"We remember O God, those through whom you have acted, in the world, in the church, and in our own experience. As you stood by them and made the clear witnesses to your gospel, stand by us and by all the people of your church, so that we may remain faithful and receive the crown of eternal life."
Contemporary - China
World War II - Nazi Germany
"...there is a tendency to regard the witness of Christianity during the Hitler years to have been either non-existent or cowardly... But there is still something missing...the lack of interest in and visibility for those of the Christian faith who did put their faith and lives on the line."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Bernhard Lichtenberg
- Franz Jagerstaetter
- Kurt Gerstein
- Bishop Hans Lilje
- Heinrich Gruber
- Karl Stellbrink
- Paul Schneider (a.k.a. The Pastor of Buchenwald)
- Micheal Faulhaber
- Clemens Count von Galen
- The Ten Boom Family
- Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
"What those times required, and ours do too, was and is a combination of responsiveness and resistance. What my observation at the time and of the time led me to is the conclusion that the combination required a kind of piety and presupposed or developed religious faith. I have always been struck by the disproportionately high incidence of piety among those who did resist the Nazis. One had not much known or noticed such people before. But now, when resistance was what one looked for, often in vain, it was such people that seemed to have it and to offer it. And there were those, too, who under that deadly challenge developed into such people. It was an experiential discovery of religion, if you like, putting it another way, one might say that the man or the woman willing to undergo risks was granted faith."
ref: Resurrecting the Third Reich. - Richard Terrell, pp 107-126
Hunting House Publishers, Louisiana, 1994
ISBN 1-56384-019-7
May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon them.
'According to many estimates, approximately five thousand members of the German clergy were sent to concentration camps and more than two thousand of them died while there." Ibid pp 124
