Wilhelm Geyer: One Pastor Ventures More

The regional consistory resolved to refrain from a protest with government authorities after the November Pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. Nuremberg District Dean Julius Schieder (1888-1964), who had always displayed great courage in ecclesio-political disputes, was also unable to bring himself to advise his subordinate pastors to protest publicly. Fear that pastors’ families and parsonages would be attacked like the Jews in the event of a protest played a major role.

Schieder merely advised his pastors to read the Ten Commandments aloud in their churches. He hoped that worshippers would understand, even without any direct reference, that the demonstrative reading of the Ten Commandments was directed at the crimes of the November Pogrom. In his Day of Repentance sermon, Wilhelm Geyer, pastor of the Church of St. Lawrence in Nuremberg, nevertheless ventured to go beyond Schieder’s advice.

Geyer had condemned Jew-baiting several times and therefore been a repeated victim of defamatory articles in the malicious anti-Semitic tabloid “Der Stürmer” since the early 1930s. In his sermon, Geyer especially reminded his parishioners of their share of responsibility and complicity in the deeds committed by Germans:

What the nation, apart from me, does, what the unchurched and anti-church powers and people in this our nation do, I and we do not have do any penance for that; that is none of our concern ... But would we not then be completely ignoring the question that God addressed to the first humans: “Where is your brother?” You are a member of the German nation, you have a brotherly bond with the people of this your nation; where is your brother? ... God’s love has not yet been intimately experienced by those who are unable to feel anything in their conscience, who are able to remain cold blooded or who are, as the saying goes, able to walk over corpses.

In conclusion, Geyer prayed, Protect us from privileges over other people and teach us to see that the sins of our day and our nation are our guilt and complicity (… wo ist Dein Bruder Abel, 108). Afterward, all of the clergy of the Church of St. Lawrence in Nuremberg stepped before the altar and recited the Ten Commandments aloud.