Nazi church to be restored

An old church in Berlin needs a new roof and other running repairs.

This particular church, built in 1929 in the Bauhaus style, comes complete with interior decoration from the Third Reich although there are bare patches where swastikas, illegal in Germany since 1945 have been ripped out.

There is an image of a Nazi storm trooper side by side with Jesus Christ carved into the pulpit, the entrance is lit by a chandelier in the shape of an iron cross and the organ was used to stir the spirits at a torch-lit Nuremberg rally.

“There was a bust of Adolf Hitler in the nave,” Isolde Boehm, dean of the church, said. “A carved face of Hitler has been replaced by one of Martin Luther. There is even a rumour that the church was supposed to be called the Adolf Hitler Church.”

There is no other church in Germany so obviously from the Third Reich era.

In the 1930s two thirds of the parish of Martin Luther Memorial were Nazi Party members. Their babies were baptised in a wooden font, which still bears the image of a storm trooper, and they married to music played by an organ that helped to create the dark atmosphere of the Nuremberg rallies.

Until 1942 bells embossed with the swastika called the Nazi faithful to church on Sundays. Then the bells were melted down and made into cannon.

In 1932 the Protestant church came under the influence of a Nazi movement called the "German Christians" -- called "stormtroopers of Jesus," by the group's leader and founder Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder.

In 1933 Hitler forced regional Protestant churches to merge into the Protestant Reich Church which, based on Nazi ideas of “positive Christianity”, portrayed Jesus as an “Aryan” and eliminated the Old Testament.

During the war Alfred Rosenberg conceived a new National Reich Church which would replace the Bible with Mein Kampf.

Parishioners and priests are trying to raise the €3.5 million (about $US4.2 million) needed to rescue the church from collapse.

Sources:

Der Spiegel (This site has many pictures of the interior of the church)

The Times on Line

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