Tag Archives: Helmut Hesse

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943) (Bremen, Wuppertal: De Noantri, 2019). 80 pp. ISBN: 978-3-943643-11-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

The history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is bleak, a seemingly unrelenting litany of miseries. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered roughly six million Jews as well as hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma on the basis of their race. Gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Germans, and those the regime deemed physically and/or mentally handicapped were also subjected to unspeakable cruelties. As the horrors unfolded, very few Germans raised their voices to protest the brutality. For some, this was due at least in part to fear of the dire recriminations that could result from speaking out. Others simply lacked real sympathy for Jews and others who already lived on the margins of German society. Because opposition and outright resistance to the regime were so rare, we have come to know many of the opponents and resisters by name: Sophie Scholl, Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet, over the past few decades, scholars like Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Manfred Gailus, and Gerhard Lindemann – whose body of work together generally affirms the consensus view that the German Protestant Church as a whole did very little to resist Nazism or to speak out publicly on behalf of the victims of the Shoah – have published works highlighting the exploits of individual Protestants who, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase “[fell] into the spokes of the wheel.” These courageous Protestants include not only Niemöller and Bonhoeffer, but also Elisabeth Schmitz and Katharina Staritz. In Gegen the Mainstream der Hitlerzeit, Manfred Gailus offers a concise but nuanced biography of another such lesser-known Protestant “martyr,” the Wuppertal theologian Helmut Hesse. Because we have already published excerpts of Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit here, this review will focus on some of the book’s important contributions rather than a detailed summary of its subject’s life. Even so, a sketch of his biography is in order.

Helmut Hesse was born in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) in 1916, the youngest son of the well-known Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Helmut had three brothers and a sister (10, 15). Beginning in 1935, he undertook theological studies, which included several stints at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Elberfeld, the University of Halle on the Saale, a winter term at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Berlin, and, for two semesters, under Karl Barth at Basel (17-18).

In Sunday worship services on May 23, 1943 and again on June 6, Helmut prayed for persecuted Jews, read the names of detained Christians (including Niemöller and Heinrich Grüber, leader of the “Büro Grüber,”), criticized Protestant church politics and attitudes within the Confessing Church, and called for the church to resist antisemitism (49-50). On June 8, Helmut and his father Hermann Albert, were arrested by the Wuppertal Gestapo and imprisoned in Barmen, where they languished for over five months (57). On November 14, father and son were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Just ten days later, Helmut, having been denied essential medications for a previously diagnosed chronic renal insufficiency, died of post angina septicemia. He was just 27 years old (62-63). Gailus’s fascinating biography paints the picture of a rather cantankerous if principled and courageous young theologian who, for his public advocacy for Jews and persecuted Christians, paid with his life.

In his June 6 sermon in Elberfeld, Hesse, who had addressed ill-treatment of Jews by “Christian peoples” in a February sermon, addressed the matter of Jews and Judaism directly. He quotes liberally a petition about the church’s position on the persecution of Jews (54). The letter had been written to Bavarian bishop Hans Meiser by Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem and some members of the Lempp Circle, a small group of men and women committed to the theology of the Confessing Church and opposed to the policies of the “intact” Bavarian Protestant church.[1] Bishop Meiser did not make it public, but passed it on to the Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who similarly refused to publish it (54).

As recorded by the Wuppertal Gestapo, Hesse proclaimed:

As Christians, we can no longer bear the fact that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us to do so is the simple commandment of Nächstenliebe (love of neighbor). The Jewish question is a Protestant question and not a political one. The Church must resist any antisemitism in the community. To the state, the Church must testify to the importance of Israel in the history of salvation and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. Every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, has fallen under the murderers in Germany today. (55).

Hesse’s stark pronouncement closely mirrors some of the language in the Munich petition.[2] Perhaps for these words more than any others, Hesse’s fate was sealed.

One is left to wonder why Hesse’s remarkable story has not been publicized more widely. Perhaps one reason lies in a scandalous affair that Gailus’s research uncovers. During a house search, the Gestapo found some private letters of Hesse’s that suggested that he had had a romantic relationship with a married woman with a school-aged child whose husband was fighting in the war (58-59). The fact that the affair with the unnamed woman took place is not in question (the Gestapo bemoaned the fact that Hesse proclaimed that “God has already forgiven him for this adultery. There is no trace of a sense of guilt ….” (59); also, Hermann Klugkist Hesse (no relation to Hermann Albert and Helmut), an Elberfeld pastor and friend of the family, tried to deal with the fallout of the Gestapo’s discovery with Elberfeld parishioners and church leadership, as well as with Helmut himself (59-60); finally, according to Klugkist Hesse, gossip about the matter had spread through the Elberfeld Reformed community and beyond (60-62)).

Yet, as seriously as the matter of adultery was regarded in such a pious Reformed community, the lack of support that Helmut apparently received from his church community while in prison and the concentration camp might be regarded as more scandalous than Helmut’s sins. So great was “the matter with Helmut,” as the affair was called, that Klugkist Hesse bitterly relays that local church leaders did not once visit Helmut during his nearly six-month ordeal, despite having visitation rights (60, 64 – 65).

In the end, due to Helmut’s physical and psychological frailty, as well as his rigid Reformed upbringing, Gailus regards Helmut Hesse as a “difficult martyr” – but a martyr nonetheless (69-70). Gailus argues that, despite his idiosyncrasies and failings, because of his incredibly courageous advocacy for Jews especially but also for his fellow travelers in the Confessing Church who had dared to speak out against the regime, Hesse merits a special place in the pantheon of Protestant “heroes and martyrs.” In fact, his name belongs with those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Friedrich Weißler, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Hans and Sophie Scholl (among others) (71-73). Given the case he has presented in this excellent study, it is hard to argue with this conclusion.

Notes:

[1] Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, trans. Victoria J. Barnett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 215-216; Hermann Diem, Ja oder Nein – 50 Jahre Theologie in Kirche und Staat (Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1974), 130; Walter Höchstädter, “Der Lemppsche Kreis,” Evangelische Theologie 48, no. 5 (1988): 468-473.

[2] Hermann Diem, “Wider das Schweigen der Kirche zur Judenverfolgung. Offener Brief an Landesbischof D. Meiser, 1943,” (Against the Silence of the Church on the Persecution of Jews: Open Letter to Regional Bishop Dr. Meiser, 1943) in Hermann Diem and Uvo Andreas Wolf, Sine vi- sed verbo: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Voten (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1965), 108-111, here 108.