It has been suggested that the protests from the Churches mostly came too late, and thus fell flat. This is partly true. The Protestant leaders in Hungary did speak out very late, and Bishop Wurm of Wurttemberg sent his letters when there only remained a chance of doing something for the "privileged" Jews.
On the other hand, Churches or Church leaders in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States began to protest in 1933. The Churches in the Netherlands protested at the very beginning of the German attacks on the Dutch Jews, in 1940. The Church of Denmark had prepared a public protest before the deportations started.
It is, however, necessary to keep the dates of protests in mind, in order to arrive at a fair evaluation of the moral courage which such protests required. After Hitler's defeat at Stalingrad, at the end of 1942, and the defeat of Rommel at El-Alamein, it became more and more clear that Germany would lose the war. The measure of success is in itself no yardstick for the moral value of a deed. One can hardly say that Church leaders in Rumania behaved better than Church leaders in, for instance, the Netherlands, because the former, contrary to the latter, actually succeeded in saving many lives. <23>
To this it must be added, however, that the seeming absence of any chance of success could not be an excuse for maintaining silence or for doing nothing against the terror of the Nazis. Prince William the Silent is said to have stated that it is not necessary to hope in order to try, nor to succeed in order to persevere.
4 HELP TO CHRISTIANS OF JEWISH ORIGIN
Apart from the 500,000 Jews who registered as members of their community in 1933, there were some 50,000 Jews in Germany who no longer belonged to the Jewish community. Though born as Jews, they had been baptized. In addition, some 210,000 people had at least one Jewish parent, and another 80,000 one Jewish grandparent; thus a total of some 340,000 people in Germany were, in addition to the "full Jews", affected by racial legislation. [88]
Until the end of the year 1938, Christian leaders and Churches tended to stress the necessity of helping Christian refugees of Jewish origin, rather than calling for help for Jews in general. A notable exception to this rule was the Appeal of the Ecumenical Council for Life and Work, in 1933, to help "Jews, Christians of Jewish origin and political refugees". [89] During the war, Churches in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary and the Netherlands, instituted steps to protect their members of Jewish origin. It can hardly be denied that it was the right as well as the duty of the Churches to do so, but more than once the Churches were tempted to try and save their own members while neglecting the Jews in general. The announcement read from the pulpits of the Hungarian Protestant churches, on July 16, 1944, is significant:
"The Bishops… wish to inform the congregations that in connection with the Jewish question, and particularly in the case of baptised Jews, they have repeatedly intervened with the competent Government authorities…" [90] <24> A comment on the "Confessing Church" in Germany is:
"The Church took up the cudgels for the baptized Jews and that meant to the average churchgoer that the unbaptized Jew, i.e. the Jew as such, was left to the devil." [91]
Church leaders in the Netherlands regarded the issue as a temptation: