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Review of Tilman Tarach, Teuflische Allmacht. Über die verleugneten christlichen Wurzeln des modernen Antisemitismus und Antizionismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Review of Tilman Tarach, Teuflische Allmacht. Über die verleugneten christlichen Wurzeln des modernen Antisemitismus und Antizionismus (Freiburg–Berlin: Edition Telok 2022). 224 pages. ISBN 9783981348644.

By Dirk Schuster, University for Continuing Education Krems / University of Vienna

Christian anti-Judaism – a term that still causes extreme controversy today. To put it simply, this is intended to draw a distinction from modern racial anti-Semitism and reduce Christian anti-Semitism to theological arguments alone. The reviewer has had problems with such a distinction from the very beginning, since it suggests that there is a good (Christian) and a bad (racial) hatred of Jews. Tilman Tarach uses this topic and presents a book that convincingly explains that such a distinction is no more than a relief strategy for a Christian socialized society (134). The central thesis is that the most important arguments of modern antisemitism are based on Christian antisemitism (10).

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 additional references, such as in Chapter 8, are particularly interesting. Tarach compares the classic anti-Semitic accusation of poisoning by the Jews, such as poisoning of wells, etc., with the arguments of modern vaccine refusers and conspiracy theorists, who argue using those same anti-Semitic narratives.

The main part of the book is made up of the sections from Chapter 9 onwards. Here Tarach clearly and comprehensibly points out, partly with recourse to existing research literature, that so-called racial anti-Semitism was invented by the churches. As early as the sixteenth century, the Jesuit order had introduced a kind of “Aryan proof” that was even stricter in its interpretation than the Nuremberg racial laws of the National Socialists. It was not until 1946 that the Jesuit order removed this section from its constitution. The same can be found in Spain since the fifteenth century. Here, like in modern anti-Semitism, blood was of crucial importance: This means that converts and their descendants were still regarded as “Jewish” since those persons would carry Jewish blood. In some Spanish areas, converts still had to wear the so-called Jew’s hat because of their “Jewish blood”. As the author rightly points out, this alone shows that a distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and modern racial anti-Semitism is untenable, because the reference to biological characteristics has long been part of Christian anti-Semitism. Conversely, it should be noted that so-called modern racial anti-Semitism is based solely on the religion factor. The Nuremberg Race Laws defined Jews and “half-Jews” solely based on a person’s religious background or the religion of his ancestors. And the anti-Semitic laws from Spain in the early modern period, introduced by the church, served as a model for the law in the Third Reich.

In chapter 12, Tarach describes very impressively how the nature of Christian anti-Semitism developed and how those narratives are still present today: The Jew rejects Christ, which is why he becomes a threat to Christian identity. The refusal of Jews to convert to Christianity has thus increased hatred of Jews over the centuries. Jews are thus understood as bearers of individuality because they do not want to belong to the Christian community, which automatically makes them a danger of wanting to destroy the Christian community and identity. The image of the destruction of German identity by the Jews can be found again in the nineteenth century in the völkisch movement. The argument remained the same and was adapted to the realities of modernity. In addition, deeply rooted stereotypes that people have been presented by the church for centuries could be served.

The last chapters go into specialized topics such as Israel and Islamic anti-Semitism. Here too the author explains that the arguments behind the various stereotypes always come from the Christian context.

The overall verdict on Tarach’s book can only be: Anyone who deals with the subject of anti-Semitism or church history should read this book.

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Review of Manfred Gailus, Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich (Freiburg: Herder 2021). 223 pages. ISBN 9783451033391.

By Sarah Thieme, University of Münster

With his monograph “Gläubige Zeiten”, Manfred Gailus, also one of the editors of this journal, succeeds in providing a compact synthesis of his many years of research on the history of religion during the National Socialist era and his thesis of a “religious revival” (p. 15) provides a convincing framework for his account. This well-executed study is rich in examples and quotations from contemporaneous actors that bring the story to life for the broader audience to whom he is presenting the current state of research on the “return of religiosity” (“Wiederkehr des Religiösen”) (p. 11) from 1933 to 1945. These years were marked by diverse faiths and a multitude of (often hybrid) creeds, an intensification of religious action, competition between religious actors and conflict over questions of faith.

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 first chapter on the two main Christian denominations is particularly compelling. Gailus convincingly develops the argument that there was a significant “religious experience” (p. 15) in 1933 that can be perceived as a turning point which raised hopes for a re-Christianisation, especially within Protestantism. As evidence of this shift, the author refers to a deluge of confessional publications and the mass marriages of Berlin stormtroopers, which, by being initiated by enthusiastic Protestant pastors, demonstrates that the Nazi state welcomed such confessional commitment, at least initially. Gailus tells the story of the so-called “Church Struggle” or “Kirchenkampf” as an internal Protestant conflict between the völkisch-antisemitic religious movement “Deutsche Christen”, which dominated many regional churches, and the internal church opposition to it, the “Bekennende Kirche”. The internal tension between these groups permeated all levels of the church, creating disputes amongst church leaders and intellectuals and local disputes within the parishes. The Apostle Church in Berlin provides a particularly vivid illustration, which included blockades of the church space, fights on the pulpit and loud counter-sermons.

Using the Protestants as a starting point, Gailus evaluates the “performance” of the Catholics, whom he suggests were “less moved” (p. 23) in 1933. It is noticeable that the author analyses Catholics in a more general way and provides fewer examples of local and regional actors. He focuses primarily on the Reichskonkordat, the treaty between the Nazi government and the Vatican made in the summer of 1933 and whose observance the Church and the Nazis struggled over in the following years. To summarise, Gailus emphasises that although Catholic religiosity and Nazi faith were not mutually exclusive, in comparison to the Protestants, who he considers as fairly open to National Socialism, he considers the Catholics, overall, as more reserved and sceptical and, thus, increasingly pushed out of the public eye by the National Socialists. A stronger appreciation of the internal-Catholic plurality and diversity of forms of behaviour would have been desirable. It would also have been preferable if the developments between 1933 and the start of the war had been examined more closely. Having said that, Gailus succeeds exceedingly well in his interpretation of Protestantism, which he vividly portrays as a divided “many-voiced and dissonant choir without a conductor” (p. 37-8).

In order to do justice to the breadth of the religious field, given the great competition over questions of faith and a multitude of religious confessions that occurred at the time, the second chapter covers the new faith movements in the “Third Reich”, i.e. the völkisch movements, the so-called “God-believers”/“Gottgläubige”, and religious factions within the NSDAP.

First, he uses the example of the heterogeneous “Deutsche Glaubensbewegung” and the “Ludendorff Movement” to show the dynamics of the new-religious awakening that occurred from 1933 onwards. The churches in particular saw the “neo-pagans”, whom they overestimated, as a great threat. However, the Nazi state, which initially allowed the völkisch faith movements to continue, wanted to prevent a religious division of the “Volksgemeinschaft” and increasingly undermined the new-religious groups from 1936 onwards as the new faith was to serve National Socialism. Young, fanatical National Socialists in particular – usually SS men, party functionaries and civil servants from industrial-urban regions, often from the fringes of Protestantism – saw the NSDAP and SS as their new religious community and called themselves “Gottgläubige”. From 1936 on, they were officially recognised as a third denomination despite not having an organisational context, an explicit programme of faith or a religious practice of their own.

Within the NSDAP, Gailus considers the “Gottgläubigen” among the “ideological rigorists”, one of three distinct religious-political factions within the party, although they did not express their religious-political conflicts openly. In addition to this group, with their radical anti-church and anti-Christian attitudes, there was a large group of “Christian National Socialists” in the middle and lower levels of the party hierarchy, who desired a synthesis of beliefs, and thirdly, the “centrists” who wanted to avoid the NSDAP’s break with the large Christian portion of the population because of the power politics. Thus, the NSDAP left the solution to the religious question open. Based on the membership statistics, however, the party remained a Christian one. Nevertheless, Gailus considers the religious dimension of the Nazi movement as an expression of the religious revival, which he exemplifies, inter alia, with the so-called “Lebensfeiern”.

The third chapter is less strongly oriented towards the thesis of the “religious revival”. In this chapter, Gailus explores the perspectives of religious actors on Jewish people and their behaviour during the November pogrom of 1938. He shows how Judaism was declared “evil” by Nazi salvation beliefs and how this added a religious dimension to racist antisemitism. Following Saul Friedländer, the author puts forward the thesis of “redemptive anti-semitism” unfortunately without explaining the concept in more detail. He also elucidates how both denominations supported racist exclusion by issuing so-called “Aryan certificates”. According to the author, the churches and the new Nazi faith conformed in their “Frontstellung” – against people of Jewish faith. Due to his statement that Jews “were not an independent player in… the religious field” (p. 89), they appear merely as objects in the depiction of this chapter.

With regard to his question about the national-socialist religious foundation of antisemitism, Gailus regrettably omits the perpetrators of the violence in his examination of the actors and reactions of Christians to the so-called “Kristallnacht”. He emphasises the silence of the churches as institutions and, at the same time, shows that many Christians, especially Protestants, agreed to the racist pogrom. A small number of individual clergymen spoke out against the events publicly in sermons. However, they themselves then had to reckon with attacks and arrests, as is demonstrated through several case studies. To explain the pogrom from the point of view of Nazi believers, the author monocausally refers to an “expulsion campaign” or “Austreibungsaktion” against the “evil” (p. 110).

The fourth and final chapter, containing the most sub-chapters, focuses on the relationship between the Second World War, Christians and the Shoa. Beginning with the observation that although there was some enthusiasm and support, especially from the “Deutsche Christen”, the mood at the start of the war was less euphoric than in 1914, Gailus traces expressions of joy, for example, in field post letters. He also discusses the official change in Nazi church policy at the beginning of the war, which was, in practice, still characterised by the fact that the Church’s religious practice was restricted and even attacked. The effects of the war also increasingly restricted religious life on the “home front”. Based on recent research by, for example, Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Brodie, the author emphasises that if we move beyond the dominant narrative according to which all Catholics were victims of National Socialism and suffering because of the war, Catholic Germans also approved of and participated in the war. With regard to the development of Nazi faith over the course of the war, Gailus argues that the trend towards “de-confessionalisation” was in sharp decline, as Nazi faith could not adequately explain the mass deaths, yet, at the same time, the “post-Christian utopias” (p. 145) of some Nazi leaders became even more radicalised.

The brief sub-chapter on the Shoa explores the attitudes of Protestants and Catholics towards the Holocaust. The author stresses that only individual theologians spoke out publicly against the persecution of the Jews and that the Church institutions remained publicly silent about the Shoa despite their knowledge – mediated, for example, through Wehrmacht soldiers. Instead, the Church hierarchy chose the path of less successful petitions to Nazi leaders. Overall, Gailus emphasises that “Christian silence” (p. 160) was widespread. In addition, there had been a “de-solidarization” (p. 160) against Jewish people in the ecclesiastical sphere and “non-Aryans” were excluded from congregational life. Moreover, Protestant theologians, in particular, were actively involved in the genocide. Thus, he ultimately concludes that the Holocaust was “performed out of a Christian society” (p. 163) in which only a few protested publicly.

In sum, Manfred Gailus convincingly presents his thesis that the years from 1933 to 1945 were “faith-filled times” characterised by religious revivals of not only the two Christian denominations but also the völkisch, “gottgläubige” and Nazi believers. He conveys his argument and the current state of research vividly to a broader audience, writing in a clear and richly pictorial manner, citing numerous examples and allowing contemporary source quotations to guide the narrative, which makes the volume a pleasure to read. Source classifications, research debates and comprehensive analyses are sometimes somewhat lacking; especially with regard to the target audience, some explanations of terms (e. g. “political religion”; “redemptive anti-semitism”; …) would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the sections on Protestantism and Nazi faith, which are based on the author’s own extensive studies, are particularly convincing.

The religions studied are analysed as imagined religions, that is, they are conceptualised in terms of their discourses, confessions, church official statements and theologies. Therefore, theologians, clergy and intellectual thinkers are the main actors encountered in this volume. The level of religious practice, the performance of worship and the everyday life of the Church are not brought as clearly into view. This is regrettable, especially because in this way the lived religiosity of women could have also been taken into account more effectively. Nevertheless, and in conclusion, I unreservedly recommend this generally comprehensible overview of the history of religion during the Nazi era as an introduction to the topic and the current debates in the scholarship.

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Review of Michael Hesemann, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Review of Michael Hesemann, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan (Stuttgart: Langenmüller, 2020). 448 pages. ISBN 978-3-7844-3449-0.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

Michael Hesemann, an independent scholar who has published several works on Pius, on Hitler’s view of religion, and on the Armenian genocide, offers a new contribution to the ongoing “Pius Wars,” the continuing scholarly debate about the degree to which Pope Pius XII opposed national socialist Antisemitism and how much he did to assist persecuted Jews. The spectrum of opinion in this debate reaches from hagiographic apologists such as Michael Feldkamp to vehement critics such as Susan Zuccotti, not to mention Ralf Hochhuth’s early attack on Pius in “The Deputy.” Hesemann makes a case for Pius’s sincere concern for Jewish suffering and his active, pragmatic support for rescue measures. He offers little new insight but amasses a large volume of evidence in the pope’s favor. This work could be a valuable contribution to the discussion, were it not for occasional disparaging comments against those with opposing viewpoints and a failure not only to make his case but engage and disprove the opposing case.

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.

Beyond the question of papal ambiguity and silence, Hesemann devotes much of the work to proving that the pope was active and vocal about the holocaust. Addressing the pope’s supposed inactivity during the holocaust, Hesemann lists many instances in which the pope quietly directed that financial resources, albeit limited, be provided to help those persecuted by the National Socialists. At the same time, Hesemann shows that this aid extended beyond Catholics whom the national socialist regime considered Jewish. The examples he provides show that his assistance was reactive rather than systematic. In light of the immense need, the Vatican necessarily limited its expenditures in aid to those persecuted. Hesemann also argues that reliable information about persecutions, especially about mass murder, was challenging to obtain. According to him, Pius learned of the true extent of the genocide only after the war. (212) On the same page, however, Hesemann argues that the pope received eyewitness accounts proving the systematic nature of the murders in the East “already a few weeks before the Wannsee Conference.” (212). Thus, in January 1942, the pope knew the National Socialists were murdering according to a concrete plan. How then, as Hesemann describes a few pages later, in September 1942, could Monsignor Montini (later Pope Paul VI) have honestly told American envoy Myron Taylor that the Holy See did not possess information “confirming this grave information?” (216). To argue that the pope knew about violence, terror, and massacres, but not about the extent of the genocide seems farfetched.

Hesemann devotes an entire chapter to “the ‘wise silence’ of the pope.” (220). Pius’ silence was the result of bitter experience, claims Hesemann. Pius himself claimed that any public statements condemning Antisemitism and the holocaust were counterproductive. To each one, the national socialist regime responded with increased persecution. (208) The most robust case for reticence was the Dutch experience under occupation. Beginning in 1941, the Dutch had publicly protested against German antisemitic measures. Each time, the Germans had responded with enormous levies and additional arrests. When deportations began in 1942, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht ordered his protest read in all churches. (222) Within days, all Dutch Catholics whom the occupation forces considered Jewish were deported, among them Carmelite religious Edith Stein. According to the pope’s housekeeper, upon hearing the news, the pope immediately burned the draft of the public protest he had intended to make in support of the Bishop of Utrecht. German responses to Radio Vaticane’s regular reports about atrocities against Catholics led to arrests of priests, executions, and more. (231) In response to the pope’s Christmas broadcast of 1942, in which he condemned the suffering of innocents, including those persecuted based on race, the German Foreign Office threatened the pope with reprisals in Germany, should such “interference” occur again. (241). Hesemann makes a strong case that a broad, explicit public condemnation of the genocide would have wrought much suffering. However, one must ask if safeguarding the moral integrity of the Catholic Church’s leader might not have been worth the price in the scope of the crimes committed, preserving the moral integrity of the leader of the Catholic Church might not have been worth the price?

The book’s argument falters when Hesemann presents an image of Pope Pius XII as a friend of Jews, perhaps “the church leader best-disposed to Jews during his lifetime.” (61). For example, the author points to a Jewish childhood friend with whom Pius was close and whose emigration to Palestine he facilitated in 1938. More generally, Hesemann’s case for Pius’ pro-Jewish attitudes and activities during his time as nuncio in Germany relies on the testimony of Pinchas Lapide and Nahum Sokolow. Problematic are claims that Pius XII condemned the Reich pogrom of 1938 because he “must have approved and possibly even dictated himself” the Osservatore Romano’s critical response to this violent persecution. To claim that there was “no leading Catholic clergyman other than Eugenio Pacelli who opposed Hitler and National Socialism as early and as uncompromisingly” is an audacious claim. (92) Sometimes, even among the best historians, the desire for a particular “past” colors one’s work. There is no doubt that Hesemann gathered much evidence to support his case. In the cases mentioned above, the evidence presented by Hesemann broadly supports his argument. Still, a more solid foundation of evidence is needed to support some of the claims made convincingly.

The publisher’s jacket cover promises “the first publication in German of these explosive [brisant] documents.” Anyone expecting full-length explosive and previously unpublished documents will, however, be disappointed. In only two cases does Hesemann claim to offer documentary evidence he newly discovered. For example, he found a message of January 9, 1939, in which Pius, still Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli, appealed to all leading archbishops to create structures to welcome Catholic refugees whom the Third Reich considered Jews. Pius XII claimed that about 200,000 individuals the regime considered Jewish fell into this category. Hesemann points out that this number exceeded the number of Catholics persecuted as Jews, which meant that Pius sought to create opportunities for practicing Jews. (79-80, 148)

Hesemann’s summary of post-war Jewish expressions of gratitude is exhaustive but not novel. Several significant document editions appear in the citations. However, his archival research is limited to records in the Vatican Secret Archives, specifically those of the nunciatures in Munich and Berlin and the apostolic delegation in Turkey. The documents Hesemann found in the Vatican Secret Archives generally are not new. Of the relevant scholarly literature used by Hesemann, some appeared recently, but a good number of the works are outdated. Even fifty years ago, Father Ludwig Volk, SJ, who had seen the Secret Archives, warned that this collection contained no smoking guns.

In part because Hesemann relies on questionable scholarship, his work lacks judiciousness. For example, he describes Hochhuth’s play as the result of a KGB plot (18) without mentioning that this claim stems from a largely unverifiable work by former Romanian secret police officer Ion Pacepa. Hochhuth did not need the KGB’s help writing “The Deputy.” Even were this assertion correct, it is not surprising that the Soviet bloc sought to embarrass the Vatican, nor does such a connection change the content or impact of the play. Hesemann dismisses rather than engages the work of Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, and others. Accusing David Kertzer of inventing the claim that Pius XI did not want to publish an encyclical that would offend Hitler is a scholarly accusation that deserved a much more detailed explanation. In general, Hesemann undermines his work by this combination of disparaging scholars with contradictory opinions and failing to disprove their claims.

Beyond the corpus, the book includes a preface by Father Peter Gumpel, Ph.D., SJ, deeply involved in the canonization process of Pius XII. In the acknowledgments, Hesemann thanks Pope Benedict XVI for his encouragement and leading German curial officials for their help as he wrote the manuscript. While the preface and acknowledgments do not predetermine the book’s conclusions, they suggest that Hesemann would have felt the need to be all the more critical of his sources and their arguments to avoid the appearance of prejudice.

Reading the work without context, one seems to see a convincing case for an actively engaged pope, one who opposed National Socialism at every turn but whom experience had taught to be diplomatic and to act “under the radar,” without openly condemning his powerful enemies. Such a reality would have been an almost ideal papacy. This wishful thinking is not exclusive to Hesemann. It seems that, at least for now, the “Pius Wars” will continue to obstruct objective scholarship.

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Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Pp. 322. ISBN: 9781487505639.

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

Questions around the legacy of German colonialism and how its racist ideologies and genocidal campaigns against the Maji-Maji in German East Africa (1905-1908) and the Herero in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) influenced Nazi exterminationalist policies in World War II and the Holocaust have been debated in scholarship and public discourse for a good two decades. In the same decades, public awareness of the persistence of reflexive, uncaring repetitions of colonial patterns in postcolonial nations has steadily grown, not at least because of recent protests against vestiges of colonialism that led, to name just two examples, to the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts from European museums and the removal of public monuments in countries like Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. The presumption that Christian missionary activities were deeply embedded in the colonial enterprise, working in tandem with secular colonialist rulers, sounds like a truism today. And yet, Jeremy Best’s new book on German missionary culture questions a facile alignment of colonial economic exploitation (by secular nations states) with missionary ambitions to win souls for Christ.

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.

Following in the footsteps of text-centered Lutheran traditions—even if not all German missionaries were Lutherans—it may not surprise that education, learning, and reading were centerpieces for German missionary activities. They included bringing the word of God to “heathens,” translating the Bible into indigenous languages, publishing multiple mission journals, and creating the new academic discipline of Missionswissenschaft. Hence, with a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Gospel of John, Heavenly Fatherland opens with the following lines: “In the beginning were words. Words said, words written, words read by German Protestants seeking knowledge of God, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of other people” (5). From the very first page, the reader gets prepared for an exploration of a German Sonderweg of missionary activities, a path distinct from mission aims of other colonial empires like Britain or Spain, but also distinct from German Catholic activities in German Southwest and East Africa.

The author presents his arguments in six chapters. Though he is mostly focusing on German East Africa (surrounded by British, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial territories) and on the work of the Berlin Mission, his perspective is always directed at the larger political picture. The book brings together, Best states, “religious history [and] the history of German colonialism” (18). Seamlessly woven into his overall thesis are materials from other mission societies and Hilfsvereine at home as well as larger political tensions and competitions between various actors (between European colonialists; Protestant missionaries and German colonial elites; German national politics and Protestant dreams of a global “heavenly fatherland”; German Protestants and their anti-Catholic crusade during the Kulturkampf).

Chapter 1 focuses on the development of German Protestant mission ideals that pursued not national interests but the preaching of the Gospel. Important figures like Gustav Warneck and Carl Mirbt advocated for the Gospel of Mark’s Great Commission: mission work should not create “Germans” among colonized people, but “Christians” among “heathens.” These men followed an international vision with “economically self-sufficient…colonized communities” (45) in Africa as well as aspirations for a worldwide Christian mission network. At the turn of the century and before the outbreak of World War I, a younger generation of mission leaders, like Karl Axenfeld and Julius Richter, followed, however, a new direction, pushing more forcefully to align Christian mission work with the German nation.

Chapter 2 pays attention to the importance of language and education that Protestant Germans ascribed to regarding their missionary ideals. Rather than replacing native languages and culture with those of the colonizer, Gustav Warneck understood that “Christianity [as] a foreign religion can only become indigenous…if they grasp it in their mother tongue” (68). To some extent, Warneck and others wanted a less-intrusive cultural exchange, respecting indigenous languages while organizing the newly found African-Christian communities as Volkskirchen—this very German idea that a particular church community is constituted by a particular Volk (a people/ethnos/ nationality/race). What Warneck and others did not grasp—according to Best—is that their professed global outlook nevertheless implanted particular national concepts in Africa, and thus inadvertently participated in the national colonial enterprise they resisted.

Chapter 3 examines tensions between missionary aspirations and secular state interests regarding the indigenous work force. While the state wanted cheap labor (and at best allowed for something like trade schools), the theology of missionaries aimed for a broader education to create communities for African Christians, in opposition to demands for producing “a proletariat toiling for European colonialists” (111). Chapter 4 provides a gripping analysis of the clash between three parties: secular, national imperialists focused on exploiting indigenous peoples and lands, Protestant missionaries wanting to create local indigenous Volkskirchen as Christian agrarian communities, and Catholic missionaries somewhere in between (according to Protestant polemics, the Catholic Church “satisf[ied] the needs of trading companies [and] plantation owners”; 120). The chapter briefly reviews the history of anti-Catholic sentiments in Germany and how this conflict spilled over into the African continent, with the result of Protestants and Catholics jostling over land. To that end, missions, like the Berlin Mission, acquired land as protection zones from economic exploitation. This process was, of course, just another colonial “paternalistic plan” (127) of land appropriation—albeit in the form of benign paternalism with the goal of protecting Christian-African communities.

Chapters 5 and 6 return “home” to the European continent. While Chapter 5 shows the tremendous effort of Protestant missionaries to build up support networks in German localities through presentations, exhibits, testimonies by Christianized Africans, and publications, Chapter 6 introduces the reader to the Protestant efforts of creating international Christian mission networks. It focuses on the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, where the German participants hoped, for good reasons, to take a leading role in future global mission outreach. Those dreams were shattered with World War I. By 1918, Germany did not only lose its colonies, it also lost its moral standing in international settings, and that included the churches. The rise of Hitler and eventually World War II and the Holocaust confirmed to the world that Germans could not be trusted.

Compared to other colonial empires (like British, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese), German colonial rule was short-lived. It lasted for about half a century. Whatever long-term dreams national-secular elites and Protestant missionaries followed when they expanded into African territories, they all came to an abrupt end after World War I. The question remains: Were German Protestant missionaries and their theologies entangled in a racist and colonial enterprise in Africa that may have laid the foundation for the rise of racist antisemitism and the eventual genocidal campaigns in Europe after 1939? Jeremy Best’s work provides evidence that this is not the case. Generally, he sees nineteenth century German colonial history having more “in common with its contemporaneous Western empires than it does with the Third Reich” (11). Specifically, he makes us aware of significant differences between the aims of German Protestant missionaries and national interests of secular colonialists. The former resisted colonialist economic exploitation.

Nowhere does Best claim that German missionaries were free of colonialist and racist thoughts and practices; only that they “imagined racial differences differently” (10). He concludes that they “rejected the most extreme elements of racism and imperialism” (217). Best has no interest in glorifying or morally elevating German missionaries. He is fully aware that he is approaching his study through the eyes of the documentation left behind by the missionaries themselves, not through the eyes of the indigenous African population, thus privileging a European perspective. Hence, a study like this, he writes, “cannot pretend to be the whole truth of German colonialism” (218).

Framed within an awareness of the limitations of his study on colonialism and missionary activities, this is an excellent book—motivating, perhaps, someone else to write a response based on historical documentation by the indigenous population of German East and Southwest Africa, however scarce. Even when assessing some of Best’s interpretations differently, Heavenly Fatherland is an important read.

If there is any flaw (on a more formal level), then we can point to a certain kind of repetitiveness related to the author’s main thesis and sub-theses. Too often do we find central insights repeated in slightly different wordings, holding back the flow of the text and the reader’s attention when we were already prepared to move onward.

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Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pp . 313 + ix. ISBN: 9780197516447

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In the ruins of 1945 Berlin, American Christian leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., worried about the danger of Communism to Christian civilization as he and other US Protestants knew it. Just as problematic, however, was the “German Problem” they had grappled with throughout the war years: how could Germany be both the birthplace of Protestantism and the country of Nazism—home to Adolf Hitler’s racial nationalism and militarism. And where did the theological liberalism of Germany fit into the picture?

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).

God’s Marshall Plan revolves around two groups of US Protestants. The first is the “ecumenists,” who worked through the powerful Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and were eager to develop a new “’World Christianity,’ an imagined global community that was ecumenically Protestant in its spirituality and democratically oriented in its politics” (2). Moreover, “they marshalled their spiritual and political energies to oppose any perceived ‘totalitarian’ threat to such an order—including communism and secularism, as well as Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalism—both at home and across the European continent” (3).

The second group is the “evangelicals” (often “fundamentalists” in Strasburg’s narrative), who “promoted biblical fundamentals and conversionary mission as the proper theological expression of Protestant Christianity. They also identified individual liberty, limited government, free market capitalism, and an America-first foreign policy as their nation’s proper political values” (3).

As Strasburg explains, his book “narrates the origins and history of these competing American Protestant missions to Germany and Europe.” More specifically, “it examines how ecumenical and evangelical American Protestants used the onset of two world wars and an era of reconstruction as rationale to spiritually and politically intervene in Europe” in order to develop their “respective world orders.” Beyond that, the book explains “how this spiritual struggle for Europe activated and advanced American Protestantism’s long-standing Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world” (3).

As they worked for Europe’s spiritual recon­struction, both ecumenists and evangelicals drew on an American “‘conquering faith’—its spir­itual impulse to shape, lead, and transform the globe through the spread of Protestant Christianity and American democracy.” In pursuit of this aim, both groups of US Protestants “mobilized for world war and pursued strategic partnerships with federal officials, foreign policymakers, and the American military. Through these efforts, they hoped to spread dem­ocratic values and Protestant Christianity to Europe, and as such, to remake the continent in the American image” (4).

But, as Strasburg argues, the competing agendas of US Protestants in postwar Germany both grew out of and reflected religious fractures at home, as ecumenists and evangelicals struggled over “the spiritual leadership of their nation and the so-called ‘Christian West’” (4). Moreover, European Protestants had their own ideas about the spiritual and social reconstruction of war-torn Germany and Europe, the most prominent of which was a “third way” theology of peace and reconciliation independent of either superpower. This, in turn, prompted some US Protestants to rethink their own approaches to world missions and global politics in the era of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, here too ecumenists and evangelicals clashed, and so “the spiritual struggle for Europe thus left American Protestants deeply divided and at odds over their global mission. It ultimately forged competing theologies of global engagement—Christian nationalism and Christian globalism—that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and re­ligion in an era of world war and beyond” (5).

As Strasburg demonstrates throughout God’s Marshall Plan, when US Protestants grappled with rival ideologies—democratic liberal, fascist, and communist—very often,

their national and po­litical allegiances overpowered their religious commitments. In particular, such loyalties often challenged their faith’s summons to love of neighbor, re­gardless of that neighbor’s nationality, race, or politics. Christian nationalism likewise clashed with the biblical admonition to prioritize peacemaking and to seek the welfare of the wider world. Finally, it undercut the biblical man­date to hold a higher citizenship in heaven and to declare a greater devotion to a kingdom that knew no borders. (12)

One cannot read this history and not be struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment. In so many ways, the fissures Strasburg explores throughout his book remain challenges at the very heart of American Christianity today.

God’s Marshall Plan traces this story from the aftermath of the First World War through the rise of totalitarian regimes on through the Second World War and into the Cold War that followed. With respect to the book’s title, Strasburg notes:

The Marshall Plan serves as an apt metaphor for the ambitions of American Protestants in Europe. As the American govern­ment worked to remake the continent’s markets and politics, American Protestants complemented these efforts through tent revivals, theo­logical exchanges, and reconstruction programs designed to revive the continent’s soul. In effect, they worked to establish an American empire of the spirit. They hoped that exporting their faith’s values abroad and creating new ocean-spanning religious networks would provide spir­itual support for America’s new transatlantic democratic order. (18)

Strasburg develops his argument in eight chapters. The first (“Spiritual Conquest”) explores the US Protestant response to the First World War. For ecumenists like Congregational minister, relief worker, and church leader Henry Smith Leiper, the German imperialism that led to war in 1914 required the antidote of US spiritual democracy in keeping with Wilsonian internationalism. But for evangelicals like the fundamentalist Baptist pastor and anti-evolutionist William Bell Riley, the problem was not German imperialism but German theological modernism, which required the solution of a return to the Bible, Christian morality, and evangelical mission (23). Strasburg explains the competing ideas of ecumenists and evangelicals by surveying groups and individuals as diverse as the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), President Woodrow Wilson, lay evangelist and International Missionary Council leader John R. Mott, Leiper, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, the 1910 World Missionary Conference, German pastors Martin Niemöller and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, The Christian Century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, revivalist Billy Sunday, Riley, fundamentalist leaders French Oliver and A.C. Dixon, and The King’s Business. But if US ecumenists “outlined a mission to create a new international system rooted in Wilsonian principles,” to make Europe “more authentically Christian,” and to “promote a democratic spirit abroad” (42), conservative Protestants founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to combat “the doctrinal shallowness and modernist teachings of the Federal Council and German Protestantism” (44) and supported and supported “America First” Republican Henry Cabot Lodge’s US Senate faction which fought tooth and nail against the formation of the League of Nations. Racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-socialism, and antisemitism were also features of this movement of reaction against US participation in ecumenical Christianity and internationalist politics. As Strasburg explains, in the aftermath of the First World War, US Protestants were increasingly divided about global mission—caught between Christian nationalism and Christian globalism. Despite these divisions, however, Strasburg argues that “American Protestants still generally agreed that the United States was a Christian na­tion with an exceptional role to play in the world. … American Protestants worked to reshape the world through American values and outlined a vision for global spiritual conquest” (50).

In chapters 2 to 4, Strasburg describes the growth of US Protestant engagement with Germany through the economic and political upheaval of the Weimar era (“World Chaos”) and the turmoil of Nazism and its church politics (“The Lonely Flame”), and World War II and the defeat of Nazism (“For Christ and Country”). The rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement provoked alarm among US Protestants, whether because of its totalitarianism, antisemitism, and racial nationalism (ecumenists) or because its collectivist nature seemed all too similar to “Soviet communism, planned economies, and the New Deal” (evangelicals) (52). Strasburg notes that even as modernists and fundamentalists sparred in the United States, so too pro-Nazi German Christians and their opponents in the Confessing Church entered into a church struggle in Germany. American ecumenist Protestants followed these events closely, expressing concern over the unwillingness even of Confessing Church leaders to move beyond their own conservatism, nationalism, and militarism to oppose the Nazi state itself (58).

Here Strasburg discusses the ideas and views of Leiper and Niebuhr, and recounts Bonhoeffer’s experiences in the United States and the impact of his experiences at Union Seminary and among Black Christians in New York. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany “as one of the most resolute German Protestants in his spiritual and political opposition to Hitler and the German Christian crusade” (64). Likewise, American ecumenists supported the Confessing Church at ecumenical conferences and other events, such as the 1934 Baptist World Congress held in Berlin. And Leiper wrote extensively in books and articles about the menace of Hitlerism, arguing that only the universal values of Protestant ecumenism could support the democratic order that would combat Nazism and, more broadly, secularism.

In contrast, evangelicals saw the rise of European dictators as a portent of the end times. Viewing current events through an apocalyptic lens (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations), these premillennial fundamentalists were on the lookout for the Antichrist, believing as they did that the world was indeed descending into the chaos of the end times. Here Gerald Winrod, Riley, J. Frank Norris, and Oswald J. Smith take centre stage, with their attacks on Soviet communism and New Deal America. Of note was Winrod’s 1935 pilgrimage to Germany, during which he revised his views of Hitler and the Nazi state, in part based on the virulent antisemitism Winrod now preached. So too Riley, who praised Hitler for rescuing “Germany from the very jaws of atheistic communism” and blamed Bolshevism on international Jewry (75). Other fundamentalists did raise concerns about Nazism and its persecution of Jews, including Baptist churchman John J. Rice. For all of these fundamentalists, however, Christian nationalism was the antidote to both foreign dictators and dangerous domestic developments in both church and state.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the ecumenist pastor Stewart Herman shepherded the “lonely flame” of American Protestantism in Germany at the American Church. Herman studied and travelled widely in Germany, witnessing the rise of the German church struggle in the early years of the Third Reich. He also visited Jews in Germany and understood their plight clearly. While he appreciated Nazi attacks on Communism, Herman was alarmed over political developments in Hitler’s Germany, and his own involvement in American affairs in Berlin earned him the attention of the Gestapo. Herman tried to remain neutral, but the arrest of Niemöller in 1937 pushed him towards the Confessing Church, and Herman became something of a spokesman for the Confessing Church in international ecumenical meetings, which its representatives were prohibited from attending.

From 1938 onwards, Herman’s ministry took place under the shadow of the persecution of Jews. Though he did help so-called “non-Aryan” Christians, Herman harboured anti-Judaic and antisemitic sympathies and generally refused to aid Jews. Christian mission to Jews, urging them to convert, was for Herman the answer to Jewish persecution. Only when the Nazi regime began deporting Jews in 1941 was Herman moved to aid Jews, though once the United States declared war, he was interned with American Embassy staff. Strasburg uses Herman’s story and references to Leiper and Bonhoeffer to explore diverse perspectives and levels of willingness to act among ecumenical Protestants.

The entry of the United States into the war aroused ecumenical Protestants (Niebuhr, Herman—after his return from Germany—and John Foster Dulles) to declare that America needed to responsibly exercise its power, defeat “pagan” Nazism, and establish a new global Christian democratic order. Herman went so far as to join the Office of Secret Services (OSS). He also talked up the Confessing Church as an anti-Nazi opposition movement, helping create a myth that would later serve the Allied Occupation well. During the war, ecumenists began to draft plans for a democratic and Christian order in postwar Germany, and its integration into a multilateral federation of nations.

American evangelicals also supported the war, but also “advanced their commitments to conversionary mission, liberty, and unilateralism” (104). Viewing the war from a premillennialist fundamentalist perspective, Winrod and colleagues initially opposed the US entrance into the war, promoting “America First” isolationism. Other fundamentalists stressed links between Hitler, Satan, the Beast, and the Anti-Christ, and so supported the effort to defeat them and hold evil at bay. As Christian nationalists, fundamentalists conflated God and country, piety and patriotism. It was during the Second World War that the American flag found its way into many Protestant sanctuaries (124). Prayer became a weapon of war and Christian nationalist evangelism a form of mobilization, as in the case of the 1944 “Victory Rally” organized by Youth for Christ (YFC), bringing 28,000 Chicago area youth and service members together. Fundamentalists also attacked “modernism” and the Federal Council of Churches, which it accused of “theological Hitlerism” (127). Another sign of the resurgence of evangelicals was the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942, which attempted to look forward but still opposed women’s rights and racial equality.

Chapters 5 through 8 carry the story forward, from the spiritual reconstruction of Germany (“Reviving the Heartland”) and the threat of Soviet Communism (“Battleground Europe”) to the attempt to create a new Christian world order (“God’s Marshall Plan”) and evangelistic campaigns in the time of the Cold War (“Spiritual Rearmament”). Ecumenist Protestants like Stewart Herman played an important role in postwar Germany, serving religious and political reconstruction agendas as he travelled about on behalf of the World Council of Churches, supported by the OSS and the American Military Government (AMG). With others, he hoped the German churches could serve a foundational role in the Christian and democratic renewal of Germany.

As Strasburg argues, “In occupied Germany, American ecumenists wed their ‘conquering faith’ to America’s newfound project of building the ‘American Century.’ Men like Herman and Allen and John Foster Dulles advanced religious and state interests in tandem and used their nation’s postwar primacy to build the foundations of an American-led new Christian world order” (132). They perceived an emerging “spiritual cold war against secularism and communism” and “worked to recruit German Protestants as Christian partners in their quest to establish a new democratic and Christian alliance against these perceived threats” (133). A new Reformation would transform the German churches into a democratic, voluntaristic, and activist force.

But German Protestants (including the liberated Martin Niemöller and Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm) had their own ideas about the reconstruction of their church and nation, and often opposed US Protestant agendas. German and European leaders argued that they themselves needed to rebuild their churches and spiritual life. One key battle took place over the structure of the postwar German Church. Wurm and Niemöller clashed over the formation of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), with Wurm’s traditional state church model winning out over Niemöller’s more ambitious congregational plan. Another contentious topic was the question of German guilt, and here Niemöller’s “Stuttgart Declaration” receives Strasburg’s attention. The author rightly notes the silence of the statement on the subject of the Jews. A third challenge was denazification, which German church leaders chafed against.

Evangelicals responded to the defeat of Germany and the rising threat of Communism with calls by young evangelists Torrey Johnson (YFC) and Billy Graham for a “spiritual invasion” of “Battleground Europe” (156). As Strasburg explains, they focused first on “occupied Germany, where they preached their conversionary gospel and commitments to freedom and free enterprise,” supported by American military chaplains and fundamentalist military officers (157). Once again, theological modernism, secularism, and the rejection of the Bible and of Jesus Christ were presented as important causes of the German catastrophe (and American worldliness), even as revival and return to Christ would restore Germany (and America).

But whether ecumenical or evangelical, US Protestants partnered with the US government (including President Harry Truman personally) and the American Military Government to oppose a rising Communist threat. German church leaders like Niemöller, Berlin Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius and Berlin Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing also undertook speaking tours in the United States, praising the democracy and freedom of the USA and hoping to generate sympathy and support for Germany and its churches. Moreover, they supported the Marshall Plan to physically reconstruct Germany as a parallel force contributing to the spiritual renewal of Germany, alongside the efforts of US Protestants. As Strasburg puts it, “In an era when American capital, con­sumer goods, popular culture, and military platoons poured into Europe and began to remake the continent’s economics, society, and politics, this accompanying spiritual intervention sought to transform Europe’s soul” (185). One place these spiritual and economic plans came together was in the reconstruction of German churches, so many of which had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Germany. Christian literature campaigns and educational projects were also important. So too were US Protestant relief efforts to gather material supplies for beleaguered Germans.

But even within the effort to rebuild Germany, Strasburg finds conflicts between ecumenists and evangelicals. The latter group criticized the World Council of Churches—Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri project was a fundamentalist attempt response to both liberal Christianity and secular society. Evangelicals like Billy Graham also criticized the Marshall Plan itself, arguing it was “folly” and a “give-away program” rooted in “deficit spending.” Once again, big government and collectivism were the enemy. Evangelicals also rejected Truman’s Fair Deal programs, calling the proposal for national health insurance “socialized medicine” and a pathway to “societal slavery” (209).

Evangelical Protestants responded to the problems of postwar Germany most forcefully through revival meetings. In 1954, YFC evangelist Billy Graham held meetings in the former Nazi parade grounds at Nuremberg, preaching salvation through Jesus Christ. But Graham was also trying to convince Germans to support the US Cold War effort to push back Communism and protect Europe. To that end, US evangelical Protestants also strongly supported the US military. “Led by a coalition of free-enterprise businessmen, Cold War hawks, and conservative clergy, these postwar crusades rallied God-fearing Americans to defend their values of faith, freedom, and free enterprise both at home and abroad against New Deal liberalism, Soviet communism, and postwar secularization” (212). This despite the fact that many German Protestants resisted rearmament.

One intriguing element of this spiritual campaign against Communism was the Wooden Church Crusade, a plan to build 49 chapels along the line of the Iron Curtain in West Germany which gained strong support among US political and industrial leaders. By the end of 1956, 28 houses of worship had been built, including a few synagogues.

In the book’s epilogue, the author carries the story of US Protestant engagement with Germany through to the end of the Cold War. Strasburg concludes that if US evangelical Protestants were more obviously “America First” in their orientation, US ecumenical Protestants were also “quick to serve their nation’s interests and advance its global project” (238). As they tried to build a just and peaceful world order, they promoted a particularly American combination of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity abroad. And as they worked to Christianize and democratize the world, protecting it against totalitarian and secular ideologies, they did so by attempting “to rebuild Germany as the European cornerstone of an American-led Christian world order” (238). In their own way, they too supported American Christian nationalism. Thus the line between the Christian globalism of the ecumenists and the Christian nationalism of the evangelicals was in truth rather blurry. And Strasburg carries this point into today, arguing that “the challenge for many Protestant Christians in the twentieth century involved untangling their faith from the creeds of nation, race, and empire. That struggle continues to this day” (239).

In contrast to this Christian nationalism, German and European Protestant leaders espoused a Third Way in the 1960s, as men like Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller sharply critiqued elements of American capitalism, militarism, empire, and domestic social inequality. In some cases, this proved influential among US ecumenists. For example, Stewart Herman, whose ideas and work are central to Strasburg’s account, ended up denouncing antisemitism and racism, supporting refugee work, learning from liberation theology and Vatican II Catholicism, and embracing interfaith partnerships with Jews (243). To a large extent, however, US Protestants continued to struggle with racial equality, immigration, and other challenges to (white) Christian nationalism, even as they remained susceptible to the allure of political power. Strasburg’s concluding hope is that studying this history “might play a part in helping American Protestants foster and practice theologies and a style of politics that more fully reflect the ways of a border-defying faith” (252).

This is a fine work of history—deeply and widely researched and clearly argued. Strasburg’s grasp of the secondary literature on both German and especially US Protestantism is solid, and the notes are filled with references to books, articles, and speeches by Protestant leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including the personal correspondence and papers of Henry Smith Leiper and Stewart Winfield Herman and other material drawn from church and state archives in Washington, Berlin, and Geneva, among others. With almost 50 pages of rich notes, no bibliography was included.

As for criticisms, it is not surprising that this is almost entirely the story of the men who led churches and spoke for both American and German Christianity. Women are virtually absent from this account, save for the Birmingham women who donated syrup to the German relief effort (195). Yet we know that North American women were substantially involved in relief and administrative work in the postwar era, as well as in Christian missions. Did they engage with the issues raised in God’s Marshall Plan any differently than did their male colleagues? More broadly, beyond attending conferences or rallies or subscribing to church periodicals, is there evidence to indicate how deeply engaged ordinary US Protestants were in the spiritual reconstruction of Germany? The Wooden Church Crusade is an excellent example of this. Were there others? Finally, one would wish for a little more background on some of the characters whose writings Strasburg quotes. To what extent can their ideas and statements be taken as representative of their denominations or constituencies?

Those issues aside—and some go beyond the scope of an already extensively-researched study—God’s Marshall Plan is an enlightening and challenging account of how US Protestant Christian nationalism worked itself out both abroad in postwar Germany and at home in the United States. An excellent contribution to the literature, it is also, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a cautionary tale.

 

 

 

 

 

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Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943) (Bremen, Wuppertal: De Noantri, 2019). 80 pp. ISBN: 978-3-943643-11-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

The history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is bleak, a seemingly unrelenting litany of miseries. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered roughly six million Jews as well as hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma on the basis of their race. Gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Germans, and those the regime deemed physically and/or mentally handicapped were also subjected to unspeakable cruelties. As the horrors unfolded, very few Germans raised their voices to protest the brutality. For some, this was due at least in part to fear of the dire recriminations that could result from speaking out. Others simply lacked real sympathy for Jews and others who already lived on the margins of German society. Because opposition and outright resistance to the regime were so rare, we have come to know many of the opponents and resisters by name: Sophie Scholl, Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus von Stauffenberg.

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 Elisabeth Schmitz and Katharina Staritz. In Gegen the Mainstream der Hitlerzeit, Manfred Gailus offers a concise but nuanced biography of another such lesser-known Protestant “martyr,” the Wuppertal theologian Helmut Hesse. Because we have already published excerpts of Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit here, this review will focus on some of the book’s important contributions rather than a detailed summary of its subject’s life. Even so, a sketch of his biography is in order.

Helmut Hesse was born in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) in 1916, the youngest son of the well-known Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Helmut had three brothers and a sister (10, 15). Beginning in 1935, he undertook theological studies, which included several stints at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Elberfeld, the University of Halle on the Saale, a winter term at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Berlin, and, for two semesters, under Karl Barth at Basel (17-18).

In Sunday worship services on May 23, 1943 and again on June 6, Helmut prayed for persecuted Jews, read the names of detained Christians (including Niemöller and Heinrich Grüber, leader of the “Büro Grüber,”), criticized Protestant church politics and attitudes within the Confessing Church, and called for the church to resist antisemitism (49-50). On June 8, Helmut and his father Hermann Albert, were arrested by the Wuppertal Gestapo and imprisoned in Barmen, where they languished for over five months (57). On November 14, father and son were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Just ten days later, Helmut, having been denied essential medications for a previously diagnosed chronic renal insufficiency, died of post angina septicemia. He was just 27 years old (62-63). Gailus’s fascinating biography paints the picture of a rather cantankerous if principled and courageous young theologian who, for his public advocacy for Jews and persecuted Christians, paid with his life.

In his June 6 sermon in Elberfeld, Hesse, who had addressed ill-treatment of Jews by “Christian peoples” in a February sermon, addressed the matter of Jews and Judaism directly. He quotes liberally a petition about the church’s position on the persecution of Jews (54). The letter had been written to Bavarian bishop Hans Meiser by Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem and some members of the Lempp Circle, a small group of men and women committed to the theology of the Confessing Church and opposed to the policies of the “intact” Bavarian Protestant church.[1] Bishop Meiser did not make it public, but passed it on to the Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who similarly refused to publish it (54).

As recorded by the Wuppertal Gestapo, Hesse proclaimed:

As Christians, we can no longer bear the fact that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us to do so is the simple commandment of Nächstenliebe (love of neighbor). The Jewish question is a Protestant question and not a political one. The Church must resist any antisemitism in the community. To the state, the Church must testify to the importance of Israel in the history of salvation and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. Every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, has fallen under the murderers in Germany today. (55).

Hesse’s stark pronouncement closely mirrors some of the language in the Munich petition.[2] Perhaps for these words more than any others, Hesse’s fate was sealed.

One is left to wonder why Hesse’s remarkable story has not been publicized more widely. Perhaps one reason lies in a scandalous affair that Gailus’s research uncovers. During a house search, the Gestapo found some private letters of Hesse’s that suggested that he had had a romantic relationship with a married woman with a school-aged child whose husband was fighting in the war (58-59). The fact that the affair with the unnamed woman took place is not in question (the Gestapo bemoaned the fact that Hesse proclaimed that “God has already forgiven him for this adultery. There is no trace of a sense of guilt ….” (59); also, Hermann Klugkist Hesse (no relation to Hermann Albert and Helmut), an Elberfeld pastor and friend of the family, tried to deal with the fallout of the Gestapo’s discovery with Elberfeld parishioners and church leadership, as well as with Helmut himself (59-60); finally, according to Klugkist Hesse, gossip about the matter had spread through the Elberfeld Reformed community and beyond (60-62)).

Yet, as seriously as the matter of adultery was regarded in such a pious Reformed community, the lack of support that Helmut apparently received from his church community while in prison and the concentration camp might be regarded as more scandalous than Helmut’s sins. So great was “the matter with Helmut,” as the affair was called, that Klugkist Hesse bitterly relays that local church leaders did not once visit Helmut during his nearly six-month ordeal, despite having visitation rights (60, 64 – 65).

In the end, due to Helmut’s physical and psychological frailty, as well as his rigid Reformed upbringing, Gailus regards Helmut Hesse as a “difficult martyr” – but a martyr nonetheless (69-70). Gailus argues that, despite his idiosyncrasies and failings, because of his incredibly courageous advocacy for Jews especially but also for his fellow travelers in the Confessing Church who had dared to speak out against the regime, Hesse merits a special place in the pantheon of Protestant “heroes and martyrs.” In fact, his name belongs with those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Friedrich Weißler, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Hans and Sophie Scholl (among others) (71-73). Given the case he has presented in this excellent study, it is hard to argue with this conclusion.

 

Notes:

[1] Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, trans. Victoria J. Barnett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 215-216; Hermann Diem, Ja oder Nein – 50 Jahre Theologie in Kirche und Staat (Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1974), 130; Walter Höchstädter, “Der Lemppsche Kreis,” Evangelische Theologie 48, no. 5 (1988): 468-473.

[2] Hermann Diem, “Wider das Schweigen der Kirche zur Judenverfolgung. Offener Brief an Landesbischof D. Meiser, 1943,” (Against the Silence of the Church on the Persecution of Jews: Open Letter to Regional Bishop Dr. Meiser, 1943) in Hermann Diem and Uvo Andreas Wolf, Sine vi- sed verbo: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Voten (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1965), 108-111, here 108.

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Review of Robert M. Zoske, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Robert M. Zoske, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2020), 448 pages.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Several books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles appeared in 2021 on the occasion of the hundredth birthday of Sophie Scholl. She was born on 9 May 1921 in Forchtenberg (Württemberg) and was executed at the age of 21 in the Munich-Stadelheim prison on 22 February 1943, having been by sentenced to death on the same day by the National Socialist People’s Court on the charge of “preparation for high treason.” One of the most competent publications by far in this anniversary year is the great biography by the Protestant theologian and historian Robert M. Zoske. The author received his doctorate at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg in 2014 on the basis of a study of Sophie’s brother Hans Scholl. Four years later he presented a highly acclaimed, scholarly, and critical biography of Hans Scholl, which he has recently followed up with this substantial portrait of the short life of Hans’ younger sister and fellow resister. Taken together, Zoske must undoubtedly be counted one of the best experts on the history of the Scholl siblings and the resistance group of “The White Rose.”

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.

At 55 pages, by far the most extensive chapter is “Beloved,” which is devoted to Scholl’s complicated love affair with the soldier Fritz Hartnagel, which began in 1937. In 1940 alone, the two exchanged 91 letters, which reveal deep insights into the extremely difficult, torn mental life of the 19-year-old. She never escaped an ongoing vacillation and hesitation between being in love and physical love on the one hand, and her religious, pietistic interpretation of “sex as sin” on the other. And this fluctuation was accompanied by multiple, strenuous attempts to reduce their love relationship to the “purely spiritual,” but which often failed in practice.

The reading of the Scholl siblings and their circle of friends is informative: one encounters a lot of Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann. In addition, genuinely religious-Catholic literature was very popular among them: Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Romano Guardini, and then also classics such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Blaise Pascal. Their reading was generally not systematic, but rather a searching reading with many interruptions and sudden breaks. Influences from Carl Muth, the editor of the Catholic magazine Hochland, could be felt here. The circle of friends had contact with him during the later Munich years, beginning in 1940-1941. This resulted in the development of a religious motivation for resistance—in a sense “with God against Hitler.” By all appearances, there was no contact between the Scholl group and the Confessing Church at all.

After graduating from high school, training as a kindergarten teacher, and performing her compulsory labor service, Sophie Scholl began studying in Munich in the summer semester of 1942. However, she was seldom seen in the lecture halls of the university. It was only towards the end of this turbulent year that she was gradually included in the resistance actions of the circle around her brother Hans and Alexander Schmorell. It was the decisive year of her political awakening, and the moment of her decisive participation in the political resistance against Hitler.

Zoske’s deserving book clears up all kinds of legends about the Scholl siblings. In the final chapter, “Nachspiel,” the author traces the genesis of the “Icon Sophie Scholl” during the post-war period. The hour of birth of this transfiguration was the “Biographische Notizen” (1950) of her sister Inge Scholl, which was published in 1955 as the book Die Weisse Rose [The White Rose]. Since then, many allegations have been corrected, and the factual knowledge of the resistance group has also increased significantly. This new biography presents the reader with a reliable picture of the life of the young Protestant martyr in the resistance against Hitler. Important documents are printed in the appendix of the book, including detailed excerpts from Sophie Scholl’s interrogation transcripts (pp. 312-348). The early, seemingly-authentic memories of her friend Susanne Hirzel from 1946 are also impressive. From this I would like to quote in conclusion: “We met at the age of 14 in the League of German Girls. She was like a fiery, wild boy, wore her straight, dark brown hair in a man’s cut and preferred to wear a blue fisherman’s shirt or her brother’s winter shirt. She was lively, bold, with a bright, clear voice, daring in our wild games and of a divine sloppiness.”

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Review of Ulrich Peter, Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz. Die Deutschen Christen und der Bund der nationalsozialistischen Pastoren in der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche Mecklenburgs

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Ulrich Peter, Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz. Die Deutschen Christen und der Bund der nationalsozialistischen Pastoren in der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche Mecklenburgs (Kiel: Lutherische Verlagsanstalt, 2020). 607 pages. ISBN 978-3-87503-266-6.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna / Danube University Krems

Church struggle (Kirchenkampf) is a term that has shaped church historiography since the end of the Second World War. It is still partly subject to instrumentalization today: The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) is characterized positively, often even as an opponent of Nazi ideology against the German Christians. For a long time, there was no further in-depth research into the German Christians beyond this assumption, because the theologically influenced church historiography preferred to turn to the supposed “heroes” of the Confessing Church for historical information. Fortunately, many research projects have emerged in the last few decades, such as the work of Robert P. Ericksen, Susannah Heschel, Doris L. Bergen, Manfred Gailus, Kyle Jantzen, and many more. These researchers have not only studied German Christians and their racist and anti-Semitic notions but have also established a completely new image of the “church struggle,” some going so far as to “deconstruct” the image of a heroic Confessing Church.

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.

In the research on the German Christians, however, there has always been a blank spot that has been pointed repeatedly: whenever the Thuringian German Christians were mentioned as the most powerful group of the German Christians, one reads again and again that, in addition to the complete control of the Thuringian regional church, they could also rely on their sister organization in Mecklenburg because the German Christians also controlled that entire regional church. However, and this must be clearly stated, next to nothing was known about the conditions in Mecklenburg, the prehistory, the period between 1933 and 1945, or even the post-war history apart from individual biographical studies.

Ulrich Peter, who has been dealing with the history of the Protestant Church in Mecklenburg during the Nazi period (alongside his work on the “Religious Socialists”) for a long time, has now presented an overall study that tries to close this large gap–and does it completely. With his historiographical study, Peter provides a fundamental work that is an indispensable addition to further research on church history. Peter consults all the sources available to him: reports from various regional and national archives, papers, publications, etc.

In addition to the strictly chronological presentation of the events between 1933 and 1945 and an overview of the time after 1945 (p. 446–464), it is above all the first part of the book that, from the reviewer’s point of view, makes the developments in Mecklenburg clearly understandable. Since Peter does not begin his study with the founding of the German-Christian movement, the Bund für Deutsche Kirche or the German Christians, but with the structure and theological self-image of the regional church before the First World War, the developments of the 1920s can clearly be understood. This is, for example, the big difference between his work and Oliver Arnhold’s book on the Thuringian German Christians. Peter describes and contextualizes the prehistory on which the developments from 1933 onwards were based. For instance, in a separate subchapter, he makes it clear that long before 1933, even before 1914, anti-Semitism was virulent in the regional church. Another example is the attitude of Regional Bishop Rendtorff (also one of those alleged heroes of apologetic church historiography) and his statements in favor of National Socialism at the beginning of the 1930s.

The subsequent chapter examines in detail the disputes within the church and the increasing influence of the German Christian Church Movement (Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen), which ultimately found itself directly dependent on Bishop Schulz. It becomes clear that although the German Christian Church Movement increasingly dominated the regional church, they did not have an organizational or even financial basis. Fake membership numbers and disastrous financial behavior at the expense of the regional church characterized the German Christian Church Movement in Mecklenburg.

With his study, Ulrich Peter provides for the first time a detailed insight into the structure, thinking and connections of that regional church. He has completely succeeded in closing the research gap. Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz deserves to be included among the canonical works on church history during the “Third Reich” on which further research will be based.

 

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Review of Jonas Hagedorn, Oswald von Nell-Breuning: Aufbrüche der katholischen Soziallehre in der Weimarer Republik

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Jonas Hagedorn, Oswald von Nell-Breuning: Aufbrüche der katholischen Soziallehre in der Weimarer Republik (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019). 532 pages. ISBN 978-3-657-78795-1.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this meticulously detailed and well-differentiated dissertation, Jonas Hagedorn discusses the early published work of Oswald Nell-Breuning, a German Jesuit social theorist. Before engaging the substance of Hagedorn’s analysis, it is helpful to begin with the words of noted theologian Josef Mausbach, Professor at the University of Münster, who provided the first assessment of Nell-Breuning’s dissertation. Mausbach wrote, “the abstract nature and the high [intellectual] level of the work is such, that only a narrow circle of theologically interested economists and economically prepared theologians can truly access this work.” (267) One could say the same about Hagedorn’s work.

The introduction lasts the first seventy pages, and not until almost halfway through the volume does the discussion focus on Nell-Breuning. The previous pages explained the state of Christian solidarity in the 1920’s, describing Nell-Breuning’s definition of the term as post-liberal corporatist solidarity, but not fascist or reactionary. Hagedorn explains in detail the distinctions between the more romanticist-idealist Catholic thinkers in Vienna and the northern German approach to Catholic solidarity, which better reflected the economic realities of the 1920’s. Nell-Breuning was more comfortable with the “Kölner Richtlinien” of 1926, which explicitly accepted Catholic trade unions and much else in Catholic social teaching that would integrate Catholics in the broader economic and labor concerns of the times. For example, the Austrians denied any compatibility between capitalism and Christianity. At the same time, the commission established by Cardinal Schulte, Archbishop of Cologne, sought to find a way for Catholics, employers, employees, and others to function in the Weimar Republic’s economic conditions. Nell-Breuning also advocated ecclesiastical recognition of Christian trade unions and not just Catholic workers’ associations (katholische Arbeitervereine) led by priests.

Nell-Breuning, guided by fellow Jesuit Gustav Gundlach, delivered to Pope Pius XI a draft of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Hagedorn, in turn, provides the reader with a detailed analysis of the divergences between Nel-Breuning’s draft and the final text. In large part, Nell-Breuning’s draft focused too much on German concerns and the conflict with the Viennese. The final draft of the encyclical guided Catholic thought on a global level, and thus different in some ways from Nell-Breuning’s draft. Nell-Breuning’s fellow Jesuit Gustav Gundlach and others also contributed to the text. Still, Nell-Breuning provided the direction and goals for Quadragesimo Anno.

Nell-Breuning’s dissertation discussed the ethics of stock market speculation. The Jesuit distinguished between speculation designed to protect against unexpected losses, which Hagedorn describes as “hedging,” and speculation out of greed. The principal distinction underlying Nell-Breuning’s thinking is between revenue sought for a moral purpose and income aimed primarily to increase wealth and possession.

Sometimes, the reader perceives that Hagedorn felt compelled to discuss Nell-Breuning’s view on almost every economic facet of Catholic social teaching. The breadth of teaching included employee-labor relations, the morality of goods pricing, the nature and limits of the welfare state, and more. Hagedorn shows how Nell-Breuning strove to balance the individual’s responsibility and the community’s solidarity. For example, Hagedorn defended the welfare state as an institution by which the community meets the needs of those who cannot afford the minimum necessary for existence through no fault of their own. However, he vehemently rejected a community that provided for all without expectation of self-reliance, which he called the Versorgungsstaat. Hagedorn insisted on prices that covered material costs and adequate wages for all employees, and a moderate reward for the employer. He rejected prices dictated purely by the market. Nell-Breuning’s understanding of appropriate and fair employer-employee relations demanded workers complete an honest day’s work, but strongly supported Christian trade unions, even over clerically led Catholic workers’ associations. Finally, Nell-Breuning’s understanding of the purpose of property, to serve the bonum commune, has become accepted in Catholic teaching. Nell-Breuning drew on the full range of papal teaching from Leo XIII onward.

One of the strengths of Hagedorn’s work is the explanation of other contemporary social justice thought, both within and outside of Catholicism. Nell-Breuning drew on Marx and other socialist thinkers without any sympathies for communism. The primary targets of his criticism, and he avoided no controversy, were Viennese and Austrian Catholic social justice theorists. Primarily, Nell-Breuning dueled with Othmar Spann and Joseph Eberle of Schönere Zukunft, but also with Anton Orel and Eugen Kogon. Nell-Breuning rejected the idealistic-romantic notions of the Viennese thinkers. His background in economics compelled him to remain rooted in practical measures to secure the ideals of Catholic social teaching. Also, he would not share the Viennese group’s rejection of capitalism and democracy.

Within a year of defending his dissertation, Nell-Breuning was asked to produce a foundational draft to form the basis of a new social encyclical. Section by section, Hagedorn meticulously analyzes the evidence of Nell-Breuning’s draft in the published version of Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI’s social encyclical of 1931. Nell-Breuning’s nuanced critique of capitalism, his ability to appreciate the strengths of the capitalist economy while seeking to correct its inequities, his appreciation for socialism’s analysis while rejecting its socio-economic prescriptions. In those interwar years, Nell-Breuning analyzed and recast the framework of Catholic social teaching. He discussed them all, and Hagedorn summarizes and analyzes the vast scope of Nell-Breuning’s comments. In the bibliography, Nell-Breuning’s works take up fifteen pages, and Hagedorn has read them all.

Hagedorn ends his analysis of Nell-Breuning’s thinking by pointing to his fundamental resistance to National Socialism. In 1933, he criticized the National Socialist falsification of corporatism. In the summer, however, Nell-Breuning proved his loyalty to the hierarchy in Germany and Rome by publishing an article welcoming the Concordat. In the article, however, Nell-Breuning carefully hid his quite incisive critique, according to Hagedorn. He cited the admonition of Saint Ambrose to Emperor Theodosius and some of the Catholic heroes of the Kulturkampf. (436) To any theologically conscious Catholic, these names sufficed to highlight Nell-Breuning’s opposition to the regime. From 1934 until 1945, Nell-Breuning published little.

There is only little to criticize in this work. One might argue that Hagedorn’s text is better used as a reference than a narrative with analysis. The details prevent any reviewer from addressing all the topics in their highly developed nuances. Furthermore, Hagedorn’s work is not for those uninitiated into Catholic social teaching or the socio-economic theory of the Weimar Republic. Finally, this work is not for those seeking a biographical analysis of Nell-Breuning, nor for those seeking a discussion of the shifts in Nell-Breuning’s thinking in the post-war period.

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Review of Hagen Markwardt, Fruszina Müller and Bettina Westfeld, eds., Konfession und Wohlfahrt im Nationalsozialismus. Beispiele aus Mittel- und Ostdeutschland

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Hagen Markwardt, Fruszina Müller and Bettina Westfeld, eds., Konfession und Wohlfahrt im Nationalsozialismus: Beispiele aus Mittel- und Ostdeutschland (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2021). 372 pages. ISBN 978-3-428-15753-2.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna / Danube University Krems

Denomination and welfare under National Socialism – a topic that at first glance is not directly related to the National Socialist mass crimes. However, right at the beginning of their introduction, the editors help the reader understand the importance of welfare in the Third Reich. During the nineteenth century, there was a massive expansion of charitable institutions in Germany. With the seizure of power by the National Socialists in January 1933, a new understanding of the tasks of a health policy would develop based on the party ideology, which was fundamentally opposed to the previous ideas. Accordingly, the institutions owned by religious associations were faced with the crucial question of how to deal with the reorientation of health policy from 1933 onwards.

The focus on the regions of Central and Eastern Germany is a response to the current dearth of research on that region. Because denominational institutions were relatively autonomous at that time, such a regional delimitation makes perfect sense. Due to the denominational character of the region, then, most of the contributions deal with institutions and actors from the Protestant (evangelisch) spectrum, which is understandable. This will allow comparisons to be drawn between the various actors and institutions in different regions of Germany at a later point in time. It is regrettable that the editors did not succeed in soliciting contributions on the Thuringian region. They have focused on Silesia, however, which has also been rarely examined by research so far. A positive point to be emphasized here is the approach of the editors, acknowledging that the “relationship between the Christian-denominational institutions and the Nazi rule [are] not to [be understood] from the outset as dichotomous” (p. 11). Even if this approach should be a matter of course from this reviewer’s point of view, recent works show again and again that an ideological opposition between Christians and National Socialists is frequently assumed from the outset. Therefore, as self-evident as it may be, the editors’ basic attitude as it is formulated and implemented in the book is to be appreciated.

In the first, very well-structured article, Norbert Friedrich examines the developments within the Kaiserwerther Verband (KWV) in the ‘Third Reich.’ The KWV was the umbrella organization of the German deaconess mother houses. The head of the KVW is at the center of Friedrich’s examination. The KWV, to which around 30,000 deaconesses were subordinate in 1936, quickly introduced self-enforced conformity with National Socialist policies in 1933 without government coercion. In the same year, the national-conservative and anti-democratic executive committee accordingly abolished the democratic structures remaining from the times of the Weimar Republic, which were not popular anyway. By the end of March 1933, antisemitic propaganda from the National Socialists was also being echoed by the KWV. During the same year, the leadership of the association also clearly positioned itself in favor of German Christian Movement, which illustrates anti-democratic and antisemitic thinking. Due to the increasingly strong position of the Thuringian German Christians, the association distanced itself from the German-Christian spectrum from 1934 onwards, but this should not obscure its support for the Hitler state. Even if the state increasingly tried to restrict the deaconry in its actions, the KVW remained an important point of contact over the years.

In his contribution, Uwe Kaminsky analyzes the Expert Committee for Eugenics of the Inner Mission (“Fachausschuss für Eugenik der Inneren Mission”), which was founded in 1931. He concentrates on the Saxon representatives of the committee – those tasked by the regional church to discuss eugenics and euthanasia. That discourse was not without consequences, as Kaminsky rightly states, in reference to the approximately 25,000 Saxon victims of eugenics policies during the period from 1933 onwards. In the essay, Kaminsky presents biographical analyses of the individual Saxon representatives and concludes that many who had previously advocated voluntary sterilization went on to support the compulsory sterilization enforced by the National Socialists in 1933. Nevertheless, even though they agreed to the plans of the new authorities for mass sterilization, the representatives rejected euthanasia.

The Regional Association of Saxony of the Inner Mission is the focus of Bettina Westfeld’s contribution. Particularly shocking is the fact that in 1931 three of five clergymen in this regional association were members of the NSDAP. It is therefore not surprising that, immediately after Hitler came to power, the Inner Mission made declarations of loyalty to the new regime throughout Germany. Even before 1933, there was an endorsement of sterilization measures in the Regional Association of Saxony, citing as the reason for such measures the cost of care for mentally and physically handicapped people. In the years that followed, the Regional Association found itself in a field of tension within the divided Saxon regional church, which certainly did not make it easier for them to act. Westfeld’s contribution is shocking in some places, as she repeatedly refers to the number of victims and the individual fates of victims of the Nazi terror. She also addresses the attempt by individual deaconesses to hide patients to prevent them from being transported to killing centers like Pirna-Sonnenstein. However, these were individual actions and not measures by the regional church and the Inner Mission, which were hardly able to act anyway. The positive attitude towards sterilization measures also weakened the arguments of the Inner Mission to act against further measures aimed at “racial hygiene.” In the end, there was the terrifying number of 432 deaths from the homes of the Inner Mission, as well as a still unknown number of deaths of people over whom the Inner Mission held guardianship.

Christoph Hanzig examines another important aspect of this history, namely, that most of the facilities for the care of handicapped people in Saxony were not church-owned, but state-sponsored. Accordingly, Hanzig offers biographical information about the Protestant pastors in those state care facilities, in which pastors functioned as state officials. None of the pastors portrayed in detail belonged to a democratic party before 1933, but some were members of the NSDAP. So, it is hardly surprising that from 1933 almost all those pastors were actively involved in the Nazi state, supporting Nazi health policy.

The six contributions by Jan Brademann, Annett Büttner, Fruzsina Müller, Helmut Bräutigam, Manja Krausche and Elena Marie Elisabeth Kiesel all deal with empirical studies on one or more deaconess houses in Saxony or Saxony-Anhalt. For example, Kiesel examines the internal correspondence between headmasters and the sisterhood, using the case of the houses in Halberstadt, Magdeburg, and Halle/S and focusing on the “Schwesternbriefe” as a primary source. These were private in nature, which is why they offer an exclusive insight into the actual correspondence between the various staffing levels. As can be seen in the other contributions, the superiors of the houses examined by Kiesel also endorsed the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor and called on the sisterhood to participate in “building up the Volksgemeinschaft.” Despite the increasing pressure from the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), loyalty to the state was never in question. In 1940, an antisemitic appeal was issued to fight the Jews on the home front as well. The persecution of the Jews and the practice of euthanasia were almost never mentioned. Only in 1943 does a change in the content of the letters become visible, in which the previously loyal position to the regime was given up in favor of a stronger orientation toward peace.

Maik Schmerbauch provides a study on nursing and welfare for the poor in Breslau, while Jürgen Nitsche and Hagen Markwardt examine Jewish care facilities. Nitsche’s contribution illustrates the pressure that Jewish communities faced beginning in 1933. Increasingly deprived of infrastructure and government grants, they had to try on their own to organize care for older and handicapped community members. Accordingly, the Jewish community in Chemnitz, which serves as an empirical example, was forced to build a rest home.

Even though the regional focus is on Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, the knowledge gained through the anthology is expansive. The respective contributions impress with their empirical depth, so that the reader gets an insight into the connection between welfare and church denomination during the time of National Socialism, from the level of regional associations down to the very local level. However, the anthology deserves a summarizing conclusion. The individual contributions are highly informative and contain many new findings. A summary by the editors would have made it possible to systematically analyze the empirical contributions again, articulate special features and point out new research perspectives. Unfortunately, the editors missed this opportunity to broaden the perspective. Nevertheless, the anthology generates a multitude of new findings regarding the role of welfare institutions under religious sponsorship during the period of the ‘Third Reich.’

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Review of Wilfried Loth. “Freiheit und Würde des Volkes:” Katholizismus und Demokratie in Deutschland

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Wilfried Loth, “Freiheit und Würde des Volkes:” Katholizismus und Demokratie in Deutschland, Religion und Moderne, Vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2018). ISBN 978-3-593-50838-2.

By Martin R. Menke, Rivier University

Wilfried Loth is a well-known German historian. In addition to research on nineteenth-century German Catholicism, he has also published on the early Cold War, on the history of France, and on European unification. In this collection of fourteen previously published essays, Loth analyzes Catholics’ contributions to the development of democracy in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century. Loth offers a nuanced analysis based on an impressive command of the scholarly literature and archival sources. He argues that while the institutional Church opposed modernity until after World War II, lay Catholics, especially those organized in political parties, contributed significantly to the development of modern democracy in Germany.

Loth argues that much relevant scholarship has rested on Rainer Lepsius’ theory of a closed Catholic milieu, largely dominated by ultramontane clergy.[1] According to Loth, instead of a stereotype of German Catholicism dominated by clergy and uniform in thought and practice, German Catholics learned early that defending modern goals such as the constitutional order, a responsible ministry, and the defense of civil rights was the best way to defend Catholic faith and values against in a secularized world. Loth’s analysis represents a strain of scholarship dating back to Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s Practicing Democracy: Elections and Culture in Imperial Germany and including Margaret Stieg Dalton’s Catholicism, Popular Culture and the Arts in Germany, 1880-1933, as well as Mark Edward Ruff’s The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965, and others. [2]

One might question why a collection of Loth’s articles, which are generally well known, is needed. In the introduction, Loth warns that, “a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, western pluralism, parliamentary democracy, and European unification suddenly no longer belong to the secure elements of the social order in Germany and Europe.”(9) Loth blames this decline on the alienation of social elites, middle strata and lower classes. He claims that reviewing the contribution of German Catholics to the country’s democratization might be useful to the development of a vigilant and self-asserting democracy, which the national Catholic convention of 2018 demanded. Keeping this admonition in mind lends the essay additional coherence.

In the first essay, Loth reviews the ultramontane attitude of the nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy. Rather than considering Leo XIII, author of rerum novarum, as a modernizer, Loth reminds the reader that the church rejected all Catholic organizations beyond the control of the hierarchy, which impeded the social integration of Catholics. By the early twentieth century, however, German Catholics desired full integration into the majority society. To this end, the Center Party, the Volksverein, and the Görresgesellschaft were founded to further the Catholic laity’s political interests free of the hierarchy, to educate the lower classes, and to create a forum for Catholic scholars and intellectuals.  Loth argues in his second essay that Bismarck’s Kulturkampf did more for Catholic unity than the ultramontane faction could ever have done.

In the third chapter, Loth convinces the reader that assumptions about a coherent and homogeneous Catholic milieu are erroneous. This is both Loth’s most important and most controversial contribution to scholarship, first made in his Habilitationsschrift of 1984. He describes a Catholic bourgeoisie bent on emancipation in the Reich, populist tendencies among peasants and freeholders, as well as among the petit bourgeoisie, and finally, a Catholic labor movement. In this essay in particular, Loth offers such a nuanced and differentiating analysis to prove generalizations about “the” Catholic milieu become impossible. Rather, it is resistance against discrimination that brings Catholics together in support of the Center Party as the broadest Catholic organization.

In the fourth essay, Loth addresses the milieu thesis more directly, again with notable differentiation. He distinguishes between frequenting the sacraments and the liturgies on the one hand and living a life of Catholic daily practices and habits. What milieu may have formed would arise regionally to defend against discrimination. After 1945, the milieu disappeared completely. Loth concludes, “Political Catholicism and Catholic milieu constituted transitional phenomena. If these were created to resist modernity, Catholics instead ended up helping shape modernity.”(107)

In the following essay on the priest Georg Friedrich Dasbach, as in the essays on the resister Nikolaus Groß and on the Center Party’s colonial politics, Loth inserts case studies to illustrate his broader arguments. Father Dasbach established a publishing enterprise in which he supported small freeholders.  His calls for reform led to a Prussian state repression against him. Dasbach’s engagement for small freeholders, vintners, and the miners of the Saar brought him the disapproval of Catholic notables. Against the wishes of the Center Party leadership, the voters returned him to the Reichstag with 92 percent of the vote. This man’s fight against both state repression and the Catholic elites demonstrates the impossibility of a homogeneous Catholic milieu.

In the sixth essay, Loth describes the work of late nineteenth-century Catholic social thinkers such as Georg Hertling, Father August Pieper of the Volksverein, and the future Reich labor minister, Father Heinrich Braun, who openly rejected ultramontane attitudes and demanded Catholic teaching be rendered effective in laws to protect workers and their families. Loth further discussed the Volksverein in a separate chapter. He explains its transitional character to facilitate the entry of Catholic workers into the broader trade union movement. It began as an organization to protect Catholic workers from socialist temptations, then briefly became the voice of Catholic labor as a whole. After World War One, however, Catholic workers no longer needed the Volksverein as interdenominational Catholic unions now provided an attractive venue for the political and social formation of workers. Analyzing Catholic unions more specifically in a separate essay, Loth explains the eventual victory of Catholic workers over the ultramontane pressures of the hierarchy.  Despite near-condemnation from Rome, the Christian unions prevailed and thrived until 1933.

The ninth essay is probably the least satisfactory, largely because it addresses too great a time span. Loth addressed the development of political Catholicism from the Wilhelmine empire to the end of Weimar. Of the thirty pages of the essay, only five are devoted to the Weimar period before 1930. Loth concisely summarizes the Center Party’s struggles against the ultramontane hierarchy, against increasingly marginalized Catholic notables and nobles, and against the distrust of the Reich’s leadership. Loth convincingly argues that the Center drove towards the establishment of responsible government in a parliamentary democracy even before 1914. He cites the Center’s role in colonial politics, in the military budget. While in 1912, Matthias Erzberger, one of the Center’s young hotheads, openly demanded parliamentary democracy, the Center’s leaders avoided risking an open break with the government. Soon, however, the party’s labor wing demanded more radical measures to protect its interests, which amounted to reforms limiting the power of the dynasty, the nobility, and other elites. In this chapter, Loth argued the Center Party downplayed its demands for parliamentary government in 1918 due to the rapidly evolving constitutional crisis. One might argue, however, that by late summer, the Center’s role in the mixed committee of political parties (the Interfraktionelle Ausschuß) in the Reichstag amounted to the that of a party with governing responsibility, especially in uncovering the navy’s falsification of data claiming great achievements in submarine warfare and then, after August 1918, exercising de facto legislative and increasingly executive power. Also, describing the 1920’s, Loth exaggerates the degree to which the Center Party leadership adopted utopian notions of organic corporatism and revived medieval Reich. In fact, the Center focused primarily on quotidian demands and needs until 1933, perhaps too much so. Loth further argues that Heinrich Brüning, the last Center Party chancellor, actively sought to exclude the SPD from government, which is questionable. Loth agrees with Larry Eugene Jones and others that German parliamentary democracy ended in 1930, not later.

The essay on colonial politics is oddly placed between the essay on the role of the Catholic Center Party before 1930 and the chapter on 1933. Loth claims that Catholic support for colonial expansion reflected the end of Catholic rejection of capitalism.  Furthermore, Loth argues that Catholics supported colonialism to demonstrate loyalty to the Reich’s leadership and as a means to exploit its crucial role in the Reichstag. Colonial politics, however, alienated small freeholders and workers from the Center. The burden of naval armaments and the fear of social decline led many Catholics to reject Germany’s drive for global influence.

In a crucial chapter on the rise of National Socialism, Loth adopts the arguments generally accepted today. Neither the Church nor the party chairman, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, sacrificed the party for the concordat. Loth does argue, however, that while Kaas and the hierarchy did not stab the party in the back, they did not explore possible alternatives to supporting the Enabling Act or negotiating the Concordat.

In an essay on the Catholic resistance to the National Socialist regime, Loth largely summarizes well-known scholarship about the internal divisions in the German hierarchy. He criticizes the Church for not doing more to mobilize German Catholics against the regime. Here again, Loth adds an essay illustrating his point. This time, he focuses on the Christian union official Nikolaus Groß. Groß opposed the regime and eventually collaborated with members of the Abwehr in the planning of the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, for which Groß paid with his life.

In a last essay, published in 2012, Loth summarizes the argument made in this volume. He emphasizes the ambiguity between the anti-modern ultramontane positions of much of nineteenth century Catholic leaders on the one hand and the development of lay Catholic movements and initiatives on the other. The latter, Loth argues, stemmed from the laity, not the hierarchy, with the intention both of securing Catholic rights in a modern secular world but increasingly also to shape the values and policies of that world. German Catholicism became an advocate for workers, for Poles, Alsatians, for peasants and small freeholders. The Kulturkampf resulted in German Catholics’ advocacy of the civic rights and equality for all Germans, which led the Center Party to the defense of parliamentary democracy in the Wilhelmine period and to participation in many Reich cabinets of the Weimar Republic. Resistance to National Socialism led Catholics to prize cooperation of all democratic forces, regardless of religious identity. After 1945 all over Europe, Catholics actively participated in Christian Democratic parties, which in turn contributed much to the development of post-war democracy. Loth concludes, “In the long run, the ideas of solidarity and subsidiarity in contemporary debates about the future of the social welfare state in continental Europe can be considered a legacy of Catholic experience.” Loth hopes this experience and these principles will contribute to remedies for the weakening of state instruments across Europe.

While in a collection of essays representing the span of Loth’s career one cannot expect new archival discoveries or interventions in contemporary scholarly debates, this volume nonetheless serves useful ends. Loth reminds the reader of the milieu-debate, still smoldering among scholars of German Catholicism. By his argument against a homogeneous, national, and persistent milieu, Loth gives one the impression that those who insist on the existence of a milieu might be those who wish to simplify German Catholicism in order to offer over-generalized critiques.[3] Loth himself, however, limits his argument against the existence of a milieu by referring to regional milieux created against outside pressures. Kicking off this debate, by his own admission unintentionally might be Loth’s greatest scholarly legacy. Loth also argued that the Center’s contribution specifically and German Catholicism generally to the parliamentarization and thus to the democratization of Germany is one of its most unrecognized merits. In this volume, now published three years, ago, Loth reminds Germans how dear the price paid for the establishment of parliamentary democracy and the firm commitment to civil rights has been. To support his warning about the endangerment of parliamentary democracy in the early twenty-first century, Loth’s work analyzes the historical example of the alienation between Catholic nobles, notables, and middle class from Catholic workers and small freeholders, which eventually contributed to the collapse of Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary democracy. It might be beneficial for colleagues teaching German history and the history of Christianity in history to integrate his analysis into their lectures.

Notes:

[1] M. Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur. Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft” in Wilhelm Abel et al., eds. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1966).

[2] Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Margaret Stieg Dalton, Catholicism, Popular Culture and the Arts in Germany, 1880-1933 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and Mark Edward Ruff, The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

[3] Loth includes Olaf Blaschke among those whose use of the milieu concept is problematic.  See Olaf Blasche, Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, eds. Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten, Krisen (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2000).

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Review of Holy Silence (directed and produced by Steven Pressman, 2020)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Holy Silence, directed and produced by Steven Pressman (Seventh Art, 2020)

Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Filmmaker Steven Pressman often tells the story of the moment he heard Pope Francis’ announcement in March 2019 that Vatican archival materials related to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) would soon be made available to researchers for the first time. At the time, Pressman was in the editing stage for his new film, Holy Silence, which offers a fresh take on the longstanding questions about the role of the Vatican during the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Pressman has said that although he was initially concerned that the opening of the archives would eclipse his film and render it outdated before it was even released, he soon realized that the timing was fortuitous. With more than 16 million pages spread across several archives in Vatican City and Rome, historians will be filling in missing puzzle pieces and bringing nuance to polarized debates for years to come. COVID-related delays have extended these timelines even further. In this context, Holy Silence offers a balanced and accessible primer to audiences, both newcomers and those well-versed in this history.

The film features several academics familiar to CCHQ readers, including members of the editorial team Kevin Spicer and Suzanne Brown-Fleming. Interviews with Robert Ventresca, Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, Maria Mazzenga, and many others are interspersed with historic footage, and occasional re-enactment to explore the actions of popes Pius XI and XII and some of the innerworkings of the Vatican. Pressman offers a range of voices, including a few outliers like Norbert Hofmann, Secretary of the Holy See’s Commission for Jewish Relations, who views Pius XII in a sympathetic light. We also hear contrasting viewpoints from Sister Maria Pascalizi of the Roman Convent of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori and Micaela Pavoncello, a local Jew, about the Vatican’s role in sanctioning or encouraging the hiding of Jews in churches.

The film is centered on the Vatican, but it employs a distinctly American lens, featuring several American individuals who intersected with this history. The contribution of American Jesuit priest John LaFarge and the so-called “hidden encyclical” drafted in 1938 is explored in detail. Unfortunately, the film does not mention the pre-Vatican II supersessionist and anti-Judaic themes of Humani generis unitas (“The Unity of the Human Race”). Instead, it focuses on LaFarge’s formative experiences ministering in African-American communities, highlighting the transatlantic context in which some people were formulating their critiques of racism in the 1930s and 40s.

Holy Silence concludes with the end of World War II and does not address the postwar entanglements of the Vatican with Nazis fleeing Europe; doing so would require a much longer film than the current 55 minutes. Like any good documentary film, it presents a narrative but asks more questions than it answers. As the debates around the role of the Catholic church and Pope Pius XII in the Holocaust receive new breath due to the opening of the archives, this film provides an entry point for productive discussion about the role of religious leaders, the relationship between large religious institutions and governments, and local dynamics between religious majorities and minorities.

Holy Silence is available to stream through PBS and Amazon Prime. Recordings of multiple panel discussions about the film co-sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are available on YouTube.

 

 

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Review of Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Social scientist Robert Braun has made an important contribution to the study of rescue during the Holocaust, up-ending much of the conventional wisdom and modes of analysis about rescue and rescuers. Braun argues that most studies of rescue are insufficient because they focus too much on motivation, overlook the rescuers’ capacity to effectively carry out the rescue, and do not account for regional variation. This book addresses all three of these factors. Braun is especially skeptical of religious teachings as primary motivating factors, illustrated by a compelling opening anecdote about two Dutch towns in the region of Twente with similar sociocultural profiles but very different responses to the deportation of Jews in 1941. In Almelo many Jews were able to evade deportation with the help of the local Catholic church and 42% of the town’s Jews survived the war. In the nearby town of Borne, the local Catholic churches did not engage in rescue efforts and only 22% of the town’s Jews escaped deportation. Catholic theology and social teaching cannot account for this variation, nor can political or wartime circumstances. Herein lies the guiding question of this study: why are some religious communities willing and able to protect victims of mass persecution and others are not?

Because this is a work of social science, it employs a methodology very different from how historians approach research and thus warrants some explanation. Braun begins with a hypothesis that religious minorities are more likely to assist or rescue persecuted groups from mass violence or genocide. In this framing, religious minorities could hold minority status on a national level because of their small size (e.g., Quakers) or they could be a minority in a given region—Catholics in a majority Protestant region and vice versa. This minority theory is based on the idea that religious minorities recognize a shared vulnerability with other minorities, which triggers empathy. Braun posits that all religious communities seek security and self-preservation. When they cannot achieve this through religious dominance, then pluralism is the next safest option to ensure survival. So, a commitment to pluralism accounts for the willingness factor but minority status also enables capacity. Minority communities are able to engage in clandestine collective action while reducing exposure because of their members’ commitment and their relative isolation (more on isolation below). (40)

Braun proceeds to test this hypothesis through detailed geocoding of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands and Belgium, combining spatial statistics, archival sources, contemporary newspapers and other published materials, and postwar testimony, including materials from Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations program. Numerous graphs, charts, and maps are included throughout these chapters, as well as an insert of ten colour figures. The maps help to explain the story yet the technical presentation of the data makes these chapters largely inaccessible to those not familiar with social scientific methodologies.

Compelling as it is, the limitations of Braun’s thesis are just as important to understand as the argument itself and the data that supports it. There are a number of significant qualifications, the most important being that it is not just minority status that motivates and enables rescue but a certain level of isolation. (112) To illustrate this point, Braun offers the case of a Catholic chaplain in a majority Catholic area of Belgium who carried out a successful rescue operation because he used farmers in remote locations to hide Jews. The farmers were not socially isolated but rather geographically isolated. (170-171) Another crucial factor to consider is that Jews were more likely to survive when their individual networks overlapped with those of isolated minority groups—when doctors and patients and business owners and business patrons interacted on regular basis.

The book’s concluding chapter considers the applicability of the minority theory in other countries during the Holocaust. Here we see that the seemingly straightforward thesis posited in the book comes with some significant exceptions and qualifications. In order for Braun’s theory to work, the rescue must be collective and clandestine. He outlines three exceptions that suggest why we do not necessarily find religious minorities rescuing Jews to the same extent in other settings during the Holocaust and other modern genocides. Religious minorities may not engage in higher levels of successful rescue where: 1) majority elites, both secular and religious, openly object to persecution and cooperate to stymie the persecution; 2) the rescue is highly individualized and does not require coordination, as in Poland; and 3) the minority groups are closely aligned with the repressive apparatus undertaking the violence. (236) This third point is paramount to understanding the actions of religious minorities in Nazi Germany, where most Christian minorities responded to their perceived vulnerable status by aligning themselves with the Nazi state rather than responding with empathy for other persecuted minorities. Yet the book’s thesis may shed light on German religious minorities if we consider how the Volksgemeinschaft offered belonging and affirmation for previously marginalized groups in German society, thus eclipsing the recognition of shared vulnerability and the promotion of pluralism.

As the author points out, studying clandestine behaviour is hard. (116) Due to the extensive documentation available for the Netherlands, this book is able to compare situations on a granular level and isolate individual factors. Although its applicability may not be as broad as the author explores, he has offered a sophisticated methodology and way of thinking about rescue that moves far beyond religious motivation.

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Review of Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century (London: Oneworld Publications, 2020). 273 pages. ISBN: 9781786078308.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

As one might see immediately from the title of the above-named work, the Reverend Butler-Gallie is quite clever and creative in wordplay. This is one of the most engaging books written as inspiration for those who have come to believe that Christianity was more than a willing tool of fascist regimes and genocidal projects in the twentieth century. In fact, in the brief introduction to the book, the author notes that Christianity and Fascism have been intertwined and that the complex relationship of Christian institutions with Fascist dictatorships has spawned an enormous number of works. This work is not attempting to delve deeply into the interplay of Christian Church leadership with the monumental devastation produced by fascist projects. Instead, this work serves as an attempt to underscore the rare and therefore more extraordinary acts of Christian men and women who decided that their commitment to the teachings of Christ and their understanding of Christian teaching meant that they had no other choice but to resist destructive fascist actions and the harmful ideology behind them.

The book is divided into five sections, beginning in occupied France, with stories of “resistance par excellence” focusing on the lives of Canon Felix Kir (of blanc de cassis aka “Kir” fame) and Abbe Pierre (born Henri Marie Joseph Groues). Both of these individuals engaged in acts of sabotage, rescue work (especially of persecuted Jews), and generally served as thorns in the sides of the Nazis and their French collaborators.

The next section focuses on places where resistance to fascism meant going against one’s own people and one’s own government: Germany and Italy. Here readers encounter a Catholic bishop, Clemens August Graf von Galen; a Protestant minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and finally a Catholic priest, Don Pietro Pappagallo, who engaged in forging new identities for the persecuted in and around Rome. This inspiring story of Don Pietro Pappagallo then leads into the longest section of the book; an examination of Christians resisting while living under occupying powers. This section brings in Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks, Poles, Dutch, and Danes. Some survived their acts of resistance, while others, such as Sister Sara Salkahazi, a former chain-smoking journalist turned nun, did not.

Finally, the two remaining sections of the book focus on two individuals who left the relative safety of Ireland and Scotland, Father Hugh O’Flaherty of Scarlet Pimpernel fame and the much lesser-known but no less inspiring Jane Haining, who traveled to Hungary to help orphaned girls and who died along with her charges in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. The final segment focuses on Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, who fought for integration in the deep South of the United States, and on a young seminarian from New England, Jonathan Daniels, who took a bullet intended for a young black girl attempting to attend an all-white school. This final segment on civil rights in the United States seems a bit out of sync with the rest of the work. That said, one can see the overlap in racist ideology and understand why the author decided to include these accounts in a work on resistance.

As one can see from this brief overview, the book aims to cover a great deal of ground, using individual life stories as lessons for the reader. Are saints mad? Are they fools? Are martyrs always brave in the face of life-threatening circumstances? And so on. These vignettes are also meant to inspire the reader with a sense that, even in the darkest of times, there are always good, brave people who decide that they would rather give their lives in the name of their principles and beliefs than conform to whatever the majority in society is doing at the time.

The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie’s writing style makes for a rollicking read, and, despite the fact that I disagree with his interpretation of my scholarship on Bishop von Galen, I found the work to be one that I did not want to put down. There is much energy, plenty of puns, and some non-scholarly vocabulary in the work (such as saying Father Kir’s actions indicated his “sheer ballsiness,” p.14) yet this type of non-scholarly language is what makes the book so engaging. It breaks through the clutter of stale academic prose, it captures the reader’s imagination with wonderful turns of phrasing, and it radiates some of the energy that this cast of characters must have needed to draw upon in order to maintain their faith and values in the face of death.

I am certain that scholars who have spent years researching each one of these individuals might find errors or misinterpretations of the subjects’ lives, yet, in spite of that fact, many readers might then be led to follow up on the suggested readings at the very end of the book to investigate each person whose bravery and dedication to God reverberates throughout the work. If one takes the book on its face – that is, that it is meant to serve as a source of inspiration and hope for readers of all faiths much like reading a Lives of the Saints collection, I would recommend reading the book. In a time when a person’s decisions could have life-saving or life-threatening consequences, the individuals featured by Rev. Butler-Gallie reveal the power that deep faith in God can serve as a continued source of strength for us all.

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Review of Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan, Paul Leo. Lutherischer Pastor mit jüdischen Wurzeln (1893–1958)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan, Paul Leo. Lutherischer Pastor mit jüdischen Wurzeln (1893–1958) (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2019). 86 pages. ISBN 978-3-95948-453-4.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna / Danube University Krems

Historian Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan, Professor of Contextual Theology at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, present the life and work of the Lutheran Evangelical pastor and theologian Paul Leo (1893–1958) in 86 pages. Linden wrote the first part, Nessan the second. Unfortunately, the two parts are not well coordinated, so that there are repetitions in places. The relevance of examining the life of Paul Leo and paying tribute to him with this booklet lies in his family of origin. One of his ancestors was Moses Mendelsohn. Still, like his father, Paul Leo was a baptized Christian. At this point, a great nuisance begins: Carsten Linden writes about Paul Leo, who was baptized in infancy: “The extent to which he was Jewish, however, seems to be a little in the eye of the beholder” (p. 7). Linden is right in referring to interpretations of Jewish theology stating that the descendants of a Jewish mother are Jews. The annoyance, however, is that the author assumes Leo could possibly have a Jewish identity, just as the National Socialists did. For them, the Protestant pastor was a Jew because of his ancestors. Why Linden does not simply accept Leo’s religious self-image as a Protestant Christian at this point, instead of relying on external attributions, remains unclear.

Based on extensive archival source material, Linden describes Paul Leo’s early professional career. When the National Socialists came to power, Leo faced increasing difficulties due to his Jewish ancestors. Why Linden then adopts the racial biological interpretations of the National Socialists in this regard and describes Paul Leo as the “Jewish pastor of the regional church” (p. 19) is disturbing, however. Unfortunately, Linden also makes significant mistakes in terms of content: The Confessing Church did not form due to alleged state and National Socialist (where should a dividing line be drawn here?) interventions in church affairs (p. 18). This apologetic church historiography of the 1950s has been refuted many times in recent years, which should be taken into account when dealing with such a topic.

Since Paul Leo was mainly responsible for pastoral care in state institutions, he successively lost all of his responsibilities, as a result of which the church council assigned him the Osnabrück district of Haste for pastoral care. But even there, Paul Leo was increasingly hindered in his work because he was considered a Jew in the National Socialist understanding. The church council therefore decided to suggest ‘temporary retirement’ to Leo in mid-1938. On November 9, 1938, Paul Leo shared the same fate as thousands of Jews throughout the ‘Third Reich’: the SS arrested him and deported him to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Since Paul Leo received a visa for the Netherlands, he was released from the concentration camp at the end of 1938. However, he never spoke about his experiences there. In the Netherlands, he also had to live separated from his daughter (the mother had died during childbirth), which, in addition to the loss of his homeland, was certainly another inhuman burden. From the Netherlands, Leo then came to the USA in 1939, where he held various positions as pastor and theologian until his sudden death in 1958. Craig Nessan describes this second phase of life in Leo’s new home in America. It becomes clear how difficult life could be for exiles in the first few years.

The brief account of the life and work of Paul Leo is a classic descriptive biographical treatise. It conveys very well the depressing circumstances under which people had to live who did not belong to the ideal of the National Socialist ‘Volksgemeinschaft.’ And as a pastor, Leo received no significant protection from the regional church. From the point of view of the reviewer, the description of Leo’s first years in the USA is particularly impressive. Despite his successful escape from Nazi Germany, which ensured Leo’s and his daughter’s survival, the first few years were a struggle for survival in a completely different society. The Lutheran theologian Paul Leo had to work in his early years as a teacher in a Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh, which ensured his and his family’s financial survival.

Embedding the descriptions within the overall context of the ‘Third Reich’ with the help of current research literature would certainly have done the book some good, ­even more so a final editing. The many grammatical errors are unworthy of an appreciation of Paul Leo’s life.

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