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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes:

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

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

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

[3] Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 488.

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

[5] Ibid., 54.

[6] Ibid., 60-62.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

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

Rebecca Carter-Chand, USHMM*

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

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

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

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

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Letter from the Editors (Summer 2024)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Conference Announcement: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Conference Announcement: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

Conference Announcement

Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective 

A Conference co-organized by:

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

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary Church History)

&

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

October 2 – 4, 2024

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Article Note: Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Article Note: Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 511-538.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this article, Udi Greenberg explores how Catholics and Protestants set aside longstanding animosities in favour of new conceptions of religious pluralism and religious freedom that preserved Christian identity by excluding Jews and Muslims. In contrast to the view that Catholic-Protestant collaboration was either the “predictable consequence of a broader liberalization in postwar Christian thought and politics” (511) or a response to the pressures of the Cold War, Greenberg argues that it was in fact driven by two political upheavals between the 1930s and the 1960s. The first was the Nazi attempt to unite the two confessions into a single racial church marked by anticommunism and antisemitism, while the second was decolonization in Africa and Asia, which produced an inter-Christian alliance to preserve missionary work and combat Islam. This history, he contends, helps explain why contemporary European politics and law support a form of religious pluralism that benefits Christianity but discriminates against non-Christians.

Greenberg makes his case by examining leaders of postwar ecumenism and exploring their links to two ideological projects. The first attempt to overcome the confessional divide was driven by pro-Nazi Christians inspired by “the Third Reich’s vision of a unified anti-liberal and anti-Jewish European order. For these thinkers and leaders, interconfessionalism was not meant to promote liberal equality. Rather, it was designed to secure Christian supremacy in the public sphere, and it often coexisted smoothly with blatant antisemitism” (512). Ironically, after the war, these pro-Nazi ecumenists were joined by their erstwhile opponents, who helped them form new intellectual associations and political parties designed to bolster Christian hegemony in Europe.

Still, as Greenberg notes, both Catholic and Protestant church leaders remained opposed to formal cooperation—that is, until the crisis of decolonization threatened the existence of missionary churches and Christian communities in former colonies. Only a pan-Christian alliance would ward off religious enemies (especially Muslims), while only the ecumenical model of interreligious peace and cooperation could teach Asians and Africans the lessons they would need to reach European standards of civilization. Ecumenism, as Greenberg notes, was a tool to “revamp imperial logic” (512).

As Greenberg explains, this Catholic-Protestant collaboration both promoted and undermined religious pluralism:

What these two moments of European ecumenical flourishing shared was a key goal: dismantling some hierarchies in order to bolster others. Calls for interconfessional cooperation often differed from calls for universal equality; most notably, several influential ecumenists were antisemites and Islamophobes, and hoped to reverse tolerance for Jews or Muslims. What is more, in both time periods, Catholic-Protestant talk of peace was often laced with visions of struggle. The language and visions of the Nazi era were transferable to the era of decolonization in part because ecumenical activists conceived of these two moments as similar: periods of combat in which European culture and Christianity (which they often conflated) faced existential danger. (512)

Referencing the contradictory use of religious liberty in the contemporary era, with secular regimes banning supposedly inappropriate expressions of religion like Muslim clothing or circumcision, Greenberg observes:

It may be, then, that religious liberty is best understood not as a stable concept that emerged from liberal and secular governance; rather, as the story of European ecumenism shows, its meaning constantly shifts, enabling both increased equality and the denial of rights to the very minorities that religious liberty claims to protect. (514)

Having established his argument, Greenberg devotes the balance of his article to describing the depth of late-nineteenth-century animosity between the two confessions and to detailing the networks of people and organizations devoted to Catholic-Protestant collaboration from the 1930s to the 1960s. Readers are reminded of ultranationalist Catholics (Charles Maurras) and Protestant nationalists (leaders of the German Kulturkampf), and the way that members of each confession blamed the ills of modernity on the other. Pope Pius X’s 1910 description of Protestants as “enemies of the cross of Christ” and “corrupters” who “paved the way for … modern rebellions and apostacy” is just one example of this antagonism. (515) Across Europe, each confession lobbied for political and legal discrimination against the other. Globally, competition between Catholics and Protestants was played out on the mission field.

Ecumenical collaboration began in response to the threat of atheistic Communism. While the Vatican established the Jesuit Secretariat on Atheism in 1932, Protestants established the Swiss International Anti-Communist Alliance and the Campaign against Alienation from God and Anti-Divine Forces in Germany. But it was the Nazi campaign to politically mobilize Christians into “positive Christianity” for non-Jews and non-Communists that really brought leaders from the two confessions together, making Germany a “launching pad for systematic ecumenical writing and organization” (520). Catholic theologians Robert Grosche and Damasus Winzen launched the journal Catholica to explore connections to Protestantism and express their desire to participate in a Germanic, racially-based spiritual community, while Protestants like Wilhelm Stählin and others promoted the idea of a national body of Christ. Publications, mutual visits between seminaries, and various conferences bringing Catholics and Protestants together soon followed. Notably, Catholic historian Joseph Lortz reimagined the Reformation sympathetically, and added a series of ecumenical pamphlets and discussion guides, too. Greenberg observes that these interconfessional advocates were mostly not fanatical Nazis, but adds that they were profoundly anti-liberal and opposed to universal equality. As examples of ecumenically-minded antisemites, Greenberg offers names like Catholics Albert Mirgeler and Otto Schilling, though there were surely many on the Protestant side as well.

In the postwar era, these same figures participated in the growing European ecumenical movement—a movement that almost never included Jewish participants and that pursued a largely anti-liberal agenda. Fixation on the threat of Communism was, rather, the animating issue bringing Catholics and Protestants together in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The formation of the Christian Democratic Union, under Catholic politician Konrad Adenauer, is perhaps the most notable example of this collaboration, but leaders from across the continent “shared Adenauer’s clamor that Marxism’s ‘materialist philosophy’ was a ‘moral disease’ and ‘the root of all disorder,’ and the era’s principal task was ‘saving Occidental Christian Europe’” (525).

That said, Protestant leaders remained antipathetic to Catholicism. For example, the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 launched a decade of studies on religious freedom, which routinely blamed Catholic-led countries as oppressors. Similarly, the fact that Catholics led in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community aroused grave suspicions among Protestant politicians (526).

The dynamic that changed all this was decolonization. As European countries abandoned their formal empires, both Catholic and Protestant elites worried that the loss of imperial protection, the rise of anti-Western sentiments in Asia and Africa, and the surge of nationalisms, pan-Islam, and Communism would potentially eradicate Christianity in large parts of the world. In response, “leading writers proclaimed that Europe still had a Christian civilizing mission,” which could now “be achieved only through confessional collaboration, which would inspire appropriate religious behavior for the rest of the world” (527).

For these European Christians, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was but one example of the disaster that could befall the Church. People like Joseph Blomjous, the Dutch Catholic bishop of Mwanza, Tanzania; Hans Burgman, a German missionary in Uganda; and John Jordan, a British missionary writer in Nigeria, called for interconfessional schools and medical facilities, along with other forms of ecumenical cooperation. Scottish Presbyterian bishop Lesslie Newbigin, General Secretary of the International Missionary Council, also called for overcoming confessional obstacles in his 1961 work Is Christ Divided? A Plea for Christian Unity in a Revolutionary Age. He was only one of many such voices. Indeed, Blomjous and Newbigin led a Vatican-WCC study of European mission work, then established the Committee on Society, Development and Peace (SODEPAX) to support a wide range of interconfessional collaboration.

Greenberg shows how these 1960s ecumenists drew on the work of their 1930s predecessors, thus blending “talk of diversity and tolerance with an overwhelming sense of conflict” with Communism and Islam. Examples include the work of French Dominican writer Marie-Joseph Le Guillou and Fridtjor Birkeli, the former director of the Norwegian missions and bishop of Stavanger, who feared for the extermination of European Christianity overseas. As he summed it up:

It was exactly this blend of forging peace between Christians while waging struggle with “anti-Christian” forces that made ecumenism an appealing response to decolonization even beyond missionary circles. For Christians ambivalent or even despondent about Europe’s collapsing political power, unity offered a new spiritual mission, a novel teaching for Europeans to take overseas. Indeed, for all their talk about the need to “indigenize” the churches, many European commentators continued to assume that it was Europe’s role to provide the template. Catholic and Protestant peace, they paternalistically proclaimed, was Europe’s new global “responsibility,” which would show Africans and Asians the direction of the future. (532)

Ecumenism thus became a new kind of civilizing mission, linking European Catholics and Protestants in a shared global project. This trend culminated in the Second Vatican Council, which reimagined Protestants as brethren in the faith rather than heretics—a sentiment reciprocated by the WCC. The result was an expansion of Protestant rights in Catholic countries. As in the 1930s, however, while interconfessional collaboration in the 1950s and 1960s overcame historic conflicts that had divided European Christians since the Reformation, it produced less a liberal vision of universal equality than an exclusivist version of religious liberty in which Christian unity was marked by antisemitic, anti-Communist, and anti-Islamic sentiments. Ironically, while a newly ecumenical Christianity in Europe soon declined sharply, Christianity exploded in the former colonial world. Still, in an increasingly secular twenty-first-century Europe, political and legal privileges for Christianity are coupled with ongoing limits to the religious freedom of non-Christians.

 

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Letter from the Editors (Spring 2024)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Spring 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

As winter turns to spring, we at the CCHQ are thrilled to bring you the first installment of our 2024 newsletter. I want to start by thanking editor Sarah Thieme for her time on our editorial board, and to wish her all the best as she steps down from duties to the CCHQ and engages in new professional challenges.

Pope Pius XII, in a September 1945 audience. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Infallible_(Pope_Pius_XII)_%E2%80%93_Sept._1945.jpg

In this issue we have a conference report from Martin R. Menke from the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, in January. Martin was a panelist on the roundtable that featured a critical exchange of views about David Kertzer’s recent monograph The Pope at War, about the pontificate of Pius XII during the Second World War using documentation from the recently-opened Vatican archive. Kyle Jantzen provides a thoughtful chapter note about Susannah Heschel’s 2022 chapter, “Sacrament Versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany,” which appeared in On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence, edited by Irene Kacandes. Recent doctoral graduate Rob Thompson has shared a research note on his dissertation, successfully defended late last year, on Christian relief workers in post-war Germany and their encounters with Holocaust survivors. Finally, I have translated a report from a September 2023 conference held in Hamburg, Germany, about historiographical research on attitudes (in relation to but not synonymous with mindsets, or mentalities) vis-à-vis Nazism during the Third Reich.

Looking ahead, I am excited that the next several issues are taking shape; they will feature a dynamic array of book and film reviews as well as chapter and research notes as well as relevant conference reports.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

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

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Conference Report: Panel Discussion on David Kertzer, The Pope at War, ACHA/AHA

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Conference Report: Panel Discussion on David Kertzer, The Pope at War, ACHA/AHA

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

At this year’s American Catholic Historical Association conference, held in conjunction with the American Historical Association’s 2024 Annual Meeting, four colleagues in twentieth-century Italian and German history – Mark Ruff, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Martin Menke, and Roy Domenico – met to offer a panel discussion of David Kertzer’s latest work, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (Random House, 2022). Kertzer then offered a response to their comments. The discussion built on a review forum of his work, to which the panelists contributed, that had appeared in the summer 2023 issue of the Catholic Historical Review (Vol. 109 (2023): 752-767). The in-person conversation proved fruitful by adding new insights and perhaps a more nuanced understanding of this complicated topic.

The first to speak was Mark Ruff of Saint Louis University. He succinctly summarized the book’s topic, what he described as the cause of the “sullied reputation” of Pius XII, which was his action, or lack thereof, to protect or at least protest against the persecution of Europe’s Jews during the war. Ruff noted that Kertzer shows, relying on the papers of Angelo Roncalli (the later Pope John XXIII), that Pius XII was well aware of the damage that his silence might do to his reputation, which meant he was aware he was being perceived to be silent. Ruff notes that Kertzer distinguishes between the early years of the war, when a German victory seemed possible, and the later years when an Allied victory became much more likely. During the earlier period, Vatican officials considered the need to arrange itself with a victorious National Socialist German regime in Europe. Kertzer also showed how well Pius XII was informed of Jewish suffering throughout Europe, especially in his beloved Rome. While the pope did not clearly condemn Jewish persecution, he did vehemently decry Allied bombings of Rome and personally visited the affected areas. Ruff pointed to Kertzer’s explanation for this papal reticence, which was the pope’s “personal weakness, not ideological affinity.” This is an essential break with earlier scholars who argued that Pope Pius XII preferred authoritarian fascism to liberal democracy. Kertzer notes that, in the safety of June 1945, Pius XII described National Socialism as a “satanic ghost.” Ruff emphasized Kertzer’s “unsparing judgment” that this pontificate was a moral failure.

Ruff’s most significant contribution to the discussion is related to the historiographical context of Kertzer’s work. Ruff notes that while Kertzer refuted the pope’s apologists, his critique of Pius differs from that of previous critics. Pius XII had no affinity for fascism, nor is there evidence that, in contrast with leading papal officials, he was an antisemite. Ruff also noted that Church history has become increasingly globalized. Since the pontificate of Pius XII extended another thirteen years, was he, as Kertzer’s title suggests, always a “pope at war?” What about his public interventions in the Middle Eastern question, in defense of Christians in Communist China, or his criticisms of Cold War communism in Eastern Europe? Ruff’s concluding questions suggest that a better understanding of the remainder of Pius XII’s pontificate might contribute by extension to a better understanding of his wartime behavior.

Next, Suzanne Brown-Fleming from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offered comments. She expanded on Kertzer’s argument that, until 1943, the pope had to expect a future Europe dominated by National Socialist Germany, in which the Church would need to find ways to survive. Brown-Fleming argued that the necessary proof of the importance of Kertzer’s work lies in the many responses to the book and related articles in The Atlantic  First, “What the Vatican’s Secret Archives are about to Reveal” (March 2, 2020),  “The Pope, the Jews, and the Secret of the Archives” (July 27, 2020), “The Pope’s Secret Back Channel to Hitler,” (May 31, 2022). Perhaps the most robust rejoinder appeared in a full-page article in L’Osservatore Romano (20 June 2022). Given the depth of Kertzer’s archival research, Brown-Fleming found the resistance to his findings surprising. She voiced hope for a new manner of historical scholarship and dialogue that is open-minded and evidence-based rather than a continuation of the type of conjecture typical of much of the scholarship produced before the recent opening of the relevant archival materials in the Vatican archives, both supportive and critical of the pope.

Martin Menke of Rivier University noted that, while defenders of Pius XII have pointed to particular statements that can be interpreted as statements of concern for persecuted Jews, Kertzer emphasized that the pope’s contemporaries considered the statements weak. Menke pointed out that the chair of the Fulda bishops’ conference, Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau, similarly refrained from public pronouncement but relied instead on private petitions out of fear that public opposition would yield further repression of Catholics. Kertzer shows that, in the pope’s private encounters with German diplomats, he was at times more candid than in his public pronouncements. Menke noted that Pius XII’s greatest fears were for the survival of both the Church in Europe, as much as the Vatican State. Menke said, “Ultimately, the pope’s fear of jeopardizing the sacramental life and the integrity of the institutional church led to his reticence.” Pius XII did not realize how fascist forces had already compromised this integrity. Menke also compared Pius XII’s criticism of moral decay in Allied-occupied Rome with Bishop Clemens Graf von Galen’s criticism of the British treatment of Germans in occupied Westphalia, which reflected willful blindness to German crimes. One doubts whether Italian fascists or German National Socialists would have been as tolerant of criticism of the pope’s criticism as were the Allied powers.

Menke asked if Kertzer might have shown greater understanding of the pope’s humanity, in all its weakness, or if one might consider the Catholic teaching of accidentalism, that governments are to be obeyed as long as they defend Catholic moral teaching. Finally, Menke pointed out that Pius XII privately resented the silence of many German bishops, such as Cardinal Bertram, and applauded the more confrontational stand of Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing. In the end, Menke agreed with Kertzer that timidity prevented Pius XII from being a great, forceful leader of the Church and instead led to his failing as Pontifex Maximus.

In his remarks, panel chair Roy Domenico of the University of Scranton contributed a critical Italian historical perspective to the discussion. He emphasized the romanitá of Pius XII, which eventually made him an alternative authority figure to fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Domenico shows that the pope’s popularity rose as that of Mussolini and, eventually, the king declined. He also discussed the pope’s significance in promoting the postwar idea of Italians as brava gente, hardly responsible for the regime’s collaboration with the National Socialists and the Italian fascist regime’s atrocities. Crucially, Domenico reminded those present that the Church cannot be reduced to one man, even one as necessary as the pope. Many Catholics in Italy and elsewhere did do much to save persecuted Jews. He stressed that at no time did the moral authority of the Italian fascists outweigh that of the Church. One might add that, in Germany, too, most of the bishops proved weak, but their priests and laypeople often risked their lives to help those persecuted by the regime.

The author of The Pope at War, David Kertzer of Brown University, responded to the other panelists. Despite his profound archival research and his kind acknowledgment of the other panelists’ comments, his response reflected the fundamental confusion or astonishment at the moral failure of Pius XII by all those who expect the Church, and especially the pope as its head, to live up to the higher moral calling they claim to embody. Many scholars and laypeople share in this confusion about the poor record of the Christian churches during this time. In the end, Kertzer argued that the Church perhaps needed a two-fold leadership: the pope as a moral leader and some other administrator of the Holy See and its interests worldwide, since someone tasked with moral leadership, as history shows, is easily compromised by diplomatic and other political considerations.

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Conference Report: “Convinced by National Socialism? Political attitudes of religious groups and individuals in the Nazi and post-war period”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Conference Report: “Convinced by National Socialism? Political attitudes of religious groups and individuals in the Nazi and post-war period,” Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg (FZH); University of Münster; Schleswig-Holstein State Archives; Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, September 14-15, 2023, in Hamburg, Germany

By Marvin Becker, Research Institute for Contemporary History Hamburg; Helge-Fabien Hertz, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History at the University of Duisburg-Essen; Lisa Klagges, Institute for Political and Communication Science, University of Greifswald

Translation by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, with the assistance of DEEPL (text translation only)

What attitudes did representatives of the two mainstream Christian churches hold towards National Socialism? In sociology, social psychology, and pedagogical diagnostics, the latent construct of “attitudes” is surveyed through items and operationalized using indicators. This interdisciplinary conference in Hamburg focused on the question of how past political attitudes of people who can no longer be interviewed can be captured. Representatives from the fields of history, social science, political science, the sociology of religion, and church history explored this question on all three societal levels within their different methodological challenges: the micro level (individuals); the meso level (specific study groups); and the macro level (the German population).

In two keynote speeches, OLAF BLASCHKE (Münster) and PETER GRAEFF (Kiel) approached the question methodologically. Blaschke built on a previous conference, “Was glaubten die Deutschen 1933-1945?”,[1] on the hybrid or dual faith of Protestants and Catholics under the Nazi regime, and discussed various methods and sources for recording attitudes at the micro, meso and macro levels. Precise findings on the attitudes of religious groups and individuals towards National Socialism could be obtained based on positive and negative “attitude objects.” Graeff described the development and status quo of methods of attitude research in sociology. Attitudes can also be derived from historical biographical material using the tools of modern empirical social research.

In the conference’s first panel on the micro level (individual actors), NORA ANDREA SCHULZE (Munich) and MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin) showed how much attitude research is embedded in classical biographical studies. Schulze used the personal history of the former Bavarian state bishop Hans Meiser to illustrate the long-lasting impact of his monarchist-nationalist and authoritarian socialization under the Kaiserreich, but also his slowly evolving change of mind towards the Nazi regime, whose church policy he strongly rejected. She stressed oral history interviews in combination with a broad range of source studies as an effective means of ascertaining attitudes. In his lecture on the later EKD Council chairman Otto Dibelius, Gailus focused on Dibelius’s publicized attitudes towards National Socialism in the years 1932 to 1934. The rapid change from joyful expectation to fulfillment and then disappointment to partial rejection illustrated the temporal instability of attitudes, especially in the turbulent times of a system change. The third speaker, KLAUS GROSSE KRACHT (Hamburg), used the Catholic laymen Erich Klausener and Walter Dirks to discuss irritatingly positive statements on the new regime from 1933, which should be understood as an expression of a search for meaning [Suchbewegung] within the Catholic religious field, which changed rapidly during the negotiation and implementation of the Reich concordat (of 1933). In this time of upheaval, the two committed and decidedly anti-clerical laymen had longed for a convergence, i.e. a future rapprochement between the Catholic milieu and National Socialism. At the end of the panel, DETLEF POLLACK (Münster) and MARVIN BECKER (Hamburg) added an interdisciplinary accent. Using the example of national Protestantism, they explored the question of the extent to which the attitudes of individual actors can be used to draw conclusions about the collective convictions of their milieu. Pollack began by explaining his theory of “broken lines of continuity” in Protestantism after 1945, where previous nationalist attitudes had been shaken by the caesura of 1945. He substantiated this theory based on both the admission of guilt by church leaders and committees in the post-war period as well as interviews that he conducted with East German Protestant church leaders in the 1990s. Becker then discussed the extent to which the analysis of statements by German Protestants and Catholics on National Socialism in the post-war period could provide insight into Protestant thinking. He drew on the model of social networks as carrier groups of discourses (Sabrina Hoppe) and attempted to reconstruct the rules at that time of what could be said that regulated the verbalization of inner attitudes. Becker achieved this by comparing internal and external communications in German-Christian networks. This discourse regulation refers to the underlying collective convictions of the network and at the same time contributes to their change in a process of mutual influence.

The meso level then focused on specific research groups. LUCIA SCHERZBERG (Saarbrücken) shed light on the political position of the members of the “Working Group for Religious Peace” and its antecedent and successor organizations. She highlighted party books and files, self- representations, foreign expressions, and greetings as important sources for the formation of indicators; she also found more remote access to be productive in relation to role theory or the concept of the “national community (Volksgemeinschaft).” MARKUS RAASCH (Mainz) also focused on the Volksgemeinschaft in his presentation on the relationship of Eichstätt’s Catholic milieu to National Socialism. Using a mixture of top-down and bottom-up access allows for a differentiated examination of semantics, practices, and emotions, thus enabling the detection of political attitudes. With the “Nazi conviction score,” HELGE-FABIEN HERTZ (Essen) then provided a further interdisciplinary impulse. He presented thirty-six attitude indicators based on Schleswig-Holstein’s pastors during the Nazi era, as well as the method of their generation and validation. According to his argument, such indicators always increased the probability of the occurrence of approval or rejection of National Socialism, but without being able to denote it with certainty. Only on the basis of their processing in a measurement model, the core of which is the score, can the set of indicators be used to draw conclusions about the attitude of the person in question and, in this way, also analyze large groups of people.

At the macro level, the focus was on attitudes towards National Socialism within German society, which even during the Nazi period was shaped by Christianity. THOMAS BRECHENMACHER (Potsdam) provided insights into a research project that sought to capture public opinion in pre-demoscopic periods through a quantitative analysis of first names. Statistical clusters of first names such as Adolf (Hitler), Horst (Wessel) or Germanic first names, in combination with other indicators, certainly allowed conclusions to be drawn about the acceptance of National Socialism among the population, whereby one might ask whether the first-name indicator also applies to groups particularly close to the church, such as pastors. JANOSCH STEUWER (Halle) took up the argument that there was no collective opinion of the German population about National Socialism (Peter Longerich). Based on 140 diaries from the Nazi era, he pointed out that communication structures had led to the perception of collective approval, while at the same time a multitude of opinions remained hidden. To make visible divergent thoughts behind the binary concept of approval-disapproval, qualitative measurement methods should not be ignored. In a quantitative content analysis, JÜRGEN W. FALTER (Mainz) and LISA KLAGGES (Greifswald) provided a further interdisciplinary impulse by analyzing reports from NSDAP members regarding their motives for joining the party. The decision to join was generally the result of a complex interplay of various factors, of which one component was ideological attitude. By comparing statements made by these same individuals in their later denazification files, conclusions could also be drawn regarding the argumentation strategies used during the denazification process.

In the closing discussion, the potential of the concept of attitude for historiographical research held firm, because such a concept accentuates the need for sensitization to the question of the inner life of historical persons. This inner life cannot be equated simply with levels of behaviour directly accessible in sources. The basic prerequisite of historiographical research on attitudes is, on the one hand, a clarification of the category “attitude” in conceptual distinction to terms such as “mentality” and, on the other hand, stronger methodological and source-critical reflections on one’s own cognitive process.[2] The research approaches amassed from various disciplines at the conference will be presented in a conference volume as a — by no means exhaustive — “methodological toolbox” for historiographical research on attitudes vis-à-vis the Third Reich, which includes both quantitative approaches (indicator research) and hermeneutic approaches. It aims to provide pragmatic suggestions for the micro, meso and macro levels, from whose arsenal future research projects can draw on the political attitudes of religious groups and individuals under National Socialism, and which can also provide incentives for historical research.

Conference Overview

Moderators: Thomas Großbölting (Hamburg), Rainer Hering (Schleswig)

Keynote Speeches 

Olaf Blaschke (Münster): Introductory reflections on “attitudes” as a category of analysis for research on churches and National Socialism

Peter Graeff (Kiel): Attitude research in sociology

 Panel I: The Micro Level 

Nora Andrea Schulze (Munich): Politically neutral? Bishop Hans Meiser in the change of political systems

Manfred Gailus (Berlin): Otto Dibelius and the Third Reich

Klaus Große Kracht (Hamburg): Borders and convergences. Biographical approaches to the relationship between Catholicism and National Socialism

Interdisciplinary Impulse 

Detlef Pollack (Münster), Marvin Becker (Hamburg): From the particular to the general. On the changing attitudes of individual Protestants and the breakdown of national Protestant mentalities after 1945

Panel II: The Meso Level 

Lucia Scherzberg (Saarbrücken): The “Working Community for Religious Peace”, its predecessor and successor organizations

Markus Raasch (Mainz): Volksgemeinschaft und Katholischsein in Eichstätt. Theoretical and methodological considerations on a confessional history of everyday life under National Socialism

 Interdisciplinary Impulse

Helge-Fabien Hertz (Essen): The “Nazi conviction score”. Indicator-based measurement of political attitudes of Schleswig-Holstein pastors during the Nazi era

Panel III: The Macro Level 

Janosch Steuwer (Cologne): A phantom and how to grasp it. “Popular opinion” and the formation of political opinion under the Nazi dictatorship

Thomas Brechenmacher (Potsdam): First names as demoscopic indicator? A research project in retrospect

Interdisciplinary Impulse

Jürgen W. Falter (Mainz), Lisa Klagges (Greifswald): Motives for joining the NSDAP

Closing Discussion

 

Notes:

[1] Conference report via H-Soz-uKult, “What did the Germans believe 1933-1945? A New Perspective on the Relationship Between Religion and Politics under National Socialism”, 15 February 2019.

[2] The original conference report authors noted in an email exchange with the translator that there has to be an accurate distinction between the term “attitude” and similar concepts such as “mentality” as characterized by Annales School, to avoid misunderstandings in future surveys.

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Chapter Note: Susannah Heschel, “Sacrament versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Chapter Note: Susannah Heschel, “Sacrament versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany,” in: On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence, ed. Irene Kacandes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 136-172.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this chapter, Susannah Heschel tackles a challenging question: in Hitler’s Germany, how were Christians of Jewish descent treated by their fellow parishioners, their brothers and sisters in Christ? More particularly, whether Protestant or Catholic, how were they treated after 15 September 1941, the date on which Germans identified by the Nazi regime as racially Jewish were required to wear the Judenstern, the yellow Star of David, in public—irrespective of religious affiliation? In the contest between sacrament and racism, which won out?

Heschel identifies the implementation of this mandate that publicly marked Jews as a watershed for relations within local church congregations, surmising that before that date, fellow parishioners would not have known who had been baptized as Christians from infancy and who had converted as adults. Whether or not that was the case, there is little question that the mandate shone a spotlight on race within the church, making the prospect of “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” Christians worshipping together much more challenging.

Heschel enters into her question through the story of Erna Becker-Kohen, a German Jew baptized as a Catholic in 1936. By all indications a devout believer and faithful choir member, she was shunned by her congregation, who didn’t want a Jew participating in worship with them. Her story is a complex one, however, as “some priests tried to help and console her.” (90) Even then, though, out of consideration for the other parishioners, she was asked to sit in the choir loft, so as not to be seen. She was not invited into the homes of fellow parishioners, and eventually she couldn’t attend her own parish church because of all the harassment she received whenever she went out in her neighbourhood. (99-100)

If marriage to an Aryan German spouse offered a limited measure of protection for a German Jew—there were 20,454 such marriages in existence in 1939—conversion and baptism offered little beyond the hope of comfort and occasional kindnesses from priests and pastors. (90) Still, assimilation through conversion and baptism was common. Estimates are that there were about 300,000 “non-Aryan” Christians in Germany in mid-1933. This meant, according to Nazi racial definitions, having at least one Jewish grandparent (i.e. either “Mischlinge” status or “full Jews”). How many emigrated and how many died at the hands of Nazis is unclear, though Heschel explains that there were only about 164,000 Jews of any kind left in Germany in October 1941, and by April 1943, there remained only 31,910 Jews wearing the Star of David and another 17,375 Jews in “privileged” marriages to Aryans, and who thus did not have to wear a star. (91)

In the subsequent section, Heschel explains the relationship between baptism and race prior to 1941, noting how Nazi propaganda help race to be more significant than baptism, and how the regime prohibited the baptism of Jews after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. Protestant theologians debated whether Christians of Jewish descent could be ordained and serve in pastoral ministry. The clearest answer to that question came from Karl Barth, who argued that the German Protestant Church would cease to be a Christian church if it failed to baptize Jewish Christians. (94) And yet, as various other anecdotes from the German churches suggest, it would seem that Christians of Jewish descent were rejected at least as much as they were accepted, and probably more. One thought-provoking observation of Heschel’s is that trams and churches were probably the only enclosed spaces in which “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” Germans might mingle in Nazi Germany, such was the effect of the social isolation of Jews after 1938. (97)

Heschel offers three possible interpretations through which we might understand the history of Christians of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany: first, that Jews baptized as Christians existed in a kind of borderland between Christian and Jewish communities, not really members of either; second, that Jews baptized as Christians functioned as “uncanny” intruders, arousing “suspicion, anxiety, and disgust” among Christians; and third, that Jews baptized as Christians evoked a kind of horror, in part because they reminded “Aryan” Christians that Christianity itself was grafted onto Judaism (Romans 11)—the two faiths were forever closely interconnected. (104-109)

Heschel raises an important and uncomfortable question, highlighting the relative weakness of Christian community to stand up against state-sponsored racism and persecution. It will not be surprising that she makes unsettling comparisons to twentieth- and twenty-first century American religion and politics.

 

 

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Research Report: British and American Christians in the Aftermath of the Holocaust and their Encounters with Survivors

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Research Report: British and American Christians in the Aftermath of the Holocaust and their Encounters with Survivors

By Robert Thompson, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

‘What I have written is true—so witness me God’, wrote an army chaplain following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. My PhD research brought together the experiences of army chaplains, with other British and American Christians, including relief workers, interfaith activists, and government officials, and reconsidered their experiences as amongst the first expressions of post-Holocaust Christianity. In the five years following the liberation of Belsen and other camps, they encountered survivors of the Holocaust. They listened to testimony, confronted the post-war challenges facing Jews, and reapproached their Christian faith as a consequence. These case-studies reveal previously untold human stories in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and they encourage reflection on the unique implications of these ‘ordinary’ personal experiences for understanding post-Holocaust Christianity.

My research journey began when I was working for the British Council of Christians and Jews. In this role I worked closely with colleagues at Yad Vashem to organise an annual seminar for Christian clergy at the International School of Holocaust Studies. In encouraging Christians to consider how we could respond, as Christians in our contemporary situation, to knowledge of the Holocaust, I was drawn to also ask: how did Christians respond? In particular, how did Christians in my own, British, context first respond to what they learned of the Nazi persecution of the Jews?

For my Master’s thesis, I conducted a study of British Christian army chaplains who participated in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I published an article based on this aspect of my research in The English Historical Review.[1] I argued that, in being present at Belsen for prolonged periods, and working face-to-face with survivors, chaplains were distinct amongst the liberators for being more likely to recognise the Jewish identities of the majority of the camp’s victims. In responding to what they experienced at Belsen, chaplains often articulated an understanding, to an extent, of the particular experiences of Jews under Nazism.

Developing this approach during my PhD, I considered British and American Christians who encountered Holocaust survivors in four formative contexts in Jews’ post-war lives: liberation, relief, occupation, and exodus. In the process of liberation, burying the dead and caring for the living, army chaplains largely came to recognise survivors, not as they first appeared—as anonymous, mass victims—but eventually as Jews with particular experiences of persecution and loss. Relief workers worked as Christians, and as women, and learned about the displacement, repatriation, and antisemitism that continued to face Jews as they looked to the future. Occupation officials initiated meetings between German Christians and remaining Jewish communities. In this work, the future Holocaust theologian Franklin Littell began to consider how far Christianity must change in response to the Holocaust. In the journey of Jews to Mandate Palestine, the only Christian crew member on the symbolic Exodus ship adopted the role of spokesperson for its refugees, influencing emerging memory of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.

As individuals, chaplains and relief workers within these cases-studies were distinct in their experiences, but in studying them together, what unites them is the way in which their practical experiences with survivors in post-war occupied Germany impacted their own Christianity. My approach builds on work by historians and sociologists of religion and their study of so-called ‘lived religion’, defined by Meredith McGuire as religion ‘experienced and expressed by ordinary people in the context of their everyday lives’.[2]

Using neglected archival sources, the previously ignored private correspondence of women relief workers for example, as well my own interviews with subjects’ surviving relatives, I traced the Christian reflections that these individuals engaged in. One key source was a previously unknown pamphlet by a Church of England chaplain, which was printed just weeks after Belsen’s liberation and published what were possibly the first camp survivor testimonies to appear in English, alongside photographs of survivors. One of my case studies conducted Bible study with a Jewish colleague in a DP camp. Another summed up his arrival at Belsen with a single scripture reference. Franklin Littell found in his day-to-day work in Germany inspiration for his developing belief that Christianity must change in order to directly confront its own antisemitism.

Making visible and taking seriously these grassroots experiences suggests that post-Holocaust Christianity first emerged, not in the theological Academy or the institutions of the Church, but experientially, in the personal and the everyday, and especially in encounters between Christians and survivors in the aftermath of liberation.

As I revise this research into a book manuscript, I am giving further thought to the theme of witnessing which was claimed after the camp’s liberation by the Belsen chaplain I quoted at the beginning of this piece. After His resurrection, Jesus said to the disciples, invoking Isaiah, ‘You are witnesses of these things’ (Luke 24:48). If Christianity is at its heart a way of witness to the presence of God in the world, what did the confrontation with evil in the Holocaust do to that responsibility to be a witness?

In Bible study, interfaith activism, writing letters and distributing reports, giving public talks, or reminiscing in oral history interviews, all these individuals reflected on the impact their experiences in Germany had in clarifying, challenging, and changing their Christian viewpoints. They did so not as lone voices but in dialogue and relationship with other people. Their responses were complicated, and there were aspects of the Holocaust and its aftereffects that they overlooked or misunderstood. Nevertheless, they took on a responsibility to witness. When he returned to his English parish after the war, the chaplain found himself a long way from Belsen. But he continued to tell his parishioners about his experiences. As a result, because of his experiences and his ongoing reflections, more Christians could learn about the Jewish experience he witnessed, and, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, they too could begin to respond.

Robert Thompson was awarded his PhD in 2023 from University College London. He is currently Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1 January-31 August 2024). Before beginning his PhD he was Senior Programme Manager for the Council of Christians and Jews (UK).

[1] Robert Thompson, ‘“The True Physicians Here are the Padres”: British Christian Army Chaplains and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen’, The English Historical Review 138: 593 (2023), 841–70.

[2] Merdith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford, 2008), 3.

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Letter from the Editors (Fall 2023)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Letter from the Editors (Fall 2023)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

A very happy new year’s greeting to all readers of Contemporary Church History Quarterly! I am excited to write to you in my new capacity as managing editor of CCHQ. I have been involved as an active reader and contributor to CCHQ since my graduate student years at Brown University, and have served as a member of the editorial board for the past ten years. Since 2016 I have taught history at Simon Fraser University, where I focus on modern European history, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. While my current research focuses on Holocaust child survivors and the impact of trauma on survival and memory, I continue to remain engaged with and interested in church-state relations in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century and intend to return in the near future to the inspiring story of Franz Stock. I am conscious of the role I am taking on with CCHQ, as successor most immediately to Kyle Jantzen and to the Quarterly’s first and founding managing editor, John Conway.

I am thrilled to announce a team of editors who will assist me with the collation and release of CCHQ issues, each of whom provides their own separate introduction as part of this issue. Kyle Jantzen will continue as associate technical editor. Long-time editorial board members Rebecca Charter-Chand and Mark Ruff join me as acting CCHQ associate editors.

We apologize for releasing the final issue of 2023 a month late, but we are pleased to bring you a variety of pieces. Martin R. Menke has provided an updated translation of a conference report first published by the CCHQ last summer. Michael Heymel (independent scholar) shared a report detailing the October 2022 conference in Germany dedicated to the life and legacy of Otto Dibelius. Menke has also reviewed Doris Bergen’s highly anticipated book, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany. Ion Popa (University of Manchester/Gerda Henkel Stiftung) has written a report about the October 2023 conference hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome that explores the impact of the newly-opened pontifical archives on Pope Pius XII and its impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Kyle Jantzen includes an article note about Gordon Keith’s review of Canadian Presbyterians and pacifism in the interwar period. Finally, Recent MA graduate Madison Barben (Washington State University) has provided a short overview of her Master’s thesis about the German Methodist Episcopal Church, as its members were caught between the Nazi regime and the American Methodist Church in the 1930s.

We are excited to step into 2024 with a dedicated and dynamic team of editors and contributors, and anticipate a sequence of full quarterly issues through the year and into next year. We fervently hope you find the December 2023 issue a welcome and stimulating conclusion to a busy year.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

 

Rebecca Carter-Chand

I am the director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I have been a longtime reader of CCHQ; even before I joined the editorial team in 2019, I contributed occasional pieces while I was a PhD student in history at the University of Toronto. I wrote a dissertation on the Salvation Army in modern Germany, analyzing how this British Protestant social welfare organization navigated its international relationships and national loyalties in Germany. I came to this research through a broader interest in Germany’s Free Churches and other Anglo-American religious groups in the 1930s and 40s. When I was beginning my PhD studies, scholarship on the Protestant and Catholic German churches under Nazism was well developed and sophisticated — much of it produced by current and former CCHQ editors. It’s been exciting to see this field develop further and also inspire new approaches to studying Christianity in Germany and beyond, such as transnational approaches to religious communities, ecumenical and comparative methodologies, the study of lay people and women religious in church hierarchies, Christian-Jewish interactions in European countries beyond Germany, and a nuanced approach to analyzing different types of complicity and their implications. In my role at the USHMM, I sit at the crossroads of Holocaust studies, religious studies, and the history of Christianity. I am very pleased to take on a greater role on the CCHQ editorial team and contribute to providing timely book reviews, conference reports, and notes on new research, and opportunities for scholars.

Mark Ruff

It is my pleasure to continue to serve in a leadership role in the Contemporary Church History Quarterly.  I am a Professor of History at Saint Louis University, where I am currently serving as Interim Chair for the department. My connection to the journal goes back to my years in graduate school at Brown University in the 1990s. Because of my interest in postwar German Catholicism and the erosion of what has often been called the Catholic milieu, I sought out John Conway, who was still teaching at the University of British Columbia.  Our scholarly contacts developed into a close friendship that lasted until his death in 2017. For my book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), I interviewed John extensively, since he crossed paths in Germany with other leading scholars like Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen examining the conduct of the German churches during the years of National Socialism. 

In 2013, I helped organize a conference in his honor at UBC and Regent College, a conference which also brought together many of the board members of the journal. I continue to make 20th century religious history in both Germany and increasingly Europe writ large the focus of my scholarship.  I am currently working on multiple research projects, including an edited volume looking at the rise, fall, and transformation of Christian Democratic parties across western and southern Europe.  

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Review of Doris L. Bergen, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Review of Doris L. Bergen, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University (mmenke@rivier.edu)

Doris Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at Toronto. Her works on the Holocaust, War, and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust and Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich are standard works in the field. In her most recent work, she studies the one thousand Christian chaplains in the Wehrmacht during World War II. (2) Specifically, she asks whom chaplains served during the war. Her answer is a few chaplains served the regime, most served the soldiers in their care, and virtually none served the victims of Germany’s wartime atrocities.

Bergen first asks what chaplains knew about the annihilation of the Jews and whether or not they sought to intervene. Working with letters individual chaplains sent to their bishops, friends, and family, official Wehrmacht reports on the chaplaincy, and more, Bergen paints an expected but devastating picture. Bergen demonstrates that the chaplains she studied were committed to their pastoral duties as they understood them. The chaplains celebrated religious services, counseled individual soldiers, and accompanied soldiers sentenced to death by a German court-martial on their final way. Before the war, Bergen shows, the chaplains continuously sought to prove their relevance to the soldiers in the field, both to prove their Germanic manliness and to prove themselves worthy of serving at the front. As Lauren Faulkner Rossi showed in her work Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation, the chaplains were constantly fighting efforts by the national socialist regime to curtail their activities, including the wartime decision not to replace chaplains killed or wounded in action with other chaplains and appoint Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere (NSFO), national socialist leadership officers, instead. (Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015)). Beyond the fear of the NSFO, Bergen shows the chaplains continuously sought to prove their relevance to the soldiers in the field, both to prove their Germanic manliness and to prove themselves worthy of serving at the front.

At the heart of the study lies the chaplains’ response to the antisemitic atrocities occurring around them. Bergen shows that chaplains hardly ever wrote or spoke about massacres observed near their positions. Instead, Bergen convincingly argues, the chaplains focused their pastoral care on both active duty and wounded soldiers, often more intensely than the regime desired. Soldiers perceived the chaplains’ presence and pastoral to absolve the soldiers from any guilt incurred during combat but also in measures against the civilian population. (8, 10, 20) Bergen asks, “Were the chaplains Nazis? A more fruitful question asks how people who were not fervent Nazis or eager killers ended up playing an essential role in atrocity?” (15)

Bergen’s work contributes to current scholarly inquiry into the behavior of Christian clergy during the national socialist era. How did Christian clergy respond to national socialist persecution of minorities such as Jews and individuals with disabilities? One must find the military chaplains essentially wanting by today’s standards. Just as clergy in the Altreich, with exceptions, failed to protect Jews, military chaplains closed their eyes to the atrocities committed by the German armed forces. Already in 1933, the might be said about Christian leaders in general, such as Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, who in 1933 argued that “Jew-Christians” (Judenchristen) could take care of themselves. (Ludwig Volk, Der Bayerische Episkopat und der Nationalsozialismus 1930-1934. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, series B, vol. 1 (Mainz, 1965), 78: Nachlaß Faulhaber)) In addition to the concerns Bergen mentioned about manliness and loyalty, Faulhaber mentioned the fear that defending Jews might lead to the persecution of Catholics. The desire to avoid opposing national socialist policy prevailed among military chaplains as it did among most civilian clergy. See, in exemplary fashion, the work of Kevin Spicer. (Kevin Spicer, C.S.C., Resisting the Third Reich: Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004) and Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2008)). Also, military chaplains faced the additional burden of supporting troops on the front lines. She argues, “The Wehrmacht chaplaincy acted as an insulating layer, protecting German soldiers from listening to their consciences or reflecting on Christian teachings. The buffer also covered the chaplains themselves and absorbed objections they may have had. The chaplaincy became a cone of silence, a tunnel.” (20) It would have been challenging to warn those involved in atrocities of the sinful nature of their acts.

While Bergen’s argument makes sense, one wishes she had done more to explore subjects that might weaken her argument. Most importantly, putting pen to paper during the national socialist era was perilous. It would have been helpful to understand the chaplains’ reports and letters home in the context of military censorship of the mail from the front. Given the regime’s hostility to the chaplaincy, might the chaplains have been particularly concerned their mail would be intercepted and exploited? Bergen herself notes that clergy who contradicted the regime’s official line on the Kristallnacht pogrom found themselves barred from service as chaplains. (74) Bergen shows that the vetting process for chaplains sought to weed out any individual previously critical of the regime. As Bergen notes, this kept principled clergy from becoming chaplains, which led to a chaplain’s corps being more inclined to support the regime. Bergen might have displayed more understanding of the pressure chaplains felt to care for their assigned flock against the scrutiny of the regime. They focused on the soldiers in their units, to support them and provide them with solace, which they could not have done had they remonstrated with them about the atrocities German forces were committing.

Furthermore, with few exceptions, Bergen does not show direct awareness by chaplains of atrocities committed by German forces. “Many chaplains’ activity reports situate individual clergy squarely in the areas of major massacres of Jews, although they do not explicitly mention these events.” (123) A more detailed analysis of the stations at which Christian chaplains served at any given point during the war about the occurrence of atrocities would have been helpful. Beyond the data provided, a more detailed analysis of the distribution of Christian chaplains among Wehrmacht units would have been helpful.

Nonetheless, Bergen’s fundamental question remains valid: “Whom or what does a chaplain serve?” (2) A Christian clergy should first serve God and God’s commandments, regardless of nationality, ideology, etc. Seeing evil, or at least the evidence of evil, clergy should have interceded for the victims. Instead, and this Bergen might have emphasized further, the chaplains considered their mission limited to the welfare of German soldiers, not to all those they encountered. As a result, “In the Nazi empire, Christianity and Christian chaplains were essential components in a system of ideas, structures, and narratives that protected and rewarded the perpetrators of genocide and their communities even as it erased their victims and denied their crimes.” (232)

 

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Conference Report: New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Conference Report: “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians,” Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, October 9-11, 2023

 By Ion Popa, University of Manchester/Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

The Conference “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII” was the largest and most significant gathering of international scholars working on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust since the March 2020 opening of the Pope Pius XII collections. Organised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies (CBCJS) at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Centre for Catholic-Jewish Studies at Saint Leo University, and the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, the conference provided the first significant insight into the new documents.

As noted by Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Director of International Academic Programs, USHMM, and Fr. Etienne Vetö, Auxiliary Bishop, Reims (France), formerly Director of CBCJS, in their opening remarks, the new archives, estimated to be at least 16 million pages, will, for years to come, shed light on historical and theological debates over Pope Pius XII and the Holy See during the Holocaust, and on Jewish-Christian relations at multiple levels – from ordinary people to authority figures in Jewish and Catholic milieus, institutions, and power structures. The long-overdue decision of the Vatican to open these wartime era documents and Pope Francis’s words “The Church is not afraid of history” were referred to many times during the event.

The conference started on October 9th, two days after the Hamas terror attack, when the magnitude of atrocities was becoming clearer. This was mentioned in the address of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, who expressed his and Pope Francis’s “sorrow at what is happening in Israel.” He condemned “the despicable attack” against “many Israeli brothers and sisters,” and highlighted the plight of innocent Palestinian civilians. Most conference participants, having relatives and friends in Israel, followed the news with anxiety throughout the proceedings. The US and Israeli ambassadors to the Holy See and Rabbi Noam Marans, American Jewish Committee, also issued, in their remarks, strong condemnations of Hamas murders. Due to these extreme circumstances, the Yad Vashem delegation, including Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, one of the main organizers, could not participate in the conference.

Debates on Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust have, for decades, navigated between the apologetic and the more critical approaches. These sides were present at the “New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII” conference too. In fact, before the beginning of the announced proceedings, the Pontifical Gregorian University advertised a pre-conference session titled “Jews Rescued in Ecclesial Houses During the Nazi Occupation of Rome: A Documentation Discovered at the Pontifical Biblical Institute.” This idea of Catholic/Holy See help for or rescue of Jews appeared in many talks, some speakers trying to present local, exceptional, limited cases of Catholic aid as the general attitude of the Church; see, for instance, the presentations by, amongst others, Dr. Grazia Loparco FMA, Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione Auxilium, Rome, or Dr. Annalisa Capristo, Center for American Studies, Rome. Another example of this tendency was the presentation of Dr. Johan Ickx, Archive for Section for Relations with States, Secretariat of State, Vatican, who based most of his argument about the intervention of papal nuncios and the Vatican on only one archival example, a Jewish woman originally from Romania, who was in Rome in 1938, and asked for Holy See assistance. He, as others, tried to extrapolate such cases and argue that Pope Pius XII himself was behind these interventions, but there was no clear evidence in this sense in any of the conference presentations.

Several papers, including those of Dr. Giovanni Coco, Vatican Apostolic Archive, or Professor David Kertzer, Brown University, examined the role of Angelo Dell’Acqua in shaping Vatican policy towards Jews during the Holocaust. Dell’Acqua was a lower-level assistant in the Holy See Secretariat of State during WWII, but he was seen, it was argued, as a main adviser on Jewish matters. His wartime scepticism over reports about the mass-murder of Jews was often infused with vile antisemitic tropes. Later, he would climb the ladder of ecclesiastical career, becoming a deputy Vatican Secretary of State (1954), Archbishop of Chalcedon (1958), Cardinal President of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See and vicar general of Rome (1967). The question of duplicity regarding his wartime antisemitism and contribution to the Vatican’s policy of silence vs his post-war successful ecclesiastical career was asked, but easily dismissed. The focus on Dell’Acqua, including by prominent scholars from the Vatican, marks a step forward in acknowledging that the Holy See did not do enough in speaking out against the murder of European Jews. However, the suggestion, implicit in some presentations, that he was the main responsible for the Vatican and Pope Pius XII’s inactions is misleading. The tendency to shift the blame away from the Pope and other major figures in the Vatican apparatus to this low-rank assistant is historically inaccurate, and the question of his influence on the Holy See’s policy on Jews will need more polished examination in the future.

More evidence from Pope Pius XII collections was presented, during the conference, on Holy See real-time knowledge about the murder of European Jews (such as the papers of Dr. Michele Sarfatti and Dr. Monika Stolarczyk-Bilardie), antisemitism in interwar Italian Catholic society and universities (Dr. Tommaso Dell’Era and Dr. Raffaella Perin), Pius XII and Vatican responses to requests for help (Prof. Dr. Hubert Wolf and his team at the University of Münster), the duplicitous attitude of papal nuncios in France or Romania (Dr. Nina Valbousquet and Dr. Ion Popa), the limits of Vatican humanitarianism (Dr. Robert Ventresca), Catholic contribution to escape of war criminals from Allied justice (Dr. Gerald Steinacher and Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming), or the theological issues raised by returning baptised children to their Jewish families (Dr. Matthew Tapie). The case of Romania was mentioned several times. Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, Holy See ambassador to Bucharest from 1936 to 1947, has often been praised and used as a good example of Catholic interventions in favour of Jews. While this is not under question, more evidence started to emerge about his own antisemitism, or about the duplicitous diplomatic attitude of the Vatican. In January 1938, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State, expressed open desire to collaborate with the heavily antisemitic Romanian National Christian Party cabinet, and in July 1943 Mihai Antonescu, one of the most important actors in the murder of up to 380,000 Jews during the Holocaust in Romania, had an audience with Pope Pius XII.

Particularly interesting was the paper of Professor Philip Cunningham, Saint Joseph’s University, who examined the draft 1938 encyclical Humani Generis Unitas, and its possible adverse impact on later Catholic theological documents. Seen by some historians as Pope Pius XI’s laudable intention to condemn antisemitism, the proposed encyclical still maintained the distinction between “good” and “bad” antisemitism and continued to promote conspiracies about a Jewish plot to control the world. As Cunningham concluded, had the encyclical been promulgated, it would have in fact “raised the notion of divine malediction against Jews to the status of formal Catholic doctrine” and it would have created serious obstacles for the later Noastra Aetate declaration (1965), which repudiated antisemitism altogether.

Last, but not least, although the conference gathered a great number of excellent historians and theologians, some countries/regions were missing. There were no papers on/from Ukraine, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia/Czechoslovakia, Belgium or the Netherlands. This is very likely because no scholars working on these countries have started to look at the new Pope Pius XII documentation yet. Nevertheless, this geographical gap seen at the October 2023 conference is an invitation for a re-union, in a not-so-distant future, where more insight and new updates can be shared by those researching these incredibly rich and meaningful archives.

The full conference is available to view on the Pontifical Gregorian University’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@unigregoriana

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