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Review of Klara Kardos, The Auschwitz Journal: A Catholic Story from the Camps

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Klara Kardos, The Auschwitz Journal: A Catholic Story from the Camps, trans. Fr. Julius D. Leloczky, O.Cist. (Paraclete Press, 2020). 144 Pp.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

In June 1944, a young Hungarian woman, born in 1920, received the order that she had to vacate her apartment, taking with her only the things she could carry. She noted in her account, “My packing was very simple indeed: just the bare minimum of the most needed items. As we were leaving, the apartments were sealed… And in our room was hanging on the wall – I left it there deliberately – the crucifix.” (33-34) Until the last portion of the sentence is reached, the reader might assume this is going to be an account of one of the millions of Jewish victims of Nazi horrors. Indeed, the young Hungarian woman, Klara Kardos, was born into a Jewish family although her mother had converted to Catholicism before Klara was born, Klara’s parents were divorced, and Klara had been baptized as an infant into the Catholic faith. For many non-experts, Klara’s deportation to a ghetto in Szeged, then her internment in Auschwitz concentration camp, where her forearm received the tattoo, might come as a shock. How could Klara, who identified wholeheartedly with her Catholic identity, end up in a Nazi death camp as a Jew? Of course, for the experts this is perhaps not as puzzling, as Klara and her extended family fell under the Nazi racial classification system as racially Jewish. But Klara’s account of her experiences during the Holocaust are not the usual recounting. To Klara, her suffering (of which she speaks very little) was part of her Catholic faith. She understood, as a well-educated young woman, that she was persecuted for an identity to which she did not ascribe, and that many of the Jewish inmates did not feel a connection to her since she had never been a practicing Jew. The entire, relatively short account that Klara provides for her readers is focused, not on the countless indignities and the unimaginable horrors recounted by Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi, but instead on how her memories of she fought to preserve and persevere in her faith. For some readers, this account might be somewhat disappointing. It does not seek to dwell on the nightmarish world created by the Nazis. Instead, she wants her readers to focus on how she relied on her Catholic faith as a way to sustain the human spirit in the midst of untold tragedies.

Much like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Frankl made a conscious decision to fight to retain his humanity against all odds, Klara Kardos’ story features a similar decision. In Kardos’ case, though, her prayer life and her way of framing her persecution allowed her to detach herself from the day-to-day horrors she was experiencing. When Kardos was deported from the Szeged ghetto to Auschwitz, her spiritual director (a priest not named in full in the account) wrote of her walking to the deportation train as a “deportee of heroic spirit… with a triumphant smile on her face for the road of sufferings. Will she ever return to Szeged? Only God can say. We can only hope. But her heroic spirit that was shining from her soul showed the world that the soul, even in a body trampled underfoot, in the midst of ignominy, can be victorious over her oppressors…” (42). Kardos humbly remarks that the priest’s words were very idealistic, but she also confirms that the essence of his words describing her departure were true.

The train journey to Auschwitz took three long, excruciatingly hot days in June 1944. Kardos describes the fear, the rumors, and the “absurd” (44) movement of people in her train carriage, putting on all of their best clothes. Not knowing where they were being taken to, many hoped that, if they dressed up in their best outfits, they would make a strong impression. In contrast to their actions, Kardos relates how she took out the pictures of her parents and younger sister and ripped the photos up, letting them out slip through the train carriage’s ventilation slit. She explains that she did not want “sacrilegious” hands to touch her family photos. Once she had disposed of her precious family photos, she placed her rosary around her neck and waited for what might happen next. (45-46)

She arrived at Auschwitz on 28 June 1944. Kardos rejects delving into the details of de-training, not because she does not recall the bad memories, but because, she says, “I do not consider it worth doing.” (49) Like Frankl’s earlier work, Kardos asserts that she is most interested in writing how “we tried to remain human in the midst of inhuman circumstances.” (51) She chooses to focus on the unexpected times she encountered expressions of love, although that does not prevent her from also detailing at least some of the dehumanizing procedures experienced by those selected for work in the camp. She also writes of the hastily prepared barracks for the Hungarian deportees, the last large Jewish community in Europe to be deported. Kardos describes the summer thunderstorms with rain pouring in through the roof, soaking everyone inside. No beds, cots, or planks to sleep on were available there. During one particular drenching nighttime rainstorm, Kardos recalled how several of the women took their shared blanket, made a tent over their heads and stood reciting the rosary prayer in the wet darkness. Kardos recalls how more women joined in. On the first Sunday in Auschwitz, Kardos relates how, as a young child, she had memorized the Latin text of the ordinary mass, and the Christian women in the barracks held a version of the mass. The end of the service concluded with the recitation of religious Hungarian poems with Kardos writing, “That’s the way the Christian community of Auschwitz celebrates the Lord’s Day…” (72) Of course, readers should remind themselves of two important pieces of context: the first, that Catholic masses at this time were always said in Latin, and the Hungarian-language poems were an expression of a specific community; the second, that, to the Nazi regime and its collaborators, Klara Kardos was not considered to be a Christian at all. Hence, she is in Auschwitz because she has been placed into the racial category of being Jewish, not because of her Catholic faith.

Kardos writes of the changes that she experienced in her spiritual life at Auschwitz. She used to meditate on texts of the Holy Mass during the long, drawn-out Appels (roll calls). She talks about “spiritual Communion”, meaning that spending time counseling other camp inmates, reciting poems by Catholic Hungarian authors, and participating in “cultural events” when inmates were restricted to their barracks was her way of practicing her faith in the absence of priests and the sacrament of the Eucharist. She also notes that she spent time trying to get to know the “real” Jews (79), although she recognizes that there was a wide abyss between those who were imprisoned in Auschwitz as “real” Jews versus “non-Aryan Christians.” No matter the divide, the Nazi regime worked to control all of the camp population. By July 1944, Kardos was selected along with ninety-nine other women to be moved to the “Czech camp”, Camp B2. While in Camp B2, Klara forms friendships with three other women, and she comments on how the barracks had furniture to sleep on and even water. Despite these “improved” conditions, starvation began to take its toll of most of the women, although Kardos would not indulge in fantasies about food with other inmates. Instead, she would separate from those conversations, stating that “the spirit, not the body, should enforce its rights!” (92) She reiterates this emphasis on the spiritual over physical reality when she describes how, at one point in the camp, sitting alone on her camp bunk, she experienced a visitation of her loved ones in her mind. (98) To Kardos, this experience was so intense that it served to confirm her core belief that the spirit can triumph over the limitations of physical reality. But physical reality was always lurking in the background, and Kardos contracted scarlet fever, landing her in the camp infirmary for a time.

Kardos used her time in the infirmary to increase her spiritual devotions, converting another ill inmate to Catholicism while interned there. After three months in Auschwitz, Kardos was once again selected to leave that particular Hell. Her first stop after Auschwitz was Bergen-Belsen, and after a few weeks in Bergen-Belsen, she was sent to work in an ammunition factory. In the factory, she mentions the 12-to-15 hour shifts that the inmates were forced to work. Despite the freezing cold and difficult circumstances, Kardos writes, “Trust in God and sheer willpower: they were our saviors. For the sake of God’s love, I just should not become sick! … This inner power of resistance was decisive. Whoever lost that also lost herself. But whoever clung to God possessed the greatest inner strength.” (117-118) Kardos worked in the ammunition factory from October 1944 to April 1945. Throughout the whirring machinery of the factory and the potentially dangerous conditions of working with explosives, Kardos reiterates her theme throughout the work: “To put it simply: we kept struggling to remain human!” (121)

Finally, on 14 April 1945, the first American troops entered the ammunition factory grounds. Kardos and one of her friends, Franci, walked to the nearby city to find a Catholic Church so that they could confess in order to attend Sunday mass and receive the Eucharist. Kardos was ill with a high fever at this time and, after finally getting to attend mass, she fainted. She was transported to the city hospital where Catholic nurses took care of her. While recovering her strength in the hospital, one of the nurses gave her a journal and a pen.  Her first entry in the journal, which she kept with her for the rest of her life, read, “April 18, 1945, Wednesday. Magnificat! May this be the first word that I write down. …I have a Bible! I have a journal!—I have everything! With this I begin my little spiritual exercise in the sanatorium, if God helps me!” (137) Her journal recorded the suicide of Hitler, the death of Mussolini, and finally, her ability to make the journey back to Hungary. There Kardos worked through the slow and difficult process of reacclimatizing to middle-class standards of life. In her final pages of the book, Kardos reminds her readers that people kept asking for her personal story and she hoped that people who read the work would come to some degree of understanding of the “unbelievable, sweet paradox: the bliss, the happiness of suffering.” (143) Although most readers might never associate the words “bliss” or “happiness” with Auschwitz, to Kardos she firmly believed the her suffering was sanctified according to the principles of her Catholic faith.

Kardos’ account of her experiences provide insight into the life of a very religious and spiritual person who was constantly striving to understand what God wanted her to experience and how she might interpret those experiences. Her faith that her suffering served a larger purpose kept her mentally strong during unimaginable trials. Her faith eventually led her away from Communist Hungary to Austria and she passed the rest of her life translating religious works for the Catholic Church. Though a short account, it emanates with the power of Kardos’ religious fervor and opens up our world to an examination of how “non-Aryan Catholics” experienced the horrors of the Holocaust.

 

 

 

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

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

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

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

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 284 Pp. ISBN: 9780674047686.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The Jobbik Party of Hungary. Greece’s Golden Dawn. The Neo-Confederate movement in the United States and countless other nationalist extremist movements. What unites all of them on a certain level is their adoption of the rhetoric chiefly associated in many people’s minds with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich: that of a worldwide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy traditional Christian morality and age-old civilizations. Paul Hanebrink’s examination into the origins and power of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth offers readers the opportunity to think – not about how true the Judeo-Bolshevik myth is, but rather, “to understand why it has been and remains so powerful” (5).

Hanebrink’s work has been influenced by the approach taken by Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov whose work on nineteenth-century Germany explained the rise of antisemitic language as part of a response to the many unsettling experiences caused by the late unification of Germany. No matter how quickly economic modernization, rapid urbanization, and cultural changes were dislocating people in Germany, Volkov argued that the use of antisemitic rhetoric and tropes about Jews were part of a “cultural code.” By addressing the “Jewish Question” an individual could then respond with solutions to the so-called problem. This often allowed many people to believe that the problems they were experiencing in their daily lives could be explained by one, all-powerful disruptor: the Jew. Hanebrink explores the use of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” over the course of different time periods and across various countries in Europe and the United States, allowing the reader to track how this destructive myth about Jews varied over the course of the twentieth century and to ponder why the myth continues to persist so powerfully into the twenty-first.

Following the unsettling and devastating impact of the First World War and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, much of Europe seemed to be in a state of revolutionary flux. Much like the work of Robert Gerwarth,[1] Hanebrink opens his work with the reality that, for so many Europeans, the First World War did not really end in November 1918. War and revolution continued on in many places, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, so that the experience of many people was not one of peace and stability but simply a continuation of the violence of 1914-1918. With so many revolutions breaking out in such a time of instability and dislocation, the search was on for the root cause of such upheavals. The answer that presented itself to so many people was a simple one: Jews were the face of revolution and revolutions seemed to be breaking out everywhere. From Munich, Germany, to Hungary, Romania, Poland, Russia, left-wing attempts to take over governments and countries led to an atmosphere of the total upheaval of societal norms. The one element that so many could agree upon was the role that Jews played in leftist activity. Hanebrink does not deny the involvement of some Jews in each of these movements, but he works hard to refute the notion that Jews created Bolshevism, supported the radical movement, and therefore all Jews were to be held responsible for the crimes of Bolshevism (14). The idea of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” was linked to the centuries-old language of hatred directed towards and about Jews: the figure of the Jew was linked to being the creator of disorder, disruption, and fanaticism, and there were just enough men and women who could be identified as being Jewish in each revolutionary movement that the myth seemed to embody a core kernel of truth.

How did this myth impact actual Jewish lives? Hanebrink exams the pogroms that repeatedly broke out in various parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, for example, Symon Petliura argued that by fighting against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks,” Ukrainians would be able to unify into a National Republic. Others in Ukraine attacked Jews, not to form a new Republic, but to restore an older state. In either case, Jews suffered directly because of the belief that they were behind the forces of disorder and chaos in Ukraine. Judeo-Bolshevism as an international threat played a prominent role in the political calculations of various faction leaders not only in Ukraine but also in Poland, Hungary, and Romania in the interwar years. Adding to this fear was the imagined idea that all Jews were by nature conspiratorial and therefore untrustworthy as potential allies. Works by Timothy Snyder and Omer Bartov[2] underscore Hanebrink’s analysis: some Jews in the borderland regions were caught in a crossfire of competing armies. The one element that each army could agree on was that the Jews were a true obstacle to achieving their objectives. As a result, more and more Jews lost their property if not their very lives. In such a tumultuous atmosphere, Jews were perceived my many as posing both an internal as well as an external threat to a country’s gentile population. The fears that Jews could potentially contribute to revolution, threatening the national security of a newly-formed nation fueled and rationalized the violence perpetrated against local Jewish populations.

While violence and pogroms continued in Eastern European territories, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on its perhaps most destructive power under the influence of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Hanebrink rightly points out that it is perhaps no coincidence that the early Nazi party had its beginnings in Munich – a city that had been rocked by left-wing revolution in 1919. Hitler took the pre-existing imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik and used it to animate his followers. He told them they were fighting to defend traditional German Christian society which Jewish-Bolsheviks threatened to overturn. In Hitler’s mind, fighting the power of a Jewish-Bolsheviks was a matter of life or death for Germans. In this way, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on it perhaps most lethal form yet. If Germans were to live, then Jewish-Bolshevik supporters had to die.[3] Lending support to the “reality” of a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to destroy all of Christian Europe was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Here Hitler saw an opportunity to elevate the existential threat that Jews posed to Germans – now he could point to Catholic Spain and argue that all of Europe would succumb to Judeo-Bolshevism unless there was a mighty crusade (led by him) to destroy it.[4] Once again, the mere presence of some Jews in the Spanish Civil War lent an air of truth to the idea of a vast “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy. From the 1930s onward, the fight against Jewish Bolshevism would be tied to Nazi Germany, reaching its most destructive peak with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It was in that event that Nazi propagandists could unleash the full force of their anti-Jewish-Bolshevik imagery. Layered upon Judeo-Bolshevik images was the portrait of Russia as an Asiatic, barbaric, foreign place that had been perverted by Jewish domination for decades. Jews were set in the role of saboteurs, conspirators, partisans, and the supreme proponents of Communism. Therefore, they were seen as the ultimate security threat. This helped the Nazis and many of their Eastern European allies participate in mass violence against Jewish populations, ultimately labeled as the Holocaust. Hanebrink also tracks the evolution that occurs – from the period of Nazi victories inside of the Soviet Union to the periods of Nazi defeat – and he provides examples of how Nazi propaganda would leave a long-lasting mark, particularly as the Soviet Red Army advanced further westward. The successful blending of images of Red Army soldiers as representative of Jewish vengeance, along with the notion that the Red Army was composed of “Asiatic barbarians” come to overturn all of European Christian civilization would have a long-lasting impact on areas that found themselves living in a post-WWII Communist-dominated territory.

In places such as Poland, Romania, and Hungary, the success of the Red Army meant one, ultimate thing: “Soviet occupation had brought Jews to power” (168). Jews who had survived the Holocaust emerged from hiding and many who had believed that Jews had been eradicated in the war now feared Jews would seek revenge for their suffering. This was coupled with the belief that Communist systems were led by Jews. There was even a tendency among post-war countries such as in the case of Poland, where leaders argued that Jews had supported Communism and they, therefore, had no one but themselves to blame for any hatred directed against them by the public. This line of argumentation was particularly useful when, in 1946, a charge of blood libel was made against Jews which resulted in the murder of at least 42 Jewish people. In yet another cruel twist of irony, local Communists also exploited anti-Jewish sentiments, particularly in Hungary where the economy was floundering and accusations of war profiteering were utilized to stir up crowds against “capitalist exploiters” whose images looked suspiciously like stereotypes of Jews. In these types of cases, Jews were associated with capitalism, exploitation, speculation, and the like. In the post-war environment, Communist leaders sought to shake free of the association of Jewishness with Communism.

For the post-WWII Western nations, the question that emerged was how to continue to fight against the growing spread of Communism without associating the fight with Nazism? Hanebrink explores the shifting of terminology in the West, going from fighting against “Judeo-Bolshevism” to embracing “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Now, instead of Hitler leading the crusade against Communism, the United States would be the lead fighter for Western Civilization. Intellectuals could still maintain that the Soviets and Communism, in general, represented “Asiatic barbarity” but they de-coupled the language of “Judeo-Bolshevism” from this fight. In the aftermath of the devastation of the war, many Christians in Europe and in the U.S. argued that Christianity could lead Europe out of the darkness it had fallen into under Nazi domination. Now the fight could be reframed as a battle against “atheistic Communism” with Christians and Jews working together, sharing a common biblical tradition that provided the seedbed for moral renewal. The concept of Judeo-Christianity was one that allowed Jews to align themselves in the battle of the Cold War against the forces of atheism. In this new way of thinking, Jews could become Cold Warriors. The idea of shared moral values between Christians and Jews connected with the idea of creating a more liberal, more tolerant society. This also impacted the way in which the memory of the Holocaust was addressed in public discourse.

In some instances, voices emerged in post-Communist societies that argued that the crimes committed under Communist regimes were ignored, while undo attention was given to specifically Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. In countries such as Poland, heated debates rose to the surface, asking why so much attention was given to Jewish victimhood at the hands of the Nazis while the victimization of gentile Poles at the hands of the Communist leaders was downplayed or ignored altogether? This line of argumentation brought back the specter that has haunted Europe for much of the twentieth and now part of the twenty-first centuries: that of the Judeo-Bolshevik. Right-wing and populist leaders demand an acknowledgement that Jews supported Communism, that Communism created categories of its own victims, and in this way, Hanebrink argues, “The Judeo-Bolshevik myth was reborn in post-Communist Europe as a tool for challenging the premises on which transnational memory of the Holocaust rested- and with those premises, the liberal civic ideals of multicultural toleration, human rights, and European integration that Holocaust memory culture had come to symbolize so powerfully” (273).

Hanebrink’s book is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book could benefit from the addition of several items including maps of the areas he is discussing, some pictures of propaganda imagery, and, most importantly, the book needs a comprehensive bibliography. The work would be useful in classes of graduate students who have studied some of the history of antisemitism, intellectual history, and histories of the twentieth century.

[1] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End (NY, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

[2] See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (NY, NY: Basic Books, 2010) and Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (NY, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

[3] See especially the work of Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion. Violence Against Jews in Provinicial Germany, 1919-1939 (NY, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012) and also Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). These works explore the dynamic of “us vs. them” in Nazi ideology.

[4] See, for example, Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon Roman Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany,” in Kevin P. Spicer, ed., Antisemitism, Chrisitian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 121-135 and Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “Crusade. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Invasion of the Soviet Union on the Roman Catholic Church under the Nazi Regime,” in Glaube- Freiheit-Diktatur in Europa und den USA. Festschrift für Gerhard Besier zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Strübund (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 715-726.

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Review of Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 284 pp. ISBN: 9781472586919.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Beth A. Griech-Polelle’s book enters the market of Holocaust history as a thoroughly accessible and carefully constructed overview of the Shoah, beginning quite properly in the long history of antisemitism that lay behind the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. The author states from the outset that she is interested in “the theme of the power of language and how language and rhetoric can result in deadly actions” (1). Drawing on the work of the French political scientist Jacques Semelin, Griech-Polelle notes that a society’s ideological concerns around “identity, purity, and security” can be impacted by “destructive legends, myths, and stereotypes” that generate caricatures which create fears that “enemy outsiders” will “defile, pollute, and destroy … us” (1). In like manner, she uses Thomas Kühne’s work on persecution as community-building and Saul Friedländer’s notion of redemptive antisemitism to argue that “language and rhetoric influenced the construction of ‘the Jew’ as eternal enemy” and that “language led to the violence and annihilation of European Jewry in the Holocaust” (2). Anyone familiar with Alon Confino’s insightful book A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) will recognize Griech-Polelle’s approach and be reminded of the ways in which language contributed to the creation of a culture—a social imaginary, to invoke Charles Taylor’s term—that made possible the Nazi persecution of the Jews and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

Griech-Polelle begins with the rise of religious antisemitism—rooted in the concept of Jews as “Christ-killers’’—in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ arrest, death, and resurrection. With the emergence of Christianity came the belief that the Early Church was the “New Israel” which replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people (10-11). Tracing the loss of Jewish rights in the late Roman Empire, the author shows how the Codex Theodosianus began to impose restrictions on Jews and to generate the segregating language that would shape the medieval era. Through the period of the crusades and on into the Middle Ages, Griech-Polelle explains important incidents in the history of Jewish persecution, but beyond that, she endeavours to outline the way a particular kind of antisemitic language emerged in, for example, tropes like the Wandering Jew or the blood libel. A short section on Thomas Aquinas shows how he built on Augustine’s notion of the preservation of the Jews as a witness to the truth of both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian gospels, adding that the Jews were people with souls that needed to be saved. “Somehow, Jews were to be converted voluntarily—despite the persecutions and horrendous depictions of Jews as being in league with the devil, desecrating the Host, and reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus” (20). This chapter on the history of religious antisemitism continues with the medieval expulsions of Jews from various European countries and follows the story through the Renaissance and Reformation, the emergence of a substantial Jewish community in Poland, and the impact of the Enlightenment, French Revolution, modern nationalism, and post-1848 reactionary politics. It closes with the persecution faced by Jews in Tsarist Russia.

I’ve focused closely on this opening chapter (chapter 2 in the book, since the Introduction is chapter 1) to indicate how Griech-Polelle—a scholar both of German Catholicism in the Third Reich and of the Holocaust—handles this important topic of the Christian antisemitic foundation upon which later antisemitisms and (in the end) the Holocaust itself rested. A third chapter follows the story of how cultural and especially political antisemitism developed from the nineteenth century through the First World War and the Weimar era in Germany. Key concepts are the coining of the term antisemitism itself, the notion of “scientific” antisemitism, and “the Jew” as the outsider. What becomes clear is that antisemitism was a tool used by European political parties to spur the growth of nationalism within European mass society.

Other chapters cover the topics one would expect in an introduction to the history of the Holocaust, though in ways that enable Griech-Polelle to highlight her theme of the role of antisemitic language and rhetoric. Chapter four includes everything from the rise of Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to Hitler’s views on Jews, the seizure of power and early phase of Nazi rule, and Nazi Jewish policy through 1935. Chapter five is called “Turning Points,” and argues that although Jewish life had been deteriorating from 1933 onwards, the period from 1936-1938 was marked by exclusionary policies which reinforced “the notion that to create the Volksgemeinschaft [national community], anti-Jewish actions were required” (111). Emigration, the growing refugee crisis, expulsion, the Kristallnacht Pogrom, and the beginning of the Second World War are all surveyed here. Chapters six to eight cover the heart of the Holocaust, from “Resettlements, Deportations, and Ghettos” to “Einsatzgruppen, Executions, and ‘Evacuations’ to the East,” to “The Final Solution,” with its emphasis on the death camps in Poland. Throughout, Griech-Polelle treats a host of subtopics briefly but conscientiously, meaning that her history of both antisemitism and the Holocaust comes to only 232 pages of nicely formatted text, making it easy to read.

Two features of the book are worthy of note. First, throughout her work, Griech-Polelle employs material from various volumes of the important new series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Series Editor: Jürgen Matthäus), and in particular the five volumes entitled Jewish Responses to Persecution. The result is that she is able to present the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust from multiple perspectives, incorporating the experiences of Jewish victims along with those of Nazi perpetrators. For instance, in her description of the opening phase of Nazi antisemitic policy, she recounts the reflections of Mally Dienemann, whose diary describes the “unvarying … fate” of the Jews: “now we are [supposedly] harming Germany with fairy tales about atrocities, while in the Middle Ages it was we who were supposed to have poisoned wells, etc…. Could people really do this to each other?” (89, editorial insertion and ellipsis in the original). Likewise, during her account of the Kristallnacht Pogrom, Griech-Polelle uses the testimony of Margaret Czellitzer, whose home was invaded, radio broken, china smashed, beds overturned, mattresses ruined, and valuables stolen (124). In this sense, Griech-Polelle’s introduction to the Holocaust reflects current best practices in the field of Holocaust Studies, which attempt to balance perpetrator accounts with victim voices.

Second, at the close of each chapter, the author includes a short section entitled “For your consideration,” in which she combines short primary source texts with reflection questions. For instance, in chapter 2 on religious antisemitism, she offers biblical texts from Matthew 27 and John 8 and excerpts from Martin Luther’s “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” (1543). On the gospel texts, questions revolve around the descriptions of Jews, their role in the sentencing of Jesus, the naming of particular groups of Jews, and the link between these depictions and the rise of the myth of deicide. With respect to the Luther text, questions involve Luther’s picture of the Jews, his use of medieval prejudices, and the potential influence his writings might have had. These texts and questions at the close of each chapter would work well for undergraduate classroom discussions or reflection assignments.

Rooted in the history of antisemitism, written in accessible prose which encompasses multiple perspectives on the events of the Holocaust, accompanied by primary texts, reflection questions, suggestions for further reading, and a helpful glossary, Griech-Polelle’s Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will serve uninitiated laypeople and undergraduate students as a helpful introduction to the events of the Holocaust and the discourse of antisemitism which prepared the way for the annihilation of the Jews.

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Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “Between ‘National Community’ and ‘Milieu’: German Catholics at War, 1939-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “Between ‘National Community’ and ‘Milieu’: German Catholics at War, 1939-1945,” Contemporary European History 26 no. 3 (August 2017): 421-440.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Thomas Brodie’s examination of German Catholics in the Rhineland and Westphalia from 1939-1945 offers a challenge to arguments presented by both the “Volksgemeinschaft” (“National Community”) paradigm and the analysis which argues for a Catholic subculture sealed off from the dominant Protestant majority. Brodie’s analysis reveals that neither the explanation that Catholics were living in a hermetically sealed “milieu”, separated from the Third Reich and its supporters, nor the presentation of a homogenous “National Community” with all Catholics going along with Nazi propaganda are accurate portrayals capturing the everyday lived experiences of Rhenish-Westphalian Catholics. Instead, Brodie presents readers with a much more nuanced and complex examination of Catholic loyalties, mentalities, and influences acting upon them. He argues that Catholics’ membership in the Volksgemeinschaft as well as their participation in the Catholic milieu subculture of the region contributed to a wide range of opinions, effectively curbing church-state conflict during the war years.

One of the main issues for Catholics living in the Rhineland-Westphalia region was the question of loyalty. Could Catholics be loyal to the Hitler State while simultaneously thinking of themselves as “good Catholics”? For many Nazi Party members, who were also practicing Catholics, the answer was a clear and emphatic “yes.” Brodie’s article explores the compatibility of religious identity with Nazi ideology for Catholics who were negotiating the complexities of living in a dictatorship that demanded undivided loyalty. For those Catholics who were perhaps not ardent Nazi Party members, Brodie finds that younger Catholic clergy were interested in combining their Catholicism with the Volksgemeinschaft in order to place their Church firmly into the “National Community.” Older clergy tended to maintain a stricter sense of church hierarchy and more traditional neo-Scholastic teachings. For many lay people, navigating a course between the practice of their Catholic faith and their participation in the Third Reich reveals the growing tensions in German society as the war years intensified.

What Brodie’s research offers is a much more complex, nuanced understanding of issues related to the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft, particularly as his research aims to address confessional identities whereas most works on the “National Community” ignore the role of religious beliefs. His work examines the minor conflicts which arose between local government and Church officials in the region. He tracks the decline of support for the Nazi regime among Catholic lay people as the war turned against Germany yet Brodie also highlights areas of ideological overlap between Catholics and National Socialists. Here he is able to demonstrate effectively how Catholics could incorporate traditional nationalistic language with Catholic devotion, thereby bringing their faith and support for the war effort into greater alignment. Brodie argues that Catholic laity, in particular, often criticized religious leaders if they were seen as being too harsh or too critical of the regime during its difficult years.

Brodie concludes with an examination of popular Catholic attitudes towards the Jews and their persecution. In this, he sees the co-mingling of both Catholic teachings about divine punishment as well as Nazi regime propaganda arguing that Germany’s fate was linked to the destruction of the Jews. Finally, what emerges is a much more complex understanding of Catholic reactions to church-state conflict underscoring the intermixing of both Catholic religious subculture and Nazi Volksgemeinschaft influences.

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Conference Report: 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Conference Report: 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches took place March 2-4, 2019. Hosted by the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, this year’s conference theme was “Conflicting Realities of the Holocaust.” Although the conference has evolved over the years to include topics and themes far beyond “the Churches,” it has retained its commitment to interfaith dialogue and reconciliation. This year several papers dealt with issues of religion and related topics, such as rescue, humanitarian aid, and antisemitism.

Mark Roseman’s keynote address examined the Bund (Gemeinschaft für ein sozialistisches Leben), a small German life-reform group that was committed to self-improvement through communal life and education. The fascinating talk was based on his forthcoming book, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany, and offered a new theoretical model for conceptualizing small acts of assistance, solidarity, and resistance in the context of networks and small groups. During the Nazi years the Bund offered solidarity and assistance to persecuted Jews. Yet Roseman questioned any easy labels, probing the members’ intent, and emphasizing that their lived experience was characterized more by fear of total war rather than of Nazi authorities.

Five scholars whose names will be familiar to readers of the CCHQ offered a nuanced and erudite panel on Christians, Jews, and Judaism. Chaired by Beth Griech-Polelle, the panel addressed different cases of Protestants and Catholics in the 1930s and 40s understood their relationship with Jews and Judaism. Christopher Probst offered a much-needed critical examination of Protestant theologian Adolf Schlatter. Suzanne Brown-Fleming analyzed a collection of correspondence from ‘non-Aryan’ Catholics to the Vatican in the second half of 1938, highlighting these Catholics’ feelings of abandonment and desperation. Kyle Jantzen showcased new research he has done in collaboration with one of his students on the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a dispensationalist evangelical denomination in Canada and the United States. Matthew Hockenos’ paper explored Martin Niemöller and the ‘Jewish Question’ after 1945, emphasizing the change in Niemöller’s thinking over time.

Other papers of interest to this journal included Eileen Groth Lyon’s contextualization of memoirs of priests who had been in Dachau, Kelly Palmer’s investigation of the American Friends Service Committee’s work in France, and Rebecca Carter-Chand’s comparison of the Salvation Army’s assistance to Jews in several western European countries.

This conference, more than some others, offers a platform for scholars at all career stages – this openness has the potential to be its strength going forward. Graduate students presented and senior scholars, such as Martin Rumscheidt, Henry Knight, and David Patterson, offered personal reflections based on their long and distinguished careers in the field. But generational shifts are underway and the future trajectory of the conference is not entirely clear. As the conference organizers look toward next year’s 50th anniversary, they are faced with challenges and opportunities in encouraging the future of Holocaust research.

 

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Article Note: Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-Communism in the 1930s”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-Communism in the 1930s,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 2 (April 2016): 261-290.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Giuliana Chamedes’ article addresses the intersection of Soviet, Vatican, and German policies through an examination of the Vatican’s Secretariat on Atheism and its transnational campaign to fight the spread of international Communism. In the early 1930s, the Vatican launched the Secretariat on Atheism as a branch of its foreign policy apparatus. The Secretariat led the anti-communist campaign by publishing monthly journals, creating traveling exhibitions, and sponsoring radio programs, writing contests, and even film propaganda. Although the Secretariat was deeply engaged in the fight against the spread of communism, Chamedes argues that the Secretariat’s success was due in part to its willingness to work with pre-existing networks of anti-communists, including the Nazis, Fascists, and others in Europe and in the Americas.

The creation of the Secretariat was part of the Vatican’s determination to re-assert Rome as the center of global Catholic life while simultaneously underscoring the Catholic Church’s ongoing prominence in international affairs. It was also part of an effort to protect the Church against threats that seemed to challenge the very existence of the Church. By revealing more information about the under-studied Secretariat on Atheism, Chamedes’ article expands on the history of transnational anti-communism. In addition, Chamedes’ research helps us to understand how Catholic Church leaders got involved with Fascists and Nazis in the Vatican’s quest to gain control over the multitude of anti-communist organizations.

Chamedes notes that Vatican-Soviet relations were carried on diplomatically throughout the 1920s and that a change in the relationship came about in the early 1930s. For Chamedes, the Vatican’s “crusade of prayer” played only a small role in the changing dynamics of Vatican-Soviet relations. Rather, she cites the years 1932-1933 as the moment when mild protests against Soviet policy were replaced with a transnational campaign, aiming to vilify communism “as the greatest existing threat to the survival of Catholicism and the Catholic Church” (266). She connects this sea change to several factors, including the outbreaks of anticlerical violence in Spain and Mexico and the emergence of a new cadre of Vatican insiders such as Eugenio Pacelli, who functioned as the Secretary of State at the Vatican. By 1931, Pacelli was obsessed with the rise of the Spanish Republic and its attempts to separate Church and State. He was convinced that the Spanish Republic was part of a communist plot to destroy Catholic Spain. He took a similar approach when examining events in Mexico. By early 1932, Pacelli revealed in a circular letter sent to Vatican officials in 39 countries that a new campaign was going to be launched from Rome to fight against the existential threat of communism against Catholicism and the Church.

1932 was also the year in which the Vatican developed the anti-communist encyclical, Divinum Mandatum. Pacelli was once again involved in this project as well and the encyclical argued that the international Catholic Church could weaken international communism. The encyclical, however, was never published and the reasons remain somewhat unclear. This did not stop Pacelli. In January 1933, a group of officials at the Vatican agreed to form the Secretariat on Atheism. The organization would be run by the Jesuits, who would keep in continual contact with the Secretary of State, and Rome would serve as the organization’s home base. Its purpose would be to launch an international counter-revolution in an attempt to defeat the aims of the Soviet Union. The new organization began by coordinating itself with anti-communist activists in Europe, the Americas, and in countries in Asia and Africa.

The Secretariat argued that it was uniquely qualified to lead the charge against communists, asserting that “the Vatican was the only ‘dynamic and truly global organization’ that stood ‘above all nations and nationalities’, and was capable of competing with international communism…” (271). Unlike Fascist and Nazi propaganda, the Secretariat did focus on communism as being essentially atheistic and godless, therefore avoiding the anti-Semitic tropes employed by men such as Hitler. Despite the struggle between the Secretariat and Nazi-Fascist forces for leadership in the charge against communism, Chamedes argues that cooperation between the competitors actually increased when one examines the case studies of traveling exhibitions and a writing competition.

With the urging and support of Pope Pius XI, the Secretariat on Atheism was charged with overseeing an international writing competition (although the role of the Secretariat was to be kept secret). The judges for the competition were known for their fascist and proto-fascist sympathies. Over 500 novels were submitted, and a Russian émigré to Vienna, Alja Rachmanova, won first place. Her novel represented the triumph of Christianity over an immoral and extremely violent Bolshevism. While Rachmanova’s novel did not employ Nazi-Fascist motifs, the second-place novel, written by Erik Maria Ritter von Kühnelt-Leddihn, told the story of a Jesuit and two other men who traveled around Europe beating up communists. Further book prizes were awarded in ways which underscored the growing interconnectedness between the Secretariat and radical right-wing political movements. For instance, when writing to the judges of the competition, Pius XI noted that book awards should go to authors who stressed themes that were anti-democratic, authoritarian, and rooted in religious political thinking (275). The Pope also warned that the novels should not stress extreme nationalism as that would threaten the role of the Catholic Church as an international organization capable of leading the fight against communism.

By the spring of 1936, as the Spanish Civil War was close to erupting, the Secretariat released a traveling exhibit meant to re-affirm that the Vatican was the leader in the fight against Communism. The thrust of the exhibit stressed that the Soviet Union and its nefarious influence could only be defeated with the collaboration of state powers with the Vatican. Using many types of modern staging techniques, visitors would encounter the growing threat of international communism. The final room in the exhibit, however, showed the Secretariat’s brochures, posters, and related material, leaving visitors with a feeling of hope that the Catholic Church was capable of defeating communism. The exhibition traveled to many different European cities and was followed up by two other exhibitions in 1938 and in 1939. In the case of these exhibitions, the Vatican did not shy away from working with Nazi and Fascist governments, as their anti-communist agenda was a shared one. This common cause also led to agreements with the Gestapo that allowed previously banned publications to be brought into Nazi Germany, showing the work of the Secretariat in its battle with the Soviet Union.

In March 1937 the Vatican released three encyclicals, one of which addressed the growing Soviet threat. Divini Redemptoris revealed the influence of the Secretariat on Atheism in its emphasis that the power and resources of the Catholic Church would be the only effective means of maintaining world peace. This encyclical was followed by Firmissimam Constantiam, which argued that violent action was needed in response to threats against Catholicism in Mexico. Using the theory of just war, the encyclical allowed and even encouraged the use of force in the fight against communism. The final encyclical of 1937, Mit brennender Sorge, addressed the rise of racist ideology. Though it avoided naming Nazi Germany specifically, it nonetheless clarified some of the Church’s position regarding Nazism.

Until the outbreak of the Second World War, many European nations and the United States of America courted the Vatican to support the fight against the spread of communism. However, once the war began in 1939, the Secretariat on Atheism was shut down. Chamedes suggests that because of Vatican cooperation with Nazi-Fascist forces during the interwar years, the Secretariat was never reopened. Chamedes concludes: “In order to weaken the Soviet Union and the global appeal of communism, the Vatican agreed to a tactical cooperation with Nazi-Fascist forces in a number of on-the-ground campaigns. The Vatican often took the initiative in doing so, even as it increasingly distanced itself in doctrinal terms from the Fascist and Nazi project” (289-290).

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Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922-1933”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922-1933,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (June 2015): 280-306.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Todd H. Weir’s article is a transnational account of the anti-Catholicism gripping Europe in the interwar years. Between 1927-1939, thousands of Catholic clerics and lay people suffered persecution, torture, and murder in places such as Mexico, Spain, and Russia.  Weir addresses an interesting aspect of the ‘culture wars’ by examining the role that religion plays in relation to political ideologies in an age of extremes. The focus is on Germany as the site of a contested ideological and religious struggle between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. The work is divided into two phases of the relationship, covering the 1920s through 1930 as a time when Germany played the role of diplomatic mediator between the Soviet Union and the Vatican via the German Communist Party and the Catholic Center Party. Beginning in 1930, however, Germany became the chief battle arena for an ever-increasing transnational propaganda war between Catholics and communists.

In the first phase, Weir offers explanations as to why both the Vatican and the Soviet Union were open to negotiations. For Vatican officials, the communist takeover meant that there was a need to ensure access to the sacraments for the more than two million Catholics in Russia. It also offered an opportunity for the Church to seek converts from Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism. For Soviet officials, the need to secure diplomatic recognition from powerful entities and to avoid offending countries with substantial Catholic populations were reasons enough to enter into diplomatic talks. Throughout these discussions, Germany emerged as the chief negotiator, particularly since Germany and the Soviet Union had reached a diplomatic agreement in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922.

During the 1920s, influenced by the Rapallo Treaty, the German Foreign Office refused to do more than mention religious persecution within the Soviet Union. To increase the pressure on the Soviets, Vatican Officials, including Eugenio Pacelli, began using their connections to German Catholic newspapers such as Germania to insert demands for an end to religious persecution. In response, the Bolsheviks issued an April 1929 decree making it possible for the state to persecute religious associations even more. The April decree also placed greater burdens on congregations to maintain the upkeep and taxes on their churches. The persecution and targeting of church leaders also proved to be an effective way of destroying village solidarity and ridding the areas of local elites. The Soviet clamp-down on Catholic priests induced German Catholics, including Friedrich Muckermann, to place still more articles attacking the Soviet authorities for attempting to rid their country of religion.

By 1929, Pope Pius XI had given up hope that diplomacy would win the day. Now, the Vatican would launch a “crusade of prayer” (which opened publicly on March 19, 1930) attacking the persecution of Catholic priests inside the Soviet Union, but the crusade also sought to counter the growing promotion of anticlericalism—especially in Germany. The German Freethinkers, under the influence of Soviet examples, urged Germans to leave the churches through public demonstrations, agitprop theater, and graphic propaganda. Both sides now squared off: the Soviets proclaimed that the Pope was the ringleader of Western powers seeking the destruction of the Soviet Union while the Vatican argued that communists were seeking to spread atheism and anti-clericalism throughout Europe. In Germany, Catholic priests followed the pope’s lead in the “crusade of prayer” and organized marches and demonstrations in which thousands protested the spread of anticlericalism. Priests in Germany were trained to combat atheism largely through the People’s Association for Catholic Germany. Through lectures, demonstrations, conference meetings and brochures, priests were instructed to take positive steps in the fight against the spread of atheism and godlessness. These efforts were transnational when some German priests went as a delegation to Mexico to address uprisings against the Cristero movement.

Weir tracks the divisions among German Social Democrats, German Communists, and Catholic Center Party members, revealing the strains of anticlericalism, fears about secularization, and the rising tide of groups such as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party with its promise to end secularism in Germany. The author concludes his article by suggesting that the study of political ideas “should investigate Christian apology as a crucible in which a number of religious-social discourses and theological-political strategies were forged. Although most succumbed to the more powerful political ideologies and are now largely forgotten, these Christian strategies and discourses represent signature elements of the political culture of the period” (305).

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Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust.” The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, November 1-3, 2017.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education conference began with Steve Pressman, documentary filmmaker, showing clips of his soon-to-be released film, “Holy Secrets.” Pressman discussed his process in making the documentary which explores the actions and inactions taken by the Vatican during the Holocaust.

The first panel session continued this theme by exploring the “Pius Wars,” with papers by Robert Ventresca and Jacques Kornberg. Both presented critical re-assessments of Pius XII, suggesting the need for a framework for the proper historical and ethical evaluation of the choices made by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Further panels included the exploration of Catholic antisemitism, with Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara co-presenting their recent work on Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage. Martin Menke presented research on Weimar Catholic leaders who differentiated between being anti-racist and being anti-Semitic.

Jonathan Huener shared his latest research on the Reichsgau Wartheland and the diverse ways in which the Nazi occupation regime persecuted the Catholic Church in occupied Poland. This was followed by Brenda Gaydosh analyzing why Bernhard Lichtenberg resisted and protested Nazi anti-Semitic measures and why he prayed for the Jews.

The final presentation of the first day of panels was a keynote address by John Connelly: “How the Catholic Church Overcame Its Own Theology and Proclaimed God Loves Jews.” Connelly argued that Vatican II’s new teaching about God loving the Jews came about because of Nazi racism. Many of the theologians who advised the bishops at Vatican II were opponents of Hitler in the 1930s. Some of them were converts from Judaism and many had been targets of antisemitism themselves. Yet for them, the Church’s new teaching about Jews was not a revolution; it was a return to the ideas of the Jewish thinker, Saul of Tarsus. Far from a revolution, the new teaching of Vatican II was a return to the Church’s origins.

The final day of the conference featured a panel on post-Holocaust theology and the Jews with a presentation by Zuzanna Radzik, a Catholic theologian specializing in Christian-Jewish relations and feminist theology. Karma Ben Johanan from the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute then presented on the way in which the Catholic discourse on the Holocaust functioned in the construction of the Church’s identity and in the reforging of Jewish-Christian relations from the Second Vatican Council to the present.

Raymond Sun brought the conference into the present by analyzing the rhetoric, symbolism, and historical precedents employed by church leaders in urging Catholics to oppose the persecution or exclusion of targeted groups. He explored possible reasons for the absence of direct references to the Holocaust and pondered the implications of this for Catholic memory of the Holocaust. This was followed by Gershon Greenberg’s presentation on the restoration of Jewish faith in the displaced persons camps, beginning with the survivor’s question: “Why was I still alive?” The survivors’ answer was: in order to study Torah—which in turn nourished life. The fact that Jewish faith was revived necessitates the conclusion that somehow, some way, sacramental existence never totally disappeared, even in the midst of catastrophe.

The conference closed with a presentation from Marie-Anne Harkness, whose family members rescued Jews in France during the war. Mrs. Harkness’s grandmother, Madame Celine Morali, used the family’s hardware store to smuggle Jews out of danger. She and her daughter worked with Monsignor Joseph Moussaron, Bishop of Albi, and other Catholics to rescue Jews.

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Review of Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, eds. and trans., The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, eds. and trans., The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). Pp. 161. ISBN: 9780253029577.

By Beth Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The story of Erna Becker-Kohen provides a welcome and much-needed contribution to the scholarly literature on survivors of the Holocaust. Becker-Kohen’s memoir, written as a diary, allows historians to explore the experiences of someone who was labelled by the Nazi regime as “privileged,” demonstrating how persecution, discrimination, and threats of death impacted such persons, wiping away any sense of privilege whatsoever. Spicer and Cucchiara have added to our understanding of what life could be like for a neglected category of people: Catholics of Jewish heritage. Erna’s simple and straightforward style of writing conveys a sense of immediacy, with no knowledge of what the future may have in store for Erna, her Catholic Aryan husband, Gustav Becker, and their small child, Silvan. Readers may take the journey with Erna, hoping that all three family members will outlast the Nazi horrors.

Erna’s first entry at Christmas 1937 begins with an announcement: she and her Catholic husband, Gustav, are expecting their first child in March. By this time, Hitler had been in power in Germany for four years. Erna and Gustav had married in 1931 while Erna was still Jewish and Gustav Catholic. As Spicer and Cucchiara note, the newlyweds could have had no idea then that their religious heritages would come to matter so very much to the outside world. In the early phases of Hitler’s chancellorship, Gustav continued working in an engineering company. His status as a pure Aryan accorded Erna a measure of protection. However, as the years of the Third Reich continued, Gustav and Erna would come to see that the so-called “privileged” status of their union was really no protection against an increasingly hostile German society. What adds yet another layer to this fascinating story is that Erna had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1936. She longed for community in the face of such social isolation and persecution and she took increasing solace in her Catholic faith.

Throughout the memoir, Erna records the challenges she confronted. She and Silvan are separated time and again from Gustav—first due to neighbors and their discriminatory remarks, then due to aerial bombardments in Berlin, which lead Erna and Silvan to make their way to potential safety in the Tyrol. From the beginning of these separations, Erna recognizes that she and Silvan are in grave danger and that she must seek out help in order to survive on the run. Her careful observations show us how her baptism as a Catholic did not necessarily translate into assistance from Catholic Aryans. From an October 1941 entry, “For a while I was a member of the church choir in our little parish. Singing has always given me much joy, but now I had to give it up because a few singers did not like the idea of a Jew participating. I always remained modestly, even shyly, in the background. Still, I am not wanted” (46). Despite being told by a priest that she was “like a leper” and would have to stay away from other people, Erna continued to note in her writings whenever she found what she referred to as “the true spirit of Christianity.” In an entry labelled late February 1942, Erna encounters a woman who had tried to befriend her. “Frau Herberg came to see me to inquire why I have not come to see her… She consciously stands by me and insists that I continue to come and visit her. This once again gives me courage and the certainty that Christianity lived makes people strong and good” (48).

But Erna’s faith in people living the message of Christianity would be tried many times over. In March 1943 the Gestapo paid Erna a visit at the family’s apartment. She was arrested and taken to a collection point for Jews in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. After her release, her fears for her family increased, particularly her fear of being separated from her son and what might become of him if she were taken away to a camp. She and Silvan had to flee their home in Berlin on June 15, 1943, with only one hour to pack as the Nazis were restricting purchases of train tickets. A kind priest, Father Erwin, advised Erna to take Silvan by train before the restrictions went into effect. Thanks to Father Erwin, Erna and Silvan were able to find refuge in a remote corner of Tyrol in August 1943. Once in the Tyrolean village, Erna finds Catholics willing to help her but she also quickly notes that the mayor of the village is a fanatical Nazi. Erna understands that, as nice as the local Catholic villagers are, if the mayor finds out she is of Jewish ancestry, they will not be able to help or protect her.

In addition to Erna’s recollections of her encounters with both helpful as well as awful people, she provides information about the fate of her extended Jewish family. Erna’s mother, who felt deeply betrayed when Erna converted, went to live in Belgium with her son. While she died of natural causes, the fate of many of Erna’s relatives, including her brother, reveal stories of persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and death. Erna’s sister and brother-in-law emigrated to Chile and so they survived the war. Central to Erna’s story is the fate of her loyal husband, Gustav.

Throughout the memoir, Gustav appears as brave and loyal to his wife and son. In the early years, Gustav takes on traditional “women’s work” by stopping after work to do the grocery shopping- primarily because he is an Aryan and is therefore entitled to more food than Erna is as a Jew. He attempts to find safe places with nuns in convents for Erna, and sends her whatever he can while she and Silvan are moving from place to place for safety. As the Nazis came closer and closer to defeat in the war, they attempted to drive apart those individuals who remained steadfast to their “non-Aryan” partners, refusing to divorce them. To that end, Gustav was ordered to report to a work camp to force him to separate from Erna, thus removing her designation of “protected status.” Gustav refused and after performing hard labor he contracted skeletal tuberculosis. He survived the war, but was confined to a plaster body cast for years, and ultimately died from the harsh conditions under which he suffered because of his dedication to his marriage. Although Gustav and Erna were reunited before his death, Gustav never again experienced joy in life. He died in 1952.

As Erna struggled in the post-war world, her memoirs note how she felt homeless and sickened by the people who had once tormented her and rejected her. Now that the war was over, she saw the hypocrites rushing to befriend her to prove that they had not turned away from her when she most desperately needed their assistance. Some of Erna’s faith in Christianity and more broadly in humanity was restored to her through her interactions with Father Paul, who “has proved to me repeatedly that there is no contradiction between Judaism and Christianity” (125). Erna seems to have found some true inner peace when she penned:

But why do I nonetheless record this memory? First to impress upon mankind that something like this must never happen again. We, too, want to be recognized as human beings, and if you can look upon Jews without any racial conceit, then you have solved half of the Jewish problem. Second, to confirm that I encountered those forces that unyieldingly fought for human rights and dignity only where the Christian teaching—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)—was not mere words but was consciously lived (126).

By giving the English-speaking world access to Erna Becker-Kohen’s memoir, Spicer and Cucchiara have provided us all with insight into what it was like to be a Catholic of Jewish descent in a time when most people could only see a “Jew” in front of them. Like the diary of Victor Klemperer, Erna’s account allows us to experience her world—with all of its ugliness as well as all of its extreme acts of kindness. The editors have also provided a substantial amount of background material in both their introduction and their footnotes so that readers will be able to place Erna’s memoir into the larger context of Nazi laws and the persecution of Catholics of Jewish heritage. This is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature, deepening our understanding of an understudied group of persecuted people.

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Review of Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Jacques Kornberg, The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 405 Pp., ISBN 9781442628281.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

“When Words are not matched by Actions”

“The Pope at times cannot remain silent. Governments only consider political and military issues, intentionally disregarding moral and legal issues in which, on the other hand, the Pope is primarily interested in and cannot ignore…How could the Pope, in the present circumstances, be guilty of such a serious omission as that of remaining a disinterested spectator of such heinous acts, while the entire world was waiting for his word?” (301)

These are strong words, uttered by Pope Pius XII to Dino Alfieri, the Italian Ambassador to the Holy See. Which heinous acts was the Pope willing to denounce? In this case, Alfieri had explained to Pius XII that Il Duce was displeased that in May 1940, Pius had sent a letter of commiseration to Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands upon their invasion by Nazi Germany. In The Pope’s Dilemma, Jacques Kornberg takes the reader on an odyssey to examine the reasons why Pope Pius XII might have chosen silence and inaction over outright condemnation of Nazi atrocities committed during the Second World War. Kornberg’s work represents a monumental compilation of materials, both primary and secondary sources, reflecting a lifetime of study on the role that organized religion plays in our world. Written clearly and argued persuasively, one might hope that this work would be the definitive end to the “Pius Wars,” however, one can assume that this just might engender further responses from both sides of the battle.

Kornberg-PopesKornberg takes on both sides of the Pius War, questioning the various ways in which scholars have sought to either support Pius’s reactions to the Nazi regime or have tried to find fault with Pius’s response (or lack thereof). At the book’s outset, Kornberg asks the fundamental question that has frustrated both sides of the scholarly debate: “why was the pope unable to deal with radical evil?” (3) Kornberg argues that, in his view, the papacy of Pius XII was a moral failure out of “calculated acquiescence;” meaning that the pope willingly allowed Nazi atrocities to happen “because of his own priorities and responsibilities as head of the Roman Catholic Church” (8-9). Kornberg then tracks how Pius’s reputation drastically plummeted in the 1960s, in no small part to the wildly successful play by Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter, (The Deputy) which depicted a cold, calculating Pius who sat silent in the face of Nazi crimes for “reasons of state” (16). With this incendiary play, debates raged: was Pius complicit with the Nazi regime due to his silence or was Hochhuth’s play no more than a deeply flawed portrayal of the Pope? Kornberg takes the reader through the play, the reactions and counter-reactions to it and links this to the role of Vatican II in further sealing the demise of Pius’s reputation. A new era was opening up for the Church under the leadership of the charismatic and charming Pope John XXIII and Kornberg dryly notes that in this new climate, “it was inevitable that Pius XII’s reputation would sink like a stone” (35). At issue here was the question of mission: what was the Catholic Church’s role? Was it to serve as a voice of morality to the world, was it to concern itself primarily with pastoral care, or was it to be a mixture of both of these? Raising these questions allows Kornberg to move on to his next chapter, addressing the options of Eugenio Pacelli and his role in the drafting of the Reichskonkordat.

Kornberg takes readers through the historiography of the 1960s-1970s debate between Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen. Scholder denounced the role of then Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli for sacrificing Catholic opposition to the Nazi regime in his single-minded quest for a treaty between the Holy See and the German Reich. On the other side of the debate was Konrad Repgen, who interpreted Pacelli’s actions in a much more favorable light, arguing that the Cardinal Secretary of State was attempting to keep the Catholic Church’s institutions protected in the face of a ruthless dictatorship. Kornberg neatly walks readers through the works of other prominent historians, such as Ludwig Volk, Hubert Wolf, Gerhard Besier, Martin Menke, and many more to summarize their findings that Pacelli, and his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, had both determined that the Vatican’s top priority was to find guarantees that the institutions of the Church would go on. To achieve that end, they followed the German Catholic populations’ lead, deciding to reach an accommodation with Hitler’s regime. This allowed German Catholics to believe that they could be both “good Catholics” while simultaneously behaving as “good Germans.” But, how were German Catholics to behave in the face of war?

Kornberg’s third chapter analyzes Pope Pius XII’s wartime papacy. Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope in March 1939. Two weeks later Hitler seized control of what was left of the Czech state. For the new pope, he was now face-to-face with the totalitarian aims of Hitler and Mussolini and, as war raged, how would the new pope respond? Chapter Three focuses on Pius’s interactions with some of the Catholic belligerent states- Slovakia, Croatia, France, Italy, and Hungary, with the premise that the pope was revered there and should have had some kind of palpable influence over Catholics living in these territories. What emerges, in each case, are examples of local church leaders expressing concern–or even outrage–that Catholics of “Jewish descent”(converts to Catholicism), were going to be impacted by anti-Jewish legislation and deportations. Pius XII feared moving too far ahead of local Catholic popular opinion, so he chose not to challenge Catholics, never urging them to go beyond defending narrowly defined Catholic interests. In each country Kornberg presents, Pius listened to local church leaders, thought about local Catholic consensus, and opted to not alienate Catholics and risk losing them for the Church. Reinforcing the structures of the church, providing sacramental care for local Catholics, trumped publically intervening to save the lives of persecuted minorities such as the Jews. Perhaps the most indicting of all the examples in this chapter, refers to Pius moving heaven and earth to protect Rome from destruction. While Jews of Rome were being deported, Pius spoke out eloquently against the potential destruction of the seat of Christianity. To Pius, Rome was sacred, eternal, and it was his mission to use his spiritual and moral authority to become “the Savior of the City” (121). Through his actions, Pius XII had ensured that Catholics would have access to the instruments of the sacraments, preserving the institutions of the Catholic Church all while remaining silent regarding the round ups of Jews throughout Rome.

Chapter four presents the special case of Poland, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, site of unimaginable brutality during the war- against both Catholic Poles and Jews. Surely, the pope would have an obligation to condemn Nazi aggression and the consequent victimization of the Polish population at the hands of their oppressors? Kornberg reveals, however, that the pope opted to hold back, carefully weighing his concerns. Foreign diplomats pressed the pope to utter an open, forthright condemnation of Nazi aggression against Poland, yet, when the pope did speak out, on October 20, 1939, his words were primarily a prayer for Blessed Mary’s intervention in Poland. The pope’s silence was incomprehensible to many who were suffering, but the pope maintained that German retaliation such as was being carried out in the Warthegau region of conquered Poland, kept him from saying more. Again, as in chapter three, we see the pope following the lead of local bishops, the general Catholic consensus, and opting to keep Catholic institutions functioning so as to provide pastoral care to those Catholics who desired it. The pope feared more than anything else that the Church would not be able to provide care for the souls of the people (155) and people was defined as Catholic people, not Jews.

What were the attitudes of Pius XII towards the Jews? This has been hotly contested by historians since at least 1964 when Guenter Lewy argued that traditional antisemitism precluded a true sense of moral outrage in Vatican circles. Beginning with an exploration of Pope Pius XI’s attitudes towards Jews, Kornberg unpacks many of the statements issued by Pius XI (pope from 1922-1939) and his Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli. For both men, Kornberg demonstrates a strong linkage between fears of communism and Jewishness added on to the pre-existing Catholic Church beliefs in supercessionism and charges of deicide. Both men also used condemnatory language regarding modern day Jews rather than trying to emphasize to their listeners that Catholicism and Judaism had a shared heritage. At a time when Jewish lives were in extreme peril, Pope Pius XII chose to speak only in general terms of suffering where all involved in war were victims. Anti-Jewish decrees were seen as a way of protecting Christian society from the “harmful influences of the Jews” and did nothing to inspire Catholics to protest the transformation of Jews into second class citizens in whatever nations they lived. Pope Pius XII “continued to speak of the guilt of the Jews and their continued hostility to the church. In doing so he did nothing to prevent Catholics from looking upon Jewish distress with indifference, and to continue to acquiesce to the German government’s persecution of the Jews, and ultimately to the destruction of European Jewry” (184).

Because so many historians have accused Pius of silence in the face of such utter destruction, Kornberg looks to earlier popes and their responses to similar crises such as the Armenian genocide or the use of poison gas against civilians in Ethiopia. What Kornberg presents is strong evidence that Pius was one of a piece- examining the policies of Leo XIII, Benedict XV, and Pius XI reveals that each of these popes, when faced with mass atrocities, weighed the advantages and disadvantages to the Church and always chose the option that promised Catholic unity and reinforced papal authority. In one exceptional case, that of the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, then Pope Pius XI issued an ambiguously worded letter, which then led French Catholics to declare that they were immune to papal influence and that the French state was a sacred concept to them. In this instance, papal authority was shown to be without teeth and the limits of papal authority had been revealed. In the case of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and its use of mustard gas against civilians, Pius XI urged conciliation on the part of Ethiopia, recognizing that the Italian people supported the conquest and he feared a further weakening of his authority over Catholics in Fascist Italy. Towards the end of Pius XI’s life, he began to publically address the racism of the Nazi regime. In an encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), in March 1937, the pope condemned the exaltation of one race over another, stressing the common humanity of all, but the true intent of the encyclical was that Pius linked Nazi racism with an effort to establish a national church based on German blood, thus supplanting the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. Racism had also by this time been uncoupled from antisemitism as Pius had argued that Catholics had a right to defend themselves against the corrupting power of secular, liberalized, emancipated Jews (226).

What then were Pius XII’s priorities? Why did he refuse to condemn Catholics who participated in atrocities or those who sat passively by the side allowing such despicable acts to be implemented? Here again, Kornberg takes the reader through the historiography of papal apologists as well as papal detractors. Did Pius XII favor Germany due to his trepidation regarding the spread of Communism? Kornberg argues effectively that, no, Pius encouraged American Catholic support of lend-lease material to the Soviet Union, that he refused to press Germany for a separate peace in the face of growing Communist power, that he engaged in an active plot to unseat Hitler from power. If Pius did not view Germany as a bulwark against Communism, was he silent about Nazi atrocities in order to preserve his role as diplomatic mediator at war’s end? Here again Kornberg argues that no, Pius XII’s diplomatic efforts to avert war ended in failure and that, following the invasion of Poland, his diplomacy was largely ignored. Another explanation offered by the pope’s defenders with regard to his silence is that he worried that if he spoke out, then worse things would happen to the victims. Kornberg examines Pius XII’s own explanations for his silence and finds that Pius cited two different reasons: as “common Father” to all Catholics on each side of the war, he thought he had to remain impartial; the second explanation, regarding potential retaliation against victims of Nazi aggression as it turns out referred to the suffering of the Polish Catholic Church and the threatened loss of sacramental life in Poland.

So, what were the pope’s priorities then? Kornberg places Pius’s top priority in his pastoral responsibilities of a universal church. His goal was to not alienate any Catholics from the Church and, hence, from potential salvation. Therefore, he concluded that he could not challenge Catholics to choose between their loyalty to the Church versus their loyalty to their State. Taking the long view of history, the Pope was envisioning a time when the war was over and Catholics from all of the warring nations would have to be reunited in the Church. Any Catholics who had participated in atrocities could receive forgiveness and salvation if they were truly repentant. Kornberg concludes that a great sacrifice was made in this decision: “Pope Pius XII looked the other way when human rights were being trampled on, and when Jews were deported to face unprecedented horrors, and continued to look the other way when Catholics participated in these crimes” (264). Religious values of the “good” trumped the moral imperative.

Finally, Kornberg brings the reader back to his opening question: why did the pope retreat before radical evil? To that, Kornberg responds with a thorough examination of Church doctrines ranging from the creation of the early Church under the Apostles, to the writings of St. Augustine, to the time of Pope Pius XII. The manuals that would have been available for Pius to consult would have been the culmination of centuries of teaching, and those manuals would have stressed that human beings are prone to sin and weakness but, through the power of the sacraments, provided by the Church, salvation was still a possibility. For Pius, as head of the Church, his primary responsibility as he saw it, was to provide access to the sacraments so that the faithful could be saved. This meant that the Pope could not overly burden the consciences of ordinary Catholics whose weak faith might result in their damnation. Weighing ‘greater evils” versus “lesser evils,” this type of casuistry led Pius XII to engage in “calculated acquiescence to mass atrocities when committed by fellow Catholics in order to hold out to them the prospect of God’s forgiveness and grace” (274).

Pius XII, at the war’s end, could feel that he had done his duty: he had preserved the institutions of the Church. Unfortunately his claims of being a moral authority who spoke truth to power and encouraged Catholics to resist evil were only words. Words not matched by actions.

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Review of Sean Brennan, The Politics of Religion in Soviet-Occupied Germany: The Case of Berlin-Brandenburg, 1945-1949

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Sean Brennan, The Politics of Religion in Soviet-Occupied Germany: The Case of Berlin-Brandenburg, 1945-1949 (New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2011), 235 Pp.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State University

Brennan’s book opens with the question, what was Soviet rule in Germany like? Or, more specifically, what was Soviet policy like with regards to religious issues in the hot spot of Berlin-Brandenburg in the immediate post-WWII environment? Through the examination of the SVAG (Soviet military administration in Germany) and the SED (the Socialist Unity Party of Germany), Brennan’s work seeks to explain how Stalinist religious policies were devised and implemented within the Soviet-controlled zone of Germany. His work reveals the complex and often contradictory approaches that the SVAG and the SED leaders took towards religious policy issues and it contributes to a neglected area of research: that of the Soviet occupation zone, the Soviet’s formation of religious policies, and the role of both the German Catholic and Protestant Churches in reacting to those policies. The Churches, for their part, worked to ensure the continued existence of religion in Germany, while the SVAG and SED leaders were never in doubt that their policies would end “outmoded” religious belief.

Chapter One offers a brief overview of the struggles of both the German Protestant and Catholic Churches under the Nazi dictatorship, documenting Nazi policies on the seizure of church property, youth groups, and charitable organizations. Brennan also shows how leaders in both Churches were divided as to how their organizations should respond to Nazi policies. Likewise, he addresses the mixed approaches of the Nazi regime towards the churches- from outright attempts to eradicate Church influence in Germany to more restrained attacks which sought to limit the Church’s political and social role. In many respects, the SVAG and the SED would follow some of these same approaches in the aftermath of the war.

Perhaps the most divisive issue facing the churches in the Soviet zone in 1945 was the relationship with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). To the SVAG and SED leadership, the churches, in league with the CDU, were a reactionary front whose sole purpose was to prevent the establishment of an anti-fascist German state. Chapters Two and Three examine the connections made between the CDU and the churches and how that relationship was perceived by the SVAG authorities. Colonel Sergei Tiul’panov, leader of the SVAG section that dealt with religious questions, Jakob Kaiser and Andreas Hermes, the two leaders of the CDU in the Soviet zone, all emerge as key players in these chapters.  From 1945 through the fall elections of 1946, Tiul’panov expected (as did many others in the SVAG), that the SED would sweep the elections, and thus, the SVAG authorities primarily sought to limit the political role churches could play, and they waged a propaganda campaign against the CDU’s idea of “Christian Socialism.” Throughout the campaign season, SED leadership stressed through newspaper articles and speeches that the “true Christians” (p.35) would be supportive of an antifascist Germany while implying that voting for the CDU meant pursuing reactionary attitudes found in both the Protestant and Catholic Churches. The CDU, for its part, was particularly successful in stressing that the SED was an atheistic party which could never represent religious Germans’ concerns.  When the votes were counted, the SED had not achieved a majority of votes. Despite the poor showing of the SED in the fall 1946 elections, Brennan’s study of the SVAG and SED correspondence reveals that both the Soviets and their “German friends” were not afraid of the long term influence of the churches and the CDU. In effect, they believed that it was only a matter of time before the democratic transformation of the Soviet zone would go unchallenged.

Chapter Three documents the decline and fall of Jakob Kaiser and an independent CDU. For Tiul’panov, once Kaiser was removed from his leadership position in the CDU, this meant that reactionary clergy would no longer have a political ally. The breaking point that led to Kaiser’s removal as leader of the CDU was the Volkscongress planned for December 1946. Kaiser publically and repeatedly denounced the congress while the SVAG and the SED attacked Kaiser for not supporting the meeting. Tiul’panov met with Kaiser, rebuked him for his “antidemocratic stance,” and removed him from his leadership position. Kaiser was replaced by Otto Nuschke, who abandoned the CDU policy of “Christian Socialism,” and understood that if the CDU was to continue to exist in the Soviet zone, it would have to follow the SED. At this point, church leaders such as Otto Dibelius and Cardinal Konrad von Preysing, began to speak out against the anti-religious policies developing in the Soviet zone. Both Preysing and Dibelius, from late 1947 through 1948, denounced what they perceived as the threat to their religious freedoms. Although Tiul’panov and other SVAG and SED authorities suspected that the forces of conservative reactionaries were working in league together, Brennan effectively demonstrates how church leaders preferred to work independently from CDU leaders when addressing religious issues with the Soviet zonal leaders.

Chapters Four through Six explore the issues of religious education in the school system, youth and women’s organizations, and charitable church-run activities within the Soviet zone.  With respect to the realm of education, the SVAG and SED leaders were absolutely determined to secularize the school system. Yet, from 1945 to 1949, one of the bitterest struggles in the Berlin-Brandenburg area, was over the issue of religion in the school system.  The SVAG and SED authorities had determined that there would be no place in the school system for religion. Only dialectical materialism would be taught in the schools yet, because of complaints by men such as Dibelius and Preysing, an agreement was reached in 1946 regarding religion in the educational system. The compromise of 1946 allowed for religious educational courses to be taught in school buildings, after school hours, with churches having to provide the instructors (as well as pay for their salaries).  In addition, the courses could not be required for students and parental permission was needed for students to attend the courses. Further additions to the compromise included proving that all of the religious teachers had never been members of the Nazi Party. As time progressed, more and more obstacles were placed in the way of the courses actually being taught, denying religious institutions the ability to offer religious education in the schools. To the SED leaders, the schools had to be completely secularized while to Church authorities, the roadblocks they encountered in the realm of religious education only confirmed in their minds that Nazism was being replaced by yet another totalitarian system.

In the area of youth and women’s organizational activities, Soviet authorities assumed that antifascist groups such as the Free German Youth and the Democratic Women’s Federation, would naturally attract a large following. SVAG and SED policies towards religious organizations increased in intensity over the years 1945-49. Escalating from propaganda attacks, to the banning of public meetings to finally arresting and imprisoning the leaders of religious youth and women’s organizations, the SED and SVAG revealed their belief that any religious organization was an impediment to creating a democratic, antifascist Germany modeled on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to render these religious organizations to the margins of German society while still promoting ideas of “religious freedom” in the zone.

In contrast with the SVAG and SED policies to erode the power of youth and women’s religious organizations, Soviet policies toward charitable work of the Churches was quite different. In this area, the churches were left relatively free to engage in charitable activity although the SVAG did create an umbrella organization, Volkssolidarität, which was there to supposedly bring all charitable work into one, coordinated mass effort to bring relief. Brennan notes, however, that within the idea of charitable work, SVAG authorities had differing opinions. For example, in the realm of running orphanages, most SVAG leaders believed they could leave them in the hands of religious institutions while the issue of controlling hospitals elicited the exact opposite reaction from SVAG authorities, who imagined that church-run hospitals were using their powers to coerce their patients into accepting Western imperialism.  Despite the takeover of church-run hospitals, the field of charitable relief was relatively free of the bitter conflict found in other church-state struggles in the Soviet zone.

Throughout all of the battles being waged over the churches’ rights to participate in the Soviet zone of control loomed the larger issue of religious freedom. This idea, that true religious freedom, could and would exist in a socialist society, was at the root of all of these fights. The SVAG and SED authorities engaged in a propaganda campaign which contrasted with the reality of their religious policies. Brennan demonstrates that this attempt to win over German support for a socialist society began long before the war’s end with various Communist Party conferences promising the promotion of religious freedom, however, the reality of the persecution of religion in Stalinist Russia, did much to dissuade Germans from truly believing in the truthfulness of the campaign. Within the Berlin-Brandenburg region of Soviet control, there was an attempt to drive a wedge between the “reactionary” Catholic Church and the “progressive” Protestant denominations, yet there is no evidence that reveals animosity between men such as Dibelius and Preysing. In the end, this religious freedom campaign was abandoned by the SVAG and the SED by 1948.

In the final chapter, Brennan examines why the Allied Religious Affairs Committee (ARAC) failed in its mission to provide a unified religious policy for the four occupation zones of Germany. In many respects ARAC’s inability to recommend a unified religious policy simply serves as a microcosm of the emerging Cold War with the Western Powers agreeing to one strategy while the Soviets pursue a different one. ARAC in particular developed the habit of sending two differing recommendations to higher occupation authorities except when it came to items such as endorsing supplying wine for church services. In most cases, ARAC leaders simply could not arrive at unanimous recommendations, thus revealing that even in the realm of religious issues, a single, unified policy for the divided German zones was impossible.

Brennan’s work is truly a wonderful addition to the field of church-state policy history. His work in Soviet, German, and U.S. archives makes this book a very strong examination of emerging Soviet policies in the earliest days of the Cold War. However, the book is rife with typographical and grammatical errors that often distract the reader from following the argument. For example, “This chapter examines how the experience of religious youth and women’s organizations and so to illuminate power realities in the Soviet zone of Germany,…” (p.102) or, “Much like the DFD or the antifascist women’s committees, the bulletin argued.” (p.110). In addition, simple mistakes such as misspelling author’s names Tischer on p.XXI for Tischner  or Bishop August von Galen, omitting Clemens from the Bishop’s name, (p. 2), distract from the overall effectiveness of Brennan’s persuasive argument. Overall, however, these are minor points that will not interfere with the fascinating study Brennan has produced.

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Review of Erna Putz, ed., Franz Jaegerstaetter: Letters and Writings from Prison

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2011

Review of Erna Putz, ed., Franz Jaegerstaetter: Letters and Writings from Prison, trans. Robert Anthony Krieg (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009), 252 Pp. ISBN 978-1-57075-826-3.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State University

This review appeared first in H-German, H-Net Reviews in February 2011 (URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31488) and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

This volume presents the life and thoughts of a once obscure Austrian farmer, Franz Jaegerstaetter (1907-43). Thanks in part to the research of Gordon Zahn in the 1960s, Jaegerstaetter’s name began to circulate as a conscientious objector to Hitler’s brutal war.[1] And now, thanks to the beautiful translations of Robert Krieg and the careful editing of Erna Putz, readers can be reintroduced to the deeply moving writings of a truly spiritual man who determined that it would be better to die for his Catholic faith than to serve the evils of National Socialism.

The collection begins with Jim Forest’s introduction and with Robert Krieg’s overview of the general outline of Franz Jaegerstaetter’s life and death. Readers are transported to the small village of St. Radegund (d. 587) in Austria, not far from Adolf Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau-am-Inn. It is perhaps fitting that Jaegerstaetter was born in St. Radegund, since Radegund had lived through political turmoil, family assassinations, a forced marriage, and finally the formation of her own convent. St. Radegund’s institution enforced strict rules of meditation and constant prayer, and this example might have been useful to Jaegerstaetter, although his early life showed no signs of potential sainthood or a calling to martyrdom. Born an illegitimate child, Franz was eventually adopted by his mother’s husband. He had only an eighth-grade education, got in fist-fights, fathered an illegitimate daughter himself, and rode around on the village’s only motorcycle. Jaegerstaetter’s life, however, took a more noticeable turn when he married the devout Franziska Schwaninger. The farming neighbors may never have known this, but prior to Franz and Franziska’s marriage, both of them had independently considered entering religious life. However, most neighbors thought that Franz’s new wife influenced his openly religious dedication.

Part 1 of the volume reveals the extent to which Franz and Franziska’s religious views overlapped and supported each another. Here, Putz provides correspondence between the husband and wife while Franz was completing required military training (1940 and 1941), and then later his letters from his imprisonment (March-August, 1943). Throughout the correspondence, the couple’s love and respect for each other is evident. During the military training period, most of the letters detail the everyday life on the farm for Franziska, Franz’s widowed mother, and the couple’s three daughters. These letters have at times a playful note, since the couple fully anticipated being reunited once the training period was over. Franz offers advice about running the farm, often urging Franziska not to work too hard and to leave things for him to do upon his return. He also wrote briefly to Franziska’s father, who often came to help at the Jaegerstaetter’s farm. At other times, Franz begins to allude to his trouble in accepting the membership requirements of the “Volk community.” As his military training progresses, Franz begins to express more of his frustration with what he refers to as “the stream,” that is, National Socialism. He constantly uses this metaphor of struggling against “the stream’s” strong current, and he expresses dismay at the futility of much of what the training has entailed.

Although all of these letters offer compelling reading regarding the state of mind of Franz and Franziska, they also offer historians insight into the everyday life of Catholic farming communities under National Socialism. In them we see how various local priests were denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for speaking openly against the policies of the Third Reich. We run across Franz mentioning a mental institution in Ybb, and he alludes to the murderous “euthanasia project” of the Nazis. In some of Franziska’s letters from home, we can see how children were not allowed to attend mass on school days, how feast days had to be moved so Catholics could attend mass, how local politics played a role in who received leaves of absence, and who got to run an inn and whose inn was shut down due to “political unreliability.” Throughout this entire period, Franziska experiences pressure to participate in the local Nazi organizations, such as the Women’s Association, including the threat of social ostracism when choosing to opt out in this very small community.

The situation changes dramatically for the Jaegerstaetters on February 22, 1943. Franz receives notification that he is required to go to Enns for military service on February 25, 1943. By this time, Franz had written essays in various notebooks at home, which helped him to decide to refuse to fight for the Reich. Arriving at the Enns’ induction center on March 1, 1943, Franz had to return the next day due to a long line of men ahead of him. On March 2, 1943 Franz declared himself unwilling to fight for National Socialism, and, as he had anticipated, he was immediately arrested. Chapter 4 contains the correspondence between Franz and Franziska (although there was censorship of the mail) while Franz was in the prison in Linz. At this point of Franz’s incarceration, he still remained hopeful that he would be able to live, writing, “I want to save my life but not through lies” (p. 82). Indeed Franz writes to his wife that he would be willing to serve as a military medic, as that would not contradict his Christian conscience (p. 86). Ultimately, Franz decides that he cannot serve in any capacity in the military because he would be required to take the military oath of unconditional obedience to the Führer. What also emerges in this section is Franz working through his position, struggling with commands to obey earthly authority while serving the will of God. He resolves that it is far better to obey God than men. Jaegerstaetter determined that his eternal salvation was more important to him than his physical well-being, or even life. At the moment of his transfer to Berlin’s Tegel Prison, he quickly writes to Franziska, “Concerning my decision, I can tell you that I have come to no different decision as a result of the process that has played itself out. I am resolved to act no differently” (p. 108).

Arriving in Berlin on May 4, 1943, Franz was immediately incarcerated in the Tegel prison where he awaited his trial and sentence. At this point, Franz was only permitted to write one letter per month to his wife, but Franziska was allowed to send at least twelve letters to her husband. She was also able to visit him for twenty minutes on July 13. In Franz’s letters, he constantly offers his wife consolation, telling her that he is eating well, and is not physically suffering. He nonetheless exhorts her to continue to pray for him. Franziska sends him prayers, Communion petitions, and updates on village and farm activities. At one point, she is even able to send him a photograph of their lovely young daughters, which surely broke his heart. No less emotionally daunting for Franz would be the surprise visit of Franziska and Pastor Fürthauer on July 13, 1943. Franz’s defense attorney had arranged the meeting, urging Franziska and the priest to convince Franz to sign a statement that he would be willing to serve in the military. The twenty-minute meeting did not go smoothly. Franz became agitated with the priest, and in the days leading up to Franz’s execution, he wrote his last letters to Franziska, asking her, “Do you believe that all would go well for me if I were to lie in order to prolong my life?” (p. 128).

Franz, his hands in chains, wrote, “Do not be overly concerned about earthly things. The Lord indeed knows what we need…. In the next life we need suffer no longer. And the greater the suffering here, the greater the joy there” (p. 128). This letter was mailed the morning of August 9, the day that Franz was transferred to the prison at Brandenburg. There he wrote a final letter to his family, asking them for their forgiveness if he had offended them. At 4 p.m., August 9, 1943, Franz was guillotined. The priest, Pastor Albert Jochmann, reported that Franz went to his death peacefully.

Part 2 of the collection shows the evolution of Franz’s religious and political thought. There are two poems he wrote in 1932, and then a longer letter that he had written to his godson in 1935. The first of the notebooks was written by Franz in the period between his military training and his imprisonment. Each of the essays describes Franz’s thoughts on various aspects of Christian life, ranging from “On Faith” to “On our Fear of Other People” to “A Brief Reflection on the Current Era.” He addressed all of the essays to his family. They reveal Franz’s deep concern to preserve his integrity despite pressure from many sides to superficially accept the Nazi regime. He refused, stating, “What a terror it would be for us if we were sentenced by an earthly judge to life in prison. Yet it would be an even greater terror if we were sentenced by the eternal Judge to eternal damnation” (p. 158). The final essay in this notebook again directly references the dangers of swimming along with seemingly everyone else in “the stream,” and the dangers to one’s eternal soul.

Notebook 2, written in 1942, addresses the demands of National Socialism, opening with the important question: “Can someone be both a Catholic and a National Socialist?” (p. 173), to which Jaegerstaetter answers no. Catholics need to pull themselves “out of this swamp in which we are stuck and to become eternally blessed” (p. 176). He argues that suffering and martyrdom are part of working for Christ and one way to earn a place in Heaven. In subsequent essays, Franz explains that it will take true courage to be able to separate oneself from the “anti-Christian Volk community” (p. 178), but the promise of eternal salvation far outweighs any earthly suffering one might endure. He also argues that an acceptance of Nazism based on its fight against atheistic Bolshevism does not justify the taking of lives and property of Russian people (p. 183). He criticizes the lack of guidance and instruction from Catholic Church leaders: “Finding the right path is especially difficult when those who know about this path refuse to answer questions or give false information” (p.187). He then writes that Pope Pius XI warned that National Socialism was, in fact, more dangerous than communism (p. 190).

Chapters 9 through 12 contain separate essays and shorter notebooks, in which Franz continues his exploration of his faith and his understanding of the world and its demands. Throughout these writings, Franz argues that people must move beyond being Catholic in words but not in action. He refuses to judge National Socialists or people who claim to be Nazis, but he states that he does judge National Socialism as an evil ideology that endangers people’s souls. He asks, “Is death so horrible for us Catholics that we must gladly do everything so that we can lengthen our lives? Must we experience all of life’s enjoyments? Would we find much in this world to be difficult if we were to keep in mind the eternal joy of Heaven?” (p. 203). Throughout his final writings, Franz insists that Catholics take action in order to save themselves: “Who fares better in this world: the person who places earthly life before eternal life or the person who puts eternal life before earthly life?… For instead of being concerned about saving me from serious sins and directing me toward eternal life, these people are concerned about rescuing me from an earthly death” (p. 243). What Franz Jaegerstaetter concluded was startingly simple: “People want to observe Christians who have taken a stand in the contemporary world, Christians who live amid all of the darkness with clarity, insight, and conviction” (p. 211). He decided to live and to die with that clarity and conviction.

This deeply moving book is more than a collection of letters and essays by an uncompromising individual. It poses universal questions about the moral and physical consequences of the decisions that people make every day–questions about obedience to different institutions and individuals, and whether one should accept the cost of remaining quiet and going along with situations that give us ethical misgivings. Readers will be challenged and even inspired by the clear-sightedness of one obscure, straight-talking Austrian farmer, who decided that his “No,” even if it brought him an earthly death, was worth eternal life.

Note

[1]. Gordon Charles Zahn, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jaegerstaetter, revised ed. (Spingfield, IL: Tempelgate,1986).

 

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