It is fitting on this day to remember some of his victims. While Hitler was a vicious anti-Semite, he was also anti-Christian, rejecting the notion of a Jewish Jesus who preached love of neighbor. He attempted to co-opt the church into something pagan and nationalistic. While many Lutheran and Catholic Germans went along with the regime, some had the courage to oppose it and paid with their lives. Christians in occupied territories felt the vengeance of the Nazi machine even more intensely. This post recognizes ten Christian martyrs of the Nazi regime in order of their deaths.
I chose Christians even though other groups suffered more severely because I am part of this group. By looking through this lens, the atrocities of the Nazi regime are no longer something which happened to someone else, but something personal, which could have happened to my family if they had remained in Germany or Norway during this time.
2/19/37: Dr. Friedrich Weissler
Nationality: German
Religion: Evangelical Church
Dr. Weissler was a Geman lawyer. He was dismissed from his position as a judge in March 1933 due to his opposition to the Nazis. He worked with the Confessing Church, which was the Protestant opposition to the German state church. At Pentecost 1936, the Confessing Church issued a memorandum to Hitler condemning anti-Semitism, concentration camps and state terrorism. The memorandum was read from the pulpits on August 23, 1936. It stated:
If blood, race, nationhood and honour are given the rank of eternal values, so the Evangelical Christian is compelled by the First Commandment, to oppose that judgement. If the Aryan human is glorified, so it is God's word, which testifies the sinfulness of all human beings. If - in the scope of the National Socialist weltanschauung - an anti-Semitism, obliging to hatred of the Jews, is imposed on the individual Christian, so for him the Christian virtue of charity is standing against that.
The Gestapo blamed Weissler for leaking the memorandum to the foreign media, an erroneous charge. However, because he was a Protestant of Jewish descent, he was sent to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp without a trial. He was tortured to death from February 13 to 19, 1937. He became the first lethal victim of the German campaign against the churches on the Protestant side.
7/18/39: Paul Schneider
Nationality: German
Religion: Evangelical Church
Paul Schneider was a German pastor who spoke out against the Nazis from an early date. He was arrested for the first time in June 1934 when he rebuked a Nazi official for invoking Horst Wessel during a Christian funeral ceremony. By the spring of 1937, he had begun the process of excommunicating parishioners who swore allegiance to the Nazi party. He was arrested for two months and forbidden to return to his parish. He returned to preach and was arrested once again. This time, he was sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. While in the Concentration Camp, he earned the wrath of the authorities for continuing to preach against the Nazi regime and for refusing to remove his beret in honor of Hitler’s birthday.
On July 18, 1939, he was executed by lethal injection.
8/14/41: Maximilian Kolbe
Nationality: Polish
Religion: Catholic
Maximilian Kolbe was a Catholic friar who founded and supervised a monastery near Warsaw, a radio station and several publications. He also founded a monastery on the outskirts of Nagasaki which survived the nuclear blast there.
After his area was occupied by the Germans, he was briefly arrested. When he returned, he and his fellow friars began to organize a shelter for 3,000 Polish refugees, including 2,000 Jews. He spoke out against the Nazi atrocities by amateur radio and in his publications. Early in 1941, he wrote:
No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?
On February 17, 1941, he was arrested and sent to the Pawiak prison near Warsaw. On May 28, 1941, he was deported from Pawiak to Auschwitz. In the summer of 1941, there was an escape from the camp. Ten prisoners were selected for execution in reprisal. One of those chosen cried out that he had a family. Father Kolbe volunteered to take his place. The prisoners were taken to underground cells where they were deprived of food and water. After two weeks, Father Kolbe still had not died, so he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid.
He was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church on October 10, 1982.
7/26/42: Titus Brandsma
Nationality: Dutch
Religion: Catholic
Father Brandsma was ordained in 1905 and earned a Ph.D. in 1909. When the Germans invaded Holland, the church instructed that sacraments not be given to Catholics who supported the Nazi regime. Father Brandsma incurred the wrath of the Nazis when he delivered a letter from the Catholic bishops to Catholic editors enjoining them from printing Nazi publications.
Father Brandsma was arrested on January 19, 1942 and sent to Dachau. When his health began to fail, the Nazis used him for biological experiments. He was executed by lethal injection on July 26, 1942.
He was declared Blessed, a preliminary step to sainthood in November 1985.
8/9/42: Edith Stein
Nationality: German
Religion: Catholic
Edith Stein was born to a Jewish family and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. In 1922, she converted to the Catholic faith. She was a teacher until 1933, when she was forced to resign because of anti-Semitic legislation. At that point, she entered a monastery. Her order transferred her to the Netherlands to avoid Nazi persecution. On July 26, 1942, the Reichskomissar ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts in the Netherlands. Edith and her sister Rosa were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. She was gassed on August 9, 1942. She was canonized by the Catholic Church on May 1, 1987.
11/15/43: Bernhard Lichtenberg
Nationality: German
Religion: Catholic
Father Lichtenberg was a Catholic priest. As early as 1933, he encouraged the church to intervene against Anti-Semitic legislation being passed. When he was placed in charge of the Relief Office of the German episcopate, he assisted many Catholics of Jewish descent in emigrating away from Germany.
After Kristallnacht on November 9-10, 1938, Father Lichtenberg began to pray daily from his pulpit in the St. Hedwig Cathedral for both Jews and Jewish Christians. He was denounced by two women students who heard him praying for the Jews and was arrested on October 23, 1941. When they searched his home, they found a proclamation which he planned to deliver on the upcoming Sunday. It stated,
An anonymous slanderous sheet against the Jews is being distributed to Berlin houses. This leaflet states that every German who supports Jews with an ostensibly false sentimentality, be it only through friendly kindness, commits treason against his people. Let us not be misled by this un-Christian way of thinking but follow the strict command of Jesus Christ: ‘You shall love you neighbor as you love yourself’.
In 1942, he wrote a letter to the chief physician of the Reich protesting the euthanasia program, stating,
I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest, and a German demand of you, Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding, and with your consent, and which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people.
In May 1942, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment on account of abuse of the pulpit and insidious activity. Toward the end of his sentence, he was given the option to be released if he would refrain from preaching. Instead, he asked to be allowed to accompany the deported Jews and Jewish Christians to Lodz, Poland to serve there as a pastoral minister. He was ordered interred at Dachau Concentration Camp, but died while waiting to be deported.
On June 23, 1996, he was awarded the title of Blessed, a preliminary step to sainthood.
On July 7, 2004, he was recognized as a Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
2/17/44: Franz Kauffman
Nationality: German
Religion: Protestant
Franz Kaufmann was born to Jewish parents but was baptized a protestant. In 1936, he was dismissed from his post with the German government based on his Jewish origins.
He was protected from deportation because he was married to an Aryan woman and had raised his daughter as a Christian.
Beginning in 1940, he was active in the Confessing Church, the protestant opposition to the German state church. He joined an underground group which provided false identity papers to fugitive Jews.
He was arrested in October 1943. On February 17, 1944, he was taken to Sachenhausen Concentration Camp and shot. Before he died, he was asked why he did what he did. He replied:
My deep roots in a Christian standpoint, and my mature years, have no doubt given me a heightened awareness of the need and suffering that can afflict the individual more or less through no fault of his own. That made me, unintentionally, a focus and meeting point for Jewish fugitives. I could not disappoint their trust and their hope that I could give them, including giving emotional support. I offered my help not because they were Jews, but because they were people, in need and afraid.
1/23/45: James Helmuth von Moltke
Nationality: German
Religion: Lutheran
James Helmuth von Moltke was a German aristocrat and lawyer. He was a great nephew of a famous von Moltke who was a general for Bismark. He married a woman from South Africa and had friends in England, France and elsewhere. Prior to the war, he practiced as an attorney in London for a time.
As war approached, he was a legal advisor in the Abwehr, the German military intelligence. After he was arrested, he wrote, “Ever since National Socialism came to power, I have done my best to mitigate the consequences for its victims and prepare for a change.”
He used his legal skills to engage in bureaucratic infighting to avert the worst abuses of the Nazi regime. He intervened on behalf of prisoners of war and to oppose the killing of civilian hostages in occupied territories.
By 1941, he was convinced of two things: that the Nazi regime was violating international law and basic human rights and that it would be defeated. Among other things, he was aware that the deportation of the Jews was not simply a re-location at an early date. He raged against members of his family who collaborated with the Nazis.
While continuing to work at his government job, he met with leaders of the opposition. While he opposed the assassination of Hitler, he and his group, known as the Kreisau Circle, made plans for a post-defeat Germany. He also used his diplomatic connections to attempt to make communication with the West.
In January 1944, he warned a friend that he was under surveillance by the Gestapo. For this, he was taken into protective custody. The failed attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944 brought Moltke under suspicion. He was tried for treason in January 1945.
Among the charges brought against him were that he had discussed matters of state without having a member of the National Socialist Party present and that he had a defeatist attitude.
During his trial, the judge stated, “one thing Christianity and we National Socialists have in common, and only one: we demand the whole man.”
He was executed on January 23, 1945.
One legacy which von Moltke left the world was his extensive correspondence with his wife. His letters provide an inside view of what it meant to be an opponent of the Third Reich, as well as what the war looked like from the German side. One terrible irony is that the anti-Hitler plotters faced death not only from the German regime but from allied bombing raids. While they sought the defeat of the Nazi regime, the very attacks which would bring about that end placed them in peril as well.
2/2/45: Alfred Delp
Nationality: German
Religion: Catholic
Alfred Delp was a Catholic priest who was a member of the Kreisau Circle with James Helmuth von Moltke. His role was to teach Catholic social teaching to the group. Father Delp was arrested on July 28, 1944. He was offered release if he would leave the Jesuits, but he refused. He was sentenced to death for treason and hanged on February 2, 1945. The judge who condemned him was killed in an air raid the next day.
His last words, spoken to the prison chaplain were “In half an hour, I’ll know more than you do.”
4/9/45: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nationality: German
Religion: Lutheran
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young pastor when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Two days after Hitler was installed as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer gave a radio address warning that Germany was slipping into an idolatrous cult of the Fuhrer. He was cut off in mid-sentence. Bonhoeffer was one of the founders of the Confessing Church in March 1934. The Barmen Declaration adopted by the Confessing Church proclaimed that Christ and not the Fuhrer was the head of the church.
After his authorization to teach was revoked in August 1936, he founded an underground seminary. He began meeting with members of the German resistance in February 1938. Although he briefly taught in the United States during 1939, he returned to Germany on the last scheduled steamer before the start of the war.
Back in Germany, he was forbidden to speak in public and required to report to the police. Through his contacts with German military intelligence (the Abwehr), he became convinced that Hitler should be assassinated. Bonhoeffer and his brother in law, Hans von Dohanyi, were involved in an Abwehr operation to help German Jews escape to Switzerland. He traveled abroad to rally support for the opposition under the cover of the Abwehr.
On April 6, 1943, Bonhoeffer and Dohanyi were arrested in a turf war between the SS and the Abwehr. After the failure of July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler failed, his connection to the conspirators was discovered. He was tried by the SS on April 8, 1945 and was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945.
The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote:
I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer ... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.
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