The Evangelical Alliance in Germany has asked the Jewish people for forgiveness, admitting that its leaders welcomed Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and later defended anti-Jewish measures with arguments drawn from the Bible.
The alliance, known by its German initials EAD, which links about 900 local alliances and more than 380 affiliated organizations, released the statement Nov. 9 as an expansion of a confession of guilt it first issued in 1946, according to an EAD press release. Three alliance leaders read the text aloud at a memorial devotional service at the EAD's Berlin office, which stands beside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The 1946 confession conceded that the alliance had not always recognized "the error of that time" in time to oppose it. It did not mention Jews or any other group of victims. The EAD said that omission left the earlier text incomplete.
"We confess that our fathers became guilty before God and before the Jewish people," the new statement reads.
The statement also commits the alliance to protecting Jewish people today. German police recorded 6,548 antisemitic crimes in 2025, a record and a 5% increase over the previous year, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. In a 2024 European Union survey of Jewish people in 13 member states, including Germany, 8 in 10 respondents said antisemitism had grown in their country over the previous five years.
The date was deliberate, the EAD said. Nov. 9 is the anniversary of the 1938 pogrom known in German as the Reichspogromnacht, and the release came 80 years after the alliance’s first confession.
The 1946 confession appeared in a commemorative publication for the centenary of the Evangelical Alliance, founded in London in 1846. The movement that began there later gave rise to today's World Evangelical Alliance.
This year, the EAD's working group on Israel, Judaism and the Middle East reexamined the 1946 text and the conduct of the alliance's leadership during the Nazi period, the EAD said.
‘Our fathers contradicted the gospel of Jesus Christ’
According to the statement, leading alliance figures welcomed the "national uprising" of 1933, a Nazi propaganda term for the takeover, and placed hopes in Hitler that it now calls "fatal misjudgments." Rather than remaining critically alert, they expected the new government to lead the nation back to "God's ordinances."
Hitler, the text says, was praised "as the savior sent by God for people and fatherland." It describes this as a grave misreading of what National Socialism was and what it intended.
The alliance's periodical, Allianzblatt, did not condemn the exclusion and early persecution of Jews with the clarity required, the statement says. Anti-Jewish measures were instead justified with "seemingly biblical arguments," and the alliance declared the actions of what it calls the "unjust state" to be necessary.
"In doing so, our fathers contradicted the gospel of Jesus Christ," the text states. "Today we recognize that such interpretations of Holy Scripture are wrong."
The EAD asks forgiveness for its predecessors' failure and for injustice committed "on the part of the church and of Christians." It pledges to stay vigilant, to name injustice and to protect Jewish people, and says it opposes "every form of hatred of Jews and of Israel."
'The position of the Evangelical Alliance'
The text was read by Siegfried Winkler, a Munich pastor and deputy speaker of the EAD Members' Assembly; Susanne Thyroff, first speaker of the EAD Convention and chair of the executive board of the Christian media organization ERF; and Reinhardt Schink, the EAD's executive director, the German Christian news agency IDEA reported.
Schink said the working group drafted the text, the Convention deliberated on it and the Members' Assembly adopted it, according to IDEA. "This is not a paper from a working group; it is the position of the Evangelical Alliance," he said.
Johann Matthies, the EAD's political representative in Berlin, said leaders of the alliance's own movement had attached "hopes for a national and spiritual renewal" to Hitler's rule.
"They were not only mistaken. They justified injustice," he said.
Matthies said today's generation does not bear the personal guilt of those leaders but does stand within the movement's history. The 1946 confession was being supplemented "not in order to change the past after the fact, but in order to take up our responsibility in the present more clearly," he said.
He pointed to the memorial outside the venue's windows, where 2,711 concrete slabs commemorate the 6 million Jews murdered under Nazi rule. What the city makes visible in its center, he said, the alliance also wants to do with its own history: "to face the truth, to call guilt by its name and to take responsibility."
Referring to the Greek New Testament word for repentance, metanoia, Matthies called for a fundamental change of direction.
"Repentance means turning around. A 180-degree turn," he said. Where earlier leaders kept silent, the alliance wants to speak, he said, and where they conformed to those in power, it wants to follow conscience and the Word of God.
"Where they failed Jewish people, we want to protect Jewish life and resolutely oppose every form of antisemitism," Matthies said. A confession without repentance is incomplete, he added, "and repentance without changed action remains unconvincing."
Guests included Andrei Ignatenko, head of the Messianic Jewish ministry Beit Sar Shalom in Berlin; Ivan Fröhlich, rabbi of the Messianic Jewish congregation Beit-El Israel in Koblenz; and Jan-Philipp Knoop, representing the Israeli Embassy.
The November 1938 pogrom
The violence of Nov. 9-10, 1938, is widely known outside Germany as Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass," after the shattered windows of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues. Many German institutions now avoid that term as a euphemism and use Reichspogromnacht or "November pogroms" instead.
Nazi leaders used the shooting of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, 17, as a pretext, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In late October, German authorities had deported his family and more than 17,000 other Jews with Polish citizenship to Poland. Vom Rath died of his wounds Nov. 9, and that night Nazi leaders set off coordinated attacks across Germany, which by then included Austria and the Sudetenland.
Mobs led by members of the Nazi Party, the SA, the SS and the Hitler Youth burned more than 1,400 synagogues and vandalized thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and homes, the museum says. Firefighters were ordered only to keep the flames from spreading to neighboring buildings.
Police arrested about 26,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Hundreds of Jews died during the pogrom and its aftermath, including many in the camps.
The regime then ordered Germany's Jews to pay a collective "atonement payment" of 1 billion Reichsmarks and issued a series of decrees pushing them out of economic and public life. Historians regard the pogrom as a turning point from legal exclusion toward systematic persecution.
Full text of the statement
The following is a translation of the German original. The EAD has not published an official English version.
Supplement to and Extension of the Confession of Guilt of 1946
Bad Blankenburg, Nov. 9, 2026
As part of the commemorative publication marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Evangelical Alliance in London, the German Evangelical Alliance published the following confession in 1946:
"We confess that the witness of the Evangelical Alliance has often not been clear enough and not powerful enough in the Spirit. We did not stand up strongly and courageously enough against the powers of unbelief among our people, and we also brought the needs of our time before God too little in faithful intercession and fervent ardor. We ought to have demonstrated more of the gospel's power as light and salt. We also humble ourselves before God over the fact that in the years now behind us we did not always immediately recognize the error of that time and set against it a clear, courageous confession. We are aware that the Church of Christ must humble itself here and must commit itself far more resolutely, more unitedly and more responsibly to the serious and great tasks of the present."¹
Looking back on the time of National Socialism and the conduct of the leadership of the German Evangelical Alliance at that time, we must acknowledge today that important aspects of our failure were not addressed in the Confession of Guilt of 1946, and that the confession has therefore remained incomplete.
It fills us with pain and shame that leading representatives of the Evangelical Alliance welcomed the "national uprising" of 1933 and attached hopes to Adolf Hitler's seizure of power that, from today's perspective, were fatal misjudgments. In place of critical vigilance came the expectation that the new political leadership would lead the people back to God's ordinances. In this, Hitler was praised as the savior sent by God for people and fatherland. This was a grave misjudgment of the nature and aims of National Socialism.
We confess that our fathers became guilty before God and before the Jewish people. In its publications in the Allianzblatt, the leadership of the Evangelical Alliance at that time condemned neither the exclusion nor the beginning persecution of the Jewish population with the necessary clarity. Instead, anti-Jewish measures were even justified and grounded in seemingly biblical arguments. Under National Socialism, the Evangelical Alliance did not stand on the side of the persecuted Jewish women and men, but declared the measures of the unjust state to be necessary. In doing so, our fathers contradicted the gospel of Jesus Christ. Today we recognize that such interpretations of Holy Scripture are wrong.
We ask the Jewish people for forgiveness for the failure of our fathers and for the injustice committed on the part of the church and of Christians. From the remembrance of this arises for us the responsibility to be vigilant, to name injustice clearly, and to stand up for Jewish people and protect them. As the Evangelical Alliance in Germany, we therefore resolutely oppose every form of hatred of Jews and of Israel.
¹ Erich Beyreuther, Der Weg der Evangelischen Allianz in Deutschland (The Path of the Evangelical Alliance in Germany), Brockhaus, 1969, p. 113.
