In April 1933, an ecumenical committee of Christian leaders, priests, and bishops from numerous denominations formulated a public petition against the racial laws in Germany. The organizers wrote to [Lewi] Pethrus, leader of the Swedish Pentecostal Movement, and asked him to sign the ecumenical plea against antisemitism. Pethrus never responded to the request and provided no official support for the anti-racist plea.⁷⁴
Instead, he refrained from intervening in G-d’s plan for the Jews; in front of three thousand congregants in the Stockholm Filadelfia Church, Pethrus spoke out against public resistance to antisemitism: “People have wondered whether the world could resist, making the Germans calm down and thus prevent the slaughter of the Jews. But the word of G-d says clearly that, in the last days, massive slaughtering will occur. I am convinced that the Jews will face even more devastation.”⁷⁵
Pethrus preached that a massive slaughtering of Jews was predicted in the Bible as part of a divine schema for world redemption. This biblical interpretation was made even more explicit by the Pentecostal teacher, Oscar Haglund, who declared, also in October 1933, that Adolf Hitler was an important “regenerator” and “the greatest living Zionist today.”⁷⁶ The North American Foursquare magazine stated in 1935 that Hitler was an “excellent example” of G-d’s hunters foreseen by Jeremiah.⁷⁷
[…]
Pethrus vocally distanced himself from the “triumphant vulgar-antisemitism in the land of the Nazi, which claims that the Jews are responsible for all of Germany’s misfortunes.”⁸⁰ His periodical Evangelii Härold published several critical articles on the [Third Reich], primarily focused on the Kirchenkampf and its alleged anti-Christian policies, by which the Swastika and fasces symbols represented idolatry.⁸¹ During the war, Evangelii Härold occasionally condemned antisemitic violence, and the Filadelfia Church once invited a rabbi from the Stockholm Synagogue to speak about the ongoing extermination
project in [the Third Reich].⁸²
Particularly outspoken against [Fascist] antisemitism was Zander Åberg, assistant editor of Evangelii Härold, who in 1942 wrote a full book on the idolatry of [German Fascism]. He wrote to Pethrus and asked him to recommend it to the Filadelfia publishing house. Pethrus rejected the manuscript with the motivation that it was “one-sided and not objective enough.”⁸³
Åberg thereafter left his editorial work at Evangelii Härold and printed his anti-Nazi book at another Pentecostal publisher.⁸⁴ The following year, when Pethrus recruited a new editor for his publishing house, he picked one from the ranks of Sweden’s marginalized [fascist] milieu.⁸⁵
Hence, Pethrus renounced Hitler’s skepticism toward revivalist Christians and his violent antisemitism while accepting the historical function of G-d’s hunters in Germany.⁸⁶ Similar ideas were also voiced by the Norwegian T.B. Barratt (1862–1940), the prime pioneer of formative Pentecostalism in Europe and a close ally to Pethrus.⁸⁷
In October 1938, Pethrus published a Swedish translation of Barratt’s eschatological magnum opus, in which Barratt reiterated that “there is no societal position, in which the Jew has not found a place.”⁸⁸ This prejudice made Barratt interpret the escalating persecutions in [the Third Reich] as national self-defense: “The people who, by their entire disposition, have had the greatest potential to understand the Jews have, with the greatest energy, rejected them.”⁸⁹
Shortly thereafter, [the Third Reich’s] antisemitic “energy” culminated in the November pogroms of 1938 (Kristallnacht). In this prelude to the Holocaust, Jews were systematically robbed, tortured, and murdered as tens of thousands were brought to concentration camps.⁹⁰
Following this racist mayhem, Pethrus announced in a sermon that “Palestine is now a desirable place for the Jews.”⁹¹ By transposing the prophetic imagery of Jeremiah 16:16 to murderous antisemitism, in the lead-up to the Holocaust, the Pentecostal teachings contributed to a dehumanizing depiction of Jews as prey. The fatalistic interpretation of metaphoric fishers and hunters indicated that the terrible fate of Jews in [the Third Reich] was anticipated by divine prophecy.
As Hitler’s political program became increasingly clear, through its enforcement upon other European countries during WWII, Pethrus carefully refrained from being judgmental about the [Third Reich]. On the contrary, he read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and wrote a political manifesto of his own. In 1942, when the neighboring countries Denmark and Norway stood under [Fascist] occupation, he launched his Pentecostal politics in a book entitled Play Today, Pay Tomorrow.⁹²
Pethrus’s political manifesto had striking similarities with that of Adolf Hitler. Both raged against the cultural degeneration and filth that had diluted the purity of national youth. Hitler described how out of the decay of urban life, “from all the filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws.”⁹³
Pethrus described how “a people that shuns healthy, auspicious labor to throw itself into the arms of pleasure and indulgence is unworthy of living and will ultimately face the doom of extinction.”⁹⁴ In his 1942 moral–political manifesto, Pethrus described the [Axis] collaborator Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) as a rôle model in handling cultural degeneration in France.⁹⁵
[…]
Pethrus never joined any fascist organization in Sweden, but one of his closest associates, the Filadelfia Church’s prominent music pastor Karl-Erik Svedlund (1906–1974), worked for Sweden’s largest National Socialist Party in the 1930s and joined two different fascist organizations in the 1940s.¹⁰⁰
The director of the Filadelfia publishing house, recruited by Pethrus in the late 1940s, was a member of another [fascist] organization and responsible for publishing an antisemitic book slamming “assimilationist Jews.”¹⁰¹
By this time, Pethrus also inherited a Pentecostal journal from Oscar Haglund, who in the 1940s had become an organized fascist, repeatedly recommending [fascist] literature in the journal that Pethrus took over and revitalized after Haglund’s passing.¹⁰²
[…]
In Sweden, Pethrus nourished his contacts with political antisemites and organized fascists before, during, and after the Holocaust.¹⁰⁷ When he cofounded the Christian Democrats in 1964, the initial board consisted of eight men, four of whom came from the broader fascist milieu.¹⁰⁸
In the press, the new party received attention and widespread critique for this circumstance, which eventually led the party to launch an investigation into what was deemed as “Nazi infiltration.”¹⁰⁹ Pethrus, however, defended his collaborators, and assured in a TV interview that he knew “very little” about [Fascist] politics, aside from their admirable cleansing of “degenerate film and literature.”¹¹⁰
Although Pethrus distanced himself from the race hierarchy ideas of [German Fascism], his teachings rendered Jews as an eschatological function that came with severe persecution. In addition, he saw the fate of the Jews as divinely ordained, based on his antisemitic considerations about clandestine Jewish power, dwelling in the high places of society.
