A declaration issued by a group of German theologians, led by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as representatives of the newly formed 'Confessing Church' in May 1934 asserting their opposition to the almost wholesale surrender of German liberal Protestant churches (collectively known as the German Christians) to the increasingly malevolent racism and fascism of Adolf Hitler's Nazism.
The end of WWI saw Germany, which lost the war, entering one of its most painful and confusing periods of her history. The great German empire was finished, the Kaiser was, at a stroke, dismissed and the Weimar Republic was proclaimed (in the city of Weimar, hence its name), and forced to pay heavy indemnities for her role in the war. Bitterness and humiliation quickly became the national sentiments. It was not, therefore, difficult for the German people to fall willing prey to Hitler's brand of politics of hate and Aryan supremacy (we witnessed the same sort of thing, though in a milder form, during the 2016 US election of Donald Trump; evangelical Christians were among his strongest supporters). For all the ills Germany was going through he found an easy scarecrow in the Jews. For a century or more, already, liberal theology had been the diet of the German churches; they were now ill prepared to face critically the invitation of Nazism and churches after churches, including the national Lutheran Church, were swept into Hitler's evil scheme. It was against this background of Hitler's meteoric rise to power that a group of younger Reformed theologians reacted against the liberal theology on which they had grown up and decided in 1933-4 a 'Confessing Church,' and issued the Barmen Declaration to fight against the "destructive errors of the German Christians and the present national church governments." Remarking many years later, when the horror of the Holocaust had become known, Karl Barth, who drafted the Declaration, regreted that it had not included a clause that had more clearly asserted the rights of the Jews.
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