Guest Post by Morbo
Leaders of the Lutheran Church in Germany have an unusual problem on their hands: They don’t known what to do with a church full of Nazi imagery.
As Religion News Service explained recently, Berlin’s Martin Luther Memorial Church definitely has some odd features.
From the outside, it’s an ordinary church with a bell tower in need of renovation. The inside seems standard at first, until one takes a closer look at the elevated lectern. Carved into the wood is a sermonizing Jesus Christ; in the crowd gathered around him are a Nazi soldier and one of Adolf Hitler’s infamous brown-shirted storm troopers.
Planned in the 1920s but completed in 1935, the church is a bizarre blend of the Protestant faith and National Socialist dogma. A carved soldier decorates the baptismal font. Tiles on the wall include Nazi symbols. The spot now occupied by a bust of Martin Luther once was filled by a bust of Hitler. Even the Christ figure on the altar’s cross is strong, athletic and defiant, embodying the Nazi concept of the Ubermensch more than the traditional Jesus surrendering himself.
Other Nazis symbols were removed after the war, but amazingly, the church was used for services until about two years ago. Now in poor shape and in need of extensive repairs, the facility has been decommissioned by the Lutheran Church. Normally a building like this would just be demolished, but church leaders fear that would lead to accusations that they are trying to cover up part of their history.
That history is not good. Nazi leaders found ways to blend Lutheran ideas with their repugnant political philosophy. Despite his important role in the religious history of the West, Luther was, unfortunately, an anti-Semite. His writings blasting the Jews played right into Nazi hands. A historian who has studied the church notes that some members were only too happy to ingratiate themselves with the Nazis.
What should happen to this church?
There is a proposal on the table to turn it into a museum, and I hope that’s what happens. Stop using the church for worship and turn it over to the government, which should pay for the necessary structural repairs. The facility can be a memorial as well. It would offer powerful lessons to visitors.
Several concentration camps were preserved so that future generations would never forget what happened there. Historians will always keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through their writings long after the last survivor is dead — but we need more than that. We need to see the gates of the camps, we need to see the squalid buildings and the death chambers (even if some of them are replicas, which they are in some cases). We need to be able to touch these things and at least try to imagine what it must have been like to be warehoused in a place of such unspeakable horror. We need professional historians to run these sites and provide the necessary context for what occurred in them.
Historians should also take over this church. We know that during the Nazis’ rule, some religious leaders bravely resisted and even saved those marked for deaths. Others acted as sycophants and gave their churches over to the service of the regime. This is reality and it must be faced square on.
Keep the Nazi church open. Germany should also consider passing a new law: Before ordination, every pastor in the country should be required to visit it to learn what happens when religion gets too bound up with grotesque political ideologies.