Saving a Nazi Church: Aryans on the Altar; Swastikas on the Church Bells - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News: "It is the country's last surviving Nazi era church with an interior still dominated by fascist symbols. Consecrated in 1935 two years after Hitler seized power, its exterior was designed in the Bauhaus style in 1929, before the reign of the Nazis began. Brown-tiled and cavernous, it is foreboding and devoid of grace, yet religious services took place here regularly until just a year ago when the church was deemed unsafe because tiles started falling off the façade.

'When you hold sermons in this church your words clash with the symbols around you,' Isolde Böhm, dean of the parish, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. 'It's hard work talking about human dignity when you're constantly aware that your surroundings evoke a system that trampled on dignity. Sometimes I had the feeling that the symbols overpowered the words.'

Despite the remnants of Nazism in the church though, Böhm and other priests and parishioners are trying to raise the €3.5 million needed to rescue the church from collapse. It's an ethical dilemma, but one they regard as worth tackling. The building could serve as a warning to future generations and as a reminder of how the German church aligned itself with the Nazis in the 1930s, they say.

In the early 1930s the Protestant church came under the influence of a racist and fascist movement called the 'German Christians' -- called 'stormtroopers of Jesus,' by the group's leader and founder Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder."

(Via Martini Republic.)