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Franz Stock and the “Barbed-Wire Seminary” at Le Coudray, France

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Franz Stock and the “Barbed-Wire Seminary” at Le Coudray, France*

By Lauren N. Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

“Abbé Franz Stock – that is no name, it is a program!”[1]

Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Franz Stock died alone in a Parisian hospital in February 1948, not yet forty-four years old. Born in Neheim (now part of the city of Arnsberg) in Rhineland-Westphalia in 1904, he had spent most of his adult life in France, working as a priest, a prison chaplain and, beginning in 1945, the director of a “barbed-wire seminary” in a French POW camp for German soldiers wanting to become priests. He was an ardent Catholic and a devout Francophile. His story, in particular his contributions to Franco-German rapprochement after 1945, remains relatively separate from mainstream historiography, with only one recently-published account in English.[2] Those who know of him on both sides of the Franco-German border insist that no complete account of postwar rapprochement, and the laying of the groundwork for the European Union itself, can be proffered without acknowledging Stock’s vital role. Who exactly was this priest, then?

Boniface Hanley’s 2010 biography is more hagiographic than academic, but it contains a helpful account of Stock’s family life and spiritual influences, and Stock’s significance as a German in France during the Nazi occupation and the first few years of the post-occupation period. Hanley conducted interviews with individuals who had known Stock personally, or did extensive research on him; his book is the culmination of several decades of work. Stock was the oldest of nine children born to a working-class couple, and he knew by the time he was twelve years old that he wanted to become a priest. He attended the seminary at Paderborn and joined the Quickborn (Catholic youth) movement, with which he was first able to visit France during the summer of 1926, for an international peace conference held at Bierville. He was deeply influenced by the example of Marc Sangnier, a militant French Catholic pacifist who was in favor of progressive reform for the Church, who had organized the conference. As a result of this love affair with France, Stock applied to spend three semesters at the Institut Catholique in Paris; he was the first German to be admitted since the Middle Ages. It was during this impressionable stage of his life, Hanley writes, that Stock became determined to dedicate his life Franco-German reconciliation, a devotion all the more extraordinary for the reality Stock faced when he gave himself over to it: this was arguably the most intensely hostile period of the two countries in their centuries-long history of rivalry, enmity, and bloodshed.

Stock was ordained a priest in 1932, and two years later was appointed to run the Boniface Mission, Paris’ German Catholic center, in the Latin Quarter of the French capital. However, it is between the 1940 fall of France to Nazi Germany and the final months of 1947 that Stock’s life would find its fullest meaning. His arrival back in Germany upon the outbreak of the Second World War was only temporary; he applied for and received permission to return to Paris in June 1940. Eventually he procured from the German ambassador to Vichy France a pass allowing him to visit imprisoned Frenchmen and women, to give them pastoral care. Subsequently he was given the title of auxiliary Wehrmacht chaplain, with the honorary rank of Major, and assigned to tend the souls in the prisons of Fresnes, La Santé and Cherche-Midi, all of the Wehrmacht prisons in the greater Paris area (used to hold German soldiers charged with breaches of discipline), and La Pitié Hospital. He also retained his position as director of the Boniface Mission. With the exception of two relatively brief periods when he had junior chaplains assisting him, Stock was the sole provider of pastoral care for three of France’s largest prisons, a hospital, a myriad of smaller prisons, and his own church. As part of his pastoral duties, he accompanied hundreds of prisoners, mostly members of the French Résistance, to their execution site at the infamous Mont Valérien between 1940 and 1944.[3] During the occupation of France, he also served as a clandestine intermediary between the prisoners and their families, and often was the only link through which they could communicate with each other.

The religious figures involved in getting the “barbed wire seminary” off the ground. From left to right: Georges Le Meur; Wilhelm Delbeck, Stock’s main assistant at the seminary; Jean Rodhain (?); Angelo Roncalli, Vatican nuncio to France; Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

This remarkable individual, and his equally remarkable life, are remembered less for the inestimable services he performed as a chaplain during the Occupation, and more for the responsibility he took on at the end of the war, when he was already physically and emotionally fatigued. In the winter of 1944/45, after France had been liberated from Axis control, Abbé Jean Rodhain, French chaplain-general in charge of all German and Axis POWs, took note of the presence of young prisoners in various POW camps across the country who had been studying in seminaries before being conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Together with his assistant Georges Le Meur, another priest who had been active in the Résistance, Rodhain received permission from the military authorities to organize a temporary seminary in one camp and began to search for volunteer attendees from among the POW population. They did so in the interests of revitalizing the Catholic Church in Germany, in the hopes that the Church would play a role in the reconstruction – and re-Christianization – of Germany after the fall of Nazism. Rodhain and Le Meur did not hesitate to choose a German priest to head the seminary. It was Le Meur who nominated Stock for the position. Stock was himself a POW at a camp near Cherbourg; despite his physical illness, he readily assented to his new position.

Plan of Block 1, the “barbed wire seminary” at Le Coudray. The main barrack, housing the dormitory, refectory, and chapel, is at the bottom. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

What began as an experiment with a few seminarians near the POW camp at Orléans became by Christmas 1945 an impressive, smoothly-running operation at Le Coudray, on the outskirts of Chartres, with more than 380 enrolled seminarians. The seminary was moved after encountering increasingly severe problems with the other German POWs at Orléans. The camp’s military commander and supporter of the seminary project, Laurent Gourut, was transferred to Le Coudray and arranged for the seminary to go with him. In addition to the seminarians, the project also involved forty lay brothers (also culled from the German POW population in France) who served as cooks and cleaners, Chartres’ bishop, Monsignor Thomas Harscouet, who knew of and approved of what was going on, and the Vatican’s nuncio in France, Angelo Roncalli, who gave his blessing to the camp in person. In 1946, Stock added several volunteer faculty members from the University of Freiburg, who came of their own free will – and became POWs as a result – to teach courses on moral theology, pastoral theology, canon law, scripture, and others. In the two years that the “barbed wire seminary” (French: séminaire de barbelés; German: Stacheldrahtseminar) existed, more than 1,000 Germans benefitted from its courses, and more than 600 of these went on to be ordained priests.[4]

The refectory of the “barbed wire seminary.” Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

What is even more astonishing was the secrecy that remained relatively intact around the entire affair: few ministers in the de Gaulle provisional government knew of the seminary (excepting Michelet and Boisseau, director-general of prisoners of war in France) because Rodhain and Le Meur feared the reaction of the communists if they learned of what was going on. The majority of the French ecclesiastical hierarchy who knew of the seminary did not approve, but kept silent about its existence. And finally, the inhabitants of Chartres did not know much, either of the seminary or of the camp itself. Consumed with the business of surviving in the post-war chaos, few interested themselves in the detested German POWs languishing indefinitely behind barbed wire on the outskirts of their city.

Taking in the air outside the barracks. Franz Stock is the priest seated in the middle of the picture. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

The camp’s remaining seminarian internees were liberated on 1 May 1947, shortly after they had completed their final examinations. Le Coudray was shut down in December of that year. During the summer, Stock returned to Paris, a paroled POW whose could not even obtain an identity card that would have allowed him to leave Paris for short periods of time. He began to reorganize the Boniface Mission in the Latin Quarter and helped whoever came to his door, which included both French and German priests but mostly former German POWs (now called “free workers”) unable or unwilling to make the journey back to a devastated Germany.[5] On 22 February 1948, he collapsed and was hospitalized, diagnosed with pulmonary edema. He died two days later. Because of his POW status, he was not permitted a public funeral, nor was his family allowed to make the journey from Neheim to attend. Still, some one hundred people appeared for the private service that his friends had organized. Those who attended included Abbé Rodhain, Angelo Roncalli as nuncio, the auxiliary bishop of Paris, and government ministers Michelet and Francisque Gay. He was buried in a simple grave marked only with an unpainted wooden cross in Paris’s large Thiais cemetery.[6]

One side of the original gate to the camp, Depot #501, Le Coudray, France. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Today the camp at Le Coudray still stands, but is much diminished. Originally occupying thirty-two hectares and known as POW Depot #501, today the camp is just under eight hectares (the size of the original camp, first opened in 1912). The Franz Stock Committee, in its French and German manifestations, Les Amis de Franz Stock and Franz-Stock-Komitee, is dedicated to preserving the site, renamed the Franz Stock European Meeting Center (Centre Européen de Rencontre Franz Stock; Europäische Begegnungsstätte Frankz Stock). It is composed of a single preserved barrack, which housed the main building of the seminary and its chapel, and the land immediately around it. The rest of the site and the half-dozen or so remaining barracks are owned by various local collectivities. The military has not been associated with the site since 2001.

Much of the association’s successes have come only in the last two decades. In March 1998, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany visited Chartres and the former POW camp to honor Stock on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It was only in June 2005 that the association succeeded in securing the buildings as historical monuments. In February 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy marked the sixtieth anniversary of Stock’s death with a ceremony at Mont Valérien, where he had accompanied so many Résistance prisoners to be executed; the plaza in front of the memorial set up there had been renamed after Stock in 1990. In November 2009, the process of beatification was opened for Stock in his birthplace in Neheim, and is currently ongoing.[7]

Stock’s Pietà, post-war. Note the barracks of the camp and, behind that, the town of Chartres on the left, and two cathedral spires (presumably Chartres Cathedral) behind trees on the right. The grieving Mary is flanked by the POW seminarians, and Stock has inserted himself where the Apostle John is often depicted. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

The interior of the seminary chapel today, complete with Stock’s original (restored) murals. Saint Michael slaying the dragon on the left, Saint Boniface on the right. Both are patron saints of Germany. Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

Most of the exhibitions about Franz Stock and the seminary are set up in the barrack that once served as the refectory, sleeping hall, and chapel. Since it is unheated, one gets a sense if one visits in late January of how brutally cold the seminarians’ lives must have been in the winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47, and also of how intimate, since dozens of men would have been crowded against each other. The chapel has received the most concerted restoration efforts thus far; Stock’s murals on the wall behind the altar have been repainted recently, and some of the original Stations of the Cross, also painted by Stock, have been returned. It is still used for masses on special occasions, and the site receives a healthy does of visitors annually, mostly schoolchildren of various ages from France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, but also Catholics who have heard of Stock.

Stock’s own paintings of The Stations of the Cross graced the seminary chapel. Station 12, the death of Christ on the cross. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

It is difficult to argue convincingly that Stock had a direct impact on postwar Franco-German rapprochement; there is no evidence that draws a straight line from him to de Gaulle and Adenauer in 1963, and during his lifetime there was no interest in French political circles to extend to Germans the hand of friendship. But this misses the true impact of Stock’s life and work. He was a quiet, behind-the-scenes worker, proving by his own example rather than through force of words that French and Germans could co-exist peacefully, even amicably. This devotion produced a trickle-down effect, demonstrating to the French families who suffered the execution of loved ones during the occupation that not all Germans were evil, and to the German POWs in French camps after the war, many of whom went on to become priests in post-war Germany, that not all Frenchmen were focused on revenge against Germany. It is more than seventy years now since France and Germany were at war with each other. Stock may have been out of step with his time, as a German who loved the French and wished to live among them, but this failed to daunt him. It is time that his life and his influence were introduced to a wider audience.

Stock’s shrine and grave at St. Jean-Baptiste Rechèvres Church, in Chartres. The inscription on the headstone reads:
To Franz Stock
Priest of the diocese of Paderborn
1904-1948
Chaplain of the prisons of Fresnes
La Santé and Cherche-Midi
1940-1944
The families of the French prisoners and executed are appreciative
The inscription on the ground reads on the left: Rector of the German parish of Paris 1934-1944; on the right: Superior of the barbed-wire seminary of Chartres 1945-1947
Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

* The author would like to thank Monsieur Hubert Briand, of Les Amis de Franz Stock, for his time and patience in introducing the camp and answering all manner of questions about Franz Stock, German POW seminarians, and Chartres, and for his permission to use several camp photos.

[1] Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, at a private funeral service after Stock’s death, 28 February 1948. At the time he was nuncio to France.

[2] This report is based on Boniface Hanley, The Last Human Face: Franz Stock: A Priest in Hitler’s Army (self-published, 2010), and on the author’s visit to Chartres in January 2013. This was a preliminary research trip to gather information for a future book-length project on the barbed-wire seminary at Le Coudray and the French treatment of German POWs between 1945 and 1948.

[3] Mont Valérien is a small rise in Suresnes, a western suburb of Paris. Before the Nazi occupation of France, it had part of the city’s fortifications. The Nazis used it almost exclusively as an execution site. More than 1,000 Frenchmen were executed there between 1940 and 1944 (French law, which the occupiers observed in this instance, prohibited the execution of women by firing squad, so there were no women victims). Stock’s wartime diary, which he used to record his daily ministrations for the condemned prisoners, and which Hanley indicates he kept quite faithfully, mentions 863 of these victims, the majority by name.

[4] The author is still researching information about what kinds of courses were offered, by whom they were taught, how long they were, and of what the examinations consisted. All information at the time of writing indicates that the exams were recognized in Germany, and presumably the Vatican, because the seminarians did not have to repeat these courses after their release.

[5] It is not clear how long after the war the Boniface Mission in Paris remained open for Germans, or how it was funded. Today there is a small plaque on the wall of the building at 21-23 Rue Lhomond identifying it as the former home of Franz Stock. It appears now to be a private residence.

[6] After a concerted effort led by former barbed-wire seminarians, Stock’s remains were exhumed and transferred in June 1963 to a small shrine built for the purpose in the new St Jean-Baptiste church, just outside the city of Chartres, in Rechèvres. Six months earlier, Charles de Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer of West Germany had signed the Treaty of Élysée, more commonly known as the Friendship Treaty. It formally ended centuries of hostility between the two countries. Stock’s tomb at Rechèvres draws many visitors, but his empty grave at Thiais is still honored with a plaque, and often with flowers.

[7] Neheim is also home to the Franz Stock Museum in the Fresekenhof, a former aristocratic dwelling dating to the fourteenth century, which contains a permanent exhibition dedicated to Stock’s life and works. Documentation about Franz Stock is also housed at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and a more limited amount in Germany, at the National Military Archives in Freiburg im Breisgau and the Catholic Military Bishop’s Office in Berlin. The author has yet to see Stock’s diary, which she believes is in Neheim.

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust: “The Holocaust Today: New Directions in Research and Teaching,” November 1-4, 2012, Northwestern University.

By Lauren Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

Professor Emeritus Jacques Kornberg, from the University of Toronto, began his introduction to the panel on the German Protestant churches with the following observation: “I have been studying the Catholic Church in Germany for a long time. I’m happy to say, the Protestant churches were worse.” Kornberg drew a laugh from the sizeable audience, but it would be one of the very few moments of levity for the two panels of the conference devoted to investigating the German churches during the Third Reich.

Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and Northwestern University, Lessons and Legacies continues to be a major conference for Holocaust scholars in North America and Europe. This year’s theme emphasized new research and teaching methods, and the scholars giving papers on the German churches set out to emphasize this in their investigations.

The panel chaired by Kornberg consisted of Robert Ericksen from Pacific Lutheran University, Christopher Probst from Saint Louis University, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ericksen’s paper, entitled “Antisemitism Under the Faulty Gaze of Early Postwar Germans,” took the case study of Klaus-Wilhelm Rath, professor of economics at the University of Göttingen, to complicate the current understanding of the denazification process. Using the example of Rath, who was part of the “terror group” of pro-Nazi academics at Göttingen, Ericksen outlines the process: an initial charge by the Allies led to relatively severe penalties, followed by years of appeals and a gradual softening of the penalties. Rath was dismissed summarily from his position in 1945. He lost his first appeal; second and third appeals led to his classification as a category III offender (assigned to those who had enthusiastically supported the regime). He appealed one final time, in 1950, sensing the change in mood towards denazification in West Germany, and taking advantage of the fact that denazification proceedings were now controlled by Germans. The final appeal resulted in a category IV classification, as a so-called Mitläufer, or “fellow traveler” of the regime. Rath was not satisfied – he wanted a full exoneration – but the change in status meant that he was no longer deemed an antisemitic agitator. This for a professor whose 1944 publications included a book depicting the Jews as responsible for the manipulation of the economy aimed at world domination, and who was designated in 1944 by the Nazi regime as one of the most important Nazi professors at Göttingen!

Like Ericksen, Probst presented material that comes in part from his recently published book on the demonization of Jews in Nazi Germany. Unlike Ericksen, whose focus is on members of the higher levels of the academy, Probst is interested in lower-level clergy in rural areas. In “German Protestant Attitudes Towards Jews and Judaism in Württemberg,” he explores the changes in antisemitism exhibited by Protestant pastors from the end of the Weimar Republic to the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. This snapshot across the conventional time periods is useful in presenting threads of continuity that otherwise are more difficult to follow. Probst shows that distinctions between religious and racial antisemitism are important insofar as the former identified Jews as a religious “other” capable of redemption through conversion, while the latter employed racial or biological language to describe an irredeemable, immutable “other.” The problem he underscores in his paper is that the Lutheran pastors he examines in and around Stuttgart used both modes of expression in their discussions of Jews before, during, and after the Third Reich. These same men, who used antisemitic tropes in their lectures and sermons, ultimately became part of a “rectory chain” that hid some seventeen Jews in their parsonages between 1943 and 1945. One of his subjects, the Heimsheim pastor Heinrich Fausel, delivered a lecture on “the Jewish question” in 1934. Seeking to distance himself from biological and racial notions of Jewishness, he borrowed liberally from the Bible and the writings of Martin Luther to emphasize the failings of Jews across centuries. At the same time, he insisted that the rejection of Christ was the pivotal moment for the Jews as a Volk, and that the German Volk must defend itself against the “terrifying foreign invasion” that began in the nineteenth century, with the emancipation of the Jews. By 1943, Fausel was hiding Jews in his home. There is no evidence to indicate that he changed his mind about them, leading Probst to argue that people often behave in ways that contradict their own beliefs, and that German pastors during the Nazi period are no exception.

Schmidt’s essay, “The Dilemma of being a Good Neighbor and a Good Citizen in the Protestant Village of Süssen,” based on research for her book about rural Judaism during the Holocaust, asks the same probing questions that anchor Probst’s study. Süssen was (and continues to be) a small town not far from Stuttgart. Her subjects are civil servants, in this case the mayor, Fritz Saalmüller, and the town’s pastor, Martin Pfleiderer. Both had deep associations with Lutheranism in the area, and both were early Nazi enthusiasts. Pfleiderer later changed his mind and left both the Nazi Party in 1936, claiming he had been ignorant of the “true” ideology at play. He did not, however, mention the Jews of Süssen, who were deported and killed. Saalmüller, who became mayor in 1933, did not share Pfleiderer’s change of heart, and as mayor he was definitively antisemitic, enforcing the regime’s policies that forced Süssen’s Jews to sell their property before they were deported. Like the pastor, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht upon the outbreak of war in 1939, but served for its duration. In 1944, he was ordered by a superior to shoot an American POW, which he did; in 1946, it was for this crime that he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Petitions for clemency came from all corners on his behalf, including from the bishop of Württemberg, who described Saalmüller as a “good, upstanding Christian” and loyal to his community. No mention was made of his dealings with the Langs and Ottenheimers, the Jewish families in Süssen who had been killed in the East. The postwar mayor of Süssen, August Eisele, was also not interested in pursuing these matters, and in fact for thirty years (!) suppressed Jewish reparations files submitted to him by three children of the deported Jewish families who had survived the Holocaust.

The panel analyzing the Catholic Church in Germany also treated antisemitism as its main focus. Panel members included Beth Griech-Polelle of Bowling Green State University, as chair; Martin Menke of Rivier College; Martina Cucchiara from Bluffton University; Kevin Spicer from Stonehill College; and commentator Suzanne Brown-Fleming, from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like those who presented on Protestantism, these scholars aimed to complicate traditional notions of Catholic antisemitism and the ways it manifested itself during the Third Reich. The panelists limited their explorations to the pre-1939 period.

Menke’s paper, “German Catholicism and Nazi Racism, 1933,” highlighted a pressing question iterated recently by Thomas Brechenmacher: where is the agency in the Catholic Church in twentieth century Germany, particularly where antisemitism is concerned? Menke considered multiple answers: the individual bishops, the bishops as a whole, the Center Party leaders, and German Catholic laity. Although he did not tender an explicit answer to this thorny question, his paper made clear that he judged all parties at least partly responsible. He related what historians now commonly accept: following the examples of their Catholic bishops, Catholics in Germany rejected Nazi racism – understood distinctly here from antisemitism – as an intrinsically un-Christian ideology. On this ground, the episcopate condemned the Nazi movement as a whole. Antisemitism, however, was a different matter: In fact, the only public figure to denounce racism and antisemitism officially was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Austria, who stressed Nächstenliebe vis-à-vis the Jews. (Innitzer was an active proponent of the Austrian fascist government of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg; he also endorsed the 1938 Anschluß, signing a declaration with an approving “Heil Hitler!”.) Menke is particularly hard, and justifiably so, on the bishops. They stated frequently, both during and after the Third Reich, that their priority was to defend the Church. Properly understood, this should have extended to a condemnation of any immoral action undertaken by the state. The bishops did not do this for several reasons: the Nazis did not take over the state until 1933; by that time, communism was accepted as the greater evil to be combatted; and finally, the Church treated Nazism as it did any other heresy, calling for a slow, unhurried examination. However, by the end of March 1933, when Hitler consolidated his hold on power, the bishops were ready to cooperate with his government, and set an example that permitted the acceleration of latent antisemitism among the Catholic populace.

Cucchiara’s work on Catholic nuns in Nazi Germany introduces women agents to a scene that frequently focuses on men as the exclusive subjects. In “Jewish Girls in Catholic Schools in Nazi Germany,” she studies the German-based School Sisters of Notre Dame, whose motherhouse was located in Munich until the 1950s. Their behavior between 1933 and 1938 complicates the conventional understanding of Catholic nuns as rescuers and convents as good hiding places for Jews. Cucchiara finds that convent-run schools were spaces of fusion, in which Catholicism and Nazism co-existed with the full knowledge, even open support, of the nuns. Jewish girls did experience more safety hidden in convents in comparison to other hiding places they may have discovered, but this does not follow, she argues, that Nazism failed to penetrate. The nuns in question worked to preserve their classrooms as distinctly Catholic spaces in the Third Reich. However, preservation often occurred with the least difficulty through integration with the state. As a result, they worked hard to highlight the positive, good works of Hitler and his regime, and emphasized continuity and sacrifice, bringing the regime more closely in line with their own religion. Cucchiara reports that Jewish girls remembered later that there was a remarkable absence of antisemitism exhibited by their religious caretakers, but this does not mean that the convents were hotbeds of anti-Nazi activity. Cucchiara concludes by urging historians to avoid imposing a false separation of religion, as represented by Church members and leaders, and Nazi Germany, and to treat witnesses who testify to this separation with care.

Kevin Spicer’s paper, “The German Catholic Church and the ‘Judenfrage’ in Weimar Germany” rounded out the panel, concerned explicitly with the connection between religious and racial antisemitism during the Weimar era. He identifies the dual pillars of the “Jewish question” for Catholics at that time: the theological pillar, identifying conversion as a possible remedy, and the societal pillar, lamenting and fearing the influence of Jews on German-Christian culture and society. During the years of the republic, a third pillar evolved, identifying Jews as a racial and biological enemy, though many Catholics continued to adhere to the more traditional, culture- and social-based aversion to Jews. Spicer’s most intriguing revelations involve Augustin Bea, the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Germany from 1921 to 1924. Bea was convinced that antisemitism was inextricably linked to anti-Catholicism; occasionally using anti-Jewish and antisemitic language, he and others defended Jews insofar as they, like Catholics, were a persecuted religious minority in Germany, and that the problem could be better solved by working with, not against, them. Otherwise, they would continue to pose a distinct potential danger to future German prosperity. His role in the production of Nostra Aetate at Vatican II, and his work to bring Jews and Christians into greater and more open dialogue in the post-Holocaust world, present Bea as a staunch opponent of discrimination and prejudice and a champion of ecumenism (unusual for a Catholic). However, in the early 1920s in Germany, Bea had not yet found this orientation.

It was fitting that Suzanne Brown-Fleming began her comments with Nostra Aetate, that great and necessary Church document promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of Vatican II. Its importance to the post-Holocaust Church is undeniable, but Brown-Fleming adeptly highlighted the individuals presented by the panel, who in the 1920s and 1930s were still mired in anti-Jewish, antisemitic ways of thinking, but who nonetheless began to grope toward reforming their interactions with their Jewish neighbours. Although Menke, Cucchiara and Spicer present historical figures who found ways to accommodate a regime that ultimately tried to solve the “Jewish problem” by physically exterminating them, the Catholic bishops, the School Sisters, and Bea never condoned the extreme racial rhetoric of Nazism. She concluded by citing one of the most significant questions that calls for further investigation, that could easily be applied to the Protestant context as well: why did some Catholics resist and other did not, and of those who resisted, what prompted them to do so?

By way of concluding this report, I want to relate an unexpected occurrence that unfolded outside of the two panels devoted to the study of the German churches, that nevertheless has a direct bearing on scholars of the German churches. Immediately preceding the panel on German Catholicism was a workshop on new cultural approaches to the Holocaust. The afternoon workshop, featuring Doris Bergen, Alon Confino, Mark Roseman, and Amos Goldberg, attracted a large audience and engendered a lively discussion, following remarks that concentrated on the role of agency and that called for the decentering of “race” from the story of the Holocaust. Religion, Christianity specifically, was identified as an element that needed to be reinserted vigorously into the narrative to make the Holocaust imaginable and representable. In the Q&A, Alan Steinweis questioned the presentation of this as innovative and “new”, pointing to Bergen and several others in the audience, including Kevin Spicer, Robert Ericksen, and Dagmar Herzog, who have contributed substantial and acclaimed works on the role of religion and the Christian churches in the Holocaust. As a spectator who had listened closely to the remarks, I found myself in agreement with Steinweis: surely those of us who work on the German churches did not produce our work in a vacuum? Hasn’t the field of modern German history been moving for a while now towards the full integration of religious history into its narratives? The workshop is perhaps a good reminder that this integration has not yet been achieved, and that studies of the German churches, both Protestant and Catholic, must continue to present themselves as vital to the study of German society and culture as a whole, and not simply as “church history” or “religious history,” in order to explain as accurately as possible how attitudes about “otherness” can lead to persecution and genocide. In Nazi Germany, racism and Social Darwinism is part of this, but Christian belief that for centuries had depicted the Jews as “other” is just as culpable. In the wake of the turbulent exchange, as the scholars for the panel on German Catholicism settled into their seats and awaited their audience, Kevin Spicer summarized it best: “Our colleagues who don’t normally deal with the churches are discovering religion, and we’re all very excited about that.”

Review of Sascha Hinkel, Adolf Kardinal Bertram. Kirchenpolitik im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik

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

Review of Sascha Hinkel, Adolf Kardinal Bertram. Kirchenpolitik im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen 117 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), ISBN: 978-3-506-76871-1.

By Lauren N. Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

In his first published book based on doctoral work in Mainz, Sascha Hinkel does not set an easy task for himself. His subject is Adolf Cardinal Bertram, chairman of the Fulda Conference of Bishops from 1920 to 1945 and, as such, the most powerful Catholic bishop in Germany. Although Bertram is “among the most controversial German bishops of the 20^th century” (336), he lacks a definitive, updated biography.^{^[1]} Bertram’s accommodation of the Nazi regime is notorious: “his opponents criticize him as vigorously as his proponents defend him.” (336) Rather than recounting Bertram’s well-known Nazi-era activities, Hinkel observes “a younger Bertram … who was not prejudiced by later events.” (12) The Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic are the twin epicenters of the book as Hinkel seeks to explain Bertram’s post-1933 behavior in his pre-1933 experiences. Thus, Bertram’s activities during the Third Reich are limited largely to a ten-page section at the end of the final chapter. The result is a portrait of a man who was not yet the acquiescent cardinal who kowtowed to Adolf Hitler. And though Hinkel’s biographical approach limits him to the reach of one man, there is no denying Bertram’s considerable influence in the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. His actions impacted Catholic Germans, Vatican policy, the ethnic Poles who resided in Prussian Upper Silesia before the post-WWI territorial redistributions.

In scrutinizing his experiences as bishop in Hildesheim (1906-1914) and Breslau (1914-1945) and his 1920 accession to the cardinalate and simultaneous appointment to the chair of the Fulda Conference of Bishops, rather than Bertram’s more well-known Nazi period activities, Hinkel reminds us that it is worth looking closely at an individual’s formative years in order to explain later behavior. Bertram came of age during the papacy of Leo XIII, whose Harmoniemodell, or model of harmony, served as the basis for Bertram’s own approach to church-state relations. This paradigm preached compromise because God’s authority informed all earthly governments, and that the state was God’s designated instrument for preserving social order and peace.

With this, Hinkel explains Bertram’s remarkable adaptation to regime change in Germany. From monarchy to parliamentary democracy to dictatorial regime, Bertram accommodated the successive shifts while holding strong reservations. Bertram was a classic Vernunftrepublikaner, hostile to democracy like many other Church leaders of the time but recognizing the inevitability of its coming, and he rejected much of Nazi ideology despite his endorsement of Hitler as the legitimate head of state.

Arguably the most valuable part of the book is the section detailing Bertram’s involvement in the resolution of the “Upper Silesia question.” Its story comprises more than a fifth of the book, and it is one of Bertram’s defining pre-1933 moments, showcasing his capabilities as bishop, political player, and administrator. The re-emergence of Catholic Poland necessitated the re-drawing of national and ecclesiastical borders between 1919 and 1925, which impacted the Catholic Church in Germany significantly and sparked political battles between Germans, Poles, and Vatican administrators for control of the new territories. James E. Bjork has done valuable work in this area already; Hinkel’s portrayal of Bertram adds to this, though Hinkel does not reference Bjork in his bibliography.^{^[2]}

It is difficult to get a grasp of the ethnic and national identities of the contested province of Upper Silesia: the inhabitants of the region, which had been part of Prussia since the eighteenth century, included German and Polish speakers. How many of these considered themselves Silesians (German-speaking, or Polish-speaking)? Alternately, how many classified themselves as German nationals or, after 1919, Polish nationals? Hinkel does not dwell long on these slippery distinctions. Instead, he reconstructs the events that led to the 1921 plebiscite that split Upper Silesia in two, with the eastern (mostly Polish) portion going to the Polish Silesian Voivodeship and the western (mostly German) portion remaining part of Germany.

It is in this section that Hinkel’s Bertram comes most vividly to life, as he attempted to prove himself a major player in the power contest surrounding the plebiscite. Of particular note is the relationship between Bertram and Achille Ratti, nuncio to Warsaw and later Pope Pius XI. They formed their mutual and enduring coolness toward each other here: Bertram saw Ratti’s presence as disruptive and a challenge to his own authority, and Ratti regarded Bertram as on edge, malcontent, and self-interested. Bertram’s attitude vis-à-vis the Poles was forceful, and it made him unpopular: he encouraged them to vote in elections, but he advised steadfastly that Upper Silesia remain part of Germany, and in late 1920 he forbade clergy, irrespective of nationality, to use their pulpits for political lecturing. (This did not go over well with either the German or the Polish priests.)

Hinkel has used documents from eleven archives in Germany, the Vatican, Poland and Austria, including documents recently released from the Vatican’s secret archives. He admits to having limited access to files in Wrocław (formerly Breslau) as well as in the Vatican, which has yet to release to the public much of its documentation pertaining to the Second World War. Despite these limitations, the book holds together well. Readers may be interested in the biograms at the end, comprised of a list of people in ecclesiastical and political circles whose paths crossed with Bertram, including their birth- and death-dates and their positions.^{^[3]}

Some minor editorial adjustments could have made Hinkel’s study more accessible, including a map of Upper Silesia showing shifting national and diocesan boundaries. The retention of quotations in their original language in the main body of the text will be problematic for scholars with no knowledge of Latin, French, or Italian.

There are some deeper questions for which Hinkel’s argument cannot account. The “model of harmony” does not explain well Bertram’s role in two concordat negotiations. He was a minor player in the processes that led to both the 1929 Prussian concordat and the 1933 Reichskonkordat, but both concerned him directly. No persuasive explanation is tendered for Bertram’s minimal involvement in either, beyond the observations that Bertram’s relationship with Eugenio Pacelli was distant (at the time, Pacelli was secretary of state and the overseer of both concordats), the Breslau cardinal was skeptical of a federal concordat, advocating instead for state-level concordats (he famously said, “a frame without a picture is merely ornamentation without content” – 209 fn. 412), and that he was overworked. This does not marry persuasively with Hinkel’s portrayals of Bertram as autonomous and authoritarian.

One may also quibble with the presentation of Bertram’s antisemitism, which Hinkel qualifies as “a latent existing religious anti-Judaism.” (280) The subject of Bertram’s attitude toward Jews is hardly a central tenant of the biography. Its presence towards the end of the book, and mostly confined to a footnote, reads as an aside. Yet how useful is the distinction between religious-based anti-Judaism and racist antisemitism? While certainly one cannot argue that Bertram belongs among the blatant, unapologetic antisemites of the Third Reich, he was also hardly neutral regarding the Jews. What Bertram really thought about Jews is a question Hinkel does not resolve, but one is reminded that they were not an irrelevant minority in Breslau – statistics indicate they made up as much as 4% of the population, and paid as much as 20% of the city’s taxes.^{^[4]} Two of his most damaging statements (which, Hinkel acknowledges, approximate Nazi language) describe a Jew-controlled international press, in March 1933, and refer in early 1938 to the conversion of Saint Paul as a rejection of “the errors of degenerate Jewishness [Judentum]” (280 fn 198). Susannah Heschel reminds us that words must be understood in the context of their time. In the 1930s, the German word Judentum could be used to refer both to the religion, Judaism, as well as the people who adhered it, “shifting meaning away from a theological-based polemic to a polemic against people.”^{^[5]} This important point applies to Bertram, and makes his comments about Jews more ominous than Hinkel presents them.

Finally, there is Bertram’s unwavering enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler after March 1933. Although he remained staunchly critical of its race-based world view and promotion of positive Christianity, Bertram did approve the regime’s restoration of social order, its fight against communism, and Hitler’s professed respect for the Christian churches. But this is hardly enough to explain the effusive praise that he (and the other bishops) offered after the signing of the 1933 concordat, or the personal birthday greetings he sent to Hitler every year. Why did Bertram lose no opportunity to show his loyalty to Hitler, sometimes estranging even his own colleagues in the process?

The way that Hinkel has organized his argument may be the problem here. The book focuses on the 1906-1933 period, which at the beginning of this review I describe as one of its strengths. But this periodization makes it difficult to account fully for Bertram’s behavior under the Nazi regime and his support for Hitler. Because Hinkel stops his biography in 1933, the reader is left with many questions about Bertram’s legacy in its entirety. Can the model of harmony account for Bertram’s post-1933 behavior? Upon reflection, the answer is: not persuasively. The kind of dictatorship that Hitler erected was then unprecedented, and it may be unfair to expect Bertram to recognize it for what it was, let alone repudiate it publicly. This is tantamount to asking him to break with his training and decades of Church tradition. On the other hand, his unwillingness to be critical of Hitler is rooted in more than a stubborn perception of the Nazi Party as a God-given, legitimate authority. Moreover, the model of harmony fails to suggest what course of action to take when the state ceases to compromise for the sake of social order, or attacks the institution of the Church, as Hitler’s regime did after 1933, leaving one to wonder if the “model of harmony” argument determined Hinkel’s periodization.

Despite the limitations of his central argument and the questions that remain, Hinkel’s book provides critical information about an important figure in the Catholic hierarchy in twentieth-century Germany. It is valuable to scholars studying episcopal politics and church-state relations in Germany from the Belle Epoch to the end of the Weimar Republic. It provides a new angle along which to study the impact of national and ecclesiastical border drawing on Germans, Poles, and the Vatican. Finally, it belongs to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the necessity of rethinking conventional periodizations in modern European history. The twelve-year Third Reich will always be bracketed because of the horrific devastation it spawned. But Hinkel proves that what came before 1933 is just as much worth studying on its own terms, and not simply as context for what came next.

[1] Hinkel gives a thorough overview of the literature dealing with Bertram on pages 14-27. These include works by Joachim Köhler, Bernhard Stasiewski, Werner Marschall, Antonia Leugers, August Hermann Leugers-Scherzberg, and others. Hinkel’s explanation as to why it has taken so long for scholars to engage with a study of Bertram is persuasive: the timing of his death at the end of the Second World War; the transfer of Breslau to Poland in August 1945, when it became Wrocław; the early postwar “memory literature”, which upheld Bertram as “the epitome of a lost, transfigured homeland [Heimat]” (12); and the domination of the 1933-1945 period in historiography that depicted Bertram as the compliant leader of the Catholic bishops without delving into his personality.

[2] Bjork’s book, based on his dissertation work, is Neither German Nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

[3] My thanks to my colleague John Deak for helping me refine my understanding of the biogram, and for his helpful comments on an early draft of this review.

[4] Statistics taken from http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Silesia, accessed 12 July 2012.

[5] Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan” in Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33 (2011), 261. The article lays out an eloquent argument favoring a move away from a rigid distinction of the terms anti-Judaism and antisemitism.

Seminar Report: Annual Seminar for Seminary and Religious Faculty, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., June 18-22, 2012

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

Seminar Report: Annual Seminar for Seminary and Religious Faculty, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., June 18-22, 2012

By Lauren N. Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

Recently sixteen scholars met in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for a five-day seminar led by two expert historians of modern Germany, Victoria Barnett and Robert Ericksen. Every year, the museum hosts a seminar for seminary and religious faculty via its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. It is aimed primarily at academics and teachers whose interests are focused on religion, but participants’ backgrounds are diverse. This year, the topic was the role of the churches during the Third Reich, and it attracted an impressive array of scholars. In addition to instructors of religion, which include the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths, there were also several historians of modern Germany in attendance, as well as biblical studies experts, a professor of ethics, and a professor of philosophy and religion who also teaches environmental science. This diversity of interests contributed to a lively and enriching discussion.

The seminar was held entirely in the museum, which showcased its multiple uses: in addition to being an active museum and memorial, it is also a research center and a teaching resource, with an impressive library and an enormous archive. Seminar participants took advantage of the location and were given time to tour the museum and familiarize themselves to library and archival holdings. They were also introduced to Paul Shapiro, the director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, director of the Visiting Scholars Program, and fellows working at the museum’s archives.

There were five distinct units through which the seminar participants explored the topic of church complicity in Nazi Germany: Church Reactions to National Socialism; Anti-Judaism/Antisemitism: Continuities and Distinctions; Rescue, Resistance, and Opposition; Debates About Denazification and Postwar Justice; and Church Statements that Address the Holocaust. Ericksen’s chapters about the churches in his new Complicity in the Holocaust (2010) were required reading; Barnett’s text, Bystanders (2000), was recommended, as was Peter Fritzsche’s Germans Into Nazis (1998). In addition to several articles, the group also read primary documents from the period, including the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Barmen Declaration, Pope Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas Message, the postwar Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, and “We Remember,” from 1998, among others. Reading was completed before the commencement of the seminar, so that each day the bulk of seminar time was devoted to intensive discussion.

If the focus of the seminar was the Christian churches during the Third Reich, the theme was complicity, and one of the primary goals of Barnett and Ericksen was to invite participants to complicate their understanding of the term, and how it might be applied to the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany. “Complicity”, a shared responsibility for an ultimate outcome, inculpates those who were not perpetrators of murder, but who nonetheless contributed to the construction of an environment in which the Nazi genocide became possible. Evidence gathered over the last seven decades has clarified some elements of the complicity puzzle: the postwar efforts by both churches to misrepresent what had been reality under Nazism, combined with deliberate dishonesty during the denazification process, are now widely recognized and condemned; there is abundant evidence of broad, enthusiastic support for Hitler in both churches, among clergy as well as laity; and there is a painful lack of evidence for consistent, open opposition from the churches to Hitler’s regime. Scholars identify various factors undergirding church behavior: the nationalism of German church leaders, their tendency to view democracy with hostility during the Weimar era, their reluctance to embrace modernist trends (particularly among the Catholics), and the attraction of certain of Hitler’s values, not the least of which was a relentless opposition to communism.

The organization of the seminar, the deliberate and thoughtful direction of the two instructors, and the interdisciplinary nature of the discussion that took place resulted in an exciting and original investigation of a topic that has been exhaustively scrutinized. Barnett and Ericksen came determined to immerse the participants in the historical and theological dynamics of church complicity. The unit readings and the seminar discussion, therefore, exposed participants to both the history of the topic and the theological “ecosystem” of the men (and a few women) whose actions and behavior were the focus of the seminar.

Over the course of the five days, the backgrounds of individual participants created an informed, vibrant discussion that often complicated the conventional understanding of the subject. The concept of complicity was one, as were the concepts of forgiveness, mercy, and resistance. Jewish-Christian dialogue and post-Holocaust Christian political theology surfaced frequently, and the group benefited immeasurably from the willingness of certain participants, Christian and Jewish, to debate these issues with intellectual curiosity and respect. The discussion of Christian antisemitism, especially in the New Testament, was riveting.

It may be easy for specialists of the Third Reich and the Holocaust to assume that knowledge of church complicity with Nazism is widespread and uncontroversial. But this seminar demonstrated the inaccuracy of such an assumption. Every participant came away with a firmer grasp on the nuances and complexities of the situation, and a resolution to ask the difficult ethical questions about responsibility and guilt, both in their own work and with their students. Barnett and Ericksen were the perfect discussion guides throughout the seminar, offering their considerable expertise as well as personal anecdotes and experiences. The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies should be commended for organizing and funding the seminar, which was a resounding success in the eyes of the participants.