child in Hitler’s Germany offered a unique response to events. So an eye for what individuals did or failed to do is a legitimate way to examine the evidence at hand. Without a doubt, the church as a social and political institution failed the test of confronting Nazism (just as, in my judgment, “the church” failed in much the same manner during the American civil rights movement). However, the “institution”—intent on survival rather than sacrifice, as Victoria Barnett emphasizes—was also the mystical