Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)
Review of Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2014), 374 Pp., ISBN 9780307363084.
By Stephanie Corazza, University of Toronto
Scholars of rescue during the Holocaust are very familiar with the story of Le Chambon, the French village that sheltered many Jews during the Second World War. Its success as a haven for the persecuted and its international recognition as a recipient of Yad Vashem’s title of Righteous among the Nations add to its distinction. Yet, accounts of this rescue effort are marked by inconsistent interpretations. Some suggest that individuals and families acted singly and silently to shelter Jews; others show that religious leaders directed operations and that networks funneled people into the region. Secrecy was paramount and many Jews used false identification papers; yet Le Chambon had a reputation as a safe haven and its activities were an open secret known to French and German authorities. Religion motivated the pious, mainly Protestant, rescuers, although people of different faiths were involved at all levels. These sometimes discordant claims help to explain the continued interest in the region by scholars, politicians, local memory custodians, and the descendants of rescuers and survivors.
Philosopher Philip Hallie wrote the first study of Le Chambon in 1979, and his work continues to shape the writing of this history. Using the framework of ethics, he sought to understand “how goodness happened” in Le Chambon by evaluating the behaviour of the villagers, and attributing a special role to the Protestant pastor André Trocmé. His explanation is that this was a religious community guided by a shared conscience and the principle of non-violence, so that sheltering Jews seemed “natural and necessary.”[1] The next significant contribution was Pierre Sauvage’s 1989 autobiographical documentary film Weapons of the Spirit. His interpretation aligns with Hallie’s and they share a moral tone, but the film introduced important nuances including the essential support provided by people and pastors in surrounding towns on the plateau as well as a variety of outside individuals and welfare organizations. Although Sauvage presents the rescue as a primarily Protestant endeavour, his film includes Catholic and Jewish rescuers. Following the film and a 1990 colloquium held in the town, interest in Le Chambon increased, as did dissent over what happened there and why. For instance, Hallie and Sauvage put the number of rescued Jews at several thousand, while others offer the more modest figures of 800 or 1,000. Other subjects of debate include the role of non-violence versus the presence of different forms of resistance, and the singling out of Le Chambon from the surrounding localities on the plateau. Some scholars have de-centred Le Chambon by referring to the entire region, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, reflecting the breadth of the rescue effort. Still, the standard view of a non-violent, Protestant rescue effort led by Pastor Trocmé in Le Chambon continues to dominate popular memory.
Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France claims to offer a new interpretation of the subject. Despite the title, her book accents the variety of inhabitants of the plateau who cooperated to help the refugees arriving there. She situates her narrative within the broader context of occupied France by treating French attitudes toward Jews and the Vichy regime, anti-Jewish measures including camps and deportations, self-help and rescue efforts in southern France, and French resistance. Her narrative of an increasingly persecuted Jewish population is compelling, if unsurprising to anyone familiar with this topic. Moorehead’s strength is her ability to trace individual stories throughout the entire period, weaving them into the larger historical narrative. For instance, she begins with the saga of the Polish Liwerant family in Paris, follows its two sons as they struggle to connect with each other while sheltered on the plateau, and the last we hear is of the older boy, Simon, waiting for his parents to return from the east.
Moorehead casts her work as the complete, never-been-told-before story. Certainly, she expands the standard scope of rescue in Le Chambon. Rather than rescue activities centered in one village, she shows how the surrounding areas also welcomed refugees. She insists that the rescuers were not just the descendants of the Huguenots, but rather a more diverse group of Christians that included Catholics and followers of a little-known Protestant sect called Darbyists. Most controversially, Moorehead minimizes the influence of André Trocmé by emphasizing the role of all pastors in the region and highlighting the variety of attitudes present on the plateau beyond non-violence. Her concluding explanation for the rescue includes a list of commonly cited reasons and “a felicitous combination of timing, place and people.”[2]
Although elements of Moorehead’s thesis are worth exploring – and indeed have been explored before – overall, it is weakened by problematic argumentation and a lack of methodological rigour. She seems unaware of the many discrepancies that her text generates. For instance, in order to establish her point about the diversity of religious groups involved in the rescue, she often refers to the self-effacing Protestant sects in the region, the largest of which were the Darbyists. She presents few examples, generally just referring vaguely to “Darbyists.” These were pious people, isolated from political concerns, who agreed to shelter children whom they may or may not have known to be Jewish; yet elsewhere she asserts that these same people were actively “defying the Nazis” and playing “a crucial role in the battle against Vichy for the Jews.”[3] It remains unclear just how they understood their own actions. Her claim that this modest group, too humble to seek recognition or accept the honour of Yad Vashem’s Righteous among the Nations, are among those who now feel bitterly shut out from the glory of Le Chambon, seems uncharacteristic.
Moorehead argues that faith was an important motivating factor for the rescuers, but she calls into question this point at the end of the book. Notwithstanding her insistence on a fresh interpretation, hers is a laudatory study of individuals motivated by faith to act bravely and with love, similar in tone to the early works by Hallie and Sauvage. Moorehead devotes a section to the history of the religious denominations in the area and her categorization of rescuers by faith suggests that she attributes significance to this factor. Then, in the Afterword, she adds “atheists and non-believers” to the mix of people involved in saving Jews, despite not mentioning anyone who fits those categorizations in the body of the work. And she leaves out Jews from this concluding list, even though the book covers several key Jewish figures.
Throughout, Moorehead paints vivid tableaux of daily life on the plateau. Her descriptions of scenes and terrain, personality quirks and physical features, evoke the period, the setting, and its characters. Yet it is in these details that she undermines the value of her work. Pierre Sauvage has already pointed out egregious errors to be found throughout the book.[4] One that stuck out to me appears in a poignant scene in the chapter on internment camps: Moorehead mistakenly identifies a relief worker who encountered many desperate mothers begging her to help their children as Mary Elmes, an American Friends Service Committee representative who spent time at the internment camp at Rivesaltes. She cites the well-known memoir by Vivette Samuel as her source, but having recently consulted this text I know that it was Samuel, not Elmes, who experienced this episode.[5] Such errors will likely be visible only to those familiar with the detailed history of this period, but scholars and others will worry about how trustworthy are other details, particularly since the author is not bound to the conventions of scholarly citation.
Some interpretive points that Moorehead raises are valuable, such as her challenge to the idea of Protestant exceptionalism and the attention she calls to the shaping of the memory of Le Chambon. However, she is not the first to make these claims. In a recent article pre-dating Village of Secrets, historian Marianne Ruel Robins considers alternative explanations to the standard view of Protestant faith-based hospitality. One of her findings is that local economic patterns (that is, habits of receiving seasonal paying visitors like sickly children and tourists) make it difficult to distinguish between hosting visitors and rescuing Jews. Significantly, Robins shows that her chronological look at the reception of Jews does not contradict the thesis of a region of morally courageous inhabitants: what was primarily an economic habit “took on a different meaning” as the situation for Jews and those who helped them changed over the years of occupation.[6]
Ultimately, Moorehead’s contribution does not get us much closer to understanding the contentious history of Le Chambon, nor does it help explain any of the lingering inconsistencies in its representation, such as the degree to which the plateau was ordinary or exceptional. In her final pages Moorehead claims that it was both: the plateau was exceptional in the scale of rescue and the unity of the inhabitants, but Le Chambon and the surrounding villages were just a few of many across France that did similar rescue work. The urge to turn this historical episode into a lesson about altruism reminds us of the different ways this story is used; some prioritize the understanding of the past on its own terms, while others see its commemorative and prescriptive possibilities. Moorehead’s book does not fully satisfy the first objective, but perhaps it will serve the second by eliciting some ethical reflection amongst its readership.
The author would like to thank Doris Bergen, Stacy Hushion, Michael Marrus, and Marianne Ruel Robins.
[1] Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 284.
[2] Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2014), 338.
[3] Ibid, 106.
[4] See Pierre Sauvage, “Does ‘Village of Secrets’ Falsify French Rescue During the Holocaust?” Tablet Magazine Online, Oct. 31, 2014.
[5] Moorehead, 57, 352n57. Vivette Samuel worked for the Œuvre de secours aux enfants, and in 1941 and 1942 she was a resident social worker at Rivesaltes. The previous sentence, also based on information pulled from Samuel’s memoir, is about Mary Elmes smuggling children out of the camp. She continues to use this source for the following sentence, but forgets to switch the subject back to Samuel. See Vivette Samuel, Rescuing the Children, A Holocaust Memoir (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 43, 78.
[6] Marianne Ruel Robins, “A Grey Site of Memory: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and Protestant Exceptionalism on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon,” Church History 82 (2013): 329-30. Pastor Trocmé’s wife, Magda, makes a similar point about the arrival of Jews in the region: “At first, they were paying guests in the hotels and at the farms. Later they became refugees.” See Carol Rittner and Sondra Myers, eds., The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 101.
When Tiso was born in 1887, Slovakia was an outlying rural part of the Hungarian kingdom, an enclave of conservative Catholicism staunchly resisting the approach of modernity, particularly in the commercial field. His education and spiritual formation as a young priest were in the highly reactionary tradition espoused by Pope Pius X. But at the same time, he welcomed the emphasis on social action, and the need for Catholics to promote a vibrant corporate life, along with engagement in corporate Catholic politics. He became the editor of a local Slovak newspaper, stressing the Catholic values of solidarity and modesty and attacking both the free-thinking Socialists and the rapacious capitalists, especially the Jews.
The bookend essays by senior scholars Omer Bartov and Timothy Snyder offer both critiques of current trends in the field and directions for future research. In his introductory piece, Bartov evaluates scholarly efforts of the last decade to situate the Holocaust as part of a broader phenomenon of genocidal violence in the modern world; in other words, the Final Solution is not the genocide but a genocide among others. Bartov is unsettled by attempts to compare the Holocaust to other genocides, arguing that such comparisons often obscure the particularities of the Nazi genocide and result in the erasure of the experiences of its primary victims, European Jews. Rather than understanding the Holocaust – with its enormous arsenal of scholarship and domination of popular culture – as a barrier to the study of other genocides, Bartov invites us to conceptualize it as a singular historical example of extreme violence that can in fact enrich the field of genocide studies.
Castagna’s excellently researched examination of the diplomatic archives of both the Vatican and the United States for this short period of twenty years provides a useful extension of comparative diplomatic history. He adds in various papal documents as well as notes the contributions of scholars of this subject in various languages. It is only unfortunate that the papers of Pope Pius XII are still unavailable, so that the next stage of the relationship between the Holy See and the United States, particularly where their policies diverged from 1940 onwards, remains to be told. (For these next events, see J. S. Conway, “Myron C. Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican 1940-1950,” Church History 44, no. 1 (March 1976): 1-15.) It can only be hoped that Castagna, who teaches at the University of Salerno, will be among those scholars invited to follow up this valuable study with a sequel, which could then demonstrate how, in the aftermath of 1945, this relationship actually became the bridge across the ocean of his title. The present short study must therefore be regarded as a prelude, describing the early stages of the thaw in Vatican-American relations which was only fulfilled when full diplomatic relations were finally established in 1984.
In their various explorations and elaboration of the papers from the Vatican archive, it is hardly surprising that these authors paint a favorable picture of the Vatican diplomats, especially of Cardinal Pacelli. Rob Ventresca, for example, in his survey of Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli and the Italian Fascism, agrees with Castagna that Pacelli’s moderating influence was designed to head off any open breach with Mussolini’s aggressive tactics over Abyssinia, and to promote a negotiated settlement of the dispute. The price paid was to mute the Church’s public criticism of the morality of Mussolini’s imperial misadventures, which Ventresca suggests set a pattern to be repeated later with the even more serious breaches of the peace by Hitler. In her essay, Emma Fattorini takes a more critical attitude. She repeats the theme of her book Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican, pointing to the profound differences of position and temperament between Pius XI and Pacelli. Fattorini clearly prefers the irrepressible intransigence of the elderly pontiff. Jacques Kornberg is even more critical, suggesting that both Pius XI and Pius XII failed to conduct themselves according to their own moral standards. The Vatican issued no outraged protests about the Nazis’ November 1938 Crystal Night pogrom because this was seen as not being a threat to Catholic interests. In Kornberg’s view, civic rights, or universal human rights, were not a matter for the papacy’s concern. On the other hand, Fr. Robert Trisco, in recounting the furor over the outspoken criticisms of Hitler and the Nazi regime made by Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago in May 1937, praises Pacelli for castigating privately the malicious invectives and disparagement perpetrated against the Holy See by the Nazi leadership. Trisco also describes the widespread support for Cardinal Mundelein given by different sections of American opinion, including President Roosevelt. Indeed Roosevelt took Mundelein’s advice about the difficult issue of how to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican, but otherwise does not feature much in these essays. In all, there are few surprises, since many of the contributors have already had their say elsewhere. But, as Charles Gallacher remarks, there are still unanswered questions, such as why Pius XI sent Pacelli to the United States in 1936, or what topics were covered when Roosevelt and Pacelli met privately at Hyde Park.
After the genocide, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray asked church leaders in Rwanda if “the blood of tribalism proved deeper than the waters of baptism”—a question that seems to speak deeply to Carney’s investigation of the role of the church. Carney quotes it both in the Introduction and the Epilogue (pp. 2, 207), though not in support of the idea of “tribalism.” On the contrary, he argues that the Hutu-Tutsi division was mobilized ideologically for defining Rwanda’s national independence from colonialism. As a historian, however, he wonders why people of the same faith ended up slaughtering each other. As a matter of fact, whereas Catholic parishes served as sanctuaries during anti-Tutsi violence in the years 1959 to 1964, this protection utterly failed in 1994, when “more Tutsi died in churches than anywhere else” (p. 197). An estimated 75,000 were slaughtered in the Kabgayi parish alone, the center of Catholic life since the early twentieth century. Throughout Rwanda, more than 200 priests and people from religious orders (mostly Tutsi) were killed, while other priests actively endorsed or supported the interahamwe militias, like diocesan priest Fr. Athanase Seromba, who burned down a church with 2,000 Tutsi inside (p. 308, n.124). How can we account for the dramatic shift from Catholic sanctuary to mortuary?
Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher opposed to the Nazis from the earliest days. Ever since 1921 the Nazis had him on their blacklist. The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project, currently headquartered at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, oversees the translation, publication, and promotion of von Hildebrand’s work. Despite their efforts, his work continues to be not very well known.
The patriarch, Adolf von Thadden, inherited the estate after Napoleon’s defeat and was greatly influenced by the wave of pietistic fervor which swept across Germany in those years. He turned Trieglaff into a center for revivalist meetings for the whole of Pomerania. This was a strongly conservative faith which maintained an uncritical biblical fundamentalism and often expressed itself in sectarian excesses. But it sought to uphold the witness of the individual believer and to prevent the incursion of rationalist or secular ideas. In particular, the Trieglaffers resented the top-heavy controls exercised over the church by state officials, who obeyed the commands of the monarch King Frederick William III in uniting the Lutheran and Reformed adherents into one United Prussian Church. The result was a clash in the village and the secession of a group true to their former loyalties and calling themselves Old Lutherans. They even built their own church at the other end of the village which still survives today.
Charles Marsh’s book is an eloquent, well-written portrayal of Bonhoeffer and his theological development from his young student days to the end of his life. Marsh offers two primary re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theological development: one concerns the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on Bonhoeffer during his year at Union as pushing Bonhoeffer to a more concrete and activist ethics once he returned to Germany. The other is an attempt to show the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s theology was influenced by Judaism, particularly the work of Martin Buber.
Bonhoeffer the Assassin offers a theological examination of Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace from a pacifist perspective (the authors are Anabaptists). It offers a good summary of these texts, from the early period of the 1930s through the prison period, demonstrating the strong theological continuity from his ecumenical speeches to Discipleship to Ethics that shows the centrality of a peace ethic in Bonhoeffer’s thought. The analysis and insights of these texts from a peace tradition perspective is a genuine contribution to the literature.
Reggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus builds on Young’s insights but breaks new ground in offering a detailed and vibrant portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that was in full blossom during Bonhoeffer’s time in New York. The course syllabi and reading lists for Bonhoeffer during this time (published in DBWE 10) show that Bonhoeffer read a number of books by black authors like Countee Cullen, and Williams talks about what it was the Bonhoeffer was actually reading, how authors like Cullen and W. E. B. Du Bois thought about racism in the broader sense, and what he would have encountered in the culture at Abyssinian Baptist Church and beyond.
In Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965, Stephan Linck analyses the situation in the four Protestant churches which united in 2012 to form the Evangelical Church of North Elbia. He had earlier organized a travelling exhibition which did much to break the silence about these churches’ failures in former years. His central point is that this part of Germany had a long history of extreme nationalism, backed by Lutheran authoritarianism. This made these congregations particularly susceptible to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and encouraged their extremist and anti-communist attitudes, which were only reinforced in this region after 1945, when so many refugees fled to the region to escape the Russian occupation and the subsequent Communist domination of eastern Europe. These churches’ active support of the refugees’ desire to regain their homelands, in Linck’s view, only exacerbated their reactionary political attitudes and entrenched their prejudices.
These same features were on display in the Bavarian Protestant Church, too. They are the subject of Björn Mensing’s chapter in the collection of essays edited by Antonia Leugers, entitled Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Mensing also comments acerbically on the apologetic and self-serving accounts of Bavarian Protestantism written by survivors, which excused the early and enthusiastic support given to Adolf Hitler as stemming from a desire to prevent a victory for Communism and as a sign of the “rechristianising” of a war-torn Germany. Those few voices calling for a more critical and less self-justifying account of the Nazi years were quickly sidelined. So too those who had been involved in the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler and had been executed as a result, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were regarded by the majority of the Bavarian Protestant leaders as “traitors to the national cause”. Mensing, who is now the Pastor of the Church of Reconciliation erected in the former concentration camp at Dachau, recounts with some bitterness the opposition to the building of this chapel by the former pro-Nazi pastor of the neighboring parish, clearly backed by the majority of his parishioners. It was only after the generation of participants in the Nazi years had all passed from the scene that a more fitting recognition of the church’s failures and a new sense of repentance could be encouraged. Mensing blames the continuing influence of the conservative leadership in the Bavarian Protestant Church for the slowness with which a greater sense of repentance and reconciliation has at last been adopted. But in view of the entrenched national conservatism of most Bavarian Protestants, Mensing believes there is still a long way to go before the deficiencies of the past can be finally laid to rest.
Edward Madigan’s valuable study begins with a comprehensive survey of the literature about chaplains and their war-time contributions, some written by chaplains themselves, such a Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, or the far more influential novel by Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That. Many of these books presented a largely negative picture of the war records of these chaplains, finding that they were generally not respected by either officers or men, being considered inadequate to the tasks they faced.
From the outset, Forstner makes it clear that his book will depart from the following works: Thomas Breuer’s Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstreit zwischen nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt im Erzbistum Bamberg (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992); Thomas Fandel’s Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: Evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930-1939 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997); and Tobias Haaf’s Von volksverhetzenden Pfaffen und falschen Propheten: Klerus und Kirchenvolk im Bistum Würzburg in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). All of these works, he argues, centered primarily on questions relating to resistance and politics without significant consideration of priestly culture and everyday life. Forstner places my own 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press) in the same category, though he does acknowledge that my work included “some” discussion of priestly culture. By contrast to these studies, Forstner seeks to understand specifically the all-too often hermetic world of Munich’s clergy, especially their pastoral training, outlook, and practices, quite closely akin to Monika Nickel’s Habilitation, Die Passauer theologisch-praktische Monatsschrift: Ein Standesorgan des Bayerischen Klerus an der Wende vom 19. Zum 20. Jahrhundert (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 2004), a study upon which Forstner lavishes great praise. Nickel’s work examined pastoral practice addressed in the Passau Monthly of Practical Theology.
The bulk of the book, which is written in a somewhat convoluted Germanic style, but competently translated into English by Rebecca Pohl, is based on a thorough examination of all of Hitler’s surviving speeches and writings. Bucher’s main contention is that Hitler’s worldview was far more than just an ideology adopted for tactical reasons in order to gain political support. Rather, in Bucher’s view, Hitler’s ideas constituted a theology, even though it was an intellectually crude and merciless construct, and based on an abominable racism. Bucher is well aware that speaking of Hitler’s theology is provocative because it seems to associate what Christians believe with one of the worst criminals of our era. So he is careful to ensure that he cannot be accused of trying to undertake any kind of vindication. His task is therefore one of explanation rather than condemnation, let alone approbation. In this he succeeds with consummate skill.
Dean Stroud’s Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich uses a broad definition of resistance along the lines of Tec’s definition. This is problematic, because his focus is preaching in the German Confessing Church. In his 48-page introduction to the historical context, Stroud does not engage the vast literature on resistance in Germany or offer his opinion on the competing definitions of resistance by scholars such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Peter Hoffmann, Detlev Peukert, and many others. But one can easily ascertain that he considers pastors in the Confessing Church to be a part of the Resistance, that he believes resistance among pastors was more wide spread than is acknowledged, and that he views Christianity as a radical alternative to Nazism. It is self-evident to Stroud that the thirteen sermons he includes in his book are “sermons of resistance.”
He begins with an account of the Norwegian reception of the German Church Struggle in the pre-1940 period, since he rightly notes that both nations had Lutheranism as their official Protestant state religion and as their traditional focus of loyalty. The challenge of Nazi ideology and its attempt to corrupt Luther’s teachings was therefore immediately recognized. Hassing pays tribute to the skilful manner in which Bishop Berggrav differentiated the Norwegian understanding of Luther from that held by many theologians in Germany. He also notes the skill with which the Norwegian church leaders were able to forge an alliance amongst themselves and resolve long-held theological antagonisms, in order to oppose the invaders and their supporters in Norway.
Lang was born in Scotland, the son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister. When he came to study in Oxford, he switched allegiance to a moderate high Anglicanism and opted to be ordained in the Church of England. His gifts were obvious and he quickly gained preferment. In fact, in 1890, at the age of 36, he became a suffragan or assistant bishop, and at the age of 44 was selected to be Archbishop of York, the second highest appointment in the English hierarchy. He spent twenty years there, before being moved to Canterbury in 1928. In Beaken’s view, it was hardly his fault that he was appointed to York too early and to Canterbury too late in life. He was a loner and a workaholic, and a bachelor who had difficulty in relating to others even of his own class and complexion. As a result, he never established any personal associations and had no following to uphold his legacy. This biography will, however, serve to record his achievements and gives a sympathetic analysis of Lang’s actions during the difficult and traumatic years of the 1930s.