Illegal Education of Theologians

The education of future pastors had caused more conflicts since 1934. Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller closed the Old Prussian theological seminaries in order to be able to educate seminarians entirely in the German Christian spirit. Numerous German Christians were members of the examination committees for the theological exams in the destroyed regional churches. The Nazi state filled chairs of theology with German Christians loyal to the regime in order to exert ideological influence on the schools of theology. Many professors who were members of the Confessing Church were fired or transferred.

The Confessing Church feared that young theologians would be educated to be “teachers of false doctrine”. It therefore began to take the education and examination of young theologians into its own hands and established its own examination committees, theological seminaries and a church college.

This precipitated not only conflicts with German Christian ecclesiastical authorities but also direct confrontations with the Nazi state as of 1935. Theology students, who decided on an education from the Confessing Church, gave up any professional security and were regarded as “illegals” from then on.

Reich Minister of Education Bernhard Rust forbade Protestant theology students in a decree of November 17, 1936 to attend alternative course or similar institutions instead of university courses. Noncompliant students were threatened with exclusion from degree programs at all German institutions of higher education.

This directly affected the students at the Confessing Church’s church college in Wuppertal-Elberfeld and Berlin. Despite the Gestapo’s ban, the church college had commenced classes in November of 1935, underground in Berlin and disguised as part of a school of theology that already existed there in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.

The college students refused to obey the ban. The student Hans Brückmann wrote his parents on December 6, 1936 that it is now either or. Either become a ‘theologian’ of Nazi weltanschauung at a state college or a church theologian, i.e. be obedient to the church’s one Lord, Jesus Christ.

When Heinrich Himmler banned all of the Confessing Church’s educational and examination institutions under threat of punishment in August of 1937 and thus forced them underground, hundreds of young theologians also stuck by their refusal to be turned into to a generation of theologians whose only function is to prop up the Nazi state religiously.