Erich Koch - Koch and Christianity

Koch and Christianity

Koch was one of the few Nazi party leaders to consider himself a professing Christian. In addition to his political career, Koch was also the elected praeses of Synod of the old-Prussian Ecclesiastical Province of East Prussia. Although Koch gave preference to the Deutsche Christen movement over traditional Protestantism, his contemporaries regarded Koch as a bona fide Christian, whose success in his church career could be attributed to his commitment to the Lutheran faith.

Koch officially resigned his church membership in 1943, but in his post-war testimony he stated: "I held the view that the Nazi idea had to develop from a basic Prussian-Protestant attitude and from Luther's unfinished Protestant Reformation". On the 450th Anniversary of Luther's birth (10 November 1933), Koch spoke on the circumstances surrounding Luther's birthday. He implied that the Machtergreifung was an act of divine will and stated that both Luther and Hitler struggled in the name of belief.

It has been speculated that Koch's conflicts with Rosenberg and Darré had a religious element to them: both Rosenberg and Darré were anti-Christian Nordicists who did not believe that the Nazi Weltanschauung ("world view") was compatible with Christianity.