Religion: Out of the Night

The best-known churchman in Germany spent the war like a Christian in a concentration camp. The ex-U-boat commander of World War I, Martin Niemoller, of Berlin’s weathy, suburban Jesus Christus Church, seemed at times the last spark of Germany’s all-but-extinguished soul. When anti-Nazi churchmen organized the Confessional Church in 1934 to fight Hitler’s attempts to liquidate Christianity, Niemoller was among the founders.

Last week the Confessional Synod elected Pastor Niemoller president of their church’s newly formed executive council for the areas comprised by the old province of Hesse-Nassau. According to U.S. Captain Dumont Fox Kenny, religious affairs officer of the local A.M.G., President Niemoller’s responsibilities for the 1,000,000 Confessionalists he now leads would include “interpretation of spiritual dogma, review of the services, guidance of thought on several problems, shaping the trend of seminary thinking and general supervision of church life.”

In a speech before the Synod, Pastor Niemoller touched the uneasy conscience of many a German churchman. Said he: if Germany’s 14,000 pastors had stood together to damn the Nazis in the beginning, they might all have been shot, but their deaths might have opened the eyes of the world and saved at least 35,000,000 lives.