Ina letter to French Protestants in December 1939, Karl Barth wrote that the church should witness uncompromisingly to Chris tians in Germany: Your cause is not just! . . . Have no more to do with this Hitler! Hands off this war! It is his war alone! Change your course while there is yet time!1 The Confessing Church, to which Barth was referring, had resisted National Socialism, but chiefly those policies which had circumscribed the institutional freedom of the church. One result of that resistance was that the Confessing Church in 1939 was still proclaiming the biblical gospel rather than a Germanic religion, but Confessing Christians, like nearly all other Christians in Germany, had only occasionally and without much spirit, condemned the violence and immorality of National Socialism. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, nearly all Con fessing pastors affirmed their loyalty to the government, although they did not endorse the aims of the National Socialist state. No one in the Confessing Church publicly protested the violence and immorality of an unjust war. It was a course which would not be significantly altered until the last eighteen months of the war. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, nearly all of those pastors who would become members of the Confessing Church anticipated cooperation rather than confronta tion with National Socialism. They supported Hitler's authoritar ian government, his opposition to communism, and the goals which he set forth for the national regeneration of Germany. By the end of that year, however, from 25 to 30 percent of all Protestant clergy men, deeply disturbed by the regime's ecclesiastical policies, had