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Most Germans welcomed Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor (prime minister) on January 30, 1933. Few were more jubilant than Protestant church leaders. They welcomed the possibility of a national regeneration.

The dean of the Magdeburg Cathedral exulted in the Nazi flags prominently displayed in his church. “Whoever reviles this symbol of ours is reviling our Germany,” he declared. “The swastika flags around the altar radiate hope—hope that the day is at last about to dawn.”

Some churchmen even referred to the “turning point in history” where “through God’s providence our beloved fatherland has experienced a mighty exaltation.” Pastor Siegfried Leffler declared that “in the pitch-black night of church history, Hitler became, as it were, the wonderful transparency for our time, the window of our age, through which light fell on the history of Christianity. Through him we were able to see the Savior in the history of the Germans.” Pastor Julius Leutheuser added that “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.”

The Protestant press in 1933 was full of editorials affirming that Germany’s honor would be vindicated. The humiliation of the lost world war would be left behind. Old moral values of authority, family, home, and church would be restored. The stagnant economy would move once again.

These editorials reflected the reality that the church had long held strong ties to German monarchs. Church leaders looked upon the “November Revolution” in 1918, which forced the abdication of the Kaiser (Emperor William II), as an unparalleled disaster.

Socialists had been leaders in that revolution, and they had helped form the subsequent liberal democratic Weimar Republic. Most Protestant clergy were anti-Marxist and feared communism. To them, the hated Weimar Republic had “casually” accepted the humiliating peace terms following World War I. The republic allegedly was dominated by liberals and Jews who were leading the country to destruction.

Jews, who composed only 1 percent of the German population, were accused of fostering materialism, secularism, pacifism, anti-patriotism, and moral degeneracy. The clergy also bitterly hated the Western Allies for imposing the harsh Versailles peace treaty upon Germany.

These factors insured that Protestant leaders would be solidly in the conservative camp in the 1920s. They called for a synthesis of Volkstum (German national identity) and Christianity.

Although many German Protestants bought into this anti-democratic moral myopia, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not one of them. Two days after Hitler’s appointment, he delivered a radio address. In it, he warned that if a leader (Führer) should succumb to the wishes of his followers and become their idol, then he would be a “misleader” who “makes an idol of himself and his office, and who thus mocks God.” The microphone was mysteriously shut off before Bonhoeffer could utter the last sentences.

In the flush of enthusiasm following Hitler’s appointment, some Protestants set out to achieve their long-desired hope: replacing their scattered regional churches with one centralized national church (“Reich Church”).

Others wanted to revise the churches’ creeds to bring them into line with National Socialism. These churchmen were known collectively as the “German Christians.” They planned to appoint a single national “Reich Bishop.”

More ominously, they wanted to apply within the church the “Aryan Paragraph” of the new Nazi civil-service law. This clause, passed on April 7, 1933, prohibited Jews (or those of Jewish ancestry) from being appointed to any civil-service or government positions. Applied to the church, the Aryan Paragraph would have barred any Jewish Christian from holding ministerial office, or ultimately, from being part of the church at all.

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