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Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective, Washington, October 2024

By Kevin P. Spicer, Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Andrew Kloes, Victoria Barnett, Kathryn Julian, and Jonathan Huener

The conference “Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective” was co-organized by the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History; and the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. It was held from October 2 – 4, 2024, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Session 1

Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College, Moderator

Martin Menke, Rivier University: French are Catholics, Poles are Slavs: German Catholic Views of Their Neighbors, 1900-1945

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna: The German Christian Movement in Austria and Romania, 1933-1945

Based on published and archival sources from the period, such as Abendland, Hochland, Center Party publications and Center-related newspapers, Reichstag proceedings, and government records, Martin Menke’s paper compared the development of German Catholic views of France and Germany, mainly during the interwar period. While German Catholics considered French Catholics to be brothers and sisters in faith and co-heirs to the realm of Charlemagne, they considered Poles to be Slavs first and ignored the Poles’ strong Catholicism. While this perception of the French helped to overcome postwar animosity, the pre-1914 defense of Polish rights by the Center Party evaporated during the struggles over Upper Silesia.

Dirk Schuster’s paper examined the impact of the German Christians Eisenach Institute for Research and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life on the Protestant churches in Austria and Romania. In both countries, the Protestant churches were a religious minority, and already in the 1920s, they experienced a decisive turn towards National Socialism. The national church in Romania was a stronghold of conservative elites. Younger church representatives rebelled against this situation and joined forces with the National Socialists. Due to various scandals, high church levies, and a widening gap between clergy and laity, many younger pastors and theologians took advantage of the momentum of National Socialism. They ousted the conservative elites from the church leadership. In Austria, the massive turn to National Socialism followed Austrian fascism’s rise after 1932 but did not impact the church in the same manner.

In 1939, the German Christians established the Eisenach Institute. The degree of radicalization of the national churches impacted the outreach of the Eisenach Institute. In Romania, young pastors without advanced theological training made up the majority; thus, advanced scholarly research was impossible. Instead, the clergy regularly adopted the output of the Eisenach Institute, such as a de-Judaized Bible and hymnal. The use of these texts continued even after the war ended. In many ways, the Protestant church in Romania became a testing ground for implementing such publications.

In Austria, the German Christians did not experience the same influence. We know of only six parishes in which the de-Judaized Bible was introduced after 1941. The Protestant Theological Faculty situation was completely different, as ethnonationalism permeated their teaching and scholarship. In turn, these academics eagerly embraced the “scholarship” of the Eisenach Institute and willingly collaborated with it.

 

Session 2

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, Moderator and Respondent

Mark Ruff, St. Louis University, “Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler and his efforts to free convicted Nazi war criminals”

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, USHMM, “‘Love and Mercy’ after the Holocaust: The Vatican’s Postwar Clemency Campaign, 1945-1958”

Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies, “Feindesliebe, ‘The Guilt of Others’, and the Jewish Question: Württemberg Protestant Clergy Coming to Terms with the Past”

These were three fine papers, each highlighting the roles of individuals in the immediate post-war era who worked within a world defined by crushing wartime defeat – the second in a generation – and all that entailed: a literally destroyed homeland; millions dead, wounded and missing; a Europe in ruins and dominated by the implacable ideologies of liberal democracy from the west and Soviet-style communism from the east. Many Germans, especially those with backgrounds like the subjects in these papers, had distrusted or feared both of these ideologies for decades. All three papers focus on individuals navigating courtrooms and judges and perpetrator-defendants, and questions about guilt and punishment and mercy. There seemed to be a shared understanding among them that the bad guys were not the Germans in the dock or in prison, but the Allies (read: the Americans), who at best were misguided and ignorant of what Germans had come through under Nazism and war, or at worst were hypocritical and vengeful.

I am struck that all three papers offer compelling evidence of continuity: the so-called “Stunde Null” of 1945 does not hold much weight in these accounts. Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s use of the recently-opened Vatican archives to investigate the involvement of Pope Pius XII and his “officers” – what she terms the “triumvirate” of Pius XII; Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI; and Domenico Tardini, later Secretary of State under John XXIII — in attempts to gain clemency for convicted war criminals provides evidence of, among other persistent traits, both latent and manifest antisemitism in the Holy See. Her findings mirror other scholars who have also gained access to these documents, notably David Kertzer in his portrayal of the wartime papacy. Mark Ruff’s presentation of Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler highlights the persistence of certain traditions in Catholic moral theology: there is no sin too big that may not be forgiven; the spiritual journeys of all Christians but evidently especially perpetrators must be encouraged and supported by God’s representatives on earth (i.e. priests). I found this resonant with my own research more than a decade ago, when priests and seminarians in the military used multiple ways of justifying their service in the Wehrmacht, but ultimately they claimed that they were all part of the same chorus: the men with whom they were serving (not so much those on the receiving end of the Wehrmacht’s attentions) had great need of them. Christopher Probst tells of Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem’s devotion to love above all else, even of one’s enemies, and of the fierce national devotion of Theophil Wurm, chairman of the Protestant Church Council in Germany, which led him to intercede on behalf of mass murderers like Einsatzgruppe leader Martin Sandberger.

The worldview to which our protagonists adhered left little room for any other kind of victim: Jew, Romani, communist, Slav. Christopher presents what may be an anomaly in this context, in the example of Diem, who helped to hide Jews during the Shoah as part of a Württemberg “rectory chain” and whose postwar sermons emphasized accountability, responsibility, and a condemnation of evil in all its forms through a kind of ferocious love. Apart from Diem, we are treated to an array of individuals displaying stalwart German nationalism or, to clarify the motivations of the Italians in Brown-Fleming’s presentation, a “brotherly understanding”; both nationalism and understanding (what we might otherwise call sympathy) led these individuals to agitate on behalf of convicted criminals who had said reprehensible things (the antisemite Gerhard Kittel) or who had facilitated or perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity (the SS leaders Oswald Pohl and Otto Ohlendorf; the foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath; the navy admiral Erich von Raeder; the field marshal Wilhelm List). In their view, these were good Christian men who had either (1) made mistakes that they now repented, (2) had simply followed orders, or (3) were perhaps guilty of some charges, but of far greater concern were the alleged abuses and irregularities of the American prosecutors. Of course, the three exonerative appeals could operate conveniently in tandem.

Such evidence leads us to agree with our presenters’ conclusions that, once more, Christian moral theology in the 1940s and early 1950s consistently enabled its adherents to advocate on behalf of those co-religionists that they viewed were most in need of their support, and that it was easier to encourage an affinity/sympathy with a “sorrowful” Christian perpetrator (and the extent of the sorrow is debatable) than with the perpetrator’s victim – many of whom were dead and therefore absent anyway. There was a time when I would have cast this kind of moral theological thinking as falling short of true Christian aims. But as I’ve become immersed in this particular history, I think these papers raise the question whether we, in the 21st century, should continue to expect Christian leaders in the 1940s to have behaved otherwise, given the framework within which they had been raised and trained. Diem is the example that we wish was the standard, but instead he is the anomaly perhaps because he broke with tradition to articulate what he saw as the more pressing needs of his day, even if it went against his upbringing. I wonder if he recognized this, and felt like an outsider, even as he stood (somewhat alone) on the strength of his convictions.

 

Session 3

Andrew Kloes, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent 

Andrea Strübind, Oldenburg University: “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship”

Sandra Langhop, “Between Obedience and Resistance: The Basel Mission in National Socialism”

The second day of the conference began with presentations by two scholars from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. Professor Dr. Andrea Strübind spoke on “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship.” In her paper, Strübind analyzed “central themes in Christian anti-Semitism and racist anti-Semitism in Baptist churches, as well as their conduct towards the Jewish-Christian members and office holders in response to the measures promoted by the National Socialist regime to persecute Jews.” Strübind emphasized during her remarks that she approached this topic as a historian and as Baptist pastor in the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland. As an introductory focus, Strübind discussed the poignant case of Josef Halmos, who was a Jewish convert to Christianity and the member of a Baptist congregation in Munich. As a Sunday school teacher, Halmos was well-acquainted with the family of the pastor, Heinrich Fiehler, whose son, Karl Fiehler, served as the Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Munich from March 1933 through May 1945. Drawing upon entries from Halmos’ diary, Strübind was able to demonstrate that the Fiehlers and other members of the congregation, of which he had long been an active member, enthusiastically embraced National Socialism and concomitantly ostracized Halmos because of his Jewish background. Strübind convincingly argued that, while Baptists numbered only about 70,000 in Germany and were thus one of the smallest churches, the history of their response to the Nazi regime after January 1933 generally mirrored those of the much larger Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches. “Some Baptists hid Jews and Jewish Christians. Many did recognize that the planned destruction of the ‘people of the Covenant’ increasingly bore the signs of diabolical rule in Germany and that this would lead to a catastrophe. A few theologians expressed this apocalyptic thought in words in their sermons and addresses. But nothing was officially mentioned nor was there any sort of petition made to the authorities.” Strübind concluded by discussing the current efforts of Baptists in Germany to memorialize those members of their congregations who were abandoned during the Holocaust, including Josef Halmos, who was murdered at Auschwitz.

Sandra Langhop, a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Institut für Evangelische Theologie und Religionspädagogik of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, presented a paper based on her ongoing doctoral research into the Basel Mission during the National Socialist period. Citing a June 1933 article published by Karl Hartenstein, a Universität Tübingen graduate and the German director of this Swiss missionary society, Langhop was able to show persuasively that National Socialist thinking had become influential among some German-speaking Protestant missionaries. Hartenstein wrote in his society’s periodical, Der Evangelische Heidenbote: “We can never thank God enough that he once again had mercy on our Volk. After years of great despair, he gave us new hope for our Volk and our Reich. He sent us a real Führer after the times of great confusion… He pulled our Volk back from the abyss of Bolshevism at the last moment. He made our Volk united… as hardly ever before in its history. He has begun a cleansing process with us, in which everything rotten and corrupt from years ago has been broken open and can be swept out.” Langhop further analyzed how völkisch thinking variously shaped certain Basel missionaries’ approaches to their work in India, vis-à-vis British colonial government officials and indigenous peoples, and between German and Swiss missionaries.

One theme that connected both papers was their analysis of the positive reception with which many Christian churches and Christian organizations in Germany welcomed National Socialism in 1933, believing it to be a preferable to both Weimar era-democracy and communism. Secondly, both papers demonstrated how, despite the historic bonds that had long connected them to Protestants in other countries, German Baptists and German missionary supporters adopted identities that emphasized their belonging to the German people and eschewed alternative conceptions of self that were international in nature, such as belonging to the global Christian community or to the spiritual body of Christ.

Dr. Andrew Kloes is an applied researcher in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed here are the those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

Session 4

Victoria Barnett, University of Virginia, Moderator and Respondent

Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College: “The Selberg Circle and Transatlantic Propaganda”

Friedericke Henjes, Oldenburg University: “The Reception of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories on the Internet”

These two papers cover different eras and topics—but their underlying theme (the dynamics of propaganda) led to an illuminating discussion.

Blake McKinney discussed a little-known pro-German group in the United States, led by an American businessman, Emil Selberg, that pushed Nazi propaganda during the 1930s. Selberg was sympathetic to post-1918 German resentments, including the view that the Versailles Treaty had placed an impossible burden on the German people, whose resentment and anger led them to see Adolf Hitler as a leader offering new hope.

Selberg wanted to promote a positive image of the new regime in the United States. His allies were U.S. Senator Royal Copeland from New York and a prominent Methodist layman, Paul Douglass (who later became president of American University). Copeland suggested early on that Selberg might find a receptive ear for his work in American churches, including staff members at the Federal Council of Churches in New York who were focused on promoting reconciliation with Germany after the First World War.

Selberg’s main point of contact in Berlin was August Wilhelm Schreiber, an official in the Church Federation office. Both men seem to have seen this as an opportunity to advance their own careers. Having a high-ranking church contact in Berlin gave Selberg an entry point to the FCC staff. In turn, an important American church contact made Schreiber useful, both to the Deutsche Christen as they sought to create a new Reich Church and to the Nazi regime, which was already creating propaganda aimed at the U.S. McKinney’s research offers some insight into why, by the end of 1933, FCC officials like Henry Leiper were backpedaling from their early forthright condemnations of German church silence about Nazi measures to a “both-sides” approach, as they navigated the divisions within German Protestantism.

Ultimately, Selberg’s attempts were sidelined by the events of the Church Struggle itself and growing international outrage at Nazi policies. Adolf Hitler abandoned the Reich Church project in October 1934 because of the domestic and international backlash. In the United States, there was growing attention (much of it focused on Martin Niemoeller and the Confessing Church) to what people saw as the Nazi persecution of Christians. Copeland and Douglas, however, continued to defend the “new Germany” throughout the 1930s, and Douglas even published a book in 1935, God Among the Germans, which gave a sympathetic picture of Nazi Germany and the Deutsche Christen.

McKinney’s research provides an interesting new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of international Protestant reactions to the events unfolding in Nazi Germany. It is also a revealing glimpse of German and American cooperation in spreading propaganda on behalf of National Socialism, long before the rise of the internet.

The Russian antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion also reached a worldwide audience in the pre-internet era, but as Friedericke Henjes’ paper illustrated, modern social media has brought it to new audiences. The most striking aspect of her research is that the Protocols itself is no longer even necessary. Its message has been incorporated into modern conspiracy theories.

The Protocols is a case study in how conspiracy theories spread because of underlying prejudices. As Henjes noted, even in the 1930s the Protocols were recognized as a forgery—but in a conspiracy theory, the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is how the conspiracy theory is used to explain popular resentments about world events. The Protocols did this by drawing on the long history of Christian anti-Jewish tropes and their historical legacy in terms of “otherizing” Jews through various anti-Jewish legal restrictions, etc. The dog whistles have not changed since the first copy of the Protocols appeared, for example: the “wandering Jew” who infiltrates society leading to the collapse of moral standards, and the conviction that there is a secret society of “Jewish bankers” who manipulate world history.

Henjes explores how these prejudices dovetail neatly with more modern dog whistles about “globalism,” the purported influence of George Soros, etc. The core of her argument is that “the content of the ‘Protocols’ is largely disseminated on the internet via the keywords and antisemitic narratives they contain.” She offered two modern examples from two activists in the German anti-vaccine movement:  Attila Hildman and Oliver Janich. Hildman literally quotes the Protocols but links its various antisemitic tropes to recent developments like the Covid pandemic and the anti-vax movement. Janich does something similar, tying the Protocols to current issues, quoting the Gospel of John, and promoting conspiracy theories.

As Henjes notes, many modern conspiracy theories may not immediately be recognized as antisemitic—but they share a common language with the Protocols, now over a century old. Even without using the actual text of the Protocols, there are numerous slogans and images in the digital ecosystem that convey antisemitism and incite violence against Jews.

 

Session 5

Kathryn Julian, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent

Katharina Kunter, University of Helsinki: “Anne Frank in Frankfurt: Entangling the Holocaust, Local Memory and Civil Education”

Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University: “The Sound of Evil: Imagining Perpetrators”

Carina Brankovic, Oldenburg University, “Conceptions of Remembrance in Leyb Rochman’s Chronicle of Survival”

In all three of these projects, there’s an interplay between intersecting memory cultures: international/ globalized memory, national/ local, civic/ confessional. Each panelist discussed how the subject changed depending on the context in which a text or memorial is being read, watched, or listened to, which indicated how memory culture can be politicized and also find interesting overlaps between various groups. For instance, Katharina discussed how the memory of Anne Frank evolved in Frankfurt in response to both international and local politics, from Adenauer’s conservative West Germany of the 1950s to a reunified Germany that emphasized humanitarianism to a more recent globalized vision of Anne Frank. There were a variety of global connections that could be made about Katharina’s project (e.g. how the memory of Sadako Sasaki has been used in the same way in Hiroshima and in global peace movements). In all three projects, there could be important interventions if discussed in a global context.

Historicization and temporality was also incredibly important in each of these talks. They showed that engagement with Holocaust memory is vastly different whether the 1950s, 1989/ 90, or in 2024. Carina, for example, showed how Leyb Rochman’s chronicle was read and reimagined in the immediate postwar period by the survivor generation as a yizkor book and memorial vs. how his writing was read by the second generation and implications for the future. In this same vein, Björn discussed how silence was used in the 2023 film Zone of Interest. He contended that this film in its omission of violent imagery was even more chilling to audiences in 2023, because what occurred during the Holocaust and at extermination camps has long been established in public memory and discourse. Each of these papers illuminated how Holocaust memory continues to be interpreted and reimagined in a variety of temporalities, civic, and religious contexts, whether in museums, local education, texts, film, or even in quotidian interactions.

 

Session 6

Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont, Moderator and Respondent

Rebecca Carter-Chand, USHMM, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks”

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany”

The final session was devoted to presentations by Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Director of Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the USHMM, and Dr. Kyle Jantzen, Professor of History at Ambrose University. The session was a fitting capstone to the conference, as both papers encouraged reconsideration of conventional approaches to church history in the Nazi era, even as they proposed new avenues of inquiry.

Carter-Chand’s contribution, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks,” began with a historiographical overview emphasizing that traditional analyses have tended to focus on the individual rescuer’s motives, personality, courage, and sacrifice. Carter-Chand, however, encourages a redirection in the scholarship away from rescue as a psychological phenomenon and toward rescue as a historical phenomenon, focusing more on circumstances and context in the form of “structural” and “situational” factors – factors that might include landscape, victim and rescuer networks, or the nature of occupation and coercive state power in a given setting. As an illustration, Carter-Chand concluded with a brief video interview with Holocaust survivor Zyli Zylberberg, inviting consideration of what contextual factors moved Zylberberg to make the choices she did, and how we are to evaluate her own personal agency in the complex process of rescue.

Kyle Jantzen’s presentation, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany,” also offered a novel approach in our attempt to understand the place of the churches and Christianity in Nazi Germany. Reflecting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “After Ten Years,” Jantzen urged consideration of how the current growth of Christian nationalism and the so-called “culture wars” might help us in understanding the churches during the Third Reich. We are accustomed to drawing upon the lessons of the past to inform the present, but Jantzen suggested an inversion of sorts, that is, letting the challenges of the present inform our approach to the churches in the Nazi era, considering broadly how Christianity and its institutions adapt to politics and, more precisely, the “bending” of Christianity to the politics of the right. For Jantzen, this “bending,” both in Nazi Germany and in the present, is to be understood not in static or linear terms, but as a complex dynamic process, often improvised and experimental. Moreover, Jantzen emphasized that, in attempting to understand this process, we need to “look to the middle,” that is, between the categories of support, compliance, and defiance, and to local contexts.

 

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Conference Announcement: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Conference Announcement: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

Conference Announcement

Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective 

A Conference co-organized by:

Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary Church History)

&

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

October 2 – 4, 2024

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Members of the editorial boards of KZG/CCH and CCHQ are invited to present papers on this theme, including topics related to the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as well as those related to memory or Vergangenheitsbewӓltigung. We are especially interested in papers that analyze connections, transfers, or entangled histories between German churches and organizations and those in other countries.

KZG/CCH and CCHQ members who wish to present at the conference should send a 200-300 word abstract and title to Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand: rcarter-chand@ushmm.org by June 28, 2024. A quick note indicating your interest would be appreciated even sooner.

For these presenters, the USHMM will cover the cost of direct travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and lodging for the duration of the workshop. Presenters will also receive a $250 stipend for meals and incidentals (eg. ground transportation).

Scholars outside of these editorial groups interested in presenting can also send an abstract to Dr. Carter-Chand by June 28, 2024, but please note, conference funding for travel and hotel is not guaranteed.

The CCHQ will provide a detailed conference report for our readers in the December 2024 issue.

 

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Conference Report: “Convinced by National Socialism? Political attitudes of religious groups and individuals in the Nazi and post-war period”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Conference Report: “Convinced by National Socialism? Political attitudes of religious groups and individuals in the Nazi and post-war period,” Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg (FZH); University of Münster; Schleswig-Holstein State Archives; Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, September 14-15, 2023, in Hamburg, Germany

By Marvin Becker, Research Institute for Contemporary History Hamburg; Helge-Fabien Hertz, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History at the University of Duisburg-Essen; Lisa Klagges, Institute for Political and Communication Science, University of Greifswald

Translation by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, with the assistance of DEEPL (text translation only)

What attitudes did representatives of the two mainstream Christian churches hold towards National Socialism? In sociology, social psychology, and pedagogical diagnostics, the latent construct of “attitudes” is surveyed through items and operationalized using indicators. This interdisciplinary conference in Hamburg focused on the question of how past political attitudes of people who can no longer be interviewed can be captured. Representatives from the fields of history, social science, political science, the sociology of religion, and church history explored this question on all three societal levels within their different methodological challenges: the micro level (individuals); the meso level (specific study groups); and the macro level (the German population).

In two keynote speeches, OLAF BLASCHKE (Münster) and PETER GRAEFF (Kiel) approached the question methodologically. Blaschke built on a previous conference, “Was glaubten die Deutschen 1933-1945?”,[1] on the hybrid or dual faith of Protestants and Catholics under the Nazi regime, and discussed various methods and sources for recording attitudes at the micro, meso and macro levels. Precise findings on the attitudes of religious groups and individuals towards National Socialism could be obtained based on positive and negative “attitude objects.” Graeff described the development and status quo of methods of attitude research in sociology. Attitudes can also be derived from historical biographical material using the tools of modern empirical social research.

In the conference’s first panel on the micro level (individual actors), NORA ANDREA SCHULZE (Munich) and MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin) showed how much attitude research is embedded in classical biographical studies. Schulze used the personal history of the former Bavarian state bishop Hans Meiser to illustrate the long-lasting impact of his monarchist-nationalist and authoritarian socialization under the Kaiserreich, but also his slowly evolving change of mind towards the Nazi regime, whose church policy he strongly rejected. She stressed oral history interviews in combination with a broad range of source studies as an effective means of ascertaining attitudes. In his lecture on the later EKD Council chairman Otto Dibelius, Gailus focused on Dibelius’s publicized attitudes towards National Socialism in the years 1932 to 1934. The rapid change from joyful expectation to fulfillment and then disappointment to partial rejection illustrated the temporal instability of attitudes, especially in the turbulent times of a system change. The third speaker, KLAUS GROSSE KRACHT (Hamburg), used the Catholic laymen Erich Klausener and Walter Dirks to discuss irritatingly positive statements on the new regime from 1933, which should be understood as an expression of a search for meaning [Suchbewegung] within the Catholic religious field, which changed rapidly during the negotiation and implementation of the Reich concordat (of 1933). In this time of upheaval, the two committed and decidedly anti-clerical laymen had longed for a convergence, i.e. a future rapprochement between the Catholic milieu and National Socialism. At the end of the panel, DETLEF POLLACK (Münster) and MARVIN BECKER (Hamburg) added an interdisciplinary accent. Using the example of national Protestantism, they explored the question of the extent to which the attitudes of individual actors can be used to draw conclusions about the collective convictions of their milieu. Pollack began by explaining his theory of “broken lines of continuity” in Protestantism after 1945, where previous nationalist attitudes had been shaken by the caesura of 1945. He substantiated this theory based on both the admission of guilt by church leaders and committees in the post-war period as well as interviews that he conducted with East German Protestant church leaders in the 1990s. Becker then discussed the extent to which the analysis of statements by German Protestants and Catholics on National Socialism in the post-war period could provide insight into Protestant thinking. He drew on the model of social networks as carrier groups of discourses (Sabrina Hoppe) and attempted to reconstruct the rules at that time of what could be said that regulated the verbalization of inner attitudes. Becker achieved this by comparing internal and external communications in German-Christian networks. This discourse regulation refers to the underlying collective convictions of the network and at the same time contributes to their change in a process of mutual influence.

The meso level then focused on specific research groups. LUCIA SCHERZBERG (Saarbrücken) shed light on the political position of the members of the “Working Group for Religious Peace” and its antecedent and successor organizations. She highlighted party books and files, self- representations, foreign expressions, and greetings as important sources for the formation of indicators; she also found more remote access to be productive in relation to role theory or the concept of the “national community (Volksgemeinschaft).” MARKUS RAASCH (Mainz) also focused on the Volksgemeinschaft in his presentation on the relationship of Eichstätt’s Catholic milieu to National Socialism. Using a mixture of top-down and bottom-up access allows for a differentiated examination of semantics, practices, and emotions, thus enabling the detection of political attitudes. With the “Nazi conviction score,” HELGE-FABIEN HERTZ (Essen) then provided a further interdisciplinary impulse. He presented thirty-six attitude indicators based on Schleswig-Holstein’s pastors during the Nazi era, as well as the method of their generation and validation. According to his argument, such indicators always increased the probability of the occurrence of approval or rejection of National Socialism, but without being able to denote it with certainty. Only on the basis of their processing in a measurement model, the core of which is the score, can the set of indicators be used to draw conclusions about the attitude of the person in question and, in this way, also analyze large groups of people.

At the macro level, the focus was on attitudes towards National Socialism within German society, which even during the Nazi period was shaped by Christianity. THOMAS BRECHENMACHER (Potsdam) provided insights into a research project that sought to capture public opinion in pre-demoscopic periods through a quantitative analysis of first names. Statistical clusters of first names such as Adolf (Hitler), Horst (Wessel) or Germanic first names, in combination with other indicators, certainly allowed conclusions to be drawn about the acceptance of National Socialism among the population, whereby one might ask whether the first-name indicator also applies to groups particularly close to the church, such as pastors. JANOSCH STEUWER (Halle) took up the argument that there was no collective opinion of the German population about National Socialism (Peter Longerich). Based on 140 diaries from the Nazi era, he pointed out that communication structures had led to the perception of collective approval, while at the same time a multitude of opinions remained hidden. To make visible divergent thoughts behind the binary concept of approval-disapproval, qualitative measurement methods should not be ignored. In a quantitative content analysis, JÜRGEN W. FALTER (Mainz) and LISA KLAGGES (Greifswald) provided a further interdisciplinary impulse by analyzing reports from NSDAP members regarding their motives for joining the party. The decision to join was generally the result of a complex interplay of various factors, of which one component was ideological attitude. By comparing statements made by these same individuals in their later denazification files, conclusions could also be drawn regarding the argumentation strategies used during the denazification process.

In the closing discussion, the potential of the concept of attitude for historiographical research held firm, because such a concept accentuates the need for sensitization to the question of the inner life of historical persons. This inner life cannot be equated simply with levels of behaviour directly accessible in sources. The basic prerequisite of historiographical research on attitudes is, on the one hand, a clarification of the category “attitude” in conceptual distinction to terms such as “mentality” and, on the other hand, stronger methodological and source-critical reflections on one’s own cognitive process.[2] The research approaches amassed from various disciplines at the conference will be presented in a conference volume as a — by no means exhaustive — “methodological toolbox” for historiographical research on attitudes vis-à-vis the Third Reich, which includes both quantitative approaches (indicator research) and hermeneutic approaches. It aims to provide pragmatic suggestions for the micro, meso and macro levels, from whose arsenal future research projects can draw on the political attitudes of religious groups and individuals under National Socialism, and which can also provide incentives for historical research.

Conference Overview

Moderators: Thomas Großbölting (Hamburg), Rainer Hering (Schleswig)

Keynote Speeches 

Olaf Blaschke (Münster): Introductory reflections on “attitudes” as a category of analysis for research on churches and National Socialism

Peter Graeff (Kiel): Attitude research in sociology

 Panel I: The Micro Level 

Nora Andrea Schulze (Munich): Politically neutral? Bishop Hans Meiser in the change of political systems

Manfred Gailus (Berlin): Otto Dibelius and the Third Reich

Klaus Große Kracht (Hamburg): Borders and convergences. Biographical approaches to the relationship between Catholicism and National Socialism

Interdisciplinary Impulse 

Detlef Pollack (Münster), Marvin Becker (Hamburg): From the particular to the general. On the changing attitudes of individual Protestants and the breakdown of national Protestant mentalities after 1945

Panel II: The Meso Level 

Lucia Scherzberg (Saarbrücken): The “Working Community for Religious Peace”, its predecessor and successor organizations

Markus Raasch (Mainz): Volksgemeinschaft und Katholischsein in Eichstätt. Theoretical and methodological considerations on a confessional history of everyday life under National Socialism

 Interdisciplinary Impulse

Helge-Fabien Hertz (Essen): The “Nazi conviction score”. Indicator-based measurement of political attitudes of Schleswig-Holstein pastors during the Nazi era

Panel III: The Macro Level 

Janosch Steuwer (Cologne): A phantom and how to grasp it. “Popular opinion” and the formation of political opinion under the Nazi dictatorship

Thomas Brechenmacher (Potsdam): First names as demoscopic indicator? A research project in retrospect

Interdisciplinary Impulse

Jürgen W. Falter (Mainz), Lisa Klagges (Greifswald): Motives for joining the NSDAP

Closing Discussion

 

Notes:

[1] Conference report via H-Soz-uKult, “What did the Germans believe 1933-1945? A New Perspective on the Relationship Between Religion and Politics under National Socialism”, 15 February 2019.

[2] The original conference report authors noted in an email exchange with the translator that there has to be an accurate distinction between the term “attitude” and similar concepts such as “mentality” as characterized by Annales School, to avoid misunderstandings in future surveys.

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Research Report: British and American Christians in the Aftermath of the Holocaust and their Encounters with Survivors

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Research Report: British and American Christians in the Aftermath of the Holocaust and their Encounters with Survivors

By Robert Thompson, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

‘What I have written is true—so witness me God’, wrote an army chaplain following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. My PhD research brought together the experiences of army chaplains, with other British and American Christians, including relief workers, interfaith activists, and government officials, and reconsidered their experiences as amongst the first expressions of post-Holocaust Christianity. In the five years following the liberation of Belsen and other camps, they encountered survivors of the Holocaust. They listened to testimony, confronted the post-war challenges facing Jews, and reapproached their Christian faith as a consequence. These case-studies reveal previously untold human stories in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and they encourage reflection on the unique implications of these ‘ordinary’ personal experiences for understanding post-Holocaust Christianity.

My research journey began when I was working for the British Council of Christians and Jews. In this role I worked closely with colleagues at Yad Vashem to organise an annual seminar for Christian clergy at the International School of Holocaust Studies. In encouraging Christians to consider how we could respond, as Christians in our contemporary situation, to knowledge of the Holocaust, I was drawn to also ask: how did Christians respond? In particular, how did Christians in my own, British, context first respond to what they learned of the Nazi persecution of the Jews?

For my Master’s thesis, I conducted a study of British Christian army chaplains who participated in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I published an article based on this aspect of my research in The English Historical Review.[1] I argued that, in being present at Belsen for prolonged periods, and working face-to-face with survivors, chaplains were distinct amongst the liberators for being more likely to recognise the Jewish identities of the majority of the camp’s victims. In responding to what they experienced at Belsen, chaplains often articulated an understanding, to an extent, of the particular experiences of Jews under Nazism.

Developing this approach during my PhD, I considered British and American Christians who encountered Holocaust survivors in four formative contexts in Jews’ post-war lives: liberation, relief, occupation, and exodus. In the process of liberation, burying the dead and caring for the living, army chaplains largely came to recognise survivors, not as they first appeared—as anonymous, mass victims—but eventually as Jews with particular experiences of persecution and loss. Relief workers worked as Christians, and as women, and learned about the displacement, repatriation, and antisemitism that continued to face Jews as they looked to the future. Occupation officials initiated meetings between German Christians and remaining Jewish communities. In this work, the future Holocaust theologian Franklin Littell began to consider how far Christianity must change in response to the Holocaust. In the journey of Jews to Mandate Palestine, the only Christian crew member on the symbolic Exodus ship adopted the role of spokesperson for its refugees, influencing emerging memory of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.

As individuals, chaplains and relief workers within these cases-studies were distinct in their experiences, but in studying them together, what unites them is the way in which their practical experiences with survivors in post-war occupied Germany impacted their own Christianity. My approach builds on work by historians and sociologists of religion and their study of so-called ‘lived religion’, defined by Meredith McGuire as religion ‘experienced and expressed by ordinary people in the context of their everyday lives’.[2]

Using neglected archival sources, the previously ignored private correspondence of women relief workers for example, as well my own interviews with subjects’ surviving relatives, I traced the Christian reflections that these individuals engaged in. One key source was a previously unknown pamphlet by a Church of England chaplain, which was printed just weeks after Belsen’s liberation and published what were possibly the first camp survivor testimonies to appear in English, alongside photographs of survivors. One of my case studies conducted Bible study with a Jewish colleague in a DP camp. Another summed up his arrival at Belsen with a single scripture reference. Franklin Littell found in his day-to-day work in Germany inspiration for his developing belief that Christianity must change in order to directly confront its own antisemitism.

Making visible and taking seriously these grassroots experiences suggests that post-Holocaust Christianity first emerged, not in the theological Academy or the institutions of the Church, but experientially, in the personal and the everyday, and especially in encounters between Christians and survivors in the aftermath of liberation.

As I revise this research into a book manuscript, I am giving further thought to the theme of witnessing which was claimed after the camp’s liberation by the Belsen chaplain I quoted at the beginning of this piece. After His resurrection, Jesus said to the disciples, invoking Isaiah, ‘You are witnesses of these things’ (Luke 24:48). If Christianity is at its heart a way of witness to the presence of God in the world, what did the confrontation with evil in the Holocaust do to that responsibility to be a witness?

In Bible study, interfaith activism, writing letters and distributing reports, giving public talks, or reminiscing in oral history interviews, all these individuals reflected on the impact their experiences in Germany had in clarifying, challenging, and changing their Christian viewpoints. They did so not as lone voices but in dialogue and relationship with other people. Their responses were complicated, and there were aspects of the Holocaust and its aftereffects that they overlooked or misunderstood. Nevertheless, they took on a responsibility to witness. When he returned to his English parish after the war, the chaplain found himself a long way from Belsen. But he continued to tell his parishioners about his experiences. As a result, because of his experiences and his ongoing reflections, more Christians could learn about the Jewish experience he witnessed, and, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, they too could begin to respond.

Robert Thompson was awarded his PhD in 2023 from University College London. He is currently Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1 January-31 August 2024). Before beginning his PhD he was Senior Programme Manager for the Council of Christians and Jews (UK).

[1] Robert Thompson, ‘“The True Physicians Here are the Padres”: British Christian Army Chaplains and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen’, The English Historical Review 138: 593 (2023), 841–70.

[2] Merdith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford, 2008), 3.

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Conference Report: New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Conference Report: “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians,” Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, October 9-11, 2023

 By Ion Popa, University of Manchester/Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

The Conference “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII” was the largest and most significant gathering of international scholars working on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust since the March 2020 opening of the Pope Pius XII collections. Organised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies (CBCJS) at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Centre for Catholic-Jewish Studies at Saint Leo University, and the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, the conference provided the first significant insight into the new documents.

As noted by Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Director of International Academic Programs, USHMM, and Fr. Etienne Vetö, Auxiliary Bishop, Reims (France), formerly Director of CBCJS, in their opening remarks, the new archives, estimated to be at least 16 million pages, will, for years to come, shed light on historical and theological debates over Pope Pius XII and the Holy See during the Holocaust, and on Jewish-Christian relations at multiple levels – from ordinary people to authority figures in Jewish and Catholic milieus, institutions, and power structures. The long-overdue decision of the Vatican to open these wartime era documents and Pope Francis’s words “The Church is not afraid of history” were referred to many times during the event.

The conference started on October 9th, two days after the Hamas terror attack, when the magnitude of atrocities was becoming clearer. This was mentioned in the address of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, who expressed his and Pope Francis’s “sorrow at what is happening in Israel.” He condemned “the despicable attack” against “many Israeli brothers and sisters,” and highlighted the plight of innocent Palestinian civilians. Most conference participants, having relatives and friends in Israel, followed the news with anxiety throughout the proceedings. The US and Israeli ambassadors to the Holy See and Rabbi Noam Marans, American Jewish Committee, also issued, in their remarks, strong condemnations of Hamas murders. Due to these extreme circumstances, the Yad Vashem delegation, including Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, one of the main organizers, could not participate in the conference.

Debates on Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust have, for decades, navigated between the apologetic and the more critical approaches. These sides were present at the “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII” conference too. In fact, before the beginning of the announced proceedings, the Pontifical Gregorian University advertised a pre-conference session titled “Jews Rescued in Ecclesial Houses During the Nazi Occupation of Rome: A Documentation Discovered at the Pontifical Biblical Institute.” This idea of Catholic/Holy See help for or rescue of Jews appeared in many talks, some speakers trying to present local, exceptional, limited cases of Catholic aid as the general attitude of the Church; see, for instance, the presentations by, amongst others, Dr. Grazia Loparco FMA, Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione Auxilium, Rome, or Dr. Annalisa Capristo, Center for American Studies, Rome. Another example of this tendency was the presentation of Dr. Johan Ickx, Archive for Section for Relations with States, Secretariat of State, Vatican, who based most of his argument about the intervention of papal nuncios and the Vatican on only one archival example, a Jewish woman originally from Romania, who was in Rome in 1938, and asked for Holy See assistance. He, as others, tried to extrapolate such cases and argue that Pope Pius XII himself was behind these interventions, but there was no clear evidence in this sense in any of the conference presentations.

Several papers, including those of Dr. Giovanni Coco, Vatican Apostolic Archive, or Professor David Kertzer, Brown University, examined the role of Angelo Dell’Acqua in shaping Vatican policy towards Jews during the Holocaust. Dell’Acqua was a lower-level assistant in the Holy See Secretariat of State during WWII, but he was seen, it was argued, as a main adviser on Jewish matters. His wartime scepticism over reports about the mass-murder of Jews was often infused with vile antisemitic tropes. Later, he would climb the ladder of ecclesiastical career, becoming a deputy Vatican Secretary of State (1954), Archbishop of Chalcedon (1958), Cardinal President of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See and vicar general of Rome (1967). The question of duplicity regarding his wartime antisemitism and contribution to the Vatican’s policy of silence vs his post-war successful ecclesiastical career was asked, but easily dismissed. The focus on Dell’Acqua, including by prominent scholars from the Vatican, marks a step forward in acknowledging that the Holy See did not do enough in speaking out against the murder of European Jews. However, the suggestion, implicit in some presentations, that he was the main responsible for the Vatican and Pope Pius XII’s inactions is misleading. The tendency to shift the blame away from the Pope and other major figures in the Vatican apparatus to this low-rank assistant is historically inaccurate, and the question of his influence on the Holy See’s policy on Jews will need more polished examination in the future.

More evidence from Pope Pius XII collections was presented, during the conference, on Holy See real-time knowledge about the murder of European Jews (such as the papers of Dr. Michele Sarfatti and Dr. Monika Stolarczyk-Bilardie), antisemitism in interwar Italian Catholic society and universities (Dr. Tommaso Dell’Era and Dr. Raffaella Perin), Pius XII and Vatican responses to requests for help (Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf and his team at the University of Münster), the duplicitous attitude of papal nuncios in France or Romania (Dr. Nina Valbousquet and Dr. Ion Popa), the limits of Vatican humanitarianism (Dr. Robert Ventresca), Catholic contribution to escape of war criminals from Allied justice (Dr. Gerald Steinacher and Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming), or the theological issues raised by returning baptised children to their Jewish families (Dr. Matthew Tapie). The case of Romania was mentioned several times. Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, Holy See ambassador to Bucharest from 1936 to 1947, has often been praised and used as a good example of Catholic interventions in favour of Jews. While this is not under question, more evidence started to emerge about his own antisemitism, or about the duplicitous diplomatic attitude of the Vatican. In January 1938, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State, expressed open desire to collaborate with the heavily antisemitic Romanian National Christian Party cabinet, and in July 1943 Mihai Antonescu, one of the most important actors in the murder of up to 380,000 Jews during the Holocaust in Romania, had an audience with Pope Pius XII.

Particularly interesting was the paper of Professor Philip Cunningham, Saint Joseph’s University, who examined the draft 1938 encyclical Humani Generis Unitas, and its possible adverse impact on later Catholic theological documents. Seen by some historians as Pope Pius XI’s laudable intention to condemn antisemitism, the proposed encyclical still maintained the distinction between “good” and “bad” antisemitism and continued to promote conspiracies about a Jewish plot to control the world. As Cunningham concluded, had the encyclical been promulgated, it would have in fact “raised the notion of divine malediction against Jews to the status of formal Catholic doctrine” and it would have created serious obstacles for the later Noastra Aetate declaration (1965), which repudiated antisemitism altogether.

Last, but not least, although the conference gathered a great number of excellent historians and theologians, some countries/regions were missing. There were no papers on/from Ukraine, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia/Czechoslovakia, Belgium or the Netherlands. This is very likely because no scholars working on these countries have started to look at the new Pope Pius XII documentation yet. Nevertheless, this geographical gap seen at the October 2023 conference is an invitation for a re-union, in a not-so-distant future, where more insight and new updates can be shared by those researching these incredibly rich and meaningful archives.

The full conference is available to view on the Pontifical Gregorian University’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@unigregoriana

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Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

Translated from the German by Martin R. Menke

Editor’s note: the translation has hewed closely to the original German of the conference report. In a few instances some linguistic liberties were taken to ensure readability in English, but we have tried to minimize these. On occasion the original German terms are retained in square brackets to clarify a translation.

From October 5 to 7, 2022, an international conference on [Otto] Dibelius took place in Marburg. LUKAS BORMANN of the Phillips University Marburg and MANFRED GAILUS of the Technical University Berlin organized the event. The organizers selected talks by sixteen scholars active in Protestant theology and historical, cultural, and religious scholarship on Otto Dibelius (1886-1967). The conference’s purpose was to develop a new understanding of this extraordinary personality in German Protestantism for the first time since the publication of his first and, so far, only biography thirty years ago.

The conference program consisted of seven thematic sessions. The first session featured contributions to the historiography concerning Dibelius. MARTIN STUPPERICH (Hannover) reported as a witness to the creation of the Dibelius biography written by his father, Robert Stupperich. In 1967, a group around Kurt Scharf had tasked the elder Stupperich with writing a biography to honor their esteemed teacher. The publisher, however, rejected the first draft. Subsequently, the son, Martin, took on the difficult task of revising the first draft with his father. Working with his wife, the doctorally qualified historian Amrei Stupperich, Martin Stupperich claimed to have composed a significant part of the [published] manuscript. He centered the biography on the theme of the church’s independence after 1919, one of Dibelius’s most important concerns. Martin Stupperich sought to mention the persecution of the Jews because originally Robert Stupperich had not focused on accusations of antisemitism against Dibelius. When the biography appeared in 1989, Dibelius was not perceived as an antisemite.

The two following presentations were dedicated to the intellectual formation of Dibelius in late Imperial Germany. ALBRECHT BEUTEL (Münster) traced Dibelius’ development before the First World War and described him as an ambitious church reformer who oriented his thinking about parishes and parish activities on the work of Emil Sulze. Pleading for a form of preaching easily understood by the people, which Dibelius connected to a differentiated parish organizational program, he engaged the ideas of Calvin and his experience gained while studying abroad in the Church of Scotland and its small parishes. Dibelius sought to encourage parishes actively to participate in the life of the church. In his work, Dibelius considered himself a modern Lutheran and kept his distance from pietism. Dibelius embraced much of the Prussian tradition from Queen Louise to Bismarck, which to him embodied Germany. While he interpreted the outbreak of war in 1914 as a divine epiphany, his writing from the period reveals no trace of antisemitism.

WOLF-DIETRICH SCHÄUFFELE (Marburg) analyzed Dibelius’ activities during the First World War. Schäuffele concluded that his wartime sermons concerned pastoral concerns but were influenced by nationalist phraseology and far removed from the reality of the front. As a superior pastor in Lauenburg, he served soldiers’ needs. A year later, he conducted patriotic rallies in the Protestant Berlin parish of Heilsbronnen. The Christian state was his ideal, whose morality should be guaranteed by the church and Christianity. He also considered Germany’s status as a world power to be essential. Dibelius believed in a Christian German mission, and he understood the war as a just and holy war in which God, as the Lord of history, was continuing his work of creation. It seemed incredible to him that God should permit the political might of Germans to break. In 1918, Dibelius joined the DNVP.[1] At war’s end, he advocated the stab-in-the-back legend and decried the Treaty of Versailles as a satanic construct.

In the next session, which concerned itself with the church as guardian after 1919, BENEDIKT BRUNNER (Mainz) presented a talk online in which he analyzed the public and publishing activity of Dibelius in the Weimar Republic. For more than fifty years, Dibelius called for a people’s church (Volkskirche). In 1919, he considered it time for a free, strong people’s church. Dibelius claimed he was the best-informed man of the Prussian Church, who published until 1933 in seven journals. Furthermore, he supported religious instruction in public schools and called upon the people to gather around the Protestant church to resist secularization. In 1925, Dibelius became General Superintendent of the Kurmark and assumed the leadership of the Prussian church. In a much discussed and observed debate with Karl Barth, Dibelius used triumphalist language to defend the imperial church and its responsibility for the people.

TODD H. WEIR (Groningen), whose presentation had been prepared in part and translated by MAURICE BACKSCHAT (Münster), addressed the work of Dibelius at the Apologetical Center, founded in Berlin Spandau in 1921. From a Protestant perspective, the center engaged with secularization and the German atheist [Gottlosen] movement. It advocated a Christian worldview. Karl Barth considered the language of apologetics dangerous. Dibelius saw in Barth a dogmatic, disconnected from the world’s reality, who hardly understood the church’s mission. After 1945, Dibelius continued his apologetic work during the Cold War. Dibelius conceived the people’s church [Volkskirche] as a counterpoint to secular culture, which the church should engage. Dibelius recognized positive religious energies in nationalism but envisioned himself on the apologetic front against National Socialism and the German Christian movement. Until 1933, he found it increasingly difficult to delimit the boundary between his apologetics and the right-wing margins.

The fourth session analyzed Dibelius’ engagement in public debate. LUKAS BORMANN (Marburg) opened the session with a presentation about Dibelius’ most influential work, The Century of the Church, which was first published in 1926 and appeared in six further editions. Dibelius addressed his work to the educated reading middle class. Dibelius’ thesis held that the Lutheran Reformation had eliminated the church. He saw a wave of churches on a global scale and developed a Protestant cultural program that employed racial and national socialist terminology.[2] He identified freethinkers, Jews, and Catholics as demons. He argued that, while sects and the German free churches formed distinct groups, the church aimed to include everyone. At the time, Dibelius claimed that the Protestant church could co-exist with any form of government; later faced with the GDR, he relativized that position. More recent research (for example, from Wolfgang Huber, Hartmut Fritz, and Benedikt Brunner) is more critical of Dibelius’ program. He did not reach the broader masses. Instead of recognizing the church as polysemous, he polarized it and thus found himself between the fronts of a diverse Protestantism.

BRANDON BLOCK (Wisconsin) gave a virtual presentation in which he concentrated on the West German reception of Dibelius’ work Authority [Obrigkeit], published in 1959. As bishop and chairman of the Council of the Protestant Churches (EKD) in Germany, Dibelius took a traditional anti-communist position. At the same time, the Councils of Brethren sought a new role for the church. In 1958, the East German bishops professed their loyalty to the GDR. Given the situation, Dibelius wanted to make a statement about the nature of state authority. The term “authority” [Obrigkeit] (Romans 13) no longer seemed to be an adequate interpretation. Dibelius’ new work sparked a debate in which conservative Lutherans recognized an analogy between the GDR and the Third Reich. The circle around Karl Barth and the Councils of Brethren rejected Dibelius’ text. They claimed that, with his reactionary conservatism, Dibelius may have strengthened counter-reactions, which encouraged the transformation of the Protestant church into a church open to democracy and society.

JOLANDA GRÄSSEL-FARNBAUER (Marburg) addressed Dibelius’ position on women’s issues. She analyzed the work We Call Germany to God [Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott] (1937), published by Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. She also studied critical reactions by contemporary female readers. We Call Germany responded to National Socialist church politics and criticized the German Christian movement. In the last chapter, the authors explained their view of the women’s movement. They thought women had contravened their destiny when they went to work for pay and sought education and public works. First and foremost, they were to be wives and mothers. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack contradicted this view, and  theologians Meta Eyl and Gertrud Eitner identified an affinity of the text with National Socialist ideology. Although many women were active in the Confessing Church, it remained ambivalent on the question of women’s roles. Dibelius conceded to theologically educated women a role of service in the church but not the proclamation [of the gospel] in religious worship. Until the end, he refused to ordain women.

The fifth session focused on National Socialism and the church struggle [Kirchenkampf]. According to MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin), at the opening of Parliament in Potsdam (March 21, 1933), Dibelius welcomed the National Socialist regime’s initial antisemitic policies. Using racist rhetoric, he [claimed] he had expected the “inflow of fresh blood” [“das Einströmen frischen Blutes”] as early as April 1932 and believed in a resurgence of faith. For him, the solution to the Jewish question was to prevent immigration from Eastern Europe. Dibelius’ antisemitic attitude, Gailus claimed, was amply documented. He did not encounter problems with the German Christian movement until he lost his administrative power. As an advisor to the regional Confessing Church of Brandenburg, he remained a man in the middle. He was never a Confessing Church pastor in a Confessing Church parish. Dibelius desired a large, strong, autocratically governed Germany but rejected the hierarchy of the German Christians. After 1945, a negative understanding of Dibelius developed in East Germany; in West Germany, he was seen more positively.

ANDREAS PANGRITZ (Osnabrück) studied the poorly-explored relationship of Dibelius to Jews. Pangritz considered him an antisemite with a clear conscience. After 1945, Dibelius sought to relativize his views. In an article published in 1948, in a retrospective on the Reichspogrom,[3] he did not explain why the church had remained silent. Still, he did emphasize that it was a duty of honor for the Confessing Church to help persecuted Jews. He also claimed that, after euthanasia,[4] he could no longer acknowledge the National Socialist state as an authority. He declared that he had employed two non-Aryans. Since 1934, he had employed a “half-Jew” as a secretary. Already in 1928, Dibelius confessed that he had always been an antisemite. Regarding the boycott of Jewish stores in 1933, Dibelius wrote on April 9 in the Protestant Sunday newspaper of Berlin [Evangelischen Sonntagsblatt Berlin] that the international economy and the international press were in Jewish hands. He continued that Jews abroad were rallying against Germany. He concluded that Jews were a foreign race and Eastern Jews were of questionable moral character.

TETYANA PAVLUSH (Cardiff) had been scheduled to speak on Dibelius’s attitude towards denazification. Because she canceled her talk, MICHAEL HEYMEL (Limburg) presented a talk on the relationship between Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. In a sketch of their personalities, he pointed out that there had been no conflict of authority until both occupied high leadership posts in the church. Both were Prussians, convinced monarchists, and homeless [heimatlose] national Protestants. They welcomed Hitler’s seizure of power but found themselves in ecclesiastical opposition to the German Christians. During the Kirchenkampf, they acted as allies for a time. Dibelius was initially only an observer of the Confessing Church and began his full cooperation only in June 1934. The opposition position that Niemöller assumed after the war’s end originated in the Confessing Churches’ internal fissures. This is evident in the differing evaluations of the church conference at Treysa. Niemöller considered Dibelius the bureaucratic leader of an ecclesiastical administration, while Dibelius considered Niemöller the representative of a superseded ecclesiastical minority.

The three papers of the following session were devoted to the post-war era. CLAUDIA LEPP (München) analyzed the work of Dibelius as a bishop of Berlin (1945-1966) under four aspects. First, in 1945, when he resumed his office in the Prussian Council of Brethren, Dibelius acted as a strongman, solidified old structures, and prevented a reorganization as the Council of Elders around Niemöller intended. In his work, he included both German Christian and National Socialist pastors. Second, in his sermons and pastoral letters, he assumed the position of someone who could analyze and interpret contemporary affairs, in order to frame and structure the life of the people. He also compared the Federal Republic with the Weimar Republic and the GDR with the National Socialist state. Thirdly, he acted as an anti-communist engaged in a church struggle, insisting on the rule of law and freedom of opinion in the GDR. At the time, ninety percent of the GDR’s population belonged to a Christian church. Dibelius struggled in vain against the Socialist Youth Ceremony of Jugendweihe, since most Protestants were unwilling to resist the government’s ritual. Fourth, he acted as a national Protestant activist for the reunification of Germany. By 1957, he was banned from entering the GDR but formally remained a bishop of East and West Berlin until 1966.

HANSJÖRG BUSS (Siegen) focused on the East German political and ecclesiastical opponents of Dibelius as bishop of Berlin. He was the only East German representative on the Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany and, during the 1950s, he was the face of the Protestant church. During this time, the Protestant church in the GDR lost public support. In a film produced by East German television, Dibelius was portrayed as a cold warrior based on his notorious sermon at Potsdam in 1933. This reflected the East German regime’s tendency to see him as an ideological opponent. In East German media, he was portrayed in caricatures as a NATO bishop and purveyor of the hydrogen bomb. While the East German polemic against Dibelius included antisemitic overtones, it increased his support in the West. In 1958, opposition among the pastors of Berlin-Brandenburg increased. Günter Jacob, Superintendent of the Neumark since 1946, became his primary opponent. Jacob did not insist on a unified Protestant church in Germany and, after 1960, turned against the structure of the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, which was tailored to Dibelius and the office of the bishop.

SIEGFRIED HERMLE (München) used the annual reports written by Dibelius to analyze his tenure in office as chair of the Council of the Lutheran Church in Germany [Rat der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland] (1949-1961). The council consisted of eleven members and was intended to lead and administer. Eleven individuals ran for the chair’s position in the 1949 elections. A clear majority voted for Dibelius and Lilje as his deputy. Niemöller was no longer capable of gaining a majority. For Dibelius, the churches in the German states represented the central points of German Protestantism. The individual churches did not want a strong central leadership. The Council of the Lutheran Church in Germany should only occasionally speak publicly in the name of the individual churches. In the eight annual reports filed by Dibelius, relations between church and state took up much space. He believed Bonn protected the church while, in the GDR, the church was increasingly exposed to propaganda. He argued that the Church should not let itself be abused in the competition of political forces. He acknowledged differences of opinion in military matters but disagreed with the Councils of Brethren. This was a contrast that influences debates concerning peace to this day. The conservative majority of the Councils of Brethren agreed with him.

The last session concerned Dibelius on the international stage. THEA SULMAVICO (Halle) characterized Dibelius’ position in the rearmament debate as ambivalent. The GDR press responded with polemics when he signed the agreement on pastoral care in the military (1957). Dibelius, in The Boundaries of the State [Die Grenzen des Staates] of 1949, criticized modern war. His criticism of the secular state was aimed only at the GDR, not against the Federal Republic. For Dibelius, the Fatherland had a higher priority than the state. It was a matter of national honor to provide for the defense of one’s own country. He warned against the great danger from the East. After atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, he believed the Soviet Union to possess superiority over the West. He accused Niemöller and Heinemann[5] of political propaganda. He claimed Lutherans were better than the followers of Barth in keeping separate political questions and questions of faith. Neither side ever entirely accepted Dibelius’ claim that he was unpolitical.

BERND KREBS (Berlin) discussed Dibelius’ relationship with Poland. In the 1920s, the primary focus was on Germans under Polish rule. Two-thirds of these Germans left Poland. General Superintendent Juliusz Barsche advocated the integration of all Protestants in the Polish state. Dibelius was convinced of a German mission in the East. Using strongly nationalist tones, he represented the interests of German Protestants in Poland. Before 1914, the region included a million Protestant Christians; after the war, only 350,000 remained. German pastors [in Poland] followed the DNVP party line and were considered leaders in ethnic German circles. In the mid-1920s, tensions worsened. National Socialist policies exerted massive pressure on the Protestant church in Posen. German Protestants in Poland were disappointed by National Socialism. Poland remained a realm of different cultures, in which the desired Germanification failed. After 1945, Dibelius concerned himself with the Lutherans in Poland.

A promised presentation on Dibelius’ active participation in the Ecumenical Movement had to be canceled because KATHARINA KUNTER (Helsinki) could not attend. HARTMUT LEHMANN (Kiel) summarized the conference and asked if anyone actually knew who Dibelius was. Did the presentations together constitute a new understanding of Dibelius? Three facets, Lehmann argued, were recognizable: 1. Dibelius was a prince of the church who always claimed leadership roles. 2. He was a man of the political right who consistently combated the left. Like the average German Protestant of his age, he supported antisemitism and initially also National Socialism. He integrated individuals from different backgrounds into the Council of the Protestant Churches of Germany. 3. After 1945, Dibelius missed the opportunity for a new orientation of the Protestant Church. One could at least imagine an alternative behavior marked by repentance and reversal. The question of what might have happened if Dibelius, as leader of the church, had acted differently before and after National Socialism would go beyond historical scholarship. LEPP and HERMLE remarked that, in such an instance, Dibelius would not have been himself and would not have risen to the church leadership positions he held.

The conference took place with relatively good participation by female scholars within a mixture of several generations of scholars and a constructive atmosphere. Nonetheless, in evaluating the work of Robert Stupperich’s discussion of antisemitism, tensions became evident. Relating to ecumenicism and denazification, gaps in the scholarship were regrettably noticed. New were the investigations of Dibelius during the Kaiserzeit[6] and his relationship to the Weimar era. On the question of antisemitism and Dibelius’ “tragic” post-war role between polemics and his slow distancing from them, the final word has not been spoken. The contributions to the conference are to be published in an edited volume.

[1] Editor’s note: German National People’s Party, a right-wing conservative nationalist party.

[2] Translator’s note: the preceding two sentences are contradictory in the original German.

[3] Editor’s note: the pogrom of November 9, 1938.

[4] Editor’s note: the Nazis’ T-4 “euthanasia” program.

[5] Editor’s note: Gustav Heinemann, at the time President of the Synod of German Churches and Minister of the Interior under Konrad Adenauer.

[6] Editor’s note: refers to the period 1871-1918.

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Research Report: Madison Barben on German and American Methodists and Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Research Report: Madison Barben on German and American Methodists and Nazi Germany

By Madison Barben, Washington State University

My master’s thesis, “Between Brethren and Fatherland: German Methodist Relations with Nazi Germany and American Methodism, 1933-1939,” (Department of History, Washington State University, 2023) explores conflicts of religion, politics, and international relations between Nazi Germany and the United States by focusing on the German Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). As the Nazis rose to power, they worked furiously to bring all aspects of Germany society, including churches under their control. The Nazis’ consolidation efforts affected not only the larger official state-recognized churches like the German Evangelical and the Catholic Churches, but also the Free Churches. Due to their independent status and foreign ties, the German Methodists and other Free Churches were in a precarious position. While the German Methodists feared their Anglo-American ties jeopardized their Free Church status, Nazi officials saw their connections as a means to influence American public opinion. In the thesis, I examine the German Methodist bishops’ international visits to analyze their changing relationship with the Nazi state and their American church brethren. To explore these ideas, I used Methodist periodicals The Christian Advocate and as well as the German Methodist bishops’ writing, speeches, and correspondence to church leadership in the United States.[1]

Recently, the Free Churches and German Protestants’ transnational ties have received specific attention. Historians Kyle Jantzen, Rebecca Carter-Chand, and Blake McKinney’s research stress the transnational scope of the Kirchenkampf with Carter-Chand and McKinney specifically examining the Free Churches.[2] I focused on the Methodists as a case study to examine how one Free Church navigated its place amidst Nazi control and conflicts amongst the German churches. With my thesis, I aim to contribute to scholarship on the Free Churches and the Kirchenkampf’s transnational influence. Also, my thesis builds on prior scholarship into Methodism in the Third Reich by emphasizing the church’s transnational connections through the bishops’ international tours.[3]

From 1933-1939, Bishops John L. Nuelsen (1912-1936) and F. H. Otto Melle (1936-1946) completed multiple propaganda tours in the United States and England on behalf on the Nazis. Their international visits illustrate the extent to which the German Methodist leaders went to preserve their church, even if it meant complying with an oppressive regime. The first bishop, Nuelsen, complied with Nazi orders as means for the MEC to survive, fearing opposition would destroy the MEC’s existence in Germany and connections to international Methodism. In 1933 and 1935, he completed propaganda tours in the United States supporting the Nazi’s positive influence over German society. While he showed early public support, he privately criticized the Nazis and later, when Germany was no longer part of his episcopal jurisdiction, ceased explicitly defending the Reich.

While Nuelsen cooperated with the Nazis for the church to survive, his successor, Melle, did so for it to thrive. In contrast to his predecessor, Melle, a self-described German national, was more opportunistic and eager to cooperate with the Nazi state. This is most evident in his controversial attendance and statements defending the Third Reich while dismissing the Confessing Church at the 1937 Life and Work “Oxford Conference.” Through his willingness to collaborate, Melle received political and material favor for the German Methodists, much to the dismay of Nuelsen and international Methodists.

My thesis only touched the surface of German Methodists and other Free Churches in the Third Reich. My project ends at the outbreak of World War II and does not cover wartime, the Holocaust, and post war.[4] While my thesis focuses on an individual Free Church, there is value in examining them collectively to highlight their parallel experiences and ecumenical relationships.[5] Finally, there can be more research into the Free Churches’ transnational relationships, specifically examining how their connections were used to influence opinions and politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Biographical Note

Madison Barben recently graduated with a master’s degree in history from Washington State University. She is an Assistant Content Creator for the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History and an Assistant Archivist at the Nebraska United Methodist Historical Center and Archive. She is currently applying to Ph.D. programs and intends to continue researching intersections of religion and politics in German-American international relations.

[1] I specifically researched at the United Methodist Archives at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey and The Interchurch Center in New York City.

[2] Blake McKinney, “Conference Report: “Nazi Germany, International Protestantism, and the German Churches,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly, 27, no. 4 (December 2021), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2021/12/conference-report-nazi-germany-international-protestantism-and-the-german-churches/; Rebecca Carter-Chand, “Nationalism and Religious Bonds: Transatlantic Religious Communities in Nazi Germany and the United States,” in Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars, eds. Kevin P. Spicer and Rebecca Carter-Chand (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022); Blake McKinney, “The National and International Church: National Socialism, German Protestantism, and the Watching World” (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 2021)

[3] James A. Dwyer, “The Methodist Episcopal Church in Germany, 1933-1945: Development of Semi-
Autonomy and Maintenance of International Ties in the Face of National Socialism and the German Church Struggle,” PhD diss., (Northwestern University, 1978); Herbert Strahm, Die Bischöfliche Methodistenkirche im Dritten Reich, (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1989); Roland Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders: German Methodists and the Nazi State,” Church History 70, no. 2 (2001); Daniel, W. Harrison, “To Strengthen the Ties That Bind: Bishop John L. Nuelsen and German-Connectionalism in the Methodist Episcopal Church Mission in Europe, 1912-1940.” Methodist History 38, no. 3 (April 2000); Ulrike Schuler, “Crisis, Collapse, and Hope: Methodism in 1945 Europe,” Methodist History, 51 no. 1&2 (2012); Helmut Nausner, “Tracing Reconciliation: Post 1945,” Methodist History, 51 no. 1&2 (2012); Karl Heinz Voigt, “Melle, Friedrich Heinrich Otto,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, 1993, https://www.bbkl.de/index.php/frontend/lexicon/M/Mc-Me/melle-friedrich-heinrich-otto-63151.

[4] There has not been much scholarship into German Methodist responses to the Holocaust besides Karl Voigt’s chapter in Daniel Heinz’s edited volume. Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

[5] Carter-Chand and McKinney’s recent research examine the Anglo-American Free Churches as a collective unit, but there is still room to expand on these ideas.

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Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

From October 5-7, 2022, an international conference devoted to new research on the German Protestant leader Otto Dibelius took place in Marburg. It was organized by LUKAS BORMANN (Philipps University of Marburg) and MANFRED GAILUS (TU Berlin). Sixteen scholars of Protestant theology, history, culture, and religion presented papers on Otto Dibelius (1880-1967), contributing to a new perspective on this outstanding personality of German Protestantism, more than 30 years after the publication of the first and so far only biography.

The conference program, which was divided into seven thematic blocks, began with an overview of  the scholarship on Dibelius. MARTIN STUPPERICH (Hannover), whose father Robert Stupperich wrote a Dibelius biography, spoke as a personal witness. In 1967, his father was commissioned by a group around Kurt Scharf to write a biography in which he tried to capture the merits of the honoured teacher. This the publisher rejected, and so Martin then took on the difficult task of revising the first version together with his father. By his account, he and his wife, the historian AMREI STUPPERICH, wrote a significant part of the text. The emphasis was now on Dibelius’ main theme, namely the new independence of the church after 1919, insisting also to include the persecution of the Jews, since the accusation of antisemitism had been neglected by Robert Stupperich. Even in 1989, per Martin, when the biography was published, Dibelius was not perceived as an antisemite.

The next two lectures were devoted to the mentalities of the Imperial era. ALBRECHT BEUTEL (Münster) traced Dibelius’ career up to the First World War and described him as an ambitious church reformer who based his parish program on that of Emil Sulze. Appealing to a popular preaching style while organizing the complexity of his parish, he adopted ideas not only from Calvin but also from the Church of Scotland and its small congregations, which he knew from a study visit. His aim was to encourage active participation in the parish community. Dibelius saw himself as a modern Lutheran and kept his distance from Pietism. For him, the epitome of Germanness was Preussentum (Prussianism, like Bismarck and Queen Luise) was the epitome of Germanness. He interpreted the outbreak of war in 1914 as a “revelation from God”. During the Imperial period, Dibelius showed no signs of antisemitism.

WOLF-FRIEDRICH SCHÄUFELE (Marburg) went into more detail about Dibelius’ work in the First World War and came to the conclusion that although his war sermons had expressed pastoral concerns, they were strongly influenced by nationalistic phraseology and were far removed from reality. As head pastor in Lauenburg, Dibelius looked after soldiers in 1914, and a year later organized patriotic rallies in Berlin-Heilsbronnen. His ideal was the Christian state, whose morality was to be guaranteed by the church and Christianity. He considered it vital for the Wilhelmine Empire to exist as a world power. Dibelius believed in a Christian-German mission, interpreting the Great War as a just and holy war in which God was at work as Lord of History. It seemed hardly conceivable to him that God could work in such a way that would break the political power of Germans. In 1918, Dibelius joined the German National People’s Party (DNVP). At war’s end, he promoted the stab-in-the-back legend and denounced the Versailles Treaty as a satanic construct.

In the next thematic section, which revolved around the church as guardian after 1919, BENEDIKT BRUNNER (Mainz) examined the public and journalistic activities of Dibelius during the Weimar Republic in an online presentation. Dibelius stood for the national church [Volkskirche] for more than fifty years. In 1919, he saw the time had come for a free, powerful people’s church [Volkskirche]. He was the most highly informed man in the Prussian Church, publishing in seven journals by 1933. He also campaigned for religious education in state schools and called on people to rally around the Protestant church to resist de-Christianization. In 1925, Dibelius became General Superintendent of the Kurmark, at the top of the Prussian Church. In a widely publicized debate with Karl Barth, he defended the empirical church as one that bears responsibility for the people, while Barth criticized Dibelius’ triumphalist language and attitude.

TODD H. WEIR (Groningen), whose lecture was co-written and translated into German by MAURICE BACKSCHAT (Münster), examined Dibelius’ work in the Apologetische Centrale founded in Berlin-Spandau in 1921, which grappled with secularism and the ‘godless’ movement and advanced a ‘Christian world view’. Karl Barth found the language of the apologists dangerous. Dibelius considered Barth a dogmatist who was disconnected from the reality of the world and who could barely see the mission of the church. After 1945, Dibelius continued his apologetics into the Cold War. He understood the people’s church [Volkskirche] as the antithesis to secular culture and the institution which could confront secularism. In nationalism he saw positive religious energy, even as he himself participated on the apologetic front against Nazism and the German Christians (DC). By 1933, he found it increasingly difficult to distinguish himself from the right-wing fringe in his apologetics.

The fourth thematic section, which dealt with Dibelius in public debate, was opened by LUKAS BORMANN (Marburg), who gave a lecture on Dibelius’ most influential publication, the book Das Jahrhundert der Kirche [The Century of the Church] (1926), which went through six editions. It was written for an educated middle-class readership. According to Dibelius’ argument, the Lutheran Reformation purged the church. In contrast, he saw a global wave of the church and developed a Protestant cultural program that used ethnic (völkisch) and nationalist terminology. By demons he meant freethinkers, Jews, and Catholics. While sects and free churches focused on specific groups, the Protestant church encompassed the whole people. Dibelius later distanced himself from his view that the Protestant church could live with any state system. More recent research (e.g. Wolfgang Huber, Hartmut Fritz, and Benedikt Brunner) judges his program critically. It didn’t reach the general public. Instead of understanding the church as a polyseme, he polarized it and got caught between the fronts of a many-sided Protestantism.

In his online lecture, BRANDON BLOCH (Wisconsin) focused on the West German reception of Dibelius’ writing Obrigkeit [Authority] (1959). As bishop and Council Chair in the Protestant Church in Germany [EKD], situated between the divided German states, Dibelius represented a traditionally anti-communist position, while the [Confessing Church] Councils of Brethren in the EKD pleaded for a new role for the church. In 1958, East German bishops declared their loyalty to East Germany. In this context, Dibelius wanted to say something about the nature of state authority in the modern age. The term “government” (Romans 13) no longer seemed to him to be a correct translation for this. His authority document unleashed a debate in which conservative Lutherans saw an analogy between the GDR and the Third Reich, while the circle around Karl Barth and the Councils of Brethren rejected the document. Through his reactionary conservatism, Dibelius may have strengthened counter-reactions that promoted the transformation of the Protestant church into a church open to democracy and society.

JOLANDA GRASSEL-FARNBAUER (Marburg) dealt with Dibelius’ attitude to the “women question.” In doing so, she referred to the text Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott [We call Germany to God] (1937) published by Dibelius and Martin Niemöller and to critical reactions from contemporary readers. The writing reacted to Nazi church politics and settled accounts with the German Faith Movement. In the last chapter, the authors commented on the women’s movement. They felt that women had defied their destiny when they took up paid work and sought education and public work because they were wives and mothers first. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and the theologian Meta Eyl contradicted this, while Gertrud Eitner noted that the writing ran close to Nazi ideology. Although many women were active in the Confessing Church (BK), there was an ambivalent attitude towards women. While Dibelius allowed theologically educated women to serve in the church, they were not allowed to preach in church services and he refused to the end to ordain women.

The fifth section focused on National Socialism and “Church Struggle.” According to MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin), on the day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), Dibelius welcomed the National Socialist Jewish policy of the first weeks of Nazi rule. Using völkisch rhetoric, he had already expected “the influx of fresh blood” in April 1932 and had seen the reawakening of faith. For him, too, the solution to the Jewish question was not to allow any immigrants from the East. Dibelius’ antisemitic attitude is well documented. He only had problems with the German Christians [DC] when he was deprived of administrative power. As an adviser to the regional Confessing Church [BK] of Brandenburg, he remained a man of the middle and did not stand for a BK parish, as the BK pastors did. Dibelius desired a great, strong, and autocratically-governed Germany but opposed the DC church government. After 1945, in the context of the Cold War, a negative image of Dibelius emerged in Eastern Germany and a positive one in Western Germany.

ANDREAS PANGRITZ (Osnabrück), who described Dibelius as an antisemite with a clear conscience, examined Dibelius’ relationship to Judaism, which is still little researched. After 1945, Dibelius glossed over his attitude. In an article from 1948, looking back on the Kristallnacht Pogrom, he did not say why the church was silent at the time, but only that it had become a duty of honor in the BK to help persecuted Jews. He also claimed that, after the euthanasia program, he had no longer been able to recognize the Nazi state as an authority, adding that he had employed two non-Aryans. A half-Jewish woman had been working for him as a secretary since 1934. As early as 1928, Dibelius admitted that he had always been an antisemite. Regarding the boycott of Jewish businesses, he wrote on April 9, 1933, in the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt Berlin that international business capital and the press were in Jewish hands and that Jewry abroad was stirring up anti-Germany sentiment, that Jews were a foreign race, and that Eastern Jews were of dubious moral quality.

TETYANA PAVLUSH (Cardiff) was scheduled to contribute on Dibelius’ stance on denazification. She was unable to attend.

Instead, MICHAEL HEYMEL (Limburg) followed with a lecture on the relationship between Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. In a sketch of their personalities, he pointed out that a conflict of authority between the two only emerged when they met in church leadership positions. Both were Prussians, convinced monarchists and homeless national Protestants who welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, but then found themselves in the church opposition to the DC. In the Church Struggle they had acted as temporary allies, since Dibelius was only involved in the beginnings of the BK as an observer and his involvement only began in June 1934. The contrary position that Niemöller took after the end of the war was rooted in the BK’s internal divisions. This can be seen in the different assessments of the Treysa church conference. Niemöller saw Dibelius as the administrator of a church apparatus, while his opposite number saw him as a representative of an outdated church minority position.

The three lectures in the following thematic section were dedicated to the post-war period. CLAUDIA LEPP (Munich) analyzed the work of Dibelius as Bishop of Berlin (1945-1966) from four angles. In 1945, Dibelius acted as a mover and shaker in the Prussian Council of Brethren by taking up his old office again, consolidating the old structures and preventing a new order in the spirit of the Dahlemite Council of Brethren. He also took on DC and NS pastors. Secondly, in his sermons and pastoral letters, he took on the role of an interpreter of times who wanted to shape the life of the people. He compared the Federal Republic with Weimar and the GDR with the Nazi state. Thirdly, he acted as an anti-communist church fighter who valued legal security and freedom of expression in the GDR. At that time, 90 percent of the GDR population belonged to a Christian church. Dibelius fought in vain against the [Communist] Youth Consecration (Jugendweihe) because the majority of the church people were not prepared to resist. Fourthly, as a national Protestant unity fighter, he campaigned for German reunification. After 1957 he was no longer allowed to enter the GDR, but remained formally Bishop for both East and West Berlin until 1966.

HANSJÖRG BUSS (Siegen) dealt with the political and ecclesiastical opponents of the Berlin Bishop Dibelius in East Germany. He was the only East German church representative on the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany) Council and the face of the Protestant church in the 1950s. During this time, the Protestant Church in the GDR lost support. In memory of the infamous Potsdam sermon in 1933, an actor portrayed him as a cold warrior in a GDR television film. This corresponded to the tendency of the regime, which saw him as an ideological opponent, and of the press media, which caricatured him as a “NATO bishop” and the person who brought the H-bomb. With its somewhat antisemitic undertones, the GDR polemic actually strengthened Dibelius’ support in the West. In 1958, opposition to him increased among pastors in the working group in Berlin-Brandenburg. Günter Jacob, General Superintendent of Neumark since 1946, became his opponent. He did not adhere to a unified EKD and after 1960 turned against the basic order of Berlin-Brandenburg, which was tailored to Dibelius and the episcopal office.

SIEGFRIED HERMLE (Munich) examined Dibelius’ time as EKD Council Chair (1949-1961) based on his reports to the EKD Synod. The eleven-member council was intended to provide leadership and administration. Eleven people ran for the position of chair in 1949, with the clear majority of votes going to Dibelius, with Lilje as deputy. Niemöller was no longer someone about whom people could agree. For Dibelius, the focus of church life was on the regional churches. They did not want central management; only occasionally did the council need to speak publicly on their behalf. In Dibelius’ eight reports, the church-state relationship took up a lot of space. He saw that the church in Bonn was protected, but in the GDR it was increasingly exposed to propaganda. It should not allow itself to be exploited in the play of political forces. On military issues, he recognized different opinions but positioned himself against the Brotherhoods (Bruderschaften), a contrast that continues to have an impact in debates on peace issues to this day. The conservative majority of council members followed his lead.

The last thematic section dealt with Dibelius in international relations. THEA SULMAVICO (Halle) characterized Dibelius’ stance in the rearmament debate as ambivalent. The GDR press reacted to the military pastoral care contract he signed (1957) with polemics. In his 1949 work The Limits of the State, Dibelius criticized modern war. However, his criticism of the secular state was only directed against the GDR, not against the Federal Republic. For him, the Fatherland ranked higher than the state. For Dibelius, it was a question of national honor to ensure the defense of his own country. He invoked the great danger from the East and, after atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, judged the Soviets militarily superior over the West. He accused Niemöller and Heinemann of political propaganda and said that Lutherans were better at distinguishing between political questions and questions of faith than the Barthians. However, Dibelius’ unpolitical nature was not always accepted by both sides.

BERND KREBS (Berlin) spoke about Dibelius and Poland. In the 1920s, the theme was Germans under Polish rule. Two thirds of them left Poland. General Superintendent Juliusz Bursche advocated the integration of all Protestants into the Polish state. Convinced of the German mission in the East, Dibelius presented himself as strongly nationalistic in support of the interests of German Protestants in Poland. Before 1914 there were a million Protestant Christians there; after the war 350,000. German pastors were oriented to the DNVP and were considered political leaders of German identity (Deutschtum). Tensions increased in the mid-1920s. At that time, Nazi politics put the Protestant church in Posen under massive pressure. German Protestants were therefore disappointed with National Socialism. Poland remained an area of diverse cultures, and the desired Germanization failed. After 1945, Dibelius turned to the Lutherans in Poland.

An announced lecture on Dibelius’ commitment to the ecumenical movement had to be canceled due to the absence of KATHARINA KUNTER (Helsinki/Finland).

HARTMUT LEHMANN (Kiel) concluded by asking whether we now really knew who Dibelius was and whether what we had heard was coming together to form a new picture. Three facets can be recognized: 1. The pragmatic church prince Dibelius, who always claimed leadership positions. 2. The man of the political right who consistently fought the left. Like the average German Protestant of his time, he supported antisemitism and, at the beginning, also National Socialism. He integrated various positions in the EKD council. 3. Dibelius missed the opportunity to reorient the Protestant Church after 1945. An alternative approach in the sense of repentance and conversion was at least conceivable. The question of what would have happened if Dibelius had behaved differently as a church leader before and after National Socialism obviously went beyond historical research. LEPP and HERMLE noted that in this case Dibelius would not have been himself and would not have risen to the church leadership positions he held.

The conference took place with a mixture of several generations of research and a constructive atmosphere, although tensions were noticeable in the evaluation of Robert Stupperich’s work and the topic of antisemitism. One complaint would be “gaps” with regard to ecumenism and denazification. The statements about the imperial Dibelius, his relationship to Weimar, the still open question of antisemitism and Dibelius’ “tragic” post-war role between Eastern polemics and his slow retreat from it were noteworthy. The conference contributions are to be published in an anthology.

 

 

 

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Research Report: KU Leuven Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies Research Group on the History of Contemporary Religious Identities and Ideas

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Research Report: KU Leuven Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies Research Group on the History of Contemporary Religious Identities and Ideas

By Dries Bosschaert, KU Leuven

In the transition to the 21e millennium, the Leuven historian Roger Aubert reflected on the future of the discipline of contemporary church history. He emphasized the adage ‘nova et vetera‘: in order to develop, the discipline should both learn from the past and draw inspiration from insights from other disciplines. [1] It is the same adage that I used in my inaugural lecture for presenting the future research lines of the KU Leuven Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies Research Group on the History of Contemporary Religious Identities and Ideas. [2] Research done within this group will deal with contemporary church history with a particular focus on the development of (religious) identities. Three theoretical lines were developed in this lecture: the historical study of identity formation, the role of (religious) concepts within it and the opportunities that methodological innovation can offer. Examples from the long 1960s were used to illustrate all this. Indeed, what makes these years so fascinating, according to historian Hugh McLeod, is the fact that within them “perhaps the biggest change was the weakening of the collective identities that had been so important in the years before”. [3] This transition, but just as much revolutionary events during these years such as the Second Vatican Council, makes this a particularly fascinating period for the discipline of contemporary history of church and theology when it seeks to focus on identity formation.

A strong tradition of research on identities already exists within the discipline of church history, but in the past these studies were often characterized by their focus on important figures and/or on identities described in a static or monolithic way. In light of developments in social and cultural history, the inaugural address pleaded to complement the classical church-historical approach in a threefold way: By focusing more strongly on ‘forgotten’ or marginalized identities; by doing justice to the intersectionality of identities in which religion is one of the categories that interacts within identity formation with various other relevant categories such as gender and social class; and by paying attention to the creativity in which individuals will combine different religious elements from their own and other traditions to develop their own, and thus often hybrid, identity.

This threefold approach offers opportunities to study individual (religious) identities in the past, but does not yet help so much to thematize the collectivity of these identities. The second part of the lecture therefore focused on how historical individuals function within an intellectual sociability: milieus of actors and institutions that share intellectual frameworks, shape them and interact with other milieus from this background. In light of the aforementioned Second Vatican Council, the church historian Philippe Chenaux often refers for example to the importance of the Leuven theological milieu in the preparation and as an influence on the council. [4] In the historical search for these collective identities and/or intellectual milieus, certain concepts often play a key role. For example, in that same Leuven context concepts such as ‘Christian humanism’ or ‘personalism’ played a key role. These central concepts are often picked up from other milieus – in the case of Catholic identity formation, by the way, they are often concepts from one’s own historical tradition – but are then creatively filled in with new meaning on the basis of one’s own identity. Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal speaks of ‘travelling concepts‘ to designate these concepts. [5] Hence the plea in this lecture to approach collective identities in recent church history and/or theological milieus from these ‘travelling religious concepts’. Indeed, it is often these central concepts, the concepts that are foundational to one’s identity, that will play a central role in the collective narrative and myth-making processes of collectives. To push the example further, it appeared in the identity debates surrounding the Catholic University of Leuven that ‘Catholic’ identity was interpreted through references to this Christian humanist or personalist basis.

Finally, the discipline of contemporary church history faces methodological challenges. While it can draw on a strong tradition of archival and text-historical research, this has not yet enabled to bring all stories to life and, moreover, often makes it difficult to map the identity of the social categories described above and the use of religious concepts within them. This explains the plea to keep innovating methodologically as well. Two avenues seem particularly worth exploring in this regard. Firstly, that of oral history, which can make it possible to tap into a whole field of unexplored sources within contemporary church history, the memories of those who lived it or helped shape historical processes. In addition, the lecture indicated the added value of the Digital Humanities to facilitate research. For instance, historical network analysis offers added value to analyse and visualise historical relational data in a structural way. It is one thing to speak metaphorically about these theological environments and milieus, another by studying whether there are indeed underlying links between certain figures that constitute these environments and their intellectual reference points. These and other strands will be further developed in the coming years in our own research or as part of some start-up research projects:

  • The Digital Synopsis Vatican II project which is committed to digitizing conciliar material and developing a collaborative online platform for the study of the genesis and reception of religious normative texts.
  • The Auxiliaires de l’Apostolat research project that seeks to map and study the identities and common vocation of a particular network of lay women in church and society;
  • The REACT project which aims to study the phenomenon of ‘bystandership’ in cases of transgressive behavior and/or abuse of power in Catholic contexts from a historical, practical theological, and social psychological perspective;
  • For an overview of the team and their individual work, see criid.be.

In addition, members of the research group actively contribute to:

  • The international project Vatican II: Legacy and Mandate (vatican2legacy.com) which aims to write a cross-cultural history and commentary of the documents of the Second Vatican Council;
  • The Jocist Women Leaders Project (jocistwomen.josephcardijn.com) that studies the influence of the thought and method of Joseph Cardijn in the international Jocist movements with a specific attention to the role of women in its shaping.
  • The RESILIENCE research infrastructure (resilience-ri.eu) that aims to facilitate the connection between theology and religious studies and the European Union’s science policy with its focus on data management and FAIR data (i.e. European Open Science Cloud programme).

Notes:

[1] Roger Aubert, “Les nouvelles frontières de l’historiographie ecclésiastique,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 95, no. 3 (2000): 757–81.

[2] A full version of this inaugural lecture will appear as Dries Bosschaert, Is there a Future for Contemporary Church History? Exploring Identities in the Long Twentieth Century through Travelling Religious Concepts, in Louvain Studies 2023 (forthcoming).

[3] Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York : Oxford university press, 2007), 259.

[4] Philippe Chenaux, Le Temps de Vatican II: Une Introduction à l’histoire Du Concile, Pages d’histoire (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2012).

[5] Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto : University of Toronto, 2002).

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Architectural and Website Note: “Lernort Garnisonkirche” (“Potsdam Garrison Church Site of Learning”)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Architectural and Website Note: “Lernort Garnisonkirche” (“Potsdam Garrison Church Site of Learning”)

By Philipp Oswalt, Universität Kassel; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The tower of the Potsdam Garrison Church, which was badly damaged in April 1945 and demolished in 1968, has been under reconstruction since 2017 under the patronage of German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. As is customary in Germany today, this reconstruction is taking place in a photo-realistic form, i.e. its external appearance should correspond to the former photographic image. In this place, however, this is a particularly explosive idea, because the building has always been a symbol of the synthesis of state power, the military, and the Protestant church. This made it a central national symbol of Prussian-German rule by the 19th century, at the latest, and thus the church also became a central symbol for militaristic, anti-democratic, and ethno-racist circles. During the Imperial era, the colonial wars were celebrated here, including the genocide of the Hereros and Nama. During the Weimar period, right-wing groups from the Stahlhelm and the Kyffhäuserbund to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) gathered here. After the “Day of Potsdam” on March 21, 1933, the building was an important place of tradition for the Nazi regime. Its silhouette was imprinted 75 million times together with swastikas in coins. Its carillon served as the interval signal between broadcasts on Goebbels’ Reich radio network.

It was, of all things, an increasingly right-wing extremist Bundeswehr officer with his “Potsdam Glockenspiel Tradition Society” who initiated the reconstruction project and pushed it forward for over 20 years with increasing support from Potsdam politicians. Since 2001, the Protestant Church has taken on the project and in 2008 it set up a church foundation for this purpose. An architectural break, visible from outside, was originally planned but was soon abandoned, however, under pressure from right-wing donors, even if their attempted influence on the content of church services in the planned church was rejected. Because of this dispute, the right-wing extremist circles did not hand their funds over directly to the reconstruction project, but rather donated them to other church building projects in what was once Prussia.

As a result, since that time, the Garrison Church project has been financed mainly from public funds. In addition to the theme of Christian reconciliation (“The Community of the Cross of Nails”) picked up from Coventry (UK), part of the usage concept is to create a historical site of learning. This aspiration was not fulfilled. On the contrary, so far the instigators of the reconstruction have been engaged in revising history. Until recently, they stylized the church, in which violence and war crimes have been religiously legitimized and sanctioned for centuries, as itself a victim of history. The “Call from Potsdam” on which the reconstruction project is based declares the church a victim of National Socialism, the bomber war, and the GDR dictatorship. But contrary to claims, the Garrison Church was not abused against the will of the Prussian Church on the “Day of Potsdam,” but rather it was high-ranking church representatives like General Superintendent Otto Dibelius who helped to make the symbolically important ceremony possible at this location. The bombing by the British Royal Air Force was not a symbolic act of punishment, but a military operation in support of the Red Army’s final attack on Berlin and took place because the Germans were not ready to surrender, despite their hopeless situation. The orchestrators of the reconstruction have not only falsified the historical facts for many years, but have also failed to problematize and critically research the theological tradition of national Protestantism associated with this place. This, even though völkisch, anti-democratic, nationalistic, anti-Polish, anti-French and bellicose-war-glorifying ideas have been preached here since the crushing of the 1848 Revolution, if not earlier.

The project has been controversial in Potsdam society from the beginning, but, unlike the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace, it received little national attention, despite federal funding and the patronage of the Federal President. In the summer of 2019, an array of well-known scientists, artists, architects and church representatives gathered to publish a critical open letter against the project. [1] As a result of this letter, the Potsdam carillon, which had been remade by the right-wing ex-Bundeswehr officer and his colleagues, was switched off after it had been in operation for 18 years. In September 2019, the initiators of the open letter announced the creation of a critical Garrison Church “site of learning,” in order to correct the historical image of this location—which had been sugarcoated and falsified by the advocates of rebuilding—and to explain its history.

As a first step towards a critical public view, various events were held, for example, a controversial panel discussion at the Berlin Academy of Arts in December 2019 and several lecture evenings on the history of Protestantism at the Potsdam Museum. A scholarly advisory board was founded, which advises the critical project and itself actively contributes to the content-related work of the “Lernort Garnisonkirche” website. The advisory board includes: Educational scholar Prof. Dr. Micha Brumlik, the social scientist Prof. Dr. Michael Daxner, the art historian Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dolff-Bonekämper, the historians Prof. Dr. Geoff Eley, Prof. Dr. Manfred Gailus, Dr. Matthias Grünzig, Dr. Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Dr. Annette Leo, the professor of Jewish studies Dr. Susannah Heschel, the religious scholar Prof. Dr. Horst Junginger, the theologian Prof. Dr. Andreas Pangritz, the cultural historian Dr. Agnieszka Pufelska, and the military historian Prof. Dr. Wolfram Wette. The institutional sponsor of the critical site of learning is the Martin Niemöller Foundation, in cooperation with the University of Kassel (Department of Architectural Theory and Design).

In June 2020, the internet platform http://lernort-garnisonkirche.de/ went online, and has published 60 articles about the history of the site, the reconstruction project, and the related debates. New articles are published here regularly. In September 2020, the Lernort initiative opened an exhibition at the site of the former Garrison Church. It is held in the Kunst- und Kreativhaus Rechenzentrum, in a building constructed in 1971, during the period of the GDR, which is now used as an art and creative centre. The exhibition focuses on the genesis of the reconstruction plan and the influences of right-wing radical groups on the church project. This presentation is based on several years of research in numerous archives, the explosive results of which will appear in the renowned scholarly journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Munich) in the summer of 2022.

In 2021 the site of learning addressed the tradition of Prussian-German national Protestantism. On the basis of extensive source research of sermon texts in archives and libraries, the scholars at Lernort Garnisonkirche initiated research on individual military pastors in the Potsdam Garrison Church. In October 2021, a two-day conference with a dozen presentations on this topic took place at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House in Berlin. The contributions from this event will be published in 2022. Also in October 2021, the Leipzig religious scholar Horst Junginger published his book on this topic: Der preußische Adler in der deutschen Herrschaftsgeschichte: Eine Vogelkunde aus religionspolitischer Sicht (“The Prussian Eagle in the History of German Rule: An Ornithology from a Religious-Political Point of View“), which critiqued the symbiotic relationship between the Protestant church and the Prussian-German state over the past three centuries.

Through the activities of the Lernort initiative, it has been possible to influence the development of the reconstruction project. This not only applies to the use of the replica carillon and its right-wing-leaning dedications of the bells. In the spring of 2020, the scholarly advisory board of the Garrison Church Foundation, i.e. the re-builders, presented a concept for a future exhibition in the new church tower, which for the first time takes up the issues raised by the Lernort scholars and comprehensively integrates them. The City of Potsdam, for its part, has initiated a process to clarify the future design of the controversial location in the area of ​​the former nave in terms of content and design. They have decided not to leave this question to the church or the church foundation alone, but to take on a central role in the matter. In the discussion and negotiations surrounding this, the Lernort Garnisonkirche has representation on the team of the Kunst- und Kreativhaus Rechenzentrum. In this respect, there is now hope that, through critical historical research and education, we will ultimately be able to deal responsibly with this site of remembrance of German and European history.

The current proposal suggests that the site of the former church nave is returned to the City of Potsdam, which intends to build a “house of democracy” there, including an assembly hall for Potsdam’s city council. The plans to demolish the neighbouring GDR-era Rechenzentrum are supposed to be cancelled; instead, the modernist building from 1971 should become part of an intentionally heterogenous architectural ensemble.

 

Notes:

[1] Signatories included Monica Bonvicini, Micha Brumlik, Thomas Demand, Maria Eichhorn, Hans Haacke, Katharina Hacker, Thomas Heise, Kasper König, Peter Kulka, Olaf Nicolai, Tobias Rehberger, Matthias Sauerbruch, Gregor Schneider, Friedrich Schorlemmer, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Klaus Staeck, Sybille Steinbacher, Robert Jan van Pelt, and Wolfram Wette.

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Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism, November 4, 2021

By Alain Epp Weaver, MCC

Since its inception in the second half of the nineteenth century, modern humanitarianism has operated within fields of power, with humanitarian actors seeking to carve out space to carry out their work in accordance with their principles such as impartiality and neutrality. Humanitarian practice has always run the danger of becoming entangled in different ways with government agendas and with the complicated histories of individuals and communities displaced by war that humanitarian agencies seek to assist. On November 4, 2021, a group of historians gathered at a virtual roundtable convened by the University of Winnipeg on the theme, “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” to discuss one example of such humanitarian entanglements before, during, and after the Second World War. The roundtable built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections (a publication of Mennonite Central Committee, or MCC), that featured examinations by 12 historians from Canada, the United States, Paraguay, France, Germany, and the Netherlands of the complex ways in which MCC, as a Christian humanitarian agency, interacted and was bound up with Nazism and its legacy from the 1930s into the mid-1950s. Several articles featured in Intersections benefited from extensive consultation of MCC’s archives in Akron, Pennsylvania.

At the roundtable, four authors from the Intersections issue highlighted key findings from their research on MCC’s postwar resettlement efforts with displaced Mennonites, with Anna Holian, author of a landmark study of uprooted groups in Germany after WWII, offering a response.[1] This roundtable also drew on sustained scholarly attention from the past few years on transnational Mennonite intersections, entanglements, and even complicity with Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s.[2] This brief report highlights findings from both the November 4 roundtable and the fall 2021 issue of Intersections, outlining the various ways that MCC entanglements with Nazism were bound up with broader Mennonite entanglements with Nazism.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged as a byproduct of the organization’s efforts to assist Mennonites seeking to leave the Soviet Union.[3] MCC was founded by Mennonite churches in the United States in 1920 to respond to the call of Mennonites in southern Russia (soon to become part of the Soviet Union) who, along with their neighbors, faced both war and a devastating famine. In the first half of the 1920s, MCC operated feeding and agricultural development programs in parts of southern Russia home to Mennonite communities. While MCC distributed humanitarian assistance, other actors, such as the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBC), worked to help Soviet Mennonites migrate to Canada, with Soviet officials sometimes suspecting MCC of supporting and encouraging such migration efforts.[4]

The conditions facing Soviet Mennonite communities progressively worsened in the 1920s, with the Soviet state dispossessing Mennonite landholders and imposing increasingly strict restrictions on religious expression. By 1929, the situation had worsened to the point that up to 15,000 German-speaking Soviet citizens (Mennonites, but also Catholic, Lutherans, and others) descended on Moscow to demand that they be allowed to migrate. This pressure eventually led to 4,000 Mennonites receiving permission to leave the Soviet Union for Germany—with financial loans from the German government (guaranteed by MCC), these Mennonites then migrated to Paraguay where, with MCC assistance, they established the Fernheim colony in the country’s Gran Chaco region.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged from this period. Once the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, MCC de facto became a debtor to the Nazi government. To help with negotiations with the German government to postpone payment on this debt, MCC relied on pro-Nazi Mennonites, including Benjamin Unruh (one of the Mennonites from Russia who had appealed to U.S. Mennonites for help in 1920 and who had ended up in Germany).[5]

Strongly anti-Communist, Unruh also dreamed of Mennonite settlement in eastern European lands to be conquered by the Nazis and helped nourish the hopes of some in the Mennonite Fernheim colony in Paraguay of a return to Europe following anticipated Nazi victories. MCC grew increasingly concerned throughout the 1930s and into the war years by the growing pro-Nazi feeling within this Paraguayan Mennonite colony it had helped to set up and continued to support. MCC sought to nurture commitment to the traditional Mennonite doctrine of nonresistance among Fernheim’s colonists, while also avoiding direct involvement in Fernheim’s governance. However, once the tension within Fernheim between the völkische (German nationalist) and wehrlose (unarmed, or nonresistant) factions erupted into violent conflict in 1944, MCC, under pressure from the U.S. government, in turn pushed colony leadership to expel the völkische leaders.[6]

Mennonites and other groups classified as German by the Soviet authorities faced sustained and harsh persecution under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s, including the deportation of half of the Mennonite population from what is now Ukraine to Siberia. The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine in 1942 brought a reprieve for Mennonites and others identified as Volksdeutsche who were viewed favorably within the Nazi racialized hierarchy. During the Nazi occupation period, not only did Mennonites receive favored treatment, but some also actively implemented Nazi genocidal policies, including the massacre of Soviet Jews.[7]

As German forces retreated from the Soviet Union, many Soviet Mennonites fled with them. Nazi authorities settled some of these Mennonites in Germany and some in occupied Poland, depending on how ideologically trustworthy the Nazis viewed specific individuals. Mennonite men of eligible age served in German military units; some served in the Waffen-SS and in the paramilitary death squads of the Einsatzgruppen. These displaced Mennonites received houses and other goods stolen by Nazi authorities from Poles, Jews, and others. The vast majority of these displaced Mennonites accepted German citizenship.

After the Allied defeat of Nazi forces, these displaced Mennonites found themselves in a precarious situation, under threat during the first couple years after the war of deportation back to the Soviet Union. [And, in fact, around half of these displaced Mennonites were returned to the Soviet Union, where they faced a deeply precarious future.] Mennonite refugees seeking options within the emerging postwar international refugee system had multiple strikes against them—their acceptance of German citizenship, service in the German military, and the assessment by international refugee bodies that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union voluntarily.

Alongside broader postwar humanitarian efforts, including active participation in the joint efforts of the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany (CRALOG), MCC worked to assist displaced Soviet Mennonites (along with Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region who had fled after the war) and to help them migrate to the Americas (especially Canada and Paraguay). To counter the strikes that displaced Mennonites had against them, MCC workers advanced different arguments in different contexts, making a variety of arguments regarding Mennonite “nationality” (e.g., that they were Dutch, or that Mennonites should be viewed as having their own nationality, similar to Jews), contending that Mennonites had been coerced into accepting German citizenship, and downplaying Mennonite participation in Nazi military bodies. When one argument failed, MCC staff advanced others in their sustained lobbying efforts for Mennonite refugees. Over the course of the decade following the war, MCC succeeded in resettling around 15,000 displaced European Mennonites in the Americas, including approximately 12,000 Mennonites from the Soviet Union.[8]

The University of Winnipeg’s November 2021 roundtable on “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” chaired by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, the co-director of the university’s Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies, examined this latter part of the story of MCC entanglements with Nazism, with four historians who contributed to the fall 2021 issue of Intersections briefly sharing key highlights from their research.

Benjamin W. Goossen, affiliated with Harvard University, initiated the roundtable with remarks underscoring the importance of contextualizing Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism within broader and longer histories of Mennonite antisemitism. Goossen highlighted how antisemitic attitudes can be found in the writings of leading anti-Nazi Mennonites in the United States, Canada and Europe—not only among overtly pro-Nazi Mennonites. MCC’s postwar comparison of Mennonites to Jews, deployed as part of efforts to secure Mennonite migration, was, Goossen contended, disingenuous, covering over the complex, multifaceted ways that Soviet Mennonites had not only benefited from Nazism but had in different ways been actively complicit with it, including, in some cases, participation in the Holocaust. The postwar public narrative promulgated by MCC workers among Mennonite communities in Canada and the United States of the providential, Exodus-like rescue of a persecuted Mennonite community not only grossly simplified a much more complicated reality but also chilled Mennonite postwar grappling with legacies of antisemitism and investigation into Mennonite involvement in Nazism’s genocidal program.

Many MCC workers in postwar Europe expended considerable time and effort to convince groups such as the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) of Soviet Mennonite eligibility to migrate from Europe (and to receive international assistance to do so). In her presentation, Erika Weidemann of Texas A&M University traced how IGCR officials debated internally about Soviet Mennonite eligibility for Displaced Persons (DP) status and examined the evolving arguments MCC workers advanced to convince the IGCR and IRO of that eligibility. On the whole, Weidemann noted, these MCC efforts proved successful. International refugee bodies sought to articulate an unambiguous approach to Soviet Mennonite refugees, but in practice the approach was constantly shifting, with MCC adjusting to those shifts in its efforts to interpret Mennonites to international refugee agencies and to advocate for their favorable treatment.

Steve Schroeder of the University of the Fraser Valley focused his intervention on MCC’s assistance to uprooted Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region. To help secure Mennonite emigration from Europe, Schroeder explained, MCC workers argued that Danziger Mennonites had an identity that transcended Germanness and portrayed these Mennonites as victims. In reality, Schroeder continued, these Mennonites had fully assimilated into German society decades before the war.[9] During the war, Danziger Mennonites voluntarily served in the army, some worked as concentration camp guards, and some used enslaved labor from concentration camps on their farms. Like Goossen, Schroeder underscored how MCC’s constructed narratives about displaced Danziger Mennonites contributed to and furthered a distorted narrative of European Mennonites having been removed from or above the fray of the war (or of having been victims of the war), a narrative that covered over the varied forms of Danziger (and broader European) Mennonite complicity with Nazism.

The final panelist, the University of Winnipeg’s Aileen Friesen, began by urging historians to recall the individual toll of the Holocaust, naming the individuals murdered by people carrying out Nazism’s genocidal program. On the Yad Vashem website, one can search the towns and villages in Ukraine once home to large Mennonite communities like Molochansk and find the names of Jewish people like Maria Sheffer and Mendel Ioffe who were murdered in the Holocaust. Friesen discussed how MCC’s postwar attempts to present Soviet Mennonites as having “Dutch” nationality was a reinvention of older arguments and discussion about where Mennonites fit into the emerging order of nation-states. Drawing from her Intersections article, Friesen suggested that the assessment of international refugee organizations after the war that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union “voluntarily” did not square with how the Mennonite refugees perceived their departure. Interpreting Soviet Mennonite actions during the Nazi war-time occupation and as German forces retreated cannot, Friesen stressed, be divorced from the backdrop of two decades of increasingly harsh persecution faced by Soviet Mennonites.

Building on her research in MCC’s archives, Friesen discussed how MCC workers providing humanitarian assistance to displaced Soviet Mennonites sought to make sense of those Mennonites as they learned about the ways those Mennonites had been entangled and had collaborated with Soviet authorities and then with the Nazi regime. Tensions among displaced Mennonites in MCC-operated camps in post-war Germany simmered and sometimes erupted with recriminations about different forms of collaboration. The response of MCC workers as they learned in piecemeal fashion of these Mennonite entanglements with both Soviet communism and Nazism was to “let it all go”—rather than seeking to establish a true account of what choices different individuals under MCC’s care had made during the war, MCC instead focused on constructing general accounts of Mennonite victimhood in efforts to secure Mennonite emigration from Erope. This hands-off MCC approach enabled someone like Heinrich Wiebe, who served as mayor of Zaporizhzhia during the German occupation, to present himself to MCC and CMBC as a pillar of the Mennonite community who had remained distant from Nazism, when in fact he had been involved in the ghettoization of the city’s Jewish population and the expropriation of their property and was active as mayor when the city’s security apparatus, which included Mennonites among its leaders, executed the city’s remaining Jews in 1942.

In her response to the panel, Anna Holian of Arizona State University placed MCC’s postwar refugee resettlement efforts within the broader context of the emerging international refugee regime in which “nationality” functioned as the key concept. Holian explained that in this postwar system, one’s “nationality” (understood in both political and cultural terms) determined where one supposedly belonged, even if that was not where one had previously lived or was where one wished to be. Mennonites were not the only group seeking to classify themselves as a distinct nationality as they sought favorable outcomes for themselves in this postwar system: Jews and Ukrainians also sought to disentangle themselves from other national identities.

Holian’s response and the discussion that followed pointed to questions for further research: How did MCC postwar work with displaced Mennonites change over time? How did MCC understand (or fail to understand) the Mennonites whom it sought to assist? Mennonites were not free of the varied forms of antisemitism that marked Christianity in Europe, the United States, and Canada—what role did that antisemitism play in MCC (and broader Mennonite) entanglements with Nazism? To what extent did MCC shape or dictate Mennonite refugee narratives about themselves and their war-time experiences—and to what extent were MCC narratives about these Mennonite refugees shaped by how the refugees narrated their experiences to MCC? The rich conversation at the November 2021 roundtable on these and other questions highlighted that much fertile scholarly ground remains to be explored regarding Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism and its legacies before, during, and after the Second World War.

Alain Epp Weaver directs strategic planning for Mennonite Central Committee. He is the author of Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation: A Missiological History of Mennonite Central Committee, C.H. Wedel Series No. 21 (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2020).

Notes:

[1] Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

[2][2] See especially Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen, eds., European Mennonites and the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

[3] For an analytical overview of MCC entanglements with National Socialism, see Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazsim, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021):

[4] Esther Epp-Tiessen, “MCC and Mennonite Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920-1932,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 13-17.

[5] Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Benjamin Unruh, Nazism, and MCC,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 17-27.

[6] See John Eicher, Exiled among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Eicher, “MCC and Nazi Impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite Colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 27-32; John D. Thiesen, Mennonite and Nazi? Attitudes Among Mennonite Colonists in Latin America, 1933-1945 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1999); Daniel Stahl, “How the Fernheimers Learned to Speak about the Nazi Era: The Long Historical Echo of a Conflict,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 285-298; Stahl, “Paraguay’s Mennonites and the Struggle against Fascism: A Global Historical Approach to the Nazi Era,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 273-284; and Stahl, “Between German Fascism and U.S. Imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2022): 32-35.

[7] See Martin Dean, “Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 248–71 and Aileen Friesen, “A Portrait of Khortytsya/Zaporizhzhia under Occupation,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Janzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 229–249.

[8] For examinations of MCC’s efforts to resettle displaced Mennonites after the Second World War, see Ted Regehr, “Of Dutch or German Ancestry? Mennonite Refugees, MCC, and the International Refugee Organization,” Journal of Mennonite Studies (1995): 7-25; Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazism, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 3-12; Erika Weidemann, “Identity and Complicity: The Post-World War II Immigration of Chortitza Mennonites,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 269-289; Weidemann, “Facing the Future, Reinterpreting the Past: MCC’s Solutions for Successful Mennonite Immigration after the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 45-50; Aileen Friesen, “Defining the Deserving: MCC and Mennonite Refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 50-54; Steven Schroeder, “National Socialism and MCC’s Post-War Resettlement Work with Danziger Mennonites,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 54-60; and John D. Thiesen, “John Kroeker and the Backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,’” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 40-45.

[9] See Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

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Conference Report: “Let Us Solace Ourselves with Love:” Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Conference Report: “Let Us Solace Ourselves with Love:” Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany, German Studies Association Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IN and Virtual, September 30-October 3, 2021

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

Presenters of the virtual panel “’Let Us Solace Ourselves with Love:’ Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany” at this year’s German Studies Association used the lens of emotions to reconsider Jewish and Christian women’s increased participation in organized religion in nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany.  Questions about women’s progress and oppression in patriarchal religious institutions long have been at the fore of this scholarship, and pioneering historians like Gail Malmgreen posited early on that “what is clear is that the dealings of organized religion with women have been richly laced with ironies and contradictions.” The tension of women’s religious engagement as liberating or oppressive also was palpable in this panel but panelist explored this topic in new ways. Scholars traditionally have analyzed the intersections of women’s religious engagement and progress in modern Europe through the lenses of labor and education, which at times has failed to highlight the increasing importance of women’s religiosity in the modern nation state.  Addressing this lacuna in the scholarship is vital because women’s religious engagement in fact increased in the modern era. Drawing on methodologies from the history of emotions, the presenters illuminated this heretofore neglected aspects of women’s religiosity and practice in the modern era.

In her talk titled “Desperate Desires: Religious Feelings as Discipline and Exaltation in Notburga, a Nineteenth-Century Magazine for Catholic Maidservants,” Martina Cucchiara (Bluffton University) used the concept of “emotionology” developed by Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns in her analysis of this magazine, to highlight the strict religious-emotional standards set for these mostly poor and unmarried women whose purportedly wild emotions were seen as a threat to the stability and prosperity of the modernizing state. Much of Notburga indeed was devoted to the social control of poor women through the fostering the proper religious feelings in its female readership. At the same time, the magazine also succeeded in fostering positive feelings of piety, pride, hope, and belonging in a group of poor women whose already dire situation only worsened in modern Germany.  Thus, Notburga’s emotional script was not always oppressive, a point all panelists stressed in their presentations. In her talk “Love and Unity, Love and Opportunity: Rhetorical Uses of Love in Calls for Change by Catholic Women Leaders 1900-1914,” Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker (Indiana University South Bend) illuminated the important free spaces two Catholic women leaders, Isabella Baroness von Carnap and Barbara Klara Renz, carved out for themselves in the early twentieth-century Church in particular how they used love “as a way to make diverse claims for change within German society.” In particular, she highlighted the utilization of various approaches from the history of emotions in her work.

Doctoral student Nisrine Rahal from the University of Toronto explored how women within the dissenting Deutschkatholiken and the kindergarten movement in the nineteenth century “mobilized the ideal of love and feminine emotions as an act of protest and opposition to the patriarchal state and church.” Her talk was titled “The Deutschkatholiken and Love: A New Type of Womanly Emotion.”  The last presentation, “Between the ‘feminization of Judaism’ and the “New Woman:” German Jewish Women’s Religious Experiences, 1918-1968 by Christian Bailey (Purchase College/Suny) directed the audience’s attention to Jewish women intellectuals in twentieth-century Germany, asking “how these intellectuals’ new ways of living out their Judaism,” for instance by asserting their right to discuss Jewish scholarship in print, rather than merely expressing piety within private spaces, “affected the emotional scripts that applied to a new generation of Jewish women.” Due to time constraints, the speaker focused mainly on the Nazi era. He argued convincingly that whereas Jewish women were forced to once more practice their faith in private under Nazism, their continued exploration of their faith emboldened some survivors to take on prominent roles in postwar Germany.  Rebecca Bennette (Middlebury College) offered thoughtful commentary on the presentations, and the panel concluded with a brief but lively discussion.

 

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Conference Report: “Nazi Germany, International Protestantism, and the German Churches”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Conference Report: “Nazi Germany, International Protestantism, and the German Churches,” German Studies Association Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IN and virtual, October 1, 2021.

By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College

After a yearlong delay, five scholars of German and religious history virtually convened a panel entitled, “Nazi Germany, International Protestantism, and the German Churches” at the German Studies Association Annual Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. This panel featured papers by Rebecca Carter-Chand (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Kyle Jantzen (Ambrose University), and Blake McKinney (Texas Baptist College). Maria Mitchell (Franklin & Marshall College) cheerfully served as moderator and Stewart Anderson (Brigham Young University) provided helpful commentary that flowed into a collegial conversation among the panelists and attendees.

Religion in the Third Reich remains a dynamic field. Long gone are the simple characterizations of godless National Socialists persecuting the good Christians of Germany. Over the past fifty years, historians of religion in the National Socialist era have added to a complex understanding of the social, political, theological, and ethno-national facets of Christian experiences in Germany. This panel represents the growing influence of transnational analysis in the robust field of religion in the Third Reich, especially in relation to German Protestantism. German Protestants simultaneously viewed themselves as members of the church universal and as Christian Germans. The panel papers considered the complex roles of transnational confessional identification, internationalism and ecumenicism, the interconnectedness of foreign and domestic concerns within National Socialist Germany, and eschatological interpretations of geo-political developments. The panel presented a multi-faceted approach to transnational analysis of religion in the Third Reich, examined often overlooked Christian groups within Germany and North America, and showed points of connection between German domestic church politics and Christian international relations.

Rebecca Carter-Chand opened the presentations with her paper, “Navigating International Relationships in Nazi Germany: Anglo-American Religious Communities in 1930s Germany.” This paper comes from her work in the forthcoming volume co-edited with Kevin Spicer entitled Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars (McGill-Queen’s University Press, January 2022). In her paper, Carter-Chand offered a comparative examination of many small churches and religious communities in Germany with Anglo-American roots. She noted that relatively few of these groups were banned in the Nazi era, and she explored the challenges and opportunities presented to these groups by their marginal status in Germany and their international connections. She discussed how different groups approached the coordinating efforts of the early years of the Nazi regime, and how they negotiated their place in Germany. Furthermore, she explored different groups’ shifts in international relationships with their co-religionists in the pre-war years. Carter-Chand’s analysis of a broad collection of these groups (e.g., Adventists, Baptists, Quakers, Salvation Army, etc.) demonstrated “that many of these religious groups were not only allowed to continue operating in the Nazi period but also found their place in the Volksgemeinschaft and participated in various aspects of Nazi society.” Carter-Chand concluded that for many of these groups, “national, international, and religious identities were not mutually exclusive.”

Kyle Jantzen followed with his paper, “From Aryan Messiah to Jacob’s Trouble: Nazis and Jews in Fundamentalist Christian Eschatology.” This paper comes from Jantzen’s current book project considering the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s eschatological interpretations of National Socialist antisemitic policies. His paper drew on a rich (and previously untapped) source base. He analyzed the complex of attitudes, theologies, and convictions that shaped North American fundamentalist Christian perspective on Hitler, Nazism, Jewish persecution, and the Holocaust. Jantzen offered a helpful overview of premillennial dispensational eschatology, which he argued provided the key to understanding Christian and Missionary Alliance interpretations of National Socialism and its treatment of Jews. He contrasted the critiques of National Socialism by North American liberal Protestants based on humanitarian concerns and critiques by fundamentalist Protestants (represented by the Christian and Missionary Alliance) who interpreted Nazism eschatologically. Jantzen argued that the dispensationalist eschatology of Christian and Missionary Alliance writers served as a “social imaginary” both guiding and limiting interpretations of—and responses to—National Socialist actions against Jews. Jantzen concluded by arguing for the contextualization of Christian responses to Nazism and the Holocaust, stating that these responses must not be seen “as isolated sentiments but as facets of wider sets of beliefs and practices about Christians, Jews, world events, and eschatology.”

Blake McKinney finished the paper presentations with his, “Are There Free Churches in Germany? International Responses to German Protestantism and the Universal Council of Life and Work – Oxford 1937.” This paper originated from the final chapter of his dissertation, which examines the impact of international Protestantism on German Protestant church politics from 1933-1937. His paper concentrated on the Life and Work World Conference on Church, Community, and State held in Oxford July 1937 as a focal point of the intersection of German Protestant interactions with the Nazi state and world Protestantism. In the weeks immediately preceding the Oxford Conference, many Confessing Church leaders had their passports revoked or suffered arrest. The lone German representatives at the largest ecumenical gathering since 1925 were leaders of German Baptist, Methodist, and Old Catholic churches. McKinney argued that the events of the summer of 1937 demonstrated the completion of a transformation in the Nazi state’s policies towards German Protestant engagement with international ecumenicism. Whereas, in 1933-34 the Nazi state sought positive propaganda to international Protestant audiences, “by the summer of 1937 opposition to international Protestant interventions in German church politics paid richer dividends for German Protestants than ecumenical cooperation.”

Stewart Anderson provided commentary on the three papers and posed questions that invited the panelists to converse on the use of “Protestantism” to describe these varied movements, the transatlantic flow of information and news regarding German church events, and the relevance of these studies to historical scholarship beyond “Church History.” Anderson commended the panelists for exploring how various Protestant groups “in multiple geographic and cultural contexts had to come to terms with the implications of National Socialism’s triumph.” A fruitful discussion followed with expressions of eager anticipation for the publication of new works examining international aspects of the history of Christianity in Nazi Germany.

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Webinar Announcement: The Holocaust-Era Archives of Pope Pius XII: The State of the Question

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Webinar Announcement: The Holocaust-Era Archives of Pope Pius XII: The State of the Question

The Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust are co-presenting a webinar entitled “The Holocaust-Era Archives of Pope Pius XII: The State of the Question.”

This event will take place on October 17, 2021, from 2:00-3:30 EDT (19;00-20:30 UTC).

The webinar will consider the significance of the archives and of the scholarship on this topic for Jewish-Christian relations. Speakers include Drs. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, David Kertzer, and Robert Ventresca.

On its website, the USHMM states, “For decades, the USHMM and many others have called for the opening of the wartime Vatican archives—16 million pages that could shed light on the actions of Pope Pius XII and his fellow church leaders as millions of Jews and other victims were being murdered across Europe. At last, in 2019, Pope Francis announced they would open in 2020, stating ‘The Church is not afraid of history.'”

For more information, and to register, visit https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/mchvearchvs1021.

 

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Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, April 27-28, 2021

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

On this topic an international conference took place on April 27-28, 2021, at the Evangelische Akademie Frankfurt. The conference was conceived by Lukas Bormann, professor for New Testament research at Philipps-Universität Marburg, together with practical theologian Michael Heymel, and was conducted in collaboration with study director Eberhard Pausch. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held as a videoconference.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) is one of the most internationally known German Protestant church leaders and theologians of the 20th century. For some years he has been back in the discussion through the biographies of Heymel (2017), Hockenos (2018), Ziemann (2019) and Rognon (2020). Historian Benjamin Ziemann takes a particular position. He emphasizes Niemöller’s temporary closeness to German national (völkische) movements and problematizes his attitude toward Judaism and Jewish people, the attribution of his activities from 1933 on as resistance against the Nazi regime, his criticism of the Lutheran regional churches, and his contribution to the ecclesiastical discourse on guilt to 1948.

The conference, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the Promotion of Science and the EKHN Foundation, took up these topics in the new Niemöller debate. It presented contributions on basic questions of Niemöller research and on the reception of Martin Niemöller in five European countries and the USA, which were discussed in an interdisciplinary and multinational exchange. This was done in order to arrive at a historically and theologically reflected re-evaluation of Niemöller’s work in international perspective.

Section I dealt with the particularly controversial topics of anti-Semitism and resistance. Benjamin Ziemann (Sheffield) emphasized Niemöller’s racial antisemitism as seen in his connection to the Deutsch–Völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund after the First World War. This völkisch antisemitism remained in place through the balance of the Weimar era. Beginning in 1931-1932, Niemöller embarked on a theological interpretation of Jewry and Judaism but continued to struggle with antisemitism even into the postwar era.*

When asked if Niemöller had been a man of resistance against the Nazi regime, Victoria Barnett (Washington) answered with a “cautious no.” She indicated that resistance was a complicated matter. Personality and a common language played an important role. As a “good German,” Niemöller had seen himself in opposition to the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen), similar to other nationalist Germans. Others, especially women, had been clearer in their opposition. The Nazi policy against the church had touched him as a pastor and in his loyalty to the fatherland and challenged him as a fighter, which he had been by nature. He had been seen as a successor to Luther who became a preacher of resistance. With regard to Niemöller’s conflict between nationalistic loyalty and Nazi church policy, Barnett brought his attitude to the concept of a “loyal resister”.

Malte Dücker (Frankfurt) suggested that Niemöller should be viewed from the perspective of cultural studies as a figure of memory. He distinguished phases of reception, which were characterized by companions of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, or BK), church-historical heroization, and the deconstruction of Niemöller legends in response to them. Niemöller was portrayed as a Christian who confronted the rulers like Luther in Worms, or as a socio-political Protestant who appeared like a biblical prophet (i.e. Jeremiah). He was perceived as an authentic personality. In contrast, narrative contextualization of today’s post-heroic society shows him as an ambivalent hero with fractures and contradictions. An artistic form (musical, drama, film) could be suitable for this.

The lectures in Section II were devoted to Niemöller’s reception in European Protestantism and dealt especially with the period after 1945. Frédéric Rognon (Strasbourg), who presented the first French biography on Niemöller in 2020, made clear that his name is generally unknown in France today. Before 2020, only one book about him and one by him had been published: in 1938 an anonymous, hagiographically colored writing about the everyday life of the Dahlem pastor, in 1946 a brochure with four texts about German guilt, which hardly allowed French readers to understand Niemöller’s special situation. To this day, he is not recognized in France because he was German and a pastor, and especially in secular France there is a strong distrust of religious people. Moreover, for the Protestant minority, he is overshadowed by Bonhoeffer. But it is precisely the paradoxical character of his life and thought that encourages people to identify with Niemöller.

Stephen Plant (Cambridge) outlined how the relationship between Niemöller and Karl Barth changed from casual allies in the 1930s to respectful friends after 1945. For both, he said, the Lutheran churches offered a common front. Barth had seen in Niemöller “too good a German” and “too good a Lutheran.” After the end of the war, he honored him as a symbol of resistance and reaffirmed his full confidence in Niemöller when it came to the future path of the church in Germany and a confession of guilt. He also noted Niemöller’s “blind spot for church diplomacy” and admonished him in 1951 to concentrate his energies. The confessional synod in Barmen (1934) had made Barth and Niemöller colleagues, the church conference in Treysa (1945) friends.

Wilken Veen (Amsterdam) spoke about the reception of Niemöller’s appearances and speeches in the Netherlands. There he is one of the ten best-known Germans. Niemöller was very popular as a resistance fighter after 1945; he was identified with the Confessing Church and was acclaimed like a movie star during his first visit in 1946. Franz Hildebrandt’s anonymous writing of 1938 had been translated immediately. Although a nationalist, Niemöller had preached biblical sermons. His sermons in the Netherlands had been evangelistic and missionary, and only in his speeches had he expressed himself politically.

Peter Morée (Prague) illuminated Niemöller’s relationship with Josef L. Hromádka against the backdrop of the special situation of the Czech Protestant Church as a minority church in an Eastern Bloc state. Church and state were ecumenically isolated here after 1945. Hromádka had contacts with Karl Barth and the Confessing Church. Without him there would have been no ecumenical relations. Niemöller came to Prague in 1954; his visit had been in the interest of the Politburo of the Communist Party since 1951. He and Hromádka would have known that their friendship was determined by the political agenda. The Christian Peace Conference (CFK) had been founded in 1958 together with representatives of the BK (including Iwand, Vogel and Gollwitzer) in response to the refusal of the World Council of Churches (WCC) to cooperate with the World Peace Council (WFR), which had existed since 1950.

Section III focused on Niemöller as a preacher and theologian. Alf Christophersen (Wuppertal) problematized Niemöller’s position between Lutheranism and Catholicism. In his notes of 1939, there was only one church for Niemöller; his exclusive model only allowed being Catholic or Protestant. From his point of view, Luther’s mistake had been that there was no longer any magisterial authority; the confessional writings could not be updated. Niemöller had formed an ideal image of Catholicism. Later, he did not see a plural Protestantism, but polarized it through his declamatory preaching.

Michael Heymel (Limburg/Lahn) presented Niemöller in three ecclesiastical fields of work—as preacher, theologian, and ecumenist. Niemöller’s sermons from 1945 to 1981, unlike those of the Dahlem period, have not yet been critically edited, and comparative studies are lacking. Niemöller had always wanted to preach Jesus Christ as the only Lord and to reach people in the reality of their lives. As a Bible-oriented theologian, influenced by Luther and Prussian Pietism, and one who was concerned with faith and the church as a Christocratic brotherhood, he criticized an academic theology without reference to the congregation. As an ecumenist, he said, he worked for communion with Christ in all churches and the “brotherhood of all people” and adhered to the WCC’s programmatic objectives. “The time of the white man is over,” he declared, adding that one must adjust to an ecumenism not dominated by the West.

Lukas Bormann (Marburg) devoted himself to Niemöller’s approach to the Bible in the Dahlem sermons, first emphasizing the importance of scriptural interpretation in the sermon and the service in a cognitive science perspective as a religious ritual. As a preacher in 1933-1937, Niemöller stood in a unique way for the religious distinctiveness of Protestantism. In his sermons on Volkstrauertag, or Heldengedenktag from 1934 on, there was no enthusiasm for war and no heroic pathos, but rather an increasing distancing from the National Socialist instrumentalization of “heroic remembrance.” The preacher addressed a “we” beyond the National Socialist state, created solidarity among those who positioned themselves beyond National Socialism, and strengthened the individual. Admittedly, an ethical orientation in the sense of a ‘church for others’ (Kirche für andere) was missing.

Matthias Ehmann (Ewersbach) pointed to a forward-looking theological contribution of Niemöller to the transnational responsibility of the churches. At the WCC World Conference on Migration in June 1961, Niemöller, at the beginning of his term as one of the presidents of the WCC, called on the churches to show solidarity with non-Christian migrants. He referred to the image of the Good Samaritan and stressed that mission to people in need took precedence over church structures. An increase in churches founded by migrants was to be expected, he said. Ehmann praised Niemöller’s speech as a differentiated contribution to interreligious dialogue that took into account the growing diversity of the churches.

Section IV turned to the leading figure of the Pfarrernotbund and later church president. Thomas Martin Schneider (Koblenz-Landau) characterized the Barmen Theological Declaration (BTD) as a church-political and theological consensus paper and confession of basic Reformation truths, which was received differently in the two wings of the Confessing Church. The BTD did not contain a political program, but after 1945 it was claimed politically for different goals. It had been called the “sum” of Niemöller’s theology, although as late as 1934 he referred to theological teachers such as Wehrung and Althaus who were in tension with the BTD. He was concerned with the one ecclesiastical office of preaching, whereas the fourth Barmen thesis speaks of ministries of equal rank. Niemöller had no understanding for Lutheran concerns—the experience of Barmen was more important to him than the theology of the BTD. All in all, he only took up the Christocentrism of the first thesis, but showed hardly any interest in the other theses.

Gisa Bauer (Karlsruhe) looked at the relationship between Niemöller and the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau (EKHN) from the perspective of the history of perception. In the official self-representation of the EKHN, Niemöller stood for a political church. The radical wing of the EKHN had voted for him as church president. Pastors of this direction had been strongly positioned in Hesse; the regional council of brethren had elected him as chairman in 1946. Niemöller helped to shape the first thrusts of the politicization of the EKHN, after which he became its symbol. The commemorative publication of 1982 and funeral and memorial speeches of 1984 elevated him to the pantheon of the political church. It is difficult to separate the symbolic and the historical person, Bauer pointed out.

Jolanda Gräßel-Farnbauer (Marburg) showed how Niemöller positioned himself in the process towards equality for women in church positions. While he was initially ambiguous in the church synod and in 1955 still argued from the basis of creation-related biological differences between men and women, in 1958-1959 he argued for a law on women pastors, which paved the way for equality. In 1969, he even proposed Marianne Queckbörner, then only 37 years old, to the synod as church president, but Helmut Hild was elected. The EKHN still does not have a woman as church president at its head. How it would have developed if Niemöller’s suggestion had been followed stimulates the historical imagination considerably. Niemöller had taken a positive attitude towards women vicars in the church struggle. He did not share the anti-feminism of some representatives of the Confessing Church, who denied women the administration of the sacraments.

Finally, Section V focused on Barmen and the legacy of the Confessing Church, with two lectures examining Niemöller in the light of his relationship with two fellow Confessing Church members in the postwar period. Gerard C. den Hertog (Amsterdam) spoke about Niemöller’s and Hans Joachim Iwand’s common path from national Protestantism to the ecumenical peace movement. Iwand came from eastern Germany, was a soldier and became involved in the Freikorps in 1921. As a theologian, he presented a polemical Luther. Niemöller had known Iwand since September 1934 and had received his Luther studies, which advocated the doctrine of justification, in the concentration camp. As a Dortmund pastor, Iwand was committed to Jews; there was no anti-Semitism in him. Niemöller had been “the closest of friends” with him and had written to him: “We understand each other before we talk to each other.”

On the other hand, Hannah M. Kreß (Münster) made clear how the relationship between Niemöller and Hans Asmussen changed between 1945 and 1948. The latter had been involved in the Reich Church since 1933, was active at the Church College in Berlin and supported Else Niemöller during her husband’s imprisonment. Conflicts broke out in Treysa, where Asmussen became the head of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (EKD) church chancellery. He was concerned that the brethren councils might gain too much influence among the Lutherans. In a letter to him in 1946, Niemöller had reckoned with the founding of the EKD. It lacked the connection to Barmen. He feared an understanding of ministry in the EKD that he considered to be hierarchical in the style of Catholicism. Asmussen had come into conflict with the Council of the EKD and left office in 1948. In that year, Niemöller had broken off his friendship with him. An important role in the alienation process was played by the disagreement over the church’s participation in public political activities.

Arno Helwig (Berlin) reported on remembrance work at the Martin Niemöller House in Berlin-Dahlem, which served as a peace center in the intellectual environment of Gollwitzer and Marquardt from 1980 to 2007 and was shaped as such by Pastor Claus-Dieter Schulze. After 2007, it became a memory and learning space. The former pastor in Dahlem, Marion Gardei, is now the commissioner for remembrance culture in the Evangelische Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz (EKBO). In 2018-2019, the house was reopened with a permanent exhibition covering the topics of Jews, human rights, social responsibility and resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. Niemöller’s work after 1945, however, is almost completely missing.

What remains of the Confessing Church? Who carries on the memory of it? Harry Oelke (Munich) took up these questions about the significance of the legacy of Barmen for today’s Protestantism, limiting himself to the German Protestantism of the regional churches. Four phases of the culture of remembrance of the Confessing Church can be distinguished: (1) a contemporary witness-supported communicative memory formation (1945-1970), in which church history was written by and about participants and, with the exception of Niemöller’s call to repentance, no self-critical remembrance was practiced (“Confessing Church myth”); (2) a politicization, polarization, and pluralization of Christian value concepts (1970-1989); (3) a canonization (1990-2005), in which the Confessing Church had become a part of Protestant identity. (4) The present perspectives (since 2005) have been characterized by the loss of contemporary witnesses, the end of the culture of excitement, an objectification of the culture of historical scholarship and, in some tension with this, a tendency towards moral evaluation.

The final discussion circled around open questions and tasks of further research. 75 years after the end of the war, there is a danger that the Protestant Church will shirk its responsibility for the legacy of the Confessing Church, especially since the EKD is planning a considerable reduction in funding for the Institute for Contemporary Church History. Who would be the bearer of the memory of the Confessing Church in the future was up in the air. Benjamin Ziemann made it clear that he was against renaming institutions that bear Niemöller’s name. It remains to be considered how Niemöller could be present in a contemporary form in the practical culture of remembrance. Dahlem, with its new exhibition, stands as an example of how the memory of Niemöller is possible in a post-migrant society.

Research will focus on clarifying open questions about Niemöller’s understanding of preaching after 1945, his ecumenical commitment against colonialism and racism, and his attitude toward the state of Israel. For this purpose, further sources have to be opened up for scholarship, such as Niemöller’s unedited sermons after 1945, the sources on his activities as president of the World Council of Churches or also as head of the administrative council of the Palestine Association. Terms such as ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘resistance’ need to be further differentiated and clarified in relation to Niemöller. When it comes to the Confessing Church, the concept of resistance should in any case not be too narrowly defined. Finally, theological and non-theological perspectives of the perception of the life and work of Martin Niemöller must be combined.

A conference volume is to be published in the series “Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte” (AKIZ.B) by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen.

* This paragraph was edited for clarity after publication.

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