Nazi Christian Ethics: Killing Unequal Humans, Victims of Guilt and Sin (Book Notes: The Holy Reich)

Some wonder how Christians could have cooperated with the Nazis - especially when it came to the Nazis' more vicious policies, like forced euthanasia, wars of aggression, and eventually the Holocaust. Evidently, it wasn't too hard - they didn't even need to compartmentalize and ignore their dogmas. They could rely on Christian leaders providing theological justifications for Nazi programs.

In The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Richard Steigmann-Gall writes:

The most important policy statement for the Inner Mission [the Protestant church’s welfare branch] as a whole came at a January 1931 conference in Treysa, under the chairmanship of Harmsen, who called on the assembly to recognize the “natural inequality of all human beings.”

One of the most eminent participants in the conference was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, head of the Bethel institutions and Reich Bishop-designate in 1933. At this conference, it was his opinion that “In service to the Kingdom of God we have received our body... God gave man responsibility for the body. If [the body] leads to evil and the destruction of the Kingdom of God in this or that member of the community, then there is the possibility or even duty for elimination [Eliminierung] to take place.”

Bodelschwingh was, I think, relying on gospel verses like this: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire...” [Mark 9:47-48]

Few Christians today take such a verse literally; but if we are going to read it metaphorically, why not read it like Bodelschwingh?

The public statement issued by the participants was almost identical to this opinion. It proclaimed that the 30,000 patients in their institutions were “the victims of guilt and sin.” The statement concluded that the need for assistance should therefore be curtailed by sterilization, with substantial help given only to those who could regain their productive status in the community. The statement added that there was “a moral obligation to sterilization on the grounds of charity and the responsibility which has [been] imposed upon us not only for the present generation, but also for future generations.” [...]

In a 1937 address to the local NSDAP Ortsgruppe, [Rudolf Boeckh, chief doctor of the Lutheran Neuendettelsau Asylum in Central Franconia] advocated the elimination of “life unworthy of life.” His theological justification for this course of action acknowledged that “the Creator had certainly imposed illness upon the destiny of mankind.” However, “the most severe forms of idiocy and the totally grotesque disintegration of the personality had nothing to do with the countenance of God..., we should not maintain these travesties of human form we should return them to the Creator.”

People generally think that concept like “life unworthy of life” were purely Nazi in origin, but here we have clear evidence of Christians adopting it for their own use and constructing a theological basis for it. We also see just how horrible the consequences can be when people take seriously ancient notion that illness or disability is a punishment for sin. Why did Christians cooperate to extensively with the Nazis? Because German Christianity and German fascism all had their roots in the same culture and the two cross-pollinated all over the place.

 

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