Category Archives: Volume 16 Number 2 (June 2010)

Letter from the editors: June 2010

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Letter from the editors: June 2010

By Kyle Jantzen

Statue of St. Boniface, Apostle of the Germans, in Mainz.

We are pleased to offer our second issue of the ACCH Quarterly, successor publication to John S. Conway’s Association of Contemporary Church Historians Newsletter. In this issue, the emphasis is on German Catholic Christianity in the twentieth century, with reviews of two new books on the relationship between Catholicism and Nazism, a note about Vatican archival documents recently made available to scholars online, as well as a report from a recent conference on Eugenio Pacelli as the Vatican Nuncio in Germany. Other contributions consider Protestant antisemitism and smaller evangelical movements as well.

It is our sincere hope as editors that you enjoy the new e-journal format and content of the ACCH Quarterly. Over time, we plan to mount all of the old newsletters (volumes 1-15) on the new site. For now, you can still find old issues of the newsletter at Randall Bytwerk’s excellent website, available at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/akz/.

If you are affiliated with a university or college, we would encourage you to request that the ACCH Quarterly be added to your library’s electronic resources. Our ISSN number is 1923-1725, and your librarian will know how to add our journal to your library’s existing online resources.

Each issue of the ACCH Quarterly will be compiled by three or more members of the editorial team, on a rotating basis. We welcome your suggestions for content or any other feedback you might have about the new format. Please send these to Kyle Jantzen at kjantzen@ambrose.edu.

On behalf of all of the ACCH Quarterly editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

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Review of Michael Hirschfeld/Maria Anna Zumholz, eds., Oldenburgs Priester unter NS-Terror, 1932 – 1945. Herrschaftsalltag in Milieu und Diaspora

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Review of Michael Hirschfeld/Maria Anna Zumholz, eds., Oldenburgs Priester unter NS-Terror, 1932 – 1945. Herrschaftsalltag in Milieu und Diaspora (Münster: Aschendorgg Verlag, 2006), 818 pp. ISBN: 3-402-02492-6.

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 96 No. 1 (January 2010): 160-161, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

This mammoth volume details the persecution of Roman Catholic priests in Oldenburg during the years of National Socialist rule.  Containing nearly 80 separate accounts of individual priests and clergy who ran afoul of the Nazi state, this compilation is a Festschrift for Joachim Kuropka, the historian at the local University in Vechta known for his regional histories of the Oldenburg region in Northwestern Germany and his scholarship on the Cardinal of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen.

This dense volume centers on Oldenburg, a long, slender sliver that technically belonged to the diocese of Münster but was cut off geographically by the diocese of Osnabrück. The northern sections were part of the Catholic diaspora, an almost exclusively Protestant bastion known for his strong support for the Nazis. In contrast, the southern regions, which included the regional centers of Cloppenburg and Vechta, was home to a thriving Catholic milieu.  With than 90 percent of the population consisting of registered Catholics, the Catholic parishes there boasted thriving ancillary organizations and a dynamic parish life.

The editors, Michael Hirschfeld and Maria Anna Zumholz, leave little doubt that the strength of the Catholic milieu in these southern regions contributed to the efficacy of actions that thwarted Nazi efforts to dismantle the building blocks of this Catholic subculture. They argue that the milieu in this region did not erode. The “indicators” of religious strength – the number of priests in a region, Easter attendance, etc. – show that the milieu, in spite of significant persecution, more than held its own. Nor did clergy contribute to an attitude of uncritical obedience to the Nazi state. Instead, they were in the forefront of the resistance to Nazi ideology, seeking to counter the anti-Christian attacks launched by the Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg. As such, these priests earned the special enmity of Nazi enforcers in the Gestapo, who cracked down – sometimes methodically, sometimes sporadically – on Catholic institutions and their associates.

To be sure, this focus on persecution – the arrests, the threats, the disruptions to parish life – is an indispensable part of the story of the Catholic church under Nazi rule. For in fact, as the section on regional Nazi perpetrators in the Gestapo, party and the courts makes clear, hardliners sought to eradicate nearly all traces of religious influence on German public life.

But this is a selective lens with which to view this era, one which is by definition, incomplete. The focus on persecution necessarily precludes an analysis of accommodations to the Nazi state made by other clergy either by choice or out of necessity.  Absent are what might be termed the grey areas in the relationship between the church and National Socialism. To what extent were these priests representative of the clergy as a whole and were there areas in which they granted their approval to the other aspects of the Nazi agenda and state? The editors pay lip service to these questions, but their answers ultimately hearken back to works of earlier eras. The narratives they create are those produced already in the 1940s by chroniclers such as Johannes Neuhäusler : the patterns they use were laid out in the 1980s and 1990s in the voluminous works, Priester unter Hitlers Terror, produced by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn.  This is not to negate their findings but to suggest that this is but one part – and a necessary part – of a larger picture.

 

 

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Review of Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and the Early Nazi Movement in Munich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Review of Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and the Early Nazi Movement in Munich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 312 pp. ISBN: 0195390245.

By Beth Ann Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State University

For many people the National Socialist movement is forever embedded in their minds with neo-pagan revivals and pseudo-sacral rituals. Derek Hastings’ work, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism, attempts to prove otherwise.Hastings’ research reveals a distinctly Catholic overtone in the early development of the Nazi movement in Munich and its environs and he argues that, up until the failed 1923 Beerhall Putsch, the movement was overwhelmingly Catholic in its orientation.Hastings’ greatest contribution here is to provide well-researched evidence that addresses the very early moments of the NSDAP’s formation, something that has hitherto been largely neglected by historians of the Third Reich. He also makes a major contribution by providing portraits of individual Catholics, both from the clergy and the laity, in order to demonstrate how the early movement was intertwined with Catholic identity. Once again,Hastings makes an enormous contribution in that most studies, when addressing the foundations of the Nazi movement, ignore the reality of Catholic-dominated Munich and seek to portray Nazism as incompatible with Catholicism. Finally,Hastings is also able to show how the movement eventually lost its Catholic orientation and along the way, many of its original Catholic supporters.

One of the many strengths of Hastings’ work is his ability to “break the mold” and prove that Munich Catholics were not “typical” in that they were generally opposed to ultramontanism and especially rejected political Catholicism. This resulted in many Catholics rejecting the Center Party and also in the development of a distinctive Catholic culture, which emphasized “religious Catholicism” in opposition to that of the perceived hypocrisy of political Catholicism. Through the exploration of pre-WWI Catholic trends, Hastings convincingly argues that Reform Catholicism became a type of “fighting,” nationalistic movement around Munich and that Reform Catholicism was able to link itself to the more nebulous “Positive Christianity,” which the early Nazi movement incorporated into the 1920 party platform. In the third and fourth chapters of his work, Hastings makes a compelling argument that although Nazism stressed interconfessionalism, the movement was flourishing in a Catholic environment where Nazi publications stressed that their members should attend Catholic masses, ceremonies, and demonstrations. He also shows, through short biographical sketches, various Catholic priests who energetically stepped forward to encourage their parishioners to join the Nazi movement. All of this Catholic overlay began to dissipate once Hitler made the decision to allow Erich Ludendorff and the Kampfbund to become involved in the attempted putsch of 1923.Hastings traces the decline of Catholic influence and the drifting away of many of the early and most vocal Catholic supporters of the Nazi movement. Once the Nazi movement was refounded, a more secularized version of political religion supplanted what had once been intimately tied to a Catholic-Christian world view.

Derek Hastings has made a significant contribution to the field of German history with this manuscript. His work makes an excellent companion piece to Kevin P. Spicer’s Hitler’s Priests, as Spicer’s work tracks many of these same Catholic supporters of Nazism, albeit in a later time period. Also, Hastings’ work will complement the work of Richard Steigmann-Gall since Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich seeks to argue that many Nazi leaders thought of themselves as practicing Christians—but Steigmann-Gall focuses primarily on Protestants which again places the work in a later time frame. In addition, Hastings has been able to effectively argue, through the use of excellent archival sources, that the early Nazi movement was in fact dominated by a type of German Catholicism and that this perspective on the world should not be overlooked simply because of an antagonistic relationship that developed between the Catholic Church and Hitler’s regime in the latter years of the Third Reich. Perhaps most importantly,Hastings work will challenge German historians to re-think what made many German Catholics believe that they could be both “good Nazis” and “good Catholics.” His work goes a long way in showing how that connection was in fact possible, particularly when the parish priest was giving the blessing over swastika flags and officiating at various Nazi ceremonies.

 

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Article Reprint: Björn Krondorfer, “Review of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Article Reprint: Björn Krondorfer, “Review of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.”

By Dr. Björn Krondorfer, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

(This slightly corrected review appeared first in theologie.geschichte 4 (2009), http://aps.sulb.uni-saarland.de/theologie.geschichte/inhalt/2009/126.html, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.)

Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, 384 p., U$ 29,95, ISBN: 978-0-691-12531-2.

Just recently, Germany celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which brought to an end the GDR (East German government) and began the unification of Germany. This momentous political change quickly turned into debates about judicial and moral responsibility and the roles of history and memory—discursive ingredients quite familiar to postwar German attempts at coming to terms with the past. But from now on (1989 onwards) one could no longer talk about Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the singular but in the plural: making sense of the past now referred both to Nazism/Shoah as well to the dictatorial regime of the GDR.

For historians, the opening of the Wall translated into archival access not only to the staggering number of files bearing witness to the surveillance apparatus of the Stasi but also to documents related to the Nazi past in the neue Bundesländer (Eastern regional states) that had hitherto been stashed away. The old East German propagandistic argument that the Nazi past was a problem only in the capitalist West crumbled in light of the evidence of the popularity of Nazism in those Eastern regions in the 1930s and 1940s. For church historians, the states of Saxony and Thuringia became of special interest since these regional churches had propagated theologies that blended völkisch-nationalist inspirations with racist-antisemitic ideologies. Back then, theologians and men of the church had weighed in heavily in support of the National Socialist regime. After 1989, it became inevitable that a new chapter on contemporary German church history would be written: it would reassess the degree of complicity of the churches with völkisch ideologies—a project undertaken by a number of German researches on the history of church and theology on local and regional levels.

In the United States, theologians and religious studies scholars have had a long-standing interest in questions of ideological complicity of the German churches in the Nazi regime, not least spurred by Robert Ericksen’s Theologians under Hitler (1985). In 1996, historian Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross expanded the research to a social and gendered analysis of the movement of “German Christians” (pro-Nazi faction of Protestant churches). In the last ten years, a new generation of American historians (not theologians!)–among them Matthew Hockenos, Kevin Spicer, Beth Griech-Pollele, Richard Steigmann-Gall, and James McNutt —has further probed the infiltration of Nazism into church and religion and investigated the continuing effects of antisemitism on postwar Germany theology.

With Susannah Heschel’s 2008 publication, The Aryan Jesus, the scholarship will yet again move a significant step forward. Heschel, who is professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, synthesizes the various strands of scholarly approaches by looking at a specific group of “theologians under Hitler” within their historical embeddedness in the Nazi regime and the German university system. Her research does not stop in the year 1945 but also traces the postwar careers in West and East Germany of the men who had espoused antisemitic and völkisch theologies. In the sense that The Aryan Jesus could not have been written earlier, it is a groundbreaking work and a culmination of Heschel’s long research (which she started in 1991). The book is also the result of political changes that gave access to secreted-away church documents in the GDR as well as of new scholarly developments in the United States that created fresh conceptual frameworks for the assessment of historical material.

In her previous work, Heschel has repeatedly called attention to the many instances of theological and moral failure of German theologians during the rise of National Socialism. Rather than providing a bulwark against ideologies of hatred and exclusion—ideologies that were eventually translated into a genocidal program—churches and theologians frequently participated in and contributed to ruthlessly exclusionary systems of thought and action. Heschel frequently inserts a passionate voice into her meticulous research, which is also discernible in The Aryan Jesus. Here, she hones in on the complicity of a group of Protestant theologians who were instrumental in the creation and operation of the Entjudungsinstitut inJena, the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence of German Church Life” (from now on “Institute”). Under the political/organizational leadership of pastor Siegfried Leffler and the academic/theological leadership of Walter Grundmann, the Institute was the product of a concerted effort to unite the “German Christians” of Saxony and Thuringia and, beyond this regional goal, to “forge an alliance [with] the larger world of academic scholarship in the field of theology” (201). The Institute became, in today’s language, a kind of think-tank for articulating a theology that aimed at reconciling Christianity with the racist-völkisch agenda of Nazism. Furthermore, it provided scholarly credentials to the efforts of dejudaizing Christianity, thus legitimizing the removal of Jews from German society.

Heschel’s archival research is placed alongside a conceptual grid of race theory and of modernizing trends that advance antisemitic research agendas. This makes for engaging reading. What emerges is a dense and fascinating portrait of a segment of Nazi Germany about which, until recently, not much had been known. Rich in detail about the lives of individual theologians and the institutional work of an organization, The Aryan Jesus also provides conceptual perspectives for understanding the historical narrative in a larger frame. Overall, these two strands (archival research/conceptual grid) complement each other well, but at times the book suffers from interpretive claims that sweep aside a more careful look at the historical data. It is at these junctures that Heschel’s passionate voice seems to get the better of her scholarly prose.


Historical Narrative

The primary substance of The Aryan Jesus rests on two pillars: the work of the Institute as well as its academic director, Walter Grundmann.

Grundmann, professor of New Testament inJena, who had completed his dissertation under Gerhard Kittel, was a prolific writer who wanted to prove the non-Jewish identity of Jesus and the pro-völkisch nature of Christianity. No other theologian better exemplifies the personal involvement in the ideological enterprise of dejudaizing German Christianity. Grundmann was actively engaged in formulating a völkisch theology and in widening the Institute’s political reach, eager to make Christianity palatable to a Nazi leadership—even when the Nazi elite increasingly distanced itself from the Institute’s work. After 1945, Grundmann portrayed himself as a victim of Nazism and, surprisingly, managed to regain respectable positions in the Thuringian church—a fact that demonstrates the successful reintegration of compromised men in the GDR. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Grundmann became an informer for the Stasi, partly because of his continued animosity toward former Confessing Church members. His successful postwar rehabilitation also sheds light on the continuity of anti-Jewish thought patterns in postwar German theology–albeit now cleansed from any overt racist and antisemitic attitudes.

As important as Grundmann’s role had been in the work of the Institute, he was not the only influential figure in its creation. Conservative pastors, some of whom had been members of the paramilitary Free Corps and later became spokespeople for various nationalist causes, were instrumental in the establishment of the Institute. Foremost among them were Siegfried Leffler and, earlier, Julius Leutheuser; both men knew that they could count on the support of people in the church hierarchy, among them Martin Sasse, bishop of Thuringia. Once established, the Institute drew on the wide support of academic theologians across Germany, among them the more notorious theologians Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Walter Birnbaum, Heinz Erich Eisenhuth, and Heinz Hunger as well as people like Johannes Leipoldt (New Testament) and Johannes Hempel (Old Testament). A younger cohort of theologians did their academic work under the mentorship of these men, like Hans-Joachim Thilo, doctoral student of Grundmann and Eisenhuth, who later made a name for himself as practical theologian and therapist in Hamburg. In Heschel’s words, these theologians “represented a spectrum of generational and demographic patterns as well as areas of research within theology” (166). Much of the information on the careers and attitudes of individual theologians is contained in Chapter 4, where Heschel introduces a host of theologians compromised by National Socialism beyond the Institute itself (including Grundmann’s teachers Adolf Schlatter and Gerhard Kittel). Chapter 5 looks at the faculty of Jena where the Institute had found its home, and Chapter 6 describes the reintegration efforts of many of the compromised theologians in East and West Germany.

The second pillar of Heschel’s archival research is the Institute itself: how it came into being, what function it had, and what role it aspired to assume within National Socialism. Chapter 3 describes the multiple projects that the Institute staff initiated and oversaw. It was a huge operation of cleansing and purging: it encompassed the Gospels, prayers, hymnals, catechism, liturgy, and Sunday school materials. References to Judaism and Jews were expunged or exchanged for a new nationalist-völkisch language. Words like Zion, Hosanna, or Jerusalem became victims of the obsessively anti-Judaic and antisemitic censors, indicating how wide a net the Institute tried to cast in its efforts to dejudaize Christianity, far beyond mere academic theologizing.

Heschel mentions the important elements of the Institute’s work, and her research might be detailed enough for an English-speaking audience to understand the extent of the Institute’s ambitions without getting lost in the complexity of local and regional proceedings. Indeed, the English language reviews of The Aryan Jesus that have appeared so far repeatedly praise the thoroughness of her research and frequently provide content summaries of the book’s findings (most extensively in Kevin Madigan’s review in JAAR 77/3 [September 2009], but also in Paula Fredriksen [www.tabletmag.com] and Daniel Harrington [America Magazine, Feb. 16, 2009]).

It may be helpful to know that during the same year as the publication of The Aryan Jesus, another comprehensive study on Grundmann and the “Entjudungsinstitut” was completed. This study relied on the same archival sources and was conducted during the same time period as Heschel’s work. In 2008, Oliver Arnhold, who had first reported on his findings in a 1994 Examensarbeit, submitted his dissertation on the subject at Paderborn University. The 800-page manuscript, to be published in two volumes in the series of “Studien zu Kirche und Israel,” is entitled Die Entjudung des religiösen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscher Theologie und Kirche: Die Thüringer “Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen” und das “Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben” (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 2010). Arnhold, like Heschel, introduces the lives and careers of important figures within the inner and outer circles of the Institute, studies their internal differences and spheres of influence, and traces some of their postwar fates.

At the core of Arnhold’s thesis—and here it differs from The Aryan Jesus—is the organizational structure of the Institute. Arnhold reconstructs in minute detail the Institute’s various branches and projects, its financial structure and internal hierarchy, the infightings and rivalries. Saturated with quotes and footnotes, the picture that emerges in Arnhold’s thesis is far more complex than that of The Aryan Jesus. Although the details sometimes make for tiring reading, the attention given to the various factions and rivalries within the German Christian movement and among the political and spiritual founders of the Institute disallow for the same linear and unifying narrative that Heschel presents. Three valuable appendices complete Arnhold’s study: one lists the names of the Institute staff (according to Arnhold, about 180 people worked at one time or another for the Institute); a second contains short biographies of people relevant to the German Christian movement and those within the Institute’s reach; and the third provides a systematic overview of the Institute’s research projects, committees, and work groups. Arnhold’s work will be another indispensable source for understanding the place and influence of the Entjudungsinstitut.

Conceptual Grid

Besides the difference in emphasis—with Heschel widening the lens to take in the larger landscape of Nazi-infested theologies, and Arnhold focusing the lens on the Institute’s organizational structure and micro-historical development—the two authors differ in yet another way. Whereas Arnhold keeps his study very much within the limits of the history of the “Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen” (the branch of German Christians in Thuringia), Heschel reads the theological debates as part of a modernization effort, arguing that German Protestant theologians under Hitler used racial thinking as a way to stay relevant for “the new political and cultural atmosphere of the Third Reich” (26).

Two strategies, according to Heschel, were operative in the theological battle for recognition: First, Protestant theologians racialized Christianity and, second, aryanized Jesus. This is the conceptual grid laid out for the reader in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Aryan Jesus. Heschel locates the crucial role of the Institute within this grid. “The theology of the Institute,” she writes, “[took] over elements of Nazi racial ideology to bolster and redefine the Christian message” (8), while a non-Jewish Jesus became the “anchor of the Christian identity of Germans, and as Aryan, of the Germanic identity of Christianity” (65). Thus, the “Institute theologians” were able to legitimate “the Nazi conscience through Jesus” (66).

By conceptualizing the issues beyond the pale of a narrow church study, Heschel can apply to her archival materials theoretical frameworks sensitive to gender issues and (post)colonialism. The aryanization of Jesus, for example, is read within a history that began with German romanticism in the nineteenth century, rendering Jesus increasingly nationalist and masculinist over against a stereotyping of a disloyal, feminized Judaism. Keeping this context in mind, the racial construction of a Jesus devoid of Jewishness, which Grundmann and others proclaimed, must be seen less as a Nazi invention but, rather, as a radicalization and racialization of anti-Jewish ideas already present in German culture. “Nazi ideology,” Heschel writes, was itself a “form of supersessionism, a usurpation and colonization of Christian theology, especially its antisemitism, for its own purpose. The theology of the Institute was a similar effort at supersessionism in reverse” (8).

These are helpful suggestions for thinking through the bizarre maze of theological thought that strikes today’s readers as fanciful aberrations and lethal fantasies. It is altogether plausible to regard modernity’s antisemitism as a secular version of supersessionism: the theological supersessionism of old was replaced by racial supersessionism that emerged in the nineteenth century. Under Nazism, in turn, racial supersessionism was retranslated into theological paradigms, seeking removal of the Jewish “stain” from its traditions. For German theologians who bought into and promoted such a racialized Christianity, there was little left that would have enabled them to oppose or resist a program that eventually called for the physical annihilation of Jews.

Limitations

The explanatory power of Heschel’s conceptual grid, however, has limits due to her occasional circular reasoning and a tendency to make sweeping claims. For example, Heschel argues that Nazism is an inverse form of Christian theological supersessionism (“Nazism itself sought a supersessionist position in relation to Christianity”; 23), while also asserting that racialized Christianity is an inverse form of Nazi racial supersessionism. The inherent circularity of such argumentation recalls the irresolvable chicken-or-egg question (what came first: Nazi racialism or theological antisemitism?). Such indeterminacy permits Heschel to allude to the Institute’s and its theologians’ implication in the Holocaust without backing it up with more documentary evidence. On the one hand, the author suggests that the Institute’s influence was instrumental in the implementation of the genocidal program. She writes: “the Institute statements regarding Jews and Judaism were mirrors, in Christianized language, of the official propaganda issued by the Reich during the course of the Holocaust” and they had a “far deeper resonance than that spoken by a politician or journalist.” On the other hand, she inserts disclaimers about any direct linkage, cautioning the reader that “one cannot prove that the Institute’s propaganda helped cause the Holocaust” (14-16). Such rhetorical wavering remains on the suggestive level; it also results in an overestimation of the political effectiveness of the Institute. Readers need to keep in mind that despite the radicalization of the rhetoric coming out of the Institute after 1940, it increasingly became politically ineffective during the war years. German historian Manfred Gailus writes in his review of The Aryan Jesus (H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net [Sept. 2009]) that Heschel’s conclusion about the Institute is not sustainable: It did not, as Heschel argues, reach its “zenith of influence and power” (282) during the war—despite the fact that its staff, and Grundmann among them, mightily vied for such influence. The German Christian movement, within which the Institute must be seen, had passed its peak by the time the war started. What Heschel and Arnhold successfully point out, however, is that the German Christian movement did not simply fade away after 1936 (as it sometimes is assumed), but remained a strong and organized force throughout the Nazi regime.

On other occasions, one senses the author’s moral impatience with the material. When, for example, she quotes Siegfried Leffler—a dangerously ideological and unsympathetic figure—she jumps to a conclusion that seems to be driven more by her passionate dislike of Nazi theologians than by her discernible eye as a scholar of the history of theology. At a meeting of theologians in Dresden in 1936, Leffler—one of the driving forces behind the Institute and the Thuringia German Christians–voiced his opinion that, as a Christian, one might have to kill Jews. The attending theologians (Paul Althaus among them) apparently did not take Leffler to task and, as far as the documents reveal, remained silent. Such silence is, in hindsight, a troubling moral failure. But does it support Heschel’s judgment when she writes that this “lack of outrage is evidence that ridding Germany of Jews had become an acceptable point of discussion among theologians, even when murder was proposed as a technique for achieving it” (10)? Does a non-response to an outrageous opinion already prove acceptance of such a position? Does it really make sense to claim that Protestant theologians already considered the murder of Jews five years before the Nazi leadership decided on the Endlösung, their final genocidal program? Most theologians under Hitler–despite their racism and antisemitism and their wish to dejudaize Christianity and, concomitantly, remove Jews from Germany—usually shied away from articulating support for the physical murder of Jews. It does not diminish the outrage we should feel today about Leffler’s homicidal imagination (and, perhaps, intent), but it does not yet prove genocidal consent. Similarly, a sentence like “the Nuremberg Laws could easily be read as upholding classical Christian values” is prone to too many misunderstandings to be helpful, especially since the author does not elucidate this sweeping claim. In my own work on German theologians, I know of the temptation to disrupt with moral disapproval the callousness that speaks through historical documents of this time, so I understand how such statements can enter into scholarly prose. Yet as scholars we need to indicate when we assess a situation historically and when we insert our personal judgment.

The different conceptual frameworks in the studies of Heschel and Arnhold lead the authors toward drawing different conclusions even when they arrive at a similar analysis. Both studies make clear that it is no longer viable to portray the Protestant German church struggle in terms of starkly opposing groups—here the steadfast Confessing Church, there the corrupted German Christian, and in the middle the non-committal “intact churches.” Both Heschel and Arnhold agree that the study of the archival materials on the Institute and Grundmann demonstrates how deeply antisemitic thought had penetrated German regional churches and academic theologies. The question of whether the Institute played a key role in Nazism or whether its radicalization of a völkisch-antisemitic theology had limited political impact may not be fully answerable yet. But, as Arnhold points out, we know now that the Institute enjoyed the initial support of eleven (!) regional churches.

Arnhold and Heschel generally agree on the fact that multiple layers of antisemitic, völkisch, nationalist, and racist thought had affected to some degree most German theologians, bishops, pastors, and lay people during the Third Reich. This mixture of poisonous discourse was, to use Heschel’s phrase, the “lingua franca of the Nazi era” (7) and it was employed across a wide spectrum of people, even those who opposed Hitler. Arnhold and Heschel, however, interpret the function and role of this “lingua franca” differently. While Arnhold uses the widespread employment of a racist-völkisch-antisemitic language to emphasize the rivalries between different factions of the German Christians, Heschel uses it to argue for the unifying power of such discourse. According to Heschel, the importance of the “lingua franca” was its exclusionary function: by removing Jews and dejudaizing Christianity, German Christians succeeded in proclaiming unity with their own national community. “Antisemitism,” she writes, “was the glue that joined the various theological method and impulses and also brought passion to religion” (66).  Though Heschel occasionally concedes that antisemitism was also used as a “tactic in the rhetorical battles among the different Christian factions” (7), she really emphasizes the unifying effect of the theologians’ racialized discourse. In the Third Reich, theologians “translated the often inchoate meaning of Nazism into a substantive discourse on Christian ritual and theology, giving Nazism religious and moral authority” (16).

Arnhold, on the other hand, does not see so much unity as disunity at work. Although his study is not sufficiently deliberate in teasing out this issue in theoretical terms, throughout he points to the multiple differences among the various völkisch-racist-nationalist positions. Theologians across a broad spectrum referred to a lingua franca which–however appallingly similar and bizarre to modern ears–was then understood in its nuances to stake out competing theological and political claims. The Institute was not free from such competition: it was not an exemplary place for völkisch unity but was steaming with political conflicts and personal rivalries. Arnhold emphasizes—more pronouncedly than Heschel—that the Institute was eventually neglected by the Nazi leadership. The more the Institute was ignored, the more its founders and theologians radicalized their thinking in the hope that, one day, they would regain favor in the eyes of the party. The firmer the secularized Nazi leaders proceeded with the implementation of the genocidal program, the less relevant church and theologians became in their eyes.

Together with previously published studies on aspects of Grundmann and the Entjudungsinstitut (by scholars like Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Roland Deines, Peter von der Osten Sacken), both Heschel’s and Arnhold’s important works contribute to a fuller understanding of German church history in general and of the Nazi-infested German Christian movement in particular. The special merit of Heschel’s book, in addition to her historical research, lies in the broadening of the issues, whether these concern patterns of antisemitism in modernity, race and colonialism, and the gendered dynamics hidden away in the formation of national and religious identities. Future research on the effects of genocidal and totalitarian mentalities on theology and the church cannot sidestep The Aryan Jesus.

 

 

 

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Book Note: Victims of Nazism: Bonhoeffer and Jägerstätter

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Book Note: Victims of Nazism: Bonhoeffer and Jägerstätter

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements, The SPCK Introduction to Bonhoeffer (London: SPCK, 2010), 106 pp. ISBN: 978-0-281-06086-3.

Jeffrey C. Pugh, Religionless Christianity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times (London and New York: T & T Clark International, 2008), 171 pp. ISBN: 0567032590.

Franz Jägerstätter, Letters and Writings from Prison, edited by Erna Putz, translated with commentary by Robert A. Krieg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 252 pp. ISBN: 1570758263.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9th, 1945, less than a month before the Nazi regime was overthrown, for his involvement with the plot to assassinate Hitler. His tragic death, along with his provocative writings from prison, made him a significant figure in the post-1945 years, when he became Germany’s best-known theologian of recent times. The account of his life, written by his friend Eberhard Bethge, and more recently translated into English by Victoria Barnett, is probably one of the twentieth century’s outstanding biographies. But it is compendious. Hence the need for more concise introductions for newer audiences.

The English author, Keith Clements, and the American scholar, Jeffrey Pugh, have recently supplied us with the latest useful additions to this genre, following in the steps of the Australian John Moses, whose book The Reluctant Revolutionary was reviewed here last year (see Vol. XV, no. 7/8, July/August 2009). Clements, a leading figure inEurope’s ecumenical fraternity, is keen to stress the young Bonhoeffer’s early enthusiasm for the movement which eventually culminated in the World Council of Churches. In those early days, Bonhoeffer felt a strong attraction towards pacifism. His biographers have therefore had to explain why he later came to advocate the forcible overthrow of the Nazi totalitarian system and the murder of Hitler. Clements believes this was because he came to realize that his hopes for a universal Ecumenical Council proclaiming peace to the world was simply unrealistic. Pugh leaves the issue open but points to a change in orientation after 1935 with Bonhoeffer’s greater emphasis on the personal appropriation of faith through the Sermon on the Mount.

Similarly all his recent biographers have felt a need to include a chapter on Bonhoeffer and the Jews. Difficulties arise from the fact that Bonhoeffer’s most significant writing on this subject dates from early 1933, and contains a highly traditional Lutheran view of “reprobate” Judaism and the need for conversion. There are only minor utterances in later years and no references at all to Judaism in his Letters and Papers from Prison. But Moses asserts that Bonhoeffer, along with Karl Barth, led the way in repudiating Christian anti-Judaism and embraced Jews as Jews. On the other hand, Stephen Haynes (see review here Vol. XII, no. 9, September 2006) is sceptical of any claims making Bonhoeffer out to be a precursor of post-Holocaust Christian theology. Clements sits on the fence, but has to admit that such a novel stance can only be inferred, in the absence of any sustained treatment.

Clements seeks to avoid hagiography, but points out that both in his theology and in his participation in the anti-Nazi Resistance, Bonhoeffer transcended the cultural and political limitations of his generation. In his final chapter he describes how Bonhoeffer’s radical demands have continued to provoke churches and ecumenical communities to renounce their traditional attitudes. Bonhoeffer’s theology, he concludes, will continue to be relevant, because it deals so centrally with the nature of human existence.

Pugh equally deplores hagiography on the matter of Bonhoeffer’s legacy in more recent American political controversies. But he also draws parallels, and much of his book seeks to warn his countrymen of the dangers of capitulation to or complicity with the military and political goals of their governing structures of power. The German churches’ attitudes in the 1930s, he asserts, constituted one of Western Christianity’s greatest failures. Bonhoeffer’s prophetic witness and resistance are therefore still significant for us today.

Pugh’s chief emphasis is on Bonhoeffer’s more radical theological challenges as found in his prison letters from the last months of his life. His critique of the religious subculture of his day is one which Pugh seeks to correlate not only to today’s politically obedient churches but also to the current secular states and their ideologies of power. In a world come of age, he asks, where can the individual find guidelines for his own or his community’s behaviour? How can Christianity and Scripture be interpreted in a non-religious sense? We have, he suggests, to respond first to the sufferings created by those who so ruthlessly wield power in the world. The answer lies not in any theology of power, but in the theology of the cross, in “watching with Christ inGethsemane”.

For Pugh, identification with the suffering and oppressed peoples of the world justifies, both for Bonhoeffer and for us, the need to confront the powers of domination, after so many centuries when the church has so often allowed itself to be compromised. In a world come of age, Christians urgently need to find a new relationship to the power structures so often bent on destructive paths. This is the heart of Pugh’s message, and he sees Bonhoeffer as his mentor in this process. Religionless Christianity bars us from allegiance to any particular church structure or political order, but instead calls us to the discipline of peace and reconciliation so that we may witness to God’s reconciling and healing.

Franz Jägerstätter was executed on August 9, 1943 for refusing to serve in a combatant unit of the Nazi Wehrmacht. He was a largely self-taught peasant farmer, living in a small village on the western border ofAustria, and a very devout Catholic. Since Nazi Germany had no tolerance for conscientious objectors, his refusal to serve led to his imprisonment, transfer to Berlin, court-martial, and finally to the guillotine. But sixty years later, in 2007, his resolute witness was recognized by theVatican which approved his beatification in an impressive ceremony attended by his 94-year old widow and descendants. To mark this occasion, an edition of his surviving letters and writings was published, which has been skilfully edited and translated by Robert Krieg, and now made available to the English-speaking audience by the publishing arm of the Maryknoll Fathers inNew YorkState.

Krieg’s useful edition and commentary clearly owes a debt to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. By a remarkable coincidence, both men were held in Tegel prison inBerlin during several months from May to August 1943, though there is no record that they actually met.

Jägerstätter’s heroic resistance was first known to the wider world some forty-five years ago when an American pacifist professor, Gordon Zahn, discovered his story in the Austrian church archives, and published his seminal account In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964). Zahn’s book contained long extracts from the surviving letters and testimony. But the present work is more comprehensive, is chronologically arranged, and includes numerous letters to the prisoner from his wife. The picture however remains the same. So does the unresolved enigma of why this peasant farmer should have resolved to adopt this dedicated and costly stance. He was one of only a handful of Catholic conscientious objectors who suffered the same fate. He was not politically engaged, as was Bonhoeffer, nor does he seem to have had contacts with any anti-war or anti-Nazi groups. His was very much a lone decision. The suggestion remains unproven that he had been influenced by Jehovah’s Witnesses, of whom some two hundred were executed during these years for refusing to take up arms or join the army.

What comes through in his letters is his absolute confidence in his Catholic beliefs, strengthened by an intimate knowledge of the Bible. All the more notable is therefore his unwillingness to agree to any compromise, despite the earnest pleas not only of his family and friends, but also of his priest and bishop. His reflections on “What Every Christian Should Know” and his “Last Thoughts” are moving testimonies of faith, conveying both his passion and his pain, but also his stubborn determination not to take the military oath of obedience to his Führer because the call of Christ came first.

Zahn’s book appeared at the time of the Second Vatican Council where Jägerstätter’s intransigent and unwavering stand received much acclaim. The respectful acknowledgement of his sacrifice may have assisted in bringing about changes in Catholic attitudes towards the morality of war. Subsequent history has reinforced the recognition that Christians have a duty to resist evil even at the cost of their lives. And it is notable that the twentieth century has brought forth more Christian martyrs than ever before. Jägerstätter’s witness is therefore both a voice from the past and a call for similar obedience in the future.

 

 

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Article Note: Research on German Free Churches and Sects

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Article Note: Research on German Free Churches and Sects

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia and Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Andrea Strübind, “German Baptists and National Socialism,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 8 no. 3 (May 2008): 5-20.

Carl Simpson, “Jonathan Paul and the German Pentecostal Movement—the First Seven Years, 1907-1914.” JEPTA: Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 28, no. 2 (2008): 169-182.

Andrea Strübind’s article provides the English-speaking audience with a valuable summary of her earlier findings in her book on the Baptist Church during the Nazi era, Die unfreie Freikirche: der Bund der Baptistengemeinden im “Dritten Reich” (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991). Strübind is Professor of Church History in the Protestant Faculty of Oldenburg University, and an authoritative, but not uncritical, observer of her denomination’s chequered record during the turbulent years of Nazi rule.

German Baptists were among those small groups of free churches which had to struggle throughout the nineteenth century to gain a foothold in Germany against the intolerant pressures of the established Lutheran church. By the twentieth century they had become a conditionally recognised religious community on the edges of society. They sought to encourage the ideal life of true believers, separated from the rest of sinful society and its politics. Hence abstention from all worldly associations was coupled with the demand for freedom from all state interference in church life.

Hitler’s rise to power was greeted by most Baptists as a welcome development. His stress on a healthy and purified society and his anti-communism drew much support. At the same time the Baptist leadership under the strongly nationalist and conservative Paul Schmidt adopted an emphatic affirmation of the state and took no action in support of those in the Protestant Confessing Church who recognised the dangers of Nazi totalitarianism. For instance, in 1937, German Baptists were permitted to attend the Oxford Ecumenical Conference on Life and Work, at which they spoke up loyally in favour of the Nazi regime and its seeming tolerance of Free Church activity.

Despite the increasing evidence of political repression against many of the small sects in Germany, the Baptists remained staunchly loyal to the state. At the same time, the leadership sought to concentrate on the missionary task at home, exclusively concerned with the personal salvation of its adherents.

Given such a stance, it is hardly surprising that German Baptists behaved passively towards the Nazi persecution of the Jews, all the more since there were virtually no Jewish converts in their community. By contrast Hitler’s military victories were hailed as an opportunity for new missionary endeavours. Only one Baptist is known to have become a conscientious objector and was hanged in 1943 for subversion of the armed forces. No protest on his behalf was made. In 1944, after the attempted assassination plot against Hitler, the Baptist leadership sent a congratulatory telegram to prove their unbroken loyalty to their Führer.

This attitude of uncritical support undoubtedly saved the Baptists from the repression and closure meted out to other small sects. But Strübind rightly points out that the narrow focus on such biblical precepts as Romans 13 meant that the Baptists were wholly unequipped to tackle questions of resistance to Nazi tyranny on Christian grounds. Obedience to the state was upheld even after the anti-Christian character of the regime had become terribly evident. Indifference to the political system and individual passivity were this biblically legitimised. The protection of the church’s existence and the survival of local churches were perceived to be the highest aims. And since the same leadership under Schmidt continued in office for many years after 1945, there was never any acknowledgment of these shortcomings or apologies for the enthusiastic loyalty paid to Hitler and his regime.

Like other small sects and Free Churches, German Pentecostals in the Third Reich were both more vulnerable to state repression than the large Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic churches and less likely to attract the concerted attention of police or party authorities. Indeed, judging by correspondence in the files of the Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Gestapo and other state officials were often highly confused about the identity of obscure Pentecostal groups, regularly confusing them with various pseudo-Christian spiritualist movements.

But who were the German Pentecostals, and how did they get their start? This is what Carl Simpson sets out to explain as he introduces us to Jonathan Paul, the early leader of Pentecostalism in Germany. Simpson describes the dramatic conferences which led to the organization of the German Pentecostals in 1907, then outlines the early opposition from other German churches, and the creation of the Mülheimer Verband (the largest Pentecostal Association). Along the way, he argues that, while the American Azusa Street Revival was an important factor, the Pentecostal movement developed a unique and largely independent identity across Europe, with German leaders like Jonathan Paul, Emil Meyer, and Emil Humburg, and Carl Octavius Voget leading the way.

Pentecostalism arrived in Germany from Norway when German evangelist Heinrich Dallmeyer and two Norwegian sisters, Dagmar Gregersen and Agnes Thelle, held evangelistic meetings in Kassel. Conversions, healings, and experiences of speaking in tongues soon aroused a great deal of interest, scandal, and controversy, so that city officials eventually ordered the meetings ended. Within eighteen months, however, Pentecostalism had spread to at least eighteen different German communities, in part through the influence of the pietistic and revivalistic Gemeinschaftsbewegung loosely associated with Lutheran and Reformed churches. By the end of 1908, German Protestant pastor Jonathan Paul had assumed the leadership of German Pentecostals, largely through his position as editor of its official organ, the Pfingstgrüße. Paul set an independent course for his movement, affirming glossolalia as a spiritual gift but not a necessary sign of spirit-filling, asserting that a fruitful Christian life was a more important measure of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Despite Paul’s efforts to chart a moderate course, most German church leaders decisively rejected Pentecostalism, regarding the speaking in tongues as a manifestation of evil, not a divine gift. Other points of controversy were the leadership of women in the Pentecostal movement and the doctrine of Christian perfection, the holiness teaching that asserts spirit-filled Christians can be free from the taint of knowing sin (a “purity of intention,” to use a Wesleyan phrase). On September 15, 1909, this opposition reached a head, when members of the Gnadauer Verband (of the Gemeinschaftsbewegung), the Evangelical Alliance, and other German Free Churches overwhelmingly repudiated the Pentecostal Movement. In response, Pentecostals issued the Mülheim Declaration, a document carefully defining the role of glossolalia and affirming their desire to work with other evangelical movements in Germany. Soon Mülheim became the important centre for German Pentecostals, as evidenced by annual conferences and the name it gave to the association of German Pentecostal churches. By forming as an association rather than as a denomination, Pentecostals could retain membership in their Lutheran or Reformed church homes, while cultivating a more vibrant Christianity among their spirit-filled brothers and sisters in Pentecostal assemblies. Thus it was that Pentecostalism remained in an anomalous position, growing up alongside but not officially connected to other sects and Free Church associations in Germany.

 

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Article Note: “Holy See Documents From World War II Go Online. Researchers Welcome Availability of Pius XII Information”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Article Note: “Holy See Documents From World War II Go Online. Researchers Welcome Availability of Pius XII Information” Zenit, March 25, 2010.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Scholars have long desired greater access to the Vatican Archives, not least for the era of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. This article, in the March 25 issue of Zenit, explains that the Vatican has now made material from the Actae Sanctae Sedis and the Acta Apostolica (the official acts of the Holy See) available online in pdf format. While some of this material had already been published in the Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Acts and Documents of the Holy See Related to the Second World War) between 1965 and 1981, it is a hopeful sign that theseVatican holdings are now appearing digitally.

To view the entire article in Zenit, go to: http://www.zenit.org/article-28755?l=english.

To view the document collection online, go to: www.vatican.va/archive/atti-ufficiali-santa-sede/index_en.htm.

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Conference Report: 40th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Conference Report: 40th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, March 6-8, 2010, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA.

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Plenary Session: “Three Institutional Responses to the Early Persecution of the Jews and to Kristallnacht: The Canadian churches, the Vatican, and the Federal Council of Churches in the United States.”

This plenary session, organized by the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, featured three presentations. The first, by Victoria J. Barnett, Staff Director of Church Relations in the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, was titled, “Seeking a United Voice: The Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the Kirchenkampf, 1933-1938.” Barnett argued that some of the most activist early responses, both to the German Kirchenkampf and the Nazi measures against the Jews, came from the Protestant ecumenical Federal Council of Churches in New York. FCC officials worked with Jewish organizations in the United States, visited Germany and issued public statements, and in particular pressed their German colleagues to condemn the Nazi anti-Jewish measures. As the Kirchenkampf progressed, however, the FCC position shifted to a more neutral tone.  Her comments focused particularly on the reasons why the FCC reactions changed and the way in which FCC officials helped shape the U. S.reaction to Kristallnacht.

Barnett’s presentation was followed by Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Director of Visiting Scholar Programs in the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Brown-Fleming’s paper, “The View from Rome: The Vatican’s Response to Reichskristallnacht,” contextualized the decision by the Holy See to decline an open condemnation of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, despite receiving full reports about this landmark event. While many U.S. religious groups responded swiftly and sharply, Brown-Fleming offered, in contrast, insight into the concerns and preoccupations that shaped the Holy See’s muted response to Kristallnacht.

The final paper, by Kyle Jantzen, Associate Professor of History at Ambrose University College, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and Jonathan Durance, Graduate Student, University of Calgary, was entitled “‘Our Jewish Brethren’: Christian Responses to Kristallnacht in Canadian Mass Media.” Jantzen and Durance examined the early responses of Christian clergy and lay people in the Canadian Protestant churches to Kristallnacht through an analysis of newspaper coverage from across the nation in November and December, 1938. In contrast to the “silence” often attributed to Canadian churches, they presented evidence that many Canadian Christian clergy and lay people engaged in principled protests against Nazi brutality and made energetic calls for government action to alleviate the growing refugee crisis in Germany by allowing Jews into Canada.

The session was lively and well-attended, with many questions raised (perhaps inevitably) concerning the record of Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) during the Third Reich. While (also perhaps inevitably), no definitive conclusions could be reached on the topic, the discussion pointed to the need for more research not only on the role of the Roman Catholic Church, but also on the Protestant Churches worldwide during the Nazi era.

 

 

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Conference Report: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Conference Report: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, March 18-20, 2010, Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, WA.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On March 18-20, 2010, Robert Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies at Pacific Lutheran University, hosted the Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education. This program grows out of generous gifts from the Mayer, Powell, and Heller families which have made possible an endowed chair as well as this annual conference.

The sessions began on March 18 with a lecture by Christopher Browning. He spoke on “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities,” based upon his research for his most recent book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp. Browning gave a nuanced analysis of the benefits and difficulties in using survivor testimony. While he discussed in detail various aspects of survivor testimony which must be considered by historians, he also concluded with the thought that it is not the obligation of survivors to give testimony which matches our expectations.

Friday’s sessions began with two presentations by Holocaust survivors. Philip Waagner, who is a member of the Speakers Bureau of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center (Seattle), described his remarkable experiences as a child survivor in Holland. Sarah Tamir also described her childhood experiences, as well as the Holocaust memory activities now undertaken by the large survivors’ community in her home of Melbourne. The afternoon session began with a presentation by Sara Horowitz, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, speaking on her latest project, “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory.” Professors Lisa Marcus, Rona Kaufmann, and Jennifer Jenkins, all of PLU, spoke on “Jewish Literacies and the Holocaust;” and Tomaz Jardim, a recent Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, spoke on “Ambiguous Justice: The Mauthausen SS Before American Military Commission Courts.” Friday ended with the announcement of two student winners of the Raphael Lemkin Student Essay Contest at PLU, highlighted by James Waller speaking on the themes within his important book, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Mass Murder and Genocide.

Saturday’s session focused on the theme of bystanders. First, Carl Wilkens described his experience of the Rwandan Genocide. As the only American who stayed in Rwanda throughout the violence, he took great risk but survived without harm and was able to intervene successfully in several situations. Victoria Barnett then continued our discussion of bystanders, with recent reflections on her book, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust. John Roth responded to her presentation in a session chaired by John Conway. Throughout this day, students and others in attendance were inspired to consider the importance of their own response to injustice and also the potential for brave individuals actually to make an impact.

The next PLU Holocaust Conference will take place March 17-19, 2011. Interested persons are invited to contact Robert Ericksen (ericksrp@plu.edu) with inquiries or suggestions.

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Conference Report: Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Conference Report: Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland, March 24-26, 2010, Münster,Germany.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

The most controversial pontiff of the 20th century was the focus of a three-day symposium assembled and hosted by Professor Hubert Wolf and sponsored by the European research network, Pio XI, and the Excellence Cluster, Religion and Politics, at the University of Münster. Bringing together more than thirty researchers between March 26 and 28, this symposium honed in on Eugenio Pacelli’s years as the Nuncius in Germany between 1917 and 1929. Participants came from more than eight nations, including Italy,Germany,Poland, the Czech Republic,Israel, the United States,Austria and Switzerland. All presentations were translated simultaneously into Italian and/or German, the two official conference languages.

Keynote addresses were delivered by Romano Prodi, the former Prime Minister of Italy and current President of the European Commission and Mordechai Lewy, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican. In very general terms, Prodi underscored the significance of the disastrous interwar years for the creation of the European Union and the importance of the European Union for the European future. Lewy, on the other hand, spoke much more critically of the conference subject. While dismissive of the epithet, “Hitler’s Pope,” Lewy spoke sharply of Pacelli’s own lack of interest in the fate of European Jews, particularly in the postwar era. The Vatican, he pointed out, was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel, regarding it as the dangerous creation of Communist and atheist forces. The curia, he added, was a bastion of anti-Semitic attitudes. Pius himself greeted the news of Israel’s creation “with mixed feelings,” and called for a “crusade of prayer” for “the sacred land.”

The centerpiece of the symposium was the formal presentation of a massive critical online edition of the approximately 7000 reports that Pacelli transmitted from Germany to the Vatican during his years as Nuncius from 1917 through 1929. Based on software  developed through the assistance of the German Historical Institutes in Rome and London, this online edition places these reports into an online databank, allowing scholars to search for documents by name, date or keyword. This software – DENQ  (Digitalle Editionen neuzeitlicher Quellen) – will allow scholars to compare drafts of Pacelli’s reports with the final versions he dispatched to Rome through multiple windows and color-coded texts.  Observing often subtle changes provide valuable glimpses into Pacelli’s thought processes. In one such report, Pacelli altered his description of Kaiser Wilhelm II from “nondeltutto equilibrato” to “nondeltutto normale.” By allowing users to open multiple windows, this software also provides user with valuable biographical information, e.g. birth and death dates, about those to whom Pacelli refers in his reports. To make optimal use of these features, users will need to use browsers based on Webkit or Gecko, including Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. While it will ultimately take twelve years to bring this project to fruition, the project directors will not wait until then to open up this edition to scholars. Beginning with the year 1917, Pacelli’s reports will be released in regular intervals.

Following the unveiling of this online edition, three papers subsequently examined aspects of Pacelli’s tenure as nuncius.  The German scholar, Klaus Unterburger, described Pacelli’s skepticism vis-à-vis many German theologians as well as attempts to muzzle potentially critical voices. In describing Pacelli’s love for Germany, Phillip Cheneaux, Professor at the Lateran University, underscored the continuities between Pacelli’s years as Nuncios and his later pontificate. The Italian historian Emma Fattorini emphasized the wartime influence of the German Center Party politician, Matthias Erzberger, on Pacelli’s understanding of German politics. Though chronologically far removed from the interwar years, the scandals put in motion by the German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, in the mid-1960s were at the center of Mark Edward Ruff’s presentation. Ruff focused on the missteps of Catholic defenders of Pacelli and, in particular, of the German Catholic media, whose clumsy counterattacks played into the hands of Hochhuth and his champions.

On the third day of the symposium, a panel of six scholars compared nuncios throughout Europe during the interwar era.  Thomas Brechenmacher, Professor in Potsdam, focused on Alberto Vassallo-Torregrossa (1925-1934) and the better known Cesare Orsenigo (1930-1945).  Rupert Klieber, Gianfranco Armando, Alberto Guasco, Emilia Hrabovec, Stanislaw Wilk provided respective portraits of the nuncios in Vienna, Paris, Rome, Prague and Warsaw. Of these nuncios, the most notable was Achille Ratti, Nuncio in Warsaw between 1919 and 1921 before being anointed Pope in 1922.

A final panel provided an overview of political Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Urs Altermatt, Professor in Fribourg, sketched the history political Catholicism in Switzerland, while Karsten Ruprecht laid out the trajectory of the Roman Catholic Center Party in Germany. Walter Iber summed up the history of the Christian Socialist Party in Austria: Stefano Trinchese provided the same for the Partito Popolari in Italy. Jaroslaw Sebek, finally, described the papal policies towards interwar Bohemia.

The conveners intend to publish the conference proceedings within the next year. More details will provided here at a later date.

 

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