ABSTRACT
For two millennia Christians have faced questions of how to sustain authentic and life-giving faith in the face of powers hostile to the subversive energy of the gospel. For sheer savagery and the pervasive betrayal of values central to human culture and the Christian church, however, few contexts in those two thousand years can match Nazi Germany. Out of the post-war trauma and humiliating economic disaster of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s rise to power fed on national instability and promised order, hope, and pride for Germany-but at the cost of humanity, in every sense. By the mid 1930s, Nazi chaos had begun to dissolve German society by eroding truth, stability, peace, trust, and the basic coherence of shared communal reality. By 1940, this chaos had overtaken every dimension of life in full-blown war and the Holocaust itself. This was life in hell: a totalitarian police state ruled by madmen, where those who tell the truth are put to death and those who lie to save their lives risk losing their souls. It was a state with neither free speech of any kind nor any way to communicate with allies, where any slip could mean death for oneself or torture for one’s companions. And it was a state that was not just devastating its own citizens but visiting chaos on its neighbors in every direction: invading Poland, the Sudetenland, France, and Holland, bombing England, and occupying Scandinavia.
