Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Pp. xii + 212, ISBN: 9780802872272.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship, Andrew Chandler grapples with the ecumenical and political legacy of this influential bishop. Beginning with a description of the eclectic contents of one of Bell’s little blue notebooks, Chandler explains how it “captures a mind and a soul in perpetual motion in the world: attentive, enquiring, pursuing. It is a testament of Christian life in the middle twentieth century, wrought out of the turmoil of politics, war, persecution, calamity. It is a proof of one man’s decision to take his place in such a world, and to do so as a faithful Christian” (4).

George Bell was born in 1883 on the south coast of England, into a “secure, comfortable middle-class clerical home” (7). He attended Westminster School beginning in 1896, then Christ Church, Oxford, in 1901. Next he enrolled in theological college in Wells, in the West of England, where he was introduced to the student ecumenical movement and to Christian Socialism. Ordained as a deacon in Ripon Cathedral in 1907 and as a priest in Leeds in 1908, Bell returned to Oxford in 1910, where he combined a growing commitment to social justice with a vibrant personal faith. As he explained, “Christianity is a life before it is a system and to lay too much stress on the system destroys the life” (12).

After this overview of Bell’s formative years, Chandler breaks Bell’s ecclesiastical career into a series of chronological chapters which revolve around his positions and causes. Chandler begins with Bell’s time as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury (1914-1924), as dean of Canterbury (1924-1929), and as the newly appointed bishop of Chichester (1929-1932). From there the author examines Bell in his various roles as an interested observer and periodic participant in the German Church Struggle (1933-1937), as an ecumenical leader in a continent hurtling towards war (1937-1939), as a champion of peace in a time of war (1939-1942), as an active supporter of the German Resistance (1942-1945), as a leader in the postwar ecclesiastical reconstruction of Europe (1945-1948), as a key figure in the emergence World Council of Churches (1948-1954), and as an elderly bishop winding down his career (1954-1958).

Throughout these diverse phases of his career, the breadth and volume of Bell’s activities was formidable. Over a span of more than fifty years, he wrote, edited, and contributed to over two-dozen books, ranging from poetry and ecclesiastical biography to credal, incarnational, and pastoral theology, to Christian unity and the relationship between the church and modern politics. Along with his leadership in the Church of England, Bell was a force in numerous international ecumenical institutions, including the World Conference of Life and Work (particularly in Stockholm in 1925 and Oxford in 1937), other ecumenical meetings at Fanö in 1934 and Sigtuna in 1942, the postwar Treysa meeting with German church leaders, and the World Council of Churches, where Bell was elected moderator of the Central Committee at the first WCC assembly in Amsterdam, in 1948.

Bell’s activities were often centred on German affairs. Almost immediately after the rise of Hitler, Bell and his colleague A.S. Duncan-Jones, who was Dean of Chichester, monitored German politics and visited contacts in the German churches, in order to understand the nature of the German Church Struggle for themselves. Bell soon became a critic of the Nazi dictatorship, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement, and the policy of persecution against both non-Aryan Christians and Jews in general. Around this time, the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was serving in a German congregation in London, and he and Bell began to develop a warm friendship.

Over the following years, Bell regularly spoke out against the Hitler regime and its supporters within the German churches. When the German delegation failed to appear at the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference, Bell won support for a letter noting the absence of the German delegation and expressing concern over “the afflictions of many pastors and laymen who have stood firm from the first in the Confessional Church for the sovereignty of Christ, and for the freedom of the Church of Christ to preach His Gospel” (64). After Martin Niemöller’s incarceration in a concentration camp, Bell maintained close contact with the Niemöller family and wrote a stirring foreword for an anonymous biography of the Berlin pastor, in which Bell praised the faith of those standing for the Gospel in Germany. And when the Jewish refugee crisis began to grow acute in 1938, Bell spoke on behalf of refugees in his inaugural speech in the House of Lords, and also lectured publicly about the crisis, describing it as a “crisis of humanity” (69).

Chandler’s description of George Bell’s wartime activities illustrates both the breadth of Bell’s concern and the regularity with which his principled participation in continental political and ecclesiastical affairs pushed him out of step with his peers in the Church of England and British House of Lords. First of all, Bell argued that the church’s role in war was distinct from that of the state. The church was to be a universal body, “charged with a gospel of God’s redeeming love” and tasked with “creating a community founded on love” which would outcast the changes brought about by war (75). Whether in war or in peace, the church, declared Bell, should stand for principles like “the dignity of all men, respect for human life, the acknowledgment of the solidarity for good and evil of all nations and races of the earth, fidelity to the plighted word, and the appreciation of the fact that any power of any kind, political or economic, must be coextensive with responsibility” (75).

Second, Bell worked for peace, championing the vision of a federal union of European states and arguing for negotiation with the German state, even in the midst of the war, in hopes that the Germans would remove Hitler from power. His position was shared by few. Karl Barth felt Bell was “too much a British gentleman and thus unable to understand the phenomenon of Hitler,” while Archbishop Cosmo Lang wrote Bell: “You are an optimist and I am a realist” (81, 82).

In the same way, Chandler shows how Bell’s views on the morality of war were at odds with his contemporaries. When Bell opposed the internment of German and Austrian refugees as enemy aliens in the House of Lords, a fellow member wondered whether the bishop realized England and Germany were at war. When Bell tried to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, he was vigorously opposed in parliament and harangued by a Chichester parishioner. When he protested in the Convocation of Canterbury against the area bombing of German cities, he was shouted down. Worse still, at home in his diocese, he had become so unpopular that Duncan-Jones suggested he not attend a military service at the Chichester Cathedral.

Chandler does an admirable job of explaining the role for which Bell is often best known in German history circles—his activity as secret intermediary between the German Resistance and the British government. In late May 1942, in the city of Stockholm, Bell met with German Pastor Hans Schönfeld of the International Christian Social Institute in Geneva, whom he had known for over a decade. Schönfeld explained that there was a growing opposition movement within Germany, determined to topple Hitler from power and restore the German government to a Christian basis. A few days later, he provided Bell with a list of the names of important conspirators. Just after that, Bell met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden. Bonhoeffer also outlined the nature of the German Resistance, urging Bell to ask the British government for assurances that the Allies would negotiate with the German opposition, if it could seize power. This Bell did, meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but to no avail. Chandler explains not only the government’s skepticism about such “peace feelers,” but also the way in which Bell’s continued lobbying made him suspect and undermined his mission further (100).

After explaining Bell’s determined efforts towards postwar reconciliation and the establishment of the World Council of Churches, Chandler assesses Bell’s legacy in a concluding chapter. There he paints the image of Bell as a man of many interests, causes, and campaigns—indeed, as a man of paradoxes. A member of the Establishment who “did not quite belong to it,” Bell “so often refused to conform to categorical expectations” (166, 170). He was an Anglican with an ecumenical orientation, an Englishman who cared as much or more about international affairs as English matters, and a man of deep devotion who lived large parts of his life in the world of politics. Influenced by high-church incarnational theology, Bell worked to bring art and artists into the life of the church, even as he also exerted himself on behalf of social justice for the working classes and hospitality for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution (170-171). Most especially, perhaps, he stood for principled and often unpopular positions, such as ecumenical unity and international peace in a time of nationalism and war.

Sadly, no new biography of Bishop George Bell can avoid dealing with the October 2015 allegation that Bell “had committed sexual offenses against an individual who was at the time a young child” (170). Chandler laments the fact that almost everyone associated with this time has passed away, making it virtually impossible to consider the charges in a normal judicial process. He does not in any way deny that these offenses could have occurred, but does the only thing a historian can do, which is to attempt to place the allegations in their historical context. In an appendix devoted to the controversy, Chandler notes that Bell’s 368 volume archive contains his personal notebooks and pocket diaries from 1919 to 1957, in which he kept track of all his appointments and engagements. He notes Bell’s “conspicuously high view of the standards required by his office,” and adds that Bell was almost constantly observed, that he participated in many disciplinary processes for clergy, that he maintained what seemed like a happy marriage, and that he worked almost continually in the presence of his wife, secretary, domestic chaplain, or driver. Chandler interviewed the only member of Bell’s circle still alive, his domestic chaplain from the early 1950s. This man “is firm, indeed emphatic, that ‘no child or young teenager ever entered during my two years as Chaplain, except on the day in January chosen for the parish Christmas party which he and Mrs Bell laid on every year for the children of the clergy’” (198) Add to this that Bell tended to work with his door open and often held private conversations outdoors in the garden and it leads Chandler to describe the 2015 allegation as “anomalous” and seeming to exist “in its own world, evidently uncorroborated by any other independent source” (199).

Andrew Chandler has published widely on the life and ministry of Bishop George Bell, and is the current acknowledged expert on him. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester is a concise, accessible overview of Bell’s engagement in the world of ecumenism and international politics during the turbulent times in which he lived and worked. It deserves a wide readership, especially among those who only know Bell as Bonhoeffer’s friend and English contact on behalf of the German Resistance.

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence, Parts 1 and 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-4438-8006-0 and 978-1-4438-8011-4.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Bishop George Bell was the stalwart champion in the Church of England promoting ecumenical relations with the other churches of Europe and North America throughout the nearly thirty years of his episcopate from 1929-1958. He held leading positions in innumerable committees, councils and conferences, and in 1937, during the world meeting in Oxford of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, was a strong advocate for joining with Faith and Order, in order to found a World Council of Churches, which took place in 1938. At the same time it was agreed that this new Council (still in process of formation) should be established in Geneva, and that a young Dutch theologian W.A.Visser ‘t Hooft (Vim), who had served for several years in the Geneva scene as General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, should be appointed as General Secretary. Visser ‘t Hooft was far more of a General than a Secretary—I knew him personally—and brought unrivalled resourcefulness and a resolute determination to see his ideas realized, for the best part of thirty years. This was the beginning of a partnership between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, who early on struck up a strong and harmonious relationship. They are rightly described in the book’s title as being “intimately associated for many years”.

The exchanges by post or telegrams recorded in these volumes are largely drawn from the Geneva archives of the World Council of Churches or from the voluminous Bell papers, now deposited in the Lambeth Palace library in London. The first volume covers the period up to 1949, and the second the final years of Bell’s life up to 1958. The editing by Gerhard Besier is very helpful, since his footnotes give the biographical details of all persons mentioned, as well as bibliographical references to the many scholarly books relating to their endeavors. (There are, however, aggravating lapses in the proof-reading and printing of the English text.) Besier’s introduction is reproduced from the chapter he contributed to The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958 (p. 169-194), edited in 2012 by Andrew Chandler.

Many of these exchanges have to do with the plans for the various meetings of World Council bodies, and discussions about the membership, the place and date, as well as the content. These documents are however not too informative about the results. Obviously when the two men met at such meetings, they had intense verbal discussions and made significant decisions about the World Council’s operations. But these were not recorded in their correspondence at the time, and so are missing from these volumes. This is particularly noticeable with regard to such highly significant meetings as the First Constituent Assembly held in Amsterdam in 1948, when Bell became Chairman of the WCC’s Central Committee. While these documents discuss at length the preparations for this Assembly in August 1948 (p. 365-428), they provide no indication of the important deliberations and decisions taken on that occasion. The same is true for the Second Assembly, held in 1954 in Evanston, Illinois. Equally regrettable is the absence of documents relating to the important meeting in Stuttgart in October 1945, at which both Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft were present, and at which the famous Declaration of Guilt was issued (p. 287-94). Obviously both Bell and Vim played an active part and had extensive discussions with the German leaders, including Martin Niemöller, for whom they had been praying ever since his first incarceration in 1937. But they left no further record of their deliberations or their conclusions about this conference or its historic significance in their correspondence. An equally striking omission is the exchange between Bell and Vim about Bell’s journey to Sweden in May 1942, his meeting there with Bonhoeffer, and the information he gained about the German resistance, which the Bishop then passed on to the British Foreign Secretary, asking for some public gesture of support be given to the anti-Nazi forces in Germany. Eden’s refusal was conveyed to Visser ‘t Hooft in the notable telegram sent by Bell on July 23, 1942: “Interest undoubted, but deeply regret no reply possible”. (Bell’s message is discussed on p. 158 of W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Memoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973).) But this calamitous blow to Bell’s hopes for some gesture of support for the German resistance is not mentioned in Besier’s work. In fact, this first volume is silent for the whole period of November 1941 to August 1942.

It would have been helpful if the editor could have inserted short passages to fill such gaps. He could also have directed the reader to look at both of the biographies of Bell by Canon Jasper (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (London: Oxford University Press,1967)) and Andrew Chandler (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), also Visser ‘t Hooft’s Memoirs (1973), as well as such comprehensive histories as A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (London: SPCK, 1954), edited by Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neil, and its sequel The Ecumenical Advance: A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1948-1968 (Geneva: WCC, 1986), edited by Harold Fey. Unless these more complete sources are available to be consulted, the usefulness of these two volumes alone will be limited. Libraries may well consider whether the expense is justified.

However, the value of these exchanges is that they fill in the details of the frequent consultations between these church leaders. In particular, they provide information about how the two men dealt with the three principal obstacles they faced in these years. The first was the fear expressed by many churchmen that this new World Council would evolve into a vast ecumenical enterprise which would swallow up the individual entities in some sort of super-church. The second fear, expressed by many more Orthodox leaders, was that this new World Council would produce a new doctrine of Christianity which would override the traditions and individual heritages of these Protestant or Orthodox churches. The third obstacle was the refusal of the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic Church, to be associated in any way with this new venture. This refusal meant that the vision of a united Christendom, strongly urged by Bell, was thwarted, and still remains incomplete. Not until the Second Vatican Council, i.e. several years after Bell’s death, did the Roman Catholic authorities show a more tolerant and cooperative attitude. But the World Council has yet to overcome the barrier of Rome’s reluctance to belong to this wider ecumenical fraternity.

Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, during the period from 1938 to 1958, i.e. during the fruitful years of cooperation between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, the World Council moved from a tentative and provisional beginning to becoming the acknowledged chief instrument and channel of the ecumenical movement. The correspondence contained in the second volume spells out the contexts of these years from 1950 to 1958, including the preparations for the second Assembly meeting in the United States in 1954, at which point Bell resigned his position as Chairman of the Central Committee, and was promoted to Honorary President of the Council. But, as this correspondence shows, he continued to be very actively engaged in the affairs of the Council, even after his retirement in 1958 from the Chichester diocese. In fact he took part in a meeting of the Central Committee in Denmark, and preached a self-critical sermon there only two months before his untimely death in October 1958. The volume concludes with two moving tributes to Bell’s achievements written by Visser ‘t Hooft shortly after Bell’s funeral.

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis. Schriften des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts fur Totalitarismusforschung, 41 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 457 Pp., ISBN 9783525369173.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a Protestant millenarian sect, who look forward in anticipation to the last days, which they expect will take place very shortly in a catastrophic conflict between good and evil. Founded in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, a small number had already come to Germany before the First World War. But the turbulent, revolutionary political upheavals which took place in Germany after 1918 seemed to confirm their expectations. The Witnesses grew in number, and were reckoned by 1933 to count some 20,000 adherents, who were active as door-to-door preachers in many parts of the country.

Much of the scholarly literature about the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been conditioned by the harassment and persecution which this sect endured during the period of Nazi rule after 1933. Most of the authors have displayed sympathy with the Witnesses’ sufferings and pay tribute to their enduring loyalty to their faith. Gerald Hacke, however, is principally interested in the actions of the state authorities, and the organization of the various methods of repression which took such a toll. Furthermore he has noted that the same kind of repression was carried out in the post-1945 years in what became known at the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under the aegis of the Communist rulers of that part of Germany for the next 40 years. His large-scale account is therefore mainly a comparison of the similarities as well as the differences in the treatment of this minority religious group by the two ideologically opposed dictatorships. In so doing he has delved in to the vast amount of state documentation left behind by both regimes, particularly in their police and judicial records and the files of the various government ministries who attempted to bring the Jehovah’s Witnesses to heel.

Hacke divides his account chronologically, with 200 pages dealing with the Nazi period and the same for the decades of repression in the GDR. These surveys are accompanied by an extensive list of the files consulted and a forty page bibliography. He completes his study with a close examination of the parallels and differences in the forms of repression put in place by the two regimes. In both cases he notes the stubborn refusal of the Witnesses to conform to the states’ requirement of political loyalty. But the subsequent banning of their organizations and activities stirred up a sense of victimization which in fact only strengthened the community. The increasing number of legal challenges, as well as pressure from the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Witnesses, for example in 1934, showed that such repressive policies had disadvantages, even though the wider public, including the mainline churches, showed little or no sympathy. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935 led to the arrest and imprisonment of numerous younger male members of this sect. The same feature was to follow the identical measure taken in the early 1950s in the GDR. But in neither case did the Witnesses abandon their faithful and stubborn commitment to refuse any form of military activity. The Nazi and Communist officials were therefore both forced to recognize the ineffectiveness of such punitive actions, but were adamant in regarding the Witnesses as a political and ideological danger which required drastic treatment.

Hacke avoids drawing any direct link between the repressive forces mobilized by Himmler, allegedly in order to follow Hitler’s call for ”the eradication of this venomous brood”, and those followed twenty years later in the GDR by the Ministry of Security, commonly known as the Stasi. The similarity of tactics is however clear. Both dictatorships sought to imprison the sect’s leading figures, imposing employment bans, and even removing children from their families. During the Nazi period some 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned, including 2000 sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by wearing purple triangles on their clothes. Moreover, 240 were executed, while up to 1200 lost their lives while incarcerated. No other group of religious prisoners was exposed to the sadism of the Nazis in such a brutal fashion.

To be sure, the Gestapo offered to release these prisoners if they would sign a paper declaring their renunciation of their former views and promise not to associate with their fellow Witnesses. Hacke does not make it clear whether this project was designed to sow dissension in the Witnesses’ ranks, or to relieve the prison and concentration camp system of these unwanted and uncooperative inmates. In any case the tactic failed.

After 1945 and the collapse of the Nazi regime, the surviving Witnesses began to regroup and to resume their activities, though mainly in hiding from the successor authorities. Soon enough they were to meet vehement opposition from the newly-established Communist authorities in the eastern sector of the country, which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic. This campaign made much of the fact that the Witnesses were founded in the United States, and were therefore seen as agents of American anti-Communist imperialism. The Stasi was characterized by the same fanatical zeal as the Gestapo, and in fact extended their intrusive surveillance to even wider sections of the population. But right up to 1989, the Communist regime justified its repression of the Witnesses with very similar accusations of disloyalty and failure to support the national goals of the Communist party.

Hacke rightly points out that both regimes, despite their different propagandistic justifications, were deliberately seeking to suppress any supposedly deviant groups by very similar methods. The Witnesses, however, were able to mount an effective resistance in part because they had arrived in Germany with the expectation that their dissident beliefs would create conditions in which they would be persecuted. Their long experience of victimization gave them an intense sense of group solidarity, and the faithful adherence to their beliefs was thus built in and maintained throughout the more than fifty years of repression.

After 1989, with the overthrow of the Stasi and its political masters, the Witnesses were no longer subjected to government-sponsored suspicion and surveillance. But as Hacke points out, the decades of defamation and discrimination had left an almost indelible pejorative reputation in the minds of the general public. The Witnesses then campaigned successfully to gain recognition as a public corporation in German law, but the wider issue of prejudice still remains, as can be seen in the active hostility by some of the more established church groups against the proselytizing undertaken by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The search for a new identity in a new Germany still continues.

Article Note: Martina Cucchiara, “The Bonds That Shame: Reconsidering the Foreign Exchange Trials Against the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany, 1935/36”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Article Note: Martina Cucchiara, “The Bonds That Shame: Reconsidering the Foreign Exchange Trials Against the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany, 1935/36,” European History Quarterly 45, no 4 (2015): 689-712.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This fascinating and meticulously researched article demonstrates the importance of including the often-forgotten middle years of National Socialism in studies of the churches under Hitler. Martina Cucchiara examines a series of trials in 1935-36 against Catholic orders accused of contravening Germany’s regulations about foreign currency. The details turn out to be intriguing in themselves—we catch a glimpse of Der Stürmer’s blend of misogynist, antisemitic, anti-Catholicism and get a helpful lesson in the functioning of the bond market and the entangled economies of Germany and the United States in the 1920s—but most significant is Cucchiara’s central finding. The foreign exchange trials and the Nazi propaganda campaign that went with them, she argues, were first and foremost an effort by the regime to push the Catholic church “out of the public sphere.” Although she leaves open the question as to whether or not the regime succeeded in this attempt, Cucchiara strongly suggests the answer was “yes.”

Cucchiara’s nuanced analysis indicates that indeed the regime benefited in several ways. The trials were just one of a series of initiatives that stirred up crises and fomented division in Catholic circles. Lack of resolution around the concordat and the issue of lay associations, the episcopate’s pusillanimous responses to the trials, and the resulting alienation of the laity all served to increase what Cucchiara calls the regime’s “leverage” over the church. In addition, she shows, regional and local officials, like sharks who smell blood, “piled on” to pursue their own political agendas at the expense of weakened Catholic institutions. It is outside the purview of Cucchiara’s discussion, but one wonders whether Protestants, looking on, took pleasure in the disciplining of their old confessional rivals or felt a chill of dread as they pondered their own standing in the Nazi German order.

Conference Report: “The Confessing Church’s Memorandum of May 28, 1936 and the Murder of Friedrich Weißler (1891-1937) in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Topography of Terror

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: “The Confessing Church’s Memorandum of May 28, 1936 and the Murder of Friedrich Weißler (1891-1937) in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Topography of Terror, Berlin, May 28, 2016

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

On May 28, 1936, the Second Provisional Directorate of the German Evangelical Church sent a now famous memorandum directed to Hitler personally. This protest, signed by ten members of the various wings of the Confessing Church, drew Hitler’s attention to the fact that in the fourth year of Nazi rule, the church was being repressed by the state “to a very large extent” in what seemed to be an attempt to “de-Christianize” Germany. Secondly, it refuted the Nazi interpretation of “positive Christianity” as theologically unsound. The Memorandum further attacked the Nazi ideology with its divination of “Blood “, ”Race” and “National Identity”. Above all, the authors criticized the arbitrary police measures which had undermined the rule of law, as well as leading to the erection of the system of concentration camps. The memorandum further declared that:

When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

This Memorandum was not without its consequences. Originally it was sent to Hitler privately without publicity, in the expectation that such a private remonstrance would lead Hitler to abandon the policies to which its authors took exception. But less than six weeks later the whole memorandum appeared in a Swiss newspaper, the Basler Nachrichten, and shortly afterwards was printed in the New York Herald Tribune. At the beginning of October the Gestapo arrested the Confessing Church’s collaborator Dr. Friedrich Weißler, who came under suspicion for having authorized the publication in Switzerland. On February 19, 1937, shortly after he had been transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he was found dead as a result of a severe bodily assault. Since then he has become regarded as the Confessing Church’s first ‘martyr’. At the same time, there can be no doubt that his murder was sparked by anti-semitism, since, although a strong supporter of the Confessing Church, Weißler came from a Jewish family. By the Nazi definition, he was counted as “fully Jewish”, and as such had already been dismissed from his post of Provincial Court judge in Magdeburg in July 1933.

To mark this Memorandum’s 80th anniversary, a lecture series was organized at the Topography of Terror Foundation by the Berlin-Brandenburg Evangelical Church in co-operation with Dr. Manfred Gailus. The title of this series was “’With Deep Concern’ over De-Christianization, Anti-Semitism and Arbitrary Breaches of Law”, and was designed to draw attention to the Confessing Church’s Memorandum and to Weißler’s fate. The high point was a public forum in which some 130 guests took part. Martin Greschat, now an emeritus professor of church history at Giessen University and author of the standard history of this Memorandum, described the origins and composition of the Memorandum in its various stages.[1] Afterwards Hansjörg Buss outlined Weißler’s biography and his role in the Memorandum’s composition and publication. In Michael Germann’s view, this was the high and catastrophic turning point in Weißler’s life. Manfred Gailus then took up the story by claiming that no evidence exists that Weißler’s murder was ‘organized’ by higher elements in the Nazi bureaucracy. One could conclude therefore that the motive for this brutal mishandling was the anti-semitic attitudes of Jew-hatred among lower echelons of the SS guards. It is possible, so Greschat suggested, that this murder stalled the launching of a full-scale trial of the Confessing Church leadership, which numerous signs suggest was being planned.

The final contribution was made by Peter Steinbach, long-time director of the German Resistance Memorial Center and emeritus professor of history at Mannheim University. His title was “Treason – Breach of Confidence – Resistance: Reflections on the Memorandum and on Friedrich Weißler”. He believes that Weißler suffered from deeply-felt feelings of isolation, like many other people who were deprived of their positions and rights during the Nazi period. This led to a total disorientation. The destruction of his bourgeois life-style, and the social exclusion which he experienced even within his church connections took an enormous toll. As a consequence he was to pay with his life for this hurtful rejection.

In conclusion, Friedrich Weißler’s grandson, Wolfgang Weißler, reflected spontaneously on how the family reacted to his fate. His grandmother had never spoken about the circumstances of his death. Only in the 1980s when this case was ‘discovered’ both in the church and society more generally was his fate also discussed in his own family circle.

Many details about the Memorandum and Weißler’s arrest still remain open. Above all, there is the question as to how this Memorandum was smuggled out to the foreign press in the summer of 1936, which was the immediate cause of Weißler’s detention. Did he give his consent to its publication? Was there any consultation with or backing from the Confessing Church leadership? (This would seem unlikely, given the speed with which these leaders dissociated themselves from his actions.) If no further sources turn up, then such questions may remain unsolved. But any such new information will not be decisive. In fact, Weißler’s murder meant that the staunchly opposing wing of the Confessing Church, known as the “Dahlemites”, could no longer have any illusions about the character of the Nazi state.

In recent years this incident has become better known both generally and in church circles. Weißler is no longer a completely unknown figure. And the keen participation in the symposium described above means that there is a continuing interest in what Gailus depicts as a modern twentieth century Passion Story. In Steinbach’s view, the whole tragedy and catastrophe of the early twentieth century in Germany is summed up in Weißler’s fate. Manfred Gailus has now completed a full biography which will appear in February 2017, and on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of his death on February 19, 2017, a memorial service will be held on the grounds of the Sachsenhausen Camp.

Notes:

[1] Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler: Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (forthcoming, Goettingen 2017). See also Martin Greschat, Widerspruch und Widerstand: Texte zur Denkschrift der Bekennenden Kirche an Hitler (Munich: Kaiser, 1987); Greschat, “Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist der Bekennenden Kirche im Widerstand gegen Hitler,” in Ursula Buettner and Martin Greschat, Die verlassenen Kinder der Kirche: Der Umgang der Kirche mit den Christen jüdischer Herkunft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 86-122; John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), 162-64.

Conference Report: “Ecumenical Cooperation and World Politics”. The 2016 Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History Conference

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: “Ecumenical Cooperation and World Politics”. The 2016 Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History Conference, Helsinki, October 26-28, 2016

By Robert P. Ericksen

On Oct. 26-28, 2016, Professors Aila Lauha and Mikko Ketola of the Theological Faculty at the University of Helsinki hosted an international conference on the topic, “Ecumenical Cooperation and World Politics.” This conference also served as the annual meeting of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, with the papers to be published in that journal in 2017.

Sessions at this conference focused primarily on the twentieth century, a time when conflicts ranged from World War I and World War II to the Cold War and its occasional outbreaks of considerable violence. This also was the period in which Christian churches struggled to overcome centuries of bickering among themselves with a push toward international ecumenism. Could Christians working together reduce the scourge of war? Could ecumenical Christians help resolve the problems of racism, colonialism, or the social and cultural changes embodied in Western modernity?

These would have been very large questions to resolve in a two-day conference. Within those constraints, however, sessions probed a few specific examples within the ecumenical experience. Also, given the setting in Helsinki, there emerged a slight Nordic tilt to the proceedings, with four of the fourteen presenters describing Nordic actors within the broader ecumenical movement. One further distinction within the program bears mention. The two main days of the conference were divided between a first day focused on “Ecumenical responsibilities—dreams, utopias and realities,” and a second day on the more sobering subtheme, “Ecumenism facing the challenges of nationalism, chauvinism and extremism.”

Andrea Strübind delivered the first paper of this conference, “The International Fellowship of Reconciliation as an ecumenical and interfaith forerunner for human rights.” Two founders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR), the German pacifist Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze and the English pacifist Henry Hodgkin, met on 3 August 1914, the day before Great Britain entered World War I. These two men committed themselves to the principle that Christian nations should not turn to war against each other. Although they had little or no chance of stopping the carnage to come, they created an organization that still exists and now can be seen as a precursor of and participant in the broader ecumenical movement. Strübind focused her paper on a little-researched aspect of the FoR—its influence on the American Civil Rights Movement. As early as the1930s, the FoR began bringing Gandhi’s tactic of non-violent civil disobedience to questions of civil rights and economic rights in the United States. Bayard Ruskin, for example, a later ally of Martin Luther King, Jr, began working fulltime for the FoR in 1942 and pursued this theme. In the mid-1950s, Glenn Smiley, a Methodist pastor and a representative of the FoR, moved to Montgomery, Alabama. He and the FoR helped develop and train activists in the non-violent tactics that proved successful in the Montgomery bus boycott and then spread across the South.

Gerhard Besier followed with a paper on “80 Years WCC—Theological, Political and Societal Ambiguities.” The “ambiguities” involve the ways in which ecumenism gets caught up in issues that seem unavoidably political and/or cultural, rather than simply religious. For example, when the interwar ecumenical movement tried to deal with German Protestantism after 1933, it first tried to work with the official church leadership. Gradually, however, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and others convinced ecumenists to accept the point of view of the Confessing Church, with its rejection of radically Nazi elements within the official Protestant Church. That led to the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945, followed by early postwar efforts to rebuild and strengthen ecumenism. Quickly, however, the Cold War impinged and once again ecumenical Christians faced political questions. John Foster Dulles, an active lay person and son of a Presbyterian minister, imagined the Federal Council of Churches (FCC, later the NCC) working within the WCC toward “a just and durable peace” in the American mold. The Czech theologian, Josef Hromadka, argued that socialism should be understood as the truly Christian stance. Some theologians in Eastern Europe both collaborated with their own regimes and critiqued the WCC as a voice for NATO. Participation by the Russian Orthodox Church established in the 1960s added further questions about the mix of politics and religion. On the one hand, one might hope that ecumenical Christendom could find a prophetic voice based upon Christian values. In the worst case, however, some might see Christian ecumenism as a theology of convenience, bent to the need for getting along.

Gerhard Ringshausen’s presentation gave a partial answer to Besier’s question. On the topic, “George Bell’s political engagement in ecumenical context,” he describes the Bishop of Chichester’s response to the “German question” before and during World War II as both theological and political. Totalitarian restraint on freedom to preach must be opposed, he said. An “ethic of peace” should include equal dignity for all. Bombing policy should make a distinction between military and civilian targets. While consistent with Christian values, these choices can also be built upon natural law. Bell gave the November Pogrom of 1938 a theological response, however, with the suggestion that non-Aryan pastors and their wives should be welcomed in England as members of the Christian community in need.

The next session grew out of a research program for PhD students directed by Aila Lauha at the University of Helsinki, “The Ecumenical Movement and Cold War Politics.” The title of this session expressed the essence of an underlying theme for ecumenism: “Can the World Council of Churches Change the World?” The conditional answer presented by products of Lauha’s program seems to be, at least in limited ways, yes. Juha Meriläinen presented on “The Reconstruction of European Churches as a WCC Programme.” War had left Europe with massive destruction. Early American attitudes exacerbated this, with, for example, a sign at a U.S. military canteen in 1945 in Berlin: “Do not feed the civilians. Put what you do not eat into the garbage can.” The Americans soon changed their minds, however, as President Truman worried about saving Europe from the USSR. One result was the Marshall Plan, which poured American aid into postwar Europe. W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft and the WCC also saw human need in postwar Europe. The WCC did its part, with a program that invested $6.2 million, a sort of counterpart to the Marshall Plan. Matti Peiponen spoke on “The Commission of the Churches on International Affairs,” judging it a success, especially in the early postwar years. It had a voice in the WCC and also in the UN. In the latter case, this commission made sure that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included the right to freedom of thought, expression, and confession, rather than merely the “freedom to worship,” as preferred by the USSR. Antti Laine spoke on “The Programme to Combat Racism.” Here he brought the story forward by two decades, reflecting on the WCC Assembly at Uppsala in 1968, a meeting where Martin Luther King’s place on the list of speakers fell to his assassination that spring. The turbulence implicit in King’s assassination spoke to a new world, with widespread activism among young people and with questions about racism in the United States as well as other parts of the world. The WCC focus on race advocated action, not just discussion, and the action included controversial grants made to sometimes radical organizations opposed to racial injustice. These sessions on WCC programs provoked a lively discussion in the Q and A, especially involving the question of theology, which was de-emphasized (if not actually banned) at Uppsala in 1968. According to Laine, however, leaders of the WCC considered their program against racism a success, proving the Christian ecumenical movement to be a credible player amidst the widely accepted idea that racism represented an evil to be opposed.

Katharina Kunter stayed in the decade of the Uppsala Assembly for her final presentations on this first day, “Revolutionary Hopes and Global Transformations: The World Council of Churches in the 1960s.” She actually called her timeframe the “long decade” of the 1960s, beginning as early as the mid-1950s and continuing well into the 1970s. Uppsala in 1968 represented a turning point. A Theology of Liberation developed in the 1970s. White men in the WCC were replaced by increasing numbers of women and people of color. Collective human rights replaced the Western emphasis on individual human rights. The geographical locus began shifting from west to east and from north to south. Some conservatives in Europe and the United States viewed this as the end of Christianity in Christian ecumenism. Some churches withdrew their membership. Under the theme for this first day of the conference, “dreams, utopias and realities,” this stage reached by the WCC in the 1970s seemed to contain a little bit of each.

Morning sessions on the second day included papers on ecumenism in Finland presented by Aila Lauha and Mikko Ketola. Professor Lauha described the early years of the Reformation when Finland was a Swedish possession, with the Lutheran faith declared the one true faith and Catholics known primarily as opponents during times of war. Even during the nineteenth century, when Finland was a province of Russia, the legal role of the Russian Tsar did not impinge on the dominant place of Lutheranism within Finland. By the 1920s, 95 percent of Finns remained within the dominant Lutheran faith and an ecumenical group formed in 1917 primarily involved Lutherans talking with each other. With a very strong nationalism in 1920s Finland, newly granted autonomy in 1917, ecumenism was seen largely as a threat of foreign influence, and the very few Catholics in Finland were widely suspected of disloyalty. After World War II, Lutherans in Finland gradually moved toward an acceptance of ecumenism. This was based upon the development of cross-denominational theological conversations. Also, suspicions against Catholics diminished with the dramatic changes developed at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. A Joint Declaration on Justification in 1999 helped solidify the Finnish respect for Catholics, so that by the turn of the century a modern, multicultural acceptance of ecumenism became the norm in Finland. Mikko Ketola picked up on this story of rapprochement between Finnish Lutherans and the Catholic Church in his paper, “Finland—Ecumenical Wonderland?” He noted that a small conversation began in 1967, when representatives of the Roman Catholic and the Finnish Orthodox Churches were invited to the Finnish celebration of the 450^thanniversary of the Reformation. More importantly, three Finnish Lutheran bishops made a first visit to Rome in 1985, during the papacy of John Paul II, and Finnish bishops have returned to Rome annually since. These past three decades have marked a period in which Finnish acceptance of and enthusiasm for ecumenism has increased dramatically.

Anders Jarlert began the afternoon session with “Nathan Söderblom and Nationalism—Riga, Uppsala, and Ruhr.” Many scholars view Söderblom as an internationalist, rather than a nationalist. Jarlert acknowledged that Söderblom worked for international cooperation and peace, especially in Europe, and that he was an important figure in the international ecumenical movement. However, Söderblom also had a very strong sense of his Swedish roots and a concern for the wellbeing of Sweden. Using numerous examples, Jarlert showed how these two realities can coexist in one person. Historians make a mistake when they try to find the right box into which to place a complex figure, he argued. Historical actors rarely fit so precisely into those boxes where we are tempted to place them.

The final session in this conference included three somewhat disparate topics. Aappo Laitinen spoke on “Religion and politics in Malta during the interwar years: between ‘Protestant’ Britain and the Holy See.” This story involves a complicated Catholic-Protestant clash, with a largely Catholic population on Malta, but British political control since the Napoleonic wars. Hanna-Maija Ketola spoke on “Strengthening the Alliance through Church Connections: The Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during WWII.” This involves a side story to the British-Soviet alliance during World War II, an unexpected alliance occasioned by Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR. A Church of England delegation visited their Russian Orthodox counterparts in 1943, hoping to use an ecumenical conversation as part of the connection that would solidify the political and military alliance of the two nations. This visit produced press reports that exaggerated the extent of religious freedom in the USSR, the sort of misunderstanding perhaps useful during the war itself, but part of the rapid separation between Russia and the West after Allied victory in 1945. Finally, Villa Jalovaara spoke on “Nordic bishops’ meetings during the Cold War.” Beginning in the 1920s, bishops from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden began meeting every third year. World War II interrupted this practice, as Danish and Norwegian bishops necessarily saw Germany as their enemy, but Finland most feared the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, these nations divided up between Norway, Denmark, and Iceland as members of NATO, with Sweden and Finland non-aligned, and with Finland maintaining a “friendly” relationship with the USSR. Although these differences of alignment made it difficult to produce joint statements, at least these bishops continued to meet regularly throughout the Cold War.

I would encourage readers interested in these topics to look for the fall edition of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in 2017, when refined versions of these papers will be available in print.

Conference Report: “Germany and the Confessional Divide, 1871-1989,” Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: “Germany and the Confessional Divide, 1871-1989,” Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, 2016, San Diego, California

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

On the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, twenty-five historians and theologians gathered at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association from September 30 through October 2 in San Diego to examine a confessional divide between Catholicism and Protestantism characterizing the social, political and religious landscape of Germany from the Kaiserreich through German reunification in 1990.

Convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Wilhelm-Westfälische-Universität in Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, the seminar grappled with how confessional identity is created and upheld. How and why did theologians, church leaders and politicians define themselves negatively against confessional enemies? To what extent was this process of definition influenced by geography, and in particular, the degree to which their regions were confessionally homogenous or heterogeneous? How did population shifts alter processes of confessionalization? How was this process of self-definition affected by encounters with non-Christian religions, including Jews and Muslims? And finally, which voices sought to counter such confessionalization processes and what impact did they have on received identities?

The seminar began the first day by focusing on the deepening of confessional tensions in the nineteenth century. The sociologist, M. Rainer Lepsius, spoke of the concept of “socio-moral miliuex,” borrowing the concept of a “Catholic milieu” from the Catholic publicist, Carl Amery. Some of Lepsius’ disciples, in turn, referred to a “conservative Protestant milieu.” The historian, Olaf Blaschke, calls much of the nineteenth century a “second confessional era,” one marked by the intensity of passions found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the wake of the Reformation. A participant in the seminar, Blaschke described the origins of his approach in his study with the renowned Bielefeld social historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Seminar participants, examining Blaschke’s thesis as well as objections from his critics, nonetheless remained divided over whether parallels with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hold up for the nineteenth. All nonetheless agreed that the era represented an era of significant and troubling confessional tensions, even if some pointed out that the forces driving these tensions varied significantly between the early modern and modern eras.

On the second day, participants examined attempts to overcome these confessional tensions in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis had striven to create a “positive Christianity,” a recognition of how deeply these confessional fault lines cut through German society. The discussion centered on Richard Steigmann-Gall’s classic and contested monograph, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Participants focused less on Steigmann-Gall’s claims that the Nazis, contrary to later mythologizing, understood themselves as good Christians and acted on the basis of their Christian faith. They focused instead on Steigmann-Galls’s analysis of how the Nazis exploited the goals of “positive Christianity” in hopes of standing above the confessions and bridging the confessional divide.

Even so, and spite of attempts to put aside these confessional differences through the creation of interconfessional movements of Christian Democracy, confessional fault lines persisted through the Adenauer Era in the Federal Republic—and in some regions, even longer. Only in the German Democratic Republic did these differences recede, the region being home to only a tiny minority of Catholics and under the control of an officially atheistic regime. The third session accordingly analyzed forces that ultimately closed these confessional rifts in the second half of the twentieth century. They began with a discussion of Maria Mitchell’s seminal article in the Journal of Modern History, “Materialism and Secularism. CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945-1949,” (67, no. 2 (June 1995): 278-308) which showed how Catholics and Protestants found common ground in the CDU through their shared hostility to materialism. Mitchell was also present and provided an overview of her article’s genesis while she was at graduate school at Boston University. Participants also examined the second chapter of Mark Edward Ruff’s forthcoming monograph, The Battle for the Catholic Past: Germany, 1945 -1980. This chapter examined the fights over the validity of the Reichskonkordat in the postwar era that culminated in a landmark case before the Constitutional Court in June, 1956. The seminar concluded with a discussion of Thomas Mittmann’s article in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, “Säkularisierungsvorstellungen und religiöse Identitätsstiftung im Migrationsdiskurs. Die kirchliche Wahrnehmung ‘des Islams’ in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit den 1960er Jahren“ (51 (2011): 267-289).

The fruitful conversations will lead to an edited volume, likely under the title, Germany and the Confessional Divide, 1871-1989. The 500^th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation provides the ideal opportunity to take stock of the Reformation legacy, not just in Germany but throughout the world.

Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference, sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University and Claremont McKenna College, November 3-6, 2016, Claremont, CA

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

At this year’s Lessons & Legacies Conference, a number of scholars presented on the Catholic Church in Europe under Nazism and Fascism.

On Friday, Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont) presented his study on the little-known Nonnenlager Schmückert, a labor camp for Polish nuns in the Reichsgau Wartheland. Between February 1941 and January 1945, the Gestapo, in collaboration with the Reichsstatthalter’s office of Arthur Greiser (via the Gau Self-Administration), imprisoned over six hundred nuns in the camp. In his analysis of the camp, Huener emphasized the intersections and conflicts “between ideology and economic rationality” in the Nazis’ anti-Church policies in the Warthegau. Initially, the regime’s persecution of the Polish Catholic Church, that included the dissolution of cloisters and the imprisonment of nuns, was crucial to germanization measures in the Gau. As a key symbol of “Polish national consciousness,” the Nazis viewed the destruction of the Polish Catholic Church as tantamount to the destruction of the Polish nation. Nuns in their conspicuous habits thus represented the dual threat of Catholicism and fanatical Polish nationalism and animated the Gestapo’s efforts to imprison the women in 1941. But if the initial imprisonment of nuns was driven by ideology, Huener argued that by 1942, severe labor shortages became the main impetus for the Gau administration’s renewed efforts to round up and incarcerate the remaining nuns in the Warthegau. Attempts to use nuns as forced laborers at Schmückert failed, however. Still, although most of the women were simply too ill to work, Huener concluded that the camp’s continued existence shows both the “regime’s commitment to incarcerating and exploiting its alleged enemies,” and its “obsession with Polish Catholicism as an inherently dangerous and conspiratorial locus of anti-German, Polish-national sentiment.”

On Saturday, the panel “Antisemitism and Catholicism during the Holocaust” focused on manifestations of and responses to antisemitism in the Catholic Church in Germany, France, and Italy under Nazism.

Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College) and Martina Cucchiara (Bluffton University) explored the topic through the lens Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage, whose writings the presenters have translated and annotated. The volume, The Evil that Surrounds Us: The Writings of Erna Becker Kohen, is forthcoming in 2017 from Indiana University Press. Overwhelmed by fear and isolation in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Erna converted to Catholicism in 1936. The history of Catholics of Jewish heritage primarily has been told from the perspective of the Catholic hierarchy. Focusing on the experience of one Catholic of Jewish heritage, Spicer and Cucchiara lowered their gaze to illuminate the consequences of the Catholic hierarchy’s refusal to take a clear stance on Jews, even Catholics of Jewish heritage, in Nazi Germany. Largely leaving their flock to their own devices, Church leaders did little to check the pervasive antisemitism and malice that Erna routinely encountered in Catholic parishes and women religious communities. Nonetheless, Erna, along with a small number of German Jews, did benefit from the Catholic Church’s feeble intervention on their behalf when the regime refrained from dissolving marriages between Jews and non-Jews. On account of her “privileged” marriage to a non-Jewish man, Erna therefore was exempt, for a time, from the most severe anti-Jewish decrees, including deportation. But, as Spicer and Cucchiara argued, the Church’s contribution to the protection of “privileged” Jews was incidental, as the episcopate first and foremost sought to defend its traditional right to govern marriage. The Church did not intervene when the Nazis deported Catholics of Jewish heritage or when they imprisoned the “Aryan” partners of Jews in the fall of 1944 to force them to divorce their Jewish spouses. Erna felt the full brunt of this policy of silence when the regime imprisoned her “Ayran” husband Gustav in a labor camp. Erna and her young son Silvan struggled to survive the war and the Holocaust in southern Germany and Tyrol. Gustav, too, survived but eventually succumbed to severe injuries he sustained during his time of imprisonment.

In her presentation “Catholic Antisemitism in France and Italy during the Holocaust,” Nina Valbousquet (Sciences Po Paris) also raised the issue of intermarriage, albeit in post-Fascist Italy in 1943. Following Mussolini’s fall, Father Tacchi Venturi, a member the Italian Catholic clergy, advocated for the abolition of provisions of the Fascist racial laws of 1938 that forbade intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews. At the same time, he also lobbied the Italian Ministry of the Interior to retain certain antisemitic provisions that in his estimation were consistent with Catholic traditions and principles. Valbousquet argued that Venturi’s position was representative of members of the Catholic clergy in Fascist Italy and Vichy France who disavowed Nazi antisemitism as un-Christian but continued to spread “acceptable” forms of antisemitism. In their promotion of Catholic antisemitic propaganda that conflated traditional Christian anti-Jewish prejudices with modern secular antisemitic stereotypes, the Church became complicit in legitimizing anti-Jewish laws and measures in France and Italy. From here it was but a small step for some Catholic activists during World War II to cast Fascist antisemitic laws as “a legitimate self-defense of Christian civilization” against World Jewry. At the very least, Valbousquet concluded, Catholic antisemitic propaganda contributed to widespread indifference to the suffering of Jews, and for this reason the topic deserves far greater scholarly attention that it has received so far.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) also sought answers to the Catholic Church’s apparent indifference to the persecution of Jews in the months following Hitler’s ascension to power. In particular, she examined the intersection between the Catholic Church’s response to the regime’s treatment of Jews and Catholics in 1933. Brown-Fleming argued that scholars must consider the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and Catholics together in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Church’s silence about the escalating persecution of Jews in 1933. Drawing on files from the Vatican secret archives, Brown-Fleming painted a vivid picture of discussions between the Vatican and the German episcopate on how to respond to the new regime’s persecution of Jews. In the end, Church leaders remained silent because, in the words of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, should the Church defend Jews, “the war against the Jews would also become a war against the Catholics.” Whereas Brown-Fleming attributed the Catholic Church’s silence about Jews mainly to fears for its own flock, implicitly, she raised yet another intriguing reason for the Church’s public indifference to the suffering of Jews. It appears that upon Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, many Catholics were not fearful but enthusiastic about the new regime. Some younger Catholics chafed against the ban on Catholic membership in the NSDAP that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference had issued in 1930. Cesare Orsenigo the Vatican nuncio in Berlin, went so far as warning the Vatican in 1933 that the Church should take care not to alienate the many “National Socialist Catholics,” lest they left the Church. Although Brown-Fleming did not explicitly make the argument, she nonetheless raised the question whether the Catholic Church remained silent about the persecution of Jews not just because they feared a war against Catholics but because they feared losing the support of large segments of Catholics whose enthusiasm for the new regime clearly outweighed their trepidations about Nazism.

Conference Report: 30th Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: 30th Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, October 20-22, 2016

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Under the title of “Marching to Zion: Judaism, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism,” three scholars from the Conference on Faith and History examined the relationship between American Protestant Christians, Judaism, and Antisemitism during the tumultuous twentieth century.

Daniel Hummel, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, presented “Rethinking Covenant, Land, and Mission: Jewish-Evangelical Dialogue after Oslo.” In it he recounted the history of Jewish-evangelical dialogue in the United States, which was first officially begun in 1969 with a highly publicized meeting between Billy Graham and the American Jewish leaders at the headquarters of the American Jewish Committee in New York City. While interreligious dialogue and politics do not always go hand-in-hand, they are inextricable in the case of Jewish-evangelical dialogue. Since the late 1960s, it has expanded into one of the most active fronts of Jewish-Christian dialogue, while at the same time American evangelical support for Israel was politicized in the Christian Zionist movement. Hummel argued that Jewish-evangelical dialogue has supplied evangelicals over the past 45 years with new ways of thinking about theological concepts of covenant, land, and mission. Through a combination of changing evangelical theology, exposure to strands of modern Jewish theology, and the very act of interreligious dialogue, new conceptualizations of covenant, land, and mission have helped legitimate Christian Zionism. In political terms, the dialogue has rationalized the Christian Zionist focus on a blessing theology rooted in Genesis 12:3. This theology argues that the Jewish people remain in covenant with God. by which the Jewish people are irrevocably granted the Land of Israel (as demarcated in the Bible), while the mission of Christians is to bear witness to this arrangement by de-prioritizing evangelism and strengthening the covenant through support for the state of Israel.

Timothy D. Padgett, who just defended his PhD from Trinity International University, gave a paper entitled “Diverse Discourse on Zion: American Evangelical Public Discussions of Zionism and the State of Israel, 1937-1973.” In it, he traced the evolution of what he argued were diverse evangelical perspectives on Zionism and the State of Israel in evangelical periodicals. Some periodicals, like Arno C. Gaebelin’s dispensationalist Our Hope, were eschatologically minded but ambivalent about Zionism and (later) the Israeli government. In contrast, the editor and writers at Christian Herald (including the pseudonymous reporter Gabriel Courier) were strongly pro-Israel but wholly uninterested in eschatology. The Reformed magazine, Southern Presbyterian Journal, though often published weekly, had precious little to say about Zionism or Israel. Most stereotypically, perhaps, the Moody Monthly was both uniformly pro-Israeli and motivated by eschatological theology. Next, the dispensationalist Presbyterian magazine Eternity combined ardent support for and harsh criticism of Israel. Finally, Christianity Today and its editor Carl Henry were quite positive about the Jewish state, but gave little expression to any theology of the end times. Overall, American evangelicals were generally pro-Israeli, though this did not seem to correlate with their level of interest in eschatological theology.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University rounded out the panel, with “German Racism, American Antisemitism, and Christian Duty: U.S. Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938.” In it, he assessed the rhetoric employed by liberal Protestant writers and editors in Advance (Congregational), Christendom (unaffiliated), and The Churchman (Episcopalian) in responding to National Socialism, US antisemitism, the German Church Struggle, and the Jewish refugee crisis of 1938. Without doubt, these members of the Protestant church press–many of them church leaders–understood it to be their Christian duty to respond to a profound sense of crisis. Democracy, civilization, Christianity, and all religion were under attack from the forces of war, totalitarianism, racism, and paganism. These writers and editors named the evils of war and totalitarianism, in particular the threat that Hitler and Nazi Germany posed to the civilized world. They also fought against antisemitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without reviving centuries-old anti-Jewish prejudices from time to time, and also not without reframing the persecution of Jews and the Jewish refugee crisis as the persecution of Christians and Jews and the Christian and Jewish refugee crisis. In the end, the plight of the Jews was not uppermost in their minds. Most important to these liberal Protestant spokesmen was the reaffirmation that Christianity was the only force that could ultimately save their civilization, preserve democracy, and protect the world from self-destruction.

Letter from the Editors (September 2016)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Letter from the Editors (September 2016)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

French Church of Friedrichstadt,Berlin

As fall begins and students return to universities across Europe and North America, we are delighted to bring you a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Our September issue is highlighted by reviews of two books: Lauren Faulkner Rossi’s Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation and Christoph Picker et al.’s Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus.

Along with these reviews, we have prepared a variety of interesting news and notes: a couple of conference reports, some article and book notes, a film announcement, and a call for papers for an upcoming conference on religion and ethno-nationalism. These diverse offerings attest to the ongoing vibrancy of the contemporary history of German and European religious history. We hope you enjoy them and wish you well in this autumn season.

On behalf of the entire editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), Pp. 352, ISBN: 9780674598485.

By Robert Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University

Rossi-Wehrmacht Lauren Faulkner Rossi has produced a measured and original contribution to the serious body of scholarship that has emerged over the past decade or so chronicling the varied responses and experiences of German Catholic priests under Nazism and in the Second World War. Actually, this book is about both ordained clergy and seminarians, an crucial distinction that merits a more precise articulation at the outset of this important study. We are talking here about a subject group that has received comparatively little attention from scholars to date: Catholic priests and seminarians who were conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Significantly, only a fraction of them served officially as military chaplains; this is yet another important fact that is easily overlooked given the book’s understandable emphasis on chaplains and bishops. To be clear, the subject group under study was relatively small. Of the over 17,000,000 Wehrmacht soldiers who served in the war, 17,000 self-identified as priests or seminarians–roughly one-tenth of one percent. As Faulkner Rossi openly acknowledges, both the size of the subject group as well as the limited source base from which she draws do limit the book’s analytical scope. Most of the quantitative evidence presented here is based on the records of a single seminary in Bavaria. Further qualitative and narrative analysis is drawn heavily from the recollections of one man, Georg Werthmann, the Catholic Field Vicar-General and second-in-command to Reich Catholic Field Bishop Franz Justus Rarkowski. Accordingly, Faulkner Rossi wisely sets out forthrightly the delimitations of her analysis, inviting readers to appreciate instead the rich insights that can be gleaned through a thorough case study (2). It is indeed helpful to have at the outset a clear explanation that this is not a social history of the subject group.

These delimitations are purposeful and instructive and underscore the utility of the case study approach. That priests and seminarians should comprise such a small fraction of the Wehrmacht is not at all surprising. So the question of numbers is largely irrelevant. What matters from the standpoint of historical understanding is that these priests and seminarians were conscripted in the first place and, most important of all, that they chose to serve in such overwhelming numbers; it is remarkable and telling indeed that of those conscripted, just one–Franz Reinisch, an Austrian Pallottine priest–chose the path of conscientious objection, a choice for which he was executed. Adding to the unique perspective of the subject group are two further qualifying factors. For one, as mentioned, very few of them served as military chaplains. This meant, in short, that they were not primarily, or officially at least, responsible for the pastoral care of German Catholic soldiers, even though most of them seem to have rationalized their military service precisely in this vocational sense. Second, by virtue of the secret supplement to the 1933 Reichskonkordat between the Hitler government and the Holy See, priests and seminarians conscripted into the army were to be inducted into the medical unit or to concern themselves with the “pastoral care for the troops,” under the jurisdiction of the military bishops. This meant, in practice, that most of the men in the subject group did not take up arms in the literal sense. Instead, they provided medical service, working as assistants in field hospitals, as stretcher-bearers and so on. Serving as neither chaplains nor armed soldiers, then, these priests and seminarians were something of an anomalous group.

Precisely because they were something of an anomaly, these so-called “Wehrmacht priests” make for a fascinating case study. Why did they agree to serve? Why did only one refuse? What were their experiences like on the front lines of Hitler’s war of annihilation? How did their Catholic worldview and pastoral training influence their responses to what they witnessed and their relationship with their fellow soldiers? How did the Wehrmacht priests come to terms with their participation in the war, and how did they rationalize their role in the light of their faith and their national loyalties? Faulkner Rossi does an admirable job of focussing the reader’s attention on these animating questions. Most important, she provides compelling answers that tell us much about the challenges German Catholics confronted in the face of an “ever-shifting, fluid negotiation of national and religious identity under the Nazi regime” (5). Because it was ever-shifting and fluid, that process of negotiation was ongoing. Invariably, it pushed these Wehrmacht priests onto a kind of ethical gray zone, trying to do go some good–or so they believed–while cooperating with the Hitler state in a war that many of them believed to be unjust. And yet they justified their service nonetheless, ostensibly in the name of serving God and country.

Since she wants to understand her subjects as men of their time, Faulkner Rossi offers a nuanced assessment of how these priests and seminarians reasoned and acted within the confines of their worldview. The book is perhaps most incisive and most effective at re-creating the “mental horizons”–to borrow from John Connelly–of this distinctive group of devout German Catholics who heeded the call for military service (3). It was a worldview framed by the reigning Catholic moral theology of the day, by the particular contours of their clerical training, and by their personal experiences as young German Catholics whose formative years were defined by the turbulent collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism and the inexorable radicalization and racialization of German society under the auspices of Gleichschaltung (16). Theirs was a German Catholic cultural and moral universe that nurtured a strong and resilient autonomous youth movement and associational life, but also learned to accommodate if not make peace entirely with the Hitler regime. This limited degree of autonomy, which lessened over time, nonetheless did create some space for German Catholics to distance themselves from certain Nazi policies and practices without feeling compelled to engage in active or even passive forms of resistance to the regime before or during the war.

Faulkner Rossi very deftly dissects these mental horizons, revealing the complex intersection and interaction of religious faith, cultural identity and national loyalty. She reasons that two themes were formative in the motivation and rationalization of conscripted priests and seminarians: the twin emotional and intellectual demands of faith and national identity (3). Faulkner Rossi concludes that most of these conscripted priests and seminarians did not go to war because they supported Nazism (154). To the contrary, she says, they “consistently divorced” their participation in the war and even the army itself–leaders and soldiers–from Nazism (154). We are told simply that most of them went to war for “a variety of reasons” (154). Two reasons appear to have been paramount: a sense of duty to care spiritually for German Catholic soldiers, and a sense of patriotic duty to defend their country. As Faulkner Rossi concludes, for the Wehrmacht priests and seminarians, “religion and nationalism worked in tandem as motivation” (154).

Importantly, this mutually reinforcing motivation produced what Faulkner Rossi evocatively describes as a “dangerous myopia,” wherein the presumed salvation of the souls of German Catholic soldiers counted above anything and everything else. In other words, an understandable pastoral impulse to care for the spiritual and emotional health of German Catholic soldiers fighting a war of annihilation proved a more powerful claim for this select group of priests and seminarians than resisting inhumane and unjust behaviour in war (155). This, according to Faulkner Rossi, is what made the Wehrmacht priests so genuinely different from other conscripts, that is, this avowedly “vocational aspect of their military service” (240). These men believed fervently that serving dutifully in the Wehrmacht meant serving God and country, not Hitler per se; they told themselves during and after the war that there was a “greater good” to be served in offering pastoral care for Catholic soldiers and mitigating the suffering of all German soldiers through other forms of compassionate service. They were determined, in Faulkner Rossi’s words, “to do some good or to make a difference for the soldiers” (154).

The logic of the “greater good” thereby provided the Wehrmacht priests with a confirmatory moral justification for serving. In short, these priests and seminarians brought to the war zone a unique blend of “training, faith, and feeling” that distinguished them from laymen soldiers and also sustained them in their military service; Faulkner Rossi labels this as a kind of “spiritual opportunism” (154). In the end, this vocational sense of military service helped the Wehrmacht priests to “rationalize their complicity with a racist, murderous regime” (155). True, these men saw their spiritual sustenance of laymen soldiers as pastorally and morally vital, and proper to their vocation and training. But this trapped them in what Faulkner Rossi rightly describes as a “flawed rationalization” (155). They told themselves that they were working for God and country and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of that conviction, however myopic or flawed we may judge the rationalization. In the words of one former priest-soldier, identified only as Wilhelm W.

I served the Church. A side effect of this was, in effect, to render a service to the state, but I had to hazard the consequences. I believe fundamentally in helping soldiers, in serving them, in preserving the Church and to that final end serving the glory of God… The other part of it included a cooperation that one simply couldn’t repudiate (250).

Evidently, the impulse to “do some good” and to seek the “greater good” through a vocational sense of military service did not extend to speaking or acting on behalf of the innocent victims of Hitler’s wars. Paradoxically, the deeper the religious and pastoral commitment to the spiritual welfare of soldiers, the more myopic–perhaps even blinded–the Wehrmacht priests grew vis-à-vis the most vulnerable–those, as Faulkner Rossi puts it, “most in need of defense, namely Europe’s Jews” (156).

An important caveat is in order here. Much of what we know about how Wehrmacht priests rationalized their decision to serve in a war that was, as Faulkner Rossi notes, “criminal” and “antithetical” to their Catholic values, comes from written testimony some 140 priest-veterans provided many decades after the war ended. Allowing for the usual hazards of private and public memory of traumatic episodes, the reader is struck, as Faulkner Rossi was, by the obvious difficulty these priests and seminarians had in coming to terms with their service. It is impossible to ignore the fact that few of these men engaged in a serious, self-critical examination of conscience about what they saw and did or did not do on behalf of the victims during their military service.

Troublingly, most of the men claimed never to have witnessed first hand or even to have known about the atrocities until after the war, a claim that strains the limits of credulity. Consider the recollection of one Josef P., who served as a medical orderly and chaplain. He recalled being assigned to a small Polish city “full of Jews, all of whom wore the Jewish star.” But, he insisted, at that point the “systematic extermination had not yet begun…. I never witnessed atrocities against Jews or civilian populations. I only heard about it after the war.” Josef recalled hearing stories about SS troops killing Jewish children in disturbingly horrific ways. “But these were stories,” he said. “I never witnessed it. I didn’t know if it was true” (242). Still other men insisted on distinguishing and distancing the Wehrmacht from the Nazis. In the words of Kunibert P., “our Wehrmacht, or at the division I was in, was anything but Nazi…. [W]e served an unethical regime, that was clear to everyone, the Nazis were criminals…. I’ve already said, I was gladly a soldier, but we were never Nazis” (247). Of course, this exculpatory claim–we were never Nazis–was invoked widely and persistently in the years after the war by various segments of society, by powerful institutions like the military and the Church both in Germany and well beyond. In fact, Faulkner Rossi sees in the individual failure by the Wehrmacht priests to consider the consequences of their complicity with a murderous regime a corollary failure of the two institutions in which these men served–the German military and the Catholic Church (253).

To her great credit, Faulkner Rossi handles the interview responses with an appropriately critical sensitivity, thereby avoiding facile historical or moral judgements. Consequently, she is able to write persuasively about the dilemma that most of the Wehrmacht priests and seminarians faced: a binary choice between their sense of duty to offer pastoral care and sustenance to soldiers on the one hand and the inescapable realization of their complicity with a murderous regime on the other. The dilemma was captured aptly by one chaplain who said years after the war, “Naturally, one wondered repeatedly if this was a just war…. [O]n the one hand, as a Christian, one couldn’t endorse the regime, couldn’t support it. But on the other hand, we did this indirectly, by emboldening the soldiers. Doubt often came over me: should I continue doing this or not? And if I thought about the soldiers themselves, I could do nothing but continue” (251).

Such a statement conveys powerfully the sense of the inescapability of the binary choice the Wehrmacht priest and seminarians said that they faced. The irrevocable commitment to provide pastoral care for the conscience of the Catholic soldier meant that Wehrmacht priests understood and accepted that their service entailed some degree of complicity with a criminal regime. Yet, their “consciousness of the dire need for pastoral care” was the tipping point so to speak, the decisive factor in their decision to serve. Faulkner Rossi reasons that this sense of pastoral duty “outweighed any impulse to take a principled stand against a regime that did not tolerate dissent. When a priest can literally see before him a phalanx of Catholics asking for spiritual guidance in the midst of the annihilation, the idea of abandoning his training and ignoring that plea for guidance was morally irresponsible” (251).

So we are left to conclude that a moral choice lay behind the decision to serve and to do so dutifully even in the midst of the annihilation of entire communities across Eastern Europe. We know, of course, that this choice–these thousands of choices–had consequences, however unintended and unforeseen. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the choice to serve was guided primarily by religious and pastoral commitments, as we are told repeatedly in the postwar testimonials, or whether service truly was inspired and sustained by nationalism. For her part, Faulkner Rossi concludes that nationalism, not Catholicism, was the “essential ingredient” in the military service of Wehrmacht priests and seminarians. “These men,” we are told, “were deeply German” (241). If that was the case–and there is plenty of evidence presented here to substantiate the point–then the reader is left to wonder: were these Wehrmacht priests and seminarians really all that different from laymen soldiers or from Protestant chaplains and priests for that matter? More to the point, did their avowed vocational sense of military service distinguish them from laymen soldiers, or was it simply the confirmatory rationalization for serving above all to defend country–a shared goal with Nazism that clearly facilitated and eased accommodation and complicity or at the very least stifled dissent or resistance for most.

The role that these priests played in providing spiritual guidance and perhaps even forms of formal or informal absolution to soldiers waging a war of annihilation is a troubling yet deeply consequential question that warrants further research and analysis. It is deeply consequential because it cuts to the heart of the choices soldiers (and civilians) made in the midst of the Nazi war of annihilation: the choice to follow orders or to refuse; the choice to look away when confronted with brutality and violence or to protest, to dissent, to resist; the choice to refuse to be conscripted or to serve dutifully, thereby playing a part, however small or indirect, as a cog in the wheel of the machinery of destruction. It may be true that most of the Wehrmacht priests were never avowed Nazis but, as Faulkner Rossi reminds us, other people–including some priests–made other choices and paid the ultimate sacrifice for them. That is the moral of the story of conscientious objectors like Franz Reinisch, a story that is told altogether too briefly and too hurriedly at the end of this otherwise very informative book. Thanks to Lauren Faulkner Rossi, we now have a much deeper understanding of why and how priests served in Hitler’s war of annihilation. The perplexing and troubling question persists, though: why were there so few priests like Father Reinisch?

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus, 2 Vols. (Speyer and Leipzig: Verlagshaus Speyer and Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), Pp. 911, ISBN: 9783374044122.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Picker-Protestanten The Protestant Union Church of the Palatinate is one of the smaller regional churches in Germany, with its headquarters in Speyer on the west bank of the Middle Rhine. The church authorities, after lengthy delays, have now published this voluminous collection of essays by more than 60 contributors, which describes the fate of the church during the years of Nazi rule. It constitutes one of the best regional studies of the Protestant church for this period, although, as the chief editor Christoph Picker acknowledges in his introduction, the results are highly sobering. In this region of Germany which was diverse in its denominational loyalties, Protestantism and National Socialism went hand in hand. Many leading Nazi functionaries saw themselves as “good Protestants,” and the collaboration between the church leadership under the “German Christian” Bishop Ludwig Diehl and the Nazi Party’s regional hierarchy was at first close and on very good terms. Above all, the desire among churchmen for stability led them to endorse the Nazi project for “national unity” (Volksgemeinschaft) in the interests of harmony. So no real Church Struggle took place in the Palatinate Church, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the pastors belonged to the German Christian faction in 1933. The limited opposition from those who supported the Confessing Church when it was organized in 1934 was successfully integrated with the dominant German Christians. More than 20 percent of the pastors took out membership in the Nazi Party.
Four large chapters in Volume 1 spell out the details:

Chapter one describes the historical developments of this Church from the political and religious situation during the Weimar Republic up to the difficult and contentious coming-to-terms with its “brown” past during the immediate post-war years up to 1949. Chapter two (“Institutions, organizations, and groups”) includes the relationships with the national Reich Church under Bishop Ludwig Mueller as well as with the Nazi state. Details are also provided about the traditional church parties, the German Christian Movement and the local Confessing Church in the Palatinate. Chapter three covers the growth of antisemitism and the church’s reactions to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, as well as the results of the Nazi plans for ethnic cleansing through its euthanasia program in church institutions, and also the more general Nazi persecution measures against Protestants. Chapter four details internal church developments. This section describes such things as the character of church services, church art and architecture, youth work, the church press, the continuing and formative hostility towards the Catholics of this very mixed region, and finally the role of church women and especially of the pastors’ wives, who held prominent position in the parishes. All this is described in great detail in the 638 pages of the first volume. At the same time, a large number of impressive photographs are included, which are of considerable historical value.

The second and less extensive volume covers the activities of the major church protagonists, who were mainly pastors, with short biographical sketches. Given the multiplicity of these articles, it is naturally impossible to examine individual items. Particularly notable, however, is Walter Rummel’s contribution on the performance of the church during the Second World War, which describes the extensive and willing participation of church members in Hitler’s campaigns. For example, the Dean of Speyer, Karl Wien, gave a rousing sermon on Heroes’ Remembrance Day in 1940, which, in flaming tones, exalted the list of German heroes from those who had fallen during the First World War to the “freedom fighters” in the postwar period up to the fighters in the SA and those who were actually now fighting in the ranks of the German army. After the German victory over France in June 1940, Bishop Diehl ordered all parishes to hold services of Thanksgiving. As long as these victories continued, there was a regular personality cult around Hitler, even in church pronouncements.

Roland Paul describes the church reactions to the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of November 1938, noting the widespread silence in church circles. Shortly afterwards, in his annual report, Pastor Georg Becker of Iggelheim wrote that, with these pogroms, the Nazis were actually carrying out Luther’s intentions and inheritance. “Those cities and sites where the Jews have blasphemed God and Jesus Christ will shortly disappear from the Reich of our dear leader Adolf Hitler” (357). Pastor Johannes Baehr in Mutterstadt was the exception. In November 1938, while teaching his class of schoolchildren, many of whom had witnessed the burning-down of the local synagogue, Pastor Baehr declared that such actions were not to be justified. On the very same day he was taken into “protective custody” and only released two days later after the intervention of Bishop Diehl.

This is a significant publication, providing a self-critical account of the church’s activities and attitudes. Of course, its appearance is very late. Only after several generations have passed by can we expect such a sobering and self-critical analysis of these twelve horrifying years of Nazi rule, which were also twelve fatal years for German Protestantism. So far not all regional Protestant churches have found the courage to undertake such a thorough and self-critical examination. So this example by a relatively small church shows what can be done on its own initiative. We can hope that these two volumes will find many readers, especially since 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Not only do these volumes provide us with examples of dangerous perversions to be avoided, but also remind us of the long and illustrious history which German Protestantism has enjoyed for the last 500 years.

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 760-790.

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

As Kyle Jantzen noted in our most recent issue, Samuel Koehne has published over the last several years a series of articles that offer significant insights on National Socialist views of religion. This study is no exception. Koehne offers nuanced conclusions based on meticulous research. The article is especially valuable for the light it sheds on the interaction between “the völkisch world of thought,” (764) which he dubs the “strange worldview out of which Nazism emerged,” (767) and Nazi views on religion as illuminated by their celebrations of Christmas in the early years of the Weimar Republic.

Koehne’s main argument is threefold: that “the Nazis were clearly a part of the völkisch movement, that they reflected the movement’s diverse religious trends, and that there is an urgent need for historians to reconnect the Nazi Party to the milieu from which it emerged” (762-763). While major histories of the Third Reich have examined the role played by antisemitism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism in the broader völkisch subculture in which the Nazis operated, he avers, “there is a need for a deeper analysis of the intellectual roots of National Socialism with respect to its religious beliefs—and to how those beliefs connected with earlier völkisch religious trends” (763). Koehne’s emphasis on the syncretistic interaction between Nazi ideology, the völkisch milieu of the early twentieth century, and Christianity is both welcome and thoroughly elucidated here.

Koehne’s conclusions are also threefold. First, he concludes that there was no “cohesive meaning” to “positive Christianity,” a much discussed phrase used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Program. Instead, the fact that this “positive Christian” party both promoted and reported its own Christmas celebrations as “the Germanic pagan festival of winter solstice” demonstrates both that leading Nazis (including Hitler) were not concerned about appearing as traditional Christians and that a wide array of religious views existed within the party (787). Second, he contends that “the early Nazi Party was immersed in the völkisch movement, including its pagan trends and traditions” (787). Koehne demonstrates that the party both promoted and was influenced to a significant degree by the ideas of people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Theodor Fritsch, and Arthur Dinter. Third, Koehne concludes both that there is no “inherent dichotomy” within the Nazi Party between its pagans and its Aryan Christians and that—because of the context and meaning poured into the terms by their Nazi adherents—references to Jesus Christ, Christianity, and the Bible do not necessarily exclude paganism (788). The picture that emerges here is one of a wide diversity of beliefs and indeed a great deal of syncretism between Christianity, Germanic paganism, and völkisch ideology.

Koehne’s study of a rather narrow topic—early Nazi views of the celebration of Christmas—offers tantalizing answers to much bigger questions, including the one posed in the article’s title. The study is extremely meticulous. The author’s nuanced conclusions are worthy of careful consideration and will no doubt propel others to plow further ground in this relatively fallow area of scholarly research.

Article Note: Todd Weir, “The Christian Front against Godlessness: Anti-Secularism and the Demise of the Weimar Republic, 1928-1933”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Todd Weir, “The Christian Front against Godlessness: Anti-Secularism and the Demise of the Weimar Republic, 1928-1933,” Past and Present 229 (Nov. 2015): 201-238.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Though historians have long been attentive to the role of organized religion in the demise of the Weimar Republic, Todd Weir argues that they have failed to recognize the full significance of anti-secularism in the political developments that brought Hitler to power. In contrast, Weir sees a close relationship between campaigns against godlessness and the Nazi Party’s electoral breakthrough with conservative Protestant voters beginning in 1930.

To make his case, Weir employs M. Rainer Lepsius’ conceptual model of four “mutually hostile” social-cultural milieux (socialist, Catholic, liberal Protestant, and conservative Protestant) among which Germans had been divided since the late nineteenth century (207). The socialist milieu, represented by the Communist and Social Democratic parties in the Weimar era, was decidedly secular in comparison with the others, and its members were prominent in the German Freethought Association as well as the periodic church-leaving campaigns. From 1929 onward, the communists’ displays of anti-clericalism grew increasingly provocative as they tried to draw ardent secularists away from their more moderate social democratic rivals. Catholic and Protestant clergy and lay organizations—most often aligned with the Center Party and the German National People’s Party, respectively—responded to these threats with energetic campaigns against godlessness. Their domestic mobilization dovetailed with widespread concern over the persecution of Christians in Mexico and the USSR, leading many Christians in Germany to conclude that their “defensive campaigns against German secularists” were part of a larger “global battle with unbelief” (202).

A side effect of this escalating cultural conflict was that it further undermined the position of Heinrich Brüning of the Center Party, who was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932. Although Brüning suppressed communist freethought associations and banned a high-profile Jugendweihe (secular confirmation ceremony) that communists had planned for 2000 youth in Berlin, he was derided by conservative Catholics and Protestants for tolerating socialist freethinkers and the Center/Social Democratic coalition that governed the state of Prussia. Disappointment with the Center Party’s ‘tepid’ responses to secularism gave the National Socialists an opening to present their party as a more aggressive and effective champion in the struggle against godlessness. Their strategy seems to have been most effective among Protestants on the far right.

Weir’s article demonstrates a positive correlation—though not necessarily a causal relationship—between heightened concerns over godlessness and conservative Protestant support for the Nazis. Expressions of outrage over anti-clericalism and governments that appeared to tolerate it were certainly part of the toxic mix that undermined the Weimar Republic. However, Weir’s neglect of the liberal Protestant milieu and its role is puzzling. Members of this subculture also opposed godlessness, though many of them considered the ‘Catholicizing tendencies’ of conservative Protestants to be an equally grave threat to German culture. Consideration of this milieu would not necessarily negate Weir’s central argument, but it would provide a more nuanced representation of Christian responses to organized secularism at the end of the Weimar era.

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War,” German History 33, no. 1 (March 2015): 80-99.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Thomas Brodie of Jesus College, Oxford, has drawn from his doctoral research on German Catholics on the home front during the Second World War to publish this interesting article about the vagaries of religious practice among Rhenish Catholics displaced by Allied bombing. He follows Catholic evacuees from the Rhineland and Westphalia to places like Thuringia, Saxony, and southern Württemberg, where they often struggled to make new homes and develop healthy spiritual practices.

The article begins with a strong historiographical section, placing the author’s research in the context of recent scholarship on the air war, evacuations, the home front, and German religious history. While many accounts have suggested that the experience of the Second World War was conducive to an upswing in religious activity and clerical influence, Brodie disagrees, arguing that scholars have taken “insufficient account of the manifold strains the conflict imposed on the Churches’ pastoral structures during this very period” (82). To the contrary, he suggests that, “It was indeed precisely from 1943 onwards, as Allied bombing of northern and western Germany intensified, that civilian evacuations increasingly disrupted established religious geographies and networks of clerical ministry in these regions” (82). In short, he suggests that the western German Catholic milieu didn’t survive displacement.

Brodie asks a series of useful questions: Were clergy able to minister to their displaced parishioners, or were evacuees essentially removed from their influence? Did evacuation to Protestant or remote Catholic regions weaken the faith of Catholics from the Catholic strongholds of the Rhineland and Westphalia? Do the experiences of Catholic evacuees tell us anything about the wider level of religious engagement in German wartime society? And how did the Catholic clergy and laity understand their experiences as evacuees? His overarching argument is that population movements were significantly disruptive to confessional life: “German society may not have been disintegrating by 1943/1944, but the measures required to maintain the national war effort were proving increasingly corrosive of traditional ‘milieu’ boundaries” (83).

In the sections that follow, Brodie draws on the reports of Rhenish clergy working with evacuees to illustrate a series of problems created by the mass evacuation of western German Catholics. For instance, often Rhenish priests simply lacked important materials for their ministry, like Bibles, catechisms, or prayer books. Moreover, they frequently wanted for the necessary means of transportation to reach widely scattered evacuees. Large parishes and poor public transportation meant that they were frequently cycling 10 to 20 km to minister to families or provide religious instruction. Then, even if they could reach their charges, clergy needed a place to meet with them. In Thuringia, for example, the Protestant church government refused to allow Catholics to use their church buildings at any time during the war. On top of that, the Gestapo often prohibited Catholics from holding religious services in schools or homes. Even when evacuees ended up in Catholic regions, however, religious practices were often so different that the Rhinelanders struggled to join in.

Compounding these problems were others. Often, clergy had no way of knowing how many Rhenish Catholics had been evacuated, where they had settled, or if they had returned home. In one case relating to the Cologne Archdiocese, out of about 250,000 evacuees, only 16,500 had registered for religious supervision in the diaspora (86).

Brodie also notes the acute shortage of Catholic clergy. In late 1943, 9 percent of German parishes lacked a priest, and the vast majority of theology students and trainee priests–at least in the Cologne area–were being called up for military duty. (This research mirrors the reality in many Protestant regions, where many clergy cared for two and three parishes during the war and administrators struggled to fill gaps.)

In Protestant regions, Catholic priests often faced confessional hostility from Protestant lay people or police. Both they and their parishioners felt this, and Rhenish clergy developed a self-understanding of working in exile. They often complained about the secularism of Protestant regions like Thuringia, and viewed their labour as a participation in the wider effort to stem the tide of godlessness in Europe. Drawing on their neo-Scholastic theology, these clergy interpreted the spiritual apathy they observed to the Reformation’s “depowering of the sacraments and the sacrifice of the cross.” The result was, as one priest put it, “the whole faith increasingly collapses” (92). In Austrian Catholic regions to which evacuees had been sent, this declining religious vitality was attributed to “enlightened Josephinism” and its modernizing effect. Everywhere, however, priests also pointed to the morally corrosive effect of the war itself, including the prevalence of adultery and marital breakup.

In the final section of his article, Brodie suggests that the weakness of Catholic evacuees’ religious practice in wartime and their observations about Protestant secularism in places like Thuringia and Saxony suggests that the narrative of a general upsurge in German religious activity on the Second World War home front may be mistaken. In fact, Brodie suggested confessional identity took a beating, with Catholics slipping into Protestant services or (more often) just going shopping or sightseeing on Sunday. In parts of Saxony, for instance, the movie theatre seems to have outdrawn the church (95). Ultimately, if many Rhenish Catholics struggled to attend church at home, how much less likely were they in the situation of displacement?

In his conclusion, Brodie reiterates his primary argument that wartime was not conducive to increasing clerical influence or religious engagement. Rather, “the experiences of the Catholic diaspora as a whole indicate that although German society was not completely atomized during 1943 and 1944, certain traditional customs and networks were fraying under the pressures of war” (98).