The documentary "Storm Troopers Of Christ: The Jews and Baptism in Nazi Germany" explores how a major, influential faction of German Christianity, the Protestant Church in Germany especially, helped support the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, to relatively minor opposition from Christian clergy who disagreed with German fascism and the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.

During the Third Reich, German Jews to be sent to concentration camps and death camps were parsed from "Aryan" Germans not on the basis of their names, their physiological attributes, or other characteristics but mainly through their presumed racial heritage - as attested to, on their baptismal certificates, by their pastors. Simply by definition, people without baptismal records were in an "illegal" category. In effect, the requirement that all Germans carry with them, at all times, their baptismal records (if they had them) amounted to state-imposed Christianity.

As Steve D. Martin explores in "Storm Troopers Of Christ", the main struggle between the "Confessing Church" of Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Nazi-sympathetic Deutsche Christen ('German Christians'), was over whether baptism could transform German Jews into, simply, Christians.

The Deutsche Christen never fully prevailed in their desire to strip from baptism its transformative power, and one of the most striking personal stories Steve D. Martin weaves into the tapestry of his documentary is that of a German-Jewish woman whose mother, ethnically German, had married a Jewish German man and, against advice assuring her that it was absurdly unnecessary, convinced her pastor to baptize her baby daughter...

The baptism saved not only the baby girl's life but her father's life as well, and perhaps the life of the mother even; the daughter's racial classification was, because of the baptism, changed from "mixed race" to German and the parents lived safely, unmolested by the Nazi authorities, in Berlin through to the war's end.

But, because under the Third Reich the baptism of Jews had been made illegal, the pastor who performed the baptism was sent away to a concentration camp. He survived, however, and lived to perform a marriage ceremony for a young woman whom he had baptized and so saved through his heroic ceremonial act that carried such legal force and which, it seems, the Nazi authorities lacked the power to annul.

"...for many Christians inside Germany, Protestants and
Catholics, there was a kind of difficult relationship with the idea of Democracy in Germany, and I think by 1930 German Democracy, the Weimar Republic was already on pretty shaky ground.... a lot of decisions were being made by the President, sort of bypassing the elected representatives, and I think for many church people this change, or this move away from a kind of a functioning democratic process, was quite welcome. - Doris Bergen, author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement In The Third Reich,as interviewed in Storm Troopers Of Christ

[ from the Vital Visual, Inc. description of "Storm troopers Of Christ"]

"In 1933 Berlin Bishop Joachim Hossenfelder proclaimed the popular, pro-Nazi "German Christian" movement the "Storm Troopers of Christ." Hossenfelder led the early phase of a movement that still echoes through the church today, even though the world has tried to forget.

This film uncovers a history few have remembered: a church of heroes and heretics, of selfless good alongside unspeakable evil:

• Ludwig Mueller, the bishop of the Third Reich
  
  

• Martin Niemoeller, the first to resist the Nazification of the church
  
  

• Karl Themel, a pastor who used baptismal certificates to send "Jewish Christians" to the concentration camps
  
  

• Werner Syltan, a pastor who died at Dachau because of his work on behalf of persons of Jewish descent
  
  

• Walter Grundmann, a renowned Biblical scholar and architect of the "Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life"

Recent academic studies, by scholars such as Robert P. Erickson, Doris Bergen, Susannah Heschel and others have demonstrated that the role of the German Protestant churches, in aiding, sympathizing with, and failing to oppose, the rise of Hitler and the German Nazi Party, was dramatically greater than has been previously recognized.

While the role of the Catholic Church, especially in terms of its Concordat with Hitler that gave key, early recognition to the Nazis and the National Socialist Party, has been long acknowledged, public and even academic awareness - of the role the German Protestant Churches played in failing to prevent, or even tacitly approving, the "Final Solution" has - has until recently been shockingly meager.

[from a 1993 review of Robert P. Erickson's Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch by Michael Hakeem, PhD.]

Professor Robert P. Erickson did an unusually comprehensive investigation of the three theologians' writings, utterances, and activities as they pertain to Nazism and the Jewish Question. He reports his findings in a book, Theologians Under Hitler. If anyone should know whether submission or opposition is demanded of the followers of the living Christ when confronted with a regime as totally reprehensible as that of the Nazis, surely it would be these theologians.

What conclusions did Erickson reach as to the stance of the three men who would be expected to exemplify the ultimate in the embodiment of those noble values that millions of Sunday school children are taught attach to Christian folk? They are grim:

"They each supported Hitler openly, enthusiastically, and with little restraint." In fact, they deemed it the Christian thing to do. They "saw themselves and were seen by others as genuine Christians acting upon genuine Christian impulses." Furthermore, all three tended "to see God's hand in the elevation of Hitler to power." Hirsch was a member of the Nazi party and of the SS. The Nazi state, he said, should be accepted and supported by Christians as a tool of God's grace. To Althaus, Hitler's coming to power was "a gift and miracle of God." He taught that "we Christians know ourselves bound by God's will to the promotion of National Socialism."

Kittel and a group of twelve leading theologians and pastors issued a proclamation that Nazism is "a call of God," and they thanked God for Adolf Hitler.

The Deutsche Christen, some of whom called themselves "Stormtroopers For Christ", formed the religious and theological "tip of the spear" of a German Christianity that for the most part aligned itself with, and even embraced, ideology and goals of the Nazis, and the much vaunted role of German theologians - such as Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer - in opposing Hitler and German fascism have been substantially overstated. According to Doris L. Bergen, author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, "People like Niemoller initially voiced their opposition very, very carefully and often in terms of, you know, 'we too are opposed to the undue Jewish influence inside our society' .

Who killed Anne Frank ?

That was not a casual question for Doris Bergen, author of "Twisted Cross"; it was an exercise Bergen designed for teachers in a course she was leading, for schoolteachers, that was called "Teaching The Diary Of Anne Frank", to raise their awareness of the "chain of complicity" that led to the Holocaust...

Bergen wrote out, on cards she passed out one by one to the teachers, "identities" of different people who each played a part in the death of Anne Frank - Hitler, Himmler, the person who snatched a scrap of bread from Anne Frank's hand in the concentration camp, the Dutch couple who turned Frank's family in to the Nazis, and so on. There were about 15 teachers, 15 cards. The assignment was that the teachers, based on their given "identity" written out on their card, should line up in order based on the relative responsibility each bore for Anne Frank's death, from greatest responsibility to least responsibility.

As Bergen describes the results, in Steve Martin's documentary "Theologians Under Hitler", "My expectation was that the person who held the card that said 'Adolf Hitler' would immediately march to the front of the line and stay there and the others would line themselves up behind that person. That's not what happened. Instead the teacher who had a card that said 'a German pastor who preached hatred of Jews, from the pulpit, in the 20s and 30s', that person marched immediately to the front of the line and refused to cede that position. No matter who came along, the person with the 'Hitler' card, the person with the 'SS' card... that woman said 'this person is the most responsible, this person who used the power of the pulpit, who used the authority of the Christian Church, of Christian tradition, to teach that it was not only acceptable but desirable to hate fellow human beings, to hate Jews, to fear Jews, to fight against them to attack them - this person is as responsible and more responsible than anyone else.' ".
Even Hitler...even Hitler. I have come to agree.

I have come to understand racism as primarily theological and I am writing this post to urge anyone - and especially readers here who belong to Christian churches, to synagogues, to mosques and temples - or any other communities of deep religious or philosophical belief - to consider holding screenings of "Storm Troopers of Christ" in such communities.

In many politically partisan commentaries, comparisons to Germany under Hitler's Third Reich, often poorly or inadequately supported, are used as a political weapon - to shut down discourse. From the left, many critics of the current Bush Administration have asserted parallels between pre-World War Two Germany and contemporary America. From the right, many critics warn that unless America widens it's military involvement in the Middle East, especially through an attack on Iran to forestall allegedly evil designs of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - who such accounts routinely compare to Hitler, the United States risks enabling a second Holocaust.

In "Storm Troopers Of Christ: Baptism and The Jews In Nazi Germany" and in his earlier documentary film on the same topic such as "Theologians Under Hitler", documentary film maker Steve D. Martin" has studiously avoided loaded historical comparisons and so Americans almost anywhere on the political and religious map should be able to watch Martin's documentary films-- on the role of German Christianity in failing to oppose, sympathizing with and supporting the rise of Hitler and the Nazis --without feeling themselves somehow accused of the same sort of complicity, or even participation, that marked the German Christian churches during the period leading up to, and during, the Third Reich.

This is important not just for 'historical' reasons, I feel, and I say that as one who has personally heard a call, last October 2006 at the Family Research Council's Voter Values Conference, from former US Secretary of Education Dr. Bill Bennett, for the United States to level 'rebellious' Iraqi cities, such as Fallujah, with nuclear weapons. The animus I heard, from Bennett, was racist but not for the 'racial' or ethnic reasons as those are typically understood though such shadings were certainly present. Also present at the conference were several current 2008 GOP presidential candidates: most notably Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

The eliminationalist hatred in Bennett's speech seemed to be at least in part theologically grounded, an imperative arising from what was widely cast during the conference as a religious war between Christianity and Islam. Such manichean eliminationalist views can currently be found on both the American political left and the American political right. One currently famous atheist, typically identified more with the American left than the right, has written that entire classes of humanity must be hunted down and killed not because of the nature of their souls but for their religious or philosophical beliefs.

Indeed, in a conversation with Steve D. Martin, he informed me that Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention was one of the first major theologians from either the left or the right who saw the significance of Martin's documentary Theologians Under Hitler, and Land was the first major religious figure to endorse the documentary. [ Oddly, Richard Land was also a signatory to a 2002 letter to George W. Bush, signed by a number of religious leaders associated with the American religious right, affirming that in their view a US attack on Iraq would fall under the traditional Christian definition of a "just war".]

In Becoming Evil:How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press), Whitworth Professor of Psychology James Waller drew on extensive firsthand accounts from those who had both suffered and inflicted mass political violence to reach the simple conclusion : most humans can be conditioned to perpetrate acts of mass violence. In my Talk To Action story How Average Humans Can Be Conditioned To Carry Out Acts Of Mass Violence I reviewed several studies that have confirmed Waller's hypothesis. Below: Whitworth College summary of James Waller's 2002 "Becoming Evil" :

Written for both scholars and laypeople and drawing on eyewitness accounts from perpetrators, victims and bystanders, Waller's Becoming Evil refutes many of the standard explanations for antisocial behavior and presents four ingredients that lead ordinary people to commit acts of extraordinary evil. Waller contends that being aware of our own capacity for inhumane cruelty, and knowing how to cultivate the moral sensibilities that curb that capacity, are the best safeguards we can have against future genocide and mass killing.

"To offer a psychological explanation for the atrocities committed by perpetrators is not to forgive, justify or condone their behavior," Waller states in his preface. "Instead, the explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil."

So, humans-- every one of us --are very complex, with motives both good and bad, mercenary and altruistic, and categorical demonization and vilification of others, whole societal groups, peoples or cultures only serves to inflame conflict, obscure our human potential to do good and elicit the innate potential for evil we all carry. I have come to feel that humanity must, above all, learn to transcend such forms of racism and categorical hatred if we are to survive in the coming decades.

"It's just upsetting to me, as a daughter of a Protestant theologian, who was taught that Nazism was - that Christians were anti-Nazi... to actually discover that when I read documents from the Third Reich... medical doctors, legal theorists, they kind of throw in anti-Semitism to please the regime, you can tell they're instrumentalizing it, they're doing their little - granting the regime it's wanting to hear the little anti-Jewish thing. You don't really believe them. They're not really anti-Semitic. It's not viscerally felt.

You read the Protestant clergy and the Catholic clergy... they hate the Jews. They really do... You feel the hatred coming off the page. They're deeply threatened. It's scary to them, and they blame Jews not just for sexual immorality but also for secularization, for doubt about the truth of the Gospel." - Dagmar Herzog, author Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, as quoted in Steve D. Martin's new documentary "Stormtroopers Of Christ".

What is racism ? I am not sure I have met any human, during my short life, who did not show elements of racist thinking but I am using a very broad definition of racism, one very new to me which I have come to by way of the documentary work of Steve D. Martin.

What is racism ? "Theologians Under Hitler" was Steve D. Martin's video documentary examination of three very prominent German theologians who condoned and aided the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis. One of those three Christian Protestant theologians wrote a theological justification for legally excluding German Jews from a number of professions: Gerhard Kittel. Such a measure to benefit the "Aryan" German Volk might, Kittel noted, cause many German Jews great hardship and some might even starve - but Kittel deemed such a measure regrettably necessary.

In his earlier academic career Gerhard Kittel had a number of Jewish friends and might have even been described as philo-Semitic. He and his father did foundational Biblical research and, as part of that, became deeply knowledgeable about Jewish history and culture.

What happened to Kittel ?

We think of racism as having to do with skin color, facial structure, physical build...

Let me turn to a statement, from Suzanna Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus, that Heschel made towards the conclusion of The Stormtroopers Of Christ: Baptism and The Jews During The Third Reich ;

"Racism in itself is a kind of theological or spiritual argument, and I'll give you an example of what I mean. A racist will say "The Jewish nose, look how horrible it is", and they have pictures of it and so forth - a big Jewish nose. Well, what is it about a nose ? A nose in itself isn't a dangerous thing. If someone has a big nose, a little nose, what difference does it make ? It doesn't harm me. Do you even notice, when you talk to somebody, the size and shape of the nose ? Of course not. Is this going to jump out, the nose, and shoot me ? Of course not.

So what is it about a nose ? Maybe the way racism works is this : the body is a manifestation of something deeper, of a spirit. What was of concern to racists was not the nose itself but the nose as bearing within it a degenerate moral spirit, a degenerate spirit that was dangerous for society, and it was a moral degeneracy that wasn't visible. You can't see it and touch it. But it was there nonetheless. And, you have to be careful because that's what can destroy you, moral degeneracy. And Germany, racists claimed, was being undermined by Jewish immorality, by Jewish degeneracy, exploitativeness and so forth.

And so, in that sense, my understanding of racial theory is that it's a kind of incarnational theology. It says that the moral degeneracy is incarnate in the body, in the nose or the lips or the hair, and what a racist tells you is ; you have to know how to read the body and interpret it properly so that you know the moral degeneracy that adheres in that body, that's incarnate in that body." - Susannah Heschel, author of the upcoming book The Aryan Jesus: Christianity, Nazis and the Bible