Shoghi Effendi's Letter to the German Friends

The Baha'i Stories Blog preserves, in one of its small historical posts, a paraphrased account of a letter Shoghi Effendi sent in the late 1930s to the German Bahá'í community.

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The community at the time was small — a few hundred believers concentrated in Stuttgart, Esslingen, and a few other German cities. The 1933 rise of the National Socialists had brought immediate restrictions. By 1937 the Bahá'í gatherings had been formally banned by the regime as incompatible with Aryan nationalism. By the late 1930s the small community was meeting only in private homes, with careful watch on the door, and the German believers were under steady individual harassment.

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The Guardian's letter, in the paraphrase preserved in the blog post, was characteristically brief. It expressed his love and his sympathy. It did not promise a quick end to the persecution. It did not advise resistance in any political sense. It urged the community to a quiet steadfastness; to continued private gathering where this remained possible; to careful protection of any Bahá'í literature that might still be in private hands; and to the spiritual work of prayer that was never within the state's reach.

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> Be steadfast; the prayers of every believer in the world > are with you.

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The phrase, paraphrased in the blog's post, named the sustaining principle. The German friends were not alone. The worldwide Bahá'í community — the friends in Persia, in the United States, in India, in the small communities then beginning across Africa and South America — were holding them in prayer. The visible community had been driven into the parlour. The invisible community of prayer extended across every continent. The first would, in the end, be restored. The second had never been broken.

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The German friends survived the war years. The community re-emerged after 1945. Several of the believers who had held to the small private gatherings would in time become the founding members of the post-war German Local Spiritual Assemblies. The Guardian's letter, treasured through the darkest years, had given them what they needed to endure.

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