure of this Roman, Pilate, whereas we most emphatically 

dissociate and separate ourselves from all the others who helped to bring 

about the death of Jesus. The cold hatred of the Jewish authorities fills us 

with horror, the groundless and unfathomable treachery of Judas makes us 

shudder, and the pusillanimous fanaticism of the multitude rouses our con-

tempt [emphasis added].
44

 

 

Niemöller does not discuss his view of the Jews again in this sermon, but this 

first paragraph alone reveals what may be a commonly held view in Germany that 

the Jews—its leaders and the masses—were responsible for the execution of Je-

sus. Yet Niemöller invokes in the congregation sympathy for Pilate, the Roman 

governor who actually had Jesus tortured and crucified as an insurrectionist. 

Remarkably, most of the anti-Judaic comments in these forty sermons were 

not from pastors on the fringe of the Confessing Church, expressing views that 

would have embarrassed their colleagues. In fact, many of these pastors are wide-

ly considered heroes of the Confessing Church. For example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

                                                            
42

 One of the fourteen does not provide enough information to determine if it was delivered before 
or during the war. 
43

 Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler, 190. 
44

 Martin Niemöller, God is My Fuehrer: Being the Last Twenty-Eight Sermons, translated by Jane 

Lymburn (New York: Philosophical Library, 1941), 169. 



             

              13                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

ran an underground seminary before participating in a conspiracy against Hitler 

and the regime. And Martin Niemöller courageously spoke out against Nazi intru-

sions in church administration and theology, and also against persecutions of its 

pastors. They were admired leaders in their movement, and yet they expressed an-

ti-Judaic views that could only have alienated Christians from their Jewish 

neighbors or confirmed their already-existing antisemitism. If the best and the 

brightest of Confessing Church pastors, the most courageous and insightful, made 

such anti-Judaic statements in their sermons, we can conclude along with Bar-

anowski, Gerlach, and Haynes, among others, that these sentiments were deeply 

ingrained in Christian theology and that they were widespread.
45

 

While we find many examples of Confessing Church pastors using anti-

Judaic tropes to demonstrate the moral superiority of Christians over Jews, or of 

Christianity over Judaism generally, another common and quite remarkable usage 

of anti-Judaic expressions is to compare Jews to Nazis, or Judaism to National 

Socialism. Confessing Church pastors would take common anti-Judaic percep-

tions of Jews as a wayward people obsessed with race, and use them to criticize 

Nazis and National Socialism for similar “sins.” Consider an example from Pastor 

Karl von Schwartz from Braunschweig, who published a sermon late in 1933, but 

possibly preached earlier, in which he argued that, “The whole history of Israel 

from Sinai to the Pharisees is a history of waywardness. And if today this people 

had all the gold in the world and all the power in the world, the waywardness will 

remain: it should be a light to lighten the Gentiles… Also the Aryan race is no 

exception, despite all the idealization.”
46

 Schwartz presents the Jews as stubborn 

in their own beliefs. The implication is that this people is not to be trusted, but 

kept at a distance as a sign to the world of a people gone astray.  

This sermon is an example of how anti-Judaic prejudice can easily transition 

to antisemitic expression. “Waywardness” is explicitly presented as a spiritual 

condition, but the implication is that it is biologically passed down from genera-

tion to generation to “be a light to the Gentiles.” And furthermore, the assertion 

that the waywardness would remain even if the Jews “had all the gold in the 

world” implies the antisemitic trope of Jews as a greedy, profiteering people in 

control of the world’s financial systems. In this example by Schwartz, the anti-

Judaic prejudice provides the foundation for the antisemitic trope. 

But having said all this, Schwartz continues and asserts that “Aryans,” de-

spite their glorification in Nazi propaganda, must take a lesson from the Jewish 

people: even the “Aryan race” is in need of repentance and must humbly submit 

to and follow God or face God’s punishment. Schwartz’s implication is that the 

two groups are not all that different—both are wayward and need to submit to 

God.  

                                                            
45

 See Baranowski, “The Confessing Church and Antisemitism”; Barnes, Nazism, Liberalism, and 
Christianity, 140-141; Bergen, “Catholics, Protestants, and Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” 329-348; 

Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, 236; Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies?” 341-367; and Tal, “On 

Modern Lutheranism and Jews,” 203-213.  
46

 Karl von Schwartz, Gottes Wort an Gottes Volk: Ein Jahrgang Predigten (Braunschweig: Hellmuth 

Wollermann Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933), 58.  



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            14 
 

 

                   

The historian Uriel Tal has shown—using sources as varied as academic lec-

tures, private letters, and published articles and books—that the leadership of the 

Confessing Church commonly made comparisons between Jews and Nazis in 

their conceptions of race and Volk, as a means to criticize the Nazi regime, its 

leadership, and ideology, especially after the mid-1930s.
47

 Likewise, Stephen 

Haynes has demonstrated the common usage of anti-Judaic tropes in the anti-Nazi 

rhetoric among leaders in the German churches, especially in the writings of Die-

trich Bonhoeffer.
48

 Moreover, the criticism of comparing Jews to Nazis as both 

creators of a false ethno-nationalist identity implicitly draws on the traditional an-

tisemitic trope of “tribalism,” or the belief in the superiority of one’s own racial 

or ethnic group over others.
49

 

My research demonstrates that Confessing Church leaders made these same 

criticisms in sermons as part of worship services, and not simply in the secular 

public sphere. Pastors utilized overt anti-Judaic tropes with implicit antisemitic 

overtones, in a religious context, to condemn a political system and its ideology. 

Confessing Church pastors not only used anti-Judaic tropes to condemn those 

outside the German churches, but those within, specifically the pro-Nazi German 

Christian movement. The sermons reveal a deepening rift in German Protestant-

ism between the German Christian movement and the nascent Confessing 

Church. The confrontation came to a head in November 1933, in the Berlin 

Sportspalast, where the headline speaker, a German-Christian leader named Dr. 

Reinhold Krause, gave a speech attacking the Hebrew Bible for its legalistic mo-

rality and condemning the Apostle Paul for “Judaizing” Christianity, ideas that 

would greatly increase in popularity among the German Christian movement by 

the end of the 1930s.
50

 Following Krause, members of the German Christian 

movement condemned “Rabbi Paul” and his theology “with its scapegoats and in-

feriority complex.”
51

  

While sermons of the Confessing Church reveal centuries-old anti-Jewish 

sentiments, such as the Jewish rejection of Christ, the sermons of the German 

Christian movement overtly expressed racial prejudice meant to exclude Jews 

from the church and German society. For example, one sermon by Heinrich Kalb 

from Wiessenburg, delivered in 1937, entitled Juden Christ – deutscher Christ? 

(Jewish Christian – German Christian?), argues for the separation of Jewish 

Christians from “Aryan” congregations, which he sums up in the phrase, “Ger-

                                                            
47

 Uriel Tal, “On Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust,” in 

Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York, 
1981), 122. 
48

 Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies?” 350-367. 
49

 Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies?” 344-347. 
50

 Bergen, Twisted Cross, 17. See also Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians 

and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2008). Heschel examines the history of how 

the German-Christians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on 
German Religious Life in 1939 with the aim to “Aryanize” Jesus and the New Testament. 
51

 Bergen, Twisted Cross, 158.  



             

              15                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

many for Germans, and also in the Church!”
52

 He and those in the German Chris-

tian movement wished to purify the German churches of all “foreign” elements, 

particularly church leaders of “foreign” backgrounds.
53

 “Only German men may 

speak to the German people from German pulpits; not Turks, Chinese, or even 

Jews!”
54

 

The German Christian movement so transformed the theology, practice, and 

ethics of Christianity through the racial principle of “Aryan” supremacy that it 

substantively altered the meaning and message of Christianity. To the German-

Christian, the gospel is not universal, baptism is effective only for “Aryans,” and 

the church must be racially segregated. In other words, the movement engaged in 

a process of changing the fundamental elements of Christianity, transforming the 

religion into a Nazi-based organization. In fact, to many Christians in Nazi Ger-

many, the German Christian movement was “barely recognizable as Christian.”
55

 

For example, the German Christian movement celebrated Hitler as a savior of the 

German people, and made efforts to transform Christianity into a volkish religion. 

The German Christian movement rejected the canonicity of the Hebrew Bi-

ble, and made controversial claims about the New Testament, such as the 

assertion that Jesus was an “Aryan,” and that a core element of the gospel mes-

sage was hatred of the Jews.
56

 Susannah Heschel has argued that German-

Christians spearheaded the formation of an organization in April 1939, the Insti-

tute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life 

(Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdisches Einflusses auf das 

deutsche kirchliche Leben), a government-sponsored and church-supported insti-

tute dedicated to eradicating Jewish influence from Christianity.
57

 

Confessing Church pastors responded publicly in the pulpits to what they 

considered gross heresy in the German-Christian movement, though at times in-

voking anti-Judaic tropes. For example, in late August 1935, Niemöller preached 

a sermon entitled, “The Office of the Church,” in which he combats the German-

Christians and their attack on the Hebrew Bible. But in so doing, he asserts that 

ancient Judaism was legalistic and works-oriented; he comments that Paul’s op-

ponents are Christians “of Jewish origin” and thus “set a particularly high value 

on the law.”
58

 He stated this not because he wanted his congregation to know that 

first-century Judaism was legalistic, but to demonstrate to the modern-day critics 

of Paul that the apostle himself fought against Judaism’s legalism. This is the 

crux of the problem for Niemöller. If the German Christian movement condemns 

Paul and his “Jewish” teaching, and if Paul’s writings are in part foundational for 

the Christian faith, then the Christian faith itself is gravely undermined. Niemöl-

                                                            
52

 Heinrich Kalb, „Judenchrist – deutscher Christ?“ in Deutsches Christentum, dargestellt in Predigt 

und Vortrag (Nürnberg: Fr. Städler, 1937), 21. 
53

 Bergen, Twisted Cross, 82-83. 
54

 Kalb, „Judenchrist – deutscher Christ?“ in Deutsches Christentum, 19. 
55

 Bergen, Twisted Cross, 2. 
56

 Bergen, Twisted Cross, 142-154. 
57

 Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3, 13. 
58

 Niemöller, Here Stand I! 200. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            16 
 

 

                   

ler relates how he hears all over Germany calls for the German Evangelical 

Church to free itself from the “dead formulas and dogmas” that prevent it from 

giving and sustaining life.
59

 Alas, Niemöller admits, Christians are not free to just 

toss out whatever in the biblical texts is not to their tastes. He concludes that 

Christians must stand before the Hebrew Bible, before the “inexorable will” of 

God, and respond to his grace and mercy.
60

 The irony of course is that in defend-

ing Paul and the Hebrew Bible, he diminishes the scriptural foundation of 

Judaism (in the Hebrew Bible) as legalistic and impoverished. Thus, Confessing 

Church pastors such as Niemöller critiqued attempts by members of the German 

Christian movement to eliminate the Jewish foundations of Christianity by draw-

ing on anti-Judaic ideas.
61

 The sermons that express this anti-Judaic trope affirm 

an existing hierarchy that differentiates the spiritually superior from the spiritual-

ly inferior. Though the prejudice is not racial in nature, it contributes to the 

alienation of Jews to Christians in Nazi Germany. 

But perhaps the most dangerous anti-Judaic trope used by Confessing Church 

pastors in Nazi Germany was that God has or is currently punishing the Jews for 

the rejection of Jesus.
 62

 Remarkably, pastors used this trope not simply to criti-

cize Jews, but to condemn pro-Nazi supporters as well. For example, a sermon by 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer identifies Germans of his day with Israel in rebelling against 

God, setting up false idols, and then reaping God’s punishment as a result. He 

wrote the sermon to be delivered by his close friend and colleague (and later bi-

ographer) Eberhard Bethge at the Mission Festival in Ohlau, Silesia, on October 

20, 1941. This was mere months after the start of Operation Barbarossa, Germa-

ny’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But it was also shortly after he 

began to hear reports of massacres on the eastern front from his collaborators in 

the Abwehr resistance.
63

 By the fall of 1941, Bonhoeffer had begun his involve-

ment with Unternehmen 7 (Operation 7), an intricate plan to smuggle seven Jews 

out of Germany and into Switzerland to report on Nazi treatment of the Jewish 

population.
64

  

Despite his concern and concrete actions to save Jews in Nazi Germany, 

Bonhoeffer still expresses anti-Judaic ideas as a clergyman. The prepared mes-

sage was based in part on Jeremiah 16:21, a text that refers to God’s teaching the 

Israelites of God’s power and might. Bonhoeffer mirrors Jeremiah’s admonition 

against his own people: a time will come when God will cease asking his people 

to stop idolatry, and he will eventually punish his people to set them right. In this 

context Bonhoeffer recalls the anti-Judaic trope that Israel is a stubborn people 

                                                            
59

 Niemöller, Here Stand I! 201. 
60

 Niemöller, Here I Stand! 204. 
61

 Michael, Holy Hatred, 160. 
62

 I have found seven examples in these 910 sermons, from five different pastors that reflect this view 

of God’s curse upon the Jews and his subsequent punishment of them.  
63

 Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 

Kindle Edition, location 7080. 
64

 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, 747-752; Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, Kindle Edition, location 7098; and Elizabeth 

Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Dohnanyi, Resisters against 

Hitler in Church and State (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 96-98. 



             

              17                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

who have consistently rebelled against God. He writes, “There is a last resort by 

which God leads his people (Israel), who have repeatedly misused and resisted 

God’s grace and have toyed with it, to lead them to the recognition of God’s au-

thority: namely, the powerful angry strike of God’s hand [emphasis in the 

original].”
65

 Christians are the new Israel, Bonhoeffer asserts, and Christians in 

Germany have been struck with “war, crises, imprisonment, distress of all 

kinds.”
66

 The meditation is a call for Germans to consider their response to God’s 

“dark revelation”: will they return to God or harden their hearts? Once again we 

see anti-Judaism used to criticize the shortcomings of Christians in Nazi Germa-

ny. 

Moreover, the assertion that God has punished Jews throughout history for 

rebellion implicitly draws on the antisemitic trope of the Jews as biologically 

“wayward,” a condition passed down from generation to generation. Remarkably, 

Bonhoeffer contends that Germans are at risk for the same kind of punishment. 

The reception of these anti-Judaic sentiments is tremendously difficult to 

gauge. I have been unable to find any commentaries or reports from government 

agencies, such as the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, henceforth SD) or Ge-

stapo, or in letters or diaries from colleagues or parishioners. The likely reason is 

that anti-Judaism had long been an aspect of Christianity and thus no one took 

note when it was expressed. The post-war reflection of Eberhard Bethge—the 

same friend, colleague, and biographer of Bonhoeffer—illuminates the mind-set 

of German citizens (and not just pastors) under the Nazi regime. In 1989, Bethge 

gave a talk criticizing the antisemitism of various resistance figures, and he sent a 

letter to one German critic of his talk. Bethge argued that “the ‘old tradition’ of 

Christian anti-Judaism had converged with the radical anti-semitism of Na-

zism.”
67

 Bethge writes, 

 

[W]e have simply been long, long blind and—without having been radical 

anti-Semites—nonetheless we were in our language and consciousness the 

bearers of unholy potential. I see the problem in that even extraordinary re-

sistance fighters were at the same time still sunk in the kind of language and 

attitudes whose anti-Jewish content could only be made clear decades after 

1945.
68

 

 

Bethge speaks of “we” not only to disarm his critics, but to argue the pervasive-

ness of anti-Judaism even among those who were not “radical anti-Semites.”
69

  

The anti-Judaic comments in these sermons indicate that some Confessing 

Church pastors interpreted the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany through a 

                                                            
65

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 1940-1945 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 

2006), 625. 
66

 Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 625. 
67

 John W. De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge (Minneapolis: 

Fortress Press, 2005), 190. 
68

 Quoted in De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, 191. 
69

 De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, 191. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            18 
 

 

                   

theological lens, and yet this opened the door to implicit antisemitic connections. 

This research supports the assertion that the primary concern of pastors in relation 

to the Jewish people was “right belief” and conversion, not their material condi-

tion as a people group targeted by the Nazi regime for exclusion from German 

public life.
70

  

 

2. Voices of Support for Jews and Judaism from the Pulpit 

 

Though pastors periodically expressed anti-Jewish sentiments from the pul-

pit, they also expressed views supportive of Jews and Judaism, thus opposing 

National Socialist ideology and racial policies, and at the same time distinguish-

ing themselves from the explicit antisemitic perspectives of the pro-Nazi German 

Christian movement. Of the 910 sermons I have examined, forty articulate per-

spectives that defend Jews or Judaism. The sermons can be grouped according to 

the following themes: first, Judaism is a foundation for the Christian faith; sec-

ond, the Jews are the people of God and must be respected as such; third, there is 

no qualitative difference between Jews and other people groups, and thus they 

should be treated equally; and fourth, condemnations of the persecution of Jews. 

Regardless of the pastors’ motivations or intentions, the pastors’ religiously-based 

pronouncements in support of Jews and Judaism took on political significance as 

implicit or explicit criticisms of Nazi ideology and racial policy.
71

 Thus, surpris-

ingly, both negative and positive expressions about Jews could serve to criticize 

the Nazi regime, the German Christian movement, or Germans more generally in 

Nazi Germany. This reveals the tremendous complexity and ambivalence that 

characterized the thinking about Jews in Nazi Germany.  

The first major theme in these forty sermons that support or defend the Jews 

and Judaism is the expression that the Jews are the chosen people of God, the 

people whom God has chosen to enter into covenant with and to preserve his rev-

elation. This is the most common theme in these forty sermons, occurring 

eighteen times. The expressions would often be concise, straightforward state-

ments that the Jews are the special people of God. For example, Karl von 

Schwartz, the cathedral pastor of Braunschweig and also the provost of the St. 

Marienberg monastery, often refers to the Jews as a “chosen” or “special” people 

of God. I counted five different sermons in which he deliberately pointed out the 

chosen-ness of the Jewish people, which is more than any other single pastor.
 72

 

Interestingly, these sermons were part of a collection published by Hellmuth Wol-

lermann’s Verlagsbuchhandlung in Braunschweig in late 1933 (though some may 

have been preached earlier). The unusual characteristic of this collection is that 

the sermons were based on Hebrew Bible texts. Clearly, Schwartz believed that 

                                                            
70

 See Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1, 43-44; and Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were 
Silent, 7. 
71

 See Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92. 
72

 See Karl von Schwarz, Gottes Wort an Gottes Volk, Ein Jahrgang Predigten (Braunschweig: 

Hellmuth WollermannVerlagsbuchhandlung, 1933). 



             

              19                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

Christians needed to become more acquainted with the Hebrew Bible and the 

Jews as the people of God. 

This positive view of the Jews—that they are blessed and special—aroused 

the concern of the Nazi regime because it blatantly undermined Nazi racial ideol-

ogy. Gestapo and SD reports give us insight into the Nazi regime’s reception of 

these public pronouncements by Confessing Church pastors that the Jews are the 

chosen people of God. A Gestapo report from Berlin on December 1, 1939, re-

lates that a Confessing Church pastor by the name of Eberle in Hundsbach (in the 

district of Kreuznach) was arrested because he said in a sermon, “The God of our 

Church is the Jewish God of Jacob, to whom I confess… In 1932, I stood in Saar-

brücken together with 3000 faithful Protestants. Since that time, more and more 

are falling away from the Protestant faith.”
73

 This report is unique because it re-

ports a rare instance, as far as I have been able to uncover, of the Nazi regime 

actually arresting a pastor solely due to the content of a sermon. But what is 

more, the “offensive” remarks were not about Hitler or the Nazi leadership per se; 

instead, the pastor was arrested for publicly acknowledging that the Christian God 

is the Jewish God and that Christianity is in decline in the Third Reich. The of-

fense was in identifying the Jewish God as the Christian God, and that indeed 

Christianity owes much to Judaism. The assertion that Christians and Jews have 

the same God closely binds the two together as God’s people, and this contradicts 

Nazi racial ideology that denigrates Jews as inferior human beings. 

A second theme in these sermons that support Jews and Judaism is belief that 

Judaism is the foundation of Christianity and, as such, Christians should value 

and appreciate the Hebrew Bible. This assertion directly undermines efforts of the 

German Christian movement to denigrate the Hebrew Bible and remove it from 

the Christian canon, as epitomized in the Institute for the Study and Eradication 

of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life.
74

 I have found nine occurrences of 

this theme in these forty sermons. The Lutheran pastor and theologian Hans 

Iwand of the Marienkirche in Dortmund, delivered a sermon focusing on the 

theme of Christianity’s foundation in Judaism on August 2, 1941, just a couple 

months after the Nazis began the invasion of Russia earlier that summer. Up to 

this time, Hitler and the Nazi regime had not developed a clear and consistent 

policy concerning European Jewry, yet the war against Russia proved a turning 

point.
75

 As the Wehrmacht conquered new territory, the Einsatzgruppen of the SS 

followed and massacred Jews and Soviet “commissars” and on an unprecedented 

scale.
76

 By August 1941, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been massacred by 

                                                            
73

 Heinz, Boberach, ed., Berichte des SD und der Gestapoüber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in 

Deutschland 1934-1944 (Mainz: Matthias-Grünwald-Verlag, 1971), 376. 
74

 Heschel, Aryan Jesus, 3 and 13. 
75

 See Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews 1933-1939 
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Christopher Browning, with contributions by Jürgen 

Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-

March 1942 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2004); and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, 
and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 
76

 See Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 252-63; Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the 
Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 125-140; Saul Friedländer, Nazi 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            20 
 

 

                   

Nazi forces and their allies in Lithuania, the Ukraine, Bialystok, Romania, Belo-

russia, and the Soviet Union, among other war zones.
77

 It is possible that Iwand 

had not heard news of the Jewish massacres in the war zones, but he had to be 

aware of anti-Jewish policies closer to home: the expulsion of Jews from public 

and professional life was long underway, the “Aryanization” of Jewish property 

and businesses increased since 1937 and 1938, and the ghettoization of Polish 

Jews began shortly after the start of World War II.
78

 And after the Nazi invasion 

of Poland in September 1939, Jews throughout Europe would be systematically 

labeled with a yellow Star of David and thus targeted for persecution. Iwand him-

self was particularly sensitive to the problem of Nazi persecution of Christians of 

Jewish descent. The Nazi regime classified his wife Ilse as Mischling (“mixed-

breed”) first class, meaning that she had two grandparents of the Jewish faith.
79

  

Iwand’s sermon affirms that the source of the gospel comes from Israel, and 

argues that a denial of this fact is at best ignorance. Commenting on Galatians 

1:10-24, a text in which the Apostle Paul discusses the source of his revelation, 

Iwand argues, 

 

Do you think you could perhaps go back on the wide strand of the gospel and 

you could then visit from where the source comes, and you could discover 

that the source comes from a land, and you could discover that the source 

comes from a land that is Jewish, and then you come to God and say, Is the 

source something dirty, as if there is a spirit that we must bring out?
80

 

 

Iwand challenges the perspective of Christians like those in the pro-Nazi German 

Christian movement who devalue the Hebrew Bible and Judaism because they 

fail to appreciate the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.
81

 They can-

not acknowledge the debt that Christianity owes to Judaism. For Confessing 

Church pastors like Iwand, this is a failure to understand from where revelation 

ultimately comes, and that is, as Paul affirms, “from above.”  

Confessing Church pastors preached against excising the Hebrew Bible from 

Christianity – without it, Christianity loses its source and foundation. Thus, these 

                                                                                                                                         
Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 

207-225; and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic 

Books, 2010), 126-127, 182-200. 
77

 Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 

266-278. 
78

 The earliest rumors of mass killings of Jews are found as early as autumn 1941, though by mid-

1942 rumors circulated far and wide and reports were even broadcast by the BBC by autumn 1942. 
See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 2008), 142; and also Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hit-

ler’s “Final Solution” (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1981).  
79

 Dr. F.W. Arnold. Report of the Kirchliche Hilfsstelle für evangelische Nichtarier (Büro Pfarrer 

Grüber. 21 December 1938. Nichtarische Geistliche Kirchengemeindebeamte, Gemeindevertreter 
usw., von Oktober 1933 bis Dezember 1952. EZA 7/1952. 
80

 Hans Joachim Iwand, Nachgelassene Werke, Dritter Band (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1963), 
92. 
81

 See Bergen, Twisted Cross, 26-27. 



             

              21                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

sermons represent a stake in the ground for the Confessing Church that the He-

brew Bible must not be alienated from the Christian tradition.
82

 In this sense, the 

Confessing Church pastors stand in stark contrast to members of the German 

Christian movement and Nazi supporters who condemned the Hebrew Bible as 

immoral, as a thoroughly “Jewish book,” as “un-German,” and inconsonant with 

“Aryan” morality.
83

  

We know from Gestapo and SD reports that the Nazi regime was concerned 

when pastors defended Judaism from the pulpit. Unfortunately, the reports do not 

mention whether or not the pastors were Confessing Church members. Neverthe-

less, the reports are instructive. For example, one describes how a pastor Ulricht 

of Prenzlau gave a sermon on January 1, 1934, and lamented the paganization of 

Christianity in the one year since the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
84

 Ul-

richt drew a connection between the Christ whom the Nazis “forgot” and how the 

Jews were denied full participation in German life. 

 

Man idolizes today great men who have achieved much, but the Christ who 

let himself be nailed to the cross, whom one forgets, he is no longer consid-

ered. Jesus Christ was also a Jew, yes indeed, but the faith teaches: Go into 

the world and make disciples of all the peoples, etc. If a Jew cannot be a 

German, so can he very well—and I stress this explicitly—be a good Chris-

tian.
85

  

 

This statement not only condemns Nazi ideology and those who “forget” Christ, 

but at the same time it connects into one community all individuals who desire to 

be Christian, regardless of nationality or culture. Ulricht’s statement caught the 

attention of the Gestapo because he claims Jews can be good Christians, even if 

the Nazis declare they cannot even be good Germans. He affirms that German 

identity, in truth, is less important than Christian identity. Statements such as 

these clearly caught the attention of the Gestapo as public expression of opposi-

tion to National Socialism. 

Why would the Nazi regime have been concerned with such statements? 

These are religious statements of faith that do not explicitly advocate active re-

sistance to the Nazi regime, whether in the form of protests or violent 

confrontation or even unity with Jews in a common cause. But the implications 

were troubling to the Nazi regime. The Gestapo and SD took notice of these ser-

mons as evidence that the German churches were sites in Nazi Germany where 

pastors could publically express anti-Nazi ideas and pro-Jewish sentiment.
86

 

                                                            
82

 Arthur Cochrane, The Church’s Confession under Hitler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 

184-185; see also Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 234; and Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 38, 568. 
83

 Bergen, Twisted Cross, 144. 
84

 Gestapo Report on Pastor Ulricht: “Staatsfeindliches Verhalten evangelischer Geistlicher, v.a. der 
Bekennenden Kirche, 1934-1935,” Papers of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, BA R58/5679. 
85

 Gestapo Report on Ulricht, “Staatsfeindliches Verhalten evangelischer Geistlicher,“ BA R58/5679. 
86

 See Hoffmann, The History of German Resistance, 13; and Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the 

Final Solution, 166. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            22 
 

 

                   

The third and last theme expressed in these Confessing Church sermons is 

the condemnation of Nazi persecution of the Jews. This theme only occurs nine 

times in these 910 sermons. I have found just a couple cases of pastors speaking 

about the persecution of Jews before World War II. For example, Dietrich Bon-

hoeffer delivered the funeral oration after the death of his grandmother, Julie 

Bonhoeffer, in Berlin on January 15, 1936, just months after the passage of the 

Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. While recalling fond memories of his 

grandmother, Bonhoeffer tells of how troubled she was that the principles of her 

youth— “the inflexibility of law, the free word of free men, the binding quality of 

the given word, plain and sober speech, honesty and simplicity in personal and 

public life”—had been betrayed during the Nazi dictatorship.
87

 She could not 

keep quiet amid this betrayal, he says. “Therefore her last years were deeply trou-

bled by the great sorrow she bore for the suffering and fate of the Jews among our 

people. She sought to help and suffered with them. She stemmed from a different 

age, out of a different spiritual world. This world does not sink with her into the 

grave.”
88

 Bonhoeffer emphasizes the strange-ness of Nazi values to the world in 

which his grandmother Julie lived. While Bonhoeffer’s sermon celebrates this 

courageous and principled woman, it is even more significant that he makes her a 

model for his family to emulate in troubled times. He says that the inheritance 

that Julie gave his family—this strength of character and great courage—was in 

the form of an “obligation” to emulate her example as fellow “strangers” in Nazi 

Germany. 

One of the most remarkable sermons about the Nazi persecution of the Jews 

was in response to the nation-wide pogrom on the night of November 9-10, 1938. 

For Pastor Julius von Jan of Oberlenningen, the pogrom known as Kristallnacht, 

the night of broken glass, marked a decisive moment in his career.
 89

 He preached 

a sermon a week later on 16 November 1938, in which he sought to expose the 

criminal behavior of his fellow Germans whose passions and hatred had run 

amok.
90

 The Nazi regime fomented the pogrom in response to an event on No-

vember 7, 1938, when a seventeen-year-old Pole named Herschel Grynszpan shot 

and fatally wounded a junior official, Ernst vom Rath, of the German embassy in 

Paris. Grynszpan’s grievance concerned another Nazi policy of persecution 

against the Jews, this time the deportation of foreign-born Jews living in Germa-

ny. The Polish government closed its borders to 8,000 of the 12,000 Polish 

refugees, and Grynszpan’s parents were among those stranded at the border.
91

 

Rath died of his injuries in the afternoon on 9 November 1938, which gave the 

                                                            
87

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson (Grand Rap-

ids: Zondervan, 2005), 123. 
88

 Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, ed. Robinson, 123. 
89

 See Dean G Stroud, Preaching under Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich 

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). The work is an edited collection of sermons and profiles of the 

pastors who delivered them. For more on Jan, see Conway, Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 375-
376; and Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 142. 
90

 Conway, Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 375; and Stroud, Preaching under Hitler’s Shadow, 
123. 
91

 Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 23. 



             

              23                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

Nazi regime an opportunity for reprisal against the Jews of Germany. Within 

twenty-four hours, and at Hitler’s instigation, Nazi thugs destroyed 1000 syna-

gogues and over 7500 Jewish-owned businesses, filling the streets of Germany 

with broken glass.
92

 The best figure for the number of Jews arrested is approxi-

mately 30,000, an astounding number, marking the first time that Jews as Jews 

were arrested en masse and sent to concentration camps.
93

 While Nazi records in-

dicate that 91 men died in the pogrom, another 300 Jews, at the depths of despair, 

committed suicide it its wake.
94

 

Most clergymen were silent about the pogrom the following week, revealing 

timidity and a concern only for their own.
95

 Nevertheless, a few Confessing 

Church pastors did speak out the next week in church services, Jan among them. 

His sermon was based on Jeremiah 22:2-9, which declares the prophet’s role in 

proclaiming the law of God to his nation, king, and princes who have trampled 

upon it.
96

 In the first few lines, Jan accuses the Nazi regime for jailing God’s 

prophets, and also condemns the German-Christians as posers and liars. A crime 

has been committed in Paris, he argues, 

 

Passions have been released, the laws of God jeered at, houses of God that 

were sacred to others have been burned to the ground, property belonging to 

the foreigner plundered or destroyed, men who faithfully served our nation 

(Volk) and who fulfilled their duty in good conscience have been thrown into 

concentration camps simply because they belong to another race… Even if 

the authorities do not admit their hand in this injustice, the healthy sensitivity 

of the people (Volk) feels the truth without any doubt—including where peo-

ple do not dare speak of this.
97

 

 

The German people have lost their way and followed not simply a political reli-

gion, but an “organized anti-Christianity,” established by the state and 

administered by German-Christians.
98

 Germans have burned “houses of God” to 

the ground—note he does not say Synagoge but Gotteshäuser to bridge the dis-

tance some might see in the houses of worship of the two traditions. He echoes 

the prophet Jeremiah: “God will not be ridiculed. What a person sows, he will 

reap!”
99

 The people know that God’s judgment is coming unless they repent of 

what they have done. 

                                                            
92

 See Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 139; Gilbert, Kristallnacht, 28-29, and 118; and Richard 

Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 581. 
93

 Evans, Third Reich in Power, 581. 
94

 In fact, the true figure of those murdered may run between one and two thousand. See Evans, Third 
Reich in Power, 590. 
95

 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 142; and Evans, Third Reich in Power, 581. 
96

 Julius von Jan, “O Land, Land, Land: Hear the Word of the Lord!” in Stroud, Preaching under Hit-

ler’s Shadow, 121. 
97

 Jan, “O Land, Land, Land,” in Stroud, Preaching under Hitler’s Shadow, 123. 
98

 Jan, “O Land, Land, Land,” in Stroud, Preaching under Hitler’s Shadow, 123. 
99

 Jan, “O Land, Land, Land,” in Stroud, Preaching under Hitler’s Shadow, 124. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            24 
 

 

                   

Word of Jan’s sermon spread. Nearly two weeks later, on 25 November at 

10:30 pm, a mob of 500 demonstrators found Jan, beat him senseless, and took 

him to the Town Hall for an hour-long interrogation, which resulted in incarcera-

tion in the country prison for four months.
100

 One year later, on 15 November 

1939, Jan was tried before the Nazi “special court” (Sondergericht) and con-

demned for “misusing the pulpit” and “treachery.”
101

 His sentence was 16 

months. Jan was able to continue preaching after his release in May 1940, but was 

drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 and served on the Russian front, ultimately 

surviving the war. Jan’s story illustrates the danger and costs the Confessing 

Church pastor faced if he decided to speak out boldly against Nazi persecution 

and in support of the Jews. 

German pastors were certainly aware of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, 

though the extent of this knowledge is not certain, particularly regarding the de-

tails of the Holocaust. Strikingly, these nine cases of Confessing Church pastors 

speaking out against the persecution of the Jews represent a minuscule fraction of 

the 910 sermons I have examined. Even in these instances, the pastors most often 

do not give specifics about the persecution, or the identities of the persecutors, or 

even the nature of the crimes being committed against the Jews.  

My research presents a significant problem given the historiography of the 

German population’s knowledge of the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry, 

which has been extensively examined.
102

 Conservative estimates are that by 1942 

and 1943, approximately one-third of the German population had received news 

in one form or another of the mass murder of the Jews.
103

 If we exclude teenagers 

and children from this equation—those whose parents might have “shielded” 

them from such knowledge—less conservative estimates indicate that perhaps 

one-half of the population was aware of the atrocities.
104

 This would of course in-

clude Confessing Church pastors. And yet my findings indicate that less than one 

percent of the 910 sermons make mention of the atrocities and persecutions. 

Knowledge of Nazi atrocities spread to Germans of all socioeconomic and educa-

                                                            
100

 Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, 144. 
101

 The following biographical background is based on Stroud, Preaching under Hitler’s Shadow, 

119. See also Conway, Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 375-376; and Barnett, For the Soul of the 

People, 142. 
102

 Marlis Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude during the Second 

World War, translated by Thomas de Witt (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); Walter Laqueur, 
The Terrible Secret: An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler's "Final Solu-

tion" (London, 1980); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: 

Bavaria 1933-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Hans Mommsen, “What did the 
Germans Know about the Genocide of the Jews?” in Walter H. Pehle, ed., November 1938: From 

‘Kristallnacht’ to Genocide (New York: Berg, 1991), 187-221; David Bankier, The Germans and the 

Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (London, 1992); Hans Mommsen and Volker Ullrich, 
"'Wir haben nichts gewusst': Ein deutsches Trauma," 1999 4 (1991): 11-46; Eric A. Johnson and Karl-

Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, An Oral 

History (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2005); and Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Der Holocaust als 
offenes Geheimnis: Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Allierten (München: C.H. Beck, 2006). 
103

 Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, 39. Also, Laqueur argues that “news of the ‘final solution’ 
had been received in 1942 all over Europe” (emphasis added), see The Terrible Secret, 196. 
104

 Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, 392. 



             

              25                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

tional backgrounds through widely-listened to BBC broadcasts and also reports of 

Wehrmacht soldiers returning home from the eastern front.
105

  

At the same time, we must also consider the impact of the Nazi propaganda 

machine on Germans throughout World War II. Through the constant barrage of 

propagandistic speeches by Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders, 

broadcast across Germany, as well as wall posters strategically positioned 

throughout commuter and pedestrian traffic, the Nazi regime used unambiguous 

language to express their approach to the “Jewish menace”; they used words such 

as Vernichtung (extermination) and Ausrottung (annihilation).
106

 The regime 

reached millions upon millions of Germans who could not help but be exposed to 

the pervasive propaganda and thereby become informed of the Nazi approach to 

the Jewish people. It has even been argued that by mid-1942, knowledge of “the 

mass crimes of the Nazis, and in particular the murder of the Jews, was an open 

secret in the Reich and among the Allies.”
107

 There was simply no possibility of 

keeping crimes so immense a secret hidden from Germans and the peoples of oc-

cupied Europe, not with the murders taking place throughout much of Eastern 

Europe, the millions of victims involved, and the incredible inhumanity of the 

crimes.
108

 Many Confessing Church pastors, who were leaders in their religious 

communities and ministers to families with sons at war, “who kept their eyes and 

ears open,” would have known about the Nazi mass murder of the Jews.
109

  

How might we account for the extraordinarily low percentage of sermons 

that address the Nazi persecution of the Jews? A few factors might shed some 

light on this problem. First, we should keep in mind that for most Germans the 

war and its progress were of utmost concern, not the fate of the Jews.
110

 As Ian 

Kershaw writes, “The Jews were out of sight and literally out of mind for 

most.”
111

 Second, we must consider the nature of the knowledge of Nazi atrocities 

among the German population. While millions of Germans knew of the Nazi 

massacres of Jews, most failed to put all the puzzles pieces together to see the full 

picture the Holocaust; they simply could not fathom the systematic extermination 

of all European Jewry.
112

 

A third reason for the lack of response in sermons was a sense of hopeless-

ness and powerlessness that many must have felt living in a totalitarian society.
113

 

                                                            
105

 BBC broadcasts provided constant news updates of atrocities and mass murders. See Bankier, The 
Germans and the Final Solution, 113; Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, 396-397; Mommsen, 

What did the Germans Know?” 206; and Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, 201. 
106

 Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cam-

bridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 2006), 267. 
107

 Bajohr and Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis, 128. 
108

 Bajohr and Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis, 128. 
109

 Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, 397. 
110

 Mommsen, “What did the Germans Know?” 192; and Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 360. 
111

 Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, 364. 
112

 Mommsen, “What did the Germans Know?” 206, 209; and Bankier, The Germans and the Final 

Solution, 115. 
113

 Mommsen, “What did the Germans Know?” 205; Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, 

103; and Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, 208 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            26 
 

 

                   

The news of atrocities would have presented a challenge to pastors: one could ask 

questions, investigate the stories, speak out against the Nazi regime, and reap the 

consequences, including possible arrest and imprisonment, or worse. Or one 

could remain silent, refuse to follow up on news of atrocities, and continue serv-

ing the congregation, hoping to outlive the Nazi regime. In the end, as the 

historian David Bankier writes, many Germans—and many pastors—“knew 

enough to know that it was better not to know more.”
114

 The Confessing Church 

pastors behaved just like the vast majority of Germans in not speaking out in sup-

port of Jews facing Nazi persecution, and this reflects several factors: a sense of 

resignation that there is nothing to be done but wait for the regime to topple; a 

significant degree of repression under the watchful eyes of the regime’s police 

apparatus, the Gestapo agents and their networks of informers; and also the moral 

desensitization of nearly a decade witnessing the day-by-day, step-by-step, exclu-

sion of the Jewish people from German public life.
115

  

But we must also take into account the anti-Jewish prejudice expressed in the 

Confessing Church pulpits. The evidence supports the historiography of the 

churches in Nazi Germany that anti-Jewish prejudice was pervasive among Chris-

tians.
116

 Sermons that repeat centuries-old tropes that portray Jews as wayward, 

stubborn, as guilty of murdering Christ, and as divinely punished throughout his-

tory, could serve to mitigate any compassion or empathy that a Christian might 

otherwise feel for their persecuted Jewish neighbors. I would assert that this “un-

holy potential,” as Bethge describes it, prevented pastors from speaking out more 

forcefully and often in support of Jews and Judaism. 

While these relatively few instances of Confessing Church pastors expressing 

concern about the persecution of Jews are important in and of themselves, the fact 

that there are so few from the rank and file of the “oppositional” faction of the 

German churches underscores the muted voice of Germany’s pastors during the 

ghettoization, deportation, and extermination of European Jewry. Peter Fritzsche 

argues that in German society there was a “general silence” about the suffering 

and fate of the German Jews in Nazi Germany, a silence that filled the sanctuaries 

of German churches as well.
117

 He makes an interesting point that the fate of the 

Jews lay beyond the Germans’ “limits on empathy” because they simply could 

not imagine being Jewish. While Germans (and Christians) debated the Nazi poli-

cy of euthanasia because they could actually imagine this policy causing the 

suffering of their own families, at the same time “they could not imagine being 

Jewish” and suffering simply for this reason.
 118

 But as all the sermons indicate, 

Christians had a wealth of religious concepts and principles that could (one might 

                                                            
114

 Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, 115. 
115

 Mommsen, “What did the Germans Know?” 205; Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, 
103; and Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, 208. 
116

 See Michael, Holy Hatred; Probst, Demonizing the Jews; and also Friedländer, Nazi Germany and 
the Jews, Vol. 2, 56. 
117

 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 
119. 
118

 Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, 119. 



             

              27                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

say should) have aided this imagination. Christians share much of the same sa-

cred history, the same sacred stories that inform and shape moral behavior and 

spiritual growth. One could argue that this common heritage should have been 

utilized more often and more explicitly to bond Christians and Jews together in 

Nazi Germany.  

Yet it is remarkable that after the war many Germans had no problem imag-

ing themselves as the persecuted minority. The emphasis on German suffering 

was quite common among post-war German leaders, especially church leaders, 

who argued for the victimization of Germans under the Nazi dictatorship and also 

the Allied conquest of Germany, thus casting themselves as survivors.
119

 Some 

went so far as to liken the Nazi treatment of the Confessing Church to the Hebrew 

Bible’s depiction of Israel’s suffering under Egyptian and Babylonian persecu-

tions. For example, shortly after the war’s end in July 1945, the bishop of Berlin-

Brandenburg, Otto Dibelius, delivered a sermon in which he explicitly claimed 

that “the Lord with his mighty hand has delivered us [the Confessing Church] 

from the power of the Devil and led us out of Egypt, out of the house of servi-

tude.”
120

 As Susannah Heschel has argued, both Confessing Church members and 

German-Christians appropriated the identity of the Jews in the Hebrew Bible to 

describe the recent calamity of Germans “who had been liberated from Hitler but 

conquered by the Allies; having murdered the Jews, the Germans could now take 

their identity.”
121

 Confessing Church leaders identified themselves with biblical 

Israel, and in the process exonerated themselves as honorable instruments of God 

that confronted an oppressive kingdom. Yet ironically, as the “new Israel” they 

overwhelmingly failed to speak out for persecuted Jews under the Nazi regime. 

 

3. Conclusions 

 

We can draw several conclusions based on the evidence I have presented. 

The expressions of prejudice revealed in these sermons may overwhelmingly be 

categorized as non-rational or anti-Judaic, meaning the prejudice is based on reli-

gious convictions founded in scripture and a Christian reading of history. In other 

words, the prejudice expressed is based primarily on explicit religious convic-

tions, not racial convictions. When implicit antisemitic tropes are articulated, they 

always serve religiously-based anti-Judaic assertions. The anti-Jewish prejudice 

                                                            
119

 See also the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, October 1945. This document was drawn up by the 

Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and refers to the German people as a “Gemeinschaft 
der Leiden,” a “community of suffering.” See Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 279-281; Matthew Hocke-

nos, A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington, IN: Indiana 

University Press, 2004), 46-47, 52-54, and 187; Spotts, Churches and Politics, 62-69; and Bill Niven, 
ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (New York: Palgrave, 

2006), 1-21; Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of 

Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 3-4, 44-48; and Steven M. Schroeder, 
To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954 (Lincoln, NE: 

University of Toronto Press, 2013), 9, 40-44. 
120

 Quoted in Hockenos, A Church Divided, 52. 
121

 Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 279. 



               

               Skiles: “The Bearers of Unholy Potential”                                                            28 
 

 

                   

in these sermons contrasts to the explicit antisemitism of the German Christian 

movement, which utilized the irrational antisemitic prejudiced, based on fear, 

paranoia, and envy.
122

 Moreover, I have not found one instance of Confessing 

Church pastors using Nazi racial terminology—such as Untermenschen (sub-

humans)—to denigrate the Jewish people, or blame the Jews for Germany’s prob-

lems since World War I, again in contrast to the German-Christians. Thus, the 

prejudice against the Jews expressed in these Confessing Church sermons relies 

upon traditional Christian tropes found throughout the history of the Church. 

Yet the sermons reveal just how anti-Judaic prejudice may interact with anti-

semitic tropes. We must keep in mind that the expressions of anti-Judaism 

revealed in these sermons have the potential to overlap with Nazi racial antisemi-

tism in German society, and thereby possibly advance the exclusion of Jews from 

public life. For example, if a pastor argues that God has punished the Jews as an 

accursed people since the crucifixion of Christ, then the implications in Nazi 

Germany are potentially devastating. The congregant may generalize and per-

ceive that the Jews as a people group are evil, pernicious, and immoral; that they 

conspire to dominate, to destroy Christianity, and thus, that they cannot be trust-

ed.
123

 While anti-Judaic tropes may originate in churches, we should expect these 

ideas to interact and overlap with other secular ideas outside church doors. Schol-

ars have recently contributed much to understanding how religious anti-Judaism 

blended with antisemitism in academia.
124

 

My analysis also reveals that Confessing Church pastors often used anti-

Judaic expressions for a purpose, not only to advocate for the superiority of 

Christianity to Judaism, but to criticize the Nazi regime and even the German 

people. They compared the Jews to Nazis as hard-hearted, obsessed with race 

consciousness and the racial purity of the people, as legalistic, weak, and errone-

ously convinced of their own “superiority” and “chosen-ness.” Again, these 

comments draw on the antisemitic trope that accuses the Jews of tribalism – tak-

ing pride in a false ethno-nationalist identity that denies equality with other 

groups. Thus, ironically, Confessing Church pastors combated overt Nazi racial 

ideology by using antisemitic tropes. This demonstrates that anti-Jewish expres-

sions were not often simply extemporaneous comments, or merely meant to 

denigrate Jews in Germany society, but they were often employed purposefully to 

challenge the Nazi regime and its racial policies and ideology. 

The sermons also reveal evidence of a historic dilemma Christians have in re-

lating to Jews and Judaism. On the one hand, Judaism plays a central role in the 

Christian tradition; from Jesus’ ministry in a Jewish context to the inclusion of 

the Hebrew Bible in the Christian canon, Christianity affirms Jewish religious ex-

                                                            
122

 See for example, Bergen, Twisted Cross; Robert Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kit-

tel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and Heschel, 

The Aryan Jesus. 
123

 Michael, Holy Hatred, 12. 
124

 See for example, Robert Ericksen’s Theologians under Hitler, and Complicity in the Holocaust: 

Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and also 

Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus. 



             

              29                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11, no. 1 (2016) 
 

                 

perience and God’s covenant with Israel. On the other hand, elements of the 

Christian tradition stemming all the way back to its biblical texts present Jews as 

“Christ-killers” and as an accursed people.
125

 The ambivalence is palpable. Fur-

thermore, the low percentage of sermons that expressed support of Jews and 

Judaism reveals a missed opportunity for pastors to draw connections between 

Christians and Jews in a shared religious tradition.  

The importance of these sermons is reflected in the concern that the Gestapo 

and SD paid to pastors who spoke out in support of Jews from the pulpit. Gov-

ernment reports indicate that the Nazi regime was indeed concerned about 

Confessing Church pastors not simply supporting and defending Jews, but devel-

oping connections between Christians and Jews based on their shared traditions 

and values. The evidence suggests that Confessing churches had the potential to 

become sites of support and sympathy for Jews in Nazi Germany, a place where 

Christians could develop their imagination—based on common theological con-

cepts and stories—to place themselves in the situation of persecuted Jews. The 

mere fact that only 40 of 910 sermons made pro-Jewish statements indicates that 

this was a missed opportunity to shape the imagination and behavior of Chris-

tians. 

To the attentive congregant sitting in a pew in Nazi Germany, the sermons of 

the Confessing Church present an ambivalent perspective of the Jews and Juda-

ism. She might have heard an occasional positive word about the Jews, or about 

the inextricable connections between Judaism and Christianity. But at the same 

time, she might have heard a harsh word that reflects centuries of anti-Judaic 

prejudice that condemns Jews as wayward and deserving of God’s punishment. 

These sermons reveal that anti-Judaic theology in twentieth-century German 

Protestantism became an impediment to Confessing Church pastors proclaiming 

clear and unequivocal messages about Jews as the spiritual cousins of Christians 

and Judaism as a valued and inextricable foundation for Christianity—messages 

sorely needed in Nazi Germany. 

  

                                                            
125

 Michael, Holy Hatred, 16-19.