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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* This paragraph was edited for clarity after publication.

Letter from the Editors (March 2021)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Letter from the Editors (March 2021)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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, 5^th 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 2^nd 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 10^th 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.

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)

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.