DIE DEUTSCHE SCHULD MARTIN NIEMOLLER 1946   This should be our starting point, and with this very thing in mind, we have to start in earnest. Nobody wants to take the responsibility of the guilt, no one of our German people is guilty, everybody shoves the guilt over to his neighbor. The local official says: I was only a little man, the whole guilt lies with you, Herr local commander; and he, in turn says: I did not wrong anybody; I only obeyed orders. The whole guilt lies with you, you of the Gestapo. But the latter don't want it either and finally everything lands on Himmler and Hitler. These are the greatest sinners, who cannot throw the guilt on others anymore, even if they did try to do so before their death. Can it disappear into thin air this way? The guilt exists, there is no doubt about it. Even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns, containing the ashes of burnt Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt weighs heavily on the German people and on the German name and on all Christendom. For these things happened in our world and in our name. Can we of the Confessional Church have nothing to do with it? Can we say that the church triumphed on all the fronts? When Pastor Niemoller was taken to a concentration camp, in 1937, we wrote about it; when the concentration camps were opened, in 1933, we wrote about it; and those who were then put into concentration camps were communists. Who cared about them? We knew about it; it was in all the papers. Who spoke up? Perchance the Confessional Church? We thought: Communists, those adversaries of religion, those enemies of Christianity — "should I be my brother's keeper?" The sick ones were then put aside, the so-called incurables. — I remember a conversation with a man who claimed to be a Christian. He decided: "This might be right. The state spends a lot of money on those incurable people and they are only a burden to all the others. Is not doing away with them best for everybody?" And only after that did the attack on the Church itself begin. Then we did have our say, and did so until officially silenced too. Can we say it is not our fault? The persecution of the Jews, the manner in which we treated the invaded countries, the goings-on in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, or in the Netherlands, those things we could read about in the papers? That hundreds of hostages were simply lined up against the wall because of sabotage committed by others? Behold ye one who murmureth against his own sin? I think we Christians belonging to the Confessional Church have all the reasons for saying; "My fault, my most grievous fault." We cannot get out of it with the excuse: I might have had to pay with my life had I spoken out. In my Bible I have read: "Defend the Truth with thine own life." Or let us think of Luther's words: "Take away body, belongings, honor, child, wife!" We preferred to keep quiet. We are most certainly not without guilt; and I ask my- self over and over again what would have happened if 14,000 evangelical ministers and the Evangelical communities, all over Germany, had defended the truth with their very lives in the year 1933 or 1934, when there must have been a possibility? If we had said then that it is not just for Herman Goering simply to throw 100,000 communists into concentration camps to perish? I can imagine that 30 to 40 thousand Evangelical Christians would have been shortened by a head, but I can also imagine that we would have thus saved 30-40 Millions of lives, f or this is the price that we now have to pay. And I believe that, if we now want to start all over again and bear witness for Christ, there is no other possibility than to strive at being at peace with God again, before we start preaching and testifying on His behalf. We have to do penance and never say that the Church triumphed; we have all refused to serve, even 1; for, those who remained Christians and defended truth with their lives, those do not bear any heads on their shoulders any more. We owe it to our Redeemer to retrace our steps; otherwise, we will find no peace, and we will go on grumbling, and there will be no testimony. I can hear the objection: We might risk doing penance before God, but you want us to recognize our guilt before mankind. I once left the divine service myself, after the first world war, because the minister was talking about war guilt. I know how a man feels when he resists. We are told: "Before God, yes; but we refuse to recognize our guilt before men, because they say: We now have the right to punish you." Nevertheless, we cannot find peace with God if we refuse to confess our guilt to people who suffered because of it. When a child misbehaves, it has to do penance before his mother, and not in his own little corner; the mother expects it. just as the prodigal son, who does not go to his own little corner, but to the Father and confesses: