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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1 (March 2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), 326 Pp. ISBN 978-2-8254-1656-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements is a British theological scholar who served for many years as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, thus becoming well aware of the churches’ modern ecumenical dimensions. He has previously written a number of shorter works about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but in this more substantial study concentrates on Bonhoeffer’s connections to and involvement with the ecumenical church bodies of the 1930s. Drawing largely on the Collected Works, now fortunately all translated into English, Clements seeks to show that this was the most continuous thread of his life and activity, but one which has been rather neglected in earlier biographies which have concentrated on Bonhoeffer’s theology or his role in the German Church Struggle.

Clements-Dietrich In fact, Bonhoeffer’s participation in ecumenical affairs started immediately after his return in September 1931 from his visit to the United States. He was sent as a German youth delegate to a meeting in Cambridge of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. This body had originally been established in 1914, but had to suspend its activities during the war, and had only been resuscitated in 1920. Its support came from influential lay and clerical leaders, particularly in the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. They recognized the need for programs of reconciliation and peace activities in order to bind up the wounds caused by the destructive violence of the recent war. It was here that Bonhoeffer met with such leading figures as the Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, with whom he was to collaborate for the next decade.In fact, Bonhoeffer made such an impact that he was forthwith appointed as an Honorary Youth Secretary and given responsibility for the World Alliance’s youth work in central Europe. This was a challenge he could hardly refuse, and one to which he brought his newly-minted skills in theological advocacy and his energetic support of the World Alliance’s aims.

As Clements makes clear, however, Bonhoeffer soon saw that the whole ecumenical endeavour was sadly lacking an adequate theology. Passing high-minded resolutions at conferences or engaging in moralistic wishful thinking about the need for peace was not enough. With all the brashness of a twenty-eight-year-old—Clements calls it boldness—Bonhoeffer set out to remedy this deficiency. At the World Alliance’s next major conference held in Denmark in 1934, he advanced the argument that what was needed was for a great ecumenical council of churches to be convened which would commit all its members to non-violence and abjure all forms of militarism. The cause of peace demanded a universal approach and was not a matter just for individuals, or even for local or national churches. In the absence of any such body, the World Alliance meeting should dare to act as that council.

It was therefore especially necessary to attack those theological ideas about “the orders of creation” which German theologians were using to justify their nationalistic sentiments. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for an order of preservation which would obey God’s commandment to witness to truth and justice, and prepare the way for the reception of the gospel of Christ. But in fact the ecumenical community was not yet ready for this precocious and prophetic vision of Christian witness. And Bonhoeffer himself became fully occupied with the onset of the Church Struggle within Germany, following Hitler’s take-over of power in 1933. He was now taken up with combatting the eager support given to the Nazi Party, particularly by his contemporaries amongst the younger pastors who so eagerly began to spread Nazi militaristic, nationalistic and antisemitic ideas in the fallacious belief that this would bring ordinary people back to the church.

Bonhoeffer’s move to England in October 1933 brought him into more frequent contact with Bishop Bell, who indeed came to rely on Bonhoeffer’s valuable guidance about the hectic developments in the German Evangelical Church. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful in persuading any of these ecumenical bodies to sever their connections with the now nazified official church structures, and to regard the Confessing Church as the only true vehicle for Christian witness in Germany. The tensions this dispute caused led to the result that no one from the German Evangelical Church was allowed to attend the significant ecumenical conferences which took place in Britain in 1937, or to participate in the discussions in 1938 which resulted in the founding of the World Council of Churches.

By this time, however, Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany to lead the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde in the remotest part of east Pomerania. This necessarily cut down on his opportunities to be in contact with his ecumenical partners. But, as Clements points out, Bonhoeffer was insistent that “The German Church Struggle is the second great stage in the history of the ecumenical movement and will be decisive for its future. It is not an ideal which has been set up but a commandment and a promise—it is not high-handed implementation of one’s own goals that is required but obedience. The question has been posed.” But in this idealistic vision Bonhoeffer was to be disappointed.

Clements does not elucidate how far this set-back induced Bonhoeffer to be drawn increasingly into the ranks of those who now sought to oppose Nazism and Hitler by some form of resistance or revolt. But as the war clouds increasingly gathered in the late 1930s, and as the Nazi ambitions became ever clearer, the hopes of the peace party were doomed to disillusionment and frustration. To be sure, it was largely due to his ecumenical friends in the United States, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Lehmann and Henry Leiper, that Bonhoeffer was offered an escape route from the risk of being conscripted for military service by accepting offers from New York to return to the United States in the summer of 1939. Yet, shortly after his arrival, Bonhoeffer realized he had made a mistake. As he explained in the well-known letter to Niebuhr, it was not the call of family, or of his church, but of his nation which led to his decision to return to Germany:

I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…. Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Clements rightly comments that in speaking of “Christian civilization” Bonhoeffer recognized the threat posed by the Nazis not just to Germany but to the wider Christian community. He saw himself engaged in the struggle for the widest goals of Christian witness which now required him to go back and face this ”terrible alternative”. It was all part of the costly discipleship to which he was committed.

After the outbreak of war, and his recruitment as an agent of the Military Intelligence Service, Bonhoeffer found that the hostilities virtually paralyzed the activities of the ecumenical movement and forced its supporters to find new ways of upholding their sense of community and mutuality. Clements argues that in these circumstances Bonhoeffer’s commitment to ecumenism became still more pronounced even though carried out in a conspiratorial manner. Thanks to his connections he was able to travel abroad, twice to Switzerland, where he contacted both Karl Barth and Visser’t Hooft, now the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), and told them about the discussions for post-war renewal going on in the resistance circles in Germany

Bonhoeffer’s most significant journey came in April 1942 to Sigtuna, Sweden, where he met once again with Bishop Bell. Bonhoeffer’s objective was to persuade Bell to urge the British Government to make a public declaration of support for the German Resistance in the hope that any such declaration would provide evidence that, when Germany was defeated, she would not have to suffer an even more vindictive settlement than in 1919. To this end, Bonhoeffer revealed to Bell the names of the leading members of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and eagerly looked forward to his nation’s eventual defeat, since Germany deserved punishment and ought to express repentance for the crimes committed in the nation’s name. But, in fact, when Bell fulfilled his mission on his return to London, the result was a disappointing rejection. Clements clearly admires Bonhoeffer’s dangerous venture as an example of ecumenism in practice. But other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that this plan was more the product of these churchmen’s wishful thinking than any realistic awareness of the international political scene, or the realities of choices facing the British authorities at the time.

In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and taken to Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He was never to regain his freedom. But from the letters, essays and poems smuggled out by a friendly warder, we have the evidence that his dedication to the ecumenical cause remained as before. As Clements shows, he used the opportunity to explore the dimensions of Christian discipleship in the service of the world when the church takes upon itself the needs of the world before God. We have one final glimpse of his ecumenical commitment from the day before he was murdered in April 1945. Together with a group of other notable prisoners, including a British P.O.W., Captain Payne Best, whom Bonhoeffer had discovered was acquainted with Bishop Bell, they were spending the night in a Bavarian schoolhouse. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer was persuaded to hold a short service for them all. He had hardly finished when two SS policemen entered, and called out “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us”. He had just time to give a message for Best to pass on to Bishop Bell. “Tell him, Bonhoeffer said, that this is the end but for me the beginning of life. With him I believe in the principle of the Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”. Then he was led away, taken back to Flossenbürg concentration camp, placed in front of a summary court martial, condemned to die, and on the following morning, 9 April, executed in the prison yard.

Clements’ final chapter describes the post-war reception of Bonhoeffer’s fame and ideas, beginning with the heartfelt tribute paid by Bishop Bell at a memorial service held in a large London church in July 1945, which was broadcast by the BBC’s German service and heard by members of Bonhoeffer’s family. It was the first intimation they had that he was no longer alive. It was the beginning of the process which Victoria Barnett has rightly called “the making of an ecumenical saint”, and culminated in the placing of Bonhoeffer’s statue on the front portal of Westminster Abbey in London, together with other Christian martyrs of the twentieth century. He was seen as a suffering Christian witness and defender of the faith. The emphasis was on his unconquerable piety and his unyielding trust in God.

But in fact, there were also contrasting reactions which Clements does not mention. In post-war Germany, not a few of the more conservative members of the Evangelical Church, including those in the ranks of the Confessing Church, took a much more hostile view of Bonhoeffer’s past. To many of these men, Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr but a national traitor. It was inconceivable to them that a pastor should have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the head of state, should have openly refused to pray for Germany’s military victories, or should have welcomed the prospect of his nation’s downfall and defeat. It took some twenty years before Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and biographer, was able to overcome these prejudices. Another and more favourable reception came in the 1950s in Britain and North America with the English translation of Letters and Papers from Prison and the revelations about Bonhoeffer’s political activism and participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. At the same time, these letters aroused a tremendous excitement, especially in the younger generation, because of the stimulating critique of existing church doctrines and the enigmatic assertions about the “world come of age”, the call for a “religion-less Christianity”, or the necessity of being “the church for others”. These were the themes which gave, and still give, Bonhoeffer an enormous appeal as a major source of inspiration and guidance.

Fortunately, in so praising Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Clements has avoided the distortions and omissions which have marked the recent American biographies by Metaxas and Marsh. Instead he points to Bonhoeffer’s posthumous appeal and influence, which have established his reputation far beyond his native German Lutheran home. Indeed, Clements can claim that in view of Bonhoeffer’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, he has also become a significant figure for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In so doing, Bonhoeffer belongs internationally and irrevocably to the ecumenical scene. His witness to this cause remains his most lasting memorial and is one which still commands respect. We can therefore be grateful to Keith Clements for so fully and convincingly outlining Bonhoeffer’s contributions to the ecumenical world view to which he was so seriously committed and in which he believed so passionately.

Review of Andrew Chandler, ed., The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Andrew Chandler, ed., The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012), Pp. xvi + 227, ISBN 978-14094-25564.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

George Bell, Bishop of Chichester on England’s south coast from 1929 to 1958, has long enjoyed recognition as one of the outstanding figures in the Church of England during the first half of the last century. He championed consistently and relentlessly two major aspects of church life, namely the cause of church unity and the search for international peace and justice. Bell’s achievement was to advocate these ideals with effectiveness and tenacity even against the vocal opposition of many of his episcopal colleagues, his laity, and the wider conservative public. The result was that in many cases he appeared a lonely contender for failed causes. But this corresponded with his style of leadership. He was not a team player, had no oratorical gifts, and was an ineffective chairman of committees. His strength was seen best in one-to-one conversations, and his persuasiveness in such encounters was enhanced by his genuine interest and humanity, as is well recorded in his extensive correspondence, fortunately now preserved in Lambeth Palace library. Above all, he set the sights for Christian witness at the highest level, and tirelessly sought to challenge any lesser, more parochial views for both the church and the nation.

It is for these qualities that Bell will be remembered. To help this task, a memorial conference was held in 2008, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The result is this collection of essays in his honour, elegantly edited and introduced by Andrew, Chandler, the Director of the George Bell Institute in Chichester. Among the distinguished contributors is the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, whose penetrating tribute closes the volume. Also included are essays about various aspects of Bell’s ministry.
Gerhard Besier of Dresden gives us an informative piece about Bell’s efforts to promote the cause of church unity on the international level, in collaboration with Visser ‘t Hooft, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. In the inter-war years, this mainly Protestant ecumenical movement owed much to Bell’s careful but enthusiastic involvement, which pulled together the separate strands of Life and Work, along with Faith and Order. When the World Council was finally established in 1948, it was fitting that Bell should be Chairman of its Executive and later one of its Presidents.

These rise of Nazism to power in Germany and the attempts by one section of the German Protestant churches to oppose its ideological goals aroused Bell’s close interest, and his efforts to support the Confessing Church’s resistance to Nazism are touched on in several of these essays . Chandler himself contributes a chapter entitled “The Patronage of Resistance,” outlining Bell’s unwavering encouragement of “the other Germany” by drawing a clear distinction between the Nazi regime and the German people. To many people in Britain, especially during war-time, this seemed a perverse or at least naive view. Bell persevered, however, and was determined to create conditions after the war in which this “better” Germany could rise again. After his well-known meeting with Bonhoeffer in Sweden in 1942, Bell sought to get the British government’s approval of some gesture of assistance to the German Resistance. This only earned him the scorn of the politicians who saw him as a “turbulent priest,” out of touch with mainstream British opinion.

Even more controversial were Bell’s outspoken protests in the House of Lords against the Royal Air Force’s bombing of German cities and civilians. As some have supposed, this principled stance against his own government’s policies led to his being passed over when the Archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant in 1944. Less well known, but equally a part of Bell’s humanitarian concerns, were his efforts on behalf of the German refugees in war-time Britain, as described by Charmian Brinson. In 1940 the British government ordered whole-scale internment of such refugees, even though many of them were Jews expelled by the Nazis who had sought refuge across the Channel. Nonetheless, many of them were deported to Canada and Australia on the flimsiest of pretexts. Bell spent much time in attempts to mitigate their position through his dedicated engagement, especially for the group of 37 “non-aryan” pastors from Germany whom he had personally sponsored to come to England in 1938-9. This was a noble if unpopular task, but Bell did not flinch from doing what he believed was his duty.

After Nazism was overthrown, Bell turned his energies to the reconstruction, reconciliation and hoped-for re-Christianization of Europe. Predictably, as Philip Coupland describes, he showed empathy for the German people, and resolved to do what he could to assist the churches there in rebuilding their devastated church life. He strenuously avoided any talk of collective guilt and was openly critical of aspects of the war crimes trials and the ‘de-nazification’ process. But in the view of Tom Lawson, in the only essay in the book critical of Bell’s tactics, this was a moral blunder, since Bell became associated with the perpetrators of the most reprehensible crimes, for whom he pleaded leniency, allegedly in the interests of healing the war’s wounds.

Certainly Bell was fully persuaded that Christian values would be vital in fashioning the new Europe. Hence he was all the more alarmed by the growing threat of Soviet Bolshevism. His remedy was for a federal United States of Europe, but the onset of the Cold War doomed such a prospect. The political division of Germany between the victors was a bitter blow. So too was the British Government’s reluctance to seek a closer unity even in western Europe. On the other hand, as Dianne Kirby makes clear in her contribution on George Bell and the Cold War, Bell was a welcome ally for the British Foreign Office’s propaganda campaigns. He exercised a moral influence through many circles of the establishment and kept at bay those who still believed in the good-heartedness of the Soviet Union. Seeking to combat Communism by the teaching of a better religion and a truer philosophy, Bell alerted people to the Communist threat and reinforced with religious arguments the level of popular anti-Communism. At the same time, though, Bell was appalled by the development of nuclear weapons, the use of which he considered incompatible with Christian international morality . The inherent contradictions in such views remained unresolved. So too the Cold War split rather than united Europe’s churches. Bell’s pastoral and political legacy is therefore a mixed one. Yet he remained a striking voice calling on the Church to rise above temporary loyalties or immediate interests, and instead to place the needs of suffering humanity in the forefront of Christian responsibility and obligation.

Letter from the Editors: December 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Letter from the Editors: December 2011

St. Martin’s Cathedral, the thousand-year-old seat of the Archbishop of Mainz.

It was exactly seventy years ago that the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, took the striking step of writing a Christmas message to be broadcast by the BBC to his friends in the churches of Germany. For Bell, the message affirmed the unity of all Christians, however they may be divided by national borders and all the extremities of war. Naturally, such a message was acceptable to his own government: it offered its own, unequivocal condemnation of the evils of Nazism and marked a clear line between the ideology of the Hitler regime and the faith of Christians everywhere. Bell addressed some of his words directly to Martin Niemoeller.

In this December issue of the ACCH Quarterly, the broadcast of 24 December 1941 might also remind us that the issues which arose in Germany between 1933 and 1945 were at once the concern of observers, friends and allies abroad. They, too, became participants in the tragic history that unfolded in these years. And we might continue to reflect on the importance of pursuing our own international friendships in a world where creative intellectuals and men and women of faith still seek to make their voice heard in countries governed by dictatorship, repression and alienation.

On behalf of the editors,

Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Bishop George Bell of Chichester, BBC Christmas Message to Germany, 1941:

I AM talking to all Christians in Germany; for all Christians in Germany are oppressed. Many of you are my friends, and it is impossible to forget you now. I am a poor hand still at speaking German, and so I have asked a German pastor who is your friend and my friend, Pastor Hildebrandt of the Confessional Church, to read what I want to say.

This Christmas Eve I want to give you my heart-felt greetings as a fellow Christian. In the years before the war many of us worked together in closest fellowship on the tasks of the Church. My mind goes back to the meetings at the Wartburg of German and British scholars, with Archbishop Soderblom in the midst; and to another memorable conference at Eisenach a year or two later. Some of you have been my guests at the Palace in Chichester. Do you remember that walk, Doctor, in a rather muddy field one spring afternoon, with the Cathedral spire behind us, when we talked of the German Evangelical Church and its organisation? I thank God for the strong stand you have been taking ever since 1933 against those who are trying to destroy Christianity within the German nation. I think of some of you in your homes in Marburg, Hanover and Berlin, where you made me so welcome. I can picture you now, watching the Christmas tree, and thinking of the absent sons and daughters. Do you remember, old friend in Berlin, an evening party of Confessional Church leaders in your house four years ago, when we discussed the latest news of the German Church conflict? I can see your wife and daughter now, so courteously helping us all at the table. How vivid the talk was, and how friendly! Do you remember the young pastor saying, with such prophetic truth, that once a revolution had started like the Nazi revolution, its very logic compelled it to go where the extreme men drove it?

Well, the Nazi revolution has gone where the extreme men drove it, with a vengeance. The Nazi leaders have dealt sharper and sharper blows at the Christian Church. They have attacked everything for which Christianity stands in Germany. And the logic of their attack is compelling them now to try to destroy everything for which Christianity stands all over the earth.

Christmas means Christ and His rule of love. It brings good tidings of great joy, and speaks of peace and goodwill. Could anything be in greater contrast to the injustice and violence with which those who persecute the Evangelical Church and the Catholic Church would enslave all nations? It is good to remind one another on Christmas Eve that you and I have a bond as fellow Christians which all the anti-Christian forces in the world are powerless to destroy.

I remember the sermon Pastor Niemöller preached on New Year’s Day, 1937, in Dahlem, only a few months before his imprisonment. He was very frank about the fight the Nazis were waging against faith in Jesus Christ. But he was full of encouragement. Christians, he said, are not to imagine that they are alone, a forlorn little group, facing certain ruin. ‘In the world nothing counts but what men can see. But God’s Word decrees otherwise. God’s Word speaks plainly enough, even concerning very high personages. … It is truly not worth our while to hang our heads and to be afraid because the wicked spring as grass and the evildoers flourish as though their power were eternal. They spring as grass – yes, but, says God’s Word, only as grass, and they flourish-yes, says God’s Word, but only until they be ‘destroyed for ever.’

Ah, Martin Niemöller, my friend, I rejoice to hear your brave voice. I rejoice to hear your voice too, Bishop Wurm in Stuttgart, and yours, Bishop von Galen in Münster; and all the other voices, soft or loud, which swell the chorus of those who speak up for Christ and His Church in these days when wickedness walks the earth, and destroys freedom, and takes its ghastly toll of human life.

Believe me, fellow Christians in Germany, we understand you. You are not alone. Keep up your faith. Help to save your country’s soul by resisting the evil spirit by which it is now possessed. Your fellow Christians everywhere are by your side. Your struggle is our struggle. The days are dark, but Christmas brings salvation. Light will break through. Hold fast, never yield. Trust in the Power of God, and the Love of Christ.

24 December 1941

November 2009 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

November 2009 — Vol. XV, no. 11

Dear Friends,

In this month of anniversaries, we recall not only the twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell, but also the earlier German revolution of 1918, and the horrific Chrystal Night pogrom of 1938. These events are constitutive of kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, so I hope the following reviews will be of help in coming to terms with these legacies.

I will be glad to hear from any of you with your comments, But please remember to send them to my personal address, as below, and not to press the REPLY button unless you want all our subscribers to hear your opinions.

1) Conference Report: German Studies Association, 2009

2) Book reviews

a) Ruotsila, Christian anti-internationalism
b) Vos, Pryfogle, George, Faith in the World. Mark Gibbs and Vesper Society
c) P. Raina ed., Bishop George Bell
d) Jekeli. German Intellectuals in Romania under Communism
e) Leichsenring, Die katholische Kirche und “ihre Juden”

3) Book notes: Lazarus, In the shadow of Vichy. The Finaly Affair

1) Conference Report:

At the recent German Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. (October 8-11, 2009), several members of the Association of Contemporary Church History participated in a panel entitled, “Protestant Theological Responses to Race and Religion in Nazi Germany.” Moderated by Robert P. Ericksen (Pacific Lutheran University), three papers explored various aspects of Protestant theology and practice: Kyle Jantzen (Ambrose University College), “Blood and Race or Sin and Salvation: Parish Pastors Debate Rosenberg’s Mythus”; Christopher Probst (Howard Community College), “Protestant Scholarship, Luther, and ‘the Jews’ in Nazi Germany”; and Matthew Hockenos, “Converting Jews in the Third Reich: Antisemitism and the Berlin Judenmission, 1930-1950.” Richard Steigmann-Gall (Kent State University) provided a commentary on the papers.

Jantzen’s paper explored the reactions of parish clergy in three regions of Germany (Brandenburg, Saxony, and Württemberg) to the ideological challenge posed by racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg’s famous work, Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts). Protestant clergy often found it hard to discern Rosenberg’s significance within the Nazi Party or the important of the Mythus officially, Rosenberg’s book represented his own private opinions, while at other times party officials hailed his views as intellectual treasures central to Nazi racial ideology. A few parish pastors (generally from the radical Thüringian wing of the German Christian Movement) took Rosenberg seriously and proclaimed the truth of his racial ideology. Most clergy who encountered his work rejected it as heretical. While they often acknowledged Rosenberg as an expert on race and were frequently obsessed with defining the proper relationship between the German Volk and the Christian Church, they generally rejected Rosenberg’s denial of the transcendence of God, the sinfulness of humanity, and the validity of the Old and New Testaments. Where Rosenberg championed Jesus as a heroic Aryan fighter, Protestant clergy affirmed Jesus as the Son of God (and a Jew) who defeated sin and death by suffering and dying on a cross. Jantzen concluded that Rosenberg functioned as a line in the theological sand whose work caused all but the most extreme German Christians to reaffirm important aspects of traditional Protestant orthodoxy. He also noted that the widespread criticism of Rosenberg’s ideas might suggest that he was not as important a figure as some scholars have asserted.

Probst’s paper analyzed the interpretation of Martin Luther’s writings on the Jews by Heinrich Bornkamm, Protestant professor of church history in Gießen, Leipzig, and (after the war) Heidelberg. Probst argued that Bornkamm viewed Jews through a prism of Volk and race that drew upon his background in historical theology. Seeking to address the tumultuous events unfolding in Germany, Bornkamm forwarded his own version of Luther’s nonrational argumentation about Judaism, harnessing Luther’s powerful irrational antisemitic rhetoric in tacit support of antisemitic Nazi policy.

After noting Bornkamm’s pro-Nazi and antisemitic sentiments in 1935, he commented on the “Jewish press” which had formerly controlled the forces of “left liberalism,” while in 1939, he wrote about the “powerful and undeniable truth of racial-thinking” and of a religiously inspired Bolshevism led by stateless Jews Probst examined his short 1933 work, “Volk and Race in Martin Luther.” According to Bornkamm, Luther must have known “something” of the “biological and historical unity of a State” and had “at least a notion” of the “biological basic elements in the structure of mankind” which overlap borders of State and Volk, “which we call races.” Thus Bornkamm espoused an interpretation of Luther’s Judenschriften that closely paralleled Nazi conceptions of Volk and race. Paradoxically, then, even as Bornkamm affirmed Luther’s struggle with Jews to be a spiritual effort the goal of which was conversion, the twentieth-century church historian continually conflated religious and racial antipathy towards Jews as he interacted with the writings of the sixteenth-century reformer.

Hockenos’s paper examined the history of the German Protestant Church’s Berlin-based “Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews” (Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden), commonly refered to as the Berlin Jewish Mission, during the Nazi era and the immediate postwar years. Exploring how the men and women who staffed the Berlin Jewish Mission understood the “Jewish question,” Hockenos asked whether the missionaries’ earnest desire to convert Jews to Christianity put them at odds with antisemitic racial theories or whether missionaries incorporated Nazi racial theories into their missionary worldview?

Surprisingly, the Berlin Jewish Mission remained open through much of the Third Reich, baptizing 704 Jews between 1933 and 1940 in its Messiah Chapel in the German capital (Hockenos estimates that about 3500 Jews converted to Christianity under the influence of the German Jewish missions) until the Mission was shut down by the Gestapo in January 1941. Many Protestants rejected the work of the Berlin Jewish Mission German Christians, who were openly antisemitic, ridiculed the idea that Jews might convert to Christianity for genuinely spiritual reasons, assuming Jewish conversions were politically motivated. Even members of the Confession Church, however, considered the presence of Jews in the Christian community as problematic because they brought with them undesirable “Jewish traits.” The few Protestants who did support the Berlin Jewish Mission believed that if the church approached Jews in the spirit of brotherly love and shared with them Christ’s message of love and forgiveness, the “Jewish problem” could be solved through conversion. Although missionaries identified Jews as a race with certain negative characteristics, they believed that converted Jews, whose faith was genuine, were cleansed, purified, reborn and transformed by the sacrament of baptism, thereby receiving a grace which overcame their race.

The internal conflicts of this position could be seen already in a 1932 article by the president and the director of the Berlin Jewish Mission, Hans Kessler and Edwin Albert. As they wrote, “There is no such thing as a German gospel or a German Christ. The gospel is the gospel for all people, regardless of race. The gospel has the power to transform men of all races, even the Jews. When one no longer believes this and believes only in race . . . they can longer call themselves a Christian.” People who think this way, they went on, reject Jesus and “come into opposition with God, just as the Jews once did.” Continuing in this minor key, Kessler and Albert railed against the spirit of Jewry, insisting that it needed to be overcome a task which could only be accomplished by the Holy Spirit (and not the German spirit). As such, the two men argued that the Jewish Mission stood at the forefront of the struggle of the German people against modern Jewry. At the close of his paper, Hockenos used the term “missionary antisemitism” to describe these complicated and at times contradictory theological responses.

Richard Steigmann-Gall’s commentary brought into focus the central idea common to all three papers, namely, that Protestants in the Third Reich adopted a wide range of perspectives on race and religion, mixing aspects of Nazi antisemitism and racial salvation with either religious or racial antipathy to Jews and a confessional theology which was just as likely to affirm the Jewish origins of Christianity, the Jewishness of Jesus, and the transformative effects of conversion, regardless of race. Various members of the audience also posed questions, making for a lively and fruitful discussion.

K.Jantzen, Calgary

2a) Markku Ruotsila, The origins of Christian anti-internationalism. Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press 2008. 240 Pp. ISBN 978-1-58901-191-5.

Despite its somewhat cumbrous title, Markku Ruotsila’s study is both topical and relevant to present concerns. His insightful analysis of a significant section of American Protestantism stresses the continuity of this group’s strongly-held views about America’s destiny and in particular its conduct of foreign policy. He traces the origins of attitudes which dominated and still dominate the mentality of the Protestant minority, commonly called “the Religious Right”, and shows how their views were formulated in the crises of a century ago, particularly in their strident opposition to the policies advocated by the Democratic Party’s President Woodrow Wilson.

This opposition was based on certain key presuppositions. First and foremost, conservative Evangelicals held that traditional orthodox Christianity was the sole source of truth and hence their guide to public policy. Cooperation between Christians and non-Christians compromised their beliefs, and was therefore unacceptable. Any international organization, such as the proposed League of Nations, even if supposedly devoted to peace, was bound to fail because of the unprincipled and dubious association with non-Christian states such as Japan and China. For such Protestants, it was the supreme virtue of the United States that it had a divinely-appointed call to witness to and defend the true faith.

This belief in the special destiny of the United States and its accepted calling to witness to Christ came of course from the first Puritan settlers. By the end of the nineteenth century, this Protestant tradition had hardened into a theological and political conservatism, evidenced by both a literal reading of the bible, and the promotion of Victorian family values and morality. At the beginning of the new century, its champions were already engaged in a bitter struggle against the forces of modernization, secularism and indifferentism. They took especial aim at the advocates of theological liberalism, whose ideas seemed to be based on the heresies of German biblical criticism. They particularly attacked the idea that Christian salvation could be brought nearer by schemes of collective or reformist improvement. They never shared the optimistic assumptions of humanistic betterment so widely adopted by the supporters of the Social Gospel movement of the times. So too conservative Evangelicals deplored the perceived weakening of America’s cherished spiritual values. They opposed many of the changes from an essentially rural to a much more morally ambiguous urban and industrialized society. Contrary to the views championed by progressive politicians, such as President Wilson, they were not inclined to give in to the temptation of moving with the times.

America’s participation in the first world war only intensified this confrontation. Both for personal and political reasons, President Wilson laid great stress on the moral reasons behind the war effort in 1917. No less altruistic was the propaganda put out on behalf of his peace plans in 1918, including his proposals for a League of Nations to ensure “perpetual peace”. Indeed Wilson and his supporters fully believed that the opportunity beckoned to apply the principles of Christianity on a cosmic scale, led of course by the reformist and “progressive” enthusiasts who were Wilson’s most ardent backers in the churches.

It used to be said that “The League of Nations enjoyed the support of all organized religion; and for those who had no religion, it formed an adequate substitute”. Ruotsila;s careful research disputes at least the first half of this adage as far as American Protestantism goes. He scrupulously analyses the various segments of American anti-internationalist Protestantism, and describes the theological bases of their utterances. Basically all of them shared a common rejection of the immanentist theology of the Social Gospel, with its confident belief in human self-sufficiency and the beneficial effect of collective improvements though institutional measures. These conservative Evangelicals were, by contrast, firmly convinced of human sinfulness, and their utter dependence on God for everything, including politics. They totally rejected the kinds of anthropocentric assumptions which underlay the reformers’ ideas for the rectification of world evils by political means.

Ruotsila’s contribution is to show how prevalent the religious arguments were in the heated debates over the ratification of the League’s Covenant. He argues rightly that these have not been given their due weight in most secular histories, either of the League or of twentieth century America. And he shows how widespread and well mobilized were the utterances of those who used their conservative theologies to combat not merely the League of Nations, but all other aspects of modernization and secularization. His evaluation of the various positions adopted by the dispensationalists, hard-line Baptists, conservative Lutherans and Presbyterians, and even a few isolated Episcopalians and Methodists, is excellently nuanced. Each produced their own variant on a similar theme. Generic Christian anti-internationalism was a sub-theme of anti-modernism. The League of Nations offered an unacceptable mixture of unwelcome features: a multinational co-operation with non-Christians; the creation of a dangerous supranational authority; the vision of an impossible goal of human betterment. This would be an apostate deviation from America’s true calling. The fundamental belief that the United States was and is a uniquely Christian nation with a special role to play in the world was already deeply rooted in such circles a hundred years ago. Its recurrence and indeed fulfilment in George W. Bush’s unilateral war in Iraq shows how strongly these conservative Evangelicals’ ideas continue to be played out, even after the League of Nations has long since disappeared.

Interestingly enough, Markku Ruotsila is an adjunct professor of American church history at the University of Helsinki. Is there any comparable position in any American University devoted to Finnish church history?

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2b) N.Vos, D.Pryfogle and M George, Faith in the world. Mark Gibbs and Vesper Society, Being God’s Lively People. San Francisco: Vesper Society Imprint 2009. 129 Pp. ISBN 1441479201, <http://www.vesper.org/>http://www.vesper.org

This short but vivid tribute to Mark Gibbs and the Vesper Society records a remarkable trans-Atlantic partnership which encouraged the laity of the churches to take their faith into the world of their everyday lives in new and stimulating ways. Mark Gibbs was an Anglican layman, living in a wind-swept cottage on the north Yorkshire moors, who teamed up with a group of American businessmen mainly from the San Francisco area, seeking to enlarge the horizons of church members, and to see the wider implications for their faith in the world. Too often, it seemed, the clergy had called on the laity to support church-related projects and institutions, but had not equipped them to witness in their secular occupations. Since the laity comprised 99% of church members, and the clergy only 1%, there was an obvious disproportion in the amounts spent on Christian education for the non-professional members in the church pews.. For twenty years from the middle 1960s, Mark Gibbs and the Vesper Society saw it as their mission to mobilize the laity through a series of educational programmes, which pulled together leading Christian laymen to expand their witness and make it relevant to their day-to-day occupations. They paid special attention to the ethical principles which should apply in all walks of life, and sought to overcome the barriers and limitations of too narrow an emphasis on personal salvation in the pious church circles. Rather Christian witness had to apply to all spheres of life, and lay men and women were the ones to make this happen. Mark Gibbs had a special flair for arousing such concerns, not only comforting the afflicted but afflicting the comfortable. For many years he became a roving ambassador for lay renewal, writing, teaching, stimulating, inspiring and sometimes irritating to achieve his ends. In America, the Vesper Society provided the resources to organise seminars, retreats and conferences where the message for lay renewal could be heard. Together they made a significant impact.

Interestingly, the project was largely derived from Germany. After the Second World War, the German Evangelical Church developed two major initiatives designed as reparations for the churches’ disastrous failure to resist the evils of the previous Nazi regime. The first of these was the creation of a series of Evangelical Academies, of which Bad Boll, near Stuttgart was – and is – the most famous. These professionally-staffed institutions provided a large-scale and year-round programme of seminars and short courses, some of them residential, which were a form of continuing Christian education, ranging over a wide number of topics, and using debates and discussions on controversial and topical subjects to draw out the Christian implications. Over the years, the result has been to build up a large corps of informed and critical lay opinion.
No less significant were the biennial Kirchentage or Church Rallies, held in major cities, usually for a week in June, which brought – and still bring – together many thousands of people, including foreigners, in stimulating debates and discussions. Organized and led by lay people, these rallies do much to offset the often sombre and unexciting life in the local Protestant parishes. They also provide an opportunity for all church-related organizations in the social, political and mission fields, to broadcast their messages in a vital and net-working fashion.

These were the models Mark Gibbs brought to America where he found receptive audiences. His belief that the renewal of the church depended on lay people acting beyond the church walls and taking up their ministries in daily life, proved popular and attractive. He helped to overcome the laity’s isolation and to equip them for their everyday vocations. It was also a call for prophetic witness for social justice and peace, particularly during the height of the Vietnam War, and hence ran parallel to the efforts promoted by such bodies as the World Council of Churches, and the emphasis stemming from the Second Vatican Council. Gibbs found new ways to inspire his audiences to be faithful followers of Christ in the secular worlds where they lived. For the layman, he believed, was the essential interpreter of the Christian message in the battlefield of the world, and must be properly equipped for such a task. At a time of turbulent political events and challenges, this reflective Christian witness was most helpful.

Mark Gibbs’ understanding of the church was always inclusive and ecumenical, and sought to overcome the limitations of private piety and individualistic attitudes in social morality. Such a purely private faith, he believed, was as dangerous as a fanatically political creed, and both needed the world-restoring allegiance of the gospel of God.

Unfortunately Gibbs died in 1986, and without his energy and drive the cause languished, especially in England. But in many ways his ideal has flourished with the rapid expansion of lay-led voluntary agencies, ministering and witnessing all over the world. With the obvious decline of clergy-based influence, the laity is now taking a much more active role. But we still need men of Mark Gibbs’ calibre to maintain the enthusiasm and direction of God’s lively people as they live out their faith in the world.
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2c) Peter Raina ed. , Bishop George Bell. House of Lords Speeches and Correspondence with Rudolf Hess. Oxford, Berne etc: Peter Lang. 2009. 226 Pp.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958. Tributes to his memory have already appeared in this Newsletter, viz a report on the Memorial Conference held in Chichester (September 2008)) and a full account of the papers given at that conference (April 2009). But we can happily add to these a short note about the edition of Bell’s speeches in the House of Lords and his correspondence with the Nazi leader Rudolf Hess, prepared by one of Bell’s devoted admirers, Peter Raina. We can certainly be grateful that he has researched into the massive archive Bell left behind to dig out the texts of his speeches given in the House of Lords during his twenty-one years as a member of the bench of bishops, as well as the remarkable but wholly ineffective exchange of letters between Bell and Hitler’s Deputy, Hess, from1935 to 1938. (Hess’ German texts are also printed). These materials can only reinforce the impression that Bell was a courageous, outspoken, singular and persistent voice of conscience in those most difficult years for Christian witness. He believed, however, that he had the duty to speak out for the Church on matters of public concern. The House of Lords offered him a public platform, even if his fellow peers were rarely in agreement. Nor were most of his fellow bishops. But Bell was not to be deterred by opportunistic considerations, as was most notable in the famous speech he made in February 1944 denouncing as inhumane the British policy of indiscriminate bombing of German cities, which is reproduced here in full. His protest was based on two main thoughts: first, that the war should be prosecuted in ways which would uphold the ideals for which it was being fought, and secondly, that such destructive bombing made no distinction between the supporters of Nazism in Germany and the numerous opponents of the regime who, Bell believed.would one day rise up and overthrow the monstrous tyranny imposed by Hitler. This was a belief he had long held. Indeed Bell’s whole career had been deeply affected by what he considered was the mistake, even the crime, of the Versailles Peace Treaty, which had so insulted Germany and thereby led to the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. He campaigned long and hard against the vindictive anti-German attitudes held by many leading Britons, and pleaded for the cause of peace and reconciliation throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His leadership in the international ecumenical movement of the mainly Protestant churches had given him many contacts in the European churches as well as in pacifist circles. So he was naturally outraged by the vicious measures adopted by the radical Nazis especially against the Jews. He personally organized numerous relief efforts on their behalf, and rescued a number of Protestant clergymen by providing them with asylum in England. His concern for refugees and his desire to raise awareness (and funds) for their situation was clearly reflected in his pre-1939 speeches, as was his indignation at their treatment as enemy aliens after war broke out. By the end of the war, Bell was looking at the wider horizons and seeking new patterns for post-war reconstruction and reconciliation, as well as renewal though a recommitment to Christianity. These are the themes which are reflected in his speeches, all well and succinctly thought out, penetrating in his resolve not to let the issues be overwhelmed by pragmatic or political considerations, and consistent in his witness to Christian values. Bell sought to make this witness relevant to all aspects of life, and therefore was bold to offer his opinions on a wide range of topics, some of which he could only know at second-hand.

In 1936 Bell took the opportunity of one of his periodic visits to Germany to obtain an interview with Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess. Bell was undoubtedly influenced by the idea that a personal contact with top German leaders could ensure that they were made aware of the criticisms of the Nazi treatment of the German churches, and would take measures to remedy the repressive actions of their underlings. Thus he told Hess bluntly that church circles abroad were apprehensive of those “prominent leaders of the party who have far more radical opinions and favour a far more radical policy to the whole Church question”. In 1937 he tried to use the same channel to express his concern about specific Confessing Church victims of Nazi repression, and asked for the modification of the measures taken against them. His intervention on behalf of Pastor Martin Niemoeller shortly after his arrest in July 1937,however, earned him a brusque reply for his audacity in pleading on behalf of a clergyman whose “attacks and slanders against the State and its Head have reached such dimensions that the State has been forced to set the law against Pastor Niemoeller” Furthermore, Hess’ letter retaliated by asking how Bell would like it if the British Government’s policies were attacked by Germans on behalf of an unrestrained Irish clergyman. This missive concluded with the peremptory statement: ”90 per cent of the German people did not bestow their confidence on their Government, so that afterwards this Government should tolerate a situation in which a few misguided persons should threaten the internal peace and the basis for the security of the nation as well as its Christian religion”. Undeterred Bell tried again a year later to ask for an alleviation of Niemoeller’s prison terms. He received no reply.

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2d) E.P.Jikeli, Siebenbürgisch-sächsische Pfarrer, Lehrer und Journalisten in der Zeit der kommunistischen Diktatur (1944-1971) [European University Studies, Series III, History and Allied Studies, Vol. 1044.] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2007. Pp. 321. $86.95. ISBN 978-3-631-56769-2.)

(This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, October 2009, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author)

Erwin Peter Jikeli’s study of ethnic German intellectuals in Romania during the first half of the communist era opens a discussion of questions familiar to historians of modern Germany but newer to scholars of communist Eastern Europe. To what extent was the ruling ideology in this case, Romanian communism imported from abroad or imposed from above? Was it only endured by the populace, or did certain elements in society welcome it from below? To what extent were intellectuals in this case, pastors, teachers, and journalists committed democrats engaged in resistance against their regime while making superficial public compromises? Or were they willing collaborators out of ideological conviction or for professional gain?

In this published version of his doctoral dissertation from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Jikeli (who was raised and educated in Romania) explores the vocational history of ethnic German intellectuals from the Siebenbürgen (“Seven Fortresses”) region of Romania, where Saxons first settled in the twelfth century as defenders of Transylvania. Jikeli employs a social-scientific approach, applying biographical techniques to understand the pastors, teachers, and journalists he analyzes. Indeed, one of the unique features of Jikeli’s study is his attempt to survey 259 former members of the three professions (many had emigrated to Germany proper before and after 1989). Unfortunately, only 91 (just over a third) responded at all and only 52 (barely one-fifth) filled out his long, probing questionnaires, the others “presumably afflicted by a moral dilemma or fear of the truth” (p. 7). These limitations aside, Jikeli is to be commended for his wide use of primary sources, including diaries, biographies, letters, chronicles, newspapers and publications, and all manner of official correspondence and personnel records (some of which, he notes, contained lies meant to discredit the intellectuals during the communist era).

Following a methodological introduction and four chapters of historical and socio-political background, Jikeli probes the attitudes and actions of his subjects during the first half of the Romanian communist era from the installation of the single-party system under Soviet military pressure to the intense Stalinism of the 1950s to the relaxation and adoption of independent foreign, economic, and cultural policies in the early years of Nicolai Cea escu’s reign in three main chapters. The year 1971, when the Romanian dictator implemented a harsher domestic policy (and when the thirty-year freeze on archival records began to affect his study), marks the end point of Jikeli’s research. Two subsequent chapters assess the issues of party membership and contact with Securitate, or Romanian secret service.

Jikeli’s goal is to understand the extent to which these Saxon pastors, teachers, and journalists maintained some critical distance from the regime and attempted to represent the interests of their minority group. What he discovers is that all three groups of intellectuals suffered under policies which attempted to draw professionals from the “healthy” social categories of workers and farmers and which suppressed minority populations (primarily Hungarians) in favour of Romanianization. German Protestant pastors (mainly Lutheran since the Reformation) in Transylvania found themselves under great suspicion since they were only indirectly under the control of the state and since they stood by definition in opposition to the atheism of the communist party. For that reason, pastors were monitored and recruited intensely by the Securitate. German teachers were pressured to join the communist party, not least because of their important role as transmitters of the state’s materialist and assimilationist educational program. Journalists were required to be party members and worked under editors-in-chief who were party appointees charged to direct the propaganda program of the press.

Jikeli argues that all three groups of German intellectuals found ways to subvert or evade some of the burden of their association with the communist system (his few survey respondents were quick to provide these kinds of stories) and to bolster siebenbürgisch-sächsisch identity. But given the important position held by Romanian professionals and particularly by these natural leaders in the minority population, there can be little doubt that they must have made significant accommodations with the Romanian party-state. Due to the lack of survey respondents and the absence of relevant secret service files, however, Jikeli concludes that we will never likely know the full extent of such collaboration among the ethnic German intellectuals of Romania.

Kyle Jantzen, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

2e) Jana Leichsenring, Die katholische Kirche un “ihre Juden”. Das “Hilfswerk beim Bischoeflichen Ordinariat Berlin” 1938-1948. Berlin: Metropol Verlg. 2007 349 Pp. ISBN 978-3-938690-58-1

This thoroughly researched dissertation for Berlin’s Technical University tells the story of the Catholic agency belatedly established in 1938 to assist those Catholics of Jewish ancestry as they faced persecution and deportation by the Nazis. (Ms Leichsenring’s footnotes are exemplarily exhaustive!) But the meat of the thesis concerns the often reluctant measures, taken with inadequate means by the Catholic authorities, to help these unfortunate members of their flock, and includes a number of heart-wrenching stories of their fate. Leichsenring estimates that there were approximately 45,000 Catholics labelled by the Nazis as “Jews” or “Mischlinge”. Many resided in Berlin, so that it was natural that the office to help them should be placed under the auspices of the Berlin Bishop, Konrad von Preysing. At first, efforts had been made to assist such Catholics to emigrate through the St Raphael’s Verein, but the Gestapo placed increasing restrictions on this program, and in 1941 ordered the society to be dissolved. In any case, in October 1941 no further emigration of Jews was allowed. (The same decree put an end to the Protestant Church’s similar efforts, along with the arrest of its principal organiser, Pastor Heinrich Gruber). But the Catholic Hilfswerk continued, under the direction of resolute and resourceful leadership of Margarete Sommer, whose valiant endeavours deserve to be better known. Since emigration was no longer possible, Sommer had to concentrate on personal assistance on the spot. Her imaginative and thorough efforts to give whatever assistance to her individual contacts was possible are here fully recorded and praised But she also wanted to mobilize the whole church to protest against the injustices and terrorization which her charges were undergoing. To this end she prepared a number of reports, from February 1941, especially on the effects of deportation, and the drastic living conditions in the ghettos in the east where these individuals had been sent. A year later she reported on what she had learnt about the so-called Wannsee Conference, which led her to the conviction that the Jews were to be murdered en masse, and that the same treatment was to be given to those Catholics in mixed marriages and their children. Bishop Preysing then forwarded these reports to his superior Cardinal Bertram in Breslau. In fact Sommer also personally went to see Bertram, but was not believed. Her plea for a strong public denunciation by the whole Catholic hierarchy of the Nazis’ misdeeds was turned down The Cardinal refused to act on such unverified information, and limited himself to written protests to specific Reich ministers and bureaucrats about the Nazi plan to dissolve Church-blessed mixed marriages. When Sommer went to visit him for one last time in April 1944, he refused to see her, and ordered Preysing to keep her under control. Leichsenring thus adds to the already established evidence that the Catholic response to the persecution of the Jews was far too limited, and was given, even by Sommer herself, only to practising Catholics. The conclusion has to be reached that, while it is untrue to say that nothing was done, far greater efforts could have been made if the Catholic bishops had been more determined to take up arms against the regime. But having given their allegiance in 1933, and afraid for the consequences if the Reich Concordat was to be revoked, and in the circumstances of total war, none of the bishops were prepared to act publicly on behalf of the Jews, who had been so denounced in every piece of Nazi propaganda. The record of the Hilfswerk, whose papers Leichsenring has so competently researched, is therefore one of frustration and very limited success.

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3) Book notes: J.B.Lazarus, In the shadow of Vichy. The Finaly Affair, New York: Peter Lang, 2008. ISBN 9784331-0212-7
In the immediate post-Holocaust years, Catholic-Jewish relations in France were deeply perturbed by the controversial issue of the future fate of Jewish children whose parents had been murdered by the Nazis and who had been given refugee by Catholics in convents and schools. After the end of hostilities, these care-givers were not surprisingly reluctant to part from these charges. But the Jewish community organisations went to great efforts to reclaim the children and sought to place them with Jewish relatives, or in Jewish communal institutions, or even to let them take part in an early aliyah to Palestine. The most notorious case, where one French Catholic care-giver sought to thwart these claims, came in the dispute over two small boys, the Finaly brothers. This Catholic true believer refused to deliver the boys to their aunts in New Zealand and Israel, had them secretly baptised as Catholics and even eventually had them smuggled out of France to Spain. She also successfully mobilized the Catholic community to her side using arguments derived from the Dreyfus affair of fifty years earlier. The anti-Semitic overtones were explicit. Fortunately, as the author makes clear, there were other Catholic clerics appalled by this bigotry. Finally a settlement was reached and the boys were returned to their relatives. But the polarization of French opinion was only healed when more eirenic views prevailed, as was seen in the declarations on relations with Judaism at the Second Vatican Council. JSC

With every best wish
John Conway