ABSTRACT
The story of Christianity and Resistance in Germany during the Third Reich is by and large not a success story. The churches remained silent on the exclusion of Jews from most professions in 1933; on the defamation and forceful segregation of Jews from the non-Jewish German majority in 1935; on the November Pogrom of 1938 and the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps from 1941 onwards. Under normal circumstances the decision of non-Jewish husbands and wives to remain loyal to their Jewish spouses would have been natural behaviour provoking little interest from historians. However, under the Third Reich normal circumstances did not prevail. The final objective of the National Socialist policy towards Jews was clear from the beginning: to remove all Jews from the German population and from every territory under German control. This included in particular those Jews who by their family ties were most closely connected to the German people.
