Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

By: Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This lecture, the Hal Israel Endowed Online Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations, was delivered for Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization on November 5, 2020.

Before we begin, I would like to note for the record that the views expressed in this lecture are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization. It is such an honor and pleasure to be invited by the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University to deliver the Hal Israel Endowed Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations. I especially want to thank Dr. Anna Sommer Schneider, Associate Director for the Center for Jewish Civilization. I have had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Schneider since we met at an important conference on antisemitism held at Indiana University over a decade ago and I know a kindred spirit when I see one!

I am going to start my comments today in the summer of 1996. As a blissfully naïve late-twenty-something Ph.D. candidate in modern German History at the University of Maryland, I had finally landed on a dissertation topic and had arrived at the Catholic University’s Archives in Washington, D.C. I had learned that Catholic University housed the personal papers of Cardinal Aloisius Muench. American-born Cardinal Muench was the most powerful American Catholic figure and influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and subsequent West Germany between 1946 and 1959. Cardinal Muench held the diplomatic positions of apostolic visitor, then regent, and finally Pope Pius XII’s nuncio, or papal diplomat to Germany. I was delighted to have access to his personal papers, for the personal papers of papal diplomats are typically held in the Vatican’s own archives in Rome. In one of those accidents of history, Cardinal Muench had shipped the bulk of his papers to the United States so that a young American priest could utilize them to write a biography of the cardinal. Happily for me, his papers stayed in America, and so I arrived on my first day, put on my white gloves, and requested the collection. I came across 1957 correspondence between Cardinal Muench and Monsignor Joseph Adams of Chicago. Muench was describing his most recent audience with Pope Pius XII on a spring day in Rome. Muench and Pius were close, bonded by their ties to and love of Germany and its people. They were at ease with one another and, by the time of this audience, had worked together for over 11 years. In this particular May 1957 audience, the pope – and I’m quoting now – told Muench […a] “story…with a great deal of delight.” I continue to quote here: “Hitler died and somehow got into heaven. There, he met the Old Testament prophet Moses.  Hitler apologized to Moses for his treatment of the European Jews.  Moses replied that such things were forgiven and forgotten here in heaven. Hitler [was] relieved,” continued the pope, and “said to Moses that he [Hitler] always wished to meet [Moses] in order to ask him an important question. Did Moses set fire to the burning bush?”  Let me stop here and explain the two references in the “joke.” The pope was making an equivalency between two historical events. The first: the Jewish prophet Moses’ arbitration of the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people after an angel of God appeared to him in a burning bush. The second: Hitler’s rumored involvement in the 1933 Reichstag (parliament) fire, an event that facilitated consolidation of Hitler’s dictatorial powers. Muench closed his letter to Monsignor Adams with this line: “Our Holy Father told me the story with a big laugh.”

So here I was, feeling dumbfounded among other things. The “delight” and “laughter” described by Cardinal Muench indicated to me that neither he nor the pope appeared to understand the inappropriateness of telling a joke relating to the murder of six million European Jews.  To my eyes, this exchange between them – one a prince of the church and the other in the chair of Saint Peter as God’s representative on earth for faithful Catholics like myself – demonstrated that neither placed much importance on the Jewish experience under National Socialism.  Some might say it captures the failure of the institutional Roman Catholic Church to undertake a strong and public position of sensitivity, respect, and positive action vis-à-vis Jews and Judaism during the papacy of Pius XII.

But what could be carefully researched was limited by the fact that at that time (the late 1990’s), the full archives of Pius XII were still closed. No longer. On March 2, 2020, these archives fully opened. Announced by Pope Francis on March 4, 2019, on the 80th anniversary of the election of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) to the office of pope, these new archives consist of an estimated 16 million pages in dozens of languages, spread across multiple archives in Rome and Vatican City. In an ironic twist of history, the much-anticipated archives had to close after four days due to the COVID 19 pandemic. They reopened in early June, and, considering normally scheduled summer closures in July and August, researchers have so far had less than 90 days in the archives. Today I will reflect on their early research findings and the meaning of the archives for Christian-Jewish relations.

The church is complex and so are its archives. Nor are the archives that opened this year completely new. Important but incomplete documentation has been available beginning in 1965 as part of the published series Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War. Also already available are archives from the pontificate of Pius XI, available in full since 2006, and those of the Vatican Office of Information for Prisoners of War, available since 2004.

For scholars of the churches during World War II, the Holocaust, and the postwar period, we are witnessing an exciting moment. I’m going to first talk about findings in the archives from the perspective of what we learned this last decade from the archives covering the years 1922 to 1939. I will then move to preliminary early findings that have begun to appear since last March.

No modern pope has been as scrutinized as Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Soft spoken, aristocratic, and trained in law and diplomacy, scholars have only been able to study Pius XII through Vatican documents up to 1939 (the date of the end of Pius XI’s reign). Sometimes called “Il Papa Tedesco” (the German Pope) Pius XII was enormously popular with the German people during his time as papal diplomat to Germany from 1917-1929. From 1930 to 1939, he served Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, as Secretary of State, the second most powerful position in the Vatican hierarchy. When he became pope in 1939, he controlled the worldwide Catholic Church and the tens of millions of Catholics in a Europe on the brink of war.

Portions of the Vatican’s archival record for the 1922-1939 period are available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With thousands of archival pages at my disposal in the Museum’s reading room, three growing children and a full-time job, I decided to approach the material by looking at two key events in Holocaust history: the response of the Vatican and the German Catholic church to the first anti-Jewish laws in 1933 and to the Night of Broken Glass pogrom in 1938. My detailed findings are published elsewhere. Here, let me try to capture some highlights. Let us go back to March 1933. On March 23, 1933, the German parliament passed the so-called “Enabling Law,” abolishing democracy and the constitutional state in Germany. For our purposes, of especial interest is the statement German Chancellor Adolf Hitler made, promising to “respect all treaties between the Churches and the states” and that the “rights” of the Churches would “not be infringed upon.” In response, on March 28, the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference seated in the city of Fulda removed the current ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. On the same day that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference reversed the ban on Nazi Party membership for German Catholics, the Nazi party leadership ordered a boycott, to begin on April 1, at 10 a.m., directed against Jewish businesses and department stores, lawyers, and physicians. A second discriminatory law swiftly followed. On April 7, the passage of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service contained the so-called Arierparagraph, stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service. State-sponsored Nazi persecution of its Jewish population had begun.

I was curious about the correspondence going to and coming back from the Vatican around these two extremely sensitive issues. Most surprising to me were letters to German bishops, the nuncio, or to the pope himself from German Catholics, including priests, who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. I will give just one example. Princess Georg von Sachsen-Meiningen, who had joined the Nazi party already in May 1931 on her thirty-sixth birthday, tried to explain her distress in a letter to the Holy Father. She was responding to the fact that in the fall of 1930, the pastor of Kirchenhausen bei Heppenheim in the Diocese of Mainz declared in a sermon that no Roman Catholic could be a member of the Nazi Party, and, further, any active member of the Nazi party could be refused the sacraments. Countess Klara-Maria wrote to her pope, “as a good Catholic, I fear to end up in a conflict of conscience and to be in danger of punishment by the Church. If these measures and rules of the Mainz diocese are taken up by other dioceses, I will not be the only one to find myself in this conflict, but joined by hundreds and thousands of men and women who have decided to heroically fight for any culture or world opinion that will destroy Marxism and Bolshevism.”

While letters like this must be weighed against a population of nearly thirty million German Catholics, what they tell us is that fear of losing their flock to the growing Nazi movement was a factor for the Vatican and the German Catholic Church when making decisions. In lifting their ban on Nazi membership for Catholics, a decision was made to compromise, especially if, as Hitler stated in his March 23 address, the Church would be left alone.

This thinking was at play – alongside prejudiced views of Jews buttressed by 2,000 years of Church teachings – when the next test came: the April laws of 1933. Pope Pius XI himself was asked to intervene in a letter from unnamed – I am quoting here – “high-ranking Jewish notables.” In an internal memorandum, the pope transmitted this request to Secretary of State Pacelli. The precise language Pacelli, the future pope, used is as follows: “It is in the tradition of the Holy See to fulfill its universal mission of peace and love for all human beings, regardless of their social status or the religion to which they belong […].” The memorandum then asked for the advice of the papal nuncio in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, and of the German bishops in formulating a response. The answer sent back from Berlin was clear: the Church should not intervene beyond conveying “the will of Catholicism for universal charity.”

Why this response? Fear of alienating Catholics attracted to Nazism; fear of losing the independence of Church practices in the new Nazi state, and, finally the mentality best captured by the response of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich. In a letter dated April 10, Cardinal Faulhaber, like Orsenigo, discouraged the Holy See from intervening. He wrote to Pacelli: “Our bishops are also being asked why the Catholic Church, as often before in history, has not come out in defense of Jews. This, at present, is impossible, because the war against the Jews would also become the war against the Catholics; also, the Jews can defend themselves, as the quick end to the boycott has shown.”

Five years later, after the devastating Night of the Broken Glass pogrom, Secretary of State Pacelli would again receive a missive asking the Vatican to denounce what many consider to be the opening act of the Holocaust – total destruction of every Jewish man, woman and child.  This time, the missive was from one of his own. Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, 5th archbishop of Westminster, wrote to Pacelli requesting papal condemnation of the pogrom. Pacelli refused on behalf of the pope, who had recently suffered a heart attack. The official Vatican response read as follows: “The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

We have here another unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church.  He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

To wrap up on the topic of the 1922-1939 archives, these millions of documents still have so much potential. Open since 2006, fourteen years have not nearly exhausted the possibilities. For me, I learned the lesson that the response of the Catholic Church to Nazi treatment of Jews cannot be separated from the Church’s response to Nazi treatment of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. What do I mean? The last weeks of March and first weeks of April 1933 make painfully clear that the Catholic Church’s decisions and responses to persecution of their own co-religionists influenced and even dictated their tepid response to the mistreatment of Jews. Another lesson: the role that 2,000 years of Catholic prejudice against Jews played from the lowest to highest levels of the Church during these fraught years should and must be studied beyond the person of the pope himself. The 1922-1939 archives are rich with material from ordinary Catholics, their priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals and from their Jewish neighbors, grasping for any help they might find and typically not finding it.

Fast-forward to March 2020. Since their opening on March 2, the fascination with the 1939-1958 materials has only grown. A documentary by award-winning director Steven Pressman, titled Holy Silence, premiered in January of this year. It garnered over 3,000 views when shown as part of a recent joint program between the Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Film Institute of San Francisco.  An interview with Hubert Wolf, a historian at the University of Münster whose team was among those in the archives that first week in March went viral. More recently, Brown University historian David Kertzer’s article in The Atlantic on his and his research collaborators’ findings resulted in a counter-article in none other than L’Osservatore Romano. This is the daily newspaper of the Vatican City State which reports on the activities of the Holy See and events taking place in the Church and the world.

Earlier this month, I stood in the Vatican Apostolic Archive for the first time in my life. Where does one begin with the many questions that I have been accumulating since that first day in the Catholic University archives? With limited time to work in the archive, I decided to follow up on an old question that has nagged at me since those early days at the Catholic University Archives – that of Pius XII’s thought process as he pleaded for clemency for Germans indicted and convicted for war crimes by Allied courts in occupied Germany. Scholars have already established that Pius XII and his key advisors involved themselves in clemency efforts for convicted German war criminals, most especially Catholic ones. I recalled that even Muench had questioned this practice, telling U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy in 1950 that some championed by the Vatican “were up to their elbows in blood.”

Selecting a folder labeled “Prisoners of War, 1950-1959” from the papers of the Vatican’s diplomatic headquarters in Germany, I started to turn the fragile pages in the beautifully appointed “Pius XI Study Room.” Midway through the folder, the subject heading “Case Oswald Pohl” caught my eye. Oswald Pohl joined the Nazi party in 1926 and the SS in 1929.  The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was an elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party that served as Hitler’s personal guard and as a special security force in Germany and the occupied countries. Pohl became chief of administration at SS headquarters in February 1934, responsible for the armed SS units and the concentration camps.  Ultimately, he headed a sprawling organization that was responsible for recruiting millions of concentration camp inmates for forced labor units, and also responsible for selling Jewish possessions—jewelry, gold fillings, hair, and clothing—to provide funds to Nazi Germany.  On November 3, 1947, in the “U.S. versus Oswald Pohl et al,” the U.S. Army sentenced Pohl to death.  During the three-year confinement in Landsberg prison that followed the trial, Pohl converted to Catholicism.  This, however, did not prevent his execution by hanging on June 8, 1951.

The dates in the folder sitting in front of me also caught my eye – April 1951, less than 8 weeks before Pohl’s execution date. There are three memos written (in Italian) from Muench, headquartered in Kronberg, Germany, to the Vatican’s Substitute Secretary of State Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Saint Pope Paul VI and at that time, Pius XII’s closest advisor and friend. On April 2, Muench wrote to Montini, “I consider it my duty to remit to Your Excellency […] newspaper articles which report news of the Holy Father sending a Papal Blessing to Mr. Oswald Pohl, former General of the SS., sentenced to death in Landsberg.” Muench’s 2nd memorandum to Montini got even more interesting and confirmed that indeed, Pohl had received a Papal Blessing via telegram. Let me pause to briefly explain that The Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death is part of the Last Rites in the Catholic tradition. The Christian News Service in Munich issued a clarification that, according to Landsberg prison chaplain Carl Morgenschweis, the telegram conferring the Papal Blessing was “purely private, and not a diplomatic step or a Vatican stance.”

Specifically, a Father “Costatino Pohlmann” sent an urgent request to Pius XII with a request that a Papal Blessing be sent to Pohl on the eve of his death, in keeping with Catholic practice, and the pope did so. In Muench’s view, this was “not at all a matter of a telegram from the Vatican, much less a position taken by the Pope on the Pohl case.”

In the third and final memo from Muench to Montini on the matter, Muench took the time to send to Montini – second only to the pope in terms of power and position – a copy of an essay Pohl had written while imprisoned. The essay was titled “My Way to God.” Muench ensured Montini that the essay had come from the heart. Father Morgenschweis “closely followed the radical change of Pohl,” and wrote the preface, confirming that in Father Morgenschweis’ eyes, Pohl converted “only for the beneficial influence of God’s grace” and marked “the sincere return to the Lord of a misguided soul.”

What are we to make of Pius XII granting the Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death to Oswald Pohl, a recently converted Catholic condemned to death as one of the greatest Nazi overlords of the slave labor system? A week in the new archives cannot answer such a question of moral, ethical and theological significance. It did provide, at least for me, a sense that more historical evidence exists in other parts of this or another of the newly opened archives. I believe the core story we tell now about the Vatican, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust will be fundamentally altered after historians have done their work. But it will take time.

To conclude, why all the intense interest in these archives, 75 years after the end of World War II? And what might they mean for Christian-Jewish relations, which have been on a steady and positive path since the Church’s rejection of antisemitism as a sin with the Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965? There is no doubt that some documents will bring to the fore very tough conversations. Other documents will bring cause for celebration. The vast majority will engender elements of both. It is an overdue conversation, and one that must be approached with humility before our Jewish brothers and sisters – for our Church (my Church) has much to answer for that the Nostra Aetate declaration does not erase. When announcing the opening of these archives, His Holiness Pope Francis said, “the Church is not afraid of history; rather, she loves it … I open and entrust to researchers this documentary heritage.”  This is our moment to study the past in a clear, responsible, precise way. This is our moment to accept we will find stories across the full spectrum of the human condition, from the most depraved to great acts of kindness. This is our moment to be equally honest about both the failings and triumphs we are already finding, from top to bottom. Thank you.

 

 

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Article: “Simultaneously Devout Christian and Antisemite: The Tübingen Theologian and ‘Jewish Researcher’ Gerhard Kittel”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Article: “Simultaneously Devout Christian and Antisemite: The Tübingen Theologian and ‘Jewish Researcher’ Gerhard Kittel”

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

This article was originally published in zeitzeichen, November 2020, p. 50-52. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

The renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948) was an ardent enemy of Jews. His life’s work was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) — Generations of theology students have engaged with this standard work. The historian Manfred Gailus writes about a theologian who never showed remorse, even after the war.

Christians, it is often heard and read today, could not also be antisemites at the same time. This idea is false. Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948), the renowned New Testament scholar from Tübingen, was certainly a devout Christian. As a New Testament theologian, he confessed to being passionately anti-Jewish and repeatedly called the New Testament the “most anti-Jewish book in all the world.” As a völkisch-thinking contemporary of the Hitler era, he was also explicitly antisemitic. There is no denying his pious Christianity, which emerged biographically out of Swabian Pietism. But his genuine antisemitism is also without doubt.

In his 1942 memorandum on “The Position of Jewish Studies within the Framework of General Scholarship,” (“Die Stellung der Judaistik im Rahmen der Gesamtwissenschaft”), Kittel judged: Judaism is a disease affecting the German national body, the severity of which does not allow for “Romantic harmonization and idealization.” As soon as Jewish research ceases “to see its subject matter as a non-type, as the absence of type, as a sickness and perversion,” it offends against its purpose to be a servant of the knowledge of nature, of what is genuine, of what is healthy. Precisely because of its singularity and “essential perversion of the genuine national existence,” an independent academic Jewish Studies is necessary. Only on the basis of an accurate Jewish Studies will it be possible to determine the essential appearance of Judaism and to banish the “Jewish danger.”

Kittel wrote these lines in the fourth year of the war, 1942, when the Holocaust was well underway and the annual number of Jewish victims was reaching its zenith. One hesitates to attribute Kittel’s just-cited positions simply to Christian anti-Judaism.

Professor at Age 33

Born in 1888 in Breslau as the son of the renowned Old Testament writer Rudolf Kittel from Württemberg, Gerhard Kittel followed early in his father’s footsteps: theological studies, doctorate, habilitation. It all happened very quickly—at 33 he was professor of New Testament in Greifswald, a little later (1926) holder of the Schlatter chair in Tübingen. Like so many Protestants, Kittel had his genuine Protestant experience in 1933, the year Hitler came to power: joining the NSDAP, participating in the antisemitic German Christians, and writing lively journalism in the völkisch zeitgeist.

Kittel’s booklet “The Jewish Question” (June 1933) can be considered one of the most influential Protestant statements of the epoch. The Christian, too, he said, must have his place in the current front of the antisemitic struggle. Even though he used the term “race” sparingly and rather implicitly, in this book, as in many future publications, he lamented a disastrous “mixture of blood and race” in Germany and saw in it a “poison” that had brought about the “degradation” of the German Volk since the emancipation of the Jews in the eighteenth century and which could only be corrected again through a tough, völkisch policy. Through baptism, the theologian emphasized, a Jew willing to convert does not become a German, but remains a “Jewish Christian.”

Already in 1933 Kittel voted for a ban on Christian-Jewish mixed marriages, mentally anticipating the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935. He cautiously distinguished himself from the explicit racial antisemitism of leading Nazi ideologues and advocated what he believed to be ‘better,’ a more academically-based and more strongly Christian-inspired antisemitism.

Kittel’s work was complex. There was the genuine theological researcher with academic contributions to early Christianity and ancient Judaism, which found international recognition. There was the ordained theologian who proclaimed his Christian faith from the pulpit. There was the ethno-political “Jew researcher” who collaborated with the Hitler party and the Nazi state.

The real center of his life’s work, however, was the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), the first four volumes of which were published under his editorship from 1933 to 1942. Generations of theology students have worked with this standard work. For obvious reasons, the question arises to what extent Kittel’s decided anti-Judaism and his ethnic antisemitism were reflected in the contributions of the TDNT. The latest analysis by the Paderborn theologian Martin Leutzsch shows that dedicated antisemitism only occurs marginally in the scientific articles. However, the dictionary is permeated throughout with a structural modern Christian anti-Judaism, in order to develop a Christian “narrative of superiority” vis-à-vis Judaism.

Collaboration with the Nazi Regime

Kittel’s political and ideological collaboration with the Nazi regime was expressed primarily through his participation in the “Research Department of the Jewish Question” of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank. As a renowned theologian and expert on ancient Judaism, he took part in all four annual conferences of this institute (1936-1939) and published consistently in its antisemitic series of publications. At an event accompanying the Munich exhibition “The Eternal Jew,” Kittel gave a lecture in December 1937 on “The Racial Development of Judaism.” He took part in the Nuremberg Rally in 1938 as “the Führer’s guest of honour.”

In December 1941, Kittel wrote a report on the Paris assassin Herschel Grynszpan, who was imprisoned in Berlin, and presented his Parisian act of violence in November 1938 as the act of a “Talmudic Jew” controlled by international world Jewry. In an article on “Talmudic Thinking and Judaism” (published October 1941), Kittel wrote: “In Talmudic terms, only the Jew actually deserves to be called a person. The gentile is to the Jew as the chaff is to the wheat, like the dust to the pearl, like the miscarriage to the living child, like the animal to the human being. Even the dog still deserves preference over the non-Jew.”

Preparing the Way for the Holocaust

According to Kittel’s postwar account, it was not until the beginning of 1943 that he found out about the systematic killing of Jews in the East through his son Eberhard, who was on military leave in Tübingen. Kittel certainly did not take an active part in the Holocaust. And he must have reacted in horror to the terrible news from the East. The Tübingen theologian will, however, have to be counted among the ones who spiritually paved the way for the Holocaust.

On May 3, 1945, the French occupation forces, which had moved into Tübingen, arrested eight professors from the Eberhard Karl University, including Gerhard Kittel. Six months in prison, imprisonment in a camp for suspected Nazi perpetrators in Balingen, and forced residency in Beuron with a work permit for the monastery library—Kittel was only able to return to Tübingen in February 1948. He renounced his Tübingen professorship, but demanded an appropriate pension and wished to be able to continue the publication of the TDNT. On July 11, 1948, the theologian died at the age of 59, following a serious illness. Kittel did not die of inner brokenness or spiritual contrition.

The denazification arbitration chamber proceedings initiated against him did not reach a conclusion during his lifetime. Based on the state of affairs then and in comparison with other “cases,” he would have been acquitted. In his justification, “My Defense” (1946), there are only minor traces of a subjective self-awareness of guilt. He admitted complicity in the general catastrophe of the Germans. Individually, however, as a devout Christian, he felt at peace with himself. He wrote in 1946 that he had not touched a hair on a single Jew. Rather, as a courageous Christian confessor he had contradicted the Nazi worldview and its “vulgar antisemitism” and had worked in the party in this critical sense. With this resistance, he had risked a lot and had repeatedly been threatened with concentration camps.

Not Touched a Hair

Much about the “Kittel case” was kept silent in the post-war period. The Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm, who was also the first chair of the postwar Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, or EKD), defended the theologian against accusations in a 1947 “expert opinion” and ruled that it was part of Professor Kittel’s ecclesiastical theological teaching assignment to show the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.”

Even in the 1970s, the Tübingen church historian Klaus Scholder had difficulty dealing with the suppressed topic. In his substantial 900-page work on The Churches and the Third Reich (1977) he mentions Kittel only marginally once in the notes. It was Scholder’s assistant at the time, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, and the American historian Robert P. Ericksen, who simultaneously addressed the taboo topic, starting in the late 1970s. Siegele-Wenschkewitz apparently ventured too far too early with her courageous reappraisal, thereby losing the prospect of a university career as a church historian within the German theological faculties.

Further Reading: Gailus, Manfred, and Clemens Vollnhals, eds. Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Der Tübinger Theologe und „Judenforscher“ Gerhard Kittel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020.

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Review of Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Großbölting, eds., Was glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 and 1945? Religion und Politik im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Großbölting, eds., Was glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 and 1945? Religion und Politik im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2020). 540 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-51077-4 (paperback); 978-3-593-44223-5 (eBook).

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

In December 2018, at their home institution, the Westphalian Wilhelm University in Münster, Olaf Blaschke, a professor of nineteenth-century European history, and Thomas Großbölting, a professor of modern and contemporary European history, convened a diverse group of scholars to examine “What did the Germans believe 1933-1945, a New Perspective on the Relationship between Religion and Politics under National Socialism.” The conference resulted in the publication of the present volume, What did the Germans Believe 1933-1945? Religion and Politics under National Socialism, consisting of twenty unnumbered chapters divided into three parts. Blaschke’s and Großbölting’s collection follows an approach initially begun by Manfred Gailus and Armon Nolzen in their influential 2011 edited volume, Estranged ‘Ethnonationalist Community’: Faith, Denomination, and Religion under National Socialism (Zerstritten ‘Volksgemeisnchaft’ Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). The essays in the Gailus and Nolzen collection examined the implications of the data that more than ninety-five percent of the German population belonged to either the Catholic or Protestant Church until National Socialism’s collapse in 1945, while, at the same time, at least two-thirds of these individuals also belonged to at least one National Socialist organization. The essays explored the intersection of these stark realities as Germans negotiated what it meant to be Christian and likewise members of the Volksgemeinschaft in the National Socialist state.

The essays in Blaschke and Großbölting’s volume continue this investigation in a similar vein by widening and deepening it. They ask: Where did the churches and National Socialism interact with each other? In what ways did they stand in each other’s way? How did they compete for members or prominence? And how did they promote each other’s particular concerns? For the editors, an apologetic and mistaken emphasis on resistance – “cross versus sword” narrative – has dominated the interpretative framework of studies on Christianity in Germany under National Socialism. By contrast, however, they view the period fluidly, recognizing that few Germans rejected Nazism entirely. They claim a closer tie between the two than previously articulated in the Gaius and Nolzen collection as well as by others. If one concludes that religion was a significant factor in German society in the 1920s and 30s, they raise the following questions: did National Socialism arise despite Christianity, as many historians have suggested, or did Nazism develop and establish itself precisely because of society’s Christian character? The essays of this volume primarily support the latter by exposing the interplay of National Socialism and Christianity in a variety of historical situations.

The approach is not driven by examining the hierarchy of the churches nor by scrutinizing the nature of the institutions themselves. Instead, the chapters seek to uncover individual voices and actions of ordinary Christians both inside and outside traditional church settings. As with any volume, the results are mixed. Some are thoroughly convincing, while others offer the reader only a preview of an undeveloped argument. At the same time, the essays are not as original or groundbreaking in their field as the editors suggest. Although, since the turn of the century, apologetic and simplistic works have appeared, many studies on the churches under National Socialism have parted from the “cross versus sword” narrative to uncover elements of Christian complicity that lent support to the National Socialist state and abetted its crimes. Likewise, the authors have generally ignored the role of theology as a motivational factor and neglected the legacy of the Kulturkampf on Catholics. Still, this present volume advances our knowledge of the continuity of “brownness” among Christians prior, during, and after National Socialism officially existed in Germany.

The editors title the first section of their work as “Protagonists and their Practices.” Here the essays seek to reveal the interconnectedness and “entanglement” of National Socialism and Christianity in the different “social strata and milieus” in which Christians went about their daily existence (19-20). Unfortunately, the essay by Detlef Scheichen-Ackermann, which begins this section, rambles on, as it were, as he first attempts to elucidate alternate theories to explain the attraction of Germans toward the Volksgemeinschaft before presenting five concrete reasons for political reorientation to arise among them in the first place. These events include the failed experiment in councils coupled with the 1918-1919 civil upheaval that led to a “primal fear” of Bolshevism, the disgrace of Versailles, the loss of the talents and mediating influence of Gustav Stresemann upon his untimely death in 1929, fluctuating economic crisis, and, finally, the failure of Heinrich Brüning amid the bankruptcy of political Catholicism (50). In the following chapter, Jürgen W. Falter revisits his impressive, earlier 1991 research on the voting behavior of Catholics and Protestants that led to Hitler’s ascension to power and recalls his previous hypothesis, “if there had only been Catholics, there would probably never have been a National Socialist takeover, because then the NSDAP would not have easily managed to move beyond the status of a minority party” (61). While support for the NSDAP was always significantly higher among Protestants, Falter also concludes that in the last months of the Weimar Republic, the “relatively considerable resistance of the Catholic population to National Socialism diminished” (61).

Markus Raasch, in his contribution, attempts unsuccessfully to reveal how the relatively small city of Eichstätt and its surrounding communities evolved from a clerical-inspired “black” characterization of a staunchly Catholic community to a National Socialist “brown.” He argues that a “real resilient opposition between Catholicism and National Socialism never existed” (90). In his analysis, he gives almost no consideration to the impact of Konrad von Preysing (bishop, 1932 to 1935) on Eichstätt’s interaction with National Socialism. Likewise, he interprets the appropriation of National Socialist terminology by Catholics as a “Catholicization of National Socialism based on the Nazification of Catholicism” (94). Other authors, including myself, have interpreted the Catholic leaders’ adoption of such Nazi idiom in a different light, especially when faced with the repressive tactics against such use by Prussian Minister-President Hermann Göring in 1935. Raasch’s use of evidence is also selective, ignoring relevant studies and seemingly drawing from others without citation.

Sarah Thieme’s insightful chapter examines the metamorphosis of Advent and Christmas celebrations in the south Westphalian city of Bochum as they increasingly departed from their Christian roots. Before January 1933, an influential Protestant pastor, Philipp Klose, embraced the National Socialist “struggle” rhetoric and portrayed Christ as a militant soldier. Both Protestant and Catholic laywomen, for example, intertwined their roles in church associations, charity work, and, as individual members, in the National Socialist Women’s Organization. Such interaction resulted in cooperation between these groups in charity efforts such as the Winter Relief Program of the National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare (NSV). Church, state, and party organizations in Bochum, Thieme notes, also maintained traditional manners of celebrating Advent and Christmas, including nativity plays. In 1938, apparent national trends led the National Socialist Women’s Organization local leader to push for a reorientation of the celebrations. Ostensively, in an effort to avoid any denominational tensions, festivals of “light and joy” and adoration of a Nazified sacralized ideal for German mothers replaced Advent rites and “veneration of the blessed mother.” The war, however, brought an end to most public celebrations of the holiday season, Thieme concludes, as such events were relegated to the churches and private spheres.

Thomas Brodie’s essay on Catholic Faith during the Second World War summarizes his recent work, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 2018), which I reviewed in CCHQ (25:2, June 2019). In that study, he sought to understand what religion meant to the German Catholic faithful during the war. For Brodie, a central contention is that Catholicism’s legitimization of the war outside of National Socialist ideology enabled Germans to support the battle on the homefront. This, of course, is not a new insight as Gordon Zahn and Heinrich Missilla came to a similar conclusion many years back. Next, Armin Nolzen contemplates the understanding of religion within the League of German Girls (BDM). He points out that there has been little investigation of this topic in the studies of this period. Although, for example, in December 1933, Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller enabled Protestant youth groups to merge with the Hitler Youth and, four years later, in 1937, the state forbade dual membership in denominational youth groups and the Hitler Youth (under which the BDM falls), there were still, by November 1939, thirty Protestant and twenty-five Catholic youth groups in existence. While Nolzen does not entirely succeed in uncovering the role of religion in the BDM, he does raise important questions for researchers to pursue.

In chapter seven, Christiane Schröder studies Protestant women’s religious communities in the Lower Saxony former regions of Calenberg and Lüneburg under National Socialism. Schröder explains that these communities have seldom been the topic of study and admits that they consisted of only 240 women. Remnants of pre-Reformation Catholic religious life, these communities required that women be Lutheran, unmarried, and at least fifty-five years old. Most came from the Hanoverian lower nobility and bourgeoisie classes. Overseen by the Klosterkammer in Hannover, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Reich and Prussian Ministry of Science, Education, and Culture, the communities were not entirely free of state supervision. Members of these communities no longer had to partake in a traditional monastic routine, but nevertheless were required to participate in a Sunday service, evening meals in common, and select prayer services while receiving rent-free apartments and a monthly allowance. For many women, these communities raised their social prestige and freed them from living with parents or relatives. Schröder freely admits that her research is in its initial stages directed toward her dissertation-in-progress. Thus far, her research has uncovered approximately twenty-six women who were members of the NSDAP, with a handful who were “old fighters.” By 1936, the state ordered the denomination requirement for entrance to be dropped, and, in its place, merely proof of Aryan ancestry. The institutions’ chronicles, Schröder’s central source, reveal the women’s collective gratitude and appreciation for Hitler, especially for destroying Bolshevism in Germany and for his initial gains in foreign policy. Support for the war, however, was mized among the women, with the chronicle authors heralding victories, but also expressing concern for the well-being and safety of German soldiers.

Martina Steber introduces the story of Augsburg’s second, possibly third-ranked composer Arthur Piechler, whose mother’s heritage was from a Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. Steber’s interpretation is multilayered. Obtaining civil servant status in 1934 while being of mixed racial background, Piechler was an anomaly to the norm experienced by so many other Germans of similar heritage. Though persecuted on the national level by expulsion from the Reich Chamber of Music and forced labor under Organization Todt, Piechler became a pawn in the power struggle among the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Gau (NSDAP district) and city officials. Steber views the defense of Piechler as partially ideological – his work embodied the “ideological disposition” of Gau Schwaben, which enabled the Catholic cultural conservative traits of “nationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-modernism” to connect forces with National Socialism (212). Augsburg officials and bourgeoise citizens embraced Piechler’s music as representative of German art, arguing that his Ayran roots superceded his Jewish heritage. Piechler survived the war and was soon promoted by the allied occupiers to the director of Augsburg’s conservatory. He remained a “star” in Augsburg, but never gained national recognition as critics deemed his musical composition style outdated.

Finishing out the first section is Olaf Blaschke’s impressive chapter on the faith of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. Although Stauffenberg has been the subject of numerous studies, according to Blaschke, none have convincingly examined his religious motivations. Likewise, no historian has provided a “single motif for his affinity to National Socialism” (255). Blaschke concludes that if faith is credited for his resolute choices after 1943, then his faith must also be seen as active in his decisions before this point. He finds no “direct evidence” against such a conclusion, especially when one acknowledges the anti-liberalism of both National Socialism and Catholicism as a point of convergence.

The editors designate the essays in section two, “Ideological and Religious Motives,” though, in many ways, they continue themes present in the first part. Klaus Große Kracht, for example, investigates five large gatherings of Catholics in Berlin in 1933. In my 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press), I covered the same ground and reached similar conclusions. During these events, Catholics appropriated Nazi language and imagery, expressing nationalistic language and a desire to serve the German Reich. Große Kracht argues that this is the period before anticlericalism dominated the politics of the National Socialist state. He also highlights the nationalistic rhetoric of Father Marianus Vetter, a Dominican religious and celebrated preacher, who, I too, covered, making similar points, in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). As previous studies have shown, once the bishops lifted their prohibition against membership in the National Socialist Party, many Catholics worked for a positive relationship between the state and church. Große Kracht’s essay affirms these earlier findings.

Miloslav Szabó’s essay reaches beyond the borders of the German Reich to Slovakia to examine priests’ affinity for National Socialism. He is fond of Roger Griffin’s 2007 term “clerical fascism” that distinguishes between those priests who defended “fascist ideology” and those clergymen who only succumbed to the “temptations of ‘national rebirth’” to combat Bolshevism and liberalism. Szabó takes significant issue with my use of the term “brown priest” and the discussion thereof by Thomas Forster in Priests in the Era of Radical Change: Identity and Life of Catholic Parish Clergy in Upper Bavaria 1918 to 1945 (Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs: Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbazern 1918 bis 1945, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Evidently, Szabó did not read Hitler’s Priests theoretical first chapter that covers analogous ground or Forster’s insightful contextual discussion of the term. Szabó divides “brown priests” into two categories: “clerical National Socialists” who, in their support of National Socialism, turn against the Church and eventually replace doctrine with ideology and “clerical fascists” who agitate for National Socialism but remain loyal to Catholicism and their ordinaries. To illustrate his use of the terms, Szabó presents three case studies. He identifies the first two priests of his study, Fathers František Boháč and Viliam Ries, as “clerical National Socialists” who worked tirelessly to implement National Socialist ideology radically. Szabó’s third cleric, Father Josef Steinhübl, is labeled a “clerical fascist” who endeavored to reconcile Catholicism with National Socialism, especially as a prominent agitator for the Carpathian German Party that represented the German minority in Slovakia. Szabó’s essay is informative and well-researched, though, I believe, he could have been more aware in his analysis of the geographical and situational uniqueness of the clerics that he studies. His categorization of Monsignor Jozek Tiso as a “clerical fascist minimum” (clerical-faschistisches Minimum) is also somewhat perplexing and not entirely helpful.

In chapter twelve, Holger Arning invites the reader to ponder the difference between trust (vertrauen) and faith (glauben) in the year 1934, specifically as it appears in the articles in Unser Kirchenblatt, the Münster diocese’s newspaper. He informs us that the term trust can “inspire true confidence” both in the Church and the leader (322). By 1934, the relationship between Church and state, however, had radically altered following the murder of Erich Klausener during the Röhm Purge – a turning point on which Arning and I agree. While the word Führer (leader) repeatedly appears in the pages of the newspaper, affirming the validity of the National Socialist leadership principle (Führerprinzip), authors of the newspaper articles use it more often in a Catholic context, reinforcing the Church’s authoritarian ideal and hierarchical system and aligning it with the kingship of Christ. (In 1925, Pope Pius XI had established the feast of Christ the King in response to anti-clericalism, secularism, and nationalism). Arning interprets this as the “adaptation of the editors to the new political circumstances” without specifically approving National Socialist ideology (326). In its rhetoric about Hitler, the newspaper was positive, but more often than not, referred to him by his official title as Chancellor. Arning concludes that in 1934 in the articles in Unser Kirchenblatt, Catholic trust “in Hitler and National Socialism was unstable,” and any confidence expressed in National Socialism was self-serving (343).

In a chapter on religious rites under National Socialism, Hans-Ulrich Thamer offers an insightful point about the nature of worship and ritual. For those who withdrew membership in their respective Christian denominations and legally became “believers in God” (Gottgläubigen), they did not immediately forfeit public expressions of their ingrained religious traditions. They brought these with them and, in turn, consciously or unconsciously influenced the structure of newly created National Socialist rites. Ample photos illustrate Thamer’s captivating argument. The second section ends with Christopher Picker’s ambitious essay on the belief and convictions of Palantine Protestants from 1933-1945. Focusing on the March 1934 Resolution of Palatine Protestants that proclaimed support for Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller as well as for the German Christians and placed the Palatine regional church “entirely at the disposal of the National Socialist state and its aid organizations,” the essay uncovers the overwhelming support of Protestant Christians in this region for National Socialism and the Nazi state (371). Picker devotes much of the article to National Socialism’s initial years of rule with little emphasis on the later years. Perhaps a more balanced focus would yield a more nuanced portrait of Palentine Protestantism under National Socialism.

The third part of the book focuses on “Interpretive Discourse,” as each essay connects themes and underlying patterns in the belief of Christians under National Socialism. Uwe Puscher examines the role of völkisch (ethnonationalist) religion in Nazi Germany. According to him, there were at most five thousand individuals who adhered to some form of völkisch religion under Hitler. Puscher chooses specifically not to focus on völkisch religion itself, but on Oskar Stillich, an economist, sociologist, and pacifist who dedicated a part of his career to studying völkisch thought and religious ideology, uncovering its racist and nationalistic aims. Removed in 1933 from his position at Humbolt University in Berlin, Stillich went into inner emigration, as it were, though he continued to research and write. He died on January 1, 1945. Though the chapter is informative on Stillich, it does not connect particularly well to the overall themes of the volume. Likewise, in an ambitious and wildly focused essay, Christoph Auffarth writes about contradictions in the theological interpretations he found among various professors at the University of Marburg under National Socialism. Despite the presence of National Socialist supporter Ernst Benz on its faculty, Marburg University’s faculty of theology maintained its allegiance to the Confessing Church, the branch of German Protestantism that sought freedom from Nazi state oversight and interference. In the next chapter, Manfred Gailus offers reflections on Christians in Nazi Germany by emphasizing both the impact of the 1933 Reich Concordat on Catholics and the high percent of Protestant clergy embracing National Socialism. For him, there should be “no talk of a block of ‘Christian resistance’ or Catholic resistance” (449). At the same time, there was “no clear strategy of religious policy on the part of the NSDAP or the Nazi state.” Instead, both entities approached religion with a “trial and error” mentality (455). Gailus is also one of the few authors who directly addresses the link between Christian and racial antisemitism. Then he concludes, “faith, denomination, and religion were hotly debated topics since 1933, and they occupied most Germans during this epoch more than before and more than afterward in the twentieth century” (461).

Lucia Scherzberg’s essay continues her ongoing study of the National Socialist Priests’ Circle that was the focus of her recent book, Between Party and Church: National Socialist Priests in Austria and Germany 1938-1944 (Zwischen Partei und Kirche: Nationalsozialistische Priester in Österreich und Deutschland 1938-1944, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2020), which I reviewed in the last issue of CCHQ (26:3, September 2020). In her chapter, she focuses on Father Franz Sales Seidl, a priest of the Passau diocese and one of a few Catholic priests involved in the Eisenach based Institute to Research and Eradicate the Jewish Influence on German Church Life. An active and enthusiastic member, Seidl contributed a three-part study, “Ethnonationalist Elements in the Roman Liturgy,” in which he proposed how to purify the Catholic liturgy of Jewish elements and to recover its so-called Germanic and Nordic roots. Despite the antisemitic and radical nature of his ideas, Seidl and his fellow National Socialist-inclined priests remained traditionally clerical, entirely opposed to any changes in the priesthood.

Mark Edward Ruff offers a thought-provoking essay by comparing the similarities between the “political and religious landscapes of the present with that of National Socialism” to uncover the hybridism of religious belief (493). He asks, “If a 66-year old evangelical Christian spends two hours a week in his church and twenty hours watching Fox News, the question arises which institution has the decisive influence on him. To draw a parallel with the National Socialist era, the following example may be given: If a 28-year old Protestant…in the Nazi era attended church once a month and was politically active for ten hours a week, one wonders what influence had the greatest impact on him” (508). To this end, he concludes, “in many cases, it is much more the political actors who not only draw the line between the religious and the secular but also determine and change the context of faith and its forms” (510).

Finally, Isabel Heinemann offers an overview of the volume by providing a summary of the arguments. She points out five areas of connection: First, although Germany was overwhelmingly Protestant, Catholicism dominated the subjects of the collection’s essays. In part, she believes this fact rests on the need for historians to challenge and dismantle interpretations that emphasize the fundamental resistance of the Catholic Church and Catholics to National Socialism. Second, the connection between faith and racism enabled Christians to integrate racist ideology into the practice of their faith easily. Third, during wartime, most Christians had “no problem with violence against Jews or Bolsheviks” (521). Fourth, the interplay between faith and gender appeared conspicuously, especially the relationship between Christian men and women during the war. Fifth, the interaction of religion and politics highlights the fact that the regime used “sacred symbolism and religious ritual to legitimize its rule and to exalt its own worldviews” (526). Upon pointing out these five areas of connection, Heinemann proposes topics for further study, which include moving beyond Germany to the occupied regions; expanding the time-period of focus (beyond 1933-1945); studying the relationship between faith and war as they tie to the question of annihilative ideology; and investigating the ties between Christian antisemitism and racism, empirically. Lastly, Heinemann recommends exploring the relationship of ethnonationalism to religion, the topic that Rebbeca Carter-Chand and I explore in our upcoming edited volume on ethnonationalism, antisemitism, and Christianity in the era of the two world wars.

Overall, this worthwhile volume provokes more questions than it answers. Still, this posture of inquiry is important as it will advance our understanding of Christian belief under National Socialism. Likewise, as we ponder the convergence of politics and faith in the essays of this volume, Mark Edward Ruff’s chapter, in particular, make for essential reading during this polarized election season.

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Review of Klaus Vondung, Paths to Salvation: The National Socialist Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of Klaus Vondung, Paths to Salvation: The National Socialist Religion, trans. William Petropulos (St Augustine’s Press: South Bend, Indiana, 2019). 168 Pp. ISBN: 978-1-58731-656-2.

By Samuel Koehne, Trinity Grammar School

In Paths to Salvation Klaus Vondung, with considerable nuance, examines the extent to which religious concepts may be applicable to National Socialism. The study in itself is complex and interesting, exploring what Vondung refers to as the ‘forms’ of ‘religiosity’ that might best characterise National Socialism – while still focusing on Nazism as principally a secular and even atheistic ideology. In broad terms, the work fits within the historiographical school of thought that explains Nazism as a kind of ‘political religion,’ and this has been a key focus in Vondung’s career, including his much earlier work Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Magic and Manipulation: The Ideological Cult and Political Religion of National Socialism). As a result, Vondung’s text explicitly focuses on particular ‘religious aspects’ that he believes are the ‘fundamental religious phenomena’ of National Socialism – Faith, Mysticism, Myth and Ritual, Cult, Theology, Apocalypse – and these then form the chapters of his book. As such, this publication fits into the recent revival of interest in the concept of ‘political religion.’ However, unlike some works which have considered a particular Nazi leader, a text or event, the author adopts what might be termed a ‘pointillist’ approach to the topic: layering smaller examples to illustrate his arguments.

Vondung is clear from the outset that he believes central religious notions such as redemption or salvation have also formed links to very different movements across Germany’s history, from nationalist movements arising out of the Napoleonic Wars through to intellectual movements, and that National Socialism must also be considered ‘a political movement’ with ‘political goals.’ The introduction in itself explores a fascinating and diverse cast of characters, ranging from Fichte to Johst to Mirbt to Gerstenhauer, but argues a kind of coherence around the central theme of a desire for ‘redemption.’ Vondung writes extremely well, and consistently draws on a broad knowledge of German history. His larger historical perspective does sometimes mean that comparisons are drawn from examples that range from the Napoleonic wars to the Nazi state. For readers familiar with the larger history of Germany, this poses no issue, but it does assume an understanding of key historical context. Despite the fact that figures which are quoted come from different periods of time, the central desire for ‘redemption’ is argued to have been born from a ‘complex of motives’ that are summarised as ‘a combination of national frustration, fundamental unease with modernity, and the feeling that life was devoid of meaning.’ While the Introduction does not fully explain the purpose of this book, it does illustrate the overarching approach of many scholars who write in the field of ‘political religion’– that that there is either a perceived inadequacy in religion or an inefficacy of religion to fill the need for meaning in modernity (dominated by ‘rationalism and materialism’) that has led people to seek ‘a new spiritual home.’

The first chapter of the book – ‘Political Religion?’ – is particularly useful in summarising the ways in which Nazism was considered either a ‘secular religion’ or ‘political religion’ by contemporaries, and Vondung summarises major scholars of the 1920s and 1930s who understood ‘Hitlerism’ and the Nazi Party in this way. Drawing especially on the work of Eric Voegelin on Political Religions, he provides a subtle and fascinating argument that balances explanations of political religion against those who critique it, pointing out that while that has been a revival of interest in ‘political religions’ there remain major objections to its use. Vondung notes that Voegelin believed National Socialism went beyond using ‘a religious vocabulary’ or ‘cultic forms of celebration’ and argues that ‘[Voegelin’s] analysis revealed the religious nature of [National Socialism’s] existential core’ in that ‘partial contents of the world’ – like ‘race’ – became ‘objects of faith.’ Yet he also summarises the criticisms, such as the arguments that it there was a ‘religious nature’ to Nazism, the ‘dogmas’ of Nazism were ‘empty’ (quoting de Rougemont) and that Nazism was not homogenous but instead embraced diverse religious positions and expressions of ‘faith.’ He also includes Mommsen’s fairly damning assessment that ‘The decisive object to applying the theory of political religion to National Socialism is that it attributes an ideological rigor and consistency to a movement that lacked any.’ In fact, it appears that Vondung does not fully embrace the concept of ‘political religion’ either, pointing out that Voegelin himself noted in later works that this term was ‘too vague.’ Nonetheless, the author sees much value in the very recent work of Emilio Gentile in this field, and views his own book as examining ‘the various forms in which religiosity is articulated in National Socialism.’ While his work does cover diverse topics, I believe that it is important to detail two particular foci – ‘Faith’ and ‘Apocalypse’ – as these help to give a sense of the remainder of the book.

Vondung is very convincing in his argument that Hitler saw ‘faith’ as one of the core and necessary methods to building a powerful political movement, and that this drew on existing religious notions and traditions. It has been well established that Hitler not only admired the dogmatic method of the Catholic Church (while fundamentally rejecting the content of such dogmas) but that he also thought such assurance and ‘apodictic force’ was absolutely essential to the creation of a ‘brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will’ (Mein Kampf) that would draw the diverse völkisch movement into a powerful political vehicle. For that matter, the page headings of Mein Kampf summarised this neatly: ‘From religious sentiment to an apodictic belief / From völkisch feeling to a political confession.’ Vondung examines this, and elaborates on it, noting that this ‘faith’ then formed a powerful method by which people were drawn to central tenets of Nazism. Most especially, there was ‘faith’ in Hitler himself, but Vondung also believes that other such objects of faith were ‘Blood and Soil, Volk and Reich’ and the swastika flag itself. The argument is well made that this then formed a far more fanatical adherence and ‘stronger commitment’ to the Nazi Party that merely agreeing to follow a party platform. Although Voegelin believed that Nazism went beyond ‘cultic forms of celebration,’ Vondung notes that these actually form the strongest examples of a commitment to ‘faith’ and belief: noting the consecration of flags at the Nuremberg rallies (with the ‘blood flag’ of the Munich Putsch) and ‘swearing-in ceremonies’ that formed a common part of events for new members of both the NSDAP and the SS. Vondung uses a powerful example of ‘liturgical forms of declarations of faith’ that repeated the mantra of ‘We believe…’ Providing multiple examples of both songs and poems, as well as personal diary entries of such figures as Goebbels, Vondung points out that much of what would commonly be accepted as religious declarations of faith were indeed both applied to new ‘catechisms’ of race, blood, and the Volk and experienced by some Nazi adherents as a genuine expression of faith. Nonetheless, he does urge caution and notes that there were also party adherents who were quite ‘cynical’ in joining the party, or those who only participated in the sense of ‘command and obedience’ without necessarily experiencing either an emotional connection – as others certainly did – or feeling any deeper commitment. Nonetheless, while Vondung feels that it is difficult to ascertain the ‘earnestness’ of those professing a Nazi faith, it is clear that the intention was to build such faith in Nazi Germany and its aims. What this does show is there is some strong evidence and support for the argument that ‘religious phenomena’ could be either used by the Nazis or genuinely adapted to a new form of racial faith. However, it does not necessarily follow that this shows the ‘religious nature of [National Socialism’s] existential core.’ This is illustrated by the final chapter of the work, which in some ways counter-balances the very strong chapter on ‘Faith.’

When it comes to the final chapter of his work, Vondung sees the ‘apocalyptic’ view of the Nazis (relying particularly on Hitler and Rosenberg) as the ‘extreme manifestation’ of Nazi religiosity. However, he goes further, arguing that this is the ‘only plausible explanation for the intention to destroy the Jews.’ This is difficult to sustain on the face of it, even though it does fit with the notion of ‘redemptive antisemitism’ that Saul Friedländer proposed as the core of National Socialism. For that matter, Vondung’s view that the Nazis’ world-view was akin to that of an ‘apocalyptic visionary’ does in broad terms fit with the famous definition of Fascism by Roger Griffin: ‘Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.’

Yet Vondung locates the notion of the apocalypse not only in the kind of approach that characterized the work of early figures such as Eric Voegelin or later scholars like Hans Mommsen – that Nazism was a ‘political messianism’ or that Nazism possessed a ‘chiliastic character’ – but in the context of this term both within the book of Daniel and in the book of Revelation. In this regard, and it is worth quoting at length, Vondung believes that ‘the apocalyptic message’ in either the Old or New Testament ‘was originally for those who longed for redemption because they were oppressed and persecuted, and because their suffering was so extreme that a change for the better no longer seemed possible,’ but he also notes that it therefore offered ‘consolation.’ While thereafter arguing that the core of the apocalyptic is ‘destruction and renewal…annihilation and redemption’ it appears to be deeply problematic to take these notions and directly link them to the Nazis. This is because in either the accounts of Daniel or Revelation the key focus was on people who were oppressed and that the change in their situation was to be brought about by God, that is, by a force that was greater than the people involved, and in faith that such a change would occur without human intervention. Neither of these appear to be strictly applicable to the Nazis.

Vondung argues – and powerfully so – that many of those drawn into the Nazi Party and forming part of its leadership experienced the entire post-war period as a time of despair and hopelessness, that might draw them then to a promise of redemption. While it is undoubtedly correct that they felt ‘oppressed and persecuted’ in the wake of World War I, the Nazis and the German state that they controlled were also clearly the oppressors by the outbreak of the Second World War. This is countered somewhat by Vondung, in that he does state that the perception of oppression may be a ‘false interpretation’ while still maintaining that a person with an apocalyptic mindset ‘experiences the world as suffering and longs for redemption.’ This still implies a far more cohesive perspective than that argued by scholars like Jeffrey Herf, who noted in his detailed study of National Socialist propaganda that the Nazis ‘were able to entertain completely contradictory versions of events simultaneously, one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, and the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim.’

Vondung does caution that ‘Jewish and Christian visions of the apocalypse’ did not create ‘activists’ but rather led to ‘quietists,’ and that perhaps the consolation they experienced was that derived simply from ‘fantasies of revenge.’ This forms a stark contrast to either the Nazis or Communists, although both movements were held to be ‘political religions’ by Voegelin. While Vondung believes that ‘modern political apocalyptic movements’ drew on religious traditions but then ‘broke with their roots,’ there seems to be little other than analogy that is offered to support this interpretation. In a broad sense, it certainly is correct that notions of ‘destruction and renewal, of annihilation and redemption’ were core aspects of the Nazi Party, and that they saw ‘national salvation’ (Kershaw) as their major aim. But the desire to therefore see them as the modern incarnation of religious apocalyptic tradition involves such key conceptual shifts that one wonders whether the analogy suffices.

He identifies ‘modern apocalyptic movements’ as having ‘real violence’ because it is not God but rather ‘human beings’ that are meant to bring ‘salvation’ (whether it is a social class in ‘the Marxist drama of history’ or ‘race’ in Nazism) and states that the focus has shifted to an ‘earthly paradise’ rather than ‘a Heavenly Jerusalem.’ While Vondung relies on a general comparison to Judeo-Christian .apocalyptic traditions, there were also secular and even more specifically völkisch traditions within Germany that had already developed harrowing notions of a degenerate and decaying world that did not necessarily draw in any direct sense on Judeo-Christian tradition, but instead on notions of disconnected industrialised and urbanised populations – the ‘Asphalt-menschen’ as Goebbels and Feder disparagingly called them – or on concepts of Nordic ‘apocalypse’ as they existed within the idea of Ragnarok. For instance, Gottfried Feder used this in the official commentary on the Nazi Programme in order to explain view of the post-war period as ‘the twilight of the gods…[a] time of the wolf and the axe…fire falls from heaven and gods and men pass away,’ quoting the Norse Edda. In all fairness, this directly supports Vondung’s central argument: that leading Nazis viewed the world in an apocalyptic way. Yet it simultaneously indicates that we may be looking at the wrong apocalyptic framework if we turn to the Book of Daniel.

Vondung notes that Hitler and Rosenberg viewed the world in Manichean terms – with the Jews representing all evil and their destruction representing ‘salvation’ for the world. While this does not take account of Hitler’s views of a supposedly ‘racial’ group between these two (‘culture-bearers,’ as he put it in Mein Kampf) it certainly does fit with the broader writings and speeches of both men. Nonetheless, one feature that does not appear to be accounted for is that Hitler did not merely view the world as a great struggle between Aryans and Jews, but argued a racial-historical perspective akin to Houston Stewart Chamberlain. This tended to portray the victory of ‘Jews’ as a complete destruction of the world, an apocalyptic vision where ‘this planet will…move through the ether devoid of men’ (Mein Kampf), while believing that somehow the culture of the world had only ever been created by ‘Aryans’ and that ensuring no ‘blood intermixture’ would be sufficient for the world to continue as it was, rather than fundamentally changing. Put another way, this was not an approach that necessarily saw change or redemption, but mere survival and stasis as the best possible outcome – if ‘Aryans’ survived, so too did the world.

In this sense, the notion of the ‘apocalypse’ in political or secular terms is also fundamentally different. The destruction of the ‘old world’ in religious terms is often seen as a complete destruction leading to a ‘new world.’ Hitler and others in the Nazi Party did not really seem to be seeking a ‘new world’ but – in their view – simply survival of the ‘Aryans’ or possibly a return to an ‘old world’ in which the supposed ‘Aryan race’ dominated. It was their view that all great civilisations had been created by Aryans because they were understood as the only ‘race’ capable of creation. Hitler and Rosenberg were both very clear that ‘sin against the blood’ was the central facet of the downfall of such societies as Persia, Greece, or Rome (viewed in somewhat paradisical terms as ‘Aryan’ societies) so that it was not only a stark dualism that defined their world-view, but a fear of the blending of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ races that drove their agenda. This seems to draw their conceptual approach away from a purely ‘apocalyptic’ perspective to one that drew far more on scientific-rationalist notions relating to the early science of genetics. Vondung argues strongly for the Nazis as ‘apocalyptic’ because he believes that this is why Hitler (and others) thought that ‘unlimited violence against Jews [was] justified’ given the view that ‘Germany’s fate, indeed the fate of mankind, depends on the evil enemy being destroyed.’ He goes on to note that this was combined with the active demonisation of the Jews. Yet the Nazis did not simply use violence against the Jews, but against those they considered (on some levels) to be their own ‘race,’ and it is unclear whether the ‘apocalyptic vision’ can fully explain the kind of broader racial framework that antisemitism fitted within in Nazi ideology – ‘based upon the exclusion and extermination of all those deemed to be “alien,” “hereditarily ill” or “asocial”’ (Burleigh and Wippermann). This remains a core issue with arguing ‘religious phenomena’ should be applied to the Nazis as a political or ideological movement. If we become too focused on the notion of an apocalyptic ‘vision’ as the ‘only plausible explanation for the intention to destroy the Jews’ that it does not appear to deal adequately with the racial anxiety and even political or economic anxieties that were used to justify destroying the mentally ill as ‘ballast existences.’ If the first systematic destruction of life practiced by the Nazi state was aimed ‘within’ (through the T4 Aktion) and was based on eugenics concepts, then the question arises as to whether the notion of the ‘apocalypse’ as an explanatory framework is adequate to cover the ideas of racial salvation that drove Nazi violence. This remains unanswered in Vondung’s book, as the concept of ‘apocalypse’ is applied only to the destruction of the Jews.

Mommsen’s concepts of ‘cumulative radicalization’ and a gradual and changing process of antisemitic policy in Nazi Germany also appears to challenge the idea that an ‘apocalyptic vision’ is fundamental to explaining the destruction of the Jews. Vondung counters this by arguing that the process may have changed over time, but that the ‘general intention’ and justification for action was ‘the apocalyptic image of the evil enemy of mankind.’ Certainly he is correct that Hitler’s hatred of the Jews remained unchanged from the beginning of his political career, and that he consistently demonized the Jews as not only ‘vermin’ but a ‘racial tuberculosis.’ The challenge posed by Mommsen still remains a key issue, because at times figures like Hitler argued that the Nazis were combating a ‘racial illness,’ but their notions of how to (in the words of Hitler) ‘expel’ a ‘racial tuberculosis of the peoples’ might then vary (from the 1 April Boycott to purging Jews from the Civil Service; enacting Racial Laws through to the Shoah), whereas an ‘apocalyptic vision’ implies a far stronger intentionalist approach. In this regard, Vondung is very clear that such an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in itself is not sufficient to lead to actual violence and requires other factors, pointing out that there was ‘a broad spectrum of motives that led human beings to torment, persecute, and murder Jews.’ Yet he remains adamant that an ‘apocalyptic image’ was central to the Nazis’ approach, so that perpetrators of the Shoah at all levels ‘justified their actions by appealing to a system of values whose center is the apocalyptic world view of Hitler and other National Socialist leaders.’ Whether one agrees or disagrees with this perspective, the book certainly provides an interesting analysis and a thought-provoking consideration of whether key concepts of ‘religiosity’ are applicable to National Socialism.

 

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Review of Father Chester Fabisiak, S.J., Memories of a Devil: My Life as a Jesuit in Dachau

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of Father Chester Fabisiak, S.J., Memories of a Devil: My Life as a Jesuit in Dachau (Coppell, TX: Dr. Danuta B. Fabisiak, 2018). 430 Pp. ISBN: 978-1732117006.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Eight prisons, two forced labor camps, and finally, Dachau Concentration Camp. The young, newly ordained Jesuit priest, Father Chester Fabisiak, endured all of this between September 1939 and April 1945 when Dachau was liberated by Allied Forces. Father Fabisiak then continued his path as a Jesuit priest, serving for nearly twenty years in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, then serving another thirty more years in the United States of America. Arguably, the bulk of his adulthood was spent in relative freedom abroad, yet this memoir limits itself to the most dramatic and life-threatening aspects of what was then a young man’s experiences.

After the war’s end, Father Fabisiak was working as a missionary in Bolivia. There, many people expressed their curiosity about “the Phenomenon,” or, as we call it, the Holocaust. The Polish priest served as a living witness to the events his parishioners had only heard about over radio broadcasts or had read in newspapers. And many of them were skeptical: could such atrocities have truly been committed by human beings? How could something so obscene as the Holocaust have been possible? This reluctance to accept what had happened inspired Fabisiak to write down his experiences—not out of hatred for the enemy, but as a way of showing readers what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Each chapter is very brief, written like a vignette, allowing readers to move easily from one terrifying experience to the next. All of this was written with the intent of documenting the truth of Father Fabisiak’s fate when he was in the hands of the Nazis.

When war broke over Poland on 1 September 1939, the young Chester Fabisiak went repeatedly to volunteer to fight for his nation. His conscription was rejected each time, as his eyesight was terrible. He was warned by various people, including his ophthalmologist, that he should flee the city of Poznan and go into hiding. However, the young man had been ordained a Jesuit priest and his superior ordered all of the priests to stay put. The Superior believed wholeheartedly that Germans were so cultured, so well-educated and so sophisticated that they would not harm the Jesuits. This trust was misplaced and soon enough the Jesuits’ home was being plundered by the occupying authorities. Before the end of September, the brothers living in the Jesuit home had been arrested and their residence had been turned into an office of the Gestapo.

After being transported from the initial jail cell in Poznan, thirteen of the brothers were placed in homes that Jewish families had occupied. The Nazis took away the Jewish families and imprisoned the priests in two separate homes. From what Fabisiak could deduce, the Nazis had no idea what to do with their captive priests, so they left them in the two homes, under guard, but provided no food whatsoever. Father Fabisiak, through good fortune, was allowed to step out onto the back patio for a time when he heard a Polish woman’s voice asking if the priests needed food. She threw bread and sausages over the fence, also providing Fabisiak with the town’s name (Golina). The woman’s brave act of generosity saved the lives of the priests. Fabisiak, strengthened from the food, decided to take action to provide for his “family.” He made runs out of the house for food, which he then divided and delivered to the priests living in both houses. One of his brothers referred to Fabisiak as “more dangerous than the devil himself.” (19) Fabisiak, reflecting back on that comment, added, “but he did not know that one day this dangerous devil would be his salvation.” (20) This type of action, of risking his own life for the sake of others, served as a hallmark of Father Fabisiak throughout the rest of his life despite the allusions to being a devil.

Other prison transfers followed, with Father Fabisiak describing in detail the craven acts of his captors—Austrians, Volksdeutsche, and Poles, but his account also focuses on the stories of assistance granted to him and the other Jesuits.  There were times when Fabisiak was able to walk around somewhat freely, yet in a country occupied by Germans, it was only a matter of time before his freedom was taken from him once again. At one point, after being on the run, Fabisiak was denounced by a young Polish girl. He was accused of impersonating an ethnic German and ended up being interrogated by the Gestapo. As he was enduring a brutal whipping, Fabisiak came to realize the strength of his own character, refusing to utter a single word. For his insolence and refusal to cooperate with the Gestapo, the young priest was labelled as a thief and was sent to yet another cell awaiting his appearance before a judge.

Fabisiak’s account of the “trial” reveals the farce that Justice had become. His lawyer was not allowed to speak in his defense, the judge had already decided that Fabisiak was a thief and a liar, and so the sentencing was brief: off to serve an indeterminate time in a work camp, then on to a concentration camp. This led to yet another transfer to a jail in Zachthaus-Sieradz in 1940. During his time in Zachthaus-Sieradz, Fabisiak provides portraits of the various inmates who touched his life while sharing cell #13. Again and again, Father Fabisiak relates how various inmates came to respect his skills at thwarting their captors, referring to the theme of being a devil. One foul inmate, the hardened Mario, once told Fabisiak, “I suspected that you were a bad man, but now I see you are a devil.” (82) Devil, or not, Fabisiak helped to provide news of the outside world and obtain food for his cellmates while working as a barber, then later, as a secretary to the chief in the prison. Because Fabisiak could write in German Gothic Script, his skills allowed him to move into a slightly better situation, with a new set of prison clothes and even shoes. When the chief was being transferred, he offered to transfer Fabisiak with him to continue his office work. The Gestapo, however, intervened, and placed Fabisiak in a transport of prisoners sentenced to a work force in Ostrow (in western Poland).

After serving only a brief time in Ostrow, Fabisiak was sent, with no shoes, to work on a farm in a town called Ronau. The work was brutal—the prisoners had summer attire on, most had no appropriate shoes and it was November. Forced to dig frozen soil, beaten by whips, the prisoners were further punished with reduced rations each time they failed to meet the expected quotas of the day. The chief German announced to the starving, overworked men, the cure: “Those who cannot work have no right to live.” (104) Fabisiak notes after this, “We had a choice: die a little later in the work camp or die instantly under the brutal blows and kicks of the chief…” (104) This workforce was then transferred to Kotzine where Fabisiak was reunited with the man he had worked for as a secretary. This chief became Fabisiak’s protector and this relationship saved Fabisiak’s life. He was exempted from the exhausting work of digging canals, and instead spent his days cutting wood into long sticks while he looked across a field of wildflowers to a forest.

With the forest being so tantalizing close, the prisoners often dreamt of running to the woods to escape. Two men did try to escape but both met their end—with the chief providing the grisly details of the capture, wounds, and execution of one of the men. Along with this horrifying experience, Fabisiak encountered a German soldier who claimed to be a pastor. The soldier-pastor had volunteered to join the army because he thought the sacrifices of being a missionary were not “worth it.” (123) He warned Fabisiak to stop being a priest, predicting that once the war had ended, “priests would no longer exist.” (123) In the pastor-soldier’s mind, the Germans would win the war, thus defeating Christianity. Then the new religion would be German culture, with Hitler as their God. (124) Following this vignette, Fabisiak recalls how local Volksdeutsche farmers would yell and throw rocks at the prisoners as they marched to and from work details. Fabisiak then muses, “Their feelings of German superiority had poisoned and separated these families from the rest of the world. From these houses, young men were being recruited into the German army. With such hatred toward other human beings, they were no longer Catholic families, or religious families of any kind. Hitler’s ideas had deeply penetrated them, promising universal control and complete superiority over any individuals unlucky enough to not belong to their race of ‘supermen.’ They were being cultivated to have brutal instincts and to annul any morality other than their own splendid future of being Germans.” (125-126)

At the beginning of 1941, Father Fabisiak was moved on Gestapo orders to a jail in the city of Lodz. Officials in the prison presented Fabisiak with a choice: sign a document which denied his Polish ancestry (and changed him to an ethnic German) albeit a German with a long list of immoral crimes attached to his name. Father Fabisiak, despite their threats and shoves, refused to deny his Polish heritage and so he was left to contemplate his fate in the prison. He explains how on each Saturday afternoon, the prison guards would come to the cells demanding that all Jews and priests present themselves. The prisoners who had been housed there understood that if a Jew or priest did present themselves, they would be taken out to a courtyard and forced to sing and dance and be mocked by their captors. Fabisiak recalls that those Saturday afternoons were filled with anxiety, not knowing whether one was going to be pulled out of their cell, and, he also remembers that the German guards took great delight in these humiliations, noting, “For the Germans, those were days that were entirely appropriate and natural, days when they could enjoy the suffering of innocent men and behave exactly like who they were: first-class demons.” (143)

On March 14, 1941 at 11:00 p.m. Father Fabisiak was put on a train from the hellish prison in Lodz. The prisoners were provided with a small loaf of bread and a little piece of cheese. Five people occupied the space; as there was not enough room for all five people to sit at the same time, they took turns sitting and standing. The group was guarded by a Polish guard, who often left their train door open to allow air in for the five prisoners. To Fabisiak and his fellow travelers, the trip had the air of a happy journey, believing that their next place of imprisonment might be better. The train stopped at Dachau and Fabisiak noted, “We were immediately converted from a group of men into a group of animals.” (149)

His depiction of the screaming of the guards, the blows hitting all of the prisoners, and the general chaos of the situation is palpable.  Father Fabisiak takes his readers along with him into the bathhouse, where the men were stripped naked, shaved, hit with streams of icy cold water followed by the sting of disinfectant; the shivering, starving men were further humiliated by their guards. Then it was on to quarantine for two weeks, all while being punished and threatened by the block leader (kapo) whose only task was to instruct and intimidate the new prisoners in the life of the camp. Once the period of quarantine ended, Father Fabisiak was assigned to a barracks and to work details including constructing roads, assisting bricklayers, and shoveling snow without shovels; all of which further weakened him physically. As Fabisiak put it, he felt no need to work for Hitler, but the law of the camp was “One who does not work cannot live.” (177) Along the way Fabisiak befriended a Protestant pastor, a communist diehard, and many others who he vividly sketches for his readers.

As he details the ins and outs of how Dachau functioned from a prisoner’s perspective, Fabisiak’s willingness to take risks is amazing. He decided one day to slip through a window of an empty barracks, climb under the bunks and go to sleep. On another occasion he refused to say that he had had sexual relations with women (for the promise of gaining a cushy job) and despite his refusal and threats to beat him, he stayed true to his principles. He also never lost an opportunity when it presented itself; in one instance, after cleaning the soldiers’ room and collecting the leftover food from their breakfast, he was able to smuggle the bits of food back to the priests’ barracks. When the barrack’s kapo saw what Father Fabisiak had been able to bring back he remarked, “Some time ago, I heard you were a devil, and now I see you are worse than a devil.” (182) The kapo then smiled and let Prisoner 29697 go past him.

As the days passed in Dachau, Father Fabisiak shares bits and pieces of stories about the other inmates he encountered, seeking to capture the diversity of the prisoners housed in the camp. He details one of the Roma prisoners, the tireless work of inmates in the infirmary, his encounters with Russian POWs, an English POW, a Hungarian Jew, a Greek young man, a Jewish bread thief, etc. In each of these chapters, Fabisiak shares his shrewd insight into the character of each man, assessing where they stood in relationship to God (if at all), and how these experiences with such diverse men influenced his growth as a human being. One particularly moving story featured a Catholic German man, imprisoned for ten years in Dachau. Fellow prisoners organized a jubilee to mark the date of the man’s 10th year in prison. The old man cried, tears streaming down his face, and Fabisiak reflected on the event, noting, “Somehow, their hearts remained alive and unbroken.” (213) But, despite the positive sketches, Father Fabisiak did not shy away from sharing the brutal reality of the camp. This is underscored in his chapter about a very young Polish boy, Zbyszek, who having been in Dachau from a tender age, learned that he must kill other prisoners in order to survive himself. He had been trained to “care” for the ill, which in reality meant that he was to administer lethal injections to end a patient’s life. Zbyszek’s hatred of Polish priests brought out the worst of his character, shouting obscenities, never showing remorse for his brutality and certainly displaying that he had no conscience—until one day when Zbyszek administered a syringe to a young Italian man. As the young man died, he cried out for his mother in such a way that Zbyszek stood pale and petrified, softly saying, “I also have a mother.” (218) The young Polish “nurse with the syringe” disappeared from the infirmary that day, never to kill another patient again.

Fabisiak also provides the harsh details of the system of punishments at Dachau, the awful reality that the beatings and other punishments were public so that human suffering was a part of daily life in the camp. He also recalls the building of a new, mysterious building, that only later, once construction had ended, did the men who built the structure come to discover that they had built a gas chamber. Once the facility was complete, the only remaining piece of the puzzle was to test the chamber’s effectiveness. Twenty young men from one of the barracks were brought in, told that they were “lucky” because they were inaugurating the new bathhouse.  Other prisoner-inmates continued to be experimented on in the gas chamber. Fabisiak recalls the arrival of many Italian-Jewish families rounded up by the Nazis, how the authorities lied to the unsuspecting Jews (who mistakenly believed that since Italy was an ally of Germany, nothing bad would happen to them), telling them to bring all of their valuables with them during the “evacuation.” Once the Jewish families realized what was happening, many panicked, swallowing as many of their valuables as they could. Fabisiak records, “The Jews were clever, but the Germans were relentless.” (250) What followed was a scene of drawn out terror, some Jews were taken for X-rays to detect if they had swallowed valuables, others were administered strong doses of laxatives. The Germans picked through feces to dig out any final valuables. “Once this process was complete, the Jews had no more value to the German nation…. Dispossessed of all their belongings and riches, they stopped being men and became Jewish dogs.” (251) The gas chamber would be the final stop for these families and countless other victims.

From his time in Dachau, Father Fabisiak’s depictions and reflections reveal his concern with living according to Christian principles and what can happen when mankind abandons those moral principles for the ideology of Social Darwinism and Nazism. At the time of Dachau’s liberation, 29 April 1945, Father Fabisiak noted that out of the 85 Polish priests he knew at the camp, only 30 were still alive.  As the survivors were left to reconstruct their lives and try to search for some meaning of these years of terror and absolute brutality, one passage stands out. Father Fabisiak is remarking on the rapaciousness of the Germans, how they were not content to ransack everything that was of value, “they wanted torn laces, old shoes, worn utensils, clothing with holes, like a band of poor housewives trying to prepare a family breakfast ‘feast.’ They threw themselves over other people’s goods and their misery as if they were dying of hunger and thirst. I remember, at this time, the Lager Fuehrer Redwitz—a barrack boss who was somewhat kind and who watched over us—holding some of these useless objects in his hands and saying, “What the hell is this for?”[italics added] (264) Perhaps Redwitz’s question could be applied in a broader sense to the years of suffering at the hands of the Nazi regime: what the hell was it all for?  Father Fabisiak, attempting to chronicle the years of torment, shows the reader who the real devils were and repeats his motto, “Live only for today, and be peaceful on this day.” That motto helped save Father Fabisiak and countless others he encountered on his journey.

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Review of David Rice, I Will Not Serve: The Priest Who Said NO to Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of David Rice, I Will Not Serve: The Priest Who Said NO to Hitler (Dublin: Mentor Books, 2018). ISBN: 978-1-912514-04-5.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

In the early morning hours of August 21, 1942, Austrian priest Franz Reinisch was executed by the Nazi regime for “subversion of the military force” (a literal translation of the German term Wehrkraftzersetzung). His specific crime was refusing to swear the oath of loyalty required of all German soldiers when called up, which included explicit language about rendering “unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces.” Reinisch’s response was not so much pacifism or even conscientious objection, which is a refusal to perform military service (this has not stopped segments representing both groups from claiming him as a hero). He made very clear that he would have willingly served the German people or a different government, and that he believed in the fight against Bolshevism. Rather, he was absolutely unwilling to give an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler, whom he viewed as a monster verging on the Antichrist. As such, he was the only Catholic priest in the Third Reich who refused his call-up order, and the only priest executed for this.[1] Irish journalist David Rice brings us the story of this remarkable, and anomalous, individual.

This is not a typical academic monograph. Students or scholars looking for a rigorous critical examination of Reinisch and his environment, with careful documentation of the evidence, will be disappointed. Rice’s judgment of his subject his balanced – he depicts Reinisch as a flawed human whose strength of will was extraordinary but who also clearly had his faults – but his sympathy for Reinisch is tangible. Rice does not provide consistent citations, though occasionally he will clarify a term or refer to a source for a quotation. His “source books”, listed at the end in (seemingly) random rather than alphabetical order, contain relevant scholarship on Reinisch in both English and German, but is not exhaustive on any given subject, indicates no archival research, and includes references whose impact on the text are unclear. For instance, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, and Heinz Höhne’s The Order of the Death’s Head are all mentioned, but do not appear nor are they alluded to in the main text. What scholars are likely to find most problematic, though, is the style in which Rice chooses to write: in an interview with The Irish Examiner, Rice explains, “I didn’t want it to be a history book. I wanted to write it like a film script, so that you could see things happening. I couldn’t be a fly on the wall, but I tried to get inside the protagonist’s head, and I took on Joyce’s and Proust’s stream of consciousness.”[2] Thus much of the book is either conversational, as Rice reconstructs exchanges that Reinisch allegedly had with family members, friends, other priests, and representatives of the Nazi regime, or introspective, as Rice attempts to convey Reinisch’s mental state and thought processes about Nazism and his decision to refuse the oath. The dialogue, delivered in present tense, can be doubly jarring for the historian, both for its intended emotional resonance as well as for its unconventionality. Studies that claim to be “based on historical fact and painstakingly researched” (back cover) simply do not usually include the following kind of verse:

‘But here’s the thing you must remember: your Church – my Church, indeed (I’m a Catholic myself) – has not spoken against military service. And more than that, the attitude of your superiors flatly contradicts yours. Their wish and orders are for you to serve. Can you go against that?’

‘That’s what bothers me the most -’

‘You’ve got to keep in mind the interests of the Church itself, of your order, indeed of your family. They’ll all be terribly damaged by your refusing the oath. And by your execution, which will certainly follow.’

‘I’m aware that I am going to be shot for this -’

‘I hate to have to tell you, Father, that you’re not going to be shot.’

‘I’m not -?’

‘Shooting is for soldiers. You’re going to be beheaded.  You see, you’ll be a criminal, not a soldier. I’m afraid it’s the Fallbeil for you – the guillotine.’

Franz stares at him. Then, with a hand to his mouth, he lurches towards the open window and vomits. And vomits until there is nothing left to vomit. (215-216; emphasis in original)

The passage is vivid, the dilemma stark, the protagonist immediately sympathetic. But for the reviewer, considering the author’s explicit intentions and the book’s format and style, it is difficult to know which standards to apply. I Will Not Serve might be treated as a piece of investigative journalism by an award-winning and acclaimed journalist and author; it might also be judged historical fiction or fictionalized history, depending on the reviewer’s perspective and mood. The WorldCat database categorizes it under “World War, 1939-1945 – Religious Aspects – Catholic Church” and “Reinisch, Franz”, indicating its important historical and biographical dimensions. I will scrutinize the book according to two measures: the historical accuracy of the text itself, and the utility of trying “to get inside [Reinisch’s] head” for readers interested in religious history (and this newsletter).

In his interview with the Irish Examiner, Rice mentions his background in German (Languages and Literature), which enabled him to translate material by and about Reinisch that he received from “an order” in “a diocese in Germany.” He does not provide either name, but one might assume the diocese to be Trier, where Schönstatt is located – although Reinisch was a Pallottine priest who was ordained in Innsbruck, he was also a member of the Schönstatt apostolic movement founded by Pallottine priest, and mentor of Reinisch, Josef Kentenich (who would himself survive three years in Dachau). Rice declares, “Reinisch took to the Schönstatt spirituality as if he were born to it” (92). Thus the reader can assume the author’s access to personal documentation written by Reinisch himself, including his diaries, but is left to wonder exactly which excerpts are drawn from this documentation, which ones Rice has embellished, and which are more or less inferred or fabricated. Establishing historical accuracy insofar as Reinisch’s statements are concerned is thus a frustrating enterprise. On the grander brushstrokes of biographical and historical context – Reinisch’s early life and family in the Tyrol, the history of Nazism, the history of the Pallottines, Father Kentenich and the Schönstatter movement – Rice treads more stable ground, if only because he stays close to what scholars accept as common knowledge. Reinisch had a wild spell as a young man before deciding on the priesthood. He suffered from regular bouts of ill health. He doubted his vocation on more than one occasion and gave forceful, opinionated sermons that likely played a role in his frequent transfers from diocese to diocese in both Austria and Germany. Long before the 1938 Anschluss he was a convinced and open opponent of Nazism and its leader, to whom he referred more than once as the “shit-brown Führer.” At a conference in Mannheim in December 1935, he reminded his listeners, “The Jesus on [the] cross is the world’s great apostle, who lived and bled for all the world. For all the world, I say. He died for all, and that includes the Jews” (107; emphasis in original). In Salzburg in early 1937, in another sermon, he said, “Satan is loose in Germany. I know. I’ve been there and I’ve seen it” (128). In 1940 the Gestapo formally forbade him from preaching.

Beyond these brushstrokes, the critical reader will have trouble determining what to trust as authentic. Rice relates a conversation as early as 1925 between Reinisch and another of his priestly mentors, his “de facto spiritual director” Richard Weickgenannt, responsible for interesting Reinisch in the Pallottines. When Weickgenannt brings up the subject of Hitler and Nazi racism, Reinisch replies, “Anyhow the churches would take a stand against such nonsense, wouldn’t they? I mean, Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he?” (55) When Weickgennant argues, justifiably, that antisemitism in the Catholic Church was much broader and ongoing than a few “bigoted individuals” (56 – Rice puts these words in Reinisch’s mouth), Reinisch is initially affronted. That Reinisch had a quick temper is apparent in other biographies, and that the Catholic Church has a long history of anti-Jewish and antisemitic beliefs and behaviours is incontrovertible. But here one wonders exactly what the documentation shows and what Rice has invented to illustrate that quick temper as well as Church history: did Reinisch speak so explicitly as early as the mid-1920s on the subject? Was he an unusual enough Catholic to defend Jesus’s Jewish origins but not astute enough to recognize the antisemitism in his own church?

Later in the text Reinisch encounters a friend of his from childhood, Anton Loidl, who chose to fall in with the Nazi regime and became a member of the SS-Einsatzgruppen. In mid-October 1941, he seeks out Reinisch while on leave and confesses his crimes, delineating in some detail his involvement in the mass shooting of Jewish men, women, and children on the Eastern Front. He asks Reinisch for forgiveness, as a penitent to a priest, but Reinisch refuses out of disgust and horror: “You’re a child of Satan. You – are – evil. Like Cain, you’re accursed on this earth. He only killed one – you’ve slaughtered hundreds – thousands by now. You are cursed beyond redemption.” He changes his mind the next day, but only after the intercession of a nun. We are told that Loidl transferred to the Wehrmacht and was later killed in battle (192-193; emphasis in original).

Again, the passage mixes the verifiable with the unverifiable: it is not incredulous that Reinisch might have known someone who was involved in mass shooting; the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen, who had been formed by Reinhard Heydrich in the aftermath of the Anschluss, were filled with Austrians. Nor is it unlikely that priests, both serving as chaplains with the Wehrmacht as well as stationed in parishes on the home front, might have heard confessions that included admissions of responsibility for participating in atrocities and war crimes, though the seal of the confessional prevents us as scholars from knowing definitively what these confessions might have contained, what penance was given, whether absolution was granted.  What we cannot authenticate is Rice’s presentation: that Reinisch knew someone personally in the Einsatzgruppen, that that person confessed to him about his role in mass shootings, that Reinisch reacted by withholding absolution citing a lack of true remorse (but also, his temper). Perhaps Rice found notes about this encounter in Reinisch’s diary but he does not relay this to his audience. Rice gives us a full name – Anton Loidl – so it seems unlikely that he would have fabricated an individual and given him such a story.[3] But considering his explication about getting into Reinisch’s head, and of writing Reinisch’s story more like a film than like a history text, the reviewer is left to conclude that Rice may have exaggerated some or most of an actual incident to make for a more dramatic scene in which Reinisch learns of the genocide and has to decide how to act, as a human but also as a priest, vis-à-vis a perpetrator.

Many of the dialogic passages will lead readers to these same questions. So one will have to decide to what extent these passages render the book untrustworthy in its entirety. Initially I was inclined to treat I Will Not Serve as a half-step removed from historical fiction: Rice cites his sources, but does not convey how he has used them, and has, quite literally, put words into the mouths of his subjects. But as I began to construct the review I was reminded of another book that I taught in a class last semester, and the controversy it aroused when a historian dared to embark on a somewhat similar enterprise. Natalie Zemon Davis published The Return of Martin Guerre in 1983, a story about the trial of an imposter in sixteenth-century France that centers significantly on the imposter’s wife: what she knew, when she knew it, whether she played a role in the imposter’s deception. Zemon Davis candidly recounted in the introduction that, where her sources fell short in preserving evidence about her subjects, “I did my best through other sources from the period and place to discover the world they would have seen and the reactions they might have had. What I offer you here is in part my invention.”[4] When the book instigated considerable controversy about her methodology, leading another historian to charge her with fabrication and anachronism, she responded, “my whole book… is an exploration of the problem of truth and doubt…. ‘In historical writing, where does reconstruction stop and invention begin?’ is precisely the question I hoped readers would ask and reflect on.”[5]

The comparison is not entirely without friction: Rice’s “stream of consciousness” is not quite at the level of Zemon Davis’s studied inventions. She is a trained historian and was both thorough and rigorous in her explanation of sources, where she found them, and how she used them; Rice is a journalist (he also holds a degree in sociology) and, as already explained, he lists his sources but otherwise gives no indication as to how he has used them, and does not mention at all the primary-source documentation he received about Reinisch in Germany. Zemon Davis does not recount conversations in her text, though she sometimes speculates about what might have been said between the protagonists or how the trial unfolded (she had different accounts of the trial on which to base this speculation). Most of Rice’s chapters are centered around dialogue, either between Reinisch and another person, or within Reinisch himself, relaying his considerable struggle to reconcile himself with the ramifications of abjuring the oath. Likely Rice has evidence of this internal conflict since he was able to use Reinisch’s personal papers, which almost certainly included such indications. But again, the reader does not know for certain.

Beyond these significant concerns, a reviewer might take issue with other, more minor aspects of the book. Rice begins each chapter with an epigraph, most of which are about conscience, from sources ranging widely from Hermann Göring to Mahatma Gandhi. None are cited, nor are sources for the epigraphs clearly listed in his source list. The cover is also awkward, featuring a small black-and-white photo of Reinisch (which we learn in the text is undated, but likely from his last years before he was arrested and executed) that is dominated by a larger photo of Hitler in his later years, a swastika in the background, in red and yellow tones. Cover designs are usually decided by the publisher, but surely the author might have pointed out the irony that Reinisch, the subject about whom he’s written so meaningfully, is literally dwarfed by Hitler, the man who Reinisch believed was a criminal and even the personification of evil, and the reason that Reinisch was executed.

So there is a lot in this book that should concern a careful, critical reader searching for historical evidence about Franz Reinisch. Perhaps a casual reading attitude is more appropriate to fully appreciate the text. In my opinion, however, even the critical reader should consider Rice’s contribution to the growing literature about Reinisch carefully. To this point it is the only book-length treatment in English of Reinisch. This is also a labour of personal passion. In his interviews with various Irish press outlets, Rice is clearly inspired by Reinisch’s commitment to his conscience even when most of his world was against him (the Pallottines threatened to expel him if he did not recant his refusal to swear the oath; one of his last acts before his execution, as Rice relates, was to encourage the Father Provincial to do this to save anyone from guilt by association – the letter is printed seemingly in its entirety on p. 260-261). His conscientious delineation of Reinisch’s spirituality, and of the way his beliefs formed and transformed him over a period of several years, contains both important historical notes about different faith movements in Germany and Reinisch’s role in them, notably the Schönstatter movement, as well as the portrayal of an extraordinary individual’s commitment to faith and to his conscience.[6] It is a powerful portrait of one of the Catholic Church’s true martyrs, a German spiritual leader (one of the very few) who took a public stand against Nazism, and paid for it with his life. Reinisch himself deserves broader recognition beyond Germany, particularly as the process of his canonization is ongoing,[7] and Rice’s contribution is likely to facilitate that recognition.

Notes:

[1] My earlier research on Catholics who refused military service found very few examples of conscientious objection, under which I included Franz Reinisch; he was the only priest who refused, although there were at least two other members of lay religious communities. For a complete list, see Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), pg. 114 n5 and pg. 252.

[2] Sue Leonard, “The priest whose faith decided his fate: execution by the Nazis” (interview with David Rice) in The Irish Examiner, September 8, 2018, https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-30867560.html#:~:text=David%20Rice%2C%20whose%20book%2C%20I,align%20himself%20with%20the%20Nazis (last accessed March 2, 2021).

[3] Pandemic-related restrictions and closures prohibited me from trying to document Anton Loidl in written sources; I could unearth nothing about him online. These restrictions also prevented me from accessing German-language biographies of Reinisch, available to me only through interlibrary loan, which is operating but on a much reduced basis. So I could not cross-reference Loidl there, either.

[4] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983), 5. Emphasis added.

[5] Natalie Zemon Davis, “On the Lame”, part of the AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre, in The American Historical Review 93/3 (June 1988), 572.

[6] In this manner Reinisch provokes comparisons with another Catholic Austrian who was executed for his refusal to answer his military service call-up: Franz Jägerstätter, who identified Reinisch as a role model and was executed in 1943. I reviewed a recent film about Jägerstätter, A Hidden Life, in the September 2020 issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly.

[7] The beatification process, the first step towards canonization, began in April 2013 and was concluded in June 2019. I have been unable to find any current updates about the next stage. Knowing this as I read the book, the remark in Rice’s book that Reinisch allegedly makes during his last meeting with the Tegel prison chaplain, Heinrich Kreutzberg, less than two weeks before his execution, is particularly ironic: “Don’t you try to make a saint out of me!” (260)

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Research Report: Ben Goossen on Mennonites, Nazism, and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Research Report: Ben Goossen on Mennonites, Nazism, and the Holocaust

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Since the publication of his widely acclaimed history of Mennonite identity, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), Ben Goossen has published a fascinating series of short articles on the collaborative blog “Anabaptist Historians.” Collectively, these posts offer a disturbing window into the complicity of Mennonites in the Nazi occupation of the East and the Holocaust in Ukraine and South Russia.

Most recently, in January 2021, Goossen posted “How a Nazi Death Squad Viewed Mennonites,” drawing on documentation from Einsatzgruppe C to describe how Nazi mobile killing units who engaged in the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine reacted when they came across welcoming Mennonites in the region which included the Chortitza settlement: “The murder team immediately began integrating these ethnic Germans into its operations, distributing Jewish plunder and placing trusted men in positions of local authority.” Goossen goes on to discuss the interpretation of Nazi documentation and also explores the case of Amalie Reimer, a Mennonite women who spied for the Soviets then appealed to the Nazis for protection–successfully, for a time. Finally, he turns to a consideration of the ways Mennonites were drawn into the Holocaust, using the slaughter of Jews in Zaporizhzhia, near Chortitza, as an example.

In “How to Catch a Mennonite Nazi” (October 2020), Goossen details his painstaking research into the backstory of Heinrich Hamm, a Mennonite refugee from Ukraine who ended up as an employee of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in a refugee camp in Germany. In his account of his experience of displacement and flight, written in 1947 when he was 54, Hamm portrays himself as a victim of Nazism, like many Mennonites did. Mennonites like Hamm were portrayed as “un-Nazi and un-nationalistic,” yet Goossen retraces his journey from Ukraine to the Baltic region, Denmark, and Germany, showing how he condemned “Jewish-Bolshevik rule” in Russia and praised the Nazi “liberation from the Jewish yoke of Bolshevism.” (This was written around the time Hamm lived in Dnepropetrovsk, within a month of the murder of ten thousand Jews there.) Goossen explains how Hamm misrepresented other aspects of his wartime experiences, downplaying his connections to Nazism and his involvement in the exploitation of Jewish forced labourers. Ultimately, he became “a paid employee and spokesperson” for the MCC in Germany.

In August 2020, Goossen posted “Himmler’s Mennonite Midwife,” using material from the newly published diaries of Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of German Police, to explore this leading Nazi’s connections to Mennonites. In his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Ethnic Stock, Himmler was eager to work with Mennonites, who the Nazis considered especially racially pure. (Goossen writes extensively on this in Chosen Nation.) In “Himmler’s Mennonite Midwife,” Goossen explains how Himmler sought to meet with “the leading representative of Mennonites in the Third Reich, Benjamin Unruh.” In fall 1942, the two met, and Himmler passed on greetings to Unruh from a Frau Helene Berg, long “a pillar of the Molotschna Mennonite colony in southeastern Ukraine.” The post details the interest of Himmler in Mennonites as the foundation of German colonization in Ukraine, and the ways Mennonites benefitted from the Holocaust and Nazi imperialism.

In “Mennonite War Crimes Testimony at Nuremberg” (December 2019), Goossen explains that “Mennonite leaders and others affiliated with the church actively repressed evidence of Nazi collaboration and Holocaust participation,” demonstrating his case using the testimony of Benjamin Unruh and Franziska Reimers at trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg after the war:

Benjamin Unruh’s postwar claims of helping Jews and of opposing genocide are not supported by the extensive correspondence preserved in his personal papers, government archives, or other sources. In fact, he appears to have hastened the turn toward extreme antisemitism in Mennonite church organizations in the Third Reich. Unruh contributed financially to the SS already in 1933, and in the same year, he personally quashed a request by two Jewish physicians for Mennonite help in leaving Germany. During the Second World War, Unruh collaborated with various Nazi agencies to aid Mennonites while these same offices expropriated and murdered Jews and others.

As for Reimers, she vouched for the character of a member of Einsatzkommando 6–one of the the mobile killing units slaughtering Jews in Ukraine. She benefitted from the protection and aid of this unit, but pretended not to know much of the Holocaust that was unfolding around Kryvyi Rih and Chortitza, her home.

Another of Goossen’s fine posts is “Mennonites and the Waffen-SS” (June 2019), in which he explores the subject of Mennonite perpetration in the Holocaust, but examining Mennonites in the Waffen-SS (Armed-SS), and particularly a cavalry regiment of 700 men from the Halbstadt colony in Ukraine. Heinrich Himmler’s Special Commando R (“R” for Russia), drawn from Mennonites in Halbstadt,  was tasked with offering welfare to ethnic Germans in the region, but also partnered with Einsatzkommandos and thus “participated in the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews and other victims across Eastern Europe.” It was also engaged in partisan warfare in the region, and in other aspects of the war further afield. Goossen concludes:

The history of the Halbstadt cavalry regiment demonstrates the involvement of Ukraine’s Mennonites in the machinations of the Waffen-SS during the German occupation of Eastern Europe. Mennonites’ induction into this organization and their activities within it reflected the broader maneuverings of the Nazi war machine and the fate of the Eastern Front. Little of this context has survived in collective Mennonite memory. After the war, Mennonite refugees in war-torn Germany had strong incentives to deny involvement in war crimes, a process aided by church organizations. Most notably, the North America-based Mennonite Central Committee told tales of innocence while helping to transport refugees, including former Waffen-SS members, to Paraguay and Canada. Coming to terms with Mennonite participation in the Third Reich’s atrocities remains a task for the denomination.

“Hitler’s Mennonite Physicist” (March 2019) discusses the work of Abraham Esau, the Mennonite who “headed the Nazi nuclear program during much of the Second World War.” Goossen explains his journey into the Nazi Party and his rise to the top of nuclear physics. Captured by the Americans and then imprisoned in the Netherlands, Esau later took advantage of the willingness of MCC workers to believe a fellow Mennonite, and once released, received aid from the organization. Eventually, he took up a university position in Aachen, Germany, though not without controversy, since other leading scientists knew he was tainted by his Nazi past.

Finally, or perhaps I should say “first,” in December 2018, Goossen posted “The Kindergarten and the Holocaust,” in which he described a Mennonite Kindergarten in Einlage, Ukraine. This “Nazi showpiece” was refurbished by military engineers and SS agents, because of the high number of young Mennonite children in the area with “German blood.” Nazi papers profiled the Kindergarten, and Goossen demonstrates how these kinds of sources open a window into Mennonite daily life under Nazi occupation. As Goossen describes it:

The same agencies that liquidated Jews provided aid to Mennonites. Their backdrop was total war. Thousands starved across Ukraine, and the land was pocked with barely-covered mass graves. But Nazi administrators wanted “ethnic Germans” to live happy and whole. “Blossom-white are the dresses and the head coverings of the women and the girls,” remarked one visitor of a Sunday in Chortitza. Another crowed: “The simple church is no longer a movie theater as in Bolshevik times.” Both Chortitza and Halbstadt played host to triumphal delegations of the Third Reich’s leading Nazis, including enormous rallies for Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg.

He concludes, noting that–in contrast to the “blood-soaked pits virtually a stone’s throw away”–Nazi officials highlighted the Einlage Kindergarten in their propaganda, and intended it “to show Nazism’s radiant potential.”

These seven blog posts–short articles, really, for they are well-researched with copious citation–offer profound insights into the significant relationships between Mennonite individuals and communities and the Nazi forces which conquered and occupied Ukraine. Mennonites collaborated, benefitted, and then obfuscated their knowledge of and participation in the Holocaust.

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Webinar Announcement: The Opening of the Pius XII Archive and Holocaust Research

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Webinar Announcement: The Opening of the Pius XII Archive and Holocaust Research

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The American Catholic Historical Association is holding a webinar entitled “The Opening of the Pius XI Archive and Holocaust Research,” on March 10, 2021, at 7:00 pm ET. Presenters include 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 register, visit achahistory.org/webinar.

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Call for Editors

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Call for Editors

The editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly would like to invite applications for up to five new positions on the editorial team. We would welcome scholars who specialize in our core mandate of reviewing literature and providing news and commentary on the history of the German churches in the Nazi era, as well as those whose interests would help us broaden our reach geographically into other parts of Europe and/or chronologically into the whole of the twentieth century. Scholars from all career stages are welcome to apply.

Editors are expected to review at least one book each year, and make other shorter contributions as well (article notes, conference reports, research updates, etc.). The journal’s language is English, but those who write in German will have their work translated. Editorial terms are three years, and renewable. Application is by letter, which may be sent to Kyle Jantzen at kjantzen@ambrose.edu by April 30, 2021. Please put “CCHQ editor application” in the subject line.

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Letter from the Editors (December 2020)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 4 (December 2020)

Letter from the Editors (December 2020)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

This is just a short note to explain that, due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the work many of us do in academia, we are not able to bring you the December 2020 issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Our publication will resume in March 2021.

With best wishes,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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Letter from the Editors (September 2020)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Letter from the Editors (September 2020)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Once again it is a pleasure to offer you our newest series of articles, reviews, and notes concerning the recent history of the churches in Germany and Europe. The beginning of the fall semester in North America and Europe has made for an especially busy season for many full-time academics, and so we are grateful for the many fine contributions of our editorial team.

Two articles headline this issue. Manfred Gailus explains the politics behind  three construction projects in Berlin–the Berlin Palace, the Garrison Church in Potsdam, and the House of One–which weave together religious, political, and nostalgic elements. Samuel Koehne highlights a series of primary sources on the Hitler Youth, which demonstrate (among other things) the deep antipathy of that movement towards Christianity.

Memorial plaque for Franz Jägerstätter, documenting his death by hanging on account of his opposition to an unjust war. By Christian Michelides – Christian Michelides, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42007683

Under the category of reviews, Kevin P. Spicer assesses Lucia Scherzberg’s new study of National Socialist priests in Austria and Germany. Victoria J. Barnett reviews Manfred Gailus’ book on Friedrich Weißler, the Jewish-Christian lawyer and member of the Confessing Church whose death was the result of his involvement in the publication of the 1936 Confessing Church memorandum to Hitler. And Lauren Faulkner Rossi reviews the critically acclaimed film A Hidden Life, by Terrence Malick, which depicts the story of Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer whose objections to the Nazi regime and its war cost him his life.

Finally, a series of notes by Heath A. Spencer, Doris L. Bergen, and Samuel Koehne describe new research on Roman Catholic voting in the late Weimar era, Nazi views on religion, the Romanian fascist cleric Liviu Stan, and the German army’s treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were conscientious objectors. We have also provided a link to the English translation of the recent statement of the German Bishops Conference, “The German bishops in the World War.”

Our hope is that you find these articles, reviews, and notes to be both interesting and informative, and we wish you health and safety in the coming season.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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Fierce Culture Wars Over Three Construction Projects in the German Capital Region

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Fierce Culture Wars Over Three Construction Projects in the German Capital Region

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

Dr. Manfred Gailus is an expert on the history of the Berlin churches during the Nazi era and regularly writes about the ongoing impact of that history on the current religious, ecclesiastical, and political scene in the German capital, where he lives and works.

Three historically significant architectural projects in the Berlin-Brandenburg capital region have been the subject of heated public disputes for years. Unmistakenly restorative and in part explicitly religious-political, they exemplify a problematic cultural policy. In their origins, all three projects exhibit common or similar structural features, indicating that this concerns more than simple and singular architectural reconstruction projects. All three construction projects were initially announced as private or small-group campaigns financed by donations, but were unable to raise the necessary financial resources for realization. The protagonists then proceeded to appeal to public bodies (the Federal Republic of Germany, the Berlin Senate as state government, the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (EKBO)), effectively forcing these state and church bodies to help bring these lofty project ideas to fruition by massive financial grants. In all three cases, in fact, the project implementation only got off the ground through subsidies from public and church funds (tax money, church tax money). In all three projects, the same or similar interwoven networks of denominational and political figures played and still play an essential role. In addition, partly anonymous donors (private donors, associations, etc.) can buy their way into the design of the emerging buildings through large donations and thus write their private wishes, preferences, and motives into the public space. Anyone who has money can “immortalize” themselves here. Those who don’t are unlucky.

1) Reconstruction of the Berlin Palace

Idea: Once again, the German capital should have a striking architectural symbol in the city center. And in the twenty-first century the new symbol will now become the old one—the historic Hohenzollern Palace. Of course, today it will be filled with different spiritual contents than the lost Prussian monarchic divine grace. The building is now in the city center: on the outside, predominantly heroic Baroque Prussia; on the inside, world culture is to be presented under the Humboldt Forum label. The state provided the financing and contributed around 500 million euros. About 100 million was financed through donations and private “purchases” for the building. The organization of the project is run by a foundation and a development circle that is primarily responsible for fundraising. In these circles, much of old Prussia has been revived—nostalgic feelings: We are getting our old castle back! The main actors in these networks include: Monika Grütters, an avowed Catholic of the ruling CDU party, in her capacity as Minister of State for Culture; Agricultural machinery dealer and first project initiator Wilhelm von Boddien, as managing director of the supporters’ association; the Protestant theologian Richard Schröder from Humboldt University; and recently, also the General Director of the Humboldt Forum, Hartmut Dorgerloh.

There were quite a few public controversies in the course of the reconstruction process. The most glaring unreasonable demand recently was: a gold-plated cross on the dome above the main entrance and a slogan mounted on the dome taken from two biblical passages (Acts 4:12 and Philippians 2:10): There is no other salvation, and no other name given to men, except the name of Jesus, to the glory of God the Father. That at the name of Jesus all should bow down on their knees who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth. In the spirit of throne and altar, Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had this slogan installed in 1848, the year of the revolution, instrumentalizing these words for political purposes. This was already a provocation for the Liberals and Democrats of 1848. In the end, the king crushed the democratic revolution of 1848-49 with Prussian soldiers. The golden “Reichsapfel” (orb) at the foot of the gold cross now features a donor dedication from “Otto-Versand Hamburg”. It reads: “In memory of my husband Werner A. Otto 1909-2011. Inga Maren Otto.” The widow of the founder of the mail-order company and current patron financed the gold cross with a private donation of one million euros.

2) Garrison Church, Potsdam

The idea: Resurrection of the former Prussian military church (destroyed by the British Royal Air Force in April 1945) as the dominant urban structure of the Brandenburg state capital Potsdam. The principle actors here presumably thought: A church lighthouse is to be built here for missionary work in the East, which became “godless” in the time of the GDR. The entire project would cost well over 100 million euros. The amount raised for the reconstruction project remained modest—not enough to rebuild anything. In the meantime, people have to content themselves with only rebuilding the church tower, which is now under construction. This alone will cost well over 40 million euros. The project organizers were unable to raise even this sum from donations alone. The church tower is now mainly financed from grants from the Federal Republic and grants (loans) from the EKBO and EKD. The organization of the project is in the hands of a “Garrison Church Foundation” and a circle of friends who, like the palace, run the fundraising campaign. Relevant networks are: a church group around former bishop Wolfgang Huber, parts of the regional church (EKBO), and supporters from the EKD. It is currently unclear whether the project can be fully implemented. The ongoing conflicts over the building have divided the citizens of Potsdam. The current situation seems to be a mess. The US star architect Daniel Libeskind recently volunteered and announced that he will be offering proposals to resolve the architectural dispute.

For the general public, the most unreasonable demands are: a Prussian throne-and-altar nostalgia stimulated by the project, and the tendency of the builders to engage in historical falsification and historical revisionism. The steeple with the Prussian eagle, which has already been restored according to the historical model, is currently located next to the tower in a protective metal cage. The hungry Prussian eagle would like to learn to fly again, should it find its way to the top of the tower anytime soon.

Note: The opposition movement, to which the Martin Niemöller Foundation belongs, has recently installed a website “Lernort-Garnisonkirche.de” on the Internet, which provides comprehensive information on the historical context of this controversial Prussian-German site of remembrance.

3) “House of One,” Central Berlin

The idea: In the center of Berlin, on the site of the former St. Peter’s Church, which was destroyed in the war, a “house of three religions” is to be built to support fellowship among the three Abrahamic world religions. The aim is an inter-religious dialogue in the spirit of Lessing’s ring parable (“Nathan the Wise”). Last but not least, it should be an ecclesiastical “reparation” for the undoubtedly grave “sins” of the Protestant Church during the Nazi era. The initiator is Pastor Gregor Hohberg from St. Mary’s Church (St. Marienkirche) in Berlin, who comes from a GDR parsonage and has been running this project with some success for almost twenty years. Here, too, international donations were to have made the project of 40-50 million euros possible. The donations were sparse. Here again, public donors stepped in: the Federal Republic and the Berlin state government each gave 10 million, in addition to various grants from the EKBO, and from the beginning the project was supported by the strong commitment of church staff. The relevant networks come from within the church: St. Mary’s in the center of Berlin, several church staff members, and various prominent supporters from the cultural scene. The current protagonists include EKBO Bishop Christian Stäblein and the pastor and project “inventor” Hohberg; Rabbi Andreas Nachama (formerly director of the Berlin Topography of Terror Foundation) has also been involved for several years.

Here, too, there are provocative aspects that have aroused criticism for years, particularly regarding the international financial contributions to the project coming from the Qatar Foundation International as well as from controversial groups like the Gülen movement. Indeed, one leading German sponsor withdrew support for the House of One on account of its connection with Gülen. Another striking aspect of the activity of the builders is the denial of the prehistory, because here they are building on the foundations of the former St. Peter’s Church in central Berlin. Berlin’s top Nazi pastor and provost Walter Hoff worked at this church from 1936 to 1945. According to his own admission in 1943, Hoff was involved in Holocaust campaigns during the war in the East. As a potential war criminal, he was never seriously threatened for prosecution for this, but rather was reinstated into church ministry after a period of suspension. The builders of the “House of One” have persistently refused to come to terms with this history since about 2012-13.

*

The obvious parallels between these three architectural projects must provoke objections. It corresponds to the political spirit of the grand coalition, in which the CDU sets the course and the SPD fails and keeps its mouth shut. Social Democrats have often been connected to these projects through networks of connection—people like the (former) Prime Ministers of Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe and Matthias Platzeck, in Potsdam; Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (he has assumed the patronage of the Potsdam project); the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller; former Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse; and university theologian Richard Schröder, among others. The leading newspaper in Berlin (Der Tagesspiegel) is also remarkably cautiously neutral in its reporting. Its motive, presumably: just don’t stir up any “culture wars” (“Kulturkämpfe “) in the German capital, a place so critical of religion. Parts of the regional church (EKBO) see themselves wonderfully on the offensive with these projects. The cross and Prussian eagle soon over Potsdam again, and now the cross over the atheistic capital Berlin again too. In short: there is much cultural and religious-political restoration on the advance, while little sustained or effective outcry from a critical public can be heard. And in the background behind these seemingly harmless architectural projects, all sorts of networks nostalgic for the old Prussia, friends, and political circles of the New Right gather. They see their chance in these architectural projects and are certainly waiting for their hour to come soon.

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The Nazis and Religion: Digital Visual Resources for Research and Teaching

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

The Nazis and Religion: Digital Visual Resources for Research and Teaching

By Samuel Koehne, Trinity Grammar School

Given the continuing interruption that COVID-19 poses around the world, this review considers three readily available resources on the Hitler Youth that are either digitalized or available in digital format from the following institutions:

Each of these provides access to materials from film strips in the form of slides (Bildbänder) that were sent out by the Hitler Youth to ‘explain’ certain topics and propagandize for the Nazis. Although not commonly used in the literature, these are helpful for both research and teaching. As they were produced by the Amt der weltanschauulichen Schulung der Hitlerjugend (Division for Ideological Education of the Hitler Youth) they may also be particularly useful for university students – they are readily available, they are quite striking visual sources, and they effectively summarize key topics in Nazism (including Nazi views on religion). In addition to this, they are useful as official productions of the Nazi state in the 1930s that were aimed at the youth, and because some of them do not require German – for example, the USHMM and PLU slides and booklets have English translations or captions of the German text. Not least, students may very readily understand these Bildbänder, given they were essentially the ‘PowerPoints’ of their day. As a result, it is well worth bringing these resources to the attention of scholars more generally, as a potential digital resource.

The slide-shows produced by the Hitler Youth often had instructional booklets that allowed those screening the materials to use this as (effectively) a kind of introduction and script when showing the films, in order to both create a consistent message and minimize the extra work that would be required by any Hitler Youth leader who was using this for ‘ideological instruction.’ Both the German Bild-Archiv and Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections still have many of the original script booklets, but they are not extant for those in the USHMM.[1]

General contents

Many of the Bildbänder were focused on the military and war, including one curious slide-show (available through the PLU) that dealt with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, and another that depicted the English as a state that was seeking world domination.[2] The latter (Englands Griff nach der Welt) begins with an image of a clawed hand seizing the world, an image normally used by the Nazis to depict the Jews, but here used to portray England. The slide-show itself argued England had sought to control the entire world through its empire, that they had ‘poisoned the Chinese people’ through opium, and – a particularly interesting aspect for any scholar of Nazism – they demonized the English for the following: ‘Their troops exterminated Australian aborigines, plundered the rich land of the Boers and dragged women and children into concentration camps.’ The accompanying booklet appears to indicate that this was produced just before World War II. There is a terrible irony in the ways that the slide-show depicted both concentration camps under the British – with a drawing of people desperately rushing the fences while guards watch them unconcerned – and declared the ‘bloody suffering’ of British rule was due to ‘shameless violence’ and ruling through ‘brutality and force.’ Given that we now associate these very things with Nazi Germany, it is curious that they also argued the ‘High-Church of England’ gave its ‘blessing’ to such violence, an interesting point of comparison to the ways in which some Christian groups and churches (like the German Christians) comparably ‘blessed’ the Nazis and their ideology. Much of the remainder of this slide-show argued that Jews controlled England, and focused on the concept of Lebensraum. Other slide-shows contained advice to the youth in serving the nation through being physically fit, with one (‘You have the duty to be healthy’) containing such basic advice as brushing one’s teeth or washing regularly, alongside warnings against smoking and drinking alcohol.[3]  Michael Buddrus points out that the range of materials offered in the full series ranged from the Treaty of Versailles to the rebuilding of the German army, colonies to Erbkranker Nachwuchs, ‘Hereditarily diseased offspring.’[4] Many of them contain a core Nazi message, such as a slide-show that was a series of pleasant images of nature on ‘The Natural World’ (Lebendige Welt) but contained in the script such messages as these: ‘Life is struggle (Kampf), and victory is its validation.’ The same slide-show began with a statement by Hans Schemm that identified God simply as ‘nature’: ‘National Socialism at its most fundamental is nothing other, than a wonderful Confession to the organic, to growth, to comply together [presumably to ‘laws of nature’], and at the same time a Confession to God’ (Der Nationalsozialismus ist im Grundprinzip nichts anderes, als ein wundervolles Bekenntnis zum Organischen, zum Wachsen, zum Sichzusammenfügen und zu gleicher Zeit ein Bekenntnis zu Gott).[5]

Race and Antisemitism

This is not to say that the ideological films avoided the topics of antisemitism or eugenics, and one of the core collections in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is entitled Deutschland überwindet das Judentum, ‘Germany overcomes Jewry.’ The notion of ‘race’ was writ large in the films sent to Hitler Youth on ‘overcoming Jewry,’ with the first slide quoting Hitler: ‘Jewry was always a people [Volk] with particular racial characteristics and never a religion. The Jew is and remains a parasite [Schmarotzer]. Where he appears, the host-nation dies.’ The series went on to very clearly outline the Nazi perspective that Jews were to be attacked and removed from society as a ‘foreign race’ – although Jews were also depicted as a ‘bastard’ race. The slide-show for the Hitler Youth argued not only that Jews did not have the rights of citizenship in the Middle Ages and were forced to live in ghettoes, but directly argued that they had only received the same rights as ‘state-citizens of German blood’ (die deutschblütigen Staatsbürger) through the French Revolution. It repeated many of the stereotypes that the Nazis had used to characterise ‘Jewry’ from the very foundation of the German Workers’ Party, including the notions that Jews ran all money-markets, were the major bankers of the world, controlled literature, film, and the press. It also contained Hitler’s notion that Jews were incapable of culture: ‘The Jew possesses no culture-creating ability.’ As so often occurred in Nazi propaganda, there was a conflation of conspiratorial concepts, with freemasonry and Marxism being viewed as merely ‘tools in the fight for political power’ in the Bildband. The slide-show ended with the notion that ‘Adolf Hitler with his [Nazi] movement broke the Jewish domination’ through quoting the Nazi Party Programme, Point 4: ‘Only someone who is a Volk-comrade can be a citizen. A Volk-comrade can only be someone of German blood, regardless of confession. No Jew therefore can be a Volk-comrade.’ The Nuremberg Race Laws were also quoted, to the effect that a ‘citizen of the Reich can only be a state-citizen of German or racially-related blood,’ going on to note specific measures against Jews as public officials, authors, and against intermarriage, ‘[f]or the protection of German blood from foreign-racial intermixture’ – with a chart demonstrating who might ‘count’ as being of ‘German blood.’

The Bible and the Church

In terms of the topic of religion, at least two of the productions in the Bildbänder demonstrate that Christianity was viewed as negative because it was believed to somehow denigrate the ‘Germanic race,’ and any such supposed attack on ‘race’ was a cardinal sin in National Socialism. While this extended (as Burleigh and Wippermann identified) to ‘the exclusion and extermination of all those deemed to be “alien,” “hereditarily ill” or “asocial”’ it also appears to have been used in the Hitler Youth educational films to argue the ‘alien’ nature of Christianity.[6]  While ‘Germany overcomes Jewry’ was intended to promote racial concepts of blood and to establish the supposed enmity the Nazis believed existed between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews,’ the purpose of the slide-show ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ (5000 Jahre Germanentum) was intended to create pride in German history and opposition to the church.

In a booklet that came along with the film, it was clear that this was not only designed to create a sense of ‘Germanic’ superiority but to specifically attack the Catholic Church. The instructions – I have only been able to source a screenshot of the first pages – began with a comment on the ‘Church and German pre-history’ (Kirche und deutsche Vorgeschichte). The very first lines indicated the view of the church: ‘Two heavy shackles (Fesseln) have formerly hindered the wider promotion in the Volk of the findings from research into ancient German history: the lie of the barbarism of our forefathers and the Jewish teaching of the creation of the world, as it is found in the Bible.’ The blame for the former was placed solidly on ‘the church,’ which was accused of having created a ‘lie of the barbarism of the Germanic tribes (Germanen)’ as a ‘wild people’ that had only gained ‘Roman culture’ originally ‘through the missionaries of the church.’ The notion appears to have been part and parcel of the broader concept in Nazism – promote by various leaders, including Hitler – that the Germans, as ‘Aryans,’ were supposedly already creative and constructive as a ‘race,’ prior to their conversion to Christianity. For example, Hitler argued that ‘Aryans’ were the only ‘race’ to be able to create cultures, community or society in Mein Kampf.[7] In his view – as for many other leading Nazis – Christianity therefore could be seen as essentially false for promoting religion over race, for portraying Jesus Christ as the sacrificial lamb or for ‘weakening’ racial ideology through such core orthodox Christian notions as original sin. By contrast, Hitler argued variously that ‘God’s work’ was race – ‘in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord’ – that Jesus Christ was a violent antisemite – ‘what today is a blackjack was earlier a whip’ [referring to Matthew 21] – and that ‘sin against blood and race is the original sin of this world.’[8]

Yet there was also a more ‘hidden’ critique of Christianity in such statements, as was identified by Hans F.K. Günther, the so-called ‘Race Pope,’ who argued that ‘pure-blooded ancient Germans were fundamentally capable, fundamentally good, and not originally sinful.’[9] This identified the fact that orthodox Christianity, by its very insistence on sin, argued that people were not perfect. Concomitant with this, the introduction of Christianity and the conversion of the German peoples was seen as a positive change and an advancement in Germany. For the Nazis, the ‘Aryans’ were supposedly already perfect, cultured and advanced, so that the claim that the Germanic peoples were not ‘civilized’ was seen as opposing this racial world-view. ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ encapsulated this, by arguing that the ‘lie promoted by the Catholic Church’ was that ‘the ancient Germanic peoples [Germanen] had only adopted agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, and all artisanal work and art from the Romans and monks.’ The purpose of the slide-show then was to show that this was incorrect, and that the Germanic tribes had possessed all of these for thousands of years. In another comparable ‘educational film for the Hitler Youth’ – ‘So lived our Forefathers’ (So lebten unserer Vorfahren) – the primary issue taken with such concepts was that the Hitler Youth leadership saw it as promoting a ‘completely false’ notion of ‘our forefathers’ that did not fit with the Nazi notion of a ‘superior race.’ As a result, it was argued that to see Germans as barbarians ‘placed the Germanic tribes on the same level as the uncultured Negro [kulturloser Negerstamm].’ This is an interesting form of ‘cultural’ attack on the churches – it did not attack religion per se, but attacked the churches as institutions for daring to claim that the Germanen were ever anything but perfect.  In a sense, the notion of thousands of years of German culture – 5000 years in 5000 Jahre Germanentum or up to 7000 years in So lebten unserer Vorfahren – indicated a kind of cultural cringe. In ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ one slide quoted Hitler to the effect that Germans should not be ‘ashamed’ of their ‘forefathers,’ but take pride in their ancestors, just as the Italians, Greeks, or British did for their ancestors. The church was clearly attacked for portraying the Germanic tribes as pagan, and the ‘cardinal sin’ of denigrating race was directly identified in one of the final slides of ‘5000 Years of German Culture,’ quoting Hans Schemm: ‘Whoever claims, that the Germanic tribes were uncultured pagans, falsifies history and commits a crime against German blood.’ The Catholic Church was seen as committing precisely this ‘crime.’

What is more interesting is that the Hitler Youth were being directly encouraged to place the Bible in direct opposition to ‘Research’ and to see the Bible itself as fundamentally opposed to National Socialism. This was very clearly outlined in one of the earliest slides of 5000 Jahre Germanentum, which argued that ‘Research’ led to ‘National Socialism’ while ‘the Bible’ led to the ‘Jewish International’:

Research Bible
Time of the prehistoric peoples [Urmenschen] 300,000 to 5000 before the turning-point of the age [vor Zeitwende]

 

Germanic period 5000 v.Ztw – 800 n.Ztw.

 

German History 800 – 1933

 

National Socialism

 ????

 

Creation of the World 4000 BC

 

10 Commandments of Moses 1300 BC

 

Christ’s Birth

 

Diaspora of the Jews

 

Jewish International

Unfortunately the instructional script for this slide is missing, but the overall concept was clear. Curiously enough, the Nazi version of events to the left did not even make use of Christ as a point of reference, while positioning the Bible entirely as ‘Jewish.’ The use of ‘vor Zeitwende’ rather than ‘vor Christus’ was partly explained, however, by the concept that Germans should not be seeking their culture outside of a fairly narrowly defined part of the world – and that this region (because of its connection to ‘race’) thereby became sacralized. In this sense, one entire slide simply asked ‘Where is our Holy Land?’ and answered it promptly: ‘North Germany. The original homeland of the Germanic tribes is our Holy Land.’ The concept of Germans as ‘culture creators’ then followed, with the claim that the ‘most ancient farmhouse of the earth’ was the Germanic long-house, and that both ‘ploughs and wagons’ were ‘early Germanic discoveries.’ Using examples of stone weapons and early German pottery, the continual theme was that Germanic tribes had been advanced, sophisticated and possessed a ‘high culture’ (Hochkultur) that supposedly derived from their ‘race.’ For that matter, a parallel slide-show on the ‘German impact in the East’ (Deutsche Leistung im Osten) in the USHMM argued that the ‘Germanic peoples created the foundations of European culture,’ which were then meant to have been transported to Eastern Europe by Germans. One of these was supposedly the ‘Germanic sacred symbol’ (Heilszeichen) of the swastika, as indicated by swastikas marked out on an old barn. In terms of culture, the invasions of Rome were promoted as a positive impact on the Roman Empire, seen as ‘rotting from within.’

It is here that ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ overlapped with the promotion of paganism as a kind of indication of Germanic spirituality, as the slide-show not only showed advances in materials and tools, from stone to bronze, but argued that the burial practices of the Germanic peoples showed a fine sense of religiosity, whether these involved burial or cremation. While showing artists’ recreations of the interior of long-houses, the slide-show noted that such ‘halls [of the German peoples] rang with the heroic songs of the Edda’ and it introduced instances of the swastika on weapons as an emblem. All of this appears to have led to the central identification of the swastika as apparently something both connected to being ‘godly’ (göttliches) and as a depiction of the sun. Unfortunately the slide in the USHMM that contains this information is damaged, but I suspect that it refers both to the Hakenkreuz and Sonne, from the text that remains. This would bear further investigation, but the following slide certainly continued to discuss the swastika as a symbol and the early German notions of the sun-wheel.

One fascinating omission in ‘5000 Years of German Culture’ is that it made no positive mention of Christianity or showed any indications of the impact of Christian faith on Germany. This ‘silence’ was significant, the more so given that Christianity was still the dominant religion in Germany at the time. Instead, all aspects of the slide-show focused on the achievements of Germans before Christianity. It is clear this was not accidental, as the slide-show from the same series for Christmas (Deutsche Weihnachten) continually emphasized that the Nazi Party intended to celebrate this as the pagan festival of solstice, not as a Christian festival.[10] It is remarkable quite how open both of these slide-shows (‘5000 years of German Culture,’ ‘German Christmas’) were in terms of the way that they clearly and directly argued that the Nazi Party was focused on ancient Germanic notions, including religion. Scholars have already identified that the Nazis from early on celebrated Christmas as the Germanic ‘Yule’ or winter solstice festival.[11]  The Hitler Youth slide-show from the late 1930s linked directly to this by seeking to explain all aspects of Christmas in Germany as a kind of expression of the ‘racial soul’ in which original ‘markers’ or symbols of Germanic-pagan life were absorbed into the modern tradition. As Perry has pointed out, this was part and parcel of the Nazis attempting to ‘eliminate altogether’ the ‘Christian aspects of the holiday.’ Certainly the Hitler Youth slide-show (held by PLU) argued that Christmas was to be celebrated in the pagan form of the festival, not as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.[12]

The ‘German Christmas’

The very introduction of the ‘German Christmas’ presented it as a time of anticipation, home, and baking. When children were mentioned as gathering around ‘the mother’ at twilight for ‘the most beautiful time’ of the day, it was to hear ‘fairy-tales’ and stories from ‘our sagas.’ This was linked to the main theme of the slide-show, that Christmas should be celebrated in the manner of ‘our forefathers’ who were argued to have ‘celebrated Christmas [Weihnachten] as the festival of the light rising again and the renewal of life’ (Unsere Vorfahren feierten Weihnachten als Fest des wieder aufsteigenden Lichtes und der Erneuerung des Lebens). Drawing on ‘history and sagas’ the instruction guide advised that the celebration of winter solstice was based on the hope for ‘new-born light,’ ‘the hope for the reawakening of life in nature [after winter], for warmth and the sun,’ that it was a time of ‘thinking of the dead’ and that (in their view) small trees were placed ‘at the grave and decorated with lights.’ These were seen as the traditions of the German people that has been: ‘reinterpreted and used for the form of a Christian festival. In place of the old Germanic forms came the saints of the Christian church.’

The instructional guide – available through PLU – was clear as to how the Nazis were reverting to the earlier tradition: ‘Today we reflect again on our old, original form, on that, which our forefathers passed down to us, and we wish to again celebrate Christmas as the festival of the returning light and the renewal of life [my emphasis].’ In ensuring that the message of returning to a pagan festival was clear, the slides identified the same point repeatedly: ‘Our forefathers celebrated Christmas as the festival of the light rising again and the renewal of life.’ It argued that the Christmas tree itself was a ‘symbol of life,’ but that it – like many of the ‘existing traditions of the homeland’ – had been used by ‘the church’ to create the ‘festival of the birth of Christ.’ In the slide-show, these were explained variously as ‘[t]he most beautiful symbol life, mother and child, becoming ‘Mary and the Christ-child,’ while ‘Frau Holle became the decorative angel’ and ‘St Nicholas took the place of Odin [Wodan].’ The last two of these are particularly striking, as they took up the notion that older Germanic gods had continued as traditions, but simply been ‘converted’ into new Christian forms. Frau Holle (sometimes also Frau Holda) had been perceived as ‘a benevolent goddess of German antiquity’ since Jacob Grimm had argued this in the nineteenth century, though he believed that ‘folk tales which are common to both Frau Holda and the Virgin Mary’ had been ‘originally’ about Holda, then ‘as a result of Christian influence she was debased and replaced by Mary.’[13] While other scholars later disagreed, this appears to be the interpretation offered by the Nazi Party, although obviously showing Frau Holle as becoming the angel on the tree, rather than Mary. With images showing Hitler Youth, the slide-show repeated that the Nazis did not aim to celebrate Christmas as a Christian festival of any kind, but as a ‘return to the old German form: as the reappearance of the light, and the renewal of life.’

In conclusion, then, these sources may serve as a useful point of either research for students or as ‘summaries’ for particular topics in teaching. In any case, they serve as a reminder that the Nazis were quite adept at using different media to attempt to communicate their ideas. Like their use of film, the Bildbänder appear to have been designed to create a direct, simplified message so as to communicate the more effectively with youth. Given this, what they were communicating by the 1930s about religion is rather striking.

Notes:

[1] Enormous thanks are owed to Dr. Napp of the Deutsches Bild-Archiv and Anna Trammell of the Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections, for all their assistance.

[2] See Folders 1.18, Englands Griff nach der Welt; 1.22, Legion Condor; from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[3] Folder 1.4, Du hast die Pflicht, gesund zu sein, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[4] Michael Buddrus, Totale Erziehung für den totalen Krieg: Hitlerjugend und nationalsozialistische Jugendpolitik (München: K.G.Saur, 2003), 64n.21.

[5] Folder 1.11, Lebendige Welt, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[6] Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), 304-7.

[7] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (München: Franz Eher/Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1936),

311-62.

[8] Respectively: Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Pimlico, 2004), 60; Speech, 2 November 1922, Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen: 1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 720; Hitler, Mein Kampf (München: Franz Eher/Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1936), 272, 449.

[9] Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (München: J.F. Lehmann, 1922), 398–99.

[10] See Folder 1.10, Deutsche Weihnachten, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[11] Joe Perry, ‘Nazifying Christmas: Political Culture and Popular Celebration in the Third Reich,’ Central European History 38 (2005): 572–605; Samuel Koehne, ‘Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,’ Central European History 47 (2014): 760–90.

[12] All remaining materials refer to the Bildband and instructional booklet held in Folder 1.10, Deutsche Weihnachten, from the Bildband für die Schulung in der Hitler-Jugend Records OPVARCH6.4.3, Pacific Lutheran University Archives and Special Collections.

[13] Edgar List, ‘Is Frau Holda the Virgin Mary?’, The German Quarterly, 29, no.2 (1958): 80–4, here 80.

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Review of Lucia Scherzberg, Zwischen Partei und Kirche: Nationalsozialistische Priester in Österreich und Deutschland (1938-1944)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of Lucia Scherzberg, Zwischen Partei und Kirche: Nationalsozialistische Priester in Österreich und Deutschland (1938-1944), Schriftreihe “Religion und Moderne” Band 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2020). 645 pages, 49,00,- €, (44,99,- € E-Book), ISBN: 9783593444185.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

This review was originally published in theologie.geschichte and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher. The original review is available here: http://universaar.uni-saarland.de/journals/index.php/tg/article/view/1154/1211.

In Zwischen Partei und Kirche, Lucia Scherzberg, professor of systematic theology at Saarland University and co-editor of Theologie.Geschichte, studies a relatively small group of Catholic priests and select laity from Germany and Austria who actively promoted a positive relationship between the National Socialist state and the Catholic Church. In the book’s introduction, among many questions, she asks, “Were they a few crazy fanatics? Were the members isolated or did they find their support in the rest of the clergy?” and “How much did the priests differ in their convictions and actions from the rest of the leadership of the Catholic Church?” (14). Scherzberg finds that though they were fanatical in their support for National Socialism, these Catholic clerics and laity were far from deranged. Rather, they were intelligent, intensely calculating, and fully cognizant of their actions in support of Hitler and the Nazi government and party. Yet, as Scherzberg reveals, at times, their outlook was not always exceptional when compared with some of their fellow clergymen. Still, they made the ill-advised mistake of imperiously bucking the Church’s hierarchical system by assuming roles and tasks traditionally reserved for the Church’s episcopate, and thereby became persona non grata in their dioceses.

As I have shown in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, there were approximately one-hundred-fifty “brown priests” who publicly supported and aligned themselves with National Socialism.[1] In my more broadly based work, I devoted a chapter to examining the National Socialist Priests’ Group (NS-Priests) studied by Scherzberg. By contrast, Scherzberg spent years researching the NS-Priests’ personalities, tracking down minute details, and uncovering extensive networks between and among them. Her research deepens our knowledge of the complexity of church-state relations under National Socialism and builds upon previous works such as Hitler’s Priests. Additionally, the pioneering studies of the late contemporary witness Franz Loidl, professor of church history at the Catholic-Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna, provided Scherzberg with a basic introduction to the NS-Priests that included vital primary documents, though the study was limited in scope and often apologetic in analysis.[2] Josef Lettl’s brief but impressive Diplomarbeit (Master’s Thesis), Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den religösion Frieden 1938 (Association for Religious Peace 1938), offered a general introduction to the initial but short-lived public organization of the NS-Priests.[3] More recently, in Hitlers Jünger und Gottes Hirten (Hitler’s Disciples and God’s Shepherds), Eva Maria Kaiser examined a few of the leading NS-Priests in her study of the Austrian bishops’ post-war advocacy for former National Socialists.[4] In the end, Scherzberg’s study is authoritative and will become a standard work.

Scherzberg uses the 1938 Anschluss to divide her work into two parts that contain headings but without chapter numbers. In the first part, Scherzberg identifies the original members of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden (AGF), the initial rendering of the NS-Priests that became public after the March 1938 Anschluss. The AGF consisted of both lay and ordained Catholics, primarily under the leadership of three individuals: Johann Pircher, a former religious of the Deutsch-Orden who had incardinated into the Vienna archdiocese in 1921 and joined the NSDAP in 1933; Wilhelm van den Bergh, a former Capuchin friar from the Netherlands who like Pircher had incardinated into the Vienna archdiocese in 1929; and Karl Pischtiak, a lay Catholic, National Socialist, and SA-Sturmbannführer who had ties with Josef Bürckel, Reichskommissar für die Wiedervereinigung Österreichs mit dem Reich (Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the Reich;1938-1939) and Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Vienna (Reich Governor and NSDAP District Leader; 1939-1940). According to Scherzberg, the AGF developed from the remnants of several Catholic pro-Anschluss groups. The same individuals had also been entangled in more politically aligned extreme right-wing associations such as the Katholisch-Nationalen (Catholic Nationals), the Deutsche Klub (German Club), and the Deutsche Gemeinschaft (German Community). Many of these same individuals had likewise been involved in the post-war Catholic youth movement, which had been heavily influenced by the writings of theologian Michael Pfliegler. Pfliegler criticized political Catholicism and emphasized the importance of the Church’s pastoral mission, especially to promote peace between church and state. Youth associations such as Reichsbund Jungösterreich, Bund Neuland, and Quickborn rejected the Peace Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye (1919), supported a Greater-Deutschland, and embraced various forms of antisemitism, though generally not racial. Many of their members also rejected the Austrian Corporative State, especially the close alignment between the Austrian Catholic Church and the Dollfuß and Schuschnigg governments. Catholic priests from Styria, whose borders had been affected by the 1919 treaty, particularly rejected the situation of post-war Austria. Scherzberg provides a comprehensive overview of Austria’s pre-Anschluss history to contextualize the AGF’s foundation.

Before the 10 April 1938 National Referendum on the Anschluss, the Austrian bishops issued a solemn declaration that expressed their goodwill towards National Socialism. The Holy See, however, was not pleased by the stance of the Austrian episcopate, especially after the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), that criticized the German state’s encroachment on the rights of the Catholic Church. On 8 April 1938, Schmerzensfreitag (Friday of Sorrows), many of the individuals who were predisposed to form the AGF, issued a letter directed to Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, archbishop of Vienna, in support of the Anschluss and critical of the Vatican. Eight days later, on 17 April, Pircher, van den Bergh, and two other priests in the name of the AGF issued a public appeal to the Catholic clergy to support the political developments between Austria and the German Reich. Newspapers covered it and reported that the appeal allegedly resonated with the clergy. Immediately, Jakob Weinbacher, Innitzer’s secretary, made it known that he did not approve. As early as May 1938, the Vienna Diözesanblatt (Diocesan Gazette) reminded clergy that they were not to be involved in politics and should limit their realm of activity to the pastoral sphere. On 30 September 1930, Cardinal Innitzer ordered diocesan newspapers to announce a ban against the AGF. Pircher and van den Bergh were never personally informed beforehand. In October 1938, Pircher issued a statement carried by Austrian newspapers that announced the disbandment of the AGF.

Scherzberg’s argument reveals that the prohibition was not due solely to a question of tactics or a difference of opinion about applying them that led to the AGF’s ban. Instead, one could attribute it more to the nature and function of the diocesan hierarchical structure, whereby only a bishop or his delegate speaks in the name of the Church. The ban also took place during a period of tense church-state conflict as the two sides negotiated for power in annexed Austria. With pressure on his back from the Holy See to assert the rights of the Church and to critique National Socialism, Innitzer could not allow a renegade group of priests to speak for his diocese. Pircher and van den Bergh were not alone. Pircher claimed that 525 priests were members, and an additional 1844 expressed their support (out of 8,000 priests in Austria). Scherzberg finds that these numbers may not be entirely overstated. Through meticulous research, she identifies at least 150 priests who joined the AGF and offers convincing arguments about the missing individuals not accounted for.

Around the time of the AGF’s prohibition, a power struggle ensued between Pircher and Pischtiak. Scherzberg speculates that Pischtiak used his connections with Bürckel to have the Gestapo confiscate the AGF’s membership index from its headquarters in Pircher’s home. At this point, it might have been helpful if Scherzberg had also analyzed the contemporary lay-cleric dynamics in this power struggle. Nevertheless, in the end, Scherzberg reveals that Pircher proved more skillful at power-play, apparently enjoying a more significant share of Bürckel’s trust. Pitschtiak then separated himself from the AGF and disappeared from the historical record.

Even though the AGF had formally disbanded, Pircher refused to let go of his dream to create a mass organization for priests within the NSDAP structure. Moving underground, Pircher maintained his contacts with like-minded priests. In a November 1938 letter to a former AGF member, he declared that the NS-Priests needed to retain, “‘reconciling, mediating, and state-affirming ideas [until] a modus vivendi can be achieved in religious terms’” (228). He was not alone. Pfarrer, Richard Hermann Bühler, a retired priest of the Limburg diocese, suggested that they establish an NS Religionsdiener-Verband (National Socialist Religious Servants Association) that would educate the clergy in a National Socialist spirit. Yet, in the disbanded AGF world, these efforts had little practical impact as the actual group of priests dwindled over time to a select few.

Amid this post-AGF climate, in December 1938, Pircher travelled to Cologne to meet for the first time Richard Kleine, a priest of the Hildesheim diocese and religion teacher at the Duderstadt Gymnasium. Though the specific origins of their initial contact are unknown, Kleine would become a leading figure among the NS-Priests as well as its primary theorist. Kleine’s entry along with others would also broaden the group’s geographic scope, enlarging it from its primarily Austrian locale to a broader demographic reach that would encompass the Greater German Reich.

Scherzberg’s research reveals a great deal more about Kleine than previous studies uncovered. To avoid scandal over Kleine’s illegitimate birth, he had to be ordained for Hildesheim instead of his home diocese of Cologne. Likewise, he was rejected as a Feldgeistlicher (military chaplain) in the First World War. While not overemphasizing these points, Scherzberg speculates that they had an impact on his self-perception and world outlook. Still, Kleine had further influences. His professor, Arnold Rademacher, a specialist in fundamental theology at the University of Bonn, advocated for both church reform and the reunification in faith among the Christian denominations. In the same vein, at University of Tübingen, Wilhelm Koch, professor of dogmatics and apologetics and a progressive intellectual, provided Kleine with a religious worldview that contrasted with the dominant neo-scholastic approach of his era. Accused of the heresy of modernism, Koch ended up leaving teaching and returned to full-time pastoral ministry. The impact of Rademacher and Koch on Kleine would especially be felt when Kleine raised issues that preoccupied him and shared them with members of the NS-Priests.

In addition to Pircher, Kleine, van den Bergh, and Bühler, other prominent members included Alois Nikolussi, a priest of the Trient diocese who in 1919 became a Chorherr of St. Augustine at Stift Sankt Florian; Simon Pirchegger, a priest of the Graz-Seckau diocese, a Dozent of Slavic Studies at University of Bonn, and an NSDAP member; Joseph Mayer, an Augsburg priest and professor of moral theology at Theologische Fakultät Paderborn; and Adolf Herte, a Paderborn priest and a professor of church history and patristics also at Paderborn. As Scherzberg’s previous works have also shown, Karl Adam, professor of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen, later joined this group.[5] A few Catholic laymen were also involved, including Josef Bagus, editor of the Kolpingsblatt, and Alois Brücker, an editor and NSDAP member living in Cologne. For each of these individuals, Scherzberg provides extensive background information to contextualize their support of National Socialism and initial contact with Pircher and Kleine. Additionally, she concludes the first part of her study by discussing the theological positioning of the group. The individual egos of the group’s members, along with the intermittent commitment of each, did not easily lead to consensus on religious questions. Pircher, for example, remained obsessed and convinced of the group’s ability to influence the outlook of high-ranking National Socialists on the Church. Kleine became fixated on an antisemitic interpretation of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, interpreting it as a declaration of war on Judaism. Finally, Mayer and Herte appeared reluctant in their involvement, having to be nudged along by Pircher.

Part two of the work focuses on the activities of the NS-Priests, who never agreed on an official name for the group. The outbreak of war for Germany, with its decisive initial victories and subsequent harsh defeats, created a radicalization in the group’s outlook. Scherzberg’s systematic theological expertise is evident throughout her writing, especially in part two, as she analyzes the publications and presentations of the group’s members. Most chilling is the parallel she draws between the NS-Priests’ antisemitism, which led members to advocate the removal of references to Jews in Catholic sacramental rites, and the dormant antisemitism among members of a subcommittee dealing with liturgical reform in the Fulda Bishops’ Conference who discussed and similarly advocated for the removal of Jewish names from the marriage rite. Though the German bishops never agreed upon a revised rite for the sacraments under National Socialism, one did appear in 1948, with the Jewish names discussed above removed.

The ideas of the NS-Priests appeared in Kameradschaftlicher Gedankenaustausch (Comradely Exchange of Ideas; KG), a newsletter that ran inconsistently for twenty-seven issues from September 1939 to January 1945. With the help of a Catholic laywoman, Pircher edited and distributed each issue that typically was four pages in length. Pircher published most articles with pseudonyms. Nevertheless, Scherzberg spends significant time and does crucial detective work identifying the authors of the contributions. The KG’s language was overtly nationalistic and repeatedly implored its readers to serve their fatherland faithfully, especially in wartime. Increasingly in each issue, the KG’s language also became more militant and antisemitic. Alongside the KG, on his own initiative, from 1938-1940, Pircher wrote Information zur kulturpolitischen Lage (Information on the Church-Political Situation), mirroring the SD’s Meldungen aus dem Reich (Reports from the Reich), in which he reported on church issues that he believed would be of interest to the state. He shared the reports with Gauleiter Bürckel, who, it appears, for a brief time financially supported Pircher’s efforts. Despite their actions and National Socialist worldview, Pircher and Kleine had little sympathy for priests who proposed a more radical course for the Church’s clergy, such as abandoning clerical celibacy. Likewise, Pircher revealed his allegiance to Catholicism by including criticisms of the state’s treatment of the Catholic Church in his reports. He confided to Kleine that he might end up in Dachau for his more critical comments. Two separate party proceedings to remove Pircher from the NSDAP were eventually introduced, but neither succeeded.

The efforts of the NS-Priests brought them in contact with like-minded clergy and laity from other Christian denominations, and even in contact with representatives of völkisch non-Christian groups. Kleine pursued unification efforts with the Nationalkirchliche Bewegung Deutsche Christen (National Church Movement of German Christians; DC), and with the Völkisch-Religious Gemeinschaft (Ethnonationalist-Religious Community) nurtured by Ernst Graf von Reventlow from Postdam. Though Kleine at first was taken aback by the involvement of a few former Catholic clergymen in the DC, he soon adjusted and began to work with them. The dialogue that ensued led to a series of meetings where the participants attempted to work out the significant obstacles that existed between them. Scherzberg painstakingly analyses the discussion at these meetings and the individuals involved. Due to numerous factors, nothing of note resulted in the end. However, Kleine did receive an invitation from the Protestant biblical studies professor, Walter Grundmann, to join his Institut für Erforschung und Beseitgung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben (Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life), which he accepted. As a result, Kleine’s antisemitism became more radical and even at one point promoted an ecclesiastical solution parallel to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

Kleine’s work with the DC led him into contact with the Mecklenburg Landesbishof (state bishop) Walther Schultz, who was sympathetic to Klein’s ecumenical efforts. Kleine also sought a similar collaborator from the Catholic side and believed he had found one in the newly appointed archbishop of Paderborn, Lorenz Jaeger, a former Wehrmachtspfarrer (army chaplain). While a previous biography has been sympathetic to Jaeger’s choices under National Socialism[6], Scherzberg’s findings reveal that while Jaeger was staunchly nationalist and open to listening, in the end, he rejected Kleine’s efforts at a joint Protestant-Catholic Pastoral Letter and refused to sanction Kleine’s understanding of church and ecumenism. Yet, Kleine did succeed in bringing together Schultz and Jaeger to a meeting with him to discuss the pastoral letter. A research commission focusing on Jaeger is ongoing in the Paderborn archdiocese.

As the war turned for the worse for Germany, the NS-Priests became more embittered, and their antisemitism proportionally increased. In their voluminous correspondence, they condemned the 1943 Decalogue Letter, which was critical of the state and adopted by the plenary assembly of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference. Scherzberg concludes that the worsening of the war situation and the party’s dwindling attention and notice given to the NS-Priests led to this escalation. One might also perceive that the radical antisemitism was always present, and that the apocalyptic situation at the end of the war provided the impetus for the priests to express their views more openly and, in turn, attempt to prove their allegiance even more. After the war, most of the known members of the NS-Priests, centered around Pircher and Kleine went through some form of denazification and lost their positions. The lay members, less so. Yet, Scherzberg reveals that none dropped their racist National Socialist views, but instead, merely suppressed them.

In her introduction, Scherzberg offered a theoretical framework that included the sociological theories of (de)-differentiation, (de)-secularization, and (re)-sacralization, to understand and evaluate how the priests interacted with the church and state. She returned to this framework in her conclusion. For Scherzberg, the priests she studied lived in a differentiated and often secularized society, operating within their own independent sub-system. She continued, “They demanded freedom of religion, freedom of the church and freedom of conscience. In their understanding state and church were responsible for separate areas – the state for the welfare of the people, the church for the salvation of souls. Consequently, the members of the group consistantly rejected attacks by the state or the party on the church and the practice of religion” (599-600). Yet, in their own way and according to their values, the priests were traditional, upholding priestly celibacy and religious education. Often, they wanted the best of both worlds, rejecting political Catholicism while still hoping to influence political and social processes. At the same time, they were willing to accept the state’s oversight in areas such as the training of clergy.

Scherzberg also considered how the polycratic nature of the NS-State, especially evident in the leadership of Vienna’s Reichsstatthalter und Gauleiter Josef Bürckel and Baldur von Schirach, affected the NS-Priester. Like many Germans, the NS-Priester did not blame Hitler for the persecution of the Church. Instead, they relegated the responsibility to lower-level National Socialists or more likely than not to clergy themselves for not supporting the party and state. While not identifying state leadership style as polycracy, the NS-Priests attempted to benefit from the regionally differentiated leadership approaches at-large by courting Bürckel and Schirach with varying levels of success. Finally, Scherzberg considered the role that masculinity and comradeship played in the relational milieu that NS-Priests fostered. Most of the NS-Priests, for example, bought into the overtly militaristic language of the time, with some taunting or jeering the hesitancy of fellow priests to act, accusing the latter of a breach in masculinity. The comradely address shared between them and displayed boldly on their newsletter, however, ultimately had little weight as conflict and doubt arose among them. In the end, according to Scherzberg, they appear to be lone agents out for themselves and only brought together by a prevailing ideology. Each seemed willing to sell out the other, if necessary, to become more recognized by National Socialist leadership.

Lucia Scherzberg has produced an excellent study that should be widely read. It significantly helps the reader to understand the dangers of extreme nationalism and the temptation to misshape religion for personal and political gain.

Notes:

[1] Kevin P. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, DeKalb, IL, 2008; vgl. „Gespaltene Loyalität. ‚Braune Priester‘ im Dritten Reich am Beispiel der Diözese Berlin“, übersetz. Ilse Andrews, Historisches Jahrbuch 122 (2002), S. 287-320.

[2] z.B. Franz Loidl, Religionslehrer Johann Pircher. Sekretär und aktivster Mitarbeiter in der ‚Arbeitgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden‘ 1938 (Vienna 1972); ders., Hg., Arbeitgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden 1938/1939. Dokumentation, 1. Teil (Vienna 1973); ders., Hg., Arbeitgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden 1938/1939. Ergänzungs-Dokumentation, 2. Teil (Vienna 1973).

[3] Lettl was a former student of Rudolf Zinnhobler, professor of church history at the katholische Privatuniversität Linz. Josef Lettl, Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den religiösen Frieden 1938, Diplomarbeit (Linz 1981).

[4] Eva Maria Kaiser, Hitlers Jünger und Gottes Hirten: Der Einsatz der katholischen Bischöfe Österreichs für ehemalige Nationalsozialisten nach 1945 (Wien/Köln/Weimar 2017).

[5] Lucia Scherzberg, Kirchenreform mit Hilfe des Nationalsozialismus. Karl Adam als kontextueller Theologe. (Darmstadt 2001) and ders., Karl Adam und der Nationalsozialismus (Saarbrücken 2011; theologie.geschichte, Beiheft 3).

[6] Heribert Gruß, Erzbischof Lorenz Jaeger als Kirchenführer im Dritten Reich. Tatsachen-Dokumente-Entwicklungen-Kontext-Probleme (Paderborn 1995).

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Review of Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2017). 316 pages, with illustrations and an appendix with documentation. ISBN 978-3-525-30109-8.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Retired)

Manfred Gailus (who is one of the editors of this quarterly review) has published several studies of little-known and under-examined individuals in the German Protestant churches under National Socialism, including Helmut Hesse, Elisabeth Schmitz, and other Protestant women who resisted Nazi racial policy. These books are not only detailed studies of what dignity and heroism in Nazi Germany looked like. They reveal how marginalized such people were in their own times and all too often in the historiography.[1]

Friedrich Weißler is another such figure. A legal advisor to the Confessing Church, he is usually mentioned (if at all) in his connection to the 1936 Confessing Church memorandum (Denkschrift) to Adolf Hitler. Tortured and beaten to death in Sachsenhausen in February 1937, Weißler was the only person to be killed as a result of the memorandum. Not coincidentally, he was also the only “Volljude” involved. This 2017 book by Manfred Gailus is a gripping biography of a courageous man and a well-documented account of the genesis and aftermath of the memorandum. (Gailus is the first author to examine the papers that were in the family possession.)

Weißler was raised in a secular and patriotic Jewish home. His father was a lawyer who was such a conservative nationalist that he committed suicide in the wake of the Versailles Treaty. Weißler studied and began to practice law during the 1920s, married a Protestant pastor’s daughter, and had two sons. Although he certainly encountered antisemitism in this first decade of his career, the Weimar years were generally happy ones professionally and personally. He moved steadily ahead in his career and became director of a legal journal; he also published books and articles on various aspects of the law. In 1932 he was appointed director of the regional court in Magdeburg. The Weißler family moved there in January 1933.

Within days of the Nazi ascent to power his life changed dramatically. Weißler issued a fine against a young SA man accused of violence who had appeared in court in uniform. The local Nazi press immediately targeted the “Jewish” judge. In an ugly incident local SA and Stahlhelm members pushed their way into the court building and hung a swastika flag from the balcony facing the town square. They then dragged Weißler to the balcony and forced him to salute the swastika flag. A few days later Weißler was suspended from his position, and in July he lost his position under the new civil service laws. Under Nazi racial laws he was a “Volljude.” In September the family, including Weißler’s elderly mother, moved to Berlin.

Weißler was 42 years of age. He had a very small pension and the family’s assets were modest. Having joined the Protestant church during the 1920s, in 1934 he became a member of the Confessing Church and developed close ties to the most radical circles in Dahlem. His legal expertise now became useful to the Confessing Church leadership as they navigated the realities of Reich church politics and Nazi law.

As in his other books, Gailus documents the antisemitism that was all too present in Confessing Church circles. It was something that Weißler encountered repeatedly and personally. The portrait that emerges is of a man who was characteristically reserved but outspoken and unafraid to confront antisemitism. After Pastor Walter Thieme of the Stadtmission defended Adolf Stoecker’s warnings against the “influence of the Jewish spirit on the life of our Volk,” Weißler wrote Thieme that he could “summon no understanding for your behavior.” He also critiqued members of the Deutsche Christen—a courageous risk for someone in his position.

All this took its toll. There are poignant examples of friends and colleagues who abandoned or turned against the Weißler family. Having received an antisemitic letter from one such “friend” Weißler noted that he was replying “only in consideration that you like so many others have succumbed to the general psychosis of this era, and given that which we previously shared.”

This general antisemitism is an important context for Gailus’s account of the 1936 memorandum to Hitler. Like all Confessing Church protests, it was a mixed bag. A small group within the Confessing Church had been urging the leadership to issue a clear public protest against the regime’s antisemitic measures; in the wake of the September 1935 Nuremberg laws these efforts gained new momentum. Although most Confessing Christians were focused primarily on church members (so-called “Christian non-Aryans”) there were others (notably Elisabeth Schmitz) who wanted the church leadership to speak decisively about the persecution of all German Jews.

These efforts led to the Confessing Church leadership’s decision to issue a memorandum and send it directly to Adolf Hitler. The decision coincided with growing divisions within the church opposition between more radical voices like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church’s more compromising leaders. The memorandum was the work of a committee and like many such documents it had been considerably watered down by the time it was completed. The result was primarily an expression of the Confessing Church’s concerns about the Nazi regime’s pressures on the churches and the “dechristianization” of German society. It opened, for example, with a conciliatory expression of gratitude to Führer for defeating the threat of “bolshevism.”

The most notable section of the memorandum however condemned antisemitism in the most explicit wording that would ever be issued by the Confessing Church. It criticized the growing Nazi incitement of anti-Jewish hatred, particularly propaganda aimed at younger Germans, as “anti-Christian.” It went further, condemning the extrajudicial nature of Gestapo measures and the concentration camps, and warning against the “deification” of the Führer.

The memorandum was intended for Hitler’s eyes only and those involved were sworn to secrecy. Supposedly there were only three copies: a document personally delivered to the Reichskanzlei on June 4, 1936, by Pastor Walter Jannasch; a separate copy given to Birger Forell, pastor of the Swedish Church in Berlin; and another copy placed in the safe of the church chancellery in Berlin. It is not known whether Hitler ever even saw the memorandum; the Chancellor’s Office forwarded it to the Reich Church Ministry.

On July 15—two weeks before the opening of the Berlin Olympics—the New York Herald reported on the memorandum, and on July 23 the Basler Nachrichten published the entire document as an example of Protestant opposition to the Nazi regime. The story was also picked up by leading papers like the New York Times and the London Times.

Alarmed, the Confessing Church leadership immediately tried to find out who had leaked the memorandum. They focused on individuals with foreign press contacts, including Friedrich Weißler, who had advised throughout the planning of the memorandum. The others were Werner Koch, a seminarian who had studied with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Finkenwalde, and Ernst Tillich, who had studied under Bonhoeffer in Berlin before abandoning his theological studies. Weißler admitted to the church leadership that he had given a copy of the memorandum to Tillich (who knew Koch and had ties to the foreign press).

Gailus methodically reconstructs the subsequent events. Weißler, Koch, and Tillich were arrested in October 1936, as was Dr. Heinrich Schmidt, a lawyer who worked for the Confessing Church. Schmidt was released after a short time, but the other three were interrogated throughout the fall of 1936. In the meantime the Confessing Church leadership distanced itself from the group and the memorandum. In a late October meeting it was Martin Niemöller who argued that the church had to distance itself completely from Weißler: “We owe it to the Confessing Church.”

In a damning letter to Heinrich Himmler in early February 1937 the Confessing Church leadership emphasized that Weißler had never held an official position in the Confessing Church and had served only in an informal capacity. Five days later the three men were transferred from the Gestapo prison in Berlin to Sachsenhausen. Koch and Tillich were imprisoned in a block doing forced labor and released after several months. On the orders of Sachsenhausen commandant Karl Koch, Weißler was placed in solitary confinement a different block of the camp. Six days later his wife received word that he was dead. Accompanied by Heinrich Schmidt, she went to the camp and was able to see that her husband’s face was swollen and badly bruised.

Even by Nazi standards, Weißler’s death was considered extrajudicial, and at the end of 1938 three Sachsenhausen guards were tried in the killing. It became clear from the court proceedings that Weißler had been badly beaten over the six days of his imprisonment before dying of his injuries, and equally clear, as Gailus notes, that the sole motive was “blind hatred” against Jews. Only one of the guards was sentenced, to one year in prison.

Gailus’ account acknowledges those members of the Confessing Church who did stand by Weißler throughout this ordeal—notably Hans Böhm and Fritz Müller. Franz Hildebrandt, a Confessing vicar affected by the racial laws who would soon flee himself to England, was also outspoken in Weißler’s defense. In the aftermath of his death, Hildebrandt and Heinrich Schmidt continued to help Weißler’s widow and family. Weißler’s eldest son Ulrich was able to emigrate to England in 1939 on the Kindertransport. His widow and other son remained in Germany, assisted financially by friends. Weißler’s elderly mother, who lived with the family, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943 and died there shortly thereafter. Ironically, when Martin Niemöller was sent to Sachsenhausen in March 1938 as a “special prisoner” of the Führer, he was imprisoned in the same block in which Weißler had been murdered.

Gailus concludes this fine book with a reflective chapter on the continuing importance of these individual histories, even decades after the end of National Socialism. Readers of this journal will not need to be convinced of that, but I wish this book could be translated into English. The story of Friedrich Weißler is a crucial corrective for the all too frequent superficial understandings of the Confessing Church. I will add that reading this book in light of our current events in the United States, including the murders of Black men by the police and the rise in right-wing hatred and violence, was especially sobering.

Notes:

[1] I should note that the oral histories I conducted in Germany during the 1980s included interviews with Werner Koch and Heinrich Schmidt, both of whom were involved in the memorandum. Excerpts from both interviews, giving detailed accounts of the memorandum and Weißler’s death, were published in For the Soul of the People. Both interviews are now available to scholars in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (the transcript of the Schmidt interview, which was not taped, is being added): https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn707864.

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