Why read For the Soul of the People?

Book cover of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler

Book description

Victoria Barnett describes the dramatic struggle between Nazism and the German Confessing Church -- a group of outraged Christians who sought to establish a church untainted by Nazi ideology. For this remarkable book, Barnett interviewed more than sixty Germans who were active in the Confessing Church. She quotes liberally from…

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Why read it?

1 author picked For the Soul of the People as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Kevin P. Spicer and Rebecca Carter-Chand

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Based largely on interviews conducted by Barnett in the 1980s, this book remains the standard text on the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. Barnett situates the Confessing Church’s experience within the broader context of the Protestant Churches, which comprised two-thirds of Germany’s population in the Nazi era. Initially formed in response to the German Christian movement’s attempts to Nazify Christianity, the Confessing Church remained committed to the theological integrity and structural independence of the church. Yet Barnett argues that the Confessing Church was not a resistance movement against Nazism itself. Some were arrested and lost their lives, some made compromises…

From Kevin's list on German Protestantism in Hitler’s Germany.