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Review of Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2017). 316 pages, with illustrations and an appendix with documentation. ISBN 978-3-525-30109-8.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Retired)

Manfred Gailus (who is one of the editors of this quarterly review) has published several studies of little-known and under-examined individuals in the German Protestant churches under National Socialism, including Helmut Hesse, Elisabeth Schmitz, and other Protestant women who resisted Nazi racial policy. These books are not only detailed studies of what dignity and heroism in Nazi Germany looked like. They reveal how marginalized such people were in their own times and all too often in the historiography.[1]

Friedrich Weißler is another such figure. A legal advisor to the Confessing Church, he is usually mentioned (if at all) in his connection to the 1936 Confessing Church memorandum (Denkschrift) to Adolf Hitler. Tortured and beaten to death in Sachsenhausen in February 1937, Weißler was the only person to be killed as a result of the memorandum. Not coincidentally, he was also the only “Volljude” involved. This 2017 book by Manfred Gailus is a gripping biography of a courageous man and a well-documented account of the genesis and aftermath of the memorandum. (Gailus is the first author to examine the papers that were in the family possession.)

Weißler was raised in a secular and patriotic Jewish home. His father was a lawyer who was such a conservative nationalist that he committed suicide in the wake of the Versailles Treaty. Weißler studied and began to practice law during the 1920s, married a Protestant pastor’s daughter, and had two sons. Although he certainly encountered antisemitism in this first decade of his career, the Weimar years were generally happy ones professionally and personally. He moved steadily ahead in his career and became director of a legal journal; he also published books and articles on various aspects of the law. In 1932 he was appointed director of the regional court in Magdeburg. The Weißler family moved there in January 1933.

Within days of the Nazi ascent to power his life changed dramatically. Weißler issued a fine against a young SA man accused of violence who had appeared in court in uniform. The local Nazi press immediately targeted the “Jewish” judge. In an ugly incident local SA and Stahlhelm members pushed their way into the court building and hung a swastika flag from the balcony facing the town square. They then dragged Weißler to the balcony and forced him to salute the swastika flag. A few days later Weißler was suspended from his position, and in July he lost his position under the new civil service laws. Under Nazi racial laws he was a “Volljude.” In September the family, including Weißler’s elderly mother, moved to Berlin.

Weißler was 42 years of age. He had a very small pension and the family’s assets were modest. Having joined the Protestant church during the 1920s, in 1934 he became a member of the Confessing Church and developed close ties to the most radical circles in Dahlem. His legal expertise now became useful to the Confessing Church leadership as they navigated the realities of Reich church politics and Nazi law.

As in his other books, Gailus documents the antisemitism that was all too present in Confessing Church circles. It was something that Weißler encountered repeatedly and personally. The portrait that emerges is of a man who was characteristically reserved but outspoken and unafraid to confront antisemitism. After Pastor Walter Thieme of the Stadtmission defended Adolf Stoecker’s warnings against the “influence of the Jewish spirit on the life of our Volk,” Weißler wrote Thieme that he could “summon no understanding for your behavior.” He also critiqued members of the Deutsche Christen—a courageous risk for someone in his position.

All this took its toll. There are poignant examples of friends and colleagues who abandoned or turned against the Weißler family. Having received an antisemitic letter from one such “friend” Weißler noted that he was replying “only in consideration that you like so many others have succumbed to the general psychosis of this era, and given that which we previously shared.”

This general antisemitism is an important context for Gailus’s account of the 1936 memorandum to Hitler. Like all Confessing Church protests, it was a mixed bag. A small group within the Confessing Church had been urging the leadership to issue a clear public protest against the regime’s antisemitic measures; in the wake of the September 1935 Nuremberg laws these efforts gained new momentum. Although most Confessing Christians were focused primarily on church members (so-called “Christian non-Aryans”) there were others (notably Elisabeth Schmitz) who wanted the church leadership to speak decisively about the persecution of all German Jews.

These efforts led to the Confessing Church leadership’s decision to issue a memorandum and send it directly to Adolf Hitler. The decision coincided with growing divisions within the church opposition between more radical voices like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church’s more compromising leaders. The memorandum was the work of a committee and like many such documents it had been considerably watered down by the time it was completed. The result was primarily an expression of the Confessing Church’s concerns about the Nazi regime’s pressures on the churches and the “dechristianization” of German society. It opened, for example, with a conciliatory expression of gratitude to Führer for defeating the threat of “bolshevism.”

The most notable section of the memorandum however condemned antisemitism in the most explicit wording that would ever be issued by the Confessing Church. It criticized the growing Nazi incitement of anti-Jewish hatred, particularly propaganda aimed at younger Germans, as “anti-Christian.” It went further, condemning the extrajudicial nature of Gestapo measures and the concentration camps, and warning against the “deification” of the Führer.

The memorandum was intended for Hitler’s eyes only and those involved were sworn to secrecy. Supposedly there were only three copies: a document personally delivered to the Reichskanzlei on June 4, 1936, by Pastor Walter Jannasch; a separate copy given to Birger Forell, pastor of the Swedish Church in Berlin; and another copy placed in the safe of the church chancellery in Berlin. It is not known whether Hitler ever even saw the memorandum; the Chancellor’s Office forwarded it to the Reich Church Ministry.

On July 15—two weeks before the opening of the Berlin Olympics—the New York Herald reported on the memorandum, and on July 23 the Basler Nachrichten published the entire document as an example of Protestant opposition to the Nazi regime. The story was also picked up by leading papers like the New York Times and the London Times.

Alarmed, the Confessing Church leadership immediately tried to find out who had leaked the memorandum. They focused on individuals with foreign press contacts, including Friedrich Weißler, who had advised throughout the planning of the memorandum. The others were Werner Koch, a seminarian who had studied with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Finkenwalde, and Ernst Tillich, who had studied under Bonhoeffer in Berlin before abandoning his theological studies. Weißler admitted to the church leadership that he had given a copy of the memorandum to Tillich (who knew Koch and had ties to the foreign press).

Gailus methodically reconstructs the subsequent events. Weißler, Koch, and Tillich were arrested in October 1936, as was Dr. Heinrich Schmidt, a lawyer who worked for the Confessing Church. Schmidt was released after a short time, but the other three were interrogated throughout the fall of 1936. In the meantime the Confessing Church leadership distanced itself from the group and the memorandum. In a late October meeting it was Martin Niemöller who argued that the church had to distance itself completely from Weißler: “We owe it to the Confessing Church.”

In a damning letter to Heinrich Himmler in early February 1937 the Confessing Church leadership emphasized that Weißler had never held an official position in the Confessing Church and had served only in an informal capacity. Five days later the three men were transferred from the Gestapo prison in Berlin to Sachsenhausen. Koch and Tillich were imprisoned in a block doing forced labor and released after several months. On the orders of Sachsenhausen commandant Karl Koch, Weißler was placed in solitary confinement a different block of the camp. Six days later his wife received word that he was dead. Accompanied by Heinrich Schmidt, she went to the camp and was able to see that her husband’s face was swollen and badly bruised.

Even by Nazi standards, Weißler’s death was considered extrajudicial, and at the end of 1938 three Sachsenhausen guards were tried in the killing. It became clear from the court proceedings that Weißler had been badly beaten over the six days of his imprisonment before dying of his injuries, and equally clear, as Gailus notes, that the sole motive was “blind hatred” against Jews. Only one of the guards was sentenced, to one year in prison.

Gailus’ account acknowledges those members of the Confessing Church who did stand by Weißler throughout this ordeal—notably Hans Böhm and Fritz Müller. Franz Hildebrandt, a Confessing vicar affected by the racial laws who would soon flee himself to England, was also outspoken in Weißler’s defense. In the aftermath of his death, Hildebrandt and Heinrich Schmidt continued to help Weißler’s widow and family. Weißler’s eldest son Ulrich was able to emigrate to England in 1939 on the Kindertransport. His widow and other son remained in Germany, assisted financially by friends. Weißler’s elderly mother, who lived with the family, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943 and died there shortly thereafter. Ironically, when Martin Niemöller was sent to Sachsenhausen in March 1938 as a “special prisoner” of the Führer, he was imprisoned in the same block in which Weißler had been murdered.

Gailus concludes this fine book with a reflective chapter on the continuing importance of these individual histories, even decades after the end of National Socialism. Readers of this journal will not need to be convinced of that, but I wish this book could be translated into English. The story of Friedrich Weißler is a crucial corrective for the all too frequent superficial understandings of the Confessing Church. I will add that reading this book in light of our current events in the United States, including the murders of Black men by the police and the rise in right-wing hatred and violence, was especially sobering.

Notes:

[1] I should note that the oral histories I conducted in Germany during the 1980s included interviews with Werner Koch and Heinrich Schmidt, both of whom were involved in the memorandum. Excerpts from both interviews, giving detailed accounts of the memorandum and Weißler’s death, were published in For the Soul of the People. Both interviews are now available to scholars in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (the transcript of the Schmidt interview, which was not taped, is being added): https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn707864.

Conference Report: “The Confessing Church’s Memorandum of May 28, 1936 and the Murder of Friedrich Weißler (1891-1937) in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Topography of Terror

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: “The Confessing Church’s Memorandum of May 28, 1936 and the Murder of Friedrich Weißler (1891-1937) in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Topography of Terror, Berlin, May 28, 2016

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

On May 28, 1936, the Second Provisional Directorate of the German Evangelical Church sent a now famous memorandum directed to Hitler personally. This protest, signed by ten members of the various wings of the Confessing Church, drew Hitler’s attention to the fact that in the fourth year of Nazi rule, the church was being repressed by the state “to a very large extent” in what seemed to be an attempt to “de-Christianize” Germany. Secondly, it refuted the Nazi interpretation of “positive Christianity” as theologically unsound. The Memorandum further attacked the Nazi ideology with its divination of “Blood “, ”Race” and “National Identity”. Above all, the authors criticized the arbitrary police measures which had undermined the rule of law, as well as leading to the erection of the system of concentration camps. The memorandum further declared that:

When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

This Memorandum was not without its consequences. Originally it was sent to Hitler privately without publicity, in the expectation that such a private remonstrance would lead Hitler to abandon the policies to which its authors took exception. But less than six weeks later the whole memorandum appeared in a Swiss newspaper, the Basler Nachrichten, and shortly afterwards was printed in the New York Herald Tribune. At the beginning of October the Gestapo arrested the Confessing Church’s collaborator Dr. Friedrich Weißler, who came under suspicion for having authorized the publication in Switzerland. On February 19, 1937, shortly after he had been transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he was found dead as a result of a severe bodily assault. Since then he has become regarded as the Confessing Church’s first ‘martyr’. At the same time, there can be no doubt that his murder was sparked by anti-semitism, since, although a strong supporter of the Confessing Church, Weißler came from a Jewish family. By the Nazi definition, he was counted as “fully Jewish”, and as such had already been dismissed from his post of Provincial Court judge in Magdeburg in July 1933.

To mark this Memorandum’s 80th anniversary, a lecture series was organized at the Topography of Terror Foundation by the Berlin-Brandenburg Evangelical Church in co-operation with Dr. Manfred Gailus. The title of this series was “’With Deep Concern’ over De-Christianization, Anti-Semitism and Arbitrary Breaches of Law”, and was designed to draw attention to the Confessing Church’s Memorandum and to Weißler’s fate. The high point was a public forum in which some 130 guests took part. Martin Greschat, now an emeritus professor of church history at Giessen University and author of the standard history of this Memorandum, described the origins and composition of the Memorandum in its various stages.[1] Afterwards Hansjörg Buss outlined Weißler’s biography and his role in the Memorandum’s composition and publication. In Michael Germann’s view, this was the high and catastrophic turning point in Weißler’s life. Manfred Gailus then took up the story by claiming that no evidence exists that Weißler’s murder was ‘organized’ by higher elements in the Nazi bureaucracy. One could conclude therefore that the motive for this brutal mishandling was the anti-semitic attitudes of Jew-hatred among lower echelons of the SS guards. It is possible, so Greschat suggested, that this murder stalled the launching of a full-scale trial of the Confessing Church leadership, which numerous signs suggest was being planned.

The final contribution was made by Peter Steinbach, long-time director of the German Resistance Memorial Center and emeritus professor of history at Mannheim University. His title was “Treason – Breach of Confidence – Resistance: Reflections on the Memorandum and on Friedrich Weißler”. He believes that Weißler suffered from deeply-felt feelings of isolation, like many other people who were deprived of their positions and rights during the Nazi period. This led to a total disorientation. The destruction of his bourgeois life-style, and the social exclusion which he experienced even within his church connections took an enormous toll. As a consequence he was to pay with his life for this hurtful rejection.

In conclusion, Friedrich Weißler’s grandson, Wolfgang Weißler, reflected spontaneously on how the family reacted to his fate. His grandmother had never spoken about the circumstances of his death. Only in the 1980s when this case was ‘discovered’ both in the church and society more generally was his fate also discussed in his own family circle.

Many details about the Memorandum and Weißler’s arrest still remain open. Above all, there is the question as to how this Memorandum was smuggled out to the foreign press in the summer of 1936, which was the immediate cause of Weißler’s detention. Did he give his consent to its publication? Was there any consultation with or backing from the Confessing Church leadership? (This would seem unlikely, given the speed with which these leaders dissociated themselves from his actions.) If no further sources turn up, then such questions may remain unsolved. But any such new information will not be decisive. In fact, Weißler’s murder meant that the staunchly opposing wing of the Confessing Church, known as the “Dahlemites”, could no longer have any illusions about the character of the Nazi state.

In recent years this incident has become better known both generally and in church circles. Weißler is no longer a completely unknown figure. And the keen participation in the symposium described above means that there is a continuing interest in what Gailus depicts as a modern twentieth century Passion Story. In Steinbach’s view, the whole tragedy and catastrophe of the early twentieth century in Germany is summed up in Weißler’s fate. Manfred Gailus has now completed a full biography which will appear in February 2017, and on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of his death on February 19, 2017, a memorial service will be held on the grounds of the Sachsenhausen Camp.

Notes:

[1] Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler: Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (forthcoming, Goettingen 2017). See also Martin Greschat, Widerspruch und Widerstand: Texte zur Denkschrift der Bekennenden Kirche an Hitler (Munich: Kaiser, 1987); Greschat, “Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist der Bekennenden Kirche im Widerstand gegen Hitler,” in Ursula Buettner and Martin Greschat, Die verlassenen Kinder der Kirche: Der Umgang der Kirche mit den Christen jüdischer Herkunft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 86-122; John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), 162-64.

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

This month marks the 80^th anniversary of the Confessing Church’s most courageous act of opposition to Hitler’s regime. On June 4, 1936, Pastor Wilhelm Jannasch of the Confessing Church delivered to the Reich Chancellery a memorandum addressed to Adolf Hitler that stands out in the history of the Church Struggle for its frank criticism of Nazi church policy and, more remarkably, the Nazi attempt to force racial anti-Semitism on the Christian population. It is both unfortunate and highly illuminating that this extraordinary act of resistance remains tarnished by the Confessing Church’s decision to distance itself from Friedrich Weißler, a Christian of Jewish descent, who the Nazis arrested for his role in the publication of the memorandum and eventually murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Following the decisive break in the confessional front at the fourth confessional synod in Bad Oeynhausen in February 1936, the Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church represented by the Second Provisional Church Administration and the “Dahlemites” in the Council for the German Evangelical Church drafted the memorandum to Hitler. The memorandum went through several renditions and, as is often the case with statements written by committees, it lost some of its sharpness as the process went on for several weeks. In Martin Greschat’s book on the memorandum, Zwischen Widerspruch und Widerstand, he identifies the theologian Hans Asmussen as one of its principal authors; other signees included Fritz Müller, Martin Albertz, Hans Böhm, Bernhard Heinrich Forck, and Otto Fricke of the Provisional Administration and Karl Lücking, Friedrich Middendorf, Martin Niemöller, and Reinhold von Thadden of the Council for the German Evangelical Church.

The primary focus of the memorandum’s seven sections was to criticize Nazi church policy, especially the state’s interference in the affairs of the church. Instead of providing the churches with the freedom and protection Hitler promised in 1933, the authors claimed that the Nazi state and party were guilty of publically assailing the Christian faith, muzzling church leaders, and trying to de-Christianize the nation. Church leaders had complained about all of these incursions in the religious life of the population before but never with such transparency and brutal honesty, calling out Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Hanns Kerrl, and even Hitler for harsh criticism.

But by far the most impressive and distinctive section of the document is the one in which the Confessing Church turns its sight on Nazi racial thought and in two succinct sentences rejects the Nazi racial worldview and racial anti-Semitism:

When blood, ethnicity, race, and honor here receive the rank of eternal values, then the Evangelical Christian is forced by the First Commandment to reject this valuation. When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

These are extremely courageous words in the context of the mid-1930s when Hitler was cracking down on dissent with increasing brutality. Prior to the memorandum only a few lone voices from within the Confessing Church had the courage to condemn racial anti-Semitism toward unbaptized Jews. We should be clear, however, that while the fifth section calls on Christians to counter Nazi hatred toward Jews by following the commandment to love one’s neighbor, the memorandum does not condemn the religious anti-Semitism prevalent within the churches that viewed unbaptized Jews as “erring brothers” who crucified Jesus and lived under God’s eternal damnation.

The authors of the memorandum had hoped to keep its contents confidential until after Hitler had an opportunity to read the document and to respond. Despite their efforts, the document was leaked and published in the foreign press in July, just as Berlin was gearing up for the summer Olympics. Nazi officials were irate, as was the leadership of the Confessing Church. Among those responsible for its publication was Ernst Tillich, a down-and-out 26-year-old former theology student with connections to the press. He had borrowed a copy of the memorandum from Friedrich Weißler, the bureau chief and a legal consultant for the Provisional Church Government, copied it verbatim, and shared it with journalists for a fee. When the Provisional Church Government learned that it was Weißler who provided Tillich with a copy of the memorandum, it suspended Weißler for breach of trust.

In October and November 1936 the Gestapo arrested Tillich, his friend Werner Koch, and Weißler on “suspicion of illegal activity,” i.e., colluding with the foreign press against the Nazi regime. All three were sent to the police prison at Alexanderplatz, where they were interrogated, and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937. Because Weißler was a Jew as defined by the Nazi state, he was immediately separated from Tillich and Koch and, after six days of torture at the hands of the SS camp guards, Weißler died. Koch and Tillich, on the other hand, were released in 1938 and 1939, respectively.

During the crucial weeks and months of Weißler’s internment—when intervention by leading churchmen might have been effective—leaders of the Confessing Church, including Martin Niemöller, deliberately distanced themselves from their colleague in order to protect the reputation of the Confessing Church from the political charge that Weißler had acted treasonably by publishing the memorandum. Let there be no misunderstanding: Hitler’s racial state was responsible for the murder of Friedrich Weißler—not the Confessing Church—but it is a shame that his brothers in Christ did not even attempt to intervene on his behalf, being well aware of his special status as baptized Jew.

The Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church should be applauded for the unequivocal stance it took in June 1936 against Nazi racial anti-Semitism. At no time before or after did the Confessing Church repeat this rebuke with such clarity. But in the aftermath of the memorandum’s premature publication, fearing a Nazi crackdown, they disassociated themselves from their most vulnerable of colleagues, leaving Weißler to his fate at the hands of the SS. The legacy of the “Hitler Memo” is in many ways the legacy of the Confessing Church, a legacy that includes courage and cowardice, opposition and accommodation, and resistance and complicity.

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, February 19, 2012

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, February 19, 2012.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität, Berlin

Seventy-five years ago, in February 1937, Freidrich Weissler died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a result of mistreatment by the prison guards. He is widely regarded as the first Confessing Church member to be murdered as a victim of the Nazi persecution of the churches. Recently, at a commemorative ceremony held in the camp, Professor Manfred Gailus of Berlin’s Technical University honoured him with a fine tribute, which is here translated in abbreviated form by John S. Conway.

Friedrich Weissler came of a Jewish family, but, as a child, was baptized into the Protestant Church. He completed his studies in law just before the outbreak of war in 1914, when he served his country loyally and with true German patriotism. In the 1920s he resumed his legal career and by 1932 had been appointed a judge in Magdeburg. However, the rise of the National Socialists to power rapidly brought his career to an end. Already in April 1933 he was one of the 600 so-called “non-aryan” judges suspended from office, and in July he was dismissed. Despite his war service and distinguished record, the Nazis regarded him as “politically unreliable”. Thereafter there was little or no likelihood of his being employed in any branch of the public service.

Later he moved to Berlin and began to look for work in the private sphere. Due to his connections with the Protestant Church, he obtained a post as legal advisor to the incipient Confessing Church, first under Bishop Marahrens of Hannover, but subsequently with the more uncompromising wing led by Martin Niemöller and Martin Albertz. These men gave a strong lead to the Confessing Church’s rebuttal of the so-called “German Christians” efforts to infiltrate Nazi ideologies and practices into church life But there were also divisions in the Confessing Church’s ranks. The more moderate members were prepared to compromise on some issues, while the more radical wing, led by Niemöller, refused any such accommodations. They courageously adhered to the views outlined in the 1934 Barmen Declaration and resisted all attempts to limit or weaken the Church’s autonomy. Weissler joined this latter was a dangerous step, all the more because he had been branded since 1933 as a “non-aryan”. But he maintained his beliefs and served as a legal advisor for this wing of the Confessing Church.

In 1936, the increasing harassment of individual Confessing Church pastors and laity led this group’s leaders to draw up a petition calling for an end to such stressful persecution by the Gestapo or local Nazi agencies. Politely but unflinchingly the memorandum opposed the regime’s on-going attempts to “de-Christianize” Germany. The Nazi interpretation of “positive Christianity” was criticized. The document also called for an end to the measures limiting the church’s outreach in the schools, the press or public media. Finally the church leaders roundly declared their opposition to the Nazi antisemitic campaign, since such an ideology was against the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour. Weissler was closely associated in drawing up this document to ensure that it was fully in compliance with the existing law. This forceful protest was to be presented in June 1936 to Hitler personally and in private, in the hope that he would then issue restraining orders to his underlings. But it was a sign of the Confessing Church’s political naivety that they entirely miscalculated the Nazis’ response. The scandal was made worse by the fact that somehow or other a copy was made available to the foreign press, where it was hailed as a significant challenge to Hitler’s regime. (Later researches have never been able to discover exactly how this happened.) The Gestapo immediately launched investigations into this act of national treason, and suspicion fell on Weissler – as a “Jew” – as well on two young curates, Werner Koch and Ernst Tillich. The Confessing Church leaders hastily sought to dissociate themselves from any accusation of political treachery and left Weissler to his fate. In October 1936 he was arrested and in February 1937 taken off to Sachsenhausen. Within a few days he was brutally done to death. The fact that Weissler was left in the lurch by his former employers and by the anti-Nazi champions in the Confessing Church was long suppressed. Only recently have attempts been made for some form of appropriate recognition. In Magdeburg a street has been named after him, and since 2008 one of the law courts bears his name. In 2005 the then chairman of the Evangelical Church’s Governing Council, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, said this: “We in the Evangelical Church have to acknowledge our guilt in not standing up for our co-worker Friedrich Weissler. Our history is not always one of heroic resistance to tyranny.” It is to be hoped that in the near future a suitable church building in Berlin will carry his name, as a token of remembrance of this intrepid Confessing Church member during those dark times.