Memorandum

Since nothing happened within the Inner Mission, Superintendent Albertz asked Marga Meusel to draw attention to the tribulations of people affected by Nazi racial policy in a memorandum for the Confessing Church. In May of 1935, Albertz forwarded the memorandum she had drafted to Karl Koch, President of the Confessing Church Synod. He was supposed to present it to the Third National Synod of the Confessing Church in Augsburg in early June of 1935.

In her memorandum, Meusel described the psychological and actual plight of Protestants of Jewish descent and emphasized the equality of every baptized member of the church. She called upon the Confessing Church to establish an aid agency despite the attendant risks and to address its non-Aryan members publicly. Regarding the Inner Mission, she admonished, One cannot adhere to the Confessing Church and simply disregard the Gospel’s demands, which are inconvenient.

Marga Meusel did not intend however to call for political resistance against the regime. According to Meusel, in keeping with Romans 13:1, the Inner Mission’s work for Protestant non-Aryans should neither be done out of opposition against the state nor lead to such. At the same time, she demanded that the Confessing Church quite simply [must] take the path of obedience and faith, even if it knows that it will thus lose outward safeguards. Then the Lord Christ, on whose behalf it acts, bears the responsibility.

Meusel’s memorandum was not discussed at the National Confessing Church Synod in Augsburg. At the most, it was the topic of conversations on the side. In the medium term, her impetuses also entered into the establishment of “Pastor Grüber’s Office” in the circle around Albertz and Niemöller in 1938.