We Must Recognize Our Guilt

While the war was still going on, regional bishop Wurm did some brutally honest soul-searching and recognized his own guilt and deep entanglement in events.

In a letter of September of 1941 to the German Christian pastor Otto Lohss (1881–1961), he not only quite openly named the regime’s crimes – murder of the Jews and mentally ill people, acts in the occupied territories (hostage system), Gestapo and concentration camp system, elimination of an independent judiciary – but also bluntly pointed out the innocuousness of Christians who had long not noticed all of this.

Wurm concluded that one had to have the courage to admit to oneself that one had not seen clearly enough. Bringing up the enemy and their methods would not help further. On the contrary, the crucial question was whether what is happening and has happened among us is right before God. Wurm explicitly mentioned Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, Ley und Rosenberg – they had brought Germany in this situation.