An Embassy Besieged - Emmy Barth

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faith and with joy and unity in the love of Christ. I have been entrusted to receive here in Switzerland all letters from you that deal with difficult questions concerning the German authorities and emigration.25

      4

      May to June 1933

      Honor the Worker!” Adolf Hitler proclaimed on May 1, 1933. For the past fifty years, the Labor Movement had made this day an International Workers’ Day. Now Hitler announced that May Day would be celebrated throughout the coming centuries in Germany in honor of the German worker. In Berlin, thousands of people marched the streets led by brass bands of storm troopers playing patriotic songs. Over a million people gathered under a sea of Nazi flags in the evening to hear Hitler’s voice booming over the radio.

      The first of May was also an important day of celebration at the Rhon Bruderhof—a day to rejoice in the end of winter with singing, folk dancing, and often a maypole. The girls wound garlands of flowers for their hair, and little boys tied bunches of flowers to sticks: holding them high they walked around the buildings singing May songs.

      The rising tide of nationalism cast an ominous shadow over this year’s festivities, however. The day before, the police had come up to the Rhön Bruderhof to make sure its members would take part in the national festivities. How should they respond without participating in the nationalistic fervor?

      The sun rose on a bright spring day. Apple trees were in full blossom, and the meadows were bright with dandelions. After breakfast the community gathered for worship. Eberhard opened the meeting:

      We need to meet this morning and remind ourselves of what the way of the church is. We want to let God speak to us in silent worship and to ask him to stand by us in all that confronts us.

      After some minutes of silence, he spoke again.

      The First of May is kept everywhere as a day celebrating work. We too have every reason to think about it and to remind ourselves of what work means to us. What is the goal that we work for? What distinguishes our work from that done in the business world of capitalism? What is the ultimate meaning of our work? We have always rejected the bloody class struggle; we wage a spiritual fight to win all strata of society for the kingdom of God.

      In recent months the previous government was swept away. The red flags we used to see on the First of May have been suppressed, and if you walk through the streets of a town today, you will see the swastika displayed at every house.1

      When the meeting closed, the young men and women prepared for their own parade. They had decided to make a maypole as they always did. On it they tied ribbons of black, white, and red, the colors of the German flag. Then they added blue and yellow for Sweden, white and red for Switzerland, and black and gold for Austria. When the delegation arrived from the neighboring village to invite them to join the parade starting at the firehouse, they apologized that they had already scheduled a procession and couldn’t come. The whole community walked across their fields and over the knoll led by Hans and Margrit Meier on their violins, the children with their garlands and flower sticks.2 Edith wrote about it to Hardy:

      The First of May was a fine day here, very festive. The maypole and the children with many flowers—like a painting by Richter. Everybody was very happy, and there was a unity that went right down into every smallest detail. We danced all day.3

      That evening a few of the brothers went to the neighboring village of Eichenried to listen to Hitler on the radio. Hitler promised that compulsory labor service would reestablish manual labor as honorable work by the end of the year. But his words of honoring the worker were a clever piece of trickery. The next day brownshirts and SS men stormed the trade union offices throughout the country. Union officials were arrested. In Duisburg four were beaten to death.

      v

      After the war, many Germans were shocked at the atrocities that had taken place, of which they had been unaware. Eberhard was under no such illusion. He told the community:

      A hundred foreign newspapers have been banned. Max Wolf [a Jewish friend in Schlüchtern] is in protective custody, accused of being connected with communism. Marxist literature along with the classics and romantics will be confiscated. Many people have been put in concentration camps.4

      Heiner later said:

      When Hitler came into power my father was extremely sad. Once when I was alone with him he told me quite a number of stories that did not appear in the papers. He told me that in the neighboring village of Sterbfritz the Nazis took a Jewish man, stripped him, and beat him, and left him in a ditch. He had to walk home without trousers, to his great humiliation and the joke of the Nazis. Papa told me some of the things that happened in the concentration camps. These things were completely unknown, and I asked him, “Where do you know that?” He said, “It is better you don’t know in case you are once asked.” He had some source where he got information, someone among the Nazis, I think, who was against it.5

      National Socialism was attempting a cultural revolution “in which alien cultural influences—notably the Jews but also modernist culture more generally—were eliminated and the German spirit reborn. Germans were not merely to acquiesce in the Third Reich, they had to “support it with all their heart and soul.”6 As part of this revolution, German students organized the burning of “un-German” books on May 10. Huge bonfires were lit in Berlin and thousands of books were thrown into the flames—books by internationally respected authors such as Erich Maria Remarque, Friedrich Wilhelm Förster, Erich Kästner, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Albert Einstein, Jack London, and Helen Keller.

      Annemarie Wächter followed with great interest and concern the developments at her beloved Keilhau. For decades, her family had run the boarding school founded by the renowned educator Friedrich Froebel. Now she learned that the school had been forced to hire a Nazi teacher. Eberhard answered:

      Teachers with a socialist view are being discharged everywhere. If my book Innerland, which I hope will be in book stores by October 1, were discovered as being in any way anti-Hitler, our school might also be assigned a National Socialist director, whom we would have to pay. If Hitler continues as he is now, not only the question of labor service but our whole attitude to life will become critical. Let us ask God that we may hold on to freedom of conscience in these times of bondage; that we neither become silent and no longer speak up about our calling, nor become cowardly fugitives who leave the battlefield before their duty is done. Let us ask God that our conscience may be filled with the whole Christ, with the absoluteness of his truth, so that we in no point lag behind what he demands on the way of his discipleship.7

      Love Your Enemy

      Christians everywhere were clearly struggling to find a response to National Socialism. Leonhard Ragaz, the Swiss Religious Socialist, wrote a column on the world situation in his monthly periodical Neue Wege (New Paths). In recent issues, Germany dominated the scene. He wrote with justified indignation of the lies at the opening of the Reichstag in March, of suppression and mistrust, of the murder of dozens of people, the dismissal of Jewish professors, doctors, and lawyers, of the threat of war, and the fact that the churches were not lifting a finger in protest.8 In the May issue he wrote about the concentration camps where 30,000 to 50,000 socialists, communists, and pacifists were being held.

      Ragaz’s article was read and discussed at the dinner table one evening at the end of May. Eberhard did not deny Ragaz’s allegations, but he was disappointed that he seemed to have lost sight of the kingdom of God. He explained his difference with Ragaz in a letter to their common friend, the Anabaptist historian in Vienna Robert Friedmann.

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