Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)
Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 488
By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College
Raul Hilberg famously employed a tripartite schema in his Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. Subsequent works have often divided German society in the Third Reich along these lines. Some have lumped most of the population in the perpetrator category. Others have portrayed German society as a neat bell curve in which perpetrators and victims make up the extremes and the vast majority fit within the bell as bystanders. While categorizations have heuristic value, simple categorical divisions fail to adequately describe the complexity of human activity and change over time. In Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Mary Fulbrook probes the complexity of the concept of “bystanders”— a group she describes as “the muddled middle.”
Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She is a familiar and respected contributor to scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In this work she avoids teleological interpretations of events and rejects simplistic categorizations. She endeavors to tell the story of German bystanders “from the inside out” through “selected accounts of personal experiences” (16). She tells the stories of individuals. In so doing, she humanizes history. Victims and bystanders had names. They had stories. They were not a grouping of data points on a chart. Fulbrook’s subjects are profoundly human, and their complex stories challenge facile characterizations of society in Nazi Germany. Fulbrook’s primary sources for Part I are autobiographical essays from 1939 written on the theme “My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933.” These essays give a broad range of everyday experiences before such memories were shaped by knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. Likewise, in Part II she employs a variety of firsthand accounts and memoirs to tell stories from the ground level. Fulbrook argues well for the value and limitations of her source base in her introduction.
Fulbrook divides her analysis into two parts. Part I, “The Slippery Slope: Social Segregation in Nazi Germany,” analyzes German society from the First World War until the beginning of Hitler’s territorial expansions. Periodization matters in historical argumentation, and Fulbrook tells a fuller story of German society by beginning her narrative well before Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship. She gives a rich account of German society and the experience of German Jews before the racialization of the Nazi period. She demonstrates the shift from pre-1933, when “social class, gender, regional, family, or individual issues had been far more significant than religious affiliation or Jewish ancestry”, to the enforcement of (and voluntary conformity with) the dichotomy of “Aryan”/”non-Aryan” divisions in the first years of the Third Reich (27).
Three out of the five chapters in Part I detail societal changes before the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. Fulbrook demonstrates that, well before the Nuremberg Laws, “Germans were already learning and practising distinctions between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’ in everyday life, and with far-reaching consequences” (91). She asserts, “widespread acceptance and more or less willing enactment… was key to the broader impact of Nazi racism over time” (103). In account after account, Fulbrook illustrates the complexities of conformity and concern. Many victims of National Socialist racial policies recorded moments of kindness from their “Aryan” compatriots, but these were nearly always marked by fear and considerations of self-preservation. Fulbrook contends that this mixture of public conformity and private misgivings allowed non-Jewish Germans to enjoy “both the benefits of public conformity and the moral glow of private dissidence,” but “in the process, this pre-emptively conformist behaviour only served further to define and deepen the rifts that Nazi ideology introduced” (118). The implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 further solidified broad conformity with mandated racial discrimination. Part I demonstrates the shift from voluntary conformity to compulsory conformity to Nazi racial policies within Germany.
Part II – “The Expansion of Violence at Home and Abroad” – traces the broader and devastating reach of Nazi racial policies as the Nazi regime began to dominate its neighbors. Chapter six examines the spread of Nazi racial ideology among the German-speaking populations throughout Europe with particular attention on the Baltic states and Austria. Regarding Austria, Fulbrook concludes “the progression from conformity through compliance to complicity was massively accelerated” compared to the early years of Nazi Germany (193). Chapter seven highlights Kristallnacht as a definitive turning point for the “bystander society” in Germany. If non-Jewish Germans feared the potential violent response if they protested mistreatment of “non-Aryans” from 1933-1934, the unrestrained violence of November 9-10, 1938 demonstrated the danger of not conforming with state definitions of the Volksgemeinschaft. Fulbrook asserts, “In November 1938, it was neither ignorance nor indifference that shaped the polarization of popular responses, but perceptions of the relative risks versus potential benefits of different forms of action” (232). Simply put: Kristallnacht changed the math for those calculating the reasonableness of aiding their “non-Aryan” neighbors, diminishing the already small minority of those willing to not conform.
The next two chapters detail the horrific escalation of violence resulting in genocide. Chapters ten and eleven examine the category of “bystander” for Germans from 1941-1945. Chapter ten, “Inner Emigration and the Fiction of Ignorance,” demonstrates the widespread awareness of extreme violence against Jews committed in the East. Auschwitz often functions as a metonym for the Holocaust. Fulbrook explores how German “bystanders” employed this practice to claim ignorance: “The popular refrain ‘we knew nothing about it’ generally restricted the ‘it’ to a very narrow focus, such as the chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The focus on ‘Auschwitz,’ or ‘gas chambers,’ effectively excluded the discrimination and persecution of the peacetime years, with which the majority of people had been forced to comply, in which many had more actively participated, and from which many had also benefitted” (311). Fulbrook covers a wide array of personal cases where non-Jewish Germans learned of the murderous atrocities against Jews. At this point in the regime’s power (and usage of violence), she acknowledges the great difficulty facing citizens who ran the risk of becoming victims of extreme violence if they expressed dissent, “yet remaining silent meant in effect condoning brutality and murder, even if this strategy was a form of ‘muddling through’ in existentially threatening times” (339).
Fulbrook concludes with an indictment of both German elites and the wider society, but with elites bearing the greater burden. She faults elites for not standing against Hitler at an early stage, which left members of the wider society in “an arena of repression and violence, in which it was easier to conform” (341). Fulbrook identifies gradual societal change rather than a driving ideology as the crucial feature of the creation of a “bystander society” that acquiesced to (and often benefitted from) the persecution of Jews. She argues that the greatest lesson is to “explore how very small changes in everyday life that seem anodyne or justifiable at the time can have catastrophic consequences within a matter of just a few years” (374). The pre-war Nazi years are more than the “Seizure of Power,” the Nuremberg Laws, and Kristallnacht. Fulbrook’s careful narration of everyday shifts and accommodations to Nazi racial policy in German society show the complexity of human agency and possible choices in the face of growing violence.
Mary Fulbrook’s account of German bystanders reflects both sympathy for the difficulty of choices made under the shadow of violence as well as grief that courage was the exception and not the rule. She reflects upon the emergence of a “bystander society” — “a society in which social relations and political conditions are such that most people would either not want or not dare to intervene on behalf of victims, and in which most people learned to look away” (381). With hindsight, one can see that the early years of the Nazi regime were the years in which dissidence would have proven most effective, yet in those early months and years when so many Germans expected National Socialism to be a passing fad, many opportunities were missed as people just muddled through. Fulbrook closes her book with a final charge that the best way to enact the cry of “never again” is to be aware enough to enact “earlier or more effective intervention. It is, then, vital that we extend our understanding of the historically contingent conditions for the production of a bystander society” (399). Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society enriches the scholarship on German society in the Third Reich and serves as a helpful reminder of the gradual developments that lead to nightmarish catastrophes.
While not directly addressing the scholarship of the modern German churches, this book will help inform future studies addressing the everyday experience of otherwise anonymous members of German society in the Nazi era. Scholars of the German churches will recognize the growth of state power in the mid-1930s that made dissidence far less probable or effective than it was in 1933. Fulbrook’s concept of the “muddled middle” may find particular resonance in studies of German Protestantism, which have often focused on the Confessing Church and Deutsche Christen minorities to the neglect of the majority.
The primary argument of the book is that conservative student activists, and especially leaders of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (Association of Christian Democratic Students or RCDS), were not only present during the 68er generation’s protests but were meaningful actors that shaped many of the era’s signature events. The photographs and opening anecdotes to each chapter alone convincingly prove this point. The cover photo shows a famous debate in Freiburg between the older liberal academic Ralf Dahrendorf and young Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund (SDS) figurehead Rudi Dutschke. Lurking in the margins of the photo are young Christian Democrats, Meinhard Ade and Ignaz Bender, who helped organize the event and participated in the debate. Von der Goltz emphasizes how these two students are rarely recognized and sometimes even cropped out of this famous photo to illustrate how the primary subjects of her inquiry have been overlooked. The presence of Ade and Bender at the debate is nonetheless significant. On the one hand, they positioned themselves against their generational spokesperson, Dutschke, and spoke out against left-wing radicalism. On the other hand, their willingness to dialogue with left-wing students and their embrace of the liberal Dahrendorf distinguished them from the older generations of Christian Democrats. Another chapter opens by revealing that the RCDS had organized the visit of the South Vietnamese ambassador in 1966, which Rudi Dutschke and the SDS interrupted, to intentionally draw national attention to the New Left’s unpopular protest tactics. Additionally, the fifth chapter opens with a description of when RCDS chair Gerd Langguth held his ground, condemning the constitutional threat posed by the Marxist Student Association Spartakus while being pelted by cheese curds in 1972. Such examples highlight the often-forgotten role of the right in these moments of protest and illustrates how young Christan Democrats initiated dialogue about reform in the 1960s, imitated many of the theatrical tactics of their left-wing adversaries, and eventually condemned the far-left’s militant turn in the 1970s.
Based on her 2017 dissertation in Protestant theology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Loos presents a meticulously researched, insightful, and densely written work on German Protestant attitudes toward communism in general (ideas, ideologies, organizations) and Soviet communist-Bolshevism in particular. Occasionally referencing pre-World War I events, her focus is Germany’s political transition through the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, tracing the intensification of anti-communist rhetoric on the eve of World War II and the eventual military assault on the Soviet Union in 1941. While the opening chapter points to a few academic-theological debates at the turn of the century on possible family resemblances between the ideals of early Christian and communist communities, the last chapter briefly outlines post-war developments in the Protestant churches until the mid-1950s, with anti-communist stances, though more restrained, remaining largely intact.
The study on Catholic women authors was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the University of Erfurt. Antonia Leugers, Jörg Seiler, and Lucia Scherzberg, well-known historians of German Catholicism, as well as other church historians and several literature scholars and experts in database-supported research, collaborated on this study. Establishing a database of 160 Catholic women authors, as many as the grant permitted, the participants welcome future scholars to append additional writers, especially from earlier and later periods, to the historical record.
Instead, the volumes offer a wealth of case studies. Some of the authors, such as Gertrud von le Fort and Hedwig Dransfeld, were well-known, while others published only a few works. Each of the authors has their history. The Leugers volume includes a primarily quantitative summary of the women’s experiences, how many got divorced, converted to Catholicism, left the church, lived in same-sex relationships, had children out of wedlock, attempted suicide, chose cremation, were childless, etc. Leugers admits, however, that such personal information is sometimes difficult to obtain and that, given the limited sample, the data are more “symptomatic” than representative. This detailed qualitative analysis, however, lacks explanatory power. The more important questions raised in the project remain unanswered. The authors offer no conclusions about Catholic women’s emancipation, their understanding of gender, chastity, and parenthood. While some suggest disapproval of modernity, most suggest ways of accommodating it while maintaining a life of faith. In all cases, Catholic faith triumphs. Beyond this, however, this rich body of evidence cries for additional meaningful analysis. One wonders if these volumes report results from which results can be drawn.
Another instance in which women’s agency proved important can be found in Dominik Schindler’s discussion of the relationship between the Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund and Michael von Faulhaber, a theology professor at Strasbourg and bishop of Speyer. In a nuanced brief essay, Schindler argues that Faulhaber actively supported the formation of the Frauenbund and the Hildburgisbund, an organization supporting female university students. According to Schindler, Faulhaber largely adhered to traditional values, but insisted that Catholic values reflect the equal role many Catholic women played in securing the family’s income. He also argued publicly that Catholic theology proved no obstacle to women’s suffrage. While men remained heads of household, this did not consign women to second-class status. Faulhaber’s view of the family remained conservative. Still, he acknowledged that in an industrial society, a man’s wages might not suffice to meet the family’s expenses, and thus a woman might be forced to work. Faulhaber argued that women from the upper classes should be encouraged to participate in social and cultural life. In contrast, women in the lower classes deserved much support to earn an honorable living. He believed that women’s work was necessary to meet the needs of their children. Schindler argues that, even if Faulhaber’s views seem backward today, at the time, they were quite progressive.
Under the terms of the Hitler-Mussolini Agreement, all those South Tyroleans who retained Austrian citizenship after 1919 were now considered citizens of the Reich. They had no choice but to resettle in post-Anschluss Germany. South Tyroleans who had become Italians in 1919 were given a choice. They could opt for Germany and be resettled as German citizens in Germany, or remain and be confirmed in their Italian citizenship. Lamprecht successfully illustrates the painful decisions that South Tyroleans, lay and clergy, had to make. As a result of effective German propaganda and Italian fascist repression, more than eighty percent of South Tyroleans opted for Germany. South Tyrolean laypeople opted for Germany primarily out of resentment of Italian fascism and Italianization policies. The clergy in the parishes, however, found the decision much more difficult. Most sought to remain in their homeland.
Another aunt, on the other hand, talks incessantly about the damnation that awaits Hirneise because of her turning away from God. For this aunt, there is no reality outside of faith, which is why she constantly asks God for forgiveness for Hirneise and her mother. This aunt’s husband is also strictly religious, but unlike his wife, he accepts scientific views to explain the world. For example, he sees the creation of the universe through the Big Bang as entirely possible. And he also accepts that people turn away from God, a stance that his own wife acknowledges with incomprehension. Hirneise’s mother, for her part, reports how her own mother (Hirneise’s grandmother with dementia) had demanded that her daughter remain completely abstinent until her husband—who, it should be noted, had left her—came back to her. The subject of the divorce is not discussed further, so it remains unclear why Hirneise’s father left the family. And of course, he never came back.
In the second chapter, Pangritz addresses the problematic distinction between the terms anti-Judaism and antisemitism. He shows that the distinction between a theologically-argued hostility towards Jews and a racially argued antisemitism, which has been repeatedly postulated since the end of the Second World War, has not stood the test of time. On the contrary, such a distinction harbors the danger that (Christian) hatred of Jews is trivialized by juxtaposing it with antisemitism. Pangritz proposes “not to speak of a break, but rather of a transformation of the traditional Christian ‘doctrine of contempt’ (Lehre der Verachtung) into the modern forms of antisemitism” (35). It remains unclear, however, why Pangritz returns to the concept of anti-Judaism later in the book (e.g. 119). The term has been overused by Christian apologetics, and Pangritz himself has pointed out that the academic distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism has not produced any new insights or meaningful differentiations. (30). Conceptual clarity would have been helpful here, especially since Pangritz argues well with Léon Poliakov, Peter Schäfer and even Reinhard Rürup that “antisemitism” should be used in its most general sense: “The word ‘antisemitism’ denotes hostility, hatred and contempt of all kinds against Jews and Judaism; this does not exclude differences in motivation, but includes them” (33). However, this small point is the only criticism I can make in the entire book.
But as Tim Lorentzen’s new book illustrates, it is hardly the first time that interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been based on his ties to the German resistance. Lorentzen, Professor of Early Modern Church History at Kiel University, traces the chronology of German cultural narratives about Bonhoeffer’s resistance, and their intersections with German Protestant memorialization, from 1945 to 2006. His focus on resistance (rather than German historiography about Nazism, the Holocaust, the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or Bonhoeffer’s theological writings) is a narrow lens through which to understand Bonhoeffer, but it raises interesting and provocative questions. As historians know, Bonhoeffer was a minor figure in the resistance circles—and yet this very aspect of his life has become central in the narratives about him. Would Bonhoeffer’s theology be as well-known and widely read today if this were not the case? Has the emphasis on resistance led to the historical distortions one finds in many works on Bonhoeffer? Conversely, does it offer insights we might not otherwise have into his theology and his life?
The film, which is beautifully shot and scored, but at times laden with clunky dialogue, begins with a glimpse into the domestic life of the Bonhoeffer family (warm and loving, and also tranquil until Dietrich’s beloved older brother Walter is killed in the Great War). Yet it largely focuses on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933. The film flashes back and forth, from Bonhoeffer’s imprisonments in Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to the years preceding the war. It tells the tale of a young theologian whose participation in the 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer and overthrow the Nazi regime seems nearly inevitable. The flashbacks often muddle both the chronology and the film’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s de-contextualized words.
Breger rightly notes that following World War II, neutrality had a negative connotation and was often seen as a form of collaboration with the Nazis. Countries like Switzerland, and to some extent Sweden, did not emerge from the war with their reputations fully intact. Consequently, for many years, Vatican neutrality has received little attention in academic literature. This volume, which spans from 1870 to 2020, helps to close that gap by examining various aspects of the Vatican’s neutrality over these 150 years. However, the main focus is on the Vatican’s neutrality as defined in the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which also established the city-state. Breger states the goal of the project thus: “This book will consider the interplay between two normatively disparate subjects – the concept of neutrality in international law and the concept of the Vatican as a neutral actor in international relations” (Breger xii). This review will provide a general overview of the volume, highlighting a selection of the thirteen essays rather than examining each one in detail. I will focus primarily on essays that fall more closely in my own research purview, which deals with Fascism, WWII and the immediate postwar years.
Christian internationalism has yet to find a secure place in the various histories of twentieth-century churches. Very largely this is due to a persistent emphasis on national categories and narratives, but denominational perspectives have also fashioned a great deal of what we expect to find in the foreground. All too often, Bell and Oldham may be observed, usually dutifully and briefly, hovering in the background of anything other than ecumenical surveys. In the final volume of the recent Oxford History of Anglicanism (OUP, 2019), Bell flits about here and there, but there is no very confident sense of where to put him for very long. Meanwhile, Oldham, the United Free Church layman, has almost vanished from ecclesiastical memory altogether. This is an authentic tragedy because it indicates how horizons have contracted across the western Protestant churches in the half-century since their deaths.
After setting his agenda in the introductory chapter, Skiles outlines in Chapter 2 the religious conflicts under National Socialism, and more specifically, the division in German Protestantism between the German Christian movement, which sought to align Protestant theology and praxis with Nazi ideology, and the Confessing Church. For Skiles, at the foundation of that conflict was “a profound disagreement about the nature of divine revelation,” (p. 28) with the German Christians claiming to find divine revelation in history, national identity, and racial “science.” By contrast, the Confessing Church, in the spirit of the Reformation, held to the doctrine that knowledge of God is to be found in scripture alone. This chapter provides important context as it guides the reader through some of the early milestones in the regime’s conflict with the Confessing Church: the controversy over the “Aryan Paragraph” of 1933, which excluded clergy of alleged Jewish heritage from the pastorate; the subsequent formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League, which formed the basis for the Confessing Church; and the issuing of the Barmen Declaration in 1934. Skiles also effectively challenges in this chapter two common and simplified interpretations: that the Confessing Church was an anti-Nazi resistance group, and that the Confessing Church’s conflict with the regime was essentially about ecclesiastical freedom.