Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective, Washington, October 2024

By Kevin P. Spicer, Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Andrew Kloes, Victoria Barnett, Kathryn Julian, and Jonathan Huener

The conference “Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective” was co-organized by the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History; and the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. It was held from October 2 – 4, 2024, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Session 1

Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College, Moderator

Martin Menke, Rivier University: French are Catholics, Poles are Slavs: German Catholic Views of Their Neighbors, 1900-1945

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna: The German Christian Movement in Austria and Romania, 1933-1945

Based on published and archival sources from the period, such as Abendland, Hochland, Center Party publications and Center-related newspapers, Reichstag proceedings, and government records, Martin Menke’s paper compared the development of German Catholic views of France and Germany, mainly during the interwar period. While German Catholics considered French Catholics to be brothers and sisters in faith and co-heirs to the realm of Charlemagne, they considered Poles to be Slavs first and ignored the Poles’ strong Catholicism. While this perception of the French helped to overcome postwar animosity, the pre-1914 defense of Polish rights by the Center Party evaporated during the struggles over Upper Silesia.

Dirk Schuster’s paper examined the impact of the German Christians Eisenach Institute for Research and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life on the Protestant churches in Austria and Romania. In both countries, the Protestant churches were a religious minority, and already in the 1920s, they experienced a decisive turn towards National Socialism. The national church in Romania was a stronghold of conservative elites. Younger church representatives rebelled against this situation and joined forces with the National Socialists. Due to various scandals, high church levies, and a widening gap between clergy and laity, many younger pastors and theologians took advantage of the momentum of National Socialism. They ousted the conservative elites from the church leadership. In Austria, the massive turn to National Socialism followed Austrian fascism’s rise after 1932 but did not impact the church in the same manner.

In 1939, the German Christians established the Eisenach Institute. The degree of radicalization of the national churches impacted the outreach of the Eisenach Institute. In Romania, young pastors without advanced theological training made up the majority; thus, advanced scholarly research was impossible. Instead, the clergy regularly adopted the output of the Eisenach Institute, such as a de-Judaized Bible and hymnal. The use of these texts continued even after the war ended. In many ways, the Protestant church in Romania became a testing ground for implementing such publications.

In Austria, the German Christians did not experience the same influence. We know of only six parishes in which the de-Judaized Bible was introduced after 1941. The Protestant Theological Faculty situation was completely different, as ethnonationalism permeated their teaching and scholarship. In turn, these academics eagerly embraced the “scholarship” of the Eisenach Institute and willingly collaborated with it.

 

Session 2

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, Moderator and Respondent

Mark Ruff, St. Louis University, “Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler and his efforts to free convicted Nazi war criminals”

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, USHMM, “‘Love and Mercy’ after the Holocaust: The Vatican’s Postwar Clemency Campaign, 1945-1958”

Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies, “Feindesliebe, ‘The Guilt of Others’, and the Jewish Question: Württemberg Protestant Clergy Coming to Terms with the Past”

These were three fine papers, each highlighting the roles of individuals in the immediate post-war era who worked within a world defined by crushing wartime defeat – the second in a generation – and all that entailed: a literally destroyed homeland; millions dead, wounded and missing; a Europe in ruins and dominated by the implacable ideologies of liberal democracy from the west and Soviet-style communism from the east. Many Germans, especially those with backgrounds like the subjects in these papers, had distrusted or feared both of these ideologies for decades. All three papers focus on individuals navigating courtrooms and judges and perpetrator-defendants, and questions about guilt and punishment and mercy. There seemed to be a shared understanding among them that the bad guys were not the Germans in the dock or in prison, but the Allies (read: the Americans), who at best were misguided and ignorant of what Germans had come through under Nazism and war, or at worst were hypocritical and vengeful.

I am struck that all three papers offer compelling evidence of continuity: the so-called “Stunde Null” of 1945 does not hold much weight in these accounts. Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s use of the recently-opened Vatican archives to investigate the involvement of Pope Pius XII and his “officers” – what she terms the “triumvirate” of Pius XII; Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI; and Domenico Tardini, later Secretary of State under John XXIII — in attempts to gain clemency for convicted war criminals provides evidence of, among other persistent traits, both latent and manifest antisemitism in the Holy See. Her findings mirror other scholars who have also gained access to these documents, notably David Kertzer in his portrayal of the wartime papacy. Mark Ruff’s presentation of Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler highlights the persistence of certain traditions in Catholic moral theology: there is no sin too big that may not be forgiven; the spiritual journeys of all Christians but evidently especially perpetrators must be encouraged and supported by God’s representatives on earth (i.e. priests). I found this resonant with my own research more than a decade ago, when priests and seminarians in the military used multiple ways of justifying their service in the Wehrmacht, but ultimately they claimed that they were all part of the same chorus: the men with whom they were serving (not so much those on the receiving end of the Wehrmacht’s attentions) had great need of them. Christopher Probst tells of Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem’s devotion to love above all else, even of one’s enemies, and of the fierce national devotion of Theophil Wurm, chairman of the Protestant Church Council in Germany, which led him to intercede on behalf of mass murderers like Einsatzgruppe leader Martin Sandberger.

The worldview to which our protagonists adhered left little room for any other kind of victim: Jew, Romani, communist, Slav. Christopher presents what may be an anomaly in this context, in the example of Diem, who helped to hide Jews during the Shoah as part of a Württemberg “rectory chain” and whose postwar sermons emphasized accountability, responsibility, and a condemnation of evil in all its forms through a kind of ferocious love. Apart from Diem, we are treated to an array of individuals displaying stalwart German nationalism or, to clarify the motivations of the Italians in Brown-Fleming’s presentation, a “brotherly understanding”; both nationalism and understanding (what we might otherwise call sympathy) led these individuals to agitate on behalf of convicted criminals who had said reprehensible things (the antisemite Gerhard Kittel) or who had facilitated or perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity (the SS leaders Oswald Pohl and Otto Ohlendorf; the foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath; the navy admiral Erich von Raeder; the field marshal Wilhelm List). In their view, these were good Christian men who had either (1) made mistakes that they now repented, (2) had simply followed orders, or (3) were perhaps guilty of some charges, but of far greater concern were the alleged abuses and irregularities of the American prosecutors. Of course, the three exonerative appeals could operate conveniently in tandem.

Such evidence leads us to agree with our presenters’ conclusions that, once more, Christian moral theology in the 1940s and early 1950s consistently enabled its adherents to advocate on behalf of those co-religionists that they viewed were most in need of their support, and that it was easier to encourage an affinity/sympathy with a “sorrowful” Christian perpetrator (and the extent of the sorrow is debatable) than with the perpetrator’s victim – many of whom were dead and therefore absent anyway. There was a time when I would have cast this kind of moral theological thinking as falling short of true Christian aims. But as I’ve become immersed in this particular history, I think these papers raise the question whether we, in the 21st century, should continue to expect Christian leaders in the 1940s to have behaved otherwise, given the framework within which they had been raised and trained. Diem is the example that we wish was the standard, but instead he is the anomaly perhaps because he broke with tradition to articulate what he saw as the more pressing needs of his day, even if it went against his upbringing. I wonder if he recognized this, and felt like an outsider, even as he stood (somewhat alone) on the strength of his convictions.

 

Session 3

Andrew Kloes, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent 

Andrea Strübind, Oldenburg University: “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship”

Sandra Langhop, “Between Obedience and Resistance: The Basel Mission in National Socialism”

The second day of the conference began with presentations by two scholars from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. Professor Dr. Andrea Strübind spoke on “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship.” In her paper, Strübind analyzed “central themes in Christian anti-Semitism and racist anti-Semitism in Baptist churches, as well as their conduct towards the Jewish-Christian members and office holders in response to the measures promoted by the National Socialist regime to persecute Jews.” Strübind emphasized during her remarks that she approached this topic as a historian and as Baptist pastor in the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland. As an introductory focus, Strübind discussed the poignant case of Josef Halmos, who was a Jewish convert to Christianity and the member of a Baptist congregation in Munich. As a Sunday school teacher, Halmos was well-acquainted with the family of the pastor, Heinrich Fiehler, whose son, Karl Fiehler, served as the Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Munich from March 1933 through May 1945. Drawing upon entries from Halmos’ diary, Strübind was able to demonstrate that the Fiehlers and other members of the congregation, of which he had long been an active member, enthusiastically embraced National Socialism and concomitantly ostracized Halmos because of his Jewish background. Strübind convincingly argued that, while Baptists numbered only about 70,000 in Germany and were thus one of the smallest churches, the history of their response to the Nazi regime after January 1933 generally mirrored those of the much larger Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches. “Some Baptists hid Jews and Jewish Christians. Many did recognize that the planned destruction of the ‘people of the Covenant’ increasingly bore the signs of diabolical rule in Germany and that this would lead to a catastrophe. A few theologians expressed this apocalyptic thought in words in their sermons and addresses. But nothing was officially mentioned nor was there any sort of petition made to the authorities.” Strübind concluded by discussing the current efforts of Baptists in Germany to memorialize those members of their congregations who were abandoned during the Holocaust, including Josef Halmos, who was murdered at Auschwitz.

Sandra Langhop, a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Institut für Evangelische Theologie und Religionspädagogik of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, presented a paper based on her ongoing doctoral research into the Basel Mission during the National Socialist period. Citing a June 1933 article published by Karl Hartenstein, a Universität Tübingen graduate and the German director of this Swiss missionary society, Langhop was able to show persuasively that National Socialist thinking had become influential among some German-speaking Protestant missionaries. Hartenstein wrote in his society’s periodical, Der Evangelische Heidenbote: “We can never thank God enough that he once again had mercy on our Volk. After years of great despair, he gave us new hope for our Volk and our Reich. He sent us a real Führer after the times of great confusion… He pulled our Volk back from the abyss of Bolshevism at the last moment. He made our Volk united… as hardly ever before in its history. He has begun a cleansing process with us, in which everything rotten and corrupt from years ago has been broken open and can be swept out.” Langhop further analyzed how völkisch thinking variously shaped certain Basel missionaries’ approaches to their work in India, vis-à-vis British colonial government officials and indigenous peoples, and between German and Swiss missionaries.

One theme that connected both papers was their analysis of the positive reception with which many Christian churches and Christian organizations in Germany welcomed National Socialism in 1933, believing it to be a preferable to both Weimar era-democracy and communism. Secondly, both papers demonstrated how, despite the historic bonds that had long connected them to Protestants in other countries, German Baptists and German missionary supporters adopted identities that emphasized their belonging to the German people and eschewed alternative conceptions of self that were international in nature, such as belonging to the global Christian community or to the spiritual body of Christ.

Dr. Andrew Kloes is an applied researcher in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed here are the those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

Session 4

Victoria Barnett, University of Virginia, Moderator and Respondent

Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College: “The Selberg Circle and Transatlantic Propaganda”

Friedericke Henjes, Oldenburg University: “The Reception of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories on the Internet”

These two papers cover different eras and topics—but their underlying theme (the dynamics of propaganda) led to an illuminating discussion.

Blake McKinney discussed a little-known pro-German group in the United States, led by an American businessman, Emil Selberg, that pushed Nazi propaganda during the 1930s. Selberg was sympathetic to post-1918 German resentments, including the view that the Versailles Treaty had placed an impossible burden on the German people, whose resentment and anger led them to see Adolf Hitler as a leader offering new hope.

Selberg wanted to promote a positive image of the new regime in the United States. His allies were U.S. Senator Royal Copeland from New York and a prominent Methodist layman, Paul Douglass (who later became president of American University). Copeland suggested early on that Selberg might find a receptive ear for his work in American churches, including staff members at the Federal Council of Churches in New York who were focused on promoting reconciliation with Germany after the First World War.

Selberg’s main point of contact in Berlin was August Wilhelm Schreiber, an official in the Church Federation office. Both men seem to have seen this as an opportunity to advance their own careers. Having a high-ranking church contact in Berlin gave Selberg an entry point to the FCC staff. In turn, an important American church contact made Schreiber useful, both to the Deutsche Christen as they sought to create a new Reich Church and to the Nazi regime, which was already creating propaganda aimed at the U.S. McKinney’s research offers some insight into why, by the end of 1933, FCC officials like Henry Leiper were backpedaling from their early forthright condemnations of German church silence about Nazi measures to a “both-sides” approach, as they navigated the divisions within German Protestantism.

Ultimately, Selberg’s attempts were sidelined by the events of the Church Struggle itself and growing international outrage at Nazi policies. Adolf Hitler abandoned the Reich Church project in October 1934 because of the domestic and international backlash. In the United States, there was growing attention (much of it focused on Martin Niemoeller and the Confessing Church) to what people saw as the Nazi persecution of Christians. Copeland and Douglas, however, continued to defend the “new Germany” throughout the 1930s, and Douglas even published a book in 1935, God Among the Germans, which gave a sympathetic picture of Nazi Germany and the Deutsche Christen.

McKinney’s research provides an interesting new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of international Protestant reactions to the events unfolding in Nazi Germany. It is also a revealing glimpse of German and American cooperation in spreading propaganda on behalf of National Socialism, long before the rise of the internet.

The Russian antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion also reached a worldwide audience in the pre-internet era, but as Friedericke Henjes’ paper illustrated, modern social media has brought it to new audiences. The most striking aspect of her research is that the Protocols itself is no longer even necessary. Its message has been incorporated into modern conspiracy theories.

The Protocols is a case study in how conspiracy theories spread because of underlying prejudices. As Henjes noted, even in the 1930s the Protocols were recognized as a forgery—but in a conspiracy theory, the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is how the conspiracy theory is used to explain popular resentments about world events. The Protocols did this by drawing on the long history of Christian anti-Jewish tropes and their historical legacy in terms of “otherizing” Jews through various anti-Jewish legal restrictions, etc. The dog whistles have not changed since the first copy of the Protocols appeared, for example: the “wandering Jew” who infiltrates society leading to the collapse of moral standards, and the conviction that there is a secret society of “Jewish bankers” who manipulate world history.

Henjes explores how these prejudices dovetail neatly with more modern dog whistles about “globalism,” the purported influence of George Soros, etc. The core of her argument is that “the content of the ‘Protocols’ is largely disseminated on the internet via the keywords and antisemitic narratives they contain.” She offered two modern examples from two activists in the German anti-vaccine movement:  Attila Hildman and Oliver Janich. Hildman literally quotes the Protocols but links its various antisemitic tropes to recent developments like the Covid pandemic and the anti-vax movement. Janich does something similar, tying the Protocols to current issues, quoting the Gospel of John, and promoting conspiracy theories.

As Henjes notes, many modern conspiracy theories may not immediately be recognized as antisemitic—but they share a common language with the Protocols, now over a century old. Even without using the actual text of the Protocols, there are numerous slogans and images in the digital ecosystem that convey antisemitism and incite violence against Jews.

 

Session 5

Kathryn Julian, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent

Katharina Kunter, University of Helsinki: “Anne Frank in Frankfurt: Entangling the Holocaust, Local Memory and Civil Education”

Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University: “The Sound of Evil: Imagining Perpetrators”

Carina Brankovic, Oldenburg University, “Conceptions of Remembrance in Leyb Rochman’s Chronicle of Survival”

In all three of these projects, there’s an interplay between intersecting memory cultures: international/ globalized memory, national/ local, civic/ confessional. Each panelist discussed how the subject changed depending on the context in which a text or memorial is being read, watched, or listened to, which indicated how memory culture can be politicized and also find interesting overlaps between various groups. For instance, Katharina discussed how the memory of Anne Frank evolved in Frankfurt in response to both international and local politics, from Adenauer’s conservative West Germany of the 1950s to a reunified Germany that emphasized humanitarianism to a more recent globalized vision of Anne Frank. There were a variety of global connections that could be made about Katharina’s project (e.g. how the memory of Sadako Sasaki has been used in the same way in Hiroshima and in global peace movements). In all three projects, there could be important interventions if discussed in a global context.

Historicization and temporality was also incredibly important in each of these talks. They showed that engagement with Holocaust memory is vastly different whether the 1950s, 1989/ 90, or in 2024. Carina, for example, showed how Leyb Rochman’s chronicle was read and reimagined in the immediate postwar period by the survivor generation as a yizkor book and memorial vs. how his writing was read by the second generation and implications for the future. In this same vein, Björn discussed how silence was used in the 2023 film Zone of Interest. He contended that this film in its omission of violent imagery was even more chilling to audiences in 2023, because what occurred during the Holocaust and at extermination camps has long been established in public memory and discourse. Each of these papers illuminated how Holocaust memory continues to be interpreted and reimagined in a variety of temporalities, civic, and religious contexts, whether in museums, local education, texts, film, or even in quotidian interactions.

 

Session 6

Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont, Moderator and Respondent

Rebecca Carter-Chand, USHMM, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks”

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany”

The final session was devoted to presentations by Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Director of Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the USHMM, and Dr. Kyle Jantzen, Professor of History at Ambrose University. The session was a fitting capstone to the conference, as both papers encouraged reconsideration of conventional approaches to church history in the Nazi era, even as they proposed new avenues of inquiry.

Carter-Chand’s contribution, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks,” began with a historiographical overview emphasizing that traditional analyses have tended to focus on the individual rescuer’s motives, personality, courage, and sacrifice. Carter-Chand, however, encourages a redirection in the scholarship away from rescue as a psychological phenomenon and toward rescue as a historical phenomenon, focusing more on circumstances and context in the form of “structural” and “situational” factors – factors that might include landscape, victim and rescuer networks, or the nature of occupation and coercive state power in a given setting. As an illustration, Carter-Chand concluded with a brief video interview with Holocaust survivor Zyli Zylberberg, inviting consideration of what contextual factors moved Zylberberg to make the choices she did, and how we are to evaluate her own personal agency in the complex process of rescue.

Kyle Jantzen’s presentation, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany,” also offered a novel approach in our attempt to understand the place of the churches and Christianity in Nazi Germany. Reflecting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “After Ten Years,” Jantzen urged consideration of how the current growth of Christian nationalism and the so-called “culture wars” might help us in understanding the churches during the Third Reich. We are accustomed to drawing upon the lessons of the past to inform the present, but Jantzen suggested an inversion of sorts, that is, letting the challenges of the present inform our approach to the churches in the Nazi era, considering broadly how Christianity and its institutions adapt to politics and, more precisely, the “bending” of Christianity to the politics of the right. For Jantzen, this “bending,” both in Nazi Germany and in the present, is to be understood not in static or linear terms, but as a complex dynamic process, often improvised and experimental. Moreover, Jantzen emphasized that, in attempting to understand this process, we need to “look to the middle,” that is, between the categories of support, compliance, and defiance, and to local contexts.

 

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Conference Report: Seminar, Religion and Secularism in Germany from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Conference Report: Seminar, Religion and Secularism in Germany from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, German Studies Association, September 2024

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

This seminar, which featured 14 participants and 6 auditors, was originally scheduled to convene at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association from September 27-29, 2024. Because of flooding and power outages caused by Hurricane Helene, however, most of the participants were unable to arrive safely in Atlanta in person. The seminar took place instead over Zoom in three sessions of an hour and fifty minutes each.

Convened by Professor Dr. Florian Bock, a church historian at the Ruhr-Universität-Bochum (RUB) and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, this seminar explored the complex relationship between religion and secularism in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was a topic that until recently had received relatively little attention from scholars, who simply assumed that the relationship between secularist movements and organized religion in Germany was characterized by mutual hostility.

This hostility certainly existed. Freethinker and secularist movements inveighed against organized religion.  Frequently denouncing religion as little more than superstition, they also showed themselves to be rabidly anticlerical in their broadsides against established religious institutions. Predictably, they disproportionately directed their fire against the Catholic church: freethinkers disproportionately arose out of Protestant rinks. To be sure, defenders of orthodox religion often responded in kind. They met hostility with hostility, and for that reason alone, scholars were for decades apt to take as a given mutual animosity between secularism and religion.

But the relationship between religion and secularism was never quite that simple. For one, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam were anything but homogenous; significant differences existed not only between but within each over how to position oneself in politics, society and the so-called “modern” world with its default assumption of secularity. For another, secularism and secularity were not coherent concepts either. Secularism ran the gamut from laicité and anticlericalism to free-thinking, materialism, agnosticism, and atheism. Its relationship to ostensibly secular parties like the SPD was complicated, since most Germans retained formal religious affiliations through the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Not least, secular ideas emerged out of religious institutions and inquiry and vice versa; religious discussions of gender, sexuality, and capitalism were shaped by complicated interactions with secularist views.

Aiming to explore how religion and secularism defined themselves and each other vis-à-vis the other and its impact on the lives of the faithful, indifferent and skeptical, this seminar put together readings mostly from the first two decades of the 21st century. The first day’s readings sought to make sense of competing understandings of secularism and the secular.  They included portions of Talal Asad’s classic work, Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007) along with a set of reflection by the German sociologist, Detlef Pollack, on secularization. Taylor had famously posed the question of why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 in the West while in today’s world and especially in the “secular” academy, it is “easy,” if not “inescapable?” Participants pointed out a paradox. Although Asad published his book before Taylor, portions of it were expressly designed to counter Taylor’s arguments and framework of the secular which he had encountered in bits and pieces in the preceding decade. Many participants also noted how both works were profoundly shaped by the attacks of September 11, 2001. How much of these frameworks, they queried, remained viable more than twenty years later?

For the second day of the seminar, participants applied and historicized these theories in greater detail. They discussed Manuel Borutta’s pioneering article, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,“ which appeared in the German journal, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, in 2010. They also explored portions of Rebekka Habermas’ edited volume, Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire. Transnational Approaches (Berghahn Books, 2019), and its chapters on religion in the so-called “long 19th-century.”  The attendees also discussed the chapter by Carolin Kosuch, “Secularism and Unbelief” from the forthcoming edited volume by Anthony Steinhoff and Jeffrey Zalar, Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Since Zalar was one of the participants in the seminar, he shed light on this chapter’s origins and significance. Not least, participants discussed what has become the go-to work on secularism in modern Germany, Todd Weir’s, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014.)  At stake in these readings was the question of how secularist paradigms became embedded in discourses of masculinity and became potent political and ideological weapons.

On the third and final day, participants turned to the second half of the 20th century. They read the introduction to an edited volume by Wilhelm Damberg’s, Frank Bösch, and Lucian Hölscher. Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel. Transformationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1989 (Klartext, 2011). Evoking the greatest discussion and controversy were readings by Joan Scott. Featured were significant portions of her short monograph, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2018). They questioned whether her analysis, which was derived from recent French history, also applied to Germany. Some argued that she was painting with too broad of a brush. Other participants critiqued her approach of seeing secularism primarily as a political discourse and not a transcendent set of principles.

At the close, the scholars of religion and secularism gathered over Zoom were once again left wondering about the relevancy of frameworks published in the aftermath of September 11. How precisely did sexual emancipation become a weapon in the so-called “clash of civilizations?” Are we indeed living in a secular age or a post-religious world?  If so, how do we eschew the simple binaries and teleologies characteristic of many readings on these topics? Is our only answer to historicize?

 

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Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Article Note: Harry Legg, “‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria,” Contemporary European History (2024), 18 pages, doi:10.1017/S0960777324000262.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This is the second article from Edinburgh PhD candidate Harry Legg, following his 2022 publication “Non-Jewish ‘Full Jews’: The Everyday Life of a Forgotten Group Within Nazi Germany,” in which he analyzed the experienced of Germans who were racially identified as Jews by the Nazi regime but who did not consider themselves Jewish religiously or culturally. In this article, Legg asks a related question: “What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances?” (1). He examines four facets of this moment of discovery: the clues to Jewish ancestry that were overlooked, the reactions of antisemites who discovered they were racially Jewish, the despair many felt when they discovered they were Jews, and the minority who reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish heritage. Legg’s overriding purpose is to explore the nuances of identity among those who didn’t fall neatly into the binaries of Jew and German (or Austrian) Christian.

The title of the article comes from the testimony of Rudolf Briske, who secluded himself after learning of his Jewish ancestry from his parents in 1929. Briske was one of forty Germans and Austrians who Legg studied, most of whom were not initially aware of their Jewish ancestry (in part, of course, because they were raised as non-Jews) but who later wrote about it after the war. (2) (He calls these subjects non-Jewish “Jews” because they did not identify as Jewish but were identified as either “Full Jews” or “Mischlinge” [partially Jewish] by the Nazi regime.) Most of the “moments of discovery” Legg studies did not come from parents but at school, whether as denunciations by classmates (armed with knowledge from their parents) or as discoveries from filling out racial forms for school or for Nazi youth groups (7).

Legg argues that there were in fact clues that might have alerted these non-Jewish “Jews” to their Jewish ancestry. One was the presence of Jewish relatives, which might seem more obvious in retrospect than in real time, when many non-Jewish “Jews” didn’t think of Jewishness in racial terms (10). Since many of the subjects of Legg’s study were minors, they simply didn’t understand what racial terms like Mischlinge or slurs like Rassenschande meant (11).

The most dramatic moments of discovery of Jewishness were those of antisemites. As Legg points out, the very fact that non-Jewish “Jews” could be deeply antisemitic illustrates how separated they were from the Jewish communities around them (12). Some tried to deny their Jewishness, invoking their “hereditary character” as evidence of their hoped-for non-Jewishness. Others adjusted their worldviews, abandoning their antisemitism. One compared it to the adaptation process involved in a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Another experienced guilt over her antisemitism. For others still, their moment of discovery amounted to an emergence out of naiveté. Still, the language of these discoveries was usually the language of despair: “thunderstruck,” “horrified,” “stunned,” and “terrible, terrible, terribly upsetting” (14). For many, the hardest part of the discovery was being “dropped” by friends (15). Others experienced the disgrace of public exposure (16).

A few of the non-Jewish “Jews” who Legg studied reacted positively to the discovery of their Jewish ancestry, though this was more common among those whose moment of discovery came before 1933 (17).

This is a fascinating article which offers genuine insight into the experiences of those who were raised as Germans or Austrians—and normally as Christians—and then discovered their Jewish ancestry. It sheds light on the diversity of experiences among ordinary Germans and Austrians forced to face the brutalities of Nazi racial ideology.

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Letter from the Editors (Fall 2024)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Fall 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

Bells collected from Westphalia in 1943. Image from Stiftung Kloster Dalheim, LWL-Landesmuseum für Klosterkultur, ed., _Und vergib uns unsere Schuld? Kirchen und Klöster im Nationalsozialismus._ See Kevin Spicer’s review of the book in this issue.

As we near the end of September, I am again tardy in posting our latest issue. My apologies for the unforeseen delays, but I hope it’s worth the wait.

First, I am excited to announce once more that we have grown our editorial board! Please join me in welcoming Maria Mitchell, from Franklin & Marshall College; Michael E. O’Sullivan, from Marist College; and Blake McKinney, from Texas Baptist College. I think I speak on behalf of all of our editors when I say how pleased I am that we’ve been able to grow our ranks as we have this year. This trio brings with them significant contributions in research and writing to central European history, the history of gender and sexuality, international Protestantism, and postwar reconciliation.

This issue features a bevy of reviews. For our book reviews we have a double contribution from Martin Menke, writing on Johannes Sachslehner’s biography of controversial Bishop Alois Hudal as well as on Giuliana Chamedes’ study of the Vatican response to communism and fascism. Dirk Schuster offers an examination of Oliver Arnhold’s examination of the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Beth Griech-Polelle writes an overview of Klara Kardos’s Auschwitz journal. We have two article notes: Rebecca Carter-Chand relates Bastiaan Bouwman’s recent analysis of the World Council of Churches during the Cold War, and Kyle Jantzen surveys Franz Hildebrandt’s broadcasts into Nazi Germany via the BBC, as reviewed by William Skiles. Finally, Kevin P. Spicer gives us a glimpse into an exhibition on church and monastery life during the Third Reich, currently on display at Dalheim Monastery.

Next month, members of our editorial board will be meeting with editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (KZG) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I am excited at the prospect of seeing familiar faces and meeting new ones, and I look forward to sharing a full report on the meeting in our December issue.

Our December issue promises to be the fullest of 2024. It will include multiple book and article reviews as well as reports from major academic conference, including the GSA and Lessons & Legacies. I invite you, as the reader, to let us know about any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

 

Kindly note: the editorial board of the CCHQ reserves the right to consider requests for translations of articles by contributors. Please direct your request to Lauren Faulkner Rossi at lnf@sfu.ca.

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Review of Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). ISBN 978-0-674-98342-7.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this useful volume, Giuliana Chamedes describes the Catholic Church’s efforts to resist what it considered the dangerous ideologies of the modern world.  She presents not only communism and National Socialism as the enemies of faith, but in the most crucial contribution of the work, she demonstrates that the Church resisted and rejected what it perceived to be American liberalism and materialism. She argues that, to oppose liberalism and especially communism, the Church made common cause with fascist regimes. She describes these efforts as a crusade, which is an unusual choice of word, laden with historical and also contradictory meaning. Using the term “crusade” to refer to the attempted conquests of the Holy Land several centuries ago is problematic. The term is more appropriate if one defines a crusade as an organized effort by the Church to regain influence on the European continent. Chamades’ interpretation of the Vatican’s efforts to combat modern ideologies ever since Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum as part of an organized campaign to regain political and moral influence justifies the term “crusade.” Chamades, however, goes beyond the broad term “crusade” to argue for the existence of a Catholic “International,” a term suggesting a centrally-organized, conscious effort with national and regional branches. Instead, the sources indicate an effort that might better be described as a theme or leitmotif rather than an organized campaign. Thus, while Chamades demonstrates consistent anti-communist efforts by various Vatican offices, these efforts fall short of an institutionalized and centrally organized campaign. There is no evidence of an organized or institutionalized Catholic “International.” Nonetheless, the work has some interesting points to offer.

Chamedes summarizes the existing scholarship concerning the Church’s fight against communism and its willingness to collaborate with fascism. However, her insights about the fear of Western liberalism and materialism are novel and worth exploring further.  For example, she cites Vatican archival records in which editor of the Code of Canon Law Eugenio Pacelli, future nuncio to Germany, Cardinal Secretary of State, and Pope, stated his fear that the U.S. entry into World War I was part of the campaign to secularize Europe. [2] The author argues that the Church perceived President Woodrow Wilson as determined to destroy the Church. As Chamades shows, the Church’s fear of liberalism lasted well beyond World War II. After World War I, the Church saw itself engaged in an existential struggle with liberalism, which explains its willingness to work with fascist regimes that opposed both liberalism as well as socialism.

The author suggests that the papal peace plan of 1917 and the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law that same year constituted efforts to gain influence in international relations by reviving papal diplomacy.  The Church sought to promote its values by integrating provisions of the new Code of Canon Law into concordats to curb the influences of socialism and liberalism.  The church sought to retain legal control over marriages and education. Chamedes shows that this new papal diplomacy by concordat succeeded only when the country in question also considered such agreements advantageous. For example, the Baltic Republics and Poland believed the concordats affirmed their national sovereignty. The Church also usually conceded to the state some influence over appointing influential national church leaders. [44] When in 1925, the Vatican established a Polish metropolitan see at Vilnius, however, Lithuania broke off concordat negotiations before an authoritarian regime concluded a concordat in 1927. [62-63]

Chamedes discusses scholarly literature and sources referring to the “Catholic International” compared to the Communist International and similar organizations, but she does not fully define the term, nor does she provide evidence of a Catholic International. [6, 86] While the term “Catholic internationalism” describes the Church’s universalist claims well, the term “International,” especially when capitalized, suggests something much more formal and suggests a structure comparable to the Communist “International.” That idea suggests more centralized power over national churches than the papacy ever possessed. Also, the fascist regimes with which the Church cooperated – never unconditionally and rarely wholeheartedly – rejected internationalism, a contradiction that Chamedes does not address. In fact, in its propaganda, the National Socialist regime told a tale of secret Catholic ambitions to control the world. The closest the Church came to an open claim to world leadership was its vehement rejection of the League of Nations, another Wilsonian idea. Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, declared the League superfluous since the Church was the one true global league. [55] With some justification, other Church officials denounced the League as a tool of the war’s victors to control international affairs.

Between the end of World War I and the early Cold War, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli played an essential role in Vatican diplomacy, first as one of the editors of the Code of Canon Law, then as nuncio to Bavaria and Germany, then as Cardinal Secretary of State, and finally as Pope Pius XII. Chamades accurately narrates Pacelli’s turn to a fiercely anti-communist and more antisemitic position based on his experiences as nuncio in Munich during the revolutionary period 1918-1919. (80) Chamades suggests Pacelli embraced the popular notion of Judeo-Bolshevism and encouraged the Bavarian People’s Party, which had broken away from the (Catholic) German Center Party, to establish Bavaria as a base against the perils of communism [90]. Chamades stresses that Pacelli adopted this stance well before the Vatican relinquished hopes of achieving a modus operandi with the Soviet government in the later 1920s. Chamades argues that Pacelli urged his predecessor as Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri, to pursue an aggressive anti-communist agenda. [104]

While increasingly the Church focused on anti-communism, anti-liberalism remained a common denominator between the Church and fascist regimes. Chamades explains how Italian fascism, initially anti-clerical, changed course out of consideration that the Church was an enemy of communism. [96] Chamades emphasizes Mussolini’s early anti-liberal turn, which the anti-communist campaign later superseded. According to Chamades, the Church responded to communism and liberalism by promoting its model of an ideal civil society, organized around “Catholic Action,” a renewed attempt to tie Catholics to civic organizations arranged within a parochial, diocesan, and universal Catholic hierarchy. [112] Of all the early twentieth-century Vatican initiatives, Catholic Action was the most organized and institutional, though still largely ineffective in rallying the faithful. Catholic Action’s aims to organize all Catholics led to the Church’s first open conflict with Italian fascism, a conflict then repeated with all other authoritarian regimes.

Intending to resolve such differences, the Vatican began negotiating a concordat with fascist Italy. Pope and Duce each intended the subsequent Lateran Agreements of 1929, ostensibly concluded to resolve their conflicts, to advance their own interests, which led to continued tension. [117] Concordats were no longer measures to impose Catholic Canon Law and Catholic moral teaching on the state, but rather defensive agreements to secure existing rights. The Lateran Agreements gravely disappointed anti-fascist Catholic politicians such as Luigi Sturzo and Alcide de Gasperi. Chamades demonstrates that the financial terms of the Lateran Agreements, primarily their financial and bond payments by Italy to the Holy See, exposed the Vatican to global economic turmoil in new and devastating ways. [122] To put the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum in the context of the post-war world and the Great Depression, Pope Pius XI again related liberalism and socialism to one another as erroneous ideologies destined to lead the faithful astray. Discussing the aftermath of Quadragesimo Anno, Chamades again refers to a Vatican anti-communist “campaign.” The term “campaign” denotes organized and coordinated efforts. While Chamades cites the most relevant scholarly works before the establishment of the Secretariat for Atheism in the later 1930s, the argument lacks a smoking gun. She does not mention a meeting, correspondence, or institution that launched such a campaign. Yes, the Vatican’s efforts after Quadragesimo Anno no longer sought any accommodation with communist regimes, but there is no evidence of a campaign against communism. Instead, it seems as if an anti-communist Zeitgeist might be a better term than “campaign.” According to Vatican archival documents cited by Chamades,  by 1931, Pope Pius XI determined that communism was the most dangerous enemy of the hour, but he did not launch an anti-communist campaign. [125] Chamades points out that Pacelli was the driving force behind the pope’s anti-communism, which by April 1932 had come to dominate the Holy See’s ideological concerns. [134] According to Chamades, a 1932 circular by Pacelli, now Cardinal Secretary of State, “proposed to launch an anticommunist campaign.” [125] Since the document is crucial to Chamades’ arguments, one wishes she had discussed it in more detail, especially regarding its consequences. What did Pacelli mean by the term “anti-communist campaign?” Again, a campaign requires organization and leadership. Did this ever come to be? Did Pacelli intend something like the creation of the Secretariat of Atheism? A later discussion of the “anti-communist campaign” provides no further explanation except to equate Catholic internationalism with the media “campaigns” of the 1930s. Missing is proof of any organized campaign. (132)

While Chamades correctly identifies anti-communism as the European hierarchy’s primary concern, she underestimates the Church’s continuing wariness of fascism, as for example with the German episcopate’s 1931 condemnation of fascism, to which she does not give sufficient attention. (138) Until the late 1920s, the Vatican had sought some accommodation with the Soviet regime and had devoted charitable aid to the regions stricken by the Russian Civil War. It is essential, however, to consider the Church’s growing anti-communism in connection with the Vatican’s increasing concern with Mussolini’s fascism and German National Socialism. Neither ideology developed in ways compatible with Catholic teaching. Furthermore, concerning the National Socialist rise to power, Chamades follows a familiar but deeply flawed argument when she claims it was an easy path from the March 1933 Enabling Act to the Concordat signed that July. All evidence, much of it available since the 1960s, proves how tortuous the negotiations were, and how the Vatican sought to gain every possible advantage. Chamades herself relies heavily on Vatican records, but not on all of them. Her use of the Vatican correspondence with papal nuncio in Berlin Cesare Orsenigo and the correspondence between Jesuit Superior General Wlodimir Ledochowski and the Vatican is beneficial. Still, she ignores other Vatican archival records relating to such processes as the Reich concordat negotiations. In particular, it would have been useful had she used the documents published by Father Ludwig Volk, SJ, and Alfons Kuppers. (Ludwig Volk, Kirchliche Akten über die Reichskonkordatsverhandlungen 1933. Mainz: Mathias-Grunewald-Verlag, 1969. Alfons Kupper, Staatliche Akten über die Reichskonkordatsverhandlungen 1933. Mainz: Mathias-Grunewald-Verlag, 1969).

While the fascist governments in Berlin and Rome violated the concordats as much as they observed them, Chamades shows that forces in the Vatican now called for a single-minded focus on anti-communism. In late 1933, Jesuit Superior General Wlodimir Ledochowski convinced Pius XI to establish a “Secretariat on Atheism.” [146] Chamades explains the considerable public relations activity of the Secretariat across Europe; one wonders how effective the Secretariat was in influencing not only members of the hierarchy but also the faithful. How much was the average Catholic aware of this centrally coordinated campaign? Furthermore, while Chamades convincingly shows the extent of the Vatican’s anti-communist “campaign” across the continent, one has to wonder how much fascist regimes desired to encourage widespread media work by the Church. Furthermore, the question again arises of how organized and centralized efforts must be to qualify as a campaign. It seems as if different Vatican offices pursued anti-communist efforts because they knew these were in line with the leitmotif of anti-communism, not because someone centrally coordinated their efforts.

While one might think that the establishment of the Secretariat marked the end of anti-fascist concerns, Chamades acknowledges that the Church in the early 1930s was preparing a new Syllabus of Errors to condemn both communism as well as fascism. The Church abandoned this thrust not only because of the opposition of Ledochowski, but also under the influence of the Popular Front victory in Spanish elections. [172-173] Alongside many scholars, Chamades criticizes the relatively weak language in the 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge and notes, in contrast, that in the anti-communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris released five days later, the Vatican pulled no punches. Following the condemnation of communism in Mexico in Firmissimam Constantiam, these three encyclicals made clear that the Church now considered communism, not totalitarianism, to be the greatest threat of the twentieth century. While much of the narrative recounted here is well known, Chamades provides a useful summary and some helpful distinctions. Her global perspective is helpful.

Once the newly elected Pius XII and those around him suppressed the draft of Pius XI’s encyclical condemning racism outright and when, a year later, World War Two broke out, the Church seemed firmly on the side of all anti-communist forces. Comparing the Church’s position in World War II to that in World War I, Chamades notes that the Church had virtually no allies in the second war and that the Vatican developed no significant diplomatic activity, an assessment surprising to any historian familiar with the Vatican during that time. Faced with Pius XII’s supposed inaction, Chamades argues an internal opposition arose within the Church. When Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, however, the Vatican reaffirmed its centralizing and hierarchical approach to church leadership, in which there was little room for dissent. The outbreak of war, however, limited the ability to engage in any efforts to combat communism and subjected the Church to an increasingly assault by National Socialism. Both to those hoping for a pontiff more critical of fascism as well as for the Catholic leaders of newly invaded Poland, the first encyclical of Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, proved a disappointment because it lacked a clear condemnation of the German invasion and its consequences. Those Catholics whom the Vatican’s inaction disappointed began to demand greater Catholic engagement for peace. Men like Don Luigi Sturzo, Jacques Maritain, and Henri de Lubac forcefully made their case in whatever press would publish their work. Additional efforts by Sturzo and Maritain, whom Chamades calls Catholic internationalists, to convince Pius XII to take a more active stand failed. This inspired a new type of Catholic activist, those committed to a peace based on Christian democracy.

Chamades demonstrates that Vatican attitudes shifted after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the U.S. entry into the war. [220-222] The pope did not endorse the German invasion. Furthermore, he agreed to urge the American bishops to support the lend-lease agreement. Her discussion of the papacy’s response to the Shoah is limited to a few pages in which she notes that bishops informed the Vatican of the deportations of Jews and that the Vatican could have done far more to help Jews. On the one hand, this brevity is a wise choice, given the vast and contradictory scholarly literature on the subject. Chamades could have developed the complexity of her argument. Does she consider national socialist antisemitism an instance of concurrence between longstanding Catholic antisemitism and a modern ideology? On the other hand, given the German promotion of a “crusade against Bolshevism” and the thesis she is trying to prove, a more detailed discussion of the Catholic response to the Shoah would have been helpful. Chamades points out, that the Vatican did not welcome the public appeals for an outspoken condemnation of National Socialist atrocities. [228] Nonetheless, Catholic dissidents, as Chamades calls them, continued to speak up and began to organize to create a post-war world based on Christian principles, especially on a commitment to freedom and peace. Eventually, these would become the post-war Christian Democrats. She points out that “after the war, the papacy also agreed to work with Europe’s new Christian Democratic parties” [236] and even endorsed the United Nations, part of the Vatican’s general shift to greater cooperation and engagement with other civil society organizations. And yet, the Vatican’s new understanding of democracy was not one of total liberty but of freedom based on Catholic moral teaching.  A more probing analysis of how, why, and with what consequences the war transformed the Vatican’s values would have enriched the work.

Beginning in 1945, the Vatican feared that the Western allies were too accommodating of the Soviet Union and were willing to hand over Eastern Europe. Chamades points out that, in contrast to the Church’s wartime failure to share information about atrocities in Eastern Europe, it now broadly shared all news of communist persecution of the Church and the faithful. [245] Furthermore, Pope Pius XII sought the aid of the United States to combat the growth of communist parties in Western Europe, which represented an abandonment of the Church’s interwar anti-liberal criticism of the United States. Despite these tactical changes, the Church envisioned a Europe formed of Christian states. It became suspicious of Christian Democratic movements when these, building on the wartime criticism within the Church, insisted on their independence from the Catholic hierarchy. [250] Chamades might have noted that the interwar Catholic parties also jealously guarded their independence from the Vatican. She claims that a new Christian Democratic International arose from the discussions of post-war Christian Democratic groups, but again, there was no such organization.

Chamades shows that, in the postwar era, the Vatican could not exercise the influence which it had expected in a post-war world. A brief period of goodwill towards the United States and the new Christian Democrats soon gave way to criticism and mistrust of both as too independent in the case of the Christian Democrats and too rooted in anti-Catholicism in the case of the United States. As Chamedes herself shows, the Vatican feared that Christian Democracy was insufficiently immune to communist. Also, Christian Democratic political parties and actors proved increasingly independent of the Vatican. The Vatican again became critical of the United States. [282] According to Chamedes, the resurgence of American Protestant anti-Catholicism and the break in U.S. diplomatic representation to the Vatican contributed to a revival of Vatican anti-Americanism, expressed as fears of American hegemony and materialism.  This seemingly left the Vatican without political allies.

In the 1950s, new criticisms arose against the Vatican. The Church’s failure to side with anti-imperialist movements in the developing world led to further alienation. [286] Another challenge to Church authority and legitimacy arose via the accusations by journalists, scholars, and others of Church complicity with the National Socialist regime. In many ways, the 1950s marked the nadir of Church influence in Europe. Chamades argues that the Second Vatican Council represented Pope John XXIII’s recognition that the influence of the Vatican and of the broader over the faithful in private and public life was waning, and that the policies of his predecessors had led the Church to a dead-end.

Consequently, as Chamades convincingly explains, the Second Vatican Council overthrew much of what the Vatican leadership had considered self-evident about Church-state relations and about Church power and authority. She argues that the new Apostolic Constitutions, such as Lumen Gentium and Dignitatis Humanae, on the one hand, attempted to meet the expectations of many who demanded change in the post-war Church while at the same time proving unable to relinquish dogmatic claims to represent the one true path to salvation. Chamedes argues that Gaudium et Spes, the constitution explaining how Catholics and their Church should function in a modern, pluralistic society, constituted a rejection of the concordat strategy employed during the first half of the twentieth century. [301] Instead, the Second Vatican Council suggested a way forward in cooperation with other faiths and other ideologies as long as they authentically promoted human welfare.

In the conclusion, Chamedes argues that the Vatican’s policies of the 1930s sowed the seeds for the demand for reform that became vocal after 1945. The Church’s reform efforts of the 1960s came too late; too many Catholics were already heading out the door. [312] Chamades argues that Humanae Vitae accelerated the exodus. In contrast, Pope John Paul II promoted Church leaders who were critical of the Second Vatican Council and more comfortable with cold-war anti-communism. Despite this decline in Vatican authority over the faithful, Chamedes argues that the Church remains a powerful actor on the world stage thanks to its moral pulpit.

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Review of Oliver Arnhold, “Entjudung” von Theologie und Kirche: Das Eisenacher “Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben” 1939–1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Oliver Arnhold, “Entjudung” von Theologie und Kirche: Das Eisenacher “Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben” 1939–1945 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2020). ISBN: 9783374066223; 245 Pp.

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna

If you have a look at church history during the Third Reich, you will quickly come across the “Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben). Susannah Heschel began to work on the history of this “De-Judaization Institute” with her first contributions in the 1990s. In 2008, she published The Aryan Jesus, the first monograph to focus on the “Eisenach Institute” and its key protagonists.[1] Just two years later, Oliver Arnhold published his doctoral thesis on the “De-Judaization Institute”, which, in two volumes of over 900 pages, provides a detailed description of its origins, structure, publications and staff.[2]

Ten years later, Arnhold has published a condensed version of his doctoral thesis. In 245 pages, he tells the history of the establishment of the largest research institute in the Third Reich that dealt with the so-called “Jewish question”. Promoted by the Thuringian German Christian Church Movement (Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen), the institute was opened at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach – one of the most important places for Protestants –in May 1939 with the intention of tracing and eliminating all Jewish influences within (Protestant) Christianity. The aim was to prove – on its own initiative, without state influence, supported by various Protestant regional churches and with the collaboration of renowned professors – that Jesus of Nazareth, and with him Christianity as a whole, had always stood in extreme contrast to Judaism. Jews, however, had distorted the true message of Jesus, which the Eisenach Institute was to bring to light again. Accordingly, some of the staff also saw themselves as completing Luther’s Reformation. Luther had liberated Christianity from the papacy in the sixteenth century. Now, under the rule of the “God-sent Führer” Adolf Hitler, the time had come to accomplish in full Luther’s Reformation and remove all alleged Jewish influences from Christianity. The message of Jesus and, indeed, his entire person were to be “de-Judaized” (entjudet) – nothing more and nothing less.

In the first part of the book, Arnhold devotes himself to the institute’s prehistory, i.e. how the Eisenach Institute came to be founded in the first place. The German Christians are discussed, and Arnhold devotes a separate chapter to Walter Grundmann, the scientific director and spiritus rector of the institute, as well as the infamous Godesberg Declaration. At this meeting in March 1939, attended by leading church representatives from most German Protestant regional churches, Christianity was defined as the greatest possible opposition to Judaism and the founding of the “De-Judaization Institute” was decided.

In the second part of the book, Arnhold focuses on the opening of the institute at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach, the place where Martin Luther had translated the Bible into German. Individual chapters are devoted to the structure, thematic research topics inside the working groups like the origin of Jesus and German piety, the “de-Judaization” of the New Testament and the Protestant hymnal, the relationship with the state and the Nazi Party, and the dissolution of the institute in 1945. The respective careers of institute employees after 1945, which Arnhold describes on eleven pages, are always shocking. There were very few postwar professional restrictions for former employees, despite their antisemitic writings up until 1945.

Anyone familiar with the subject of the Eisenach Institute will not find anything new in this book. However, this is not the author’s intention so much as he wishes to present a compact overview of the German Christian Church Movement and the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. He has succeeded well in summarizing his doctoral thesis on which this book is based. For those readers who are not yet familiar with the history of the Eisenach Institute, the book offers a quick and easy-to-understand insight into the subject.

 

Notes:

[1] Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[2] Oliver Arnhold, Kirche im Abgrund. Vol. 1: Die Thüringer Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen 1928–1939; Vol. 2: Das »Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben« 1939–1945 (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 2010).

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Review of Stiftung Kloster Dalheim, LWL-Landesmuseum für Klosterkultur, eds., Und vergib uns unsere Schuld? Kirchen und Klöster im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Stiftung Kloster Dalheim, LWL-Landesmuseum für Klosterkultur, eds., Und vergib uns unsere Schuld? Kirchen und Klöster im Nationalsozialismus (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2024).

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

The exhibition “And forgive us our sins? Churches and Monasteries under National Socialism” runs from May 17, 2024, to May 18, 2025, at the Stiftung Kloster Dalheim in Lichtenau near Paderborn. Founded by Augustinian canons in the fifteenth century, the Dalheim monastery was a victim of early nineteenth-century secularization and was used for regional agricultural purposes afterward. In 2002, the Westfalen-Lippe Regional Authority (LWL) transformed the ruins and grounds of the former Augustinian monastery into a state museum and created a permanent exhibition on monastic life and culture in 2007. Further renovations and provisions from 2008 to 2010 enabled the housing of additional exhibits, including “Churches and Monasteries under National Socialism.” I visited the exhibition in mid-July 2024, reaching it by rental car as public transportation was limited. This review will combine my experience of the exhibition and a review of the essays in its companion volume.

The exhibition is well-crafted, offering a thorough and balanced introduction to the history of the Christian churches under National Socialism. At its entrance, a placard lists the curators under the leadership of the Stiftung Kloster Dalheim’s director, Ingo Grabowsky, and the scholarly advisors, Oliver Arnhold of the University of Paderborn; Olaf Blaschke and Hubert Wolf of the University of Münster; Gisela Fleckenstein and Hermann Großevollmer of the Paderborn Archdiocese’s Commission for Contemporary History; Kirsten John-Stucke of the Büren-Wewelsburg District Museum; and Kathrin Pieren of the Westfalen Jewish Museum. As our readers know, Blaschke and Wolf have written extensively about the churches under Nazism. The placard also contains an impressive and extensive list of archives, museums, and libraries, encompassing cities, towns, and institutions across Germany that contributed to the exhibit. Interestingly, there is no mention of Bonn’s influential Commission for Contemporary History or the participation of any of its academic board members.

The curators have organized the exhibit around ten questions. The companion volume follows this format and summarizes the exhibit’s content in an introduction and ten brief, well-cited essays. The companion volume is not a catalog, as it does not contain photos and descriptions of all the exhibit’s photos and items. Instead, it includes select images, vividly reproduced in considerable size, some covering two pages.

In the volume’s forward, Georg Lunemann, the chair of the Stiftung’s board of trustees and director of LWL, and Barbara Röschoff-Parzinger, chair of the Stiftung’s executive board and director of LWL’s cultural affairs, ask the question, “Is Christian faith and belief in National Socialism mutually exclusive?” According to them, the exhibit seeks to help its viewers answer this question by examining the interaction of both lay and ordained church members with the German state. They quote noted German historian Joachim Fest’s father, who originally wrote in Latin, “Even if everyone does it, I do not,” echoing Matthew 26:33. These words remind the visitor and reader of Fest’s resistance under National Socialism and “serve as a reminder and orientation for all of us not to become indifferent, but to face the challenges of our time with courage and knowledge of the past” (7). Indeed, the exhibition’s content endeavors to face the churches’ history under National Socialism with candor.

The Stiftung’s director, Ingo Grabowsky, authors the introductory essay, previewing and contextualizing the exhibit’s content. He points out that the exhibit seeks to aid a visitor to form an opinion about the churches under National Socialism but not to impose one. For him, the situation of the churches was “complex and ambiguous,” inviting the visitor and reader to realize that “we cannot use generalities to characterize the period.” He continues, “Few topics in contemporary history are so emotionally charged and simultaneously so controversial within a discipline. Few evoke such reflexive, morally weighted discussion compared to classical historiography, which first seeks to reconstruct historical events and then to fathom their causes” (10).

While the exhibition presents the history of both Christian traditions, even in the introduction, the curators portray Protestantism as more susceptible to National Socialism. Citing Hubert Wolf, Grabowsky explains that the Roman Catholic Church was the only institution under Nazi Germany that evaded Gleichschaltung (coordination) by which institutions collapsed together and Nazified. This exception allowed Catholicism to challenge the state from a unique position. The number of arrests or fines of members from the two traditions illustrates this point. Under National Socialism, we are told, nine hundred Protestant pastors and laity faced disciplinary action or arrest for faith-based activities compared to approximately 22,700 Catholic priests who endured the same fate. Still, the exhibit’s narrative and Grabowsky’s essay make us aware that reality is more complex than these numbers and, therefore, needs to be deeply studied. Ultimately, he reminds us that there is no unanimous historical opinion about the churches under National Socialism. Instead, we are invited to form views from the evidence presented.

A Stiftung researcher and staff member, Carolin Mischer, authored the first essay, “What was the situation in Germany before 1933?” Both the exhibit and Mischer’s essay well recall the Weimar Republic’s impactful events, such as the Versailles Treaty, reparations, the Weimar constitution, the Ruhr occupation, hyperinflation, the 1923 currency reform, the Golden ‘20s, the 1929 stock market crash, the government’s so-called presidential cabinets, the 1930 election with the NSDAP Reichstag representative increase, and Fritz von Papen’s machinations to promote Hitler. Numerous items representing the material culture of Weimar Germany accompany the exhibit. Most notable is an Electrola recording of Fritzi Massary singing “Jede Frau hat irgendeine Sehnsucht” (Every woman has a longing of some kind). Massary was an actress and singer who, in 1917, converted from Judaism to Protestantism. In 1932, because of antisemitism’s ascendency, she and her husband, the actor Max Pallenberg, left Germany for England, eventually moving to the United States. Her story reinforces the effect of the impact of Nazism’s blood-racial ideology – whereby conversion to Christianity did not alter an individual’s Jewish identity – on German society even before Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

An SS Julleuchter, a candle holder used in Winter Solstice festivals resplacing Christmas (p. 31).

Kirsten John-Stucke next asks, “What position did National Socialism take with Christianity?”, emphasizing that this relationship fluctuated over time as individual Nazis approached the churches differently, spanning the spectrum from collaborating with the churches to seeking to replace or destroy them. Hitler, she pointed out, wanted to coordinate the twenty-eight Protestant state churches under a central bishop. This internal effort ultimately failed under Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller. Next, attempting an external approach, in 1934 Hitler appointed Hanns Kerrl as Reich Church Minister for Church Affairs. He, too, was unsuccessful in unifying the various elements of Protestantism, which generally remained at odds with each other until 1945. Overall, the presentation on the state and Protestantism is convincing. However, the essay and the exhibit might have dug deeper to unpack the diversity among the personalities of the Confessing Church membership and the roles that nationalism and antisemitism played among them. Regarding the state and Catholicism, this exhibit’s section and John-Stucke’s essay primarily examine state-church interactions during seminal events such as the passing of the Concordat, the Oldenburg crucifix affair of November 1936, and the promulgation of the 1937 Vatican encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge. They also examine Martin Bormann’s June 1941 memo, which predicted a doomed vision of Christianity’s future in Germany, in which the churches were repressed, extinguished, and replaced by National Socialism. Both conclude with a fascinating examination of items related to National Socialism’s replacement rites and accompanying “sacramentals,” including a Julleuchter (Yule or Winter Candle) meant to be used in an ersatz Christmas celebration. The one on display and pictured in the companion volume was discovered in the house of a former Waffen-SS soldier. It was well used, complete with hardened wax droppings.

Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenberg, Day of Potsdam (p. 35).

Oliver Arnhold then asks the question, “Did Protestant Germany support National Socialism?” by centrally focusing on the infamous 1933 postcard depicting Chancellor Hitler in civilian attire bowing to President Paul von Hindenburg in a medal-covered military uniform. This portrait signified a hope to return to former values, restoring the throne and altar and the preeminence of Protestantism within the German state. Protestants accepted Hitler’s March 23, 1933, promise to make Christianity the foundation of his state. They did not protest the establishment of concentration camps or the gradual exclusion of Jews from German society. Arnhold clarified the complexity of Confessing Church members’ relationship to the state better than the previous essays, pointing out that, although they were opposed to the infiltration of the church by the state, most members did not oppose everything in National Socialism. Overall, Arnhold argues that most Protestants came to terms with National Socialism, and their Church institutionally never issued a public word against the state’s annihilative policies. Instead, in May 1939, their radicals founded the Eisenbach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on Church Life.

Carolin Mischer makes a second contribution with the essay, “Was the Catholic Church an opponent or a partner of National Socialism?” To frame this question, she presents a chronological threefold model. At first, the Catholic hierarchy rejected National Socialism following the Mainz diocese’s 1930 decision to prohibit Catholics from being Nazi Party members. However, neither Misher nor the exhibit details the bishop’s varied stances on National Socialism. After 1933, the Church came to an arrangement with National Socialism following Hitler’s March 1933 promise to uphold Germany’s Christian nature and the 1933 Concordat’s signing. Misher and the exhibit emphasize that bridge-builders like the theologian Michael Schamus and church historian Joseph Lortz were in the minority. Both highlight the well-known controversy between historians Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen regarding the Concordat’s origins. Arrangement eventually led to defense as the state consistently infringed upon the Concordat’s demands, eventually leading to Mit brennender Sorge’s promulgation. Unfortunately, the exhibit and essay frame the encyclical as making more of a critique of the National Socialist racial ideology than it actually did historically. Likewise, both present Bishop Clemens von Galen as an opponent of euthanasia and entirely ignore his nationalistic and antisemitic worldview. Notwithstanding, both emphasize that the bishops, through their pastoral letters, supported the war and encouraged the Catholic faithful in their pastoral letters to be “loyal and obedient to the Führer” while never publicly protesting the persecution and systematic murder of Europe’s Jews. Misher concludes that “resistance to the National Socialist system was left to a brave few” (46).

Hubert Wolf covers the topic, “Did the pope remain silent?”, a theme he has been researching and writing extensively about. Both Wolf’s essay and the exhibit focus on Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas Address, which defenders point to as evidence of the Pope’s protesting the treatment of Jews. Wolf reveals that much of the speech, now missing from the Vatican Archives, was written by Gustav Gundlach, SJ. Nevertheless, most people did not interpret the pope’s words as condemning the systematic murder of Jews. Wolf concludes that the pope was ever so cautious, never even speaking out against the murder of millions of Poles, the majority of whom were Catholic. How, then, does anyone believe that he would condemn what has come to be known as the Shoah when he never bothered to condemn the mass killing of his own flock? Yet Wolf emphasizes that the pope was well informed about the treatment of Jews by nuncios, diplomats, bishops, and laity, Christian and non-Christian, and overwhelmingly through the thousands of letters he received asking for material assistance or emigration support. Wolf and his research team are currently engaged in research in the Vatican archives, organizing and digitizing these letters for an online database project. Overall, the pope remained neutral, writing in a February 20, 1941 letter to Matthias Ehrenfried, the bishop of Würzburg, “Unfortunately, where the Pope wants to speak out loudly, he must remain silent and wait; where he wants to act and help, he must wait patiently” (55). While the exhibit closely follows Wolf’s essay, some of its material culture seems misplaced for a historical exhibit, such as the inclusion of the graphic novel by Bernhard Lecomte, Un pape dans l’historie. Pie XII face au nazisme, vol. I (2020). Likewise, when the display asks, “Was the Pope silent?”, it refers visitors to the translated works of Saul Friedländer, John S. Conway, and Walter Laqueur, who examined this question long before the Vatican archives of this period were opened.

Sonja Rakocyz, a Stiftung researcher, next asks, “Were the churches and monasteries also victims of the regime?” Centering on the totalitarian claim of the German Führer state under National Socialism, both the essay and exhibit examine the areas in which the state directly attacked the churches. Both point to the currency and morality trials instigated by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and the confiscation of monasteries and church bells; the latter were melted down and turned into ammunition and other war-waging materials. Most important is the recollection of the often-forgotten story of Dominican Sister Brigitte Hilberling’s condemnation of the murder of Jews in occupied Poland, for which she was denounced and suffered months-long incarceration. Rakocyz concludes her essay by stating that the “churches and monasteries were victims of the National Socialist regime.” In particular, she views religious orders and monasteries as the regime’s “forgotten victims” (64).

The most critical essay, “Reflectance, Contradiction, Resistance?”, by Olaf Blaschke, questions the continued use of Kirchenkampf (church struggle) and Widerstand (resistance), explaining, “There was certainly not a Kirchenkampf, not a struggle of the National Socialist regime against the churches, and not a struggle of the churches against the National Socialist regime. Rather, there were only individual political measures and individual ecclesiastical countermeasures; by and large, there was a high degree of adaptation” (68). For Blaschke, viewing the churches as institutionally engaged in active resistance is incorrect. He is also not keen on using Martin Broszat’s term Resistenz, which denotes standing in the way, often unconsciously, of the total claims and machinery of National Socialism. Blaschke presents Klaus Gott and Hans Günther Hockerts’s fourfold resistance model, from “selective dissatisfaction” to “active resistance,” finding it unhelpful as 95% of Christians did not engage in resistance. Instead, he suggests a fourfold collaboration model, from “selective satisfaction” to “active collaboration.” Blaschke and the exhibit conclude that it was “characteristic of the period from 1933 to 1945 to be able to live both in consensus and contradiction” (74).

An image of ornamental tiles in the Martin Luther Memorial Church, Berlin (p. 77).

Sonja Rakoczy contributes a second essay, “Consensus, Cooperation, Complicity?”, by first highlighting the incorporation of Nazi symbols in church architecture under National Socialism, pointing to the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin Mariendorf, nicknamed the “Nazi-Church.” The essay and exhibit use case studies of specific individuals to illustrate collaboration and complicity, including the Protestant, Abbess Emilie von Möller of Küne Abbey, and the Catholics, Abbot Ildefons Herwegen, OSB of Maria Laach; Father Johannes Strehl of St. Peter and Paul Parish in Potsdam; Father Lorenz Pieper; and Abbott Alban Schachleiter, OSB. Among the collaborators, both include the 1,300-plus military chaplains who supported the war effort by strengthening the soldiers’ morale and the parishes and congregations that benefited from slave labor. Most interesting is the case of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee sanitarium and nursing home staffed by the Mercy Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, who fulfilled the demands of the euthanasia program by feeding their patients a low-nutrition diet to prepare them for transport to murder facilities. After seeking guidance on their participation in such unethical and deadly activity, they received assurance from the pro-Nazi auxiliary bishop Franz X. Eberle of Augsburg to continue the preparations for deportation, encouraging them to see them as a “charitable labor of love” (80). The exhibit reproduces Eberle’s letter in its entirety. Rakoczy concludes that there was a mixture of individual and selective institutional cooperation and participation among members of both Christian churches in the annihilative mechanisms of National Socialism.

At the root of National Socialist ideology was the ostracization and vilification of Jews. To this end, Andreas Joch, a Stiftung researcher, examines “How Christian is antisemitism?” His essay opens with a 1927 quote from Otto Dibelius, the General Superintendent of Kurmark within the Protestant Old Prussian Union, stating, “The Jewish Question is in the first place not a religious but a racial question. The portion of Jewish blood running through the body of our Volk is much higher than the religious statistics indicate” (84). Joch is determined to detach Christian anti-Judaism from antisemitism, writing, “This classification is crucial, as the antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries consciously distanced itself from older, religiously motivated forms of hostility towards Jews supported by the Christian church, which are summarized by the term anti-Judaism. Antisemitism no longer regarded Judaism as a religion but as a race. Christian beliefs were no longer to play a role in their rejection of Judaism” (84). While this may be the case, one must admit that there would be no antisemitism if Christianity had not first demonized Jews biblically and theologically. Joch never acknowledges this truth. For him, “antisemitism is an era-specific phenomenon” (89). Despite this stance, both Joch and the exhibit amply document the progression of anti-Jewish rhetoric and depiction over the centuries in a brief amount of space. In the end, Joch concludes, “It can therefore no more be assumed that Christian anti-Judaism continued to have an ‘unbroken effect’ than that antisemitism was eternal. However, this statement is by no means suitable for exonerating the Christian churches concerning their role in the National Socialist era” (89).

Sonja Rakoczy’s final essay, “Forgive and Forget?” examines the role of the churches in denazification and the ratlines, which facilitated the escape of wanted Nazi criminals. The exhibit presents various examples of Persilscheine, letters attesting to a clean political and social bill of health for individuals during the denazification processes. Persil was (and still is) a brand of laundry detergent, hence the snide whitewashing reference. Likewise, both her essay and the exhibit discuss the various efforts by church leaders to come to terms with the National Socialist past.

Despite my few critical observations above, the exhibition and companion volume successfully introduce the public to the question of the churches under National Socialism using a critical and well-argued approach. No one will leave the exhibition viewing the churches and their members as resisters who only battled the Nazi state. That myth is upended by the evidence presented. Instead, a visitor should understand the churches’ history under National Socialism through shades of grey, both good and evil as well as everything in between.

As is common among German-language works on the churches, no non-translated works by English authors are among the cited works. Perhaps this was done deliberately. The exhibit and companion volume do not include translations, though the museum provides visitors with a brief English-language handout. Both are meant for a German-speaking audience, inviting them to come to terms with Christianity’s choices and activities under National Socialism. Critics could easily dismiss any evidence referencing an English-language work as fundamentally biased and unfair. Instead, this exhibition created by and for Germans invites Germans to examine their churches’ past.

On the Sunday afternoon I viewed the exhibit, the audience consisted of individuals in their fifties and over – at least by appearance! I genuinely hope that all generations of Germans can see it.

 

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Review of Johannes Sachslehner, Hitlers Mann im Vatikan: Bischof Alois Hudal: ein dunkles Kapitel in der Geschichte der Kirche

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Johannes Sachslehner, Hitlers Mann im Vatikan: Bischof Alois Hudal: ein dunkles Kapitel in der Geschichte der Kirche (Graz: Molden Verlag, 2019). ISBN 978-3-222-15040-1.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this work, Johannes Sachslehner, an Austrian historian and prolific author, offers a biography of the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, notorious for his complicated relationship with National Socialist ideology and for his involvement in the postwar effort to enable refugees and war criminals to escape to South America. The author’s attention to Hudal’s entire lifespan — not only his years at the Pontifical Institute of Santa Maria dell’Anima, better known as “the Anima,” but especially to his formative years in Graz — might have rendered this work a useful contribution to the scholarly literature. Instead, the reader faces a fatally flawed book.

Sachslehner’s emphasis on Hudal’s early ambition, constant desire for recognition, and embarrassment over his heritage helps to explain both his career as well as his extreme commitment to German nationalism. Hudal’s contemporaries soon recognized his ambitions and accused him of sycophancy. Sachslehner suggests that this need for recognition contributed to Hudal’s völkisch and pro-National Socialist positions as well as his later commitment to a free Austria, even as he helped hunted war criminals to escape. Hudal grew up near Graz. Proving himself intelligent, he won scholarships to obtain a Catholic education, leading to his ordination in 1908 and to a doctoral degree in Old Testament Scripture in 1911. In 1914, the bishop of Graz sent Hudal to the Anima in Rome to continue his studies. Such appointments were considered a stepping stone to higher office in the Austrian church. Hudal helped to ensure that the leadership of the parish and the institute remained in Austrian hands despite German diplomatic efforts to change that. At the time, Hudal believed his only suitable further promotion was to the episcopal seat at Graz, whereas his bishop believed a university post in Graz was a sufficiently dignified position.

During World War One, Hudal served as a military chaplain in the Habsburg army. He gave rousing sermons in German, Italian, and Slovenian. Soon after the collapse of Austria-Hungary following the war, Hudal began promoting Germany’s cultural mission in Europe and the political hegemony arising from that mission. In 1919, Hudal became a professor of Old Testament Scripture at Graz University and achieved tenure in 1923. The same year, he was appointed coadjutor at the Anima (he took a leave from Graz to pursue this) and became its rector in 1937. In 1934, Hudal seized the opportunity to promote himself by producing a draft concordat with Austria long before either the Austrian government or the Holy See considered such a treaty. Hudal’s contributions to the concordat won him the favor of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Cardinal Secretary of State and later Pope Pius XII, at least for a time. His role in placing Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythos des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts on the index of forbidden books in 1934 also enhanced his standing in the Vatican. Furthermore, it showed how opposed Hudal initially was to National Socialist ideology.

As Sachslehner shows, Hudal suffered humiliating career reversals during his early years. Hudal repeatedly attempted to rewrite his biography to erase his working-class roots and Slovenian paternity. In 1923, Cologne’s Archbishop Cardinal Karl-Joseph Schulte, who wanted to end Austrian leadership of the German-speaking community in Rome, strongly opposed Hudal’s appointment as Coadjutor of the Collegio Teutonico di Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome. Fully expecting to be ordained Archbishop of Vienna upon the death of Cardinal Friedrich Gustav Piffl in 1932, Hudal ordered a bishop’s crozier. Ultimately, he had to wait a year before his ordination as titular bishop of Aela without a proper diocese. Furthermore, as World War Two ended, Hudal began emphasizing his Austrian heritage and his critiques of National Socialism. He sought good relations with the Allies in Rome and elsewhere. Sachslehner also shows Hudal’s exaggerated self-importance, shown when he sent memoranda to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin on a possible post-war Danubian confederation.

Later, Hudal nurtured plans for a new university chair in Vienna dedicated to the study of the Eastern churches, which he intended to fill himself. This also did not come to pass. These details confirm what other scholars have written about Hudal’s most active years, and Sachslehner puts these activities within the broader contexts of Hudal’s life.

Once Hudal became rector of the Anima, in spite of the opposition of Cardinal Schulte and with the support of the Austrian government, he tried to emphasize the Anima’s all-German identity. Like many Germans and Austrians, Hudal rejected the outcome of World War One. Hudal did not seek, however, the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic empire, nor did he seek, at the time, the Anschluss (the unification of Austria and Germany). He imagined Austria’s future as a strong, independent state. Furthermore, Sachslehner shows that, throughout his life, Hudal still ranked commitment to the church and faith above his commitment to the German nation. As others have shown, Hudal’s views on National Socialism changed over time. Sachslehner contributes a differentiated view of these changes. Hudal rejected National Socialism’s desire to replace faith in Christianity with racial faith, but he embraced antisemitism and ethnic prejudice. His antisemitism stemmed from his formative years in Graz. In 1919, he blamed Austria-Hungary’s defeat on the “Jewish Bolshevik [Karl] Kautsky.” Hudal always associated communism with Judaism. Sachslehner argues that Hudal’s desire for recognition fed his increasingly close ties to National Socialism. In 1937, the same year he became rector of the Anima, he published Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, seeking to build a bridge between the Church and National Socialism. He argued that only German culture could guarantee the continuation of Christian values in Europe. The work showed that Hudal completely misunderstood the National Socialists’ intentions and overestimated his own importance. The changes in National Socialist ideology that Hudal considered necessary and possible were, in fact, unimaginable. The Grundlagen sapped much of Hudal’s support in the Vatican curia, and after the 1938 Anschluss, which Hudal had promoted, he lost all favor with Pacelli (the future Pius XII). Pacelli forbade Hudal from celebrating a Te Deum thanksgiving service for the Anschluss. While many historians have focused on Hudal’s work enabling hunted war criminals to escape, Sachslehner shows that these pre-war events marked the beginning of Hudal’s downfall.

The story of Hudal’s wartime and post-war activities is well known. Working with archival records from the Anima made available in 2006, Sachslehner offers some useful corrections to the most extreme accusations leveled against Hudal. For example, during the German occupation of Rome, Hudal hid both hunted Germans and Austrians (such as conservatives who had been safe in fascist Italy, such as the German army officer Bernhard Schilling [161]) and Allied soldiers in the Anima. During the 1943 raids against Roman Jews, German diplomats asked Hudal to send a letter to the German Commandant of Rome, Major General Rainer Stahel. Written at the clandestine prompting of German embassy officials, it was intended to hasten end of the raids. (159) Because of bureaucratic delays, the letter reached Berlin when the raids had all but ended. It should be noted here that, while Sachslehner cites his source, Rom 1943-1944 by Robert Katz, the citation is incomplete (the complete title is Rom, 1943-1944: Besatzer, Befreier, Partisanen und der Papst [Essen, 2006]), and Sachslehner does not list this volume in the bibliography. Sachslehner notes that Hudal was “not particularly proud” of the letter and quotes Hudal’s secretary, Joseph Prader, who claimed, “Hudal absolutely hated Jews.” (159) Sachslehner points out that, after the war, he did help known war criminals escape but was not responsible for the escape of Adolf Eichmann. Hudal abused his ties to Austria in order to provide false documents for these criminals. Hudal seemed to see no contradiction between hiding anti-fascists during the war and helping fascists escape after the war. To him, they were all persecuted Christian victims deserving of Christian charity. In Rome, Hudal sought to maintain control of the Austrian community. Suddenly, he supported Austrian independence and claimed to represent Austrian interests when dealing with Allied officials in Rome. There is some evidence that Hudal acted as a paid informant for U.S. military counterintelligence services. As in so many cases from this period, a strident anti-Communism made up for Hudal’s previous fascist leanings.

Sachslehner again points to Hudal’s need for recognition as a driving force for his post-war actions, which occurred after he had lost Vatican support and his academic position at Graz, for which he had been paid during his entire lengthy absence. By the early 1950s, his continued presence at the Anima proved an embarrassment to Church officials, who forced him from office, which left him embittered.

Sachslehner provided no evidence that Hudal ever admitted the contradictions in his life, even to himself.

Sachslehner’s argument about and analysis of Hudal’s early life are persuasive. Some scholarly concerns about the work remain. The citations of archival materials lack detail. In some cases, only box numbers are mentioned. In others, even box numbers are missing.  Sachslehner includes some questionable works among his cited sources, such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s The Catholic Church and the Holocaust and the judgment of a German neo-Nazi. Even if he critiques their judgment, why include them at all in his review of the literature? Hudal’s views and actions justly led to his condemnation by less controversial scholars. Even so, Sachslehner’s contribution to scholarship on this subject might have been his emphasis on what one might consider Hudal’s inferiority complex about his origins and certainly on his ambition and need for recognition as motives for his views and actions. But do they change the field’s judgment of Hudal’s role in this dark chapter of history? Not significantly. Worse, there is good reason to believe that academic dishonesty undermines any value of this work.

Given the problematic use of the Katz volume mentioned above, it is not surprising that other reviewers have found additional scholarly problems. A fellow editor directed this reviewer to a lengthy review of Sachslehner’s work by Austrian historian Dirk Schuster[i], who found a number of problematic passages. Conducting further research, Schuster found an uncanny resemblance between passages in Sachslehner’s volume and the unpublished dissertation of Markus Langer, entitled “Alois Hudal: Zwischen Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: Versuch einer Biographie,” submitted in 1995.[ii] First, the chapter and sub-chapter titles in Sachslehner vary very little from those of Langer.[iii] Second, according to Schuster, there are passages in Sachslehner’s work that are simple paraphrases of Langer’s work.[iv] While Sachslehner mentions some of Langer’s work in the endnotes (for example, endnote 148), he omits the title and any additional information, and he omits Langer’s work entirely from the bibliography.

In the case of another scholar’s work, Schuster accuses Sachslehner of plagiarism. Schuster shows that Sachslehner copied verbatim several text passages from the work of Hansjakob Stehle in Die Zeit.[v] While Sachslehner mentions several works by Stehle in his endnotes and bibliography, he does not identify them as quotations. Schuster also mentions other problems concerning inaccurate citations. Simply put, with his name on the book, Sachslehner claims credit for scholarly research that he never conducted. This renders the work unreliable and the author’s conduct unethical.

Thus, we will continue to wait for an authoritative biography of Alois Hudal to appear. As Thomas Brechenmacher points out, Hudal offers much more scope for research than what has been published up to this point.[vi]

 

Notes:

[i] Dirk Schuster, “Sachslehner, Johannes: Bischof Alois Hudal. Hitlers Mann im Vatikan. Ein dunkles Kapitel in der Geschichte der Kirche “ In Religion in Austria 6 (2021), 395-411.

[ii] Schuster, 396.

[iii] Schuster, 400.

[iv] Schuster, 402.

[v] Hansjakob Stehle, “Pässe vom Papst? Aus neuentdeckten Dokumenten: Warum alle Wege der Ex-Nazis über Rom nach Südamerika führten.” Die Zeit, 4 May 1984, 9-12, discussed in Schuster, 403-407.

[vi] Thomas Brechenmacher Alois Hudal – der „braune Bischof“? In: Freiburger Rundbrief. Nr. 2 14, 2007, ISSN 0344-1385, S. 130–132.

 

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Review of Klara Kardos, The Auschwitz Journal: A Catholic Story from the Camps

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Klara Kardos, The Auschwitz Journal: A Catholic Story from the Camps, trans. Fr. Julius D. Leloczky, O.Cist. (Paraclete Press, 2020). 144 Pp.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

In June 1944, a young Hungarian woman, born in 1920, received the order that she had to vacate her apartment, taking with her only the things she could carry. She noted in her account, “My packing was very simple indeed: just the bare minimum of the most needed items. As we were leaving, the apartments were sealed… And in our room was hanging on the wall – I left it there deliberately – the crucifix.” (33-34) Until the last portion of the sentence is reached, the reader might assume this is going to be an account of one of the millions of Jewish victims of Nazi horrors. Indeed, the young Hungarian woman, Klara Kardos, was born into a Jewish family although her mother had converted to Catholicism before Klara was born, Klara’s parents were divorced, and Klara had been baptized as an infant into the Catholic faith. For many non-experts, Klara’s deportation to a ghetto in Szeged, then her internment in Auschwitz concentration camp, where her forearm received the tattoo, might come as a shock. How could Klara, who identified wholeheartedly with her Catholic identity, end up in a Nazi death camp as a Jew? Of course, for the experts this is perhaps not as puzzling, as Klara and her extended family fell under the Nazi racial classification system as racially Jewish. But Klara’s account of her experiences during the Holocaust are not the usual recounting. To Klara, her suffering (of which she speaks very little) was part of her Catholic faith. She understood, as a well-educated young woman, that she was persecuted for an identity to which she did not ascribe, and that many of the Jewish inmates did not feel a connection to her since she had never been a practicing Jew. The entire, relatively short account that Klara provides for her readers is focused, not on the countless indignities and the unimaginable horrors recounted by Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi, but instead on how her memories of she fought to preserve and persevere in her faith. For some readers, this account might be somewhat disappointing. It does not seek to dwell on the nightmarish world created by the Nazis. Instead, she wants her readers to focus on how she relied on her Catholic faith as a way to sustain the human spirit in the midst of untold tragedies.

Much like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Frankl made a conscious decision to fight to retain his humanity against all odds, Klara Kardos’ story features a similar decision. In Kardos’ case, though, her prayer life and her way of framing her persecution allowed her to detach herself from the day-to-day horrors she was experiencing. When Kardos was deported from the Szeged ghetto to Auschwitz, her spiritual director (a priest not named in full in the account) wrote of her walking to the deportation train as a “deportee of heroic spirit… with a triumphant smile on her face for the road of sufferings. Will she ever return to Szeged? Only God can say. We can only hope. But her heroic spirit that was shining from her soul showed the world that the soul, even in a body trampled underfoot, in the midst of ignominy, can be victorious over her oppressors…” (42). Kardos humbly remarks that the priest’s words were very idealistic, but she also confirms that the essence of his words describing her departure were true.

The train journey to Auschwitz took three long, excruciatingly hot days in June 1944. Kardos describes the fear, the rumors, and the “absurd” (44) movement of people in her train carriage, putting on all of their best clothes. Not knowing where they were being taken to, many hoped that, if they dressed up in their best outfits, they would make a strong impression. In contrast to their actions, Kardos relates how she took out the pictures of her parents and younger sister and ripped the photos up, letting them out slip through the train carriage’s ventilation slit. She explains that she did not want “sacrilegious” hands to touch her family photos. Once she had disposed of her precious family photos, she placed her rosary around her neck and waited for what might happen next. (45-46)

She arrived at Auschwitz on 28 June 1944. Kardos rejects delving into the details of de-training, not because she does not recall the bad memories, but because, she says, “I do not consider it worth doing.” (49) Like Frankl’s earlier work, Kardos asserts that she is most interested in writing how “we tried to remain human in the midst of inhuman circumstances.” (51) She chooses to focus on the unexpected times she encountered expressions of love, although that does not prevent her from also detailing at least some of the dehumanizing procedures experienced by those selected for work in the camp. She also writes of the hastily prepared barracks for the Hungarian deportees, the last large Jewish community in Europe to be deported. Kardos describes the summer thunderstorms with rain pouring in through the roof, soaking everyone inside. No beds, cots, or planks to sleep on were available there. During one particular drenching nighttime rainstorm, Kardos recalled how several of the women took their shared blanket, made a tent over their heads and stood reciting the rosary prayer in the wet darkness. Kardos recalls how more women joined in. On the first Sunday in Auschwitz, Kardos relates how, as a young child, she had memorized the Latin text of the ordinary mass, and the Christian women in the barracks held a version of the mass. The end of the service concluded with the recitation of religious Hungarian poems with Kardos writing, “That’s the way the Christian community of Auschwitz celebrates the Lord’s Day…” (72) Of course, readers should remind themselves of two important pieces of context: the first, that Catholic masses at this time were always said in Latin, and the Hungarian-language poems were an expression of a specific community; the second, that, to the Nazi regime and its collaborators, Klara Kardos was not considered to be a Christian at all. Hence, she is in Auschwitz because she has been placed into the racial category of being Jewish, not because of her Catholic faith.

Kardos writes of the changes that she experienced in her spiritual life at Auschwitz. She used to meditate on texts of the Holy Mass during the long, drawn-out Appels (roll calls). She talks about “spiritual Communion”, meaning that spending time counseling other camp inmates, reciting poems by Catholic Hungarian authors, and participating in “cultural events” when inmates were restricted to their barracks was her way of practicing her faith in the absence of priests and the sacrament of the Eucharist. She also notes that she spent time trying to get to know the “real” Jews (79), although she recognizes that there was a wide abyss between those who were imprisoned in Auschwitz as “real” Jews versus “non-Aryan Christians.” No matter the divide, the Nazi regime worked to control all of the camp population. By July 1944, Kardos was selected along with ninety-nine other women to be moved to the “Czech camp”, Camp B2. While in Camp B2, Klara forms friendships with three other women, and she comments on how the barracks had furniture to sleep on and even water. Despite these “improved” conditions, starvation began to take its toll of most of the women, although Kardos would not indulge in fantasies about food with other inmates. Instead, she would separate from those conversations, stating that “the spirit, not the body, should enforce its rights!” (92) She reiterates this emphasis on the spiritual over physical reality when she describes how, at one point in the camp, sitting alone on her camp bunk, she experienced a visitation of her loved ones in her mind. (98) To Kardos, this experience was so intense that it served to confirm her core belief that the spirit can triumph over the limitations of physical reality. But physical reality was always lurking in the background, and Kardos contracted scarlet fever, landing her in the camp infirmary for a time.

Kardos used her time in the infirmary to increase her spiritual devotions, converting another ill inmate to Catholicism while interned there. After three months in Auschwitz, Kardos was once again selected to leave that particular Hell. Her first stop after Auschwitz was Bergen-Belsen, and after a few weeks in Bergen-Belsen, she was sent to work in an ammunition factory. In the factory, she mentions the 12-to-15 hour shifts that the inmates were forced to work. Despite the freezing cold and difficult circumstances, Kardos writes, “Trust in God and sheer willpower: they were our saviors. For the sake of God’s love, I just should not become sick! … This inner power of resistance was decisive. Whoever lost that also lost herself. But whoever clung to God possessed the greatest inner strength.” (117-118) Kardos worked in the ammunition factory from October 1944 to April 1945. Throughout the whirring machinery of the factory and the potentially dangerous conditions of working with explosives, Kardos reiterates her theme throughout the work: “To put it simply: we kept struggling to remain human!” (121)

Finally, on 14 April 1945, the first American troops entered the ammunition factory grounds. Kardos and one of her friends, Franci, walked to the nearby city to find a Catholic Church so that they could confess in order to attend Sunday mass and receive the Eucharist. Kardos was ill with a high fever at this time and, after finally getting to attend mass, she fainted. She was transported to the city hospital where Catholic nurses took care of her. While recovering her strength in the hospital, one of the nurses gave her a journal and a pen.  Her first entry in the journal, which she kept with her for the rest of her life, read, “April 18, 1945, Wednesday. Magnificat! May this be the first word that I write down. …I have a Bible! I have a journal!—I have everything! With this I begin my little spiritual exercise in the sanatorium, if God helps me!” (137) Her journal recorded the suicide of Hitler, the death of Mussolini, and finally, her ability to make the journey back to Hungary. There Kardos worked through the slow and difficult process of reacclimatizing to middle-class standards of life. In her final pages of the book, Kardos reminds her readers that people kept asking for her personal story and she hoped that people who read the work would come to some degree of understanding of the “unbelievable, sweet paradox: the bliss, the happiness of suffering.” (143) Although most readers might never associate the words “bliss” or “happiness” with Auschwitz, to Kardos she firmly believed the her suffering was sanctified according to the principles of her Catholic faith.

Kardos’ account of her experiences provide insight into the life of a very religious and spiritual person who was constantly striving to understand what God wanted her to experience and how she might interpret those experiences. Her faith that her suffering served a larger purpose kept her mentally strong during unimaginable trials. Her faith eventually led her away from Communist Hungary to Austria and she passed the rest of her life translating religious works for the Catholic Church. Though a short account, it emanates with the power of Kardos’ religious fervor and opens up our world to an examination of how “non-Aryan Catholics” experienced the horrors of the Holocaust.

 

 

 

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Article Note: William Skiles, “Franz Hildebrandt on the BBC: Wartime Broadcasting to Nazi Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Article Note: William Skiles, “Franz Hildebrandt on the BBC: Wartime Broadcasting to Nazi Germany,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 74, no. 1 (January 2023): 90-115.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, William Skiles analyzes thirteen wartime sermons of Franz Hildebrandt, the prominent German-Jewish pastor who emigrated to England in 1937 to minister and teach at Cambridge. As the author explains, Hildebrandt studied theology in Berlin and ministered in the Lutheran Church, working alongside Martin Niemöller in Berlin-Dahlem. Also a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hildebrandt joined the Pastors’ Emergency League and Confessing Church, contributed substantially to the 1936 Confessing Church memorandum to Hitler, and was arrested and detained for four weeks in 1937 for illegally collecting funds for the Confessing Church. Upon his release, he moved to England. Briefly interned as an “enemy alien” in 1939, Hildebrandt ended up working for the BBC Overseas Service, writing and preaching German-language sermons as part of the secret Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, a section within the British Ministry of Information. Skiles explains that these sermons were part of a “white” or open propaganda campaign and “developed as a way for the British to demonstrate love and care for the spiritual needs of their brothers and sisters in Nazi Germany” (96) through the provision of German-language church services over the radio.

In his analysis, Skiles identifies various themes running through Hildebrandt’s thirteen wartime propaganda sermons broadcast into Germany by the BBC. First was the idea that British and German Christians were more unified by their shared faith than divided by national rivalries, and that this unity compelled Christians from other countries to support their German counterparts who were suffering under Nazi persecution.

Second, Hildebrandt preached against Nazism, describing it as a false ideology. In doing so, he also argued that the German churches were betraying Christ by collaborating with Nazism. Another aspect of this was Hildebrandt’s criticism of Nazi racial superiority. Only God’s grace accepted by faith would save the German people. A life of service to others would be the outcome.

Third, Skiles argues that Hildebrandt’s sermons called Germans to reassess their loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state. Christians in Germany should honour their government leaders, but only insofar as those leaders led their people to honour God. For reasons which remain unclear, Hildebrandt seems to have preached little about the plight of the Jews, even though he was well-connected and knew about the mass murder of Jews in Europe through his work in the BBC.

There are two aspects of Hildebrandt and his propaganda sermons about which I would like to know more.

First, what role did Hildebrandt’s status as a “non-Aryan” Christian play in his work? Skiles notes that Hildebrandt was one of 117 “non-Aryan” pastors he has found within the German Protestant clergy of the 1930s[1] and adds that “National Socialist supporters in the German Churches challenged their Christian identity, imposed a Jewish identity upon them and ultimately sought their exclusion from German public life” (93). That said, though Skiles states that Hildebrandt’s Jewish ancestry played a role in his arrest, imprisonment, and exile (90-91), it would be helpful to know more about how that unfolded, since so much of Hildebrandt’s energy and passion revolved around his commitment to Scripture and doctrine and his intensive work in the Pastors’ Emergency League and Confessing Church. As Hildebrandt’s biographer Holger Roggelin put it, it was Niemöller’s arrest that confirmed Hildebrandt’s decision to leave Germany for good. Hildebrandt’s final sermon before his 1937 arrest—on the day he had planned to leave the country—was an exposition of the Acts 4 text of the arrest of the apostles for preaching about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As he stated, the Church’s weapon was “to speak with all boldness [Christ’s] Word and the confession: There is salvation in none other!”[2] It’s not clear that his German-Jewish identity had much to do with these theological convictions, though at one point Hildebrandt did speak up against the Confessing Church’s weakness with respect to Nazi Jewish policy.[3]

Second, to what extent did the propaganda aims of the BBC shape Hildebrandt’s sermons? Skiles argues that Hildebrandt had “considerable freedom” in his radio preaching, noting that Hildebrandt was appointed to an advisory committee and asked for more sermons than he could deliver. On the other hand, though, all his sermons and prayers had to be submitted to the BBC censor for approval (100). Did he choose his own scriptural texts, or simply follow a lectionary? To what extent was he offering spiritual care, or was he more focused on subtly undermining Nazi ideology? To understand the extent to which Hildebrandt’s sermons were shaped by his own concerns, it would be helpful to have more historical background on this aspect of British wartime propaganda, and the wider role of the Sonderberichte or German news talks, which included not only Religious Broadcasts but also Talks for Workers, Naval Programmes, and Forces Programmes.[4] As Vike Martina Plock argues, the BBC European Services determined that Nazi propaganda was monochromatic—focused on the two themes of war and Hitler and directed to the collective of the German nation without distinction. “To develop effective counterpropaganda the BBC had to find ways to dissolve these crowds of synchronised automata by designing programmes that reinstated individuality and strengthened listeners’ sense of personal responsibility.”[5] Religious broadcasts were part of this initiative to target specific audiences, though there were disputes within the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive about whether exploiting religious broadcasts for political propaganda purposes would backfire. Some of the early religious broadcasts used text from Karl Barth’s books which were critical of Hitler and Nazism, and there was some question about whether Barth himself would be asked to deliver broadcasts. (He wasn’t.) BBC officials walked a fine line not only with the content of these broadcasts but also in the way they pitched them to the theologians who delivered them, suggesting that the broadcasts were primarily meant to offer messages of hope and to help ensure that there would be a remnant of faithful Christians in Germany after the end of Nazism. Eventually, as the German Religious Advisory Committee was formed (which, as Skiles notes, included Hildebrandt), Protestant broadcasts were transmitted every Wednesday morning at 10:15, beginning in November 1942. From March 1943, regular Catholic services were broadcast on Sundays and Thursdays at 10:00 am.[6]

Franz Hildebrandt is someone about whom many of us who study the history of the German Church Struggle should know more. It is surprising to me that so little has been written about him. William Skiles’ assessment of Hildebrandt’s wartime propaganda sermons hints to us of the potential for more study on this interesting figure.

 

Notes:

[1] For more details, see William Skiles, “Preaching to Nazi Germany: the Confessing Church on National

Socialism, the Jews, and the question of opposition,” PhD diss. (University of California, San Diego, 2016), 403-408, which includes the author’s list of the 117 pastors of Jewish descent.

[2] Holger Roggelin, Franz Hildebrandt: Ein lutherischer Dissenter im Kirchenkampf und Exil (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 122. See also the many references to Hildebrandt’s collaboration with Bonhoeffer and Niemöller in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. and ed. Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), as well as Franz Hildebrandt, “Barmen: What to Learn and What Not to Learn,” in The Barmen Confession: Papers from the Seattle Assembly, ed. Hubert G. Locke (Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellon, 1986), 285-302.

[3] Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 488.

[4] See Vike Martina Plock, The BBC German Service during the Second World War: Broadcasting to the Enemy (Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), especially chapter 3.

[5] Ibid., 54.

[6] Ibid., 60-62.

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Article Note: Bastiaan Bouwman, “Between Dialogue and Denunciation: The World Council of Churches, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights during the Cold War”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Article Note: Bastiaan Bouwman, “Between Dialogue and Denunciation: The World Council of Churches, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights during the Cold War,” Contemporary European History 31 (2022): 15-30.

Rebecca Carter-Chand, USHMM*

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

In this article, and the dissertation from which it emerged, Dutch historian Bastiaan Bouwman traces the evolution of the World Council of Churches (WCC) during the Cold War, in light of shifting concepts of religious freedom and human rights. Bouwman shows how the World Council of Churches’ early embrace of religious freedom, diplomacy, and dialogue increasingly became at odds with the organization’s reorientation to the Global South and the recasting of human rights as a language of public denunciation. At the center of this story is the WCC’s relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, which was granted WCC membership in 1961. Aware of the Orthodox Church’s limitations and precarious position in a communist state, the WCC pursued a policy of ecumenical engagement with church leaders in a genuine attempt to help the Church sustain itself. Western representatives within the WCC were careful to avoid jeopardizing the Russian Orthodox Church’s position through overt criticism of the state.

Throughout the 1960s it became increasingly clear that this policy was out of step with the intensifying religious and political dissidence in the Soviet Union. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sent a letter to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1972, criticizing the Church hierarchy for submitting to the state, a debate emerged about how and to what extent the Church ought to push for religious freedom. The WCC largely sided with the Church hierarchy, which argued that the Church ought to accept its circumstances and work within the system. Bouwman contextualizes this debate within international politics in these same years, which embraced dissidents and placed them at the center of human rights language. Moreover, diverse religious voices began to engage the language of human rights to criticize religious repression in the Eastern Bloc, from American evangelicals to Pope John Paul II.

At the same time, the World Council of Churches itself was undergoing a major reorientation to the Global South, as decolonization, liberation theology, and social justice became important themes. In this context, the WCC’s policy toward the Soviet Union and the Russian Orthodox Church seemed incongruent with its willingness to speak out against human rights violations in other parts of the world. Bouwman concludes that the WCC’s decision not to support Soviet dissidents “damaged its credibility as a truly global voice for human rights.” (p.30) The organization also faced internal and external tensions related to decolonization and late-Cold War geopolitics. In this way, the trajectory of the WCC highlights broader tensions between anticommunism strands of human rights advocacy and the activism of postcolonialism and social justice in the last decades of the twentieth century.

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Letter from the Editors (Summer 2024)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

As June turns into July, we reach the halfway mark of 2024, and I am excited to bring to you our second issue of the year along with exciting news about growing the ranks of our editorial board as well as upcoming conferences in the second half of this year.

Munich Marienplatz during the failed Beer Hall Putsch. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 119-1486 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5415949.

This issue features a book review from Kevin P. Spicer on Michael Brenner’s 2022 work, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Manfred Gailus has written a detailed review of Helge-Fabien Hertz’s three-volume work on Protestant pastors in Schleswig-Holstein during the Third Reich, based on his doctoral dissertation; I’ve provided the English translation of this review, which was originally written in German for H-Soz-Kult. Lastly, Kyle Jantzen delivers a thoughtful note about Udi Greenberg’s article, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” which appeared in The American Historical Review in 2019.

Our editorial board is larger by three! I am thrilled to welcome our newest editorial board members: Martina Cucchiara of Bluffton University; Jonathan Huener of the University of Vermont; and Gerald J. Steinacher of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Our entire team of editors is looking forward to working with this trio of engaged and active scholars who have established their excellence in researching and writing about central and eastern European church history.

Our associate managing editor Rebecca Carter-Chand is happy to announce a conference featuring contributions from the combined editorial boards of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (KZG) and our own Contemporary Church History Quarterly (CCHQ). Rebecca will be helping to host the conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, this October. Please see the formal Call for Papers included in this month’s issue for more details.

Looking ahead, I am eager to share that, after relatively slender issues to start 2024, we will have two very ample issues to round out the year, in September and December; these issues will include multiple book and article reviews as well as conference reports from several editors, including our newest team members. I invite you, as the reader, to let us know about any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

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Review of Michael Brenner, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Review of Michael Brenner, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022). 378 pages, ISBN: 978-0-691-19103-4.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

Midway in his study, Michael Brenner writes, “In this kind of atmosphere, Hitler had it easy” (162), exploiting for his own ends the antisemitic, ultraconservative, and pogrom-like madness drowning post-World War I Munich. No longer did the city stand for tolerance, erudite culture, and cosmopolitanism but, instead, had turned into a haven for violent right-wing extremism. In his immensely readable and well-searched study, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism, Brenner investigates the individual actors and events behind this change.

Brenner first focuses on the background of the revolutionaries and their relationship to Judaism – a relationship that spanned a broad spectrum. The most influential was Kurt Eisner, who, on November 8, 1918, became minister-president of the Free State of Bavaria. Historian Sterling Fishman, whom Brenner quotes, described “the full-bearded” Eisner as speaking “like a Prussian,” sound[ing] like a socialist, and look[ing] like a Jew” (31). Eisner’s Judaism was not of particular importance to him but, at the same time, he did not bear any “feelings of hatred for his Jewish background” (32). Nevertheless, Jewish spirituality influenced Eisner through the mentorship of the Jewish scholar Hermann Cohen, whose writings emphasized a messianic theology, yearning for earth’s renewal and a heralding of God’s kingdom. The legislation he promoted, such as eight-hour workdays and women’s suffrage, concretized this spiritual hope. Eisner was unsuccessful in translating his ideas into reality and ultimately failed to win the support of the Bavarian population. For example, only one percent of Bavarian women voted for Eisner’s Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (42). His term was brief, ending on February 21, 1919, with a bullet from the gun of Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, a rejected applicant to the antisemitic Thule Society. Though many antisemites praised the assassination, Count Arco’s act failed to gain him admittance to the Society due to his mother’s Jewish background.

Of all the revolutionaries, Gustav Landauer most embraced Jewish spirituality, especially the biblical prophets and their hope for a better world. Like Hermann Cohen’s relationship with Kurt Eisner, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was an intellectual mentor to Landauer, who, more than his peers, “recognized a Jewish dimension to the revolution” (61). On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Council Republic appointed Landauer the People’s Commissioner for Public Education, Science, and Arts. In leadership, he was joined by Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, both of whom had Jewish backgrounds. Mühsam had officially left the organized Jewish community as a religious denomination in 1926 but remained in solidarity with fellow Jews. The much younger Toller came from the “border region between Germany and Poland, where Eastern European Jews intersected with West European Jewry” (77). He rarely referred to his Jewish background during the revolutionary period but, in later writings, reflected positively on it.

All the revolutionaries under discussion suffered at the hands of the right-wing Freikorps. On May 1, 1919, Freikorps members arrested Landauer and “brutally murdered” him the following day in Munich’s Stadelheim prison (67). Mühsam, too, was arrested and imprisoned in a Franconian abbey, a fact that Brenner states more than likely spared him from the same fate. Still, he was not released until December 20, 1924. Toller was active in almost all the revolutionary governments and only survived the Freikorp’s wrath by hiding. In June 1919, he was captured, tried, and sentenced to a five-year prison term.

The final leader that Brenner writes about is Eugen Leviné-Nissen, who he describes as a “‘Jewish Bolshevik’ that antisemites could not have done a better job inventing” (87). Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, his native language was German, a fact that antisemites neglected to recognize. Leviné turned away from his Jewish faith early in life and embraced Communism. Editor of Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Party newspaper, he led the final Communist Council in Munich. Captured on June 3, 1919, at thirty-six years of age, he was sentenced to death and executed two days later, leaving a wife and children.

Although other individuals had various degrees of attachment to Judaism among the revolutionary leadership, chroniclers of the revolution failed to mention that most Munich Jews did not readily identify with radical socialism or support the council-style republics. Brenner quotes Werner Cahnmann, a Munich native and sociologist who later immigrated to the United States, “The council republic was represented as ‘Jewish’ from the outset…. On the other hand, the much more characteristic involvement of Jews on the other side was hardly ever mentioned” (94). Indeed, Brenner reminds us that historian Thomas Weber’s research found that “the percentage of people in the Freikorps with Jewish ancestry roughly corresponded to their percentage in the overall population” (96).

Chapter Three, “A Pogrom Atmosphere in Munich,” recounts the intensification of antisemitism following the Freikorps capture of Munich in early May 1919. The provincial Münchener Stadtanzeiger followed this worsening pattern, deteriorating from its tolerant stance toward Jews to comparing them with vermin – a charge also made later by National Socialists. The linguistic scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer also chronicled antisemitism’s increase, noting, “In truth, the Jews have it no better than the Prussian here; they share the fate of being blamed for everything, and depending on the situation they are either the capitalists or the Bolshevists” (130).

Catholic leaders did not help the situation for Munich’s Jews. Utilizing the online reports from the Vatican’s Bavarian Nunciature, Brenner details how Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, embraced and spread lies about Kurt Eisner’s Eastern European origins – he was born in Berlin – labeling him a “Galician Jew” (119). His assistant, Monsignor Lorenzo Schioppa, likewise defamed the revolutionaries by writing to the Vatican, “The Munich Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council is made up of the dregs of the population, of lots of non-Bavarians from the navy, Jews, natives who have long been rebelling against the nobility and the clergy, and hardly of citizens and soldiers who were actually at the front” (120-121). Schioppa ignored Toller’s thirteen months in the front-line trenches of World War I. Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, joined this clerical maligning bandwagon by describing Eisner as a “foreign Galician writer.” He also refused to meet with council republic representatives. However, Faulhaber granted an audience to Count Arco, Eisner’s assassin. Building on the research of the German historian Antonia Leugers, Brenner quotes extensively from Faulhaber’s diaries, recently transcribed from their original Gabelsberger shorthand and made available online, to reveal the archbishop’s conviction that the revolution was the work of Jews.

For their part, most of Munich’s Jews made every effort to disassociate themselves from the revolutionaries. Brenner stresses that they were not alone in wanting to avoid situations that had the potential to fuel antisemitism. For example, he describes how the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and the Zionist Association for Germany’s Chair Kurt Blumenfeld counseled Walter Rathenau in Berlin to decline the post of German Foreign Minister. Rathenau was murdered in June 1922 by right-wing assassins less than five months after he took office. Still, Brenner emphasizes there was a “wide range of views…inside the Jewish community” (148).

Chapter Four details the violence that followed the revolution’s end. Brenner notes that “between 670 and 1,200 people” were murdered following the final breakdown of the revolutionary governments (163). Eventually, Gustav von Kahr was elected Bavarian Prime Minister in March 1920, supported by the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), of which he was a member even though he was a Protestant. An antisemite, one of his first acts was to target East European Jewish immigrants for expulsion. His first effort was relatively unsuccessful, though he would implement a similar policy more successfully during his later tenure as Bavarian State Commissioner. Kahr surrounded himself with right-wing politicians such as Franz Gürtner, who would also later serve in Hitler’s government as Reich Justice Minister. Kahr’s government enabled the intensification of Munich’s antisemitic atmosphere. Brenner recounts the newly arrived Helene Cohn’s letter to the editor of Das Jüdische Echo, “Never before in my life have I sensed around me such a degree of hate-filled passion as in the streets of this city. When I buy newspapers on the street corner, look at bookstore displays, hear a conversation in a tram or restaurant – everyone is filled with hate and inflammatory defamations of Jews” (185). One of the perpetrators of this hatred was Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, the publisher of Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, the city’s most influential newspaper. Cossmann was a convert from Judaism to Catholicism who worked overtime to distance himself from his background. He served as a chief propagator of the stab-in-the-back myth and zealously propagated antisemitism. He went out of his way to defame Kurt Eisner’s former secretary, Felix Fechenbach, initiating a legal proceeding against him that some compared to France’s trial of Alfred Dreyfus.

This seething cesspool of hatred and mindless violence made Hitler’s rise possible. In Chapter Five, Brenner briefly recounts the 1923 Putsch and its aftermath due to its extensive coverage in other works. He is more interested in capturing the climate in Munich that led to the Putsch. Brenner returns to Archbishop Faulhaber, whom the Holy See elevated to a cardinal in March 1921. In 1922, speaking at the dedication of a Catholic school, Faulhaber declared, “In Bavaria there is still an army that won’t let the Christian denominational school be robbed by the revolutionary Jews. The people ha[ve] people now, and now we will see if we live in a people’s state or in a Jews’ state” (247). The following year, in a sermon on All Saints’ Day, Faulhaber seemingly spoke against Munich’s overarching antisemitic climate by proclaiming, “With blind hatred against Jews and Catholics, against peasants and Bavaria, no wounds will be healed. …Every human life is something precious” (248). Just over a month later, the Central Committee of Munich Catholics issued a statement printed in the Bayerischer Kurier: “The Herr Cardinal said nothing in his sermon other than what the commandment to love your neighbor announces and demands, that excludes no human being from love. Of course, he never wanted to excuse the sins committed by Jewish revolutionaries and profiteers against the German people and their well-being over the last few years” (248). Brenner is convinced that the cardinal had a hand in the statement’s release. His clerical secretary would make a similar about-face on behalf of Faulhaber following the cardinal’s well-known 1933 Advent sermons.

The antisemitic climate in Munich would eventually lessen after Heinrich Held became Minister President of Bavaria in July 1924 and brought stability. Still, no Jewish politician would hold government office in Bavaria following the revolution or even after 1945. Brenner’s work brilliantly reveals how antisemitism rose from Munich’s gutters to dominate early interwar society and politics. As he points out, even today, Kurt Eisner remains an outsider, commemorated only on a street sign in Neuperlach, far outside central Munich. On the other hand, Cardinal Faulhaber and Eugenio Pacelli’s names remain on centrally located street signs in the city’s center.

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Review of Helge-Fabien Hertz, Evangelische Kirchen im Nationalsozialismus. Kollektivbiografische Untersuchung der schleswig-holsteinischen Pastorenschaft

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Review of Helge-Fabien Hertz, Evangelische Kirchen im Nationalsozialismus. Kollektivbiografische Untersuchung der schleswig-holsteinischen Pastorenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022). ISBN: 9783110760835; 1,778 pp.

Reviewed for H-Soz-Kult by Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

Edited by Marc Buggeln; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, with the assistance of DEEPL

This review was first published in H-Soz-Kult, and is used by kind permission of the editors. The original German version can be found here.

Over the last two to three decades, several regional historical studies on Protestant milieus during the Third Reich have provided important insights into the penetration of Nazi ideology and associated behavior within the Protestant churches. The results of these studies were always the same or at least very similar: the nazification of this particular religious milieu proved to be extraordinarily high. In any case, nazification was much more far-reaching than the conventional literature on church history, under the heading of “church struggle” [Kirchenkampf], had previously suggested. This earlier literature put particular emphasis on the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, or BK) as a staunch opponent of the regime.

Helge-Fabien Hertz’s weighty dissertation (2021) from Kiel University, supervised by Rainer Hering (Schleswig- Holstein State Archives), Peter Graeff and Manfred Hanisch (both from Kiel University), now joins this recent research tradition. The study consists of a group biography of the 729 pastors who worked in the Schleswig-Holstein state church shortly before and during the Nazi era (1930-1945). The study is based on a broad range of sources: the clergymen’s personal files were evaluated; in addition, the author has consulted sermons and confirmation lesson plans, denazification files, the relevant state church archive files on the Kirchenkampf, documents on NSDAP membership in the Berlin Federal Archives, and a wealth of contemporary lectures, articles, letters, diaries. Hertz uses a sophisticated set of social-science methods to operationalize the exorbitant amount of data from this large group of people (quantification of “attitudes” and “actions” with the aid of indicators) and to present it using a variety of statistics, diagrams, etc. One must admit at the outset, it is not always easy to keep track of the whole given the extreme complexity of the work’s organization into “parts”, “sections”, “chapters”, and so on.

Volume 1 (392 pages) presents results formulated in advance of theses as well as theoretical and methodological foundations and, as a representative cross-section of the entire study group, ten prototypical Nazi biographies that show the entire spectrum of pastor behaviour: from extreme cases of fanatical Nazi activists to politically-resistant Confessing Church pastors. Volume 2 presents manifestations of “Nazi conformity” in the group of pastors and, with its 900 pages, is not coincidentally the most comprehensive of the three volumes. Volume 3, which is smaller in comparison (around 450 pages), contains findings about “Nazi non-conformity” among the clergy. Such a performance was significantly rarer. If one wanted to differentiate between the contents of the three volumes according to the respective degrees of Nazi color tones depicted, we have the selection between brown (Volume 1), deep brown (Volume 2) and light brown with a few white spots (Volume 3).

For obvious reasons, it is not possible to read through this extensive, highly complex social science work in one go. It is not narrative historiography. Rather, the study can be considered as a handbook for an exemplary analysis of the professional status of pastors in the Third Reich. Thereby, introductory sections in Volume 1 can be read in anticipation of important results. The leading six theses (pp. 4-30) offer a “substantive quintessence” [inhaltliche Quintessenz] of the whole. Thesis Two reads: “The pastoral ministry of the Third Reich [in Schleswig-Holstein] was primarily characterized by collaboration with and affection for Nazism, by Nazi-compliant actions and attitudes.” (p. 5) This thesis is substantiated in the more than 900 pages of Volume 2 that follow, in which the individual subgroups are presented with precise and relative orders of magnitude, using the methods of social science. Although the widespread “Kirchenkampf narrative” of conventional church history is important, it is insufficient to fully grasp the diverse findings of proximity and distance in the relationship between Protestantism and National Socialism. Above all, this is illustrated by the example of the “pastor option” [Pfarreroption] for the Confessing Church: “The Confessing Church was not only not a resistance group. Its main characteristics consisted of Nazi collaboration and inclinations towards Nazism combined with ecclesiastical attempts at autonomy, in connection with Nazi-compliant behavior and attitudes and with self-assertion.” (Thesis 4, p. 15) Volume 1 also contains an analysis of the spectrum of group behavior based on ten possible “Nazi positioning forms” (POS 1-10). The biographies presented here provide an easy-to-read cross-section of all pastor options using the example of selected prototypes (pp. 225-311). Anyone reading this will already be somewhat familiar with the examples of Schleswig-Holstein pastors during the Hitler era, from fanatical Nazi pastors such as Ernst Szymanowski or Johann Peperkorn (both “Deutschkirche” ) to German Christian pastors (27.1 percent of the total group, which numbered 665), clergy who were new to church politics (26.5 percent), and Confessing-Church pastors, who (surprisingly) made up the largest church-political subgroup within the sample, at 45 percent. Among these Confessing pastors were a few exceptional pastors such as Friedrich Slotty, to whom the very rare attribute of resistance to Nazism can be ascribed.

The dark-brown-colored Volume 2 collects all forms of Nazi conformity among the pastors: memberships in the NSDAP or with the very Nazi-affiliated followers of the German Christians [Deutsche Christen, or DC] and the ethnic Christian German Church, as well as positive references to National Socialism and its ideology and forms of practical Nazi action inside and outside the church. For example, forty-five pages of evidence present “verbal extolment of Hitler and the swearing of allegiance to the Nazi state.” Exactly 237 pastors substantiated this type of action. BK pastors did this in sermons and catecheses almost as often as their DC colleagues. Provost Peter Schütt (DC), for example, praised Hitler in his sermon on July 24, 1940, after the occupation of France: “The way he spoke [in the Reichstag session on July 19, 1940], only a victor could speak with the noblest spirit. […] He put into practice the commandment given by our Savior in the Sermon on the Mount.” (p. 604) And the (later) BK pastor Gustav Emersleben was knowledgeable about “right discipleship” (John I, 43-51) in his examination sermon of September 2, 1933: people always would have had the need to be led. They expected help in moments of need and misery. Where a leader emerges from need and misery, there is an opportunity to find true discipleship. “In recent years, no nation has experienced how all this plays out in detail better than we Germans. We were and are […] a downtrodden people; there certainly have been few who have not longed for a real leader. We may well say that he was given to us in our chancellor.” (p. 611)

The wealth of evidence on individual types of action, which are not only listed but also evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively, is truly overwhelming. The categories include: condemnation of the Weimar Republic; the people’s community and the Führer’s will; theological anti-Judaism; and Christian antisemitism. The frequency with which Nazi symbols were adopted in the church, the practice of issuing “Aryan certificates” from the church registers, the use of the Hitler salute, and the denazification measures within the church since 1945 – which in Schleswig-Holstein, as elsewhere, were lenient by all accounts – are also documented. All in all, this heavy, brown-colored Volume 2 is hard reading and offers overwhelming evidence of the frightening extent to which nationalist and National Socialist ideas and various forms of Nazi practice were able to penetrate the inner circles of a medium-sized regional church. The special feature of this study is that this high degree of Nazi penetration can be measured more precisely than ever before by means of empirical social research. In 1933, around 92 percent of the 1.6 million inhabitants of the province between the North and the Baltic Seas, which had been part of Prussia since 1867, were Evangelical-Lutheran Christians, living in 466 parishes. The young researcher deserves great credit for the fact that he presents his often-shocking empirical findings in an emphatically sober, objective and socially-disciplined manner.

Finally, forms of political Nazi non-conformity within the church are addressed (Volume 3). Here, primarily Kirchenkampf conflicts in the narrower sense are depicted, above all in disputes between the DC and the BK. The author sums up this “church struggle” more specifically: while DC pastors conformed to the Nazis almost without exception, BK theologians displayed a broad spectrum of positions. “However, collaboration with and inclinations towards Nazism dominated there as well, often in combination with a desire for autonomy within the church – not a contradiction in terms: the ‘church struggle’ of the BK pastors against the DC and its efforts to transform Christianity under the Nazis often went hand-in-hand with an affirmation of the Nazi (state) and stalwart involvement with Nazism. Although the very few resistant clergy were all BK members, they also remained an unwelcome exception within the BK. Radical forms of Nazi activism remained rare among BK members – as did political dissent. A brown vest with shading and white spots represented the BK as a whole, rather than a white vest with brown spots.” (p. 1697)

In conclusion: this work is undoubtedly an important contribution to the topic of Protestantism and National Socialism, and also to research on Nazism as a whole. It would be hard to find a similarly differentiated group-biographical analysis of the Third Reich. At the same time, the author’s holistic, empirical approach to research destroys long-lasting Kirchenkampf legends, especially with regards to the academic evaluation of the performance of the Confessing Church. In the post-war reappraisal of the church (mostly via memoirs by theologians in the BK tradition and by church historians at Protestant faculties), there was almost always an interest-driven whitewashing. Not by chance did Hertz encounter fierce resistance to his investigation in conservative church circles of today’s “Northern Church.” As far as the church-political moderate BK is concerned, highly adapted to the regime as it was, there can be almost no talk of resistance to the Nazi regime. Rather, forms of collaboration and consent played a major role.

However, the work is not a fully integrated study of the history of a Protestant regional culture. We learn little about the sensitivities and forms of participation of the ordinary church people in the 466 parishes, which are an essential part of assessing a confessional regional culture. However, it seems plausible that the thinking and behavior of the Schleswig-Holstein pastors is a massive indication of the mental characteristics of the church region as a whole: a church region that was strongly adapted to the Nazi regime and, in many respects, even Nazified during the Hitler era. The Protestant churches in the north, the author concludes, were primarily a pillar of society in the Third Reich that consolidated and supported the Nazi regime.

The reviewer’s final wish: the author should write a highly condensed, reader-friendly “people’s edition” of 300 pages (at an affordable price) on the empirical basis presented here. In other words: more narrative and fewer figures, so that the most important results of his research can also be taken note of beyond specialist academic circles.

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Conference Announcement: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Conference Announcement: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

Conference Announcement

Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective 

A Conference co-organized by:

Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary Church History)

&

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

October 2 – 4, 2024

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Members of the editorial boards of KZG/CCH and CCHQ are invited to present papers on this theme, including topics related to the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as well as those related to memory or Vergangenheitsbewӓltigung. We are especially interested in papers that analyze connections, transfers, or entangled histories between German churches and organizations and those in other countries.

KZG/CCH and CCHQ members who wish to present at the conference should send a 200-300 word abstract and title to Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand: rcarter-chand@ushmm.org by June 28, 2024. A quick note indicating your interest would be appreciated even sooner.

For these presenters, the USHMM will cover the cost of direct travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and lodging for the duration of the workshop. Presenters will also receive a $250 stipend for meals and incidentals (eg. ground transportation).

Scholars outside of these editorial groups interested in presenting can also send an abstract to Dr. Carter-Chand by June 28, 2024, but please note, conference funding for travel and hotel is not guaranteed.

The CCHQ will provide a detailed conference report for our readers in the December 2024 issue.

 

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