When faith fails

From the outside looking in, Susanne Hirzel appeared to have the perfect family. At least from our vantage point eighty or ninety years later.

From a purely “patriotic” view, both Hirzel parents were true German heroes. Ernst Hirzel had served as lieutenant of the 123rd Infantry during the War to End All Wars. On September 2, 1914, his left leg was injured in battle; he was back with his regiment by Easter 1915. In the Battle of Somme in 1916, he received a severe head wound—so severe, in fact, that the military would not return him to active duty.

So Ernst Hirzel joined Ulm’s Reserve Battalion 123 a year later and was back on the front lines by October 1918.

Margarete Hirzel nee Gradmann worked as a Red Cross nurse in Tübingen during World War I, where she contracted toxemia (blood poisoning). The disease cost her use of her right hand.

Ernst Hirzel was awarded the Medal of Honor I and II, as well as the German equivalent of the purple heart, and the wartime service medal with swords. The German government designated him as 50% disabled due to war injuries, and Mrs. Hirzel as 30% disabled.

Susanne’s father could have commanded pity. Instead, he became vicar of a Lutheran church in Ulm. The little Hirzel family—Ernst, Margarete, and their two children Susanne and Hans—briefly lived in Untersteinbach, near Margarete’s hometown of Forchtenberg (where Sophie Scholl was born).

When a brand new church with cutting edge architecture called Ernst Hirzel as pastor in 1927, the Hirzels gladly accepted. Photo above is Martin-Luther-Kirche, where Rev. Hirzel served.

From a nationalist German perspective in the 1920s, the Hirzels had an impeccable reputation. Margarete was eventually awarded the NSDAP’s “Mother’s Medal in Silver” for having borne six children. Ernst’s position at Martin-Luther-Kirche elevated his status in the community.

Ulm’s Nazi Party recruited Rev. Ernst Hirzel. A man with such strong nationalist credentials, a wife with so many children!, he was the sort of cleric they wanted on their side. Ernst dutifully read Mein Kampf. He studied the party platform. He paid 2 RM ($16) in monthly dues to the NSV, the National Socialist Welfare Society. Ernst Hirzel even joined the Reich Soldiers’ League, the Reich Air Raid League, and the Reich League of German Officers.

And yet. He could not bring himself to join the NSDAP. He mostly liked the party’s domestic and foreign policies. Rev. Ernst Hirzel simply did not trust Adolf Hitler’s attitude towards the church. Something about ‘alignment’ didn’t sit right.

A professor’s daughter, Margarete Hirzel exerted enormous influence over her brood. Both Hans and Susanne attributed their love of music and academia to their mother.

Their father, on the other hand, led by example. Despite his nationalistic tendencies, the more he learned about National Socialism, the less he liked it. Even before Hitler ascended to power in January 1933, Rev. Hirzel distanced himself from the very politics that could have elevated his status in the community.

Early one Sunday morning in those pre-Hitler years, a group of Storm Troopers showed up at Martin-Luther-Kirche in Ulm, dressed in full uniform. They requested permission to participate in Sunday morning worship. Pastor Hirzel politely declined.

“Thank God, I refused,” he wrote in a memorandum for the Gestapo in 1943. “And that was held against me for a very long time. This was before 1933. If I had permitted it, I would have brought the battle on the streets inside the church.”

Ultimately, this concept—civil war inside the church—proved most critical for Ernst Hirzel and his impressionable children. In that same memorandum for the Gestapo, he wrote:

I cannot allow my children to see State and Fatherland in such high, holy status. Out of love, we must continue to struggle through this. The older children have very clear memories of the wretched time before 1933 in their souls. They lived through the awful parades of the Red Front and the riots between the NSDAP and the Reichsbanner [German ex-servicemen’s association, 1924 – 1933].

After the war, Hans Hirzel would write: “Blind obedience and external ‘standing at attention’ went against his very nature.”

Pomposity and posturing inevitably met with Ernst Hirzel’s ridicule. The pastor could be moved to tears by medieval architecture or a Bruckner symphony, but he was left cold by men in uniform who yelled and spoke nonsense.

Both parents, therefore, taught their young children to question authority, not to take “I said so” as a valid response. Although all six Hirzel children were baptized in the Lutheran faith, took Communion, and participated in religious rituals, Ernst and Margarete accepted doubt and misgivings as logical conclusions to the manner in which they raised their kids. Lunch and dinner were devoted to argument and debate. No holds barred.

Even when Hans and Susanne decided they wanted to join Hitler Youth, their parents agreed (begrudgingly). But demanded of them that they fulfill all obligations: Chores, schoolwork, and duties in Hitler Youth and Jungmädel. Nothing could fall through the cracks.

Rev. Hirzel’s distrust of the man with the little moustache in Berlin proved prescient when the NSDAP arrested a close friend and Lutheran bishop who spoke out against the “aligned” Lutheran church. After falsely accusing the good bishop of embezzling funds, the NSDAP imprisoned him. Not only a bridge too far. A crime too far, slander. His country, Rev. Hirzel’s beloved Germany!, was silencing religious leaders who dared disagree with the Führer! Too much.

When Ernst Hirzel and other pastors stood up to the Brown horde, they too were threatened with imprisonment. He began to take his friend’s humiliation personally. Susanne and Hans, the eldest of the six children, encouraged their father to fight back, not to take the insults. Instead, Rev. Hirzel chose to hunker down and “wait it out.” Oh, his children were angry!

Something imperceptible happened to Ernst Hirzel over the next couple of years. He signed the Bonhoeffer-Niemöller Confession, along with around 7000 other Lutheran pastors. No fanfare, no overt protest. Just his signature on a document, along with thousands of others.

But then—the aligned Lutheran church demanded that all Lutheran pastors swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. This was not optional. It applied to aligned and “Confessing” Lutheran churches equally. The hunker-down mentality disappeared. Ernst Hirzel dug in his heels.

The government then applied fierce pressure on national church councils to bring the men in line. The aligned Lutheran church, fearful of losing even more ground to Catholics (who had a Konkordat), advised their clergy that any cleric who did not swear the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler would see his salary halved.

Those 7000 men who had signed the Confession? Their numbers dwindled down to 10% or fewer of the original number. Yes, 6300+ Lutheran pastors thought it was more important to keep their full salaries than to resist alignment. Alignment meant incorporating the Horst Wessel song into their liturgy, praying to Adolf Hitler during the service, posting a large portrait of him on the pulpit, accepting antisemitism and abhorrence of pacifism as part of their creed. Money trumped doctrine.

To the delight of Hans and Susanne Hirzel, their “please everybody” father signed the Confession a second time. In reaction to his salary cut, he became wildly determined, immediately purchasing a hundred pounds of oatmeal and a hundred pounds of sugar. He displayed both sacks prominently in his workroom upstairs where all the Hirzel children could see them. Susanne noted, “We were 100% certain that breakfast was taken care of!”

And yet—once Germany invaded Poland and World War II was underway, Rev. Ernst Hirzel reverted to his nationalistic tendencies. He did not unsign the Confession. He still believed that Hitler had overstepped with regards to freedom of religion.

It was that old Romans 13 issue that blocked many devout Christians from standing up against injustices perpetrated by their government. Germany needed to win the war against Poland—and eventually France, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, and of course the UK—and then they could go back to worrying about justice. Winning the war was everything.

As is almost always the case, yielding on one point made it easier for Rev. Hirzel to rationalize away the principles he had held so dear, the values that had caused him to invest in 100 pounds of oatmeal and 100 pounds of sugar.

After Hans and Susanne were arrested for their White Rose resistance efforts, Ernst Hirzel pondered how he could have “failed” his children. Perhaps if he had been more responsive to their political considerations (he said), he would have sat them down and given them a patriotic sermon.

That patriotic sermon would have included liberal doses of flag-waving and exhortations to give Hitler’s young government a chance. He would have pointed to the “loyal, untiring, voluntary work” that Party members performed in a thousand different ways, proof of their enthusiastic idealism.

Most importantly, he would have urged Hans and Susanne to understand that the censorship of the press to which they so objected was not something the National Socialists desired; no, it was due to the “heartless exploitation of every weakness” undertaken by the enemies of National Socialism.

Therefore, he would have concluded, in spite of everything: Cooperate, think long term! Recognize the good in things, and tolerate the bad!

Ernst Hirzel attributed Hans Hirzel’s willingness to risk everything on behalf of justice to that son’s struggle with the theme of an individual’s responsibility. As Hans faced off with himself over that difficult topic, he became susceptible to “treasonous” thought (so his father), specifically from Sophie Scholl.

In other words, Ernst Hirzel moved from courageous theologian with enough backbone to tolerate a substantial pay cut in order to live with his conscience, to a man all but emasculated, willing to “tolerate the bad.” Their family essentially lost contact with its patriarch. Instead of arguments and debates around the dinner table, Rev. Hirzel disappeared into his job. Choir practice, Bible study, taking on extra funeral services (for pay), doing “whatever” at cemeteries (his description was vague), these activities became more important to the pastor than his family. He even took on the distasteful task of prison chaplain.

He admitted that often he would return home just as everyone was going to bed. He confessed his self-inflicted schedule made him tired, agitated, even irritable. He no longer listened to Susanne or Hans. His church duties consumed every waking minute, almost as defense against hearing the voices of his children calling him to justice.

Summer of 1942 and early 1943 as White Rose leaflets were generated and distributed, as the Scholls recruited Hans and Susanne Hirzel, Susi was in Stuttgart studying music. Another pastor, a clergyman who would lead the call to repentance and confession after the war, became her mentor. Her father had abandoned her, would not give her room to vent, to scream about wrongdoing on every hand. Rev. Rudi Daur listened. Her father would not.

Hans Hirzel, still at home, still vacillating between trying to please his dad and doing what he knew to be right, took drugs as his escape from reality. Together with a high school friend, they concocted a medication almost identical in composition to LSD. Hans’ diary and letters to himself speak of the psychedelic trances he experienced, his mood-altering flight from existence when Rev. Hirzel was “too busy.” Ernst Hirzel would later blame his inattentiveness on “war.”

These two young adults had lost their anchor.

Shortly before the arrests in February 1943, Hans Hirzel toyed with the idea of suiciding. He saw no real choice. He hated the government his father did obeisance to. And yet, what if his father was right? What if Romans 13 were true? What if he was just supposed to close his eyes and tolerate the bad until the storm passed over? None of that seemed judicious to Hans Hirzel. He quietly enquired about the availability of cyanide capsules.

Then came the arrests. I cannot imagine the disappointment Susanne and Hans felt when their parents all but disowned them when the Ulm Gestapo interviewed them about their children. Instead of defending Hans and Susanne, instead of finding a semblance of backbone, Ernst and Margarete Hirzel blamed their son Hans for Susi’s treason. And indeed, the parents deemed their children’s action as treason.

In document after document, together and separately, the Hirzel parents distanced themselves from their son and daughter’s deeds. To be sure, Ernst bemoaned his absence from the family home, claiming if he had been present he could have stopped their seditious acts. And both parents admitted they were too busy fighting to pay attention to what was happening under their roof.

Not one word of “we are proud of Hans and Susi,” or discussion of the Bonhoeffer-Niemöller Confession. We do learn how much Margarete Hirzel nee Gradmann hated the Scholls. She spared no insult when speaking of that family (which raises questions about what she knew from life in Forchtenberg). But they pretty much left their precious young adults to defend themselves to the Gestapo. The parents hired an attorney, and that attorney became confidant to their children.

The Hirzel parents were able to secure seats in the courtroom on April 19, 1943 as Hans and Susanne stood trial with twelve others. Susanne’s witness to those events clearly and unmistakably underscores that not only had she come to terms with whatever sentence she would receive, but that she would have it no other way.

When Judge Freisler gave her and the other three “girls” (a clear insult) a relatively light sentence, Susanne did not grovel or beg for mercy. Instead, she hoped that someone would come forward and stab Judge Freisler to death. She even considered doing so. Reason and sanity set in fairly quickly, and she told herself that her very small “fire” would be speedily extinguished if she made the slightest attempt at carrying out such a delicious daydream.

As the doors to the courtroom swung open, Susanne clearly saw that any person who thought, who reasoned, who contemplated life was the greatest enemy of the German State. “That’s why Freisler feared Professor Huber most of all, why he cursed him so awfully,” she concluded.

Hans and Susanne Hirzel saw their parents as they left the courtroom. Susanne recalled that she was sorry that her parents had sat through that spectacle. “But I thought it served my father right to have to see by what kind of people we were governed,” she said. “Father, who by nature could not hate anyone, could not fathom the depths of their villainy.”

Ernst and Margarete Hirzel waved to their children, and the siblings said goodbye. It was a poignant moment, one that stayed etched in Susanne’s memory.

Over the next six months as she sat in a women’s prison not terribly far from Ulm, Susanne received exactly one visitor. Prison had been hard for her. Nothing she had tried had removed her “outcast” status. Therefore, when she was told she had a visitor, she could hardly stand the excitement.

The visitor was not Rev. Ernst Hirzel, not Margarete Hirzel. (Neither parent ever visited Susanne while she was at Gotteszell.) Rather it was her dear, dear Professor Albert Saal. Everyone was thinking about her, he said. Professor Hermann Keller (the organist and father of Axel Keller, a ‘White Rose adjacent’ friend), Professor Hans von Besele, Professor Carl Wendling, even Mrs. Burckhard the secretary. They had instructed him to give Susanne their warmest greetings. These phenomenal musicians, they cared.

And Trude Maisch-Schefold, Susanne’s piano teacher in Ulm, she had died recently, far too young to die, that woman. Susanne remembered that “she was at her wit’s end.” Professor Saal did not care. He let her cry, and cry some more, holding her in his arms like a father.

Susanne needed that tenderness. It had to last for years to come. When she was released on Sunday, August 22, 1943, her mother at least did her the courtesy of picking her up from prison. Margarete Hirzel was stiff—she stood in the doorway while Susanne’s youngest siblings romped in the prison courtyard—and she was clearly uncomfortable at the surroundings.

But she did two things that Susanne forever remembered with pleasure. She brought along swimsuits and took her three children swimming in a pond. And she fed them an evening dinner “that consisted of large rolls with a piece of dark collared pork. Those days, that was a true delicacy. These days [1998], I am not so sure,” Susanne wrote in her memoir.

The good memories ended as quickly as they came. The very next day, Margarete Hirzel went to the Labor Board and petitioned the bureaucrats to allow Susanne to work in their home as a paid servant. They agreed without too much arguing. Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo telephoned the Hirzel family and said that “from now on, your mail will be censored.”

These were miserable days for Susanne, some of the worst in her life. Her mother never stopped talking about “the great misfortune that has befallen our family,” the loss of honor that Susanne and Hans had brought them. It was never a direct accusation. It did not have to be. To hurt.

Her parents fought constantly. Air raids increased. They could not buy basic groceries—not for lack of money, but for lack of food in the stores. They worried about Peter on the Russian front and Hans in prison. And their friends avoided them as if they had the plague. Every day, Susanne feared the Gestapo would rearrest her, or would pick her up and take her to Dachau. It could happen. It had happened to others. (Traute Lafrenz!)

If Susanne had been a paid servant in name only, life would have been tolerable. But it was not. By mid-September, her daily grind had not improved much from her previous existence in prison. She worked sixty-hour weeks as a servant in her own home, rarely if ever talking to her mother. Mrs. Hirzel was “emotionally unstable,” Susanne said in her memoirs. “Due to the sorrows and troubles that weighed her down, she also suffered from depression. It was important to simply support her. Past experiences”—such as the time Susanne had spent in prison—“were not important.”

Susanne also could not understand why sixteen-year-old Konrad Hirzel avoided home life. She comprehended his reasons one day when he sat at the Hirzels’ dinner table. It was not simply that Ernst and Margarete fought constantly. Rather, Konrad shared the political views of his elder siblings, Hans and Susanne.

“I was twelve years old when this war started,” Konrad told his father bluntly. “I don’t have anything to do with either it or Hitler. I am going to do everything I can to get out of military duty.”

No, responded Rev. Hirzel. You have to stick with the military until the war ends. “Then and only then can you chase the boys, that is the Nazis, to the devil.” He told Konrad that he could not imagine what it would be like to have the country overrun by the enemy. Susanne was almost embarrassed by her father’s rhetoric. She knew that even he did not believe in a “final victory.”

These confrontational meals were tense and oppressive, she recalled. “All in all, it was a miserable way to live.”

Ernst Hirzel did what he knew how to do best: He ran away, back to Martin-Luther-Kirche, back to his “duties” as clergy. Margarete Hirzel eventually abandoned her children and moved in with family outside Ulm. Susanne was left to be father, mother, cook, housekeeper, and peacemaker.

In 1944 when Allied bombers targeted Ulm, using the Münster as landmark, bombing ever outwards from its spire, the Hirzels’ home—near the railway station—was among the first to be hit. As was Martin-Luther-Kirche.

As bombs fell, Rev. Hirzel hurried to the church. Together with a few congregants, they climbed on top of the roof, putting out fires as quickly as possible. It was a Herculean effort, but they managed to save the structure. After the war, Martin-Luther-Kirche was one of the few churches or auditoriums left standing. Rev. Ernst Hirzel received great applause and approbation for his heroism.

He received applause and approbation—from people in Ulm. Not from Susanne. He left his then-23-year-old daughter alone with his very young kids. She and she alone was responsible for getting her siblings out of Ulm, to safety. As bombs rained down around her, she did not have kind thoughts towards either parent. The Hirzels’ home was totally destroyed. But her father had saved the church building!

During my initial quick reading of Susanne Hirzel’s memoir in 1999, I was struck by how critical she was of her Lutheran faith. She technically remained Lutheran until her death. While she criticized both the judiciary and military for failing to stop Hitler early on, her harshest critique was reserved for the Lutheran denomination. Not even Christendom as a whole, Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Apostolic, and Lutheran. Her finger pointed directly at Lutherans.

Her bitterest denunciation of Lutheranism seemed pointed directly at her parents. At two people who never, ever forgave her and her brother Hans for standing up for what was right. In the eyes of Ernst and Margarete Hirzel, Susanne and Hans brought shame and disgrace on their family.

Nothing changed after the war. Ernst Hirzel continued as pastor of the Martin-Luther-Kirche for a few decades.

Oh, Inge Scholl turned the church into part of her White Rose legend, claiming that Franz Josef Müller and Hans Hirzel prepared leaflets for mailing in the guts of the organ (where the pipes are located). Müller was more than happy to latch on to Inge’s invention. In January and February 1943, it was impossible to stand up in the organ “guts,” much less to type envelopes there.

Rev. Wolfgang Lipp explained in 1995 that Hans Hirzel carried out his work in the choir loft, in front of the pipes. Not inside the organ. Photo is of choir loft in current state. Although a person can now stand inside the organ "guts," it would be impossible to work there. I saw it with my own eyes.

Otherwise, in those years after the war, Rev. Hirzel kept on baptizing babies, performing wedding ceremonies and funerals, busying himself with the work of his church so he didn’t have to think too much about those years. The years he’d rather forget.

But that his children never could. They remembered. How they remembered!

Those days when faith failed.

Note: I had initially entitled this essay When our institutions disappoint us. After all, we tend to make a big deal of the difference between faith and religion.

Indeed, in the early days of National Socialism, one could argue that religion failed, not faith. That it was the fault of the aligned churches—Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist—that Nazism could become so deeply entrenched.

I thought long and hard about Susanne, about Hans. I have a series of letters Hans wrote in 2003-2004, ten years after his disillusionment took the ultimate wrong turn into neo-Nazi politics. Both siblings, actually all six siblings, became upstanding citizens in the new Germany, attorneys, writers, musicians.

Their foundation had been destroyed with trauma they likely never came to terms with. With a father who deserted family in favor of church. A mother who abandoned her children to bombs and near-penury. Faith that talked a good game in the beginning, but crumbled when put to the test. I cannot imagine how Hans and Susanne (and Peter and Konrad and Ursula and Roland) felt.

Multiply the Hirzels’ experience millions of times over in Germany. It’s become a nation that has all but abandoned its “religious” heritage. In 2024, the number of religiously-unaffiliated Germans outnumbered those with any religious affiliation. That’s never been the case, as far back as anyone knows.

More than that, only 5% of the German population self-reported as attending church at least once a month. If that’s self-reported, the real number is likely half, or less. And that’s monthly, not weekly.

There are apparently three countries in the world where church attendance is at or above 50% (<== and that number is weekly). Of course, the United States of America, with Alabama, Texas, and Utah compensating for the lower rates of California, New York, and Oregon. The USA is joined by… Venezuela and Nigeria.

Which brings me right back to the reason I named this, When faith fails.

When Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others who claim “faith” live by Ernst Hirzel’s mantra: Cooperate, think long term! Recognize the good in things, and tolerate the bad!...

When faith is hollow and does obeisance to tyranny, it has ceased to be faith.

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Image credits: Top photograph--Martin Luther Kirche, exterior. © 1995 Denise Elaine Heap. Second photograph--Martin Luther Kirche, exterior, with Martin Luther looking down on congregants. © 1995 Denise Elaine Heap. Third photograph--Choir loft inside Martin Luther Kirche. © 1995 Denise Elaine Heap. Fourth photograph--Park near Martin Luther Kirche. © 1995 Denise Elaine Heap. Fifth photograph--Shopify, public domain for platform users.

The above information is fully footnoted in our White Rose histories. Please purchase them for access to that material! To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 1933-April 30, 1942), click here. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. WRH1 is © 2002, 2003, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap. WRH2 is © 2002, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap.

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