Identity, Belonging, and Christian Community in Protestant Responses to the Aryan Paragraph in Nazi Germany

Abstract

Examining Christianity and its representative denominations and groups in Nazi Germany has led scholars to try to construct how these Christian groups interacted with a government which institutionalized the death of millions. The focus of past scholarship has centered on debates over the extent to which institutional Protestant Christianity and individual Protestants opposed Adolf Hitler’s regime and Nazism. The focus of this thesis examines how four Protestants or Protestant groups employed definitions of what made one a Jewish Christian, what being Jewish meant, and who was included within the larger Christian community in their 1933 responses to the Aryan paragraph. These responses originated from the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the General Synod of the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union, the faculty of theology at the University of Marburg, and the German Christian movement. Though each response to the Aryan paragraph utilized a unique definition of Jewish Christians and Christian community, they all reveal a Protestant church unprepared to answer the questions of belonging and identity posed by its society. In their search for a unified answer to the question of whether a baptized Jew belongs in the Protestant church, Protestants displayed that they had no unified answer. The consequences of not belonging in Nazi Germany could and did lead to discrimination, persecution, and genocide.