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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

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

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter from the Editors (June 2019)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Letter from the Editors (June 2019)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

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

This month marks two changes to the CCHQ editorial team. First, we would like to offer our thanks and best wishes to Dr. Steven Schroeder of the University of the Fraser Valley, who is concluding his time as a member of the editorial team, on which he has served since 2010. Second, we would like to welcome Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand to the editorial team. Dr. Carter-Chand works in the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2016, with a dissertation entitled “Doing good in bad times: The Salvation Army in Germany, 1886-1946,” and brings to the journal her expertise in free churches and sects in twentieth-century Germany.

The Fulda Cathedral, home of the German Bishops’ Conference. Photo courtesy Florian K at Wikimedia Commons.

This issue of the journal features three reviews relating to Roman Catholicism in Nazi Germany. Lauren Faulkner Rossi reviews Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld’s substantial edited volume on German Catholic bishops, Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit, while Kevin P. Spicer reviews both Thomas Brodie’s German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 and Michael E. O’Sullivan’s Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945.

Alongside these entries, Andrew Chandler reviews Ian M. Randall’s study of a little-known group, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942, while various notes consider recent articles by Heath Spencer and David A.R. Clark, a book chapter by Manfred Gailus, and an interesting collection of online sources on “American Christians’ responses to events in Europe in the 1930s and 40s and the ways in which many Americans viewed the rise of Nazism, World War II, and news of the Holocaust through the lens of their Christian identity.”

We hope you find these reviews and notes interesting and enlightening, and wish you an enjoyable summer season.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2017), XII + 817 Pp., ISBN: 9783402132289.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

This hefty tome, running past eight hundred pages, is a valuable contribution to the fields of German history, church history, and theological studies. Its inception was a conference held at the Catholic Academy Stapelfeld, in Cloppenburg in November 2016. Considering its subject – individual biographies of the Catholic bishops of Germany between 1933 and 1945 – its length is perhaps not surprising, though its editors caution us against treating it as exhaustive or comprehensive. For this reason, the reader may notice some sizeable gaps or curious omissions: Lorenz Jaeger, archbishop of Paderborn from 1941 into the postwar period, is not included (though his predecessor, Caspar Klein, is), nor are the bishops of Speyer, Aachen, Limburg, and Augsburg. Some chapters seem relatively cursory or incomplete: the chapter on Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber by Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising and an expert on this subject, runs a scant twelve pages, only six of which deal specifically with the Third Reich; similarly, the chapter on Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, focuses mostly on his pre-1939 biography.

The editors, Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, discuss significant forthcoming works on both von Faulhaber and Jaeger to account partly for the brevity of the studies here (13). And while there is a detailed chapter by Raphael Hülsbömer on Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli – later Pope Pius XII – and his relations with the German bishops, there is no attempt to integrate the episcopate into Vatican politics or consider the complicated, at times strained relationship between the wartime pope and the bishops as a collective. The editors justify this in part by referencing the closed archives covering the wartime pontificate of Pius XII; they could not have known that the year following this volume’s publication, the Vatican would finally announce the much-anticipated opening of these “secret archives” in 2020.[1]

Taken together, though, these gaps fail to significantly undermine what the volume brings to existing scholarship. Twenty-six German scholars, the majority with doctorates in history or theology (or both), several of whom direct diocesan archives or affiliated institutes, have produced twenty-one biographical chapters on twenty-three bishops.[2] Conscious that historical literature over the past seven decades has focused consistently on the political behaviour of the bishops, sometimes individually but more often as a group, and particularly on what the bishops failed or neglected to do – namely, explicitly condemn the Nazi regime’s human rights abuses and especially its persecution of the Jews – the contributors to this volume concentrate instead on studying the central purpose of the bishops: the exercise of their priestly, magisterial, and pastoral offices, which encompassed their zeal to preserve the teachings of the church and its values from distortion, and to immunize Germany’s Catholics against the Nazi world view.

In this, the contributors build on Antonia Leugers’ seminal 1996 study, which pointed to the bishops’ remarkably homogeneous backgrounds as a partial explanation for their lack of collective resistance to the regime’s policies during the war.[3] This volume goes further and acknowledges the distinctions not just between the bishops but also between their dioceses, exploring such diverse factors as age, health, the size of non-Catholic or non-German populations, the varied impact of industrialization and secularization, even the regional nature of German Catholicism, contrasting north versus south and centre versus periphery.

Despite these strong differences, the editors emphasize that the bishops remained united in thinking that the real lapse (Sündenfall) of Nazism was not its turn away from democracy, but its rejection of God and complete disregard for his commandments (11). They were not ignorant of the broader arena in which the Church was under attack by those intent on exterminating religion: events in Russia, Spain, and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s urged the bishops to prepare for an existential battle within Germany up to the outbreak of war, a point made by Joachim Kuropka (to whom the volume is dedicated) in his introductory chapter.

This underscored the bishops’ commitment, at once individual and collective, to maintaining their office as pastoral care providers, even at the expense of becoming political actors. As pastors, they consistently identified their primary goal as confronting and limiting the insidious impact of Nazi ideology on German Catholics. They recognized Nazism, with its absolute political rule and its feverish attempts to claim universal jurisdiction over the construction of all worldly meaning, as a grave threat to the autonomy of the Church in Germany. They wielded an array of methods, from sermons to pastoral letters to a rigorous defense of the independence of Catholic youth organizations, to try to keep their flocks immunized against Nazism (die Immunisiering gegen die NS-Ideologie, 7). In this they were successful: there was no steep drop in the number of Germans identifying as Catholic throughout this period, to which the useful diocesan statistics in the appendix testify. Kuropka references Gestapo reports that describe a spiritual battle between the regime and German Catholics, which, he insists, the former lost (27).

Despite this uniform commitment to pastoral work, the bishops were not a uniform group, as their biographies emphasize. In his study of the two bishops of Fulda (Joseph Damian Schmitt and Johannes Baptist Dietz), Stefan Gerber argues that the most prominent members of the episcopate – Clemens von Galen, Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Freising, Konrad von Preysing in Berlin, Joannes Baptista Sproll in Rottenburg – were in many ways exceptions and therefore are not helpful in reconstructing the self-perceptions, motives, expectations, and frictions of the “so-called second row” bishops (347). Indeed, von Galen, bishop of Münster, spoke publicly and forcefully against the regime’s euthanasia program in the summer of 1941 (Kuropka, the chapter’s author, gives this incident short shrift, more interested in other aspects of von Galen’s personality; he does not stress that von Galen spoke on his own, and not as a representative of the bishops), but he was the only Catholic bishop to do so. Other bishops designated assistants to spearhead efforts to help the victims of Nazism, particularly Catholics who had converted from Judaism and who were thus Catholic in the eyes of the Church, but Jewish in the eyes of the regime: Conrad Gröber in Freiburg, Cardinal Adolf Bertram in Breslau, and von Preysing in Berlin all took this route.

Other authors wrestle with source-based or historiographical problems. Thomas Flammer’s study of Joseph Godehard Machens, in the diaspora diocese of Hildesheim (its population in 1933 was less than 10% Catholic; the only diocese smaller than this, according to 1933 numbers, was Berlin) points to contradictory descriptions of the bishop’s personality: scholars have called him warmonger and Nazi and, according to his employees, he was both vain and humble, egotistical and shy, and “trusted very few people and counted even fewer among his friends.” (381) But upon his death in 1956, the Bundestag held a moment of silence, calling him a warrior against Nazism, and the Jewish community of Lower Saxony spoke of him as a friend and a great Catholic bishop.

Christoph Schmider wrestles with the legacy of Conrad Gröber, archbishop of Freiburg, which swings between the poles of “brown Conrad” (for his early openness to working with Hitler’s regime) and of “warrior of the resistance” (411). Schmider concedes ultimately that such a personality abjures a simple black-and-white characterization but instead requires “numerous gray tones so that, depending on the view of the observer, sometimes the gloomy and sometimes the brighter nuances prevail” (433).

Ulrich Helbach writes about how Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne who died during a bomb attack in 1941, has been consistently overshadowed in scholarship by his successor, Josef Frings, and his detailed analysis of Schulte centers on his personality, the challenges of leading one of Germany’s larger dioceses, and the impact of a serious heart attack (at the relatively young age of fifty-six, in 1927, six years into his tenure as archbishop) on his vocation and his reactions to Nazism. His observation about Schulte’s tendency towards compromise and conflict reduction (161), strengths which served him well in the 1920s, were a completely different matter under Nazism, and one that might be applied to other bishops as well.

All contributors treat diocese and region as integral to understanding the personality and behaviour of the bishop in question, and do not shy away from posing difficult historical and theological questions. In one of the longest chapters, Bernhard Schneider situates Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser’s particular difficulties partly in the task of shepherding the peripheral diocese of Trier. So, on the one hand, Bornewasser was deeply involved in formulating a church-based approach to the pro-German campaign of the 1935 Saar plebiscite, a task for which his ardent love for the Fatherland (which he distinguished from “unchristian nationalism”) prepared him well and which seemingly put him in step with the regime (260). On the other hand, in September 1941 he preached about the prohibition against killing, referring to the T4 program and referencing other episcopal writings (including von Galen’s, indirectly), apparently willing to risk the wrath of the regime in doing so.

Andreas Hölscher writes of Jacobus von Hauck as decisive in shaping the archdiocese of Bamberg for the twentieth century; in 1933, when he was seventy-one, he was the second-oldest and second-longest serving of all the German bishops, having been archbishop since 1912. Since the 1990s his reputation has been shaped by accusations of accommodation with Nazism and a failure to speak out on behalf of human rights. But as Hölscher argues, these questions can, and should, be asked of all the bishops, and of the Church as a whole: what was, and is, the Church’s mission in connection to the defense of human rights? Does the Church have a clearly defined mission beyond the recognized and accepted ecclesiastical milieu (kirchliches Umfeld, 615)? Hölscher and other contributors address these issues, but mostly by way of concluding remarks, and do not attempt to wrestle with them at length. It should be noted that these questions have risen largely in hindsight, after 1945, and that it is far from clear that any of the German bishops at the time entertained them, either in the safety and security of their own minds or, with less security, in conversation with each other.

While the volume fails to tackle these questions directly, its contributors and editors might claim, with justification, that they lie beyond the scope of their objective, which is to consider each bishop in the context of his diocese. They have eschewed overly moral or hagiographic narratives in favour of critical historical analyses of how each bishop approached his office as pastor, and how this shaped his interactions to the Nazi regime, from accommodation to opposition. In some cases, this spectrum is apparent even within an individual case (the best example is Gröber). This is the real strength of the book as a whole: each chapter demonstrates the significance of background (birthplace, education, family history, friendships) and location in helping to determine the course of action a bishop took. Ultimately the image of the episcopate as a group that emerges is not simply one of collective silence in the face of murder and atrocity, as previous histories stress, but also of collective concern for the preservation of the Church in Germany, a concern that co-existed, sometimes with considerable tension, alongside individual hopes and fears, private dissent and frustrations, and physical and emotional limitations. United they may have been in presenting a unified front to Hitler, but behind this façade these men were individual humans, with myriad strengths and weaknesses.

The tendency throughout the volume is to rely on archival material, though the contributors and editors have also relayed relevant historiographical information, detailing shifting interpretations of episcopal actions and reactions across several decades. Michael Hirschfeld’s introductory essay is particularly illuminating in this regard, tracing the post-1945 history of the bishops under Nazism through three distinct phases that affected the broader narrative of the history of the Catholic Church under Nazism between the end of the war and twenty-first century. In this he echoes, though with far less detail, some of Mark Ruff’s findings in his recent book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980, which appeared in print a year before this volume. Hirschfeld does not cite Ruff (likely the book was not available in time), and the secondary literature included in the bibliographies is entirely in German. This reflects the state of the field, in which – predictably – German scholars have undertaken the great bulk of writing the history of their Church leaders.

This book is currently the most up-to-date collection of biographical chapters on the German Catholic bishops during the Third Reich. Its dedication to highlighting revelatory contextual information by plumbing their personal backgrounds and integrating them more fully into their diocesan environments is invaluable, and is rendered explicitly, as Hirschfeld tells us, to reflect a growing trend: the rejection of the easy, unambiguous understandings of historical figures that our contemporary information society peddles in order to “embrace the grey tones that make possible a nuanced image of the respective personalities of the bishops” (49-50). Many contributors acknowledge this trend as well, and reference research projects of various sizes that are underway, for example of Jaeger and Faulhaber, as already mentioned, but also of Machens and Sproll. Thus the volume will hardly be the final word on many of the individual histories. So too we must anticipate that the opening of Pope Pius XII’s “secret archives” next year will generate a new wave of questions and challenges about the Catholic Church’s leaders in Germany and their relationship with the Vatican during the war. Until then, Hirschfeld and Zumholz and their host of contributors have given those of us interested in the Catholic bishops and their historical legacy much to consider.

[1] “Pius XII: Vatican to Open Secret Holocaust-Era Archives,” BBC World News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47444293, last accessed 30 May 2019.

[2] Hirschfeld and Zumholz define the German episcopate from 1933 to 1945 as consisting of 9 archbishops and 25 bishops, using the Altreich (1937) borders of Germany (pg. 2). The study therefore excludes the Austrian bishops and dioceses integrated into Germany following the 1938 Anschluss.

[3] Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens : Der Ausschuß für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945 (J. Knecht Verlag, 1996).

Review of Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 288 Pp., ISBN: 9780198827023.

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

In German Catholicism at War, Thomas Brodie, lecturer in twentieth-century European history at the University of Birmingham, has produced a valuable examination of Catholicism in Germany during the Second World War. Similar in approach to Patrick Houlihan’s World War I study, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge, 2015), Brodie’s work aims to explore “Catholicism’s social, cultural, and political roles in German society during the Second World War” (3). Rather than tackle Catholicism in Germany as a whole, Brodie conducts a regional study focusing upon Catholics in the Rhineland and Westphalia, specifically in the archdiocese of Cologne and the dioceses of Aachen and Münster. He explains his selection by writing, “These regions represented heartlands of German Catholicism, with Cologne nicknamed the ‘German Rome’ and its archbishopric featuring the largest Catholic population of any in the Reich” (11). In these regions of the home front during the war, Brodie wishes to examine Catholic “devotional practices and confessional communities” (10) to understand “how far Catholics supported their nation’s war efforts as its genocidal dimension unfolded, and whether they were able to reconcile national, political, and religious loyalties over the tumultuous years from 1939-1945” (3-4).

According to Brodie, few scholars have dedicated attention to such questions. Certainly, Brodie is correct that there is no monograph that singularly examines Catholicism on the German Home Front during the Second World War. At the same time, he excludes from his bibliography studies by individuals such as Thomas Breuer, Ernst Christian Helmreich, and Heinrich Missalla, which have endeavored, at least, partially but perceptively, to address related issues. He also is quick to dismiss much of the recent historiography on the churches, deeming them too focused on the “German Churches institutional relationship with the Holocaust,” too preoccupied with “religious leaders and theologians,” and too often written in a “moralizing argumentative tone” (8). Brodie laments that many recent works on Germany under National Socialism, especially recent titles focusing on the German Volksgemeinschaft (national/racial community), have completely ignored the impact of religion on German culture and society. By contrast, Brodie sets out to build upon the works of Dietmar Süß (Death from the Skies, Oxford, 2014) and, his Doktorvater, Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms (London, 2015), which, as a part of their larger narrative, address the role religion played in German society during the Second World War.

From the outset, Brodie makes a series of claims that challenge much of the existing historiography on the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While the Church experienced restrictions and confiscation of its properties, Brodie asserts that its clergy was a part of the “national community” and not a “persecuted minority beyond its boundaries” (18). He notes, “In marked contrast to the Kulturkampf, no German Catholic bishop was imprisoned during the Third Reich” (18). Active resistance was “far from uniform” and only reflected “the commitments of individuals and small groups rather than a coherent trend across the milieu” (18-19). The Nazi leadership had no plans to “demolish” or “dismantle” the Churches after the war. More likely, Brodie suggests, “Hitler and Goebbels had less violent measures in mind,” such as the “withdrawal of state financial support” (17). Ultimately, Brodie insists that one cannot misleadingly describe the German Catholic milieu as an “impermeable” sub-culture and place it in juxtaposition against “anti-clerical” National Socialist leaders (20). Rather, one must conceive of the Catholic milieu as multi-faceted and permeable. Within it, existed individuals across the political and social spectrum. As Armin Nolzen finds (and Brodie quotes), “most members of the party and its auxiliary organizations were affiliated with the Christian Churches during the Third Reich” (20). Such definitive claims are provocative. Throughout the study, Brodie endeavors to defend them. At times, he succeeds; at others, he is less convincing. Still, he offers much for the reader to consider and for historians to explore further.

In his initial chapter, “Prologue 1933-1939,” Brodie introduces the reader to the history of church-state relations under National Socialism. Though Catholics had participated in Weimar democracy, Brodie explains that authoritarian thought had increasingly crept into Catholic intellectual discourse. He attributes this openness to conservative-authoritarian ideas primarily to the Church’s Neo-Scholastic theology, which he explains, “Located the evils of a godless modernity in the secularizing trends unleased within European society since the enlightenment and French Revolution” (24). Brodie’s use of Neo-Scholasticism is perhaps misplaced. He uses it again and again as if to explain the nature of the statements and pastoral letters of the bishops, to clarify the motivations of the Catholic clergy, and to describe reticent actions of Church leaders toward the state.

In general, Brodie makes little differentiation in his presentation of theology throughout his work and, in my opinion, does not fairly consider its implications. Perhaps, he would have done well to consult Robert Krieg’s Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany (New York, 2004) or a similar study to learn more about the diversity of Catholic theology at that time. (To be fair, he does cite an article by Krieg, but this article is limited in scope and not as broad a work as Catholic Theologians.) Klaus Breuning’s classic study, Die Vision des Reiches (Munich, 1969), could also have assisted Brodie more convincingly to contextualize his analysis of Catholic intellectual-theological bridge-building with National Socialism. Instead, Brodie writes, “The Nazi regime enjoyed considerable support among Catholic intellectuals, both clerical and lay, in the Rhineland and Westphalia during its initial years of power” (25). Such sweeping statements are not helpful in his otherwise insightful analysis.

According to Brodie, the initial years of National Socialist rule experienced little tension in church-state relations. Even the 1934 murder of Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic-Action in Berlin, during the Röhm Purge, or the increasing number of infringements against the Reich-Vatican concordat does not warrant much concern. Recalling Ian Kershaw’s insight, Brodie writes, “Catholics extensively believed that Nazi anti-clerical policies were the work of Party radicals, and deemed Hitler innocent of involvement in their introduction” (26). A valid point indeed. Yet, such analysis enables Brodie to understate state-church tensions and to emphasize the nationalism of Catholics. For Brodie, Catholics proudly exhibited their nationalism as the National Socialist state remilitarized the Rhineland, gave assistance to the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, and annexed Austria. Catholics deeply longed to be a part of the “national community” and eagerly supported its endeavors. In the latter 1930s, this even led Catholic clergymen “to defend the Catholic Church from hostile Nazi propaganda” by downplaying “the faith’s Jewish heritage” and by stressing its “national reliability” instead (28).

While these are legitimate facts, they are perhaps presented one-sidedly while ignoring the wealth of studies on Catholic resistance. Yet, even in the face of a definitive thesis, Brodie does point out that there is evidence Catholics did not as a whole support violence toward Jews during Kristallnacht nor did they condone increased tensions in church-state relations in the latter 1930s. Brodie concludes his prologue – a pattern he follows in each chapter – by leaving space for conflicting interpretations, stating, “Relations between German Catholics and the Nazi regime were accordingly complex on the eve of the Second World War in summer 1939” (30).

In Chapter One, “The Years of Victory, 1939-1940,” Brodie investigates how German Catholics responded to the outbreak of war in Poland and German victory in France. In comparison to the enthusiasm for war shown by the bishops in 1914, in general, the Catholic hierarchy in the Rhineland and Westphalia were generally more reserved and focused on the “fulfillment of duty and a “swift end to the conflict” (33). If anything, the bishops viewed the war “in universal terms as a divine punishment for sinful, secular humanity” (35). Brodie attributes the bishops’ interpretation to the influence of Neo-Scholastic theology but also points out that there was an exception to this outlook. Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Münster, for example, made statements and produced pastoral letters that incorporated forceful language with “overtly nationalist sentiments,” a trait he continued throughout the war, even into the post-war period (33). In this observation, Brodie confirms the arguments first put forward by Beth Griech-Poelle, which have been unfairly maligned by Joachim Kuropka and his Münsterland colleagues (primarily in German language works).

In their statements and letters, the bishops were myopic, almost self-centered, focusing on the “future fate of the Church in Germany,” not the “current situation in Poland” (37). They showed no concern for their Polish confreres, even though the Bishop of Katowice had sent at least two reports about the plight of the Polish clergy to the Fulda Bishops’ Conference. Michael Phayer first emphasized this fact, though Brodie does not cite him at this point in his narrative. If anything, German Catholics only showed sympathy toward co-religionist Polish forced laborers in their midst. (Again, Brodie makes this point without referencing the pioneering work of John J. Delaney on this subject.) In general, German Catholics showed little or no concern toward the plight of the Poles under Nazi occupation. The greater concern for the bishops and clergy was the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact and how it might impact the Church. Yet, despite this development, the German hierarchy, lower clergy, and laity continued to support the German state, especially after the fall of France in June 1940. The bishops even placed the resources of Caritas, the German Church’s charity organization, at the disposal of the Reich government.

Toward the end of the first chapter, Brodie emphasizes the impact antisemitic propaganda had on Rhineland and Westphalian Catholics. As evidence, he cites antisemitic and nationalistic articles from the Kolpingsblatt that he admits is “hardly representative of episcopal policy” (54). In turn, Brodie discusses the response to the 1939 lecture on the German Catholicism by theologian Karl Adam, a priest of the Regensburg diocese, who called for closer alignment between German nationalism and Roman Catholicism. While ignoring much of the existing historiography on Adam, Brodie fixates on a Düsseldorf Gestapo report that describes how Adam’s lecture had enthused younger clergy but produced opposition from the German hierarchy and more ultramontane-inclined older clergy. Brodie makes much of this statement, especially the insight he believes it offers on the response to the lecture among parish priests and Catholic laity. For him, this response is an example of the permeability of the Catholic milieu and the divisions that existed among the clergy in relation to acceptance and rejection of National Socialism. Unfortunately, Brodie can offer no further evidence to substantiate the Gestapo report nor can he present additional substantial evidence when he returns in chapter three to similar points of tension among the clergy.

Chapter Two, “Confrontation and its Limits,” focuses primarily on the three widely known sermons delivered by Bishop von Galen in the summer of 1941, following a period of intense church-state conflict. Brodie regrets that in the past the examination of von Galen has focused on “a moralizing debate concerning Galen’s individual status as a resister of Nazism” (65). Indeed, the bishop’s words were clear and stood in contrast to the “highly abstract and intellectual Neo-Scholastic language normally” used by the bishops in their pastoral letters; yet, Brodie insists they cannot be viewed as “articulations of outright opposition to the Nazi regime” (71-72). Instead, Brodie argues, Galen “skillfully positioned his protests within mainstream German nationalist opinion” (73). As such, German Catholics could agree with them, especially as many Catholics had first-hand witnessed the confiscation of monastic and Church properties. Similarly, fearing the forced euthanasia of their own institutionalized family members or wounded sons coming back from the battlefield, lay Catholics could easily relate to the bishop’s criticisms of the T-4 euthanasia policy. Despite such agreement, Brodie uncovers criticism recorded by SD and Gestapo agents from individuals who worry that von Galen has “undermined the home front” (81). Such concerns were quickly forgotten as Brodie reports that the sermons had little lasting effects, at least according to the Gestapo. By late fall, both the state and von Galen had reached a modus vivendi as Goebbels noted in his diary in mid-November, “The theoreticians in the Party must be put back in their cupboards” (86-87). Similarly, by late 1941, German Catholics “viewed their chief priority as securing their place inside the ‘national community’” (92). According to Brodie, this also meant that Catholics were not going to protest the state’s persecution of Jews.

Chapter Three, “The War Intensifies, December 1941-June 1944,” examines Catholic response to the war from the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the subsequent onset of systematic murder of the Jews through German military defeat at the battle of Stalingrad in early 1943 and the D-Day invasion of June 1944. The German hierarchy’s responses follow established general patterns. No longer playing the role of a resister, in March 1942, von Galen issued a pastoral letter for Heroes’ Memorial Day, which praised the fallen against Bolshevism as “Christian martyrs in a ‘Crusade’ against ‘a satanic ideological system” (95). Frings of Cologne did his best to “avoid confrontation with the Nazi authorities,” even though past scholars have portrayed the bishop as a resister. In December 1942, Frings did issue a pastoral letter, The Principles of Law, meant to confront the state’s racial policy, but its “abstract intellectual” language failed to sway Catholics in any significant manner. Frings’ response was indicative of the stances taken by most of the German bishops. Even though faced with accurate reports on the mass murder of Jews, they remained indecisive and at odds with each other on how to respond. Though this issue has been exhaustively investigated by Antonia Leugers in Gegen einer Mauer: bischöflichen Schweigens (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), Brodie does not cite her but relies on more general sources for his narrative.

Over the course of 1942, the Nazi state lessoned its anti-clerical policies. This change did not go unnoticed by the bishops or the clergy. Still, the parish clergy, who had to deal with the regime daily on the ground level, maintained a “special hostility towards individual members of the Nazi regime” who, they believed, were behind anti-clerical measures (100). Their anger was frequently directed at Himmler and the SS and not toward the German government and, therefore, according to Brodie, betraying the “self-interested perspectives of the clergy, with the Nazi regime’s anti-clerical record being the primary source of their discontent, not its genocidal and imperial projects under way in eastern Europe” (101). Once the anti-clericalism subsided, Brodie argues that clergy were more accommodating of the regime. Utilizing a case study of two priests from Corpus Christi parish in Aachen, Brodie arrives at the far-flung conclusion that clergy who resisted or consistently held “negative attitudes towards the Nazi state and wider war” were in the minority (104), offering little nuance in his analysis. As evidence, he turns to the case of Dr. Johann Nattermann(es), a priest of the Cologne archdiocese, who gave outright support to the war. Brodie seems to have no knowledge of Nattermann’s pro-Nazi sympathies, his pro-National Socialist work with the Kolping Association, or his contributions to a 1936 pro-Nazi publication, Sendschreiben katholischer Deutscher an ihre Volks- und Glaubensgenossen.

After the February 1943 surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the mood of the Catholic population and clergy toward the war changed. The bishops continued to support the war but also increased the language of sin and judgment in their pastoral letters. Meanwhile, the Gestapo and SD received frequent reports about unrest among the parish clergy whose criticism of the war appeared to be growing. Lay Catholics, too, complained, often about their bishops, especially for not condemning Allied bombing of Germany and for admonishing Catholics not to resort to language of “revenge.” In the end, Brodie’s analysis attempts to support dual interpretations, as he writes, “Whereas many Catholic clergymen and members of the laity were increasingly pessimistic concerning the war’s development, others continued to believe in, and hope for, German victory” (120).

Chapter Four, “Religious Life on the German Home Front,” examines the impact of the war on parish and diocesan church life on the home front. Brodie does not agree with the conventional historiography that posits an increase in piety and religiosity as German Catholics retreated inwardly in the face of total war. By contrast, Brodie portrays a gradual break-down of diocesan and parish structures that supported Catholics’ faith. While, soon after the war began, the number of withdrawals from official Church membership (Kirchenaustritt) decreased, at the same time, the number of young men entering the seminary also substantially decreased, especially with general mobilization. State laws, such as the October 29, 1940 air raid ordinance for religious services, placed restrictions on the public practice of religion. Such measures limited the availability of Masses for Catholics and thus affected religious practice.

Still, Brodie finds evidence of lay Catholics turning to their priests for guidance and protection during air raids, such as requesting the presence of clergy strategically positioned throughout air raid shelters. Other Catholics turned to religious medallions and devotions for solace during Allied bombing. What existed of parish activity was often championed by lay women Catholics who maintained their religious practices and parish involvement. Despite the state attempting to limit religious practice and even organize state funerals for victims of bombing, Brodie argues that “local parish priests remained for most Catholics a primary source of comfort in times of bereavement” (162). Funerals, he argues, should not be interpreted as promoting “defeatist sentiment or overt cultural retreat from Nazism,” but presented opportunities for an “overlap between Catholic ritual and Nazi ideology,” both which supported the state (163). In certain areas, such as Cologne, clergy and Nazi authorities cooperated to provide “mass public funerals for air-raid victims” (164). Brodie stresses that, “Catholic piety did not so much afford a space for cultural retreat from Nazism, as contribute to a ritual performance of national solidarity and victimhood, co-existing with the iconographies and languages of the NSDAP as well as older nationalist traditions” (165).

Chapter Five, “The Catholic Diaspora – Experiences of Evacuation” is an excellent chapter that breaks new ground in its description of the evacuation experience of Catholics to escape Allied bombing. As Brodie explains, Catholics from western Germany were temporarily relocated to Thuringia, Saxony, Brandenburg, and lower Silesia. Many of these areas were heavily Protestant and unwelcoming, or even hostile, to Catholics. In addition, as one National Socialist Welfare official commented on the relocation of Catholic children, “Finally we can get our hands on the children and separate them from the priests” (173). Though the western dioceses sent priests to minister to the transplanted Catholics, the task for the clergy was daunting. Geography was one of the main factors preventing contact between clergy and laity with some priests being required to cover wide stretches of territory often using poor public transportation. Many other obstacles existed. Such challenges led priests to describe their pastoral tasks in “martyrological language.” Brodie believes the use of such language prepared the clergy later to adopt it to explain their “self-understanding as victims of Nazism,” once the war ended (191).

In the sixth chapter, “Of Collapses and Rebirths,” Brodie recounts the well-documented post-war experience of the German Catholic hierarchy. As the Catholic Church’s infrastructure lay in ruins, the German bishops sought to find redemption. One path they chose was embracing the language of suffering as Brodie explains, “By evoking Christ’s passion and the Book of Job as metaphors to make sense of the fate befalling the Catholic Heimat, Frings and Galen strengthened and legitimized Catholic Germans emerging self-understanding as innocent victims of the war” (208). Such analysis offers evidence of the singularity of Brodie’s theological interpretation.

As the Allied troops moved eastwardly, the local clergy often became trusted contacts. Goebbels cynically noted this fact in a March 8, 1945 diary entry (224). After the conflict ended, the German bishops publicly promoted the language of victimhood and rejected collective guilt. Pope Pius XII supported such efforts to promote the image of a suffering German Catholicism by elevating Frings and von Galen to the college of cardinals soon after the war ended. Even Bernard William Griffin, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, contributed to this interpretation by inviting Cardinal Frings to preach in London’s Westminster Cathedral in September 1946. Frings’ homily focused on the “severe persecution” the Catholic Church in Germany” had endured under National Socialism (225). Whatever ground the Church had lost under National Socialism, it seems to have regained it in post-war Germany.

Brodie has produced a helpful study of the German Catholic Church at war. For it, he has consulted an impressive array of church and state archival sources. Most interesting is his use of clerical Gestapo V-Männer reports held in the North-Rhineland-Westphalian State Archive (Rhineland Division) to ascertain the climate of both ordained and lay Catholics. Brodie is cautious in his use of this material and generally informs his reader of its use, especially when analyzing and drawing conclusions. Often such reports are the only avenue by which to gauge the opinion of lay Catholics. Brodie does supplement such reports with quotes from published and unpublished diaries, memoirs, and letters of both ordained and lay Catholics. All of this, he weaves together in an engaging and insightful narrative. His bibliography is extensive, but something about his sources does not sit right with me. At key points in the narrative, as I have pointed out above, he seems to be neglectful or unaware of important secondary sources, especially those focusing specifically on the Catholic Church in Germany under National Socialism. By contrast, his integration of more secularly based secondary works is impressive and contextualizes his study well into the historical events of Germany under war. At times, Brodie’s terminology is odd for a study on German Catholicism, referring: to a “curate” as a “trainee clergyman” (49); to a “religious community” as “holy orders” (67); to a “seminarian” as a “trainee priest” (135); to a newly appointed pastor as a “trainee pastor” (136); to “rectory” as a “parochial house” (146); to a “Vicar General” as a “General Vicar” (223). I know that I might sound punctilious, but I link this concern to Brodie’s ubiquitous use of Neo-Scholasticism to explain repeatedly clerical theological motivation. From the outset, Brodie makes it clear that he does not wish to engage in moralizing, but in the end, he has produced a sententious narrative that in itself does not fully elucidate the multifaceted nature of Catholicism under National Socialism.

Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 344 Pp., ISBN: 9781487503437.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

For every Marian apparition approved by the Vatican, such as at Guadalupe, Mexico (1531), La Salette, France (1846), and Lourdes, France (1858), there are numerous that remain under study or are refused recognition by the Church. Nevertheless, the lack of approbation cannot contain the fervor of many believers from seeking an intimate connection with the supernatural or, put in theological terms, miraculous intervention for the relief of malady or burden. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, Michael E. O’Sullivan, associate professor of history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, examines the nature and impact of Marian apparitions and the phenomena of stigmatic ecstasies on German Catholicism from the time of the establishment of the Weimar Republic up through the middle of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Though these occurrences are notable in nature and unique in theological understanding, they share a supernatural commonality that O’Sullivan recounts as events of “miraculous faith” (4). O’Sullivan rightly argues that historians, even those who specialize in church history, have for too long neglected incidents of miraculous faith in their analysis of German history. In his fascinating study, O’Sullivan endeavors to fill this void. For him, miraculous faith events both reflect and intensify the institutional, political, cultural, and gender tensions within German Catholicism.

O’Sullivan concurs with historians, such as Oded Heilbronner, who view post-WWI Catholicism already in decay, documented, in part, by communion statistics and lessening of participation in urban male Catholic associations. At the same time, for O’Sullivan, the miraculous faith events also reveal, “an upsurge in devotion and a revolt by traditionalists against mainstream religious and political leaders that ultimately contributed to the church’s fragmentation and transformation of Christianity’s role in politics” (4). To this end, the events of miraculous faith “disrupted three major elements of German history: religious secularization, Christian politics, and patriarchal gender roles” (4).

Disruptive Power departs from standard secularization theories and posits a “braided,” twisting path of secularization, which O’Sullivan defines as “the process by which religion becomes less central to the world view, mentalities, and institutions that shaped the everyday lives of modern historical subjects” (5). Explaining further, O’Sullivan writes, “secularization followed a hybrid path in the modern age where the secular and sacred existed side by side” (5). To clarify this point, O’Sullivan turns to Robert Orsi’s concept of “lived religion,” which focuses on how generations transmitted, subordinated, or rediscovered devotional practices. According to O’Sullivan, Orsi surmises that “religious worlds, subcultures, and mentalities” need not be portrayed as “isolated and separate from other aspects of society and experience” (8). Rather, twentieth-century German Catholicism reflected German society and its regional differentiation. In this respect, it is incorrect to portray it as a rigid monolith or a single all-encompassing milieu.

Such insight on milieu reflects similar perspectives argued in other recently published works on German Catholicism, most notably by Jeffrey Zalar in Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914. However, O’Sullivan emphasizes the role of milieu much less than Zalar.

More important for O’Sullivan is the conflict among and between competing groups for influence over differentiated Catholic milieus. To illustrate such struggles, O’Sullivan makes use of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “‘religious field’ of competition” between clergy and laity over “legitimation and the ‘goods of salvation’” as various groups and individuals vie for power and authority within Catholicism (11). Such applications enable O’Sullivan to make connections between miraculous faith events and the fluctuations of power in and influence of Catholic political parties, especially during Weimar and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Similarly, tensions in ecclesial power play often uncovered cracks in the gender dynamics of the church as religious authority vacillated between traditional female and male ecclesiastical roles. In particular, O’Sullivan makes it clear that he rejects anachronistic portraits of “piously Catholic women” and instead endeavors to present them “as empowered agents negotiating a perilous but evolving patriarchal power structure” (15).

In twentieth-century Germany, the Catholic woman who best negotiated the patriarchal structure of German society and the German Catholic Church was the stigmatic, seer, and mystic, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, from Bavaria, in the Regensburg diocese. She serves as the focus of O’Sullivan’s study by offering a lucent example of how “pious women negotiated spheres of power while embracing strict moral codes and paternal hierarchy” (7). Unlike Neumann, lesser-known mystics, such as Anna Maria Goebel, failed to maneuver adroitly through the numerous obstacles facing them and, generally, have been forgotten. By contrast, Neumann is still quite well known. In 2005, after much debate and at least forty-thousand requests, Bishop Gerhard Müller of Regensburg had Therese Neumann declared a “Servant of God” by opening an official beautification process for her (https://www.bistum-regensburg.de/news/eroeffnung-des-seligsprechungs-verfahrens-von-therese-neumann-296/). O’Sullivan’s study uncovers why Therese Neumann and her supporters – commonly identified as the “Konnersreuth Circle” – are unique and so memorable.

In Chapter One, “Germany between Apocalypse and Salvation: Bloody Images and Miraculous Cures,” O’Sullivan describes the rise of events of miraculous faith in post-World War I Germany. Existing Marian pilgrimage sites at Neviges (Ruhr district) and Kevelear (Rhineland) received an upsurge in visitors as Catholics visited them out of a quest for meaning amid a changing political landscape and rising secularism in German society. New events of miraculous faith also took place in Aachen and Bickendorf (Eifel), all of which captured the imagination of German Catholics. In 1920, in Aachen, a visiting excommunicated French priest, Argence Vachère, who had a history of seeing images of Christ and consecrated hosts bleed, together with several lay Catholics, witnessed a picture of Jesus and a religious statue shed blood for several days. This “Blood Miracle” of Aachen also attracted the attention and support of the followers of Barbara Weigand of Schippach (near Würzburg), a mystic, who, following her beatific visions, criticized clerical authority and advocated for a less patriarchal church. Around the same time, in the tiny village of Bickendorf, Anna Maria Goebbel began to endure profuse bleeding and experienced religious visions.

For O’Sullivan, these seemingly disparate phenomena illustrate larger tensions for Catholics in German society. The eccentric unwieldy nature of the mystics made them problematic for the German bishops of their respective dioceses, fearing that they might “jeopardize Catholic attempts to integrate nationally” (29). O’Sullivan argues that the bishops preferred to uphold their hierarchical, patriarchal power structure by organizing their own contained celebration of events of miraculous faith, such as when the Trier diocese placed the Holy Tunic of Christ on display in the summer of 1933. In the chapter’s conclusion, O’Sullivan posits that this struggle over the control of the “goods of salvation” unintentionally “reduced the power of the formal church and its leadership” (52). An interesting claim, one repeated often in the book, but one for which clearer evidence is needed.

In Chapter Two, “The Rise of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth during the Weimar Republic,” O’Sullivan introduces the miraculous story of Neumann, nicknamed, “Resl.” Beginning in 1926, Neumann experienced the stigmata following years of sickness and personal tragedy. Like clockwork, on Friday afternoons, Neumann would experience “suffering” from a mixture of stigmata, head wounds imitating Jesus’ crown of thorns, and ecstatic visions of Christ’s Passion. Thousands journeyed to her humble family home to wait in line for hours to witness personally the spectacle. Neumann also claimed to subsist solely on consecrated hosts.

Unlike other mystics whose cause floundered, Neumann attracted a powerful group of male supporters who publicly defended her against criticism and doubters. The list of hierophants is significant, including Father Joseph Naber, the pastor of St. Laurentius, the Catholic parish in Konnersreuth; Erwein Freiherr von Aretin, an editor with the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten; Father Franz Xaver Wutz, a professor of Old Testament at the Philosophical-Theological College in Eichstätt; Friedrich von Lama, an eccentric conservative free-lance journalist; and Fritz Gerlich, an author and journalist who subsequently founded the anti-Nazi, Der gerade Weg.

O’Sullivan devotes the greatest attention to Gerlich who left his Calvinist faith and hedonistic lifestyle (yes, the two are mutually contradictory) after meeting Neumann and joined the Catholic Church. He argues that these advocates, along with thousands of other supporters, were able to experience “God directly through Neumann without confession, communion, and other sacramental formalities” (55). In turn, for those Catholics who positively encountered Neumann, she “replaced the church as the primary focus of their prayers and they set their own rules with flexibility regarding official doctrine” (75-76). O’Sullivan repeatedly emphasizes this point about the usurpation of power by Neumann and the Konnersreuth Circle from the institutional Church. Indeed, Neumann’s witness and testimony became the impetus for many individuals to return to the practice of their Catholic faith. Many Catholics also turned toward Neumann to have clearer access to the “sacred.” As O’Sullivan instructs, such avenues fell outside official Church channels, becoming of great concern to the bishops. Nevertheless, while many Catholics sought out the guidance and counsel of Neumann, in the end, they practiced their faith through the traditional sacramental forms of worship—a point that O’Sullivan describes but neglects to make.

In Chapter Three, “Saving Souls and Making Enemies: The Struggle over Konnersreuth and the Downfall of Political Catholicism,” O’Sullivan builds upon Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933, which examined intellectuals, such as Jacques Maritain and Georges Rouault, who turned to Catholic mysticism to cope with the aftermath of the First World War. O’Sullivan believes the Konnersreuth Circle did the same in Germany. Despite such support, Neumann also encountered numerous critics, including Father Johann Baptist Westermayr, a priest of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising and the Freising seminary rector, and Father Georg Wunderle, a priest of the Eichstätt diocese (O’Sullivan incorrectly identifies him as a Franciscan), a professor of apologetics at the University of Würzburg, and, from 1932-1933, rector of the university [Wolfgang Weiß, “Wunderle, Georg,” BBKL 36 (2015): 1538-1550]. Both desired to protect the “church’s control of the ‘goods of salvation’” (85).

Likewise, Bishop Michael Buchberger of Regensburg, in whose diocese Konnersreuth resided, remained skeptical and arranged, in July 1927, for an official medical exam of Neumann. After a fourteen-day observation in Neumann’s family home, and in the presence of four nuns, the doctors concluded that the religious nature of her experiences were in doubt and should be explained through “the growing field of parapsychology” (86). O’Sullivan suggests that the doctors desired “to defend the faith from embarrassment” and thus chose to define Neumann’s experiences through a “genuinely modern belief system” (87). Despite this verdict and the urging of a representative from the Apostolic Nunciature in Munich, Buchberger never excommunicated Neumann nor did he transfer Father Naber from the Konnersreuth parish.

Other factors, too, supported Neumann and her circle. Her family had strong ties with local and state politicians from the Bavarian People’s Party. In turn, the Konnersreuth Circle regularly directed its defense of Neumann primarily against left-wing criticism, while generally ignoring that of the right. O’Sullivan concludes that such forms of defense, “bolstered Catholic conservatives that opposed Centre Party republicanism, and contributed to the Nazi rise to power” (107). While one might draw this conclusion, the evidence presented does not firmly support such a definitive interpretation.

Chapter Four, “Between Feminine Agency and Moral Utopia: Gender and Sex in Konnersreuth,” examines the role of gender in the events surrounding Neumann and the Konnersreuth Circle. According to O’Sullivan, Neumann was “neither a feminist advocate of emancipation nor a powerless pawn of traditional patriarchs” (116). Instead, he argues that Neumann “manipulated the gender norms of her time to survive as a public and holy figure where other mystics faded and accumulated more spiritual capital than just about any other Catholic female of her era” (116).

What is not completely clear is the distinction between Neumann’s manipulation of the gender norms and the existing gender dynamics within Bavarian society. For example, though Neumann “expressed her own willingness” to submit to Bishop Buchberger’s request for a second medical examination, at the same time, she remained obedient to her father, Ferdinand, who forbade any additional examinations (119). Her family and the Konnersreuth Circle also weaponized Neumann’s chastity to prevent medical investigation and to discredit her critics. Evidence for this may be seen when the Neumann family accused Father Georg Wunderle of “touching Neumann’s breasts inappropriately during an examination of her stigmata” and thereby denied him “future access to their home” (136). Despite the pressure placed upon Neumann, her family, and upon the Konnersreuth Circle, no second examination was ever undertaken.

In Chapter Five, “Disruptive Potential: Catholic Miracles under the Third Reich,” O’Sullivan first briefly presents previous interpretations of Neumann and the Konnersreuth’s response to the National Socialist state. Popular opinion has presented Neumann and her Circle as a “‘nest of resistance.’” By contrast, anthropologist Ulrike Wiethaus believes Neumann “represented the resistance of a rural culture against a modernizing and centralizing nation-state.” Historian Thomas Breuer adds, “rural Catholic discord with Nazism constituted a protest against modernity rather than NS ideology.” O’Sullivan finds neither completely satisfying and argues that the response of Neumann and her Konnersreuth Circle to National Socialism “contained too many layers of ambiguity to be exclusively labeled anti-Nazi or anti-modern” (141).

Elaborating on this conclusion, O’Sullivan embraces traditional interpretations on the response of Catholics to Nazism. He writes, “While the vast majority of Catholics supported the regime’s campaign of law and order and aggressive foreign policy, they bristled as the Third Reich limited the role of organized Christian churches” (142). Such limitation on the churches resulted in the temporary destruction of many of its traditional supportive structures such as associations, youth ministry, and charitable programs. O’Sullivan finds that from this dismantling evolved “a more personalized and private faith that possessed dynamism but became increasingly free of formal church control” (142). For him, Neumann is a perfect example of this occurrence. Unfortunately, neither the remaining church institutions nor the personalized private faith did much to “obstruct vast human rights violations against Jews, communists, and others” (143).

Still, the Konnersreuth Circle did not survive National Socialist rule unscathed. The SS murdered Gerlich during the Röhm Purge in retaliation for his anti-Nazi journalism. Other members endured arrest, Gestapo interrogations, internment in concentration camps, and death.

Nevertheless, the legacy of Konnersreuth leaves more than a vestige of ambiguity in connection with National Socialism. Therese Neumann, for example, had contacts in the Gestapo and local Nazi Party who protected her from arrest and informed her about impending house searches. Similarly, like her Church, Neumann continually perpetuated religious antisemitism through her Friday “sufferings” by including “anti-Judaic themes of Jews as tormenters of Christ” (160). Still, O’Sullivan points out that “none of this evidence indicates an alignment between the Konnersreuth Circle and the Third Reich on racist antisemitism” (160).

Chapter Six, “Miraculous Times in West Germany: Marian Apparitions during the Early Federal Republic,” discusses the increased number of Marian apparitions across Europe following the aftermath of the Second World War. Eleven such instances occurred in Germany alone. O’Sullivan argues that these events of miraculous faith emerged not only as a “reaction to the Cold War, but also to anxieties about Americanization, consumerism, and Catholic narratives about the Nazi past” (174).

Such events of miraculous faith were not the only response to the new world order. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which brought together the former Centre and conservative and liberal Protestant political parties, sought to redefine the political landscape by projecting the image of West Germany as the “New Christian Occident (Abendland) defined by rigid social hierarchy, religious morality, and…opposition to materialist forces in modernity.” Coupled with this outlook was a fear of “growing consumerism and Americanization,” which “threatened clerical control of moral values.” Such a worldview led to the “reassertion of patriarchy and normative gender roles for women,” and, at the same time, to a reassessment of the “ambiguous Nazi past by inaccurately depicting religion as the exclusive bulwark against National Socialism” (175).

To illustrate these themes, O’Sullivan examines Marian apparitions in Heroldsbach (Bavaria), Fehrbach (Rhineland-Palatinate), Niederhabbach (Rhineland-Westphalia), and Rodalben (Rhineland-Palatinate). These events of miraculous faith shared similar characteristics with previous ones, including supporters usurping authority traditionally held by bishops and priests, the encouragement of the conversion of sinners to a life of faith, and vocal support by strong male figures, acting as “spiritual advisors and publicists” (192).

Interestingly, neither Church authorities nor Christian political parties supported the apparitions and their adherents. To counter such resistance, those devoted to Marian apparitions “drew parallels between the Nazi suppression of free speech and institutional efforts to discourage miracles not sponsored by the Vatican” (201). Repeating the failed 1933 Trier (Holy Tunic) attempts to control the miraculous, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne organized a “traveling Madonna” linked to Fatima to more than three-hundred parishes in the Rhineland. Despite a successful “tour,” the archdiocesan controlled Marian celebrations failed to produce any lasting positive effects among Rhineland Catholics. Likewise, O’Sullivan notes that such enthusiasm for miraculous apparitions and visions “faded with the growing economic and political stability of the Federal Republic” (210).

In the final chapter, “Therese Neumann between Catholic Traditionalism, Cold War, and Economic Miracle,” O’Sullivan recounts the uniqueness of Neumann’s experience that transcended the epochs of twentieth-century Germany to survive political upheaval, National Socialism, World War, and American occupation. Neumann became an unofficial ambassador to the American troops, as well a sign of German-American reconciliation in post-war Germany as GIs of all ranks flocked to Konnersreuth to see the miraculous stigmatic in action. Moreover, O’Sullivan argues that in Neumann’s projection of a regional Bavarian identity “where local traditions and modern economics intermingled,” she “assisted the secular turn of the CSU and fostered some of the consumerist trends that overwhelmed clerical authority by the time of her death” (212).

Disruptive Powers deals with a myriad of themes in a complex, ambitious narrative based to a great degree on primary sources from numerous state and church archives. O’Sullivan also valiantly endeavors to offer equal attention to the three major issues: religious secularization, Christian politics, and patriarchal gender roles. At times, the balance works well; at other times, the narrative integration of all three together seems forced. Still, O’Sullivan gives us much to ponder in his thought-provoking, challenging work. In the end, whether or not the Church will ever declare Therese Neumann a saint remains to be seen. For now, however, one may conclude that O’Sullivan offers a convincing work to show that Therese Neumann, her Konnersreuth Circle, and other miraculous faith events cannot remain on the periphery of this time, but are essential to interpreting gender dynamics and power structures within twentieth-century German Catholicism.

Review of Ian M. Randall, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Ian M. Randall, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 241 pp., ISBN: 9781532639982.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The ideals and experiences of the Bruderhof community have, perhaps inevitably, hovered in the background of histories of international religion in the early twentieth century. The inspired creation of the German internationalists, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, much associated with the Hutterites and responsive to all forms of evangelical Protestantism, the Bruderhof offered a practical piety and a new vision of Christian authenticity. It sought to maintain firmly a principle of removal from the world and yet was constantly and perseveringly at large in that world, searching out new friendships, useful connections, and necessary alliances. Already in the 1920s, the community had become known to British Quakers working in Germany. It also found new friends and allies in the pacifist and internationalist circles which broke out after the First World War. It was a son of the Arnolds, Hardy, who provided the crucial link with Britain before 1933, preparing the way for the movement to set down new roots in foreign soil. The growing encroachments of the new National Socialist state – in particular, the compulsory conscription into military service – undermined the German Bruderhof by insistent degrees and in 1936 the two principal communities there were shut down, precipitating an exodus, through the Netherlands and across the English Channel, to a new home.

The suppression of the Bruderhof in Nazi Germany was not unobserved in Britain: there were protests and interventions by figures as diverse as the eminent Anglican laymen Sir Wyndham Deedes and the Baptist internationalist J.H. Rushbrooke. Friends of all kinds now proved effective, particularly in practicalities. By May 1936, the Bruderhof could be found in a farm near Ashton Keynes in the Cotswolds where a new community comprised sixteen Germans, fourteen British friends, and one Austrian. At the height of its quiet prosperity there, in October 1939, the community included as many as 119 Germans, 116 British members, 30 Swiss, 17 Austrians, and stray individuals from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, France, Sweden, Italy, and Turkey. All came with their own stories and for their own reasons. All sought to be useful. A miner from the coalfields of Durham cycled three hundred miles to join them and was promptly set to work picking potatoes; another new arrival was a Lancashire poultry farmer who was also a Methodist lay preacher and admirer of the Indian Christian mystic Sundar Singh. In choosing the Cotswolds, a deeply rural area which possessed something of the character of an English arcadia, the community chose well. Birmingham, the second city of the country and a bastion of Quakerism and Free church life and worship, was not far away. Ashton Keynes also had a railway station. Visitors and longer-term guests could come and go as they chose – and they did.

This book is especially valuable for showing the extent to which the whole venture at Ashton Keynes depended upon the kindness of strangers: the supportive Assistant Secretary at work in the Aliens Department of the British Home Office, the sympathetic estate agent at nearby Cirencester, the manager of the local building society, the local architect and builder, the many private benefactors and well-wishers. It was not only Quakers who found in the Bruderhof something of real spiritual and moral significance: Leyton Richards, the leading Congregationalist and minister of Carr’s Lane church in Birmingham, had from the earliest days in Germany proven an admirer and a steadfast ally.

In sum, for a few years there followed a brief flourishing, a great many activities, initiatives and meetings, a good deal of dairy farming, Bible reading, dancing and ‘sharing’, a manufacturing of what the British could regard as ‘arts and crafts’ products, an association with the Peace Pledge Union and other Christian pacifist organizations, a successful new journal (The Plough) and, increasingly, an adoption of other refugees from Nazism (twenty by December 1938). Children were born there and began to grow up. Inevitably, not everything went well and not everybody was happy. Local opinion could be sullen and resentful of expansion and there were skirmishes in the newspapers. One antagonist, a nearby farmer, was particularly belligerent. But the founding ideals could still be found alive and well. The representative of a national Jewish youth organization visited the Bruderhof and rejoiced to think that it was very like a kibbutz.

It was the war which challenged and then extinguished all of this. Local criticism grew more hostile and more bizarre. Then came internment. For marrying a German, one of the leading lights in the community, Freda Bridgwater, now found herself classified as an ‘Alien’: eight days after her wedding she was removed peremptorily by the police to the Isle of Man. The situation faced by the little community turned up in questions in Parliament and became a part of a vigorous national debate on internment altogether. In the midst of such pressures, the Cotswold Bruderhof lost its confidence. Complicated negotiations to find sanctuary across the Atlantic were soon underway; by the end of 1940 the first members of the community were arriving in Paraguay and the last members joined them in the following April. Even as the members departed, new enquirers and seekers turned up at Ashton Keynes, only to find much of the settlement now in the hands of the London Police Court Mission.

Something of the vision evidently remained even after its adherents had gone. Indeed, as Ian Randall observes at the end of the book, today the Bruderhof has over 2,900 members living in twenty-three international communities, most of them across Europe and North America. The rich archive of the movement is to be found in Walden, New York. The time is surely ripe for a gathering of these strands and the telling of this story.

This is an intricate, meticulous and compassionate book about the haphazard fortunes of communities of renewal and revival across the first half of the twentieth century; communities which sought separation from the world but remained caught up in its turmoil; communities which sought a new simplicity of life only to commit hours of labour to the complexities of adjustment, assistance and survival in a threatening world of totalitarian politics, international war, and social intolerance. For all these reasons, it certainly deserves a wide audience and a place on many shelves, both institutional and personal.

Digital Humanities Highlight: American Christians, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust in the USHMM’s Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Digital Humanities Highlight: American Christians, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust in the USHMM’s Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Experiencing History is a digital teaching and learning tool developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Organized thematically, the tool provides carefully curated collections of primary sources intended for classroom use. Sources are contextualized with brief introductions and users can view the original sources, translations, and transcriptions.

In March 2019, Experiencing History launched a new collection, “American Christians, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust,” which is part of the Museum’s current emphasis on Americans and the Holocaust (see also the current special exhibition, much of which can be viewed at https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/americans-and-the-holocaust).

Developed by the USHMM’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust (with helpful feedback from CCHQ Managing Editor Kyle Jantzen), the collection explores American Christians’ responses to events in Europe in the 1930s and 40s and the ways in which many Americans viewed the rise of Nazism, World War II, and news of the Holocaust through the lens of their Christian identity. The collection presents a cross-section of American Christian life, with sources by Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Quakers, as well as ecumenical and interfaith bodies and faith-based relief organizations. Taken together, the sources point to a number of broad trends, including an early focus on the German Church Struggle (and a tendency to interpret Jewish persecution as part of a broader Nazi hostility to religion), the widespread outrage at Nazi antisemitism and violence in the wake of Kristallnacht (users can listen to a fascinating radio broadcast excerpt from Catholic University of America), and the lack of organized aid to Jewish refugees (with the exception of the American Friends Service Committee).

Several sources also illuminate the ways in which Christian leaders from both sides of the Atlantic shaped Americans’ perceptions of Nazi Germany. Protestant minister Henry Leiper is one example of an American church leader who traveled to Europe in 1932-33 and subsequently published a personal reflection of his experience. Germans also travelled to the United States in the 1930s, sometimes with support of the German government, to shape public opinion of Nazi Germany. The collection includes a letter by an American Adventist woman who was the interpreter for one such German representative, pointing to the difficulties that Christian denominations faced in navigating international relationships with co-religionists.

More collections on topics relating to religion may be developed in the future. The Experiencing History team welcomes feedback, especially from professors who have used the tool in the classroom. The tool can be found here: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/american-christians-nazi-germany-and-the-holocaust.

Book Note: Manfred Gailus, “Religion,” in A Companion to Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Book Note: Manfred Gailus, “Religion,” in A Companion to Nazi Germany, eds. Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen, and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). ISBN: 9781118936887.

Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum *

Like most overviews of Nazi Germany, this new anthology, published in the Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History series, includes a chapter on “religion.” The hefty 600+ page volume contains 37 chapters on a wide range of thematic topics, providing an accessible snapshot of the latest historiography on Nazi Germany and its legacy. Along with addressing enduring questions about the rise of Nazism and the nature of Nazi rule, the volume includes some intriguing chapters on the spatial turn, the history of emotions, and the study of information policies.

In just 13 pages Manfred Gailus gives an overview of the Christian churches and religious identity and practice in Germany during the 12 years of Nazi rule. Rather than placing the Kirchenkampf and an assessment of the Catholic hierarchy at the centre of this narrative, Gailus paints a picture in which several diverse religious groups quarreled and competed with each and with the state. In addition to the Deutsche Christen, the Confessing Church, and the Catholic Church, he discusses the Free Churches, other small independent religious communities (Adventists, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.), and völkisch ‘new pagan’ groups (including the German Faith Movement and the Ludendorff movement). These völkisch-religious groups, whose proponents were called “German Believers,” need to be differentiated from the similarly-named “Believers in God” (a new label for those ardent Nazis who had left the church).

Gailus’ summation reveals the consensus among historians on a number of important issues that have long dominated the historiography, such as the complicity of “considerable parts of the Protestant churches” in the persecution of the Jews (337) and the importance of gender and class in understanding the German Christians and the Confessing Church. He affirms the usefulness of the concept of political religion to understand Nazism, but admits the issue will continue to be debated. Finally, he points to a few topics that are still under-researched, namely the independent smaller churches and the changes that took place during the war years.

The references, bibliography, and suggested reading list point to the most relevant scholarship in German and English.

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

Article Note: Heath Spencer, “The Thuringian Volkskirchenbund, the Nazi Revolution, and Völkisch Conceptions of Christianity”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: Heath Spencer, “The Thuringian Volkskirchenbund, the Nazi Revolution, and Völkisch Conceptions of Christianity,” Church History 87, no. 4 (December 2018): 1091-1118.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Recently, Heath Spencer of Seattle University has been investigating the connections and disconnections between German liberal Protestant thought and Nazi conceptions of Christianity. In this article, he tackles the question of why prominent Thuringian liberal Protestants in the Volkskirchenbund (People’s Church League) supported the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (German Christians) in the German church elections of July 1933. He argues that ideological affinity between the Volkskirchenbund and the German Christians was less important than pragmatic and strategic considerations, and that these liberal Protestants only supported German Christians reluctantly, once other options had been exhausted. “Their story,” Spencer writes, “illustrates one of the more complicated paths toward Christian complicity in the Third Reich” (1092).

The episode around which Spencer’s article revolves was the decision of the Volkskirchenbund—a liberal faction in the Thuringian Protestant synod—not to run their own candidates in the July 1933 church election, but rather to recommend to their members that they vote for the list of candidates put forward by the German Christian Movement, the leading pro-Nazi faction. The result was that the Volkskirchenbund disappeared from the synod and became a study group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), while the German Christians went on to capture 46 of the 51 seats in the synod and proceeded to make Thuringia a bastion of Nazi Protestantism.

Spencer critiques the view offered by Karl Barth and promulgated by members of the theologically conservative Confessing Church that the rise of the German Christian Movement was the product of two centuries of theological modernism. Thuringian Volkskirchenbund leaders, he suggests, “did not rush into the arms of the Deutsche Christen in July 1933; anxiety and resignation were prominent alongside of cautious optimism and occasional expressions of enthusiasm” (1094).

Tracing Thuringian church politics from 1918-1933, Spencer argues that the Thuringian church constitution of 1924 gave rise to diverse church-political factions, including the Volkskirchenbund, which represented the political left, over and against the right-leaning Lutheran Christliche Volksbund (Christian People’s League) and the centrist Einigungsbund (Unification League). The Volkskirchenbund aligned itself with other German liberal Protestants who “called for democratic governance, theological pluralism, and churches that stood above political parties and narrow class interests—all key elements of the liberal Protestant Volkskirche ideal” (1098). Heinrich Weinel (professor of New Testament in Jena) was a key figure in the Volkskirchenbund, working with other liberal Protestant leaders to advocate for modern theology, innovative adult education programs, and interdenominational elementary schools to broaden the reach of liberal Protestantism (and liberal politics) in the region.

After 1924, however, both Thuringian parliamentary politics and church politics became more conservative. In the Protestant synod, the rise of leftist Religious Socialists was matched by the emergence of a new völkisch group, Bund für Deutsche Kirche (League for German Church), which began introducing “church legislation that promoted racial purity, hardline nationalism, and the removal of ‘Jewish elements’ from Christianity” (1105). Because liberals in the Volkskirchenbund promoted theological pluralism, they professed openness towards both these new groups. Indeed, Heinrich Weinel and others became increasingly engaged with the Christian-völkisch movement in Thuringia, combining “gestures of toleration, criticism of ‘excesses,’ and partial affirmation” in their responses, even proving willing to “recognize race and nation as the God-given foundations of all human life and all human love,” as Weinel put it (1106).

By the beginning of the 1930s, as the völkisch movement grew dramatically in both the Thuringian state and church, the Volkskirchenbund (now led by Hans Heyn) remained open to it as an important expression of Christianity among German people, criticizing only those aspects that liberals deemed overly divisive, including some of the anti-Jewish elements of the Bund für Deutsche Kirche.

Ultimately, though, a völkisch wing emerged within the Volkskirchenbund itself, particularly among younger members who were animated by the ways in which German racial nationalism seemed to unite society and church. By the time of the Nazi seizure of power and the 1933 church elections, four new developments pushed the Volkskirchenbund to capitulate to völkisch Protestantism: the rise of the German Christian Movement, which polled strongly in the January 1933 church elections; the frustration of Volkskirchenbund leaders over their failure to attract more younger followers; their fear that theological conservatives would seize control and make Thuringia too sectarian; and their lack of money to run a proper campaign in the July 1933 church elections (1111-1112). In the end, leaders in the Volkskirchenbund decided that the German Christians best represented the church-political goals of the Volkskirchenbund, sent around an official announcement of their support for the pro-Nazi Protestants, and effectively closed up shop on their own movement.

Spencer’s article illuminates the way theological liberals in the Volkskirchenbund—committed to pluralism and unity—brought themselves to support the German Christian Movement. They hoped to ensure that the church did not miss its chance to “to rescue an embattled and divided nation, to remedy the mistakes of the past” and “to meet the needs of the hour” (1118). “Ironically, their dream of a free, democratic, and culturally relevant Volkskirche led them to support—at least momentarily—an authoritarian group determined to impose its militant and racist ideology on the church and its members” (1118).