[April 2003 journal entry]
Dietrich invested in the Confessing Church as a non-violent civil disobedience strategy and was deeply disappointed when the strategy failed. The credibility of such a resistance strategy depends on two key assumptions/anticipations – i.e., the expectation that the enemy/aggressor will be caused to pause (eventually responding to the strategy) and the ability of the resistors to remain resolute when injuries, deprivations, deaths begin to occur. By 1939 Dietrich saw that the strategy had failed on both counts. Unlike the British in India, the Nazis were in their homeland and had a deep/dark core. The ranks of the Pastors’ Emergency League broke in 1937 when the Nazis brutally confronted the Confessing Church after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.