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Article Note: Gordon L. Heath, “Canadian Presbyterians and the Rejection of Pacifism in the Interwar Years, 1919-1939”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Article Note: Gordon L. Heath, “Canadian Presbyterians and the Rejection of Pacifism in the Interwar Years, 1919-1939,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 98, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020), 66-77.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, Gordon Heath of McMaster Divinity College has analyzed diverse forms of pacifism within the Presbyterian Church of Canada (PCC) during the 1920s and 1930s. He argues that support for internationalist pacifism—a “liberal reformist” movement committed to “international developments for peace” but “willing to support the use of force as a last resort” (68)—was strong among Presbyterians, but that support for absolute pacifism—the refusal “to support the use of force for any reason” (68)—waned in the later 1920s and 1930s. This was in large part because the minority of Presbyterians who remained with the PCC after most chose to join the new United Church of Canada (UCC) were largely committed to the Just War tradition, a core Presbyterian conviction (67).

In the first section, “Shifting Views and Rising Pacifism,” Heath explains Canadian enthusiasm for the First World War in 1914 aimed initially at “saving civilization from German militarism,” then also putting a halt to the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey and more generally creating a world without war. Though postwar Presbyterians went on to commemorate the Great War, Canadians as a whole began to embrace pacifism, because of the costs of the war—both human and material. Among Christians, one evidence of this surge in pacifism was “A Creed for Believers in a Warless World” (1921), which articulated “belief” in arms reductions, international law, “a worldwide association of nations for world peace,” racial equality, good will between nations, “just dealing and unselfish service,” Christian brotherhood, and a “warless world” (66, 69). A wave of internationalism swept through the churches, just as it had the wider society. The influence of the social gospel was important for pacifism, as was the formation of the League of Nations, which the Presbyterian press supported, and a series of international agreements which suggested the possibility of arms reduction, normalization of relations with Germany, and the elevation of diplomacy over war (70).

Among Canadian Presbyterians, however, support for pacifism was limited to these hopes for stable international relations marked by bilateral and multilateral agreements, which would render war less likely. Absolute pacifism convictions were rejected. As one Presbyterian writer put it, while war was “contrary to the will of Christ and foreign to His spirit” as well as “not Christ’s method of bringing in His Kingdom” and “fundamentally alien to the spirit of brotherhood which he came to establish on earth,” it should be emphasized that “the Church does not take the position that no circumstances can justify armed resistance to unlawful aggression or inaction in the face of wrong and suffering inflicted upon the weak and defenseless” (71). Another writer asserted that German aggression in the First World War had demonstrated that “sometimes war was needed to stop bellicose nations.”

Still, Heath argues that 1920s Presbyterians believed that international organizations and the churches could partner to make peace, foster “universal brotherhood,” and usher in the Kingdom of God. The Christian contribution would be to invest in global Christian mission. By the 1930s, however, these hopes were challenged by the increasing aggression of dictatorships in Japan, Italy, and Germany. Presbyterians referred to a “Dark Valley” of international tensions that made pacifism seem more and more untenable (71).

The second section of Heath’s article (“Just War (Redux)”) illustrates the growing division among pacifists and the fact that PCC convictions were primarily internationalist and not those of the “absolute pacifists” (72). In 1934, for instance, the Canadian editor of the Presbyterian Record quoted his US counterpart (from the Presbyterian Banner) stating that any Presbyterians who support resolutions opposed to the use of any force to defend the country “should remember that they subscribed to a different doctrine when they accepted our Confession of Faith” (72) The magistrate still exercised the sword in the “Just War” tradition. Heath references other similar PCC statements to illustrate the limits of Presbyterian pacifism, while also noting that there were still some scattered Presbyterian statements renouncing war entirely. Overall, though, a new realism took hold.

Here Heath enters into historical debates about 1) the relative importance of the social gospel within Presbyterianism, 2) the level of preoccupation with survival and reconstruction of Canadian Presbyterianism after the departure of most Presbyterians for the UCC, 3) the extent to which Presbyterians had any energy at all for theological innovation, and 4) the level of conservatism within the (now much smaller and more homogenous) PCC. Above all, Heath argues,

Presbyterian identity was under duress due to the recent formation of the UCC. Despite the optimism for peace, it is not entirely surprising that absolute pacifism did not take root in the PCC. There was no significant pacifist movement in the Reformed tradition, and thus the surging peace movement did not resonate strongly with a pre-existing body of pacifist Presbyterians. More importantly, absolute pacifism directly contradicted the creeds of the church… (74).

As a result, when German Führer Adolf Hitler launch the world into war once again in 1939, “the PCC remained faithful to the Just War tradition, and the war against Hitler was deemed to be a Just War” (74). Moreover, commentary in the Presbyterian Record and resolutions from the General Assembly both maintained strong support for the war against Hitler and Nazism. What the pacifist influence had done, though, was to temper the enthusiasm with which the PCC endorsed the Second World War as compared to the First.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

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

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

Translated from the German by Martin R. Menke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

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

By Madison Barben, Washington State University

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

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

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

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

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

Biographical Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article Note: Harry Legg, “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Article Note: Harry Legg, “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany,” Journal of Holocaust Research 36 no. 4 (2022): 299-326.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, Harry Legg, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, analyzes the everyday lives of “non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’”—Germans who did not identify religiously or culturally as Jews but who were categorized as “Full Racial Jews” according to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Focusing on a case study of the Eisig family, he argues that the experience of persecution of these “Jews” (he places the term in quotation marks to emphasize that it was the Nazis who identified them as Jews, and not they themselves) was fundamentally different than the experience of persecution among German Jews (quotation marks absent) who did identify religiously and/or culturally as Jews.

Legg begins by noting that these important distinctions and the dramatically different lived experiences behind them are generally ignored in the secondary literature about Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany (300-308). While German Jews suffering persecution turned more and more inward towards their own religious and cultural community for support and sustenance, the same was not true for the “Jews” who had assimilated into Christian and/or secular German life and who had no Jewish community to turn to once the Nazi regime began to marginalize and then persecute them.

The author notes that the concepts of wealth and status are particularly useful in assessing the lived experiences of these “Jews”—those racially identified as Jews who were non-Jewish in other respects. Simply put, in many cases, entrepreneurial wealth and respect within the wider community replaced support from Jewish communities to which they did not belong, and allowed non-Jewish “Jews” to obtain temporary relief from Nazi persecution. “Though these factors could not halt the progressive slide of ‘full Jews’ toward expulsion from Germany, they could soften the daily experience of this relentless march. They could also vitally alter the form that this expulsion would ultimately take.” (310)

The bulk of the article revolves around Ludwig and Amalie Eisig, who formally withdrew from their Göppingen Jewish community soon after their wedding, who baptized their children as Protestants, and who thoroughly embraced both German nationalism and Christianity. Their experiences, and those of their children (son Konrad suffered greatly from educational persecution), bear out the two key aspects of Legg’s argument: that the Eisigs’ wealth and social standing in the wider (non-Jewish) community slowed and softened the process by which they suffered social isolation and persecution in their southwest German corner of Nazi Germany (from which they eventually emigrated, thanks in large part to their wealth); and that, on the other hand, having little to no connection to Jews who belonged to the Jewish religious and cultural community in their town, they were more socially isolated in the times and places in which that protection was useless and all who were identified as racial Jews suffered at the hand of the Hitler regime.

In sum, this article adds important nuances to our understanding of diverse Jewish experiences in Nazi Germany, reminding us that Nazi racial categories often had little at all to do with the lived experiences of Germans of Jewish descent—not least for those assimilated into Christian communities.

Of special interest to historians studying the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s and attempts to support “non-Aryan Christians” in their efforts to immigrate to Britain, the United States, and other (primarily Western) countries, Legg devotes an appendix to the question, “Who were the so-called Nichtglaubensjuden?” As he argues, “Despite the fact that ‘Jewishness’ at the time was not just a religious identity, but also a secular one, there are multiple reasons to suggest that a sizeable proportion of the 19,716 Nichtglaubensjuden (non-believing Jews) listed in the 1939 census also did not self-identify as secular Jews. We can also safely conclude that the majority had not recently resigned from the Jewish community.” (323)

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

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

By Dries Bosschaert, KU Leuven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

Journal Note: MCC and National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Journal Note: MCC and National Socialism, Intersections: MCC Theory & Practice Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Fall 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Over the past five years, much have been discussed and written about the activities and experiences of Mennonite Christians in the Holocaust. The problematization of Mennonite history and memory related to the Holocaust began with a 2017 Toronto workshop assessing the work of Gerhard Rempel and then a 2018 Conference at Bethel College. In the forefront of this debate has been Benjamin Goossen, whose book Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, and numerous articles have highlighted the complexities of Mennonite identity and Mennonite collaboration.

More recently, scholars have begun to examine the entanglements of the Mennonite Central Committee–the church’s relief and development agency–in Nazism and the Holocaust. A November 2021 roundtable of historians discussed the MCC, refugees, and the legacies of National Socialism, and built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections: MCC Theory & Practice Quarterly. It is that special issue of the Intersections that this note attends to. Compiled by Alain Epp Weaver, it contains twelve short articles:

“MCC and Nazism, 1929–1955,” by Benjamin W. Goossen (3-12)
“MCC and Mennonite emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920–1932,” by Esther Epp-Tiessen (13-17)
“Benjamin Unruh, Nazism and MCC,” by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast (17-27)
“MCC and Nazi impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” by John Eicher (27-32)
“Between German fascism and U.S. imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” by Daniel Stahl (32-35)
“From care to rescue: MCC in the face of the persecution of Jews in France (1939–1945),” by Stéphane Zehr (36-40)
“John Kroeker and the backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,'” by John Thiesen (40-45)
“Facing the future, reinterpreting the past: MCC’s solutions for successful Mennonite immigration after the Second World War,” by Erika Weidemann (45-50)
“Defining the deserving: MCC and Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” by Aileen Friesen (50-54)
“National Socialism and MCC’s post-war resettlement efforts with Danziger Mennonites,” by Steven Schroeder (54-60)
“MCC’s resettlement of the Dutch war criminal Jacob Luitjens,” by David Barnouw (60-62)
“Hands under the cross: MCC and the post-war construction of German Mennonite peace identity,” by Astrid von Schlachta (63-68)

As Rick Cober Baumann, Ann Graber Herschberger, and Alain Epp Weaver note in their introduction:

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is a worldwide ministry of Anabaptist churches that seeks to share God’s love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice—such a mission is diametrically opposed to the racist, genocidal program of Nazism. Yet, as recent scholarship has highlighted with renewed focus, MCC’s humanitarian efforts from the late 1920s through the mid-1950s to help Mennonites from the Soviet Union migrate to the Americas were entangled with National Socialism and its legacy in multiple, complex ways. What were these entanglements? What are we to make of them? (1)

The articles that follow are short summaries of the research of scholars from Canada, the USA, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The articles are richly illustrated and include both source citations and guides to further reading. Topics taken up in the various articles include:

interactions between Mennonites and the Hitler regime relating to the resettlement of refugees from the Soviet Union (which include the activities of Mennonite Nazi Benjamin Unruh),
pro-Nazi sentiments and ideological conflicts in the Fernheim Mennonite colony in Paraguay,
the observation of Nazi genocidal policies in wartime France by MCC workers, and efforts to rescue Jewish children,
the resettlement of displaced Mennonites–many genuine refugees but some with ties to Nazism and the Holocaust–from the Soviet Union through Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War.

This research interrogates the postwar narrative among Mennonites “of the dramatic and providential escape of desperate Mennonites in post-war Europe from the threat of deportation back to the Soviet Union and the exodus-like passage of these Mennonites through a Red Sea of danger to the promised lands of the Americas” (3). Seventy years ago, the MCC helped propagate that narrative. Now, it is promoting scholarly research that explores the much more complex reality behind that story. And the goal is not merely academic, but comes with the expectation of further response by the organization. The result is an excellent example of partnership between church organizations and scholars to pursue the truth of the past, even at the cost of soul-searching in the present and redress in the future.

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000,” Antisemitism Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 233-265.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Benjamin Goossen is among the most active scholars among the historians currently preoccupied with re-examining the history of Mennonite Christians and the Second World War, and especially their relationship to Nazism and the Holocaust. In his new article “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945–2000,” Goossen tackles the person of Ingrid Rimland, the Mennonite novelist who became a prominent Holocaust denier in the 1990s after years of acclaim for her literary accounts of women’s suffering in the Soviet Union.

Rimland was born in 1936 into a Russian Mennonite family, which followed Hitler’s retreating armies westwards in 1943 to escape Bolshevik rule. After the war, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) facilitated her family’s immigration as refugees to Paraguay. As an adult, she moved to the United States and became took up writing. In her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), Rimland compared Mennonite women’s suffering to the persecution of the Jews under Nazism. She fictionalized her own experiences of displacement, flight, and emigration but was silent about the collaboration and perpetration of crimes by Mennonites in the Holocaust.

As a single mother caring for a disabled child in the 1980s, Rimland struggled to maintain her literary career. The end of the Cold War also diminished her impact, as the theme of her work–suffering under Communism–became passé. In response, she turned to antisemitic conspiracy theories, becoming intellectually, financially, and then romantically involved with the infamous Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel. Zündel was born in Germany in 1939, later immigrated to Canada, and was the subject of a serious of high-profile hate-speech trials in the 1980s and 1990s. Rimland launched the website Zundelsite.org from her home in California, in order to help Zündel spread his Holocaust denial while avoiding Canadian anti-hate laws. The site was a primary source of online Holocaust denial in the 1990s, while Rimland also sent out daily “Z-Grams” through a listserv.

Rimland also used Zundelsite.org to promote her own literary work, including her three-volume novel Lebensraum! (1988). In it she depicted Mennonites as racially pure Germans and wrote about two Mennonite settlements, one in Ukraine and one in Kansas–each threatened by Jews. The novel included a sub-plot about a global Jewish conspiracy (the “New World Order”).

Goossen sees Rimland’s life as an exemplar of how far-right extremism migrated from Hitler’s Third Reich to present-day North America. Her own turn to neo-Nazism was rooted in her long history of equating Mennonite suffering with that of the Jews in the Holocaust. “As counterintuitive as it may seem, Mennonites’ propensity to self-identify with Jews opened a path for Rimland’s racist trajectory” (236). But when a scholar suggested Canadian Mennonite views were not so different from those of Rimland, a broader controversy erupted, revealing that Canadian Mennonites had never examined the theological implications of the Holocaust for their Anabaptist theology (242).

Goossen explains Rimland’s novel The Wanderers and its appeal among Mennonite leaders, along with her slide into antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. He concludes that various influences played a role in her fate–her association with Ernst Zündel, to be sure, but also the background of Mennonite silence about collaboration with Hitler and her uneasy relationship with male Mennonite elites who used her depictions of female Mennonite suffering but refused to support her career.

Conference Report: 35th Annual Conference of the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Conference Report: 35^th Annual Conference of the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung

By Sarah Thieme, WWU University of Münster, and Martin Belz, Institute for Mainz Church History

Conference organizers: Sarah Thieme, Center for Religion and Modernity, WWU University of Münster; Martin Belz, Institute for Mainz Church History; Markus Leniger, Catholic Academy Schwerte of the Archdiocese of Paderborn

Date: 19-21 November 2021

Location: Schwerte, Germany

This conference report was first published in German at H-Soz-Kult: Tagungsbericht 35. Jahrestagung des Schwerter Arbeitskreises Katholizismusforschung. 19.11.2021–21.11.2021, Schwerte, in: H-Soz-Kult 07.02.2022, online access at: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-9296?title=35-jahrestagung-des-schwerter-arbeitskreises-katholizismusforschung&recno=10&q=&sort=&fq=&total=8988. We would like to thank Katharina Reuther (Münster) for assistance with the translation.

Approximately 40 scholars from the fields of church history and historiography took part in the 35^thannual conference of the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung (working group for Catholicism research, SAK). Organised by the new speakers Sarah Thieme and Martin Belz, the conference took place as always in cooperation with the Catholic Academy in Schwerte of the Archdiocese of Paderborn. The event focused on the presentation and discussion of ongoing research work on Catholicism from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This year’s general debate was dedicated to the topic “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35) – Catholicism and refugees in historical and contemporary perspective.

The church historical presentation by DOMINIK HERINGER (Mainz) dealt with the Rheinischer Reformkreis in the twentieth century. Heringer located the hotspot of the circle, whose main concern was to secure a greater national independence of the German church from Rome, in the diocese of Aachen, which was newly founded in 1930. From there, the positions of the circle und its partly national socialist affinities resonated throughout Germany. As a result, church-wide battles broke out over whether and how to renew of the church. The presenter showed that Augustin Bea SJ played a leading role, one unknown until now, in monitoring the protagonists and their actions.

LEA TORWESEN (Bochum) provided an analysis of Christian-religious sites of memory. Her historiographical presentation focused on how the writing of church history had important aftereffects socially, culturally, and politically. Looking at the example of the Dortmund church Heilige Dreifaltigkeit (Holy Trinity) (1898), she elaborated on two competing stories of memory: the attribution of meaning as a community of workers in the coal and steel industry (part of industrial culture) and the currently more powerful coding as so-called BVB-founding church of those members of the youth fellowship who founded the football club Borussia Dortmund in 1909, after disagreements with the church community (part of football-fan culture). That collective memory operated selectively can also be seen in the second case study, the “Essen Catholic Day 1968,” which emerged as another site of memory because of its uniquely turbulent nature. To this day, it is associated with protest signs, chants, and heckling. These memories erroneously made it appear that the Katholikentage (Catholic Day) were generally associated with protests. In reality, such protests did not take place in any of the other six Katholikentag-forums.

MAXIMILIAN KÜNSTER (Mainz) subsequently delivered a presentation about how Catholic seminary candidates personally experienced and interpreted the Second World War. His analysis of 867 field letters from Mainz seminarians addressed to their Head of Seminary from the battlefront, and also on other sources on teaching and studying in the years 1933-1945, allowed him to draw conclusions about how their social backgrounds and the interpretive framework they created to make sense of the war were connected. As Künster showed, their war interpretation was influenced by the traditional socialisation in family and in seminary, as well as by youth organizations and the mindset of the NS-movement. The former became particularly clear in the reception of traditional war theology, the latter through a “communalization” (Vergemeinschaftung) of one’s own military service and the interpretation of the German-Soviet War as an “anti-Bolshevist crusade.”

SANDRA FRÜHAUF (Hamburg) presented her historical PhD project on the influence of post-conciliar priest and solidarity groups in the West German Catholic church and in the context of the transformation of society as a whole between 1965 and 1989/90. The priest and solidarity groups were established from 1968 onwards in West German dioceses to implement the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and to counteract restorative tendencies. By 1970 they were present in nearly every diocese. Initially, they were dedicated to solving inner church problems, but from 1971 onwards they turned increasingly to political and social issues. To assess which forms of protest the goals of the priest and solidarity groups – democratisation, humanisation and solidarity – could be implemented, Frühauf provided a historical conceptualization of the social movements’ own analyses, rituals and what she labelled “anti-rituals.” She provided a case study: the meeting of European priest groups in Chur, Switzerland from 5-10 July 1969 and in particular, their eucharistic celebrations.

The negotiation of gender concepts in GDR Catholicism from the late 1940s to the early 1970s is a field of research that has not yet been sufficiently explored – according to the thesis of KATHARINA ZIMMERMANN (Tübingen). In her doctoral dissertation, she accordingly investigates how Catholic citizens of the GDR experienced the tension between socialist politics and Catholic teachings on the body, gender, and sexuality in everyday practices and experiences. Zimmermann presented the research design of her work and gave first insights into her research, using examples to analyse the relevance of flight, expulsion, and (sexualised) violence after 1945, with regard to the understanding of gender in GDR Catholicism.

ALEXANDER BUERSTEDDE (Hamburg) presented his historical doctoral project on developments in the image of the priest and in the training of priests in the West German Catholic church between 1965 and 1989/90. These, he argued, could be understood as conflicts over sacrality and sacralisation in the battleground of social upheaval and post-conciliar crisis. When in the diocesan leadership of the middle 1960s the slogan was issued not to train priests for yesterday, but for tomorrow, the initial zeal for reform soon gave way to conservative attempts at containment. A case in point was the training of pastoral assistants and priests in the archdiocese of München and Freising in the early 1970s. Once trained in the roles together, men and women were separated. Looking ahead, he referred (on the one hand) to the loss of stable practices of self-transcendence (Hans Joas) during the period under study, and (on the other hand) to successful strategies of the clerical preservation of power, despite rapidly declining birthrates. Did the end of the so-called Catholic Milieu go hand-in-hand with a farewell to the priestly ideals long associated with it?

DAVID TEMPLIN (Osnabrück) used Hamburg as an example to shed light on the Catholic Church’s mission to foreigners, which grew in number and importance in the course of labor migration into the Federal Republic from the 1960s onward. He highlighted the importance of the missions for migrants, since they not only worked to provide religious orientation but also functioned as a social “infrastructure of arrival” and as an instance of the community building through their social care. At the same time, Templin described the conflicts and negotiation processes in questions of participation, financial support, and recognition of migrant structures, which flared up in the 1970s in particular, and which made it clear that social debates about migration and integration were also taking place within the Catholic church, though articulated in a particular way.

The documentary film Friedland, about the Lower Saxon border reception camp of the same name, which was watched and discussed under the moderation of Markus Leniger, provided the topic for general debate. It addressed the relationship between Catholic believers and the institution of the Catholic church as a whole and refugees, from contemporary and historical perspectives. In a dialogue between history and social ethics, special attention was paid to the motives and (faith) convictions behind, respectively, Christian and Catholic commitment to refugees, as well as argumentation structures that underlie church attempts at integration and willingness to accept.

In the first presentation of the general debate, MARKUS STADTRECHER (Ulm) used the example of the integration of refugees and expellees after the Second World War in the diocese of Augsburg to confirm the initial thesis that Christian values represented an important motivation for a culture of welcome. In addition, however, there were strategic power interests of church leaders, who tried to use the new believers towards their efforts at re-catholisation. At the same time Stadtrecher made it clear that this migration movement was characterized by a high level of rejection on the part of the local population.

Based on the migration-friendly positions of the Church Magisterium, which ascribes extensive rights to migrants as members of the “human family”, GERHARD KRUIP (Mainz) applied John Rawls’ well-known thought experiment about the human community in its original state to the global level. Under the “veil of ignorance” those involved in the original state would decide to found states, but at the same time would advocate for the greatest possible freedom of movement and open borders. According to Kruip, the application of these “ideal theories” to current problems of migration requires the consideration of reasonableness and possible negative consequences of a brain drain for the countries of origin. In his estimation, making immigration easier is also in the well-understood self-interest of Central European countries, which are heavily influenced by the powerful demographic change.

In the subsequent discussion of both presentations, the Augsburg example could be contextualised within the framework of postwar Catholicism and society and compared with other case studies (e.g. from the diocese of Limburg). On the other hand, there was a lively exchange on Kruip’s thesis, with the focus in particular on the opportunities and limits of a policy open to immigration.

Conference Overview:

Dominik Heringer (Mainz): Hotspot Aachen – Neue Erkenntnisse zum Rheinischen Reformkreis

Lea Torwesten (Bochum): Ankerpunkte des (Glaubens-)Gedächtnisses – Christlich-religiöse Erinnerungsorte des Ruhrgebiets am Beispiel der BVB-„Gründungskirche“ (1898) und des Essener Katholikentages 1968

Maximilian Künster (Mainz): Die Feldpostbriefe der Alumnen des Mainzer Priesterseminars (1939–1945)

Sandra Frühauf (Hamburg): Abschied von „Hochwürden“. Priester- und Solidaritätsgruppen als Foren kirchlicher Selbstreflektion und klerikaler Kritik

Katharina Zimmermann (Tübingen): Gender-Konzepte zwischen Katholizismus und Sozialismus. Körper, Geschlecht und Sexualität im DDR-Katholizismus 1945–1973

Alexander Buerstedde (Hamburg): Katholisches Priesterbild und katholische Priesterausbildung in der Bundesrepublik von 1965 bis 1989/90. Ein Werkstattbericht

David Templin (Osnabrück): „Ausländermissionen“: Migration, institutionelle Einbindung und Konflikte in der Katholischen Kirche am Beispiel Hamburgs, 1960–1990

„Friedland – Der Dokumentarfilm“: Film und Diskussion, Moderation: Markus Leniger

Sarah Thieme (Münster) / Martin Belz (Mainz): Einführung in das Thema der Generaldebatte: „Ich bin ein Fremder gewesen und ihr habt mich aufgenommen“ (Mt 25,35) – Katholizismus und Geflüchtete in historischer wie gegenwärtiger Perspektive

Markus Stadtrecher (Ulm): „Brüder nehmt die Brüder mit“ – Christliche Willkommenskultur und ihre Grenzen am Beispiel der Flüchtlinge und Vertriebenen im Bistum Augsburg nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg

Gerhard Kruip (Mainz): Gibt es ein Recht auf Einwanderung – wo doch alle Menschen Glieder der einen Menschheitsfamilie sind?

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel

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

“Sie haben [. . .] geholfen, den nationalistischen Einbruch in unsere Kirche abzuwehren.” Anmerkungen zu Gerhard Kittel und dessen Lehrtätigkeit in Wien

This chapter by Karl Schwarz appeared under the above title in Uta Heil and Annette Schellenberg, eds., Theologie als Streitkultur, Vienna University Press (as published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht), 2021, 319-339. This volume also serves as the entirety of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Theologie, vol. 13, 2021, “Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Wien.”

Karl Schwarz, author of this chapter, has spent his career as a member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, while also filling important administrative positions at the university in several stages of his career. In addition, he has been a long-time member of the multi-national editorial board at Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which is how I met him decades ago. In the early 1990s, Schwarz contributed a chapter on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna in the important volume edited by Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten Nicolaisen, Theologische Fakultäten im Nationalsozialismus, (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1993).[1] In the chapter reviewed here, Schwarz revisits a portion of that topic, focusing on Gerhard Kittel and the years from 1939 to 1943. This was a time when Kittel, famous as the founding editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, took leave from his position at Tübingen, moved with his family to Vienna, and lectured as a visiting member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna.

Schwarz touches upon several aspects of this Viennese moment in Kittel’s career. For example, the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, since 1938 within German borders, imagined that it might become an enlarged, more important institution as a “Borderland Faculty” (“Grenzlandfakultät”), reaching out to the “volksdeutsche Diaspora” in southeastern Europe.[2] Adding someone with the stature of Gerhard Kittel might have been useful, and both the Theological Faculty and Kittel seemed to have had this in mind. However, Schwarz then highlights another issue in this piece. That is the contrast found between one major portion of Kittel’s oeuvre, his very harsh work regarding Jews and Judaism, ongoing during those years in Vienna, and the glowing letters of support and admiration he received from Bishop Gerhard May and others during his postwar confrontation with denazification.

Schwarz’s chapter appears under a title that begins with this direct quote, taken from a letter Bishop Gerhard May of Vienna sent to Gerhard Kittel on 29.11.1946: “You have … helped protect us against a nationalistic attempt to take over our church.” Kittel then used this letter along with several others (e.g., from the theologian Hans von Campenhausen, postwar Rector at the University of Heidelberg) as character references appended to Kittel’s own Meine Verteidigung.[3] That latter document, sent to numerous friends and colleagues to convince them (and denazification authorities) of his innocence, followed eighteen months of postwar experience that suggested his guilt: his arrest by French occupation troops at the end of World War II, his removal from his professorship at Tübingen, his six months in prison, his eleven months of internment, and then his “sort of ‘Klosterhaft’” at Beuron, a form of ongoing confinement at a monastery near Tübingen.[4]

For purposes of Kittel’s denazification defense, Gerhard May’s letter could be understood as a “Persilschein,” the sort of postwar attestation named for a famous brand of German soap. These testimonies were given the nickname to identify their main goal: to wash clean a person’s Nazi past and get him or her past the denazification process. Despite the “Persilschein” term, with its satirical implications that we might be tempted to apply to Gerhard May’s letter, it is possible, of course that Bishop May had something important and appropriate to say in Kittel’s defense. He was Kittel’s bishop during those years from 1939-1943 when Kittel lectured at the University of Vienna and he and his family lived in Vienna. May in this letter made the claim for Kittel that he, as a professor of New Testament in the Theological Faculty at Vienna, worked hard to protect the Theological Faculty and the Protestant Church from the worst excesses of Nazi ideology and practice.

That claim provides the essence of the question that Karl Schwarz pursues. Were Bishop May and other important figures in the Protestant Church in Austria (an integral part of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945) accurate in their defense of Gerhard Kittel? Were they correct postwar in separating professors of theology from Nazis? Were real Christians not Nazis? Did May’s description of Kittel as a fellow Christian really establish him as one who stood up for his faith and for his co-believers against Nazi encroachment? (Among other things, Bishop May in his postwar remarks repeatedly referred to the Confessing Church, almost certainly exaggerating its level of support in Austria as well as its actual level of opposition to Hitler and National Socialism.) Kittel did in fact grow up in a pietist family and continued that tradition within his own family. He also taught the normal things for a Protestant professor of theology. In his four years at Vienna, he lectured on the synoptic Gospels, as well as on various books of the New Testament: Romans, Ephesians, Philemon, etc.[5]

However, Kittel also held a second position at Vienna, giving lectures in the Faculty of Philosophy. That is where he dealt most directly with his theories about Jews, Jewishness, and the role of Jews in history and in Germany. In particular, Kittel presented his own theory, identifying a dramatic change from traditional Jews in the Old Testament to the diaspora Jews of the modern world. This distinction about Jews allowed Kittel to accept the Old Testament and its place in the Christian Bible, when many “Deutsche Christen” wanted to exclude it. He thus stayed within the boundaries of normal Christian beliefs. It also allowed him to accept the career of his father, Rudolf Kittel, a famous professor of Old Testament and the translator of a modern version that became well known. Kittel justified his respect for Jews of the Old Testament by developing a theory that modern Jews had changed entirely during the diaspora. From about 500 BCE to 500 CE, he argued (in line with modern antisemitic prejudice), Jews lost their healthy roots in the soil of their homeland and their occupation as farmers. They then spread out in all directions, becoming the uprooted, money-oriented, disreputable, and noxious Jews of medieval and modern Europe.[6]

Kittel presented this idea in his keynote talk at the opening conference in November 1936 of the Nazi-oriented Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands. It was here that Kittel described the alleged transformation from biblical Jews to modern Jews, how “the admirable Jews of the Old Testament degenerated into the loathsome Jews of the modern world.” This lecture, “Die Entstehung des Judentums und die Entstehung der Judenfrage” [“The Origin of Judaism and the Origin of the Jewish Question”], soon appeared in the first issue of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, the new journal of research on “the Jewish question” supported by the Reichsinstitut.[7] This journal published a total of seven annual volumes, with Kittel becoming the single most active contributor. It was the sort of work and alleged expertise that helped make him seem a suitable scholar also to work on the propaganda exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” in 1938 in Vienna, and “The Physical and Mental Appearance of the Jews” in 1939.[8]

Karl Schwarz considers two seemingly contradictory explanations for Kittel’s attitude toward Jews, either a Christian antijudaism with its 2000 years of history and its basis in religious belief, or a modern antisemitism with its more recent history, its racist underpinnings, and its significance within the now discredited Nazi Germany. The former could be the sort of distinction that might allow Bishop May—whether honestly or surreptitiously—to ignore the antisemitic side of Kittel’s academic work. Was Kittel simply a pious Christian, researching and writing a spiritual critique against Jews? That could be explained as part of a long Christian tradition, not least including a quite vicious version contributed by Martin Luther. From this point of view, Kittel was simply a professor of theology. Bishop May’s claim that Kittel had always tried to protect Christianity and the church, implied that he actually held an “anti-Nazi” stance. By this argument, it was only in his role in the Faculty of Philosophy–a role ignored by Bishop May–that he indulged in antisemitism, the sort of thing for which Nazis postwar were being condemned.

Throughout the balance of Schwarz’s chapter, he pursues the abundant evidence that Kittel both participated in and contributed to the racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime. I recently noted in a publication about Kittel, edited by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals in 2020, that Gerhard Kittel returned to Vienna in the summer of 1944 for a guest lecture on “The Race Problem in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity” [“Das Rassenproblem der Spätantike und das Frühchristentum”] In that lecture he described “Christianity as a bulwark against the Jewish threat” [“das Christentum als Bollwerk gegen die jüdische Bedrohung;” which I then described as proof of his “complicity in the Nazi persecution of Jews” [“Mittäterschaft an der Judenverfolgung der Nazis”]. I was pleased to see that Karl Schwarz quoted those two passages and affirmed my conclusion.[9]

I believe that Kittel describing Adolf Hitler as late as 1944 as a “twin bulwark” alongside the Christian church, saving Christian Europe from the Jewish menace–indeed from the Enlightenment as a whole–tells us all we need to know about where Kittel’s allegiance can be found. Karl Schwarz seems to agree. Though the title of his chapter begins with Bishop May defending Gerhard Kittel as a good Christian and an important defender of Christian culture, Schwarz concludes,

The most recent publications, calling back to memory a scholar with a worldwide reputation, show how he allowed himself, pushed by the spirit of the times, to instrumentalize the antisemitic politics of National Socialist rule—and indeed, they show how the proclamation of antijudaism turned into a Christian antisemitism. Added to that, the years of his work in Vienna register clear signals that no character references from the side of the church could hide.[10]

[Die jüngsten Publikationen rufen einen Wissenschaftler von Weltruf in Erinnerung; sie zeigen, wie er sich vom Zeitgeist getrieben für die antisemitische Politik der nationalsozialistischen Machthaber instrumentalisieren liess—und wie in der Tat aus dem proklamierten Antijudaismus ein christlicher Antisemitismus geworden war. Dazu sind auch in den Jahren seines Wirkens in Wien deutliche Signale zu registrieren, über die auch die Leumundszeugnisse der Kirche nicht hinwegtäuschen können.]

This chapter by Schwarz is a very useful treatment of the four years in which Kittel was based at the University of Vienna and also a part of the Protestant church in that region. It is interesting. It is important. And, as Schwarz shows, it confirms that the broad and deep critique of Gerhard Kittel that has developed in the past four plus decades is accurate and justified.

Notes:

[1] Additional publications by Schwarz on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna include “’Haus der Zeit.’ Die Fakultät in den Wirrnissen dieses Jahrhunderts,” in Karl Schwarz and Falk Wagner, eds, Zeitenwechsel und Beständigkeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät in Wien 1821-1996, Schriftenreihe des Universitätsarchiv 10, Vienna 1997, 125-204; Karl Schwarz, “Zwischen kulturpolitishen Kalkül und theologischem Interesse: Die Ehrenpromotion von Nichifor Crainic an der Universität Wien,” ZBalk 56 (2020), 69-85; and Karl Schwarz, “Bejahung—Ernüchterung—Verweigerung: Die Evangelische Kirche in Österreich und der Nationalsozialismus,” JGPrÖ 124/125 (2008/2009), 18-38.

[2] Schwarz, 324-327.

[3] For a recent treatment of Kittel’s defense statement, see Matthias Morgenstern and Alon Segev, Gerhard Kittels Verteidigung: Die Rechtfertigungsschrift eines Tübinger Theologen und “Judentumsforscher” vom Dezember 1946, Berlin 2019.

[4] Schwarz, 320. Kittel died in the summer of 1948 at the age of 59, without having been given permission to return to his home (much less his position) in Tübingen.

[5] Schwarz, 330.

[6] Loyal to Nazi norms, Kittel also emphasized in his Nazi publications that the “pure” racial identity of Old Testament Jews was destroyed by sexual mixing during the diaspora. Several of his contributions to Forschungen zur Judenfrage tried to identify and prove this proclivity, in line with bizarre Nazi ideas about the imagined racial purity of “Aryans,” and hence, the special danger of racially mixed (and even sexually predatory!) diaspora Jews. See my chapter on Kittel in Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (Yale University Press, 1985), especially 61-68. See also my first article on Kittel, “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel,” Journal of Contemporary History, 12 (1977), 595-622.

[7] See Robert P Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und “Judenforscher” Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2020). The actual quotation here comes from this chapter of mine, note 7, p. 33 in the Gailus and Vollnhals volume. This volume by Gailus and Vollnhals, based upon a conference on Kittel they convened in 2017, is a very important recent contribution on the “case” of Gerhard Kittel.

[8] Schwarz, 319.

[9] Schwarz, 333, and Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen,” 27, note 7.

[10] Schwarz, 338.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

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

By Alain Epp Weaver, MCC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

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

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

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

By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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