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Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich, Translated and Edited by John Henry Crosby with John F. Crosby (New York: Image, 2014), 341 Pp, ISBN 978-0-385-34751-8.

By Christopher S. Morrissey, Redeemer Pacific College, Trinity Western University

An earlier and shorter version of this book review was published in The B.C. Catholic (Oct 20, 2014).

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) fled Germany to Austria, where in Vienna he founded and edited Der Christliche Ständestaat (The Christian Corporative State).

“That damned Hildebrand is the greatest obstacle for National Socialism in Austria. No one causes more harm,” fumed Franz von Papen, the Nazi ambassador to Austria, who proposed to Hitler a plan to assassinate Hitler’s public enemy number one. Because von Hildebrand’s anti-Nazi paper was so widely read, von Papen called him “the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria.”

Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher opposed to the Nazis from the earliest days. Ever since 1921 the Nazis had him on their blacklist. The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project, currently headquartered at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, oversees the translation, publication, and promotion of von Hildebrand’s work. Despite their efforts, his work continues to be not very well known.

Thanks to their newest publication, however, that fact may be changing. My Battle Against Hitler, which is being widely disseminated by arrangement with Random House’s Image Books imprint, allows us to read for ourselves the most substantial excerpt of von Hildebrand’s heroic anti-Nazi publications ever available in English.

The book also makes a significant new contribution to the historical record because it chronicles the years from 1921 to 1938 with never before published selections from von Hildebrand’s handwritten memoirs.

“It is an immense privilege,” writes the volume’s main translator, compiler, and editor, John Henry Crosby, “to present to the world the shining witness of one man who risked everything to follow his conscience and stand in defiance of tyranny.”

Many readers will be familiar with the similarly heroic witness of Protestant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But most will have not yet heard of the Catholic von Hildebrand, despite the fact that Pope Pius XII is said to have remarked, “Von Hildebrand is the twentieth-century doctor of the Church.”

Although widely quoted and attributed to Pius XII, this remark must be considered apocryphal, since uncontestable documentary evidence for it is not available, as John Henry Crosby insisted in conversation with me. Yet von Hildebrand was a friend of Eugenio Pacelli, so the remark understandably has the ring of authenticity.

But Pius XII is not the only one to direct our attention to von Hildebrand’s historical importance. “There is but one man who can stand with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both in intellectual brilliance and in bravery toward the Nazis; that man is Dietrich von Hildebrand,” writes Eric Metaxas, New York Times bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

In addition, the work of the Hildebrand Project also has more recent papal approval. “I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once said, speaking as Joseph Ratzinger.

My Battle Against Hitler makes an invaluable contribution to that intellectual history. Its publication has most likely taken so long because, during the last decades of his life, von Hildebrand produced over five thousand handwritten pages of memoirs at the request of his second wife, Alice von Hildebrand, whom he married in 1959.

His first wife, Gretchen, to whom he had been married for forty-five years, had died in 1957. Being over thirty years younger than him, Alice expressed regret at having missed out on so much of Dietrich’s life. Purely out of love, he produced the handwritten pages for her, as an intimate communication of his earlier life.

These memoirs are especially interesting because of the fact that von Hildebrand never sought to promote himself by publishing his memoirs or reprinting his essays against Nazism. It is an essential mark of his character that he was not someone who thought of himself as a hero or as someone who deserved special praise.

In spite of whatever obstacles his habitual modesty may have erected to historical inquiry, thankfully with this book we can now start to review the record for ourselves. As we read his autobiographical revelations to Alice, the immediacy of his recollections transports us into the scene in a most striking way.

Targeted for assassination because of his anti-Nazi publications, eventually von Hildebrand had to flee from Vienna on March 11, 1938. He fled across Europe, from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland to France to Portugal. In 1940, he came via Brazil to New York, where he taught philosophy until 1960 at Fordham University, where he met Alice.

When von Hildebrand first spoke out in 1921 against Nazi ideas, he had been placed on the blacklist of enemies whom they would execute immediately when they came to power. On November 8, 1923, Hitler with six hundred Storm Troopers attempted to seize power in Bavaria with the Beer Hall Putsch. The next morning, after attending 7:00 a.m. morning Mass and before teaching his 9:15 a.m. class, von Hildebrand learned of the unfolding events.

With the help of a Benedictine monk who was also von Hildebrand’s confessor, arrangements were made for him to flee to safety with his wife and son. Fortunately, as the family was in flight, the Nazi putsch was meeting with failure. The Nazi threat was averted and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on April 1, 1924.

Yet during this time, until October 1924, Hitler worked on his infamous book, Mein Kampf, which was published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926. It coldly outlined his racist agenda and insane political goals. Its title is usually translated as “My Struggle” but could also be rendered as “My Fight” or “My Battle.” Among the papers of von Hildebrand’s memoirs, one outline was found titled Mein Kampf Gegen Hitler, “My Battle Against Hitler.”

It was decided that this would make the best possible title for the posthumously published memoirs, although the book was originally developed by the Hildebrand Project under the working title He Dared Speak the Truth. Now published under its final title, My Battle Against Hitler chronicles the heroic struggle of one of the Catholic Church’s greatest philosophers and his fight against Hitler’s evil ideas. “It is precisely our struggle against evil that God wills, even when we suffer external defeat,” said von Hildebrand in a memorable phrase, alluding to the title of Hitler’s evil book.

“Dietrich von Hildebrand often quotes the Latin saying tua res agitur, which means ‘this concerns you,’” observes Crosby. “He would say his battle against Hitler concerns you. Why? Because as a human person you are no less called than von Hildebrand himself was to know, to serve, and to bear witness to truth.”

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

By Roger Newell, George Fox University

Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, the founding organizer of the famous peace prayers in the 1980s, died on 30 June, at the age of seventy-one. Not long ago, Professor Roger Newell of George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon took a party of students to visit sites of special significance in European Church history. One of their stops was in Leipzig, about which he reported as follows:

We were welcomed by the good Pastor who led us straight into the church, right up to the main altar, explaining that this was formerly reserved for the priests in centuries past, but now was open to everyone. There we got a short tour of the church building, its history and the tradition of music (including the link with J.S. Bach, who functioned mainly in the nearby Thomaskirche). Then he took us to the adjacent priests’ vestry, where he told us the story of his ministry beginning in the early 1980s. He reminded us that it was a time of increasing tension between East and West. The Cold War’s trench cut Germany in half. On both sides of the Berlin Wall, Germans grew increasingly anxious that Germany could become the battleground for Europe’s third war in this century. At the same time, what was then the government of East Germany vastly increased its police-state controls through its secret policy (the Stasi) which deployed a huge force backed by unofficial collaborators to keep tabs on any possible opponents and dissidents. It made for a highly oppressive situation where suspicion and mistrust reigned.

This was the brooding climate in which Pastor Führer opened the doors of the church to young people anxious to discuss such things. The initial gathering took place in 1981 when Pastor Führer invited people with concerns about peace and the arms race to meet at the Church late in the evening (possibly to avoid Stasi attention). He expected maybe ten or so people to come and let off some steam. But to his astonishment ten times that number showed up. They were mostly young, many of them dissidents who were not getting along with the Communist government.

Next, Führer described how he brought everyone right to the central altar, sat them on the floor of the church and laid a large rough wooden cross on the floor in their midst. He asked everyone who wanted to raise a point to take a candle, light it, and speak to their concern as they placed their candle around the cross. If the dissidents were surprised to find themselves at an old-fashioned prayer meeting, it was Pastor Führer’s turn to be surprised when every single person lit a candle, spoke a concern and shared in what turned out to be the most significant prayer meeting in the forty year history of the German Democratic Republic The sharing continued past midnight as gradually the bare wooden cross changed into a cross glowing with light. The mood of openness, freedom and acceptance was so life-giving that no one wanted to leave. It was a harbinger of things to come of which no one sitting there could have foreseen.

As I read later in the Nikolai brochure:

When we open the church to everyone who has been forced to keep silent, has been slandered or maybe even imprisoned, then no one can ever think of a church again as being simply a kind of religious museum or a temple for art aesthetics. On the contrary, Jesus is then really present in the church because we are trying to do what he did and what he wants us to do today. This is the hour of the birth of the Nikolai Church–open for everyone–also for protest groups and those living on the margin of society. Throw open the church doors! The open wings of the church door are like the wide open arms of Jesus: “Come unto me, everyone who is troubled and burdened, and I will relieve you! ” And they came and they come!

From this first event Führer would eventually arrange what he called ‘peace prayers’ to meet every Monday evening at 5 p.m. to pray for peace in both local and international situations of conflict. Later these prayers were sometimes followed by the people walking into the streets carrying candles to witness for peace and freedom. These were the largest and also the most peaceful of any such demonstrations in the GDR.

A particular moment of tension occurred in May 1989 following a blatantly fraudulent election in which the Communist party claimed to have received 98% of the votes cast. The public was outraged at such a flagrant deception. Calls for reform grew louder. The police reacted by blocking all driveways to the church, seeking to shot down the Monday prayer meetings, which they determined had become a cover for political insurrection. Nevertheless the crowds only increased.

On October 7, the GDR was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary. President Gorbachev, the author of the movement for openness and Perestroika, attended from the Soviet Union. Naturally the government did not want the occasion to be used for any kind of public expression of discontent. In Leipzig, for ten long hours police battered and bullied defenseless demonstrators who made no attempt to fight back. Many were taken away in police vehicles.

In this heightened atmosphere, just two days later, Monday 9 October, the peace prayers were to be held. The government warned protesters that any further demonstrations would not be tolerated. All day long, Führer told us, the police and military tried to intimidate them with a hideous show of force. Schools and shops in the city were shut down. Roadblocks were built. The police had guns loaded with live ammunition. Soldiers with tanks were mobilized and surrounded the central area. Extra beds and blood plasma had been assembled in the Leipzig hospitals. Rumors from many reliable sources circulated that the government intended to use the “Chinese Solution” and repeat the massacre of Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

To neutralize and perhaps disrupt the prayer meeting, 1ooo party members and Stasi went early on to the church. 600 of them filled up the nave by 2 p.m. But,as Führer described it in the brochure:

They had a job to perform. What had not been considered was the fact that these people were exposed to the word, the gospel and its impact! I was always glad the the Stasi agents heard the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount every Monday. Where else would they hear these?

So the stage was set, the actors assembled for the climatic Monday prayer service. Huge numbers came out to pray, not only at the Nikolai Church but at other churches throughout the city, which had joined the peace prayers. During the service, the atmosphere and the prayers were serenely calm. As he prepared to send the people out into the streets, Pastor Führer made a final plea to the congregation to refrain from any form of violence or provocation. The Sermon on the Mount was again read aloud.

As the doors opened for the worshipers to depart, something unforgettable happened. The 2000 people leaving the sanctuary were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands. That night an estimated 70,000 people marched around the main city streets. Though the police and the military were everywhere, Pastor Führer said: Our fear was not as big as our faith … Two hands are needed to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing. So you cannot carry stones or clubs at the same time.

As the good pastor noted:

There were thousands in the churches. Hundreds of thousands in the streets around the city centre. But not a single shattered window. This was the incredible witness to the power of non-violence. … It was an evening in the spirit of our Lord Jesus for there were no winners and no defeated. Nobody triumphed over the other, nobody lost his face. There was just a tremendous feeling of relief.

It was later reported that Horst Sindemann, a serving member of the Central Committee of the GDR, summed up both the extensive preparations of the authorities as well as their inability to know how to respond to the events of that evening:

We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.

A month later the Berlin Wall was breached, and the whole Communist empire crumbled away.

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear Friends,

Freising Cathedral, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freisinger_Dom_aussen_01.jpg.

Once again I have the privilege of introducing a new issue of reviews and notes on contemporary church history in Germany and Europe. This issue features two themes: Bavarian Catholicism under the leadership of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and Nazism as political religion.

The former is treated in an extensive report about a fascinating project to publish a critical edition of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber’s massive diary. This report is courtesy of Dr. Hubert Wolf, one of the project leaders. Complementing the report on the Faulhaber diary is a review by Kevin P. Spicer examining Thomas Forstner’s Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs, an analysis of the identity and culture of Catholic parish clergy in Upper Bavaria from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

The second theme of political religion is taken up first of all by John S. Conway in his review of the interesting new book by Rainer Bucher, provocatively entitled Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion. Then, Kyle Jantzen assesses two recent articles by Samual Koehne, who examines the relationship between Nazism and Christianity from both the perspective of the Nazi ideologues and their concept of “Positive Christianity” and from the perspective of conservative Protestants in Württemberg.

Three other reviews round out our issue: Matthew D. Hockenos on an edited volume of “Resistance sermons” and John S. Conway on two wider European matters: church resistance in Norway and the British Archbishop Cosmo Lang.

We hope, as always, that you enjoy the various reviews and other notes on contemporary church history. Feel free to add your comments at the end of the articles. We always welcome feedback and debate on the books and other material we take up in Contemporary Church History Quarterly.

Best wishes in this season of Pentecost.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

By Hubert Wolf, University of Münster [1]

Ever since 2012, a corpus of sources has become accessible in the Archdiocesan Archive of Munich and Freising, which historians have long awaited: the diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952), which were predominantly written in a shorthand called “Gabelsberger.” Johannes Waxenberger (1915-2010), the last secretary of the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had taken the diaries – against the archbishop”s testamentary will – and kept them in a cardboard box under his bed for decades. That the cardinal had kept a diary was known to researchers. Waxenberger, however, refused to release the records and only transcribed singular pages of the diaries for the purpose of a few academic studies. It was only in 1999 that he concluded an agreement with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich until 2008, according to which the diaries were to be restored to the Archiepiscopal See of Munich after his death, which occurred on June 25, 2010.

This longtime-hidden treasure will now be edited by researchers and made accessible online for anyone to view. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a long-term project for a duration of twelve years, for which the historian Prof Dr. Andreas Wirsching, head of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), and I are responsible. Concise but elaborate annotations will furnish information on the individuals and the most important issues recorded in the diaries. The edition is not only intended for use by historians and theologians, but also by scholars from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Sources edited online are also suitable for the use in university teaching, which the “Critical Online Edition of the Nuncial Reports of Eugenio Pacelli (1917-1929)” in Münster has already proven. The new project will profit from this in many ways. The first texts that Faulhaber wrote during the eventful period from 1917 to 1919, which are of utmost importance for his biography, will be available online by late 2014 at www.faulhaber-edition.de.

A close look behind the scenes of official correspondences

Michael Faulhaber was bishop of Speyer from 1911 to 1917 and archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1917 until his death in 1952. He was of humble birth, being the son of a baker and farmer from the Lower Franconian village of Heidenfeld near Schweinfurt. In 1913, however, he was ennobled and created a cardinal in 1921. Faulhaber was an excellent theologian, an articulate pioneer of political Catholicism, and a champion of Catholic interests. His influence reached far beyond Germany”s borders and those of the Catholic Church. Faulhaber had marvelous connections with the Bavarian people and with the elites of Church, politics, nobility and the media at home and abroad. He was a close friend of Pope Pius XII, but also negotiated with Adolf Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer. The numerous interlocutors that Faulhaber received day by day came from all social classes. It is especially through his published sermons that he reached a mass audience. Already in his lifetime, church members admired him, but he remained highly controversial, especially due to his stance during the period of National Socialism.

The fact that a representative of the Church wrote down his experiences and thoughts in a detailed diary for over four decades is a stroke of luck for historians. Since the Catholic Church is a “global player” and Faulhaber had excellent foreign contacts, there are various possibilities to approach the issues mentioned in the diaries on an internationally comparative level.

The diaries represent a corpus of sources that is unique in terms of quality and quantity. They have been fully preserved for the period from 1911 to 1952. The diaries consist of 32 volumes in notebook format comprising more than 4,000 pages that primarily contain succinct entries on the individuals Faulhaber met as well as brief summaries of their conversations. In total, Faulhaber recorded about 52,000 visits. These diaries are often referred to as a “visitors’ diary,” in order to distinguish them from other, less comprehensive diaries that Faulhaber kept. He, however, used it also to record information he considered important with regard to his views on key political, social or religious events. Whenever he considered such issues to a greater depth or had particularly important conversations, he added ample supplementary sheets, of which approximately 1,000 have been recorded so far. The average length of a supplementary sheet ranges from one to four pages in octavo. The edition will thus offer a detailed view of approximately 15,000 days of Faulhaber”s life.

According to what is known about him so far, Faulhaber was a great and reliable observer, who mostly wrote soberly, but sometimes used very frank words to phrase his opinions. His records were not only influenced by his own observations and experiences, but also by messages received orally and by letter and by reports from newspapers and radio transmissions. He then enhanced such communication with his own interpretations. The entries are usually brief, being written down shortly after the depicted event had taken place. The notes apparently served him as a sort of reminder, not being intended for publication, which is why Faulhaber had the possibility to write down confidential and maybe even incriminating contents of his conversations.

The source is therefore to be considered a highly authentic relic that was transmitted unintentionally. The private records allow for an exciting view of a church dignitary”s emotional world and behind the scenes of official correspondences and official statements. They complement the corpora of sources already accessible, so that new perspectives and motives for his actions may be discovered, which could so far scarcely be delineated. The diaries represent a key to open up his comprehensive papers and to analyze them from particular perspectives. Ahead of schedule, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter made the larger part of Faulhaber”s papers in the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising available to research in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is easily accessible, but has only been analyzed rudimentarily. There is no comparable corpus for other important German church representatives.

The supplementary sheets are scattered among Faulhaber’s papers, but many of them emerged recently in the records turned over by Waxenberger. So far, only a few supplementary sheets have been edited by Ludwig Volk (Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917-1945, 2 vol., Mainz 1975/1978). These documents are frequently quoted by researchers and give proof of this source’s potential for historical research. Ludwig Volk saw only a brief selection of the many items Waxenberger withheld from Faulhaber’s papers. It may thus be assumed that those supplementary sheets that are politically charged are only casino online now soon to be made accessible to researchers and the general public.

Gabelsberger Centre of Excellence is to make accessible further archival holdings

The historical analysis of the diaries and supplementary sheets is complicated by the fact that it was only the dates and names of his interlocutors that he wrote down in longhand, as well as geographical, political and ecclesiastical or religious terms, though often in abbreviated form. For the rest he used Gabelsberger, which was the most widespread short hand in Germany before the introduction of the German Unified Shorthand (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) in 1924. Today, only few experts know how to decipher Gabelsberger. The long-term project therefore also comprises stenographic training, which pursues the aim of establishing a centre of excellence for shorthand in Munich. This training was financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which in general sponsored the preliminary work of the long-term project. With the help of those newly trained experts on the cultural technique of reading Gabelsberger further comprehensive archival holdings will be made accessible to researchers. A survey has revealed that German archives hold ample collections of the nineteenth and twentieth century written in Gabelsberger.

Online edition offers numerous advantages

The online edition aspires to offer a flexible, multidimensional technique of editing, which permits the contemporary display of two textual versions of each diary entry in arbitrary combination: first, the scanned facsimile; second, the precise transcription; and third, an extensive reading version that contains references to supplementary sheets, spelled-out abbreviations, other possible readings and indications of the respective stages. Annotations will appear as pop-ups. The database-based online edition offers numerous advantages compared to a printed volume:

(1) Accessibility: the project supports the principle of Open Access. The diaries and the supplementary sheets will be accessible all over the world, for free and comparably fast and easy.

(2) Efficiency: an online edition is considerably more low-priced and resource-efficient, especially given the amplitude of sources.

(3) Flexibility and velocity: the texts and the pertaining annotations are to be uploaded in sections – and thereby accessible more quickly. Moreover, particularly interesting parts of various years can be transcribed and made accessible online together with the respective supplementary sheets, even before the other documents of that particular year are transcribed and all supplementary sheets have been retrieved. Belated additions and modifications are not a problem, for instance in case further relevant documents are found among Faulhaber”s comprehensive papers.

(4) Transparency and meticulousness: an online edition offers the opportunity to mark cases of doubt as well as various readings more thoroughly than a traditional print edition. This is a huge advantage considering the complexity of the material”s content and the difficulties that are to be expected when deciphering Gabelsberger. The multidimensional technique of editing allows for excellent attention to detail as well as for legibility.

(5) Linking possibilities: the documents in the database can be linked with each other, but also with external corpora of sources, such as image or audio files.

(6) User-friendliness: among the most important advantages of the online edition are the comprehensive search options, the possibility to copy the texts easily and the multi-linking with the entries in the biographical as well as in the keyword databases. Moreover, online editions are comparably easy to analyze from a statistic point of view, which may raise new questions, e.g. as far as writing processes and the development of terminologies are concerned.

(7) Interactivity: online editions make it easier for users to forward advice and recommendations to the project team. There is going to be a contact form on the website of the Faulhaber-edition.

The online edition is based on software called “DENQ” (Digital edition of contemporary sources), which was developed by Dr. Jörg Hörnschemeyer from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome in cooperation with the DHI London. The IFZ assumes the hosting of the database and of the website as well as of the project”s internal server platform, which contains a protected area. Long-term storage is secured within the frame of the Institute”s close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library.

State of research and possible questions

The biographical literature on Faulhaber”s fellow bishops is not very broad yet. Nonetheless, it offers a basis to compare what is representative and what is specific of Faulhaber”s biography. Neither a biography based on source material nor partial biographies of Munich”s spiritual leader have been published so far. A history of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the first half of the twentieth century is missing as well.

What is more, the edition is going to be illuminating on many fundamental questions of Germany’s and Europe’s history. In his notes, Faulhaber reported on the German Empire, the First World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation period as well as on the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. This period saw several surges of secularization and re-confessionalization as well as fundamental theological developments. Many questions that Faulhaber was confronted with are still current today, and essential for the self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

Faulhaber”s diaries and the pertaining supplementary sheets are of particular interest as far as several fundamental issues are concerned, which are in various ways interlinked: the relationship of religion and politics, especially that of the Catholic Church and the “Third Reich,” the relationships with other religions and confessions, and the Church”s structures and networks. Moreover, it is concerned with questions of cultural, religious, and theological history and deals with issues such as emotions and piety.

The interdisciplinary team of the long-term project began its work on October 31, 2013 and cooperates closely with Dr Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising. Members are Dr. Erich Ruff, an expert on Gabelsberger, Dr. Philipp Gahn, a Catholic theologian, Dr. Peer Oliver Volkmann, a historian, Matthias Bornschlegel, a computer scientist, and Carina Knorz and Franziska Nicolay, graduate students, who will critically examine the diaries in their dissertations.

Links related to the project:

Hubert Wolf: http://www.uni-muenster.de/FB2/personen/mnkg/seminar/wolf.html

Andreas Wirsching: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/andreas-wirsching/

Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis: http://www.pacelli-edition.de/

Jörg Hörnschemeyer: http://dhi-roma.it/team.html

Peter Pfister: http://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/Page005788.aspx

Erich Ruff: http://www.erichruff.gmxhome.de/

Philipp Gahn: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/philipp-gahn/

Peer Oliver Volkmann: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/peer-oliver-volkmann/

Matthias Bornschlegel: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/matthias-bornschlegel/

Carina Knorz: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/carina-knorz/

Franziska Nicolay: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/franziska-nicolay/

[1] I would like to thank Elisabeth-Marie Richter for translating the present article and Holger Arning for his contributions to the concept of the text.

Memorial Speech: Dr. Margot Kaessmann on the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Memorial Speech: Dr. Margot Kaessmann on the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz

By Margot Kaessmann

On 17 December 2013, the City of Berlin and the Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia honoured the historian Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz with a prestigious memorial service on the occasion of the 120^th anniversary of her birth. The memorial speech was given by the former Bishop of Hannover, Dr. Margot Kaessmann, who is currently representative of the Council of the EKD for the Reformation Jubilee of 2017. We are pleased to publish excerpts from her speech and thank Dr. John S. Conway for his translation of the text.

Margot Kaessmann: Memorial speech on Elisabeth Schmitz (1893-1977)

Elisabeth Schmitz was born on 23 August 1893. I am grateful that 120years later André Schmitz and Manfred Gailus have taken the initiative to honour her this evening in Berlin, and also that the present Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg Markus Droege is here with us. She lived here in Berlin from 1915 to 1943, and from 1933 onwards she saw at close range how damaging the Nazi ideology truly was, which led her to recognize the dangers and to protest, quietly but unmistakably. It is now 75 years since the notorious Crystal Night pogrom in 1938, but Elisabeth Schmitz had already foreseen such disasters. As a result she felt obliged to resign her duties as a teacher, fearing that her integrity would be compromised.

Today’s commemoration must be seen as an exceptional event. This “protesting Protestant”, as Manfred Gailus calls her in his biography, has hardly been known, and much too little recognized. But as he says: “Protestantism in Germany in the 21st century will want to accord this woman a high place, and even sooner or later to put her in the category of Protestant saints.” Of course Protestants have a problem with saints, since they believe that only God deserves to be worshipped, not men or women. For people in the Reformation tradition, the communion of saints is reserved for those whose life and death was totally committed to God, as is recognized in Article 21 of the Augsburg Confession of 1530.

…

But Manfred Gailus is quite right to assert that we can learn from the example set by Elisabeth Schmitz’ faithful witness and her self-sacrificing commitment to others. It is high time that we acknowledge what she achieved. When people talk about the Resistance Movement in the Third Reich, we all know about such names as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, or Hans von Dohnanyi. But women’s names are mentioned only as supportive wives. But of course there were women active in this resistance, and not only in the “White Rose” circle, such as Sophie Scholl, or in the Red Chapel network. One of them was Elisabeth Schmitz. She was originally from Hanau, but worked here in Berlin, but finally went back to Hanau where she died at the age of 84 in 1977. Only seven people attended her funeral.

Why are we commemorating her now? One of her pupils was Dietgard Meyer, who later became a pastor in Hessen. I myself was ordained in 1985 in Hessen and so learnt to know Dietgard Meyer. She told me about Dr. Katharina Staritz, who was provisionally ordained in Breslau as a “city vicar” in 1938, and who was arrested because of her engagement in the resistance, but whose status was not recognized after the war. Only in the last few years did I learn about Elisabeth Schmitz, but I was quickly appreciative of her early and clear recognition of the unbearable violations of human dignity and rights by the Nazis. From Manfred Gailus’ biography I learnt how well established Elisabeth Schmitz was in her circle of well-educated women, such as Dr. Carola Barth, who taught religion, and also Dr. Elisabet von Harnack, or particularly later with Dr. Martha Kassel, a medical doctor, who was a Protestant of Jewish origin. She had good contacts with Professor Elisabeth Schiemann, and also with such colleagues as Dr. Elisabeth Abegg and Margarete Behrens. These were among the first generation of women to be particularly well educated, and took advantage of this fact to express their views with vigor. This gave them a capacity for a critical approach to affairs, and their freedom and independence therefore made them skeptical towards the allurements of the National Socialist ideology.

Already in 1933 Elisabeth Schmitz had expressed her outrage about the injustice and cruelties inflicted upon those of Jewish origin. This was a time when many in the church thought that matters would improve after the Nazis took power. But Elisabeth Schmitz was more sanguine. As Gailus noted: “She was deeply involved and offended by the daily humiliations inflicted on her ‘non-aryan’ friends Martha Kassel, and her brother the lawyer Heinrich Kassel, as well as on other friends and acquaintances. She was also influenced by belonging to a circle of Jewish intellectuals around Julius Bab, by her reading of the writings of Karl Barth and by her extended correspondence with this Swiss theologian from April 1933 onwards.” These were the factors which affected her after that date, and brought her to join the circle led by Pastor Gerhard Jacobi in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial parish. In 1934 she took the step of signing the “Red Card” indicating her willingness to join the Confessing Church group in this parish.

In 1935 already she wrote a memorandum urging her church to stand up against the discrimination being inflicted on the Jews. She wrote: “For the past two and a half years a severe persecution has been inflicted on a portion of our people because of their racial origin, including a portion of our own parish membership. The victims of this persecution have suffered dreadful distress both outwardly and inwardly but this is not widely known, which makes the guilt of the German people all the more reprehensible.”

Elisabeth Schmitz had studied history, German, and theology in order to teach in a secondary high school. She graduated in 1920 as a pupil of Friedrich Meinecke in Berlin, which was an unusual achievement for a woman at that time. She was then granted her teaching certificate, and from April 1929 she was promoted to be a senior teacher in the Berlin school system. One of her pupils described her as being “quietly reserved, concentrating on the lesson materials, but both positive and demanding in her requirements from us. Her dress was very modest, her hair parted in the middle and held up with a comb. All of which gave her a slightly old-fashioned look, which didn’t inspire us. Nevertheless she succeeded in gaining our respect. Her quiet authority made us speechless.”

These pupils didn’t know anything about what she did outside the school. But in fact she was a member of Helmut Gollwitzer’s “Dogmatic Study Circle.” Between 1933 and 1936 she conducted an extensive correspondence with Karl Barth in the hopes of getting him to adopt a public stance on the subject of the situation of the Jews in Germany. In these early years she received two answers. From her standpoint, this persecution of the Jews and the silence of the Church in response was a vital matter, but Barth at that time regarded this only as a side-issue. This seems to me to denote a vital difference among the active members of the Confessing Church who were trying to live out their Christian convictions. Was this really an issue about the true nature of the Church? Or was it merely a matter of standing up for the rights of the persecuted Jews? Or was the Church failing in its most essential obligation when it did not oppose vehemently enough the oppression, the betrayal of values, and the disrespect for human beings?

I was particularly struck by finding a very similar protest being made by Edith Stein, who was a Catholic convert from Judaism, writing to Pope Pius XI in April 1933. But she, like Elisabeth Schmitz, got no answer. But Schmitz carried on her commitment by writing an extensive memorandum about the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and presenting this to the Synod of the Confessing Church which was held in Berlin in September 1935. But she got no reply. It is still not clear just who actually received this document. It would seem that its contents were talked about, but that it was never officially presented to the synod.

An interesting fact is that for a long while the authorship of this document was ascribed not to Elisabeth Schmitz, but to another member of the Confessing Church, Marga Meusel. Not until 1999 was Elisabeth Schmitz’ authorship recognized, and then only by chance when a large number of documents were discovered left behind in Hanau after her death. But the question still remains: why did she herself not take more trouble to have its contents better known even after the Nazi regime was overthrown?

This memorandum is an impressive document. Its author was an alert observer of the damages inflicted by the Nazi regime. For example, in describing the fate of children, she wrote: “Children ought to have the first claim on our sympathy. But now? In many large cities, Jewish children are sent to Jewish schools. Or their parents send them to Catholic schools, since in their view they will be better protected than in Protestant schools. And what about the converted Protestant children? And what happens to Jewish children in smaller communities where there is no Jewish school, or in the countryside? In at least one small town I have heard that the exercise books of Jewish children are torn up, and that their breakfast snacks are thrown in the gutter. Christian children are doing this, while Christian parents, teachers and pastors allow this to happen.” And to think that all this was written three years before Crystal Night!

Why did this protest fail to gain any support? Was it because the Confessing Church was more concerned about safeguarding its own existence than in saving the Jews? Or was it because the author was a woman and not a properly ordained pastor?

Elisabeth Schmitz was denounced because she had given hospitality to Martha Kassel, a Christian of Jewish origin. From 1935 on, she had increasing problems at her Lankwitz school because she couldn’t agree to “educate the children in the spirit of National Socialism”. So after the Crystal Night she asked to be allowed to retire. She was evacuated from Berlin in 1943 and returned to her parents’ home in Hanau. But from 1946 to 1958, she was once again teaching as before. She evidently had close contacts with her friends and former students, but never raised the subject of her memorandum.

I am concerned about this story. For one thing, it shows how early the injustices of Nazi policy were recognized. Everyone could have known what was happening. Look at the questions she posed so frankly in 1935: “Why do the ‘non-aryan’ Christians feel so deserted by the Church both locally and at the international level? Why does the Church do nothing? Why do they allow these palpable injustices to be perpetrated?”

Of course this raises the question about the nature of the Church. For her, it wasn’t just a question of the Church’s freedom to witness, as Karl Barth assumed, or about the fate of the baptized Jews, which so concerned Marga Meusel. She was much more concerned about the fate of the Church as Church if it was not prepared to stand up for the rights of those being maltreated. This was happening in front of these churchmen’s own eyes, or even with their participation. On the other hand, it is unforgivable that this memorandum was not honored after 1945. The church leaders were surely guilty of a collective amnesia, when only a few heroes were selected to be remembered, but their own failures were pushed out of sight and forgotten.

…

But today we should really celebrate Elisabeth Schmitz and be thankful for her stalwart witness. And we should be encouraged to follow her example in the life of our churches today. Her story is one which needs to be resurrected from the archives and kept alive in the day-to-day practice of our community. In this way Elisabeth Schmitz can truly be described as a Protestant saint, whose life and witness will remain of vital importance for us today and for the future.

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: William Skiles

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

New Research on Nazism: William Skiles

By William Skiles, University of California, San Diego

William Skiles is a Ph.D Candidate in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego. Here is a brief description of his dissertation research. Mr. Skiles can be reached at wskiles@ucsd.edu.

Historians of the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany have closely examined the establishment of the oppositional Confessing Church (die Bekennende Kirche) in 1934, as well as the institutional conflicts between factions and figures within the movement and also with the regime and its supporters. Yet the approach of most historians has focused on the institution, its leaders, and its persecution by the Nazi regime, leaving essentially unexamined the most elemental task of the pastor – that is, preaching. My research explores the Confessing Church through the sermons its pastors preached Sunday after Sunday, for holidays and weddings and funerals, and even in the dark corners of concentration camps.

I am concerned with finding answers to a few key questions. First, do the sermons of the Confessing Church reveal expressions of condemnation or support for National Socialism or Adolf Hitler? In other words, did the pastors enter into a public debate about the Nazi regime from their position of influence behind the pulpit? Second, how do these sermons express views either in support or antagonistic towards Jews and Judaism? How often do we see cases of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism preached, or conversely, how often do we see the Jews encouraged or esteemed as religious cousins in Nazi Germany? And lastly, just how often do we see Confessing Church sermons offer dissent, opposition, or even resistance to the Nazi regime. Given their unique role in Nazi Germany as professionals who had the opportunity to speak to the German population about Jews and their tradition, what did they say and how did they say it? And in answering these questions, I aim to understand how these sermons may have contributed to the social and religious milieu of the Protestant Church and, in a wider scope, Nazi Germany.

Of course, one of the most difficult problems is determining what constitutes opposition or resistance. I have examined over 900 sermons to find any expressions about Nazism or Hitler, and also about Jews and Judaism. Categorizing comments about Adolf Hitler and National Socialism is much more straight-forward, as political comments in a sermons stand out as unusual and purposeful in a sermon. For example, a pastor might condemn National Socialism as a false ideology or an ideology in direct opposition to Christianity; or a pastor would criticize Hitler as a false messiah or leader, or condemn other Nazi leaders for their persecution of the German churches.

On the other hand, analyzing comments about Jews and Judaism is more complicated. Naturally, we expect Christian pastors to preach on the Old Testament, to tell the stories contained in this book. Often the pastors’ presentations of these stories is without implication for the support or prejudice of Jews in Nazi Germany, they are simply re-iterations of old stories for a new audience. Therefore, I pay particular attention to comments that reflect views of Jews and Judaism relevant to the current situation in Nazi Germany. I did not catalogue more mundane examples of pastors discussing the traditions of the Jewish people, such as reiterations of the story of Jonah and the whale, for example. Nevertheless, the fact that these Confessing Church pastors preached on the Old Testament and held up Hebrew and Jewish figures as heroes or moral and spiritual examples demonstrates not only their appreciation of the Old Testament as a sacred text, but differentiates them from the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christian movement (Glaubensbewegung “Deutsche Christen”).

This research is an original contribution to the historiography because for the first time we will have an in-depth analysis of a variety of messages delivered by Confessing Church pastors in their sermons to their communities of faith. This will give us greater insight into the nature and the degree of dissent, opposition, and resistance in the everyday ministry of the church, and also provide some insight about public opinion expressed from the pulpit from week to week, whether explicitly or cryptically. In addition, I am interested in how the Nazi regime perceived these sermons and dealt with pastors who were deemed too vocal – the Gestapo repots are superb documents in this regard. Lastly, my research will advance our understanding of the social world of Germans in the Nazi dictatorship, particularly the values and priorities of their communities of faith, and how sermons may have informed political, social, and theological perspectives. In the end, we may better be able to answer to what extent Confessing Church pastors spoke out for the Jews or against the Nazi regime, or as was too often the case, simply kept silent.

Review of David Bankier, Dan Michman, Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Current State of Research

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of David Bankier, Dan Michman, Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Current State of Research (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2012).

By Jacques Kornberg, University of Toronto

This book, on an enduring controversy, offers something new. Based on a workshop in 2009, which was jointly organized by the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem and Reverend Roberto Spataro of the Salesian Theological Institute of Saints Peter and Paul in Jerusalem, the book aims for dialogue rather deepening controversy. There is a story behind this unusual aim. Relations with the Vatican had deteriorated over statements in the Yad Vashem museum that Pope Pius XII did nothing about the genocide of European Jewry during World War II. This charge led the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, Archbishop Antonio Franco, to threaten to boycott the 2007 annual memorial ceremony on the Holocaust held at Yad Vashem. Negotiations led Franco to withdraw his threat. In return, Yad Vashem somewhat softened its statement on the pope, mentioning another point of view, that papal neutrality might have helped the Church rescue Jews, and that final judgment awaits opening the wartime archives. Still it stuck to its view that the pope’s record was one of “moral failure.”

BankierPius The workshop was a further attempt to mend frayed relations. Yad Vashem and the Reverend Roberto Spataro (acting “on behalf of the Nuncio”) each chose five scholars for the workshop. The latter: Andrea Tornielli, Matteo Napolitano, Grazia Loparco, Jean-Dominique Durand, and Thomas Brechenmacher; the former: Paul O’Shea, Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, Sergio Minerbi, and Dina Porat. Summing up at the end, the Reverend Spataro commented: “we met in an atmosphere of confidence, trust and mutual respect.”

The book is organized around key issues: Pacelli’s personality and the Jews, which also covers his policies as Secretary of State and later as Pope; Pius XII and rescue in Italy, which dealt with Vatican policies during the German occupation of Rome; post-war assistance to fleeing Nazis and policies on hidden Jewish children, which covers the infamous “rat-line” and Vatican policies on returning hidden Jewish children to families or to Jewish institutions. All of these subjects have long been examined by scholars, but always bear re-assessment especially when new evidence emerges.

Though originating in political stroking and mutual deference, the book has a good deal of scholarly value. For one, it avoids the hyperboles of overheated debate. Discussion is focussed on key documents, thus firmly grounded, foregoing sweeping generalizations. Of course a document’s meaning is not self-evident but subject to varying interpretations. This is what makes the book valuable.

Some participants introduce new archival documents; some reread old and well-known ones. Andrea Tornielli argues that Pacelli acted to alleviate the Jewish plight. He points to a Pacelli letter of 16 November 1917 to the Foreign Minister of Bavaria. Pacelli, Nuncio to Bavaria, urged the Foreign Minister to safeguard the Jews of Jerusalem, endangered by Ahmed Gamal Pasha, the Turkish military governor of Syria (including Palestine), who threatened to expel them. Ahmed Gamal saw Zionism as an enemy of Turkish rule and took steps to remove Jewish settlements, as part of an overall policy of repression of Arabs and Armenians in Syria during World War I

Next, Tornielli notes a Pacelli letter of 1938 as Vatican Secretary of State, opposing a law forbidding Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita) in Poland. Tornielli translates Pacelli’s words: the law “would constitute a real persecution against the Jews.” The letter about shechita is published in the appendix to the book. Another report notes that Pope Pius XI brought up the matter in talks with Polish bishops.

These documents challenge long-held views, based on multiple documents, of Pacelli’s public silence over crimes against Jews, including the German pogrom of November 1938. These long-held views are articulated by others in this book.

Jean-Dominique Durand also argues the case for Pacelli. He points to a document, this time a well-known report of 19 August 1933 by Ivone Kirkpatrick, British chargé d’affaires to the Vatican, to R. Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the British Foreign Office, recounting a conversation he had with the Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli. Durand quotes Kirkpatrick: “Cardinal Pacelli criticized the German government’s internal policy, the persecution of the Jews, their actions against their political opponents, and the regime of terror to which the whole nation was submitted.” What Durand left out is crucial and weakens his argument. Kirkpatrick wrote that Pacelli’s views were “for private consumption only. I do not think there is any question of any public expression by the Vatican of disapproval of the German government.”

It is gratifying to note that after over fifty years of scholarship on the role of the Vatican in the 1930s and 1940s, wide consensus has been achieved on some issues. Most scholars now agree on Pacelli’s early assessment of Nazism as an enemy of civilization and of the Church. Few see the concordat signed with Nazi Germany in July 1933, as anything else than a harsh necessity. The concordat did not carry any endorsement of Nazi rule. Indeed, the Vatican sought a concordat with Bolshevik Russia as well, but failed to reach an agreement. In addition, as Torielli points out, the first international agreement signed with Nazi Germany was not the concordat, but the Four Power Pact signed by Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in mid-June 1933, requiring mutual consultations on all foreign policy issues in the spirit of the League of Nations, the Locarno Pact and the Briand-Kellogg Pact.

Other issues would be better illuminated by the opening of the Vatican archives for the pontificate of Pope Pius XII. One controversy is about whether Pius XII acted out of any concern for the fate of Jewish-Italians, more particularly Jewish-Romans, during the German occupation of Italy. We know that he was advised not to issue any protests against Germany during the occupation, because Hitler’s volatile rages may well have led to a German occupation of the Vatican. Documents also show that Pius sought to dampen polarization between Italians and German occupying forces, because he feared a communist uprising in Rome. But was rescuing Jews part of his strategy?

Consensus does exist on how to interpret the absence of a written papal directive to Catholic institutions to rescue Jews. The pope would not have undertaken such a recklessly, transparent measure in view of the German occupation. Further, it was not papal policy to direct Catholics to risk their lives by helping Jews evade deportation. In summary: the pope wanted to distance the Vatican from anything provocative. However, Grazia Loparco points to Vatican undersecretary Giovanni Montini’s (later Pope Paul VI), response to a Jesuit request for guidance on whether to help rescue Jews, that it was their own responsibility. She goes on to point out that we do not know whether or how much face-to-face personal encouragement or approval Vatican officials provided on the issue of rescue. Pius XII implicitly encouraged rescue in a statement to the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano of 25/26 October 1943, where he spoke of the “universally paternal charity of the Supreme Pontiff [which] …does not pause before boundaries of nationality, religion or descent.” But he did not go any further than this. He did not protest the round-up of Jewish-Romans on 16 October 1943, though his defenders argue that the round-ups in Rome ceased simply because he threatened protest through German diplomatic channels. But the evidence for this, based on timing, is weak. Indeed, after an interval, deportations of Jewish-Romans continued, though many by now had moved from their homes and were in hiding. My own view is that rescuing Jews was far less important to him than having a non-confrontational German occupation.

A final controversy deals with the aid Vatican officials provided to Nazi war criminals seeking to flee to South America. Michael Phayer poses the question: “Did the Pope know what was happening? ” He makes a strong case for “yes.” The reason: the pope hoped to supply South America with fervent anticommunists.

The lessons of this book are that documents are often slippery; they too often can support conflicting interpretations; that what is omitted in reading documents is as important as what is left in; and that further documentation through the opening of the wartime Vatican documents is essential.

Review of Carsten Linden, Die Bedeutung des Beziehungsgeflechts der Osnabrücker ev.-luth. Pastoren für den Verlauf der Osnabrücker Kirchenpolitik 1907-1936

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Carsten Linden, Die Bedeutung des Beziehungsgeflechts der Osnabrücker ev.-luth. Pastoren für den Verlauf der Osnabrücker Kirchenpolitik 1907-1936 (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac Verlag, 2012), 2 Vol., 960 Pp.

By Hansjörg Buss, Universität des Saarlandes

Carsten Linden’s work, accepted by the University of Osnabrück as a doctoral thesis in 2012, examines the networks of protestant pastors in the Osnabrück church district in the first third of the twentieth century. As to method, it is based on social network analysis (in the sense that concept is used by German historian Wolfgang Reinhard), attributing to the interpersonal relationship between these pastors great importance in determining issues of church policy (p. 17). Despite some changes in these relationships, there was a lot of continuity: of nine pastors serving their parish in 1910, four still held their ministry in 1936.

The work is divided into four “complexes” which Linden has assigned to the years 1907-1910, 1920, 1926-1930 and 1933-1936 respectively. According to the author, these times saw greater changes in inter-pastoral relationships than did the political watersheds of 1914, 1918 and 1933. Linden explains the beginning of the time period considered by referring to comprehensive changes in the churchly life of Osnabrück, especially the increasing passivity of the laymen and therefore the increasing importance of the pastor in the parish. By contrast, why the time period ends in 1936 is not explained. According to the attached short biographies, there was no significant change to church staffing in that year with the exception of Rudolf Detering, who went to Goslar for a better position. However, Linden states at the end that the intensity of the relationships had decreased since 1935, with increasing isolation leading to fewer opportunities for networking or cooperation (p. 793).

Linden first quickly introduces the history of the Protestant Church in Osnabrück, reaching back into the reformation years in 1542/1543, and explains the standing of local Protestantism in the early twentieth century. He then describes certain main events and conflicts concerning the several chapters, which he analyzes in terms of his chosen method of social network analysis. Examples for the years 1907-1910 are the reorganisation of churchly offices and changes in church staff. For the “complex 1920”, he refers to the public conflicts between the minority of so-called churchly “Positivives” and the majority of liberal pastors. Finally, for the years 1926-1930, he refers to the reorganization of pastoral care in special care institutions, the use of the Apostles’ Creed in worship, and (once again) the staffing of pastoral offices. In the expansive fifth chapter (1933-1936), which forms the main part of the book, Linden provides an overview of the general development of church affairs in the Reich as well as the church of Hannover, before turning to their impact on the Osnabrück church district. Above all, this concerns the formation of religious and church-political groups and the attitude of the church towards the NSDAP and the Nazi state. This is followed by a short review of the position of Osnabrück superintendent Ernst Rolffs, by a survey of conflicts in the Luther-Gemeinde, a newly independent parish, in the years from 1929 to 1933, and finally by the longest sub-chapter (one single section of two hundred pages) on “process and relationship structures” during that time period. In sum, the way the book is structured is unconvincing, a problem that extends down into individual sections. Furthermore, Linden is unable to give a short and concise statement of his results beyond a repetitive and somewhat tiresome recapitulation.

From this reviewer’s perspective, the main problem is that the method chosen by the author cannot carry the work. It is of course true that group building processes and networks, interpersonal relationships, the enforcement of common interests, and not least personal sympathy or antipathy play an important role in social processes, especially in a more or less clearly defined socio-moral milieu. This is well known from the research of contemporary church history. There is also no doubt that these processes strongly influence decisions and actions. But the very narrow way in which the topic is considered here, exhausting itself in an isolated and decontextualised observation of relevant actors, does not do much to help enlighten the social and historical decision-making processes. The voluminous and detailed description of the historical background does not seem to be linked to the real object of the study, the structure of relationships of protestant pastors of Osnabrück, and remains a mere accessory part. Even the pastors are hardly made tangible beyond their position as actors within a social network, since explanations for their actions are not provided.

If non-consideration of the existing results of research into social history and history of mentalities is generally a problem of Linden’s work, this is exacerbated by the fact that he does not offer any guidance or orientation, refusing to put his results into context. To give one example, Linden describes in quite some detail the social commitment of liberal pastor Friedrich Grußendorf against the widespread abuse of alcohol, which he convincingly explains as a result of the pastor’s personal experiences (pp. 134-154). But the social function of this ecclesial commitment remains unmentioned, as does its being a part of a romanticized and backward-looking utopia propagated by the church under the popular term of “morality”. This lack of context becomes quite clear in the consideration of the play ‘It will be fine in the end’ (Es wird noch werden gut), penned by Grußendorf and first shown in 1914, on the well-known closure of the mine in neighbouring Piesberg (1898). Grußendorf, in a work containing some anti-catholic undertones, had explained this closure as the result of a strike which in turn was caused by a witch seducing the coal miners with a poisoned drink (i.e. alcohol). Linden does mention contemporary criticism of Grußendorf’s “falsification of history”, but he does not state that the closure was in fact approved by the shareholders simply because the mine was not profitable anymore after several water leaks. But the social significance of the play lies precisely in the fact that it misrepresents a calculated business decision as a necessity caused by (alleged and real) alcohol abuse of the coal miners.

Such inadequate classifications as well as other assessments which invite questioning can be found throughout the work. For example, the interpretation of a local protest event of the Protestant League against a meeting of the Catholic Church (1901) as motivated “primarily” by the need to express the displeasure of Osnabrück’s liberals with the positivism of the church (i.e. as primarily motivated by intra-protestant reasons) is hardly convincing (pp. 106-108). Another example is the early (September 1917) membership of liberal pastor August Pfannkuche in the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei, DVLP); shortly before the end of the war Pfannkuche even found himself on the national executive committee of the party. Linden describes this engagement as a change in political attitude which “gave more consideration to the interests and ideological motives of the traditional conservative centre, without however formulating a break with the working class” (p. 131). He does so unaffected by the nearly undisputed results in research literature, according to which the function of DVLP was that of a bridge between the conservative right of the German Empire and the extreme and strictly antidemocratic right of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, well-known German historian Ulrich Wehler has characterized the DVLP as the “first right-wing proto-fascist party of the masses”. Such an understanding is absolutely vital in order to define the standing and actions of the Protestant Church in Osnabrück society along with the relationships within the protestant milieu and between pastors.

The second volume, which deals with the early years of the Nazi state, also suffers from inaccuracies, lack of classification and unlinked narrative threads. This is exacerbated by a failure to consider the research literature on the topic. The big syntheses of Kurt Meier and Klaus Scholder are named, but hardly considered in fact, and numerous recent studies do not find any attention at all. For example, on the issue of the “German Christian Movement,” the standard works of by Kurt Meier, Doris Bergen, Peter von der Osten-Sacken and Manfred Gailus are not considered at all. The same holds true for the issue of “Protestantism, Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism”.

It should also be mentioned that the author employs a style of writing which this reviewer found quite exhausting. Many sections are full of details, but devoid of structure and largely have the character of a retelling, losing the sense for what’s important. Also, it would have been desirable for the summaries to include more than a repetition of what has already been said, namely a targeted synthesis and, where applicable, a few words on new questions arising from the results. The permanent description of the pastoral relationships with words like “clique”, “prestige”, “activation”, “integration”, “insurance”, “coalition building”, “disturbance”, “resource development”, “weak” and “strong ties” , “in-“ and “outdegrees”, etc. are not only exhausting to read in their almost formal-seeming clustering, they also do not help one gain a better understanding of the relationship structures considered. It seems that a nomenclature is over-used without leading to any new insights, rather ending up in the middle of nowhere.

This criticism also extends down to the smallest details of the book. In one case, Linden acknowledges a critique, formulated in 1925 by a female social democratic journalist, of a church event with former papal chaplain Bruno Doehring, known for his national-conservative and anti-catholic views and thus controversial even within the Protestant Church, with the following words: “Especially her classification of the sermon as ‘inciting the people to hatred’ was hardly suitable to begin an open-minded communication with the Osnabrück pastors” (p. 293). This fails entirely to consider the relationship between the Protestant Church and the Social Democrats, or the anti-democratic, largely nationalist and revanchist actions of prominent representatives of German Protestantism, of which Doehring was a very eloquent example. Doehring’s public appearances were no more likely to foster an “open-minded conversation” than was the coverage in the social democratic press. Indeed, neither party intended to have an “open-minded communication,” something Linden does not seem to recognize.

Elsewhere, one wonders whether certain formulations can be considered appropriate. For instance, Linden refers to Osnabrück pastor Paul Leo, who was forced into retirement by the church in 1938, was later incarcerated in Buchenwald and finally emigrated from Germany, as a “Jew” rather than as a baptized “non-Aryan” (this is still the most correct terminology), despite being aware of the importance of this difference (p. 822, 866). To give one last example, after the spate of arrests in March 1935 (at the very latest), large parts of the Protestant Church, especially in and around the Confessing Church, no longer held any illusions about the Gestapo. For many pastors, even beyond the borders of the churches of the Old Prussian Union, sometimes existential experiences and a variety of pressures would follow, to which they reacted with a variety of strategies. The author’s formulation that Osnabrück’s pastors tried, by way of “anticipatory good conduct”, to “reduce to a minimum” acts by the Gestapo (p. 810) does not do justice to this situation.

In sum, the present reviewer can find hardly anything positive in the work under review. The author has conducted intensive and meticulous research into the historical sources and he introduces many new people and events from local church history, but he does not succeed in binding his results together into a well-thought-out whole. Because he refrains from classifying his results or comparing them to others, his study floats in a vacuum and raises more questions rather than it answers. Certainly, the work did nothing to dispel this reviewer’s general doubts whether social network analysis is suitable for furthering historical research.

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im Dritten Reich. Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im Dritten Reich. Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld. Kirche – Konfession – Religion, 54 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), Pp. 344, ISBN: 9783899716900.

By Nicholas Railton, University of Ulster

This review was originally published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History Volume 63, no. 1 (January 2012): 202-203, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and journal.

This volume of papers dealing with ten Free Church denominations in the so-called Third German Empire is an excellent study of key issues related to the themes of prejudice and guilt in Christians’ dealings with Jews. Being denominations organised and financed independently of the state, the Free Churches were not faced with some of the pressures challenging larger mainstream denominations. No constitutional bar to Jews becoming pastors or members was imposed on their ranks, but this did not necessarily signify that Jewish Christians experienced solidarity and protection. Notices on the doors of Adventist churches, for example, told Jews that they were not permitted to enter. There were indeed righteous Gentiles who dissented from official or semi-official statements made by their ecclesiastical leaders and sought to alleviate the suffering of Jews and Jewish Christians. Yet too many representatives of Free Church organisations conformed to the spirit of the age. The authors of these studies weigh their former leaders in the balance and find them wanting. The book concludes with an appendix which primarily deals with a single pastor in Vienna. Graf-Stuhlhofer regurgitates his fanciful speculations about the Viennese Baptist whom he incongruously considers to have been the single most vocal public critic of the National Socialist regime (p. 311). He achieves this by reading political messages back into innocuous sermon notes, which form his primary source base. Graf-Stuhlhofer’s feverish imagination transfigures Arnold Köster into a prophet of righteousness, standing out, Moses-like, against the diabolical forces of Nazism. This essay is certainly the weakest contribution to the volume. Whereas all the other chapters make an attempt to unearth the roots of prejudice and spiritual blindness, the appendix highlights a Free Churchman who, the reader is led to believe, was miraculously untouched by Austrian antisemitism. The author fails to explain how Köster could refer to Jews as ‘hook-nosed creatures’ (p. 326) and why he apparently believed that Germany was a divinely chosen rod to chastise Israel (p. 327). Throughout the volume, moreover, the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung receives little treatment. We learn nothing about why some Free Churches took decades before issuing paper statements about the sins of their fathers. Yet, even with these defects, this volume is an important addition to the literature on antisemitism and the shoah and will hopefully encourage more research on how and why members of minority religious groups internalised antisemitic views. The purely typological reading of the prophetical books favoured by Köster and other Free Churchmen was, and is, an essential ingredient of all anti-Judaism. Given that Bishop Wenner (p. 7) and Professor Heinrichs (p. 29) both misquote the Bible one wonders whether Free Church leaders are, however, in a position to correct traditional ecclesiastical exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet Bonhoeffer’s view is still valid today: only those who speak up for Jews (and the Jewish state) have a right to sing hymns or Gregorian chants.

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: Samuel Koehne

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: Samuel Koehne

By Samuel Koehne, Deakin University

Sam Koehne is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute (Deakin University, Australia). He is working on the official Nazi positions on religion and on his first book, Nazi Germany as a Christian State: Liberal and Conservative Christian Responses from the Great War to the Nazi State.

I would like to outline my research in two fields, one being that of the Christian response to the rise of the Nazi Party and the other being my most recent research into the Nazis’ official views on religion. The concern of my doctoral work was to ascertain how ‘ordinary’ Christian Germans of the Protestant tradition responded to the rise of the Nazis. It was a close study of two German Protestant communities (based near Stuttgart) from 1914-1939 to understand Christians’ responses to the Nazis in the context of their experiences of the First World War and the Weimar Republic.

In this sense, it fits with the recent trend in scholarship (as in works like those of Manfred Gailus and Kyle Jantzen) towards examining the complex and heterogeneous nature of German Protestantism and the question of the particularity of response. My aim was to examine the response at a local community level and provide the contrast between theologically liberal and theologically conservative Christian communities. Given this, my central questions were threefold: How did Christians at opposite ends of the theological spectrum respond to National Socialism and the changes engendered by it when the Nazis came to power? Why did they respond as they did? What difference (if any) did their faith position make?

The two groups that were chosen as case-studies represented fairly neatly one of the major sections of society that were likely to vote for the Nazis: nationalist and politically conservative Protestants. However, they were also both ‘free church’ communities located near Stuttgart whose origins lay in Württemberg Pietism: the conservative Christian Brethren in Korntal (Evangelische Brüdergemeinde Korntal) and the liberal Christian Temple-Society in Degerloch (Tempelgesellschaft). The Temple-Society had actually split from the Brethren in the nineteenth century and established further communities in Russia and Palestine (under Turkish rule and the British Mandate).[1]

Such communities formed fixed points of reference for their members. As micro-societies that were already self-defined and focused inward, they constitute particularly interesting subjects in their responses to wider changes, especially as spheres of the public and private became blurred in the Third Reich. Their Christian faith was integral to their identity and their members’ lives were dictated by religious belief, as they were mean to demonstrate an ‘active’ or lived Christianity in everyday life. This included a direct concern with politics, given a chiliastic focus on reading current events through a ‘religious lens.’

Some of the most interesting discoveries were precisely how aware both communities were of the Nazi agenda before 1933, and how little this mattered in 1933 itself, which they tended to call a ‘year of wonder.’ There are some interesting links to recent work that has been reviewed in the ACCH Quarterly. By 1932 the perception of Nazism in both groups was very similar to that of the Kulturkampf bulletin during the Nazi regime itself (ACCH Quarterly Vol.16, no.4, December 2010): that Nazism was ‘totalitarian…an ideologically conceived religion or substitute for religion’ and fundamentally antisemitic.

Those living in Korntal were advised by 1930 that Nazism was built ‘upon an anti-Christian glorification and absolutism of race,’ that its ideology was inherently violent, revolutionary, and formed an ‘ersatz religion.’ One prominent Korntaler even called it a ‘blasphemy’ for the ‘hate-filled’ Nazis to claim they adhered to ‘positive Christianity.’ The Templers reached similar conclusions by 1932: that the Nazis were fundamentally antisemitic and adhered to a racial ideology, that Nazism itself was a new faith, that Hitler sought to establish a dictatorship and was relying on mass-psychology and a time of crisis in order to rise to power. Yet both communities embraced the rise of a ‘new Germany’ under Hitler in 1933. Although they first believed they were supporting a DNVP-NSDAP coalition government, a fascination with Hitler quickly developed and he was described consistently as having been ‘given by God.’

There is also a link to the recent work by Robert P. Ericksen on the question of complicity (ACCH Quarterly 18, no.2, June 2012). There were certainly instances of antisemitism in both groups, although the best characterization of the response to the Nazis’ violence and antisemitism in 1933 itself was an ‘active’ passivity. The most enthusiastic support was for the perceived national and spiritual rebirth of Germany, a perspective deriving very much from pre-1933 experiences. From this initial enthusiasm, the two groups gradually moved in opposite directions, to a point where those in the Korntal Brethren were saying ‘No’ to the Nazi state at the same time that leading Templers were just as emphatically saying ‘Yes.’ Generally the dominant trends in the Temple-Society by 1939 were at least in line with the German Christian Movement although some leaders were going so far as to link the community to the neo-pagan German Faith Movement. The Brethren position became one of retreat in the face of what was increasingly seen to be an ‘anti-Christian’ state. The situation was complex, but these final positions were largely dictated by the theological stance of the two communities.

My most recent research has considered the question of the official Nazi position on religion. While there are many excellent studies regarding church responses to the Nazis, or leading Nazis’ religious beliefs, there exists somewhat of a gap as to what the Nazis themselves chose to represent with respect to religion in their official publications. Given this, my current project is driven by the query: how did the Nazi Party present its official position on religion and what was promoted in those texts that were viewed (both within and outside the Nazi movement) as representing the official stance? This clearly carries the burden of ascertaining what was considered ‘official.’ A necessary second component of such research is to examine the reception of such official texts and how they were interpreted, though this will form the next stage of my work.

Given the very vigorous debates of recent years on the Nazi Program, especially Point 24 and ‘positive Christianity,’ the first stage of this research has been to consider the origins of the Nazi Program (undertaken through detailed research into the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP) as well as examining the two official commentaries (by Alfred Rosenberg in 1922 and Gottfried Feder in 1927) and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The commentaries have sometimes been overlooked, even though they were official statements and aimed to describe to both the Party faithful and a broader public what “Nazism” was (and was not). Though also clearly serving a promotional or propaganda purpose, these were statements that people at the time could turn to in understanding the Nazi Party.

The initial results of this research are that Point 24 appears to have been designed principally to serve an antisemitic function, illustrated by the fact that there is consistency from the first ‘Foundational Principles’ or Grundsätze of the German Workers’ Party through the 25 Point Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to the commentaries and also Mein Kampf on this major point: religious teachings or doctrines (Religionslehren, Glaubenslehren) would be opposed if they failed to satisfy German ‘laws of morality and ethics,’ (Grundsätze) or the ‘ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race’ (Program).

There does not seem to have been any comprehensive sense to ‘positive Christianity.’ The first commentary certainly argued more in favor of the idea that both religion and class would act to splinter rather than cohere Nazism as a movement, which seems to have been maintained in official statements. For instance the ‘Fundamental Regulations for the Re-Formation of the NSDAP’ that were issued when the Nazi Party was formed again in 1925 stated: ‘Religious or class conflicts will not be tolerated in the Movement.’ This was reconfirmed at the Bamberg Conference of 1926, as reported in the Völkischer Beobachter: ‘Religious problems have no role to play in the National Socialist Movement and are only suitable for undermining its political effectiveness. It is incumbent on every individual to sort out such problems for themselves.’[2] What this means is that when Rudolf Hess caused controversy in October of 1933 by arguing that the Nazi Party adhered to ‘freedom of conscience’ in religion, it was not a new concept.

What was essential (at least in official statements) was that religion meet racial requirements. The official position on religion was not principally about the form of faith, but the actual content of faith. Further research is required, yet this appears to help towards explaining the great disparity that was to be found amongst the Nazi leaders, from those advocating a ‘Germanized’ Christianity through to the ‘pagans’ or ‘paganists.’ Rosenberg’s commentary was explicit that ‘Morality is completely racially conditioned, and not abstract Catholic, Protestant or Muslim.’ It has been fascinating to find (as indicated by Rosenberg’s statement) that there was opposition to the notion of revealed religions in favor of the view that what was repugnant or acceptable in religious teaching would be ‘revealed’ through the response of one’s moral conscience, itself supposedly conditioned by race.

To use the example of Christianity and such a conception of ‘Germanic’ morality: depending upon how one measured the cloth of religious belief against such a racial yardstick, it was possible to cut out sections (the Old Testament, parts of the New Testament), create a patchwork (joining fairy-tales or the Nordic sagas to the story of Christ), or throw it away and sew a new garment altogether (neo-paganism, German Faith). ‘Germanizing and dejudaising’ religious teachings was a major concern––as it was in movements amongst the German Christians (see the reviews of Susannah Heschel’s work in ACCH Quarterly Vol.16, no.4, December 2010).

This perhaps takes us beyond current discussions, which have tended to focus on the promotion of ‘German Christianity’ or an ‘Aryan’ Christianity, or alternatively on the ‘new faiths’ of neo-pagan organizations, both of which topics have a number of studies examining such questions ‘from below’ or ‘from above.’ The official position may provide us with insight into what was meant to be common to all Nazis, regardless of the faith they professed.

[1] Some of my previous research considered the internment of many members of the Temple-Society under the British Mandate of Palestine in WWII and their subsequent deportation to and internment in Australia. The major history is Paul Sauer, The Holy Land Called: The Story of the Temple Society, trans. Gunhild Henley (Melbourne: Temple Society Australia, 1991). I have dealt with the literature on the Korntal Brethren at greater length in S.P. Koehne, “Pietism as Societal Solution: The Foundation of the Korntal Brethren,” in Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, ed. Jonathan Strom (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic, 2010). The major history remains the account in Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1969).

[2] Translations from Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Voice: The Völkischer Beobachter, 1920–1933, vol. 1: Organisation & Development of the Nazi Party (Oxford: P. Lang, 2004), 125, 149.

Conference Abstract: “Confessions of a Protestant Past: The Memorialisation of the Kirchenkampf in Contemporary Berlin”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Conference Abstract: “Confessions of a Protestant Past: The Memorialisation of the Kirchenkampf in Contemporary Berlin”

By Diana Jane Beech, University of Cambridge

Anyone visiting Berlin for the first time will be struck by the wealth of heritage sites dedicated to remembering the tyranny of Germany’s Nazi past. From the haunting spectres of the sinister strength of the Third Reich (as epitomised by the Olympiastadion or the former home of the Reichsluftfahrtministerium) to the plethora of memorials commemorating the various victims of Nazi atrocities around the Reichstag, Berlin is a city with a showcase on both the perpetrators and the casualties of its dark history. But what of those institutions in the Third Reich like the Protestant Church, which comprised both pro- and anti-Nazi movements and, as such, do not fit neatly into Berlin’s dualistic memorial landscape?

At first glance, one would be forgiven for focusing on the bombed-out shell of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church located in the centre of Berlin’s main shopping district, which presents the Protestant Church as an innocent bystander and a tragic casualty of Allied bombings—a convenient illusion perhaps for an institution whose resistance to Nazism was less than glorious, save for the heroism of Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer or outspoken leader of the Confessing Church resistance group, Martin Niemoeller? A closer examination of Berlin’s Protestant landscape off the ‘tourist track’ nonetheless reveals the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Mariendorf, which is a lesser-known place of worship kept under lock and key due to its Nazi-inspired interior, demonstrating only too well the complicity of the Protestant Church in furthering the Nazis’ hold over the German nation. Even the St. Annen Church in Dahlem, famous for its associations with the Confessing Church, cannot escape the shadow of guilt of its fellow Protestant institutions when counterbalancing its visible, outdoor memorial against racial fanaticism, war and dictatorship with a concealed, indoor display of Doris Pollatschek’s critique of the churches’ ambivalent conduct in the Third Reich: the ‘Triptych for Auschwitz’.

And it is not just Berlin’s churches that have been affected by the parallel need to acknowledge the resistance efforts of some of their members yet, all the while, emphasising their overall ineffectiveness in preventing Nazi crimes and, in some cases, even facilitating them. Physical memorials, too, erected to honour the Confessing Church, have paled in significance against their more prominent counterparts and have been left to decay just like the reputation of the churchmen they were designed to uphold. The plaque erected opposite the ‘Topography of Terror’ at Wilhelmstrasse 36 to commemorate the meeting place of the Protestant resistance movement demonstrates this perfectly. Inconspicuously placed on a graffitied and now boarded-up YMCA building and hardly noticed by the throngs of visitors at the ruins of the SS headquarters nearby, it reflects a paradoxical obligation to remember but also to relativise this contentious aspect of Third Reich history.

By focusing on the Berlin cityscape as a whole, then, my paper seeks to show how the debate over the significance of the Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) in the Third Reich has come to be reflected both in patterns of heritagisation and memorialisation. As well as examining the preservation of sites of historical interest, my paper will explore how aspects of Kirchenkampf history have permeated Berlin’s urban landscape, through street names, building dedications and commemorative plaques. It will explore the nature and location of the sites used, and question how in the long term these sites can not only come to shape public perceptions of the history of the Kirchenkampf, but also transmit powerful ideological messages about the value of virtue and morality in modern society.

Conference Report: XI International Bonhoeffer Congress, Sigtuna, Sweden, June 27-July 1, 2012

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Conference Report: XI International Bonhoeffer Congress, Sigtuna, Sweden, June 27-July 1, 2012

By Keith Clements

We are grateful to Dr. Keith Clements for the following conference report. Dr. Clements was general secretary of the Conference of European Churches from 1997-2005 and editor of Bonhoeffer Works Volume 13: London, 1933-1935.

Sigtuna, Sweden, was the venue for the recent XI International Bonhoeffer Congress. The 140 participants came not only from Europe and North America but from as far afield as Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, drawn by the overall theme A Spoke in the Wheel: Reconsidering the Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Sigtuna, the small, picturesque lakeside town situated between Sweden’s capital Stockholm and its most historic cathedral city Uppsala, lays claim to having the country’s oldest surviving street, Stora Gatan. For the Congress participants however one house in Stora Gatan was invested with particular historic interest, for it was there that late one night in May 1942 Dietrich Bonhoeffer had his clandestine meeting with his English ecumenical friend Bishop George Bell, giving him the fullest possible details of the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. These details Bell was to pass to the British foreign office in the hope of securing allied support for a coup and a new, non-Nazi German government. It was perhaps the most significant, daring and fateful point in Bonhoeffer’s political involvement. The house in Stora Gatan (today it is the local tourist office) became a point of pilgrimage for many at the Congress, while the recalling of that 1942 meeting provided a firm point of contact with historical and political reality for the Congress discussions themselves.

No less appropriately, the Congress was housed in the Sigtuna Stiftelsen (Foundation), established in 1917 and one of Sweden’s most creative and influential church-related institutes facilitating dialogue on social and cultural issues. On the opening evening two of our Swedish hosts—Congress President Bishop Dr Martin Lind and Prof. Dr Sven-Erik Brodd—cogently but carefully expounded the significance of the Swedish Lutheran scene and its relation to Bonhoeffer’s German context for a proper understanding of the reception of Bonhoeffer in Sweden—a reception which in fact began in 1936 when Bonhoeffer brought his Finkenwalde class of students on a short visit to the country. The Congress was equally well served by the other plenary lecturers whose presentations followed by open discussion occupied the next three mornings: Bishop Prof. Dr Wolfgang Huber (Berlin) on ‘The Theological Profile of Bonhoeffer’s Political Resistance’; Prof. Dr Jean Bethke Elshtain (Chicago) on ‘The Profile of Bonhoeffer’s Political Resistance from the Perspective of Political Science’; Prof. Dr Wolf Krötke (Berlin) on ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Understanding of the State’; Dr Victoria J. Barnett (Washington D.C.) on ‘‘Church, State and Civil Society”; and Prof. Dr Nico Koopman (Stellenbosch, South Africa) on ‘How Do We Live Responsibly?’ Rarely can Bonhoeffer’s thought and actions have been subjected to such scrutiny and interpretation from so varied angles in three short days. Warnings were issued, for example by Wolfgang Huber, against seeing Bonhoeffer as more than a marginal figure in the political resistance as far as his personal activity was concerned. As the other presenters also argued, his true significance lies rather in his underlying perception of responsibility in relation to state and society, and his daring to inhabit the misty borderland between ecclesial and individual responsibility. Another reiterated concern was Bonhoeffer’s relation to democracy: was he, or would he have become, a democrat such as we assume now to be the norm in westernised society? Again, warnings were heard against too easy answers, either those of dismissing him as a conservative traditionalist and therefore of little contemporary relevance, or of assuming that his anti-totalitarianism equally betokens an ease with what passes for liberal democracy (but may in truth be anything but liberal or democratic) in western society today. The real questions are about how Bonhoeffer theologically interpreted his situation then, and how we might learn from him how we might no less critically and theologically evaluate our situations now. Nico Koopman aptly summarized how, in the still-changing context of post-apartheid South Africa, Bonhoeffer is persistently relevant:

Bonhoeffer’s theology helps South Africans in our quest for responsible living. He offers helpful descriptions of responsible living as a life that responds faithfully to the concrete call of God in Jesus Christ, which also implies responding faithfully to human beings of our generation, as well as those of past and future generations. He equips us with a theological rationale and motivation, as well as with thicker theological descriptions of human dignity and human rights. He provides essential tools for formulating policies that are cautions about wrong compromises, and that advance the fulfilment of human dignity and human rights. He shows the way to a threefold action of firstly prayer, which includes spiritual and moral formation, secondly concrete obedience, and lastly active hoping and waiting upon God.

The issues raised in plenary, with other questions, were examined further in no fewer than 36 shorter afternoon seminars on a fascinating range of subjects which presented participants with beguiling problems of choice: topics ranging from ‘Religion, Race and Resistance’ to ‘The Form of Christ and Christian Formation’; from ‘The Politics of Life Together’ to ‘The parish as a body of otherness’; from ‘Theology as Politics versus “Political Theology”’ to ‘Bonhoeffer and Human Rights.’ Andreas Pangritz (Bonn) looked yet again at the oft-quoted phrase ‘to fall within the spokes of the wheel,’ alluded to in the Congress title itself and found in Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay ‘The Church and the Jewish Question.’ It seems we Anglophones are still wilfully misreading this phrase! But as well as established academics taking a fresh look at perennial points of interest and debate, these seminars also allowed many younger scholars to share their work-in-progress on quite new themes and perspectives, and drawing upon more recent approaches in social and political science, gender studies and psychology. The plenary papers and much of the seminar material will, it is hoped, be published in due course.

Though intensive, in true Bonhoefferian style the Congress was not ‘all work and no play.’ An octet of voices from the Uppsala University Choir gave an utterly charming evening concert of traditional Swedish songs, to rapturous and prolonged applause (have you ever seen young people sing so joyfully with their whole faces?). A group performed the play ‘Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen’, by Galileo Galilei and der Narr. The layout of the Foundation with its informal lounges and outdoor ‘cloister’ made for easy communality during coffee breaks and late evening conviviality around the bar, while in the long Scandinavian summer daylight Sigtuna at large, with its lakeside and woodland walks, lent itself to contemplation whether alone or with others. It is rumoured that theological conversations even took place between early-morning joggers. Then of course mealtimes served not only splendid meals, such as Bonhoeffer himself would have relished, but also the opportunities to talk or argue with friends old and new. To all this was added morning worship in the chapel, calm and meditative, and uplifted by the inspiring organ-playing of Gottfried Brezger (Berlin). Thanks are due to John Matthews, Hans Buurmeester, Michael Lukens and Gottfried Brezger for arranging these services. Towards the end of the Congress, news from the different language and national sections of the International Bonhoeffer Society was shared.

Prof. Dr. Christiane Tietz (Mainz) perceptively and succinctly surveyed the ‘Harvest’ of the Congress under five main headings: awareness of the need for care in retrospective reading of Bonhoeffer in his own historical context as distinct from ours; a new perception of the political character of Bonhoeffer’s whole theology; a realization that a contextually committed theology will always have political implications; new insights into Bonhoeffer’s political actions which were not simply confined to his role in the conspiracy but involved a novel questioning of the state and the nature of its authority; and a fresh encounter with the foundational role of spirituality in Bonhoeffer’s political engagement, which enabled him to remain faithful even in the most extreme circumstances. These insights, Tietz stated, map a future for the new generation of Bonhoeffer scholars but are not merely of historical interest: they are inspirational for our own contemporary responsibilities in society.

The Congress certainly demonstrated that Bonhoeffer studies not only have a past but a future, as evidenced by the strong presence and vital contributions of so many younger participants—not to mention the fact that for reasons of time and space the organizers had had to decline as many proposals for seminar topics as they accepted. At the final chapel worship, one of the leading veterans of the Bonhoeffer Society, John de Gruchy (South Africa), gave a poignant meditation on the theme ‘Nothing is Lost,’ referring to the text Ephesians 1:10 ‘. . . as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ,’ taken up by Irenaeus in his doctrine of recapitulation and in turn by Bonhoeffer in his prison reflection on the line in the hymn ‘I will restore it all.’ A group that has existed as long as the Bonhoeffer Society, said de Gruchy, should have no fears that the work of its pioneers will lose its significance, any more than a loss in our personal lives is irredeemable. In this spirit also, a card with signed greetings was sent by the Congress to Renate Bethge who is no longer able to attend meetings in the way she, and of course Eberhard, did to the immense profit of so many of us.

At the Congress banquet on the final (Saturday) evening several distinguished guests from church and cultural life in Sweden were welcomed, and Bishop Martin Lind as President expressed his deep satisfaction with all that had taken place. John Matthews from the English-Speaking section spoke of the Sigtuna event providing a four-fold experience for us all: inter-national, inter-generational, inter-disciplinary and inter-personal and thus a real taste of Gemeinsames Leben. Finally, next morning we made our way to Uppsala for High Mass in the impressive Cathedral, at which Bishop Lind preached on authentic witness to Christ as always involving the overcoming of separation—a hopeful note on which to take leave of one another to go our ‘separate’ ways across the world.

Heartfelt thanks, then, to our hosts in Sigtuna and the Congress organizers especially Bishop Lind, Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Anders Jonåker, John Matthews, Karina Juhl Kande, Jurjen Wiersma, Hans Buurmeester, Martin Hüneker and Stephen Plant. Much appreciated also was the work of the German-English interpreters Elaine Griffiths, Renate Sbeghen and Ursula Ziel.

And what of a future Congress? Sigtuna has set a dauntingly high standard in terms alike of content, organization and venue, but a provisional committee is already investigating possibilities for 2016. This particular wheel will keep turning!

Review of Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772-1880

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Review of Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772-1880 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

By Robert Beachy, Goucher College

Mark Jantzen’s study – titled Mennonite German Soldiers, which must sound oxymoronic to many – is a model of scrupulous, well-presented scholarship. Jantzen explains how the Prussian state succeeded over the course of a century in transforming a sect of pacifist peasants into self-conscious German nationalists. In ten chronological chapters, counting the introduction and conclusion, Jantzen demonstrates how this tortuous process was driven by “both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors” (p. 2). The heavy hand of the Prussian state imposed taxes for exemption from military service and at the same time restricted property ownership and other civil rights. Only the renunciation of a formal theological opposition to state-sponsored military service provided those Mennonites who remained in Germany after national unification (1871) full emancipation (p. 224). But the story, as Jantzen tells it, also sheds new light on the evolution of German nationalism and the peculiarities of German history. In that respect, his work will be as valuable, potentially, to historians of Germany as it is for students of Mennonite history.

Jantzen begins his narrative with the first partition of Poland in 1772, which added the Vistula Valley including a population of roughly 10,000 Mennonites to the territory of royal or West Prussia (p. 20). Formerly under Polish suzerainty, the Vistula communities had sought privilege and exemption from a range of local lords. Under their new Prussian overlord, however, the Mennonites faced a centralized and more uniform policy, or set of policies. At least during the reign of the irreligious Frederick the Great (1740-1786), the Vistula Mennonites were spared the worst bigotry and were able to purchase their exemption from military service with annual collective contributions of 5000 Reichsthaler (p. 30). An additional restriction imposed for their pacifism was a limitation on the acquisition of property from non-Mennonites. Already at this stage, liberal Russian policies that promised more favorable conditions lured many to emigrate to territories further east (p. 42).

The first comprehensive law, the so-called Prussian “Mennonite Edict,” was promulgated in 1789 and combined disparate regulations on exemption taxes, church taxes, and property ownership into a single policy (p. 55). This discriminatory law remained in effect until 1874. An elaboration of the 1789 edict issued in 1801 promised full emancipation for those who accepted military service. But those who continued to claim the exemption faced additional restrictions on property ownership: “only direct male descendants of current Mennonite property owners would be allowed to keep both their property and their exemption” (p. 69). Jantzen tells us that this reflected the nadir of Prussian anti-Mennonite discrimination.

The somewhat surprising result of the Napoleonic era and the Wars of Liberation was a more liberal policy towards Mennonite exceptionalism. Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806 ultimately increased militarization and an incipient German nationalism, and in 1814 Prussia introduced universal conscription. Yet soon after, in 1815, the state issued a secretive exemption – never published – that allowed Mennonites to continue to observe their pacifist beliefs. The effect of this relief was to reinforce the separate, estate-like status of the Mennonites – an odd development in the nineteenth century – and likewise strengthen their communities’ leaders, who continued to negotiate and represent their interests to the king and his ministers (pp. 93, 106).

The political differences between liberal and conservative Germans in the half century leading up to national unification (1871) was mirrored increasingly among Mennonites. The character of this division within the Mennonite community was extremely curious, however, and counterintuitive, perhaps, for a twentieth-first century observer. German liberals supported equal rights (and obligations) for religious minorities, and were therefore staunch proponents of Jewish (and Mennonite) emancipation. But since full citizenship demanded military service, according to liberals, it should be expected of all regardless of creed. In contrast, German conservatives sought to maintain traditional estate differences and had no problem with the differential treatment of religious minorities. These philosophical differences, Jantzen explains, inclined the Mennonite traditionalists who clung to their pacifism to embrace the German conservatives, while those willing to accept conscription identified with and gave political support to the liberals. For this reason, Mennonite pacifists made common cause with German conservatives while those willing to surrender their pacifism followed the liberals (p. 159).

Jantzen’s account of Mennonite acculturation also offers a valuable contribution to the broad historiography of German Central Europe. For one, the more traditional depiction of a German state riven between a monolithic Protestant majority and substantial Catholic minority is an oversimplification. Not only Germany’s tiny Jewish community but also the many smaller non-Catholic sects, such as the Mennonites, complicate the too-easy depiction of a tidy Catholic-Protestant division. Jantzen asserts that the Vistula Delta Mennonites “developed their own customized version of German national identity” by about 1880 (p. 6). A central issue in this process was the requirement of military service, a feature of citizenship and national identity that has been neglected, Jantzen suggests, in much of the literature on nationalism. As his analysis also illustrates, nationalism was never simply a state-sponsored project imposed from on high but rather a process in which individual actors and their communities participated in drawn-out negotiations with a range of cultural and state institutions (p. 9).

Conference Report: Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, April 15-16, 2012

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Conference Report: Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, April 15-16, 2012.

By Bernard M. Levinson, University of Minnesota, and Melissa Kelley, University of Minnesota

On April 15-16, 2012, the University of Minnesota hosted “Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich,” a multi-discipline symposium organized by Bernard M. Levinson, Berman Family Chair of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible, and Bruno Chaouat, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The symposium examined transformations in the academy and disciplines of the humanities during and after the Third Reich inGermany,ItalyandNorth America. The symposium consisted of three main sessions, “Nazi Germany and the Humanities in International Perspective,” “Disciplinary History,” and “Broader Implications.”

Alan Steinweis, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, opened the symposium with a talk entitled “New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Impact on the Humanities.” Steinweis provided a chronological overview of scholarly attempts to investigate the relationship between faculties within the arts and humanities and the Nazi regime. Steinweis also posed questions that proved key throughout the symposium: was there a fundamental incompatibility between the largely conservative professoriate and the Nazi state in 1933? What were “academic values” in the early 20^th century, and were those values “betrayed”?

Stephen H. Norwood, Professor of History at Louisiana State University, then turned attention to the United States with “Appeasing Nazis: American Universities and the Hitler Regime, 1933-1939.” Detailing examples of tacit and direct support of Nazi policies and officials at elite academic institutions in theU.S.(including the Seven Sisters andColumbiaUniversity),Norwoodemphasized the often-sharp distinction between what might be deemed the more “grassroots” elements of the university community and administrations. Many students and community members protested the invitation of Nazi officials and sympathizers to campus.

Anti-Nazi demonstrations outside the academy, too, suggested a high level of knowledge about the extent of anti-Semitic measures in the Third Reich within and around university settings. Bringing the focus back to Germany, Robert Ericksen, the Kurt Meyer Chair of Holocaust Studies at Pacific Lutheran University, provided a case study of a specific university: “Göttingen: A ‘Political University’ in the Mirror of Denazification.” Ericksen demonstrated that, while the process of Entnazifierung [denazification] at Göttingen failed to rid the university of Nazi collaborators, it nonetheless provided later scholars with essential documentation on the politicization of the university during and after the Nazi regime. Professors claiming to take on the appearance of being a Nazi or a Nazi collaborator in order to “work from the inside” is one dynamic Ericksen has found in his work.

The next session on “Disciplinary History” examined individual fields of study and emphasized again the international context of the academy under National Socialism. Johannes Renger, Professor Emeritus of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the Freie Universität Berlin, in “German Assyriology 1933-1945: A Discipline in Troubled Waters between Emigration and Compliance with the Regime,” discussed the effects of the Nazi regime on the field of Assyriology, focusing on the loss of scholars due to Nazi pressures. The following talk from Anders Germar, Associate Professor of Theology at Uppsala University, entited “Theology in German Academia under the Swastika – the Case of Tübingen” showed how the confluence of a particular social milieu, the cultural and political environment, and an established research tradition made Tübingen’s theology faculty the site of a scholarly justification of antisemitism. Fascination with the ancient world was the subject of Suzanne L. Marchand’s talk, entitled “On Nazism and the Ancient World.” Professor of History at LouisianaStateUniversity, Marchand argued that scholars have underestimated how important the classical and biblical worlds were to historical and self-understandings in the 1920s and 1930s. Notions of the “ancient” were bound up in debates about what and who was “German.” Despite Nazi interest in so-called “German antiquity,” however, the field of German Altertumswisschenschaft did not make much headway within the academy. Eric Weitz, Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, in “The Complicity of the Academic Professions with the Third Reich,” emphasized the atmosphere of “crisis” within the universities preceding the Nazi seizure of power. A lack of jobs and mobility for those trained for the academic professions made Nazi supported programs such as Ostforschung compelling to those in the “crisis generation.” The session concluded with Franklin Adler, G. Theodore Mitau Professor of Political Science at Macalester College, who presented “The Italian Fascist Racial Laws of 1938 and the Expulsion of Jewish Professors,” an examination of the treatment of Jewish scholars in fascist Italy. The day closed with a public lecture given by Alvin Rosenfeld, Professor of Jewish Studies and English and Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, entitled “Is There an Anti-Jewish Bias in Today’s University?”

The second day of the symposium was devoted to a session on “Broader Implications.” It opened with Michael Cherlin, Professor of Music at theUniversityofMinnesota, speaking on “Schoenberg, Creation and Catastrophe.” Cherlin presented Schoenberg’s distinctive musical creativity as drawing extensively upon the significance of catastrophe and exile in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Emmanuel Faye, Associate Professor of Philosophy at theUniversityofRouen, in “National Socialism and Totalitarianism in the Interpretations of Hannah Arendt and Aurel Kolnai,” connected Hannah Arendt’s defense of Martin Heidegger’s Nazism to her similar use of Nazi thinkers, such as Carl Schmitt, in her approach to totalitarianism. Faye maintained that Arendt whitewashed Schmitt and others by using them as sources rather than objects of critique. In the final presentation, “Hitler’s Willing Lawyers,” Oren Gross, Irving Younger Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, examined the “philosophical cloak for the Nazis’ arbitrary acts and crimes” provided by Carl Schmitt.

A session with all the participants closed the symposium. The discussion highlighted the benefits of interdisciplinary inquiry on the concepts of “betrayal,” “the humanities,” the Humboldtian Bildung ideal of the university, and “academic freedom.” An edited volume is in preparation to continue this exploration of the mutation of academic disciplines under National Socialism. Further information on the symposium is available at the website: https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/both/

Article Note: New Research on Cold War Catholicism

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2012

Article Note: New Research on Cold War Catholicism

Karim Schelkens, “Vatican Diplomacy after the Cuban Missile Crisis: New Light on the Release of Josyf Slipyj,” The Catholic Historical Review 97, no. 4 (October 2011): 679-712.

Marie Gayte, “The Vatican and the Reagan Administration: A Cold War Alliance?” The Catholic Historical Review 97, no. 4 (October 2011): 713-736.

By William Doino Jr., Contributing Editor, Inside the Vatican magazine

Few conflicts have been more intense, or protracted, than the Roman Catholic Church’s battle with Communism. Two years before Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto (1848), Pope Pius IX referred to “that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism which is absolutely contrary to the Natural Law” and which “would utterly destroy the rights, property and possessions of all men.”

That is still, essentially, the Church’s teaching, though how it’s been expressed and applied over the years has varied, depending on historical circumstances, and the approaches of different popes.

Two articles on what might be called “Cold War Catholicism”covering the immediate post-war era to the collapse of the Soviet Union have recently appeared in The Catholic Historical Review (October, 2011) and are worthy of note.

The first is “Vatican Diplomacy after the Cuban Missile Crisis: New Light on the Release of Josyf Slipyj,” by Karim Schelkens, Secretary of the Center for the Study of Vatican II at the Catholic University of Leuven.

The author draws on notes, diaries and specialized archives to describe the dramatic events leading up to the February 1963 release of Josyf Slipyj, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic archbishop who had been imprisoned by the Soviet Communists for almost twenty years.

Schelkens helpfully provides the historical background. In communion with the Holy See since the Union of Brest in 1595-96, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) had long been in tension with the Russian Orthodox Church, especially after the Communists took power and made the latter a virtual instrument of the state. That conflict—held at bay during the Second World War, when a temporary unity prevailed against the Germans—re-emerged with a vengeance as the war came to a close. Schelkens writes:

On April 11, 1945, the Ukrainian Catholic bishops, including Slipyj, were arrested. Most of them were accused of collaboration with Nazi rule and sentenced to forced labor and exile. These draconic measures prompted a strong reaction from Pius XII, expressed in his encyclical Orientales Omnes of December 23, 1945. In it, the Vatican did not only condemn Communism but also openly and specifically attacked Moscow Patriarch Alexis. The situation worsened when on March 8-10, 1946, some 200 Greek Catholic priests were forced to revoke formally their Union with Rome, declare the Brest Union annulled, and convert to Russian Orthodoxy in a sobor set up by the Kremlinall without any say from the Ukrainian Catholic bishops. These dramatic events set the tone for decades to come, and the UGCC would become a “Church of Silence.”

The Church of “Silence” soon became a Church of Martyrs, as many Ukrainian Catholics who were interned by the Communists perished, if they were not tortured and killed beforehand. The full story of this brutal persecution has yet to be told, but to the extent it is remembered, Archbishop Slipyj is a large reason why.

Successor to the legendary Metropolitan Andrey Sheptystky, and a towering figure in his own right, Josyf Slipyj was the soul of the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church, even as he languished in the Siberian Gulag. News of his courageous witness spread, especially after his prison writings managed to circulate. But when the Communist authorities found out, they cracked down even harder, re-sentencing him again.

The death of Stalin in 1953 did not ease the lot of Slipyj or the suppressed UGCC; nor even did Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschkev’s famous “de-Stalinizination” speech of 1956. A fortuitous combination of events, however, led to Slipyj’s release, and it is in recounting this that Schelken excels.

In October of 1962, Pope John XXIII, successor to Pius XII, opened the Second Vatican Council, and with it a new approach toward the world (“aggiornamento”). This included searching new avenues to ease the suffering of Christians under Communist rule, without withdrawing any of the Church’s warnings about Marxist-Leninist ideology. The new approach was described by Msgr. Igino Cardinale, chief of protocol at the Secretariat of the Holy See, as being “ready to engage in relations with any state,” as long as there was a reliable assurance that “freedom for the church and the sanctity of the moral and spiritual interests of its citizens” were respected. Given the deceptions and crimes of the Communists, that was asking a lot, but the Vatican was willing to take risks, in hopes of achieving a greater good.

It didn’t take long to test the new policy. Just a few days after Vatican II opened, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out and the mediation of the Church was sought. President Kennedy—pulling out all stops to avert a catastrophe—contacted his friend, the author Norman Cousins, who believed the greatest independent force in the world was the papacy. Cousins in turn reached out to his friend, Belgian priest Father Felix Morlion, O.P., who contacted the Holy See, and was assured of the Pope’s willingness to help. The next day, October 24, 1962, John XXIII issued a dramatic appeal to the relevant leaders not to remain deaf to “the cry of humanity.” On October 28, Khrushchev told President Kennedy that the missiles would be withdrawn. Many historians believe Pope John’s public appeal provided Khrushchev with a face-saving way to change course, depicting himself as a savior of world peace, rather than an outfoxed aggressor who blinked. Kennedy explicitly thanked John XXIII for his help.

Many of these same players, as Schelkens reveals, also worked together to obtain the release of Archbishop Slipyj. Thanks to a private intervention by Fr. Morlion with Russian representatives, the indefatigable Cousins was able to interview Khrushchev directly, and serve as an intermediary for the Holy See on behalf of world peace, religious freedom, and Archbishop Slipyj. Dutch Monsignor Johannes Willebrands also took parallel measures with other key diplomatic and religious figures, and the Soviets were surprisingly—though note entirely—cooperative. By early 1963, a decision had been made to release Slipyj on the condition that he would remain in exile and that his freedom would not be exploited by the Church for “anti-Soviet” purposes. In fact, as Schelkens reveals, “the Soviets thought it crucial that it was not to be considered a rehabilitation…. The release was to be regarded as an amnesty and that Slipyj was still considered an enemy of the Soviet government.” The Holy See agreed not to exploit the matter but made no promises about restricting its admonitions against Communism. Willebrands traveled to Russia to receive the Ukrainian archbishop and accompanied him back to Rome, where he was able to participate in the Council. Slipyj’s long-won freedom was further complicated by the fact that Russian Orthodox observers had been invited to attend the Council, as an ecumenical gesture, and accepted. Their presence “deeply shocked” the Ukrainian diaspora bishops who thought that the Holy See had conceded far too much to prelates they considered accessories to the Soviet suppression of the UGCC. But in the large picture, and whatever internal debates remained, the Holy See believed that its strategy had succeeded in accomplishing its ecumenical and political goals, without sacrificing any of its genuine principles.

Schelken’s article is complemented by another essay, “The Vatican and the Reagan Administration: A Cold War Alliance?” by Dr. Marie Gayte, professor of U.S. history at Université du Sud Toulon-Var in France. Here, she examines relations between the Holy See and the United States in the post-war era, culminating with the friendly and often productive but not always unified dealings with the Reagan administration.

At the end of World War II, Gayte relates, there was a convergence of interests between Pope Pius XII and President Harry Truman. The pontiff “well understood the intensity of suffering and persecution inflicted on Catholics under the Soviet regime,” while the President “became convinced of the expansionist aspiration of Stalin’s regime.” Thus, in spite of certain reservations about dividing the world into two blocs, Pius XII “welcomed American aid to Turkey and Greece, as well as the Marshall Plan, granting numerous audiences to congressional representatives. According to J. Graham Parson, who was assistant to Myron Taylor, Truman’s personal representative to Pius XII, ‘it [was not] too far to go in saying that most probably all the top people in the Vatican saw the United States as the only possible salvation of the values which they fundamentally stood for.”

But while Pius XII welcomed American support for shared interests, a careful reading of his pronouncements reveals an independent voice, one that could challenge the assumptions of America’s policymakers. An example of this was Pius XII’s strong warnings against the arms race, and the grave evils that would ensue should war break out between the two superpowers (a theme that would be developed and promulgated at Vatican II, after Pius XII’s passing). Pius was a strenuous opponent of the Soviet empire, and thus longed for its ideological collapse; but he was not (as he has sometimes been portrayed) a reckless anti-Communist who believed in “brinksmanship.”

Neither, for that matter, did his successors, John XXIII and Paul VI. As the international situation grew more intense—with nuclear arms proliferating and Cold War conflicts erupting in the Third World—both maintained that dialogue, rather than warfare, was the best means for obtaining a sound peace and social justice. What emerges clearly from Gayte’s essay is the apprehension papal pronouncements like the encyclicals Pacem in Terris (John XXIII) and Populorum Progressio (Paul VI) caused a succession of American administrations. The tension reached its height during the Vietnam War, which the Holy See did not condemn outright but clearly wanted ended. “The United States,’ writes Gayte, “seems to have been keen to avoid a Vatican portrayal of the United States as morally equivalent to the other belligerents, lest such a representation benefit its opponents in the war and its critics at home. This led to U.S. efforts to influence Vatican pronouncements on several occasions, something of which there is ample evidence in the archives of the Johnson and Nixon administrations.”

When the Vietnam War finally did end, it was not on terms favorable to anyone—except, perhaps, the Communist despots who took over. Even those who strongly opposed the war, in conscience, and saw it as an immoral act of American imperialism, were forced to concede that America’s opponents were hardly the meek, agrarian reformers depicted in some dubious quarters. They were, in fact, ruthless totalitarians who silenced their opponents, often by mass murder. The result was not peace with honor, but “peace with horror,” as one author acidly remarked.

Communism’s brutal record in Southeast Asia created a new sobriety within the Vatican, about the limits of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, and this, in turn, set the stage for the rise of Communism’s ultimate spiritual nemesis, Pope John Paul II. Having lived in Poland under both the Nazis and Communists, he understood the totalitarian mind better than many world leaders, and demonstrated that knowledge in his successful combat with them. He was fortunate to have as an ally Ronald Reagan, whose conservative American presidency has grown more impressive (and popular) over the years. Gayte describes the many areas the two leaders saw eye to eye on—for example, the dangers of a Marxist-driven “liberation theology” and the naïvete of certain peace activists about unilateral disarmament. John Paul told Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, “you know we are for peace, of course, but we are not for pacifists—unilateral pacifists. We know that is not the way to keep the peace.” Such Christian realism was welcomed by the Reaganites.

At the same time, Gayte properly rejects the simplistic notion of a “holy alliance” conjured up by some journalists. Appreciative as he was toward President Reagan, John Paul II did not hesitate, anymore than previous popes, to distance himself from certain American attitudes and policies the Church found objectionable, particularly the frightful idea that a nuclear war could be fought and won. “Although the pope unambiguously opposed Communism,” writes Gayte, “his pontificate also was one of continuity with his predecessors as far as defense of the third world, peace and social justice were concerned.”

To the extent disagreements did arise, it was because of erroneous American ideas about the Holy See. To their credit, officials in the Reagan administration did eventually learn this, with one candidly admitting, “The Vatican has its own agenda which leads it to statements and actions not always compatible with our policies. …the Vatican’s activities are understandable and follow naturally from the position of the pope as the spiritual leader of the Catholic world. Automatic assumptions in Washington that the Vatican is always on our side are misplaced.” That said, there can be no doubt that the relationship, at its best, did much to bring the Cold War to a largely positive conclusion, even as other dangers have arisen in its wake.

One principle that John Paul II and Ronald Reagan did share was a resounding belief in religious liberty, and the rights of individual conscience—attacks against which continue to arise. Today, as we witness the persecution of minorities in many regions of the world, and see attempts to intimidate religious leaders even in self-proclaimed “free” democracies, a renewed spiritual and political witness in defense of both is needed, now more than ever.