The Remarkable Story Of The German Wallenberg
…Dean Grüber had been the only German to testify against Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in April 1961. During the war Eichmann, an SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), had been the SS officer responsible for organizing the mass deportation of Jews to the extermination camps.
It took a great deal of courage for Grüber to testify against a fellow German in an Israeli court. I was later to learn that Grüber had been a man of exemplary courage during the Hitler years. When the pro-Nazi German Christian movement gained control of the German Evangelical Church in 1933, Grüber joined the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche ) whose members included such opponents of the regime as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. The Confessing Church came into being in response to actions by the far larger, pro-Nazi Evangelical Church such as adopting the “Aryan clause” which effectively defrocked pastors of Jewish descent as well as non-Jewish pastors with a “non-Aryan” spouse. The fundamental issue was whether race or baptism determined membership and service within the church.
Initially, men like Bonhoeffer and Grüber were not concerned with the Hitler regime’s anti-Semitic policies but with the church’s autonomy in matters religious. The attitude of most members of the Confessing Church toward Nazi antisemitism has been described by Wolfgang Gerlach, a German scholar and pastor, as “ambivalent.”[i] Grüber was one of a very small number of German Protestant clergy who, at great personal risk, sought to rescue Jews. His efforts began with baptized Jews in September 1938 when the Berlin Confessing Church set up the Büro Grüber (office). Initially, the office helped only baptized Jews to emigrate…