The greatest enemy of our country today is the polarizing forces of hate and violence that feed off the apathetic indifference of self-satisfied people. As the vanguard and embassy of God’s kingdom, the church is called to show that only radical love can overcome the bankruptcy of these two extremes. Here is a story that demonstrates in very concrete terms what this love entails, why it matters, and why it cannot be defeated. May it inspire us, especially those who confess Jesus as Lord, but more importantly, may it move us to act while there is still time.
Johann Christoph Arnold
June 2010
Acknowledgments
I would like to offer special tribute to Hela Ehrlich, who was my mentor for many years and who provided many of the translations in this book. She and her parents fled Nazi Germany to South America, where she met the Bruderhof. My thanks go also to Hugo Brinkmann, who compiled the raw material for the book’s framework and translated all of Eberhard Arnold’s correspondence with the Nazi government. Hugo, a young German studying in England during World War II, was interned in Canada as an enemy alien. I am also deeply grateful to Doug Moody, Art and Mary Wiser, and Derek Wardle. Without the help of each of these individuals this book would never have come to fruition.
Prologue
Kassel, April 9, 1937
Office of the Secret State Police
Order of the Gestapo:
In accordance with paragraphs 1 and 4 of the Reich president’s decree for the protection of the Volk and the state of February 28, 1933, (RGB 1 I.S. 83): the incorporated society Neuwerk-Bruderhof, Veitsteinbach, district of Fulda, is being dissolved for state police reasons, this to take effect immediately. The entire property of the association is confiscated.
Violations of this order, in particular any further activity in the sense of the dissolved society, are liable to punishment according to paragraph 4 of the above-mentioned decree.
There is no means of legal redress against this order, but a complaint can be addressed to the Gestapo office in Berlin.
(Signed) Herrmann1
Around 10:00 in the morning of April 14, 1937, about fifty SS and Gestapo surrounded the community of the Rhön Bruderhof, some emerging from the woods, others arriving by car or bicycle. Armed guards positioned themselves at the doors of every building.
The forty members of the community were herded into the dining hall, and the Gestapo commissar read out the announcement: The Bruderhof no longer existed. Its members were required to return to their former homes, and those German nationals of military age were to register for military service. They were questioned individually: name, date of birth, names of their parents and of their children. From where had they come to join the community? Had they ever belonged to a political party banned in 1933? Books and papers were carried from the office to the cars below. The three members of the executive committee—Hans Meier, Hannes Boller, and Karl Keiderling—were questioned at length and then taken away in a Gestapo car.
Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof, had been dead for over a year. Now his life work was destroyed and his followers were to be scattered.
But the little group refused to return to their former homes; neither would they register with the military. They had pledged their lives—not to Eberhard Arnold, but to the kingdom of God—and they trusted that they were in God’s hand, even if this meant their deaths.
Two days later they were trudging up the hill to the waiting buses—carrying their little children, a sick woman who was unable to walk, and whatever bags they could hold. Thirty-one of them would go to England via Holland and the remaining eleven to the principality of Liechtenstein. Hella Römer, a thirty-one-year-old single woman, was left to close out the accounts.
1
Historical Background
The Path to Community
This is the story of a small group who dared to confront Adolf Hitler and the entire Third Reich with the love of Jesus Christ. Even before Hitler seized power, they knew that the National Socialist ideology stood in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus, and they refused to participate in any way. They never said, “Heil Hitler.” They did not vote in the plebiscites in which all Germans were expected to express their support for Hitler’s actions. Their young men did not join the armed forces. But neither did they stage public protests nor conspire to assassinate Hitler. They believed that living in unity and humility was the only way to oppose party politics and the Führer cult. Only love could overcome hatred—even love of Adolf Hitler himself. In their own words, they were “less than a gnat to an elephant,” but that did not matter: the message of Jesus Christ needed to be proclaimed in Nazi Germany, even if that should mean death to the messengers.
World War I
Germany was in chaos after the First World War. Soldiers returned—beaten and humiliated—or failed to return. The country was starving. The Kaiser had abdicated and social conventions were crumbling. New world views were gaining momentum: pacifism, communism, anarchism, socialism. Adolf Hitler surrounded himself with disgruntled war veterans and began building up the National Socialist Party based on the anger and bitterness of a vanquished people.
At the same time, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold were struggling to find God’s purpose in the confusion around them. They were in their mid-thirties and had five young children. Eberhard, born on July 26, 1883, was a popular Christian speaker and author. He was on the board of the Student Christian Movement and was literary advisor of its magazine Die Furche. In his leadership role Eberhard had formed strong friendships with members of Germany’s upper class and academia: Karl Heim (who became a professor in Tübingen), Paul Zander (the surgeon who would perform the fatal operation on his leg), Georg Michaelis (who served as Germany’s chancellor for a few months in 1917), plus military generals and others.
As a theology student in Halle in 1907, Eberhard and Dr. Karl Heim had organized lectures for charismatic speakers, which sparked a revival in the town. He met Emmy in the home of a wealthy woman where an “impressive mix of artists, doctors, and military officers’ wives” had gathered to hear him speak.1 The two young people felt drawn toward each other immediately, and within weeks he had asked her to marry him. Their engagement and marriage were born out of this Christian revival, and from the beginning of their relationship they were determined to allow God to guide their lives and to live by their convictions, regardless of the cost.
When World War I was declared in 1914, the German Student Christian Movement was swept up in nationalist fervor. Die Furche began printing a special leaflet for soldiers on the front. To quote from its pages:
When war was declared, our circles were prepared, by the grace of God, and the call of our king and Kaiser was accepted and followed in a noteworthy way. God’s hand had suddenly brought the time of the seed, the long time of peace, to an end. Now we had to prove that the two things that stood side by side in our name, “German” and “Christian,” bound the hearts of our brothers to a higher unity.2
Eberhard himself wrote numerous patriotic articles. But when soldiers began to come home, wounded and tormented by the horrors they had witnessed, he began to question the Christian role in warfare. Years later he described his difficult years of questioning and seeking:
Groups