Two Christian Responses to Hitler and the Holocaust: Barmen and Le Chambon

Much has been written about the silence of the German churches during European Jewry’s tragic extermination known as the Holocaust during Adolf Hitler’s German regime. Why did the German church leaders not speak out against the genocide? Why did the Roman Catholic Church not excommunicate Hitler, a Roman Catholic? Why did European Christian communities do so little to save their Jewish populations? Why did Christian men and women prefer to look away when their Jewish neighbors mysteriously disappeared? Why did German Christians not protest against the Holocaust once its brutalities had, by 1942, become common knowledge? Why did the churches not live by Jesus’ and their own teaching that a Christian “love one’s neighbor as oneself”? This program consists of a juxtaposition of the actions of a small Christian congregation in Le Chambon, France, which managed to save three thousand Jews, on the one hand, and the absence of any kind of saving action on the parts of the German Protestant and German Roman Catholic churches, on the other hand. Dr. Walter Ziffer also briefly discusses the role of the German “Confessing Church” and one of its outstanding members, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.