Capernaum Church
Encyclopedia
Capernaum Church is one of the two places of worship of the Evangelical
Capernaum Congregation, a member of today's Protestant umbrella Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia
. The church is located on Seestraße No. 34 in the locality of Wedding
, in Berlin's borough of Mitte
. The church was named after Capernaum, today Kfar Nachum כפר נחום (literally "Nachum's village"; transliteration in and in ) in today's Israel
.
Christians revere the town of Capernaum, since on Sabbath
s Jesus of Nazareth used to teach in the local synagogue (cf. Gospel of Luke
). The synagogue where Jesus possibly taught is a handsome, standing ruin open to visitors. Therefore it is likely that the town has been the home of Jesus (cf. Gospel of Matthew
4:13), at least for some time. In Capernaum also, Jesus allegedly healed a man, and a fever in Simon Peter's mother-in-law.
board refused to approve that. Thus he offered the site on the crossroads of Seestraße #34/35 with Antwerpener Straße No. 50 on the condition of starting the constructions until a certain date, otherwise the tendered money would be forfeited. Oppersdorf speculated for a rise of land prices by the establishment of a church in the area.
Thus in 1896 the presbytery of Nazareth Congregation, presided by Pastor Ludwig Diestelkamp, commissioned the architect Baurat Carl Siebold from Bethel (a part of today's Bielefeld
), then leading the construction department of the Bethel Institution
, to build an additional church in the undeveloped area. Diestelkamp knew Siebold through his friend Friedrich von Bodelschwingh
. On 30 September 1897 the cornerstone
was hastily laid. Effective constructions were only started in 1900.
Siebold, who build almost 80 churches, many of them in Westphalia
, recycled his design for Christ Church in Hagen
-Eilpe, which he adapted to the site on Seestraße. On 22 July 1902 the church was finished. The Evangelical Association for the Construction of Churches , a charitable organisation then headed by the Prussian
Queen Augusta Victoria
, co-financed the constructions. On 26 August the same year she, her son Crown Prince Frederick William and her husband King William II
attended the inauguration of Capernaum Church, the latter in his then function as summus episcopus (Supreme Governor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces). In the following year the Capernaum Congregation was constituted as independent legal entity, within the then Protestant umbrella Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. The new congregation took over the northwestern part of the parish of the Nazareth Congregation, which is the northwestern part of the locality of Wedding, including the African Quarter north of the church building.
, but directed to the southeast. The building consists of three longish nave
s on an asymmetric ground plan. While the northeastern nave is large and harbours a loft, in order to place more seats, the southwestern nave to Antwerpener Straße is narrow, rather resembling an aisle.
The outside structure of Romanesque Revivalism
, built from red brick, with its Lombard band
s and the entrance hall to Antwerpener Straße rather resembles a basilica
. Siebold's design is inspired by Romanesque architecture
of Rhenish churches such as St. Apostles, and Great St. Martin Church
(both Cologne
).
The quire
is highlighted by two octagonal towers, which are connected by a columned gallery of arcades . The room underneath the elevated quire was designed for the instruction of confirmands, thus being an early example of a structure combining church and community centre functions.
The tower at the crossroads of Seestraße with Antwerpener Straße, topped by a typical Rhenish steep rhombohedral
spire, was built to form a landmark. Siebold designed it after the towers of St Mary's Assumption Church (for a picture see Andernach). The façade to Seestraße showed a great rose window
. A second, considerably smaller tower connects the church building to the alignment of houses in Seestraße. In 1909 August Dinklage, Olaf Lilloe, and Ernst Paulus added a rectory
in Rundbogenstil
with round-arched windows in Seestraße #35, finished on 1 April 1911, thus inseriating the church with the alignment of houses. The rear wing of the rectory confines the backyard of church and rectory as a semi-closed court.
Starting in 1952 the architect Fritz Berndt began the reconstructions, accomplished by architect Günter Behrmann until 1959. The structures were simplified, the rose window was replaced by three biforium
windows, while the main tower now bears a steep saddle roof
. The gable towards Seestraße was simplified due to the new simple saddle roof, covering the main nave, the side naves carry catslide roofs, thus the nave to Antwerpener Straße lost its spire light
s. The church was re-inaugurated on the occasion of the feast of Evangelical
New Year (so-called First Sunday of Advent
) on 29 November 1959.
painting displayed an enthroned Jesus of Nazareth in a mandorla surrounded by angel
s alternating with palms. A painting on the tympanum
on top of the apsis depicted the Roman Centurion
asking Jesus to heal his servant
(Gospel of Matthew
). Stained glass windows of ornamental and figured design in the apsis continued the rich colourfulness of the quire. All this was destroyed in May 1944.
The new interior of 1959 under a wooden barrel vault
is very plain. Behrmann created a new altar
and a new pulpit
. Eva Limberg (Bielefeld) designed the new christening bowl
, the candlestick, carried by Apostle figures, and the lectern
, depicting the scene of the Roman Centurion and Jesus. In 1958 August Wagner created new coloured windows above the altar, after the design of the Hermann Kirchberger. The windows depict the Benedictive Jesus, the Nativity of Jesus
, and the Descent of the Holy Spirit
(Pentecost
). A surviving element of the original furnishing is a larger than life-sized copied statue of the benedictive Jesus after the famous statue by Bertel Thorvaldsen
.
als on 23 July 1933, which the Nazi government had imposed onto all Protestant church bodies
in Germany (see Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union), the Nazi partisan Protestant so-called Faith Movement of German Christians
gained a majority in the presbytery of the Capernaum Congregation, like in most congregations within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union. With the new majorities on all levels of church organisation the German Christians systematically tried to subject any unadulterated form of Protestantism by way of firing church employees of other opinion, blocking church property for non-Nazi Protestant groups, prohibiting collections for other purposes than the officially approved ones.
The majorities of German Christian synod
als – first in the provincial synod of Brandenburg
(24 August 1933), competent for the Berlin and Brandenburg subsection, and then in the General Synod of the overall Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union (5/6 September 1933) – voted in the so-called Aryan paragraph
, meaning that employees of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union – being all baptised Protestant church members -, who had grandparents, who were enrolled as Jews, or who were married with such persons, were all to be fired.
On 11 September 1933 Gerhard Jacobi , pastor of the William I Memorial Church
in Berlin, leading the opposing synodals, gathered opposing pastors, who clearly saw the breach of Christian and Protestant principles and founded the Emergency Covenant of Pastors
, presided by Pastor Martin Niemöller
. Its members concluded that a schism
was unavoidable, a new Protestant church was to be established, since the official organisation was anti-Christian, heretical
and therefore illegitimate.
Three out of six pastors of the Capernaum Congregation joined the Covenant to wit Karl Berlich, Helmut Petzold, and Friedrich Lahde, the latter holding as senior pastor the office of chief executive of the presbytery, dominated by German Christians since the imposed re-election. In 1933 among the pastors of Berlin, 160 stuck to Gospel and Church (the official name of the list of Nazi-opposing candidates in the re-election, most joined the Covenant), 40 were German Christians while another 200 had taken neither side. The same was true for the average parishioners, the vast majority did not bother being non-observant, many did not even participate in the elections, those who did, often voted for the German Christians, but in the following Struggle of the Churches
, they never acted up as German Christian activists. The Kirchenkampf was an enactment performed by two minority groups within a rather indifferent majority.
As part of the re-election campaign the Nazi government and the Nazi party promoted that Nazi party members of Protestant descent, who were not members of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, would (re-)join that church body in order to secure a clear majority of votes for the Nazi group of the German Christians. In 1933 the Capernaum Congregation reached a number of about 70,000 parishioners through these tactical mass enlistments. Once the interest of the Nazi leadership, to convert official Protestantism into a Nazi movement, faded due to the ongoing problems with opponents from within the churches, the policy changed. Many Nazis, being anyway non-observing Protestants, seceded again from the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and the number of parishioners of the Capernaum Congregation dropped to 41,000 by 1935.
The existing majorities in the bodies on the different levels of church organisation remained, since in the synods the majority of German Christian synodals had voted for an abolition of further church elections. Parishioners' democratic participation by elections only re-emerged after the end of the Nazi reign. The Nazi government preferred the Protestant church bodies to weaken their influence in Germany by letting them enter into a destructive self-deprecation, once in while orchestrated by Nazi government interference in favour of the German Christians, but mostly in favour of the Protestant church bodies' dropping into insignificance.
The pastors of the Emergency Covenant of Pastors advanced their project of a new Protestant church and organised their own synods with synodals representing the intra-church opposition. The movement declared Protestantism was based on the complete Holy Scripture, the Old Covenant
of Jewish heritage, and the New Covenant
. The participants declared this basis to be binding for any Protestant Church deserving that name and confessed their allegiance to this basis (see Barmen Theological Declaration
). Henceforth the movement of all Protestant denominations, opposing Nazi intrusion into Protestant church affairs, was called the Confessing Church
, their partisans Confessing Christians, as opposed to German Christians .
Pastor Berlich gathered opposing activist parishioners to form a Confessing Christian congregation. The double role of the pastors, paid by the official church body and thus also obliged to fulfill the regular services
for the Capernaum Congregation and their parallel activity as Confessing Christians turned out to be a precarious balancing act. Official services were attended by denunciators, who would report any critical utterance to the Gestapo
, while German Christian parishioners and presbyters would inflict disciplinary procedures through the superior levels of the official church body.
Services and other meetings of Confessing Christians had to take place as private events, thus only true Confessing Christians would be admitted, who had to identify by red cards of membership, which were issued by confidents only. 380 parishioners of the Capernaum Congregation were card-carrying Confessing Christians. Compared with other congregations in the north of Berlin this was a great number of Confessing Christians. They elected their own brethren council consisting of the installer Mr Bolz, Mrs Brandt, Mr Grundt, the parochial vicar Ilse Kersten, the merchant Mr Komnow, inspector Mr Krummrei, Mrs Ranitz, and Mrs Rosendahl. However, even though the Confessing Christian congregation at Capernaum Church had a stable and considerable membership, the congregation did not hold regular rogation prayers for those persecuted by the Nazi regime and the three Confessing Christian pastors did not participate regularly in the meetings of the Emergency Covenant of Pastors on the regional, let alone the Berlin-wide level. The three pastors, who had not taken sides, did not bother their three Confessing Christian colleagues. All the fighting was promoted by German Christian presbyters and other parishioners.
A particular problem was fund-raising. The Confessing Christians depended completely on offertories, since the official church bodies did not share their revenues from the contributions levied from the parishioners by way of a surcharge on the income tax (so-called Church tax
), collected and then transferred by the state tax offices. To block any access to funds, in 1934 the Nazi government subjected any form of public money collection to state approval, which was regularly denied if Confessing Christians applied for it. So door-to-door collections became a dangerous, but necessary thing. In the parish of the Capernaum Congregation, never anybody denounced the collectors, while in other, particularly more rural parishes many a Confessing Christian cleric and layman or laywoman was denounced and subsequently taken to court.
At the beginning of November 1934 the official presbytery, dominated by German Christians, reached the dismissal of Lahde as executive chief of the Capernaum Congregation for his allegiance with the Confessing Christians by the fickle superior cleric in charge, Superintendent
Dr. Johannes Rosenfeld. Lacking any substantial basis for this decision, Lahde reached his reappointment on 19 December.
In 1935 the Confessing Christian pastor Petzold left the Capernaum Congregation. Thus a dispute between the German Christian presbytery and its executive chief Lahde arose. While Lahde, fearing the appointment of a new German Christian pastor, argued the diminished number of parishioners would not allow the employment of another pastor, the presbytery under the merchant Ebeling demanded a new pastor. On 19 October 1935 the March of Brandenburg provincial consistory
(the competent executive and clerical body) agreed to restaff the vacancy. On 18 November the presbytery thus chose the orthodox German Christian pastor Heyne from the Thuringian Evangelical Church, the church body being at the heart of the Faith Movement of German Christians
.
The Confessing Christians in the Capernaum Congregation then started the collection of signatures among the parishioners against Heyne's appointment. They handed in 300 signatures, what made the consistory to change its mind. In order to pacify the situation, it refused any reappointment on 23 November. Only in 1942 the presbytery succeeded and the German Christian pastor Johannes Hoffmann was appointed, coming from Mount of Olives Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg
.
Among the signatories we find the names of Vicar Kersten, the bookkeeper Dora Mechur, and Pastor Hans Urner (1901–1986; chaplain at the diaconal senior home Paul Gerhardt Stift in the years 1935–1953). These three ran an underground circle to help persons, persecuted by the Nazi regime as Jews, to emigrate.
The institutionally independent foundation of Paul Gerhardt Stift, located in Müllerstraße 58 at the corner with Barfusstraße within the parochial boundaries, was run by deaconess
es. The staff was divided in its allegiances to the German Christians and the Confessing Christians. While the institution's two chaplains, Pastor Urner and Pastor Hermann Wagner stuck with the Confessing Church, the matron deaconess sided with the German Christians. In the morning prayers led by her she included Adolf Hitler
in her rogations, while the two pastors on their turn never did so. The deaconess leading the medical station of the Paul Gerhardt Stift, an active Confessing Christian in the neighbouring Nazareth Congregation, and other colleagues of her, continued to treat Jewish patients even after this was strictly forbidden in 1938 and therefore could not be invoiced to the health insurance anymore.
Kersten, Mechur, and Urner were also friends with Pastor Harald Poelchau, who with the Social Democrat
Agnes Laukant (Brüsseler Str. 28a), ran another underground circle, hiding persecuted persons.
Lahde was denounced at the Gestapo
for his refusal to hoist the swastika flag on Capernaum Church, as did many congregations on certain dates or events of Nazi interest. This earned him an entry in his Gestapo file, collecting material against Lahde. Even after Lahde – due to his weak health – went into early retirement by the end of 1937, the presbytery inflicted a disciplinary procedure on him because of his alleged attitude of treason against the German people and state in 1938.
The knowledgeable Vicar Kersten (died 25 Oct. 1967), becoming after the war one of the first woman pastors in Berlin, was an important proponent of the Confessing Christians in the Capernaum Congregation. She led the Sunday school of the official Capernaum Congregation and regularly attracted 250 children and juveniles of parents of all allegiances. In the scope of the Confessing Church she held weekly Bible hours in her private apartment in Müllerstraße #97c, until she was bombed out in an allied air raid in February 1945. At the end of these meetings she traded the latest news about murders, arrestments, and what was going on in concentration camps, which were concealed by the official Nazi media. Kersten informed about a senior police officer in the local Seestraße precinct, who issued official police documents confirming the Christianness of its bearer, as Mechur recalled in 1989.
Mechur's father was a Jew, but somewhat protected because he was married with a so-called Aryan
Protestant, and his daughter was by religion not Jewish, this made the Nazi authorities classify his marriage as a then so-called 'privileged' mixed marriage
. German Jews and Jewesses and German Gentiles of Jewish descent living in privileged mixed marriage were in fact spared from deportation. On November 1944 Mr. Mechur died in the Jewish Hospital of Berlin , after he had been badly injured by a falling burning beam during an allied air raid. Dora Mechur recalls that the Christian friends of her family and fellow parishioners attended her father's burial on the Jewish Weißensee Cemetery
, which was then a rare sign of sympathy. Many Protestant congregations had ousted their co-parishioners, who were fully or partly of Jewish descent.
In the beginning of the Nazi reign the two groups around Kersten and Poelchau, helping persecuted persons, were mostly helping them to emigrate or to avoid arrest, until a flight abroad could be organised. From 18 October 1941 on, when the deportations of German Jews and Gentiles of Jewish descent from Berlin started, the purpose of hiding persons became a permanent issue. Jews, hiding from deportation, 'dived' in the underground and thus used to call themselves submarines .
Pastor Harald Poelchau , since the mid-1930s a parishioner of Capernaum Congregation, was a Christian Socialist. In April 1933 he was appointed prison chaplain in the Tegel prison (Zuchthaus Tegel ) of Berlin, and later also worked in the Plötzensee Prison
(very close-by to the parish of Capernaum Congregation), where many prominent opponents of the Nazi regime were executed, and in the prison of Brandenburg upon Havel
(Zuchthaus Brandenburg ). He smuggled (last) letters and messages of many death candidates and other detainees to their relatives. Already in 1933 under the impression of the maltreatment and torture of many political inmates in Tegel he and Laukant founded a circle of opponents, helping persecuted persons to hide.
He later joined the group named Kreisauer Kreis, led by his Silesian
fellow-countryman Helmuth James Graf von Moltke
. After 1939 it became particular difficult to feed the hidden persons, because food was only available on official ration stamps, of course not issued to hiding persons. Moltke provided Poelchau with food from his Silesian manor estate in Kreisau, which he embezzled from the requisitions imposed by the authorities. Poelchau stored them in his basement in Afrikanische Straße # 140b and handed them out. Helping Poelchau's group Urner hid submarines in his official residence in the Paul Gerhardt Stift. In 1944 Poelchau joined a further group named Onkel Emil, promoting the fast capitulation of Germany by public graffiti on walls.
, has its own graveyard section in the denominational Eastern Churchyard in formerly East Berlin's eastern suburb of Ahrensfelde
. Between 27 May 1952 and 3 October 1972 West Berliners were banned from free access to the East German German Democratic Republic
proper – as distinguished from East Berlin
. In this time all West Berliners, wishing to visit the grave of a late relative or friend in the cemeteries in East Germany, were excluded, as well as late widows and widowers, who wanted to be buried side by side with their earlier deceased spouses buried there. Between 1972 and 22 December 1989 West Berliners had restricted access, because they had to apply for East German visas and to pay for a compulsory exchange (officially in , i.e. minimum exchange).
Prussian Union (Evangelical Christian Church)
The Prussian Union was the merger of the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church in Prussia, by a series of decrees – among them the Unionsurkunde – by King Frederick William III...
Capernaum Congregation, a member of today's Protestant umbrella Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia
Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia
The Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia is a Protestant church body in the German states of Brandenburg, Berlin and a part of Saxony. The seat of the church is in Berlin. It is the most important Protestant denomination in the area....
. The church is located on Seestraße No. 34 in the locality of Wedding
Wedding (Berlin)
Wedding is a locality in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, Germany and was a separate borough in the north-western inner city until it was fused with Tiergarten and Mitte in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform...
, in Berlin's borough of Mitte
Mitte
Mitte is the first and most central borough of Berlin. It was created in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform by the merger of the former districts of Mitte proper, Tiergarten and Wedding; the resulting borough retained the name Mitte. It is one of the two boroughs which comprises former West and...
. The church was named after Capernaum, today Kfar Nachum כפר נחום (literally "Nachum's village"; transliteration in and in ) in today's Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
.
Christians revere the town of Capernaum, since on Sabbath
Shabbat
Shabbat is the seventh day of the Jewish week and a day of rest in Judaism. Shabbat is observed from a few minutes before sunset on Friday evening until a few minutes after when one would expect to be able to see three stars in the sky on Saturday night. The exact times, therefore, differ from...
s Jesus of Nazareth used to teach in the local synagogue (cf. Gospel of Luke
Gospel of Luke
The Gospel According to Luke , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Luke or simply Luke, is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension.The...
). The synagogue where Jesus possibly taught is a handsome, standing ruin open to visitors. Therefore it is likely that the town has been the home of Jesus (cf. Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
4:13), at least for some time. In Capernaum also, Jesus allegedly healed a man, and a fever in Simon Peter's mother-in-law.
Congregation and church
The area belonged previously to the Nazareth Congregation, the oldest in Wedding. Due to the high number of new parishioners moving in at the end of the 19th c. the Nazareth Church grew too small. Count Eduard Karl von Oppersdorf, who purchased many grounds along Seestraße in order to develop them as building land, offered to donate a site for a new church and a considerable sum of money to build it. He considered a prestigious site on a square to be developed in Antwerpener Straße, but Berlin's planning and zoningZoning
Zoning is a device of land use planning used by local governments in most developed countries. The word is derived from the practice of designating permitted uses of land based on mapped zones which separate one set of land uses from another...
board refused to approve that. Thus he offered the site on the crossroads of Seestraße #34/35 with Antwerpener Straße No. 50 on the condition of starting the constructions until a certain date, otherwise the tendered money would be forfeited. Oppersdorf speculated for a rise of land prices by the establishment of a church in the area.
Thus in 1896 the presbytery of Nazareth Congregation, presided by Pastor Ludwig Diestelkamp, commissioned the architect Baurat Carl Siebold from Bethel (a part of today's Bielefeld
Bielefeld
Bielefeld is an independent city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 323,000, it is also the most populous city in the Regierungsbezirk Detmold...
), then leading the construction department of the Bethel Institution
Bethel Institution
The Bethel Institution is a diaconal hospital for the mentally ill in Bielefeld, Germany....
, to build an additional church in the undeveloped area. Diestelkamp knew Siebold through his friend Friedrich von Bodelschwingh
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Junior was a German theologian and public health advocate. His father was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Senior , founder of the Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel charitable foundations.-Public health activities:Friedrich was the son of Reverend Friedrich von...
. On 30 September 1897 the cornerstone
Cornerstone
The cornerstone concept is derived from the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation, important since all other stones will be set in reference to this stone, thus determining the position of the entire structure.Over time a cornerstone became a ceremonial masonry stone, or...
was hastily laid. Effective constructions were only started in 1900.
Siebold, who build almost 80 churches, many of them in Westphalia
Province of Westphalia
The Province of Westphalia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Free State of Prussia from 1815 to 1946.-History:Napoleon Bonaparte founded the Kingdom of Westphalia, which was a client state of the First French Empire from 1807 to 1813...
, recycled his design for Christ Church in Hagen
Hagen
Hagen is the 39th-largest city in Germany, located in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It is located on the eastern edge of the Ruhr area, 15 km south of Dortmund, where the rivers Lenne, Volme and Ennepe meet the river Ruhr...
-Eilpe, which he adapted to the site on Seestraße. On 22 July 1902 the church was finished. The Evangelical Association for the Construction of Churches , a charitable organisation then headed by the Prussian
Kingdom of Prussia
The Kingdom of Prussia was a German kingdom from 1701 to 1918. Until the defeat of Germany in World War I, it comprised almost two-thirds of the area of the German Empire...
Queen Augusta Victoria
Augusta Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein
Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein was the last German Empress and Queen of Prussia. Her full German name was Auguste Victoria Friederike Luise Feodora Jenny von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg.She was the eldest daughter of Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein and Princess...
, co-financed the constructions. On 26 August the same year she, her son Crown Prince Frederick William and her husband King William II
William II, German Emperor
Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, ruling the German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia from 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918. He was a grandson of the British Queen Victoria and related to many monarchs and princes of Europe...
attended the inauguration of Capernaum Church, the latter in his then function as summus episcopus (Supreme Governor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces). In the following year the Capernaum Congregation was constituted as independent legal entity, within the then Protestant umbrella Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. The new congregation took over the northwestern part of the parish of the Nazareth Congregation, which is the northwestern part of the locality of Wedding, including the African Quarter north of the church building.
Building
Due to the location of the site the church is not orientedOrientation of Churches
The orientation of churches is the architectural feature of facing churches towards the east .The Jewish custom of fixing the direction of prayer and orienting synagogues influenced Christianity during its formative years. In early Christianity, it was customary to pray facing toward the Holy Land...
, but directed to the southeast. The building consists of three longish nave
Nave
In Romanesque and Gothic Christian abbey, cathedral basilica and church architecture, the nave is the central approach to the high altar, the main body of the church. "Nave" was probably suggested by the keel shape of its vaulting...
s on an asymmetric ground plan. While the northeastern nave is large and harbours a loft, in order to place more seats, the southwestern nave to Antwerpener Straße is narrow, rather resembling an aisle.
The outside structure of Romanesque Revivalism
Romanesque Revival architecture
Romanesque Revival is a style of building employed beginning in the mid 19th century inspired by the 11th and 12th century Romanesque architecture...
, built from red brick, with its Lombard band
Lombard band
A Lombard band is a decorative blind arcade, usually exterior, often used during the Romanesque and Gothic periods of architecture.Lombard bands are believed to have been first used during the First Romanesque Period of the early 11th Century. At that time, they were the most common architectural...
s and the entrance hall to Antwerpener Straße rather resembles a basilica
Basilica
The Latin word basilica , was originally used to describe a Roman public building, usually located in the forum of a Roman town. Public basilicas began to appear in Hellenistic cities in the 2nd century BC.The term was also applied to buildings used for religious purposes...
. Siebold's design is inspired by Romanesque architecture
Romanesque architecture
Romanesque architecture is an architectural style of Medieval Europe characterised by semi-circular arches. There is no consensus for the beginning date of the Romanesque architecture, with proposals ranging from the 6th to the 10th century. It developed in the 12th century into the Gothic style,...
of Rhenish churches such as St. Apostles, and Great St. Martin Church
Great St. Martin Church
The Great Saint Martin Church is a Romanesque Catholic church in Cologne, Germany. Its foundations rest on remnants of a Roman chapel, built on what was then an island in the Rhine. The church was later transformed into a Benedictine monastery...
(both Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
).
The quire
Quire (architecture)
Architecturally, the choir is the area of a church or cathedral, usually in the western part of the chancel between the nave and the sanctuary . The choir is occasionally located in the eastern part of the nave...
is highlighted by two octagonal towers, which are connected by a columned gallery of arcades . The room underneath the elevated quire was designed for the instruction of confirmands, thus being an early example of a structure combining church and community centre functions.
The tower at the crossroads of Seestraße with Antwerpener Straße, topped by a typical Rhenish steep rhombohedral
Rhombohedron
In geometry, a rhombohedron is a three-dimensional figure like a cube, except that its faces are not squares but rhombi. It is a special case of a parallelepiped where all edges are the same length....
spire, was built to form a landmark. Siebold designed it after the towers of St Mary's Assumption Church (for a picture see Andernach). The façade to Seestraße showed a great rose window
Rose window
A Rose window is often used as a generic term applied to a circular window, but is especially used for those found in churches of the Gothic architectural style and being divided into segments by stone mullions and tracery...
. A second, considerably smaller tower connects the church building to the alignment of houses in Seestraße. In 1909 August Dinklage, Olaf Lilloe, and Ernst Paulus added a rectory
Rectory
A rectory is the residence, or former residence, of a rector, most often a Christian cleric, but in some cases an academic rector or other person with that title...
in Rundbogenstil
Rundbogenstil
Rundbogenstil , one of the nineteenth-century historic revival styles of architecture, is a variety of Romanesque revival popular in the German-speaking lands and the German diaspora....
with round-arched windows in Seestraße #35, finished on 1 April 1911, thus inseriating the church with the alignment of houses. The rear wing of the rectory confines the backyard of church and rectory as a semi-closed court.
Destruction and Reconstruction
The Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II inflicted severe damages on Capernaum Church. In May 1944 the church completely burnt out to the outside walls, in February 1945 the main tower was also hit and burnt out.Starting in 1952 the architect Fritz Berndt began the reconstructions, accomplished by architect Günter Behrmann until 1959. The structures were simplified, the rose window was replaced by three biforium
Triforium
A triforium is a shallow arched gallery within the thickness of inner wall, which stands above the nave of a church or cathedral. It may occur at the level of the clerestory windows, or it may be located as a separate level below the clerestory. It may itself have an outer wall of glass rather than...
windows, while the main tower now bears a steep saddle roof
Saddle roof
A saddle roof is one which follows a convex curve about one axis and a concave curve about the other. The hyperbolic paraboloid form has been used for roofs at various times since it is easily constructed from straight sections of lumber, steel, or other conventional materials...
. The gable towards Seestraße was simplified due to the new simple saddle roof, covering the main nave, the side naves carry catslide roofs, thus the nave to Antwerpener Straße lost its spire light
Spire light
Spire light , the term given to the windows in a spire which are found in all periods of English Gothic architecture, and in French spires form a very important feature in the composition....
s. The church was re-inaugurated on the occasion of the feast of Evangelical
Prussian Union (Evangelical Christian Church)
The Prussian Union was the merger of the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church in Prussia, by a series of decrees – among them the Unionsurkunde – by King Frederick William III...
New Year (so-called First Sunday of Advent
Advent
Advent is a season observed in many Western Christian churches, a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas. It is the beginning of the Western liturgical year and commences on Advent Sunday, called Levavi...
) on 29 November 1959.
Furnishings
Originally the church was sparingly furnished. The main nave was not vaulted but covered by a wooden ceiling, repeating in the middle the saddle-roof form of the outside roof. Both side naves had even ceilings, supported by columns with cubic capitals. The lofts opened through three wide arches into the main nave. Mural paintings repeated Lombard bands and Romanesque ornaments. The quire was elaborately decorated with mural paintings typical for the Evangelical churches of the end of the 19th c. The apsisApsis
An apsis , plural apsides , is the point of greatest or least distance of a body from one of the foci of its elliptical orbit. In modern celestial mechanics this focus is also the center of attraction, which is usually the center of mass of the system...
painting displayed an enthroned Jesus of Nazareth in a mandorla surrounded by angel
Angel
Angels are mythical beings often depicted as messengers of God in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles along with the Quran. The English word angel is derived from the Greek ἄγγελος, a translation of in the Hebrew Bible ; a similar term, ملائكة , is used in the Qur'an...
s alternating with palms. A painting on the tympanum
Tympanum (architecture)
In architecture, a tympanum is the semi-circular or triangular decorative wall surface over an entrance, bounded by a lintel and arch. It often contains sculpture or other imagery or ornaments. Most architectural styles include this element....
on top of the apsis depicted the Roman Centurion
Centurion (Roman army)
A centurion , also hekatontarch in Greek sources, or, in Byzantine times, kentarch was a professional officer of the Roman army after the Marian reforms of 107 BC...
asking Jesus to heal his servant
Healing the Centurion's servant
Healing the Centurion's servant is one of the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.According to the Gospels, a Roman Centurion asked Jesus for help because his boy servant was ill. Jesus offered to go to the Centurion's house to perform the healing, but the Centurion suggested that...
(Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
). Stained glass windows of ornamental and figured design in the apsis continued the rich colourfulness of the quire. All this was destroyed in May 1944.
The new interior of 1959 under a wooden barrel vault
Barrel vault
A barrel vault, also known as a tunnel vault or a wagon vault, is an architectural element formed by the extrusion of a single curve along a given distance. The curves are typically circular in shape, lending a semi-cylindrical appearance to the total design...
is very plain. Behrmann created a new altar
Altar
An altar is any structure upon which offerings such as sacrifices are made for religious purposes. Altars are usually found at shrines, and they can be located in temples, churches and other places of worship...
and a new pulpit
Pulpit
Pulpit is a speakers' stand in a church. In many Christian churches, there are two speakers' stands at the front of the church. Typically, the one on the left is called the pulpit...
. Eva Limberg (Bielefeld) designed the new christening bowl
Baptismal font
A baptismal font is an article of church furniture or a fixture used for the baptism of children and adults.-Aspersion and affusion fonts:...
, the candlestick, carried by Apostle figures, and the lectern
Lectern
A lectern is a reading desk with a slanted top, usually placed on a stand or affixed to some other form of support, on which documents or books are placed as support for reading aloud, as in a scripture reading, lecture, or sermon...
, depicting the scene of the Roman Centurion and Jesus. In 1958 August Wagner created new coloured windows above the altar, after the design of the Hermann Kirchberger. The windows depict the Benedictive Jesus, the Nativity of Jesus
Nativity of Jesus
The Nativity of Jesus, or simply The Nativity, refers to the accounts of the birth of Jesus in two of the Canonical gospels and in various apocryphal texts....
, and the Descent of the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit is a term introduced in English translations of the Hebrew Bible, but understood differently in the main Abrahamic religions.While the general concept of a "Spirit" that permeates the cosmos has been used in various religions Holy Spirit is a term introduced in English translations of...
(Pentecost
Pentecost
Pentecost is a prominent feast in the calendar of Ancient Israel celebrating the giving of the Law on Sinai, and also later in the Christian liturgical year commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ after the Resurrection of Jesus...
). A surviving element of the original furnishing is a larger than life-sized copied statue of the benedictive Jesus after the famous statue by Bertel Thorvaldsen
Bertel Thorvaldsen
Bertel Thorvaldsen was a Danish-Icelandic sculptor of international fame, who spent most of his life in Italy . Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen into a Danish/Icelandic family of humble means, and was accepted to the Royal Academy of Arts when he was eleven years old...
.
The Capernaum Congregation in the Nazi Era
After the premature re-election of presbyters and synodSynod
A synod historically is a council of a church, usually convened to decide an issue of doctrine, administration or application. In modern usage, the word often refers to the governing body of a particular church, whether its members are meeting or not...
als on 23 July 1933, which the Nazi government had imposed onto all Protestant church bodies
Landeskirche
In Germany and Switzerland, a Landeskirche is the church of a region. They originated as the national churches of the independent states, States of Germany or Cantons of Switzerland , that later unified to form modern Germany or modern Switzerland , respectively.-Origins in the Holy Roman...
in Germany (see Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union), the Nazi partisan Protestant so-called Faith Movement of German Christians
German Christians
The Deutsche Christen were a pressure group and movement within German Protestantism aligned towards the antisemitic and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles...
gained a majority in the presbytery of the Capernaum Congregation, like in most congregations within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union. With the new majorities on all levels of church organisation the German Christians systematically tried to subject any unadulterated form of Protestantism by way of firing church employees of other opinion, blocking church property for non-Nazi Protestant groups, prohibiting collections for other purposes than the officially approved ones.
The majorities of German Christian synod
Synod
A synod historically is a council of a church, usually convened to decide an issue of doctrine, administration or application. In modern usage, the word often refers to the governing body of a particular church, whether its members are meeting or not...
als – first in the provincial synod of Brandenburg
Brandenburg
Brandenburg is one of the sixteen federal-states of Germany. It lies in the east of the country and is one of the new federal states that were re-created in 1990 upon the reunification of the former West Germany and East Germany. The capital is Potsdam...
(24 August 1933), competent for the Berlin and Brandenburg subsection, and then in the General Synod of the overall Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union (5/6 September 1933) – voted in the so-called Aryan paragraph
Aryan paragraph
An Aryan paragraph is a clause in the statutes of an organization, corporation, or real estate deed that reserves membership and/or right of residence solely for members of the Aryan race and excludes from such rights any non-Aryans, particularly Jews or those of Jewish descent, as well as to those...
, meaning that employees of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union – being all baptised Protestant church members -, who had grandparents, who were enrolled as Jews, or who were married with such persons, were all to be fired.
On 11 September 1933 Gerhard Jacobi , pastor of the William I Memorial Church
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
The Protestant Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is located in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm in the centre of the Breitscheidplatz. The original church on the site was built in the 1890s. It was badly damaged in a bombing raid in 1943...
in Berlin, leading the opposing synodals, gathered opposing pastors, who clearly saw the breach of Christian and Protestant principles and founded the Emergency Covenant of Pastors
Pfarrernotbund
The Pfarrernotbund was an organisation founded on 11 September 1933 to unite German evangelical theologians, pastors and church office-holders against the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the 28 Protestant regional church bodies and the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche and against the...
, presided by Pastor Martin Niemöller
Martin Niemöller
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem "First they came…"....
. Its members concluded that a schism
Schism (religion)
A schism , from Greek σχίσμα, skhísma , is a division between people, usually belonging to an organization or movement religious denomination. The word is most frequently applied to a break of communion between two sections of Christianity that were previously a single body, or to a division within...
was unavoidable, a new Protestant church was to be established, since the official organisation was anti-Christian, heretical
Heresy
Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion...
and therefore illegitimate.
Three out of six pastors of the Capernaum Congregation joined the Covenant to wit Karl Berlich, Helmut Petzold, and Friedrich Lahde, the latter holding as senior pastor the office of chief executive of the presbytery, dominated by German Christians since the imposed re-election. In 1933 among the pastors of Berlin, 160 stuck to Gospel and Church (the official name of the list of Nazi-opposing candidates in the re-election, most joined the Covenant), 40 were German Christians while another 200 had taken neither side. The same was true for the average parishioners, the vast majority did not bother being non-observant, many did not even participate in the elections, those who did, often voted for the German Christians, but in the following Struggle of the Churches
Kirchenkampf
Kirchenkampf is a German term that translates as "struggle of the churches" or "church struggle" in English. The term is sometimes used ambiguously, and may refer to one or more of the following different church struggles:...
, they never acted up as German Christian activists. The Kirchenkampf was an enactment performed by two minority groups within a rather indifferent majority.
As part of the re-election campaign the Nazi government and the Nazi party promoted that Nazi party members of Protestant descent, who were not members of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, would (re-)join that church body in order to secure a clear majority of votes for the Nazi group of the German Christians. In 1933 the Capernaum Congregation reached a number of about 70,000 parishioners through these tactical mass enlistments. Once the interest of the Nazi leadership, to convert official Protestantism into a Nazi movement, faded due to the ongoing problems with opponents from within the churches, the policy changed. Many Nazis, being anyway non-observing Protestants, seceded again from the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and the number of parishioners of the Capernaum Congregation dropped to 41,000 by 1935.
The existing majorities in the bodies on the different levels of church organisation remained, since in the synods the majority of German Christian synodals had voted for an abolition of further church elections. Parishioners' democratic participation by elections only re-emerged after the end of the Nazi reign. The Nazi government preferred the Protestant church bodies to weaken their influence in Germany by letting them enter into a destructive self-deprecation, once in while orchestrated by Nazi government interference in favour of the German Christians, but mostly in favour of the Protestant church bodies' dropping into insignificance.
The pastors of the Emergency Covenant of Pastors advanced their project of a new Protestant church and organised their own synods with synodals representing the intra-church opposition. The movement declared Protestantism was based on the complete Holy Scripture, the Old Covenant
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
of Jewish heritage, and the New Covenant
New Covenant
The New Covenant is a concept originally derived from the Hebrew Bible. The term "New Covenant" is used in the Bible to refer to an epochal relationship of restoration and peace following a period of trial and judgment...
. The participants declared this basis to be binding for any Protestant Church deserving that name and confessed their allegiance to this basis (see Barmen Theological Declaration
Barmen Declaration
The Barmen Declaration or The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 is a statement of the Confessing Church opposing the Nazi-supported "German Christians" movement known for its anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism...
). Henceforth the movement of all Protestant denominations, opposing Nazi intrusion into Protestant church affairs, was called the Confessing Church
Confessing Church
The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...
, their partisans Confessing Christians, as opposed to German Christians .
Pastor Berlich gathered opposing activist parishioners to form a Confessing Christian congregation. The double role of the pastors, paid by the official church body and thus also obliged to fulfill the regular services
Service of worship
In the Protestant denominations of Christianity, a service of worship is a meeting whose primary purpose is the worship of God. The phrase is normally shortened to service. It is also commonly called a worship service...
for the Capernaum Congregation and their parallel activity as Confessing Christians turned out to be a precarious balancing act. Official services were attended by denunciators, who would report any critical utterance to the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
, while German Christian parishioners and presbyters would inflict disciplinary procedures through the superior levels of the official church body.
Services and other meetings of Confessing Christians had to take place as private events, thus only true Confessing Christians would be admitted, who had to identify by red cards of membership, which were issued by confidents only. 380 parishioners of the Capernaum Congregation were card-carrying Confessing Christians. Compared with other congregations in the north of Berlin this was a great number of Confessing Christians. They elected their own brethren council consisting of the installer Mr Bolz, Mrs Brandt, Mr Grundt, the parochial vicar Ilse Kersten, the merchant Mr Komnow, inspector Mr Krummrei, Mrs Ranitz, and Mrs Rosendahl. However, even though the Confessing Christian congregation at Capernaum Church had a stable and considerable membership, the congregation did not hold regular rogation prayers for those persecuted by the Nazi regime and the three Confessing Christian pastors did not participate regularly in the meetings of the Emergency Covenant of Pastors on the regional, let alone the Berlin-wide level. The three pastors, who had not taken sides, did not bother their three Confessing Christian colleagues. All the fighting was promoted by German Christian presbyters and other parishioners.
A particular problem was fund-raising. The Confessing Christians depended completely on offertories, since the official church bodies did not share their revenues from the contributions levied from the parishioners by way of a surcharge on the income tax (so-called Church tax
Church tax
A church tax is a tax imposed on members of some religious congregations in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Sweden, some parts of Switzerland and several other countries.- Germany :About 70% of church revenues come from church tax...
), collected and then transferred by the state tax offices. To block any access to funds, in 1934 the Nazi government subjected any form of public money collection to state approval, which was regularly denied if Confessing Christians applied for it. So door-to-door collections became a dangerous, but necessary thing. In the parish of the Capernaum Congregation, never anybody denounced the collectors, while in other, particularly more rural parishes many a Confessing Christian cleric and layman or laywoman was denounced and subsequently taken to court.
At the beginning of November 1934 the official presbytery, dominated by German Christians, reached the dismissal of Lahde as executive chief of the Capernaum Congregation for his allegiance with the Confessing Christians by the fickle superior cleric in charge, Superintendent
Superintendent (ecclesiastical)
Superintendent is the head of an administrative division of a Protestant church, largely historical but still in use in Germany.- Superintendents in Sweden :...
Dr. Johannes Rosenfeld. Lacking any substantial basis for this decision, Lahde reached his reappointment on 19 December.
In 1935 the Confessing Christian pastor Petzold left the Capernaum Congregation. Thus a dispute between the German Christian presbytery and its executive chief Lahde arose. While Lahde, fearing the appointment of a new German Christian pastor, argued the diminished number of parishioners would not allow the employment of another pastor, the presbytery under the merchant Ebeling demanded a new pastor. On 19 October 1935 the March of Brandenburg provincial consistory
Consistory
-Antiquity:Originally, the Latin word consistorium meant simply 'sitting together', just as the Greek synedrion ....
(the competent executive and clerical body) agreed to restaff the vacancy. On 18 November the presbytery thus chose the orthodox German Christian pastor Heyne from the Thuringian Evangelical Church, the church body being at the heart of the Faith Movement of German Christians
German Christians
The Deutsche Christen were a pressure group and movement within German Protestantism aligned towards the antisemitic and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles...
.
The Confessing Christians in the Capernaum Congregation then started the collection of signatures among the parishioners against Heyne's appointment. They handed in 300 signatures, what made the consistory to change its mind. In order to pacify the situation, it refused any reappointment on 23 November. Only in 1942 the presbytery succeeded and the German Christian pastor Johannes Hoffmann was appointed, coming from Mount of Olives Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg
Kreuzberg
Kreuzberg, a part of the combined Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough located south of Mitte since 2001, is one of the best-known areas of Berlin...
.
Among the signatories we find the names of Vicar Kersten, the bookkeeper Dora Mechur, and Pastor Hans Urner (1901–1986; chaplain at the diaconal senior home Paul Gerhardt Stift in the years 1935–1953). These three ran an underground circle to help persons, persecuted by the Nazi regime as Jews, to emigrate.
The institutionally independent foundation of Paul Gerhardt Stift, located in Müllerstraße 58 at the corner with Barfusstraße within the parochial boundaries, was run by deaconess
Deaconess
Deaconess is a non-clerical order in some Christian denominations which sees to the care of women in the community. That word comes from a Greek word diakonos as well as deacon, which means a servant or helper and occurs frequently in the Christian New Testament of the Bible. Deaconesses trace...
es. The staff was divided in its allegiances to the German Christians and the Confessing Christians. While the institution's two chaplains, Pastor Urner and Pastor Hermann Wagner stuck with the Confessing Church, the matron deaconess sided with the German Christians. In the morning prayers led by her she included Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
in her rogations, while the two pastors on their turn never did so. The deaconess leading the medical station of the Paul Gerhardt Stift, an active Confessing Christian in the neighbouring Nazareth Congregation, and other colleagues of her, continued to treat Jewish patients even after this was strictly forbidden in 1938 and therefore could not be invoiced to the health insurance anymore.
Kersten, Mechur, and Urner were also friends with Pastor Harald Poelchau, who with the Social Democrat
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...
Agnes Laukant (Brüsseler Str. 28a), ran another underground circle, hiding persecuted persons.
Lahde was denounced at the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
for his refusal to hoist the swastika flag on Capernaum Church, as did many congregations on certain dates or events of Nazi interest. This earned him an entry in his Gestapo file, collecting material against Lahde. Even after Lahde – due to his weak health – went into early retirement by the end of 1937, the presbytery inflicted a disciplinary procedure on him because of his alleged attitude of treason against the German people and state in 1938.
The knowledgeable Vicar Kersten (died 25 Oct. 1967), becoming after the war one of the first woman pastors in Berlin, was an important proponent of the Confessing Christians in the Capernaum Congregation. She led the Sunday school of the official Capernaum Congregation and regularly attracted 250 children and juveniles of parents of all allegiances. In the scope of the Confessing Church she held weekly Bible hours in her private apartment in Müllerstraße #97c, until she was bombed out in an allied air raid in February 1945. At the end of these meetings she traded the latest news about murders, arrestments, and what was going on in concentration camps, which were concealed by the official Nazi media. Kersten informed about a senior police officer in the local Seestraße precinct, who issued official police documents confirming the Christianness of its bearer, as Mechur recalled in 1989.
Mechur's father was a Jew, but somewhat protected because he was married with a so-called Aryan
Aryan
Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...
Protestant, and his daughter was by religion not Jewish, this made the Nazi authorities classify his marriage as a then so-called 'privileged' mixed marriage
Interracial marriage
Interracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry. This is a form of exogamy and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation .-Legality of interracial marriage:In the Western world certain jurisdictions have had regulations...
. German Jews and Jewesses and German Gentiles of Jewish descent living in privileged mixed marriage were in fact spared from deportation. On November 1944 Mr. Mechur died in the Jewish Hospital of Berlin , after he had been badly injured by a falling burning beam during an allied air raid. Dora Mechur recalls that the Christian friends of her family and fellow parishioners attended her father's burial on the Jewish Weißensee Cemetery
Weißensee Cemetery
The Weißensee Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery located in the neighborhood of Weißensee in Berlin, Germany. It is the second largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. The cemetery covers approximately and contains approximately 115,000 graves. It was dedicated in 1880....
, which was then a rare sign of sympathy. Many Protestant congregations had ousted their co-parishioners, who were fully or partly of Jewish descent.
In the beginning of the Nazi reign the two groups around Kersten and Poelchau, helping persecuted persons, were mostly helping them to emigrate or to avoid arrest, until a flight abroad could be organised. From 18 October 1941 on, when the deportations of German Jews and Gentiles of Jewish descent from Berlin started, the purpose of hiding persons became a permanent issue. Jews, hiding from deportation, 'dived' in the underground and thus used to call themselves submarines .
Pastor Harald Poelchau , since the mid-1930s a parishioner of Capernaum Congregation, was a Christian Socialist. In April 1933 he was appointed prison chaplain in the Tegel prison (Zuchthaus Tegel ) of Berlin, and later also worked in the Plötzensee Prison
Plötzensee Prison
Plötzensee Prison was a Prussian institution built in Berlin between 1869 and 1879 near the lake Plötzensee, but in the neighbouring borough of Charlottenburg, on Hüttigpfad off Saatwinkler Damm. During Adolf Hitler's time in power from 1933 to 1945, more than 2,500 people were executed at...
(very close-by to the parish of Capernaum Congregation), where many prominent opponents of the Nazi regime were executed, and in the prison of Brandenburg upon Havel
Brandenburg (town)
Brandenburg an der Havel is a town in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, with a population of 71,778 . It is located on the banks of the River Havel. The town of Brandenburg, which is almost as widely known as the state of Brandenburg, provided the name for the medieval Bishopric of Brandenburg,...
(Zuchthaus Brandenburg ). He smuggled (last) letters and messages of many death candidates and other detainees to their relatives. Already in 1933 under the impression of the maltreatment and torture of many political inmates in Tegel he and Laukant founded a circle of opponents, helping persecuted persons to hide.
He later joined the group named Kreisauer Kreis, led by his Silesian
Province of Silesia
The Province of Silesia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1815 to 1919.-Geography:The territory comprised the bulk of the former Bohemian crown land of Silesia and the County of Kladsko, which King Frederick the Great had conquered from the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy in the 18th...
fellow-countryman Helmuth James Graf von Moltke
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was a German jurist who, as a draftee in the German Abwehr, acted to subvert German human-rights abuses of people in territories occupied by Germany during World War II and subsequently became a founding member of the Kreisau Circle resistance group, whose members...
. After 1939 it became particular difficult to feed the hidden persons, because food was only available on official ration stamps, of course not issued to hiding persons. Moltke provided Poelchau with food from his Silesian manor estate in Kreisau, which he embezzled from the requisitions imposed by the authorities. Poelchau stored them in his basement in Afrikanische Straße # 140b and handed them out. Helping Poelchau's group Urner hid submarines in his official residence in the Paul Gerhardt Stift. In 1944 Poelchau joined a further group named Onkel Emil, promoting the fast capitulation of Germany by public graffiti on walls.
The Cemetery of Capernaum Congregation in formerly East German Ahrensfelde
Capernaum Congregation, located in what used to be West BerlinWest Berlin
West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
, has its own graveyard section in the denominational Eastern Churchyard in formerly East Berlin's eastern suburb of Ahrensfelde
Ahrensfelde
Ahrensfelde is a municipality in the district of Barnim, in Brandenburg, Germany. It is situated 13 km northeast of Berlin ....
. Between 27 May 1952 and 3 October 1972 West Berliners were banned from free access to the East German German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
proper – as distinguished from East Berlin
East Berlin
East Berlin was the name given to the eastern part of Berlin between 1949 and 1990. It consisted of the Soviet sector of Berlin that was established in 1945. The American, British and French sectors became West Berlin, a part strongly associated with West Germany but a free city...
. In this time all West Berliners, wishing to visit the grave of a late relative or friend in the cemeteries in East Germany, were excluded, as well as late widows and widowers, who wanted to be buried side by side with their earlier deceased spouses buried there. Between 1972 and 22 December 1989 West Berliners had restricted access, because they had to apply for East German visas and to pay for a compulsory exchange (officially in , i.e. minimum exchange).