Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich Alec Ryrie

Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich Alec Ryrie

For as long as we suffer these parsons in our midst, it serves us right!. . . We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews. Adolf Hitler, 11 August 1942

The Party as such stands for a positive Christianity, without binding itself denominationally to a particular confession. It fights against the Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and believes that. . . the welfare of the community comes before that of the individual. NSDAP programme, 1920

. . . the threat of a quite specific disintegrated and demoralizing urban spirituality, whose representative now is primarily the Jewish Volk. . . Paul Althaus, 1928

Martin Luther, Of the Jews and their Lies (1543)

Angry recognition of the Jewishness in the Old Testament and in parts of the New Testament has arisen, obstructing access to the Bible for innumerable German people. Walter Grundmann, director of the Dejudaisation Institute,

I have always considered myself an anti. Semite. One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilization. Bishop Otto Dibelius, 1928

The doctrine of the two kingdoms ‘lies like a cloud over the ecclesiastical thinking and action of more or less every course taken by the German Church’. Karl Barth, 1939

We are not unacquainted with Christian love and the obligation to the helpless, but we demand that the nation be protected from the feckless and the inferior. Guiding Principles of the German Christians, 26 May 1932

Love for the German homeland. . . has a hard, warrior-like face. It hates everything soft and weak because it knows that all life can only then remain healthy and fit for life when everything antagonistic to life, the rotten and the indecent, is cleared out of the way and destroyed. Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, 1939

Liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish recompense ethic, from all those stories about cattle-dealers and pimps. This book has been characterised quite rightly as one of the most questionable books in the world’s history. . The whole scape-goat and inferioritytype theology of the Rabbi Paul should be renounced. Reinhold Krause, 13 November 1933

Nave of the Christuskirche, Hamburg. Wandsbeck, 1940

The Volkstestam ent, 1940

Walter Grundmann, director of the Dejudaisation Institute

Martin Niemöller (1892 -1984)

An army of neutrals. . . whose symbol consists of two thick blinkers and whose ecclesiastical desire is to be dangerous to noone, thus letting themselves be in no danger. Karl Barth, 1939

The systematic murder of Jews and Poles is taking place in the occupied territories. . It is contrary to the clear commandment of God to bring about the death of people who have been convicted of no crime simply because they belong to another race. Bishop Theophil Wurm, letter to the Minister of the Interior 28 January 1943

is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the people’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money

Paul Braune & Friedrich von Bodelschwing

Clemens Graf von Galen, Roman Catholic bishop of Münster

Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich Alec Ryrie