Review of Manfred Gailus, Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gläubige Zeiten. Religiosität im Dritten Reich (Freiburg: Herder 2021). 223 pages. ISBN 9783451033391.

By Sarah Thieme, University of Münster

With his monograph “Gläubige Zeiten”, Manfred Gailus, also one of the editors of this journal, succeeds in providing a compact synthesis of his many years of research on the history of religion during the National Socialist era and his thesis of a “religious revival” (p. 15) provides a convincing framework for his account. This well-executed study is rich in examples and quotations from contemporaneous actors that bring the story to life for the broader audience to whom he is presenting the current state of research on the “return of religiosity” (“Wiederkehr des Religiösen”) (p. 11) from 1933 to 1945. These years were marked by diverse faiths and a multitude of (often hybrid) creeds, an intensification of religious action, competition between religious actors and conflict over questions of faith.

The book is divided into four main chapters – I. Christian Denominations and Nazism; II. New Faith Movement; III. Jews, Antisemitism and “Kristallnacht”; IV. War, Christians and the Holocaust – with varying numbers of sub-chapters. Instead of an introduction, Gailus precedes the chapters with a short section entitled “Concepts, Questions, Problems” in which he introduces his topic and the central question of his study: “What did the Germans believe in during the Hitler era?” (p. 8). Given it has been shown that 95% of Germans belonged to a Christian denomination during the Nazi regime and the “astonishing mixture of individual faiths” (p. 10) and “hybride Doppelgläubigkeiten” that Gailus has identified – in particular, those blending Christian faith and Nazi confession – the study sets out to analyse the traditional Christian characteristics in relation to the reshaping and partial new imprints of religiosity that occurred during the “Third Reich” and, thereby, offer an interpretation of the Nazi era in terms of the history of religion. The author proposes that the Nazi era was a “time of faith”, “Gläubige Zeiten” with a “high conjuncture” of faith and faithfulness (p. 11). Methodologically speaking, Gailus claims to look from above, from a “bird’s eyes view” (p. 11), though it should be noted that his altitude varies significantly throughout the book. Given his own extensive research, he flies in very close to Protestantism, while remaining more distant from Catholicism, the perspective on which is primarily literature-based and, therefore, more superficial. Gailus also flies particularly close to Berlin, the geographical focus of his own research and most of the examples he cites.

The first chapter on the two main Christian denominations is particularly compelling. Gailus convincingly develops the argument that there was a significant “religious experience” (p. 15) in 1933 that can be perceived as a turning point which raised hopes for a re-Christianisation, especially within Protestantism. As evidence of this shift, the author refers to a deluge of confessional publications and the mass marriages of Berlin stormtroopers, which, by being initiated by enthusiastic Protestant pastors, demonstrates that the Nazi state welcomed such confessional commitment, at least initially. Gailus tells the story of the so-called “Church Struggle” or “Kirchenkampf” as an internal Protestant conflict between the völkisch-antisemitic religious movement “Deutsche Christen”, which dominated many regional churches, and the internal church opposition to it, the “Bekennende Kirche”. The internal tension between these groups permeated all levels of the church, creating disputes amongst church leaders and intellectuals and local disputes within the parishes. The Apostle Church in Berlin provides a particularly vivid illustration, which included blockades of the church space, fights on the pulpit and loud counter-sermons.

Using the Protestants as a starting point, Gailus evaluates the “performance” of the Catholics, whom he suggests were “less moved” (p. 23) in 1933. It is noticeable that the author analyses Catholics in a more general way and provides fewer examples of local and regional actors. He focuses primarily on the Reichskonkordat, the treaty between the Nazi government and the Vatican made in the summer of 1933 and whose observance the Church and the Nazis struggled over in the following years. To summarise, Gailus emphasises that although Catholic religiosity and Nazi faith were not mutually exclusive, in comparison to the Protestants, who he considers as fairly open to National Socialism, he considers the Catholics, overall, as more reserved and sceptical and, thus, increasingly pushed out of the public eye by the National Socialists. A stronger appreciation of the internal-Catholic plurality and diversity of forms of behaviour would have been desirable. It would also have been preferable if the developments between 1933 and the start of the war had been examined more closely. Having said that, Gailus succeeds exceedingly well in his interpretation of Protestantism, which he vividly portrays as a divided “many-voiced and dissonant choir without a conductor” (p. 37-8).

In order to do justice to the breadth of the religious field, given the great competition over questions of faith and a multitude of religious confessions that occurred at the time, the second chapter covers the new faith movements in the “Third Reich”, i.e. the völkisch movements, the so-called “God-believers”/“Gottgläubige”, and religious factions within the NSDAP.

First, he uses the example of the heterogeneous “Deutsche Glaubensbewegung” and the “Ludendorff Movement” to show the dynamics of the new-religious awakening that occurred from 1933 onwards. The churches in particular saw the “neo-pagans”, whom they overestimated, as a great threat. However, the Nazi state, which initially allowed the völkisch faith movements to continue, wanted to prevent a religious division of the “Volksgemeinschaft” and increasingly undermined the new-religious groups from 1936 onwards as the new faith was to serve National Socialism. Young, fanatical National Socialists in particular – usually SS men, party functionaries and civil servants from industrial-urban regions, often from the fringes of Protestantism – saw the NSDAP and SS as their new religious community and called themselves “Gottgläubige”. From 1936 on, they were officially recognised as a third denomination despite not having an organisational context, an explicit programme of faith or a religious practice of their own.

Within the NSDAP, Gailus considers the “Gottgläubigen” among the “ideological rigorists”, one of three distinct religious-political factions within the party, although they did not express their religious-political conflicts openly. In addition to this group, with their radical anti-church and anti-Christian attitudes, there was a large group of “Christian National Socialists” in the middle and lower levels of the party hierarchy, who desired a synthesis of beliefs, and thirdly, the “centrists” who wanted to avoid the NSDAP’s break with the large Christian portion of the population because of the power politics. Thus, the NSDAP left the solution to the religious question open. Based on the membership statistics, however, the party remained a Christian one. Nevertheless, Gailus considers the religious dimension of the Nazi movement as an expression of the religious revival, which he exemplifies, inter alia, with the so-called “Lebensfeiern”.

The third chapter is less strongly oriented towards the thesis of the “religious revival”. In this chapter, Gailus explores the perspectives of religious actors on Jewish people and their behaviour during the November pogrom of 1938. He shows how Judaism was declared “evil” by Nazi salvation beliefs and how this added a religious dimension to racist antisemitism. Following Saul Friedländer, the author puts forward the thesis of “redemptive anti-semitism” unfortunately without explaining the concept in more detail. He also elucidates how both denominations supported racist exclusion by issuing so-called “Aryan certificates”. According to the author, the churches and the new Nazi faith conformed in their “Frontstellung” – against people of Jewish faith. Due to his statement that Jews “were not an independent player in… the religious field” (p. 89), they appear merely as objects in the depiction of this chapter.

With regard to his question about the national-socialist religious foundation of antisemitism, Gailus regrettably omits the perpetrators of the violence in his examination of the actors and reactions of Christians to the so-called “Kristallnacht”. He emphasises the silence of the churches as institutions and, at the same time, shows that many Christians, especially Protestants, agreed to the racist pogrom. A small number of individual clergymen spoke out against the events publicly in sermons. However, they themselves then had to reckon with attacks and arrests, as is demonstrated through several case studies. To explain the pogrom from the point of view of Nazi believers, the author monocausally refers to an “expulsion campaign” or “Austreibungsaktion” against the “evil” (p. 110).

The fourth and final chapter, containing the most sub-chapters, focuses on the relationship between the Second World War, Christians and the Shoa. Beginning with the observation that although there was some enthusiasm and support, especially from the “Deutsche Christen”, the mood at the start of the war was less euphoric than in 1914, Gailus traces expressions of joy, for example, in field post letters. He also discusses the official change in Nazi church policy at the beginning of the war, which was, in practice, still characterised by the fact that the Church’s religious practice was restricted and even attacked. The effects of the war also increasingly restricted religious life on the “home front”. Based on recent research by, for example, Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Brodie, the author emphasises that if we move beyond the dominant narrative according to which all Catholics were victims of National Socialism and suffering because of the war, Catholic Germans also approved of and participated in the war. With regard to the development of Nazi faith over the course of the war, Gailus argues that the trend towards “de-confessionalisation” was in sharp decline, as Nazi faith could not adequately explain the mass deaths, yet, at the same time, the “post-Christian utopias” (p. 145) of some Nazi leaders became even more radicalised.

The brief sub-chapter on the Shoa explores the attitudes of Protestants and Catholics towards the Holocaust. The author stresses that only individual theologians spoke out publicly against the persecution of the Jews and that the Church institutions remained publicly silent about the Shoa despite their knowledge – mediated, for example, through Wehrmacht soldiers. Instead, the Church hierarchy chose the path of less successful petitions to Nazi leaders. Overall, Gailus emphasises that “Christian silence” (p. 160) was widespread. In addition, there had been a “de-solidarization” (p. 160) against Jewish people in the ecclesiastical sphere and “non-Aryans” were excluded from congregational life. Moreover, Protestant theologians, in particular, were actively involved in the genocide. Thus, he ultimately concludes that the Holocaust was “performed out of a Christian society” (p. 163) in which only a few protested publicly.

In sum, Manfred Gailus convincingly presents his thesis that the years from 1933 to 1945 were “faith-filled times” characterised by religious revivals of not only the two Christian denominations but also the völkisch, “gottgläubige” and Nazi believers. He conveys his argument and the current state of research vividly to a broader audience, writing in a clear and richly pictorial manner, citing numerous examples and allowing contemporary source quotations to guide the narrative, which makes the volume a pleasure to read. Source classifications, research debates and comprehensive analyses are sometimes somewhat lacking; especially with regard to the target audience, some explanations of terms (e. g. “political religion”; “redemptive anti-semitism”; …) would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the sections on Protestantism and Nazi faith, which are based on the author’s own extensive studies, are particularly convincing.

The religions studied are analysed as imagined religions, that is, they are conceptualised in terms of their discourses, confessions, church official statements and theologies. Therefore, theologians, clergy and intellectual thinkers are the main actors encountered in this volume. The level of religious practice, the performance of worship and the everyday life of the Church are not brought as clearly into view. This is regrettable, especially because in this way the lived religiosity of women could have also been taken into account more effectively. Nevertheless, and in conclusion, I unreservedly recommend this generally comprehensible overview of the history of religion during the Nazi era as an introduction to the topic and the current debates in the scholarship.

Review of Michael Hesemann, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Michael Hesemann, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan (Stuttgart: Langenmüller, 2020). 448 pages. ISBN 978-3-7844-3449-0.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

Michael Hesemann, an independent scholar who has published several works on Pius, on Hitler’s view of religion, and on the Armenian genocide, offers a new contribution to the ongoing “Pius Wars,” the continuing scholarly debate about the degree to which Pope Pius XII opposed national socialist Antisemitism and how much he did to assist persecuted Jews. The spectrum of opinion in this debate reaches from hagiographic apologists such as Michael Feldkamp to vehement critics such as Susan Zuccotti, not to mention Ralf Hochhuth’s early attack on Pius in “The Deputy.” Hesemann makes a case for Pius’s sincere concern for Jewish suffering and his active, pragmatic support for rescue measures. He offers little new insight but amasses a large volume of evidence in the pope’s favor. This work could be a valuable contribution to the discussion, were it not for occasional disparaging comments against those with opposing viewpoints and a failure not only to make his case but engage and disprove the opposing case.

The most important contribution of Hesemann’s work is its exhaustive collection of all evidence and arguments that portray the pope’s record in a positive light. A frequently cited problem was the vague and diplomatic language used in the pope’s statements and writings; Hesemann points to contemporary sources that clearly understood the pope’s intent. Referring to Pius’ first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, which includes a reminder about human fraternity and about the right of the victims of war and racism to human compassion, Hesemann points to the New York Times, which reported that the pope “condemned dictators, those who break international agreements, and racism.” Furthermore, the Times reported that while such a condemnation had been expected, “only few observers had expected the condemnation to be so clear and unequivocal” (104). Hesemann’s evidence suggests that Pius was not only not silent but that readers understood his guarded speech as he intended.

Beyond the question of papal ambiguity and silence, Hesemann devotes much of the work to proving that the pope was active and vocal about the holocaust. Addressing the pope’s supposed inactivity during the holocaust, Hesemann lists many instances in which the pope quietly directed that financial resources, albeit limited, be provided to help those persecuted by the National Socialists. At the same time, Hesemann shows that this aid extended beyond Catholics whom the national socialist regime considered Jewish. The examples he provides show that his assistance was reactive rather than systematic. In light of the immense need, the Vatican necessarily limited its expenditures in aid to those persecuted. Hesemann also argues that reliable information about persecutions, especially about mass murder, was challenging to obtain. According to him, Pius learned of the true extent of the genocide only after the war. (212) On the same page, however, Hesemann argues that the pope received eyewitness accounts proving the systematic nature of the murders in the East “already a few weeks before the Wannsee Conference.” (212). Thus, in January 1942, the pope knew the National Socialists were murdering according to a concrete plan. How then, as Hesemann describes a few pages later, in September 1942, could Monsignor Montini (later Pope Paul VI) have honestly told American envoy Myron Taylor that the Holy See did not possess information “confirming this grave information?” (216). To argue that the pope knew about violence, terror, and massacres, but not about the extent of the genocide seems farfetched.

Hesemann devotes an entire chapter to “the ‘wise silence’ of the pope.” (220). Pius’ silence was the result of bitter experience, claims Hesemann. Pius himself claimed that any public statements condemning Antisemitism and the holocaust were counterproductive. To each one, the national socialist regime responded with increased persecution. (208) The most robust case for reticence was the Dutch experience under occupation. Beginning in 1941, the Dutch had publicly protested against German antisemitic measures. Each time, the Germans had responded with enormous levies and additional arrests. When deportations began in 1942, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht ordered his protest read in all churches. (222) Within days, all Dutch Catholics whom the occupation forces considered Jewish were deported, among them Carmelite religious Edith Stein. According to the pope’s housekeeper, upon hearing the news, the pope immediately burned the draft of the public protest he had intended to make in support of the Bishop of Utrecht. German responses to Radio Vaticane’s regular reports about atrocities against Catholics led to arrests of priests, executions, and more. (231) In response to the pope’s Christmas broadcast of 1942, in which he condemned the suffering of innocents, including those persecuted based on race, the German Foreign Office threatened the pope with reprisals in Germany, should such “interference” occur again. (241). Hesemann makes a strong case that a broad, explicit public condemnation of the genocide would have wrought much suffering. However, one must ask if safeguarding the moral integrity of the Catholic Church’s leader might not have been worth the price in the scope of the crimes committed, preserving the moral integrity of the leader of the Catholic Church might not have been worth the price?

The book’s argument falters when Hesemann presents an image of Pope Pius XII as a friend of Jews, perhaps “the church leader best-disposed to Jews during his lifetime.” (61). For example, the author points to a Jewish childhood friend with whom Pius was close and whose emigration to Palestine he facilitated in 1938. More generally, Hesemann’s case for Pius’ pro-Jewish attitudes and activities during his time as nuncio in Germany relies on the testimony of Pinchas Lapide and Nahum Sokolow. Problematic are claims that Pius XII condemned the Reich pogrom of 1938 because he “must have approved and possibly even dictated himself” the Osservatore Romano’s critical response to this violent persecution. To claim that there was “no leading Catholic clergyman other than Eugenio Pacelli who opposed Hitler and National Socialism as early and as uncompromisingly” is an audacious claim. (92) Sometimes, even among the best historians, the desire for a particular “past” colors one’s work. There is no doubt that Hesemann gathered much evidence to support his case. In the cases mentioned above, the evidence presented by Hesemann broadly supports his argument. Still, a more solid foundation of evidence is needed to support some of the claims made convincingly.

The publisher’s jacket cover promises “the first publication in German of these explosive [brisant] documents.” Anyone expecting full-length explosive and previously unpublished documents will, however, be disappointed. In only two cases does Hesemann claim to offer documentary evidence he newly discovered. For example, he found a message of January 9, 1939, in which Pius, still Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli, appealed to all leading archbishops to create structures to welcome Catholic refugees whom the Third Reich considered Jews. Pius XII claimed that about 200,000 individuals the regime considered Jewish fell into this category. Hesemann points out that this number exceeded the number of Catholics persecuted as Jews, which meant that Pius sought to create opportunities for practicing Jews. (79-80, 148)

Hesemann’s summary of post-war Jewish expressions of gratitude is exhaustive but not novel. Several significant document editions appear in the citations. However, his archival research is limited to records in the Vatican Secret Archives, specifically those of the nunciatures in Munich and Berlin and the apostolic delegation in Turkey. The documents Hesemann found in the Vatican Secret Archives generally are not new. Of the relevant scholarly literature used by Hesemann, some appeared recently, but a good number of the works are outdated. Even fifty years ago, Father Ludwig Volk, SJ, who had seen the Secret Archives, warned that this collection contained no smoking guns.

In part because Hesemann relies on questionable scholarship, his work lacks judiciousness. For example, he describes Hochhuth’s play as the result of a KGB plot (18) without mentioning that this claim stems from a largely unverifiable work by former Romanian secret police officer Ion Pacepa. Hochhuth did not need the KGB’s help writing “The Deputy.” Even were this assertion correct, it is not surprising that the Soviet bloc sought to embarrass the Vatican, nor does such a connection change the content or impact of the play. Hesemann dismisses rather than engages the work of Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, and others. Accusing David Kertzer of inventing the claim that Pius XI did not want to publish an encyclical that would offend Hitler is a scholarly accusation that deserved a much more detailed explanation. In general, Hesemann undermines his work by this combination of disparaging scholars with contradictory opinions and failing to disprove their claims.

Beyond the corpus, the book includes a preface by Father Peter Gumpel, Ph.D., SJ, deeply involved in the canonization process of Pius XII. In the acknowledgments, Hesemann thanks Pope Benedict XVI for his encouragement and leading German curial officials for their help as he wrote the manuscript. While the preface and acknowledgments do not predetermine the book’s conclusions, they suggest that Hesemann would have felt the need to be all the more critical of his sources and their arguments to avoid the appearance of prejudice.

Reading the work without context, one seems to see a convincing case for an actively engaged pope, one who opposed National Socialism at every turn but whom experience had taught to be diplomatic and to act “under the radar,” without openly condemning his powerful enemies. Such a reality would have been an almost ideal papacy. This wishful thinking is not exclusive to Hesemann. It seems that, at least for now, the “Pius Wars” will continue to obstruct objective scholarship.

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Pp. 322. ISBN: 9781487505639.

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

Questions around the legacy of German colonialism and how its racist ideologies and genocidal campaigns against the Maji-Maji in German East Africa (1905-1908) and the Herero in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) influenced Nazi exterminationalist policies in World War II and the Holocaust have been debated in scholarship and public discourse for a good two decades. In the same decades, public awareness of the persistence of reflexive, uncaring repetitions of colonial patterns in postcolonial nations has steadily grown, not at least because of recent protests against vestiges of colonialism that led, to name just two examples, to the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts from European museums and the removal of public monuments in countries like Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. The presumption that Christian missionary activities were deeply embedded in the colonial enterprise, working in tandem with secular colonialist rulers, sounds like a truism today. And yet, Jeremy Best’s new book on German missionary culture questions a facile alignment of colonial economic exploitation (by secular nations states) with missionary ambitions to win souls for Christ.

Best, a historian at Iowa State University, pleads for a careful analysis of historical documentation related to German Protestant missionary activities in the nineteenth century within the context of German religious and political culture. His study of “the vast corpus of texts produced by the German missionary movement…between 1860 and the First World War” (7) arrives at the insight that relations between Protestant missionaries and German secular colonial elites were tense and fractured. They did not see eye-to-eye with regards to the purpose of establishing colonies in Africa. German Protestant missionaries aimed for a global Christian community in which the indigenous population (the colonized subject) was given some agency. They recognized the value of indigenous subjectivity that, in their imagination, would blossom economically on local levels, thus protecting them from becoming objects of brutal exploitation in the interest of European nation states, including the late colonial aspirations of the Wilhelmine Empire. What indigenous Africans were missing, according to German Protestant missionaries, was education, and that meant, of course, Christian education.

Following in the footsteps of text-centered Lutheran traditions—even if not all German missionaries were Lutherans—it may not surprise that education, learning, and reading were centerpieces for German missionary activities. They included bringing the word of God to “heathens,” translating the Bible into indigenous languages, publishing multiple mission journals, and creating the new academic discipline of Missionswissenschaft. Hence, with a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Gospel of John, Heavenly Fatherland opens with the following lines: “In the beginning were words. Words said, words written, words read by German Protestants seeking knowledge of God, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of other people” (5). From the very first page, the reader gets prepared for an exploration of a German Sonderweg of missionary activities, a path distinct from mission aims of other colonial empires like Britain or Spain, but also distinct from German Catholic activities in German Southwest and East Africa.

The author presents his arguments in six chapters. Though he is mostly focusing on German East Africa (surrounded by British, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial territories) and on the work of the Berlin Mission, his perspective is always directed at the larger political picture. The book brings together, Best states, “religious history [and] the history of German colonialism” (18). Seamlessly woven into his overall thesis are materials from other mission societies and Hilfsvereine at home as well as larger political tensions and competitions between various actors (between European colonialists; Protestant missionaries and German colonial elites; German national politics and Protestant dreams of a global “heavenly fatherland”; German Protestants and their anti-Catholic crusade during the Kulturkampf).

Chapter 1 focuses on the development of German Protestant mission ideals that pursued not national interests but the preaching of the Gospel. Important figures like Gustav Warneck and Carl Mirbt advocated for the Gospel of Mark’s Great Commission: mission work should not create “Germans” among colonized people, but “Christians” among “heathens.” These men followed an international vision with “economically self-sufficient…colonized communities” (45) in Africa as well as aspirations for a worldwide Christian mission network. At the turn of the century and before the outbreak of World War I, a younger generation of mission leaders, like Karl Axenfeld and Julius Richter, followed, however, a new direction, pushing more forcefully to align Christian mission work with the German nation.

Chapter 2 pays attention to the importance of language and education that Protestant Germans ascribed to regarding their missionary ideals. Rather than replacing native languages and culture with those of the colonizer, Gustav Warneck understood that “Christianity [as] a foreign religion can only become indigenous…if they grasp it in their mother tongue” (68). To some extent, Warneck and others wanted a less-intrusive cultural exchange, respecting indigenous languages while organizing the newly found African-Christian communities as Volkskirchen—this very German idea that a particular church community is constituted by a particular Volk (a people/ethnos/ nationality/race). What Warneck and others did not grasp—according to Best—is that their professed global outlook nevertheless implanted particular national concepts in Africa, and thus inadvertently participated in the national colonial enterprise they resisted.

Chapter 3 examines tensions between missionary aspirations and secular state interests regarding the indigenous work force. While the state wanted cheap labor (and at best allowed for something like trade schools), the theology of missionaries aimed for a broader education to create communities for African Christians, in opposition to demands for producing “a proletariat toiling for European colonialists” (111). Chapter 4 provides a gripping analysis of the clash between three parties: secular, national imperialists focused on exploiting indigenous peoples and lands, Protestant missionaries wanting to create local indigenous Volkskirchen as Christian agrarian communities, and Catholic missionaries somewhere in between (according to Protestant polemics, the Catholic Church “satisf[ied] the needs of trading companies [and] plantation owners”; 120). The chapter briefly reviews the history of anti-Catholic sentiments in Germany and how this conflict spilled over into the African continent, with the result of Protestants and Catholics jostling over land. To that end, missions, like the Berlin Mission, acquired land as protection zones from economic exploitation. This process was, of course, just another colonial “paternalistic plan” (127) of land appropriation—albeit in the form of benign paternalism with the goal of protecting Christian-African communities.

Chapters 5 and 6 return “home” to the European continent. While Chapter 5 shows the tremendous effort of Protestant missionaries to build up support networks in German localities through presentations, exhibits, testimonies by Christianized Africans, and publications, Chapter 6 introduces the reader to the Protestant efforts of creating international Christian mission networks. It focuses on the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, where the German participants hoped, for good reasons, to take a leading role in future global mission outreach. Those dreams were shattered with World War I. By 1918, Germany did not only lose its colonies, it also lost its moral standing in international settings, and that included the churches. The rise of Hitler and eventually World War II and the Holocaust confirmed to the world that Germans could not be trusted.

Compared to other colonial empires (like British, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese), German colonial rule was short-lived. It lasted for about half a century. Whatever long-term dreams national-secular elites and Protestant missionaries followed when they expanded into African territories, they all came to an abrupt end after World War I. The question remains: Were German Protestant missionaries and their theologies entangled in a racist and colonial enterprise in Africa that may have laid the foundation for the rise of racist antisemitism and the eventual genocidal campaigns in Europe after 1939? Jeremy Best’s work provides evidence that this is not the case. Generally, he sees nineteenth century German colonial history having more “in common with its contemporaneous Western empires than it does with the Third Reich” (11). Specifically, he makes us aware of significant differences between the aims of German Protestant missionaries and national interests of secular colonialists. The former resisted colonialist economic exploitation.

Nowhere does Best claim that German missionaries were free of colonialist and racist thoughts and practices; only that they “imagined racial differences differently” (10). He concludes that they “rejected the most extreme elements of racism and imperialism” (217). Best has no interest in glorifying or morally elevating German missionaries. He is fully aware that he is approaching his study through the eyes of the documentation left behind by the missionaries themselves, not through the eyes of the indigenous African population, thus privileging a European perspective. Hence, a study like this, he writes, “cannot pretend to be the whole truth of German colonialism” (218).

Framed within an awareness of the limitations of his study on colonialism and missionary activities, this is an excellent book—motivating, perhaps, someone else to write a response based on historical documentation by the indigenous population of German East and Southwest Africa, however scarce. Even when assessing some of Best’s interpretations differently, Heavenly Fatherland is an important read.

If there is any flaw (on a more formal level), then we can point to a certain kind of repetitiveness related to the author’s main thesis and sub-theses. Too often do we find central insights repeated in slightly different wordings, holding back the flow of the text and the reader’s attention when we were already prepared to move onward.

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pp . 313 + ix. ISBN: 9780197516447

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In the ruins of 1945 Berlin, American Christian leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., worried about the danger of Communism to Christian civilization as he and other US Protestants knew it. Just as problematic, however, was the “German Problem” they had grappled with throughout the war years: how could Germany be both the birthplace of Protestantism and the country of Nazism—home to Adolf Hitler’s racial nationalism and militarism. And where did the theological liberalism of Germany fit into the picture?

This is the starting point for James D. Strasburg’s fine study, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. It is the story of how, during and after the Second World War, leading US Protestants “identified Germany as the prime territory for creating a new Christian and democratic world order in the heart of Europe, one that could dispel any new totalitarian threat, whether spiritual or political” (2).

God’s Marshall Plan revolves around two groups of US Protestants. The first is the “ecumenists,” who worked through the powerful Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and were eager to develop a new “’World Christianity,’ an imagined global community that was ecumenically Protestant in its spirituality and democratically oriented in its politics” (2). Moreover, “they marshalled their spiritual and political energies to oppose any perceived ‘totalitarian’ threat to such an order—including communism and secularism, as well as Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalism—both at home and across the European continent” (3).

The second group is the “evangelicals” (often “fundamentalists” in Strasburg’s narrative), who “promoted biblical fundamentals and conversionary mission as the proper theological expression of Protestant Christianity. They also identified individual liberty, limited government, free market capitalism, and an America-first foreign policy as their nation’s proper political values” (3).

As Strasburg explains, his book “narrates the origins and history of these competing American Protestant missions to Germany and Europe.” More specifically, “it examines how ecumenical and evangelical American Protestants used the onset of two world wars and an era of reconstruction as rationale to spiritually and politically intervene in Europe” in order to develop their “respective world orders.” Beyond that, the book explains “how this spiritual struggle for Europe activated and advanced American Protestantism’s long-standing Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world” (3).

As they worked for Europe’s spiritual reconstruction, both ecumenists and evangelicals drew on an American “‘conquering faith’—its spiritual impulse to shape, lead, and transform the globe through the spread of Protestant Christianity and American democracy.” In pursuit of this aim, both groups of US Protestants “mobilized for world war and pursued strategic partnerships with federal officials, foreign policymakers, and the American military. Through these efforts, they hoped to spread democratic values and Protestant Christianity to Europe, and as such, to remake the continent in the American image” (4).

But, as Strasburg argues, the competing agendas of US Protestants in postwar Germany both grew out of and reflected religious fractures at home, as ecumenists and evangelicals struggled over “the spiritual leadership of their nation and the so-called ‘Christian West’” (4). Moreover, European Protestants had their own ideas about the spiritual and social reconstruction of war-torn Germany and Europe, the most prominent of which was a “third way” theology of peace and reconciliation independent of either superpower. This, in turn, prompted some US Protestants to rethink their own approaches to world missions and global politics in the era of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, here too ecumenists and evangelicals clashed, and so “the spiritual struggle for Europe thus left American Protestants deeply divided and at odds over their global mission. It ultimately forged competing theologies of global engagement—Christian nationalism and Christian globalism—that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and religion in an era of world war and beyond” (5).

As Strasburg demonstrates throughout God’s Marshall Plan, when US Protestants grappled with rival ideologies—democratic liberal, fascist, and communist—very often,

their national and political allegiances overpowered their religious commitments. In particular, such loyalties often challenged their faith’s summons to love of neighbor, regardless of that neighbor’s nationality, race, or politics. Christian nationalism likewise clashed with the biblical admonition to prioritize peacemaking and to seek the welfare of the wider world. Finally, it undercut the biblical mandate to hold a higher citizenship in heaven and to declare a greater devotion to a kingdom that knew no borders. (12)

One cannot read this history and not be struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment. In so many ways, the fissures Strasburg explores throughout his book remain challenges at the very heart of American Christianity today.

God’s Marshall Plan traces this story from the aftermath of the First World War through the rise of totalitarian regimes on through the Second World War and into the Cold War that followed. With respect to the book’s title, Strasburg notes:

The Marshall Plan serves as an apt metaphor for the ambitions of American Protestants in Europe. As the American government worked to remake the continent’s markets and politics, American Protestants complemented these efforts through tent revivals, theological exchanges, and reconstruction programs designed to revive the continent’s soul. In effect, they worked to establish an American empire of the spirit. They hoped that exporting their faith’s values abroad and creating new ocean-spanning religious networks would provide spiritual support for America’s new transatlantic democratic order. (18)

Strasburg develops his argument in eight chapters. The first (“Spiritual Conquest”) explores the US Protestant response to the First World War. For ecumenists like Congregational minister, relief worker, and church leader Henry Smith Leiper, the German imperialism that led to war in 1914 required the antidote of US spiritual democracy in keeping with Wilsonian internationalism. But for evangelicals like the fundamentalist Baptist pastor and anti-evolutionist William Bell Riley, the problem was not German imperialism but German theological modernism, which required the solution of a return to the Bible, Christian morality, and evangelical mission (23). Strasburg explains the competing ideas of ecumenists and evangelicals by surveying groups and individuals as diverse as the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), President Woodrow Wilson, lay evangelist and International Missionary Council leader John R. Mott, Leiper, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, the 1910 World Missionary Conference, German pastors Martin Niemöller and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, The Christian Century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, revivalist Billy Sunday, Riley, fundamentalist leaders French Oliver and A.C. Dixon, and The King’s Business. But if US ecumenists “outlined a mission to create a new international system rooted in Wilsonian principles,” to make Europe “more authentically Christian,” and to “promote a democratic spirit abroad” (42), conservative Protestants founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to combat “the doctrinal shallowness and modernist teachings of the Federal Council and German Protestantism” (44) and supported and supported “America First” Republican Henry Cabot Lodge’s US Senate faction which fought tooth and nail against the formation of the League of Nations. Racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-socialism, and antisemitism were also features of this movement of reaction against US participation in ecumenical Christianity and internationalist politics. As Strasburg explains, in the aftermath of the First World War, US Protestants were increasingly divided about global mission—caught between Christian nationalism and Christian globalism. Despite these divisions, however, Strasburg argues that “American Protestants still generally agreed that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world. … American Protestants worked to reshape the world through American values and outlined a vision for global spiritual conquest” (50).

In chapters 2 to 4, Strasburg describes the growth of US Protestant engagement with Germany through the economic and political upheaval of the Weimar era (“World Chaos”) and the turmoil of Nazism and its church politics (“The Lonely Flame”), and World War II and the defeat of Nazism (“For Christ and Country”). The rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement provoked alarm among US Protestants, whether because of its totalitarianism, antisemitism, and racial nationalism (ecumenists) or because its collectivist nature seemed all too similar to “Soviet communism, planned economies, and the New Deal” (evangelicals) (52). Strasburg notes that even as modernists and fundamentalists sparred in the United States, so too pro-Nazi German Christians and their opponents in the Confessing Church entered into a church struggle in Germany. American ecumenist Protestants followed these events closely, expressing concern over the unwillingness even of Confessing Church leaders to move beyond their own conservatism, nationalism, and militarism to oppose the Nazi state itself (58).

Here Strasburg discusses the ideas and views of Leiper and Niebuhr, and recounts Bonhoeffer’s experiences in the United States and the impact of his experiences at Union Seminary and among Black Christians in New York. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany “as one of the most resolute German Protestants in his spiritual and political opposition to Hitler and the German Christian crusade” (64). Likewise, American ecumenists supported the Confessing Church at ecumenical conferences and other events, such as the 1934 Baptist World Congress held in Berlin. And Leiper wrote extensively in books and articles about the menace of Hitlerism, arguing that only the universal values of Protestant ecumenism could support the democratic order that would combat Nazism and, more broadly, secularism.

In contrast, evangelicals saw the rise of European dictators as a portent of the end times. Viewing current events through an apocalyptic lens (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations), these premillennial fundamentalists were on the lookout for the Antichrist, believing as they did that the world was indeed descending into the chaos of the end times. Here Gerald Winrod, Riley, J. Frank Norris, and Oswald J. Smith take centre stage, with their attacks on Soviet communism and New Deal America. Of note was Winrod’s 1935 pilgrimage to Germany, during which he revised his views of Hitler and the Nazi state, in part based on the virulent antisemitism Winrod now preached. So too Riley, who praised Hitler for rescuing “Germany from the very jaws of atheistic communism” and blamed Bolshevism on international Jewry (75). Other fundamentalists did raise concerns about Nazism and its persecution of Jews, including Baptist churchman John J. Rice. For all of these fundamentalists, however, Christian nationalism was the antidote to both foreign dictators and dangerous domestic developments in both church and state.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the ecumenist pastor Stewart Herman shepherded the “lonely flame” of American Protestantism in Germany at the American Church. Herman studied and travelled widely in Germany, witnessing the rise of the German church struggle in the early years of the Third Reich. He also visited Jews in Germany and understood their plight clearly. While he appreciated Nazi attacks on Communism, Herman was alarmed over political developments in Hitler’s Germany, and his own involvement in American affairs in Berlin earned him the attention of the Gestapo. Herman tried to remain neutral, but the arrest of Niemöller in 1937 pushed him towards the Confessing Church, and Herman became something of a spokesman for the Confessing Church in international ecumenical meetings, which its representatives were prohibited from attending.

From 1938 onwards, Herman’s ministry took place under the shadow of the persecution of Jews. Though he did help so-called “non-Aryan” Christians, Herman harboured anti-Judaic and antisemitic sympathies and generally refused to aid Jews. Christian mission to Jews, urging them to convert, was for Herman the answer to Jewish persecution. Only when the Nazi regime began deporting Jews in 1941 was Herman moved to aid Jews, though once the United States declared war, he was interned with American Embassy staff. Strasburg uses Herman’s story and references to Leiper and Bonhoeffer to explore diverse perspectives and levels of willingness to act among ecumenical Protestants.

The entry of the United States into the war aroused ecumenical Protestants (Niebuhr, Herman—after his return from Germany—and John Foster Dulles) to declare that America needed to responsibly exercise its power, defeat “pagan” Nazism, and establish a new global Christian democratic order. Herman went so far as to join the Office of Secret Services (OSS). He also talked up the Confessing Church as an anti-Nazi opposition movement, helping create a myth that would later serve the Allied Occupation well. During the war, ecumenists began to draft plans for a democratic and Christian order in postwar Germany, and its integration into a multilateral federation of nations.

American evangelicals also supported the war, but also “advanced their commitments to conversionary mission, liberty, and unilateralism” (104). Viewing the war from a premillennialist fundamentalist perspective, Winrod and colleagues initially opposed the US entrance into the war, promoting “America First” isolationism. Other fundamentalists stressed links between Hitler, Satan, the Beast, and the Anti-Christ, and so supported the effort to defeat them and hold evil at bay. As Christian nationalists, fundamentalists conflated God and country, piety and patriotism. It was during the Second World War that the American flag found its way into many Protestant sanctuaries (124). Prayer became a weapon of war and Christian nationalist evangelism a form of mobilization, as in the case of the 1944 “Victory Rally” organized by Youth for Christ (YFC), bringing 28,000 Chicago area youth and service members together. Fundamentalists also attacked “modernism” and the Federal Council of Churches, which it accused of “theological Hitlerism” (127). Another sign of the resurgence of evangelicals was the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942, which attempted to look forward but still opposed women’s rights and racial equality.

Chapters 5 through 8 carry the story forward, from the spiritual reconstruction of Germany (“Reviving the Heartland”) and the threat of Soviet Communism (“Battleground Europe”) to the attempt to create a new Christian world order (“God’s Marshall Plan”) and evangelistic campaigns in the time of the Cold War (“Spiritual Rearmament”). Ecumenist Protestants like Stewart Herman played an important role in postwar Germany, serving religious and political reconstruction agendas as he travelled about on behalf of the World Council of Churches, supported by the OSS and the American Military Government (AMG). With others, he hoped the German churches could serve a foundational role in the Christian and democratic renewal of Germany.

As Strasburg argues, “In occupied Germany, American ecumenists wed their ‘conquering faith’ to America’s newfound project of building the ‘American Century.’ Men like Herman and Allen and John Foster Dulles advanced religious and state interests in tandem and used their nation’s postwar primacy to build the foundations of an American-led new Christian world order” (132). They perceived an emerging “spiritual cold war against secularism and communism” and “worked to recruit German Protestants as Christian partners in their quest to establish a new democratic and Christian alliance against these perceived threats” (133). A new Reformation would transform the German churches into a democratic, voluntaristic, and activist force.

But German Protestants (including the liberated Martin Niemöller and Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm) had their own ideas about the reconstruction of their church and nation, and often opposed US Protestant agendas. German and European leaders argued that they themselves needed to rebuild their churches and spiritual life. One key battle took place over the structure of the postwar German Church. Wurm and Niemöller clashed over the formation of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), with Wurm’s traditional state church model winning out over Niemöller’s more ambitious congregational plan. Another contentious topic was the question of German guilt, and here Niemöller’s “Stuttgart Declaration” receives Strasburg’s attention. The author rightly notes the silence of the statement on the subject of the Jews. A third challenge was denazification, which German church leaders chafed against.

Evangelicals responded to the defeat of Germany and the rising threat of Communism with calls by young evangelists Torrey Johnson (YFC) and Billy Graham for a “spiritual invasion” of “Battleground Europe” (156). As Strasburg explains, they focused first on “occupied Germany, where they preached their conversionary gospel and commitments to freedom and free enterprise,” supported by American military chaplains and fundamentalist military officers (157). Once again, theological modernism, secularism, and the rejection of the Bible and of Jesus Christ were presented as important causes of the German catastrophe (and American worldliness), even as revival and return to Christ would restore Germany (and America).

But whether ecumenical or evangelical, US Protestants partnered with the US government (including President Harry Truman personally) and the American Military Government to oppose a rising Communist threat. German church leaders like Niemöller, Berlin Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius and Berlin Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing also undertook speaking tours in the United States, praising the democracy and freedom of the USA and hoping to generate sympathy and support for Germany and its churches. Moreover, they supported the Marshall Plan to physically reconstruct Germany as a parallel force contributing to the spiritual renewal of Germany, alongside the efforts of US Protestants. As Strasburg puts it, “In an era when American capital, consumer goods, popular culture, and military platoons poured into Europe and began to remake the continent’s economics, society, and politics, this accompanying spiritual intervention sought to transform Europe’s soul” (185). One place these spiritual and economic plans came together was in the reconstruction of German churches, so many of which had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Germany. Christian literature campaigns and educational projects were also important. So too were US Protestant relief efforts to gather material supplies for beleaguered Germans.

But even within the effort to rebuild Germany, Strasburg finds conflicts between ecumenists and evangelicals. The latter group criticized the World Council of Churches—Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri project was a fundamentalist attempt response to both liberal Christianity and secular society. Evangelicals like Billy Graham also criticized the Marshall Plan itself, arguing it was “folly” and a “give-away program” rooted in “deficit spending.” Once again, big government and collectivism were the enemy. Evangelicals also rejected Truman’s Fair Deal programs, calling the proposal for national health insurance “socialized medicine” and a pathway to “societal slavery” (209).

Evangelical Protestants responded to the problems of postwar Germany most forcefully through revival meetings. In 1954, YFC evangelist Billy Graham held meetings in the former Nazi parade grounds at Nuremberg, preaching salvation through Jesus Christ. But Graham was also trying to convince Germans to support the US Cold War effort to push back Communism and protect Europe. To that end, US evangelical Protestants also strongly supported the US military. “Led by a coalition of free-enterprise businessmen, Cold War hawks, and conservative clergy, these postwar crusades rallied God-fearing Americans to defend their values of faith, freedom, and free enterprise both at home and abroad against New Deal liberalism, Soviet communism, and postwar secularization” (212). This despite the fact that many German Protestants resisted rearmament.

One intriguing element of this spiritual campaign against Communism was the Wooden Church Crusade, a plan to build 49 chapels along the line of the Iron Curtain in West Germany which gained strong support among US political and industrial leaders. By the end of 1956, 28 houses of worship had been built, including a few synagogues.

In the book’s epilogue, the author carries the story of US Protestant engagement with Germany through to the end of the Cold War. Strasburg concludes that if US evangelical Protestants were more obviously “America First” in their orientation, US ecumenical Protestants were also “quick to serve their nation’s interests and advance its global project” (238). As they tried to build a just and peaceful world order, they promoted a particularly American combination of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity abroad. And as they worked to Christianize and democratize the world, protecting it against totalitarian and secular ideologies, they did so by attempting “to rebuild Germany as the European cornerstone of an American-led Christian world order” (238). In their own way, they too supported American Christian nationalism. Thus the line between the Christian globalism of the ecumenists and the Christian nationalism of the evangelicals was in truth rather blurry. And Strasburg carries this point into today, arguing that “the challenge for many Protestant Christians in the twentieth century involved untangling their faith from the creeds of nation, race, and empire. That struggle continues to this day” (239).

In contrast to this Christian nationalism, German and European Protestant leaders espoused a Third Way in the 1960s, as men like Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller sharply critiqued elements of American capitalism, militarism, empire, and domestic social inequality. In some cases, this proved influential among US ecumenists. For example, Stewart Herman, whose ideas and work are central to Strasburg’s account, ended up denouncing antisemitism and racism, supporting refugee work, learning from liberation theology and Vatican II Catholicism, and embracing interfaith partnerships with Jews (243). To a large extent, however, US Protestants continued to struggle with racial equality, immigration, and other challenges to (white) Christian nationalism, even as they remained susceptible to the allure of political power. Strasburg’s concluding hope is that studying this history “might play a part in helping American Protestants foster and practice theologies and a style of politics that more fully reflect the ways of a border-defying faith” (252).

This is a fine work of history—deeply and widely researched and clearly argued. Strasburg’s grasp of the secondary literature on both German and especially US Protestantism is solid, and the notes are filled with references to books, articles, and speeches by Protestant leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including the personal correspondence and papers of Henry Smith Leiper and Stewart Winfield Herman and other material drawn from church and state archives in Washington, Berlin, and Geneva, among others. With almost 50 pages of rich notes, no bibliography was included.

As for criticisms, it is not surprising that this is almost entirely the story of the men who led churches and spoke for both American and German Christianity. Women are virtually absent from this account, save for the Birmingham women who donated syrup to the German relief effort (195). Yet we know that North American women were substantially involved in relief and administrative work in the postwar era, as well as in Christian missions. Did they engage with the issues raised in God’s Marshall Plan any differently than did their male colleagues? More broadly, beyond attending conferences or rallies or subscribing to church periodicals, is there evidence to indicate how deeply engaged ordinary US Protestants were in the spiritual reconstruction of Germany? The Wooden Church Crusade is an excellent example of this. Were there others? Finally, one would wish for a little more background on some of the characters whose writings Strasburg quotes. To what extent can their ideas and statements be taken as representative of their denominations or constituencies?

Those issues aside—and some go beyond the scope of an already extensively-researched study—God’s Marshall Plan is an enlightening and challenging account of how US Protestant Christian nationalism worked itself out both abroad in postwar Germany and at home in the United States. An excellent contribution to the literature, it is also, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a cautionary tale.

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943) (Bremen, Wuppertal: De Noantri, 2019). 80 pp. ISBN: 978-3-943643-11-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

The history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is bleak, a seemingly unrelenting litany of miseries. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered roughly six million Jews as well as hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma on the basis of their race. Gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Germans, and those the regime deemed physically and/or mentally handicapped were also subjected to unspeakable cruelties. As the horrors unfolded, very few Germans raised their voices to protest the brutality. For some, this was due at least in part to fear of the dire recriminations that could result from speaking out. Others simply lacked real sympathy for Jews and others who already lived on the margins of German society. Because opposition and outright resistance to the regime were so rare, we have come to know many of the opponents and resisters by name: Sophie Scholl, Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet, over the past few decades, scholars like Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Manfred Gailus, and Gerhard Lindemann – whose body of work together generally affirms the consensus view that the German Protestant Church as a whole did very little to resist Nazism or to speak out publicly on behalf of the victims of the Shoah – have published works highlighting the exploits of individual Protestants who, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase “[fell] into the spokes of the wheel.” These courageous Protestants include not only Niemöller and Bonhoeffer, but also Elisabeth Schmitz and Katharina Staritz. In Gegen the Mainstream der Hitlerzeit, Manfred Gailus offers a concise but nuanced biography of another such lesser-known Protestant “martyr,” the Wuppertal theologian Helmut Hesse. Because we have already published excerpts of Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit here, this review will focus on some of the book’s important contributions rather than a detailed summary of its subject’s life. Even so, a sketch of his biography is in order.

Helmut Hesse was born in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) in 1916, the youngest son of the well-known Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Helmut had three brothers and a sister (10, 15). Beginning in 1935, he undertook theological studies, which included several stints at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Elberfeld, the University of Halle on the Saale, a winter term at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Berlin, and, for two semesters, under Karl Barth at Basel (17-18).

In Sunday worship services on May 23, 1943 and again on June 6, Helmut prayed for persecuted Jews, read the names of detained Christians (including Niemöller and Heinrich Grüber, leader of the “Büro Grüber,”), criticized Protestant church politics and attitudes within the Confessing Church, and called for the church to resist antisemitism (49-50). On June 8, Helmut and his father Hermann Albert, were arrested by the Wuppertal Gestapo and imprisoned in Barmen, where they languished for over five months (57). On November 14, father and son were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Just ten days later, Helmut, having been denied essential medications for a previously diagnosed chronic renal insufficiency, died of post angina septicemia. He was just 27 years old (62-63). Gailus’s fascinating biography paints the picture of a rather cantankerous if principled and courageous young theologian who, for his public advocacy for Jews and persecuted Christians, paid with his life.

In his June 6 sermon in Elberfeld, Hesse, who had addressed ill-treatment of Jews by “Christian peoples” in a February sermon, addressed the matter of Jews and Judaism directly. He quotes liberally a petition about the church’s position on the persecution of Jews (54). The letter had been written to Bavarian bishop Hans Meiser by Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem and some members of the Lempp Circle, a small group of men and women committed to the theology of the Confessing Church and opposed to the policies of the “intact” Bavarian Protestant church.[1] Bishop Meiser did not make it public, but passed it on to the Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who similarly refused to publish it (54).

As recorded by the Wuppertal Gestapo, Hesse proclaimed:

As Christians, we can no longer bear the fact that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us to do so is the simple commandment of Nächstenliebe (love of neighbor). The Jewish question is a Protestant question and not a political one. The Church must resist any antisemitism in the community. To the state, the Church must testify to the importance of Israel in the history of salvation and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. Every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, has fallen under the murderers in Germany today. (55).

Hesse’s stark pronouncement closely mirrors some of the language in the Munich petition.[2] Perhaps for these words more than any others, Hesse’s fate was sealed.

One is left to wonder why Hesse’s remarkable story has not been publicized more widely. Perhaps one reason lies in a scandalous affair that Gailus’s research uncovers. During a house search, the Gestapo found some private letters of Hesse’s that suggested that he had had a romantic relationship with a married woman with a school-aged child whose husband was fighting in the war (58-59). The fact that the affair with the unnamed woman took place is not in question (the Gestapo bemoaned the fact that Hesse proclaimed that “God has already forgiven him for this adultery. There is no trace of a sense of guilt ….” (59); also, Hermann Klugkist Hesse (no relation to Hermann Albert and Helmut), an Elberfeld pastor and friend of the family, tried to deal with the fallout of the Gestapo’s discovery with Elberfeld parishioners and church leadership, as well as with Helmut himself (59-60); finally, according to Klugkist Hesse, gossip about the matter had spread through the Elberfeld Reformed community and beyond (60-62)).

Yet, as seriously as the matter of adultery was regarded in such a pious Reformed community, the lack of support that Helmut apparently received from his church community while in prison and the concentration camp might be regarded as more scandalous than Helmut’s sins. So great was “the matter with Helmut,” as the affair was called, that Klugkist Hesse bitterly relays that local church leaders did not once visit Helmut during his nearly six-month ordeal, despite having visitation rights (60, 64 – 65).

In the end, due to Helmut’s physical and psychological frailty, as well as his rigid Reformed upbringing, Gailus regards Helmut Hesse as a “difficult martyr” – but a martyr nonetheless (69-70). Gailus argues that, despite his idiosyncrasies and failings, because of his incredibly courageous advocacy for Jews especially but also for his fellow travelers in the Confessing Church who had dared to speak out against the regime, Hesse merits a special place in the pantheon of Protestant “heroes and martyrs.” In fact, his name belongs with those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Friedrich Weißler, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Hans and Sophie Scholl (among others) (71-73). Given the case he has presented in this excellent study, it is hard to argue with this conclusion.

Notes:

[1] Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, trans. Victoria J. Barnett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 215-216; Hermann Diem, Ja oder Nein – 50 Jahre Theologie in Kirche und Staat (Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1974), 130; Walter Höchstädter, “Der Lemppsche Kreis,” Evangelische Theologie 48, no. 5 (1988): 468-473.

[2] Hermann Diem, “Wider das Schweigen der Kirche zur Judenverfolgung. Offener Brief an Landesbischof D. Meiser, 1943,” (Against the Silence of the Church on the Persecution of Jews: Open Letter to Regional Bishop Dr. Meiser, 1943) in Hermann Diem and Uvo Andreas Wolf, Sine vi- sed verbo: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Voten (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1965), 108-111, here 108.

Journal Note: MCC and National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Journal Note: MCC and National Socialism, Intersections: MCC Theory & Practice Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Fall 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Over the past five years, much have been discussed and written about the activities and experiences of Mennonite Christians in the Holocaust. The problematization of Mennonite history and memory related to the Holocaust began with a 2017 Toronto workshop assessing the work of Gerhard Rempel and then a 2018 Conference at Bethel College. In the forefront of this debate has been Benjamin Goossen, whose book Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, and numerous articles have highlighted the complexities of Mennonite identity and Mennonite collaboration.

More recently, scholars have begun to examine the entanglements of the Mennonite Central Committee–the church’s relief and development agency–in Nazism and the Holocaust. A November 2021 roundtable of historians discussed the MCC, refugees, and the legacies of National Socialism, and built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections: MCC Theory & Practice Quarterly. It is that special issue of the Intersections that this note attends to. Compiled by Alain Epp Weaver, it contains twelve short articles:

“MCC and Nazism, 1929–1955,” by Benjamin W. Goossen (3-12)
“MCC and Mennonite emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920–1932,” by Esther Epp-Tiessen (13-17)
“Benjamin Unruh, Nazism and MCC,” by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast (17-27)
“MCC and Nazi impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” by John Eicher (27-32)
“Between German fascism and U.S. imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” by Daniel Stahl (32-35)
“From care to rescue: MCC in the face of the persecution of Jews in France (1939–1945),” by Stéphane Zehr (36-40)
“John Kroeker and the backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,'” by John Thiesen (40-45)
“Facing the future, reinterpreting the past: MCC’s solutions for successful Mennonite immigration after the Second World War,” by Erika Weidemann (45-50)
“Defining the deserving: MCC and Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” by Aileen Friesen (50-54)
“National Socialism and MCC’s post-war resettlement efforts with Danziger Mennonites,” by Steven Schroeder (54-60)
“MCC’s resettlement of the Dutch war criminal Jacob Luitjens,” by David Barnouw (60-62)
“Hands under the cross: MCC and the post-war construction of German Mennonite peace identity,” by Astrid von Schlachta (63-68)

As Rick Cober Baumann, Ann Graber Herschberger, and Alain Epp Weaver note in their introduction:

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is a worldwide ministry of Anabaptist churches that seeks to share God’s love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice—such a mission is diametrically opposed to the racist, genocidal program of Nazism. Yet, as recent scholarship has highlighted with renewed focus, MCC’s humanitarian efforts from the late 1920s through the mid-1950s to help Mennonites from the Soviet Union migrate to the Americas were entangled with National Socialism and its legacy in multiple, complex ways. What were these entanglements? What are we to make of them? (1)

The articles that follow are short summaries of the research of scholars from Canada, the USA, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The articles are richly illustrated and include both source citations and guides to further reading. Topics taken up in the various articles include:

interactions between Mennonites and the Hitler regime relating to the resettlement of refugees from the Soviet Union (which include the activities of Mennonite Nazi Benjamin Unruh),
pro-Nazi sentiments and ideological conflicts in the Fernheim Mennonite colony in Paraguay,
the observation of Nazi genocidal policies in wartime France by MCC workers, and efforts to rescue Jewish children,
the resettlement of displaced Mennonites–many genuine refugees but some with ties to Nazism and the Holocaust–from the Soviet Union through Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War.

This research interrogates the postwar narrative among Mennonites “of the dramatic and providential escape of desperate Mennonites in post-war Europe from the threat of deportation back to the Soviet Union and the exodus-like passage of these Mennonites through a Red Sea of danger to the promised lands of the Americas” (3). Seventy years ago, the MCC helped propagate that narrative. Now, it is promoting scholarly research that explores the much more complex reality behind that story. And the goal is not merely academic, but comes with the expectation of further response by the organization. The result is an excellent example of partnership between church organizations and scholars to pursue the truth of the past, even at the cost of soul-searching in the present and redress in the future.

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000,” Antisemitism Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 233-265.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Benjamin Goossen is among the most active scholars among the historians currently preoccupied with re-examining the history of Mennonite Christians and the Second World War, and especially their relationship to Nazism and the Holocaust. In his new article “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945–2000,” Goossen tackles the person of Ingrid Rimland, the Mennonite novelist who became a prominent Holocaust denier in the 1990s after years of acclaim for her literary accounts of women’s suffering in the Soviet Union.

Rimland was born in 1936 into a Russian Mennonite family, which followed Hitler’s retreating armies westwards in 1943 to escape Bolshevik rule. After the war, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) facilitated her family’s immigration as refugees to Paraguay. As an adult, she moved to the United States and became took up writing. In her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), Rimland compared Mennonite women’s suffering to the persecution of the Jews under Nazism. She fictionalized her own experiences of displacement, flight, and emigration but was silent about the collaboration and perpetration of crimes by Mennonites in the Holocaust.

As a single mother caring for a disabled child in the 1980s, Rimland struggled to maintain her literary career. The end of the Cold War also diminished her impact, as the theme of her work–suffering under Communism–became passé. In response, she turned to antisemitic conspiracy theories, becoming intellectually, financially, and then romantically involved with the infamous Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel. Zündel was born in Germany in 1939, later immigrated to Canada, and was the subject of a serious of high-profile hate-speech trials in the 1980s and 1990s. Rimland launched the website Zundelsite.org from her home in California, in order to help Zündel spread his Holocaust denial while avoiding Canadian anti-hate laws. The site was a primary source of online Holocaust denial in the 1990s, while Rimland also sent out daily “Z-Grams” through a listserv.

Rimland also used Zundelsite.org to promote her own literary work, including her three-volume novel Lebensraum! (1988). In it she depicted Mennonites as racially pure Germans and wrote about two Mennonite settlements, one in Ukraine and one in Kansas–each threatened by Jews. The novel included a sub-plot about a global Jewish conspiracy (the “New World Order”).

Goossen sees Rimland’s life as an exemplar of how far-right extremism migrated from Hitler’s Third Reich to present-day North America. Her own turn to neo-Nazism was rooted in her long history of equating Mennonite suffering with that of the Jews in the Holocaust. “As counterintuitive as it may seem, Mennonites’ propensity to self-identify with Jews opened a path for Rimland’s racist trajectory” (236). But when a scholar suggested Canadian Mennonite views were not so different from those of Rimland, a broader controversy erupted, revealing that Canadian Mennonites had never examined the theological implications of the Holocaust for their Anabaptist theology (242).

Goossen explains Rimland’s novel The Wanderers and its appeal among Mennonite leaders, along with her slide into antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. He concludes that various influences played a role in her fate–her association with Ernst Zündel, to be sure, but also the background of Mennonite silence about collaboration with Hitler and her uneasy relationship with male Mennonite elites who used her depictions of female Mennonite suffering but refused to support her career.

Conference Report: 35th Annual Conference of the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Conference Report: 35^th Annual Conference of the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung

By Sarah Thieme, WWU University of Münster, and Martin Belz, Institute for Mainz Church History

Conference organizers: Sarah Thieme, Center for Religion and Modernity, WWU University of Münster; Martin Belz, Institute for Mainz Church History; Markus Leniger, Catholic Academy Schwerte of the Archdiocese of Paderborn

Date: 19-21 November 2021

Location: Schwerte, Germany

This conference report was first published in German at H-Soz-Kult: Tagungsbericht 35. Jahrestagung des Schwerter Arbeitskreises Katholizismusforschung. 19.11.2021–21.11.2021, Schwerte, in: H-Soz-Kult 07.02.2022, online access at: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-9296?title=35-jahrestagung-des-schwerter-arbeitskreises-katholizismusforschung&recno=10&q=&sort=&fq=&total=8988. We would like to thank Katharina Reuther (Münster) for assistance with the translation.

Approximately 40 scholars from the fields of church history and historiography took part in the 35^thannual conference of the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung (working group for Catholicism research, SAK). Organised by the new speakers Sarah Thieme and Martin Belz, the conference took place as always in cooperation with the Catholic Academy in Schwerte of the Archdiocese of Paderborn. The event focused on the presentation and discussion of ongoing research work on Catholicism from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This year’s general debate was dedicated to the topic “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35) – Catholicism and refugees in historical and contemporary perspective.

The church historical presentation by DOMINIK HERINGER (Mainz) dealt with the Rheinischer Reformkreis in the twentieth century. Heringer located the hotspot of the circle, whose main concern was to secure a greater national independence of the German church from Rome, in the diocese of Aachen, which was newly founded in 1930. From there, the positions of the circle und its partly national socialist affinities resonated throughout Germany. As a result, church-wide battles broke out over whether and how to renew of the church. The presenter showed that Augustin Bea SJ played a leading role, one unknown until now, in monitoring the protagonists and their actions.

LEA TORWESEN (Bochum) provided an analysis of Christian-religious sites of memory. Her historiographical presentation focused on how the writing of church history had important aftereffects socially, culturally, and politically. Looking at the example of the Dortmund church Heilige Dreifaltigkeit (Holy Trinity) (1898), she elaborated on two competing stories of memory: the attribution of meaning as a community of workers in the coal and steel industry (part of industrial culture) and the currently more powerful coding as so-called BVB-founding church of those members of the youth fellowship who founded the football club Borussia Dortmund in 1909, after disagreements with the church community (part of football-fan culture). That collective memory operated selectively can also be seen in the second case study, the “Essen Catholic Day 1968,” which emerged as another site of memory because of its uniquely turbulent nature. To this day, it is associated with protest signs, chants, and heckling. These memories erroneously made it appear that the Katholikentage (Catholic Day) were generally associated with protests. In reality, such protests did not take place in any of the other six Katholikentag-forums.

MAXIMILIAN KÜNSTER (Mainz) subsequently delivered a presentation about how Catholic seminary candidates personally experienced and interpreted the Second World War. His analysis of 867 field letters from Mainz seminarians addressed to their Head of Seminary from the battlefront, and also on other sources on teaching and studying in the years 1933-1945, allowed him to draw conclusions about how their social backgrounds and the interpretive framework they created to make sense of the war were connected. As Künster showed, their war interpretation was influenced by the traditional socialisation in family and in seminary, as well as by youth organizations and the mindset of the NS-movement. The former became particularly clear in the reception of traditional war theology, the latter through a “communalization” (Vergemeinschaftung) of one’s own military service and the interpretation of the German-Soviet War as an “anti-Bolshevist crusade.”

SANDRA FRÜHAUF (Hamburg) presented her historical PhD project on the influence of post-conciliar priest and solidarity groups in the West German Catholic church and in the context of the transformation of society as a whole between 1965 and 1989/90. The priest and solidarity groups were established from 1968 onwards in West German dioceses to implement the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and to counteract restorative tendencies. By 1970 they were present in nearly every diocese. Initially, they were dedicated to solving inner church problems, but from 1971 onwards they turned increasingly to political and social issues. To assess which forms of protest the goals of the priest and solidarity groups – democratisation, humanisation and solidarity – could be implemented, Frühauf provided a historical conceptualization of the social movements’ own analyses, rituals and what she labelled “anti-rituals.” She provided a case study: the meeting of European priest groups in Chur, Switzerland from 5-10 July 1969 and in particular, their eucharistic celebrations.

The negotiation of gender concepts in GDR Catholicism from the late 1940s to the early 1970s is a field of research that has not yet been sufficiently explored – according to the thesis of KATHARINA ZIMMERMANN (Tübingen). In her doctoral dissertation, she accordingly investigates how Catholic citizens of the GDR experienced the tension between socialist politics and Catholic teachings on the body, gender, and sexuality in everyday practices and experiences. Zimmermann presented the research design of her work and gave first insights into her research, using examples to analyse the relevance of flight, expulsion, and (sexualised) violence after 1945, with regard to the understanding of gender in GDR Catholicism.

ALEXANDER BUERSTEDDE (Hamburg) presented his historical doctoral project on developments in the image of the priest and in the training of priests in the West German Catholic church between 1965 and 1989/90. These, he argued, could be understood as conflicts over sacrality and sacralisation in the battleground of social upheaval and post-conciliar crisis. When in the diocesan leadership of the middle 1960s the slogan was issued not to train priests for yesterday, but for tomorrow, the initial zeal for reform soon gave way to conservative attempts at containment. A case in point was the training of pastoral assistants and priests in the archdiocese of München and Freising in the early 1970s. Once trained in the roles together, men and women were separated. Looking ahead, he referred (on the one hand) to the loss of stable practices of self-transcendence (Hans Joas) during the period under study, and (on the other hand) to successful strategies of the clerical preservation of power, despite rapidly declining birthrates. Did the end of the so-called Catholic Milieu go hand-in-hand with a farewell to the priestly ideals long associated with it?

DAVID TEMPLIN (Osnabrück) used Hamburg as an example to shed light on the Catholic Church’s mission to foreigners, which grew in number and importance in the course of labor migration into the Federal Republic from the 1960s onward. He highlighted the importance of the missions for migrants, since they not only worked to provide religious orientation but also functioned as a social “infrastructure of arrival” and as an instance of the community building through their social care. At the same time, Templin described the conflicts and negotiation processes in questions of participation, financial support, and recognition of migrant structures, which flared up in the 1970s in particular, and which made it clear that social debates about migration and integration were also taking place within the Catholic church, though articulated in a particular way.

The documentary film Friedland, about the Lower Saxon border reception camp of the same name, which was watched and discussed under the moderation of Markus Leniger, provided the topic for general debate. It addressed the relationship between Catholic believers and the institution of the Catholic church as a whole and refugees, from contemporary and historical perspectives. In a dialogue between history and social ethics, special attention was paid to the motives and (faith) convictions behind, respectively, Christian and Catholic commitment to refugees, as well as argumentation structures that underlie church attempts at integration and willingness to accept.

In the first presentation of the general debate, MARKUS STADTRECHER (Ulm) used the example of the integration of refugees and expellees after the Second World War in the diocese of Augsburg to confirm the initial thesis that Christian values represented an important motivation for a culture of welcome. In addition, however, there were strategic power interests of church leaders, who tried to use the new believers towards their efforts at re-catholisation. At the same time Stadtrecher made it clear that this migration movement was characterized by a high level of rejection on the part of the local population.

Based on the migration-friendly positions of the Church Magisterium, which ascribes extensive rights to migrants as members of the “human family”, GERHARD KRUIP (Mainz) applied John Rawls’ well-known thought experiment about the human community in its original state to the global level. Under the “veil of ignorance” those involved in the original state would decide to found states, but at the same time would advocate for the greatest possible freedom of movement and open borders. According to Kruip, the application of these “ideal theories” to current problems of migration requires the consideration of reasonableness and possible negative consequences of a brain drain for the countries of origin. In his estimation, making immigration easier is also in the well-understood self-interest of Central European countries, which are heavily influenced by the powerful demographic change.

In the subsequent discussion of both presentations, the Augsburg example could be contextualised within the framework of postwar Catholicism and society and compared with other case studies (e.g. from the diocese of Limburg). On the other hand, there was a lively exchange on Kruip’s thesis, with the focus in particular on the opportunities and limits of a policy open to immigration.

Conference Overview:

Dominik Heringer (Mainz): Hotspot Aachen – Neue Erkenntnisse zum Rheinischen Reformkreis

Lea Torwesten (Bochum): Ankerpunkte des (Glaubens-)Gedächtnisses – Christlich-religiöse Erinnerungsorte des Ruhrgebiets am Beispiel der BVB-„Gründungskirche“ (1898) und des Essener Katholikentages 1968

Maximilian Künster (Mainz): Die Feldpostbriefe der Alumnen des Mainzer Priesterseminars (1939–1945)

Sandra Frühauf (Hamburg): Abschied von „Hochwürden“. Priester- und Solidaritätsgruppen als Foren kirchlicher Selbstreflektion und klerikaler Kritik

Katharina Zimmermann (Tübingen): Gender-Konzepte zwischen Katholizismus und Sozialismus. Körper, Geschlecht und Sexualität im DDR-Katholizismus 1945–1973

Alexander Buerstedde (Hamburg): Katholisches Priesterbild und katholische Priesterausbildung in der Bundesrepublik von 1965 bis 1989/90. Ein Werkstattbericht

David Templin (Osnabrück): „Ausländermissionen“: Migration, institutionelle Einbindung und Konflikte in der Katholischen Kirche am Beispiel Hamburgs, 1960–1990

„Friedland – Der Dokumentarfilm“: Film und Diskussion, Moderation: Markus Leniger

Sarah Thieme (Münster) / Martin Belz (Mainz): Einführung in das Thema der Generaldebatte: „Ich bin ein Fremder gewesen und ihr habt mich aufgenommen“ (Mt 25,35) – Katholizismus und Geflüchtete in historischer wie gegenwärtiger Perspektive

Markus Stadtrecher (Ulm): „Brüder nehmt die Brüder mit“ – Christliche Willkommenskultur und ihre Grenzen am Beispiel der Flüchtlinge und Vertriebenen im Bistum Augsburg nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg

Gerhard Kruip (Mainz): Gibt es ein Recht auf Einwanderung – wo doch alle Menschen Glieder der einen Menschheitsfamilie sind?

Letter from the Editors (December 2021)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Letter from the Editors (December 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

As Christmas approaches and the 2021 year draws to a close, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to present a new issue of the journal. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has added complications to everyone’s life, it seems, one of which is to reduce the time many scholars have for research and scholarly activity. Nonetheless, we are doing our best to provide you with regular news, reviews, and commentary on contemporary religious history with a focus on Germany and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This quarter, there are three reviews to tell you about. Manfred Gailus reviews Robert M. Zoske’s new book, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen, which explores the religious underpinnings of this famous member of The White Rose resistance group. Dirk Schuster assesses an important new regional study of the German church struggle by Ulrich Peter, entitled Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz: Die Deutschen Christen und der Bund der nationalsozialistischen Pastoren in der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche Mecklenburgs. Schuster explains how Peter went deep into the pre-history of the German Christians in Mecklenburg, and also traced developments after 1945. Finally, Martin Menke reviews Jonas Hagedorn’s study Oswald von Nell-Breuning SJ. Aufbrüche der katholischen Soziallehrte in der Weimarer Repubik. Nell-Breuning was an important Catholic social theorist who played a significant role in the creation Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI’s social encyclical of 1931.

Potsdam Garrison Church carillon. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 170-123 / Max Baur / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5484451

Well worthy of note in this issue of CCHQ are several substantial “notes.” The first of these is provided by Phillip Oswalt of Kassel, who explains some of the recent events surrounding the reconstruction plans for the Potsdam Garrison Church, so famous for its role in the Nazi seizure of power. Oswalt and others, including CCHQ editor Manfred Gailus, are part of a group of scholars connected with the website “Lernort Garnisonkirche,” which seeks to explain the history behind the Potsdam Garrison Church and influence the reconstruction project. Next, Robert P. Ericksen explores a recent chapter on German theologian Gerhard Kittel’s time in Vienna, from 1939 to 1943, and the debates about his influence there on behalf of National Socialism. Alain Epp Weaver authors the next substantial note, which outlines recent developments in the history of the Mennonite Central Committee and its connections to antisemitism and National Socialism–connections which also influenced its refugee work in the postwar era. Finally, Martina Cucchiara and Blake McKinney offer conference reports related to two panels at this past fall’s German Studies Association annual conference: one on women, religion, and emotions in modern Germany and the other on Nazi Germany, international Protestantism, and the German churches.

On behalf of the CCHQ editorial team, let me wish you a Merry Christmas and restful 2021 holiday season, as well as a safe beginning to 2022.

Sincerely,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Robert M. Zoske, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Robert M. Zoske, Sophie Scholl: “Es reut mich nichts.” Porträt einer Widerständigen (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2020), 448 pages.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Several books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles appeared in 2021 on the occasion of the hundredth birthday of Sophie Scholl. She was born on 9 May 1921 in Forchtenberg (Württemberg) and was executed at the age of 21 in the Munich-Stadelheim prison on 22 February 1943, having been by sentenced to death on the same day by the National Socialist People’s Court on the charge of “preparation for high treason.” One of the most competent publications by far in this anniversary year is the great biography by the Protestant theologian and historian Robert M. Zoske. The author received his doctorate at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg in 2014 on the basis of a study of Sophie’s brother Hans Scholl. Four years later he presented a highly acclaimed, scholarly, and critical biography of Hans Scholl, which he has recently followed up with this substantial portrait of the short life of Hans’ younger sister and fellow resister. Taken together, Zoske must undoubtedly be counted one of the best experts on the history of the Scholl siblings and the resistance group of “The White Rose.”

Zoske worked for a long time as a practicing theologian and pastor in northern Germany. For obvious reasons, he is particularly interested in religious aspects in the biography of his protagonist, so that it seems almost appropriate to speak of the book as a biography of a young Protestant who is religiously searching. Sophie Scholl came from a Christian family: her mother Lina is described as a “cheerful Pietist” and her father as a “skeptical cultural Protestant.” Nonetheless, the Scholl siblings became enthusiastic about the Hitler movement in their teenage years. For many years, Sophie Scholl was a group leader in the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM) in addition to her church formation.

At 55 pages, by far the most extensive chapter is “Beloved,” which is devoted to Scholl’s complicated love affair with the soldier Fritz Hartnagel, which began in 1937. In 1940 alone, the two exchanged 91 letters, which reveal deep insights into the extremely difficult, torn mental life of the 19-year-old. She never escaped an ongoing vacillation and hesitation between being in love and physical love on the one hand, and her religious, pietistic interpretation of “sex as sin” on the other. And this fluctuation was accompanied by multiple, strenuous attempts to reduce their love relationship to the “purely spiritual,” but which often failed in practice.

The reading of the Scholl siblings and their circle of friends is informative: one encounters a lot of Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann. In addition, genuinely religious-Catholic literature was very popular among them: Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Romano Guardini, and then also classics such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Blaise Pascal. Their reading was generally not systematic, but rather a searching reading with many interruptions and sudden breaks. Influences from Carl Muth, the editor of the Catholic magazine Hochland, could be felt here. The circle of friends had contact with him during the later Munich years, beginning in 1940-1941. This resulted in the development of a religious motivation for resistance—in a sense “with God against Hitler.” By all appearances, there was no contact between the Scholl group and the Confessing Church at all.

After graduating from high school, training as a kindergarten teacher, and performing her compulsory labor service, Sophie Scholl began studying in Munich in the summer semester of 1942. However, she was seldom seen in the lecture halls of the university. It was only towards the end of this turbulent year that she was gradually included in the resistance actions of the circle around her brother Hans and Alexander Schmorell. It was the decisive year of her political awakening, and the moment of her decisive participation in the political resistance against Hitler.

Zoske’s deserving book clears up all kinds of legends about the Scholl siblings. In the final chapter, “Nachspiel,” the author traces the genesis of the “Icon Sophie Scholl” during the post-war period. The hour of birth of this transfiguration was the “Biographische Notizen” (1950) of her sister Inge Scholl, which was published in 1955 as the book Die Weisse Rose [The White Rose]. Since then, many allegations have been corrected, and the factual knowledge of the resistance group has also increased significantly. This new biography presents the reader with a reliable picture of the life of the young Protestant martyr in the resistance against Hitler. Important documents are printed in the appendix of the book, including detailed excerpts from Sophie Scholl’s interrogation transcripts (pp. 312-348). The early, seemingly-authentic memories of her friend Susanne Hirzel from 1946 are also impressive. From this I would like to quote in conclusion: “We met at the age of 14 in the League of German Girls. She was like a fiery, wild boy, wore her straight, dark brown hair in a man’s cut and preferred to wear a blue fisherman’s shirt or her brother’s winter shirt. She was lively, bold, with a bright, clear voice, daring in our wild games and of a divine sloppiness.”

Review of Ulrich Peter, Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz. Die Deutschen Christen und der Bund der nationalsozialistischen Pastoren in der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche Mecklenburgs

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Ulrich Peter, Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz. Die Deutschen Christen und der Bund der nationalsozialistischen Pastoren in der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche Mecklenburgs (Kiel: Lutherische Verlagsanstalt, 2020). 607 pages. ISBN 978-3-87503-266-6.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna / Danube University Krems

Church struggle (Kirchenkampf) is a term that has shaped church historiography since the end of the Second World War. It is still partly subject to instrumentalization today: The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) is characterized positively, often even as an opponent of Nazi ideology against the German Christians. For a long time, there was no further in-depth research into the German Christians beyond this assumption, because the theologically influenced church historiography preferred to turn to the supposed “heroes” of the Confessing Church for historical information. Fortunately, many research projects have emerged in the last few decades, such as the work of Robert P. Ericksen, Susannah Heschel, Doris L. Bergen, Manfred Gailus, Kyle Jantzen, and many more. These researchers have not only studied German Christians and their racist and anti-Semitic notions but have also established a completely new image of the “church struggle,” some going so far as to “deconstruct” the image of a heroic Confessing Church.

Above all, the work on the Thuringian German Christians, the dominant German-Christian movement in the “Third Reich” up to 1945 (Clemens Vollnhals), clearly shows how a large number of evangelical pastors–also far beyond Thuringia–dealt with National Socialism, perceiving it as connected to or at least instrumental in helping to build a “new Germany.” It is particularly striking, however, how many pastors–here again, beyond the Thuringian German Christians–welcomed the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists and even justified it theologically.

In the research on the German Christians, however, there has always been a blank spot that has been pointed repeatedly: whenever the Thuringian German Christians were mentioned as the most powerful group of the German Christians, one reads again and again that, in addition to the complete control of the Thuringian regional church, they could also rely on their sister organization in Mecklenburg because the German Christians also controlled that entire regional church. However, and this must be clearly stated, next to nothing was known about the conditions in Mecklenburg, the prehistory, the period between 1933 and 1945, or even the post-war history apart from individual biographical studies.

Ulrich Peter, who has been dealing with the history of the Protestant Church in Mecklenburg during the Nazi period (alongside his work on the “Religious Socialists”) for a long time, has now presented an overall study that tries to close this large gap–and does it completely. With his historiographical study, Peter provides a fundamental work that is an indispensable addition to further research on church history. Peter consults all the sources available to him: reports from various regional and national archives, papers, publications, etc.

In addition to the strictly chronological presentation of the events between 1933 and 1945 and an overview of the time after 1945 (p. 446–464), it is above all the first part of the book that, from the reviewer’s point of view, makes the developments in Mecklenburg clearly understandable. Since Peter does not begin his study with the founding of the German-Christian movement, the Bund für Deutsche Kirche or the German Christians, but with the structure and theological self-image of the regional church before the First World War, the developments of the 1920s can clearly be understood. This is, for example, the big difference between his work and Oliver Arnhold’s book on the Thuringian German Christians. Peter describes and contextualizes the prehistory on which the developments from 1933 onwards were based. For instance, in a separate subchapter, he makes it clear that long before 1933, even before 1914, anti-Semitism was virulent in the regional church. Another example is the attitude of Regional Bishop Rendtorff (also one of those alleged heroes of apologetic church historiography) and his statements in favor of National Socialism at the beginning of the 1930s.

The subsequent chapter examines in detail the disputes within the church and the increasing influence of the German Christian Church Movement (Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen), which ultimately found itself directly dependent on Bishop Schulz. It becomes clear that although the German Christian Church Movement increasingly dominated the regional church, they did not have an organizational or even financial basis. Fake membership numbers and disastrous financial behavior at the expense of the regional church characterized the German Christian Church Movement in Mecklenburg.

With his study, Ulrich Peter provides for the first time a detailed insight into the structure, thinking and connections of that regional church. He has completely succeeded in closing the research gap. Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz deserves to be included among the canonical works on church history during the “Third Reich” on which further research will be based.

Review of Jonas Hagedorn, Oswald von Nell-Breuning: Aufbrüche der katholischen Soziallehre in der Weimarer Republik

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Review of Jonas Hagedorn, Oswald von Nell-Breuning: Aufbrüche der katholischen Soziallehre in der Weimarer Republik (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019). 532 pages. ISBN 978-3-657-78795-1.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this meticulously detailed and well-differentiated dissertation, Jonas Hagedorn discusses the early published work of Oswald Nell-Breuning, a German Jesuit social theorist. Before engaging the substance of Hagedorn’s analysis, it is helpful to begin with the words of noted theologian Josef Mausbach, Professor at the University of Münster, who provided the first assessment of Nell-Breuning’s dissertation. Mausbach wrote, “the abstract nature and the high [intellectual] level of the work is such, that only a narrow circle of theologically interested economists and economically prepared theologians can truly access this work.” (267) One could say the same about Hagedorn’s work.

The introduction lasts the first seventy pages, and not until almost halfway through the volume does the discussion focus on Nell-Breuning. The previous pages explained the state of Christian solidarity in the 1920’s, describing Nell-Breuning’s definition of the term as post-liberal corporatist solidarity, but not fascist or reactionary. Hagedorn explains in detail the distinctions between the more romanticist-idealist Catholic thinkers in Vienna and the northern German approach to Catholic solidarity, which better reflected the economic realities of the 1920’s. Nell-Breuning was more comfortable with the “Kölner Richtlinien” of 1926, which explicitly accepted Catholic trade unions and much else in Catholic social teaching that would integrate Catholics in the broader economic and labor concerns of the times. For example, the Austrians denied any compatibility between capitalism and Christianity. At the same time, the commission established by Cardinal Schulte, Archbishop of Cologne, sought to find a way for Catholics, employers, employees, and others to function in the Weimar Republic’s economic conditions. Nell-Breuning also advocated ecclesiastical recognition of Christian trade unions and not just Catholic workers’ associations (katholische Arbeitervereine) led by priests.

Nell-Breuning, guided by fellow Jesuit Gustav Gundlach, delivered to Pope Pius XI a draft of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Hagedorn, in turn, provides the reader with a detailed analysis of the divergences between Nel-Breuning’s draft and the final text. In large part, Nell-Breuning’s draft focused too much on German concerns and the conflict with the Viennese. The final draft of the encyclical guided Catholic thought on a global level, and thus different in some ways from Nell-Breuning’s draft. Nell-Breuning’s fellow Jesuit Gustav Gundlach and others also contributed to the text. Still, Nell-Breuning provided the direction and goals for Quadragesimo Anno.

Nell-Breuning’s dissertation discussed the ethics of stock market speculation. The Jesuit distinguished between speculation designed to protect against unexpected losses, which Hagedorn describes as “hedging,” and speculation out of greed. The principal distinction underlying Nell-Breuning’s thinking is between revenue sought for a moral purpose and income aimed primarily to increase wealth and possession.

Sometimes, the reader perceives that Hagedorn felt compelled to discuss Nell-Breuning’s view on almost every economic facet of Catholic social teaching. The breadth of teaching included employee-labor relations, the morality of goods pricing, the nature and limits of the welfare state, and more. Hagedorn shows how Nell-Breuning strove to balance the individual’s responsibility and the community’s solidarity. For example, Hagedorn defended the welfare state as an institution by which the community meets the needs of those who cannot afford the minimum necessary for existence through no fault of their own. However, he vehemently rejected a community that provided for all without expectation of self-reliance, which he called the Versorgungsstaat. Hagedorn insisted on prices that covered material costs and adequate wages for all employees, and a moderate reward for the employer. He rejected prices dictated purely by the market. Nell-Breuning’s understanding of appropriate and fair employer-employee relations demanded workers complete an honest day’s work, but strongly supported Christian trade unions, even over clerically led Catholic workers’ associations. Finally, Nell-Breuning’s understanding of the purpose of property, to serve the bonum commune, has become accepted in Catholic teaching. Nell-Breuning drew on the full range of papal teaching from Leo XIII onward.

One of the strengths of Hagedorn’s work is the explanation of other contemporary social justice thought, both within and outside of Catholicism. Nell-Breuning drew on Marx and other socialist thinkers without any sympathies for communism. The primary targets of his criticism, and he avoided no controversy, were Viennese and Austrian Catholic social justice theorists. Primarily, Nell-Breuning dueled with Othmar Spann and Joseph Eberle of Schönere Zukunft, but also with Anton Orel and Eugen Kogon. Nell-Breuning rejected the idealistic-romantic notions of the Viennese thinkers. His background in economics compelled him to remain rooted in practical measures to secure the ideals of Catholic social teaching. Also, he would not share the Viennese group’s rejection of capitalism and democracy.

Within a year of defending his dissertation, Nell-Breuning was asked to produce a foundational draft to form the basis of a new social encyclical. Section by section, Hagedorn meticulously analyzes the evidence of Nell-Breuning’s draft in the published version of Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI’s social encyclical of 1931. Nell-Breuning’s nuanced critique of capitalism, his ability to appreciate the strengths of the capitalist economy while seeking to correct its inequities, his appreciation for socialism’s analysis while rejecting its socio-economic prescriptions. In those interwar years, Nell-Breuning analyzed and recast the framework of Catholic social teaching. He discussed them all, and Hagedorn summarizes and analyzes the vast scope of Nell-Breuning’s comments. In the bibliography, Nell-Breuning’s works take up fifteen pages, and Hagedorn has read them all.

Hagedorn ends his analysis of Nell-Breuning’s thinking by pointing to his fundamental resistance to National Socialism. In 1933, he criticized the National Socialist falsification of corporatism. In the summer, however, Nell-Breuning proved his loyalty to the hierarchy in Germany and Rome by publishing an article welcoming the Concordat. In the article, however, Nell-Breuning carefully hid his quite incisive critique, according to Hagedorn. He cited the admonition of Saint Ambrose to Emperor Theodosius and some of the Catholic heroes of the Kulturkampf. (436) To any theologically conscious Catholic, these names sufficed to highlight Nell-Breuning’s opposition to the regime. From 1934 until 1945, Nell-Breuning published little.

There is only little to criticize in this work. One might argue that Hagedorn’s text is better used as a reference than a narrative with analysis. The details prevent any reviewer from addressing all the topics in their highly developed nuances. Furthermore, Hagedorn’s work is not for those uninitiated into Catholic social teaching or the socio-economic theory of the Weimar Republic. Finally, this work is not for those seeking a biographical analysis of Nell-Breuning, nor for those seeking a discussion of the shifts in Nell-Breuning’s thinking in the post-war period.

Architectural and Website Note: “Lernort Garnisonkirche” (“Potsdam Garrison Church Site of Learning”)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Architectural and Website Note: “Lernort Garnisonkirche” (“Potsdam Garrison Church Site of Learning”)

By Philipp Oswalt, Universität Kassel; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The tower of the Potsdam Garrison Church, which was badly damaged in April 1945 and demolished in 1968, has been under reconstruction since 2017 under the patronage of German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. As is customary in Germany today, this reconstruction is taking place in a photo-realistic form, i.e. its external appearance should correspond to the former photographic image. In this place, however, this is a particularly explosive idea, because the building has always been a symbol of the synthesis of state power, the military, and the Protestant church. This made it a central national symbol of Prussian-German rule by the 19th century, at the latest, and thus the church also became a central symbol for militaristic, anti-democratic, and ethno-racist circles. During the Imperial era, the colonial wars were celebrated here, including the genocide of the Hereros and Nama. During the Weimar period, right-wing groups from the Stahlhelm and the Kyffhäuserbund to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) gathered here. After the “Day of Potsdam” on March 21, 1933, the building was an important place of tradition for the Nazi regime. Its silhouette was imprinted 75 million times together with swastikas in coins. Its carillon served as the interval signal between broadcasts on Goebbels’ Reich radio network.

It was, of all things, an increasingly right-wing extremist Bundeswehr officer with his “Potsdam Glockenspiel Tradition Society” who initiated the reconstruction project and pushed it forward for over 20 years with increasing support from Potsdam politicians. Since 2001, the Protestant Church has taken on the project and in 2008 it set up a church foundation for this purpose. An architectural break, visible from outside, was originally planned but was soon abandoned, however, under pressure from right-wing donors, even if their attempted influence on the content of church services in the planned church was rejected. Because of this dispute, the right-wing extremist circles did not hand their funds over directly to the reconstruction project, but rather donated them to other church building projects in what was once Prussia.

As a result, since that time, the Garrison Church project has been financed mainly from public funds. In addition to the theme of Christian reconciliation (“The Community of the Cross of Nails”) picked up from Coventry (UK), part of the usage concept is to create a historical site of learning. This aspiration was not fulfilled. On the contrary, so far the instigators of the reconstruction have been engaged in revising history. Until recently, they stylized the church, in which violence and war crimes have been religiously legitimized and sanctioned for centuries, as itself a victim of history. The “Call from Potsdam” on which the reconstruction project is based declares the church a victim of National Socialism, the bomber war, and the GDR dictatorship. But contrary to claims, the Garrison Church was not abused against the will of the Prussian Church on the “Day of Potsdam,” but rather it was high-ranking church representatives like General Superintendent Otto Dibelius who helped to make the symbolically important ceremony possible at this location. The bombing by the British Royal Air Force was not a symbolic act of punishment, but a military operation in support of the Red Army’s final attack on Berlin and took place because the Germans were not ready to surrender, despite their hopeless situation. The orchestrators of the reconstruction have not only falsified the historical facts for many years, but have also failed to problematize and critically research the theological tradition of national Protestantism associated with this place. This, even though völkisch, anti-democratic, nationalistic, anti-Polish, anti-French and bellicose-war-glorifying ideas have been preached here since the crushing of the 1848 Revolution, if not earlier.

The project has been controversial in Potsdam society from the beginning, but, unlike the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace, it received little national attention, despite federal funding and the patronage of the Federal President. In the summer of 2019, an array of well-known scientists, artists, architects and church representatives gathered to publish a critical open letter against the project. [1] As a result of this letter, the Potsdam carillon, which had been remade by the right-wing ex-Bundeswehr officer and his colleagues, was switched off after it had been in operation for 18 years. In September 2019, the initiators of the open letter announced the creation of a critical Garrison Church “site of learning,” in order to correct the historical image of this location—which had been sugarcoated and falsified by the advocates of rebuilding—and to explain its history.

As a first step towards a critical public view, various events were held, for example, a controversial panel discussion at the Berlin Academy of Arts in December 2019 and several lecture evenings on the history of Protestantism at the Potsdam Museum. A scholarly advisory board was founded, which advises the critical project and itself actively contributes to the content-related work of the “Lernort Garnisonkirche” website. The advisory board includes: Educational scholar Prof. Dr. Micha Brumlik, the social scientist Prof. Dr. Michael Daxner, the art historian Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dolff-Bonekämper, the historians Prof. Dr. Geoff Eley, Prof. Dr. Manfred Gailus, Dr. Matthias Grünzig, Dr. Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Dr. Annette Leo, the professor of Jewish studies Dr. Susannah Heschel, the religious scholar Prof. Dr. Horst Junginger, the theologian Prof. Dr. Andreas Pangritz, the cultural historian Dr. Agnieszka Pufelska, and the military historian Prof. Dr. Wolfram Wette. The institutional sponsor of the critical site of learning is the Martin Niemöller Foundation, in cooperation with the University of Kassel (Department of Architectural Theory and Design).

In June 2020, the internet platform http://lernort-garnisonkirche.de/ went online, and has published 60 articles about the history of the site, the reconstruction project, and the related debates. New articles are published here regularly. In September 2020, the Lernort initiative opened an exhibition at the site of the former Garrison Church. It is held in the Kunst- und Kreativhaus Rechenzentrum, in a building constructed in 1971, during the period of the GDR, which is now used as an art and creative centre. The exhibition focuses on the genesis of the reconstruction plan and the influences of right-wing radical groups on the church project. This presentation is based on several years of research in numerous archives, the explosive results of which will appear in the renowned scholarly journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Munich) in the summer of 2022.

In 2021 the site of learning addressed the tradition of Prussian-German national Protestantism. On the basis of extensive source research of sermon texts in archives and libraries, the scholars at Lernort Garnisonkirche initiated research on individual military pastors in the Potsdam Garrison Church. In October 2021, a two-day conference with a dozen presentations on this topic took place at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House in Berlin. The contributions from this event will be published in 2022. Also in October 2021, the Leipzig religious scholar Horst Junginger published his book on this topic: Der preußische Adler in der deutschen Herrschaftsgeschichte: Eine Vogelkunde aus religionspolitischer Sicht (“The Prussian Eagle in the History of German Rule: An Ornithology from a Religious-Political Point of View“), which critiqued the symbiotic relationship between the Protestant church and the Prussian-German state over the past three centuries.

Through the activities of the Lernort initiative, it has been possible to influence the development of the reconstruction project. This not only applies to the use of the replica carillon and its right-wing-leaning dedications of the bells. In the spring of 2020, the scholarly advisory board of the Garrison Church Foundation, i.e. the re-builders, presented a concept for a future exhibition in the new church tower, which for the first time takes up the issues raised by the Lernort scholars and comprehensively integrates them. The City of Potsdam, for its part, has initiated a process to clarify the future design of the controversial location in the area of the former nave in terms of content and design. They have decided not to leave this question to the church or the church foundation alone, but to take on a central role in the matter. In the discussion and negotiations surrounding this, the Lernort Garnisonkirche has representation on the team of the Kunst- und Kreativhaus Rechenzentrum. In this respect, there is now hope that, through critical historical research and education, we will ultimately be able to deal responsibly with this site of remembrance of German and European history.

The current proposal suggests that the site of the former church nave is returned to the City of Potsdam, which intends to build a “house of democracy” there, including an assembly hall for Potsdam’s city council. The plans to demolish the neighbouring GDR-era Rechenzentrum are supposed to be cancelled; instead, the modernist building from 1971 should become part of an intentionally heterogenous architectural ensemble.

Notes:

[1] Signatories included Monica Bonvicini, Micha Brumlik, Thomas Demand, Maria Eichhorn, Hans Haacke, Katharina Hacker, Thomas Heise, Kasper König, Peter Kulka, Olaf Nicolai, Tobias Rehberger, Matthias Sauerbruch, Gregor Schneider, Friedrich Schorlemmer, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Klaus Staeck, Sybille Steinbacher, Robert Jan van Pelt, and Wolfram Wette.

Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)

“Sie haben [. . .] geholfen, den nationalistischen Einbruch in unsere Kirche abzuwehren.” Anmerkungen zu Gerhard Kittel und dessen Lehrtätigkeit in Wien

This chapter by Karl Schwarz appeared under the above title in Uta Heil and Annette Schellenberg, eds., Theologie als Streitkultur, Vienna University Press (as published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht), 2021, 319-339. This volume also serves as the entirety of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Theologie, vol. 13, 2021, “Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Wien.”

Karl Schwarz, author of this chapter, has spent his career as a member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, while also filling important administrative positions at the university in several stages of his career. In addition, he has been a long-time member of the multi-national editorial board at Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which is how I met him decades ago. In the early 1990s, Schwarz contributed a chapter on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna in the important volume edited by Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten Nicolaisen, Theologische Fakultäten im Nationalsozialismus, (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1993).[1] In the chapter reviewed here, Schwarz revisits a portion of that topic, focusing on Gerhard Kittel and the years from 1939 to 1943. This was a time when Kittel, famous as the founding editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, took leave from his position at Tübingen, moved with his family to Vienna, and lectured as a visiting member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna.

Schwarz touches upon several aspects of this Viennese moment in Kittel’s career. For example, the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, since 1938 within German borders, imagined that it might become an enlarged, more important institution as a “Borderland Faculty” (“Grenzlandfakultät”), reaching out to the “volksdeutsche Diaspora” in southeastern Europe.[2] Adding someone with the stature of Gerhard Kittel might have been useful, and both the Theological Faculty and Kittel seemed to have had this in mind. However, Schwarz then highlights another issue in this piece. That is the contrast found between one major portion of Kittel’s oeuvre, his very harsh work regarding Jews and Judaism, ongoing during those years in Vienna, and the glowing letters of support and admiration he received from Bishop Gerhard May and others during his postwar confrontation with denazification.

Schwarz’s chapter appears under a title that begins with this direct quote, taken from a letter Bishop Gerhard May of Vienna sent to Gerhard Kittel on 29.11.1946: “You have … helped protect us against a nationalistic attempt to take over our church.” Kittel then used this letter along with several others (e.g., from the theologian Hans von Campenhausen, postwar Rector at the University of Heidelberg) as character references appended to Kittel’s own Meine Verteidigung.[3] That latter document, sent to numerous friends and colleagues to convince them (and denazification authorities) of his innocence, followed eighteen months of postwar experience that suggested his guilt: his arrest by French occupation troops at the end of World War II, his removal from his professorship at Tübingen, his six months in prison, his eleven months of internment, and then his “sort of ‘Klosterhaft’” at Beuron, a form of ongoing confinement at a monastery near Tübingen.[4]

For purposes of Kittel’s denazification defense, Gerhard May’s letter could be understood as a “Persilschein,” the sort of postwar attestation named for a famous brand of German soap. These testimonies were given the nickname to identify their main goal: to wash clean a person’s Nazi past and get him or her past the denazification process. Despite the “Persilschein” term, with its satirical implications that we might be tempted to apply to Gerhard May’s letter, it is possible, of course that Bishop May had something important and appropriate to say in Kittel’s defense. He was Kittel’s bishop during those years from 1939-1943 when Kittel lectured at the University of Vienna and he and his family lived in Vienna. May in this letter made the claim for Kittel that he, as a professor of New Testament in the Theological Faculty at Vienna, worked hard to protect the Theological Faculty and the Protestant Church from the worst excesses of Nazi ideology and practice.

That claim provides the essence of the question that Karl Schwarz pursues. Were Bishop May and other important figures in the Protestant Church in Austria (an integral part of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945) accurate in their defense of Gerhard Kittel? Were they correct postwar in separating professors of theology from Nazis? Were real Christians not Nazis? Did May’s description of Kittel as a fellow Christian really establish him as one who stood up for his faith and for his co-believers against Nazi encroachment? (Among other things, Bishop May in his postwar remarks repeatedly referred to the Confessing Church, almost certainly exaggerating its level of support in Austria as well as its actual level of opposition to Hitler and National Socialism.) Kittel did in fact grow up in a pietist family and continued that tradition within his own family. He also taught the normal things for a Protestant professor of theology. In his four years at Vienna, he lectured on the synoptic Gospels, as well as on various books of the New Testament: Romans, Ephesians, Philemon, etc.[5]

However, Kittel also held a second position at Vienna, giving lectures in the Faculty of Philosophy. That is where he dealt most directly with his theories about Jews, Jewishness, and the role of Jews in history and in Germany. In particular, Kittel presented his own theory, identifying a dramatic change from traditional Jews in the Old Testament to the diaspora Jews of the modern world. This distinction about Jews allowed Kittel to accept the Old Testament and its place in the Christian Bible, when many “Deutsche Christen” wanted to exclude it. He thus stayed within the boundaries of normal Christian beliefs. It also allowed him to accept the career of his father, Rudolf Kittel, a famous professor of Old Testament and the translator of a modern version that became well known. Kittel justified his respect for Jews of the Old Testament by developing a theory that modern Jews had changed entirely during the diaspora. From about 500 BCE to 500 CE, he argued (in line with modern antisemitic prejudice), Jews lost their healthy roots in the soil of their homeland and their occupation as farmers. They then spread out in all directions, becoming the uprooted, money-oriented, disreputable, and noxious Jews of medieval and modern Europe.[6]

Kittel presented this idea in his keynote talk at the opening conference in November 1936 of the Nazi-oriented Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands. It was here that Kittel described the alleged transformation from biblical Jews to modern Jews, how “the admirable Jews of the Old Testament degenerated into the loathsome Jews of the modern world.” This lecture, “Die Entstehung des Judentums und die Entstehung der Judenfrage” [“The Origin of Judaism and the Origin of the Jewish Question”], soon appeared in the first issue of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, the new journal of research on “the Jewish question” supported by the Reichsinstitut.[7] This journal published a total of seven annual volumes, with Kittel becoming the single most active contributor. It was the sort of work and alleged expertise that helped make him seem a suitable scholar also to work on the propaganda exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” in 1938 in Vienna, and “The Physical and Mental Appearance of the Jews” in 1939.[8]

Karl Schwarz considers two seemingly contradictory explanations for Kittel’s attitude toward Jews, either a Christian antijudaism with its 2000 years of history and its basis in religious belief, or a modern antisemitism with its more recent history, its racist underpinnings, and its significance within the now discredited Nazi Germany. The former could be the sort of distinction that might allow Bishop May—whether honestly or surreptitiously—to ignore the antisemitic side of Kittel’s academic work. Was Kittel simply a pious Christian, researching and writing a spiritual critique against Jews? That could be explained as part of a long Christian tradition, not least including a quite vicious version contributed by Martin Luther. From this point of view, Kittel was simply a professor of theology. Bishop May’s claim that Kittel had always tried to protect Christianity and the church, implied that he actually held an “anti-Nazi” stance. By this argument, it was only in his role in the Faculty of Philosophy–a role ignored by Bishop May–that he indulged in antisemitism, the sort of thing for which Nazis postwar were being condemned.

Throughout the balance of Schwarz’s chapter, he pursues the abundant evidence that Kittel both participated in and contributed to the racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime. I recently noted in a publication about Kittel, edited by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals in 2020, that Gerhard Kittel returned to Vienna in the summer of 1944 for a guest lecture on “The Race Problem in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity” [“Das Rassenproblem der Spätantike und das Frühchristentum”] In that lecture he described “Christianity as a bulwark against the Jewish threat” [“das Christentum als Bollwerk gegen die jüdische Bedrohung;” which I then described as proof of his “complicity in the Nazi persecution of Jews” [“Mittäterschaft an der Judenverfolgung der Nazis”]. I was pleased to see that Karl Schwarz quoted those two passages and affirmed my conclusion.[9]

I believe that Kittel describing Adolf Hitler as late as 1944 as a “twin bulwark” alongside the Christian church, saving Christian Europe from the Jewish menace–indeed from the Enlightenment as a whole–tells us all we need to know about where Kittel’s allegiance can be found. Karl Schwarz seems to agree. Though the title of his chapter begins with Bishop May defending Gerhard Kittel as a good Christian and an important defender of Christian culture, Schwarz concludes,

The most recent publications, calling back to memory a scholar with a worldwide reputation, show how he allowed himself, pushed by the spirit of the times, to instrumentalize the antisemitic politics of National Socialist rule—and indeed, they show how the proclamation of antijudaism turned into a Christian antisemitism. Added to that, the years of his work in Vienna register clear signals that no character references from the side of the church could hide.[10]

[Die jüngsten Publikationen rufen einen Wissenschaftler von Weltruf in Erinnerung; sie zeigen, wie er sich vom Zeitgeist getrieben für die antisemitische Politik der nationalsozialistischen Machthaber instrumentalisieren liess—und wie in der Tat aus dem proklamierten Antijudaismus ein christlicher Antisemitismus geworden war. Dazu sind auch in den Jahren seines Wirkens in Wien deutliche Signale zu registrieren, über die auch die Leumundszeugnisse der Kirche nicht hinwegtäuschen können.]

This chapter by Schwarz is a very useful treatment of the four years in which Kittel was based at the University of Vienna and also a part of the Protestant church in that region. It is interesting. It is important. And, as Schwarz shows, it confirms that the broad and deep critique of Gerhard Kittel that has developed in the past four plus decades is accurate and justified.

Notes:

[1] Additional publications by Schwarz on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna include “’Haus der Zeit.’ Die Fakultät in den Wirrnissen dieses Jahrhunderts,” in Karl Schwarz and Falk Wagner, eds, Zeitenwechsel und Beständigkeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät in Wien 1821-1996, Schriftenreihe des Universitätsarchiv 10, Vienna 1997, 125-204; Karl Schwarz, “Zwischen kulturpolitishen Kalkül und theologischem Interesse: Die Ehrenpromotion von Nichifor Crainic an der Universität Wien,” ZBalk 56 (2020), 69-85; and Karl Schwarz, “Bejahung—Ernüchterung—Verweigerung: Die Evangelische Kirche in Österreich und der Nationalsozialismus,” JGPrÖ 124/125 (2008/2009), 18-38.

[2] Schwarz, 324-327.

[3] For a recent treatment of Kittel’s defense statement, see Matthias Morgenstern and Alon Segev, Gerhard Kittels Verteidigung: Die Rechtfertigungsschrift eines Tübinger Theologen und “Judentumsforscher” vom Dezember 1946, Berlin 2019.

[4] Schwarz, 320. Kittel died in the summer of 1948 at the age of 59, without having been given permission to return to his home (much less his position) in Tübingen.

[5] Schwarz, 330.

[6] Loyal to Nazi norms, Kittel also emphasized in his Nazi publications that the “pure” racial identity of Old Testament Jews was destroyed by sexual mixing during the diaspora. Several of his contributions to Forschungen zur Judenfrage tried to identify and prove this proclivity, in line with bizarre Nazi ideas about the imagined racial purity of “Aryans,” and hence, the special danger of racially mixed (and even sexually predatory!) diaspora Jews. See my chapter on Kittel in Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (Yale University Press, 1985), especially 61-68. See also my first article on Kittel, “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel,” Journal of Contemporary History, 12 (1977), 595-622.

[7] See Robert P Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und “Judenforscher” Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2020). The actual quotation here comes from this chapter of mine, note 7, p. 33 in the Gailus and Vollnhals volume. This volume by Gailus and Vollnhals, based upon a conference on Kittel they convened in 2017, is a very important recent contribution on the “case” of Gerhard Kittel.

[8] Schwarz, 319.

[9] Schwarz, 333, and Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen,” 27, note 7.

[10] Schwarz, 338.

Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism, November 4, 2021

By Alain Epp Weaver, MCC

Since its inception in the second half of the nineteenth century, modern humanitarianism has operated within fields of power, with humanitarian actors seeking to carve out space to carry out their work in accordance with their principles such as impartiality and neutrality. Humanitarian practice has always run the danger of becoming entangled in different ways with government agendas and with the complicated histories of individuals and communities displaced by war that humanitarian agencies seek to assist. On November 4, 2021, a group of historians gathered at a virtual roundtable convened by the University of Winnipeg on the theme, “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” to discuss one example of such humanitarian entanglements before, during, and after the Second World War. The roundtable built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections (a publication of Mennonite Central Committee, or MCC), that featured examinations by 12 historians from Canada, the United States, Paraguay, France, Germany, and the Netherlands of the complex ways in which MCC, as a Christian humanitarian agency, interacted and was bound up with Nazism and its legacy from the 1930s into the mid-1950s. Several articles featured in Intersections benefited from extensive consultation of MCC’s archives in Akron, Pennsylvania.

At the roundtable, four authors from the Intersections issue highlighted key findings from their research on MCC’s postwar resettlement efforts with displaced Mennonites, with Anna Holian, author of a landmark study of uprooted groups in Germany after WWII, offering a response.[1] This roundtable also drew on sustained scholarly attention from the past few years on transnational Mennonite intersections, entanglements, and even complicity with Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s.[2] This brief report highlights findings from both the November 4 roundtable and the fall 2021 issue of Intersections, outlining the various ways that MCC entanglements with Nazism were bound up with broader Mennonite entanglements with Nazism.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged as a byproduct of the organization’s efforts to assist Mennonites seeking to leave the Soviet Union.[3] MCC was founded by Mennonite churches in the United States in 1920 to respond to the call of Mennonites in southern Russia (soon to become part of the Soviet Union) who, along with their neighbors, faced both war and a devastating famine. In the first half of the 1920s, MCC operated feeding and agricultural development programs in parts of southern Russia home to Mennonite communities. While MCC distributed humanitarian assistance, other actors, such as the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBC), worked to help Soviet Mennonites migrate to Canada, with Soviet officials sometimes suspecting MCC of supporting and encouraging such migration efforts.[4]

The conditions facing Soviet Mennonite communities progressively worsened in the 1920s, with the Soviet state dispossessing Mennonite landholders and imposing increasingly strict restrictions on religious expression. By 1929, the situation had worsened to the point that up to 15,000 German-speaking Soviet citizens (Mennonites, but also Catholic, Lutherans, and others) descended on Moscow to demand that they be allowed to migrate. This pressure eventually led to 4,000 Mennonites receiving permission to leave the Soviet Union for Germany—with financial loans from the German government (guaranteed by MCC), these Mennonites then migrated to Paraguay where, with MCC assistance, they established the Fernheim colony in the country’s Gran Chaco region.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged from this period. Once the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, MCC de facto became a debtor to the Nazi government. To help with negotiations with the German government to postpone payment on this debt, MCC relied on pro-Nazi Mennonites, including Benjamin Unruh (one of the Mennonites from Russia who had appealed to U.S. Mennonites for help in 1920 and who had ended up in Germany).[5]

Strongly anti-Communist, Unruh also dreamed of Mennonite settlement in eastern European lands to be conquered by the Nazis and helped nourish the hopes of some in the Mennonite Fernheim colony in Paraguay of a return to Europe following anticipated Nazi victories. MCC grew increasingly concerned throughout the 1930s and into the war years by the growing pro-Nazi feeling within this Paraguayan Mennonite colony it had helped to set up and continued to support. MCC sought to nurture commitment to the traditional Mennonite doctrine of nonresistance among Fernheim’s colonists, while also avoiding direct involvement in Fernheim’s governance. However, once the tension within Fernheim between the völkische (German nationalist) and wehrlose (unarmed, or nonresistant) factions erupted into violent conflict in 1944, MCC, under pressure from the U.S. government, in turn pushed colony leadership to expel the völkische leaders.[6]

Mennonites and other groups classified as German by the Soviet authorities faced sustained and harsh persecution under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s, including the deportation of half of the Mennonite population from what is now Ukraine to Siberia. The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine in 1942 brought a reprieve for Mennonites and others identified as Volksdeutsche who were viewed favorably within the Nazi racialized hierarchy. During the Nazi occupation period, not only did Mennonites receive favored treatment, but some also actively implemented Nazi genocidal policies, including the massacre of Soviet Jews.[7]

As German forces retreated from the Soviet Union, many Soviet Mennonites fled with them. Nazi authorities settled some of these Mennonites in Germany and some in occupied Poland, depending on how ideologically trustworthy the Nazis viewed specific individuals. Mennonite men of eligible age served in German military units; some served in the Waffen-SS and in the paramilitary death squads of the Einsatzgruppen. These displaced Mennonites received houses and other goods stolen by Nazi authorities from Poles, Jews, and others. The vast majority of these displaced Mennonites accepted German citizenship.

After the Allied defeat of Nazi forces, these displaced Mennonites found themselves in a precarious situation, under threat during the first couple years after the war of deportation back to the Soviet Union. [And, in fact, around half of these displaced Mennonites were returned to the Soviet Union, where they faced a deeply precarious future.] Mennonite refugees seeking options within the emerging postwar international refugee system had multiple strikes against them—their acceptance of German citizenship, service in the German military, and the assessment by international refugee bodies that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union voluntarily.

Alongside broader postwar humanitarian efforts, including active participation in the joint efforts of the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany (CRALOG), MCC worked to assist displaced Soviet Mennonites (along with Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region who had fled after the war) and to help them migrate to the Americas (especially Canada and Paraguay). To counter the strikes that displaced Mennonites had against them, MCC workers advanced different arguments in different contexts, making a variety of arguments regarding Mennonite “nationality” (e.g., that they were Dutch, or that Mennonites should be viewed as having their own nationality, similar to Jews), contending that Mennonites had been coerced into accepting German citizenship, and downplaying Mennonite participation in Nazi military bodies. When one argument failed, MCC staff advanced others in their sustained lobbying efforts for Mennonite refugees. Over the course of the decade following the war, MCC succeeded in resettling around 15,000 displaced European Mennonites in the Americas, including approximately 12,000 Mennonites from the Soviet Union.[8]

The University of Winnipeg’s November 2021 roundtable on “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” chaired by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, the co-director of the university’s Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies, examined this latter part of the story of MCC entanglements with Nazism, with four historians who contributed to the fall 2021 issue of Intersections briefly sharing key highlights from their research.

Benjamin W. Goossen, affiliated with Harvard University, initiated the roundtable with remarks underscoring the importance of contextualizing Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism within broader and longer histories of Mennonite antisemitism. Goossen highlighted how antisemitic attitudes can be found in the writings of leading anti-Nazi Mennonites in the United States, Canada and Europe—not only among overtly pro-Nazi Mennonites. MCC’s postwar comparison of Mennonites to Jews, deployed as part of efforts to secure Mennonite migration, was, Goossen contended, disingenuous, covering over the complex, multifaceted ways that Soviet Mennonites had not only benefited from Nazism but had in different ways been actively complicit with it, including, in some cases, participation in the Holocaust. The postwar public narrative promulgated by MCC workers among Mennonite communities in Canada and the United States of the providential, Exodus-like rescue of a persecuted Mennonite community not only grossly simplified a much more complicated reality but also chilled Mennonite postwar grappling with legacies of antisemitism and investigation into Mennonite involvement in Nazism’s genocidal program.

Many MCC workers in postwar Europe expended considerable time and effort to convince groups such as the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) of Soviet Mennonite eligibility to migrate from Europe (and to receive international assistance to do so). In her presentation, Erika Weidemann of Texas A&M University traced how IGCR officials debated internally about Soviet Mennonite eligibility for Displaced Persons (DP) status and examined the evolving arguments MCC workers advanced to convince the IGCR and IRO of that eligibility. On the whole, Weidemann noted, these MCC efforts proved successful. International refugee bodies sought to articulate an unambiguous approach to Soviet Mennonite refugees, but in practice the approach was constantly shifting, with MCC adjusting to those shifts in its efforts to interpret Mennonites to international refugee agencies and to advocate for their favorable treatment.

Steve Schroeder of the University of the Fraser Valley focused his intervention on MCC’s assistance to uprooted Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region. To help secure Mennonite emigration from Europe, Schroeder explained, MCC workers argued that Danziger Mennonites had an identity that transcended Germanness and portrayed these Mennonites as victims. In reality, Schroeder continued, these Mennonites had fully assimilated into German society decades before the war.[9] During the war, Danziger Mennonites voluntarily served in the army, some worked as concentration camp guards, and some used enslaved labor from concentration camps on their farms. Like Goossen, Schroeder underscored how MCC’s constructed narratives about displaced Danziger Mennonites contributed to and furthered a distorted narrative of European Mennonites having been removed from or above the fray of the war (or of having been victims of the war), a narrative that covered over the varied forms of Danziger (and broader European) Mennonite complicity with Nazism.

The final panelist, the University of Winnipeg’s Aileen Friesen, began by urging historians to recall the individual toll of the Holocaust, naming the individuals murdered by people carrying out Nazism’s genocidal program. On the Yad Vashem website, one can search the towns and villages in Ukraine once home to large Mennonite communities like Molochansk and find the names of Jewish people like Maria Sheffer and Mendel Ioffe who were murdered in the Holocaust. Friesen discussed how MCC’s postwar attempts to present Soviet Mennonites as having “Dutch” nationality was a reinvention of older arguments and discussion about where Mennonites fit into the emerging order of nation-states. Drawing from her Intersections article, Friesen suggested that the assessment of international refugee organizations after the war that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union “voluntarily” did not square with how the Mennonite refugees perceived their departure. Interpreting Soviet Mennonite actions during the Nazi war-time occupation and as German forces retreated cannot, Friesen stressed, be divorced from the backdrop of two decades of increasingly harsh persecution faced by Soviet Mennonites.

Building on her research in MCC’s archives, Friesen discussed how MCC workers providing humanitarian assistance to displaced Soviet Mennonites sought to make sense of those Mennonites as they learned about the ways those Mennonites had been entangled and had collaborated with Soviet authorities and then with the Nazi regime. Tensions among displaced Mennonites in MCC-operated camps in post-war Germany simmered and sometimes erupted with recriminations about different forms of collaboration. The response of MCC workers as they learned in piecemeal fashion of these Mennonite entanglements with both Soviet communism and Nazism was to “let it all go”—rather than seeking to establish a true account of what choices different individuals under MCC’s care had made during the war, MCC instead focused on constructing general accounts of Mennonite victimhood in efforts to secure Mennonite emigration from Erope. This hands-off MCC approach enabled someone like Heinrich Wiebe, who served as mayor of Zaporizhzhia during the German occupation, to present himself to MCC and CMBC as a pillar of the Mennonite community who had remained distant from Nazism, when in fact he had been involved in the ghettoization of the city’s Jewish population and the expropriation of their property and was active as mayor when the city’s security apparatus, which included Mennonites among its leaders, executed the city’s remaining Jews in 1942.

In her response to the panel, Anna Holian of Arizona State University placed MCC’s postwar refugee resettlement efforts within the broader context of the emerging international refugee regime in which “nationality” functioned as the key concept. Holian explained that in this postwar system, one’s “nationality” (understood in both political and cultural terms) determined where one supposedly belonged, even if that was not where one had previously lived or was where one wished to be. Mennonites were not the only group seeking to classify themselves as a distinct nationality as they sought favorable outcomes for themselves in this postwar system: Jews and Ukrainians also sought to disentangle themselves from other national identities.

Holian’s response and the discussion that followed pointed to questions for further research: How did MCC postwar work with displaced Mennonites change over time? How did MCC understand (or fail to understand) the Mennonites whom it sought to assist? Mennonites were not free of the varied forms of antisemitism that marked Christianity in Europe, the United States, and Canada—what role did that antisemitism play in MCC (and broader Mennonite) entanglements with Nazism? To what extent did MCC shape or dictate Mennonite refugee narratives about themselves and their war-time experiences—and to what extent were MCC narratives about these Mennonite refugees shaped by how the refugees narrated their experiences to MCC? The rich conversation at the November 2021 roundtable on these and other questions highlighted that much fertile scholarly ground remains to be explored regarding Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism and its legacies before, during, and after the Second World War.

Alain Epp Weaver directs strategic planning for Mennonite Central Committee. He is the author of Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation: A Missiological History of Mennonite Central Committee, C.H. Wedel Series No. 21 (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2020).

Notes:

[1] Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

[2][2] See especially Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen, eds., European Mennonites and the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

[3] For an analytical overview of MCC entanglements with National Socialism, see Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazsim, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021):

[4] Esther Epp-Tiessen, “MCC and Mennonite Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920-1932,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 13-17.

[5] Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Benjamin Unruh, Nazism, and MCC,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 17-27.

[6] See John Eicher, Exiled among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Eicher, “MCC and Nazi Impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite Colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 27-32; John D. Thiesen, Mennonite and Nazi? Attitudes Among Mennonite Colonists in Latin America, 1933-1945 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1999); Daniel Stahl, “How the Fernheimers Learned to Speak about the Nazi Era: The Long Historical Echo of a Conflict,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 285-298; Stahl, “Paraguay’s Mennonites and the Struggle against Fascism: A Global Historical Approach to the Nazi Era,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 273-284; and Stahl, “Between German Fascism and U.S. Imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2022): 32-35.

[7] See Martin Dean, “Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 248–71 and Aileen Friesen, “A Portrait of Khortytsya/Zaporizhzhia under Occupation,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Janzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 229–249.

[8] For examinations of MCC’s efforts to resettle displaced Mennonites after the Second World War, see Ted Regehr, “Of Dutch or German Ancestry? Mennonite Refugees, MCC, and the International Refugee Organization,” Journal of Mennonite Studies (1995): 7-25; Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazism, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 3-12; Erika Weidemann, “Identity and Complicity: The Post-World War II Immigration of Chortitza Mennonites,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 269-289; Weidemann, “Facing the Future, Reinterpreting the Past: MCC’s Solutions for Successful Mennonite Immigration after the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 45-50; Aileen Friesen, “Defining the Deserving: MCC and Mennonite Refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 50-54; Steven Schroeder, “National Socialism and MCC’s Post-War Resettlement Work with Danziger Mennonites,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 54-60; and John D. Thiesen, “John Kroeker and the Backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,’” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 40-45.

[9] See Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).