Nazi-era church in Berlin up for sale

By Clive Freeman Sep 27, 2007, 10:15 GMT

Berlin - The Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin's Mariendorf district, which is decorated with Nazi-style carvings, is up for sale after being closed for the past three years.

Consecrated in 1933 - the year that Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany - the church with seating for 1,000 worshippers has proved an embarrassment to the authorities for more than 50 years.

Reliefs on its baptismal font and pulpit include German soldiers among the groups of Christ's followers. A chandelier shaped like an iron cross, a German military symbol, lights the church entrance.

Formerly a bust of Hitler stood in the nave, later to be replaced by one of Martin Luther.

Even the figure of Christ on the cross bears the face of a victorious Aryan with an athlete's frame, and does not suggest a tortured Jesus.

Three years ago, the church, which has an impressive 50-metre-high tower in the Bauhaus style, was closed and shrouded with scaffolding and tarpaulins after tiles began falling from the church roof.

Pillars supporting the tower were found to be eroding.

The cost of repairing the tower, which was first damaged by wartime bombing, was estimated at 3.5 million euros - a sum the formerly 10,000-strong church community has been unable to raise.

Minister Hans-Martin Brehm says church members have been fervent in their desire to keep the church going, but over the past 25 years the size of its congregation has declined.

That prompted proposals that the church be leased to tenants for use as a theatre or be transformed into a museum to depict how Lutherans both supported and opposed the Third Reich.

But to date, no one has made a firm offer to take over the building.

'We are paying about 40,000 euros annually in upkeep for the building,' said Brehm.

Some parishioners feel the best thing would be to tear down the church and redevelop the site - an idea that shocks most of the area's active Lutherans.

'One doesn't destroy a living church,' said one elderly man indignantly as he leaned on his stick in front of the locked church.

Memorial Church parishioners currently worship on Sundays at the nearby Alt Mariendorf church, built in the year 1230 and reputedly Berlin's second-oldest church.

When the church was first closed down, efforts were made to save it. A fund-raising campaign was organized with bring-and-buy sales, but to no avail.

Built between 1933 and 1935, the church's interior decoration was notably Nazi in style, especially its triumphant chancel arch decorated with 800 terracotta reliefs containing Nazi as well as Christian symbols.

After the Second World War, the church served temporarily as a chapel for US forces, once the military had seen to it that Hitler's bust in the nave and swastikas draping the walls had been removed.

Post-war Mariendorf church members earned respect by working tirelessly for reconciliation between the people of Poland and Germany.

Annual services on September 1 atoned for the infamous date in 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland and set off the war.

Collages by Polish artist Pavel Warhol about the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp have been on permanent display at the church since 1989, underlying the evil of Nazi ideology and the failure of both German society and the Lutheran Church to stop Nazism in the 1930s.

Hitler forced regional Lutheran churches in Germany to merge into the Lutheran Church of the Reich which propagated a Nazi-based idea of 'positive Christianity' and portrayed Jesus Christ as an 'Aryan.'

Peter Schabe of the Foundation for the Protection of Historic Monuments considers the Martin Luther Church to be an unusually graphic record of Nazi evilness which should be preserved for that reason.

Monika Geyler of the Berlin Forum for Contemporary History BFGG agrees. She said many churches have some Nazi-style elements, but none has them so ingrained as in the Berlin church.

'Money could be raised if there were a serious plan (for a future use),' she said. The city-state of Berlin was willing to contribute and aid could be applied for from the Historic Monuments Foundation.