Nazi rule

Nazi rule is presented as a political order whose effects reached into private life, religious communities, and the choices of people beyond Germany. The account follows American Quakers trying to understand and support German Quakers, Simone Weil’s displacement under anti-Jewish measures, and the wider demands of wartime conscience. Across these distinct experiences, fear is not an abstraction: it governs what can safely be written, exposes the vulnerability of persecuted people, and presses witnesses to ask what love and solidarity require.

Rule, fear, and the German Quakers

American Quakers were concerned for the welfare of Quakers living under Adolf Hitler. In the summer of 1938, Thomas Kelly returned to Germany on a trip arranged by Rufus Jones and others. German Quakers who remembered his earlier visit welcomed him. His purpose was to assess their situation and convey the love and concern of Quakers in the United States. The visit made religious concern a practical undertaking: Kelly was not simply observing from a distance but carrying a message to people whose circumstances he had been asked to understand.

The restrictions of the regime shaped even the means by which he communicated. At one point Kelly crossed the border into France so that he could write home without German censorship. He told his wife that his letters could not name people or places. In explaining why, he described a climate in which a chance anecdote might have grave consequences, including imprisonment, beatings, family separation, or death. The need to withhold names was itself evidence of the pressure under which people lived: ordinary correspondence had to be weighed against the possible danger it could bring to others.

Kelly’s journey formed part of a continuing Quaker response. Douglas Steere, committed both to Quaker life and to peace work, had made a risky visit to Germany in 1937 to encourage German Quakers while Hitler was in power and war threatened. He returned in 1940, after war had begun in Europe. His international peace work also included activity in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, whose American section he chaired from 1954 to 1966. These actions place Quaker concern within a sustained effort to maintain relationships across national boundaries during a period when such contact carried risks.

The moral shock of witnessing

What Kelly encountered in Germany changed how he judged his own life in the United States. He had been living comfortably at Haverford College, amid parklike surroundings and substantial privilege. Against the suffering he had seen, that comfort became a question: what could he offer a world in flames? The experience also sharpened his understanding of the consequences of an absence of love. He came to understand that God’s final nature was love, and that failure to recognize this truth helped account for the inhumanity he had witnessed.

The return in September 1938 did not simply close the journey. Kelly was the last person off the ship and seemed dazed. His brother-in-law, Robert Whitehead, later said that, after talking with Kelly, he felt he had no religion at all by comparison. Yet the return to familiar surroundings was difficult rather than triumphant. Kelly experienced spiritual dryness; the intense experiences of God that had preceded the trip had been brief and passing. He knew he needed to change his life. He renewed his relationship with his family, showed them more love, and played with his children after teaching. He also invited students to his home to read spiritual classics together. The German experience thus carried consequences into ordinary relationships and practices, not only into public judgment. He began work on A Testament of Devotion, which was published after his death.

Persecution, displacement, and resistance

The regime’s reach is also visible in Simone Weil’s experience. After the German occupation of Paris, her family moved to Marseilles. In 1940, the Vichy state teaching service officially dismissed her under anti-Jewish laws. The account connects political persecution to a concrete loss of employment and to the displacement of a family. Weil’s religious life intensified in this period, and she formed a deep friendship with Father J. M. Perrin, who became her spiritual director. He later sent her to Gustave Thibon, a lay theologian who operated a Catholic agricultural colony in southern France. Her passage through these relationships took place amid the danger and instability created by persecution.

On May 17, 1942, the Weil family sailed for the United States and settled on Riverside Drive in New York. Weil was unhappy there: she found life too secure while people in France suffered under Nazism and war. She attended daily Mass at Corpus Christi Church, but safety did not resolve her sense of distance from those in danger. Her wish to be parachuted back into France proved unrealistic, making that route home impossible. She nevertheless remained determined to join the French Resistance. On November 9, 1942, she left her family and sailed for England to work for the Free French government in exile. There she wrote The Need for Roots, a book concerned with the needs of the soul, the uprooting caused by war, and the restoration of rooted life. Its posthumous publication in 1949 extended her response beyond the immediate circumstances of exile and resistance.

Wider contrasts and wartime conscience

The account distinguishes Nazi persecution from other forms of oppression rather than treating them as identical. Howard Thurman’s childhood in segregated Florida, for example, reveals another structure of exclusion: his hometown offered African American children schooling only through the seventh grade. His grandmother, a former slave, rejected readings from Saint Paul because of the apostle’s instruction that slaves obey their masters. Later, in Ceylon, a college principal challenged Thurman over Christianity’s historical complicity in slavery and the continuing realities of segregation, lynching, and racial violence in the United States. Thurman answered by distinguishing Christianity from the religion of Jesus and by pointing to a minority of Americans who understood Jesus as a source of freedom, liberty, and justice. This is not an account of Nazi rule; its relevance is the book’s broader insistence that religious claims must be tested against the harms carried out in their name.

Wartime conscience also shaped Dorothy Day’s work. The Catholic Worker reported on poverty, racism, labor, and other social questions, while its circulation fell during World War II because of Day’s pacifism. Her commitment to caring for poor people did not replace political opposition to violence with indifference to suffering. She understood hospitality as a response to Christ present in people who needed food and shelter, even when they were difficult to serve. Read alongside the journeys of Kelly, Steere, and Weil, this practice gives the account a second scale of response: support for endangered communities and resistance to war appear alongside direct care for people in need. Nazi rule is therefore significant not only as a source of coercion and persecution, but as the pressure against which religious commitments to peace, love, and human dignity become visible.