Conference Report: “International Protestants and Nazi Germany as Viewed Through Three Lenses”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “International Protestants and Nazi Germany as Viewed Through Three Lenses,” German Studies Association, Atalnta, GA, October 2017.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Five scholars of German church history convened a panel on October 8, 2017, at the German Studies Association in Atlanta, Georgia, to reflect on international Protestants and Nazi Germany. The panel consisted of presenters Robert Ericksen, Victoria Barnett, and Matthew Hockenos, while Rebecca Carter-Chand offered insightful comments and Christopher Probst did the introductions. All five panelists engaged the audience in a lively exchange after the presentations.

Robert Ericksen led with his paper “On Luther, Jews, and Lutherans in Nazi Germany.” He lamented that while the 500th anniversary of Luther’s “break” with the Catholic Church was receiving widespread attention across Europe and the United States, Luther’s antisemitism—most famously on display in On the Jews and Their Lies—rarely became a major focal point of these commemorations. Despite this lapse (or intentional manipulation) of historical memory, there are indisputable signs that most Lutherans no longer try to explain away Luther’s derogatory and hateful Judenschriften, but rather condemn his anti-Jewish diatribes and antisemitism unequivocally. Ericksen believes that the contemporary renunciation of Luther’s antisemitism is a direct result of Holocaust scholarship over the past three or four decades. The advent of “Holocaust Studies,” Holocaust museums, and scholarly and media attention on the Holocaust have all contributed to the waning of the antisemitism’s social acceptability in the United States and parts of Europe. This attention on the Shoah—its sheer inhumanity and ugliness—had the effect of “inoculating” the public against contempt for Jews. While not excusing their antisemitism, Ericksen pointed out that German Protestant theologians and pastors who backed Hitler, like Gerhard Kittel and Martin Niemöller, did not have the benefit of this inoculation. Ericksen concluded with the observation that the current support for right-wing populism in Europe and the U.S. raises the concern that the post-Holocaust inoculation against antisemitism might be losing its influence.

Vicki Barnett’s paper, “A Two-Way Street: The Complex Relationships between German and U.S. Protestant leaders, 1933-1939,” examined some of the many transatlantic interactions that took place between U.S. and German Protestants during the Nazi era. These contacts included active partnerships, participation in conferences, lecture tours, and visitations by church leaders. In addition to the more well-known exchanges between the leaders of the U.S. Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the leaders of the German Protestant Church (DEK), Barnett also explored contacts between German and American Baptists, Methodists, and Adventists. Barnett’s research demonstrates that there was no monolithic relationship between American and German Protestants, though there were tendencies. While most German Protestants were bent on convincing their American counterparts of the validity of the Nazi regime and downplayed Nazi anti-Semitism, American Protestants diverged in their opinions on the Nazi regime and the response by the German churches. For example, the German Adventist, Hulda Jost, and the German Methodist, Bishop Otto Melle, both went on extensive speaking tours in the U.S. to defend Nazism. And the German Christian (Deutsche Christen) Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller used meetings in Germany with FCC leaders to try to convince them that Nazi critics in the U.S. were misrepresenting the situation in Germany. Sharp divisions, however, developed among American Baptists between those who deplored German nationalism and antisemitism and those who wanted to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt. The leadership of the FCC was more united in its criticism of Nazism. In an extraordinarily critical letter, Henry Smith Leiper of the FCC dressed down Ludwig Müller for thinking that his pro-Nazi propaganda campaign would gain any adherents in the FCC. The time, money, and effort expended by Americans and Germans in their interaction with each other attests to the importance they attributed to these relations. Transatlantic contacts between Protestants diminished markedly after Kristallnacht and the outbreak of the war, only to be revived after the war.

Matthew Hockenos’ paper, “Guilt, Repentance, and International Public Relations in the German Protestant Church, 1945-1948,” examined how German Protestants from the Nazi-era Confessing Church and the American Protestants in the FCC sought to reestablish close ties after the war. German church leaders were understandably horrified and dismayed by Germany’s total devastation and isolation in 1945 and wanted to ameliorate the suffering of their people. But the church’s reputation as ultra-conservative and nationalist led the Allies to take a cautious approach toward allotting the churches a leading role in German reconstruction. Church leaders believed that the only way to get the occupying powers to soften their policies and embrace the church as a partner would be to convince them that there was a German opposition to the Nazis—led by the churches—and that Germans were willing to take responsibility for the war and all the devastation that it wrought. Beginning with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in October 1945 and throughout the late 1940s, church leaders went on a public relations blitz—issuing statements of guilt, meeting the occupation powers, and travelling abroad—in an effort to rehabilitate their reputation and influence occupation policies. Hockenos’ paper focused on Martin Niemöller’s five-month lecture tour in the United States from December 1946 to May 1947, during which he hoped to convince Americans that he was representative of the many good Christians in Germany who fought and prayed for an end to the Hitler menace and who were now barely eking out an existence in bombed cities. Hockenos maintained that Niemöller often stretched the truth during his addresses, embellishing his and the Confessing Church’s resistance credentials. But Niemöller’s efforts to win over American Protestants were only partially successful—Americans remained divided over the legacy of German Protestantism during the Nazi era.

Rebecca Carter-Chand observed in her comments that these three papers made the case that we only get the full picture when we examine German Protestants during this era from an international perspective. With the exception of those scholars who have focused on the ecumenical movement, a transnational approach to studying twentieth-century German church history has not been common. Perhaps its time has come.

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Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust.” The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, November 1-3, 2017.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education conference began with Steve Pressman, documentary filmmaker, showing clips of his soon-to-be released film, “Holy Secrets.” Pressman discussed his process in making the documentary which explores the actions and inactions taken by the Vatican during the Holocaust.

The first panel session continued this theme by exploring the “Pius Wars,” with papers by Robert Ventresca and Jacques Kornberg. Both presented critical re-assessments of Pius XII, suggesting the need for a framework for the proper historical and ethical evaluation of the choices made by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Further panels included the exploration of Catholic antisemitism, with Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara co-presenting their recent work on Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage. Martin Menke presented research on Weimar Catholic leaders who differentiated between being anti-racist and being anti-Semitic.

Jonathan Huener shared his latest research on the Reichsgau Wartheland and the diverse ways in which the Nazi occupation regime persecuted the Catholic Church in occupied Poland. This was followed by Brenda Gaydosh analyzing why Bernhard Lichtenberg resisted and protested Nazi anti-Semitic measures and why he prayed for the Jews.

The final presentation of the first day of panels was a keynote address by John Connelly: “How the Catholic Church Overcame Its Own Theology and Proclaimed God Loves Jews.” Connelly argued that Vatican II’s new teaching about God loving the Jews came about because of Nazi racism. Many of the theologians who advised the bishops at Vatican II were opponents of Hitler in the 1930s. Some of them were converts from Judaism and many had been targets of antisemitism themselves. Yet for them, the Church’s new teaching about Jews was not a revolution; it was a return to the ideas of the Jewish thinker, Saul of Tarsus. Far from a revolution, the new teaching of Vatican II was a return to the Church’s origins.

The final day of the conference featured a panel on post-Holocaust theology and the Jews with a presentation by Zuzanna Radzik, a Catholic theologian specializing in Christian-Jewish relations and feminist theology. Karma Ben Johanan from the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute then presented on the way in which the Catholic discourse on the Holocaust functioned in the construction of the Church’s identity and in the reforging of Jewish-Christian relations from the Second Vatican Council to the present.

Raymond Sun brought the conference into the present by analyzing the rhetoric, symbolism, and historical precedents employed by church leaders in urging Catholics to oppose the persecution or exclusion of targeted groups. He explored possible reasons for the absence of direct references to the Holocaust and pondered the implications of this for Catholic memory of the Holocaust. This was followed by Gershon Greenberg’s presentation on the restoration of Jewish faith in the displaced persons camps, beginning with the survivor’s question: “Why was I still alive?” The survivors’ answer was: in order to study Torah—which in turn nourished life. The fact that Jewish faith was revived necessitates the conclusion that somehow, some way, sacramental existence never totally disappeared, even in the midst of catastrophe.

The conference closed with a presentation from Marie-Anne Harkness, whose family members rescued Jews in France during the war. Mrs. Harkness’s grandmother, Madame Celine Morali, used the family’s hardware store to smuggle Jews out of danger. She and her daughter worked with Monsignor Joseph Moussaron, Bishop of Albi, and other Catholics to rescue Jews.

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Letter from the Editors (December 2017)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Letter from the Editors (December 2017)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

As the Advent season is once again upon us, the editors are pleased to publish a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. For many of us—editors and readers—the encounter between German Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, and Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime is the defining event of the twentieth-century history of Christianity. As usual, this subject stands at the centre of our work at the journal. What strikes me as interesting are the ways in which the reviews and notes in this issue expand the boundaries of that story—chronologically, thematically, and geographically.

The Cecilienstift in Halberstadt, which hosted a recent workshop on Protestant institutions in the Third Reich.
Image courtesy of FrankBothe (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Edward Ruff’s new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980, reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen, asks why Catholic Christians came under scrutiny for their behaviour during the Third Reich long before Protestants, whose record was ultimately more troubling. It serves as the springboard for an expansive study of Catholic controversies about the Church in the Nazi era, from early triumphalist interpretations through various legal struggles, the uproar over Rolf Hochhuth’s treatment of Pope Pius XII, and on to cross-confessional debates between Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen in the 1970s and 1980s.

Heath Spencer then reviews Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra’s Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie. This survey of a broadly European (with a nod to global) array of theological responses to the cataclysms of the First World War, spanning from justifications of the conflict to Christian pacifist rejections of violence. What emerges is a picture of the extent to which the war provoked theological crises, some of which led to renewal and others of which continued to play out in encounters with totalitarianism, war, and Holocaust.

Lee B. Spitzer has written a detailed account of US Baptist responses to Jews and Jewish persecution and annihilation in the Hitler era, showing how events in Germany preoccupied North American Christians as well. As expected, Spitzer finds a mixture of responses—some ambivalent, others sympathetic, though none practically effective in ameliorating the crisis faced by European Jews.

Beth Griech-Polelle reviews The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen. Kohen, a Jewish-German who married a Catholic and subsequently converted, wrote of her day-to-day experiences in Nazi Germany. Her account, edited and translated by Kevin Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, reveals the sharp limits and high costs of the “protected status” of Jewish Germans married to “Aryans.” Though filled with disappointments and struggles, her memoir also reveals the potential of faith to sustain hope.

The shorter notes which follow these reviews continue to expand the story of Christianity’s encounter with Nazism and the Holocaust, assessing Protestant responses to Allied occupation, Romanian Catholic conversion of Jews, and Protestant institutional life in the Third Reich. Finally and most broadly, Mark Edward Ruff reports on recent scholarly engagements around questions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian revivalism in Germany.

We hope you find these contributions interesting, and we appreciate your continued readership.

With best wishes, on behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen

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Review of Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Pp. 408. ISBN 9781107190665.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Mark Edward Ruff, Professor of History at Saint Louis University, has spent the past eleven years completing The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980. This includes four years working in Germany, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the NEH, and the ACLS, as well as visits to a total of “two continents, six nations, and seventy-seven archives” (vii). The result is an important book that takes its place alongside John Connelly’s recent From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Connelly devotes more than half of his book to the period pre-1945; however, the importance of his book culminates in the 1960s, when, according to his argument, converts to Catholicism, several with German or German language roots, and especially Catholics of Jewish origin, inspired the remarkable transition in Catholic theology found in Vatican Two and Nostra Aetate.[1] Ruff’s book is more completely based in the postwar period. However, it also deals with the most salient issue addressed by postwar historians of Germany and of Catholicism: a measuring of the Catholic Church’s response to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, and especially to the Shoah, the murder of six million Jews by a Christian nation within a Christian Europe. Connelly describes the incubation of ideas that led to a dramatic change in universal Catholic doctrine. Ruff describes the first thirty-five postwar years within Germany and the struggle over how to understand the history of Catholics, especially their place within and their relationship to the Nazi regime and its crimes.

Ruff begins with the assumption that both churches, Catholic and Protestant, share a compromised history within the Nazi state. He also acknowledges that both churches from 1945 to 1949 worked to polish their reputations: “Not wishing to further damage Germany’s reputation abroad …,” both Catholics and Protestants “elevated to orthodoxy the picture of the church triumphant, of clear-headed leaders valiantly resisting and the faithful unflinchingly following” (243). Not until the 1980s did historians of the Protestant Church seriously begin to redraw this rosy picture. However, Catholic behavior came under widespread attack already in the 1950s, “Doubts about the moral fitness of Catholic bishops, Cardinal Secretary of States and pontiffs of the Nazi era were cascaded before the public. They screamed from front-page headlines, the magazine covers of the most influential newsweeklies, the glossy pages of illustrated magazines and the best-seller lists in Germany and the United States.” Why did this happen? “This has been a guiding question for this book, since by almost all objective yardsticks, the German Protestant leadership left behind a more troubling record of collaboration than their Catholic counterparts” (244).[2]

Ruff clarifies early on his basic explanation of how the microscope quickly became focused on Catholics rather than Protestants in postwar Germany. First it has to do with demographics. Catholics had been an embattled minority in Germany since the aggressive Protestant, Otto von Bismarck, founded modern Germany. After 1945, millions of German Protestants were left behind in Poland and in the Soviet Union, but especially in the Russian Zone of Occupation that became East Germany. As a result, the percentage of Catholics rose from just over one-third in all of Germany prior to the war to 45 percent in postwar West Germany.

More importantly, Konrad Adenauer and his newly-created Christian Democratic Union—primarily a Catholic party, even though it invited Protestant participation—dominated the early years of West Germany, from the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949 until 1969. Ruff concludes (as “the central finding of this book”) that “controversies over the church’s relationship to National Socialism were frequently surrogates for a larger set of conflicts over how the church was to position itself in modern society—in politics, international relations, the media and the public sphere” (2). Because Catholics were powerful in the first two decades of the Federal Republic, questionable Catholic behavior under Hitler came under close inspection, an attractive target for any opponent of the Adenauer agenda. Protestants, by contrast, not exercising national power, were able to nurture their misleading claim that the Confessing Church had represented the Protestant stance in the Third Reich, and that it had been a church of resistance.

Ruff compresses the massive volume of postwar debates surrounding Catholic behavior in the Nazi era into seven chapters, each devoted to a specific controversy. Chapter 1 on the period 1945-1949 describes both Protestant and Catholic efforts to produce “postwar anthologies.” Each church strove in those years to prove their persecution under Nazism and their supposedly triumphant response. Ruff comments, “They knew—how could they not?—that the church had lost its decisive battles against the National Socialist juggernaut, its resistance notwithstanding” (13). Johannes Neuhäusler, author of the massive Cross and Swastika (1946), a story of Catholic suffering and resistance, personally resisted and suffered himself. He spent the last four years of the war in Dachau as a neighbor to Martin Niemoeller.[3] However, Ruff shows that Neuhäusler’s approach to writing history came “straight out of the playbook of a skilled intelligence operative. He presented evidence rife with omissions and manipulations …. In ambiguous documents that showed evidence of both support for the Nazi regime and opposition, he cut out passages professing support, leaving out the ellipses that would have indicated the cuts.” Later, a younger Catholic historian, Hans Müller, “discovered this cut-and-paste job … and publicly took the author to task” (34-35).

Chapter 2 describes a legal battle before the FRG’s Constitutional Court in 1956 that Ruff compares in significance to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 in the United States. Ironically, however, this German case involved trying to protect the separation of students along denominational lines. The SPD-led government of Lower Saxony had written a law maintaining the option of faith-based public schools, but insisting they be interfaith rather than denominational. Adenauer and the CDU filed a lawsuit, wanting to protect the right of Catholic parents to send their children to publicly-funded Catholic schools. Unfortunately, the CDU had to base its case on the Reichskonkordat of 1933, which had guaranteed such schools. This opened a can of worms. The Reichskonkordat represented Hitler’s first foreign policy success and also a widely questioned “accomplishment” of Eugenio Pacelli and the Vatican. Furthermore, a close 1950s-look at the Reichskonkordat and its origins required also a close look at the Enabling Act of March 1933 that made the Reichskonkordat possible. This Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial power, had only happened with the support of every vote within the Catholic Center Party faction. Critics of Adenauer’s position began to see a corrupt bargain in the Reichskonkordat’s provision of denominational schools and the Catholic votes that had given Hitler his Enabling Act. They also accused Catholics in West Germany of wanting to keep one foot in the authoritarian past, rather than accept the democratic concepts of religious liberty and an open society. In a fine example of Ruff’s ability to describe complex events, he builds this chapter upon six episodes within the schools conflict, from battles under the Weimar Republic, through the writing of the Basic Law of the FRG, to the networks built up by each side during the public relations battles of the 1950s, and finally to the decision of the Constitutional Court.

The Court ruling in May 1957, handed down by a nine-person court with five Catholic members, confirmed the Reichskonkordat’s legal standing. On the other hand, in a complicated balancing act, it also confirmed the right of Lower Saxony to order its own school affairs, since the Basic Law of the FRG had handed all control of education to the states. Ruff notes that this climactic event in the mid-1950s set the battle lines among church historians for years to come, especially the tendency to focus on Catholic rather than Protestant behavior in Nazi Germany. It also hardened political stances, with Catholics and their allies defending the past, including the authoritarian and (to outside eyes, at least) intolerant nature of Catholic hierarchy. On the other hand, critics hardened their stance in favor of a more extensive (and increasingly secular) view of civil society, civil rights, and religious liberty.

Chapter 3 takes us into the 1960s, with a dramatic February 1961 article by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “German Catholicism in 1933: A Critical Examination.” Ruff describes this as “a bolt of lightning,” given Böckenörde’s “array of devastating quotations from cardinals, bishops, theology professors and lay presidents” in support of the Nazi state (86). The young Böckenförde, a conscientious Catholic headed for an impressive career in constitutional law, inspired other members of the “1945 generation” to undertake a rigorous inquiry into the stance of those Catholic leaders. This also inspired opponents of Böckenförde’s critique to organize, including their creation of the Association for Contemporary History, a Catholic body attempting to emulate the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and soon led by the young and “pugilistic” Catholic historian, Konrad Repgen (116-19).

Two American scholars entered the fray at about this time, first the young sociologist, Gordon Zahn, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Zahn spent the academic year 1956-57 in Germany, supported by a Fulbright grant. This placed Zahn in Germany just as the quarrel over denominational schools reached the Constitutional Court and grabbed his attention. Also, as a long-time member of the Catholic peace movement, he chose to interview former Catholic peace advocates in Germany during the Nazi era. In September 1959 he delivered a paper on this topic at a meeting of the American Catholic Sociological Association. In the published version, “The Catholic Press and the National Cause,” he showed how newspapers and journals had preached a hyper-nationalism that, in his view, represented a “critical failure” in their message to German Catholics. Catholics in late-1950s Germany, from Johannes Neuhäusler to the German bishops, reacted angrily to this article, as did the Vatican and the German Foreign Office. These opponents successfully barred Zahn’s ability to publish in Catholic venues, though they failed in their attempt to get Loyola University to violate his tenure rights and release him. Ruff says, however, that they made his life at Loyola “perfectly miserable” until he moved to the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1966. Despite powerful efforts to block Zahn’s impact, he got his book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, into print in 1962, with a German translation in 1965 (143-46). He also inspired the next American thorn in the flesh of the German Catholic Church.

Guenter Lewy, born into a Jewish family in Breslau in 1923, fled Germany with his family, spent some time on a Palestinian kibbutz, and became part of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army. This gave him a chance to shout—in German—while his unit was taking their first German prisoners, “Surrender, the Jews are here!” (195) There is no record that he gave the same warning when he published The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany in 1964. However, the books by Zahn and Lewy in 1962 and 1964 were outside entrants into a field of criticism that raised alarms among defenders of the church in Germany. Among other things, church officials and archivists decided never again to give outsiders easy access to the sort of documents used by Zahn and Lewy, as Ruff highlights in his title to Chapter 6, “Guenter Lewy and the Battle for Sources.”

The most famous of all the early 1960s battles involved Rolf Hochhuth and his play, The Deputy, first performed in 1963. We all know this to be an early entry into the “Pius Wars,” with its condemnation of the pontiff’s alleged silence in the face of the Holocaust. Ruff gives a useful background on Hochhuth, the original production of the play, and the bitter conflicts that ensued. He concludes that “counter-strikes by the defenders of the beleaguered pontiff transformed a debate about the silence of the wartime pope into something more injurious to their cause. This was a debate about freedom of expression, civil liberties and tolerance, when in the early to mid-1960s societal attitudes on these subjects were fundamentally shifting” (156). In fact, Ruff says controversy about The Deputy “marked the fundamental turning point in the battles for the Catholic past. It represented the last gasp of the Catholic milieu, the final extraordinary mobilization of organizations, politicians and clerics. But this time it was unable to prevent a fundamental taboo from being not just infringed but shattered” (192).

Chapter 7 brings us into the 1970s and 1980s, with two powerful antagonists, Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen, squaring off against each other. They did so in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in their scholarly publications, and with assistance from their graduate students. Scholder, in Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Band 1 (Frankfurt, 1977), did begin to see weaknesses in the Protestant response to the Nazi takeover in 1933. However, he also attempted to write about the Catholic Church, and, in his opening salvo, an article in the FAZ, he resuscitated what he had to admit was a speculative claim about linkage between Catholic Center Party votes for the Enabling Act and Hitler’s decision to negotiate a Reichskonkordat. This article, a sort of advertisement for his forthcoming book, “focused exclusively on the ignominious role played by Catholic politicians and ecclesiastical leaders in the catastrophe of 1933. Nowhere was the Protestant past from 1933 to be found in either headline or article” (226). Repgen, leader of the Association for Contemporary History of the Catholic Church, responded with vigor and tenacity, leading to a set of exchanges from 1977 to 1979. In those years Scholder, a professor of church history at Tübingen had several advantages. These included his strong political contacts to the FDP, his easy access to the press, and his role as a frequent commentator on television.

Even if Adenauer and the Catholic CDU dominated the first twenty years of the Federal Republic and even if Catholics represented 45 percent of the population, certain advantages fell not just to Scholder but to Protestants in general throughout the period from 1945 to 1980. This included the fact that Protestant behavior in Nazi Germany did not yet fall under close inspection, as did Catholic behavior. It included advantages such as that which Scholder enjoyed in his relationship to German media and the German establishment in his conflict with Repgen, despite Repgen’s ability to identify weak areas in Scholder’s arguments. It is also possible to gain from this very fine book by Mark Ruff the sense that first-generation defenders of the Catholic Church in Germany had to struggle not just with the past, but also with the future.

When Böckenförde or Hochhuth or even Klaus Scholder seemed to prevail in the court of public opinion, it had a great deal to do with the path toward our modern world and the way in which democratic ideals of religious liberty and an open society came to prevail. Mark Ruff’s well researched, well written, and cogently argued book adds significantly to our understanding of how early postwar views of churches in Nazi Germany developed. First for Catholics and eventually for Protestants, this topic moved past a struggle to defend church behaviors into an effort to understand and to learn from them. Mark Ruff makes a fine contribution in that undertaking.

[1] For my take on the remarkable nature of Nostra Aetate, see Robert P. Ericksen, “Jews and ‘God the Father’ after Auschwitz: American Responses to Nostra Aetate,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 29/2 (2016), 323-36.

[2] In support of this claim, Ruff cites Manfred Gailus, “Keine gute Performance. Die deutsche Protestanten im ‘Dritten Reich,’” in Manfred Gailus and Armin Nolzen, eds., Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft.” Glaube, Confession, und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011), 96-121.

[3] Neuhäeusler also participated in the famous June 5, 1945 Naples interview in which Niemoeller admitted he had been ready to fight for Germany during the war. He, Neuhäeusler, and Josef Müller all agreed that Germany was not ready for democracy, adding to the very critical press response to this interview in the West.

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Review of Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie (Freiburg: Herder, 2016). Pp. 540. ISBN 9783451328510.

Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

The seventeen chapters in this volume are the published version of a lecture series in Marburg (2014/2015) on the impact of the First World War on Christian theology. Collectively, they are global and ecumenical in scope, though there is more emphasis on Europe than other parts of the world, more focus on Germany than other European societies, and more attention given to Protestant than Catholic, Orthodox, or other Christian traditions. They reflect—though in a limited way—broader trends in the historiography of the First World War, which has shifted from a focus on Western and Central Europe toward greater emphasis on international and global dimensions of the war and the experiences and agendas of Asian and African as well as European participants. On the other hand, none of the contributions selected for this volume gives any attention to women who were theologically-trained or pursued religious vocations. Therefore, its assessment of the impact of the war on religious thought remains partial and incomplete.

The book begins with two chapters offering broad surveys of early twentieth-century European culture and German war theology, respectively. Elmar Salmann’s “Der Geist der Avantgarde und der Große Krieg” covers familiar territory as it catalogs challenging and unsettling developments in modern psychology, philosophy, art, music, literature, and the natural sciences. For those contemporaries in despair over the complexity and contradictions of modern life, the Great War was a great simplifier and a welcome relief. Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele’s “Der ‘Deutsche Gott’” follows up with an overview of German war theology—also familiar terrain—but Schäufele generates new insights through his side-by-side analysis of Catholic and Protestant war theologies, his recognition of diverse perspectives among theologians of the same confession, and his cost-benefit analysis of contextual theology.  In addition to those theologians of both confessions who saw the war as justified self-defense, an occasion for moral and spiritual renewal, or an experience of the sacred, Schäufele draws our attention to Protestant theologians like Reinhold Seeberg and Ferdinand Kattenbusch who believed war was a means by which God tested the ‘Geschichtsfähigkeit’ of nations, a theme that comes up again in Justus Bernhard’s chapter on Emanuel Hirsch (“’Krieg, du bist von Gott’”). Though most German war theology promoted the “civil-religious ideology of German nationalism” (73), Schäufele does not accept Karl Barth’s demand for a radical separation of theology from religious experience. As an alternative, he points to the more nuanced and critical theological engagement with wartime realities that he finds in the works of Rudolf Otto, Karl Holl, Friedrich Niebergall, and Otto Baumgarten.

Nine of the chapters that follow offer narrower case studies of individuals representing significant trends in wartime or postwar religious thought. The majority were German Protestant theologians (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann, Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, Emanuel Hirsch), though four German Catholic intellectuals (Erich Przywara, Hugo Ball, Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson) and one Jewish-German philosopher (Franz Rosenzweig) are also represented.

Georg Pfleiderer’s “Kriegszeit und Gottesrreich” challenges some of the origin myths of Dialectical Theology through a close examination of Karl Barth’s “August Experience” (140). Despite Barth’s own claims of an absolute rupture between prewar and postwar theology, Pfleiderer argues that Barth’s intense exchanges with liberal theologians like Adolf von Harnack, Martin Rade, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Friedrich Naumann should be seen as a family quarrel that included moments of understanding and recognition as well as conflict and alienation. Christoph Markschies (“Revanchismus oder Reue?”) also challenges the notion that Barth and Dialectical Theology simply brushed aside an older generation whose systems of thought collapsed in the wake of the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. He does so through an examination of the postwar works of Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann, and Adolf von Harnack, assessing the extent to which they broke from their prewar foundations. Markschies finds very little change in Seeberg’s case, noting continuities between his Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion (1902), Grundriss der Dogmatik (1932), and the theology of the German Christian movement—though without fully exploring the final link in that chain. Deissmann remained consistent in the fundamentals of his theology but underwent a significant reorientation in terms of his appraisal of the war and his embrace of the ecumenical movement. Harnack stood somewhere in between, but Markschies argues that Marcion (1920) demonstrates a greater awareness of the distance between Christ and culture in Harnack’s postwar theology than is often recognized.

Joachim Negel’s study of Erich Przywara (“Nichts ist wirklicher als Gott”) and Barbara Nichtweiß’ analysis of Erik Peterson (“’Der Himmel des Garnisonspfarrers’”) demonstrate that Catholic theologians who lived through the First World War also emphasized the gulf between heaven and earth and between God and humanity. Przywara ultimately concluded that “God, who from beyond this world and its history, entered and vanished into history (kenosis), can only be encountered through its contradictions and catastrophes” (226). Similarly, Peterson’s postwar fable “Der Himmel des Garnisonspfarrers” (1919) was a scathing indictment of pastors and theologians who, by substituting militarism for the teachings of Jesus, conflated heaven and earth, or divine and human agendas. At the end of the story, the “Son of God” (actually Satan in disguise) proclaims, “Look, now everyone is in heaven, everyone in hell!” (400).

If there is any comic (or tragi-comic) relief in this book, it is in Bernd Wacker’s account of the complicated relationship between Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt (“’Die Revolution tagt in Versailles’”). Along with his role in the Dada movement, Ball’s editorship of the anti-war journal Freie Zeitung and his critique of German militarism and authoritarianism in Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (1919) were anathema to conservative nationalists like Schmitt, who would eventually be known as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” (304). However, Schmitt was pleasantly surprised by Ball’s Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), which he took as an indication of Ball’s religious and political conversion (he was only half right). Around the same time, Ball wrote a series of relatively positive essays on Schmitt’s political theology for the journal Hochland, but Schmitt began to fear for his own reputation when he learned that Ball planned to release a slightly-revised version of Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz under the new title Die Folgen der Reformation. Ball’s own illusions were shattered when an associate of Schmitt’s who reviewed the book accused him of having spent the war in exile working alongside of other “paid traitors” (341). The relationship ended with each convinced that his own ideas about Germany, the war, and democracy were rooted in Catholic traditions.

Although over half of the chapters focus on individual German intellectuals, several explore international dimensions of the war’s impact on Christian theology. Jörg Ernesti’s “Der Vatikan im Ersten Weltkrieg” argues that Benedict XV’s “peace note” was a watershed in the history of the papacy. In the face of almost complete political marginalization, and widely ignored or disparaged by Catholics on both sides, Benedict XV tried to use his moral authority to bend world affairs in the direction of peace and reconciliation, signaling a greater humanitarian agenda and openness to the world on the part of the Vatican. Karl Pinggéra’s chapter on Orthodox theology (“Alte und Neue Wege”) also sees the war as a watershed, through its destructive impact on Christian theology within the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Churches, seminaries, ancient manuscripts, unique forms of religious education, and a majority of the theologians themselves were annihilated in the context of war, genocide, revolution, and civil war in these regions. Liberal reform movements influenced by German Protestant theology and steps toward greater lay leadership were cut off abruptly within the Armenian and Russian Orthodox Churches. Though Orthodox theology continued among émigré theologians in cities like Paris, they tended to define themselves in opposition to “the West,” by which they meant not only the Catholic and Protestant traditions but also centuries of pre-war Orthodox theology they believed had been corrupted by Western influences.

Hannelore Müller’s chapter on the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches (“Jenseits von Konfession und Nation”) focuses on the small subset of European and North American Christians who promoted international understanding and the protection of religious and national minorities in the new postwar world order. Yet even here there was ambiguity, as members of the World Alliance occasionally used issues like the rights of religious minorities to advance their own national and religious interests and to bring “civilization through law” to “backward” peoples in the “orient” and other parts of the world (451).

The only chapter to fully engage theological developments outside of Europe and North America is Frieder Ludwig’s “Das also ist Christentum?”, which addresses the impact of the European war on churches and missions in Africa and Asia. Even here, the author gives substantial attention to European perspectives before considering Asians and Africans as subjects in their own right. The second half of the chapter offers cross-regional comparisons of anti-colonial resistance led by prophets representing or embodying indigenous gods but influenced by Christian millenarianism (in Uganda and Kenya) as well as Christian resistance leaders like John Chilembwe (Nyasaland) and Garrick Braide (Nigeria). In addition to those who rebelled, there were African Christians who continued to work with European missionaries even as they criticized European political and religious leadership and demanded greater equality. Following a brief nod to Asian elites and theologians (Rabindrath Tagore in India and Liang Qichao and Yu Rizhang in China), Ludwig concludes that the global nature of the war challenged European claims regarding peace, community and Christianity and made contradictions between missionary work and colonial policies more apparent than ever. As a result, it called into question not only the Christian character of Europe, but also the European character of Christianity (511-512).

Two other chapters offer reflections on the fate of the Christian churches in light of the catastrophic failures of the early twentieth century. Thomas Ruster (“Krieg gegen die Glaubensbrüder”) poses the question: “Can one still believe a single word from the churches, given their endorsement and affirmation of this war?” (102). After all, “the whole community of the faithful went astray … from the bishops down to the last believing lay persons—and especially the theologians” (105). According to Ruster, the only way forward is to identify the theological errors that led to the churches’ capitulation a century ago, and to develop a more sophisticated theological understanding of ‘principalities and powers’ in the present, in order to avoid aligning the church with systems that bring death rather than life. Roman Siebenrock (“’Gewalt ist kein Name Gottes!’”) revisits the same problems in the final chapter, arguing that when Christians of different countries pray to the same God for victory in war, they not only destroy the unity of the church, but the Christian proclamation as well. Siebenroth wants “Gewalt ist kein Name Gottes” to be an article of faith against which all affairs of the church are measured. If God’s all-powerful nature means not an infinite extension of power in human terms, but something qualitatively different (Incarnation, kenosis), then the church must also renounce power, privilege, and triumphalism.

Such prescriptions are appropriate for churches and believers who have placed themselves in the service of destructive institutions and ideologies. On the other hand, they also assume that white, male, European Christianity stood for (and still stands for?) the whole church. How might a theology of “principalities and powers” or concepts like Incarnation and kenosis be understood within a global and more inclusive framework, with our gaze directed toward individuals like Sister Margit Slachta, Pastor John Chilembwe and Dorothy Day as well as Reinhold Seeberg and Emanuel Hirsch?

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Review of Lee B. Spitzer, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust: The Hand of Sincere Friendship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Lee B. Spitzer, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust: The Hand of Sincere Friendship (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2017). Pg. xiv + 482. ISBN: 9780817017828.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lee B. Spitzer, General Secretary of American Baptist Churches, USA, has written a comprehensive study of the relationship between Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust. Long curious about Baptist attitudes and responses during that time on account of his own secular Jewish background and his relatives’ reluctance to discuss their Holocaust experiences, Spitzer traces Northern, Southern, and African American Baptist engagement with both US and European Jews, the latter under threat of annihilation by Hitler’s Nazi regime. The book’s subtitle comes from a 1935 London speech by Dr. J.H. Rushbrooke, President of the Baptist World Alliance, in which he reaffirmed a declaration against racial persecution issued by the 1934 Baptist World Congress in Berlin. Quoting the declaration’s condemnation of “the placing of a stamp of inferiority upon an entire race” and “every form of oppression or unfair discrimination towards the Jew” as “a violation of God the Heavenly Father,” Rushbrooke lamented the suffering of European Jews. “To my Jewish brothers and sisters under such conditions I extend the hand of sincere friendship,” he avowed (3).

Despite the initial impression that the author’s ecclesiastical position and the book’s subtitle might suggest, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust is no simple glorification of Baptist-Jewish history. Rather, it is a thoroughly researched analysis of diverse Baptist responses to the plight of Jews during the Nazi era. Spitzer’s sources include a wide array of archival material: annual convention or conference books of Northern, Southern, Swedish, Regular, African American, and Seventh Day Baptists; minutes and correspondence from the Baptist World Alliance; papers from various Baptist boards, societies, and personnel; and several dozen national and regional Baptist periodicals. This is complemented by three main Jewish sources—The Jewish Chronicle, The American Hebrew, and The American Jewish Yearbook—and a solid collection of relevant secondary sources. Surveying the existing accounts of scholars like William E. Nawyn, E. Earl Joiner, and Robert W. Ross, Spitzer finds only brief, negative assessments of the two large, national, and white Baptist conventions. Omitted are the African American and the regional, state, and local facets of the history.

Convinced of the need for a fresh assessment, the author begins by considering historic Baptist commitments to both democracy and religious toleration, then turning to Baptist-Jewish encounters during times of Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here we find fears of immigrant criminality from “this European sewer” but also compassion for “God’s own people” (22, 24). This background is useful, because it contextualizes the unruly mixture of Baptist concerns and responses to Jews later, in the 1930s and 1940s.

For example, Northern Baptists provided relief at Ellis Island, funded city missions to convert Jews, and developed “the Christian Americanization movement organized by the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society” (34). In the 1920s, they also passed resolutions against war and condemned the Turkish genocide against Armenian Christians. As the Committee on Interracial Relationships put it in 1928:

In racial prejudices and false nationalism are to be found the sources of such curses of the human race as wars, oppressions, and the exploitations by the stronger races of the weaker. … Only in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and in the common Fatherhood of God and the Universal Brotherhood of man which he reveals, is there a remedy for race antagonisms. (48)

Statements like these simultaneously asserted racial difference—even hierarchy—affirmed a Baptist commitment to the primacy of Christianity, and expressed a desire to live in peace and harmony with other peoples.

As for Southern Baptists, already in the nineteenth century they “recognized the role of the Jews as the Old Testament people of God, acknowledged a missionary call toward them, demonstrated ambivalence toward the restoration of Israel as a nation, and imagined a responsibility for mission work among Arabs as well” (55). Like their northern counterparts, Southern Baptists expressed fear that the immigration of “Roman Catholics, Jews and heathen,” who were “enemies of the evangelical faith,” would flood American cities and threaten both American and Christian institutions (59). More surprisingly, Southern Baptists called for an international conference in 1919 to alleviate Jewish suffering and emphasized a core Baptist commitment to religious liberty (60-61).

With respect to the Nazi era, Spitzer asks three questions that form the basis of his study: “was the Baptist offer of friendship to Jews really sincere? Did Baptists throughout the United States reach out to Nazi victims through individual and corporate expressions of caring and compassion? Were Baptists in the United States truly concerned, or were they apathetic in the face of the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people?” (5). He formulates his answers in sections covering Baptist periodicals and then Northern, Southern, and African American Baptists, each in their turn, before turning to the Baptist World Alliance towards the end of the book.

As Spitzer examines reports and editorials on the plight of the European Jews, he expands on Robert W. Ross’ research on the Protestant church press by scrutinizing a wide variety of Baptist publications, most importantly Missions and The Watchman-Examiner. The latter reported extensively on Nazi antisemitic campaigns, Jewish emigration, attacks on eastern European Jews, deportations, camps, and the scale of the killing in the Holocaust. Also important were the editors’ interest in Zionism and Jewish migration to Palestine (in light of biblical eschatology) and numerous condemnations of Nazism and antisemitism (139). Complementing this examination of the Baptist church press was a chapter on The American Hebrew, which covered the 1934 Baptist World Congress, considered Christian-Jewish relations, and praised Baptist and other Protestant expressions of sympathy, only growing more critical after 1943, when it censured both Christian antisemitism and Baptist suggestions that Jews convert (135).

Having concluded that Baptists were well-informed about Jewish suffering, Spitzer moves into the heart of his study, seeking to determine whether Baptists responded to the Holocaust and, if so, how. He finds that Northern Baptists, who were used to addressing domestic and international social and political issues, repeatedly issued national statements condemning Nazism and sympathizing with persecuted Jews. In 1939, for instance, the Committee on Race Relations denounced American antisemitism, while the Resolutions Committee affirmed that “God hath made of one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and that we are His offspring” (152). The committee then condemned prejudice against African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews. Various regional and state assemblies did likewise, though none of these sentiments were translated into personal, practical aid.

In contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention made much less of Jewish persecution, in part because some of the key leaders, like President M.E. Dodd and missionary leader Everett Gill, were antisemitic or racist, but also because “Southern Baptist complicity in Jim Crow culture opened them up to charges of hypocrisy” (439). Indeed, its Social Service Commission described the race problem quite unsympathetically in 1940:

Whenever two races live along side each other or come into necessary contact with each other there is, as always in the history of the world, a race problem. Sometimes it is the Aryan and the Jew; sometimes it is the Arab and the Jew; sometimes it is the White man and the Negro, but always wherever two races have to deal with each other you have a race problem…. (276)

Spitzer explains how Southern Baptists criticized the Nazi regime primarily for its attempt to overthrow “all the things for which men have fought, bled and died for” since the time Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount, namely the “idea of the worth and dignity of the individual, which is the basis of democracy” (277). Still, Southern Baptists did support the racism resolution at the 1934 Baptist World Congress, as well as its reiteration in 1939. At the state level, apart from Missouri, Southern Baptist Conventions did not express sympathy for persecuted Jews until after the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938. Then, however, six state conventions were outspoken in their denunciations of Nazism and their support for Jews, and two others expressed some sympathy (303-324). Overall, though, the author concludes that Southern Baptists were more concerned to convert Jews than to work for justice for them (343).

One of the strengths of Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust is the attention Spitzer gives to African American Baptists, who, he writes, “experienced a competitive friendship with the Jewish community” (440). African American Baptists identified with Jews for two reasons. They saw them as fellow victims of prejudice and marginalization within American society, and they identified strongly with the biblical account of Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. Still, there were perhaps stronger reasons for rivalry: Jewish immigrants were far more likely to prosper economically than African Americans; Jews were often landlords where African Americans were tenants, as in Harlem; and international sympathy for the persecuted Jews of Europe stood in marked contrast to the absence of compassion for the plight of African Americans. As Nannie Helen Burroughs of the Women’s Auxiliary put it:

… we confess that our sympathy is mixed with sadness, fear and suspicion. We wonder if when the Czech and the Pole and the Jew, of all nations, eventually achieve freedom from fear, they will join the rest of the white world in appropriating and reserving for themselves this freedom for which black men, too, have fought, bled and died? Freedom for all men, everywhere, is the only thing worth fighting for (363-364).

Internationally, Spitzer argues, the responses of the Baptist World Alliance to the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews were an amalgam of all of these diverse Baptist perspectives. “While passing resolutions that voiced Baptist opposition to Nazism, the persecution of Jews, and anti-Semitism, the BWA never developed a strategy for assisting Jewish victims of Nazism or resettling Jewish exiles in the aftermath of the Holocaust” (441).

In the end, Spitzer’s analysis uncovers the good, the bad, and the ugly about Baptist responses to the Holocaust. Writing for his coreligionists, he concludes that “the hand of sincere friendship” was not really offered by Baptists towards Jews. He makes the appropriate judgment that “Baptists felt solidarity with Jews because of their status as a persecuted minority and not because they were involved in caring relationships with Jewish neighbors. … Baptist recognition of Jewish victimhood did not compel comprehensive, concerted, or practical action on their behalf, which friends might expect from friends” (455). We can only hope, with the author, that his thorough analysis of this history bears fruit in contemporary Baptist and wider Christian responses to antisemitism in the twenty-first century.

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Review of Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, eds. and trans., The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, eds. and trans., The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). Pp. 161. ISBN: 9780253029577.

By Beth Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The story of Erna Becker-Kohen provides a welcome and much-needed contribution to the scholarly literature on survivors of the Holocaust. Becker-Kohen’s memoir, written as a diary, allows historians to explore the experiences of someone who was labelled by the Nazi regime as “privileged,” demonstrating how persecution, discrimination, and threats of death impacted such persons, wiping away any sense of privilege whatsoever. Spicer and Cucchiara have added to our understanding of what life could be like for a neglected category of people: Catholics of Jewish heritage. Erna’s simple and straightforward style of writing conveys a sense of immediacy, with no knowledge of what the future may have in store for Erna, her Catholic Aryan husband, Gustav Becker, and their small child, Silvan. Readers may take the journey with Erna, hoping that all three family members will outlast the Nazi horrors.

Erna’s first entry at Christmas 1937 begins with an announcement: she and her Catholic husband, Gustav, are expecting their first child in March. By this time, Hitler had been in power in Germany for four years. Erna and Gustav had married in 1931 while Erna was still Jewish and Gustav Catholic. As Spicer and Cucchiara note, the newlyweds could have had no idea then that their religious heritages would come to matter so very much to the outside world. In the early phases of Hitler’s chancellorship, Gustav continued working in an engineering company. His status as a pure Aryan accorded Erna a measure of protection. However, as the years of the Third Reich continued, Gustav and Erna would come to see that the so-called “privileged” status of their union was really no protection against an increasingly hostile German society. What adds yet another layer to this fascinating story is that Erna had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1936. She longed for community in the face of such social isolation and persecution and she took increasing solace in her Catholic faith.

Throughout the memoir, Erna records the challenges she confronted. She and Silvan are separated time and again from Gustav—first due to neighbors and their discriminatory remarks, then due to aerial bombardments in Berlin, which lead Erna and Silvan to make their way to potential safety in the Tyrol. From the beginning of these separations, Erna recognizes that she and Silvan are in grave danger and that she must seek out help in order to survive on the run. Her careful observations show us how her baptism as a Catholic did not necessarily translate into assistance from Catholic Aryans. From an October 1941 entry, “For a while I was a member of the church choir in our little parish. Singing has always given me much joy, but now I had to give it up because a few singers did not like the idea of a Jew participating. I always remained modestly, even shyly, in the background. Still, I am not wanted” (46). Despite being told by a priest that she was “like a leper” and would have to stay away from other people, Erna continued to note in her writings whenever she found what she referred to as “the true spirit of Christianity.” In an entry labelled late February 1942, Erna encounters a woman who had tried to befriend her. “Frau Herberg came to see me to inquire why I have not come to see her… She consciously stands by me and insists that I continue to come and visit her. This once again gives me courage and the certainty that Christianity lived makes people strong and good” (48).

But Erna’s faith in people living the message of Christianity would be tried many times over. In March 1943 the Gestapo paid Erna a visit at the family’s apartment. She was arrested and taken to a collection point for Jews in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. After her release, her fears for her family increased, particularly her fear of being separated from her son and what might become of him if she were taken away to a camp. She and Silvan had to flee their home in Berlin on June 15, 1943, with only one hour to pack as the Nazis were restricting purchases of train tickets. A kind priest, Father Erwin, advised Erna to take Silvan by train before the restrictions went into effect. Thanks to Father Erwin, Erna and Silvan were able to find refuge in a remote corner of Tyrol in August 1943. Once in the Tyrolean village, Erna finds Catholics willing to help her but she also quickly notes that the mayor of the village is a fanatical Nazi. Erna understands that, as nice as the local Catholic villagers are, if the mayor finds out she is of Jewish ancestry, they will not be able to help or protect her.

In addition to Erna’s recollections of her encounters with both helpful as well as awful people, she provides information about the fate of her extended Jewish family. Erna’s mother, who felt deeply betrayed when Erna converted, went to live in Belgium with her son. While she died of natural causes, the fate of many of Erna’s relatives, including her brother, reveal stories of persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and death. Erna’s sister and brother-in-law emigrated to Chile and so they survived the war. Central to Erna’s story is the fate of her loyal husband, Gustav.

Throughout the memoir, Gustav appears as brave and loyal to his wife and son. In the early years, Gustav takes on traditional “women’s work” by stopping after work to do the grocery shopping- primarily because he is an Aryan and is therefore entitled to more food than Erna is as a Jew. He attempts to find safe places with nuns in convents for Erna, and sends her whatever he can while she and Silvan are moving from place to place for safety. As the Nazis came closer and closer to defeat in the war, they attempted to drive apart those individuals who remained steadfast to their “non-Aryan” partners, refusing to divorce them. To that end, Gustav was ordered to report to a work camp to force him to separate from Erna, thus removing her designation of “protected status.” Gustav refused and after performing hard labor he contracted skeletal tuberculosis. He survived the war, but was confined to a plaster body cast for years, and ultimately died from the harsh conditions under which he suffered because of his dedication to his marriage. Although Gustav and Erna were reunited before his death, Gustav never again experienced joy in life. He died in 1952.

As Erna struggled in the post-war world, her memoirs note how she felt homeless and sickened by the people who had once tormented her and rejected her. Now that the war was over, she saw the hypocrites rushing to befriend her to prove that they had not turned away from her when she most desperately needed their assistance. Some of Erna’s faith in Christianity and more broadly in humanity was restored to her through her interactions with Father Paul, who “has proved to me repeatedly that there is no contradiction between Judaism and Christianity” (125). Erna seems to have found some true inner peace when she penned:

But why do I nonetheless record this memory? First to impress upon mankind that something like this must never happen again. We, too, want to be recognized as human beings, and if you can look upon Jews without any racial conceit, then you have solved half of the Jewish problem. Second, to confirm that I encountered those forces that unyieldingly fought for human rights and dignity only where the Christian teaching—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)—was not mere words but was consciously lived (126).

By giving the English-speaking world access to Erna Becker-Kohen’s memoir, Spicer and Cucchiara have provided us all with insight into what it was like to be a Catholic of Jewish descent in a time when most people could only see a “Jew” in front of them. Like the diary of Victor Klemperer, Erna’s account allows us to experience her world—with all of its ugliness as well as all of its extreme acts of kindness. The editors have also provided a substantial amount of background material in both their introduction and their footnotes so that readers will be able to place Erna’s memoir into the larger context of Nazi laws and the persecution of Catholics of Jewish heritage. This is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature, deepening our understanding of an understudied group of persecuted people.

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Article Note: Andrew H. Beattie, “‘Lobby for the Nazi Elite’? The Protestant Churches and Civilian Internment in the British Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1948”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Article Note: Andrew H. Beattie, “‘Lobby for the Nazi Elite’? The Protestant Churches and Civilian Internment in the British Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1948,” German History 35, no. 1 (2017): 43-70.

By Connor Sebestyen, University of Toronto

As with the best of case studies, Beattie’s examination of the work of Protestant clergy in civilian internment camps in the British zone of occupation forces historians to reconsider an established narrative. In “Lobby for the Nazi Elite?”, Beattie calls for “differentiation” and nuance in explaining whom the Church helped in the immediate postwar years and why. As the story went, the German Protestant and Catholic Churches both supported former Nazis and war criminals and opposed the Allied occupation governments; in doing so they largely ignored the wellbeing of the victims of the Nazi regime. Beattie does not downplay the German Protestant clergy’s fervent advocacy on behalf of war criminals but seeks to put these actions in a wider context of German Church help to the roughly 400,000 civilian internees that were held by the Allies during the occupation years. The German Protestant Church saw POWs, internees, expellees from the East, and convicted war criminals as part of the same group of “Germans in foreign captivity”. So in order to fully understand the intertwined motivations and circumstances that led to Church officials becoming so actively involved both in opposition to and cooperation with the occupation governments, we need to keep this context in mind.

Drawing on Protestant Church archives throughout the region of the former British zone of occupation, Beattie contends that it was not a small group of activist clergy who were conspiring to aid the ‘Nazi elite’, but rather that “Protestant internee work was a collective endeavour supported by an extensive bureaucracy” that was coordinated at a regional and national level. The article outlines how the Protestant Church organized its aid efforts and how this aid evolved from fulfilling immediate basic needs like “Seelsorge” (pastoral care) and communication with families to providing “Fürsorge” (material welfare) and eventually to focusing primarily on legal services. Beattie points out that a lot of these activities were coordinated with the British authorities, arguing that the occupation government shared many goals with the Church clergy and that they spent at least as much time working together as partners as they did as antagonists.

Beattie’s article has done a good job of showing that “…Protestant internee work in the British zone was even more extensive [and well organized] than previously recognized.” He also expands on existing explanations of the Church’s support for internees, primarily based on a refusal to confront the past and ideological reasons, to include “interconfessional rivalry, national solidarity and the lack of a German government”, and most importantly a genuine opposition to extrajudicial internment itself. Beattie also criticizes Robert P. Eriksen’s claim that there was “a willingness to give church support to almost any alleged war criminal”, and instead argues that responses from clergy were “… more diverse and ambiguous, than previously recognized.” In support of this claim, he alludes to a couple of examples of individual pastors who refused to help certain internees, in part because of their criminal pasts. We should be careful that these examples are not just outliers and do in fact constitute a significant trend that could overturn Eriksen’s description of sweeping and undiscerning Church support. American, British, and French archives are filled with thousands of letters that their occupation governments received from German clergy petitioning for clemency on behalf of war criminals, and many stated that they were doing so out of a sense of universal Christian forgiveness, regardless of the crimes these men had committed. Therefore, an avenue for further research could be to more definitively establish the balance between those pastors who uncritically supported war criminals and those pastors who were more discerning with their advocacy and turned them away.

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Article Note: Ion Popa, “Sanctuary from the Holocaust? Roman Catholic Conversion of Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1942”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Article Note: Ion Popa, “Sanctuary from the Holocaust? Roman Catholic Conversion of Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no 1 (Spring 2015): 39-56.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Of the many painful topics around Christianity and the Holocaust, one of the thorniest is conversion. Even basic questions remain unanswered. How many Jews sought baptism? How willing were Christian clergy to help? How did the situation differ across regions and confessions? Did converting actually save lives? Ion Popa’s important article addresses these questions for Romania and in the process reveals the complex tangle of religious, political, military, and diplomatic interests that determined life and death for Jews during the Holocaust.

Popa’s meticulous research deepens and complicates the picture drawn by John Morley, Lya Benjamin, and others. In 1941, conversion of Jews to any other religion was forbidden in Romania, but the state, acting on its perception that the Vatican wielded vast power and eager to keep its options open, made exceptions for the Roman Catholic Church. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, tried to exploit this opening to shelter Jews from deportation and death. But as Popa demonstrates, contrary to claims made at the time (and by some scholars since), Roman Catholics, whom Romanian reports regularly and inaccurately described as “Magyars,” did not baptize tens of thousands of Jews. The actual number, Popa concludes, is impossible to ascertain, but it was small: he estimates perhaps 500 people.

Still, those Romanian Jews who were baptized into the Roman Catholic church “generally” avoided deportation. This was not the case for the smaller number who converted to other forms of Christianity, including the majority Romanian Orthodox church. In fact, Popa shows, many recent converts were rounded up as Jews, some even arrested for violating the law against conversion. Other grim scenes include Romanian Orthodox churchmen whining because they were denied the lavish sums of money Catholics supposedly made by charging Jews for their services. (Popa reserves judgment as to whether converts indeed paid.) In the wake of the Axis debacle at Stalingrad, Antonescu lifted the ban on conversions—but only for the Roman Catholics, and without announcing the decision outside Bucharest for six months. This is a chilling view of leaders who wanted it both ways: when it served their interests, they supported the destruction of Jews, and when it no longer seemed opportune, they might allow others to try to help Jews. Existing scholarship sheds light on conversion in other jurisdictions (Nina Paulovicova’s 2012 dissertation, Rescue of Jews in the Slovak State; Beate Meyer’s many publications on German-Jewish history), but much remains to be done. Popa’s excellent article provides a strong framework for drawing comparisons and analyzing connections.

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Conference Report: “Protestant Institutions in Central Germany under National Socialist Rule”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Conference Report: “Protestant Institutions in Central Germany under National Socialist Rule,” Cecilienstift Halberstadt, September 28, 2017.

By Dirk Schuster, Universität Potsdam

This public workshop was jointly organized by the Chair of Modern History of the University of Magdeburg, the Cecilienstift Halberstadt, the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (state center for political education) Saxony-Anhalt and the Historical Commission for Saxony-Anhalt. In her welcoming speech, Pastor Hannah Becker drew attention to the need to engage in a public discussion to engage in a public discussion on the central topic of this conference. In her bachelor thesis (2016), Elena Kiesel examined the history of the Cecilienstift in Halberstadt during the “Third Reich” and carried out pioneering research in this area.[1] This work initially sparked the idea of researching Protestant institutions during the period of National Socialism. However, ‘institution’ should not be understood as a rigid concept, as was also specifically pointed out by the organizer David Schmiedel at the end. This term rather includes a range of organizational units in its scope.

The second reason mentioned by Hannah Becker in her opening speech for such a workshop is the necessity of keeping the memory concerning the crimes that took place under the National Socialists alive. How very up-to-date this historical awareness should remain was shown in the elections to the national parliament in Germany this year. It was considered a given beforehand that the right-wing party “Alternative for Germany” would join the German Bundestag in the September general elections. Before the election, the staff at the local home for the disabled in Halberstadt were repeatedly asked by a resident whether conditions for the disabled in Germany would now revert back to what they were like under the Nazis.

After the welcoming address by Silke Satiukov, a research overview of the processing of Protestantism for the time of the Third Reich was given by Manfred Gailus. He argued in his remarks that it would only be possible to eventually provide an overview of heterogeneous Protestantism at that time after profound regional studies had taken place. Exemplary of such a successful regional study referred to by Gailus is the double volume on the Protestant Church in the Palatinate (Pfalz) published in 2016.[2]

In the presentations that followed, the diaconal institutions formed the main focus of the workshop. Helmut Bräutigam exemplified the Paul-Gerhard-Stift and its deaconess house in Wittenberg. He pointed out in his speech that the board of directors of the hospital and monastery was initially strongly oriented towards the German Christians, but this attitude changed as early as 1934 towards a more neutral course of thought. Even though the hospital suffered enormously from the lack of skilled staff, the leadership refused to hire Protestants of Jewish origin in the mid-1930s. Likewise, the hospital’s willing involvement in around 300 forced sterilizations of men shows that the monastery and deaconess house became compliant helpers of Nazi ideology. In the subsequent discussion, the question of internal debates or even refusals among employees regarding forced sterilization came up. Bräutigam had not found any indication for these and therefore believes that doctors and deaconesses actively participated but did not speak about it.

In her presentation, Elena Kiesel summarized the results of her bachelor thesis. The Cecilienstift in Halberstadt actually welcomed the takeover of power by the National Socialists. After the “godless” years of the Weimar Republic, the monastery hoped to be able to bring more children into the church. In the following years, however, the first areas of conflict began to emerge. The National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) continuously increased their influence on the children’s education of the monastery. Moreover, they obtained complete control over the child care of the Cecilienstift, as it was eventually transferred entirely to the NSV. Even though those responsible protested against the closing of the educator training of the monastery, Kiesel does not see this as “resistance” in the classical sense. Incidentally, letters written in 1943 by pastor Hanse (one of the key protagonists of the monastery) have been found, in which he signed off with the reference “God bless the leader.” This example reveals the broad gap between resistance and consent, as was made clear in the discussion. It did not come to a general rejection of National Socialism, but some did oppose specific abuses on the grounds which could often be found in the attitude, “If only our Führer knew about this.”

Fruzsina Müller came up with similar results. She dealt with the deaconess house in Leipzig. Partly out of conviction, partly for reasons of economic motivation, the house in Leipzig adapted to the new balance of power. The whole ambivalence is shown in the fact that one could hide a “Jewish Christian” deaconess from the Nazis until the end of war, while, at the same time, doctors of the hospital participated in systematic crimes such as sterilization and so on. Blanket statements about attitudes of deaconess houses are impossible. Ultimately, what took place were the (non-)actions of individuals and not the attitudes of institutions and their religious worldview.

Such a conclusion can also be drawn in accordance with the research presented by Hagen Markwardt. The example of the Saxon state institution Großhennersdorf, a state-owned institution since its founding, shows that it was individual motives that led to the transfer of the institute to the Inner Mission (Innere Mission) at the end of 1933. The Inner Mission and the National Socialists pursued parallel interests, according to contemporary thought of the time: While National Socialism was to take care of “high-performance people,” the Inner Mission should look out for the physical and mental “cripples,” as it was said at that time. In 1933, the institute director of Großhennersdorf since 1911, Ewald Melzer, who had a very close connection to the Inner Mission, was in charge of the transfer of the institution to the Inner Mission. From its perspective, the Nazi state was able to pursue its “duty” while at the same time the Inner Mission benefited, also financially, from the new task of administering the institution. As Markwardt noted, National Socialism and the Church did not contradict each other, but rather created a consensus that ultimately benefited both sides.

Rather than analyzing the attitude of individual diaconal institutions during the period of the Third Reich, Norbert Friedrich decided to examine the Kaiserwerther Verband. This was the umbrella organization of the individual deaconess mother-houses. Like a large fraction of German Protestantism, the association initially hoped that National Socialism would support a rechristianisation of German society. The association conformed early on and could thus ensure a continuity of personnel. In the church struggle, the association tried, on the other hand, to keep to a neutral course, thereby leaving it up to individual houses of how they wanted to position themselves concerning the German Christians and the Confessing Church. During the resulting discussion, the question was raised as to how the Kaiserwerther Verband behaved towards euthanasia. In the attitude of the association to euthanasia, Friedrich sees a reflection of the whole attitude of the Kaiserwerther Verband: it did not comment on it, but handed over the responsibility to the individual houses. One did not want to attract attention and, accordingly, behaved calmly.

Through the presentations by Benedikt Brunner on the semantic framework of “Volkskirche” in the Central German region, by Karsten Krampitz on the life of the pastor Wolfgang Staemmler, and by Dirk Schuster on the importance of the Eisenach “Entjudungsinstitut” (Institute for De-Judaization), the workshop received a broader thematic setting than the mere consideration of diaconal organizations and institutions. Such a broad view is necessary, as was reiterated in the closing words of David Schmiedel, speaking on behalf of the organizers. As opposed to the existence of one Protestantism, a variety of Protestantisms (28 regional churches, Lutherans, Reformed, United, German Christians, Confessing Church, middle, etc.) existed. Similarly, a wide variety of individuals with different motivations were behind the respective institutions. And in addition to theological arguments for or against motives for cooperation with representatives of the Third Reich, it was often profane reasons that played a crucial role for the respective attitude.

At the end of the workshop, the (recurring) debate concerning the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism came up again. One contribution to the discussion put the finger on the problem when, in an ironic question, someone asked about the meaningfulness of such a distinction: Is a theological hatred of Jews better than a racially argued hatred of the Jews? From the perspective of the author of these lines, representatives of such a distinction often forget a crucial point. It was secondary to the social marginalization of Jews whether this was based on racial and/or theological arguments. Crucial was the stigmatization of the Jews, which made it possible for German society to endorse the persecution and deprivation of these people. As a supplement to the research outlook sketched by Manfred Gailus, the direct impact of anti-Semitic statements and actions of local church representatives should be more in the focus of future research. The presentations of this workshop have provided an important impetus.

[1] The paper was subsequently published as an article. Elena Kiesel, “Kinderpflege im göttlichen Auftrag. Das Diakonissen-Mutterhaus Cecilienstift in Halberstadt und sein Verhältnis zur Nationalsozialistischen Volkswohlfahrt (NSV),” in Sachsen und Anhalt. Jahrbuch der Historischen Kommission für Sachsen-Anhalt 29 (2017): 257–292.

[2] Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stüber, et. al. (eds.), Protestanten ohne Protest. Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus, vol. 1+2 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016).

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Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19th and 20th century Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19th and 20th century Germany,” German Studies Association, 2017

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

Thirteen historians, religious studies scholars and literary specialists gathered at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association from October 6-8 in Atlanta to examine the impact of religious revivals in Germany in the 19th and 20th century. The seminar analyzed phenomenon as distinct as the early-to-mid 19th Century revivals, Marian apparitions, the youth, liturgical and bible movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the political religions of the 1920s and 1930s, and the cults, sects and lifestyle movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic. In different ways, all of these different events and movements challenged understandings of confessional orthodoxy, hierarchy and authority.

Convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Wilhelm-Westfälische-Universität in Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, the seminar analyzed the circumstances under which these movements emerged as well as their impact. Why did the Protestant and Catholic churches contest, at least initially, all of these revival movements, sects and cults, some emerging from inside the church walls but most from outside? Why did some remain on the margins, while others were appropriated by the major church bodies? Answering these questions led the participants to grapple with definitions of religion and to examine those put forward, explicitly or implicitly, by churchmen in the past. All forced churchmen to engage with societal currents with which most would have preferred not to engage. Most unfolded against a backdrop of fear—of secularization, societal unrest, state persecution.

The first day’s discussion focused on highly contested conceptions of “secularization,” “modernization” and “resacralization.” They focused on the conflicting interpretative frameworks put forward by Steve Bruce, a proponent of traditional secularization paradigms, and Grace Davie, who has championed the notion of “believing without belonging.” Bruce’s and Davie’s works from the 1990s and 2000sprimarily discussed religious changes in the post-1945 era, but the definitions they put forward are easily applicable to the religious revivals and transformations of the long 19th century because of their conflicting understandings of religious “cults” and “sects.” Seminar participants subsequently discussed excerpts from David Blackbourn’s now classic work, Marpingen, which analyzed Marian apparitions in a small Saar village. Though popular pressure mounted to have the Marpingen apparitions officially recognized by the church, church leaders refused to do so, even amid the atmosphere of fear and violence generated by the Kulturkampf and stationing of troops in this village in the borderlands.

For the second day, the seminar discussed a chapter from the Marist College scholar Michael O’Sullivan’s forthcoming book with the University of Toronto Press, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965. Participants compared his analytical analysis of the miracles associated with Terese Neumann with that of Blackbourn. Since the miracles associated with her and her circle took place in the 1930s (and later), they also took up two seemingly timeless question: To what extent did National Socialism represent a “political religion” and to what extent did movements like the German Christians represent the flourishing of a sect?

The third day brought forward some of the most intense discussions. Did the 1960s represent an era of “secularization” or of “religious revival?” What meanings and significance can be ascribed to New Age movements, occultism and esoterica? Were these movements indicative of a fundamental transformation in religion or were they in the tradition of movements and cults from earlier decades and centuries? What distinguished those movements that were incorporated into the churches from those that remained outside? The seminar closed with a discussion of a controversial document, the final report of the Enquete-Kommission from 1998 detailing the role of sects and “psycho-groups” within the landscape of the Federal Republic. The controversies engulfing Scientology in Germany were repeatedly raised as an example of a new group challenging definitions of what constituted religion.

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Letter from the Editors (September 2017)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Letter from the Editors (September 2017)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Martin Luther statue in front of Dresden’s restored Frauenkirche

The editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are delighted to present a new issue of articles, reviews, news, and notes. Three themes dominate this issue. First and foremost, we want to take time to remember and to commemorate the life and work of John S. Conway, the founding editor of what became the CCHQ. John, who passed away this past June, was a great mentor and friend to us, and two of our senior colleagues–Doris Bergen and Robert Ericksen–have captured John’s legacy in moving articles.

Second, in this year of the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation, we want to attend to one of the more controversial issues in recent Luther scholarship: the relationship of Luther to antisemitism and the Holocaust. To that end, Manfred Gailus offers an article considering Luther’s reception in the Third Reich, while Christopher Probst reviews a work on the influence of Luther’s “Jewish Writings” in the modern era and guest contributor Dirk Schuster reviews the catalogue from the new Topography of Terror (Berlin) exhibition “‘Überall Luthers Worte …’ – Martin Luther im Nationalsozialismus / ‘Luther’s Words are everywhere …’ – Martin Luther in Nazi Germany.”

Finally, there’s a good deal of attention these days on the history of Mennonites in the Third Reich. On that topic, we have a review of Benjamin W. Goossen’s Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, as well as a report on a recent meeting held at the University of Toronto, together with information on an upcoming conference in Kansas.

We trust that these and other offerings in this issue will prove to be stimulating and informative. We want to thank you for your continued interest in the Contemporary Church History Quarterly, and wish you all the best for the autumn season.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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John S. Conway: engaged skeptic and skeptical activist

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

John S. Conway: engaged skeptic and skeptical activist

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This article was originally published in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27 no. 1 (2014), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of that journal. It had its origins as a presentation at the July 2013 “Reassessing Contemporary Church History” Conference held at the University of British Columbia, where members of the CCHQ editorial team and others also took the opportunity to pay tribute to John S. Conway, founder of CCHQ, on the occasion of his 85th birthday.

John Conway is an intellectual leader, an astute and indefatigable historian of the churches, and a trailblazer in the fields of modern German, modern European and international church history. As everyone who knows John is aware, he is also a generous mentor and loyal friend.[1] John Conway has a sharp sense of humour, and it would be fitting to open this essay with a joke or witticism. But the field in which we work does not easily lend itself to jokes, so I will offer only one illustration of Professor Conway’s sometimes irreverent and always unsentimental approach to life and to himself. A few years ago he told me over the telephone about a serious medical procedure he had just undergone. Rather than highlight the severity of the operation or draw attention to his own discomfort, he exclaimed, “They slit my throat!”

As an expert on the churches in National Socialist Germany, Conway has been interviewed for several documentaries. He appears in a widely circulated film entitled Stand Firm: Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault [2], and he also features in Martin Doblmeier’s award-winning 2003 film, Bonhoeffer.[3] These media appearances encapsulate several important qualities of Conway’s work and life and illustrate in a compelling way who he is. Although separated by seventeen years they show some striking similarities. In both interviews Conway emphasizes the importance of the First World War in shaping subsequent events. He also speaks in similar ways about Adolf Hitler and the churches, in both films displaying a combination of distance and proximity, a balance between scholarly detachment and moral engagement that characterizes all of his work. Also notable is Conway’s treatment of antisemitism, where in both cases he moves from a scholarly analysis of the past to a call for action and activism in the present.

The First World War

The importance of the First World War is evident throughout all of John Conway’s work. In his publications, in the books he has chosen to review over the years and in the many academic and public talks he has given, the theme of the war and its dreadful impact on European culture and society and on Christianity around the world recurs over and over again.[4] It was during the First World War, Conway insists, when church leaders on all sides of the conflict preached the jingoist credo of “Gott mit uns!” – “God is on our side!” – that the Christian churches sowed the seeds for the decay of their credibility throughout the twentieth century.[5]

But Conway communicates an even bigger point about the war. The core problem he engages is the violence of the world, the destruction that human beings wreak on one another. Religion has a particular place in this set of issues. As Conway sees it, the role of Christianity and of the churches as moral authorities creates a responsibility to guide people toward what is good and right, but instead during the First World War church leaders egged on the brutality. Rather than healing and strengthening the best potential in people, they were blinded and obstructed the moral vision of their members and followers. They misused their authority and in the process forfeited it. Conway’s anguish at the suffering the war unleashed on the world and the failure of the Christian churches in the face of it is palpable in everything he does. The problem as Conway conceptualizes it is as old as the church and worldwide, and as a result his work, though concentrated on Germany (and the two Germanys)[6], always has a global perspective.

Many details of Conway’s biography connect with this preoccupation with the First World War and the problems of violence and suffering. John Conway was a student at Cambridge University. He started off studying literature, a decision that followed in the footsteps of many famous scholars in his family. His grandfather, R. S. Conway (Robert Seymour Conway, 1863-1933), was a well-known classicist, famed, among other accomplishments, for the vicious reviews he wrote. (The many of us who have had our books reviewed by John over the years can be grateful that he did not inherit this characteristic).

John Conway switched to History apparently because he had a sense that it might be better able to provide tools to respond to the recent past, the Second World War (an opinion in which he differs from his daughter Alison Conway, a professor of literature in Canada).[7] The young John Conway did his compulsory military service in the postwar period when that cataclysmic conflict was still a raw wound. His father, also a Cambridge man, served as captain of the English rugby team and in the trenches during the First World War. It is not surprising that John Conway has an enduring interest in religion and war, including specifically in military chaplains, in all their contexts. For his work Germany has always been a major case to study[8], but the world as a whole is his real stage.

In 1955 Conway faced a major culture shock when he left Cambridge for his first academic position, at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He had to return to England to submit and defend his dissertation, and on the boat back he met his future wife, Ann. Evidently Ann had embarked on her own Commonwealth adventure, with plans to go from Canada to India, Australia and other faraway destinations. Instead she married John, which brought other kinds of adventures, though they did include travel. The two of them and their children have always moved internationally: their son David divides his time between Mexico and Canada, and from there he works designing film sets for Hollywood.

John Conway has always been on the move. He was offered his next academic position, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on a train, and one of his gifts to that institution was a travel scholarship for graduate students to go to Germany and Israel. (Historian Steven Schroeder was one of the recipients of this award).[9] Perhaps the most lasting evidence of Conway’s international scope is the newsletter he founded to connect people around the world with an interest in contemporary church history. Several decades and at least two changes in title later, it has thousands of subscribers spread across all continents.[10]

Distance and Moral Engagement

Conway’s most famous work, his book, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches[11],  received considerable praise for its depth of research and clarity of judgment. But it was also criticized by reviewers, some of whom deemed it too harsh, others of whom accused Conway of being too forgiving of the Germans. This divided response brings to mind Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Ivan Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons. Turgenev, Berlin maintained, proved himself to be a genuine moderate and a true liberal because he was attacked from both sides.[12] In Conway’s case, that two-pronged attack offers evidence that he is a genuine scholar whose work combines the proximity of profound engagement with the distance of objectivity or better put, restrained subjectivity.[13]

For Conway the goal is to capture the big picture. His is a perspective that focuses on structures and forces larger than individual manipulation, akin to the Annales view of history. Yet he insists on individual responsibility at the same time, and his statements in this direction are all the more powerful for their sparseness. Conway’s friendships are legendary, and his strong ties to Rudolf Vrba, a survivor and escapee from Auschwitz[14], and to Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, are at the heart of some of his most moving work. Likewise the longstanding bond with Franklin Littell produced extraordinary results, including the Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Church Struggle, a major international venue for presentation of research and the stimulus for a series of important volumes.

Conway’s trademark balance of engagement and distance also reflects aspects of his biography. His mother, Dr. Elsie Conway, was an academic too, a marine botanist, to be precise, with a degree from the University of Glasgow. As a boy, John Conway joined his two brothers in collecting seaweed for their mother to analyze. So of course it has been natural for Conway throughout his career to share the stage with women academics and to mentor women as well as men. His daughter, Jane Lister, is a Dean at Okanagan College in Vernon, Canada. Conway’s interpretations of the past reveal his conviction that history in the end is a gloomy science where big forces are at play. In place of the false pride of the idealist, Conway has the cold eye of a realist. Hence his admiration for William Rubinstein’s iconoclastic book, The Myth of Rescue: Why the democracies could not have saved more Jews from the Nazis.[15] Rubinstein set out to counter the notion that no one “did anything” to help Jews by pointing out that indeed there was a severe limit to what the United States, Britain, and Jews around the world could have done.

Conway has made a similar argument about the Vatican, not to absolve Pius XII of responsibility or to endorse wildly exaggerated claims of papal rescue efforts, but to introduce a reality check into the conversation. His extensive response to Rolf Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, published in 1965 [16], is still cited, though sometimes by ardent defenders of the papacy who read it selectively. John Conway is neither an apologist nor a fatalist. For him distance opens space for genuine engagement with the past rather than for judgment. His position is always complex, and although he insists that there is a limit to what could have been done, he is equally clear that much more should have been done by the Vatican, the Allies and Christians inside Germany and all over the world to aid Jews and to stand by them.[17]

Conway’s scholarship always shows his feet on the ground, critically engaging with complex issues. His 1989 essay on Canada and the Holocaust is a case in point: it manages to avoid both the familiar congratulatory stance (Canada the multicultural haven) and the lugubrious ‘we did nothing’ to provide a clear-sighted account that is all the more damning for its understated tone.[18] Never one to take the easy route, Conway also tackled the thorny issue of the Jewish leaders in Hungary and charges that they suppressed the 1944 Vrba-Wetzler report and thereby blocked the possibility of more people managing to evade the Nazi killing machine.[19] In 2006 Yehuda Bauer devoted a lengthy piece in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte to refuting Conway on this point.[20] As Conway’s students at the University of British Columbia could attest, it was always his goal to provide evidence and then let them make up their own minds as to what they thought.

Activism

In Stand Firm, there is a segment where Conway describes the churches’ reaction to Kristallnacht: “So when the ‘Crystal Night’ pogrom takes place in November 1938, that shocking and very visible evidence of Nazi antisemitism, the churches were totally silent.”[21] He bites off the word ‘silent’ with a finality that speaks volumes, and the director or editor had the dramatic sense to end the scene there. Conway himself has been far from silent throughout his career, and although his words have spoken loudly, his actions speak even louder. While searching for some of Conway’s early articles I stumbled across a 1977 publication entitled Visit to the Tibetan Settlements in Northern India.[22] This must have been written by a different John Conway, I assumed, knowing that both “John” and “Conway” are common names in the Anglo-American context. But something made me check to be sure, and indeed, this fascinating report was the work of Professor Conway in his role as Vice Chair of the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society of Canada.

In that capacity Conway made a series of trips to India, during which he met the Dalai Lama and supervised the progress of a series of projects he and his organization had initiated and continued to support. In painstaking detail he described visits to schools, monasteries, and elder care facilities. He also wrote knowledgeably about tractors and toilets and movingly about the people he encountered. This work with Tibetan refugees was part of Conway’s wider involvement with refugee issues, including a major commitment with the people known at the time as ‘boat people’. Alison Conway told me that many times people arrived in Canada with only one telephone number: John Conway’s. In this enterprise Conway worked closely with the well-known anarchist George Woodcock, who moved from England to British Columbia after the Second World War.[23] They did not see eye-to-eye on every political issue but they proved to be a highly effective team in support of people in need.

Conway’s activism is also linked in myriad ways to his family. His wife Ann, a physiotherapist, has always been literally ‘hands-on’ in her attitude toward others. Deeply involved in her church, she is active in promoting First Nations rights in Canada. In the 1970s, she, her husband, and their children welcomed a Tibetan foster child into their home. The child had cerebral palsy and needed a lot of care and attention. The Conways provided a home until the birth parents were able to do so. Like her parents, the eldest daughter, Jane Lister, is very community oriented and initiated a microloans program to help people in the city of Vernon get on their feet. She is also an expert in corporate social responsibility and global environmental governance.[24] Conway’s great-aunt Katharine (Kitty) Conway (later Glasier) was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party of England.[25] Known for her position of ethical socialism, she too was a classicist by training. Perhaps that long view gave her and gives her great-nephew a sense of the magnitude of human suffering and the massive forces that generate it. For both of them that awareness comes coupled with a powerful drive to do what you can to alleviate suffering.

Reflecting on these themes and John Conway’s treatment of them through his scholarship and activism brings to mind a well-known passage in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, from the part of the book known as ‘The Grand Inquisitor.’ Two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, dispute the meaning of human suffering and the appropriate response. Ivan, the nihilist, skeptic, and genius of reason, rants in despair. Armed with a seemingly endless list of horrific cases of brutal treatment of children that he has found in the newspapers, he delivers a brilliant argument against the existence of God, or at least of a loving, benevolent God who cares about human beings. Alyosha, the monk, remains silent until his brother has ended his diatribe. Then he does two things: he kisses his brother and mutters, “Never mind. I want to suffer too.” Mikhail Bakhtin famously characterized Dostoevsky’s approach as ‘polyphonic’, where the interaction, even clash of multiple opposing opinions generates its own truth.[26] John Conway embodies this kind of dialogue, between clearheaded, skeptical, painful reason with no illusions, and solidarity and activism, not always fully articulated or even able to be put into words, but like Alyosha’s response, full of love. We are grateful to John Conway for his example of engaged skepticism and the quiet model he has provided of skeptical activism.

[1] I would like to thank Steven Schroeder, Mark Ruff, Lauren Faulkner Rossi, and Kyle Jantzen for all they did to organize and host the conference on Reassessing Contemporary Church History in July 2013 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  Robert Ericksen was instrumental in bringing some of the important research presented there to the pages of this journal. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Alison Conway, John Conway’s daughter and a professor at Western University in London, Canada for her generous and indispensable assistance.

[2] Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, New York 1996.

[3] Martin Doblmeier, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Pacifist, Nazi Resister, 2003: winner of the 2004 Religion Communicators Council’s Wilbur Award for best documentary film.

[4] John S. Conway, Bourgeois German Pacifism during the First World War, in: Andrew Bonnell et al. (eds.), Power, Conscience and Opposition: Essays in German History in Honour of John A. Moses, New York 1996.

[5] See also Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, translated by Richard Aldington, New York 1969, original publication 1928.

[6] John S. Conway, The Political Role of German Protestantism, 1870-1990, in: Journal of Church and State 34, no. 4 (1992): 819-842; Conway, The ‘Stasi’ and the churches: Between Coercion and Compromise in East German Protestantism, 1949-1989, in:  Journal of Church and State 36, no. 4 (1994): 725-745.

[7] Major publications are Alison Conway, The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narratives and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750, Toronto 2010; Alison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791, Toronto 2001.

[8] John S. Conway, Coming to Terms with the Past: Interpreting the German Church Struggles, in: German History 16, no. 3 (1998): 377-96.

[9] Steven Schroeder, To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany 1944-1954, Toronto 2013.

[10] Since Dec. 2012 Contemporary Church History Quarterly, online.

[11] John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, New York 1968.

[12] Isaiah Berlin, Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament, Romanes Lecture, Oxford 1972; reprinted as Introduction to Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, Harmondsworth 1975.

[13] Saul Friedländer put it this way: “My own work, begun in 1990, was meant to show that no distinction was warranted among historians of various backgrounds in their professional approach to the Third Reich, that all historians dealing with this theme had to be aware of their unavoidably subjective approach, and that all could muster enough self-critical insight to restrain this subjectivity.” Saul Friedländer, “Prologue,” in: Lessons and Legacies IX, Jonathan Petropoulos et al (eds.), Evanston, IL 2010: 3.

[14] See a series of publications on Vrba: John S. Conway, Frühe Augenzeugenberichte aus Auschwitz: Glaubwürdigkeit und Wirkungsgeschichte, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 2 (April 1979): 260-84. Here Conway discusses the Vrba-Wetzler Report at length in an essay framed by remarks on two then-recent efforts to discredit the Holocaust, by David Irving and Arthur Butz. Also Conway, Der Holocaust in Ungarn. Neue Kontroversen und Überlegungen, in: VfZ (1984): 179-212; and for later reflections and reactions, Conway, Flucht aus Auschwitz: Sechzig Jahre danach, in: VfZ 53, no. 4 (2005): 461-475.

[15] William Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, New York 1997.

[16] John S. Conway, The Silence of Pope Pius XII, Review of Politics 27, no. 1 (Jan. 1965): 105-131. Also see John S. Conway, Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War, in: Yad Vashem Studies 15 (1983): 327-45.

[17] John Conway, Between Apprehension and Indifference: Allied Attitudes to the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, in: Wiener Library Bulletin (1973/4): 37-48.

[18] John S. Conway, Canada and the Holocaust, in: Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda. Vol. 1: Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer et al (eds.), Oxford 1989: 296-305.

[19] See translation of the 1944 Vrba-Wetzler Report as: Testimony of Two Escapees from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camps at Oswiecim, Poland, in: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1535 (accessed Jan. 2014). See also Rudolf Vrba, I Cannot Forgive, London 1963, and Alfred Wetzler, Escape from Hell, New York 2007; originally published in 1963. For analysis see Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, Ithaca, NY 2004.

[20] Yehuda Bauer, Rudolf Vrba und die Auschwitz Protokolle. A reply to John S. Conway, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 54, no. 4 (2006): 701-710.

[21] Conway quoted in Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault: Study Guide for the Documentary Video, New York 1997: 52.

[22] John S. Conway, Visit to Tibetan Settlements in Northern India, International Project Booklet no. 7, New Westminster, B.C. 1977.

[23] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, Toronto 2004; originally published 1962.

[24] Publications include Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister, Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability, Cambridge, MA 2013; and Dauvergne and Lister, Timber, Cambridge, U. K. 2011.

[25] Paul Salveson, “ILP@120: Katharine Bruce Glasier – The ILP’s Spiritual Socialist,” ILP, Independent Labour Publications (25 Nov. 2013), http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2013/11/25/ilp120-katharine-bruce-glasier-%E2%80%93-the-ilp%E2%80%99s-spiritual-socialist/ (accessed 15 Jan. 2014).

[26] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel, Ann Arbor, MI 1973.

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Memories of John Conway (1929-2017)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Memories of John Conway (1929-2017)

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

John Conway is known to all who contribute to or read this online journal as the energetic, knowledgeable, committed, and seemingly indefatigable founder of the project. For fifteen years, John published a monthly online newsletter, filled primarily with his own review of books on German church history. That means something like 180 issues and, though I have not done an actual count, presumably 500 or more books reviewed. At the age of 80, John seemingly “slowed down” by creating the present Contemporary Church History Quarterly (CCHQ), with more than a dozen co-editors and with publication every three months. Until just weeks before his death, he remained the most prolific contributor to this project as well.

Readers of this online journal almost certainly also recognize John’s remarkable contribution to modern German church history, most especially based upon his magnum opus, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968). John not only produced the first substantial historical study in English of German churches in Nazi Germany, he also preceded his German counterpart, Klaus Scholder, by almost a decade.[i] Nearly fifty years after its publication, John’s Nazi Persecution of the Churches remains foundational for the field. During those subsequent decades, John lectured around the world; published numerous important articles on German church history as well as the role of Pius XII and the Vatican in the Nazi period; served on editorial boards, including for Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte since its inception in 1988; and provided very important mentoring to junior scholars as they began to work in this field, including most or all of the editors of this online journal.

In 1976 I was one of those junior scholars given a chance to meet John Conway. Christopher Browning, soon to emerge as a Holocaust scholar known worldwide, invited John to drive three hours south to give a lecture at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. I was invited to speak at the same event. Although my doctoral dissertation was far from finished, my first article was about to appear in the Journal of Contemporary History. Thus I could be allowed to appear alongside John and give my first public lecture on Gerhard Kittel. Two years later, Chris and John encouraged me to travel to Stanford to attend the third annual meeting of the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS), the organization now known as the German Studies Association. We three shared a room and, as the junior person, I lay on a cot at the foot of the two beds. We turned out the lights, kept talking, and I remember John Conway commenting sadly about “good Germans” during the Nazi period: “Even the best of them had feet of clay.” Over the next decades, I learned to see this combination of high aspirations for Christian behavior, coupled with an honest recognition of human weakness, as typical of John Conway’s work. Though he entitled his path-breaking book The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, it is also filled with stories of the failure of church leaders, Protestant and Catholic, to confront Nazi policies, or even to dampen their own enthusiasm for many of those policies.

I managed to meet some important figures in this field before I met John, including, for example, Klaus Scholder and the remarkable Bonhoeffer friend and relative by marriage, Eberhard Bethge. But it was through John that I met figures in the Scholars Conference on Churches and the Holocaust, an organization led by Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke, which began in 1970 to host the first annual Holocaust conference in North America. In 1984 John helped plan a fiftieth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration in Seattle, with participation by Bethge, but also by John de Gruchy, Wolfgang Gerlach, and Desmond Tutu, among others. Since its origins in 1988, John and I served together as members of the editorial board of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. In more recent years (as I can say as a senior member among John’s junior colleagues), the panel sessions, meetings, and conversations have included such important people as Susannah Heschel, Doris Bergen, and Victoria Barnett. At numerous meetings over forty years, I saw John play his prodigious role as a forceful, knowledgeable, articulate, senior scholar in the world of modern German church history. It was a great privilege, with the additional good fortune for me to spend most of my career just three hours away from John, his home, his wonderful wife Ann, and, not least, the impressive library collection he built at UBC.

[i] Klaus Scholder, Die Kirche und das Dritten Reich. Bd. 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen, 1918-1934 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1977).

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Luther’s Evil Writings

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Luther’s Evil Writings

The reformer was not only anti-Jewish, but also antisemitic. So he was understood in the Nazi era, too.

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

 

The original article was published in German as “Luthers böse Schriften” in Der Tagesspiegel, 18 July 2017, and is available at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/hass-auf-juden-luthers-boese-schriften/20071254.html. It is produced here in translation by permission of the author and newspaper.

Martin Luther’s late “Jewish writings” are no longer as unknown as they were for a long time—and the horror over the sharp anti-Jewish tone of the reformer is great everywhere. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Chair of the EKD, has repeatedly confessed in interviews that he is ashamed of such texts by the principal founder of the Protestant churches in Germany.

Was Martin Luther an antisemite? And what would that mean for the Lutheran Churches as public-law institutions? For the many churches named after him? For a city which proudly bears the name “Lutherstadt Wittenberg”? For the many schools and streets that bear his name? Or was he perhaps not antisemitic, but “merely” an anti-Judaist motivated by Christian theology?

In the writing of church history, things have been seen this way for a long time. Certainly, most would concede that Luther’s “Jewish writings” are bad, but would add that his case is not one of genuine antisemitism, but “merely” one of theologically based (though also harsh) anti-Judaism. It is often added, however, that in his youth he wrote in a friendly manner, and that later he had grown old, was suffering from physical affliction and depression, and had long been disappointed by the stubborn unteachability of his Jewish contemporaries.

He was “only” anti-Jewish, reads the official view of the Church

Margot Käßmann, commissioned by the EKD as a Reformation and Luther ambassador for the 2017 commemorative year, is not always to be envied for her job, especially when it comes to the topic “Luther and the Jews.” As far as can be seen, the Luther ambassador (like Bedford-Strohm) maintains that Luther was “anti-Jewish” in his bad omissions about the Jews, and thus not antisemitic.

It’s easy to understand. After Hitler and the Holocaust, how today can anyone—no matter their undisputed achievements and merits—be advertised as an antisemite? At their Synod in Bremen (November 2015) the EKD approved a statement “Martin Luther and the Jews – A Necessary Reminder on the Occasion of the Reformation Anniversary.” The reformers, it says, stood in a tradition of anti-Jewish patterns of thought, whose roots reached back to the beginnings of the Church. With regard to Luther’s utterances, “hatred of Jews,” “resentments,” or “invective against Jews” is the language used—the word “antisemitism” is carefully avoided. Here, as elsewhere, the view is that antisemitism exists only in cases of racial antisemitism, which had only existed since the second half of the nineteenth century. So, it is said, we cannot talk about antisemitism when it comes to Luther.

Luther was taken up with the expulsion of the Jews

Thomas Kaufmann, the Göttingen church historian who stands beyond reproach as an expert in the Reformation period, came to the conclusion in his study Luthers Juden (2014) that Luther’s Jew hatred had included motifs that went beyond traditional Christian anti-Judaism. In addition to Luther’s central theological anti-Judaism, Kaufmann also attributes “premodern antisemitism” to the reformer. Luther ‘s recommendations to sixteenth-century authorities and church leaders, which he described as “severe mercy,” were notorious: destruction of synagogues, homes, and writings; confiscation of money and property; forced labor; prohibition of Jewish worship services; and, as the ultima ratio, the expulsion of Jewish communities from city and country. With relation to Luther’s evil writings, the church historian Kaufmann speaks of “a literary final solution of the Jewish question.”

It is well known that by 1933 a powerful antisemitism had spread among Protestant theologians. Did they get it from Martin Luther? Pastor Siegfried Nobiling, who held a position in the “Zum Guten Hirten” (“Good Shepherd”) parish (Berlin-Friedenau) since 1928, professed in a 1932 statement on National Socialism: “In conclusion, I can confess quite sincerely that National Socialism was for me destiny and experience.”

“The interests of the race,” he said, “are always valid only to the extent that they are useful to the nation as a whole. We see in Judaism the spiritual-biological poisoning of our race.”

Already in 1932, Nobiling joined the “Faith Movement of the German Christians” (DC). There he met numerous like-minded colleagues.

For the theologian-generation of 1933, the Reformations of the sixteenth century and with them Luther’s image of the Jews lay far in the background. There were, first and foremost, other impulses directly and personally experienced, which were closer to them and which determined their attitudes toward Jews. Paramount for the anti-Jewish conditioning of this generation were, for example: the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, the influential theology professor Reinhold Seeberg, then also the antisemitic and Christian “Association of German Student Fraternities” (VVDSt); and the unloved Weimar democracy, which was maligned as the “godless republic.”

In the Nazi era, there was a remarkable Luther revival

The sense of religious excitement of 1933, marked by the antisemitic “German Christians,” also included a remarkable Luther revival: the reformer as German national hero, as the prototype of the quintessential German man and fighter. Not infrequently, historical lines of tradition were drawn from Luther to Hitler—by Protestants themselves, and with pride. In the “Advent” parish (Prenzlauer Berg), “German Christian” member Haertel spoke on December 12, 1933, about “Luther and the Jews.” It must be the task of the “German Christians” to fully re-establish Luther’s clear position in the “Jewish question,” which Hitler had taught anew.

In the Spandau “Luther” parish, in parallel with the passing of the “Nuremberg Laws,” the parish church council decided in September 1935 to undertake the immediate free distribution of one thousand copies of “Luther and the Jews” as well as the procurement of display cases for Streicher’s Der Stürmer. In March 1937, Johannes Schleuning, a superintendent in Berlin East, referred in particular to Martin Luther and Adolf Stoecker as Christian champions against Judaism, in an article entitled “Judaism and Christianity.” He praised the most recent special issue of Der Stürmer on the “Jewish question” and emphasized that Christ had been an “Aryan,” a Nordic hero, as described by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

In contrast to the “Nuremberg Laws,” which were widely endorsed in the “German Christian” press, silence prevailed throughout the Protestant milieu after the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938. Explicit approval of the excesses was rare, but it did occur. On November 20, 1938, the “German Christian” theologian Immanuel Schairer wrote a commentary on the events, expressly referring to Luther’s “On the Jews and their Lies.” Immediately after the pogroms, the Thuringian Protestant bishop, Martin Sasse, printed extracts from Luther’s “Jewish writings” and sent them to Thuringian pastors. The intense Protestant antisemitism of the Hitler period fed on many sources—not only religious or theological—and mainly on those which were closer to the protagonists historically and biographically than Luther’s “Jewish writings.” Thus, on the one hand, these writings were not needed at all to generate the massive antisemitic confessions in the churches of the Hitler period. Since 1933, however, everywhere Luther’s “Jewish writings” were dug out and disseminated in the media, they reaffirmed the already-existing Protestant antisemitism and gave it additional legitimation.

Even before 1933, Luther’s “Judenschriften” had to be regarded as a serious derailment

Even before the year 1933, Luther’s “Jewish writings” had to be regarded as a serious derailment in the eyes of unbiased readers. After Hitler and the Holocaust, these writings stand in a changed historical context, which once again places the texts in a different light and makes Luther’s verbal derailments even more serious.

The current 2017 memorial year is the first Lutheran and Reformation commemoration ever to make the existence and explosiveness of the “Jewish writings” known to a broader public. This is to be welcomed as a historical clarification. For today’s Protestant churches, however, it is not easy to deal with this problematic heritage. In the long run, euphemistic assessments such as “anti-Judaism” or the discordant metaphor of the regrettable “shadows” of the great theologian will not suffice. One also wonders what the Protestant “learning history,” much invoked during the 2017 commemorative year, is supposed to mean, considering the churches’ performance (after 400 years of learning time) during the “Third Reich.”

Luther the confession-founder will not be taken away from anxious church contemporaries. The reformer is historically significant, and that will continue into the future. Still, the current image of Luther will have to keep changing. His status as a monumental figure will diminish, while the Luther-dilemma associated with his antisemitism will grow.

The author is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin.

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