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Review of Klaus Vondung, Paths to Salvation: The National Socialist Religion

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of Klaus Vondung, Paths to Salvation: The National Socialist Religion, trans. William Petropulos (St Augustine’s Press: South Bend, Indiana, 2019). 168 Pp. ISBN: 978-1-58731-656-2.

By Samuel Koehne, Trinity Grammar School

In Paths to Salvation Klaus Vondung, with considerable nuance, examines the extent to which religious concepts may be applicable to National Socialism. The study in itself is complex and interesting, exploring what Vondung refers to as the ‘forms’ of ‘religiosity’ that might best characterise National Socialism – while still focusing on Nazism as principally a secular and even atheistic ideology. In broad terms, the work fits within the historiographical school of thought that explains Nazism as a kind of ‘political religion,’ and this has been a key focus in Vondung’s career, including his much earlier work Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Magic and Manipulation: The Ideological Cult and Political Religion of National Socialism). As a result, Vondung’s text explicitly focuses on particular ‘religious aspects’ that he believes are the ‘fundamental religious phenomena’ of National Socialism – Faith, Mysticism, Myth and Ritual, Cult, Theology, Apocalypse – and these then form the chapters of his book. As such, this publication fits into the recent revival of interest in the concept of ‘political religion.’ However, unlike some works which have considered a particular Nazi leader, a text or event, the author adopts what might be termed a ‘pointillist’ approach to the topic: layering smaller examples to illustrate his arguments.

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.’

The first chapter of the book – ‘Political Religion?’ – is particularly useful in summarising the ways in which Nazism was considered either a ‘secular religion’ or ‘political religion’ by contemporaries, and Vondung summarises major scholars of the 1920s and 1930s who understood ‘Hitlerism’ and the Nazi Party in this way. Drawing especially on the work of Eric Voegelin on Political Religions, he provides a subtle and fascinating argument that balances explanations of political religion against those who critique it, pointing out that while that has been a revival of interest in ‘political religions’ there remain major objections to its use. Vondung notes that Voegelin believed National Socialism went beyond using ‘a religious vocabulary’ or ‘cultic forms of celebration’ and argues that ‘[Voegelin’s] analysis revealed the religious nature of [National Socialism’s] existential core’ in that ‘partial contents of the world’ – like ‘race’ – became ‘objects of faith.’ Yet he also summarises the criticisms, such as the arguments that it there was a ‘religious nature’ to Nazism, the ‘dogmas’ of Nazism were ‘empty’ (quoting de Rougemont) and that Nazism was not homogenous but instead embraced diverse religious positions and expressions of ‘faith.’ He also includes Mommsen’s fairly damning assessment that ‘The decisive object to applying the theory of political religion to National Socialism is that it attributes an ideological rigor and consistency to a movement that lacked any.’ In fact, it appears that Vondung does not fully embrace the concept of ‘political religion’ either, pointing out that Voegelin himself noted in later works that this term was ‘too vague.’ Nonetheless, the author sees much value in the very recent work of Emilio Gentile in this field, and views his own book as examining ‘the various forms in which religiosity is articulated in National Socialism.’ While his work does cover diverse topics, I believe that it is important to detail two particular foci – ‘Faith’ and ‘Apocalypse’ – as these help to give a sense of the remainder of the book.

Vondung is very convincing in his argument that Hitler saw ‘faith’ as one of the core and necessary methods to building a powerful political movement, and that this drew on existing religious notions and traditions. It has been well established that Hitler not only admired the dogmatic method of the Catholic Church (while fundamentally rejecting the content of such dogmas) but that he also thought such assurance and ‘apodictic force’ was absolutely essential to the creation of a ‘brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will’ (Mein Kampf) that would draw the diverse völkisch movement into a powerful political vehicle. For that matter, the page headings of Mein Kampf summarised this neatly: ‘From religious sentiment to an apodictic belief / From völkisch feeling to a political confession.’ Vondung examines this, and elaborates on it, noting that this ‘faith’ then formed a powerful method by which people were drawn to central tenets of Nazism. Most especially, there was ‘faith’ in Hitler himself, but Vondung also believes that other such objects of faith were ‘Blood and Soil, Volk and Reich’ and the swastika flag itself. The argument is well made that this then formed a far more fanatical adherence and ‘stronger commitment’ to the Nazi Party that merely agreeing to follow a party platform. Although Voegelin believed that Nazism went beyond ‘cultic forms of celebration,’ Vondung notes that these actually form the strongest examples of a commitment to ‘faith’ and belief: noting the consecration of flags at the Nuremberg rallies (with the ‘blood flag’ of the Munich Putsch) and ‘swearing-in ceremonies’ that formed a common part of events for new members of both the NSDAP and the SS. Vondung uses a powerful example of ‘liturgical forms of declarations of faith’ that repeated the mantra of ‘We believe…’ Providing multiple examples of both songs and poems, as well as personal diary entries of such figures as Goebbels, Vondung points out that much of what would commonly be accepted as religious declarations of faith were indeed both applied to new ‘catechisms’ of race, blood, and the Volk and experienced by some Nazi adherents as a genuine expression of faith. Nonetheless, he does urge caution and notes that there were also party adherents who were quite ‘cynical’ in joining the party, or those who only participated in the sense of ‘command and obedience’ without necessarily experiencing either an emotional connection – as others certainly did – or feeling any deeper commitment. Nonetheless, while Vondung feels that it is difficult to ascertain the ‘earnestness’ of those professing a Nazi faith, it is clear that the intention was to build such faith in Nazi Germany and its aims. What this does show is there is some strong evidence and support for the argument that ‘religious phenomena’ could be either used by the Nazis or genuinely adapted to a new form of racial faith. However, it does not necessarily follow that this shows the ‘religious nature of [National Socialism’s] existential core.’ This is illustrated by the final chapter of the work, which in some ways counter-balances the very strong chapter on ‘Faith.’

When it comes to the final chapter of his work, Vondung sees the ‘apocalyptic’ view of the Nazis (relying particularly on Hitler and Rosenberg) as the ‘extreme manifestation’ of Nazi religiosity. However, he goes further, arguing that this is the ‘only plausible explanation for the intention to destroy the Jews.’ This is difficult to sustain on the face of it, even though it does fit with the notion of ‘redemptive antisemitism’ that Saul Friedländer proposed as the core of National Socialism. For that matter, Vondung’s view that the Nazis’ world-view was akin to that of an ‘apocalyptic visionary’ does in broad terms fit with the famous definition of Fascism by Roger Griffin: ‘Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.’

Yet Vondung locates the notion of the apocalypse not only in the kind of approach that characterized the work of early figures such as Eric Voegelin or later scholars like Hans Mommsen – that Nazism was a ‘political messianism’ or that Nazism possessed a ‘chiliastic character’ – but in the context of this term both within the book of Daniel and in the book of Revelation. In this regard, and it is worth quoting at length, Vondung believes that ‘the apocalyptic message’ in either the Old or New Testament ‘was originally for those who longed for redemption because they were oppressed and persecuted, and because their suffering was so extreme that a change for the better no longer seemed possible,’ but he also notes that it therefore offered ‘consolation.’ While thereafter arguing that the core of the apocalyptic is ‘destruction and renewal…annihilation and redemption’ it appears to be deeply problematic to take these notions and directly link them to the Nazis. This is because in either the accounts of Daniel or Revelation the key focus was on people who were oppressed and that the change in their situation was to be brought about by God, that is, by a force that was greater than the people involved, and in faith that such a change would occur without human intervention. Neither of these appear to be strictly applicable to the Nazis.

Vondung argues – and powerfully so – that many of those drawn into the Nazi Party and forming part of its leadership experienced the entire post-war period as a time of despair and hopelessness, that might draw them then to a promise of redemption. While it is undoubtedly correct that they felt ‘oppressed and persecuted’ in the wake of World War I, the Nazis and the German state that they controlled were also clearly the oppressors by the outbreak of the Second World War. This is countered somewhat by Vondung, in that he does state that the perception of oppression may be a ‘false interpretation’ while still maintaining that a person with an apocalyptic mindset ‘experiences the world as suffering and longs for redemption.’ This still implies a far more cohesive perspective than that argued by scholars like Jeffrey Herf, who noted in his detailed study of National Socialist propaganda that the Nazis ‘were able to entertain completely contradictory versions of events simultaneously, one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, and the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim.’

Vondung does caution that ‘Jewish and Christian visions of the apocalypse’ did not create ‘activists’ but rather led to ‘quietists,’ and that perhaps the consolation they experienced was that derived simply from ‘fantasies of revenge.’ This forms a stark contrast to either the Nazis or Communists, although both movements were held to be ‘political religions’ by Voegelin. While Vondung believes that ‘modern political apocalyptic movements’ drew on religious traditions but then ‘broke with their roots,’ there seems to be little other than analogy that is offered to support this interpretation. In a broad sense, it certainly is correct that notions of ‘destruction and renewal, of annihilation and redemption’ were core aspects of the Nazi Party, and that they saw ‘national salvation’ (Kershaw) as their major aim. But the desire to therefore see them as the modern incarnation of religious apocalyptic tradition involves such key conceptual shifts that one wonders whether the analogy suffices.

He identifies ‘modern apocalyptic movements’ as having ‘real violence’ because it is not God but rather ‘human beings’ that are meant to bring ‘salvation’ (whether it is a social class in ‘the Marxist drama of history’ or ‘race’ in Nazism) and states that the focus has shifted to an ‘earthly paradise’ rather than ‘a Heavenly Jerusalem.’ While Vondung relies on a general comparison to Judeo-Christian .apocalyptic traditions, there were also secular and even more specifically völkisch traditions within Germany that had already developed harrowing notions of a degenerate and decaying world that did not necessarily draw in any direct sense on Judeo-Christian tradition, but instead on notions of disconnected industrialised and urbanised populations – the ‘Asphalt-menschen’ as Goebbels and Feder disparagingly called them – or on concepts of Nordic ‘apocalypse’ as they existed within the idea of Ragnarok. For instance, Gottfried Feder used this in the official commentary on the Nazi Programme in order to explain view of the post-war period as ‘the twilight of the gods…[a] time of the wolf and the axe…fire falls from heaven and gods and men pass away,’ quoting the Norse Edda. In all fairness, this directly supports Vondung’s central argument: that leading Nazis viewed the world in an apocalyptic way. Yet it simultaneously indicates that we may be looking at the wrong apocalyptic framework if we turn to the Book of Daniel.

Vondung notes that Hitler and Rosenberg viewed the world in Manichean terms – with the Jews representing all evil and their destruction representing ‘salvation’ for the world. While this does not take account of Hitler’s views of a supposedly ‘racial’ group between these two (‘culture-bearers,’ as he put it in Mein Kampf) it certainly does fit with the broader writings and speeches of both men. Nonetheless, one feature that does not appear to be accounted for is that Hitler did not merely view the world as a great struggle between Aryans and Jews, but argued a racial-historical perspective akin to Houston Stewart Chamberlain. This tended to portray the victory of ‘Jews’ as a complete destruction of the world, an apocalyptic vision where ‘this planet will…move through the ether devoid of men’ (Mein Kampf), while believing that somehow the culture of the world had only ever been created by ‘Aryans’ and that ensuring no ‘blood intermixture’ would be sufficient for the world to continue as it was, rather than fundamentally changing. Put another way, this was not an approach that necessarily saw change or redemption, but mere survival and stasis as the best possible outcome – if ‘Aryans’ survived, so too did the world.

In this sense, the notion of the ‘apocalypse’ in political or secular terms is also fundamentally different. The destruction of the ‘old world’ in religious terms is often seen as a complete destruction leading to a ‘new world.’ Hitler and others in the Nazi Party did not really seem to be seeking a ‘new world’ but – in their view – simply survival of the ‘Aryans’ or possibly a return to an ‘old world’ in which the supposed ‘Aryan race’ dominated. It was their view that all great civilisations had been created by Aryans because they were understood as the only ‘race’ capable of creation. Hitler and Rosenberg were both very clear that ‘sin against the blood’ was the central facet of the downfall of such societies as Persia, Greece, or Rome (viewed in somewhat paradisical terms as ‘Aryan’ societies) so that it was not only a stark dualism that defined their world-view, but a fear of the blending of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ races that drove their agenda. This seems to draw their conceptual approach away from a purely ‘apocalyptic’ perspective to one that drew far more on scientific-rationalist notions relating to the early science of genetics. Vondung argues strongly for the Nazis as ‘apocalyptic’ because he believes that this is why Hitler (and others) thought that ‘unlimited violence against Jews [was] justified’ given the view that ‘Germany’s fate, indeed the fate of mankind, depends on the evil enemy being destroyed.’ He goes on to note that this was combined with the active demonisation of the Jews. Yet the Nazis did not simply use violence against the Jews, but against those they considered (on some levels) to be their own ‘race,’ and it is unclear whether the ‘apocalyptic vision’ can fully explain the kind of broader racial framework that antisemitism fitted within in Nazi ideology – ‘based upon the exclusion and extermination of all those deemed to be “alien,” “hereditarily ill” or “asocial”’ (Burleigh and Wippermann). This remains a core issue with arguing ‘religious phenomena’ should be applied to the Nazis as a political or ideological movement. If we become too focused on the notion of an apocalyptic ‘vision’ as the ‘only plausible explanation for the intention to destroy the Jews’ that it does not appear to deal adequately with the racial anxiety and even political or economic anxieties that were used to justify destroying the mentally ill as ‘ballast existences.’ If the first systematic destruction of life practiced by the Nazi state was aimed ‘within’ (through the T4 Aktion) and was based on eugenics concepts, then the question arises as to whether the notion of the ‘apocalypse’ as an explanatory framework is adequate to cover the ideas of racial salvation that drove Nazi violence. This remains unanswered in Vondung’s book, as the concept of ‘apocalypse’ is applied only to the destruction of the Jews.

Mommsen’s concepts of ‘cumulative radicalization’ and a gradual and changing process of antisemitic policy in Nazi Germany also appears to challenge the idea that an ‘apocalyptic vision’ is fundamental to explaining the destruction of the Jews. Vondung counters this by arguing that the process may have changed over time, but that the ‘general intention’ and justification for action was ‘the apocalyptic image of the evil enemy of mankind.’ Certainly he is correct that Hitler’s hatred of the Jews remained unchanged from the beginning of his political career, and that he consistently demonized the Jews as not only ‘vermin’ but a ‘racial tuberculosis.’ The challenge posed by Mommsen still remains a key issue, because at times figures like Hitler argued that the Nazis were combating a ‘racial illness,’ but their notions of how to (in the words of Hitler) ‘expel’ a ‘racial tuberculosis of the peoples’ might then vary (from the 1 April Boycott to purging Jews from the Civil Service; enacting Racial Laws through to the Shoah), whereas an ‘apocalyptic vision’ implies a far stronger intentionalist approach. In this regard, Vondung is very clear that such an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in itself is not sufficient to lead to actual violence and requires other factors, pointing out that there was ‘a broad spectrum of motives that led human beings to torment, persecute, and murder Jews.’ Yet he remains adamant that an ‘apocalyptic image’ was central to the Nazis’ approach, so that perpetrators of the Shoah at all levels ‘justified their actions by appealing to a system of values whose center is the apocalyptic world view of Hitler and other National Socialist leaders.’ Whether one agrees or disagrees with this perspective, the book certainly provides an interesting analysis and a thought-provoking consideration of whether key concepts of ‘religiosity’ are applicable to National Socialism.

Review of Father Chester Fabisiak, S.J., Memories of a Devil: My Life as a Jesuit in Dachau

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of Father Chester Fabisiak, S.J., Memories of a Devil: My Life as a Jesuit in Dachau (Coppell, TX: Dr. Danuta B. Fabisiak, 2018). 430 Pp. ISBN: 978-1732117006.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Eight prisons, two forced labor camps, and finally, Dachau Concentration Camp. The young, newly ordained Jesuit priest, Father Chester Fabisiak, endured all of this between September 1939 and April 1945 when Dachau was liberated by Allied Forces. Father Fabisiak then continued his path as a Jesuit priest, serving for nearly twenty years in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, then serving another thirty more years in the United States of America. Arguably, the bulk of his adulthood was spent in relative freedom abroad, yet this memoir limits itself to the most dramatic and life-threatening aspects of what was then a young man’s experiences.

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.

When war broke over Poland on 1 September 1939, the young Chester Fabisiak went repeatedly to volunteer to fight for his nation. His conscription was rejected each time, as his eyesight was terrible. He was warned by various people, including his ophthalmologist, that he should flee the city of Poznan and go into hiding. However, the young man had been ordained a Jesuit priest and his superior ordered all of the priests to stay put. The Superior believed wholeheartedly that Germans were so cultured, so well-educated and so sophisticated that they would not harm the Jesuits. This trust was misplaced and soon enough the Jesuits’ home was being plundered by the occupying authorities. Before the end of September, the brothers living in the Jesuit home had been arrested and their residence had been turned into an office of the Gestapo.

After being transported from the initial jail cell in Poznan, thirteen of the brothers were placed in homes that Jewish families had occupied. The Nazis took away the Jewish families and imprisoned the priests in two separate homes. From what Fabisiak could deduce, the Nazis had no idea what to do with their captive priests, so they left them in the two homes, under guard, but provided no food whatsoever. Father Fabisiak, through good fortune, was allowed to step out onto the back patio for a time when he heard a Polish woman’s voice asking if the priests needed food. She threw bread and sausages over the fence, also providing Fabisiak with the town’s name (Golina). The woman’s brave act of generosity saved the lives of the priests. Fabisiak, strengthened from the food, decided to take action to provide for his “family.” He made runs out of the house for food, which he then divided and delivered to the priests living in both houses. One of his brothers referred to Fabisiak as “more dangerous than the devil himself.” (19) Fabisiak, reflecting back on that comment, added, “but he did not know that one day this dangerous devil would be his salvation.” (20) This type of action, of risking his own life for the sake of others, served as a hallmark of Father Fabisiak throughout the rest of his life despite the allusions to being a devil.

Other prison transfers followed, with Father Fabisiak describing in detail the craven acts of his captors—Austrians, Volksdeutsche, and Poles, but his account also focuses on the stories of assistance granted to him and the other Jesuits. There were times when Fabisiak was able to walk around somewhat freely, yet in a country occupied by Germans, it was only a matter of time before his freedom was taken from him once again. At one point, after being on the run, Fabisiak was denounced by a young Polish girl. He was accused of impersonating an ethnic German and ended up being interrogated by the Gestapo. As he was enduring a brutal whipping, Fabisiak came to realize the strength of his own character, refusing to utter a single word. For his insolence and refusal to cooperate with the Gestapo, the young priest was labelled as a thief and was sent to yet another cell awaiting his appearance before a judge.

Fabisiak’s account of the “trial” reveals the farce that Justice had become. His lawyer was not allowed to speak in his defense, the judge had already decided that Fabisiak was a thief and a liar, and so the sentencing was brief: off to serve an indeterminate time in a work camp, then on to a concentration camp. This led to yet another transfer to a jail in Zachthaus-Sieradz in 1940. During his time in Zachthaus-Sieradz, Fabisiak provides portraits of the various inmates who touched his life while sharing cell #13. Again and again, Father Fabisiak relates how various inmates came to respect his skills at thwarting their captors, referring to the theme of being a devil. One foul inmate, the hardened Mario, once told Fabisiak, “I suspected that you were a bad man, but now I see you are a devil.” (82) Devil, or not, Fabisiak helped to provide news of the outside world and obtain food for his cellmates while working as a barber, then later, as a secretary to the chief in the prison. Because Fabisiak could write in German Gothic Script, his skills allowed him to move into a slightly better situation, with a new set of prison clothes and even shoes. When the chief was being transferred, he offered to transfer Fabisiak with him to continue his office work. The Gestapo, however, intervened, and placed Fabisiak in a transport of prisoners sentenced to a work force in Ostrow (in western Poland).

After serving only a brief time in Ostrow, Fabisiak was sent, with no shoes, to work on a farm in a town called Ronau. The work was brutal—the prisoners had summer attire on, most had no appropriate shoes and it was November. Forced to dig frozen soil, beaten by whips, the prisoners were further punished with reduced rations each time they failed to meet the expected quotas of the day. The chief German announced to the starving, overworked men, the cure: “Those who cannot work have no right to live.” (104) Fabisiak notes after this, “We had a choice: die a little later in the work camp or die instantly under the brutal blows and kicks of the chief…” (104) This workforce was then transferred to Kotzine where Fabisiak was reunited with the man he had worked for as a secretary. This chief became Fabisiak’s protector and this relationship saved Fabisiak’s life. He was exempted from the exhausting work of digging canals, and instead spent his days cutting wood into long sticks while he looked across a field of wildflowers to a forest.

With the forest being so tantalizing close, the prisoners often dreamt of running to the woods to escape. Two men did try to escape but both met their end—with the chief providing the grisly details of the capture, wounds, and execution of one of the men. Along with this horrifying experience, Fabisiak encountered a German soldier who claimed to be a pastor. The soldier-pastor had volunteered to join the army because he thought the sacrifices of being a missionary were not “worth it.” (123) He warned Fabisiak to stop being a priest, predicting that once the war had ended, “priests would no longer exist.” (123) In the pastor-soldier’s mind, the Germans would win the war, thus defeating Christianity. Then the new religion would be German culture, with Hitler as their God. (124) Following this vignette, Fabisiak recalls how local Volksdeutsche farmers would yell and throw rocks at the prisoners as they marched to and from work details. Fabisiak then muses, “Their feelings of German superiority had poisoned and separated these families from the rest of the world. From these houses, young men were being recruited into the German army. With such hatred toward other human beings, they were no longer Catholic families, or religious families of any kind. Hitler’s ideas had deeply penetrated them, promising universal control and complete superiority over any individuals unlucky enough to not belong to their race of ‘supermen.’ They were being cultivated to have brutal instincts and to annul any morality other than their own splendid future of being Germans.” (125-126)

At the beginning of 1941, Father Fabisiak was moved on Gestapo orders to a jail in the city of Lodz. Officials in the prison presented Fabisiak with a choice: sign a document which denied his Polish ancestry (and changed him to an ethnic German) albeit a German with a long list of immoral crimes attached to his name. Father Fabisiak, despite their threats and shoves, refused to deny his Polish heritage and so he was left to contemplate his fate in the prison. He explains how on each Saturday afternoon, the prison guards would come to the cells demanding that all Jews and priests present themselves. The prisoners who had been housed there understood that if a Jew or priest did present themselves, they would be taken out to a courtyard and forced to sing and dance and be mocked by their captors. Fabisiak recalls that those Saturday afternoons were filled with anxiety, not knowing whether one was going to be pulled out of their cell, and, he also remembers that the German guards took great delight in these humiliations, noting, “For the Germans, those were days that were entirely appropriate and natural, days when they could enjoy the suffering of innocent men and behave exactly like who they were: first-class demons.” (143)

On March 14, 1941 at 11:00 p.m. Father Fabisiak was put on a train from the hellish prison in Lodz. The prisoners were provided with a small loaf of bread and a little piece of cheese. Five people occupied the space; as there was not enough room for all five people to sit at the same time, they took turns sitting and standing. The group was guarded by a Polish guard, who often left their train door open to allow air in for the five prisoners. To Fabisiak and his fellow travelers, the trip had the air of a happy journey, believing that their next place of imprisonment might be better. The train stopped at Dachau and Fabisiak noted, “We were immediately converted from a group of men into a group of animals.” (149)

His depiction of the screaming of the guards, the blows hitting all of the prisoners, and the general chaos of the situation is palpable. Father Fabisiak takes his readers along with him into the bathhouse, where the men were stripped naked, shaved, hit with streams of icy cold water followed by the sting of disinfectant; the shivering, starving men were further humiliated by their guards. Then it was on to quarantine for two weeks, all while being punished and threatened by the block leader (kapo) whose only task was to instruct and intimidate the new prisoners in the life of the camp. Once the period of quarantine ended, Father Fabisiak was assigned to a barracks and to work details including constructing roads, assisting bricklayers, and shoveling snow without shovels; all of which further weakened him physically. As Fabisiak put it, he felt no need to work for Hitler, but the law of the camp was “One who does not work cannot live.” (177) Along the way Fabisiak befriended a Protestant pastor, a communist diehard, and many others who he vividly sketches for his readers.

As he details the ins and outs of how Dachau functioned from a prisoner’s perspective, Fabisiak’s willingness to take risks is amazing. He decided one day to slip through a window of an empty barracks, climb under the bunks and go to sleep. On another occasion he refused to say that he had had sexual relations with women (for the promise of gaining a cushy job) and despite his refusal and threats to beat him, he stayed true to his principles. He also never lost an opportunity when it presented itself; in one instance, after cleaning the soldiers’ room and collecting the leftover food from their breakfast, he was able to smuggle the bits of food back to the priests’ barracks. When the barrack’s kapo saw what Father Fabisiak had been able to bring back he remarked, “Some time ago, I heard you were a devil, and now I see you are worse than a devil.” (182) The kapo then smiled and let Prisoner 29697 go past him.

As the days passed in Dachau, Father Fabisiak shares bits and pieces of stories about the other inmates he encountered, seeking to capture the diversity of the prisoners housed in the camp. He details one of the Roma prisoners, the tireless work of inmates in the infirmary, his encounters with Russian POWs, an English POW, a Hungarian Jew, a Greek young man, a Jewish bread thief, etc. In each of these chapters, Fabisiak shares his shrewd insight into the character of each man, assessing where they stood in relationship to God (if at all), and how these experiences with such diverse men influenced his growth as a human being. One particularly moving story featured a Catholic German man, imprisoned for ten years in Dachau. Fellow prisoners organized a jubilee to mark the date of the man’s 10^th year in prison. The old man cried, tears streaming down his face, and Fabisiak reflected on the event, noting, “Somehow, their hearts remained alive and unbroken.” (213) But, despite the positive sketches, Father Fabisiak did not shy away from sharing the brutal reality of the camp. This is underscored in his chapter about a very young Polish boy, Zbyszek, who having been in Dachau from a tender age, learned that he must kill other prisoners in order to survive himself. He had been trained to “care” for the ill, which in reality meant that he was to administer lethal injections to end a patient’s life. Zbyszek’s hatred of Polish priests brought out the worst of his character, shouting obscenities, never showing remorse for his brutality and certainly displaying that he had no conscience—until one day when Zbyszek administered a syringe to a young Italian man. As the young man died, he cried out for his mother in such a way that Zbyszek stood pale and petrified, softly saying, “I also have a mother.” (218) The young Polish “nurse with the syringe” disappeared from the infirmary that day, never to kill another patient again.

Fabisiak also provides the harsh details of the system of punishments at Dachau, the awful reality that the beatings and other punishments were public so that human suffering was a part of daily life in the camp. He also recalls the building of a new, mysterious building, that only later, once construction had ended, did the men who built the structure come to discover that they had built a gas chamber. Once the facility was complete, the only remaining piece of the puzzle was to test the chamber’s effectiveness. Twenty young men from one of the barracks were brought in, told that they were “lucky” because they were inaugurating the new bathhouse. Other prisoner-inmates continued to be experimented on in the gas chamber. Fabisiak recalls the arrival of many Italian-Jewish families rounded up by the Nazis, how the authorities lied to the unsuspecting Jews (who mistakenly believed that since Italy was an ally of Germany, nothing bad would happen to them), telling them to bring all of their valuables with them during the “evacuation.” Once the Jewish families realized what was happening, many panicked, swallowing as many of their valuables as they could. Fabisiak records, “The Jews were clever, but the Germans were relentless.” (250) What followed was a scene of drawn out terror, some Jews were taken for X-rays to detect if they had swallowed valuables, others were administered strong doses of laxatives. The Germans picked through feces to dig out any final valuables. “Once this process was complete, the Jews had no more value to the German nation…. Dispossessed of all their belongings and riches, they stopped being men and became Jewish dogs.” (251) The gas chamber would be the final stop for these families and countless other victims.

From his time in Dachau, Father Fabisiak’s depictions and reflections reveal his concern with living according to Christian principles and what can happen when mankind abandons those moral principles for the ideology of Social Darwinism and Nazism. At the time of Dachau’s liberation, 29 April 1945, Father Fabisiak noted that out of the 85 Polish priests he knew at the camp, only 30 were still alive. As the survivors were left to reconstruct their lives and try to search for some meaning of these years of terror and absolute brutality, one passage stands out. Father Fabisiak is remarking on the rapaciousness of the Germans, how they were not content to ransack everything that was of value, “they wanted torn laces, old shoes, worn utensils, clothing with holes, like a band of poor housewives trying to prepare a family breakfast ‘feast.’ They threw themselves over other people’s goods and their misery as if they were dying of hunger and thirst. I remember, at this time, the Lager Fuehrer Redwitz—a barrack boss who was somewhat kind and who watched over us—holding some of these useless objects in his hands and saying, “What the hell is this for?”[italics added] (264) Perhaps Redwitz’s question could be applied in a broader sense to the years of suffering at the hands of the Nazi regime: what the hell was it all for? Father Fabisiak, attempting to chronicle the years of torment, shows the reader who the real devils were and repeats his motto, “Live only for today, and be peaceful on this day.” That motto helped save Father Fabisiak and countless others he encountered on his journey.

Review of David Rice, I Will Not Serve: The Priest Who Said NO to Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of David Rice, I Will Not Serve: The Priest Who Said NO to Hitler (Dublin: Mentor Books, 2018). ISBN: 978-1-912514-04-5.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

In the early morning hours of August 21, 1942, Austrian priest Franz Reinisch was executed by the Nazi regime for “subversion of the military force” (a literal translation of the German term Wehrkraftzersetzung). His specific crime was refusing to swear the oath of loyalty required of all German soldiers when called up, which included explicit language about rendering “unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces.” Reinisch’s response was not so much pacifism or even conscientious objection, which is a refusal to perform military service (this has not stopped segments representing both groups from claiming him as a hero). He made very clear that he would have willingly served the German people or a different government, and that he believed in the fight against Bolshevism. Rather, he was absolutely unwilling to give an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler, whom he viewed as a monster verging on the Antichrist. As such, he was the only Catholic priest in the Third Reich who refused his call-up order, and the only priest executed for this.[1] Irish journalist David Rice brings us the story of this remarkable, and anomalous, individual.

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.”[2] Thus much of the book is either conversational, as Rice reconstructs exchanges that Reinisch allegedly had with family members, friends, other priests, and representatives of the Nazi regime, or introspective, as Rice attempts to convey Reinisch’s mental state and thought processes about Nazism and his decision to refuse the oath. The dialogue, delivered in present tense, can be doubly jarring for the historian, both for its intended emotional resonance as well as for its unconventionality. Studies that claim to be “based on historical fact and painstakingly researched” (back cover) simply do not usually include the following kind of verse:

‘But here’s the thing you must remember: your Church – my Church, indeed (I’m a Catholic myself) – has not spoken against military service. And more than that, the attitude of your superiors flatly contradicts yours. Their wish and orders are for you to serve. Can you go against that?’

‘That’s what bothers me the most -’

‘You’ve got to keep in mind the interests of the Church itself, of your order, indeed of your family. They’ll all be terribly damaged by your refusing the oath. And by your execution, which will certainly follow.’

‘I’m aware that I am going to be shot for this -’

‘I hate to have to tell you, Father, that you’re not going to be shot.’

‘I’m not -?’

‘Shooting is for soldiers. You’re going to be beheaded. You see, you’ll be a criminal, not a soldier. I’m afraid it’s the Fallbeil for you – the guillotine.’

Franz stares at him. Then, with a hand to his mouth, he lurches towards the open window and vomits. And vomits until there is nothing left to vomit. (215-216; emphasis in original)

The passage is vivid, the dilemma stark, the protagonist immediately sympathetic. But for the reviewer, considering the author’s explicit intentions and the book’s format and style, it is difficult to know which standards to apply. I Will Not Serve might be treated as a piece of investigative journalism by an award-winning and acclaimed journalist and author; it might also be judged historical fiction or fictionalized history, depending on the reviewer’s perspective and mood. The WorldCat database categorizes it under “World War, 1939-1945 – Religious Aspects – Catholic Church” and “Reinisch, Franz”, indicating its important historical and biographical dimensions. I will scrutinize the book according to two measures: the historical accuracy of the text itself, and the utility of trying “to get inside [Reinisch’s] head” for readers interested in religious history (and this newsletter).

In his interview with the Irish Examiner, Rice mentions his background in German (Languages and Literature), which enabled him to translate material by and about Reinisch that he received from “an order” in “a diocese in Germany.” He does not provide either name, but one might assume the diocese to be Trier, where Schönstatt is located – although Reinisch was a Pallottine priest who was ordained in Innsbruck, he was also a member of the Schönstatt apostolic movement founded by Pallottine priest, and mentor of Reinisch, Josef Kentenich (who would himself survive three years in Dachau). Rice declares, “Reinisch took to the Schönstatt spirituality as if he were born to it” (92). Thus the reader can assume the author’s access to personal documentation written by Reinisch himself, including his diaries, but is left to wonder exactly which excerpts are drawn from this documentation, which ones Rice has embellished, and which are more or less inferred or fabricated. Establishing historical accuracy insofar as Reinisch’s statements are concerned is thus a frustrating enterprise. On the grander brushstrokes of biographical and historical context – Reinisch’s early life and family in the Tyrol, the history of Nazism, the history of the Pallottines, Father Kentenich and the Schönstatter movement – Rice treads more stable ground, if only because he stays close to what scholars accept as common knowledge. Reinisch had a wild spell as a young man before deciding on the priesthood. He suffered from regular bouts of ill health. He doubted his vocation on more than one occasion and gave forceful, opinionated sermons that likely played a role in his frequent transfers from diocese to diocese in both Austria and Germany. Long before the 1938 Anschluss he was a convinced and open opponent of Nazism and its leader, to whom he referred more than once as the “shit-brown Führer.” At a conference in Mannheim in December 1935, he reminded his listeners, “The Jesus on [the] cross is the world’s great apostle, who lived and bled for all the world. For all the world, I say. He died for all, and that includes the Jews” (107; emphasis in original). In Salzburg in early 1937, in another sermon, he said, “Satan is loose in Germany. I know. I’ve been there and I’ve seen it” (128). In 1940 the Gestapo formally forbade him from preaching.

Beyond these brushstrokes, the critical reader will have trouble determining what to trust as authentic. Rice relates a conversation as early as 1925 between Reinisch and another of his priestly mentors, his “de facto spiritual director” Richard Weickgenannt, responsible for interesting Reinisch in the Pallottines. When Weickgenannt brings up the subject of Hitler and Nazi racism, Reinisch replies, “Anyhow the churches would take a stand against such nonsense, wouldn’t they? I mean, Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he?” (55) When Weickgennant argues, justifiably, that antisemitism in the Catholic Church was much broader and ongoing than a few “bigoted individuals” (56 – Rice puts these words in Reinisch’s mouth), Reinisch is initially affronted. That Reinisch had a quick temper is apparent in other biographies, and that the Catholic Church has a long history of anti-Jewish and antisemitic beliefs and behaviours is incontrovertible. But here one wonders exactly what the documentation shows and what Rice has invented to illustrate that quick temper as well as Church history: did Reinisch speak so explicitly as early as the mid-1920s on the subject? Was he an unusual enough Catholic to defend Jesus’s Jewish origins but not astute enough to recognize the antisemitism in his own church?

Later in the text Reinisch encounters a friend of his from childhood, Anton Loidl, who chose to fall in with the Nazi regime and became a member of the SS-Einsatzgruppen. In mid-October 1941, he seeks out Reinisch while on leave and confesses his crimes, delineating in some detail his involvement in the mass shooting of Jewish men, women, and children on the Eastern Front. He asks Reinisch for forgiveness, as a penitent to a priest, but Reinisch refuses out of disgust and horror: “You’re a child of Satan. You – are – evil. Like Cain, you’re accursed on this earth. He only killed one – you’ve slaughtered hundreds – thousands by now. You are cursed beyond redemption.” He changes his mind the next day, but only after the intercession of a nun. We are told that Loidl transferred to the Wehrmacht and was later killed in battle (192-193; emphasis in original).

Again, the passage mixes the verifiable with the unverifiable: it is not incredulous that Reinisch might have known someone who was involved in mass shooting; the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen, who had been formed by Reinhard Heydrich in the aftermath of the Anschluss, were filled with Austrians. Nor is it unlikely that priests, both serving as chaplains with the Wehrmacht as well as stationed in parishes on the home front, might have heard confessions that included admissions of responsibility for participating in atrocities and war crimes, though the seal of the confessional prevents us as scholars from knowing definitively what these confessions might have contained, what penance was given, whether absolution was granted. What we cannot authenticate is Rice’s presentation: that Reinisch knew someone personally in the Einsatzgruppen, that that person confessed to him about his role in mass shootings, that Reinisch reacted by withholding absolution citing a lack of true remorse (but also, his temper). Perhaps Rice found notes about this encounter in Reinisch’s diary but he does not relay this to his audience. Rice gives us a full name – Anton Loidl – so it seems unlikely that he would have fabricated an individual and given him such a story.[3] But considering his explication about getting into Reinisch’s head, and of writing Reinisch’s story more like a film than like a history text, the reviewer is left to conclude that Rice may have exaggerated some or most of an actual incident to make for a more dramatic scene in which Reinisch learns of the genocide and has to decide how to act, as a human but also as a priest, vis-à-vis a perpetrator.

Many of the dialogic passages will lead readers to these same questions. So one will have to decide to what extent these passages render the book untrustworthy in its entirety. Initially I was inclined to treat I Will Not Serve as a half-step removed from historical fiction: Rice cites his sources, but does not convey how he has used them, and has, quite literally, put words into the mouths of his subjects. But as I began to construct the review I was reminded of another book that I taught in a class last semester, and the controversy it aroused when a historian dared to embark on a somewhat similar enterprise. Natalie Zemon Davis published The Return of Martin Guerre in 1983, a story about the trial of an imposter in sixteenth-century France that centers significantly on the imposter’s wife: what she knew, when she knew it, whether she played a role in the imposter’s deception. Zemon Davis candidly recounted in the introduction that, where her sources fell short in preserving evidence about her subjects, “I did my best through other sources from the period and place to discover the world they would have seen and the reactions they might have had. What I offer you here is in part my invention.”[4] When the book instigated considerable controversy about her methodology, leading another historian to charge her with fabrication and anachronism, she responded, “my whole book… is an exploration of the problem of truth and doubt…. ‘In historical writing, where does reconstruction stop and invention begin?’ is precisely the question I hoped readers would ask and reflect on.”[5]

The comparison is not entirely without friction: Rice’s “stream of consciousness” is not quite at the level of Zemon Davis’s studied inventions. She is a trained historian and was both thorough and rigorous in her explanation of sources, where she found them, and how she used them; Rice is a journalist (he also holds a degree in sociology) and, as already explained, he lists his sources but otherwise gives no indication as to how he has used them, and does not mention at all the primary-source documentation he received about Reinisch in Germany. Zemon Davis does not recount conversations in her text, though she sometimes speculates about what might have been said between the protagonists or how the trial unfolded (she had different accounts of the trial on which to base this speculation). Most of Rice’s chapters are centered around dialogue, either between Reinisch and another person, or within Reinisch himself, relaying his considerable struggle to reconcile himself with the ramifications of abjuring the oath. Likely Rice has evidence of this internal conflict since he was able to use Reinisch’s personal papers, which almost certainly included such indications. But again, the reader does not know for certain.

Beyond these significant concerns, a reviewer might take issue with other, more minor aspects of the book. Rice begins each chapter with an epigraph, most of which are about conscience, from sources ranging widely from Hermann Göring to Mahatma Gandhi. None are cited, nor are sources for the epigraphs clearly listed in his source list. The cover is also awkward, featuring a small black-and-white photo of Reinisch (which we learn in the text is undated, but likely from his last years before he was arrested and executed) that is dominated by a larger photo of Hitler in his later years, a swastika in the background, in red and yellow tones. Cover designs are usually decided by the publisher, but surely the author might have pointed out the irony that Reinisch, the subject about whom he’s written so meaningfully, is literally dwarfed by Hitler, the man who Reinisch believed was a criminal and even the personification of evil, and the reason that Reinisch was executed.

So there is a lot in this book that should concern a careful, critical reader searching for historical evidence about Franz Reinisch. Perhaps a casual reading attitude is more appropriate to fully appreciate the text. In my opinion, however, even the critical reader should consider Rice’s contribution to the growing literature about Reinisch carefully. To this point it is the only book-length treatment in English of Reinisch. This is also a labour of personal passion. In his interviews with various Irish press outlets, Rice is clearly inspired by Reinisch’s commitment to his conscience even when most of his world was against him (the Pallottines threatened to expel him if he did not recant his refusal to swear the oath; one of his last acts before his execution, as Rice relates, was to encourage the Father Provincial to do this to save anyone from guilt by association – the letter is printed seemingly in its entirety on p. 260-261). His conscientious delineation of Reinisch’s spirituality, and of the way his beliefs formed and transformed him over a period of several years, contains both important historical notes about different faith movements in Germany and Reinisch’s role in them, notably the Schönstatter movement, as well as the portrayal of an extraordinary individual’s commitment to faith and to his conscience.[6] It is a powerful portrait of one of the Catholic Church’s true martyrs, a German spiritual leader (one of the very few) who took a public stand against Nazism, and paid for it with his life. Reinisch himself deserves broader recognition beyond Germany, particularly as the process of his canonization is ongoing,[7] and Rice’s contribution is likely to facilitate that recognition.

Notes:

[1] My earlier research on Catholics who refused military service found very few examples of conscientious objection, under which I included Franz Reinisch; he was the only priest who refused, although there were at least two other members of lay religious communities. For a complete list, see Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), pg. 114 n5 and pg. 252.

[2] Sue Leonard, “The priest whose faith decided his fate: execution by the Nazis” (interview with David Rice) in The Irish Examiner, September 8, 2018, https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-30867560.html#:~:text=David%20Rice%2C%20whose%20book%2C%20I,align%20himself%20with%20the%20Nazis (last accessed March 2, 2021).

[3] Pandemic-related restrictions and closures prohibited me from trying to document Anton Loidl in written sources; I could unearth nothing about him online. These restrictions also prevented me from accessing German-language biographies of Reinisch, available to me only through interlibrary loan, which is operating but on a much reduced basis. So I could not cross-reference Loidl there, either.

[4] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983), 5. Emphasis added.

[5] Natalie Zemon Davis, “On the Lame”, part of the AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre, in The American Historical Review 93/3 (June 1988), 572.

[6] In this manner Reinisch provokes comparisons with another Catholic Austrian who was executed for his refusal to answer his military service call-up: Franz Jägerstätter, who identified Reinisch as a role model and was executed in 1943. I reviewed a recent film about Jägerstätter, A Hidden Life, in the September 2020 issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly.

[7] The beatification process, the first step towards canonization, began in April 2013 and was concluded in June 2019. I have been unable to find any current updates about the next stage. Knowing this as I read the book, the remark in Rice’s book that Reinisch allegedly makes during his last meeting with the Tegel prison chaplain, Heinrich Kreutzberg, less than two weeks before his execution, is particularly ironic: “Don’t you try to make a saint out of me!” (260)

Review of Lucia Scherzberg, Zwischen Partei und Kirche: Nationalsozialistische Priester in Österreich und Deutschland (1938-1944)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of Lucia Scherzberg, Zwischen Partei und Kirche: Nationalsozialistische Priester in Österreich und Deutschland (1938-1944), Schriftreihe “Religion und Moderne” Band 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2020). 645 pages, 49,00,- €, (44,99,- € E-Book), ISBN: 9783593444185.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

This review was originally published in theologie.geschichte and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher. The original review is available here: http://universaar.uni-saarland.de/journals/index.php/tg/article/view/1154/1211.

In Zwischen Partei und Kirche, Lucia Scherzberg, professor of systematic theology at Saarland University and co-editor of Theologie.Geschichte, studies a relatively small group of Catholic priests and select laity from Germany and Austria who actively promoted a positive relationship between the National Socialist state and the Catholic Church. In the book’s introduction, among many questions, she asks, “Were they a few crazy fanatics? Were the members isolated or did they find their support in the rest of the clergy?” and “How much did the priests differ in their convictions and actions from the rest of the leadership of the Catholic Church?” (14). Scherzberg finds that though they were fanatical in their support for National Socialism, these Catholic clerics and laity were far from deranged. Rather, they were intelligent, intensely calculating, and fully cognizant of their actions in support of Hitler and the Nazi government and party. Yet, as Scherzberg reveals, at times, their outlook was not always exceptional when compared with some of their fellow clergymen. Still, they made the ill-advised mistake of imperiously bucking the Church’s hierarchical system by assuming roles and tasks traditionally reserved for the Church’s episcopate, and thereby became persona non grata in their dioceses.

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.[1] In my more broadly based work, I devoted a chapter to examining the National Socialist Priests’ Group (NS-Priests) studied by Scherzberg. By contrast, Scherzberg spent years researching the NS-Priests’ personalities, tracking down minute details, and uncovering extensive networks between and among them. Her research deepens our knowledge of the complexity of church-state relations under National Socialism and builds upon previous works such as Hitler’s Priests. Additionally, the pioneering studies of the late contemporary witness Franz Loidl, professor of church history at the Catholic-Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna, provided Scherzberg with a basic introduction to the NS-Priests that included vital primary documents, though the study was limited in scope and often apologetic in analysis.[2] Josef Lettl’s brief but impressive Diplomarbeit (Master’s Thesis), Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den religösion Frieden 1938 (Association for Religious Peace 1938), offered a general introduction to the initial but short-lived public organization of the NS-Priests.[3] More recently, in Hitlers Jünger und Gottes Hirten (Hitler’s Disciples and God’s Shepherds), Eva Maria Kaiser examined a few of the leading NS-Priests in her study of the Austrian bishops’ post-war advocacy for former National Socialists.[4] In the end, Scherzberg’s study is authoritative and will become a standard work.

Scherzberg uses the 1938 Anschluss to divide her work into two parts that contain headings but without chapter numbers. In the first part, Scherzberg identifies the original members of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden (AGF), the initial rendering of the NS-Priests that became public after the March 1938 Anschluss. The AGF consisted of both lay and ordained Catholics, primarily under the leadership of three individuals: Johann Pircher, a former religious of the Deutsch-Orden who had incardinated into the Vienna archdiocese in 1921 and joined the NSDAP in 1933; Wilhelm van den Bergh, a former Capuchin friar from the Netherlands who like Pircher had incardinated into the Vienna archdiocese in 1929; and Karl Pischtiak, a lay Catholic, National Socialist, and SA-Sturmbannführer who had ties with Josef Bürckel, Reichskommissar für die Wiedervereinigung Österreichs mit dem Reich (Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the Reich;1938-1939) and Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Vienna (Reich Governor and NSDAP District Leader; 1939-1940). According to Scherzberg, the AGF developed from the remnants of several Catholic pro-Anschluss groups. The same individuals had also been entangled in more politically aligned extreme right-wing associations such as the Katholisch-Nationalen (Catholic Nationals), the Deutsche Klub (German Club), and the Deutsche Gemeinschaft (German Community). Many of these same individuals had likewise been involved in the post-war Catholic youth movement, which had been heavily influenced by the writings of theologian Michael Pfliegler. Pfliegler criticized political Catholicism and emphasized the importance of the Church’s pastoral mission, especially to promote peace between church and state. Youth associations such as Reichsbund Jungösterreich, Bund Neuland, and Quickborn rejected the Peace Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye (1919), supported a Greater-Deutschland, and embraced various forms of antisemitism, though generally not racial. Many of their members also rejected the Austrian Corporative State, especially the close alignment between the Austrian Catholic Church and the Dollfuß and Schuschnigg governments. Catholic priests from Styria, whose borders had been affected by the 1919 treaty, particularly rejected the situation of post-war Austria. Scherzberg provides a comprehensive overview of Austria’s pre-Anschluss history to contextualize the AGF’s foundation.

Before the 10 April 1938 National Referendum on the Anschluss, the Austrian bishops issued a solemn declaration that expressed their goodwill towards National Socialism. The Holy See, however, was not pleased by the stance of the Austrian episcopate, especially after the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), that criticized the German state’s encroachment on the rights of the Catholic Church. On 8 April 1938, Schmerzensfreitag (Friday of Sorrows), many of the individuals who were predisposed to form the AGF, issued a letter directed to Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, archbishop of Vienna, in support of the Anschluss and critical of the Vatican. Eight days later, on 17 April, Pircher, van den Bergh, and two other priests in the name of the AGF issued a public appeal to the Catholic clergy to support the political developments between Austria and the German Reich. Newspapers covered it and reported that the appeal allegedly resonated with the clergy. Immediately, Jakob Weinbacher, Innitzer’s secretary, made it known that he did not approve. As early as May 1938, the Vienna Diözesanblatt (Diocesan Gazette) reminded clergy that they were not to be involved in politics and should limit their realm of activity to the pastoral sphere. On 30 September 1930, Cardinal Innitzer ordered diocesan newspapers to announce a ban against the AGF. Pircher and van den Bergh were never personally informed beforehand. In October 1938, Pircher issued a statement carried by Austrian newspapers that announced the disbandment of the AGF.

Scherzberg’s argument reveals that the prohibition was not due solely to a question of tactics or a difference of opinion about applying them that led to the AGF’s ban. Instead, one could attribute it more to the nature and function of the diocesan hierarchical structure, whereby only a bishop or his delegate speaks in the name of the Church. The ban also took place during a period of tense church-state conflict as the two sides negotiated for power in annexed Austria. With pressure on his back from the Holy See to assert the rights of the Church and to critique National Socialism, Innitzer could not allow a renegade group of priests to speak for his diocese. Pircher and van den Bergh were not alone. Pircher claimed that 525 priests were members, and an additional 1844 expressed their support (out of 8,000 priests in Austria). Scherzberg finds that these numbers may not be entirely overstated. Through meticulous research, she identifies at least 150 priests who joined the AGF and offers convincing arguments about the missing individuals not accounted for.

Around the time of the AGF’s prohibition, a power struggle ensued between Pircher and Pischtiak. Scherzberg speculates that Pischtiak used his connections with Bürckel to have the Gestapo confiscate the AGF’s membership index from its headquarters in Pircher’s home. At this point, it might have been helpful if Scherzberg had also analyzed the contemporary lay-cleric dynamics in this power struggle. Nevertheless, in the end, Scherzberg reveals that Pircher proved more skillful at power-play, apparently enjoying a more significant share of Bürckel’s trust. Pitschtiak then separated himself from the AGF and disappeared from the historical record.

Even though the AGF had formally disbanded, Pircher refused to let go of his dream to create a mass organization for priests within the NSDAP structure. Moving underground, Pircher maintained his contacts with like-minded priests. In a November 1938 letter to a former AGF member, he declared that the NS-Priests needed to retain, “‘reconciling, mediating, and state-affirming ideas [until] a modus vivendi can be achieved in religious terms’” (228). He was not alone. Pfarrer, Richard Hermann Bühler, a retired priest of the Limburg diocese, suggested that they establish an NS Religionsdiener-Verband (National Socialist Religious Servants Association) that would educate the clergy in a National Socialist spirit. Yet, in the disbanded AGF world, these efforts had little practical impact as the actual group of priests dwindled over time to a select few.

Amid this post-AGF climate, in December 1938, Pircher travelled to Cologne to meet for the first time Richard Kleine, a priest of the Hildesheim diocese and religion teacher at the Duderstadt Gymnasium. Though the specific origins of their initial contact are unknown, Kleine would become a leading figure among the NS-Priests as well as its primary theorist. Kleine’s entry along with others would also broaden the group’s geographic scope, enlarging it from its primarily Austrian locale to a broader demographic reach that would encompass the Greater German Reich.

Scherzberg’s research reveals a great deal more about Kleine than previous studies uncovered. To avoid scandal over Kleine’s illegitimate birth, he had to be ordained for Hildesheim instead of his home diocese of Cologne. Likewise, he was rejected as a Feldgeistlicher (military chaplain) in the First World War. While not overemphasizing these points, Scherzberg speculates that they had an impact on his self-perception and world outlook. Still, Kleine had further influences. His professor, Arnold Rademacher, a specialist in fundamental theology at the University of Bonn, advocated for both church reform and the reunification in faith among the Christian denominations. In the same vein, at University of Tübingen, Wilhelm Koch, professor of dogmatics and apologetics and a progressive intellectual, provided Kleine with a religious worldview that contrasted with the dominant neo-scholastic approach of his era. Accused of the heresy of modernism, Koch ended up leaving teaching and returned to full-time pastoral ministry. The impact of Rademacher and Koch on Kleine would especially be felt when Kleine raised issues that preoccupied him and shared them with members of the NS-Priests.

In addition to Pircher, Kleine, van den Bergh, and Bühler, other prominent members included Alois Nikolussi, a priest of the Trient diocese who in 1919 became a Chorherr of St. Augustine at Stift Sankt Florian; Simon Pirchegger, a priest of the Graz-Seckau diocese, a Dozent of Slavic Studies at University of Bonn, and an NSDAP member; Joseph Mayer, an Augsburg priest and professor of moral theology at Theologische Fakultät Paderborn; and Adolf Herte, a Paderborn priest and a professor of church history and patristics also at Paderborn. As Scherzberg’s previous works have also shown, Karl Adam, professor of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen, later joined this group.[5] A few Catholic laymen were also involved, including Josef Bagus, editor of the Kolpingsblatt, and Alois Brücker, an editor and NSDAP member living in Cologne. For each of these individuals, Scherzberg provides extensive background information to contextualize their support of National Socialism and initial contact with Pircher and Kleine. Additionally, she concludes the first part of her study by discussing the theological positioning of the group. The individual egos of the group’s members, along with the intermittent commitment of each, did not easily lead to consensus on religious questions. Pircher, for example, remained obsessed and convinced of the group’s ability to influence the outlook of high-ranking National Socialists on the Church. Kleine became fixated on an antisemitic interpretation of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, interpreting it as a declaration of war on Judaism. Finally, Mayer and Herte appeared reluctant in their involvement, having to be nudged along by Pircher.

Part two of the work focuses on the activities of the NS-Priests, who never agreed on an official name for the group. The outbreak of war for Germany, with its decisive initial victories and subsequent harsh defeats, created a radicalization in the group’s outlook. Scherzberg’s systematic theological expertise is evident throughout her writing, especially in part two, as she analyzes the publications and presentations of the group’s members. Most chilling is the parallel she draws between the NS-Priests’ antisemitism, which led members to advocate the removal of references to Jews in Catholic sacramental rites, and the dormant antisemitism among members of a subcommittee dealing with liturgical reform in the Fulda Bishops’ Conference who discussed and similarly advocated for the removal of Jewish names from the marriage rite. Though the German bishops never agreed upon a revised rite for the sacraments under National Socialism, one did appear in 1948, with the Jewish names discussed above removed.

The ideas of the NS-Priests appeared in Kameradschaftlicher Gedankenaustausch (Comradely Exchange of Ideas; KG), a newsletter that ran inconsistently for twenty-seven issues from September 1939 to January 1945. With the help of a Catholic laywoman, Pircher edited and distributed each issue that typically was four pages in length. Pircher published most articles with pseudonyms. Nevertheless, Scherzberg spends significant time and does crucial detective work identifying the authors of the contributions. The KG’s language was overtly nationalistic and repeatedly implored its readers to serve their fatherland faithfully, especially in wartime. Increasingly in each issue, the KG’s language also became more militant and antisemitic. Alongside the KG, on his own initiative, from 1938-1940, Pircher wrote Information zur kulturpolitischen Lage (Information on the Church-Political Situation), mirroring the SD’s Meldungen aus dem Reich (Reports from the Reich), in which he reported on church issues that he believed would be of interest to the state. He shared the reports with Gauleiter Bürckel, who, it appears, for a brief time financially supported Pircher’s efforts. Despite their actions and National Socialist worldview, Pircher and Kleine had little sympathy for priests who proposed a more radical course for the Church’s clergy, such as abandoning clerical celibacy. Likewise, Pircher revealed his allegiance to Catholicism by including criticisms of the state’s treatment of the Catholic Church in his reports. He confided to Kleine that he might end up in Dachau for his more critical comments. Two separate party proceedings to remove Pircher from the NSDAP were eventually introduced, but neither succeeded.

The efforts of the NS-Priests brought them in contact with like-minded clergy and laity from other Christian denominations, and even in contact with representatives of völkisch non-Christian groups. Kleine pursued unification efforts with the Nationalkirchliche Bewegung Deutsche Christen (National Church Movement of German Christians; DC), and with the Völkisch-Religious Gemeinschaft (Ethnonationalist-Religious Community) nurtured by Ernst Graf von Reventlow from Postdam. Though Kleine at first was taken aback by the involvement of a few former Catholic clergymen in the DC, he soon adjusted and began to work with them. The dialogue that ensued led to a series of meetings where the participants attempted to work out the significant obstacles that existed between them. Scherzberg painstakingly analyses the discussion at these meetings and the individuals involved. Due to numerous factors, nothing of note resulted in the end. However, Kleine did receive an invitation from the Protestant biblical studies professor, Walter Grundmann, to join his Institut für Erforschung und Beseitgung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben (Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life), which he accepted. As a result, Kleine’s antisemitism became more radical and even at one point promoted an ecclesiastical solution parallel to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

Kleine’s work with the DC led him into contact with the Mecklenburg Landesbishof (state bishop) Walther Schultz, who was sympathetic to Klein’s ecumenical efforts. Kleine also sought a similar collaborator from the Catholic side and believed he had found one in the newly appointed archbishop of Paderborn, Lorenz Jaeger, a former Wehrmachtspfarrer (army chaplain). While a previous biography has been sympathetic to Jaeger’s choices under National Socialism[6], Scherzberg’s findings reveal that while Jaeger was staunchly nationalist and open to listening, in the end, he rejected Kleine’s efforts at a joint Protestant-Catholic Pastoral Letter and refused to sanction Kleine’s understanding of church and ecumenism. Yet, Kleine did succeed in bringing together Schultz and Jaeger to a meeting with him to discuss the pastoral letter. A research commission focusing on Jaeger is ongoing in the Paderborn archdiocese.

As the war turned for the worse for Germany, the NS-Priests became more embittered, and their antisemitism proportionally increased. In their voluminous correspondence, they condemned the 1943 Decalogue Letter, which was critical of the state and adopted by the plenary assembly of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference. Scherzberg concludes that the worsening of the war situation and the party’s dwindling attention and notice given to the NS-Priests led to this escalation. One might also perceive that the radical antisemitism was always present, and that the apocalyptic situation at the end of the war provided the impetus for the priests to express their views more openly and, in turn, attempt to prove their allegiance even more. After the war, most of the known members of the NS-Priests, centered around Pircher and Kleine went through some form of denazification and lost their positions. The lay members, less so. Yet, Scherzberg reveals that none dropped their racist National Socialist views, but instead, merely suppressed them.

In her introduction, Scherzberg offered a theoretical framework that included the sociological theories of (de)-differentiation, (de)-secularization, and (re)-sacralization, to understand and evaluate how the priests interacted with the church and state. She returned to this framework in her conclusion. For Scherzberg, the priests she studied lived in a differentiated and often secularized society, operating within their own independent sub-system. She continued, “They demanded freedom of religion, freedom of the church and freedom of conscience. In their understanding state and church were responsible for separate areas – the state for the welfare of the people, the church for the salvation of souls. Consequently, the members of the group consistantly rejected attacks by the state or the party on the church and the practice of religion” (599-600). Yet, in their own way and according to their values, the priests were traditional, upholding priestly celibacy and religious education. Often, they wanted the best of both worlds, rejecting political Catholicism while still hoping to influence political and social processes. At the same time, they were willing to accept the state’s oversight in areas such as the training of clergy.

Scherzberg also considered how the polycratic nature of the NS-State, especially evident in the leadership of Vienna’s Reichsstatthalter und Gauleiter Josef Bürckel and Baldur von Schirach, affected the NS-Priester. Like many Germans, the NS-Priester did not blame Hitler for the persecution of the Church. Instead, they relegated the responsibility to lower-level National Socialists or more likely than not to clergy themselves for not supporting the party and state. While not identifying state leadership style as polycracy, the NS-Priests attempted to benefit from the regionally differentiated leadership approaches at-large by courting Bürckel and Schirach with varying levels of success. Finally, Scherzberg considered the role that masculinity and comradeship played in the relational milieu that NS-Priests fostered. Most of the NS-Priests, for example, bought into the overtly militaristic language of the time, with some taunting or jeering the hesitancy of fellow priests to act, accusing the latter of a breach in masculinity. The comradely address shared between them and displayed boldly on their newsletter, however, ultimately had little weight as conflict and doubt arose among them. In the end, according to Scherzberg, they appear to be lone agents out for themselves and only brought together by a prevailing ideology. Each seemed willing to sell out the other, if necessary, to become more recognized by National Socialist leadership.

Lucia Scherzberg has produced an excellent study that should be widely read. It significantly helps the reader to understand the dangers of extreme nationalism and the temptation to misshape religion for personal and political gain.

Notes:

[1] Kevin P. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, DeKalb, IL, 2008; vgl. „Gespaltene Loyalität. ‚Braune Priester‘ im Dritten Reich am Beispiel der Diözese Berlin“, übersetz. Ilse Andrews, Historisches Jahrbuch 122 (2002), S. 287-320.

[2] z.B. Franz Loidl, Religionslehrer Johann Pircher. Sekretär und aktivster Mitarbeiter in der ‚Arbeitgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden‘ 1938 (Vienna 1972); ders., Hg., Arbeitgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden 1938/1939. Dokumentation, 1. Teil (Vienna 1973); ders., Hg., Arbeitgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden 1938/1939. Ergänzungs-Dokumentation, 2. Teil (Vienna 1973).

[3] Lettl was a former student of Rudolf Zinnhobler, professor of church history at the katholische Privatuniversität Linz. Josef Lettl, Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden 1938, Diplomarbeit (Linz 1981).

[4] Eva Maria Kaiser, Hitlers Jünger und Gottes Hirten: Der Einsatz der katholischen Bischöfe Österreichs für ehemalige Nationalsozialisten nach 1945 (Wien/Köln/Weimar 2017).

[5] Lucia Scherzberg, Kirchenreform mit Hilfe des Nationalsozialismus. Karl Adam als kontextueller Theologe. (Darmstadt 2001) and ders., Karl Adam und der Nationalsozialismus (Saarbrücken 2011; theologie.geschichte, Beiheft 3).

[6] Heribert Gruß, Erzbischof Lorenz Jaeger als Kirchenführer im Dritten Reich. Tatsachen-Dokumente-Entwicklungen-Kontext-Probleme (Paderborn 1995).

Review of Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2017). 316 pages, with illustrations and an appendix with documentation. ISBN 978-3-525-30109-8.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Retired)

Manfred Gailus (who is one of the editors of this quarterly review) has published several studies of little-known and under-examined individuals in the German Protestant churches under National Socialism, including Helmut Hesse, Elisabeth Schmitz, and other Protestant women who resisted Nazi racial policy. These books are not only detailed studies of what dignity and heroism in Nazi Germany looked like. They reveal how marginalized such people were in their own times and all too often in the historiography.[1]

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.)

Weißler was raised in a secular and patriotic Jewish home. His father was a lawyer who was such a conservative nationalist that he committed suicide in the wake of the Versailles Treaty. Weißler studied and began to practice law during the 1920s, married a Protestant pastor’s daughter, and had two sons. Although he certainly encountered antisemitism in this first decade of his career, the Weimar years were generally happy ones professionally and personally. He moved steadily ahead in his career and became director of a legal journal; he also published books and articles on various aspects of the law. In 1932 he was appointed director of the regional court in Magdeburg. The Weißler family moved there in January 1933.

Within days of the Nazi ascent to power his life changed dramatically. Weißler issued a fine against a young SA man accused of violence who had appeared in court in uniform. The local Nazi press immediately targeted the “Jewish” judge. In an ugly incident local SA and Stahlhelm members pushed their way into the court building and hung a swastika flag from the balcony facing the town square. They then dragged Weißler to the balcony and forced him to salute the swastika flag. A few days later Weißler was suspended from his position, and in July he lost his position under the new civil service laws. Under Nazi racial laws he was a “Volljude.” In September the family, including Weißler’s elderly mother, moved to Berlin.

Weißler was 42 years of age. He had a very small pension and the family’s assets were modest. Having joined the Protestant church during the 1920s, in 1934 he became a member of the Confessing Church and developed close ties to the most radical circles in Dahlem. His legal expertise now became useful to the Confessing Church leadership as they navigated the realities of Reich church politics and Nazi law.

As in his other books, Gailus documents the antisemitism that was all too present in Confessing Church circles. It was something that Weißler encountered repeatedly and personally. The portrait that emerges is of a man who was characteristically reserved but outspoken and unafraid to confront antisemitism. After Pastor Walter Thieme of the Stadtmission defended Adolf Stoecker’s warnings against the “influence of the Jewish spirit on the life of our Volk,” Weißler wrote Thieme that he could “summon no understanding for your behavior.” He also critiqued members of the Deutsche Christen—a courageous risk for someone in his position.

All this took its toll. There are poignant examples of friends and colleagues who abandoned or turned against the Weißler family. Having received an antisemitic letter from one such “friend” Weißler noted that he was replying “only in consideration that you like so many others have succumbed to the general psychosis of this era, and given that which we previously shared.”

This general antisemitism is an important context for Gailus’s account of the 1936 memorandum to Hitler. Like all Confessing Church protests, it was a mixed bag. A small group within the Confessing Church had been urging the leadership to issue a clear public protest against the regime’s antisemitic measures; in the wake of the September 1935 Nuremberg laws these efforts gained new momentum. Although most Confessing Christians were focused primarily on church members (so-called “Christian non-Aryans”) there were others (notably Elisabeth Schmitz) who wanted the church leadership to speak decisively about the persecution of all German Jews.

These efforts led to the Confessing Church leadership’s decision to issue a memorandum and send it directly to Adolf Hitler. The decision coincided with growing divisions within the church opposition between more radical voices like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church’s more compromising leaders. The memorandum was the work of a committee and like many such documents it had been considerably watered down by the time it was completed. The result was primarily an expression of the Confessing Church’s concerns about the Nazi regime’s pressures on the churches and the “dechristianization” of German society. It opened, for example, with a conciliatory expression of gratitude to Führer for defeating the threat of “bolshevism.”

The most notable section of the memorandum however condemned antisemitism in the most explicit wording that would ever be issued by the Confessing Church. It criticized the growing Nazi incitement of anti-Jewish hatred, particularly propaganda aimed at younger Germans, as “anti-Christian.” It went further, condemning the extrajudicial nature of Gestapo measures and the concentration camps, and warning against the “deification” of the Führer.

The memorandum was intended for Hitler’s eyes only and those involved were sworn to secrecy. Supposedly there were only three copies: a document personally delivered to the Reichskanzlei on June 4, 1936, by Pastor Walter Jannasch; a separate copy given to Birger Forell, pastor of the Swedish Church in Berlin; and another copy placed in the safe of the church chancellery in Berlin. It is not known whether Hitler ever even saw the memorandum; the Chancellor’s Office forwarded it to the Reich Church Ministry.

On July 15—two weeks before the opening of the Berlin Olympics—the New York Herald reported on the memorandum, and on July 23 the Basler Nachrichten published the entire document as an example of Protestant opposition to the Nazi regime. The story was also picked up by leading papers like the New York Times and the London Times.

Alarmed, the Confessing Church leadership immediately tried to find out who had leaked the memorandum. They focused on individuals with foreign press contacts, including Friedrich Weißler, who had advised throughout the planning of the memorandum. The others were Werner Koch, a seminarian who had studied with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Finkenwalde, and Ernst Tillich, who had studied under Bonhoeffer in Berlin before abandoning his theological studies. Weißler admitted to the church leadership that he had given a copy of the memorandum to Tillich (who knew Koch and had ties to the foreign press).

Gailus methodically reconstructs the subsequent events. Weißler, Koch, and Tillich were arrested in October 1936, as was Dr. Heinrich Schmidt, a lawyer who worked for the Confessing Church. Schmidt was released after a short time, but the other three were interrogated throughout the fall of 1936. In the meantime the Confessing Church leadership distanced itself from the group and the memorandum. In a late October meeting it was Martin Niemöller who argued that the church had to distance itself completely from Weißler: “We owe it to the Confessing Church.”

In a damning letter to Heinrich Himmler in early February 1937 the Confessing Church leadership emphasized that Weißler had never held an official position in the Confessing Church and had served only in an informal capacity. Five days later the three men were transferred from the Gestapo prison in Berlin to Sachsenhausen. Koch and Tillich were imprisoned in a block doing forced labor and released after several months. On the orders of Sachsenhausen commandant Karl Koch, Weißler was placed in solitary confinement a different block of the camp. Six days later his wife received word that he was dead. Accompanied by Heinrich Schmidt, she went to the camp and was able to see that her husband’s face was swollen and badly bruised.

Even by Nazi standards, Weißler’s death was considered extrajudicial, and at the end of 1938 three Sachsenhausen guards were tried in the killing. It became clear from the court proceedings that Weißler had been badly beaten over the six days of his imprisonment before dying of his injuries, and equally clear, as Gailus notes, that the sole motive was “blind hatred” against Jews. Only one of the guards was sentenced, to one year in prison.

Gailus’ account acknowledges those members of the Confessing Church who did stand by Weißler throughout this ordeal—notably Hans Böhm and Fritz Müller. Franz Hildebrandt, a Confessing vicar affected by the racial laws who would soon flee himself to England, was also outspoken in Weißler’s defense. In the aftermath of his death, Hildebrandt and Heinrich Schmidt continued to help Weißler’s widow and family. Weißler’s eldest son Ulrich was able to emigrate to England in 1939 on the Kindertransport. His widow and other son remained in Germany, assisted financially by friends. Weißler’s elderly mother, who lived with the family, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943 and died there shortly thereafter. Ironically, when Martin Niemöller was sent to Sachsenhausen in March 1938 as a “special prisoner” of the Führer, he was imprisoned in the same block in which Weißler had been murdered.

Gailus concludes this fine book with a reflective chapter on the continuing importance of these individual histories, even decades after the end of National Socialism. Readers of this journal will not need to be convinced of that, but I wish this book could be translated into English. The story of Friedrich Weißler is a crucial corrective for the all too frequent superficial understandings of the Confessing Church. I will add that reading this book in light of our current events in the United States, including the murders of Black men by the police and the rise in right-wing hatred and violence, was especially sobering.

Notes:

[1] I should note that the oral histories I conducted in Germany during the 1980s included interviews with Werner Koch and Heinrich Schmidt, both of whom were involved in the memorandum. Excerpts from both interviews, giving detailed accounts of the memorandum and Weißler’s death, were published in For the Soul of the People. Both interviews are now available to scholars in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (the transcript of the Schmidt interview, which was not taped, is being added): https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn707864.

Review of A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick (Fox Searchlight 2019)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi

The Extraordinary Stance of an Ordinary Man

Scholarship tells us that the German military authorities executed tens of thousands of men and jailed hundreds of thousands more during the Second World War for the crime of Wehrkraftzersetzung, or the undermining of military morale.[1] Such a category encompassed a broad spectrum of treasonous behaviour, from deliberate sabotage to desertion of one’s post to conscientious objection. Franz Jägerstätter is one of the more well-known examples of the last category. Gordon Zahn’s 1964 English-language biography, In Solitary Witness, brought him renown beyond his immediate community and did much to illuminate the historical and moral circumstances of Jägerstätter’s life and especially his execution. Numerous articles, books, and screen treatments of him followed over several decades, leading to the 1998 formal abrogation of his sentence and his 2007 beatification by Pope Benedict XVI, who also recognized him as a martyr.[2] Terrence Malick’s exploration, therefore, does not necessarily break new ground, but the strength of the film, as it retreads established paths, is the director’s attention to the emotional toll of Jägerstätter’s conviction on himself and his family, and the director of photography’s breathtakingly beautiful shots of the South Tyrol alpine countryside.[3]

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.

Their life as farmers (some scholars call them peasants) can be backbreakingly hard, a fact that Malick and Jörg Widmer, the director of photography, take great care to emphasize continuously, so one cannot charge the film with romanticizing rural workers. Their existence is dominated by the seasons, and harvests, and very dependent on the cooperation of the entire community: cutting and milling wheat, ploughing fields without advanced machinery, tending sheep and other farm animals, pulling dirt and mud out of a dried-up well by hand. But there is also an authenticity in their labour and a simplicity to their daily routine: planting potatoes, picking fruit from trees, their daughters underfoot or at their sides, the frequent daytime breaks for quiet moments together or to play games, window frames and sills decorated with fresh wildflowers. The mountains are quasi-protagonists themselves, looming in and out of view in the wide-angled shots that Malick favours in many of his features, emphasizing the grandiosity and majesty of nature and the relative insignificance of humans.

Malick ensures that this visually arresting scenery is firmly implanted in his audience as he continues towards the middle of his narrative. Franz – well liked, an upstanding member of his community, a family man – undertakes compulsory military training in 1940 (around which time a third daughter arrives), at first with benign acceptance but then with increasing doubt. Documentary footage from the battlefield, shown as part of training, leaves a deep and obviously negative impression on him, and he returns home full of doubt about his willingness and ability to serve. (The film does not make this clear, but he received an exemption as a farmer and would not be called up until 1943.) His doubts are rooted in the unjustness of the war and the conduct of the German Wehrmacht, though Malick seems less interested in historical context and more in the emotional, almost visceral angst of Franz. The real-life Jägerstätter’s objections were more than mere hostility to the war effort, had a much longer brewing period – he was the only person in his village to vote against the Anschluss in 1938 – and had as much to do with the nature of the Nazi regime as the war itself. He condemned the Nazi T4 “euthanasia” program when he learned of it and followed with dismay the repeated and open attacks by the Nazis on the Catholic Church in both Germany and Austria, which further estranged him from the idea of military service.

His struggle is conducted internally and externally; in the film, in addition to countless wordless scenes of long gazes and conflicted expressions, there is almost no one that Franz does not eventually seek out for counsel. He speaks with his wife and his mother, Rosalia. (He was her only son, and she did not initially support his decision.) He speaks with his local priest in the church where he works as sacristan (and where he became a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, a fact not mentioned in the film), who nervously tells him, “Your sacrifice would benefit no one”, but nonetheless arranges for him to meet with Josef Fließer, bishop of Linz. The bishop tells him, “You have a duty to the Fatherland – the Church tells you so.” (Franz confides to his wife that he felt the bishop treated him as a potential spy and feared to speak openly.) He defends himself to the mayor, once a friend, and to the former mayor, and to the miller, and to a painter working on the church frescoes, and to others who would listen. The earlier emphasis on community now reveals itself for its significance: if that community should turn against you, the bleakness of life tending a farm in such remote conditions is acute. Franz finds no true like minds and almost no supporters, and his family is actively ostracized and jeered at for his “act of madness, [his] sin against family and village.” His wife and her sister, Resie, must endure bullying and fits of shouting; his children are picked on. The mayor calls him a traitor to his face. The few people that show an understanding continue their friendships discreetly, from a distance. For his part, Franz is not swayed from his conviction: he knows he will not take the oath to Hitler – “the anti-Christ,” as one of the very few sympathetic villagers refers to him, in a soft tone – that is required of all soldiers; he refuses to give donations to veterans’ associations, whose brown-shirted members are canvassing for money; he refuses the Hitler greeting, clinging obstinately to the regional “Grüß Gott” that one still encounters there today. He and Fani hope that the war will be over before he is called up, and talk about possibly running away, maybe hiding in the forest. (Fani eventually encounters a bedraggled, dirt-crusted man, a stranger and, one assumes, a Jew, in the forest near the village, but he flees before she can approach. There are no Jews in the movie and no mention of the word Jew itself, only vague allusions to unwanted foreigners during one of the mayor’s drunken monologues shrieked before a blazing outdoor fire.) Franz does not seem to have seriously considered this. In any case, his fate cannot be delayed long.

Franz is called up in March 1943, in the aftermath of the disastrous German defeat at Stalingrad (Malick does not mention this context). In short order, Franz refuses the oath and is tossed into jail, first at Enns where he underwent training, and then later at Tegel, in Berlin. Here is where Malick comes closest to showcasing the violence and sadism of Nazism, in the form of Franz’s military guards who subject him to endless beatings, torture, and other cruelties. The windows of the cells he is moved through grow gradually smaller until he is held in a space scarcely larger than a closet with a tiny window he cannot reach. Such claustrophobic confinement is contrasted with his memories of home, the sweeping meadows, the trees with low-hanging fruit, and even more dramatically by Malick’s insertion of colourized documentary footage of Hitler at his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, entertaining the Nazi elite and their children, or sitting contemplatively in a chair with the mountains looming behind him.

Both Franz and Fani are subjected to temptations: the suave lawyers who try to persuade Franz to change his mind, and Resie, who insists to Fani that Franz’s behaviour is prideful and selfish. Where Fani’s faith comes across as childlike, perhaps even naïve – “No evil can happen to a good man,” she tells herself as she waits to hear the outcome of her husband’s arrest – Franz’s is presented as more complex, and, not surprisingly, more tortured. Any comparison of suffering is mostly an unhelpful exercise, because without doubt both of them suffered, if in different ways: beyond the endless waiting and uncertainty, Fani has only Resie for help through one springtime since no one from the village would work for them, and eventually was loathe even to go to church, where she had to endure the unwelcoming stares of her neighbours. As for Franz, his mental state begins to deteriorate rapidly, salvaged only briefly by the reappearance of Waldlan, a friend from basic training who also ended up in Tegel. (Not much by way of explanation is given: “What are you here for?” “Treason.”) Waldlan’s childlike demeanour and goofy smile leads to one of the film’s more tender, introspective moments as he stares out of his jail cell window, speaking to Franz of being free, planting vines to make wine (a white wine for summer, a red wine for winter), and sometimes going to church, and sometimes staying home.

The denouement is a foregone conclusion, even if the audience is not familiar with Franz’s story: he appears before a military tribunal, having declined numerous times to volunteer for service in a medical unit as a way to save himself. (In fact, the real Franz Jägerstätter was willing to serve in a non-arms-bearing capacity, but this was evidently ignored at his trial.[4]) He is screamed at by a junior official, and taken to the senior judge’s private chambers during a recess and gently questioned there about his position. The conversation between Franz and the judge, played by the indomitable Bruno Ganz (famous among North American audiences for playing Hitler in Der Untergang, here in one of his final roles), is almost as affecting as Widmer’s mountain shots: Ganz as the judge lets sober contemplation and discomfort play across his face and, after Franz is returned to the courtroom, he sits down in the chair he had occupied, hands on knees, silent, as if trying to imagine himself in Franz’s place. Ultimately, he is not moved enough to challenge the inevitable: Franz is sentenced to death, and executed by guillotine on 9 August 1943.

Cinematically, this is the most beautiful film I have seen this year, and maybe for several years. Malick and Widmer are famous for such productions. Even if one expects a visual spectacle based on their reputation, to experience the camera following closely behind Franz’s motorcycle on the sun-soaked mountain path, skimming through rolling fields, past simple shrines and straw-hatted labourers packing hay, is breathtaking. Fani’s search for firewood in the winter of 1940/41, while Franz is undergoing training, is similarly arresting, as she trudges alone over streams and up hills through waist-high snow. The pacing is even and unrushed, and while there is very little action (in the American sense), the three hours was not arduous. The two lead actors are convincing in both their love for and dedication to each other as well as the anguish that Franz’s position causes. Malick is hardly a stranger in confronting the deeply spiritual and philosophical conundrums of our time and exploring the repercussions of an individual’s difficult decision, particularly on loved ones. His camera lingers on Franz’s face, anxious to catch any evidence of doubt or regret (one senses it but never quite sees it), and exposes us to Fani’s breakdown, her hands ripping into the earth in vain, her fists and feet pummeling the unyielding wood of the pasture fence before climbing over it and running into the distance. The impressive supporting cast adds heft to the drama: in addition to Ganz, appearances are made by Matthias Schoenaerts as one of Franz’s lawyers, Jürgen Prochnow as the former mayor, Michael Nyqvist as Bishop Fließer, Karl Markovics as the mayor, and Franz Rogowski as Waldlan. Malick deftly uses language to convey various moods as well: the movie is in English with un-subtitled German threaded into specific scenes, including the trial and community gatherings. But this is not Hollywood’s take on the shrieking Nazi, the German rendered villainous and almost unintelligible; there is that too, as the villagers holler at Fani and Resie in guttural, spit-flecked Austrian dialect, but Malick also uses it for Franz’s whispered prayers and Bible recitations, and Fani’s own musings, prayers and half-thoughts, both sprinkled throughout the movie.

The critical eye of the historian will be less generous in her assessment of the film, though clearly Malick made decisions as the writer and director without feeling obliged to honour the deeper historical context. Franz and Fani are presented as partners, but his decision to refuse the oath is his own. Historically Franziska Jägerstätter endured much controversy and was depicted in her community both at the time and for many years after the war as a co-conspirator, maybe even an arch-influencer, in Franz’s decision; the fact that she supported him, even encouraged him to stand his ground (relayed in the film as her swearing, in the wrenching final meeting between them sometime before his trial, that she would love him no matter what he chose to do) was read by many as having fueled Franz to commit himself to his conscientious objection. She was the more religious of the two when they married; he became more serious about his faith after they wed. This gives a deeper meaning to one of the only exchanges with words between Fani and Rosalia, when she asks her mother-in-law if she blames her for her son’s actions; Rosalia responds cryptically, “He was different, before he met you,” and then the scene cuts away. He was also significantly affected by the example of Franz Reinisch, a fellow Austrian conscientious objector and the only Catholic priest to be executed during the Third Reich, in August 1942, for refusing to swear the Hitler oath; Franz found great affirmation in the fact that he was following the example of a priest. Reinisch plays no role in the movie. Nor does Rupert Mayr, another member of the Third Order of Saint Francis and fellow conscientious objector, who Franz met during his training; the two grew very close through a voluminous correspondence. Rather, Malick presents Franz as something of a lone wolf in his principled stance.

The film is clearly the story of Franz and, to a slightly lesser extent, Fani, and their emotions. Thus Malick spends little time delving into the motivation behind Franz’s decision, beyond his disgust with the war and rejection of Hitler. Their deep religiosity is evident, as is Franz’s desire to be guided by authorities in his church and his belief that what he is doing is right. But the true cause of his refusal to swear the oath – his conviction that, as a Catholic he could not in good conscience swear loyalty to a man like Hitler and the regime he represented, both of which were antithetical to all that a faithful Catholic held as central – is not as deeply interrogated as his emotional journey to stay faithful to that refusal. We do not really learn how he came to feel this way. We know nothing of Franz before 1939 other than brief flashbacks centred on Fani, and we are left to assume what exactly his objections are to Nazism. There is no evidence in the film that Franz wrote extensively, but he did, both about his faith (including, evidently, a catechism for his children, in fearful anticipation that they would not receive a proper Catholic education; his parish priest burnt it in 1945[5]) as well as his opposition to Nazism. Malick’s Franz holds a pencil only to write a few last lines, presumably to Fani, on a clipboard that a guard thrusts at him as he stands waiting for his sentence to be carried out. Even less time is spent on the Church authorities that Franz trusted and who forsook him: the bishop in Linz and the parish priest in Sankt Radegund both come across as typical clergy for the time, careful not to speak openly against the regime, content to stress one’s duty to nation, community and family. Why they failed to share Franz’s conviction that one could not compromise with Nazism without endangering one’s soul is a question still debated today, with few satisfying answers: why did he resist, but not these others? Why was accommodation to Nazism far more common than resistance?

But A Hidden Life, while based on true events and largely accurate to those events as documents tell us, does not pretend to be a rigid historical rendering. Malick is intent on sketching a portrait of Franz and the depth and breadth of his humanity. Each scene was prepared to show the extraordinary goodness of an ordinary man in exceptional circumstances, who was killed for refusing to compromise his deepest beliefs. (An epigraph featuring a George Eliot quotation, unidentified as from Middlemarch, clarifies the meaning of the title.) For this reason the film may well be one of Malick’s masterpieces, bringing the story of Franz Jägerstätter to a more popular audience, and giving to a more informed, scholarly audience a nuanced, reverent treatment of one of the era’s few genuine heroes.

Notes:

[1] See Norbert Haase and Gerhard Paul, Die andere Soldaten : Wehrkraftzersetzung, Gehorsamsverweigerung, und Fahnenflucht im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995).

[2] A concise but detailed analysis of the abrogation is delivered by Manfred Messerschmidt, « Die Aufhebung des Todesurteils gegen Franz Jägerstätter » in Kritische Justiz 31/1 (1998), 99-105.

[3] Because of the amount of literature on Franz Jägerstätter, some of which is academic and much of which is hagiographic, I will analyze the film for the most part on its own terms, with some critical discussion of its attention to historical context, rather than within the framework of the Jägerstätter historiography.

[4] Erna Putz, Franz Jägerstätter – Martyrer : Leuchtendes Beispiel in dunkler Zeit (Bischöfliches Ordinariat der Diözese Linz, 2007), 84-85.

[5] Putz, pg. 68.

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition (Munich: DVA, 2019). 640 pages. ISBN: 978-3-421-04712-0.

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

At Christmas 1940, Martin Niemöller appeared on the front page of Time Magazine as the “Martyr of 1940.” Since that same autumn, the film Pastor Hall, inspired by a drama by the playwright Ernst Toller, had been showing in American cinemas. It captured the story of the “Church Struggle” in Germany on celluloid, with little attempt to conceal Niemöller’s biographical details. Since his arrest in the summer of 1937 and subsequent transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller had become a worldwide symbol of church resistance to the National Socialist dictatorship. Interest in his person continued even after his liberation at the beginning of May 1945. Despite the irritation that Niemöller provoked by making nationalistic statements in his first public postwar interview, he and his wife travelled to the United States for several months in 1946 and 1947, where he gave over 200 public lectures in 22 states.

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.

Born in 1892, Niemöller came from the home of a Westphalian pastor and chose the career of naval officer. Caught up in the national Protestantism of his time, he experienced the German defeat in the First World War as nothing less than a catastrophe. Only then did he decide to study theology, which he successfully completed in Münster. The book chapter on the völkisch and German national “student politician” is one of the most striking. Niemöller belonged to various far-right parties and associations such as the antisemitic German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbund) and the National Association of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere) and counted himself among the enemies of Weimar democracy. He also personally held, as Ziemann comprehensively proves for the first time, an aggressive attitude of racial antisemitism. As a father of several children and with his entry into civilian professional life, Niemöller became more moderate in the second half of the 1930s, but initially his political stance did not change. In 1931, after seven years as the organizer of the Westphalian Inner Mission, he moved to Dahlem, a well-to-do parish in Berlin’s southwest. Like many German nationalist pastors of his generation, Niemöller welcomed Hitler’s chancellorship, the “Third Reich,” and the emergence of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) founded on Christianity.

Those disputes, which are treated today under the term “church struggle,” were crucial tests. As head of the Pastors’ Emergency League, founded in mid-September 1933, Niemöller became one of its most important protagonists in the second half of 1933 and gained importance throughout the Reich. Ziemann expertly describes the activities of Niemöller in the conflicts of the “church struggle,” accompanied by ecclesiastical, political, and personal tensions and breaks, and ascribes to him a key role in the debates of the Confessing Church concerning the inevitable consequences of Barmen Theological Declaration of the end of May 1934. He experienced the February 1936 division of the Confessing Church into a Dahlemite wing led by Councils of Brethren and a Lutheran wing led by regional bishops not only as a loss, but also as an opportunity for the (Confessing) Church.

His involvement, which led him to become increasingly opposed to the Nazi state and the growing state pressure on the church, ended abruptly on July 1, 1937, with his arrest. After a comparatively mild judgment by the Special Court at the regional court level, which would actually have resulted in his release, he was transferred directly to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. In the detailed description of his concentration camp imprisonment in the almost fifty-page chapter on Niemöller’s time of suffering as the “personal prisoner of the Führer,” two themes stand out. One was the almost-two-year deliberation about conversion to the Catholic Church, which he only finally decided against at the urging of his wife, in February 1941, a few months before his transfer to Dachau. The other was the “empathy for communists and other victims of Nazi terror,” which Ziemann exposes as a subsequent self-stylization of the postwar period. Rather, he demonstrates an ongoing anti-Bolshevik and nationalist stance: “Even at the moment of liberation from the concentration camp, he interpreted the defeat of the German nation as the fall of the West” (p. 356).

Up to the 1970s, Niemöller remained a public figure and a noticeable and by no means uncontroversial voice in the social debates of the early Federal Republic. Ziemann goes into great detail about Niemöller’s disappointment at the development of the postwar Protestant Church, which he accused of episcopal and confessional tendencies and of supporting Konrad Adenauer’s policies, which he characterized as restorationist. Rooted in his understanding of a “prophetic guardian role” for the church, this went hand in hand with his keen criticism of the founding of the Federal Republic (“conceived in Rome and born in Washington”), the decision to ally with the West, and West German rearmament. Biographically, Niemöller’s sharpest break occurred at the end of the 1950s over the question of war and peace. Under the impact of the destructive force of hydrogen bombs, the former naval officer—who, despite his pacifist criticism of politics and the West German military, felt committed to the ethos of an officer throughout his life—became the most outspoken leader of the West German peace movement, in the campaign “Fight Against Nuclear Death” (“Kampf dem Atomtod”) and after 1957 as president the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft). Only then did Niemöller’s Protestant nationalist guiding principles wear off, which in the immediate postwar period were still expressed in nationalist speeches and manifest in his participation in the mythology of German victimhood. Ziemann’s portrait of the post-war Niemöller is extremely multifaceted, describing how Niemöller, increasingly shaped by international and ecumenical concerns, dramatically shifted his stance toward the church and underwent a political transformation.. Ziemann, however, does not lose sight of the continuities: Niemoller’s persistent unease (which he never completely abandoned) with representative party democracy and media diversity , his latent anti-Catholicism and anti-Americanism, as well as his persistent culturally and socially fueled antisemitic resentment.

Anyone interested in Martin Niemoeller’s eventful life cannot ignore Ziemann’s extremely rich, brilliantly written, critical, yet balanced account. In the controversial and polarizing person of Niemoller—the “volcano” Niemöller, as the Bishop of Württemberg Theophil Wurm once put it—he also depicts the fundamental conflicts that marked the four political systems of the late empire, the unpopular and defeated Weimar Republic, the National Socialist ideological dictatorship, and the Federal Republic, which was in search of new ways forward. Using the example of the “belated” pastor, the “church fighter” (“Kirchenkämpfer”), the church president of the postwar Hesse-Nassau Regional Church, and the internationally-recognized ecumenist, Ziemann also reflects the fundamental upheavals of twentieth-century religious life.

The strength of his biography is also a result of the fact that he does not stop at the public Martin Niemöller. Without committing any indiscretions, Ziemann writes about the strict “patriarch” and family man; the restless, often overwhelmed and driven worker; the impatient, polemical, and self-opinionated disputant who also offended those who were on his side; and, last but not least, the one who was challenged, who repeatedly suffered severe personal crises. And he writes about Else Niemöller, his wife who died in a car accident in 1961 and with whom Martin had been married for almost forty years. One of Ziemann’s great achievements in his publication is that he acknowledges her role as a discussion partner and advisor, editor of his sermons, emotional support during his term in prison, and, last but not least, as the one who took care of the family during Niemöller’s extremely time-consuming activities as an organizer of the Inner Mission, as a pastor, and as a church politician. Benjamin Ziemann’s Niemöller biography is already a standard work.

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche, eds. Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2019). 268 pages. ISBN: 9783579085449.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Retired)

In the first week of February 1941, while Martin Niemöller languished in the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, the London Times was one of several international newspapers to announce his conversion to Catholicism. The New York Times headlined this story more circumspectly: “Niemöller’s Friends Deny His Conversion: Say Imprisoned Pastor Is Only Studying Catholic Doctrine” (New York Times, 5 Feb. 1941). Neither version was quite on target. Niemöller had not converted to the Catholic Church; however, his study of Catholic doctrine hardly represented mere curiosity. It involved a serious consideration on his part to convert. This brief moment in Martin Niemöller’s life has received relatively little attention, though it does get mentioned by some, including Matthew Hockenos in his recent Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (reviewed in CCHQ, 25/1, March 2019).

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.

Many or most readers of this CCHQ online journal will know at least the main features of Martin Niemöller’s life. He is one of the most famous and most important participants in the German Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) alongside important friends and colleagues such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. He founded the Pastors’ Emergency League in the fall of 1933. He participated in the creation of the Barmen Declaration in 1934, and he played a leading role in the first three years of the Confessing Church. Niemöller was arrested on 1 July 1937 and spent the next eight months in prison in Berlin, awaiting the outcome of his case. Then, having completed the necessary prison time required by the court, he was not released but designated a “personal prisoner” of Adolf Hitler. Instead of going home to Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, he was hurried off to solitary confinement at the nearby concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, where he stayed from March 1938 until July 1941. At that point he was transferred to Dachau, near Munich, where he remained incarcerated until the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Niemöller emerged from Dachau a famous figure and he quickly became a leader in the postwar German Protestant Church. His international stature also was high, resulting among other things in a stint as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961-68. After a postwar life traveling the world as a famous advocate for various causes, he died in 1984 at the age of ninety-two. (Personal note: I caught up with Martin Niemöller in 1973 and sought his friendly advice, but only via telephone.)

Martin Niemöller was not a theologian, though he knew theologians. Martin Niemöller also had a first career that gave him a portion of public recognition. Born in 1892 to a Lutheran pastor, he chose life as a naval officer. When World War I began, he commanded a submarine which supported the German cause by sinking British ships. His first burst of fame in Germany came from these activities, especially with his war memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit (1934), in which he described his wartime exploits as well as his postwar turn toward the church. By 1933, when Niemöller began developing what became his high profile in the Confessing Church, he was already forty-one years old, a pastor in the Dahlem suburb of Berlin, a husband, and a father to seven children.

It is clear from Christophersen and Ziemann’s careful work that Niemöller pursued the possibility of conversion to the Catholic Church with great seriousness. By the summer of 1938 he was using a Catholic prayer book for his daily devotions while sequestered in Sachsenhausen. By August he wrote to his wife that he was “astonished by the richness of prayers and biblical readings” (“erstaunt über den Reichtum an Gebeten und biblischen Lektionen”) in the Catholic tradition (p. 9). By the spring of 1939 he was angered by the attempt of church authorities in Berlin to remove him from his pastorate in Dahlem, a form of discipline intended for the most active opponents of Reich Bishop Müller and the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian”) leadership in the Protestant Church. By July 1939, he wrote, “the Protestant State Church has never been a Christian church” (“Die Evangelische Landeskirche [ist] niemals christliche Kirche gewesen”), but merely a bureaucracy (p. 11, quoting from Martin Niemöller, Brief aus der Gefangenschaft, 61). Soon he was asking Elsa, his wife, to send him books by or about converts to Catholicism, people such as John Henry Newman. This mid-nineteenth-century professor at Oxford University was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1825, famously converted to Catholicism in 1845, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, and was created a cardinal in 1879. (Newman eventually achieved sainthood in the Catholic tradition in 2019).

From late August to the beginning of November in 1939, Niemöller began and finished the manuscript now described and printed in this book. Christopherson and Ziemann have had access to many sources. These include the document itself, plus letters Martin and Elsa Niemöller were allowed to send every two weeks, and records of the twice-per-month visits Elsa was allowed to make to Niemöller in Sachsenhausen, especially as recorded in notes Niemöller made after those meetings. All of these handwritten materials are available to us based on two pieces of good fortune. First, Niemöller was able on short notice to pack papers into his luggage when transferred from Sachsenhausen to Dachau. Then on 5 April 1945, when the Catholic priest, Michael Höck, was suddenly released from Dachau, he agreed to carry Niemöller’s “things” (“Sachen”) to safety (p. 39).

As Niemöller leaned toward the Catholic Church, it was based partly on his attraction to certain forms of piety in the Catholic faith. His primary concern, however, involved the role of authority. Niemöller was no fan of the tremendous variety of beliefs and emphases within the Protestant tradition, nor was he entirely comfortable with the fruits of modern biblical scholarship. Rather, he valued straightforward teachings of the biblical text. Writing to Elsa, Niemöller regretted about Luther “that in practical terms he abolished the teaching office of the church” (“dass er das Lehramt der Kirche praktisch abgeschaft hat”) (p. 43). He also envied the “apostolic succession” Catholics claimed on the basis of biblical authority, especially the text in which Jesus elevated Peter to a position of special authority.

It is clear that these pages in which Niemöller compared Catholic and Protestant teachings represented for him not just a personal inclination–plus his aversion to the wildly pro-Nazi theological claims of Deutsche Christen in the Kirchenkampf, of course. It also was his one effort to join the ranks of his theologian friends. He did so with some trepidation, not least because so many of his friends were such important theologians. Hans Asmussen, a prolific scholar and a close friend in the Confessing Church, stayed close to Elsa Niemöller as advisor and friend during Martin’s incarceration. Martin asked Elsa to seek Asmussen’s assistance and council and welcomed the chance to use Asmussen’s help. In May 1939, however, he also showed some recognition of his role as a beginner. As he wrote to Elsa, “Certainly Asmussen in my situation already would have written a thick book, or several” (“Asmussen hätte in meiner Lage sicher schon ein dickes Buch oder mehrere geschrieben”) (p. 29).

In fact, Elsa secretly worked together with Asmussen, Helmut Gollwitzer (another close friend and an assistant pastor in Dahlem), and Martin’s clergyman brother Wilhelm Niemöller to try to steer Martin away from his plan to convert. In all cases, they gave assistance and advice to Martin, but usually with small warnings or a nudge against Martin’s intended path. For Elsa, of course, the implications were the most pressing. She worried about financial considerations if Martin gave up his position and his career: “Then you can become a scavenger; and where are we left with the children? In that case we could not feed [or perhaps “support”, RPE] more than three” (“Dann kannst du Strassenkehrer werden; und wo bleiben wir mit den Kindern? Mehr als 3 können wir dann nicht ernähren”) (p. 12). During these months there were tears. There were requests that Martin promise not to make a hasty decision, or not to make a final decision without talking to her beforehand. After nearly two years of contemplation and indecision from July 1939 to the spring of 1941, Niemöller finally gave up on the idea of conversion. Christophersen and Ziemann describe various important reasons for this outcome, but conclude, “The real reason was the tenacity of his wife” (“Der wahre Grund war die Hartnäckigkeit seiner Frau”) (p. 22).

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019). 336 pages + 25 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-406-73137-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Wolfgang Huber is a distinguished voice in the German theological world, both academic and ecclesiastical, and a sustained treatment of the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by such a figure at once demands attention. His book is in many ways an introductory survey which seeks to unite the ‘fragments’ of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in a single coherent picture, for, as Huber remarks, at every turn in Bonhoeffer’s short life, ‘belief and life, theology and resistance closely interrelated’ (p. 9). The fertile phrases which Bonhoeffer cast upon the waters of the theological world are all here and considered in turn with authority and insight. Altogether, Huber views his primary material with poise and it may be said that every kind of source – theses and books, letters and poems – is justly represented. As befits such a portrait the acknowledgement of other secondary studies is kept to a minimum: here they sharpen perspectives and come and go at important junctures without crowding the picture. Sometimes there is an acknowledgement of later debates which have come to define Bonhoeffer scholarship in the world at large, not least the guilt of the Christian Church, the campaign to claim Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’, the two worlds of East and West Germany, and the controversies which emerged in the churches of South Africa under Apartheid. Huber clearly knows this broad ground very thoroughly indeed but here his attention is primarily claimed by Bonhoeffer himself and his voice is very much his own.

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.

Huber acknowledges how extraordinary was Bonhoeffer’s achievement in maintaining sustained theological study under the many pressures and dangers to which his life exposed him. An extended discussion of the development and ‘actuality’ of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism precedes an examination of his place in the history of the German resistance against Hitler and his significance there as a ‘theologian of resistance’. Here Huber acknowledges frankly that to account for the motives which lay behind the actions of any figure of resistance, whether they became fundamental to events or peripheral, must be ‘difficult, even impossible’ (p. 172). At all events, with this decisive turning comes an intensification of the discussion of Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings and a deepening emphasis on the themes of guilt and responsibility. It is in these contexts of resistance that Huber is most of all struck by Bonhoeffer’s singular, even ‘astonishing’, new steps, and even if they only reach us as fragments the sense of a coherent picture remains. Indeed, it is in ‘the extreme loneliness of a prison cell’ that Bonhoeffer finds a ‘wonderful security’ in the achievement of a unity of faith, teaching and life (p. 34). A further section, stoutly entitled ‘No end to Religion’, again shows the importance of situating Bonhoeffer’s thought securely in the intellectual contexts with which he was familiar. A final, and rewarding, section on the ‘Polyphony of life’ maintains a fascination with dualities (‘Bach or Beethoven’; ‘Music or Theology’) and offers a particularly attractive discussion of Bonhoeffer and Gregorian plainsong (provoked by the famous remark to Eberhard Bethge). An epilogue reflects at length on ‘what remains’, searching through the subsequent publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings and the accumulating studies of his many interpreters, and observing, rather nicely, the creative achievement of a ‘polycentric internationalism’. A gentle parting note occurs with a reflection on Bonhoeffer’s late poem ‘The Powers of Good’, in which Huber finds a final place of rest in a vast, unsentimental and moving trust in God (p. 298).

It could be said that of the making of books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer there is no end. In such a field many new authors labour to produce some distinctive insight or bold (even tenuous) claim, perhaps to justify the writing of another book or to address a particular audience or time. Over the years particular aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thought have certainly been placed under many microscopes. It is natural at first to wonder if a new, introductory portrait by an established scholar might turn out to be something of an academic tour of duty. We may expect a good deal of craft and even a dose of wisdom. But Huber’s book is something better than this: the encounter of author and subject is duly rigorous but it is also fresh, alert and warmly responsive. Nothing here is taken for granted; often Huber acknowledges that he finds a particular idea, or development, ‘astonishing’ and one senses that he really does. Indeed, he serves his subject and his audience very well. Such a book would make an excellent place for German readers make a start. One might well hope for an English edition too.

Review of Rebecca Scherf, Evangelische Kirche und Konzentrationslager

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Rebecca Scherf, Evangelische Kirche und Konzentrationslager (1933 bis 1945) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). 296 pages. ISBN 978-3-525-57057-9.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Retired)

Most of the literature on the intersections between the German churches and the Nazi concentration camp system has concerned the imprisonment of Christian clergy. In addition to studies of the Dachau “clergy barracks” (where most of these clergy were held, including more than 1700 Polish priests) there are studies of prominent figures, such as Martin Niemoeller (who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was in Buchenwald before being sent to Flossenbürg to be executed). Several studies of the Confessing Church (including my own work) have documented instances in which clergy were arrested and sent to camps or prisons, even briefly.

In other words, the subject has been framed largely in terms of clerical resistance and the persecution of the churches. Yet, the growing scholarship on the camp system, with its detailed portrayal of its scope and visibility, raises important questions about whether and how German Protestant and Catholic churches addressed these larger issues during the 1930s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ongoing research project, the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, has documented more than 44,000 camps, prisons, and ghettoes throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Within Nazi Germany, between 1933 and 1939, there were hundreds of small camps and sub-camps (in addition to Gestapo prisons), beginning with the establishment of Dachau in 1933. Those sent to these early camps included members of opposition political parties and other opponents of the regime, pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others.

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 study begins with a brief synopsis of the rise of National Socialism and the responses within the GEC, particularly with respect to the German Church Struggle and the sharp divisions between the “German Christian” movement and the Confessing Church between 1933 and 1935. Although the Church Struggle thwarted a complete alliance between the GEC and the Nazi state, it was focused on internal church matters, not political opposition. By 1935 the Confessing Church clergy and leadership were marginalized in most regional churches; the official church leadership was either openly “German Christian” or had made its peace with the regime. This, in turn, shaped church policy toward the camp system, including how regional church leaders reacted when their clergy were arrested and imprisoned.

The earliest issue that arose concerned the question of Protestant chaplains in the camps. In July 1933 Hermann Stöhr—a pacifist who would be executed in 1940 for his conscientious objection to military service—wrote GEC leaders in Berlin to ask whether there were Protestant chaplains in the camps. By that date, there were concentration camps in sixteen of the twenty-eight regional churches (some of these early camps were in existence for a relatively short time), and around 18,000 people were imprisoned in these camps. Stöhr also raised more directly political questions, noting that local pastors were not being informed when camps were set up in their districts, nor were they able to obtain family contact information for those who were imprisoned. The GEC church leadership in Berlin replied several months later that such arrangements had not yet been made.

In the meantime, however, some of the affected regional churches began to assign pastors to serve as chaplains in the camps. Most of the chaplains were “German Christians” and understood their pastoral duties accordingly. In many early camps, there was an emphasis on the “re-education” of political prisoners, and Scherf quotes one chaplain who stressed how essential Protestant chaplaincy was for prisoners’ rehabilitation “into the great German Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich.” In another instance, Scherf discovered a camp chaplain who tried unsuccessfully to report and stop the mistreatment of prisoners. In some camps, chaplains held regular worship service and were able to counsel prisoners; in others, their duties were strictly limited—in Dachau, for example, the chaplain was permitted only to hold the service and was forbidden to have any other contact, including conversation, with the prisoners. With the gradual consolidation of the camp system under central SS oversight, the state tightened its restrictions on even “German Christian” chaplains, and Scherf found a growing number of cases in which chaplains were banned. In 1937 Heinrich Himmler banned the chaplaincy in the concentration camps; no protest came from the official church leadership.

The second section of Scherf’s study focuses on the Protestant clergy imprisoned in the camps (virtually all of these clergy had ties to the Confessing Church). Relatively few Protestant clergy were actually sent to concentration camps—she documents only 71 in this book —although there were many more who were arrested and imprisoned in Gestapo prisons. In March 1935, for example, some 700 Prussian pastors were imprisoned briefly after reading from the pulpit a Confessing Church protest against the Nazi view of religion, but only 26 of them were sent to camps. In many cases, the decisive criterion seems to have been the extent to which the regional church leadership was overtly “brown.” Most of the clergy sent to camps were released the same year of their arrest.

For her case studies, Scherf focuses on the two camps with the highest number of Protestant clergy, Dachau and Sachsenburg (which was in Saxony). Dachau had the highest number of imprisoned clergy (over 2700) and they came from a number of different countries; most of them were Polish Catholic priests, but there were also clergy from the different Orthodox churches, Old Catholics, and other Protestant groups, as well as two Muslims. In contrast, most of the clergy imprisoned in Sachsenburg were from Saxony, the region in which the camp was located, and most had been arrested in conjunction with the March 1935 pulpit proclamation. The Bishop of Saxony was Friedrich Coch, one of the leading “German Christians.” Scherf offers a detailed and fascinating case study of the ways in which the camp experience provoked political protest and a different theological response among those in the camp, leading them to send a protest letter to the Saxony church leadership for its lack of solidarity. Even after the war ended several of those who had been together in Sachsenburg continued to work through their experience theologically.

The experiences of Confessing clergy who had been imprisoned fostered the post-1945 portrayal of the Confessing Church as a resistance group that had been persecuted for its opposition to Nazism—but it also deepened the postwar divide within the Evangelical Church itself, for some of those who had been imprisoned blamed the official church leadership for its failure to speak out. Nonetheless, the history of clergy who were sent to camps, including accounts by Catholic priests who had been in Dachau, became an important element in the postwar narratives about the “martyrdom” of both churches.

In her conclusion, Scherf discusses the ways in which history touches on the larger issue of how the German Evangelical Church responded to Nazi crimes before and after 1945. This study of the church responses to the concentration camps, particularly during the 1930s, offers some significant new insights into the relationship between the Protestant churches and the Nazi state.

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1 (March 2020)

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 476 pages. ISBN 978-1-4742-5766-4.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Retired)

Gerhard Leibholz was a German attorney and professor of state law, married to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s twin sister Sabine. George Bell was a British Anglican priest, the bishop of Chichester and an active leader in the international Protestant ecumenical movement who became one of Bonhoeffer’s closest allies. These two very different figures would be brought together by the accidents of history, but this fascinating volume shows that they found common ground on a number of issues. Starting on the eve of the Second World War and extending into the 1950s, the Bell-Leibholz correspondence gives a vivid portrait of the challenges they faced as well as their reflections on the nature of democracy and totalitarianism, and on Christianity’s future in a transformed postwar political order.

A baptized Protestant, Leibholz came from a secular Jewish family and was categorized as a Volljude under the Nazi racial law. After the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service in April 1933, Leibholz’s father lost his position, dying only five days later (there is speculation that his death was a suicide). One of his brothers, Peter, lost his position at the same time. A professor in Göttingen, Gerhard Leibholz managed to keep his position until early 1935. He and his family remained in Nazi Germany until spring 1938, when his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi warned them of the regime’s plans to require all those affected by the racial laws to have a “J” in their passport. Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge drove the Leibholzes to the Swiss border; from there they made their way to England where they were joined later by their two daughters.

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.

Bell succeeded in cobbling together various stipends and opportunities by which Leibholz could support his family in England. A moving aspect of this book is Bell’s often heroic support and advocacy for the German refugees, particularly as popular British sentiment against them intensified. The bishop also came under growing fire for his opposition to total war and his arguments on behalf of the “other Germany,” positions that probably cost him an appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The book’s greatest significance, however, may be its documentation of the developing conversations between the two about Christianity, democracy, human rights, and their visions for the postwar European order. Their correspondence was part of a larger international conversation at the time that included diplomats, intellectuals, Catholics, Protestant ecumenists, and others. The detailed discussion of these issues in this volume could be an important resource for the scholarship today about the shaping of post-1945 Europe, particularly the differing conceptions of human rights that emerged after 1945.

Leibholz viewed these social and political questions from the standpoint of someone who had studied law; his doctorate had focused on issues of legitimacy in parliamentary law. (As an aside: in 2000 I interviewed Gerhard Riegner, who directed the World Jewish Congress during the war years. Riegner told me that he had studied law in Berlin during the 1920s with Leibholz and spoke of their early common commitment to human rights.) Leibholz shared Bell’s view that the major battle of their times was the defense of liberal democracy and its values against the threat of totalitarianism. Their understanding of those ideals was very much the product of the era, culture, and class from which they came. Leibholz, for example, viewed the “totalitarian” form of nationalism in National Socialism as something completely different from Prussian nationalism.

It is difficult to know how much previous Bonhoeffer family discussions had influenced Leibholz before he arrived in England, but the extent to which he began to focus in England on the centrality of Christian teaching and doctrine for Western ideals is striking. He was naturally interested in the German church struggle in which his brother-in-law was so engaged, and his first published article in Britain was a 1939 report about the situation confronting German churches. By 1940 he was already influenced by Bell’s book Christianity and World Order (Leibholz’s review of the book is included in an appendix to this volume). In 1942 Leibholz gave a series of lectures on “Christianity, Politics, and Power,” that was subsequently published in the widely read Christian News-Letter.

Leibholz intently followed British reports and commentary on the implications of the European situation. His letters to Bell are filled with analysis and commentary, particularly his sense of how Germans would react to British public policy and statements. Bell clearly valued Leibholz’s opinion and feedback. One of this volume’s many revelations is the extent to which Leibholz shaped Bell’s view of the German resistance. Bell sometimes sent Leibholz drafts of public statements in advance for his opinion, as in late 1942 with a question he planned to raise in the House of Lords: “I want to ask you whether the form in which the Question if put could and would be twisted by Goebbels so as to make it appear that I or the Church of England had turned Communist….” (115) Bell frequently shared Leibholz’s observations with other church and political officials, but with time Leibholz developed his own connections and sometimes wrote these figures directly. In a letter of 19 June 1942 to J. H. Oldham, for example, he commented on the Anglo-Russian treaty and the need for more discussion in Britain of what form of German government “the Anglo-Saxon countries would be prepared to accept after a collapse of ‘Hittlerite Germany’”(94). Another interesting development that was new to me was Leibholz’s growing belief that Catholic teachings on natural law were fundamental for modern liberal democracy, and his emphasis on the need for the “re-Christianization” of Germany after the defeat of National Socialism.

As the war progressed the personal strains on the Leibholzes intensified. They naturally focused on the German resistance and the fates of their family members. They learned of the April 1943 arrests of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi only four months later, in August. Two months after the failed coup attempt of July 1944, Leibholz compiled a list of people whom he believed had been executed and sent it to Bell with a comment about the loss this would mean for a postwar Germany. In the spring of 1945, they received conflicting information about the executions of Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer (the Leibholzes initially believed that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had survived). They only received confirmation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death on 31 May from Adolf Freudenberg in Geneva; confirmation of the deaths of Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi didn’t arrive until late July. Bell immediately began to write about the German resistance, and much of the correspondence during Leibholz’s remaining time in Britain concerned the reconstruction of what had happened to his brothers-in-law.

In 1947 the Leibholzes returned to Germany. Gerhard Leibholz became a federal judge in Karlsruhe in 1951 (he continued, however, to teach in Göttingen) and remained there until his retirement in 1971. After his return Leibholz sent letters reporting on denazification and the political reconstruction of Germany, but over time their exchanges grew infrequent. The friendship continued until Bell’s death in 1958. The final document in the volume is the Leibholzes’ condolence letter to Bell’s widow in October 1958, in which they wrote that they had “lost the most faithful and best friend we have had in the English speaking world.”

This book includes an excellent introduction by Ringshausen and Chandler giving the general historical context for the correspondence. The letters are grouped by year, with a short chronology for each year, and there are helpful footnotes throughout that identify the people mentioned and give more background for the issues being described. This volume will certainly be of interest to Bonhoeffer scholars and those interested in ecumenical and British church history. I hope that it will find a wider audience, because these extensive and often revealing conversations between a German refugee lawyer and a British Anglican bishop provide a close-up view of the larger historical conversations about war, democracy, human rights, and the construction of civil society at a critical juncture in twentieth-century history.

Review of Dietz Bering, Luther im Fronteinsatz. Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Dietz Bering, Luther im Fronteinsatz. Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). Pp. 229.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was a PhD student researching the “German Christian” movement, someone told me about Dietz Bering’s Der Name als Stigma. Antisemitismus im deutschen Alltag 1812-1933 (1987; published in English in 1992 as The Stigma of Names). The book was a revelation, highly original and insightful, and reading it felt like a special secret, a feeling I would also get with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) and Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness (1998), though I subsequently learned that all of these books were widely known and admired.

More than thirty years later, Bering is an acknowledged public intellectual whose 2010 book, Die Epoche der Intellektuellen, attracted significant attention. This newest book, about the uses and abuses of Martin Luther in World War I, does not have the cachet of a surprise discovery, but it shares with The Stigma of Names the author’s detailed attention to language – he is a linguist by training – his patience for quantitative and qualitative analyses, and a knack for moving from carefully presented evidence to bold conclusions. In this case, Bering examines a body of World War I writing in which Martin Luther features, literally counting the number of times certain words and phrases appear – “hammer”, “hero”, “manliness”, and many more – and layers his findings onto a sketch of the war as experienced by Germans. The result is an insightful elucidation of the transformation, or more aptly, weaponization, of the defiant monk and reformer into a nationalist propaganda, morale-boosting tool. As Bering shows, that process unfolded in one world war and left the Protestant reformer and his avatar primed for deployment in another.

Luther im Fronteinsatz is a tightly structured, amply documented essay on the origins of an ideology rather than a sustained historical investigation. Readers familiar with recent works by Christopher Probst, Hartmut Lehmann, Manfred Gailus, and Lyndal Roper, or the older scholarship by Martin Greschat, Gottfried Maron, and others are unlikely to learn anything new about Luther or his legacies in the twentieth century. Nor does the book re-interpret the social history of the Great War and its fall-out in Central Europe, as illuminated by Belinda Davis, Roger Chickering, Maureen Healy, Deborah Cohen, Annelise Thimme, and many others in a massive historiography in English and German. (Of the authors named in this paragraph, only Roper and Maron appear in Bering’s bibliography.)

Yet Bering’s book is still valuable for its compelling articulation of a process that injected Luther into the “idea of 1914,” metonymized as the “hammer” and lauded as the original “German personality” and the embodiment of “German loyalty.” Confronted with the setbacks and defeats of 1917-18, Bering shows, this set of images ossified in a new propaganda initiative, “instruction for the Fatherland” – Vaterländischer Unterricht. Bering devotes most attention to the leaders and shapers of a dynamic discourse: Ernst Troeltsch, Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf von Harnack, and other prominent men. But he also examines opinion multipliers including military periodicals such as the Feldpressestelle, Deutsche Kriegswochenschau, Karnisch-Julische Kriegszeitung, and the Kriegszeitungen of the 4^th, 7^th, and 10^th armies, as well as grassroots popularizers, notably local pastors. Throughout his analysis, Bering weaves in a dialectical component. As he shows, enemy propaganda fueled a feedback loop: for example, accusations that German soldiers were unthinking automatons sparked an insistent emphasis on the concept of “freedom,” in particular “German freedom,” in contrast to the supposed shallow and individualistic freedoms of the French with their violent revolutions and British with their fixation on “Gold und Geld”.

Bering makes a convincing case, and the book is a lively read, especially the crisp opening chapter, “Deutschland auf der Suche nach sich selbst”. Still he raises many questions that remain unaddressed or are discussed only briefly. One involves Catholics. Given the many Catholics in Germany and the much more pronounced Catholic presence in the Austro-Hungarian military, they merit further attention. Bering does make some effort to show how the Luther-myth was adapted for a German Catholic audience, but it is not commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge. Patrick Houlihan’s study of Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (2017) would have been a useful conversation partner.

Another underexamined issue is antisemitism. In The Stigma of Names, Bering revealed a deep and nuanced understanding of how anti-Jewish assumptions, messages, and provocations were built into Christian signs, symbols, and names. This book includes some astute observations about how anti-Black and anti-Turkish racisms functioned in the weaponized Luther system but has surprisingly little to say about antisemitism. Yet antisemitism hovers just outside the frame in many of the quotations analyzed, from the stereotype of the materialist British (and their shadowy Jewish cousins) obsessed with “money and gold,” to the emphatic addition of German to modify the nouns “courage”, “character”, “loyalty”, and “faith”, and to exclude Jews and others constructed as the non- or anti-Germans. Luther’s 1543 screed, On the Jews and Their Lies, is not mentioned in the book, which made me wonder whether German World War I propagandists deliberately avoided that text or Bering chose not to address it.

A third underexplored topic involves reception. How did soldiers, their families and friends receive this instrumentalized version of the familiar figure of Luther? Bering observes that class divisions and failing morale were the reasons German opinion leaders adopted aggressive mythmaking in the first place. Censors found letters between home and fighting fronts to be rife with bitter complaints from people who felt hungry, used, and disregarded by the warmakers. Did the men and women who wrote such letters buy into the weaponized Luther? Did they ridicule and lampoon it, which must have been tempting given the heavy-handedness of its promoters? Observers were certainly aware of the religious elements in German chauvinism, as depictions of “Prussians” in Jaroslav Hašek’s 1921 novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, make hilariously clear.

John Conway, the founder of this journal, always insisted it was the discrediting of organized Christianity in Germany during World War I, with the jingoistic insistence that “God is on our side,” that opened the way for the ravages of National Socialism. This claim and Bering’s interpretation open a series of question central to any critique of populism. Were ordinary Germans and ordinary Christians victims or dupes? Were they silenced, manipulated, or won over so that they themselves become proponents of the nationalist bile? As an academic, I have been conditioned to believe that diagnosing a problem, unpacking a discourse to reveal its construction, takes away its power. But does that claim still hold if an audience prefers the discourse, lies and all, to its informed analysis?

Review of Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach, eds., Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach, eds., Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2018). Pp. 294. ISBN: 9783863313821.

By Christina Matzen, University of Toronto

Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 is an unconventional and significant tribute to the Christian women who were interned in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp during World War II. Editors Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach curated this volume as an accompaniment to the Ravensbrück Memorial’s 2017 exhibit on Christian prisoners, which was part of a German Evangelical Church Kirchentag event in Berlin. In the context of this exhibition, the term “Christian” is a category of self-description and encompasses women from Eastern and Western Europe. Indeed, this inclusive approach lies at the heart of the book’s strength. Through the contributors’ attention to women and their religious lives before and during their incarceration, women victims of Christian faith are rightly made more visible in the history of Nazi Germany, Christianity, gender, and memory.

Resistance is a central theme of the book. Christian women in Ravensbrück tended to be involved in opposition within charitable associations and in education but have long been regarded as “apolitical, inconspicuous, and therefore irrelevant,” helping to explain the marginal attention paid to this persecuted group in historical scholarship (21). Most forms of resistance from Christian women entailed critical statements against the German government and expressions of solidarity with people attacked by the Nazi regime. As Manfred Gailus writes in his contribution on Protestant resistors, many religious women found themselves in a dual position of opposition: they criticized both Nazism and sexist religious conventions (206).

Dr. Katharina Staritz is just one compelling woman chronicled in the book. Born in Breslau in 1903, Staritz became a member of the Confessing Church in 1934 and by 1938 was blessed as a vicar. Shortly after the November Pogrom, Staritz took over leadership of the Breslau branch of Protestant theologian Heinrich’s Grüber’s “auxiliary body for non-Aryan Christians,” a welfare agency to help Jews who had converted to Christianity emigrate safely in order to escape deportations. Although Staritz was forbidden as a female vicar to perform baptisms, she nonetheless baptized Jewish women. In September 1941 she wrote a circular to the Breslau clergy asking them not to exclude parishioners marked with a yellow star. The Gestapo confiscated the circular, labeled her as “Jewish friendly and objectionable,” and arrested her the following winter (25-26). Staritz wrote after the war that while she was interned in Ravensbrück, she worshiped the Bible every Sunday and preached to a small group of women as they walked up and down the camp road (155). With Claudia Koonz’s seminal work in mind on how women could be both victimized by the regime and complicit in the regime’s murderous policies, one might wonder to what extent Staritz—an oft-cited figure throughout the book—is representative of Christian women who served time in Ravensbrück. Her story is profound and important, but readers who approach this volume without some familiarity of the complex roles of both women and religious institutions in Nazi Germany may be left with an incomplete impression of the scope of Christian women’s actions in the Reich.

The book is organized in three parts and is largely based on survivor accounts and judicial and police records. Eschebach provides an introduction on the social and religious contexts of Christians in the Ravensbrück. The second (and largest) section of the book explores religious practices in concentration camps and chronicles the lives of thirteen women who, inspired by their religious views, opposed the Nazi regime and were consequently arrested and incarcerated in Ravensbrück. The final section comprises six essays that cover topics such as the experiences of women in various Christian sects that were represented in the Ravensbrück inmate population (namely Catholic, Protestant, and Jehovah’s Witness, but other groups are referenced as well), religious life in Fürstenberg and Ravensbrück during the Third Reich, and the role of church remembrance and memorial work.

Analytical contributions of the book are strongest in regard to Christian social life in Ravensbrück. The authors argue that ecumenical efforts in the camp had a limited impact, and Christian convictions seldom resulted in prisoners overcoming confessional differences, national origins, educational milieus, and politically and religiously motivated concepts of community and resistance. Language skills and class distinctions tended to inhibit communication among Christian women in Ravensbrück, and multinational and pan-Christian discussions were predominantly initiated by individuals. All prisoners lacked holy texts and liturgical objects, and although Ravensbrück camp regulations did not explicitly prohibit religious practice, large group meetings outside the barracks were prohibited, limiting the possibility of collective services. Women resorted to creative responses and generated booklets with Bible verses and psalms from stolen office papers. Women also used plastic and aluminum to fashion miniature crucifixes and pendants with depictions of saints. However, these common struggles did little to unify observant women who hailed from other countries and engaged in dissimilar Christian practices.

An innovative and empathetic blend of public history and traditional scholarship, this book’s discussion of women’s struggles within their religions, within Nazi-dominated Europe, and within the Ravensbrück concentration camp is commendable. Additional information and especially archival citations for the thirteen biographies would have strengthened the volume since this book will certainly be indispensable for those seeking a deeper knowledge of the particular denominations and individuals highlighted in the book. Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 nevertheless is a forceful and insightful overview that will be of great interest to a wide readership.

Review of Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer on Resistance: The Word against the Wheel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer on Resistance: The Word against the Wheel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 170 Pp. ISBN: 9780198824176.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Michael P. DeJonge’s book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theo-political vision of resistance is a concise response to recent conflicting invocations of a “Bonhoeffer moment” by both conservative and liberal Christians in the United States. Concerned about the lack of clarity concerning the legacy of Bonhoeffer’s political resistance and the narrow focus at present on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy to commit tyrannicide, DeJonge argues that “to associate his legacy exclusively with this conspiracy dramatically truncates his witness.” Indeed, “his participation in a conspiracy that intended violence was the endgame of a long resistance process, the final stop through an elaborate flowchart of resistance activity” (5). The author wants us to turn to Bonhoeffer for more than just inspiration for contemporary political activism. To that end, he seeks to go beyond narrating what Bonhoeffer did in order to ask what Bonhoeffer actually thought about political resistance, and to locate that within Bonhoeffer’s theology of church, politics, and resistance. In doing this, DeJonge seeks to fill a gap in the scholarly literature—the lack of a “comprehensive and accessible account of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking” (7).

In fourteen short chapters, DeJonge guides his readers through Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance, identifying no less than six types of resistance in the German theologian’s writings. The author begins with basic theological foundations—creation, fall, and redemption—then adds the Lutheran accents of the law and gospel, explaining them in terms of the categories of preservation and redemption. He then outlines Bonhoeffer’s belief in politics as a component of God’s preserving activity, complete with Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of politics as an order of creation (with linkages to Natural Law, an aberration he associates with Roman Catholics and with “pseudo-Lutherans” who see the Volk as an order of creation) or as an order of redemption (with links to the Kingdom of God, which he associates with the Reformed tradition and the “mistake” of treating the gospel as a blueprint for society) (31-34). Rather, as DeJonge argues, Bonhoeffer uses the Lutheran theological mainstays of the two kingdoms and the orders as a way to define and hold down a middle position in which state and church (along with the household) work together in the task of preserving and redeeming humankind (38).

Important to DeJonge’s account is Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the law and gospel, the orders, and the work of church and state needed to be reconnected in his time—brought back into cooperative harmony—having drifted apart into two entirely different sets of norms and values in the modern era. Drawing on Bonhoeffer’s 1932 lecture “The Nature of the Church,” DeJonge explains Bonhoeffer’s thinking about church and state as orders working together—the state to preserve external righteousness and create space for the service of Christ, which is the church’s specialized role. (45, 54). The church, for Bonhoeffer, is where Christ is truly present and where Christ is proclaimed through the preaching of the Word. Because Christ is lord over the whole world—including both church and state—and because the God’s Word (meaning both Christ’s presence and Christ preached) is of utmost importance, the church must be on guard to protect its role: “Obedience to the state exists only when the state does not threaten the word. The battle about the boundary must then be fought out!” (45). This idea is so central to DeJonge’s account of Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance that it is worth quoting him at length here:

This remarkable understanding of the church’s proclamation is the anchor of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking. For him, the most powerful form of political resistance is not any action in the ordinary sense of that word, whether that action comes in the mild form of nonviolent civil disobedience or in the drastic form of violent governmental overthrow. Rather, the most powerful form of political resistance is words, although these are words in a special sense, words that are themselves, paradoxically, the most fundamental kind of action. This is, specifically, the divine word entrusted to the church. This word is the centre of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking and activity. When Bonhoeffer advocated or himself undertook any other form of resistance, it was in the service of this ultimate form of resistance. Because the word is the highest form of resistance, the church is the most important agent of resistance (48).

Chapters 5 through 14 analyze Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking in a series of key texts written between 1932 and 1943, during the time of the Nazi dictatorship and the German Church Struggle: “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933), “What is Church?” (1933), “The Führer and the Individual in the Younger Generation” (1933), “On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World Alliance” (1932), “False Teaching in the Confessing Church?” (1935-1936), “The Church and the Peoples of the World” (1934), Discipleship (1937), Ethics (1940-1943), “Protestantism without Reformation” (1939), “State and Church” (1940s), “’Personal’ and ‘Objective’ Ethics” (c. 1942), “State and Church” (c. 1941), “After Ten Years” (1943), “History and Good” (1940s), “The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates” (1943), and “What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?” (1943). Along the way, he identifies three phases of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activity and six forms of resistance in Bonhoeffer’s writing (9-10, 59). In the first phase, from 1932-1935, in which Bonhoeffer engaged in “resistance through the proclamation of the ecumenical church” (9), four types of resistance stand out: 1.) individual and humanitarian resistance to state injustice, 2.) the church’s diaconal service to the victims of state injustice, 3.) the church’s “indirectly political word” to the state, and 4.) the church’s “directly political word” against an unjust state (10). In the second phase, from 1935-1939, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, entered the “second battle” of the church struggle, and engaged in a new form of resistance: 5.) resistance through discipleship in the church. Finally, in the third phase of his resistance, from 1939-1945, Bonhoeffer entered the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, and a final type of resistance: 6.) resistance through the responsible action of the individual (9-10).

As he works his way through these writings, phases, and types of resistance, DeJonge argues that Bonhoeffer was remarkably consistent in his understanding of resistance. He suggests that some of the confusion over seemingly contradictory statements made by Bonhoeffer—especially in “The Church and the Jewish Question”—can be reconciled through a proper grounding of the German theologian’s resistance thinking in his theology of the two kingdoms, the orders, and the relationship between church and state. The main problem, according to DeJonge, is that readers of Bonhoeffer (scholars included) have failed to attend to Bonhoeffer’s distinction between individual and humanitarian resistance on the one hand and churchly resistance on the other (59-68, passim).

Individual and humanitarian resistance are manifest in the first and sixth types of resistance identified by DeJonge. In the first type, as “The Church and the Jewish Question” makes clear, individuals and humanitarian groups (but not the church) can point out the specific injustices of state policies, “to make the state aware of the moral aspect of the measures it takes … to accuse the state of offenses against morality” (63-64).

The church, however, does not critique the state based on morality but based on the gospel. The church preaches and hears the gospel, and is defined by the presence of Christ (in conjunction with the proclamation of Christ, the message of the gospel) (62). But the church has both a preaching office and a diaconal office, and thus the second type of resistance (and the first offered by the church) is the diaconal “service to the victims of the state’s actions”—the work to “bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel” (66). This is accompanied by two other types of resistance (numbers 3 and 4 in DeJonge’s typology) arising from the preaching office of the church: the “indirectly political word of the church,” which flows from Bonhoeffer’s notion of the church “questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does” (69); and the “directly political word of the church,” which is rooted in Bonhoeffer’s belief that in extreme circumstances the church might act “not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself” (79). These are not about challenging the state directly concerning the morality of specific policies or actions, but about working to define the boundary of state authority and calling the state to fulfill its God-given mandate to preserve external righteousness. Even in the extreme case (the status confessionis, or state of confession), the church is not usurping the role of the state, but offering a “concrete commandment” in a specific situation in which the state has overstepped its bounds (82-87). The goal of type 3 and 4 resistance is, to quote Bonhoeffer, to “protect the state from itself and preserve it.” As DeJonge puts it, “The goal of the concrete commandment is to reestablish ordinary times in which the state and church fulfill their respective mandates” (87). It is essential to note that DeJonge returns time and again to the importance of the two kingdoms and the orders, or divine mandates, as Bonhoeffer comes to call them, for judging both the actions and the legitimacy of the state, and for defining the responses of the church.

To continue with DeJonge’s schema, type 5 resistance is the last of the churchly forms of resistance. It is the resistance that dominated the period in which Bonhoeffer directed the illegal Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, where he engaged in what he called the second battle of the church struggle, the battle to see the church enter into genuine discipleship to Jesus. This radical discipleship would in turn provide it with the spiritual foundation from which to speak the indirect and direct words of the church to the state (109-119). It is the idea of discipleship as resistance, an entrance into the suffering of Christ and into suffering for Christ. For Bonhoeffer, only the community radically devoted to Christ belongs to the body of Christ. Indeed, Bonhoeffer even argued that membership in the Confessing Church—the only true church—was a requirement for salvation (124).

Finally, with phase 3 and type 6 of Bonhoeffer’s resistance, DeJonge argues that Bonhoeffer leaves behind churchly resistance and returns to the resistance of individuals or groups. This last resistance is the resistance of individuals willing to take “free responsible action” in the world (142-143), to enter into extreme situations in which normal standards of guilt and innocence do not apply, because the ordinary relationship of the two kingdoms or the orders/mandates of church and state have been thrown into confusion (152-154). Such resistance accepts the fact that “it is impossible to avoid guilt and complicity” (154). Again, as in the church’s resistance, this free responsible action of the individual is directed to one aim: to re-establish the conditions of life—to return to the place where the two kingdoms and divine mandates are once again working in harmony (155).

As DeJonge identifies these types of resistance in Bonhoeffer’s life and writing, one of the thorny problems he tries to solve is Bonhoeffer’s seemingly contradictory statements about Jews. Chapter 9 is devoted to this specific issue—to understanding how Bonhoeffer can argue that the church has an “unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community,” but continue on to state that:

The church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the “chosen people,” which hung the Redeemer of the world on the cross, must endure the curse of its action in long-drawn-out suffering. “The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere, and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting place” (Luther, Table Talk). But the history of suffering of this people that God loved and punished will end in the final homecoming of the people of Israel to its God. And this homecoming will take place in Israel’s conversion to Christ. (100-101)

DeJonge rejects the notion that this is a case of an inconsistent, early version of Bonhoeffer “working out his thinking about Jews and resistance on the fly” (101). Rather, DeJonge argues that “the relationship between the mistreatment of the Jews and resistance to the state is not immediate but rather mediated by other concerns. Specifically, these concerns are the two kingdoms (as illustrated in the first part of “The Church and the Jewish Question”) and justification (as illustrated in the second part)” (101-102). Within the context of these concepts, Jewish persecution is, then, first and foremost an issue of the state failing in its divinely-ordained mandate, and in two ways: first, in failing to provide enough order to protect the rights of its people (and to which the church must respond unconditionally, on behalf of Jews), and second, in overreaching its authority and encroaching on the church’s freedom to proclaim the gospel (for the salvation of all, including the Jews) (105-108).

In his conclusion, DeJonge attempts to clarify Bonhoeffer’s thinking about rights (“inviolable rights are not fundamental”), the state (state authority is grounded not in popular sovereignty but in God’s mandate), and the church (the church’s political voice focuses on the state’s mandate and does not follow the “ethical-political logic” of individuals or humanitarian groups) (158-159). He reminds us that, for Bonhoeffer, the most fundamental action is not found in “our own deeds” but in “God’s word” (159). His hope is that his readers will understand that, for Bonhoeffer, the church is at the heart of his resistance thinking, and that “seizing the wheel” is not about civil disobedience or overthrow.

DeJonge has engaged in a thorough analysis of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking. Those of us who work on the historical side of the German church struggle would do well to incorporate his and other theologians’ insights into our work, to enrich our interpretations and aid us in the cultivation of an undistorted and unpoliticized interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s life and work.

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 284 Pp. ISBN: 9780674047686.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The Jobbik Party of Hungary. Greece’s Golden Dawn. The Neo-Confederate movement in the United States and countless other nationalist extremist movements. What unites all of them on a certain level is their adoption of the rhetoric chiefly associated in many people’s minds with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich: that of a worldwide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy traditional Christian morality and age-old civilizations. Paul Hanebrink’s examination into the origins and power of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth offers readers the opportunity to think – not about how true the Judeo-Bolshevik myth is, but rather, “to understand why it has been and remains so powerful” (5).

Hanebrink’s work has been influenced by the approach taken by Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov whose work on nineteenth-century Germany explained the rise of antisemitic language as part of a response to the many unsettling experiences caused by the late unification of Germany. No matter how quickly economic modernization, rapid urbanization, and cultural changes were dislocating people in Germany, Volkov argued that the use of antisemitic rhetoric and tropes about Jews were part of a “cultural code.” By addressing the “Jewish Question” an individual could then respond with solutions to the so-called problem. This often allowed many people to believe that the problems they were experiencing in their daily lives could be explained by one, all-powerful disruptor: the Jew. Hanebrink explores the use of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” over the course of different time periods and across various countries in Europe and the United States, allowing the reader to track how this destructive myth about Jews varied over the course of the twentieth century and to ponder why the myth continues to persist so powerfully into the twenty-first.

Following the unsettling and devastating impact of the First World War and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, much of Europe seemed to be in a state of revolutionary flux. Much like the work of Robert Gerwarth,[1] Hanebrink opens his work with the reality that, for so many Europeans, the First World War did not really end in November 1918. War and revolution continued on in many places, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, so that the experience of many people was not one of peace and stability but simply a continuation of the violence of 1914-1918. With so many revolutions breaking out in such a time of instability and dislocation, the search was on for the root cause of such upheavals. The answer that presented itself to so many people was a simple one: Jews were the face of revolution and revolutions seemed to be breaking out everywhere. From Munich, Germany, to Hungary, Romania, Poland, Russia, left-wing attempts to take over governments and countries led to an atmosphere of the total upheaval of societal norms. The one element that so many could agree upon was the role that Jews played in leftist activity. Hanebrink does not deny the involvement of some Jews in each of these movements, but he works hard to refute the notion that Jews created Bolshevism, supported the radical movement, and therefore all Jews were to be held responsible for the crimes of Bolshevism (14). The idea of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” was linked to the centuries-old language of hatred directed towards and about Jews: the figure of the Jew was linked to being the creator of disorder, disruption, and fanaticism, and there were just enough men and women who could be identified as being Jewish in each revolutionary movement that the myth seemed to embody a core kernel of truth.

How did this myth impact actual Jewish lives? Hanebrink exams the pogroms that repeatedly broke out in various parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, for example, Symon Petliura argued that by fighting against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks,” Ukrainians would be able to unify into a National Republic. Others in Ukraine attacked Jews, not to form a new Republic, but to restore an older state. In either case, Jews suffered directly because of the belief that they were behind the forces of disorder and chaos in Ukraine. Judeo-Bolshevism as an international threat played a prominent role in the political calculations of various faction leaders not only in Ukraine but also in Poland, Hungary, and Romania in the interwar years. Adding to this fear was the imagined idea that all Jews were by nature conspiratorial and therefore untrustworthy as potential allies. Works by Timothy Snyder and Omer Bartov[2] underscore Hanebrink’s analysis: some Jews in the borderland regions were caught in a crossfire of competing armies. The one element that each army could agree on was that the Jews were a true obstacle to achieving their objectives. As a result, more and more Jews lost their property if not their very lives. In such a tumultuous atmosphere, Jews were perceived my many as posing both an internal as well as an external threat to a country’s gentile population. The fears that Jews could potentially contribute to revolution, threatening the national security of a newly-formed nation fueled and rationalized the violence perpetrated against local Jewish populations.

While violence and pogroms continued in Eastern European territories, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on its perhaps most destructive power under the influence of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Hanebrink rightly points out that it is perhaps no coincidence that the early Nazi party had its beginnings in Munich – a city that had been rocked by left-wing revolution in 1919. Hitler took the pre-existing imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik and used it to animate his followers. He told them they were fighting to defend traditional German Christian society which Jewish-Bolsheviks threatened to overturn. In Hitler’s mind, fighting the power of a Jewish-Bolsheviks was a matter of life or death for Germans. In this way, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on it perhaps most lethal form yet. If Germans were to live, then Jewish-Bolshevik supporters had to die.[3] Lending support to the “reality” of a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to destroy all of Christian Europe was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Here Hitler saw an opportunity to elevate the existential threat that Jews posed to Germans – now he could point to Catholic Spain and argue that all of Europe would succumb to Judeo-Bolshevism unless there was a mighty crusade (led by him) to destroy it.[4] Once again, the mere presence of some Jews in the Spanish Civil War lent an air of truth to the idea of a vast “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy. From the 1930s onward, the fight against Jewish Bolshevism would be tied to Nazi Germany, reaching its most destructive peak with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It was in that event that Nazi propagandists could unleash the full force of their anti-Jewish-Bolshevik imagery. Layered upon Judeo-Bolshevik images was the portrait of Russia as an Asiatic, barbaric, foreign place that had been perverted by Jewish domination for decades. Jews were set in the role of saboteurs, conspirators, partisans, and the supreme proponents of Communism. Therefore, they were seen as the ultimate security threat. This helped the Nazis and many of their Eastern European allies participate in mass violence against Jewish populations, ultimately labeled as the Holocaust. Hanebrink also tracks the evolution that occurs – from the period of Nazi victories inside of the Soviet Union to the periods of Nazi defeat – and he provides examples of how Nazi propaganda would leave a long-lasting mark, particularly as the Soviet Red Army advanced further westward. The successful blending of images of Red Army soldiers as representative of Jewish vengeance, along with the notion that the Red Army was composed of “Asiatic barbarians” come to overturn all of European Christian civilization would have a long-lasting impact on areas that found themselves living in a post-WWII Communist-dominated territory.

In places such as Poland, Romania, and Hungary, the success of the Red Army meant one, ultimate thing: “Soviet occupation had brought Jews to power” (168). Jews who had survived the Holocaust emerged from hiding and many who had believed that Jews had been eradicated in the war now feared Jews would seek revenge for their suffering. This was coupled with the belief that Communist systems were led by Jews. There was even a tendency among post-war countries such as in the case of Poland, where leaders argued that Jews had supported Communism and they, therefore, had no one but themselves to blame for any hatred directed against them by the public. This line of argumentation was particularly useful when, in 1946, a charge of blood libel was made against Jews which resulted in the murder of at least 42 Jewish people. In yet another cruel twist of irony, local Communists also exploited anti-Jewish sentiments, particularly in Hungary where the economy was floundering and accusations of war profiteering were utilized to stir up crowds against “capitalist exploiters” whose images looked suspiciously like stereotypes of Jews. In these types of cases, Jews were associated with capitalism, exploitation, speculation, and the like. In the post-war environment, Communist leaders sought to shake free of the association of Jewishness with Communism.

For the post-WWII Western nations, the question that emerged was how to continue to fight against the growing spread of Communism without associating the fight with Nazism? Hanebrink explores the shifting of terminology in the West, going from fighting against “Judeo-Bolshevism” to embracing “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Now, instead of Hitler leading the crusade against Communism, the United States would be the lead fighter for Western Civilization. Intellectuals could still maintain that the Soviets and Communism, in general, represented “Asiatic barbarity” but they de-coupled the language of “Judeo-Bolshevism” from this fight. In the aftermath of the devastation of the war, many Christians in Europe and in the U.S. argued that Christianity could lead Europe out of the darkness it had fallen into under Nazi domination. Now the fight could be reframed as a battle against “atheistic Communism” with Christians and Jews working together, sharing a common biblical tradition that provided the seedbed for moral renewal. The concept of Judeo-Christianity was one that allowed Jews to align themselves in the battle of the Cold War against the forces of atheism. In this new way of thinking, Jews could become Cold Warriors. The idea of shared moral values between Christians and Jews connected with the idea of creating a more liberal, more tolerant society. This also impacted the way in which the memory of the Holocaust was addressed in public discourse.

In some instances, voices emerged in post-Communist societies that argued that the crimes committed under Communist regimes were ignored, while undo attention was given to specifically Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. In countries such as Poland, heated debates rose to the surface, asking why so much attention was given to Jewish victimhood at the hands of the Nazis while the victimization of gentile Poles at the hands of the Communist leaders was downplayed or ignored altogether? This line of argumentation brought back the specter that has haunted Europe for much of the twentieth and now part of the twenty-first centuries: that of the Judeo-Bolshevik. Right-wing and populist leaders demand an acknowledgement that Jews supported Communism, that Communism created categories of its own victims, and in this way, Hanebrink argues, “The Judeo-Bolshevik myth was reborn in post-Communist Europe as a tool for challenging the premises on which transnational memory of the Holocaust rested- and with those premises, the liberal civic ideals of multicultural toleration, human rights, and European integration that Holocaust memory culture had come to symbolize so powerfully” (273).

Hanebrink’s book is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book could benefit from the addition of several items including maps of the areas he is discussing, some pictures of propaganda imagery, and, most importantly, the book needs a comprehensive bibliography. The work would be useful in classes of graduate students who have studied some of the history of antisemitism, intellectual history, and histories of the twentieth century.

[1] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End (NY, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

[2] See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (NY, NY: Basic Books, 2010) and Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (NY, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

[3] See especially the work of Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion. Violence Against Jews in Provinicial Germany, 1919-1939 (NY, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012) and also Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). These works explore the dynamic of “us vs. them” in Nazi ideology.

[4] See, for example, Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon Roman Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany,” in Kevin P. Spicer, ed., Antisemitism, Chrisitian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 121-135 and Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “Crusade. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Invasion of the Soviet Union on the Roman Catholic Church under the Nazi Regime,” in Glaube- Freiheit-Diktatur in Europa und den USA. Festschrift für Gerhard Besier zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Strübund (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 715-726.