Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Pp. 486. ISBN 9781451464726.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Since 1945, Nazism has been universally condemned. Historians have written extensively, but always pejoratively, about its personalities, its politics, its ideology, and particularly its crimes, which culminated in the Holocaust. As a result, less research has been carried out, and always negatively, into the reasons why Nazism gained support from an overwhelming majority of Germans, including many Protestant churchmen and women. Particularly vocal in Nazism’s cause was the minority group pf Protestants known as the German Christian Faith Movement, whose members very actively sought to introduce and popularize Nazi ideas into the liturgical and practical life of their parishes. Mary Solberg has now selected and translated into English a useful collection of this group’s writings, which provide an English-speaking readership with the full range of their ideas. Presumably she feels that the time is not yet ripe, or the audience not yet ready, for any extended analysis of these sources.

Solberg-Church Despite the excellent contributions of such authors as James Zabel, Doris Bergen and Robert Ericksen, Solberg feels that “far too few people in or out of the academy know far too little“ about the conduct of the churches In Hitler’s Germany. But her extended introduction clearly indicates her approach to answering the questions posed by her documents: specifically what role did this German Christian Faith Movement play in the wider picture; how successful or significant were its supporters in the rise and maintenance of Nazism, at least up to 1940; and how should Christians and churches today learn from this example of a church undone? Her skillful translations of the writings of several prominent members of this movement will be of considerable value to those who do not read German, but it would have been helpful to have a biographical note or appendix outlining the careers of these authors. Her conclusion is that this was not a unique episode, that the conflation of political, racist and nationalist ideas with theological witness is a constant temptation, and therefore that the German experience in the 1930s deserves further study by both theologians and historians.

The opening chapter provides us with the original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, written in 1932 by Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder, who went on to become Bishop of Brandenburg in September 1933. He shared the views of many younger clergymen who regarded the leaders of the various provincial Protestant churches as outdated conservatives. They had failed to catch the spirit of renewal needed to bring Protestant witness up-to-date. By contrast, the Nazi Party had caught the imagination of the people and had already affirmed in its platform through its support for “Positive Christianity”. The church could not afford to be left behind, but should rally its supporters behind the values of the German race, ethnicity, and nation, following the lead given by Adolf Hitler. Armed with this kind of “heroic piety”, the German Christian Movement would be ready to take up the struggle against godless Marxism.

The Nazi take-over of power in January 1933 was naturally enthusiastically greeted by the members of the German Christian Movement. They applauded the Nazis’ initial measures against the Jews, such as the law passed in April debarring Jews from public office with the application of the so-called “Aryan Paragraph”. During the summer, church elections saw the supporters of the movement installed in high positions in many church bodies, such as the Synod of the Old Prussian Union Church, which in September resolved to apply the “Aryan Paragraph” to its clergy. But this move aroused vigorous opposition, such as that expressed by Karl Barth, then a professor in Bonn, whose 15-page pamphlet is here reproduced in full.

Together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose shorter protest is also given, these forceful objections in defence of Protestant orthodoxy stressed the fact that all Christians were joined in a common baptism, and could not be separated on the basis of racial origin. However, they limited these protests on behalf of those converted Jews who had become Christians and did not raise questions about the wider scope of Nazi persecutions. The members of the German Christian Movement were not so reticent. They called for a more complete renunciation of all things Jewish in both church membership and liturgical practice. In a notably violent speech before a large audience of 20,000 supporters in November 1933, one of the radical German Christians, Reinhold Krause, called for a complete alignment of the church with National Socialism, in particular by “liberating itself from the Old Testament with its Jewish rewards and punishment morality and its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps”. German Christians instead must “return to the heroic Jesus” as a “fearless combatant” against the pernicious influence of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees. But this speech went too far for the majority of Protestant loyalists who then left the movement, and transferred their allegiance to the nucleus demanding church independence, which later coalesced into the Confessing Church.

More effective support for the German Christian Movement came from the theological professors, such as Emanuel Hirsch of Göttingen or Gerhard Kittel of Tübingen, both of whom had distinguished publication records. Hirsch became and remained a “true believer” in National Socialism, even after 1945, since, as he claimed, “God speaks in and to the particular historical situation in which people find themselves – in this case National Socialist Germany”. The church should not isolate itself on the remains of Reformation theology, as did Barth, but instead the church is called to be engaged with the new spirit of national regeneration, and reflect and contribute to the drive for racial purity, which left no room for Jewish Christians. Kittel, the author of the most widely used biblical dictionary, was even more prolific in addressing large audiences up and down the country. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and shortly afterwards wrote a major piece on the Jewish issue, which was a central one for all the members of the German Christian Movement. His purpose, according to one source, was to raise the discussion of the Jewish question above the level of slogans and vulgar racism and give it a moral Christian basis. He claimed that there were four solutions to the Jewish issue: extermination, expulsion, assimilation or a guest status, where Jews would be tolerated so long as they kept to separate ways. He judged the first three solutions to be impractical, so argued fiercely for the fourth. After the war, when he was put on trial for his Nazi sympathies, Kittel tried to argue he had been only a moderate campaigner, but the forcefulness of the extracts printed here suggests otherwise.

Solberg also provides a number of extracts from the speeches or writings of leading members of the German Christian Movement, such as Joachim Hossenfelder, Julius Leutheuser, Siegfried Leffler, and the Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, all written in the early years of Nazi rule. In addition, she provides a thoughtful critique of these views by Professor Paul Althaus of Erlangen, who argued that the conflation of German nationalism, admiration for Hitler, and Christian tradition went far too far by asserting that God’s salvation was being played out in Germany’s history. This, he claimed, was a “bald-faced theological heresy”. But Althaus’ own variant of the “orders of creation” included a positive enthusiasm for National Socialism as a political movement and for an ethno-national Christianity. He utterly rejected any idea that the combination of Nazi politics and the Faith Movement’s version of religion could turn Germany into a world-savior.

It is clear that these divisions within the Protestant churches led to Hitler abandoning any hopes he had held that they would combine under his authority. Instead he increasingly supported the anti-clerical and anti-Christian elements in the Nazi leadership, such as Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, who were to institute increasingly severe measures of persecution and repression on the churches. These doomed any chances of the German Christian Movement’s hopes for success. Its leaders made one final bid to win back support in their notable Godesberg Declaration of March 1939, in which they indicated their strong support for the regime’s hostile antisemitic policies and established an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. The final document in this collection is by Walter Grundmann, the first academic director of the Institute, whose career continue into the German Democratic Republic, where he served for many years as a pastor, publishing widely-used commentaries on the gospels but also working as an informant for the Stasi. There is little evidence that he changed his view that “the content of Jesus’ preaching shapes and determines his work. In Jesus of Nazareth something utterly un-Jewish appears”.

Solberg does not attempt any evaluation of these sources, but her careful and viable translations will be of help to English-speaking students who will now be able to trace the vagaries of this section of German Protestantism during its short but vibrant and mistaken career. It remains to be seen whether the temptations to which these authors gave expression will be repeated in churches elsewhere. She has given us a useful cautionary tale.

Review of Peter Itzen, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945-1990

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Peter Itzen, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945-1990 (Baden Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2013). Pp. 437. ISBN 9783832966089.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Very few German scholars have recently published works on England, and fewer still on the Church of England. It is therefore a welcome sign that Peter Itzen has now contributed this well-researched and balanced study of the Church England in the second half of the last century, which will undoubtedly be of value to German students and theologians, many of whom usually look with both puzzlement and envy at the church scene across the English Channel.

Itzen-Streitbare This account pays little attention to theology, but instead follows in the footsteps of such authors as Grace Davie and Callum Brown in emphasizing the sociological patterns he discerns in the Church of England’s development during the fifty years following the Second World War. Itzen lays particular stress on the views and the impact of the major church leaders on the political and social life of the nation, and makes extensive use of the archives held in Lambeth Palace, the residence of successive Archbishops of Canterbury. He also appends short but useful biographical details of many church leaders. The result is a well-informed but not uncritical account of the sometimes controversial stances adopted by the church, and the often critical responses by politicians, for instance during the Suez Crisis in the 1950s, or during Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister in the 1980s.

Itzen acknowledges that public support for the Church of England, in terms of participating in its regular weekly worship services, has suffered a marked decline during these years, when compared to the situation of a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the Church of England, like the monarchy, still remains as a symbol of tradition and continuity. As with the monarchy, there is virtually no support for its abolition or disestablishment. The Church of England has a presence in virtually every village across the realm, although the pattern of religious observances has changed greatly with the recent influx of immigrants from distant lands and other faiths. But in contrast to the countries of continental Europe, England in modern times has never been invaded, nor suffered from being occupied by enemy troops. England’s last political convulsion was four hundred years ago, and its last religious convulsion took place in the sixteenth century. This has given the Church of England a stability and an institutional advantage of inestimable benefit for its political witness. On the other hand, as Itzen repeatedly points out, the situation has changed. The Church of England is no longer “the Tory Party at prayer”, or an automatic supporter of Conservative governments, as some politicians would like it to be. The advance of secularism has meant that the Church of England no longer commands the allegiance of a large proportion of the population, and is not listened to as readily as before when advocating moral guidance on political or social issues. But the fact that its senior bishops have always been, and are still, members of parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, and frequently avail themselves of this opportunity to convey the opinion of church members, presents a very different picture from other countries. They owe their position to the centuries-old process of English history, rather than to any transient political poll. Hence they enjoy the ability to speak for the whole of society, and see themselves as the guardians of their respective diocese’s welfare. To be sure, these church leaders are aware that they can no longer command unquestioning support, or dictate standards of Christian morality to an increasingly skeptical public. Nevertheless their energetic stand against the unbridled individualism of the Thatcher years, gained respect for its vigorous defence of the need for social cohesion, and support for the poorest and weakest in society’s ranks, the so-called “bias for the poor”. This process was also helped by the professionalization of the Church of England’s administrative structures which provided its spokesmen in the House of Lords with more expert political guidance. So too the establishment of such organs as the General Synod and the Board of Social Responsibility provided help in the propagation of responsible church pronouncements. In the many critical debates and conflicts of these years, the Church of England was able to play a moderating role, so that the interventions of the church leaders served to enhance its position as a link between competing political factions.

In more recent years, such as the 1990s, the most pressing issue for the Church of England was the question of the ordination of women. Fortunately, the new Archbishop, George Carey, as an Evangelical, was open to compromises which offered the more stringent Anglo-Catholics an olive branch of friendship. And in any case, the more militant supporters of women’s rights were satisfied with the eventual agreement of the church assemblies, though it took another ten years for women’s ordination to the episcopate to be realized. Far more contentious was the issue of homosexuality, which then spilled over into the term of office of the following Archbishop, Rowan Williams. Williams himself was an advocate of a liberal and tolerant stance for the Church of England on this question. But as Archbishop of Canterbury he was also the leader of the world-wide Anglican Communion. He faced intransigent opposition to any such toleration from the majority of African bishops. He thus found himself in an insoluble impasse which threatened to break open the ranks of the Communion, and make impossible the show of Anglican unity as previously displayed at the decennial Lambeth Conferences. This situation remains unresolved. No less problematical remains the issue of Britain’s multi-cultural and multi-religious identity. But the readiness of the Church’s leaders to issue constructive appeals for national and social harmony indicates a willingness to bring the influence of this heritage to bear, and to mobilize its supporters to proclaim its ethical and historical relevance to the problems of the 21^st century

Itzen’s conclusion is therefore a positive one for the future of the Church of England’s political and social witness. He takes issue with the teleological views of such secularists as Richard Dawkins, who sees all religious activities as survivals of bygone superstition, or the modernists, who regard the Church of England as an outdated institution which is due shortly to fade away. Instead he believes that, despite all the manifold difficulties of its political and social engagement, the Church will continue to play an unrivalled and positive, though not undisputed, role in the nation’s life as the spiritual advisor to successive political regimes.

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. 286. ISBN 9780198714569.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lucian Leustean, who teaches Political Science at Aston University, Birmingham, England, begins his study with the distinctly odd claim that two events are at the core of the relationship between the ecumenical movement and the European Community. He asserts, firstly, that a member of the German resistance movement, Adam von Trott, who was executed by the Nazis in August 1944 a month after the failure of the plot to assassinate Hitler, left a legacy indicating that not all prominent Germans backed the Nazi regime, that his Christian faith inspired churchmen to resist occupation, and that he had a vision of a federal post-war Europe with close relations between East and West. Very much the same role was played by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is mentioned by Leustean only in passing. But in fact, Trott is now virtually forgotten whereas Bonhoeffer’s theology has steadily grown in influence. It is dubious, however, that either of them had much influence on the making of the European Community.

Leustean’s second claim is even more doubtful. He suggests that the creation of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), established in 1946, was of significance to the making of the European Community. This highly elitist body was led by an Englishman, Kenneth Grubb, and an American, Frederick Nolde, and was designed to draw the American churches into the debates about the post-war world, and subsequently about the Cold War. But Grubb was skeptical about Britain’s association with any European political reconstruction, since he saw Britain’s future in terms of its overseas possessions in the Commonwealth. And as Leustean admits, the CCIA failed to give any lead or engage in the process of European integration. It was thus years before the Protestant and Anglican churches adopted a coherent position towards the European Community, or even agreed what Europe was.

Leustean-Ecumenical To be sure the tasks of European reconstruction and reconciliation were formidable for politicians and churchmen alike. Priority had to be given to the immense task of caring for the vast millions of bombed-out, brutalized, and displaced populations. Most churches were still tied to their own national affairs and regarded plans for European integration as lying outside their spiritual domain. However a few of the survivors of the pre-war ecumenical bodies, led by the valiant and dynamic personality of the Dutch Calvinist, Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, recognized the importance of seeking closer relations with those politicians involved in European reconstruction. The World Council, which achieved its long-delayed inauguration in 1948, almost immediately suffered a grievous, if not unexpected, blow by the rejection of its invitation to the Vatican to have Roman Catholics as full members. The initiative in European affairs was therefore left to the Anglicans, the Protestant leaders of northern Europe, and a handful of Orthodox churchmen in Eastern Europe. So too, those politicians who had expected that the legacy of unbridled nationalism under Hitler would lead to a willingness to cooperate more closely in pan-European revival were soon to be disappointed by the brusque refusal of the Soviet government to entertain any such measures for the areas of Eastern Europe under its military control. In both the political and religious fields, therefore, expectations had to be cut down, and prognoses for European integration modified, often drastically.

Leustean’s account examines the role of political and religious contacts with a direct impact on European institutions. He records how a number of Protestant churchmen saw their duty as Christians to go beyond furthering the local piety of their congregations. These men of vision believed that European cooperation was a mission for the wider Christian constituency. This witness became especially relevant in 1948, when the Berlin blockade made the threat of Soviet military power all too evident, and seemingly doomed the hopes for a peaceful cooperation throughout the continent. Leustean pays particular attention to the Ecumenical Commission on European Cooperation, founded in 1950, since some of its members went on to fulfill high administrative positions in the European Community’s structures. These included Gustav Heinemann, later President of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and Jean Rey, who became President of the European Commission. These men were not dreamy idealists, but practical executives, who believed that their project could and should deserve the moral guidance of the churches.

However, since most of the western European countries who founded the European Community had large Catholic populations, and since its founding leaders came from Catholic backgrounds, it was hardly surprising that relations with the Protestant ecumenists were at first marked by tensions. Later, however, after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a new spirit of interdenominational cooperation was to be seen.

The European Community can be said to begin in 1950 with the plan put forward by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, for the amalgamation of industrial resources in the European Coal and Steel Community. But this initial success was overshadowed by the tensions resulting from the Cold War, by the proposals to rearm West Germans to play their part in defending their homeland, and by the reluctance of some idealists to encourage any step which would divide the nations of Western and Eastern Europe from each other. Many leading German churchmen campaigned for a unified and neutral Germany. Many British churchmen still adhered to their former attachment to the Commonwealth and were skeptical about any form of European cooperation. Many others adopted the traditional view that politics and religion should act in separate spheres. The cause of European unity therefore faced an uphill battle. The most that could be hoped for was “unity in diversity” which was finally acknowledged as the motto of the European Union in May 2000.

After the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the European Common Market among the six western European nations was founded in 1960. However the attention of the ecumenical fraternity was more attuned to the project for a pan-European Conference of European Churches, which held its first meeting in 1959. But the obvious Soviet propaganda and control of the churches in Eastern Europe meant that the CEC was a rather dubious venture. On the other hand, in the early 1960s, the British Government had a change of heart and applied to join the Common Market. But when its application was rejected by De Gaulle in 1963, this paradoxically stirred up interest among the British churches, and eventually led to a more positive approach to western European cooperation. Yet, at the same time the same French government’s refusal to accept the proposal, put forward by the Vatican, to appoint a diplomatic envoy to the European Commission in Brussels, delayed the establishment of formal relations with Europe’s largest religious community until 1970.

In the 1970s the economic successes of the Common Market were notable. With the Soviet military threat contained behind the Iron Curtain, the western European economies flourished. Living standards rose rapidly. New integrative measures were started such as the European Parliament, the adoption of a single currency, and after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the abolition of border controls and customs offices in many parts of Europe. These developments owed little to any church initiatives, nor even to representatives of the Ecumenical Movement. As one observer commented, this lack of ecumenical mobilization was in part due to the European Community being regarded as a purely economic and political project in which religious communities could not find a theological basis for participation. Also national churches, which saw themselves as the preservers of their country’s past, were unwilling to take up the cause of others with whom they had no common heritage or language.

In fact, the Ecumenical Movement concentrated more on the personal and pastoral witness amongst the ever growing number of international bureaucrats at the European Community’s offices in Brussels. The hopes of some leading Eurocrats that the churches would take a lead in calling the young and creative forces in Europe to unite behind a common vision were never realized. British churchmen, for instance, remained skeptical about the influence of supra-national technocrats, who were not directly responsible to any national government. The ideal of political integration between different parts of Western Europe therefore remained a nonstarter, since it threatened to curtail relations with Eastern Europe or the developing world outside Europe.. As a result, no common ‘European’ consciousness appeared, transcending national loyalties.

Leustean takes his account up to 1978, but in a concluding chapter is obliged to note the dramatic changes in later years, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. Many churchmen have since sought to engage in dialogue in order to understand the role of religion in the new Europe. Over these years countless committees, councils, conferences, and gatherings have been established or re-established with a bewildering array of alphabetical abbreviations, for which there is fortunately an appended index. But essentially the complex scale and scope of what is now the European Union defies easy or synoptic description.. It was left up to a retiring President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to call in 1990 for an attempt to give Europe a soul through a spiritual and intellectual debate in which the Churches should participate actively. It was a brave but mistaken view that the Churches, or other faith communities, could find enough common ground to overcome their mutual and historic differences, which are likely to remain prevailing in the foreseeable future.

Leustean’s conclusion is therefore that a fragmented, interrupted vision of Europe at both the political and religious levels, which had impacted the attempts to bring unity and integration to at least Western Europe, was the major factor why the dreams of idealists such as his hero von Trott were never realized.

Article Note: Ján Liguš, “Obedience or Resistance: The Legacy of Bonhoeffer”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Article Note: Ján Liguš, “Obedience or Resistance: The Legacy of Bonhoeffer,” European Journal of Theology 24:2 (2015), 173-182.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In this article, Ján Liguš offers a brief overview of Bonhoeffer’s theology with a focus on church-state relations, submission to legitimate authorities, and conditions under which Christians might practice passive disobedience or actively resist the state. Liguš notes that even before the Nazis came to power, Bonhoeffer was already exploring the boundaries of church and state and emphasizing God’s sovereignty over both. In Das Wesen der Kirche (1932), Bonhoeffer drew a distinction between the Church as a visible institution and the Kingdom of God that transcends it and “includes in itself all races, cultures [and] religions” (175). He also reflected on the limits of secular authority, asserting that “if the state prevents the proclamation of the Word of God, conflict will arise and the Church can criticise and disobey the state” (176). Similarly, in The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and Life Together (1939), Bonhoeffer stressed surrender and submission to the will of God, which might require civil disobedience but precluded rebellion. Liguš describes this position as a “pacifist theological-ethical orientation” that Bonhoeffer later gave up (178). Not until Ethics, which Bonhoeffer began writing in 1940, does Liguš find a theological-ethical justification for resistance. By that point, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of freedom and responsibility, inspired by Jesus’ voluntary acceptance of guilt due to his love for a sinful humanity, allowed him to take on the guilt of participating in a conspiracy that included an attempt to kill the head of state. Here, Liguš follows the interpretation of Larry Rasmussen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance.

Liguš’ aim is not only to explain what led Bonhoeffer from his earlier pacifism to participation in an assassination plot, but to identify elements in Bonhoeffer’s theology that were helpful to Eastern European Christians under communist regimes and that continue to offer hope in the present moment, when “the vast majority of people regard the church as irrelevant” (180). The article begins by comparing Bonhoeffer to reformer and martyr Jan Hus and ends with Bonhoeffer’s confidence that “the day will come” when Christians “will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it” (Letters and Papers from Prison, quoted on 180).

Unfortunately, Liguš fails to integrate his assessment of Bonhoeffer’s theology with recent historical research on Bonhoeffer and the German churches during the Third Reich. The result is an oversimplification of the “church struggle” as a contest between Nazism-free orthodoxy and Nazism-infused heresy. For example, Liguš’ claim that the German churches “departed from the heritage of Martin Luther” (174) during the Nazi era fails to address the fact that many Protestant National Socialists were inspired by Luther and believed they were carrying his work forward. A more subtle version of the same argument is apparent when Liguš writes that Bonhoeffer was “initially influenced by the biblical scholar Adolf Schlatter” but “had to deal with prominent liberal theologians Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg” (174, emphasis mine).

The article also suffers from a lack of attention to other dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s life that contributed to his uniqueness—even within the Confessing Church—as well as his decision to participate in the conspiracy. There is little discussion of the political orientation of his family (of which four members were in the resistance), the fact that he had a brother-in-law of Jewish ancestry, or the impact of his experiences living abroad. Some statements are also misleading, as when Liguš emphasizes the piety of Bonhoeffer’s mother but fails to mention that the Bonhoeffers were not a church-going family. Robert Ericksen, by way of contrast, has suggested that Bonhoeffer’s limited exposure to Christianity as a child might have been an advantage, given that so many church-going Protestants ultimately supported Hitler (see Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust, 112-114). Finally, there is very little attention to Bonhoeffer’s responses to (and at times neglect of) the “Jewish Question,” even though Bonhoeffer’s famous essay on this topic in 1933 considers the possibilities of criticism, amelioration, and resistance to state policy on the part of the Church.

The strength of Liguš’ article is that it takes seriously both the pacifism and the resistance of Bonhoeffer. However, the search for a second Jan Hus is best served by a close examination of Bonhoeffer in his historical context, with full awareness of its complexity and ambiguity.

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick: ‘Ethnotheism’ and Official Nazi Views on Religion”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick: ‘Ethnotheism’ and Official Nazi Views on Religion,” German Studies Review 37, no. 3 (2014): 575–596.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Over the past few years, Samuel Koehne of the University of Melbourne has published a series of insightful articles on National Socialist views of religion, as disseminated in various official publications. In this article, he revisits the problematic text of Article 24 in the 1920 Nazi Party Program, interpreting it in light of four other documents: the 1919 Grundsatz or Foundational Principle of the German Workers’ Party (predecessor to the 1920 Nazi Party Program), Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925-1926), and—most importantly—Alfred Rosenberg’s 1923 and Gottfried Feder’s 1927 commentaries on the Party Program. Koehne has chosen these in part because he wants to understand what National Socialists had to say about their religious policies before they took power in 1933.

Koehne is unsatisfied with the existing conflicting interpretations of Nazi religious policy. He argues that Nazism was neither a neo-pagan religious movement, nor a political religion, nor a quasi-Christian movement. Rather, he advances “a new conceptual approach: ‘ethnotheism,’ or religion defined by race and the supposed moral or spiritual characteristics that the Nazis believed were inherent in race” (576). Ethnotheism, writes Koehne, was the unifying principle around which a wide array of religious beliefs could flourish under National Socialism. Within Article 24 of the 1920 Party Program, ethnotheism is found in the Nazi determination to oppose any kind of religious doctrine which might “endanger [the state’s] existence or offend the ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race” (588). Importantly, Koehne argues that the subsequent sentence about the Party’s support for “positive Christianity”—normally seen as the centrepiece of Nazi religious policy—was less important. It was purposely vague, he suggests, and had no precedent or subsequent life within Nazi statements on religion. In contrast to this, the 1919 Foundational Principle of the German Worker’s Party proposed “non-interference in religious matters, except as they were matters of state or threatened the existence of the people or nation (Volk) and its ‘morality and ethics,’” as did other völkisch parties (580). This elevation of race over religion was the central principle at work, and the source of Koehne’s ethnotheism.

Koehne identifies several key Nazi ideas: that religion caused division, which would only be overcome by a common commitment to antisemitic racial nationalism, and that morality was blood bound. As Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg put it, “Morality is completely racially conditioned, and not abstract Catholic, Protestant or Muslim” (582). Similarly, ideologue Gottfried Feder proclaimed that Nazism would attack any religious teachings that offended German morality (583). And Hitler wrote much the same thing in Mein Kampf, where he rejected mixing of politics and religion and argued that pious German Protestants and Catholics would be united in a joint völkisch world view and racial struggle against the Jew (585). Indeed, this “ecumenicism of National Socialism” was what accounted for the strange mixture of Norse religion and Christianity in the work of Rosenberg. Any number of religious beliefs could be practiced under the banner of antisemitism, racial morality, and the swastika, “an Aryan symbol of renewal” (587). All this is supported by Feder’s arresting assertion that Article 24 in the 1920 Party Program was “the spiritual foundation of the entire position of National Socialism towards the Jews” (588).

Koehne’s position draws on important sources and is well-argued. Moreover, it fits with other elements of Nazi ideology, such as Hitler’s assertion that the soul of a people was contained in its blood, or that Jews (with impure blood) were devoid of spiritual capacity. It also accounts for the confusing and contradictory religious statements made and religious practices supported by leading Nazis. There is good potential in Koehne’s concept of ethnotheism. We look forward to its continued development.

Program Announcement: Early Career German-American Bonhoeffer Research Network

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Program Announcement: Early Career German-American Bonhoeffer Research Network

The Bonhoeffer Chair in Theology and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York, is pleased to announce a new research project: Early Career German-American Bonhoeffer Research Network, funded by the German Federal Government.

Beginning in June 2017, five German and five American scholars will meet for a week-long seminar at Union Seminary, New York, to share research-in-progress and to organize a network for ongoing research discussion. The project will run for three years, meeting in Berlin in 2018 and again in New York in 2019, adding ten new scholars to the network each year. The 2017 seminar will be led by Professor Christiane Tietz, University of Zurich, and Professor Michael DeJonge, University of South Florida. The Project Director is Professor Clifford Green, who is currently serving as Bonhoeffer Chair Scholar at Union Theological Seminary.

By early career scholars we understand doctoral students who are at the dissertation stage, and those with completed doctorates who are in their first academic appointment or working on their Habilitation. Costs of travel, accommodation, and meals will be covered by the project, so expenses to participants will be minimal.

Scholars chosen to participate in the Bonhoeffer Research Network will commit to presenting their current research in a summer seminar and to contribute actively to internet research discussion for the three years of the project.

The 2017 seminar will meet from June 11 to June 17. Applications for the 2017 seminar may be submitted now, and no later than September 30, 2016. Applications and inquiries should be sent to Professor Green (cgreen@uts.columbia.edu). Applications must include: CV (listing any conference papers, publications); a two-page statement describing the applicant’s research, plus related writing such as a dissertation or grant proposal or a sample chapter; and a confidential letter of recommendation from the academic advisor or supervisor of the research.

This project is funded by the Transatlantic Program of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany with funds from the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi).

Conference Announcement: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-22 July 2016

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Conference Announcement: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-22 July 2016

Faith-WWI The extent and importance of religious faith in the First World War is undoubtedly one of the great rediscoveries of the centenary years. Among the belligerent empires and nations, religion proved to be a vital sustaining and motivating force, with the Ottoman war effort cloaked as a jihad, the United States entering the war on Good Friday 1917, and even professedly secular societies such as France experiencing a degree of religious revival. At the same time religious convictions also provided some of the most powerful critiques of the war, contributing to tireless peace-making efforts by Pope Benedict XV and to the stand of thousands of conscientious objectors in Great Britain and the United States. Faith also inspired many of the women who were active in war resistance and initiatives for peace, including Quakers, feminists and Christian socialists who were involved in the Hague Peace Congress of 1915, the resulting Women’s International League, and also grassroots action such as the Women’s Peace Crusade, which was launched in Glasgow in the summer of 1916.

This conference seeks to explore the huge diversity and significance of religious faith for those who experienced the First World War, addressing themes such as faith in the armed forces and on the home front, religion, war resistance and the peace crusade, and the role of religion in remembrance.

Key-note speakers will include Professor S. J. Brown (University of Edinburgh), Dr Lesley Orr (University of Edinburgh), and Professor Michael Snape (University of Durham).

There will also be a program of events to mark the centenary of the Women’s Peace Crusade, which will take place on 23 July 2016 at the Glasgow Women’s Library.

To register for the conference, please contact Dr Charlotte Methuen (charlotte.methuen@glasgow.ac.uk) or visit (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/faith-and-the-first-world-war-tickets-24680348587). Cost to participants is £25.00 per day to include coffees, teas and lunch. Please pay by cheque (made out to “The University of Glasgow”) or by cash on the day. A list of local and university accommodation is also available.

Letter from the Editors (March 2016)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Letter from the Editors (March 2016)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

As Lent will soon give way to Easter, it is our pleasure to publish once again a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, with short articles, book reviews, and notes on the contemporary history of German and European religious history. In this edition of the journal, we see the full spectrum of response by Christians to the moral challenge of National Socialism.

Hartmut Ludwig of Humboldt University in Berlin has contributed a copy of a public lecture he gave recently at the Topography of Terror in Berlin, and which John S. Conway has kindly translated. It describes the work of Pastor Heinrich Grüber of Berlin, who partnered with a good number of Christians (many of Jewish descent) to care for the persecuted Jews of Germany. At great risk to themselves, they established a relief agency that facilitated the emigration of close to 2000 Jews from Germany between 1938 and 1940.

Berlin memorial plaque to Elizabeth Schmitz. Von OTFW, Berlin – Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17086962

Accompanying the Ludwig lecture is a review of Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik, an edited volume by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals. Victoria Barnett of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reviews this book, which assesses the determined efforts of a group of Protestant women to resist Nazi racial policies. The contributors highlight an impressive list of resisters, many of whom took action when the men in power around them refused: Agnes and Elisabet von Harnack, Elisabeth Abegg, Elisabeth Schmitz, Elisabeth Schiemann, Margarete Meusel, Katharina Staritz, Agnes Wendland and her daughters Ruth and Angelika, Helene Jacobs, Sophie Benfey-Kunert, Elisabeth von Thadden, and Ina Gschlössl.

Chancellor Adolf Hitler and Reich President Paul von Hindenburg at the Garrison Church, Potsdam, March 21, 1933. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S38324 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5369386

On the other end of the spectrum, Kyle Jantzen reviews another edited volume by Manfred Gailus, Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945. Gailus and other scholars explain the ways in which individuals and groups of theologians, church leaders, and clergy who voluntarily accommodated themselves to the ecclesiastical and racial policies of the Third Reich, in many cases becoming participants in the perpetration of great evil. Various chapters focus on the Day of Potsdam, the German Christian Movement, Gerhard Kittel, “Brown Priests,” Hanns Kerrl and Hermann Muhs, Walter Grundmann, Karl Themel, and Erich Seeberg.

Other contributions round out the volume, including a book review on the Church of England in the First World War, two conference reports (each covering a good number of sessions and papers), and a call for papers for the journal Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations.

We hope you enjoy this issue. Please feel free to comment on anything you read, either out of appreciation or a desire for debate.

With best wishes, on behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Public Lecture: On the Side of the Disenfranchised and the Weak: The Office of Pastor Grüber (1938-1940)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Public Lecture: On the Side of the Disenfranchised and the Weak: The Office of Pastor Grüber (1938-1940)

By Hartmut Ludwig, Humboldt University, Berlin; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Historians are now largely agreed that during the twelve years of Nazi rule there were four distinct and successive stages to the discrimination, persecution and eventual expulsion of Germany’s Jewish citizens. Each of these stages saw an escalation in the severity of the measures taken earlier, and eventually led to the decision to eliminate almost everybody of Jewish origins in the areas of Europe under Nazi control.

The first phase from 1933 to 1935 can be described as the period of discrimination and disenfranchisement. In 1933 there were approximately 500,000 persons belonging to the Jewish communities, as well as approximately 400,000 Christians or non-believers who were of Jewish descent and were included in the Nazi categories of those to be discriminated against. The first measures were implemented only two months after the Nazis came to power in January 1933, when on 1 April a nation-wide boycott of Jewish shops and businesses was carried out. This was followed a week later by the passing of a new Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which covered all appointments to major institutions, such as hospitals and universities. (The title of this Law was entirely misleading since it was chiefly concerned to apply the discriminatory code of the so-called Aryan paragraph, banning Jews from public offices, along with supposed political opponents, in order to extinguish the idea of any independence in the civil service.)

This law did not apply to Germany’s religious bodies, but nevertheless the pro-Nazi sections of the Protestant Church, known as the “Deutsche Christen”, demanded that the same “Aryan paragraph” should be applied to their church. This suggestion was heavily contested, and led in fact to the establishment of the Confessing Church, and a ginger group calling itself the Pastors’ Emergency League.

Their protest was based on their view that the “Aryan paragraph” introduced racial considerations instead of loyalty to the church’s doctrines. On the other hand, these churchmen did not raise any objections to the law’s application to the wider society. Only a few protested it on these grounds, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who frequently quoted the verse taken from Proverbs 31.8: “Open Thy mouth for the Dumb”, and at the same time asked: “Who recognizes that this is the Bible’s least demand in such a time as today?” And as Karl Barth wrote two years later when the Confessing Church had also suffered persecution: “The Church has not found adequate expressions to counter the million-fold injustices being perpetrated. She speaks – if she speaks – only on behalf of her own members. She still clings to the fiction that we are living in a state which upholds the law as envisaged in Romans 13.”

The second stage from 1935 to 1938 can be seen as a period of isolation and exclusion. This began with the decree embodying the Nuremberg Racial Laws of September 1935, which was followed by an unprecedented campaign of vilification against the Confessing Church because it allegedly was trying to counteract and silence the Nazis’ campaign against the evil influences of the Jews. But this was a grossly exaggerated propaganda attack. In fact, when a staff member, Marga Meusel, had put forward the request that the Confessing Church create an office to help those affected by the Nuremberg Laws, she was ignored, as was the elaborate protest written by the Berlin girls high school teacher, Elisabeth Schmitz, which she presented in vain to the Confessing Church Synod in September 1935. “How should we answer all the despairing and bitter questions and complaints? Why is the Church doing nothing? Why does it allow these countless acts of injustice to happen? Why does it continue to make these joyful acclamations of the Nazi state, which are really political declarations, when the lives of a section of its membership are being endangered?”

Renewed calls for some practical steps to assist these Christians of Jewish extraction came from the Heidelberg Pastor Hermann Maas, as well as from the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, which had already in January 1936, at a meeting in London, set up an “International Relief Committee for Refugees from Germany”. In addition, the English Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, who was much engaged in ecumenical activities, had sent his sister-in-law, Laura Livingstone, to Berlin to help arrange and intensify such international collaboration. But it was only after five and a half years of Nazi rule that the Confessing Church finally recognized that it had a responsibility to assist the Christians of Jewish origin. So began the work later known as the so-called Office of Pastor Grüber.

The third phase from 1938 to 1941 began with the violent pogrom and the burning of synagogues on November 9 and 10, 1938, commonly known as the Kristallnacht, and led to the enforced expulsion of numerous Jewish citizens from Germany in order to make the country as quickly as possible “free from Jews”. During this pogrom some 30,000 men were dispatched to a concentration camp, from which they were released only when they could produce a paper showing that they were emigrating from Germany as soon as possible. A number of pastors were included in this repressive action. The Churches were silent. Out of the approximately 18,000 Protestant pastors only a small handful brought the subject up in their sermons. The chief of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, then organized the “Reich Association of Jews” in order to speed up the process of their expulsion. Devotedly the Nazi members and their supporters in the Protestant ranks, the “Deutsche Christen”, followed this lead. Six “Deutsche Christen” provincial churches in Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia. Mecklenburg, Lubeck and Schleswig-Holstein then expelled any Christians of Jewish extraction out of their congregations. In May 1939, a new Institute, called the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” was founded in Eisenach. Its staff members then undertook a project called “God’s Message” which produced a New Testament from which all mention of Jesus’ Jewish origin had been removed.

The fourth phase from 1941 to 1945 began in October 1941 with the first mass deportation of Jews from Germany to the ghetto in Litzmannstadt in Poland. This was preceded by a police edict of September 1, 1941, ordering all Jews over the age of six to wear a Jewish star on their clothing. By this means they were openly stigmatized and eventually excluded from German society. In Breslau, Katharina Staritz, who was vicar of the main church, called on all her colleagues in her diocese to give particular pastoral care to any Christians of Jewish origin, since, in her view, they held the same rights in the church as other parishioners. She was then arrested and deported to the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück and was held there until May 1943. Only in a few parishes were Christians wearing the Jewish star allowed to take part in the church services. In other parishes, a poster was put up stating “Jews are unwanted here”. In addition, on December 22, 1941, the vice-chairman of Church House in Berlin sent out a circular to all churches advising them that Christians of Jewish origin should absent themselves from participation in church life. And on January 20, 1942, the head of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, informed leading members of the Reich government, at a conference held at the Wannsee, near Berlin, about the measures to be taken to deport all remaining Jews in order to make Germany “free from Jews”. Many of those affected still continued to believe that they were only being resettled in Eastern Europe. For that reason, various parishes organized “Farewell Services”. But it became ever clearer that these people were not being resettled, but instead murdered. So some of them tried to go underground, and adopt a false identity in order to survive. In March 1943, representatives of a Bible study group in Munich wrote to their bishop, Hans Meiser, and requested him to break the church’s silence on this issue of Jewish persecution. In their letter they wrote: “We are driven by the simple requirement of loving your neighbor. . . Every “non-Aryan” whether Jewish or Christian today in Germany has fallen into the hands of murderers. We have to ask ourselves whether we are going to behave like the priest or the Levite, or like the Samaritan.” Bishop Meiser refused their request.

The Establishment and History of Pastor Grüber’s Office, 1938-1940

We can distinguish between three phases: 1) the creation of this relief office in 1938; 2) the extension and consolidation of the relief efforts in 1939, and 3) the restrictions and final closure of the Office in 1940.

The various relief efforts for Christians of Jewish origin which had been created since 1933 had nevertheless failed. Already in May 1933 the Berlin ecumenical leader Professor Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze had proposed a plan for a joint ecumenical service for German emigrants, whether Protestant, Catholic or Jewish. The idea was to establish a counselling service for all those forced to leave Germany because of Nazi persecution, which would operate to give advice about job opportunities and some financial assistance in order to help them create new lives abroad. But in June 1933 Siegmund-Schultze was arrested and obliged to leave Germany. So this plan came to nothing. Only in 1935 was the same effort started from Switzerland by Pastor Hermannn Maas.

But in July 1933 some Christians of Jewish origin founded in Berlin a self-help organization with a grandiose title of “National Association of Christians with German Citizenship, Who Are Non-Aryans or Only Partly Non-Aryans”. The object was to persuade the government that these Christians of Jewish origin were just as good Germans as others, and in order to persuade the churches to treat them as fully entitled to the same rights as others. But the church leadership was dominated by “Deutsche Christen” who agreed with the Nazi policy of seeking to expel these Christians of Jewish origin from the church. So this plan also came to nothing. This National Association was obliged to rename itself in September 1935, and adopt the name of the “Paulusbund” In March 1937 all those who were fully Jewish were forced out. So the remaining structure was meaningless.

In August 1934, the plight and shattering experiences of these Christians of Jewish origin led Marga Meusel, the director of the Protestant Welfare Agency in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf and her colleague Charlotte Friedenthal to recommend a central church advisory center. They turned to Martin Albertz, the Church Superintendent for the Spandau region of Berlin, who sought to gain the support of Friedrich Bodelschwingh and Theodor Wenzel, both leading personalities in the church’s Inner Mission. But both refused. And in June 1935 the Confessing Church leaders made it clear that they were not prepared to join such a venture, so Marga Meusel was able to help only a very few persons out of her office in Zehlendorf.

Phase One: The Creation of the Church Relief Agency for Protestant Non-Aryans (Pastor Grüber’s Office)

The Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938, and the consequent campaign led by Adolf Eichmann to drive out Austrian Jews in a particularly violent manner, led to a new wave of refugees. At the end of May, Pastor Hermann Maas came from Heidelberg to Berlin in order to try and persuade the leadership of the Confessing Church finally to become more active on behalf of these Christians of Jewish origin. Together with Martin Albertz, who was a member of the Provisional Leadership team in the Confessing Church, he openly complained about the lack of any Relief Agency. They then managed to persuade the pastor of the church in Kaulsdorf, a suburb on the east side of Berlin, Heinrich Grüber, to accept the challenge. According to a report by Laura Livingstone, he immediately threw himself into this task with great energy and enthusiasm. Because he recognized that this Relief Agency should not be undertaken solely by the Confessing Church, he sought to gain increased legitimacy from the whole of the German Protestant Church. He then hired Ingeborg Jacobson as his secretary, working out of his manse in Kaulsdorf.

On June 22, 1938, Grüber was able to enlist the support of Thomas Breit, the chairman of the Council of Berlin’s Protestant Churches. This opened the way to approach other churches in the rest of the country. In the following months, and through a massive correspondence campaign, Grüber was able to build up a network of twenty-two sponsors and colleagues in Germany’s major cities.

This new refugee situation compelled President Roosevelt to invite representatives from various countries to meet at Evian on Lake Constance from June 8 to 15 in order to consider how best to respond to this wave of emigrants or refugees from Germany and Austria. Naturally those persons affected by the Nazi persecutions placed great hopes on this meeting. But the assembled governments and their delegates seemed not to recognize the dangers. One after another each country announced that it was unwilling to open its doors to these refugees. The main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, ironically commented: “No one wants to accept these mongrels. Most of the delegates rightly refused to take in these scoundrels who were seeking to bring about Germany’s ruin”.

Despite this discouraging situation, Grüber sought to set up a Relief Agency for emigrants. But for it to succeed, he needed official permission. In August he paid a call on the German Foreign Ministry, and discussed his plans with one of the officials there. Naturally he took care to describe his efforts as being fully in line with the Nazi government’s aims. As he later wrote: “If the state now believes that these non-Aryans are no longer acceptable for the growth of Germany’s national well-being, it should still recognize the desirability of their being allowed to emigrate in order to find some other refuge elsewhere. In other words, it is in the state’s interests that this flood of emigrants should not leave with hatred and resentment in their hearts. We particularly see this danger in the young people who have grown up without any future or hope of advancement, because they have been largely chucked out of every opportunity of employment. Such young people have nothing to lose, so they may well turn to anarchism or bolshevism.”

Grüber waited four months for an answer from the Foreign Ministry, but in vain. So on November 30 he turned instead to the Office for Emigration set up by the Ministry of the Interior, which he knew was not yet fully infiltrated by ardent Nazis. From this office he received permission to contact foreign states to discuss their reception from Germany of Christians of Jewish origin.

In the middle of October he convened his colleagues from various parts of the country to a meeting in Eisenach, and again at the end of November, when they met in the Quakers’ International Office in Berlin. Paul Braune, the head of the Hoffnungstaler Hospital in Lobetal later reported to Bodelschwingh about this meeting. “Ninety per cent of the discussion revolved around emigration, while my questions about the provision of welfare for those who were remaining here did not find as much interest. One had to recognize that for these beleaguered persons only one goal was uppermost: how to get out of Germany”. Grüber was tireless in beseeching Bodelschwingh to come to Berlin to give him support, and to intervene with the various ministries in protest against the anti-Semitic measures being perpetrated throughout the country. Two days after the notorious November 9, 1938, pogrom he wrote to Bodelschwingh to say: “We cannot and must not leave these people in the lurch…. Matthew 25 is still our guideline.” We can only surmise why Bodelschwingh never replied. But Grüber and Braune collaborated with a rough division of labor, under which Grüber concentrated on emigration and Braune looked after the social welfare needs of these Christians of Jewish origin.

One of those who tried to leave Berlin as quickly as possible after the November pogrom was Heinrich Poms, who was in charge of the house in the Oranienburg Street operated by the British Mission to the Jews. This house was only a few hundred meters from the New Synagogue, in the middle of the Jewish quarter of Berlin. Poms arranged for Grüber to take over the lease of the Mission House, which then became the Church Relief Agency for Protestant Non-Aryans. Also close by was the Catholic Agency engaged in the same work for Catholic non-Aryans, led by Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg. On December 7, Grüber wrote to all his colleagues to announce that his agency was now opening its office in Oranienburg Street 20. And in a circular sent out on December 19, he gave the names of his immediate colleagues: Margarete Draeger, Paul Heiritz, Will Oelsner, Heinrich Hirschwald and Ingeborg Jacobson.

Phase Two: Extension and Consolidation of the Service in 1939

It soon became clear that the space in Oranienburg Street 20 was inadequate. Pastor Werner Sylten, who had volunteered his services and was taken on by Grüber as his deputy, had found an old and stately building, An der Stechbahn 3-4, across the street from the Berlin Castle, which had a very suitable second-story suite of rooms. This house which had previously belonged to Arnold Panofsky, who was Jewish, had recently been “confiscated”. So in January 1939 Grüber’s office for emigration took over six of the rooms, while for the time being the other departments which dealt with welfare, child evacuation and spiritual counselling remained in the Oranienburg Street house until the autumn of 1939. Some 20 colleagues worked as counsellors or secretaries, seeing between 100 and 120 clients every day, and providing advice as best they could. In the beginning of February 1939 Laura Livingstone moved her office to the same address, and by the end of March the two offices had recruited 30 co-workers. They also established contacts abroad, such as Pastor Adolf Freudenberg who represented Grüber’s office in London. After he paid a visit to Berlin, he reported: “The staff in the Stechbahn offices, who were all themselves members of the persecuted group of non-Aryans, did not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the flood of enquirers, all of whom now felt the sword of Damacles hanging over their heads. Instead, they cheerfully sought to provide advice and help as best they could. This was a small candle of comfort in the surrounding darkness”.

By May 1939, besides the central office, there were 22 sub-offices throughout the country, led by contact persons who in many cases were themselves Christians of Jewish origin. Circulars to these contacts were sent out from time to time reporting on the regulations for emigration to various countries abroad, or where complications had been encountered. For example, a circular issued in March stated: “There are reasons to repeat our instructions, which should be closely observed, that we are strictly to confine our services to Protestant non-Aryans. In no case should we provide advice to those still belonging to the Jewish community”. And another circular asked that the addresses of those who had received advice and already left the country should be put in a card index and forwarded to Berlin.

Margaret Draeger was in charge if the section dealing with children and their evacuation. After the November pogrom, both Holland and Great Britain opened their doors to receive several thousand children between the ages of six and 17 who were being persecuted because of their racial origin. Difficulties however arose because the organization of these child transports had been undertaken by the Jewish agencies in Germany, leaving little room for Christian children to join them. Sylvia Woolf organized several such transports of children to Sweden.

In this third phase of the Nazi persecution from 1938 to 1941, the aim was to drive all remaining Jews out of the country. But since all previous efforts seemed inadequate and hadn’t produced the desired results, the head of the Gestapo, Heydrich, resolved to step up the process by instituting a central office for forcible emigration. The result was the Reich Office for Jewish emigration. All Jews, including the Christians, were to be included so that they could be better controlled, and financially plundered. The Nazis did not see the merging of Christians of Jewish origins along with other Jewish agencies as a problem, since they wanted to get rid of them all. But these Christians saw the issue in a quite different light. Would the Jewish agencies provide the same help, or would they be doubly discriminated against?

On February 14 Grüber and his Catholic counterpart Fr. Max Grösser, the General Secretary of St Raphael’s Society wrote to the specialist for Jewish affairs in the Gestapo headquarters to say: “It is a heavy burden for Christians of Jewish origin to be lumped together with full Jews, particularly when their financial affairs are being discussed”. In fact, the division between the two groups was only heightened by the Nazi persecution. They therefore requested a separate arrangement for Christians of Jewish origin so that the existing Christian agencies could work independently from Heydrich’s office.

A compromise was eventually reached, whereby the Christian agencies were allowed to continue their work, but were only tolerated and not seen as partners in the Nazi plans. This so-called collaboration meant that they were unable to prevent the financial plundering of Jewish property, but in fact received a monthly subsidy of 5000 Marks to cover their administration costs.

After the November pogrom, the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, forbade Jewish children to attend public schools. But since school attendance was still compulsory, this meant that Christian pupils had to go to Jewish schools. In order to avoid this situation, the Confessing Church leaders in Berlin established a private school arrangement of their own. Pastor Adolf Kurtz and his curate Klara Hunsche created a special school class in January 1939, at first in the parish house of the Apostles’ Church on Nollendorf Square. But after the Emigration Office had moved to the house An der Stechbahn, three or four rooms became available in the Oranienburg Street offices, so that the Protestant children were able to move in. The Gestapo allowed this arrangement for these Christian children. Klara Hunsche directed the teaching, while Pastor Kurtz dealt with outside bodies. By October 1939 the school had 42 pupils in four classes. This family school actually managed to survive after the Gestapo closed down Grüber’s office in December 1940. In February 1941 more than 1000 children and youth were attending but it clearly remained a thorn in the Gestapo’s flesh. They demanded that it should be merged with a Jewish school, and in August 1941, the Ministry of Education withdrew the school’s operating permit. Subsequent negotiations between Eichmann and Pastor Kurtz and the Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Wienken resulted in a compromise solution. The family school had to be abandoned, but instruction for Christian children of Jewish origin was to be continued in two separate classrooms in the Jewish elementary school on the Kaiser Street in central Berlin. But on June 30, 1942, the entire provision of education for Jews was forbidden.

Phase Three: Restriction on the Service and Final Closure of the Office, 1940-41

In November 1939 another restructuring of the Office took place, when Grüber announced that he would have to limit his engagement in this work. Pastor Werner Sylten, as his deputy, would take on the leadership position. But in order to ensure continuity and a broader support base, Grüber proposed setting up an advisory board, which would involve persons not as yet directly engaged in the work of the Office but who understood what was being attempted, such as Superintendent Martin Albertz, the lawyer Fritz Werner Arnold, Pastor Paul Braune and Heinrich Spiero, who had been the chairman of the Paulusbund.

With the outbreak of war, most states around Germany closed their borders. So organizing emigration plans also decreased. Some of Grüber’s staff had been able to emigrate shortly before war began, but at the end of 1939 there still remained 27 staff members in four sections. Thanks to a special permit given by Eichmann, Grüber was allowed to travel to Switzerland in March 1940 to investigate what the possibilities of emigration there might be. He wrote to Visser ’t Hooft, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation) to say that he had managed to arrange for several people to get to Shanghai. But his attempt to obtain money from the USA was in vain.

The Gestapo continued to demand that all successful emigration activities should be reported to them. And after they closed down the Office, they confiscated and destroyed all the files and card indexes. So we now have only sketchy and insufficient evidence about these emigration projects. In a report prepared by Adolf Freudenberg in London, he stated that up to the end of August 1939, 1138 persons had successfully emigrated. In a later circular issued in November 1940 he was able to name a further 580 persons, bringing the total to 1718. But this figure was only for those who were serviced by the Berlin office, and did not include the partner offices in other cities. We only have the numbers supplied by the Munich office, which had assisted 48 persons to emigrate before the outbreak of war. So we can reckon that approximately 1800 to 2000 persons were able to reach safety abroad through the services of Grüber’s Office.

In 1940 the hindrances imposed by the Gestapo only increased. The scope of the Office’s activities was even more reduced. It was clear that, for the Gestapo, their only interest in Grüber’s office was to ensure the emigration, or more properly the flight, of Jewish refugees out of Germany. In February 1940 for the first time Jews from Germany were deported from Stettin to Lublin in former Poland. Grüber was beseeched to protest this outrageous action. But when he did so, he was summoned to the Gestapo headquarters in the Alexander Square and told in no uncertain terms not to criticize the measures taken by the Nazi Party and government. Grüber replied: “As long as I can speak, I will do so, and as long as I can work, I will work”. In October 1940, 6504 Jews were deported from the Saar region in western Germany and sent to the Gurs camp in southern France. Grüber only learnt about this from Pastor Hermann Maas in Heidelberg, and then considered how he might alleviate their plight in Gurs. But unfortunately his plans came to nothing.

In December 1940 the Gestapo took steps to stop Grüber in his tracks. They accused him of overstepping his allowed authority, and ordered the Office to be closed. The staff was dismissed and Grüber himself arrested. He was first taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Alexander Square and later transported to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. On December 20 Pastor Werner Sylten was ordered to appear at the Gestapo headquarters. He was told that the Office was now closed and all further work was forbidden. He should dissolve the office entirely, and transfer its furniture to its Jewish counterpart. He was given permission to have three or four former staff members help him. The welfare files should be transferred to the Jewish agency. A month later he was informed that the files dealing with emigration should be handed over to the Jewish agency’s division, i.e. Protestant members of Jewish origin. But this arrangement only lasted until November 1941, when the final phase of deportation and mass murder of Jews and Christians of Jewish origin began.

Sylten’s hoped that at least pastoral counselling for his charges could continue. But this was not allowed. On February 1, 1942 he informed the Gestapo office that he had fulfilled all their requirements, but on February 27 he was arrested and after several months in solitary confinement sent to Dachau Concentration Camp where he was later murdered.

Ingeborg Jacobson, who had been Grüber’s secretary, gave the names and addresses of several former clients to Helene Jacobs, one of the Confessing Church parish members in Berlin-Dahlem, in the hopes that she might be able to help them. And in fact a small group led by Franz Kaufmann did manage to assist a few persons who attempted to “take a leap into the dark” that is to go underground and live illegally. These persons were equipped with false identities and false papers. But of course they were constantly in danger. They had frequently to change their quarters whenever nosy neighbors or the police began enquiries. But several Protestant pastors in Württemberg, East Prussia and Pomerania made hiding places in their parish houses and established a chain of refuges where these Christians of Jewish origin were able to find sanctuary. It was of course a highly dangerous undertaking, but in some sense can be seen to be carrying on the work which Pastor Grüber and his Office had attempted to do.

Fortunately Grüber himself survived the war, and later returned to his parish in East Berlin, where he continued his efforts to assist the few remaining Christians of Jewish origin. He became renowned as the Provost of Berlin, and for nine years served as the chief negotiator with the Communist government. But his lasting memorial is the dedication and compassion shown to the Nazis’ victims when he constantly strove to follow the role of the Good Samaritan and thereby to atone for the scandalous derelictions of the wider church. He died in 1975.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Göttingen: V&Runipress, 2013). Pp 280, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783847101734.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The history of the Protestant women involved in resistance against the Nazi regime is well-documented, but it remains under-examined in the broader literature about the German Church Struggle and the resistance movements. Manfred Gailus, a contributing editor to this journal and co-editor of the book under review here, has devoted much of his recent work to correcting this.[1]

Mit Herz und Verstand is one of his recent additions to the literature. In addition to the fine overview of the topic in the introduction by Gailus and co-editor Clemens Vollnhals, it consists of biographical and historical profiles of Agnes and Elisabet von Harnack, Elisabeth Abegg, Elisabeth Schmitz, Elisabeth Schiemann, Margarete Meusel, Katharina Staritz, Agnes Wendland and her daughters Ruth and Angelika, Helene Jacobs, Sophie Benfey-Kunert, Elisabeth von Thadden, and Ina Gschlössl.

Only a few of these women are recognizable names (notably Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, but usually in conjunction with her more famous father, theologian Adolf von Harnack), yet even a brief description of who they were and what they did illustrates why their stories are deserving of greater scholarly attention. In addition to achieving their doctorates, both Harnack sisters were active feminists during the 1920s. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack (who held a doctorate in Germanistics and philosophy) helped found the Deutsche Akademikerinnenbund and became the chairwoman for the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, and Elisabet von Harnack (who had studied political economics and church dogmatics) was a leader on women’s issues and school reform. Elisabeth Abegg was a Quaker who had worked with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze during the 1930s and helped hide almost 80 Jews during the Nazi era (for which she has been honored by Yad Vashem). Abegg taught at the Luisenschule, a Gymnasium for young women in Berlin when Elisabeth Schmitz also taught. Schmitz of course was the author of the 1935 memorandum to Confessing Church leaders urging them to speak out in solidarity with the persecuted Jews; she subsequently resigned her teaching position in protest after the November 1938 pogroms. Elisabeth Schiemann was one of the first German women to attain a doctorate in botany and genetics, published several well-received studies and was affiliated with Friedrich-Wilhelms University and the Botanical Museum in Berlin. She joined the Confessing Church in 1934 (she was a member of the Dahlem parish) and became one of its most vocal members, writing letters to Martin Niemoeller urging him to speak out more forcefully. She personally delivered Elisabeth Schmitz’s memorandum to Karl Barth in Basel, and Franz Hildenbrandt used excerpts from a 1936 memorandum written by Schiemann in the 1937 statement on the Jews that he submitted to the 1937 Confessing synod (he acknowledged her text). While we now know that Elisabeth Schmitz was the author of the famous 1935 memorandum, Margarete Meusel (to whom it had been attributed) wrote a similar memorandum and worked throughout the Nazi era helping and hiding “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews. Katharina Staritz, a Confessing Church theologian of Jewish descent who worked with the Grüber office, is known for her protest against the Breslau church authorities’ decision to bar people wearing the yellow star from the churches—for which she immediately lost her job. With no cover from the church, she became the target of Nazi propaganda and ended up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Agnes Wendland, wife of a Confessing Church pastor in Berlin, hid several Jews in their parsonage and was helped by her daughters Ruth and Angelika. Helene Jacobs was one of the few Germans to make no compromises with the regime, beginning with her refusal in 1933 to fill out the Aryan certificate for university study and ending with her participation in the Kaufmann resistance circle that forged false documents for Jews and helped them escape (Jacobs, too, spent the final war years in Nazi prisons). Sophie Benfey-Kunert was a staunch feminist who became the first woman in Hamburg to take the theological exams; she was chaplain in a women’s prison before she married Bruno Benfey. Benfey, one of the “non-Aryan” pastors in the Hannover church, became the target of Nazi propaganda and found no support from Bishop August Marahrens; the Benfeys finally emigrated to the Netherlands in 1939 and returned to Göttingen after 1945. Elisabeth von Thadden founded a small private school that continued to accept Jewish students until the regime took it over in 1941; she then became involved in various resistance activities and was arrested in early 1944. She was beheaded in the Plötzensee prison in September 1944. Ina Gschlössl, who founded the Association of Protestant Women Theologians in 1925, was fired from her teaching job as a religious educator in 1933 after making critical remarks about Hitler; she eventually worked for the Confessing Church’s Inner Mission.

The story of each woman is important in its own right, but the real value of this volume is that the essays go beyond the biographical, portraying the women in a broader historical context that records both their significant achievements before 1933 and the scandalous treatment of them after 1933, particularly within the church. It also includes the post-1945 period, which shows that their contributions were largely forgotten and dismissed. This volume illustrates why the study of these women offers some important correctives to our general understanding of the larger issues in the German churches, the emergence and nature of different resistance movements, and the early postwar dynamics. It is impossible to understand these women separately from the historical, social, and political context of early twentieth century Germany. They were among the first generation of women in western societies (not only in Germany) to mobilize politically, study for advanced degrees, and enter traditionally male professions. The social shifts of the Weimar years opened the way for them to enter the political sphere in Germany; almost 7 percent of the Reichstag representatives in 1926, for example, were women. Their stories show how very different the experiences of these women were from the young men in their generation. This is especially evident in the essay on Agnes von Zahn-Harnack. During the 1920s she published and spoke widely on the women’s movement; organized German academic women and was the German delegate to the meetings in Amsterdam and Geneva of the International Federation of University Women and was elected to its board. In that international context she became one of the leading German voices on the “peace question.” The accounts in this volume of their various activities throughout the 1920s reveal a “Who’s Who” of early German feminist leaders.

Thus, although many of the women studied here sought careers or were active in the German Evangelical Church, they also shared a history of feminist and political activism in the interwar period. A number of them (both Harnack sisters, Abegg, Schmitz, Wendland, and von Thadden) had worked in Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze’s social ministry in east Berlin during the 1920s. Others were involved in early German feminist organizations like the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein (which Agnes von Zahn-Harnack led) and the religious socialist movement. In each of these three organizations, they had contact with Catholics and Jews, which was a factor in their active help for Jewish friends and colleagues after 1933.

Their interwar activities offered a different foundation in 1933 for political opposition to National Socialism. Not surprisingly, it also made the women easy targets. They were attacked not only by Nazi newspapers and party leaders, but also by male Confessing Church leaders who dismissed them. The introduction to this book opens with a vivid account of a 1937 pamphlet, Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott, written by Otto Dibelius and Martin Niemoeller, which in addition to defending the Confessing Church attacked the feminist movement, particularly women with advanced academic degrees, criticizing them for the declining birth rate and changing social values. Although women comprised seventy to eighty percent of the Confessing Church membership in Berlin, there were no women in church governance and only one woman (Stephanie von Mackensen) attended the Barmen Synod in May 1934. The 1930s saw an ongoing battle for the right to ordination that received scant attention or support among Confessing Church leaders. (It should be noted that were a few male Confessing Church leaders who supported the women theologians’ battle for ordination; according to the women I interviewed for my book, these included Kurt Scharf, Hermann Diem, and Martin Albertz.)

The issue where the historical record of these women really casts a poor light on their male counterparts in the Confessing Church, however, is in their political clarity and their willingness to take early stands with respect to the persecution of the Jews. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and other board members dissolved the Bund Deutsche Frauenvereine in March 1933 after being confronted with the demand to dismiss “non-Aryan” members and merge the organization with the Nazi Deutsche Frauenfront. Even more impressively, when the Frauenbund was reconstituted in 1945, women who had been Nazi party members or members of Nazi women’s’ organization were barred from membership. Despite their impressive record of political consistency, attacks on these early feminists continued into the 1980s, when they were accused of having somehow prepared the ground for the Nazi ideological precepts about women such as the “Mutterkult.”

The authors of each of these biographical essays bring different strengths and insights to the studies of these women. One of the most valuable aspects of the volume is the authors’ detailed examination of the papers and correspondence many of the women left behind. This material shows that they were critical not just of the sexism but the antisemitism within the Confessing Church. In addition to the aforementioned memoranda and protests, for example, Schmitz and Schiemann publicly criticized Walter Kunneth’s anti-Semitic attacks on Judaism They were also critical of the Confessing Church’s inherent political and theological conservatism. As the daughter of Adolf von Harnack, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack had grown up in an atmosphere of liberal, humanistic Protestantism that she feared was abandoned by the Confessing Church. Although she supported it in the Church Struggle, she criticized its conservatism, writing that “if we don’t pay attention, (the confessional front) could conjure up a new orthodoxy that would be the opposite of what we want.”

By looking at the culture and perspective of German feminism throughout this era, this volume makes an important contribution that goes beyond simply documenting the role played by these women. There continues to be a gendered division of history that runs through most of the literature on the Protestant Kirchenkampf, including the numerous books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (For those readers who are wondering, Bonhoeffer made no reference to the ordination debates and related feminist issues and showed no public solidarity with the Confessing Church women, despite the fact that he had taught several of them in Berlin and his close friend Elisabeth Zinn was among them.) The integration of these women’s lives into the scholarship could give us some new perspectives on the internal church debates. By portraying their political clarity and courage, particularly with regard to the persecution of Jews, this volume illustrates that there were people in the Confessing Church who stood up to the Nazi regime when it counted—many of them were women.

The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

Notes:

[1] In my 2011 review in this journal of Gailus’s study of Elisabeth Schmitz (Mir aber zerriss es das Herz), I noted the three volumes of documentation that came out of a project at Göttingen University during the 1980s and 1990s, the Frauenforschungsprojekt zur Geschichte der Theologinnen. The three volumes are “Darum wag es, Schwestern…”: Zur Geschichte evangelischer Theologinnen in Deutschland (1994); Der Streit um die Frauenordination in der Bekennenden Kirche: Quellentexte zu ihrer Geschichte im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1997); Lexikon früher evangelischer Theologinnen: Biographische Skizzen (2005). Works in English that have incorporated research on these women include my For the Soul of the People (1992) and Theodore Thomas’s Women Against Hitler: Christian Resistance in the Third Reich (1995)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Pp. 260. ISBN 9783835316492.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Manfred Gailus’ newest contribution to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich is a collection of case studies of theologians, church leaders, and clergy whose writings or activities place them into the categories of perpetrators in or accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The various contributions are the product of a series of public lectures at the Topography of Terror in Berlin in 2013 and 2014. As such, none of the chapters in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 represent new research. Nonetheless, the volume is more than the sum of its parts, in the way that it demonstrates the depth and breadth of the Christian support for and participation in Nazi Germany. As Gailus notes at the end of his introduction, millions of tourists come to Berlin every year, eager to see the sites of Nazi power and commemorations of Jewish suffering. When they come to the Berlin Cathedral or other historic church buildings in central Berlin, they ask questions about the role of the churches in the Third Reich. Gailus argues it is vitally important that the churches work through the issue of Christian complicity in Hitler’s Germany, in order to provide honest answers to these questions and find a healthy way forward.

Gailus-Taeter Following Manfed Gailus’ introductory chapter, there are nine chapters (three by Gailus, six by a variety of other scholars) and a theological afterward by Christoph Markschies, church historian, theologian, and former president of Humboldt University. The various chapters link thematically with one another in fruitful ways. Gailus starts things off with an analysis of the Day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), the day on which Adolf Hitler opened the German parliament in the Garrison Church which had served Prussian monarchs for two hundred years. Drawing on his work in the 2011 book Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, Gailus describes the Day of Potsdam as a great, joyful “Yes” spoken by German Protestantism to Hitler and his National Socialism government. He describes in particular the key role played by Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and leading Protestant churchman in the region. It was Dibelius who was the main speaker at a special worship service in the Nikolaikirche in central Berlin, attended by a majority of Protestant members of parliament and Reich President Hindenburg before they made their way to Potsdam for the opening of the Reichstag. Dibelius chose Romans 8:31 as his text: “If God be for us, who can be against us.” Since this was the same text used by the imperial court preacher at the outset of the Great War in 1914, Dibelius was consciously connecting the patriotic spirit of the First World War to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. While there were quiet notes of criticism in Dibelius’ message, none other than Hermann Goering shook his hand afterwards and declared it to be the best sermon he had ever heard (35-37).

Gailus makes a strong case for the Day of Potsdam as an important component in the revival of institutional Protestantism during the opening months of Nazi rule. Here the German Christian Movement played the leading role. One of example of this is Gailus’ description of a special “patriotic thanksgiving service” held by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Parish on March 22. Meant to be an “ecclesiastical Potsdam,” the event depicted the German Christians as a mass movement parallel to National Socialism and celebrated the salvation of Germany from the “hell” of the godless Weimar Republic (41-42). In the end, Gailus explains the victory of the German Christians in the July 1933 church elections as the result of the fact that the majority of clergy and church people wanted this völkisch transformation, while the forces of opposition within the church were weak (46). “On the ‘Day of Postdam,’ half of society celebrated and acclaimed their ‘national awakening,’ while the other half of society was on the verge of being excluded, shackled, muzzled, and displaced” (47).

Film historian Ralf Forster follows up Gailus’ examination of the Day of Potsdam with a chapter analyzing the occasion as a propaganda event. Forster assesses the media coverage, particularly on radio and in newsreel footage. He notes the importance of the live radio broadcast of the day’s events and the many “special editions” of newspapers, some of which were printed later that same day, and were thus almost as current as the radio broadcasts. He also provides a detailed description of the newsreel footage of the Day of Potsdam, which brought the spectacle of the events at the Garrison Church to German moviegoers (57-60).

Next, editor Manfred Gailus contributes a second chapter, which shifts attention from the Day of Potsdam to the history of the takeover of Protestant church governments by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, especially in Berlin. German Christians united the National Socialist world view with the Christian tradition of belief, seeking to make belief in Jesus and belief in Hitler fully compatible. Gailus explains how the German Christian Movement cultivated mass ritual as its centerpiece, focusing of the Germanization of Protestant liturgy and the introduction of an ecclesiastical cult of flags (74). While the German Christians were initially successful in seizing the reigns of Protestant church governments, by 1934 they faced serious opposition, and over time they fell out of favour among the Nazi elites. This, Gailus suggests, makes it easy to believe they were insignificant. Rather, he argues they were a mass movement which dominated North Germany, Middle Germany, and East Elbian Prussia during the 1930s (78).

Horst Junginger, a professor of religious studies at Leipzig University, draws on his research on religion and antisemitism during the Nazi era to recount the career of theologian Gerhard Kittel, who joined both the German Christian Movement and the Nazi Party in 1933. Kittel’s publication The Jewish Question committed him to the antisemitic struggle against emancipation and equality for Jews in Germany and in turn elevated racial research to a central place in the University of Tübingen, making it into a “bulwark against Judaism,” as Kittel himself declared (87). As the “Jewish Question” became a subject of scientific and scholarly research, Kittel followed this agenda throughout the Third Reich, publishing articles and giving lectures as late as 1943 and 1944 for the Ministry of Propaganda and German universities. In doing so, he brought Christian anti-Judaism into the service of racial antisemitism (103-105).

Thomas Forstner, who recently published Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945, contributes a chapter on the phenomenon of the so-called Brown Priests. These pro-Nazi clergy were few in number compared to their Protestant counterparts—Forstner discusses fewer than 150 of them (123-124). He notes that the Roman Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from these priests, who were drawn to Nazism out of national sentiment or opportunism (not least to shed their celibacy) (129). Forstner discusses Joseph Roth and Albert Hartl as two examples of Catholic priests who engaged deeply with National Socialism.

Hansjörg Buss, author of “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950), carries the Protestant story forward with an assessment of the role of Hanns Kerrl, Hitler’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and his assistant, Hermann Muhs. He portrays Kerrl as a loyal servant, trying to accomplish the impossible task of unifying German Protestantism under church committees into order to fashion a centralized Reich Church adapted to National Socialism (148-149). This effort collapsed by 1937, and Christians like Kerrl lost favour year by year in the face of opposition from anti-Christian ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann. Kerrl’s assistant Muhs, a member of the radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement, suggested “an administrative dictatorship” to “annihilate the Confessing Church” (162). This he attempted to do in part through the use of the church finance office to put serious pressure on Confessing Church pastors and parishes.

Susannah Heschel, whose book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany has received extensive attention in this journal (here, here, and here), provides a useful overview of her important work on Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Through the Institute, Grundmann and others worked to develop an aryanized Christian confession for the Third Reich. Despite his leadership in such an obviously antisemitic venture, Grundmann retained his position within the Protestant church after 1945, even serving as an informer for the East German regime.

Manfred Gailus follows Susannah Heschel with a chapter on Karl Themel, Berlin pastor and race researcher. Themel was a member of the German Christian Movement, the SA, and the Nazi Party, eagerly taking up the position of “Expert for Race Research” with the Reich Interior Ministry. Working closely with the Reich Office for Geneological Research, Themel created an Office of Church Registers, Old Berlin. There they transferred the genealogical information of thousands of Berliners from these church records onto new identification cards, which were in turn used to check the Aryan ancestry of those who needed to prove their racial purity in order to take up various government positions. By 1941, Themel’s office had processed over 160,000 requests involving over 330,000 individuals, and had discovered over 2600 cases of Jewish ancestry—almost two cases per day, as Themel boasted late that year (209). Despite this direct participation in the implementation of Nazi antisemitic policy, Themel was rehabilitated by 1949, eventually taking up a pastorate in rural Brandenburg, then migrating back into archival work for the Berlin-Brandenburg church province! Upon his death, his work collecting and copying church registries in Berlin during the Third Reich was lauded as a service to the archival branch of the church (213). Not until 2002 was Themel’s work publicly denounced by church leaders (215).

Thomas Kaufmann’s chapter on influential church historian Erich Seeberg’s connections to the Nazi Party and the German Christian Movement offers another window into the ways individual theologians and church leaders navigated the Nazi era. In Seeberg’s case, his career revolved around research into transconfessional “German piety” which could be adapted easily to Nazi ideology (228). Seeberg studied Meister Eckhart and German mysticism, then applied his völkisch approach to the study of Martin Luther. Seeberg wanted to turn the Luther Renaissance into a “Luther Revolution.” This meant preaching a Luther who was “dangerous” and not “bourgeois” (229). Importantly, Seeberg also sought to recast theological education in a Nazi mold. His plans included revising theological curricula by abandoning historical-critical methodology and the study of the Hebrew language, replacing them with a “history of German piety” (241).

Finally, to complete the volume, Christoph Markschies writes on behalf of the Humboldt University Faculty of Theology, arguing that his institution still needs to engage in a thorough assessment of its activities during the Third Reich. This is a call very much in line with Gailus’ purpose for this volume, which is to demonstrate the extent to which German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Catholics voluntarily adapted themselves to Hitler’s regime and participated in the National Socialist quest to eliminate German Jewry and thereby “purify” the German racial community. Gailus is driven by the conviction that the German churches still have much work to do in coming to terms with this history. This volume contributes substantially to his project, by compiling some of the best of current research into the German churches in the Nazi era. It also demonstrates that there is still much to do before those Berlin tourists receive proper answers to their questions about the German churches in the time of Hitler.

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918 (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). Pp. 272. ISBN: 9781783270514.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Colchester, fifty two miles north-east of London, has been a garrison town since the days of the Romans. During the First World War its military establishment was vastly expanded, including four major army hospitals where the casualties from the battlefields in France were treated. The impact of the war was immediate and very visible. Colchester’s Church of England parishes were quickly and significantly involved, as is described in Beaken’s insightful and well researched account of these critical years.

Beaken-Church Colchester’s social elite, which was well represented in the Church of England parishes, was conservative, nationalist and hierarchical. Its members supported the British government’s decision to go to war in August 1914 for moral as well as political reasons. They joined in the widespread campaign urging young men to join the armed forces, until conscription was introduced in 1916, rendering such appeals superfluous. Thereafter the leading men set an example by supporting campaigns for contributions to the War Savings Bonds, while the church ladies were very active in ministering to the troops training in Colchester and to the wounded. Church people were assiduous in providing hospitality to the troops, and at least thirty five social clubs were established where recreational facilities and food were supplied, often at little cost. In part such provision was seen as a Christian virtue, but, as Beaken notes, in part it was inspired by the desire to keep the soldiers out of public houses, and so to keep prostitution and its attendant problems at bay.

The clergy’s position was more problematic. At first many of the younger clergy had felt drawn to join their parishioners by volunteering to serve in the ranks, which they believed would be a means of getting to know their fellow men better. But the bishops soon asserted that such notions were incompatible with their ordination vows. Instead they were to remain in their parishes where their services, because of the shortage of army chaplains and the extra requirements caused by the war, would be all the more demanding. In fact, in Colchester, both clergy and laity soon recognized the need for extra pastoral witness to the many thousands of young men passing through the garrison on their way to the western front, or to those returned to Colchester for treatment in the hospitals. They were also called to officiate at the funerals of those who died from their wounds, and to comfort their surviving families. After the initial euphoria of the early months was replaced by the grim horror of the devastating and depressing stalemate of the Flanders trench-warfare, the clergy’s often self-imposed role in support of the war effort became more dubious, and even counter-productive. Since it was they who often had to bring the dreaded news to the families of men killed in action, their pastoral skills were increasingly honed to the presence of disaster and death.

In the aftermath of the war, particularly in the 1930s, there was a widespread revulsion against all those, including a few prominent clergymen, who had so eagerly preached militant sermons in favour of the war effort. And inevitably such skepticism and resentment was turned against the religion these clergymen were upholding. The contradiction between the slaughter of so many of “the flower of the nation’s youth”, and the message of love and peace as contained in the Christian gospels was too glaring to be easily overcome. Understandably, Beaken does not try to answer the question posed by almost everyone at some point during the war: “Why does the Christian God allow such a devastating catastrophe to take place?” Instead he takes issue with some of the post-war writers, particularly those who misrepresented what actually happened and instead promoted their own interpretations for anti-war or pacifist reasons. For example, he dismisses the view that the ordinary workingman, who had volunteered for army service, had been seduced by bloodthirsty clergymen and subsequently was misled by glory-seeking and incompetent army leaders. So too the charge that the Church of England chaplains were too cowardly to go up to the front line needs to be refuted by the fact that such postings were forbidden by the military leaders. It is certainly true, as Beaken admits, that, despite the almost universal support of the war effort at the time, in later years many people came to feel that the senseless and degrading conflict in the Flanders mud had made the proclamation of the Christian gospel irrelevant. But the evidence here produced for the war-time conditions in Colchester would seem to prove the opposite. Church attendance remained almost the same throughout the war years, as did the number of confirmations. The overwhelming support given to the erection of war memorials, and the sincere participation at Armistice or Remembrance Day services for the remainder of the century and beyond, would seem to disprove the contention that the Church of England had a ‘bad’ First World War. Beaken disputes the myth that things were never the same after 1918. He points to the fact that in the vast majority of parishes the Church’s witness with its emphasis on Mattins on Sunday morning remained unchanged for a further fifty years. But he agrees that, in Colchester, as elsewhere, when the fabric if the city’s close-knit, inter-dependent society came apart, so the Church of England came to occupy a peripheral position. But this does not contradict Beaken’s central argument that the Church of England fared significantly better during the First World War than has been understood or acknowledged for much of the past century.

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, 2015

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, 2015

By Robert Ericksen

“‘Ein neues Klima’: Rezeptionsgeschichte des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils in Ost- und Mitteleuropa”

A conference took place on December 3-4, 2015 at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in the premises of the Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa. This meeting, organized and hosted by Professor Andrea Strübind and the Institut für Evangelische Theologie at Oldenburg, met in conjunction with the Editorial Board of the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. The papers from this conference are expected to appear in the Fall 2016 edition of that journal.

This meeting took place in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II. The main focus, as explained in introductory comments by Professor Strübind, involved the assumption that the Second Vatican Council opened a new spirit of religious freedom within the Catholic Church as it faced the very changed circumstances of the Post-WWII world. Pushed especially by Catholics from the United States, in Strübind’s view, Vatican II created important changes within Catholicism—the mass in the vernacular, for example—and also changed the Catholic point of view toward other religions. Most famously, perhaps, Vatican II by way of Nostra Aetate dramatically modified Catholic teaching about Jews. This Council also opened to Protestants and to Eastern Orthodox churches new ways to understand and anticipate ecumenism within the Christian community.

Stanislaw Krajewski, a professor of philosophy at Warsaw University with an interest in Jewish-Christian relations and a connection to the Jewish-Christian institute at Cambridge, opened the conference with a paper on Jewish-Christian relations in Poland. One of the very few Jews growing up in postwar Poland, he noted that about ten percent of Polish Jews—some 350,000—survived the Holocaust, but that most of them, often returning from the USSR, fled the country as quickly as possible. Krajewski then gave his assessment on steps leading toward Nostra Aetate and the impact of that statement over time. Precursors, such as a Christian statement from the Seelisberg Conference in 1947, were so controversial they were not accepted by either Protestants or Catholics, and the Seelisberg statement itself could not be published at the time. Krajewski also noted John Connolly’s recent book, From Enemy to Brother, with its argument that primarily Jewish (and some Protestant) converts to Catholicism were the ones able to push in the direction of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation. This points toward a more deep-seated antisemitism among those born into Catholicism. Krajewski also suggested that the Holocaust would seem to have provided a strong push toward Nostra Aetate, but he claims that 2,500 bishops who responded with comments and advice never mentioned the Holocaust as a precipitating factor in this doctrinal change. Then, noting that Abraham Heschel called conversion “spiritual fratricide,” he argued that most Jews, even with Nostra Aetate,were suspicious of residual Christian hopes for conversion in the new Catholic stance. As for Polish reactions to Nostra Aetate, Krajewski pointed out the mono-ethnic nature of postwar Poland and suggested that most Poles were very pleased with this concentrated Roman Catholic Polish identity. Among other things it meant there were few Jewish partners for dialogue after Vatican II. In the 1970s, however, some young Poles, thinking their own culture somewhat insipid, began to look to the past and see pre-Holocaust Jewish culture as especially creative and exciting. Residual antisemitism lingered; yet now, Krajewski says, the atmosphere is very different. Since the 1990s, January 17 has been celebrated as a “Day of Judaism,” with clergy in some areas hosting inter-religious events. Jewish-Catholic dialogue takes place, though Krajewski thinks it still falls short of deep, doctrinal reconciliation, a situation he thinks true outside Poland as well. Finally, he says that antisemitism is unacceptable in today’s Poland, even though the depth of this change among the laity cannot be fully known.

Katarzyna Stoklosa gave a second paper on Poland, beginning with a description of the somewhat fraught relationship of Poland toward Vatican II. The Polish people seem to have been relatively unaware of and/or suspicious of this council. Some even considered any reconciliation with Judaism a “poisoning” of the Catholic faith. The government also was suspicious of Vatican II, fearing among other things, that any Polish priests who attended might not return. One bishop led a pilgrimage to Rome, which pushed the government into a limited cooperation. In the end, 250 Polish priests attended, rather than the higher figure of 1500 that once had been considered. Among the most important outcomes may have been the chance for Polish and German bishops to spend considerable time together and establish the basis for future contact.

Other papers included one on Switzerland by Franziska Metzger of Fribourg. She described the Swiss postwar circumstances as a time in which social questions grew in importance, both in terms of how the churches could nurture the holding on to moral values and how they could adjust to modernization. Vatican II represented a moment of change, so that by the 1970s churches in Switzerland began looking toward questions of equality, pluralism, social change and social justice, a direction that has continued since then.

Gerhard Besier, speaking about Vatican II and ecumenism, noted that Catholics had been resistant to ecumenical efforts in the late-1940s and 1950s. The World Council of Churches finally got Catholics to participate in the 1961 meeting in Delhi. He sees an ongoing difference, perhaps especially in Germany, in which Protestants see ecumenism as a willingness to live with differences, but Catholics see in ecumenism the goal of eventual unity. This has led to a certain amount of “phantom” discussion, according to Besier, and a discussion not accessible to the laity. As for the laity, Besier sees a Germany in which most people are less and less concerned with the arguments and goals of church leaders as they seek contentment in this life. One example? In Germany today the children of mixed marriages are supposed to divide by gender, with boys taking the religion of the father and girls that of the mother. In practice, according to Besier, fathers are likely not to press their “advantage,” nor are any in the family likely to attend church on a regular basis.

Mikko Ketola, speaking about the reception of Vatican II in Finland, similarly described a very broad change, in this case from the early to the late twentieth century. Starting with the recognition of the nearly universal dominance of the Lutheran church in Finland, Ketola noted a population of only 999 Catholics in 1940, a similar number to Jews. In the 1920s a Lutheran bishop had described Catholicism and Bolshevism as “the two greatest threats” to Finland. An analysis of Finnish attitudes toward Catholicism in 1959 described a “prejudice resting upon a firm foundation of ignorance.” Suspicion greeted Vatican II in the 1960s. However, the rapid modernization of Finland which began about that time, along with specific leadership on these issues, resulted by the 1980s with a Finland transformed, by then a “model of ecumenism.”

Hans Hermann Henrix reported on the impact of Nostra Aetate in three Eastern European nations: Russia, White Russia, and Ukraine. In all cases this reception was influenced by 1) the impact of Soviet policy through 1989, 2) the small number of surviving Jews after the Shoah, and 3) the small number of Catholics in relation to the dominance of Eastern Orthodoxy. Nostra Aetate was first translated into Ukrainian in 1996, into Russian in 1998, and first published in White Russia in 2009. In each case the Catholic Church is a small part of the population, as few as 600,000-800,000 among the 140 million Russians, for example. Also, the post-Shoah Jewish population is very small, although Ukrainian independence led to something of a Jewish “rebirth,” with a population today of 400,000. In all cases there have been efforts at Jewish-Christian dialogue and at developing Catholic respect for the Jewish faith in line with Nostra Aetate. These efforts are quite recent and often center around attempts to celebrate January 17 as a “Day of Judaism.” St. Petersburg, for example, has held such a festival in 2012, 2014, and 2015. A similar Ukrainian celebration took place in 2013 and 2014, although it failed to take place in 2015, due to the political crises that year. White Russia has been a place of Jewish-Christian dialogue since a large international conference in Minsk in November 2009.

Robert Ericksen moved outside the Middle and East European orbit of this conference to give a report on the North American discussion of Nostra Aetate. American bishops considered themselves natural leaders in the post-Vatican II discussion, especially because of the large number of Jews living in the United States by the 1960s, and also because of certain American ideas about respect for religious freedom. In March 1967, the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops published their “Guidelines for Catholic-Jewish Relations,” taking very seriously the radical nature of Nostra Aetate with its insistence that Catholics could no longer teach Christian supersession in God’s eyes or Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism. Ericksen showed the assertive nature of Jewish voices in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, voices of individuals such as Rabbi Irving Greenberg and Emil Fackenheim. He also described the increasingly substantive trajectory of change within the Christian-Jewish relationship to be found in the recent work of Catholic figures such as Father John Pawlikowski.

Tobias Weger completed this conference with a presentation on new church architecture in Poland and Germany and its reflection of Vatican II. One aspect involves a greater emphasis on lay participation along with a less rigorous assertion of the priest’s authority as the voice of God. This can be seen in the placement and style of furnishings in relation to the altar. Another emphasis is upon local history and aesthetic preferences, so that there is no single style to which a Catholic church must conform. In all cases, the discussion of Vatican II at this conference involved a recognition that it pointed in the direction of significant change. Furthermore, these changes continue to mark the Catholic Church and the Christian world in our day.

Conference Report: 8th Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Conference Report: 8^th Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, July 6-9, 2015

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

The experiences of Christians defined as “non-Aryans” by Nazi and Axis racial laws remain among the most fascinating and under-researched aspects of the Holocaust, not least because this very specific category of Christians, made so by the sacrament of baptism, is sometimes still misunderstood/misrepresented. They are seen as Jews and are (literally) counted as “Jews” rescued or aided by Christian institutions, NGOs, and individuals. In July 2015, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem organized a workshop for seventeen scholars from eight countries (Austria, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, the United States), to present their work-in-progress and compare their findings on this issue.

Monday, July 6, began with stimulating opening remarks by Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Dan Michman. The first panel focused on Christians defined as non-Aryans by Nazi laws residing in Germany. Assaf Yedidya (Yad Vashem and Efrata College, Israel) presented his research on hundreds of converts from Christianity to Judaism, and their treatment under Nazi law. True to the Nazi racial definition of a Jew as someone with Jewish parents and/or grandparents, a Christian of “Aryan” descent who asked to convert to Judaism was not only permitted to do so, but was shielded from deportation by state authorities on the basis of his or her “Aryan” race credentials. Nor could a religious convert to Judaism who was an “Aryan” marry another (racial) Jew, since this was prohibited by the Nuremberg Laws.

Maria von der Heydt (Centre for Antisemitism Research, Technical University Berlin, Germany) followed with her research on so-called “Geltungsjuden,” defined in Nazi racial law as those born into mixed marriages and who met three conditions: if they belonged to a Jewish religious community after September 1935; if they were married to a Jews; or if they were born out of wedlock to a Jewish mother after July 1936. The number of Germans meeting this set of criteria was small, numbering only about 2,000 in 1943, at which time essentially they were subjected to the same fate as so-called “Mischlinge.”

In a session moving across the Vatican city-state, France, and Romania, Suzanne Brown-Fleming (USHMM) opened with her early findings from Vatican records generated during the key latter half of 1938, when the annexation of Austria, the Italian racial laws, and the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany drove many Catholics in mixed marriages or who were themselves defined as “non-Aryan” to write to the Vatican for aid and succor. Many of these letters reflected a feeling of belonging neither to the Catholic nor to the Jewish communities. As such letters mounted rapidly in the latter half of 1938, Pope Pius XI contacted the United States National Catholic Welfare Conference to request aid for Catholics impacted by the racial laws and attempting emigration. Internal correspondence between the Vatican and various nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) around the world revealed a clearly stated lack of willingness to offer help to either practicing or secular Jews.

Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem) followed with a nuanced and fascinating presentation about rescue of Jews, Catholics defined as such by Nazi/Axis racial laws, and so-called “Mischlinge” by the Congregation of Priests of Notre Dame de Sion and their sister community, the Congregation for Religious of Notre Dame de Sion. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Jewish converts to Catholicism, both communities were originally founded to seek the conversion of Jews. Nidam Orvieto examined the broader issues of conversion and the motivations for it, the preference given or not given to the baptized, and the way Catholics impacted by the racial laws were treated in the case of Notre Dame de Sion in France.

Ion Popa (Free University Berlin, Germany) discussed the case of Romanian Jews who sought conversion to Roman Catholicism, and attempted to do so in large numbers after 1941 in the hopes for Vatican protection. Describing the bans on conversion in Romania issued in 1938 and 1941 and the fight against these measures by papal nuncio Andrea Cassulo, Popa highlighted the acceptance of the ban against conversation by the Romanian Orthodox Church and the open opposition to it by the Roman Catholic Church. He also described the particular case of Bukovina, where Jews converted in large numbers to a small Evangelical Church before 1940, providing the context of the vicious persecution of Jews in Romania in the 1930s driving such trends.

On Tuesday, July 7, the case of Poland was the focus of three presentations, the first by Rachel Brenner (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). Brenner gave a moving presentation on the interwar “intellectual-artistic Polish-Jewish” milieu in Warsaw and rescue efforts by three Polish-Gentile members of this circle: Zofia Nałkowska, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and Aurelia Wyleżyńska, focusing specifically on the psychological crises, emotional stresses, and intellectual justifications used by the Polish-Gentile diarists under study as their behavior toward friends considered as equals prior to the stresses of the war and Holocaust changed, often not for the better. Katarzyna Person (Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw, Poland) presented her research on the Jewish Order Service in the Warsaw Ghetto, often described in contemporary accounts by other Jews as consisting largely of “converted” or “highly assimilated” Jews. Using lists of members in the Jewish Order Service in Warsaw, Person found that its membership also included orthodox Jews and Jews with strong Zionist backgrounds. Emunah Nachmany Gafny (Independent Scholar, Israel) discussed Jewish children in hiding on the “Aryan side” in Poland, their experiences in formulating a false Christian identity, their reception by Polish Catholics, and their own conflicted feelings as they professed to become part of the Christians community.

A session on Serbia followed. Jovan Ćulibrk (Jasenovac Committee of the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church) presented a picture of the small Jewish community in pre-war Yugoslavia, which consisted of the Zagreb Jewish community that in large numbers converted in Roman-Catholicism in 1938; the Sephardi community with its strong identification with the Serbian national cause; and the “new” generation that embraced Zionism. Ćulibrk argued that where one understood oneself–and was understood by others–to fall on this spectrum had a distinct impact on one’s fate. Bojan Djokic (Museum of Genocide Victims, Belgrade, Serbia) presented a list of over 657,000 individuals who died during World War II, some of whom had at least one Jewish parent but are not understood to be “Jewish” victims. Djokic outlined the complex research required to better document which victims were, in fact, of Jewish origin.

Wednesday, July 8, began with a set of presentations on Austria and Germany. Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Austrian Academy of Sciences) focused on the living conditions of those classified as so-called “Halbjuden” (half-Jews) and their parents in so called “Mischehen” (mixed marriages) during the Nazi regime in Austria. With dramatic changes to their situation and status in 1938 with the Anschluss, in 1941 with the introduction of the yellow star, and during the war with the deportations of Jews, the remaining population of Christians defined as Jews by the racial laws could suddenly find themselves in positions of authority in the Jewish Council of Elders, even though they held no religious ties to the Jewish community.

Maximilian Strnad (Ludwigs-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany) presented his research on the over 12,000 Jews in “privileged” mixed marriages who had been spared deportation and were still living in the so-called Altreich in September 1944. In the final year of the war, the Nazi regime established labor battalions in the Rhineland, Westphalia and Breslau, followed by orders for deportation to Theresienstadt in the spring of 1945. Strnad laid out the internal dynamics within the Nazi regime driving the increasingly radical, though not necessarily successful, policy in the final months of the war.

Geraldien Von Frijtag (Utrecht University, Netherlands) discussed the fascinating case of Hans Georg Calmeyer, the figure within the German administration in the Netherlands authorized to decide upon 5,500 cases of Jews who petitioned for a change in their administrative status from so-called “Volljude” (full Jew) to “Mischling” or non-Jew. Von Frijtag discussed how Calmeyer treated these cases, based on his own background and political inclinations.

Jaap Cohen (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) presented a large-scale rescue operation, the Action Portuguesia, set up by a group of Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands in order to evade deportation. The Action Portuguesia formulated an argument that because they were of a different “race” than Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardim should not be regarded as Jews under Nazi and Axis racial law. Cohen examines the precedents, arguments and ultimate fate of this school of thought as espoused by members of the d’Oliveira family.

The final day of the workshop, July 9, began with a presentation by Susanne Urban (International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen, Germany), who examined the postwar fates of so-called “Halbjuden” and “Mischlinge.” She discussed their own “self-understanding/self-perception” as expressed in their applications to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) for displaced persons (DP) status, and analyzed how IRO officials categorized such applicants. This depended on many factors, including whether they had spent the war years in forced labor, in a concentration camp, or even as draftees into the German Wehrmacht.

Joanna Michlic (University of Bristol, United Kingdom and Brandeis University, United States) presented what she called “atypical” histories of Polish Jewish children during and after the war. The children she studied came from highly culturally assimilated middle-class Jewish families, from ethnically mixed marriages between Polish-Jews and ethnic Poles, and from relationships between Jewish fugitives and their rescuers.

The workshop concluded with two presentations relating to Italy. Valeria Galimi (University of Tuscia, Italy) examined the Italian racial laws of 1938 and how they were understood and implemented by the Mussolini regime and during the Republic of Salò. Especially interesting was her analysis of petitions for exemption in “cases of special merit” (benemerenze particolari), which often contained letters directly to Mussolini reflecting the petitioner’s thoughts on the “Fascist cause” and their own place within it. Maura de Bernart (University of Bologna, Italy) examined the fate of Jews and Christians defined as such in Forlì, culminating in the massacres at the Forlì airport (June to September 1944).

Dina Porat (Chief Historian, Yad Vashem and Tel Aviv University, Israel) offered closing comments, remarking on the difficulties of making any broad generalizations about those Nazi and Axis victims who found themselves defined, in whole or in part, as Jews under the racial laws. Factors included conversion to Christianity (and the date at which it took place), level of implementation at the local level, attitudes of the local population and religious institutions, radicalization of the Nazi and Axis regimes in the face of defeat, and many other influences discussed over the four days of the conference. Workshop participants agreed on the need to continue study of what the organizers called “non-Jewish Jews” at the city/community, regional and national levels, so as to be able to best contextualize these victims within the larger history of the Holocaust.

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

Book Note: Hartmut Ludwig, Suddenly Jews

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Book Note: Hartmut Ludwig, Suddenly Jews: The Story of Christians whom the Nazi racial laws classified as Jews, and of the Good Samaritans who came to their aid (the Bureau Grüber), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Berkeley: Duplex Press, 2015). ISBN: 1517109914.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

This translation of Ludwig’s larger account An der Seite der Entrechteten und Schwachen, reviewed in CCHQ in June 2013, now makes more easily available in an English translation the same story of a small and heroic group of German Protestants, mainly of Jewish origin, who managed to rescue a tiny proportion of those caught up in the Nazi Holocaust. It has been capably translated, but omits all the footnotes and the bibliography, presumably in order to reach a much wider constituency of English-speaking readers.

Ludwig-Suddenly When Hitler came to power in 1933, the majority of German Protestants loyally supported him, believing his promises to restore Germany’s place in the world, and to save them from the danger of Communist revolution. His rabble-rousing attacks on the Jews were dismissed as mere propaganda, which would be abandoned once the regime settled into power. But in fact the Nazis only increased their anti-Semitic campaigns, both by executive decree and by legislation, leading to the vicious outbursts of November 1938, known as the Kristallnacht. Grievously affected were those in the Protestant churches who now found they were classified as Jews on racial grounds, regardless of the fact that they or their parents had converted to Christianity in earlier years. They could expect no help from the pro-Nazi authorities in the majority of Protestant churches. Only in the minority Confessing Church were to be found some men and women who rallied to their support. In the crucial circumstances in later 1938, the Provisional Leadership of the Confessing Church selected a Berlin pastor, Heinrich Grüber, to organize relief efforts for these Protestants of Jewish origin throughout the country. He set up his own independent office, and immediately began to search out opportunities for those affected to emigrate. At the same time, he sought to provide assistance to those who could not or were not willing to leave the country. But in 1940 this assistance was halted by the Gestapo. Grüber’s chief assistant was murdered, along with fourteen other helpers deported to extermination camps. Fortunately, Grüber himself survived and continued his ministry in post-war Berlin.

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)