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Harald Poelchau took a job with the Nazis in April of 1933. Just days before, the Reichtag had passed its Enabling Act, granting Hitler unchecked powers. Communists and trade unionists had been rounded up by the Gestapo and beaten in basements since Hitler assumed power as chancellor at the end of January, just two months before. On Poelchau’s first day on the job, the Nazis announced a boycott of Jewish businesses. In his role as chaplain at Tegel prison, Poelchau would work for the Nazis for the next twelve years.
Today, a mural of Harald and his wife Dorothee covers the side of an eight-story building in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin, celebrating the actions they took to hide Jews and feed prisoners who would be starved during the terrors of the Third Reich. The Poelchau’s were never caught – which is to say, they convinced the Nazis they were obediently serving the Fürher, even as they worked in secret to save lives. But this also meant that Poelchau participated in the execution of some of his own co-conspirators.
The Poelchaus are models of courage in the face of authoritarian extremism. But in their resistance, were they complicit?
The Poelchaus have been on my mind since I got back from two weeks in Germany and Poland with the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics [ [link removed] ] (FASPE), an innovative, inter-professional program that immerses early career professionals in the story of the Nazi regime to ask this question: what can we learn from the decisions professionals made in the processes that led to the Holocaust and mass killings? (If you know or teach young professionals, you should encourage them to apply.)
Along with Rabbi Amy Wallk, I facilitated this year’s cohort of clergy fellows – an exceptional group of young pastors, rabbis, and chaplains from the US, Canada, Ghana, and Nigeria. We made our journey alongside and in dialogue with cohorts of doctors and journalists – good conversation partners for questions about how clergy serve life and shape a public narrative in our work. As it turns out, they’re also important conversation partners for anyone who hopes to offer moral leadership in the midst of an authoritarian crisis.
I should be clear: FASPE is a professional ethics fellowship that aims to make good use of history to fill a gap in so much professional formation. Yes, our journalism schools and medical schools and seminaries require ethics courses. But programs that compete for students in a market-driven education model have been incentivized to make professional ethics about what helps a person do well on the job. Don’t steal from your clients. Don’t sleep with your parishioner. Don’t give up your sources. Don’t cut corners for short term gain. Ask anyone who’s made these mistakes and they will tell you: these are important lessons to learn. But following all the rules of professionalism did nothing to prevent most doctors and journalists and clergy from facilitating mass murder in Nazi Germany. FASPE asks early-career professionals to think about what more their moral and ethical commitments require of them.
But FASPE is not a program to teach professionals how to resist authoritarianism. By design, it aims to expand the horizon of the ethical questions professionals ask by immersing them in a story of authoritarian horrors that everyone can agree was evil. When we consider a context where complicity with evil is a given - not something to be debated - it creates a space to ask what motivated the perpetrators to do the things that they did. “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous,” Primo Levi wrote in his memoir about surviving Auschwitz. “More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” For two weeks, we ask fellows to get to know the functionaries of the Nazi regime – the young professionals without whom Hitler would never have been able to enact the illusions he articulated in Mein Kampf. We asked them not to imagine what they might have done to resist, but to try to understand why people very much like them decided not to resist.
Which is to say, we didn’t study the case of the Poelchaus. Instead, we were immersed in the waters of the world they had to negotiate. We took time to understand what it felt like to be a university student in the 20s and early 30s of the Weimar Republic. We went to the Bebel Platz at the Humbolt University where Goebbels gave his famous speech in front of the pyre of burning books, that same spring when Poelchau started his new job at Tegel prison. We learned that it wasn’t the Nazi propaganda office that planned the book burnings, but rather enthusiastic students who would go on to serve as young professionals in the Reich. These were Poelchau’s peers. Many well-educated young Germans in the early thirties were enthusiastic about the Nazi program, just as the churches saw Hitler’s movement as a sign of revival that could be good for the faith. The cathedral in Berlin held a service of thanksgiving the Sunday after Hitler became chancellor. People who resisted the Nazis weren’t seen as defenders of their neighbors or of human rights; they were dismissed as radicals and silenced in public life.
As a pastor on the Nazi payroll, Poelchau never joined the Confessing Church, which challenged the Nazi Party when its most ardent supporters in the churches began to change traditional church teachings to conform to Nazi ideology. He is not remembered alongside the martyrs Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Alfred Delp. But he and Dorothee are remembered by Yad Vashem as “righteous among the nations” because they took action to save their Jewish neighbors.
Were they complicit in the regime’s evil? Maybe so, but that wasn’t the question that shaped their choices each day. In the face of an authoritarian crisis, the Poelchaus chose to act – not to change what they could not, but to do what they could. FASPE’s insistence that we attend to the decisions that perpetrators made in an authoritarian crisis has helped me clarify the context for their resistance and for ours. Often we don’t have anywhere to stand where we’re not complicit in some evil. This does not absolve us of our moral responsibility.
Each of us makes choices every day. We can choose to act for life, even if we are complicit with death-dealing systems. We do not hold onto our humanity by trying to stand apart from the mess of this world. The Poelchaus are witnesses that we remain human by practicing moral agency amidst death-dealing systems.
A couple of years ago, I met a student while giving a guest lecture who told me about her vocation to become a trauma surgeon. I promised to pray for her, and we’ve stayed in touch. The hospital where she is now doing her residency is close to a private detention center that ICE uses to confine people they snatch from their jobs on the street. When she moved there, this young doctor reached out to me to learn about the community partners who are working to shutter this private detention center. She sees it for the real evil that it is, but she also recognizes that her hospital is the trauma center that cares for people who are suffering in terrible conditions there.
When a young man detained there was recently brought in by the private security guards with chest pains, she diagnosed his cardiac issue and informed the young man that he would need emergency surgery. Acting to save his life was what her most basic professional ethic required. But she also recognized she had a choice to make: would she allow him to go back to the conditions that were killing him, or would she take action to change his situation? She wrote an order stating that her patient would die if he was returned to the detention center. She made clear to the private prison company that they would be responsible for his death, and she secured his release to the care of his family.
That detention center is still full of people. It will not close until enough of us insist that we do not want to be the kind of people who pretend our well-being depends on the caging of our neighbors. In the meantime, we have decisions to make every day about how we will treat the people in front of us. I think the Poelchaus have stayed with me because they offer a more pointed challenge than even the martyrs. They do not ask me what I will do in that rare circumstance where I have to choose between my own life and my moral commitments; they ask me what I will do today, in response to the people in front of me, to serve life and build beloved community in the ways that I can.

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