Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013), xii + 203p., ISBN 978-0-8028-6902-9.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Defining “resistance” to the Nazi regime is notoriously difficult because of the vast array of individual and specific factors underlying the acts that could be deemed resistance. Factors such as race, nationality, religion, occupation, gender, and age, as well as time and place, complicate arriving at a comprehensive definition. Broad definitions of resistance that include all acts of defiance no matter how small are appropriate for certain groups in specific times and places but not for others. In Nechama Tec’s most recent book, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford, 2013) she chooses a very broad definition that tries to account for the wide variety of Jewish acts of defiance in Nazi occupied Poland. She defines resistance as, “a set of activities motivated by the desire to thwart, limit, undermine, or end the exercise of oppression over the oppressed.” This definition is broad enough to include armed and unarmed resistance, small acts of defiance and assassination plots, and, most importantly for her, resistance by Jews, who were simply trying to survive in the forests, camps, and ghettos in Eastern Europe. But broad definitions of resistance like this are problematic for those of us interested primarily in German resistance because a good deal of resistance by Germans was directed at specific Nazi policies. Tec’s broad definition of resistance works well for her consideration of Jewish resistance in Poland, where a morale-building activity in the Warsaw Ghetto counted as resistance, but it lacks the nuance necessary for making distinctions between acts of resistance, opposition, single-issue dissent, and non-conformity in Germany.

stroud-preaching Dean Stroud’s Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich uses a broad definition of resistance along the lines of Tec’s definition. This is problematic, because his focus is preaching in the German Confessing Church. In his 48-page introduction to the historical context, Stroud does not engage the vast literature on resistance in Germany or offer his opinion on the competing definitions of resistance by scholars such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Peter Hoffmann, Detlev Peukert, and many others. But one can easily ascertain that he considers pastors in the Confessing Church to be a part of the Resistance, that he believes resistance among pastors was more wide spread than is acknowledged, and that he views Christianity as a radical alternative to Nazism. It is self-evident to Stroud that the thirteen sermons he includes in his book are “sermons of resistance.”

Of the thirteen sermons, twelve are by Protestants, and include such luminaries as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Martin Niemöller. Paul Schneider, who was murdered in Buchenwald, and Helmut Gollwitzer, who took over Niemöller’s parish after his arrest, each have two sermons. Julius von Jan’s famous sermon in the wake of Kristallnacht is included as is a 1944 sermon by the Confessing Church pastor, Wilhelm Busch. The final Protestant sermon is by Gerhard Ebeling, who studied under Bultmann and Brunner, and later Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde. The sole Catholic contribution comes from Bishop von Galen and is his famous August 3, 1941 sermon against euthanasia. Stroud also includes as an appendix a sermon written for pastors in the Prussian church on the loyalty oath to Hitler, the authorship of which is unclear.

The thirteen sermons vary widely in their topics and in their degree of condemnation of the Nazi regime. In my mind what they have in common is not that they are all “resistance sermons” but rather sermons that in diverse ways seek to provide Christian guidance at a time of confusion and crisis brought about by Nazi rule and the rise of the German Christians. Paul Schneider’s January 1934 sermon rages against the German Christian heresy, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and “leading figures of the new Germany” who embraced racial thinking in the church. He reminds his parishioners of the error of placing “blood and race alongside the will of God revealed alone in the words of the Scripture.” But he also mentions aspects of the new regime that he finds appealing, i.e., “the will for political unity, for national honor, for a social community [Volksgemeinschaft].” Stroud comments in a footnote that Schneider “seems to be looking for areas of cooperation between church and state, as one would expect of a good Lutheran pastor nourished by the ‘two kingdoms’ teaching of Protestantism.” This type of observation, which is extremely rare in Stroud’s book, is of central importance to understanding the weaknesses of the Christian resistance to National Socialism. Stroud would have better served his readers had he chosen to use his considerable knowledge about Christianity, preaching, and the German language to analyze the sermons in greater detail with particular focus on how many of the leading figures of the Confessing Church forcefully opposed Nazi intrusions into the affairs of the church while at the same time found areas of agreement with National Socialism.

Despite Stroud’s background as a Presbyterian minister and German literature professor, he does not provide more than snippets of his own interpretation of the sermons. His 2-3 page introductions to each sermon are mostly concerned with providing historical and biographic background information. His rather long introduction to the book has over twenty subsections on well known topics such as Hitler’s notion of “positive Christianity,” the German Christian movement, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Barmen Declaration. He relies heavily on Klaus Scholder and John Conway to provide the historical context to the Church Struggle and Michael Burleigh for general background to the Nazi period. The most interesting and original sections of the introduction are when Stroud abandons the secondary sources and provides his own analysis or commentary. For example, his analysis of the essay, “Was ist positives Christentum?” by pastor Wilhelm Rott and his commentary on an essay that appeared in Barth’s series Theologische Existenz heute by theology student Max Lackmann introduce readers to two men who engaged in the Church Struggle, who have received very little attention thus far. Stroud also provides at the end of his introduction some useful tips on how to read the thirteen sermons with an eye to how Christian vocabulary could serve as subversive language.

If there is one underlying thesis to the book it is “Christianity’s total incompatibility with Nazi doctrine.” And herein lies the biggest problem. For Stroud Christianity and Nazism are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. He does not address the role that Christian anti-Semitism and nationalism played in Christian complicity, including by the Confessing Church, in Nazi rule and the Holocaust. He writes, “Although the Nazi program included a counterfeit ‘positive Christianity’ and although Hitler peppered speeches with references to God, neither he nor Nazism had a single thing in common with traditional Christianity.” The pastors and theologians in the Confessing Church are portrayed as the representatives of traditional Christianity in complete opposition to the Nazis and German Christians. Although Stroud does mention Niemöller’s early anti-Judaism, he concludes without equivocation that after 1934 Niemöller was an opponent of Nazism. Besides this brief mention of Niemöller’s anti-Semitism, Stroud does not give any serious consideration to the ways that Nazi rule might appeal to a faithful Christian.

The Confessing Church as a whole was never opposed to Nazism as a whole. The authors of the thirteen sermons were unique in their courage and the Nazis viewed them as such a threat that they banned, exiled, jailed, or murdered several of them. Publishing beautiful translations of their sermons honors them and provides a wonderful resource of scholars and students. But if there is one thing that the scholarship on the Confessing Church over the past two decades has uncovered it is that the Confessing Church and its leaders had a complicated relationship to National Socialism that involved different levels of consent and dissent at various times during the 12 years of Nazi rule.

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014), Xx + 384 Pp. ISBN 978-0-295-99308-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Arne Hassing’s achievement is to write the first comprehensive account in English of the Church Struggle in Norway, concentrating on the period following the invasion and occupation of the country by German troops in April 1940. Although news about conditions in Norway, and particularly about its churches, was printed in England during the war as a means of war-time propaganda, Hassing’s more complete study based on the official archives and several decades of secondary sources will undoubtedly become the authoritative account. As such, it is a valuable addition to scholarly learning. As he correctly remarks, church historians of this period have neglected the struggles of smaller nations such as Norway or Holland, and have concentrated on Germany where the complications and complexities of the churches’ relationships to the Nazi state have been intensively studied. But Hassing’s illuminative account of the conditions in Norway has much to offer, particularly in terms of the solidarity of church members against the imposition of an alien ideology and their resistance to any unwanted divergence from the national traditions. Although the main outlines of this resistance, and particularly the special role of the chief bishop, Eivind Berggrav of Oslo, have been known earlier, this book’s detailed analysis will undoubtedly be a major resource for future treatments of European church-state relations during the early twentieth century.

hassing-church He begins with an account of the Norwegian reception of the German Church Struggle in the pre-1940 period, since he rightly notes that both nations had Lutheranism as their official Protestant state religion and as their traditional focus of loyalty. The challenge of Nazi ideology and its attempt to corrupt Luther’s teachings was therefore immediately recognized. Hassing pays tribute to the skilful manner in which Bishop Berggrav differentiated the Norwegian understanding of Luther from that held by many theologians in Germany. He also notes the skill with which the Norwegian church leaders were able to forge an alliance amongst themselves and resolve long-held theological antagonisms, in order to oppose the invaders and their supporters in Norway.

At the same time, he does accept the fact that this Church Struggle in Norway never reached the kind of intensity as for example in Poland. This was due not so much to the firm adherence by Norwegians to Christian doctrine but more to the reluctance of the German governor, Josef Terboven, to engage in an open and costly Church Struggle. Still, Christian resistance of a more passive kind could be seen in the refusal to join the ranks of the pro-Nazi clergy, who followed the line adopted by the chief pro-Nazi Norwegian, Vidkun Quisling. The overwhelming proportion of the Norwegian church members, clergy as well as laity, refused to participate in services which the few pro-Nazi clergy tried to organize. Hassing makes good use of the available statistics to show the bankruptcy of this attempt to create a Nazified Norwegian church.

On the other hand, he also evaluates the somewhat unheroic stand of the Church of Norway in the matter of the persecuted Jews, and points to the lack of any timely mobilization of protest on humanitarian grounds. Even though the number of victims was small, the belated recognition of this issue by Norwegian church leaders has to be acknowledged.

Hassing’s book concludes with a valuable epilogue, pointing out that the defeat of Nazi Germany and the restoration of the pre-war church polity in Norway did not lead to any revival or intensification of church life. In the end, the church struggle reinforced the conservative and pietistic character of the Church of Norway but was insufficient to deflect the social developments led by the socialist and largely secular governments of the post-war period.

My only criticism of this work would be that more should be said about the role of the laity. Hassing’s concentration on the small number of anti-Nazi bishops and clergy, who constituted the essence of church resistance, does not tell us enough about how this lead was followed by the people in the pew, whose attitudes are surely recorded in parish records or personal memoirs. The title of the work would suggest a much broader participation by Christians, but we are not given the evidence, even in retrospect.

Hassing’s excellent command of the large number of secondary sources and his systematic exploitation of the archival records, especially those dealing with the German side of the Norwegians’ church affairs, is commendable in every respect. His esteem for his original homeland shines through, but at the same time, his study gives us a balanced and not uncritical account of the turbulent events of seventy years ago in a country too little recognized as one in which the popular barriers to Nazi ideas were effectively raised and maintained.

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), ISBN 978-1789763552, Pp. xix + 300.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In his biographer’s view, the reputation of Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, has suffered unfairly in the seventy years since his death. He was attacked for being “proud, pompous and prelatical” and is often remembered only for the critical public speech he made during King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis in 1936. This seemed to lack any sign of Christian charity towards the monarch he had earlier sworn to serve loyally. But Robert Beaken presents a more favourable picture, based on a full examination of Lang’s papers in the Lambeth Palace library. He portrays a church leader faced with complex and difficult situations, both ecclesiastical and national, whose temperament was elitist but not cavalier, and who held together the divergent segments of the Church of England with considerable adroitness. That said, Lang lacked both the theological scholarship and the charismatic personality of his successor, William Temple. And in the changed atmosphere of the post-1945 world, he appeared to be a devotee of the past and the top-heavy establishment of the Church of England. In Beaken’s view, however, Lang deserves the credit for holding the Church together during the Second World War without reproach, maintaining the morale of the public and helping the Church to adjust to a variety of thorny political situations.

beaken-lang Lang was born in Scotland, the son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister. When he came to study in Oxford, he switched allegiance to a moderate high Anglicanism and opted to be ordained in the Church of England. His gifts were obvious and he quickly gained preferment. In fact, in 1890, at the age of 36, he became a suffragan or assistant bishop, and at the age of 44 was selected to be Archbishop of York, the second highest appointment in the English hierarchy. He spent twenty years there, before being moved to Canterbury in 1928. In Beaken’s view, it was hardly his fault that he was appointed to York too early and to Canterbury too late in life. He was a loner and a workaholic, and a bachelor who had difficulty in relating to others even of his own class and complexion. As a result, he never established any personal associations and had no following to uphold his legacy. This biography will, however, serve to record his achievements and gives a sympathetic analysis of Lang’s actions during the difficult and traumatic years of the 1930s.

Beaken admits that Lang was ambitious and a snob, and even speculates whether his keen desire to attain high office may have stemmed from a need to justify his conversion to and ordination in Anglicanism. His greatest gift was to be an administrator, getting on with the daily grind of an archbishop. This made for an uneventful career, broken twice by major crises, one ecclesiastical and one political.

The first of these arose in the 1920s over plans to issue a new Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England, to update the 1662 liturgies, which had survived largely unchanged since Cranmer’s days four centuries earlier. After the shock of the Great War, such reforms were held to be necessary for revitalizing church life. The reformers, especially in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church, sought a liturgy more inclusive of their desires for more colourful and prayerful services. But evangelicals viewed such ideas as an attack on the Reformation heritage of their church, and as a dangerous precedent for “creeping Romanism”. By law all such changes had to be approved by Parliament. But when the new Prayer Book was presented in 1927, it was twice defeated in the House of Commons, due to the mobilization of those MPs who were fearful of any innovations, especially if derived from Roman Catholic practices. Following this setback, the then Archbishop Davidson resigned, and Lang was left to pick up the pieces and to try and heal the obvious disagreements about churchmanship.The two major issues were: first, who held the lawful authority to alter the Book of Common Prayer and its rituals; and second, what changes, if any, were desirable or acceptable to the majority of the Church of England? Beaken regards Lang’s actions as insufficient and tepid. Certainly he appointed a high-level commission, but it took seven years to produce a report, and then recommended keeping the status quo. On the second point, there was no agreement, so confusion reigned. Different parishes, even adjacent ones, could and did provide wholly different liturgies, and the situation still remains unresolved. It was not, in Beaken’s view, Lang’s finest hour.

On the matter of King Edward VIII’s abdication, the second of Lang’s crises, Beaken claims that Lang played a much more decisive part. He acquits him on the charge of organizing a “plot”, along with Prime Minister Baldwin, to force the king to abdicate. But he does suggest that quite early on Lang recognized Edward’s unwillingness to maintain the role of a dedicated Christian monarch upholding traditional values, as had his father before him or his niece after him. Lang saw the monarchy in sacramental rather than merely political terms. But Beaken is critical of the speech made shortly after the abdication which scolded the former king for not upholding the ideals of the Church on Christian marriage, and for associating with those “whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts of his people”. At the time Lang was attacked for being smugly sanctimonious—and not only by the king’s supporters. At the time, too, most people in Britain blamed the king’s mistress, Mrs. Simpson, the twice divorced American, for causing the catastrophe. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now share Lang’s view of Edward’s unsuitability, and can be thankful that his successor was quickly able to restore the aura of the monarch, as could be seen in the splendid ceremonies of the 1937 coronation, over which Lang presided.

Lang’s leadership of the church and nation as the war clouds regathered over Europe earns Beaken’s praise. He had learnt the lessons of the earlier war, and avoided any claims of divine guidance or approval of Britain’s war efforts. Most of his time was spent in keeping the administration and pastoral witness of the Church of England going. It was not glamourous, but rather a humdrum necessity. Lang did, however, lead in denouncing the Nazi victimization of the Jews, and guided the country during national days of prayer. Even though he was outspoken in opposing the Nazi regime, he also warned against any spirit of vindictiveness or hatred towards the enemy. He joined his colleague Bishop Bell in condemning the blanket bombing of German cities and gave his support to the pacifists’ desire for conscientious exemption from military service. He also gave leadership to discussions for future post-war plans, but soon the added strains of war-time, including the bombing of Lambeth Palace, led him to recognize that he should retire. A younger man would, in any case, be needed to take up the burden of post-war reconstruction. So, in March 1942 he resigned and was replaced by William Temple.

In summary, Beaken believes that Lang left the Church of England in better shape after his fourteen years in office. At the same time, he notes a certain sadness about Lang’s character. “He sat at the top of an ecclesiastical pyramid, the focus of all sorts of unrealistic hopes and expectations, trying to hold together and to guide his Church, and coping with an unenviable workload. … As Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang simply kept going, doing his best for long hours, day by day, filled with an almost Calvinistic sense of duty and obligation” (238-239). He had inherited a ramshackle church government, and struggled under a heavy burden of office without adequate support. Still, his vision for a Christian England was upheld and in many ways is still in place.

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne, “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity,’” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60 No. 1 (2014): 28-42.

Samuel Koehne, “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg,” Central European History 46 No. 1 (March 2013): 97-123.

In this past year, Samuel Koehne has published two new articles, both of which are interesting contributions to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. One looks at the question from the perspective of the National Socialist movement, probing the party’s use of the term “Positive Christianity”. The other examines the relationship from the perspective of conservative Christians in Württemberg, analyzing their early responses to Nazi rule.

In “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity’”, Koehne challenges Richard Steigmann-Gall’s interpretation of “Positive Christianity”—the term used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Koehne rejects Steigmann-Gall’s view, as presented in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, that “Positive Christianity” was a kind of Nazi Christianity which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical. Noting that Steigmann-Gall never considered the pre-history of the term, Koehne argues convincingly that from the nineteenth-century on, “Positive Christianity” emerged in juxtaposition to liberal, rationalistic Christianity. Right into the Weimar era, the term was widely used to mean conservative, orthodox, doctrinal (i.e. dogmatic) Christianity. It had appeared in Meyers Konversationslexikon, then in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart as well as in Brockhaus, and was featured in church election campaign coverage in the Weimar period—even in the Völkischer Beobachter. Though Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller tried to redefine “Positive Christianity” on behalf of the German Christian Movement, Koehne points out (following the lead of James Zabel) that there were other meanings floating around, including “orthodoxy, neo-paganism, heroic faith, anti-intellectualism and moderation” (32). Indeed, this “lack of definition” may have been an important reason the term was adopted by Hitler for the NSDAP Platform.

Koehne finds a great deal of diversity in the use of “Positive Christianity” among National Socialists. Some meant it in its older sense of “not liberal,” while others linked it to cultic or neo-pagan movements. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself emphasized the role of traditional dogma in turning religious or political belief into faith, and in generating both certainty and intolerance, which Hitler felt to be important for any movement, including his own. In short, it was as “doctrinal faith” that the Führer understood “Positive Christianity” (39). Nonetheless, it is precisely here that Koehne identifies:

the paradox of Hitler’s dogma. In his most public statement it is clear that Hitler defined Christianity as a religious system precisely in terms of dogmatic faith. It is equally clear that those leading Nazis who declared themselves to be Christian adhered not to a dogmatic form like that of the Catholic or Protestant orthodox position, but to a radical and “Aryanised” form of faith (40).

In his conclusion, Koehne argues convincingly that the Nazis were trying to have it “both ways”, a tension revealed in Gottfried Feder’s official commentary on the Nazi Party Platform. In it, Feder asserted that National Socialists supported: 1) “Complete freedom of conscience”, 2) “Special protection of the Christian creeds”, and 3) “Suppression and obstruction of doctrines which are contrary to the German moral sense and whose content is of a character destructive to the state and Volk” (40-41). Clearly, these were not mutually compatible.

Though Koehne has effectively demonstrated that “Positive Christianity” was not a coherent “religious system” (à la Steigmann-Gall), his findings don’t exactly clarify the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. Near the end of his article, Koehne argues that “Hitler’s own definition [of “Positive Christianity”] meant that the Nazis were decidedly “un-Christian” (40). That may be, but as Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated, many leading Nazis self-identified as Christians. By both affirming traditional doctrinal Christianity and reinterpreting it in light of National Socialist racial ideology, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues created a great deal of confusion, both then and now. As a result, whether Point 24 and its affirmation of “Positive Christianity” was merely a smokescreen for Nazi anti-Christianity or whether it represented a willingness to accept the Christian churches as subordinate partners in the remaking of Germany is still open to debate. Koehne rightly calls for more research into how ordinary Christians understood the “Positive Christianity” of Nazism, in order to better define the relationship between Nazism and Christianity.

In “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg” (the earlier of the two articles, in terms of publication dates), Koehne engages in just the kind of research he calls for. This article is a response to Manfred Gailus’ call for new micro-histories of Christianity in Nazi Germany, and especially of the upsurge in Christian nationalism during the Nazi seizure of power—what Gailus, studying Berlin, calls the “Protestant Experience” of 1933 (97). Koehne attempts to discover whether a similar phenomenon occurred in Württemberg, and he does so by analyzing parish newsletters and pastoral correspondence, particularly from conservative (Pietist) Protestants in the Pastors’ Prayer Group (Pfarrergebetsbund) headquartered in Korntal. His goals are to discover how they viewed the Nazi regime in 1933 and how they responded to Nazi antisemitism.

As in the article on “Positive Christianity”, Koehne begins with a historical review—this time, of the relationship between politics and religion during the pivotal years of German Unification (1870) and of the outbreak of the First World War (1914). What he finds is that the conservative Protestants like the Korntal Pietists tended to view political events in religious terms, so that, “as Hartmut Lehmann has noted, events such as the foundation of the German Reich, World War I, and the rise of the Nazis could be read as indicating divine will” (100). Germany was, according to this perspective, a Christian nation.

In light of this, conservative Protestants came to see the Weimar era as a time of spiritual crises and godlessness, the product of the collapse of the Christian state that was Imperial Germany. As his 1933 speeches make clear, Hitler leveraged this fear. He called for a fight against communism and a duty to reestablish national unity and revive the German spirit. He declared his support for the Catholic and Protestant churches, proclaiming that they would play a key role in the moral and national renewal of Germany. He even announced that National Socialists “would create a state in which there could be a really profound revival of religious life” (103).

The Korntal Pietists Koehne studied responded favourably to Hitler’s overtures. Koehne quotes Regional Bishop Wurm, in the Korntal Parish Newsletter, drawing a parallel between the German Wehrmacht and the Christian Church, both of which stood above the conflict of the parties, served the entire nation, and fought “for good against evil and for the well-being of the whole Volk” (105). Similarly, the Korntal Parish Newsletter editors welcomed Hitler’s ascension to power, giving thanks for a Führer as a leader not seen since Bismarck, and one who was saving Germany from Marxist terror. As they put it, “Hitler and his regime have proclaimed the Christian State” (106). For Koehne, this was a revival of the spirit of 1914, a combined national and religious revival in the wake of powerful political events. Here he reviews the excitement of conservative Württemberg Protestants from that time, who saw the outbreak of war as a “spiritual springtime” complete with large upswings in church attendance. He quotes Gailus’ argument that both 1914 and 1933 were seen as “God’s hour” and interpreted “as a reunion with God of a people who had strayed from the true faith, a change of direction toward re-Christianization” (107).

If conservative Württemberg Protestants were pleased with the national-spiritual revival of early 1933, they grew increasingly concerned throughout the course of 1933 over the increasing politicization of the German churches. Whether it was the attempt by Premier Wilhelm Frick to place the Mecklenburg church under state control, the appointment of August Jäger as commissar over the Old Prussian Union Church, or Hitler’s support for the German Christian Movement, the Korntal Pietists understood that the state was interfering regularly in the life of the churches. There was, quite simply, a significant inconsistency between Hitler’s assurances that the inner religious life of the churches would be protected and his advocacy of the German Christians, the group who sought to “bring the Protestant Church in line with National Socialism—taking extreme positions on religious questions in doing so” (109). If, as the Korntal Pietists believed, the churches were to act as “the conscience of the Volk,” then the essential question was not about the national revival, but about the spiritual one: Would the Volk “listen to the voice of the Word of God proclaimed by the church, which does not simply awaken the slumbering good in our Volk but also judges the evil” (111)?

In addition to his findings concerning the attitudes of conservative Protestants towards the new Nazi state, Koehne also probes his sources for evidence concerning Christian attitudes towards antisemitism. He finds almost no mention of antisemitic events like the April 1 boycott of Jewish shops, and beyond that, little opposition to the persecution of Jews or other victims of Nazism. Rather, the emphasis among Korntal Pietists was invariably on the role of the Nazi state in working toward national renewal, leaving the spiritual renewal to the churches. They believed Hitler’s state was creating the conditions for spiritual renewal in four ways: 1) by fighting immorality, 2) by promoting a Christian concept of community, 3) by publicly supporting the Christian churches, and 4) by sparking general enthusiasm in German society, a “spring storm” of sentiment (112). Writers in the Korntal Parish Newsletter called on the German Protestant Church to use this enthusiasm to create a national mission (Volksmission) and hoped Christians would enter into and take on leadership roles in the National Socialist movement. In reality, as Koehne notes, the proselytization went the other way, as Nazi values reshaped the Christian churches. He also describes how conservative Protestants viewed the neo-pagan German Faith Movement as a growing threat.

Koehne finds that, in contrast to the Korntal Parish Newsletter, the correspondence among members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group was more circumspect, a mixture of joy and concern. Yes, Hitler was a God-given saviour, but the German Christian Movement, the totalitarian claims of the state, and the growing prevalence of the “racial question” in the Church was disconcerting. Indeed, one member of the group wondered whether the “‘Aryan question’ … was possibly a satanic devise to prevent ‘a genuine awakening’” (115). In terms of antisemitism, Koehne found allusions to the persecution of Jews, but didn’t seem to uncover much material on the “Jewish Question.” In fact, he wonders whether antisemitic measures had any real impact on these pastors or their congregations and concludes that their “willingness to overlook antisemitic policy” or other “less pleasing” actions of the state (here he is quoting one of the pastors) “meant that they were actively passive, having made a choice to remain passive, to abide” (118).

Overall, the members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group exhibited a mixture of political joy but religious concern. While they saw Hitler as a “God-given Führer” for the nation, they lamented the absence of a “spiritual leader” for German Protestants (119). They worried about the extensive politicization of religion and the growth of a media culture which created a sensory overload and left no room for spiritual reflection. In terms of racial politics, their narrow focus on the national rebirth meant that they found National Socialist antisemitism tolerable. Again, they were “actively passive,” viewing their interests as limited to the ecclesiastical realm and deciding that the positive aspects of National Socialism overwhelmed the negative ones.

In his conclusion, Koehne quotes the Korntal Parish Newsletter’s description of the experience of 1933 like a national-spiritual wave, a return to the high point of 1914 after the low ebb of the Weimar era. Once again, Koehne has demonstrated the complexity of relations between Nazism and Christianity, particularly at the outset of the Third Reich. His conservative Protestants from Württemberg clearly welcomed the new Nazi state and saw themselves as participants in a spiritual revival that ran alongside Hitler’s national revival, as had been the case in earlier moments of national importance, such as 1870 or 1914. Their sense of partnership with the new regime enabled them to ignore the regime’s antisemitism, though the growing politicization of religious life concerned them. Still, in 1933, they expressed “belief in a national revival under the Nazis” and “belief that Nazi Germany was a state in support of religion” (120).

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear Friends,

Freising Cathedral, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freisinger_Dom_aussen_01.jpg.

Once again I have the privilege of introducing a new issue of reviews and notes on contemporary church history in Germany and Europe. This issue features two themes: Bavarian Catholicism under the leadership of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and Nazism as political religion.

The former is treated in an extensive report about a fascinating project to publish a critical edition of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber’s massive diary. This report is courtesy of Dr. Hubert Wolf, one of the project leaders. Complementing the report on the Faulhaber diary is a review by Kevin P. Spicer examining Thomas Forstner’s Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs, an analysis of the identity and culture of Catholic parish clergy in Upper Bavaria from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

The second theme of political religion is taken up first of all by John S. Conway in his review of the interesting new book by Rainer Bucher, provocatively entitled Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion. Then, Kyle Jantzen assesses two recent articles by Samual Koehne, who examines the relationship between Nazism and Christianity from both the perspective of the Nazi ideologues and their concept of “Positive Christianity” and from the perspective of conservative Protestants in Württemberg.

Three other reviews round out our issue: Matthew D. Hockenos on an edited volume of “Resistance sermons” and John S. Conway on two wider European matters: church resistance in Norway and the British Archbishop Cosmo Lang.

We hope, as always, that you enjoy the various reviews and other notes on contemporary church history. Feel free to add your comments at the end of the articles. We always welcome feedback and debate on the books and other material we take up in Contemporary Church History Quarterly.

Best wishes in this season of Pentecost.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

By Hubert Wolf, University of Münster [1]

Ever since 2012, a corpus of sources has become accessible in the Archdiocesan Archive of Munich and Freising, which historians have long awaited: the diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952), which were predominantly written in a shorthand called “Gabelsberger.” Johannes Waxenberger (1915-2010), the last secretary of the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had taken the diaries – against the archbishop”s testamentary will – and kept them in a cardboard box under his bed for decades. That the cardinal had kept a diary was known to researchers. Waxenberger, however, refused to release the records and only transcribed singular pages of the diaries for the purpose of a few academic studies. It was only in 1999 that he concluded an agreement with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich until 2008, according to which the diaries were to be restored to the Archiepiscopal See of Munich after his death, which occurred on June 25, 2010.

This longtime-hidden treasure will now be edited by researchers and made accessible online for anyone to view. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a long-term project for a duration of twelve years, for which the historian Prof Dr. Andreas Wirsching, head of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), and I are responsible. Concise but elaborate annotations will furnish information on the individuals and the most important issues recorded in the diaries. The edition is not only intended for use by historians and theologians, but also by scholars from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Sources edited online are also suitable for the use in university teaching, which the “Critical Online Edition of the Nuncial Reports of Eugenio Pacelli (1917-1929)” in Münster has already proven. The new project will profit from this in many ways. The first texts that Faulhaber wrote during the eventful period from 1917 to 1919, which are of utmost importance for his biography, will be available online by late 2014 at www.faulhaber-edition.de.

A close look behind the scenes of official correspondences

Michael Faulhaber was bishop of Speyer from 1911 to 1917 and archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1917 until his death in 1952. He was of humble birth, being the son of a baker and farmer from the Lower Franconian village of Heidenfeld near Schweinfurt. In 1913, however, he was ennobled and created a cardinal in 1921. Faulhaber was an excellent theologian, an articulate pioneer of political Catholicism, and a champion of Catholic interests. His influence reached far beyond Germany”s borders and those of the Catholic Church. Faulhaber had marvelous connections with the Bavarian people and with the elites of Church, politics, nobility and the media at home and abroad. He was a close friend of Pope Pius XII, but also negotiated with Adolf Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer. The numerous interlocutors that Faulhaber received day by day came from all social classes. It is especially through his published sermons that he reached a mass audience. Already in his lifetime, church members admired him, but he remained highly controversial, especially due to his stance during the period of National Socialism.

The fact that a representative of the Church wrote down his experiences and thoughts in a detailed diary for over four decades is a stroke of luck for historians. Since the Catholic Church is a “global player” and Faulhaber had excellent foreign contacts, there are various possibilities to approach the issues mentioned in the diaries on an internationally comparative level.

The diaries represent a corpus of sources that is unique in terms of quality and quantity. They have been fully preserved for the period from 1911 to 1952. The diaries consist of 32 volumes in notebook format comprising more than 4,000 pages that primarily contain succinct entries on the individuals Faulhaber met as well as brief summaries of their conversations. In total, Faulhaber recorded about 52,000 visits. These diaries are often referred to as a “visitors’ diary,” in order to distinguish them from other, less comprehensive diaries that Faulhaber kept. He, however, used it also to record information he considered important with regard to his views on key political, social or religious events. Whenever he considered such issues to a greater depth or had particularly important conversations, he added ample supplementary sheets, of which approximately 1,000 have been recorded so far. The average length of a supplementary sheet ranges from one to four pages in octavo. The edition will thus offer a detailed view of approximately 15,000 days of Faulhaber”s life.

According to what is known about him so far, Faulhaber was a great and reliable observer, who mostly wrote soberly, but sometimes used very frank words to phrase his opinions. His records were not only influenced by his own observations and experiences, but also by messages received orally and by letter and by reports from newspapers and radio transmissions. He then enhanced such communication with his own interpretations. The entries are usually brief, being written down shortly after the depicted event had taken place. The notes apparently served him as a sort of reminder, not being intended for publication, which is why Faulhaber had the possibility to write down confidential and maybe even incriminating contents of his conversations.

The source is therefore to be considered a highly authentic relic that was transmitted unintentionally. The private records allow for an exciting view of a church dignitary”s emotional world and behind the scenes of official correspondences and official statements. They complement the corpora of sources already accessible, so that new perspectives and motives for his actions may be discovered, which could so far scarcely be delineated. The diaries represent a key to open up his comprehensive papers and to analyze them from particular perspectives. Ahead of schedule, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter made the larger part of Faulhaber”s papers in the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising available to research in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is easily accessible, but has only been analyzed rudimentarily. There is no comparable corpus for other important German church representatives.

The supplementary sheets are scattered among Faulhaber’s papers, but many of them emerged recently in the records turned over by Waxenberger. So far, only a few supplementary sheets have been edited by Ludwig Volk (Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917-1945, 2 vol., Mainz 1975/1978). These documents are frequently quoted by researchers and give proof of this source’s potential for historical research. Ludwig Volk saw only a brief selection of the many items Waxenberger withheld from Faulhaber’s papers. It may thus be assumed that those supplementary sheets that are politically charged are only casino online now soon to be made accessible to researchers and the general public.

Gabelsberger Centre of Excellence is to make accessible further archival holdings

The historical analysis of the diaries and supplementary sheets is complicated by the fact that it was only the dates and names of his interlocutors that he wrote down in longhand, as well as geographical, political and ecclesiastical or religious terms, though often in abbreviated form. For the rest he used Gabelsberger, which was the most widespread short hand in Germany before the introduction of the German Unified Shorthand (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) in 1924. Today, only few experts know how to decipher Gabelsberger. The long-term project therefore also comprises stenographic training, which pursues the aim of establishing a centre of excellence for shorthand in Munich. This training was financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which in general sponsored the preliminary work of the long-term project. With the help of those newly trained experts on the cultural technique of reading Gabelsberger further comprehensive archival holdings will be made accessible to researchers. A survey has revealed that German archives hold ample collections of the nineteenth and twentieth century written in Gabelsberger.

Online edition offers numerous advantages

The online edition aspires to offer a flexible, multidimensional technique of editing, which permits the contemporary display of two textual versions of each diary entry in arbitrary combination: first, the scanned facsimile; second, the precise transcription; and third, an extensive reading version that contains references to supplementary sheets, spelled-out abbreviations, other possible readings and indications of the respective stages. Annotations will appear as pop-ups. The database-based online edition offers numerous advantages compared to a printed volume:

(1) Accessibility: the project supports the principle of Open Access. The diaries and the supplementary sheets will be accessible all over the world, for free and comparably fast and easy.

(2) Efficiency: an online edition is considerably more low-priced and resource-efficient, especially given the amplitude of sources.

(3) Flexibility and velocity: the texts and the pertaining annotations are to be uploaded in sections – and thereby accessible more quickly. Moreover, particularly interesting parts of various years can be transcribed and made accessible online together with the respective supplementary sheets, even before the other documents of that particular year are transcribed and all supplementary sheets have been retrieved. Belated additions and modifications are not a problem, for instance in case further relevant documents are found among Faulhaber”s comprehensive papers.

(4) Transparency and meticulousness: an online edition offers the opportunity to mark cases of doubt as well as various readings more thoroughly than a traditional print edition. This is a huge advantage considering the complexity of the material”s content and the difficulties that are to be expected when deciphering Gabelsberger. The multidimensional technique of editing allows for excellent attention to detail as well as for legibility.

(5) Linking possibilities: the documents in the database can be linked with each other, but also with external corpora of sources, such as image or audio files.

(6) User-friendliness: among the most important advantages of the online edition are the comprehensive search options, the possibility to copy the texts easily and the multi-linking with the entries in the biographical as well as in the keyword databases. Moreover, online editions are comparably easy to analyze from a statistic point of view, which may raise new questions, e.g. as far as writing processes and the development of terminologies are concerned.

(7) Interactivity: online editions make it easier for users to forward advice and recommendations to the project team. There is going to be a contact form on the website of the Faulhaber-edition.

The online edition is based on software called “DENQ” (Digital edition of contemporary sources), which was developed by Dr. Jörg Hörnschemeyer from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome in cooperation with the DHI London. The IFZ assumes the hosting of the database and of the website as well as of the project”s internal server platform, which contains a protected area. Long-term storage is secured within the frame of the Institute”s close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library.

State of research and possible questions

The biographical literature on Faulhaber”s fellow bishops is not very broad yet. Nonetheless, it offers a basis to compare what is representative and what is specific of Faulhaber”s biography. Neither a biography based on source material nor partial biographies of Munich”s spiritual leader have been published so far. A history of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the first half of the twentieth century is missing as well.

What is more, the edition is going to be illuminating on many fundamental questions of Germany’s and Europe’s history. In his notes, Faulhaber reported on the German Empire, the First World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation period as well as on the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. This period saw several surges of secularization and re-confessionalization as well as fundamental theological developments. Many questions that Faulhaber was confronted with are still current today, and essential for the self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

Faulhaber”s diaries and the pertaining supplementary sheets are of particular interest as far as several fundamental issues are concerned, which are in various ways interlinked: the relationship of religion and politics, especially that of the Catholic Church and the “Third Reich,” the relationships with other religions and confessions, and the Church”s structures and networks. Moreover, it is concerned with questions of cultural, religious, and theological history and deals with issues such as emotions and piety.

The interdisciplinary team of the long-term project began its work on October 31, 2013 and cooperates closely with Dr Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising. Members are Dr. Erich Ruff, an expert on Gabelsberger, Dr. Philipp Gahn, a Catholic theologian, Dr. Peer Oliver Volkmann, a historian, Matthias Bornschlegel, a computer scientist, and Carina Knorz and Franziska Nicolay, graduate students, who will critically examine the diaries in their dissertations.

Links related to the project:

Hubert Wolf: http://www.uni-muenster.de/FB2/personen/mnkg/seminar/wolf.html

Andreas Wirsching: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/andreas-wirsching/

Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis: http://www.pacelli-edition.de/

Jörg Hörnschemeyer: http://dhi-roma.it/team.html

Peter Pfister: http://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/Page005788.aspx

Erich Ruff: http://www.erichruff.gmxhome.de/

Philipp Gahn: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/philipp-gahn/

Peer Oliver Volkmann: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/peer-oliver-volkmann/

Matthias Bornschlegel: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/matthias-bornschlegel/

Carina Knorz: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/carina-knorz/

Franziska Nicolay: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/franziska-nicolay/

[1] I would like to thank Elisabeth-Marie Richter for translating the present article and Holger Arning for his contributions to the concept of the text.

Letter from the Editors: March 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Letter from the Editors: March 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear Friends,

Lutheran Church of St. Mary, Marburg

I am pleased to introduce the newest issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Several production delays have slowed our work this month, but finally we have our usual collection of reviews and notes to pass along to you. As per usual, there is no shortage of new material on Dietrich Bonhoeffer for us to analyze for you. But we also have the privilege of introducing a new scholar in the field, William Skiles, even as we note the passing of another, Ernst Klee. And we also pass along to you two public addresses–a memorial speech devoted to Elisabeth Schmitz and a lecture on Catholic responses to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.

We wish you all the best as spring comes to the Northern Hemisphere, even if slowly in many places.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Historical Perspectives/Emerging Issues (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), Pp. xvi + 258, ISBN 978-4514-6541-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The time has come, the editors said, for a synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s theology and witness. So Clifford Green and Guy Carter invited an international gathering of theologians, translators and historians for a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in November 2011. The papers from that meeting have now been published in this book. But since they were presumably prepared in advance, it is not clear how much resulted from this meeting. The reader is left to make his or her own synopsis.

greencarter-interpretingbonhoeffer The tone is of course laudatory, rather than critical. But at least these papers help to set the boundaries within which Bonhoeffer scholarship can flourish today, and thus exclude some of the more exaggerated theories. For example, in recent years, Bonhoeffer has been characterized as a revolutionary, an assassin and an American Evangelical. None of these authors was invited. On the other hand, it is also clear that the theologians and the historians are not always talking on the same wave-length. The latter’s approach is empirical, concrete and historical, whereas the former seem often to engage in highly theoretical, even metaphysical interpretations, which rarely touch down on the solid earth of Nazi Germany. So this book should help to encourage some cross-fertilization in the debates about Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

Victoria Barnett leads off for the historians, along with three other members of our CCHQ team. She has been the general editor of the English translations of the sixteen volumes of Bonhoeffer’s papers, but still feels that this is only a work-in-progress. And just because the epoch in which he lived is gone, so the challenge is to try and understand the church and faith which shaped him and his students. In the thousands of pages which survived–his biographer Bethge collected everything–it is easy to get lost in the forest and not to see the trees. His life and work remain fragmentary and unfinished. And, as he himself admitted, he was never completely clear about his motives. Barnett rightly states that, contrary to his later fame, Bonhoeffer was a marginal figure in the German Church and the Resistance Movement. For the most part, as he himself admitted, he was amongst those who were “silent witnesses to evil deeds.” His life was cruelly cut short at an early age. His theological enterprise was barely begun. Yet his contribution–at a time when European Christianity suffered drastic blows–was an authentic witness to a world come of age.

Doris Bergen takes up the question of why the churches made so few protests against the Nazis’ crimes. Their silence in face of the Nazi persecutions and outrages has been a charge frequently leveled against Christianity. The question, she thinks, is inadequate. It is not the silence, but the noisy and enthusiastic support for the Nazi regime which concerns her most. Much more pertinent would be to question why the churches so readily backed the Nazi state. Why did they engage in pro-Nazi ceremonies, lend their religious support to Hitler’s wars of aggression, indulge in antisemitic propaganda, and even expel Jewish-Christian members from their parishes? She gives numerous and shocking examples of how the majority of churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, subordinated or distorted Christian teachings in order to provide ringing and voluntary endorsements as loyal Germans, and genuine Nazis. This was the very opposite of silence. She clearly does not have much time for those who were later to argue that churchmen were intimidated by the ruthless police state tactics of the regime, and were fearful lest they be taken off to be imprisoned in one or other concentration camp. As she rightly points out, silence or martyrdom were not the hallmarks of the majority of German Christians, though all honour is due to those who chose this latter path. But she might have considered more fully the principal reason for what seems to us now as widespread apostasy. In my view, the root cause lies in the churches’ shattering loss of credibility in the years after 1918 when their strident preaching of an imminent German victory with God’s blessing was proved false, and their proclamation of God’s beneficence had to come to terms with the millions of corpses lying in Flanders Fields. In the subsequent years, the attempt to regain the allegiance of those they had so grievously misled was their principal concern. Enthusiastic support for a popular political movement seemed to be the avenue to make the church relevant again. For Catholics, who had for so long been regarded as second-class citizens, the opportunity to upgrade their status by joining the Nazi bandwagon seemed to secure their institutional position in the wider society. Protestants too were eager to celebrate their national loyalties and to swallow their reservations about the tactics employed by their new rulers. Their complicity in the regime’s crimes cannot be doubted, even if many of them deluded themselves as to its true nature or intentions. The silence of the churches after 1945 was all the more obvious when, for the most part, they showed no remorse or repentance.

Bob Ericksen echoes the same themes in his short chapter, in which he too strongly criticizes the readiness of so many church people to concur with Nazism, including the majority of the Confessing Church, at least on national grounds. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few pastors of his generation who differed from the majority. This only led to his isolation both during his life, and even more so afterwards. For many years after 1945 the majority of nationally-minded churchmen took exception to his political or to his theological views, or to both. It was at least twenty years before the impact of his “new theology” and the prodigious efforts of his biographer, Eberhard Bethge, paid off. Ericksen has more recently written extensively about the complicity of both the pastors and the professors in serving the Nazi regime, mainly for nationalistic reasons. In this essay he correctly criticizes the churches’ readiness to praise Hitler’s brutal imposition of repressive measures, especially against the Jews, for whom churchmen showed relatively little or no empathy, and all too readily accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews were a threat to German values. Their predisposition to anti-Judaic theological biases rendered them, even Bonhoeffer, incapable of changing to a much more positive evaluation of their Jewish heritage.

Matthew Hockenos gives an excellent summary of how the Protestant churches eventually came to terms with this deficient legacy. He rightly questions the extent to which Bonhoeffer himself changed his theology about the Jews, since we lack any substantial evidence after his very tradition-bound statement of supersessionist theology from 1933. Hockenos points out that the leaders of the Evangelical Church after 1945 were all survivors of the Confessing Church struggle, and still politically and theologically nationalistic. When it came to addressing the church’ share of responsibility for the policies of the Third Reich, these leaders “demonstrated more trepidation than courage, more equivocation than clarity, and more obstruction than determination.” Most of them were shocked by Bonhoeffer’s readiness to take part in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and regarded him as a national traitor not a Christian martyr. They stressed the post-war indignities and sufferings of their own people at the hands of the occupying powers, rather than the far greater sufferings their countrymen had imposed on so many other nations and peoples. It took years before Bonhoeffer’s reforming ideas could take hold. Similarly, years were to pass before a new climate of repentance for Christian prejudice against the Jews could emerge. Hockenos provides a notable if brief description of the slow and often reluctant process of “metanoia” in the Evangelical Churches on the subject of attitudes towards the Jews, and contrasts this with the much more vibrant contributions of such Catholics as John Oesterreicher and Gertrud Luckner, whose pioneer efforts were to find fruition in the Second Vatican Council. But thanks to Bonhoeffer’s biographer, Eberhard Bethge, the same route was finally taken by the German Protestants too.

Keith Clements’ fine contribution focuses on Bonhoeffer’s postwar reception in Britain, which was much more friendly and sympathetic than in his homeland. This was largely due to the friendships he had established with the ecumenically-minded community during his earlier visits to England. Principally it was the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, with whom Bonhoeffer had collaborated in the Life and Work Movement, and who warmly welcomed him on his arrival to look after the German-speaking churches in London. Bell found Bonhoeffer a most valuable source of information about the German Evangelical Church, and resolutely backed the Confessing Church in its struggle to block the Nazi plans. It was also Bell, who most courageously defied public opinion and organized the first memorial service for Bonhoeffer–a dead German–in a large London church in July 1945. So too Bonhoeffer found an ally in Joe Oldham, one of the chief architects of the future World Council of Churches, and in Ronald Gregor Smith, the Editor of the Student Christian Movement Press, which was the first to publish Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in English translation. Its impact caused sensational reactions in the early 1950s. All of these men had a deep sense of the crisis facing Western Civilization, and the need for new visions, not just for the church, but for the world and humanity. Bonhoeffer’s message from his prison cell exactly matched their hopes, and gave a pragmatic concreteness to their witness in those years.

Other essays in this collection explore the impact of Bonhoeffer’s theology in such far distant societies as Japan and Brazil, thus giving a world-wide dimension to his legacy. Of course, this global appearance of his ideas and life-story owed much to the successes of his translators, especially into English. Several papers in this book show how this task was undertaken, and how the translators had to wrestle with Bonhoeffer’s cultivated, upper-class, but somewhat dated German, and to find up-to-date and more colloquial expressions in English for his much wider audiences. A very good instance of their dilemmas comes in trying to translate the well-known poem Christen und Heiden. They were also perplexed by Bonhoeffer’s continual use of masculine pronouns for “God” or “Man”, and wondered how appropriate it would be to turn these gendered expressions into some more modern form of inclusive language. It was a delicate course to steer between the Scylla of Bonhoeffer the proto-feminist and the Charybdis of Bonhoeffer the hopeless chauvinist.

The theologians’ contributions focus very largely on Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “public ministry” and are drawn from close studies of his Ethics. As the epoch of European-centered Christianity is increasingly replaced by global diversification, and as his homeland Germany, like other parts of historic Christian Europe, becomes more and more pluralistic in its religious allegiances, so Bonhoeffer’s insights will undoubtedly continue to be of value in guiding us forward in fashioning new forms of discipleship for the years ahead.

Review of Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 222 Pp., ISBN 978-0-19-977357-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

John Stott was one of the most prominent leaders of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England during the second half of the last century. This sympathetic but not uncritical biography records his achievements and places him in the long tradition of English Evangelicals stretching back to the days of the first Queen Elisabeth, and sustained by the faithful witness of such men as John and Charles Wesley, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce.

chapman-godlyambition John Stott was born in 1921 in a well-to-do professional family and, as was the custom, went to one of England’s most prestigious private (i.e. “public”) schools, Rugby, where his talents led to his appointment as Head Boy. At the age of seventeen, he had a classic evangelical conversion experience and invited Jesus Christ into his life. This was largely due to the influence of an itinerant Anglican clergyman named Eric Nash, whose mission it was to attract young public school leaders and lead them to a life of Christian witness and service . Nash remained Stott’s mentor for many years and undoubtedly encouraged him to seek ordination as a Church of England priest. This decision was to be a great disappointment to Stott’s family, as was (even more so) his resolve not to be conscripted to do military service at the very moment when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Stott took advantage of the loop-hole which allowed students in training for the ministry to be exempt from military service. He was thus one of the few young men taking his war-time undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he moved on to the nearby theological college, Ridley Hall, which resolutely maintained the evangelical tradition of those martyrs burnt at the stake by Queen Mary four centuries earlier.

After his ordination, Stott served as curate at his home parish in central London, but his initial fame came through his series of university “missions” which he conducted in several British universities during the first post-war decade. These were aimed directly at the intellectual elite. He avoided the kind of approach adopted by earlier Evangelicals which stressed an emotional “hell-fire” approach. Criticism of American evangelists and their “enthusiastic” tactics was widespread. So Stott carefully argued along traditional lines for a reasoned defence of the faith, aiming for a broad social influence among his peers. Student interest was also built up through the writings of T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, who argued for a rational form of proclamation of Christian truths. Such views only strengthened the desire for a responsible and conservative social order which prevailed in post-war Britain. The ceremonies of the 1953 Coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II gave full expression to this sentiment. Stott was amongst those who looked for a renewed sense of a Christian moral order for which both church and state would collaborate.

But it was not to be. In the 1960s British popular culture moved rather rapidly away from the establishment conservatism which John Stott embodied and sought to inculcate. These were the years of the Beatles generation. Britain had lost its empire and was unsure of any future direction. The moral seriousness and sense of national destiny that the empire had encouraged faded away. Church attendance declined strikingly. Increasing numbers of the population no longer saw adherence to Christian beliefs as relevant to their lives. To be sure, there were parishes, especially evangelical ones, which flourished. Among them was All Souls, Langham Place, in the heart of London’s prestigious shopping district. In 1950 John Stott was promoted and appointed its Rector, or senior clergyman. But the change in climate only led to these outposts of evangelical fervour to be regarded with even more skepticism, and their spiritual ministries were disdained by the surrounding population. Still, Stott served for twenty years and upheld thoughtfully and tenaciously the central core of evangelical beliefs, such as a strong devotion to the Bible and the importance of a personal devotion to Christ. At the same time, his focus was not fixed on the past. He began to recognize that the church’s witness had to be not solely spiritual but also social, not just local, but also—taking advantage of the new means of communication—world-wide. Even though some of his parishioners grumbled at his frequent absence on preaching tours in different parts of the globe, Stott earned good marks for bringing the gospel to new audiences and new converts in a sober and dignified but also enthusiastic manner.

Stott’s priority was always evangelism and the equipping of his congregants to join him in reaching out to reach new converts with the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. But Stott’s witness and manner combined a definitive message with an openness which made All Souls a comfortable and appealing place for all classes. Given the high mobility and transience of the local population, this was a recipe which needed to be stressed. Rigid adherence to Anglican formulaic traditions was abandoned in favour of a more open invitation to any and all to attend and take part in the services. This made All Souls particularly welcoming to students and international visitors and reproduced a sense of Christian universalism which Stott was only too glad to encourage. Stott never married, apparently in order to dedicate himself to his ministry. This of course gave him greater freedom to fulfill his world-wide evangelism.

This latter interest was in part driven by the fact that All Souls remained a stubbornly middle-class enclave. The hoped–for converts from the masses never materialized, despite his training of lay evangelists for door-to-door visiting. The social diversity of the parish was elusive, and was only strengthened when the rise of the welfare state severed many of the traditional charitable links between the churches and the working classes. To the latter, All Souls and its Rector appeared patronizing and elitist. All Souls was a parish for the well-educated who appreciated Stott’s learned preaching, his impeccable accent, and the refined music. But even with these devoted followers, the longed-for revival of English Christianity did not occur.

In 1970, after twenty-five years of pastoral ministry in the same parish, Stott believed he had said his piece. He was disappointed with the results, and tired of the minutiae of parish life. However his ambition drove him to believe that in other places, particularly overseas, new opportunities for evangelism were to be found with more receptive audiences. Stott was a life-long Anglican, but he now began to look beyond the established church, and to seek out occasions where his kind of evangelism could be the vehicle for a wider Christian unity. Although the Church of England had the advantage of a church in practically every town and village, often inherited from the Middle Ages, Stott was worried about the fact that it had too few evangelical clergy. After the 1958 meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops at Lambeth Palace, Stott took the initiative in founding the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion in order “to bear witness with courage and clarity to the great Biblical and Reformation principles.” One of the results was his leadership in the campaign to maintain Parliament’s control over the form of services as enacted in the Book of Common Prayer, which had remained unchanged since 1662. Three hundred years later, both the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had petitioned to have the right to institute more flexible and timely changes to the Church of England liturgy, but Stott and his faction saw this as a dangerous move to increase the influence of Anglo-Catholics in their national church . Naturally the Archbishops were incensed at such opposition, but were relieved when Parliament allowed their petition with hardly any murmur. All this meant that the long-standing identification of the national destiny with evangelical Protestantism was no longer valid. Stott and his friends were dismayed. They were fearful of a Catholic drift in the Church of England and were determined to challenge it. By this time, his position of leadership in this cause, and his years of faithful service, naturally led him to believe that he might be in line for promotion to a bishopric, where his influence would be greatly increased. But in fact this never happened. Chapman gives no reason for this lack of preferment, but possibly it was because his outspokenness was too rebarbative for his superiors among the clergy. On the other hand, Stott was not tempted to join in any move away from the national church and kept his faction of Evangelicals loyal to the traditional establishment.

The challenge for Stott and his less rigid colleagues was to try and hold together Evangelicals of different persuasions with no power other than that offered by loyalty, persuasion and success. At the same time, he was aware that approaches for dialogue with other branches of the church might raise alarms among the staunchest Evangelicals. But as he explained, when accepting an invitation to the World Council of Churches Assembly in 1968: “our desire for dialogue does not mean we think all points of view are equally valid, or all theological and ecclesiastical systems equally pleasing to God”. This balancing act between a willingness to learn from others, and a resolve to hold on to the rightness of evangelical faith, was not easy and at times led to misunderstandings. But it was one he sought to implement in a variety of settings around the world. Agreement among Evangelicals, Chapman suggests, is made all the harder because of their individualistic streak, coupled with a tradition-bound rigidity of outlook, which still looked back to the Reformation and was suspicious of any possible infiltration of Catholic ideas or practices.

Evangelicals have often been tempted to focus on their own holiness rather than on social righteousness. But Stott had seen enough of the social problems in London to recognize that the Church’s witness needed to reach out to those who did not or had not aspired to personal salvation. And his many trips abroad widened his horizons. He began to see that the world’s concerns needed a Christian response. Social action to relieve suffering in an unjust world was to become his insistent theme. As he opened his eyes to global poverty, he was ready to hear the critique of Western capitalism that non-Western Christians were making. In Chapman’s opinion, from being a young preacher with little time for social problems, he became a major advocate for Christian social action.

Increasingly Stott’s sphere of action became world-wide. He readily accepted invitations from numerous countries, and made use of the new intercontinental air travel services, so that, for many, he became a new type of evangelical hero for the jet age. His favourite audiences were students, but his wider fame was seen at the notable Lausanne International Conference on World Evangelism in 1974, where he was the principal speaker and chair of the committee writing the conference report. But Lausanne, which had been funded by Billy Graham’s organization, and supported by most of the American evangelical leadership, saw itself as the rival of the World Council of Churches, and therefore downplayed the emphasis on the social gospel and theological modernism, which characterized the WCC. Stott had a hard task in trying to convince the Americans that his view of social responsibility had to be built into any talk of world evangelism. This was an uphill battle, and in Chapman’s view, it largely failed. But that did not stop Stott from pursuing his hopes for the world without apology.

In summary, Stott was a missionary with a world-wide parish. His ministry was to show that evangelicals could present an intelligent witness based on more than just enthusiasm. His numerous books enjoyed a wide circulation, and, although not original, presented orthodox Christianity with verve, and hence were justifiably influential especially among students. He successfully opened the minds of many followers beyond the engrained rigidity of evangelical fundamentalism, and thus restored the intellectual credibility of his message. He showed evangelicals that it was possible to be devout and intellectually creative as well as politically conservative. In this manner he was able to fulfil his godly ambitions.

Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives,” The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, 23 October 2013.

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

For more information or documentation relating to this lecture at the Wiener Library, please contact Dr. Brown-Fleming at sbrown-fleming [at] ushmm.org. The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

In March 1943, in his final public statement before his death and speaking to the World Jewish Congress in New York, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster and as such, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales (1935-1943) said the following: “I denounce with utmost vigor the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors.” Even the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, nor Pope Pius XI before him, had ever, or would ever, publicly voice objection to persecution of Jews specifically by the Nazis specifically by name. Tonight I will discuss the concerns and preoccupations that shaped the Holy See’s muted response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. My talk today is based on the records of the Vatican nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) in Munich and Berlin during the 1930s. In February 2003, in an unprecedented break with Vatican Secret Archives policy, the Holy See opened those records pertaining to the Munich and Berlin nunciatures (Vatican diplomatic headquarters) for the period 1922 to 1939. During these years, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), served as nuncio to Bavaria (1917), nuncio to Germany (1920), and Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI (1930–1939). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s archives now hold microfilm copies of this subset of critical new primary source material.

Discussions about the plight of European Jewry swirled in the offices of the Secretary of State in the months before the November pogrom. Secretary of State and future Pope Eugenio Pacelli and his lieutenants received many, many requests for help. Internal exchanges reveal a certain level of sympathy, tinged still by anti-Jewish sentiment. In February 1938, Apostolic Inter-Nuncio to the Netherlands Father Paul Giobbe wrote to Undersecretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs Domenico Tardini to softly encourage a petition from president of the Dutch Zionist Committee H.B. van Leeuwen, asking for the Holy See’s support in favor of Jewish emigration to Palestine. “Under the current difficult political and social circumstances, the Jews, declared undesirables in some European countries and in the face of… blood and violence that currently dissuade the pursuit of systematic emigration to Palestine, [yet] obstinately imbued…with the utopia of the reconstruction of the Jewish Kingdom, now want to find territories that are safe and easily accessible…the Holy See should at least support them by smoothing the way,” he wrote. Apostolic nuncio to Switzerland Fillippo Bernardini sent a detailed report concerning the persecution of Austrian Jewry and a proposal for the emigration of 10,000 Viennese Jews to Lebanon in May 1938. The September 1938 Italian racial laws were discussed in great detail in the Secretariat of State before their passage, to the point where the Vatican’s emissary to Benito Mussolini, Father Tacci Venturi, brokered a deal between Pope Pius XI and the Duce that the pope would agree to decline any public condemnation of the Italian racial laws as long as the Duce would give his word to stop persecution of the Italian Catholic youth group Catholic Action, and to agree not to subject the Jews to “bad treatment of the kind that was customary for centuries”—a promise, needless to say, Mussolini did not keep.

The Reichskristallnacht folio is small, containing only 15 documents: 10 letters from private individuals, some addressed to Secretary of State Pacelli and some to Pope Pius XI and all written in August 1938, and 5 pieces of official correspondence. Small in number, letters from private individuals illuminate the atmosphere in Europe and the United States in the months before the November pogrom. On August 12, 1938, German American Catholic Dr. Gotthold Steinführer of Chicago, Illinois wrote a brief and impassioned letter to Pope Pius XI in Rome. “Permit me to make Your Eminence aware of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ regarding the Jewish question, for example in Matthew 8:11[1] and Revelation 2:9.[2] Your Eminence should not defend the Jews, who [belong to] the Synagogue of Satan. Referring to the above words of Christ, those who defend the Jews defend for Satan. The entire Gospel of John shows the fight of the Jews against Christ. The greatest enemies of all Christendom are the Jews, from Paul until today. Yours Faithfully, Dr. Gotthold Steinführer,” he wrote.

I should note that letters to the Holy See filed in other folios also require systematic examination, as they offer interesting insights into popular Catholic thinking, such as the one from Maria Theresa Bauer of Paris to Pope Pius XI noting that a gesture of protection from the Holy Father “would make many [Jews] inclined to convert to Catholicism in these painful hours.” As to those who had done so already, decades earlier, they, too, wrote to their pope. These were Catholics whose families were affected by the 15 September 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Law to Protect German Blood and Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law) and other Nazi legal restrictions.

Mrs. George Marse described herself as “a German Catholic wife to a Jewish German doctor.” Their four children, baptized as Catholics and raised in Catholic schools, were now defined by the Nazi state as “half Aryans.” Mrs. Marse wrote to Pope Pius XI as a last measure following years of unsuccessful attempts to find financial support for emigration. “I have found no help. The Jewish committees are only responsible for purely Jewish cases! Our family consists of but one Jew and five Catholics! How can my husband expect help from the Jews with his Catholic wife and his [four] Catholic children!?” she wrote in her impassioned letter. Another letter, addressed to Pope Pius XI and received by the Holy See in August 1938, made the same argument: “I am one of the many thousands of my comrades in fate… so-called “Half-Jews” [Halbjuden]…our coreligionists leave us in the lurch—no one cares about us!! One wants to shout to all the world, Christians, where are you?” Such letters reflect the general need for further research on discussions and concrete aid efforts within the Holy See regarding those Catholics who were defined as Jews by the Nazi state. Currently, no monograph treats this important subject.

Of greatest interest are 2 official reports from Vatican nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to the Secretary of State in Rome, Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII). They are dated 15 and 19 November 1938, respectively. A brief word Cesare Orsenigo, author of the reports, is in order. An Italian national who was Pacelli’s successor as nuncio to Germany in 1930, 56 years of age when he was appointed to Berlin, Archbishop Orsenigo has thus far not fared well in the historiography for the 1933-1945 period. His contemporary, George Shuster, described Orsenigo as “frankly, jubilant” about Hitler’s election to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933. Other documents across the Vatican archives demonstrate Orsenigo’s admiration for many aspects of the Nazi regime. This is why the tone of these two reports, decidedly sympathetic to beleaguered Jewry, is surprising. Let us begin with Orsenigo’s first report about Reichskristallnacht, dated 15 November 1938. His description of the events themselves openly acknowledged the reality of anti-Semitic vandalism (as he titled the report), and, the Nazi and German popular role therein:

The destructions have been initiated, as if by a single order… The blind popular revenge followed one identical method everywhere: in the night, all display windows were shattered and the synagogues were set on fire; the day after, shops that did not have any defense were looted. Doing this, [the looters] destroyed all the goods, even the most expensive ones. Only towards the afternoon of the 10^th, when the masses, having vented their wildest feelings, and not being restrained by any policeman, did Minister Goebbels give the order to stop, characterizing what happened as venting by “the German people…” All of this easily leaves the impression that the order or permission to act came from a higher authority… The hour is to follow of ministerial laws and dispositions in order to isolate Jews more and more, prohibiting them every commerce, every [ability to frequent] the public schools, every partaking in places of public diversion (theaters, cinemas, concerts, cultural meetings), with a fine totaling one billion [Reichsmarks] to be paid [by Jews themselves].

In the remainder of the report, Orsenigo noted the strong temptation of German Jewry to commit suicide in the wake of these terrible events, noted the positive if limited efforts by the embassies of Columbia, England, and Holland to document these events and protect the assets of Jewish nationals, and openly criticized Poland, writing, “it was… Poland that provoked the violent action of Germany” by refusing to extend the expired passports of Polish Jews from Germany, prompting Germany to “suddenly sen[d] back to Poland tens of thousands of Jews, and among these and also the parents the young exasperated boy [Polish Jewish student Herszel Grynszpan], that then assassinated the German ambassador in Paris [Ernst vom Rath].” In reading the report as a whole, Orsenigo is critical of the events of Kristallnacht, critical of the Nazi state, and critical of the German population.

The second report, dated 19 November 1938, concerned impending legislation declaring “null and void all marriages already conducted” between “Aryans” and Jews, including those marriages in which the Jewish spouse had converted to Catholicism after the marriage. Not surprisingly, Orsenigo objected to the legislation, due to its disregard for Canon Law, but he also added critical commentary about the increasingly radical nature of the Nazi state, noting that “serenity and competence” were “more and more lacking in high places of command” and that there existed a “state of mood that [Orsenigo thought] greased the anti-Semitic events[, a state of mood that] reveals always more and more turbulence and agitation, and is increasingly less able to be controlled,” he wrote.

Let us turn to Eugenio Pacelli’s (the future wartime pope’s) response. We know that he received both of Orsenigo’s reports of 15 and 19 November, and, hence, received direct and detailed information about the pogrom. While no documentation of Pacelli’s response to the two Orsenigo reports has yet been discovered, we do have available Pacelli’s response to a request from Cardinal Hinsley that Pope Pius XI make a statement about the pogrom. The story was this: in late November, Cardinal Hinsley sent to Pacelli a request from Lord Rothschild, whom Hinsley described as “the most famous and highly esteemed amongst Jews in England.” On 26 November 1938, Cardinal Hinsley wrote to Pacelli the following:

…There will be a public gathering in London in order to ask [for] aid and attendance to all those who suffer from persecution [for reasons of] religion or race… If [in] principle [it] were possible to have an authentic word of the Holy Father being declared that in Christ discrimination of race does not exist and that the great human family must be joined in peace [by] means of respect of the personality of the individual, such message would [be] sure [to] have in England and America, [and] nevertheless through the entire world, the [effect of] leading to good will towards the [Catholic] Religion and the Holy See.”

Cardinal Hinsley was, as far as I have found, the only head of a bishops’ conference to ask Pope Pius XI to protest Kristallnacht. Perhaps we can attribute this to his particularly British world view? University of Chichester scholar Andrew Chandler recounts a conversation between Cardinal Hinsley and Winston Churchill after the fall of France in 1940: “I’m glad we’re alone [in this fight],” he was said to have remarked. When Churchill asked why, Hinsley responded that “Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.”

It is worth recounting Pacelli’s response to Hinsley’s letter, dated December 3, 1938, in full. Pacelli’s notes on the matter read as follows:

If the [matter] were of substantially private character, it would be easier. On the other hand, it is necessary to remove the appearance of fearing that which does not need to be feared. Cardinal Hinsley could speak [if] saying he is surely interpreting the thought of the Sovereign Pontiff saying that the [matter] not only finds the Pope in a moment of much worry for his health, but also overwhelmed by the amount of matters before him. It is therefore not possible for [the Holy Father] to [respond] personally. He [Cardinal Hinsley] can say that he is interpreting the thoughts of the Holy Father which view all aid to those who are unhappy and unjustly (unworthily or dishonorably) suffering with a humane and Christian eye.

This response was telegraphed to Cardinal Hinsley on December 3rd. Were Pacelli’s comments about the health of Pope Pius XI accurate? David Kertzer’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that the pope suffered a heart attack on November 25^th. We will return to this point—the pope’s health and the impact it had on the ability of Secretary of State Pacelli to maneuver—later in this lecture.

On December 10th, illustrious figures that included Cardinal Hinsley; William Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury; Lord Rothschild; Clement R. Attlee, leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons; Sir Alan Anderson, Conservative MP; and General Evangeline Booth, representative of the Salvation Army, gathered at the invitation of Sir Frank Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House. A resolution “offering whole-hearted support” for the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees was “unanimously adopted.” The Baldwin refugee fund for victims of religious and racial persecution, first announced by former prime minister, Lord Stanley Baldwin, 1^st Earl of Baldwin, during a radio address on the evening of December 8th, was expressly meant to provide financial aid to both Jews and “non-Aryan Christians:”

Tonight, I plead for the victims who turn to England for help, the first time in their long and troubled history that they have asked us in this way for financial aid…the number of these so-called non-Aryan Christians, who, according to German law, are regarded as Jews, certainly exceeds 100,000; in addition there are some half a million professing Jews, and no words can describe the pitiable plight of these 600,000 human souls. What can be done to help?

A brief article in the New York Times, entitled, it is interesting to note, Pope Backs Britons on Aid to Refugees, appeared that same day. According to the article, “one of Pope Pius [XI]’s rare messages to an interdisciplinary body was read at a meeting representing all faiths and political parties, called by the Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House today to support the Earl Baldwin Fund for the victims of religious and racial persecution.”

It was Lord Rothschild who read the Vatican telegram to the assembled. Before reading the telegram, Lord Rothschild remarked that “Cardinal Hinsley had written to Rome on his behalf,” and that “everyone respected the Pope for his courage and unswerving adherence to the principles which the whole civilized world knew must be maintained if civilization was to persist.” The Vatican telegram, as reproduced in the London Times, read as follows:

The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

Cardinal Hinsley’s presence at the Mansion House meeting made headlines, as did the fact that Pacelli’s message was read at a high-level public meeting with the specific purpose of support for Jews—I remind us that Lord Baldwin’s December 8^th radio appeal was quite clear as to the need for funds for approximately 500,000 Jews and 100,000 “non-Aryan Christians.” Yet, here we have an unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church. He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

Let us return for a moment to the issue of the pope’s health and one major implication of it: Pacelli’s personal response could dictate the Holy See’s official institutional response in the months before Pius XI’s death on February 10, 1939. On December 6, four days before the Mansion House gathering, Pacelli received Italian ambassador to the Holy See Bonfiacio Pignatti, who implored him, on behalf of Mussolini, “to instruct all of Italy’s bishops not to criticize the anti-Semitic campaign.” Of that meeting, Pignatti wrote, “Cardinal [Pacelli] observed that it would be very easy to give the advice I was suggesting orally, but that having to put it in writing would be more difficult.” In the end, Pacelli agreed to do so in the case of the diocese of Rome and to “study the best way to take care of Italy’s other dioceses.” In this context, it should come as no surprise that Pacelli was not willing to aggressively and specifically condemn the 9-10 November Nazi pogrom against Jews. Pacelli was only willing to authorize (on behalf of the pope) a reminder of the church’s broad commandment and mission to aid the suffering and the persecuted. It is quite the understatement to say that in these troubled times, such a response was not enough.

The Vatican archives also offer us glimpses into the broader popular response to the plight of European Jewry. In the interest of time, I have chosen only a few. On December 7, 1938, Berlin Protestant Gerda Erdmann took it upon herself to write to Pope Pius XI. “Please permit me, as a non-Catholic Christian, to address you regarding a matter that has called much attention: the question of the Jews (Es handelt sich um die Judenfrage). With this letter, I want to make a suggestion which seems to me could be a solution to this [and one] coming from Christianity,” she wrote, satisfaction and eagerness dripping from her pen. “It is basically God’s hand that weighs so heavily on the Jews; God’s judgment has reached them as has already occurred several times before, during history since the time of Christ. Since that time, God’s message through his son is: Jews are guilty.” Erdmann took many more lines to explain why, in her perception, “Jews [were] guilty.” Her solution: “…huge empty territories are available (for instance in South America…) where:

“if the Jewish immigrants were baptized in their new homeland…the local population would in every way show their acceptance and open their doors. There would be no closed gates. The children of the baptized would be raised since childhood in the Christian faith; they would grow up within the church and the nation, end up in mixed marriages and create a new population. Among the colorful racial mixture overseas, the entire European Jewish people would be absorbed without danger. The refreshing influence of European intelligence could be a gain in many places.”

Erdmann understood herself as a faithful Christian and understood her solution as a Christian one: “What a great and beautiful task opens up for world Christianity! What a bright future! United, Christianity can achieve a colossal purpose of love for they fellow man…A task achieved, which will go down in history as a shining example of selfless Christian love performed for the Honor and Glory of God,” she concluded. When I first came across this letter in the Vatican archives, I could not resist sending it to several close colleagues under the heading: “with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Most letters came from Jews begging for help, and left wanting. In December 1938, German Jew Franz Knüppel wrote to the Secretariat of State on the eve of his forced expulsion from his current residence in France. The recipient of many such letters daily, Secretary of State Pacelli directed his undersecretary to contact the nunciature in France, for, as his undersecretary put it, “the abovementioned gentleman is not known by the Secretary of State;” and thus his undersecretary would “therefore leave it up to [the nuncio] to judge whether it is opportune to deal with Mr. Franz Knüppel’s request in the way that he wishes.” In short-hand, the process was as follows: when a letter requesting aid arrived in the Secretariat of State, if Secretary of State Pacelli did not know the individual personally, he asked his undersecretary to forward it to the appropriate nuncio, to handle as he saw fit. This in and of itself is a revelation about how the Vatican bureaucracy and communications between Catholic countries and the Vatican worked at this juncture.

In the interest of allowing for time for questions, I will conclude. I fear I have thoroughly depressed this audience; as a Catholic, I certainly depress myself when I see, document after document, diplomacy and self-interest and even anti-Semitism chosen over the basic value of charity and love of neighbor. A tiny handful of Catholics—unfortunately neither Pope Pius XI nor Pope Pius XII among them—did see the light. With regard to Nazi and Axis crimes against Jews, Cardinal Hinsley is one of them. “Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race,” Cardinal Hinsley told his audience at the World Jewish Congress. His words were not weak and his heart was not cold. Thank you.

[1] Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 8, Verse 11: “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1450.

[2] Book of Revelation, Chapter 2, Verse 9: “I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1927.

In Remembrance: Ernst Klee (1942-2013)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

In Remembrance: Ernst Klee (1942-2013)

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

Ernst Klee, who died in May of last year, was a redoubtable investigative journalist and a noted non-academic historian whose publications did much to expose some of the darker side of National Socialism and its crimes. Originally he studied to be a social worker, and during the 1970s did much to support the lost and homeless inhabitants of his home town Frankfurt, particularly the mentally ill, the handicapped and those suffering from discrimination. But in the 1980s he became well known for his numerous books and newspaper articles about the scandals of the Nazi doctors, especially those involved with the so-called euthanasia programmes, as well as about the Nazi lawyers and what became of them later. He also published a number of items which revealed striking findings about the misdeeds and complicity of church officials and parishioners. The publicity he gained naturally made him enemies among these doctors, lawyers and clergymen in post-1945 Germany. But he persevered in exposing the former compromised careers of many prominent members of the Federal Republic. The number of his books is remarkable. Twenty-five of them were published by the well-known S. Fischer Publishing House. And in 1989 his sharp attack on the churches’ attitudes after 1933 appeared under the title: Jesus Christ’s Storm Troopers: The Churches under Hitler’s Thumb (Die SA Jesu Christi: Die Kirchen im Banne Hitlers). In the book’s foreword, the author was quick to note that “this is not an attack on the church, to which I myself still belong. The Church was not alone in its apostasy. But nowhere else was the hypocrisy so evident of on the one hand claiming to uphold the cause of the poor and weakest in society, while on the other hand in fact abandoning them for the sake of clinging to their own positions of power.”

Particularly notable was Klee’s wide-ranging Encyclopedia of People in the Third Reich. Who Was What Before and After 1945? (Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945?). This 750 page volume first appeared in 2003, containing the biographies of 4300 individuals from all sections of German society. In many cases this was the first time the wider public learnt about the activities of some leading figures of the Nazi era and their subsequent careers. Even today these revelations continue to surprise many people, since the individuals concerned have taken great pains to conceal their previous political sympathies or actions. Shortly before his death, Klee was able to finish his last book, published in the autumn of 2013, The Auschwitz Perpetrators and Accomplices, and What Became of Them (Auschwitz: Täter, Gehilfen, Opfer und was aus ihnen wurde: ein Personenlexikon).

It was only to be expected that Klee should have aroused much opposition by his forthright and uncompromising pursuit of truth. On the other hand he was honoured and admired for his dedication, and awarded tributes such as the Family Scholl Prize in 1997 and the Goethe Medallion given by the City of Frankfurt in 2001. Walther H. Pehle, a long-time friend and the reader for the S. Fischer Publishing House, praised him as “an outstanding journalist and significant historian of the Nazi period, whose courageous and innovative investigations were a most valuable contribution towards an adequate knowledge of those dark days.”

Book Note: Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Book Note: Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), Pp. 157, ISBN 978-1-59017-681-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The latest addition to the Bonhoeffer corpus of writings is a double-headed tribute to both Dietrich and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, written by Fritz Stern, a distinguished historian of Germany at Columbia University, New York, and by Elisabeth Sifton, the daughter of the noted American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Their aim, in this short book, is to refresh and uphold the heroic picture of these men’s lives and tragic deaths as already formulated seventy years ago by British and American liberal churchmen, such as Bishop George Bell and Reinhold Niebuhr. According to this interpretation, their participation in the resistance movement in Germany was motivated by their high ethical ideals and by their moral revulsion against the Nazis’ aggressive and violent persecution of their opponents, particularly the Jews. Their account of the careers of both Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi clearly follows that given by Eberhard Bethge, since they too later got to know the surviving members of both families. In essence, however, they bring no new insights to the political or theological controversies about the resistance movement, its motives or tactics. Instead they repeat the now familiar themes of earlier biographies. They honour the inherent decency and courage of these intrepid witnesses to a “better” Germany. They deplore the readiness of other Germans, even years afterwards, to regard these men as traitors to the nation for seeking to overthrow the established government. They still regret the British government’s refusal to offer the resisters any gestures of support. They are dismayed at the leniency extended to former Nazis in post-war West Germany. In short, although well aware of the dangers of hagiography, especially in Bonhoeffer’s case–for all the wrong reasons–these authors nevertheless seek to affirm that “the Third Reich had no greater, more courageous and more admirable enemies” than these men who so steadfastly expressed their moral and political revolt against horrendous injustice and immeasurable cruelty. But they leave unexplored the many questions which historians and theologians still have about the complexities of the German resistance movement, and the historical conditions which led these men to follow the path of heroic self-sacrifice and eventual death as witnesses to their beliefs.

Curiously, in the appended footnotes, the references to the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Collected Works are all drawn from the German, rather than the now completed English edition.

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing The Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing The Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 No. 3 (July 2013): 423-445.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne is a young Australian scholar who has been researching on the twin topics of how liberal and conservative Christians interpreted and responded to the rise of the National Socialist movement and how the Nazi movement developed its official policy on religion (see our summary of his research in Contemporary Church History Quarterly 18, no. 4 (December 2012)). In his recent article in the Journal of Contemporary History, Koehne revisits the controversy surrounding the Richard Steigmann-Gall book, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945—a controversy which featured prominently in the pages of the same journal back in early 2007. Koehne examines one of Steigmann-Gall’s key arguments in The Holy Reich, that the “positive Christianity” of Point 24 in the 1920 NSDAP Programme represented a coherent Nazi version of Christianity, which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical (placing common interest before private interest). In contrast, Koehne argues that “the notion of ‘positive Christianity’ as a Nazi ‘religious system’ has been largely invented” (423). Koehne makes his case by analyzing the public statements of Nazi leaders Adolf Hitler, Gottfried Feder, and Alfred Rosenberg on confession, community, and “Jewish” materialism, finding that all three ideas were “openly depicted as part of Nazi a racial-nationalist ideology,” and not portrayed as part of some kind of Nazi Christianity (424). In terms of source material, Koehne focuses on Hitler’s statements prior to the Munich Putsch and his writing in Mein Kampf, along with published explanations of the party programme by Rosenberg and Feder, from 1933 and 1934 respectively.

Koehne makes his case well. By the end of the article, there is little question that German racial purity, antisemitism, and Volksgemeinschaft were essential components of Nazi ideology, as opposed to core beliefs in a kind of Nazi Christianity. As a result, the “positive Christianity” of Point 24 remains ambiguous—social cohesion in Hitler’s Germany would not be achieved through an “’interconfessional’ religion but by a kind of salvational nationalism” (444). But if Koehne’s conclusion casts doubt on one of Richard Steigmann-Gall’s key arguments in The Holy Reich, it doesn’t clarify the questions the latter raises about individual Nazis’ attitudes towards Jesus or Christianity (444) or about the nature of National Socialist ecclesiastical policy. Amid Koehne’s examples of Hitler’s criticisms of the churches for the insufficiency of their Germanness and antisemitism are other references that suggest Christianity and the churches could play a positive role in German political life, as they had during the First World War (432-434). Nonetheless, Koehne’s article is an important reminder that religion was of minor importance to Hitler and other leading Nazis as they formulated and later implemented their antisemitic völkisch ideology, even if the their movement posed difficult challenges to Christianity and the German churches.

Article Note: Nicholas Railton, “Escaping from Sodom: A Christian Jew Encounters German Antisemitism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Article Note: Nicholas Railton, “Escaping from Sodom: A Christian Jew Encounters German Antisemitism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013): 787-826.

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

In his fascinating article, Nicholas Railton of the University of Ulster’s faculty of arts details the life of Maly Kagan (1897-1963), a Christian of Jewish heritage, to highlight the struggles faced by such individuals under National Socialism. The daughter of Russian immigrants who fled to Germany in the Kaiserzeit, Kagan left Orthodox Judaism in 1919, following a period of spiritual trial and personal tragedy. In 1925, her faith-journey led her to accept a position as an auxiliary nurse at the Innere Mission sponsored Tannenhof psychiatric hospital in Remscheid-Lüttringhausen in the Rhineland. Like many similar institutions in Germany, the Tannenhof hospital underwent nazification within a few months of Hitler’s assumption of power. Steps in this process included the introduction of the Hitler salute for all employees and the implementation of the July 1933 sterilization law. Tannenhof’s clerical director, Pastor Paul Ernst Werner, a devout Nazi and member of the German Christians, zealously promoted National Socialist doctrine through his leadership and bible study sessions. In particular, he was aided by Martha Rielandt, a teacher at Tannenhof and a member of the National Socialist Women’s League, who similarly promoted National Socialist ideology, especially in her classes for trainee deaconesses. Such changes in the institution did not go smoothly, especially after the German Christian Berlin Sportspalast November 1933 fiasco in which Reinhold Krause called for the removal of the Old Testament from the biblical canon. Though evidence is conflicting, it appears that Hildegard von Bülow, Mother Superior of Tannenhof’s deaconesses, challenged Werner and Rielandt on the content of their teaching. Both Werner and Rielandt were eventually removed from their positions. Kagan was also dismissed at the same time. It is unclear if the departures were linked, though Railton surmises that Kagan “became the sacrificial lamb that was meant to limit the influence and impact of Nazi ideology on the establishment” (p. 801).

After finding refugee at the Malche Bible House in Freienwalde an der Oder, upon recommendation of a director there, Kagan made her way to Berlin to begin work with the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI), a missionary society designed to “bear witness for Christ to the Jewish people in all its lands of their dispersion” (p. 804). There she worked with Heinrich Poms, also a Christian of Jewish heritage, who shared a background similar to Kagan. Following Kristallnacht, Poms and his family fled Germany with Kagan’s assistance. Kagan herself remained behind and assumed the running of the HCTI. Amazingly, she avoided deportation three times and continued in her administrative position. During this time, Kagan was even able to have surgery to correct a degenerate eye condition. She also became involved with relief efforts in connection with Pastor Heinrich Grüber’s Office, the Kirchliche Hilfsstelle für evangelische Nichatarier. This perilous work eventually brought her to hide both Jews and Christians of Jewish heritage in the HCTI building. At some point, the situation became too dangerous for Kagan to remain in public view and she went into hiding until the war ended.

In post-war Germany, the situation for Christians of Jewish heritage within the German Lutheran Church did not change. Railton attributes this to the Church’s unwillingness to address its National Socialist past directly and honestly. He writes: “It was a strange time when silence veiled a multitude of sins committed during the dark night of National Socialism: sins of commission and even more sins of omission” (p. 813). Despite this situation, Kagan resumed her missionary efforts and promoted the healing of wounds between Christians and Jews. To this end, she encouraged her former colleague, Heinrich Poms, to return to Germany to assist her in her efforts. Poms accepted her invitation and inaugurated a series of lectures that addressed the “‘demonic origin of antisemitism’ and the need to repent of all forms of such prejudice” (p. 816). After seven years of toiling with reconciliation work and finding little support from the Lutheran Church, Kagan had had enough. Family members in Israel had already been encouraging her to move there. Giving up on Germany, she accepted their invitation and moved to Israel just outside of Haifa. After her move, she continued to minister to the small Messianic Jewish community there until her sudden death in May 1963, the result of being hit by a motorbike.

Railton’s article informatively relates the horrendous impact of antisemitism on Christians of Jewish heritage. As Railton notes, this is a topic that deserves more scholarly attention. The article is well researched as Railton has thoroughly scoured the existing archives to tell Kagan’s story. Yet, there are some areas where the reader desires more information or greater clarification. For example, this reader would like to know more about the trials Poms and Kagan faced together. Similarly, one learns little about Kagan’s experience in hiding in the last years of the war. More specific examples might also have been offered to illustrate the prolongation of antisemitism in post-war German Lutheranism. These points aside, Railton’s article provides us with a unique insight into the life of one woman who courageously resisted the Nazis by living out her faith conviction. Hopefully, Railton’s work will inspire fellow historians to investigate this under-studied area further.

Memorial Speech: Dr. Margot Kaessmann on the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Memorial Speech: Dr. Margot Kaessmann on the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz

By Margot Kaessmann

On 17 December 2013, the City of Berlin and the Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia honoured the historian Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz with a prestigious memorial service on the occasion of the 120^th anniversary of her birth. The memorial speech was given by the former Bishop of Hannover, Dr. Margot Kaessmann, who is currently representative of the Council of the EKD for the Reformation Jubilee of 2017. We are pleased to publish excerpts from her speech and thank Dr. John S. Conway for his translation of the text.

Margot Kaessmann: Memorial speech on Elisabeth Schmitz (1893-1977)

Elisabeth Schmitz was born on 23 August 1893. I am grateful that 120years later André Schmitz and Manfred Gailus have taken the initiative to honour her this evening in Berlin, and also that the present Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg Markus Droege is here with us. She lived here in Berlin from 1915 to 1943, and from 1933 onwards she saw at close range how damaging the Nazi ideology truly was, which led her to recognize the dangers and to protest, quietly but unmistakably. It is now 75 years since the notorious Crystal Night pogrom in 1938, but Elisabeth Schmitz had already foreseen such disasters. As a result she felt obliged to resign her duties as a teacher, fearing that her integrity would be compromised.

Today’s commemoration must be seen as an exceptional event. This “protesting Protestant”, as Manfred Gailus calls her in his biography, has hardly been known, and much too little recognized. But as he says: “Protestantism in Germany in the 21st century will want to accord this woman a high place, and even sooner or later to put her in the category of Protestant saints.” Of course Protestants have a problem with saints, since they believe that only God deserves to be worshipped, not men or women. For people in the Reformation tradition, the communion of saints is reserved for those whose life and death was totally committed to God, as is recognized in Article 21 of the Augsburg Confession of 1530.

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But Manfred Gailus is quite right to assert that we can learn from the example set by Elisabeth Schmitz’ faithful witness and her self-sacrificing commitment to others. It is high time that we acknowledge what she achieved. When people talk about the Resistance Movement in the Third Reich, we all know about such names as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, or Hans von Dohnanyi. But women’s names are mentioned only as supportive wives. But of course there were women active in this resistance, and not only in the “White Rose” circle, such as Sophie Scholl, or in the Red Chapel network. One of them was Elisabeth Schmitz. She was originally from Hanau, but worked here in Berlin, but finally went back to Hanau where she died at the age of 84 in 1977. Only seven people attended her funeral.

Why are we commemorating her now? One of her pupils was Dietgard Meyer, who later became a pastor in Hessen. I myself was ordained in 1985 in Hessen and so learnt to know Dietgard Meyer. She told me about Dr. Katharina Staritz, who was provisionally ordained in Breslau as a “city vicar” in 1938, and who was arrested because of her engagement in the resistance, but whose status was not recognized after the war. Only in the last few years did I learn about Elisabeth Schmitz, but I was quickly appreciative of her early and clear recognition of the unbearable violations of human dignity and rights by the Nazis. From Manfred Gailus’ biography I learnt how well established Elisabeth Schmitz was in her circle of well-educated women, such as Dr. Carola Barth, who taught religion, and also Dr. Elisabet von Harnack, or particularly later with Dr. Martha Kassel, a medical doctor, who was a Protestant of Jewish origin. She had good contacts with Professor Elisabeth Schiemann, and also with such colleagues as Dr. Elisabeth Abegg and Margarete Behrens. These were among the first generation of women to be particularly well educated, and took advantage of this fact to express their views with vigor. This gave them a capacity for a critical approach to affairs, and their freedom and independence therefore made them skeptical towards the allurements of the National Socialist ideology.

Already in 1933 Elisabeth Schmitz had expressed her outrage about the injustice and cruelties inflicted upon those of Jewish origin. This was a time when many in the church thought that matters would improve after the Nazis took power. But Elisabeth Schmitz was more sanguine. As Gailus noted: “She was deeply involved and offended by the daily humiliations inflicted on her ‘non-aryan’ friends Martha Kassel, and her brother the lawyer Heinrich Kassel, as well as on other friends and acquaintances. She was also influenced by belonging to a circle of Jewish intellectuals around Julius Bab, by her reading of the writings of Karl Barth and by her extended correspondence with this Swiss theologian from April 1933 onwards.” These were the factors which affected her after that date, and brought her to join the circle led by Pastor Gerhard Jacobi in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial parish. In 1934 she took the step of signing the “Red Card” indicating her willingness to join the Confessing Church group in this parish.

In 1935 already she wrote a memorandum urging her church to stand up against the discrimination being inflicted on the Jews. She wrote: “For the past two and a half years a severe persecution has been inflicted on a portion of our people because of their racial origin, including a portion of our own parish membership. The victims of this persecution have suffered dreadful distress both outwardly and inwardly but this is not widely known, which makes the guilt of the German people all the more reprehensible.”

Elisabeth Schmitz had studied history, German, and theology in order to teach in a secondary high school. She graduated in 1920 as a pupil of Friedrich Meinecke in Berlin, which was an unusual achievement for a woman at that time. She was then granted her teaching certificate, and from April 1929 she was promoted to be a senior teacher in the Berlin school system. One of her pupils described her as being “quietly reserved, concentrating on the lesson materials, but both positive and demanding in her requirements from us. Her dress was very modest, her hair parted in the middle and held up with a comb. All of which gave her a slightly old-fashioned look, which didn’t inspire us. Nevertheless she succeeded in gaining our respect. Her quiet authority made us speechless.”

These pupils didn’t know anything about what she did outside the school. But in fact she was a member of Helmut Gollwitzer’s “Dogmatic Study Circle.” Between 1933 and 1936 she conducted an extensive correspondence with Karl Barth in the hopes of getting him to adopt a public stance on the subject of the situation of the Jews in Germany. In these early years she received two answers. From her standpoint, this persecution of the Jews and the silence of the Church in response was a vital matter, but Barth at that time regarded this only as a side-issue. This seems to me to denote a vital difference among the active members of the Confessing Church who were trying to live out their Christian convictions. Was this really an issue about the true nature of the Church? Or was it merely a matter of standing up for the rights of the persecuted Jews? Or was the Church failing in its most essential obligation when it did not oppose vehemently enough the oppression, the betrayal of values, and the disrespect for human beings?

I was particularly struck by finding a very similar protest being made by Edith Stein, who was a Catholic convert from Judaism, writing to Pope Pius XI in April 1933. But she, like Elisabeth Schmitz, got no answer. But Schmitz carried on her commitment by writing an extensive memorandum about the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and presenting this to the Synod of the Confessing Church which was held in Berlin in September 1935. But she got no reply. It is still not clear just who actually received this document. It would seem that its contents were talked about, but that it was never officially presented to the synod.

An interesting fact is that for a long while the authorship of this document was ascribed not to Elisabeth Schmitz, but to another member of the Confessing Church, Marga Meusel. Not until 1999 was Elisabeth Schmitz’ authorship recognized, and then only by chance when a large number of documents were discovered left behind in Hanau after her death. But the question still remains: why did she herself not take more trouble to have its contents better known even after the Nazi regime was overthrown?

This memorandum is an impressive document. Its author was an alert observer of the damages inflicted by the Nazi regime. For example, in describing the fate of children, she wrote: “Children ought to have the first claim on our sympathy. But now? In many large cities, Jewish children are sent to Jewish schools. Or their parents send them to Catholic schools, since in their view they will be better protected than in Protestant schools. And what about the converted Protestant children? And what happens to Jewish children in smaller communities where there is no Jewish school, or in the countryside? In at least one small town I have heard that the exercise books of Jewish children are torn up, and that their breakfast snacks are thrown in the gutter. Christian children are doing this, while Christian parents, teachers and pastors allow this to happen.” And to think that all this was written three years before Crystal Night!

Why did this protest fail to gain any support? Was it because the Confessing Church was more concerned about safeguarding its own existence than in saving the Jews? Or was it because the author was a woman and not a properly ordained pastor?

Elisabeth Schmitz was denounced because she had given hospitality to Martha Kassel, a Christian of Jewish origin. From 1935 on, she had increasing problems at her Lankwitz school because she couldn’t agree to “educate the children in the spirit of National Socialism”. So after the Crystal Night she asked to be allowed to retire. She was evacuated from Berlin in 1943 and returned to her parents’ home in Hanau. But from 1946 to 1958, she was once again teaching as before. She evidently had close contacts with her friends and former students, but never raised the subject of her memorandum.

I am concerned about this story. For one thing, it shows how early the injustices of Nazi policy were recognized. Everyone could have known what was happening. Look at the questions she posed so frankly in 1935: “Why do the ‘non-aryan’ Christians feel so deserted by the Church both locally and at the international level? Why does the Church do nothing? Why do they allow these palpable injustices to be perpetrated?”

Of course this raises the question about the nature of the Church. For her, it wasn’t just a question of the Church’s freedom to witness, as Karl Barth assumed, or about the fate of the baptized Jews, which so concerned Marga Meusel. She was much more concerned about the fate of the Church as Church if it was not prepared to stand up for the rights of those being maltreated. This was happening in front of these churchmen’s own eyes, or even with their participation. On the other hand, it is unforgivable that this memorandum was not honored after 1945. The church leaders were surely guilty of a collective amnesia, when only a few heroes were selected to be remembered, but their own failures were pushed out of sight and forgotten.

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But today we should really celebrate Elisabeth Schmitz and be thankful for her stalwart witness. And we should be encouraged to follow her example in the life of our churches today. Her story is one which needs to be resurrected from the archives and kept alive in the day-to-day practice of our community. In this way Elisabeth Schmitz can truly be described as a Protestant saint, whose life and witness will remain of vital importance for us today and for the future.