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The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (German : Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis) was a declaration issued on October 19, 1945, by the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, EKD), in which it confessed guilt for its inadequacies in opposition to the Nazis and the Third Reich.
The Declaration states in part:
Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole church: We did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.
The Declaration makes no mention of any particular atrocities committed during the Third Reich or of the church's support for Hitler during the early years of the regime. [1]
One of the initiators of the declaration was pastor Martin Niemöller.
After the EKD conference at Treysa achieved some administrative unity, critics still found a lack of contrition in the church. Niemoller stated, with some frustration, that "you should have seen this self-satisfied church at Treysa." [1]
American representatives reporting from the Treysa conference voiced views similar to Niemoller. Robert Murphy, a career diplomat in the US State Department, commented:
There is little evidence that the German Protestant church repented Germany's war of aggression or the cruelties visited upon other peoples and countries. [1]
Other Americans were perhaps more diplomatic in their statements but the meaning was no doubt the same:
It cannot be said that the attitude of the church toward its political responsibility is as yet satisfactory, let alone clear.—Stuart Herman [1]
The Declaration was prepared in response to church representatives from the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Britain and the US who came to Stuttgart to reestablish ties with the German Protestant Church, based on a "relationship of trust." The representatives believed that any relationship would fall apart in the absence of a statement by the German churchmen, due to the hatred felt in their home countries toward Germany in 1945.
But the eleven members of the council had differing ideas on the moral responsibility of their churches for Nazi Germany. One prepared a draft laying blame on "our fellow citizens" in Germany, thus implicitly denying or diffusing the responsibility of the church. This language was stricken from the draft, and Niemoller insisted on the language "Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries."
...Hans Asmussen, Martin Niemöller... and Wilhelm Niesel ... needed no prodding to express lament over their own and the church's failure to speak out loudly and clearly against Nazism. Nevertheless, the Stuttgart Declaration was not simply an act of conscience. Persistent pressure by foreign church leaders for ... recognition of the ... inadequate response to Nazism played a significant role. [1]
The Declaration was viewed by many Germans as a further capitulation to the Allies and a betrayal of German interests; one signatory asked the foreign churchmen to refrain from publishing the Declaration, entirely contrary to the purpose of obtaining it in the first place. Various interpretations and arguments were raised by some members the EKD Council to try to deflect the criticisms raised against them by irate parishioners:
Of the eleven signatories, only Niemöller chose to publicize it: "For the next two years", he claimed, "I did nothing but preach the Declaration to people." This bold approach, along with his internment at Dachau, helped create his controversial reputation. [2]
Many Germans objected to the confession of guilt, on the ground that they had also suffered in the war, as a result of Allied wrongdoing (particularly Soviet).
...the dreadful misery of 1945-1946 held the Germans back from all remorse. Because--most people believed this--the occupation troops were responsible for the misery. "They're just as inhuman as we were", was how it was put. And with that, everything was evened up. [2]
Some Germans quickly drew comparisons to the "war guilt" clause of the Versailles Treaty, as the Declaration admitted that there was a "solidarity of guilt" among the German people for the endless suffering wrought by Germany. They feared that, once again, the victors would use such logic to impose punishment upon Germany, as Versailles had widely been viewed after the conclusion of World War I. [1]
Furthermore, was "solidarity of guilt" a code word for "collective guilt"—the notion, advocated by some of the more hawkish Allied spokesmen, that all Germans (except the active resistance) bore all responsibility for the Nazi crimes, whether or not they had personally pulled triggers or ejected gas pellets on children? The Declaration did not expressly stipulate collective guilt, but neither did it expressly adopt the more moderate doctrine that guilt and responsibility, like all things human, were generally matters of degree. [1]
Niesel, a former student of Karl Barth and one of the signatories of the Declaration, concluded that there was a general unwillingness by the German people to accept responsibility for the Nazi rule. As Hockenos puts it:
The righteous intermingling of self-justification and self-pity was as important a factor in creating a hostile environment for a public confession as were postwar fears of another Versailles or Allied charges of collective guilt. [1]
One German churchman reflected on his contacts with his Swiss church comrades as those were renewed after the war; they had remained in contact even during the war, but there were boundaries still to overcome after the war's end. His reflections are revealing, both for the revelation and articulation of those boundaries and of his own post-war attitude of "helplessness" in the face of totalitarianism, his underlying premise that individual Germans could do nothing because the obstacles imposed by Nazi totalitarianism were simply too great, so the clergy had no choice but to collaborate:
The accusation [from the Swiss] was that we [the German churchmen] had survived.... for them that was treachery. They couldn't understand that, under a totalitarian system, one has to make compromises... one has to have a certain flexibility... they couldn't understand any of this. [Eventually there was mutual understanding and]... I was elected by the Swiss delegates to the governing council.... me, as a German!"... That moved me greatly... the bridge was truly there again. [2]
Many Germans raised the practical objection that the Declaration would be interpreted by the Allies as an expression of collective guilt, which would in turn justify harsh treatment by the Allies in the postwar world. Most Protestants were willing to admit some degree of responsibility, provided that the Allies reciprocated and admitted their own wrongdoing.
In letter after letter [to the signatories] the same cry of resentment [against the Allies] is heard. To most Germans the suffering [of defeat and postwar conditions] itself was punishment enough for whatever share of guilt Germans bore....since the Allies also committed war crimes, this fact should somehow lessen the gravity of the crimes committed by Germany. [1]
Others, who saw the Declaration more in theological than in practical or political terms, recognized that confession is made before God and not before men, and that such "conditional confessions" were theologically wrong-headed and misunderstood the meaning of Christian confession. As one Protestant rather wryly noted, neither the Allies nor the World Council of Churches "are our father confessor." [1]
Hockenos identifies three basic reasons that Germans were reluctant to confess wrongdoing:
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem "First they came ...". The poem exists in many versions; the one featured on the United States Holocaust Memorial reads: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
"First they came ..." is the poetic form of a 1946 post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the silence of German intellectuals and clergy — including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself—following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt, repentance, and personal responsibility.
The Confessing Church was a movement within German Protestantism during Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church.
The Protestant Church in Germany, formerly known in English as the Evangelical Church in Germany, is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants. In 2020, the EKD had a membership of 20,236,000 members, or 24.3% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thuringia was a Lutheran member church of the umbrella Protestant Church in Germany. The seat of the church was in Eisenach. The church covered those parts of the state of Thuringia that were not part of the former Province of Saxony. It was the largest Protestant denomination in this area.
The Barmen Declaration or the Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 was a document adopted by Christians in Nazi Germany who opposed the German Christian movement. In the view of the delegates to the Synod that met in the city of Wuppertal-Barmen in May 1934, the German Christians had corrupted church government by making it subservient to the state and had introduced Nazi ideology into the German Protestant churches that contradicted the Christian gospel.
The Pomeranian Evangelical Church was a Protestant regional church in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, serving the citizens living in Hither Pomerania. The Pomeranian Evangelical Church was based on the teachings brought forward by Martin Luther and other Reformators during the Reformation. It combined Lutheran and Reformed traditions. The seat of the church was Greifswald, the bishop's preaching venue was the former Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Greifswald.
The German Evangelical Church was a successor to the German Protestant Church Confederation from 1933 until 1945.
Article 231, often known as the War Guilt Clause, was the opening article of the reparations section of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War between the German Empire and the Allied and Associated Powers. The article did not use the word "guilt" but it served as a legal basis to compel Germany to pay reparations for the war.
Kurt Scharf was a German clergyman and bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg.
The Prussian Union of Churches was a major Protestant church body which emerged in 1817 from a series of decrees by Frederick William III of Prussia that united both Lutheran and Reformed denominations in Prussia. Although not the first of its kind, the Prussian Union was the first to occur in a major German state.
Positive Christianity was a religious movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination". The Nazi movement had been hostile to Germany's established churches. The new Nazi idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany's Christian majority by implying that the Nazi movement was not anti-Christian. That said, in 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said. Hitler's public presentation of Positive Christianity as a traditional Christian faith differed. Despite Hitler's insistence on a unified peace with the Christian churches, to accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to distance themselves from the Jewish origins of Christ and the Christian Bible. Based on such elements, most of Positive Christianity separated itself from traditional Nicene Christianity and as a result, it is in general considered apostate by all mainstream Trinitarian Christian churches, regardless of whether they are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
The Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau is a United Protestant church body in the German federal states of Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate. There is no bishop and therefore no cathedral. One of its most prominent churches is Katharinenkirche in Frankfurt am Main.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria is a Lutheran member church of the Protestant Church in Germany in the German state of Bavaria.
The Berlin Declaration of 5 June 1945 or the Declaration regarding the defeat of Germany, had the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France, acting on behalf of the Allies of World War II, jointly assume de jure "supreme authority" over Germany after its military defeat and asserted the legitimacy of their joint determination of issues regarding its administration and boundaries prior to the forthcoming Potsdam Conference.
Kirchenkampf is a German term which pertains to the situation of the Christian churches in Germany during the Nazi period (1933–1945). Sometimes used ambiguously, the term may refer to one or more of the following different "church struggles":
Theophil Heinrich Wurm was the son of a pastor and was a leader in the German Protestant Church in the early twentieth century.
German collective guilt refers to the notion of a collective guilt attributed to Germany and its people for perpetrating the Holocaust and other atrocities in World War II.
Hans Christian Asmussen was a German Evangelical and Lutheran theologian.
The Kirchliche Hochschule Berlin was a theological university in Berlin, Germany, from 1945 to 1992, a facility of the Protestant Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia.
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