Review of Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

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

Social scientist Robert Braun has made an important contribution to the study of rescue during the Holocaust, up-ending much of the conventional wisdom and modes of analysis about rescue and rescuers. Braun argues that most studies of rescue are insufficient because they focus too much on motivation, overlook the rescuers’ capacity to effectively carry out the rescue, and do not account for regional variation. This book addresses all three of these factors. Braun is especially skeptical of religious teachings as primary motivating factors, illustrated by a compelling opening anecdote about two Dutch towns in the region of Twente with similar sociocultural profiles but very different responses to the deportation of Jews in 1941. In Almelo many Jews were able to evade deportation with the help of the local Catholic church and 42% of the town’s Jews survived the war. In the nearby town of Borne, the local Catholic churches did not engage in rescue efforts and only 22% of the town’s Jews escaped deportation. Catholic theology and social teaching cannot account for this variation, nor can political or wartime circumstances. Herein lies the guiding question of this study: why are some religious communities willing and able to protect victims of mass persecution and others are not?

Because this is a work of social science, it employs a methodology very different from how historians approach research and thus warrants some explanation. Braun begins with a hypothesis that religious minorities are more likely to assist or rescue persecuted groups from mass violence or genocide. In this framing, religious minorities could hold minority status on a national level because of their small size (e.g., Quakers) or they could be a minority in a given region—Catholics in a majority Protestant region and vice versa. This minority theory is based on the idea that religious minorities recognize a shared vulnerability with other minorities, which triggers empathy. Braun posits that all religious communities seek security and self-preservation. When they cannot achieve this through religious dominance, then pluralism is the next safest option to ensure survival. So, a commitment to pluralism accounts for the willingness factor but minority status also enables capacity. Minority communities are able to engage in clandestine collective action while reducing exposure because of their members’ commitment and their relative isolation (more on isolation below). (40)

Braun proceeds to test this hypothesis through detailed geocoding of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands and Belgium, combining spatial statistics, archival sources, contemporary newspapers and other published materials, and postwar testimony, including materials from Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations program. Numerous graphs, charts, and maps are included throughout these chapters, as well as an insert of ten colour figures. The maps help to explain the story yet the technical presentation of the data makes these chapters largely inaccessible to those not familiar with social scientific methodologies.

Compelling as it is, the limitations of Braun’s thesis are just as important to understand as the argument itself and the data that supports it. There are a number of significant qualifications, the most important being that it is not just minority status that motivates and enables rescue but a certain level of isolation. (112) To illustrate this point, Braun offers the case of a Catholic chaplain in a majority Catholic area of Belgium who carried out a successful rescue operation because he used farmers in remote locations to hide Jews. The farmers were not socially isolated but rather geographically isolated. (170-171) Another crucial factor to consider is that Jews were more likely to survive when their individual networks overlapped with those of isolated minority groups—when doctors and patients and business owners and business patrons interacted on regular basis.

The book’s concluding chapter considers the applicability of the minority theory in other countries during the Holocaust. Here we see that the seemingly straightforward thesis posited in the book comes with some significant exceptions and qualifications. In order for Braun’s theory to work, the rescue must be collective and clandestine. He outlines three exceptions that suggest why we do not necessarily find religious minorities rescuing Jews to the same extent in other settings during the Holocaust and other modern genocides. Religious minorities may not engage in higher levels of successful rescue where: 1) majority elites, both secular and religious, openly object to persecution and cooperate to stymie the persecution; 2) the rescue is highly individualized and does not require coordination, as in Poland; and 3) the minority groups are closely aligned with the repressive apparatus undertaking the violence. (236) This third point is paramount to understanding the actions of religious minorities in Nazi Germany, where most Christian minorities responded to their perceived vulnerable status by aligning themselves with the Nazi state rather than responding with empathy for other persecuted minorities. Yet the book’s thesis may shed light on German religious minorities if we consider how the Volksgemeinschaft offered belonging and affirmation for previously marginalized groups in German society, thus eclipsing the recognition of shared vulnerability and the promotion of pluralism.

As the author points out, studying clandestine behaviour is hard. (116) Due to the extensive documentation available for the Netherlands, this book is able to compare situations on a granular level and isolate individual factors. Although its applicability may not be as broad as the author explores, he has offered a sophisticated methodology and way of thinking about rescue that moves far beyond religious motivation.

Review of Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century (London: Oneworld Publications, 2020). 273 pages. ISBN: 9781786078308.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

As one might see immediately from the title of the above-named work, the Reverend Butler-Gallie is quite clever and creative in wordplay. This is one of the most engaging books written as inspiration for those who have come to believe that Christianity was more than a willing tool of fascist regimes and genocidal projects in the twentieth century. In fact, in the brief introduction to the book, the author notes that Christianity and Fascism have been intertwined and that the complex relationship of Christian institutions with Fascist dictatorships has spawned an enormous number of works. This work is not attempting to delve deeply into the interplay of Christian Church leadership with the monumental devastation produced by fascist projects. Instead, this work serves as an attempt to underscore the rare and therefore more extraordinary acts of Christian men and women who decided that their commitment to the teachings of Christ and their understanding of Christian teaching meant that they had no other choice but to resist destructive fascist actions and the harmful ideology behind them.

The book is divided into five sections, beginning in occupied France, with stories of “resistance par excellence” focusing on the lives of Canon Felix Kir (of blanc de cassis aka “Kir” fame) and Abbe Pierre (born Henri Marie Joseph Groues). Both of these individuals engaged in acts of sabotage, rescue work (especially of persecuted Jews), and generally served as thorns in the sides of the Nazis and their French collaborators.

The next section focuses on places where resistance to fascism meant going against one’s own people and one’s own government: Germany and Italy. Here readers encounter a Catholic bishop, Clemens August Graf von Galen; a Protestant minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and finally a Catholic priest, Don Pietro Pappagallo, who engaged in forging new identities for the persecuted in and around Rome. This inspiring story of Don Pietro Pappagallo then leads into the longest section of the book; an examination of Christians resisting while living under occupying powers. This section brings in Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks, Poles, Dutch, and Danes. Some survived their acts of resistance, while others, such as Sister Sara Salkahazi, a former chain-smoking journalist turned nun, did not.

Finally, the two remaining sections of the book focus on two individuals who left the relative safety of Ireland and Scotland, Father Hugh O’Flaherty of Scarlet Pimpernel fame and the much lesser-known but no less inspiring Jane Haining, who traveled to Hungary to help orphaned girls and who died along with her charges in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. The final segment focuses on Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, who fought for integration in the deep South of the United States, and on a young seminarian from New England, Jonathan Daniels, who took a bullet intended for a young black girl attempting to attend an all-white school. This final segment on civil rights in the United States seems a bit out of sync with the rest of the work. That said, one can see the overlap in racist ideology and understand why the author decided to include these accounts in a work on resistance.

As one can see from this brief overview, the book aims to cover a great deal of ground, using individual life stories as lessons for the reader. Are saints mad? Are they fools? Are martyrs always brave in the face of life-threatening circumstances? And so on. These vignettes are also meant to inspire the reader with a sense that, even in the darkest of times, there are always good, brave people who decide that they would rather give their lives in the name of their principles and beliefs than conform to whatever the majority in society is doing at the time.

The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie’s writing style makes for a rollicking read, and, despite the fact that I disagree with his interpretation of my scholarship on Bishop von Galen, I found the work to be one that I did not want to put down. There is much energy, plenty of puns, and some non-scholarly vocabulary in the work (such as saying Father Kir’s actions indicated his “sheer ballsiness,” p.14) yet this type of non-scholarly language is what makes the book so engaging. It breaks through the clutter of stale academic prose, it captures the reader’s imagination with wonderful turns of phrasing, and it radiates some of the energy that this cast of characters must have needed to draw upon in order to maintain their faith and values in the face of death.

I am certain that scholars who have spent years researching each one of these individuals might find errors or misinterpretations of the subjects’ lives, yet, in spite of that fact, many readers might then be led to follow up on the suggested readings at the very end of the book to investigate each person whose bravery and dedication to God reverberates throughout the work. If one takes the book on its face – that is, that it is meant to serve as a source of inspiration and hope for readers of all faiths much like reading a Lives of the Saints collection, I would recommend reading the book. In a time when a person’s decisions could have life-saving or life-threatening consequences, the individuals featured by Rev. Butler-Gallie reveal the power that deep faith in God can serve as a continued source of strength for us all.

Review of Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan, Paul Leo. Lutherischer Pastor mit jüdischen Wurzeln (1893–1958)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan, Paul Leo. Lutherischer Pastor mit jüdischen Wurzeln (1893–1958) (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2019). 86 pages. ISBN 978-3-95948-453-4.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna / Danube University Krems

Historian Carsten Linden and Craig Nessan, Professor of Contextual Theology at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, present the life and work of the Lutheran Evangelical pastor and theologian Paul Leo (1893–1958) in 86 pages. Linden wrote the first part, Nessan the second. Unfortunately, the two parts are not well coordinated, so that there are repetitions in places. The relevance of examining the life of Paul Leo and paying tribute to him with this booklet lies in his family of origin. One of his ancestors was Moses Mendelsohn. Still, like his father, Paul Leo was a baptized Christian. At this point, a great nuisance begins: Carsten Linden writes about Paul Leo, who was baptized in infancy: “The extent to which he was Jewish, however, seems to be a little in the eye of the beholder” (p. 7). Linden is right in referring to interpretations of Jewish theology stating that the descendants of a Jewish mother are Jews. The annoyance, however, is that the author assumes Leo could possibly have a Jewish identity, just as the National Socialists did. For them, the Protestant pastor was a Jew because of his ancestors. Why Linden does not simply accept Leo’s religious self-image as a Protestant Christian at this point, instead of relying on external attributions, remains unclear.

Based on extensive archival source material, Linden describes Paul Leo’s early professional career. When the National Socialists came to power, Leo faced increasing difficulties due to his Jewish ancestors. Why Linden then adopts the racial biological interpretations of the National Socialists in this regard and describes Paul Leo as the “Jewish pastor of the regional church” (p. 19) is disturbing, however. Unfortunately, Linden also makes significant mistakes in terms of content: The Confessing Church did not form due to alleged state and National Socialist (where should a dividing line be drawn here?) interventions in church affairs (p. 18). This apologetic church historiography of the 1950s has been refuted many times in recent years, which should be taken into account when dealing with such a topic.

Since Paul Leo was mainly responsible for pastoral care in state institutions, he successively lost all of his responsibilities, as a result of which the church council assigned him the Osnabrück district of Haste for pastoral care. But even there, Paul Leo was increasingly hindered in his work because he was considered a Jew in the National Socialist understanding. The church council therefore decided to suggest ‘temporary retirement’ to Leo in mid-1938. On November 9, 1938, Paul Leo shared the same fate as thousands of Jews throughout the ‘Third Reich’: the SS arrested him and deported him to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Since Paul Leo received a visa for the Netherlands, he was released from the concentration camp at the end of 1938. However, he never spoke about his experiences there. In the Netherlands, he also had to live separated from his daughter (the mother had died during childbirth), which, in addition to the loss of his homeland, was certainly another inhuman burden. From the Netherlands, Leo then came to the USA in 1939, where he held various positions as pastor and theologian until his sudden death in 1958. Craig Nessan describes this second phase of life in Leo’s new home in America. It becomes clear how difficult life could be for exiles in the first few years.

The brief account of the life and work of Paul Leo is a classic descriptive biographical treatise. It conveys very well the depressing circumstances under which people had to live who did not belong to the ideal of the National Socialist ‘Volksgemeinschaft.’ And as a pastor, Leo received no significant protection from the regional church. From the point of view of the reviewer, the description of Leo’s first years in the USA is particularly impressive. Despite his successful escape from Nazi Germany, which ensured Leo’s and his daughter’s survival, the first few years were a struggle for survival in a completely different society. The Lutheran theologian Paul Leo had to work in his early years as a teacher in a Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh, which ensured his and his family’s financial survival.

Embedding the descriptions within the overall context of the ‘Third Reich’ with the help of current research literature would certainly have done the book some good, even more so a final editing. The many grammatical errors are unworthy of an appreciation of Paul Leo’s life.

Review of John A. Moses, Anglicanism: Catholic Evangelical or Evangelical Catholic? Essays Ecumenical and Polemical. A Homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng, Martin Luther and John Henry Newman

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of John A. Moses, Anglicanism: Catholic Evangelical or Evangelical Catholic? Essays Ecumenical and Polemical. A Homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng, Martin Luther and John Henry Newman (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2019), pp.xxxiii + 155.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

John Moses is a distinguished scholar of German history, not least admired for his standard two-volume study of German trades unions from Bismarck to Hitler, published in 1982, and, more recently, his book The Reluctant Revolutionary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Collision with Prusso-German History (2009). He is also an Anglican priest, and of a kind that is getting harder to find these days. This collection of recent essays finds him entering with gusto into contemporary church debates and bringing with him a good deal of his academic experience and weight. In many respects it is tempting to sense that as a historian and as an Anglican Moses has much in common with John Conway, the founding father of this journal. But here Moses has to confront a number of distinctive giants at large in the landscapes of Australian Anglicanism. In particular, there is the question of the Diocese of Sydney.

In his foreword to the book, Mark Lindsay welcomes Moses warmly into the realm of contemporary theological angst, affirming the proper place of a historian in all such things. This may seem all too obvious, but then the authority of the historical craft, and of historical knowledge altogether, has for some years now become increasingly obscure to those who oversee the life and work of most of our Protestant churches. When a moment of vital significance turns up historians are seldom to be found in the counsels of authority. If anything, they are likely to be deliberately excluded from them, though they might now and then be recruited to write introductory paragraphs. Evidently, we are all expected to return to a vigorous state of primitive Christianity as though nothing of significance has occurred across the intervening centuries. But there may be other reasons to maintain this state of ignorance. The historian of the modern church is not quite a tame creature. The churches prefer a show of loyalty, while those in charge of them care not at all to be criticised. Historians tend to do this rather freely, particularly when provoked. The historian of the Reformation may unhelpfully point out doctrinal contradictions or emphasize acts of violence. The historian of secularization will certainly prove to be bad for morale. As for the historians of the Third Reich, it is much safer to leave them in their university departments than to invite them to observe patterns and parallels. And why should there be any, after all?

John Moses has certainly not been tamed; nor has he submitted to obscurity or been shunted unprotestingly into the pleasant groves of academe, much as he may enjoy being there. He acknowledges, generously, the influence of those who have taught him across a long and busy life. In this book he is wonderfully adamant that he has a voice for the contemporary Church and that he is, if quite necessary, prepared to raise it. He, like many other unhappy observers, observes that Anglican Sydney is a diocese ‘captured’ by a narrow, rigid – indeed, ideologized – conservative evangelicalism. Moses himself has inevitably been a casualty of this obscurantism. But he has not fallen silent, not least because he has too confident, and too profound, a sense of the traditions in which he has been nurtured. All of the lectures and essays in this volume present these qualities vividly and they make it a book well worth reading.

There are seven chapters – lectures and articles for various audiences – and an Epilogue. There are also appendices, chosen with intent (one is ‘John Henry Newman’s definition of a Gentleman’). It is important to acknowledge that while Moses is clearly eager to set about his principal adversaries, the primary purpose at work is both generous and constructive. He is devoted to pursuing a picture of what Anglicanism can still seek to offer the whole Christian Church, in ecumenical vision and in liberal, reconciling gifts. One essay is ‘The case for a renewed Anglicanism’, and another, ‘The Chaos of Anglicanism: Towards unravelling the Paradox’. There follows an attractive portrait of Father Peter Bennie, a scholar-priest who comes to embody many of the virtues to which Moses is drawn. ‘The real antithesis of the Catholic Church, warns Bennie, ‘is the sect, and sectarianism ever stunts the spirit, binds the mind, and inhibits the imagination.’ (p. 107.)

One of the most attractive qualities of the book is the freedom with which Moses writes of his own life and experiences, and of the many people he has known. This reveals a truth which he plainly acknowledges: that often what divides opinionated people is their formation and education and – above all – their ongoing patterns of reading. As a schoolboy in the far North of Queensland he was impressed by Dr Wilhelm Lorenz Rechnitz, a German Jew who had become an Anglican and was now to be found teaching Latin in St Francis College. (‘The Church of England’, Rechnitz warned the young Moses, ‘is a good thing in bad hands.’) He also encountered the priests of the Brotherhood of St Barnabas, ‘a remarkable group of young men, almost exclusively “Oxbridge” educated priests’, while the bishop, John Oliver Feetham, was a figure formed very much on the same lines. As a student at the University of Queensland his eyes were opened still wider and then followed the almost-miracle of a period of post-graduate study in Germany. Here, in Munich, Moses was taught by Franz Schnabel, ‘a liberal-minded Roman Catholic scholar of immense erudition and humanity’, (p. 3) who had resisted National Socialism. A spell at the University of Erlangen followed under the benign tutelage of Waldemar Besson, Karl-Heinz Ruffmann and Walther-Peter Fuchs.

After all of this the young John Moses was hardly likely to spend the rest of his days poring over the works of James Innell Packer. Yet, as an honorary assistant curate in a Brisbane suburb for seventeen years, he would have to find a way of collaborating with a rector who had done exactly that – while the rector, for his part, found that he had to cope with his highly educated, internationally-minded curate. Significantly, it was not here that Moses the priest came unstuck, but later, in the diocese of Armidale, where he found he was required to affirm explicitly the inerrancy of the Bible, to repudiate the ordination of women and to disavow the toleration of homosexuals. ‘In an open society such as exists in Australia’, he reflects, ‘one does not expect to encounter people, let alone those calling themselves Anglican, who exhibit a mindset reminiscent of doctrinaire Nazis or Communists.’ (p. 12) Stinging words, no doubt, but words that he is well qualified to justify.

Moses can certainly take comfort in the company of giants from diverse traditions: the writings of Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng and John Henry Newman suffuse the book. For him the conspicuous quality of Anglicanism lies not in the brittle rigidities of denominational existence, still less in acts of intellectual iconoclasm and ‘doctrinal terrorism’ (p. 10), but in the promise of a richly creative ecumenical vision. It is still his church and he will not abandon it. In part this is because he has found too much to love and admire in it, not that there is much sentimentality here. In one essay he observes its various tribes with a caustic eye (indeed, his description of ‘Old-fashioned “Spikes”’ is hilarious). For Moses himself the Christian faith remains unique in offering to the world a radical social ethic, expressive of love, humility, tolerance and understanding – all qualities which might never have found a home there without it. In their strenuous assertions, impositions and proscriptions the fundamentalists of Australian Anglicanism have sought to bury what is essentially true, vital and enduring in it. In this sense the book is a protest, and perhaps a warning. But it is certainly not a work of lamentation, for the general character of it remains perseveringly faithful. It would be a pity to leave it in Australia, not least because we have all come to know, in one way or another, the issues of which it speaks. Moreover, few scholars of history have stepped out of their lecture rooms to deplore, declaim and insist as bravely and cogently as this fine scholar of modern Germany.

Webinar Announcement: The Holocaust-Era Archives of Pope Pius XII: The State of the Question

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Webinar Announcement: The Holocaust-Era Archives of Pope Pius XII: The State of the Question

The Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust are co-presenting a webinar entitled “The Holocaust-Era Archives of Pope Pius XII: The State of the Question.”

This event will take place on October 17, 2021, from 2:00-3:30 EDT (19;00-20:30 UTC).

The webinar will consider the significance of the archives and of the scholarship on this topic for Jewish-Christian relations. Speakers include Drs. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, David Kertzer, and Robert Ventresca.

On its website, the USHMM states, “For decades, the USHMM and many others have called for the opening of the wartime Vatican archives—16 million pages that could shed light on the actions of Pope Pius XII and his fellow church leaders as millions of Jews and other victims were being murdered across Europe. At last, in 2019, Pope Francis announced they would open in 2020, stating ‘The Church is not afraid of history.'”

For more information, and to register, visit https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/mchvearchvs1021.

Letter from the Editors (June 2021)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Letter from the Editors (June 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Once again, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to present a new issue of book reviews and reports pertaining to the history of twentieth-century German and European Christianity and Christian churches. In this issue, we consider a mix of Catholic and Protestant individuals and institutions.

Martin Niemöller in 1952. By J.D. Noske / Anefo – Nationaal Archief, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28946076.

Kevin Spicer reviews Jonathan Huener’s “definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation.” Noting that scholars have long considered “the Warthegau as a blueprint of the Nazi state’s plans of actions for the future of all churches in Germany,” Spicer explains how “Huener situates his analysis of the church’s plight in the Warthegau clearly in the Nazi state’s Kirchenpolitik and Volkstumskampf or ethno-racial struggle.” Still, Spicer concludes (quoting the author) that the Polish church “survived more than five years of Nazi occupation and emerged in 1945 as an institution with significant moral capital.”

Christopher Probst examines Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals’ edited volume on the famous Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel, who is “as well-known for his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question; 1933) as he is for being the editor until 1945 of the influential Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament).” Topics include the legacy of Kittel in Tübingen; German Protestant reactions to 1933 and the rise of the Nazis; Kittel’s background, education, and early career; Kittel’s works on Jews and Judaism during the Third Reich; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in German scholarship; the connection between Kittel’s students and the Eisenach Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life; Kittel’s international reception; and Kittel’s My Defense (1946).

Beth Griech-Polelle reviews Traude Litzka’s book, The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna, in which the author examines the work of Father Ludger Born, head of the Aid Office for Non-Aryan Catholics, an agency supported by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna. Born and his staff (largely women, some of them “non-Aryan” Catholics themselves) worked to help converted Jews navigate the bureaucracy of emigration. Over time, Born and his colleagues worried less about the nature of conversion, baptizing Jews in large numbers, in order to help them emigrate. After the war made emigration impossible, the Aid Office turned into a social welfare agency, procuring food, clothes, and other supplies for its clients. As Griech-Polelle concludes, Litzka “is to be commended for attempting to uncover the untold stories of assistance given in Vienna by religious men and women.”

Robert Ericksen introduces us to Ian Harker’s short work, Pearls before Swine: The Extraordinary Story of The Reverend Ernst Biberstein, Lutheran Pastor and Murder Squad Commander. Biberstein was tried and convicted at Nuremberg for his role as a commander of a mobile killing unit which murdered 2,000 to 3,000 Jews. But before he became a Holocaust perpetrator, Biberstein had been a Lutheran pastor near Hamburg. Harker outlines Biberstein’s entrance into the Nazi movement and career path that took him into the Sicherheitsdeinst (Security Service, or SD) of the SS, where he worked for Reinhard Heydrich in Berlin, then in Upper Silesia and Ukraine, where he was part of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units). As Ericksen concludes, “The life of Ernst Biberstein reflects a number of important issues involving Christians in Nazi Germany, from the level of their actual enthusiasm for and participation in the regime to the postwar difficulties—persisting for at least a generation—in coming to grips with the realities of that past.”

Doris Bergen examines Alexander Reynolds’ account, To War Without Arms: The Journal of Reverend Alexander Reynolds, May – November 1944: The D-Day Diary of an Army Chaplain, edited by Simon Trew. Bergen offers high praise for this work, noting its relevance for the study of “World War II, the Normandy campaign, military chaplains, or contemporary church history.” Reynolds provides the context for Normandy invasion, the role of British Army chaplains, and the harrowing experience of D-Day. Chaplains played a significant role under British General Bernard Law Montgomery, who, editor Simon Trew writes, “appears to have believed quite sincerely that religious faith provided the underpinnings for success in battle.”

Three fascinating reports round out this issue of CCHQ. Suzanne Brown-Fleming highlights a webinar on the opening of the Pius XII archives and Holocaust research. Björn Krondorfer reports on a webinar comparing various historic and contemporary expressions of Christian nationalism. And Michael Heymel offers a detailed review of a recent German conference on Martin Niemöller and his international reception.

This issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly also brings with it significant changes to our editorial team. After many years of service, Doris Bergen (University of Toronto) and Heath Spencer (Seattle University) are resigning as editors. Their careful reviews and dedicated support for the work of the journal will be missed, though we hope that they will continue to write for the journal occasionally. In particular, Doris played a key role in the early days of the journal, when several of us decided to reimagine John Conway’s monthly newsletter into an open-source online journal. Doris and Heath, many thanks for your fine work over the years. We will miss you!

In the March issue, we put out a call for new editors and were delighted by the strong interest from a good number of fine scholars. Recently, the editorial team decided to bring five new editors on board: Dr. Benedikt Brunner, Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, Germany; Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University, United States; Dr. Martin Menke, Rivier University, United States; Dr. Dirk Schuster, Universität Potsdam, Germany; and Dr. Sarah Thieme, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. You can find out more about them and their work on the journal’s About page. We appreciate their excitement about the journal and look forward to their regular contributions over the coming years.

And to you, our readers, we offer our thanks for your ongoing interest in the journal.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Jonathan Huener, The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation. The Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Jonathan Huener, The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation. The Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2021). 353 pages. Cloth $90.00, ISBN: 978-025305402-9; Paperback $42.00, ISBN: 978-025305404-3; Ebook $41.99 ISBN: 978-025305406-7.

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

Jonathan Huener, professor of history at the University of Vermont, has produced a definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation. Identified by the Germans as the Reichsgau (district) Wartheland or Warthegau, it encompassed 45,000 square kilometers (“roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire,” Huener notes) with a “population of more than 4.9 million, including approximately 4.2 million Poles, 400,000 Jews, and 325,000 Germans.” Of this demographic, 3.8 million were Catholic and ninety percent were ethnic Poles. The German Reich incorporated the territory even though its borders remained guarded and not easily crossed. Ecclesiastically, it was expansive, encompassing the “prewar archdioceses of Poznań (Posen) and Gniezno (Gnesen), nearly all of the Włocławek (Leslau) diocese, the majority of Łodź (Lodsch/Litzmannstadt) diocese, and fractions of the Częstochowa (Tschechenstochau), Warsaw (Warschau) and Płocl (Schröttersburg) dioceses.” It included 1,023 parishes, served by 1,829 diocesan priests, 277 male religious, and 2,666 women religious (2). Before World War II ended, the German occupiers would close more than ninety-seven percent of the churches, dissolve all Catholic organizations, deport or imprison most women religious, and arrest more than 1,500 priests, of whom 815 they murdered directly or indirectly. In eighteen succinct and exceptionally well-written chapters, Huener uncovers the history of the church in the Warthegau, masterfully contextualizing it in the politics of the Nazi occupation. It is the first English language study on this topic, extensively based upon sources from both church and state archives.

Many studies on the existence of churches under National Socialism point to the Warthegau as a blueprint of the Nazi state’s plans of actions for the future of all churches in Germany. Generally, however, historians have drawn such conclusions prematurely, basing them on select archival documents without examining the broader context of Nazi policies for the Warthegau and for Poland as a whole. By setting right these ill-considered assumptions, Huener situates his analysis of the church’s plight in the Warthegau clearly in the Nazi state’s Kirchenpolitik and Volkstumskampf or ethno-racial struggle. Dominating this regional policy was Arthur Greiser, a native of the region and the Warthegau’s long-serving (1939-1945) Gauleiter (district leader) and Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor), and his deputy, August Jäger, whom historian Klaus Scholder had previously identified as instrumental in intensifying state involvement in Protestant Church affairs in the initial years of Nazi rule. Huener mentions but does not explore this connection. Greiser and Jäger did not act alone. From Munich, Martin Bormann, chief of staff in the Office of the Deputy Führer and, after May 1941, head of the party chancellery, and from Berlin, Heinrich Himmler, SS Leader and Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, influenced Warthegau church policy while also allowing Greiser freedom to craft and implement it locally. The result revealed competing concerns between the ethno-racial struggle against Poles and an existing distrust of Catholicism. What historians have traditionally interpreted as attacks on Christianity by limiting or prohibiting Masses, Huener explains, were primarily security measures implemented by the occupiers to “prevent Poles from congregating and fomenting dissent or resistance” while they continued their policy of “undermin[ing] Poles’ sense of national identity and community” (6). Amid such motivations, strong anti-church sentiments also existed.

Despite the multiplicity of motivations for curtailing the church’s freedoms, the German occupiers’ actions against the Polish Catholic Church were drastic. From the outset, the Germans targeted the church and its priests, especially viewing the latter as instigators of Polish nationalism and extremely hostile to Germany. Huener explores the origins of Nazi anti-Polish, bias, tracing it in significant depth. While clergy were not specifically signaled out for imprisonment or execution, he shows how the Einsatzgruppen (operation groups) included them among the more than sixty-thousand Polish citizens that they massacred during Operation Tannenburg, following the invasion of Poland. After the military handed governing to a German civilian administration in late October 1939, clergy continued to be counted among the intelligentsia chosen for execution or imprisonment. In chapter three, Huener delves deeper into the reasons for the Germans’ anticlerical outlook, tracing it back to the 1870s Kulturkampf in Polish regions under Prussian rule. According to Huener, the church “functioned as a vector of Polish nationalism,” with the clergy often supporting right-wing nationalist politics, including the Endecja or National Democracy movement. He describes this movement as “socially conservative, generally antisemitic, hostile to minorities,” and advocating “the Polonization of the German minority in Poland” (47).

Whether the Polish clergy did or did not embody such nationalistic anti-German sentiments, Reichsstaathalter Greiser obsessively believed they did and planned to purge his Mustergau (model Gau) of such unwanted elements. As chapter four reveals, he had a monumental task as the region was predominantly Polish; and even its Jewish minority was larger than its ethnic German inhabitants. Huener recalls that in 1944, despite countless arrests, murders, and deportations, only thirteen percent of the Warthegau’s population was ethnically German. Such percentages did not bode well for Greiser, considering that the neighboring Gau of Danzig-Westpreußen was fifty-eight percent German.

To carry out his purge, Greiser and other Gau authorities initiated a series of actions against the church, becoming more draconian and ruthless over time. Chapter five discusses the 5 October 1939 “invasion” of the Ostrów Tumski island enclave of the Poznań diocesan administration. Popularly known as the “Cathedral Island Action,” the Gestapo and various police units raided the diocesan archive seeking files that might reveal “potentially dangerous clergy and church institutions” and arresting four priests who worked in the diocesan chancery. Although August Hlond, archbishop and primate, left Poland in late September 1939 at the request of the Polish government, his auxiliary, Walter Dymek, remained in Poznań and was placed under house arrest. At first, German officials promised Dymek that the church would be left unharmed. In return, Dymek issued a memorandum calling on diocesan clergy to “care for the poor and to maintain social peace, and also to comply with the orders of the authorities” (78). Huener stresses that this should not be “seen as an expression of sympathy or eager compliance” but rather an “attempt to ensure that Polish Catholics would continue to have access to ‘word and sacrament’” (79). Such promises meant nothing, of course, as the occupiers began to restrict the number and times of Masses and enforce further limitations on the church’s ministries. Huener argues such restrictions were part of a threefold plan to incarcerate and deport a significant number of clergy, restrict Poles’ access to churches and parish facilities, and take “economic and legal measures to undermine the unity, integrity, and structure of the Polish church as an institution” (82).

Chapters six, eleven, and twelve detail the specific actions Nazi authorities took against Polish priests that nearly deprived Warthegau Catholics of the sacraments. These actions took place in four stages: (1) immediately following the fall 1939 invasion; (2) in early 1940 (aimed primarily against priests of the Gniezno and Poznań archdiocese); (3) in August 1940, when the Gestapo and police rounded up two hundred priests and deported them to Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald; and (4) in early October 1941 when more than 500 Warthegau priests were arrested in a move meant to destroy the Polish clergy (86). Priests of religious orders were rounded up and exiled at higher rates than diocesan priests. Before deportation to the General Government (non-incorporated part of occupied Poland) or to a concentration camp, many clergy were held in confiscated monasteries or friaries appointed for such purposes. Life in these transitional sites was not ideal but significantly less harsh than that experienced in camps such as the notorious Fort VII, located on the western outskirts of Poznań. Huener recounts numerous tragic tales of the brutal torture of interned clergy. Such horrible and murderous experiences reached their apex at Dachau, the subject of chapter twelve, where more than 1,700 Polish Catholic priests were incarcerated, of whom 850 perished, accounting for eighty-three percent of all clergy who lost their lives there (185).

As state authorities ended priests’ freedom to minister in a variety of pastoral settings, parish worship was also affected, as chapters seven through nine reveal. Memorandums from Berlin forbade the use of Polish in worship and called for “‘specially selected, German-conscious German clergy’” (104). Huener points out that generally, the implementation of such commands was more radical than initially proposed. Interestingly, he notes that this was not only to curb Polish nationalism, but also, in the Warthegau, to restrain the Catholic Church, which “remained a foreign and hostile element, regardless of whether its clergy were patriotic Germans or allegedly subversive Poles” (105). Evidence of restrictions on religion affecting ethnic Catholic Germans residing in the Warthegau appears at several points in the narrative. Not only were Masses and the sacraments limited, but state authorities also systematically destroyed roadside devotional sites throughout the Warthegau. Vivid photos reproduced alongside the narrative visually document such desecration. Likewise, both the Gestapo and police confiscated churches, cloisters, friaries, and parish buildings, converting them to secular use by organizations such as the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV).

Prohibition of the Polish language in worship and parish ministry was intertwined in the Nationalitätenprinzip or national principle calling for racial segregation in church life. Following the National Socialist racial principle, Germans and Poles were strictly separated in all religious contexts, designating separate churches for each demographic. Huener incorporates the memoir of Father Hilarius Breitinger, a German Franciscan who served in Poznań as the apostolic administrator for German Catholics from 1942-1945, to recount the obsession of Nazi authorities to implement this form of segregation. Interestingly, Huener also reveals that such regulations were, at times, challenging to enforce as religious practice appears to have superseded racial segregation. Extremely harsh penalties could be imposed on both Germans and Poles who failed to follow segregational ordinances. An August 1943 report of the Polish underground resistance recounts, German parishioners formed a cordon to prevent Poles from entering their “German” church before an impending search by the Gestapo during Mass (129). Huener clarifies that the guards’ motives were not apparent but appeared to have an altruistic motive of concern for their Polish co-religionists. He concludes, “for some of the population (and some clergy among them), the church could erase, or at least blur, the linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and racial frontiers that the regime so rigorously imposed and defended” (131). Huener here points to the research of James Bjork on Upper Silesia, which draws similar conclusions. Unmentioned is that John J. Delaney previously reached the same conclusion regarding Polish forced laborers living among rural Bavarian Catholics.

Behind the segregation and anti-church policy stood thirteen points articulated in September 1939 by Jäger and Gerhard Klopfer, the latter a representative of Martin Bormann. Huener reconstructs the thirteen points from various primary documents. They include destroying denominational associations, upholding the national principle, prohibiting religious instruction in schools, limiting church offertory collections, forbidding religious organizations to engage in social welfare activities, abolishing religious orders, dismantling theological studies at Posen University, and turning the priesthood into a part-time profession. Without mentioning the thirteen points, Albert Hartl, an SD official and a former priest of the Munich and Freising archdiocese, and a Dr. Fruwirth, incorporated the spirit of the thirteen points into a fourteen-page memorandum to guide future state ecclesiastical policy. Huener argues that this document revealed, “a basic synergy with respect to church policy between the party leadership, SD, and Warthegau administration” (144). Such insights highlight the importance of Huener’s well-grounded argument and his exceptional ability to integrate National Socialism’s political and social history into church history.

Although much of the information In Huener’s work will be new, at least for English-speaking readers, chapter thirteen is especially ground-breaking. In it, Huener describes the persecution of women religious in the Warthegau and their internment in Bojanowo Labor Camp, located near the southern border of the Wartheland. During the occupation, women religious often had to take up the ministry left unfulfilled by the arrested and murdered priests. Though they could not administer the sacraments, women religious still provided essential pastoral care and spiritual enrichment to Catholics throughout Poland. Such activity, coupled with the Nazis’ hatred of religious orders, resulted in more than six hundred women religious being incarcerated in the camp. Conditions in the camp were hard but not as brutal as other concentration camps and prisons in the Warthegau. In Bojanowo, women religious had to engage in labor, including manufacturing munitions. Unlike their male counterparts, they were granted brief furloughs to venture into the local village. In some cases, their captors released them to return to live with their relatives. Huener reports that deaths were rare, with only eight to eleven sisters perishing in the camp.

As with almost any discussion on the Catholic Church under National Socialism, Huener addresses the silence of Pope Pius XII, in this case, his silence toward the persecution of Poles and the Polish Catholic Church. Huener emphasizes that by the fall of 1939, Pius XII had already been well informed about German atrocities against the Poles and the Polish Catholic Church. Huener concludes that the pope “preferred expressions of sympathy and avenues of diplomacy over overt protest, condemnation, or calls for resistance” (273). For him, Pius chose “impartiality” over “neutrality” (283). Still, Huener points out that the Poles and their religious leaders were not cognizant of the extent of intervention exerted on their behalf, for example, by Cesare Orsenigo, the Berlin papal nuncio. He acknowledges such intervention as remarkable, especially considering Orsenigo’s checkered history under National Socialism. At the same time, he also emphasizes the limitations of such an approach.

Huener concludes his study by again recounting the devastating losses among the Polish clergy. Though such emphasis might seem hagiographic, it is far from it. Throughout the work, Huener balances his presentation and judgment, describing the Polish church’s strengths and weaknesses, including its antisemitism, as it sought to exist under German occupation. In the end, he concludes that unlike the German Catholic Church and the papacy that “emerged from the Second World War as institutions compromised,” the Polish Catholic Church “survived more than five years of Nazi occupation and emerged in 1945 as an institution with significant moral capital” (311). Huener has provided excellent documentation of this ecclesiastical and human narrative of survival.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und ‚Judenforscher‘ Gerhard Kittel

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und ‚Judenforscher‘ Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2020), 276pp. ISBN: 978-3-8471-0996-9.

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

Even those with only a cursory knowledge of the history of the churches in Nazi Germany know the name Gerhard Kittel. The Tübingen New Testament scholar is as well-known for his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question; 1933) as he is for being the editor until 1945 of the influential Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament). Many may not be aware, though, that in 1930 Kittel participated in the conference of a Jewish mission society the goal of which included not only Jewish mission but also Jewish-Christian dialogue (Martin Buber gave a two-hour lecture titled “The Soul of Judaism”); or that in 1942 he gave an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom (Kristallnacht) that followed. This volume of essays about the theologian and ‘Judenforscher’ provides nuggets such as these and fills in some gaps in his biography and bibliography.

In a wide-ranging introduction, the editors skillfully contextualize the issues surrounding Protestant anti-Judaism and antisemitism during the Third Reich. Gailus and Vollnhals use the national reactions to the commemoration of the 500^th anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation as a jumping off point. These 2017 commemorations included – for the first time in a Luther jubilee year – critical analysis of the reformer’s “Judenschriften,” of which the deeply anti-Judaic and antisemitic Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies) stands out. Very soon after these commemorations ended, a group of historians, church historians, theologians, and religion scholars met in Dresden to assess Kittel’s biography, work, and legacy (7), which occasioned the present volume. Though Luther and Kittel lived and worked in vastly different historical contexts, their oeuvres stir similar debates about animus toward Jews and Judaism in Protestant theology and their real-world effects (8). Despite some overlap and repetition, the essays that follow address these issues in a comprehensive and satisfying fashion.

In his fascinating essay, “Schweigen und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” (Silence and Talk about the ‘Kittel Case’ after 1945), Robert Ericksen both recapitulates the development, impetus, and major conclusions of his own seminal work on Kittel, which is well-known to our readers, and reflects with noteworthy frankness and humility on his conversations and scholarly dialogue with the late Tübingen church historian Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, who contributed substantial scholarly works about the relationship between Kittel, Protestant theology, National Socialism, and Judaism from the 1970s until her untimely death in 1999. Contrasting his position as an American historian in the 1970s and early 1980s with hers as a church historian in the very same theology faculty to which Kittel had belonged several decades earlier, Ericksen intones, “Now I understand that she was right when she told me that a more critical, more comprehensive account on Kittel would not have been published and would have damaged her career” (38).

Clemens Vollnhals’s chapter, titled “Nationalprotestantische Traditionen und das euphorische Aufbruchserlebnis der Kirchen im Jahr 1933” (National Protestant Traditions and the Euphoric Awakening Experience of the Churches in 1933), sets the euphoric reactions of Protestants to the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazi regime against the backdrop of longstanding Protestant traditions, especially the “close connection between religious and national feeling, the identification of emperor, empire, and Protestantism” (46) that had infused Protestant circles since the unification of Germany in 1871 and the “traumatization” brought on by the collapse of the German Empire in the wake of the First World War (45-49). The essay provides important context for an understanding of the changes brought about in Protestant circles during this momentous and tumultuous year, changes which had important ramifications for the twelve years of Nazi rule in Germany.

Gerhard Lindemann sketches Kittel’s family origins, education, and early years as a scholar. Gerhard Kittel’s father Rudolf, one of the leading Old Testament scholars of his time, rightfully looms large in this discussion. Lindemann’s conclusions are necessarily calibrated, as Kittel’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism in his early career was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he utilized a wide variety of Jewish sources and could often treat them in the 1920s with a certain degree of respect. On the other hand, he could accept racist categories and employ völkisch antisemitism in his analysis of a purportedly tainted “modern Judaism” (82). The essay demonstrates (as does Vollnhals’s) the importance of viewing Kittel and Protestant theology during the Third Reich through a wider chronological lens.

After sketching German Protestantism from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi era, Horst Junginger’s essay covers Kittel’s works on Jews and Judaism during the Third Reich and his lengthy 1946 “defense” of his actions toward both Jews and the Nazi regime. Junginger pulls no punches, describing Kittel’s output from 1933 to 1945 as “Judengegnerschaft in Wort und Tat” (Antisemitism in Word and Deed) (87-96). During this period, Kittel, for example, wrote Die Judenfrage, an occasional work that reached a wide audience and which combined scholarly – if often anti-Judaic – analysis with politicized and antisemitic speech (87-90); used his scholarly reputation to become a leading light of “Judenforschung” – the politically motivated denigration of Jews and Judaism via “scholarly” means (90-92); and gave an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, in which, despite the fact that Grynszpan wasn’t especially religious, Kittel portrayed his murder of vom Rath as “the act of a Talmudic Jew controlled by international Jewry” (95).

The Theologische Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, or TDNT) has been so identified with Gerhard Kittel that the multi-volume work of biblical and theological philology is often referred to by the shorthand “Kittel.” Martin Leutzsch’s critical appraisal of the work labels its anti-Judaism and antisemitism a “Wissenschaftliche Selbstvergötzung des Christentums” (Scholarly self-idolization of Christianity). Helpfully, Leutzsch offers a detailed discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant re-evaluations of Christianity as a religion eminently superior to Judaism, indeed one that is more “enlightened” in the rational, Enlightenment-era sense of that term (106-110).

Indeed, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was marked in this era of Protestant theology by a series of newly created oppositional concepts. For example, diaspora Judaism could now be reckoned as “Spätjudentum” (late Judaism) in opposition to “Urchristentum” (early Christianity) (108-109); Judaism as a “national religion (with a national god)” v. Christianity as “universal religion” (112-113). Seen in this broader context, Leutzsch’s conclusion about the content of the TDNT (for which he offers a significant amount of evidence) is unsurprising yet nuanced. “What the reading of TDNT shows throughout is the ideological functionalization of philology and comparison of religions for the thesis of the superiority of Christianity” (118). Because of this pre-determined and “self-idolizing” approach, a fair comparison of Christianity with Judaism (or any other religion) is made impossible in the work.

Oliver Arnhold examines the connection between Kittel’s students and the “Eisenach ‘De-Judaization Institute.’” The ostensibly academic Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life was a group that sought a comprehensive de-Judaization of Christianity, as demonstrated by their constant attacks against the canonicity of the Old Testament and their publication of Bibles, hymnals, and catechisms that were stripped of their Jewish elements. Arnhold reveals that a significant number of Kittel’s students (and, e.g., students of Johannes Leipoldt) who worked on TDNT were also members of the Eisenach Institute (e.g., Herbert Preisker, Rudolf Meyer, Carl Schneider, Gerhard Delling, Walter Grundmann, and Georg Bertram).

Arnhold argues that Kittel did not participate in the Eisenach Institute at least in part because he affirmed the Old Testament while Institute members largely rejected it and affirmed the “Aryan” Jesus theory. These were bridges too far, even for Kittel (131). It is also worth noting that Kittel had experienced great success as a “Judenforscher” in Walter Frank’s Nazi-approved Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany). As the Eisenach Institute was not an officially approved institution of the Nazi State, Kittel might not have craved its imprimatur. Arnhold affirms Dirk Schuster’s interpretation – essentially, that Kittel and Grundmann affirmed a view of “the Jew” that was “allegedly” based in “race research” as well as other problematic positions and practices “in order to remove Christianity from its Jewish context and to make it compatible with the Nazi ideology” (131-132)

Lukas Bormann’s essay examines Kittel’s relationships with scholars outside of Germany and the international reception of his works, from his early career to his death in 1948. Bormann begins with an analysis of the state of the Kittel archives. Given the amount of ink that has been spilled about his life and work, it is perhaps surprising that there are significant gaps in the sources. Bormann notes, “While there are publicly accessible and archival estates for the other named personalities [Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius], there is no such estate from Kittel …” Further, archival collections at Leipzig, where Kittel taught from 1917 to 1921, and from Kohlhammer Press, which published the original German version of TDNT, were destroyed in the war (135-136).

Because of his support for the Nazi State, Kittel was able to travel more freely than, e.g., Dibelius or Bultmann. Because of these same political commitments, no British universities granted him an honorary doctorate, while they did so for Barth and Bultmann largely, so Bormann, because of British support for the Confessing Church (150). Yet, despite reservations about Kittel’s known anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi views, Bultmann’s support for TDNT lent it international credibility (151). From 1937 to 1939 especially, Kittel reached the highpoint of his international influence. Bormann avers, “He had known how to use the political and ecclesiastical conditions for himself in such a way that he was perceived and addressed at home and abroad, by friend and foe as the most influential and effective New Testament scholar in Germany” (155).

In the final essay of the volume, after summarizing the last three years of Kittel’s life, Manfred Gailus summarizes and analyzes the lengthy document “Meine Verteidigung” (My Defense; 1946), which Gailus regards as Kittel’s attempt at the justification of a “heavily compromised theologian.” Gailus presents the document in a generally nuanced fashion. Resisting the temptation to read the entire document as a cynical ploy, he notes that Kittel of course would try to defend himself – he was in a potentially dire position with “the court of public opinion” at least mixed, if not convinced of his guilt, at least about his antisemitism and collusion with regime-favored figures to advance Nazi anti-Jewish policies (172-174).

Yet, Gailus also notes Kittel’s use of self-serving language, his omissions of material from The Jewish Question that made him look guilty (in My Defense, he cites passages from the lecture version, rather than the subsequently published version, which included, e.g., citations of Hitler from Mein Kampf and Kittel’s personal embrace of an “antisemitic struggle” (175)). Kittel also tried to make his cooperation with anthropologists who really were racial “scientists” – e.g., Walter Frank, Wilhelm Grau, Eugen Fischer, Otmar von Verschuer – seem “harmless” while adopting their terminology in “numerous publications” from the late 1930s through the war (176).

In his conclusion, Gailus widens the net of culpability from Kittel to include the numerous Christians (Protestant and some Catholic) who came to his defense because of his supposedly “legitimate” anti-Judaism while affirming his self-styled “rejection” of “vulgar antisemitism.” Gailus argues that, in a certain sense, it was not only Kittel in the dock in 1948; there also was “the question of legitimacy of a Christian anti-Judaism in the early twentieth century, and its theological, moral, political and legal evaluation after Hitler and the Holocaust” (181). Such a question, so Gailus, “arguably would have overwhelmed any court to decide and … hardly seems judicial in the sense of criminal law” (181).

Though Gailus is right about the broader implications of Christian anti-Judaism in a post-Holocaust world, perhaps he has, with respect to this conclusion anyway, let Kittel – and the churches – off a bit too lightly where the preceding era is concerned. It is not as if Christian anti-Judaism (and antisemitism) had not been confronted (often with dire consequences) by, e.g. Eduard Lamparter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the “Büro Grüber,” and Julius von Jan in the decades leading up to and including the Shoah.

The remaining third of the book consists of some tools and sources that will be especially useful for Kittel specialists. These include the text of Kittel’s advisory opinion regarding Herschel Grynszpan, an excerpt from My Defense that deals with “the question of Kittel’s indirect complicity in the persecution of Jews,” (195-202), a thorough biographical outline of Kittel in its political and ecclesiastical context, and a comprehensive bibliography of Kittel’s works.

This excellent collection of essays both presents Kittel through a wide chronological lens and answers some very particular questions about his life and work. Taken together, the work synthesizes existing research and fills historical lacunae about one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century German Protestantism. Students and scholars who study religion, theology, antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, and the Holocaust will find the volume extremely valuable; for Kittel specialists, it will be indispensable.

Review of Traude Litzka, The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Traude Litzka, The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna, trans. Gerda Joseph (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2018). 159 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-643-91036-3.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Traude Litzka’s work, in some respects, might be misleading in its title. The Church’s Help for Persecuted Jews in Nazi Vienna does not quite speak to the contents of the volume. Instead, it might have been more helpful to title the book, The Church’s Help for Those Persecuted as Jews in Nazi Vienna. In this way, readers would perhaps recognize the signal that many of the individuals who risked their lives to protect other people in danger were focused, at least at first, on saving those individuals who had been baptized as Roman Catholics and were, therefore, according to the theology of the Church, no longer Jews, but Catholics. Later in Litzka’s work, Jews who had not been baptized were also helped—to the credit of the team of rescuers operating in Vienna. Her book serves as a reminder to historians that the fate of the “non-Aryan Catholics” still needs to be further researched. Her work also reveals the enormous difficulties in conducting such research as so many rescue operations had to be enacted through verbal orders in an effort to evade Gestapo and other denouncers’ attempts to thwart the life-saving activities.

Despite the challenges of locating survivors and documents which would testify to the actions of the brave Catholic men and women engaged in rescue work, Litzka has assembled quite a roster of both individuals as well as orders of religious who decided that, despite the threat of arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment (or worse), their consciences would not allow them to remain inactive in the face of overwhelming discrimination and hardships. One such man who figures prominently throughout the book is the Jesuit priest, Ludger Born (born in Duisburg in 1897). Born was appointed as head of the “Aid Office for Non-Aryan Catholics” by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer in 1940 and for the next five years, Father Born worked assiduously to aid all those who needed help. He inherited his position from another priest, Father Georg Bichlmair, who had established the office and had staffed it primarily with dedicated women. Some of these women’s stories were later documented after the war by Father Born, providing some insight into both their identity and motivations. Out of the twenty-three employees, Father Born’s documentation focused on only five of the female workers. He attributed their dedication to their profound religiosity.

What exactly did the Aid Office for Non-Aryan Catholics do? At first, when the Nazis marched into Austria, Cardinal Innitzer was friendly towards the Hitler regime. However, by July 1938 he had reconsidered his conciliatory position, as the Nazis shuttered all Catholic schools, dissolved Catholic libraries, forbade Catholic orders from providing instruction, and expropriated abbeys and other houses of orders, expelling and harassing priests and nuns (129). At that point, the Cardinal determined it was time to assist victims of Nazism and he worked personally with both Father Bichlmair and Father Born to establish the Aid Office, often donating his own money and material goods to help the organization. At first, the Aid Office focused on assisting Jews who had been baptized into the Catholic faith and much of Litzka’s primary source documentation attests to this focus. She also emphasizes that, according to the teaching of the Church at that point in time, there was still a great deal of anti-Judaism and suspicion of converted Jews, even though the Church’s focus was on saving Jewish souls through conversion.

While in the early years a number of Jews sought conversion motivated by a genuine interest in Christianity, as time went on and conditions worsened, Father Born and his staff began to realize that some Jews sought baptism as a way of easing emigration problems (some countries such as Brazil favored Catholics in their immigration policy). However, as the persecutions and discriminations increased in quantity and in severity, the Aid Office and priests in Vienna began baptizing large numbers of Jews, recognizing that a baptismal certificate might be a life-saving measure rather than a marker of the true conversion of souls. After the war began, a baptismal certificate did not generally assist in saving someone from being persecuted as a “non-Aryan of Jewish descent” and the number of requests for baptisms of Jews declined sharply.

There were different types of assistance that the Aid Office offered to the persecuted. The staff did not request to see “proof” of baptismal certificates and were therefore open to aiding unconverted Jews as well as “non-Aryan Catholics.” Workers at the Aid Office initially assisted with the emigration process, providing advice and assistance with the complicated bureaucratic red tape to obtain visas, affidavits, and passports. Once emigration became less and less likely for the persecuted, the Aid Office began functioning as a social welfare agency. Staff visited the persecuted in their overcrowded apartments, procuring food, medical supplies, and even dentures (!). They served as a lifeline for those who were being deported to places such as Theresienstadt, mailing parcels with food and sometimes clothing and monitoring the postcards that arrived from each deportee. The system they established, helping victims of persecution, was even more poignant when one realizes that many of the women who worked in the Aid Office were themselves categorized as “non-Aryan Catholics” and some of them were deported as well.

In addition to offering spiritual comfort and material aid, workers in the Aid Office and other Catholic institutions also sought to hide the persecuted in various ways. In one such situation, Dominican nuns in Vienna-Hacking had retreated to Kemmelbach, which was located along a river and could be developed agriculturally. The sisters worked the farm and raised animals—but they also hid Jews on the premises:

During the most dangerous period for them, they had been hidden and fed for three weeks…. 25 Jews were hidden between the two ceilings (of the pigpen). The oxcart took them to St. Pölten, where they were placed with a farmer. He was happy that he could use them as laborers. Sr. Antonia and Mrs. Reichel, afraid of the Russians, went to Vienna with the Jews. The Jews continued on to their home in Hungary. (83)

The order’s chronicle then adds the fascinating twist to the end of the story—as the Russians advanced, Sr. Antonia and Mrs. Reichel were in turn saved by the Jews they had originally rescued.

A Jewish woman disguised Sr. Antonia and Mrs. Reichl—who were the most threatened by the Russians—and took them along as “her daughters”…. One morning at 4 a.m., the bell at the gate rang, and a Jew delivered “girls” who were marked with a Jewish star. (83)

In this way, one life-saving kindness had been returned.

Litzka also included less than flattering reasons for some religious to take in frightened Jews. In the case of the Carmelite Sisters of Töllergasse, Born’s reports reveal that the sisters first motivation to get involved with non-Aryan Catholics was from a monetary desire. They needed to pay off a debt and in their chronicle they openly admit that they took in individuals who “donated” jewelry, which the nuns used to purchase a monstrance. They also apparently accepted gold from their wards. Unlike the Dominican nuns mentioned above, the Carmelite nuns seemed to have profited monetarily from their relief efforts. As Litzka states, “Independently of whether the donation of their jewelry was truly ‘willingly’ and based on gratitude, the suggestion for ‘gold donation’ and then even more the acceptance of these donations, appears to be exploitation in a hopeless situation” (87).

This publication is to be commended for attempting to uncover the untold stories of assistance given in Vienna by religious men and women. The book itself is somewhat choppy in its presentation of anti-Judaism and only devotes limited space to discussions of the role of Pope Pius XI and Pius XII in influencing (or not) the desire on the part of Catholics to aid “non-Aryan Catholics” as well as full Jews in their time of greatest need. There are some minor errors, including the misspelling of Margarete Sommer’s name, but these are only minor points considering the number of chronicles and other accounts the author had to search through in order to compile the examples contained in the work. In the final analysis, Litzka who considers all of the many reasons why there has been such silence about the attempted rescue operations in Vienna concludes, “At least one thing is certain: In those times, there were unquestionably more individuals who clandestinely assisted but who even afterwards did not want to ‘make a big deal of it’—which is why we learn of it only rarely or incidentally (131)”. Litzka is to be commended for her dedication to uncovering these stories so that they are not lost forever.

Review of Ian Harker, Pearls before Swine: The Extraordinary Story of The Reverend Ernst Biberstein, Lutheran Pastor and Murder Squad Commander

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Ian Harker, Pearls before Swine: The Extraordinary Story of The Reverend Ernst Biberstein, Lutheran Pastor and Murder Squad Commander (Canterbury, UK: Holocaust Studies Center, 2017), 72 pp., ISBN: 978 1 5272 9648 9.

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

Many historians interested in German churches in the Nazi period know about the Rev. Ernst Biberstein. His is a dramatic story. He was tried at Nuremberg for his role as commander of a mobile killing unit, convicted of the murder of 2000 to 3000 Jews, and sentenced to death by hanging. But few have written about him or given him more than a brief mention. Ian Harker, a Church of England clergyman, is now an exception. I met him several years ago when he was doing graduate work under Michael Berkowitz, a Professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. Berkowitz introduced me, we chatted, and I encouraged him in his topic.

The resulting book is relatively brief. It has certain lapses in presentation, with typos proliferating in the final pages, for example. Even his acknowledgement of me at the end, with mention of my small role in his process, though it proved accurate in the use of the Norwegian “sen” in my last name, replaced “Robert” with “Richard.” However, I am pleased to see that Harker has given us a monograph on this Lutheran pastor, Biberstein, a committed Nazi, who rose to an active leadership position in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Born in Westphalia in 1899, Biberstein, moved to Schleswig-Holstein when his father, a railroad official, transferred there in 1906. This proved important for the son, placing him in the staunchly Lutheran atmosphere of the region. It also placed him into the sort of political atmosphere which eventually made this one of the “brownest” regions in Germany. During the elections of 1932 and 1933, northern Protestants gave Hitler the votes he needed, first to lead a coalition government and then to grab absolute power.

Biberstein began studying theology at the University of Kiel during the First World War. He was soon drafted, however, and his service at the front gave him an enthusiastic patriotism, followed by a bitter sense of unjust loss that further shaped him for his future career. Biberstein finished his theological studies postwar, received a probationary position in 1924, and then accepted an appointment in 1927 to the comfortable parish church in Kaltenkirchen, twelve kilometers north of Hamburg.

These early stages in Biberstein’s career were all documented under his birth name, Szymanowski. His lack of a German-sounding last name did not hamper his success as a pastor or his political enthusiasms during his six years in Kaltenkirchen. It did not inhibit his joining the fledgling Nazi Party in 1926 or his association with the strongly nationalistic and anti-Jewish Bund für Deutsche Kirche, or, later, the similarly antisemitic Deutsche Christen. Those connections and inclinations got him a 1935 appointment, suggested by Martin Bormann, to the newly created Ministry of Church Affairs in Berlin. Bormann meant him to be a watchdog on the director, Hanns Kerrl, who was thought to be too even-handed in the conflicts between the Confessing Church and Deutsche Christen factions within the church. Soon Werner Best recruited him to join the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) of the SS, with the task of actively spying on Kerrl from within the Ministry of Church Affairs. By the spring of 1936, he was producing secret reports about Kerrl’s private criticisms of leading Nazis. He also shared the task of listening in and reporting on Kerrl’s telephone conversations. Beyond these secret tasks, he monitored regional clergy, especially if he considered their behavior political and critical rather than spiritual. Having become a spy for the SD, he chose at this time to withdraw from his clerical position in the church, thereafter choosing to designated himself as gottgläubig rather than Protestant on his SS membership card.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Biberstein was drafted simply as a soldier. The SS quickly intervened and brought him back to Berlin, not to the Ministry of Church Affairs but to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), led by Reinhard Heydrich. At his first interview, Heydrich pointed him toward “police work.” However, for the next year and a half he remained in Berlin, working within this office that oversaw all security matters, whether under the SS, the SD, or the Gestapo. On June 1, 1941, just before the German invasion of the USSR, Biberstein received an appointment as Gestapo chief in Oppeln in Upper Silesia, with direct involvement in the already ongoing purge and murder of Jews that began with the invasion of Poland. At this point in his life, arriving in a part of Germany with a majority population of Poles and with German forces occupying half of Poland, Szymanowski officially changed his name. He chose Biberstein, less Polish-sounding and more acceptable for someone about to implement the full, harsh authority of the Germanic people.

Biberstein spent a year as head of the Gestapo in Oppeln. This assignment left him with some explaining to do after the war. Three months before his arrival, a sealed ghetto had been created in Oppeln, in which 8000 Jews were confined. The invasion of the Soviet Union just three weeks after his arrival led to the calculated murder of Jews, with new methods and a thoroughness beyond the widespread killing already experienced in Poland. But his role in Oppeln was not likely to have landed him postwar in Nuremberg, charged with the murder of Jews.

After his one year as Gestapo chief in Oppeln, Biberstein, now an SS Lieutenant Colonel, was deployed to Kiev in the Ukraine and placed in charge of Einsatzkommando 6, a part of Einsatzgruppe C. For his trial in Nuremberg, he willingly described two executions at which he had been present.[1] The first was a mass shooting next to a prepared pit. The victims had to undress and kneel next to the pit to be shot in the back of the neck. An officer then walked over the bodies and ordered more bullets if any were still alive. At his trial, Biberstein claimed he never could have done that task of walking over the bodies. He also admitted being present at a second execution, this time using a gas van. He acknowledged that 2000 to 3000 people were murdered in gas vans under his authority. He said the gas made it “much easier for [both] victims and soldiers.” This was the figure of two to three thousand victims used in his indictment at Nuremberg, though the actual number murdered under his authority was presumably much higher.

It was Biberstein’s year in charge of this Einsatzkommando killing unit which led to his conviction for murder. His final assignment, however, based in Trieste for the last year of the war, was similarly scandalous and involved him with especially unsavory co-workers. Himmler had appointed Odilo Globocnik commander of the SS in the region. Globocnik had previously served as commander of Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder Jews at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps. Other colleagues included Franz Stangl, former commander at Sobibor and Treblinka, and Christian Wirth, who had been an inspector at the death camps. Biberstein’s job in Trieste involved “overseeing police work [dealing] with the black market.” This job did not produce documents or specific evidence for Biberstein’s trial, though the leadership of Globocnik and Stangl in the chaos of northern Italy in 1944 involved the shooting of Jews, the roundup of Jews, and approximately two train loads of Jews per month sent to Auschwitz. It also involved a huge black market in confiscated valuables, with Stangl overseeing that market while carrying suitcases filled with cash. This was the violently chaotic setting for Biberstein’s final year in the SS.

At war’s end and in the midst of that chaos, Biberstein was apprehended and sent to Schleswig-Holstein. He remained imprisoned in northern Germany until he was moved to Nuremberg for the Einsatzkommando trial in the fall of 1947. The twenty-four defendants planned to argue that their actions were legal. They had merely obeyed legal orders to police the eastern front after the Wehrmacht had passed through, even if many Jews were among the victims. Biberstein modified this approach for his part in the trial. He claimed under oath that he had never heard orders that involved the killing of Jews, nor did he ever know or notice that Jews were being singled out or that their murder was a goal of the SS. He claimed that his role had simply involved legitimate and necessary work against criminals and bandits.

At one point the presiding judge asked Biberstein whether, as a pastor, he had felt compassion toward the Jews about to be murdered, or felt he should express some sort of blessing. He responded, “One should not cast pearls before swine.” This produced sounds of astonishment in the courtroom, even among his fellow defendants. Later Biberstein protested that he was speaking from scripture. People had failed to recognize he was merely quoting Jesus. In May 1948, Biberstein was one among the fourteen defendants at the Einsatzkommando trial sentenced to death by hanging.

Harker does a nice job of telling the rest of the story. First of all, Biberstein’s death sentence was delayed, as happened to many of those sentenced to death. By 1951, four of the fourteen convicted at the Einsatzkommando trial had been executed, and Biberstein and the rest had their sentences commuted to life in prison. By that time, the Federal Republic of Germany had been established and the Cold War had begun. The United States was eager to assist its West German ally facing off against the German Democratic Republic, in a battle for hearts and minds between West and East. At least partly as a result, the Allied postwar emphasis on denazification, the removal of committed Nazis from positions of influence, softened almost entirely by 1951. The postwar churches, both Catholic and Protestant, had quickly moved to describe their stance during the Third Reich as one of victimhood and quiet opposition, rather than support.

In the case of Biberstein, incarcerated in Landsberg Prison, supporters noted his religious faith and practice. Richard Steffen, a fellow pastor who advocated most effectively for his release, had been a prominent member of the Deutsche Christen, a member of the Nazi Party, and had served in the SS. Now postwar Dean of Neumünster, Steffen visited Biberstein in prison and confirmed that, even while working for the SS, he “had a good conscience before God and men in all his actions.” Furthermore, Steffen had found Biberstein with a Bible in his hand and a conviction that he was holding “Christ in his heart.” In May 1958, Biberstein and the other two remaining prisoners from the Nuremberg Einsatzkommando Trial were released from Landsberg. The following September, a Swiss publication, Deutsche Pfarrerblatt, strongly criticized both Biberstein and those supportive churchmen who had aided in his release. Steffen wrote back that Biberstein was not a criminal but a victim of “Nuremberg justice,” while adding that Christians were meant to forgive. Biberstein lived almost three decades after his release from prison, even working for the church for a time. He then labored as a handyman in a senior living complex, dying in 1986 at the age of 87.

I recommend Harker’s book as a starting point in the attempt to understand an individual such as Biberstein. Harker worked with documents in the Wiener Library in London. He also worked in the Imperial War Museum for access to the Einsatzgruppen Trial records from Nuremberg, and with assistance from church archivists in Schleswig-Holstein. In his book, he cites important historians on German church history, from Conway, Scholder, and Besier to editorial participants in the CCHQ: Bergen, Gailus, and Hockenos. He also uses significant historians of the Holocaust, from Raul Hilberg to Gitta Sereny to Michael Wildt, among many others.

Biberstein has been given a very small place in the literature on Nazi Germany. Brief mention can be found in John Conway (The Nazi Persecution of the Churches) and Gerhard Besier (Die Kirchen und das Dritten Reich: Spaltungen und Abwehrkämpfe 1934-1937). In Conway’s case, one finds two index references under the name Biberstein. Besier’s index notes eight brief references under the name Szymanowski. Gerhard Hoch (1923-2015) produced several not very accessible publications in his later years that dealt with his homeland of Schleswig-Holstein. One of these is Ernst Szymanowski-Biberstein, die Spuren eines Kaltenkirchener Pastors: Gedanken zu einem in Deutschland einmaligen Fall (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2009). I suspect that others eventually will follow in Harker’s path. The life of Ernst Biberstein reflects a number of important issues involving Christians in Nazi Germany, from the level of their actual enthusiasm for and participation in the regime to the postwar difficulties—persisting for at least a generation—in coming to grips with the realities of that past.

Notes:

[1] Quotations indicated in this review primarily represent Biberstein’s own words from his personal statement at Nuremberg as used by Harker.

Review of Alexander Reynolds, To War Without Arms: The Journal of Reverend Alexander Reynolds, May – November 1944: The D-Day Diary of an Army Chaplain

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Alexander Reynolds, To War Without Arms: The Journal of Reverend Alexander Reynolds, May – November 1944: The D-Day Diary of an Army Chaplain, ed. Simon Trew (Devizes, UK: Sabrestorm Publishing, 2019). Pp. 152. ISBN: 9781781220146.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Anyone interested in World War II, the Normandy campaign, military chaplains, or contemporary church history will benefit from reading this book. Statements of this sort usually come at the end of reviews, but I wanted to begin with the conclusion, in order to highlight the value of this modest publication. Written by an unpretentious man, Revd. Alexander (“Sandy”) Reynolds, To War Without Arms was skillfully but unobtrusively edited and published by a small, non-academic press. Yet it provides a wealth of information and insight across a wide range of important topics. Like most personal accounts, it is engaging, at times surprising, and a pleasure to read. Maps, numerous photographs, and five appendices, one of them a reproduction of Chaplain Reynolds’s poem, “Beach Dressing Station, June 6/44,” supplement and illuminate the main text.

Readers eager to expand their knowledge of World War II will appreciate details that are rarely addressed in standard histories. Reynolds, who served with the 120^th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, describes how he experienced the elaborate preparations for the Normandy landings, including three days on board LST (Landing Ships Tank) 319. He also provides a fascinating glimpse into British interactions with locals in northern France and Belgium in the months after the breakout. For example, through a funeral he conducted for a Protestant civilian, Reynolds met and befriended a French woman, Mlle Perremond, who spoke excellent English. He subsequently learned that she and two other French women, one young, the other elderly, had helped seven downed RAF pilots escape to England.

Reynolds’s journal entries dealing with the first days in France capture both the enormity and the carnage of D-Day. Simon Trew aptly titled his “Editor’s Introduction” to this section Burying the dead. Reynolds describes burn victims, one of whom asked, “through his bandages,” for someone to hold his hand (59). The chaplain obliged, staying to talk with the man for half an hour before moving on to a church where twenty-one men lay dead. “Death, en masse, is a queer revolting smell,” Reynolds observes (60). In simple, direct language, he portrays the devastation of the men’s bodies, their faces grimy and contorted, limbs missing, bones splintered. The journal’s only reference to God appears in this section: “What an insult to the Creator that these creatures which he shaped should be so mangled and smashed. For a time, I even forgot that the soul was not there, neither destroyed” (62). I have read those two sentences over and over, unable to decide if they express doubt, faith, or both.

To War Without Arms offers some useful facts about British Army chaplains. One hundred of them landed with Allied personnel on D-Day; twenty were killed in the campaign. Their duties were similar to those of their German counterparts – they administered the sacraments, tended to the sick and wounded, and buried the dead – and they faced some of the same practical challenges, including difficulty getting around: without a car, driver, and fuel, a chaplain was practically useless. Reynolds was likely also typical of British and German chaplains in that his wartime experience “clearly made a deep impression on him,” in Trew’s words (117). He continued to seek ways to connect with service personnel after returning home and he may have been somewhat restless in civilian life. Whether his declining health was connected to the stresses of his time at war is not indicated, but he died suddenly, at the age of 59.

The cover of the book features a large copper cross made for Chaplain Reynolds in Normandy by a group of Royal Engineers, and Appendix 1 describes its continued use in services and ceremonies since the war. That cross bespeaks a vision of military Christianity that weaves through the editorial comments, illustrations, and appendices. Trew spells it out in his sketch of the duties of British Army chaplains. The Army “regarded religious inspiration as a source of spiritual and moral strength throughout the Second World War,” he writes (18). Appendix 2, titled “Montgomery and his chaplains,” identifies this view as the personal conviction of General Bernard Law Montgomery, the son of an Anglican Bishop: “He appears to have believed quite sincerely that religious faith provided the underpinnings for success in battle, and that the army’s own chaplains could play a critical role in raising morale and standards of discipline among the troops” (123).

Trew contrasts the positive attitude of Montgomery and others in the British military hierarchy toward their chaplains with the German situation, but the difference may be one of degree and not of kind. German chaplains too emphasized their utility and downplayed the religious nature of their mission. Most of them would have been proud to be described in the words Trew uses to praise Reynolds: “Although there was ample evidence of the sincerity of Reynolds’ personal beliefs and sense of duty, the journal lacked any trace of religiosity, piosity or sanctimoniousness” (8). In short, it was not their relationship with military authorities or the work they did that distinguished the Wehrmacht chaplains from their British counterparts: it was the murderous cause they served.

To War Without Arms is fascinating reading, and the editor’s informed commentary elucidates the significance of Revd. Reynolds’s text. However, this reader was left wishing the editor had offered more analysis. For instance, Trew notes that “much of the journal’s content was clearly written sometime after the events described” (11); it would have been good to get a clearer sense of that timeline and the process. Likewise, more discussion of the photographs would be helpful, particularly because they include a mix of archival images and photos from Reynolds’s personal collection.

The role of Reynolds’s daughter, Georgina Spencer, in initiating and facilitating publication of this book also deserves mention. So many priceless personal accounts have seen the light of day thanks to the combined efforts of family members and scholars. In fact, a cooperation of this sort is currently underway involving the daughter of Johannes Schröder, a German Protestant chaplain captured by the Soviets in January 1943, and the historians Hartmut and Silke Lehmann.[1] The resulting book, like To War Without Arms, will be a welcome addition to the small but growing body of work on military chaplains during World War II.[2]

Notes:

[1] Johannes Schröder, Waches Gewissen – Aufruf zum Widerstand. Reden und Predigten
eines Wehrmachtpfarrers aus sowjetischer Gefangenschaft 1943 – 1945, ed. Christiane Godt, Peter Godt, Hartmut Lehmann, Silke Lehmann, and Jens-Holger Schjörring (Göttingen: Wallstein 2021).

[2] See, among others: Manfred Messerschmidt, “Aspekte der Militärseelsorgepolitik in nationalsozialistischer Zeit,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1/1968, and Messerschmidt, “Zur Militärseelsorgepolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1/1969; Hans Jürgen Brandt, ed., Priester in Uniform: Seelsorger, Ordensleute und Theologen als Soldaten im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Augsburg: Pattloch, 1994); Doris L. Bergen, “Between God and Hitler: German Military Chaplains and the Crimes of the Holocaust,” in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds., In God’s Name: Religion and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 123-38; The GI’s Rabbi: World War II Letters of David Max Eichhorn, ed. Greg Palmer and Mark S. Zaid (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London: Routledge, 2005); Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz. Die katholische Feldpastoral 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014); Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2015); Dagmar Pöpping, Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront: Evangelische und katholische Wehrmachtseelsorge im Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2016); Jouni Tilli, “’Deus Vult!’ The Idea of Crusading in Finnish Clerical War Rhetoric, 1941-1944,” War in History 24, no. 3 (2017): 363-85; David A. Harrisville, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

Webinar Note: The Opening of the Pius XII Archives and Holocaust Research

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Webinar Note: The Opening of the Pius XII Archives and Holocaust Research

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On March 2, 2020, the multiple archives relating to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) opened. Important but incomplete documentation has been available since the publication of the series Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War (beginning in 1965).[1] Scholars have also had access to the archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939, since 2006) and those of the Vatican Office of Information for Prisoners of War (1939-1947, since 2004).[2] Announced by Pope Francis on March 4, 2019 and marking 80 years since the election of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) to the office of pope, the Pius XII archives are now accessible in multiple locations across Vatican City. The global reaction to the papal announcement invites us to reflect on the connections between history, memory, archives and public opinion.

On March 10, 2021, the American Catholic Historical Association held a webinar entitled “The Opening of the Pius XI Archive and Holocaust Research.” Presenters included Suzanne Brown-Fleming, US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University; Claire Maligot, Ecole pratique des hautes études, Paris, and Institut d’études politiques, Strasbourg; Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University; and Robert A. Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University.

To view the video of the webinar, please visit https://achahistory.org/webinar/.

Notes:

[1] Actes et documents du Saint-Sìege relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale, ed. Pierre Blet, Robert A. Graham, Angelo Martini, Burkhardt Schneider. Vatican City: Libreria Vaticana, 1965-1981, 12 vols.

[2] Inter arma caritas: l’Ufficio informazioni vaticano per i prigionieri di guerra istituito da Pio XII, 1939-1947. 2 vols.

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

At the time of this writing, the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville is battling for its soul: Should they adhere to their conservative interpretations of biblical values to fight back against the perceived evils of secular modernity? Or should they confirm a politicized evangelicalism that is deeply rooted in southern white culture and epitomized by a categorical support of Trumpism? Put differently, will southern Baptists continue to battle their century-old “culture wars” for the sake of individual salvation, or define themselves as fighting a “political war” for the soul of the nation?

While, for decades, scholars and observers have read the anti-modernist, anti-humanist, and scripturalist impulse of American Christianity as an expression of religious fundamentalism, the analytical (and popular) literature has recently shifted its discourse to speak about Christian nationalism: the idea that it is more important to defend a particular—and, no doubt, mythologized—version of America as a divinely-ordained nation than limiting one’s mission to the preaching of a biblical-ordained lifestyle. As Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry put it in their study, Taking America Back For God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020), “The ‘Christianity’ of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion, [such as] assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.”

Because of the relevance of this topic—and propelled by the insurrectionist violence we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6—the Martin-Springer Institute* put together a 4-part Zoom conversation series on Christian nationalism in April 2021. Titled Unholy Alliance: Nationalism and Christianity, the series took a comparative approach by bringing in voices from different national contexts: Victoria Barnett on “Protestants and Ethno-Nationalism in Nazi Germany”; Sarah Posner on “The Rise of Christian Nationalism Among American White Evangelicals”; Annamaria Orla-Bukowska on “Roman Catholicism, the Church, and Polishness in Contemporary Poland”; and Katya Tolstaya on “Post-Soviet Patriotism, Nationalism, and Russian Orthodoxy.”

Though the focus of the series was not to directly address the links between religiously inspired anti-democratic groups across different nations, it is important to note that such transatlantic networks exist between American ultra-conservative evangelicals and their Orthodox and Catholic counterparts in Eastern Europe. We could call this cooperation a new kind of ecumenical alliance that seeks common ground on anti-abortion, anti-LGTBQ, anti-woman health, and anti-democratic platforms; their leaders believe that strong, autocratically-ruled states will promote their religious values, such as in Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, and Poland’s Law and Justice party. In the U.S, the Institute for Cultural Conservatism or the World Congress of Families, founded and promoted by people like Paul Weyrich, William Lind, and Brian Brown, have embraced the authoritarian style of Putin and Orban as models for a renewed America.

Victoria Barnett, former director of the USHMM’s Program on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, started the series with an analysis of the Protestant churches during the Third Reich, geared toward an audience of non-specialists. Given the historical proclivity of German Protestants to identify with a German nation-state, it was not surprising that many Germans—after the defeat in 1918 and the perceived national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty—had high hopes that Hitler would restore Germany to its rightful (and superior) place among nations. In 1933, when Hitler took power, there was little opposition by the churches, until the moment when some theologians and clergy began to fear the Nazi encroachment on church autonomy. Those familiar with this history would quickly recognize the distinctions Barnett drew between the three evolving movements: the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), the Confessing Church, and the patriotic middle (the so-called “intact churches”). The Deutsche Christen, Barnett explained, was a “Christian nationalist, pro-Nazi group within the German Protestant church.” Its “politically nationalistic, right-wing” supporters “developed an understanding of Protestantism that was strongly ethnicized.” They emphasized “the Germanic nature of their faith [and] affirmed much of the Nazi platform.” When asked about lessons learned for today, Barnett pointed to the failure of the church to find a strong oppositional voice to Nazism. She mentioned the tragedy of becoming bystanders—of what Bonhoeffer bemoaned as the “silent witnesses of evil deeds.” Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=msc6ZV4eT94&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-

Our second speaker, Sarah Posner, author of Unholy Alliance: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (2020), introduced our Zoom audience to the development of American fundamentalist evangelicals and their battles since the 1950s. She asked how a religious movement that presented itself originally as a defender of religion and family values turned into a political force. “The conceptualization of America as a Christian nation that is under threat by secularism,” she argued, “accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century.” She concluded by pointing out the danger of anti-democratic convictions among white evangelicals who deploy religion for their own political agendas. Given these developments, she cautioned that “complacency is not an option.” Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCUvl3EkoZU&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=2&t=3775s

“Out of the frying pan into the fire” (literally, “from the rain into the eaves”), this cartoon critically depicts Poland’s transition from communist to Catholic (state) ideology.

Anna Maria Orla-Bukoswka from Jagiellonian University in Krakow introduced our audience to the contemporary landscape of Polish Catholicism, with its split between, what she called, the “open and closed” church. Whereas the former promotes openness to dialogue with civil society and embraces diversity (including Catholic-Jewish relations), the closed church refers to the clerical hierarchy working in tandem with nationalist themes promoted by the Law and Justice party. Referencing the “founding myth of Polish history as the Chrzest polski, the Baptism of Poland in 966,” she presented a more complex history of the slow Christianization of Poland with its multicultural and ethnically diverse population. Only as a result of the Holocaust and the redrawing of borders after 1945 did Poland become a majority Catholic population, though religion remained repressed under Communism. “The entire modern Polish history,” she argued, “has taught Poles not to trust the State but the Church.” As a result, Roman Catholicism and Polish nationalism became entangled entities, which led to the current marriage between church and state authorities pursuing an illiberal agenda and discriminating against minority groups. Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=21V-gVCRkyc&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=3&t=18s

Katya Tolstaya, Professor of Religion and Theology in Post-Trauma Society at the Vrije University of Amsterdam, introduced current themes of nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy in post-Soviet Russia. Briefly delineating some key differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and Protestantism (such as the central role of icons and martyrs), she traced the alliance of Russian patriotism and Orthodoxy to Dostoyevsky who had stated that “to be Russian is to be Orthodox”—a phrase, according to Tolstaya, that is often quoted by extreme Russian nationalists today. Despite religious and ethnic diversity in post-Soviet society, “Orthodoxy has become the national church in Russia.” Orthodoxy is not only a powerful force shaping society but is also deployed to legitimate national expansion into other regions today, such as Ukraine. Tolstaya lamented the lack of transparency regarding suspected collaboration between the KGB and the church in the Soviet Union, the lack of a “civil society” in Russia today, and the participation of theologians in “operationalizing sacred liturgical texts” for xenophobic and nationalist purposes. Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYrDTHP9NWk&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=4&t=25s

Though in no way exhaustive, this series brought attention to the fact that religion—which in the second half of the twentieth century was seen as a waning force—has resurfaced as a main player in society and politics, often supporting illiberal and nationalist visions of governance and policies.

* The Martin-Springer Institute attends to the experiences of the Holocaust in order to relate them to today’s concerns, crises, and conflicts. Our programs promote the values of moral courage, tolerance, empathy, reconciliation, and justice. Founded by Doris, who survived the Holocaust, and her husband Ralph Martin, the Institute fosters dialogue on local, national, and international levels. http://nau.edu/martin-springer

Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, April 27-28, 2021

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

On this topic an international conference took place on April 27-28, 2021, at the Evangelische Akademie Frankfurt. The conference was conceived by Lukas Bormann, professor for New Testament research at Philipps-Universität Marburg, together with practical theologian Michael Heymel, and was conducted in collaboration with study director Eberhard Pausch. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held as a videoconference.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) is one of the most internationally known German Protestant church leaders and theologians of the 20th century. For some years he has been back in the discussion through the biographies of Heymel (2017), Hockenos (2018), Ziemann (2019) and Rognon (2020). Historian Benjamin Ziemann takes a particular position. He emphasizes Niemöller’s temporary closeness to German national (völkische) movements and problematizes his attitude toward Judaism and Jewish people, the attribution of his activities from 1933 on as resistance against the Nazi regime, his criticism of the Lutheran regional churches, and his contribution to the ecclesiastical discourse on guilt to 1948.

The conference, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the Promotion of Science and the EKHN Foundation, took up these topics in the new Niemöller debate. It presented contributions on basic questions of Niemöller research and on the reception of Martin Niemöller in five European countries and the USA, which were discussed in an interdisciplinary and multinational exchange. This was done in order to arrive at a historically and theologically reflected re-evaluation of Niemöller’s work in international perspective.

Section I dealt with the particularly controversial topics of anti-Semitism and resistance. Benjamin Ziemann (Sheffield) emphasized Niemöller’s racial antisemitism as seen in his connection to the Deutsch–Völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund after the First World War. This völkisch antisemitism remained in place through the balance of the Weimar era. Beginning in 1931-1932, Niemöller embarked on a theological interpretation of Jewry and Judaism but continued to struggle with antisemitism even into the postwar era.*

When asked if Niemöller had been a man of resistance against the Nazi regime, Victoria Barnett (Washington) answered with a “cautious no.” She indicated that resistance was a complicated matter. Personality and a common language played an important role. As a “good German,” Niemöller had seen himself in opposition to the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen), similar to other nationalist Germans. Others, especially women, had been clearer in their opposition. The Nazi policy against the church had touched him as a pastor and in his loyalty to the fatherland and challenged him as a fighter, which he had been by nature. He had been seen as a successor to Luther who became a preacher of resistance. With regard to Niemöller’s conflict between nationalistic loyalty and Nazi church policy, Barnett brought his attitude to the concept of a “loyal resister”.

Malte Dücker (Frankfurt) suggested that Niemöller should be viewed from the perspective of cultural studies as a figure of memory. He distinguished phases of reception, which were characterized by companions of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, or BK), church-historical heroization, and the deconstruction of Niemöller legends in response to them. Niemöller was portrayed as a Christian who confronted the rulers like Luther in Worms, or as a socio-political Protestant who appeared like a biblical prophet (i.e. Jeremiah). He was perceived as an authentic personality. In contrast, narrative contextualization of today’s post-heroic society shows him as an ambivalent hero with fractures and contradictions. An artistic form (musical, drama, film) could be suitable for this.

The lectures in Section II were devoted to Niemöller’s reception in European Protestantism and dealt especially with the period after 1945. Frédéric Rognon (Strasbourg), who presented the first French biography on Niemöller in 2020, made clear that his name is generally unknown in France today. Before 2020, only one book about him and one by him had been published: in 1938 an anonymous, hagiographically colored writing about the everyday life of the Dahlem pastor, in 1946 a brochure with four texts about German guilt, which hardly allowed French readers to understand Niemöller’s special situation. To this day, he is not recognized in France because he was German and a pastor, and especially in secular France there is a strong distrust of religious people. Moreover, for the Protestant minority, he is overshadowed by Bonhoeffer. But it is precisely the paradoxical character of his life and thought that encourages people to identify with Niemöller.

Stephen Plant (Cambridge) outlined how the relationship between Niemöller and Karl Barth changed from casual allies in the 1930s to respectful friends after 1945. For both, he said, the Lutheran churches offered a common front. Barth had seen in Niemöller “too good a German” and “too good a Lutheran.” After the end of the war, he honored him as a symbol of resistance and reaffirmed his full confidence in Niemöller when it came to the future path of the church in Germany and a confession of guilt. He also noted Niemöller’s “blind spot for church diplomacy” and admonished him in 1951 to concentrate his energies. The confessional synod in Barmen (1934) had made Barth and Niemöller colleagues, the church conference in Treysa (1945) friends.

Wilken Veen (Amsterdam) spoke about the reception of Niemöller’s appearances and speeches in the Netherlands. There he is one of the ten best-known Germans. Niemöller was very popular as a resistance fighter after 1945; he was identified with the Confessing Church and was acclaimed like a movie star during his first visit in 1946. Franz Hildebrandt’s anonymous writing of 1938 had been translated immediately. Although a nationalist, Niemöller had preached biblical sermons. His sermons in the Netherlands had been evangelistic and missionary, and only in his speeches had he expressed himself politically.

Peter Morée (Prague) illuminated Niemöller’s relationship with Josef L. Hromádka against the backdrop of the special situation of the Czech Protestant Church as a minority church in an Eastern Bloc state. Church and state were ecumenically isolated here after 1945. Hromádka had contacts with Karl Barth and the Confessing Church. Without him there would have been no ecumenical relations. Niemöller came to Prague in 1954; his visit had been in the interest of the Politburo of the Communist Party since 1951. He and Hromádka would have known that their friendship was determined by the political agenda. The Christian Peace Conference (CFK) had been founded in 1958 together with representatives of the BK (including Iwand, Vogel and Gollwitzer) in response to the refusal of the World Council of Churches (WCC) to cooperate with the World Peace Council (WFR), which had existed since 1950.

Section III focused on Niemöller as a preacher and theologian. Alf Christophersen (Wuppertal) problematized Niemöller’s position between Lutheranism and Catholicism. In his notes of 1939, there was only one church for Niemöller; his exclusive model only allowed being Catholic or Protestant. From his point of view, Luther’s mistake had been that there was no longer any magisterial authority; the confessional writings could not be updated. Niemöller had formed an ideal image of Catholicism. Later, he did not see a plural Protestantism, but polarized it through his declamatory preaching.

Michael Heymel (Limburg/Lahn) presented Niemöller in three ecclesiastical fields of work—as preacher, theologian, and ecumenist. Niemöller’s sermons from 1945 to 1981, unlike those of the Dahlem period, have not yet been critically edited, and comparative studies are lacking. Niemöller had always wanted to preach Jesus Christ as the only Lord and to reach people in the reality of their lives. As a Bible-oriented theologian, influenced by Luther and Prussian Pietism, and one who was concerned with faith and the church as a Christocratic brotherhood, he criticized an academic theology without reference to the congregation. As an ecumenist, he said, he worked for communion with Christ in all churches and the “brotherhood of all people” and adhered to the WCC’s programmatic objectives. “The time of the white man is over,” he declared, adding that one must adjust to an ecumenism not dominated by the West.

Lukas Bormann (Marburg) devoted himself to Niemöller’s approach to the Bible in the Dahlem sermons, first emphasizing the importance of scriptural interpretation in the sermon and the service in a cognitive science perspective as a religious ritual. As a preacher in 1933-1937, Niemöller stood in a unique way for the religious distinctiveness of Protestantism. In his sermons on Volkstrauertag, or Heldengedenktag from 1934 on, there was no enthusiasm for war and no heroic pathos, but rather an increasing distancing from the National Socialist instrumentalization of “heroic remembrance.” The preacher addressed a “we” beyond the National Socialist state, created solidarity among those who positioned themselves beyond National Socialism, and strengthened the individual. Admittedly, an ethical orientation in the sense of a ‘church for others’ (Kirche für andere) was missing.

Matthias Ehmann (Ewersbach) pointed to a forward-looking theological contribution of Niemöller to the transnational responsibility of the churches. At the WCC World Conference on Migration in June 1961, Niemöller, at the beginning of his term as one of the presidents of the WCC, called on the churches to show solidarity with non-Christian migrants. He referred to the image of the Good Samaritan and stressed that mission to people in need took precedence over church structures. An increase in churches founded by migrants was to be expected, he said. Ehmann praised Niemöller’s speech as a differentiated contribution to interreligious dialogue that took into account the growing diversity of the churches.

Section IV turned to the leading figure of the Pfarrernotbund and later church president. Thomas Martin Schneider (Koblenz-Landau) characterized the Barmen Theological Declaration (BTD) as a church-political and theological consensus paper and confession of basic Reformation truths, which was received differently in the two wings of the Confessing Church. The BTD did not contain a political program, but after 1945 it was claimed politically for different goals. It had been called the “sum” of Niemöller’s theology, although as late as 1934 he referred to theological teachers such as Wehrung and Althaus who were in tension with the BTD. He was concerned with the one ecclesiastical office of preaching, whereas the fourth Barmen thesis speaks of ministries of equal rank. Niemöller had no understanding for Lutheran concerns—the experience of Barmen was more important to him than the theology of the BTD. All in all, he only took up the Christocentrism of the first thesis, but showed hardly any interest in the other theses.

Gisa Bauer (Karlsruhe) looked at the relationship between Niemöller and the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau (EKHN) from the perspective of the history of perception. In the official self-representation of the EKHN, Niemöller stood for a political church. The radical wing of the EKHN had voted for him as church president. Pastors of this direction had been strongly positioned in Hesse; the regional council of brethren had elected him as chairman in 1946. Niemöller helped to shape the first thrusts of the politicization of the EKHN, after which he became its symbol. The commemorative publication of 1982 and funeral and memorial speeches of 1984 elevated him to the pantheon of the political church. It is difficult to separate the symbolic and the historical person, Bauer pointed out.

Jolanda Gräßel-Farnbauer (Marburg) showed how Niemöller positioned himself in the process towards equality for women in church positions. While he was initially ambiguous in the church synod and in 1955 still argued from the basis of creation-related biological differences between men and women, in 1958-1959 he argued for a law on women pastors, which paved the way for equality. In 1969, he even proposed Marianne Queckbörner, then only 37 years old, to the synod as church president, but Helmut Hild was elected. The EKHN still does not have a woman as church president at its head. How it would have developed if Niemöller’s suggestion had been followed stimulates the historical imagination considerably. Niemöller had taken a positive attitude towards women vicars in the church struggle. He did not share the anti-feminism of some representatives of the Confessing Church, who denied women the administration of the sacraments.

Finally, Section V focused on Barmen and the legacy of the Confessing Church, with two lectures examining Niemöller in the light of his relationship with two fellow Confessing Church members in the postwar period. Gerard C. den Hertog (Amsterdam) spoke about Niemöller’s and Hans Joachim Iwand’s common path from national Protestantism to the ecumenical peace movement. Iwand came from eastern Germany, was a soldier and became involved in the Freikorps in 1921. As a theologian, he presented a polemical Luther. Niemöller had known Iwand since September 1934 and had received his Luther studies, which advocated the doctrine of justification, in the concentration camp. As a Dortmund pastor, Iwand was committed to Jews; there was no anti-Semitism in him. Niemöller had been “the closest of friends” with him and had written to him: “We understand each other before we talk to each other.”

On the other hand, Hannah M. Kreß (Münster) made clear how the relationship between Niemöller and Hans Asmussen changed between 1945 and 1948. The latter had been involved in the Reich Church since 1933, was active at the Church College in Berlin and supported Else Niemöller during her husband’s imprisonment. Conflicts broke out in Treysa, where Asmussen became the head of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (EKD) church chancellery. He was concerned that the brethren councils might gain too much influence among the Lutherans. In a letter to him in 1946, Niemöller had reckoned with the founding of the EKD. It lacked the connection to Barmen. He feared an understanding of ministry in the EKD that he considered to be hierarchical in the style of Catholicism. Asmussen had come into conflict with the Council of the EKD and left office in 1948. In that year, Niemöller had broken off his friendship with him. An important role in the alienation process was played by the disagreement over the church’s participation in public political activities.

Arno Helwig (Berlin) reported on remembrance work at the Martin Niemöller House in Berlin-Dahlem, which served as a peace center in the intellectual environment of Gollwitzer and Marquardt from 1980 to 2007 and was shaped as such by Pastor Claus-Dieter Schulze. After 2007, it became a memory and learning space. The former pastor in Dahlem, Marion Gardei, is now the commissioner for remembrance culture in the Evangelische Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz (EKBO). In 2018-2019, the house was reopened with a permanent exhibition covering the topics of Jews, human rights, social responsibility and resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. Niemöller’s work after 1945, however, is almost completely missing.

What remains of the Confessing Church? Who carries on the memory of it? Harry Oelke (Munich) took up these questions about the significance of the legacy of Barmen for today’s Protestantism, limiting himself to the German Protestantism of the regional churches. Four phases of the culture of remembrance of the Confessing Church can be distinguished: (1) a contemporary witness-supported communicative memory formation (1945-1970), in which church history was written by and about participants and, with the exception of Niemöller’s call to repentance, no self-critical remembrance was practiced (“Confessing Church myth”); (2) a politicization, polarization, and pluralization of Christian value concepts (1970-1989); (3) a canonization (1990-2005), in which the Confessing Church had become a part of Protestant identity. (4) The present perspectives (since 2005) have been characterized by the loss of contemporary witnesses, the end of the culture of excitement, an objectification of the culture of historical scholarship and, in some tension with this, a tendency towards moral evaluation.

The final discussion circled around open questions and tasks of further research. 75 years after the end of the war, there is a danger that the Protestant Church will shirk its responsibility for the legacy of the Confessing Church, especially since the EKD is planning a considerable reduction in funding for the Institute for Contemporary Church History. Who would be the bearer of the memory of the Confessing Church in the future was up in the air. Benjamin Ziemann made it clear that he was against renaming institutions that bear Niemöller’s name. It remains to be considered how Niemöller could be present in a contemporary form in the practical culture of remembrance. Dahlem, with its new exhibition, stands as an example of how the memory of Niemöller is possible in a post-migrant society.

Research will focus on clarifying open questions about Niemöller’s understanding of preaching after 1945, his ecumenical commitment against colonialism and racism, and his attitude toward the state of Israel. For this purpose, further sources have to be opened up for scholarship, such as Niemöller’s unedited sermons after 1945, the sources on his activities as president of the World Council of Churches or also as head of the administrative council of the Palestine Association. Terms such as ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘resistance’ need to be further differentiated and clarified in relation to Niemöller. When it comes to the Confessing Church, the concept of resistance should in any case not be too narrowly defined. Finally, theological and non-theological perspectives of the perception of the life and work of Martin Niemöller must be combined.

A conference volume is to be published in the series “Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte” (AKIZ.B) by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen.

* This paragraph was edited for clarity after publication.

Letter from the Editors (March 2021)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Letter from the Editors (March 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

After a hiatus in December 2020, the editorial team of Contemporary Church History Quarterly is pleased to offer a new set of articles, reviews, and notes about German and European church history in the twentieth century. Our issue features a public lecture by Suzanne Brown-Fleming on the implications of opening the Vatican Archives relating to the pontificate of Pius XII, as well as a short article by Manfred Gailus on the devout-but-antisemitic Protestant theologian Gerhard Kittel.

Two pairs of reviews follow. Kevin Spicer and Samuel Koehne review books on the belief in the Third Reich: a multi-author volume on “what Germans believed between 1933 and 1945,” and a study on Nazi political religion. Then Beth A. Griech-Polelle and Lauren Faulkner Rossi review two popular works on Catholic clergy under Nazi persecution.

A research report by Kyle Jantzen surveys a series of recent blog posts on Mennonites, Nazis, and the Holocaust, written by Ben Goossen. There’s also an upcoming webinar (on which we will report in June), and–importantly–a call for editors. If you work in the field and would like to get involved in the CCHQ, please contact us with your interest, as outlined there.

Finally, we have both welcomes and good-byes to tell you about. We are pleased to welcome the Australian scholar Samuel Koehne to our editorial team. His expertise on political religion will be welcome. And sadly for us (though we’re happy for her), we say good-bye to Victoria J. Barnett, retired now from her long career at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and now stepping down from her role on the CCHQ editorial team as well. I know I speak for the whole editorial team when I express my deep appreciation for all the wisdom, support, and work you have given to the journal, Vicki. You have been one of our most faithful contributors, and your expertise in so many aspects of the history of the German churches in the Nazi era and in the Holocaust has been invaluable. Thank you ever so much for your service, and best wishes for your retirement!

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University