On 1st February 1933, two days after his election as Reichskanzler, Hitler published a proclamation in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he promised to take Christianity, ‘the basis of our whole morality’, under his ‘Firm protection’. This meant that the state religion would have to conform with and support National Socialist ideology. For some who rebelled against this it meant exile and for others death.

The universities were among the earliest of state institutions to be purged after the confirmation of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and as early as April 1933 Bernhard Rust, the Prussian Minister for Cultural Affairs, had suspended the theologians Emil Fuchs, Professor at Kiel, Karl Ludwig Schmidt at Bonn and Paul Tillich at Frankfurt where he was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology, together with teachers of other subjects in other universities.

Tillich had lived a curious life in Germany up to that time. Having been an Army Chaplain in the 1914-18 war and having endured the battle at Verdun, he became firmly identified with the political fate of Germany after the war. He became a Religious Socialist and had a very reserved and equivocal association with the institutional church. Yet he managed to combine his socialism with an enthusiastic participation in the parties of upper class society, and he combined his Lutheran Christianity with a still more enthusiastic participation in a wide variety of sexual adventures. Despite his detestation of the thuggery of Nazi university students he was loath to leave Germany even after the accession of Hitler and his desire to return from New York in 1934 and be given a university job led him to produce a most compromising letter to Rust in which he appealed for employment in Germany.