Category Archives: Articles

Thomas Großbölting in Memorium

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Thomas Großbölting in Memorium

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

The fields of German history and religious history suffered a devastating and irreplaceable loss on February 11, 2025. The prominent German historian and Director of the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg, Thomas Großbölting, who had generated headlines in Germany for having uncovered the sordid details of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic clergy in the diocese of Münster, died tragically in a train accident in Hamburg, Germany. He was the sole fatality in a collision between his high-speed ICE train with 285 passengers and a semi-truck at a rail crossing in Hamburg-Rönnenburg.

Dr. Thomas Großbölting

His death comes as a shock to all who knew him, and not least his wife of nearly thirty years and four children. Großbölting was a highly respected, if not revered figure for multiple reasons. The most obvious was his remarkable scholarly output that spanned thirty years and multiple subdisciplines in contemporary Germany history. He was the author of ten monographs, the co-editor of seven edited volumes, and the author of dozens of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. His topics ranged widely in their geographical and chronological scope. He earned renown not only for his magnum opus on religion in Germany since 1945, which was translated into English under the title, Losing Heaven: Religion in Germany since 1945, but also for his exposé of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. He wrote about the Stasi, German society after reunification, the representations of societal order in industrial and trade exhibitions in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and their role in popularizing consumption, the politics of memory in Italy after the Second World War, amongst many other topics.

Born in 1969 near Bocholt, Thomas Großbölting was a product of the flat western regions of the Münsterland, in Westphalia in northwestern Germany. He studied history, German, and Catholic theology at the nearby university in Münster. He spoke fluent English and Italian. But even while a student there, he exhibited that characteristic which would accompany him until his final minutes on a high-speed train: he was constantly in motion. He jaunted from one archive and center of historical research to another. These early years in Münster were filled with excursions to Cologne, Bonn, and Rome. Fittingly, his final undergraduate research broached a topic that would remain part of his scholarly journey over the decades: debates in the Catholic Church about reform following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). His dissertation, however, was about the history and fate of middle-class bourgeois society in the East German cities of Magdeburg and Halle during the Cold War. From there he went to Berlin, where he led scholarly investigation into the Stasi files. His more than five years of research culminated in a book about German society post-reunification, which appeared in print in 2020. His waystations as a professor began in Magdeburg, moved back to Münster following a detour to the University of Toronto, and concluded in Hamburg. He was involved in more scholarly nexuses, organizations, and associations than it is possible to list. He remained one of the best-connected historians – on both sides of the Atlantic – that one will find. An inveterate organizer, he mastered the fine art of bringing people together, delegating where necessary, and synthesizing.

His remarkably scholarly career aside, Großbölting was revered for a more important reason. As nearly of the testimonials and eulogies printed in Germany correctly note, he was that rare German academic with a combination of intelligence, ambition, and rigor – minus the vanity. As frequent a presence as he was on podiums across Germany and North America, he was equally a listener. He was never one to prescribe: serving as a mentor to dozens of budding scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, he was generous with his wisdom. He indeed was more than willing to offer constructive suggestions when his many students, research assistants, and co-workers needed them. He nonetheless never did so from an exalted or lofty position that sought to tell others what they needed to know or had failed to grasp. His assistance came instead from a position of trust and confidence. When taking part in a conference at Regent College in August 2013 to commemorate the Canadian church historian, John Conway, he offered many constructive suggestions for how to transform Conway’s newsletter that had focused on German church history and recent church developments into an electronic journal encompassing a broader range of topics and geographies.

Above all, Großbölting exuded optimism, radiated sunshine, and transmitted energy. Even when he was not traveling to another archive or to give another talk, he was always on the move. His favorite way of relaxing was to go jogging. I knew Thomas for almost thirty years, almost to the day. We met in early 1995 in a working group based in Münster whose focus appropriately was contemporary church history. The Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Münster was then under the direction of its founder, the renowned church historian, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Damberg. Thomas and I were both 25-year-old graduate students; that we were from opposite shores of the Atlantic did not matter. We quickly developed a friendship that was equal parts scholarly and personal. We planned and led four seminars between 2014 and 2017 at the German Studies Association on the subject of religion in Germany between 1789 and the present. We also co-edited a volume, Germany and the Confessional Divide, which was published by Berghahn Books in 2021. While collaborating on these projects and seminars, we hosted each at other at our respective homes in St. Louis and until recently in Münster over the decades. Following conferences, we went swimming in the Pacific in San Diego and Vancouver Bay in British Columbia. Großbölting was at ease equally in discussing the vicissitudes of German Catholic history and the lives of our respective children. He was a devoted father to his four children, for whom he was an inspirational figure and his loss incomprehensible.

For me too, his untimely death remains inexplicable. It is akin to a rolling stone ceasing to move. In earlier eras, as Thomas knew all too well – and himself wrote about! – sudden departures from this world were more the norm than the exception. Theologians, hymnists, priests, and pastors all repeatedly spoke of the frailty and contingency of life. Here, today; gone tomorrow. In the words of one such German chorale, as rendered into English in The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941:

Who knows when death may overtake me!
Time passes on, my end draws near.
How swiftly can my breath forsake me!
How soon can life’s last hour appear!
My God, for Jesus’ sake I pray
Thy peace may bless my dying day.

That of all people, it was Thomas, the sunniest of optimists, who came to illustrate this age-old axiom is the bitterest of ironies. Yet in keeping with the spirit of the 17^th century, this hymn also concludes on a note of solace:

And thus I live in God contented
And die without a thought of fear;
My soul has to God’s plans consented,
For through His Son my faith is clear.

In his book, Losing Heaven, Großbölting explicitly described how remote and incomprehensible the religious sentiment articulated in this chorale had become in the later years of the Federal Republic. If the Christian churches wished to contribute to the moral questions facing society in the 21^st century in light of changing religious understandings, he wrote, they needed to show openness and enter into dialogue with those of all faiths as well as those of no faith. Yet as his untimely death also tells us, particularly in times of upheaval like ours, the task of church historians and theologians is to enter into a dialogue between past and present. The collective wisdom of the past and the needs of the present have to be in constant and constructive conversation. Thomas Großbölting would have agreed whole-heartedly.

I would like to close by extending my condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues who are suffering from this terrible loss.

Nachruf auf den Historiker Thomas Großbölting

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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.

The Rome Lectures: Father Marie-Benoît and the Path to Jewish-Christian Rapprochement

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Article: The Rome Lectures: Father Marie-Benoît and the Path to Jewish-Christian Rapprochement

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University

This essay was originally published in Holocaust Education Today: Confronting Extremism, Hate, and Mass Atrocity Crimes. The Ethel Lefrak Holocaust Education Conference Proceedings. Carol Rittner, ed. (Greensburg, PA: Seton Hill University, 2023), pp. 137-145. We are grateful for the permission of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education to reprint it here.

Abstract

In November 1944, with deportations to Auschwitz only having ceased the month prior, Father Marie-Benoît gave a series of lectures at the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion in Rome. In the lectures, he tried to bring together Jews and Christians by discussing topics such as the creation of the universe, man formed in the image of God, monogamy, the sanctity of marriage, the unity of the human family, and other topics common to both Christianity and Judaism. His lectures came to the attention of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office, the office within the Roman Curia that ruled on matters of faith and morals. This essay describes the tug-of-war between various authority figures, congregations within the Curia, and religious Orders that ensued, ultimately foreshadowing the sea changes of the Second Vatican Council.

Essay

On November 29, 1944, His Eminence Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani (1871-1951), Secretary of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office,[2] wrote to Father Donatus von Welle, Minister General of the Order of Capuchin Friars Minor (Capuchin Franciscans/O.F.M. Cap). Cardinal Selvaggiani was puzzled by an announcement he read in L’Osservatore Romano:[3] “on Sunday, November 5, at the Sisters of [our Lady of] Sion (Via Garibaldi 28) at 3:00 p.m., Fr. Benedict of Bourg d’Iré, O.M. Cap., will give the second lecture on Christian-Jewish friendship,” stated the small and inconspicuous passage.[4]

“As has been announced in the newspapers,” Cardinal Selvaggiani wrote to Father von Welle, “Father Benedict of Bourg d’Ire [Père Marie-Benoît/Father Mary Benedict/Padre Maria Benedetto; hereafter Father Benoît], of this Religious Order, is holding a course of conferences ‘to maintain and spiritually consolidate the rapprochement between Israelites and Christians during the period of the recent persecution.’”[5]

This, wrote Cardinal Selvaggiani, was not in keeping with the Acta Apostolique Sedis,[6] and the cardinal wished for an explanation from the minister general of the Capuchin Franciscans. “May Your Reverend Fatherhood provide this Supreme Congregation with detailed information concerning the above-mentioned initiative, bearing in mind the dispositions given by this Supreme with the Decree of March 25, 1928, published in the Acta Ap. Sedis, edition of April 2, 1928, page 103, regarding the Amici Israel,’” the cardinal wrote.[7]

Opus sacerdotale Amici Israel, or the Clerical Association of Friends of Israel, was a controversial and short-lived international organization founded in February 1926. Conceived of as both a bridge between Jews and Catholics and a tool for conversion, it briefly enjoyed broad support. By the end of 1926, its membership included 18 cardinals, 200 bishops and about 2,000 priests. The association’s proposal to amend the Good Friday Prayer that used the word “perfidis” (perfidious) to describe Jews surfaced internal power struggles and sharp disagreements between the Congregation of Rites,[8] the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office, and Pope Pius XI (1922-1939). The Holy Office did not approve the change, and Pope Pius XI ordered that Amici Israel be dissolved in 1928.[9] This was the controversy and resulting ruling that Cardinal Selvaggiani referenced in his 1944 letter, one he likely remembered well.

Few new more intimately the “recent persecutions” of the “Israelites” than did Father Benoît, the organizer of the conferences in question. The French Capuchin was one of the few Roman Catholic priests to be named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem[10] in April 1966.[11] He was atypical in his herculean efforts on behalf of Jews trying to survive under Nazi and Axis onslaught. In 1940, he left the Capuchin monastery on the Via Boncompagni 71 in Rome to return to France, specifically to the Capuchin monastery in Marseilles, where he was active in rescue activities that included false baptismal certificates for Jews. Forced to return to Rome in 1943, he was elected acting president of Delasem (Delegazione Assistenza Emigranti Ebrei), an Italian and Jewish resistance organization that worked in Italy between 1939 and 1947.[12]

In November 1944, Rome was only six months into recovering from Nazi occupation (September 1943 – June 1944). World War II still raged. Deportations to the Nazi death Camp Auschwitz in Poland had only ceased in late October 1944. Father von Welle replied quickly to Cardinal Selvaggiani’s letter.[13] On December 5, 1944, he wrote a long explanatory letter emphasizing that Father Benoît could be relied on to carry out what the Holy Office would consider an appropriate approach to Jews, explaining:

Father Maria Benedetto of Bourg d’ Iré, from 1940 to 1943, was in temporary residence, for reasons of the war, in our convent of Marseilles, where, with the permission of the Most Rev. Ordinary of the place, he instructed in the Catholic faith and baptized a good number of Jews. This spiritual ministry gave him the opportunity to help also materially the converted and non-converted Jews, and so for three years he collaborated with the Jewish committees of Marseilles, Cannes and Nice in France, to protect the persecuted Jews, in agreement with the Italian Authorities in the French area they then occupied.[14]

Furthermore, the Holy Father himself approved – for in July 1943, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) received Father Benoît and approved of the priest’s work, asserted Father von Welle. In fact, Father von Welle had been the one to present Father Benoît to the pope. In early September 1943, “hundreds of foreign Jews from France poured into Rome,” according to Father von Welle. Surely one could not expect Father Benoît to ignore their plight, for when visiting these new refugees, Father Benoît “recognized among them a good number of his assistants from Marseilles and Nice.” This meant he was “not able to avoid the duty of resuming his assistance,” and in answer to their plight, began his work with Delasem.[15]

Father von Welle argued Father Benoît’s work was “known to the Secretary of State [Cardinal Luigi Maglione] and to the Vicariate of Rome.” It was work to be praised, implied Father von Welle, for “it put Father Maria Benedetto in serious danger several times and required intense and continuous energy.” This was important work. According to his knowledge at that time, “on June 4, 1944,[16] there were 4,000 subsidized people in Rome, of whom 1,500 were foreigners and 2,500 Italians.” During the Nazi occupation of Rome, “about 25,000,000 Italian liras were spent,” wrote Father von Welle.[17] Father Benoît’s work was a point of pride for the pope, argued Father von Welle:

Once the persecution had passed, at least for Rome, the Jews immediately asked Fr. Maria Benedetto if they could express their gratitude to the Supreme Pontiff. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, [Israel] Zolli, accompanied by lawyer [Carlo Alberto] Ottolenghi, was received in private audience by His Holiness. The Holy Father received them very paternally, and also accepted the proposal of a public audience for all the Jews of Rome, but for later, when circumstances permit.[18]

As to the immediate November 5 conference that had already taken place on the Via Garibaldi 28, Father von Welle responded by quoting a letter from Father Benoît, produced upon the request of his superior. The lengthy passage is fascinating for the window it gives us into the manner in which Father Benoît understood his work:

I thought it was opportune to maintain and spiritually consolidate the rapprochement that took place between Israelites and Christians during the period of the recent persecution. To this end, taking advantage of the great popularity I enjoy among the Jews of Rome, I invited Jews and Catholics to listen to lectures given by me on the Old Testament, beginning at the very beginning with Genesis. It is a common ground on which we can meet and meditate together on the great religious teachings of the Word of God. My method is neither scientific nor polemical, but based […] on the Italian version of the Vulgate,[19] it is expository-educational. The immediate fruit of this should be, as I said in the first conference, a greater union between Jews and Christians, to fight every form of anti-Semitism, to arrive at a better understanding between all and to promote every good work. In the first three lectures I was already able to speak of the creation of the universe, of man formed in the image of God, of monogamy, of the sanctity of marriage, of the unity of the species, or rather of the human family, and thus of universal brotherhood, all matters that have pleased and made a salutary impression, as I was able to judge from the conversations that followed. Being a graduate of Theology from the [Pontifical] Gregorian University and a teacher of Theology in our International College for nearly twenty years, I believe I am able to give these lectures from the doctrinal point of view. I am familiar with the condemnation of the “Friends of Israel” because I used to be a member, but I believe I avoid the drawbacks of this association. I endeavor to conform my lectures to the spirit of the Church and the teaching of the Holy Fathers. I make use of the best commentators on the Bible such as Father [Francis de] Sales. I do not intend in any way to propose modifications in the Sacred Liturgy such as the Oremus “pro perfidis Iudaeis” on Good Friday; nor to attenuate the responsibilities of the Jewish people in the trial of Jesus or other similar things; on the contrary, I take advantage of every opportunity to make Christian doctrine known as it is, as I have already done once for the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass.[20]

It is a remarkable “defense” from a man who risked much to offer aid to persecuted Jewry during the Holocaust. It also speaks to the degree that both Fathers von Welle and Benoît knew that any rapprochement with Judaism – or any other tradition – was deeply frowned upon as Indifferentism.[21] Christian charity toward the suffering was one thing, but words and deeds that could be construed as approval of another faith tradition -especially Judaism -was quite another. And once again, as had been the case in 1928, the Congregation of Rites became involved.

In a long memorandum dated 18 December 1944, canon law jurist Vigilio Dalpiaz of the Congregation of Rites condemned Father Benoît’s lectures, using as a reference point the 1928 dissolution of Amici Israel. After summarizing the main points of the 1928 decree of the Holy Office, published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, issue of April 2, 1928, the memo noted an earlier announcement in L’Osservatore Romano, dated October 18, 1944 and more fleshed out than the subsequent November 4 version. In the memorandum, the entire premise of Father Benoît was rejected:

But can Fr. Benedict of Bourg be allowed to give to Catholics and Jews the conferences of which he speaks, and with the method he followed, that is, dealing with religious themes of common interest, but basing himself exclusively on the Old Testament? The Old Testament is only a prelude, a preparation for the New Testament, according to which the plan of universal salvation of souls is now based exclusively on faith in Christian revelation, on belonging to the Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, on participation in the Sacraments, etc. […] The Church and her ministers have the right and the duty to preach, but to preach the Gospel […] If Fr. Benedict of Bourg de Iré had conceived and enunciated his course of lectures on the Old Testament, so as to present them to his Catholic and Jewish listeners as a necessary premise for a further exposition of Christian faith and morals according to the New Testament, he would have done praiseworthy work, and would have been well-deserving before the Church, as well as before souls. But he has stopped, and intends to remain, halfway, taking care not to make that move towards Christianity in general and towards the Church in particular: and this, evidently so as not to upset his Jewish hearers, who could in turn repeat the gesture of their ancestors when they left the synagogue of Capernaum, protesting against the “durus sermo” [intense speech] of Jesus.[22] In fact, the subjects he [Benoît] deals with must completely disregard the revelation of the New Testament, and form a “common ground” on which Catholics and Jews can meet, such as the Creation of the Universe and man, the unity of the human species, the institution and sanctity of Marriage, etc… Even the Messianic question, which, reflected in innumerable prophecies, forms the most vibrant chord of the Old Testament, and touched with a gentle hand, finds the most harmonious echo in the pages of the New Testament, converging irresistibly the eye and the heart if the divine figure of Jesus, is left completely aside. And what is the fruit intended by Fr. Benedict with these lectures? “A greater union with God,” he replies, “and a greater union between Jews, and Christians, in order to combat every form of anti-Semitism to arrive at a better understanding between all, and to promote every good work.” Without wishing to discuss that mysterious “union with God” especially for Catholics, it is clear, however, that the purpose of such conferences is purely philanthropic and humanitarian, i.e. such as even a simple rabbi, or any layman, could propose and achieve. But, then, why should Fr. Benedict set himself to work in his capacity as a Religious, that is, as a Minister of the Catholic Religion, and, even while dealing with religious matters, absolutely disassociate himself from the New Testament, that is, from the foundation of the Catholic Religion, the only true one? Certainly, his expostulation cannot but produce a sense of disorientation in the Catholics already used to considering the most serious problems of the spirit in the light of the New Testament, and not inject as a sweet soporific into the Jews, to whom it will not seem even true that now finally the Catholic Church resigns itself to accept as definitive the conceptions of the Old Testament, at least concerning the most fundamental religious questions. In order to achieve a greater union between Jews and Christians, which is a natural end, Fr. Benedict compromises the supernatural field of faith: in order to materially and morally favor the Jews he endangers the spiritual good of both Jews and Catholics: because both Jews and Catholics, seeing religious problems of such gravity treated by a Catholic priest exclusively according to the Old Testament, they will easily think that one Testament is worth the other, and the Jews will feel the impulse that perhaps pushed them towards the Christian Religion failing: while the Catholics will fall into the religious indifferentism that necessarily accompanies the fall of the Christian religion. Benedict of Bourg d’Iré should be enjoined to use the New Testament as the basis of his lectures, revealing its differences and superiority over the Old Testament through its points of contact and harmonies. If, as is foreseeable, this were not possible given the nature of the audience, he should be forbidden to hold these lectures.[23]

As was the case in 1928, opinion remained divided. HE Pietro Cardinal Fumasoni Biondi (1872-1960), Prefect of the Congregation for the Propaganda of Faith[24] from 1933 until his death, wrote,

Benedict of Bourg d’Iré seems commendable for his science and piety. Doctor of Theology, Professor of Dogmatics, Spiritual Director of the International College. Here in Rome he has given three lectures so far, and these on the Old Testament. Of course, it begins there, but it is not said that it ends there. This is demonstrated by the fact of the conversion of the Rabbi-Chief of Rome and the other fact that in Marseilles he has instructed in the Catholic Faith and baptized a good number of Jews. So let us leave him to it, and at the most, on the part of Monsignor Assessore or others, a word of praise and wise direction for the future.[25]

Discussions about the case continued into 1946, and the ACDF is a treasure trove for the continued wrestling between different congregations and authority figures within the Roman curia.

To conclude, in the midst of the Holocaust, efforts at rapprochement with Judaism were still met with a mixture of dear, defensiveness, and even hostility. Even figures like Father Benoît knew they needed to choose their words carefully when justifying such efforts. Aid to suffering Jews was tolerated, and some argue encouraged, by the pope and his closest advisors and disciplinary bodies. Acceptance of Judaism as a religious tradition was still rejected, and would only change with the Second Vatican Council. It would take 35 years after the Holocaust for Pope John Paul II to tell his Jewish audience in Berlin that God’s covenant with the Jewish people was never revoked. It is fascinating to consider the sea change that occurred between Cardinal Selvaggiani’s November 1944 inquiry and Pope John Paul II’s November 1980 address. It is sure that pioneers like Father Benoît contributed to the Church’s journey.

Further Reading

Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives during the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Discussion Questions

What are the main themes and arguments stressed by Father Benoît as included in the 1944 letter from Father von Welle to Cardinal Selvaggiani?
What are the main themes and arguments made in the judgement of canon lawyer Vigilio Dalpiaz?
Compare and contrast these arguments. Which do you find more convincing?

Video/Film Resources

The Assisi Underground [DVD]. New York, N.Y.: MGM/UA Home Video; Distributed by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2011.

My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust (2014). Available on Netflix. See https://myitaliansecret.com/.

Notes

[1] The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

[2] This congregation, renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1965, promotes and safeguards the doctrine on faith and morals in the whole Catholic world. See https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_pro_14071997_en.html, accessed 3/30/2022.

[3] L’Osservatore Romano is the daily newspaper of the Vatican City State. It reports on the activities of the Holy See and events taking place in the Church and the world. It is owned by the Holy See. For a description see https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html, accessed 3/30/2022.

[4] L’Osservatore Romano, 4 November 1944 – N.259 (25.676) page 2. Short announcement under the heading “Nostra Signora di Sion.” The text read: Domenica 5 novembre, presso le Suore di Sion (via Garibaldi 28) alle ore 15 il P. Benedetto da Bourg d’Iré, O.M. Cap. Terrà la seconda conferenza sull’amicizia cristiano-ebraica.

[5] Letter from HE Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani to Father Donatus von Welle, 29 November 1944, 125/28. Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, hereafter ACDF), Vatican City: 00161 – 2 c. 206 227: Circa le conferenze del P. Benedetto.

[6] The Acta Apostolique Sedis is the official gazette of the Holy See containing all the principal decrees, encyclical letters, decisions of Roman congregations, and notices of ecclesiastical appointments. See https://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/index_ge.htm, accessed 3/30/2022.

[7] Letter from HE Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani to Father Donatus von Welle, 29 November 1944, 125/28. Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, hereafter ACDF), Vatican City: 161 – 2 c. 206 227: Circa le conferenze del P. Benedetto.

[8] At the turn of the 20^th century, the Congregation of Rites dealt with matters directly related to sacred worship as well as matters relating to saints. By 1928, the Congregation consisted of two sections: one for beatification and canonization, the other for sacred rites. In 1969, the Congregation of Rites was divided into two separate entities: the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. See https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/index.htm, accessed 3/30/2022.

[9] See Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives during the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010; and Emma Fattorini, Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That was Never Made, translated by Karl Ispen (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011).

[10] Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is the national Holocaust memorial of the state of Israel.

[11] See https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/benoit.html, accessed 3/30/2022.

[12] See Gérard Cholvy, Marie-Benoît de Bourg d’Iré (1895-1990): Itinéraire d’un fils de Saint François, Juste des Nations (Paris : Les Editions du Cerf, 2010); and Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), among others.

[13] Letter from Father Donatus von Welle to HE Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani, 5 December 1944, 125/28. ACDF, Vatican City: 161 – 2 c. 206 227: Circa le conferenze del P. Benedetto.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Date of the liberation of Rome from Nazi control by the Allied powers.

[17] Letter from Father Donatus von Welle to HE Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani, 5 December 1944.

[18] Susan Zuccotti describes this event through the eyes of Father Benoît in her book Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue, p.196-198. With full access to the ACDF archive since early 2020, scholars can now better understand the context for Father Benoît’s 4 December 1944 letter – to whom he was writing, and why. Father von Welle relied heavily on Father Benoît’s text in his response to Cardinal Selvaggiani, dated the very next day.

[19] The Vulgate is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible.

[20] Letter from Father Donatus von Welle to HE Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani, 5 December 1944.

[21] Indifferentism is the belief that no one religion is superior to another.

[22] According to the gospels of Luke (4:31–36) and Mark (1:21–28), Jesus of Nazareth taught in the synagogue in Capernaum and healed a man who was possessed by an unclean spirit.

[23] ACDF, Vatican City: 161 – 2 c. 206 227: Circa le conferenze del P. Benedetto, pp.223-228 and 65/1-65/6. On December 18, 1944, Dalpiaz rendered the decision of the judicial system of the Vatican City State seated in Piazza Santa Marta.

[24] Now called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, this congregation of the Roman Curia is responsible for missionary work and related activities. See https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cevang/index.htm, accessed 3/30/2022.

[25] Ibid. N.125/28; 66/3 and p.233 in the file.

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

Leave a reply

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.

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

By: Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This lecture, the Hal Israel Endowed Online Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations, was delivered for Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization on November 5, 2020.

Before we begin, I would like to note for the record that the views expressed in this lecture are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization. It is such an honor and pleasure to be invited by the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University to deliver the Hal Israel Endowed Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations. I especially want to thank Dr. Anna Sommer Schneider, Associate Director for the Center for Jewish Civilization. I have had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Schneider since we met at an important conference on antisemitism held at Indiana University over a decade ago and I know a kindred spirit when I see one!

I am going to start my comments today in the summer of 1996. As a blissfully naïve late-twenty-something Ph.D. candidate in modern German History at the University of Maryland, I had finally landed on a dissertation topic and had arrived at the Catholic University’s Archives in Washington, D.C. I had learned that Catholic University housed the personal papers of Cardinal Aloisius Muench. American-born Cardinal Muench was the most powerful American Catholic figure and influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and subsequent West Germany between 1946 and 1959. Cardinal Muench held the diplomatic positions of apostolic visitor, then regent, and finally Pope Pius XII’s nuncio, or papal diplomat to Germany. I was delighted to have access to his personal papers, for the personal papers of papal diplomats are typically held in the Vatican’s own archives in Rome. In one of those accidents of history, Cardinal Muench had shipped the bulk of his papers to the United States so that a young American priest could utilize them to write a biography of the cardinal. Happily for me, his papers stayed in America, and so I arrived on my first day, put on my white gloves, and requested the collection. I came across 1957 correspondence between Cardinal Muench and Monsignor Joseph Adams of Chicago. Muench was describing his most recent audience with Pope Pius XII on a spring day in Rome. Muench and Pius were close, bonded by their ties to and love of Germany and its people. They were at ease with one another and, by the time of this audience, had worked together for over 11 years. In this particular May 1957 audience, the pope – and I’m quoting now – told Muench […a] “story…with a great deal of delight.” I continue to quote here: “Hitler died and somehow got into heaven. There, he met the Old Testament prophet Moses. Hitler apologized to Moses for his treatment of the European Jews. Moses replied that such things were forgiven and forgotten here in heaven. Hitler [was] relieved,” continued the pope, and “said to Moses that he [Hitler] always wished to meet [Moses] in order to ask him an important question. Did Moses set fire to the burning bush?” Let me stop here and explain the two references in the “joke.” The pope was making an equivalency between two historical events. The first: the Jewish prophet Moses’ arbitration of the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people after an angel of God appeared to him in a burning bush. The second: Hitler’s rumored involvement in the 1933 Reichstag (parliament) fire, an event that facilitated consolidation of Hitler’s dictatorial powers. Muench closed his letter to Monsignor Adams with this line: “Our Holy Father told me the story with a big laugh.”

So here I was, feeling dumbfounded among other things. The “delight” and “laughter” described by Cardinal Muench indicated to me that neither he nor the pope appeared to understand the inappropriateness of telling a joke relating to the murder of six million European Jews. To my eyes, this exchange between them – one a prince of the church and the other in the chair of Saint Peter as God’s representative on earth for faithful Catholics like myself – demonstrated that neither placed much importance on the Jewish experience under National Socialism. Some might say it captures the failure of the institutional Roman Catholic Church to undertake a strong and public position of sensitivity, respect, and positive action vis-à-vis Jews and Judaism during the papacy of Pius XII.

But what could be carefully researched was limited by the fact that at that time (the late 1990’s), the full archives of Pius XII were still closed. No longer. On March 2, 2020, these archives fully opened. Announced by Pope Francis on March 4, 2019, on the 80th anniversary of the election of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) to the office of pope, these new archives consist of an estimated 16 million pages in dozens of languages, spread across multiple archives in Rome and Vatican City. In an ironic twist of history, the much-anticipated archives had to close after four days due to the COVID 19 pandemic. They reopened in early June, and, considering normally scheduled summer closures in July and August, researchers have so far had less than 90 days in the archives. Today I will reflect on their early research findings and the meaning of the archives for Christian-Jewish relations.

The church is complex and so are its archives. Nor are the archives that opened this year completely new. Important but incomplete documentation has been available beginning in 1965 as part of the published series Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War. Also already available are archives from the pontificate of Pius XI, available in full since 2006, and those of the Vatican Office of Information for Prisoners of War, available since 2004.

For scholars of the churches during World War II, the Holocaust, and the postwar period, we are witnessing an exciting moment. I’m going to first talk about findings in the archives from the perspective of what we learned this last decade from the archives covering the years 1922 to 1939. I will then move to preliminary early findings that have begun to appear since last March.

No modern pope has been as scrutinized as Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Soft spoken, aristocratic, and trained in law and diplomacy, scholars have only been able to study Pius XII through Vatican documents up to 1939 (the date of the end of Pius XI’s reign). Sometimes called “Il Papa Tedesco” (the German Pope) Pius XII was enormously popular with the German people during his time as papal diplomat to Germany from 1917-1929. From 1930 to 1939, he served Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, as Secretary of State, the second most powerful position in the Vatican hierarchy. When he became pope in 1939, he controlled the worldwide Catholic Church and the tens of millions of Catholics in a Europe on the brink of war.

Portions of the Vatican’s archival record for the 1922-1939 period are available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With thousands of archival pages at my disposal in the Museum’s reading room, three growing children and a full-time job, I decided to approach the material by looking at two key events in Holocaust history: the response of the Vatican and the German Catholic church to the first anti-Jewish laws in 1933 and to the Night of Broken Glass pogrom in 1938. My detailed findings are published elsewhere. Here, let me try to capture some highlights. Let us go back to March 1933. On March 23, 1933, the German parliament passed the so-called “Enabling Law,” abolishing democracy and the constitutional state in Germany. For our purposes, of especial interest is the statement German Chancellor Adolf Hitler made, promising to “respect all treaties between the Churches and the states” and that the “rights” of the Churches would “not be infringed upon.” In response, on March 28, the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference seated in the city of Fulda removed the current ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. On the same day that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference reversed the ban on Nazi Party membership for German Catholics, the Nazi party leadership ordered a boycott, to begin on April 1, at 10 a.m., directed against Jewish businesses and department stores, lawyers, and physicians. A second discriminatory law swiftly followed. On April 7, the passage of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service contained the so-called Arierparagraph, stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service. State-sponsored Nazi persecution of its Jewish population had begun.

I was curious about the correspondence going to and coming back from the Vatican around these two extremely sensitive issues. Most surprising to me were letters to German bishops, the nuncio, or to the pope himself from German Catholics, including priests, who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. I will give just one example. Princess Georg von Sachsen-Meiningen, who had joined the Nazi party already in May 1931 on her thirty-sixth birthday, tried to explain her distress in a letter to the Holy Father. She was responding to the fact that in the fall of 1930, the pastor of Kirchenhausen bei Heppenheim in the Diocese of Mainz declared in a sermon that no Roman Catholic could be a member of the Nazi Party, and, further, any active member of the Nazi party could be refused the sacraments. Countess Klara-Maria wrote to her pope, “as a good Catholic, I fear to end up in a conflict of conscience and to be in danger of punishment by the Church. If these measures and rules of the Mainz diocese are taken up by other dioceses, I will not be the only one to find myself in this conflict, but joined by hundreds and thousands of men and women who have decided to heroically fight for any culture or world opinion that will destroy Marxism and Bolshevism.”

While letters like this must be weighed against a population of nearly thirty million German Catholics, what they tell us is that fear of losing their flock to the growing Nazi movement was a factor for the Vatican and the German Catholic Church when making decisions. In lifting their ban on Nazi membership for Catholics, a decision was made to compromise, especially if, as Hitler stated in his March 23 address, the Church would be left alone.

This thinking was at play – alongside prejudiced views of Jews buttressed by 2,000 years of Church teachings – when the next test came: the April laws of 1933. Pope Pius XI himself was asked to intervene in a letter from unnamed – I am quoting here – “high-ranking Jewish notables.” In an internal memorandum, the pope transmitted this request to Secretary of State Pacelli. The precise language Pacelli, the future pope, used is as follows: “It is in the tradition of the Holy See to fulfill its universal mission of peace and love for all human beings, regardless of their social status or the religion to which they belong […].” The memorandum then asked for the advice of the papal nuncio in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, and of the German bishops in formulating a response. The answer sent back from Berlin was clear: the Church should not intervene beyond conveying “the will of Catholicism for universal charity.”

Why this response? Fear of alienating Catholics attracted to Nazism; fear of losing the independence of Church practices in the new Nazi state, and, finally the mentality best captured by the response of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich. In a letter dated April 10, Cardinal Faulhaber, like Orsenigo, discouraged the Holy See from intervening. He wrote to Pacelli: “Our bishops are also being asked why the Catholic Church, as often before in history, has not come out in defense of Jews. This, at present, is impossible, because the war against the Jews would also become the war against the Catholics; also, the Jews can defend themselves, as the quick end to the boycott has shown.”

Five years later, after the devastating Night of the Broken Glass pogrom, Secretary of State Pacelli would again receive a missive asking the Vatican to denounce what many consider to be the opening act of the Holocaust – total destruction of every Jewish man, woman and child. This time, the missive was from one of his own. Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, 5^th archbishop of Westminster, wrote to Pacelli requesting papal condemnation of the pogrom. Pacelli refused on behalf of the pope, who had recently suffered a heart attack. The official Vatican response read as follows: “The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

We have here another unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church. He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

To wrap up on the topic of the 1922-1939 archives, these millions of documents still have so much potential. Open since 2006, fourteen years have not nearly exhausted the possibilities. For me, I learned the lesson that the response of the Catholic Church to Nazi treatment of Jews cannot be separated from the Church’s response to Nazi treatment of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. What do I mean? The last weeks of March and first weeks of April 1933 make painfully clear that the Catholic Church’s decisions and responses to persecution of their own co-religionists influenced and even dictated their tepid response to the mistreatment of Jews. Another lesson: the role that 2,000 years of Catholic prejudice against Jews played from the lowest to highest levels of the Church during these fraught years should and must be studied beyond the person of the pope himself. The 1922-1939 archives are rich with material from ordinary Catholics, their priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals and from their Jewish neighbors, grasping for any help they might find and typically not finding it.

Fast-forward to March 2020. Since their opening on March 2, the fascination with the 1939-1958 materials has only grown. A documentary by award-winning director Steven Pressman, titled Holy Silence, premiered in January of this year. It garnered over 3,000 views when shown as part of a recent joint program between the Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Film Institute of San Francisco. An interview with Hubert Wolf, a historian at the University of Münster whose team was among those in the archives that first week in March went viral. More recently, Brown University historian David Kertzer’s article in The Atlantic on his and his research collaborators’ findings resulted in a counter-article in none other than L’Osservatore Romano. This is the daily newspaper of the Vatican City State which reports on the activities of the Holy See and events taking place in the Church and the world.

Earlier this month, I stood in the Vatican Apostolic Archive for the first time in my life. Where does one begin with the many questions that I have been accumulating since that first day in the Catholic University archives? With limited time to work in the archive, I decided to follow up on an old question that has nagged at me since those early days at the Catholic University Archives – that of Pius XII’s thought process as he pleaded for clemency for Germans indicted and convicted for war crimes by Allied courts in occupied Germany. Scholars have already established that Pius XII and his key advisors involved themselves in clemency efforts for convicted German war criminals, most especially Catholic ones. I recalled that even Muench had questioned this practice, telling U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy in 1950 that some championed by the Vatican “were up to their elbows in blood.”

Selecting a folder labeled “Prisoners of War, 1950-1959” from the papers of the Vatican’s diplomatic headquarters in Germany, I started to turn the fragile pages in the beautifully appointed “Pius XI Study Room.” Midway through the folder, the subject heading “Case Oswald Pohl” caught my eye. Oswald Pohl joined the Nazi party in 1926 and the SS in 1929. The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was an elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party that served as Hitler’s personal guard and as a special security force in Germany and the occupied countries. Pohl became chief of administration at SS headquarters in February 1934, responsible for the armed SS units and the concentration camps. Ultimately, he headed a sprawling organization that was responsible for recruiting millions of concentration camp inmates for forced labor units, and also responsible for selling Jewish possessions—jewelry, gold fillings, hair, and clothing—to provide funds to Nazi Germany. On November 3, 1947, in the “U.S. versus Oswald Pohl et al,” the U.S. Army sentenced Pohl to death. During the three-year confinement in Landsberg prison that followed the trial, Pohl converted to Catholicism. This, however, did not prevent his execution by hanging on June 8, 1951.

The dates in the folder sitting in front of me also caught my eye – April 1951, less than 8 weeks before Pohl’s execution date. There are three memos written (in Italian) from Muench, headquartered in Kronberg, Germany, to the Vatican’s Substitute Secretary of State Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Saint Pope Paul VI and at that time, Pius XII’s closest advisor and friend. On April 2, Muench wrote to Montini, “I consider it my duty to remit to Your Excellency […] newspaper articles which report news of the Holy Father sending a Papal Blessing to Mr. Oswald Pohl, former General of the SS., sentenced to death in Landsberg.” Muench’s 2^nd memorandum to Montini got even more interesting and confirmed that indeed, Pohl had received a Papal Blessing via telegram. Let me pause to briefly explain that The Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death is part of the Last Rites in the Catholic tradition. The Christian News Service in Munich issued a clarification that, according to Landsberg prison chaplain Carl Morgenschweis, the telegram conferring the Papal Blessing was “purely private, and not a diplomatic step or a Vatican stance.”

Specifically, a Father “Costatino Pohlmann” sent an urgent request to Pius XII with a request that a Papal Blessing be sent to Pohl on the eve of his death, in keeping with Catholic practice, and the pope did so. In Muench’s view, this was “not at all a matter of a telegram from the Vatican, much less a position taken by the Pope on the Pohl case.”

In the third and final memo from Muench to Montini on the matter, Muench took the time to send to Montini – second only to the pope in terms of power and position – a copy of an essay Pohl had written while imprisoned. The essay was titled “My Way to God.” Muench ensured Montini that the essay had come from the heart. Father Morgenschweis “closely followed the radical change of Pohl,” and wrote the preface, confirming that in Father Morgenschweis’ eyes, Pohl converted “only for the beneficial influence of God’s grace” and marked “the sincere return to the Lord of a misguided soul.”

What are we to make of Pius XII granting the Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death to Oswald Pohl, a recently converted Catholic condemned to death as one of the greatest Nazi overlords of the slave labor system? A week in the new archives cannot answer such a question of moral, ethical and theological significance. It did provide, at least for me, a sense that more historical evidence exists in other parts of this or another of the newly opened archives. I believe the core story we tell now about the Vatican, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust will be fundamentally altered after historians have done their work. But it will take time.

To conclude, why all the intense interest in these archives, 75 years after the end of World War II? And what might they mean for Christian-Jewish relations, which have been on a steady and positive path since the Church’s rejection of antisemitism as a sin with the Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965? There is no doubt that some documents will bring to the fore very tough conversations. Other documents will bring cause for celebration. The vast majority will engender elements of both. It is an overdue conversation, and one that must be approached with humility before our Jewish brothers and sisters – for our Church (my Church) has much to answer for that the Nostra Aetate declaration does not erase. When announcing the opening of these archives, His Holiness Pope Francis said, “the Church is not afraid of history; rather, she loves it … I open and entrust to researchers this documentary heritage.” This is our moment to study the past in a clear, responsible, precise way. This is our moment to accept we will find stories across the full spectrum of the human condition, from the most depraved to great acts of kindness. This is our moment to be equally honest about both the failings and triumphs we are already finding, from top to bottom. Thank you.

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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.

The Nazis and Religion: Digital Visual Resources for Research and Teaching

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

The Nazis and Religion: Digital Visual Resources for Research and Teaching

By Samuel Koehne, Trinity Grammar School

Given the continuing interruption that COVID-19 poses around the world, this review considers three readily available resources on the Hitler Youth that are either digitalized or available in digital format from the following institutions:

Each of these provides access to materials from film strips in the form of slides (Bildbänder) that were sent out by the Hitler Youth to ‘explain’ certain topics and propagandize for the Nazis. Although not commonly used in the literature, these are helpful for both research and teaching. As they were produced by the Amt der weltanschauulichen Schulung der Hitlerjugend (Division for Ideological Education of the Hitler Youth) they may also be particularly useful for university students – they are readily available, they are quite striking visual sources, and they effectively summarize key topics in Nazism (including Nazi views on religion). In addition to this, they are useful as official productions of the Nazi state in the 1930s that were aimed at the youth, and because some of them do not require German – for example, the USHMM and PLU slides and booklets have English translations or captions of the German text. Not least, students may very readily understand these Bildbänder, given they were essentially the ‘PowerPoints’ of their day. As a result, it is well worth bringing these resources to the attention of scholars more generally, as a potential digital resource.

The slide-shows produced by the Hitler Youth often had instructional booklets that allowed those screening the materials to use this as (effectively) a kind of introduction and script when showing the films, in order to both create a consistent message and minimize the extra work that would be required by any Hitler Youth leader who was using this for ‘ideological instruction.’ Both the German Bild-Archiv and Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections still have many of the original script booklets, but they are not extant for those in the USHMM.[1]

General contents

Many of the Bildbänder were focused on the military and war, including one curious slide-show (available through the PLU) that dealt with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, and another that depicted the English as a state that was seeking world domination.[2] The latter (Englands Griff nach der Welt) begins with an image of a clawed hand seizing the world, an image normally used by the Nazis to depict the Jews, but here used to portray England. The slide-show itself argued England had sought to control the entire world through its empire, that they had ‘poisoned the Chinese people’ through opium, and – a particularly interesting aspect for any scholar of Nazism – they demonized the English for the following: ‘Their troops exterminated Australian aborigines, plundered the rich land of the Boers and dragged women and children into concentration camps.’ The accompanying booklet appears to indicate that this was produced just before World War II. There is a terrible irony in the ways that the slide-show depicted both concentration camps under the British – with a drawing of people desperately rushing the fences while guards watch them unconcerned – and declared the ‘bloody suffering’ of British rule was due to ‘shameless violence’ and ruling through ‘brutality and force.’ Given that we now associate these very things with Nazi Germany, it is curious that they also argued the ‘High-Church of England’ gave its ‘blessing’ to such violence, an interesting point of comparison to the ways in which some Christian groups and churches (like the German Christians) comparably ‘blessed’ the Nazis and their ideology. Much of the remainder of this slide-show argued that Jews controlled England, and focused on the concept of Lebensraum. Other slide-shows contained advice to the youth in serving the nation through being physically fit, with one (‘You have the duty to be healthy’) containing such basic advice as brushing one’s teeth or washing regularly, alongside warnings against smoking and drinking alcohol.[3] Michael Buddrus points out that the range of materials offered in the full series ranged from the Treaty of Versailles to the rebuilding of the German army, colonies to Erbkranker Nachwuchs, ‘Hereditarily diseased offspring.’[4] Many of them contain a core Nazi message, such as a slide-show that was a series of pleasant images of nature on ‘The Natural World’ (Lebendige Welt) but contained in the script such messages as these: ‘Life is struggle (Kampf), and victory is its validation.’ The same slide-show began with a statement by Hans Schemm that identified God simply as ‘nature’: ‘National Socialism at its most fundamental is nothing other, than a wonderful Confession to the organic, to growth, to comply together [presumably to ‘laws of nature’], and at the same time a Confession to God’ (Der Nationalsozialismus ist im Grundprinzip nichts anderes, als ein wundervolles Bekenntnis zum Organischen, zum Wachsen, zum Sichzusammenfügen und zu gleicher Zeit ein Bekenntnis zu Gott).[5]

Race and Antisemitism

This is not to say that the ideological films avoided the topics of antisemitism or eugenics, and one of the core collections in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is entitled Deutschland überwindet das Judentum, ‘Germany overcomes Jewry.’ The notion of ‘race’ was writ large in the films sent to Hitler Youth on ‘overcoming Jewry,’ with the first slide quoting Hitler: ‘Jewry was always a people [Volk] with particular racial characteristics and never a religion. The Jew is and remains a parasite [Schmarotzer]. Where he appears, the host-nation dies.’ The series went on to very clearly outline the Nazi perspective that Jews were to be attacked and removed from society as a ‘foreign race’ – although Jews were also depicted as a ‘bastard’ race. The slide-show for the Hitler Youth argued not only that Jews did not have the rights of citizenship in the Middle Ages and were forced to live in ghettoes, but directly argued that they had only received the same rights as ‘state-citizens of German blood’ (die deutschblütigen Staatsbürger) through the French Revolution. It repeated many of the stereotypes that the Nazis had used to characterise ‘Jewry’ from the very foundation of the German Workers’ Party, including the notions that Jews ran all money-markets, were the major bankers of the world, controlled literature, film, and the press. It also contained Hitler’s notion that Jews were incapable of culture: ‘The Jew possesses no culture-creating ability.’ As so often occurred in Nazi propaganda, there was a conflation of conspiratorial concepts, with freemasonry and Marxism being viewed as merely ‘tools in the fight for political power’ in the Bildband. The slide-show ended with the notion that ‘Adolf Hitler with his [Nazi] movement broke the Jewish domination’ through quoting the Nazi Party Programme, Point 4: ‘Only someone who is a Volk-comrade can be a citizen. A Volk-comrade can only be someone of German blood, regardless of confession. No Jew therefore can be a Volk-comrade.’ The Nuremberg Race Laws were also quoted, to the effect that a ‘citizen of the Reich can only be a state-citizen of German or racially-related blood,’ going on to note specific measures against Jews as public officials, authors, and against intermarriage, ‘[f]or the protection of German blood from foreign-racial intermixture’ – with a chart demonstrating who might ‘count’ as being of ‘German blood.’

The Bible and the Church

In terms of the topic of religion, at least two of the productions in the Bildbänder demonstrate that Christianity was viewed as negative because it was believed to somehow denigrate the ‘Germanic race,’ and any such supposed attack on ‘race’ was a cardinal sin in National Socialism. While this extended (as Burleigh and Wippermann identified) to ‘the exclusion and extermination of all those deemed to be “alien,” “hereditarily ill” or “asocial”’ it also appears to have been used in the Hitler Youth educational films to argue the ‘alien’ nature of Christianity.[6] While ‘Germany overcomes Jewry’ was intended to promote racial concepts of blood and to establish the supposed enmity the Nazis believed existed between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews,’ the purpose of the slide-show ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ (5000 Jahre Germanentum) was intended to create pride in German history and opposition to the church.

In a booklet that came along with the film, it was clear that this was not only designed to create a sense of ‘Germanic’ superiority but to specifically attack the Catholic Church. The instructions – I have only been able to source a screenshot of the first pages – began with a comment on the ‘Church and German pre-history’ (Kirche und deutsche Vorgeschichte). The very first lines indicated the view of the church: ‘Two heavy shackles (Fesseln) have formerly hindered the wider promotion in the Volk of the findings from research into ancient German history: the lie of the barbarism of our forefathers and the Jewish teaching of the creation of the world, as it is found in the Bible.’ The blame for the former was placed solidly on ‘the church,’ which was accused of having created a ‘lie of the barbarism of the Germanic tribes (Germanen)’ as a ‘wild people’ that had only gained ‘Roman culture’ originally ‘through the missionaries of the church.’ The notion appears to have been part and parcel of the broader concept in Nazism – promote by various leaders, including Hitler – that the Germans, as ‘Aryans,’ were supposedly already creative and constructive as a ‘race,’ prior to their conversion to Christianity. For example, Hitler argued that ‘Aryans’ were the only ‘race’ to be able to create cultures, community or society in Mein Kampf.[7] In his view – as for many other leading Nazis – Christianity therefore could be seen as essentially false for promoting religion over race, for portraying Jesus Christ as the sacrificial lamb or for ‘weakening’ racial ideology through such core orthodox Christian notions as original sin. By contrast, Hitler argued variously that ‘God’s work’ was race – ‘in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord’ – that Jesus Christ was a violent antisemite – ‘what today is a blackjack was earlier a whip’ [referring to Matthew 21] – and that ‘sin against blood and race is the original sin of this world.’[8]

Yet there was also a more ‘hidden’ critique of Christianity in such statements, as was identified by Hans F.K. Günther, the so-called ‘Race Pope,’ who argued that ‘pure-blooded ancient Germans were fundamentally capable, fundamentally good, and not originally sinful.’[9] This identified the fact that orthodox Christianity, by its very insistence on sin, argued that people were not perfect. Concomitant with this, the introduction of Christianity and the conversion of the German peoples was seen as a positive change and an advancement in Germany. For the Nazis, the ‘Aryans’ were supposedly already perfect, cultured and advanced, so that the claim that the Germanic peoples were not ‘civilized’ was seen as opposing this racial world-view. ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ encapsulated this, by arguing that the ‘lie promoted by the Catholic Church’ was that ‘the ancient Germanic peoples [Germanen] had only adopted agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, and all artisanal work and art from the Romans and monks.’ The purpose of the slide-show then was to show that this was incorrect, and that the Germanic tribes had possessed all of these for thousands of years. In another comparable ‘educational film for the Hitler Youth’ – ‘So lived our Forefathers’ (So lebten unserer Vorfahren) – the primary issue taken with such concepts was that the Hitler Youth leadership saw it as promoting a ‘completely false’ notion of ‘our forefathers’ that did not fit with the Nazi notion of a ‘superior race.’ As a result, it was argued that to see Germans as barbarians ‘placed the Germanic tribes on the same level as the uncultured Negro [kulturloser Negerstamm].’ This is an interesting form of ‘cultural’ attack on the churches – it did not attack religion per se, but attacked the churches as institutions for daring to claim that the Germanen were ever anything but perfect. In a sense, the notion of thousands of years of German culture – 5000 years in 5000 Jahre Germanentum or up to 7000 years in So lebten unserer Vorfahren – indicated a kind of cultural cringe. In ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ one slide quoted Hitler to the effect that Germans should not be ‘ashamed’ of their ‘forefathers,’ but take pride in their ancestors, just as the Italians, Greeks, or British did for their ancestors. The church was clearly attacked for portraying the Germanic tribes as pagan, and the ‘cardinal sin’ of denigrating race was directly identified in one of the final slides of ‘5000 Years of German Culture,’ quoting Hans Schemm: ‘Whoever claims, that the Germanic tribes were uncultured pagans, falsifies history and commits a crime against German blood.’ The Catholic Church was seen as committing precisely this ‘crime.’

What is more interesting is that the Hitler Youth were being directly encouraged to place the Bible in direct opposition to ‘Research’ and to see the Bible itself as fundamentally opposed to National Socialism. This was very clearly outlined in one of the earliest slides of 5000 Jahre Germanentum, which argued that ‘Research’ led to ‘National Socialism’ while ‘the Bible’ led to the ‘Jewish International’:

Research

Bible

Time of the prehistoric peoples [Urmenschen] 300,000 to 5000 before the turning-point of the age [vor Zeitwende]

Germanic period 5000 v.Ztw – 800 n.Ztw.

German History 800 – 1933

National Socialism

????

Creation of the World 4000 BC

10 Commandments of Moses 1300 BC

Christ’s Birth

Diaspora of the Jews

Jewish International

Unfortunately the instructional script for this slide is missing, but the overall concept was clear. Curiously enough, the Nazi version of events to the left did not even make use of Christ as a point of reference, while positioning the Bible entirely as ‘Jewish.’ The use of ‘vor Zeitwende’ rather than ‘vor Christus’ was partly explained, however, by the concept that Germans should not be seeking their culture outside of a fairly narrowly defined part of the world – and that this region (because of its connection to ‘race’) thereby became sacralized. In this sense, one entire slide simply asked ‘Where is our Holy Land?’ and answered it promptly: ‘North Germany. The original homeland of the Germanic tribes is our Holy Land.’ The concept of Germans as ‘culture creators’ then followed, with the claim that the ‘most ancient farmhouse of the earth’ was the Germanic long-house, and that both ‘ploughs and wagons’ were ‘early Germanic discoveries.’ Using examples of stone weapons and early German pottery, the continual theme was that Germanic tribes had been advanced, sophisticated and possessed a ‘high culture’ (Hochkultur) that supposedly derived from their ‘race.’ For that matter, a parallel slide-show on the ‘German impact in the East’ (Deutsche Leistung im Osten) in the USHMM argued that the ‘Germanic peoples created the foundations of European culture,’ which were then meant to have been transported to Eastern Europe by Germans. One of these was supposedly the ‘Germanic sacred symbol’ (Heilszeichen) of the swastika, as indicated by swastikas marked out on an old barn. In terms of culture, the invasions of Rome were promoted as a positive impact on the Roman Empire, seen as ‘rotting from within.’

It is here that ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ overlapped with the promotion of paganism as a kind of indication of Germanic spirituality, as the slide-show not only showed advances in materials and tools, from stone to bronze, but argued that the burial practices of the Germanic peoples showed a fine sense of religiosity, whether these involved burial or cremation. While showing artists’ recreations of the interior of long-houses, the slide-show noted that such ‘halls [of the German peoples] rang with the heroic songs of the Edda’ and it introduced instances of the swastika on weapons as an emblem. All of this appears to have led to the central identification of the swastika as apparently something both connected to being ‘godly’ (göttliches) and as a depiction of the sun. Unfortunately the slide in the USHMM that contains this information is damaged, but I suspect that it refers both to the Hakenkreuz and Sonne, from the text that remains. This would bear further investigation, but the following slide certainly continued to discuss the swastika as a symbol and the early German notions of the sun-wheel.

One fascinating omission in ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ is that it made no positive mention of Christianity or showed any indications of the impact of Christian faith on Germany. This ‘silence’ was significant, the more so given that Christianity was still the dominant religion in Germany at the time. Instead, all aspects of the slide-show focused on the achievements of Germans before Christianity. It is clear this was not accidental, as the slide-show from the same series for Christmas (Deutsche Weihnachten) continually emphasized that the Nazi Party intended to celebrate this as the pagan festival of solstice, not as a Christian festival.[10] It is remarkable quite how open both of these slide-shows (‘5000 years of German Culture,’ ‘German Christmas’) were in terms of the way that they clearly and directly argued that the Nazi Party was focused on ancient Germanic notions, including religion. Scholars have already identified that the Nazis from early on celebrated Christmas as the Germanic ‘Yule’ or winter solstice festival.[11] The Hitler Youth slide-show from the late 1930s linked directly to this by seeking to explain all aspects of Christmas in Germany as a kind of expression of the ‘racial soul’ in which original ‘markers’ or symbols of Germanic-pagan life were absorbed into the modern tradition. As Perry has pointed out, this was part and parcel of the Nazis attempting to ‘eliminate altogether’ the ‘Christian aspects of the holiday.’ Certainly the Hitler Youth slide-show (held by PLU) argued that Christmas was to be celebrated in the pagan form of the festival, not as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.[12]

The ‘German Christmas’

The very introduction of the ‘German Christmas’ presented it as a time of anticipation, home, and baking. When children were mentioned as gathering around ‘the mother’ at twilight for ‘the most beautiful time’ of the day, it was to hear ‘fairy-tales’ and stories from ‘our sagas.’ This was linked to the main theme of the slide-show, that Christmas should be celebrated in the manner of ‘our forefathers’ who were argued to have ‘celebrated Christmas [Weihnachten] as the festival of the light rising again and the renewal of life’ (Unsere Vorfahren feierten Weihnachten als Fest des wieder aufsteigenden Lichtes und der Erneuerung des Lebens). Drawing on ‘history and sagas’ the instruction guide advised that the celebration of winter solstice was based on the hope for ‘new-born light,’ ‘the hope for the reawakening of life in nature [after winter], for warmth and the sun,’ that it was a time of ‘thinking of the dead’ and that (in their view) small trees were placed ‘at the grave and decorated with lights.’ These were seen as the traditions of the German people that has been: ‘reinterpreted and used for the form of a Christian festival. In place of the old Germanic forms came the saints of the Christian church.’

The instructional guide – available through PLU – was clear as to how the Nazis were reverting to the earlier tradition: ‘Today we reflect again on our old, original form, on that, which our forefathers passed down to us, and we wish to again celebrate Christmas as the festival of the returning light and the renewal of life [my emphasis].’ In ensuring that the message of returning to a pagan festival was clear, the slides identified the same point repeatedly: ‘Our forefathers celebrated Christmas as the festival of the light rising again and the renewal of life.’ It argued that the Christmas tree itself was a ‘symbol of life,’ but that it – like many of the ‘existing traditions of the homeland’ – had been used by ‘the church’ to create the ‘festival of the birth of Christ.’ In the slide-show, these were explained variously as ‘[t]he most beautiful symbol life, mother and child, becoming ‘Mary and the Christ-child,’ while ‘Frau Holle became the decorative angel’ and ‘St Nicholas took the place of Odin [Wodan].’ The last two of these are particularly striking, as they took up the notion that older Germanic gods had continued as traditions, but simply been ‘converted’ into new Christian forms. Frau Holle (sometimes also Frau Holda) had been perceived as ‘a benevolent goddess of German antiquity’ since Jacob Grimm had argued this in the nineteenth century, though he believed that ‘folk tales which are common to both Frau Holda and the Virgin Mary’ had been ‘originally’ about Holda, then ‘as a result of Christian influence she was debased and replaced by Mary.’[13] While other scholars later disagreed, this appears to be the interpretation offered by the Nazi Party, although obviously showing Frau Holle as becoming the angel on the tree, rather than Mary. With images showing Hitler Youth, the slide-show repeated that the Nazis did not aim to celebrate Christmas as a Christian festival of any kind, but as a ‘return to the old German form: as the reappearance of the light, and the renewal of life.’

In conclusion, then, these sources may serve as a useful point of either research for students or as ‘summaries’ for particular topics in teaching. In any case, they serve as a reminder that the Nazis were quite adept at using different media to attempt to communicate their ideas. Like their use of film, the Bildbänder appear to have been designed to create a direct, simplified message so as to communicate the more effectively with youth. Given this, what they were communicating by the 1930s about religion is rather striking.

Notes:

[1] Enormous thanks are owed to Dr. Napp of the Deutsches Bild-Archiv and Anna Trammell of the Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections, for all their assistance.

[2] See Folders 1.18, Englands Griff nach der Welt; 1.22, Legion Condor; from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[3] Folder 1.4, Du hast die Pflicht, gesund zu sein, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[4] Michael Buddrus, Totale Erziehung für den totalen Krieg: Hitlerjugend und nationalsozialistische Jugendpolitik (München: K.G.Saur, 2003), 64n.21.

[5] Folder 1.11, Lebendige Welt, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[6] Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), 304-7.

[7] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (München: Franz Eher/Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1936),

311-62.

[8] Respectively: Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Pimlico, 2004), 60; Speech, 2 November 1922, Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen: 1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 720; Hitler, Mein Kampf (München: Franz Eher/Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1936), 272, 449.

[9] Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (München: J.F. Lehmann, 1922), 398–99.

[10] See Folder 1.10, Deutsche Weihnachten, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[11] Joe Perry, ‘Nazifying Christmas: Political Culture and Popular Celebration in the Third Reich,’ Central European History 38 (2005): 572–605; Samuel Koehne, ‘Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,’ Central European History 47 (2014): 760–90.

[12] All remaining materials refer to the Bildband and instructional booklet held in Folder 1.10, Deutsche Weihnachten, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[13] Edgar List, ‘Is Frau Holda the Virgin Mary?’, The German Quarterly, 29, no.2 (1958): 80–4, here 80.

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

By Olaf Blaschke, University of Münster

The following commentary examines the April 29, 2020, publication of “Deutsche Bischöfe im Weltkrieg. Wort zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs vor 75 Jahren” (“German Bishops in the World War: Statement on the 75th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War”) by the German Roman Catholic Bishops Conference.

Despite rumors to the contrary, this is not the first statement by German Catholic bishops on the behavior of the shepherds in the time of National Socialism and in the Second World War. Other reflections have already been uttered several times in collective pastoral letters and those written by certain bishops or in certain statements.

In January 1945, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen (Münster) conceded mistakes of the hierarchy in a letter to the archbishop of Cologne, and at the same time Bishop Johannes Joseph van der Velden of Aachen admitted to the US-Psychological Warfare Division, the Church itself had failed.¹ Four weeks after the total capitulation (May 8, 1945), the north-western German bishops of Cologne, Aachen, Limburg, Münster, Osnabrück, Trier, Paderborn, Fulda and Hildesheim, covering most of Germany (except the south), came together in Werl and decided to write a petition to the Military Government, to the bishops in the USA and Great Britain, and to the Pope. In this text, the bishops critically considered why they kept silent, also concerning the atrocities against Jews. Looking back, they got the impression “that it would have served our church and our people more if we had kept silent less.”²

It was a fatal event that the speech of Pius XII on June 2, 1945 – not known by the bishops meeting in Werl on June 5 – caused the bishops to change their course for the coming decades. In his address to the college of cardinals the pope praised the “great qualities of the people” in Germany, among which he had spent twelve years between 1917 and 1929, and condemned the “satanic specter raised by National Socialism,” which was persecuting the Church. “To resist such attacks millions of courageous Catholics, men and women, closed their ranks around their bishops, whose valiant and severe pronouncements never failed to resound even in these last years of war. These Catholics gathered around their priests to help them adapt their ministry to the ever-changing needs and conditions. And right up to the end they set up against the forces of impiety and pride their forces of faith, prayer and openly Catholic behavior and education.”³ This was the sentence which from now on was quoted in several pastoral letters. Backed by the authoritative voice of the pope in a context of a world condemning the Germans, the bishops felt encouraged to present themselves as victims, not as part of the system, being involved in resistance, not in collaboration, and to discard any claim of a collective guilt.⁴

In their first pastoral letter after the war, the Bavarian bishops referred to the pope’s speech, emphasizing that the bishops had warned against National Socialism and that the German “Volk” had suffered immensely.⁵

Accordingly, in the first pastoral letter of the joint German bishops of August 23, 1945, the Catholic people were praised because they had kept away from the “idolatry of brutal power.” Certainly, “terrible things” had happened before and during the war “by Germans in the occupied countries. We deeply regret it: Many Germans, even from our ranks [!], have let themselves be seduced by the wrong teachings of National Socialism and have remained indifferent to crimes against human freedom and human dignity; many of them promoted crimes through their attitude, many have become criminals themselves.” This admission of guilt is famous, but only made up 4.4 percent of the entire document. Whether “our ranks” also included the bishops is highly questionable.⁶ The bishops took the course of seeing themselves and the faithful as victims. The statements were shaped by dualism (Church vs. National Socialists), opposition (the Church resisted the regime), and exculpation. For years, this position remained mainstream.

The pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops in April 1946 claimed: “We bishops have fought ‘the satanic specter of National Socialism’ [again quoting Pius XII] so decisively and suffered so much from it that we cannot be suspect that we now want to wash away all his followers of guilt and free them from punishment.” The letter was about commitment for the “political prisoners” and former party members.⁷

Later statements spoke more frankly: In 1976 the Common Synod of Bishoprics complained that the ecclesial community had kept silent about the murder of the Jews. After the TV series “Holocaust” had been broadcast, the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference explained in 1979 a certain complicity, because the Church didn’t comment on the boycott, the Nuremberg race laws, or the pogroms of 1938. When the outbreak of the war commemorated its 40^th anniversary in 1979, the Church acknowledged the co-responsibility of the German people, including the guilt “in the church” – but not of the Church. On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it was confirmed that “failure and guilt was common among Catholics.”

Contrasted with earlier documents, the present shepherds’ word breathes a completely different spirit. Its creation was advised by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte and the German Commission Justitia et Pax. The document knows about the decades of apologetic tendencies in the Catholic Church and is not afraid to “name misconduct,” which however only becomes clear from the middle of the document onwards (p. 12 of 23). Despite all the well known distance to National Socialism, “the Catholic Church in Germany was part of the war society.” This is clearly stated. It was the Church, not only people in the Church.

In the controversy that has been going on for 75 years, whether the bishops have “proven themselves”⁸ or whether they have “failed,” this document emphasizes in a balanced way of argumentation that they were actually “complicit in the war.” Between 1933 and its last meeting in 1943, the Bishops Conference was “not up to the challenge of National Socialism.”⁹

The document is immune from ahistorical moralization. Rather, it recognizes the need to explain the historical circumstances: the shared belief at the time that state power came from God, the teaching of just war, nationalism, and anti-Bolshevism. Wolfgang Böckenförde identified these elements in 1961 as the interface between Catholicism and National Socialism, holding it against ecclesiastical apologetic, while now it is part of an ecclesiastical document.¹⁰

To conclude: the recent statement of the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference corresponds to the well-established tendency of historical research to no longer search for the genocidal and war “program” of Nazi leaders in an intentionalist way, placing the guilt on a handful of “outcasts”, viewing the Germans as seduced by a brown clique. Rather, research into perpetrators (“Täterforschung”) expanded down to “ordinary men,” as Christopher Browning put it.¹¹ Now the bishops also turn out to be “ordinary churchmen.” They no longer adorn themselves with the narrative of exculpation and dualism, sacrifice and resistance, but admit their “own entanglements” which have to be interpreted in their historical context. Even the interpretation that the war against the Soviet Union in 1941 was felt and endorsed as a “crusade” against “godless Bolshevism” can be found in this document. It gave the bishops “an additional meaning to the war.”¹²

What remains unclear is the choice of the date of publication, commemorating the 75^th year of the liberation of the Dachau concentration-camp on April 29, 1945. Why is Dachau never mentioned in the document? 2700 clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, were imprisoned there, among them 1700 Polish priests. Many felt abandoned by their bishops, treated as disobedient, and suffered from their bishops’ de-solidarization. In 1945, the bishops told them they should not act as martyrs. Dachau is not the topic of the document, rather the 75^th commemoration of the end of the Second World War nine days later. The statement explicitly marks the 8^th of May as a day of liberation, but its authors chose another day to make it public. This, however, is a minor objection in the face of a document which has made great progress.

Notes:

¹Vera Bücker, Die Schulddiskussion im deutschen Katholizismus nach 1945, Bochum 1989, p. 89; Wolfgang Löhr, Bischof Johannes Joseph van der Velden und die Schuldfrage nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Kirche im Bistum Aachen, Jahrbuch 7, 2004, p. 247-257, 255, quoted in: Ulrich Helbach, Es hätte unserer Kirche und unserem Volk mehr gedient, wenn wir weniger geschwiegen hätten … Die “Schuldfrage” im Frühjahr 1945 im Lichte eines neuen Quellenfundes: Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Papst Pius XII., in: Siegfried Schmidt (Hg.), Rheinisch – Kölnisch – Katholisch. Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Landesgeschichte, FS H. Finger, Köln 2008, p. 341-372, 344. For the context: Damian van Melis / Joachim Köhler (ed.), Siegerin in Trümmern: Die Rolle der katholischen Kirche in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1998. Olaf Blaschke, Olaf, Die Kirchen und der Nationalsozialismus, Bonn 2019 (Stuttgart 2014), p. 231-244.

²[Probably Lorenz Jaeger], Entwurf für eine Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Pius XII. zur Kollektivschuldfrage, Paderborn, ca. 5. 6. 1945, in: Ulrich Helbach (Bearb.), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945. Westliche Besatzungszonen 1945-1947, vol. 1, Paderborn 2012 (Veröffentlichungen der KfZG, Reihe A: Quellen, Bd. 54), p. 115-120 (EA Paderborn, NL Jaeger, Sachgruppe 1 [Rom], Hefter: Eingaben/Verfügungen). The story of this document is told by its discoverer: Helbach, Schuldfrage.

³Pius XII, Ansprache an das Kardinalskollegium, 2. 6. 1945, in: Wilhelm Jussen (ed.), Gerechtigkeit schafft Frieden, Reden und Enzykliken des Heiligen Vaters Pius XII., Hamburg 1946, p. 201-216.

⁴Officialla, the collective guilt was never announced. Cf. Norbert Frei, Von deutscher Erfindungskraft. Die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit, in: Gary Smith (ed.), Hannah Arendt revisited. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” und die Folgen, Frankfurt 2000, p. 157-170.

⁵Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Erstes gemeinsames Hirtenwort nach dem Krieg, Eichstätt, June 28^th 1945, in: Wolfgang Löhr (Bearb.), Dokumente deutscher Bischöfe 1945-1949, vol. 1: Hirtenbriefe und Ansprachen zu Gesellschaft und Politik 1945-1949, Würzburg 1985, S. 29-32.

⁶Hirtenbrief der deutschen Bischöfe, 23. 8. 1945, in: Löhr (ed.), p. 40-45.

⁷Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Hirtenwort über das Glaubensleben und Zeitprobleme, Eichstätt, 9. 4. 1946, in: Löhr (Bearb.), p. 99-103, 102.

⁸Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918 bis 1945, Paderborn 1992, p. 550.

⁹Here, the scholarly findings of Antonia Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens. Der Ausschuss für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945, Frankfurt 1996, find their way into the document.

¹⁰Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933. Eine kritische Betrachtung, in: Hochland 53 (1961), p. 215-239.

¹¹Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York 1992.

¹²Cf. Antonia Leugers, Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung, Paderborn 2009.

“The German Catholic Bishops and the Second World War: A Historic Reappraisal”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

“The German Catholic Bishops and the Second World War: A Historic Reappraisal”

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

On May 8, 2020, the 75^th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender to the Allies, the German Catholic bishops issued a statement, “Germany’s Bishops during the War,” admitting their complicity in the Second World War. “By not unequivocally saying ‘no,’ to the war and by strengthening instead the resolve (to fight and persist), they came to share in the guilt for the war,” declared their twenty-three page message released during a video conference because of the coronavirus epidemic.

Without a doubt, this statement’s critical tones marked a massive departure in how the German bishops portrayed their conduct during the war. Earlier claims of the hierarchy’s guilt had been met with fire and fury. When in September 1959, the American Catholic pacifist, Gordon Zahn, accused the German bishops of having unconditionally supported what he called “Hitler’s predatory wars,” the West German bishops responded critically, commissioning a team in the Central Committee of German Catholics to gather exculpating documents.[1] No less than Cardinal Augustin Bea, who later would gain a reputation as an influential ecumenical representative at the Second Vatican Council, attempted to have him removed from his position as a tenured professor at Loyola University, Chicago.[2]

What made possible this remarkable shift? The recent bishops’ statement was, in part, the fruit of Professor Heinrich Missalla, a Catholic theologian based for much of his career at the University of Essen and a pacifist. Missalla was long known as an ardent and passionate critic of the Catholic Church’s conduct during the Third Reich. His last published book from 2015 was entitled, Remembering for the Future: How the Catholic Bishops supported Hitler’s War.[3]

Missalla had hoped to publish an open letter to the bishops for the 80^th anniversary on the outbreak of war in 2019. But his death on October 3, 2018 put an end to those plans. The left-wing Catholic newspaper, Public Forum, instead published his letter posthumously in its August 2019 edition under the imposing title: “Do you finally have the courage to face the truth? Not only Protestant but also Catholic Bishops let themselves be carried away by the enthusiasm for war.”[4] In this final statement, Missalla raised the questions that had occupied him for his entire life: how was it possible that the German Catholic bishops could send soldiers to their deaths up to the very end in a war of unspeakable cruelty and annihilation – and justify this with religious and theological arguments? Why did they hold on for so long to their justifications for fighting which included “duty,” “obedience,” “readiness to sacrifice,” and “Christian struggle.” As he put it: “It remains a puzzle why nearly the entire German episcopate did not call out the criminal nature of Hitler’s war by name and accordingly called on the faithful entrusted to it to place itself (at Hitler’s command) obediently and with a willingness to die.”

But Missalla was also preoccupied by the church’s failures in the postwar era. Why were the bishops not able to find the courage to own up to their failure and guilt after 1945? Missalla believed that inadequate historical research was part of the problem. “In reality,” he wrote, “there are numerous documentations and investigations of the events and problems of this dark period of German Catholic Church history. It is somewhat astounding, however, that no comprehensive account of the conduct of the German Catholic Church in the war has been put together.”

This claim is, of course, not entirely accurate. Numerous scholars, including many church critics, addressed the conduct of the church in the war, from Gordon Zahn’s classic work from 1962, German Catholics and Hitler’s War: A Study in Social Control, to Lauren Faulkner’s monograph from 2015, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation. [5] Thomas Brodie’s book from 2018, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945, provided precisely the comprehensive, critical and nuanced account Missalla was calling for.[6] Yet even on the other side of the Atlantic, Karl-Joseph Hummel’s and Christoph Kösters’ 600-age edited volume from 2007, Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945, provided valuable snapshots into the theology, conduct, and world-view of the German church hierarchy.[7]

However inaccurately as Missalla may have represented the state of existing scholarship, the chair of the German Bishops Conference, the Bishop of Limburg, Georg Bätzing, nonetheless expressly acknowledged Missalla’s lifelong engagement when he formally presented the Bishops’ Statement to the public. The Bishops Conference, moreover, did draw on recent and critical findings from scholars, most from contemporary German historians and theologians, in putting together its statement. They turned to the scholarship of the recently retired church historian and theologian from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Wilhelm Damberg, who had critically analyzed the theologies of war and understandings of just war that had informed the thinking of theologians from the 1920s through the 1950s.[8] In this vein, they also drew on the scholarship of the Tübingen theologian and church historian, Andreas Holzem.[9] Both Damberg and Holzem played a significant role in steering the Bonn-based Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in a new direction over the course of the last decade. Long seen by critics as a nexus for defensive and apologetic accounts of the church during the Third Reich, the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte under Damberg’s leadership in particular shed this reputation as a fortress for Catholic culture warriors. It brought in many younger scholars, theologians and historians alike, into its ranks. Just this year, it received a multi-million Euro grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to research the history of the Catholic Church in Germany from 1965 through 1989. Scholarship from the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte during the last twenty years thus marked a decisive break from that of earlier generations which focused primarily on the “resistance” and “distance” brokered by the ecclesia and laity alike.

This increasingly nuanced and even critical scholarship from the 2000s and 2010s about the church and the war found its way directly into the Deutsche Kommission Justitia et Pax of the Bishops Conference. It informed not just the ensuing statement’s tone but its epistemology. “As difficult it is to understand and as incorrect the conduct of our predecessors in the ranks of the bishops might seem to us today, it does not defy historical understanding. Only this way can we escape the temptation of letting the events from that time not come close to us today.”

The commission drew on the findings of these theologians and historians who had pointed to the resources that the church provided for Hitler’s war. These ranged from patriotic pastoral letters to the nationalistic exhortations of military chaplains and even to the role played by women religious in military hospitals and sick wards. The bishops thus duly painted a picture of ambivalence. In spite of an inner distance to National Socialism and on occasion even enmity, they stated, the Catholic Church in Germany remained part of a “war society.” In this regard, the increased repression towards Christianity, the war of annihilation, the change in the tides of war between 1940 and 1943, and the increasing casualties as a result of the bombing war against Germany changed the bishops’ attitudes but little.

At the same time, the Bishops Conference did not want this statement to be seen as a formal “ostracism” (Scherbengericht) of their predecessors. On the contrary: they saw it instead as a new link in a chain of Catholic institutional memory, one understood not as an end in itself but rather as a tool for peace and the reconciliation of peoples.

“With the distancing effect of time, the reality that for many years there was no understanding of the suffering and sacrifice of others is particularly shameful,” asserted the closing section of this declaration. “Exchanges and the paths to reconciliation with our neighbors, especially Poland and France, have helped us to put behind this way of seeing things, which was characterized by avoidance, repression and a fixation on our own pain. Through this, we hope to experience that these meetings and contacts also have contributed and contribute to the renewal of the church.”

To no surprise, this declaration was received well by Germany’s neighbors, and in particular Poland. This showed that the church in Germany has made an important stride forward as far as the politics of the past is concerned. It followed Missalla’s dictum: “remember for the sake of the future.”

The text of the declaration and the statements to the press from April 29, 2020, can be found at the following link:

https://dbk.de/nc/presse/aktuelles/meldung/wort-der-deutschen-bischoefe-zum-ende-des-zweiten-weltkriegs-vor-75-jahren-veroeffentlicht/detail/

An English-language translation is scheduled to be made available in June 2020.

[1] Archiv der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Bonn, NL Walter Adolph, WA 16a, Auszug aus dem Protokoll der Konferenz der westdeutschen Bischöfe, Pützchen, 9.-11.12.1959

[2] Diözesanarchiv Berlin, NL Julius Döpfner, Augustin Bea to Julius Döpfner, February 11, 1960.

[3] Heinrich Massalla, Erinnern um die Zukunft willen: Wie die katholischen Bischöfe Hitlers Krieg unterstützt haben (Oberursel: Public-Forum-Verlags GmbH, 2015).

[4] Heinrich Massalla, „“Haben Sie endlich Mut zur Wahrheit?“: Nicht nur evangelische, sondern auch katholische Bischöfe ließen sich von der Kriegsbegeisterung mitreißen,“ in: Publik-Forum, August 23, 2019, 34-35.

[5] Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s War: A Study in Social Control (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962); Lauren Faulkner, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

[6] Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[7] Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007).

[8] See Wilhelm Damberg, „Krieg, Theologie und Kriegserfahrung,“ in: Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 203-216.

[9] Andreas Holzem, “Theological War Theories,” in: Angela Kallhoff and Thomas Schulte-Umberg (eds.), Moralities of Warfare and Religion (Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformationin Contemporary Society [J-RaT], Vol. 4), Vienna 2018, 21-37; Andreas Holzem, “Christentum und Kriegsgewalt,” in: Theologische Quartalschrift 191 (2011), 314-338; Andreas Holzem, ed., Krieg und Christentum. Religiöse Gewalttheorien in der Kriegserfahrung des Westens (Krieg in der Geschichte, Bd. 50), (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).

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

Leave a reply

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.

“Understanding Twenty-first Century Christian Nationalism and Its Antecedents: A Scholarly Conversation”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

“Understanding Twenty-first Century Christian Nationalism and Its Antecedents: A Scholarly Conversation”

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (retired) and Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

The following is a scholarly conversation concerning the interpretation of Christian nationalism at the time of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and, more recently, in the wake of U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s surprising electoral victory in 2016. The exchange of views begins with a review essay and commentary by Victoria J. Barnett, who analyzes Robert P. Ericksen’s recent article “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America.” This is followed by Ericksen’s response to Barnett’s review and commentary.

Review Essay and Commentary of Robert P. Ericksen. “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31, no. 2 (2018): 427-440.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (retired)

Robert P. Ericksen’s 1985 book, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press), was a ground-breaking work that marked a turning point in the field of Holocaust studies. A critical examination of Luther scholar Paul Althaus, theologian and philosopher Emanuel Hirsch, and biblical scholar Gerhard Kittel, the most disturbing but significant aspect of the book is Ericksen’s well-documented argument that these theologians supported National Socialism as Christians. As Ericksen himself notes in the article under review, his book appeared at a time when the notion that Christians could embrace Nazism was still a strange and uncomfortable one. By giving a deep account of the thought and actions of these theologians, Ericksen established that this phenomenon was an important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany.

Althaus, Hirsch, and Kittel were brilliant, world-renowned theologians and biblical scholars who not only knew their stuff, but considered themselves (and were regarded as) serious and faithful Christians. Nonetheless they viewed Adolf Hitler as a leader sent by God in Germany’s hour of crisis and a statesman who would defend “Christendom” against the forces of Communism and modernity. They went on to support and cooperate with Nazi policies, including the antisemitic measures that culminated in the genocide of European Jews.

When Theologians under Hitler appeared I happened to be working on my first book, a collection of oral histories of Germans who had been members of the Confessing Church.[1] As Ericksen notes about his own work, I began my research with the naïve assumption that Christians in Nazi Germany—particularly the people I was studying—had been outspoken opponents of National Socialism, but soon realized that the historical record was more complex. Most Confessing Christians, like other German Protestants, were nationalistic and antisemitic. Their fight against the heresies of the explicitly pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen was driven by opposition to the latter’s ideologically-driven distortions of Christian doctrine as well as the idolization of the Führer and Nazi state. But even within those parameters there was a wide range of political views and a great deal of caution and cowardice. The Confessing Christians who explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith remained a minority within German Protestantism.

Over the decades Ericksen, I, and many of the editors of this journal have continued to explore critically the role of the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches during the Nazi era. This history offers troubling insights into the nature and different manifestations of “Christian nationalism.” It is worth noting that in the early twentieth century Christian nationalism was not only a German phenomenon. I helped organize a 2017 conference, “Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the World Wars,” jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, that explored the numerous Christian ethno-nationalist and fascist movements across Europe during the interwar period. During the same period there was a surge in right-wing Christian groups in the United States, as well as growing polarization between liberal Protestants and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as the fundamentalism wars of the 1920s sharpened the political divide.

For many of us whose scholarship has focused on these issues, our present historical moment has disturbing echoes of the history we’ve studied for decades. Then and now, there are groups in Europe and North America that define themselves by “Christian nationalism.” Some of these groups are identifiably part of the Christian spectrum—that is, they emerge from recognizable Christian communities. Others, I would argue, use “Christian” more ideologically to embrace “western culture” and nativism (Hannah Strømmen at the University of Chichester in the UK has done valuable work on this). All of them, however, embrace different forms of nationalism, nativism, white supremacy and other ideologies, promoting absolutist and sometimes violent political agendas using the language of “faith.” For all the significant historical differences between the 1930s and today, there are some haunting similarities when one looks at the present landscape.

Does the German example offer insights here? Are there parallels between the ethno-nationalist versions of Christianity during the first half of the twentieth century and the similar movements we see today? This is the subject of Ericksen’s article, “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice,” in which he compares the religiosity of figures like Gerhard Kittel and that of conservative evangelicals who support the current U.S. administration.

Ericksen has chosen to emphasize the role of “piety” and “devotion” by exploring “the relationship between pious religious beliefs within the Protestant Christian tradition and political stances that seem to defy those beliefs.” (The essay was written for a conference on “Devotion and Memory.”) In the first section of his essay Ericksen offers a detailed overview of Kittel’s behavior and his convictions, reminding us yet again of the inconvenient truth that people like Kittel practiced their faith seriously, praying and reading daily scriptural devotions. Not only did Kittel see no contradiction between his Christian faith and National Socialism, he actually viewed Adolf Hitler as a leader who would restore Christian values that were under attack by various forces such as modernity, Enlightenment values, and, of course, “the Jews.”

I would challenge the extent to which Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch were actually faithful to the teachings of Christianity, but there’s no doubt that they viewed themselves as such. They were joined in their views by most fellow Protestants, who voted overwhelmingly in the November 1932 elections for the Nazi Party (which received about 32 percent of the vote in those elections). The German population in 1933 was 98 percent Christian (Protestants comprising about 60 percent). Referring to electoral maps of those 1932 elections, Ericksen notes that the “brownest” areas—those regions where support for the Nazi Party was strongest—were “the most pious Protestant regions.” I’ve seen these maps, and the most striking aspect to me was that the support for National Socialism ran regionally along the lines of German religious demographics. Regions in which the population was predominantly Catholic voted overwhelmingly for the Catholic Center Party.

The question is how to interpret such a map. Do the “brown” parts of the map signify “piety” or “Protestantism,” and is there a useful distinction between the two? Catholics voted differently than Protestants for a number of historical and more immediate political reasons, but I doubt that those maps reflect a different degree of “devotion” when it came to Catholic seriousness in matters of faith. In other words, these maps may not reflect the sincerity or depth of Christian devotion or piety so much as give us a portrait of German Protestantism at the time. That, I would contend, is what the November 1932 voting maps show: the almost complete convergence of nationalism and religion in the Protestant regions of Germany. This convergence had deep historical and cultural roots in post-Reformation history.

Ericksen’s underlying assumption seems to be that the more “religious” someone is—as measured by “piety” and “devotion” (regular practices like daily bible reading, prayer, and church attendance), the more likely they are to hold extreme nationalist views. Ericksen writes for example of the relationship “between Christian beliefs, ethno-nationalism, and the democratic values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of belief, and political equality.”

This brings me to my primary problem with Ericksen’s analysis, although I agree with many of his historical points and I also agree with his conclusion that the history of people like Kittel offers some insights for the present moment. Having read his article several times, I wish that he had focused not on difficult-to-define religious attributes like “piety” and “devotion” but on the complex intersections of religious and national identity and how these, in turn, shape political and religious attitudes. That, I suspect, is the instructive parallel between what happened across Europe in the early twentieth century and the rise of Christian nationalism today.

In the German case the “Christian beliefs” that I believe Ericksen is describing—as reflected in the 1932 election maps—reflected a centuries-in-the-making synthesis of Christianity, nationalism, antisemitism and understandings of church and state, which in turn certainly helped spawn German Protestant support for Nazism. As one foreign visitor noted in the late nineteenth century, for most German Protestant clergy their “belief in Christianity was so closely intertwined with a strong nationalism that it was difficult even for themselves to say where the one began and the other ended.” Around the same time historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, “…we Germans are a Christian nation… Christianity is entwined with every fiber of the German character” and added that Judaism was the “national religion of a tribe which was originally alien to us.”

German Protestantism’s understanding of the relationship between church and state authority, the extent to which this understanding became both nationalized and ethnicized during the late nineteenth century, and the radicalizing effects of the period after 1918 produced a very particular kind of Christianity. Among other things it laid the foundation for the widespread assumptions that Jews—even converted Jews—could never really be “German.” One of the accounts I gave in my book on the Confessing Church was of a late nineteenth-century debate in a Protestant newspaper about whether Christian baptism could render a Jew fully “German.”

The Christian world is not a monolithic entity, however, and the synthesis of Christianity, fascism, and nationalism provoked alarm among other Christians, particularly among Protestant ecumenists who condemned these developments as “political” or (notably) even as “secular” forms of religion. In 1933 the Swiss ecumenist Adolf Keller wrote of “the new power” of “the religion of nationalism and a new mysticism of the State”; in 1935 the American interfaith leader Everett Clinchy described these developments as “tribal lunacies.” In 1938 the Danish ecumenist Hal Koch warned that across the globe “nationalism has assumed a religious character.”

The issue of the internal battle over such issues within German Protestantism is another factor that I think deserves serious study. As Ericksen notes, in the early postwar period a hagiographical portrait emerged about Protestant opposition to the Nazis that over-emphasized the numbers involved and the courage and clarity of such opposition. For all its shortcomings, however, the Confessing Church was based upon a theological critique that repudiated the views of people like Kittel and Althaus, and I would argue that the Church Struggle was perhaps the most significant event since the Reformation itself in terms of the issues at stake. The Barmen Declaration was an explicit theological rejection of the notions that Hitler’s leadership could be understood as divine will and that the Nazi state placed claims on Christians that surpassed those of scripture and church teachings. The 1936 Confessing Church memorandum to Hitler went further, explicitly repudiating the antisemitism of the Nazis.

All religious traditions (not just Christianity) offer the capacity for revision and self-criticism, and indeed the history of such moments of religious fanaticism and extremism has often led to serious changes within a tradition. This became evident after 1945 in the emergence of post-Holocaust Christianity, in which theologians and some church bodies (the Vatican, in Nostra Aetate, for example, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in its repudiation of Martin Luther’s antisemitic texts) officially repudiated the Christian anti-Jewish teachings that had led to the widely embedded antisemitism in western culture that culminated in the Holocaust. But even before 1945 such opposing voices existed in the Confessing Church itself—particularly in figures like Elisabeth Schmitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became engaged in political opposition. Outside Nazi Germany, the strongest condemnations of Nazi anti-Jewish policies and of the failures of the German Protestant churches emerged from Protestants like Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, various ecumenical leaders, and theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. All of these figures, I would note, were devout Protestants who took their faith seriously.

This brings me to Ericksen’s analysis of the ca. 80 percent of American evangelical voters who voted for Donald J. Trump. Here again, his emphasis is on the “devotion” and “piety” that finds its expression in “Christian nationalism.” As in his examination of the German history, he notes several key political issues and historical factors that have shaped the political convictions of these religious voters. Since the 1970s (when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right to abortion in the Roe vs. Wade decision) the abortion issue has been the most decisive issue for many evangelical and Catholic voters. There is also much to suggest that the long and terrible U.S. history of racism, slavery, and white supremacy continues to shape, challenge and divide not only whites and people of color but the different sectors of U.S. Christianity. In the past two years, this has re-emerged as a bitterly divisive issue across the political and religious landscape, particularly given the open advocacy of white supremacy by some groups. Similarly to the centuries-long dynamics by which antisemitism became embedded in European culture, racism and white supremacy are embedded in U.S. culture.

Reducing all this to which group shows more signs of “devotion” misses the point, I think. The U.S. religious landscape is complex, and while certain groups may claim to be “more Christian” than others, it’s not that easy. According to the most recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, 70.8 percent of the U.S. population is Christian. Of that percentage, the largest groups are evangelical Protestants (25.4 percent) and “non-affiliated” (“nones”) at 22.8 percent (Catholics are third, at 20.8 percent). Non-Christian faiths are currently around 6 percent. Another recent major survey, the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, shows evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and “nones” as statistically tied. Pew also measures religious attitudes in terms of political affiliation, and in patterns of “devotion” as measured by questions on the importance of religion, belief in God, and frequency of church attendance and prayer, Republicans measure higher but not exclusively so on most issues (for example, 62 percent of Republicans pray daily as compared to 50 percent of Democrats). Belief in God is high across the board (84 percent of Democrats; 93 percent of Republicans; even 27 percent of “nones” say they believe in God). And other variables come into play: African-American Protestants and Roman Catholics measure highly in terms of “devotion”-related questions but vote quite differently on some issues.

Moreover, there are growing generational differences in polls among evangelicals, and there has been a strong and explicitly Protestant backlash in the United States against Christian forms of nationalism, white supremacy, and related ideologies, much of it articulated by critical evangelicals like Michael Gerson, David Gushee, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons and others.

There is another important difference between the immensely diverse U.S. Protestant denominational landscape and that of the German Protestant Church—one that was noted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his important 1939 essay on “Protestantism without Reformation.” Because none of the American churches “can dare to make the claim to be the one church,” he wrote, they stake their claims and fight their battles over social, cultural, and political issues, and those battles take place in the public sphere. This echoes an observation made by Alexis de Tocqueville one hundred years previously when he wrote that “Religion in America … must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.” To the extent that the leaders of the German Church Struggle of the 1930s addressed broader political issues, they did so internally within institutional Protestantism. In the United States, in contrast, such battles are openly political and the result is that (in Bonhoeffer’s words) “The church claims the right for itself to address almost any topic in public life and to act since only in this way the kingdom of God can be built.”

Any analysis of the parallels between the German Protestantism of the 1930s and the current manifestations of Christian nationalism on the U.S. religious landscape must take such differences into account, as well as the respective histories of cultural, political, and religious intersections in these two cases. For that reason, I think the analysis of Kittel as a case study in “devotion” is too narrow to explain contemporary Christian nationalism. The German example can shed some insight into this, but only if we avoid essentializing or reducing the role of “religion” to belief or “devotion.” To be fair, in his books Theologians under Hitler and his subsequent Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ericksen actually does offer a broader and more nuanced discussion of these issues, putting Kittel and his colleagues in the larger context that shaped them.

Bob Ericksen and I have spent our respective careers looking at different pieces of this historical puzzle, and I suspect to some extent this explains our different approaches. (I also have a Master of Divinity degree, so I tend to look below the surface of theo-political claims and give more weight to the internal church and theological debates) So I write this critical review with deep regard for my colleague and gratitude for our long-time conversation, which I continue here.

Response to Victoria J. Barnett’s “Review Essay and Commentary”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

I deeply appreciate Victoria Barnett’s willingness to review my recent article in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America.” As readers of this issue of CCHQ will notice, I am an admirer of Barnett’s remarkable three-part career—as a scholar of the German Church Struggle, as an expert on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and as an important, recently retired administrator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I also appreciate not just Barnett’s willingness to review my article, but also the questions she raises about my work.

Barnett is quite right in asserting that “piety” and “devotion” are not adequate measures or predictors of political stance among Protestant Christians, or Christians as a whole, whether in 1930s Germany or today’s America. In my defense, I originally gave this paper at a conference on “Devotion and Memory.” However, I also do think that self-assessments as well as outward markers of “piety” and “devotion” have some relevance. Not all professors of theology in 1930s Germany were as pious in their behavior as Gerhard Kittel and Paul Althaus (and possibly even Emanuel Hirsch). Though I have never lived in the American South, I believe things I have read, such as the question to newcomers: “Which church will you attend?” I also recognize the importance to some believers of offering a table prayer before eating in a public restaurant, and I do think these behaviors manifest themselves in today’s America more frequently in the Bible Belt, and perhaps especially in the South.

My starting point with this paper on devotion, of course, combined my recognition that Protestantism stands out in 1932 as a marker of votes for Hitler, along with the widely publicized 80-percent figure of self-identified evangelical voters in the United States who voted for and mostly continue to support Donald Trump. I am struck by these voting indicators, first of all, since neither Hitler nor Trump appears to have had any significant relationship to the Christian faith. Secondly, neither is known for political policies embodying any portion of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully agree when Barnett notes that devotion can be found among critics of Hitler, especially including Elisabeth Schmitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I also admire the public critique of Donald Trump expressed by Michael Gerson, and I am especially impressed by the critique raised by David Gushee and others. I receive at least daily emails from FaithfulAmerica.org, an organization rallying Christians who oppose Trumpism, and I have been an admirer for years of Sojourners as an expression of Christian values.

The difficulty for me has long been how best to understand the actual correlation between Christian faith and Christian nationalism, between Christian faith and Christian rightwing, nationalistic, and occasionally brutal politics. I certainly recognize Christians I admire who acted in the manner Vicki Barnett describes. This includes some leading members of the Confessing Church, including those who composed the memorandum to Hitler in 1936, and it includes the Christian (and Jewish) leaders Barnett has been researching in the 1930s ecumenical movement. I agree with her that the German Church Struggle is very important and might even be the most important event in Protestantism since the Reformation. However, some years ago I discovered Wilhelm Niemöller’s estimate that the Confessing Church amounted to about 20 percent of the German Protestant Church. And even with that 20 percent figure, I am not sure that they all “explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith.” I think that members of the Confessing Church grounded their opposition to the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian Movement”) in their Christian faith, but not all opposed all aspects of National Socialism or gave up their appreciation of Hitler. These are the results of my first work on Kittel, Althaus and Hirsch, along with various projects undertaken since. As for Catholics in Germany, I do think their unwillingness to vote for Hitler in 1932 was admirable, but based very largely on the existence of the Catholic Center Party and its hold upon Catholic voters since the Bismarck era. After Center Party delegates gave the votes need to pass the Enabling Act in March 1933, Catholic loyalty to the Nazi state seems not entirely different from that found among Protestants. As Barnett notes, of course, all these matters are in need of additional interrogation.

I do acknowledge that I used a broad brush to merge Nazi voters in the 1930s with Trump voters in 2016. I tried to avoid any claim that these are the same phenomena, since I do not mean to diminish the level of horror implemented by Adolf Hitler. I only was struck by the one surprising element in each case, the willingness of a fairly large number of self-identified Christians to support politicians and politics that seem to me to violate important Christian norms.

[1] For The Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992).

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

Leave a reply

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.

Theology in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Bonhoeffer Scholar Victoria J. Barnett

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

“Theology in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Bonhoeffer Scholar Victoria J. Barnett”

By Collegeville Institute

This article was originally published in Bearings Online, July 17, 2018. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Collegeville Institute. You can view the original interview here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Victoria J. Barnett is a scholar who has served as a general editor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series of the theologian’s complete works, published by Fortress Press. She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Barnett recently wrote a new introduction to Bonhoeffer’s essay After Ten Years. In this interview, the Collegeville Institute spoke with her about the resulting book, “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times (Fortress Press, 2017).

You’ve written the introduction to a new edition of Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. In the past that essay has usually appeared as a preface of sorts to Letters and Papers from Prison. Why a new edition of that particular essay now?

This is my favorite Bonhoeffer text, and I’ve thought for several years that it deserved to be published as a stand-alone edition. It’s so eloquent and powerful. As I wrote in my introduction, it is timeless—which is interesting, because it has such a concrete historical context. I don’t think it’s accidental many of the most-quoted passages from Bonhoeffer are from this essay. But to your question, why now?: We’re living in a time where many of us are wrestling collectively and individually with issues of conscience and our responsibilities as people of faith and as citizens. This essay goes to the heart of those issues.

Bonhoeffer addresses a wide range of issues in After Ten Years including the failure of German institutions, moral passivity and civic cowardice on the part of its citizens, the susceptibility of Germans to the influences of propaganda and group think, and more. Have you underlined a passage in the essay that you think is particularly worth highlighting? If you have, why does it catch your attention?

My favorite sentence in the essay comes from the section on “Some statements of faith on God’s action in history”: “I believe that our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.”

It’s simultaneously a reminder for humility and against hopelessness—a reminder that while we may fall short and we don’t know what the outcome of our actions will be, that’s no reason to lose hope and it’s certainly no reason not to act. That perspective—don’t lose hope, take responsibility for whatever you can do, and don’t become paralyzed by doubt or your own failings—is the subtext of so much of this essay. Many other passages touch on it—think of the section “Are we still of any use?” It’s the aspect of the essay that moves me the most personally.

Bonhoeffer’s emotions seem unusually close to the surface in After Ten Years, even more so than in the letters he writes from prison. Do we learn anything about Bonhoeffer from this brief essay?

This kind of relates to what I was just talking about. I wouldn’t quite describe this essay as “whistling in the dark,” but he wrote it at a very uncertain time, and I get the sense that he was trying to clarify and strengthen his own resolve. The day-to-day pressures of those years must have taken their toll. In my own research I’ve found several accounts by people who knew Bonhoeffer who describe a certain emotional fragility (and of course Bonhoeffer himself wrote about his struggles with depression). I personally believe that’s one reason for his frequent trips out of Nazi Germany; he just had to get out and breathe free air for a little while. By late 1942 things were closing in—everywhere, not just in Bonhoeffer’s circles. Both for the victims of National Socialism and those who opposed it, the atmosphere in Berlin was grim on so many levels.

I’ll add another interesting note: last fall I happened to meet a US physician who had a long friendship with Eberhard Bethge (Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer) and his wife Renate. This doctor shared with me an interview he did with Bethge, and I learned for the first time that Bonhoeffer’s father Karl read this letter to the entire family at Christmas 1942. That was news to me. After Ten Years has been understood as a confidential letter to his closest friends in the conspiracy, although Bethge does note in his biography that Bonhoeffer gave a copy to his father. It’s interesting if Bonhoeffer’s father shared this with the family—and this was an extraordinarily close family—and that makes me think more about the emotional undertone you mention.

I would add that Bonhoeffer wrote this between November 1942, when Maria von Wedemeyer’s family had asked him not to write her, and January 13, 1943, when she wrote to say that she would marry him. While there’s been a lot of speculation about their relationship, his January 17 response to her letter and the subsequent love letters between them do indicate some genuine emotional attachment—it’s as if their relationship opens a new door for him and he begins to envision a personal future in a way that he hadn’t before. So I agree with you; I think there’s a lot going on here.

In your introduction to the new edition you warn readers about the hazards of drawing simplistic historical analogies in general, and about the period of National Socialism in particular. Yet, aspects of political life in Bonhoeffer’s Germany seem to help many to gain insight into our own political situation, and, as you have said, you think a new edition of the work is timely. Are you, nevertheless, resistant to pointing to Bonhoeffer and his times as a useful historical analogue to our own? If so, why?

I think Bonhoeffer’s reflections in this essay hold many insights for us today, but I stumble over the phrase “useful historical analogue.” I don’t mean at all to minimize the significance of the xenophobia, hatred, and nationalism that we’re seeing in some parts of our society (and internationally as well), and threats to civil liberties and the free press should be taken very seriously. There are clearly people in our country and elsewhere today who draw inspiration from the history of Nazi Germany and that’s extremely disturbing. Frankly, however, I think we’re wrestling more with the demons of our own history than with German ones, and any response or solution we come up with has to address those demons.

The level on which historical analogies may be most useful is at the level of ordinary human behavior—and of course, to some extent that’s what Bonhoeffer is writing about in After Ten Years.The level on which historical analogies may be most useful is at the level of ordinary human behavior—and of course, to some extent that’s what Bonhoeffer is writing about in After Ten Years. I wrote a book several years ago about the issue of “bystanders,” in which I argued that the political and social dynamics by which certain groups are “otherized,” for example, or the processes by which ordinary people start out as “bystanders” but end up becoming complicit in evil, or the processes by which we rationalize such complicity, or the processes by which bureaucrats and institutions get co-opted, tend to be very similar, whatever the political circumstances.

My biggest concern is that a focus on comparisons to Nazi Germany may deflect our attention from the very American roots of much of what we’re seeing. This is hardly the first time in US history when racism, xenophobia, isolationism, nativism, and nationalism became powerful political forces. The Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence during the 1920s, and the antisemitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism of that era led to a dramatic rise in hate groups during the 1930s. Last summer Neo-Nazis and white supremacists convened in Charlottesville because of the city of Charlottesville voted to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee—a Confederate monument that was commissioned—like many Confederate monuments—during the Jim Crow era (the Lee statue was commissioned in 1917 and dedicated in 1924).

In addition to our ongoing struggles with racism and the legacy of slavery, we’re wrestling with other issues, like deeply clashing philosophies about centralized government vs. states’ rights, about regulation of corporations and businesses, about distribution of wealth. All that sounds very wonkish but these things have consequences not only politically but for our values as a civil society. Should the federal government be run like a corporation, and what does that mean for the ideals of public service or foreign policy? Should we privatize and outsource certain agencies (as has already happened with much of our prison system)? Do we want to live in a society where the rights of women, or immigrants, or gay or transgender individuals, or the poor, vary from state to state? Do we believe in having some kind of social safety net? Do we believe in having free access to information? All those things are on the table.

We could also draw on the long and rich tradition in our history of resistance by people like Elizabeth Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, etc.—people who didn’t just fight against injustice but articulated a new language and vision for what our society can be.

So I think the key here is not to impose Nazi Germany as the template by which we measure what’s happening, but to bring Bonhoeffer’s insights into conversation with those voices in US history who have spoken to similar issues in our context. That’s why at the end of my introductory essay for this edition of After Ten YearsI mention Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Abraham Heschel’s No Religion is an Island. Those texts, like Bonhoeffer’s essay, acknowledge the reality of social and political evil but in a provocative and challenging way that appeals to our better selves.

Sorry this has turned into such a long answer, but as you can see I think a lot about these things.

As an editor of the English translation of Bonhoeffer’s complete works, the editor and reviser of the first unabridged English edition of Eberhard Bethge’s monumental biography of Bonhoeffer, a historian of the German church under National Socialism, and as a Bonhoeffer scholar in your own right, you must have read nearly every known word the man wrote. Can you point to some ways that this prolonged and detailed exposure to Bonhoeffer has affected you?

This certainly wasn’t planned! When I wrote my first book on the Confessing Church I deliberately focused on the “non-Bonhoeffers” because I felt that there was already enough literature on Bonhoeffer. Oh, well.

I’d say that for all the differences between his world and perspective and my own, I’ve come to see him as a reliably thoughtful conversation partner, especially with regard to how we Christians think about our role as citizens. We tend to read him only as a theologian, but like all of us, he was a complex person who was shaped by many factors, one of which was the humanism and sense of public responsibility that characterized much of his family, and that resonates with me. This may sound odd, but I also feel almost a tenderness about the poignancy of this young man and his brief life.

There were moments throughout the Bonhoeffer project, often in one of his letters, when I would suddenly get a deeper glimpse of the person and that was always moving. When you spend years looking at the close-up, sometimes daily, record of someone’s life, you’re reminded constantly how short our life on this earth is, and how little control we have over much of what happens to us.

Just as various divergent Christian theological camps claim Reinhold Niebuhr as their own—there’s the conservative Niebuhr and the liberal Niebuhr—there is now a struggle over Bonhoeffer. Is he to be seen through the lens of evangelical Christianity in the US, or is he more appropriately placed in the tradition of progressive Christianity? What do you make of this tug of war?

First, I think this is a very US-specific phenomenon, and it’s been part of the Bonhoeffer story from the beginning. When Eberhard Bethge arrived at Harvard in 1958 to work on the biography, he commented that “everyone here has his own Bonhoeffer.” That’s partly due to the drama of Bonhoeffer’s life story and partly due to his ability to write about the meaning and challenges of Christian faith in the modern world in a language that speaks to Christians, whether they are evangelicals or liberal mainline Protestants. So everyone likes to claim him but they take the story and his theological significance in different directions.

Politically, his attitudes are pretty clear. He was very outspoken during his time in the US about our problems with racism and horrified by the treatment of African Americans, including the lynchings of that era. In February 1933 when the new Nazi government started targeting its political opponents he wrote Reinhold Niebuhr that Germany needed a Civil Liberties Union. He urged his church to speak out for those who were targeted and powerless. He offered an immediate and unambiguous critique of the Christian nationalism that was embraced by so many German Protestants.

Theologically, he’s complex and doesn’t fit neatly on one side or the other of our American religio-culture wars. There are certain texts that resonate more for mainline Protestants and others that resonate deeply among evangelicals. Bonhoeffer writes about the daily practices of faith, and he also writes about the centrality of social justice as a core part of Christian discipleship. But you know, all these texts were written by the same man, and I wonder whether we might be able to have a different kind of conversation about Bonhoeffer if we acknowledged that and tried to read him on his terms, not ours. The fact that Bonhoeffer’s words resonate with so many people from very different Christian backgrounds should tell us something.

One of the biggest problems however is the hagiography. There’s a popular picture of Bonhoeffer as the leader of the Confessing Church, the one person who spoke out consistently against the persecution of the Jews, and the primary example of Christian witness against National Socialism—a general tendency to portray Bonhoeffer as the central figure in a clear-cut tale of good against evil. In fact, he was on the margins of his church and often struggled with what he should do. There are other Confessing Church figures whose record of resistance, especially during the 1930s, is much clearer than his. The wartime resistance circles in which he moved were a very complicated group. That’s one reason why I tried to give some critical historical details in my introduction to After Ten Years, including the fact that the German resistance included some people who would have been tried for war crimes had they survived. These weren’t all heroic figures who rose up against a system they had always hated; many of the high-ranking generals and bureaucrats who were in a position to overthrow the regime had been very much a part of the Nazi system.

Is there anything important, in your view, that biographers and commentators on Bonhoeffer are missing?

I think we need to recover the person behind the hagiography.We’ve been sifting and re-sifting the same material for decades now, and the time has come to step outside the material in the Bonhoeffer Works—that is, outside the Bethge narrative—if we really want to discover something new. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not going to get new biographical or historical insights into Bonhoeffer unless we do that, and I suspect that such research might also give us some new insights into his theology.

There’s now this vast literature about Nazi Germany, the role of the churches, the Holocaust, and many fascinating but overlooked contemporaries of Bonhoeffer. Exploring Bonhoeffer’s life through that broader lens might give us some new information, and it could also be a corrective to some of the things we’ve gotten wrong. As full disclosure, I should add that I’m writing a new book on Bonhoeffer in which I’m attempting to explore his significance from that outside perspective. And I’ve come across quite a bit of new material, some of which has surprised me and is leading me to rethink my own assumptions. So I guess I’m not done yet.