We'll conclude Veith's review today. Veith writes:
The German Lutherans faced yet another danger. Once Hitler came into power and World War II approached, Stalin declared that all German citizens and Russians of German origin were subject to arrest. They were all suspected of Nazism and of spying for Germany.In other words, these men lied to insure that innocent people would be subjected to horrible suffering and death in the Soviet prison camps. Such was the morality of the communists.
The NKVD—the predecessor of the KGB—began rounding up pastors and church members. The donations the Lutheran church had received from foreign churches became prima facie evidence of treason, subversion, and espionage. Church youth groups were defined as Nazi cells. Sermons were interpreted as pro-Nazi agitation.
In at least one case, a pastor’s preaching on “the Kingdom of God” was interpreted as a symbolic reference to the Third Reich.
Heise uncovers two confessions from NKVD agents, including the chief interrogator of the Leningrad Lutherans who was himself arrested years later and admitted that the cases against the believers were all fabricated and that the recorded testimonies were written by the officers themselves.
In Stalin’s “German operation,” some 42,000 Russian citizens of German background were executed. Still more, including entire villages, were put into boxcars and shipped to Siberia. Nevertheless, Heise records the astonishing faith of the pastors and laity who persisted even as the persecutions got worse and worse.The courage of these simple people is as inspirational as it is astonishing. They continued to practice their faith and serve their Lord and His people despite having lost almost everything and knowing that eventually they'd probably be sent to the camps to be worked and starved to death, or, if they were lucky, get a bullet in the head.
We read about the seminary, whose students kept coming, even though they knew that upon their ordination they would become “former persons,” lose all their rights, and be targeted themselves for arrest and possible execution. Still, they kept studying. The seminary had to spend half its budget on taxes. One by one the professors got arrested.
Yet, when no more were left, the administrators started teaching their classes.
Bishop Meier, knowing that before long no church buildings would be available and the last pastor would soon be gone, began teaching parishioners how to keep the faith alive without clergy. He taught his people how to baptize, how to conduct weddings and funerals, how to teach their children the catechism, how to come together for prayer and worship.
On November 27, 1937, the last pastor was killed.
Heise’s book ends with the apparent extinction of the Lutheran Church and the beginning of World War II. It doesn’t continue with the story of those Lutherans in Siberia and elsewhere who did what the bishop had taught, preserving and handing down their faith by means of the ordinary practices still performed today by Lutherans everywhere—learning the catechism by heart, learning the hymns, memorizing Bible verses—and carrying out the priesthood of all believers by worshiping and baptizing.Veith then appends his own epilogue, tying the persecution inflicted by the leftists in the Soviet Union on Christians to the trends we see forming today in our own society:
Heise does, though, include an epilogue, which jumps past the postwar years to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policies and to the collapse of the Soviet Union. During that time, the victims of Stalin’s “Great Terror,” including the Lutherans, were cleared of the accusations against them.
Survivors and their children and grandchildren came out into the open and identified as Lutheran. They organized into congregations. Church property, including the “swimming pool” church, was restored to them. The old, vandalized buildings once again became houses of worship. They had pastors again.
Just as Jesus promised of His body, the church, the gates of hell did not prevail against the church in Russia.
In reading this chronicle of persecution, we can’t help but see the parallels, faint now but real, with today’s leftist opponents of religious liberty. Religion can be tolerated only if it remains inside a person’s head and is neither acted upon nor expressed in the public square. “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear.”Veith is right that some of the book, that which deals with church administration and politics, is a bit tedious, but Heise's account of the suffering these men and women, old and young, endured for the sake of the gospel, is simply extraordinary.
Children should be indoctrinated against the beliefs of their parents. Religion is only a mask for oppression. And we see how religion can be persecuted not only through violence but also through economic sanctions (threatening churches with the tax code), cultural pressures (undermining the values Christians try to instill in their children), and the law (punishing those who won’t conform to the prevailing secularist ideology).
Reading this book is a heart-wrenching but inspiring experience. It begins with the mundane efforts to bring Russian Lutherans into one church body, so we hear about meetings, fundraising, personality conflicts, and church politics. This is the ordinary stuff of the “institutional church” that so many American Christians are tired of.
But then the pressures begin and intensify, grow worse and worse, more and more lethal. Yet we see these ordinary pastors, church ladies, Sunday school teachers, youth group members—so very much like those we know in our own congregations—holding on to Christ, trusting in God’s Word, no matter what the NKVD does to them, and becoming blessed martyrs, and in some cases even living witnesses.