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)
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 
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.
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.
Lost in all of the attention paid to Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is the fact that an English-language translation Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s 2006 biography of Bonhoeffer was also published in 2010.[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance is surprisingly unknown and seldom reviewed. Even this journal—dedicated to twentieth-century German church history and replete with Bonhoefferiana—failed to assess either the original German version or the subsequent English translation. Nor can this oversight be explained on account of any inadequacy in the qualifications of the author or the quality of the research. The following analysis is both a compensation for the absence of a more timely review and an attempt to reconcile differing views of Bonhoeffer through a close analysis of Schlingensiepen’s work.
Some of the highlights of the collection include the lead essay by Wolfgang Huber in which he provides a theological profile of Bonhoeffer’s political resistance, particularly his involvement in Hans von Dohnanyi’s conspiracy in the Abwehr. Despite the limitations placed on what Bonhoeffer could put into writing during the Third Reich, Huber believes a “theology of resistance” can be teased out of Bonhoeffer’s writing during this time. His call for the Church to take a public stand in solidarity with the Jews against the repressive state; his formulation of a confession of guilt in the name of the church; his theory of a responsible life; and his trust in God’s guidance—all indicate the rudiments of a theology of resistance, Huber believes.
Pollard has an imposing pedigree, which one might demand of a scholar willing to tackle such a contentious subject: he is no amateur in examining modern popes in times of conflict. He has devoted much of his professional career to the Vatican and Catholicism in Fascist Italy, and his biography of Benedict XV is one of the most significant of any language. His introduction includes several crucial definitions and a brief sketch of the papacy up to Benedict’s election in September 1914. His conclusion speaks cogently of the legacy of the period as a whole, which he refers to simply as the age of totalitarianism, and addresses its greatest legacy: bringing the divisions between Church conservatives and liberals to the fore, leading to the most radical changes in Church history at the Second Vatican Council (478).
Kornberg takes on both sides of the Pius War, questioning the various ways in which scholars have sought to either support Pius’s reactions to the Nazi regime or have tried to find fault with Pius’s response (or lack thereof). At the book’s outset, Kornberg asks the fundamental question that has frustrated both sides of the scholarly debate: “why was the pope unable to deal with radical evil?” (3) Kornberg argues that, in his view, the papacy of Pius XII was a moral failure out of “calculated acquiescence;” meaning that the pope willingly allowed Nazi atrocities to happen “because of his own priorities and responsibilities as head of the Roman Catholic Church” (8-9). Kornberg then tracks how Pius’s reputation drastically plummeted in the 1960s, in no small part to the wildly successful play by Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter, (The Deputy) which depicted a cold, calculating Pius who sat silent in the face of Nazi crimes for “reasons of state” (16). With this incendiary play, debates raged: was Pius complicit with the Nazi regime due to his silence or was Hochhuth’s play no more than a deeply flawed portrayal of the Pope? Kornberg takes the reader through the play, the reactions and counter-reactions to it and links this to the role of Vatican II in further sealing the demise of Pius’s reputation. A new era was opening up for the Church under the leadership of the charismatic and charming Pope John XXIII and Kornberg dryly notes that in this new climate, “it was inevitable that Pius XII’s reputation would sink like a stone” (35). At issue here was the question of mission: what was the Catholic Church’s role? Was it to serve as a voice of morality to the world, was it to concern itself primarily with pastoral care, or was it to be a mixture of both of these? Raising these questions allows Kornberg to move on to his next chapter, addressing the options of Eugenio Pacelli and his role in the drafting of the Reichskonkordat.
In the detail given to the spy rings operating out of the Vatican, Riebling’s account goes far beyond earlier accounts like those of the American scholar, Harold Deutsch. It adduces evidence from published documentary collections, state, church and intelligence archives in Britain, Germany, Poland and the United States as well as the extensive interview transcripts found in Harold Deutsch’s papers in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In light of the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the sheer volumes of conspirators, adversaries and agendas, this research is one that only a historian of intelligence could have pulled off so compellingly. Shaping the contours of this book is Riebling’s broad range of experiences as an editor for Random House, security expert and terrorist analysis. This is simply the finest work on the subject in print.
The panel participants began the conference with a dinner to honour Hartmut and his wife, Silke Lehmann. James Harris spoke about Hartmut’s life and career trajectory, emphasizing his close ties to the United States, which began with a high school exchange program and continued through many visiting positions at UCLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton. In 1987 Lehmann became the founding director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, returning to Germany in 1992 to serve as director of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. He has been professor emeritus at the University of Kiel since 2004, while continuing to visit the United States often, most recently as a visiting professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.