The Grey Book | Page 4

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the State and their estrangement from their parents, teachers and
preachers. An example of this tendency towards the total
dehumanization of the individual, as reflected in the persecution of the
Jews, and that provoked the Church to protest, was the decree
authorizing sterilization. The stand of the Church in this matter was
stated in the "Letter on the Question of Sterilization" that was sent in
May 1943 by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Holland to the
officials of the Reich and in which, among other things, we find the
following:
"...In the last few weeks the sterilization of the so-called mixed
marriages has begun. But God, who created heaven and earth and
whose commandments are for all men, and to whom even your
Excellency will have to give account one day, has said to mankind: 'Be
fruitful and multiply' (Gen. 1. 18). Sterilization is a physical and
spiritual mutilation directly at variance with God's commandment that
we shall not dishonour, hate, wound or kill our neighbours.
Sterilization constitutes a violation of the divine commandment as well
as of human rights. It is the last consequence of an anti-Christian racial
doctrine that destroys nations, and of a boundless self-exaltation. It
represents a view of the world and of life which undermines true
Christian human life, rendering it ultimately impossible... [10]
The fact that the protest of the Church against the persecution and
annihilation of the Jews was an inseparable part of its general protest
against the inhuman and anti-Christian character of modern
anti-semitism places the documents collected in this volume in a broad

historical context. These documents offer ample evidence of the
Church's opposition to an historical phenomenon rooted long before the
Nazis came to power, hence also prior to the rise of modern
anti-semitism. The protest of the Church was fundamentally directed
against those pagan and mythological elements that had crept into
Christianity itself in the course of its historical development among the
heathen. To many of the fathers of modern anti-semitism, which is the
racial and political Anti-semitism that arose towards the end of the 19th
century and reached its highest stage during the Third Reich, the
rejection of Judaism was tantamount to the rejection of religion in
general. This view goes back to Feuerbach's anthropological criticism
of religion, to the young Hegelians (Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer) and to
the early Romantics who longed to return to the primitive forms of a
religion called "vorchristliches Germanenthum". [11] Modern
anti-semitism was influenced by these streams of thought through
Nietzsche's concept of the 'Antichrist', although Nietzsche himself kept
aloof from the more vulgar manifestations of political anti-semitism of
his day. In him the anthropological view reaches its culmination - God,
who is nothing more than the deified form of man [12] is finally
overthrown by Dionysian man who found courage to assert his
instinctive life and abjure the gross and enslaving notions of
Christianity that men are equal and can be redeemed by faith,
the gospel of the downtrodden and everything that creeps on earth. [13]
These views, inimical to religion and to Christianity, were already
being expounded with great vigour towards the end of the 19th century.
Christian doctrine was accused of perverting man's instinctive life,
vitiating his natural enthusiasm, inflaming his ego, invading his private
life over which it declares its dominance only to enslave human nature,
to weaken and alienate man, by imposing upon him "un-natural"
restraint such as the anguish of his conscience. Wilhelm Marr, one of
the early fathers of modem racial and political Anti-semitism and the
man who during the late 70's coined the term 'anti-semitism'[14]
included in the rejection of Judaism his critique of Christianity as early
as the year 1862. In a polemical work called "Der Christenspiegel von
anti-Marr" by Moritz Freystadt, a member of the "Society for History
and Theology" in Leipzig, written in answer to Marr's "Judenspiegel",
the author interprets Marr's rejection of Judaism as a rejection of

monotheism, based on his anthropological view of God as a subjective
product of our conscious life - an antireligious analysis Marr evidently
borrowed from Voltaire, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. [15]
With Marr's intensification of anti-Jewish propaganda inspired by the
new racial anti-semitism we find increased criticism of Christianity
both as a system of beliefs and as an institution. In one of his popular
books "Religioese Streifzuege eines Philosophischen Touristen" (1876)
Marr, relying on theories propounded by Voltaire and Feuerbach,
observes that from the atheistic point of view it is evident: "that
Christianity, in its dogmas and precepts, is like every religion, a malady
of human consciousness. The philosopher explains... every religion as a
product of man's conscious life and relegates to the sphere of phantasm
the so-called 'revelations' of which all people boast depending on the
state of their culture..."