The Grey Book by Johan M. Snoek

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Produced by the nephew of the author.

Transcriber's Note:
(Gutenberg preparation by Ge J. Snoek 2004: g.snoek3@chello.nl
The original printed paper book pages are marked as right
aligned, (because lots of pages are referenced: omitting page nrs
troubles comfortable searching, while footnotes are marked/numbered
between square [123] hooks.)

JOHAN M. SNOEK

THE GREY BOOK

A COLLECTION OF PROTESTS
AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM AND PERSECUTION OF JEWS
ISSUED BY
NON-ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCHES AND CHURCH LEADERS
DURING HITLERS RULE

INTRODUCTION BY URIEL TAL

Van Gorcum & Comp. N.V. dr. H.J. Prakke & H.M.G. Prakke--Assen, 1969

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION (by Uriel Tal)

Part I

1 PROBLEMS OF EVALUATION
2 FACTORS LEADING TO PUBLIC PROTESTS
3 RESULTS
4 HELP TO CHRISTIANS OF JEWISH ORIGIN
5 "MERCY-BAPTISMS"

Part II

6 HISTORICAL EVENTS
7 GERMANY
8 THE NETHERLANDS
9 BELGIUM
10 FRANCE
11 SWITZERLAND
12 DENMARK
13 SWEDEN
14 HUNGARY
15 RUMANIA
16 GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
17 THE UNITED STATES
18 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS OF CHURCHES

Part III

19 HISTORICAL EVENTS, 1939-1945
20 GERMANY
21 NORWAY
22 THE NETHERLANDS
23 FRANCE
24 YUGOSLAVIA
25 GREECE
26 DENMARK
27 SLOVAKIA
28 RUMANIA
29 BULGARIA
30 HUNGARY
31 SWITZERLAND
32 SWEDEN
33 GREAT BRITAIN
34 THE UNITED STATES
35 THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES
36 TERRITORIES IN WHICH THE CHURCHES REMAINED SILENT
37 IN CONCLUSION
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PERIODICALS AND REPORTS

INTRODUCTION (by Uriel Tal)

The protests of the non-Roman Catholic Churches against the persecution
and extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period, carefully compiled
and amply documented in this volume, possess a significance that is not
confined to the history of Christian-Jewish relations. They constitute an
important chapter in the history of Christianity itself in that they reveal
the deeper aspects of the Church's antagonism to the anti-religious and
hence anti-Christian character of Nazi anti-semitism.
The well-attested facts presented to us in this volume are a clear
confirmation of the Church's reputation of Nazi doctrines, not only when
these doctrines were directed against the Jews but, first and foremost,
when they threatened the very existence of the Church itself, both as a
system of theological doctrines and beliefs and as an historical institution.
The Church regarded freedom, freedom of man as well as its own, as an
inalienable right rooted in the nature of man as a rational being created
in God's image. Hence, when the Church was deprived at the right of
self-determination, it felt its very existence endangered, and it was then
that it recognized the full symbolic import of Jewish persecution. This
view was plainly set forth at the beginning of the persecution of the Jews
by the Nazi-regime in Holland, by D. J. Slotemaker de Bruine, Protestant
pastor and Minister of State, who declared:

"...Freedom of the spirit is our life-blood. By that I mean freedom in
questions of the spirit, freedom of conscience, freedom of the Church,
freedom of instruction, freedom of the Word of God, freedom to bear
witness..." [1]

In the light of this statement it is obvious that the Church was provoked
to raise its voice in protest chiefly because the Nazis appropriated the
messianic structure of religion which they exploited to their own ideological
and political ends.
This was made clear already in the early days of the Third Reich by "Die
Geistlichen Mitglieder der Vorlaufigen Leitung der Evangelischen Kirche" who,
in a memorandum (Denkschrift) addressed to the Fuehrer (May 1936), accuse
Hitler of pursuing a policy that is not only directed against the Church but
which is designed "to de-Christianize the German people" (das deutsche Volk
zu entchristlichen), quoting, among other things, the words of
Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Robert Ley:

"The Party lays total claim to the soul of the German people...and hence
we demand the last German, whether Protestant or Catholic..." [2]

To those Church circles that raised their voices in protest this totalitarian
structure of the Nazi regime presented a double threat to the very existence
of the Church. First, the pseudo-religious and pseudomessianic character of
Nazism was calculated to weaken the Church from within and to mislead the
Christian community, especially its youth. It became increasingly clear to
these circles that the Nazi racial doctrine - which Hitler and also the
"Deutsche Christen" had called positive Christianity in their first
formulation as early as 5 May 1932 - constituted a kind of additional
gospel of messianic redemption that ostensibly strengthened Christianity
as an institution and as a religion of revelation. Secondly, this pseudo-
messianic and pseudo-religious authority that the Nazi regime arrogated to
itself was able by means of its repressive measures to curtail the influence
of the Church and even to reduce it to silence. This danger was perceived at
an early date by the "Bekenntnissynode der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche" in
its Botschaft (Part I, par 2, 5) adopted by the Conference held in Berlin-
Dahlem 19-20 October 1934, which stated:

"The National Church that the Reich's bishop has in view under the slogan:
One State - one People - one Church, simply means that the Gospel is no
longer valid for the German Evangelical Church and that the mission of the
Church is delivered to the powers of this world.... The introduction of the
Fuehrer principle into the Church and the demand of unconditional obedience
based upon this principle are contrary to the Word of Scripture and bind the
officials of the Church to the Church regiment instead of to Christ... [3]

Towards the end of the period that is dealt with in the sources collected in
this volume, in the year 1943, we also meet with a clear expression of the
Church's opposition to this pseudo-religious and pseudo-messianic character
of Nazism in the "Pastoral concerning National Socialist Philosophy" that
was sent in Holland:

... to parochial church councillors to give them the necessary basis for
their opposition in the struggle against National Socialist ideology, and
especially against the intangible, but all the more dangerous religious
ideas and expressions of National Socialism which will exercise an influence
even after the war."

In its penetrating analysis of the totalitarian character of Nazism this
Pastoral observes:

"...It is not surprising that National Socialism has the power to become the
religion of the masses, and its assemblies to take the form of a kind of
popular worship in which a great deal of latent religious emotion is
released.... In carrying out its ministry the Church must therefore make
its work in this connection even more definite in character, and must tell
its members very clearly and resolutely that what is at stake here is the
first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods besides me...!" [4]

This pseudo-religious and pseudo-messianic character of Nazism was by no
means accidental or the product of mass hysteria induced by some skilful
propagandists. It was rather an ideological structure that was consciously
given definite patterns and developed within a conceptual system in accordance
with its own laws of logic. In this development the traditional theological
concepts of Christianity were retained but given an altogether different
meaning. Values that had previously been regarded as relative in the culture
of Christianity and of the West now became absolute; and values that had
formerly been considered absolute, being interpreted as metaphorical or
visionary, became relative. Phenomena with an imminent historical essence
were lifted to a meta-historical plane. Means were converted to ends, and
ends were endowed with absolute authority in so far as they sanctified
the means.
In this manner the fundamental concepts of religion were not invalidated
nor the integrative functions served by these concepts impaired, such as
those cohesive factors that hold together the social structure and ensure
its normal functioning. The Nazis retained these concepts and their functions
as a legitimate part of their racial theory and, after depriving them of
their authentic historical content, turned them into political expedients
to be used in their attack against humanism, religion and Christian values.
Basic theological concepts such as God, redemption, sin and revelation were
now used as anthropological and political concepts. God became man, but not
in the theological Christian sense of the incarnation of the Word:
"...and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us..." (John 1. 14) or in
the Pauline conception of the incarnation of God in Christ in whom "the
whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2. 9).
In the new conception God becomes man in a political sense as a member of
the Aryan race whose highest representative on earth is the Fuehrer.
This change in the essential meaning of the concepts God-man is, from the
standpoint of cognition, effected by converting the relative into the
absolute and, from the standpoint of theology, by transferring the Pauline
conception (Ephesians 4. 24; Colossians 3. 10) from the plane of metaphysics
and eschatology to that of nationality rind politics.

It was this radical change from Christian doctrines to pagan myths that
aroused the Churches to express their protest against Nazism, and also
against the persecution of the Jews, in the above Pastoral of the year 1943:

"And there is now a return to the worship of life and power by accepting and
exalting the old Adam as the original and eternal MAN. There is an attempt at
self-salvation - the old Adam is not crucified with Christ (Rom. 6. 6) but
by his very own inmost strength achieves a new life and a heightened
vitality..." [5]

Similarly, the theological concepts of sin and redemption were transferred
to a legal category of administrative regulations that demanded outer
conformity and inner obedience. The traditional conception of sin and
redemption that was common to all currents of Christian thought held that
man's redemption, and hence eschatological existence, depends on his faith:
"the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ... since all have
sinned and... they are justified by grace... through the redemption which
is in Christ Jesus..."(Rom. 3. 22-24). In the totalitarian Nazi regime the
concepts sin and redemption were used as means by the State or the Party
to convert man into a loyal subject whose allegiance is assured by his
constant fear not only of violating some concrete ordinance or governmental
decree but simply of just deviating from the official ideology. The Christian
belief that man could be saved through faith in the forgiveness of Jesus who
died for his sins, "so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might
no longer be enslaved to sin" (Rom. 6.6), was transferred from the theological
to the secular, political plane. Even the comforting assurance of the believer
that his sins shall be forgiven and that he shall be found worthy of the
purifying influences of grace could now be gained only by the individual's
complete identification with the State, the Party and the superior Aryan race.
An instructive illustration of this shift from theology to ideology is to be
found in the circular letters (Rundschreiben) and in the speeches of the
Reichsorganisationsleiter Dr. Robert Ley, for example in his words of
26. June 1935:

"Strength through joy (Kraft durch Freude) is the embodiment of National
Socialism.

Over against sin we put discipline, over against penitence pride! Over
against the weak and their infirmities we put strength... " [6]

This doctrine was not mere Aryan propaganda; it became an integral part of
school studies and was systematically inculcated into the minds of the young.
The following is an example of a dictation given in 1934 to the third grade
of an elementary school:

"Just as Jesus redeemed mankind from sin and hell, so did Hitler rescue the
German people from destruction. Jesus and Hitler were persecuted; but whereas
Jesus was crucified, Hitler rose to be Chancellor... Jesus worked for
heaven, Hitler for the German soil..." [7]

This same pattern of reversing meanings was also applied by the totalitarian
Nazi regime to the basic concepts of western culture. Nationalism as an
historical phenomenon of a people with a common language and culture and
with the consciousness of a common destiny was raised to a mythical,
meta-historical plane. The essence of national unity was discovered to
reside in race and soil; the cultural and spiritual creations of the nation
were attributed to man's biological resources. Similarly, the State became
an end in itself, an ideal meta-historical entity that was identical with
the national spirit. [8]
This view was critically described by the Dutch Church as follows:

"... The whole cult of National Socialism finds its most powerful
manifestation in a State which claims to support, lead and fill in the
material and spiritual, educational, cultural and religious spheres,
the whole life of its subjects. Not only does the State order the life of
the individual, but it takes a creative part in it. It becomes the founder
of the true religion and the dispenser of the true philosophy; it furnishes
the data for knowledge..." [9]

Mythical nationality in the totalitarian regime thus developed a monolithic
structure which functioned as the only ontological framework in which the
individual may acquire his own identity, his selfknowledge and understanding.
While in a different, non-totalitarian civilization man establishes his inner
freedom by means of intellectual autonomy, the Nazi regime made the actual
biological belonging to the Aryan race into the ultimate condition for the
self-realization of Man.
Hence one who could not belong to the Aryan race, the prototype of whom was
the Jew, was doomed to be completely alienated, deprived not only of all
rights, but of the very justification to exist. It was this reversal of the
status of the individual which prepared the ground for subsequent developments
against which the Church protested, such as forced labour, the repression
of independent thought, the indoctrination of the young by the State and
their estrangement from their parents, teachers and preachers. An example
of this tendency towards the total dehumanization of the individual, as
reflected in the persecution of the Jews, and that provoked the Church to
protest, was the decree authorizing sterilization. The stand of the Church
in this matter was stated in the "Letter on the Question of Sterilization"
that was sent in May 1943 by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Holland
to the officials of the Reich and in which, among other things, we find the
following:

"...In the last few weeks the sterilization of the so-called mixed marriages
has begun. But God, who created heaven and earth and whose commandments are
for all men, and to whom even your Excellency will have to give account one
day, has said to mankind: 'Be fruitful and multiply' (Gen. 1. 18).
Sterilization is a physical and spiritual mutilation directly at variance
with God's commandment that we shall not dishonour, hate, wound or kill our
neighbours. Sterilization constitutes a violation of the divine commandment
as well as of human rights. It is the last consequence of an anti-Christian
racial doctrine that destroys nations, and of a boundless self-exaltation.
It represents a view of the world and of life which undermines true
Christian human life, rendering it ultimately impossible... [10]

The fact that the protest of the Church against the persecution and
annihilation of the Jews was an inseparable part of its general protest
against the inhuman and anti-Christian character of modern anti-semitism
places the documents collected in this volume in a broad historical context.
These documents offer ample evidence of the Church's opposition to an
historical phenomenon rooted long before the Nazis came to power, hence
also prior to the rise of modern anti-semitism. The protest of the Church
was fundamentally directed against those pagan and mythological elements
that had crept into Christianity itself in the course of its historical
development among the heathen.
To many of the fathers of modern anti-semitism, which is the racial and
political Anti-semitism that arose towards the end of the 19th century and
reached its highest stage during the Third Reich, the rejection of Judaism
was tantamount to the rejection of religion in general.
This view goes back to Feuerbach's anthropological criticism of religion,
to the young Hegelians (Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer) and to the early Romantics
who longed to return to the primitive forms of a religion called
"vorchristliches Germanenthum". [11] Modern anti-semitism was influenced by
these streams of thought through Nietzsche's concept of the 'Antichrist',
although Nietzsche himself kept aloof from the more vulgar manifestations
of political anti-semitism of his day. In him the anthropological view
reaches its culmination - God, who is nothing more than the deified form
of man [12] is finally overthrown by Dionysian man who found courage to
assert his instinctive life and abjure the gross and enslaving notions of
Christianity that men

are equal and can be redeemed by faith, the gospel of the downtrodden and
everything that creeps on earth. [13] These views, inimical to religion and
to Christianity, were already being expounded with great vigour towards the
end of the 19th century. Christian doctrine was accused of perverting man's
instinctive life, vitiating his natural enthusiasm, inflaming his ego,
invading his private life over which it declares its dominance only to
enslave human nature, to weaken and alienate man, by imposing upon him
"un-natural" restraint such as the anguish of his conscience.
Wilhelm Marr, one of the early fathers of modem racial and political
Anti-semitism and the man who during the late 70's coined the term
'anti-semitism'[14] included in the rejection of Judaism his critique of
Christianity as early as the year 1862. In a polemical work called
"Der Christenspiegel von anti-Marr" by Moritz Freystadt, a member of
the "Society for History and Theology" in Leipzig, written in answer
to Marr's "Judenspiegel", the author interprets Marr's rejection of
Judaism as a rejection of monotheism, based on his anthropological view
of God as a subjective product of our conscious life - an antireligious
analysis Marr evidently borrowed from Voltaire, Feuerbach and Bruno
Bauer. [15]

With Marr's intensification of anti-Jewish propaganda inspired by the new
racial anti-semitism we find increased criticism of Christianity both as a
system of beliefs and as an institution. In one of his popular books
"Religioese Streifzuege eines Philosophischen Touristen" (1876) Marr,
relying on theories propounded by Voltaire and Feuerbach, observes
that from the atheistic point of view it is evident:

"that Christianity, in its dogmas and precepts, is like every religion, a
malady of human consciousness. The philosopher explains... every religion
as a product of man's conscious life and relegates to the sphere of phantasm
the so-called 'revelations' of which all people boast depending on the state
of their culture..." [16]

Most additional factors in the rejection of Judaism, Marr continues, go
beyond the attack directed against Christianity as a system of beliefs and
superstitions that demoralizes man and corrupts his nature. Anti-semitism is
not only called to combat religion and Christianity; its chief aim is to
save the German nation and the whole world from Jewish domination and from
the moral depredation of the Jewish race. Christianity is not yet fully
cognizant of the gravity of the problem, and it deceives itself when it
thinks that baptism or conversion is a gratuitous deliverance from native
corruption, for the Jew's aberrations are not religious but biological
and hence incorrigible. The Jewish question, Marr concludes, is a racial
question for the infidelity of the Jew is essentially biological, and
hence Christianity is in no position to save the world from the perils
of the Semitic-Jewish race. [17]

We here encounter a primary distinction between the doctrines of racial
anti-semitism and those of the Christian Heilsgeschichte, a contradiction
that awoke the Church to the dangers of Nazism when, in 1933, it opposed
the "Arierparagraph". This racial law rejected the notion that the Jews
could still hope for redemption, and for a renewed status of election,
assured them in the New Testament (Rom. 9-11) on condition that they
acknowledge their error and accept the redeeming truth of Christianity.
Even in the early years of racial anti-semitism, in the seventies and
eighties of the last century, we already find this inner contradiction
between a racial theory that regards Jews as the ontological embodiment
of an ineradicable evil and the views of the Heilgeschichte that believes
this evil to be remedial if only the Jews could be persuaded that salvation
comes from the Savior who was sent first of all to the Jews themselves, and
who atoned for the sins of all mankind.
It is this inner tension between the recalcitrance of the Jew and the
incorrigibility of Judaism that refuses to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah,
already conspicuous in the change that took place in Luther's attitude to
the Jews between 1523 and 1543, which charactarizes the theological and
political attitude of Adolf Stoecker, court preacher in the Bismarck era
and one of the leading figures of modern anti-semitism. Until recently
historians concentrated much on his importance in preparing the ground
for racial and political anti-semitism. It is true that without his powerful
influence during the last decades of the 19th century the rise of modern
political anti-semitism would be incomprehensible. A more balanced approach
has been taken lately, as may be seen in the instructive study by Walter
Holsten on the part played by Stoecker in the rise of modern anti-semitism.
The author shows that many phases of Stoecker's anti-semitism had their roots
in the conservative tradition of Lutheranism and at the same time were
opposed to the anti-Christian tendencies of racial anti-semitism. [18]

The early phases of Stoecker's activity already reveal the ambivalent
nature of his attitude to the Jews and to Judaism, an ambivalency that
characterized the anti-Christian elements in antisemitic "Christian"
ideology throughout the days of the Third Reich. In his speeches after
the political defeat of his Christian Social Labor Party in the summer
of 1878, Stoecker insisted on making a distinction between the anti-Jewish
attitude that arises in conjunction with or flows from Christianity and
the antisemitic attitude which at the same time also impugns Christian
ethics. In his well-known antisemitic speech as early as 19.9.1879 Stoecker
warns his listeners:

"We can already detect here and there a hatred directed against the Jews
that is contrary to the Gospels". [19]

Even in his most violent speeches against the Jews Stoecker did not draw
the extreme biological consequences of his racial theories and continued
to maintain that conversion was the only authentic solution to the Jewish
question that would complete the universal mission of Christianity and that
only baptism could save the Jews from their ignominious belief in the
validity of the halacha after the coming of Jesus. The salvation promised
to the Jew then is to be saved from his Judaism. The final redemption,
however, will not raise the Jews above the nations of the world, as
promised in the Old Testament, but this position of eminence and election
will pass, or actually has already passed, from the Jews not just to the
Christians but to Christian Germany. The redemption promised to the Jews
is thus to be attained by way of the baptismal font at the entrance to
the Church:

"All Israel will be saved when the fullness of the heathen shall have come
to an end. This was Paul's promise to his beloved people - final salvation
and not a future glory that will raise Israel above the other nations as
proclaimed in the Old Testament... and every believing Christian knows well
what a rejoicing there will be in the Kingdom of God when the people of the
Old Testament finally acknowledge their sin against Christ and repent. This
event will be hailed by all Christendom and by the angelic hosts with paeans
of praise, and it will be turned by the Church in the End of Days into glory
and renown when Israel will bring to it its uncommon religious talents and
intellectual gifts..." [20]

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