Thursday, January 23, 2025

*** This is a rough transcript of today’s show ***

It is the 23rd of January 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Popular history, and indeed this show, is no stranger to telling the stories of World War II, Nazi atrocities, and the Christian response. Much attention has been paid to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (you can pronounce it as you wish, remembering that pronunciation is often a matter of custom and preference)- you can check out my weekend Edition on Dietrich with a link in the transcript (https://www.1517.org/podcast-overview/2023-04-22)

But there is another compelling figure who is often overlooked, although this is being rectified in our century- the remarkable Helmuth James von Moltke, who was born in 1907 and executed on this day in the Plötzenzee prison in Berlin- he was later known to be heavily involved in anti-Nazi activity but at the time of his arrest no charges would stick and he was, in his own words to his wife “attacked and condemned primarily…as a Christian and nothing else”.

His story is remarkable because of his family’s history and his own conversion to the faith. The “Moltke” family may be known in Berlin as untold numbers cross the Moltkebrücke (Moltke Bridge) even today to cross the Spree River coming out of the main city station. The ancestors of James included Helmuth Moltke the Elder, a famous general under Bismark, and Helmuth Moltke the Younger, a disgraced WWI general.

His parents were Christian scientists who helped translate Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with the Key to the Scriptures into German. But James rejected his parents' sect and instead requested to be baptized into the Prussian national church. He went on to study law during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and qualified to be a judge just as the Reichstag Fire led to the rise of Hitler and the end of Weimar. Knowing he would have to join the Nazi party if he were to become a judge, he and his wife decided that he would open a private law firm and eventually prepare to move to England.

But as he was making his preparations, World War II broke out, and he was drafted by the Nazi Abwehr (their illegal intelligence agency). Having been trained in international law, he was shocked by the initial wave of Nazi laws and began to reason his way into a place of resistance. He opened his home in Kriesau to other dissenters of varying stripes, and it is here that his reliance on a Christian vision of nonviolent resistance.

As the war progressed he argued against the breaking of the Geneva Convention but was ignored by his superiors. He began to meet secretly with international visitors to warn them against an alliance with the Nazis, and his work with a Brazilian spy is credited with keeping Brazil from going forward as a German ally. When news of Concentration Camps circled, he began to spread the word to his international correspondents. He played a role in the secret deportation of Jewish people from Nazi-occupied Denmark and into Sweden.

He argued against the assassination of Hitler, arguing that it would only create a martyr for the movement. Instead, he believed that a new model of collective governance was called for, something like what would become the European Union.

He would be arrested with others in his circle but was rightly exonerated from the charges of attempted assassination. Nonetheless, he was an enemy of the state. Through the over 1,000 letters still extant between him and his wife, Freya, we get a picture of his increasing reliance on his faith in opposition to the Nazis.

The court would note, presciently, that “we National Socialists and Christianity have one thing in common and one only: we demand the whole man.”

He wrote to his wife that it was his “whole” commitment to Christianity, which was most offensive to his accusers, and thus he  “therefore stands not as a nobleman, not as a Prussian, not as a German---no as a Christian and nothing else”.

In 1992 his story would be told in the Academy Award-nominated documentary "The Restless Conscience Resistance to Hitler in Nazi Germany."

In 2007, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, a service was held in the French Dome Church of Berlin, and he was praised by Chancellor Angela Merkel for his contributions. Born in 1907, Helmuth James von Moltke was murdered on the 23rd of January in 1945- he was 37 years old.

The last word for today from the daily lectionary- from Romans 7:

4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. 5 For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 23rd of January 2025 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man I swear I saw this morning in an advertisement for ESPN Bet- “the boost it” commercial- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man back in Berlin this fall- go to gtitours.org to sign up and join me! I’m Dan van Voorhis .You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.