Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
Conference Report: “Critical Presentism: Working on Churches/Theology/Religion and the Holocaust in 2025,” Religion and Socio-Cultural Transformation: European Perspectives and Beyond, European Academy of Religion 8th Annual Conference, Vienna, July 2025
By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University
In early July 2025, a subset of the editorial board of Contemporary Church History Quarterly gathered at the European Academy of Religion’s eighth annual conference, hosted in Vienna, Austria. The closed panel session was devoted to individual attempts to take stock of the evolution of our scholarship in the broader flow of transformations and rapid change both in our field and in the political and scholarly landscapes around us. The panel’s title, “Critical Presentism”, was proposed as “an evocative reversal of our general understanding of ‘presentism’ as an uncritical adherence to present-day approaches,”[1] especially the tendency to approach and interpret the past through the prism of contemporary values and happenings.
Kyle Jantzen opened the panel with a quotation of E.H. Carr’s famous axiom that history is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Rather than approaching the present in terms of reference to the past, Jantzen reversed the starting-point and queried what our present culture wars might reveal about Europe some eighty years ago. He outlined Carr’s particular relevance to the current state of German church history in the Third Reich. For one, recent eruptions of Christian nationalism in Western societies have called into question the past lessons supposedly learned about the dangers of fusing Christianity with exclusionary nationalist ideology. What is more, some new Christian nationalists are reinterpreting history so that they distort the meaning and message of Christians caught up in the German “Church Struggle” of the 1930s. He noted the lack of a clear centre in the movement that constitutes contemporary Christian nationalism and remarked that this was an invitation to rethink the divisions and fractions of the 1930s that fueled the church struggle vis-à-vis ethnonationalism. The parallels between then and now are obvious and troubling as, once again, Christianity, Christians, and churches are subject to ideological polarization as well as political manipulation and mobilization by far-right leaders, movements, and governments.
Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s presentation introduced the audience to revelations and new conclusions based on the opening of the Vatican’s archives for the Holocaust era, spanning the pontificate of Pope Pius XII (1939-1958). As such, this moment represents a generational opportunity to explore institutional Catholicism’s attempts to reckon with the historical, ethical and theological implications of the Holocaust. Her immediate concern was the Holy See’s clemency campaign for war criminals convicted during the Allied war crimes trials in the early post-war era. In the early fall of 1949, Pope Pius XII instructed his nuncio in Germany to write a letter supporting clemency for convicted German war criminals to General Thomas Handy, commander of United States European Command (EUCOM). “In the spirit of centuries-old traditions, the Church seeks to have justice tempered with mercy. In accord with the time-honored prerogative of the Church to intercede for even the worst of criminals, Pope Pius XII respectfully requests that clemency be shown,” wrote Pius XII’s representative in Germany to General Handy on February 27, 1950. The motivations of Pope Pius XII and his advisors in clemency efforts for convicted German war criminals, most especially Catholic ones, came down, it seems, to a desire to rehabilitate Germans rather than give support to the victims of Nazism, and to increasing anxieties around the spread of communism. In pursuit of this there was a notable resurgence of antisemitism (arguably never absent from the Vatican), even within the ranks of the American military. It was during this period, between 1945 and the early 1950s, that the Vatican abandoned its long commitment to political neutrality in favour of defending German Christians, both clerical and lay.
Björn Krondorfer provided some valuable complementary remarks to Jantzen’s earlier paper, attempting to glean lessons from the past that might provide informed commentary for understanding the present. His question was (and is) fundamental for our editors and our readers: as scholars of “kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/contemporary church history,” critical theologians, and observers of Christian movements past and present, what are our obligations in 2025 and beyond? In considering his answer, he referenced twentieth-century historians — Christopher Browning and Benjamin Hett among them – who implicitly or explicitly drew analogies between Germany’s walk into dictatorship and recent political developments in the United States, especially over the dismantling of democracy and threats of violence. Since Christianity in Germany was so deeply affected and compromised by Nazism’s völkisch ideology, we saw after the war an enormous output of studies and scholarship attempting to trace the failures and shortcomings of the German churches and their theology. Krondorfer asks, as scholars still active in these fields, do we have an obligation to draw attention and parallels to today’s toxic forms of White Christian Nationalism in the United States, great replacement theories in Europe, and beyond? There is certainly a growing number of engaged scholars, journalists, and activist Christians who have changed the public and scholarly discourse from “religious fundamentalism” to “White Christian Nationalism.” This is a necessary move to account for the radicalization and racialization of specific (not all) forms of Protestant Christianity. Should we push the similarities (and differences) between the Nazi “Aryanization” of Christianity and the U.S. American nationalization of Christianity further? He, like Jantzen, noted the role that emotion is playing contemporaneously and sees parallels with currents in the 1930s.
Kevin Spicer turned the panel’s attention to the results of his recent research, with important connections to growing scholarly concerns with the allegations at the heart of the “immorality trials” in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1937, a series of legal proceedings charging clergy with various sexual abuse crimes. During the Third Reich there existed approximately 150 Catholic priests whose sustained allegiance to and membership in the Nazi Party was scandalous for the German Catholic Church. In 2008, Spicer published his groundbreaking study on these “brown priests,” which used case studies to examine this phenomenon. While the book discussed select priests in support of its central contentions, he found it impossible to cover each cleric’s story comprehensively, and his writing reflected only a small portion of the archival material he had gathered. The paper he offered in Vienna focused on some of the rich details of the life of one particular priest, Father Werner Kreth (1890-1942), a priest from the Ermland diocese, a Domvikar, an NSDAP member, and a V-Mann. Although the diocesan files from this period no longer exist, Spicer was able to reconstruct Kreth’s story from numerous state and church archives. He used Kreth’s case to discuss how the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and NSDAP local leadership could conspire when an individual belonging to both institutions broke societal moral norms. Kreth’s various improprieties and the crimes of which he was convicted led to his expulsion from the NSDAP and suspension from the priesthood. While Spicer could not comment on his representativeness, he noted that Kreth’s trial unfolded against the larger backdrop of the Sittlichkeitsprozesse, and that Kreth received a twelve-year sentence, the harshest sentence at the time given to a priest.
Gerald Steinacher returned the panel to the subject of the Vatican in the immediate postwar period, in a paper that complemented Brown-Fleming’s findings. In 1948, Pope Pius XII openly called for forgiving and forgetting the wartime crimes of individual Germans, intent instead to focus on rebuilding Germany. At the same time, papal organizations assisted former Nazis and their collaborators in evading extradition and avoiding prosecution by fleeing overseas. Some names of individual clergymen are recognizable and well known, including Alois Hudal and Krunoslav Draganović. But other aspects remain dramatically understudied, and rife with opportunity thanks to the recent opening of the Vatican archives for the period of the war and the Holocaust. Steinacher highlighted the attempts to flee Europe sought not just by war criminals but also by refugees and DPs, many of whom used Italy as their preferred escape route. The motivations of the Vatican officials involved in this enterprise were manifold and complex, including the impulse to offer basic (physical) aid; to save souls (i.e. bring those who had erred back to Chris); and to combat rising communism. Some, including Hudal, remained defiantly proud of their actions even after encountering opprobrium. Steinacher used the case study of Erich Priebke to great effect, discussing the former head of the Roman Gestapo’s arrest and subsequent escape, his second “sub conditione” baptism in 1948 that yielded a new identity, and his successful flight to Argentina after some time hiding in South Tyrol.
Rebecca Carter-Chand delivered a paper calling attention to continuities and ruptures during the Third Reich and how international charitable organizations operated under democracies as well as dictatorships. Her focus was the Salvation Army in Germany, known as the Heilsarmee. The Nazis, for instance, brought significant changes to the operations of private charities in Germany, as the regime tried to centralize social welfare and demarcate lines of inclusion in and exclusion from the ethnonational community. Yet for an organization like the Salvation Army, a Protestant social service provider and religious movement, there were important continuities that ran from the Weimar into the Nazi period. Operational since the 1880s in Germany, the Salvation Army was responsible for a variety of institutions, including homeless shelters, maternity homes, and orphanages; it also provided various forms of assistance to Germany’s most poor and vulnerable. Her paper began with commentary on the German branch’s response to the appointment of an Englishman as the head of the Salvation Army, and explored evolving government policy on the role of private religious charity in a modern democracy and how the Heilsarmee’s situation in Germany changed after 1933. Her scholarship showcases the stories that financial records – following the money, as it were – can tell about an organization, as the Heilsarmee received no support from state taxes. This in turn shaped its approach to basic questions about how the funds it raised in Germany were spent, whether the money remained in Germany, and in which areas of need the money was used. The Heilsarmee sought consistently to improve its reputation and expand its work while maintaining the approval of the Nazi government. It also continued to pursue its vision of integrated religious work and social work. Its appointment as an approved auxiliary organization in the NSV (National Socialist People’s Welfare) represented both a continuation of similar public-private partnerships in previous eras as well as an unprecedented shift in its focus; it retained its legal autonomy while reporting directly to the main office responsible for Nazi welfare programs.
Dirk Schuster’s paper was devoted to the German Christian (Deutsche Christen) faction active in Thuringia. Over the last 25 years, a variety of scholars have produced important work on this pro-Nazi Protestant church organization, which sought to combine Protestantism and National Socialism. By 1938, this undertaking officially fell under the aegis of Eisenach’s Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life. In addition to propagating the supposed scientific evidence that Jesus was not Jewish, and that Judaism had always been the greatest enemy of the German Volk, the institute dedicated itself to the project of “de-Judaizing” Protestant doctrine. The German Volk was understood in its eyes to constitute the chosen people of God, and it accepted Adolf Hitler as a divinely-ordained Führer. To achieve the institute’s main goal, the implementation of a “de- Judaized” Christianity, the institute published, among other things, a “Jew-free” Bible and a “de-Judaized” hymnal, called Die Botschaft Gottes, the latter featuring the alteration or removal of certain problematic terms. Schuster asserted that whatever traces of Jewishness remained served only to perpetuate antisemitic stereotypes. Even after the war had ended, the Botschaft hymnal remained in circulation and could be found in parts of Germany and elsewhere, including in Romania, as late as the 1960s.
Chris Probst was unable to attend the panel in Vienna in person but submitted his paper, which was read aloud on his behalf. In it he took a stand with Alon Confino, conceding at the outset that it is not difficult to argue that Hitler and the Nazi regime sought a world without Jews during the Third Reich. Yet, five years before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Stuttgart Protestant pastor Eduard Lamparter, who worked tirelessly for the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, found it necessary to publish two polemical works about the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism. In both books, Lamparter decried Christian antisemitism, countering a portrait of Judaism that he regarded as untruthful. He argued in Evangelische Kirche und Judentum that the greatest danger for contemporary Jewish-Christian relations was the attempt by some Protestant ministers to “purify” Christianity “of all Jewish or Old Testament leaven.” Probst’s current research project, Purifying the Volk, is keen to demonstrate that, over the succeeding twenty years, Lamparter’s attempts to counter his fellow Protestants’ antisemitic views largely fell on deaf ears. In seeking to understanding this particular milieu and its antisemitism, Probst adopted an innovative approach for the paper, considering a “view from the other side” – German Jewish views of Protestants from 1929 to 1949, especially where political liberalism, assimilation, and antisemitism were concerned. He presented in detail the case study of Rabbi Aron Tänzer of Göppingen to underscore what the disintegration of the Weimar Republic must have looked like from such a Württemberger perspective. Rabbi Tanzer spent several years documenting the history of the Jews in Württemberg, underscoring the seminal work of the Jewish Central Committee in combatting public antisemitism in the community during the First World War; he completed a draft for publication by 1933, though it was not published until 1937, the year that he died. Tanzer’s Jewish community that he had so meticulously written about was decimated during the Holocaust.
Notes:
[1] Björn Krondorfer, private email exchange, 29 November 2024.
