FROM U-BOAT TO PULPIT
By R. H. S. CROSSMAN ONE of the curious by-products of the Nazi revolution is the sympathy aroused by it in the most unexpected quarters for the religious conscience in its struggle for freedom. Communists, rationalists and even hard- headed conservative politicians whom none could have previously accused of interest in Church problems have suddenly found a soft spot in their hearts for the Protest- ant pastors who. have shoWli such an unexpected power of resistance to Nazi methods of persuasion and gkich- schaltung. It is often felt that here at last Liberal and even Democratic ideas have found a rallying point, from which they can launch a counter-attack upon the Hitler government, and the opposition pastors are looked upon as the devoted upholders of Western culture in the country of the new barbarism.
Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth than such a view. The protesting pastors are most of them loyal Nazis, and I suspect that Hitler does not regard their opposition too seriously. For, in the first place, he has a complete control of the youth of the country, and the leaders of the Hitlerjugend can afford to snap their fingers at the offending theologians, whose abstruse differences mean nothing to most young people in Germany. And secondly, as Bismarck in the days of the Kulturkampf found, it is highly convenient to canalize a conservative opposition, which might possibly become a political menace, into religious channels. There are many sides of National Socialism which shock the respectable bourgeois German, and nothing could be more opportune than that his attention should be concen- trated upon a religious struggle to the neglect of the really important political and economic issues.
I was confirmed in this view by a book* which recently came into my hands. It is the work of Niemoeller, pastor in the wealthy Berlin suburb of Dahlem, and one of the leaders of the recalcitrant Protestant pastors, and is really a sketch for an autobiography. A translation of it is much to be desired, but would, I fear, destroy many illusions about the character of the opposition movement in the German Protestant Churches : but its effect should not be wholly destructive. On the contrary, it would give the discerning reader some idea of the real nature of that opposition, and show him conclusively that in present-day German politics neither side can be assumed to represent the English point of view. The German Church conflict is not a struggle of the liberal against the authoritarian, but of old-fashioned Lutheran theology against the German Christian move- ment whose Erastianism approximates at some points to the Anglican attitude. Both sides are profoundly German, both are loyal to Hitler, both abjure Socialism and lastly, both reject " Liberalism and Democracy." It is significant that Niemoeller only describes that part of his life which fell between the years 1915 and 1924. War, revolution, inflation, these are the events which moulded his attitude to life and which he therefore finds worth recording ; and in fact half his autobiography is concerned with his experiences on a submarine. The life of piracy on the high seas was obviously stimulating to him, but only one chance event in that life concerns us here. One day his submarine met a French transport Shepherded by a destroyer. The transport was tor- pedoed and the destroyer attempted to rescue the survivors. The submarine commander then ordered a second torpedo to be fired at the destroyer. It missed, but the moral issue raised by this incident stirred Niemoeller to write as follows : " Would we have been right in not disturbing' the destroyer in its `rescue work' ? Suddenly the whole riddle of war opened out before our eyes and we realized from a bit of actual experience the tragic guilt which little individual men are just too weak to avoid. Moratorium of Christianity ? That was the theological catchword of the time. We young officers had no idea of that : but we did see that there are situations where every ethical system goes bankrupt and no possibility remains of maintaining • a clean conscience—the question whether we collapse into desperation or carry on through the fight with a living conscience depends abso- lutely and entirely in such cases on whether we believe in fargivetwss. . . . That 25th of January was important to my life : it opened my eyes to the impossibility of a moral picture of the world.'
This is the heart of Niemoeller's theology and most of the book is a variation on this single theme. When his flotilla returned to Kid at the end of November, 1918, the revolution had spread all over .Germany, and a Social Democratic government was in command. There was not a moment's hesitation ; the officer of the Imperial Navy could not conceive of recognizing a Socialist. government. The Christian .could see in it only a creation of the devil. Niemoeller thought of entering one of the- mercenary bands of Black and Tans which helped the Socialist government to smash the reds ; he was deterred by the fact that, if he did so, he would have to take an oath to a Socialist government ! Instead he married and went on the land as an agri- cultural labourer since it was from "Blut and Boden " that the new regenerate Germany should arise. But when, after a few months, the first beginnings of the inflation made it impossible for him to buy a farm he began to see his real vocation. In the Church, free from political influences he could work for the new Germany, and so he became a theological student at Muenster. But his theological studies were soon dis- turbed by the Kapp Putsch. Here at last he saw his chance and the future pastor organized the " Academic Regiment " with which to help Kapp to crush the * Votn U-Boot zur Kanzel. By Martin Niemoeller. (Martin - Warneck, Berlin. 3 marks.) Marxist . government in Berlin. The Kapp Putsch failed, but the " Academie Regiment " was used by the Marxist Government to suppress the Communist rising in the Ruhr, and Niemoeller bitterly attacks Severing for his leniency to the prisoners taken. Then came the inflation and Niemoeller, a married man with two children, was on the edge of starvation. He earned his daily bread on the railway, working at his examinations at night, until he was dismissed by the trades union officials as a blackleg. Soon afterwards he obtained a post on the Protestant Inner Mission and this typical story Of post-War student life in Germany closes in 1924.
Nothing could illustrate more clearly than the bare facts here related—facts which must have occurred in much the same way to hundreds of thousands of middle-class Germans—the real tragedy of the German nation. To Niemoeller, the German parson, socialists arc accursed, and he frequently expresses his surprise when he meets them and finds them really quite decent fellows. The split between the National tradition and the Socialist tradition was unbridgeable, widened as it had been by fifty years of feud and political persecution. And yet many English people were only too ready after the War to believe that, with the disappearance of the Kaiser, the flags and the military bands Germany. under the Social Democrats, had become a " Cis ilized Western Nation." In fact Nationalism had merely gone underground. This book describes how a simple decent German reacted to its temporary disappearance from the arena. He worked for its reappearance. In 1924, the year in which two million votes were cast for the National Socialist Party, Niemoeller finished his examinations and in his capacity as a pastor entered upon the non-political activity of lighting Marxism. " And so in my thoughts I found my way to the cheerful Christianity of my parents with its sympathy for social problems which is yet not conditioned by those problems : I found my way to reconcile my conscience to the considerable part which I had played in those patriotic organizations of which at that moment Orgeseh was becoming the most important." (Orgesch was a mer- cenary troop from which Captain Rochm drafted most of the early members ()I' the S.A. Such troops were notorious for the Fenme murders.) It is of such material that the Protestant Church opposition is in part composed.
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