From Nazi Germany to Today

The Nazi period offers more insight into religion’s mixing in politics. Many thinking people have wondered, ‘How did Catholic and Lutheran clergymen deal with Hitler and his brutal Nazis?’

Basically, it was by support or at least coexistence. Few religious voices rose in protest. Professor T. A. Gill writes about one exception. “[The theologian Dietrich] Bonhoeffer found out at last what his father and brothers had been telling him since he was fifteen: the church was not important enough anymore in the things that matter most to justify giving his life to it.” Wearied by the church’s support of Hitler or its passivity, Bonhoeffer joined a plot to kill Hitler. But Bonhoeffer was an exception.

Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity describes the norm: “Both churches, in the main, gave massive support to the regime.

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“The Catholic church in Germany was German to the core, and like the Protestant church upheld the state and its authority.”​—The German Churches Under Hitler.