ABSTRACT
The question whether, independent of individual assessments, a collective responsibility of the German people for the atrocities of the Nazi regime should be publicly acknowledged, was the subject of much debate in the post-war years. The two big German churches took two fundamentally different stands: whereas the first Catholic pastoral of 1945 spoke of the joy about the fact that so many had refused to succumb to the power of Baal, the protestant Council of the Evangelical Church of Germany signed a document which became known as Schuldbekenntnis, a ‘confession of guilt’ which did not exempt even those who had remained opposed to Nazism as members of the Bekennende Kirche, the professing church. This movement had been formed in 1933 in opposition to the Reichskirche, an organisation of protestant churches loyal to the new regime. The Catholic church had not experienced a similar schism in spite of Nazi violations of the concordat with the Vatican of 20 July 1933, which bound the clergy to political neutrality while promising non-interference of the state in religious and educational matters. Many Catholics as well as Protestants ended up in concentration camps, including one of the most prominent signatories of the Stuttgart Schuldbekenntnis of 19 October 1945, Martin Niemöller (born 1892). A submarine commander in World War I, Pastor Niemöller was a prisoner from 1937 to 1945, resuming his clerical duties after the war and explaining the message of the document quoted here in many sermons and public speeches, which met with extremely mixed receptions.
