Tag Archives: Antisemitism

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.”  The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD   have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

 

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

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Review of Andreas Pangritz, Die Schattenseite des Christentums. Theologie und Antisemitismus

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Review of Andreas Pangritz, Die Schattenseite des Christentums. Theologie und Antisemitismus. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2023.

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna

Theology and antisemitism: to be honest, the subtitle of the book initially led me to believe that this was yet another classic theological-apologetic attempt to negate the Christian influence in the development of antisemitism. Fortunately, Andreas Pangritz, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Bonn, proved me wrong. With his book, based on a lecture at the University of Bonn in 2020, Pangritz wants to achieve exactly the opposite. He follows the basic assumption that there is a connection between Christian theology and antisemitism (11). Accordingly, the main thesis is that antisemitism is essentially Christian antisemitism and that the importance of Christian theology in the formation of antisemitism should not be underestimated (17).

In the second chapter, Pangritz addresses the problematic distinction between the terms anti-Judaism and antisemitism. He shows that the distinction between a theologically-argued hostility towards Jews and a racially argued antisemitism, which has been repeatedly postulated since the end of the Second World War, has not stood the test of time. On the contrary, such a distinction harbors the danger that (Christian) hatred of Jews is trivialized by juxtaposing it with antisemitism. Pangritz proposes “not to speak of a break, but rather of a transformation of the traditional Christian ‘doctrine of contempt’ (Lehre der Verachtung) into the modern forms of antisemitism” (35). It remains unclear, however, why Pangritz returns to the concept of anti-Judaism later in the book (e.g. 119). The term has been overused by Christian apologetics, and Pangritz himself has pointed out that the academic distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism has not produced any new insights or meaningful differentiations. (30). Conceptual clarity would have been helpful here, especially since Pangritz argues well with Léon Poliakov, Peter Schäfer and even Reinhard Rürup that “antisemitism” should be used in its most general sense: “The word ‘antisemitism’ denotes hostility, hatred and contempt of all kinds against Jews and Judaism; this does not exclude differences in motivation, but includes them” (33). However, this small point is the only criticism I can make in the entire book.

In Chapter Three, Pangritz argues cogently why Christian theology included a self-image that was explicitly directed against the existence of Judaism from its inception. The theological interpretation that Christians had replaced Jews as the chosen people of God inevitably led to antisemitism. From this particular Christian perspective, the Jews’ refusal to recognize Jesus as the Messiah means nothing other than denying the Christian claim to truth.

Pangritz devotes an entire chapter to Martin Luther and his radical hatred of Jews. Here, too, he succeeds in demonstrating how Luther’s inflammatory writings served as a reservoir for the development of the scientific antisemitism in later centuries. Accordingly, Pangritz also denounces the attempts of Protestant theologians to separate Luther the reformer from Luther the anti-Semite in order to trivialize the latter as a negligible, even marginal phenomenon in history. True to the motto: what must not be, does not exist.

In German national Protestantism, which unified German national identity and the Protestant faith, the anti-Jewish ideas of Protestant theologians ultimately culminated in an “antisemitism of redemption” (as coined by Saul Friedländer). It is correct that Pangritz emphasizes the admiration of such Protestant leaders as Theophil Wurm and Otto Dibelius for the most popular antisemite of the late nineteenth century, Adolf Stoecker. The antisemitic outbursts of church representatives during the Third Reich therefore can no longer be attributed solely to the German Christians (Deutsche Christen)—a disingenuous shifting of blame that still happens far too often in German-speaking countries, though, fortunately, less frequently in America. This juxtaposition of good (Confessing Church) and evil (German Christians), or “intact” and “broken” regional churches, as is still standard in Protestant church historiography, is ultimately just another attempt to serve one’s own myth of victimization instead of dealing seriously with anti-Jewish theology and its history within one’s own (Christian) faith.

In his conclusion, Pangritz once again addresses different scholarly views on possible straightforward connections between Luther and Hitler. Whether these connections are direct or indirect is ultimately not of decisive importance, and Pangritz does not make a definitive statement here, either, which is not necessary. Instead, he concludes with an appeal: “Within Christian theology today, there is still consensus on the condemnation of antisemitism. The question remains, however, whether this condemnation also translates into a willingness to repent regarding anti-Jewish thought patterns in theology and, in particular, in theological education” (192).

The book deserves a broad audience. For non-theologians, the book offers a number of suggestions for focusing more on Christian theology and its inherent hostility towards Jews when dealing with the phenomenon of antisemitism. For theologians, on the other hand, to whom the book is primarily addressed, the book represents an excellent critical self-reflection of their own faith. Anyone, whether an active scholar or a lay Christian, who still holds the view that the murderous antisemitism of the last two centuries did not originate in Christian hatred of Jews should read this book.

 

 

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Review of Tilman Tarach, Teuflische Allmacht. Über die verleugneten christlichen Wurzeln des modernen Antisemitismus und Antizionismus

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Review of Tilman Tarach, Teuflische Allmacht. Über die verleugneten christlichen Wurzeln des modernen Antisemitismus und Antizionismus (Freiburg–Berlin: Edition Telok 2022). 224 pages. ISBN 9783981348644.

By Dirk Schuster, University for Continuing Education Krems / University of Vienna

Christian anti-Judaism – a term that still causes extreme controversy today. To put it simply, this is intended to draw a distinction from modern racial anti-Semitism and reduce Christian anti-Semitism to theological arguments alone. The reviewer has had problems with such a distinction from the very beginning, since it suggests that there is a good (Christian) and a bad (racial) hatred of Jews. Tilman Tarach uses this topic and presents a book that convincingly explains that such a distinction is no more than a relief strategy for a Christian socialized society (134). The central thesis is that the most important arguments of modern antisemitism are based on Christian antisemitism (10).

First, Tarach uses National Socialist propaganda for his analysis and demonstrates that many Nazi stereotypes came directly from the Christian context: the Jews as children of the devil, the betrayal by Judas Iscariot, etc. In the middle of the twentieth century, those images were well known by Christian people. The murder of Jesus of Nazareth remains the central element of Christian anti-Semitism up to modern anti-Semitism and forms the background of all persecutions of the Jews. Even today, in parts of Eastern Europe, the Jew is symbolically burned at Easter because he murdered Christ. We fully agree with the author’s statement that the New Testament already spread the first anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: the Jew as murderer of God (48). The desire for the annihilation of all Jews, which was already virulent before National Socialism, is based precisely on this motive: a danger emanates from the Jews. That is why the extermination of the Jews is also seen as self-defense. At this point, the author could, or even should, have referred to the minutes of the Wannsee Conference to support his arguments. In it, the motivation for the extermination of the Jews in Europe by the National Socialists as an act of self-defense is particularly clearly expressed.

The additional references, such as in Chapter 8, are particularly interesting. Tarach compares the classic anti-Semitic accusation of poisoning by the Jews, such as poisoning of wells, etc., with the arguments of modern vaccine refusers and conspiracy theorists, who argue using those same anti-Semitic narratives.

The main part of the book is made up of the sections from Chapter 9 onwards. Here Tarach clearly and comprehensibly points out, partly with recourse to existing research literature, that so-called racial anti-Semitism was invented by the churches. As early as the sixteenth century, the Jesuit order had introduced a kind of “Aryan proof” that was even stricter in its interpretation than the Nuremberg racial laws of the National Socialists. It was not until 1946 that the Jesuit order removed this section from its constitution. The same can be found in Spain since the fifteenth century. Here, like in modern anti-Semitism, blood was of crucial importance: This means that converts and their descendants were still regarded as “Jewish” since those persons would carry Jewish blood. In some Spanish areas, converts still had to wear the so-called Jew’s hat because of their “Jewish blood”. As the author rightly points out, this alone shows that a distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and modern racial anti-Semitism is untenable, because the reference to biological characteristics has long been part of Christian anti-Semitism. Conversely, it should be noted that so-called modern racial anti-Semitism is based solely on the religion factor. The Nuremberg Race Laws defined Jews and “half-Jews” solely based on a person’s religious background or the religion of his ancestors. And the anti-Semitic laws from Spain in the early modern period, introduced by the church, served as a model for the law in the Third Reich.

In chapter 12, Tarach describes very impressively how the nature of Christian anti-Semitism developed and how those narratives are still present today: The Jew rejects Christ, which is why he becomes a threat to Christian identity. The refusal of Jews to convert to Christianity has thus increased hatred of Jews over the centuries. Jews are thus understood as bearers of individuality because they do not want to belong to the Christian community, which automatically makes them a danger of wanting to destroy the Christian community and identity. The image of the destruction of German identity by the Jews can be found again in the nineteenth century in the völkisch movement. The argument remained the same and was adapted to the realities of modernity. In addition, deeply rooted stereotypes that people have been presented by the church for centuries could be served.

The last chapters go into specialized topics such as Israel and Islamic anti-Semitism. Here too the author explains that the arguments behind the various stereotypes always come from the Christian context.

The overall verdict on Tarach’s book can only be: Anyone who deals with the subject of anti-Semitism or church history should read this book.

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

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

By Sarah Thieme, University of Münster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

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

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

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

By Alain Epp Weaver, MCC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor at Age 33

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration with the Nazi Regime

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

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

Preparing the Way for the Holocaust

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

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

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

Not Touched a Hair

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

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

By Samuel Koehne, Trinity Grammar School

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

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

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

General contents

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

Race and Antisemitism

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

The Bible and the Church

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

German History 800 – 1933

 

National Socialism

????

 

Creation of the World 4000 BC

 

10 Commandments of Moses 1300 BC

 

Christ’s Birth

 

Diaspora of the Jews

 

Jewish International

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

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

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

The ‘German Christmas’

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

311-62.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933,” Canadian-American Theological Review 7 (2018): 124-137.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

David A.R. Clark, a PhD candidate at Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, has written a compact overview and theological assessment of Reinhold Krause’s famous Sportpalast speech of November 1933, in which the Berlin leader of the German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen) “demanded the elimination of Jewish influences from the Protestant church, calling for the deletion of Hebraisms from hymnody, the rejection of the theology of ‘rabbi Paul,’ and the erasure of the Old Testament itself. Ominously, Krause also endorsed excluding Christians of Jewish descent from the churches” (124). Drawing on the speech itself and several English-language historical analyses, Clark highlights what he calls a “conflation of hostilities” in which the “German Christian Movement targeted the Old Testament for exclusion and destruction even as Nazi leadership targeted Jews for exclusion and destruction.” He argues that “the parallels were not incidental; rather, invective against the Old Testament, in the context of Nazi Germany, yielded violent implications” (125).

Clark begins with the background to Krause’s speech, outlining the rise of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic German Christian Movement in 1932 and noting its attempt to fuse Protestant Christianity and Nazi ideology through a racialist ecclesiology in which a German national church would unite Aryan German Protestants (and Catholics) and exclude Christians of Jewish descent. Given its rapid growth through 1933, the German Christians hoped a large rally in the Berlin Sportpalast would launch a massive new propaganda campaign and prove their indispensability to the Nazi regime. On November 13, 1933, some 20,000 supporters of the German Christian Movement filled the arena, which was decorated with swastikas and other Nazi material. They came to hear a series of speakers, headlined by local high school religion teacher and German Christian leader Dr. Reinhold Krause.

Clark describes the speech itself as crude and abusive—an attack against the Old Testament and other fundamentals of Christianity derived from Jewish influences. Analyzing Krause’s “anti-Jewish and anti-Old Testament rhetoric” (127), Clark finds that Krause connected the supposed unity of the German people (Volk) under Adolf Hitler with the idea of a powerful people’s church (Volkskirche) which would mirror the Nazi state and support the remolding of Germans into National Socialists. Clark quotes some of the lowlights of the speech:

Krause denounced “rabbi Paul,” whose “scapegoat- and inferiority-theology” had led to an “un-National Socialist” desire “to cling to a kind of salvation egotism.” Similarly, Krause condemned Jewish traces in hymnody and liturgy, decrying the intrusion of Hebrew words into German worship. “We want to sing songs that are free from any Israelite-isms,” he demanded, adding: “We want to free ourselves from the language of Canaan.” … In what became a notorious section of his speech, Krause demanded “liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish reward-and-punishment morality, with its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps” (128, 129).

Clark goes on to argue that Krause conflated invective against the Old Testament and hostility towards contemporary Jews. Even Krause he scorned elements of Judaism within German Protestantism, he also lashed out against Jews themselves, advocating the expulsion of Christians of Jewish ancestry from the church. Just as Nazis rejected purchasing goods and services from Jews, he reasoned, so too should Christians reject receiving spiritual goods from Jews—whether biblical content from ancient Jews or spiritual ministry from contemporary Jewish Christians.

As for the effect of the Sportpalast speech, Clark observes that its contents were widely reported in both the German and international press and adds that the speech was published as a pamphlet and distributed by German Christians in Berlin and beyond. But the speech was widely criticized by Protestant clergy, especially for its radical rejection of the Old Testament as Scripture. The ensuing controversy led to a mass of clerical resignations from the German Christian camp and sparked an ecclesiastical opposition movement that grew into the Confessing Church. For the German Christian base, however, Krause’s antisemitic attacks against the Bible, Jewish language, and Jewish Christians became programmatic.

Finally, Clark turns to the violent impact of the Sportpalast speech. Drawing on an incident reported in Doris Bergen’s definitive study Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), in which a German Christian writer urged the burning of Jewish parts of the Bible as well as “that which threatens our people” (presumably meaning the Jews themselves), Clark notes the connection between antisemitic rhetoric within German Protestantism and the genocidal campaign of the Hitler regime.

Reflecting theologically, Clark observes that Krause’s speech involved “violent rhetoric targeting Jewish Scriptures in the context of violent rhetoric—and murderous action—targeting Jewish people” (134). Asking “how should the implications of anti-Old Testament invective be defined in the genocidal context of Nazi Germany?” (134), Clark affirms that the German Christians helped create the conditions in which genocide could occur, on the basis that they “effectively weaponized specific aspects of the Christian tradition for antisemitic purposes” (135). While Clark acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust would have unfolded much the way it did with or without these German Christian contributions, he concludes that the German Christians “participated in the broader framework of complicity that made the destruction of Jews a conceivable and convincing option for Christian Europe” (136).

Clark’s essay won the Jack and Phyllis Middleton Memorial Award for Excellence in Bible and Theology, awarded to the best paper by a graduate student or non-tenured professor given at the interdisciplinary theology conference on “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology,” spon­sored by the Canadian-American Theological Association (CATA) at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario, October 20, 2018.

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Luther’s Evil Writings

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Luther’s Evil Writings

The reformer was not only anti-Jewish, but also antisemitic. So he was understood in the Nazi era, too.

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

 

The original article was published in German as “Luthers böse Schriften” in Der Tagesspiegel, 18 July 2017, and is available at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/hass-auf-juden-luthers-boese-schriften/20071254.html. It is produced here in translation by permission of the author and newspaper.

Martin Luther’s late “Jewish writings” are no longer as unknown as they were for a long time—and the horror over the sharp anti-Jewish tone of the reformer is great everywhere. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Chair of the EKD, has repeatedly confessed in interviews that he is ashamed of such texts by the principal founder of the Protestant churches in Germany.

Was Martin Luther an antisemite? And what would that mean for the Lutheran Churches as public-law institutions? For the many churches named after him? For a city which proudly bears the name “Lutherstadt Wittenberg”? For the many schools and streets that bear his name? Or was he perhaps not antisemitic, but “merely” an anti-Judaist motivated by Christian theology?

In the writing of church history, things have been seen this way for a long time. Certainly, most would concede that Luther’s “Jewish writings” are bad, but would add that his case is not one of genuine antisemitism, but “merely” one of theologically based (though also harsh) anti-Judaism. It is often added, however, that in his youth he wrote in a friendly manner, and that later he had grown old, was suffering from physical affliction and depression, and had long been disappointed by the stubborn unteachability of his Jewish contemporaries.

He was “only” anti-Jewish, reads the official view of the Church

Margot Käßmann, commissioned by the EKD as a Reformation and Luther ambassador for the 2017 commemorative year, is not always to be envied for her job, especially when it comes to the topic “Luther and the Jews.” As far as can be seen, the Luther ambassador (like Bedford-Strohm) maintains that Luther was “anti-Jewish” in his bad omissions about the Jews, and thus not antisemitic.

It’s easy to understand. After Hitler and the Holocaust, how today can anyone—no matter their undisputed achievements and merits—be advertised as an antisemite? At their Synod in Bremen (November 2015) the EKD approved a statement “Martin Luther and the Jews – A Necessary Reminder on the Occasion of the Reformation Anniversary.” The reformers, it says, stood in a tradition of anti-Jewish patterns of thought, whose roots reached back to the beginnings of the Church. With regard to Luther’s utterances, “hatred of Jews,” “resentments,” or “invective against Jews” is the language used—the word “antisemitism” is carefully avoided. Here, as elsewhere, the view is that antisemitism exists only in cases of racial antisemitism, which had only existed since the second half of the nineteenth century. So, it is said, we cannot talk about antisemitism when it comes to Luther.

Luther was taken up with the expulsion of the Jews

Thomas Kaufmann, the Göttingen church historian who stands beyond reproach as an expert in the Reformation period, came to the conclusion in his study Luthers Juden (2014) that Luther’s Jew hatred had included motifs that went beyond traditional Christian anti-Judaism. In addition to Luther’s central theological anti-Judaism, Kaufmann also attributes “premodern antisemitism” to the reformer. Luther ‘s recommendations to sixteenth-century authorities and church leaders, which he described as “severe mercy,” were notorious: destruction of synagogues, homes, and writings; confiscation of money and property; forced labor; prohibition of Jewish worship services; and, as the ultima ratio, the expulsion of Jewish communities from city and country. With relation to Luther’s evil writings, the church historian Kaufmann speaks of “a literary final solution of the Jewish question.”

It is well known that by 1933 a powerful antisemitism had spread among Protestant theologians. Did they get it from Martin Luther? Pastor Siegfried Nobiling, who held a position in the “Zum Guten Hirten” (“Good Shepherd”) parish (Berlin-Friedenau) since 1928, professed in a 1932 statement on National Socialism: “In conclusion, I can confess quite sincerely that National Socialism was for me destiny and experience.”

“The interests of the race,” he said, “are always valid only to the extent that they are useful to the nation as a whole. We see in Judaism the spiritual-biological poisoning of our race.”

Already in 1932, Nobiling joined the “Faith Movement of the German Christians” (DC). There he met numerous like-minded colleagues.

For the theologian-generation of 1933, the Reformations of the sixteenth century and with them Luther’s image of the Jews lay far in the background. There were, first and foremost, other impulses directly and personally experienced, which were closer to them and which determined their attitudes toward Jews. Paramount for the anti-Jewish conditioning of this generation were, for example: the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, the influential theology professor Reinhold Seeberg, then also the antisemitic and Christian “Association of German Student Fraternities” (VVDSt); and the unloved Weimar democracy, which was maligned as the “godless republic.”

In the Nazi era, there was a remarkable Luther revival

The sense of religious excitement of 1933, marked by the antisemitic “German Christians,” also included a remarkable Luther revival: the reformer as German national hero, as the prototype of the quintessential German man and fighter. Not infrequently, historical lines of tradition were drawn from Luther to Hitler—by Protestants themselves, and with pride. In the “Advent” parish (Prenzlauer Berg), “German Christian” member Haertel spoke on December 12, 1933, about “Luther and the Jews.” It must be the task of the “German Christians” to fully re-establish Luther’s clear position in the “Jewish question,” which Hitler had taught anew.

In the Spandau “Luther” parish, in parallel with the passing of the “Nuremberg Laws,” the parish church council decided in September 1935 to undertake the immediate free distribution of one thousand copies of “Luther and the Jews” as well as the procurement of display cases for Streicher’s Der Stürmer. In March 1937, Johannes Schleuning, a superintendent in Berlin East, referred in particular to Martin Luther and Adolf Stoecker as Christian champions against Judaism, in an article entitled “Judaism and Christianity.” He praised the most recent special issue of Der Stürmer on the “Jewish question” and emphasized that Christ had been an “Aryan,” a Nordic hero, as described by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

In contrast to the “Nuremberg Laws,” which were widely endorsed in the “German Christian” press, silence prevailed throughout the Protestant milieu after the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938. Explicit approval of the excesses was rare, but it did occur. On November 20, 1938, the “German Christian” theologian Immanuel Schairer wrote a commentary on the events, expressly referring to Luther’s “On the Jews and their Lies.” Immediately after the pogroms, the Thuringian Protestant bishop, Martin Sasse, printed extracts from Luther’s “Jewish writings” and sent them to Thuringian pastors. The intense Protestant antisemitism of the Hitler period fed on many sources—not only religious or theological—and mainly on those which were closer to the protagonists historically and biographically than Luther’s “Jewish writings.” Thus, on the one hand, these writings were not needed at all to generate the massive antisemitic confessions in the churches of the Hitler period. Since 1933, however, everywhere Luther’s “Jewish writings” were dug out and disseminated in the media, they reaffirmed the already-existing Protestant antisemitism and gave it additional legitimation.

Even before 1933, Luther’s “Judenschriften” had to be regarded as a serious derailment

Even before the year 1933, Luther’s “Jewish writings” had to be regarded as a serious derailment in the eyes of unbiased readers. After Hitler and the Holocaust, these writings stand in a changed historical context, which once again places the texts in a different light and makes Luther’s verbal derailments even more serious.

The current 2017 memorial year is the first Lutheran and Reformation commemoration ever to make the existence and explosiveness of the “Jewish writings” known to a broader public. This is to be welcomed as a historical clarification. For today’s Protestant churches, however, it is not easy to deal with this problematic heritage. In the long run, euphemistic assessments such as “anti-Judaism” or the discordant metaphor of the regrettable “shadows” of the great theologian will not suffice. One also wonders what the Protestant “learning history,” much invoked during the 2017 commemorative year, is supposed to mean, considering the churches’ performance (after 400 years of learning time) during the “Third Reich.”

Luther the confession-founder will not be taken away from anxious church contemporaries. The reformer is historically significant, and that will continue into the future. Still, the current image of Luther will have to keep changing. His status as a monumental figure will diminish, while the Luther-dilemma associated with his antisemitism will grow.

The author is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin.

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Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group.  What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share?  How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments?  While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals.  The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic  Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews.  While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

  • Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
  • Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
  • Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
  • Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
  • James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
  • Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
  • Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
  • Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
  • Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”
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Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2010): 431–94.

Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 257–79.

Many of our readers will be familiar with Susannah Heschel’s important and widely-reviewed work, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Fewer may know of these two articles from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, which take up the long-standing debate over the use of “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” in the context of Christian hostility towards Jews and Judaism, whether in pre-modern Christian history or in the history of the Holocaust. This exchange between New Testament scholar Robert Morgan and Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel highlights key disciplinary differences between theological and historical approaches to this question. Morgan hopes to distinguish between various theoretical categories of Jew hatred, while Heschel focuses on the historical confluence of theological, cultural, and racial attitudes and language of hostility towards Jews.

In his sixty-page critique of Heschel’s book, Morgan argues that The Aryan Jesus presents a one-sided impression of 1930s German church history,” based on a “failure to distinguish clearly between the churches and the völkisch movement that stands behind Nazi antisemitism.” (431) In contrast to her, he makes the case for a conceptual distinction between medieval Christian antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and modern secular antisemitism.

Morgan minimizes the connection between modern German theological developments and the participation of masses of German Protestants and Catholics in the Holocaust–simply put, for Morgan, the failure of Christians of the Nazi period to live up to their beliefs was nothing unusual in the history of Christianity, and didn’t require an associated failure of theology. In that vein, he argues that the efforts of theologian Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established in 1939) had little if anything to do with the Holocaust (434).

With this as his starting point, Morgan raises the broader question of the historical relationship between theological anti-Judasim and secular antisemitism. His answer revolves around setting theological scholars like Grundmann and those involved in the Institute, who “introduced the racial issue into their older liberal Protestant theology,” into a separate category from the masses of Christians who supported the Hitler movement during and after 1933. He maintains that Heschel fails to examine Grundmann’s theological context in sufficient detail or to assess carefully enough his relationship to and responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In contrast, Morgan argues that the Institute was an outgrowth of a particular radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement. Apart from this development, most Germans were caught up in “a pervasive antisemitism” which was fueled by factors like “nationalism, hostility to modernity, to secularism, to left-wing politics, resentment against rich bankers at a time of national distress, and a perceived disproportionate influence of assimilated Jews in the professions and national life. But little of this passive antisemitism was ideologically driven, as it was in the völkisch movement and its political expression in the National Socialist party” (441). Morgan goes on to distinguish what he calls “this (passive) cultural antisemitism” from both “the more aggressive völkisch racist antisemitism” and “theological anti-Judaism” (441). Morgan admits that “some modern antisemitism surely included religious and tribal echoes and memories along with its more obvious social, political and economic ingredients,” but argues we still need more investigation about “how far (when at all) it was fuelled by theological anti-Judaism” (441). As a way to distinguish between older and newer eras, he introduces a new term for medieval and Reformation-era Jew hatred, which he calls “theological antisemitism,” and which occurs “where monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ lead directly to antisemitism.” Moving forward to the Nazi era, Morgan argues that theologians like Grundmann and Gerhard Kittel were not guilty of this “medieval ‘theological antisemitism'” but rather promoted a “poisonous modern antisemitism” which was “distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship” (441). Their scholarship, which contained a measure of “theological anti-Judaism,” was “less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism” (441-442).

What emerges from this detailed process of categorization is the sense that Morgan would like to rescue the term “theological anti-Judaism” and redefine it to mean simply the disagreement of Christians with Jews concerning the one God they both worship–in other words, criticisms of the religion, not the people. As an example of his granular approach to categories of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, Morgan describes the Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller as “untouched by racial theory,” but sharing in “the pervasive cultural antisemitism of the time, which was presumably reinforced by the tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism and even contained residual traces of ‘theological antisemitism’.” This was, Morgan adds, “social and cultural non-violent antisemitism” (444).

Morgan continues in this vein throughout the rest of the article, criticizing Heschel for not distinguishing clearly between various scholarly theological developments, cultural antisemitism, the rise of the völkisch movement and Nazi party, nationalism, and racism (461). He is willing to admit to the indirect influence of theology on popular belief, but attempts to keep these areas as distinct as possible (465). In his conclusion, he reasserts that Heschel has not properly demonstrated the “contributions of theological anti-Judaism to Christian antisemitism,” that Christianity is not racialist, nor a kind of anti-Judaism, nor antisemitic, though Christians themselves have acted in those ways (488-489).

Not surprisingly, Heschel disagrees with Morgan’s critique, particularly with respect to his categories of theological anti-Judaism, and modern, racial antisemitism. In her article, she argues “that the texts of pro-Nazi German Protestant theologians integrate race and religion with a fluidity that obviates a sharp distinction between the two terms. Antisemitic propaganda produced by Christian theologians during World War II leaves the strictly theological realm in its use of Nazi language and concepts, even when framed in a Christian context, and demands a different kind of conceptualization by historians” (257).

In the first instance, Heschel highlights the significant difference between her approach and that of Morgan, noting how she and many other scholars “no longer find the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and antisemitism to be helpful.” She argues this categorization tends to “mask rather than illuminate the historical material we are studying,” and that she and many other scholars are now “less interested in establishing definitions and boundaries than in finding slippages, similarities, influences and parallels” (258). More concretely, Heschel demonstrates how intertwined Christian and Nazi racial ideas were with one another. For instance, she characterizes Morgan’s view that Martin Niemöller exhibited cultural antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and theological antisemitism as “quite a brew” (258). To drive this home, she asks how we should understand the mixture of ideas in the speech of Siegfried Leffler, a well-known leader in the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, who stated in 1936: “Even if I know ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God or ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ” (258-259). Simply put, Heschel doesn’t find Morgan’s taxonomy useful as a means to historical explanation. Instead, she points out how the historical context of Leffler’s words–the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between “Aryan” Germans and Jews and the widespread fear-mongering about the dangers of Jewish impurity–goes a long ways to explaining the passion in Leffler’s outburst against the dangers of Jews and Judaism for German Christianity.

Heschel also questions Morgan’s chronological differentiation between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with theological anti-Judaism giving way to secular racism and antisemitism. Indeed, she notes how this view has been abandoned by many scholars, who prefer to describe all hostility to Jews and Judaism as antisemitism. Religious hostility, which might be called anti-Judaism, is just another kind of antisemitic discourse, alongside economic, political, nationalistic, or racial modes of speech. For instance, Heschel quotes a New Testament scholar, who explained: “The problem is that even in the patristic and medieval eras, long before the coinage of the term antisemitism as such, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the racial and religious/ethnic elements. Form many of these authors, as I’ve seen in my Caiaphas research, Jews were by their nature evil, and their rejection/killing of Christ is evidence of that evil nature” (260). Heschel adds that racial language and imagery were used to describe Jewish degeneracy in the Middle Ages, creating “an otherness of the Jewish body … that, already by the thirteenth century, was believed to be immutable and incapable of erasure even by baptism” (260).

As for the Nazi era, Heschel lists four reasons why scholars increasingly employ “antisemitism” to describe Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism: 1) explicitly Nazi language plays a central role in Christian discussions of Jews, while older terms took on new connotations in the Third Reich; 2) negative theological statements about Jews have to be understood in their wider social and political context; 3) “‘das Judentum’ is an ambiguous term in German,” meaning “Judaism, the Jews, or Jewishness,” which in turn creates an ambiguity in German theological language; and 4) “given the Nazi regime’s policies towards the Jews, terms such as ‘Entjudung’ (dejudaization) of Christianity or ‘Beseitigung’ (eradication) of Jewish influences insinuate practical implications and not just theoretical allusions” (261).

Heschel goes on to criticize Morgan for an outdated historical understanding of the German Christian Movement and an outdated theoretical understanding of the relationship between racism and nationalism, providing examples to show how racially-oriented German Protestant leaders were. For instance, she notes how Walter Grundmann “spoke about fighting on the ‘spiritual battlefield’ to protect Germans from Jews, Christianity from Judaism,” how he described “Jews as the underlying enemy of Germany,” and how he wrote that “‘the Jew’ is ‘the Antichrist [who] wants to unleash itself and overthrow the Reich’ through the war, Bolshevism and liberalism” (264). Heschel adds that this mixture of theological and racial antisemitism can be found in Grundmann’s scholarly and popular writing, making it impossible to separate his words and ideas into different categories of antisemitism.

Heschel restates the interpretation she puts forward in The Aryan Jesus: Grundmann and his colleagues “were theologians predisposed to accept the nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler and to view politics through religious lenses.” They viewed Nazism as a means to revitalize Christianity and sought to support Nazism with spiritual means. “To that end, Nazism had to be defined as embodying Christian values, and Christianity as embodying Nazi values.” They sought “to eradicate Jewishness from Christianity, just as the Reich sought to eradicate Jews from Europe” (265). And Nazi theologians need to be understood not only in their theological context, but also in their political and social context. She illustrates this last point by reminding Morgan (and her readers) of the wide-ranging evidence of Grundmann’s Nazi affinities and activities and the broad consensus of scholars such as Robert Ericksen, Guenter Lewy, and Kevin Spicer. In the end, Grundmann and his theological allies provided Hitler with ideological and propaganda support for “the disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews,” (268) just as so many other academics and functionaries did throughout German institutional life.

To summarize, Heschel argues persuasively that the older distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism is increasingly difficult to sustain, given current scholarship on either historic Christianity or the churches in the Third Reich. This is certainly the interpretive path most historians now follow. Taken together, the Morgan and Heschel articles outline the two main perspectives in this terminological debate.

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January 2008 Newsletter

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

January 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 1

Dear Friends,

Jesu, nimm dich deiner Glieder
Ferner in Genaden an;
Schenke, was man bitten kann,
Zu erquicken deine Brüder:
Gib der ganzen Christenschar
Frieden und ein selges Jahr!
Freude, Freude über Freude!
Christus wehret alle, Leide.
Wonne, Wonne über Wonne!
Er ist die Genadensonne.

J. S. Bach, Cantata BWV 40

A very warm welcome to you all in the New Year. I trust you had a blessed and refreshing holiday and are now about to resume you manifold interests in your different parts of the globe. I am always glad to hear from you, but please do NOT press the reply button above unless you want your remarks to be shared by all of our Newsletter subscribers. Instead, send me word to my private address = jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

I am hoping in the coming year that the reviews and notices I send you will continue to be of interest. I try to be as ecumencal as possible, and not to concentrate too much on any one subject. But I will admit that I may possibly have some hobby-horses, and some of you rightly commented earlier that I gave these too much free rein! Your comments and suggestions are very much apprreciated.
We were saddened to learn this month of the death of two distinguished members of our fraternity, who made significant contributions to our field of church history. Their obituaries are printed below.

Contents:

1) Obituaries:

a) Rev. Edwin Robertson;
b) Professor Gordon Zahn

2) Book reviews –

a) Ed. Spicer, Antisemitism, Christian ambivalence and the Holocaust
b) Plokhy/Sysyn, Religion and Nationalism in modern Ukraine

3) Conference report – American religious responses to the Kristallnacht

List of books reviewed in Vol. XIII – 2007

1a) Paul Oestreicher wrote the following tribute in The Guardian, London:

The Rev Edwin Robertson, who has died of bronchial pneumonia aged 95, was a renaissance man with a breadth of knowledge and a sharpness of wit that never diminished and never ceased to delight. He was a Baptist minister, broadcaster, author, translator and editor, notably in making known the life and work of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis just before the end of the war.

Born in West Ham, London, Robertson saw little of his father, a ship’s cooper, but was devoted to his deeply religious mother. Life was spartan and he never ceased being a puritan in the best sense of the word. His politics were shaped by the harsh reality of his early environment. In 1938 he began his ministerial life in Stopsley, Luton, and married Ida Bates the following year. They moved to Luton and later St Albans, but war intervened. Having gained a first-class degree in physics and chemistry at London University before training for the Baptist ministry at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, he was directed into oil research, specifically on fuel for Spitfires.
Robertson took a deep interest in German Christians who resisted Hitler and befriended those exiled to England as well as German prisoners of war. Like George Bell of Chichester who, alone among the English bishops, was close to Bonhoeffer and the resistance inside Germany, Robertson deplored the bombing of German civilians. That perhaps made him the ideal person to head the religious affairs branch of the British military administration of occupied Germany, with the rank of brigadier. Speaking fluent German, this involved everything from getting food to the undernourished, setting up clergy training schemes and befriending survivors of the opposition, such as Martin Niemoeller, who were now Germany’s church leaders. In 1949 Robertson was made assistant head of religious broadcasting at the BBC, the start of his broadcasting career. He helped to shape the Third Programme and was a distinctive voice on Any Questions.

From 1956 he spent six years in Geneva as study secretary of the United Bible Societies and consultant to the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council. He then introduced to England, during a brief spell in Yeovil, the Bible weeks he had encountered in Germany.

The years 1964-75 were a natural progression from his work at the BBC. He was executive director of the World Association of Christian Broadcasting, responsible for the mass-media training of students from around the world. Together with the Evangelical Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church – a hitherto unheard of combination – he set up the churches’ advisory committee for local broadcasting. Based from 1975 at Westbourne Park Baptist church, he continued this work with his own radio studio, tutoring many students. To this he added a commitment to psychotherapy.

The author of nearly 100 books, Robertson wrote biographies of John Wycliffe, Paul Schneider, Lord Tonypandy, Chiara Lubich and Igino Giordani. Discovering that the only serious biography of Bell neglected his involvement with Germany and Bonhoeffer, he put that right with Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches (1995). Robertson treated academic theology with scepticism and the growth of religious fundamentalism disturbed him. Like Neville Cardus, he was dedicated both to cricket and to music. He was confident that Bach was not the only composer he would meet in heaven, where the angels would surely be singing Mozart. He was made a Lambeth doctor of divinity two years ago.

Edwin Hanton Robertson, clergyman, writer and broadcaster, born February 1 1912; died November 3, 2007.

1b) Gordon Zahn (1918-2007)

Gordon Zahn, an internationally known Catholic peace activist and scholar, died on December 9th in Wisconsin, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He leaves behind a significant legacy which deeply influenced the Catholic Church’s teaching on conscientious objection, and helped propel Zahn’s hero, Franz Jagerstatter, on the path to sainthood.

Born in Milwaukee in 1918, Zahn took the highly unpopular stand during World War II of refusing to serve in the United States army, and served in a Civilian Public Service camp in New Hampshire. He would later write about that experience in his memoir, Another Part of the War: the Camp Simon Story (1979).

After the War, Zahn went on to earn a doctorate in sociology from the Catholic University of America, and then to teach, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, until his retirement. He also served as president and director of the Center on Conscience and War in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of his career, Zahn published and edited numerous works, the most famous beingGerman Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (1962) and In Solitary Witness: the Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter (1965).The first book—which argued that the German Catholic hierarchy had provided moral support to the German war effort, even as it rejected the evils of the Nazi regime—provoked a firestorm of criticism, which led him to move from the Jesuit Loyola institution to the more secular University of Massachusetts. Paradoxically, however, it was there that he completed his most important Catholic work, notably his biography on Franz Jagerstatter. In Solitary Witness revealed the now-famous Austrian martyr’s story to the world—and most importantly, to the attention of the Catholic Church. Had Zahn never unearthed Jagerstatter’s witness—discovered while he was researching his book on German Catholics—it is unlikely that this humble Austrian farmer, who stood up to Hitler and died for his Catholic convictions, would ever have been beatified (as he was in October, 2007)—a fact Jagerstatter’s own widow, Franziska (still living at 94), has gratefully acknowledged. Zahn was too ill to attend the beatification ceremony in Linz, Austria; but those who did were made aware of Zahn’s indispensable role in bringing it about.

Zahn, at his best, influenced the Catholic Church in a profound and positive way. The progressive National Catholic Reporter commented: “Without Zahn’s work, one can hardly imagine the publication of the American bishops, ‘The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response’ in 1983. There, for the first time in Catholic history, nonviolence received equal billing with the just war tradition. The pastoral letter’s foundation, acknowledged in its footnotes, was the scholarship and research by Zahn.” More importantly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while clearly affirming traditional just war teaching, also strongly defended the rights of conscientious objectors: “The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community.” Many believe this passage vindicates Zahn’s entire life’s work.

Despite the gravity of his subject matter, and the many rebuffs he suffered, Zahn never lost faith in the justice of his cause. He always believed education could enlighten and persuade people to promote the Gospel’s mandate for peace. As one of his friends told the Chicago Tribune: “Gordon had a deep sense of the pain of the world, but he also had hope and optimism.”

Gordon Zahn was, by all counts, a pious and gentle man, who touched the hearts of all those who knew him, including those who sometimes disagreed with his positions.

William Doino Jr.

2a) ed. K. Spicer C.S.C,. Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 2007 xxi + 329 pp.
ISBN 113: 978-0-253-34973-9 cloth)

This review first appeared on H-German on December 6th 2007 (revised) Reviewers do not like coping with collections of essays. Either the topics covered are too diverse, or the quality of the contributions varies too widely. Some essays are abbreviated versions of books their authors have already written, others are a foretaste of books yet to be undertaken. The present volume, edited by Kevin Spicer, who now teaches at Notre Dame University, shares all these characteristics. But it is held together by the common thread of how the European churches of the twentieth century reacted to the ideology of antisemitism and to the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust which resulted from it.

The contributors, both historians and theologians, are suitably ecumenical, including Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Most are younger scholars, and are united in a highly critical view of Christian theology and prejudice in the early twentieth century, particularly in its propagation and encouragement of antisemitism. They all share the new perceptions about Judaism adumbrated since the Second Vatican Council, though some argue that the earlier pejorative antisemitic views still persist The editor, Kevin Spicer, maintains that even today antisemitism is present in Christian ranks because of the failure to understand and acknowledge Judaism on its own terms.
These essays are therefore designed both to record the fateful role antisemitism played in the Christian churches of the past, especially in their responses to National Socialism, and also to warn against any relapse into similar attitudes in the future.

The essays are grouped in four sections: Christian theology, clerical pastoral practices, Jewish-Christian dialogue and popular perceptions which Jews and Christians have of each other. The authors of the first group of essays predictably condemn the theological antisemitism of earlier centuries with its emphasis on Jewish disobedience, deicide and divine punishment, along with the accompanying claim that Christianity had superseded Judaism, leaving only the hope of conversion as the remedy. But they equally take issue with the argument put forward by some theologians of the twentieth century that a sharp dividing line should be drawn between Christian anti-Judaism, which was regrettable, and racial antisemitism, which was still more regrettable. In these authors’ eyes, following the lead given by Uriel Tal forty years ago, the two overlap and reinforce each other, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish the precise sources of prejudice and antipathy. There can be no doubt that ideological intolerance provided a fertile seedbed for Nazi propaganda. The real question is how far, or to what extent, were the Nazi attacks on the Jews supported, or at least not opposed, for theological reasons.. This remains much more difficult to estimate.

These authors may be criticized for assuming that theology or theologically-based anti-Judaic resentment, played a more substantial role than other factors. Alternatively, where sentiment favorable to Jews was expressed, as in Denmark, they seek to show that this can be attributed to an anti-German or nationalist pride rather than to any sympathy with Jews as such. This suggests that national and political factors rather than theology were determinant, both for or against the Jews. In Thorsten Wagner’s view, it was only after the protests against the Nazis’ actions against the Jews became an act of national resistance that the process of rethinking began in milieus affiliated with the church. But, as Robert Krieg points out, none of the theological factors which earlier fueled prejudice against Jews and Judaism, specifically the notion of supersessionism, the rejection of historical reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry and Jewish world, and the disavowal of religious freedom, are accepted any longer by the Catholic Church or by mainstream Protestants.. The second group of essays asks why certain churchmen demonstrated support for extreme right-wing political views and parties. Examples are quoted from Germany, Poland and Romania, though no essay deals with either Italy or Iberia. The reason is simple. Liberal democracy had never caught on east of the Rhine. The disasters of the first world war discredited all liberal panaceas. The violence and bloodshed in the newly-established Soviet Union destroyed belief in a socialist alternative. Security and safety could best be found in the historical rootedness of one’s own community. Dictators could be regarded as father figures. Antisemitism was only part of the much wider anti-alienism, which sought to exclude all baneful influences from abroad. Right-wing parties appeared to support the churches against the dangers of godless communism. As Donald Dietrich notes, the abstract neoscholastic theology taught in seminaries seemed totally inadequate to build up resistance to totalitarian movements. And, as the experience of the Vatican under Pope Pius XII shows, the church lacked an institutional platform to identify and resist political extremism or racial policies leading to extermination.

The third group of essays describes the attempts at Christian-Jewish dialogue in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Matthew Hockenos analyses the German Protestants who finally, after five years, came to realize the need for a full metanoia. So too Elias Füllenbach records the similar process of shock, renewal and crisis in the Catholic Church which culminated in the path-breaking Declaration of Nostra Aetate (1965). Füllenbach notably outlines the contributions made by the journalists Waldemar Gurian and Karl Thieme in the 1930s warning German Catholics against any concessions of the racial question. After 1945, Thieme linked up with Gertrud Luckner, a redoubtable social worker, whose efforts on behalf of the Jews during the war had led to her being incarcerated in Ravensbrück. Together they began from their base in Freiburg to campaign for a renewed Catholic attitude, despite warnings and even prohibitions from the Vatican. Luckner’s main achievement was the annual publication of the notable Freiburger Rundbriefe, which collected all statements and documents relating to the theme of improved Catholic-Jewish relations. At first, these authors still cling to the view that, because of the Holocaust, Jews would be psychologically disposed to accept Christianity. But later they went through a painful internal development to rid themselves of any anti-Judaic stereotypes and theological concepts, and instead to welcome Jews and Judaism on their own terms.

The final section describes Jewish reactions. Understandably there were and are still strong reservations to any encounter with Christians. Some Jewish scholars believe that distance has to be maintained since Jewish monotheism can never be reconciled to any other creeds, all of which are idolatrous. But other scholars argue that, given the churches’ new stance, there are now avenues of collaboration open to all those who seek to oppose any possible resurgence of the destructive antisemitism of the past. Gerson Greenberg’s article relates the various views put forward in the aftermath of the Holocaust. both assessing the significance of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the way forward while still living in a largely hostile world. He quotes with approval Maimonides’ exhortations to his people to ensure that they remembered the singular destiny of the Jewish people and religion.

To sum up, these essays are motivated by the eirenical desire to improve Christian-Jewish relations. They are therefore written with a “presentist” agenda, with all the benefits of enlightened hindsight, an approach that runs the danger of distorting the historical balance of past events. On the other hand, they do serve to remind us that the Holocaust’s legacy is not purely historical. The Church’s past ambivalence towards Judaism need now to be replaced with a much greater sensitivity and awareness, which is largely happening thanks to contributions such as those provided by these authors. While the book offers little new historical research, it will be pedagogically useful for undergraduates and for those who believe that analyzing the Church’s former and mistaken views of Jews and Judaism offers a means of achieving a more positive relationship in the future.

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2b) Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn, Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. 2003. 216 pp. ISBN 1-895571-45-6 (bound); 1-895571-36-7 (pbk.) $39.95 (bound) $27.95 (paper)
Religion und Nation: Die Situation der Kirchen in der Ukraine. edited by Thomas Bremer, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2003. 147 pp. ISBN 3-447-04843-3. Euro.36. (paper)

This review appeared first in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol 41, no 4, Winter 2007.

The early history of Scotland was once described as murder tempered by theology. The more recent history of Ukraine could also qualify. No other part of Europe during the past hundred years has been so convulsed by turbulent political events, with horrendous and massive losses of life and property. In fact, as a crossroads between East and West, Ukraine has long been involved in a continuous struggle to obtain independence and identity. In its repeated attempts to achieve a national revival, the local churches have played a significant role, not only as inheritors of past traditions, but also as active participants in fashioning new intellectual and ideological agendas, as they relate to the indigenous religious populations.

The complexity and conflictual character of much of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical scene has long deterred western scholars from any evaluative surveys. In fact, the most comprehensive account is by the German scholar, Friedrich Heyer, who recently updated his initial study written fifty years ago. So it is all the more welcome to have the short analysis by two former Ukrainian scholars now resident in Canada, which will help to sort out some of the entangled religious and political questions of the current period.

Because of its earlier history, Ukraine was always multi-ethnic and hence pluralistic in its religious loyalties. At the same time, its rulers – then and now – have sought to mobilize religious forces to advance their particular cause. The Tsarist monarchs promoted the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, while in the western parts of the country, the Uniate Church, which is familiarly but misleadingly known as the Greek Catholic Church, owing its allegiance to the Pope in Rome, predominated under the sponsorship of the Austro-Hungarian emperors. In the twentieth century, further religio-political alliances resulted during and after the first world war. The rise of Communism in the Soviet Union and the subsequent persecutions led to the growth of local groupings such as the breakaway Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox church. During the Nazi occupation, both this splinter group and the Greek Catholics sought to regain ground. But after the Soviet victory, both were liquidated, and the remnants compulsorily amalgamated under the Moscow-dominated Patriarchate.

After 1989, the Greek Catholics almost spontaneously resurrected themselves and reclaimed their former churches and constituents. At the same time, another section of the Orthodox community sought to re-establish its own patriarch in Kiev. But for political reasons they refused to acknowledge the autocephalous group, and both are spurned by those who still acknowledge Moscow’s ecclesiastical authority.

These internal struggle,as the authors make clear, are intimately related to the different concepts of national autonomy upheld by rival political groups. Some look back to the past as a model for the revival of Ukrainian cultural and political independence, seeking to promote the Orthodox Church as the upholder of a specific Ukrainian destiny. But the political record of the autocephalists during the second world war continues to leave a bitter legacy. On the other side, the long subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate, with its frequent execution of the Soviet leaders’ demands, has also caused deep resentments. For example, after 1989, a large number of Orthodox priests and congregations switched over, or back, to the Greek Catholic Uniates. But these Uniates, in turn, seek to establish their independence from their Polish neighbors, who maintain the Latin rite and equally see their Roman connection as a vital part of the Polish national revival. Since there is a great intermingling of these respective populations and no clear acceptance of any one model for national resurgence, the result is still one of unresolved tensions and religious divisions.

Plokhy and Sysyn provide ample evidence of the close interaction between state building and religious movements. The politicians seek to enlist, or even to exploit, the churches in pursuit of their particular view of national identity. This, however, still remains illusory. These same problems are explored in the collection of essays, edited by Thomas Bremer, which resulted from a Berlin conference in 2001. These authors also stress the need for western scholars to be fully acquainted with the origins and development of each individual Ukrainian church in order to understand its particular contribution to the task of forging religious and political identity. They also provide a useful multi-lingual bibliography.

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2) Conference Report – North American responses to Kristallnacht

Three scholars recently unveiled new research into American religious responses to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 at the Middle Tennessee State University Holocaust Studies Conference this past November 8-10, 2007.

Dr. Maria Mazzenga, Education Archivist at the American Catholic History Research Center and Adjunct Instructor of History at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., examined Catholic institutional responses to Kristallnacht, by contrasting the antisemitic bombast of Father Coughlin with the penetrating critiques offered by Catholic clerical and lay leaders in a national radio broadcast held on November 16, 1938. The speakers on the broadcastFather Maurice Sheehy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Education at Catholic University and assistant to the University Rector; Archbishop John J. Mitty of San Francisco, California; Bishop John M. Gannon of Erie, Pennsylvania; Bishop Peter L. Ireton of Richmond, Virginia; former Democratic Presidential Candidate and Governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, and Catholic University Rector, Monsignor Joseph M. Corriganargued that the violence unleashed on Jews and Jewish property in Germany was immoral, contrary to Christian teaching, and out of step with the religious and civic freedom valued by Americans. As Sheehy asserted, “The Catholic loves his Jewish brother, because, as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, we are all spiritual Semites.”

Dr. Patrick Hayes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology at St. John’s University in Staten Island, presented an explanation of the relationship between National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and the refugee policy of the United States government. Hayes focused on the work of the NCWC’s Bureau of Immigration Affairs, staffed by Bruce M. Mohler and Thomas F. Mulholland , two Catholic laymen, and its cooperative efforts alongside the Committee for Catholic Refugees from Germany (CCRG), headed up by Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans. The result was that Mohler and Mulholland were able to facilitate the immigration of almost four thousand Catholic non-Aryans to America in 1938 and 1939.

Kyle Jantzen, Associate Professor of History at Ambrose University College in Calgary, analyzed the immediate responses of mainline North American Protestants to Kristallnacht, finding them to be both swift and decisive. In keeping with liberal traditions that emphasized the “fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” church leaders in the Episcopalian/Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist traditions protested the Kristallnacht pogrom in ways that were both similar to and deliberately embedded in the broader American and Canadian outcry. In doing so, they emphasized the barbarism of Hitler and his Nazi movement and called upon government officials to make complaints to their German counterparts. This Protestant reaction was centred on four key moments: first, the Armistice Day remembrance services and hastily organized Anti-Nazi League radio broadcast on November 11; second, the Sunday worship services and public denunciations of Germany made by Protestant denominational leaders on November 13; third, the national radio broadcast sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) on November 14; and fourth, the ecumenical and interfaith rallies held to mark the FCC day of prayer held throughout the United States on November 20 and echoed in at least seventeen rallies held that same day across Canada. Many of these protests not only condemned Nazi Germany for lapsing into barbarism, but also expressed sympathy for Jewish “brethren,” lamented the loss of human rights in Germany, and called for the defence of freedom of religion, liberal democracy, and western civilization. In some cases, leaders also called for the Canadian and American governments to open the doors of their nations for Jewish refugees to find new homes.

Much of this new research was facilitated by support from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Mazzenga, Hayes, Jantzen, and seven other scholars (Michael Berkowitz, University College, London; Matthew Burton Bowman, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.; Gerald P. Fogarty, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Gershon Greenberg, American University, Washington, D.C.; Karen Riley, Auburn University, Montgomery; and Victoria Barnett and Suzanne Brown-Fleming of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM) met together in a USHMM Summer Research Workshop this past August, under the theme, “American Religious Organizations and Responses to the Holocaust in the United States: Reichskristallnacht as a Case Study.” Comparing Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant reactions to the pogrom of November 1938, the members of the workshop converged on four interpretive questions. First, they noted that the problem of American antisemitism influenced the responses of American religious leaders to Kristallnacht, raising questions about whether protests were focused on the particular issue of Jewish as victims or the universal problem of the violation of human rights and the creation of a refugee crisis. Second, the workshop participants discovered that most protests drew on the American values of religious freedom and pluralism, contrasting their liberal democratic world with the fascist (and communist) dictatorships of men like Hitler. Third, the scholars found that many of the religious protests against Kristallnacht were ecumenical and even interfaith in nature. This was particularly true of a number of significant radio broadcasts involving important public and religious leaders in the days and weeks following the Nazi attack on the Jews. Fourth and finally, the members of the workshop discovered that at least in some circles the Kristallnacht pogrom became, among other things, a significant moment of theological Kairos. Members of the workshop plan to publish their research in two volumes: a collection of essays drawn from the summer institute itself, and a primary source volume collecting and analyzing the various radio broadcasts organized in protest against the Kristallnacht pogrom.

Kyle Jantzen, Calgary

List of books reviewed in 2007.

Ackermann, S Christliche Frauen in der DDR May
Allen, J. Rabble-rouser for peace. a biography of Desmond Tutu November
Austin A. and Scott, J. S. Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples July
Berkman, J.A. ed Contemplating Edith Stein January
Böttcher, M. Gratwanderungen einer Freikirche im totalitären Regime
Die gemeinschaft der Sieben-Tags-Adventisten in der DDR May
Brechenmacher, T. Der Vatikan und die Juden February
Carter, R., In search of the lost. Martyrdom in Melanesia March
Chandler, A. The Church of England and the politics of reform 1948-1998 November
Chertok, H. He also spoke as a Jew. The Life of James Parkes April
Coupland, P. Britannia, Europa and Christendom October
Franz Jägerstätter December
Gailus, M. and Krogel, W. eds. Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft
der Kirche im Nationalen
 June
Heinecke, H. Konfession und Politik in der DDR January
Humel, K-J and Kösters, C. eds. Kirchen im Krieg.Europa 1939-1945 July
Krondorfer, B., von Kellenbach, K. Reck, N. Mit Blick auf die Täter March
Kushner, T. and Valman, N eds. Philosemitism, antisemitism and the Jews April
Lawson, T. The Church of England and the Holocaust February
Linker, D. The Theocons. Secular America under Siege June
Mau, R. Der Protestantismus im Osten Deutschlands May
Mitzscherlich, B. Diktatur und Diaspora. Das Bistum Meissen 1932-1951 December
Munro, G. Hitler’s Bavarian Antagonist: Georg Moenius May
Parkes, James End of an Exile. Israel, the Jews and the Gentile world April
Peart-Binns, J.S. A heart in my head. A biography of Richard Harries September
Raina, P. Bishop George Bell. The greatest Churchman May
Richmond, C. Campaigning against antisemitism April
Scherzberg, L. ed. Theologie und Vergangenheitsbewältigung May
Schmidtmann, C. Katholische Studierende 1945-1973 October
Snape, M., God and the British Soldier. Religion and the British Army October

With all my good wishes for the start of the New Year

John Conway

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