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[German Version] I. Church History The policy of the state toward the church in National Socialist Germany had met with resistance since 1933, on the part of both Protestants and Catholics. As already demonstrated by the founding of the Pastors’ Emergency League in Berlin (by M. Niemöller), by the opposition to the National Socialist Deutsche Christen at the confessing synods of Barmen and Dahlem, and by the open criticism of the resolute faction within the Confessing Church (voiced in the position paper of the Second Provisional Church Directory fr…

[German Version] I. Church History World War I stands for a hitherto unknown escalation in the intensity and violence of warfare in the name of the nation and the national state. As the first fully-fledged technological and industrial mass conflict – or in the words of M. Weber: as the Maschinenkrieg (“war of machines”) of the “modern military state” –, World War I revealed the extent to which the expectations of national integration had changed and gave rise to a new form of wartime reality: as a “total war,” it confronted all the warring stat…