Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)
Review of Traude Litzka, The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna, trans. Gerda Joseph (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2018). 159 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-643-91036-3.
By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University
Traude Litzka’s work, in some respects, might be misleading in its title. The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna does not quite speak to the contents of the volume. Instead, it might have been more helpful to title the book, The Church’s Help for Those Persecuted as Jews in Nazi Vienna. In this way, readers would perhaps recognize the signal that many of the individuals who risked their lives to protect other people in danger were focused, at least at first, on saving those individuals who had been baptized as Roman Catholics and were, therefore, according to the theology of the Church, no longer Jews, but Catholics. Later in Litzka’s work, Jews who had not been baptized were also helped—to the credit of the team of rescuers operating in Vienna. Her book serves as a reminder to historians that the fate of the “non-Aryan Catholics” still needs to be further researched. Her work also reveals the enormous difficulties in conducting such research as so many rescue operations had to be enacted through verbal orders in an effort to evade Gestapo and other denouncers’ attempts to thwart the life-saving activities.
Despite the challenges of locating survivors and documents which would testify to the actions of the brave Catholic men and women engaged in rescue work, Litzka has assembled quite a roster of both individuals as well as orders of religious who decided that, despite the threat of arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment (or worse), their consciences would not allow them to remain inactive in the face of overwhelming discrimination and hardships. One such man who figures prominently throughout the book is the Jesuit priest, Ludger Born (born in Duisburg in 1897). Born was appointed as head of the “Aid Office for Non-Aryan Catholics” by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer in 1940 and for the next five years, Father Born worked assiduously to aid all those who needed help. He inherited his position from another priest, Father Georg Bichlmair, who had established the office and had staffed it primarily with dedicated women. Some of these women’s stories were later documented after the war by Father Born, providing some insight into both their identity and motivations. Out of the twenty-three employees, Father Born’s documentation focused on only five of the female workers. He attributed their dedication to their profound religiosity.
What exactly did the Aid Office for Non-Aryan Catholics do? At first, when the Nazis marched into Austria, Cardinal Innitzer was friendly towards the Hitler regime. However, by July 1938 he had reconsidered his conciliatory position, as the Nazis shuttered all Catholic schools, dissolved Catholic libraries, forbade Catholic orders from providing instruction, and expropriated abbeys and other houses of orders, expelling and harassing priests and nuns (129). At that point, the Cardinal determined it was time to assist victims of Nazism and he worked personally with both Father Bichlmair and Father Born to establish the Aid Office, often donating his own money and material goods to help the organization. At first, the Aid Office focused on assisting Jews who had been baptized into the Catholic faith and much of Litzka’s primary source documentation attests to this focus. She also emphasizes that, according to the teaching of the Church at that point in time, there was still a great deal of anti-Judaism and suspicion of converted Jews, even though the Church’s focus was on saving Jewish souls through conversion.
While in the early years a number of Jews sought conversion motivated by a genuine interest in Christianity, as time went on and conditions worsened, Father Born and his staff began to realize that some Jews sought baptism as a way of easing emigration problems (some countries such as Brazil favored Catholics in their immigration policy). However, as the persecutions and discriminations increased in quantity and in severity, the Aid Office and priests in Vienna began baptizing large numbers of Jews, recognizing that a baptismal certificate might be a life-saving measure rather than a marker of the true conversion of souls. After the war began, a baptismal certificate did not generally assist in saving someone from being persecuted as a “non-Aryan of Jewish descent” and the number of requests for baptisms of Jews declined sharply.
There were different types of assistance that the Aid Office offered to the persecuted. The staff did not request to see “proof” of baptismal certificates and were therefore open to aiding unconverted Jews as well as “non-Aryan Catholics.” Workers at the Aid Office initially assisted with the emigration process, providing advice and assistance with the complicated bureaucratic red tape to obtain visas, affidavits, and passports. Once emigration became less and less likely for the persecuted, the Aid Office began functioning as a social welfare agency. Staff visited the persecuted in their overcrowded apartments, procuring food, medical supplies, and even dentures (!). They served as a lifeline for those who were being deported to places such as Theresienstadt, mailing parcels with food and sometimes clothing and monitoring the postcards that arrived from each deportee. The system they established, helping victims of persecution, was even more poignant when one realizes that many of the women who worked in the Aid Office were themselves categorized as “non-Aryan Catholics” and some of them were deported as well.
In addition to offering spiritual comfort and material aid, workers in the Aid Office and other Catholic institutions also sought to hide the persecuted in various ways. In one such situation, Dominican nuns in Vienna-Hacking had retreated to Kemmelbach, which was located along a river and could be developed agriculturally. The sisters worked the farm and raised animals—but they also hid Jews on the premises:
During the most dangerous period for them, they had been hidden and fed for three weeks…. 25 Jews were hidden between the two ceilings (of the pigpen). The oxcart took them to St. Pölten, where they were placed with a farmer. He was happy that he could use them as laborers. Sr. Antonia and Mrs. Reichel, afraid of the Russians, went to Vienna with the Jews. The Jews continued on to their home in Hungary. (83)
The order’s chronicle then adds the fascinating twist to the end of the story—as the Russians advanced, Sr. Antonia and Mrs. Reichel were in turn saved by the Jews they had originally rescued.
A Jewish woman disguised Sr. Antonia and Mrs. Reichl—who were the most threatened by the Russians—and took them along as “her daughters”…. One morning at 4 a.m., the bell at the gate rang, and a Jew delivered “girls” who were marked with a Jewish star. (83)
In this way, one life-saving kindness had been returned.
Litzka also included less than flattering reasons for some religious to take in frightened Jews. In the case of the Carmelite Sisters of Töllergasse, Born’s reports reveal that the sisters first motivation to get involved with non-Aryan Catholics was from a monetary desire. They needed to pay off a debt and in their chronicle they openly admit that they took in individuals who “donated” jewelry, which the nuns used to purchase a monstrance. They also apparently accepted gold from their wards. Unlike the Dominican nuns mentioned above, the Carmelite nuns seemed to have profited monetarily from their relief efforts. As Litzka states, “Independently of whether the donation of their jewelry was truly ‘willingly’ and based on gratitude, the suggestion for ‘gold donation’ and then even more the acceptance of these donations, appears to be exploitation in a hopeless situation” (87).
This publication is to be commended for attempting to uncover the untold stories of assistance given in Vienna by religious men and women. The book itself is somewhat choppy in its presentation of anti-Judaism and only devotes limited space to discussions of the role of Pope Pius XI and Pius XII in influencing (or not) the desire on the part of Catholics to aid “non-Aryan Catholics” as well as full Jews in their time of greatest need. There are some minor errors, including the misspelling of Margarete Sommer’s name, but these are only minor points considering the number of chronicles and other accounts the author had to search through in order to compile the examples contained in the work. In the final analysis, Litzka who considers all of the many reasons why there has been such silence about the attempted rescue operations in Vienna concludes, “At least one thing is certain: In those times, there were unquestionably more individuals who clandestinely assisted but who even afterwards did not want to ‘make a big deal of it’—which is why we learn of it only rarely or incidentally (131)”. Litzka is to be commended for her dedication to uncovering these stories so that they are not lost forever.
Readers eager to expand their knowledge of World War II will appreciate details that are rarely addressed in standard histories. Reynolds, who served with the 120th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, describes how he experienced the elaborate preparations for the Normandy landings, including three days on board LST (Landing Ships Tank) 319. He also provides a fascinating glimpse into British interactions with locals in northern France and Belgium in the months after the breakout. For example, through a funeral he conducted for a Protestant civilian, Reynolds met and befriended a French woman, Mlle Perremond, who spoke excellent English. He subsequently learned that she and two other French women, one young, the other elderly, had helped seven downed RAF pilots escape to England.
The essays in Blaschke and Großbölting’s volume continue this investigation in a similar vein by widening and deepening it. They ask: Where did the churches and National Socialism interact with each other? In what ways did they stand in each other’s way? How did they compete for members or prominence? And how did they promote each other’s particular concerns? For the editors, an apologetic and mistaken emphasis on resistance – “cross versus sword” narrative – has dominated the interpretative framework of studies on Christianity in Germany under National Socialism. By contrast, however, they view the period fluidly, recognizing that few Germans rejected Nazism entirely. They claim a closer tie between the two than previously articulated in the Gaius and Nolzen collection as well as by others. If one concludes that religion was a significant factor in German society in the 1920s and 30s, they raise the following questions: did National Socialism arise despite Christianity, as many historians have suggested, or did Nazism develop and establish itself precisely because of society’s Christian character? The essays of this volume primarily support the latter by exposing the interplay of National Socialism and Christianity in a variety of historical situations.
Vondung is clear from the outset that he believes central religious notions such as redemption or salvation have also formed links to very different movements across Germany’s history, from nationalist movements arising out of the Napoleonic Wars through to intellectual movements, and that National Socialism must also be considered ‘a political movement’ with ‘political goals.’ The introduction in itself explores a fascinating and diverse cast of characters, ranging from Fichte to Johst to Mirbt to Gerstenhauer, but argues a kind of coherence around the central theme of a desire for ‘redemption.’ Vondung writes extremely well, and consistently draws on a broad knowledge of German history. His larger historical perspective does sometimes mean that comparisons are drawn from examples that range from the Napoleonic wars to the Nazi state. For readers familiar with the larger history of Germany, this poses no issue, but it does assume an understanding of key historical context. Despite the fact that figures which are quoted come from different periods of time, the central desire for ‘redemption’ is argued to have been born from a ‘complex of motives’ that are summarised as ‘a combination of national frustration, fundamental unease with modernity, and the feeling that life was devoid of meaning.’ While the Introduction does not fully explain the purpose of this book, it does illustrate the overarching approach of many scholars who write in the field of ‘political religion’– that that there is either a perceived inadequacy in religion or an inefficacy of religion to fill the need for meaning in modernity (dominated by ‘rationalism and materialism’) that has led people to seek ‘a new spiritual home.’
After the war’s end, Father Fabisiak was working as a missionary in Bolivia. There, many people expressed their curiosity about “the Phenomenon,” or, as we call it, the Holocaust. The Polish priest served as a living witness to the events his parishioners had only heard about over radio broadcasts or had read in newspapers. And many of them were skeptical: could such atrocities have truly been committed by human beings? How could something so obscene as the Holocaust have been possible? This reluctance to accept what had happened inspired Fabisiak to write down his experiences—not out of hatred for the enemy, but as a way of showing readers what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Each chapter is very brief, written like a vignette, allowing readers to move easily from one terrifying experience to the next. All of this was written with the intent of documenting the truth of Father Fabisiak’s fate when he was in the hands of the Nazis.
This is not a typical academic monograph. Students or scholars looking for a rigorous critical examination of Reinisch and his environment, with careful documentation of the evidence, will be disappointed. Rice’s judgment of his subject his balanced – he depicts Reinisch as a flawed human whose strength of will was extraordinary but who also clearly had his faults – but his sympathy for Reinisch is tangible. Rice does not provide consistent citations, though occasionally he will clarify a term or refer to a source for a quotation. His “source books”, listed at the end in (seemingly) random rather than alphabetical order, contain relevant scholarship on Reinisch in both English and German, but is not exhaustive on any given subject, indicates no archival research, and includes references whose impact on the text are unclear. For instance, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, and Heinz Höhne’s The Order of the Death’s Head are all mentioned, but do not appear nor are they alluded to in the main text. What scholars are likely to find most problematic, though, is the style in which Rice chooses to write: in an interview with The Irish Examiner, Rice explains, “I didn’t want it to be a history book. I wanted to write it like a film script, so that you could see things happening. I couldn’t be a fly on the wall, but I tried to get inside the protagonist’s head, and I took on Joyce’s and Proust’s stream of consciousness.”
As I have shown in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, there were approximately one-hundred-fifty “brown priests” who publicly supported and aligned themselves with National Socialism.
Friedrich Weißler is another such figure. A legal advisor to the Confessing Church, he is usually mentioned (if at all) in his connection to the 1936 Confessing Church memorandum (Denkschrift) to Adolf Hitler. Tortured and beaten to death in Sachsenhausen in February 1937, Weißler was the only person to be killed as a result of the memorandum. Not coincidentally, he was also the only “Volljude” involved. This 2017 book by Manfred Gailus is a gripping biography of a courageous man and a well-documented account of the genesis and aftermath of the memorandum. (Gailus is the first author to examine the papers that were in the family possession.)
Malick is an atypical American director: he has protected his private life to the point of reclusiveness; his projects routinely consume several years; while he has made several critically-acclaimed films (his first film, Badlands; The Thin Red Line, about the Vietnam War; The Tree of Life, about immortality), he is both lauded and criticized for favouring themes and visual aesthetics over plot and narrative (see The Tree of Life). In fact, A Hidden Life delivers a more linear narrative than many of his films, with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end. It opens with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, the famous aerial shot of clouds and a city gradually coalescing through the mist. Lasting only the first couple of minutes, and including splices from elsewhere in that famous 1934 documentary, such as the stunning panorama of the Nazi Party’s rally grounds, this is all Malick gives to the audience of Hitler’s climb to power and takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia before plunging directly into the fall of 1939. Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) is married to Franziscka (“Fani”, Valerie Pachner), and has two small blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughters. They live in the Upper Austrian village of Sankt Radegund, not far from the German border (Bavaria). We watch them pause in their labour as unseen planes fly overhead, our only clue that the war has begun.
To this day, Martin Niemöller remains one of the most famous German churchmen of the twentieth century. He is regarded as an upright resistance fighter against Hitler, who testified to his stance with seven years of incarceration in concentration camps, as a preacher who admonished German “guilt” and as someone who had transformed from an imperial submarine commander of the First World War into a pacifist, who during the 1950s eloquently and powerfully opposed the Federal Republic of Germany’s Western alliance, its remilitarization, and nuclear weapons. Now, 35 years after Niemöller’s death in 1984, Benjamin Ziemann, Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, cuts through the thicket of legend concerning Niemöller’s story and uncovers important strands of his life.
This book, edited by Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann, has given a surprising moment in Niemöller’s life its most thorough explication. It also offers readers an edited version of the handwritten manuscript Niemöller produced within a period of less than three months during his four years of solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen. His assessment of Catholicism versus Protestantism, a document which numbers over 200 pages in Niemöller’s hand, now comprises 150 printed pages in this book.
The structure of the book is not unduly distinctive, but it sets out clearly the overall argument and method. Huber’s Bonhoeffer is certainly a big and complex figure. He is also one full of contrasts and the author delights in framing and exploring them. An introductory section evokes the figure of Bonhoeffer as we might first encounter him in a variety of places, not least over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. There follows a section on Bonhoeffer’s background and early formation and then another three on his early work in the contexts of university and church life, the first situating him firmly in the landscapes of German thought, the second examining a theology of grace which was deeply rooted in the precepts of Lutheranism, and the third discussing the place of the Bible in a world of maturing historical criticism. Each of these sections present dualities which already defined so much in Bonhoeffer’s work (‘Individual spirituality or Society’; ‘The Church of the World or the Church of the Word’; ‘Acting justly and waiting for God’s own time’; ‘The Historical Jesus or the Jesus of Today’). The young Bonhoeffer is certainly very much at home in the intellectual landscapes of German Lutheranism but the emerging vision is an open one and there is no knowing where it will lead.
Rebecca Scherf’s study of the German Evangelical Church’s (GEC) responses to the concentration camps is a significant new contribution to the scholarship. While her main focus concerns Protestant clergy who were sent to concentration camps (she confined her study to concentration camps, so it does not include pastors who were in prisons), she has broadened her analysis to address three points of intersection between the GEC and the concentration camp system. The first concerns the relationship between regional churches and the Protestant chaplains who served in the early camps. The second examines the official church responses when clergy were sent to camps. The third looks at the experiences of those who were imprisoned in camps by drawing on contemporary documentation and subsequent memoirs. There are several appendixes with helpful graphs illustrating the number of clergy arrests by year (1935—when there were mass arrests of Confessing pastors due to a pulpit protest—was the peak), by camp, and by regional church. While most clergy who were sent to camps were held only briefly (indicating that the Nazi state intended such arrests as a form of intimidation), the number of arrests during the war grew and fewer were released. There is also a chronologically and geographically organized list of the Protestant clergy who were imprisoned.
The volume opens with Bell’s September 1938 letter to Bonhoeffer assuring him of his willingness to help the Leibholzes. George Bell had been actively involved since 1933 in assisting refugees from Nazi Germany, including members of the Confessing Church who were affected by the Nazi laws. The early correspondence offers a detailed picture of the difficulties refugees faced even after they reached a safe country. They could not assume, of course, that they would remain in safety; Leibholz’s brother Hans and his wife managed to reach Holland, but committed suicide in 1940 after the German invasion. Added to this anxiety were financial concerns (Germany froze Leibholz’s assets when he fled, so they arrived in England with nothing), worries about the family they had left behind, existential concerns about employment and the future, and dealing with anti-German prejudice in England once the war began. In May 1940 Leibholz was interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man, along with a number of Confessing Church pastors and their wives. Bell managed to obtain his release in August 1940, after which the two men pursued the possibility that the Leibholzes might immigrate to the United States. With the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s contacts in New York, Leibholz was offered and accepted an invitation to Union Theological Seminary in 1941, but by then the door had closed due to new U.S. restrictions on immigration.