The German Genius

leading Nazis, despite Himmler, thought was laughable), Positive Christianity stressed active Christianity—helping the Volk , preserving the sanctity of the family, keeping healthy, practicing anti-Semitism, getting involved in the Winter Relief program to feed the poor—rather than reflection. Indeed, these activities seemed designed to prevent contemplation, and again this suggests that the Nazis’ real worry over Christianity was that it represented the most powerful force that might be used against them.
    N AZI T HEOLOGIANS
     
    By no means all religious leaders were as courageous as Barth or Bonhoeffer, and some theologians accommodated themselves—and their theology—to the new regime. Robert Ericksen has studied three who, he says, advanced theology at the time but now seem little more than opportunists.
    Gerhard Kittel was professor of New Testament Theology at Tübingen. Born, like the other two, in 1888, he was the son of a famous Old Testament scholar, Rudolf Kittel. Gerhard joined the National Socialists in May 1933 and his main theological contribution concerned the Jewish background to the origins of Christianity. He wrote that Jesus, “if he was a Galilean,” might have had “a couple of drops” of non-Jewish blood in his veins. 45 Over time, throughout the Weimar years, Kittel became more and more anti-Semitic to the point where, in June 1933, he delivered a public lecture in Tübingen titled The Jewish Question in which he considered “what should be done with the Jews in Germany?” He ruled out extermination, but on the grounds of expedience—“It has not worked before and it will not work now.” He rejected Zionism and assimilation and, on account of the Diaspora, opted for “guest status,” the forcible separation of the Jews from the people with whom they lived, including the prohibition of “mixed” marriages. 46 The theological basis for his argument was the “transition” that took place in Jewry between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. , since which time the race had “degenerated.” The Diaspora, he said, made the Jews a “perpetual problem” for their neighbors, one consequence being that they were always “trying for World Power.” His lecture caused an uproar and a heated exchange with Martin Buber. Theologically, Kittel was looking for a “spiritual basis” for anti-Semitism. He was imprisoned in 1945.
    Paul Althaus (1888–1966) achieved distinction as a Lutheran scholar at Göttingen. He believed God speaks to man through nature and history, and he derived a concept of Ur-Offenbarung or natural revelation, one element of which may be summed up by saying that “God created and approves the political status quo.” 47 God’s will, according to Althaus, equals the situation at any given moment, and obedience toward God means accepting one’s allotted position in life “as handed down by years of tradition.” A second element was his idea of Ordnung , order, a primary element of which was the Volk . The Volk , he said, were ordained by God according to a mysterious process: “We have no eternal life if we do not live for our Volk .” 48 A third element was a return to Luther’s idea of the two realms, the kingdom of God, ruled by love, and the kingdom of man, ruled by the sword. All these came together, he said, in a great German “turning point,” the National Socialist völkisch movement. Althaus was removed from teaching at Erlangen at the end of the war but reinstated a few months later.
    Emanuel Hirsch was also the son of a pastor. He studied with both Althaus and Paul Tillich and theologically was much exercised by what he saw as the crisis of modernity. His philosophy, first revealed in his book, Deutschlands Schicksal (Germany’s Fate), published in 1920, was that revelation teaches us universal values and “internal certainty.” Two of the “certainties” that Hirsch identified were the failure of rationalism and the evolution of the state. These were not particularly new ideas in a German context, as will be apparent, but they had never had a theological stamp of approval before. In particular, he thought that “Germany can now create a new form of authoritarianism in which people freely give their obedience to the state so long as the state properly represents the Volk .” Christianity, he said, fitted admirably into “the German concept of leader and follower.” 49
    As Robert Ericksen has observed, Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch were not