Category Archives: Volume 30 Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Winter 2024)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Winter 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

Very warm Christmas greetings to our readers! Once again I bring our issue to post a bit later than intended, but I hope that the very full content makes up for the tardiness. As my first year as managing editor comes to a close, I am quietly very pleased that our journal can end on such a strong note, with a variety of contributions for December and the promise that 2025 and beyond will feature similar breadth, depth, and quality scholarship from our editorial board.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5436013.

This issue features a variety of reviews, including five book reviews and a film review, as well as an article note and two conference reports: one concerning a seminar on religion and secularism in nineteenth-century Germany from the September 2023 German Studies Association meeting; the other detailing the joint meeting of editorial boards for Contemporary Church History Quarterly and Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Washington, DC, in October. This conference report was written collaboratively by the editors in attendance and features brief summaries of all papers presented, to give our readers an idea of the ongoing commitment to and relevance of church/Church history and related fields on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in multiple languages. It was a fruitful and all-too-brief opportunity for our board to meet in person, and for the executive committee to welcome several of our newest editors; we are hopeful that such meetings will occur with more frequency, or at least more regularity, in the coming years.

Martina Cucchiara has written a detailed analysis of David Kertzer’s The Pope at War, one of the most recent contributions (and there is sure to be more) to the scholarly debates about the activities of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust using the recently-opened wartime archives of his papacy. In his review of a related work, Gerald Steinacher takes on the edited volume of Marshall J. Breger and Hubert R. Reginbogin, The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality, with essays that explore the concept of neutrality and its ability to explain Vatican diplomacy over a century of history. Andrew Chandler offers a comment on Keith Clements’ study of two ecumenical pioneers and their role in Christian internationalism in the twentieth century in J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers. Jonathan Huener examines William Skiles’ study, Preaching to Nazi Germany, of the responses of Confessing Church clergy to National Socialism to explain their failure to mount stiffer opposition to its ideology. In an article note, Kyle Jantzen comments on Harry Legg’s exploration of instances of Jewish self-discovery in pre-WWII Europe, published in Contemporary European History this past fall.

A pair of reviews intersect in prominent and provocative ways in taking on new material about a much-studied and popular subject in the annals of German church history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Christopher Probst’s film review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin (2024), is a sensitive and careful reflection of what the film does well in addition to identifying some serious flaws. (The film attracted significant media attention both in Germany as well as in the United States because of its use – and misuse – in Christian nationalist propaganda.) Connected to this, our own editor-emerita Victoria Barnett writes a detailed review of Tim Lorentzen’s most recent study, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt, which considers Bonhoeffer’s role in the resistance to Nazism and how the legacy and memory of this has shifted over time.

As ever, I invite you, as the reader, to let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our site, and to relate any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly at lnf@sfu.ca.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi,
Simon Fraser University

Kindly note: the editorial board of the CCHQ reserves the right to consider requests for translations of articles by contributors. Please direct your request to Lauren Faulkner Rossi at lnf@sfu.ca.

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Review Article: Tim Lorentzen, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review Article: Tim Lorentzen, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt. (Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2023). Illustrations. ISBN 978-3-506-70473-3.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English edition, and former director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.[i]

This fall a new film about the German theologian/resistance figure Dietrich Bonhoeffer has revived debates among Christians about his legacy and its relevance for contemporary issues. The film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, provoked protests (in which I was involved) from German and North American scholars in the Bonhoeffer Society and eighty-six members of the extended Bonhoeffer family, as well as disclaimers about the film’s marketing by the German actors and the film’s director. Like most films on Bonhoeffer, the new production plays fast and loose with the historical facts. Readers of this journal will be surprised, for example, to see Martin Niemoeller preaching a rousing sermon in defense of German Jews after Kristallnacht and Winston Churchill appreciatively reading excerpts from Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question.” Most protests focused on the film’s portrayal of Bonhoeffer’s resistance as a militant embrace of violence in the name of a just cause: a stunning misrepresentation of Bonhoeffer’s theology and, at a time of rising political violence and Christian Nationalism in the United States, a potentially dangerous one.

But as Tim Lorentzen’s new book illustrates, it is hardly the first time that interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been based on his ties to the German resistance. Lorentzen, Professor of Early Modern Church History at Kiel University, traces the chronology of German cultural narratives about Bonhoeffer’s resistance, and their intersections with German Protestant memorialization, from 1945 to 2006. His focus on resistance (rather than German historiography about Nazism, the Holocaust, the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or Bonhoeffer’s theological writings) is a narrow lens through which to understand Bonhoeffer, but it raises interesting and provocative questions. As historians know, Bonhoeffer was a minor figure in the resistance circles—and yet this very aspect of his life has become central in the narratives about him. Would Bonhoeffer’s theology be as well-known and widely read today if this were not the case? Has the emphasis on resistance led to the historical distortions one finds in many works on Bonhoeffer? Conversely, does it offer insights we might not otherwise have into his theology and his life?

In his introduction, Lorentzen argues that despite the growing body of scholarship on memorialization and memory cultures (especially with respect to the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust), there has not yet been a work focusing on church memory culture, where Bonhoeffer has achieved unusually central and symbolic status (and not just in Germany). This is especially important between 1948 and 1989, when parallel memory cultures about the Nazi era emerged in the German Democratic Republic in the east and the Federal Republic in the west.

The process began even before all the family members had received confirmation of his death and the deaths of his brother Klaus and two brothers-in-law. In May 1945, the ecumenical press office in Geneva issued a press release about his death. The report was sent to Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States, and on June 15 Niebuhr’s tribute, “The Death of a Martyr,” was published in the U.S. biweekly magazine Christianity and Crisis. In July 1945 Bishop George Bell presided over a memorial service in London’s Holy Trinity Church, broadcast by the BBC, in which he praised Bonhoeffer and the other executed resistance figures as examples of “the other Germany” that he had championed throughout the war. One week later, Confessing Church veterans held their first postwar synod in Spandau, where Probst Hans Böhm expressed his hope that Bell’s service in London could renew the bond between British and German churches; Bonhoeffer was similarly honored at the Treysa synod in August 1945. In early October, George Bell published an account of his last conversation with Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden, in May 1942, when Bonhoeffer had told him that God would punish Germany for its guilt and that resistance was “an act of repentance.” Weeks later in Stuttgart, German church leaders met with ecumenical leaders, including Willem Visser ‘t Hooft (who was familiar with Bell’s article), and wrote the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. Lorentzen argues that Bell’s account influenced the wording of the Stuttgart Declaration in October 1945. That same month, George Bell visited Germany and met with Eberhard Bethge, who had compiled excerpts of various Bonhoeffer texts. In December 1945, the World Council of Churches published these texts in a short paperback titled  Zeugnis eines Boten.

By the end of 1945, then, Bonhoeffer was recognized internationally as both Christian martyr and political resister. His story had become a cornerstone of the revived relationship between the German Protestant churches and their international partners, but this meant something very different on either side of the border. Inside Germany, tensions were already developing between Bonhoeffer’s closest allies and the official postwar church. Bethge in particular viewed Bonhoeffer’s resistance and death as an implicit accusation against those who had collaborated and compromised. In contrast, some postwar German church leaders found it a useful alibi as they reconstituted the Protestant Church and navigated their relationship with the Allied occupation government. They embraced Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom and resistance as exemplary of the Protestant Church’s courage under the Nazi regime (a deceptive move that obscured the complicity of the churches and, in many cases, their own).

As Lorentzen astutely observes, the memorialization of Bonhoeffer was a public process from the very beginning of the postwar era: “there was not a single moment when it was confined to being a family affair.” [13] This is worth pondering in terms of what it meant for Eberhard Bethge, who in the summer of 1945 was helping a traumatized family that had just lost four family members to Nazi violence and assisting the survivors of several other resistance families. In his Bonhoeffer biography and elsewhere, Bethge later contended that Bonhoeffer’s significance was quickly marginalized in the postwar Protestant Church and that he was dismissed by figures like Bishop Meiser as a “political” martyr, not a religious one. Lorentzen makes a convincing case that this was untrue (and one of the features of this book is that he pushes back against Bethge’s version of some things)—although, I would add, Lorentzen’s narrow focus omits a closer look at the broader early postwar disputes among Protestants who had been involved in the Kirchenkampf (which was the background for many of Bethge’s battles).

In any case, Bethge was central to the elevation of Bonhoeffer’s story. In spring 1946 he published some of Bonhoeffer’s poetry in Unterwegs, an occasional publication by Bonhoeffer’s former students; the poems also appeared in other publications, including the international newsletter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Each publication put a different spin on the texts—the Berlin newspaper Neue Zeit published the poem “Night Voices in Tegel,” for example, without mentioning that Bonhoeffer was a theologian. In February 1946, on the 40th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth, Bethge published an article in Neue Zeit, George Bell wrote a two-part article on the German resistance for the New York Herald Tribune, and Reinhold Niebuhr published a piece in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review about Bonhoeffer’s resistance. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom was now firmly interwoven into German Protestant postwar ties to foreign churches, and there was international fascination with his story.

All of this influenced early perspectives on the Kirchenkampf and the German resistance. Lorentzen argues that many theologians and church leaders already understood the broader German resistance in the context of Bonhoeffer (not the other way around), leading to an early “sanctification” of the July 20 conspirators and an emphasis on Christian resistance against Nazism. This was also possible, I would add, because in the 1930s much of the international reaction to the Kirchenkampf had focused on the “Nazi persecution of Christians.” Martin Niemoeller’s trial and imprisonment became an international cause célèbre (in December 1940, Time Magazine put him on the cover as the “Martyr of 1940”). Although Lorentzen doesn’t delve into those precedents, his analysis helps to explain how the Bonhoeffer legacy dovetailed with early postwar portrayals of Confessing Church heroism. In his lectures and essays in the late 1940s, Bethge offered a similar framing of the resistance. In 1951 the first German edition of the prison letters, Widerstand und Ergebung, was published (the English publication of Letters and Papers appeared in 1953).

By then, Bonhoeffer’s status as a martyr was well established. A new phase began in which his legacy was incorporated into other postwar political narratives in the new German Federal Republic. There were two major processes between 1946 and 1961 (which Lorentzen describes as the “martyrization” phase). First, Bonhoeffer’s status as “martyr” and resistance figure gave him a broader political symbolic value. Secondly, however, postwar Germany was already moving on to the burning political issues of the 1950s. Church and civil commemorations of events like the July 20 bomb plot continued, but surviving figures from the Kirchenkampf—people like Martin Niemoeller, Otto Dibelius, Eugen Gerstenmaier, and Theodor Heckel—were now focused on issues like the Cold War and German rearmament. Gerstenmaier and Heckel (former nemeses of Bonhoeffer with whom Bethge continued to do battle) had moved into the political sphere.

The first histories of the Kirchenkampf were also written during this period; Wilhelm Niemoeller’s Die Evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich appeared in 1956. Survivors of the July 20 circles and other groups that had been persecuted and imprisoned under the Nazi regime founded their own organizations and began holding their own commemorations. Bethge was increasingly uncomfortable with Bonhoeffer’s inclusion in the celebration of “Heldentod” (the deaths of heroes). In 1960 a two-volume set titled Das Gewissen Steht Auf and Das Gewissen Entscheidet was published (the second volume had a foreword by Willy Brandt). The books profiled individual resistance figures from the July 20 group, the Protestant and Catholic churches, all the executed members of the Bonhoeffer family, and many other resisters.

Certain events (notably the mid-1950s trials of Walter Huppenkothen, who had overseen the trials and executions of Bonhoeffer, Canaris, and other conspirators in Flossenbürg) brought Bonhoeffer’s name back into the public eye, revealing ongoing postwar divisions about the resistance. Public reaction to these trials showed that Germans were still divided in their opinions about the July 20 group, with almost half of those polled (as well as some still-some prominent apologists for the Nazi regime) condemning the conspirators as “traitors.” Huppenkothen and his co-defendants were eventually sentenced to the time they had already served in prison.

But here, Lorentzen argues, public statements from Bonhoeffer’s sole surviving brother Karl-Friedrich, survivors of the conspiracy,  and Protestant theologians altered public discussion of the trials and led to a “lasting shift” in how Germans thought about the resistance. The theological memorandum and testimony from former Confessing pastor and theologian Han Joachim Iwand, in which he explained the theological foundation for resistance and even declared that the churches should have resisted in 1933, had a profound impact that extended beyond the trial. (I should add, however, that these battles continued for several decades. In 1976 Eberhard Bethge and Gerhard Leibholz won a defamation suit against a right-wing propagandist on behalf of the Bonhoeffer family).

Although Lorentzen doesn’t mention it, the Huppenkothen trial had another impact on postwar politics and international relations. A 38-minute excerpt from the trial was filmed and distributed by the West German Government Office of Political Education (the USHMM in Washington, DC, has a copy). The film clip (which opens with photographs of Bonhoeffer, Oster, Dohnanyi, and Canaris) was produced at the very moment when the Adenauer government sought to reestablish the West German military. By honoring the German conspirators who died for their resistance to National Socialism (especially Oster and Canaris, who had been leading military figures) and showing a public democratic trial of former Nazis, the clip was intended in part, I suspect, to reassure western allies at a time when German rearmament was still controversial.

It was still the era of Bonhoeffer’s “martyrization”,  but his story was now firmly embedded in the historical complexities of the post-Nazi era. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the period during which Eberhard Bethge left Germany to serve a church in London in 1953 and then came to Harvard in 1957 to begin writing the biography, where he famously observed how in the United States, ”Everyone here has his own Bonhoeffer.” In the United States, too, Bonhoeffer was already well-known as a martyr, and over the ensuring decades (to the present moment, I would argue) there are multiple and very different American spins on that story.

In 1961, the Berlin Wall was built. Divided Germany became ground zero for many international political battles. Lorentzen describes the years between 1961 and 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down) as the era of the “politicization” of Bonhoeffer’s memory. He continued to play a morally symbolic role for German Protestants on both sides of the border, but increasingly on behalf of very different political causes. During the same years, the first postwar generation of Germans reached adulthood and began to critically challenge early hagiographies. There was a growing focus on the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the churches’ complicity with the Nazi regime. Rolf Hochuth’s critical play, Der Stellvertreter, about the role of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, premiered in 1963. It was also during this period that Wolfgang Gerlach wrote his And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Jews (although it was not published in Germany until 1987).

Bonhoeffer acquired a new symbolic status as a politically critical theologian who was embraced by younger theologians. His resistance against Nazism represented a critique of church leaders who had made compromises with the Deutsche Christen and the Nazis. It also offered the basis for postwar activism on other issues: his pacifism, for example, became a rallying cry for anti-nuclear groups. His postwar relevance was amplified by the 1967 publication of Bethge’s massive Bonhoeffer biography (an abridged English translation was published in 1970). Bethge’s narrative encompassed the story of the German churches and the Kirchenkampf, the role played by theologians like Karl Barth, and the German resistance, but with Bonhoeffer at the heart of every story. The biography was also Bethge’s first systematic attempt to explain Bonhoeffer’s theological journey, especially his vision for the future of the Protestant Church.

This intersected with a growing number of international church conversations in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In the German Democratic Republic, the head of the Protestant Church was Albrecht Schönherr, who had been one of Bonhoeffer’s seminarians in Finkenwalde. Schönherr took Bonhoeffer’s understanding of “the church for others” as the model for what he wanted the “church in socialism” to be. During this same period, the international Bonhoeffer Society was founded, bringing together theologians and clergy from around the world. Its first meeting was in 1976 in Geneva, underscoring Bonhoeffer’s role (and ongoing relevance) in the ecumenical movement. Bonhoeffer’s story had become seminal to Christian memory culture on a global scale, from South Africa to the United State to Asia. His theology and his life story resonated in very different churches and political circumstances.

Bethge was a singular and influential force in these developments, internationally and increasingly in terms of the publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings . During this period the German publication of the seventeen-volume Bonhoeffer Werke began, with Bethge’s involvement. He was also influential in the German church, where he often invoked Bonhoeffer’s legacy. From 1961 to 1975 he was director of the Pastoral College in the Rhineland, and in 1981 he was instrumental in shaping the Rhineland Synod’s declaration on Christian-Jewish relations, making the Rhineland church the first German Landeskirche to acknowledge the validity of Judaism.

“Politicization” is too narrow a term for some of this, but Lorentzen skillfully illustrates how Bonhoeffer’s memory remained central in shaping the German churches’ public positions during this period. During these years (especially in the 1980s, after the nationwide television broadcast of the American docudrama Holocaust), numerous localized memorials and exhibitions about the Nazi persecution of the Jews began to appear. There were also new memorials to Bonhoeffer, and hundreds of churches, schools, and streets were named after him. One of the most striking examples of this “politicization” is the Bonhoeffer statue in an outside corner of the Petrikirche in Hamburg, at the site of a protest against atomic weapons by a Tübingen teacher, Hartmut Gründler, who burned himself to death there in 1977. The site soon became a shrine for environmental activists, who covered it with flowers and marked it with a series of memorial plaques intended both to honor Gründler as well as to inspire others to protest. The ongoing protests and demonstrations inspired a deep debate within the church and in the wider public. This ended when Axel Springer, the conservative publisher of Germany’s largest tabloid, gave the money for a Bonhoeffer statue on that very spot. There it stands to the present day: an ironic “memorial” that is simultaneously an erasure (there are two images of the statue in the book’s appendix of illustrations).

It is a useful reminder that memorial culture invariably elevates certain themes and obscures others. Drawing on German bishop Wolfgang Huber’s description of Bonhoeffer as a “Protestant saint,” Lorentzen describes the third phase, from 1990-2006, as a period of “sanctification.” There were a growing number of pilgrimages, especially from other countries, to Flossenbürg, Finkenwalde, the resistance memorial sites in Berlin, and of course the Bonhoeffer Haus (where the family had lived) in Charlottenburg. Bonhoeffer’s writings and history were regularly invoked by churches and in the ecumenical movement. Even Catholic countries and shrines have honored Bonhoeffer alongside Catholic victims of Nazism like Alfred Delp and Bernard Lichtenberg. In the appendix of illustrations, Lorentzen includes photographs of many memorials to Bonhoeffer, including some there were unfamiliar to me. The most famous memorial of course is the statues of ten “modern martyrs” at the West Entrance to Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1998. There, Bonhoeffer stands alongside figures from around the world, including Maximilian Kolbe, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Oscar Romero. But there is also an icon in the Church of San Bartolomeo in Rome (where Bonhoeffer is pictured with Catholic Bishop of Münster Clemens Graf von Galen, Bernard Lichtenberg, and Friedrich Weissler), and the Romanian Orthodox Cathedral in Nuremberg, which features Bonhoeffer together with Catholic and Protestant saints through the centuries.

The final chapter explores the significance of “Christian resistance” in church memorial culture and the inherent tensions between religious and cultural interpretations of memory. In many ways, memorialization “domesticates” resistance figures; the Petrikirche memorial statue is certainly a striking example of that. Bonhoeffer is an interesting figure in this regard because he continues to be claimed by very different kinds of Christian groups (especially in the United States).  It is almost as if the status of “resister” has lifted him above theological and political divisions that might otherwise prevent people from claiming him. In the process, what scholar Stephen Haynes once called the “Bonhoeffer Phenomenon,”[ii] leads to misinterpretations of his theological writings and his historical role.

Lorentzen’s book masterfully illustrates the process by which Bonhoeffer acquired an “über-historical” status soon after the war. To this day, many books and films about him are symbolic and very selective histories of heroism and martyrdom, not actual studies of the man and his times. Not surprisingly, this also means that they are riddled with false historical claims, not just with respect to the resistance but in terms of his significance in the Kirchenkampf. Lorentzen’s book helps us understand how this happened. For that reason alone, the  book is a major achievement that any student or scholar of Bonhoeffer who is writing reception history or looking at Bonhoeffer’s impact in postwar Germany should read. By focusing specifically on the issue of resistance, this book offers a fascinating analysis of how, in east and west, postwar Germany wrestled with the intersections of resistance and martyrdom over six decades. It also offers some new insights into the theological literature on Bonhoeffer, much of which has been shaped by legends of his centrality in the resistance.

At the same time, however, this work parallels (but does not discuss at any length) the changes in historical narratives about the German Kirchenkampf, the German scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the different phases of political memorialization and commemoration and specific debates around the Historikerstreit, and the more critical studies of the Wehrmacht and resistance circles. It would naturally be impossible to include all these other influences on the Bonhoeffer narrative and still have a coherent book, but this does skew his account of some developments.

There is one issue in particular that I wish he had addressed in greater depth:  how German political and church memory cultures in these postwar decades addressed the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. I suspect this is partly because this remains a significant gap in the Bonhoeffer literature—which tells us something about the symbolic and ahistorical nature of many books on him. But over the decades there was growing discussion of the Holocaust in the German churches, in the various Kirchentags, and among theologians like Dorothee Soelle—and it certainly became central to the public discourse after 1979. I was surprised, for example, that he didn’t discuss Tetyana Pavlush’s 2015 Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik,[iii] which traces these discussions in both Germanys (and she includes some analysis of Bonhoeffer’s impact).

Nonetheless, Lorentzen’s book stands on its own merits. This is an important work that led me to rethink some of my own assumptions. While not about reception history per se, it is a masterful study of the myriad political influences that shape the construction and revision of biographical and theological narratives over time. Along the way, Lorentzen offers some fascinating glimpses into the postwar telling of the Bonhoeffer story in Germany.

 

Notes:

[i] The views expressed in this essay are the author’s own.

[ii] Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (2004); Lorentzen mentions Haynes’ work (including his other The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives (2006).

[iii] Reviewed in this journal in 2016: https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2016/06/review-of-tetyana-pavlush-kirche-nach-auschwitz-zwischen-theologie-und-vergangenheitspolitik/

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Film Review:  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Film Review:  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin, directed by Todd Komarnicki (Angel Studios, 2024)

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies

Introduction

On the morning of April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age 39, was hanged on a gallows at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and General Hans Oster, key conspirators in the military resistance against Hitler, met with the same fate that day, as did several others. Dietrich’s brother, Klaus, and brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi – who had recruited Dietrich into the resistance – and Rudiger Schleicher were executed the same week. Almost from the beginning of Todd Komarnicki’s sincere but problematic new film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin, Bonhoeffer’s end is in focus. This review centers on the film’s historical content and its narrative, but also includes an examination of controversies surrounding its marketing and message.

The Film’s “Bonhoeffer” and Bonhoeffer the Man

The film, which is beautifully shot and scored, but at times laden with clunky dialogue, begins with a glimpse into the domestic life of the Bonhoeffer family (warm and loving, and also tranquil until Dietrich’s beloved older brother Walter is killed in the Great War). Yet it largely focuses on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933. The film flashes back and forth, from Bonhoeffer’s imprisonments in Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to the years preceding the war. It tells the tale of a young theologian whose participation in the 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer and overthrow the Nazi regime seems nearly inevitable. The flashbacks often muddle both the chronology and the film’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s de-contextualized words.

Bonhoeffer did provide nearly contemporaneous early details of the first deportation of Jews to “the east” and was involved in “Operation Seven,” an intricate and successful plot to rescue fourteen Jews. Yet the extent of his involvement in resistance efforts, including “Operation Valkyrie,” the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life (but not the March 21, 1943 Gersdorff plot depicted in the film), has been debated extensively by Bonhoeffer scholars.[1] In any case, he was arrested in April 1943 for plotting to rescue Jews, using his travels outside of Germany for matters unrelated to German military intelligence, and abusing his position in the Abwehr to help Confessing Church pastors escape military service. He was initially imprisoned in the Wehrmacht’s Tegel prison in Berlin.

Though Bonhoeffer knew of efforts to topple the Hitler regime as early as 1938, his tangential involvement in Operation Valkyrie was the occasion of Dietrich’s ultimate demise. A couple of months after only one of the two planned bombs exploded near Hitler and injured but did not kill him, the Gestapo discovered documents implicating especially Dohnanyi but also Bonhoeffer. Shortly thereafter, Dietrich was moved to a notorious prison cellar at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin; in February 1945, he was transferred to Buchenwald, then moved to the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

In a pivotal sequence, the film cuts back and forth breathlessly between the aborted March 21, 1943 Gersdorff assassination attempt and Bonhoeffer’s imagined practice sermon at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1939. The scene, which, as happens many times in the film, conflates various writings penned by the young theologian, highlights the famous quote from The Cost of Discipleship (1937): “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” One implication seems to be that Bonhoeffer was prophetic – or at least that he somehow had a sense, even before the war began, that participating in resistance against Hitler and the Nazis would lead to his own death more than five years later. Another takeaway is the central message that the film wants to convey: that Christians should be willing to die (or at least be willing to suffer greatly) for their faith.

Yet, while Bonhoeffer was indeed executed by direct order of Hitler in April 1945, it was Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff who carried explosives into the Zeughaus in Berlin; he intended to tackle Hitler just before the bomb, with its ten-minute fuse, was set to explode. The conspirators had expected Hitler to spend a significant amount of time at the Prussian war museum, but instead he hurried through the exhibition, prompting Gersdorff to defuse the bomb in the lavatory (he only had a couple of minutes to do so).[2] It was Claus von Stauffenberg who carried the bomb into the “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia on July 20, 1944.

This is not to say that Bonhoeffer lacked courage; his participation in the daring activities that he carried out as a spy for the resistance in the Abwehr was of course extremely courageous and led ultimately to his death by hanging. But the desire to put Bonhoeffer closer to the center of this story than he was distorts the historical picture even if it meets a perceived need to put Dietrich’s endorsement of violent means at the center of the narrative. This distortion also minimizes his efforts both to save the lives of European Jews as well as to discern and proclaim some theological meaning not only about martyrdom, but about what it means to live in the world as a follower of Christ.

The imagined Harlem sermon also includes a reference to the shooting of 33,000 Jews near Kyiv – the Babyn Yar massacre, which did not occur until September 1941. Dietrich’s sojourns in Harlem were indeed central to his thinking, especially about matters related to race. Yet, the conflation of events that took place closer to the height of the genocide (most Jews who were killed during the Holocaust died in 1942 and 1943) with occurrences and writings from the summer before the war downplays the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology; so much of his thought was a painstaking yet direct response to what he was witnessing with his own eyes (and hearing about from his contacts in the resistance).

Victoria Barnett, a leading authority on the life and work of Bonhoeffer and past editor for this journal,[3] thinks we should read Bonhoeffer in a different way than do so many films and books that insist on making him an uncomplicated hero; he was “one decent human being who understood better than any of us that in evil times, we must remain faithful … for the sake of future generations ….” Ferdinand Schlingensiepen urges that “Bonhoeffer did not want to be venerated; he wanted to be heard. Anyone who puts him on a lonely pedestal is defusing that which … makes a thoughtful encounter with him worthwhile.”[4] Bonhoeffer was a complex individual and theologian; he was also, above all else, a thinker and a writer. Bonhoeffer never justified his participation in the assassination plot on biblical or theological grounds – indeed, he believed he needed to ask forgiveness for it.

Historical Context

The film also gets some significant aspects of the broader historical context wrong. Crucially, as in Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography, Hitler and the Nazi Party leadership are portrayed as taking over the German Protestant Church and, apparently, never relinquish their hold over it, creating a “Reich Church.”[5] Meanwhile, the Confessing Church – here led by Bonhoeffer and Niemöller – courageously fights the Nazis, especially their anti-Jewish policy and actions, including the Holocaust. This misleading narrative suggests that there were two sides of the Church Struggle: the (apparently fearless) Confessing Church and the “Reich Church,” which in the film represents the remainder of the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (German Protestant Church, DEK) who supposedly had been coopted by Hitler’s “brute nationalism.”

This version of the Church Struggle fuses with the Reich Church the significant minority faction of the DEK, the German Christians, who eagerly embraced many aspects of Nazism and created and used “de-Judaized” Bibles and hymnals. Yet it omits altogether the majority of German Protestants, who chose not to affiliate with either the German Christians or the Confessing Church. It also elides the fact that Hitler eventually gave up on the idea of a Reich Church. In 2010, Victoria Barnett critiqued the similarly-misplaced portrait of the German Protestant Church during the Third Reich in Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography in this journal.

Further, as many scholars have demonstrated, the German Protestant myth of the Church Struggle as a courageous fight against Nazism, which was proliferated after the war chiefly by pastors and theologians determined to paint their actions and that of their churches in the most benign light, has been refuted. Many of the churches in fact cooperated with Hitler, in many cases promulgating Nazi ideology, including antisemitism.[6] Bonhoeffer’s evolving views about Jews and Judaism and certainly his later embrace of a (enigmatic but potentially very potent) “religionless Christianity” were held by very, very few Protestant Christians of his day. As our own Kyle Jantzen related in 2015, “For better or worse, Bonhoeffer has received more attention than his historical roles in the German church struggle, resistance, or ecumenical world would merit.”

Other inaccuracies in the film are characterized as intentional, with various reasons offered by the filmmakers (e.g., a depicted event being a “metaphor” or a means of condensing storytelling for a film). It is common for filmmakers to conflate events for the purpose of telling a story more efficiently. The scene with Bonhoeffer jamming in a jazz club with Black musicians, for example, did not happen; yet it is certainly the type of event that could have happened at the time and comports with what we know about Bonhoeffer: he was a skilled pianist and his time in Harlem really did expand his musical tastes (as well as his theology).[7]

Yet, other scenes are unintentionally inaccurate or “metaphorical.” When Martin Niemöller recites the (now famous) poem “First they came for the socialists …” he does so in a thunderous sermon in prophetic fashion, as if he uttered those famous words before the Nazis “came for him.” In the film, the sermon is apparently given in 1944 even though Niemoller was arrested in 1937 and would have been in Dachau in 1944. (the film’s Niemöller states during the sermon that he had been their pastor “for thirteen years”; Niemöller became a pastor at Berlin-Dahlem in 1931). What came to be known as Niemöller’s “confession” was not uttered until after the war, and thus after his seven-year incarceration in first a Berlin prison, then Sachsenhausen, and finally Dachau.

A staunch nationalist, the pastor of the Berlin Dahlem Confessing Church neither resisted nor even opposed the regime’s persecution of Jews and other minorities from 1933 to July 1937 (when he was arrested). Placing the words of the famous poem in his mouth in 1944 obscures the historical reality of a man who only realized his sins against Jews and other victims of Nazism after the Holocaust. This heroizing of Niemöller aligns with the film’s portrait of Bonhoeffer. The audience is robbed of the more complex picture of this complicated man with deep German nationalist sympathies who dissented against the regime in defense of the German Protestant Church, not Jews and other victims of Nazism, a man who recognized his sins against the latter only later in life (gradually, beginning at Dachau, but continuing for decades thereafter).[8]

Controversial Marketing

As the film was promoted in the weeks before yet another contentious US presidential and congressional election, and was released just weeks afterward, its marketing campaign engendered significant controversy. A post on X (formerly Twitter) by the distribution company, Angel Studios, still available as of this writing, reads in part “The battle against tyranny begins now! Watch Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. in theaters November 22! …”; the text appears above a poster with Bonhoeffer carrying a gun.

An international group of Bonhoeffer scholars wrote and circulated a petition condemning such abuses of Bonhoeffer’s legacy; it has to date garnered thousands of signatures. Similarly, many of the German actors in the film, the Board and staff members of the Bonhoeffer Haus in Berlin as well as members of Bonhoeffer’s extended family issued statements condemning misuses of Bonhoeffer’s life and work.

Misinterpretations or misuses of Bonhoeffer are certainly not confined to the religious right. In Charles Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer has a romantic attraction to Eberhard Bethge, a notion that, however close their friendship, is belied by weightier evidence to the contrary. In another Bonhoeffer biography, the authors contend that Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist.[9]

Yet, Victoria Barnett argues that Bonhoeffer’s views on the quest for peace conflicted with his participation in the resistance in ways that he could never fully resolve. The coupling of an image of Bonhoeffer with a gun and the descriptor “assassin” in the film’s title is irresponsible, as it turns the Berlin theologian into someone he was not, at a time of heightened political polarization in the US and Europe and war in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Conclusion

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin has many flaws, not least of which is the last descriptor in its title. The portrayal of the German Protestant Church lacks nuance; the elevation of thematic messages over chronology leads at times to significant misinterpretations of Bonhoeffer, Niemöller, and the Holocaust. Its pre-release marketing campaign included some disconcerting messaging, especially as it coincided with a highly contentious US presidential election during which one of the candidates was the target of an assassination attempt. Thankfully, despite its imperfections, the film is infused with an unvarnished appreciation for its protagonist – who is indeed worthy of admiration – and its filmmakers clearly care about the perils of antisemitism and racism. We would all do well to imbibe these messages, however flawed their presentation.

If one is looking for a more accurate portrayal of Bonhoeffer’s life, including his political resistance efforts, the International Bonhoeffer Society has a good list of documentaries and films. Better still, one might get to know Bonhoeffer a bit better by reading Schlingensiepen’s excellent biography[10] or by delving into some of Bonhoeffer’s writings.

 

Notes:

[1] Lori Brandt Hale and W. David Hall, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theology, and Political Resistance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020)

[2] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, (Bloomsbury, 2010) 312-313.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, 16 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995–2014).

[4] Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945, xvii.

[5] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010).

[6] Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 10.

[7] See Reggie Williams’s insightful take on the film, which includes a thoughtful critique of its portrayal of Black and Jewish people. “The Tropes that Birth a Hero,” Christian Century, November 25, 2024, https://www.christiancentury.org/features/tropes-birth-hero.

[8] Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

[9] Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013).

[10] Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945.

 

 

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Review of David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (New York: Random House, 2022). ISBN: 978-0812989946.

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

With his monograph The Pope at War. The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler David I. Kertzer—who has published extensively on the Italian state and the Vatican’s relations with Jews—has added his critical voice to the longstanding controversy surrounding the papacy of Pius XII  (r. 1939–1958). There is no shortage of biographers who have attempted to understand the pope’s (in)actions during World War II and the Holocaust, but according to Kertzer, “a crucial piece of the puzzle has long been missing,” because the Vatican has only recently (in March 2020, to be exact) unsealed the archive of Pius XII’s papacy (p. xxix). Making extensive use of this and numerous other European collections, Kertzer writes that “The Pope at War offers readers the first full account of these events” (p. xxx).  What follows is an unsparing and detailed narrative of Pope Pius XII’s moral failure in Europe’s darkest hour.

Version 1.0.0

The monograph opens—somewhat unusually, and reminiscent of a play—with a “Cast of Characters” that offers brief biographies of key figures in this history. Even at this early stage, Kertzer is blunt in his assessment of many members of the Curia as unprepared for and unequal to the momentous tasks before them.  Divided into four parts, the book begins with the final months of the dying Pius XI’s papacy when, for a brief moment, it appeared that the Vatican might issue a condemnation of Fascism and Nazism. The encyclical died along with Pius XI on 10 February 1939; the ascendence of the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, to the papacy followed on 2 March 1939. The seasoned diplomat Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, immediately shifted to a conciliatory approach toward Germany and Italy when “he instructed the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to end all criticism of the German government” (p. 27).

The new pope’s first major test of his moral leadership came only two days after his coronation, on 14 March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Immediately, the new pontiff faced considerable pressure to denounce the German invasion but, setting the tone for his wartime papacy, Pius XII remained silent (p. 33).  Kertzer makes clear that Pius XII  did not remain silent because he was  “Hitler’s Pope,” as John Cornwell’s 1999 monograph by the same name claimed. The pontiff had nothing but disdain for Hitler and the Nazis, and in his dealings with them, his first priority was the protection of the institutional Catholic Church in Germany. This is not a new argument. What Kertzer adds is new evidence of secret negotiations between Pius XII and Hitler, in which Prince Philipp von Hessen represented the latter. The prince was both a very close friend of Hitler and the son-in-law of Italy’s King Victor Emmanual. The two men met for the first time on 11 May 1939 to discuss ways for improving the situation of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. Eager to reach an agreement, the pope assured the prince, “‘The German people are united in their love for their Fatherland. Once we have peace, the Catholics will be loyal, more than anyone else’” (p. 62). In this and subsequent meetings, von Hessen dangled the possibility of a rapprochement between the Vatican and Germany before the pope. Nothing came of it, of course, and the situation of the Church in Germany continued to deteriorate. The pope nonetheless clung to his conciliatory approach and refused to criticize either Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, even in the face of the extreme violence of World War II and the brutal persecution and mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust.

Kertzer relentlessly makes the argument of the moral bankruptcy of the pope’s leadership in example after example of his refusal to speak out. As the Germans rampaged through Catholic Poland, perpetrating unspeakable crimes against civilians, including members of the clergy, Pius XII remained silent. This silence cannot be explained by a lack of accurate intelligence. At no time did the Vatican lack detailed information about German atrocities, including the genocide against Jews. Defenders of Pius XII have argued that it is anachronistic and thus impossible to judge him by the standards of our time in which the defense of universal human rights is paramount. This, they argue, was not the case in 1940, when the Church’s salvific mission dictated that the pope had to do everything in his power to protect the faithful’s access to the sacraments. Kertzer rejects this argument. He shows that the controversy over of the pope’s timidity and silence during the war and genocide did not commence in the postwar period. Rather, as early as the fall of 1939, after the Polish ambassador had appealed in vain to Pius XII to speak out against German atrocities in Poland, the British envoy to the Vatican, Richard Osborne, lamented that the pontiff  “has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation…the Pope’s silence seems hard to explain and defend” (p. 88). The Allied ambassadors and envoys to the Vatican would repeat this statement in their reports in many different reiterations and with increasing exacerbation for the duration of the war. Pius XII also was pressured to speak out against Germany from members of his own curia, including the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, who complained to the archbishop of Paris in 1940 that “I fear that history will have much to reproach the Holy See for in having adopted a policy of convenience for itself and not much more… It is sad in the extreme, above all when one has lived under Pius XI” (p. 90). Kertzer makes the case that the pope’s silence was not the expected or acceptable conduct of a pontiff at the time but was instead driven by his personality in direct opposition to many who beseeched him to act differently and courageously.

By 1942, the pressure on the pope to speak out became enormous. In his twenty-four-page Christmas message that year, he finally decried the death of “’hundreds of thousands of [innocent] people… solely because of their nation or their race’” (p. 258). Although this speech is often cited as proof of Pius XII’s vocal protest against genocide, Kertzer dismisses this assertion. Rather, he concludes that the speech was in line with his previous convoluted, cautious, and ambiguous statements, all of which accomplished little. The following year, the German occupation of Rome in September 1943 and the subsequent round-up of Roman Jews put the pope’s “policy of not criticizing the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of Europe’s Jews to an excruciating test” (p. 363). Kertzer argues that the Vatican made only feeble attempts to intervene diplomatically to aid Catholics of Jewish heritage, but even those interventions often came too late. Pius XII’s action on behalf of Rome’s Jews have been the focus of much research, including research on the rescue and hiding of Jews in Catholic convents, and here and throughout the monograph, The Pope at War could have benefitted from a deeper engagement with the extant historiography on the topic.

Attempting to explain the pope’s appeasement of Germany and Italy, Kertzer argues that, prior to 1942, when it appeared that the Axis powers were winning the war, he sought ways for the Church to function within this new reality. The seat of the Holy See was, after all, in Rome and at the heart of Fascism. Whereas Kertzer does a good job describing the fraught history between the Vatican and Nazi Germany, this is not the book’s main strength. The Pope at War is as much the story of Mussolini as it is of Pope Pius XII. Kertzer shows his deep expertise and knowledge of the papacy and Fascist Italy and excels in rendering—often in excruciating detail—the intertwined stories of the vainglorious, pompous dictator and the timid, ascetic pontiff who used, disdained, and resented each other in equal measure. In writing this detailed history of the collaboration between the Italian Fascist government and the Vatican, Kertzer seeks to correct a postwar history of Fascist Italy and the papacy which, he argues, all too quickly forgot their close collaboration with each other—and with Germany. In this history, “All the efforts the pope made to avoid antagonizing Hitler and Mussolini are wiped from view. His role as primate of the Italian church, presiding over a clergy that was actively supporting the Axis war, is likewise forgotten” (p. 464). This is an overstatement, as there already exists a robust and critical historiography on the subject, but The Pope at War no doubt enriches the scholarship on Fascist Italy and adds ample fuel to the ongoing controversy surrounding Pius XII’s papacy.

 

 

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Review of Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin, eds., The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin, eds., The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2022). ISBN: 978-1-7936-4216-5

By Gerald J. Steinacher, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Permanent neutrality is a key concept for understanding the policies and teachings of the Holy See over the last 100-plus years. It is crucial for comprehending Vatican decision-making. For anyone interested in the history of the Catholic Church and the papacy, a key question in historical analysis is the motivation behind their actions, specifically the underlying theological or ideological factors. This is especially relevant in the context of the controversial discussions surrounding not only World War II but also the Cold War. The volume The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality, edited by Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin, offers rich insights and material for further thought on this important topic, revealing a wide range of expertise and diverse perspectives from scholars of church history.

Breger rightly notes that following World War II, neutrality had a negative connotation and was often seen as a form of collaboration with the Nazis. Countries like Switzerland, and to some extent Sweden, did not emerge from the war with their reputations fully intact. Consequently, for many years, Vatican neutrality has received little attention in academic literature. This volume, which spans from 1870 to 2020, helps to close that gap by examining various aspects of the Vatican’s neutrality over these 150 years. However, the main focus is on the Vatican’s neutrality as defined in the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which also established the city-state. Breger states the goal of the project thus: “This book will consider the interplay between two normatively disparate subjects – the concept of neutrality in international law and the concept of the Vatican as a neutral actor in international relations” (Breger xii). This review will provide a general overview of the volume, highlighting a selection of the thirteen essays rather than examining each one in detail. I will focus primarily on essays that fall more closely in my own research purview, which deals with Fascism, WWII and the immediate postwar years.

The volume’s chapters are mostly arranged chronologically. Part 1 examines the period from the end of the Papal States to the Vatican (1870–1929), with contributions by John F. Pollard, Kurt Martens, and Maria d’Arienzo. Pollard explains that, for centuries prior, the Church ruled over extended territories in central Italy, which the pope was determined to protect and expand. The “Vicar of Christ” in those centuries was usually neither neutral nor impartial nor peaceful. Military alliances were forged, and armies were recruited, including the now-famous Swiss troops. Popes and their families on the papal throne, such as the notorious Borgias in the 16th century, pursued wars and conquests, like other principalities in the Italian peninsula.

As in other parts of Europe and Latin America, nationalism in the nineteenth century surged through Italy. Backed by the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, Italian nationalists sought to establish an Italian ethnic nation-state, which became a reality in 1861, with Turin as its first capital. Protected by French troops, the Papal States resisted until 1870, when Italian forces seized Rome by force. With Rome now the capital of Italy, the Holy See was left without any territory, prompting the pope to famously declare himself the “Prisoner in the Vatican.” Nevertheless, several powers continued to recognize the Holy See as sovereign and maintained diplomatic relations. For decades after 1870, the tensions between the Catholic Church and the constitutional liberal Italian monarchy remained unresolved and relations were often strained.

 Claims of permanent neutrality toward all nations and the Holy See as a “peaceful sovereign” were emphasized by Vatican diplomats as early as the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815. During World War I, Pope Benedict XV (1914–1922) became known as “the great neutral.” Practical considerations played a role, as Catholics fought on both sides of the front. Pollard shows that the pope also stayed neutral when it came to accusations of war crimes committed by Russia as well as Germany. “To have pronounced one way or another on alleged war crimes could inevitably have compromised the Vatican’s claims to neutrality and impartiality, so in public, Benedict limited himself to generic condemnations of all atrocities” (10). Pollard’s point is well taken, as this arguably set a precedent for the Holy See’s position during World War II. After WWI, the Vatican also tried to stay neutral, and when new nation-states and borders emerged, the diocesan geography needed redrawing, as Kurt Martens shows.

In 1929, the Holy See negotiated an agreement with the Italian government, then under Benito Mussolini, consisting of two parts: the Lateran Treaty and a concordat, collectively referred to as the Lateran Pacts. The Church was compensated for the loss of territory, regained its status as an independent, sovereign state (Vatican City), and declared its permanent neutrality. Maria d’Arienzo reminds us that there is a key distinction when it comes to the Vatican as a city-state: The Vatican is not a nation-state but rather a state administration that was designed to provide a basis for the universal mission of the papacy (Maria d’Arienzo 45). Article 24 of the Lateran Pacts creating the Vatican city-state in 1929 states, “The Holy See declares that it desires to take, and shall take, no part in any temporal rivalries between other states, nor in any international congresses called to settle such matters, save and except in the event of such parties making a mutual appeal to the pacific mission of the Holy See, the latter reserving in any event the right of exercising its moral and spiritual power” (quoted in Brown-Fleming 106). This text and its interpretation lie at the heart of the volume and its discussions that focus on Vatican neutrality: how it has been understood and whether it has changed over time, if at all. As Pollard points out, this is where the history of Vatican neutrality truly begins.

Part II, focusing on the “long Second World War: 1931-1945,” with contributions by Lucia Ceci, Pascal Lottaz, and Suzanne Brown-Fleming, could also be titled “Neutrality [Put] to the Test.” This is the title Ceci chose for her chapter on the Vatican and the Fascist wars of the 1930s. She points out that the 1929 Lateran Pacts was “an agreement signed with an authoritarian government with totalitarian ambitions” (Ceci 63). Both the Italian state as well as the Vatican believed that a modus vivendi would be possible. The pope officially granted the state temporal power over Rome, but the state ceded sovereignty in matters of marriage and teaching. Mussolini celebrated this reconciliation between Italy and the Holy See as a great achievement. The Church, too, was hopeful, as Ceci states, that the Fascist state was “catholicizable” and would cement a “Catholic nation” (Ceci 65).

Mussolini’s war of aggression in Ethiopia (1935–36/41)[1] and his military intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as the Italian Racial Laws (1938), put the Vatican’s declared neutrality to an early test. The papacy faced immense pressure to endorse Mussolini’s Ethiopian war; however, Ceci states that Pius XI was absolutely opposed to this Fascist war of conquest (68). Meanwhile, Italian Catholic bishops and clergy went above and beyond to show their support for Mussolini’s campaign. When it came to Italian laws against Jews, the pope limited his interventions to get exceptions for baptized Jews.

Behind the scenes, Pope Pius XI authorized the drafting of an encyclical letter condemning racism and modern antisemitism. Suzanne Brown-Fleming highlights the encyclical Humani Generis Unitas [“Unity of the Human Race”], which was prepared at Pius XI’s request in 1938 but was never released to the public. The encyclical emphasized that Catholics should not remain silent in the face of Jewish persecution. However, when Pius XII ascended to the papacy in 1939, he chose to shelve this encyclical (Brown-Fleming 105). Only a few months later, World War II broke out. Not unlike Pope Benedict XV during WWI, Pius XII also attempted to maintain neutrality and guide the Church through the storm that engulfed the world. During and after the war, particularly regarding the atrocities of the Holocaust, Pius XII was accused of silence and a lack of moral guidance. In the face of the Holocaust, why did the Holy See not use its “right to exercise its moral and spiritual power,” as enshrined in the Lateran Pacts? The heated debate over the pope’s responses to the Holocaust has been at the center of discussions for decades. The challenges faced by the universal Catholic Church during World War II included mass atrocities occurring not only in Europe but also in Asia, as discussed by Pascal Lottaz about “Vatican diplomacy and Church realities in the Philippines during World War II”. Pius XII tried to be neutral, but at the same time worked on a modus vivendi with the Japanese.

Brown-Fleming focuses on the immediate postwar years and examines the Vatican’s clemency appeals for Nazi war criminals on trial, drawing from several case studies in the Vatican archives. One well-known case is that of Oswald Pohl, who oversaw Nazi slave labor operations and was sentenced to death at one of the Nuremberg trials. The Holy See and German bishops went to great lengths to save the life of this mass murderer, who had converted to Catholicism while in prison. The Church’s stance on neutrality and “forgiveness” after World War II—exemplified by the interventions of the pope’s envoy in Germany, US Bishop Aloisius Muench, and the postwar Allied military government in Germany—reflected a tendency to forgive perpetrators and quickly forget the victims. This attitude was also intertwined with strong anti-communist sentiments. The broader question raised in this volume concerns Vatican neutrality, and this has particular significance in the context of papal aid for Nazi war criminals. As I have shown in Nazis on the Run and elsewhere, much of the Vatican’s efforts on behalf of Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators did not have leniency as the primary goal. Instead, these efforts were often intended to secure impunity through generous amnesties or even assistance in escape.[2] Such actions not only hindered Allied efforts toward postwar justice but also compromised Vatican neutrality.

Pius XII could be very undiplomatically direct when it came to confronting communism, ideologically and otherwise. For example, Piotr H. Kosicki details the Holy See’s role in the crucial Italian parliamentary election of 1948, where a victory for the left-wing alliance of communists and socialists was a realistic possibility. The “Civic Committees,” organized by Church-run Catholic Action, clearly aligned with the Christian Democrats (DC) and significantly influenced the election outcome. These committees played a pivotal role for the Christian Democrats by orchestrating a propaganda campaign against the communists and socialists. Concluding his chapter, Kosicki shows that the “lonely Cold War of Pius XII”[3] shifted to the “Vatican Ostpolitik” after the pope’s death in 1958. This Ostpolitik involved the normalization of relations with the highest levels of communist parties and states, with Yugoslavia being a prominent example.

Árpád von Klimó and Margit Balogh present the case of a widely forgotten story in public memory: the saga of Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary. He spent fifteen years trapped in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, a fascinating chapter of Cold War history. In the last part of this volume, on the post-Cold War period of 1990–2020, Massimo Faggioli explains how, after the Cold War, the Vatican adopted a policy of “positive neutrality,” engaging on new social and political levels. Luke Cahill looks at the Vatican’s outreach to Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad in order to aid war victims. Maryann Cusimano Love analyzes the Church’s theological stance against nuclear weapons. In relation to just war theory, Saha Matsumoto discusses how, with the end of the Cold War, the Church felt free to oppose all nuclear weapons, no longer constrained by the “Communist menace.” Herbert Reginbogin concludes the volume in Chapter 13 by addressing the Vatican’s responses to scandals in the Church, such as money laundering, sexual abuse, and its efforts to repair historical wrongs.

To conclude, despite some minor shortcomings—including repetitive quotes and repetitions when explaining the Lateran Pacts as well as the chronology of chapters in some cases (e.g., Maria d’Arienzo’s outstanding chapter feels somewhat out of place in Part I, as much of it discusses post-1945 issues)—this volume is an excellent contribution. It presents different views and interpretations on the theme of “the Vatican and permanent neutrality” over the course of the last 150 years. The balanced contributions make the volume thought-provoking and invite further exploration of this fascinating topic. In a world where neutrality seems to be under strain—evident in Sweden and Finland recently abandoning their tradition of neutrality to join NATO—Austria’s ongoing discussions about its own tradition of “permanent neutrality” reflect the challenges faced by the once-neutral bloc of nations during the Cold War. The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality is a must-read for everyone interested in the rationales of the Holy See’s international engagement.

 

Notes:

[1] Ethiopian historians prefer to date the period from 1935 to 1941 because the fighting continued until the liberation of Addis Ababa by British and Ethiopian forces in May 1941, following six years of Italian occupation.

[2] See also Gerald J. Steinacher, “Forgive and Forget? The Vatican and the Escape of Nazi War Criminals from Justice” in S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 9 (2022) 1, 4-28.

[3] Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.

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Review of Keith W. Clements, J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of Keith W. Clements, J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers (Fortress Press, 2022), pp. xv + 235. ISBN: 9781506470009.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The distinguished British ecumenist Keith Clements has made a vital contribution to the history of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement across many years. In particular, his fundamental study of J.H. Oldham (Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham, T & T Clark, 1999) offered the first substantial examination of a missionary, organiser and Christian internationalist who has recently come to claim growing attention, from not only scholars of ecumenism but also historians of intellectual history. Meanwhile, Clements’ loyalty to the parallel figure of Bishop George Bell has been quite as vigorous. In short, this concise introductory book presents a valuable meeting between three figures, the author and his subjects, and the relationship certainly proves to be a fruitful one.

Christian internationalism has yet to find a secure place in the various histories of twentieth-century churches. Very largely this is due to a persistent emphasis on national categories and narratives, but denominational perspectives have also fashioned a great deal of what we expect to find in the foreground. All too often, Bell and Oldham may be observed, usually dutifully and briefly, hovering in the background of anything other than ecumenical surveys. In the final volume of the recent Oxford History of Anglicanism (OUP, 2019), Bell flits about here and there, but there is no very confident sense of where to put him for very long. Meanwhile, Oldham, the United Free Church layman, has almost vanished from ecclesiastical memory altogether. This is an authentic tragedy because it indicates how horizons have contracted across the western Protestant churches in the half-century since their deaths.

Clements begins with a photograph of the Fanø conference in Denmark in 1934, Bell perched on the front row with his wife, Henrietta, and Oldham at the very back, by an open door (as though, Clements remarks nicely, he has just turned up at the last minute from a committee meeting). Here, they are only two small figures in a very large ensemble indeed. Yet few church leaders laboured so vigorously and perseveringly to place Christian life and work in the heart of the great contexts of their age. Through their myriad activities, we find Christian ideas and arguments alive and at large in the world at war and at peace, exploring the new possibilities of international organization, democratic development, social progress and international law.  Clements devotes a large part of his book to extracts from their writings, showing how ecumenical priorities blended with the questions that were thrown up by a disordered world. Oldham makes his appearance as a ‘wily prophet’, making his way artfully through great affairs and controversies not just by offering views of his own but also by orchestrating those of others within his various creations, from the symphonic 1910 Edinburgh conference and the great 1937 Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State to the wartime discussions of the Moot, a chamber ensemble which drew together figures like Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi and T.S. Eliot. While Oldham had to invent a role for himself based on rather little beyond an acknowledged place in missionary societies and the ecumenical circles, Bishop Bell had a public position which gave him a firm authority in the counsels of national life. If Bell lacked some of Oldham’s creative freedom, Clements shows that his presence was by no means less striking, productive or significant. They came across each other, and worked together, often enough. After all, they were influential citizens in the same world. Yet, disappointingly, there does not appear to be a profound friendship. There exists no very great volume of correspondence between them. One is left to wonder if most of the relationship lived in conversation.

In his conclusion, Keith Clements wonders whether all this toil and vision produced a long-term legacy – and finds that it does. Oldham came to embody the possibilities of Christian adventure (a word he liked to use) while Bell represented the costly realities of Christian sacrifice. Although both could be said to be very much men of their time, the goals for which they strived remained perfectly recognisable to their ecumenical successors, even if they fashioned them in different ways in later days. Plainly, the world of the early twenty-first century presents a very great deal that would have appalled both men. Their words resonate still – and now, perhaps, we may be less inclined to take them for granted than once we might have, not so long ago. If for no other reason, we might pick up a book like this to recall the warm visions that still endure, restlessly, beneath the cold surface of a neglected history.

 

 

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Review of William Skiles, Preaching to Nazi Germany: The Pulpit and the Confessing Church

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of William Skiles, Preaching to Nazi Germany: The Pulpit and the Confessing Church (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023). 293 Pp. ISBN: 9781978700635.

By Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont

Historians of the churches under National Socialism have long been preoccupied by opposition and conformity among pastors and theologians who identified with the Confessing Church. While much of the scholarship has focused on the actions and public statements of Confessing Church leaders in the public arena, William Skiles’ highly readable new monograph is concerned with the ministry of pastors at the parish level. Analyzing more than 900 sermons delivered by ninety-five pastors, Skiles sheds new light on how clergy of the Confessing Church responded to the National Socialist ideology and the regime’s persecutory policies toward its opponents, toward the churches, and toward Jews. While this study conforms to the broader historiographical consensus that the German Protestant churches failed to mount effective opposition or resistance to National Socialism, it also emphasizes that Confessing Church pastors did succeed in articulating, if in non-explicit ways, nonconformity and opposition by characterizing National Socialism as a false and fundamentally anti-Christian ideology, by criticizing the Nazi regime’s persecution of Christians and the German churches, and by challenging Nazi anti-Jewish ideology and policy.

After setting his agenda in the introductory chapter, Skiles outlines in Chapter 2 the religious conflicts under National Socialism, and more specifically, the division in German Protestantism between the German Christian movement, which sought to align Protestant theology and praxis with Nazi ideology, and the Confessing Church. For Skiles, at the foundation of that conflict was “a profound disagreement about the nature of divine revelation,” (p. 28) with the German Christians claiming to find divine revelation in history, national identity, and racial “science.” By contrast, the Confessing Church, in the spirit of the Reformation, held to the doctrine that knowledge of God is to be found in scripture alone. This chapter provides important context as it guides the reader through some of the early milestones in the regime’s conflict with the Confessing Church: the controversy over the “Aryan Paragraph” of 1933, which excluded clergy of alleged Jewish heritage from the pastorate; the subsequent formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League, which formed the basis for the Confessing Church; and the issuing of the Barmen Declaration in 1934. Skiles also effectively challenges in this chapter two common and simplified interpretations: that the Confessing Church was an anti-Nazi resistance group, and that the Confessing Church’s conflict with the regime was essentially about ecclesiastical freedom.

Chapter 3 accounts for the “historic unmooring” (p. 64) of the Gospel from the scriptures under the influence of the German Christians. For Skiles, the antecedents for this are to be found in the development and traditions of liberal Protestant theology in the nineteenth century. This provides the foundation for Chapter 4, an analysis of the “new school” of homiletics emerging in the early twentieth century. Led by the theologians Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others, this trend elevated the importance of preaching, emphasized the authority of scripture, linked homiletics to the sacraments, and affirmed the indispensability and relevance of the Hebrew scriptures. Focusing especially on the writings of Barth, Skiles contends in this chapter that “while the German Christians wished to use the gospel to advance the National Socialist ideology for national and spiritual renewal, Confessing Christians wished to unleash the gospel as a power unto itself [emphasis in original] to achieve spiritual regeneration” (p. 97). While Skiles’ reading of this theological reorientation may be sound, his argument that it “gave Confessing pastors a foothold to express non-conformity and opposition to the German Christian movement and the Nazi regime” (p. 86) remains unconvincing.

Forming the core of Skiles’ study, the next four chapters examine the ways in which Confessing Church pastors voiced in their sermons dissent and opposition to the Nazi regime by challenging its ideology (Chapter 5), its persecution of the churches (Chapter 6), and its antisemitism and persecution of Jews (Chapters 7 and 8). The author is quick to emphasize in Chapter 5 the latitude available to pastors in their preaching, even as he acknowledges that the voicing of dissent or opposition was infrequent and, when it did occur, often implicit and issued “from a posture of obedience to the state” (p. 118). Criticism of the regime was often veiled in the use or aversion of certain words or phrases (e.g., “Bürger” as opposed to “Volksgenosse“), and at times decried National Socialism’s elevation of the “false idols” (p. 129) of nation, race, or Hitler. Skiles also cautions against uncritical acceptance of Dean Stroud’s claim that faithful preaching of the Gospel was, in the context of Nazi Germany, in and of itself an act of resistance,[1] for in this claim Stroud makes a theological assertion rather than posing a sufficient and effective historical argument based on analysis of sources.

As one would expect, pastors and theologians of the Confessing Church also voiced criticism of the Nazi regime’s persecution of Christians and the churches, but again in limited and often implicit ways. They did so by, for example, emphasizing God’s love and justice (in contrast to the obvious injustices of the Nazi state), by relating information about the persecuted (this often accomplished via intercessory prayers), and by invoking God’s judgement on evildoers. It is striking, however, that of the more than 900 sermons analyzed, only thirty-seven condemned the persecution of the churches; and of the ninety-five clergy in Skiles’ sample, only twelve voiced such criticisms, and in so doing only a few were willing to identify the regime in clear terms. Skiles’ numbers regarding Confessing pastors’ criticisms of Nazi policy against Jews, although perhaps not surprising, are equally remarkable: of some 900 sermons analyzed, only sixteen contained criticisms of the persecution of Jews. Skiles considers in Chapter 8 some of the reasons behind this disturbing reality, including Nazi propaganda, concern about the war, a sense of powerlessness vis-a-vis the regime, moral desensitization, antisemitism, and what Peter Fritzsche has described as “general silence” reflecting the German people’s “limits on empathy” (p. 228). The author confronts Confessing pastors’ antisemitism in the preceding chapter, in which he considers the symbiosis between racial prejudice and Christian hostility toward Judaism. Thirty-five of the 900 sermons analyzed contained expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice, and Skiles’ reading reveals that pastors, paradoxically, also made use of conventional anti-Jewish themes and tropes (e.g., the Jews as tribal, the Jews as God-forsaken and cursed, the Jews as idolatrous) to condemn the Nazis and their ideology.

The ninth chapter of this study addresses the efforts of the Nazi Secret State Police (Gestapo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) to monitor what was said within the walls of churches led by Confessing pastors. The reports of these organizations confirm that pastors did on occasion preach in ways that undermined Nazi ideology and policy, and they reveal the regime’s concern over these sermons. The reports, however, also invite consideration of a broader issue that Skiles raises in this chapter: the problem of reception. How did parishioners apprehend and respond to the rare expressions of dissent or opposition from the pulpit? We lack the sources to respond effectively to that question, and while Skiles’ acknowledges this challenge, he also takes an interpretive leap in asserting that “[c]lergymen’s sermons contributed to a public conversation about the moral nature and truth claims of National Socialism” (p. 242). We do not know how extensive that conversation was; nor is it clear that such a conversation was inspired or influenced by what average Germans experienced in church.

In engaging the theological realm and giving the reader a glimpse into what forms of dissent and opposition occurred within the walls of the church, Skiles accomplishes much in this monograph. Yet questions remain. The author’s source base initially appears extensive, but the number and provenance of the sermons analyzed are not effectively problematized, leaving the reader questioning if some 900 sermons are, in fact, sufficiently representative to support his conclusions. When one considers that some 6,000 pastors were affiliated with the Confessing Church in the early years of the regime, his sample of ninety-five pastors remains troublingly small. Skiles also sets out “to demonstrate the extraordinary possibilities for oppositional preaching in Nazi Germany” (p. 15) via sermons that, he concludes, were “a prominent means by which Confessing Church pastors criticized the regime and its ideology and sought to reorient the perspectives and values of their congregants” (p. 255). But how prominent were the means, and how successfully did pastors reorient the perspectives and values of parishioners? And if the possibilities for oppositional preaching were indeed extraordinary, why did so few pastors avail themselves of such opportunities? Skiles concedes that the vast majority of sermons did not voice opposition, and when they did so, criticism of the regime was seldom explicit. His elevation of the importance of the Confessing Church sermon appears, then, based in hope as much as evidence, for this is as much the story of what was not said from the pulpit, as it is the story of what was.

 

Notes:

[1] Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013).

 

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Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective, Washington, October 2024

By Kevin P. Spicer, Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Andrew Kloes, Victoria Barnett, Kathryn Julian, and Jonathan Huener

The conference “Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective” was co-organized by the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History; and the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. It was held from October 2 – 4, 2024, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Session 1

Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College, Moderator

Martin Menke, Rivier University: French are Catholics, Poles are Slavs: German Catholic Views of Their Neighbors, 1900-1945

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna: The German Christian Movement in Austria and Romania, 1933-1945

Based on published and archival sources from the period, such as Abendland, Hochland, Center Party publications and Center-related newspapers, Reichstag proceedings, and government records, Martin Menke’s paper compared the development of German Catholic views of France and Germany, mainly during the interwar period. While German Catholics considered French Catholics to be brothers and sisters in faith and co-heirs to the realm of Charlemagne, they considered Poles to be Slavs first and ignored the Poles’ strong Catholicism. While this perception of the French helped to overcome postwar animosity, the pre-1914 defense of Polish rights by the Center Party evaporated during the struggles over Upper Silesia.

Dirk Schuster’s paper examined the impact of the German Christians Eisenach Institute for Research and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life on the Protestant churches in Austria and Romania. In both countries, the Protestant churches were a religious minority, and already in the 1920s, they experienced a decisive turn towards National Socialism. The national church in Romania was a stronghold of conservative elites. Younger church representatives rebelled against this situation and joined forces with the National Socialists. Due to various scandals, high church levies, and a widening gap between clergy and laity, many younger pastors and theologians took advantage of the momentum of National Socialism. They ousted the conservative elites from the church leadership. In Austria, the massive turn to National Socialism followed Austrian fascism’s rise after 1932 but did not impact the church in the same manner.

In 1939, the German Christians established the Eisenach Institute. The degree of radicalization of the national churches impacted the outreach of the Eisenach Institute. In Romania, young pastors without advanced theological training made up the majority; thus, advanced scholarly research was impossible. Instead, the clergy regularly adopted the output of the Eisenach Institute, such as a de-Judaized Bible and hymnal. The use of these texts continued even after the war ended. In many ways, the Protestant church in Romania became a testing ground for implementing such publications.

In Austria, the German Christians did not experience the same influence. We know of only six parishes in which the de-Judaized Bible was introduced after 1941. The Protestant Theological Faculty situation was completely different, as ethnonationalism permeated their teaching and scholarship. In turn, these academics eagerly embraced the “scholarship” of the Eisenach Institute and willingly collaborated with it.

 

Session 2

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, Moderator and Respondent

Mark Ruff, St. Louis University, “Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler and his efforts to free convicted Nazi war criminals”

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, USHMM, “‘Love and Mercy’ after the Holocaust: The Vatican’s Postwar Clemency Campaign, 1945-1958”

Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies, “Feindesliebe, ‘The Guilt of Others’, and the Jewish Question: Württemberg Protestant Clergy Coming to Terms with the Past”

These were three fine papers, each highlighting the roles of individuals in the immediate post-war era who worked within a world defined by crushing wartime defeat – the second in a generation – and all that entailed: a literally destroyed homeland; millions dead, wounded and missing; a Europe in ruins and dominated by the implacable ideologies of liberal democracy from the west and Soviet-style communism from the east. Many Germans, especially those with backgrounds like the subjects in these papers, had distrusted or feared both of these ideologies for decades. All three papers focus on individuals navigating courtrooms and judges and perpetrator-defendants, and questions about guilt and punishment and mercy. There seemed to be a shared understanding among them that the bad guys were not the Germans in the dock or in prison, but the Allies (read: the Americans), who at best were misguided and ignorant of what Germans had come through under Nazism and war, or at worst were hypocritical and vengeful.

I am struck that all three papers offer compelling evidence of continuity: the so-called “Stunde Null” of 1945 does not hold much weight in these accounts. Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s use of the recently-opened Vatican archives to investigate the involvement of Pope Pius XII and his “officers” – what she terms the “triumvirate” of Pius XII; Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI; and Domenico Tardini, later Secretary of State under John XXIII — in attempts to gain clemency for convicted war criminals provides evidence of, among other persistent traits, both latent and manifest antisemitism in the Holy See. Her findings mirror other scholars who have also gained access to these documents, notably David Kertzer in his portrayal of the wartime papacy. Mark Ruff’s presentation of Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler highlights the persistence of certain traditions in Catholic moral theology: there is no sin too big that may not be forgiven; the spiritual journeys of all Christians but evidently especially perpetrators must be encouraged and supported by God’s representatives on earth (i.e. priests). I found this resonant with my own research more than a decade ago, when priests and seminarians in the military used multiple ways of justifying their service in the Wehrmacht, but ultimately they claimed that they were all part of the same chorus: the men with whom they were serving (not so much those on the receiving end of the Wehrmacht’s attentions) had great need of them. Christopher Probst tells of Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem’s devotion to love above all else, even of one’s enemies, and of the fierce national devotion of Theophil Wurm, chairman of the Protestant Church Council in Germany, which led him to intercede on behalf of mass murderers like Einsatzgruppe leader Martin Sandberger.

The worldview to which our protagonists adhered left little room for any other kind of victim: Jew, Romani, communist, Slav. Christopher presents what may be an anomaly in this context, in the example of Diem, who helped to hide Jews during the Shoah as part of a Württemberg “rectory chain” and whose postwar sermons emphasized accountability, responsibility, and a condemnation of evil in all its forms through a kind of ferocious love. Apart from Diem, we are treated to an array of individuals displaying stalwart German nationalism or, to clarify the motivations of the Italians in Brown-Fleming’s presentation, a “brotherly understanding”; both nationalism and understanding (what we might otherwise call sympathy) led these individuals to agitate on behalf of convicted criminals who had said reprehensible things (the antisemite Gerhard Kittel) or who had facilitated or perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity (the SS leaders Oswald Pohl and Otto Ohlendorf; the foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath; the navy admiral Erich von Raeder; the field marshal Wilhelm List). In their view, these were good Christian men who had either (1) made mistakes that they now repented, (2) had simply followed orders, or (3) were perhaps guilty of some charges, but of far greater concern were the alleged abuses and irregularities of the American prosecutors. Of course, the three exonerative appeals could operate conveniently in tandem.

Such evidence leads us to agree with our presenters’ conclusions that, once more, Christian moral theology in the 1940s and early 1950s consistently enabled its adherents to advocate on behalf of those co-religionists that they viewed were most in need of their support, and that it was easier to encourage an affinity/sympathy with a “sorrowful” Christian perpetrator (and the extent of the sorrow is debatable) than with the perpetrator’s victim – many of whom were dead and therefore absent anyway. There was a time when I would have cast this kind of moral theological thinking as falling short of true Christian aims. But as I’ve become immersed in this particular history, I think these papers raise the question whether we, in the 21st century, should continue to expect Christian leaders in the 1940s to have behaved otherwise, given the framework within which they had been raised and trained. Diem is the example that we wish was the standard, but instead he is the anomaly perhaps because he broke with tradition to articulate what he saw as the more pressing needs of his day, even if it went against his upbringing. I wonder if he recognized this, and felt like an outsider, even as he stood (somewhat alone) on the strength of his convictions.

 

Session 3

Andrew Kloes, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent 

Andrea Strübind, Oldenburg University: “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship”

Sandra Langhop, “Between Obedience and Resistance: The Basel Mission in National Socialism”

The second day of the conference began with presentations by two scholars from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. Professor Dr. Andrea Strübind spoke on “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship.” In her paper, Strübind analyzed “central themes in Christian anti-Semitism and racist anti-Semitism in Baptist churches, as well as their conduct towards the Jewish-Christian members and office holders in response to the measures promoted by the National Socialist regime to persecute Jews.” Strübind emphasized during her remarks that she approached this topic as a historian and as Baptist pastor in the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland. As an introductory focus, Strübind discussed the poignant case of Josef Halmos, who was a Jewish convert to Christianity and the member of a Baptist congregation in Munich. As a Sunday school teacher, Halmos was well-acquainted with the family of the pastor, Heinrich Fiehler, whose son, Karl Fiehler, served as the Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Munich from March 1933 through May 1945. Drawing upon entries from Halmos’ diary, Strübind was able to demonstrate that the Fiehlers and other members of the congregation, of which he had long been an active member, enthusiastically embraced National Socialism and concomitantly ostracized Halmos because of his Jewish background. Strübind convincingly argued that, while Baptists numbered only about 70,000 in Germany and were thus one of the smallest churches, the history of their response to the Nazi regime after January 1933 generally mirrored those of the much larger Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches. “Some Baptists hid Jews and Jewish Christians. Many did recognize that the planned destruction of the ‘people of the Covenant’ increasingly bore the signs of diabolical rule in Germany and that this would lead to a catastrophe. A few theologians expressed this apocalyptic thought in words in their sermons and addresses. But nothing was officially mentioned nor was there any sort of petition made to the authorities.” Strübind concluded by discussing the current efforts of Baptists in Germany to memorialize those members of their congregations who were abandoned during the Holocaust, including Josef Halmos, who was murdered at Auschwitz.

Sandra Langhop, a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Institut für Evangelische Theologie und Religionspädagogik of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, presented a paper based on her ongoing doctoral research into the Basel Mission during the National Socialist period. Citing a June 1933 article published by Karl Hartenstein, a Universität Tübingen graduate and the German director of this Swiss missionary society, Langhop was able to show persuasively that National Socialist thinking had become influential among some German-speaking Protestant missionaries. Hartenstein wrote in his society’s periodical, Der Evangelische Heidenbote: “We can never thank God enough that he once again had mercy on our Volk. After years of great despair, he gave us new hope for our Volk and our Reich. He sent us a real Führer after the times of great confusion… He pulled our Volk back from the abyss of Bolshevism at the last moment. He made our Volk united… as hardly ever before in its history. He has begun a cleansing process with us, in which everything rotten and corrupt from years ago has been broken open and can be swept out.” Langhop further analyzed how völkisch thinking variously shaped certain Basel missionaries’ approaches to their work in India, vis-à-vis British colonial government officials and indigenous peoples, and between German and Swiss missionaries.

One theme that connected both papers was their analysis of the positive reception with which many Christian churches and Christian organizations in Germany welcomed National Socialism in 1933, believing it to be a preferable to both Weimar era-democracy and communism. Secondly, both papers demonstrated how, despite the historic bonds that had long connected them to Protestants in other countries, German Baptists and German missionary supporters adopted identities that emphasized their belonging to the German people and eschewed alternative conceptions of self that were international in nature, such as belonging to the global Christian community or to the spiritual body of Christ.

Dr. Andrew Kloes is an applied researcher in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed here are the those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

Session 4

Victoria Barnett, University of Virginia, Moderator and Respondent

Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College: “The Selberg Circle and Transatlantic Propaganda”

Friedericke Henjes, Oldenburg University: “The Reception of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories on the Internet”

These two papers cover different eras and topics—but their underlying theme (the dynamics of propaganda) led to an illuminating discussion.

Blake McKinney discussed a little-known pro-German group in the United States, led by an American businessman, Emil Selberg, that pushed Nazi propaganda during the 1930s. Selberg was sympathetic to post-1918 German resentments, including the view that the Versailles Treaty had placed an impossible burden on the German people, whose resentment and anger led them to see Adolf Hitler as a leader offering new hope.

Selberg wanted to promote a positive image of the new regime in the United States. His allies were U.S. Senator Royal Copeland from New York and a prominent Methodist layman, Paul Douglass (who later became president of American University). Copeland suggested early on that Selberg might find a receptive ear for his work in American churches, including staff members at the Federal Council of Churches in New York who were focused on promoting reconciliation with Germany after the First World War.

Selberg’s main point of contact in Berlin was August Wilhelm Schreiber, an official in the Church Federation office. Both men seem to have seen this as an opportunity to advance their own careers. Having a high-ranking church contact in Berlin gave Selberg an entry point to the FCC staff. In turn, an important American church contact made Schreiber useful, both to the Deutsche Christen as they sought to create a new Reich Church and to the Nazi regime, which was already creating propaganda aimed at the U.S. McKinney’s research offers some insight into why, by the end of 1933, FCC officials like Henry Leiper were backpedaling from their early forthright condemnations of German church silence about Nazi measures to a “both-sides” approach, as they navigated the divisions within German Protestantism.

Ultimately, Selberg’s attempts were sidelined by the events of the Church Struggle itself and growing international outrage at Nazi policies. Adolf Hitler abandoned the Reich Church project in October 1934 because of the domestic and international backlash. In the United States, there was growing attention (much of it focused on Martin Niemoeller and the Confessing Church) to what people saw as the Nazi persecution of Christians. Copeland and Douglas, however, continued to defend the “new Germany” throughout the 1930s, and Douglas even published a book in 1935, God Among the Germans, which gave a sympathetic picture of Nazi Germany and the Deutsche Christen.

McKinney’s research provides an interesting new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of international Protestant reactions to the events unfolding in Nazi Germany. It is also a revealing glimpse of German and American cooperation in spreading propaganda on behalf of National Socialism, long before the rise of the internet.

The Russian antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion also reached a worldwide audience in the pre-internet era, but as Friedericke Henjes’ paper illustrated, modern social media has brought it to new audiences. The most striking aspect of her research is that the Protocols itself is no longer even necessary. Its message has been incorporated into modern conspiracy theories.

The Protocols is a case study in how conspiracy theories spread because of underlying prejudices. As Henjes noted, even in the 1930s the Protocols were recognized as a forgery—but in a conspiracy theory, the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is how the conspiracy theory is used to explain popular resentments about world events. The Protocols did this by drawing on the long history of Christian anti-Jewish tropes and their historical legacy in terms of “otherizing” Jews through various anti-Jewish legal restrictions, etc. The dog whistles have not changed since the first copy of the Protocols appeared, for example: the “wandering Jew” who infiltrates society leading to the collapse of moral standards, and the conviction that there is a secret society of “Jewish bankers” who manipulate world history.

Henjes explores how these prejudices dovetail neatly with more modern dog whistles about “globalism,” the purported influence of George Soros, etc. The core of her argument is that “the content of the ‘Protocols’ is largely disseminated on the internet via the keywords and antisemitic narratives they contain.” She offered two modern examples from two activists in the German anti-vaccine movement:  Attila Hildman and Oliver Janich. Hildman literally quotes the Protocols but links its various antisemitic tropes to recent developments like the Covid pandemic and the anti-vax movement. Janich does something similar, tying the Protocols to current issues, quoting the Gospel of John, and promoting conspiracy theories.

As Henjes notes, many modern conspiracy theories may not immediately be recognized as antisemitic—but they share a common language with the Protocols, now over a century old. Even without using the actual text of the Protocols, there are numerous slogans and images in the digital ecosystem that convey antisemitism and incite violence against Jews.

 

Session 5

Kathryn Julian, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent

Katharina Kunter, University of Helsinki: “Anne Frank in Frankfurt: Entangling the Holocaust, Local Memory and Civil Education”

Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University: “The Sound of Evil: Imagining Perpetrators”

Carina Brankovic, Oldenburg University, “Conceptions of Remembrance in Leyb Rochman’s Chronicle of Survival”

In all three of these projects, there’s an interplay between intersecting memory cultures: international/ globalized memory, national/ local, civic/ confessional. Each panelist discussed how the subject changed depending on the context in which a text or memorial is being read, watched, or listened to, which indicated how memory culture can be politicized and also find interesting overlaps between various groups. For instance, Katharina discussed how the memory of Anne Frank evolved in Frankfurt in response to both international and local politics, from Adenauer’s conservative West Germany of the 1950s to a reunified Germany that emphasized humanitarianism to a more recent globalized vision of Anne Frank. There were a variety of global connections that could be made about Katharina’s project (e.g. how the memory of Sadako Sasaki has been used in the same way in Hiroshima and in global peace movements). In all three projects, there could be important interventions if discussed in a global context.

Historicization and temporality was also incredibly important in each of these talks. They showed that engagement with Holocaust memory is vastly different whether the 1950s, 1989/ 90, or in 2024. Carina, for example, showed how Leyb Rochman’s chronicle was read and reimagined in the immediate postwar period by the survivor generation as a yizkor book and memorial vs. how his writing was read by the second generation and implications for the future. In this same vein, Björn discussed how silence was used in the 2023 film Zone of Interest. He contended that this film in its omission of violent imagery was even more chilling to audiences in 2023, because what occurred during the Holocaust and at extermination camps has long been established in public memory and discourse. Each of these papers illuminated how Holocaust memory continues to be interpreted and reimagined in a variety of temporalities, civic, and religious contexts, whether in museums, local education, texts, film, or even in quotidian interactions.

 

Session 6

Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont, Moderator and Respondent

Rebecca Carter-Chand, USHMM, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks”

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany”

The final session was devoted to presentations by Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Director of Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the USHMM, and Dr. Kyle Jantzen, Professor of History at Ambrose University. The session was a fitting capstone to the conference, as both papers encouraged reconsideration of conventional approaches to church history in the Nazi era, even as they proposed new avenues of inquiry.

Carter-Chand’s contribution, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks,” began with a historiographical overview emphasizing that traditional analyses have tended to focus on the individual rescuer’s motives, personality, courage, and sacrifice. Carter-Chand, however, encourages a redirection in the scholarship away from rescue as a psychological phenomenon and toward rescue as a historical phenomenon, focusing more on circumstances and context in the form of “structural” and “situational” factors – factors that might include landscape, victim and rescuer networks, or the nature of occupation and coercive state power in a given setting. As an illustration, Carter-Chand concluded with a brief video interview with Holocaust survivor Zyli Zylberberg, inviting consideration of what contextual factors moved Zylberberg to make the choices she did, and how we are to evaluate her own personal agency in the complex process of rescue.

Kyle Jantzen’s presentation, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany,” also offered a novel approach in our attempt to understand the place of the churches and Christianity in Nazi Germany. Reflecting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “After Ten Years,” Jantzen urged consideration of how the current growth of Christian nationalism and the so-called “culture wars” might help us in understanding the churches during the Third Reich. We are accustomed to drawing upon the lessons of the past to inform the present, but Jantzen suggested an inversion of sorts, that is, letting the challenges of the present inform our approach to the churches in the Nazi era, considering broadly how Christianity and its institutions adapt to politics and, more precisely, the “bending” of Christianity to the politics of the right. For Jantzen, this “bending,” both in Nazi Germany and in the present, is to be understood not in static or linear terms, but as a complex dynamic process, often improvised and experimental. Moreover, Jantzen emphasized that, in attempting to understand this process, we need to “look to the middle,” that is, between the categories of support, compliance, and defiance, and to local contexts.

 

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Conference Report: Seminar, Religion and Secularism in Germany from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Conference Report: Seminar, Religion and Secularism in Germany from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, German Studies Association, September 2024

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

This seminar, which featured 14 participants and 6 auditors, was originally scheduled to convene at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association from September 27-29, 2024. Because of flooding and power outages caused by Hurricane Helene, however, most of the participants were unable to arrive safely in Atlanta in person. The seminar took place instead over Zoom in three sessions of an hour and fifty minutes each.

Convened by Professor Dr. Florian Bock, a church historian at the Ruhr-Universität-Bochum (RUB) and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, this seminar explored the complex relationship between religion and secularism in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was a topic that until recently had received relatively little attention from scholars, who simply assumed that the relationship between secularist movements and organized religion in Germany was characterized by mutual hostility.

This hostility certainly existed. Freethinker and secularist movements inveighed against organized religion.  Frequently denouncing religion as little more than superstition, they also showed themselves to be rabidly anticlerical in their broadsides against established religious institutions. Predictably, they disproportionately directed their fire against the Catholic church: freethinkers disproportionately arose out of Protestant rinks. To be sure, defenders of orthodox religion often responded in kind. They met hostility with hostility, and for that reason alone, scholars were for decades apt to take as a given mutual animosity between secularism and religion.

But the relationship between religion and secularism was never quite that simple. For one, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam were anything but homogenous; significant differences existed not only between but within each over how to position oneself in politics, society and the so-called “modern” world with its default assumption of secularity. For another, secularism and secularity were not coherent concepts either. Secularism ran the gamut from laicité and anticlericalism to free-thinking, materialism, agnosticism, and atheism. Its relationship to ostensibly secular parties like the SPD was complicated, since most Germans retained formal religious affiliations through the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Not least, secular ideas emerged out of religious institutions and inquiry and vice versa; religious discussions of gender, sexuality, and capitalism were shaped by complicated interactions with secularist views.

Aiming to explore how religion and secularism defined themselves and each other vis-à-vis the other and its impact on the lives of the faithful, indifferent and skeptical, this seminar put together readings mostly from the first two decades of the 21st century. The first day’s readings sought to make sense of competing understandings of secularism and the secular.  They included portions of Talal Asad’s classic work, Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007) along with a set of reflection by the German sociologist, Detlef Pollack, on secularization. Taylor had famously posed the question of why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 in the West while in today’s world and especially in the “secular” academy, it is “easy,” if not “inescapable?” Participants pointed out a paradox. Although Asad published his book before Taylor, portions of it were expressly designed to counter Taylor’s arguments and framework of the secular which he had encountered in bits and pieces in the preceding decade. Many participants also noted how both works were profoundly shaped by the attacks of September 11, 2001. How much of these frameworks, they queried, remained viable more than twenty years later?

For the second day of the seminar, participants applied and historicized these theories in greater detail. They discussed Manuel Borutta’s pioneering article, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,“ which appeared in the German journal, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, in 2010. They also explored portions of Rebekka Habermas’ edited volume, Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire. Transnational Approaches (Berghahn Books, 2019), and its chapters on religion in the so-called “long 19th-century.”  The attendees also discussed the chapter by Carolin Kosuch, “Secularism and Unbelief” from the forthcoming edited volume by Anthony Steinhoff and Jeffrey Zalar, Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Since Zalar was one of the participants in the seminar, he shed light on this chapter’s origins and significance. Not least, participants discussed what has become the go-to work on secularism in modern Germany, Todd Weir’s, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014.)  At stake in these readings was the question of how secularist paradigms became embedded in discourses of masculinity and became potent political and ideological weapons.

On the third and final day, participants turned to the second half of the 20th century. They read the introduction to an edited volume by Wilhelm Damberg’s, Frank Bösch, and Lucian Hölscher. Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel. Transformationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1989 (Klartext, 2011). Evoking the greatest discussion and controversy were readings by Joan Scott. Featured were significant portions of her short monograph, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2018). They questioned whether her analysis, which was derived from recent French history, also applied to Germany. Some argued that she was painting with too broad of a brush. Other participants critiqued her approach of seeing secularism primarily as a political discourse and not a transcendent set of principles.

At the close, the scholars of religion and secularism gathered over Zoom were once again left wondering about the relevancy of frameworks published in the aftermath of September 11. How precisely did sexual emancipation become a weapon in the so-called “clash of civilizations?” Are we indeed living in a secular age or a post-religious world?  If so, how do we eschew the simple binaries and teleologies characteristic of many readings on these topics? Is our only answer to historicize?

 

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Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria,” Contemporary European History (2024), 18 pages, doi:10.1017/S0960777324000262.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This is the second article from Edinburgh PhD candidate Harry Legg, following his 2022 publication “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany,” in which he analyzed the experienced of Germans who were racially identified as Jews by the Nazi regime but who did not consider themselves Jewish religiously or culturally. In this article, Legg asks a related question: “What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances?” (1). He examines four facets of this moment of discovery: the clues to Jewish ancestry that were overlooked, the reactions of antisemites who discovered they were racially Jewish, the despair many felt when they discovered they were Jews, and the minority who reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish heritage. Legg’s overriding purpose is to explore the nuances of identity among those who didn’t fall neatly into the binaries of Jew and German (or Austrian) Christian.

The title of the article comes from the testimony of Rudolf Briske, who secluded himself after learning of his Jewish ancestry from his parents in 1929. Briske was one of forty Germans and Austrians who Legg studied, most of whom were not initially aware of their Jewish ancestry (in part, of course, because they were raised as non-Jews) but who later wrote about it after the war. (2) (He calls these subjects non-Jewish “Jews” because they did not identify as Jewish but were identified as either “Full Jews” or “Mischlinge” [partially Jewish] by the Nazi regime.) Most of the “moments of discovery” Legg studies did not come from parents but at school, whether as denunciations by classmates (armed with knowledge from their parents) or as discoveries from filling out racial forms for school or for Nazi youth groups (7).

Legg argues that there were in fact clues that might have alerted these non-Jewish “Jews” to their Jewish ancestry. One was the presence of Jewish relatives, which might seem more obvious in retrospect than in real time, when many non-Jewish “Jews” didn’t think of Jewishness in racial terms (10). Since many of the subjects of Legg’s study were minors, they simply didn’t understand what racial terms like Mischlinge or slurs like Rassenschande meant (11).

The most dramatic moments of discovery of Jewishness were those of antisemites. As Legg points out, the very fact that non-Jewish “Jews” could be deeply antisemitic illustrates how separated they were from the Jewish communities around them (12). Some tried to deny their Jewishness, invoking their “hereditary character” as evidence of their hoped-for non-Jewishness. Others adjusted their worldviews, abandoning their antisemitism. One compared it to the adaptation process involved in a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Another experienced guilt over her antisemitism. For others still, their moment of discovery amounted to an emergence out of naiveté. Still, the language of these discoveries was usually the language of despair: “thunderstruck,” “horrified,” “stunned,” and “terrible, terrible, terribly upsetting” (14). For many, the hardest part of the discovery was being “dropped” by friends (15). Others experienced the disgrace of public exposure (16).

A few of the non-Jewish “Jews” who Legg studied reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish ancestry, though this was more common among those whose moment of discovery came before 1933 (17).

This is a fascinating article which offers genuine insight into the experiences of those who were raised as Germans or Austrians—and normally as Christians—and then discovered their Jewish ancestry. It sheds light on the diversity of experiences among ordinary Germans and Austrians forced to face the brutalities of Nazi racial ideology.

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