"During the years of the Third Reich, every German carried with them a document that had to be on their person at all times. It was not a driver's license, not a passport, not even proof of citizenship but a record of their racial heritage as attested to by their pastors and their baptismal certificates. Baptism had once stood as a sign of equality. In the Third Reich, baptism became a dividing line - between heroes and heretics, between compassion and catastrophe." - Narrative introduction to Storm Troopers of Christ: Baptism and the Jews in the Third Reich
This post concerns a powerful new documentary, "Storm Troopers Of Christ: The Jews and Baptism in Nazi Germany" that explores how a major, influential faction of German Christianity, the Protestant Church in Germany especially, helped support the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, to relatively minor opposition from Christian clergy opposed to German fascism and the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.
Lately I have come to understand racism in a very different way, and I have come to feel this new understanding is critical to the future of humanity. This post concerns a new examination, a video documentary, that presents what may feel to Christians to be deeply disturbing news :
During the Third Reich, German Jews to be sent to concentration camps and death camps were parsed from "Aryan" German not on the basis of their names, their physiological attributes, or other characteristics but mainly on their presumed racial heritage - as attested to on their baptismal certficates, by their pastors. Simply by definition, people without baptismal records were in an "illegal" category. In effect, the requirement that all Germans carry with them, at all times, their baptismal records (if they had them) amounted to state-imposed Christianity.
As Steve D. Martin explores in his documentary, the main struggle between the "Confessing Church" of Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Nazi-sympathetic Deutsche Cristen (German Christians) was over whether baptism could transform German Jews into, simply German Christians.
The Deutsche Christen never fully prevailed in their desire to strip from baptism, its tranformative power and one of the most striking personal stories Steve D. Martin weaves into the tapestry of his documentary is that of a German-Jewish woman whose mother, ethnically German, had married a Jewish German man and, against advice which at the time considered such an act absurd unnecessary, convinced her pastor to baptism her baby daughter...
This story continues here...