Many World War 2 buffs, scholars and historians have no interest in a single individual like Pastor Paul Schneider. He had no impact on the course of the war, and compared to the movements of armies and grand questions of military strategy and geopolitical considerations – not to mention the metaphysical catastrophe of the Holocaust – his life was an insignificant one.
From the Christian point of view, however, the life of Paul Schneider is of great significance. He represents what, in my view, is a genuinely Christlike response to the terrors of the Third Reich, and to all tyrannies that seek to control the minds and beliefs of their subjects.
The purpose of this essay is not to paint a false picture of a heroic church rising up in opposition to Hitler, boldly proclaiming the faith like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, willing to go into the fiery furnace without regard to the personal cost. The passivity of the churches before Hitler is too well known for that.
Nevertheless, there were some exceptions. There were some who valued truth more than life itself, and Pastor Schneider was one of them. Others could be mentioned: for example, a Lutheran pastor named von Jan of Oberlenningen in Wuerttemberg denounced the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 from the pulpit. He called it a crime, and said it was the result of “the great apostasy from God and Christ, arising out of organized anti-Christianity” [Conway p. 102 – see list of sources below]. So, people who say that no one spoke out against that atrocity are 99.9999% correct, but not 100% correct.
Von Jan stated that people knew the government was behind the coordinated nationwide assaults - though they did not dare to say so - and also stated that such criminality would bring God‘s judgment on Germany. He referred to the famous Bible verse - “Whatsoever a man sows, that will he also reap” - and said that the seeds of hatred being sown would lead to a harvest of horror. A few days later he was attacked by a large mob, badly beaten and taken to jail. He was later sentenced to prison for the sinister crimes of “treachery” and “misusing the pulpit” [Stroud, p. 107].
His prophecy was fulfilled within a few years, and fulfilled in striking ways that no one could have foreseen in 1938.
To mention one more incident, in 1935 a group of Lutheran Churches known as the Confessing Church issued a bold statement in response to attacks on Christianity in a book written by Alfred Rosenberg (a high- ranking Nazi official). The statement rejected Nazi ideology as a new religion that violated the first of the Ten Commandments by putting blood, race, and the German nation in the place of God. It further rejected Rosenberg’s ideology as the ideology of the anti-Christ. Even though there was no direct attack on Hitler himself, and Hitler had distanced himself officially from Rosenberg ’s book, the Nazi reaction was severe. An official ban was placed on the statement and clergymen were forbidden to read it. Literally hundreds of pastors were arrested for ignoring the ban, and protests against these repressive measures led to further arrests [Conway, p. 122].
Some historical background
Before looking at Paul Schneider specifically, it might be useful to give some more information.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Christians had ample cause for concern. In spite of Hitler’s early promises to work with churches, it was clear that Hitler’s agenda was in no sense Christian. In 1926, a professor named O. Baumgarten published a book asserting the incompatibility of Christianity and Naziism. His book, The Cross and the Swastika, stated that “The cross and the swastika are mutually exclusive” and was sent to every Protestant clergyman in Germany [Wentorf, p. 21]. This source also mentions some other obscure Christian publications critical of National Socialism before 1933.
Nevertheless, while his basic evil should have been clear, Hitler succeeded in deceiving many people. Here are some nice words taken from his early speeches in 1933, when he had not yet fully consolidated his power:
Christianity is the foundation of our national morality . . . to fill our whole culture once more with a Christian spirit (February, 1933) . . . a really profound revival of religious life . . . The National Government regard the two Christian Confessions [Catholic and Protestant] as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality . . . Their rights are not to be infringed . . . honest co-operation between Church and State . . . Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation . . . The rights of the Churches will not be diminished (March, 1933) [Speeches, vol. 1, 370-372].
In a speech in the Reichstag in 1939, Hitler responded to charges that the National Socialist state was hostile to religion. He claimed that there was religious freedom in Germany; that no one had been or would be persecuted because of their religious views; that no churches in the Reich had been closed, interfered with, or pressured [Speeches, vol. 1, p. 401].
Such statements have been used by some – presupposing Hitler’s honesty and integrity – to show a deeper connection between National Socialism and Christianity. However, at the same time Hitler was buttering up the Christians he was also saying some very nice things about world peace:
It is the sincere desire of the National Government to be able to refrain from increasing our army and our weapons . . . Germany desires nothing except an equal right to live and equal freedom . . . The German nation wishes to live in peace with the rest of the world . . . we are ready to cooperate with absolute sincerity (March 1933, before the Reichstag). . . our longing for peace . . . (May 1933) . . . We have declared a hundred times that we wish for peace (August 1933). [Speeches, (vol. 2) pp. 1016, 1018, 1080, 1085].
Hitler told gullible Christians what they wanted to hear. How many of them were easily fooled, how many were skeptical, and how many knew he was lying? For at the same time Hitler was talking peace while preparing for war, he was talking about the importance of religion publicly while telling his party leaders privately that
the unity of the Germans must be secured through a new Weltanschauung, since Christianity in its present form was no longer equal to the demands which were today made on those who would sustain the unity of the people [Speeches, (vol. 1), pp. 377-378].
Both in Germany and abroad, people soon found out how much Hitler’s nice words were worth. While Hitler had to deal carefully with the major Protestant and Catholic Churches because of their great size, many smaller groups were eventually banned outright. Not many historians of the Third Reich know about the Seventh Day Adventists; Bible Faith Fellowship; Free Pentecostalists of Berlin; Mission for Awakening in Germany; Bible Community; The Church of the Apostle John; God’s Social Parish; New Salem Company; Union of Free Religious Communities in Germany; Bahais; Jehovah’s Witnesses, Shepherd and Flock, or Christian Gathering. These groups did not fall under Hitler’s definition of “religious freedom.” [Conway, pp. 370-374 (citing a Gestapo document)].
While Hitler was forced to deal with the larger churches more carefully and could not simply ban them outright, carefully calibrated repressive measures were employed against them. These included: forbidding certain pastors to preach; expulsion of pastors from their parishes; cancellation of salaries (the Lutheran Church was a state church); banning of private seminaries; seizing an Evangelical publishing house; and destroying a large church in Berlin on the pretext of urban renewal.
Lutheran and Catholic Churches were allowed to meet, but the government took great interest in their activities. The Gestapo was interested in the minutest details of church life, including the mandatory ringing of church bells on political occasions, ecclesiastical discipline of pro-Nazi church members and the posting of notices on bulletin boards. Hitler said in one speech that “the priest as enemy of the German state we shall destroy.” Those who know anything about Hitler and the Third Reich know that to Hitler an “enemy of the state” was anyone who failed to support him 100%.
Also, the existence and nature of concentration camps quickly became known, although public mention of them was forbidden. Even before Hitler came to power outspoken opposition to him was dangerous, and those who said the wrong things could be beaten, murdered, or simply disappear. These well-known facts are sometimes insufficiently regarded when considering the actions of the Christians in Germany - many of whom did not believe in or admire Hitler, but were not prepared to suffer either.
An enemy of the state
A letter of June 1939 from the local Gestapo headquarters to the church authorities of the Rhine province presents the criminal record of a Lutheran pastor incarcerated in Buchenwald, Paul Robert Schneider. According to this official document, Pastor Schneider was hostile to the state. He was accused (among other things) of calling National Socialism a work of the devil; making disparaging remarks about Mein Kampf; disobeying a Gestapo order forbidding him to preach in his own church; saying that “The brown crowd [the SA] does not belong in the church”; accusing the Reich government of falsifying the results of an election; and stating in a sermon that the German youth belonged not to Adolf Hitler or to Baldur von Schirach, but to Christ [Wentorf, 325-328, 340]. For these and other offenses, Schneider was sent to Buchenwald, where he died.
A few facts about Pastor Schneider
Paul Schneider was born in 1897, and served in World War I. After the war he studied theology and was ordained in the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union in 1927. He married in 1927 and had six children.
A sermon he preached in 1923 has a solid biblical basis. At this time, when many Germans were in bitterness over their defeat in the war, Schneider said: “No cruel fate of our fatherland, no matter how cruel it may seem to us, should ever be able to rob us of profound joy, the joy that is found in God . . . For what is visible is temporal, but what is invisible is eternal.” He also stated in the same sermon that “we have a commission and a calling from another world and our citizenship is there. And we know that in spite of everything this world will one day be victorious: Therefore, we will be cheerful in tribulation.” [Wentorf, p. 51]
If enough Germans had understood this basic biblical teaching, Hitler‘s message of revenge and hate would not have been successful – but general histories of the Weimar period do not present ideas of this sort as having any influence or importance. There were very few people like Paul Schneider in Germany of the 1920s, and such a message was not then (and is not now) well received. It was (and is) considered to be hopelessly out of date, irrelevant, mere words from a bygone era, contrary to the reigning philosophies and pseudo-scientific theories which all scorn the possibility of another world to come and rely on human intelligence alone. Freud, Marx, Darwin, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Kant – those were names to conjure with in Germany in 1923, not Jesus Christ or the apostle Paul.
Whether or not Schneider hoped, as many did, that Hitler would restore order to Germany - I am not convinced of Wikipedia’s accuracy on this point - he quickly began to have conflicts with the New Order. Before much time had passed, he openly came in conflict with the local NSDAP. “The Gestapo repeatedly interrogated Schneider through 1936, and temporarily took him into custody a number of times” [Gedenkstätte – link given below].
In addition to his outspoken criticisms, Pastor Schneider at one point attempted to apply church discipline to several members who had become active Nazis. This discipline meant not that the offending members were to be burned at the stake or tortured, but that they should not be allowed to partake of communion, and were no longer to be considered members of the church. Church members were advised not to shun them, but “to treat them kindly in all necessary things,” so that if possible they might be won back to the church. This was done in accordance with established church practice after previous conversations and attempts at correction. [Wentorf, 236, 296].
The response of one of the disciplined members was to report his pastor to the police, and a Gestapo document lists this attempt to exercise church discipline as one of the reasons for the pastor‘s arrest. Also referred to was Schneider’s public objection to Nazi propaganda at a church funeral, as well as statements critical of National Socialism.
Schneider’s attempt to actually discipline Nazi church members was so shocking, that it reached the attention of Heinrich Himmler himself. In response to a letter from Church officials in 1939 commenting on Schneider‘s death in confinement and respectfully asking the authorities to “ensure that constantly increasing actions taken against Protestant pastors and church members are stopped,” Himmler referred to some details of Schneider’s case. He mentioned the attempt at discipline and described it as “far exceeding the sphere of the church and amounting to the complete boycott of a national comrade,” and closed with the words “I do not have to take any measures against pastors if they stay within the framework of current laws.” This by the way was concerning the pastor of a small rural community [Wentorf pp. 362, 297]. Himmler’s letter further stated that Pastor Schneider could possibly have been released if he would have agreed to obey the deportation order forbidding him to speak in his church, but he had refused to accept this “and thus had only himself to blame for his continued stay in the camp.”
The following events led to Schneider’s final arrest and commitment to Buchenwald. He was eventually banished from his province by the Gestapo and forbidden to preach in his parish. He felt that the Gestapo had no jurisdiction over the church, and did not accept their authority over his preaching. He knowingly ignored their deportation order, returned to his church, preached a final sermon, and was arrested that same day. Having been detained twice before because of his offences against the state, he was sent to Buchenwald, where he was eventually murdered. This act of principled disobedience, by the way, occurred in 1937, when the facts of the concentration camps and the consequences of defying the Gestapo were well-known.
Not satisfied with merely disobeying the Gestapo, Schneider felt obliged to explain his actions. He justified his refusal to accept the state‘s authority in a lengthy letter sent to the provincial governor, to the Interior Ministry of the Reich, and to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. In this conflict, “Paul Schneider stands alone . . . We do not know of any statement made by the leadership councils of the Confessing Church from this time in which it wholeheartedly supports Paul Schneider . . . This failure will remain an agonizing question addressed to the Confessing Church” [Wentorf, pp.270-277]. Parenthetically, the “Confessing Church” was an informal branch of the Lutheran Church that sought to and to maintain traditional creeds and worship, while at the same time avoiding persecution by affirming loyalty to the state.
Schneider‘s great sufferings in the camp, including being lashed for refusing to salute a Nazi flag, were reported by fellow prisoners. An official Buchenwald document sent to the camp headquarters and signed by an SS-Oberscharfuhrer stated that Paul Schneider began preaching from his cell window to the inmates lined up for morning roll call. He ignored the SS man‘s command to stop and had to be taken away from the window by force. The document described this as “unbelievable behavior,” and it certainly must have been unique in the entire history of the Third Reich [Wentorf, p. 307].
Walter Poller was a political prisoner in Buchenwald. He ended up working in the medical records department and after the war wrote a book about his experiences, The Medical Recorder of Buchenwald (Der Arztschreiber von Buchenwald) [Wentorf, 340-346]. He stated that after Schneider preached from his solitary confinement cell to prisoners lined up for roll call “he was brought to the central square where roll call was taken. There he was whipped until the blood oozed through his clothes. And then he was dragged back to the solitary confinement building half-conscious.” He also described Schneider shortly before his murder by lethal injection in 1939: “The body was nothing but skin and bones, the arms were unshapely and swollen, on the wrists were bluish-red, green and bloody cuts. And the legs – they were no longer human legs but elephant legs How was it possible that this man was still living?” Then the camp physician, one Dr. Ding, said to him, “Why didn’t you let us know that you were sick, Schneider?”
Schneider was given decent treatment for eight to ten days, during which time he “recovered surprisingly fast.” The doctor said to him, “ ‘Stop this nonsense, Schneider. You can see that you are treated properly when you fit into camp discipline.’ Paul Schneider does not answer, he only smiles, but his eyes are sparkling.” The doctor then offered to have Schneider released from solitary confinement, where (as he was able to relate to some orderlies during his treatment), he had been chained “for two weeks, day and night, without interruption, as if he had been nailed to a cross.” This would explain the swollen legs. An SS-guard named Sommer, whom Schneider had called “a murderer and a torturer” to his face, had abused him the whole time.
Not long afterward, he was murdered by injection. Poller did not directly witness it, but he saw the doctor with the injection needle and expected from past experience that Schneider was going to be killed. In the report on Schneider’s death, the doctor subsequently dictated “a completely false medical history he simply made up.” Possibly he was killed because this last attempt to reform him failed, or else because his death had been decided on earlier and the treatment was only intended to improve his appearance, since the wife was allowed to view the body (the face and hands only were visible, the rest being covered by a blanket) and take it away in a casket for a full funeral ceremony.
Another of Schneider‘s fellow-prisoners, Alfred Leikam, wrote: “In my opinion he is the only one in Germany who so consciously took upon himself the cross of Christ to the point of death, overcoming all human fear and who was so deeply influenced by this word of faith: ‘Our faith is the victory that has overcome the world’ ” [Wentorf, p. 363]. While of course there were others in Germany whom Leikam had no knowledge of we can, I believe, look on Paul Schneider as an example of the proper biblical response to governmental tyranny over the church. But we also recognize him as a poor mortal who with God’s help did that which was right – and also as a man who now has no need of human praise or honor.
Wentorf states that 200 pastors from all over Germany attended the funeral, as well as “the whole Protestant and Catholic population” of the area where Schneider had served as a pastor before his final arrest. This display of public support for one officially labeled hostile to the state was disturbing to the Gestapo and was in fact a protest (p. 393).
The Gestapo observed his funeral, noted who was present, and kept a detailed record of what was said. Church letters dealing with Pastor Schneider were intercepted and a Pastor Rolffs, who sought to raise money for the dead man‘s widow and children, was charged with violating #111 of the State Legal Code forbidding unauthorized fundraising. Although his trial was suspended for reasons that are not made clear, two more pastors – Karl Immer and Julius Vogt – were also harassed for attempting to help the Schneider family.
Conway, John. The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945. Vancouver: Regent, 1968.
Hitler, Adolf. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (April 1922 – August 1939) (vols. 1 and 2), trans. Norman H. Baynes. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.
Stroud, Dean G. Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2013.
Wentorf, Rudolf. Paul Schneider: Witness of Buchenwald, trans. Daniel Bloesch. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2008.
Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/paul-schneider/?no_cache=1, Accessed March 3, 2024.
“Paul Schneider, the Martyr of Buchenwald,” Christian Library, https://www.christianstudylibrary.org/article/paul-schneider-martyr-buchenwald, Accessed March 25, 2024.