A cult developed around the person of Adolf Hitler; the “Heil Hitler” salute became compulsory in the movement in 1926. A rally in August 1929 was attended by forty thousand admirers. Nazi organizations were set up to cater to the needs of particular segments of society such as factory workers and artisans. Young people were targeted by the Hitler Youth (which began as a recruiting arm of the brownshirts), the League of German Maidens, and the National Socialist German Students’ League under the leadership of Baldur von Schirach. The Students’ League campaigned for limiting the number of Jewish students and dismissing pacifist professors.
President Hindenburg’s seven-year term ended in 1932. He was eighty-four years old and ready to retire, but his supporters encouraged him to run again out of fear that otherwise Adolf Hitler would be elected. Reluctantly, he agreed. Hitler campaigned vigorously. He rented an airplane and flew from town to town across Germany, delivering forty-six speeches. Although Germany’s major parties backed Hindenburg and he won easily, the Nazi propaganda paid off. Hitler won 37 percent of the votes and National Socialism was clearly a force to be reckoned with.
New Year’s Eve 1933
Members of the Rhön Bruderhof anxiously observed the shifting mood of their country. Eberhard Arnold’s youngest son Hans-Hermann wrote to his brother Hardy in June 1932:
At the moment we live in a very difficult time that could spell disaster for us. I am thinking of the political situation and National Socialism . . . I have a feeling that the time of our expulsion and emigration is near.2
In January 1932, Emmy Arnold’s sister Else von Hollander died of tuberculosis. Her death was a great loss to the community. She had been part of the family since the first years of Eberhard and Emmy’s marriage and had worked faithfully as Eberhard’s secretary for years: recording meetings in shorthand, typing letters, and assisting in his research and publishing work. At the same time, her Christ-centered experience of death and dying was a challenge and inspiration for the still-youthful Bruderhof.
The community had grown slowly and steadily over the years. Another of Emmy’s sisters, Monika, had joined them. She was a nurse and had married Georg Barth; they had three young sons. Adolf Braun, a veteran of the last war with his wife Martha and their two daughters had been with them since 1924. Others had also experienced the first years in Sannerz like Karl Keiderling, a former anarchist, with his Irmgard, as well as the teacher Trudi. And there were newer faces: Hannes and Else Boller from Switzerland, Nils and Dora Wingard from Sweden, and some young single men and women.
Eberhard and Emmy’s oldest daughter Emy-Margret had married Hans Zumpe; their first child was the hundredth member of the community. Hans had come from a family of civil servants and had shown considerable organizational skills. He helped with the accounting and bookselling and gradually assumed greater responsibility for the spiritual leadership of the community. The younger Arnold children were still in school: Hardy was studying in Tübingen, hoping to help his father in the publishing house. Heiner was taking a practical training in agriculture, and Hans-Hermann and Monika were still in high school.
Every New Year’s Eve, the community met at midnight to remember the year that was ending and express hopes and wishes for the coming year. At the New Year’s Eve meeting in 1932, Eberhard spoke at length about the worrying political and economic developments of the world around them.
We stand at the end of the old year and before the new, as at a winter solstice. Will it become still darker? Still colder? Or will the New Year bring again more light of love, more warmth of righteousness, more joy of community among people? Will a new humanity come about again, or will men grow still more inhuman?
The hour of the world in which we stand at this historic moment shows itself, even to the most superficial observer, as an hour of the greatest crisis and decision. But it is necessary to see things quite apart from the daily newspapers, which, in a mass of detail, give such an unclear survey of events that most readers do not notice what is really happening. We must attain a view of the present world situation which grasps the essential events without being clouded by unessential diversions.
It is not by accident that we live here in Germany right between the eastern and western powers. On the one side is the liberalism of the French Revolution. On the other side the attempt has been made in Bolshevism to limit free trade and free enterprise to the absolute minimum.
Eberhard went on to explain how the prevailing domestic and global tensions must lead inexorably to the rise of dictatorship in Germany and ultimately to a catastrophic world war:
This new nobility of the oppressed proletariat exercises an unrestrained dictatorship. Again and again they have to resort to deeds of violence and to bloodshed.
And to the south? In Italy a renegade socialist has become a dictator wielding the weapons of militarism and mass-suggestion. Mussolini takes Caesar, the first of the Roman emperors, as the model of the modern statesman. He wishes to attain world rulership, making the state, the Roman Empire, into a god, just as it was at the time of the Roman Caesars.
In Japan and China and on other parts of the earth, there is further unrest and war; thus we are living in a continual state of war, which brings with it uninterrupted, never-ending bloodshed. At the same time, between the opposing ideologies mentioned above, in spite of all peace treaties, the new and perhaps last world war is being prepared. It will necessarily be considerably more barbaric than the last world war, because poisonous gases and other techniques of war have become absolutely demonic in nature. A ruthless war will be led, not only against men and military bases, but just as much against women and children far from the front.
The parliamentary form of government in Germany is finished. It has governed itself to death in these last ten years, and it can be assumed that we will soon be under a dictatorship. This state leadership stands between parliamentary democracy on the one hand and revolution on the other. The parliamentary, liberal power cannot prevail, and the revolutionary power has no prospect in the present distribution of power to win control through violence. Since both of them cannot rise up, the consequence is evident: the Reich president and the Reichskanzler will take over complete power.
Man’s confusion has reached its peak. The present hour is such that a political catastrophe must be approaching, because the present suspense is not tenable. In the spiritual outlook of the world there reigns an absolutely hopeless confusion. No one knows any more whom he can trust or upon what he can rely. That is the position at the present hour of the world.
In the midst of this mounting crisis, Eberhard believed that Christians had a responsibility to continue God’s work.
We stand now confronting this—a most insignificant group of people, so small and so lacking in talent that we cannot even be thrown into the scales against present events. What can we do against these political and spiritual powers? We are less than a gnat on an elephant, less than a grain of sand on the seashore, less than a drop in a bucket of water. And yet our faith tells us that this does not matter. For it is not that you have something to say, that you have responsibilities, that you have something to bring into the world. Rather, that which is planted within you must be brought to the whole world. You need not worry to what extent you personally will be used. You must have the faith that what is said and given to you must be said and given to the whole world. Therefore you must be ready for the new hour, for the new day that will come over the world. You must be ready to do your utmost in our small, insignificant work. You must be very courageous; the hour demands it of you. In the face of these great events you must not be found too small. In the face of God’s great plan you must not be found too petty.
How can this come about? We do not know. We have no money to build houses, to buy farms, to clothe people, to strengthen our economic basis so as to feed an additional forty people or more. And yet we are filled with the belief that there is only one possible answer: the unity of the church, the righteousness of God’s kingdom, the spirit of God in Jesus Christ and his coming reign. Therefore we must be prepared now to risk everything. We must build. We must enlarge the farm. We must increase the publishing work, the printing and bookbinding work. Love demands that we throw ourselves in with