A New Confessing Church

While studying theology under Karl Barth in 1933, Werner Koch traveled through Europe, establishing contacts that would later help him publicize his stories of the German situation under the Nazis. Koch spent the winter of '35 and '36 with Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde, where Bonhoeffer encouraged him to use his foreign contacts to send information about the church struggle to the foreign press.

In 1936 Koch was arrested by the secret police and held in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, from which he was released two years later by special order of Heinrich Himmler. He then served for six years as an interpreter for French prisoners of war and continued his resistance activities until he deserted the German army in 1945.

After the war Koch served for a time as a correspondent for radio stations in East and West Germany and then was a minister of parishes in Berlin and Westphalia. When this article appeared, Koch's work for peace continued, and with others from the Confessing Church, such as Martin Niemoeller and Helmut Gollwitzer, he was active in the European Peace Movement.

In November of 1981, while on a speaking tour of the United States, he stopped to visit Sojourners. On the following pages are excerpts from many conversations about his experiences as a member of the Confessing Church in Germany during the war and the connections he sees between his efforts then and the work for peace in the 1980s. --The Editors

A member of the Confessing Church links his times and ours.

What we as Christians are experiencing at this moment is this: that all we said in the face of Adolf Hitler, namely that there can't be autonomy for politics, is true. Even the political affairs have to be measured by the criteria of the gospel. This was valid during the church struggle. We were many times too anxious, had not the courage, to put this into practice. We did sometimes, but often not enough and too late. But we proclaimed that the old Lutheran doctrine--that there are two absolutely separated realms, the secular one and the spiritual one having nothing to do with each other--had to be given up.

The key to understanding the Hitler era was, and still is, to understand that it was full of gods, such as the fuehrer himself, the Aryan race with its superiority over all other races in the world, the eternal reich, the eternal Germany, the almighty state, and the party which was always right, and not least, the German soldier and the German military strength.

But there were not only other gods, there were also phantoms, such as the Jews. "The Jew is our disaster," it was said. And today it is "Every Russian is a monster."

With hysterical and regressive anti-communism, Hitler persuaded the last liberal citizens of Germany that he alone was able to save them from the Red danger, that without his help the communists would take over the power in Germany, and the masses believed it. We see the same kind of thinking today in governments and the mass media in this blind anti-communism which is unable and unwilling to take into account the feelings of the Russians.

We can't deny that there is a resemblance between the state of the Third Reich and the state which we have now, and the resemblance consists of this: that the confidence in military strength is the same, this blind confidence that had such catastrophic result.

I have heard your Secretary of State Alexander Haig say, "Peace is not the most important thing." What is more important than peace? Freedom? Democracy? Justice? If this were true then the United States couldn't support all these bloody dictators in south Korea, in Pakistan, in the Philippines, in El Salvador, in South Africa. The facts are in contradiction, and there is only one reasonable conclusion: The goal is domination of the whole world, just as Hitler would have had the domination of the whole world.

We mistrust the peace proposals coming from the U.S. government after having seen for long years what the United States is doing. America uses the old system to divide and conquer; divide the world into black and white, dark and light. There's one place in the world where evil is concentrated. There's the place of the devil and here's the place of the angels. We're on the good side.

This is absolutely wrong from the point of view of the Bible. The Bible says that we are all sinners, and we must be prepared to see the work of the devil at any place in the world.

It is quite natural that a superpower should try to increase its influence, and Russia has done likewise, of course. But the Russian policy has been one since 1945 of well-calculated risk. They never made a situation that put the whole world in danger. When the Cuban missile crisis took place, they preferred to retire their weapons. They felt they had a certain moral right to install their weapons, because Russia was threatened by an orbit of weapons in Turkey, Greece, and so on. Everywhere American weapons were already installed. So the Russians said, "We will do just the same as the Americans have done for a long time."

But when the Soviets saw that it was perhaps too critical, they preferred to retire. They broke up the blockade of Berlin. They retired from south Korea, from the Manchurian Islands, from North Persia and Finland. They sent nota single soldier to Vietnam, while the Americans sent 550,000. And they did not send a single soldier to the Korean War. And they were so careful to send only Cuban soldiers to Angola.

But in my mind what the United States is doing at this moment is playing with fire. It is prepared to make a war which will be the catastrophic war of the whole world. And it follows the illusion that it can dominate this fire. That is impossible.

We must say that all atomic weapons must disappear in East and West. And the Russians are quite prepared to comply. I can't see any reasonable grounds for the Russians to attack either Europe or the United States. What could they win with an attack on Europe? Even if they were able to conquer Germany, they would win a nation of 60 million hard-boiled anti-communists. They would have to put up all the time with acts of sabotage, and they would be forced to put behind every third German an agent to supervise, to control him. And it would be the same with most of the other Europeans too.

But I can see reasonable grounds for the United States to begin an atomic war, because it is convinced it has technological superiority and can win the war in a few minutes.

The Russians fear the war much more than the Americans fear the war. Your chief negotiator for SALT II, [Paul] Warnke, has said to us: The United States has won World War I in Europe and won World War II in Europe. And they think that they can win World War III also in Europe. They have never suffered under a war.

With the Russians it is just the contrary. They suffered under the invasion of Napoleon; they suffered under the invasion of the German armies during World War I, and Germany was mighty enough to impose a severe treaty which Russia was forced to sign. And without the help of the Allies, perhaps Russia wouldn't have overcome Germany during World War II. They suffered more than any other people during the war; they lost 20 million human beings, and 30,000 of their towns and villages were completely destroyed. The fear of war is so deep in the Russian people that it is unthinkable that they would like to begin a war.

I have been in Russia twice after the war. I have had the opportunity to speak with high-ranked Russian officials, and I have spoken with youth in Russia; and I am absolutely convinced that they prefer peace to war, that they would avoid a war if they could. The only danger will come in that moment when the Russians have the impression that they are crushed against the wall and their only hope is to destroy the atomic bases of the United States before they get destroyed themselves. Our whole effort must be not to put the Russians into panic reaction. In my mind the Afghanistan affair was a reaction of panic on the Russian side and not a deliberate plan of imperialism.

The American feeling of being number one, and the new developments in atomic weapons, show us that the insight we had for many years during the Hitler era about domination is again coming true. And the result is that we have experienced this explosion of the Christian peace movement.

The church is perhaps the only organization which is able to pronounce things which for others are taboo. This is very similar to what we experienced in the Third Reich. The political parties were forbidden, the trade unions dissolved, the universities couldn't speak. The only organization which was able to speak about the crimes of Hitler was the Confessing Church, this part of the church which said that the authority of the Word of God-was superior to all other authorities, even the authority of the fuehrer.

So we are living quite revolutionary changes in the spiritual life of our church. Practically, we have a new Confessing Church, a renewal, without using the name.

At least 50 per cent of the church movement is the young people. The older generation was so involved with the Third Reich and have such a bad conscience about it that they never speak to their children about what they have seen or done in the Third Reich.

The film Holocaust has been seen by millions and millions of Germans. After the film, the youth asked their parents and grandparents, "What did you do during the Hitlerzeit (Hitlertime)?" And they kept silent. So they come to somebody like me because I am for them a reliable witness of the time. And they ask, "What was the reaction of our parents and grandparents when they learned of the crimes of Hitler, and what can we do in order to avoid such a development in our times?" So I have become more and more an advisor to the youth, young Germans who are conscientious objectors. The number of conscientious objectors has grown through the years. Last year we had more than 50,000.

All our young people say they are acting in the tradition of the Confessing Church. Once we had a meeting, speaking about a statement which the last council of the Confessing Church made in 1947. We had this meeting in 1977, in the same place that the statement was made. The younger generation said, "Our fathers and grandfathers spoke out in '47; this is just what helps us fight our fight today."

Then somebody suggested that we of the Confessing Church should tell a little bit about our experiences during the Third Reich. Martin Niemoeller, Helmut Gollwitzer, and myself and others thought perhaps 60 or 70 people would come and listen to us. Five hundred came. And they couldn't hear enough. What we are experiencing is that we are now the grandfathers of the peace movement.

We are stating that in the atomic age in which we live, the Sermon on the Mount is the only real politics to do. Jesus says that we have to love our enemies, and that means that in political terms we have to have intelligent love for our enemies. It means we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the Russians, to think what they are feeling and deliberating in Moscow. The Russians feel that they find themselves encircled by enemies--the 365 military bases of the United States and NATO, China, and Japan.

Jesus also says, "Blessed are the peacemakers." We need also now, just like in the Third Reich, to obey the Word of God and no other authority than the Word. This means the God of peace commands us to do all we can for the cause of peace. And as Jesus is always bothering about the weak and the poor, then we have to bother about the poor people who will be the victims of an atomic war. We are the victims. The Christian and ethical responsibility for the life of God's creation and the life of human beings--this is our starting point.

We wonder why there is such an enormous peace movement now. As in the Hitler era, it comes from the interaction between theology and events. We are forced now to think the peace question another time in the light of the biblical revelation.

The movement was spiritually prepared. Often in history things arrive in just the right moment, when the time has come. The time has come now for the peace movement.

The Memorandum

In 1936 the leaders of the Confessing Church wrote a memorandum to Hitler and delivered it to the chancery on the fourth of June. It stated that hatred of the Jews was in contradiction to the commandment of Jesus and of the whole Bible to love one another, and that the concentration camps were inadmissable by the church. The memorandum also condemned the secret police and the withholding of election results.

In the delivery of this memorandum the leaders of the Confessing Church were putting into practice what they had stated in the Barmen Declaration in May of 1934 that when the state fails in its mission, the church must interfere.

Hitler ignored the memorandum and was silent. The church leaders had determined that if they did not get a response in six weeks they would make the memorandum public. But when the six weeks passed, the leaders lacked the courage to follow through on the plan. So I told my correspondent in Berlin, Hans Tillich (the nephew of the theologian Paul Tillich) that we needed to at least send a communique to the foreign press saying that the memorandum existed.

That night a member of the church took the memorandum from the church's safe and gave it to Tillich, whom I instructed to take notes. But he copied the whole thing through the night, and the next day the entire text appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and other American and European newspapers. Then a Swiss paper printed 100,000 copies in German, which were smuggled back over the border into Germany. When the secret police became aware of it, 90,000 copies had been distributed so that they could confiscate only 10,000.

The memorandum ceased to be a secret affair, and the leaders of the Confessing Church were forced to break their silence. They decided to make a public announcement from all the pulpits of the Confessing Church on the twenty-fourth of August, 1936; thousands of pastors read after their sermons the main points of the memorandum. Three months later the secret police arrested Hans Tillich, myself, and others.

Don't Be Anxious

In the concentration camp, we found every morning five, six, seven, eight comrades hanging in the electrical barbed wire, because during the night they came out of the barracks full of despair and put an end to their lives. I confess that I also, had many moments of despair, because every morning when you woke up you couldn't know if you would be alive in the evening. We had to bear witness to so many cruelties and assassinations during the day. We were physically so strained and helpless that danger of resignation was very close at times.

But there was a voice we couldn't forget. The voice said, "Don't he anxious; I have driven the evil out. I am the way and the resurrection." And so we said to each other that we are on the side of victory. It is not the wicked, not the evil, who have the last word. So we received from day to day the courage to go on.

Out on a Whim

During my stay in the concentration camp several attempts were made to get me free. My father had correspondence with the office of Field Marshall Hermann Goering, but all this was in vain. Then suddenly in November '38 my father met a man who was a friend of Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the secret police.

My father was living in Weisbaden and was a member of the German British Club. The president of this club was a certain baron, a man who didn't like to speak very much. But one day at the end of November '38 he had a rather long conversation with my father. He was very kind, and so my father asked, quite surprised, "Have you a birthday today, or what is the reason that you are so glad and kindly?"

And the baron answered, "I have my friend here, Heinrich Himmler." My father said, "I didn't know he was your friend."

"Yes, we know each other from our school time, and now that Himmler is here we are walking together in the woods and playing ping pong together. We have fine days."

And then my father said, "You know that my son is in the concentration camp. Perhaps you can say a word to Himmler about this?" But the baron was quite reluctant and said it would be impossible "because your son is in the Confessing Church and the Confessing Church means for Himmler 'Confessing Front' and that is just the same as 'Red Front.'"'

But as my father insisted, finally the baron said to him, ''Go, Mr, Koch, and write me the story of your son--one page typewritten--and I shall see what I can do for you. But I am very skeptical."

My father wrote, "My son was always an idealist, and we have in our history other examples of young people who in their idealism have made some political stupidities but later were acknowledged right and became our national heroes. So my son also in his idealism has done some political stupidities in writing stories for the foreign press about the so-called church struggle. I am quite convinced that my son after two years of captivity will have changed his mind. Two years of captivity is torment enough for such youthful zeal. Heil Hitler!"

So he wrote the letter in the way Himmler could understand, and he brought it that evening to the baron. The baron gave a party in his house that night for the top managers of the secret police and the head men of the Party. They drank a lot of champagne, and the whole atmosphere was very high. At half past midnight, the baron and Heinrich Himmler sat together, and the baron asked, "Heinrich, would you do me a favor?"

"What is it?"

"Would you have a look at this paper which our friend Mr. Koch has written about his son in the concentration camp?"

Himmler studied it thoroughly and then said, "Well, what's your opinion? Should I release him?" And the baron said yes.

Then almighty Himmler called his secretary and gave the order to release Koch without any conditions. And I was protected by this decision of Himmler during all the years of the Third Reich. Not one of the secret police agents ever dared to ask his chief why he released Koch.

Crashing The Front

I was drafted in August '39, and I at once wrote that I would by no means shoot for this chief of the gangster band, Hitler. Fortunately, they needed interpreters so I served as an interpreter for French prisoners of war. We received daily instructions from headquarters concerning the prisoners: how they should be clothed, lodged, punished, and all this. I had the possibility to translate these general instructions in my own way, and I did so in as human a way as I could. I asked to have an office inside the camp where every prisoner could talk with me confidentially, like someone goes to a pastor.

When I was removed from this position, I was still chief interpreter in Bonn. We had control of the letters which were written by and received for the prisoners from France. So I had the possibility to advise the French prisoners of war of the arrival of General DeGaulle. I could do a lot of things in favor of the prisoners.

But at the end of the war I was in danger of my life because I had helped a French pilot who was shot down. Hitler had given the order that all Allied pilots had to be killed on the spot. But I had given medicine and food to this Frenchman, and a German Nazi heard something about it.

So I had to fear for my life, and I decided to desert the German army. It was a very dramatic affair. I took my big car and put two French prisoners of war in it. With great speed I approached the German front and cried out of the window, "Secret issue of the Reich! Let passage free." And the Germans were so surprised that they let me pass.

Then I was received by American headquarters, and they sent me to a camp of German prisoners in Belgium, where a British commandant came to see me and asked if I would speak to the BBC. I accepted, and a British airplane brought me to London.

The Same Fate

When our government says to us, "You are the churchmen and theologians; you are not experts and you cannot judge these medium-range rockets and intercontinental rockets and so on and so on," then I am forced to remember always some conversations I had with Hitler's minister of armaments, Albert Speer.

We met each other first in the apartment of a friend of mine, and it was a surprise to me to find him there. And I said to him, "Mr. Speer, your fate and my fate have the same name: Adolf Hitler. The same man put you in the highest possible position, and at the same time he put me down in the concentration camp. And in '45 we changed a little bit: Then you came into jail and I came out. And millions of people heard my voice over the BBC broadcastings. As long as we are living we can't forget the experiences which we have had in the Third Reich, you in your manner and I in my manner."

And then this man confessed to me, and described it with many details, how absolutely blind he had been when he was fascinated by the National Socialist ideology and by the force of Hitler. Speer was a technical genius.

Then I understood why we in the peace movement have not so much respect for all that the so-called experts say to us. They have no right to say, "The government is right; the government has its experts." We have to use first of all the directives coming from the Word of God and then to use our own intelligence. And this, whenever we are Christians, is the intelligence which is liberated from all illusions and false gods and sees reality just as the Bible does.