Religion: German Interpreter

Major Reinold von Thadden cut a fine figure as a German army officer, but he earned few laurels in Hitler's army. As occupation commander of Louvain in Belgium, he saved thousands of Belgian civilians from arrest and deportation. (Since the war's end, many have publicly thanked him.) In September 1944, just before the Allies recaptured Louvain, he calmly risked being shot by disobeying a direct SS order to execute Belgian hostages. "You know that I am a German officer," he replied. "You know that I am a Christian, too."

This week Reinold von Thadden, 60, was in the U.S. for a month-long lecture tour sponsored by the National Council of Churches. He brought evidence of revived Christian zeal among German laymen. The German Evangelical (Protestant) Church Congress—the Kirchentag—which Thadden founded 2½ years ago, has become the strongest organization of Protestant laymen in Europe. More than 300,000, from Eastern as well as Western Germany, attended its Berlin rally last summer (TIME, July 23). "The layman," Thadden told a Chicago audience last week, "is ... in fact the essential interpreter of the Christian message in the battlefield of the world, in exactly that frontier region where world and church collide."

Bismarck, Not Hitler. In the beginning, Reinold von Thadden's world and his church were comfortably unified. His family were old East Prussian nobility with a strong religious tradition. His great-randfather made the family estate a famous center of pietism—at 31, a hitherto skeptical young Otto von Bismarck prayed for the first time in 15 years during a visit there. Reinold fell into the family tradition, became a lay leader of the Pomeranian state church.

When Hitler came to power, Thadden realized the change and the challenge. Throughout the '30s he denounced Naziism in the church synods, but he was too good a Junker not to enter Hitler's army when he was called up, on the strength of his World War I service, in 1940. He was released from duty in 1944, after his sister Elizabeth was beheaded for complicity in the Hitler bomb plot.

In the spring of 1945, the Russians arrested Landowner von Thadden and sent him to Arctic Russia, with other German prisoners, for eight months. To help his fellow prisoners, he began to give short prayer services in the camp. Before long, nearly everyone was attending. Says Thadden: "Then & there I discovered that the modern young generation, whether they are pro-Nazis, or Communists, or "intellectuals, are all human beings with a great longing for something that will provide a background for their lives."

A Deeper Power. In 1949 he set about organizing the new laymen's movement. His aim: "To call upon Protestant lay-Christians to assume . . . responsibility in all provinces of public life." Although Thadden was once active in practical politics (as a Conservative deputy in the prewar Reichstag), he does not want to convert the Kirchentag into a political party.