The Pastor Who Opposed a Hitler Cult
It was a cool Sunday afternoon. The sun was piercing the clouds and the village of River was at peace. It was almost as if there wasn’t a dark shadow haunting the rooms of Kingdom House. The new inhabitants of the house hadn’t exactly been met with open arms, nor had they been accepted into the local community. They were viewed as a threat, as a stain on the serenity of the village, as an abhorrent blemish on society. They were everything the war had fought against. Britain had thought they had won the war , and defeated the Nazi evil. And yet now, they found a bastion of the ideology in their own village. And to make matters worse, they weren’t a political party. Instead, they claimed to be Christians. This cut at the very heart of the tradition and beliefs of the people. And they were beginning to become impatient, both with the inaction from the government, and the painful civility of the League of Christian Reformers.
As the breeze curled its way down the street, it carried the low rumble of a black, mud-spattered saloon car. Strapped to its roof were large loud-speakers. It drew up to the massive gate that guarded the entrance to Kingdom House. At the wheel was the 48-year-old Victor Walker. His wide brimmed hat shadowed his eyes from the sun, his jaw set, his heart beginning to pound. He was the pastor of Elim Four-Square Gospel Church, and had driven 15 miles with the sole intention of engaging these ‘Reformers’. He wanted to call them out for what he believed was blasphemy and believed they deserved to be rebuked. Parking the car, he stepped outside. He looked up at the gate that loomed over him.
He grabbed the wide, ribbed microphone, his Bible under one arm, he adjusted his tie briefly. He lifted the microphone towards his face. And began.
‘Hello everyone. I propose to hold a short religious service here today.’
His voice thundered through the village, piercing the silence. ‘His words roared away across the fields to a chorus of disapproval from startled hens, geese and dogs in a nearby farmyard.' As he spoke, his eyes wandered over to the windows of Kingdom House, and caught sight of the silhouette of a woman. It was one of the Schneider sisters. As Pastor Walker continued, a second woman appeared at the window. Joan and May Schneider, were intrigued. Never before had someone confronted the League so directly.
Undeterred, Pastor Walker continued.
‘Let us start with an old fashioned hymn.’
He leant down and clicked on a gramophone record, the voices of a choir washed over the street, ‘Jesu Lover of my Soul’ filled the air. By this time, the Pastor had drawn quite a crowd. Cars were collecting in the narrow lane that led up to Kingdom House. Women and children were gathering on their doorsteps. According to the local paper, even Local Boy Scouts halted their manoeuvres and ran to the ‘hedgerows overlooking the cult’s citadel’.
Pastor Walker was used to talking to large congregations. He opened his Bible to the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, reading out the first twelve verses of chapter two. With extra volume he read verses eight and nine.
‘And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendour of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie…’
This was a bold statement from the Pastor. He was calling out the heresy he saw, right in front of the headquarters of those ‘heretics’. He didn’t stop there, expounding on this scripture, saying:
‘Mr Winston Churchill said some time ago that there were many wonderful plans and utopian ideas being prepared for the future but that unless men bettered their minds and hearts these plans could never be brought to fruition. We believe as ministers of the real Gospel that only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can change the hearts and minds of men. As we look into the future of this atomic age, if this Gospel fails, there is nothing left but darkness, judgement and tribulation. Surely Mussolini was a deceiver. Surely Hitler was a deceiver - deceiving and both being deceived. We believe that the only true Messiah is the Lord Jesus Christ. I ask you: in whom are you putting trust? Is it in a tinpot dictator like the Hitler of latter days?’
Such a direct assault on the League’s theology had never been made before. Faced with such confidence and conviction, the response of the League was rather telling. Arthur Schneider, the custodian of Kingdom House, emerged carrying a tray with cups of tea. He set it on the garden wall and, offering Pastor Walker a cup, he said, ‘I’m sorry you can’t come in. Have your tea party out here’. As he headed back inside, he suggested, possibly sarcastically, referencing the League's confidence in the coming Kingdom, that the Pastor play the hymn ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ next time. So utterly convinced of their beliefs, the League was unshaken in their position. Making light of the protest by calling it a ‘tea party’, Arthur Schneider’s seemingly arrogant confidence shows just how deep their Hitler-based religious convictions went, how completely assured they were of their theology. Even in the face of such a bold challenge, they were unfazed. Not even a Pastor at the gate could sway them.
The years between the end of the First World War in 1918, and the outbreak of the Second in 1939, had been pivotal in the transforming of the state of Christianity in Britain. With the outbreak of the Second World War, people began to contemplate the ‘ultimate issues’ of life, death, good, evil, suffering and the nature of reality, once more. Many came to belief in God as a means by which to try and understand, or deal with the reality of war. As, put simply by the old adage, there are no atheists in a foxhole.
The post-war years were a time of transition in Britain. Church attendance declined, society began to become more liberal, secular and materialistic. Other religions, such as Islam, began to gain more of a following as immigration increased, and many people even began to reject religion as a whole, viewing it as mostly unnecessary in their daily lives, preferring to use their Sundays to play golf or go to the cinema.
Into this setting, Baker and Battersby brought forward their new form of Christianity that they saw as the answer to the turmoil of war and questions of salvation and hope. This was an amalgam of views, combining the eschatological themes of Revelation and Biblical Scripture with their political views of Fascism and Nazism, that they had formed during their time in Peveril.
In April 1942, Baker gave a speech to his fellow Peveril inmates, entitled ‘God is Love’, in which he laid out his views about Hitler and how God was supposedly using him. He believed that Hitler was acting on God’s orders, and that he was, in fact, the Second Coming of Christ. At the end of his speech, the audience, comprised of over thirty Fascists, rose, applauded, shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ and gave Baker the Nazi salute. This marked the origins of the theology that would become the foundation of the League of Christian Reformers.
Baker seems to have taken Battersby under his wing, teaching him about the ‘true’ Christianity and the role of Hitler in salvation and judgement. This teaching took hold of Battersby, with him becoming a staunch follower of Baker’s. This is evident in the fact that on October 8th 1942, Battersby wrote from Peveril to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, imploring him to come to the ‘truth’ of Hitler’s role as a vessel of God. He wrote, ‘I wish that you could visit me here, in order that I might witness to you for God in the many details of which I am in possession.’ Battersby wanted to witness to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in order to reveal to him the ‘truth’ of his Hitlerite Christology. He also viewed Baker as his spiritual mentor, who had a connection to the Holy Spirit and was receiving revelations he would pass on to Battersby. Battersby was so utterly convinced of this, that he wrote that he could ‘make this statement before God and, therefore, fearing no man’, and would ‘plead with [the Archbishop] more earnestly than I have ever pleaded with any man, that God may guide you to serve Him in these hours of trial for our country.’
This idea was to become fundamental to the League’s theology: that the war was an act of judgment from God ‘on those who serve Mammon’. The eschatological idea of ‘Mammon’ can be found in the Biblical teachings of Jesus from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke where Jesus said that man cannot ‘serve both God and Mammon’ (a translation of a Hebrew word meaning ‘money’ or ‘wealth’). The concept of Mammon has been included as one of the Seven Princes of Hell since Peter Binsfield’s 1589 Treatise on Confessions by Evildoers and Witches. In the case of the League of Christian Reformers, this became synonymous with beliefs about a Jewish global conspiracy. Common Fascist teaching that can be traced back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in 1903, accused the Jews of being behind a vast conspiracy to overthrow the world through the media, the world financial system, usury and profiteering and the propagation of communism. As all the main members of the League of Christian Reformers had previously been members of prominent Fascist groups, such as ‘The Link’, ‘The British Union of Fascists’ or the ‘Nordic League’, it is not difficult to see how their religious beliefs and political affiliations became amalgamated during the pressure of the Second World War and the Peveril Internment Camp.
However, the identification of the Jews as the centre of a global conspiracy was not where the beliefs of the League stopped. They went further, naming Hitler as ‘God's Judge and Chosen to fulfil the Divine Will’. They believed that Hitler was an ‘instrument of God… to bring about the destruction that had been religiously foretold for thousands of years’. Not only this, they also believed that Hitler was himself the Second Coming of Christ and the reincarnation of the Saviour. When asked by a Daily Herald reporter in 1945 whether he believed Hitler was dead, Battersby replied: ‘Hitler can never die because the spirit of Christ is eternal. In Adolf Hitler there was the spirit of Christ. Hitler was Christ come again.’
References
Declassified MI5 File on Arthur J. Schneider, in the National Archives KV 2/1219
Hennessy, Peter, Never Again: Britain in 1945–1951 (Penguin: 1993)
O. Morgan, Kenneth, Labour in Power, 1945-1951. (Oxford UP: 1985)
Harris, J.A., 'Religious Meetings In Camp', unpublished document, 2 April 1942, in the Home Office
files (HO) in the National Archives: HO 214/45.
Warburton, John & Jeffrey Wallder, The Defence Regulation 18B British Union Detainees List, Revised edition, (Friends of Oswald Mosley: 2008)
Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:9,11,13
Robbins, Rossell, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, (Crown Publishers: 1959)
Boym, Svetlana, ”Conspiracy theories and literary ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion". Comparative Literature, Spring 1999.
Láníček, Jan, Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews, 1938–48: Beyond Idealisation and Condemnation, (New York: Springer, 2013)
Levy, Richard, Antisemitism: a Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice, (ABC-CLIO, 2005)
Johnson, Paul, A History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987)
‘History’s greatest conspiracy theories’. The Daily Telegraph. 19 November 2008
J.L Battersby to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Letter No. 92141, 1942, from the British Newspaper Archive.
A.J. Schneider to the Bishop of Worcester, Letter No. 90391, 05 August 1943, from the British Newspaper Archive.
William J. Gage, ‘The Swastika Over Britain’, John Bull, 29 December 1945, from the British Newspaper Archive.
J.L. Battersby, Put Not Your Trust In Riches (Cheshire: 1946).
‘Herald’ Reporter, "Battersby Says ‘I’d Face M.P.s’”, Daily Herald, 01 December 1945.
Battersby, J.L., The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler, (Stockport: 1952).
J.L. Battersby, ‘The End of the Mammon World’ to the Nelson Leader, 28 December 1945, from the British Newspaper Archive.
Jones, W.A.E., ‘Gospel Roar At Kingdom House’, Daily Herald, 03 December 1945, from the British Newspaper Archive.
© Zachary Peatling and Present History. All Rights Reserved.
