Category Archives: Volume 25 Number 3 (September 2019)

Letter from the Editors (September 2019)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Letter from the Editors (September 2019)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to present the newest issue of reviews and notes related to contemporary German and European religious history. In this the 25th year of Contemporary Church History Quarterly (dating back to the late John Conway’s ACCH newsletter), we are happy to continue to serve academics and interested lay readers with commentary on the latest scholarship in the field. As we have emphasized this year, the issues and events our editors and guest contributors write about remain relevant in our current age of turmoil over identity, exclusion, and the role of religion in politics and society.

1932 Nazi election poster. “Over 300 National Socialists died for you…” An equation of the death of Nazi “old fighters” with the death of Christ and an example of the Christian nationalism of the NSDAP. Image used by permission of Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College. https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/index.htm

Indeed, the contemporary relevance of the recent history of the relationship between Christianity and nationalism receives special attention at the top of this issue of CCHQ, in the form of a scholarly conversation between Robert P. Ericksen and Victoria J. Barnett. The two distinguished historians exchange views on a recent article by Ericksen, in which he draws parallels between Christian nationalist voters in 1930s Germany and twenty-first-century America.

Four reviews follow. Beth A. Griech-Polelle assesses Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, which traces the source and course of the modern myth “of a worldwide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy traditional Christian morality and age-old civilizations,” and attempts to understand “why it has been and remains so powerful.” Kevin P. Spicer reviews Karl-Joseph Hummel and Michael Kißener’s edited volume, Catholics and Third Reich: Controversies and Debates, a translation of an important German publication from 2009. Heath Spencer evaluates Anita Rasi May’s publication, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I, an “analysis of the responses of French priests to the outbreak of war, the variety of ways in which they participated, and their perceptions of the war’s meaning for France and the church.” Finally, Rebecca Carter-Chand reviews James Enns’ Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974, in which the author “analyzes the role of North American Protestant ecumenical and mission agencies that participated in the reconstruction and spiritual rehabilitation of West Germany in the first three decades after World War II.”

This issue of CCHQ also contains two article notes: Doris Bergen reports on Jouni Tilli’s research on the presence of crusading motifs in Finnish war rhetoric during the Second World War, while Heath Spencer examines Julio de la Cueva’s study on violent culture wars–the relationship between revolution and religion in Mexico, Russia, and Spain during the interwar period.

Last, and certainly not least, we celebrate with editor Victoria J. Barnett in her retirement from over twenty years of important work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Robert P. Ericksen reports on a public panel discussion held in Barnett’s honour at the USHMM, and reflects on her many contributions at the museum and in the field of contemporary church history. Readers will be glad to hear (even as editors of the CCHQ are delighted to report) that retirement will offer more time for scholarly work, and we look forward to her future contributions in the field of Bonhoeffer studies.

We wish you a rewarding fall season and hope you find the contents of the latest issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly both interesting and informative.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

“Understanding Twenty-first Century Christian Nationalism and Its Antecedents: A Scholarly Conversation”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

“Understanding Twenty-first Century Christian Nationalism and Its Antecedents: A Scholarly Conversation”

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (retired) and Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

The following is a scholarly conversation concerning the interpretation of Christian nationalism at the time of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and, more recently, in the wake of U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s surprising electoral victory in 2016. The exchange of views begins with a review essay and commentary by Victoria J. Barnett, who analyzes Robert P. Ericksen’s recent article “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America.” This is followed by Ericksen’s response to Barnett’s review and commentary.

Review Essay and Commentary of Robert P. Ericksen. “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31, no. 2 (2018): 427-440.

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

Robert P. Ericksen’s 1985 book, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press), was a ground-breaking work that marked a turning point in the field of Holocaust studies. A critical examination of Luther scholar Paul Althaus, theologian and philosopher Emanuel Hirsch, and biblical scholar Gerhard Kittel, the most disturbing but significant aspect of the book is Ericksen’s well-documented argument that these theologians supported National Socialism as Christians. As Ericksen himself notes in the article under review, his book appeared at a time when the notion that Christians could embrace Nazism was still a strange and uncomfortable one. By giving a deep account of the thought and actions of these theologians, Ericksen established that this phenomenon was an important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany.

Althaus, Hirsch, and Kittel were brilliant, world-renowned theologians and biblical scholars who not only knew their stuff, but considered themselves (and were regarded as) serious and faithful Christians. Nonetheless they viewed Adolf Hitler as a leader sent by God in Germany’s hour of crisis and a statesman who would defend “Christendom” against the forces of Communism and modernity. They went on to support and cooperate with Nazi policies, including the antisemitic measures that culminated in the genocide of European Jews.

When Theologians under Hitler appeared I happened to be working on my first book, a collection of oral histories of Germans who had been members of the Confessing Church.[1] As Ericksen notes about his own work, I began my research with the naïve assumption that Christians in Nazi Germany—particularly the people I was studying—had been outspoken opponents of National Socialism, but soon realized that the historical record was more complex. Most Confessing Christians, like other German Protestants, were nationalistic and antisemitic. Their fight against the heresies of the explicitly pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen was driven by opposition to the latter’s ideologically-driven distortions of Christian doctrine as well as the idolization of the Führer and Nazi state. But even within those parameters there was a wide range of political views and a great deal of caution and cowardice. The Confessing Christians who explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith remained a minority within German Protestantism.

Over the decades Ericksen, I, and many of the editors of this journal have continued to explore critically the role of the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches during the Nazi era. This history offers troubling insights into the nature and different manifestations of “Christian nationalism.” It is worth noting that in the early twentieth century Christian nationalism was not only a German phenomenon. I helped organize a 2017 conference, “Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the World Wars,” jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, that explored the numerous Christian ethno-nationalist and fascist movements across Europe during the interwar period. During the same period there was a surge in right-wing Christian groups in the United States, as well as growing polarization between liberal Protestants and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as the fundamentalism wars of the 1920s sharpened the political divide.

For many of us whose scholarship has focused on these issues, our present historical moment has disturbing echoes of the history we’ve studied for decades. Then and now, there are groups in Europe and North America that define themselves by “Christian nationalism.” Some of these groups are identifiably part of the Christian spectrum—that is, they emerge from recognizable Christian communities. Others, I would argue, use “Christian” more ideologically to embrace “western culture” and nativism (Hannah Strømmen at the University of Chichester in the UK has done valuable work on this). All of them, however, embrace different forms of nationalism, nativism, white supremacy and other ideologies, promoting absolutist and sometimes violent political agendas using the language of “faith.” For all the significant historical differences between the 1930s and today, there are some haunting similarities when one looks at the present landscape.

Does the German example offer insights here? Are there parallels between the ethno-nationalist versions of Christianity during the first half of the twentieth century and the similar movements we see today? This is the subject of Ericksen’s article, “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice,” in which he compares the religiosity of figures like Gerhard Kittel and that of conservative evangelicals who support the current U.S. administration.

Ericksen has chosen to emphasize the role of “piety” and “devotion” by exploring “the relationship between pious religious beliefs within the Protestant Christian tradition and political stances that seem to defy those beliefs.” (The essay was written for a conference on “Devotion and Memory.”) In the first section of his essay Ericksen offers a detailed overview of Kittel’s behavior and his convictions, reminding us yet again of the inconvenient truth that people like Kittel practiced their faith seriously, praying and reading daily scriptural devotions. Not only did Kittel see no contradiction between his Christian faith and National Socialism, he actually viewed Adolf Hitler as a leader who would restore Christian values that were under attack by various forces such as modernity, Enlightenment values, and, of course, “the Jews.”

I would challenge the extent to which Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch were actually faithful to the teachings of Christianity, but there’s no doubt that they viewed themselves as such. They were joined in their views by most fellow Protestants, who voted overwhelmingly in the November 1932 elections for the Nazi Party (which received about 32 percent of the vote in those elections). The German population in 1933 was 98 percent Christian (Protestants comprising about 60 percent). Referring to electoral maps of those 1932 elections, Ericksen notes that the “brownest” areas—those regions where support for the Nazi Party was strongest—were “the most pious Protestant regions.” I’ve seen these maps, and the most striking aspect to me was that the support for National Socialism ran regionally along the lines of German religious demographics. Regions in which the population was predominantly Catholic voted overwhelmingly for the Catholic Center Party.

The question is how to interpret such a map. Do the “brown” parts of the map signify “piety” or “Protestantism,” and is there a useful distinction between the two? Catholics voted differently than Protestants for a number of historical and more immediate political reasons, but I doubt that those maps reflect a different degree of “devotion” when it came to Catholic seriousness in matters of faith. In other words, these maps may not reflect the sincerity or depth of Christian devotion or piety so much as give us a portrait of German Protestantism at the time. That, I would contend, is what the November 1932 voting maps show: the almost complete convergence of nationalism and religion in the Protestant regions of Germany. This convergence had deep historical and cultural roots in post-Reformation history.

Ericksen’s underlying assumption seems to be that the more “religious” someone is—as measured by “piety” and “devotion” (regular practices like daily bible reading, prayer, and church attendance), the more likely they are to hold extreme nationalist views. Ericksen writes for example of the relationship “between Christian beliefs, ethno-nationalism, and the democratic values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of belief, and political equality.”

This brings me to my primary problem with Ericksen’s analysis, although I agree with many of his historical points and I also agree with his conclusion that the history of people like Kittel offers some insights for the present moment. Having read his article several times, I wish that he had focused not on difficult-to-define religious attributes like “piety” and “devotion” but on the complex intersections of religious and national identity and how these, in turn, shape political and religious attitudes. That, I suspect, is the instructive parallel between what happened across Europe in the early twentieth century and the rise of Christian nationalism today.

In the German case the “Christian beliefs” that I believe Ericksen is describing—as reflected in the 1932 election maps—reflected a centuries-in-the-making synthesis of Christianity, nationalism, antisemitism and understandings of church and state, which in turn certainly helped spawn German Protestant support for Nazism. As one foreign visitor noted in the late nineteenth century, for most German Protestant clergy their “belief in Christianity was so closely intertwined with a strong nationalism that it was difficult even for themselves to say where the one began and the other ended.” Around the same time historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, “…we Germans are a Christian nation… Christianity is entwined with every fiber of the German character” and added that Judaism was the “national religion of a tribe which was originally alien to us.”

German Protestantism’s understanding of the relationship between church and state authority, the extent to which this understanding became both nationalized and ethnicized during the late nineteenth century, and the radicalizing effects of the period after 1918 produced a very particular kind of Christianity. Among other things it laid the foundation for the widespread assumptions that Jews—even converted Jews—could never really be “German.” One of the accounts I gave in my book on the Confessing Church was of a late nineteenth-century debate in a Protestant newspaper about whether Christian baptism could render a Jew fully “German.”

The Christian world is not a monolithic entity, however, and the synthesis of Christianity, fascism, and nationalism provoked alarm among other Christians, particularly among Protestant ecumenists who condemned these developments as “political” or (notably) even as “secular” forms of religion. In 1933 the Swiss ecumenist Adolf Keller wrote of “the new power” of “the religion of nationalism and a new mysticism of the State”; in 1935 the American interfaith leader Everett Clinchy described these developments as “tribal lunacies.” In 1938 the Danish ecumenist Hal Koch warned that across the globe “nationalism has assumed a religious character.”

The issue of the internal battle over such issues within German Protestantism is another factor that I think deserves serious study. As Ericksen notes, in the early postwar period a hagiographical portrait emerged about Protestant opposition to the Nazis that over-emphasized the numbers involved and the courage and clarity of such opposition. For all its shortcomings, however, the Confessing Church was based upon a theological critique that repudiated the views of people like Kittel and Althaus, and I would argue that the Church Struggle was perhaps the most significant event since the Reformation itself in terms of the issues at stake. The Barmen Declaration was an explicit theological rejection of the notions that Hitler’s leadership could be understood as divine will and that the Nazi state placed claims on Christians that surpassed those of scripture and church teachings. The 1936 Confessing Church memorandum to Hitler went further, explicitly repudiating the antisemitism of the Nazis.

All religious traditions (not just Christianity) offer the capacity for revision and self-criticism, and indeed the history of such moments of religious fanaticism and extremism has often led to serious changes within a tradition. This became evident after 1945 in the emergence of post-Holocaust Christianity, in which theologians and some church bodies (the Vatican, in Nostra Aetate, for example, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in its repudiation of Martin Luther’s antisemitic texts) officially repudiated the Christian anti-Jewish teachings that had led to the widely embedded antisemitism in western culture that culminated in the Holocaust. But even before 1945 such opposing voices existed in the Confessing Church itself—particularly in figures like Elisabeth Schmitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became engaged in political opposition. Outside Nazi Germany, the strongest condemnations of Nazi anti-Jewish policies and of the failures of the German Protestant churches emerged from Protestants like Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, various ecumenical leaders, and theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. All of these figures, I would note, were devout Protestants who took their faith seriously.

This brings me to Ericksen’s analysis of the ca. 80 percent of American evangelical voters who voted for Donald J. Trump. Here again, his emphasis is on the “devotion” and “piety” that finds its expression in “Christian nationalism.” As in his examination of the German history, he notes several key political issues and historical factors that have shaped the political convictions of these religious voters. Since the 1970s (when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right to abortion in the Roe vs. Wade decision) the abortion issue has been the most decisive issue for many evangelical and Catholic voters. There is also much to suggest that the long and terrible U.S. history of racism, slavery, and white supremacy continues to shape, challenge and divide not only whites and people of color but the different sectors of U.S. Christianity. In the past two years, this has re-emerged as a bitterly divisive issue across the political and religious landscape, particularly given the open advocacy of white supremacy by some groups. Similarly to the centuries-long dynamics by which antisemitism became embedded in European culture, racism and white supremacy are embedded in U.S. culture.

Reducing all this to which group shows more signs of “devotion” misses the point, I think. The U.S. religious landscape is complex, and while certain groups may claim to be “more Christian” than others, it’s not that easy. According to the most recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, 70.8 percent of the U.S. population is Christian. Of that percentage, the largest groups are evangelical Protestants (25.4 percent) and “non-affiliated” (“nones”) at 22.8 percent (Catholics are third, at 20.8 percent). Non-Christian faiths are currently around 6 percent. Another recent major survey, the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, shows evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and “nones” as statistically tied. Pew also measures religious attitudes in terms of political affiliation, and in patterns of “devotion” as measured by questions on the importance of religion, belief in God, and frequency of church attendance and prayer, Republicans measure higher but not exclusively so on most issues (for example, 62 percent of Republicans pray daily as compared to 50 percent of Democrats). Belief in God is high across the board (84 percent of Democrats; 93 percent of Republicans; even 27 percent of “nones” say they believe in God). And other variables come into play: African-American Protestants and Roman Catholics measure highly in terms of “devotion”-related questions but vote quite differently on some issues.

Moreover, there are growing generational differences in polls among evangelicals, and there has been a strong and explicitly Protestant backlash in the United States against Christian forms of nationalism, white supremacy, and related ideologies, much of it articulated by critical evangelicals like Michael Gerson, David Gushee, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons and others.

There is another important difference between the immensely diverse U.S. Protestant denominational landscape and that of the German Protestant Church—one that was noted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his important 1939 essay on “Protestantism without Reformation.” Because none of the American churches “can dare to make the claim to be the one church,” he wrote, they stake their claims and fight their battles over social, cultural, and political issues, and those battles take place in the public sphere. This echoes an observation made by Alexis de Tocqueville one hundred years previously when he wrote that “Religion in America … must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.” To the extent that the leaders of the German Church Struggle of the 1930s addressed broader political issues, they did so internally within institutional Protestantism. In the United States, in contrast, such battles are openly political and the result is that (in Bonhoeffer’s words) “The church claims the right for itself to address almost any topic in public life and to act since only in this way the kingdom of God can be built.”

Any analysis of the parallels between the German Protestantism of the 1930s and the current manifestations of Christian nationalism on the U.S. religious landscape must take such differences into account, as well as the respective histories of cultural, political, and religious intersections in these two cases. For that reason, I think the analysis of Kittel as a case study in “devotion” is too narrow to explain contemporary Christian nationalism. The German example can shed some insight into this, but only if we avoid essentializing or reducing the role of “religion” to belief or “devotion.” To be fair, in his books Theologians under Hitler and his subsequent Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ericksen actually does offer a broader and more nuanced discussion of these issues, putting Kittel and his colleagues in the larger context that shaped them.

Bob Ericksen and I have spent our respective careers looking at different pieces of this historical puzzle, and I suspect to some extent this explains our different approaches. (I also have a Master of Divinity degree, so I tend to look below the surface of theo-political claims and give more weight to the internal church and theological debates) So I write this critical review with deep regard for my colleague and gratitude for our long-time conversation, which I continue here.

Response to Victoria J. Barnett’s “Review Essay and Commentary”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

I deeply appreciate Victoria Barnett’s willingness to review my recent article in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America.” As readers of this issue of CCHQ will notice, I am an admirer of Barnett’s remarkable three-part career—as a scholar of the German Church Struggle, as an expert on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and as an important, recently retired administrator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I also appreciate not just Barnett’s willingness to review my article, but also the questions she raises about my work.

Barnett is quite right in asserting that “piety” and “devotion” are not adequate measures or predictors of political stance among Protestant Christians, or Christians as a whole, whether in 1930s Germany or today’s America. In my defense, I originally gave this paper at a conference on “Devotion and Memory.” However, I also do think that self-assessments as well as outward markers of “piety” and “devotion” have some relevance. Not all professors of theology in 1930s Germany were as pious in their behavior as Gerhard Kittel and Paul Althaus (and possibly even Emanuel Hirsch). Though I have never lived in the American South, I believe things I have read, such as the question to newcomers: “Which church will you attend?” I also recognize the importance to some believers of offering a table prayer before eating in a public restaurant, and I do think these behaviors manifest themselves in today’s America more frequently in the Bible Belt, and perhaps especially in the South.

My starting point with this paper on devotion, of course, combined my recognition that Protestantism stands out in 1932 as a marker of votes for Hitler, along with the widely publicized 80-percent figure of self-identified evangelical voters in the United States who voted for and mostly continue to support Donald Trump. I am struck by these voting indicators, first of all, since neither Hitler nor Trump appears to have had any significant relationship to the Christian faith. Secondly, neither is known for political policies embodying any portion of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully agree when Barnett notes that devotion can be found among critics of Hitler, especially including Elisabeth Schmitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I also admire the public critique of Donald Trump expressed by Michael Gerson, and I am especially impressed by the critique raised by David Gushee and others. I receive at least daily emails from FaithfulAmerica.org, an organization rallying Christians who oppose Trumpism, and I have been an admirer for years of Sojourners as an expression of Christian values.

The difficulty for me has long been how best to understand the actual correlation between Christian faith and Christian nationalism, between Christian faith and Christian rightwing, nationalistic, and occasionally brutal politics. I certainly recognize Christians I admire who acted in the manner Vicki Barnett describes. This includes some leading members of the Confessing Church, including those who composed the memorandum to Hitler in 1936, and it includes the Christian (and Jewish) leaders Barnett has been researching in the 1930s ecumenical movement. I agree with her that the German Church Struggle is very important and might even be the most important event in Protestantism since the Reformation. However, some years ago I discovered Wilhelm Niemöller’s estimate that the Confessing Church amounted to about 20 percent of the German Protestant Church. And even with that 20 percent figure, I am not sure that they all “explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith.” I think that members of the Confessing Church grounded their opposition to the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian Movement”) in their Christian faith, but not all opposed all aspects of National Socialism or gave up their appreciation of Hitler. These are the results of my first work on Kittel, Althaus and Hirsch, along with various projects undertaken since. As for Catholics in Germany, I do think their unwillingness to vote for Hitler in 1932 was admirable, but based very largely on the existence of the Catholic Center Party and its hold upon Catholic voters since the Bismarck era. After Center Party delegates gave the votes need to pass the Enabling Act in March 1933, Catholic loyalty to the Nazi state seems not entirely different from that found among Protestants. As Barnett notes, of course, all these matters are in need of additional interrogation.

I do acknowledge that I used a broad brush to merge Nazi voters in the 1930s with Trump voters in 2016. I tried to avoid any claim that these are the same phenomena, since I do not mean to diminish the level of horror implemented by Adolf Hitler. I only was struck by the one surprising element in each case, the willingness of a fairly large number of self-identified Christians to support politicians and politics that seem to me to violate important Christian norms.

[1] For The Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992).

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Karl-Joseph Hummel and Michael Kißener, eds., Catholics and Third Reich: Controversies and Debates

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Karl-Joseph Hummel and Michael Kißener, eds., Catholics and Third Reich: Controversies and Debates, translated by Christof Morrisey (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018), 315 Pp., ISBN: 9783506787866.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

In the “Preface to English Edition,” the editors inform the reader that Catholics and Third Reich is a translation of the 2009 (paperback reprint 2010) Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich: Kontroversen und Debatten, with minor corrections and additions of only essential bibliographical citations. The editors’ intention in the original German volume was to offer an update of the classic, Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich, edited by Klaus Gotto and Konrad Repgen (both of whom passed in 2017), published initially in 1980 and revised for a third and final time in 1990. Hummel and Kißener dedicated their volume to Repgen, to commemorate his eighty-fifth birthday. The editors of both collections endeavored to historiographically contextualize the current themes and debates about the Catholic Church under Nationalism Socialism through chapters that are “easy-to-read yet still academically sound…for a broad reading public” (8). Evidently, German academics have a different understanding of the term “easy-to-read” than their English-speaking counterparts. For example, a translated sentence from Christoph Kösters’ contribution, “Catholics in the Third Reich: An Introduction to the Scholarship and Research History,” reads: “While the during the 1950s and early 1960s the participant generation’s view of history still predominated, at least on the surface, behind the scenes the institutionalization and networking of an emerging community of contemporary historians was taking place, wherein Catholicism studies would establish itself as a branch” (41). Of course, it is the role of a translator to produce a text that is clear and readable. Sadly, it is missing here. In several chapters, Christof Morrisey, the translator, followed – evidently too closely – the grammatical structure of the original’s dense academic German that results in awkwardly phrased English. In turn, this affects the text’s clarity and naturally the overall presentation of the authors’ arguments. Even the title is strangely framed, Catholics and Third Reich, neglecting the determiner “the.” “Preface to English edition” again forgets “the.” Such stylistic errors are minor but nevertheless make the reading of the volume challenging. To be fair, the latter chapters flow more evenly. More importantly, too, is the choice of Ferdinand Schöningh to have this volume translated into English in the first place, without requesting significant revisions from the contributors to reflect the historiographical developments in the field. The essays in Hummel and Kißener’s volume, for example, are often contentious and dominated by older interpretive debates. A better choice to fulfill the editors’ goal would have been the more accessible 2011 (revised second edition, 2018) volume, Die katholische Kirche im Dritten Reich: Eine Einführung (The Catholic Church in the Third Reich: An Introduction), edited by Christoph Kösters and Mark Edward Ruff and published by Herder, a competitor of Ferdinand Schöningh. In any case, the volume before us is the text under review.

Hummel and Kißener have divided their volume into four sections: Overview, Controversies and Debates, Images of History, and Bibliography, the latter including insightful maps of the voting behavior of the German Catholic population in Germany during the crucial years of 1932 and 1933. In the Overview section, Michael Kißener, University Professor for Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, introduces the volume by providing a historical chronological summary of German Catholics in Nazi Germany. According to Kißener, two approaches may be taken to evaluate the choices of Catholics and the Catholic Church under Hitler. The first approach proposes making a judgment about the moral conduct or “guilt” of the Church under National Socialism, which he recognizes as legitimate, but ultimately not historically sound. Instead, Kißener favors an approach that focuses on “understanding” by analyzing the “causal factors” and establishing “theories of developmental process.” The latter, he believes, allows us “to understand the time…on its own terms, rather than to ‘condemn’” (14). Kißener points out that in 1933, Catholics in Germany represented only one-third of the population. The influence of their tradition ended in a “grey zone” of intersection between religion and politics in which the Church was overly cautious to intervene. As other contributors to this volume emphasize, Catholicism “did not require its believers to choose martyrdom” and therefore should not be compared to religious bodies such as the Jehovah Witnesses (15). At the same time, despite the hierarchical nature of Catholicism, the Catholic Church in Germany faced numerous obstacles preventing it from forming a unified approach toward the Nazi state. For example, the Freising and Fulda Bishops’ Conferences were only consolidated into one joint conference in 1933 and, as a result, had not yet perfected its operational rules. Resolutions made by the united conference were “not yet binding for individual bishops” (16). Kißener places significant responsibility for the lack of a more aggressive stance toward National Socialism on Adolf Bertram, Cardinal Archbishop of Breslau and leader of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, who, he admits, too swiftly accommodated the National Socialists. Kißener describes Bertam’s Eingabenpolitik (policy of petition) as “legitimate,” but ultimately “anachronistic and futile” as the Nazis solidified their power over the government (23). Regarding the persecution of German Jews, especially during Reichskristallnacht, Kißener asks, “Did [the bishops] fear that standing up for the Jews in the existing situation would provoke more violence against them? Or did they believe they were unable to help because it was assumed that, after the Jews, the Catholics would be the next target of Nazi attacks?” (26) Kißener finds the bishops’ reaction or lack thereof “difficult to explain” but assures the reader that it was “not the product of any racially based anti-Semitism adapted by the Church” (27). Throughout his essay, Kißener has adopted a tone that is protective of the Church and its shortcomings in the years of Hitler’s rule. Regarding resistance, he quotes a historian equally defensive, Hans Maier, who wrote, “‘one has to look at it soberly: that a church as a whole would join the resistance is not very realistic’” (34).

In the second overview essay, Christoph Kösters, a research fellow at the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn, tackles the monumental job of offering a summary of the decades of scholarship procured on the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. More recently, Mark Edward Ruff dedicated an entire book to this topic in his authoritative study, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany 1945-1960 (Cambridge, 2017), which Kösters does cite. Meanwhile, the editors have afforded Kösters just a little more than twenty pages to address the same topic. While Kösters provides a fair sketch of the topic, he primarily directs his critical comments toward four authors: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, a German jurist, Gordon Zahn, an American sociologist and pacifist, Guenter Lewy, an American political scientist, and Olaf Blaschke, a German historian. Ironically, Kösters feels the need to point out that Lewy is “Jewish,” “born in Germany,” and later “emigrated to Palestine” (47). While Kösters presents a reasonable assessment of Lewy’s thesis, not all contributors follow suit.

The editors have assigned the next nine essays to the category, Controversies and Debates. In a rather mistitled essay, “Racist Ideology and Völkisch Religiosity,” Wolfgang Altgeld, professor emeritus of Modern History at the Julius-Maximilian University in Würzburg, rehearses the arguments he made in his earlier study, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism: On Religiously-Based Contrasts and National-Religious Ideas in the History of German Nationalism; Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992). Altgeld finds the reaction of German Catholicism to National Socialism deeply rooted in the centuries-long denominational tensions in Germany between Protestants and Catholics. The overwhelming support of National Socialism by Protestants led Catholics to see Nazism virtually as a “Protestant milieu Party.” This outlook thus enabled Catholic clergy and laity to perceive themselves as living amid a “second Kulturkampf” (81).

Matthias Stickler, director of the Institute for the Study of Higher Education (Institüt für Hochschule) of the Julius-Maximilian University in Würzburg, also develops the idea of Kulturkampf in his contribution, “Collaboration or Ideological Distance? Catholic Church and Nazi State.” According to him, the “traumatic memory of the Kulturkampf” fueled Catholics’ response to Nazism in 1933. In return and to protect the Church, the German Catholic hierarchy supported a Concordat with the Nazi government. Stickler refutes historian Klaus Scholder’s theories regarding the Reich Concordat’s connection with the disbandment of the Center Party and the German bishops 28 March 1933 pronouncement by citing six historical examples. In part, these points highlight the violence against members of Catholic associations and the extensive debate over the political issues behind Concordat articles 31 and 32. For Stickler, the time spent discussing such issues reveals the “precondition of the existence of Catholic political parties” (92). Alongside these arguments, Stickler emphasizes the essential role of the Concordat in permitting the Catholic Church to function in National Socialist Germany. To support his argument, he notes the extensive limitations and persecution the Austrian Catholic Church bore after the Reich Chancery declared the Austrian Concordat of May 1934 defunct.

In “The German Bishops: Pastoral Care and Politics,” Karl-Joseph Hummel, a retired director of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn, discusses the problems that arise when attempting to interpret the Church’s response to National Socialism. Chief among these issues is the failure both to contextualize primary sources correctly and to credit the Church for the “resistance of individuals against the Nazi regime” while, at the same time, hold the Church “accountable for the failures of individual bishops” (104). Building upon Michael Kißener’s insights on the organizational weaknesses of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, Hummel relates how the united Conference met only fourteen times during Hitler’s rule. Outside of these limited meetings, all business had to be coordinated by the “time-consuming” process of postal mail (105). Hummel admits that although pastoral care was of the utmost concern for the bishops, any notion of selfish “milieu egotism,” the caring of one’s milieu alone, should be rejected. To support his claim, he cites the willingness of bishops Petrus Legge of Meißen and Johannes B. Sproll of Rottenburg to suffer at the hands of the state over issues larger than those that were directly linked to Catholicism. The state, for example, found Legge guilty of breaking foreign currency transfer rules and fined him significantly. Sproll refused to support the Anschluss plebiscite and corresponding Reichstag election in April 1938 and had to flee his diocese in fear of persecution. While the example of Sproll possibly supports Hummel’s argument, that of Legge does not. Hummel adds that despite the lack of direct persecution against other German bishops, a significant number of Catholic priests from Germany ended up imprisoned in Dachau, often as “proxies” for their bishops (106). In addition, a few Catholics bishops from occupied countries were not spared internment in Dachau nor were numerous members of their clergy shown mercy. What Hummel does not mention is the ethnonationalistic tensions that existed in Dachau between German Catholic clergy and clergy of other countries, especially from occupied Eastern Europe (on this point, see Adam Kozłowiecki, SJ. Not und Bedrängnis: Als Jesuit in Auschwitz und Dachau. Lagertagebuch, edited by Manfred Deselaers and Bernhard Sill, translated by Herbert Ulrich, Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2016). Hummel’s larger point is that the bishops did not possess a mandate “for the moral order of society at large or for advocacy of the persecuted” (110). Here he quotes Heinz Hürten, who, before his recent passing, was the doyen of modern German Catholic Church history. In this vein, Hummel speculated, “When there was no involvement, as on 1 April 1933, there may have been other reasons besides ‘silence’, ‘passivity’, ‘naivety’, or ‘egotism’. For example, in early 1933 Faulhaber appeared so convinced that the boycott of Jewish businesses was un-Christian that, in his view, not the official Church but rather every individual Christian should protest against it of his own volition. In Faulhaber’s view, there were far more important contemporary issues for the Church’s leading authorities, such as the schools, the preservation of Catholic associations, or the question of sterilization” (109-110). Ultimately, such argumentation significantly grants the benefit of the doubt to the choices the bishops made under National Socialism

Thomas Brechenmacher, professor of modern history at the University of Potsdam, takes up the broader issue of the Catholic Church and Jews under National Socialism. He rejects what he views as common points of departure for historians covering this topic: the Church “failed morally…by not speaking out and not acting” and, in turn, “violated its own duty to ‘Christian’ love; it failed politically by becoming “blinded by anti-Bolshevism” and viewing “Nazism as a natural ally in the struggle against Soviet communism; the Church was only concerned with itself and therefore could be charged with “milieu egotism”; and lastly, the Church was antisemitic and therefore refused to respond to the plight of Jews (127-128). Reviving the eternal debate among historians about the nature of hatred toward Jews, Brechenmacher rejects any argument that does not make a clear distinction between anti-Judaism, which he describes as “older” and “religiously motivated,” and antisemitism, which he defines as “newer, socioeconomic or racially based” (128). Despite this distinction, he readily admits, “Undoubtedly, there are connections and even a flowing interchange between an older Christian tradition of religiously motivated hostility toward Jews – in other words, anti-Judaism – and the new ‘anti-Semitism’, with its economic and racist argumentation” (130-131). Nevertheless, he ultimately concludes that theologically, anti-Judaism “could have never led to [the] genocide of the Jews. Nor could it have inspired devout Christians to deduce that the Jewish people must be exterminated through murder” (131). Instead, Brechenmacher reasons, only the “older, religious anti-Judaism” helps to explain “the ‘ambivalence’ with which many Catholics…occasionally responded to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews” (131). He cites, for example, the reaction of Bertram and Faulhaber to the 1 April 1933 boycott as an example of the latter. While Brechnmacher’s essay is one of the stronger ones in the volume, overall, he and his colleagues seem surprisingly out of touch with the impact of Holocaust Studies on the writing of the history of church and state under National Socialism. In addition, the citations throughout this volume testify to the narrowness of the contributors’ secondary source material, especially in relation to more recent studies in English on the Church, National Socialism, and the Holocaust.

In “The Catholic Milieu and Nazism,” Christoph Kösters examines the ever-changing milieu of German Catholicism. As reflected in more recent English-language studies, Kösters portrays the milieu as “dynamic” and “not a stagnant system” nor a sealed off “Catholic ghetto” as it is often portrayed (152-153). Though it might appear as anti-democratic and “hostile to secularization,” Kösters argues that it merely “braced itself against the developments of modern society” (153). In the same vein, Kösters rejects secularization theories that portray Catholic conflicts with the Nazi regime as arising from “traditional anti-modernization reflexes and ‘secularization conflicts’ within the Catholic milieu” (153-154). For him, the Church should not be viewed as “a moral authority and institution that focused only on its own survival [and] failed to recognize the ‘signs of the times’, in contrast to the politically resistant socialist milieu.” (155). Instead, Kösters insists that the main conflict was over the “idea of race as a core component of the Nazi worldview” (156). He continues, the Nazis ultimately wanted to “eliminate Christianity and its organizational carrier, which opposed the core idea of race” (157). Truly, this would be amazing if the Church had taken such a stance, but unfortunately extant primary documents do not consistently support such a definitive conclusion in relation to the Church’s conflict with National Socialism.

In “Is ‘Resistance’ not ‘the Right Word’?,” Michael Kißener takes aim at Georg Denzler, emeritus professor of church history at the University of Bamberg, and his work, Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort: Katholische Theologen und Priester im Dritten Reich (Resistance is not the Correct Word: Catholics Theologians and Priests in the Third Reich, Zurich: Pendo, 2003). Focusing on the cases of Konrad von Preysing, bishop of Berlin, and Willi Graf, a student and member of the White Rose resistance movement, he concludes, “‘resistance from within the church environment can only be grasped in individual cases” (175). Confirming this stance, he repeats the statement by Hans Maier, which he quoted in his introductory essay to the volume, namely that the Church “as a whole” would not realistically “enter the resistance” (175).

In his second contribution, Thomas Brechenmacher examines Pius XII and World War II. For him, Pope Pius XII engaged in the principle of Inter Arma Caritas or “Christian charity between the weapons” as a departure point for the Vatican’s response to the war. In September 1939, the pope also set up an “Office of Information” whose purpose was to offer “concrete assistance, visits to prisons and concentration camps, deliveries of food, clothing, and medicine” (182). Though taking a public position of neutrality, Pius XII likewise engaged in behind the scenes activities that were far from impartial. Such endeavors included overtures to President Roosevelt in 1938 around the time of the Munich agreement; establishing contact in early 1940 between the resistance in the German military and the British government; and in May 1940, sending telegrams to members of the royalty in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, which denounced invasions by the German army. Though such actions were unknown to most of the world, Brechenmacher does not find Pius XII silent in face of the horrible atrocities of the World War II period. Rather, Brechenmacher argues that Pius XII never deviated from his basic message: “damning the war, urging peace, calling for a new order for state and society based on Christian values, condemning modern pagan totalitarianism, demanding the observance of divine and human rights, entreating and prayer for innocent victims” (196). An important insight, yet, Brechenmacher neglects to admit that Pius XII, despite his Christmas 1942 message, never directly and specifically condemned the persecution and murder of European Jews.

In her contribution, Annette Mertens, a research fellow at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, examines the choices of German Catholics during the Second World War. At the outset, she states that no book has ever been produced on this subject. However, since this volume’s publication, Oxford University Press has published Thomas Brodie’s study, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945, which I reviewed in the last issue of CCHQ. Mertens informs the reader that “650 military chaplains” along with 20,000 clerics, monastics, and prospective priests were serving at the front, mostly as military medics” (199). She makes a clear distinction between serving the fatherland – the German nation – and serving the Nazi regime, then assures the reader that the emphasis of the Church hierarchy was on the former. Unfortunately, the bishops were not privy to any outlook that enabled them to approach the war differently than in the past. The Peace League of German Catholics (Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken) had only been founded in 1917 and banned in 1933 and, according to her, had not yet made enough impact to alter traditional thinking toward war. She concludes, that for the Catholic Church “as a national church, a general summons to martyrdom would have been unthinkable” (204).

In the final essay of the second section, Karl-Joseph Hummel examines how the German Catholic Church dealt with its past under National Socialism. He stresses that the German Catholic bishops were the first group to issue a post-war confession of guilt in August 1945. Yet, he fails to point out that their statement made no reference to the murder of European Jews. For him, doubt over the Church’s role in World War II “came under suspicion” seriously in the 1960s, primarily because it was an institution (237). This is an important insight, but it lacks any contextualization in the tumultuous events of the 1960s that upended many traditional institutions and modes of thinking.

The third section of the book, “Images of History,” contains but one essay, once again by Karl-Joseph Hummel. Entitled, “The Church in Pictures: Historical Photos as a Means of Deception,” the chapter describes the history behind several images that have appeared in more recent books about the Catholic Church under National Socialism. Among these photos is one that the editors at Northern Illinois University Press used for the cover of my book, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (2008). The photo features Abbott Alban Schachleiter, OSB, a Benedictine and emeritus abbot of Emmaus Monastery in Prague, giving the Hitler salute to SA men. Hummel not only criticizes the use of this historical photo but also misrepresents the book’s content.

Overall, the contributors to the volume do endeavor to fulfill the goal of the collection’s title by offering an overview of the state of debates and controversies regarding research on the German Catholic Church under National Socialism. Generally, the contributors’ arguments and interpretations are favorable to the Church and the choices of its leaders during this tumultuous time period. A more critical eye would have strengthened the collection. Nevertheless, as with any edited collection, one needs to consider that the chapters are, at times, brief, unnuanced summaries of more detailed arguments. The editors could have also taken steps to strengthen the English language edition by deemphasizing controversies that are long past and by revising chapters to include the depth and breadth of the current historiography (in both German and English) on the Catholic Church in the Third Reich. In addition, as I pointed out above, the translation lacks style and fluency in English, the target language, which makes the volume, at times, challenging to read and not advantageous for use in the classroom. Finally, and more practically, the book, a paperback at that, is priced at over $70.00. In recommending the book, such imperfections cannot be shaken off too easily, if at all.

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), X + 162 Pp., ISBN: 9780806159089.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

More than 33,000 French priests and members of religious orders served in the First World War. Although many of them were government-appointed or volunteer chaplains, the majority were involved in other ways—as stretcher-bearers, nurses, and combatants. Anita Rasi May draws on the memoirs, letters and biographies of thirty-three of these individuals in order to shed light on their subjective experiences. She begins with a survey of anticlerical policies during the prewar Third Republic, a “culture war” situation in which the French Catholic Church saw its status and privileges significantly curtailed. She follows up with analysis of the responses of French priests to the outbreak of war, the variety of ways in which they participated, and their perceptions of the war’s meaning for France and the church. As she assesses the consequences of the war on church-state relations, she concludes that “in the postwar period there emerged a new relationship between the priests and the people due in large part to the memory of the priests’ wartime service and to their key role in memorializing their many fallen comrades. This newly won respect provided the atmosphere in which both the government and church leaders worked out compromises in their ongoing relationship” (10).

The anticlerical policies of the prewar era provide an important backdrop for understanding the mentalities and motivations of French priests, bishops and members of religious orders during the war itself. From the 1870s forward, French political leaders feared that Catholic clergy and institutions “did not form patriots but rather encouraged loyalty to monarchical government and to an international organization, the Catholic Church, based in Rome” (16). They responded by dissolving the Jesuits and other religious orders, abolishing the military chaplaincy, and ending priests’ exemption from military service. The Catholic Church’s dubious role in the Dreyfus Affair provided the pretext for further anticlerical measures, including the abolition of church schools and the formal separation of church and state. The government’s open hostility to the Catholic Church was accompanied by a long, steady decline in religious observance, especially among people of the working class, and among men of all classes.

In light of such troubling developments, French clergy saw the Great War as an opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and prove their worth to national community. Like their counterparts in other belligerent countries, French priests believed their nation’s cause was just, but an equally powerful motivation for supporting the war was the prospect of restoring the Catholic Church to its former prominence and reversing the secularization of state and society. May cites the example of a Franciscan seminarian who believed that the war would lead to a rebirth of “the France of years past, that is to say, the true Christian France” (50). As ordinary people flocked to religious ceremonies and cheered for priests who volunteered for war service, many clergy believed they were witnessing a revitalization of religious life and an end to anticlerical hostility. These hopes and expectations help explain why so many priests volunteered for combat and non-combat roles, why French bishops gave their assent, and why so few French clergy opposed the war and the phenomenon of the soldier priest.

May’s research gives us a glimpse into the inner world of those clergy who spent time at the front. For example, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most prominent philosophers, was a stretcher-bearer with the 8^th Regiment of Moroccan Riflemen. He saw the war as a “baptism into reality” (52) and hoped his position would give him influence among the men with whom he served. A Franciscan chaplain named Édouard de Massat described the war itself as “a missionary whose voice is more eloquent than our own” and expressed the hope that France would emerge from the struggle “with a new soul” (56). As time went on, priests grew more realistic about the prospects of mass conversion and religious renewal, and their efforts at evangelizing gave way to an emphasis on pastoral care and service to their comrades in arms. This was as true of soldier priests and medical personnel as it was of chaplains.

May notes that most priests adjusted well to military life and found it easy to combine patriotic fervor and military service with their Catholic faith. This was also true of those who experienced combat. May provides numerous examples of priests who were promoted to officer status, led assaults on enemy positions, and participated actively and sometimes enthusiastically in killing. Although none of May’s thirty-three priests were pacifists, all were aware of the horrors of war (especially the damage it inflicted on their own countrymen) and occasionally struggled over the ethics of killing. Although May asserts that “in these memoirs, journals, autobiographies and biographies…there is no love of war for itself” (78), she also quotes a chaplain named Jean Lagardère who said of the front: “I am happy here: the friendship of the men, the rattling of arms, the noise of the cannon, the whistling of bullets, the view of the trenches, their infected mud delights me, thrills me, makes me quiver. I am only at home there, I only breathe there, I only do good there. I only feel myself a man there” (78). They knew the horrors of war, and some loved it anyway.

Priests’ reactions to the war were complicated and contradictory on a variety of levels. For example, they expressed contempt for men who refused to fight or mutilated themselves to avoid military service, yet some of them intervened on behalf of soldiers condemned to death for breaches of discipline. Some regretted killing the enemy, or regretted enjoying it, but few gave much thought to the humanity of the enemy. Most preferred to focus on the French soldier’s self-sacrifice rather than his role as a perpetrator of violence, and they made frequent comparisons with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. A war sermon by chaplain Louis Lenoir was one of the more eloquent and revealing expressions of this blend of faith, war, and nationalist euphoria: “Like that of Christ, this ‘beautiful blood of France’ was today, as it has always been in history, ‘liberating blood’…spread across Europe and to the extremities of the earth to defend nations against injustice and support religious and social freedom…search all the corners of the world where violated liberty has called for help, everywhere you will find traces of French blood” (85).

Whether they were chaplains, medical personnel, or soldiers, French priests took their apostolic work seriously. They administered the sacraments, counseled individual soldiers, mailed or hand delivered letters, procured books and personal items, established social spaces where soldiers could relax, visited soldiers’ families when on leave, and conveyed gifts from those families to soldiers with whom they served at the front. They heard confessions, granted absolution, and gave communion before attacks, and in the aftermath, they performed last rites for the dying, presided over burials and masses for the dead, and helped with the mapping of cemeteries. Not surprisingly, the pastoral ministry of priests at the front seems to have been the role that was most widely appreciated and accepted, even among persons who had left the church and had no interest in returning.

In terms of long-term impact, the priests’ expectations only partly coincided with reality. When the war began, many of them believed they would have the opportunity “to evangelize men who were not the usual churchgoers in early twentieth-century France” (64). They also hoped to demonstrate that they were just as manly and patriotic—and as much a part of the national community—as other French men. Although the mass conversions did not occur, priests did develop “bonds of brotherhood” with many soldiers, “based more on mutual respect than on shared faith. They also found in themselves a capacity for violence and for being swept up into the exaltation of battle, which strengthened their feelings of brotherhood and empathy for their fellows” (109). As an institution, the French Catholic Church enjoyed a slight improvement of its status in the postwar era. The state and the education system remained secularized, but members of religious orders who had returned from exile to fight for France were allowed to remain there when the war had ended. The French government also restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and though anticlerical laws remained on the books, they were not always rigorously enforced. In fact, when the government of Édouard Herriot attempted to do so in 1926, veteran priests played an important role in the protests that forced the state to back down. May credits these successes to the fact that priests enjoyed a new level of respect and status due to their wartime service.

May’s book offers a fascinating glimpse into the fears, frustrations and hopes of Catholic clergy during the First World War. The priests themselves are a stark example of the “self-mobilization” that was so prevalent in the “war cultures” of Europe during this period.[1] At the same time, the book suffers from a number of shortcomings in terms of framing as well as the selection and interpretation of sources.

First, it relies too much on priests’ own perceptions of their impact without considering other kinds of data. For example, it would be helpful to see information on baptisms, confirmations and other indicators of religious observance before, during and after the war. To what extent did the war service of priests and the rapprochement between church and state disrupt or mitigate the long, steady decline in public, corporate worship? May also refers to wartime rumors and disinformation in “anticlerical newspapers and speeches” (116) but does not comment on the intensity of anticlerical discourses at different points in time. Tracking changes and continuities in the anticlerical press would be another way of assessing whether the priests’ war service had an impact on popular opinion (i.e. whether they achieved the respect and recognition they longed for or merely imagined it).

A second shortcoming is the fact that May engages the question of clerical violence on only the most superficial level. She notes that soldier priests killed and sometimes expressed regret for killing (or for enjoying it) and follows up with the claim that these experiences made it easier for priests to identify with and minister to other men who had been in combat. May does not explore the long tradition of Catholic theological reflection on violence, nor does she acknowledge that there were many other possible areas of shared experience (visiting brothels, for example) from which priests were expected to abstain. What made military violence different?

May’s temporal framework is also problematic. Her story ends in 1926 at what appears to be a comeback moment for Catholics in France’s culture wars—a happy ending of sorts. Extending the study to 1940 or 1945 would complicate things, as May would have to grapple with those segments of the Catholic Church that supported far right movements, cast their lot with the Vichy regime and celebrated the demise of the Third Republic.

Finally, May’s study adopts an exclusively national perspective with only the briefest references to other European states and the wider world. Comparative analysis across European cultural and religious landscapes would make it more difficult to affirm the validity of bargains in which clergy supported questionable regimes and policies in exchange for acceptance and influence. The response of many German clergy to their country’s “national renewal” in 1933 should serve as a cautionary tale. Likewise, May fails to incorporate insights from a large body of recent research on the global dimensions of the war. Though she notes the existence of colonial troops, she offers no meaningful discussion of their religious and cultural identities or their wartime experiences. Several of May’s priests (including Teilhard and Lenoir) embraced their role as missionaries and affirmed France’s “civilizing mission” throughout the world, but May does not indicate the context in which those efforts and assumptions played out. For example, the majority of France’s colonial soldiers were forcibly recruited through processes that did great violence to them, their families, and their communities. After arriving in Europe, they were deployed as shock troops in an effort to lower the death toll among white French soldiers.[2] We cannot understand the ideas and actions of priests like Teilhard and Lenoir apart from these realities. By neglecting them, May’s book remains confined to the same limited horizons as the priests’ own accounts of the war and its meaning.

[1] See John Horne, “Public Opinion and Politics,” in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), 280-281.

[2] See Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).

Review of James Enns. Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of James Enns. Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). 328 Pp. ISBN: 9780773549135.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

From the perspective of North American Protestants in 1945, Germans needed “saving” on a number of fronts: from the lingering effects of Nazism, from the potential allure of communism, from the seemingly inevitable pull of secularism, and perhaps most urgently, from the vast material destruction and deprivation in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War II. James Enns’ 2017 book, Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974, analyzes the role of North American Protestant ecumenical and mission agencies that participated in the reconstruction and spiritual rehabilitation of West Germany in the first three decades after World War II.

Enns examines a range of Protestant missionary responses to postwar Germany and divides his subjects into three broad categories. Ecumenical missionaries were mainline Protestants who worked primarily through the Religious Affairs Section of the American Military Government in Germany, the World Council of Churches (WCC), and the Church World Service. They were invested primarily in relief and reconstruction, particularly helping to rebuild the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (the main Protestant church) as a pillar of German society. Denominational missionaries represent the second approach, and here Enns focuses on the Baptists and Mennonites. These denominations used pre-existing ties to their German counterparts and sought to build up these communities and their standing in German society. The third category is conservative evangelical missionaries who worked through independent mission organizations of a mid-century fundamentalist bent. The impact of organizations like Youth for Christ and Janz Team Ministries is not well known and the author does a good job integrating these organizations in the larger narrative.

Although he uses the terms “missionaries” and “missionary activity,” Enns is careful to distinguish the growing rift about the missionary endeavor within American Protestantism. By this period, mainline Protestants who supported the ecumenical movement had moved away from traditional practices of evangelizing and civilizing toward a model of humanitarian self-help (9). At the other end of the spectrum, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants remained committed to converting the “unsaved” and promoting an individualized personal faith.

What all these approaches had in common, especially in the first postwar decade, was the goal of promoting democracy. In Enns’ assessment, the Cold War context hovered over all of these various relief and mission endeavors – the motivation to bulwark Germany against communism was much stronger than the desire to help Germans come to terms with their Nazi past. Each group understood the role of Christianity in different ways: ecumenical Protestants were committed to the WCC’s Christian internationalism; Baptists and Mennonites believed their congregational models of church governance best promoted democracy and religious freedom; and conservative evangelicals believed that “inviting Christ into your life” fostered the personal freedoms of democracy (104).

I applaud the author’s integration of Germany’s Freikirchen (independent churches) into the broader narrative of German Protestantism and his ability to juggle several denominations, ecumenical bodies, and ministries in a coherent narrative. The book draws out the powerful transnational influences of individuals like Billy Graham to the growth of a German Evangeliker identity (a neologism that connotes “evangelical” in the North American sense of the term, as opposed to evangelisch, which has always referred to the main Protestant church in Germany).

The analysis is less strong when it relies on the denominational mission agencies’ own articulation of what they were accomplishing in Germany. Regarding the North American Baptists’ efforts to restore Baptist church buildings, he writes that “[t]hey were helping German Baptists claim a legitimate place in the religious life of the communities in which they were resident and thus be agents of spiritual renewal to their own people” (84). The historical actors involved may well have believed the German Baptists to be agents of spiritual renewal, but such a claim should be analyzed in a broader context of German complicity. Ten pages later the author does address the German Baptists’ involvement in Nazi society, but prefaces the discussion with the erroneous claim that German Mennonites were not “compromised by Nazi ideology” (94). A plethora of new research on Mennonites and the Holocaust suggests that Mennonites were indeed compromised by Nazism in many ways.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Saving Germany makes an important contribution to our understanding of transnational religious history in postwar Germany and does so by taking seriously the full diversity of the German religious landscape.

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

“Victoria Barnett’s Retirement from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

“Victoria Barnett’s Retirement from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

Victoria Barnett is familiar to many or most readers of CCHQ, at least partly for her position on the board of editors of this journal and as a frequent contributor, but also for the three decades in which she has been an important scholar in our field. She is far from “retirement” in any meaningful sense of the term, since she has an agenda for ongoing research and future publications. However, she retired in August from her twenty-four-year career at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To honor this occasion, the Museum organized two events on August 1, 2019. The first was a public program in the Meyerhof Lecture Hall, from 2:00 to 3:30, and the second a private event primarily for Museum staff. In all cases, Vicki’s colleagues waxed enthusiastic about her insight, her skills, her contributions to Holocaust scholarship, and her career at the Museum.

I helped organize and moderated the public session on that day, a discussion under the title, “For the Soul of the People: Reflections on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Religion and the Holocaust.” The session, which can be viewed online, was introduced by Sara Bloomfield, Director of the USHMM. Speakers included Doris Bergen (Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto) and Susannah Heschel (Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College), both well known to readers of this journal. Mary Boys (Vice-President of Academic Affairs and Dean at Union Theological Seminary as well as Skinner & McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology) also presented, as did Douglas Irvin-Erickson (Assistant Professor and Director of the Genocide Prevention Program in the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University).

The public session began with attention to Barnett’s first book, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford U Press, 1992). With this book, she became an important member of the generation of scholars who began to modify our historical view of the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany. Rather than repeat the exaggerated defense of churches common during the first several postwar decades, she helped us see the complications within a story in which not even all members of the Confessing Church contingent among Protestants were natural opponents of the Nazi regime or its harsh policies. Both Doris Bergen and Susannah Heschel emphasized the value of Barnett’s method, the extensive interviews she did with members of the Confessing Church, and especially her focus on the stories of women. These interviews contributed a new and significant insight into the Church Struggle, especially in terms of its complexity. Barnett then indicated that she has both transcripts and tapes of those interviews, extending far beyond what she has used herself, which will soon be available in the archives of the Holocaust Museum.

Mary Boys focused on Jewish-Christian relations, which have changed so considerably in the aftermath of the Holocaust, including changes in doctrine at Vatican II and the creation of Nostra Aetate. This topic of the Jewish-Christian relationship has involved important contributions from Barnett. For example, she translated and edited the English version of Wolfgang Gerlach’s important book, And the Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (U of Nebraska Press, 2000). When Barnett became Director of the Program on Church Relations at the USHMM in 2004, she paid close attention to these issues, working with Jewish members of the Church Relations Committee, offering annual summer seminars for Holocaust educators, and, in 2012, leading the important move to change the name from Church Relations Committee to the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust. She also has helped this program and this committee by adding Islam to the mix, so that now Jews, Muslims, and Christians sit on the committee and work within the program. It is also worth noting that a major focus in Barnett’s recent work involves investigations into ecumenical efforts during the 1930s in which an international group of Christian and Jewish leaders tried to investigate and mitigate the harsh measures unfolding within Germany.

Douglas Irvin-Erickson spoke about Barnett’s second major book, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Greenwood, 1999), another important contribution to our understanding of the ethical intricacies exposed by an event so devastating as the Holocaust. This also gave Irvin-Erickson a chance to bring Dietrich Bonhoeffer into the conversation. Barnett, of course, is a major figure in Bonhoeffer studies, especially in the project to publish the sixteen volumes of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English. She translated and edited individual volumes, and, more importantly, she served as General Editor of the entire DBWE from 2004 until the index volume was completed in 2014.

From the podium, I described Barnett as one of the most important figures in international Bonhoeffer studies. Others insisted I should have called her the most important. I do think that her recent small book, “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times (Fortress Press, 2017), based on Bonhoeffer’s Christmas 1942 letter to selected friends just months before his arrest and imprisonment, gives us a timely and important window into a crucial moment in his life and thought after ten years of living within Hitler’s Germany. I eagerly await the Bonhoeffer book I expect to appear as Barnett savors the more relaxed daily schedule that comes with retirement. Without doubt, her investment in the corpus of Bonhoeffer’s work—her role as translator and editor, her deep knowledge of the texts, her personal knowledge of many of the principals, her role in the International Bonhoeffer Society, her reviews of the books of others, and her work on churches in Nazi Germany since the late 1970s—gives us reason to look forward to the next works to spring from her laptop.

When members of the USHMM staff gathered after the public session for a retirement party, the program included comments from Sara Bloomfield, Director of the Museum, Robert Ehrenreich, Director of National Academic Programs, and Sarah Ogilvie, Chief Program Officer. The attendance at this event and the comments of these three individuals made it very clear that Barnett’s role at the Museum included not only her nurturing of a vibrant Program on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust, but also broader contributions to the Museum. For those of us who know her primarily as a scholar in our field, we should also know that she was widely admired and very good at her day job. She made a difference in the programs of the Museum and in the way that the Museum communicates the meaning and significance of the Holocaust to the outside world.

Vicki is known to those of us associated with the CCHQ as an important scholar of churches in Nazi Germany. She is also known as an expert and very important figure in international Bonhoeffer studies. Finally, she has had a long and important career at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I am not sure how anyone can stand upon three such large pedestals, but she has done so with grace and impact.

Article Note: Jouni Tilli, “’Deus Vult!’ The Idea of Crusading in Finnish Clerical War Rhetoric, 1941-1944”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Article Note: Jouni Tilli, “’Deus Vult!’ The Idea of Crusading in Finnish Clerical War Rhetoric, 1941-1944,” War in History 24, no 3 (2017): 363-385.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Jouni Tilli’s illuminating article invites readers to take a closer look at what seems an obscure topic: Finnish military chaplains in World War II, and more specifically, their rhetoric. Historians of the war and the Holocaust, if they mention Finland at all, invariably present it as exceptional. Though the Finns fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944, famously only eight Jews were deported from Finland to be killed, and Jewish men served in the Finnish army, some in its officer corps. This positive story, captured in the title of Hannu Rautkallio’s 1987 book, Finland and the Holocaust: The Rescue of Finland’s Jews – often described as the only English-language study of the topic – complements the so-called “separate war thesis.” That interpretation, prevalent in Finnish public discourse since the 1940s, presents Finland’s participation in the war against the Soviet Union as a Finnish-Soviet matter, occurring parallel to but not as part of the German-Soviet War. Tilli’s article counters this familiar version of events and contributes to a critical body of writing that extends back to Elina (Suominen) Sana’s 1979 book, “The Ship of Death” (in Finnish), and forward to works by Antero Holmila, Oula Silvennoinen, Tiina Kinnunen and others. Finland, it turns out, may not have been so exceptional.

Tilli’s analysis draws primarily on the sermons and writings of Finland’s Lutheran clergy during the so-called Continuation War. They uniformly preached a crusade against the Soviet Union and Communism and portrayed Germany as God’s gift to the Finnish nation, he shows. In the process, they lent religious legitimacy to violence. Their influence was considerable: 96 percent of Finns were Lutheran, and almost half of the country’s 1000 Lutheran pastors served as military chaplains, 280 of those at the front. Senior chaplain Rolf Tiivola, in a sermon to soldiers in July 1941, evoked the crusaders of the eleventh century in words that provided the title for Tilli’s article: “’God wills! God wills to make Finland great …’” Readers may be shocked, disappointed, and embarrassed by this rhetoric, reminiscent as it is of the Christian jingoism so prevalent during World War I. Similar language also occurred among the Wehrmacht chaplains, as Martin Röw has shown, although paradoxically, restrictions on “political” involvement muffled the full-throated endorsements of the Nazi German war effort that many would gladly have offered.

Finnish chaplains spoke in one voice, Tilli demonstrates, but that voice was not robotic. Indeed, their rhetoric proved to be quite supple and adaptable, and it changed with the course of events. In 1941, as the Finnish army advanced rapidly, crusading rhetoric invoked a holy war against Bolshevism, its knights clad in the armor of Christ. By late 1942, as military success gave way to setbacks and ultimately defeat, the crusade turned inward, to sermons lamenting “national sins.”

Tilli’s article was published before release in early 2019 of a report prepared by the National Archives of Finland, on “The Finnish SS-Volunteers and Atrocities 1941–1943.” Finns, it found, very likely participated in mass murder of Jews, other civilians, and prisoners of war in Ukraine and the Caucasus region. Unlike Tilli, who focused on soldiers fighting on the Finnish front, the report dealt with the 1,408 Finns in the SS Panzer Division Wiking. But those men, too, were served by chaplains: Ensio Pihkala, until his death in August 1941, then Kalervo Kurkiala. According to church historian André Swanström, Pihkala expressed horror at massacres of Jews, whereas Kurkiala had nothing but praise for the SS. One wonders whether they and the other pastors discussed by Tilli included genocide under the crusading slogan, “God wills it!”

Article Note: Julio de la Cueva, “Violent Culture Wars: Religion and Revolution in Mexico, Russia and Spain in the Interwar Period”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Article Note: Julio de la Cueva, “Violent Culture Wars: Religion and Revolution in Mexico, Russia and Spain in the Interwar Period,” Journal of Contemporary History 53:3 (2018): 503-523.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In this article, Julio de la Cueva explores the role of anticlericalism in early twentieth-century revolutionary movements that saw “defeat of religion…either as a necessary condition for revolution or as an equally necessary result” (503). He describes the antireligious violence that occurred in Mexico, Russia, and Spain during this period as the most extreme manifestation of a “second Kulturkampf” inspired by the French Revolution and the subsequent culture wars of the “long nineteenth century” (504). As was true of their counterparts in those earlier conflicts, revolutionaries of the early twentieth century believed that organized religion was an obstacle to progress and the achievement of their goals, hence the “violent culture wars” embedded in these three revolutionary struggles.

Mexican revolutionaries alternated between attempts to reform the Catholic Church and get rid of it altogether. During the period of war and violence that began in 1910, they confiscated church property, desecrated or destroyed sacred spaces and objects, and imprisoned or expelled priests and believers who opposed them. The Constitution of 1917 significantly curtailed the public power and legal privileges of the Church, outlawed religious orders, secularized education, and gave state governments permission to limit the number of priests within their territories. Vigorous enforcement of these measures by President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) and his successors led to armed resistance by devout Catholics in the Cristero War, in the course of which at least 70,000 persons were killed. The state responded with a “defanaticization” campaign and attempted to suppress Catholic worship across much of Mexico. After nearly a decade of intermittent religious war, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) recognized the futility of the state’s approach and allowed churches to reopen and priests and bishops to return. “By 1938, the savage confrontation between the Revolution and the Catholic Church had come to an end in Mexico” (510).

De la Cueva identifies several notable differences between the Mexican and Russian revolutions, including a much higher death toll and a more sustained and intense campaign to eradicate religion in the latter case. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ initial moves were similar to those of Mexico’s revolutionaries. They nationalized church lands, transferred church schools to state control, “deprived the churches of legal personality,” and waged a propaganda campaign against religious institutions and traditions (512). Physical violence against clergy and believers increased during the civil war but subsided by the end of 1922 as the state adopted a less aggressive approach and church leaders became more submissive to the new regime. However, this “semi-tolerance” gave way to renewed persecution under Stalin; by 1941, fewer than 1000 churches were still open (of the 60,000 that existed before the revolution) and only 5,665 priests remained (in comparison with 112,629 in 1914). Although the Soviet state had gone a long way toward dismantling the Orthodox Church, many Soviet citizens, especially in rural communities, remained committed to Orthodox Christianity. De la Cueva sees parallels with the Mexican case in this respect as well.

Revolutionary anticlerical violence during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) bore a resemblance to what occurred in these other revolutions. As in Mexico, Spanish revolutionaries drew on older traditions of elite and popular anticlericalism dating back to the late eighteenth century. The proclamation of the Second Republic and the Constitution of 1931 were stridently secular, calling for the separation of church and state, secular education, and the dissolution of the Jesuit Order. A wave of anticlerical violence in that same year led to the destruction of 100 religious buildings over a period of five days, and attacks on clergy began to increase as well. The most intense period of revolutionary anticlerical violence occurred during the civil war, in which 6,733 priests were killed (71 percent of them between July and September 1936). However, unlike the Mexican and Russian cases, much of this violence was initiated by local actors rather than central authorities. It came to an end in 1939 when Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces defeated the Republican government and restored the church to a place of prominence in Spanish society.

De la Cueva notes that radical movements from the French Revolution onward have identified revolution with the suppression or destruction of religion, but he highlights the variations as well. Attacks on church property and acts of iconoclasm were common across all three cases in this article, but only in the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent Spain) did violence threaten to eradicate the clergy entirely. In Mexico and the Soviet Union, the state played a central role in coordinating antireligious violence and anticlerical policies, whereas in Spain the initiative came from diverse local actors on the political left who shared a “powerful anticlerical identity” (516). Despite Pope Pius XI’s emphasis on “atheistic communism” in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937), communist ideology played only a small role in the anticlerical violence that occurred in Spain, and hardly any at all in the case of Mexico. The encyclical correctly identified Mexico, Russia and Spain as epicenters of religious persecution but was overly simplistic in its assessment of the ideological and contextual factors that were driving it.

De la Cueva begins and ends his article with a call for additional transnational comparisons as well as the integration of “different explanatory models that have been offered of antireligious violence in each country” (503). He hopes “to stimulate a dialogue between the histories and the historians of the early twentieth century revolutionary regimes” (523). Contemporary church historians will also find his work helpful in terms of understanding the moral panic and political and cultural polarization that led many Christians to seek the protection of fascist and far-right regimes during the interwar period, an alternative that proved to be equally perilous for the churches and their members.