An Embassy Besieged

The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany

Emmy Barth

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608998791
  9781498213158
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621891277
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

Here for the first time in print is the story of a small group who dared to confront Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich with the love of Jesus Christ. Avoiding covert resistance on the one hand and complicity and compromise on the other, the Rhon Bruderhof, under the courageous leadership of Eberhard Arnold, boldly witnessed to the politics of the Kingdom of God in Nazi Germany. Although "less than a gnat to an elephant," in Arnold's words, they believed that as God's ambassadors love could overcome hatred-even of Adolf Hitler himself. This is an amazing account of a community who stayed true to the nonviolent way of the Cross, and how, despite relentless Nazi opposition, God protected and victoriously led them along the way.

1

Historical Background

The Path to Community

This is the story of a small group who dared to confront Adolf Hitler and the entire Third Reich with the love of Jesus Christ. Even before Hitler seized power, they knew that the National Socialist ideology stood in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus, and they refused to participate in any way. They never said, “Heil Hitler.” They did not vote in the plebiscites in which all Germans were expected to express their support for Hitler’s actions. Their young men did not join the armed forces. But neither did they stage public protests nor conspire to assassinate Hitler. They believed that living in unity and humility was the only way to oppose party politics and the Führer cult. Only love could overcome hatred—even love of Adolf Hitler himself. In their own words, they were “less than a gnat to an elephant,” but that did not matter: the message of Jesus Christ needed to be proclaimed in Nazi Germany, even if that should mean death to the messengers.

World War I

Germany was in chaos after the First World War. Soldiers returned—beaten and humiliated—or failed to return. The country was starving. The Kaiser had abdicated and social conventions were crumbling. New world views were gaining momentum: pacifism, communism, anarchism, socialism. Adolf Hitler surrounded himself with disgruntled war veterans and began building up the National Socialist Party based on the anger and bitterness of a vanquished people.

At the same time, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold were struggling to find God’s purpose in the confusion around them. They were in their mid-thirties and had five young children. Eberhard, born on July 26, 1883, was a popular Christian speaker and author. He was on the board of the Student Christian Movement and was literary advisor of its magazine Die Furche. In his leadership role Eberhard had formed strong friendships with members of Germany’s upper class and academia: Karl Heim (who became a professor in Tübingen), Paul Zander (the surgeon who would perform the fatal operation on his leg), Georg Michaelis (who served as Germany’s chancellor for a few months in 1917), plus military generals and others.

As a theology student in Halle in 1907, Eberhard and Dr. Karl Heim had organized lectures for charismatic speakers, which sparked a revival in the town. He met Emmy in the home of a wealthy woman where an “impressive mix of artists, doctors, and military officers’ wives” had gathered to hear him speak.1 The two young people felt drawn toward each other immediately, and within weeks he had asked her to marry him. Their engagement and marriage were born out of this Christian revival, and from the beginning of their relationship they were determined to allow God to guide their lives and to live by their convictions, regardless of the cost.

When World War I was declared in 1914, the German Student Christian Movement was swept up in nationalist fervor. Die Furche began printing a special leaflet for soldiers on the front. To quote from its pages:

When war was declared, our circles were prepared, by the grace of God, and the call of our king and Kaiser was accepted and followed in a noteworthy way. God’s hand had suddenly brought the time of the seed, the long time of peace, to an end. Now we had to prove that the two things that stood side by side in our name, “German” and “Christian,” bound the hearts of our brothers to a higher unity.2

Eberhard himself wrote numerous patriotic articles. But when soldiers began to come home, wounded and tormented by the horrors they had witnessed, he began to question the Christian role in warfare. Years later he described his difficult years of questioning and seeking:

Groups of people often gathered around me, and I tried by means of Bible studies and talks to lead them to Jesus. But after a while this was no longer enough . . . I was deeply unhappy. I recognized more and more that a personal concern for the salvation of souls, no matter how dedicated it might be, did not in itself meet the demands of the life Jesus calls us to . . . I began to recognize the needs of people in a deeper way: the need of their souls and bodies, their material and social wants, their humiliation, exploitation, and enslavement. I recognized the tremendous powers of mammon, discord, hate, and violence, and saw the hard boot of the oppressor upon the neck of the oppressed . . .

Then, from 1913 to 1917, I sought painfully for a deeper understanding of the truth . . . I felt that I was not fulfilling God’s will by approaching people with a purely personal Christianity . . . During those years I went through hard struggles: I searched in the ancient writings, in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and other scriptures, but I also wanted to acquaint myself with the realities of working-class life, and I sought to share in the lives of the oppressed as they struggled within the present social order. I wanted to find a way that corresponded to the way of Jesus and of Francis of Assisi, not to mention the way of the prophets.3

Radicals

In 1910, Eberhard discovered Swiss theologian Hermann Kutter, one of the founders of Christian Socialism. In his book Sie Müssen (They Must) Kutter spoke sharply against the established churches and how they had aligned themselves with mammon at the expense of the poor.

The same God who works in the inmost hearts of men, shall He not also change the outward aspect of man’s life? He who dries up the root of sin in the heart by the power of His word, shall He not also use His power where sin flourishes like the green bay tree in the industrial world? Does God distinguish between inner and outer? Does not His energy work in every nook and corner of His vast creation? . . . And ye would deny Him the power to burst the bonds of a society in which sin has bound men by a false tie, and to create a new humanity in which righteousness dwells? He must stand quietly by and see the soil, this inexhaustible earth which He has given men for their joyous occupation, become the monopoly of a class living in luxury, while their brothers beg bread from their hands!4

If the poor victim himself cannot declare this war against evil, why do you not rise up for him as did the prophets of old, as did Jesus and his Apostles?

Why is one constantly hearing from your lips the one message and not the other? Why always the comfortable, the bourgeois deliverance, that every disturbance of our present social order is dangerous and unsound; and never the sharp, decisive summons that we cannot serve God and Mammon? Why is it that you always console the poor with the future coming of the Lord, but never terrify the rich with the same theme—as Jesus did? Why never a complaint against the rich for their avarice, while you warn the poor so solemnly against covetousness?

I think that your Christianity is a Christianity of the rich, not of the poor. If so, it has no part with Jesus—for Jesus “preached the good news to the poor.”5

As time went on, Eberhard began to use Kutter’s ideas more and more in his discussions of radical Christianity and the Sermon on the Mount. His views began to raise some eyebrows in the Student Christian Movement.

To the end of his life, Eberhard sympathized with socialist ideals. He said in September 1935 to some newer Bruderhof members:

Hermann Kutter proclaimed that the worker’s heart and soul, the worker’s concern, is the fight for God’s justice. I stand with Hermann Kutter! Today as always! I appeal to true socialism. The root question of Religious Socialism is innermost, essential justice, which is not a moral justice but a divine justice.6

v

By 1917, Germany was tired of the war. Hunger protests were staged in Berlin, and munitions workers went on strike. Eberhard grappled with the changes that the world was undergoing.

As a result of this war, the European civilization in which we live is going through a tremendous upheaval that brings what is lowest to the top and the uppermost to the bottom. It brings judgment and chastisement from God over everything that men thought they had so firmly under control. It is an upheaval that has cast the European down from the heights of his presumption and pride. We feel that the greatest changes are taking place in the economic area and that the expected peace treaty will only make these changes deeper and more fargoing. Now too a new wave of social upheaval has started in Russia, and we cannot foresee the consequences of these events. We have no idea what sweeping changes must still take place in the distribution of wealth between rich and poor, in trade and commerce, in buying and selling. We cannot yet foresee how far this revolution in outward things will affect everything else. But one thing is certain: the whole of humankind has recognized that we need an upheaval. What the Social Democrats, the anarchists, and related movements have always had on their banners has grown into a general conviction: humankind needs an upheaval.7

By now, he felt clearly that a Christian could not take part in violence. He became acquainted with pacifist English Quakers who provided daily meals to hungry children in Berlin. One of them, John Stephens, joined the discussion evenings in the Arnolds’ home and became a lifelong friend.

Eberhard sympathized with movements that were dissatisfied with the status quo. Unafraid of labels, he looked for the heartfelt ideals in widely varying world views, focusing on the positive without being blind to inherent dangers. This was true for the left-wing movements and would be true later for the right-wing National Socialist movement.

By 1920, his views were causing tensions in the Student Christian Movement and its publishing house, and he was forced to resign. With a number of like-minded friends he then began a new magazine, Das neue Werk (The New Work), which became the nucleus of a Neuwerk (New Work) movement—aligning itself with the poor and the radical left, but centered on Jesus Christ. Here, among other things, he published select writings of anarchists and communists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Spartacist League, which was the forerunner of the German Communist Party. He planned to publish some of the writings of the anarchist Gustav Landauer as part of his Innenschau (Looking Inward) series. Not surprisingly, such publications drew criticism. Eberhard answered a man who criticized his publication of a letter by Rosa Luxemburg:

You are completely right: it cannot be possible to construct an identity between a life in Christ lived from grace, and a party socialism. Yet we feel very strongly that many demands of conscience raised by socialists and pacifists indicate the same longing as that in the eschatological atmosphere at the time of John the Baptist and the early Christians. We are convinced that everything in socialism, communism, and pacifism which comes from a movement of conscience, everything directing itself purely from the heart against the rule of mammon and bloodshed, against class distinctions and individual possessiveness, comes from God. At the same time that does not prevent us from seeing how strongly satanic and demonic powers are at work in those movements. What we need today, and what none of us yet has to the degree that our times demand, is a simple discipleship of Jesus, springing from the longing of the present day.8

Eberhard spoke similarly about Kurt Eisner, a member of the Social Democratic Party, who led a revolution at the end of 1918 to overthrow the monarchy in Bavaria. Eisner was shot at point-blank range in Munich on February 21, 1919. In 1924, Emmy Arnold included his song “Wir werben im Sterben um ferne Gestirne” in her songbook Sonnenlieder. The reference note reads: “Text by Kurt Eisner, murdered 1919, sung at the first Munich revolution.”9 Years later Eberhard said about it:

We have just sung a song that was composed in Munich by people who were seeking a new life. The writer of the words of this song fell by a murderer’s hand. The meaning of the song—to translate it from poetry into ordinary language—­is this: humankind struggles to grow better; humankind fights for people to be m...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Historical Background
• Chapter 2: Hitler’s Rise to Power
• Chapter 3: March to April 1933
• Chapter 4: May to June 1933
• Chapter 5: June to October 1933
• Chapter 6: October to November 1933
• Chapter 7: Plebiscite and Raid
• Chapter 8: November to December 1933
• Chapter 9: January to February 1934
• Chapter 10: February to May 1934
• Chapter 11: June to July 1934
• Chapter 12: Romans 13
• Chapter 13: July to August 1934
• Chapter 14: September to December 1934
• Chapter 15: January to March 1935
• Chapter 16: March to October 1935
• Chapter 17: The Revelation of John
• Chapter 18: November 1935
• Chapter 19: December 1935 to July 1936
• Chapter 20: August to December 1936
• Chapter 21: January to April 1937
• Chapter 22: May to July 1937
• Notes
• Bibliography