Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Holocaust dominates our understanding of the Third Reich. The Nazi state was, quintessentially, the racial state and it is the ‘Final Solution’ that seems to encapsulate the unique horrors of Nazism. Yet for most interested observers in Britain during the 1930s it was not racism, and certainly not the treatment of Germany's Jews, that captured the iniquity of the new Nazi state. Indeed, where Nazism was seen as dangerous, racism and antisemitism, far from being understood as the central crime of the Third Reich, were interpreted (if they were seen at all) as instruments of a much wider attack on the culture and politics of the West. Similarly the Hitler regime was not interpreted as unique or singular, but part of a general dictatorial alternative to democracy that was flourishing in the ‘dark valley’ of continental Europe.

News from Hitler's Germany, at least before the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 in which Jews and Jewish property were attacked by agents of the state, was dominated by the sufferings and resistance of the Protestant churches. The German church struggle or Kirchenkampf, as the battle between parts of the churches and the state became known, was played out for English eyes in the pages of a daily press which promoted the importance of Christianity in Britain. There was fascination with the privations of German Christians, as the Nazi struggle with organised Christianity appeared to symbolise the nascent conflict between democracy and dictatorship. Central in the version of the church struggle constructed in Britain was the image of Martin Niemöller – a heroic ‘man on fire’ in the English imagination. A priest from the wealthy Berlin suburb of Dahlem, Niemöller was the leader of the Bekennende Kirche, or Confessing Church, which was set up in opposition to the state Church in 1934. That Niemöller was essentially acquitted at his trial for treason in February 1938 but then arbitrarily imprisoned in Sachsenhausen by the increasingly infamous Gestapo, appeared to eloquently articulate the growing iniquity of the German dictatorship.

The story was no different inside the Church of England, where Anglicans, perhaps unsurprisingly, were particularly concerned by the suffering of German Protestants.