Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

By Olaf Blaschke, University of Münster

The following commentary examines the April 29, 2020, publication of “Deutsche Bischöfe im Weltkrieg. Wort zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs vor 75 Jahren” (“German Bishops in the World War: Statement on the 75th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War”) by the German Roman Catholic Bishops Conference.

Despite rumors to the contrary, this is not the first statement by German Catholic bishops on the behavior of the shepherds in the time of National Socialism and in the Second World War. Other reflections have already been uttered several times in collective pastoral letters and those written by certain bishops or in certain statements.

In January 1945, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen (Münster) conceded mistakes of the hierarchy in a letter to the archbishop of Cologne, and at the same time Bishop Johannes Joseph van der Velden of Aachen admitted to the US-Psychological Warfare Division, the Church itself had failed.¹ Four weeks after the total capitulation (May 8, 1945), the north-western German bishops of Cologne, Aachen, Limburg, Münster, Osnabrück, Trier, Paderborn, Fulda and Hildesheim, covering most of Germany (except the south), came together in Werl and decided to write a petition to the Military Government, to the bishops in the USA and Great Britain, and to the Pope. In this text, the bishops critically considered why they kept silent, also concerning the atrocities against Jews. Looking back, they got the impression “that it would have served our church and our people more if we had kept silent less.”²

It was a fatal event that the speech of Pius XII on June 2, 1945 – not known by the bishops meeting in Werl on June 5 – caused the bishops to change their course for the coming decades. In his address to the college of cardinals the pope praised the “great qualities of the people” in Germany, among which he had spent twelve years between 1917 and 1929, and condemned the “satanic specter raised by National Socialism,” which was persecuting the Church. “To resist such attacks millions of courageous Catholics, men and women, closed their ranks around their bishops, whose valiant and severe pronouncements never failed to resound even in these last years of war. These Catholics gathered around their priests to help them adapt their ministry to the ever-changing needs and conditions. And right up to the end they set up against the forces of impiety and pride their forces of faith, prayer and openly Catholic behavior and education.”³ This was the sentence which from now on was quoted in several pastoral letters. Backed by the authoritative voice of the pope in a context of a world condemning the Germans, the bishops felt encouraged to present themselves as victims, not as part of the system, being involved in resistance, not in collaboration, and to discard any claim of a collective guilt.⁴

In their first pastoral letter after the war, the Bavarian bishops referred to the pope’s speech, emphasizing that the bishops had warned against National Socialism and that the German “Volk” had suffered immensely.⁵

Accordingly, in the first pastoral letter of the joint German bishops of August 23, 1945, the Catholic people were praised because they had kept away from the “idolatry of brutal power.” Certainly, “terrible things” had happened before and during the war “by Germans in the occupied countries. We deeply regret it: Many Germans, even from our ranks [!], have let themselves be seduced by the wrong teachings of National Socialism and have remained indifferent to crimes against human freedom and human dignity; many of them promoted crimes through their attitude, many have become criminals themselves.” This admission of guilt is famous, but only made up 4.4 percent of the entire document. Whether “our ranks” also included the bishops is highly questionable.⁶ The bishops took the course of seeing themselves and the faithful as victims. The statements were shaped by dualism (Church vs. National Socialists), opposition (the Church resisted the regime), and exculpation. For years, this position remained mainstream.

The pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops in April 1946 claimed: “We bishops have fought ‘the satanic specter of National Socialism’ [again quoting Pius XII] so decisively and suffered so much from it that we cannot be suspect that we now want to wash away all his followers of guilt and free them from punishment.” The letter was about commitment for the “political prisoners” and former party members.⁷

Later statements spoke more frankly: In 1976 the Common Synod of Bishoprics complained that the ecclesial community had kept silent about the murder of the Jews. After the TV series “Holocaust” had been broadcast, the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference explained in 1979 a certain complicity, because the Church didn’t comment on the boycott, the Nuremberg race laws, or the pogroms of 1938. When the outbreak of the war commemorated its 40^th anniversary in 1979, the Church acknowledged the co-responsibility of the German people, including the guilt “in the church” – but not of the Church. On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it was confirmed that “failure and guilt was common among Catholics.”

Contrasted with earlier documents, the present shepherds’ word breathes a completely different spirit. Its creation was advised by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte and the German Commission Justitia et Pax. The document knows about the decades of apologetic tendencies in the Catholic Church and is not afraid to “name misconduct,” which however only becomes clear from the middle of the document onwards (p. 12 of 23). Despite all the well known distance to National Socialism, “the Catholic Church in Germany was part of the war society.” This is clearly stated. It was the Church, not only people in the Church.

In the controversy that has been going on for 75 years, whether the bishops have “proven themselves”⁸ or whether they have “failed,” this document emphasizes in a balanced way of argumentation that they were actually “complicit in the war.” Between 1933 and its last meeting in 1943, the Bishops Conference was “not up to the challenge of National Socialism.”⁹

The document is immune from ahistorical moralization. Rather, it recognizes the need to explain the historical circumstances: the shared belief at the time that state power came from God, the teaching of just war, nationalism, and anti-Bolshevism. Wolfgang Böckenförde identified these elements in 1961 as the interface between Catholicism and National Socialism, holding it against ecclesiastical apologetic, while now it is part of an ecclesiastical document.¹⁰

To conclude: the recent statement of the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference corresponds to the well-established tendency of historical research to no longer search for the genocidal and war “program” of Nazi leaders in an intentionalist way, placing the guilt on a handful of “outcasts”, viewing the Germans as seduced by a brown clique. Rather, research into perpetrators (“Täterforschung”) expanded down to “ordinary men,” as Christopher Browning put it.¹¹ Now the bishops also turn out to be “ordinary churchmen.” They no longer adorn themselves with the narrative of exculpation and dualism, sacrifice and resistance, but admit their “own entanglements” which have to be interpreted in their historical context. Even the interpretation that the war against the Soviet Union in 1941 was felt and endorsed as a “crusade” against “godless Bolshevism” can be found in this document. It gave the bishops “an additional meaning to the war.”¹²

What remains unclear is the choice of the date of publication, commemorating the 75^th year of the liberation of the Dachau concentration-camp on April 29, 1945. Why is Dachau never mentioned in the document? 2700 clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, were imprisoned there, among them 1700 Polish priests. Many felt abandoned by their bishops, treated as disobedient, and suffered from their bishops’ de-solidarization. In 1945, the bishops told them they should not act as martyrs. Dachau is not the topic of the document, rather the 75^th commemoration of the end of the Second World War nine days later. The statement explicitly marks the 8^th of May as a day of liberation, but its authors chose another day to make it public. This, however, is a minor objection in the face of a document which has made great progress.

Notes:

¹Vera Bücker, Die Schulddiskussion im deutschen Katholizismus nach 1945, Bochum 1989, p. 89; Wolfgang Löhr, Bischof Johannes Joseph van der Velden und die Schuldfrage nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Kirche im Bistum Aachen, Jahrbuch 7, 2004, p. 247-257, 255, quoted in: Ulrich Helbach, Es hätte unserer Kirche und unserem Volk mehr gedient, wenn wir weniger geschwiegen hätten … Die “Schuldfrage” im Frühjahr 1945 im Lichte eines neuen Quellenfundes: Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Papst Pius XII., in: Siegfried Schmidt (Hg.), Rheinisch – Kölnisch – Katholisch. Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Landesgeschichte, FS H. Finger, Köln 2008, p. 341-372, 344. For the context: Damian van Melis / Joachim Köhler (ed.), Siegerin in Trümmern: Die Rolle der katholischen Kirche in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1998. Olaf Blaschke, Olaf, Die Kirchen und der Nationalsozialismus, Bonn 2019 (Stuttgart 2014), p. 231-244.

²[Probably Lorenz Jaeger], Entwurf für eine Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Pius XII. zur Kollektivschuldfrage, Paderborn, ca. 5. 6. 1945, in: Ulrich Helbach (Bearb.), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945. Westliche Besatzungszonen 1945-1947, vol. 1, Paderborn 2012 (Veröffentlichungen der KfZG, Reihe A: Quellen, Bd. 54), p. 115-120 (EA Paderborn, NL Jaeger, Sachgruppe 1 [Rom], Hefter: Eingaben/Verfügungen). The story of this document is told by its discoverer: Helbach, Schuldfrage.

³Pius XII, Ansprache an das Kardinalskollegium, 2. 6. 1945, in: Wilhelm Jussen (ed.), Gerechtigkeit schafft Frieden, Reden und Enzykliken des Heiligen Vaters Pius XII., Hamburg 1946, p. 201-216.

⁴Officialla, the collective guilt was never announced. Cf. Norbert Frei, Von deutscher Erfindungskraft. Die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit, in: Gary Smith (ed.), Hannah Arendt revisited. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” und die Folgen, Frankfurt 2000, p. 157-170.

⁵Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Erstes gemeinsames Hirtenwort nach dem Krieg, Eichstätt, June 28^th 1945, in: Wolfgang Löhr (Bearb.), Dokumente deutscher Bischöfe 1945-1949, vol. 1: Hirtenbriefe und Ansprachen zu Gesellschaft und Politik 1945-1949, Würzburg 1985, S. 29-32.

⁶Hirtenbrief der deutschen Bischöfe, 23. 8. 1945, in: Löhr (ed.), p. 40-45.

⁷Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Hirtenwort über das Glaubensleben und Zeitprobleme, Eichstätt, 9. 4. 1946, in: Löhr (Bearb.), p. 99-103, 102.

⁸Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918 bis 1945, Paderborn 1992, p. 550.

⁹Here, the scholarly findings of Antonia Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens. Der Ausschuss für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945, Frankfurt 1996, find their way into the document.

¹⁰Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933. Eine kritische Betrachtung, in: Hochland 53 (1961), p. 215-239.

¹¹Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York 1992.

¹²Cf. Antonia Leugers, Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung, Paderborn 2009.

“The German Catholic Bishops and the Second World War: A Historic Reappraisal”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

“The German Catholic Bishops and the Second World War: A Historic Reappraisal”

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

On May 8, 2020, the 75^th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender to the Allies, the German Catholic bishops issued a statement, “Germany’s Bishops during the War,” admitting their complicity in the Second World War. “By not unequivocally saying ‘no,’ to the war and by strengthening instead the resolve (to fight and persist), they came to share in the guilt for the war,” declared their twenty-three page message released during a video conference because of the coronavirus epidemic.

Without a doubt, this statement’s critical tones marked a massive departure in how the German bishops portrayed their conduct during the war. Earlier claims of the hierarchy’s guilt had been met with fire and fury. When in September 1959, the American Catholic pacifist, Gordon Zahn, accused the German bishops of having unconditionally supported what he called “Hitler’s predatory wars,” the West German bishops responded critically, commissioning a team in the Central Committee of German Catholics to gather exculpating documents.[1] No less than Cardinal Augustin Bea, who later would gain a reputation as an influential ecumenical representative at the Second Vatican Council, attempted to have him removed from his position as a tenured professor at Loyola University, Chicago.[2]

What made possible this remarkable shift? The recent bishops’ statement was, in part, the fruit of Professor Heinrich Missalla, a Catholic theologian based for much of his career at the University of Essen and a pacifist. Missalla was long known as an ardent and passionate critic of the Catholic Church’s conduct during the Third Reich. His last published book from 2015 was entitled, Remembering for the Future: How the Catholic Bishops supported Hitler’s War.[3]

Missalla had hoped to publish an open letter to the bishops for the 80^th anniversary on the outbreak of war in 2019. But his death on October 3, 2018 put an end to those plans. The left-wing Catholic newspaper, Public Forum, instead published his letter posthumously in its August 2019 edition under the imposing title: “Do you finally have the courage to face the truth? Not only Protestant but also Catholic Bishops let themselves be carried away by the enthusiasm for war.”[4] In this final statement, Missalla raised the questions that had occupied him for his entire life: how was it possible that the German Catholic bishops could send soldiers to their deaths up to the very end in a war of unspeakable cruelty and annihilation – and justify this with religious and theological arguments? Why did they hold on for so long to their justifications for fighting which included “duty,” “obedience,” “readiness to sacrifice,” and “Christian struggle.” As he put it: “It remains a puzzle why nearly the entire German episcopate did not call out the criminal nature of Hitler’s war by name and accordingly called on the faithful entrusted to it to place itself (at Hitler’s command) obediently and with a willingness to die.”

But Missalla was also preoccupied by the church’s failures in the postwar era. Why were the bishops not able to find the courage to own up to their failure and guilt after 1945? Missalla believed that inadequate historical research was part of the problem. “In reality,” he wrote, “there are numerous documentations and investigations of the events and problems of this dark period of German Catholic Church history. It is somewhat astounding, however, that no comprehensive account of the conduct of the German Catholic Church in the war has been put together.”

This claim is, of course, not entirely accurate. Numerous scholars, including many church critics, addressed the conduct of the church in the war, from Gordon Zahn’s classic work from 1962, German Catholics and Hitler’s War: A Study in Social Control, to Lauren Faulkner’s monograph from 2015, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation. [5] Thomas Brodie’s book from 2018, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945, provided precisely the comprehensive, critical and nuanced account Missalla was calling for.[6] Yet even on the other side of the Atlantic, Karl-Joseph Hummel’s and Christoph Kösters’ 600-age edited volume from 2007, Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945, provided valuable snapshots into the theology, conduct, and world-view of the German church hierarchy.[7]

However inaccurately as Missalla may have represented the state of existing scholarship, the chair of the German Bishops Conference, the Bishop of Limburg, Georg Bätzing, nonetheless expressly acknowledged Missalla’s lifelong engagement when he formally presented the Bishops’ Statement to the public. The Bishops Conference, moreover, did draw on recent and critical findings from scholars, most from contemporary German historians and theologians, in putting together its statement. They turned to the scholarship of the recently retired church historian and theologian from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Wilhelm Damberg, who had critically analyzed the theologies of war and understandings of just war that had informed the thinking of theologians from the 1920s through the 1950s.[8] In this vein, they also drew on the scholarship of the Tübingen theologian and church historian, Andreas Holzem.[9] Both Damberg and Holzem played a significant role in steering the Bonn-based Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in a new direction over the course of the last decade. Long seen by critics as a nexus for defensive and apologetic accounts of the church during the Third Reich, the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte under Damberg’s leadership in particular shed this reputation as a fortress for Catholic culture warriors. It brought in many younger scholars, theologians and historians alike, into its ranks. Just this year, it received a multi-million Euro grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to research the history of the Catholic Church in Germany from 1965 through 1989. Scholarship from the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte during the last twenty years thus marked a decisive break from that of earlier generations which focused primarily on the “resistance” and “distance” brokered by the ecclesia and laity alike.

This increasingly nuanced and even critical scholarship from the 2000s and 2010s about the church and the war found its way directly into the Deutsche Kommission Justitia et Pax of the Bishops Conference. It informed not just the ensuing statement’s tone but its epistemology. “As difficult it is to understand and as incorrect the conduct of our predecessors in the ranks of the bishops might seem to us today, it does not defy historical understanding. Only this way can we escape the temptation of letting the events from that time not come close to us today.”

The commission drew on the findings of these theologians and historians who had pointed to the resources that the church provided for Hitler’s war. These ranged from patriotic pastoral letters to the nationalistic exhortations of military chaplains and even to the role played by women religious in military hospitals and sick wards. The bishops thus duly painted a picture of ambivalence. In spite of an inner distance to National Socialism and on occasion even enmity, they stated, the Catholic Church in Germany remained part of a “war society.” In this regard, the increased repression towards Christianity, the war of annihilation, the change in the tides of war between 1940 and 1943, and the increasing casualties as a result of the bombing war against Germany changed the bishops’ attitudes but little.

At the same time, the Bishops Conference did not want this statement to be seen as a formal “ostracism” (Scherbengericht) of their predecessors. On the contrary: they saw it instead as a new link in a chain of Catholic institutional memory, one understood not as an end in itself but rather as a tool for peace and the reconciliation of peoples.

“With the distancing effect of time, the reality that for many years there was no understanding of the suffering and sacrifice of others is particularly shameful,” asserted the closing section of this declaration. “Exchanges and the paths to reconciliation with our neighbors, especially Poland and France, have helped us to put behind this way of seeing things, which was characterized by avoidance, repression and a fixation on our own pain. Through this, we hope to experience that these meetings and contacts also have contributed and contribute to the renewal of the church.”

To no surprise, this declaration was received well by Germany’s neighbors, and in particular Poland. This showed that the church in Germany has made an important stride forward as far as the politics of the past is concerned. It followed Missalla’s dictum: “remember for the sake of the future.”

The text of the declaration and the statements to the press from April 29, 2020, can be found at the following link:

https://dbk.de/nc/presse/aktuelles/meldung/wort-der-deutschen-bischoefe-zum-ende-des-zweiten-weltkriegs-vor-75-jahren-veroeffentlicht/detail/

An English-language translation is scheduled to be made available in June 2020.

[1] Archiv der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Bonn, NL Walter Adolph, WA 16a, Auszug aus dem Protokoll der Konferenz der westdeutschen Bischöfe, Pützchen, 9.-11.12.1959

[2] Diözesanarchiv Berlin, NL Julius Döpfner, Augustin Bea to Julius Döpfner, February 11, 1960.

[3] Heinrich Massalla, Erinnern um die Zukunft willen: Wie die katholischen Bischöfe Hitlers Krieg unterstützt haben (Oberursel: Public-Forum-Verlags GmbH, 2015).

[4] Heinrich Massalla, „“Haben Sie endlich Mut zur Wahrheit?“: Nicht nur evangelische, sondern auch katholische Bischöfe ließen sich von der Kriegsbegeisterung mitreißen,“ in: Publik-Forum, August 23, 2019, 34-35.

[5] Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s War: A Study in Social Control (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962); Lauren Faulkner, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

[6] Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[7] Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007).

[8] See Wilhelm Damberg, „Krieg, Theologie und Kriegserfahrung,“ in: Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 203-216.

[9] Andreas Holzem, “Theological War Theories,” in: Angela Kallhoff and Thomas Schulte-Umberg (eds.), Moralities of Warfare and Religion (Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformationin Contemporary Society [J-RaT], Vol. 4), Vienna 2018, 21-37; Andreas Holzem, “Christentum und Kriegsgewalt,” in: Theologische Quartalschrift 191 (2011), 314-338; Andreas Holzem, ed., Krieg und Christentum. Religiöse Gewalttheorien in der Kriegserfahrung des Westens (Krieg in der Geschichte, Bd. 50), (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition (Munich: DVA, 2019). 640 pages. ISBN: 978-3-421-04712-0.

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

At Christmas 1940, Martin Niemöller appeared on the front page of Time Magazine as the “Martyr of 1940.” Since that same autumn, the film Pastor Hall, inspired by a drama by the playwright Ernst Toller, had been showing in American cinemas. It captured the story of the “Church Struggle” in Germany on celluloid, with little attempt to conceal Niemöller’s biographical details. Since his arrest in the summer of 1937 and subsequent transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller had become a worldwide symbol of church resistance to the National Socialist dictatorship. Interest in his person continued even after his liberation at the beginning of May 1945. Despite the irritation that Niemöller provoked by making nationalistic statements in his first public postwar interview, he and his wife travelled to the United States for several months in 1946 and 1947, where he gave over 200 public lectures in 22 states.

To this day, Martin Niemöller remains one of the most famous German churchmen of the twentieth century. He is regarded as an upright resistance fighter against Hitler, who testified to his stance with seven years of incarceration in concentration camps, as a preacher who admonished German “guilt” and as someone who had transformed from an imperial submarine commander of the First World War into a pacifist, who during the 1950s eloquently and powerfully opposed the Federal Republic of Germany’s Western alliance, its remilitarization, and nuclear weapons. Now, 35 years after Niemöller’s death in 1984, Benjamin Ziemann, Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, cuts through the thicket of legend concerning Niemöller’s story and uncovers important strands of his life.

Born in 1892, Niemöller came from the home of a Westphalian pastor and chose the career of naval officer. Caught up in the national Protestantism of his time, he experienced the German defeat in the First World War as nothing less than a catastrophe. Only then did he decide to study theology, which he successfully completed in Münster. The book chapter on the völkisch and German national “student politician” is one of the most striking. Niemöller belonged to various far-right parties and associations such as the antisemitic German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbund) and the National Association of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere) and counted himself among the enemies of Weimar democracy. He also personally held, as Ziemann comprehensively proves for the first time, an aggressive attitude of racial antisemitism. As a father of several children and with his entry into civilian professional life, Niemöller became more moderate in the second half of the 1930s, but initially his political stance did not change. In 1931, after seven years as the organizer of the Westphalian Inner Mission, he moved to Dahlem, a well-to-do parish in Berlin’s southwest. Like many German nationalist pastors of his generation, Niemöller welcomed Hitler’s chancellorship, the “Third Reich,” and the emergence of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) founded on Christianity.

Those disputes, which are treated today under the term “church struggle,” were crucial tests. As head of the Pastors’ Emergency League, founded in mid-September 1933, Niemöller became one of its most important protagonists in the second half of 1933 and gained importance throughout the Reich. Ziemann expertly describes the activities of Niemöller in the conflicts of the “church struggle,” accompanied by ecclesiastical, political, and personal tensions and breaks, and ascribes to him a key role in the debates of the Confessing Church concerning the inevitable consequences of Barmen Theological Declaration of the end of May 1934. He experienced the February 1936 division of the Confessing Church into a Dahlemite wing led by Councils of Brethren and a Lutheran wing led by regional bishops not only as a loss, but also as an opportunity for the (Confessing) Church.

His involvement, which led him to become increasingly opposed to the Nazi state and the growing state pressure on the church, ended abruptly on July 1, 1937, with his arrest. After a comparatively mild judgment by the Special Court at the regional court level, which would actually have resulted in his release, he was transferred directly to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. In the detailed description of his concentration camp imprisonment in the almost fifty-page chapter on Niemöller’s time of suffering as the “personal prisoner of the Führer,” two themes stand out. One was the almost-two-year deliberation about conversion to the Catholic Church, which he only finally decided against at the urging of his wife, in February 1941, a few months before his transfer to Dachau. The other was the “empathy for communists and other victims of Nazi terror,” which Ziemann exposes as a subsequent self-stylization of the postwar period. Rather, he demonstrates an ongoing anti-Bolshevik and nationalist stance: “Even at the moment of liberation from the concentration camp, he interpreted the defeat of the German nation as the fall of the West” (p. 356).

Up to the 1970s, Niemöller remained a public figure and a noticeable and by no means uncontroversial voice in the social debates of the early Federal Republic. Ziemann goes into great detail about Niemöller’s disappointment at the development of the postwar Protestant Church, which he accused of episcopal and confessional tendencies and of supporting Konrad Adenauer’s policies, which he characterized as restorationist. Rooted in his understanding of a “prophetic guardian role” for the church, this went hand in hand with his keen criticism of the founding of the Federal Republic (“conceived in Rome and born in Washington”), the decision to ally with the West, and West German rearmament. Biographically, Niemöller’s sharpest break occurred at the end of the 1950s over the question of war and peace. Under the impact of the destructive force of hydrogen bombs, the former naval officer—who, despite his pacifist criticism of politics and the West German military, felt committed to the ethos of an officer throughout his life—became the most outspoken leader of the West German peace movement, in the campaign “Fight Against Nuclear Death” (“Kampf dem Atomtod”) and after 1957 as president the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft). Only then did Niemöller’s Protestant nationalist guiding principles wear off, which in the immediate postwar period were still expressed in nationalist speeches and manifest in his participation in the mythology of German victimhood. Ziemann’s portrait of the post-war Niemöller is extremely multifaceted, describing how Niemöller, increasingly shaped by international and ecumenical concerns, dramatically shifted his stance toward the church and underwent a political transformation.. Ziemann, however, does not lose sight of the continuities: Niemoller’s persistent unease (which he never completely abandoned) with representative party democracy and media diversity , his latent anti-Catholicism and anti-Americanism, as well as his persistent culturally and socially fueled antisemitic resentment.

Anyone interested in Martin Niemoeller’s eventful life cannot ignore Ziemann’s extremely rich, brilliantly written, critical, yet balanced account. In the controversial and polarizing person of Niemoller—the “volcano” Niemöller, as the Bishop of Württemberg Theophil Wurm once put it—he also depicts the fundamental conflicts that marked the four political systems of the late empire, the unpopular and defeated Weimar Republic, the National Socialist ideological dictatorship, and the Federal Republic, which was in search of new ways forward. Using the example of the “belated” pastor, the “church fighter” (“Kirchenkämpfer”), the church president of the postwar Hesse-Nassau Regional Church, and the internationally-recognized ecumenist, Ziemann also reflects the fundamental upheavals of twentieth-century religious life.

The strength of his biography is also a result of the fact that he does not stop at the public Martin Niemöller. Without committing any indiscretions, Ziemann writes about the strict “patriarch” and family man; the restless, often overwhelmed and driven worker; the impatient, polemical, and self-opinionated disputant who also offended those who were on his side; and, last but not least, the one who was challenged, who repeatedly suffered severe personal crises. And he writes about Else Niemöller, his wife who died in a car accident in 1961 and with whom Martin had been married for almost forty years. One of Ziemann’s great achievements in his publication is that he acknowledges her role as a discussion partner and advisor, editor of his sermons, emotional support during his term in prison, and, last but not least, as the one who took care of the family during Niemöller’s extremely time-consuming activities as an organizer of the Inner Mission, as a pastor, and as a church politician. Benjamin Ziemann’s Niemöller biography is already a standard work.

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche, eds. Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2019). 268 pages. ISBN: 9783579085449.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Retired)

In the first week of February 1941, while Martin Niemöller languished in the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, the London Times was one of several international newspapers to announce his conversion to Catholicism. The New York Times headlined this story more circumspectly: “Niemöller’s Friends Deny His Conversion: Say Imprisoned Pastor Is Only Studying Catholic Doctrine” (New York Times, 5 Feb. 1941). Neither version was quite on target. Niemöller had not converted to the Catholic Church; however, his study of Catholic doctrine hardly represented mere curiosity. It involved a serious consideration on his part to convert. This brief moment in Martin Niemöller’s life has received relatively little attention, though it does get mentioned by some, including Matthew Hockenos in his recent Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (reviewed in CCHQ, 25/1, March 2019).

This book, edited by Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann, has given a surprising moment in Niemöller’s life its most thorough explication. It also offers readers an edited version of the handwritten manuscript Niemöller produced within a period of less than three months during his four years of solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen. His assessment of Catholicism versus Protestantism, a document which numbers over 200 pages in Niemöller’s hand, now comprises 150 printed pages in this book.

Many or most readers of this CCHQ online journal will know at least the main features of Martin Niemöller’s life. He is one of the most famous and most important participants in the German Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) alongside important friends and colleagues such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. He founded the Pastors’ Emergency League in the fall of 1933. He participated in the creation of the Barmen Declaration in 1934, and he played a leading role in the first three years of the Confessing Church. Niemöller was arrested on 1 July 1937 and spent the next eight months in prison in Berlin, awaiting the outcome of his case. Then, having completed the necessary prison time required by the court, he was not released but designated a “personal prisoner” of Adolf Hitler. Instead of going home to Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, he was hurried off to solitary confinement at the nearby concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, where he stayed from March 1938 until July 1941. At that point he was transferred to Dachau, near Munich, where he remained incarcerated until the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Niemöller emerged from Dachau a famous figure and he quickly became a leader in the postwar German Protestant Church. His international stature also was high, resulting among other things in a stint as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961-68. After a postwar life traveling the world as a famous advocate for various causes, he died in 1984 at the age of ninety-two. (Personal note: I caught up with Martin Niemöller in 1973 and sought his friendly advice, but only via telephone.)

Martin Niemöller was not a theologian, though he knew theologians. Martin Niemöller also had a first career that gave him a portion of public recognition. Born in 1892 to a Lutheran pastor, he chose life as a naval officer. When World War I began, he commanded a submarine which supported the German cause by sinking British ships. His first burst of fame in Germany came from these activities, especially with his war memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit (1934), in which he described his wartime exploits as well as his postwar turn toward the church. By 1933, when Niemöller began developing what became his high profile in the Confessing Church, he was already forty-one years old, a pastor in the Dahlem suburb of Berlin, a husband, and a father to seven children.

It is clear from Christophersen and Ziemann’s careful work that Niemöller pursued the possibility of conversion to the Catholic Church with great seriousness. By the summer of 1938 he was using a Catholic prayer book for his daily devotions while sequestered in Sachsenhausen. By August he wrote to his wife that he was “astonished by the richness of prayers and biblical readings” (“erstaunt über den Reichtum an Gebeten und biblischen Lektionen”) in the Catholic tradition (p. 9). By the spring of 1939 he was angered by the attempt of church authorities in Berlin to remove him from his pastorate in Dahlem, a form of discipline intended for the most active opponents of Reich Bishop Müller and the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian”) leadership in the Protestant Church. By July 1939, he wrote, “the Protestant State Church has never been a Christian church” (“Die Evangelische Landeskirche [ist] niemals christliche Kirche gewesen”), but merely a bureaucracy (p. 11, quoting from Martin Niemöller, Brief aus der Gefangenschaft, 61). Soon he was asking Elsa, his wife, to send him books by or about converts to Catholicism, people such as John Henry Newman. This mid-nineteenth-century professor at Oxford University was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1825, famously converted to Catholicism in 1845, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, and was created a cardinal in 1879. (Newman eventually achieved sainthood in the Catholic tradition in 2019).

From late August to the beginning of November in 1939, Niemöller began and finished the manuscript now described and printed in this book. Christopherson and Ziemann have had access to many sources. These include the document itself, plus letters Martin and Elsa Niemöller were allowed to send every two weeks, and records of the twice-per-month visits Elsa was allowed to make to Niemöller in Sachsenhausen, especially as recorded in notes Niemöller made after those meetings. All of these handwritten materials are available to us based on two pieces of good fortune. First, Niemöller was able on short notice to pack papers into his luggage when transferred from Sachsenhausen to Dachau. Then on 5 April 1945, when the Catholic priest, Michael Höck, was suddenly released from Dachau, he agreed to carry Niemöller’s “things” (“Sachen”) to safety (p. 39).

As Niemöller leaned toward the Catholic Church, it was based partly on his attraction to certain forms of piety in the Catholic faith. His primary concern, however, involved the role of authority. Niemöller was no fan of the tremendous variety of beliefs and emphases within the Protestant tradition, nor was he entirely comfortable with the fruits of modern biblical scholarship. Rather, he valued straightforward teachings of the biblical text. Writing to Elsa, Niemöller regretted about Luther “that in practical terms he abolished the teaching office of the church” (“dass er das Lehramt der Kirche praktisch abgeschaft hat”) (p. 43). He also envied the “apostolic succession” Catholics claimed on the basis of biblical authority, especially the text in which Jesus elevated Peter to a position of special authority.

It is clear that these pages in which Niemöller compared Catholic and Protestant teachings represented for him not just a personal inclination–plus his aversion to the wildly pro-Nazi theological claims of Deutsche Christen in the Kirchenkampf, of course. It also was his one effort to join the ranks of his theologian friends. He did so with some trepidation, not least because so many of his friends were such important theologians. Hans Asmussen, a prolific scholar and a close friend in the Confessing Church, stayed close to Elsa Niemöller as advisor and friend during Martin’s incarceration. Martin asked Elsa to seek Asmussen’s assistance and council and welcomed the chance to use Asmussen’s help. In May 1939, however, he also showed some recognition of his role as a beginner. As he wrote to Elsa, “Certainly Asmussen in my situation already would have written a thick book, or several” (“Asmussen hätte in meiner Lage sicher schon ein dickes Buch oder mehrere geschrieben”) (p. 29).

In fact, Elsa secretly worked together with Asmussen, Helmut Gollwitzer (another close friend and an assistant pastor in Dahlem), and Martin’s clergyman brother Wilhelm Niemöller to try to steer Martin away from his plan to convert. In all cases, they gave assistance and advice to Martin, but usually with small warnings or a nudge against Martin’s intended path. For Elsa, of course, the implications were the most pressing. She worried about financial considerations if Martin gave up his position and his career: “Then you can become a scavenger; and where are we left with the children? In that case we could not feed [or perhaps “support”, RPE] more than three” (“Dann kannst du Strassenkehrer werden; und wo bleiben wir mit den Kindern? Mehr als 3 können wir dann nicht ernähren”) (p. 12). During these months there were tears. There were requests that Martin promise not to make a hasty decision, or not to make a final decision without talking to her beforehand. After nearly two years of contemplation and indecision from July 1939 to the spring of 1941, Niemöller finally gave up on the idea of conversion. Christophersen and Ziemann describe various important reasons for this outcome, but conclude, “The real reason was the tenacity of his wife” (“Der wahre Grund war die Hartnäckigkeit seiner Frau”) (p. 22).

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019). 336 pages + 25 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-406-73137-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Wolfgang Huber is a distinguished voice in the German theological world, both academic and ecclesiastical, and a sustained treatment of the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by such a figure at once demands attention. His book is in many ways an introductory survey which seeks to unite the ‘fragments’ of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in a single coherent picture, for, as Huber remarks, at every turn in Bonhoeffer’s short life, ‘belief and life, theology and resistance closely interrelated’ (p. 9). The fertile phrases which Bonhoeffer cast upon the waters of the theological world are all here and considered in turn with authority and insight. Altogether, Huber views his primary material with poise and it may be said that every kind of source – theses and books, letters and poems – is justly represented. As befits such a portrait the acknowledgement of other secondary studies is kept to a minimum: here they sharpen perspectives and come and go at important junctures without crowding the picture. Sometimes there is an acknowledgement of later debates which have come to define Bonhoeffer scholarship in the world at large, not least the guilt of the Christian Church, the campaign to claim Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’, the two worlds of East and West Germany, and the controversies which emerged in the churches of South Africa under Apartheid. Huber clearly knows this broad ground very thoroughly indeed but here his attention is primarily claimed by Bonhoeffer himself and his voice is very much his own.

The structure of the book is not unduly distinctive, but it sets out clearly the overall argument and method. Huber’s Bonhoeffer is certainly a big and complex figure. He is also one full of contrasts and the author delights in framing and exploring them. An introductory section evokes the figure of Bonhoeffer as we might first encounter him in a variety of places, not least over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. There follows a section on Bonhoeffer’s background and early formation and then another three on his early work in the contexts of university and church life, the first situating him firmly in the landscapes of German thought, the second examining a theology of grace which was deeply rooted in the precepts of Lutheranism, and the third discussing the place of the Bible in a world of maturing historical criticism. Each of these sections present dualities which already defined so much in Bonhoeffer’s work (‘Individual spirituality or Society’; ‘The Church of the World or the Church of the Word’; ‘Acting justly and waiting for God’s own time’; ‘The Historical Jesus or the Jesus of Today’). The young Bonhoeffer is certainly very much at home in the intellectual landscapes of German Lutheranism but the emerging vision is an open one and there is no knowing where it will lead.

Huber acknowledges how extraordinary was Bonhoeffer’s achievement in maintaining sustained theological study under the many pressures and dangers to which his life exposed him. An extended discussion of the development and ‘actuality’ of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism precedes an examination of his place in the history of the German resistance against Hitler and his significance there as a ‘theologian of resistance’. Here Huber acknowledges frankly that to account for the motives which lay behind the actions of any figure of resistance, whether they became fundamental to events or peripheral, must be ‘difficult, even impossible’ (p. 172). At all events, with this decisive turning comes an intensification of the discussion of Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings and a deepening emphasis on the themes of guilt and responsibility. It is in these contexts of resistance that Huber is most of all struck by Bonhoeffer’s singular, even ‘astonishing’, new steps, and even if they only reach us as fragments the sense of a coherent picture remains. Indeed, it is in ‘the extreme loneliness of a prison cell’ that Bonhoeffer finds a ‘wonderful security’ in the achievement of a unity of faith, teaching and life (p. 34). A further section, stoutly entitled ‘No end to Religion’, again shows the importance of situating Bonhoeffer’s thought securely in the intellectual contexts with which he was familiar. A final, and rewarding, section on the ‘Polyphony of life’ maintains a fascination with dualities (‘Bach or Beethoven’; ‘Music or Theology’) and offers a particularly attractive discussion of Bonhoeffer and Gregorian plainsong (provoked by the famous remark to Eberhard Bethge). An epilogue reflects at length on ‘what remains’, searching through the subsequent publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings and the accumulating studies of his many interpreters, and observing, rather nicely, the creative achievement of a ‘polycentric internationalism’. A gentle parting note occurs with a reflection on Bonhoeffer’s late poem ‘The Powers of Good’, in which Huber finds a final place of rest in a vast, unsentimental and moving trust in God (p. 298).

It could be said that of the making of books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer there is no end. In such a field many new authors labour to produce some distinctive insight or bold (even tenuous) claim, perhaps to justify the writing of another book or to address a particular audience or time. Over the years particular aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thought have certainly been placed under many microscopes. It is natural at first to wonder if a new, introductory portrait by an established scholar might turn out to be something of an academic tour of duty. We may expect a good deal of craft and even a dose of wisdom. But Huber’s book is something better than this: the encounter of author and subject is duly rigorous but it is also fresh, alert and warmly responsive. Nothing here is taken for granted; often Huber acknowledges that he finds a particular idea, or development, ‘astonishing’ and one senses that he really does. Indeed, he serves his subject and his audience very well. Such a book would make an excellent place for German readers make a start. One might well hope for an English edition too.

Review of Rebecca Scherf, Evangelische Kirche und Konzentrationslager

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Rebecca Scherf, Evangelische Kirche und Konzentrationslager (1933 bis 1945) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). 296 pages. ISBN 978-3-525-57057-9.

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

Most of the literature on the intersections between the German churches and the Nazi concentration camp system has concerned the imprisonment of Christian clergy. In addition to studies of the Dachau “clergy barracks” (where most of these clergy were held, including more than 1700 Polish priests) there are studies of prominent figures, such as Martin Niemoeller (who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was in Buchenwald before being sent to Flossenbürg to be executed). Several studies of the Confessing Church (including my own work) have documented instances in which clergy were arrested and sent to camps or prisons, even briefly.

In other words, the subject has been framed largely in terms of clerical resistance and the persecution of the churches. Yet, the growing scholarship on the camp system, with its detailed portrayal of its scope and visibility, raises important questions about whether and how German Protestant and Catholic churches addressed these larger issues during the 1930s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ongoing research project, the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, has documented more than 44,000 camps, prisons, and ghettoes throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Within Nazi Germany, between 1933 and 1939, there were hundreds of small camps and sub-camps (in addition to Gestapo prisons), beginning with the establishment of Dachau in 1933. Those sent to these early camps included members of opposition political parties and other opponents of the regime, pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others.

Rebecca Scherf’s study of the German Evangelical Church’s (GEC) responses to the concentration camps is a significant new contribution to the scholarship. While her main focus concerns Protestant clergy who were sent to concentration camps (she confined her study to concentration camps, so it does not include pastors who were in prisons), she has broadened her analysis to address three points of intersection between the GEC and the concentration camp system. The first concerns the relationship between regional churches and the Protestant chaplains who served in the early camps. The second examines the official church responses when clergy were sent to camps. The third looks at the experiences of those who were imprisoned in camps by drawing on contemporary documentation and subsequent memoirs. There are several appendixes with helpful graphs illustrating the number of clergy arrests by year (1935—when there were mass arrests of Confessing pastors due to a pulpit protest—was the peak), by camp, and by regional church. While most clergy who were sent to camps were held only briefly (indicating that the Nazi state intended such arrests as a form of intimidation), the number of arrests during the war grew and fewer were released. There is also a chronologically and geographically organized list of the Protestant clergy who were imprisoned.

The study begins with a brief synopsis of the rise of National Socialism and the responses within the GEC, particularly with respect to the German Church Struggle and the sharp divisions between the “German Christian” movement and the Confessing Church between 1933 and 1935. Although the Church Struggle thwarted a complete alliance between the GEC and the Nazi state, it was focused on internal church matters, not political opposition. By 1935 the Confessing Church clergy and leadership were marginalized in most regional churches; the official church leadership was either openly “German Christian” or had made its peace with the regime. This, in turn, shaped church policy toward the camp system, including how regional church leaders reacted when their clergy were arrested and imprisoned.

The earliest issue that arose concerned the question of Protestant chaplains in the camps. In July 1933 Hermann Stöhr—a pacifist who would be executed in 1940 for his conscientious objection to military service—wrote GEC leaders in Berlin to ask whether there were Protestant chaplains in the camps. By that date, there were concentration camps in sixteen of the twenty-eight regional churches (some of these early camps were in existence for a relatively short time), and around 18,000 people were imprisoned in these camps. Stöhr also raised more directly political questions, noting that local pastors were not being informed when camps were set up in their districts, nor were they able to obtain family contact information for those who were imprisoned. The GEC church leadership in Berlin replied several months later that such arrangements had not yet been made.

In the meantime, however, some of the affected regional churches began to assign pastors to serve as chaplains in the camps. Most of the chaplains were “German Christians” and understood their pastoral duties accordingly. In many early camps, there was an emphasis on the “re-education” of political prisoners, and Scherf quotes one chaplain who stressed how essential Protestant chaplaincy was for prisoners’ rehabilitation “into the great German Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich.” In another instance, Scherf discovered a camp chaplain who tried unsuccessfully to report and stop the mistreatment of prisoners. In some camps, chaplains held regular worship service and were able to counsel prisoners; in others, their duties were strictly limited—in Dachau, for example, the chaplain was permitted only to hold the service and was forbidden to have any other contact, including conversation, with the prisoners. With the gradual consolidation of the camp system under central SS oversight, the state tightened its restrictions on even “German Christian” chaplains, and Scherf found a growing number of cases in which chaplains were banned. In 1937 Heinrich Himmler banned the chaplaincy in the concentration camps; no protest came from the official church leadership.

The second section of Scherf’s study focuses on the Protestant clergy imprisoned in the camps (virtually all of these clergy had ties to the Confessing Church). Relatively few Protestant clergy were actually sent to concentration camps—she documents only 71 in this book —although there were many more who were arrested and imprisoned in Gestapo prisons. In March 1935, for example, some 700 Prussian pastors were imprisoned briefly after reading from the pulpit a Confessing Church protest against the Nazi view of religion, but only 26 of them were sent to camps. In many cases, the decisive criterion seems to have been the extent to which the regional church leadership was overtly “brown.” Most of the clergy sent to camps were released the same year of their arrest.

For her case studies, Scherf focuses on the two camps with the highest number of Protestant clergy, Dachau and Sachsenburg (which was in Saxony). Dachau had the highest number of imprisoned clergy (over 2700) and they came from a number of different countries; most of them were Polish Catholic priests, but there were also clergy from the different Orthodox churches, Old Catholics, and other Protestant groups, as well as two Muslims. In contrast, most of the clergy imprisoned in Sachsenburg were from Saxony, the region in which the camp was located, and most had been arrested in conjunction with the March 1935 pulpit proclamation. The Bishop of Saxony was Friedrich Coch, one of the leading “German Christians.” Scherf offers a detailed and fascinating case study of the ways in which the camp experience provoked political protest and a different theological response among those in the camp, leading them to send a protest letter to the Saxony church leadership for its lack of solidarity. Even after the war ended several of those who had been together in Sachsenburg continued to work through their experience theologically.

The experiences of Confessing clergy who had been imprisoned fostered the post-1945 portrayal of the Confessing Church as a resistance group that had been persecuted for its opposition to Nazism—but it also deepened the postwar divide within the Evangelical Church itself, for some of those who had been imprisoned blamed the official church leadership for its failure to speak out. Nonetheless, the history of clergy who were sent to camps, including accounts by Catholic priests who had been in Dachau, became an important element in the postwar narratives about the “martyrdom” of both churches.

In her conclusion, Scherf discusses the ways in which history touches on the larger issue of how the German Evangelical Church responded to Nazi crimes before and after 1945. This study of the church responses to the concentration camps, particularly during the 1930s, offers some significant new insights into the relationship between the Protestant churches and the Nazi state.

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1 (March 2020)

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 476 pages. ISBN 978-1-4742-5766-4.

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

Gerhard Leibholz was a German attorney and professor of state law, married to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s twin sister Sabine. George Bell was a British Anglican priest, the bishop of Chichester and an active leader in the international Protestant ecumenical movement who became one of Bonhoeffer’s closest allies. These two very different figures would be brought together by the accidents of history, but this fascinating volume shows that they found common ground on a number of issues. Starting on the eve of the Second World War and extending into the 1950s, the Bell-Leibholz correspondence gives a vivid portrait of the challenges they faced as well as their reflections on the nature of democracy and totalitarianism, and on Christianity’s future in a transformed postwar political order.

A baptized Protestant, Leibholz came from a secular Jewish family and was categorized as a Volljude under the Nazi racial law. After the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service in April 1933, Leibholz’s father lost his position, dying only five days later (there is speculation that his death was a suicide). One of his brothers, Peter, lost his position at the same time. A professor in Göttingen, Gerhard Leibholz managed to keep his position until early 1935. He and his family remained in Nazi Germany until spring 1938, when his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi warned them of the regime’s plans to require all those affected by the racial laws to have a “J” in their passport. Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge drove the Leibholzes to the Swiss border; from there they made their way to England where they were joined later by their two daughters.

The volume opens with Bell’s September 1938 letter to Bonhoeffer assuring him of his willingness to help the Leibholzes. George Bell had been actively involved since 1933 in assisting refugees from Nazi Germany, including members of the Confessing Church who were affected by the Nazi laws. The early correspondence offers a detailed picture of the difficulties refugees faced even after they reached a safe country. They could not assume, of course, that they would remain in safety; Leibholz’s brother Hans and his wife managed to reach Holland, but committed suicide in 1940 after the German invasion. Added to this anxiety were financial concerns (Germany froze Leibholz’s assets when he fled, so they arrived in England with nothing), worries about the family they had left behind, existential concerns about employment and the future, and dealing with anti-German prejudice in England once the war began. In May 1940 Leibholz was interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man, along with a number of Confessing Church pastors and their wives. Bell managed to obtain his release in August 1940, after which the two men pursued the possibility that the Leibholzes might immigrate to the United States. With the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s contacts in New York, Leibholz was offered and accepted an invitation to Union Theological Seminary in 1941, but by then the door had closed due to new U.S. restrictions on immigration.

Bell succeeded in cobbling together various stipends and opportunities by which Leibholz could support his family in England. A moving aspect of this book is Bell’s often heroic support and advocacy for the German refugees, particularly as popular British sentiment against them intensified. The bishop also came under growing fire for his opposition to total war and his arguments on behalf of the “other Germany,” positions that probably cost him an appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The book’s greatest significance, however, may be its documentation of the developing conversations between the two about Christianity, democracy, human rights, and their visions for the postwar European order. Their correspondence was part of a larger international conversation at the time that included diplomats, intellectuals, Catholics, Protestant ecumenists, and others. The detailed discussion of these issues in this volume could be an important resource for the scholarship today about the shaping of post-1945 Europe, particularly the differing conceptions of human rights that emerged after 1945.

Leibholz viewed these social and political questions from the standpoint of someone who had studied law; his doctorate had focused on issues of legitimacy in parliamentary law. (As an aside: in 2000 I interviewed Gerhard Riegner, who directed the World Jewish Congress during the war years. Riegner told me that he had studied law in Berlin during the 1920s with Leibholz and spoke of their early common commitment to human rights.) Leibholz shared Bell’s view that the major battle of their times was the defense of liberal democracy and its values against the threat of totalitarianism. Their understanding of those ideals was very much the product of the era, culture, and class from which they came. Leibholz, for example, viewed the “totalitarian” form of nationalism in National Socialism as something completely different from Prussian nationalism.

It is difficult to know how much previous Bonhoeffer family discussions had influenced Leibholz before he arrived in England, but the extent to which he began to focus in England on the centrality of Christian teaching and doctrine for Western ideals is striking. He was naturally interested in the German church struggle in which his brother-in-law was so engaged, and his first published article in Britain was a 1939 report about the situation confronting German churches. By 1940 he was already influenced by Bell’s book Christianity and World Order (Leibholz’s review of the book is included in an appendix to this volume). In 1942 Leibholz gave a series of lectures on “Christianity, Politics, and Power,” that was subsequently published in the widely read Christian News-Letter.

Leibholz intently followed British reports and commentary on the implications of the European situation. His letters to Bell are filled with analysis and commentary, particularly his sense of how Germans would react to British public policy and statements. Bell clearly valued Leibholz’s opinion and feedback. One of this volume’s many revelations is the extent to which Leibholz shaped Bell’s view of the German resistance. Bell sometimes sent Leibholz drafts of public statements in advance for his opinion, as in late 1942 with a question he planned to raise in the House of Lords: “I want to ask you whether the form in which the Question if put could and would be twisted by Goebbels so as to make it appear that I or the Church of England had turned Communist….” (115) Bell frequently shared Leibholz’s observations with other church and political officials, but with time Leibholz developed his own connections and sometimes wrote these figures directly. In a letter of 19 June 1942 to J. H. Oldham, for example, he commented on the Anglo-Russian treaty and the need for more discussion in Britain of what form of German government “the Anglo-Saxon countries would be prepared to accept after a collapse of ‘Hittlerite Germany’”(94). Another interesting development that was new to me was Leibholz’s growing belief that Catholic teachings on natural law were fundamental for modern liberal democracy, and his emphasis on the need for the “re-Christianization” of Germany after the defeat of National Socialism.

As the war progressed the personal strains on the Leibholzes intensified. They naturally focused on the German resistance and the fates of their family members. They learned of the April 1943 arrests of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi only four months later, in August. Two months after the failed coup attempt of July 1944, Leibholz compiled a list of people whom he believed had been executed and sent it to Bell with a comment about the loss this would mean for a postwar Germany. In the spring of 1945, they received conflicting information about the executions of Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer (the Leibholzes initially believed that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had survived). They only received confirmation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death on 31 May from Adolf Freudenberg in Geneva; confirmation of the deaths of Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi didn’t arrive until late July. Bell immediately began to write about the German resistance, and much of the correspondence during Leibholz’s remaining time in Britain concerned the reconstruction of what had happened to his brothers-in-law.

In 1947 the Leibholzes returned to Germany. Gerhard Leibholz became a federal judge in Karlsruhe in 1951 (he continued, however, to teach in Göttingen) and remained there until his retirement in 1971. After his return Leibholz sent letters reporting on denazification and the political reconstruction of Germany, but over time their exchanges grew infrequent. The friendship continued until Bell’s death in 1958. The final document in the volume is the Leibholzes’ condolence letter to Bell’s widow in October 1958, in which they wrote that they had “lost the most faithful and best friend we have had in the English speaking world.”

This book includes an excellent introduction by Ringshausen and Chandler giving the general historical context for the correspondence. The letters are grouped by year, with a short chronology for each year, and there are helpful footnotes throughout that identify the people mentioned and give more background for the issues being described. This volume will certainly be of interest to Bonhoeffer scholars and those interested in ecumenical and British church history. I hope that it will find a wider audience, because these extensive and often revealing conversations between a German refugee lawyer and a British Anglican bishop provide a close-up view of the larger historical conversations about war, democracy, human rights, and the construction of civil society at a critical juncture in twentieth-century history.

Article Note: Andrea Hofmann, “Martin Luther in First World War Sermons”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Article Note: Andrea Hofmann, “Martin Luther in First World War Sermons,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31, no. 1, Glaube und der Erste Weltkrieg/Faith in the First World War (2018): 118-130.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

As I noted in my News Note in this issue, in 2017, Germans commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther sites across the country, including Erfurt, Eisenach, and Wittenberg, played host to numerous events celebrating the anniversary. In the introduction to her analysis of the uses of Martin Luther in German Protestant sermons during the First World War, Andrea Hofmann notes that this anniversary provoked great academic interest as well. “In the academic discourse which accompanied the celebration,” Hofmann informs us, “Luther was not honoured as a solitary hero or lone fighter ….” Hofmann contrasts this with a “raft of popular academic publications and a flood of postcards which often depicted Luther as a hero” during the four-hundredth anniversary of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1917 (118-119).

In this rather brief but densely-footnoted article, Hofmann sets out to explore the image(s) of Luther portrayed by German Protestant clergy in their First World War sermons, especially those that were preached in 1917. The author’s aim is to “show the complexity of the image of Luther mediated through war sermons.” Yet, just as important to Hofmann is how, during the war (and after, during the “Luther Renaissance”), these preachers started to take Luther’s theology much more seriously (119-120, 129). The author ably details and analyzes Luther’s image(s) in the war sermons, offering the reader a considered approach to the topic that is based on substantial evidence.

Hofmann both frames the analysis and structures the article via three “analytical tropes,” providing evidence from some wartime sermons for all three (119). The first trope contributes to an image of Luther “in the context of the interpretation of history,” especially nineteenth-century German history. Here, according to Hofmann, pastors “placed the figure of Martin Luther in [the] narrative of a German nation-building” (120). Seen through this lens, Luther is portrayed as a national hero on par with Bismarck and even, as in the words of one pastor, a “powerful religious prophet” (121).

The second trope is that of “biographical and anecdotal references to Luther” (122-124). Here, the anecdotes and incidents from Luther’s life – e.g., his appearance before Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 – contribute to an image of the reformer grounded more on hero-worship than on instruction and nuanced biography. Courage, forceful energy, perseverance, defiance, and even a particularly encouraging variety of pastoral care are trotted out by pastors and chaplains as traits of Luther, the “ideal” German.

While the first two tropes are very helpful lenses through which to view these wartime sermons, the third and final trope, “themes from Luther’s theology and direct references to Luther’s writings,” may be the most substantive. This is implicit in the weight attached to it here: Hofmann spends as much time on it as she does the other two tropes combined. The most regularly cited topics in the sermons included Luther’s approach to just war, civic authority and the doctrine of justification (124-128). Here, Hofmann helpfully highlights sermon themes such as, e.g., Luther’s “two-kingdoms doctrine” and the differences between individual and state ethics during wartime.

The trope of Luther the national hero and “religious prophet” uncovered here by Hofmann ended up having a long and notorious life, as did the comparisons to German heroes and “prophets” such as Bismarck and Fichte. In this vein, the radical, pro-Nazi, antisemitic Stuttgart pastor Georg Schneider, in his 1934 book Völkische Reformation, included Luther together with Ernst Moritz Arndt, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg in his list of “poets of the Redeemer.” He also described them as “representatives of a völkisch religion.”

Luther, Hofmann argues, was described in many wartime sermons as “a hero who, like Otto von Bismarck in 1871, had initiated a new epoch in German history …” (120). Over many decades, Hartmut Lehmann has traced the religious underpinnings of German nationalism in the nineteenth and centuries. In his incisive May 1991 German Studies Review article, “The Germans as a Chosen People: Old Testament Themes in German Nationalism,” Lehmann teases out a “chosen people” theme in German nationalism from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich.

Despite the breadth of themes discussed in the article, Hofmann does not mention Luther’s understanding of Jews and Judaism – including his antisemitic pronouncements – as addressed in wartime German Protestant sermons. Perhaps this might be due to such material not being prominent in the evidence tranche utilized by the author. Yet, as Doris Bergen noted in her review of a book on a closely related topic, Dietz Bering’s Luther im Fronteinsatz: Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg, such an omission is conspicuous. Volker Leppin demonstrated, in a fastidious study titled “Luthers ‘Judenschriften’ im Spiegel der Editionen bis 1933” (part of an edited collection that I reviewed in 2017), that Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism appeared as part of collected editions of the reformer’s broader work and in individual editions alike from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. This means that, at the very least, German Protestant pastors had access to Luther’s ruminations on the matter.

Despite this caveat, Hofmann’s examination of this narrow but very valuable topic offers helpful answers to questions surrounding the image of Luther in nineteenth and twentieth century German history. The author’s conclusions should be contemplated carefully. Hopefully, they will provoke others to further research on the reformer’s immense but ambivalent impact on German Protestantism – and German society altogether – from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich.

News Note: “Campaign posters in ‘Luther country’ raise specter of anti-Semitism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

News Note: “Campaign posters in ‘Luther country’ raise specter of anti-Semitism”

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Last September, religion scholar and journalist Ken Chitwood asked me to comment on an article he was writing about the use of Martin Luther’s image and legacy in campaign posters for a far-right party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, or NPD) in Thuringia. As Chitwood notes in the article, “instead of ‘Here I stand,’ the rebel monk is depicted saying, ‘I would vote NPD, I cannot do otherwise,’ alongside the party’s slogan ‘defend the homeland.’”

Together with Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia formed the heartland of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther undertook his university studies at Erfurt and also became a monk in that city. While hiding out in Wartburg Castle in Eisenach, he accomplished one of his seminal achievements when he translated the New Testament into what became High German. In 2017, Germans commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther sites across the country, including Erfurt and Eisenach, played host to numerous events celebrating the anniversary. Many Germans, and Thuringians in particular, take great pride in the place that their Heimat (homeland) played in the Reformation.

In Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, I demonstrated that a large number of Protestant pastors, bishops, and theologians employed Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism – which were littered with antisemitic and anti-Judaic rhetoric – to buttress the antisemitism already present in significant degrees in Protestant circles during the era of National Socialism. Some contemporary German church historians and theologians, while recognizing that Luther attacked Jews and Judaism in stark and unseemly ways, have downplayed the impact of the reformer’s Judenschriften (writings about Jews and Judaism) in subsequent German history, including the widespread apathy toward Nazi oppression and murder of Jews exhibited by many German Protestants. Others, like Hartmut Lehmann, have highlighted this darker aspect of German Protestant history in their scholarly work.

The NPD poster includes a variation on the famous phrase “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders” (Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise), which was uttered by Luther at the Diet of Worms in defense of his understanding of the Christian gospel. Yet, it also contains the slogan “Heimat verteidigen” (defend the homeland). During the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, SA members stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned storefronts holding signs that read “Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!” (Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!) The NPD posters no doubt resonate with some who both revere Luther and – unlike the great majority of Germans, including German Protestants – have no place for “foreigners” in their homeland.

The employment of Luther in NPD’s campaign did not bear fruitful results in Thuringia, as the party finished with less than 1% of the vote. Yet, in this same election, the larger far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) won roughly 23% of the vote, overtaking Angela Merkel’s CDU as the second-largest party in the regional assembly. Chitwood’s article highlights the unsettling reality that, in Germany (as in the United States), xenophobia and racism, far from being relics of the past, have penetrated the body politic in ways not seen in decades.

Multi-Media Note: “The Danger of Indifference: ‘Then They Came for Me,’” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Facebook Live Presentation

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Multi-Media Note: “The Danger of Indifference: ‘Then They Came for Me,’” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Facebook Live Presentation, June 10, 2020

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

During the coronavirus pandemic, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been broadcasting online presentations over Facebook Live. On June 10, historian Edna Friedberg hosted one of these events, which featured Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming Director, International Academic Programs at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (and member of the editorial board of Contemporary Church History Quarterly).

In the wake of the George Floyd killing and subsequent anti-racism protests, many people have turned to a famous quotation on the final wall of the museum’s permanent exhibition—a quotation by the German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Friedberg asked Brown-Fleming to discuss the origins of the quotation, along with the man behind it. Brown-Fleming, a historian of the churches in the Nazi era, began by explaining that Germany was transformed quite quickly from a liberal democracy to a dictatorship, in part because the German society didn’t resist the emerging Nazi threat. This lack of empathy was an important factor in the Holocaust. People didn’t speak out about the persecution of the Jews because it didn’t seem like their problem.

After remarking on the power, universality, and timelessness of the Niemöller quotation Brown-Fleming explained how Niemöller—though he is often held up as an opponent of Nazism—began as a supporter of the Hitler movement. Born into a monarchic, nationalist home, he served as a naval officer during the First World War and also held the typical antisemitic stereotypes of his day, seeing Jews as the Christ-killers and as outsiders in German society. Niemöller voted for the Nazis in several elections between 1924 and 1933 and read Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. He resonated with Nazism and believed Hitler could bring God and country together into a powerful union.

Niemöller broke with the Nazi Party once he saw that it began to interfere with Protestant Church life, and reacted strongly against its distortions of Christian belief, including its racialization of the message of salvation and its challenge to the identity of Jewish converts to Christianity. By 1934, he led the Confessing Church movement, which the Nazis saw as an opposition movement. When Niemöller and other clergy met with leading Nazis that year, he found that he had become an enemy of the state. Niemöller’s status within Germany and internationally made him a prominent dissident. Arrested several times for his outspoken preaching, he was held as Hitler’s personal prisoner from 1937 to 1939, first in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and then, from 1941, in the Dachau Concentration Camp.

Time magazine featured Niemöller on its cover in 1940, as a symbol of the church, which it described as the sole domestic opponent to Nazism. Indeed, as Brown-Fleming explained, people from all around the world prayed for Niemöller and sent letters to him in the concentration camp.

Even though Niemöller was a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, however, he remained a German nationalist and even attempted to enlist in the German navy in 1939, when the war began. He also retained the antisemitic beliefs which had appeared in his sermons in the mid-1930s. As an example, Brown-Fleming discussed a 1935 quotation from one of Niemöller’s sermons, in which he described the Jews as “a highly gifted people which produces idea after idea for the benefit of the world, but whatever it takes up changes into poison, and all that Judaism ever reaps is contempt and hatred.” After the war, Niemöller even accused American occupation authorities of being influenced by vengeful Jews in the military.

Just after the war, though, in the winter of 1945, Niemöller took his wife Else back to Dachau to show her where he had been incarcerated. There, they saw a crude sign which declared that 200,000 people had been cremated at Dachau between 1933 and 1945. This devastated him, knowing that he had done nothing about this from 1933 until 1937, during the time when he had been free in Nazi Germany.

He soon began to speak publicly about the issue, stating in an October 1945 speech, “We are guilty of having been silent when we should have spoken.” He built on that speech and eventually it developed into the famous quotation.

Brown-Fleming explained Niemöller as a complex figure. He was courageous. He mistook the Nazis for something they weren’t, but it took virtually the entire Nazi era to understand the depths of Nazi depravity. A person of conscience, his realization of Nazi criminality began to change him. He grew into a committed pacifist and internationalist and let go of some of his antisemitism as well.

His famous quotation developed over time, and there was never one authoritative version. Rather, Niemöller adapted it for the various audiences before whom he spoke and used it widely in his American speaking tour in 1947.

Brown-Fleming closed with some thoughts about combatting antisemitism. She reiterated that Niemoller was a complex figure, that he held beliefs that were clearly wrong—beliefs which led to the deaths of six million Jews. Yet she also finds him to be a representative of hope, stating, “All of us can look at him an see that we’re all imperfect and yet we call all do something. We all have a voice and we can change.”

Friedberg closed the presentation with a tribute to Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, the USHMM security guard killed while by an antisemitic extremist while on duty in June 2009.

The Facebook live event can be viewed on the USHMM YouTube channel.

Letter from the Editors (April 2020)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Letter from the Editors (April 2020)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

I’m writing to you at the end of April to announce what must be obvious by now–that our March issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly is delayed. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the implications for many of us in the university world have been such that we just weren’t able to publish on time. In particular, I have not had the necessary time and energy to devote to publication.

The editors have decided to combine the March and June issues of CCHQ into a spring/summer edition. We look forward to offering that to you in early June.

Until then, we wish you well. May you stay safe over the coming weeks and months, as we all cope with the challenges of this global, historic event. For those who have endured losses, we express our condolences.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Letter from the Editors (December 2019)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Letter from the Editors (December 2019)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Although this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly has been somewhat delayed, we believe the content will be worth the wait. We are pleased to lead with an editorial from Manfred Gailus on the notion that 1933 in Germany marked the beginning of a kind of religious revival, a notion I can attest to in my own research on local church districts in various parts of the Reich. Several reviews follow from Doris Bergen, Christina Matzen, and Kyle Jantzen, on works relating to Luther as a propaganda figure in the First World War, Christian women in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and a theological analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking.

Uppsala Cathedral, seat of the Archbishop of Uppsala. By Håkan Svensson (Xauxa) – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1791946

Several interesting notes follow: Suzanne Brown-Fleming guides us into the upcoming opening of the Vatican Archives and assesses a recent article on Vatican responses to the round-up of Jews in Rome in October 1943; Robert Ericksen offers an in-depth report on the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte conference and this year’s theme of “Life-Line or Collaboration? Active contacts with churches in totalitarian societies”; Christina Matzen reports on recent conference papers devoted to Christians in the German Wehrmacht.

Lastly, I would like to take this occasion to welcome a new member to our CCHQ editorial team: Dr. Samuel Koehne from Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Koehne has written a series of provocative and insightful articles on the relationship of Nazism to religion, and in the process coined an extremely useful new concept: “ethnotheism,” which he understands as “religion defined by race and the supposed moral or spiritual characteristics that the Nazis believed were inherent in race” (from his article “The Racial Yardstick: “Ethnotheism” and Official Nazi Views on Religion,” German Studies Review 37.3 (2014): 575–596). Koehne teaches at Trinity Grammar School in Kew, Victoria, and is continuing his research in areas related to völkisch literature, Nazi leaders Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Schemm, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Was There a Religious Revival in the “Third Reich”?

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Was There a Religious Revival in the “Third Reich”?

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in Tagesspiegel, November 15, 2019, p. 22. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

What did the Germans of the Hitler era believe? 1933 meant not only a political caesura, but also for many a religious experience, too: at last, a turning away from the Weimar Republic, which was seen as a “godless republic”; at last, the beginning of a promising reverse in time (Zeitenkehre) with more faith, religion, and “national community”. There were many signs of a religious revival: church withdrawals suddenly stopped; atheist parties and associations were immediately banned; National Socialist “German Christians” (DC) organized spectacular mass wedding ceremonies and baptisms. Religious confessions of faith, magazines, and books sprang up like mushrooms. One of the most striking manifestations on the way to the “Third Reich”—the “Day of Potsdam”—took place (with the blessing of the churches) in the Old Prussian Garrison Church. In short: faith, creed, and confession were introduced again. That this was accompanied by much debate between competing religious actors does not speak against this thesis, but rather for it.

Protestants comprised two-thirds of all Germans and were therefore of particular importance. Around 1933, the main event in the majority Christian confession was the attack of the völkisch DC on the bastions of the “old church.” This Protestant parallel movement to the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) pursued the project of a unification of the 28 regional churches into a centralized Reich church, led by a Reich bishop ruling according to a “leader principle” (Führerprinzip).

The subversive impulse shook the structures of the old church forcefully, even if the DC-Reich church project failed after almost two years. It was this heretical mass movement that aroused the internal church opposition, which constituted itself after a short delay as a Confessing Church (BK) in 1934. Among Protestants, the “Church Struggle,” as the conflict over direction was also called, was predominantly a “sibling rivalry” within their own house, centred around the reorientation of theology and worship. The dispute revealed a serious identity crisis that tore apart a Protestantism deeply influenced by National Socialism. DC and BK struggled for predominance and the power to define what would be the proper, fitting Protestant church in the “Third Reich”.

All in all, the German Protestantism of the Hitler period proved to be an extremely fractional entity, a polyphonic and dissonant choir without a conductor, which consumed much of its strength in this self-defeating internal struggle. As a religious actor, it possessed no representative, capable governing bodies and could not effectively use its great potential as the majority confession to tip the balance in the religious-political struggles of the epoch.

And the German Catholics? There was no Christian-völkisch mass movement like the DC in the strictly hierarchical world-wide Roman Church. The main event in German Catholicism in 1933 was not a Christian-völkisch movement inspired by the “brown zeitgeist,” but the Concordat, a treaty between the Hitler government and the Vatican for the regulation of Catholic church-state relations. “Church Struggle” here was primarily an ongoing guerrilla war with the politically and ideologically invasive Nazi state over compliance with the Concordat. This permanent defensive stance culminated in the encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Concern”) read out from all pulpits in 1937.

If one compares the political orientation of the clergy of both denominations, then a second marked difference appears: while an average of about 20 percent of Protestant pastors belonged to the NSDAP, the proportion of “brown priests” was less than one percent. Greater susceptibility to the “brown zeitgeist” in the majority denomination, but greater distance and more isolation in the Catholic milieu—with that, the essential differences are named.

However, there can be no talk of a cohesive bloc of “Christian resistance” or even just a resistance of the Catholics to National Socialism. Even for most German Catholics, their Christian faith was compatible with National Socialism, as the functioning Nazi rule in purely Catholic regions proves. It must have been predominantly Catholics who exercised Hitler’s rule in the administrative districts of Aachen or Trier, or in the dioceses of Upper Bavaria.

Beyond the great Christian denominations, the religious upheaval of 1933 was expressed in the project of völkisch groups that joined together to form the German Faith Movement. Their leaders hoped for recognition as a “third confession.” Their offer to the NSDAP to organize the religious of the “Third Reich” independently and outside the NSDAP received little recognition from the party leadership. Until 1935, the “German-Believers” (Deutschgläubige) were unable to significantly exceed the number of 30,000 members, after which their influence declined.

A distinction should be made between “German-Believer” (Deutschgläubige) and “God-Believer” (Gottgläubige): while the former established networks with their own groups, the “God-Believers”—as fanatical National Socialists—identified the NSDAP and SS as their new church. They understood themselves as “religious” outside the Christian confessions. SS leader Heydrich spoke of a confession to a “church-free German religiosity.” Their creed was the Nazi worldview, personified in the charismatic leader figure. It was mainly SS members, party officials, and officials who professed to be “God-Believers.” They represent the inbreaking of a “new faith” into the traditional religious landscape. In 1939, about 2.75 million people (3.5 percent of the population) adhered to this “Confession.” In Berlin, “God-Believers” reached 10 percent, in the university town of Jena just under 16 percent.

The Hitler movement, with its brown cults and liturgies, also had religious dimensions. Unlike the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and the German Communist Party (KPD), the NSDAP was not an atheist party proclaiming a radical God-is-dead politics. Without their religiously inflated belief in “nation” (Volk), “race” (Rasse) and “leader” (Führer), the dynamics of the Nazi movement cannot be adequately explained. Concepts such as “political religion” have taken this into account in recent research.

After several years of successful consolidation as a regime, the religious policy of the rulers radicalized: the Nazi world view and the God-Belief or German-Belief inscribed in it should oust the “old faith” of the churches. Under slogans such as the “deconfessionalization of public life”, the regime restricted the scope of the Christian confessions, above all in schools and youth organizations. Nazi “life celebrations” for birth, marriage, and remembering the dead should replace the Christian rites of passage.

Nonetheless, there was no clear strategy in religious politics, but rather much back and forth, trial and error. The “religious question” was unresolved within the party. Based on the confessional membership of its members, the NSDAP was a “Christian party”: over two-thirds belonged to one of the two large Christian confessions. In the party leadership, the ideological rigorists (Himmler, Heydrich, Rosenberg) dominated with radical religious-political utopias in the sense of a “final solution of the religious question.” They promoted a religious break in mentality with culturally revolutionary consequences. Opposite them stood “Christian National Socialists” who considered a Germanized Christianity and National Socialism to be compatible. They were strongly represented in the middle and lower levels of the party and highly important for the cultivation of the loyalty of the very large proportion of the population that was Christian.

Under the constraints of the “Third Reich,” Jews and Judaism could not be players in the broad religious field. They were excluded from the outset, ostracized, expelled, demonized, and finally abandoned to destruction. Race and religion were not separable but rather functioned in complementary ways in the process of this modern-day collective exorcism. It was not an atheist party that set into motion persecution and extermination, but a sacrally highly-charged, religiously-variegated party, two-thirds of whose members belonged to a Christian church; a party whose extreme post-Christian faction did not boast of a modern “godlessness” but whose advocates professed “church-free German religiosity.” For the racist assignation of “German-blooded” (deutschblütig) or “Foreign-blooded” (fremdblütig), the persecutors found no hard anthropological-biological criteria. Rather, they seized on religious affiliation as a substitute. Finally, the Christian churches provided entries from their church records for the Proof of Aryan Ancestry (Ariernachweis) in the spirit of ecclesiastical assistance. The concept of “redemptive antisemitism” gets its meaning here and refers to the inherent religious content of that collective exorcism.

From 1933 on, faith, confession, and religion were heavily-debated topics, and they occupied most Germans during the Nazi era more than any time before or after in the twentieth century. In terms of the history of secularization, it’s a question of a reverse in time (Zeitenkehre) and a counter-time. However, this reversal trend did not happen as both large Christian confessions hoped, in the sense of a rechristianization. Although in one sense the political religion of National Socialism revitalized the religious enterprise, it also proved to be an existentially dangerous rival of the Christian confessions in the struggle for the souls of the Germans.

Review of Dietz Bering, Luther im Fronteinsatz. Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Dietz Bering, Luther im Fronteinsatz. Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). Pp. 229.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was a PhD student researching the “German Christian” movement, someone told me about Dietz Bering’s Der Name als Stigma. Antisemitismus im deutschen Alltag 1812-1933 (1987; published in English in 1992 as The Stigma of Names). The book was a revelation, highly original and insightful, and reading it felt like a special secret, a feeling I would also get with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) and Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness (1998), though I subsequently learned that all of these books were widely known and admired.

More than thirty years later, Bering is an acknowledged public intellectual whose 2010 book, Die Epoche der Intellektuellen, attracted significant attention. This newest book, about the uses and abuses of Martin Luther in World War I, does not have the cachet of a surprise discovery, but it shares with The Stigma of Names the author’s detailed attention to language – he is a linguist by training – his patience for quantitative and qualitative analyses, and a knack for moving from carefully presented evidence to bold conclusions. In this case, Bering examines a body of World War I writing in which Martin Luther features, literally counting the number of times certain words and phrases appear – “hammer”, “hero”, “manliness”, and many more – and layers his findings onto a sketch of the war as experienced by Germans. The result is an insightful elucidation of the transformation, or more aptly, weaponization, of the defiant monk and reformer into a nationalist propaganda, morale-boosting tool. As Bering shows, that process unfolded in one world war and left the Protestant reformer and his avatar primed for deployment in another.

Luther im Fronteinsatz is a tightly structured, amply documented essay on the origins of an ideology rather than a sustained historical investigation. Readers familiar with recent works by Christopher Probst, Hartmut Lehmann, Manfred Gailus, and Lyndal Roper, or the older scholarship by Martin Greschat, Gottfried Maron, and others are unlikely to learn anything new about Luther or his legacies in the twentieth century. Nor does the book re-interpret the social history of the Great War and its fall-out in Central Europe, as illuminated by Belinda Davis, Roger Chickering, Maureen Healy, Deborah Cohen, Annelise Thimme, and many others in a massive historiography in English and German. (Of the authors named in this paragraph, only Roper and Maron appear in Bering’s bibliography.)

Yet Bering’s book is still valuable for its compelling articulation of a process that injected Luther into the “idea of 1914,” metonymized as the “hammer” and lauded as the original “German personality” and the embodiment of “German loyalty.” Confronted with the setbacks and defeats of 1917-18, Bering shows, this set of images ossified in a new propaganda initiative, “instruction for the Fatherland” – Vaterländischer Unterricht. Bering devotes most attention to the leaders and shapers of a dynamic discourse: Ernst Troeltsch, Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf von Harnack, and other prominent men. But he also examines opinion multipliers including military periodicals such as the Feldpressestelle, Deutsche Kriegswochenschau, Karnisch-Julische Kriegszeitung, and the Kriegszeitungen of the 4^th, 7^th, and 10^th armies, as well as grassroots popularizers, notably local pastors. Throughout his analysis, Bering weaves in a dialectical component. As he shows, enemy propaganda fueled a feedback loop: for example, accusations that German soldiers were unthinking automatons sparked an insistent emphasis on the concept of “freedom,” in particular “German freedom,” in contrast to the supposed shallow and individualistic freedoms of the French with their violent revolutions and British with their fixation on “Gold und Geld”.

Bering makes a convincing case, and the book is a lively read, especially the crisp opening chapter, “Deutschland auf der Suche nach sich selbst”. Still he raises many questions that remain unaddressed or are discussed only briefly. One involves Catholics. Given the many Catholics in Germany and the much more pronounced Catholic presence in the Austro-Hungarian military, they merit further attention. Bering does make some effort to show how the Luther-myth was adapted for a German Catholic audience, but it is not commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge. Patrick Houlihan’s study of Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (2017) would have been a useful conversation partner.

Another underexamined issue is antisemitism. In The Stigma of Names, Bering revealed a deep and nuanced understanding of how anti-Jewish assumptions, messages, and provocations were built into Christian signs, symbols, and names. This book includes some astute observations about how anti-Black and anti-Turkish racisms functioned in the weaponized Luther system but has surprisingly little to say about antisemitism. Yet antisemitism hovers just outside the frame in many of the quotations analyzed, from the stereotype of the materialist British (and their shadowy Jewish cousins) obsessed with “money and gold,” to the emphatic addition of German to modify the nouns “courage”, “character”, “loyalty”, and “faith”, and to exclude Jews and others constructed as the non- or anti-Germans. Luther’s 1543 screed, On the Jews and Their Lies, is not mentioned in the book, which made me wonder whether German World War I propagandists deliberately avoided that text or Bering chose not to address it.

A third underexplored topic involves reception. How did soldiers, their families and friends receive this instrumentalized version of the familiar figure of Luther? Bering observes that class divisions and failing morale were the reasons German opinion leaders adopted aggressive mythmaking in the first place. Censors found letters between home and fighting fronts to be rife with bitter complaints from people who felt hungry, used, and disregarded by the warmakers. Did the men and women who wrote such letters buy into the weaponized Luther? Did they ridicule and lampoon it, which must have been tempting given the heavy-handedness of its promoters? Observers were certainly aware of the religious elements in German chauvinism, as depictions of “Prussians” in Jaroslav Hašek’s 1921 novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, make hilariously clear.

John Conway, the founder of this journal, always insisted it was the discrediting of organized Christianity in Germany during World War I, with the jingoistic insistence that “God is on our side,” that opened the way for the ravages of National Socialism. This claim and Bering’s interpretation open a series of question central to any critique of populism. Were ordinary Germans and ordinary Christians victims or dupes? Were they silenced, manipulated, or won over so that they themselves become proponents of the nationalist bile? As an academic, I have been conditioned to believe that diagnosing a problem, unpacking a discourse to reveal its construction, takes away its power. But does that claim still hold if an audience prefers the discourse, lies and all, to its informed analysis?

Review of Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach, eds., Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach, eds., Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2018). Pp. 294. ISBN: 9783863313821.

By Christina Matzen, University of Toronto

Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 is an unconventional and significant tribute to the Christian women who were interned in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp during World War II. Editors Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach curated this volume as an accompaniment to the Ravensbrück Memorial’s 2017 exhibit on Christian prisoners, which was part of a German Evangelical Church Kirchentag event in Berlin. In the context of this exhibition, the term “Christian” is a category of self-description and encompasses women from Eastern and Western Europe. Indeed, this inclusive approach lies at the heart of the book’s strength. Through the contributors’ attention to women and their religious lives before and during their incarceration, women victims of Christian faith are rightly made more visible in the history of Nazi Germany, Christianity, gender, and memory.

Resistance is a central theme of the book. Christian women in Ravensbrück tended to be involved in opposition within charitable associations and in education but have long been regarded as “apolitical, inconspicuous, and therefore irrelevant,” helping to explain the marginal attention paid to this persecuted group in historical scholarship (21). Most forms of resistance from Christian women entailed critical statements against the German government and expressions of solidarity with people attacked by the Nazi regime. As Manfred Gailus writes in his contribution on Protestant resistors, many religious women found themselves in a dual position of opposition: they criticized both Nazism and sexist religious conventions (206).

Dr. Katharina Staritz is just one compelling woman chronicled in the book. Born in Breslau in 1903, Staritz became a member of the Confessing Church in 1934 and by 1938 was blessed as a vicar. Shortly after the November Pogrom, Staritz took over leadership of the Breslau branch of Protestant theologian Heinrich’s Grüber’s “auxiliary body for non-Aryan Christians,” a welfare agency to help Jews who had converted to Christianity emigrate safely in order to escape deportations. Although Staritz was forbidden as a female vicar to perform baptisms, she nonetheless baptized Jewish women. In September 1941 she wrote a circular to the Breslau clergy asking them not to exclude parishioners marked with a yellow star. The Gestapo confiscated the circular, labeled her as “Jewish friendly and objectionable,” and arrested her the following winter (25-26). Staritz wrote after the war that while she was interned in Ravensbrück, she worshiped the Bible every Sunday and preached to a small group of women as they walked up and down the camp road (155). With Claudia Koonz’s seminal work in mind on how women could be both victimized by the regime and complicit in the regime’s murderous policies, one might wonder to what extent Staritz—an oft-cited figure throughout the book—is representative of Christian women who served time in Ravensbrück. Her story is profound and important, but readers who approach this volume without some familiarity of the complex roles of both women and religious institutions in Nazi Germany may be left with an incomplete impression of the scope of Christian women’s actions in the Reich.

The book is organized in three parts and is largely based on survivor accounts and judicial and police records. Eschebach provides an introduction on the social and religious contexts of Christians in the Ravensbrück. The second (and largest) section of the book explores religious practices in concentration camps and chronicles the lives of thirteen women who, inspired by their religious views, opposed the Nazi regime and were consequently arrested and incarcerated in Ravensbrück. The final section comprises six essays that cover topics such as the experiences of women in various Christian sects that were represented in the Ravensbrück inmate population (namely Catholic, Protestant, and Jehovah’s Witness, but other groups are referenced as well), religious life in Fürstenberg and Ravensbrück during the Third Reich, and the role of church remembrance and memorial work.

Analytical contributions of the book are strongest in regard to Christian social life in Ravensbrück. The authors argue that ecumenical efforts in the camp had a limited impact, and Christian convictions seldom resulted in prisoners overcoming confessional differences, national origins, educational milieus, and politically and religiously motivated concepts of community and resistance. Language skills and class distinctions tended to inhibit communication among Christian women in Ravensbrück, and multinational and pan-Christian discussions were predominantly initiated by individuals. All prisoners lacked holy texts and liturgical objects, and although Ravensbrück camp regulations did not explicitly prohibit religious practice, large group meetings outside the barracks were prohibited, limiting the possibility of collective services. Women resorted to creative responses and generated booklets with Bible verses and psalms from stolen office papers. Women also used plastic and aluminum to fashion miniature crucifixes and pendants with depictions of saints. However, these common struggles did little to unify observant women who hailed from other countries and engaged in dissimilar Christian practices.

An innovative and empathetic blend of public history and traditional scholarship, this book’s discussion of women’s struggles within their religions, within Nazi-dominated Europe, and within the Ravensbrück concentration camp is commendable. Additional information and especially archival citations for the thirteen biographies would have strengthened the volume since this book will certainly be indispensable for those seeking a deeper knowledge of the particular denominations and individuals highlighted in the book. Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 nevertheless is a forceful and insightful overview that will be of great interest to a wide readership.