Germany in Defeat by Percy Knauth Pierre van Paassen

Author:Percy Knauth, Pierre van Paassen [Percy Knauth, Pierre van Paassen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, United States, Europe, General, Germany, Special Forces
ISBN: 9781839741319
Google: _fPCDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2019-12-06T16:07:33+00:00

VII. The Church

In Frankfurt-on-the-Main, one day before the war was over, I stood in the ruins of a bombed-out church and found a symbol of Christianity’s survival through twelve years of oppression by the Nazis. The roof of the church was open to the sky, and big steel girders, melted by the heat, hung down like idly scattered pieces of string. Four fire-baked walls remained, partly caved in at one end. The rubble had spilled out onto the floor around the pedestal of a statue facing what had been the altar. It was a life-sized figure of Christ, the arms upraised in an attitude of sorrowing benediction. The hands were missing, clipped off by a piece of falling stone.

In that same church a few days later I heard an Easter service by a pastor of the Confessional Church whose leader, Martin Niemöller, the U-boat skipper of World War I, had spent eight years in concentration camps for opposing the Nazis’ Gleichschaltung of religion. The pastor who spoke now had served several sentences ranging from three months to a year for the same cause. He chose his text from the 24th chapter of St. Luke: “Abide with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.” In his severe dark robes and white ribbon bow-tied at the neck, he seemed a stern and unbending figure. He spoke first in low tones of sober rejoicing at the Church’s victory. The forces of darkness, he said, had at last been banished, and the Church, like the Christ statue in the ruins, still stood firm. As he spoke, I remembered how I used to stand years before in Niemöller’s small church in Berlin. In those days the Church had thought in terms of struggle, and each service ended with a reading of the long list of victims in that unbending war, the pastors and members of the congregation who lay in Nazi concentration camps. “But now,” the pastor said, “the Christian faith has triumphed over those who sought to deify a man.”

At the same time, I could feel the pastors unspoken thought that victory for the Church had entailed the defeat of the Fatherland. Thus the sober text of his sermon: “Abide with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.” With victory, the Church now faced a new and difficult task. “The forces of chaos all over Europe are ready to take the place of the defeated Anti-Christ,” he said. “Ruins both physical and spiritual surround us now. The day is verily far spent, and it is now toward evening. A long night faces us before the new dawn.”

He pleaded with the people not to let themselves sink into the depths of their personal tragedies now that the tension of the long struggle was over. “We must rally to each other!” he cried. “We must reaffirm the Christian brotherhood of man and nations. We must rebuild a Christian nation from the ruins. We must teach spiritual

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