I

Maly Kagan was born in Berlin on 14 December 1897. There was little in church history to encourage the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family to join the ranks of the Jews' enemies. ‘Jesus is only for the stupid’ summed up her rejection of the Church at this time.Footnote ¹² Yet, in spite of this burden of history, she came to faith in the founder of the Church and officially resigned from membership of a Berlin synagogue on 11 September 1919. In 1920 a total of 119 Berlin Jews took the same step.Footnote ¹³

How did the change take place? She related in 1950 that she had grown up with a godly fear in her heart which had been planted there by her mother. At the age of seventeen, however, the year the great slaughter in Europe began, she suddenly discovered that she could not believe in God anymore. Following the death of her mother in August 1917, she became restless and began searching again for the God she had lost contact with. She was duly baptised and became an active member of a local Protestant congregation. After living as ‘a stateless subject’ she eventually acquired German citizenship in 1926.Footnote ¹⁴ The insecurities of life as a Jew were, for her, normality. On 5 November 1923 a pogrom was unleashed in the Jewish Scheunenviertel – where the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI) building was also situated – and in Charlottenburg, where she was studying. Moreover, the role of the clerical elites in Russia and Germany in encouraging pogroms was equally familiar. Her colleague at the Berlin station of the HCTI, Heinrich Poms (1901–73), later recalled how, as a young man, he had read about the pogroms in Russia perpetrated by Orthodox Christians: ‘Far from protesting the Church remained silent. Many a priest incited the demonised mobs and led them, crucifix in hand, to the homes of the defenceless Jews. I felt deep solidarity with my unfortunate brethren and just thinking of their persecutors filled me with disgust.’Footnote ¹⁵

Poms had a similar eastern European heritage. Like Kagan, he, too, was ‘stateless’ for a long period of time.Footnote ¹⁶ This did not prevent him from becoming a zealous German patriot. His parents, Jakob Leiser Poms and Lina (Chaja, Lea) Steinmann, were both born in Warsaw and were strictly Orthodox in their views and lifestyle. Poms's father was, like Gilel Kagan, a small businessman.Footnote ¹⁷ While Maly Kagan had heard first-hand of Russian pogroms, Poms was familiar with the antisemitism of Polish Catholics. Both families no doubt hoped to find a safe haven in Germany, yet both Kagan and Poms would experience persecution and discrimination for themselves. In his published memoirs Poms recalled the behaviour and attitudes of his Religion teacher in Würzburg.Footnote ¹⁸ He describes him as ‘that type of moderate antisemite who was too enlightened to hate Jews, but too narrow-minded to understand them and far too little of a Christian to love them’. This unnamed teacher spoke with the greatest respect of the Ten Commandments and Moses, yet in the same breath could mock a young Jewish schoolboy so that his thirty-nine classmates had a good laugh at his expense. Fridays were the worst schooldays for Poms. The day began with Catholic prayers. Sixty years later he still remembered freezing when the class bellowed out: ‘The Jews crucified our Lord Jesus.’ As a young man he felt revolted by the ‘silver and gold’ in every church he visited: he was, he had to admit, a Jew through and through, even though he rebelled against the Orthodox ways and what he called the ‘dead religion’ of his fathers.Footnote ¹⁹ All his early experiences of the Christian Church were hugely disappointing. He knew enough of German history to know that Jews had suffered there for centuries.Footnote ²⁰ The Christian majority ‘looked down upon us as if we were heretics and as if they alone had the truth’.Footnote ²¹ Like Kagan he became spiritually restless. A change in his attitude to Christianity only began to take place when he realised that Jesus was a pious Jew who wore tallit.Footnote ²²

Poms came face to face with the prejudice of Bavarian Catholics in Weimar Germany. In 1920 the State Commissar for Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg decreed that Poms had to leave the country because of his political activities.Footnote ²³ His background as an eastern European Jew (another Ostjude, to use the loaded contemporary term) sufficed to draw criticism and contempt. However, just like many other Jews in Europe at the time, Poms had wanted to become assimilated and so he got involved in socialist youth work and had joined the Independent Socialist Party.Footnote ²⁴ He left the Orthodox faith of his father behind. The attraction of left-wing politics for Jews was obvious: these were the only parties committed to opposing antisemitism and to severing the baneful ties between Churches and states that had been the main source of so much pain for Jews. Poms enjoyed close contacts with the local branch of the German Communist Party in Würzburg and looked forward to a classless society where prejudice would be impossible. His hopes grew when a republic under the Jewish revolutionary Kurt Eisner was established in Bavaria and the Jewish poet Ernst Toller – a man Poms revered – sang the praises of political change.Footnote ²⁵ As a foreigner, a Jewish intellectualFootnote ²⁶ and a radical socialist Poms incarnated all the fears of bourgeois Christian society. He was deemed to be a danger to the security of the Bavarian state and was forced to leave. In October 1920 he moved to Berlin.Footnote ²⁷ Eighteen years later he would be forced to leave Berlin too, going to London, where his own father had once found temporary refuge. A chance visit to Hamburg led to his joining the team around Pastor Arnold Frank, with whom he stayed until his baptism on 20 January 1923.Footnote ²⁸ This step would not, of course, save him from further persecution. The Nazis eventually forced him, his Berlin-born wife Käthe and their children to leave Germany altogether a few weeks after the pogrom of 9/10 November 1938.Footnote ²⁹ Maly Kagan was not so fortunate.

For both the Kagan and Poms families the decision of their children to join, as they saw it, the ranks of their persecutors was a tragedy and a disgrace. Christianity was, and is, perceived to be a completely different faith. In their own minds, however, the two had indeed rejected some of the traditions of their fathers, but not the original faith. Kagan had in fact rejected atheism, while Poms gave up a freethinking agnosticism, before joining the Church. ‘We Jewish Christians have every desire to be Jews; believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are the true Jews. We only grieve that we are excluded from their community’, Poms told a British audience. ‘I am certain that it is God's wish that a Jew should remain a Jew.’Footnote ³⁰ In contrast to most Jewish Christians in Imperial and Weimar Germany, neither Kagan nor Poms wanted to give up or deny their Jewish identity. As Jewish believers they had a far keener sense of the corruptions and inadequacies of the Gentile Christian society around them. No doubt their Orthodox background and their strong links to a British organisation managed by other Jewish Christians also equipped them for their struggles with German antisemitism.

II

After studying for eighteen months at the Institute for Social Pedagogy managed by the Jugendheim Association in Berlin-Charlottenburg Kagan qualified as a kindergarten teacher in 1923 and started work in the day-school run by St Peter's Church (Berlin). Here she stayed for two years before taking up a post on 1 December 1925 as an auxiliary nurse in the Tannenhof psychiatric hospital in Remscheid-Lüttringhausen in the Rhineland .Footnote ³¹

The roots of the Tannenhof institution can be traced to the work of women amongst the town's poor around the time that the Rhenish Provincial Committee of the Home Mission (Innere Mission) was established in 1849.Footnote ³² A few years later one of the pioneers of Home Mission, Julius Disselhoff, highlighted the plight of the mentally ill in the Rhenish provinces.Footnote ³³ Before long there were about five hundred associations in the Rhineland and Westphalia seeking to alleviate the suffering of all kinds of people. The Rhenish committee would become the largest of all the provincial associations serving Home Mission.Footnote ³⁴ The Tannenhof hospital was established in May 1896.Footnote ³⁵ Deaconesses and deacons were trained for employment there in specially established institutes, both linked to the central Kaiserswerth training centre established by Theodor Fliedner in 1836. It became a legally independent institution in 1911, operating alongside and under the protection, but not under the control of the Lutheran Church. Like other Home Mission establishments the Tannenhof was not constitutionally part of the Lutheran Church. The institution – along with all the other institutions associated with Innere Mission – was actually kept afloat by government subsidies and funds to cover the pro diem charges. Such financial dependence of course opened up all Home Mission establishments to governmental interference.

The phrase ‘Home Mission’, today known as the Diakonisches Werk, is as misleading as referring to the ‘Evangelische Kirche’ as ‘Evangelical Church’. There was very little that was Evangelical or of a missionary bent in these organisations. From the revolutionary year of 1848 onwards Protestant individuals began to respond to the crying needs of many of their compatriots largely because the Lutheran Church did not see evangelisation or charitable endeavour as being inalienable, essential tasks of the organised Church. The home mission was, W. R. Ward maintains, a ‘social weapon’ created to stabilise bourgeois society by setting up various charitable enterprises.Footnote ³⁶ The Revd James Craig, an Irish Presbyterian missionary working amongst Jews in Hamburg, accompanied Johann Hinrich Wichern to the inaugural conference in Wittenberg in 1848 and was initially hopeful that vibrant members of the Lutheran denomination were about to start a new reformation. He was greatly disappointed that initial plans to establish a home for sailors in the port of Hamburg included no provision for devotional exercises and that ‘the Home Mission showed itself to have no sympathy with anything beyond mere humanitarian efforts’.Footnote ³⁷ Only a minority of the plethora of organisations established on a voluntary basis in the second half of the nineteenth century had an Evangelical character. Erich Beyreuther believes it is significant that while Wichern spoke of an ‘innere Mission’, by the end of the century Lutherans were speaking and writing about the ‘Innere Mission’. The vibrant grass-roots movement that Wichern had initially envisaged had within a few decades become an institution, a bureaucratic colossus.Footnote ³⁸ By the time that Hitler came to power many of those working within the voluntary health care sector were simply there for the job; the sense of a divine calling meant nothing to the majority.Footnote ³⁹ Fear of the embryonic Communist movement and dislike of democracy led religious conservatives to establish nursing homes; those same fears would lead them to support, or at least sympathise with, the National Socialist regime.

The most notable figure who incarnated this spirit of Home Mission was the Berlin court chaplain and one-time director of the Berlin City Mission, Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909).Footnote ⁴⁰ Stoecker, a member of the national supervisory body, the Central Committee for Home Mission in Berlin, sought, but ultimately failed, to win back the working classes for ‘Christian Germany’ by appealing to their basest instincts. On occasion he compared himself and was compared with Martin Luther; historians such as Uriel Tal have made the same comparison for very different reasons.Footnote ⁴¹ Most works on German antisemitism highlight the fact that the political party that he established in 1878 (the Christian Social Workers Party) was the first in modern German history to stand on an antisemitic platform. It introduced antisemitism into the political debates of the time, especially in Berlin where the Kagan family and other refugees from eastern Europe sought refuge from Jew-baiting in Poland. Not a few ecclesiastical figures after 1933 pointed to Stoecker's ‘home missionary’ activities as prophetically foreshadowing Adolf Hitler's religious programme.Footnote ⁴² Based on a study of Stoecker's sermons and speeches D. A. Jeremy Telman concludes in fact that one might easily find ‘all the elements of anti-Semitism of the National Socialist avant la lettre’.Footnote ⁴³ And his influence reached well beyond the Holocaust into post–1945 German Protestantism.

One might also point to Pastor Martin Niemöller, from 1 December 1923 manager of the Home Mission work in Westphalia. Niemöller voted for the National Socialists from 1924 onwards.Footnote ⁴⁴ While Stoecker blamed social problems and cultural disorientation on Social Democrats and assimilated Jewish businessmen, Niemöller blamed the Social Democratic Party for the ‘criminal’ policies that brought the First World War to an end and overthrew royal dynasties in Germany. Antisemitism, conspiracy theories, anticommunism and a rejection of western modernity coalesced into an ideology which became dominant in post-1918 German Protestantism. These themes would continue to permeate the minds of Protestants even as some Home Mission organisations sought to find a third neutral way between the ‘German Christian’ movement and the Confessing Church.

From 1925 to 1935 Maly Kagan devoted herself primarily to the care of the mentally ill and emotionally disturbed at Tannenhof. She sought to do justice to the mission statement of the institution that had been in place since 1896: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me’ (Matt. xxv. 40).Footnote ⁴⁵ One would like to know details of Kagan's work, particularly in the years after Adolf Hitler was handed the powers of Chancellor. Unfortunately, the personnel file on Kagan is missing – almost the only file that is missing from the archive on staff.Footnote ⁴⁶ The reason why the file was probably deliberately ‘mislaid’ has to do with the events surrounding Kagan's sudden departure from Tannenhof. Somebody wanted the whole sorry affair to be forgotten. In his obituary for Kagan Poms wrote: ‘The enemies of the Jews had been in power for three years, when Sister Maly realised (and in fact was made to see!) that it would be impossible for her to continue working as a nurse.’Footnote ⁴⁷ How did such a situation come about?

In 1933 there were about 70,000 Protestant deaconesses working in Home Mission establishments.Footnote ⁴⁸ Many were also carried away in the emotional frenzy which Hitler's accession to power unleashed in Germany.Footnote ⁴⁹ Many saw themselves as Christ's storm troopers and they were keen to introduce Nazi views on ‘racial hygiene’ and euthanasia into the business of nursing care. Pastor Theophil Krawielitzki, then head of the evangelical German Fellowship Social Welfare Association, actually compared conversion and spiritual regeneration with acceptance into the ranks of the SS and SA.Footnote ⁵⁰ The political turmoil in 1933 echoed through all the Churches and all theological camps.

The situation was no different at the Protestant institutions at Tannenhof.Footnote ⁵¹ Shortly after the elections in March 1933 the swastika flag was hoisted over the establishment. Ninety-seven per cent of the electors in the Tannenhof constituency had voted for the National Socialists.Footnote ⁵² The medical director at the facility introduced the Hitler salute on all wards at the beginning of 1939. Forced sterilisations were introduced shortly after the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring was enacted on 14 July 1933. Nazi eugenics was popular among the Protestants in Lüttringhausen.Footnote ⁵³

The pro-Nazi and pro-Reichskirche Pastor Paul Ernst Werner (1877–1941) functioned as clerical director (geistlicher Vorsteher) at the Tannenhof.Footnote ⁵⁴ He was also responsible for teaching religion to the trainee nurses in their first year and their final year.Footnote ⁵⁵ Born in Alsace, his mother was the great-grand-daughter of Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, who had established a variety of charitable organisations in the Steintal valley. A colleague related to the Reich bishop of the German Protestant Church on 8 May 1935 that Werner had had to leave his homeland on account of his German nationalism.Footnote ⁵⁶ His negative experiences drove him into the arms of the National Socialists. Werner had started work at Tannenhof in 1930. In spite of his pedigree he revealed a cold, unfeeling attitude towards the most vulnerable of his patients.Footnote ⁵⁷ In her tape-recorded memoirs the Mother Superior at Tannenhof, Hildegard von Bülow (1901–76), remembered that Werner was at that time ‘a very sick man’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This at least is how she interpreted his outbursts and crude attempts to Nazify the whole establishment. When Hitler did come to power it turned out – to the initial surprise of von Bülow – that Werner had already been a member of the Nazi Party for some time. In fact, he only joined the party on 1 May 1933 and roughly at the same time became an active member of the Schutzstaffel (SS).Footnote ⁵⁹ He was ‘a 120% Nazi and also a totally committed member of the German Christian Movement’. He told her that 90 per cent of deacons and 70 per cent of deaconesses were already Nazi Party and GDC members – figures, for the deaconesses at least, which she considered wishful thinking. They were no doubt targets that he had set himself. Often Werner would hold Bible studies until almost midnight and then try to persuade staff to join the GDC. Von Bülow dithered and hesitated – until the meeting of 20,000 GDC adherents in the Berlin Sportpalast on 13 November 1933 decided matters for her and other deaconesses at Tannenhof. They listened to the conference speeches on the radio. The fact that ‘everything Jewish’ was to be debunked by a National Church run by the GDC – the Old Testament, a lot of the New Testament, even a Jewish Jesus – and the so-called Aryan Paragraph applied Church-wide, effectively excluding those of Jewish descent from membership, opened their eyes to the spiritual battle taking place. Against this background it is understandable that a large number of staff began to come to von Bülow, saying they could not bear the thought of attending Werner's Bible studies anymore. One deaconess had, in fact, already succumbed to pressure and committed suicide. Only three or four deaconesses, von Bülow thought, were under the control of Werner and, since they were about to be officially inducted, showed an unwillingness to oppose his leadership. She approached the clinical director at Tannenhof, Dr Wilhelm Philipps,Footnote ⁶⁰ stating that she could no longer bear responsibility for the deteriorating situation amongst the deaconesses. While showing understanding for her predicament Philipps, a Nazi party member himself, warned her to tread softly; nor was he willing to endanger his own family by sticking his neck out. Members of the management committee gave her permission to go to Hamburg for a month. At the same time Werner was asked to stand down as director.Footnote ⁶¹

Werner was not the most avid Nazi in the Lutheran institution. In a letter to Reich Bishop Ludwig MüllerFootnote ⁶² dated 8 May 1935 – four months before the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws were adopted to protect German ‘honour’ and ‘German blood’ – one woman complained that she had been temporarily suspended from her post as a teacher in the Tannenhof establishment.Footnote ⁶³ To the bishop who, as head of the Old Prussian Church since 6 July 1933, championed an ecclesiastical establishment which excluded Jews from leadership functions, she related this personal setback to the arrival of the Kirchenkampf on the premises of her place of work. She criticised the ‘parliamentary system’ still in place in the Tannenhof. Von Bülow's memoirs provide some details on the matter.Footnote ⁶⁴

The woman in question was Martha Rielandt. Little is known about her. In November 1931 she began working at the Tannenhof, having been prepared for her tasks in the Bethel institutions. She was thirty-nine and had already been a teacher for twenty years when Hitler came to power. At the same time, however, she was one of the 2·3 million members of the National Socialist Women's League (NS-Frauenschaft) which had been established in October 1931.Footnote ⁶⁵ Membership was voluntary; only the most committed supporters of Nazism joined this organisation which, in 1935, formally became a section of the NSDAP. Explaining to the Reich bishop why she had taken this step, she quoted Luther, stating she could do no other.Footnote ⁶⁶ She held the office of a Frauenschaftsleiterin and exercised an ideological control function within the Tannenhof establishment.

Rielandt taught seventy-one trainee deaconesses a range of subjects at the Tannenhof. A three-page report in the institution's archive provides some details of her teaching.Footnote ⁶⁷ She records how Hitler's seizure of power (‘the most powerful expression of Germany's vitality’) had been welcomed with ‘great joy and gratitude’ in her place of employment. She sought to help the doubters and apolitical sisters to understand the tremendous events taking place, to personally adapt to the new situation and to enable them to make their own contribution to the reordering of society. In her literature classes Hitler's Mein Kampf was one of the works discussed. Each nurse had to give talks on aspects of the book, followed by an open discussion in the group. Geography classes were geared to underlining the importance of Germany's place and role in the world, to help Rielandt's students to ‘love Germany more and more’ and to ‘comprehend the danger in which the country found itself following the signing of the ignominious, humiliating Versailles Treaty’. History classes were devoted to the Nazi ‘liberation movement’, its successes and achievements to date. In art classes Rielandt focused on the links between art and race. Racial issues were also a core element in the psychology classes, not least because Rielandt discovered that ideas of racial purity (der völkische Gedanke) were completely alien to the older sisters. She was free to interject politically correct interpretations of Christianity into her lessons as her contribution to the subordination of all activities to the rule of the party and the wishes of the Führer (Gleichschaltung). She taught the deaconesses, for example, that Jesus had not been a Jew, but rather a full-blooded Aryan who had been born in the north of Europe – in Mecklenburg, in fact, the very place, coincidentally, that she, Rielandt, came from herself. ‘If he had really been a Jew, then she would have certainly been one of the very first people to be admitted as a patient in Tannenhof’, she is quoted as saying. Von Bülow and others made it clear to her that such instruction was unacceptable; she was forced to give up her Religion classes – a step which led to the local party boss (whose parental home was very Evangelical in tone) making a loud complaint on the phone. He relented on hearing exactly what was being taught. Not only the clergy and the doctors, but also teaching staff were drawn into the National Socialist heresy.

Rielandt was encouraged to take four weeks’ leave, too. She devoted herself to party affairs. In a memorandum dated 18 September 1935 Pastor Werner noted that the previous week her teaching ‘was interrupted for a few days when she took part in the party conference at Nuremberg’ – the seventh Nazi Party Conference (10–16 September 1935) at which the infamous Nuremburg Laws were announced, laws which would have a profound impact on her own colleague, Maly Kagan.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rielandt believed that Hildegard von Bülow was behind a conspiracy to remove her and that ideological and ecclesiastical differences between the two were the reasons. The teacher had joined the NSDAP before 1933 and supported the idea of a unified German National Church under Müller's leadership; von Bülow was not quite so right-wing in her political views (preferring the German National People's Party, whose membership was not quite as rabidly antisemitic as that of the NSDAP) and supported the Confessing Church (which was, contrary to modern received opinion, as equally enamoured with Hitler as the Reichskirche).Footnote ⁶⁹ Rielandt asked the bishop whether such varying points of view were reason enough ‘to simply throw a child of God on to the streets and to do that under the cloak of Christian love. I have to take care of my old parents all on my own – and what is to become of them if they throw me out?’ Her attack on von Bülow was not yet finished. She pointed out that the Mother Superior had also conspired, too, to have Werner temporarily removed from his post at Tannenhof. His deputy, Pastor Gustorff, was said to be a ‘fanatical supporter of the Confessing Church (Bekenntnisfront) who speaks very derogatorily about you and the National Church’. This had caused the younger nurses great anguish, though the older deaconesses were, she said, ‘all zealous supporters of the Confessing Church’. One nurse in particular had cooperated with von Bülow in her shameful manoeuvring: ‘her confidant – no, she is more than that – her adjutant, namely a baptised Galician Jew who works here as an auxiliary nurse and who stirred up all the young nurses to write a petition to the Tannenhof's board of management (all of whom are zealous supporters of the Confessing Church) demanding my immediate dismissal as a teacher because I was counteracting the influence of the Mother Superior’. Though this is clearly an overstatement, there can be little doubt that the ‘Galician Jew’ – a loaded synonym for Ostjude – referred to here (if not by name) was Maly Kagan. She seems to have been the only ‘non-Aryan’ member of staff in the whole establishment.Footnote ⁷⁰

Why, then, did Maly Kagan have to leave her nursing job in 1935? In the Schwesternbuch it is recorded when she began to work and that she had gone to Berlin. Slotted in between these points is a reference, strangely recorded by a different hand, to the fact that her eyesight was at risk, though this is not given as a reason for her dismissal.Footnote ⁷¹ Given that Kagan worked a lot in the kitchen on a women's ward short-sightedness would not have necessitated her leaving the Tannenhof. She herself states that she was forced to leave the hospital and according to deaconesses she was denounced as a trouble-maker. Von Bülow probably got wind of the threats being made and encouraged Kagan to stay with some of the deaconesses until the situation quietened down.Footnote ⁷² It was Kagan's first taste of living incognito. Only von Bülow knew of her whereabouts in the Rhineland at any one time. In all probability it was von Bülow who made it clear to Kagan that her life really was in danger and that she had to leave the region. The Gau Inspector and regional officer of the Nazi Party, Kreisleiter Strasswege, wrote to the management board of the Tannenhof on 7 July 1935, expressing his complete support for his party comrades Werner and Dr Philipps and demanding that ‘the Jew, Sister Mally Kagan [sic]’ leave the establishment immediately.Footnote ⁷³ Two days later Kagan left her place of employment and arrived at the Deaconesses’ Home in Kropp far away in Schleswig-Holstein on 11 July 1935.Footnote ⁷⁴ Officially Kagan was on leave and, again officially, only left the Tannenhof on 1 December 1935.

At the time Paul Werner was still in post, though he was eventually replaced by a Confessing Churchman. Rielandt came back off leave in the middle of August and resumed most of her teaching duties – in Racial Hygiene, for example. The two conspired to remove the Jew from their midst. Fifty years after the event the oldest deaconesses were adamant that von Bülow had done everything to ‘save’ Kagan.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, Rielandt's successor later reported that Kagan ‘had to leave as a kind of quid pro quo’ for the removal of both Werner and Rielandt.Footnote ⁷⁶ The management of the establishment had long realised that employing Jews might lead to unpleasant scenes which might put careers at risk, even in a facility supposedly dedicated to compassionate care of the vulnerable. It is quite possible that Kagan became the sacrificial lamb that was meant to limit the influence and impact of Nazi ideology on the establishment. Given the general political situation in Germany at the end of 1935 and Rielandt's attitude to Jews, Kagan felt it safer to leave the small community in Lüttringhausen. The very disappearance of her personnel file underlines the truth that she had become a persona non grata.

Kagan was forced, perhaps for a complex of reasons, to leave ‘the beloved hospital’Footnote ⁷⁷ and the close fellowship of the deaconesses. The story of Jewish Christians highlights the inaction of the Central Committee as well as the Rhenish Committee for Home Mission. German Protestants had never been able to break free from the anti-democratic, authoritarian ethos that controlled their behaviour. As a result no clear statements criticising Nazi antisemitism were forthcoming at either regional or national level. The Home Mission organisations failed to take a stand for Jewish Christians and refused to provide direct assistance to enable them, for example, to leave Germany. Such actions were left to the voluntary choices of relatively powerless individuals. But there were not only sins of omission. Kagan's experiences were not as dire as that of two Jewish patients at the Tannenhof hospital, Else Gutmann and Siegfried Marienthal, who were removed to Düsseldorf-Grafenberg in 1941 and from there deported to eastern Europe, where they were murdered.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nazi racial policies were allowed to impact on the admission and employment policies at the Tannenhof hospital. Opinion polls carried out in April/May 1935 by Marga Meusel, who headed up the Regional Protestant Welfare Office of the Home Mission in Berlin-Zehrendorf,Footnote ⁷⁹ revealed that very few Motherhouses of the deaconesses and training institutes for deacons were willing by that time to admit what the Nazis called ‘non-Aryans’, irrespective of their Christian faith and commitment.Footnote ⁸⁰ In a letter to Meusel on 23 February 1936 Dr Philipps wrote: ‘We have so far not employed any diaconal candidates who were not purely Aryan.’ On 27 April 1935 Paul Werner wrote that Protestant ‘non-Aryans’ had not been admitted as students to the Tannenhof facility because ‘problems and difficulties might easily occur’ were Jews to be employed.Footnote ⁸¹ Such unwillingness to have dealings with people of Jewish descent had not a little to do with the antisemitic spirit and influence of Adolf Stoecker.Footnote ⁸²

III

For Kagan her expulsion from the Home Mission establishment was followed by a short period of great sadness; she later recalled darkness and despair of soul, when she even contemplated suicide.Footnote ⁸³ She returned to the Women's Missionary College for Home and Foreign Mission in Freienwalde an der OderFootnote ⁸⁴ where, in 1925, she had studied for a while.Footnote ⁸⁵ This institution, normally referred to as the Malche Bible House, was the brainchild of the Evangelical pastor Ernst Lohmann (1860–1936). Officially opened in 1900, it was truly missionary in outlook and Evangelical in character, in stark contrast to many of the other charitable organisations functioning under the umbrella of the Home Mission.Footnote ⁸⁶ Kagan could be sure of receiving a warm welcome from the women there, for whom, whatever the Nuremberg Laws might say, Israel was still God's most favoured nation. From 1894 onwards Bible studies were led by Anna von Hochstetter (1862–1947) and the Jewish Christian Jeanne Wasserzug (1867–1936) in the Malche Valley and these ultimately led to the establishment of a training institute to equip women for overseas work, initially in China and India. Four years later, in 1898, the first one-year course was offered to women.

It was the pastoral director of the college, Jeanne Wasserzug, who recommended that Kagan go to Poms in Berlin.Footnote ⁸⁷ In this way she began to support the work of the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI), one of the missionary societies working with Jewish people in the Reich capital. This society was founded by two Jews, David Baron and C. A. Schönberger, in 1893 to ‘bear witness for Christ to the Jewish people in all the lands of their dispersion, in order, by the preaching of the Gospel, to call out the “Remnant according to the election of grace” and to prepare the nation for the time when “the Redeemer shall come out of Zion”, and “all Israel shall be saved” ’. HCTI staff rejected replacement theology and its social consequences.Footnote ⁸⁸

This was not the case with the oldest German missionary organisations working with Jews, the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden (established in 1822), an offshoot of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. It would be naive to generalise about Jewish missionary societies. Theological and personal differences have always hindered cooperation amongst the various Jewish missionary societies. Rarely were the respective hierarchies supportive of each other in any significant manner. The extreme nationalism which facilitated Adolf Hitler's seizure of power, and was itself fostered by that event, impacted on the miniscule Jewish missionary community in Berlin, which, anyway, failed to gain the backing of the church organisation to which the activists belonged. Professor Alfred K. G. Jeremias (1864–1935), chairman of the Lutheran Central Association for Mission to the Jews,Footnote ⁸⁹ wrote to the Oberkirchenrat on 9 February 1933 warning him that the failure of the Lutheran Church to support mission to the Jews was encouraging ‘private’ and ‘sectarian’ missionary societies to fill the vacuum. Their activities were deemed by Lutherans and Jews alike to be ‘repugnant’. Further appealing to the nationalism of his ecclesiastical superiors, Jeremias added that ‘English-speaking missionaries could hardly wait to occupy central Europe’ and so inevitably establish ‘bases’ for the unGerman Methodist and Baptist denominations. Under all circumstances their aggressive activities had to be stopped, he claimed.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Lutheran strategy of demonising a competitor did not pay off. Ironically, the London-based HCTI was allowed to continue operations a little longer than the Berlin Society, which managed to maintain its position until its offices were finally occupied by the Gestapo on 23 January 1941.Footnote ⁹¹ A few days later the society was notified that it had been dissolved and proscribed.Footnote ⁹²

Following the pogroms of November 1938 – the euphemistic Nazi propaganda term Reichskristallnacht was coined to downplay and satirise the terror unleashed against Jews of all persuasions – Maly Kagan was left in the German capital in charge of the operations of the work of the HCTI. The environment was clearly by that time not favourable to those who were still willing to talk to Jews as equals. In his diary a Mr Gamper, a Jewish Christian worker at the mission station, spoke of the capital in apocalyptic terms as he prepared to leave Germany. Berlin was, he wrote, ‘where the throne of Satan stands’.Footnote ⁹³ While Gamper and his wife, who had become Christians through the HCTI, both perished in the Holocaust, Kagan miraculously survived the final years of Nazi tyranny. Her new home was just a few yards away from the main synagogue in the Oranienburger Strasse. In April 1936 she was introduced by the British Jewish-Christian journal The Scattered Nation to British supporters of the mission in Berlin.Footnote ⁹⁴ She took over the leadership of a women's group.Footnote ⁹⁵ Starting with just a handful of Jewish women its numbers grew to a few dozen. ‘The meetings have been exceptionally well attended, sometimes the hall was over full’, The Scattered Nation reported.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bible study and singing worship songs were the core elements of these gatherings. Sometimes letters would be read out from Jewish Christian missionaries working in other countries. Meetings would close with a time of open prayer. After one year Kagan reported: ‘I did not imagine this work to be as difficult as it actually is.’Footnote ⁹⁷ She had to travel all over the city visiting contacts and members of the small Jewish Christian community. This cost a lot of time and money. Even though the distress of the suffering Jews made her ‘very sad’, she nevertheless was ‘delighted’ that she was able to carry on working with them.Footnote ⁹⁸ ‘Our great goal ever remains the spiritual quickening of our Jewish brothers and sisters’, she wrote to London at the beginning of 1939, ‘and this glorious goal remains our important task’. Even as war approached in 1939 no hindrances were being put in the way of the work of the HCTI by the authorities.Footnote ⁹⁹ Then all communication with Kagan was lost.

With the outbreak of war the HCTI house in Berlin became enemy property and was taken over by a Reich Commissar. He allowed Kagan to continue to administer the premises as long as she sent in written reports every six months. Thus she was left in charge of the building, ‘probably the only Jew still in charge of property in the whole Reich’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ If her poor eyesight had been the excuse perhaps to relieve her of her duties in the Tannenhof, it also preserved her from manual labour in a munitions factory. In the autumn of 1940 she lost her sight completely. She was actually granted the option of having an operation which proved a great success. Prayer was offered, Kagan later recorded, and she regained full sight. Nevertheless, the German authorities declared her unfit for forced labour.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Her women's meetings continued as did the relief operations. Jewish community representatives in Berlin sent homeless Jews to Oranienburger Strasse 20. On 24 December 1941 – the previous week the leaderships of the provincial churches in Saxony, Mecklenburg, Anhalt and Thuringia welcomed the introduction of the yellow star badge for Jews, quoting Martin Luther in the process, saying that Jews were the hereditary enemies of ChristiansFootnote ¹⁰² – she received notice that she was to be deported. She notes that it was no longer a secret that her deportation notice meant death – but, surprisingly, the Gestapo relented when a report was made by Jewish representatives that her services as a ‘matron’ in the home were essential: ‘God worked a miracle and I was reclaimed by the Jewish Community though they knew that I was a Hebrew Christian missionary.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Though she had in the eyes of the Jewish community abandoned Judaism, Kagan was a member of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, an organisation established by the Nazi government in July 1939 and presided over by Rabbi Leo Baeck in order better to control all those defined as Jews by the Nuremberg Laws.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Here she temporarily rejoined her Jewish companions in fate and helped to build bridges between Jews and Jewish Christians. Two more deportation notices, on 27 August 1942 and on 11 December 1942, were overturned by the Reich Commissar in consultation with the Gestapo.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The whole time Kagan refused to wear a yellow badge, continued to use public transport and was always willing to show her Jewish identity card if asked.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ She was the last missionary in Berlin.

Condemnations of National Socialism and antisemitism fill the pages of The Scattered Nation during this period. The editor and contributors left no doubt that they believed the developments in Germany, and other countries in Europe, were inhuman and ultimately of demonic origin. In an address to the annual meeting of the HCTI in April 1936 Poms tried to contextualise Nazi persecution theologically:

Divine Providence was using the evils perpetrated by politicians and churchmen to serve His ultimate purposes for Israel.

The HCTI did not only speak out against the persecution of Jews in Germany. The Jewish Christian H. D. Leuner, who knew Maly Kagan well, wrote a few years after her death that the staff of missionary societies had acted, in nearly all cases, honourably and saved many lives that otherwise would have been lost had the victims relied on the Churches.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The HCTI had premises in Berlin where Jews were accepted and welcomed as Jews. While Nazi mobs in 1938 destroyed synagogues and ransacked the rented buildings of the Mildmay Mission to the Jews, the Church Missions to the Jews as well as the offices of the Berlin Society for Propagating Christianity amongst the Jews, the HCTI building in the centre of Berlin was left untouched.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In all likelihood this was due to the fact that the property was known to belong to a foreign organisation and the Nazi government had no great wish at this time to incense British public opinion. This asset was put to good use. Help in various forms was offered and received there in the dark days of Nazi Germany. Maly Kagan was part of that relief effort, conducted for two years in connection with Provost Heinrich Grüber's office which facilitated the emigration of Jewish Christians.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This office or Kirchliche Hilfsstelle für evangelische Nichtarier was housed in the HCTI building, on the same floor as Kagan's apartment, until the end of July 1941 when the rooms were taken by the Family School.Footnote ¹¹¹ For about a year Jewish Christian children attended a school in the building.Footnote ¹¹² Dr Erwin Reisner, who was responsible for the education and pastoral care of the children, paid rent for an apartment in the building from August 1941.Footnote ¹¹³ He worked for the Grüber office, but he was also appointed, on 6 June 1939, Poms's successor as general manager of the mission.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Kagan thus became linked with the only significant attempt on the part of the Confessing Church to alleviate the distress of its Jewish Christian members:

The Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, of which Kagan was forced to be a member, as well as monies from Confessing Church circles in Bavaria and Württemberg, contributed financially to the work of this office.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this way she helped some – such as Heinrich Poms and his family – to make their escape from Germany before 1939 and comforted others who, trapped in Berlin, could no longer escape.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This work could only take place with the support of the caretaker of the building – Kagan, who from 1 January 1939 had been forced by the Nazis to call herself Maly Sara Kagan to underline her Jewish nature.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Until the end of 1942 the building was still being used for meetings – by then, in Kagan's own room – and to provide shelter for Jews and Jewish Christians who were being hunted by the Gestapo.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Poms paid for English language classes for those who had decided to emigrate to England or the USA.Footnote ¹²⁰ There were not many churches in Germany which could boast of having achieved so much for so many with so few resources.

One of the most difficult experiences for Jewish Christians in Berlin during the Third Reich was rejection by other Christians because they were Jews. On the one hand, the ‘genuine’ Christians looked upon them as brothers and sisters, but they made it clear that they did not like being seen together with them. Poms commented in 1936: ‘My presence is painful to them because of the doubtful position they would find themselves in with regard to the State …. They would rather not see me at all.’Footnote ¹²¹ The best they could hope for from fellow Christians was a timely warning that the Gestapo were looking for them. In February 1943 friends in Berlin, Wilhelm and Luise Teske, urged Kagan to leave the German capital.Footnote ¹²² Teske's daughter remembered that Kagan had wanted to hear from her father whether it was appropriate for a Christian to go underground and live illegally. On receiving an affirmative answer, Kagan hurried out of ‘this Sodom’ as fast as she could.Footnote ¹²³ If she had stayed a week longer she, too, would have become a statistic – one of the six million Jews murdered in and outside the death camps by volunteers from Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukraine and a number of other Christian countries.

IV

Until April 1945 Maly Kagan lived underground, in a variety of hideouts, seeking continuously to avoid agents of the Gestapo.Footnote ¹²⁴ Some old deaconesses at the Malche Bible School later reported that Maly Kagan had been welcomed into the home of a colleague with connections to the Malche Institute. This was Lotti Hickstein who lived in the Reichsgau Wartheland. At a time when it was forbidden for Jews to use public transport Kagan travelled east. Hickstein hid Kagan and shared her rations with her. A few other women in the village knew this and shared foodstuffs on occasion with Hickstein. Kagan felt secure enough to leave her hideout at night to look at the stars and breathe fresh air.Footnote ¹²⁵

Another unsung heroine was Dorothea Hickel, a member of a Protestant Sisterhood (Schwesternschaft der Rheinischen Frauenhilfe) who worked for the Dühringshof nursing centre with responsibility for a number of villages around Landsberg an der Warthe.Footnote ¹²⁶ She was the eldest sister of Pastor Hermann Hickel, a Confessing Church member in Oberrossbach (Hesse). Dorothea Hickel gave Kagan a deaconess's outfit to wear so that she could accompany her during house visits to the sick in the parishes for which she had responsibility.Footnote ¹²⁷ It thus happened that Kagan also provided comfort and care for the brother or father of the Nazi Ortsgruppenleiter for Landsberg.Footnote ¹²⁸ She stayed there for a whole year with the knowledge and protection of the local pastor.

Some Christians opened their homes to Jews on the run.Footnote ¹²⁹ One such helper was Annedore Hickel, the wife of the Revd Hermann Hickel. Kagan was a stranger to Hickel but she was welcomed nevertheless. A deaconess by the name of Zuleika Pyelik, a nurse in Frankfurt, had accompanied Kagan for part of the 300-mile journey across Germany from Landsberg and brought her to Hickel.Footnote ¹³⁰ Kagan stayed in the house for about four weeks until it became clear that others had got wind of her presence.Footnote ¹³¹ She was taken immediately by Sister Zuleika to Haiger, where an old tradesman by the name of Schröder – whom Kagan had once visitedFootnote ¹³² – took her into his home. Here Kagan was able to stay until the war came to an end. ‘Salvation drew nearer – preceded by bombs which destroyed about a quarter of our little town’, Kagan wrote five years later. On Good Friday 1945 her saviour arrived, in the form of an American soldier.Footnote ¹³³ The following month the war which had been whole-heartedly supported by all the Churches in Germany came to an end.

V

Millions of Jews and Jewish Christians had been murdered by the time the Second World War came to an end. Of a total of around 500,000 Jews in Germany in 1933 only 3,000 were left by 1945. In Berlin there had been 160,564 Jews in 1933; 90,000 of these had managed to emigrate, but 55,000 had been murdered. Only 8,000 Berlin Jews survived the ordeal of Nazi rule. Kagan was one of the 1,400 Jews who had survived by spending years in hiding.Footnote ¹³⁴

In spring 1946 the directors of the HCTI in London heard a rumour that Kagan was safe in Frankfurt am Main.Footnote ¹³⁵ Once a centre of Jewish life and culture Frankfurt had seen its Jewry decimated by National Socialism. In 1925 29,385 Jews lived there, representing 6·25 per cent of the total population.Footnote ¹³⁶ Between 1941 and 1944 at least 11,000 of those Jews who had remained in the city were deported and sent to their deaths. Nearly 20 per cent of the Jewish population in 1925 had been of foreign, mostly Polish extraction, and these had been forced to leave Germany in October 1938. Most will have perished in the gas chambers.Footnote ¹³⁷ Some Jewish survivors returned to their devastated city once the fighting had stopped. Even before the war was officially ended the town authorities had established, in April 1945, a centre to care for them. The Jewish community rose from the ashes and was reconstituted in Frankfurt am Main in 1949.

There were literally millions of people in Europe at the time that had been displaced by the war. Millions of ethnic Germans who had fled or been expelled from their ancestral homes in eastern Europe returned home to their fatherland. In addition, 30,000 Jewish ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs) ended up in the American zone of occupation where they were cared for by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.Footnote ¹³⁸ The numbers of Jewish Holocaust survivors streaming into the American zone increased throughout 1946 as antisemitic pogroms took place in Poland and elsewhere. Camps had to be established by the military authorities to house these poor individuals. In the summer of 1945 a camp at Zeilsheim was opened, in December 1945 another at Lampertheim and in 1946 further camps were established at Bensheim, Babenhausen and Dieburg – each holding about 1,000 Jewish refugees.Footnote ¹³⁹ Only after the British government gave up its mandate in Palestine and the state of Israel was established in May 1948 did the numbers begin to dwindle. Displaced persons still made up nearly 74 per cent of the Jewish community in Hesse.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The last camp in Germany was closed in February 1957.

It is perhaps not at all surprising that Protestants in post-war Germany did so little for the DPs. The provincial Church in Hesse was no different from the others in that it failed to denazify itself. There was a high degree of continuity in personnel in the period. ‘Screening boards of the Church made little progress, the progressive “confessional” members being hampered at every turn by reactionary bishops and a considerable number of reactionary clergy’, stated a report on the clergy in Gross-Hesse from May 1946.Footnote ¹⁴¹ More than a hundred pastors in Hesse had joined the Nazi party or other Nazi organisations. The military authorities had recommended mandatory removal of 140 pastors and the sacking of thirty-five others. In Frankfurt alone more than 27 per cent of pastors were put into the category for removal. The church authorities initially dismissed or suspended just over half. Many ‘German Christians’ were, however, reabsorbed and allowed to continue drawing salaries as if nothing had happened.Footnote ¹⁴² All but 2 per cent of salaried employees in Hesse who had been sacked for Nazi activities were in the end able to return to their jobs.Footnote ¹⁴³ It was most unlikely that such church employees, many of whom were still antisemitic in outlook, would do anything for Jewish survivors. Hessian Church representatives do not seem to have become involved in any way in building bridges between the DP camp inmates and the local German populations, though relations between the two groups were often characterised by bitterness and prejudice. In her first progress report to HCTI headquarters in London Kagan speaks of the dreadful last seven years: ‘The suffering endured is beyond description. Even unbelievers learnt to believe in the power of Satan which was so manifest.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Yet the people seemed to have no sense of guilt for ‘the diabolical cruelties [done] to the Jews’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ There was no sign of repentance.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For example, Ernst-Wolfgang Topf, whose company had provided the specially designed ovens for the SS to use in Auschwitz, re-established his business in the Hessian capital in 1946 as if nothing untoward had happened. It was a strange time when silence veiled a multitude of sins committed during the dark night of National Socialism: sins of commission and even more sins of omission. The Revd Martin Niemöller spoke of an ‘organised resistance to repentance’ in post-war Germany.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ He, however, was at the heart of the problem in Hesse. As church president for Hesse and Nassau Niemöller, who was a critic of denazification, provided secure pastoral jobs for war criminals like Matthäus Ziegler, notorious antisemites such as Wolf Meyer-Erlach and the fanatical ‘German Christian’ head of the Reich Women's Service (Evangelische Reichsfrauenhilfe), Hans Hermenau.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Churchmen provided the infamous ‘Persil certificates’, as the character references were called which washed Nazis whiter than white. There was nothing in the past of such men that might have led them to help displaced persons or Jewish Christians. Neglect and indifference were the result.

Efforts were made, however, by a few individual members of the Protestant Church in Frankfurt to gather together all those surviving Christians who had been persecuted for racial reasons by the Nazis and who had been largely left to their own devices prior to 1945. Perhaps as many as 60,000 such Christians had survived the Third Reich.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Neither the government nor the Churches paid reparations to these individuals nor would the Jewish community's relief organisations have anything to do with them. It was left to volunteers to establish and coordinate some kind of support network. A contact office for those Christians persecuted as Jews by the Nazis (Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte) was established on 5 June 1946 in the town.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Kagan made herself available once again and worked for seven years amongst the 3,000 believers who had registered with the office.Footnote ¹⁵¹ This was in some ways a continuation of her work with Provost Grüber in Berlin. Pastor Margot Nicolaus, who helped to run the help centre in Frankfurt, mentions in a letter to Pastor Dr Freudenberg of the Ecumenical Committee on Aid to Refugees in Geneva that these remnants of Jewish Christian circles in Europe had ‘unfortunately also been neglected by ecclesiastical authorities in the Third Reich or even expelled from the life of their congregations’. Most of these people had spent time in concentration camps and had lost relatives in the Shoah.Footnote ¹⁵² Yet it seemed that very little was then being done for them. Antisemitism was still rife and prevented these people from being welcomed back into the organisations that had disowned them.Footnote ¹⁵³ The goal of the centre was simply to provide material aid, not organise Bible studies or separate events for Jewish Christians as the Paulus-Bund had done during the Third Reich. Kagan was one of those few volunteers who channelled relief to Jewish Christians and other Jews, inside and outside the DP camps, from her rooms in Park Street.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The basic needs of survivors of the Shoah were thus met by a small band of helpers unsupported by either the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany or its relief organisation, the Evangelisches Hilfswerk, which were unwilling to practise any kind of positive discrimination in this regard. One should not forget that the chairman of the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany between 1949 and 1961 was bishop Otto Dibelius, a man who had never made a secret of his antisemitism and his loathing of Ostjuden.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The head of the Hilfswerk, Eugen Gerstenmaier, together with its general secretary, Christian Berg, were opposed to any special treatment of Jewish Christians and were opposed to even using the term ‘Jewish Christian’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ For the Hilfswerk it was completely irrelevant whether the person requesting aid had been a Nazi or a victim of Nazi persecution.

Logistical and financial support came from yet another source, the Orient Mission (Deutscher Hilfsbund für christliches Liebeswerk im Orient). This organisation was established in Frankfurt am Main by Pastor Ernst Lohmann and Dr Johannes Lepsius following massacres of Armenians between 1894 and 1896. Lohmann had also initiated the establishment of the Malche Bible college where Kagan had been trained to do mission work in Islamic countries. A co-founder of the evangelical Fellowship Movement within Lutheranism, he was always wary of ecclesiastical interference in his evangelistic and charitable work and preferred to maintain a high degree of independence from his own Church. He had been associated with an independent church fellowship in Frankfurt-Bockenheim. His stance almost certainly influenced Kagan who was provided by the Orient Mission with money and two deaconesses as helpers. One was Hilde Frohwein of Lemgo, who was a great help in the camps for she spoke Yiddish and was able to provide counsel and comfort to many Polish Jews.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Sister Charlotte Schüler, a trained nurse, was the other. She ran a Bible class for young people.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Secretarial support was given by Hildegard Kugelmann, whose father, a Jewish Christian, had survived concentration camps. Temporary workers were supplied by the Bible School in Beatenberg, Switzerland. The pastoral support and teaching ministry was provided by the Revd Erich Tiedtke.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Tiedtke was attached to the very same church, the Christ Immanuel Church, which Lohmann had pastored between 1891 and 1896.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Kagan conducted the Thursday Bible Class. The whole operation ran under the name of Service for Christ (Christus-Dienst). Kagan helped to gather what was in effect an embryonic Jewish Christian fellowship, providing a safe place for those who had been alienated from German Protestantism in the previous decade.

There was a strong ecumenical and international aspect to this work. Parcels of clothes, medicines and food were sent from London and Basle for them to distribute in the DP camps in and around Frankfurt.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Kagan mainly helped Jews in the Bensheim DP camp, where about 850 Jews were waiting to emigrate to Palestine.Footnote ¹⁶² Saturnin and Gertrud Wasserzug sent relief parcels as well as 1,000 German-language Christian books and other literature from Beatenberg.Footnote ¹⁶³ New Testaments in Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish were given away. Some people were helped with emigration issues. When Poms arrived to support Kagan, he offered free English classes for those hoping to emigrate. Kagan took fourteen children from a camp to Switzerland – probably to Beatenberg – for a holiday in July 1948 and returned to find that the new West German currency was exacerbating the economic distress.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Some of the relief shipments were passed on to Leipzig, in eastern Germany, where there were a number of struggling Jewish Christians;Footnote ¹⁶⁵ others went to Sister Martha Lauschke and Sister Annie Whisler in Berlin.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Some parcels of food and clothing were sent to a welfare office in Haifa.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Apart from distributing charitable donations Kagan became involved in theological attempts to improve relations between the Church and the Jewish community. Biblical teaching was essential for that process of realignment. Kagan urged Poms to return to full-time work in Germany in order to teach Christians a biblical view of the Jewish people. For many months between 1950 and 1952 Frankfurt became his base for teaching and preaching in Germany.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The prophetic truths about Israel's restoration to God's favour were highlighted in his talks:

A prayer letter from Kagan highlights Poms's important lectures and talks in churches and fellowships – to congregations of up to 900 people – on the ‘demonic origin of antisemitism’ and the need to repent of all forms of such prejudice.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ For Kagan the Jewish people not only had a future as a nation in their own land, but the future of mankind itself was intimately bound up with the material and physical prosperity of that nation.Footnote ¹⁷¹ For her, salvation still came from the Jews.Footnote ¹⁷² For these biblical reasons Kagan continued to evangelise amongst the Jews to whom she ministered. Evangelistic work was supported by Kagan's network of friends in London. The HCTI appointed Kagan ‘associate missionary’.Footnote ¹⁷³ The Central Lutheran Association for Mission Work among the Jews contributed money regularly in order to enable Kagan to carry on her work.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ At that time this association still maintained that the Christian Church had a duty to bring the Gospel to the Jews first.

From 1948 Kagan was also involved in the first conferences organised on the Church and Judaism by the Protestant Committee on Service to Israel (Deutscher Evangelischer Ausschuss für Dienst an Israel).Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In effect, this body was a German branch of the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews. The body had no official authorisation from the Council of the Protestant Church nor did it have any close affiliation with umbrella organisation of German Protestantism.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Some of Kagan's close contacts such as Provost Grüber and Pastor Fritz Majer-Leonhard, who was himself of Jewish descent, were also involved in this group which had been constituted in Hanover in January 1948 to think through relations between Jews and Christians. The theology professor Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, a former stormtrooper who had fought against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, had been a member of the International Committee since 1933 and was one of the main organisers of the German committee.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ One wonders whether he ever discussed antisemitism with Kagan.

The first conference, in Darmstadt, was opened by Martin Niemöller and Rabbi Leo Baeck of London also addressed the meeting. Kagan was one of those who passed on ‘new precious thoughts’ on a renewed relationship between Jews and Christians in Hesse. Part of this process involved a self-critical analysis of antisemitism in church teaching. Kagan was involved in the revision of schoolbooks.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Kagan was part of this attempt at organising these first conferences where dialogue replaced Luther's poisonous diatribes as well as the ingrained ecclesiastical tradition of monologue to which Jews more often than not were forcibly subjected. However, by the time the second conference took place in Kassel (27 February to 3 March 1950) the number of missionaries to Jews taking part had fallen from 29 per cent to only 6 per cent of the total number of participants.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The drop reflected a gradual move by German Protestantism away from a missionary position to one of dialogue with Jewish representatives. While twenty-eight similar conferences on aspects of the Church's relationship with Jews and Israel had been organised by 1982, the character of the Protestant Committee had changed so much by then that Jewish Christians with convictions like Kagan's would no longer be invited to share their views.

In her address to the annual HCTI conference in 1951 Kagan reckoned she had visited about a thousand families during her five years’ work in Frankfurt, many of them religious Jews but all of them victims of Hitler's persecutions.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ At the same time her Jewish Christian fellowship aimed to gradually ‘wear down that over-sensitiveness’ which, among Jewish Christians, was the counterpart to ‘the reluctance of admitting their corporate guilt’ among Christians.Footnote ¹⁸¹ After being betrayed by their coreligionists, Jewish Christians were being encouraged by Kagan to forgive and reconnect with them. Kagan's contribution to the process of truth and reconciliation in post-war Germany deserves respect, not least because, generally speaking, any attempts to reincorporate Jewish Christians into churches staffed and populated by the same people who had supported or sympathised with their ejection a few years previously, naturally failed in the absence of any signs of repentance. It is clear from the interviews conducted by Cynthia Crane with Jewish Christian women who survived the Shoah that the Protestant Churches failed to offer them pastoral care and financial support in the post-war years. This indifference was a fruit and reflection of the widespread unwillingness or inability of Protestant clergymen to analyse their support for antisemitism. This naturally led to the embittered alienation of many Jewish Christians. Hundreds rejoined synagogues in the post-war period; many others emigrated.Footnote ¹⁸²

Neither the provincial church leaderships, nor the Home Mission, nor the relief agency established to help Germans in the post-war period (the Hilfswerk) were particularly interested in providing special care to Jewish Christians who had been persecuted as Jews in the period 1933–45. The negative responses of the Central Committee of the Hilfswerk to the pleas for support from the welfare centres offering support to Jewish Christian survivors created widespread disappointment amongst volunteers.Footnote ¹⁸³ Official indifference to her work was no doubt one factor leading to Kagan turning her back on Germany. For seven years she lived amongst the murderers of her people, serving those Jews and Jewish Christians who, for a variety of reasons, were either forced to do likewise or simply wished to stay. Whereas Churches appeared to be doing very little for Jewish Christians, church leaders and pastors who had welcomed Hitler's ‘national movement’ to restore German honour suddenly became vocal critics of denazification and even helped notorious war criminals to escape justice.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ German Protestantism had certainly lost all credibility in Kagan's eyes.

VI

‘Her heart was aflame when the new State of Israel was proclaimed’, Poms later recalled.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Personal reasons attracted Kagan to the Holy Land. She desperately wanted to help the remnants of European Jewry who had emigrated to Israel.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In Hesse she had visited many of the DP camps where impoverished Jews prepared for the journey to Israel; many would be wearing clothes given to them by Kagan. In addition, one of her cousins was a rabbi in Israel and he had visited her and Poms in Frankfurt.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In March 1953 she wrote to her friends in Frankfurt: ‘I have felt at home here since the day of my arrival – in spite of everything that is unfamiliar and strange to me. I feel a great affection for everyone and everything here. It is, after all, the land of my fathers and my people.’Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The Russian-born Yitzhak Ben-Zvi was to be her president, not the new president of West Germany, Theodor Heuss, who had in 1933, as a Reichstag member, voted to give Hitler dictatorial powers.

Eschatological convictions encouraged her move from Germany.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In a circulated prayer letter from January 1949 Kagan wrote that the events in Israel were but ‘loud cries heralding the coming of the LORD JESUS’. Prayer for Israel ought to be the main prayer of His Church.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ She taught on the importance of Israel in God's plan of salvation and was called upon to conduct Bible studies in, for example, the Jerusalemkirche in Hamburg and at the Portstewart Convention in Northern Ireland.Footnote ¹⁹¹ These were two of the dwindling number of settings where Kagan was able to talk of her experiences and her work. The church in Hamburg was a fruit of Presbyterian Jewish mission work in the nineteenth century. A Jewish Christian, Arnold Frank, had been pastor there until 1938 and it was the conduit, after 1945, for material gifts sent from abroad to needy Jewish Christians in that city.Footnote ¹⁹² The Portstewart Convention was an Irish offshoot of the holiness conference at Keswick in the north-west of England. In such circles there was a traditional Evangelical understanding of the place of Israel in the plan of salvation and support for mission.

Irresistibly drawn to the land of her forefathers, Kagan was invited to go and visit her many relatives in Atlit near Haifa.Footnote ¹⁹³ She gave up the relative security of a job in Germany for the insecurities of life in Israel. In her reports she expresses admiration for the Jews’ ‘struggle to survive’ the economic deprivation there and their ‘heroic self-denial’ to enable ‘homeless brothers and sisters from the diaspora [to] return home’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Accompanied by Sister Zuleika she left for Naples. She boarded the Israeli ship Kedmah (“Forwards”) which arrived on 13 October 1952 at the port of Haifa. She was, again, to be part of a minority grouping, but she no longer had to fear for her life or even suffer verbal abuse for being part of that group.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

In central Carmel she established a small fellowship group for those seeking spiritual refreshment through the study of the Hebrew Scriptures.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Her colleague in this work from December 1960, the deaconess Ida Draitschmann, who was also a Messianic Jew,Footnote ¹⁹⁷ spoke of the home as being a place ‘where people who had suffered terrible things in their lives could find help and healing’. The Bible was studied together on Friday evenings.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ On the Sabbath morning meetings would take place. The leaders of the various congregations in Haifa usually conducted these studies. Huguette Harari, an Egyptian Jew who also ran Bible studies in Haifa for French speakers, remembered an occasion at Christmas time when Kagan invited a crowd to celebrate and listen to the music of Handel's Messiah.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Kagan possessed a lot of fine records of religious classical music which attracted neighbours. ‘Jewish people are very fond of good music and so we make contacts by inviting friends to musical gatherings in our home’, Draitschmann reported to mission headquarters.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The doors were always open; Jews and Christians were regular visitors and people were welcome to stay for the weekend. ‘Sometimes we are busy from morning till night dealing with those who are in physical, mental and spiritual need. Sister Maly and I have to be ready at all times to meet these needs’, wrote Draitschmann in March 1963.Footnote ²⁰¹ On 5 May 1963, however, they received a notice that they would have to leave the house which they were renting.Footnote ²⁰² It was the day Maly Kagan died. The problems with her vision had recurred. She failed to spot a motorbike as she tried to cross a busy road; it knocked her down and killed her.

Her death was ‘a great loss’ for the small Messianic Jewish community in Haifa and Israel generally, the Revd Henry David Leuner stated.Footnote ²⁰³ She was ‘irreplaceable’, he said. St Luke's Anglican Church, Haifa, was unusually packed for the funeral service that took place on 8 May 1963.Footnote ²⁰⁴ The presence of more than 150 people at the service spoke volumes of the love and esteem in which she was held.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Maly Kagan's body was buried in Israel's soil – the place where she had always wanted to be buried. Her final resting place was the Hof HaCarmel cemetery in Haifa.Footnote ²⁰⁶ ‘The Master is here and he is calling for you’ (John xi. 28) was inscribed, in German, on her tombstone.Footnote ²⁰⁷ At the graveside the rare phenomenon could be witnessed of Jews, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians joining together in thanks to God for a life of sacrificial service.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Sister Zuleika was able to attend the funeralFootnote ²⁰⁹ as were other friends from Germany. A letter of condolences from the association managing the orthopaedic hospital for children Alyn in Jerusalem was read out: ‘Maly Kagan was a genuine and warm-hearted friend of the children at this unique hospital and we know that we have lost with her passing away one of our most faithful helpers, whose support we have so dearly needed.’Footnote ²¹⁰ As Mr Leuner wrote in his obituary for ‘that noble lady’, public praise for a Jewish Christian from Jewish institutions was not a particularly frequent occurrence at the time. Kagan's loving personality and upright character had overcome those divisions and rifts between communities. Many loved her; all respected her. The unity at her graveside was not brought about by the hand of man; it was not an artificial device to bridge the irreconcilable.

VII

The life of Maly Kagan highlights the terrible impact of antisemitism on ordinary people. She and her colleague at the HCTI station were examples of Jews from an Orthodox background who, after losing their religion, came to faith in Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. ‘I would hesitate to call her a Zionist politically’, Huguette Harari wrote in March 2002, ‘but rather a Messianic Jewess whose supreme aim was to spread the message of salvation to her own people.’ Kagan, like Poms, felt that testifying to Jews was the most important of all tasks; it was the original mission from which all other forms of mission arose. It was the first mission and, in their view, it would be the last: ‘When all witness is finished, there will still be two witnesses in Jerusalem’ (Revelation xi).Footnote ²¹¹ The founder of the mission to which Kagan was attached put it like this in The Scattered Nation in October 1911:

For most Jews and many Jewish Christians the state of Israel was their last hope.

Antisemitism was a problem for the Church. She knew from experience that the curse of Jew-hatred had hindered the work of testifying to the Messiah and that there was little a Jew could do to prevent persecution in their diaspora. There was, in essence, no Jewish problem, but a problem at the very base of Christendom and at the heart of Christian culture, particularly those cultures where a denomination controlled, or had great influence over, the state bureaucracy, such as Germany. Teachers, medical doctors, pastors, politicians – the educated elites of German society, nearly all of whom were baptised and confirmed members of Christian Churches – had enabled hatred and prejudice to poison people's minds. They pursued their careers, obeyed their superiors and did their duty – men like Adolf Eichmann, who was executed in Israel, following a televised trial, on 1 July 1962. The Hickels and Schröders proved that there was an alternative to blind obedience, even in Germany. Yet, these exceptional individuals underlined the general rule of ecclesiastical complicity in discrimination and murder.

No amount of assimilation on the Jews' part could smash such prejudices. In particular, the theologies of baptism or the practices surrounding it – this was clearly perceived by Kagan – had no measurable effects on the Christian community and ultimately provided no protection for Jews. Baptism and church socialisation had had the function of separating and alienating Jews from their people, saving them by ‘welcoming them into the camp of the enemies of Israel’.Footnote ²¹² For Maly Kagan the Holocaust was not an aberration from the general flow of church history; it was simply an extreme expression of the norm. As a Jew who had experienced antisemitism in Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, Germany under occupation and in the Federal Republic she knew better than most that the Nazi period was not really exceptional. Whereas in the past, however, Jews might have escaped from what she called the ‘devilish tortures’ and the ‘burning flames’ of persecution by allowing themselves to be baptised,Footnote ²¹³ that option proved useless in the atmosphere of the Third Reich. Jews were sent to the HCTI because no churchman could be found who was willing to baptise them. Clergy sensed the difficulties and unpleasantness which could result for them.Footnote ²¹⁴

Historically it is true to say that those attached to Jewish missionary organisations – most of them Jews themselves – had been conversing with Jews and expressing solidarity with them for centuries before this became fashionable in the period after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. In the days of the Jews' greatest need, the established Churches, which rarely gave backing to the small missionary operations, had failed, however, to use their vast financial and other resources to help the persecuted, not even those Jews who were their members. The Theological Society in Württemberg confessed on 9 April 1946 that Christians had been ‘cowardly and passive’ when their Jewish coreligionists were being dishonoured, robbed, tortured and murdered. They had, the confession continues, allowed Jews to be thrown out of ecclesiastical posts and denied baptism without protesting. Moreover, they had accepted the Nazi prohibition of missionary work among Jews.Footnote ²¹⁵ The so-called Stuttgart Confession of Guilt (18/19 October 1945), which, anyway, was only adopted by four of the twenty-seven provincial Churches,Footnote ²¹⁶ failed even to mention Jews and it was not until the synod of Berlin-Weissensee (April 1950) that the Protestant Church in Germany began to analyse the awful consequences of its sins of omission and commission.Footnote ²¹⁷ Little did Kagan know at the time that even the record of the Confessing Church had been shameful in this regard.Footnote ²¹⁸

The mass murder of Jews proved that Christian culture and institutions in Germany required radical surgery. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had hoped that the Christian Church would give away all its assets to the needy, dissolve itself and reinvent itself as a voluntary organisation without any of the trappings of power.Footnote ²¹⁹ German Protestantism, still tied to political power and privilege by means of the church tax and state subsidies, has yet to draw the necessary consequences from its complicity in facilitating and encouraging hatred of Jews. Instead, elite-level dialogues between Christians and Jews, weeks of organised fraternal solidarity organised since 1951 and statements condemning all attempts to evangelise Jews were organised by doctors of theology. Significantly, the influential statement made by the Rhineland synod on 11 January 1980 rejecting Jewish mission failed to mention Messianic believers even once.Footnote ²²⁰ The ecclesiastical ill-treatment and murder of Jewish Christians before and during the Third Reich as well as the continuing indifference to their plight after 1945 have yet to be seriously analysed. Related theological and historical questions have been swept under the carpet.

Gentile guilt has led not merely to the abandonment of the willingness to evangelise amongst Jews (that had always ever been the preserve of an insignificantly tiny minority of Protestants acting independently and without the backing of church hierarchies anyway) but also of a biblical theology that would require such work to be done.Footnote ²²¹ It was a very cerebral, German way of dealing with the past. Kagan, like other Messianic Jews, would have considered such a move to be at best heretical and at worst motivated by antisemitism. Indeed, that position was a widely held in the initial post-war period.Footnote ²²² For different ideological reasons post-Holocaust German theology has adopted the ‘German Christian’ rejection of mission to Jews. Neither Kagan nor her fellow Jewish Christians involved in mission were asked for their opinion. In the course of Protestantism's theological readjustment in the noble effort to build bridges with the representatives of post-Holocaust Jewry Messianic believers were deliberately marginalised – yet another example of historical events and political correctness determining theology. While Hitler's ascent to power shaped theological thought and practice in the Third Reich, the fruit of Hitler's ideology, the Shoah, has been allowed to have a similarly decisive impact on biblical exegesis in the Federal Republic of Germany. The negative response to Jewish mission – and to Jewish Christians – has been one of the theological continuities in modern German ecclesiastical history.

What Kagan thought of such a response to the problem of Jew hatred can be gathered from a statement that she made a few months before her death in which she wrote of the ‘degenerate church practices’ (‘entartete Kirchenpraxis’)Footnote ²²³ of Christian denominations in Europe which resulted from a faulty theology tied to political power and social privileges. Ecclesiastical life had not stirred the Jews to jealousy – the Pauline litmus test of good practice. She knew from experience in post-war Germany that church bureaucrats were still unwilling to sever their lucrative ties with the German state. One of the seemingly necessary preconditions of antisemitic pogroms – a state-sponsored religion – was left untouched in the post-war period. Kagan turned her back on German Protestantism as an apostate system of which the rejection of Jewish mission was one central aspect. While she had close friends in all denominations she was a member of none.Footnote ²²⁴ The fellowship that she established in her own home had become the focus of her work and identity. In Israel she pondered ‘the dreadful seventeen hundred years of the Constantinian Era, during every generation of which terrible persecutions of Jews took place in which the Church was involved to some extent or another’ and wondered why denominational histories were curiously silent about this fact.Footnote ²²⁵ That era is not yet over.