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Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Pp. xii + 212, ISBN: 9780802872272.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship, Andrew Chandler grapples with the ecumenical and political legacy of this influential bishop. Beginning with a description of the eclectic contents of one of Bell’s little blue notebooks, Chandler explains how it “captures a mind and a soul in perpetual motion in the world: attentive, enquiring, pursuing. It is a testament of Christian life in the middle twentieth century, wrought out of the turmoil of politics, war, persecution, calamity. It is a proof of one man’s decision to take his place in such a world, and to do so as a faithful Christian” (4).

George Bell was born in 1883 on the south coast of England, into a “secure, comfortable middle-class clerical home” (7). He attended Westminster School beginning in 1896, then Christ Church, Oxford, in 1901. Next he enrolled in theological college in Wells, in the West of England, where he was introduced to the student ecumenical movement and to Christian Socialism. Ordained as a deacon in Ripon Cathedral in 1907 and as a priest in Leeds in 1908, Bell returned to Oxford in 1910, where he combined a growing commitment to social justice with a vibrant personal faith. As he explained, “Christianity is a life before it is a system and to lay too much stress on the system destroys the life” (12).

After this overview of Bell’s formative years, Chandler breaks Bell’s ecclesiastical career into a series of chronological chapters which revolve around his positions and causes. Chandler begins with Bell’s time as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury (1914-1924), as dean of Canterbury (1924-1929), and as the newly appointed bishop of Chichester (1929-1932). From there the author examines Bell in his various roles as an interested observer and periodic participant in the German Church Struggle (1933-1937), as an ecumenical leader in a continent hurtling towards war (1937-1939), as a champion of peace in a time of war (1939-1942), as an active supporter of the German Resistance (1942-1945), as a leader in the postwar ecclesiastical reconstruction of Europe (1945-1948), as a key figure in the emergence World Council of Churches (1948-1954), and as an elderly bishop winding down his career (1954-1958).

Throughout these diverse phases of his career, the breadth and volume of Bell’s activities was formidable. Over a span of more than fifty years, he wrote, edited, and contributed to over two-dozen books, ranging from poetry and ecclesiastical biography to credal, incarnational, and pastoral theology, to Christian unity and the relationship between the church and modern politics. Along with his leadership in the Church of England, Bell was a force in numerous international ecumenical institutions, including the World Conference of Life and Work (particularly in Stockholm in 1925 and Oxford in 1937), other ecumenical meetings at Fanö in 1934 and Sigtuna in 1942, the postwar Treysa meeting with German church leaders, and the World Council of Churches, where Bell was elected moderator of the Central Committee at the first WCC assembly in Amsterdam, in 1948.

Bell’s activities were often centred on German affairs. Almost immediately after the rise of Hitler, Bell and his colleague A.S. Duncan-Jones, who was Dean of Chichester, monitored German politics and visited contacts in the German churches, in order to understand the nature of the German Church Struggle for themselves. Bell soon became a critic of the Nazi dictatorship, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement, and the policy of persecution against both non-Aryan Christians and Jews in general. Around this time, the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was serving in a German congregation in London, and he and Bell began to develop a warm friendship.

Over the following years, Bell regularly spoke out against the Hitler regime and its supporters within the German churches. When the German delegation failed to appear at the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference, Bell won support for a letter noting the absence of the German delegation and expressing concern over “the afflictions of many pastors and laymen who have stood firm from the first in the Confessional Church for the sovereignty of Christ, and for the freedom of the Church of Christ to preach His Gospel” (64). After Martin Niemöller’s incarceration in a concentration camp, Bell maintained close contact with the Niemöller family and wrote a stirring foreword for an anonymous biography of the Berlin pastor, in which Bell praised the faith of those standing for the Gospel in Germany. And when the Jewish refugee crisis began to grow acute in 1938, Bell spoke on behalf of refugees in his inaugural speech in the House of Lords, and also lectured publicly about the crisis, describing it as a “crisis of humanity” (69).

Chandler’s description of George Bell’s wartime activities illustrates both the breadth of Bell’s concern and the regularity with which his principled participation in continental political and ecclesiastical affairs pushed him out of step with his peers in the Church of England and British House of Lords. First of all, Bell argued that the church’s role in war was distinct from that of the state. The church was to be a universal body, “charged with a gospel of God’s redeeming love” and tasked with “creating a community founded on love” which would outcast the changes brought about by war (75). Whether in war or in peace, the church, declared Bell, should stand for principles like “the dignity of all men, respect for human life, the acknowledgment of the solidarity for good and evil of all nations and races of the earth, fidelity to the plighted word, and the appreciation of the fact that any power of any kind, political or economic, must be coextensive with responsibility” (75).

Second, Bell worked for peace, championing the vision of a federal union of European states and arguing for negotiation with the German state, even in the midst of the war, in hopes that the Germans would remove Hitler from power. His position was shared by few. Karl Barth felt Bell was “too much a British gentleman and thus unable to understand the phenomenon of Hitler,” while Archbishop Cosmo Lang wrote Bell: “You are an optimist and I am a realist” (81, 82).

In the same way, Chandler shows how Bell’s views on the morality of war were at odds with his contemporaries. When Bell opposed the internment of German and Austrian refugees as enemy aliens in the House of Lords, a fellow member wondered whether the bishop realized England and Germany were at war. When Bell tried to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, he was vigorously opposed in parliament and harangued by a Chichester parishioner. When he protested in the Convocation of Canterbury against the area bombing of German cities, he was shouted down. Worse still, at home in his diocese, he had become so unpopular that Duncan-Jones suggested he not attend a military service at the Chichester Cathedral.

Chandler does an admirable job of explaining the role for which Bell is often best known in German history circles—his activity as secret intermediary between the German Resistance and the British government. In late May 1942, in the city of Stockholm, Bell met with German Pastor Hans Schönfeld of the International Christian Social Institute in Geneva, whom he had known for over a decade. Schönfeld explained that there was a growing opposition movement within Germany, determined to topple Hitler from power and restore the German government to a Christian basis. A few days later, he provided Bell with a list of the names of important conspirators. Just after that, Bell met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden. Bonhoeffer also outlined the nature of the German Resistance, urging Bell to ask the British government for assurances that the Allies would negotiate with the German opposition, if it could seize power. This Bell did, meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but to no avail. Chandler explains not only the government’s skepticism about such “peace feelers,” but also the way in which Bell’s continued lobbying made him suspect and undermined his mission further (100).

After explaining Bell’s determined efforts towards postwar reconciliation and the establishment of the World Council of Churches, Chandler assesses Bell’s legacy in a concluding chapter. There he paints the image of Bell as a man of many interests, causes, and campaigns—indeed, as a man of paradoxes. A member of the Establishment who “did not quite belong to it,” Bell “so often refused to conform to categorical expectations” (166, 170). He was an Anglican with an ecumenical orientation, an Englishman who cared as much or more about international affairs as English matters, and a man of deep devotion who lived large parts of his life in the world of politics. Influenced by high-church incarnational theology, Bell worked to bring art and artists into the life of the church, even as he also exerted himself on behalf of social justice for the working classes and hospitality for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution (170-171). Most especially, perhaps, he stood for principled and often unpopular positions, such as ecumenical unity and international peace in a time of nationalism and war.

Sadly, no new biography of Bishop George Bell can avoid dealing with the October 2015 allegation that Bell “had committed sexual offenses against an individual who was at the time a young child” (170). Chandler laments the fact that almost everyone associated with this time has passed away, making it virtually impossible to consider the charges in a normal judicial process. He does not in any way deny that these offenses could have occurred, but does the only thing a historian can do, which is to attempt to place the allegations in their historical context. In an appendix devoted to the controversy, Chandler notes that Bell’s 368 volume archive contains his personal notebooks and pocket diaries from 1919 to 1957, in which he kept track of all his appointments and engagements. He notes Bell’s “conspicuously high view of the standards required by his office,” and adds that Bell was almost constantly observed, that he participated in many disciplinary processes for clergy, that he maintained what seemed like a happy marriage, and that he worked almost continually in the presence of his wife, secretary, domestic chaplain, or driver. Chandler interviewed the only member of Bell’s circle still alive, his domestic chaplain from the early 1950s. This man “is firm, indeed emphatic, that ‘no child or young teenager ever entered during my two years as Chaplain, except on the day in January chosen for the parish Christmas party which he and Mrs Bell laid on every year for the children of the clergy’” (198) Add to this that Bell tended to work with his door open and often held private conversations outdoors in the garden and it leads Chandler to describe the 2015 allegation as “anomalous” and seeming to exist “in its own world, evidently uncorroborated by any other independent source” (199).

Andrew Chandler has published widely on the life and ministry of Bishop George Bell, and is the current acknowledged expert on him. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester is a concise, accessible overview of Bell’s engagement in the world of ecumenism and international politics during the turbulent times in which he lived and worked. It deserves a wide readership, especially among those who only know Bell as Bonhoeffer’s friend and English contact on behalf of the German Resistance.

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence, Parts 1 and 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-4438-8006-0 and 978-1-4438-8011-4.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Bishop George Bell was the stalwart champion in the Church of England promoting ecumenical relations with the other churches of Europe and North America throughout the nearly thirty years of his episcopate from 1929-1958. He held leading positions in innumerable committees, councils and conferences, and in 1937, during the world meeting in Oxford of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, was a strong advocate for joining with Faith and Order, in order to found a World Council of Churches, which took place in 1938. At the same time it was agreed that this new Council (still in process of formation) should be established in Geneva, and that a young Dutch theologian W.A.Visser ‘t Hooft (Vim), who had served for several years in the Geneva scene as General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, should be appointed as General Secretary. Visser ‘t Hooft was far more of a General than a Secretary—I knew him personally—and brought unrivalled resourcefulness and a resolute determination to see his ideas realized, for the best part of thirty years. This was the beginning of a partnership between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, who early on struck up a strong and harmonious relationship. They are rightly described in the book’s title as being “intimately associated for many years”.

The exchanges by post or telegrams recorded in these volumes are largely drawn from the Geneva archives of the World Council of Churches or from the voluminous Bell papers, now deposited in the Lambeth Palace library in London. The first volume covers the period up to 1949, and the second the final years of Bell’s life up to 1958. The editing by Gerhard Besier is very helpful, since his footnotes give the biographical details of all persons mentioned, as well as bibliographical references to the many scholarly books relating to their endeavors. (There are, however, aggravating lapses in the proof-reading and printing of the English text.) Besier’s introduction is reproduced from the chapter he contributed to The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958 (p. 169-194), edited in 2012 by Andrew Chandler.

Many of these exchanges have to do with the plans for the various meetings of World Council bodies, and discussions about the membership, the place and date, as well as the content. These documents are however not too informative about the results. Obviously when the two men met at such meetings, they had intense verbal discussions and made significant decisions about the World Council’s operations. But these were not recorded in their correspondence at the time, and so are missing from these volumes. This is particularly noticeable with regard to such highly significant meetings as the First Constituent Assembly held in Amsterdam in 1948, when Bell became Chairman of the WCC’s Central Committee. While these documents discuss at length the preparations for this Assembly in August 1948 (p. 365-428), they provide no indication of the important deliberations and decisions taken on that occasion. The same is true for the Second Assembly, held in 1954 in Evanston, Illinois. Equally regrettable is the absence of documents relating to the important meeting in Stuttgart in October 1945, at which both Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft were present, and at which the famous Declaration of Guilt was issued (p. 287-94). Obviously both Bell and Vim played an active part and had extensive discussions with the German leaders, including Martin Niemöller, for whom they had been praying ever since his first incarceration in 1937. But they left no further record of their deliberations or their conclusions about this conference or its historic significance in their correspondence. An equally striking omission is the exchange between Bell and Vim about Bell’s journey to Sweden in May 1942, his meeting there with Bonhoeffer, and the information he gained about the German resistance, which the Bishop then passed on to the British Foreign Secretary, asking for some public gesture of support be given to the anti-Nazi forces in Germany. Eden’s refusal was conveyed to Visser ‘t Hooft in the notable telegram sent by Bell on July 23, 1942: “Interest undoubted, but deeply regret no reply possible”. (Bell’s message is discussed on p. 158 of W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Memoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973).) But this calamitous blow to Bell’s hopes for some gesture of support for the German resistance is not mentioned in Besier’s work. In fact, this first volume is silent for the whole period of November 1941 to August 1942.

It would have been helpful if the editor could have inserted short passages to fill such gaps. He could also have directed the reader to look at both of the biographies of Bell by Canon Jasper (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (London: Oxford University Press,1967)) and Andrew Chandler (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), also Visser ‘t Hooft’s Memoirs (1973), as well as such comprehensive histories as A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (London: SPCK, 1954), edited by Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neil, and its sequel The Ecumenical Advance: A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1948-1968 (Geneva: WCC, 1986), edited by Harold Fey. Unless these more complete sources are available to be consulted, the usefulness of these two volumes alone will be limited. Libraries may well consider whether the expense is justified.

However, the value of these exchanges is that they fill in the details of the frequent consultations between these church leaders. In particular, they provide information about how the two men dealt with the three principal obstacles they faced in these years. The first was the fear expressed by many churchmen that this new World Council would evolve into a vast ecumenical enterprise which would swallow up the individual entities in some sort of super-church. The second fear, expressed by many more Orthodox leaders, was that this new World Council would produce a new doctrine of Christianity which would override the traditions and individual heritages of these Protestant or Orthodox churches. The third obstacle was the refusal of the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic Church, to be associated in any way with this new venture. This refusal meant that the vision of a united Christendom, strongly urged by Bell, was thwarted, and still remains incomplete. Not until the Second Vatican Council, i.e. several years after Bell’s death, did the Roman Catholic authorities show a more tolerant and cooperative attitude. But the World Council has yet to overcome the barrier of Rome’s reluctance to belong to this wider ecumenical fraternity.

Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, during the period from 1938 to 1958, i.e. during the fruitful years of cooperation between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, the World Council moved from a tentative and provisional beginning to becoming the acknowledged chief instrument and channel of the ecumenical movement. The correspondence contained in the second volume spells out the contexts of these years from 1950 to 1958, including the preparations for the second Assembly meeting in the United States in 1954, at which point Bell resigned his position as Chairman of the Central Committee, and was promoted to Honorary President of the Council. But, as this correspondence shows, he continued to be very actively engaged in the affairs of the Council, even after his retirement in 1958 from the Chichester diocese. In fact he took part in a meeting of the Central Committee in Denmark, and preached a self-critical sermon there only two months before his untimely death in October 1958. The volume concludes with two moving tributes to Bell’s achievements written by Visser ‘t Hooft shortly after Bell’s funeral.

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis. Schriften des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts fur Totalitarismusforschung, 41 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 457 Pp., ISBN 9783525369173.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a Protestant millenarian sect, who look forward in anticipation to the last days, which they expect will take place very shortly in a catastrophic conflict between good and evil. Founded in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, a small number had already come to Germany before the First World War. But the turbulent, revolutionary political upheavals which took place in Germany after 1918 seemed to confirm their expectations. The Witnesses grew in number, and were reckoned by 1933 to count some 20,000 adherents, who were active as door-to-door preachers in many parts of the country.

Much of the scholarly literature about the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been conditioned by the harassment and persecution which this sect endured during the period of Nazi rule after 1933. Most of the authors have displayed sympathy with the Witnesses’ sufferings and pay tribute to their enduring loyalty to their faith. Gerald Hacke, however, is principally interested in the actions of the state authorities, and the organization of the various methods of repression which took such a toll. Furthermore he has noted that the same kind of repression was carried out in the post-1945 years in what became known at the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under the aegis of the Communist rulers of that part of Germany for the next 40 years. His large-scale account is therefore mainly a comparison of the similarities as well as the differences in the treatment of this minority religious group by the two ideologically opposed dictatorships. In so doing he has delved in to the vast amount of state documentation left behind by both regimes, particularly in their police and judicial records and the files of the various government ministries who attempted to bring the Jehovah’s Witnesses to heel.

Hacke divides his account chronologically, with 200 pages dealing with the Nazi period and the same for the decades of repression in the GDR. These surveys are accompanied by an extensive list of the files consulted and a forty page bibliography. He completes his study with a close examination of the parallels and differences in the forms of repression put in place by the two regimes. In both cases he notes the stubborn refusal of the Witnesses to conform to the states’ requirement of political loyalty. But the subsequent banning of their organizations and activities stirred up a sense of victimization which in fact only strengthened the community. The increasing number of legal challenges, as well as pressure from the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Witnesses, for example in 1934, showed that such repressive policies had disadvantages, even though the wider public, including the mainline churches, showed little or no sympathy. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935 led to the arrest and imprisonment of numerous younger male members of this sect. The same feature was to follow the identical measure taken in the early 1950s in the GDR. But in neither case did the Witnesses abandon their faithful and stubborn commitment to refuse any form of military activity. The Nazi and Communist officials were therefore both forced to recognize the ineffectiveness of such punitive actions, but were adamant in regarding the Witnesses as a political and ideological danger which required drastic treatment.

Hacke avoids drawing any direct link between the repressive forces mobilized by Himmler, allegedly in order to follow Hitler’s call for ”the eradication of this venomous brood”, and those followed twenty years later in the GDR by the Ministry of Security, commonly known as the Stasi. The similarity of tactics is however clear. Both dictatorships sought to imprison the sect’s leading figures, imposing employment bans, and even removing children from their families. During the Nazi period some 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned, including 2000 sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by wearing purple triangles on their clothes. Moreover, 240 were executed, while up to 1200 lost their lives while incarcerated. No other group of religious prisoners was exposed to the sadism of the Nazis in such a brutal fashion.

To be sure, the Gestapo offered to release these prisoners if they would sign a paper declaring their renunciation of their former views and promise not to associate with their fellow Witnesses. Hacke does not make it clear whether this project was designed to sow dissension in the Witnesses’ ranks, or to relieve the prison and concentration camp system of these unwanted and uncooperative inmates. In any case the tactic failed.

After 1945 and the collapse of the Nazi regime, the surviving Witnesses began to regroup and to resume their activities, though mainly in hiding from the successor authorities. Soon enough they were to meet vehement opposition from the newly-established Communist authorities in the eastern sector of the country, which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic. This campaign made much of the fact that the Witnesses were founded in the United States, and were therefore seen as agents of American anti-Communist imperialism. The Stasi was characterized by the same fanatical zeal as the Gestapo, and in fact extended their intrusive surveillance to even wider sections of the population. But right up to 1989, the Communist regime justified its repression of the Witnesses with very similar accusations of disloyalty and failure to support the national goals of the Communist party.

Hacke rightly points out that both regimes, despite their different propagandistic justifications, were deliberately seeking to suppress any supposedly deviant groups by very similar methods. The Witnesses, however, were able to mount an effective resistance in part because they had arrived in Germany with the expectation that their dissident beliefs would create conditions in which they would be persecuted. Their long experience of victimization gave them an intense sense of group solidarity, and the faithful adherence to their beliefs was thus built in and maintained throughout the more than fifty years of repression.

After 1989, with the overthrow of the Stasi and its political masters, the Witnesses were no longer subjected to government-sponsored suspicion and surveillance. But as Hacke points out, the decades of defamation and discrimination had left an almost indelible pejorative reputation in the minds of the general public. The Witnesses then campaigned successfully to gain recognition as a public corporation in German law, but the wider issue of prejudice still remains, as can be seen in the active hostility by some of the more established church groups against the proselytizing undertaken by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The search for a new identity in a new Germany still continues.

Review of Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), Pp. 352, ISBN: 9780674598485.

By Robert Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University

Rossi-Wehrmacht Lauren Faulkner Rossi has produced a measured and original contribution to the serious body of scholarship that has emerged over the past decade or so chronicling the varied responses and experiences of German Catholic priests under Nazism and in the Second World War. Actually, this book is about both ordained clergy and seminarians, an crucial distinction that merits a more precise articulation at the outset of this important study. We are talking here about a subject group that has received comparatively little attention from scholars to date: Catholic priests and seminarians who were conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Significantly, only a fraction of them served officially as military chaplains; this is yet another important fact that is easily overlooked given the book’s understandable emphasis on chaplains and bishops. To be clear, the subject group under study was relatively small. Of the over 17,000,000 Wehrmacht soldiers who served in the war, 17,000 self-identified as priests or seminarians–roughly one-tenth of one percent. As Faulkner Rossi openly acknowledges, both the size of the subject group as well as the limited source base from which she draws do limit the book’s analytical scope. Most of the quantitative evidence presented here is based on the records of a single seminary in Bavaria. Further qualitative and narrative analysis is drawn heavily from the recollections of one man, Georg Werthmann, the Catholic Field Vicar-General and second-in-command to Reich Catholic Field Bishop Franz Justus Rarkowski. Accordingly, Faulkner Rossi wisely sets out forthrightly the delimitations of her analysis, inviting readers to appreciate instead the rich insights that can be gleaned through a thorough case study (2). It is indeed helpful to have at the outset a clear explanation that this is not a social history of the subject group.

These delimitations are purposeful and instructive and underscore the utility of the case study approach. That priests and seminarians should comprise such a small fraction of the Wehrmacht is not at all surprising. So the question of numbers is largely irrelevant. What matters from the standpoint of historical understanding is that these priests and seminarians were conscripted in the first place and, most important of all, that they chose to serve in such overwhelming numbers; it is remarkable and telling indeed that of those conscripted, just one–Franz Reinisch, an Austrian Pallottine priest–chose the path of conscientious objection, a choice for which he was executed. Adding to the unique perspective of the subject group are two further qualifying factors. For one, as mentioned, very few of them served as military chaplains. This meant, in short, that they were not primarily, or officially at least, responsible for the pastoral care of German Catholic soldiers, even though most of them seem to have rationalized their military service precisely in this vocational sense. Second, by virtue of the secret supplement to the 1933 Reichskonkordat between the Hitler government and the Holy See, priests and seminarians conscripted into the army were to be inducted into the medical unit or to concern themselves with the “pastoral care for the troops,” under the jurisdiction of the military bishops. This meant, in practice, that most of the men in the subject group did not take up arms in the literal sense. Instead, they provided medical service, working as assistants in field hospitals, as stretcher-bearers and so on. Serving as neither chaplains nor armed soldiers, then, these priests and seminarians were something of an anomalous group.

Precisely because they were something of an anomaly, these so-called “Wehrmacht priests” make for a fascinating case study. Why did they agree to serve? Why did only one refuse? What were their experiences like on the front lines of Hitler’s war of annihilation? How did their Catholic worldview and pastoral training influence their responses to what they witnessed and their relationship with their fellow soldiers? How did the Wehrmacht priests come to terms with their participation in the war, and how did they rationalize their role in the light of their faith and their national loyalties? Faulkner Rossi does an admirable job of focussing the reader’s attention on these animating questions. Most important, she provides compelling answers that tell us much about the challenges German Catholics confronted in the face of an “ever-shifting, fluid negotiation of national and religious identity under the Nazi regime” (5). Because it was ever-shifting and fluid, that process of negotiation was ongoing. Invariably, it pushed these Wehrmacht priests onto a kind of ethical gray zone, trying to do go some good–or so they believed–while cooperating with the Hitler state in a war that many of them believed to be unjust. And yet they justified their service nonetheless, ostensibly in the name of serving God and country.

Since she wants to understand her subjects as men of their time, Faulkner Rossi offers a nuanced assessment of how these priests and seminarians reasoned and acted within the confines of their worldview. The book is perhaps most incisive and most effective at re-creating the “mental horizons”–to borrow from John Connelly–of this distinctive group of devout German Catholics who heeded the call for military service (3). It was a worldview framed by the reigning Catholic moral theology of the day, by the particular contours of their clerical training, and by their personal experiences as young German Catholics whose formative years were defined by the turbulent collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism and the inexorable radicalization and racialization of German society under the auspices of Gleichschaltung (16). Theirs was a German Catholic cultural and moral universe that nurtured a strong and resilient autonomous youth movement and associational life, but also learned to accommodate if not make peace entirely with the Hitler regime. This limited degree of autonomy, which lessened over time, nonetheless did create some space for German Catholics to distance themselves from certain Nazi policies and practices without feeling compelled to engage in active or even passive forms of resistance to the regime before or during the war.

Faulkner Rossi very deftly dissects these mental horizons, revealing the complex intersection and interaction of religious faith, cultural identity and national loyalty. She reasons that two themes were formative in the motivation and rationalization of conscripted priests and seminarians: the twin emotional and intellectual demands of faith and national identity (3). Faulkner Rossi concludes that most of these conscripted priests and seminarians did not go to war because they supported Nazism (154). To the contrary, she says, they “consistently divorced” their participation in the war and even the army itself–leaders and soldiers–from Nazism (154). We are told simply that most of them went to war for “a variety of reasons” (154). Two reasons appear to have been paramount: a sense of duty to care spiritually for German Catholic soldiers, and a sense of patriotic duty to defend their country. As Faulkner Rossi concludes, for the Wehrmacht priests and seminarians, “religion and nationalism worked in tandem as motivation” (154).

Importantly, this mutually reinforcing motivation produced what Faulkner Rossi evocatively describes as a “dangerous myopia,” wherein the presumed salvation of the souls of German Catholic soldiers counted above anything and everything else. In other words, an understandable pastoral impulse to care for the spiritual and emotional health of German Catholic soldiers fighting a war of annihilation proved a more powerful claim for this select group of priests and seminarians than resisting inhumane and unjust behaviour in war (155). This, according to Faulkner Rossi, is what made the Wehrmacht priests so genuinely different from other conscripts, that is, this avowedly “vocational aspect of their military service” (240). These men believed fervently that serving dutifully in the Wehrmacht meant serving God and country, not Hitler per se; they told themselves during and after the war that there was a “greater good” to be served in offering pastoral care for Catholic soldiers and mitigating the suffering of all German soldiers through other forms of compassionate service. They were determined, in Faulkner Rossi’s words, “to do some good or to make a difference for the soldiers” (154).

The logic of the “greater good” thereby provided the Wehrmacht priests with a confirmatory moral justification for serving. In short, these priests and seminarians brought to the war zone a unique blend of “training, faith, and feeling” that distinguished them from laymen soldiers and also sustained them in their military service; Faulkner Rossi labels this as a kind of “spiritual opportunism” (154). In the end, this vocational sense of military service helped the Wehrmacht priests to “rationalize their complicity with a racist, murderous regime” (155). True, these men saw their spiritual sustenance of laymen soldiers as pastorally and morally vital, and proper to their vocation and training. But this trapped them in what Faulkner Rossi rightly describes as a “flawed rationalization” (155). They told themselves that they were working for God and country and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of that conviction, however myopic or flawed we may judge the rationalization. In the words of one former priest-soldier, identified only as Wilhelm W.

I served the Church. A side effect of this was, in effect, to render a service to the state, but I had to hazard the consequences. I believe fundamentally in helping soldiers, in serving them, in preserving the Church and to that final end serving the glory of God… The other part of it included a cooperation that one simply couldn’t repudiate (250).

Evidently, the impulse to “do some good” and to seek the “greater good” through a vocational sense of military service did not extend to speaking or acting on behalf of the innocent victims of Hitler’s wars. Paradoxically, the deeper the religious and pastoral commitment to the spiritual welfare of soldiers, the more myopic–perhaps even blinded–the Wehrmacht priests grew vis-à-vis the most vulnerable–those, as Faulkner Rossi puts it, “most in need of defense, namely Europe’s Jews” (156).

An important caveat is in order here. Much of what we know about how Wehrmacht priests rationalized their decision to serve in a war that was, as Faulkner Rossi notes, “criminal” and “antithetical” to their Catholic values, comes from written testimony some 140 priest-veterans provided many decades after the war ended. Allowing for the usual hazards of private and public memory of traumatic episodes, the reader is struck, as Faulkner Rossi was, by the obvious difficulty these priests and seminarians had in coming to terms with their service. It is impossible to ignore the fact that few of these men engaged in a serious, self-critical examination of conscience about what they saw and did or did not do on behalf of the victims during their military service.

Troublingly, most of the men claimed never to have witnessed first hand or even to have known about the atrocities until after the war, a claim that strains the limits of credulity. Consider the recollection of one Josef P., who served as a medical orderly and chaplain. He recalled being assigned to a small Polish city “full of Jews, all of whom wore the Jewish star.” But, he insisted, at that point the “systematic extermination had not yet begun…. I never witnessed atrocities against Jews or civilian populations. I only heard about it after the war.” Josef recalled hearing stories about SS troops killing Jewish children in disturbingly horrific ways. “But these were stories,” he said. “I never witnessed it. I didn’t know if it was true” (242). Still other men insisted on distinguishing and distancing the Wehrmacht from the Nazis. In the words of Kunibert P., “our Wehrmacht, or at the division I was in, was anything but Nazi…. [W]e served an unethical regime, that was clear to everyone, the Nazis were criminals…. I’ve already said, I was gladly a soldier, but we were never Nazis” (247). Of course, this exculpatory claim–we were never Nazis–was invoked widely and persistently in the years after the war by various segments of society, by powerful institutions like the military and the Church both in Germany and well beyond. In fact, Faulkner Rossi sees in the individual failure by the Wehrmacht priests to consider the consequences of their complicity with a murderous regime a corollary failure of the two institutions in which these men served–the German military and the Catholic Church (253).

To her great credit, Faulkner Rossi handles the interview responses with an appropriately critical sensitivity, thereby avoiding facile historical or moral judgements. Consequently, she is able to write persuasively about the dilemma that most of the Wehrmacht priests and seminarians faced: a binary choice between their sense of duty to offer pastoral care and sustenance to soldiers on the one hand and the inescapable realization of their complicity with a murderous regime on the other. The dilemma was captured aptly by one chaplain who said years after the war, “Naturally, one wondered repeatedly if this was a just war…. [O]n the one hand, as a Christian, one couldn’t endorse the regime, couldn’t support it. But on the other hand, we did this indirectly, by emboldening the soldiers. Doubt often came over me: should I continue doing this or not? And if I thought about the soldiers themselves, I could do nothing but continue” (251).

Such a statement conveys powerfully the sense of the inescapability of the binary choice the Wehrmacht priest and seminarians said that they faced. The irrevocable commitment to provide pastoral care for the conscience of the Catholic soldier meant that Wehrmacht priests understood and accepted that their service entailed some degree of complicity with a criminal regime. Yet, their “consciousness of the dire need for pastoral care” was the tipping point so to speak, the decisive factor in their decision to serve. Faulkner Rossi reasons that this sense of pastoral duty “outweighed any impulse to take a principled stand against a regime that did not tolerate dissent. When a priest can literally see before him a phalanx of Catholics asking for spiritual guidance in the midst of the annihilation, the idea of abandoning his training and ignoring that plea for guidance was morally irresponsible” (251).

So we are left to conclude that a moral choice lay behind the decision to serve and to do so dutifully even in the midst of the annihilation of entire communities across Eastern Europe. We know, of course, that this choice–these thousands of choices–had consequences, however unintended and unforeseen. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the choice to serve was guided primarily by religious and pastoral commitments, as we are told repeatedly in the postwar testimonials, or whether service truly was inspired and sustained by nationalism. For her part, Faulkner Rossi concludes that nationalism, not Catholicism, was the “essential ingredient” in the military service of Wehrmacht priests and seminarians. “These men,” we are told, “were deeply German” (241). If that was the case–and there is plenty of evidence presented here to substantiate the point–then the reader is left to wonder: were these Wehrmacht priests and seminarians really all that different from laymen soldiers or from Protestant chaplains and priests for that matter? More to the point, did their avowed vocational sense of military service distinguish them from laymen soldiers, or was it simply the confirmatory rationalization for serving above all to defend country–a shared goal with Nazism that clearly facilitated and eased accommodation and complicity or at the very least stifled dissent or resistance for most.

The role that these priests played in providing spiritual guidance and perhaps even forms of formal or informal absolution to soldiers waging a war of annihilation is a troubling yet deeply consequential question that warrants further research and analysis. It is deeply consequential because it cuts to the heart of the choices soldiers (and civilians) made in the midst of the Nazi war of annihilation: the choice to follow orders or to refuse; the choice to look away when confronted with brutality and violence or to protest, to dissent, to resist; the choice to refuse to be conscripted or to serve dutifully, thereby playing a part, however small or indirect, as a cog in the wheel of the machinery of destruction. It may be true that most of the Wehrmacht priests were never avowed Nazis but, as Faulkner Rossi reminds us, other people–including some priests–made other choices and paid the ultimate sacrifice for them. That is the moral of the story of conscientious objectors like Franz Reinisch, a story that is told altogether too briefly and too hurriedly at the end of this otherwise very informative book. Thanks to Lauren Faulkner Rossi, we now have a much deeper understanding of why and how priests served in Hitler’s war of annihilation. The perplexing and troubling question persists, though: why were there so few priests like Father Reinisch?

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus, 2 Vols. (Speyer and Leipzig: Verlagshaus Speyer and Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), Pp. 911, ISBN: 9783374044122.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Picker-Protestanten The Protestant Union Church of the Palatinate is one of the smaller regional churches in Germany, with its headquarters in Speyer on the west bank of the Middle Rhine. The church authorities, after lengthy delays, have now published this voluminous collection of essays by more than 60 contributors, which describes the fate of the church during the years of Nazi rule. It constitutes one of the best regional studies of the Protestant church for this period, although, as the chief editor Christoph Picker acknowledges in his introduction, the results are highly sobering. In this region of Germany which was diverse in its denominational loyalties, Protestantism and National Socialism went hand in hand. Many leading Nazi functionaries saw themselves as “good Protestants,” and the collaboration between the church leadership under the “German Christian” Bishop Ludwig Diehl and the Nazi Party’s regional hierarchy was at first close and on very good terms. Above all, the desire among churchmen for stability led them to endorse the Nazi project for “national unity” (Volksgemeinschaft) in the interests of harmony. So no real Church Struggle took place in the Palatinate Church, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the pastors belonged to the German Christian faction in 1933. The limited opposition from those who supported the Confessing Church when it was organized in 1934 was successfully integrated with the dominant German Christians. More than 20 percent of the pastors took out membership in the Nazi Party.
Four large chapters in Volume 1 spell out the details:

Chapter one describes the historical developments of this Church from the political and religious situation during the Weimar Republic up to the difficult and contentious coming-to-terms with its “brown” past during the immediate post-war years up to 1949. Chapter two (“Institutions, organizations, and groups”) includes the relationships with the national Reich Church under Bishop Ludwig Mueller as well as with the Nazi state. Details are also provided about the traditional church parties, the German Christian Movement and the local Confessing Church in the Palatinate. Chapter three covers the growth of antisemitism and the church’s reactions to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, as well as the results of the Nazi plans for ethnic cleansing through its euthanasia program in church institutions, and also the more general Nazi persecution measures against Protestants. Chapter four details internal church developments. This section describes such things as the character of church services, church art and architecture, youth work, the church press, the continuing and formative hostility towards the Catholics of this very mixed region, and finally the role of church women and especially of the pastors’ wives, who held prominent position in the parishes. All this is described in great detail in the 638 pages of the first volume. At the same time, a large number of impressive photographs are included, which are of considerable historical value.

The second and less extensive volume covers the activities of the major church protagonists, who were mainly pastors, with short biographical sketches. Given the multiplicity of these articles, it is naturally impossible to examine individual items. Particularly notable, however, is Walter Rummel’s contribution on the performance of the church during the Second World War, which describes the extensive and willing participation of church members in Hitler’s campaigns. For example, the Dean of Speyer, Karl Wien, gave a rousing sermon on Heroes’ Remembrance Day in 1940, which, in flaming tones, exalted the list of German heroes from those who had fallen during the First World War to the “freedom fighters” in the postwar period up to the fighters in the SA and those who were actually now fighting in the ranks of the German army. After the German victory over France in June 1940, Bishop Diehl ordered all parishes to hold services of Thanksgiving. As long as these victories continued, there was a regular personality cult around Hitler, even in church pronouncements.

Roland Paul describes the church reactions to the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of November 1938, noting the widespread silence in church circles. Shortly afterwards, in his annual report, Pastor Georg Becker of Iggelheim wrote that, with these pogroms, the Nazis were actually carrying out Luther’s intentions and inheritance. “Those cities and sites where the Jews have blasphemed God and Jesus Christ will shortly disappear from the Reich of our dear leader Adolf Hitler” (357). Pastor Johannes Baehr in Mutterstadt was the exception. In November 1938, while teaching his class of schoolchildren, many of whom had witnessed the burning-down of the local synagogue, Pastor Baehr declared that such actions were not to be justified. On the very same day he was taken into “protective custody” and only released two days later after the intervention of Bishop Diehl.

This is a significant publication, providing a self-critical account of the church’s activities and attitudes. Of course, its appearance is very late. Only after several generations have passed by can we expect such a sobering and self-critical analysis of these twelve horrifying years of Nazi rule, which were also twelve fatal years for German Protestantism. So far not all regional Protestant churches have found the courage to undertake such a thorough and self-critical examination. So this example by a relatively small church shows what can be done on its own initiative. We can hope that these two volumes will find many readers, especially since 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Not only do these volumes provide us with examples of dangerous perversions to be avoided, but also remind us of the long and illustrious history which German Protestantism has enjoyed for the last 500 years.

Review of Tetyana Pavlush, Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Tetyana Pavlush, Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Auseinandersetzung der evangelischen Kirchen beider deutscher Staaten mit der Judenvernichtung im “Dritten Reich” im politsch-gesellschaftlichen Kontext (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition, 2015). Pp. 573. ISBN: 9783631656655.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

This book (the author’s 2014 dissertation at the Freie Universitat in Berlin) examines how the Holocaust and its legacy were addressed between 1945 and 1989 by Protestant church leaders, journalists, laypeople, and theologians in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). It is an ambitious work that traces church and public discourses about the Holocaust, antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, post-Holocaust theology, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and issues of memorialization, in conjunction with the major events and anniversaries that raised public awareness of these issues and often provoked national debates. The Cold War issues always lurk in the background.

Pavlush focuses primarily on four events: the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and the wave of antisemitism that swept Germany around the same time; the controversy about Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy); the 1967 Six-Day War; and the 1979 national broadcast in the FRG of the U.S. television docudrama The Holocaust. In a separate chapter she examines the 1968, 1978, and 1988 anniversaries of the November 9 pogroms (“Kristallnacht”) as indicators of how East and West Germans viewed their history.

She sets her discussion of these events within a larger framework that draws on three intersecting levels of analysis to trace how German Protestants in general addressed their past throughout this period. The first level is a comparison between public and church conversations about the Nazi past and the Holocaust in the GDR and FRG. The second charts the chronological course of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of dealing with the past) over the decades as evinced by the aforementioned controversies and responses to them. Here she examines how the public discourses in East and West changed over time as measured by specific events (this is best illustrated by her comparisons between the different “Kristallnacht” anniversaries). The third examines how international events, such as the Eichmann trial, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Vietnam war, influenced church and public conversations about Germany’s past and its contemporary obligations.

Clearly, any one of these topics would suffice as a dissertation topic, and the scope and complexity of this work is simultaneously its strength and weakness. In many ways this is a masterful survey of the major postwar controversies and developments over the decades as Germans addressed their past. It illustrates how engaged the Protestant churches were in this process. There is a wealth of background information and documentation, the events she has selected were indeed turning points, and she gives helpful context to the various debates. Juggling so many events, time periods, and underlying narrative currents, however, makes for an extraordinary level of complexity, and Pavlush navigates this complexity more successfully in some places than in others.

She does a fine job of tracking and contextualizing the different discourses in East and West, and this may be the book’s most valuable contribution. From the beginning, the two postwar German states defined their relationship to the Nazi past differently. Aligned with the eastern bloc, the GDR became tied to Soviet narratives that emphasized anti-fascist and Communist opposition to the Third Reich. National Socialism was portrayed as a capitalist phenomenon, and the issues of antisemitism and the genocide of the European Jews were seldom addressed. Although there was a small Jewish population in the East (and her account of the role of Jewish leaders in the GDR is fascinating), Jewish-Christian dialogue existed only to a limited degree, whereas it quickly developed a visible and importantly symbolic function in the west. Throughout its history the GDR never established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. As Pavlush notes, this reality led to an “asymmetrical” dynamic between East and West: there was a lot more going on in the FDR than in the GDR. As a parliamentary democracy firmly anchored in the West, the FRG quickly assumed the mantel of responsibility in the international arena for addressing the past through reparations, war crimes trials, and relations with Israel. By the early 1950s, there was a public square in the FRG in which the Nazi past had become a constant point of reference for international and domestic issues.

What Germans understood by the very concept of “the Nazi past” varied greatly, however, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Public opinion polls in the late 1940s showed that almost 40% of Germans retained antisemitic attitudes, and there were outbursts of antisemitic violence. The EKD’s 1945 Stuttgart declaration made no direct reference to the murders of the Jews. The Württemburg Society’s 1946 declaration and the April 1948 declaration of guilt toward the Jewish people by the church of Saxony were the earliest church attempts to address the Holocaust explicitly. Like the EKD’s 1948 Wort zur Judenfrage, these statements offer a snapshot of the theological challenges and the political difficulties of the time. There was a general failure to address church complicity and acknowledge the relationship between Christian theological teachings about Judaism and Nazi antisemitism, and the persecution of the Jews was often conflated with general postwar German suffering.

Moreover, many of the leading Protestant figures in the postwar era had historical baggage of their own. In their responses to postwar controversies, they sought to justify their role before 1945 and place themselves on the right side of postwar history, as can be seen in the often opposing political positions taken by figures like Eugen Gerstenmaier, Otto Dibelius, Lothar Kreyssig, Martin Niemoeller, and Helmut Gollwitzer. Events like the Eichmann trial and the Hochhuth play became litmus tests for competing versions of history. One of the advantages of studying a forty-year period is that the differences between the different generations of prominent Protestants become evident. Pavlush delineates three clear generations, driven by different life experiences, postwar agendas and worldviews: those who were already active in or had begun their careers by the 1930s; those born during the late 1920s and early 1930s, who came of age during the Nazi era (Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Dorothee Soelle), and the third generation, born during the late 1930s or 1940s (Bertold Klappert, Peter von der Osten-Sacken), who were still children in 1945. Many in the second generation turned critically against the first, often not only historically but politically in terms of Cold War issues. The last generation was the one that became most engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue. She also examines the role of the different Jewish leaders on both sides of the border who engaged with Protestants about these issues: Siegmund Rotstein, Robert Raphael Geis, Eugen Gollomb, Nathan Levinson, and Edna Brocke.

The first Jewish-Christian organizations began quite early, often founded by those who had been engaged in rescue or resistance activities before 1945. In 1949 the German Koordinationsrates der Juden und Christen was founded, and during the 1950s groups for Jewish-Christian cooperation emerged in the major cities. The three German organizations for Judenmission, which had been dissolved during the Third Reich, reconstituted themselves as well, and so another ongoing tension in the German discussion was between those engaged in dialogue with Jews and those who wanted to revive Protestant efforts to evangelize and convert Jews. In 1958 Lothar Kreyssig, a judge and Confessing Church layman who had attempted to halt the euthanasia program, founded Action Reconciliation (Aktion Sühnezeichen) under the auspices of the EKD. The organization began to send young Germans to serve in countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, and the first AS volunteer to Israel arrived after the Eichmann trial.

By this time there were some striking differences between the FRG and the GDR. Young East Germans couldn’t get visas for the Aktion Sühnezeichen trips, for example. Yet the 1961 Kirchentag (which convened in the early summer before the construction of the Berlin Wall in August; it was the last Kirchentag that East and West Germans celebrated jointly until 1991) helped spur a new phase of Jewish-Christian engagement in both Germanys. Dusseldorf Rabbi Robert Raphael Geis gave the keynote address. The EKD working group on “Jews and Christians” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Juden und Christen’) was founded at the 1961 Kirchentag, as a sign of the churches’ commitment to fostering Jewish-Christian relations.
Pavlush’s discussion of the emergence of Jewish-Christian relationships and the related church statements is the most uneven aspect of the work. That’s partly because of how the book is structured; many of the seminal statements on Jewish-Christian relations were direct responses to the events she discusses separately in other chapters. Hence, her treatment of this issue is scattered across the different chapters and interwoven with other topics without a clear transition from one point to another. Sometimes there’s not even a clear chronology. She deals in a single paragraph, for example, with the national EKD study commission on Kirche und Judentum in 1967, its 1975 study, the 1981 Rhineland synod, and the 1965 establishment of the Institut für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Hamburg. Rather than going into detail about the genesis of these developments and the ways in which they addressed the past and contemporary issues, she then discusses Nostra Aetate before giving a brief overview of how the Middle East conflict affected Jewish-Christian dialogue in the GDR. Among other things, this book could really use an index.

The other problem is the blurring of lines between Catholic and Protestant issues and responses. Although this book is ostensibly about the Protestant churches, the author ventures into issues that were far more significant for the Catholic church (such as Nostra Aetate and the Hochhuth play), and she also refers to some of the Catholic Jewish-Christian circles and statements. This adds another thread of complexity to an already complex work, although it does illustrate the extent to which these events drew reactions from both churches. The primary example is her discussion of Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy, which provoked a firestorm because of its critical portrayal of Pope Pius XII. Because of the considerable public debate and widespread media coverage of Hochhuth, one can make the case that Protestant reactions give some insight into the public discourse about Nazi history at the time. Some Protestant observers viewed the play as a broader critique on both the Catholic and Protestant churches. In the GDR, Hochhuth’s condemnation of the Pope was seen as part of a deeper critique against fascism and the West. In its timing, the play coincided with (and perhaps helped provoke) the beginnings of the attacks on the legends of the Church Struggle. Certainly this was how figures like Otto Dibelius viewed it; he attacked Hochhuth for a “cheap and highly naïve version of history.” As in so many other postwar events, the dividing lines from the era of the Protestant Church Struggle reappeared. In contrast to Dibelius, Helmut Gollwitzer and Gunther Harder supported Hochhuth’s critique of the Pope, extending it to the Protestant churches as well.

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem was another major turning point. In 1959/60 there had been a wave of antisemitic violence, which led the churches to issue statements condemning antisemitism. While many of the EKD leaders spoke out (Otto Dibelius, who was chair of the EKD council at the time, sent a telegram of solidarity to Ben Gurion in Israel) Pavlush observes that the substance of the statements didn’t really go beyond what had been said at the 1950 Weissensee synod. Yet the trial itself demanded and provoked a rawer engagement with the past.

It aroused special interest among Protestant leaders because the only non-Jewish German witness was Heinrich Grüber, who had led the Confessing Church’s office to help “non-Aryans” (most but not all of them baptized Christians). In that capacity Grüber had dealt with Eichmann directly. In a church newspaper before the trial, Grüber wrote memorably that “it was only the ‘Hitler in us’ that gave power to the ‘Hitler over us’” and urged the German press to report on the trial in a way that would help German readers to feel a personal connection to what had happened in the Holocaust. Grüber used the trial as the occasion to confront his fellow Germans, noting the number of Nazis who had found their way into prominent postwar positions, and he charged EKD leaders with the failure of repudiating their earlier antisemitic statements. He also warned that the trial could be misused in the Cold War context to awaken tensions between the two German states—and was criticized by East Germans as a consequence. Pavlush examines the reactions on both sides of the German border, as well as perspectives of the Israeli audience, including Holocaust survivors, for whom Grüber’s testimony often seemed defensive and an attempt at apologia.

The trial compelled Germans to take a position about their past and their German identity in the contemporary world. The 1967 Six-Day war was another such occasion. Pavlush contextualizes it in the broader landscape of the 1960s, which included the student rebellions, the Vietnam War, the beginnings of a more critical view of the German churches record under Nazism, and the emergence of a new generation of political theologians like Dorothee Soelle who applied the lessons of the Holocaust to the burning issues of the 1960s. This chapter offers a good discussion of the theological and political debates of that era. The Cold War realities and alliances shaped perspectives in East and West toward the state of Israel, which in turn affected how Protestants viewed the agenda for Jewish-Christian relations. Here too there were generational and political divides. Some from the first generation of Church Struggle veterans viewed solidarity with Israel as a necessary moral position for postwar Germans; others were critical of the West and Israel. The mood in the GDR was largely anti-Zionist, although there were isolated voices in the GDR churches that called for greater balance on the issues and supported Israel’s right to defend itself.

The final example, the 1979 nationwide broadcast of Holocaust, was another turning point in the West. Yet unlike the Eichmann trial and the Hochhuth play, it didn’t trigger a similar widespread discussion in the GDR. It was broadcast only in the FRG, of course, but as Pavlush notes, it is striking that East Germans didn’t seem to follow or engage with the intense press debates and coverage in the West. Once again, however, the broadcast coincided with other events to spur a new wave of discussion about the past. In the decade that followed in the FRG, there was a growing number of forums and conferences at the church academies, new and more critical scholarship on the role of the churches during the Nazi era, and civic initiatives around the country in which local communities began to examine their history. A related development was the 17-page 1978 EKD study, Zur Verfolgung des Judentums durch den Nationalsozialismus, which traced not only the church’s record between 1933 and 1945, but critically examined how the Protestant church had interpreted (and sometimes misconstrued) that history after 1945 – for example, by conflating the suffering of the Jews with that of postwar Germans and by politicizing the Kristallnacht commemorations.
Pavlush’s book illustrates that the process of theological and political Vergangenheitsbewältigung was shaped by numerous factors over the decades between 1945 and 1989, and she shows how often the attempts to address the Nazi past became part of contemporary political agendas. Ironically, the photograph on the book cover itself highlights the complexity of the issues that confronted postwar churches. It shows the main stage at the Jewish-Christian dialogue session at the 1961 Kirchentag, with the Star of David and the Kirchentag symbols prominently displayed. Then and now, the Protestant Kirchentag symbol consists of a large central cross surrounded by four smaller crosses in each quadrant—virtually identical to the symbol of the Romanian Iron Guard, an antisemitic clerico-fascist group that sought to merge Orthodox Christianity and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. Its adoption as the Kirchentag logo was no doubt unintentional, but it’s unlikely that this went completely unnoticed by Jewish and international visitors (one of my colleagues at the Holocaust Museum immediately asked me about it). Over seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the historical minefields continue to exist.

Note: The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Pp. 486. ISBN 9781451464726.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Since 1945, Nazism has been universally condemned. Historians have written extensively, but always pejoratively, about its personalities, its politics, its ideology, and particularly its crimes, which culminated in the Holocaust. As a result, less research has been carried out, and always negatively, into the reasons why Nazism gained support from an overwhelming majority of Germans, including many Protestant churchmen and women. Particularly vocal in Nazism’s cause was the minority group pf Protestants known as the German Christian Faith Movement, whose members very actively sought to introduce and popularize Nazi ideas into the liturgical and practical life of their parishes. Mary Solberg has now selected and translated into English a useful collection of this group’s writings, which provide an English-speaking readership with the full range of their ideas. Presumably she feels that the time is not yet ripe, or the audience not yet ready, for any extended analysis of these sources.

Solberg-Church Despite the excellent contributions of such authors as James Zabel, Doris Bergen and Robert Ericksen, Solberg feels that “far too few people in or out of the academy know far too little“ about the conduct of the churches In Hitler’s Germany. But her extended introduction clearly indicates her approach to answering the questions posed by her documents: specifically what role did this German Christian Faith Movement play in the wider picture; how successful or significant were its supporters in the rise and maintenance of Nazism, at least up to 1940; and how should Christians and churches today learn from this example of a church undone? Her skillful translations of the writings of several prominent members of this movement will be of considerable value to those who do not read German, but it would have been helpful to have a biographical note or appendix outlining the careers of these authors. Her conclusion is that this was not a unique episode, that the conflation of political, racist and nationalist ideas with theological witness is a constant temptation, and therefore that the German experience in the 1930s deserves further study by both theologians and historians.

The opening chapter provides us with the original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, written in 1932 by Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder, who went on to become Bishop of Brandenburg in September 1933. He shared the views of many younger clergymen who regarded the leaders of the various provincial Protestant churches as outdated conservatives. They had failed to catch the spirit of renewal needed to bring Protestant witness up-to-date. By contrast, the Nazi Party had caught the imagination of the people and had already affirmed in its platform through its support for “Positive Christianity”. The church could not afford to be left behind, but should rally its supporters behind the values of the German race, ethnicity, and nation, following the lead given by Adolf Hitler. Armed with this kind of “heroic piety”, the German Christian Movement would be ready to take up the struggle against godless Marxism.

The Nazi take-over of power in January 1933 was naturally enthusiastically greeted by the members of the German Christian Movement. They applauded the Nazis’ initial measures against the Jews, such as the law passed in April debarring Jews from public office with the application of the so-called “Aryan Paragraph”. During the summer, church elections saw the supporters of the movement installed in high positions in many church bodies, such as the Synod of the Old Prussian Union Church, which in September resolved to apply the “Aryan Paragraph” to its clergy. But this move aroused vigorous opposition, such as that expressed by Karl Barth, then a professor in Bonn, whose 15-page pamphlet is here reproduced in full.

Together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose shorter protest is also given, these forceful objections in defence of Protestant orthodoxy stressed the fact that all Christians were joined in a common baptism, and could not be separated on the basis of racial origin. However, they limited these protests on behalf of those converted Jews who had become Christians and did not raise questions about the wider scope of Nazi persecutions. The members of the German Christian Movement were not so reticent. They called for a more complete renunciation of all things Jewish in both church membership and liturgical practice. In a notably violent speech before a large audience of 20,000 supporters in November 1933, one of the radical German Christians, Reinhold Krause, called for a complete alignment of the church with National Socialism, in particular by “liberating itself from the Old Testament with its Jewish rewards and punishment morality and its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps”. German Christians instead must “return to the heroic Jesus” as a “fearless combatant” against the pernicious influence of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees. But this speech went too far for the majority of Protestant loyalists who then left the movement, and transferred their allegiance to the nucleus demanding church independence, which later coalesced into the Confessing Church.

More effective support for the German Christian Movement came from the theological professors, such as Emanuel Hirsch of Göttingen or Gerhard Kittel of Tübingen, both of whom had distinguished publication records. Hirsch became and remained a “true believer” in National Socialism, even after 1945, since, as he claimed, “God speaks in and to the particular historical situation in which people find themselves – in this case National Socialist Germany”. The church should not isolate itself on the remains of Reformation theology, as did Barth, but instead the church is called to be engaged with the new spirit of national regeneration, and reflect and contribute to the drive for racial purity, which left no room for Jewish Christians. Kittel, the author of the most widely used biblical dictionary, was even more prolific in addressing large audiences up and down the country. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and shortly afterwards wrote a major piece on the Jewish issue, which was a central one for all the members of the German Christian Movement. His purpose, according to one source, was to raise the discussion of the Jewish question above the level of slogans and vulgar racism and give it a moral Christian basis. He claimed that there were four solutions to the Jewish issue: extermination, expulsion, assimilation or a guest status, where Jews would be tolerated so long as they kept to separate ways. He judged the first three solutions to be impractical, so argued fiercely for the fourth. After the war, when he was put on trial for his Nazi sympathies, Kittel tried to argue he had been only a moderate campaigner, but the forcefulness of the extracts printed here suggests otherwise.

Solberg also provides a number of extracts from the speeches or writings of leading members of the German Christian Movement, such as Joachim Hossenfelder, Julius Leutheuser, Siegfried Leffler, and the Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, all written in the early years of Nazi rule. In addition, she provides a thoughtful critique of these views by Professor Paul Althaus of Erlangen, who argued that the conflation of German nationalism, admiration for Hitler, and Christian tradition went far too far by asserting that God’s salvation was being played out in Germany’s history. This, he claimed, was a “bald-faced theological heresy”. But Althaus’ own variant of the “orders of creation” included a positive enthusiasm for National Socialism as a political movement and for an ethno-national Christianity. He utterly rejected any idea that the combination of Nazi politics and the Faith Movement’s version of religion could turn Germany into a world-savior.

It is clear that these divisions within the Protestant churches led to Hitler abandoning any hopes he had held that they would combine under his authority. Instead he increasingly supported the anti-clerical and anti-Christian elements in the Nazi leadership, such as Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, who were to institute increasingly severe measures of persecution and repression on the churches. These doomed any chances of the German Christian Movement’s hopes for success. Its leaders made one final bid to win back support in their notable Godesberg Declaration of March 1939, in which they indicated their strong support for the regime’s hostile antisemitic policies and established an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. The final document in this collection is by Walter Grundmann, the first academic director of the Institute, whose career continue into the German Democratic Republic, where he served for many years as a pastor, publishing widely-used commentaries on the gospels but also working as an informant for the Stasi. There is little evidence that he changed his view that “the content of Jesus’ preaching shapes and determines his work. In Jesus of Nazareth something utterly un-Jewish appears”.

Solberg does not attempt any evaluation of these sources, but her careful and viable translations will be of help to English-speaking students who will now be able to trace the vagaries of this section of German Protestantism during its short but vibrant and mistaken career. It remains to be seen whether the temptations to which these authors gave expression will be repeated in churches elsewhere. She has given us a useful cautionary tale.

Review of Peter Itzen, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945-1990

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Peter Itzen, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945-1990 (Baden Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2013). Pp. 437. ISBN 9783832966089.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Very few German scholars have recently published works on England, and fewer still on the Church of England. It is therefore a welcome sign that Peter Itzen has now contributed this well-researched and balanced study of the Church England in the second half of the last century, which will undoubtedly be of value to German students and theologians, many of whom usually look with both puzzlement and envy at the church scene across the English Channel.

Itzen-Streitbare This account pays little attention to theology, but instead follows in the footsteps of such authors as Grace Davie and Callum Brown in emphasizing the sociological patterns he discerns in the Church of England’s development during the fifty years following the Second World War. Itzen lays particular stress on the views and the impact of the major church leaders on the political and social life of the nation, and makes extensive use of the archives held in Lambeth Palace, the residence of successive Archbishops of Canterbury. He also appends short but useful biographical details of many church leaders. The result is a well-informed but not uncritical account of the sometimes controversial stances adopted by the church, and the often critical responses by politicians, for instance during the Suez Crisis in the 1950s, or during Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister in the 1980s.

Itzen acknowledges that public support for the Church of England, in terms of participating in its regular weekly worship services, has suffered a marked decline during these years, when compared to the situation of a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the Church of England, like the monarchy, still remains as a symbol of tradition and continuity. As with the monarchy, there is virtually no support for its abolition or disestablishment. The Church of England has a presence in virtually every village across the realm, although the pattern of religious observances has changed greatly with the recent influx of immigrants from distant lands and other faiths. But in contrast to the countries of continental Europe, England in modern times has never been invaded, nor suffered from being occupied by enemy troops. England’s last political convulsion was four hundred years ago, and its last religious convulsion took place in the sixteenth century. This has given the Church of England a stability and an institutional advantage of inestimable benefit for its political witness. On the other hand, as Itzen repeatedly points out, the situation has changed. The Church of England is no longer “the Tory Party at prayer”, or an automatic supporter of Conservative governments, as some politicians would like it to be. The advance of secularism has meant that the Church of England no longer commands the allegiance of a large proportion of the population, and is not listened to as readily as before when advocating moral guidance on political or social issues. But the fact that its senior bishops have always been, and are still, members of parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, and frequently avail themselves of this opportunity to convey the opinion of church members, presents a very different picture from other countries. They owe their position to the centuries-old process of English history, rather than to any transient political poll. Hence they enjoy the ability to speak for the whole of society, and see themselves as the guardians of their respective diocese’s welfare. To be sure, these church leaders are aware that they can no longer command unquestioning support, or dictate standards of Christian morality to an increasingly skeptical public. Nevertheless their energetic stand against the unbridled individualism of the Thatcher years, gained respect for its vigorous defence of the need for social cohesion, and support for the poorest and weakest in society’s ranks, the so-called “bias for the poor”. This process was also helped by the professionalization of the Church of England’s administrative structures which provided its spokesmen in the House of Lords with more expert political guidance. So too the establishment of such organs as the General Synod and the Board of Social Responsibility provided help in the propagation of responsible church pronouncements. In the many critical debates and conflicts of these years, the Church of England was able to play a moderating role, so that the interventions of the church leaders served to enhance its position as a link between competing political factions.

In more recent years, such as the 1990s, the most pressing issue for the Church of England was the question of the ordination of women. Fortunately, the new Archbishop, George Carey, as an Evangelical, was open to compromises which offered the more stringent Anglo-Catholics an olive branch of friendship. And in any case, the more militant supporters of women’s rights were satisfied with the eventual agreement of the church assemblies, though it took another ten years for women’s ordination to the episcopate to be realized. Far more contentious was the issue of homosexuality, which then spilled over into the term of office of the following Archbishop, Rowan Williams. Williams himself was an advocate of a liberal and tolerant stance for the Church of England on this question. But as Archbishop of Canterbury he was also the leader of the world-wide Anglican Communion. He faced intransigent opposition to any such toleration from the majority of African bishops. He thus found himself in an insoluble impasse which threatened to break open the ranks of the Communion, and make impossible the show of Anglican unity as previously displayed at the decennial Lambeth Conferences. This situation remains unresolved. No less problematical remains the issue of Britain’s multi-cultural and multi-religious identity. But the readiness of the Church’s leaders to issue constructive appeals for national and social harmony indicates a willingness to bring the influence of this heritage to bear, and to mobilize its supporters to proclaim its ethical and historical relevance to the problems of the 21^st century

Itzen’s conclusion is therefore a positive one for the future of the Church of England’s political and social witness. He takes issue with the teleological views of such secularists as Richard Dawkins, who sees all religious activities as survivals of bygone superstition, or the modernists, who regard the Church of England as an outdated institution which is due shortly to fade away. Instead he believes that, despite all the manifold difficulties of its political and social engagement, the Church will continue to play an unrivalled and positive, though not undisputed, role in the nation’s life as the spiritual advisor to successive political regimes.

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. 286. ISBN 9780198714569.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lucian Leustean, who teaches Political Science at Aston University, Birmingham, England, begins his study with the distinctly odd claim that two events are at the core of the relationship between the ecumenical movement and the European Community. He asserts, firstly, that a member of the German resistance movement, Adam von Trott, who was executed by the Nazis in August 1944 a month after the failure of the plot to assassinate Hitler, left a legacy indicating that not all prominent Germans backed the Nazi regime, that his Christian faith inspired churchmen to resist occupation, and that he had a vision of a federal post-war Europe with close relations between East and West. Very much the same role was played by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is mentioned by Leustean only in passing. But in fact, Trott is now virtually forgotten whereas Bonhoeffer’s theology has steadily grown in influence. It is dubious, however, that either of them had much influence on the making of the European Community.

Leustean’s second claim is even more doubtful. He suggests that the creation of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), established in 1946, was of significance to the making of the European Community. This highly elitist body was led by an Englishman, Kenneth Grubb, and an American, Frederick Nolde, and was designed to draw the American churches into the debates about the post-war world, and subsequently about the Cold War. But Grubb was skeptical about Britain’s association with any European political reconstruction, since he saw Britain’s future in terms of its overseas possessions in the Commonwealth. And as Leustean admits, the CCIA failed to give any lead or engage in the process of European integration. It was thus years before the Protestant and Anglican churches adopted a coherent position towards the European Community, or even agreed what Europe was.

Leustean-Ecumenical To be sure the tasks of European reconstruction and reconciliation were formidable for politicians and churchmen alike. Priority had to be given to the immense task of caring for the vast millions of bombed-out, brutalized, and displaced populations. Most churches were still tied to their own national affairs and regarded plans for European integration as lying outside their spiritual domain. However a few of the survivors of the pre-war ecumenical bodies, led by the valiant and dynamic personality of the Dutch Calvinist, Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, recognized the importance of seeking closer relations with those politicians involved in European reconstruction. The World Council, which achieved its long-delayed inauguration in 1948, almost immediately suffered a grievous, if not unexpected, blow by the rejection of its invitation to the Vatican to have Roman Catholics as full members. The initiative in European affairs was therefore left to the Anglicans, the Protestant leaders of northern Europe, and a handful of Orthodox churchmen in Eastern Europe. So too, those politicians who had expected that the legacy of unbridled nationalism under Hitler would lead to a willingness to cooperate more closely in pan-European revival were soon to be disappointed by the brusque refusal of the Soviet government to entertain any such measures for the areas of Eastern Europe under its military control. In both the political and religious fields, therefore, expectations had to be cut down, and prognoses for European integration modified, often drastically.

Leustean’s account examines the role of political and religious contacts with a direct impact on European institutions. He records how a number of Protestant churchmen saw their duty as Christians to go beyond furthering the local piety of their congregations. These men of vision believed that European cooperation was a mission for the wider Christian constituency. This witness became especially relevant in 1948, when the Berlin blockade made the threat of Soviet military power all too evident, and seemingly doomed the hopes for a peaceful cooperation throughout the continent. Leustean pays particular attention to the Ecumenical Commission on European Cooperation, founded in 1950, since some of its members went on to fulfill high administrative positions in the European Community’s structures. These included Gustav Heinemann, later President of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and Jean Rey, who became President of the European Commission. These men were not dreamy idealists, but practical executives, who believed that their project could and should deserve the moral guidance of the churches.

However, since most of the western European countries who founded the European Community had large Catholic populations, and since its founding leaders came from Catholic backgrounds, it was hardly surprising that relations with the Protestant ecumenists were at first marked by tensions. Later, however, after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a new spirit of interdenominational cooperation was to be seen.

The European Community can be said to begin in 1950 with the plan put forward by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, for the amalgamation of industrial resources in the European Coal and Steel Community. But this initial success was overshadowed by the tensions resulting from the Cold War, by the proposals to rearm West Germans to play their part in defending their homeland, and by the reluctance of some idealists to encourage any step which would divide the nations of Western and Eastern Europe from each other. Many leading German churchmen campaigned for a unified and neutral Germany. Many British churchmen still adhered to their former attachment to the Commonwealth and were skeptical about any form of European cooperation. Many others adopted the traditional view that politics and religion should act in separate spheres. The cause of European unity therefore faced an uphill battle. The most that could be hoped for was “unity in diversity” which was finally acknowledged as the motto of the European Union in May 2000.

After the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the European Common Market among the six western European nations was founded in 1960. However the attention of the ecumenical fraternity was more attuned to the project for a pan-European Conference of European Churches, which held its first meeting in 1959. But the obvious Soviet propaganda and control of the churches in Eastern Europe meant that the CEC was a rather dubious venture. On the other hand, in the early 1960s, the British Government had a change of heart and applied to join the Common Market. But when its application was rejected by De Gaulle in 1963, this paradoxically stirred up interest among the British churches, and eventually led to a more positive approach to western European cooperation. Yet, at the same time the same French government’s refusal to accept the proposal, put forward by the Vatican, to appoint a diplomatic envoy to the European Commission in Brussels, delayed the establishment of formal relations with Europe’s largest religious community until 1970.

In the 1970s the economic successes of the Common Market were notable. With the Soviet military threat contained behind the Iron Curtain, the western European economies flourished. Living standards rose rapidly. New integrative measures were started such as the European Parliament, the adoption of a single currency, and after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the abolition of border controls and customs offices in many parts of Europe. These developments owed little to any church initiatives, nor even to representatives of the Ecumenical Movement. As one observer commented, this lack of ecumenical mobilization was in part due to the European Community being regarded as a purely economic and political project in which religious communities could not find a theological basis for participation. Also national churches, which saw themselves as the preservers of their country’s past, were unwilling to take up the cause of others with whom they had no common heritage or language.

In fact, the Ecumenical Movement concentrated more on the personal and pastoral witness amongst the ever growing number of international bureaucrats at the European Community’s offices in Brussels. The hopes of some leading Eurocrats that the churches would take a lead in calling the young and creative forces in Europe to unite behind a common vision were never realized. British churchmen, for instance, remained skeptical about the influence of supra-national technocrats, who were not directly responsible to any national government. The ideal of political integration between different parts of Western Europe therefore remained a nonstarter, since it threatened to curtail relations with Eastern Europe or the developing world outside Europe.. As a result, no common ‘European’ consciousness appeared, transcending national loyalties.

Leustean takes his account up to 1978, but in a concluding chapter is obliged to note the dramatic changes in later years, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. Many churchmen have since sought to engage in dialogue in order to understand the role of religion in the new Europe. Over these years countless committees, councils, conferences, and gatherings have been established or re-established with a bewildering array of alphabetical abbreviations, for which there is fortunately an appended index. But essentially the complex scale and scope of what is now the European Union defies easy or synoptic description.. It was left up to a retiring President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to call in 1990 for an attempt to give Europe a soul through a spiritual and intellectual debate in which the Churches should participate actively. It was a brave but mistaken view that the Churches, or other faith communities, could find enough common ground to overcome their mutual and historic differences, which are likely to remain prevailing in the foreseeable future.

Leustean’s conclusion is therefore that a fragmented, interrupted vision of Europe at both the political and religious levels, which had impacted the attempts to bring unity and integration to at least Western Europe, was the major factor why the dreams of idealists such as his hero von Trott were never realized.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Göttingen: V&Runipress, 2013). Pp 280, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783847101734.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The history of the Protestant women involved in resistance against the Nazi regime is well-documented, but it remains under-examined in the broader literature about the German Church Struggle and the resistance movements. Manfred Gailus, a contributing editor to this journal and co-editor of the book under review here, has devoted much of his recent work to correcting this.[1]

Mit Herz und Verstand is one of his recent additions to the literature. In addition to the fine overview of the topic in the introduction by Gailus and co-editor Clemens Vollnhals, it consists of biographical and historical profiles of Agnes and Elisabet von Harnack, Elisabeth Abegg, Elisabeth Schmitz, Elisabeth Schiemann, Margarete Meusel, Katharina Staritz, Agnes Wendland and her daughters Ruth and Angelika, Helene Jacobs, Sophie Benfey-Kunert, Elisabeth von Thadden, and Ina Gschlössl.

Only a few of these women are recognizable names (notably Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, but usually in conjunction with her more famous father, theologian Adolf von Harnack), yet even a brief description of who they were and what they did illustrates why their stories are deserving of greater scholarly attention. In addition to achieving their doctorates, both Harnack sisters were active feminists during the 1920s. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack (who held a doctorate in Germanistics and philosophy) helped found the Deutsche Akademikerinnenbund and became the chairwoman for the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, and Elisabet von Harnack (who had studied political economics and church dogmatics) was a leader on women’s issues and school reform. Elisabeth Abegg was a Quaker who had worked with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze during the 1930s and helped hide almost 80 Jews during the Nazi era (for which she has been honored by Yad Vashem). Abegg taught at the Luisenschule, a Gymnasium for young women in Berlin when Elisabeth Schmitz also taught. Schmitz of course was the author of the 1935 memorandum to Confessing Church leaders urging them to speak out in solidarity with the persecuted Jews; she subsequently resigned her teaching position in protest after the November 1938 pogroms. Elisabeth Schiemann was one of the first German women to attain a doctorate in botany and genetics, published several well-received studies and was affiliated with Friedrich-Wilhelms University and the Botanical Museum in Berlin. She joined the Confessing Church in 1934 (she was a member of the Dahlem parish) and became one of its most vocal members, writing letters to Martin Niemoeller urging him to speak out more forcefully. She personally delivered Elisabeth Schmitz’s memorandum to Karl Barth in Basel, and Franz Hildenbrandt used excerpts from a 1936 memorandum written by Schiemann in the 1937 statement on the Jews that he submitted to the 1937 Confessing synod (he acknowledged her text). While we now know that Elisabeth Schmitz was the author of the famous 1935 memorandum, Margarete Meusel (to whom it had been attributed) wrote a similar memorandum and worked throughout the Nazi era helping and hiding “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews. Katharina Staritz, a Confessing Church theologian of Jewish descent who worked with the Grüber office, is known for her protest against the Breslau church authorities’ decision to bar people wearing the yellow star from the churches—for which she immediately lost her job. With no cover from the church, she became the target of Nazi propaganda and ended up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Agnes Wendland, wife of a Confessing Church pastor in Berlin, hid several Jews in their parsonage and was helped by her daughters Ruth and Angelika. Helene Jacobs was one of the few Germans to make no compromises with the regime, beginning with her refusal in 1933 to fill out the Aryan certificate for university study and ending with her participation in the Kaufmann resistance circle that forged false documents for Jews and helped them escape (Jacobs, too, spent the final war years in Nazi prisons). Sophie Benfey-Kunert was a staunch feminist who became the first woman in Hamburg to take the theological exams; she was chaplain in a women’s prison before she married Bruno Benfey. Benfey, one of the “non-Aryan” pastors in the Hannover church, became the target of Nazi propaganda and found no support from Bishop August Marahrens; the Benfeys finally emigrated to the Netherlands in 1939 and returned to Göttingen after 1945. Elisabeth von Thadden founded a small private school that continued to accept Jewish students until the regime took it over in 1941; she then became involved in various resistance activities and was arrested in early 1944. She was beheaded in the Plötzensee prison in September 1944. Ina Gschlössl, who founded the Association of Protestant Women Theologians in 1925, was fired from her teaching job as a religious educator in 1933 after making critical remarks about Hitler; she eventually worked for the Confessing Church’s Inner Mission.

The story of each woman is important in its own right, but the real value of this volume is that the essays go beyond the biographical, portraying the women in a broader historical context that records both their significant achievements before 1933 and the scandalous treatment of them after 1933, particularly within the church. It also includes the post-1945 period, which shows that their contributions were largely forgotten and dismissed. This volume illustrates why the study of these women offers some important correctives to our general understanding of the larger issues in the German churches, the emergence and nature of different resistance movements, and the early postwar dynamics. It is impossible to understand these women separately from the historical, social, and political context of early twentieth century Germany. They were among the first generation of women in western societies (not only in Germany) to mobilize politically, study for advanced degrees, and enter traditionally male professions. The social shifts of the Weimar years opened the way for them to enter the political sphere in Germany; almost 7 percent of the Reichstag representatives in 1926, for example, were women. Their stories show how very different the experiences of these women were from the young men in their generation. This is especially evident in the essay on Agnes von Zahn-Harnack. During the 1920s she published and spoke widely on the women’s movement; organized German academic women and was the German delegate to the meetings in Amsterdam and Geneva of the International Federation of University Women and was elected to its board. In that international context she became one of the leading German voices on the “peace question.” The accounts in this volume of their various activities throughout the 1920s reveal a “Who’s Who” of early German feminist leaders.

Thus, although many of the women studied here sought careers or were active in the German Evangelical Church, they also shared a history of feminist and political activism in the interwar period. A number of them (both Harnack sisters, Abegg, Schmitz, Wendland, and von Thadden) had worked in Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze’s social ministry in east Berlin during the 1920s. Others were involved in early German feminist organizations like the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein (which Agnes von Zahn-Harnack led) and the religious socialist movement. In each of these three organizations, they had contact with Catholics and Jews, which was a factor in their active help for Jewish friends and colleagues after 1933.

Their interwar activities offered a different foundation in 1933 for political opposition to National Socialism. Not surprisingly, it also made the women easy targets. They were attacked not only by Nazi newspapers and party leaders, but also by male Confessing Church leaders who dismissed them. The introduction to this book opens with a vivid account of a 1937 pamphlet, Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott, written by Otto Dibelius and Martin Niemoeller, which in addition to defending the Confessing Church attacked the feminist movement, particularly women with advanced academic degrees, criticizing them for the declining birth rate and changing social values. Although women comprised seventy to eighty percent of the Confessing Church membership in Berlin, there were no women in church governance and only one woman (Stephanie von Mackensen) attended the Barmen Synod in May 1934. The 1930s saw an ongoing battle for the right to ordination that received scant attention or support among Confessing Church leaders. (It should be noted that were a few male Confessing Church leaders who supported the women theologians’ battle for ordination; according to the women I interviewed for my book, these included Kurt Scharf, Hermann Diem, and Martin Albertz.)

The issue where the historical record of these women really casts a poor light on their male counterparts in the Confessing Church, however, is in their political clarity and their willingness to take early stands with respect to the persecution of the Jews. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and other board members dissolved the Bund Deutsche Frauenvereine in March 1933 after being confronted with the demand to dismiss “non-Aryan” members and merge the organization with the Nazi Deutsche Frauenfront. Even more impressively, when the Frauenbund was reconstituted in 1945, women who had been Nazi party members or members of Nazi women’s’ organization were barred from membership. Despite their impressive record of political consistency, attacks on these early feminists continued into the 1980s, when they were accused of having somehow prepared the ground for the Nazi ideological precepts about women such as the “Mutterkult.”

The authors of each of these biographical essays bring different strengths and insights to the studies of these women. One of the most valuable aspects of the volume is the authors’ detailed examination of the papers and correspondence many of the women left behind. This material shows that they were critical not just of the sexism but the antisemitism within the Confessing Church. In addition to the aforementioned memoranda and protests, for example, Schmitz and Schiemann publicly criticized Walter Kunneth’s anti-Semitic attacks on Judaism They were also critical of the Confessing Church’s inherent political and theological conservatism. As the daughter of Adolf von Harnack, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack had grown up in an atmosphere of liberal, humanistic Protestantism that she feared was abandoned by the Confessing Church. Although she supported it in the Church Struggle, she criticized its conservatism, writing that “if we don’t pay attention, (the confessional front) could conjure up a new orthodoxy that would be the opposite of what we want.”

By looking at the culture and perspective of German feminism throughout this era, this volume makes an important contribution that goes beyond simply documenting the role played by these women. There continues to be a gendered division of history that runs through most of the literature on the Protestant Kirchenkampf, including the numerous books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (For those readers who are wondering, Bonhoeffer made no reference to the ordination debates and related feminist issues and showed no public solidarity with the Confessing Church women, despite the fact that he had taught several of them in Berlin and his close friend Elisabeth Zinn was among them.) The integration of these women’s lives into the scholarship could give us some new perspectives on the internal church debates. By portraying their political clarity and courage, particularly with regard to the persecution of Jews, this volume illustrates that there were people in the Confessing Church who stood up to the Nazi regime when it counted—many of them were women.

The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

Notes:

[1] In my 2011 review in this journal of Gailus’s study of Elisabeth Schmitz (Mir aber zerriss es das Herz), I noted the three volumes of documentation that came out of a project at Göttingen University during the 1980s and 1990s, the Frauenforschungsprojekt zur Geschichte der Theologinnen. The three volumes are “Darum wag es, Schwestern…”: Zur Geschichte evangelischer Theologinnen in Deutschland (1994); Der Streit um die Frauenordination in der Bekennenden Kirche: Quellentexte zu ihrer Geschichte im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1997); Lexikon früher evangelischer Theologinnen: Biographische Skizzen (2005). Works in English that have incorporated research on these women include my For the Soul of the People (1992) and Theodore Thomas’s Women Against Hitler: Christian Resistance in the Third Reich (1995)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Pp. 260. ISBN 9783835316492.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Manfred Gailus’ newest contribution to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich is a collection of case studies of theologians, church leaders, and clergy whose writings or activities place them into the categories of perpetrators in or accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The various contributions are the product of a series of public lectures at the Topography of Terror in Berlin in 2013 and 2014. As such, none of the chapters in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 represent new research. Nonetheless, the volume is more than the sum of its parts, in the way that it demonstrates the depth and breadth of the Christian support for and participation in Nazi Germany. As Gailus notes at the end of his introduction, millions of tourists come to Berlin every year, eager to see the sites of Nazi power and commemorations of Jewish suffering. When they come to the Berlin Cathedral or other historic church buildings in central Berlin, they ask questions about the role of the churches in the Third Reich. Gailus argues it is vitally important that the churches work through the issue of Christian complicity in Hitler’s Germany, in order to provide honest answers to these questions and find a healthy way forward.

Gailus-Taeter Following Manfed Gailus’ introductory chapter, there are nine chapters (three by Gailus, six by a variety of other scholars) and a theological afterward by Christoph Markschies, church historian, theologian, and former president of Humboldt University. The various chapters link thematically with one another in fruitful ways. Gailus starts things off with an analysis of the Day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), the day on which Adolf Hitler opened the German parliament in the Garrison Church which had served Prussian monarchs for two hundred years. Drawing on his work in the 2011 book Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, Gailus describes the Day of Potsdam as a great, joyful “Yes” spoken by German Protestantism to Hitler and his National Socialism government. He describes in particular the key role played by Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and leading Protestant churchman in the region. It was Dibelius who was the main speaker at a special worship service in the Nikolaikirche in central Berlin, attended by a majority of Protestant members of parliament and Reich President Hindenburg before they made their way to Potsdam for the opening of the Reichstag. Dibelius chose Romans 8:31 as his text: “If God be for us, who can be against us.” Since this was the same text used by the imperial court preacher at the outset of the Great War in 1914, Dibelius was consciously connecting the patriotic spirit of the First World War to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. While there were quiet notes of criticism in Dibelius’ message, none other than Hermann Goering shook his hand afterwards and declared it to be the best sermon he had ever heard (35-37).

Gailus makes a strong case for the Day of Potsdam as an important component in the revival of institutional Protestantism during the opening months of Nazi rule. Here the German Christian Movement played the leading role. One of example of this is Gailus’ description of a special “patriotic thanksgiving service” held by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Parish on March 22. Meant to be an “ecclesiastical Potsdam,” the event depicted the German Christians as a mass movement parallel to National Socialism and celebrated the salvation of Germany from the “hell” of the godless Weimar Republic (41-42). In the end, Gailus explains the victory of the German Christians in the July 1933 church elections as the result of the fact that the majority of clergy and church people wanted this völkisch transformation, while the forces of opposition within the church were weak (46). “On the ‘Day of Postdam,’ half of society celebrated and acclaimed their ‘national awakening,’ while the other half of society was on the verge of being excluded, shackled, muzzled, and displaced” (47).

Film historian Ralf Forster follows up Gailus’ examination of the Day of Potsdam with a chapter analyzing the occasion as a propaganda event. Forster assesses the media coverage, particularly on radio and in newsreel footage. He notes the importance of the live radio broadcast of the day’s events and the many “special editions” of newspapers, some of which were printed later that same day, and were thus almost as current as the radio broadcasts. He also provides a detailed description of the newsreel footage of the Day of Potsdam, which brought the spectacle of the events at the Garrison Church to German moviegoers (57-60).

Next, editor Manfred Gailus contributes a second chapter, which shifts attention from the Day of Potsdam to the history of the takeover of Protestant church governments by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, especially in Berlin. German Christians united the National Socialist world view with the Christian tradition of belief, seeking to make belief in Jesus and belief in Hitler fully compatible. Gailus explains how the German Christian Movement cultivated mass ritual as its centerpiece, focusing of the Germanization of Protestant liturgy and the introduction of an ecclesiastical cult of flags (74). While the German Christians were initially successful in seizing the reigns of Protestant church governments, by 1934 they faced serious opposition, and over time they fell out of favour among the Nazi elites. This, Gailus suggests, makes it easy to believe they were insignificant. Rather, he argues they were a mass movement which dominated North Germany, Middle Germany, and East Elbian Prussia during the 1930s (78).

Horst Junginger, a professor of religious studies at Leipzig University, draws on his research on religion and antisemitism during the Nazi era to recount the career of theologian Gerhard Kittel, who joined both the German Christian Movement and the Nazi Party in 1933. Kittel’s publication The Jewish Question committed him to the antisemitic struggle against emancipation and equality for Jews in Germany and in turn elevated racial research to a central place in the University of Tübingen, making it into a “bulwark against Judaism,” as Kittel himself declared (87). As the “Jewish Question” became a subject of scientific and scholarly research, Kittel followed this agenda throughout the Third Reich, publishing articles and giving lectures as late as 1943 and 1944 for the Ministry of Propaganda and German universities. In doing so, he brought Christian anti-Judaism into the service of racial antisemitism (103-105).

Thomas Forstner, who recently published Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945, contributes a chapter on the phenomenon of the so-called Brown Priests. These pro-Nazi clergy were few in number compared to their Protestant counterparts—Forstner discusses fewer than 150 of them (123-124). He notes that the Roman Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from these priests, who were drawn to Nazism out of national sentiment or opportunism (not least to shed their celibacy) (129). Forstner discusses Joseph Roth and Albert Hartl as two examples of Catholic priests who engaged deeply with National Socialism.

Hansjörg Buss, author of “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950), carries the Protestant story forward with an assessment of the role of Hanns Kerrl, Hitler’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and his assistant, Hermann Muhs. He portrays Kerrl as a loyal servant, trying to accomplish the impossible task of unifying German Protestantism under church committees into order to fashion a centralized Reich Church adapted to National Socialism (148-149). This effort collapsed by 1937, and Christians like Kerrl lost favour year by year in the face of opposition from anti-Christian ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann. Kerrl’s assistant Muhs, a member of the radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement, suggested “an administrative dictatorship” to “annihilate the Confessing Church” (162). This he attempted to do in part through the use of the church finance office to put serious pressure on Confessing Church pastors and parishes.

Susannah Heschel, whose book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany has received extensive attention in this journal (here, here, and here), provides a useful overview of her important work on Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Through the Institute, Grundmann and others worked to develop an aryanized Christian confession for the Third Reich. Despite his leadership in such an obviously antisemitic venture, Grundmann retained his position within the Protestant church after 1945, even serving as an informer for the East German regime.

Manfred Gailus follows Susannah Heschel with a chapter on Karl Themel, Berlin pastor and race researcher. Themel was a member of the German Christian Movement, the SA, and the Nazi Party, eagerly taking up the position of “Expert for Race Research” with the Reich Interior Ministry. Working closely with the Reich Office for Geneological Research, Themel created an Office of Church Registers, Old Berlin. There they transferred the genealogical information of thousands of Berliners from these church records onto new identification cards, which were in turn used to check the Aryan ancestry of those who needed to prove their racial purity in order to take up various government positions. By 1941, Themel’s office had processed over 160,000 requests involving over 330,000 individuals, and had discovered over 2600 cases of Jewish ancestry—almost two cases per day, as Themel boasted late that year (209). Despite this direct participation in the implementation of Nazi antisemitic policy, Themel was rehabilitated by 1949, eventually taking up a pastorate in rural Brandenburg, then migrating back into archival work for the Berlin-Brandenburg church province! Upon his death, his work collecting and copying church registries in Berlin during the Third Reich was lauded as a service to the archival branch of the church (213). Not until 2002 was Themel’s work publicly denounced by church leaders (215).

Thomas Kaufmann’s chapter on influential church historian Erich Seeberg’s connections to the Nazi Party and the German Christian Movement offers another window into the ways individual theologians and church leaders navigated the Nazi era. In Seeberg’s case, his career revolved around research into transconfessional “German piety” which could be adapted easily to Nazi ideology (228). Seeberg studied Meister Eckhart and German mysticism, then applied his völkisch approach to the study of Martin Luther. Seeberg wanted to turn the Luther Renaissance into a “Luther Revolution.” This meant preaching a Luther who was “dangerous” and not “bourgeois” (229). Importantly, Seeberg also sought to recast theological education in a Nazi mold. His plans included revising theological curricula by abandoning historical-critical methodology and the study of the Hebrew language, replacing them with a “history of German piety” (241).

Finally, to complete the volume, Christoph Markschies writes on behalf of the Humboldt University Faculty of Theology, arguing that his institution still needs to engage in a thorough assessment of its activities during the Third Reich. This is a call very much in line with Gailus’ purpose for this volume, which is to demonstrate the extent to which German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Catholics voluntarily adapted themselves to Hitler’s regime and participated in the National Socialist quest to eliminate German Jewry and thereby “purify” the German racial community. Gailus is driven by the conviction that the German churches still have much work to do in coming to terms with this history. This volume contributes substantially to his project, by compiling some of the best of current research into the German churches in the Nazi era. It also demonstrates that there is still much to do before those Berlin tourists receive proper answers to their questions about the German churches in the time of Hitler.

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918 (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). Pp. 272. ISBN: 9781783270514.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Colchester, fifty two miles north-east of London, has been a garrison town since the days of the Romans. During the First World War its military establishment was vastly expanded, including four major army hospitals where the casualties from the battlefields in France were treated. The impact of the war was immediate and very visible. Colchester’s Church of England parishes were quickly and significantly involved, as is described in Beaken’s insightful and well researched account of these critical years.

Beaken-Church Colchester’s social elite, which was well represented in the Church of England parishes, was conservative, nationalist and hierarchical. Its members supported the British government’s decision to go to war in August 1914 for moral as well as political reasons. They joined in the widespread campaign urging young men to join the armed forces, until conscription was introduced in 1916, rendering such appeals superfluous. Thereafter the leading men set an example by supporting campaigns for contributions to the War Savings Bonds, while the church ladies were very active in ministering to the troops training in Colchester and to the wounded. Church people were assiduous in providing hospitality to the troops, and at least thirty five social clubs were established where recreational facilities and food were supplied, often at little cost. In part such provision was seen as a Christian virtue, but, as Beaken notes, in part it was inspired by the desire to keep the soldiers out of public houses, and so to keep prostitution and its attendant problems at bay.

The clergy’s position was more problematic. At first many of the younger clergy had felt drawn to join their parishioners by volunteering to serve in the ranks, which they believed would be a means of getting to know their fellow men better. But the bishops soon asserted that such notions were incompatible with their ordination vows. Instead they were to remain in their parishes where their services, because of the shortage of army chaplains and the extra requirements caused by the war, would be all the more demanding. In fact, in Colchester, both clergy and laity soon recognized the need for extra pastoral witness to the many thousands of young men passing through the garrison on their way to the western front, or to those returned to Colchester for treatment in the hospitals. They were also called to officiate at the funerals of those who died from their wounds, and to comfort their surviving families. After the initial euphoria of the early months was replaced by the grim horror of the devastating and depressing stalemate of the Flanders trench-warfare, the clergy’s often self-imposed role in support of the war effort became more dubious, and even counter-productive. Since it was they who often had to bring the dreaded news to the families of men killed in action, their pastoral skills were increasingly honed to the presence of disaster and death.

In the aftermath of the war, particularly in the 1930s, there was a widespread revulsion against all those, including a few prominent clergymen, who had so eagerly preached militant sermons in favour of the war effort. And inevitably such skepticism and resentment was turned against the religion these clergymen were upholding. The contradiction between the slaughter of so many of “the flower of the nation’s youth”, and the message of love and peace as contained in the Christian gospels was too glaring to be easily overcome. Understandably, Beaken does not try to answer the question posed by almost everyone at some point during the war: “Why does the Christian God allow such a devastating catastrophe to take place?” Instead he takes issue with some of the post-war writers, particularly those who misrepresented what actually happened and instead promoted their own interpretations for anti-war or pacifist reasons. For example, he dismisses the view that the ordinary workingman, who had volunteered for army service, had been seduced by bloodthirsty clergymen and subsequently was misled by glory-seeking and incompetent army leaders. So too the charge that the Church of England chaplains were too cowardly to go up to the front line needs to be refuted by the fact that such postings were forbidden by the military leaders. It is certainly true, as Beaken admits, that, despite the almost universal support of the war effort at the time, in later years many people came to feel that the senseless and degrading conflict in the Flanders mud had made the proclamation of the Christian gospel irrelevant. But the evidence here produced for the war-time conditions in Colchester would seem to prove the opposite. Church attendance remained almost the same throughout the war years, as did the number of confirmations. The overwhelming support given to the erection of war memorials, and the sincere participation at Armistice or Remembrance Day services for the remainder of the century and beyond, would seem to disprove the contention that the Church of England had a ‘bad’ First World War. Beaken disputes the myth that things were never the same after 1918. He points to the fact that in the vast majority of parishes the Church’s witness with its emphasis on Mattins on Sunday morning remained unchanged for a further fifty years. But he agrees that, in Colchester, as elsewhere, when the fabric if the city’s close-knit, inter-dependent society came apart, so the Church of England came to occupy a peripheral position. But this does not contradict Beaken’s central argument that the Church of England fared significantly better during the First World War than has been understood or acknowledged for much of the past century.

Review of Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ralf K. Wüstenberg, and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen. Das Politische in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ralf K. Wüstenberg, and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen. Das Politische in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Guetersloher Verlagshaus, 2014), 464 pages. ISBN: 9783579081687.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a collection of thirty essays first presented as plenary lectures and papers at the XI International Bonhoeffer Congress held in Sigtuna, Sweden in June 2012. The collection is structured in three parts under the headings: Political Resistance; Christian Anthropology and the Political; and Church and Civil Society. The first part, which is most relevant to church historians, contains essays that contextualize Bonhoeffer’s political resistance to Nazism historically and theologically. The second part contains an assortment of theological essays that examine Bonhoeffer’s theology through a variety of interpretive lenses, including his understanding of prayer, grace, guilt, discipleship, redemption, reconciliation, divine mandates, and his critique of religion, among other things. The essays in the third part return to more concrete matters by examining Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between the church, civil society, and the state in the 1930s and 40s, but also in particular postwar contexts, such as South Africa and Brazil. The overall quality of the essays is exceptional and the collection should be seen as a showcase for recent research in Bonhoeffer studies.

Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen A Spoke in the Wheel von Some of the highlights of the collection include the lead essay by Wolfgang Huber in which he provides a theological profile of Bonhoeffer’s political resistance, particularly his involvement in Hans von Dohnanyi’s conspiracy in the Abwehr. Despite the limitations placed on what Bonhoeffer could put into writing during the Third Reich, Huber believes a “theology of resistance” can be teased out of Bonhoeffer’s writing during this time. His call for the Church to take a public stand in solidarity with the Jews against the repressive state; his formulation of a confession of guilt in the name of the church; his theory of a responsible life; and his trust in God’s guidance—all indicate the rudiments of a theology of resistance, Huber believes.

Josef Außermair suggests that in addition to the texts identified by Huber that more attention needs to be paid to Bonhoeffer’s teaching at Finkenwalde to understand his political resistance. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis in his teaching on witnessing to Christ in the world, Außermair argues, was his way to prepare his students to participate in the Church Struggle and to confront the political challenges of the day. Sven-Erik Brodd and Björn Ryman both maintain that Bonhoeffer’s trips to Sweden in 1936 and 1942 played a significant role in the development of his political resistance, especially through his contact with British and Swedish members of the ecumenical movement. And Gerhard den Hertog examines how the success of Hitler’s 1940 military campaigns influenced Bonhoeffer’s reflections in Ethics and his decision to participate in the conspiracy.

Andreas Pangritz, in his examination of Bonhoeffer’s April 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” makes several provocative and perceptive points. First, he points out that in an earlier draft of the essay Bonoeffer had inserted the sub-heading “Ahasuerus peregrinus” or wandering Jew above the section with the offensive anti-Judaic passages that have gotten so much attention. Pangritz concludes that the sub-heading “represents authentically the main focus Bonhoeffer wanted to give to this part of the final edition [of his essay].” Second, he argues that Bonhoeffer’s association of “modern Jewish Christianity” with the alleged Jewish emphasis on a religion of law leads Bonhoeffer to refer to the Nazi-backed German Christians—and their desire to implement racial laws in the church—as guilty of Jewish Christianity. Third, he believes that Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase—best translated as “to fall within the spokes of the wheel,”—comes from the 18th-century writer Friedrich Schiller and was meant by Bonhoeffer to convey an act of “counter-revolutionary resistance” against the Nazi revolution. Pangritz maintains that Bonhoeffer’s political resistance “is aimed at defending the old order against its revolutionary transformation.” Pangritz concludes, that Bonhoeffer’s theological anti-Judaism “provides an ambiguous source for political solidarity with the Jews,” although Bonhoeffer’s rethinking of the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, enables him to call for direct political against the state by the church on behalf of the Jews.

Keith Clements essay focuses on Bonhoeffer and the Bruay Conference of September 1934. Clements maintains that the Bruay report, authored by Bonhoeffer and few other Germans and British representatives from the ecumenical youth movement, should be seen as more than a simple affirmation of the Fanø conference report from the previous month. Although both Fanø and Bruay call on Christians to study the social and political questions of the day and to take action “based upon the responsibility of the church members for the social order according to the Will of God,” the Bruay report offers some eminently practical—read British—steps that can be taken by church members to “reproduce the Christian life to-day.” Thus Clements believes that Bruay created “a contextual ethic of responsibility,” which foreshadows the 1937 Oxford Conference on “Church, Community, and State” and the World Council of Churches.

Wolf Krötke and Victoria Barnett both take up the question of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between church and state and its implications for civil society. Krötke argues that although Poles and East Germans struggling for a more democratic society in the 1970s and 1980s appropriated aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology, his notion of the state as a divinely sanctioned order of preservation has little to offer proponents of democracy. Unlike his more conservative colleagues, Bonhoeffer saw a crucial role for the church in limiting the state’s totalitarian ambitions in Nazi Germany. His understanding of the church-state relations may have provided Bonhoeffer with the foundation for his resistance to Nazism, but the more widely accepted Lutheran understanding of the relationship between the two kingdoms also provided many of his Lutheran colleagues with a theological defense of the Nazi state and after 1945, the GDR state. Krötke concludes that democracy activists would be better off embracing Bonhoeffer’s concept of “genuine worldliness” rather than his views on the state.

Barnett understands Bonhoeffer’s views on the state similarly to Krötke but focuses her essay on Bonhoeffer’s reaction—politically and theologically—to the Nazi state’s dual suppression of the church and civil society. Especially during his time at Finkenwalde and after, Bonhoeffer reflected on the nature of the church under National Socialism—not only on the church’s role in limiting the state’s totalitarian ambitions—but also the role of the church and individual Christians in fostering a functioning civil society. After the war began and Bonhoeffer joined the Resistance he increasingly reflected on what would come after the defeat of National Socialism and what role the church would play in these changes. The church, he maintained, could no longer concern itself only with its own self-preservation—it had to become a church that demonstrated its concern for “justice among human beings.” “All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing,” Bonhoeffer wrote in 1944, “must be born anew out of prayer and action.” Barnett suggests that Bonhoeffer’s nearly twenty years of wrestling with how to understand the nature of the church and its relationship with the state and civil society culminated in some of his most provocative theological concepts such as the “world come of age” and “religionless Christianity.”

This is just a sampling of the excellent essays contained in A Spoke in the Wheel, all of which deserve a careful reading. The collection brings together for the first time a wide variety of scholarly contributions to the debate over the relationship between Bonhoeffer’s theology and his role in the Resistance.

Review of John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 560 Pp., ISBN: 9780199208562.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi

The papacy during the first fifty years of the twentieth century is no easy subject for a historian to cover, and not merely because one of the popes is the ever-controversial Pius XII. Between 1914 and the early 1950s, the supreme leader of the global Roman Catholic Church was forced to contend with two world wars, genocide, and economic depression. Ideologies bent on achieving total control over the societies they governed, including Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and communism in the Soviet Union and China, contributed to vast political and social upheaval. As John Pollard reminds us on the opening page of his book on the papacy of this era, the popes “faced challenges far greater than anything that had arisen since the Reformation of the sixteenth century or the French Revolution” two centuries later (1). This fact, coupled with the strict closure of most of the Vatican’s archival materials on the papacy of Pius XII, means that the scholarship covering the Vatican in this period is riven with division and debate, particularly during the Second World War. Pollard wades ably through this historiographical quagmire and uses sources adroitly for his own analysis. What he produces is a more balanced account of the three men who sat on the papal throne than much of what has come before.

Pollard-Papacy Pollard has an imposing pedigree, which one might demand of a scholar willing to tackle such a contentious subject: he is no amateur in examining modern popes in times of conflict. He has devoted much of his professional career to the Vatican and Catholicism in Fascist Italy, and his biography of Benedict XV is one of the most significant of any language. His introduction includes several crucial definitions and a brief sketch of the papacy up to Benedict’s election in September 1914. His conclusion speaks cogently of the legacy of the period as a whole, which he refers to simply as the age of totalitarianism, and addresses its greatest legacy: bringing the divisions between Church conservatives and liberals to the fore, leading to the most radical changes in Church history at the Second Vatican Council (478).

The book proceeds in chronological fashion, beginning with the accession of Benedict XV and ending with the death of Pius XII. Each pope is fully realized as his own person, though Pollard cannot help but acknowledge the heavy threads of continuity running through Vatican politics in this era. Though Benedict is given the shortest space (only two chapters), Pollard minces no words about his significance: Benedict committed the Church to a peace-making, humanitarian role in a time of total war, and one hundred years later this remains the foundation of contemporary papal diplomacy. Whatever else might be said of Benedict – that his papal “moral neutrality” during the war was at once tenuous and dubious; his tendency towards paranoia; his unhelpful obstinacy; his lassitude in developing doctrine and liturgy – this is no small contribution to the modern papacy.

His successor was Pius XI, whose temperament was “authoritarian” (128) and who, refusing to bow to Roman custom, brought his own housekeeper with him into the papal apartment. Until nine years ago, Pius XI’s reign tended to be overshadowed by the man who worked as his secretary of state from 1930, and who himself became pope in 1939; however, the opening of the archives relating to his papacy in 2006 has allowed scholarship on “Papa Ratti” to grow. The interwar pope did not have to cope with the challenge of bloodshed in Europe, but between the advent of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, the worldwide economic depression, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, continual upheaval and persecution of the Church in Mexico and China, among other places, Pius XI also instituted Radio Vatican, beatified nearly five hundred people, and canonized another thirty-four (189).

Pius XI continued what Benedict had commenced with a reliance on “concordatory politics,” signing a series of important treaties in the interwar period with numerous countries that were aimed at protecting the religious rights of their Catholic citizens, notably including Italy and Germany. His papacy also heavily emphasized teaching, which is borne out by the number of public pronouncements and encyclicals he issued on subjects from Christian marriage (Casti connubii, 1930) to Soviet communism (Divini redemptoris, 1937) to the plight of the Catholic Church in Germany (Mit brennender Sorge, also 1937). His most significant challenges lay in dealing with the two totalitarian ideologies that entrenched themselves in the Soviet Union and Germany, and Pollard understandably delivers some of his sharpest criticism – of both Pius XI as well as the scholarship about him – here. He points to the obvious missed opportunity of the Vatican to have representation at the 1938 Evian Conference, when countries from across the globe met to discuss the plight of Europe’s Jews fleeing Nazism, but does not speculate about why. He acknowledges the collaborative nature of many of Pius’s encyclicals, especially the later ones, though fails to emphasize just how much of the German-language encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, was the work of Pacelli and a handful of German bishops. (See Emma Fattorini’s excellent discussion of this encyclical in Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Ultimately, Pollard insists, despite occasional vacillation, Pius left the papacy stronger than it had been when he began as pope, though on a basic level he remains a mysterious, somewhat elusive figure with regard to certain key issues, particularly the “modernist crisis” (289-290).

Like all scholars dealing with Pius XII, Pollard has to admit that the lack of access to key documents about his pontificate is problematic: until these archives are opened (and when this will happen has been the big question for many years now), scholars will have a difficult time contributing anything genuinely new to the debates. Pollard, though, does the historiography a clear service by summarizing the material that is available for study and by plumbing the controversies about Pius XII to provide fresh insights, especially with regards to his continuity with Pius XI. He underscores the stability within the Vatican hierarchy during the second Pius’s reign, largely due to the connections between the two Piuses – Pius XII had worked under his predecessor as secretary of state from 1930 to 1939. In fact, one argument about the papacy that Pollard makes unassailably is the importance and clout of the man in the position of secretary of state up to the outbreak of World War II. (The power of this position disintegrated somewhat when Pacelli became pope in 1939, though Pollard does not clarify specifically if this was due to the way that Pacelli ruled as pope or the personalities he chose to serve under him in that dicastery – or a combination of both.)

Pollard does not sidestep the controversy surrounding Pius XII. He states explicitly that Pius never mentioned specifically the plight of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, despite the Allies urging him to do so. This was not due to lack of awareness; he estimates that the Vatican knew reasonably well about the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe by early 1942 at the latest (332). Rather, Pius believed he was doing as much as he could within the limits imposed on him by external circumstances. Above all – and here is where continuity shows strongly – he was committed to the policies of his predecessors, especially Benedict XV: in time of war, the Vatican had to remain neutral so as to avoid alienating segments of the Catholic population spread across the zone of conflict. To condemn the atrocities perpetrated by one side or another risked this alienation – and condemning Germany’s atrocities in particular risked isolating the sizable Catholic minority in Germany, a country dear to Pacelli’s heart (he had served as nuncio there from 1920 until he became secretary of state).

Pollard demonstrates historical sympathy in detailing the conundrum Pius XII found himself in vis-à-vis wartime atrocities, including the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Such a show of sympathy is not tantamount to an absolution, though his refusal to be more strident in his criticism will not please those ever ready to condemn the Vatican for its muteness in the face of the Holocaust. Pollard’s heaviest criticism for Pius XII – his “ugliest silence” (346-347), as he calls it – falls on the pope’s lack of reaction to the murderous campaigns of the fascist Ustasha regime in Croatia. Although the Vatican had not formally recognized an independent Croatian state when it was instituted in 1941, it declined to protest the forced conversions and ethnic cleansing that the Croats unleashed, apart from any German initiative in the area, even though Church officials had a full awareness of what was unfolding.

Moreover, of the three popes that Pollard assesses, Pius XII is not presented as the most unsympathetic towards Jews; Pius XI is. “It is impossible,” he cautions, “to understand the papacy’s relationship with the Jews of Europe in this period except within the broader context of Christian antisemitism” (472), and here he excuses none of the popes. But he singles out Pius XI as the most ambivalent towards Jews. He was continuously conflicted, showing sympathy for their plight in some circumstances but missing several opportunities to endorse a clear renunciation of antisemitism, whether found in Church liturgy or in Nazi ideology. It would take another two decades, and two more popes, before the Church finally took responsibility for its role in perpetuating antisemitism in the issuance of Nostra Aetate. Pollard categorizes this move as the papacy’s “final [divestment] of the last trace of antisemitism” (474), though one might disagree about how final it really was.

Pollard’s contribution to the subject of the popes during the age of totalitarianism has not definitively resolved any outstanding controversies and debates, but he has provided a judicious, nuanced, and well-informed examination of Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII. Expertly using a truly impressive array of materials in multiple languages, including the most recent scholarship, he grounds these popes in the contexts of both great political crisis and upheaval in Europe as well as the Church’s institutional development and growth as a political and diplomatic player. Without drawing attention away from the experience of the victims of Nazism, he quietly reminds the reader in his conclusion of the impact of communism across the world, from Asia to Europe to North America (Mexico), on Catholics and the Church: “This period of the persecution and martyrdom of Catholics must be ranked alongside those under the Roman emperors, during the Reformation and wars of religion of the sixteenth century, and in the years following the French Revolution of 1789” (460). All three popes under scrutiny made mistakes, some grievous, but their terror of widespread communist victory, which was consistently at the forefront of their thinking and behavior, perhaps makes their actions more human, and more understandable. It is to Pollard’s credit, as historian and writer, that he has made this perspective available to his readers.

Review of Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 405 Pp., ISBN 9781442628281.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

“When Words are not matched by Actions”

“The Pope at times cannot remain silent. Governments only consider political and military issues, intentionally disregarding moral and legal issues in which, on the other hand, the Pope is primarily interested in and cannot ignore…How could the Pope, in the present circumstances, be guilty of such a serious omission as that of remaining a disinterested spectator of such heinous acts, while the entire world was waiting for his word?” (301)

These are strong words, uttered by Pope Pius XII to Dino Alfieri, the Italian Ambassador to the Holy See. Which heinous acts was the Pope willing to denounce? In this case, Alfieri had explained to Pius XII that Il Duce was displeased that in May 1940, Pius had sent a letter of commiseration to Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands upon their invasion by Nazi Germany. In The Pope’s Dilemma, Jacques Kornberg takes the reader on an odyssey to examine the reasons why Pope Pius XII might have chosen silence and inaction over outright condemnation of Nazi atrocities committed during the Second World War. Kornberg’s work represents a monumental compilation of materials, both primary and secondary sources, reflecting a lifetime of study on the role that organized religion plays in our world. Written clearly and argued persuasively, one might hope that this work would be the definitive end to the “Pius Wars,” however, one can assume that this just might engender further responses from both sides of the battle.

Kornberg takes on both sides of the Pius War, questioning the various ways in which scholars have sought to either support Pius’s reactions to the Nazi regime or have tried to find fault with Pius’s response (or lack thereof). At the book’s outset, Kornberg asks the fundamental question that has frustrated both sides of the scholarly debate: “why was the pope unable to deal with radical evil?” (3) Kornberg argues that, in his view, the papacy of Pius XII was a moral failure out of “calculated acquiescence;” meaning that the pope willingly allowed Nazi atrocities to happen “because of his own priorities and responsibilities as head of the Roman Catholic Church” (8-9). Kornberg then tracks how Pius’s reputation drastically plummeted in the 1960s, in no small part to the wildly successful play by Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter, (The Deputy) which depicted a cold, calculating Pius who sat silent in the face of Nazi crimes for “reasons of state” (16). With this incendiary play, debates raged: was Pius complicit with the Nazi regime due to his silence or was Hochhuth’s play no more than a deeply flawed portrayal of the Pope? Kornberg takes the reader through the play, the reactions and counter-reactions to it and links this to the role of Vatican II in further sealing the demise of Pius’s reputation. A new era was opening up for the Church under the leadership of the charismatic and charming Pope John XXIII and Kornberg dryly notes that in this new climate, “it was inevitable that Pius XII’s reputation would sink like a stone” (35). At issue here was the question of mission: what was the Catholic Church’s role? Was it to serve as a voice of morality to the world, was it to concern itself primarily with pastoral care, or was it to be a mixture of both of these? Raising these questions allows Kornberg to move on to his next chapter, addressing the options of Eugenio Pacelli and his role in the drafting of the Reichskonkordat.

Kornberg takes readers through the historiography of the 1960s-1970s debate between Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen. Scholder denounced the role of then Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli for sacrificing Catholic opposition to the Nazi regime in his single-minded quest for a treaty between the Holy See and the German Reich. On the other side of the debate was Konrad Repgen, who interpreted Pacelli’s actions in a much more favorable light, arguing that the Cardinal Secretary of State was attempting to keep the Catholic Church’s institutions protected in the face of a ruthless dictatorship. Kornberg neatly walks readers through the works of other prominent historians, such as Ludwig Volk, Hubert Wolf, Gerhard Besier, Martin Menke, and many more to summarize their findings that Pacelli, and his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, had both determined that the Vatican’s top priority was to find guarantees that the institutions of the Church would go on. To achieve that end, they followed the German Catholic populations’ lead, deciding to reach an accommodation with Hitler’s regime. This allowed German Catholics to believe that they could be both “good Catholics” while simultaneously behaving as “good Germans.” But, how were German Catholics to behave in the face of war?

Kornberg’s third chapter analyzes Pope Pius XII’s wartime papacy. Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope in March 1939. Two weeks later Hitler seized control of what was left of the Czech state. For the new pope, he was now face-to-face with the totalitarian aims of Hitler and Mussolini and, as war raged, how would the new pope respond? Chapter Three focuses on Pius’s interactions with some of the Catholic belligerent states- Slovakia, Croatia, France, Italy, and Hungary, with the premise that the pope was revered there and should have had some kind of palpable influence over Catholics living in these territories. What emerges, in each case, are examples of local church leaders expressing concern–or even outrage–that Catholics of “Jewish descent”(converts to Catholicism), were going to be impacted by anti-Jewish legislation and deportations. Pius XII feared moving too far ahead of local Catholic popular opinion, so he chose not to challenge Catholics, never urging them to go beyond defending narrowly defined Catholic interests. In each country Kornberg presents, Pius listened to local church leaders, thought about local Catholic consensus, and opted to not alienate Catholics and risk losing them for the Church. Reinforcing the structures of the church, providing sacramental care for local Catholics, trumped publically intervening to save the lives of persecuted minorities such as the Jews. Perhaps the most indicting of all the examples in this chapter, refers to Pius moving heaven and earth to protect Rome from destruction. While Jews of Rome were being deported, Pius spoke out eloquently against the potential destruction of the seat of Christianity. To Pius, Rome was sacred, eternal, and it was his mission to use his spiritual and moral authority to become “the Savior of the City” (121). Through his actions, Pius XII had ensured that Catholics would have access to the instruments of the sacraments, preserving the institutions of the Catholic Church all while remaining silent regarding the round ups of Jews throughout Rome.

Chapter four presents the special case of Poland, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, site of unimaginable brutality during the war- against both Catholic Poles and Jews. Surely, the pope would have an obligation to condemn Nazi aggression and the consequent victimization of the Polish population at the hands of their oppressors? Kornberg reveals, however, that the pope opted to hold back, carefully weighing his concerns. Foreign diplomats pressed the pope to utter an open, forthright condemnation of Nazi aggression against Poland, yet, when the pope did speak out, on October 20, 1939, his words were primarily a prayer for Blessed Mary’s intervention in Poland. The pope’s silence was incomprehensible to many who were suffering, but the pope maintained that German retaliation such as was being carried out in the Warthegau region of conquered Poland, kept him from saying more. Again, as in chapter three, we see the pope following the lead of local bishops, the general Catholic consensus, and opting to keep Catholic institutions functioning so as to provide pastoral care to those Catholics who desired it. The pope feared more than anything else that the Church would not be able to provide care for the souls of the people (155) and people was defined as Catholic people, not Jews.

What were the attitudes of Pius XII towards the Jews? This has been hotly contested by historians since at least 1964 when Guenter Lewy argued that traditional antisemitism precluded a true sense of moral outrage in Vatican circles. Beginning with an exploration of Pope Pius XI’s attitudes towards Jews, Kornberg unpacks many of the statements issued by Pius XI (pope from 1922-1939) and his Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli. For both men, Kornberg demonstrates a strong linkage between fears of communism and Jewishness added on to the pre-existing Catholic Church beliefs in supercessionism and charges of deicide. Both men also used condemnatory language regarding modern day Jews rather than trying to emphasize to their listeners that Catholicism and Judaism had a shared heritage. At a time when Jewish lives were in extreme peril, Pope Pius XII chose to speak only in general terms of suffering where all involved in war were victims. Anti-Jewish decrees were seen as a way of protecting Christian society from the “harmful influences of the Jews” and did nothing to inspire Catholics to protest the transformation of Jews into second class citizens in whatever nations they lived. Pope Pius XII “continued to speak of the guilt of the Jews and their continued hostility to the church. In doing so he did nothing to prevent Catholics from looking upon Jewish distress with indifference, and to continue to acquiesce to the German government’s persecution of the Jews, and ultimately to the destruction of European Jewry” (184).

Because so many historians have accused Pius of silence in the face of such utter destruction, Kornberg looks to earlier popes and their responses to similar crises such as the Armenian genocide or the use of poison gas against civilians in Ethiopia. What Kornberg presents is strong evidence that Pius was one of a piece- examining the policies of Leo XIII, Benedict XV, and Pius XI reveals that each of these popes, when faced with mass atrocities, weighed the advantages and disadvantages to the Church and always chose the option that promised Catholic unity and reinforced papal authority. In one exceptional case, that of the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, then Pope Pius XI issued an ambiguously worded letter, which then led French Catholics to declare that they were immune to papal influence and that the French state was a sacred concept to them. In this instance, papal authority was shown to be without teeth and the limits of papal authority had been revealed. In the case of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and its use of mustard gas against civilians, Pius XI urged conciliation on the part of Ethiopia, recognizing that the Italian people supported the conquest and he feared a further weakening of his authority over Catholics in Fascist Italy. Towards the end of Pius XI’s life, he began to publically address the racism of the Nazi regime. In an encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), in March 1937, the pope condemned the exaltation of one race over another, stressing the common humanity of all, but the true intent of the encyclical was that Pius linked Nazi racism with an effort to establish a national church based on German blood, thus supplanting the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. Racism had also by this time been uncoupled from antisemitism as Pius had argued that Catholics had a right to defend themselves against the corrupting power of secular, liberalized, emancipated Jews (226).

What then were Pius XII’s priorities? Why did he refuse to condemn Catholics who participated in atrocities or those who sat passively by the side allowing such despicable acts to be implemented? Here again, Kornberg takes the reader through the historiography of papal apologists as well as papal detractors. Did Pius XII favor Germany due to his trepidation regarding the spread of Communism? Kornberg argues effectively that, no, Pius encouraged American Catholic support of lend-lease material to the Soviet Union, that he refused to press Germany for a separate peace in the face of growing Communist power, that he engaged in an active plot to unseat Hitler from power. If Pius did not view Germany as a bulwark against Communism, was he silent about Nazi atrocities in order to preserve his role as diplomatic mediator at war’s end? Here again Kornberg argues that no, Pius XII’s diplomatic efforts to avert war ended in failure and that, following the invasion of Poland, his diplomacy was largely ignored. Another explanation offered by the pope’s defenders with regard to his silence is that he worried that if he spoke out, then worse things would happen to the victims. Kornberg examines Pius XII’s own explanations for his silence and finds that Pius cited two different reasons: as “common Father” to all Catholics on each side of the war, he thought he had to remain impartial; the second explanation, regarding potential retaliation against victims of Nazi aggression as it turns out referred to the suffering of the Polish Catholic Church and the threatened loss of sacramental life in Poland.

So, what were the pope’s priorities then? Kornberg places Pius’s top priority in his pastoral responsibilities of a universal church. His goal was to not alienate any Catholics from the Church and, hence, from potential salvation. Therefore, he concluded that he could not challenge Catholics to choose between their loyalty to the Church versus their loyalty to their State. Taking the long view of history, the Pope was envisioning a time when the war was over and Catholics from all of the warring nations would have to be reunited in the Church. Any Catholics who had participated in atrocities could receive forgiveness and salvation if they were truly repentant. Kornberg concludes that a great sacrifice was made in this decision: “Pope Pius XII looked the other way when human rights were being trampled on, and when Jews were deported to face unprecedented horrors, and continued to look the other way when Catholics participated in these crimes” (264). Religious values of the “good” trumped the moral imperative.

Finally, Kornberg brings the reader back to his opening question: why did the pope retreat before radical evil? To that, Kornberg responds with a thorough examination of Church doctrines ranging from the creation of the early Church under the Apostles, to the writings of St. Augustine, to the time of Pope Pius XII. The manuals that would have been available for Pius to consult would have been the culmination of centuries of teaching, and those manuals would have stressed that human beings are prone to sin and weakness but, through the power of the sacraments, provided by the Church, salvation was still a possibility. For Pius, as head of the Church, his primary responsibility as he saw it, was to provide access to the sacraments so that the faithful could be saved. This meant that the Pope could not overly burden the consciences of ordinary Catholics whose weak faith might result in their damnation. Weighing ‘greater evils” versus “lesser evils,” this type of casuistry led Pius XII to engage in “calculated acquiescence to mass atrocities when committed by fellow Catholics in order to hold out to them the prospect of God’s forgiveness and grace” (274).

Pius XII, at the war’s end, could feel that he had done his duty: he had preserved the institutions of the Church. Unfortunately his claims of being a moral authority who spoke truth to power and encouraged Catholics to resist evil were only words. Words not matched by actions.