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An Embassy Besieged
The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany
Emmy Barth
Aug 13, 2010
Germany, 1933. Adolf Hitler has been appointed Reich chancellor and is bit by bit seizing complete power. A small group under the leadership of Eberhard Arnold grapples with questions of giving a Christian witness while obeying those in authority (Romans 13) and loving their enemy (Matthew 5:44).
Worlds are colliding. If the present government is in conflict with the Catholic church and the Protestant church, it is in a much deeper conflict with the gospel of Jesus Christ and with the upper church of the Holy Spirit. We must fight this battle in love; we have no other weapon. And whether we are confronted with a mounted policeman or a labor camp official, a regional governor, a prince, a party leader, or even with the president of the Reich, it makes no difference. We must love them, and only when we truly love them shall we be able to bring them the witness of truth. That is what we are here for.
This then is our mission: to proclaim the truth as being love, and love as being truth; to come before the mighty and the lowly; to say it because we live it, and to live it as we say it. We must realize that this is the way of death, for there was one who loved to the last, without going along with what was wrong. What was the consequence? The cross on which he was executed!
So it should be with us as well. It cannot be otherwise than that we are imprisoned and killed if we truly go the way of Jesus. If this has not yet happened, it shows we have not yet gone the way of Jesus to the end. And we must not be imprisoned or killed for the sake of any other cause!
In this prophetic spirit, Jesus proclaims the final future and his enmity to the spirit of the times. It is dangerous to declare war on the spirit of the times. Yet this is the prophet’s task. The only way we can truly love those men who are tormented and crushed by this spirit is to wage war on the spirit that holds them in demonic bondage. It is the task of the church to be untimely, to be prophetic, to live in the future, and to die for that future (Eberhard Arnold, July 1933).
Read the story of the Bruderhof’s resistance until it was dissolved by the Gestapo in April 1937.
An Embassy Besieged: The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany can be purchased from Wipf and Stock Publishers.
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Eberhard Arnold (center) with members of the Rhoen Bruderhof
This meticulously documented story of faith serves as a handbook of heroism for believers today. God knows, we too are "besieged" by forces of untruth and duplicity. May we, like the Bruderhof, be found faithful.
-Daniel Berrigan
Scripture tells us that we are to be a counter-cultural community, living out the radical teachings of Christ. This book sets a pattern for those who want to live faithfully in opposition to the dictatorial consumeristic culture of our age.
-Tony Campolo, Eastern University, St. Davids, PA
In An Embassy Besieged, a small community of Christians courageously and graciously refuses to compromise their faith in the face of the worst human evil. Their witness has much to teach us today in a world so riddled with prejudice, so tired of militarism, so starved for grace, and so desperate for imagination.
-Shane Claiborne, author, activist
Seeking to embody the Sermon on the Mount and articulating a clear Anabaptist theology of church and state, the early Bruderhof movement gives a courageous testimony to nonviolence in a harsh totalitarian state. Emmy Barth tells a compelling and well-crafted story that is hard to put down.
-Donald B. Kraybill, author of The Upside Down Kingdom