Author Archives: Kyle Jantzen

Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria,” Contemporary European History (2024), 18 pages, doi:10.1017/S0960777324000262.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This is the second article from Edinburgh PhD candidate Harry Legg, following his 2022 publication “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany,” in which he analyzed the experienced of Germans who were racially identified as Jews by the Nazi regime but who did not consider themselves Jewish religiously or culturally. In this article, Legg asks a related question: “What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances?” (1). He examines four facets of this moment of discovery: the clues to Jewish ancestry that were overlooked, the reactions of antisemites who discovered they were racially Jewish, the despair many felt when they discovered they were Jews, and the minority who reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish heritage. Legg’s overriding purpose is to explore the nuances of identity among those who didn’t fall neatly into the binaries of Jew and German (or Austrian) Christian.

The title of the article comes from the testimony of Rudolf Briske, who secluded himself after learning of his Jewish ancestry from his parents in 1929. Briske was one of forty Germans and Austrians who Legg studied, most of whom were not initially aware of their Jewish ancestry (in part, of course, because they were raised as non-Jews) but who later wrote about it after the war. (2) (He calls these subjects non-Jewish “Jews” because they did not identify as Jewish but were identified as either “Full Jews” or “Mischlinge” [partially Jewish] by the Nazi regime.) Most of the “moments of discovery” Legg studies did not come from parents but at school, whether as denunciations by classmates (armed with knowledge from their parents) or as discoveries from filling out racial forms for school or for Nazi youth groups (7).

Legg argues that there were in fact clues that might have alerted these non-Jewish “Jews” to their Jewish ancestry. One was the presence of Jewish relatives, which might seem more obvious in retrospect than in real time, when many non-Jewish “Jews” didn’t think of Jewishness in racial terms (10). Since many of the subjects of Legg’s study were minors, they simply didn’t understand what racial terms like Mischlinge or slurs like Rassenschande meant (11).

The most dramatic moments of discovery of Jewishness were those of antisemites. As Legg points out, the very fact that non-Jewish “Jews” could be deeply antisemitic illustrates how separated they were from the Jewish communities around them (12). Some tried to deny their Jewishness, invoking their “hereditary character” as evidence of their hoped-for non-Jewishness. Others adjusted their worldviews, abandoning their antisemitism. One compared it to the adaptation process involved in a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Another experienced guilt over her antisemitism. For others still, their moment of discovery amounted to an emergence out of naiveté. Still, the language of these discoveries was usually the language of despair: “thunderstruck,” “horrified,” “stunned,” and “terrible, terrible, terribly upsetting” (14). For many, the hardest part of the discovery was being “dropped” by friends (15). Others experienced the disgrace of public exposure (16).

A few of the non-Jewish “Jews” who Legg studied reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish ancestry, though this was more common among those whose moment of discovery came before 1933 (17).

This is a fascinating article which offers genuine insight into the experiences of those who were raised as Germans or Austrians—and normally as Christians—and then discovered their Jewish ancestry. It sheds light on the diversity of experiences among ordinary Germans and Austrians forced to face the brutalities of Nazi racial ideology.

Article Note: William Skiles, “Franz Hildebrandt on the BBC: Wartime Broadcasting to Nazi Germany”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Article Note: William Skiles, “Franz Hildebrandt on the BBC: Wartime Broadcasting to Nazi Germany,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 74, no. 1 (January 2023): 90-115.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, William Skiles analyzes thirteen wartime sermons of Franz Hildebrandt, the prominent German-Jewish pastor who emigrated to England in 1937 to minister and teach at Cambridge. As the author explains, Hildebrandt studied theology in Berlin and ministered in the Lutheran Church, working alongside Martin Niemöller in Berlin-Dahlem. Also a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hildebrandt joined the Pastors’ Emergency League and Confessing Church, contributed substantially to the 1936 Confessing Church memorandum to Hitler, and was arrested and detained for four weeks in 1937 for illegally collecting funds for the Confessing Church. Upon his release, he moved to England. Briefly interned as an “enemy alien” in 1939, Hildebrandt ended up working for the BBC Overseas Service, writing and preaching German-language sermons as part of the secret Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, a section within the British Ministry of Information. Skiles explains that these sermons were part of a “white” or open propaganda campaign and “developed as a way for the British to demonstrate love and care for the spiritual needs of their brothers and sisters in Nazi Germany” (96) through the provision of German-language church services over the radio.

In his analysis, Skiles identifies various themes running through Hildebrandt’s thirteen wartime propaganda sermons broadcast into Germany by the BBC. First was the idea that British and German Christians were more unified by their shared faith than divided by national rivalries, and that this unity compelled Christians from other countries to support their German counterparts who were suffering under Nazi persecution.

Second, Hildebrandt preached against Nazism, describing it as a false ideology. In doing so, he also argued that the German churches were betraying Christ by collaborating with Nazism. Another aspect of this was Hildebrandt’s criticism of Nazi racial superiority. Only God’s grace accepted by faith would save the German people. A life of service to others would be the outcome.

Third, Skiles argues that Hildebrandt’s sermons called Germans to reassess their loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state. Christians in Germany should honour their government leaders, but only insofar as those leaders led their people to honour God. For reasons which remain unclear, Hildebrandt seems to have preached little about the plight of the Jews, even though he was well-connected and knew about the mass murder of Jews in Europe through his work in the BBC.

There are two aspects of Hildebrandt and his propaganda sermons about which I would like to know more.

First, what role did Hildebrandt’s status as a “non-Aryan” Christian play in his work? Skiles notes that Hildebrandt was one of 117 “non-Aryan” pastors he has found within the German Protestant clergy of the 1930s[1] and adds that “National Socialist supporters in the German Churches challenged their Christian identity, imposed a Jewish identity upon them and ultimately sought their exclusion from German public life” (93). That said, though Skiles states that Hildebrandt’s Jewish ancestry played a role in his arrest, imprisonment, and exile (90-91), it would be helpful to know more about how that unfolded, since so much of Hildebrandt’s energy and passion revolved around his commitment to Scripture and doctrine and his intensive work in the Pastors’ Emergency League and Confessing Church. As Hildebrandt’s biographer Holger Roggelin put it, it was Niemöller’s arrest that confirmed Hildebrandt’s decision to leave Germany for good. Hildebrandt’s final sermon before his 1937 arrest—on the day he had planned to leave the country—was an exposition of the Acts 4 text of the arrest of the apostles for preaching about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As he stated, the Church’s weapon was “to speak with all boldness [Christ’s] Word and the confession: There is salvation in none other!”[2] It’s not clear that his German-Jewish identity had much to do with these theological convictions, though at one point Hildebrandt did speak up against the Confessing Church’s weakness with respect to Nazi Jewish policy.[3]

Second, to what extent did the propaganda aims of the BBC shape Hildebrandt’s sermons? Skiles argues that Hildebrandt had “considerable freedom” in his radio preaching, noting that Hildebrandt was appointed to an advisory committee and asked for more sermons than he could deliver. On the other hand, though, all his sermons and prayers had to be submitted to the BBC censor for approval (100). Did he choose his own scriptural texts, or simply follow a lectionary? To what extent was he offering spiritual care, or was he more focused on subtly undermining Nazi ideology? To understand the extent to which Hildebrandt’s sermons were shaped by his own concerns, it would be helpful to have more historical background on this aspect of British wartime propaganda, and the wider role of the Sonderberichte or German news talks, which included not only Religious Broadcasts but also Talks for Workers, Naval Programmes, and Forces Programmes.[4] As Vike Martina Plock argues, the BBC European Services determined that Nazi propaganda was monochromatic—focused on the two themes of war and Hitler and directed to the collective of the German nation without distinction. “To develop effective counterpropaganda the BBC had to find ways to dissolve these crowds of synchronised automata by designing programmes that reinstated individuality and strengthened listeners’ sense of personal responsibility.”[5] Religious broadcasts were part of this initiative to target specific audiences, though there were disputes within the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive about whether exploiting religious broadcasts for political propaganda purposes would backfire. Some of the early religious broadcasts used text from Karl Barth’s books which were critical of Hitler and Nazism, and there was some question about whether Barth himself would be asked to deliver broadcasts. (He wasn’t.) BBC officials walked a fine line not only with the content of these broadcasts but also in the way they pitched them to the theologians who delivered them, suggesting that the broadcasts were primarily meant to offer messages of hope and to help ensure that there would be a remnant of faithful Christians in Germany after the end of Nazism. Eventually, as the German Religious Advisory Committee was formed (which, as Skiles notes, included Hildebrandt), Protestant broadcasts were transmitted every Wednesday morning at 10:15, beginning in November 1942. From March 1943, regular Catholic services were broadcast on Sundays and Thursdays at 10:00 am.[6]

Franz Hildebrandt is someone about whom many of us who study the history of the German Church Struggle should know more. It is surprising to me that so little has been written about him. William Skiles’ assessment of Hildebrandt’s wartime propaganda sermons hints to us of the potential for more study on this interesting figure.

Notes:

[1] For more details, see William Skiles, “Preaching to Nazi Germany: the Confessing Church on National

Socialism, the Jews, and the question of opposition,” PhD diss. (University of California, San Diego, 2016), 403-408, which includes the author’s list of the 117 pastors of Jewish descent.

[2] Holger Roggelin, Franz Hildebrandt: Ein lutherischer Dissenter im Kirchenkampf und Exil (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 122. See also the many references to Hildebrandt’s collaboration with Bonhoeffer and Niemöller in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. and ed. Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), as well as Franz Hildebrandt, “Barmen: What to Learn and What Not to Learn,” in The Barmen Confession: Papers from the Seattle Assembly, ed. Hubert G. Locke (Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellon, 1986), 285-302.

[3] Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 488.

[4] See Vike Martina Plock, The BBC German Service during the Second World War: Broadcasting to the Enemy (Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), especially chapter 3.

[5] Ibid., 54.

[6] Ibid., 60-62.

Article Note: Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Article Note: Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 511-538.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, Udi Greenberg explores how Catholics and Protestants set aside longstanding animosities in favour of new conceptions of religious pluralism and religious freedom that preserved Christian identity by excluding Jews and Muslims. In contrast to the view that Catholic-Protestant collaboration was either the “predictable consequence of a broader liberalization in postwar Christian thought and politics” (511) or a response to the pressures of the Cold War, Greenberg argues that it was in fact driven by two political upheavals between the 1930s and the 1960s. The first was the Nazi attempt to unite the two confessions into a single racial church marked by anticommunism and antisemitism, while the second was decolonization in Africa and Asia, which produced an inter-Christian alliance to preserve missionary work and combat Islam. This history, he contends, helps explain why contemporary European politics and law support a form of religious pluralism that benefits Christianity but discriminates against non-Christians.

Greenberg makes his case by examining leaders of postwar ecumenism and exploring their links to two ideological projects. The first attempt to overcome the confessional divide was driven by pro-Nazi Christians inspired by “the Third Reich’s vision of a unified anti-liberal and anti-Jewish European order. For these thinkers and leaders, interconfessionalism was not meant to promote liberal equality. Rather, it was designed to secure Christian supremacy in the public sphere, and it often coexisted smoothly with blatant antisemitism” (512). Ironically, after the war, these pro-Nazi ecumenists were joined by their erstwhile opponents, who helped them form new intellectual associations and political parties designed to bolster Christian hegemony in Europe.

Still, as Greenberg notes, both Catholic and Protestant church leaders remained opposed to formal cooperation—that is, until the crisis of decolonization threatened the existence of missionary churches and Christian communities in former colonies. Only a pan-Christian alliance would ward off religious enemies (especially Muslims), while only the ecumenical model of interreligious peace and cooperation could teach Asians and Africans the lessons they would need to reach European standards of civilization. Ecumenism, as Greenberg notes, was a tool to “revamp imperial logic” (512).

As Greenberg explains, this Catholic-Protestant collaboration both promoted and undermined religious pluralism:

What these two moments of European ecumenical flourishing shared was a key goal: dismantling some hierarchies in order to bolster others. Calls for interconfessional cooperation often differed from calls for universal equality; most notably, several influential ecumenists were antisemites and Islamophobes, and hoped to reverse tolerance for Jews or Muslims. What is more, in both time periods, Catholic-Protestant talk of peace was often laced with visions of struggle. The language and visions of the Nazi era were transferable to the era of decolonization in part because ecumenical activists conceived of these two moments as similar: periods of combat in which European culture and Christianity (which they often conflated) faced existential danger. (512)

Referencing the contradictory use of religious liberty in the contemporary era, with secular regimes banning supposedly inappropriate expressions of religion like Muslim clothing or circumcision, Greenberg observes:

It may be, then, that religious liberty is best understood not as a stable concept that emerged from liberal and secular governance; rather, as the story of European ecumenism shows, its meaning constantly shifts, enabling both increased equality and the denial of rights to the very minorities that religious liberty claims to protect. (514)

Having established his argument, Greenberg devotes the balance of his article to describing the depth of late-nineteenth-century animosity between the two confessions and to detailing the networks of people and organizations devoted to Catholic-Protestant collaboration from the 1930s to the 1960s. Readers are reminded of ultranationalist Catholics (Charles Maurras) and Protestant nationalists (leaders of the German Kulturkampf), and the way that members of each confession blamed the ills of modernity on the other. Pope Pius X’s 1910 description of Protestants as “enemies of the cross of Christ” and “corrupters” who “paved the way for … modern rebellions and apostacy” is just one example of this antagonism. (515) Across Europe, each confession lobbied for political and legal discrimination against the other. Globally, competition between Catholics and Protestants was played out on the mission field.

Ecumenical collaboration began in response to the threat of atheistic Communism. While the Vatican established the Jesuit Secretariat on Atheism in 1932, Protestants established the Swiss International Anti-Communist Alliance and the Campaign against Alienation from God and Anti-Divine Forces in Germany. But it was the Nazi campaign to politically mobilize Christians into “positive Christianity” for non-Jews and non-Communists that really brought leaders from the two confessions together, making Germany a “launching pad for systematic ecumenical writing and organization” (520). Catholic theologians Robert Grosche and Damasus Winzen launched the journal Catholica to explore connections to Protestantism and express their desire to participate in a Germanic, racially-based spiritual community, while Protestants like Wilhelm Stählin and others promoted the idea of a national body of Christ. Publications, mutual visits between seminaries, and various conferences bringing Catholics and Protestants together soon followed. Notably, Catholic historian Joseph Lortz reimagined the Reformation sympathetically, and added a series of ecumenical pamphlets and discussion guides, too. Greenberg observes that these interconfessional advocates were mostly not fanatical Nazis, but adds that they were profoundly anti-liberal and opposed to universal equality. As examples of ecumenically-minded antisemites, Greenberg offers names like Catholics Albert Mirgeler and Otto Schilling, though there were surely many on the Protestant side as well.

In the postwar era, these same figures participated in the growing European ecumenical movement—a movement that almost never included Jewish participants and that pursued a largely anti-liberal agenda. Fixation on the threat of Communism was, rather, the animating issue bringing Catholics and Protestants together in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The formation of the Christian Democratic Union, under Catholic politician Konrad Adenauer, is perhaps the most notable example of this collaboration, but leaders from across the continent “shared Adenauer’s clamor that Marxism’s ‘materialist philosophy’ was a ‘moral disease’ and ‘the root of all disorder,’ and the era’s principal task was ‘saving Occidental Christian Europe’” (525).

That said, Protestant leaders remained antipathetic to Catholicism. For example, the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 launched a decade of studies on religious freedom, which routinely blamed Catholic-led countries as oppressors. Similarly, the fact that Catholics led in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community aroused grave suspicions among Protestant politicians (526).

The dynamic that changed all this was decolonization. As European countries abandoned their formal empires, both Catholic and Protestant elites worried that the loss of imperial protection, the rise of anti-Western sentiments in Asia and Africa, and the surge of nationalisms, pan-Islam, and Communism would potentially eradicate Christianity in large parts of the world. In response, “leading writers proclaimed that Europe still had a Christian civilizing mission,” which could now “be achieved only through confessional collaboration, which would inspire appropriate religious behavior for the rest of the world” (527).

For these European Christians, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was but one example of the disaster that could befall the Church. People like Joseph Blomjous, the Dutch Catholic bishop of Mwanza, Tanzania; Hans Burgman, a German missionary in Uganda; and John Jordan, a British missionary writer in Nigeria, called for interconfessional schools and medical facilities, along with other forms of ecumenical cooperation. Scottish Presbyterian bishop Lesslie Newbigin, General Secretary of the International Missionary Council, also called for overcoming confessional obstacles in his 1961 work Is Christ Divided? A Plea for Christian Unity in a Revolutionary Age. He was only one of many such voices. Indeed, Blomjous and Newbigin led a Vatican-WCC study of European mission work, then established the Committee on Society, Development and Peace (SODEPAX) to support a wide range of interconfessional collaboration.

Greenberg shows how these 1960s ecumenists drew on the work of their 1930s predecessors, thus blending “talk of diversity and tolerance with an overwhelming sense of conflict” with Communism and Islam. Examples include the work of French Dominican writer Marie-Joseph Le Guillou and Fridtjor Birkeli, the former director of the Norwegian missions and bishop of Stavanger, who feared for the extermination of European Christianity overseas. As he summed it up:

It was exactly this blend of forging peace between Christians while waging struggle with “anti-Christian” forces that made ecumenism an appealing response to decolonization even beyond missionary circles. For Christians ambivalent or even despondent about Europe’s collapsing political power, unity offered a new spiritual mission, a novel teaching for Europeans to take overseas. Indeed, for all their talk about the need to “indigenize” the churches, many European commentators continued to assume that it was Europe’s role to provide the template. Catholic and Protestant peace, they paternalistically proclaimed, was Europe’s new global “responsibility,” which would show Africans and Asians the direction of the future. (532)

Ecumenism thus became a new kind of civilizing mission, linking European Catholics and Protestants in a shared global project. This trend culminated in the Second Vatican Council, which reimagined Protestants as brethren in the faith rather than heretics—a sentiment reciprocated by the WCC. The result was an expansion of Protestant rights in Catholic countries. As in the 1930s, however, while interconfessional collaboration in the 1950s and 1960s overcame historic conflicts that had divided European Christians since the Reformation, it produced less a liberal vision of universal equality than an exclusivist version of religious liberty in which Christian unity was marked by antisemitic, anti-Communist, and anti-Islamic sentiments. Ironically, while a newly ecumenical Christianity in Europe soon declined sharply, Christianity exploded in the former colonial world. Still, in an increasingly secular twenty-first-century Europe, political and legal privileges for Christianity are coupled with ongoing limits to the religious freedom of non-Christians.

Chapter Note: Susannah Heschel, “Sacrament versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Chapter Note: Susannah Heschel, “Sacrament versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany,” in: On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence, ed. Irene Kacandes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 136-172.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this chapter, Susannah Heschel tackles a challenging question: in Hitler’s Germany, how were Christians of Jewish descent treated by their fellow parishioners, their brothers and sisters in Christ? More particularly, whether Protestant or Catholic, how were they treated after 15 September 1941, the date on which Germans identified by the Nazi regime as racially Jewish were required to wear the Judenstern, the yellow Star of David, in public—irrespective of religious affiliation? In the contest between sacrament and racism, which won out?

Heschel identifies the implementation of this mandate that publicly marked Jews as a watershed for relations within local church congregations, surmising that before that date, fellow parishioners would not have known who had been baptized as Christians from infancy and who had converted as adults. Whether or not that was the case, there is little question that the mandate shone a spotlight on race within the church, making the prospect of “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” Christians worshipping together much more challenging.

Heschel enters into her question through the story of Erna Becker-Kohen, a German Jew baptized as a Catholic in 1936. By all indications a devout believer and faithful choir member, she was shunned by her congregation, who didn’t want a Jew participating in worship with them. Her story is a complex one, however, as “some priests tried to help and console her.” (90) Even then, though, out of consideration for the other parishioners, she was asked to sit in the choir loft, so as not to be seen. She was not invited into the homes of fellow parishioners, and eventually she couldn’t attend her own parish church because of all the harassment she received whenever she went out in her neighbourhood. (99-100)

If marriage to an Aryan German spouse offered a limited measure of protection for a German Jew—there were 20,454 such marriages in existence in 1939—conversion and baptism offered little beyond the hope of comfort and occasional kindnesses from priests and pastors. (90) Still, assimilation through conversion and baptism was common. Estimates are that there were about 300,000 “non-Aryan” Christians in Germany in mid-1933. This meant, according to Nazi racial definitions, having at least one Jewish grandparent (i.e. either “Mischlinge” status or “full Jews”). How many emigrated and how many died at the hands of Nazis is unclear, though Heschel explains that there were only about 164,000 Jews of any kind left in Germany in October 1941, and by April 1943, there remained only 31,910 Jews wearing the Star of David and another 17,375 Jews in “privileged” marriages to Aryans, and who thus did not have to wear a star. (91)

In the subsequent section, Heschel explains the relationship between baptism and race prior to 1941, noting how Nazi propaganda help race to be more significant than baptism, and how the regime prohibited the baptism of Jews after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. Protestant theologians debated whether Christians of Jewish descent could be ordained and serve in pastoral ministry. The clearest answer to that question came from Karl Barth, who argued that the German Protestant Church would cease to be a Christian church if it failed to baptize Jewish Christians. (94) And yet, as various other anecdotes from the German churches suggest, it would seem that Christians of Jewish descent were rejected at least as much as they were accepted, and probably more. One thought-provoking observation of Heschel’s is that trams and churches were probably the only enclosed spaces in which “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” Germans might mingle in Nazi Germany, such was the effect of the social isolation of Jews after 1938. (97)

Heschel offers three possible interpretations through which we might understand the history of Christians of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany: first, that Jews baptized as Christians existed in a kind of borderland between Christian and Jewish communities, not really members of either; second, that Jews baptized as Christians functioned as “uncanny” intruders, arousing “suspicion, anxiety, and disgust” among Christians; and third, that Jews baptized as Christians evoked a kind of horror, in part because they reminded “Aryan” Christians that Christianity itself was grafted onto Judaism (Romans 11)—the two faiths were forever closely interconnected. (104-109)

Heschel raises an important and uncomfortable question, highlighting the relative weakness of Christian community to stand up against state-sponsored racism and persecution. It will not be surprising that she makes unsettling comparisons to twentieth- and twenty-first century American religion and politics.

Article Note: Gordon L. Heath, “Canadian Presbyterians and the Rejection of Pacifism in the Interwar Years, 1919-1939”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Article Note: Gordon L. Heath, “Canadian Presbyterians and the Rejection of Pacifism in the Interwar Years, 1919-1939,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 98, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020), 66-77.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, Gordon Heath of McMaster Divinity College has analyzed diverse forms of pacifism within the Presbyterian Church of Canada (PCC) during the 1920s and 1930s. He argues that support for internationalist pacifism—a “liberal reformist” movement committed to “international developments for peace” but “willing to support the use of force as a last resort” (68)—was strong among Presbyterians, but that support for absolute pacifism—the refusal “to support the use of force for any reason” (68)—waned in the later 1920s and 1930s. This was in large part because the minority of Presbyterians who remained with the PCC after most chose to join the new United Church of Canada (UCC) were largely committed to the Just War tradition, a core Presbyterian conviction (67).

In the first section, “Shifting Views and Rising Pacifism,” Heath explains Canadian enthusiasm for the First World War in 1914 aimed initially at “saving civilization from German militarism,” then also putting a halt to the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey and more generally creating a world without war. Though postwar Presbyterians went on to commemorate the Great War, Canadians as a whole began to embrace pacifism, because of the costs of the war—both human and material. Among Christians, one evidence of this surge in pacifism was “A Creed for Believers in a Warless World” (1921), which articulated “belief” in arms reductions, international law, “a worldwide association of nations for world peace,” racial equality, good will between nations, “just dealing and unselfish service,” Christian brotherhood, and a “warless world” (66, 69). A wave of internationalism swept through the churches, just as it had the wider society. The influence of the social gospel was important for pacifism, as was the formation of the League of Nations, which the Presbyterian press supported, and a series of international agreements which suggested the possibility of arms reduction, normalization of relations with Germany, and the elevation of diplomacy over war (70).

Among Canadian Presbyterians, however, support for pacifism was limited to these hopes for stable international relations marked by bilateral and multilateral agreements, which would render war less likely. Absolute pacifism convictions were rejected. As one Presbyterian writer put it, while war was “contrary to the will of Christ and foreign to His spirit” as well as “not Christ’s method of bringing in His Kingdom” and “fundamentally alien to the spirit of brotherhood which he came to establish on earth,” it should be emphasized that “the Church does not take the position that no circumstances can justify armed resistance to unlawful aggression or inaction in the face of wrong and suffering inflicted upon the weak and defenseless” (71). Another writer asserted that German aggression in the First World War had demonstrated that “sometimes war was needed to stop bellicose nations.”

Still, Heath argues that 1920s Presbyterians believed that international organizations and the churches could partner to make peace, foster “universal brotherhood,” and usher in the Kingdom of God. The Christian contribution would be to invest in global Christian mission. By the 1930s, however, these hopes were challenged by the increasing aggression of dictatorships in Japan, Italy, and Germany. Presbyterians referred to a “Dark Valley” of international tensions that made pacifism seem more and more untenable (71).

The second section of Heath’s article (“Just War (Redux)”) illustrates the growing division among pacifists and the fact that PCC convictions were primarily internationalist and not those of the “absolute pacifists” (72). In 1934, for instance, the Canadian editor of the Presbyterian Record quoted his US counterpart (from the Presbyterian Banner) stating that any Presbyterians who support resolutions opposed to the use of any force to defend the country “should remember that they subscribed to a different doctrine when they accepted our Confession of Faith” (72) The magistrate still exercised the sword in the “Just War” tradition. Heath references other similar PCC statements to illustrate the limits of Presbyterian pacifism, while also noting that there were still some scattered Presbyterian statements renouncing war entirely. Overall, though, a new realism took hold.

Here Heath enters into historical debates about 1) the relative importance of the social gospel within Presbyterianism, 2) the level of preoccupation with survival and reconstruction of Canadian Presbyterianism after the departure of most Presbyterians for the UCC, 3) the extent to which Presbyterians had any energy at all for theological innovation, and 4) the level of conservatism within the (now much smaller and more homogenous) PCC. Above all, Heath argues,

Presbyterian identity was under duress due to the recent formation of the UCC. Despite the optimism for peace, it is not entirely surprising that absolute pacifism did not take root in the PCC. There was no significant pacifist movement in the Reformed tradition, and thus the surging peace movement did not resonate strongly with a pre-existing body of pacifist Presbyterians. More importantly, absolute pacifism directly contradicted the creeds of the church… (74).

As a result, when German Führer Adolf Hitler launch the world into war once again in 1939, “the PCC remained faithful to the Just War tradition, and the war against Hitler was deemed to be a Just War” (74). Moreover, commentary in the Presbyterian Record and resolutions from the General Assembly both maintained strong support for the war against Hitler and Nazism. What the pacifist influence had done, though, was to temper the enthusiasm with which the PCC endorsed the Second World War as compared to the First.

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2023)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2023)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

I must begin this Letter from the Editors with an apology for the long delay between issues of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, which is due to the recent increase in the demands of my university position. While it has been my pleasure to have led a group of scholars in transforming the late John Conway’s monthly newsletter into a quarterly journal starting back in March 2010, it is time to pass on my Managing Editor responsibilities. I am pleased to announce that Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, will be stepping into the lead role as of the next issue. I am delighted that she is willing to take on the responsibility and look forward to supporting her as she and her colleagues on the editorial board carry the CCHQ forward.

In this issue, we are pleased to present an article by Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming on a series of lectures by Father Marie-Benoît at the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion in Rome, in November 1944. In the lectures, he tried to bring together Jews and Christians by discussing topics such as the creation of the universe, man formed in the image of God, monogamy, the sanctity of marriage, the unity of the human family, and other topics common to both Christianity and Judaism. His lectures came to the attention of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office, the office within the Roman Curia that ruled on matters of faith and morals. The essay describes the tug-of-war between various authority figures, congregations within the Curia, and religious Orders that ensued, ultimately foreshadowing the sea changes of the Second Vatican Council.

We are also pleased to present a series of book reviews by Rebecca Carter-Chand, Martin Menke, Dirk Schuster, and Kyle Jantzen on the Vatican and Evangelical Christians in Fascist Italy, Archbishops Conrad Gröber and Lorenz Jaeger, Christianity and Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism, and British Christian engagement with Nazi Germany, respectively. Several news and notes round out this issue.

We hope you find these contributions both interesting and enlightening.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Andrew Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Review of Andrew Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Pp. x + 422. ISBN: 9781107129047.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Andrew Chandler has written an engaging study of the substantial preoccupation and response of diverse British Christians to Nazism, the German “Church Struggle,” the persecution of the Jews, and the Second World War. Chandler has been immersed in this history for over 30 years, and the resulting depth of knowledge shines through in the thoroughness of his research and the perspicacity of his historical judgments.

At the outset, Chandler argues that British Christians and the Third Reich is an argument for the validity of a transnational approach to British history—one exploring not those networks rooted in the British Empire but rather those networks rooted in “that liberal moral consciousness which extended the boundaries of conventional politics in the age of mass democracy” (1). He aims to demonstrate “that the relationship between British Christianity and the Third Reich is indeed a solid subject and that it is one of significance” (2) to the ways we find patterns in and write about the past, and does so by means of a chronological study drawing on a rich array of sources, including correspondence, memoranda, published books, polemical pamphlets, British parliamentary debates, records of various church assemblies, and the vast output of both church and secular press.

As the study of British Christians rather than simply British churches, Chandler’s work explores the way Christians and Christian thinking about Nazi Germany was brought to bear in ecclesiastical, political, and cultural spheres. To that end, he begins with an overview of the way in which British Christianity (Anglican, Catholic, and Free Church) was engaged with both domestic and international political concerns, through a wide variety of institutions, conferences, and (especially) publishing endeavours. Doctrinal concerns, Chandler notes, did not generally stand in the way of interaction and cooperation among the many Christian leaders and intellectuals he analyzes. These include various Anglican prelates (Cosmo Lang, Herbert Hensley Henson, William Temple, Arthur Headlam, George Bell, Arthur Stuart Duncan-Jones) and lay leaders (James Parkes, Sir Wyndham Deedes), Catholic standouts (Cardinal Bourne, Arthur Hinsley, Christopher Dawson, Michael de la Bedoyere), and Free Church notables (Henry Carter, J.H. Rushbrooke, Alfred E. Garvie, Nathaniel Micklem, William Paton, J.H. Oldham, Dorothy (Jebb) Buxton, Bertha Bracey, Corder Catchpool) whom he describes in a series of helpful biographical sketches near the beginning of the book (33-50). These are among the primary figures in Chandler’s study, the ones whose words and deeds stand in for “British Christians” more generally. It could be argued, of course, that these men and women were hardly representative of British Christians as a whole, but as spokespersons for broad swathes of British Christianity, they represent at least the attitudes and ideas in play at the leadership level of the churches—ideas communicated through church hierarchies and denominational networks, as well as through a myriad of church publications.

Chandler frames his history in five eras: during 1933-1934, British Christians first encountered Nazi Germany, developed views about it, and explored potential responses; 1935-1937 was marked by debates about whether to accept or oppose Nazism, in which Christians tended to land on the critical side; 1938-1939 introduced urgent debates about “German expansion and western Appeasement,” new and more violent attacks against Jews in Germany, and the growing likelihood of war; from 1939-1943, Britain led the war effort for democracy and against Nazi-occupied Europe, and Christians grappled with the “themes of collaboration, complicity, and resistance;” and 1943-1949 revolved around conceptual debates about “justice and judgment” and real problems of Allied occupation and humanitarian crises (8-9).

In the first section, on the period of the Nazi seizure and consolidation of power, Chandler argues “it was not true” that international opinion was slow to note and criticize Hitler’s regime (51). Yet there were doubts about whether the Treaty of Versailles would bring a lasting peace and many political attacks against democracy. Within weeks of the Nazi seizure of power, British Christians understood that Nazism was a challenge to the international system, a danger to both its political opponents and German Jews, and a dictatorial threat to German churches. While those like the Quaker Corder Catchpool in Berlin and International Student Services official James Parkes in Geneva served as important sources of information, others like Archbishops Lang of Canterbury and Temple of York consulted with government representatives and British Jewish leaders and launched debates in the House of Lords. Laypeople like Quaker Bertha Bracey established organizations like the Germany Emergency Committee, while churchmen of all stripes wrote protests in the church press.

During the eruption of the German “Church Struggle,” British Christians learned much about the diverse positions of Christians in Germany towards the Nazi state. “What is at once striking,” Chandler notes, “is the strength of the British response to these affairs” (86). The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Council on Foreign Relations was the site of much of the early conversation about the German turmoil, with information supplied by ecumenical figures like Bishop Bell of Chichester. Indeed, Arthur Stuart Duncan-Jones, Dean of the Chichester Cathedral, travelled to Germany and met pro-Nazi “German Christians,” opponents who would eventually form the Confessing Church, and even (surprisingly) Hitler himself. The result was a nuanced view of the situation, but also one that urged caution with respect to intervening in German church affairs (90).

Chandler describes the growing conflict between Bishops Headlam of Gloucester and Bell—the former overly sympathetic to the Hitler regime and prone to antisemitic remarks and the latter (along with Archbishop Lang) increasingly critical of the Nazi regime and its allies in the German Christian Movement. Bell also became quite involved in the emerging Jewish refugee crisis, while Archbishop Temple attempted to intercede with Hitler himself—just one of many interventions by British Christians against the German government. Chandler explains that by the summer of 1934, the German Foreign Office was expressing concern over the effect of German church affairs on international opinion, and British protests against antisemitism were also growing prominent. International Christian gatherings like the 1934 Baptist World Congress and the Life and Work Conference in Fanø were also taken up with the German church situation.

In the section covering 1935-1937, Chandler argues that the growth of a movement favouring rapprochement with Germany should not lead us to undervalue the resistance that remained within liberal democratic society. “British Christians were often found to be an expressive element of this [resistance], and they played a prominent part in maintaining a critical consensus when it might easily have lost its force and subsided” (139). Germany was, after all, still a racial dictatorship. Jews were, afterall, still a persecuted minority there. Christians too were still harassed and persecuted. Concentration camps still threatened, and the refugee crisis continued to grow. Indeed, while the direct interventions of British Christians waned, having grown less successful with the increasing confidence of the National Socialist state, new humanitarian ventures became a means by which British Christians could respond to the crisis in the German church, state, and society.

For instance, Quaker Dorothy Buxton travelled to Germany and spoke out (somewhat controversially) against the concentration camps in which the Hitler regime incarcerated its political opponents. Bishop Bell was reluctant to follow her lead, especially with a new round of conflict in the German “Church Struggle.” Public speeches and letters of protest concerning the treatment of the German churches were offered up by a range of British Christians: former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Bell, Temple, Bishop Henson of Durham, Moderator of the Federal Council of Free Churches Sidney Berry, and others. All of these protests found their way to Berlin, and Bell also visited Germany, meeting with both political and ecclesiastical leaders. An important moment came in November 1935, when Bell introduced a motion expressing “sympathy ‘with the Jewish people and those of Jewish origin’ in Germany” in the Anglican Church Assembly. When opposition to the motion emerged, Bishop Henson gave an impromptu and explosive address denouncing Nazi Germany, carrying the day (157-159). At the same time, on the ground, Catchpool and other Quakers in Berlin were attempting to aid concentration camp prisoners and protect Jewish institutions under threat.

The year 1936 saw yet more British Christian criticism of Nazi Germany, with a sharpening focus on its pagan and totalitarian nature. Alongside these continuing protests, there were new examples of concrete action, such as the creation of the International Christian Committee for Refugees, chaired by Bell and supported by Lang in an effort to aid so-called non-Aryan Christians (not least, children) in need of new homes outside of Germany. But the reports of British Christians visiting Germany were mixed. A.J. Macdonald of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Council on Foreign Relations played down the situation, arguing that German pastors just wanted to get on with their work and that only those who opposed the state politically landed themselves in trouble. Bell found the situation much more serious, though his German church contacts were pessimistic about and even reticent of foreign intervention. And the Congregationalist Principal of Mansfield College (Oxford), Nathaniel Micklem, discovered an underground German church fearful of arrest by secret police. In 1937, attention shifted to Roman Catholic opposition to Nazism with the publication of Pope Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”) encyclical. British Catholics were well aware of how much relations between Germany and the Catholic Church had deteriorated. Meanwhile, Anglican and Quaker attempts to raise money for non-Aryan Christian refugees fared poorly and the ongoing argument between Bishops Headlam and Bell over the church’s stance towards Germany only muddied the waters. But the arrest and incarceration of Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller sparked a new round of British Christian protests in late 1937 (195-195).

Concerning the build-up to the Second World War, Chandler asks how the morality of the appeasement policy and the presence of a significant pacifist minority coexisted with the ever-growing refugee crisis and the public scandal concerning Pastor Niemöller, “the most famous political prisoner in the world” (204). On the one hand, Chandler notes,

Appeasement sought to avoid another Great War and this resolve possessed the authority of a national consensus. In March 1938 the Church Times pronounced, ‘Is it not the law of God to try friendship and understanding?’ From the spring of 1938 the policy of the Chamberlain government found the winds of Christian opinion blowing supportively in its sails. (208)

On the other hand, criticisms such as Duncan-Jones’ The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany described the religious mysticism of Nazi Germany as “fundamentally irreconcilable” with Christianity and lambasted the oppression and “cruelty of Moloch” (205-206). Buxton, Bell, Lang, Micklem, and others continued to protest Niemöller’s incarceration, while the refugee crisis grew ever worse with the annexation of Austria. Bell, in particular, understood that political events were overshadowing the “Church Struggle” and that British Christian intervention no longer had any effect whatsoever in Germany (218-219).

But if the Munich Agreement had been greeted with calls for a national day of thanksgiving (Lang) and if Te Deums rang out in Catholic churches, the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938 brought all that to a halt, shocking British Christians and shattering hopes for peace. Archbishop Lang published an indignant letter (“A Black Day for Germany”) which was later affirmed by the Church Assembly. The Catholic Herald described Nazi “sub-human behaviour” while the Baptist Times argued, “The time for silence is past.” As the Munich consensus disintegrated, British Christians invested new energy into refugee work, which was boosted by the government decision to allow child refugees to enter Britain. Sponsorships abounded. Church statements grew firmer, too. In a March 1939 House of Lords speech, Lang urged “the massing of might on the side of right,” and when Hitler launched the war in September, he announced in the same chamber that, “I shrink indeed from linking our broken lights and our fallible purposes with the Holy Name of God, yet I honestly believe that in this struggle, if it is forced upon us, we may humbly and trustfully commend our cause to God” (260, 269).

Chandler devotes no less than 100 pages to the period of the Second World War. In the main, he notes how, with London as the international capital of a war-torn continent, British Christians engaged in new patterns of association and collaboration, not least between Protestants and Catholics and between Christians and Jews. Through these, Christians responded to the moral challenge of National Socialist ideology and politics. In the main, the European conflict was justified by Christian leaders of all kinds as a “righteous war” (273). Hitler and Nazism were condemned as evil, even as church leaders expressed sympathy for the German people, whom they regarded as deceived and led astray. Many German exiles came to London, where they collaborated with German and British Christians on publications and radio broadcasts. Though relations with the German churches were effectively severed by the war, fragments of news painted a bleak picture. The moral stance of most leading British Christians discouraged the idea of a negotiated peace, though the Vatican was working diplomatic channels intensely and ecumenical representatives in Geneva kept their hopes alive.

Among Catholics, Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster, rose to prominence as a supporter of the war. At a 1940 National Day of Prayer Mass broadcast by the BBC, he declared, “Can any Christian now hear with indifference that clarion call to defend the right; to protect the souls of millions of our brethren cruelly assailed and oppressed?” The war, he continued, was a “just crusade for the deliverance from evil which rests its strength on force alone” (287). Similar rhetoric abounded across the Christian spectrum, as the war gave rise to a vast literature on politics, religion, and morality, including Bell’s Christianity and World Order, published by Penguin (296). And debates broke out, like the one between those who regarded Germans as possessing an essentially Nazi national character and thus collectively guilty, such as senior British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart, and those who believed there were good Germans who could be cultivated and supported in the fight against Hitler, like Bell.

New relationships—particularly among laypeople—brought Protestants and Catholics closer together in a common cause, captured in historian Christopher Dawson’s call for “‘a return to Christian unity’ in the name of civilisation” (301). Similarly, the Council of Christians and Jews was established in 1942 “to co-operate in the struggle against religious and racial persecution” (310). When the British government was slow to distinguish the mass murder of Jews as a special crime in the fall of 1942, Archbishop Temple and Viscount Cecil (Free Churches) led a protest at Royal Albert Hall. That December, the Council of Christians and Jews took up a paper entitled, “Discussion of Present Extermination Policy of Nazi Government in Respect of European Jewry” (322). Various condemnatory statements were publicized by Christian leaders, but as they learned ever more about the annihilation of the Jews over the course of 1943, Temple and others expressed concern that the government’s response was far too timid. Repeated attempts to influence official policy were largely fruitless (343-349).

As the war progressed and Allied victory could be imagined, British Christians raised questions about the morality of war, the nature of a just peace, and the Christian principals that might inform a new postwar order. A Peace Aims group, spearheaded by the Presbyterian William Paton, worked to outline the Christian moral basis for peace and the political reconstruction of Europe. Striking the balance between justice and vengeance proved to be a key challenge. Any hopes that Christian leaders might shape the international settlement of the conflict were dashed by mid-1944. Much to their chagrin, retribution had emerged as the British aim with respect to Germany, and the fire-bombing of German cities illustrated the extent to which “total war” had taken hold (355-361).

After the defeat of Germany, even as the International Military Tribunal prepared to try representative German war criminals, British Christians like Bishop Bell and Wesleyan Methodist Henry Carter began the task of organizing humanitarian relief. A “Save Europe Now” campaign was launched. A new organization, Christian Reconstruction in Europe, was formed and was soon folded into the British Council of Churches as the Department of Interchurch Aid and Refugee Service. Additionally, Carter chaired the new World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Refugee Commission. Meanwhile, Bishop Bell and Methodist Gordon Rupp met with other ecumenical representatives of the World Council of Churches in the Process of Formation in Stuttgart in October 1945, making contact with the emergence Evangelical Church in Germany. It was here that Martin Niemöller and Otto Dibelius drafted the famous Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. Despite its shortcomings, it opened the door for the German churches to re-enter the ecumenical realm. As for the Nuremberg Trials, Chandler details the controversial opposition of Bishop Bell, who sought to limit the extent of this judicial process (379-387).

A short “Endings and Legacies” chapter offers brief summaries of the postwar careers of some of the main characters in Chandler’s study, many of whom he regards—probably rightly—as underappreciated. In an interesting discussion of the place of German theology in postwar Britain, Chandler explains the rise of Christian writing about the German “Church Struggle,” German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the biographies of Confessing Church leaders. He also explains the rise of new points of contact between the Christian denominations and also between Christians and Jews. Finally, he demonstrates how leading British scholars of the history and theology of the German churches under Nazism had personal links to important British Christians of that era.

In sum, Andrew Chandler’s British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations is a thoroughly researched and fascinating exploration of the moral and political engagement of leading Anglican, Catholic, and Free Church figures in Nazism, the German “Church Struggle,” the persecution of the Jews, and the Second World War. It is rich with detail from primary sources, which nicely communicates both the spirit and depth of British Christian engagement in the moral questions of the era. In true transnational historical form, it enhances our understanding of both British and German church politics during the Nazi era, along with the surprising extent to which communications flowed between the two sets of political and ecclesiastical elites.

Article Note: Harry Legg, “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Article Note: Harry Legg, “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany,” Journal of Holocaust Research 36 no. 4 (2022): 299-326.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, Harry Legg, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, analyzes the everyday lives of “non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’”—Germans who did not identify religiously or culturally as Jews but who were categorized as “Full Racial Jews” according to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Focusing on a case study of the Eisig family, he argues that the experience of persecution of these “Jews” (he places the term in quotation marks to emphasize that it was the Nazis who identified them as Jews, and not they themselves) was fundamentally different than the experience of persecution among German Jews (quotation marks absent) who did identify religiously and/or culturally as Jews.

Legg begins by noting that these important distinctions and the dramatically different lived experiences behind them are generally ignored in the secondary literature about Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany (300-308). While German Jews suffering persecution turned more and more inward towards their own religious and cultural community for support and sustenance, the same was not true for the “Jews” who had assimilated into Christian and/or secular German life and who had no Jewish community to turn to once the Nazi regime began to marginalize and then persecute them.

The author notes that the concepts of wealth and status are particularly useful in assessing the lived experiences of these “Jews”—those racially identified as Jews who were non-Jewish in other respects. Simply put, in many cases, entrepreneurial wealth and respect within the wider community replaced support from Jewish communities to which they did not belong, and allowed non-Jewish “Jews” to obtain temporary relief from Nazi persecution. “Though these factors could not halt the progressive slide of ‘full Jews’ toward expulsion from Germany, they could soften the daily experience of this relentless march. They could also vitally alter the form that this expulsion would ultimately take.” (310)

The bulk of the article revolves around Ludwig and Amalie Eisig, who formally withdrew from their Göppingen Jewish community soon after their wedding, who baptized their children as Protestants, and who thoroughly embraced both German nationalism and Christianity. Their experiences, and those of their children (son Konrad suffered greatly from educational persecution), bear out the two key aspects of Legg’s argument: that the Eisigs’ wealth and social standing in the wider (non-Jewish) community slowed and softened the process by which they suffered social isolation and persecution in their southwest German corner of Nazi Germany (from which they eventually emigrated, thanks in large part to their wealth); and that, on the other hand, having little to no connection to Jews who belonged to the Jewish religious and cultural community in their town, they were more socially isolated in the times and places in which that protection was useless and all who were identified as racial Jews suffered at the hand of the Hitler regime.

In sum, this article adds important nuances to our understanding of diverse Jewish experiences in Nazi Germany, reminding us that Nazi racial categories often had little at all to do with the lived experiences of Germans of Jewish descent—not least for those assimilated into Christian communities.

Of special interest to historians studying the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s and attempts to support “non-Aryan Christians” in their efforts to immigrate to Britain, the United States, and other (primarily Western) countries, Legg devotes an appendix to the question, “Who were the so-called Nichtglaubensjuden?” As he argues, “Despite the fact that ‘Jewishness’ at the time was not just a religious identity, but also a secular one, there are multiple reasons to suggest that a sizeable proportion of the 19,716 Nichtglaubensjuden (non-believing Jews) listed in the 1939 census also did not self-identify as secular Jews. We can also safely conclude that the majority had not recently resigned from the Jewish community.” (323)

Letter from the Editors (Spring/Summer 2022)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Letter from the Editors (Spring/Summer 2022)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

After a long hiatus, once more the editors are pleased to present a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This issue–a combined spring/summer volume–begins with the translation and reprint of an article by Manfred Gailus reassessing the high-profile Protestant churchman Otto Dibelius.

Otto Dibelius’ memorial plaque in Berlin-Lichterfelde. By OTFW, Berlin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5404813

Five reviews follow, including two on book-length studies by Gailus, a leading Berlin church historian. Sarah Thieme tackles Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich while Christopher Probst assesses Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit. Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943).

On the Catholic side, Martin Menke reviews Michael Hesemann’s study, Der Papst und der Holocaust. Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan. Further afield, Björn Krondorfer examines Jeremy Best’s book, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire, while Kyle Jantzen reviews the James Strasburg study, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe.

Three notes follow the reviews. Kyle Jantzen reports on two studies relating to Mennonites, Nazism, and the Holocaust, one a special issue of the Mennonite Central Committee journal Intersections and the other a Ben Goossen research article on Mennonite novelist and Holocaust denier Ingrid Rimland. Finally, Sarah Thieme reports on a conference devoted to Catholic historical research in Germany.

Finally, it is with sadness that I announce that long-time editor Matthew Hockenos is resigning from the CCHQ editorial team. Matthew was an important member of the group that converted the late John Conway’s newsletter into what is now Contemporary Church History Quarterly and has been an anchor on the editorial team ever since. We wish him well in his scholarly work, and look forward to reading his future publications on the German churches during and after the Hitler era.

Once again, we hope this issue of CCHQ interests and educates, and look forward to continuing to bring you news, reviews, and commentary on contemporary religious history with a focus on Germany and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pp . 313 + ix. ISBN: 9780197516447

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In the ruins of 1945 Berlin, American Christian leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., worried about the danger of Communism to Christian civilization as he and other US Protestants knew it. Just as problematic, however, was the “German Problem” they had grappled with throughout the war years: how could Germany be both the birthplace of Protestantism and the country of Nazism—home to Adolf Hitler’s racial nationalism and militarism. And where did the theological liberalism of Germany fit into the picture?

This is the starting point for James D. Strasburg’s fine study, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. It is the story of how, during and after the Second World War, leading US Protestants “identified Germany as the prime territory for creating a new Christian and democratic world order in the heart of Europe, one that could dispel any new totalitarian threat, whether spiritual or political” (2).

God’s Marshall Plan revolves around two groups of US Protestants. The first is the “ecumenists,” who worked through the powerful Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and were eager to develop a new “’World Christianity,’ an imagined global community that was ecumenically Protestant in its spirituality and democratically oriented in its politics” (2). Moreover, “they marshalled their spiritual and political energies to oppose any perceived ‘totalitarian’ threat to such an order—including communism and secularism, as well as Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalism—both at home and across the European continent” (3).

The second group is the “evangelicals” (often “fundamentalists” in Strasburg’s narrative), who “promoted biblical fundamentals and conversionary mission as the proper theological expression of Protestant Christianity. They also identified individual liberty, limited government, free market capitalism, and an America-first foreign policy as their nation’s proper political values” (3).

As Strasburg explains, his book “narrates the origins and history of these competing American Protestant missions to Germany and Europe.” More specifically, “it examines how ecumenical and evangelical American Protestants used the onset of two world wars and an era of reconstruction as rationale to spiritually and politically intervene in Europe” in order to develop their “respective world orders.” Beyond that, the book explains “how this spiritual struggle for Europe activated and advanced American Protestantism’s long-standing Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world” (3).

As they worked for Europe’s spiritual reconstruction, both ecumenists and evangelicals drew on an American “‘conquering faith’—its spiritual impulse to shape, lead, and transform the globe through the spread of Protestant Christianity and American democracy.” In pursuit of this aim, both groups of US Protestants “mobilized for world war and pursued strategic partnerships with federal officials, foreign policymakers, and the American military. Through these efforts, they hoped to spread democratic values and Protestant Christianity to Europe, and as such, to remake the continent in the American image” (4).

But, as Strasburg argues, the competing agendas of US Protestants in postwar Germany both grew out of and reflected religious fractures at home, as ecumenists and evangelicals struggled over “the spiritual leadership of their nation and the so-called ‘Christian West’” (4). Moreover, European Protestants had their own ideas about the spiritual and social reconstruction of war-torn Germany and Europe, the most prominent of which was a “third way” theology of peace and reconciliation independent of either superpower. This, in turn, prompted some US Protestants to rethink their own approaches to world missions and global politics in the era of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, here too ecumenists and evangelicals clashed, and so “the spiritual struggle for Europe thus left American Protestants deeply divided and at odds over their global mission. It ultimately forged competing theologies of global engagement—Christian nationalism and Christian globalism—that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and religion in an era of world war and beyond” (5).

As Strasburg demonstrates throughout God’s Marshall Plan, when US Protestants grappled with rival ideologies—democratic liberal, fascist, and communist—very often,

their national and political allegiances overpowered their religious commitments. In particular, such loyalties often challenged their faith’s summons to love of neighbor, regardless of that neighbor’s nationality, race, or politics. Christian nationalism likewise clashed with the biblical admonition to prioritize peacemaking and to seek the welfare of the wider world. Finally, it undercut the biblical mandate to hold a higher citizenship in heaven and to declare a greater devotion to a kingdom that knew no borders. (12)

One cannot read this history and not be struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment. In so many ways, the fissures Strasburg explores throughout his book remain challenges at the very heart of American Christianity today.

God’s Marshall Plan traces this story from the aftermath of the First World War through the rise of totalitarian regimes on through the Second World War and into the Cold War that followed. With respect to the book’s title, Strasburg notes:

The Marshall Plan serves as an apt metaphor for the ambitions of American Protestants in Europe. As the American government worked to remake the continent’s markets and politics, American Protestants complemented these efforts through tent revivals, theological exchanges, and reconstruction programs designed to revive the continent’s soul. In effect, they worked to establish an American empire of the spirit. They hoped that exporting their faith’s values abroad and creating new ocean-spanning religious networks would provide spiritual support for America’s new transatlantic democratic order. (18)

Strasburg develops his argument in eight chapters. The first (“Spiritual Conquest”) explores the US Protestant response to the First World War. For ecumenists like Congregational minister, relief worker, and church leader Henry Smith Leiper, the German imperialism that led to war in 1914 required the antidote of US spiritual democracy in keeping with Wilsonian internationalism. But for evangelicals like the fundamentalist Baptist pastor and anti-evolutionist William Bell Riley, the problem was not German imperialism but German theological modernism, which required the solution of a return to the Bible, Christian morality, and evangelical mission (23). Strasburg explains the competing ideas of ecumenists and evangelicals by surveying groups and individuals as diverse as the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), President Woodrow Wilson, lay evangelist and International Missionary Council leader John R. Mott, Leiper, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, the 1910 World Missionary Conference, German pastors Martin Niemöller and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, The Christian Century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, revivalist Billy Sunday, Riley, fundamentalist leaders French Oliver and A.C. Dixon, and The King’s Business. But if US ecumenists “outlined a mission to create a new international system rooted in Wilsonian principles,” to make Europe “more authentically Christian,” and to “promote a democratic spirit abroad” (42), conservative Protestants founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to combat “the doctrinal shallowness and modernist teachings of the Federal Council and German Protestantism” (44) and supported and supported “America First” Republican Henry Cabot Lodge’s US Senate faction which fought tooth and nail against the formation of the League of Nations. Racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-socialism, and antisemitism were also features of this movement of reaction against US participation in ecumenical Christianity and internationalist politics. As Strasburg explains, in the aftermath of the First World War, US Protestants were increasingly divided about global mission—caught between Christian nationalism and Christian globalism. Despite these divisions, however, Strasburg argues that “American Protestants still generally agreed that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world. … American Protestants worked to reshape the world through American values and outlined a vision for global spiritual conquest” (50).

In chapters 2 to 4, Strasburg describes the growth of US Protestant engagement with Germany through the economic and political upheaval of the Weimar era (“World Chaos”) and the turmoil of Nazism and its church politics (“The Lonely Flame”), and World War II and the defeat of Nazism (“For Christ and Country”). The rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement provoked alarm among US Protestants, whether because of its totalitarianism, antisemitism, and racial nationalism (ecumenists) or because its collectivist nature seemed all too similar to “Soviet communism, planned economies, and the New Deal” (evangelicals) (52). Strasburg notes that even as modernists and fundamentalists sparred in the United States, so too pro-Nazi German Christians and their opponents in the Confessing Church entered into a church struggle in Germany. American ecumenist Protestants followed these events closely, expressing concern over the unwillingness even of Confessing Church leaders to move beyond their own conservatism, nationalism, and militarism to oppose the Nazi state itself (58).

Here Strasburg discusses the ideas and views of Leiper and Niebuhr, and recounts Bonhoeffer’s experiences in the United States and the impact of his experiences at Union Seminary and among Black Christians in New York. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany “as one of the most resolute German Protestants in his spiritual and political opposition to Hitler and the German Christian crusade” (64). Likewise, American ecumenists supported the Confessing Church at ecumenical conferences and other events, such as the 1934 Baptist World Congress held in Berlin. And Leiper wrote extensively in books and articles about the menace of Hitlerism, arguing that only the universal values of Protestant ecumenism could support the democratic order that would combat Nazism and, more broadly, secularism.

In contrast, evangelicals saw the rise of European dictators as a portent of the end times. Viewing current events through an apocalyptic lens (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations), these premillennial fundamentalists were on the lookout for the Antichrist, believing as they did that the world was indeed descending into the chaos of the end times. Here Gerald Winrod, Riley, J. Frank Norris, and Oswald J. Smith take centre stage, with their attacks on Soviet communism and New Deal America. Of note was Winrod’s 1935 pilgrimage to Germany, during which he revised his views of Hitler and the Nazi state, in part based on the virulent antisemitism Winrod now preached. So too Riley, who praised Hitler for rescuing “Germany from the very jaws of atheistic communism” and blamed Bolshevism on international Jewry (75). Other fundamentalists did raise concerns about Nazism and its persecution of Jews, including Baptist churchman John J. Rice. For all of these fundamentalists, however, Christian nationalism was the antidote to both foreign dictators and dangerous domestic developments in both church and state.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the ecumenist pastor Stewart Herman shepherded the “lonely flame” of American Protestantism in Germany at the American Church. Herman studied and travelled widely in Germany, witnessing the rise of the German church struggle in the early years of the Third Reich. He also visited Jews in Germany and understood their plight clearly. While he appreciated Nazi attacks on Communism, Herman was alarmed over political developments in Hitler’s Germany, and his own involvement in American affairs in Berlin earned him the attention of the Gestapo. Herman tried to remain neutral, but the arrest of Niemöller in 1937 pushed him towards the Confessing Church, and Herman became something of a spokesman for the Confessing Church in international ecumenical meetings, which its representatives were prohibited from attending.

From 1938 onwards, Herman’s ministry took place under the shadow of the persecution of Jews. Though he did help so-called “non-Aryan” Christians, Herman harboured anti-Judaic and antisemitic sympathies and generally refused to aid Jews. Christian mission to Jews, urging them to convert, was for Herman the answer to Jewish persecution. Only when the Nazi regime began deporting Jews in 1941 was Herman moved to aid Jews, though once the United States declared war, he was interned with American Embassy staff. Strasburg uses Herman’s story and references to Leiper and Bonhoeffer to explore diverse perspectives and levels of willingness to act among ecumenical Protestants.

The entry of the United States into the war aroused ecumenical Protestants (Niebuhr, Herman—after his return from Germany—and John Foster Dulles) to declare that America needed to responsibly exercise its power, defeat “pagan” Nazism, and establish a new global Christian democratic order. Herman went so far as to join the Office of Secret Services (OSS). He also talked up the Confessing Church as an anti-Nazi opposition movement, helping create a myth that would later serve the Allied Occupation well. During the war, ecumenists began to draft plans for a democratic and Christian order in postwar Germany, and its integration into a multilateral federation of nations.

American evangelicals also supported the war, but also “advanced their commitments to conversionary mission, liberty, and unilateralism” (104). Viewing the war from a premillennialist fundamentalist perspective, Winrod and colleagues initially opposed the US entrance into the war, promoting “America First” isolationism. Other fundamentalists stressed links between Hitler, Satan, the Beast, and the Anti-Christ, and so supported the effort to defeat them and hold evil at bay. As Christian nationalists, fundamentalists conflated God and country, piety and patriotism. It was during the Second World War that the American flag found its way into many Protestant sanctuaries (124). Prayer became a weapon of war and Christian nationalist evangelism a form of mobilization, as in the case of the 1944 “Victory Rally” organized by Youth for Christ (YFC), bringing 28,000 Chicago area youth and service members together. Fundamentalists also attacked “modernism” and the Federal Council of Churches, which it accused of “theological Hitlerism” (127). Another sign of the resurgence of evangelicals was the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942, which attempted to look forward but still opposed women’s rights and racial equality.

Chapters 5 through 8 carry the story forward, from the spiritual reconstruction of Germany (“Reviving the Heartland”) and the threat of Soviet Communism (“Battleground Europe”) to the attempt to create a new Christian world order (“God’s Marshall Plan”) and evangelistic campaigns in the time of the Cold War (“Spiritual Rearmament”). Ecumenist Protestants like Stewart Herman played an important role in postwar Germany, serving religious and political reconstruction agendas as he travelled about on behalf of the World Council of Churches, supported by the OSS and the American Military Government (AMG). With others, he hoped the German churches could serve a foundational role in the Christian and democratic renewal of Germany.

As Strasburg argues, “In occupied Germany, American ecumenists wed their ‘conquering faith’ to America’s newfound project of building the ‘American Century.’ Men like Herman and Allen and John Foster Dulles advanced religious and state interests in tandem and used their nation’s postwar primacy to build the foundations of an American-led new Christian world order” (132). They perceived an emerging “spiritual cold war against secularism and communism” and “worked to recruit German Protestants as Christian partners in their quest to establish a new democratic and Christian alliance against these perceived threats” (133). A new Reformation would transform the German churches into a democratic, voluntaristic, and activist force.

But German Protestants (including the liberated Martin Niemöller and Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm) had their own ideas about the reconstruction of their church and nation, and often opposed US Protestant agendas. German and European leaders argued that they themselves needed to rebuild their churches and spiritual life. One key battle took place over the structure of the postwar German Church. Wurm and Niemöller clashed over the formation of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), with Wurm’s traditional state church model winning out over Niemöller’s more ambitious congregational plan. Another contentious topic was the question of German guilt, and here Niemöller’s “Stuttgart Declaration” receives Strasburg’s attention. The author rightly notes the silence of the statement on the subject of the Jews. A third challenge was denazification, which German church leaders chafed against.

Evangelicals responded to the defeat of Germany and the rising threat of Communism with calls by young evangelists Torrey Johnson (YFC) and Billy Graham for a “spiritual invasion” of “Battleground Europe” (156). As Strasburg explains, they focused first on “occupied Germany, where they preached their conversionary gospel and commitments to freedom and free enterprise,” supported by American military chaplains and fundamentalist military officers (157). Once again, theological modernism, secularism, and the rejection of the Bible and of Jesus Christ were presented as important causes of the German catastrophe (and American worldliness), even as revival and return to Christ would restore Germany (and America).

But whether ecumenical or evangelical, US Protestants partnered with the US government (including President Harry Truman personally) and the American Military Government to oppose a rising Communist threat. German church leaders like Niemöller, Berlin Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius and Berlin Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing also undertook speaking tours in the United States, praising the democracy and freedom of the USA and hoping to generate sympathy and support for Germany and its churches. Moreover, they supported the Marshall Plan to physically reconstruct Germany as a parallel force contributing to the spiritual renewal of Germany, alongside the efforts of US Protestants. As Strasburg puts it, “In an era when American capital, consumer goods, popular culture, and military platoons poured into Europe and began to remake the continent’s economics, society, and politics, this accompanying spiritual intervention sought to transform Europe’s soul” (185). One place these spiritual and economic plans came together was in the reconstruction of German churches, so many of which had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Germany. Christian literature campaigns and educational projects were also important. So too were US Protestant relief efforts to gather material supplies for beleaguered Germans.

But even within the effort to rebuild Germany, Strasburg finds conflicts between ecumenists and evangelicals. The latter group criticized the World Council of Churches—Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri project was a fundamentalist attempt response to both liberal Christianity and secular society. Evangelicals like Billy Graham also criticized the Marshall Plan itself, arguing it was “folly” and a “give-away program” rooted in “deficit spending.” Once again, big government and collectivism were the enemy. Evangelicals also rejected Truman’s Fair Deal programs, calling the proposal for national health insurance “socialized medicine” and a pathway to “societal slavery” (209).

Evangelical Protestants responded to the problems of postwar Germany most forcefully through revival meetings. In 1954, YFC evangelist Billy Graham held meetings in the former Nazi parade grounds at Nuremberg, preaching salvation through Jesus Christ. But Graham was also trying to convince Germans to support the US Cold War effort to push back Communism and protect Europe. To that end, US evangelical Protestants also strongly supported the US military. “Led by a coalition of free-enterprise businessmen, Cold War hawks, and conservative clergy, these postwar crusades rallied God-fearing Americans to defend their values of faith, freedom, and free enterprise both at home and abroad against New Deal liberalism, Soviet communism, and postwar secularization” (212). This despite the fact that many German Protestants resisted rearmament.

One intriguing element of this spiritual campaign against Communism was the Wooden Church Crusade, a plan to build 49 chapels along the line of the Iron Curtain in West Germany which gained strong support among US political and industrial leaders. By the end of 1956, 28 houses of worship had been built, including a few synagogues.

In the book’s epilogue, the author carries the story of US Protestant engagement with Germany through to the end of the Cold War. Strasburg concludes that if US evangelical Protestants were more obviously “America First” in their orientation, US ecumenical Protestants were also “quick to serve their nation’s interests and advance its global project” (238). As they tried to build a just and peaceful world order, they promoted a particularly American combination of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity abroad. And as they worked to Christianize and democratize the world, protecting it against totalitarian and secular ideologies, they did so by attempting “to rebuild Germany as the European cornerstone of an American-led Christian world order” (238). In their own way, they too supported American Christian nationalism. Thus the line between the Christian globalism of the ecumenists and the Christian nationalism of the evangelicals was in truth rather blurry. And Strasburg carries this point into today, arguing that “the challenge for many Protestant Christians in the twentieth century involved untangling their faith from the creeds of nation, race, and empire. That struggle continues to this day” (239).

In contrast to this Christian nationalism, German and European Protestant leaders espoused a Third Way in the 1960s, as men like Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller sharply critiqued elements of American capitalism, militarism, empire, and domestic social inequality. In some cases, this proved influential among US ecumenists. For example, Stewart Herman, whose ideas and work are central to Strasburg’s account, ended up denouncing antisemitism and racism, supporting refugee work, learning from liberation theology and Vatican II Catholicism, and embracing interfaith partnerships with Jews (243). To a large extent, however, US Protestants continued to struggle with racial equality, immigration, and other challenges to (white) Christian nationalism, even as they remained susceptible to the allure of political power. Strasburg’s concluding hope is that studying this history “might play a part in helping American Protestants foster and practice theologies and a style of politics that more fully reflect the ways of a border-defying faith” (252).

This is a fine work of history—deeply and widely researched and clearly argued. Strasburg’s grasp of the secondary literature on both German and especially US Protestantism is solid, and the notes are filled with references to books, articles, and speeches by Protestant leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including the personal correspondence and papers of Henry Smith Leiper and Stewart Winfield Herman and other material drawn from church and state archives in Washington, Berlin, and Geneva, among others. With almost 50 pages of rich notes, no bibliography was included.

As for criticisms, it is not surprising that this is almost entirely the story of the men who led churches and spoke for both American and German Christianity. Women are virtually absent from this account, save for the Birmingham women who donated syrup to the German relief effort (195). Yet we know that North American women were substantially involved in relief and administrative work in the postwar era, as well as in Christian missions. Did they engage with the issues raised in God’s Marshall Plan any differently than did their male colleagues? More broadly, beyond attending conferences or rallies or subscribing to church periodicals, is there evidence to indicate how deeply engaged ordinary US Protestants were in the spiritual reconstruction of Germany? The Wooden Church Crusade is an excellent example of this. Were there others? Finally, one would wish for a little more background on some of the characters whose writings Strasburg quotes. To what extent can their ideas and statements be taken as representative of their denominations or constituencies?

Those issues aside—and some go beyond the scope of an already extensively-researched study—God’s Marshall Plan is an enlightening and challenging account of how US Protestant Christian nationalism worked itself out both abroad in postwar Germany and at home in the United States. An excellent contribution to the literature, it is also, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a cautionary tale.

Journal Note: MCC and National Socialism

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Journal Note: MCC and National Socialism, Intersections: MCC Theory & Practice Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Fall 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Over the past five years, much have been discussed and written about the activities and experiences of Mennonite Christians in the Holocaust. The problematization of Mennonite history and memory related to the Holocaust began with a 2017 Toronto workshop assessing the work of Gerhard Rempel and then a 2018 Conference at Bethel College. In the forefront of this debate has been Benjamin Goossen, whose book Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, and numerous articles have highlighted the complexities of Mennonite identity and Mennonite collaboration.

More recently, scholars have begun to examine the entanglements of the Mennonite Central Committee–the church’s relief and development agency–in Nazism and the Holocaust. A November 2021 roundtable of historians discussed the MCC, refugees, and the legacies of National Socialism, and built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections: MCC Theory & Practice Quarterly. It is that special issue of the Intersections that this note attends to. Compiled by Alain Epp Weaver, it contains twelve short articles:

“MCC and Nazism, 1929–1955,” by Benjamin W. Goossen (3-12)
“MCC and Mennonite emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920–1932,” by Esther Epp-Tiessen (13-17)
“Benjamin Unruh, Nazism and MCC,” by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast (17-27)
“MCC and Nazi impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” by John Eicher (27-32)
“Between German fascism and U.S. imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” by Daniel Stahl (32-35)
“From care to rescue: MCC in the face of the persecution of Jews in France (1939–1945),” by Stéphane Zehr (36-40)
“John Kroeker and the backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,'” by John Thiesen (40-45)
“Facing the future, reinterpreting the past: MCC’s solutions for successful Mennonite immigration after the Second World War,” by Erika Weidemann (45-50)
“Defining the deserving: MCC and Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” by Aileen Friesen (50-54)
“National Socialism and MCC’s post-war resettlement efforts with Danziger Mennonites,” by Steven Schroeder (54-60)
“MCC’s resettlement of the Dutch war criminal Jacob Luitjens,” by David Barnouw (60-62)
“Hands under the cross: MCC and the post-war construction of German Mennonite peace identity,” by Astrid von Schlachta (63-68)

As Rick Cober Baumann, Ann Graber Herschberger, and Alain Epp Weaver note in their introduction:

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is a worldwide ministry of Anabaptist churches that seeks to share God’s love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice—such a mission is diametrically opposed to the racist, genocidal program of Nazism. Yet, as recent scholarship has highlighted with renewed focus, MCC’s humanitarian efforts from the late 1920s through the mid-1950s to help Mennonites from the Soviet Union migrate to the Americas were entangled with National Socialism and its legacy in multiple, complex ways. What were these entanglements? What are we to make of them? (1)

The articles that follow are short summaries of the research of scholars from Canada, the USA, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The articles are richly illustrated and include both source citations and guides to further reading. Topics taken up in the various articles include:

interactions between Mennonites and the Hitler regime relating to the resettlement of refugees from the Soviet Union (which include the activities of Mennonite Nazi Benjamin Unruh),
pro-Nazi sentiments and ideological conflicts in the Fernheim Mennonite colony in Paraguay,
the observation of Nazi genocidal policies in wartime France by MCC workers, and efforts to rescue Jewish children,
the resettlement of displaced Mennonites–many genuine refugees but some with ties to Nazism and the Holocaust–from the Soviet Union through Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War.

This research interrogates the postwar narrative among Mennonites “of the dramatic and providential escape of desperate Mennonites in post-war Europe from the threat of deportation back to the Soviet Union and the exodus-like passage of these Mennonites through a Red Sea of danger to the promised lands of the Americas” (3). Seventy years ago, the MCC helped propagate that narrative. Now, it is promoting scholarly research that explores the much more complex reality behind that story. And the goal is not merely academic, but comes with the expectation of further response by the organization. The result is an excellent example of partnership between church organizations and scholars to pursue the truth of the past, even at the cost of soul-searching in the present and redress in the future.

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000,” Antisemitism Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 233-265.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Benjamin Goossen is among the most active scholars among the historians currently preoccupied with re-examining the history of Mennonite Christians and the Second World War, and especially their relationship to Nazism and the Holocaust. In his new article “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945–2000,” Goossen tackles the person of Ingrid Rimland, the Mennonite novelist who became a prominent Holocaust denier in the 1990s after years of acclaim for her literary accounts of women’s suffering in the Soviet Union.

Rimland was born in 1936 into a Russian Mennonite family, which followed Hitler’s retreating armies westwards in 1943 to escape Bolshevik rule. After the war, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) facilitated her family’s immigration as refugees to Paraguay. As an adult, she moved to the United States and became took up writing. In her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), Rimland compared Mennonite women’s suffering to the persecution of the Jews under Nazism. She fictionalized her own experiences of displacement, flight, and emigration but was silent about the collaboration and perpetration of crimes by Mennonites in the Holocaust.

As a single mother caring for a disabled child in the 1980s, Rimland struggled to maintain her literary career. The end of the Cold War also diminished her impact, as the theme of her work–suffering under Communism–became passé. In response, she turned to antisemitic conspiracy theories, becoming intellectually, financially, and then romantically involved with the infamous Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel. Zündel was born in Germany in 1939, later immigrated to Canada, and was the subject of a serious of high-profile hate-speech trials in the 1980s and 1990s. Rimland launched the website Zundelsite.org from her home in California, in order to help Zündel spread his Holocaust denial while avoiding Canadian anti-hate laws. The site was a primary source of online Holocaust denial in the 1990s, while Rimland also sent out daily “Z-Grams” through a listserv.

Rimland also used Zundelsite.org to promote her own literary work, including her three-volume novel Lebensraum! (1988). In it she depicted Mennonites as racially pure Germans and wrote about two Mennonite settlements, one in Ukraine and one in Kansas–each threatened by Jews. The novel included a sub-plot about a global Jewish conspiracy (the “New World Order”).

Goossen sees Rimland’s life as an exemplar of how far-right extremism migrated from Hitler’s Third Reich to present-day North America. Her own turn to neo-Nazism was rooted in her long history of equating Mennonite suffering with that of the Jews in the Holocaust. “As counterintuitive as it may seem, Mennonites’ propensity to self-identify with Jews opened a path for Rimland’s racist trajectory” (236). But when a scholar suggested Canadian Mennonite views were not so different from those of Rimland, a broader controversy erupted, revealing that Canadian Mennonites had never examined the theological implications of the Holocaust for their Anabaptist theology (242).

Goossen explains Rimland’s novel The Wanderers and its appeal among Mennonite leaders, along with her slide into antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. He concludes that various influences played a role in her fate–her association with Ernst Zündel, to be sure, but also the background of Mennonite silence about collaboration with Hitler and her uneasy relationship with male Mennonite elites who used her depictions of female Mennonite suffering but refused to support her career.

Letter from the Editors (December 2021)

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Letter from the Editors (December 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

As Christmas approaches and the 2021 year draws to a close, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to present a new issue of the journal. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has added complications to everyone’s life, it seems, one of which is to reduce the time many scholars have for research and scholarly activity. Nonetheless, we are doing our best to provide you with regular news, reviews, and commentary on contemporary religious history with a focus on Germany and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This quarter, there are three reviews to tell you about. Manfred Gailus reviews Robert M. Zoske’s new book, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen, which explores the religious underpinnings of this famous member of The White Rose resistance group. Dirk Schuster assesses an important new regional study of the German church struggle by Ulrich Peter, entitled Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz: Die Deutschen Christen und der Bund der nationalsozialistischen Pastoren in der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche Mecklenburgs. Schuster explains how Peter went deep into the pre-history of the German Christians in Mecklenburg, and also traced developments after 1945. Finally, Martin Menke reviews Jonas Hagedorn’s study Oswald von Nell-Breuning SJ. Aufbrüche der katholischen Soziallehrte in der Weimarer Repubik. Nell-Breuning was an important Catholic social theorist who played a significant role in the creation Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI’s social encyclical of 1931.

Potsdam Garrison Church carillon. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 170-123 / Max Baur / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5484451

Well worthy of note in this issue of CCHQ are several substantial “notes.” The first of these is provided by Phillip Oswalt of Kassel, who explains some of the recent events surrounding the reconstruction plans for the Potsdam Garrison Church, so famous for its role in the Nazi seizure of power. Oswalt and others, including CCHQ editor Manfred Gailus, are part of a group of scholars connected with the website “Lernort Garnisonkirche,” which seeks to explain the history behind the Potsdam Garrison Church and influence the reconstruction project. Next, Robert P. Ericksen explores a recent chapter on German theologian Gerhard Kittel’s time in Vienna, from 1939 to 1943, and the debates about his influence there on behalf of National Socialism. Alain Epp Weaver authors the next substantial note, which outlines recent developments in the history of the Mennonite Central Committee and its connections to antisemitism and National Socialism–connections which also influenced its refugee work in the postwar era. Finally, Martina Cucchiara and Blake McKinney offer conference reports related to two panels at this past fall’s German Studies Association annual conference: one on women, religion, and emotions in modern Germany and the other on Nazi Germany, international Protestantism, and the German churches.

On behalf of the CCHQ editorial team, let me wish you a Merry Christmas and restful 2021 holiday season, as well as a safe beginning to 2022.

Sincerely,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Letter from the Editors (September 2021)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Letter from the Editors (September 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

In the midst of another busy beginning to the new academic year in many of our universities, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to present a new issue of book reviews and reports on the history of twentieth-century German and European Christianity and Christian churches. As is our usual practice, we examine a mix of Catholic and Protestant individuals and institutions.

The Mutterhaus of the Halle Evangelisches Diakoniewerk, built in 1929. The Diakonie is the Germany’s Protestant social welfare agency. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL-Lafontainestr15-DiakonieMutterhaus.JPG#/media/Datei:HAL-Lafontainestr15-DiakonieMutterhaus.JPG

Leading off is Dirk Schuster’s review of Hagen Markwardt, Fruzsina Müller, Bettina Westfeld’s study of Protestant church welfare institutions in central and eastern Germany during the Nazi era, Konfession und Wohlfahrt im Nationalsozialismus. It contains a series of case studies examining the ways in which Protestant social welfare institutions were caught up in the process of co-ordination to the National Socialist regime (Gleichschaltung), sometimes quite willingly.

Martine Menke follows with a lengthy review of Wilfried Loth’s “Freiheit und Würde des Volkes”: Katholizismus und Demokratie in Deutschland, a collection of essays that probes “Catholics’ contributions to the development of democracy in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century.” As Menke points out, in the book Loth “argues that while the institutional Church opposed modernity until after World War II, lay Catholics, especially those organized in political parties, contributed significantly to the development of modern democracy in Germany.”

Rebecca Carter-Chand contributes two reviews of works which are out of the ordinary, in terms of the usual content of the journal. First she assesses a social scientific study of the rescue of Jews in the Low Countries, Robert Braun’s Protectors of Pluralism, noting that the author tests his “hypothesis that religious minorities are more likely to assist or rescue persecuted groups from mass violence or genocide” using a “detailed geocoding of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands and Belgium, combining spatial statistics, archival sources, contemporary newspapers and other published materials, and postwar testimony.” Next, Carter-Chand reviews Steve Pressman’s film, Holy Silence, which discusses the role of the Vatican at the time of the rise of Nazism and during the Holocaust. It draws on the expertise of various scholars, including members of the CCHQ editorial team. Carter-Chand sums up the film as “a balanced and accessible primer to audiences, both newcomers and those well-versed in this history.”

This issue of CCHQ also features reviews of three books that move from history towards popular writing: Beth A. Griech-Polelle enjoys Fergus Butler-Gallie’s Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century, finding hope in the stories of clergy who resisted Fascism and Nazism (and American racism too); Dirk Schuster ponders Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan’s short biography of Paul Leo, a Lutheran pastor persecuted under Nazi racial laws who found his way to a new life and ministry in the United States; and Andrew Chandler appreciates John A. Moses’ collection of essays on the state of Anglicanism in Australia, which pays homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng, Martin Luther, and John Henry Newman.

As for shorter notes, we have included just one shorter news item: an announcement for an upcoming webinar on the significance of the Vatican Archives of Pope Pius XII, scheduled for October 17.

Finally, we have made a correction to a conference report from our June issue, on the conference Martin Niemoeller and His International Reception.

On behalf of the editorial team, I wish you a pleasant and above all safe autumn season (in the northern hemisphere).

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Letter from the Editors (June 2021)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Letter from the Editors (June 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Once again, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to present a new issue of book reviews and reports pertaining to the history of twentieth-century German and European Christianity and Christian churches. In this issue, we consider a mix of Catholic and Protestant individuals and institutions.

Martin Niemöller in 1952. By J.D. Noske / Anefo – Nationaal Archief, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28946076.

Kevin Spicer reviews Jonathan Huener’s “definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation.” Noting that scholars have long considered “the Warthegau as a blueprint of the Nazi state’s plans of actions for the future of all churches in Germany,” Spicer explains how “Huener situates his analysis of the church’s plight in the Warthegau clearly in the Nazi state’s Kirchenpolitik and Volkstumskampf or ethno-racial struggle.” Still, Spicer concludes (quoting the author) that the Polish church “survived more than five years of Nazi occupation and emerged in 1945 as an institution with significant moral capital.”

Christopher Probst examines Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals’ edited volume on the famous Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel, who is “as well-known for his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question; 1933) as he is for being the editor until 1945 of the influential Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament).” Topics include the legacy of Kittel in Tübingen; German Protestant reactions to 1933 and the rise of the Nazis; Kittel’s background, education, and early career; Kittel’s works on Jews and Judaism during the Third Reich; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in German scholarship; the connection between Kittel’s students and the Eisenach Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life; Kittel’s international reception; and Kittel’s My Defense (1946).

Beth Griech-Polelle reviews Traude Litzka’s book, The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna, in which the author examines the work of Father Ludger Born, head of the Aid Office for Non-Aryan Catholics, an agency supported by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna. Born and his staff (largely women, some of them “non-Aryan” Catholics themselves) worked to help converted Jews navigate the bureaucracy of emigration. Over time, Born and his colleagues worried less about the nature of conversion, baptizing Jews in large numbers, in order to help them emigrate. After the war made emigration impossible, the Aid Office turned into a social welfare agency, procuring food, clothes, and other supplies for its clients. As Griech-Polelle concludes, Litzka “is to be commended for attempting to uncover the untold stories of assistance given in Vienna by religious men and women.”

Robert Ericksen introduces us to Ian Harker’s short work, Pearls before Swine: The Extraordinary Story of The Reverend Ernst Biberstein, Lutheran Pastor and Murder Squad Commander. Biberstein was tried and convicted at Nuremberg for his role as a commander of a mobile killing unit which murdered 2,000 to 3,000 Jews. But before he became a Holocaust perpetrator, Biberstein had been a Lutheran pastor near Hamburg. Harker outlines Biberstein’s entrance into the Nazi movement and career path that took him into the Sicherheitsdeinst (Security Service, or SD) of the SS, where he worked for Reinhard Heydrich in Berlin, then in Upper Silesia and Ukraine, where he was part of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units). As Ericksen concludes, “The life of Ernst Biberstein reflects a number of important issues involving Christians in Nazi Germany, from the level of their actual enthusiasm for and participation in the regime to the postwar difficulties—persisting for at least a generation—in coming to grips with the realities of that past.”

Doris Bergen examines Alexander Reynolds’ account, To War Without Arms: The Journal of Reverend Alexander Reynolds, May – November 1944: The D-Day Diary of an Army Chaplain, edited by Simon Trew. Bergen offers high praise for this work, noting its relevance for the study of “World War II, the Normandy campaign, military chaplains, or contemporary church history.” Reynolds provides the context for Normandy invasion, the role of British Army chaplains, and the harrowing experience of D-Day. Chaplains played a significant role under British General Bernard Law Montgomery, who, editor Simon Trew writes, “appears to have believed quite sincerely that religious faith provided the underpinnings for success in battle.”

Three fascinating reports round out this issue of CCHQ. Suzanne Brown-Fleming highlights a webinar on the opening of the Pius XII archives and Holocaust research. Björn Krondorfer reports on a webinar comparing various historic and contemporary expressions of Christian nationalism. And Michael Heymel offers a detailed review of a recent German conference on Martin Niemöller and his international reception.

This issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly also brings with it significant changes to our editorial team. After many years of service, Doris Bergen (University of Toronto) and Heath Spencer (Seattle University) are resigning as editors. Their careful reviews and dedicated support for the work of the journal will be missed, though we hope that they will continue to write for the journal occasionally. In particular, Doris played a key role in the early days of the journal, when several of us decided to reimagine John Conway’s monthly newsletter into an open-source online journal. Doris and Heath, many thanks for your fine work over the years. We will miss you!

In the March issue, we put out a call for new editors and were delighted by the strong interest from a good number of fine scholars. Recently, the editorial team decided to bring five new editors on board: Dr. Benedikt Brunner, Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, Germany; Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University, United States; Dr. Martin Menke, Rivier University, United States; Dr. Dirk Schuster, Universität Potsdam, Germany; and Dr. Sarah Thieme, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. You can find out more about them and their work on the journal’s About page. We appreciate their excitement about the journal and look forward to their regular contributions over the coming years.

And to you, our readers, we offer our thanks for your ongoing interest in the journal.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University