Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017), 456pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-34107-4.

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

Horst Junginger’s ambitious and weighty history of an exceptionally ugly aspect of Christian scholarship during the Third Reich begins with a dedication to a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe named Sophie Ettlinger. Ettlinger “accidentally” made her way into Junginger’s meticulous work of scholarship “because she possessed a typewriter with Hebrew letters that was of service to National Socialist ‘Jew research.’” The heartrending and galling narrative about Sophie’s fate (and that of her typewriter), to which we will return shortly, illuminates not only Judenforschung during the Third Reich, but also Nazi theft of Jewish property and, ultimately, the murder of six million European Jews.

A few key conceptions and realities are at the forefront of Junginger’s study, which is a translation of a revised version of the author’s Habilitation thesis. First, the author seeks to demonstrate that Nazi-era “Jew research,” which purported to pose scholarly answers to the “Jewish Question” but in fact aimed at supporting anti-Jewish policies – was carried out at German universities in a manner that mutually reinforced religious and racial antisemitism. Thus, the book focuses on the religious aspect of modern antisemitism – even while recognizing with great care that “religious stereotypes coalesce with a racial explanation of the world” (ix). Second, the University of Tübingen’s centuries-long role as “an intellectual stronghold against Judaism” (x) culminating in its essential function as a locus of Nazi Judenforschung, is emphasized. Finally, theoretical and practical antisemitism converged during the Holocaust, as typified here by Junginger’s examination of the biographies of roughly a dozen war criminals who, the author demonstrates, were responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand European Jews during the Shoah.

The book is presented in nine chapters. Chapters one and two set out the intellectual framework for the rest of the work, demonstrating how problematic were Nazi efforts to define Jews by means of their race or religion. The fact that baptismal records were a key means of identifying whether one was an “Aryan” or not speaks both to the crucial role played by the churches in this certification (and thus, by extension, the persecution, expropriation of belongings and property, ghettoization, and murder that followed for “non-Aryans”) and to the confusion brought about by the Nazi classification system. Junginger notes astutely, “National Socialist laws and their accompanying political commentaries could concentrate on blood and genealogical succession as much as they liked; apart from religion the state had absolutely no other means to ascertain the race of its citizens” (7).

Chapter three traces the history of the University of Tübingen’s long and tortuous history as a place of exclusion for and condemnation of Jews and Judaism. A key consideration here is how such ideas survived into the post-Enlightenment and post-emancipation eras. Junginger finds the answer, in part, in the work of the social historian Jacob Katz, who argued that, even in a far less religious epoch, Christianity was still a defining aspect of the European outlook. The pre-modern image of “the Jews” metamorphized “into a seemingly rational one” (68). Yet, even in the modern era, lingering and “antiquated” Christian prejudices still contributed to a multifaceted post-emancipation antisemitic milieu.

In chapter four, Junginger demonstrates that the University of Tübingen’s institutional bias against Jews and Judaism did not reverse during the era of the Weimar Republic, which he calls “the zenith of Jewish emancipation.” Quite to the contrary, and despite the fact that the Weimar constitution guaranteed full civil rights and access to civil service employment for all, regardless of religious affiliation, the university consciously undermined such a policy so thoroughly that, when the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service came into effect in April 1933, the university had the lowest quota of dismissals of any German university. While other reasons for this include the national malaise in the wake of the First World War, Junginger places greater emphasis on Tübingen’s centuries-long “all-encompassing nationalist Protestant consensus,” which included antisemitism (111).

Chapter five deals largely with the case of Gerhard Kittel, who became Chair of New Testament Studies at Tübingen in 1926. Thanks to the work of scholars like Max Weinreich, Robert P. Ericksen, Alan Steinweis, and Anders Gerdmar, Kittel is now a well-known and notorious case of Protestant scholarship in service of the Nazi regime, including its anti-Jewish policy. Still, Junginger’s deep dive into both primary and secondary sources offers the reader some new or lesser known aspects of Kittel. One is the revealing and harrowing account of a Jewish scholar named Charles Horowitz (1890–1969). In March 1928, Gerhard Kittel applied to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) for funding of a planned collection of rabbinic texts. In his application, Kittel stressed how vital the participation of young Jewish scholars would be. The project was approved and funded handsomely (122).

As one of the Jewish scholars hired for the project, Horowitz began working in the winter semester of 1930–1931. While working at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Study of Judaism) in Berlin, Horowitz collaborated during the early 1930s on the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament), which was edited by Kittel. He apparently received no remuneration for this work. Horowitz also translated the Talmud treatise Jeruschalmi and proofread the Talmud references in Adolf Schlatter’s commentaries during this period. For his work overseeing a small working group for rabbinic texts in the summer of 1930, work which continued until March 1933, he received the paltry monthly stipend of 25 Reichsmark (124).

In April 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, Kittel notified the rector’s office that Horowitz’s salary would be discontinued immediately, adding in June that Horowitz’s work as a tutorial assistant was to be taken over by Karl Georg Kuhn (1906–76) after Horowitz’s “retirement.” Just a few days before Horowitz was summarily dismissed, Kuhn had held the official boycott speech for the Nazi Party on Tübingen’s market square. Even before the National Socialists came to power, Horowitz had been the target of antisemitic hostility in Tübingen. He often found menacing letters and antisemitic notes on his desk and all of his documents were stolen from his study (125).

Horowitz’s misery would only increase, of course, with the onset of Nazi rule. Not long after his dismissal from work at Tübingen, he and his family fled to Amsterdam and then, in 1937, to Dijon, France. After the German invasion and occupation of France, in 1941, the Horowitz family fled across the demarcation line to Valence. Despite taking every precaution, including moving from place to place, in August 1942 Charles’s wife Lea was arrested and deported after a denunciation. While Charles and his children barely survived the war and the Shoah, Lea was murdered in Auschwitz (125-126).

Chapters six through eight cover the efforts of Kittel and like-minded others to transform existing confessional studies about Judaism into purportedly scholarly antisemitic studies; the extent to which such efforts were effective; the conversion of such theoretical studies into concrete action directed against Jews (that is, ghettoization, theft, violence, and murder); and the “ultimate consequences” of the antisemitism theorized at Tübingen but promulgated and executed throughout Europe during the Holocaust – that is, the aforementioned hundreds of thousands of murders carried out and/or ordered by war criminals influenced by their studies at Tübingen.

Among other things, we learn in these three chapters how Kittel was called upon in 1942 to give an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the desperate, stateless Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot German Legation secretary Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom that began on November 9 (261ff.) and that Kittel provided both written materials and ancient Jewish caricatures for the notorious antisemitic propaganda exhibition called “Der ewige Jude,” which ran initially in the German Museum in Munich from November 1937 to January 1938 (230-231).

Though these three chapters offer a dire array of examples of words and deeds offered up by the purveyors of antisemitic Judenforschung during the war and the Holocaust, perhaps no example ties the threads of the study together quite like that of the aforementioned Sophie Ettlinger. In keeping with the increasingly common Nazi practice of theft of Jewish goods and property (made legal ex post facto) Sophie’s brand-new, very valuable portable typewriter – which contained Hebrew letters – was stolen and offered by the Reich Ministry of Education for sale to the University of Tübingen in September 1941. Though the rector at Tübingen replied favorably a few weeks later, noting that both the “research unit on the history of Judaism” and its Protestant faculty of theology would find the typewriter very useful, he received disappointing news, as it had been sold instead to the Frankfurt-based Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, whose head was Wilhelm Grau. Junginger notes the irony that an official Nazi organ for antisemitic research would thus take possession of the stolen (and re-sold) typewriter rather than “Judenforscher” Karl Georg Kuhn or another member of the faculty of Protestant theology at Tübingen.

Together with several family members, Sophie Ettlinger had been deported in October 1940 to the Gurs internment camp. Between August 5 and September 1, 1942, four deportation trains left Gurs for the extermination camps in the East, with a stop at the transit camp at Drancy along the way. Sophie was present with the more than 2,000 Jews from this group that went to Auschwitz, where Sophie was murdered (258-259).

The concluding chapter recapitulates the main emphases of the work but also reminds readers that most of the war criminals discussed in chapter eight—all of whom had significant ties to the University of Tübingen and/or its Jewish research unit and had blood on their hands by way of direct participation in the murder of European Jews—either received light jail sentences or had their sentences later reduced, enabling them to live the rest of their days in freedom and comfort.

Junginger’s work illuminates how the University of Tübingen, especially those members of its Protestant faculty of theology involved in research on the “Jewish Question,” made key contributions not merely to a broadly antisemitic atmosphere in Württemberg but to the murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews during the Holocaust. While historians and scholars of religion will find it particularly useful, patient lay readers, too, will benefit from its sophisticated but clear argument about the nexus between antisemitic words and deeds in Nazi Germany.

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 328, ISBN: 978-3-8471-0726-2

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

This review was originally published in theologie.geschichte, Bd. 13 (2018) and is reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher. The original version can be found here.

The volume is a collection of chapters on the roles of individual clergymen during the Nazi regime in the Protestant church of Saxony. It is a fairly specialized study for those concerned with regional church history in what in Germany is called Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. This branch of church history focuses on the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the impact of the Third Reich (though the field has over time widened in scope and perspective). The aim of this volume is to introduce the biographical-professional pathways, political choices, and theological justifications of men working in the church of Saxony in the 1930s and 1940s. The research is based on the evaluation of new archival materials, and all the case studies follow a consistent framework. They show the spectrum of positions these men took during the Nazi regime and the Kirchenkampf (church struggle), from the moment Hitler took power and the Nazification of German society to the outbreak of World War II and its end in 1945. They also situate each of the clergymen in their family histories and theological training before 1933, followed up briefly by notes on their personal and professional lives after 1945, including the de-Nazification process and accommodations with the new East German socialist government.

Commendably, the editors cover the various levels of complicity and resistance in their selection of biographical reconstructions. They do so systematically by dividing the volume into four parts. The first and longest part introduces the biographies of clergymen who embraced Nazi ideology and identified with the Deutsche Christen – the “German Christians,” a group within the Protestant parishes that saw no contradiction between Hitler and Luther, between Nazi ideology and church teachings (Knabe; Münnich; Coch; Fügner; Bohland; Axt). The second part covers four men belonging to the so-called “Mitte,” the center, who tried to walk a middle path between radicalized and Nazi-supporting clergy and those who opposed the Nazi takeover of church and society (Herz; Bruhns; Loesche; Gerber). The third and shortest part introduces two biographies of men of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), who prioritized faith in Christ over nationalist and völkisch ideologies and (partially) resisted the Nazi regime (von Kirchbach; Delekat). The last part documents the biographies of churchmen who were persecuted by the Nazis for political and racial reasons, including Protestant ministers who were classified as Jews (or mix-blooded) by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Stempel; Kaiser; Gottlieb; Starke; Grosse).

The volume’s internal structure – from Nazi sympathizer to active resistance – guides the reader well through the many choices these clergymen made and the degree to which they used their clerical authority to position themselves vis-à-vis a dictatorial regime. What, in hindsight, looks like an unambiguous verdict – after all, how would any Christian minister be able to support a racist, murderous, and genocidal regime? – turns into a more complicated maze of decision making, career ambitions, and ideological convictions when examining how biographical motivations intersect with political developments. Given the longstanding German tradition of fusing Lutheran theology with national aspirations, many believed that Hitler would revitalize the Protestant churches and strengthen the German nation against common foes: secularization, Bolshevism, and those responsible for the Versailles Peace Treaty. Such expectations enticed clergy to join the Nazi Party and the Deutsche Christen (DC). Some held on to both memberships, others left the DC but not the NSDAP; some moved from the DC to the Confessing Church over time, others joined the German army as military chaplains. Yet others never affiliated with any of these groups because they identified with religious-socialist circles or the political party of the Social Democrats. It is worth delving into the continuities and discontinuities we see played out in these individual biographies.

As a reviewer, it is tempting to introduce some of the characters by name and to follow their life stories within the church environment of Saxony. However, for readers unfamiliar with the particulars of Saxony’s regional church administration and struggle, the amassed archival details of each chapter would quickly overwhelm. Experts in church history will have, no doubt, an easier time in grasping the significance of certain names and nuances, and they will welcome this volume as an addition to the literature on the German church struggle. Yet, not only specialists should read Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz, a point I will return to at the end.

A few areas of concern need to be mentioned for they weaken the otherwise meticulous research presented in this volume.

More help could have been provided to the reader to make sense of the many historical details mentioned in the chapters. At times, the biographical material is just a long list of data; this is especially true for the men’s family histories and their university studies and early career pathways preceding 1933. Though the contributors claim that this information is important to understand their subjects’ later choices, this is not always evident. More explicit interpretative models would have been useful. The criticism that Philippe Lejeune once voiced against autobiographical prose can apply here to some degree. Autobiographers, Lejeune lamented, sometimes write as if they fill out a “questionnaire sent by a punctilious administration.”[1] The copiousness of biographical data does not automatically contain explanatory power.

More help could have also been provided for weighing the significance of particular choices and attitudes. How should we assess, for example, someone’s genuine Heimatliebe (love of one’s home-nation) when it goes hand-in-hand with anti-Jewish resentments (as in the case of Oskar Bruhns with his Baltic-German roots and völkisch identification)? How should we distinguish between an ambitious career move and membership in the NSDAP? Some chapters offer clear assessments, but generally the volume errs on the side of caution.

A few of the contributors are too close to their subjects, with the result that they lose critical distance and present them with undue loyalty. Generational affinity might be one reason for this shortcoming (the contributors’ birth years range from 1929 to 1988). This is especially the case for contributors born before 1945. Their own linguistic style (Sprachduktus) occasionally resembles those of their subjects – and those styles carry embedded value references. This is true, for example, for the issue of gender and gender relations. Wives and children of the churchmen are mostly introduced as an aside, such as in the case of the death of von Kirchbach’s wife after his return from World War I, which is commented with the laconic entry: “He left in good care his children, eight and six years old. For him now, the decision to study theology was firm” (208).[2] Another example is the cavalier way of commenting on behaviors questionable by today’s standards, such as the beating of students for educational purposes: “In extremely rare cases it is told that emotional stress apparently led him to slap [his students]” (313).[3]

There is also little discourse analysis of the theologians’ autobiographical writings that were consulted for this study. This lack is particularly glaring with respect to self-exculpations during the de-Nazification process (Selbstreinigung) after 1945. Ego-documents often require a reading between the lines, listening not only to what is said but also to how it is said and what is not being said, and to paying attention for the less obvious elements of emotionality, narrative patterns, and omissions.

Related to these issues is the absence of the Holocaust in the presented biographical reconstructions. Anti-Jewish tirades and antisemitic stereotyping as well as the Arierparagraph and the case of pastors of Jewish origins find mentioning in the chapters, but the Holocaust itself is largely absent. It might very well be that the archival materials do not contain any such references, but this silence in the documentation should have been addressed and problematized.

17 of the 18 churchmen introduced in this volume were born between 1877 and 1895, 12 of them between 1882 and1890 (with one outlier who was born in 1906[4]). Little is done with the opportunity to study these men as members of the same generational cohort, the 1890ers (born between 1870 and 1890).[5] This political-generational cohort shared identifications and worldviews that united them beyond their individual biographies. These men lived through a number of political dreams and upheavals, from the Wilhelmine era to the end of the Kaiserreich, from colonial ambitions to the end of imperial dreams after World War I. It was a time characterized by social tensions between workers, industrial capitalism, and the middle class. These themes (especially World War I and the attempts at re-binding the working class to the church) appear frequently in the chapters, but they are not woven into a more cohesive instrument of interpretation.

Finally, what works well for this volume – namely the ordering of the biographies according to the conventions of contemporary church history (Deutsche Christen – the Center – Confessing Church – persecuted theologians) – is also a limitation. This framing follows a progression from most complicit with the Nazi regime to least complicit. This makes sense. Yet, its reliance on a well-worn traditional framework, which categorizes individual choices along the organizational venues of the Kirchenkampf, strains the possibilities of assessing culpability and complicity differently. What if we were to apply to the biographies of Protestant clergy and theologians more fine-tuned categories of culpability, such as perpetrator, accomplice, opportunist, enabler, bystander, beneficiary, victim? What if we read the archival material through an analysis of power and male agency? What if we foregrounded in these biographies the question of male subjectivity in the gray zone of moral and political choices and opportunities? An analysis of levels of culpability might compel us to reconfigure the historical and ethical assessment of these men’s choices, and this might be particularly relevant for the men of the Mitte (center).

A volume like Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz cannot accomplish all these tasks or satisfy these desiderata; the concerns raised above merely indicate how detailed historical research can be expanded and enriched. The two volume editors write in their brief and solid introduction that “the political agenda of the NSDAP found wide and positive resonance in [German] Protestantism.” Among the reasons for Christians supporting the Nazi party, they list the following: rejection of the “Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, the strengthening of the state, measures to increase employment, [securing] of national borders [Volkstumsgrenzen],…legal discrimination of Jews,…fears of Bolshevism and also discontent with a pluralistic society” (10). If we were to replace some of the historical references in this passage with contemporary political agendas, a number of countries would come to mind where politicians currently stoke fears and hate – with the support and vote of large numbers of Christians. Replace the Versailles Treaty with the Paris Agreement of Climate Change, Volkstumsgrenzen with national border security, legal discrimination of Jews with legal discrimination of immigrants, or Bolshevism with Islam, and we find ourselves in the midst of Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary. As illiberal democracies spread, are Christians today any better prepared to resist than the Protestant theologians in the church of Saxony in the 1930s? This is why the book, Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz can and needs to be read by people beyond a circle of specialists.

Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University, USA

Notes:
[1] Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis 1989, p. 235).
[2] In the original: “Nach Dresden zurückgekehrt, fand er sie nicht mehr unter den Lebenden. Seine Kinder, acht und sechs Jahre alt, konnte er in guter Obhut lassen. Für ihn stand nun der Entschluss zum Theologiestudium fest.”
[3] In the original: “In äußerst seltenen Fällen wird berichtet, dass ihm offensichtlich als Affekthandlung die Hand ausgerutscht sei.”
[4] The outlier is Horst Ficker, a parish minister of the Confessing Church. Born in 1906, he belongs to the generational cohort of the 1933ers (see note 5). Indeed, his biography – which is juxtaposed to Bohland, a parish minister affiliated with the DC – reads quite differently from the other biographies presented in this volume.
[5] Björn Krondorfer, “Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust in Autobiographien protestantischer Theologen. ” In Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945. Edited by Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach, and Norbert Reck (Gütersloh 2006, pp.. 23-170).

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies XV, The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies XV, The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives, Washington University in St. Louis, November 2018

By Lauren Rossi, Simon Fraser University

The Holocaust Educational Foundation’s biennial conference, Lessons and Legacies, met this November in St. Louis, Missouri. This international conference continues to draw scholars from across North America and Europe, with some representation from Israel, Australia, Mexico, and Colombia. Because the focus of the conference is relatively narrow but the quality of the research presented is generally quite high, the loyalty of the attendees is evident—many have been attending for decades. Panels are mixed with both luminaries from the field as well as young scholars presenting their work for the first time to a professional audience.

This year, the quality of the work on display was no exception. The conference featured a mix of traditional panels, closed seminars with pre-circulated papers, video and poster presentations, workshops, and three dinner presentations: a keynote by Omer Bartov, whose most recent book, Anatomy of a Genocide, is a devastatingly powerful microhistory of the Ukrainian town Buczacz before and during the Holocaust (Bartov’s mother was born there and emigrated to Palestine with her parents in 1935); an awards ceremony for distinguished service and retirements; and a film screening about the Warsaw Ghetto archive. The conference, and the foundation itself remain firmly committed to the Holocaust as its primary research and pedagogical focus, but the panel content was wide-ranging. An abbreviated list of topics includes perpetrator ideology, cultural production in the camps, Holocaust memory in science fiction, museums, wartime relief, relationships between Jews and “non-Aryans,” Holocaust memory in Poland, photography and spectatorship, victimhood, and the Frankfurt-Auschwitz trials. At least two panels were devoted to situating the Holocaust within the broader context of genocide studies, one of which provoked a valuable discussion with the audience about comparative studies of cultural genocide and the Holocaust. The re-emergence of extremist movements in Europe and the far right on both sides of the Atlantic was also on display. One panel in particular, about legislating and criminalizing the history of the Holocaust, featured a conversation between Elzbieta Janicka, Jan Grabowski, and Jan T. Gross, the latter whose work is directly involved in Poland’s current history debates and has been much maligned by critics on the right.

The HEF, and especially its founder, Theodore “Zev” Weiss, has long been an ardent supporter of the importance of researching and teaching about the Holocaust and the role of the churches. So it was noticeable that the program, although heavy on the theme of antisemitism (most of it regionally focused, on Bavaria, the Ustasha, Florence, Odessa, Italy, Latvia, and Poland), offered no panel about religion or Christianity or the current state of research in the field. Only one paper explicitly addressed the topic of Catholicism, and that was my own presentation, “Catholic Seminarians and Vernichtungskrieg, 1939-1945: Masculinity, Complicity, Resistance”, in a panel about the Holocaust and masculinities. (The paper was well received, but the panel was more about gender than about religion, and much of the commentary reflected this.) This could reflect a lack of proposals for the conference organizers to choose from, though several of our editors were in attendance and I have learned that at least one proposed panel about the churches was declined. The lack of this theme certainly should not be taken as a suggestion that the field is exhausted. Our own newsletter’s quarterly installments showcase the most recent scholarship in both English and German about the various facets of Christianity and the Third Reich as well as the churches confronting postwar challenges such as secularization and their histories under fascism. The editors usually have a lengthy list of articles and books to choose from for review.

So perhaps it is a sign of other challenges, two of the most obvious being that many of those scholars currently working in the field of Christianity and the Holocaust do not attend Lessons and Legacies (or do not attend regularly), and that those scholars who do attend are not actively working in the field. Like many academic institutes that host regular conferences, the Holocaust Educational Foundation does some advertising but relies largely on word of mouth to reach new scholars, including overseas. It might be a question of making stronger appeals to those scholars whose work merits showcasing in this venue. The organizers of the next Lessons and Legacies conference, meeting in Ottawa, Canada, in 2020, might also be persuaded to consider accepting more papers and panels about religion and Christianity if it was the case that this year’s organizers turned down such proposals. There are some among the editors of the CCHQ, myself included, who could be more proactive about putting such panels together and pitching them to the organizers. In this manner, a third challenge—persuading the current decision-makers on the foundation’s academic council that the Holocaust, religion, and the churches is still an important topic producing innovative research—might be relatively easily overcome.

Another challenge, and one potentially more difficult to master, given the HEF’s ongoing and obvious commitment to the Holocaust, is a suggestion that was voiced at one of the panels that I attended, of including more papers and panels that engage with the field of genocide studies. (The audience at this panel was enthusiastic about the idea.) Increasingly over the past few conferences, Lessons and Legacies has featured papers that address genocide beyond the Holocaust, but these are always exceptions and most panels are devoted specifically to the genocide of Europe’s Jews. The debate about the Holocaust as the paradigmatic genocide, traditionally a non-starter for the specialist in Holocaust studies, contuse to loom large in genocide studies. In accepting that the Holocaust features as one of several twentieth-century genocides, Lessons and Legacies could make an important pivot that does nothing to diminish the importance of studying the Holocaust while at the same time appealing to a larger array of scholars, some of whom are doing valuable work on the role of institutional religion, its actors and adherents, and mass violence and genocide. (My own research currently tends in this direction.) And the field of genocide studies, which grew out of Holocaust studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, is a rapidly-growing field that reaches all corners of the globe. Traditionally, such comparative approaches have yielded some of the strongest, most thought-provoking presentations at Lessons and Legacies. This opinion will not be shared by all who attend Lessons and Legacies, and my suggestion is not meant to indicate that either the conference or the foundation’s work are somehow lacking because their focus is specific to the Holocaust. Indeed, this is the fifteenth Lessons and Legacies, the sixteenth is already being planned, and it continues to attract scholars both well established (Dagmar Herzog presented new findings in the T4 archive; Marion Kaplan discussed Jewish refugees in Portugal) and emerging (Sebastian Huebel analyzed Jews and gender in prewar concentration camps; Lorena Sekwan Fontaine spoke about cultural genocide in Canada). I do feel it worth noting that a conference already producing such diverse research can only be enriched by engaging more consistently with research from genocide studies.

Conference Report: “Religion and Migration: Institutions and Law”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Conference Report: “Religion and Migration: Institutions and Law,” Sponsored by the Religious Cultures Network, German Studies Association, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2018.

By Christina Matzen, University of Toronto

Five scholars convened a Religious Cultures Network-sponsored panel on September 29, 2018, at the German Studies Association conference in Pittsburgh, PA. The panel consisted of presenters Rebecca Carter-Chand, James Niessen, and Christopher Stohs, while Josiah Simon delivered commentary and Benjamin Goossen moderated the panel.

Rebecca Carter-Chand began with her paper, “The Transplantation of the Salvation Army to Germany, 1886-1918.” Using the horticultural metaphor of transplantation, she traces how the London-based Salvation Army took root in Germany, developing into a “noisy” but respected organization. The 1890s proved an important decade for the German Salvation Army because its newly-adopted mission to address social reform and poor relief corresponded with Germany’s ever-increasing concern with the “social question.” It soon had a sturdy presence in major German cities and received acceptance as a social and religious German movement. Indeed, the German Salvation Army, which grew into a de facto church and social welfare agency, employed innovative strategies of evangelism that reverberated with notions of the German Volk. Thus, when war broke out in 1914, the organization would be able to survive its British parent association, in large part due to the leadership’s successful efforts at presenting itself as a patriotic German movement with an internationalist mission.

James Niessen’s paper, “The Role of Christian Churches of German Europe in the Hungarian Refugee Crisis of 1956-57,” examines the Austrian-Catholic response to the nearly 200,000 people who fled Hungary in 1956 after Soviet forces suppressed the Hungarian Revolution. Niessen argues that Austria’s assistance was altruistic but also opportunistic, as the nation sought to compensate for its role in Nazi crimes. For faith-based groups, however, he maintains that an ethical imperative took precedence over opportunism, which can be understood through scripture mandating care for the homeless. Despite religious differences among these organizations, their leadership was united in the interests of the refugees. Niessen profiles four Austrian Catholic leaders who were instrumental in aid efforts: Archbishop of Vienna Franz König; Leopold Ungar; Stefan László; and Fabian Flynn, C.P. He also notes that Protestants quickly mobilized to provide aid to Hungary and its refugees. In his conclusion, Niessen makes clear that these humanitarian reactions should also be understood in the Cold War context of Christian anti-communism.

In the final paper, “Sprich, sing und bete Deutsch: The Lyrical Campaign against the Bennett Law,” Christopher Stohs traces Wisconsin’s 1889 Bennett Law and its implications for German immigrant life in nineteenth-century America. The law made English-language instruction compulsory for reading, writing, math, and U.S. history classes. Many German-Americans in the Midwest perceived this law to be an assault on their parochial schools and thus their religious, linguistic, and cultural freedoms. Stohs examines prose and poetry that opponents of the law wrote and published in Germania, a Protestant-leaning German-language newspaper and Wisconsin’s most widely circulated periodical at the time. He argues that these pieces stoked fears in Republican Lutherans, motivating them to join forces with Democratic Catholics to repeal the Bennett Law, which they accomplished in 1891.

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

By David A. R. Clark, University of Toronto

From time to time, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly invite a young scholar to profile his or her work. Here we are pleased to introduce you to David A. R. Clark, a PhD candidate in Theological Studies at the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology.

Broadly, my research examines the intersection between theology, biblical interpretation, and Christian responses to Nazism and the Holocaust. More specifically, my dissertation, “Jewish Scriptures in Nazi Germany: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Old Testament, 1932-1945,” examines Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Old Testament during the Nazi period, particularly in the context of antisemitic efforts by the “German Christian” movement to discredit and decanonize these Jewish Scriptures. Centrally, this three-part dissertation considers whether Bonhoeffer’s exegesis presented a theological alternative or protest to the claims of the “German Christian” movement.

Part I of the dissertation builds on historiographical research by Doris Bergen and Susannah Heschel in order to analyze the place of the Old Testament in Nazi Germany. I recently presented on this research area at the Canadian-American Theological Association interdisciplinary conference, “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology”: my paper received the conference prize, and is now a forthcoming article in the Canadian-American Theological Review entitled “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933.” Part II of the dissertation examines the significance of Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of the Old Testament in the political and theological context of the Nazi period, focusing especially on Bonhoeffer’s approach to the Psalms. My article in this research area, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in Its Interpretive Context,” was recently published in the peer-reviewed Scottish Journal of Theology, an imprint of Cambridge University Press. (For readers without institutional access to the journal, a read-only version can be accessed here.) Part III of the dissertation considers the implications for post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations of Bonhoeffer’s Nazi-era exegesis. Within the scope of the dissertation, I can only begin to trace these wide-ranging implications; accordingly, I intend a fuller treatment of this topic as a postdoctoral project.

My research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Additionally, in 2017, I was a Seminary Fellow with Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. For more information or to contact me, readers can visit www.davidarclark.ca.

Letter from the Editors (September 2018)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Letter from the Editors (September 2018)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

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

By Collegeville Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

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

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

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

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

Letter from the Editors (June 2018)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Letter from the Editors (June 2018)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

As summer begins, the editors are pleased to publish a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This issue contains an insightful article by Manfred Gailus and a combination of powerful book and film reviews, article notes, and conference reports assessing new research in German and European religious history.

Church Bells at the Potsdam Garrison Church. Bundesarchiv, Bild 170-123 / Max Baur / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_170-123,_Potsdam,_Glockenspiel_der_Garnisonkirche.jpg.

Gailus writes about the ongoing issue of Nazi-era church bells in German parish churches. Controversy has emerged in a number of locations (and perhaps should emerge in others) over church bells dedicated to Adolf Hitler and/or emblazoned with swastikas. Gailus explains the current state of the issue.

Robert P. Ericksen has contributed a detailed review of a new study by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, containing sixteen examples of German Protestant theologians who promoted an “an artgemäss theology, claiming the necessity of certain racial and cultural qualities for any Germans claiming faith in Jesus and the Christian God.” This review lays out the depth and breadth of Protestant theological participation in Nazi racial ideology.

Doris L. Bergen praises Matthias Grünzig’s new book on the ongoing saga of the Potsdam Garrison Church–the church used by Hitler to open his first parliament and symbolically launch his government. Already a centre of Nazi activity in the Weimar era, the church served as a hotbed of Nazi Christianity in the Third Reich, and its rebuilding today reopens the controversy surrounding its place in the Christian collaboration with Nazism.

Other reviews in this issue include Dirk Schuster’s assessment of Joachim Krause’s documentation of the roots of the German Christian Church Movement in the parishes of the Wieratal, and Kyle Jantzen’s reviews of the powerful new edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” essay, with an introduction by Victoria J. Barnett, and of a new film about Bonhoeffer entitled Come Before Winter.

Finally, Doris Bergen writes a fascinating conference report about a recent Bethel College conference on Mennonites and the Holocaust, and Rebecca Carter-Chand highlights a new article on the 1975 West German Catholic post-Holocaust statement “Our Hope: A Confession of Faith for Our Time.”

We trust you will find these contributions interesting and enlightening, and we wish you a fine summer ahead.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Shrill Bell Ringing

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Shrill Bell Ringing

With “Hitler Bells,” Protestant churches backed the “Führer.” Many still ring today.

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

This article was originally published in Der Tagesspiegel, Nr. 23425, Wednesday, March 28, 2018. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

How many “Hitler bells” still ring on German church towers and when will they stop? For almost a year, the idyllic wine village Herxheim am Berg (Rhineland-Palatinate) has experienced an unprecedented media hype: since 1934, in St. Jacob’s Church, a so-called “Hitler bell” has been ringing, on which a swastika is emblazoned, along with the political slogan “All for the Fatherland – Adolf Hitler.” Newspaper reporters, TV journalists, and onlookers have been visiting the community on the romantic wine route since summer 2017. Also, ring-wing political party members interested themselves in this bell and a village in which it could ring freely until September 2017. The mayor, an electrical engineer, was reduced to making awkward and somewhat questionable comments which forced him to resign.

Since December 2017, Herxheim has a new mayor—a retired pastor—but his statements are questionable too. Since then, there has been a dispute in the village and in the region: the bell must go, say some; the bell should stay, say others. Startled by the battle of Herxheim, other parishes began looking more closely at their church towers. In the meantime, five problematic bells from the Hitler era have been discovered in the Protestant Church of the Palatinate alone. And elsewhere, too, there were “Hitler bells”: one in the Saarland, two in Lower Saxony, and, amazingly, two more in the oh-so politically correct city of Berlin.

A large swastika—not easy to miss.

It is already a bit much that church bells with swastikas and corresponding Nazi slogans could even remain in use up to 2017. In Essingen (Rhineland-Palatinate), until September 2017 there rang a bell consecrated in 1936 with the inscription: “As Adolf Hitler gave sword and freedom to the German country. Cast by the Master Pfeifer, Kaiserslautern.” From the tower of the Church of the Cross in Schweringen (Lower Saxony) a bell with an oversized 35-by-35-inch swastika has rung for worship since 1934. This cannot be easily overlooked. The inscription on the bell is stamped on: “Germany has awakened out of misery and out of night – This cross gave success, helped to conquer discord – Thanks be to God.” Since September 2017, this bell has been silent. In the face of public agitation, the mayor professed he knew nothing about it.

In the Wichern Chapel in Berlin-Spandau, in October 1934, Rev. Johannes Rehse consecrated a bell bearing a Christian cross and a swastika, as well as the Bible verse (1 John 5. 4): “Our faith is the victory, which has overcome the world.” It is obvious that this creed was conceived differently in 1934 at the consecration ceremony designed by Nazi pastors. After the confirmands chanted “Under the flag we walk,” the bell consecration closed with a triple “Sieg-Heil” to Hitler and the singing of the German national anthem and the Horst Wessel song. The Spandau bell, the existence of which was acknowledged from time to time in the post-war period by the parish as well as by the church leadership in Berlin-Brandenburg, fell silent in November 2017 and has now been replaced by a new bell.

The Protestant milieu was comparatively far more infused with the Nazi zeitgeist than the Catholic Church.

In total, about a dozen bells were discovered in the 2017 Reformation commemoration year with dedications and symbols from the Nazi era that ranged from politically questionable to completely unacceptable. In all cases, these are Protestant churches. Currently, there is no Catholic Church involved, which would be similarly affected. An accident? Or perhaps Catholics have not yet looked closely at their church towers? No, no coincidence. Rather, in this finding we see an echo of the historical fact—a confirmation of the thesis that, in the “Third Reich,” the Protestant milieu was comparatively far more infused with the Nazi zeitgeist than the Catholic Church.

As a tightly centralized church and part of a global church governed by Rome, German Catholicism was less susceptible to the völkisch ideology of the era. In the Catholic Church, there was no inner-church mass movement led by theologians like the Protestant “German Christians” (DC). This is the most striking difference from the Protestants, where the German Christian Movement, which was as Christian-völkisch as it was antisemitic, conquered many of the 28 regional churches completely, and many others, like the large Prussian regional church, to a considerable extent. Certainly, there were also Catholic “brown priests” who were party members or who took up Nazi ideology. However, they accounted for less than one percent of all priests. As a number of recent studies have shown, on average, about 15 to 20 percent of the pastors in Protestant state churches belonged to the NSDAP. Of the more than 400 Protestant parish clergy in the capital, about 20 percent had joined the Hitler party and more than 40 percent were involved (at times) in the “Faith Movement” of the German Christians.

Alongside Christian motifs, diverse Nazi symbols.

Therefore, it is not surprising that church bells that are still in use today are discovered to be relics from a past, when many Protestant churches “turned brown.” Inspired by German Christian pastors, Nazi ideas, images, and symbols found their way into churches, parish halls, and permeated sermons and church newspapers. The swastika was omnipresent: on flags, firmly carved in stone on church buildings, and stamped hard into the metal on church bells. The Tempelhof Faith Church, which was renovated in 1933, bore a large swastika hewn in stone on a main pillar in the interior. The “Fatherland Bell” of the newly built Charlottenburg Gustav Adolf Church, which bore the dedication “For Our Fatherland” in addition to the Nazi symbol, may well be considered the first “swastika bell” installed in Berlin. In the entrance hall of the Mariendorf Martin Luther Memorial Church, visitors were greeted by relief portraits of Hindenburg and Hitler, and in the church itself various Nazi symbols adorned a mighty triumphal arch alongside Christian motifs. On the Mariendorf “Fatherland Bell,” consecrated in 1935, were emblazoned a swastika and the Hitler quote “May God take our work in his grace, make our will right, and bless our insight!” Swastika and Christian cross, as the Friedenau German Christian pastor Bruno Marquardt and many of his pastor colleagues said in 1934, were not opposites: “As the cross of Christ expresses our Christian convictions, so the swastika adds to our completely German-völkisch attitude.”

How to deal with the “Hitler bells” today? The reactions in Herxheim am Berg and elsewhere revealed astonishing uncertainties and at times much worse. Many “citizens” thought the bell could stay in operation. Not everything was bad back then—that too was heard. And the bells—you cannot see them when they ring. The new mayor of Herxheim, a retired pastor, ultimately argued that the bell could also be understood as a memorial and so continue to operate. His statement [about the ringing bell – Ed.] during a TV interview—”I hear the victims: these were German citizens, too, not just Jews”—aroused a considerable sensation.

At the request of an indignant Jewish citizen, the District Court of Bad Dürkheim ruled on February 6, 2018, that Mayor Welker was not allowed to repeat this statement. At the end of February 2018, the village council of Herxheim, which was responsible for the bell, decided to leave the “Hitler bell” in the church tower. Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, responded that this decision stunned him and testified to a deep disrespect of all victims of National Socialism: “How a church bell dedicated to one of the greatest criminals in human history is compatible with Christianity is a mystery to me.”

The regional churches most affected by the bell affair, in the Palatinate and in Hanover, should not idly observe the unacceptable events on the ground for too long. And the “Hitler bells” of today also affect the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) somewhat, in light of its many assurances about a Protestant “history of learning” during the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Significant damage to the church’s image has already occurred and more damage still could follow. The relevant church authorities have signalled a willingness to remove the contaminated bells and replace them with new ones. That would certainly be the minimum and needs to happen immediately.

And, above all, more attention is required to the church’s coming to terms with the past locally. As current events illustrate, even 70 years after the Nazi disaster, things are often in disarray. In the affected Spandau parish, on the occasion of the 2017 (re)discovery of a “Hitler bell,” a working group was formed immediately to come to terms with the past.

Postscript, May 2018: According to recent press reports, so-called “Hitler bells” have now been discovered in 21 Protestant churches and one Catholic church. In the area of the Protestant Church of Central Germany alone (Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt) there are still six problematic bells in the church towers.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Für ein artgemässes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologen im “Dritten Reich”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Für ein artgemässes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologen im “Dritten Reich”, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2016, 329 pp.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book, as indicated in its title, deals with what must be the most crucial flaw within German Protestant theology in the lead-up to the Nazi era, perhaps a “sickness unto death,” to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard. This flaw involves a völkisch theology, emphasizing the tight bond between Christian belief and the German people. It involves an artgemäss theology, claiming the necessity of certain racial and cultural qualities for any Germans claiming faith in Jesus and the Christian God. And, though it does not appear in the book title, this flaw involves an “orders of creation” theology, in which certain cultural, political, and racial qualities of the German Volk, as celebrated by Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, could be seen as a binding revelation from God. After an introduction to the topic, fifteen chapters of this book deal with sixteen individuals who help us better understand the complicity of Protestant Christians in the crimes of the Nazi state.

One of the editors of this volume, Manfred Gailus (a member of the editorial board of CCHQ), is a historian known to many or most of us as a prolific author and editor of books on Protestant churches in Nazi Germany. These include his Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des Sozialmilieus Berlin (Berlin, 2001), plus books such as Mir aber zerriss es das Herz: Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen, 2010), and Friedrich Weissler: Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Göttingen, 2017). He also has co-edited books with colleagues, such as Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten in Deutschland—1870-1970 (Göttingen, 2005), co-edited with Harmut Lehmann; Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft:” Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 2011), co-edited with Armin Nolzen; as well as this volume co-edited with Clemens Vollnhals.

The second editor, Vollnhals, also has a career full of important contributions to our understanding of churches in Nazi Germany, beginning with his early study on denazification, Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifizierung, 1945-1949: Die Last der nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich, 1989). He too has been prolific in co-edited projects, including Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Munich, 2013), co-edited with Manfred Gailus; and Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte (Göttingen, 2012), with Uwe Puschner; plus more than a dozen additional edited volumes. Taken together, the work of Gailus and Vollnhals could be the stuff of several seminars on the response of Protestants in Germany to the Nazi state, including analyses of some of the heroes, but especially with an attempt to understand those who found the Nazi state so very attractive. This volume, with its depiction of sixteen völkisch theologians, explores the attraction of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism for German Protestants. It takes us deeply into that Christian stance which, post-1945, strikes so many as so counter to an appropriate understanding of the teachings of Jesus.

All the theologians in this volume had some sort of relationship to the Deutsche Christen, of course, that group of German Protestants who welcomed and cheered the rise of Hitler, waved the Swastika, often wore brown uniforms in church, and tried to disguise or even remove all Jewish elements within the Christian tradition. Some of these stories are well known. Oliver Arnhold writes on Walter Grundmann and his “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” a topic also described for us in the work of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 2008). Grundmann and his so-called “Dejudaization Institute,” supported by the German Protestant Church and its notorious “Godesberg Declaration,” included a large number of seemingly reputable theologians in his project to deny the Jewish origins of Christianity, and even the Jewish origins of Jesus.

A chapter by Dirk Schuster describes Johannes Leipoldt, a professor of New Testament who, after stints at Kiel and Münster, arrived at Leipzig in 1916. Schuster emphasizes in his chapter title Leipoldt’s effort to deny Jesus’ Jewishness, including the quote, “Jesus is far removed from any sort of Jewishness” (189).[1] Leipoldt worked closely with Walter Grundmann, a former student, and became one of the most active co-workers in Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute, especially influencing the argument—important within the Nazi world—that Jesus could not really have been of Jewish blood. Despite this antisemitic activity, Leipoldt sailed through the transition of 1945. The fact that he never actually joined the Deutsche Christen or the NSDAP allowed him to be fully exonerated by the denazification process, with no attention placed on the heavily antisemitic elements in his scholarship (197). He remained at Leipzig until his retirement in 1954 (190). With his ongoing position at Leipzig and his national and international reputation, including for translations and for work on original sources, Leipoldt’s many antisemitic stereotypes, assumptions, and arguments remained fully “citationable” into the 1980s (201).

We also get a chapter by Hansjörg Buss on Gerhard Meyer. He was a simple pastor in Lübeck, rather than a theologian with a university position; but Buss shows us how completely Meyer was able to develop a church in Lübeck, the Martin Luther Parish, into a place where Germanness counted for far more than received tradition. Catholics had no place in a German church, according to Meyer, nor did Protestants who quarreled over doctrine. Jews had no place whatsoever, whether within the Christian tradition or within Germany. This all grew out of the idea of a “Deutschkirche,” advocated by the antisemitic Bund für Deutsche Kirche (League for a German Church), founded in 1921, which had an especially strong following in Lübeck and Schleswig-Holstein. Meyer, born in Lübeck in 1907, was ordained in 1932 and received his appointment in the Martin Luther Parish in September 1933. Soon he was baptizing with these words, “The Meaning of Baptism is this: Bestowed by the mother’s womb of the world, bound with God from the beginning, this child shall stride as a man of God over German soil” (131). He celebrated a group of confirmands in March 1939, alongside Reichbishop Ludwig Müller, with a similar theology: “We believe that Germany, the land and the community of German brothers and sisters, represents the order of life to which we alone are bound by body and soul” (130). Some months later, in September, shortly before his wedding, this 31-year-old pastor and enthusiast for Hitler and the Nazi ideal, recently called up for military service, died in the invasion of Poland (131).

Stephan Linck describes another pastor from Schleswig-Holstein, Ernst Szymanowski, who quickly gravitated toward the Deutschkirche and its overtly German, racist, and antisemitic concept of Christianity. Born in 1899 and after one year of active duty during World War I, he completed his theological training, was ordained in 1924, and joined the NSDAP already in 1926. He then sought to work his way up within the church, including an attempt to be selected as bishop of Lübeck in 1934, though this effort failed (242-45). Pastor Szymanowski is now better known to us as Ernst Biberstein. This is the name he legally acquired only in 1941, as a way to jettison his Slavic name and solidify his German credentials, which he claimed extended back one thousand years (250). The name-change came after he had joined the SS in 1936, and after he withdrew from church membership in 1938 (248-49), but Biberstein is the name by which he became famous after 1945.

Among Biberstein’s activities during wartime, working under Reinhard Heydrich in the RSHA, Biberstein spent several months as leader of Einsatzkommando 6, murdering thousands of Jews. When placed on trial at Nuremberg in 1948, he explained that he joined the SS because he thought it the most idealistic Nazi organization. When asked about the killing by his Einsatzkommando 6, he said, “Due to my theological development, I found it not only extremely unpleasant, but almost unreasonable, that death sentences should be ordered and enforced under my command.” Did he offer the victims “spiritual assistance,” he was asked, as they were being murdered? No, these victims were Bolsheviks, he said, who advocated godlessness. It was not his role to try to convert them: “One should not throw pearls before swine” (252).

Amidst a great deal of press interest in this pastor/murderer, who acknowledged that at least 2000-3000 victims were shot or gassed to death under his authority, Biberstein was sentenced to death (253). As often happened, that sentence gradually got reduced to incarceration at Landsberg Prison. Working for his release from prison, by 1956 Biberstein denied his own admission at Nuremberg about the thousands of deaths under his command. He also claimed to a representative from the Protestant Church in Neumünster that, despite his having left the church in 1938, “he had always felt himself to be and handled himself as a Christian and a theologian.” Furthermore, “He said . . . simply as his own inner conviction, that it would be good if every pastor’s personal attitude in life would be as decent as his had been” (256). Linck makes clear that the interlocutor reporting on the state of Biberstein’s conscience had been a fellow member of the Nazi Party and an advocate for the Deutsche Christen back in Schleswig-Holstein in the 1930s. Biberstein failed to get his hoped-for permanent return to a clergy position; however, he did gain his release from Landsberg in 1958 and had an opportunity to live outside prison another twenty-eight years before his death in 1986. Linck then quotes Raul Hilberg on Biberstein, “For Biberstein moral boundaries were like the receding horizon. He went toward them but never reached them” (259).

The sixteen chapters in this volume contain many additional examples of völkisch Protestant theologians and clergy who followed the path of German nationalism, racism, and an increasingly aggressive attack upon the Jewish place within the Christian tradition, or even within Germany itself. Rainer Hering describes Franz Tügel, the Bishop of Hamburg, who joined the Nazi Party in 1931, after a careful reading of Nazi documents, including Mein Kampf. In 1932 he expressed hope for a “rebirth of the German nation” under Hitler’s leadership. As for the projected harsh treatment of Jews, he saw no reason for the church to criticize Nazi intentions, describing Jews as a “pestilence” and “the great danger” for Germany (141-42).

Gerhard Lindemann describes a parallel example, Martin Sasse, the Bishop of Thuringia. Born in 1890, Sasse fought in World War I from 1914-1918. Then, after the war, he joined in Freikorp battles against communists and revolutionaries. After these years in uniform, Sasse returned to his theological studies and received an appointment and ordination in 1921. In March 1930 he joined the NSDAP and that fall he accepted a pastorate in Thuringia, a very brown region with an especially strong cohort of Deutsche Christen. By January 1934 Sasse had risen to Bishop of the Thuringian Church (156). From this position he gave full support to the Nazi state and Nazi ideology. This included, for example, praise for the November 1938 Pogrom as a necessary measure and part of the “world historical struggle against the Volk-destroying spirit of the Jews” (161). He was among those bishops who signed the Godesberg Declaration of 1939, which led to the creation of Walter Frank’s Dejudaization Institute. Sasse supported the radical Thuringian Deutsche Christen, even agreeing with their claim that the Jewish Old Testament had no place in the Christian Bible (163). As for the Holocaust, by August 1941 Sasse’s office produced a public announcement describing this as the “moment in which God’s hand reaches out to destroy precisely this people” (167), apparently blaming the murder of Jews on God, rather than Germans. Sasse held his position as bishop until his death in 1942, an early demise caused by problems with his heart.

Dagmar Pöpping tells the complex story of Herman Wolfgang Beyer, born in 1898, who “grew up” serving in World War I from 1916-1918 and watching all his friends die. He returned to Germany a pacifist and idealist, with high hopes for the Weimar Republic and a peaceful future. Then began a series of lurches to the right and left. The Versailles Treaty cost him his pacifism and his support of Weimar, but, while studying theology, he first stood on the left with a group who designated themselves “readers” of Die Christliche Welt, a liberal Protestant journal. He completed his theological training, however, with Karl Holl in Berlin, the founder of a “Luther Renaissance” and teacher of many of the most völkisch of the next generation of Protestant theologians, men such as Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus. Beyer befriended both men by the mid-1920s, a useful step in his career, and by the age of twenty-eight, he secured a professorship in church history at Greifswald (262-65). In 1933 he greeted the rise of Hitler with an enthusiasm as exuberant as that of his two mentors, beginning and ending every future lecture with “Heil Hitler.” As for the Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle), Beyer joined the Deutsche Christen in the spring of 1933, and also joined the SA (Nazi Stormtroopers) that fall. Surprisingly, though, Beyer became disillusioned with the harsh tactics of the DC under Reichbishop Müller in 1934 and switched his allegiance to the Confessing Church, which he maintained also when he moved to a chair at Leipzig in 1936. Throughout these changes in his church politics, he remained loyal to the Nazi state, a position not entirely uncommon among his fellow members of the Confessing Church.

When World War II broke out, Beyer volunteered to serve as a chaplain. He is interesting to us at least in part because he kept a detailed diary of his experiences on the Eastern Front. This included his personal observation of the murder of innocents, whether the shooting of 400 disabled residents of a hospital for convenience sake, or the murder of thousands and thousands of Jews. Pöpping reports on Beyer’s efforts to explain and justify these murders. Regarding the 400 disabled people dispatched by bullet, he writes, “I understand that the poor guys must be killed. One cannot simply let them run free. They would then only perish, naturally” (272). As for the mass murder of Jews, he comments, “The struggle against Jews must occur. But it has assumed a terribly hard shape…. The curse under which these people live is being fulfilled in a horrible manner” (273). Despite the horrors, Beyer taught his troops that killing Russians and Jews was necessary. He blamed the Enlightenment as a root cause, with its emphasis on equality and human rights, which finally led to Bolshevism and atheism. “We see it on the dull, staring, expiring faces of the Soviet prisoners of war who pass us by. The human being in this world has stopped being truly human” (270). True to the most hateful antisemitism of the early twentieth century, especially in its Nazi version, Beyer then made the connection to Jews, the most intensively victimized group being murdered by German forces. He explained to his troops that Jews had invented Bolshevism and, without attachment to the Christian God, both Jews and Bolsheviks had lost their souls, were no longer human. Pöpping then summarizes Beyer’s conclusion: “A human without a soul is no longer required to be treated as human” (271).

This self-description by Beyer of his work as a Protestant chaplain at the center of the Eastern Front, which was also the center of the Holocaust, could be understood simply as the rather ugly final result of völkisch theology, a theology which elevated Germany’s wounded and intense self-identity above prior Christian norms and ideals that had developed over two millennia. I appreciate Pöpping’s work on this man. I do wonder, however, whether her stance at the start of this chapter is too gentle, too understanding of the man under her gaze. She cites two historians, Doris Bergen and Felix Römer, who she accuses of describing chaplains “as ‘propagandists’ and ‘accomplices’ of the Vernichtungskrieg.”[2] In Pöpping’s view, “That would be too simple, to be content only with exposing what is morally unacceptable from today’s point of view” (261). She also cites the work of Antonia Leugers and Martin Röw for presentations of this softer approach, authors who raise the possibility of Catholics and chaplains staying moral within an immoral war.[3] These are hardly simple issues, but I am left wondering what could be seen as deficient in a “morality of today” that suggests murder and genocide are immoral. Was Beyer’s complete commitment to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state a good decision? Should we approve of his extra effort to encourage troops not to shrink from their task? Is it wrong to connect the dots in his complicated development as a theologian and suggest that something has gone dreadfully wrong when his loyalty to Germany and to Hitler have him defending the murders perpetrated and/or viewed by troops under his spiritual guidance?

This brings me to two of the most prominent theologians dealt with in this volume, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, theologians who befriended Hermann Wolfgang Beyer and may well have inspired his virtually complete loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi state. I am familiar with Althaus and Hirsch, since I focused on these two plus Gerhard Kittel in my Theologians under Hitler more than thirty years ago.[4] Tanja Hetzer’s chapter on Paul Althaus is based on her 2009 book him.[5] She begins with one of my favorite quotations from Althaus, at least in terms of its importance: his notable claim that Protestant churches in Germany “greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle from God” (69). He published that statement in 1933 and it certainly guided his overall response to the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. Hetzer argues that Althaus’s völkisch nationalism, a central aspect of his theology, was heavily influenced by his experience as a wartime pastor in Lodz during World War I, as well as his marriage to Dorothea Zielke, born in Warsaw to a German family long-settled in Poland. Of course, Althaus also was influenced by his bitterness over Germany’s loss in that First World War. During the war and throughout the 1920s, Althaus preached a love for the Fatherland and a claim that the Protestant church should speak to the bond between Germans, the German Lutheran tradition, and the beleaguered German nation. Hetzer does a very nice job of showing that Althaus’s “Orders of Creation” theology and his emphasis on “Order” and “Authority”—all developed in the early years of his career—made him ready to proclaim Hitler a “gift and miracle from God” and to give mostly enthusiastic support to the regime.[6] Hetzer shows that this stance was rooted in his völkisch obsession: “With Althaus it is vital to observe how the concept of the Volk became a new ethical reference point for theology” (76).

As for Althaus’s view of Jews, Hetzer points out that he often spoke in “cultural codes” and avoided the crudest expressions of antisemitism; but she effectively shows that a harsh antagonism toward Jews lay deeply embedded within his work.[7] During Weimar he apparently had no personal connection to important figures, such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, but he spoke of them like a “schoolmaster” and without respect (76). Hetzer effectively shows that Althaus’s “Orders of Creation” theology lays the groundwork for antisemism in its insistence that God created the various “orders” in existence, including nations and races. So it is no surprise that in the opening battles of the Church Struggle in 1933, when Deutsche Christen demanded the application of the Aryan Paragraph within the Protestant church, Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, his colleague at Erlangen, agreed that Germans had every right to include race among the requirements for clergy in the German Protestant Church (85-88). Althaus and Elert then co-authored the Ansbacher Ratschlag, an attack against the Barmen Declaration that was enthusiastically greeted by Deutsche Christen.

Hetzer concludes her chapter by pointing out that a “loyalty of the second generation” remains in place, giving Althaus a softer treatment than he deserves. This includes Walter Sparn, a systematic theologian, who claims “Althaus without doubt was never a National Socialist,” though he may have been a “political romantic” who advocated a “revolution from the right.”[8] Such a view gives little weight to Althaus’s assessment of Hitler as “a gift and miracle from God.” Hetzer also critiques the recent biographer of Althaus, Gotthard Jasper of Erlangen University.[9] The subtitle of his 2013 book, “Professor, Prediger und Patriot seiner Zeit,” certainly buries Althaus’s enthusiastic and very public support of Hitler and National Socialism with that innocuous use of “patriot,” as does Jasper’s treatment of Althaus in general. Hetzer credits Jasper with his presentation of much material, “without, however, considering problematic statements by Althaus according to his actual words or requiring of Althaus posthumous responsibility for what he actually wrote and said” (95).

I quite agree with Hetzer’s conclusion that, despite his clear political stance, “Althaus was viewed in the history of theology after 1945 not as a participant in history, but as a victim of his own ideas, above all when it involved his antisemitic undertakings” (95). I would only mention that my book from 1985 on Althaus, Hirsch and Kittel gets but one footnote in this chapter, and that is to substantiate Althaus’s “reputation as a mediator” and the fact that he is “viewed still today as a theologian with a self-chosen stance in the middle” (70). I do use the term “mediator,” and I describe him as less radical in his support of Nazi politics than either Emanuel Hirsch or Gerhard Kittel. However, this by no means hides my criticism of his very important and enthusiastic place in support of Hitler and Nazism. A large number of the quotations used by Hetzer in this chapter also appear in my book. Furthermore, Hetzer does show Althaus as a moderate of sorts, at least for his place and time. He tended to use coded and vague language. Many or most could see his attack on Jews, but he was not as outspoken or blatant as many others treated in this volume by Gailus and Vollnhals. I appreciate Hetzer’s analysis of Althaus’s work, which I think takes an important step forward in recognizing the antisemitic foundations of his scholarship. I also agree that Sparn from 1997 and Jasper from 2013 are too apologetic in their treatment of Althaus, but I remain a bit disappointed that my work in 1985 is not clearly separated from those two.

Heinrich Assel writes about Emanuel Hirsch, who was one of the main figures in his 1994 book on the Luther Renaissance from 1994.[10] This chapter also builds upon Assel’s very thorough reading of appropriate additional sources and documents to which he has gained access, even though Hirsch’s own Nachlass has been carefully restricted from public view or scholarly use. In particular, Assel has accessed a massive correspondence between Hirsch and the right-wing publicist, Wilhelm Stapel, which extended from 1931 until Stapel’s death in 1954 (47). In my view, Assel rightly places Hirsch at the very center of the völkisch theology that is at the heart of Gailus and Vollnhals’ book, and which drew Hirsch to his enthusiastic public support of Hitler by April 1932.

Hirsch became the leading theological advisor to and supporter of the Deutsche Christen and Reichbishop Ludwig Müller in 1933. He then openly designated himself a “political theologian” by 1934, taking the side of Ludwig Müller’s church government. As the Müller phase of church politics proved ineffective, Hirsch worked to support the “Gleichschaltungspolitik” of the Nazi state, privileging Hitler’s totalitarian rule over his two other loyalties, those to church and state (44). As for the Nazi stance on Jews, Hirsch moved from his earlier prejudice against Jews, which was primarily religious and cultural, to “an openly racist antisemitism.” Though others blanched at the destructiveness of the November Pogrom in 1938, he was “passionately in favor,” welcoming it as a way to push Jews toward emigration. As the murderous nature of the war in Eastern Europe and the specific annihilation of Jews developed, Hirsch was kept informed by his contacts in the Nazi Party and the SS. His response was to “give unlimited support to this politics of annihilation” (56).

Assel’s access to the Hirsch/Stapel correspondence, often comprising several letters per week and sometimes more than one letter per day, illustrates for us the overwhelming confidence placed by Hirsch and Stapel in the German Volk and the Nazi state, a convergence designed to bring Germany back to its rightful place in the world. We also learn about their harsh antisemitism. However, we do see Wilhelm Stapel losing at least some of his nerve in the last, more brutal years of the Nazi regime, while Hirsch remained firm. After the failed July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, Stapel wrote of his sympathy for the plotters. Hirsch wrote back with ten full pages, expressing unapologetic approval of Nazi church politics, Nazi foreign policy, and also the harsh judgments of the People’s Court against the conspirators. He speculated in that letter, written in the bleak summer of 1944, on two possible outcomes of the war: a German victory, leading to a healthy nation and national church, or a German defeat and the collapse of Christianity in Germany (60-64).

In an attempt to understand the uncompromising persistence of Hirsch’s stance, Assel points out one very important factor in his life, poured out in this long letter to Stapel. That is his deep grief over his son, Peter, fallen in 1941. Assel places this in the context of a “Myth of the Fallen,” the belief that only a German victory would justify the many deaths spread over the two costly wars in Hirsch’s lifetime (63-64). In my work on Hirsch, I point to his medical deferment in August 1914 at the start of World War I. This embarrassed or even haunted him, and I speculate that it might help explain the aggressive nationalism and militarism in his work.[11] The World War II loss of his son would only have multiplied that psychological impact, of course. Even though Stapel and Hirsch each lost some of their influence during the last years of the Nazi regime, Stapel more so than Hirsch, we learn from their letters that Hirsch refused to blame Hitler or the Nazi state, even after 1945, and even after the horrors of the Nazi regime had been condemned by most of the world. In my work on Hirsch, I quoted colleagues who said he never changed his politics after 1945 or admitted that he had been mistaken.[12] I was criticized for this by some friends of Hirsch. Assel’s chance to read portions of Hirsch’s correspondence now confirm I was right on that score (49).

Before leaving Assel’s treatment of Hirsch, I will once again mention my Theologians under Hitler from 1985, which dealt extensively with Hirsch. I also wrote about Hirsch in my chapter on the Göttingen Theological Faculty, first published in Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus in 1987.[13] Neither is cited by Assel. This is obviously a minor complaint. In one instance, however, I believe that Assel’s treatment of Hirsch’s postwar circumstances would benefit from my work. In May 1945, Hirsch grabbed the chance of a medical retirement, justified by his failing eyesight, in order to avoid removal for his pro-Nazi stance. This meant he circumvented his essentially certain dismissal by the English occupiers, without pay, followed by a denazification process of uncertain outcome. Instead, besides avoiding the humiliation of being thrown out of his university, he also secured a life-long pension, even if reduced by his choice of an early medical retirement, and he secured the right to stay in his beautiful, large home on the Schiller Meadow. Assel refers to a brief postwar period when the Hirsch family did not receive funds as a “bureaucratic mistake,” which is probably true. But then he adds, “Without having to go through a denazification process, Hirsch was rehabilitated as emeritus” (57).

This version of Hirsch’s postwar transition slides past an experience that was traumatic for many university professors whose politics had been enthusiastically pro-Nazi, and especially so for Hirsch. It also ignores my extensive treatment of the actual, bitter process that ensued. His medical retirement left him without any connection to his university. At the age of fifty-seven, he was not ready to retire. As he had been nearly blind since the 1920s, he clearly hoped to reverse the convenient medical excuse used in May 1945 and resume his career. Furthermore, the eventual return of most Nazi-tinged professors to their positions would have encouraged his hopes. However, despite his own efforts and energetic attempts by a few of his friends, he never could bring himself back into the good graces of Göttingen University or its Theological Faculty. From May 1945 until his death in 1972, Hirsch was never rehabilitated. He never received emeritus status, he never received announcements of events or invitations, his name was never included in university publications, and he had no formal connection whatsoever with his former faculty.[14] (He also never received the blue plaque on his home, marking the place where very important university scholars, such as his rival, Karl Barth, had lived.) This postwar result placed Hirsch among the very few, most heavily implicated Nazis not able to return to their positions at Göttingen, part of a similar pattern at other universities as well. The only students with whom Hirsch came in contact in those postwar years met with him in his home for regular meetings of an irregular, unofficial, private seminar. Some within that informal coterie became known as the “Hirsch Circle.” This group long hoped to resurrect Hirsch’s reputation as a theologian from his loss of respect in the postwar era, but largely without success. Was the postwar denial of honor or respect appropriate? Assel’s work goes a long way toward establishing that Hirsch’s devotion to Adolf Hitler was thoroughgoing. If we do not approve of Hitler’s judgment, ideas and politics, it is difficult to approve of Hirsch’s. Furthermore, the völkisch nature of the Protestant theology at the center of Hirsch’s work made his politics far more than a side issue in his career.

In the context of the Hirsch-Stapel correspondence, I will also mention Clemens Vollnhals’ chapter on Wilhelm Stapel. During the Weimar Republic, Stapel edited and wrote prolifically in the right-wing, nationalistic journal, Deutsches Volkstum. He also rose to leadership within the Hanseatic Verlag, the publisher of Deutsches Volkstum and later the publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications. Though Stapel never had an academic career, he and Hirsch were natural allies in their commitment to a völkisch Protestant theology and a nationalistic, right-wing revolution against the Weimar Republic. In 1933 Stapel greeted the rise of Hitler with Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers (“Christ’s Church and Hitler’s State”).[15] He supported the Deutsche Christen, even after the Sports Palace Scandal of November, 1933, in which 20,000 enthusiasts applauded the removal of the Old Testament and other proposed steps into open heresy (110). All of this fit into Stapel’s understanding of a special law, a Volksnomos, given by God to every nation, and, in the German case, God’s creation of a leading nation among nations, ready to build a new European empire in the manner of ancient Rome (101-04). There was no place for Jews in this venture. Stapel praised the May 1933 burning of Jewish books. He accepted the total separation of Jews from the German nation, even before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In 1938 he wrote, “Jews in the German Reich are inferior. Their place in Germany is a result of the stance they have taken against us in our struggle for German honor” (113-14). Stapel also worked within Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute. Vollnhals does show that Stapel’s stomach for harsh measures had its limits. He regretted the disorderly broken glass of November 1938. In a letter to Paul Althaus in January 1942, as deportations of Jews had begun, he admitted that what was happening to Jews was horrible. Despite the horrors, however, even in 1942 he stood by his earlier, harsh assessment of the Jewish question, “so that later it is not lost … why the symbiosis pushed for by the Jews was impossible” (114). Both Hirsch and Stapel represented the radical vision of a special place for the German Volk within God’s plan, along with a willingness to bind the resulting völkisch Protestant theology to the brutal, totalitarian regime created by Adolf Hitler.

Für ein artgemässses Christentum der Tat is a very useful book. Besides the chapters described above, it includes an excellent introductory chapter by Gailus and Vollnhals, plus additional treatments of men like Reinhold Seeberg, described by Stefan Dietzel as an important professor at Berlin in the age of Harnack, who lived into the first two years of the Nazi state and gave both eugenics and the NS racial ideology his support. Andre Postert offers us a chapter on Wolf Meyer-Erlach, the famously antisemitic and under-qualified professor who became Rektor at the University of Jena and later worked in Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute. Ulrich Peter writes about Walter Schultz and Heinrich Schwartze, two Protestant pastors, the latter also a bishop, who negotiated complicated transitions from their support of National Socialism to their place in the postwar German Democratic Republic. Isabella Bozsa describes the career of Eugen Mattiat, a small-town pastor awarded for his political reliability with a professorship at Göttingen University. Remarkably under-qualified, he quickly lost that position under denazification, but eventually became once again a small-town pastor. Manfred Gailus gives us a final chapter, describing Walter Hoff, an enthusiastic pro-Nazi pastor in Berlin. After volunteering at nearly fifty to serve in his second World War, he returned on leave to brag about his exploits. Then, responding angrily to an “unwarlike” circular letter sent to Berlin pastors in 1943, he emphasized the need to fight against “World Jewry and its evil representatives,” uninhibited by any soft Christian ideal of “mercy.” He added that in Soviet Russia he himself had “helped liquidate” hundreds of Jews (311).

Not all stories in this volume include Protestant pastors bragging about murdering Jews! All of the stories, however, provide examples of Protestants who idolized the German Volk, gave their heart to Adolf Hitler, and both accepted and promoted the antisemitism of the Nazi state. From our present perspective, these stories give us good reason to rethink our understanding of the Christian relationship to Jews, to nation, to race, and to the compassionate side of Jesus’ ethic. Gailus and Vollnhals have assembled a useful and convincing treatment of the problems that arise when Christians think someone like Adolf Hitler is on their side.

[1] Please note that all translations are by the author of this review.

[2] Pöpping cites as representatives of this point of view, Doris Bergen, “’Germany is our Mission – Christ is our Strength!’ The Wehrmacht Chaplaincy and the ‘German Christian’ Movement,” in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 66 (1997), 522-36; and Felix Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl: Wehrmacht und NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront 1941-42, Paderborn, 2008, 510 ff.

[3] See Antonia Leugers, “Opfer für eine grosse und heilige Sache: Katholisches Kriegserleben im nationalsozialistischen Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieg,” in Friedhelm Boll, ed., Volksreligiosität und Kriegserleben, Münster, 1997, 157-74; and Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz. Die Katholische Feldpastoral 1939-1945, Paderborn (2014), who, according to Pöpping, suggests (p. 448) that chaplains were “unwilling instruments” in the war of extermination.

[4] Robert P Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, New Haven, 1985.

[5] Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde.” Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus, Munich, 2009. It should be noted that most of the chapters in this book by Gailus and Vollnhals are based on book-length treatments by the authors, so that this volume becomes a useful distillation of a broad range of work.

[6] Hetzer does not mention my treatment of a possible change of heart in Althaus by 1938. His blatantly political publications cease after 1937 and family stories suggest some disillusionment. Althaus’s son Gerhard, born in 1935, told me of a family memory according to which Althaus at the dinner table denounced the November 1938 Pogrom. Gerhard himself remembered a conversation on holiday at Tegernsee in August 1943, when an officer returned from the Soviet front came back with the family from a Sunday service. As an eight-year-old boy, he overheard a story of camps at which civilians, women and children, and unarmed Soviet prisoners were shot. Afterwards, according to Gerhard, his father no longer spoke of winning the war, but of “bloodguilt,” including toward Jews. See Ericksen, 94-98.

[7] In the above-mentioned interview, Gerhard Althaus, who studied theology with his father and became a pastor, told me he questioned his father in the 1950s about the antisemitism rife in Nazi Germany. His father simply responded, “You have not experienced the Jews.” See Ericksen, 109.

[8] See Walter Sparn, “Paul Althaus,” in Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, ed., Profile des Luthertums, Gütersloh 1997, 1-26.

[9] Gotthard Jasper, Paul Althaus (1888-1996). Professor, Prediger und Patriot seiner Zeit, Göttingen, 2013.

[10] Heinrich Assel, Die Lutherrenaissance – Urspringe, Aporien und Wege: Karl Holl, Emanuel Hirsch, Rudolf Hermann (1910-1935), Göttingen, 1994.

[11] See Ericksen, 127.

[12] See Ericksen, 193.

[13] See Robert P. Ericksen, “Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät im Dritten Reich,” in Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, and Cornelia Wegeler, eds., Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, Munich, 1987 and 1998, 75-101.

[14] See Ericksen, Theologians, 191-93. See also Ericksen, “Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät im Dritten Reich,” 90-93.

[15] Wilhelm Stapel, Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers, Hamburg, 1933.