Paul Leo

Even with the passage of time, the letter is chilling in its matter-of-fact blandness. Dated August 17, 1935, it informs the German Lutheran pastor Paul Leo that since his ancestry is non-Aryan, his employment is terminated with immediate effect (22). For hundreds of thousands of people such letters meant the end of a way of life as they knew it and the prospects of a terrifying and uncertain future under the fanatical and ruthless Nazi regime, well documented in numerous publications such as Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford, 2010). Where were the Christians in all this? Wasn't baptism supposed to "erase" past identities and belongings since a baptized person was a new creation in Christ? Not those whom the Nazis considered to have been tainted with Jewish ancestry. The new book by Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), unambiguously points out in a chapter titled "The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste" that racist American laws regarding segregation and miscegenation formed the basis for the enshrining of anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany (and that some of these laws were even too harsh for as brutal a regime as that of the Nazis).

Given that several prominent Christian theologians were willing to offer their expertise in the service of the Nazi ideology (see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany [Princeton, 2008]), and given that the Confessing Church was scrambling to survive in the midst of all the fears, it's hardly surprising that people such as Paul Leo and very many others like him, in the same or similar predicament, felt totally isolated and betrayed.

While the further journeys of many such people and their families ended in violent tragedy, the book under review documents the convoluted path that led Pastor Leo to the United States and to Wartburg Theological Seminary. It is to the credit of the writers that they provide a compact yet thoroughly documented narration (with photographs) of the life, witness, legacy, and impact of Paul Leo, from his birth in Göttingen, through his studies and pastoral ministry in Germany, his incarceration in the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, and his almost miraculous pathway to the United States, where he taught at the Western Theological Seminary, served as a pastor in Texas, became a U.S. citizen, and spent the last eight years of his life as a respected and valued Professor of New Testament and Biblical Languages at Wartburg Theological Seminary.

The book offers all this and more, including a list of his publications, which certainly deserve to be revisited, and reminds us that even where one experiences the horror of abandonment, one could still testify to the sustaining hope embodied in the crucified and abandoned Lord.

J. Jayakiran Sebastian
United Lutheran Seminary
Gettysburg and Philadelphia