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Conference Report: “International Protestants and Nazi Germany as Viewed Through Three Lenses”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “International Protestants and Nazi Germany as Viewed Through Three Lenses,” German Studies Association, Atalnta, GA, October 2017.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Five scholars of German church history convened a panel on October 8, 2017, at the German Studies Association in Atlanta, Georgia, to reflect on international Protestants and Nazi Germany. The panel consisted of presenters Robert Ericksen, Victoria Barnett, and Matthew Hockenos, while Rebecca Carter-Chand offered insightful comments and Christopher Probst did the introductions. All five panelists engaged the audience in a lively exchange after the presentations.

Robert Ericksen led with his paper “On Luther, Jews, and Lutherans in Nazi Germany.” He lamented that while the 500th anniversary of Luther’s “break” with the Catholic Church was receiving widespread attention across Europe and the United States, Luther’s antisemitism—most famously on display in On the Jews and Their Lies—rarely became a major focal point of these commemorations. Despite this lapse (or intentional manipulation) of historical memory, there are indisputable signs that most Lutherans no longer try to explain away Luther’s derogatory and hateful Judenschriften, but rather condemn his anti-Jewish diatribes and antisemitism unequivocally. Ericksen believes that the contemporary renunciation of Luther’s antisemitism is a direct result of Holocaust scholarship over the past three or four decades. The advent of “Holocaust Studies,” Holocaust museums, and scholarly and media attention on the Holocaust have all contributed to the waning of the antisemitism’s social acceptability in the United States and parts of Europe. This attention on the Shoah—its sheer inhumanity and ugliness—had the effect of “inoculating” the public against contempt for Jews. While not excusing their antisemitism, Ericksen pointed out that German Protestant theologians and pastors who backed Hitler, like Gerhard Kittel and Martin Niemöller, did not have the benefit of this inoculation. Ericksen concluded with the observation that the current support for right-wing populism in Europe and the U.S. raises the concern that the post-Holocaust inoculation against antisemitism might be losing its influence.

Vicki Barnett’s paper, “A Two-Way Street: The Complex Relationships between German and U.S. Protestant leaders, 1933-1939,” examined some of the many transatlantic interactions that took place between U.S. and German Protestants during the Nazi era. These contacts included active partnerships, participation in conferences, lecture tours, and visitations by church leaders. In addition to the more well-known exchanges between the leaders of the U.S. Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the leaders of the German Protestant Church (DEK), Barnett also explored contacts between German and American Baptists, Methodists, and Adventists. Barnett’s research demonstrates that there was no monolithic relationship between American and German Protestants, though there were tendencies. While most German Protestants were bent on convincing their American counterparts of the validity of the Nazi regime and downplayed Nazi anti-Semitism, American Protestants diverged in their opinions on the Nazi regime and the response by the German churches. For example, the German Adventist, Hulda Jost, and the German Methodist, Bishop Otto Melle, both went on extensive speaking tours in the U.S. to defend Nazism. And the German Christian (Deutsche Christen) Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller used meetings in Germany with FCC leaders to try to convince them that Nazi critics in the U.S. were misrepresenting the situation in Germany. Sharp divisions, however, developed among American Baptists between those who deplored German nationalism and antisemitism and those who wanted to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt. The leadership of the FCC was more united in its criticism of Nazism. In an extraordinarily critical letter, Henry Smith Leiper of the FCC dressed down Ludwig Müller for thinking that his pro-Nazi propaganda campaign would gain any adherents in the FCC. The time, money, and effort expended by Americans and Germans in their interaction with each other attests to the importance they attributed to these relations. Transatlantic contacts between Protestants diminished markedly after Kristallnacht and the outbreak of the war, only to be revived after the war.

Matthew Hockenos’ paper, “Guilt, Repentance, and International Public Relations in the German Protestant Church, 1945-1948,” examined how German Protestants from the Nazi-era Confessing Church and the American Protestants in the FCC sought to reestablish close ties after the war. German church leaders were understandably horrified and dismayed by Germany’s total devastation and isolation in 1945 and wanted to ameliorate the suffering of their people. But the church’s reputation as ultra-conservative and nationalist led the Allies to take a cautious approach toward allotting the churches a leading role in German reconstruction. Church leaders believed that the only way to get the occupying powers to soften their policies and embrace the church as a partner would be to convince them that there was a German opposition to the Nazis—led by the churches—and that Germans were willing to take responsibility for the war and all the devastation that it wrought. Beginning with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in October 1945 and throughout the late 1940s, church leaders went on a public relations blitz—issuing statements of guilt, meeting the occupation powers, and travelling abroad—in an effort to rehabilitate their reputation and influence occupation policies. Hockenos’ paper focused on Martin Niemöller’s five-month lecture tour in the United States from December 1946 to May 1947, during which he hoped to convince Americans that he was representative of the many good Christians in Germany who fought and prayed for an end to the Hitler menace and who were now barely eking out an existence in bombed cities. Hockenos maintained that Niemöller often stretched the truth during his addresses, embellishing his and the Confessing Church’s resistance credentials. But Niemöller’s efforts to win over American Protestants were only partially successful—Americans remained divided over the legacy of German Protestantism during the Nazi era.

Rebecca Carter-Chand observed in her comments that these three papers made the case that we only get the full picture when we examine German Protestants during this era from an international perspective. With the exception of those scholars who have focused on the ecumenical movement, a transnational approach to studying twentieth-century German church history has not been common. Perhaps its time has come.

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Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust.” The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, November 1-3, 2017.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education conference began with Steve Pressman, documentary filmmaker, showing clips of his soon-to-be released film, “Holy Secrets.” Pressman discussed his process in making the documentary which explores the actions and inactions taken by the Vatican during the Holocaust.

The first panel session continued this theme by exploring the “Pius Wars,” with papers by Robert Ventresca and Jacques Kornberg. Both presented critical re-assessments of Pius XII, suggesting the need for a framework for the proper historical and ethical evaluation of the choices made by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Further panels included the exploration of Catholic antisemitism, with Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara co-presenting their recent work on Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage. Martin Menke presented research on Weimar Catholic leaders who differentiated between being anti-racist and being anti-Semitic.

Jonathan Huener shared his latest research on the Reichsgau Wartheland and the diverse ways in which the Nazi occupation regime persecuted the Catholic Church in occupied Poland. This was followed by Brenda Gaydosh analyzing why Bernhard Lichtenberg resisted and protested Nazi anti-Semitic measures and why he prayed for the Jews.

The final presentation of the first day of panels was a keynote address by John Connelly: “How the Catholic Church Overcame Its Own Theology and Proclaimed God Loves Jews.” Connelly argued that Vatican II’s new teaching about God loving the Jews came about because of Nazi racism. Many of the theologians who advised the bishops at Vatican II were opponents of Hitler in the 1930s. Some of them were converts from Judaism and many had been targets of antisemitism themselves. Yet for them, the Church’s new teaching about Jews was not a revolution; it was a return to the ideas of the Jewish thinker, Saul of Tarsus. Far from a revolution, the new teaching of Vatican II was a return to the Church’s origins.

The final day of the conference featured a panel on post-Holocaust theology and the Jews with a presentation by Zuzanna Radzik, a Catholic theologian specializing in Christian-Jewish relations and feminist theology. Karma Ben Johanan from the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute then presented on the way in which the Catholic discourse on the Holocaust functioned in the construction of the Church’s identity and in the reforging of Jewish-Christian relations from the Second Vatican Council to the present.

Raymond Sun brought the conference into the present by analyzing the rhetoric, symbolism, and historical precedents employed by church leaders in urging Catholics to oppose the persecution or exclusion of targeted groups. He explored possible reasons for the absence of direct references to the Holocaust and pondered the implications of this for Catholic memory of the Holocaust. This was followed by Gershon Greenberg’s presentation on the restoration of Jewish faith in the displaced persons camps, beginning with the survivor’s question: “Why was I still alive?” The survivors’ answer was: in order to study Torah—which in turn nourished life. The fact that Jewish faith was revived necessitates the conclusion that somehow, some way, sacramental existence never totally disappeared, even in the midst of catastrophe.

The conference closed with a presentation from Marie-Anne Harkness, whose family members rescued Jews in France during the war. Mrs. Harkness’s grandmother, Madame Celine Morali, used the family’s hardware store to smuggle Jews out of danger. She and her daughter worked with Monsignor Joseph Moussaron, Bishop of Albi, and other Catholics to rescue Jews.

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Article Note: Andrew H. Beattie, “‘Lobby for the Nazi Elite’? The Protestant Churches and Civilian Internment in the British Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1948”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Article Note: Andrew H. Beattie, “‘Lobby for the Nazi Elite’? The Protestant Churches and Civilian Internment in the British Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1948,” German History 35, no. 1 (2017): 43-70.

By Connor Sebestyen, University of Toronto

As with the best of case studies, Beattie’s examination of the work of Protestant clergy in civilian internment camps in the British zone of occupation forces historians to reconsider an established narrative. In “Lobby for the Nazi Elite?”, Beattie calls for “differentiation” and nuance in explaining whom the Church helped in the immediate postwar years and why. As the story went, the German Protestant and Catholic Churches both supported former Nazis and war criminals and opposed the Allied occupation governments; in doing so they largely ignored the wellbeing of the victims of the Nazi regime. Beattie does not downplay the German Protestant clergy’s fervent advocacy on behalf of war criminals but seeks to put these actions in a wider context of German Church help to the roughly 400,000 civilian internees that were held by the Allies during the occupation years. The German Protestant Church saw POWs, internees, expellees from the East, and convicted war criminals as part of the same group of “Germans in foreign captivity”. So in order to fully understand the intertwined motivations and circumstances that led to Church officials becoming so actively involved both in opposition to and cooperation with the occupation governments, we need to keep this context in mind.

Drawing on Protestant Church archives throughout the region of the former British zone of occupation, Beattie contends that it was not a small group of activist clergy who were conspiring to aid the ‘Nazi elite’, but rather that “Protestant internee work was a collective endeavour supported by an extensive bureaucracy” that was coordinated at a regional and national level. The article outlines how the Protestant Church organized its aid efforts and how this aid evolved from fulfilling immediate basic needs like “Seelsorge” (pastoral care) and communication with families to providing “Fürsorge” (material welfare) and eventually to focusing primarily on legal services. Beattie points out that a lot of these activities were coordinated with the British authorities, arguing that the occupation government shared many goals with the Church clergy and that they spent at least as much time working together as partners as they did as antagonists.

Beattie’s article has done a good job of showing that “…Protestant internee work in the British zone was even more extensive [and well organized] than previously recognized.” He also expands on existing explanations of the Church’s support for internees, primarily based on a refusal to confront the past and ideological reasons, to include “interconfessional rivalry, national solidarity and the lack of a German government”, and most importantly a genuine opposition to extrajudicial internment itself. Beattie also criticizes Robert P. Eriksen’s claim that there was “a willingness to give church support to almost any alleged war criminal”, and instead argues that responses from clergy were “… more diverse and ambiguous, than previously recognized.” In support of this claim, he alludes to a couple of examples of individual pastors who refused to help certain internees, in part because of their criminal pasts. We should be careful that these examples are not just outliers and do in fact constitute a significant trend that could overturn Eriksen’s description of sweeping and undiscerning Church support. American, British, and French archives are filled with thousands of letters that their occupation governments received from German clergy petitioning for clemency on behalf of war criminals, and many stated that they were doing so out of a sense of universal Christian forgiveness, regardless of the crimes these men had committed. Therefore, an avenue for further research could be to more definitively establish the balance between those pastors who uncritically supported war criminals and those pastors who were more discerning with their advocacy and turned them away.

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Article Note: Ion Popa, “Sanctuary from the Holocaust? Roman Catholic Conversion of Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1942”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Article Note: Ion Popa, “Sanctuary from the Holocaust? Roman Catholic Conversion of Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no 1 (Spring 2015): 39-56.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Of the many painful topics around Christianity and the Holocaust, one of the thorniest is conversion. Even basic questions remain unanswered. How many Jews sought baptism? How willing were Christian clergy to help? How did the situation differ across regions and confessions? Did converting actually save lives? Ion Popa’s important article addresses these questions for Romania and in the process reveals the complex tangle of religious, political, military, and diplomatic interests that determined life and death for Jews during the Holocaust.

Popa’s meticulous research deepens and complicates the picture drawn by John Morley, Lya Benjamin, and others. In 1941, conversion of Jews to any other religion was forbidden in Romania, but the state, acting on its perception that the Vatican wielded vast power and eager to keep its options open, made exceptions for the Roman Catholic Church. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, tried to exploit this opening to shelter Jews from deportation and death. But as Popa demonstrates, contrary to claims made at the time (and by some scholars since), Roman Catholics, whom Romanian reports regularly and inaccurately described as “Magyars,” did not baptize tens of thousands of Jews. The actual number, Popa concludes, is impossible to ascertain, but it was small: he estimates perhaps 500 people.

Still, those Romanian Jews who were baptized into the Roman Catholic church “generally” avoided deportation. This was not the case for the smaller number who converted to other forms of Christianity, including the majority Romanian Orthodox church. In fact, Popa shows, many recent converts were rounded up as Jews, some even arrested for violating the law against conversion. Other grim scenes include Romanian Orthodox churchmen whining because they were denied the lavish sums of money Catholics supposedly made by charging Jews for their services. (Popa reserves judgment as to whether converts indeed paid.) In the wake of the Axis debacle at Stalingrad, Antonescu lifted the ban on conversions—but only for the Roman Catholics, and without announcing the decision outside Bucharest for six months. This is a chilling view of leaders who wanted it both ways: when it served their interests, they supported the destruction of Jews, and when it no longer seemed opportune, they might allow others to try to help Jews. Existing scholarship sheds light on conversion in other jurisdictions (Nina Paulovicova’s 2012 dissertation, Rescue of Jews in the Slovak State; Beate Meyer’s many publications on German-Jewish history), but much remains to be done. Popa’s excellent article provides a strong framework for drawing comparisons and analyzing connections.

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Conference Report: “Protestant Institutions in Central Germany under National Socialist Rule”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Conference Report: “Protestant Institutions in Central Germany under National Socialist Rule,” Cecilienstift Halberstadt, September 28, 2017.

By Dirk Schuster, Universität Potsdam

This public workshop was jointly organized by the Chair of Modern History of the University of Magdeburg, the Cecilienstift Halberstadt, the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (state center for political education) Saxony-Anhalt and the Historical Commission for Saxony-Anhalt. In her welcoming speech, Pastor Hannah Becker drew attention to the need to engage in a public discussion to engage in a public discussion on the central topic of this conference. In her bachelor thesis (2016), Elena Kiesel examined the history of the Cecilienstift in Halberstadt during the “Third Reich” and carried out pioneering research in this area.[1] This work initially sparked the idea of researching Protestant institutions during the period of National Socialism. However, ‘institution’ should not be understood as a rigid concept, as was also specifically pointed out by the organizer David Schmiedel at the end. This term rather includes a range of organizational units in its scope.

The second reason mentioned by Hannah Becker in her opening speech for such a workshop is the necessity of keeping the memory concerning the crimes that took place under the National Socialists alive. How very up-to-date this historical awareness should remain was shown in the elections to the national parliament in Germany this year. It was considered a given beforehand that the right-wing party “Alternative for Germany” would join the German Bundestag in the September general elections. Before the election, the staff at the local home for the disabled in Halberstadt were repeatedly asked by a resident whether conditions for the disabled in Germany would now revert back to what they were like under the Nazis.

After the welcoming address by Silke Satiukov, a research overview of the processing of Protestantism for the time of the Third Reich was given by Manfred Gailus. He argued in his remarks that it would only be possible to eventually provide an overview of heterogeneous Protestantism at that time after profound regional studies had taken place. Exemplary of such a successful regional study referred to by Gailus is the double volume on the Protestant Church in the Palatinate (Pfalz) published in 2016.[2]

In the presentations that followed, the diaconal institutions formed the main focus of the workshop. Helmut Bräutigam exemplified the Paul-Gerhard-Stift and its deaconess house in Wittenberg. He pointed out in his speech that the board of directors of the hospital and monastery was initially strongly oriented towards the German Christians, but this attitude changed as early as 1934 towards a more neutral course of thought. Even though the hospital suffered enormously from the lack of skilled staff, the leadership refused to hire Protestants of Jewish origin in the mid-1930s. Likewise, the hospital’s willing involvement in around 300 forced sterilizations of men shows that the monastery and deaconess house became compliant helpers of Nazi ideology. In the subsequent discussion, the question of internal debates or even refusals among employees regarding forced sterilization came up. Bräutigam had not found any indication for these and therefore believes that doctors and deaconesses actively participated but did not speak about it.

In her presentation, Elena Kiesel summarized the results of her bachelor thesis. The Cecilienstift in Halberstadt actually welcomed the takeover of power by the National Socialists. After the “godless” years of the Weimar Republic, the monastery hoped to be able to bring more children into the church. In the following years, however, the first areas of conflict began to emerge. The National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) continuously increased their influence on the children’s education of the monastery. Moreover, they obtained complete control over the child care of the Cecilienstift, as it was eventually transferred entirely to the NSV. Even though those responsible protested against the closing of the educator training of the monastery, Kiesel does not see this as “resistance” in the classical sense. Incidentally, letters written in 1943 by pastor Hanse (one of the key protagonists of the monastery) have been found, in which he signed off with the reference “God bless the leader.” This example reveals the broad gap between resistance and consent, as was made clear in the discussion. It did not come to a general rejection of National Socialism, but some did oppose specific abuses on the grounds which could often be found in the attitude, “If only our Führer knew about this.”

Fruzsina Müller came up with similar results. She dealt with the deaconess house in Leipzig. Partly out of conviction, partly for reasons of economic motivation, the house in Leipzig adapted to the new balance of power. The whole ambivalence is shown in the fact that one could hide a “Jewish Christian” deaconess from the Nazis until the end of war, while, at the same time, doctors of the hospital participated in systematic crimes such as sterilization and so on. Blanket statements about attitudes of deaconess houses are impossible. Ultimately, what took place were the (non-)actions of individuals and not the attitudes of institutions and their religious worldview.

Such a conclusion can also be drawn in accordance with the research presented by Hagen Markwardt. The example of the Saxon state institution Großhennersdorf, a state-owned institution since its founding, shows that it was individual motives that led to the transfer of the institute to the Inner Mission (Innere Mission) at the end of 1933. The Inner Mission and the National Socialists pursued parallel interests, according to contemporary thought of the time: While National Socialism was to take care of “high-performance people,” the Inner Mission should look out for the physical and mental “cripples,” as it was said at that time. In 1933, the institute director of Großhennersdorf since 1911, Ewald Melzer, who had a very close connection to the Inner Mission, was in charge of the transfer of the institution to the Inner Mission. From its perspective, the Nazi state was able to pursue its “duty” while at the same time the Inner Mission benefited, also financially, from the new task of administering the institution. As Markwardt noted, National Socialism and the Church did not contradict each other, but rather created a consensus that ultimately benefited both sides.

Rather than analyzing the attitude of individual diaconal institutions during the period of the Third Reich, Norbert Friedrich decided to examine the Kaiserwerther Verband. This was the umbrella organization of the individual deaconess mother-houses. Like a large fraction of German Protestantism, the association initially hoped that National Socialism would support a rechristianisation of German society. The association conformed early on and could thus ensure a continuity of personnel. In the church struggle, the association tried, on the other hand, to keep to a neutral course, thereby leaving it up to individual houses of how they wanted to position themselves concerning the German Christians and the Confessing Church. During the resulting discussion, the question was raised as to how the Kaiserwerther Verband behaved towards euthanasia. In the attitude of the association to euthanasia, Friedrich sees a reflection of the whole attitude of the Kaiserwerther Verband: it did not comment on it, but handed over the responsibility to the individual houses. One did not want to attract attention and, accordingly, behaved calmly.

Through the presentations by Benedikt Brunner on the semantic framework of “Volkskirche” in the Central German region, by Karsten Krampitz on the life of the pastor Wolfgang Staemmler, and by Dirk Schuster on the importance of the Eisenach “Entjudungsinstitut” (Institute for De-Judaization), the workshop received a broader thematic setting than the mere consideration of diaconal organizations and institutions. Such a broad view is necessary, as was reiterated in the closing words of David Schmiedel, speaking on behalf of the organizers. As opposed to the existence of one Protestantism, a variety of Protestantisms (28 regional churches, Lutherans, Reformed, United, German Christians, Confessing Church, middle, etc.) existed. Similarly, a wide variety of individuals with different motivations were behind the respective institutions. And in addition to theological arguments for or against motives for cooperation with representatives of the Third Reich, it was often profane reasons that played a crucial role for the respective attitude.

At the end of the workshop, the (recurring) debate concerning the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism came up again. One contribution to the discussion put the finger on the problem when, in an ironic question, someone asked about the meaningfulness of such a distinction: Is a theological hatred of Jews better than a racially argued hatred of the Jews? From the perspective of the author of these lines, representatives of such a distinction often forget a crucial point. It was secondary to the social marginalization of Jews whether this was based on racial and/or theological arguments. Crucial was the stigmatization of the Jews, which made it possible for German society to endorse the persecution and deprivation of these people. As a supplement to the research outlook sketched by Manfred Gailus, the direct impact of anti-Semitic statements and actions of local church representatives should be more in the focus of future research. The presentations of this workshop have provided an important impetus.

[1] The paper was subsequently published as an article. Elena Kiesel, “Kinderpflege im göttlichen Auftrag. Das Diakonissen-Mutterhaus Cecilienstift in Halberstadt und sein Verhältnis zur Nationalsozialistischen Volkswohlfahrt (NSV),” in Sachsen und Anhalt. Jahrbuch der Historischen Kommission für Sachsen-Anhalt 29 (2017): 257–292.

[2] Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stüber, et. al. (eds.), Protestanten ohne Protest. Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus, vol. 1+2 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016).

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Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19th and 20th century Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19th and 20th century Germany,” German Studies Association, 2017

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

Thirteen historians, religious studies scholars and literary specialists gathered at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association from October 6-8 in Atlanta to examine the impact of religious revivals in Germany in the 19th and 20th century. The seminar analyzed phenomenon as distinct as the early-to-mid 19th Century revivals, Marian apparitions, the youth, liturgical and bible movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the political religions of the 1920s and 1930s, and the cults, sects and lifestyle movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic. In different ways, all of these different events and movements challenged understandings of confessional orthodoxy, hierarchy and authority.

Convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Wilhelm-Westfälische-Universität in Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, the seminar analyzed the circumstances under which these movements emerged as well as their impact. Why did the Protestant and Catholic churches contest, at least initially, all of these revival movements, sects and cults, some emerging from inside the church walls but most from outside? Why did some remain on the margins, while others were appropriated by the major church bodies? Answering these questions led the participants to grapple with definitions of religion and to examine those put forward, explicitly or implicitly, by churchmen in the past. All forced churchmen to engage with societal currents with which most would have preferred not to engage. Most unfolded against a backdrop of fear—of secularization, societal unrest, state persecution.

The first day’s discussion focused on highly contested conceptions of “secularization,” “modernization” and “resacralization.” They focused on the conflicting interpretative frameworks put forward by Steve Bruce, a proponent of traditional secularization paradigms, and Grace Davie, who has championed the notion of “believing without belonging.” Bruce’s and Davie’s works from the 1990s and 2000sprimarily discussed religious changes in the post-1945 era, but the definitions they put forward are easily applicable to the religious revivals and transformations of the long 19th century because of their conflicting understandings of religious “cults” and “sects.” Seminar participants subsequently discussed excerpts from David Blackbourn’s now classic work, Marpingen, which analyzed Marian apparitions in a small Saar village. Though popular pressure mounted to have the Marpingen apparitions officially recognized by the church, church leaders refused to do so, even amid the atmosphere of fear and violence generated by the Kulturkampf and stationing of troops in this village in the borderlands.

For the second day, the seminar discussed a chapter from the Marist College scholar Michael O’Sullivan’s forthcoming book with the University of Toronto Press, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965. Participants compared his analytical analysis of the miracles associated with Terese Neumann with that of Blackbourn. Since the miracles associated with her and her circle took place in the 1930s (and later), they also took up two seemingly timeless question: To what extent did National Socialism represent a “political religion” and to what extent did movements like the German Christians represent the flourishing of a sect?

The third day brought forward some of the most intense discussions. Did the 1960s represent an era of “secularization” or of “religious revival?” What meanings and significance can be ascribed to New Age movements, occultism and esoterica? Were these movements indicative of a fundamental transformation in religion or were they in the tradition of movements and cults from earlier decades and centuries? What distinguished those movements that were incorporated into the churches from those that remained outside? The seminar closed with a discussion of a controversial document, the final report of the Enquete-Kommission from 1998 detailing the role of sects and “psycho-groups” within the landscape of the Federal Republic. The controversies engulfing Scientology in Germany were repeatedly raised as an example of a new group challenging definitions of what constituted religion.

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Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars, University of Toronto, May 21-23, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This symposium assembled an extraordinary group of twenty scholars from twelve different countries to discuss the roles of religious individuals, institutions, and networks in the conflicts and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, the three-day event was organized by Victoria Barnett (USHMM), Doris Bergen (University of Toronto), Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College), and Rebecca Carter-Chand (University of Toronto and Clark University). The wide range of cases and issues discussed made the symposium highly stimulating (although that same quality makes it difficult to summarize). Most fundamentally the symposium showed the value of taking a global perspective, not only to compare but to connect developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas; and it demonstrated the power of in-person interactions. Having time to talk, in lengthy sessions, over meals, and outdoors, proved very fruitful and will, we hope, lead to a publication and future initiatives.

The symposium built on a 2015 summer research workshop on “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945,” held in Washington, DC and initiated by Barnett and Spicer. Now the goal was to expand the conversation by bringing in more people and looking beyond Europe. A call for papers yielded three times more abstracts than we could accept—an indication of the topic’s significance—and a team of experts in History, Religion, Islamic Studies, and Jewish Studies helped choose among them. Four facilitators—Devi Mays (University of Michigan), Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), and Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen)—worked with us to organize the fifteen participants into panels and identify themes. All papers were pre-circulated.

After an opening party on Sunday, we had a full day of sessions on Monday, May 22. The first panel was organized around the theme of “Transnational Religion and Diaspora Communities.” Francesco Pongiluppi (University of Rome), Burçin Çakir (Glasgow Caledonian University), John Eicher (German Historical Institute, Washington DC), and Stefan Vogt (Goethe University) presented their research on, respectively, Fascist Italians’ cultural activities in interwar Turkey; debates about the Armenian genocide in Turkey one hundred years later; Mennonites in South America and their relationships to Nazism; and the tensions and connections between Jewish religion and German nationalist discourse in Martin Buber’s thought. Devi Mays identified several issues to think across these disparate topics. She noted the centrality of different locations in articulating nationalism, including transnational sites. Homeland, she observed, has to be articulated, too. Of the many questions that arose in this discussion, two stand out because they recurred throughout the symposium: What is the role of religion in narratives of the nation under attack? How do visions of religious ethics as a unifying force subvert or reinforce the exclusive claims of nation and land?

The second panel explored “Religious Leadership and the Role of Clergy.” Paul Hanebrink structured the session around four questions: 1) How are enemies and threats defined? 2) How do we understand theology? Religious language can be mobilized but it also has a weight of its own. 3) How do churches’ internal debates interact with outside forces? 4) What, if anything, is distinctive about European Christianity? Francesca Silano (University of Toronto), Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont), Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem), and Brandon Bloch (Harvard University) shared highlights of their research on, respectively, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon and his condemnation of pogroms in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution; Vatican responses to Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in the Warthegau; The Religious of Our Lady of Sion, a Catholic order in France that reported assaults on Jews; and Protestant theologies of law and human rights in occupied Germany. In addition to big thematic issues, the discussion revealed some intriguing details, including Anna Shternshis’s observation that Soviet anti-religious propaganda depicted Tikhon as a Jew.

The third panel, facilitated by Milena Methodieva, was titled “Mobilization of Religion for National and Political Projects.” It featured the work of Roy Marom (University of Haifa), Peter Staudenmaier (Marquette University), Kateryna Budz (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Irina Ognyanova (Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Their research took us from Palestine in the 1930s to the Rome-Berlin Axis, and explored Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the Holocaust, and the Roman Catholic Church and Ustasha in Croatia. Methodieva raised issues about the role of religion in projects of national mobilization. She also noted how much can be learned from examining the so-called fringe or considering inconsistencies and tensions, for example, between an individual’s ideology and conduct.

These themes anticipated Tuesday’s session on “Religion and Violence.” Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya (University of Delhi), Ionut Biliuta (Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Romanian Academy), and Jason Tingler (Clark University) all addressed the period of the Second World War, but with a focus on Buddhism and ethno-nationalism of Japan, the Romanian Orthodox Exarchate from southern Ukraine, and genocidal violence in Chelm. Christhard Hoffmann offered six tips for making comparisons: 1) In each case we are dealing not with religion per se but religion in a social context; 2) Look at the history of ethno-religious conflict in a region; 3) Pay attention to expectations for the future; 4) Consider different forms of violence; 5) What were the roles of religious people and leaders? 6) How did ethno-religious groups react when they became targets of violence?

The value of taking a global perspective was especially evident from the intense interest in Mukhopadhyaya’s paper, the symposium’s only examination of religion in a non-western context. Yet her work had many points of contact with the other papers. The importance of prophecies was one and proselytization, also central to Biliuta’s analysis, was another. Certainly Mukhopadhyaya’s insight that any religion can become implicated in violence resonated across all the sessions.

The roundtable of facilitators provided another opportunity to make connections. Kevin Spicer led off by noting that a central question in the 2015 workshop—Christian antisemitism or Christian anti-Judaism?—had not featured in any of the presentations here. Mays raised the issue of absence: what does it mean when religion is not discussed? that it is not there or is so pervasive it goes unarticulated? She highlighted two areas that got short shrift in our deliberations: gender and lay people. Hanebrink drew attention to the question as to exactly how religious concepts are harnessed and what determines whether that project succeeds or not. He wondered about the divide between private and public religious discourses and commented that the symposium as a whole did not have much to say about Jews. For her part, Methodieva emphasized the multiple forms of each religion examined and the role of individuals, including particular personalities, in driving developments. Hoffmann returned to the thorny question of the boundaries of religion: what is religion and what is non religion? He also pointed to the importance of narratives of victimization and decline in situations of violence.

The group discussion that followed raised more big questions. Spicer asked about comparative approaches: When are comparisons helpful and when are they counterproductive and even irresponsible? Marom pointed out that we had failed to question the assumptions built into the symposium title. Hanebrink observed that the term “ethno-nationalism” is a product of the 1990s, and Mukhopadhyaya explained that ethno-nationalism can complicate a bigger nationalist project, as in India where it works against civic nationalism. Bloch urged us to think about religious language as shaping how people understand the world. Silano remarked on the importance of material support: where do the funds come from and who controls the finances? Vogt warned against essentializing religion, and Budz emphasized how religious identity substitutes for ethnic identity when there is no national state. Susannah Heschel pointed to the importance of the imperialist context and referred to John Kucich’s book, Imperial Masochism (2009), to draw attention to imperialists’ insistence on their own abjection: “Look how we suffer.” Tingler encouraged expanding the scope not only geographically but chronologically, for instance, to explore religious roots of nationalism in the Middle Ages. Carter-Chand highlighted the significance of conversion and the diversity of what being “Christian” meant, even within Central and Eastern Europe, and Biliuta added the dimension of competition between religions and religious groups.

The final component was a public program featuring Susannah Heschel and Victoria Barnett and moderated by Doris Bergen. Titled “Religion, Ethno-Nationalism, and Violence: Probing the Intersections,” it was an opportunity to hear from two people who have shaped the field. Barnett and Heschel responded to three questions: 1) How do you understand the relationship between religion, ethno-nationalism, and violence? 2) How do you respond to the Holocaust and the violence of our own times without despairing? 3) How has your thinking changed in the decades since you began your work?

Their reflections were personal, profound, and often funny. Barnett described her childhood in West Virginia and her formative experience with liberation theology at Union Theological Seminary and the Puebla Conference in the late 1970s. She also invoked Jonathan Fox’s study of the “salience of religious issues in ethnic conflicts” to underscore that religion is not always or solely a factor, but it becomes powerful when “things fall apart.” Heschel challenged us to be more concrete and precise, and she set an example by defining “religion”: a communal system of propositional attitudes related to the superhuman. She poked fun at what she called the “ghostbusters” approach to comparative genocide studies—“Find the ten factors and you win!”—and asked what happens to religion in a democracy. Does it lose its enthusiastic quality? Both she and Barnett observed that pluralism is not enough. Do we come together as liberals of different faiths or within each faith? Both speakers, and the two of them together, made a powerful impression. David Clark, a PhD student at Wycliffe College who is writing his dissertation on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called the event his “bibliography on stage.”

The full program of the symposium may be found at https://www.ushmm.org/research/scholarly-presentations/symposia/religion-and-ethno-nationalism-in-the-era-of-the-world-wars.

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Workshop Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Workshop Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust–and Gerhard Rempel’s Unfinished Book, Dove and Swastika: Russian Mennonites under Nazi Occupation, University of Toronto, June 12, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

On June 12, 2017, the University of Toronto hosted an intense and unusual event that brought together a small group of historians to discuss issues around the role of Mennonites in the Holocaust. The specific focus was on the manuscript written by Gerhard Rempel and under revision for publication at the time of his death in 2014. In a series of closed sessions in the morning and afternoon, Mark Jantzen (Bethel College, Kansas), Rebecca Carter-Chand (Clark University), Diana Dumitru (New Europe College, Bucharest), Aileen Friesen (University of Waterloo), Robert Nelson (University of Windsor), and Robert Teigrob (Ryerson University) presented their reflections on selected chapters. Doris Bergen (University of Toronto) chaired the conversation, and Richard Ratzlaff (University of Toronto Press, now McGill-Queen’s University Press) observed and contributed questions and insights.

Many important issues were raised, and what follows are only a few examples. Jantzen observed that Mennonites in the nineteenth century proved remarkably adaptable. He also emphasized that refusal to serve in the military was not central to Soviet Mennonite identity. Nelson noted that Rempel’s uncritical approach to his sources led to some problematic juxtapositions and assumptions about postwar Mennonite history. Friesen drew attention to translators, a job that opened the way to collaboration for many Mennonites, and police, the main role in which Mennonites would have participated in killing of Jews. Carter-Chand found that how Mennonites acted was quite typical of other small Christian groups (Quakers, Mormons). She wondered whether the Reich Germans treated Mennonites differently from other Volksdeutschen. Teigrob noted that the ways Mennonites in North America talk about things sometimes gets echoed in the scholarship (including in Rempel’s work.) Dumitru pointed out that in the manuscript the desire to defend the Mennonite community comes across as stronger than the desire to talk about the Holocaust. Mennonites seem to need a narrative to shield them from the Soviet past and ways they participated in that system as well as from the Nazi past. Jantzen mentioned that the Reich German Mennonites and their involvement in Nazism could use more study, and Ratzlaff mentioned Stutthof, where at least judging from the names on the records, Mennonites were deeply involved.

In the late afternoon, the room was opened to the public for a panel discussion. Bergen posed questions to each of the invited guests, who spoke from their areas of expertise to the topic. Jantzen and Friesen addressed why the issue of “Mennonites and the Holocaust” is currently “in the air” (Jantzen is hosting a major conference under that title at Bethel College in Kansas in March 2018). Dumitru situated the subject in the context of studies of collaboration, and Nelson linked it to transatlantic histories of colonialism. Teigrob looked at transnational and comparative commemorations of the war, and Carter-Chand reflected on Mennonites as one of many small, Christian minority groups active in Central and Eastern Europe.

The capacity audience included undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and members of the local community, among them some who identified themselves in the question and answer period as Mennonites, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, or people with no direct connection but a strong interest in the topics at hand.  At least one Holocaust survivor was present as were authors and editors of significant works in the field, notably Anne Konrad (Red Quarter Moon: A Search For Family in the Shadow of Stalin, 2012); and Harvey Dyck (editor and translator with Sarah Dyck of Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule, by Jacob A, Neufeld, 2014).

The event was sponsored by the University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies/DAAD; Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair of Holocaust Studies, and an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For more information on the conference in March 2018, click here.

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Article Note: Samuel Koehne. “Religion in the Early Nazi Milieu: Towards a Greater Understanding of ‘Racist Culture’”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne. “Religion in the Early Nazi Milieu: Towards a Greater Understanding of ‘Racist Culture,’” Journal of Contemporary History.  Prepublished January 1, 2016, DOI: 10.1177/0022009416669420.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

While many recent studies of religion and Nazism begin with religious institutions and work outward from there, Samuel Koehne’s research begins with the early Nazi milieu and assesses its openness to various religious options within or outside of well-established traditions. To do so, he examines the religious orientation of key figures within the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei, hereafter DSP), a relatively under-researched movement with numerous connections to the Nazi Party in terms of ideology and membership. Through his analysis of the DSP party conference in 1920 and DSP visions of “religious revival,” he identifies a spectrum of otherwise heterogeneous views united by antisemitism and a “racial spirituality that amounted to a kind of ‘ethnotheism’” (1).

Koehne’s demonstration of numerous connections between the Nazi Party and the DSP serves as a justification for using the latter to shed light on the former. Continue reading →

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Conference Report: “Re-Forming the Church of the Future: Bonhoeffer, Luther, Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, April 7-9, 2017

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: “Re-Forming the Church of the Future: Bonhoeffer, Luther, Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, April 7-9, 2017

By Katie Day, United Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia

On this spring weekend marking the 72nd anniversary of the execution of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer by the Nazis in their last, bloody, days, scholars gathered to consider his legacy in light of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation as well as current political shifts. Over 130 scholars and church leaders gathered from the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and South Africa as part of the annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics, held alternately in Germany and North America, a partnership of Union Seminary and the International Bonhoeffer Society (English Language Section). This year’s event was sponsored by Union’s Bonhoeffer Chair in Theology and Ethics, and coordinated by its scholar, Dr. Clifford Green. It was appropriate that reflections on Bonhoeffer take place within the spaces where the young theologian’s thought had been significantly formed in stays in 1930-31 and briefly in 1939: Union Theological Seminary and Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

The diversity and credentials of the presenters was impressive and included historians, theologians, ethicists, church leaders (including Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm) and even the former Prime Minister of Australia, the Honorable Kevin Rudd. Together they brought the life and theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer into engagement with five different historic contexts: Continue reading →

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Conference Report: “Catholic Antisemitism and German National Socialism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: “Catholic Antisemitism and German National Socialism,” Panel Presentation, Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association, January 6, 2017

By Jeremy Stephen Roethler, Texas State University

This session provided a broad survey of the complex history of the early twentieth century German Catholic Church and its legacy of both resistance to and complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich. The panel was attended by approximately 20-25 people from the American Catholic Historical Association, which met in conjunction with the annual American Historical Association conference in Denver.

Under the title, “Father Erhard Schlund: A Catholic Dialogue with Nazi Antisemitism,” Jeremy Roethler focused on an individual who exemplified the challenges facing historians seeking to understand the views of Nazi era German Catholics on both National Socialism and Judaism. Continue reading →

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Conference Report: 500 Years of Reformation: Jews and Protestants – Judaism and Protestantism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: 500 Years of Reformation: Jews and Protestants – Judaism and Protestantism, Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, February 12-14, 2017

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This year’s annual conference of the Leo Baeck Institute featured the theme of the Protestant Reformation and its impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Some 40 scholars took part in sessions that followed the evolution of Jewish-Protestant relations from the time of Luther and the Reformation era, through the Enlightenment and emergence of modernity to the cataclysm of Nazism and the Holocaust to the postwar era. Most panels were comprised of German and Israeli scholars, though a handful of North American academics were also present. Topics included Jewish perspectives on Christians and Christianity, Christian missions to Jews, conversion (in both directions), music and the arts as a sphere of Jewish-Protestant relations, and Jewish-Protestant relations during and after the Third Reich and Holocaust. The keynote speaker was Professor Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College, who challenged the audience with a provocative lecture entitled, “Is God a Virgin? Theological Benefits and Problems in the Protestant-Jewish Relationship.”

The second last panel of the conference tackled the theme of Jewish-Protestant relations “in the shadow of racism and fascism.” Dirk Schuster of the University of Potsdam spoke on the theme “Protestantism and Racial Boundaries: Jews, ‘Aryans’ and Divine Salvation at the German Christian Church Movement.” Drawing on the history of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, Schuster examined the way in which race can function as an exclusive (and excluding) space, sociologically speaking, with respect to religious salvation. Race, a collection of ethno-cultural differences and an imaginary collective which draws up borders against “the other” in the process of defining a national identity.

Schuster is particularly interested in the way in which Jews were denied access to Christian community, sacraments, and salvation on account of their Jewish racial identity. This was certainly the intention of the German Christian movement, when they focused on Martin Luther as a uniquely German holy man, or Adolf Hitler as the “Führer” sent by God to Germany in its fateful hour. Similarly, the German Christian (and Nazi) loathing of  “miscegenation” in not only the biological sense but also the spiritual or religious sense. Even Catholics, whom many Protestants scorned, were eligible for salvation in a way that Jews, who could not (in the German Christian mind) be Germans, were not. The irony in all of this, as Schuster noted, was that the Nazis themselves defined race based on church records–religious criteria!

Still, German Christians believed whole-heartedly in Hitler’s mission as the latest example of the revelation of God in and through German history. Under Hitler, Luther’s Reformation would be completed. All this meant that the political measures to socially and economically isolate Jews and drive them from the German Volk community were mirrored by the application of the Aryan Paragraph in the churches and the exclusion of Jews from the Christian community. Yet one problem remained: how could the German Christians isolate Judaism from Christianity? Here Schuster referred to Susannah Heschel’s book The Aryan Jesus and its account of the Grundmann Institute’s attempt to dejudaize Christianity. For Schuster, this was another way in which the German Christians attempted to create a space in which Jews would be excluded from Christian salvation.

Hansjörg Buss of Göttingen University followed, assessing “The Reception and Instrumentalization of Martin Luther’s ‘Judenschriften’ in the ‘Third Reich.'” Buss explores part of the terrain marked out by Schuster, namely, the ways in which Martin Luther’s antisemitic writings were employed by Nazi Protestants to justify their own antisemitism. National Socialist Protestants responded to those who expressed concern for Jews by reminding them that the founder of their church had advocated burning down Jewish synagogues, destroying Jewish houses, taking away Jewish prayer books, confiscating Jewish money, and forcing Jews to work. Luther, so argued National Socialist Protestants, developed a uniquely German piety that made it impossible to preach a Jewish Christianity to Protestants from the German racial community.

Buss explained that current research on Luther and the Jews emphasizes the continuity in his thinking, rather than the different consequences he proposed in That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523) and On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, Luther was idealized as a heroic German nationalist–by the time of the First World War, he was regularly invoked by propagandists. It was in this context that Paul Althaus described the reformer as Germany’s “secret emperor.” As antisemitism increased in the later 1800s, Luther was widely quoted, as in Theodor Fritsch’s Catechism for Antisemites (1887). In the Third Reich, Der Stürmer quoted Luther to criticize the churches for being too friendly towards Jews.

During the Nazi era, the German Christian Movement invoked Luther regularly, beginning with the first German Christian “Guidelines” of 1932, which confessed “an affirmative faith in Christ, one suited to a truly German Lutheran spirit and heroic piety.”[1] Buss explained how Luther’s 450th birthday in 1933 turned into a national festival of Protestant nationalist and Nazi ideas, an expression of a “commitment to Luther and Hitler.”

The German Christians built on this Protestant nationalism and emphasized Luther as a nordic fighter against the Jews. Buss noted that virtually all of the publications about Luther referred to the changed political situation under Hitler, and it was not uncommon for Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies to be reprinted and distributed to German Protestants. The Confessing Church, in contrast, avoided Luther’s antisemitic writings, but consistently affirmed both the Nazi state’s authority and its antisemitic policies. As clear as the Second Provisional Church Leadership’s 1936 memo to Hitler was in its condemnation of the state’s hatred of Jews, this was an exceptional occurance. More common were statements from clergy affirming Nazi policy and even noting that Luther had advocated even harsher measures than those taken by the Nazi state of the middle 1930s.

Finally, Buss examined the November 1939 publication of Thuringian Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse, called Martin Luther and the Jews: Away With Them! In this work, Sasse celebrated the way the German people had crowned the Hitler’s divinely-sanctioned fight for the liberation of the German people by attacking the Jews on Martin Luther’s birthday (November 10). Believing that Luther was the greatest antisemite of his time, Sasse went on to ask Nazi officials whether On the Jews and Their Lies could be used as a weapon in the current struggle against the Jews. Similarly, Walter Grundmann’s Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life drew on and twisted Luther’s ideas to advocate for a German racial and dejudaized Christianity. In sum, Buss demonstrates that both Christians and non-Christians used Luther’s antisemitic writings as “mental resources” (quoting Thomas Kaufmann) in support of Nazi antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University, Calgary, provided a North American perspective on the relationship between Jews and Protestants in his paper on “Nazi Racism, American Antisemitism, and Christian Duty: U.S. Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938.” Jantzen began by explaining how earlier historical accounts of U.S. Protestant responses to Hitler and his persecution of the Jews criticized Protestants for what they didn’t do, at times holding U.S. church leaders to the unrealistic expectations of stopping Hitler themselves or at least convincing the U.S. government to intervene in German domestic affairs.

Rather, Jantzen surveyed U.S. mainline Protestant church publications to discover what writers and editors, many of whom were influential church leaders, had to say about Jews and Judaism. He argued five main points: 1. that Protestant spokespersons viewed Nazism with great alarm and foreboding, sensing crisis in the air; 2. that they were primarily concerned with Nazi persecution of Christians; 3. that they also cared about the persecution of Jews; 4. that they both condemned and perpetuated forms of antisemitism in the United States; and 5. that, above all, they understood the challenge of Nazism in terms of a cosmic battle between Christianity and irreligion.

Even the staunchest mainline Protestant defenders of the Jews–men like Guy Emery Shipler of The Churchman–tended to reframe the persecution of the Jews into an attack against both Jews and Christians, or against religion in general. In part, this was a strategic move to rouse Christian support for Jewish refugees. Similarly, when W. Russell Bowie of the American Committee for Christian German Refugees solicited support, he consistently made the point that over half of the estimated 660,000 would-be refugees still in Germany and Austria were Christians, even if the Nazis defined them as racial Jews, and that the Jewish refugee crisis was very much a Christian problem.

Finally, Jantzen concluded that in 1938, in a context of German racism, American antisemitism, and a growing Jewish refugee crisis, Protestant church leaders understood their Christian duty as a call to respond to a profound sense of crisis. Democracy, civilization, Christianity, and all religion were under attack from the forces of war, totalitarianism, racism, and paganism. Clergy writing in mainline church periodicals responded by naming the evils of war and totalitarianism, in particular the threat that Hitler and Nazi Germany posed to the civilized world. They also fought against antisemitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without slipping into the language of long-standing anti-Jewish prejudices sometimes, and also not without reframing the persecution of Jews and the Jewish refugee crisis as the persecution of Christians and Jews and the Christian and Jewish refugee crisis. Most important to these church leaders, however, was the reaffirmation that Christianity was the only force that could ultimately save the world from self-destruction. Liberal Protestant writers and editors warned their readers about the forces of barbarism, totalitarianism, and war which threatened to destroy civilization, democracy, and freedom, while conservative Protestants focused more narrowly on apolitical Christian spiritual renewal and prayer as solutions for the world’s ills.

A lively discussion followed, as was the case throughout the three-day conference. Along with the host Leo Baeck Institute, the other conference sponsors included the Goethe University of Frankfurt’s Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD); the Minerva Institute for German History and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, both of Tel Aviv University; and the Center for the Study of Christianity at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There are plans for a publication of conference papers in the coming months.

Notes:

[1] Mary M. Solberg, A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), p. 49.

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Conference Report: “Election and Probation: Religious Elites and Social Leadership”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: “Election and Probation: Religious Elites and Social Leadership,” Bensheim Dialogue, Institut für Personengeschichte (Bensheim), April 20-22, 2017.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam

For the eighth time, the Institute for Personal History held the Bensheim Dialogue, a conference devoted to the historical study of individuals, social groups, and their relationship to society as a whole. This year’s conference was a continuation of last year’s meeting under the theme: Election and Probation: Religious Elites and Social Leadership (Erwähltheit und Berührung. Religiöse Eliten und sozialer Führungsanspruch). This year’s conference was focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Right from the start, in his introductory remarks, Volkhard Huth of the Institute for Personal History drew attention to the importance of the idea of election within Christian thought. It developed within the ascetic monasticism of antiquity, which, according to Sigmund Freud, ultimately depended on a special relationship between a deity and its recipient.

Michael Hirschfeld of the University of Vechta examined religious consciousness in German Catholic noble dynasties, using the example of the von Galen family. Continue reading →

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Call for Papers: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, March 16 and 17, 2018

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Call for Papers: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, March 16 and 17, 2018

Proposal deadline: Sept. 1, 2017

mla.bethelks.edu/MennosandHolocaust

The history of Mennonites as victims of violence in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly on the territory of the Soviet Union, and as relief workers during and after the Second World War has been studied by historians and preserved by many family histories. This commemorative and celebratory history, however, hardly captures the full extent of Mennonite views and actions related to nationalism, race, war, and survival. It also ignores extensive Mennonite pockets of sympathy for Nazi ideals of racial purity and, among some in the diaspora, an exuberant identification with Germany that have also long been noted. Now in the last decade an emerging body of research has documented Mennonite involvement as perpetrators in the Holocaust in ways that have not been widely known or discussed. A wider view of Mennonite interactions with Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Roma, Volksdeutsche, and other groups as well as with state actors is therefore now necessary. This conference aims to document, publicize, and analyze Mennonite attitudes, environments, and interactions with others in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s that shaped their responses to and engagement with Nazi ideology and the events of the Holocaust.

Paper topics are welcomed from a variety of perspectives, Continue reading →

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Article Note: Martina Cucchiara, “The Bonds That Shame: Reconsidering the Foreign Exchange Trials Against the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany, 1935/36”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Article Note: Martina Cucchiara, “The Bonds That Shame: Reconsidering the Foreign Exchange Trials Against the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany, 1935/36,” European History Quarterly 45, no 4 (2015): 689-712.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This fascinating and meticulously researched article demonstrates the importance of including the often-forgotten middle years of National Socialism in studies of the churches under Hitler. Martina Cucchiara examines a series of trials in 1935-36 against Catholic orders accused of contravening Germany’s regulations about foreign currency. The details turn out to be intriguing in themselves—we catch a glimpse of Der Stürmer’s blend of misogynist, antisemitic, anti-Catholicism and get a helpful lesson in the functioning of the bond market and the entangled economies of Germany and the United States in the 1920s—but most significant is Cucchiara’s central finding. The foreign exchange trials and the Nazi propaganda campaign that went with them, she argues, were first and foremost an effort by the regime to push the Catholic church “out of the public sphere.” Although she leaves open the question as to whether or not the regime succeeded in this attempt, Cucchiara strongly suggests the answer was “yes.”

Cucchiara’s nuanced analysis indicates that indeed the regime benefited in several ways. The trials were just one of a series of initiatives that stirred up crises and fomented division in Catholic circles. Lack of resolution around the concordat and the issue of lay associations, the episcopate’s pusillanimous responses to the trials, and the resulting alienation of the laity all served to increase what Cucchiara calls the regime’s “leverage” over the church. In addition, she shows, regional and local officials, like sharks who smell blood, “piled on” to pursue their own political agendas at the expense of weakened Catholic institutions. It is outside the purview of Cucchiara’s discussion, but one wonders whether Protestants, looking on, took pleasure in the disciplining of their old confessional rivals or felt a chill of dread as they pondered their own standing in the Nazi German order.

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