Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)
Review of Michael Brenner, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022). 378 pages, ISBN: 978-0-691-19103-4.
By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College
Midway in his study, Michael Brenner writes, “In this kind of atmosphere, Hitler had it easy” (162), exploiting for his own ends the antisemitic, ultraconservative, and pogrom-like madness drowning post-World War I Munich. No longer did the city stand for tolerance, erudite culture, and cosmopolitanism but, instead, had turned into a haven for violent right-wing extremism. In his immensely readable and well-searched study, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism, Brenner investigates the individual actors and events behind this change.
Brenner first focuses on the background of the revolutionaries and their relationship to Judaism – a relationship that spanned a broad spectrum. The most influential was Kurt Eisner, who, on November 8, 1918, became minister-president of the Free State of Bavaria. Historian Sterling Fishman, whom Brenner quotes, described “the full-bearded” Eisner as speaking “like a Prussian,” sound[ing] like a socialist, and look[ing] like a Jew” (31). Eisner’s Judaism was not of particular importance to him but, at the same time, he did not bear any “feelings of hatred for his Jewish background” (32). Nevertheless, Jewish spirituality influenced Eisner through the mentorship of the Jewish scholar Hermann Cohen, whose writings emphasized a messianic theology, yearning for earth’s renewal and a heralding of God’s kingdom. The legislation he promoted, such as eight-hour workdays and women’s suffrage, concretized this spiritual hope. Eisner was unsuccessful in translating his ideas into reality and ultimately failed to win the support of the Bavarian population. For example, only one percent of Bavarian women voted for Eisner’s Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (42). His term was brief, ending on February 21, 1919, with a bullet from the gun of Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, a rejected applicant to the antisemitic Thule Society. Though many antisemites praised the assassination, Count Arco’s act failed to gain him admittance to the Society due to his mother’s Jewish background.
Of all the revolutionaries, Gustav Landauer most embraced Jewish spirituality, especially the biblical prophets and their hope for a better world. Like Hermann Cohen’s relationship with Kurt Eisner, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was an intellectual mentor to Landauer, who, more than his peers, “recognized a Jewish dimension to the revolution” (61). On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Council Republic appointed Landauer the People’s Commissioner for Public Education, Science, and Arts. In leadership, he was joined by Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, both of whom had Jewish backgrounds. Mühsam had officially left the organized Jewish community as a religious denomination in 1926 but remained in solidarity with fellow Jews. The much younger Toller came from the “border region between Germany and Poland, where Eastern European Jews intersected with West European Jewry” (77). He rarely referred to his Jewish background during the revolutionary period but, in later writings, reflected positively on it.
All the revolutionaries under discussion suffered at the hands of the right-wing Freikorps. On May 1, 1919, Freikorps members arrested Landauer and “brutally murdered” him the following day in Munich’s Stadelheim prison (67). Mühsam, too, was arrested and imprisoned in a Franconian abbey, a fact that Brenner states more than likely spared him from the same fate. Still, he was not released until December 20, 1924. Toller was active in almost all the revolutionary governments and only survived the Freikorp’s wrath by hiding. In June 1919, he was captured, tried, and sentenced to a five-year prison term.
The final leader that Brenner writes about is Eugen Leviné-Nissen, who he describes as a “‘Jewish Bolshevik’ that antisemites could not have done a better job inventing” (87). Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, his native language was German, a fact that antisemites neglected to recognize. Leviné turned away from his Jewish faith early in life and embraced Communism. Editor of Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Party newspaper, he led the final Communist Council in Munich. Captured on June 3, 1919, at thirty-six years of age, he was sentenced to death and executed two days later, leaving a wife and children.
Although other individuals had various degrees of attachment to Judaism among the revolutionary leadership, chroniclers of the revolution failed to mention that most Munich Jews did not readily identify with radical socialism or support the council-style republics. Brenner quotes Werner Cahnmann, a Munich native and sociologist who later immigrated to the United States, “The council republic was represented as ‘Jewish’ from the outset…. On the other hand, the much more characteristic involvement of Jews on the other side was hardly ever mentioned” (94). Indeed, Brenner reminds us that historian Thomas Weber’s research found that “the percentage of people in the Freikorps with Jewish ancestry roughly corresponded to their percentage in the overall population” (96).
Chapter Three, “A Pogrom Atmosphere in Munich,” recounts the intensification of antisemitism following the Freikorps capture of Munich in early May 1919. The provincial Münchener Stadtanzeiger followed this worsening pattern, deteriorating from its tolerant stance toward Jews to comparing them with vermin – a charge also made later by National Socialists. The linguistic scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer also chronicled antisemitism’s increase, noting, “In truth, the Jews have it no better than the Prussian here; they share the fate of being blamed for everything, and depending on the situation they are either the capitalists or the Bolshevists” (130).
Catholic leaders did not help the situation for Munich’s Jews. Utilizing the online reports from the Vatican’s Bavarian Nunciature, Brenner details how Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, embraced and spread lies about Kurt Eisner’s Eastern European origins – he was born in Berlin – labeling him a “Galician Jew” (119). His assistant, Monsignor Lorenzo Schioppa, likewise defamed the revolutionaries by writing to the Vatican, “The Munich Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council is made up of the dregs of the population, of lots of non-Bavarians from the navy, Jews, natives who have long been rebelling against the nobility and the clergy, and hardly of citizens and soldiers who were actually at the front” (120-121). Schioppa ignored Toller’s thirteen months in the front-line trenches of World War I. Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, joined this clerical maligning bandwagon by describing Eisner as a “foreign Galician writer.” He also refused to meet with council republic representatives. However, Faulhaber granted an audience to Count Arco, Eisner’s assassin. Building on the research of the German historian Antonia Leugers, Brenner quotes extensively from Faulhaber’s diaries, recently transcribed from their original Gabelsberger shorthand and made available online, to reveal the archbishop’s conviction that the revolution was the work of Jews.
For their part, most of Munich’s Jews made every effort to disassociate themselves from the revolutionaries. Brenner stresses that they were not alone in wanting to avoid situations that had the potential to fuel antisemitism. For example, he describes how the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and the Zionist Association for Germany’s Chair Kurt Blumenfeld counseled Walter Rathenau in Berlin to decline the post of German Foreign Minister. Rathenau was murdered in June 1922 by right-wing assassins less than five months after he took office. Still, Brenner emphasizes there was a “wide range of views…inside the Jewish community” (148).
Chapter Four details the violence that followed the revolution’s end. Brenner notes that “between 670 and 1,200 people” were murdered following the final breakdown of the revolutionary governments (163). Eventually, Gustav von Kahr was elected Bavarian Prime Minister in March 1920, supported by the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), of which he was a member even though he was a Protestant. An antisemite, one of his first acts was to target East European Jewish immigrants for expulsion. His first effort was relatively unsuccessful, though he would implement a similar policy more successfully during his later tenure as Bavarian State Commissioner. Kahr surrounded himself with right-wing politicians such as Franz Gürtner, who would also later serve in Hitler’s government as Reich Justice Minister. Kahr’s government enabled the intensification of Munich’s antisemitic atmosphere. Brenner recounts the newly arrived Helene Cohn’s letter to the editor of Das Jüdische Echo, “Never before in my life have I sensed around me such a degree of hate-filled passion as in the streets of this city. When I buy newspapers on the street corner, look at bookstore displays, hear a conversation in a tram or restaurant – everyone is filled with hate and inflammatory defamations of Jews” (185). One of the perpetrators of this hatred was Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, the publisher of Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, the city’s most influential newspaper. Cossmann was a convert from Judaism to Catholicism who worked overtime to distance himself from his background. He served as a chief propagator of the stab-in-the-back myth and zealously propagated antisemitism. He went out of his way to defame Kurt Eisner’s former secretary, Felix Fechenbach, initiating a legal proceeding against him that some compared to France’s trial of Alfred Dreyfus.
This seething cesspool of hatred and mindless violence made Hitler’s rise possible. In Chapter Five, Brenner briefly recounts the 1923 Putsch and its aftermath due to its extensive coverage in other works. He is more interested in capturing the climate in Munich that led to the Putsch. Brenner returns to Archbishop Faulhaber, whom the Holy See elevated to a cardinal in March 1921. In 1922, speaking at the dedication of a Catholic school, Faulhaber declared, “In Bavaria there is still an army that won’t let the Christian denominational school be robbed by the revolutionary Jews. The people ha[ve] people now, and now we will see if we live in a people’s state or in a Jews’ state” (247). The following year, in a sermon on All Saints’ Day, Faulhaber seemingly spoke against Munich’s overarching antisemitic climate by proclaiming, “With blind hatred against Jews and Catholics, against peasants and Bavaria, no wounds will be healed. …Every human life is something precious” (248). Just over a month later, the Central Committee of Munich Catholics issued a statement printed in the Bayerischer Kurier: “The Herr Cardinal said nothing in his sermon other than what the commandment to love your neighbor announces and demands, that excludes no human being from love. Of course, he never wanted to excuse the sins committed by Jewish revolutionaries and profiteers against the German people and their well-being over the last few years” (248). Brenner is convinced that the cardinal had a hand in the statement’s release. His clerical secretary would make a similar about-face on behalf of Faulhaber following the cardinal’s well-known 1933 Advent sermons.
The antisemitic climate in Munich would eventually lessen after Heinrich Held became Minister President of Bavaria in July 1924 and brought stability. Still, no Jewish politician would hold government office in Bavaria following the revolution or even after 1945. Brenner’s work brilliantly reveals how antisemitism rose from Munich’s gutters to dominate early interwar society and politics. As he points out, even today, Kurt Eisner remains an outsider, commemorated only on a street sign in Neuperlach, far outside central Munich. On the other hand, Cardinal Faulhaber and Eugenio Pacelli’s names remain on centrally located street signs in the city’s center.
Helge-Fabien Hertz’s weighty dissertation (2021) from Kiel University, supervised by Rainer Hering (Schleswig- Holstein State Archives), Peter Graeff and Manfred Hanisch (both from Kiel University), now joins this recent research tradition. The study consists of a group biography of the 729 pastors who worked in the Schleswig-Holstein state church shortly before and during the Nazi era (1930-1945). The study is based on a broad range of sources: the clergymen’s personal files were evaluated; in addition, the author has consulted sermons and confirmation lesson plans, denazification files, the relevant state church archive files on the Kirchenkampf, documents on NSDAP membership in the Berlin Federal Archives, and a wealth of contemporary lectures, articles, letters, diaries. Hertz uses a sophisticated set of social-science methods to operationalize the exorbitant amount of data from this large group of people (quantification of “attitudes” and “actions” with the aid of indicators) and to present it using a variety of statistics, diagrams, etc. One must admit at the outset, it is not always easy to keep track of the whole given the extreme complexity of the work’s organization into “parts”, “sections”, “chapters”, and so on.
Bergen first asks what chaplains knew about the annihilation of the Jews and whether or not they sought to intervene. Working with letters individual chaplains sent to their bishops, friends, and family, official Wehrmacht reports on the chaplaincy, and more, Bergen paints an expected but devastating picture. Bergen demonstrates that the chaplains she studied were committed to their pastoral duties as they understood them. The chaplains celebrated religious services, counseled individual soldiers, and accompanied soldiers sentenced to death by a German court-martial on their final way. Before the war, Bergen shows, the chaplains continuously sought to prove their relevance to the soldiers in the field, both to prove their Germanic manliness and to prove themselves worthy of serving at the front. As Lauren Faulkner Rossi showed in her work Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation, the chaplains were constantly fighting efforts by the national socialist regime to curtail their activities, including the wartime decision not to replace chaplains killed or wounded in action with other chaplains and appoint Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere (NSFO), national socialist leadership officers, instead. (Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015)). Beyond the fear of the NSFO, Bergen shows the chaplains continuously sought to prove their relevance to the soldiers in the field, both to prove their Germanic manliness and to prove themselves worthy of serving at the front.
The main source material that Madigan draws upon comes from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939), the records of which only became available in 2006. But the story begins in the Risorgimento in the mid-nineteenth century and the triumph of a new liberal order that brought religious tolerance in the form of openness to non-Catholic religious confessions. Into this environment emerged evangelical Protestant missionaries from England and America, many of whom were Italian immigrants who had converted to a form of Protestantism in their new country and later returned to Italy. Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, the Salvation Army, the YMCA, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Adventists brought with them an evangelical style of preaching that emphasized conversion and an array of educational, medical, and social programs that benefited the Italian lower classes and peasantry. The fact that this Protestant missionary activity mapped onto a global trend of Protestant expansion in this period was all the more concerning for the Vatican, especially after World War I and the growth of Anglo-American power.
At the outset, Chandler argues that British Christians and the Third Reich is an argument for the validity of a transnational approach to British history—one exploring not those networks rooted in the British Empire but rather those networks rooted in “that liberal moral consciousness which extended the boundaries of conventional politics in the age of mass democracy” (1). He aims to demonstrate “that the relationship between British Christianity and the Third Reich is indeed a solid subject and that it is one of significance” (2) to the ways we find patterns in and write about the past, and does so by means of a chronological study drawing on a rich array of sources, including correspondence, memoranda, published books, polemical pamphlets, British parliamentary debates, records of various church assemblies, and the vast output of both church and secular press.
In 2015, a movement arose to repeal Gröber’s honorary town citizenship based on impressions contemporaries had of his speeches and his supposed support for the National Socialist regime, especially in 1933-34. In response, Mühleisen offers a differentiated analysis of Gröber and avoids definite judgment where ambiguity remains. Mühleisen also avoids moral judgment, which he argues is not the purpose of this historical study. He questions whether or not one can weigh moral accomplishments against moral failings to arrive at a “bottom line” judgment. In a fairly balanced account, Mühleisen discusses several lapses in judgment by Gröber, such as his decision to join the SS “booster club.” Also, Mühleisen notes that Gröber’s early public support for the regime confused the laity. While incomprehensible today, some have described membership in this organization as a protection racket. Similarly, in the first months of the new regime, Gröber emphasized his willingness to work with the new government authorities. Possible evidence for this is the Gestapo’s fear of Gröber’s fundamental opposition to the regime.
In the volume under review, the contributions of different generations of historians reflect this evolution. The subject is Cardinal Lorenz Jaeger, Archbishop of Paderborn, 1941-1973. Before becoming archbishop, Jaeger had served as a regular army officer in World War One, then entered the seminary. He served as Dortmund’s youth pastor and teacher during the inter-war period. Upon the outbreak of World War II, Jaeger immediately volunteered as a military chaplain. Both in his capacity as a teacher and as a military chaplain, he had to pass background checks by Nazi authorities. Various contributors, however, note that, during Jaeger’s episcopal ordination process, the regime’s security authorities reported fundamental misgivings about his appointment. As early as 1935, authorities noted his rejection of Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. The Sicherheitsdienst [SD] and regional NSDAP offices considered him a threat to the regime. At the ministerial level, both sides tried to de-escalate conflicts in the broader context of the regime’s relations with the Catholic Church, especially in episcopal ordinations. So the Reich Minister of Church Affairs, Hans Kerrl, approved Jaeger’s ordination as Archbishop of Paderborn.
First, Tarach uses National Socialist propaganda for his analysis and demonstrates that many Nazi stereotypes came directly from the Christian context: the Jews as children of the devil, the betrayal by Judas Iscariot, etc. In the middle of the twentieth century, those images were well known by Christian people. The murder of Jesus of Nazareth remains the central element of Christian anti-Semitism up to modern anti-Semitism and forms the background of all persecutions of the Jews. Even today, in parts of Eastern Europe, the Jew is symbolically burned at Easter because he murdered Christ. We fully agree with the author’s statement that the New Testament already spread the first anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: the Jew as murderer of God (48). The desire for the annihilation of all Jews, which was already virulent before National Socialism, is based precisely on this motive: a danger emanates from the Jews. That is why the extermination of the Jews is also seen as self-defense. At this point, the author could, or even should, have referred to the minutes of the Wannsee Conference to support his arguments. In it, the motivation for the extermination of the Jews in Europe by the National Socialists as an act of self-defense is particularly clearly expressed.
The book is divided into four main chapters – I. Christian Denominations and Nazism; II. New Faith Movement; III. Jews, Antisemitism and “Kristallnacht”; IV. War, Christians and the Holocaust – with varying numbers of sub-chapters. Instead of an introduction, Gailus precedes the chapters with a short section entitled “Concepts, Questions, Problems” in which he introduces his topic and the central question of his study: “What did the Germans believe in during the Hitler era?” (p. 8). Given it has been shown that 95% of Germans belonged to a Christian denomination during the Nazi regime and the “astonishing mixture of individual faiths” (p. 10) and “hybride Doppelgläubigkeiten” that Gailus has identified – in particular, those blending Christian faith and Nazi confession – the study sets out to analyse the traditional Christian characteristics in relation to the reshaping and partial new imprints of religiosity that occurred during the “Third Reich” and, thereby, offer an interpretation of the Nazi era in terms of the history of religion. The author proposes that the Nazi era was a “time of faith”, “Gläubige Zeiten” with a “high conjuncture” of faith and faithfulness (p. 11). Methodologically speaking, Gailus claims to look from above, from a “bird’s eyes view” (p. 11), though it should be noted that his altitude varies significantly throughout the book. Given his own extensive research, he flies in very close to Protestantism, while remaining more distant from Catholicism, the perspective on which is primarily literature-based and, therefore, more superficial. Gailus also flies particularly close to Berlin, the geographical focus of his own research and most of the examples he cites.
The most important contribution of Hesemann’s work is its exhaustive collection of all evidence and arguments that portray the pope’s record in a positive light. A frequently cited problem was the vague and diplomatic language used in the pope’s statements and writings; Hesemann points to contemporary sources that clearly understood the pope’s intent. Referring to Pius’ first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, which includes a reminder about human fraternity and about the right of the victims of war and racism to human compassion, Hesemann points to the New York Times, which reported that the pope “condemned dictators, those who break international agreements, and racism.” Furthermore, the Times reported that while such a condemnation had been expected, “only few observers had expected the condemnation to be so clear and unequivocal” (104). Hesemann’s evidence suggests that Pius was not only not silent but that readers understood his guarded speech as he intended.
Best, a historian at Iowa State University, pleads for a careful analysis of historical documentation related to German Protestant missionary activities in the nineteenth century within the context of German religious and political culture. His study of “the vast corpus of texts produced by the German missionary movement…between 1860 and the First World War” (7) arrives at the insight that relations between Protestant missionaries and German secular colonial elites were tense and fractured. They did not see eye-to-eye with regards to the purpose of establishing colonies in Africa. German Protestant missionaries aimed for a global Christian community in which the indigenous population (the colonized subject) was given some agency. They recognized the value of indigenous subjectivity that, in their imagination, would blossom economically on local levels, thus protecting them from becoming objects of brutal exploitation in the interest of European nation states, including the late colonial aspirations of the Wilhelmine Empire. What indigenous Africans were missing, according to German Protestant missionaries, was education, and that meant, of course, Christian education.
This is the starting point for James D. Strasburg’s fine study, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. It is the story of how, during and after the Second World War, leading US Protestants “identified Germany as the prime territory for creating a new Christian and democratic world order in the heart of Europe, one that could dispel any new totalitarian threat, whether spiritual or political” (2).
Yet, over the past few decades, scholars like Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Manfred Gailus, and Gerhard Lindemann – whose body of work together generally affirms the consensus view that the German Protestant Church as a whole did very little to resist Nazism or to speak out publicly on behalf of the victims of the Shoah – have published works highlighting the exploits of individual Protestants who, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase “[fell] into the spokes of the wheel.” These courageous Protestants include not only Niemöller and Bonhoeffer, but also 
Zoske worked for a long time as a practicing theologian and pastor in northern Germany. For obvious reasons, he is particularly interested in religious aspects in the biography of his protagonist, so that it seems almost appropriate to speak of the book as a biography of a young Protestant who is religiously searching. Sophie Scholl came from a Christian family: her mother Lina is described as a “cheerful Pietist” and her father as a “skeptical cultural Protestant.” Nonetheless, the Scholl siblings became enthusiastic about the Hitler movement in their teenage years. For many years, Sophie Scholl was a group leader in the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM) in addition to her church formation.
Above all, the work on the Thuringian German Christians, the dominant German-Christian movement in the “Third Reich” up to 1945 (Clemens Vollnhals), clearly shows how a large number of evangelical pastors–also far beyond Thuringia–dealt with National Socialism, perceiving it as connected to or at least instrumental in helping to build a “new Germany.” It is particularly striking, however, how many pastors–here again, beyond the Thuringian German Christians–welcomed the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists and even justified it theologically.