Category Archives: Volume 24 Number 3 (September 2018)

Letter from the Editors (September 2018)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Letter from the Editors (September 2018)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

As summer turns to autumn, and universities begin a new year, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to publish a new issue of articles, reviews, and other notes related to the history of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany and Europe.

In this issue, we offer new insights into familiar figures, but also consider ways in which religion impacts more recent events. For instance, we are pleased to reprint a thoughtful interview from Bearings Online, a publication of the Collegeville Institute, with Bonhoeffer scholar (and CCHQ editor) Victoria Barnett, who reflects on the publication of Bonhoeffer’s After Ten Years and its import for today. As well, Heath Spencer reviews a new book on the mixed relationship between the right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and religion.

Ludwig Isenbeck’s sculpture “Christus segnet die Gemeinde,” c. 1930, on the main facade of the Jesus Christus Kirche, Berlin Dahlem.
Source: Axel Mauruszat, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4574323

Also this quarter, Victoria Barnett contributes two reviews. The first is the biography of Reformed pastor Wilhelm Wibbeling of Hesse, a left-learning First World War veteran who pastored churches in socialist communities during and beyond the Third Reich. The second is on an updated version of Katrin Rudolph’s research on Franz Kaufmann, the key figure in a resistance circle in Martin Niemöller’s Dahlem Parish. Kaufmann and others produced forged documents for Jews, helping them survive in Nazi Berlin, until Kaufmann and others were arrested in 1943 (and, in Kaufmann’s case, murdered in Sachsenhausen in 1944).

We round out this latest issue of CCHQ with a review of a new volume of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermons, and a note about a recent article on the complicated nature (and legacy) of Orthodox missions in Nazi-occupied Russia.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. If you know of books or articles you think we should review, or conferences that our readers should know about, please feel free to write to me at kjantzen@ambrose.edu.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Theology in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Bonhoeffer Scholar Victoria J. Barnett

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

“Theology in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Bonhoeffer Scholar Victoria J. Barnett”

By Collegeville Institute

This article was originally published in Bearings Online, July 17, 2018. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Collegeville Institute. You can view the original interview here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Victoria J. Barnett is a scholar who has served as a general editor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series of the theologian’s complete works, published by Fortress Press. She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Barnett recently wrote a new introduction to Bonhoeffer’s essay After Ten Years. In this interview, the Collegeville Institute spoke with her about the resulting book, “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times (Fortress Press, 2017).

You’ve written the introduction to a new edition of Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. In the past that essay has usually appeared as a preface of sorts to Letters and Papers from Prison. Why a new edition of that particular essay now?

This is my favorite Bonhoeffer text, and I’ve thought for several years that it deserved to be published as a stand-alone edition. It’s so eloquent and powerful. As I wrote in my introduction, it is timeless—which is interesting, because it has such a concrete historical context. I don’t think it’s accidental many of the most-quoted passages from Bonhoeffer are from this essay. But to your question, why now?: We’re living in a time where many of us are wrestling collectively and individually with issues of conscience and our responsibilities as people of faith and as citizens. This essay goes to the heart of those issues.

Bonhoeffer addresses a wide range of issues in After Ten Years including the failure of German institutions, moral passivity and civic cowardice on the part of its citizens, the susceptibility of Germans to the influences of propaganda and group think, and more. Have you underlined a passage in the essay that you think is particularly worth highlighting? If you have, why does it catch your attention?

My favorite sentence in the essay comes from the section on “Some statements of faith on God’s action in history”: “I believe that our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.”

It’s simultaneously a reminder for humility and against hopelessness—a reminder that while we may fall short and we don’t know what the outcome of our actions will be, that’s no reason to lose hope and it’s certainly no reason not to act. That perspective—don’t lose hope, take responsibility for whatever you can do, and don’t become paralyzed by doubt or your own failings—is the subtext of so much of this essay. Many other passages touch on it—think of the section “Are we still of any use?” It’s the aspect of the essay that moves me the most personally.

Bonhoeffer’s emotions seem unusually close to the surface in After Ten Years, even more so than in the letters he writes from prison. Do we learn anything about Bonhoeffer from this brief essay?

This kind of relates to what I was just talking about. I wouldn’t quite describe this essay as “whistling in the dark,” but he wrote it at a very uncertain time, and I get the sense that he was trying to clarify and strengthen his own resolve. The day-to-day pressures of those years must have taken their toll. In my own research I’ve found several accounts by people who knew Bonhoeffer who describe a certain emotional fragility (and of course Bonhoeffer himself wrote about his struggles with depression). I personally believe that’s one reason for his frequent trips out of Nazi Germany; he just had to get out and breathe free air for a little while. By late 1942 things were closing in—everywhere, not just in Bonhoeffer’s circles. Both for the victims of National Socialism and those who opposed it, the atmosphere in Berlin was grim on so many levels.

I’ll add another interesting note: last fall I happened to meet a US physician who had a long friendship with Eberhard Bethge (Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer) and his wife Renate. This doctor shared with me an interview he did with Bethge, and I learned for the first time that Bonhoeffer’s father Karl read this letter to the entire family at Christmas 1942. That was news to me. After Ten Years has been understood as a confidential letter to his closest friends in the conspiracy, although Bethge does note in his biography that Bonhoeffer gave a copy to his father. It’s interesting if Bonhoeffer’s father shared this with the family—and this was an extraordinarily close family—and that makes me think more about the emotional undertone you mention.

I would add that Bonhoeffer wrote this between November 1942, when Maria von Wedemeyer’s family had asked him not to write her, and January 13, 1943, when she wrote to say that she would marry him. While there’s been a lot of speculation about their relationship, his January 17 response to her letter and the subsequent love letters between them do indicate some genuine emotional attachment—it’s as if their relationship opens a new door for him and he begins to envision a personal future in a way that he hadn’t before. So I agree with you; I think there’s a lot going on here.

In your introduction to the new edition you warn readers about the hazards of drawing simplistic historical analogies in general, and about the period of National Socialism in particular. Yet, aspects of political life in Bonhoeffer’s Germany seem to help many to gain insight into our own political situation, and, as you have said, you think a new edition of the work is timely. Are you, nevertheless, resistant to pointing to Bonhoeffer and his times as a useful historical analogue to our own? If so, why?

I think Bonhoeffer’s reflections in this essay hold many insights for us today, but I stumble over the phrase “useful historical analogue.” I don’t mean at all to minimize the significance of the xenophobia, hatred, and nationalism that we’re seeing in some parts of our society (and internationally as well), and threats to civil liberties and the free press should be taken very seriously. There are clearly people in our country and elsewhere today who draw inspiration from the history of Nazi Germany and that’s extremely disturbing. Frankly, however, I think we’re wrestling more with the demons of our own history than with German ones, and any response or solution we come up with has to address those demons.

The level on which historical analogies may be most useful is at the level of ordinary human behavior—and of course, to some extent that’s what Bonhoeffer is writing about in After Ten Years.The level on which historical analogies may be most useful is at the level of ordinary human behavior—and of course, to some extent that’s what Bonhoeffer is writing about in After Ten Years. I wrote a book several years ago about the issue of “bystanders,” in which I argued that the political and social dynamics by which certain groups are “otherized,” for example, or the processes by which ordinary people start out as “bystanders” but end up becoming complicit in evil, or the processes by which we rationalize such complicity, or the processes by which bureaucrats and institutions get co-opted, tend to be very similar, whatever the political circumstances.

My biggest concern is that a focus on comparisons to Nazi Germany may deflect our attention from the very American roots of much of what we’re seeing. This is hardly the first time in US history when racism, xenophobia, isolationism, nativism, and nationalism became powerful political forces. The Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence during the 1920s, and the antisemitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism of that era led to a dramatic rise in hate groups during the 1930s. Last summer Neo-Nazis and white supremacists convened in Charlottesville because of the city of Charlottesville voted to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee—a Confederate monument that was commissioned—like many Confederate monuments—during the Jim Crow era (the Lee statue was commissioned in 1917 and dedicated in 1924).

In addition to our ongoing struggles with racism and the legacy of slavery, we’re wrestling with other issues, like deeply clashing philosophies about centralized government vs. states’ rights, about regulation of corporations and businesses, about distribution of wealth. All that sounds very wonkish but these things have consequences not only politically but for our values as a civil society. Should the federal government be run like a corporation, and what does that mean for the ideals of public service or foreign policy? Should we privatize and outsource certain agencies (as has already happened with much of our prison system)? Do we want to live in a society where the rights of women, or immigrants, or gay or transgender individuals, or the poor, vary from state to state? Do we believe in having some kind of social safety net? Do we believe in having free access to information? All those things are on the table.

We could also draw on the long and rich tradition in our history of resistance by people like Elizabeth Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, etc.—people who didn’t just fight against injustice but articulated a new language and vision for what our society can be.

So I think the key here is not to impose Nazi Germany as the template by which we measure what’s happening, but to bring Bonhoeffer’s insights into conversation with those voices in US history who have spoken to similar issues in our context. That’s why at the end of my introductory essay for this edition of After Ten YearsI mention Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Abraham Heschel’s No Religion is an Island. Those texts, like Bonhoeffer’s essay, acknowledge the reality of social and political evil but in a provocative and challenging way that appeals to our better selves.

Sorry this has turned into such a long answer, but as you can see I think a lot about these things.

As an editor of the English translation of Bonhoeffer’s complete works, the editor and reviser of the first unabridged English edition of Eberhard Bethge’s monumental biography of Bonhoeffer, a historian of the German church under National Socialism, and as a Bonhoeffer scholar in your own right, you must have read nearly every known word the man wrote. Can you point to some ways that this prolonged and detailed exposure to Bonhoeffer has affected you?

This certainly wasn’t planned! When I wrote my first book on the Confessing Church I deliberately focused on the “non-Bonhoeffers” because I felt that there was already enough literature on Bonhoeffer. Oh, well.

I’d say that for all the differences between his world and perspective and my own, I’ve come to see him as a reliably thoughtful conversation partner, especially with regard to how we Christians think about our role as citizens. We tend to read him only as a theologian, but like all of us, he was a complex person who was shaped by many factors, one of which was the humanism and sense of public responsibility that characterized much of his family, and that resonates with me. This may sound odd, but I also feel almost a tenderness about the poignancy of this young man and his brief life.

There were moments throughout the Bonhoeffer project, often in one of his letters, when I would suddenly get a deeper glimpse of the person and that was always moving. When you spend years looking at the close-up, sometimes daily, record of someone’s life, you’re reminded constantly how short our life on this earth is, and how little control we have over much of what happens to us.

Just as various divergent Christian theological camps claim Reinhold Niebuhr as their own—there’s the conservative Niebuhr and the liberal Niebuhr—there is now a struggle over Bonhoeffer. Is he to be seen through the lens of evangelical Christianity in the US, or is he more appropriately placed in the tradition of progressive Christianity? What do you make of this tug of war?

First, I think this is a very US-specific phenomenon, and it’s been part of the Bonhoeffer story from the beginning. When Eberhard Bethge arrived at Harvard in 1958 to work on the biography, he commented that “everyone here has his own Bonhoeffer.” That’s partly due to the drama of Bonhoeffer’s life story and partly due to his ability to write about the meaning and challenges of Christian faith in the modern world in a language that speaks to Christians, whether they are evangelicals or liberal mainline Protestants. So everyone likes to claim him but they take the story and his theological significance in different directions.

Politically, his attitudes are pretty clear. He was very outspoken during his time in the US about our problems with racism and horrified by the treatment of African Americans, including the lynchings of that era. In February 1933 when the new Nazi government started targeting its political opponents he wrote Reinhold Niebuhr that Germany needed a Civil Liberties Union. He urged his church to speak out for those who were targeted and powerless. He offered an immediate and unambiguous critique of the Christian nationalism that was embraced by so many German Protestants.

Theologically, he’s complex and doesn’t fit neatly on one side or the other of our American religio-culture wars. There are certain texts that resonate more for mainline Protestants and others that resonate deeply among evangelicals. Bonhoeffer writes about the daily practices of faith, and he also writes about the centrality of social justice as a core part of Christian discipleship. But you know, all these texts were written by the same man, and I wonder whether we might be able to have a different kind of conversation about Bonhoeffer if we acknowledged that and tried to read him on his terms, not ours. The fact that Bonhoeffer’s words resonate with so many people from very different Christian backgrounds should tell us something.

One of the biggest problems however is the hagiography. There’s a popular picture of Bonhoeffer as the leader of the Confessing Church, the one person who spoke out consistently against the persecution of the Jews, and the primary example of Christian witness against National Socialism—a general tendency to portray Bonhoeffer as the central figure in a clear-cut tale of good against evil. In fact, he was on the margins of his church and often struggled with what he should do. There are other Confessing Church figures whose record of resistance, especially during the 1930s, is much clearer than his. The wartime resistance circles in which he moved were a very complicated group. That’s one reason why I tried to give some critical historical details in my introduction to After Ten Years, including the fact that the German resistance included some people who would have been tried for war crimes had they survived. These weren’t all heroic figures who rose up against a system they had always hated; many of the high-ranking generals and bureaucrats who were in a position to overthrow the regime had been very much a part of the Nazi system.

Is there anything important, in your view, that biographers and commentators on Bonhoeffer are missing?

I think we need to recover the person behind the hagiography.We’ve been sifting and re-sifting the same material for decades now, and the time has come to step outside the material in the Bonhoeffer Works—that is, outside the Bethge narrative—if we really want to discover something new. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not going to get new biographical or historical insights into Bonhoeffer unless we do that, and I suspect that such research might also give us some new insights into his theology.

There’s now this vast literature about Nazi Germany, the role of the churches, the Holocaust, and many fascinating but overlooked contemporaries of Bonhoeffer. Exploring Bonhoeffer’s life through that broader lens might give us some new information, and it could also be a corrective to some of the things we’ve gotten wrong. As full disclosure, I should add that I’m writing a new book on Bonhoeffer in which I’m attempting to explore his significance from that outside perspective. And I’ve come across quite a bit of new material, some of which has surprised me and is leading me to rethink my own assumptions. So I guess I’m not done yet.

Review of Wolfgang Thielmann, ed., Alternative für Christen? Die AfD und ihr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Wolfgang Thielmann, ed., Alternative für Christen? Die AfD und ihr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Religion (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2017). Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-3-7615-6439-4.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

This book is a collection of short chapters by Protestant clergy, lay leaders, journalists and public intellectuals on the fraught relationship between Christianity and Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party that has gained significant momentum in state and national elections since its founding in 2013. The editor and most contributors argue that the AfD and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible, though they also recognize that church members are attracted to the party and its program to roughly the same extent as the broader population. For this reason, they recommend dialogue with AfD supporters and sympathizers, though always with the goal of limiting its impact in church and society.

Among the incompatibilities cited by the authors are the AfD’s denigration of vulnerable groups (especially migrants and Muslims), its insistence on a homogeneous German Leitkultur, its political strategy (deliberate provocations and insults, distortions and “alternative facts,” manufacturing or intensifying anxieties), and its invocation of Christianity as an element of national identity rather than a universal faith and system of values. Nevertheless, they recognize that individual Christians have played a key role as founders and leaders of the party (including Frauke Petry, Bernd Lucke, and Konrad Adam on the Protestant side and Jörg Meuthen on the Catholic side). The group “Christen in der AfD” is another indicator that the party has made inroads among Christians, though very few pastors and priests have endorsed the AfD and many have been outspoken in their opposition.

The contributors’ calls for dialogue take different forms. Pastor Ulrich Kasparick of Hetzdorf (Uckerland) stresses the need for outreach to rural parishioners who rely on the internet and social media for much of their information about the wider world. Pastors and church councils must use those same channels to counter AfD positions and explain where they transgress Christian norms. Pastor Sven Petry (formerly married to Frauke Petry) argues that church leaders should listen to the concerns of Germany’s Wutbürger (enraged citizens) even as they challenge the misconceptions and scapegoating promoted by the AfD. Christina Aus der Au defends the decision to invite Anette Schultner (leader of the group “Christen in der AfD”) to participate in a panel discussion at the Protestant Kirchentag in Berlin and Wittenberg in 2017. Aus der Au, who served as president of the Kirchentag that year, appeals to the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for whom the highest priority was not looking heroic, but the survival of the coming generation. It would be better, she argues, for Christians “to get their hands dirty than to wash them in innocence” (83).

Of course, dialogue does not mean moral relativism, nor does it mean that an opponent’s views will go unchallenged. Superintendent Ilka Federschmidt (Wuppertal) welcomes a clear “no” to the AfD on the part of the churches, but like Kasparick she sees a need for ongoing dialogue and active engagement with church members who lean toward the AfD and its agenda. Law professor Jacob Joussen, an elder at the Bonhoeffer-Gemeinde in Düsseldorf, weighs the options available to lay leaders if a member of a church council declares allegiance to the AfD (as Hartmut Beucker did in Wuppertal in 2017). Joussen could find no legal justification for excluding or removing an elder based on party affiliation but argued that non-AfD parish leaders had an obligation to wage a vigorous and public campaign against the ideas of their wayward colleague if such a case were to arise.

The book also makes room for two prominent AfD voices via Hartmut Beucker’s essay “Warum ich für die AfD kandidiere” and a partial transcript from the 2017 Kirchentag, in which Anette Schultner squared off against Bishop Markus Dröge (Berlin-Brandenburg-Schlesische Oberlausitz) and journalist Liane Bednarz. Both Beucker and Schultner are fairly predictable in their opposition to “uncontrolled” migration, “Islamization,” abortion, and gender mainstreaming as well as their promotion of tighter restrictions on immigration, defense of the “Jewish-Christian foundations” of German culture, and “traditional” families. Equally noteworthy is their invocation of the fifth thesis of the Barmen Declaration to argue that the churches should steer clear of politics (i.e., criticism of the AfD), along with their strategy of representing themselves and their party as the true victims of intolerance, hatred and hysteria. When asked to comment on those who feared the AfD because its proposals threatened to restrict their rights, Schultner avoided answering directly and instead accused those who were frustrated over the existence of the AfD of being “undemocratic” (187).

Among the limitations of the book are its lack of historical depth and its minimal engagement with a growing body of research on populism, far-right political parties, and their points of connection with religious communities and identities. Also regrettable is the lack of Catholic contributors and the tendency of several of the Protestant authors to congratulate themselves for wading into the morass of dialogue, unlike their principled but risk-averse coreligionists who had refused to give AfD members access to the podium at the 2016 Katholikentag in Leipzig. A third issue, though admittedly unavoidable in such a work, is that some of the information it relays is quickly outdated. For example, Anette Schultner abandoned the AfD in October 2017, only a few months after defending it at the Kirchentag, because in her view extremists had taken over the party. In May 2018, AfD representative Volker Münz was allowed to speak at the 101^st Katholikentag in Münster.

Despite these drawbacks, the book is a fascinating source for contemporary church historians in that it shows German Protestants (in the larger regional churches as well as the smaller free churches) reflecting on and responding to right-wing populism in real time. Though the players and the circumstances are different in many respects, one cannot help but contrast the nearly unanimous opposition of church leaders to the AfD with the collaboration or complicity of church leaders during the Nazi era. Equally important are the ways in which that earlier history serves as a reference point for contemporary antagonists as they frame the debate and define their positions within it.

Review of Peter Gbiorczyk, Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling (1891-1966): Jugendbewegter, reformierte Theologe im “Zeitalter der Extreme”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Peter Gbiorczyk, Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling (1891-1966): Jugendbewegter, reformierte Theologe im “Zeitalter der Extreme” (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2016). Pp. 769. ISBN 978-3-8440-4772-1.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

This is a biography of a little-known figure in the German church, Pastor Wilhelm Wibbeling, a Reformed pastor and church leader in the church of eastern Hesse. Wibbeling’s life and career spanned what the title accurately describes as “the age of the extreme,” and author Peter Gbiorczyk relates this life story on the much larger stage of the theological, political, and ideological movements, divisions, and debates that shaped twentieth century German church history.

Wibbeling had just completed his theological examinations and practical training for the ministry when the First World War began. He fought, eventually becoming an officer, married shortly after the war ended, and was ordained in 1919. His subsequent career showed his lifelong commitment to the renewal and stability of his church as well as his own strong social-political convictions. His political leanings were socialist. He began his ministry as a youth pastor in the coal-mining town of Bochum in the Ruhr valley, where he reached out to working class, Catholic, socialist, and other youth organizations in the region, creating a coalition that focused especially on the problems of alcoholism among youth. A non-church colleague described him in those years as someone “who didn’t act like a pastor at all, avoided church language and was familiar with and understood the socialist movement.”

By the early 1920s Wibbeling had become part of the Neuwerk Bewegung, which he later described as a movement emerging from the “stormy aftermath of the First World War,” the goal of which “was a decisive breakthrough … toward a reshaping of our entire life.” The focus was social renewal and church reconciliation; the context was the Protestant church. Early leading figures in the movement included pacifists like Eberhard Arnold, who went on to found the Bruderhof movement. The Neuwerk group was one of many church, social, and political movements in interwar Germany, and this book gives an in-depth portrait of Protestant engagement in these different groups and the role played by theologians like Karl Barth, Günther Dehn, and Paul Tillich.

Wibbeling served several small parishes during the 1920s, working with a population that was working class and decidedly anti-church (a member of his church council warned him that “if Jesus himself were to preach, there still wouldn’t be anyone coming to church.”) In the village of Hellstein, where he served from 1928 to 1932, the population’s politics were evident in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, in which over 40 percent of the vote went to the Communist party (with ca. 12 percent going for the Nazi party and 35 percent for the Social Democrats). From 1932 to 1945 he served in Langendiebach, a village of around 1000 people near the town of Hanau. The political demographics were similar to those of his previous parish: 51 percent of the population voted for the Social Democrats in the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections (as compared to 18 percent nationally) and 15 percent for the Communists (compared to 12 percent nationally). The Nazi party received 28 percent of the local vote. Despite the fact that Wibbeling fit right in as a Social Democrat, his application for the pastorate initially met with resistance from the parish council itself, indicating the gap between the political demographics within the church and those of the broader populace. On March 23, 1933, the Social Democrat mayor of Langendiebach was ousted and replaced by a Nazi. Shortly thereafter, Pastor Wibbeling joined in the wider church struggle in the German Protestant church. A local chapter of the Deutsche Christen formed, and the national battles about the church Aryan Paragraph and the Reich bishop election began to unfold on the local level. In November 1934 Wibbeling led his parish to join the Confessing Church and became a member of the regional Confessing Bruderrat.

Wibbeling became drawn into the ongoing battles of the church struggle about youth work, pulpit proclamations, and church governance. Although he came under Gestapo surveillance for his Confessing Church activities, he doesn’t seem to have become more broadly engaged politically, and there was a marked contrast between his more outspoken statements and his actual record. The chapter on the persecution of the Jewish citizens and political opponents (including the arrests and imprisonment of prominent Social Democrats) in Langendiebach is a scant nine pages, and while it thoroughly documents what happened in the village there doesn’t seem to be any record of Wibbeling’s taking a public stand. In 1936 he was visited by Elisabeth Schmitz, who gave him a copy of her memorandum about the persecution of the Jews; in 1947, in fact, it was Wibbeling who signed the affidavit that she was indeed the author of the memorandum. At the time Schmitz was trying to mobilize the Confessing Church to protest the anti-Jewish measures, yet there is no indication that Wibbeling brought the matter before the regional Bruderrat. Similarly, there’s no record of Wibbeling being directly engaged on behalf of the 39 Jewish residents of Langendiebach, most of whom emigrated. After 1939, a heart condition kept Wibbeling out of active military duty and he spent most of the war focused on church youth work and regional Confessing Church politics.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany Wibbeling was soon drawn into the debates about denazification. He was outspoken on the issue: after a June 1945 memorandum to the pastors of the Kurhessen-Waldeck regional church announced the need to eradicate the “National Socialist remnants” from the church, Wibbeling responded caustically that many of those still serving in the church leadership, including its president, had been Nazi party members and had signed the 1939 Godesberg Declaration, which sought to “de-Judaize” the church and create separate congregations for Christians of Jewish descent. “Whoever was co-responsible for these decisions is among the remnants that now should be eradicated,” he wrote, and he argued that anyone who had been a member of the Nazi party or the German Christians should be removed from the ministry.

Wibbeling’s stand became part of the wider postwar debate among Protestant leaders about denazification, and this section is certainly one of the most detailed and interesting accounts in the book. Wibbeling became provost of the church district in 1946 and chaired the Hanau denazification commission for church employees (including not only clergy but deacons, organists, and religious educators). Clergy who had been party members (and those sympathetic to them) argued that only those who had failed to fulfil their pastoral obligations and “acted against scripture and confession” could be removed—i.e., that their political views per se were no criteria for removal from office. (This of course undermined the very purpose of denazification.) A striking number of those who came up before the Hanau denazification board had been members of the German Christian movement before joining the Confessing Church.

Most of the clergy who came before the Hanau denazification commission were pushed into early retirement but were able to retire with their pensions; the outcomes of denazification were more severe for non-clergy church employees, many of whom were suspended or fired. The case of Pastor Bruno Adelsberger illustrates the church’s passivity on the matter. Adelsberger was an early Nazi party member and avid German Christian who was described as a “notoriously zealous agitator” for Nazism who supported the “dejudaization” of the church. Unrepentant before the denazification board, Adelsberger was told that he could not remain in his parish but would have to apply to another parish for a position “independently,” and the matter of any further disciplinary action was turned over to the bishop. The bishop decided not to pursue the case, Adelsburger found a parish willing to give him a position, and so he remained in the ministry until he retired in 1967.

The remainder of the book chronicles Wibbeling’s postwar career until his retirement. Like others on the Protestant political left he became involved in the debates about the Cold War and the antinuclear movement. He also spearheaded local initiatives to address the Nazi past, and in 1961 led efforts to create and dedicate a memorial site where the Jewish synagogue in Hanau had stood, joining with the rabbi of Hesse, Isaak Emil Lichtigfeld. Wibbeling received the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany’s highest civilian honor, in 1961 and died in 1967.

Only about 200 pages of this book are devoted to the Nazi era, and while Wibbeling emerges as an intriguing and often outspoken figure, in much of the book he is treated almost as a minor player over against the major historical events of his times. In contrast, there are extensive descriptions of the Neuwerk movement and the political debates of the 1920s such as the 1926 plebiscite calling for the expropriation of property belonging to the former ruling nobility, which drew much support in the working class regions where Wibbeling worked. The result is a remarkably exhaustive portrait of working class Germany and of Protestant church life in such circles, giving an unusual vantage point for the events of the interwar period and the German church struggle between 1933 and 1945. The treatment of the postwar political issues and the debates of the 1950s is equally thorough. This book’s real value may be in its wealth of detail about this sector of German life and society during the first six decades of the turbulent twentieth century, as a backdrop for understanding the events in the Protestant churches.

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

Review of Katrin Rudolph, Hilfe beim Sprung ins Nichts: Franz Kaufmann und die Rettung von Juden und “nichtarischen” Christen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Katrin Rudolph, Hilfe beim Sprung ins Nichts: Franz Kaufmann und die Rettung von Juden und “nichtarischen” Christen. Publikationen der Gedenkstätte Helden. Band 7 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2017). Pp. 392. ISBN 978-3-86331-351-7.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

This is a revised and expanded edition of Katrin Rudolph’s study of Franz Kaufmann and the “Kaufman Circle” that first appeared in 2004. The Kaufmann Circle was a small resistance group in the early 1940s with ties to Martin Niemoeller’s Confessing parish in Dahlem. Its primary members were Kaufmann, Helene Jacobs, Gertrud Staewen, and a Jewish artist, Cioma Schönhaus, who forged documents such as identity papers and food ration cards that helped Jews live underground in Berlin throughout the war. Kaufmann came from a Jewish family but was a baptized Protestant in a “privileged” marriage. When the Gestapo uncovered the group’s activities in 1943 Kaufmann and Jacobs were arrested (Staewen avoided arrest), and Kaufmann was murdered in Sachsenhausen in 1944. Schönhaus made his way to safety in Switzerland, later publishing an account of the group’s activities, published in English as The Forger. Jacobs and Staewen both published short postwar accounts and gave numerous interviews. (I conducted interviews with both women and wrote about the group in my first book, For the Soul of the People.)

As Rudolph notes in her introduction, however, recent research has yielded new information about the group and important corrections to the earlier accounts (including those in my book), revealing a number of connections between Kaufmann and other people in Berlin who were attempting to help Jews. These findings have altered her understanding of how the Kaufmann group operated, and in this new edition she argues that there was not a distinct and independently operating “Kaufmann circle” but rather a wider network of “small alliances of helpers” who were loosely connected to Franz Kaufmann. This study therefore broadens our view of the group’s activities beyond the immediate circle around Kaufmann and explores the wider dynamics and patterns of assistance to Jews in wartime Berlin. Rudolph has also examined and corrected discrepancies in some of the postwar accounts, and her book serves as a critical study of how postwar narratives about rescue emerged.

Rudolph begins by tracing the emotional and social effect of Nazi anti-Jewish legislation on the people of Berlin beginning in 1933, including the initial bewilderment and denial among the highly assimilated Jewish population in suburbs like Dahlem, as well as the shamefully quick compromises of the vast majority of Germans, who turned on even longstanding Jewish friends and colleagues. A significant percentage of those considered “non-Aryan” under Nazi racial laws—perhaps as many of 300,000 of the 800,000 affected by these laws—had Jewish family background but were either secular or had “assimilated” through conversion (i.e., baptized Christians), and about two-thirds of this population was Protestant. The Protestant debates about the applicability of the “Aryan Laws” to church members was the issue that launched the church struggle in 1933, and Rudolph helpfully traces the context of the wartime rescue initiatives back to these early beginnings.

Many of the Confessing Christians who became most politically active in helping those affected by the Nazi racial laws came out of the early radical “Dahlemite” wing of the church struggle, and the Dahlem parish was a quiet center of connection and communication about other developments. While baptized Christians and people in privileged marriages initially remained more sheltered from the worst of the Nazi anti-Jewish measures, their situation grew more precarious over the course of the 1930s, particularly after the November 1938 pogroms; during this same period, Confessing Church leaders showed a growing reluctance to stand up for them. In 1938, with the approval of the Nazi regime, an office was established by Pastor Heinrich Grüber to assist the emigration of “non-Aryan Christians”; Grüber and his co-worked helped between 1500 and 2000 people emigrate before the regime shut the office down in 1940. The situation intensified dramatically in October 1941, when all further Jewish emigration was banned. All Germans affected by the Nazi racial laws had to wear a yellow star in public and the deportations of Jews from Berlin began.

Franz Kaufmann was among those affected. He had been a lawyer in the finance ministry until his dismissal in 1935, after the Nuremberg Laws. After that he lived on a modest pension and sought to emigrate, applying to the Quakers for help in reaching the United States and to ecumenical contacts in hopes that he could go to Switzerland. Tragically, both avenues failed him, and his ties to the Dahlem parish deepened in the early years of the war. As the plight of Jews in Berlin worsened, Kaufmann decided to use every means and connection he possessed to help them. He reached out to old contacts who were still in the government or whom he thought might be able to offer financial support for rescue efforts, in the process taking risks that may have exposed others. After his arrest he told his interrogators that “perhaps out of an inflated sense of responsibility, I felt called to help people who turned to me in need, fear and despair and, as it turned out, to help them with unreliable means.”

It is difficult to know whether such risks were what eventually led to the denunciations that led the Gestapo to Kaufmann and the others, but it’s clear that his initiative and his efforts made him the center point for a wide-ranging network of people in Berlin who were trying to help Jews, and in the aftermath many of them defined their connection to the underground resistance in terms of their relationship to Kaufmann. In addition to a few individuals who had worked with Grüber office and members of the Dahlem church like Jacobs and Staewen, this network included several individual Confessing pastors in Berlin whose parsonages and parishes became places of assistance: Catholics like Max Josef Metzger and Margarete Sommer, members of the Solf resistance circle, and a broader network of parsonages in Berlin and the Württemberg Confessing Church (Kirchliche Sozietät) that began to serve as an underground railroad for Jews trying to reach Switzerland (related most famously Max Krakauer’s account of his own rescue, Lichter im Dunkel). Included as well are more ambiguous figures who assisted in rescue but for ulterior motives or for payment. Rudolph has concluded that Kaufmann was involved in four distinct rescue groupings, only one of which was the Dahlem circle that has been associated with him to date, making him “synonymous with illegal assistance for those persecuted.”

There is much new material in this book not only about the different members of the resistance but the identities and fates of those who were helped. The wealth of detail, corrections to previous accounts, and focus on the intersections between the different communities is sometimes difficult to follow, but by situating the story of the Kaufmann circle in the larger context of the Confessing Church debates and the different Berlin rescue networks and individuals, Rudolph has provided a real service for those of us who seek to understand this period in its full complexity, and some important new insights into this history as it unfolded in wartime Berlin.

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

Review of Victoria J. Barnett, ed., The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Victoria J. Barnett, ed., The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). Pp. xvi + 253. ISBN: 978-1-5064-3336-3.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Victoria Barnett, general editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, has ably selected, edited, and introduced 28 Bonhoeffer messages in this the second volume of his collected sermons. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom has made him famous as a theologian and member of the German Resistance, but as Barnett points out, he was educated for careers in both academia and ministry. Indeed, one of the consistent features of Bonhoeffer’s “fragmentary life” was the writing and preaching of sermons (xi-xii). This collection of sermons and meditations, written between 1926 and 1944, certainly touch on many of the theological themes for which he is known in works like Discipleship, Life Together, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison. More importantly, however, they demonstrate Bonhoeffer’s warm pastoral heart and deep personal piety. As Barnett observes, Bonhoeffer followed the lectionary, convinced that “Scripture, preached correctly, revealed the word of God to the listener” (xiii). At the same time, he believed that preaching should speak to the contemporary world. What is perhaps most interesting, though, is the way that these sermons open up a window into Bonhoeffer’s own inner life.

Three themes run through these sermons: the seriousness of Bonhoeffer’s Christianity, the insight of his responses to the social and political crises of the late Weimar and Nazi eras, and the resolution of his engagement in the Kirchenkampf (German Church Struggle).

From the beginning of his preaching career, Bonhoeffer proclaimed an uncompromising brand of Christianity. In “A Sermon for His Contemporaries” (1926), he describes God as “absolute holiness and absolute duty,” and declares that “God’s word always commands the fulfilling of this absolute duty” (5). Indeed, God’s authority overshadowed all others: “When we do not recognize all earthly authorities as being dependent on that one authority, we make them our idols, be they state, church, reason, or genius” (6). Paradoxically, it is in obedience to God that the Christian finds freedom: “when you are bound to God in obedience, then you have become truly free. You are free from everything from which you should be free; free from people and powers, because you are bound to God” (8).

The authority of Christ is echoed in “Seeing the World through the Eyes of Christ” (1927/8), in which Bonhoeffer pronounces:

Jesus Christ is looking for lodging. He is looking for entrance into our spirits and our hearts. Do we really understand what this means? Jesus Christ is a controlling, willful guest. He wants our hearts completely. He will not tolerate competition, even if the competition only wants to dispute Jesus’s right to the least bit of his possession. Jesus Christ is a discomforting, imperious guest. He will rule whoever invites him in, and whoever invites Jesus in must serve him. (19-20)

Typical of the “both-and” way of Bonhoeffer’s thinking, however, he goes on to proclaim that Jesus comes not to destroy but to comfort, promising to give sight and to bring love into the life of the Christian. In the end, all these ideas come together: “The act of Christian love is to manifest Jesus not as a religious genius, an ethical thinker, or a philosopher, but as the Lord of death and of life; as the Word of God made flesh, for whom command and promise are the same” (22).

Dependence on God’s grace emerges time and again in Bonhoeffer’s preaching. In “The Human Yearning for God,” he asserts that the way to God is through purity of heart, even though it is impossible to attain:

The most distressing realization in the life of every Christian is that we cannot remain pure, that day by day we fall down anew and night by night must cry out to God anew: Lord, I cannot do it alone; if you make me pure, then I am pure. May God create in me a pure heart. I want so much to be pure. I want so much to behold God. (46)

Bonhoeffer’s piety manifests itself once more in “Approaching the Day in Faith: Morning Devotions” (1935), written as a reflection on his experience with his Finkenwalde seminary students. “Each new morning,” he begins, “is a new beginning for our lives. … It is long enough to find or to lose God, to keep faith or to fall into sin and disgrace” (154). Each day is created by God. Each day is an opportunity to find new mercy. In each day, we require our daily bread. Bonhoeffer goes on to describe the practice of the Finkenwalde community—their habit of beginning each day with private and communal devotions. As Bonhoeffer put it, “One hour must be put aside each morning for quiet prayer and worship together. Truly, this is not wasted time. How else are we to face the tasks, tribulations, and temptations of the day?” (155).

The seriousness of Bonhoeffer’s Christianity is matched by the thoughtfulness of his responses to the rapid social change and political turbulence of his day. In this, his preaching is a model of pastoral care in times of trial. For example, “The Soul’s Silence before God” (1928) asks hard questions which speak not only to Bonhoeffer’s day but to ours:

Is there still something like the soul in an age such as ours, an age of machines, of economic competition, of the dominance of fashion and sports; is this nothing more than a cherished childhood memory, like so much else? It just sounds so strange and peculiar amid the confusion and loud voices extolling themselves, this little word “soul.” It speaks such a gentle, quiet language that we hardly hear it anymore amid the tumult and chaos inside us. Yet it speaks a language full of the greatest responsibility and of profound seriousness: you, human being, have a soul; beware, lest you lose it, lest you awaken one day amid the frenzy of life—in both work and private life—and find that inwardly you have become empty, a plaything of events, a leaf before the wind, driven to and fro and blown away—that you have lost your soul. (33)

His answer is to cultivate silence: “My soul becomes silent before God, who helps me. God’s hours are hours of succor and comfort. God has an answer for every distress of our soul, and this answer is always one and the same … the enticing words: I love you” (35-36).

Other sermons illustrate Bonhoeffer’s ability to take the long view in the midst of upheaval. In “At the Turning Point: Waiting for God” (1931), he references the instability and chaos of the late Weimar era. In an age of clashing world views, the popular expectation is that the human being should “hold his own,” “remain master of the world, master of the future” (61). Bonhoeffer notes the way in which the Bible sets out a different response to the future—a posture of waiting on God. The sermon closes with a prayer: “God, come into our waiting. God, we are waiting for your salvation, your judgment, for your love and your peace” (66). Similarly, in “Following Christ through the World to the Cross” (1932), Bonhoeffer explains how Christ rejected the temptation to be king of the world, forsaking worldly power in obedience to God. Christ’s path was the path of love for humans, the path of the cross. “And we walk with him, as individuals and also as the church. We are the church under the cross … our kingdom is not of this world” (70). Perhaps the most powerful sermon in this vein is “Staying Grounded in Turbulent Times” (1932). In the midst of (again) instability and competing world views, Bonhoeffer takes up the prayer of 2 Chronicles 20:12: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (74). As is so often the case, Bonhoeffer’s preaching points to the mercy of God expressed in Christ’s saving death on the cross.

One of the surprising elements of these sermons is Bonhoeffer’s ability to find hope in the midst of trial. For instance, in a Christmas meditation written in 1940, Bonhoeffer explores the jubilant prophecy in Isaiah 9, detailing the wisdom, power, authority, love, and justice of Jesus and his kingdom. Concluding with the words of Isaiah: “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this,” Bonhoeffer proclaims:

The holy zeal of God for this divine kingdom guarantees that this kingdom will remain for eternity and will reach its final fulfillment despite all human guilt, all resistance. It will not depend on whether we participate. God brings his plans to fruition with or despite us. But God desires for us to be with him. Not for God’s own sake but for our sake. God with us—Immanuel—Jesus—that is the mystery of this Holy Night. But we cry out with joy: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us.” I believe that Jesus Christ—a true human being, born of the Virgin Mary, and true God, begotten of the Father in eternity—is my Lord. (208)

A few of the sermons in this volume reference more directly the state and church politics of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The most forceful of these is “… In the Eleventh Hour of Our Church” (1932), which Bonhoeffer preached in Trinity Church, Berlin, on Reformation Sunday, just after the November 1932 Reich election. Here Bonhoeffer contrasts the triumphal celebration of the Protestant Reformation and the noisy invocation of Luther with the actual state of the church, which he argues is losing its way.

We … keep saying over and over those same self-confident words with all their pathos, “Here I stand—I can do no other.” We fail to see that this is no longer Luther’s church, that Luther was distressed and agitated, pushed all the way to the wall by the devil and in fear of God when he said, “Here I stand,” and that these are hardly suitable words for us to speak. It is simply untruthful, or unforgivable heedlessness and arrogance, for us to take refuge behind these words. (93)

Again and again in the sermon, Bonhoeffer repeats the words of the Scripture text from Revelation chapter 2: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (92). As he unmasks the crisis of German Protestantism, he declares:

Let us lay the dead Luther to rest at long last, and instead listen to the gospel, reading his Bible, hearing God’s own word in it. At the last judgment God is certainly going to ask us not, “Have you celebrated Reformation Day properly?” but rather, “Have you heard my world and kept it?” (95).

Bonhoeffer dissects the lack of prayer, love, grace, and devotion in his church, calling on his hearers to repent. His closing words?

And now, when you leave the church, don’t think about whether this was a fine or a poor Reformation service, but let us go soberly and do the works that came first. God be our help. Amen” (100).

Two sermons bring together these three themes of serious Christianity, timely advice for troubled times, and decisive engagement with the political and church-political issues of his day.

The first of these is “Of Priests and Prophets in the New Germany” (May 1933). In the context of the dismantling of democracy, the rise of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, and the early signs of what would develop into the Church Struggle, Bonhoeffer preached a sermon based on Exodus 32, the story of the High Priest Aaron and the impatient Israelites building the Golden Calf—an idol—rather than waiting for their prophetic leader Moses to return from his meeting with God on Mount Sinai. Applying the text to his own day, Bonhoeffer complains that “The church of the world, the church of the priests, wants something it can see. It doesn’t want to wait any longer. It wants to go ahead and do something itself, take action itself, since God and the prophet aren’t doing so” (110). Later, Bonhoeffer describes this “worldly church” as a church,

which doesn’t want to wait, which doesn’t want to live by something unseen; as a church that makes its own gods, that wants to have a god that pleases it rather than asking itself whether or not it is itself pleasing to God; as a church that is ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of idolatry, the glorification of human ideas and values—as a church that presumes divine authority for itself through its priesthood—it is as such a church that we come again and again to worship. And it is a church whose idol lies shattered to pieces on the floor, as a church that has to hear anew, “I am the Lord your God.” (112-113)

The cross, Bonhoeffer declares, will put an end to all idolatry. We encounter the God who will tolerate no other gods, but also the God who meets us “in boundless forgiveness” (113).

The second, and the last sermon examined in this review, is “The Peace of God in Affliction” (1938), printed and sent out to the now scattered Finkenwalde seminary students for their encouragement. Based on Romans chapter 5 and the Apostle Paul’s message of peace with God through Jesus Christ, the sermon contains Bonhoeffer’s reflections on suffering: “Whether we have truly found the peace of God will be proven by the way we deal with the afflictions that come upon us” (188). He continues:

Whoever hates affliction, renunciation, crisis, slander, and imprisonment in his life might otherwise talk about the cross with big words, but nonetheless he hates the cross of Jesus and has no peace with God. But whoever loves the cross of Jesus Christ, whoever has found peace in his cross, also begins to love the affliction in his life. And finally he will be able to speak with Scripture: “but we also boast in our afflictions.” (189)

For Bonhoeffer, “Affliction produces patience, then experience, then hope. Whoever avoids affliction discards along with that God’s greatest gifts for his creatures” (190). Through affliction comes hope, and the love of God “poured into our heart” (192).

The sermons and meditations chosen by Victoria Barnett for The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2 ably demonstrate both the pastoral heart and spiritual depth of Bonhoeffer in ways that readers of his more famous works would do well to discover.

Article Note: Johannes Due Enstad, “Prayers and Patriotism in Nazi-Occupied Russia: The Pskov Orthodox Mission and Religious Revival, 1941-1944″

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Article Note: Johannes Due Enstad, “Prayers and Patriotism in Nazi-Occupied Russia: The Pskov Orthodox Mission and Religious Revival, 1941-1944,” Slavonic and East European Review 94, no 3 (2016): 468-96.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

In this illuminating article, Johannes Due Enstad, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo, demonstrates the value of integrating religion into analyses of war and occupation. At the same time, he shows how profoundly religion and religious practice are affected by political and military factors.

Enstad’s focus is the Pskov Mission, an initiative involving about 500 Russian Orthodox priests and other staff that, with permission and support from the Wehrmacht, offered spiritual services to the people, most of them peasants, of northwest Russia under German occupation. As Enstad points out, although important articles by Karel Berkhoff (2000) and Leonid Rein (2005) explored the fate of the churches in occupied Ukraine and Belarus, almost no scholarship exists on Christianity in Russia proper in the years 1941-1944.

Using German and Russian sources—notably Wehrmacht and Security Service reports generated at the time and postwar memoirs by some of the priests involved—Enstad makes a three-part argument. First, he shows that the Mission was not just a German puppet organization. The priests exercised agency, to varying degrees under intensely unstable circumstances, and in their way promoted an anti-Bolshevik strand of Russian patriotism. Second, overall, the Germans in charge were pleased with the Mission, and its efforts helped legitimate the occupation. The Russian Orthodox priests involved prayed for German victory and encouraged their congregants to cooperate with German demands. Third, the Mission had a significant impact at the time and also in the decades that followed. According to Enstad, priests associated with the Pskov Mission opened some 200 churches and provided extensive charitable care for orphans and Soviet prisoners of war. A number of those churches remained open after the war, and although many of the priests went into exile and some were imprisoned and killed, quite a few remained in place under the restored Soviet rule.

At one level, Enstad’s narrative confirms Nazi German claims to have revived Christianity in occupied Soviet territory. But his insightful analysis challenges any simplistic conclusions. The numerous Russian memoirs he examined, so detailed in their descriptions of contact with local populations, say almost nothing about the persecution and murder of Jews and Roma in the region. Enstad attributes this silence to antisemitism, which priests imbibed from their religion and its myth of Jews as Christ-killers, and from their politics, with its related myth of Jews as Bolsheviks. Russian Orthodox priests, Enstad notes, had a vested interest in exaggerating the local support they enjoyed, because after the war, that support was their best defense against charges of collaboration. He makes effective use of German accounts to corroborate the priests’ impact, although it bears mentioning that Germans too benefited from a version of events that presented them as liberators and saviors rather than tyrants and killers.

Enstad succeeds in integrating a wide range of sources and perspectives into an account that is both empathetic and methodologically sophisticated. This fascinating article breaks new ground in the transnational history of Christianity in World War II and the Holocaust. It also alerts readers keen to learn more to the existence of Enstad’s brand-new book: Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2018).