True Persecution

Years ago I got into a discussion with someone who said I was persecuting him. I said my disagreement with their religious views was not persecution. It was just disagreement. In the years before the internet I suggested he read "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" if he wanted to understand true persecution.

Organizations like 'Voice of the Martyrs' (http://www.persecution.com/) has a lot of detail on current Christian persecution.

On Christian radio a few weeks ago I heard about Paul Schnieder who was a pastor imprisoned in the prison camp Buchenwald. So later I googled his name and found out more of his story which is shared below.

[The following was copied from http://www.perryville.org with their notation "adapted from an article in the Kairos Journal;
For those interested in more details - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Schneider and http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Schneider-Buchenwald-Christian-sourcebook/dp/1887732098]

The Buchenwald Apostle—Paul Schneider (1897 – 1939)

   As the Nazi swastika was raised over Buchenwald prison camp, the command, “Caps off!” blared through the loudspeakers. On this May morning in 1938, every prisoner instantly obeyed, except one scrawny pastor from the Rhineland, Paul Schneider. His fellow inmates glanced fearfully toward the guards. These prisoners knew the young preacher was no coward, but this was madness.

When the formation was dismissed, his friends rushed to him, urging him to cooperate. He calmly replied that he must bear faithful witness to Christ and must protest the brutality he saw around him.1 That witness would soon be tested, for the loudspeakers then directed the prisoner who kept his cap on to report to the gate. If he did not, the whole camp would be punished. Schneider responded by heading to the guardhouse at a fast trot.

Schneider was in the camp because he would not accommodate Hitler’s heresies. He refused to give communion to two local Nazis, who were members of his church.2 At the funeral of a member of the Hitler Youth, a leader spoke of enrolling the deceased in the “Storm Troopers of heaven.” Schneider publicly rebuked the man and was imprisoned for a week. During the winter of 1935-36, the mayor’s office summoned him twelve times for speaking out against the party. Following another arrest in July 1937, the Nazis banished him from the Rhineland. They drove him outside his parish and warned him never to return. Instead Schneider walked straight to the station, threw his exclusion order in the bin, and caught the next train home.3

Schneider was neither a brilliant intellectual on the order of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, nor a colorful, national celebrity like Martin Niemoeller. He was only an ordinary pastor, faithful in the conduct of his day-to-day ministry. That faithfulness carried over into the camp, where he was severely beaten for refusal to remove his cap. Cast into solitary confinement for a year, Schneider nevertheless continued to protest. When escaped prisoners were captured and then executed, the pastor cried out from his cell, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I witness against the murder of prisoners . . .”4

Each time he spoke up, he was brutalized once again, and on July 18, 1939, he succumbed to his injuries. His life—and death—were so inspiring that even the atheists in the camp joined in calling him the “Buchenwald Apostle.” Later, the Communist government of East Germany would build a memorial to honor this Christian pastor.

Shortly before his final arrest, Schneider warned his congregation about the peril in the land: “[W]e can no longer close our eyes to the high towering waves which we see rolling in from our ‘folk-life’ in the Third Reich.”5 He called Nazism “naked paganism” and proclaimed it incompatible with the Christian faith.6 There could be no middle ground. It was time for fearless confession, as in the early Church, for Jesus Himself said, “Only the one who confesses Me before men will I confess before My heavenly Father.”

Though many Christians around the world today suffer severe persecution, few in the West must sacrifice their very lives for the integrity of the Church. But even in Europe and the Americas, there can be a cost, so all must decide whether they will stand with Jesus and confess His Truth or continue to look the other way and allow evil to triumph by default. If they stand true, they do so in the tradition of Pastor Schneider. Though he paid a dear price, he gained the title “Buchenwald Apostle.” Christians doff their hats to him—and to all whose graceful, yet unbending witness, honors the kingdom of God.

Footnotes:

1  Claude R. Foster, Jr., Paul Schneider – The Buchenwald Apostle (West Chester, Pennsylvania: West Chester University Press, 1997), 786.

2  Arvan E. Gordon, “Between God and the Gestapo,” Church Times Website, http://copies.anglicansonline.org/churchtimes/990716/feature.htm.

3  “A Twentieth Century Martyr,” Free Church Foundations Website, www.btinternet.com/~s.j.mackay/foundations/martyr.html (accessed May 27, 2004).

4  E. H. Robertson, Paul Schneider: The Pastor of Buchenwald (London: SCM Press, 1956), 112-114.

5  Rudolf Wentorf, Paul Schneider – The Witness of Buchenwald, trans. Franklin Sanders (Tucson: American Eagle Publications, 1993), 50.

6  See also Kairos Journal article, “The Pulpit at Le Chambon.”




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