ABSTRACT
At the end of September 1938, prompted by the Sudeten crisis, the leadership of the Evangelical Church published a prayer for peace. The Bishops promptly distanced themselves from this prayer, which had been prepared by the Provisional Church Leadership. Helmut Gollwitzer, preaching in Martin Niemoller’s parish in Berlin-Dahlem on the first Sunday of the war, denounced such natural theology as heathen and warned that German Christians should remind themselves of their guilt and of the horrors of war. In Rome the highly trained Jesuits of the Collegium Russicum were waiting to follow in the train of the German army to convert the godless and to bring the Orthodox church back into the Roman fold. The attitude of the Catholic Church was every bit as ambivalent as that of the Lutherans and ranged from enthusiastic support to outright rejection. The Evangelical Church had no such clear dogmatic position on sterilisation.
