The silence about the Jews at Barmen is often portrayed as the silence before the storm. Barmen took place before the Nuremberg laws, before Kristallnacht, before those historical markers that we see as turning points in the intensification of Jewish persecution. The focus of Protestant leaders at Barmen was on the Kirchenkampf: the rise of the Deutsche Christen, the early battles about the Reich bishop and the “Aryan paragraph”, and the other events that so divided the German Evangelical Church and directly paved the way to the Barmen Declaration. Yet the same period was also marked by horrific violence and the emergence of a police state. By the end of 1933, almost 37,000 Jews (from a population of 523,000) had fled Germany. Violence against political opponents like Communists and Social Democrats, “social undesirables” and the Jewish population of Germany had begun immediately as well. According to historian Richard Evans, by the summer of 1933 more than 100,000 “enemies of the Reich” had been arrested and hundreds of them had died in custody. Almost 50 concentration camps had been set up around the country. Violence, especially at the hands of local SA groups, had free rein. Jews in particular never knew when they might be beaten or summarily arrested, the target of public humiliation, arrest, torture or even death. More than anything else, it was this violence and the clear identification of its targets that set the tone for the new regime. For those who were willing to see, this was the true nature of National Socialism.1 And in the eighteen months leading up to Barmen, ecumenical leaders in Europe and North America were both well informed about the persecution of the Jews, and had in fact raised the issue repeatedly with their German colleagues. In October 1933 there was a meeting in New York of US interfaith leaders at the home of Harry Emerson Fosdick, the outspoken and prominent pastor of Riverside Church. It was attended by Protestant ecumenical leader Henry Leiper, Catholic theologians and priests John La Farge and John Walsh, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Unitarian leader John Haynes Holmes and others. The group met to discuss different reports they were receiving from refugees and contacts in Germany and to explore possible reactions. These harrowing reports included an instance of four Jewish brothers who had been arrested, tortured and murdered, with their mutilated bodies returned to the family, as well as an account of an elderly Jewish man forced to crawl near a sewage outlet and chew the grass.2 By the time these leaders met, a number of such reports had reached Protestant ecumenical leaders in Europe and North America. It is striking how many of the earliest responses that came from the ecumenical world focused on the violence against the Jewish community. These responses were mostly directed to German church officials in Berlin. By early April 1933, when some 3000 Jewish refugees had already arrived in Switzerland, Swiss ecumenical leader Henry Henriod sent a message to the German churches asking for a clear position on the Nazi measures.3 That same month, French Protestant leader Wilfred Monod published an open letter welcoming Jewish refugees to France.4 In May, British Bishop George Bell wrote to German Church President Hermann Kapler expressing his concern about actions against the Jews.5 In the United States, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), the precursor of today's National Council of Churches, had begun tracking the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany even before January 1933. Henry Leiper, at that time the executive secretary of the US section of Life and Work, had already visited Berlin in 1932 and returned with alarming reports about the rise in nationalism and anti-Semitism. There was also a solid foundation of Jewish-Christian interfaith activism in the United States. The FCC in 1928 had helped found the National Council of Christians and Jews, which became quite active in the 1930s – and Protestant leaders in particular were prominent figures in the early protests against the Nazi regime in the spring of 1933.6 As Leiper later put it, “the point” of US messages to their German colleagues was clear: “our dissent from anti-Semitism, Aryanism and Extreme Nationalism in the New Church of Germany.”7 The replies from German church leaders, including ecumenical leaders like Hermann Kapler (co-chair, with George Bell, of Life and Work) and Hermann Burghart (chair of the German section of the World Alliance) referred to the “alleged” persecution of the Jews and asked ecumenical leaders to stop spreading false reports.8 In March 1933, Walter Van Kirk at the FCC observed that: “European churchmen have been in a measure critical of the so-called intrusion of American churchmen into strictly European matters … The Protestant forces of Germany, in the main, seem to be in substantial agreement with the Hitler movement. Is it not likely, therefore, that any action on our part would be deeply resented by the German Protestant Church?”9 When US church leaders spoke out after the April 1 boycott of Jewish businesses in Berlin, they were scolded by Berlin church superintendent Otto Dibelius, who defended the boycott as the “natural” reaction against Jewish influences and asked: “How does an Anglican bishop [i.e., Bishop William Manning] in New York come to make himself the protector of German Jewry?”10 Perhaps the most haunting response by German church leaders, however, was made in the summer of 1933 to several US ecumenical leaders, including Leiper and Samuel Cavert, who were visiting Berlin. In November 1933, in the wake of the Sportspalast rally of the Deutsche Christen, Rev. S. Parkes Cadman (chair of the US section for Life and Work) mentioned this meeting in his letter to Berlin consistory official August Schreiber: Colleagues of mine were assured this summer in Berlin by official representatives of the churches that the (German) policy [towards the Jews] could be descrιbed as one of “humane extermination”… Frankly speaking, the Christians of America cannot conceive of any extermination of human beings as “humane”. They find it even more difficult to understand how churchmen in any land at any time can deliberately lend their influence to the carrying on of such policy … Yet we have been forced to observe that, even before the revolution, when freedom of speech was still a reality in Germany, there were no protests that reached us from churchmen in Germany against the violent anti-Semitism of the National Socialists. Since then we have had a great number of apologies for the situation, but no official and few personal statements which seem to recognize the moral factors involved.11 It should be noted that the ecumenical response would grow more cautious in the years that followed, even as the persecution of the Jews intensified, and the number of ecumenical leaders who spoke out forcefully on this as a central issue was relatively small. As the Kirchenkampf intensified, Confessing Church leaders and even exiled activists such as Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze warned their colleagues that the churches in Germany faced persecution at the hands of the regime, and in some cases asked those abroad not to interfere.12 As the struggle within the German Protestant church intensified, many, if not most, ecumenical leaders increasingly tended to treat it as an internal problem that demanded a cautious reaction. Despite the protests of a very few individuals, notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the ecumenical movement refused to take sides in the Kirchenkampf, inviting representatives of both the official church and the Confessing Church to participate in international conferences such as Fanø in 1934 and Oxford in 1937. And there was never, of course, a coherent analysis or position on Christian theological attitudes towards Jews, or a critique of the fact that most international church refugee work, as well as many of the church statements that were issued, focused exclusively on the plight of “non-Aryan” Christians, not that of secular or observant Jews. Even in the United States, the number of Jewish and Christian leaders who worked together during this period was very small indeed. By the late 1930s a dull apathy on the issue seemed to have set in among church leaders abroad, parallel to the mood within the Confessing Church itself. In his August 1938 resignation from the Confessing synod in the Rhineland, Gustav Heinemann had declared: “How much have we declared unbearable, and yet we bear it!”13 Those words could have applied to church leaders throughout the world. This preliminary historical overview of the prelude to Barmen – and the response of the ecumenical world – is important for several reasons. First, it reminds us that the 18 months that led to Barmen had also been marked by open and widespread violence and repression that had completely altered the fabric of German society, forever changed the lives of its small Jewish population, and ominously foretold the fate of European Jewry. By May 1934 Nazi Germany was a police state. The survey above reminds us also that not only was there an awareness of these changes among German Protestant leaders but in some cases the changes had been embraced by these leaders – to the extent that, as Cadman's letter attests, a Protestant leader in Berlin could tell a foreign church delegation in the summer of 1933 that the fate of Germany's Jews would be one of “humane extermination”. It also reminds us of the extent to which ecumenical leaders in Europe and North America were well informed about the persecution of the Jews, and had in fact raised the issue repeatedly with their German colleagues. Given the escalating violence against Germany's Jewish population, given the numerous demands from the ecumenical world that the German church leadership address this and the equally numerous refusals by the Germans to do so, the silence of the church at Barmen about the Jews is quite stunning. All this should add a cautionary note to any attempt today to portray Barmen as a symbol of political resistance or a cry of conscience, let alone as an act of solidarity with the victims of Nazism. It was none of these. The church leaders meeting in Barmen were worried about the growing political pressures being exerted on the churches by the Nazi state and the corresponding pressures from within being exerted by the Deutsche Christen. They were preoccupied with their own internal disputes and concerns, and desperately wanted to avoid a schism. The Barmen Declaration was a skilful compromise that allowed representatives of the entire spectrum within German theological and church traditions to unite on a position vis-à-vis the Nazi state and to affirm that position, unanimously, in confessional terms. It can not be denied that this was a profound and significant theological step in the history of German Protestantism. Particularly in its fifth thesis, where the Barmen declaration drew a clear boundary regarding the allegiance Christians should give a totalitarian state or its Führer, the potential was certainly there for a more generalized political resistance against Nazism. The carefully crafted wording of its six theses was designed to create consensus amongst the widely divergent theological and political views of its 138 delegates, but the words of Barmen certainly opened the door to potential resistance against the Nazi state, and that is why Barmen continues to be an important symbol for Christians today. Nonetheless, very few Protestants at the time went through that door, and even among those who did, there was, essentially, silence about the persecution of the Jews. And, as I have written elsewhere, the representatives of the different regional churches and traditions began arguing about the political significance of the Barmen declaration as soon as they left the meeting.14 At the Dahlem synod only months later, the fragile consensus created at Barmen would dissolve and the radical “Dahlemiten” would create the Confessing Church as a semi-separate entity within the German Evangelical Church. Even that movement, however, must be understood as an attempt to keep the church free of ideological pressures, not as a resistance movement. Barmen's significance, then and now, was that it was a theologically articulated foundation for the freedom of Christians and their church over against state or ideological demands that go counter to the word of God: a clear statement of where the allegiance of the Christian church must be. That continues to have meaning for Christians today because these challenges remain – and not only in political dictatorships. Christians continue to be confronted by the temptations of ideology, power, wealth, status and the many guises these worldly masters can take. Barmen addressed that by reminding Christians of where their ultimate allegiance had to lie. Yet as Barmen also shows us, this theological clarity does not necessarily guarantee solidarity with the victims. And, given the historical context, the absence of a statement about the violence that was already being perpetrated against the Jews or a statement of solidarity with the Jews reveals the inherently apolitical nature of the Barmen declaration. Given the demands that had already come from ecumenical leaders abroad, Barmen revealed that the German Protestant church at that moment was looking almost exclusively inward – even as this inward look was for the very purpose of finding its political footing in the context of Nazi Germany in 1934. Throughout the Third Reich, the Confessing Church would choose its political battles carefully, and one battle its leadership consistently refused to wage was the one on behalf of the persecuted Jews. There were certainly individuals (such as Elisabeth Schmitz) who wanted their church to speak out on this issue, but they stood on their own. Two reasons can be identified for this. One, of course, is theological. In 1934, neither the German Protestants nor their ecumenical partners had rethought the theological relationship between Christianity and Judaism – such a reconceptualization would really only begin after 1945. It is likely that a Barmen thesis on “the Jewish question” would have resembled Hans Ehrenberg's “Leitsätze zur judenchristliche Frage” or Bonhoeffer's “The Church and the Jewish question”. Although both these documents were clear rebuttals of the racial ideology that would have barred “non-Aryans” from the church, they still very much reflected traditional understandings of Christian salvation history. The clarity within the Confessing Church about the “Aryan paragraph” was never, ever, about Jews who had not converted, and still less about the broader attacks on their civil liberties and the violence against them. It was about the integrity of the universal Christian church as the body of Christ on earth that transcended all boundaries – in this case, of “race” and religion. A theological statement at Barmen on the political persecution of the Jews would have opened up a much wider conversation and a stronger internal critique of Christian tradition, which might have altered the conversation completely. It also would have opened up a conversation within the church about the general political situation in Nazi Germany as of May 1934, including the targeted persecution of all minorities and political opponents. But the fact is that Christians in 1933 had not even begun to think along those lines. This is in contrast, of course, to 19th and 20th century Jewish thinkers – such as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Geiger – who had indeed been wrestling with the question of what Christianity and Judaism had to say to each other, and who had already published quite a sophisticated body of scholarship on the topic. The absence of such work on the Protestant side is one indication of how deeply acculturated Protestantism was – and this in turn meant that Christian anti-Judaism did indeed converge with political and cultural anti-Semitism. This is one reason why it was all too easy for leading scholars like Paul Althaus, Gerhard Kittel and Emanuel Hirsch to become theological apologists for Nazism. This was just as true for Christians throughout Europe and in North America. The early ecumenical responses to what was happening in Nazi Germany were grounded in a concern for civil liberties and, particularly for the North Americans, in a different understanding of the church-state relationship. And, of course, the North Americans were not in the midst of a Kirchenkampf. This brings us to the second reason for Barmen's silence, which is that Barmen was as much a negotiated and strategic compromise within the church – an attempt to create a united front and thwart the aspirations of the Deutsche Christen – as it was a declaration vis-à-vis the German state's demands upon the church. This dual dynamic – this combination of the imperative for a clear Christian witness with the need for a strategy to cope with internal church divisions – shaped both the wording of Barmen and its subsequent effect in the years that followed. It shaped the political witness of the church under National Socialism all the way until the end in 1945: the cautious compromises – including its silence about the police state it was living in – meant that an inherently apolitical path had been taken as the means of remaining free of state interference. Both of these factors – the absence of a theological Auseinandersetzung with Judaism in its own right, and the apolitical caution of the church leaders at Barmen as they sought to preserve church unity – go hand in hand. They help to explain not only the subsequent course of the Kirchenkampf, but why the church remained silent for so long on the issue of the Holocaust after 1945. Tragically, the groundwork necessary for a theological discussion about the persecution and genocide of the European Jews and the related political issues could only be established in the aftermath of the catastrophe. Victoria J. Barnett is director of church relations at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and general editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition.