Luther Fuels the Resistance Movement: Jumping a 400-Year Gap

Martin Luther died in 1546. How did he play a role in energizing an underground network inside Germany working to undermine and disable Hitler’s vicious plans?

The secret organizations which undermined the National Socialist war effort and saved the lives of thousands of Jews were composed of a diverse array of individuals. Lutherans worked with Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Eastern Orthodox believers. Some members of the resistance were not primarily motivated by spirituality, but rather came from aristocratic families or from the military.

Many underground operatives, including famous leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl, were motivated by their Lutheran faith. Others weren’t explicitly Lutheran, but encountered Luther’s thought as they worked with their fellow anti-Nazi conspirators.

How did Luther contribute to this resistance? As historian Uwe Siemon-Netto write, it was Luther’s “ceaseless admonition to speak up in the face of governmental evil,” and “his unequivocal opposition to all wars of aggression — and his advice to soldiers to disobey orders that violate God’s commandments.”

In the early 1930s, when Hitler began to seize power, the demographics of Germany resembled those of many other countries at that time, and throughout both the preceding and subsequent decades: The population could be grouped into those who seriously engaged in their spirituality, and those who were content to be nominal members of some church.

Those who understood, internalized, and acted on their spiritual principles, found themselves obliged to oppose Hitler both with their words and with their deeds.

Those who made no effort to shape their lives and actions according to the Christian faith, and who made no effort to understand the ethical commitments which this faith entailed, were content to sit idly by as the National Socialists started wars and murdered Jews.

The resistance movement was explicit in citing its spiritual motives as it opposed Naziism. Uwe Siemon-Netto explains that “uniformly Lutheran countries, such as Norway, based their resistance to tyranny on Luther’s theology.”

John Steinbeck’s novel about the Norwegian resistance movement captures this in a passage describing the home of an underground member. In the house hangs a painting of Christ as bringing hope.

Luther was certainly not the only source of thought for the movement. Augustine was often cited, and contemporary German clergy from a diverse range of theologies — Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran — formulated argumentation which revealed why significant and concrete actions had to be taken against Hitler. From these sources and others, the resistance assembled an intellectual framework justifying their actions: sabotage which slowed the manufacturing of weapons, vandalism which slowed military supply lines, misinformation which confused military intelligence assessments, printing forbidden texts to alert the public to the evils of National Socialism, and the organized escapes which took Jews out of Germany and into safe countries.

By contrast, the Nazi leadership was uniform in its opposition to Christianity. The Nazis occasionally co-opted Christian words or ideas to hide their true intentions, but this was a cynical exploitation of Christianity, not in any way an embrace of it. Some National Socialist leaders had be raised in the Christian tradition, but they explicitly rejected Christianity when they joined the Nazi hierarchy, as Uwe Siemon-Netto writes:

The ex-Catholics in the top Nazi leadership rejected the Catholic faith of their childhood in favor of forms of religiosity that would not pass doctrinal review by theologians of any serious Christian denomination, with many, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler, embracing a rabidly anti-Christian variety of neo-paganism.

While individual narratives are complex, the big picture is clear: dedication to the Christian faith was a major component of the intellectual foundation of the anti-Nazi resistance movement.

The Mayerling Incident: Facts vs. Speculations

The deaths of Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf can be explained simply: On Wednesday morning, January 30, 1889, they were found dead inside a locked room in the Crown Prince’s hunting lodge in Mayerling, a small village southwest of Vienna. The circumstances have driven investigators, on that day and for the last 135 years, to conclude that the event was a murder-suicide pact, in which Mary Vetera asked Rudolf to shoot her before he shot himself.

While the basic report is clear, the further details are muddy and complicated. What was the motive — what were the motives — for this horrifying act? Who may have had knowledge or suspicions about it beforehand? One of the factors for the lack of clarity about these further questions was an organized coverup orchestrated by the Habsburg dynasty.

A number of individuals are involved in the events: Rudolf’s wife, Crown Princess Stephanie, who was wounded by the illicit affair between Rudolf and Mary, and who yet needed her marriage to Rudolf to maintain her status near the very top of the dynasty; Rudolf’s mother, Empress Elisabeth, who had been habitually disengaged in her son’s life and thereby perhaps by means of this neglect created a psychological neediness in him; Rudolf’s father, Emperor Franz-Josef, who relationship to Rudolf was distant and disparaging; and Mary’s mother, Helene von Vetsera, who raised her daughter to be an ambitious social climber. To these main figures is added a long list of other family members, a number of various government officials, and a handful of friends.

“Even after more than a century, the subject of Mayerling remains controversial,” note co-authors Greg King and Penny Wilson. The case presents “few known facts” but many “divergent ideas offering alternative explanations.” King and Wilson venture some hypotheses:

Despite the rather obvious hurdles involved in tackling an historical affair and two mysterious deaths clouded by decades of controversy, we believe that we’ve been able to reach some new conclusions offering a starkly different take on the liaison between Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera.

The complexities of investigating the Mayerling case are amplified by the secretive reaction of the Habsburg dynasty. Documents relating to the deaths of Rudolf and Mary have disappeared in some cases, or remained state secrets for many years in other cases.

The royal family had motives to suppress information which might fuel narratives unfavorable to the dynasty, and had motives to promote accounts of the incident which cast the family in a more favorable light. To which extent did the dynasty act on those motives?

Given Rudolf’s geopolitical importance, diplomats and governments around the world produced fevered speculation in large quantities, further muddying the investigative waters. While the case was a personal tragedy, it was also a matter of state.

The starting point for all hypothesizing was the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera on January 30, 1889 in the family’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. The event seemed prima facie to be a murder-suicide by gunshot wound. Letters written by Rudolf and Mary were found, seemingly confirming the murder-suicide hypothesis.

Soon, however, alternative narratives appeared. One version supposed that Rudolf had secret connections to a Hungarian nationalist group, and that when it seemed that these connections might come to light, Rudolf chose suicide rather than have his political entanglements exposed. Another version posited that a member of the royal family murdered both Rudolf and Mary, and that the dynasty was engaged in a coverup to protect the murderer.

The passage of decades has been a double-edged sword: one the one hand, the motives of defending the dynasty’s honor and of geopolitical relevance of Rudolf and his death have faded, lessening the tendency to manipulate the narrative in order to serve either, or both, of those purposes. On the other hand, some of the physical evidence, living witnesses, and relevant texts have gradually ceased to be.

Historians Greg King and Penny Wilson write:

More than 125 years have passed since the tragedy at Mayerling. Shifting stories, deliberate lies, wild theories, and the disappearance of evidence have shrouded the story in seemingly impenetrable layers of mystery. Absent documentation, history can only speculate about what happened between Rudolf and Mary at that isolated lodge. But enough remains, when coupled with modern forensic evidence and psychological analysis, to weave together a plausible version of events, one that not only fits within the framework of known facts but also offers a believable and ultimately devastating reconstruction of those final, fateful hours.

King and Wilson go on to offer scholarly support for the most sober interpretation: that they only two people in the room were Rudolf and Mary, that there was no third-party murderer, and that it was a combination of political and personal stressors, with the added factor of Rudolf’s personal dissipation, that pushed him to, and beyond, the idea of suicide — and Mary with him.

Rudolf’s life, as King and Wilson write, was falling apart, both personally and politically. Mary had become fixated on Rudolf and could imagine no future without him. Rumors add the possibilities that Mary was pregnant with Rudolf’s child, that Mary was actually Rudolf’s half-sister by means of a youthful indiscretion on the part of Emperor Franz-Josef, or that Mary had been infected by Rudolf with a sexually transmitted disease. It is not possible to prove or disprove any of these possibilities.

Politically, Rudolf encountered perpetual frustration: The Emperor failed to take seriously any of Rudolf’s policy views or suggestions. Rudolf was on track to become Emperor, but it would be another twenty-five years before that could happen: twenty-five years of waiting and of being unable to shape policy. Rudolf feared that, when he finally might become Emperor, it would be too late: that, by such a time, the European situation would have deteriorated so far that meaningful reforms could not succeed. Rudolf was correct: the dynasty would fall in 1918. Rudolf believed that he could have saved the dynasty by reforming it.

Beyond the speculations about the nature of the two deaths are the speculations about the ripple effects those deaths had on world history. Had Rudolf lived, he would have had a hand in imperial politics for the next twenty-five years, and then he would have become emperor. Could Rudolf have exerted enough influence in his father’s government to avert WW1? Even if he had been unable to prevent the war, would he have been able to find a better end to it if he’d taken the throne upon his father’s death in November 1916 — two full years before the war’s end?

Franz-Josef had planned for Rudolf to succeed him on the throne. After Rudolf’s death, the next person in the line of succession was Archduke Karl Ludwig, who would have been emperor had he not died in 1896. Karl Ludwig’s son Franz-Ferdinand then became the heir to the throne until his death in 1914. When Franz-Josef died in 1916, the throne was passed to Karl, who was a nephew of Franz-Ferdinand and a grandson of Karl-Ludwig. So it was that Emperor Franz-Ferdinand outlived three different men, each of whom was slated to be his heir.

The sad deaths of Rudolf and Mary leave many questions which will probably never be conclusively answered. The case continues to attract attention both because of its human interest and because of its location in history as a point of contact between a variety of geopolitical and sociopolitical trends.