Religion: The German Hitler Feared

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The man whom Adolf Hitler dared not kill stood in the chancel of a little church in the Alpine village of Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Only a few hours before, Pastor Martin Niem&2461ler, leader of Germany's Confessional Church—and one of Christianity's most effective anti-Nazi weapons—had been liberated by the U.S. Fifth Army. His first public act after eight years of imprisonment was to conduct a religious service, based on a text he had long since chosen for this moment:

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. . . . In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world—St. John 16: 32-33 (King James version).

Pastor Niem&2461ler became an anti-Nazi the hard way. He was a staunch early-Party member. But when he saw how the wind was blowing, he stood up in his Dahlem pulpit and denounced Hitler's mumbo-jumbo racial theories. He also refused to put the will of Der F&252hrer above the will of God.

Last week Niem&2461ler said that his defiance had cost, him four years of solitary confinement at Sachsenhausen and Dachau. But unlike most other concentration-camp prisoners, he was given permission ("without begging for it") to have books. He had read 300 volumes of English literature. His wife was allowed half-hour visits with him twice a month—always in the presence of the Gestapo.

In the fifth year, the Gestapo relaxed a bit, locked him up with three Catholic priests. Last December he was permitted to hold weekly services at Dachau. During his entire imprisonment, he said, the guards treated him "correctly"—but "I can't say why I was allowed to survive." One likely reason: an ex-U-boat commander in World War I, Niem&2461ler was known to Germans as a good German.

His worst hardship was worrying about his seven children. One daughter died last fall; a son was killed in battle on Feb. 28; two other sons were reported missing in

Russia. All he knows now is that the rest are somewhere east of Berlin.

Now Pastor Niem&2461ler is anxious to get back to work. He is certain that the church holds Germany's only hope for the future: "Our people now know that all false idealisms are worthless. . . . There is only one way in the future. . . . It is a tremendous challenge both to Catholicism and Protestantism not to let our people down at this moment."