The Deutsche Christen (German Christians) were a group of clergy and laypeople in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s who sought to synthesize National Socialism and Christianity. They aimed to purge Christianity of everything they deemed Jewish and to create a German church based on “blood.” Most of the approximately 600,000 members were Protestant, although a few Catholics were involved. By mid-1933, Deutsche Christen had acquired key posts in the Protestant establishment—in national church governing bodies and university faculties of theology, as regional bishops, and on local church councils. Many kept those positions until 1945 and beyond.
Three impulses converged to form their movement. In 1932, a group of politicians and pastors met to discuss how to win the Protestant churches of Germany to the Nazi cause. They initially named themselves Protestant National Socialists but ultimately decided on Deutsche Christen instead. Meanwhile, in Thuringia, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, two young pastors and war veterans, had been preaching religious renewal along Nazi lines since the 1920s. They also called themselves Deutsche Christen. The two groups began to cooperate. A third initiative came from the Protestant, volkisch (racist-nationalist) associations that emerged after World War I. Dedicated to reviving church life through emphasizing German culture, antisemitism, and nationalism, some of those organizations merged with the Deutsche Christen.
Instead of breaking with the established Protestant churches, the Deutsche Christen tried to take over from within. Their main rival was the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), another movement within official Protestantism. The Deutsche Christen also had opposition outside the church from neopagans who considered even Nazified Christianity “too Jewish.” Although clergy normally spoke for the movement, the Deutsche Christen represented a cross section of German society.
They aimed to create a “people’s church” that would provide a spiritual homeland for the “Aryans” of the Third Reich. Accordingly, they attacked every aspect of Christianity that was related to Judaism. They rejected the Old Testament, revised the New Testament, expunged words such as Hallelujah and Hosanna from hymns, and denied that Jesus was a Jew. Because they considered Jewishness racial, they refused to accept conversions from Judaism to Christianity as valid and insisted that only a hard, “manly” church devoid of qualities such as compassion could fight racial impurity.
Deutsche Christen ideas remained fairly constant, but the movement changed over time. From 1932 to late 1933, it enjoyed open Nazi support. It swept the Protestant church elections in 1933 and dominated the process that unified Germany’s regional Protestant churches into one German Protestant church. One of their own, the naval chaplain Ludwig Muller, became the Protestant Reich bishop. But success was shortlived. Worried that the Deutsche Christen caused dissension, Nazi leaders withdrew their support. For 1934 and most of 1935, the movement was in shambles. But even though the national group splintered, the core ideas persisted. By late 1935, the movement began reorganizing, and by September 1939, almost all the factions had reestablished ties.
War fulfilled many of the aims of the Deutsche Christen. They wanted an aggressive Christianity; now they had the nation at arms. They demanded exclusion of “non-Aryans” and Jewish influences from German religious life; that goal was realized by default, through the isolation, expulsion, and murder of people defined as Jews. But the war also brought setbacks. Even Deutsche Christen experienced hostility from some Nazi authorities who resented Christianity in any form.
When Hitler’s regime collapsed in 1945, the movement lost its credibility. To justify their involvement to Allied occupation authorities, deNazification boards, and even themselves, many former members claimed they had only wanted religious renewal. They rarely mentioned the antisemitism that had pervaded their program. Some pastors were ousted, but within a few years, almost all were back in the pulpit. Lay members easily reentered the Protestant mainstream.
Some scholars dismiss the Deutsche Christen because they constituted only about 1 percent of the population. In the Nazi context, however, their movement was significant. Through their quest for a “racially pure,” anti-Jewish church, the Deutsche Christen echoed and endorsed the crimes of the Third Reich.
—Doris L. Bergen
See also Chamberlain, Houston Stewart; Churches under Nazism; Masculinity; Rosenberg, Alfred; Volkisch Movement and Ideology References
Bergen, Doris L. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Conway, John S. The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933—45 (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
Devi, Savitri (1905-1982)
Savitri Devi was a French convert to Hinduism and a major proponent of occultic Nazi ideology. In the West, Devi is known for her identification of Adolf Hitler as an “avatar” (divine manifestation) who moved in harmony with Hindu tradition. In India, she is known as an early leader of the Hinduvta (Hindu Nationalist) movement.
Born Maximiani Portas, she was highly educated and particularly impressed by the antisemitic writings of the nineteenth-century French thinker Ernest Renan. She also followed the Nazi movement closely and was one of the few who actually read Alfred Rosenberg’s ponderous Myth of the Twentieth Century, to which she gave high marks for its justification of antisemitism. At the same time, she immersed herself in study of the Hindu classics, the Vedas and the Upanishads, and eventually adopted the name of Savitri Devi, an Aryan sun goddess. In 1940, she married Indian nationalist and esotericist A. K. Mukherjee, editor of the pro-Nazi publication The New Mercury, and settled in Calcutta, where she worked on her blueprint for a global Aryan religion combining Hinduism with Nazism. During a sojourn in Britain, she published several well-received works, including The Impeachment of Man (1946, reprinted in 1991), a manifesto for radical environmentalism and Aryan nature worship that is now regarded as a classic in neo-Nazi circles. Following World War II, while incarcerated in Germany for her Nazi activities, she wrote Gold in the Furnace (1949), an explicitly proNazi autobiography, which she considered her greatest achievement.
In The Lightning and the Sun (1958), Devi declared Hitler a mystical embodiment of those two light sources, and she dedicated the work to him—“the god-like Individual of our times, the Man against Time.” The latter tribute is explained within the book as the god-man who “lives in eternity while acting in time, according to the Aryan doctrine of detached violence.” Devi believed that Hitler was the “one-before-the-last” such incarnation, a forerunner of “the one whom the faithful of all religions. . . await.” This “last, great individual” would outdo Hitler by sparing none who “bear the stamp of the fallen ages.” Devi claimed that Hitler knew both his own role and that of the “last Man against Time,” for whom he would do “the preparatory work.” With a peculiar twist of logic, she also described the forerunner role of Hitler in Impeachment as “messiah ben Joseph,” a Jewish eschatological figure who presaged the final Messiah (ben David).
Devi’s later years were dedicated to corresponding with admirers around the world, lecturing, and promoting Holocaust denial. She claimed an ally in Hindu leader Ramana Mahar-ishi, who she said acknowledged Hitler as a gnani (sage). Devi died while on a lecture tour for the American Nazi Party, and her ashes were interred at the group’s shrine in Arlington, Virginia. Her influence among neo-Nazis persists through her books and tapes, promoted by the American Nazi Party, British National Socialist leader Colin Jordan, Canadian Ernst Zundel, and New
Zealand’s Renaissance Press, publisher of occul-tic-based fascist magazines and books.
—Hannah Newman
See also American Nazi Party; Aquarius, Age of; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust Denial, Negationism, and Revisionism; Myth of the Twentieth Century, The; Renan, Ernest; Rosenberg, Alfred
World History
