A Thought Provoking Film, part 2

A Thought Provoking Film, part 2
Thursday, July 24, 2025 by Dr. James W. Walraven

How will we respond when a nation or culture becomes corrupt? More to the point, how will we as Christians, as the church, respond to said corruption?

In the previous post, we reviewed the German film, “Music Under the Swastika,” a film that contrasted how a young Jewish girl survived the death camps because she happened to play the cello with Wilhelm Furtwangler, a world-famous German conductor who caved to the Nazis.

As Christians, how will we, as the church, respond? How did the German church respond? There are frightening parallels between how the German church responded to Hitler, and how the church in the United States is responding to our woke culture today. Sadly on the other side, one can point to some who look to Trump as their savior.

I highly recommend the book, “Theologians Under Hitler,” by Robert P. Ericksen. In it, he examines three prominent German theologians, contrasting their responses to Hitler to that of the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. All three German theologians supported Hitler. Only one of them, Paul Althaus, came to realize as the war dragged on, that he had made a dreadful mistake.

Gerhard Kittel—yes, that Kittel of the famed New Testament Greek dictionary, actually worked for a time under Goebbels, dealing with how the Jews needed to leave Germany. It is unclear whether he knew about the “final solution” or not (possibly not). He was convicted of war crimes during the Nuremberg trials, but died soon thereafter in prison. Due to his untimely death, no one really knows what he ultimately thought or where he stood.

Emanuel Hirsch was unrepentant to the very end in his support of Hitler.

In contrast, Karl Barth was anti-Hitler. He warned about who the Nazis were, but his warnings were dismissed. Since he was Swiss and not German, he was told by leading German theologians that he did not understand the German problem.

Why did these prominent German theologians back Hitler? We’ll turn to that question in the next post.