The Bishop & the Jews

The ugly taint of anti-Semitism fell last week on the Grand Old Man of German Protestantism--Otto Dibelius, Evangelical Bishop of Berlin and Brandenburg.

It began with a front-page article in East Berlin's Communist paper, Berliner Zeitung, timed to appear just after Bishop Dibelius' good-will tour through Nazi-nervous England and to coincide with the five-day Berlin meeting of the Evangelical Church of Berlin and Brandenburg. It quoted at length from an article by Otto Dibelius in the weekly Friede und Freude of April 9, 1933--just 68 days after Hitler had come to power. Wrote the then 52-year-old Dibelius: "The government of the Reich has finally recognized the necessity to boycott Jewish businesses in the correct assumption that through the international connections of Jewry the hostile campaign in foreign countries will cease only when German Jewry is economically endangered . . . But this is not the solution to the Jewish problem . . . As soon as Jewish immigration is cut off, Jewry in Germany will retrogress. The number of children in Jewish families is small. The process of dying out will proceed surprisingly fast."

Five years before, charged the Communists, Dibelius had also written: "In spite of the ugly sound often attached to the word, I have always regarded myself as an anti-Semite. The fact cannot be concealed that the Jews have played a leading part in all the symptoms of disintegration in modern civilization."

After the Gas Chambers. Accustomed to Communist polemics against the staunchly anti-Communist bishop. Western newsmen went through the routine of checking with Dibelius' office. Instead of the heated denial the reporters expected, they were jolted by the reply that the quotations were accurate. Embarrassed West German newspapers, which regard Dibelius as something of a hero, handled the story like fissionable material; the important Die Welt, for instance, ran the story on page 4 with no direct quotes.

Before the 240 members of the Evangelical synod, Dibelius explained that the controversial Biblical passage in Romans 13* had been his guide in these matters. He recalled the insults he had suffered from the Nazis and continued in a voice shaking with emotion: "All that was torture for me. But I had to tell myself that Christians in other times have experienced similar torture and have not tossed Romans 13 overboard. The turning point came for me when the business of euthanasia for so-called worthless life and the gassing of Jews became apparent."

Different Conditions. Some of Dibelius' own pastors, who remembered the atrocities against the Jews which long preceded the gas chambers, were not reassured by this explanation. But when the 80-year-old bishop announced that he would resign all his ecclesiastical offices next year (when his term ends as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches), the synod was willing to let bygones be bygones. As Bishop Dibelius put it: "These utterances date from a time now 30 years past and can be explained as part of completely different conditions. Since then I have always, under jeopardy of my own freedom and life, emphatically stood up for Jewish fellow citizens."

Last week 182 of the 240 delegates to the Evangelical synod voted a resolution of confidence in the bishop. Even his longtime critic, East Berlin Theologian Heinrich Vogel, shook Dibelius' hand. Said he: "Now the essential thing is that Christians, even in periods of hard struggle, find their way together again as brothers."

* "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God."

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