Review of A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Review of A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick (Fox Searchlight 2019)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi

The Extraordinary Stance of an Ordinary Man

Scholarship tells us that the German military authorities executed tens of thousands of men and jailed hundreds of thousands more during the Second World War for the crime of Wehrkraftzersetzung, or the undermining of military morale.[1] Such a category encompassed a broad spectrum of treasonous behaviour, from deliberate sabotage to desertion of one’s post to conscientious objection. Franz Jägerstätter is one of the more well-known examples of the last category. Gordon Zahn’s 1964 English-language biography, In Solitary Witness, brought him renown beyond his immediate community and did much to illuminate the historical and moral circumstances of Jägerstätter’s life and especially his execution. Numerous articles, books, and screen treatments of him followed over several decades, leading to the 1998 formal abrogation of his sentence and his 2007 beatification by Pope Benedict XVI, who also recognized him as a martyr.[2] Terrence Malick’s exploration, therefore, does not necessarily break new ground, but the strength of the film, as it retreads established paths, is the director’s attention to the emotional toll of Jägerstätter’s conviction on himself and his family, and the director of photography’s breathtakingly beautiful shots of the South Tyrol alpine countryside.[3]

Malick is an atypical American director: he has protected his private life to the point of reclusiveness; his projects routinely consume several years; while he has made several critically-acclaimed films (his first film, Badlands; The Thin Red Line, about the Vietnam War; The Tree of Life, about immortality), he is both lauded and criticized for favouring themes and visual aesthetics over plot and narrative (see The Tree of Life). In fact, A Hidden Life delivers a more linear narrative than many of his films, with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end. It opens with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, the famous aerial shot of clouds and a city gradually coalescing through the mist. Lasting only the first couple of minutes, and including splices from elsewhere in that famous 1934 documentary, such as the stunning panorama of the Nazi Party’s rally grounds, this is all Malick gives to the audience of Hitler’s climb to power and takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia before plunging directly into the fall of 1939. Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) is married to Franziscka (“Fani”, Valerie Pachner), and has two small blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughters. They live in the Upper Austrian village of Sankt Radegund, not far from the German border (Bavaria). We watch them pause in their labour as unseen planes fly overhead, our only clue that the war has begun.

Their life as farmers (some scholars call them peasants) can be backbreakingly hard, a fact that Malick and Jörg Widmer, the director of photography, take great care to emphasize continuously, so one cannot charge the film with romanticizing rural workers. Their existence is dominated by the seasons, and harvests, and very dependent on the cooperation of the entire community: cutting and milling wheat, ploughing fields without advanced machinery, tending sheep and other farm animals, pulling dirt and mud out of a dried-up well by hand. But there is also an authenticity in their labour and a simplicity to their daily routine: planting potatoes, picking fruit from trees, their daughters underfoot or at their sides, the frequent daytime breaks for quiet moments together or to play games, window frames and sills decorated with fresh wildflowers. The mountains are quasi-protagonists themselves, looming in and out of view in the wide-angled shots that Malick favours in many of his features, emphasizing the grandiosity and majesty of nature and the relative insignificance of humans.

Malick ensures that this visually arresting scenery is firmly implanted in his audience as he continues towards the middle of his narrative. Franz – well liked, an upstanding member of his community, a family man – undertakes compulsory military training in 1940 (around which time a third daughter arrives), at first with benign acceptance but then with increasing doubt. Documentary footage from the battlefield, shown as part of training, leaves a deep and obviously negative impression on him, and he returns home full of doubt about his willingness and ability to serve. (The film does not make this clear, but he received an exemption as a farmer and would not be called up until 1943.) His doubts are rooted in the unjustness of the war and the conduct of the German Wehrmacht, though Malick seems less interested in historical context and more in the emotional, almost visceral angst of Franz. The real-life Jägerstätter’s objections were more than mere hostility to the war effort, had a much longer brewing period – he was the only person in his village to vote against the Anschluss in 1938 – and had as much to do with the nature of the Nazi regime as the war itself. He condemned the Nazi T4 “euthanasia” program when he learned of it and followed with dismay the repeated and open attacks by the Nazis on the Catholic Church in both Germany and Austria, which further estranged him from the idea of military service.

His struggle is conducted internally and externally; in the film, in addition to countless wordless scenes of long gazes and conflicted expressions, there is almost no one that Franz does not eventually seek out for counsel. He speaks with his wife and his mother, Rosalia. (He was her only son, and she did not initially support his decision.) He speaks with his local priest in the church where he works as sacristan (and where he became a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, a fact not mentioned in the film), who nervously tells him, “Your sacrifice would benefit no one”, but nonetheless arranges for him to meet with Josef Fließer, bishop of Linz. The bishop tells him, “You have a duty to the Fatherland – the Church tells you so.” (Franz confides to his wife that he felt the bishop treated him as a potential spy and feared to speak openly.) He defends himself to the mayor, once a friend, and to the former mayor, and to the miller, and to a painter working on the church frescoes, and to others who would listen. The earlier emphasis on community now reveals itself for its significance: if that community should turn against you, the bleakness of life tending a farm in such remote conditions is acute. Franz finds no true like minds and almost no supporters, and his family is actively ostracized and jeered at for his “act of madness, [his] sin against family and village.” His wife and her sister, Resie, must endure bullying and fits of shouting; his children are picked on. The mayor calls him a traitor to his face. The few people that show an understanding continue their friendships discreetly, from a distance. For his part, Franz is not swayed from his conviction: he knows he will not take the oath to Hitler – “the anti-Christ,” as one of the very few sympathetic villagers refers to him, in a soft tone – that is required of all soldiers; he refuses to give donations to veterans’ associations, whose brown-shirted members are canvassing for money; he refuses the Hitler greeting, clinging obstinately to the regional “Grüß Gott” that one still encounters there today. He and Fani hope that the war will be over before he is called up, and talk about possibly running away, maybe hiding in the forest. (Fani eventually encounters a bedraggled, dirt-crusted man, a stranger and, one assumes, a Jew, in the forest near the village, but he flees before she can approach. There are no Jews in the movie and no mention of the word Jew itself, only vague allusions to unwanted foreigners during one of the mayor’s drunken monologues shrieked before a blazing outdoor fire.) Franz does not seem to have seriously considered this. In any case, his fate cannot be delayed long.

Franz is called up in March 1943, in the aftermath of the disastrous German defeat at Stalingrad (Malick does not mention this context). In short order, Franz refuses the oath and is tossed into jail, first at Enns where he underwent training, and then later at Tegel, in Berlin. Here is where Malick comes closest to showcasing the violence and sadism of Nazism, in the form of Franz’s military guards who subject him to endless beatings, torture, and other cruelties. The windows of the cells he is moved through grow gradually smaller until he is held in a space scarcely larger than a closet with a tiny window he cannot reach. Such claustrophobic confinement is contrasted with his memories of home, the sweeping meadows, the trees with low-hanging fruit, and even more dramatically by Malick’s insertion of colourized documentary footage of Hitler at his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, entertaining the Nazi elite and their children, or sitting contemplatively in a chair with the mountains looming behind him.

Both Franz and Fani are subjected to temptations: the suave lawyers who try to persuade Franz to change his mind, and Resie, who insists to Fani that Franz’s behaviour is prideful and selfish. Where Fani’s faith comes across as childlike, perhaps even naïve – “No evil can happen to a good man,” she tells herself as she waits to hear the outcome of her husband’s arrest – Franz’s is presented as more complex, and, not surprisingly, more tortured. Any comparison of suffering is mostly an unhelpful exercise, because without doubt both of them suffered, if in different ways: beyond the endless waiting and uncertainty, Fani has only Resie for help through one springtime since no one from the village would work for them, and eventually was loathe even to go to church, where she had to endure the unwelcoming stares of her neighbours. As for Franz, his mental state begins to deteriorate rapidly, salvaged only briefly by the reappearance of Waldlan, a friend from basic training who also ended up in Tegel. (Not much by way of explanation is given: “What are you here for?” “Treason.”) Waldlan’s childlike demeanour and goofy smile leads to one of the film’s more tender, introspective moments as he stares out of his jail cell window, speaking to Franz of being free, planting vines to make wine (a white wine for summer, a red wine for winter), and sometimes going to church, and sometimes staying home.

The denouement is a foregone conclusion, even if the audience is not familiar with Franz’s story: he appears before a military tribunal, having declined numerous times to volunteer for service in a medical unit as a way to save himself. (In fact, the real Franz Jägerstätter was willing to serve in a non-arms-bearing capacity, but this was evidently ignored at his trial.[4]) He is screamed at by a junior official, and taken to the senior judge’s private chambers during a recess and gently questioned there about his position. The conversation between Franz and the judge, played by the indomitable Bruno Ganz (famous among North American audiences for playing Hitler in Der Untergang, here in one of his final roles), is almost as affecting as Widmer’s mountain shots: Ganz as the judge lets sober contemplation and discomfort play across his face and, after Franz is returned to the courtroom, he sits down in the chair he had occupied, hands on knees, silent, as if trying to imagine himself in Franz’s place. Ultimately, he is not moved enough to challenge the inevitable: Franz is sentenced to death, and executed by guillotine on 9 August 1943.

Cinematically, this is the most beautiful film I have seen this year, and maybe for several years. Malick and Widmer are famous for such productions. Even if one expects a visual spectacle based on their reputation, to experience the camera following closely behind Franz’s motorcycle on the sun-soaked mountain path, skimming through rolling fields, past simple shrines and straw-hatted labourers packing hay, is breathtaking. Fani’s search for firewood in the winter of 1940/41, while Franz is undergoing training, is similarly arresting, as she trudges alone over streams and up hills through waist-high snow. The pacing is even and unrushed, and while there is very little action (in the American sense), the three hours was not arduous. The two lead actors are convincing in both their love for and dedication to each other as well as the anguish that Franz’s position causes. Malick is hardly a stranger in confronting the deeply spiritual and philosophical conundrums of our time and exploring the repercussions of an individual’s difficult decision, particularly on loved ones. His camera lingers on Franz’s face, anxious to catch any evidence of doubt or regret (one senses it but never quite sees it), and exposes us to Fani’s breakdown, her hands ripping into the earth in vain, her fists and feet pummeling the unyielding wood of the pasture fence before climbing over it and running into the distance. The impressive supporting cast adds heft to the drama: in addition to Ganz, appearances are made by Matthias Schoenaerts as one of Franz’s lawyers, Jürgen Prochnow as the former mayor, Michael Nyqvist as Bishop Fließer, Karl Markovics as the mayor, and Franz Rogowski as Waldlan. Malick deftly uses language to convey various moods as well: the movie is in English with un-subtitled German threaded into specific scenes, including the trial and community gatherings. But this is not Hollywood’s take on the shrieking Nazi, the German rendered villainous and almost unintelligible; there is that too, as the villagers holler at Fani and Resie in guttural, spit-flecked Austrian dialect, but Malick also uses it for Franz’s whispered prayers and Bible recitations, and Fani’s own musings, prayers and half-thoughts, both sprinkled throughout the movie.

The critical eye of the historian will be less generous in her assessment of the film, though clearly Malick made decisions as the writer and director without feeling obliged to honour the deeper historical context. Franz and Fani are presented as partners, but his decision to refuse the oath is his own. Historically Franziska Jägerstätter endured much controversy and was depicted in her community both at the time and for many years after the war as a co-conspirator, maybe even an arch-influencer, in Franz’s decision; the fact that she supported him, even encouraged him to stand his ground (relayed in the film as her swearing, in the wrenching final meeting between them sometime before his trial, that she would love him no matter what he chose to do) was read by many as having fueled Franz to commit himself to his conscientious objection. She was the more religious of the two when they married; he became more serious about his faith after they wed. This gives a deeper meaning to one of the only exchanges with words between Fani and Rosalia, when she asks her mother-in-law if she blames her for her son’s actions; Rosalia responds cryptically, “He was different, before he met you,” and then the scene cuts away. He was also significantly affected by the example of Franz Reinisch, a fellow Austrian conscientious objector and the only Catholic priest to be executed during the Third Reich, in August 1942, for refusing to swear the Hitler oath; Franz found great affirmation in the fact that he was following the example of a priest. Reinisch plays no role in the movie. Nor does Rupert Mayr, another member of the Third Order of Saint Francis and fellow conscientious objector, who Franz met during his training; the two grew very close through a voluminous correspondence. Rather, Malick presents Franz as something of a lone wolf in his principled stance.

The film is clearly the story of Franz and, to a slightly lesser extent, Fani, and their emotions. Thus Malick spends little time delving into the motivation behind Franz’s decision, beyond his disgust with the war and rejection of Hitler. Their deep religiosity is evident, as is Franz’s desire to be guided by authorities in his church and his belief that what he is doing is right. But the true cause of his refusal to swear the oath – his conviction that, as a Catholic he could not in good conscience swear loyalty to a man like Hitler and the regime he represented, both of which were antithetical to all that a faithful Catholic held as central – is not as deeply interrogated as his emotional journey to stay faithful to that refusal. We do not really learn how he came to feel this way. We know nothing of Franz before 1939 other than brief flashbacks centred on Fani, and we are left to assume what exactly his objections are to Nazism. There is no evidence in the film that Franz wrote extensively, but he did, both about his faith (including, evidently, a catechism for his children, in fearful anticipation that they would not receive a proper Catholic education; his parish priest burnt it in 1945[5]) as well as his opposition to Nazism. Malick’s Franz holds a pencil only to write a few last lines, presumably to Fani, on a clipboard that a guard thrusts at him as he stands waiting for his sentence to be carried out. Even less time is spent on the Church authorities that Franz trusted and who forsook him: the bishop in Linz and the parish priest in Sankt Radegund both come across as typical clergy for the time, careful not to speak openly against the regime, content to stress one’s duty to nation, community and family. Why they failed to share Franz’s conviction that one could not compromise with Nazism without endangering one’s soul is a question still debated today, with few satisfying answers: why did he resist, but not these others? Why was accommodation to Nazism far more common than resistance?

But A Hidden Life, while based on true events and largely accurate to those events as documents tell us, does not pretend to be a rigid historical rendering. Malick is intent on sketching a portrait of Franz and the depth and breadth of his humanity. Each scene was prepared to show the extraordinary goodness of an ordinary man in exceptional circumstances, who was killed for refusing to compromise his deepest beliefs. (An epigraph featuring a George Eliot quotation, unidentified as from Middlemarch, clarifies the meaning of the title.) For this reason the film may well be one of Malick’s masterpieces, bringing the story of Franz Jägerstätter to a more popular audience, and giving to a more informed, scholarly audience a nuanced, reverent treatment of one of the era’s few genuine heroes.

Notes:

[1] See Norbert Haase and Gerhard Paul, Die andere Soldaten : Wehrkraftzersetzung, Gehorsamsverweigerung, und Fahnenflucht im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995).

[2] A concise but detailed analysis of the abrogation is delivered by Manfred Messerschmidt, « Die Aufhebung des Todesurteils gegen Franz Jägerstätter » in Kritische Justiz 31/1 (1998), 99-105.

[3] Because of the amount of literature on Franz Jägerstätter, some of which is academic and much of which is hagiographic, I will analyze the film for the most part on its own terms, with some critical discussion of its attention to historical context, rather than within the framework of the Jägerstätter historiography.

[4] Erna Putz, Franz Jägerstätter – Martyrer : Leuchtendes Beispiel in dunkler Zeit (Bischöfliches Ordinariat der Diözese Linz, 2007), 84-85.

[5] Putz, pg. 68.

Article Note: Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann, “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann, “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis,” American Journal of Political Science 62:1 (January 2018): 19-36.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Amid the current emphasis on Catholic complicity with Nazism, Jörg Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann assess the Church’s ability to immunize its members against Nazism at the end of the Weimar era. Whereas researchers like Thomas Childers, Richard Hamilton, Jürgen Falter, and John O’Loughlin have already determined who voted for Hitler, Spenkuch and Tillmann address “the deeper question of why some groups radicalized while others did not” (20). They maintain that Catholic underrepresentation among Nazi voters was due primarily to the influence of the “Catholic Church and its dignitaries” rather than Catholic subculture or economic conditions in regions with a Catholic majority (22).

To make their case, they use a combination of county-level and municipal-level election results along with census data from 1925-1933. Controlling for other variables like demographic characteristics, unemployment rates according to occupation, workforce composition, and geographic differences, they find that “by itself, counties’ religious composition accounts for about 58% of the variation in the share of Nazi votes” (22). Using an Instrumental variables approach and ecological regression, they determine that “the ratio of Protestants to Catholics among NSDAP voters is about 8 to 1, relative to a population ratio of only 2 to 1” (27) and that “this difference cannot be attributed to systematic socioeconomic differences between both groups, as assumed in much of the prior literature” (28).

Having demonstrated the primacy of Catholic religious identity as an independent variable, the authors test their theory that elite influence shaped political choices by comparing the voting behavior of Catholics subject to the influence of pro-Nazi clerics with that of other Catholics.[1] They find that in such cases, the gap between Protestant and Catholic support for the NSDAP narrowed by 32-41%. In other words, “Catholics and Protestants voted considerably more alike in areas where the Catholic Church’s official warnings about the dangers of National Socialism were directly contradicted by the local clergy” (27).

The authors also address an anomaly that appears to undermine their claim of elite influence—the fact that Catholics were just as likely as Protestants to vote for the communist party despite the Church’s opposition. They attribute this asymmetry to the Catholic Center Party’s “ideological position” on the center-right of the political spectrum (31). While Protestant voters were free to choose the political party closest to their “ideal point,” Catholics faced sanctions if they supported the Nazis or the communists. However, Catholic voters who preferred the NSDAP found it easier than communist supporters to settle for the Center Party because it was closer to their “ideal point.”

Though Spenkuch and Tillmann are not the first to recognize the influence of the Catholic Church and its clergy on the political behavior of lay Catholics, their method quantifies and clarifies the nature of that influence in a discrete historical context. Applying their framework to “radicalized electorates” in the present, they posit that elite influence is most effective when warnings or penalties are accompanied by viable alternatives to extreme political movements: “Depending on the circumstances, a populist but influential elite may ultimately be preferable to a weak, principled one. Paradoxically, our work suggests that it may take a populist to save democracy from the fanatics” (35). They do not explain why populism is the only viable alternative, nor do they clarify the difference between populists and fanatics, but given the timing of their research and its publication, it is clear they have the United States and its religious and political landscapes in mind.

Notes:

[1] For their data set, they took the 138 priests identified by Kevin Spicer in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2008), geocoded their locations at the end of the Weimar Republic, and included all communities within a ten-mile radius.

Article Note: Amit Varshizky, ‘The Metaphysics of Race: Revisiting Nazism and Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Amit Varshizky, ‘The Metaphysics of Race: Revisiting Nazism and Religion,’ Central European History 52, no.2 (2019), 252–88; https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938919000189

By Samuel Koehne, Trinity Grammar School

In this article, Varshizky returns to the topic of Nazism and religion in order to consider the ways in which National Socialism and its core concepts of ‘race’ may be understood as not simply an amalgam of a fascination with genetics, racial science and ‘biological determinism’ but as a ‘new form of religiosity’ (252). In this sense, Varshizky draws on earlier works, such as Goodrick-Clarke and Mosse, as well as places his article very much in the current debate around whether Nazism had any core spiritual direction whatsoever.

Much of the paper considers intellectual trends within German society, and the ways in which debates in the fields of both philosophy and anthropology possibly underpinned concepts used by leading Nazis. Varshizky has previously written some very insightful work on Alfred Rosenberg, including his article on the Nazi ‘world-view’ (Weltanschauung) as a kind of ‘modern gnosis’ (Politics, Religion and Ideology 13, no.3 (2012), 311–31). The present article begins with a useful precis of the current debates on Nazism and religion, and Varshizky identifies three major schools of thought on Nazism and religion. These portray the Nazis as ‘secular and atheistic’ while making use of religious forms for a kind of ‘political religion,’ as ‘pagan’ and driven by an ‘anti-Christian impulse,’ or as identifying ‘ideological and institutional links between Nazism and Christianity (usually Protestantism)’ (254). However, Varshizky places his own paper solidly within a fourth historiographical ‘school’ that has emerged in recent years (Burrin, Koehne), which recognizes that Nazism could be all of these things at once and that ‘syncretism’ in the party was such that ‘[each] of these three narratives [political religion, paganism, Nazi Christianity] refers to a certain stream that existed within the Nazi ideological establishment’ (253–55).

For his part, Varshizky believes that the ‘most acceptable’ view on Nazism and religion is that of Wolfgang Bilias and Anson Rabinbach, that Nazi ideology was more of an ‘ethos or Gesinnung’ that was ‘vague and indistinct enough to embrace a variety of related perspectives’ (255). In common with other scholars in recent years, Varshizky therefore sees the Nazi aspect of ‘syncretism’ as a ‘racialized form of religiosity’ rather than necessarily an ideology that adhered to a ‘systematic or organized form of religion.’ Opposing the notion of a simplistic dichotomy in the field of Nazism and religion (such as ‘Christian/pagan’ or ‘atheist/religious’), Varshizky locates the origins of a blended Nazi scientific-religious approach in ‘vitalist biology’ in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, and traces the debates that existed in both theological circles and in anthropology in Germany from around 1900 (257–61; 261–68). In both cases, Varshizky argues that Nazism could form links to ‘paradigmatic transitions in philosophical and scientific thought’ in Germany including a growing use of ‘biocentric jargon’ in ‘life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)’ (257).

Varshizky points out that the theological and philosophical responses to secularization and modernity included debates that depicted ‘Judaism as the source of modernity and its crisis’ (258),’ which could form a nexus with both völkisch antisemitism and the antisemitism of ‘conservative revolutionary circles.’ (258). Varshizky places these in historical context, noting that such debates, combined with a sense of crisis in modernity and concepts of alienation, created a concept of ‘race’ that amounted to ‘a broad cultural and epistemological category’ rather than any narrowly defined or ‘scientific’ concept (261). Drawing on writers that were highly influential in the fields of genetics, anthropology and ‘racial science’– such as Walter Scheidt, Hans F.K. Günther, Fritz Lenz, Ernst Krieck – he also traces the idea of science performing the role of ‘instrument’ within a concept of race as a ‘faith’ or a ‘total reality, verified by its own factuality from its being-in-itself’ (266). This is a fascinating argument, and certainly draws on writers who heavily influenced the Nazis directly. It correlates with previous explications of Nazism and race, including leading Nazis’ obsession with salvational nationalism, but Varshizky here identifies the manner in which the Nazis might also be – in my view – rightly considered as a conspiracy group, adhering to a ‘total reality’ that dictated the manner in which they perceived the world. This had a direct impact under Nazi rule, as Varshizky notes that such an approach meant that the Nazi regime attempted to create a bewildering array of ‘Aryan’ sciences (‘Aryan physics,’ ‘Aryan mathematics,’ ‘Aryan biology’). Varshizky sees this as not only then being driven by a kind of metaphysical fascination with race, but as ultimately combining religious experience and science to some degree. The leitmotif in his consideration of Rosenberg and Gross, both of whom were leading Nazis who were deeply involved in the study of ‘racial values,’ is that their writings show the interweaving of ‘biological racism’ and ‘theological narratives employing vitalist language’ (273).

Some of the most valuable material in this paper appears in the section on Rosenberg and Bergmann (279–83), where Varshizky explores their writings in considerable depth, noting the philosophical approach that they adopt revolved around concepts of blood but also a kind of ‘pantheistic religiosity’ in which religion ‘had to be evaluated in accordance with [the Nazis’] “hyperracialized and antisemitic ideology.”’ (282). His work provides further evidence for the concept of ‘ethnotheism’ (Koehne) in the Nazi Party, as he concludes: ‘The demand to reconcile all religious views with the “moral feelings of the Germanic Race” [Point 24, Nazi Program]…resulted in a largely cohesive, if flexible, attitude toward religion,’ in which ‘all spiritual values were ultimately race-determined.’ In his view, such supposedly ‘biologically-based spirituality’ could provide an ‘all-encompassing’ world-view in a time of severe crisis during the Weimar Republic.

Indeed, it is perhaps the more pertinent to us now to return to these concepts, as many present-day crises have seen the rise of conspiracy theories and the amalgam of people’s concerns and fears with vast, fictional, but deeply held views in which a ‘total reality’ is stood against actual reality. In such crises, people are indeed turning to explanatory frameworks or a ‘conceptual grid’ that simplifies and ‘holistically’ explains the world in terms of some larger conspiracy or ‘cabal.’ While race may not necessarily be the core of such conspiracy groups today – although sadly antisemitism is often a core component – reading Varshizky’s article was a timely reminder that we perhaps have greater insight presently into the ways in which Nazi ideology worked: as a racial world-view that (to its adherents) revealed the ‘true’ nature of the world as one of ‘racial struggle.’

Article Note: Ionuṭ Biliuṭă, “Fascism, Race, and Religion in Interwar Transylvania: The Case of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973)”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Ionuṭ Biliuṭă, “Fascism, Race, and Religion in Interwar Transylvania: The Case of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973),” Church History 89:1 (March 2020): 101-124.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Ionuṭ Biliuṭă uses the case of Father Liviu Stan to confront the “collective ecclesiastical forgetting” in works that celebrate the scholarship of Romania’s interwar theologians while ignoring their collaboration with fascist and communist regimes (102). Reverence for Stan is particularly noteworthy given his virulent racism, membership in the Iron Guard, and service in government during the National Legionary State and the communist era. There is an inverse relationship between appreciation for Stan’s theology and interest in his biography.

As a university student in the early 1930s, Stan actively and at times violently supported nationalist and antisemitic agendas. By 1935, he had “converted” to fascism and equated “radical nationalist politics” with “religious salvation” (110). He officially joined the Iron Guard in 1937, the same year in which he was ordained and appointed to the faculty of the Academy of Orthodox Theology in Sibiu. Although he left the Iron Guard in 1938, his commitment to fascist ideals continued. In articles he wrote for the Legionary press, he promoted antisemitism and the exclusion of Roma from the national community. His book Race and Religion “advocated for the religious necessity of a racist outlook in accordance with the divine plan initiated by God’s creation of man” (122), and its publication in 1942 coincided with the war against the Soviet Union and Romania’s participation in the murder of European Jews.

As head of the Department of Religious Denominations in 1940, Stan was part of a failed attempt to reform the church’s institutional structure and relationship to the National Legionary State. In the early communist era, he held the same office and played a key role in the development of state religious policy, the canonization process, and ecumenical initiatives. Stan’s postwar reputation and position in government were predicated on his willingness to collaborate with the Securitate (secret police), and his new patrons discarded him once his usefulness was exhausted.

Some of Biliuṭă’s most intriguing claims remain undeveloped or at odds with one another. Were Stan and his fellow theologians conformists who cared only about their physical and professional survival, pragmatists who compromised with fascists and communists in order to pursue an independent agenda, or “true believers” who embraced fascism for a time and then abandoned it (at least outwardly) in the postwar era? Biliuṭă’s conclusion points toward the first two options, whereas the bulk of the article supports the third. The abstract refers to “interactions with various ideologies … ideological and professional reconversions, and … ability to survive when confronted with various totalitarian challenges” (101). Unfortunately, Biliuṭă’s close analysis does not continue beyond 1945, and we are left wondering about the nature of Stan’s own reconversion as well as the “agendas” that made Orthodox clergy “eager to collaborate with any political regime” (123).

Despite these unanswered questions, Biliuṭă’s article makes an important contribution to contemporary Romanian church history. Although it was the Securitate that initially “imposed a conspiracy of silence on the Fascist history of the Orthodox Church,” ecclesiastical historians of the post-communist era have perpetuated the cover-up (124). Biliuṭă intends to set the record straight, and in that respect he is successful.

Article Note: Thomas J. Kehoe, “The Reich Military Court and Its Values: Wehrmacht Treatment of Jehovah’s Witness Conscientious Objectors”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Thomas J. Kehoe, “The Reich Military Court and Its Values: Wehrmacht Treatment of Jehovah’s Witness Conscientious Objectors,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 33, no 3 (2019): 351-371.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Thomas Kehoe’s article treats a long-neglected subject: the punishment of Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to serve in the German military during World War II. Using the records of the Reich military court, which only came to light in the early 1990s, Kehoe finds that 408 Jehovah’s Witness conscientious objectors were convicted of Wehrkraftzersetzung – subverting the war effort. Of those men, 258 were executed. Kehoe puts these numbers into perspective by pointing out that Jehovah’s Witnesses made up 96% of the men sentenced to death by the Reich military court, although they constituted only 14% of the cases of subversion. Why was the Reich military court extra punitive toward Jehovah’s Witnesses, Kehoe asks? And why did it, nonetheless, not impose a death sentence in every case? In fact, he shows, all 150 convicted Jehovah’s Witness men who recanted received lesser sentences from the court.

Kehoe’s explanation involves two related points. First, he emphasizes that the court was guided by military priorities and the “necessities of war.” Second, he maintains that the subordination of justice to the command structure had its roots not in Nazism but in Prussian military tradition. Kehoe rejects legal positivist claims that judges were forced or duped into toeing the Nazi line. To the contrary, he suggests the difference in treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses from others charged with the same offence shows that the military court had significant discretion. However, Kehoe also questions a simple argument of complicity: if members of the highest military court shared Nazi ideological goals across the board, why would they not have executed all of the Jehovah’s Witnesses convicted as conscientious objectors? Because their goal was to maximize Germany’s fighting force, Kehoe concludes, it made sense to come down hard on “intransigent” Jehovah’s Witnesses but to back off in cases where men agreed to recant.

Kehoe’s analysis is persuasive but could be deepened by paying more attention to the wider social, religious, and political contexts. For instance, how did military judges view Jehovah’s Witnesses? The court presumably intended its decisions to send a message not only to condemned men themselves but to all soldiers and members of their families and communities. Death sentences conveyed the regime’s zero tolerance for refusal to perform military service. Yet the National Socialist regime was acutely aware of public opinion and always hit the most vulnerable targets first. Murder of disabled people began with those who were already isolated and marginalized. Although sex between men was subject to severe penalties, including death sentences, the men who most heavily punished were invariably unpopular outsiders. Could a similar logic have been at play with Jehovah’s Witnesses, who could be held up as a negative example without authorities, including military officers, having to worry that there would be backlash?

In his conclusion, Kehoe calls for more comparative studies of military courts and their treatment of supposed internal enemies. This idea is to be welcomed. Even within the context of Nazi Germany, some intriguing comparisons come to mind. One might be to examine Jehovah’s Witnesses together with German Jewish men, who were excluded from military service in 1935. Another would be to compare Jehovah’s Witnesses with Mennonites, none of whom were executed as conscientious objectors in Nazi Germany, or with the handful of mainstream Christian conscientious objectors, the most famous of whom, Franz Jägerstätter, has meanwhile been beatified and is now the subject of an acclaimed movie directed by Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life, 2019). Kehoe deserves credit for starting the conversation and for bringing the names of some Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were killed for refusing to serve in the Wehrmacht, to the attention of people outside their immediate family and faith communities.

The German Bishops in the World War: The English Text

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

The German Bishops in the World War: The English Text

In the March 2020 issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, we featured two analyses of the German Bishops Conference statement, “Deutsche Bischöfe im Weltkrieg. Wort zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs vor 75 Jahren,” by Olaf Blaschke and Mark Edward Ruff. In the meantime, the German Bishops Conference has published an official English translation of the statement, entitled The German Bishops in the World War: Statement on the end of the Second World War 75 years ago. For those who would like to read the statement in full, it is available here: https://dbk.de/fileadmin/redaktion/diverse_downloads/presse_2020/2020-04-29_DB_107_Englisch.pdf.

Letter from the Editors (June 2020)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Letter from the Editors (June 2020)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear friends,

We are delighted, after several months of upheaval, to finally be able to publish a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Articles, reviews, and notes from a wide range of scholars–including two guest contributions–cover several figures and events key to the history and legacy of the German “church struggle” of the Nazi era.

Adolf Bertram, Cardinal, Prince-Archbishop of Breslau and Chairman of the Fulda Conference of Bishops (1920-1945)
Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2005-0065 / Götz, H. / CC-BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)

Olaf Blaschke of the University of the University of Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of St. Louis University analyze the history and text of the recent statement issued by the German Catholic Bishops Conference: “Deutsche Bischöfe im Weltkrieg. Wort zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs vor 75 Jahren” (“German Bishops in the World War: Statement on the 75th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War”). In new ways, they find, the Catholic hierarchy in Germany is coming to terms with their responsibility for supporting the Nazi war of conquest and annihilation.

Next, Hansjörg Buss of the University of Göttingen reviews Benjamin Ziemann’s new biography of Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller, after which Robert Ericksen assesses one of Niemöller’s previously unpublished writings, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche, a comparison of Protestantism and Catholicism written during Niemöller’s incarceration in concentration camp, at a time in which he was seriously considering converting to Catholicism. In keeping with the theme of church leaders, Andrew Chandler reviews German theologian (and former Protestant Bishop) Wolfgang Huber’s new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which draws heavily from Bonhoeffer’s own writings.

Other reviews by Victoria Barnett examine Rebecca Scherf’s work on the relationship between the German churches and Nazi concentration camps and Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler’s publication of the correspondence between Anglican Bishop George Bell and German refugee Gerhard Leibholz, who was married to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s twin sister. Christopher Probst comments on Andrea Hofmann’s article about Martin Luther’s presence in First World War sermons, and also writes of the misuse of Luther in recent German right-wing election campaign propaganda posters. Finally, we return to the topic of Martin Niemöller and specifically his famous quotation about indifference–the subject of a recent United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Facebook Live presentation.

We thank you for your patience with CCHQ during the coronavirus pandemic, and look forward to resuming our normal publishing schedule in September.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

By Olaf Blaschke, University of Münster

The following commentary examines the April 29, 2020, publication of “Deutsche Bischöfe im Weltkrieg. Wort zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs vor 75 Jahren” (“German Bishops in the World War: Statement on the 75th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War”) by the German Roman Catholic Bishops Conference.

Despite rumors to the contrary, this is not the first statement by German Catholic bishops on the behavior of the shepherds in the time of National Socialism and in the Second World War. Other reflections have already been uttered several times in collective pastoral letters and those written by certain bishops or in certain statements.

In January 1945, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen (Münster) conceded mistakes of the hierarchy in a letter to the archbishop of Cologne, and at the same time Bishop Johannes Joseph van der Velden of Aachen admitted to the US-Psychological Warfare Division, the Church itself had failed.¹ Four weeks after the total capitulation (May 8, 1945), the north-western German bishops of Cologne, Aachen, Limburg, Münster, Osnabrück, Trier, Paderborn, Fulda and Hildesheim, covering most of Germany (except the south), came together in Werl and decided to write a petition to the Military Government, to the bishops in the USA and Great Britain, and to the Pope. In this text, the bishops critically considered why they kept silent, also concerning the atrocities against Jews. Looking back, they got the impression “that it would have served our church and our people more if we had kept silent less.”²

It was a fatal event that the speech of Pius XII on June 2, 1945 – not known by the bishops meeting in Werl on June 5 – caused the bishops to change their course for the coming decades. In his address to the college of cardinals the pope praised the “great qualities of the people” in Germany, among which he had spent twelve years between 1917 and 1929, and condemned the “satanic specter raised by National Socialism,” which was persecuting the Church. “To resist such attacks millions of courageous Catholics, men and women, closed their ranks around their bishops, whose valiant and severe pronouncements never failed to resound even in these last years of war. These Catholics gathered around their priests to help them adapt their ministry to the ever-changing needs and conditions. And right up to the end they set up against the forces of impiety and pride their forces of faith, prayer and openly Catholic behavior and education.”³ This was the sentence which from now on was quoted in several pastoral letters. Backed by the authoritative voice of the pope in a context of a world condemning the Germans, the bishops felt encouraged to present themselves as victims, not as part of the system, being involved in resistance, not in collaboration, and to discard any claim of a collective guilt.⁴

In their first pastoral letter after the war, the Bavarian bishops referred to the pope’s speech, emphasizing that the bishops had warned against National Socialism and that the German “Volk” had suffered immensely.⁵

Accordingly, in the first pastoral letter of the joint German bishops of August 23, 1945, the Catholic people were praised because they had kept away from the “idolatry of brutal power.” Certainly, “terrible things” had happened before and during the war “by Germans in the occupied countries. We deeply regret it: Many Germans, even from our ranks [!], have let themselves be seduced by the wrong teachings of National Socialism and have remained indifferent to crimes against human freedom and human dignity; many of them promoted crimes through their attitude, many have become criminals themselves.” This admission of guilt is famous, but only made up 4.4 percent of the entire document. Whether “our ranks” also included the bishops is highly questionable.⁶ The bishops took the course of seeing themselves and the faithful as victims. The statements were shaped by dualism (Church vs. National Socialists), opposition (the Church resisted the regime), and exculpation. For years, this position remained mainstream.

The pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops in April 1946 claimed: “We bishops have fought ‘the satanic specter of National Socialism’ [again quoting Pius XII] so decisively and suffered so much from it that we cannot be suspect that we now want to wash away all his followers of guilt and free them from punishment.” The letter was about commitment for the “political prisoners” and former party members.⁷

Later statements spoke more frankly: In 1976 the Common Synod of Bishoprics complained that the ecclesial community had kept silent about the murder of the Jews. After the TV series “Holocaust” had been broadcast, the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference explained in 1979 a certain complicity, because the Church didn’t comment on the boycott, the Nuremberg race laws, or the pogroms of 1938. When the outbreak of the war commemorated its 40^th anniversary in 1979, the Church acknowledged the co-responsibility of the German people, including the guilt “in the church” – but not of the Church. On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it was confirmed that “failure and guilt was common among Catholics.”

Contrasted with earlier documents, the present shepherds’ word breathes a completely different spirit. Its creation was advised by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte and the German Commission Justitia et Pax. The document knows about the decades of apologetic tendencies in the Catholic Church and is not afraid to “name misconduct,” which however only becomes clear from the middle of the document onwards (p. 12 of 23). Despite all the well known distance to National Socialism, “the Catholic Church in Germany was part of the war society.” This is clearly stated. It was the Church, not only people in the Church.

In the controversy that has been going on for 75 years, whether the bishops have “proven themselves”⁸ or whether they have “failed,” this document emphasizes in a balanced way of argumentation that they were actually “complicit in the war.” Between 1933 and its last meeting in 1943, the Bishops Conference was “not up to the challenge of National Socialism.”⁹

The document is immune from ahistorical moralization. Rather, it recognizes the need to explain the historical circumstances: the shared belief at the time that state power came from God, the teaching of just war, nationalism, and anti-Bolshevism. Wolfgang Böckenförde identified these elements in 1961 as the interface between Catholicism and National Socialism, holding it against ecclesiastical apologetic, while now it is part of an ecclesiastical document.¹⁰

To conclude: the recent statement of the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference corresponds to the well-established tendency of historical research to no longer search for the genocidal and war “program” of Nazi leaders in an intentionalist way, placing the guilt on a handful of “outcasts”, viewing the Germans as seduced by a brown clique. Rather, research into perpetrators (“Täterforschung”) expanded down to “ordinary men,” as Christopher Browning put it.¹¹ Now the bishops also turn out to be “ordinary churchmen.” They no longer adorn themselves with the narrative of exculpation and dualism, sacrifice and resistance, but admit their “own entanglements” which have to be interpreted in their historical context. Even the interpretation that the war against the Soviet Union in 1941 was felt and endorsed as a “crusade” against “godless Bolshevism” can be found in this document. It gave the bishops “an additional meaning to the war.”¹²

What remains unclear is the choice of the date of publication, commemorating the 75^th year of the liberation of the Dachau concentration-camp on April 29, 1945. Why is Dachau never mentioned in the document? 2700 clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, were imprisoned there, among them 1700 Polish priests. Many felt abandoned by their bishops, treated as disobedient, and suffered from their bishops’ de-solidarization. In 1945, the bishops told them they should not act as martyrs. Dachau is not the topic of the document, rather the 75^th commemoration of the end of the Second World War nine days later. The statement explicitly marks the 8^th of May as a day of liberation, but its authors chose another day to make it public. This, however, is a minor objection in the face of a document which has made great progress.

Notes:

¹Vera Bücker, Die Schulddiskussion im deutschen Katholizismus nach 1945, Bochum 1989, p. 89; Wolfgang Löhr, Bischof Johannes Joseph van der Velden und die Schuldfrage nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Kirche im Bistum Aachen, Jahrbuch 7, 2004, p. 247-257, 255, quoted in: Ulrich Helbach, Es hätte unserer Kirche und unserem Volk mehr gedient, wenn wir weniger geschwiegen hätten … Die “Schuldfrage” im Frühjahr 1945 im Lichte eines neuen Quellenfundes: Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Papst Pius XII., in: Siegfried Schmidt (Hg.), Rheinisch – Kölnisch – Katholisch. Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Landesgeschichte, FS H. Finger, Köln 2008, p. 341-372, 344. For the context: Damian van Melis / Joachim Köhler (ed.), Siegerin in Trümmern: Die Rolle der katholischen Kirche in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1998. Olaf Blaschke, Olaf, Die Kirchen und der Nationalsozialismus, Bonn 2019 (Stuttgart 2014), p. 231-244.

²[Probably Lorenz Jaeger], Entwurf für eine Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Pius XII. zur Kollektivschuldfrage, Paderborn, ca. 5. 6. 1945, in: Ulrich Helbach (Bearb.), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945. Westliche Besatzungszonen 1945-1947, vol. 1, Paderborn 2012 (Veröffentlichungen der KfZG, Reihe A: Quellen, Bd. 54), p. 115-120 (EA Paderborn, NL Jaeger, Sachgruppe 1 [Rom], Hefter: Eingaben/Verfügungen). The story of this document is told by its discoverer: Helbach, Schuldfrage.

³Pius XII, Ansprache an das Kardinalskollegium, 2. 6. 1945, in: Wilhelm Jussen (ed.), Gerechtigkeit schafft Frieden, Reden und Enzykliken des Heiligen Vaters Pius XII., Hamburg 1946, p. 201-216.

⁴Officialla, the collective guilt was never announced. Cf. Norbert Frei, Von deutscher Erfindungskraft. Die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit, in: Gary Smith (ed.), Hannah Arendt revisited. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” und die Folgen, Frankfurt 2000, p. 157-170.

⁵Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Erstes gemeinsames Hirtenwort nach dem Krieg, Eichstätt, June 28^th 1945, in: Wolfgang Löhr (Bearb.), Dokumente deutscher Bischöfe 1945-1949, vol. 1: Hirtenbriefe und Ansprachen zu Gesellschaft und Politik 1945-1949, Würzburg 1985, S. 29-32.

⁶Hirtenbrief der deutschen Bischöfe, 23. 8. 1945, in: Löhr (ed.), p. 40-45.

⁷Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Hirtenwort über das Glaubensleben und Zeitprobleme, Eichstätt, 9. 4. 1946, in: Löhr (Bearb.), p. 99-103, 102.

⁸Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918 bis 1945, Paderborn 1992, p. 550.

⁹Here, the scholarly findings of Antonia Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens. Der Ausschuss für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945, Frankfurt 1996, find their way into the document.

¹⁰Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933. Eine kritische Betrachtung, in: Hochland 53 (1961), p. 215-239.

¹¹Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York 1992.

¹²Cf. Antonia Leugers, Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung, Paderborn 2009.

“The German Catholic Bishops and the Second World War: A Historic Reappraisal”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

“The German Catholic Bishops and the Second World War: A Historic Reappraisal”

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

On May 8, 2020, the 75^th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender to the Allies, the German Catholic bishops issued a statement, “Germany’s Bishops during the War,” admitting their complicity in the Second World War. “By not unequivocally saying ‘no,’ to the war and by strengthening instead the resolve (to fight and persist), they came to share in the guilt for the war,” declared their twenty-three page message released during a video conference because of the coronavirus epidemic.

Without a doubt, this statement’s critical tones marked a massive departure in how the German bishops portrayed their conduct during the war. Earlier claims of the hierarchy’s guilt had been met with fire and fury. When in September 1959, the American Catholic pacifist, Gordon Zahn, accused the German bishops of having unconditionally supported what he called “Hitler’s predatory wars,” the West German bishops responded critically, commissioning a team in the Central Committee of German Catholics to gather exculpating documents.[1] No less than Cardinal Augustin Bea, who later would gain a reputation as an influential ecumenical representative at the Second Vatican Council, attempted to have him removed from his position as a tenured professor at Loyola University, Chicago.[2]

What made possible this remarkable shift? The recent bishops’ statement was, in part, the fruit of Professor Heinrich Missalla, a Catholic theologian based for much of his career at the University of Essen and a pacifist. Missalla was long known as an ardent and passionate critic of the Catholic Church’s conduct during the Third Reich. His last published book from 2015 was entitled, Remembering for the Future: How the Catholic Bishops supported Hitler’s War.[3]

Missalla had hoped to publish an open letter to the bishops for the 80^th anniversary on the outbreak of war in 2019. But his death on October 3, 2018 put an end to those plans. The left-wing Catholic newspaper, Public Forum, instead published his letter posthumously in its August 2019 edition under the imposing title: “Do you finally have the courage to face the truth? Not only Protestant but also Catholic Bishops let themselves be carried away by the enthusiasm for war.”[4] In this final statement, Missalla raised the questions that had occupied him for his entire life: how was it possible that the German Catholic bishops could send soldiers to their deaths up to the very end in a war of unspeakable cruelty and annihilation – and justify this with religious and theological arguments? Why did they hold on for so long to their justifications for fighting which included “duty,” “obedience,” “readiness to sacrifice,” and “Christian struggle.” As he put it: “It remains a puzzle why nearly the entire German episcopate did not call out the criminal nature of Hitler’s war by name and accordingly called on the faithful entrusted to it to place itself (at Hitler’s command) obediently and with a willingness to die.”

But Missalla was also preoccupied by the church’s failures in the postwar era. Why were the bishops not able to find the courage to own up to their failure and guilt after 1945? Missalla believed that inadequate historical research was part of the problem. “In reality,” he wrote, “there are numerous documentations and investigations of the events and problems of this dark period of German Catholic Church history. It is somewhat astounding, however, that no comprehensive account of the conduct of the German Catholic Church in the war has been put together.”

This claim is, of course, not entirely accurate. Numerous scholars, including many church critics, addressed the conduct of the church in the war, from Gordon Zahn’s classic work from 1962, German Catholics and Hitler’s War: A Study in Social Control, to Lauren Faulkner’s monograph from 2015, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation. [5] Thomas Brodie’s book from 2018, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945, provided precisely the comprehensive, critical and nuanced account Missalla was calling for.[6] Yet even on the other side of the Atlantic, Karl-Joseph Hummel’s and Christoph Kösters’ 600-age edited volume from 2007, Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945, provided valuable snapshots into the theology, conduct, and world-view of the German church hierarchy.[7]

However inaccurately as Missalla may have represented the state of existing scholarship, the chair of the German Bishops Conference, the Bishop of Limburg, Georg Bätzing, nonetheless expressly acknowledged Missalla’s lifelong engagement when he formally presented the Bishops’ Statement to the public. The Bishops Conference, moreover, did draw on recent and critical findings from scholars, most from contemporary German historians and theologians, in putting together its statement. They turned to the scholarship of the recently retired church historian and theologian from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Wilhelm Damberg, who had critically analyzed the theologies of war and understandings of just war that had informed the thinking of theologians from the 1920s through the 1950s.[8] In this vein, they also drew on the scholarship of the Tübingen theologian and church historian, Andreas Holzem.[9] Both Damberg and Holzem played a significant role in steering the Bonn-based Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in a new direction over the course of the last decade. Long seen by critics as a nexus for defensive and apologetic accounts of the church during the Third Reich, the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte under Damberg’s leadership in particular shed this reputation as a fortress for Catholic culture warriors. It brought in many younger scholars, theologians and historians alike, into its ranks. Just this year, it received a multi-million Euro grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to research the history of the Catholic Church in Germany from 1965 through 1989. Scholarship from the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte during the last twenty years thus marked a decisive break from that of earlier generations which focused primarily on the “resistance” and “distance” brokered by the ecclesia and laity alike.

This increasingly nuanced and even critical scholarship from the 2000s and 2010s about the church and the war found its way directly into the Deutsche Kommission Justitia et Pax of the Bishops Conference. It informed not just the ensuing statement’s tone but its epistemology. “As difficult it is to understand and as incorrect the conduct of our predecessors in the ranks of the bishops might seem to us today, it does not defy historical understanding. Only this way can we escape the temptation of letting the events from that time not come close to us today.”

The commission drew on the findings of these theologians and historians who had pointed to the resources that the church provided for Hitler’s war. These ranged from patriotic pastoral letters to the nationalistic exhortations of military chaplains and even to the role played by women religious in military hospitals and sick wards. The bishops thus duly painted a picture of ambivalence. In spite of an inner distance to National Socialism and on occasion even enmity, they stated, the Catholic Church in Germany remained part of a “war society.” In this regard, the increased repression towards Christianity, the war of annihilation, the change in the tides of war between 1940 and 1943, and the increasing casualties as a result of the bombing war against Germany changed the bishops’ attitudes but little.

At the same time, the Bishops Conference did not want this statement to be seen as a formal “ostracism” (Scherbengericht) of their predecessors. On the contrary: they saw it instead as a new link in a chain of Catholic institutional memory, one understood not as an end in itself but rather as a tool for peace and the reconciliation of peoples.

“With the distancing effect of time, the reality that for many years there was no understanding of the suffering and sacrifice of others is particularly shameful,” asserted the closing section of this declaration. “Exchanges and the paths to reconciliation with our neighbors, especially Poland and France, have helped us to put behind this way of seeing things, which was characterized by avoidance, repression and a fixation on our own pain. Through this, we hope to experience that these meetings and contacts also have contributed and contribute to the renewal of the church.”

To no surprise, this declaration was received well by Germany’s neighbors, and in particular Poland. This showed that the church in Germany has made an important stride forward as far as the politics of the past is concerned. It followed Missalla’s dictum: “remember for the sake of the future.”

The text of the declaration and the statements to the press from April 29, 2020, can be found at the following link:

https://dbk.de/nc/presse/aktuelles/meldung/wort-der-deutschen-bischoefe-zum-ende-des-zweiten-weltkriegs-vor-75-jahren-veroeffentlicht/detail/

An English-language translation is scheduled to be made available in June 2020.

[1] Archiv der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Bonn, NL Walter Adolph, WA 16a, Auszug aus dem Protokoll der Konferenz der westdeutschen Bischöfe, Pützchen, 9.-11.12.1959

[2] Diözesanarchiv Berlin, NL Julius Döpfner, Augustin Bea to Julius Döpfner, February 11, 1960.

[3] Heinrich Massalla, Erinnern um die Zukunft willen: Wie die katholischen Bischöfe Hitlers Krieg unterstützt haben (Oberursel: Public-Forum-Verlags GmbH, 2015).

[4] Heinrich Massalla, „“Haben Sie endlich Mut zur Wahrheit?“: Nicht nur evangelische, sondern auch katholische Bischöfe ließen sich von der Kriegsbegeisterung mitreißen,“ in: Publik-Forum, August 23, 2019, 34-35.

[5] Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s War: A Study in Social Control (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962); Lauren Faulkner, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

[6] Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[7] Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007).

[8] See Wilhelm Damberg, „Krieg, Theologie und Kriegserfahrung,“ in: Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 203-216.

[9] Andreas Holzem, “Theological War Theories,” in: Angela Kallhoff and Thomas Schulte-Umberg (eds.), Moralities of Warfare and Religion (Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformationin Contemporary Society [J-RaT], Vol. 4), Vienna 2018, 21-37; Andreas Holzem, “Christentum und Kriegsgewalt,” in: Theologische Quartalschrift 191 (2011), 314-338; Andreas Holzem, ed., Krieg und Christentum. Religiöse Gewalttheorien in der Kriegserfahrung des Westens (Krieg in der Geschichte, Bd. 50), (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition (Munich: DVA, 2019). 640 pages. ISBN: 978-3-421-04712-0.

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

At Christmas 1940, Martin Niemöller appeared on the front page of Time Magazine as the “Martyr of 1940.” Since that same autumn, the film Pastor Hall, inspired by a drama by the playwright Ernst Toller, had been showing in American cinemas. It captured the story of the “Church Struggle” in Germany on celluloid, with little attempt to conceal Niemöller’s biographical details. Since his arrest in the summer of 1937 and subsequent transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller had become a worldwide symbol of church resistance to the National Socialist dictatorship. Interest in his person continued even after his liberation at the beginning of May 1945. Despite the irritation that Niemöller provoked by making nationalistic statements in his first public postwar interview, he and his wife travelled to the United States for several months in 1946 and 1947, where he gave over 200 public lectures in 22 states.

To this day, Martin Niemöller remains one of the most famous German churchmen of the twentieth century. He is regarded as an upright resistance fighter against Hitler, who testified to his stance with seven years of incarceration in concentration camps, as a preacher who admonished German “guilt” and as someone who had transformed from an imperial submarine commander of the First World War into a pacifist, who during the 1950s eloquently and powerfully opposed the Federal Republic of Germany’s Western alliance, its remilitarization, and nuclear weapons. Now, 35 years after Niemöller’s death in 1984, Benjamin Ziemann, Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, cuts through the thicket of legend concerning Niemöller’s story and uncovers important strands of his life.

Born in 1892, Niemöller came from the home of a Westphalian pastor and chose the career of naval officer. Caught up in the national Protestantism of his time, he experienced the German defeat in the First World War as nothing less than a catastrophe. Only then did he decide to study theology, which he successfully completed in Münster. The book chapter on the völkisch and German national “student politician” is one of the most striking. Niemöller belonged to various far-right parties and associations such as the antisemitic German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbund) and the National Association of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere) and counted himself among the enemies of Weimar democracy. He also personally held, as Ziemann comprehensively proves for the first time, an aggressive attitude of racial antisemitism. As a father of several children and with his entry into civilian professional life, Niemöller became more moderate in the second half of the 1930s, but initially his political stance did not change. In 1931, after seven years as the organizer of the Westphalian Inner Mission, he moved to Dahlem, a well-to-do parish in Berlin’s southwest. Like many German nationalist pastors of his generation, Niemöller welcomed Hitler’s chancellorship, the “Third Reich,” and the emergence of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) founded on Christianity.

Those disputes, which are treated today under the term “church struggle,” were crucial tests. As head of the Pastors’ Emergency League, founded in mid-September 1933, Niemöller became one of its most important protagonists in the second half of 1933 and gained importance throughout the Reich. Ziemann expertly describes the activities of Niemöller in the conflicts of the “church struggle,” accompanied by ecclesiastical, political, and personal tensions and breaks, and ascribes to him a key role in the debates of the Confessing Church concerning the inevitable consequences of Barmen Theological Declaration of the end of May 1934. He experienced the February 1936 division of the Confessing Church into a Dahlemite wing led by Councils of Brethren and a Lutheran wing led by regional bishops not only as a loss, but also as an opportunity for the (Confessing) Church.

His involvement, which led him to become increasingly opposed to the Nazi state and the growing state pressure on the church, ended abruptly on July 1, 1937, with his arrest. After a comparatively mild judgment by the Special Court at the regional court level, which would actually have resulted in his release, he was transferred directly to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. In the detailed description of his concentration camp imprisonment in the almost fifty-page chapter on Niemöller’s time of suffering as the “personal prisoner of the Führer,” two themes stand out. One was the almost-two-year deliberation about conversion to the Catholic Church, which he only finally decided against at the urging of his wife, in February 1941, a few months before his transfer to Dachau. The other was the “empathy for communists and other victims of Nazi terror,” which Ziemann exposes as a subsequent self-stylization of the postwar period. Rather, he demonstrates an ongoing anti-Bolshevik and nationalist stance: “Even at the moment of liberation from the concentration camp, he interpreted the defeat of the German nation as the fall of the West” (p. 356).

Up to the 1970s, Niemöller remained a public figure and a noticeable and by no means uncontroversial voice in the social debates of the early Federal Republic. Ziemann goes into great detail about Niemöller’s disappointment at the development of the postwar Protestant Church, which he accused of episcopal and confessional tendencies and of supporting Konrad Adenauer’s policies, which he characterized as restorationist. Rooted in his understanding of a “prophetic guardian role” for the church, this went hand in hand with his keen criticism of the founding of the Federal Republic (“conceived in Rome and born in Washington”), the decision to ally with the West, and West German rearmament. Biographically, Niemöller’s sharpest break occurred at the end of the 1950s over the question of war and peace. Under the impact of the destructive force of hydrogen bombs, the former naval officer—who, despite his pacifist criticism of politics and the West German military, felt committed to the ethos of an officer throughout his life—became the most outspoken leader of the West German peace movement, in the campaign “Fight Against Nuclear Death” (“Kampf dem Atomtod”) and after 1957 as president the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft). Only then did Niemöller’s Protestant nationalist guiding principles wear off, which in the immediate postwar period were still expressed in nationalist speeches and manifest in his participation in the mythology of German victimhood. Ziemann’s portrait of the post-war Niemöller is extremely multifaceted, describing how Niemöller, increasingly shaped by international and ecumenical concerns, dramatically shifted his stance toward the church and underwent a political transformation.. Ziemann, however, does not lose sight of the continuities: Niemoller’s persistent unease (which he never completely abandoned) with representative party democracy and media diversity , his latent anti-Catholicism and anti-Americanism, as well as his persistent culturally and socially fueled antisemitic resentment.

Anyone interested in Martin Niemoeller’s eventful life cannot ignore Ziemann’s extremely rich, brilliantly written, critical, yet balanced account. In the controversial and polarizing person of Niemoller—the “volcano” Niemöller, as the Bishop of Württemberg Theophil Wurm once put it—he also depicts the fundamental conflicts that marked the four political systems of the late empire, the unpopular and defeated Weimar Republic, the National Socialist ideological dictatorship, and the Federal Republic, which was in search of new ways forward. Using the example of the “belated” pastor, the “church fighter” (“Kirchenkämpfer”), the church president of the postwar Hesse-Nassau Regional Church, and the internationally-recognized ecumenist, Ziemann also reflects the fundamental upheavals of twentieth-century religious life.

The strength of his biography is also a result of the fact that he does not stop at the public Martin Niemöller. Without committing any indiscretions, Ziemann writes about the strict “patriarch” and family man; the restless, often overwhelmed and driven worker; the impatient, polemical, and self-opinionated disputant who also offended those who were on his side; and, last but not least, the one who was challenged, who repeatedly suffered severe personal crises. And he writes about Else Niemöller, his wife who died in a car accident in 1961 and with whom Martin had been married for almost forty years. One of Ziemann’s great achievements in his publication is that he acknowledges her role as a discussion partner and advisor, editor of his sermons, emotional support during his term in prison, and, last but not least, as the one who took care of the family during Niemöller’s extremely time-consuming activities as an organizer of the Inner Mission, as a pastor, and as a church politician. Benjamin Ziemann’s Niemöller biography is already a standard work.

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche, eds. Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2019). 268 pages. ISBN: 9783579085449.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Retired)

In the first week of February 1941, while Martin Niemöller languished in the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, the London Times was one of several international newspapers to announce his conversion to Catholicism. The New York Times headlined this story more circumspectly: “Niemöller’s Friends Deny His Conversion: Say Imprisoned Pastor Is Only Studying Catholic Doctrine” (New York Times, 5 Feb. 1941). Neither version was quite on target. Niemöller had not converted to the Catholic Church; however, his study of Catholic doctrine hardly represented mere curiosity. It involved a serious consideration on his part to convert. This brief moment in Martin Niemöller’s life has received relatively little attention, though it does get mentioned by some, including Matthew Hockenos in his recent Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (reviewed in CCHQ, 25/1, March 2019).

This book, edited by Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann, has given a surprising moment in Niemöller’s life its most thorough explication. It also offers readers an edited version of the handwritten manuscript Niemöller produced within a period of less than three months during his four years of solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen. His assessment of Catholicism versus Protestantism, a document which numbers over 200 pages in Niemöller’s hand, now comprises 150 printed pages in this book.

Many or most readers of this CCHQ online journal will know at least the main features of Martin Niemöller’s life. He is one of the most famous and most important participants in the German Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) alongside important friends and colleagues such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. He founded the Pastors’ Emergency League in the fall of 1933. He participated in the creation of the Barmen Declaration in 1934, and he played a leading role in the first three years of the Confessing Church. Niemöller was arrested on 1 July 1937 and spent the next eight months in prison in Berlin, awaiting the outcome of his case. Then, having completed the necessary prison time required by the court, he was not released but designated a “personal prisoner” of Adolf Hitler. Instead of going home to Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, he was hurried off to solitary confinement at the nearby concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, where he stayed from March 1938 until July 1941. At that point he was transferred to Dachau, near Munich, where he remained incarcerated until the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Niemöller emerged from Dachau a famous figure and he quickly became a leader in the postwar German Protestant Church. His international stature also was high, resulting among other things in a stint as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961-68. After a postwar life traveling the world as a famous advocate for various causes, he died in 1984 at the age of ninety-two. (Personal note: I caught up with Martin Niemöller in 1973 and sought his friendly advice, but only via telephone.)

Martin Niemöller was not a theologian, though he knew theologians. Martin Niemöller also had a first career that gave him a portion of public recognition. Born in 1892 to a Lutheran pastor, he chose life as a naval officer. When World War I began, he commanded a submarine which supported the German cause by sinking British ships. His first burst of fame in Germany came from these activities, especially with his war memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit (1934), in which he described his wartime exploits as well as his postwar turn toward the church. By 1933, when Niemöller began developing what became his high profile in the Confessing Church, he was already forty-one years old, a pastor in the Dahlem suburb of Berlin, a husband, and a father to seven children.

It is clear from Christophersen and Ziemann’s careful work that Niemöller pursued the possibility of conversion to the Catholic Church with great seriousness. By the summer of 1938 he was using a Catholic prayer book for his daily devotions while sequestered in Sachsenhausen. By August he wrote to his wife that he was “astonished by the richness of prayers and biblical readings” (“erstaunt über den Reichtum an Gebeten und biblischen Lektionen”) in the Catholic tradition (p. 9). By the spring of 1939 he was angered by the attempt of church authorities in Berlin to remove him from his pastorate in Dahlem, a form of discipline intended for the most active opponents of Reich Bishop Müller and the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian”) leadership in the Protestant Church. By July 1939, he wrote, “the Protestant State Church has never been a Christian church” (“Die Evangelische Landeskirche [ist] niemals christliche Kirche gewesen”), but merely a bureaucracy (p. 11, quoting from Martin Niemöller, Brief aus der Gefangenschaft, 61). Soon he was asking Elsa, his wife, to send him books by or about converts to Catholicism, people such as John Henry Newman. This mid-nineteenth-century professor at Oxford University was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1825, famously converted to Catholicism in 1845, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, and was created a cardinal in 1879. (Newman eventually achieved sainthood in the Catholic tradition in 2019).

From late August to the beginning of November in 1939, Niemöller began and finished the manuscript now described and printed in this book. Christopherson and Ziemann have had access to many sources. These include the document itself, plus letters Martin and Elsa Niemöller were allowed to send every two weeks, and records of the twice-per-month visits Elsa was allowed to make to Niemöller in Sachsenhausen, especially as recorded in notes Niemöller made after those meetings. All of these handwritten materials are available to us based on two pieces of good fortune. First, Niemöller was able on short notice to pack papers into his luggage when transferred from Sachsenhausen to Dachau. Then on 5 April 1945, when the Catholic priest, Michael Höck, was suddenly released from Dachau, he agreed to carry Niemöller’s “things” (“Sachen”) to safety (p. 39).

As Niemöller leaned toward the Catholic Church, it was based partly on his attraction to certain forms of piety in the Catholic faith. His primary concern, however, involved the role of authority. Niemöller was no fan of the tremendous variety of beliefs and emphases within the Protestant tradition, nor was he entirely comfortable with the fruits of modern biblical scholarship. Rather, he valued straightforward teachings of the biblical text. Writing to Elsa, Niemöller regretted about Luther “that in practical terms he abolished the teaching office of the church” (“dass er das Lehramt der Kirche praktisch abgeschaft hat”) (p. 43). He also envied the “apostolic succession” Catholics claimed on the basis of biblical authority, especially the text in which Jesus elevated Peter to a position of special authority.

It is clear that these pages in which Niemöller compared Catholic and Protestant teachings represented for him not just a personal inclination–plus his aversion to the wildly pro-Nazi theological claims of Deutsche Christen in the Kirchenkampf, of course. It also was his one effort to join the ranks of his theologian friends. He did so with some trepidation, not least because so many of his friends were such important theologians. Hans Asmussen, a prolific scholar and a close friend in the Confessing Church, stayed close to Elsa Niemöller as advisor and friend during Martin’s incarceration. Martin asked Elsa to seek Asmussen’s assistance and council and welcomed the chance to use Asmussen’s help. In May 1939, however, he also showed some recognition of his role as a beginner. As he wrote to Elsa, “Certainly Asmussen in my situation already would have written a thick book, or several” (“Asmussen hätte in meiner Lage sicher schon ein dickes Buch oder mehrere geschrieben”) (p. 29).

In fact, Elsa secretly worked together with Asmussen, Helmut Gollwitzer (another close friend and an assistant pastor in Dahlem), and Martin’s clergyman brother Wilhelm Niemöller to try to steer Martin away from his plan to convert. In all cases, they gave assistance and advice to Martin, but usually with small warnings or a nudge against Martin’s intended path. For Elsa, of course, the implications were the most pressing. She worried about financial considerations if Martin gave up his position and his career: “Then you can become a scavenger; and where are we left with the children? In that case we could not feed [or perhaps “support”, RPE] more than three” (“Dann kannst du Strassenkehrer werden; und wo bleiben wir mit den Kindern? Mehr als 3 können wir dann nicht ernähren”) (p. 12). During these months there were tears. There were requests that Martin promise not to make a hasty decision, or not to make a final decision without talking to her beforehand. After nearly two years of contemplation and indecision from July 1939 to the spring of 1941, Niemöller finally gave up on the idea of conversion. Christophersen and Ziemann describe various important reasons for this outcome, but conclude, “The real reason was the tenacity of his wife” (“Der wahre Grund war die Hartnäckigkeit seiner Frau”) (p. 22).

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019). 336 pages + 25 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-406-73137-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Wolfgang Huber is a distinguished voice in the German theological world, both academic and ecclesiastical, and a sustained treatment of the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by such a figure at once demands attention. His book is in many ways an introductory survey which seeks to unite the ‘fragments’ of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in a single coherent picture, for, as Huber remarks, at every turn in Bonhoeffer’s short life, ‘belief and life, theology and resistance closely interrelated’ (p. 9). The fertile phrases which Bonhoeffer cast upon the waters of the theological world are all here and considered in turn with authority and insight. Altogether, Huber views his primary material with poise and it may be said that every kind of source – theses and books, letters and poems – is justly represented. As befits such a portrait the acknowledgement of other secondary studies is kept to a minimum: here they sharpen perspectives and come and go at important junctures without crowding the picture. Sometimes there is an acknowledgement of later debates which have come to define Bonhoeffer scholarship in the world at large, not least the guilt of the Christian Church, the campaign to claim Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’, the two worlds of East and West Germany, and the controversies which emerged in the churches of South Africa under Apartheid. Huber clearly knows this broad ground very thoroughly indeed but here his attention is primarily claimed by Bonhoeffer himself and his voice is very much his own.

The structure of the book is not unduly distinctive, but it sets out clearly the overall argument and method. Huber’s Bonhoeffer is certainly a big and complex figure. He is also one full of contrasts and the author delights in framing and exploring them. An introductory section evokes the figure of Bonhoeffer as we might first encounter him in a variety of places, not least over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. There follows a section on Bonhoeffer’s background and early formation and then another three on his early work in the contexts of university and church life, the first situating him firmly in the landscapes of German thought, the second examining a theology of grace which was deeply rooted in the precepts of Lutheranism, and the third discussing the place of the Bible in a world of maturing historical criticism. Each of these sections present dualities which already defined so much in Bonhoeffer’s work (‘Individual spirituality or Society’; ‘The Church of the World or the Church of the Word’; ‘Acting justly and waiting for God’s own time’; ‘The Historical Jesus or the Jesus of Today’). The young Bonhoeffer is certainly very much at home in the intellectual landscapes of German Lutheranism but the emerging vision is an open one and there is no knowing where it will lead.

Huber acknowledges how extraordinary was Bonhoeffer’s achievement in maintaining sustained theological study under the many pressures and dangers to which his life exposed him. An extended discussion of the development and ‘actuality’ of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism precedes an examination of his place in the history of the German resistance against Hitler and his significance there as a ‘theologian of resistance’. Here Huber acknowledges frankly that to account for the motives which lay behind the actions of any figure of resistance, whether they became fundamental to events or peripheral, must be ‘difficult, even impossible’ (p. 172). At all events, with this decisive turning comes an intensification of the discussion of Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings and a deepening emphasis on the themes of guilt and responsibility. It is in these contexts of resistance that Huber is most of all struck by Bonhoeffer’s singular, even ‘astonishing’, new steps, and even if they only reach us as fragments the sense of a coherent picture remains. Indeed, it is in ‘the extreme loneliness of a prison cell’ that Bonhoeffer finds a ‘wonderful security’ in the achievement of a unity of faith, teaching and life (p. 34). A further section, stoutly entitled ‘No end to Religion’, again shows the importance of situating Bonhoeffer’s thought securely in the intellectual contexts with which he was familiar. A final, and rewarding, section on the ‘Polyphony of life’ maintains a fascination with dualities (‘Bach or Beethoven’; ‘Music or Theology’) and offers a particularly attractive discussion of Bonhoeffer and Gregorian plainsong (provoked by the famous remark to Eberhard Bethge). An epilogue reflects at length on ‘what remains’, searching through the subsequent publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings and the accumulating studies of his many interpreters, and observing, rather nicely, the creative achievement of a ‘polycentric internationalism’. A gentle parting note occurs with a reflection on Bonhoeffer’s late poem ‘The Powers of Good’, in which Huber finds a final place of rest in a vast, unsentimental and moving trust in God (p. 298).

It could be said that of the making of books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer there is no end. In such a field many new authors labour to produce some distinctive insight or bold (even tenuous) claim, perhaps to justify the writing of another book or to address a particular audience or time. Over the years particular aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thought have certainly been placed under many microscopes. It is natural at first to wonder if a new, introductory portrait by an established scholar might turn out to be something of an academic tour of duty. We may expect a good deal of craft and even a dose of wisdom. But Huber’s book is something better than this: the encounter of author and subject is duly rigorous but it is also fresh, alert and warmly responsive. Nothing here is taken for granted; often Huber acknowledges that he finds a particular idea, or development, ‘astonishing’ and one senses that he really does. Indeed, he serves his subject and his audience very well. Such a book would make an excellent place for German readers make a start. One might well hope for an English edition too.

Review of Rebecca Scherf, Evangelische Kirche und Konzentrationslager

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Rebecca Scherf, Evangelische Kirche und Konzentrationslager (1933 bis 1945) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). 296 pages. ISBN 978-3-525-57057-9.

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

Most of the literature on the intersections between the German churches and the Nazi concentration camp system has concerned the imprisonment of Christian clergy. In addition to studies of the Dachau “clergy barracks” (where most of these clergy were held, including more than 1700 Polish priests) there are studies of prominent figures, such as Martin Niemoeller (who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was in Buchenwald before being sent to Flossenbürg to be executed). Several studies of the Confessing Church (including my own work) have documented instances in which clergy were arrested and sent to camps or prisons, even briefly.

In other words, the subject has been framed largely in terms of clerical resistance and the persecution of the churches. Yet, the growing scholarship on the camp system, with its detailed portrayal of its scope and visibility, raises important questions about whether and how German Protestant and Catholic churches addressed these larger issues during the 1930s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ongoing research project, the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, has documented more than 44,000 camps, prisons, and ghettoes throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Within Nazi Germany, between 1933 and 1939, there were hundreds of small camps and sub-camps (in addition to Gestapo prisons), beginning with the establishment of Dachau in 1933. Those sent to these early camps included members of opposition political parties and other opponents of the regime, pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others.

Rebecca Scherf’s study of the German Evangelical Church’s (GEC) responses to the concentration camps is a significant new contribution to the scholarship. While her main focus concerns Protestant clergy who were sent to concentration camps (she confined her study to concentration camps, so it does not include pastors who were in prisons), she has broadened her analysis to address three points of intersection between the GEC and the concentration camp system. The first concerns the relationship between regional churches and the Protestant chaplains who served in the early camps. The second examines the official church responses when clergy were sent to camps. The third looks at the experiences of those who were imprisoned in camps by drawing on contemporary documentation and subsequent memoirs. There are several appendixes with helpful graphs illustrating the number of clergy arrests by year (1935—when there were mass arrests of Confessing pastors due to a pulpit protest—was the peak), by camp, and by regional church. While most clergy who were sent to camps were held only briefly (indicating that the Nazi state intended such arrests as a form of intimidation), the number of arrests during the war grew and fewer were released. There is also a chronologically and geographically organized list of the Protestant clergy who were imprisoned.

The study begins with a brief synopsis of the rise of National Socialism and the responses within the GEC, particularly with respect to the German Church Struggle and the sharp divisions between the “German Christian” movement and the Confessing Church between 1933 and 1935. Although the Church Struggle thwarted a complete alliance between the GEC and the Nazi state, it was focused on internal church matters, not political opposition. By 1935 the Confessing Church clergy and leadership were marginalized in most regional churches; the official church leadership was either openly “German Christian” or had made its peace with the regime. This, in turn, shaped church policy toward the camp system, including how regional church leaders reacted when their clergy were arrested and imprisoned.

The earliest issue that arose concerned the question of Protestant chaplains in the camps. In July 1933 Hermann Stöhr—a pacifist who would be executed in 1940 for his conscientious objection to military service—wrote GEC leaders in Berlin to ask whether there were Protestant chaplains in the camps. By that date, there were concentration camps in sixteen of the twenty-eight regional churches (some of these early camps were in existence for a relatively short time), and around 18,000 people were imprisoned in these camps. Stöhr also raised more directly political questions, noting that local pastors were not being informed when camps were set up in their districts, nor were they able to obtain family contact information for those who were imprisoned. The GEC church leadership in Berlin replied several months later that such arrangements had not yet been made.

In the meantime, however, some of the affected regional churches began to assign pastors to serve as chaplains in the camps. Most of the chaplains were “German Christians” and understood their pastoral duties accordingly. In many early camps, there was an emphasis on the “re-education” of political prisoners, and Scherf quotes one chaplain who stressed how essential Protestant chaplaincy was for prisoners’ rehabilitation “into the great German Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich.” In another instance, Scherf discovered a camp chaplain who tried unsuccessfully to report and stop the mistreatment of prisoners. In some camps, chaplains held regular worship service and were able to counsel prisoners; in others, their duties were strictly limited—in Dachau, for example, the chaplain was permitted only to hold the service and was forbidden to have any other contact, including conversation, with the prisoners. With the gradual consolidation of the camp system under central SS oversight, the state tightened its restrictions on even “German Christian” chaplains, and Scherf found a growing number of cases in which chaplains were banned. In 1937 Heinrich Himmler banned the chaplaincy in the concentration camps; no protest came from the official church leadership.

The second section of Scherf’s study focuses on the Protestant clergy imprisoned in the camps (virtually all of these clergy had ties to the Confessing Church). Relatively few Protestant clergy were actually sent to concentration camps—she documents only 71 in this book —although there were many more who were arrested and imprisoned in Gestapo prisons. In March 1935, for example, some 700 Prussian pastors were imprisoned briefly after reading from the pulpit a Confessing Church protest against the Nazi view of religion, but only 26 of them were sent to camps. In many cases, the decisive criterion seems to have been the extent to which the regional church leadership was overtly “brown.” Most of the clergy sent to camps were released the same year of their arrest.

For her case studies, Scherf focuses on the two camps with the highest number of Protestant clergy, Dachau and Sachsenburg (which was in Saxony). Dachau had the highest number of imprisoned clergy (over 2700) and they came from a number of different countries; most of them were Polish Catholic priests, but there were also clergy from the different Orthodox churches, Old Catholics, and other Protestant groups, as well as two Muslims. In contrast, most of the clergy imprisoned in Sachsenburg were from Saxony, the region in which the camp was located, and most had been arrested in conjunction with the March 1935 pulpit proclamation. The Bishop of Saxony was Friedrich Coch, one of the leading “German Christians.” Scherf offers a detailed and fascinating case study of the ways in which the camp experience provoked political protest and a different theological response among those in the camp, leading them to send a protest letter to the Saxony church leadership for its lack of solidarity. Even after the war ended several of those who had been together in Sachsenburg continued to work through their experience theologically.

The experiences of Confessing clergy who had been imprisoned fostered the post-1945 portrayal of the Confessing Church as a resistance group that had been persecuted for its opposition to Nazism—but it also deepened the postwar divide within the Evangelical Church itself, for some of those who had been imprisoned blamed the official church leadership for its failure to speak out. Nonetheless, the history of clergy who were sent to camps, including accounts by Catholic priests who had been in Dachau, became an important element in the postwar narratives about the “martyrdom” of both churches.

In her conclusion, Scherf discusses the ways in which history touches on the larger issue of how the German Evangelical Church responded to Nazi crimes before and after 1945. This study of the church responses to the concentration camps, particularly during the 1930s, offers some significant new insights into the relationship between the Protestant churches and the Nazi state.

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1 (March 2020)

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 476 pages. ISBN 978-1-4742-5766-4.

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

Gerhard Leibholz was a German attorney and professor of state law, married to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s twin sister Sabine. George Bell was a British Anglican priest, the bishop of Chichester and an active leader in the international Protestant ecumenical movement who became one of Bonhoeffer’s closest allies. These two very different figures would be brought together by the accidents of history, but this fascinating volume shows that they found common ground on a number of issues. Starting on the eve of the Second World War and extending into the 1950s, the Bell-Leibholz correspondence gives a vivid portrait of the challenges they faced as well as their reflections on the nature of democracy and totalitarianism, and on Christianity’s future in a transformed postwar political order.

A baptized Protestant, Leibholz came from a secular Jewish family and was categorized as a Volljude under the Nazi racial law. After the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service in April 1933, Leibholz’s father lost his position, dying only five days later (there is speculation that his death was a suicide). One of his brothers, Peter, lost his position at the same time. A professor in Göttingen, Gerhard Leibholz managed to keep his position until early 1935. He and his family remained in Nazi Germany until spring 1938, when his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi warned them of the regime’s plans to require all those affected by the racial laws to have a “J” in their passport. Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge drove the Leibholzes to the Swiss border; from there they made their way to England where they were joined later by their two daughters.

The volume opens with Bell’s September 1938 letter to Bonhoeffer assuring him of his willingness to help the Leibholzes. George Bell had been actively involved since 1933 in assisting refugees from Nazi Germany, including members of the Confessing Church who were affected by the Nazi laws. The early correspondence offers a detailed picture of the difficulties refugees faced even after they reached a safe country. They could not assume, of course, that they would remain in safety; Leibholz’s brother Hans and his wife managed to reach Holland, but committed suicide in 1940 after the German invasion. Added to this anxiety were financial concerns (Germany froze Leibholz’s assets when he fled, so they arrived in England with nothing), worries about the family they had left behind, existential concerns about employment and the future, and dealing with anti-German prejudice in England once the war began. In May 1940 Leibholz was interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man, along with a number of Confessing Church pastors and their wives. Bell managed to obtain his release in August 1940, after which the two men pursued the possibility that the Leibholzes might immigrate to the United States. With the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s contacts in New York, Leibholz was offered and accepted an invitation to Union Theological Seminary in 1941, but by then the door had closed due to new U.S. restrictions on immigration.

Bell succeeded in cobbling together various stipends and opportunities by which Leibholz could support his family in England. A moving aspect of this book is Bell’s often heroic support and advocacy for the German refugees, particularly as popular British sentiment against them intensified. The bishop also came under growing fire for his opposition to total war and his arguments on behalf of the “other Germany,” positions that probably cost him an appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The book’s greatest significance, however, may be its documentation of the developing conversations between the two about Christianity, democracy, human rights, and their visions for the postwar European order. Their correspondence was part of a larger international conversation at the time that included diplomats, intellectuals, Catholics, Protestant ecumenists, and others. The detailed discussion of these issues in this volume could be an important resource for the scholarship today about the shaping of post-1945 Europe, particularly the differing conceptions of human rights that emerged after 1945.

Leibholz viewed these social and political questions from the standpoint of someone who had studied law; his doctorate had focused on issues of legitimacy in parliamentary law. (As an aside: in 2000 I interviewed Gerhard Riegner, who directed the World Jewish Congress during the war years. Riegner told me that he had studied law in Berlin during the 1920s with Leibholz and spoke of their early common commitment to human rights.) Leibholz shared Bell’s view that the major battle of their times was the defense of liberal democracy and its values against the threat of totalitarianism. Their understanding of those ideals was very much the product of the era, culture, and class from which they came. Leibholz, for example, viewed the “totalitarian” form of nationalism in National Socialism as something completely different from Prussian nationalism.

It is difficult to know how much previous Bonhoeffer family discussions had influenced Leibholz before he arrived in England, but the extent to which he began to focus in England on the centrality of Christian teaching and doctrine for Western ideals is striking. He was naturally interested in the German church struggle in which his brother-in-law was so engaged, and his first published article in Britain was a 1939 report about the situation confronting German churches. By 1940 he was already influenced by Bell’s book Christianity and World Order (Leibholz’s review of the book is included in an appendix to this volume). In 1942 Leibholz gave a series of lectures on “Christianity, Politics, and Power,” that was subsequently published in the widely read Christian News-Letter.

Leibholz intently followed British reports and commentary on the implications of the European situation. His letters to Bell are filled with analysis and commentary, particularly his sense of how Germans would react to British public policy and statements. Bell clearly valued Leibholz’s opinion and feedback. One of this volume’s many revelations is the extent to which Leibholz shaped Bell’s view of the German resistance. Bell sometimes sent Leibholz drafts of public statements in advance for his opinion, as in late 1942 with a question he planned to raise in the House of Lords: “I want to ask you whether the form in which the Question if put could and would be twisted by Goebbels so as to make it appear that I or the Church of England had turned Communist….” (115) Bell frequently shared Leibholz’s observations with other church and political officials, but with time Leibholz developed his own connections and sometimes wrote these figures directly. In a letter of 19 June 1942 to J. H. Oldham, for example, he commented on the Anglo-Russian treaty and the need for more discussion in Britain of what form of German government “the Anglo-Saxon countries would be prepared to accept after a collapse of ‘Hittlerite Germany’”(94). Another interesting development that was new to me was Leibholz’s growing belief that Catholic teachings on natural law were fundamental for modern liberal democracy, and his emphasis on the need for the “re-Christianization” of Germany after the defeat of National Socialism.

As the war progressed the personal strains on the Leibholzes intensified. They naturally focused on the German resistance and the fates of their family members. They learned of the April 1943 arrests of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi only four months later, in August. Two months after the failed coup attempt of July 1944, Leibholz compiled a list of people whom he believed had been executed and sent it to Bell with a comment about the loss this would mean for a postwar Germany. In the spring of 1945, they received conflicting information about the executions of Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer (the Leibholzes initially believed that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had survived). They only received confirmation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death on 31 May from Adolf Freudenberg in Geneva; confirmation of the deaths of Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi didn’t arrive until late July. Bell immediately began to write about the German resistance, and much of the correspondence during Leibholz’s remaining time in Britain concerned the reconstruction of what had happened to his brothers-in-law.

In 1947 the Leibholzes returned to Germany. Gerhard Leibholz became a federal judge in Karlsruhe in 1951 (he continued, however, to teach in Göttingen) and remained there until his retirement in 1971. After his return Leibholz sent letters reporting on denazification and the political reconstruction of Germany, but over time their exchanges grew infrequent. The friendship continued until Bell’s death in 1958. The final document in the volume is the Leibholzes’ condolence letter to Bell’s widow in October 1958, in which they wrote that they had “lost the most faithful and best friend we have had in the English speaking world.”

This book includes an excellent introduction by Ringshausen and Chandler giving the general historical context for the correspondence. The letters are grouped by year, with a short chronology for each year, and there are helpful footnotes throughout that identify the people mentioned and give more background for the issues being described. This volume will certainly be of interest to Bonhoeffer scholars and those interested in ecumenical and British church history. I hope that it will find a wider audience, because these extensive and often revealing conversations between a German refugee lawyer and a British Anglican bishop provide a close-up view of the larger historical conversations about war, democracy, human rights, and the construction of civil society at a critical juncture in twentieth-century history.

Article Note: Andrea Hofmann, “Martin Luther in First World War Sermons”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Article Note: Andrea Hofmann, “Martin Luther in First World War Sermons,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31, no. 1, Glaube und der Erste Weltkrieg/Faith in the First World War (2018): 118-130.

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

As I noted in my News Note in this issue, in 2017, Germans commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther sites across the country, including Erfurt, Eisenach, and Wittenberg, played host to numerous events celebrating the anniversary. In the introduction to her analysis of the uses of Martin Luther in German Protestant sermons during the First World War, Andrea Hofmann notes that this anniversary provoked great academic interest as well. “In the academic discourse which accompanied the celebration,” Hofmann informs us, “Luther was not honoured as a solitary hero or lone fighter ….” Hofmann contrasts this with a “raft of popular academic publications and a flood of postcards which often depicted Luther as a hero” during the four-hundredth anniversary of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1917 (118-119).

In this rather brief but densely-footnoted article, Hofmann sets out to explore the image(s) of Luther portrayed by German Protestant clergy in their First World War sermons, especially those that were preached in 1917. The author’s aim is to “show the complexity of the image of Luther mediated through war sermons.” Yet, just as important to Hofmann is how, during the war (and after, during the “Luther Renaissance”), these preachers started to take Luther’s theology much more seriously (119-120, 129). The author ably details and analyzes Luther’s image(s) in the war sermons, offering the reader a considered approach to the topic that is based on substantial evidence.

Hofmann both frames the analysis and structures the article via three “analytical tropes,” providing evidence from some wartime sermons for all three (119). The first trope contributes to an image of Luther “in the context of the interpretation of history,” especially nineteenth-century German history. Here, according to Hofmann, pastors “placed the figure of Martin Luther in [the] narrative of a German nation-building” (120). Seen through this lens, Luther is portrayed as a national hero on par with Bismarck and even, as in the words of one pastor, a “powerful religious prophet” (121).

The second trope is that of “biographical and anecdotal references to Luther” (122-124). Here, the anecdotes and incidents from Luther’s life – e.g., his appearance before Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 – contribute to an image of the reformer grounded more on hero-worship than on instruction and nuanced biography. Courage, forceful energy, perseverance, defiance, and even a particularly encouraging variety of pastoral care are trotted out by pastors and chaplains as traits of Luther, the “ideal” German.

While the first two tropes are very helpful lenses through which to view these wartime sermons, the third and final trope, “themes from Luther’s theology and direct references to Luther’s writings,” may be the most substantive. This is implicit in the weight attached to it here: Hofmann spends as much time on it as she does the other two tropes combined. The most regularly cited topics in the sermons included Luther’s approach to just war, civic authority and the doctrine of justification (124-128). Here, Hofmann helpfully highlights sermon themes such as, e.g., Luther’s “two-kingdoms doctrine” and the differences between individual and state ethics during wartime.

The trope of Luther the national hero and “religious prophet” uncovered here by Hofmann ended up having a long and notorious life, as did the comparisons to German heroes and “prophets” such as Bismarck and Fichte. In this vein, the radical, pro-Nazi, antisemitic Stuttgart pastor Georg Schneider, in his 1934 book Völkische Reformation, included Luther together with Ernst Moritz Arndt, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg in his list of “poets of the Redeemer.” He also described them as “representatives of a völkisch religion.”

Luther, Hofmann argues, was described in many wartime sermons as “a hero who, like Otto von Bismarck in 1871, had initiated a new epoch in German history …” (120). Over many decades, Hartmut Lehmann has traced the religious underpinnings of German nationalism in the nineteenth and centuries. In his incisive May 1991 German Studies Review article, “The Germans as a Chosen People: Old Testament Themes in German Nationalism,” Lehmann teases out a “chosen people” theme in German nationalism from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich.

Despite the breadth of themes discussed in the article, Hofmann does not mention Luther’s understanding of Jews and Judaism – including his antisemitic pronouncements – as addressed in wartime German Protestant sermons. Perhaps this might be due to such material not being prominent in the evidence tranche utilized by the author. Yet, as Doris Bergen noted in her review of a book on a closely related topic, Dietz Bering’s Luther im Fronteinsatz: Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg, such an omission is conspicuous. Volker Leppin demonstrated, in a fastidious study titled “Luthers ‘Judenschriften’ im Spiegel der Editionen bis 1933” (part of an edited collection that I reviewed in 2017), that Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism appeared as part of collected editions of the reformer’s broader work and in individual editions alike from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. This means that, at the very least, German Protestant pastors had access to Luther’s ruminations on the matter.

Despite this caveat, Hofmann’s examination of this narrow but very valuable topic offers helpful answers to questions surrounding the image of Luther in nineteenth and twentieth century German history. The author’s conclusions should be contemplated carefully. Hopefully, they will provoke others to further research on the reformer’s immense but ambivalent impact on German Protestantism – and German society altogether – from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich.