This same pattern of reversing meanings was also applied by the totalitarian Nazi regime to the basic concepts of western culture. Nationalism as an historical phenomenon of a people with a common language and culture and with the consciousness of a common destiny was raised to a mythical, meta-historical plane. The essence of national unity was discovered to reside in race and soil; the cultural and spiritual creations of the nation were attributed to man's biological resources. Similarly, the State became an end in itself, an ideal meta-historical entity that was identical with the national spirit. [8] This view was critically described by the Dutch Church as follows:
"… The whole cult of National Socialism finds its most powerful manifestation in a State which claims to support, lead and fill in the material and spiritual, educational, cultural and religious spheres, the whole life of its subjects. Not only does the State order the life of the individual, but it takes a creative part in it. It becomes the founder of the true religion and the dispenser of the true philosophy; it furnishes the data for knowledge…" [9] <VI> Mythical nationality in the totalitarian regime thus developed a monolithic structure which functioned as the only ontological framework in which the individual may acquire his own identity, his selfknowledge and understanding. While in a different, non-totalitarian civilization man establishes his inner freedom by means of intellectual autonomy, the Nazi regime made the actual biological belonging to the Aryan race into the ultimate condition for the self-realization of Man. Hence one who could not belong to the Aryan race, the prototype of whom was the Jew, was doomed to be completely alienated, deprived not only of all rights, but of the very justification to exist. It was this reversal of the status of the individual which prepared the ground for subsequent developments against which the Church protested, such as forced labour, the repression of independent thought, the indoctrination of the young by the State and their estrangement from their parents, teachers and preachers. An example of this tendency towards the total dehumanization of the individual, as reflected in the persecution of the Jews, and that provoked the Church to protest, was the decree authorizing sterilization. The stand of the Church in this matter was stated in the "Letter on the Question of Sterilization" that was sent in May 1943 by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Holland to the officials of the Reich and in which, among other things, we find the following:
"…In the last few weeks the sterilization of the so-called mixed marriages has begun. But God, who created heaven and earth and whose commandments are for all men, and to whom even your Excellency will have to give account one day, has said to mankind: 'Be fruitful and multiply' (Gen. 1. 18). Sterilization is a physical and spiritual mutilation directly at variance with God's commandment that we shall not dishonour, hate, wound or kill our neighbours. Sterilization constitutes a violation of the divine commandment as well as of human rights. It is the last consequence of an anti-Christian racial doctrine that destroys nations, and of a boundless self-exaltation. It represents a view of the world and of life which undermines true Christian human life, rendering it ultimately impossible… [10] <VII> The fact that the protest of the Church against the persecution and annihilation of the Jews was an inseparable part of its general protest against the inhuman and anti-Christian character of modern anti-semitism places the documents collected in this volume in a broad historical context. These documents offer ample evidence of the Church's opposition to an historical phenomenon rooted long before the Nazis came to power, hence also prior to the rise of modern anti-semitism. The protest of the Church was fundamentally directed against those pagan and mythological elements that had crept into Christianity itself in the course of its historical development among the heathen. To many of the fathers of modern anti-semitism, which is the racial and political Anti-semitism that arose towards the end of the 19th century and reached its highest stage during the Third Reich, the rejection of Judaism was tantamount to the rejection of religion in general. This view goes back to Feuerbach's anthropological criticism of religion, to the young Hegelians (Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer) and to the early Romantics who longed to return to the primitive forms of a religion called "vorchristliches Germanenthum". [11] Modern anti-semitism was influenced by these streams of thought through Nietzsche's concept of the 'Antichrist', although Nietzsche himself kept aloof from the more vulgar manifestations of political anti-semitism of his day. In him the anthropological view reaches its culmination - God, who is nothing more than the deified form of man [12] is finally overthrown by Dionysian man who found courage to assert his instinctive life and abjure the gross and enslaving notions of Christianity that men <VIII> are equal and can be redeemed by faith, the gospel of the downtrodden and everything that creeps on earth. [13] These views, inimical to religion and to Christianity, were already being expounded with great vigour towards the end of the 19th century. Christian doctrine was accused of perverting man's instinctive life, vitiating his natural enthusiasm, inflaming his ego, invading his private life over which it declares its dominance only to enslave human nature, to weaken and alienate man, by imposing upon him "un-natural" restraint such as the anguish of his conscience. Wilhelm Marr, one of the early fathers of modem racial and political Anti-semitism and the man who during the late 70's coined the term 'anti-semitism'[14] included in the rejection of Judaism his critique of Christianity as early as the year 1862. In a polemical work called "Der Christenspiegel von anti-Marr" by Moritz Freystadt, a member of the "Society for History and Theology" in Leipzig, written in answer to Marr's "Judenspiegel", the author interprets Marr's rejection of Judaism as a rejection of monotheism, based on his anthropological view of God as a subjective product of our conscious life - an antireligious analysis Marr evidently borrowed from Voltaire, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. [15]
With Marr's intensification of anti-Jewish propaganda inspired by the new racial anti-semitism we find increased criticism of Christianity both as a system of beliefs and as an institution. In one of his popular books "Religioese Streifzuege eines Philosophischen Touristen" (1876) Marr, relying on theories propounded by Voltaire and Feuerbach, observes that from the atheistic point of view it is evident: <IX> "that Christianity, in its dogmas and precepts, is like every religion, a malady of human consciousness. The philosopher explains… every religion as a product of man's conscious life and relegates to the sphere of phantasm the so-called 'revelations' of which all people boast depending on the state of their culture…" [16]
Most additional factors in the rejection of Judaism, Marr continues, go beyond the attack directed against Christianity as a system of beliefs and superstitions that demoralizes man and corrupts his nature. Anti-semitism is not only called to combat religion and Christianity; its chief aim is to save the German nation and the whole world from Jewish domination and from the moral depredation of the Jewish race. Christianity is not yet fully cognizant of the gravity of the problem, and it deceives itself when it thinks that baptism or conversion is a gratuitous deliverance from native corruption, for the Jew's aberrations are not religious but biological and hence incorrigible. The Jewish question, Marr concludes, is a racial question for the infidelity of the Jew is essentially biological, and hence Christianity is in no position to save the world from the perils of the Semitic-Jewish race. [17] <X>
We here encounter a primary distinction between the doctrines of racial anti-semitism and those of the Christian Heilsgeschichte, a contradiction that awoke the Church to the dangers of Nazism when, in 1933, it opposed the "Arierparagraph". This racial law rejected the notion that the Jews could still hope for redemption, and for a renewed status of election, assured them in the New Testament (Rom. 9-11) on condition that they acknowledge their error and accept the redeeming truth of Christianity. Even in the early years of racial anti-semitism, in the seventies and eighties of the last century, we already find this inner contradiction between a racial theory that regards Jews as the ontological embodiment of an ineradicable evil and the views of the Heilgeschichte that believes this evil to be remedial if only the Jews could be persuaded that salvation comes from the Savior who was sent first of all to the Jews themselves, and who atoned for the sins of all mankind. It is this inner tension between the recalcitrance of the Jew and the incorrigibility of Judaism that refuses to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, already conspicuous in the change that took place in Luther's attitude to the Jews between 1523 and 1543, which charactarizes the theological and political attitude of Adolf Stoecker, court preacher in the Bismarck era and one of the leading figures of modern anti-semitism. Until recently historians concentrated much on his importance in preparing the ground for racial and political anti-semitism. It is true that without his powerful influence during the last decades of the 19th century the rise of modern political anti-semitism would be incomprehensible. A more balanced approach has been taken lately, as may be seen in the instructive study by Walter Holsten on the part played by Stoecker in the rise of modern anti-semitism. The author shows that many phases of Stoecker's anti-semitism had their roots in the conservative tradition of Lutheranism and at the same time were opposed to the anti-Christian tendencies of racial anti-semitism. [18] <XI> The early phases of Stoecker's activity already reveal the ambivalent nature of his attitude to the Jews and to Judaism, an ambivalency that characterized the anti-Christian elements in antisemitic "Christian" ideology throughout the days of the Third Reich. In his speeches after the political defeat of his Christian Social Labor Party in the summer of 1878, Stoecker insisted on making a distinction between the anti-Jewish attitude that arises in conjunction with or flows from Christianity and the antisemitic attitude which at the same time also impugns Christian ethics. In his well-known antisemitic speech as early as 19.9.1879 Stoecker warns his listeners:
"We can already detect here and there a hatred directed against the Jews that is contrary to the Gospels". [19]
Even in his most violent speeches against the Jews Stoecker did not draw the extreme biological consequences of his racial theories and continued to maintain that conversion was the only authentic solution to the Jewish question that would complete the universal mission of Christianity and that only baptism could save the Jews from their ignominious belief in the validity of the halacha after the coming of Jesus. The salvation promised to the Jew then is to be saved from his Judaism. The final redemption, however, will not raise the Jews above the nations of the world, as promised in the Old Testament, but this position of eminence and election will pass, or actually has already passed, from the Jews not just to the Christians but to Christian Germany. The redemption promised to the Jews is thus to be attained by way of the baptismal font at the entrance to the Church: <XII> "All Israel will be saved when the fullness of the heathen shall have come to an end. This was Paul's promise to his beloved people - final salvation and not a future glory that will raise Israel above the other nations as proclaimed in the Old Testament… and every believing Christian knows well what a rejoicing there will be in the Kingdom of God when the people of the Old Testament finally acknowledge their sin against Christ and repent. This event will be hailed by all Christendom and by the angelic hosts with paeans of praise, and it will be turned by the Church in the End of Days into glory and renown when Israel will bring to it its uncommon religious talents and intellectual gifts…" [20]
The inner tension between the theological view that sees the solution of the Jewish question in the liquidation of Judaism and the racial view that sees it in the liquidation of the Jews is clearly expressed in an address delivered by Stoecker on 8.2.1882 about the danger to the German Reich from Jews in public life, in which he states:
"We regard the Jewish question not as a religious nor indeed as a racial question. Although it is at bottom both of these, it appears in its external form as a social-ethical question, and is treated by us as such. No people can tolerate the preponderance of an alien spirit without degenerating and being destroyed? We would not solve the Jewish question radically by force, but gradually in a spirit of peace and amity… We must keep the wounds open until they are healed…" [21]