Author Archives: Manfred Gailus

Nachruf auf den Historiker Thomas Großbölting

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Nachruf auf den Historiker Thomas Großbölting

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin

Die Nachricht war ein schwerer Schock: Am 11. Februar stieß in Hamburg-Harburg ein ICE mit einem schwer beladenen Sattelschlepper zusammen, der fatalerweise auf einem ebenerdigen Bahnübergang stehengeblieben war. Es gab Verletzte und ein Todesopfer. Einen Tag später erfuhren wir, dass es der Historiker Thomas Großbölting war, der auf diese tragische Weise im Alter von 55 Jahren aus dem Leben gerissen wurde. Ein Schock, nicht zu fassen, ein vermeidbarer Unfall, und ausgerechnet er.

Großbölting stammte aus Westfalen (Dingden/Kreis Wesel) und studierte nach dem Abitur Geschichte, katholische Theologie und Germanistik. 1997 wurde er mit einer Studie über SED-Diktatur und Gesellschaft in der Region Magdeburg und Halle promoviert. Bei Hans-Ulrich Thamer in Münster habilitierte er sich mit einer Untersuchung über Industrie- und Gewerbeausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert. Er bekleidete zahlreiche Anschlusspositionen in Magdeburg und Berlin, bis er 2009 einen Ruf als Professor für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte an der Universität Münster annahm. Beruflich außerordentlich erfolgreich und mit innovativen Projekten stets in Bewegung begriffen, trat er 2020 die renommierte Position des Direktors der Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg an.

Er hinterlässt ein beeindruckend breitangelegtes, vielfältiges wissenschaftliches Oeuvre. Der Öffentlichkeit wurde er insbesondere durch die Leitung einer wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung zum Missbrauch im Bistum Münster bekannt, die 2022 erschien. An der im Januar 2024 publizierten Aufarbeitungsstudie zu sexualisierter Gewalt in den evangelischen Kirchen war er ebenfalls maßgeblich beteiligt. Großbölting veröffentlichte über katholische Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, über die gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung von Bi-Konfessionalität in der deutschen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, zuletzt über die deutsche „Wiedervereinigungsgesellschaft“ seit 1990.

Vielbeachtet war seine Studie „Der verlorene Himmel“ (2013) zum gesellschaftlichen Bedeutungsverlust beider großen christlichen Konfessionen nach 1945. „Ein ‚christliches Deutschland‘“ – so schrieb er damals pointiert – „gibt es nicht mehr.“ Gleichwohl seien Glaube, Kirchen und Religion aus dem Leben der Deutschen nicht verschwunden, aber sie hätten sich verdünnt und seien mehr und mehr an den Rand geraten. Seinerzeit verfasste Großbölting mit diesem lesenswerten Buch eine erste umfassende moderne Religionsgeschichte der Deutschen seit 1945, ein Buch, in dem seine eigene katholische Hintergrundprägung sublim durchscheint.

Es fällt schwer, diesen Nachruf schreiben zu müssen. In Hamburg, wo er seit 2020 wirkte, hatte er in wenigen Jahren eine enorme Fülle an neuen Projekten angeregt und viele verantwortliche Positionen übernommen. Man wird ihn schwerlich ersetzen können. Jeder Kollege, jede Kollegin, überhaupt alle, die ihn kannten, schätzten seine stets freundliche, zugewandte, liebenswürdige Art – dabei konnte er gut zuhören und brachte immer frische Ideen mit, in jedem Gespräch, auf jeder Tagung. Als ich im Dezember 2021 in der Berliner Stiftung Topographie des Terrors ein Buch über Religiosität im „Dritten Reich“ vorstellte, sagte er sofort für die Moderation zu und kam von Hamburg herüber – mit dem Hochgeschwindigkeitszug. Fotos von diesem Abend zeigen ihn, wie er war und wie er im Gedächtnis bleiben wird: anregend, ideenreich, immer klug und abwägend in seiner Argumentation.

Wir alle werden ihn sehr vermissen. Mit seiner Familie – er hinterlässt seine Frau und vier Kinder -, mit vielen Historikerinnen und Historikern, und mit allen, die ihn kannten, trauern wir um einen hochgeschätzten Kollegen und überaus liebenswürdigen Menschen.

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

Review of Helge-Fabien Hertz, Evangelische Kirchen im Nationalsozialismus. Kollektivbiografische Untersuchung der schleswig-holsteinischen Pastorenschaft

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Review of Helge-Fabien Hertz, Evangelische Kirchen im Nationalsozialismus. Kollektivbiografische Untersuchung der schleswig-holsteinischen Pastorenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022). ISBN: 9783110760835; 1,778 pp.

Reviewed for H-Soz-Kult by Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

Edited by Marc Buggeln; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, with the assistance of DEEPL

This review was first published in H-Soz-Kult, and is used by kind permission of the editors. The original German version can be found here.

Over the last two to three decades, several regional historical studies on Protestant milieus during the Third Reich have provided important insights into the penetration of Nazi ideology and associated behavior within the Protestant churches. The results of these studies were always the same or at least very similar: the nazification of this particular religious milieu proved to be extraordinarily high. In any case, nazification was much more far-reaching than the conventional literature on church history, under the heading of “church struggle” [Kirchenkampf], had previously suggested. This earlier literature put particular emphasis on the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, or BK) as a staunch opponent of the regime.

Helge-Fabien Hertz’s weighty dissertation (2021) from Kiel University, supervised by Rainer Hering (Schleswig- Holstein State Archives), Peter Graeff and Manfred Hanisch (both from Kiel University), now joins this recent research tradition. The study consists of a group biography of the 729 pastors who worked in the Schleswig-Holstein state church shortly before and during the Nazi era (1930-1945). The study is based on a broad range of sources: the clergymen’s personal files were evaluated; in addition, the author has consulted sermons and confirmation lesson plans, denazification files, the relevant state church archive files on the Kirchenkampf, documents on NSDAP membership in the Berlin Federal Archives, and a wealth of contemporary lectures, articles, letters, diaries. Hertz uses a sophisticated set of social-science methods to operationalize the exorbitant amount of data from this large group of people (quantification of “attitudes” and “actions” with the aid of indicators) and to present it using a variety of statistics, diagrams, etc. One must admit at the outset, it is not always easy to keep track of the whole given the extreme complexity of the work’s organization into “parts”, “sections”, “chapters”, and so on.

Volume 1 (392 pages) presents results formulated in advance of theses as well as theoretical and methodological foundations and, as a representative cross-section of the entire study group, ten prototypical Nazi biographies that show the entire spectrum of pastor behaviour: from extreme cases of fanatical Nazi activists to politically-resistant Confessing Church pastors. Volume 2 presents manifestations of “Nazi conformity” in the group of pastors and, with its 900 pages, is not coincidentally the most comprehensive of the three volumes. Volume 3, which is smaller in comparison (around 450 pages), contains findings about “Nazi non-conformity” among the clergy. Such a performance was significantly rarer. If one wanted to differentiate between the contents of the three volumes according to the respective degrees of Nazi color tones depicted, we have the selection between brown (Volume 1), deep brown (Volume 2) and light brown with a few white spots (Volume 3).

For obvious reasons, it is not possible to read through this extensive, highly complex social science work in one go. It is not narrative historiography. Rather, the study can be considered as a handbook for an exemplary analysis of the professional status of pastors in the Third Reich. Thereby, introductory sections in Volume 1 can be read in anticipation of important results. The leading six theses (pp. 4-30) offer a “substantive quintessence” [inhaltliche Quintessenz] of the whole. Thesis Two reads: “The pastoral ministry of the Third Reich [in Schleswig-Holstein] was primarily characterized by collaboration with and affection for Nazism, by Nazi-compliant actions and attitudes.” (p. 5) This thesis is substantiated in the more than 900 pages of Volume 2 that follow, in which the individual subgroups are presented with precise and relative orders of magnitude, using the methods of social science. Although the widespread “Kirchenkampf narrative” of conventional church history is important, it is insufficient to fully grasp the diverse findings of proximity and distance in the relationship between Protestantism and National Socialism. Above all, this is illustrated by the example of the “pastor option” [Pfarreroption] for the Confessing Church: “The Confessing Church was not only not a resistance group. Its main characteristics consisted of Nazi collaboration and inclinations towards Nazism combined with ecclesiastical attempts at autonomy, in connection with Nazi-compliant behavior and attitudes and with self-assertion.” (Thesis 4, p. 15) Volume 1 also contains an analysis of the spectrum of group behavior based on ten possible “Nazi positioning forms” (POS 1-10). The biographies presented here provide an easy-to-read cross-section of all pastor options using the example of selected prototypes (pp. 225-311). Anyone reading this will already be somewhat familiar with the examples of Schleswig-Holstein pastors during the Hitler era, from fanatical Nazi pastors such as Ernst Szymanowski or Johann Peperkorn (both “Deutschkirche” ) to German Christian pastors (27.1 percent of the total group, which numbered 665), clergy who were new to church politics (26.5 percent), and Confessing-Church pastors, who (surprisingly) made up the largest church-political subgroup within the sample, at 45 percent. Among these Confessing pastors were a few exceptional pastors such as Friedrich Slotty, to whom the very rare attribute of resistance to Nazism can be ascribed.

The dark-brown-colored Volume 2 collects all forms of Nazi conformity among the pastors: memberships in the NSDAP or with the very Nazi-affiliated followers of the German Christians [Deutsche Christen, or DC] and the ethnic Christian German Church, as well as positive references to National Socialism and its ideology and forms of practical Nazi action inside and outside the church. For example, forty-five pages of evidence present “verbal extolment of Hitler and the swearing of allegiance to the Nazi state.” Exactly 237 pastors substantiated this type of action. BK pastors did this in sermons and catecheses almost as often as their DC colleagues. Provost Peter Schütt (DC), for example, praised Hitler in his sermon on July 24, 1940, after the occupation of France: “The way he spoke [in the Reichstag session on July 19, 1940], only a victor could speak with the noblest spirit. […] He put into practice the commandment given by our Savior in the Sermon on the Mount.” (p. 604) And the (later) BK pastor Gustav Emersleben was knowledgeable about “right discipleship” (John I, 43-51) in his examination sermon of September 2, 1933: people always would have had the need to be led. They expected help in moments of need and misery. Where a leader emerges from need and misery, there is an opportunity to find true discipleship. “In recent years, no nation has experienced how all this plays out in detail better than we Germans. We were and are […] a downtrodden people; there certainly have been few who have not longed for a real leader. We may well say that he was given to us in our chancellor.” (p. 611)

The wealth of evidence on individual types of action, which are not only listed but also evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively, is truly overwhelming. The categories include: condemnation of the Weimar Republic; the people’s community and the Führer’s will; theological anti-Judaism; and Christian antisemitism. The frequency with which Nazi symbols were adopted in the church, the practice of issuing “Aryan certificates” from the church registers, the use of the Hitler salute, and the denazification measures within the church since 1945 – which in Schleswig-Holstein, as elsewhere, were lenient by all accounts – are also documented. All in all, this heavy, brown-colored Volume 2 is hard reading and offers overwhelming evidence of the frightening extent to which nationalist and National Socialist ideas and various forms of Nazi practice were able to penetrate the inner circles of a medium-sized regional church. The special feature of this study is that this high degree of Nazi penetration can be measured more precisely than ever before by means of empirical social research. In 1933, around 92 percent of the 1.6 million inhabitants of the province between the North and the Baltic Seas, which had been part of Prussia since 1867, were Evangelical-Lutheran Christians, living in 466 parishes. The young researcher deserves great credit for the fact that he presents his often-shocking empirical findings in an emphatically sober, objective and socially-disciplined manner.

Finally, forms of political Nazi non-conformity within the church are addressed (Volume 3). Here, primarily Kirchenkampf conflicts in the narrower sense are depicted, above all in disputes between the DC and the BK. The author sums up this “church struggle” more specifically: while DC pastors conformed to the Nazis almost without exception, BK theologians displayed a broad spectrum of positions. “However, collaboration with and inclinations towards Nazism dominated there as well, often in combination with a desire for autonomy within the church – not a contradiction in terms: the ‘church struggle’ of the BK pastors against the DC and its efforts to transform Christianity under the Nazis often went hand-in-hand with an affirmation of the Nazi (state) and stalwart involvement with Nazism. Although the very few resistant clergy were all BK members, they also remained an unwelcome exception within the BK. Radical forms of Nazi activism remained rare among BK members – as did political dissent. A brown vest with shading and white spots represented the BK as a whole, rather than a white vest with brown spots.” (p. 1697)

In conclusion: this work is undoubtedly an important contribution to the topic of Protestantism and National Socialism, and also to research on Nazism as a whole. It would be hard to find a similarly differentiated group-biographical analysis of the Third Reich. At the same time, the author’s holistic, empirical approach to research destroys long-lasting Kirchenkampf legends, especially with regards to the academic evaluation of the performance of the Confessing Church. In the post-war reappraisal of the church (mostly via memoirs by theologians in the BK tradition and by church historians at Protestant faculties), there was almost always an interest-driven whitewashing. Not by chance did Hertz encounter fierce resistance to his investigation in conservative church circles of today’s “Northern Church.” As far as the church-political moderate BK is concerned, highly adapted to the regime as it was, there can be almost no talk of resistance to the Nazi regime. Rather, forms of collaboration and consent played a major role.

However, the work is not a fully integrated study of the history of a Protestant regional culture. We learn little about the sensitivities and forms of participation of the ordinary church people in the 466 parishes, which are an essential part of assessing a confessional regional culture. However, it seems plausible that the thinking and behavior of the Schleswig-Holstein pastors is a massive indication of the mental characteristics of the church region as a whole: a church region that was strongly adapted to the Nazi regime and, in many respects, even Nazified during the Hitler era. The Protestant churches in the north, the author concludes, were primarily a pillar of society in the Third Reich that consolidated and supported the Nazi regime.

The reviewer’s final wish: the author should write a highly condensed, reader-friendly “people’s edition” of 300 pages (at an affordable price) on the empirical basis presented here. In other words: more narrative and fewer figures, so that the most important results of his research can also be taken note of beyond specialist academic circles.

The Old Picture Is No Longer Valid: Why the Time Is Ripe for a Reassessment of the Ecclesiastical Figure of the Century, Otto Dibelius

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

The Old Picture Is No Longer Valid: Why the Time Is Ripe for a Reassessment of the Ecclesiastical Figure of the Century, Otto Dibelius

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

He was long regarded as the outstanding personality in the twentieth-century Protestant Church: Otto Dibelius (1880 – 1967). But what is missing is an overall picture of the leading theologian and “virtuoso power politician” and his work, especially during the National Socialist era, complains the Berlin history professor Manfred Gailus. An international Dibelius conference from October 5th to 7^th (2022) in Marburg is intended to close this gap.

This article was originally published in Zeitzeichen, February 2022, p. 14-17. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

It has grown quieter around Otto Dibelius. When the fiftieth anniversary of his death came in January 2017, few remembered him. No prominent memorial event, no scholarly conference, hardly any articles by well-known theologians or historians in newspapers or magazines. In Berlin, he was remembered in church services, but that was more of a small form – appreciation on the back burner. Perhaps the exuberant commemoration of the Reformation in 2017 also played a role: “Luther” was on everyone’s lips and drowned out the Protestant figure of the century, Dibelius. But by this time, “lower case” commemoration of the once highly revered Bishop of Berlin had long been in vogue. In 1980 things looked different. At that time, the renowned Tübingen church historian Klaus Scholder, in a highly regarded lecture in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, spoke on the centenary of Dibelius’ birth. On the 40th anniversary of his death in 2007, the Münster theologian Albrecht Beutel gave a lecture in the Berlin Cathedral about the powerful church leader and, referring to Scholder, characterized Dibelius as a singular “Prussian church prince”.

You rarely hear such superlatives these days. The old and sometimes strongly heroic image of Dibelius is fading. It clearly doesn’t fit anymore. It is time to draw a new picture of Dibelius that meets today’s scholarly standards and integrates his drawback in addition to his undeniable skills, achievements, and merits. He will certainly remain a major figure, but he will lose some of his shine. Until now, little has been written about his aggressive war sermons from 1914 to 1918 in the relevant Dibelius literature. His leading role in the Greater Berlin regional association of the warmongering “German Fatherland Party” from 1917 to 1918 should not be ignored. Despite the important study by Hartmut Fritz (1998), his permanent agitation against the Weimar Republic as a “godless republic” has not been adequately investigated. His performance in the “Third Reich” requires considerable corrections. His attitude towards Judaism, including a consistent veritable antisemitism, was never integrated into an overall picture of this colorful Protestant personality. In short: until now the only biography has been the highly apologetic biography by Robert Stupperich (1989). The time is now ripe for a new biographical study that situates the life and work of this controversial church leader in twentieth century political and social history, assessing his modes of action from this perspective. In what follows, Dibelius’ role in the late phase of Weimar and during the Third Reich will be discussed.

Dibelius did not like the Weimar Republic and tended to vilify it as a lifeless “godless republic” out of a proud ecclesiastical attitude. A few weeks before Hitler came to power, in a lecture on the “reawakening of faith in the present”, he lamented the devastating effects of secularization, materialism, individualism, and a general decline in values. But he also saw light at the end of the tunnel. He pinned his hopes on the “national movement” of the moment, including the National Socialists. With its appeal to a “community of blood ” [“Blutsgemeinschaft”] and “ethno-national community” [“Volksgemeinschaft”], it rebelled against the internationalism of class struggle ideas. Their goal: a new, strong ethnic group, had not been “conceived by the sharp calculating mind of a Jew.” Rather, it came from “emotion,” “instinct,” from “impulses of the blood.” The national movement was fighting for ideals that were not conceived by man, but felt “in his blood,” precisely in what was “creatively determined” for him. Although it was not yet possible to say how the struggle within National Socialism for the religious foundations would end, one thing was certain: it was possible for a “consciously Protestant life of faith” to develop within the National Socialist movement, too.

End of the “Godless Republic”

Dibelius had high hopes for the spirit of the anti-republican opposition to Weimar, especially a strong upsurge in faith and the liquidation of an epoch of unbelief. That was his expectation. From this perspective, January 30, 1933, appeared to be a fulfillment. Joy and deep satisfaction at the end of the “Godless Republic” determined the thoughts of the acting General Superintendent of the Kurmark during the first months of Hitler’s “Cabinet of National Concentration.” Now we rule, too – something like this could be used to capture his immediate sense of that moment. The smashing of the “godless movement” took place to the applause of Protestant church leaders. The rapid increase in church membership withdrawals suddenly stopped. Religious instruction was reintroduced in the modern, secular progressive schools [Reformschulen]. “Non-Aryan” lawyers in courts were forcibly expelled by SA troops. The Easter message of the Prussian church leadership spoke of “joy at the awakening of the deepest forces of our nation.” Dibelius preached as a political theologian on the “Day of Potsdam” in a euphoric mood of optimism on the big stage. He witnessed the act of state in the Garrison Church up close and was deeply moved by the ceremonial handshake between Hindenburg and Hitler.

Dibelius also justified the April 1, 1933, boycott of Jews to other countries. In his “Wochenschau” [“Week in Review”] in the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt [Protestant Sunday Paper] of April 9, he reaffirmed his positive attitude towards Nazi Jewish policy: the “Jewish element” (he wrote) had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last 15 years. “German national life” was endangered by the Jewish immigration from the East. Nobody could seriously object to the suppression of Jewish influence. Two things had to happen in order to solve the “Jewish question”: blocking off Jewish immigration from the East and strengthening the German way of life so that it did not succumb to a “foreign race.” In May, Dibelius expressed great joy at the National Socialist redesignation of May 1st as “National Labour Day” and praised “People’s Chancellor Hitler” and Goebbels’ “brilliant organizational talent.”

At the Kurmark Church Congress at the end of May, in the Potsdam Garrison Church, Dibelius praised the changes since January 30: the dirt had disappeared from the streets, the poisonous class hatred had been removed from the soul; children were receiving religious instruction again and adults were again returning to church. At the subsequent rally in front of Potsdam’s city palace, Dibelius allowed a prominent member of the Reich leadership of German Christians (Deutsche Christen, or DC), Pastor Friedrich Peter, to make political appeals to the Protestant youth.

The measures taken by the National Socialist state commissar August Jäger at the end of June 1933 marked a turning point: all Prussian church general superintendents were temporarily suspended, including Dibelius. After the end of Jäger’s state intervention, Dibelius was able to resume his official duties, but in fact he no longer had any administrative powers. The church elections of July 23, ordered at short notice by the state, brought a massive two-thirds-to-three-quarters majority for the DC. They now dominated the Prussian church government. In this precarious situation, Dibelius sent a pointed letter aimed at understanding to the new church leadership, which was dominated by radical German Christians. It was untenable, he complained, for a general superintendent to be considered politically unreliable in a church that had joyfully committed itself to the new state. He now wanted to clarify his “actual position.” Even as a student around 1900, he had been fighting against Judaism and social democracy. He had remained true to this attitude to this day. He referred to his sermon on the “Day of Potsdam.” In it he acknowledged a spirit that stood up for the greatness of the Fatherland with determination. After the sermon, the Prussian Prime Minister Goering had shaken his hand with warm words of thanks. Likewise, at the request of Reichsminister Goebbels, he spoke to America over the radio to defend the new state against atrocity propaganda from abroad. Although he was critical of the DC, he had always tried to establish good contacts with them. Thus he had invited Ludwig Müller – the DC’s designated candidate for Reich Bishop– to deliver the major address to the church congress in the Kurmark church province. According to Dibelius in mid-July 1933, the rhythm and goals of their work contained much that corresponded to his own style and goals. He had repeatedly asked himself whether his type of work was not so closely related to the intentions of the DC that a mutual quarrel was intolerable from a church point of view. Because of the state commissar’s intervention, he had finally had to take a stand for the church. Finally, Dibelius wanted an understanding as to how things should continue with him personally. It should not be, he said, that the agitation of a small circle could easily remove a general superintendent from office.

The DC no longer responded to this request. The powerful wave of the DC movement within Protestantism had pushed Dibelius aside. In September he received his letter of dismissal for early retirement from the future Nazi Reich Bishop Müller. Dibelius had played no part in the first steps of opposition to DC ecclesiastical dominance in 1933. Rather, that came from the opposition election list “Gospel and Church” in July and the founding phase of the Pastors’ Emergency League in September. After weeks of waiting, a solution emerged in the fall. At the request of relatives, Hermann Goering had exerted his influence over the appointment of the retired general superintendent. On December 1, 1933, Dibelius took up the post of curate in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. Ostensibly, he was looking for this opportunity to take a break from church politics and time for personal reflection.

Overall, Dibelius’ behavior in the decisive year of 1933 had proven to be hesitant, shaky, and ambivalent. When he returned to Berlin on June 3, 1934, critical decisions in the Church Struggle had been made – without him. He had not been present at the constitution of free confessional synods from the beginning of 1934, at the Ulm Day of Confession in April, or at the first Reich Confessing Synod at the end of May 1934 in Barmen. He was absent when the house of the church was ablaze, and when he returned the fronts in the Church Struggle had formed.

Man of the Middle

At the request of Kurt Scharf, Dibelius helped establish a Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, or BK) in the Mark Brandenburg. During the Church Struggle, he was and remained a “man of the middle,” of church-political moderation, of balance. He did not belong to the decisive wing of the Confessing Church around Martin Niemöller, Martin Albertz, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Karl Barth. His church-political attitude corresponded more to the accommodating course of the moderate wing represented by the three Lutheran bishops of Hanover, Bavaria, and Württemberg. He was not involved as a synodal member to the BK synods of Dahlem, Augsburg and Bad Oeynhausen. He did not sign the confidential memorandum of the second Provisional Church Leadership of the BK to Hitler at the end of May 1936, and he was rather distant towards its peace liturgy against the threat of war at the end of September 1938. Lastly, he was not one of the accused in the “examination process” (December 1941), through which the regional elite of the BK Berlin-Brandenburg were sentenced to sometimes considerable prison terms for illegal teaching and examination activities at the illegal church seminary.

Dibelius’ real problem in the “Third Reich” were the German Christians with their ethno-nationalist Christian theology and their aggressive claim on the church government. This dissent gave rise to various conflicts and personal clashes. But that was not general resistance to the Nazi regime, rather only opposition to a parallel movement to the Hitler party within Protestantism. Additionally, he criticized aspects of the Nazi worldview and Nazi religious policy, where these proclaimed anti-Christian goals. In 1937, this brought him into a legal dispute with Reich Church Minister Hanns Kerrl.

However, during the war years, Dibelius developed a certain inner distance from the regime. Kurt Gerstein’s eyewitness reports about the murder of the Jews in the East (August 1942) may have played a role in this. Dibelius maintained contacts with the church unification work of Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm and with the conservative Freiburg resistance group around Walter Eucken and Gerhard Ritter. But resistance against the state was not permissible for a devout Christian and avowed Lutheran, according to Romans 13 and because of the [nineteenth-century] “New Lutheran” [neulutherische] two-kingdoms doctrine. So Dibelius remained what he had always been during the “Third Reich”: a Christian-conservative churchman, a Prussian-German national Protestant, whose religious mentality had been formed by the currents prevailing in the late German Empire (Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf Stoecker, Union of Associations of German Students). It was indelibly marked by ethno-national [völkisch] sympathies and notoriously anti-Jewish and at times antisemitic tendencies.

A thorough, up-to-date, new Dibelius biography seems urgent today—as well as a thoroughly renovated Dibelius picture as part of a contemporary ecclesiastical culture of remembrance.

Review of Robert M. Zoske, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Robert M. Zoske, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2020), 448 pages.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Several books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles appeared in 2021 on the occasion of the hundredth birthday of Sophie Scholl. She was born on 9 May 1921 in Forchtenberg (Württemberg) and was executed at the age of 21 in the Munich-Stadelheim prison on 22 February 1943, having been by sentenced to death on the same day by the National Socialist People’s Court on the charge of “preparation for high treason.” One of the most competent publications by far in this anniversary year is the great biography by the Protestant theologian and historian Robert M. Zoske. The author received his doctorate at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg in 2014 on the basis of a study of Sophie’s brother Hans Scholl. Four years later he presented a highly acclaimed, scholarly, and critical biography of Hans Scholl, which he has recently followed up with this substantial portrait of the short life of Hans’ younger sister and fellow resister. Taken together, Zoske must undoubtedly be counted one of the best experts on the history of the Scholl siblings and the resistance group of “The White Rose.”

Zoske worked for a long time as a practicing theologian and pastor in northern Germany. For obvious reasons, he is particularly interested in religious aspects in the biography of his protagonist, so that it seems almost appropriate to speak of the book as a biography of a young Protestant who is religiously searching. Sophie Scholl came from a Christian family: her mother Lina is described as a “cheerful Pietist” and her father as a “skeptical cultural Protestant.” Nonetheless, the Scholl siblings became enthusiastic about the Hitler movement in their teenage years. For many years, Sophie Scholl was a group leader in the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM) in addition to her church formation.

At 55 pages, by far the most extensive chapter is “Beloved,” which is devoted to Scholl’s complicated love affair with the soldier Fritz Hartnagel, which began in 1937. In 1940 alone, the two exchanged 91 letters, which reveal deep insights into the extremely difficult, torn mental life of the 19-year-old. She never escaped an ongoing vacillation and hesitation between being in love and physical love on the one hand, and her religious, pietistic interpretation of “sex as sin” on the other. And this fluctuation was accompanied by multiple, strenuous attempts to reduce their love relationship to the “purely spiritual,” but which often failed in practice.

The reading of the Scholl siblings and their circle of friends is informative: one encounters a lot of Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann. In addition, genuinely religious-Catholic literature was very popular among them: Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Romano Guardini, and then also classics such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Blaise Pascal. Their reading was generally not systematic, but rather a searching reading with many interruptions and sudden breaks. Influences from Carl Muth, the editor of the Catholic magazine Hochland, could be felt here. The circle of friends had contact with him during the later Munich years, beginning in 1940-1941. This resulted in the development of a religious motivation for resistance—in a sense “with God against Hitler.” By all appearances, there was no contact between the Scholl group and the Confessing Church at all.

After graduating from high school, training as a kindergarten teacher, and performing her compulsory labor service, Sophie Scholl began studying in Munich in the summer semester of 1942. However, she was seldom seen in the lecture halls of the university. It was only towards the end of this turbulent year that she was gradually included in the resistance actions of the circle around her brother Hans and Alexander Schmorell. It was the decisive year of her political awakening, and the moment of her decisive participation in the political resistance against Hitler.

Zoske’s deserving book clears up all kinds of legends about the Scholl siblings. In the final chapter, “Nachspiel,” the author traces the genesis of the “Icon Sophie Scholl” during the post-war period. The hour of birth of this transfiguration was the “Biographische Notizen” (1950) of her sister Inge Scholl, which was published in 1955 as the book Die Weisse Rose [The White Rose]. Since then, many allegations have been corrected, and the factual knowledge of the resistance group has also increased significantly. This new biography presents the reader with a reliable picture of the life of the young Protestant martyr in the resistance against Hitler. Important documents are printed in the appendix of the book, including detailed excerpts from Sophie Scholl’s interrogation transcripts (pp. 312-348). The early, seemingly-authentic memories of her friend Susanne Hirzel from 1946 are also impressive. From this I would like to quote in conclusion: “We met at the age of 14 in the League of German Girls. She was like a fiery, wild boy, wore her straight, dark brown hair in a man’s cut and preferred to wear a blue fisherman’s shirt or her brother’s winter shirt. She was lively, bold, with a bright, clear voice, daring in our wild games and of a divine sloppiness.”

Article: “Simultaneously Devout Christian and Antisemite: The Tübingen Theologian and ‘Jewish Researcher’ Gerhard Kittel”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Article: “Simultaneously Devout Christian and Antisemite: The Tübingen Theologian and ‘Jewish Researcher’ Gerhard Kittel”

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in zeitzeichen, November 2020, p. 50-52. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

The renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948) was an ardent enemy of Jews. His life’s work was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) — Generations of theology students have engaged with this standard work. The historian Manfred Gailus writes about a theologian who never showed remorse, even after the war.

Christians, it is often heard and read today, could not also be antisemites at the same time. This idea is false. Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948), the renowned New Testament scholar from Tübingen, was certainly a devout Christian. As a New Testament theologian, he confessed to being passionately anti-Jewish and repeatedly called the New Testament the “most anti-Jewish book in all the world.” As a völkisch-thinking contemporary of the Hitler era, he was also explicitly antisemitic. There is no denying his pious Christianity, which emerged biographically out of Swabian Pietism. But his genuine antisemitism is also without doubt.

In his 1942 memorandum on “The Position of Jewish Studies within the Framework of General Scholarship,” (“Die Stellung der Judaistik im Rahmen der Gesamtwissenschaft”), Kittel judged: Judaism is a disease affecting the German national body, the severity of which does not allow for “Romantic harmonization and idealization.” As soon as Jewish research ceases “to see its subject matter as a non-type, as the absence of type, as a sickness and perversion,” it offends against its purpose to be a servant of the knowledge of nature, of what is genuine, of what is healthy. Precisely because of its singularity and “essential perversion of the genuine national existence,” an independent academic Jewish Studies is necessary. Only on the basis of an accurate Jewish Studies will it be possible to determine the essential appearance of Judaism and to banish the “Jewish danger.”

Kittel wrote these lines in the fourth year of the war, 1942, when the Holocaust was well underway and the annual number of Jewish victims was reaching its zenith. One hesitates to attribute Kittel’s just-cited positions simply to Christian anti-Judaism.

Professor at Age 33

Born in 1888 in Breslau as the son of the renowned Old Testament writer Rudolf Kittel from Württemberg, Gerhard Kittel followed early in his father’s footsteps: theological studies, doctorate, habilitation. It all happened very quickly—at 33 he was professor of New Testament in Greifswald, a little later (1926) holder of the Schlatter chair in Tübingen. Like so many Protestants, Kittel had his genuine Protestant experience in 1933, the year Hitler came to power: joining the NSDAP, participating in the antisemitic German Christians, and writing lively journalism in the völkisch zeitgeist.

Kittel’s booklet “The Jewish Question” (June 1933) can be considered one of the most influential Protestant statements of the epoch. The Christian, too, he said, must have his place in the current front of the antisemitic struggle. Even though he used the term “race” sparingly and rather implicitly, in this book, as in many future publications, he lamented a disastrous “mixture of blood and race” in Germany and saw in it a “poison” that had brought about the “degradation” of the German Volk since the emancipation of the Jews in the eighteenth century and which could only be corrected again through a tough, völkisch policy. Through baptism, the theologian emphasized, a Jew willing to convert does not become a German, but remains a “Jewish Christian.”

Already in 1933 Kittel voted for a ban on Christian-Jewish mixed marriages, mentally anticipating the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935. He cautiously distinguished himself from the explicit racial antisemitism of leading Nazi ideologues and advocated what he believed to be ‘better,’ a more academically-based and more strongly Christian-inspired antisemitism.

Kittel’s work was complex. There was the genuine theological researcher with academic contributions to early Christianity and ancient Judaism, which found international recognition. There was the ordained theologian who proclaimed his Christian faith from the pulpit. There was the ethno-political “Jew researcher” who collaborated with the Hitler party and the Nazi state.

The real center of his life’s work, however, was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), the first four volumes of which were published under his editorship from 1933 to 1942. Generations of theology students have worked with this standard work. For obvious reasons, the question arises to what extent Kittel’s decided anti-Judaism and his ethnic antisemitism were reflected in the contributions of the TDNT. The latest analysis by the Paderborn theologian Martin Leutzsch shows that dedicated antisemitism only occurs marginally in the scientific articles. However, the dictionary is permeated throughout with a structural modern Christian anti-Judaism, in order to develop a Christian “narrative of superiority” vis-à-vis Judaism.

Collaboration with the Nazi Regime

Kittel’s political and ideological collaboration with the Nazi regime was expressed primarily through his participation in the “Research Department of the Jewish Question” of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank. As a renowned theologian and expert on ancient Judaism, he took part in all four annual conferences of this institute (1936-1939) and published consistently in its antisemitic series of publications. At an event accompanying the Munich exhibition “The Eternal Jew,” Kittel gave a lecture in December 1937 on “The Racial Development of Judaism.” He took part in the Nuremberg Rally in 1938 as “the Führer’s guest of honour.”

In December 1941, Kittel wrote a report on the Paris assassin Herschel Grynszpan, who was imprisoned in Berlin, and presented his Parisian act of violence in November 1938 as the act of a “Talmudic Jew” controlled by international world Jewry. In an article on “Talmudic Thinking and Judaism” (published October 1941), Kittel wrote: “In Talmudic terms, only the Jew actually deserves to be called a person. The gentile is to the Jew as the chaff is to the wheat, like the dust to the pearl, like the miscarriage to the living child, like the animal to the human being. Even the dog still deserves preference over the non-Jew.”

Preparing the Way for the Holocaust

According to Kittel’s postwar account, it was not until the beginning of 1943 that he found out about the systematic killing of Jews in the East through his son Eberhard, who was on military leave in Tübingen. Kittel certainly did not take an active part in the Holocaust. And he must have reacted in horror to the terrible news from the East. The Tübingen theologian will, however, have to be counted among the ones who spiritually paved the way for the Holocaust.

On May 3, 1945, the French occupation forces, which had moved into Tübingen, arrested eight professors from the Eberhard Karl University, including Gerhard Kittel. Six months in prison, imprisonment in a camp for suspected Nazi perpetrators in Balingen, and forced residency in Beuron with a work permit for the monastery library—Kittel was only able to return to Tübingen in February 1948. He renounced his Tübingen professorship, but demanded an appropriate pension and wished to be able to continue the publication of the TDNT. On July 11, 1948, the theologian died at the age of 59, following a serious illness. Kittel did not die of inner brokenness or spiritual contrition.

The denazification arbitration chamber proceedings initiated against him did not reach a conclusion during his lifetime. Based on the state of affairs then and in comparison with other “cases,” he would have been acquitted. In his justification, “My Defense” (1946), there are only minor traces of a subjective self-awareness of guilt. He admitted complicity in the general catastrophe of the Germans. Individually, however, as a devout Christian, he felt at peace with himself. He wrote in 1946 that he had not touched a hair on a single Jew. Rather, as a courageous Christian confessor he had contradicted the Nazi worldview and its “vulgar antisemitism” and had worked in the party in this critical sense. With this resistance, he had risked a lot and had repeatedly been threatened with concentration camps.

Not Touched a Hair

Much about the “Kittel case” was kept silent in the post-war period. The Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm, who was also the first chair of the postwar Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, or EKD), defended the theologian against accusations in a 1947 “expert opinion” and ruled that it was part of Professor Kittel’s ecclesiastical theological teaching assignment to show the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.”

Even in the 1970s, the Tübingen church historian Klaus Scholder had difficulty dealing with the suppressed topic. In his substantial 900-page work on The Churches and the Third Reich (1977) he mentions Kittel only marginally once in the notes. It was Scholder’s assistant at the time, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, and the American historian Robert P. Ericksen, who simultaneously addressed the taboo topic, starting in the late 1970s. Siegele-Wenschkewitz apparently ventured too far too early with her courageous reappraisal, thereby losing the prospect of a university career as a church historian within the German theological faculties.

Further Reading: Gailus, Manfred, and Clemens Vollnhals, eds. Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Der Tübinger Theologe und „Judenforscher“ Gerhard Kittel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020.

Fierce Culture Wars Over Three Construction Projects in the German Capital Region

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Fierce Culture Wars Over Three Construction Projects in the German Capital Region

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dr. Manfred Gailus is an expert on the history of the Berlin churches during the Nazi era and regularly writes about the ongoing impact of that history on the current religious, ecclesiastical, and political scene in the German capital, where he lives and works.

Three historically significant architectural projects in the Berlin-Brandenburg capital region have been the subject of heated public disputes for years. Unmistakenly restorative and in part explicitly religious-political, they exemplify a problematic cultural policy. In their origins, all three projects exhibit common or similar structural features, indicating that this concerns more than simple and singular architectural reconstruction projects. All three construction projects were initially announced as private or small-group campaigns financed by donations, but were unable to raise the necessary financial resources for realization. The protagonists then proceeded to appeal to public bodies (the Federal Republic of Germany, the Berlin Senate as state government, the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (EKBO)), effectively forcing these state and church bodies to help bring these lofty project ideas to fruition by massive financial grants. In all three cases, in fact, the project implementation only got off the ground through subsidies from public and church funds (tax money, church tax money). In all three projects, the same or similar interwoven networks of denominational and political figures played and still play an essential role. In addition, partly anonymous donors (private donors, associations, etc.) can buy their way into the design of the emerging buildings through large donations and thus write their private wishes, preferences, and motives into the public space. Anyone who has money can “immortalize” themselves here. Those who don’t are unlucky.

1) Reconstruction of the Berlin Palace

Idea: Once again, the German capital should have a striking architectural symbol in the city center. And in the twenty-first century the new symbol will now become the old one—the historic Hohenzollern Palace. Of course, today it will be filled with different spiritual contents than the lost Prussian monarchic divine grace. The building is now in the city center: on the outside, predominantly heroic Baroque Prussia; on the inside, world culture is to be presented under the Humboldt Forum label. The state provided the financing and contributed around 500 million euros. About 100 million was financed through donations and private “purchases” for the building. The organization of the project is run by a foundation and a development circle that is primarily responsible for fundraising. In these circles, much of old Prussia has been revived—nostalgic feelings: We are getting our old castle back! The main actors in these networks include: Monika Grütters, an avowed Catholic of the ruling CDU party, in her capacity as Minister of State for Culture; Agricultural machinery dealer and first project initiator Wilhelm von Boddien, as managing director of the supporters’ association; the Protestant theologian Richard Schröder from Humboldt University; and recently, also the General Director of the Humboldt Forum, Hartmut Dorgerloh.

There were quite a few public controversies in the course of the reconstruction process. The most glaring unreasonable demand recently was: a gold-plated cross on the dome above the main entrance and a slogan mounted on the dome taken from two biblical passages (Acts 4:12 and Philippians 2:10): There is no other salvation, and no other name given to men, except the name of Jesus, to the glory of God the Father. That at the name of Jesus all should bow down on their knees who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth. In the spirit of throne and altar, Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had this slogan installed in 1848, the year of the revolution, instrumentalizing these words for political purposes. This was already a provocation for the Liberals and Democrats of 1848. In the end, the king crushed the democratic revolution of 1848-49 with Prussian soldiers. The golden “Reichsapfel” (orb) at the foot of the gold cross now features a donor dedication from “Otto-Versand Hamburg”. It reads: “In memory of my husband Werner A. Otto 1909-2011. Inga Maren Otto.” The widow of the founder of the mail-order company and current patron financed the gold cross with a private donation of one million euros.

2) Garrison Church, Potsdam

The idea: Resurrection of the former Prussian military church (destroyed by the British Royal Air Force in April 1945) as the dominant urban structure of the Brandenburg state capital Potsdam. The principle actors here presumably thought: A church lighthouse is to be built here for missionary work in the East, which became “godless” in the time of the GDR. The entire project would cost well over 100 million euros. The amount raised for the reconstruction project remained modest—not enough to rebuild anything. In the meantime, people have to content themselves with only rebuilding the church tower, which is now under construction. This alone will cost well over 40 million euros. The project organizers were unable to raise even this sum from donations alone. The church tower is now mainly financed from grants from the Federal Republic and grants (loans) from the EKBO and EKD. The organization of the project is in the hands of a “Garrison Church Foundation” and a circle of friends who, like the palace, run the fundraising campaign. Relevant networks are: a church group around former bishop Wolfgang Huber, parts of the regional church (EKBO), and supporters from the EKD. It is currently unclear whether the project can be fully implemented. The ongoing conflicts over the building have divided the citizens of Potsdam. The current situation seems to be a mess. The US star architect Daniel Libeskind recently volunteered and announced that he will be offering proposals to resolve the architectural dispute.

For the general public, the most unreasonable demands are: a Prussian throne-and-altar nostalgia stimulated by the project, and the tendency of the builders to engage in historical falsification and historical revisionism. The steeple with the Prussian eagle, which has already been restored according to the historical model, is currently located next to the tower in a protective metal cage. The hungry Prussian eagle would like to learn to fly again, should it find its way to the top of the tower anytime soon.

Note: The opposition movement, to which the Martin Niemöller Foundation belongs, has recently installed a website “Lernort-Garnisonkirche.de” on the Internet, which provides comprehensive information on the historical context of this controversial Prussian-German site of remembrance.

3) “House of One,” Central Berlin

The idea: In the center of Berlin, on the site of the former St. Peter’s Church, which was destroyed in the war, a “house of three religions” is to be built to support fellowship among the three Abrahamic world religions. The aim is an inter-religious dialogue in the spirit of Lessing’s ring parable (“Nathan the Wise”). Last but not least, it should be an ecclesiastical “reparation” for the undoubtedly grave “sins” of the Protestant Church during the Nazi era. The initiator is Pastor Gregor Hohberg from St. Mary’s Church (St. Marienkirche) in Berlin, who comes from a GDR parsonage and has been running this project with some success for almost twenty years. Here, too, international donations were to have made the project of 40-50 million euros possible. The donations were sparse. Here again, public donors stepped in: the Federal Republic and the Berlin state government each gave 10 million, in addition to various grants from the EKBO, and from the beginning the project was supported by the strong commitment of church staff. The relevant networks come from within the church: St. Mary’s in the center of Berlin, several church staff members, and various prominent supporters from the cultural scene. The current protagonists include EKBO Bishop Christian Stäblein and the pastor and project “inventor” Hohberg; Rabbi Andreas Nachama (formerly director of the Berlin Topography of Terror Foundation) has also been involved for several years.

Here, too, there are provocative aspects that have aroused criticism for years, particularly regarding the international financial contributions to the project coming from the Qatar Foundation International as well as from controversial groups like the Gülen movement. Indeed, one leading German sponsor withdrew support for the House of One on account of its connection with Gülen. Another striking aspect of the activity of the builders is the denial of the prehistory, because here they are building on the foundations of the former St. Peter’s Church in central Berlin. Berlin’s top Nazi pastor and provost Walter Hoff worked at this church from 1936 to 1945. According to his own admission in 1943, Hoff was involved in Holocaust campaigns during the war in the East. As a potential war criminal, he was never seriously threatened for prosecution for this, but rather was reinstated into church ministry after a period of suspension. The builders of the “House of One” have persistently refused to come to terms with this history since about 2012-13.

The obvious parallels between these three architectural projects must provoke objections. It corresponds to the political spirit of the grand coalition, in which the CDU sets the course and the SPD fails and keeps its mouth shut. Social Democrats have often been connected to these projects through networks of connection—people like the (former) Prime Ministers of Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe and Matthias Platzeck, in Potsdam; Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (he has assumed the patronage of the Potsdam project); the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller; former Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse; and university theologian Richard Schröder, among others. The leading newspaper in Berlin (Der Tagesspiegel) is also remarkably cautiously neutral in its reporting. Its motive, presumably: just don’t stir up any “culture wars” (“Kulturkämpfe “) in the German capital, a place so critical of religion. Parts of the regional church (EKBO) see themselves wonderfully on the offensive with these projects. The cross and Prussian eagle soon over Potsdam again, and now the cross over the atheistic capital Berlin again too. In short: there is much cultural and religious-political restoration on the advance, while little sustained or effective outcry from a critical public can be heard. And in the background behind these seemingly harmless architectural projects, all sorts of networks nostalgic for the old Prussia, friends, and political circles of the New Right gather. They see their chance in these architectural projects and are certainly waiting for their hour to come soon.

Was There a Religious Revival in the “Third Reich”?

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Was There a Religious Revival in the “Third Reich”?

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in Tagesspiegel, November 15, 2019, p. 22. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

What did the Germans of the Hitler era believe? 1933 meant not only a political caesura, but also for many a religious experience, too: at last, a turning away from the Weimar Republic, which was seen as a “godless republic”; at last, the beginning of a promising reverse in time (Zeitenkehre) with more faith, religion, and “national community”. There were many signs of a religious revival: church withdrawals suddenly stopped; atheist parties and associations were immediately banned; National Socialist “German Christians” (DC) organized spectacular mass wedding ceremonies and baptisms. Religious confessions of faith, magazines, and books sprang up like mushrooms. One of the most striking manifestations on the way to the “Third Reich”—the “Day of Potsdam”—took place (with the blessing of the churches) in the Old Prussian Garrison Church. In short: faith, creed, and confession were introduced again. That this was accompanied by much debate between competing religious actors does not speak against this thesis, but rather for it.

Protestants comprised two-thirds of all Germans and were therefore of particular importance. Around 1933, the main event in the majority Christian confession was the attack of the völkisch DC on the bastions of the “old church.” This Protestant parallel movement to the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) pursued the project of a unification of the 28 regional churches into a centralized Reich church, led by a Reich bishop ruling according to a “leader principle” (Führerprinzip).

The subversive impulse shook the structures of the old church forcefully, even if the DC-Reich church project failed after almost two years. It was this heretical mass movement that aroused the internal church opposition, which constituted itself after a short delay as a Confessing Church (BK) in 1934. Among Protestants, the “Church Struggle,” as the conflict over direction was also called, was predominantly a “sibling rivalry” within their own house, centred around the reorientation of theology and worship. The dispute revealed a serious identity crisis that tore apart a Protestantism deeply influenced by National Socialism. DC and BK struggled for predominance and the power to define what would be the proper, fitting Protestant church in the “Third Reich”.

All in all, the German Protestantism of the Hitler period proved to be an extremely fractional entity, a polyphonic and dissonant choir without a conductor, which consumed much of its strength in this self-defeating internal struggle. As a religious actor, it possessed no representative, capable governing bodies and could not effectively use its great potential as the majority confession to tip the balance in the religious-political struggles of the epoch.

And the German Catholics? There was no Christian-völkisch mass movement like the DC in the strictly hierarchical world-wide Roman Church. The main event in German Catholicism in 1933 was not a Christian-völkisch movement inspired by the “brown zeitgeist,” but the Concordat, a treaty between the Hitler government and the Vatican for the regulation of Catholic church-state relations. “Church Struggle” here was primarily an ongoing guerrilla war with the politically and ideologically invasive Nazi state over compliance with the Concordat. This permanent defensive stance culminated in the encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Concern”) read out from all pulpits in 1937.

If one compares the political orientation of the clergy of both denominations, then a second marked difference appears: while an average of about 20 percent of Protestant pastors belonged to the NSDAP, the proportion of “brown priests” was less than one percent. Greater susceptibility to the “brown zeitgeist” in the majority denomination, but greater distance and more isolation in the Catholic milieu—with that, the essential differences are named.

However, there can be no talk of a cohesive bloc of “Christian resistance” or even just a resistance of the Catholics to National Socialism. Even for most German Catholics, their Christian faith was compatible with National Socialism, as the functioning Nazi rule in purely Catholic regions proves. It must have been predominantly Catholics who exercised Hitler’s rule in the administrative districts of Aachen or Trier, or in the dioceses of Upper Bavaria.

Beyond the great Christian denominations, the religious upheaval of 1933 was expressed in the project of völkisch groups that joined together to form the German Faith Movement. Their leaders hoped for recognition as a “third confession.” Their offer to the NSDAP to organize the religious of the “Third Reich” independently and outside the NSDAP received little recognition from the party leadership. Until 1935, the “German-Believers” (Deutschgläubige) were unable to significantly exceed the number of 30,000 members, after which their influence declined.

A distinction should be made between “German-Believer” (Deutschgläubige) and “God-Believer” (Gottgläubige): while the former established networks with their own groups, the “God-Believers”—as fanatical National Socialists—identified the NSDAP and SS as their new church. They understood themselves as “religious” outside the Christian confessions. SS leader Heydrich spoke of a confession to a “church-free German religiosity.” Their creed was the Nazi worldview, personified in the charismatic leader figure. It was mainly SS members, party officials, and officials who professed to be “God-Believers.” They represent the inbreaking of a “new faith” into the traditional religious landscape. In 1939, about 2.75 million people (3.5 percent of the population) adhered to this “Confession.” In Berlin, “God-Believers” reached 10 percent, in the university town of Jena just under 16 percent.

The Hitler movement, with its brown cults and liturgies, also had religious dimensions. Unlike the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and the German Communist Party (KPD), the NSDAP was not an atheist party proclaiming a radical God-is-dead politics. Without their religiously inflated belief in “nation” (Volk), “race” (Rasse) and “leader” (Führer), the dynamics of the Nazi movement cannot be adequately explained. Concepts such as “political religion” have taken this into account in recent research.

After several years of successful consolidation as a regime, the religious policy of the rulers radicalized: the Nazi world view and the God-Belief or German-Belief inscribed in it should oust the “old faith” of the churches. Under slogans such as the “deconfessionalization of public life”, the regime restricted the scope of the Christian confessions, above all in schools and youth organizations. Nazi “life celebrations” for birth, marriage, and remembering the dead should replace the Christian rites of passage.

Nonetheless, there was no clear strategy in religious politics, but rather much back and forth, trial and error. The “religious question” was unresolved within the party. Based on the confessional membership of its members, the NSDAP was a “Christian party”: over two-thirds belonged to one of the two large Christian confessions. In the party leadership, the ideological rigorists (Himmler, Heydrich, Rosenberg) dominated with radical religious-political utopias in the sense of a “final solution of the religious question.” They promoted a religious break in mentality with culturally revolutionary consequences. Opposite them stood “Christian National Socialists” who considered a Germanized Christianity and National Socialism to be compatible. They were strongly represented in the middle and lower levels of the party and highly important for the cultivation of the loyalty of the very large proportion of the population that was Christian.

Under the constraints of the “Third Reich,” Jews and Judaism could not be players in the broad religious field. They were excluded from the outset, ostracized, expelled, demonized, and finally abandoned to destruction. Race and religion were not separable but rather functioned in complementary ways in the process of this modern-day collective exorcism. It was not an atheist party that set into motion persecution and extermination, but a sacrally highly-charged, religiously-variegated party, two-thirds of whose members belonged to a Christian church; a party whose extreme post-Christian faction did not boast of a modern “godlessness” but whose advocates professed “church-free German religiosity.” For the racist assignation of “German-blooded” (deutschblütig) or “Foreign-blooded” (fremdblütig), the persecutors found no hard anthropological-biological criteria. Rather, they seized on religious affiliation as a substitute. Finally, the Christian churches provided entries from their church records for the Proof of Aryan Ancestry (Ariernachweis) in the spirit of ecclesiastical assistance. The concept of “redemptive antisemitism” gets its meaning here and refers to the inherent religious content of that collective exorcism.

From 1933 on, faith, confession, and religion were heavily-debated topics, and they occupied most Germans during the Nazi era more than any time before or after in the twentieth century. In terms of the history of secularization, it’s a question of a reverse in time (Zeitenkehre) and a counter-time. However, this reversal trend did not happen as both large Christian confessions hoped, in the sense of a rechristianization. Although in one sense the political religion of National Socialism revitalized the religious enterprise, it also proved to be an existentially dangerous rival of the Christian confessions in the struggle for the souls of the Germans.

Book Note: Against the Mainstream of the Hitler Era: The Wuppertal Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Book Note: Against the Mainstream of the Hitler Era: The Wuppertal Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The following is an excerpt from Manfred Gailus’ book Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit: Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916–1943) (Bremen/Wuppertal: de Noantri, 2018), published on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of the death of the Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse, November 24, 2018.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or Sophie Scholl enjoy today an at least moderately interested following. But who knows the young Elberfeld theologian Helmut Hesse, who was arrested 75 years ago for his courageous preaching for persecuted Jews and imprisoned Confessing Christians and who died on November 24, 1943, at the age of 27, in the Dachau concentration camp? In 1980, in a vivid appreciation of Hesse’s fate, Günther van Norden bemoaned the fact that Hesse’s name had been forgotten and his courageous struggle was almost unknown in his community.

Hesse was born in Bremen in 1916 and grew up in Elberfeld (today Wuppertal) as the youngest son of the renowned Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Like his three brothers, he studied theology from 1935 on and actively participated in the conflicts of the church struggle during his student years. He was significantly influenced by Karl Barth, with whom he studied two semesters (1937-38) in Basel. In March 1938, he undertook a visiting mission to Austria and Hungary on behalf of the Confessing Church (BK), along with his close friend Ruth Wendland, a Berlin pastor’s daughter and theology student. The two travelers were eyewitnesses to the “Anschluss” of Austria to Hitler’s German Reich. Hesse vividly described the experiences in a travel journal. The overall impression of the two young theologians must have been depressing—partly, as Hesse states, the Austrian Protestant congregations knew little of the German church struggle, and partly, the opportunistic backing of the German Christian church governments and the Nazi regime dominated.

In February 1940, Hesse completed his first theological examination before the board of examiners of the Rhenish Council of Brethren (BK). Subsequently, Hesse vehemently rejected the “legalization agreement” concluded by the Council of the Rhenish Confessing Church with the consistory in Dusseldorf in June 1941, which provided for future examinations of BK parish candidates by the consistory. He saw in it a deviation from the spirit of the confessional synods of Barmen and Dahlem (1934). Tragically, the gap between Hesse and the Rhenish BK leadership widened during these years (1941-43) to the breaking point. In the spring of 1943, there was a singular event in the Elberfeld Reformed parish: a council not authorized by the leadership of the BK examined the young pastoral candidate and, in the church service that followed, Helmut Hesse was ordained by his father Hermann Albert Hesse as a “servant of the Word in the Reformed Church, according to God’s Word.”

Helmut Hesse served for a short time as a preacher in the Reformed parish of Elberfeld. On May 23 and June 6, 1943, together with his father, he led the services for that circle in the parish which remained faithful to the two Hesses, in spite of all the quarrels. In the invocation on May 23, the persecuted Jews were remembered. In his sermon on the resurrection of Lazarus (John 10:39-11:57), the young Hesse spoke critically about church politics, including the compromising behavior of the BK. During the intercessory prayer, the names of imprisoned Christians such as Martin Niemöller, Heinrich Grüber and Katharina Staritz were read out. One week later, large parts of Wuppertal-Barmen were reduced to rubble and ruin during night bombing raids. The service on June 6 was dedicated to this catastrophe. Father Hermann Albert Hesse saw the ruined Wuppertal “under the mighty judgment of God.” As in previous sermons, Helmut Hesse addressed the “Jewish question” and talked about it in a way that probably happened nowhere else during a worship service in the “Third Reich”: “As Christians, we can no longer bear that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us is the simple commandment to love one’s neighbour. The Jewish question is a gospel question and not a political question. The church has to resist every antisemitism in the community. In contrast to the state, the church must testify to the salvific significance of Israel and put up resistance against any attempt to annihilate Judaism. In Germany today, every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, is one fallen among the murderers.” In his unusually courageous words, Hesse leaned on formulations from the so-called “Letter from Munich Laity,” written by pastor Hermann Diem of Stuttgart. The report of the Gestapo, which recorded this sermon, concluded that the approximately 150 visitors on this evening were visibly impressed by the preacher’s remarks.

Two days later, the Gestapo arrested father and son Hesse. As the basis for detention, they named “anti-state attitudes” and repeated public prayer for the Jews. After extensive interrogations, the Gestapo summed up the charges against Helmut Hesse as follows: in intercessory prayers, he had read out the names of the imprisoned pastors, which was forbidden; he spoke in prayer against the authorities, that is, the current government; he also prayed for the Jews; finally, on June 6, he made public statements on the Jewish problem in a manner derogatory to the state. His comments on the “Jewish question” are offenses against §2 of the Treachery Act (Heimtückegesetz).

After months of imprisonment in Wuppertal, father and son Hesse were transferred in November 1943 to the Dachau concentration camp. By this point, Helmut Hesse was severely weakened from long-term detention and the withdrawal of essential medicine. He died on November 24, 1943, in a hospital barrack in the Dachau concentration camp.

There were not many Protestants who, as contemporaries in the “Third Reich”, on the recognizable road to disaster, protested and joined the Christian resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of them; the “non-Aryan” lawyer Friedrich Weißler, who was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937, is one of them; the Breslau city vicar Katharina Staritz, with her commitment to the Christians of Jewish origin, and the Berlin historian Elisabeth Schmitz, with her early memorandum of 1935/36 against the persecution of the Jews, are included; and finally, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl in Munich. This list also includes the Elberfeld protesting Protestant Helmut Hesse. Anyone who surveys Protestants in Germany today and asks about Helmut Hesse will generally hear the answer: we do not know! The time is ripe for today’s Protestants to include the life and work of Helmut Hesse in their memory and in their commemorative culture. In Wuppertal, where, in memory of the Barmen Theological Declaration, a monument was erected in a prominent place in the city in honour of the First Confessing Church Synod, one day a monument remembering the young Reformed preacher Helmut Hesse, who died in the Dachau concentration camp at the age of 27, will have to stand next to it.

The Great Silence: How the Churches Behaved When the Synagogues Burned in November 1938

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

The Great Silence: How the Churches Behaved When the Synagogues Burned in November 1938

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in zeitzeichen, November 2018, p.45-47. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

In the course of the excesses of November 1938, 1400 synagogues were destroyed, hundreds of homes and apartments devastated, and their residents humiliated, injured and robbed. The terror operation and its consequences claimed ca. 1400 deaths. And the churches, Protestants and Catholics alike, were silent, explains the Berlin historian Manfred Gailus.

***

“When we were silent on April 1, ‘33,” the Berlin historian and pedagogue Elisabeth Schmitz reminded Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer in Berlin-Dahlem shortly after the events of November1938 pogrom, “when we were silent about the public display cases of Der Stürmer, about the satanic agitation of the press, about the poisoning of the soul of the people and of the youth, about the destruction of lives and marriages through so-called [Nuremberg]‘Laws,’ about the methods of Buchenwald—there and a thousand other times were we guilty on the 10th of November 1938. And now? It appears that once again the church, where even the stones are crying out, is leaving it up to the discretion and the courage of the individual pastor to decide if he wants to say anything and, if so, what.”

Elisabeth Schmitz thanked the pastor for his courageous penitential sermon of the 16^th of November, which she had heard together with her “non-Aryan” friend Martha Kassel. Already, she reported to him, rumors were circulating that a mark was planned for the clothing of Jews: “There is nothing impossible in this country, we know that. (…) We have experienced the destruction of [Jewish] property, for which purpose the shops were called in the summer. If one goes over to labelling people—a conclusion suggests itself, which I do not want to specify. And no one will claim that these orders would not be as promptly, as unconscionably and as stubbornly, as evilly and as sadistically carried out as the present ones. I have heard of gruesome bloody excesses already this time.”

Disgusted by the excesses of violence, in protest the lecturer refused to continue teaching in a state school after November 9, 1938, for a government that allowed the synagogues to burned down. At the age of 45, she applied for her retirement on grounds of conscience.

Since 1933, she had agonized over the notorious “policy of silence” of her church, the Confessing Church (BK), and persistently opposed it through talks, letters, a memorandum on the situation of German “non-Aryan” (1935), and finally with her resignation from her profession as teacher and her commitment to rescue-resistance of persecuted Jews and “non-Aryan” Christians. But the “protesting Protestant” Schmitz was an exception.

Protesting Protestant

According to current research, about 1,400 synagogues were destroyed in the course of the November excesses of 1938. Hundreds of homes and a much larger number of apartments were wrecked and their inhabitants humiliated, injured, and robbed. Up to 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and in some cases looted. More than 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps in the days after November 10. The violence and its immediate consequences claimed 1,400 deaths, as far we know up to now. Even 80 years after the November pogroms, the exact number is still unclear.

And the churches—both Protestant and Catholic—were silent. The two major confessions were the only remaining institutions in the Nazi state that were not immediately coordinated and therefore could have spoken. In the shadow of the violent events, bishops and provosts, general superintendents, professors of theology, synods, the vast majority of pastors, the parishes, and the people of the church were silent. Silence was the salient feature of church behavior in the face of violence.

This silence, however, could have various motivations: there was an embarrassed silence, a silence of shame, a dumb horror. Often there was a silence of fear, because those who opened their mouths in criticism risked a lot. There was, finally, a silence of secret agreement or approval of the excesses of violence.

The Elberfeld Confessing Church pastor, Hermann Klugkist Hesse, noted in his diary on November 11: “The synagogue is burning down completely. The chapel in the Jewish cemetery also burned last night. The gravestones were overturned. (…) They played football with the Hebrew Bibles in the Genügsamkeits Street.” And on November 12: “Yesterday, Tudi [his wife Gertrud] took a walk to the Weinberg. Many, many people standing there before the rubble, but all silent. Silent.”

A few days later, in a letter to his son Franz, it says: “On the one hand, I was quite happy that I did not have to preach on the Day of Repentance, especially since many calls from the congregation urged caution … On the other side, I’m sorry that, for example, in the sermon that Pastor Rabius gave this morning, not a word was spoken about that which worries everyone. I mean, I would have bowed with the congregation during the sermon in bitter sorrow for those things that were happening in our midst, in the midst of the Christian community, in the midst of a people that still wants to be Christian after all. Pain, suffering, sadness—that should have marked the Repentance Day sermon this time—not about the events as such, but that they happened among us. Should not we have been light and salt in a different way so that would not have happened?”

Völkisch Theology

In the Protestant churches of the Hitler era—in contrast to the Catholic Church—German Christian “faith movements,” which propagated a völkisch theology and crass antisemitism, had gained considerable influence. Many of their followers, including many pastors, had welcomed the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 and not a few German Christians (DC) left November 1938 with quiet approval.

Pastor Friedrich Peter, for example—a leading member of the German Christians, bishop in Magdeburg from 1933 to 1935, then transferred to the Berlin Cathedral by Reich Church Minister Hanns Kerrl—gave the funeral address in Dusseldorf for the state funeral of the Parisian Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath a week after the pogroms: “And today, at this open grave, we ask the peoples of the earth, we ask the Christians around the world: What do you wish to do against the spirit of that people of whom Christ said, ‘Your God has been a murderer from the beginning and did not exist in the truth.’ We Germans have learned that one should ask for great thoughts and a pure heart from God. But what about Judah, whose god is a murderer from the beginning?”

The Stuttgart DC theologian Immanuel Schairer wrote a sympathetic commentary on the pogroms on November 20. He relied on Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” and cited the recommended seven measures of a “sharp mercy,” including the burning of their synagogues and the destruction of their homes. The Thuringian Regional Bishop Martin Sasse sent out his writing Martin Luther and the Jews: Away with Them! as a set of talking points for Thuringian pastors immediately after the pogroms. In the November 24 “Church Gazette for Mecklenburg,” there appeared a “reminder on the Jewish question”: no Christian German could “lament” the measures against the Jews in the Reich.

Our Christian compassion, it was said, was not to apply to the Jews, but to the peoples of Europe deceived and exploited by Judaism. The fight against Judaism was a vital issue for the German soul. In a late November 1938 communication to his friend, the journalist Wilhelm Stapel, the Göttingen theologian Emanuel Hirsch, a master’s student of the church historian Karl Holl (who died in 1926), responded to the violent events: He was “keen” to force the Jews into emigration by any brutality required for that purpose. If it wasn’t enough, there would be more to come. He did not believe that the “events” were folly, but rather clear and expedient political will.

Even in purely Catholic regions of southern and western Germany, the violence took place unhindered in front of everyone. No public statement on the pogrom came from Pope Pius XII in Rome or from the German Catholic bishops. Here too official silence was the predominant reaction from the institutions. What was missing from Catholics, however, was that explicit and sometimes public approval, as can be demonstrated from many Protestants. Within the Catholic Church, there was—a serious difference—no mass Christian movement comparable to the German Christians (DC). Catholic clergy kept noticeably farther away from the Hitler party (NSDAP party membership under one percent) than Protestant pastors, who had joined the NSDAP in the order of 15 to 20 percent, depending on the regional church.

Against this background, Catholic behavior was comparatively more reserved in November 1938, and the papal motto of an ecclesiastical silence was maintained almost completely. Courageous individuals such as the Catholic provost Bernhard Lichtenberg in Berlin were the exception here.

Papal Motto

Open your mouth for the mute. Examples show that this could be risky in the shadow of the Kristallnacht events and dangerous for individuals who protested. The Württemberg pastor Julius von Jan denounced the crimes that had just taken place in his Repentance Day sermon in Oberlenningen (November 16) and was attacked by a pack of motorized SA-men, physically mishandled and later imprisoned. The Stuttgart Special Court sentenced him to one year and four months in prison, citing the “Law Against Treacherous Criticism of the Government” (“Heimtücke-Gesetz”) and the “Pulpit Law” (“Kanzelparagraphen”).

In early December 1938, the “Pastor Grüber Bureau” in Berlin took up its work. This institution of the Confessing Church helped racially-persecuted people in the then often life-saving emigration process. This was an ecclesial response to the pogroms, sustained by the decidedly “Dahlemite” wing of the church opposition, a minority in the Protestant churches. But this was not the only response from the church: at the beginning of May 1939, a meeting was held at the Wartburg near Eisenach to found the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life.” German Christian (DC) pastor Walter Grundmann, a pupil of the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel and professor of “völkisch Theology” in Jena, spoke about “The dejudaization of religious life as a task of German theology and church.”

In both major confessions, great ecclesiastical silence predominated as the synagogues burned. Alongside that, there were unspeakable acclamations of the antisemitic excesses of violence from circles of Protestant German Christian (DC) theologians. Open opposition to the November pogroms remained the rare exception of courageous individuals such as pastor Julius von Jan in Württemberg or Dean Bernhard Lichtenberg in Berlin.

Shrill Bell Ringing

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Shrill Bell Ringing

With “Hitler Bells,” Protestant churches backed the “Führer.” Many still ring today.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in Der Tagesspiegel, Nr. 23425, Wednesday, March 28, 2018. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

How many “Hitler bells” still ring on German church towers and when will they stop? For almost a year, the idyllic wine village Herxheim am Berg (Rhineland-Palatinate) has experienced an unprecedented media hype: since 1934, in St. Jacob’s Church, a so-called “Hitler bell” has been ringing, on which a swastika is emblazoned, along with the political slogan “All for the Fatherland – Adolf Hitler.” Newspaper reporters, TV journalists, and onlookers have been visiting the community on the romantic wine route since summer 2017. Also, ring-wing political party members interested themselves in this bell and a village in which it could ring freely until September 2017. The mayor, an electrical engineer, was reduced to making awkward and somewhat questionable comments which forced him to resign.

Since December 2017, Herxheim has a new mayor—a retired pastor—but his statements are questionable too. Since then, there has been a dispute in the village and in the region: the bell must go, say some; the bell should stay, say others. Startled by the battle of Herxheim, other parishes began looking more closely at their church towers. In the meantime, five problematic bells from the Hitler era have been discovered in the Protestant Church of the Palatinate alone. And elsewhere, too, there were “Hitler bells”: one in the Saarland, two in Lower Saxony, and, amazingly, two more in the oh-so politically correct city of Berlin.

A large swastika—not easy to miss.

It is already a bit much that church bells with swastikas and corresponding Nazi slogans could even remain in use up to 2017. In Essingen (Rhineland-Palatinate), until September 2017 there rang a bell consecrated in 1936 with the inscription: “As Adolf Hitler gave sword and freedom to the German country. Cast by the Master Pfeifer, Kaiserslautern.” From the tower of the Church of the Cross in Schweringen (Lower Saxony) a bell with an oversized 35-by-35-inch swastika has rung for worship since 1934. This cannot be easily overlooked. The inscription on the bell is stamped on: “Germany has awakened out of misery and out of night – This cross gave success, helped to conquer discord – Thanks be to God.” Since September 2017, this bell has been silent. In the face of public agitation, the mayor professed he knew nothing about it.

In the Wichern Chapel in Berlin-Spandau, in October 1934, Rev. Johannes Rehse consecrated a bell bearing a Christian cross and a swastika, as well as the Bible verse (1 John 5. 4): “Our faith is the victory, which has overcome the world.” It is obvious that this creed was conceived differently in 1934 at the consecration ceremony designed by Nazi pastors. After the confirmands chanted “Under the flag we walk,” the bell consecration closed with a triple “Sieg-Heil” to Hitler and the singing of the German national anthem and the Horst Wessel song. The Spandau bell, the existence of which was acknowledged from time to time in the post-war period by the parish as well as by the church leadership in Berlin-Brandenburg, fell silent in November 2017 and has now been replaced by a new bell.

The Protestant milieu was comparatively far more infused with the Nazi zeitgeist than the Catholic Church.

In total, about a dozen bells were discovered in the 2017 Reformation commemoration year with dedications and symbols from the Nazi era that ranged from politically questionable to completely unacceptable. In all cases, these are Protestant churches. Currently, there is no Catholic Church involved, which would be similarly affected. An accident? Or perhaps Catholics have not yet looked closely at their church towers? No, no coincidence. Rather, in this finding we see an echo of the historical fact—a confirmation of the thesis that, in the “Third Reich,” the Protestant milieu was comparatively far more infused with the Nazi zeitgeist than the Catholic Church.

As a tightly centralized church and part of a global church governed by Rome, German Catholicism was less susceptible to the völkisch ideology of the era. In the Catholic Church, there was no inner-church mass movement led by theologians like the Protestant “German Christians” (DC). This is the most striking difference from the Protestants, where the German Christian Movement, which was as Christian-völkisch as it was antisemitic, conquered many of the 28 regional churches completely, and many others, like the large Prussian regional church, to a considerable extent. Certainly, there were also Catholic “brown priests” who were party members or who took up Nazi ideology. However, they accounted for less than one percent of all priests. As a number of recent studies have shown, on average, about 15 to 20 percent of the pastors in Protestant state churches belonged to the NSDAP. Of the more than 400 Protestant parish clergy in the capital, about 20 percent had joined the Hitler party and more than 40 percent were involved (at times) in the “Faith Movement” of the German Christians.

Alongside Christian motifs, diverse Nazi symbols.

Therefore, it is not surprising that church bells that are still in use today are discovered to be relics from a past, when many Protestant churches “turned brown.” Inspired by German Christian pastors, Nazi ideas, images, and symbols found their way into churches, parish halls, and permeated sermons and church newspapers. The swastika was omnipresent: on flags, firmly carved in stone on church buildings, and stamped hard into the metal on church bells. The Tempelhof Faith Church, which was renovated in 1933, bore a large swastika hewn in stone on a main pillar in the interior. The “Fatherland Bell” of the newly built Charlottenburg Gustav Adolf Church, which bore the dedication “For Our Fatherland” in addition to the Nazi symbol, may well be considered the first “swastika bell” installed in Berlin. In the entrance hall of the Mariendorf Martin Luther Memorial Church, visitors were greeted by relief portraits of Hindenburg and Hitler, and in the church itself various Nazi symbols adorned a mighty triumphal arch alongside Christian motifs. On the Mariendorf “Fatherland Bell,” consecrated in 1935, were emblazoned a swastika and the Hitler quote “May God take our work in his grace, make our will right, and bless our insight!” Swastika and Christian cross, as the Friedenau German Christian pastor Bruno Marquardt and many of his pastor colleagues said in 1934, were not opposites: “As the cross of Christ expresses our Christian convictions, so the swastika adds to our completely German-völkisch attitude.”

How to deal with the “Hitler bells” today? The reactions in Herxheim am Berg and elsewhere revealed astonishing uncertainties and at times much worse. Many “citizens” thought the bell could stay in operation. Not everything was bad back then—that too was heard. And the bells—you cannot see them when they ring. The new mayor of Herxheim, a retired pastor, ultimately argued that the bell could also be understood as a memorial and so continue to operate. His statement [about the ringing bell – Ed.] during a TV interview—”I hear the victims: these were German citizens, too, not just Jews”—aroused a considerable sensation.

At the request of an indignant Jewish citizen, the District Court of Bad Dürkheim ruled on February 6, 2018, that Mayor Welker was not allowed to repeat this statement. At the end of February 2018, the village council of Herxheim, which was responsible for the bell, decided to leave the “Hitler bell” in the church tower. Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, responded that this decision stunned him and testified to a deep disrespect of all victims of National Socialism: “How a church bell dedicated to one of the greatest criminals in human history is compatible with Christianity is a mystery to me.”

The regional churches most affected by the bell affair, in the Palatinate and in Hanover, should not idly observe the unacceptable events on the ground for too long. And the “Hitler bells” of today also affect the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) somewhat, in light of its many assurances about a Protestant “history of learning” during the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Significant damage to the church’s image has already occurred and more damage still could follow. The relevant church authorities have signalled a willingness to remove the contaminated bells and replace them with new ones. That would certainly be the minimum and needs to happen immediately.

And, above all, more attention is required to the church’s coming to terms with the past locally. As current events illustrate, even 70 years after the Nazi disaster, things are often in disarray. In the affected Spandau parish, on the occasion of the 2017 (re)discovery of a “Hitler bell,” a working group was formed immediately to come to terms with the past.

Postscript, May 2018: According to recent press reports, so-called “Hitler bells” have now been discovered in 21 Protestant churches and one Catholic church. In the area of the Protestant Church of Central Germany alone (Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt) there are still six problematic bells in the church towers.

Review of Thomas Martin Schneider, Wem gehört Barmen? Das Gründungsdokument der Bekennenden Kirche und seine Wirkungen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Thomas Martin Schneider, Wem gehört Barmen? Das Gründungsdokument der Bekennenden Kirche und seine Wirkungen (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017). Pp.241. ISBN: 9783374050345.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This review was originally published in zeitzeichen. Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, February, 2018. https://www.zeitzeichen.net/rezensionen/thomas-martin-schneider-wem-gehoert-barmen/. It is reprinted in translation with the permission of the publisher.

The Barmen Theological Declaration (BTD), adopted on May 31, 1934, at the First Reich Confessing Synod in Wuppertal-Barmen, is widely regarded as the Magna Carta of the church opposition in the Third Reich. It is certainly rightly considered the most demanding statement of the Confessing Church (BK) in its defense against the advance of pro-Nazi German Christians (DC). The purpose of the DC was to transform the Protestant churches into a Reich church shaped by völkisch antisemitic theology and governed from Berlin according to the “Führer principle.” Much has been written about the theological content of the six Barmen theses in the postwar era, culminating in the 50^th anniversary of the declaration in 1984. For anyone looking for quick information about this Protestant document of the century, about its historical context, about its theological meaning and its church-political significance, and about its enormously broad reception history since 1945, this popular overview can certainly be recommended. The reception of the Barmen Declaration is presented in particular detail, and its astounding variety makes it clear that various political orientations and church circles from the left to conservative evangelical groups felt that they could invoke the tradition and intention of the declaration in their current concerns. Almost all parties and groups declared sometime after 1945 that the good “spirit of Barmen” actually belonged to them and would be further developed in their work. An extensive documentary section (p.155-219) documents the diverse uses of the declaration by everyone from Marxist GDR theologians to West German Left-Protestants to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Evangelicals. It is noteworthy from today’s point of view that the Lutheran churches which were abstinent and critical of the Barmen Declaration during the time of the Church Struggle—they sensed too much Reformed spirit in the statement which was largely formulated by Karl Barth—have since 2012 (after a long period of reflection, beginning with the newly-founded North Church) begun to refer explicitly to the theological and church-political traditions of Barmen.

In this account by the Koblenz-Landau church historian, one can not ignore the remarkably sympathetic treatment (for example, pp. 62 f., 72 ff.) of the Lutheran churches which adapted to the Nazi regime and which were skeptical or even hostile to the Barmen project from the outset. From today’s point of view, a critical church-historical assessment would seem more appropriate. Also, an up-to-date church history should leave behind terms from the time of the Church Struggle such as “intact” and “destroyed” churches. For the three large Lutheran regional churches (especially that of Hanover), with their far-reaching adjustment to the regime, the label “intact” should really be dispensed with. And for divided regional churches, such as the great Old Prussian Union Church, it would be more appropriate to speak of “self-destruction.” Although the author deals comparatively with the “Altona Confession” (1932), he deals too briefly or not at all with the 1936 memorandum of the 2nd Provisional Church Leadership (of the Confessing Church) to Hitler or the memoranda by Margarete Meusel (1935) and Elisabeth Schmitz (1935/36) on behalf of Protestant “non-Aryans” and persecuted Jews. A comparative chapter involving these and other important manifestations of the period of the Church Struggle would be well placed here.

Nevertheless, on the whole, these restrictive remarks do not substantially reduce the great usefulness of this compact introduction to the most important Protestant church document of twentieth-century German history.

Luther’s Evil Writings

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Luther’s Evil Writings

The reformer was not only anti-Jewish, but also antisemitic. So he was understood in the Nazi era, too.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The original article was published in German as “Luthers böse Schriften” in Der Tagesspiegel, 18 July 2017, and is available at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/hass-auf-juden-luthers-boese-schriften/20071254.html. It is produced here in translation by permission of the author and newspaper.

Martin Luther’s late “Jewish writings” are no longer as unknown as they were for a long time—and the horror over the sharp anti-Jewish tone of the reformer is great everywhere. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Chair of the EKD, has repeatedly confessed in interviews that he is ashamed of such texts by the principal founder of the Protestant churches in Germany.

Was Martin Luther an antisemite? And what would that mean for the Lutheran Churches as public-law institutions? For the many churches named after him? For a city which proudly bears the name “Lutherstadt Wittenberg”? For the many schools and streets that bear his name? Or was he perhaps not antisemitic, but “merely” an anti-Judaist motivated by Christian theology?

In the writing of church history, things have been seen this way for a long time. Certainly, most would concede that Luther’s “Jewish writings” are bad, but would add that his case is not one of genuine antisemitism, but “merely” one of theologically based (though also harsh) anti-Judaism. It is often added, however, that in his youth he wrote in a friendly manner, and that later he had grown old, was suffering from physical affliction and depression, and had long been disappointed by the stubborn unteachability of his Jewish contemporaries.

He was “only” anti-Jewish, reads the official view of the Church

Margot Käßmann, commissioned by the EKD as a Reformation and Luther ambassador for the 2017 commemorative year, is not always to be envied for her job, especially when it comes to the topic “Luther and the Jews.” As far as can be seen, the Luther ambassador (like Bedford-Strohm) maintains that Luther was “anti-Jewish” in his bad omissions about the Jews, and thus not antisemitic.

It’s easy to understand. After Hitler and the Holocaust, how today can anyone—no matter their undisputed achievements and merits—be advertised as an antisemite? At their Synod in Bremen (November 2015) the EKD approved a statement “Martin Luther and the Jews – A Necessary Reminder on the Occasion of the Reformation Anniversary.” The reformers, it says, stood in a tradition of anti-Jewish patterns of thought, whose roots reached back to the beginnings of the Church. With regard to Luther’s utterances, “hatred of Jews,” “resentments,” or “invective against Jews” is the language used—the word “antisemitism” is carefully avoided. Here, as elsewhere, the view is that antisemitism exists only in cases of racial antisemitism, which had only existed since the second half of the nineteenth century. So, it is said, we cannot talk about antisemitism when it comes to Luther.

Luther was taken up with the expulsion of the Jews

Thomas Kaufmann, the Göttingen church historian who stands beyond reproach as an expert in the Reformation period, came to the conclusion in his study Luthers Juden (2014) that Luther’s Jew hatred had included motifs that went beyond traditional Christian anti-Judaism. In addition to Luther’s central theological anti-Judaism, Kaufmann also attributes “premodern antisemitism” to the reformer. Luther ‘s recommendations to sixteenth-century authorities and church leaders, which he described as “severe mercy,” were notorious: destruction of synagogues, homes, and writings; confiscation of money and property; forced labor; prohibition of Jewish worship services; and, as the ultima ratio, the expulsion of Jewish communities from city and country. With relation to Luther’s evil writings, the church historian Kaufmann speaks of “a literary final solution of the Jewish question.”

It is well known that by 1933 a powerful antisemitism had spread among Protestant theologians. Did they get it from Martin Luther? Pastor Siegfried Nobiling, who held a position in the “Zum Guten Hirten” (“Good Shepherd”) parish (Berlin-Friedenau) since 1928, professed in a 1932 statement on National Socialism: “In conclusion, I can confess quite sincerely that National Socialism was for me destiny and experience.”

“The interests of the race,” he said, “are always valid only to the extent that they are useful to the nation as a whole. We see in Judaism the spiritual-biological poisoning of our race.”

Already in 1932, Nobiling joined the “Faith Movement of the German Christians” (DC). There he met numerous like-minded colleagues.

For the theologian-generation of 1933, the Reformations of the sixteenth century and with them Luther’s image of the Jews lay far in the background. There were, first and foremost, other impulses directly and personally experienced, which were closer to them and which determined their attitudes toward Jews. Paramount for the anti-Jewish conditioning of this generation were, for example: the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, the influential theology professor Reinhold Seeberg, then also the antisemitic and Christian “Association of German Student Fraternities” (VVDSt); and the unloved Weimar democracy, which was maligned as the “godless republic.”

In the Nazi era, there was a remarkable Luther revival

The sense of religious excitement of 1933, marked by the antisemitic “German Christians,” also included a remarkable Luther revival: the reformer as German national hero, as the prototype of the quintessential German man and fighter. Not infrequently, historical lines of tradition were drawn from Luther to Hitler—by Protestants themselves, and with pride. In the “Advent” parish (Prenzlauer Berg), “German Christian” member Haertel spoke on December 12, 1933, about “Luther and the Jews.” It must be the task of the “German Christians” to fully re-establish Luther’s clear position in the “Jewish question,” which Hitler had taught anew.

In the Spandau “Luther” parish, in parallel with the passing of the “Nuremberg Laws,” the parish church council decided in September 1935 to undertake the immediate free distribution of one thousand copies of “Luther and the Jews” as well as the procurement of display cases for Streicher’s Der Stürmer. In March 1937, Johannes Schleuning, a superintendent in Berlin East, referred in particular to Martin Luther and Adolf Stoecker as Christian champions against Judaism, in an article entitled “Judaism and Christianity.” He praised the most recent special issue of Der Stürmer on the “Jewish question” and emphasized that Christ had been an “Aryan,” a Nordic hero, as described by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

In contrast to the “Nuremberg Laws,” which were widely endorsed in the “German Christian” press, silence prevailed throughout the Protestant milieu after the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938. Explicit approval of the excesses was rare, but it did occur. On November 20, 1938, the “German Christian” theologian Immanuel Schairer wrote a commentary on the events, expressly referring to Luther’s “On the Jews and their Lies.” Immediately after the pogroms, the Thuringian Protestant bishop, Martin Sasse, printed extracts from Luther’s “Jewish writings” and sent them to Thuringian pastors. The intense Protestant antisemitism of the Hitler period fed on many sources—not only religious or theological—and mainly on those which were closer to the protagonists historically and biographically than Luther’s “Jewish writings.” Thus, on the one hand, these writings were not needed at all to generate the massive antisemitic confessions in the churches of the Hitler period. Since 1933, however, everywhere Luther’s “Jewish writings” were dug out and disseminated in the media, they reaffirmed the already-existing Protestant antisemitism and gave it additional legitimation.

Even before 1933, Luther’s “Judenschriften” had to be regarded as a serious derailment

Even before the year 1933, Luther’s “Jewish writings” had to be regarded as a serious derailment in the eyes of unbiased readers. After Hitler and the Holocaust, these writings stand in a changed historical context, which once again places the texts in a different light and makes Luther’s verbal derailments even more serious.

The current 2017 memorial year is the first Lutheran and Reformation commemoration ever to make the existence and explosiveness of the “Jewish writings” known to a broader public. This is to be welcomed as a historical clarification. For today’s Protestant churches, however, it is not easy to deal with this problematic heritage. In the long run, euphemistic assessments such as “anti-Judaism” or the discordant metaphor of the regrettable “shadows” of the great theologian will not suffice. One also wonders what the Protestant “learning history,” much invoked during the 2017 commemorative year, is supposed to mean, considering the churches’ performance (after 400 years of learning time) during the “Third Reich.”

Luther the confession-founder will not be taken away from anxious church contemporaries. The reformer is historically significant, and that will continue into the future. Still, the current image of Luther will have to keep changing. His status as a monumental figure will diminish, while the Luther-dilemma associated with his antisemitism will grow.

The author is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin.

1933 as a Protestant Experience and the “Day of Potsdam”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

1933 as a Protestant Experience and the “Day of Potsdam”

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lecture at the joint meeting of the Martin Niemöller Foundation and the Initiative “Christians Need No Garrison Church,” Potsdam, March 18, 2017.

Vortrag auf der Gemeinsamen Tagung der Martin-Niemöller Stiftung und der Initiative “Christen brauchen keine Garnisonkirche” am 18. März 2017 in Potsdam.

German original available at https://www.christen-brauchen-keine-garnisonkirche.de/files/opensauce/scss/gailus_potsdam%20m%C3%A4rz%202017.pdf.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, the “Day of Potsdam,” which will see its 84^th anniversary in three days, was no singular derailment of the churches in the fatal year of 1933. Everywhere, Hitler’s Weltanschauung was present in the churches of 1933. But the unique feature of the ecclesiastical and also highly politically symbolic ceremony of March 21, 1933, in the Potsdam Garrison Church was this: it was the only church in which Hitler himself gave a speech during the twelve-year Nazi regime. The new Catholic Reich Chancellor was often praised in the Protestant churches of 1933: very often, brown uniforms and Nazi symbols such as the swastika were seen in churches and parish halls; and not only church songs were sung, but also frequently the “Horst Wessel Song.” On occasion, at the altar, alongside the crucified Christ was also a portrait of Hitler, whom the members of the German Christian Movement venerated in the churches as a saviour of the Germans sent by God. But that Hitler himself would make a speech in the church—as far as we know, that only happened once in the “Third Reich,” and that on the memorable day in the Potsdam Garrison Church, which now, after its destruction in Hitler’s war, is supposed to be rebuilt. Continue reading →

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus, 2 Vols. (Speyer and Leipzig: Verlagshaus Speyer and Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), Pp. 911, ISBN: 9783374044122.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Picker-Protestanten The Protestant Union Church of the Palatinate is one of the smaller regional churches in Germany, with its headquarters in Speyer on the west bank of the Middle Rhine. The church authorities, after lengthy delays, have now published this voluminous collection of essays by more than 60 contributors, which describes the fate of the church during the years of Nazi rule. It constitutes one of the best regional studies of the Protestant church for this period, although, as the chief editor Christoph Picker acknowledges in his introduction, the results are highly sobering. In this region of Germany which was diverse in its denominational loyalties, Protestantism and National Socialism went hand in hand. Many leading Nazi functionaries saw themselves as “good Protestants,” and the collaboration between the church leadership under the “German Christian” Bishop Ludwig Diehl and the Nazi Party’s regional hierarchy was at first close and on very good terms. Above all, the desire among churchmen for stability led them to endorse the Nazi project for “national unity” (Volksgemeinschaft) in the interests of harmony. So no real Church Struggle took place in the Palatinate Church, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the pastors belonged to the German Christian faction in 1933. The limited opposition from those who supported the Confessing Church when it was organized in 1934 was successfully integrated with the dominant German Christians. More than 20 percent of the pastors took out membership in the Nazi Party.
Four large chapters in Volume 1 spell out the details:

Chapter one describes the historical developments of this Church from the political and religious situation during the Weimar Republic up to the difficult and contentious coming-to-terms with its “brown” past during the immediate post-war years up to 1949. Chapter two (“Institutions, organizations, and groups”) includes the relationships with the national Reich Church under Bishop Ludwig Mueller as well as with the Nazi state. Details are also provided about the traditional church parties, the German Christian Movement and the local Confessing Church in the Palatinate. Chapter three covers the growth of antisemitism and the church’s reactions to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, as well as the results of the Nazi plans for ethnic cleansing through its euthanasia program in church institutions, and also the more general Nazi persecution measures against Protestants. Chapter four details internal church developments. This section describes such things as the character of church services, church art and architecture, youth work, the church press, the continuing and formative hostility towards the Catholics of this very mixed region, and finally the role of church women and especially of the pastors’ wives, who held prominent position in the parishes. All this is described in great detail in the 638 pages of the first volume. At the same time, a large number of impressive photographs are included, which are of considerable historical value.

The second and less extensive volume covers the activities of the major church protagonists, who were mainly pastors, with short biographical sketches. Given the multiplicity of these articles, it is naturally impossible to examine individual items. Particularly notable, however, is Walter Rummel’s contribution on the performance of the church during the Second World War, which describes the extensive and willing participation of church members in Hitler’s campaigns. For example, the Dean of Speyer, Karl Wien, gave a rousing sermon on Heroes’ Remembrance Day in 1940, which, in flaming tones, exalted the list of German heroes from those who had fallen during the First World War to the “freedom fighters” in the postwar period up to the fighters in the SA and those who were actually now fighting in the ranks of the German army. After the German victory over France in June 1940, Bishop Diehl ordered all parishes to hold services of Thanksgiving. As long as these victories continued, there was a regular personality cult around Hitler, even in church pronouncements.

Roland Paul describes the church reactions to the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of November 1938, noting the widespread silence in church circles. Shortly afterwards, in his annual report, Pastor Georg Becker of Iggelheim wrote that, with these pogroms, the Nazis were actually carrying out Luther’s intentions and inheritance. “Those cities and sites where the Jews have blasphemed God and Jesus Christ will shortly disappear from the Reich of our dear leader Adolf Hitler” (357). Pastor Johannes Baehr in Mutterstadt was the exception. In November 1938, while teaching his class of schoolchildren, many of whom had witnessed the burning-down of the local synagogue, Pastor Baehr declared that such actions were not to be justified. On the very same day he was taken into “protective custody” and only released two days later after the intervention of Bishop Diehl.

This is a significant publication, providing a self-critical account of the church’s activities and attitudes. Of course, its appearance is very late. Only after several generations have passed by can we expect such a sobering and self-critical analysis of these twelve horrifying years of Nazi rule, which were also twelve fatal years for German Protestantism. So far not all regional Protestant churches have found the courage to undertake such a thorough and self-critical examination. So this example by a relatively small church shows what can be done on its own initiative. We can hope that these two volumes will find many readers, especially since 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Not only do these volumes provide us with examples of dangerous perversions to be avoided, but also remind us of the long and illustrious history which German Protestantism has enjoyed for the last 500 years.