Tag Archives: Christianity and Nazism

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 328, ISBN: 978-3-8471-0726-2

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

This review was originally published in theologie.geschichte, Bd. 13 (2018) and is reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher. The original version can be found here.

The volume is a collection of chapters on the roles of individual clergymen during the Nazi regime in the Protestant church of Saxony. It is a fairly specialized study for those concerned with regional church history in what in Germany is called Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. This branch of church history focuses on the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the impact of the Third Reich (though the field has over time widened in scope and perspective). The aim of this volume is to introduce the biographical-professional pathways, political choices, and theological justifications of men working in the church of Saxony in the 1930s and 1940s. The research is based on the evaluation of new archival materials, and all the case studies follow a consistent framework. They show the spectrum of positions these men took during the Nazi regime and the Kirchenkampf (church struggle), from the moment Hitler took power and the Nazification of German society to the outbreak of World War II and its end in 1945. They also situate each of the clergymen in their family histories and theological training before 1933, followed up briefly by notes on their personal and professional lives after 1945, including the de-Nazification process and accommodations with the new East German socialist government.

Commendably, the editors cover the various levels of complicity and resistance in their selection of biographical reconstructions. They do so systematically by dividing the volume into four parts. The first and longest part introduces the biographies of clergymen who embraced Nazi ideology and identified with the Deutsche Christen – the “German Christians,” a group within the Protestant parishes that saw no contradiction between Hitler and Luther, between Nazi ideology and church teachings (Knabe; Münnich; Coch; Fügner; Bohland; Axt). The second part covers four men belonging to the so-called “Mitte,” the center, who tried to walk a middle path between radicalized and Nazi-supporting clergy and those who opposed the Nazi takeover of church and society (Herz; Bruhns; Loesche; Gerber). The third and shortest part introduces two biographies of men of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), who prioritized faith in Christ over nationalist and völkisch ideologies and (partially) resisted the Nazi regime (von Kirchbach; Delekat). The last part documents the biographies of churchmen who were persecuted by the Nazis for political and racial reasons, including Protestant ministers who were classified as Jews (or mix-blooded) by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Stempel; Kaiser; Gottlieb; Starke; Grosse).

The volume’s internal structure – from Nazi sympathizer to active resistance – guides the reader well through the many choices these clergymen made and the degree to which they used their clerical authority to position themselves vis-à-vis a dictatorial regime. What, in hindsight, looks like an unambiguous verdict – after all, how would any Christian minister be able to support a racist, murderous, and genocidal regime? – turns into a more complicated maze of decision making, career ambitions, and ideological convictions when examining how biographical motivations intersect with political developments. Given the longstanding German tradition of fusing Lutheran theology with national aspirations, many believed that Hitler would revitalize the Protestant churches and strengthen the German nation against common foes: secularization, Bolshevism, and those responsible for the Versailles Peace Treaty. Such expectations enticed clergy to join the Nazi Party and the Deutsche Christen (DC). Some held on to both memberships, others left the DC but not the NSDAP; some moved from the DC to the Confessing Church over time, others joined the German army as military chaplains. Yet others never affiliated with any of these groups because they identified with religious-socialist circles or the political party of the Social Democrats. It is worth delving into the continuities and discontinuities we see played out in these individual biographies.

As a reviewer, it is tempting to introduce some of the characters by name and to follow their life stories within the church environment of Saxony. However, for readers unfamiliar with the particulars of Saxony’s regional church administration and struggle, the amassed archival details of each chapter would quickly overwhelm. Experts in church history will have, no doubt, an easier time in grasping the significance of certain names and nuances, and they will welcome this volume as an addition to the literature on the German church struggle. Yet, not only specialists should read Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz, a point I will return to at the end.

A few areas of concern need to be mentioned for they weaken the otherwise meticulous research presented in this volume.

More help could have been provided to the reader to make sense of the many historical details mentioned in the chapters. At times, the biographical material is just a long list of data; this is especially true for the men’s family histories and their university studies and early career pathways preceding 1933. Though the contributors claim that this information is important to understand their subjects’ later choices, this is not always evident. More explicit interpretative models would have been useful. The criticism that Philippe Lejeune once voiced against autobiographical prose can apply here to some degree. Autobiographers, Lejeune lamented, sometimes write as if they fill out a “questionnaire sent by a punctilious administration.”[1] The copiousness of biographical data does not automatically contain explanatory power.

More help could have also been provided for weighing the significance of particular choices and attitudes. How should we assess, for example, someone’s genuine Heimatliebe (love of one’s home-nation) when it goes hand-in-hand with anti-Jewish resentments (as in the case of Oskar Bruhns with his Baltic-German roots and völkisch identification)? How should we distinguish between an ambitious career move and membership in the NSDAP? Some chapters offer clear assessments, but generally the volume errs on the side of caution.

A few of the contributors are too close to their subjects, with the result that they lose critical distance and present them with undue loyalty. Generational affinity might be one reason for this shortcoming (the contributors’ birth years range from 1929 to 1988). This is especially the case for contributors born before 1945. Their own linguistic style (Sprachduktus) occasionally resembles those of their subjects – and those styles carry embedded value references. This is true, for example, for the issue of gender and gender relations. Wives and children of the churchmen are mostly introduced as an aside, such as in the case of the death of von Kirchbach’s wife after his return from World War I, which is commented with the laconic entry: “He left in good care his children, eight and six years old. For him now, the decision to study theology was firm” (208).[2] Another example is the cavalier way of commenting on behaviors questionable by today’s standards, such as the beating of students for educational purposes: “In extremely rare cases it is told that emotional stress apparently led him to slap [his students]” (313).[3]

There is also little discourse analysis of the theologians’ autobiographical writings that were consulted for this study. This lack is particularly glaring with respect to self-exculpations during the de-Nazification process (Selbstreinigung) after 1945. Ego-documents often require a reading between the lines, listening not only to what is said but also to how it is said and what is not being said, and to paying attention for the less obvious elements of emotionality, narrative patterns, and omissions.

Related to these issues is the absence of the Holocaust in the presented biographical reconstructions. Anti-Jewish tirades and antisemitic stereotyping as well as the Arierparagraph and the case of pastors of Jewish origins find mentioning in the chapters, but the Holocaust itself is largely absent. It might very well be that the archival materials do not contain any such references, but this silence in the documentation should have been addressed and problematized.

17 of the 18 churchmen introduced in this volume were born between 1877 and 1895, 12 of them between 1882 and1890 (with one outlier who was born in 1906[4]). Little is done with the opportunity to study these men as members of the same generational cohort, the 1890ers (born between 1870 and 1890).[5] This political-generational cohort shared identifications and worldviews that united them beyond their individual biographies. These men lived through a number of political dreams and upheavals, from the Wilhelmine era to the end of the Kaiserreich, from colonial ambitions to the end of imperial dreams after World War I. It was a time characterized by social tensions between workers, industrial capitalism, and the middle class. These themes (especially World War I and the attempts at re-binding the working class to the church) appear frequently in the chapters, but they are not woven into a more cohesive instrument of interpretation.

Finally, what works well for this volume – namely the ordering of the biographies according to the conventions of contemporary church history (Deutsche Christen – the Center – Confessing Church – persecuted theologians) – is also a limitation. This framing follows a progression from most complicit with the Nazi regime to least complicit. This makes sense. Yet, its reliance on a well-worn traditional framework, which categorizes individual choices along the organizational venues of the Kirchenkampf, strains the possibilities of assessing culpability and complicity differently. What if we were to apply to the biographies of Protestant clergy and theologians more fine-tuned categories of culpability, such as perpetrator, accomplice, opportunist, enabler, bystander, beneficiary, victim? What if we read the archival material through an analysis of power and male agency? What if we foregrounded in these biographies the question of male subjectivity in the gray zone of moral and political choices and opportunities? An analysis of levels of culpability might compel us to reconfigure the historical and ethical assessment of these men’s choices, and this might be particularly relevant for the men of the Mitte (center).

A volume like Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz cannot accomplish all these tasks or satisfy these desiderata; the concerns raised above merely indicate how detailed historical research can be expanded and enriched. The two volume editors write in their brief and solid introduction that “the political agenda of the NSDAP found wide and positive resonance in [German] Protestantism.” Among the reasons for Christians supporting the Nazi party, they list the following: rejection of the “Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, the strengthening of the state, measures to increase employment, [securing] of national borders [Volkstumsgrenzen],…legal discrimination of Jews,…fears of Bolshevism and also discontent with a pluralistic society” (10). If we were to replace some of the historical references in this passage with contemporary political agendas, a number of countries would come to mind where politicians currently stoke fears and hate – with the support and vote of large numbers of Christians. Replace the Versailles Treaty with the Paris Agreement of Climate Change, Volkstumsgrenzen with national border security, legal discrimination of Jews with legal discrimination of immigrants, or Bolshevism with Islam, and we find ourselves in the midst of Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary. As illiberal democracies spread, are Christians today any better prepared to resist than the Protestant theologians in the church of Saxony in the 1930s? This is why the book, Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz can and needs to be read by people beyond a circle of specialists.

Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University, USA

Notes:
[1] Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis 1989, p. 235).
[2] In the original: “Nach Dresden zurückgekehrt, fand er sie nicht mehr unter den Lebenden. Seine Kinder, acht und sechs Jahre alt, konnte er in guter Obhut lassen. Für ihn stand nun der Entschluss zum Theologiestudium fest.”
[3] In the original: “In äußerst seltenen Fällen wird berichtet, dass ihm offensichtlich als Affekthandlung die Hand ausgerutscht sei.”
[4] The outlier is Horst Ficker, a parish minister of the Confessing Church. Born in 1906, he belongs to the generational cohort of the 1933ers (see note 5). Indeed, his biography – which is juxtaposed to Bohland, a parish minister affiliated with the DC – reads quite differently from the other biographies presented in this volume.
[5] Björn Krondorfer, “Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust in Autobiographien protestantischer Theologen. ” In Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945. Edited by Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach, and Norbert Reck (Gütersloh 2006, pp.. 23-170).

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne, “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity,’” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60 No. 1 (2014): 28-42.

Samuel Koehne, “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg,” Central European History 46 No. 1 (March 2013): 97-123.

In this past year, Samuel Koehne has published two new articles, both of which are interesting contributions to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. One looks at the question from the perspective of the National Socialist movement, probing the party’s use of the term “Positive Christianity”. The other examines the relationship from the perspective of conservative Christians in Württemberg, analyzing their early responses to Nazi rule.

In “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity’”, Koehne challenges Richard Steigmann-Gall’s interpretation of “Positive Christianity”—the term used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Koehne rejects Steigmann-Gall’s view, as presented in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, that “Positive Christianity” was a kind of Nazi Christianity which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical. Noting that Steigmann-Gall never considered the pre-history of the term, Koehne argues convincingly that from the nineteenth-century on, “Positive Christianity” emerged in juxtaposition to liberal, rationalistic Christianity. Right into the Weimar era, the term was widely used to mean conservative, orthodox, doctrinal (i.e. dogmatic) Christianity. It had appeared in Meyers Konversationslexikon, then in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart as well as in Brockhaus, and was featured in church election campaign coverage in the Weimar period—even in the Völkischer Beobachter. Though Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller tried to redefine “Positive Christianity” on behalf of the German Christian Movement, Koehne points out (following the lead of James Zabel) that there were other meanings floating around, including “orthodoxy, neo-paganism, heroic faith, anti-intellectualism and moderation” (32). Indeed, this “lack of definition” may have been an important reason the term was adopted by Hitler for the NSDAP Platform.

Koehne finds a great deal of diversity in the use of “Positive Christianity” among National Socialists. Some meant it in its older sense of “not liberal,” while others linked it to cultic or neo-pagan movements. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself emphasized the role of traditional dogma in turning religious or political belief into faith, and in generating both certainty and intolerance, which Hitler felt to be important for any movement, including his own. In short, it was as “doctrinal faith” that the Führer understood “Positive Christianity” (39). Nonetheless, it is precisely here that Koehne identifies:

the paradox of Hitler’s dogma. In his most public statement it is clear that Hitler defined Christianity as a religious system precisely in terms of dogmatic faith. It is equally clear that those leading Nazis who declared themselves to be Christian adhered not to a dogmatic form like that of the Catholic or Protestant orthodox position, but to a radical and “Aryanised” form of faith (40).

In his conclusion, Koehne argues convincingly that the Nazis were trying to have it “both ways”, a tension revealed in Gottfried Feder’s official commentary on the Nazi Party Platform. In it, Feder asserted that National Socialists supported: 1) “Complete freedom of conscience”, 2) “Special protection of the Christian creeds”, and 3) “Suppression and obstruction of doctrines which are contrary to the German moral sense and whose content is of a character destructive to the state and Volk” (40-41). Clearly, these were not mutually compatible.

Though Koehne has effectively demonstrated that “Positive Christianity” was not a coherent “religious system” (à la Steigmann-Gall), his findings don’t exactly clarify the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. Near the end of his article, Koehne argues that “Hitler’s own definition [of “Positive Christianity”] meant that the Nazis were decidedly “un-Christian” (40). That may be, but as Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated, many leading Nazis self-identified as Christians. By both affirming traditional doctrinal Christianity and reinterpreting it in light of National Socialist racial ideology, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues created a great deal of confusion, both then and now. As a result, whether Point 24 and its affirmation of “Positive Christianity” was merely a smokescreen for Nazi anti-Christianity or whether it represented a willingness to accept the Christian churches as subordinate partners in the remaking of Germany is still open to debate. Koehne rightly calls for more research into how ordinary Christians understood the “Positive Christianity” of Nazism, in order to better define the relationship between Nazism and Christianity.

In “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg” (the earlier of the two articles, in terms of publication dates), Koehne engages in just the kind of research he calls for. This article is a response to Manfred Gailus’ call for new micro-histories of Christianity in Nazi Germany, and especially of the upsurge in Christian nationalism during the Nazi seizure of power—what Gailus, studying Berlin, calls the “Protestant Experience” of 1933 (97). Koehne attempts to discover whether a similar phenomenon occurred in Württemberg, and he does so by analyzing parish newsletters and pastoral correspondence, particularly from conservative (Pietist) Protestants in the Pastors’ Prayer Group (Pfarrergebetsbund) headquartered in Korntal. His goals are to discover how they viewed the Nazi regime in 1933 and how they responded to Nazi antisemitism.

As in the article on “Positive Christianity”, Koehne begins with a historical review—this time, of the relationship between politics and religion during the pivotal years of German Unification (1870) and of the outbreak of the First World War (1914). What he finds is that the conservative Protestants like the Korntal Pietists tended to view political events in religious terms, so that, “as Hartmut Lehmann has noted, events such as the foundation of the German Reich, World War I, and the rise of the Nazis could be read as indicating divine will” (100). Germany was, according to this perspective, a Christian nation.

In light of this, conservative Protestants came to see the Weimar era as a time of spiritual crises and godlessness, the product of the collapse of the Christian state that was Imperial Germany. As his 1933 speeches make clear, Hitler leveraged this fear. He called for a fight against communism and a duty to reestablish national unity and revive the German spirit. He declared his support for the Catholic and Protestant churches, proclaiming that they would play a key role in the moral and national renewal of Germany. He even announced that National Socialists “would create a state in which there could be a really profound revival of religious life” (103).

The Korntal Pietists Koehne studied responded favourably to Hitler’s overtures. Koehne quotes Regional Bishop Wurm, in the Korntal Parish Newsletter, drawing a parallel between the German Wehrmacht and the Christian Church, both of which stood above the conflict of the parties, served the entire nation, and fought “for good against evil and for the well-being of the whole Volk” (105). Similarly, the Korntal Parish Newsletter editors welcomed Hitler’s ascension to power, giving thanks for a Führer as a leader not seen since Bismarck, and one who was saving Germany from Marxist terror. As they put it, “Hitler and his regime have proclaimed the Christian State” (106). For Koehne, this was a revival of the spirit of 1914, a combined national and religious revival in the wake of powerful political events. Here he reviews the excitement of conservative Württemberg Protestants from that time, who saw the outbreak of war as a “spiritual springtime” complete with large upswings in church attendance. He quotes Gailus’ argument that both 1914 and 1933 were seen as “God’s hour” and interpreted “as a reunion with God of a people who had strayed from the true faith, a change of direction toward re-Christianization” (107).

If conservative Württemberg Protestants were pleased with the national-spiritual revival of early 1933, they grew increasingly concerned throughout the course of 1933 over the increasing politicization of the German churches. Whether it was the attempt by Premier Wilhelm Frick to place the Mecklenburg church under state control, the appointment of August Jäger as commissar over the Old Prussian Union Church, or Hitler’s support for the German Christian Movement, the Korntal Pietists understood that the state was interfering regularly in the life of the churches. There was, quite simply, a significant inconsistency between Hitler’s assurances that the inner religious life of the churches would be protected and his advocacy of the German Christians, the group who sought to “bring the Protestant Church in line with National Socialism—taking extreme positions on religious questions in doing so” (109). If, as the Korntal Pietists believed, the churches were to act as “the conscience of the Volk,” then the essential question was not about the national revival, but about the spiritual one: Would the Volk “listen to the voice of the Word of God proclaimed by the church, which does not simply awaken the slumbering good in our Volk but also judges the evil” (111)?

In addition to his findings concerning the attitudes of conservative Protestants towards the new Nazi state, Koehne also probes his sources for evidence concerning Christian attitudes towards antisemitism. He finds almost no mention of antisemitic events like the April 1 boycott of Jewish shops, and beyond that, little opposition to the persecution of Jews or other victims of Nazism. Rather, the emphasis among Korntal Pietists was invariably on the role of the Nazi state in working toward national renewal, leaving the spiritual renewal to the churches. They believed Hitler’s state was creating the conditions for spiritual renewal in four ways: 1) by fighting immorality, 2) by promoting a Christian concept of community, 3) by publicly supporting the Christian churches, and 4) by sparking general enthusiasm in German society, a “spring storm” of sentiment (112). Writers in the Korntal Parish Newsletter called on the German Protestant Church to use this enthusiasm to create a national mission (Volksmission) and hoped Christians would enter into and take on leadership roles in the National Socialist movement. In reality, as Koehne notes, the proselytization went the other way, as Nazi values reshaped the Christian churches. He also describes how conservative Protestants viewed the neo-pagan German Faith Movement as a growing threat.

Koehne finds that, in contrast to the Korntal Parish Newsletter, the correspondence among members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group was more circumspect, a mixture of joy and concern. Yes, Hitler was a God-given saviour, but the German Christian Movement, the totalitarian claims of the state, and the growing prevalence of the “racial question” in the Church was disconcerting. Indeed, one member of the group wondered whether the “‘Aryan question’ … was possibly a satanic devise to prevent ‘a genuine awakening’” (115). In terms of antisemitism, Koehne found allusions to the persecution of Jews, but didn’t seem to uncover much material on the “Jewish Question.” In fact, he wonders whether antisemitic measures had any real impact on these pastors or their congregations and concludes that their “willingness to overlook antisemitic policy” or other “less pleasing” actions of the state (here he is quoting one of the pastors) “meant that they were actively passive, having made a choice to remain passive, to abide” (118).

Overall, the members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group exhibited a mixture of political joy but religious concern. While they saw Hitler as a “God-given Führer” for the nation, they lamented the absence of a “spiritual leader” for German Protestants (119). They worried about the extensive politicization of religion and the growth of a media culture which created a sensory overload and left no room for spiritual reflection. In terms of racial politics, their narrow focus on the national rebirth meant that they found National Socialist antisemitism tolerable. Again, they were “actively passive,” viewing their interests as limited to the ecclesiastical realm and deciding that the positive aspects of National Socialism overwhelmed the negative ones.

In his conclusion, Koehne quotes the Korntal Parish Newsletter’s description of the experience of 1933 like a national-spiritual wave, a return to the high point of 1914 after the low ebb of the Weimar era. Once again, Koehne has demonstrated the complexity of relations between Nazism and Christianity, particularly at the outset of the Third Reich. His conservative Protestants from Württemberg clearly welcomed the new Nazi state and saw themselves as participants in a spiritual revival that ran alongside Hitler’s national revival, as had been the case in earlier moments of national importance, such as 1870 or 1914. Their sense of partnership with the new regime enabled them to ignore the regime’s antisemitism, though the growing politicization of religious life concerned them. Still, in 1933, they expressed “belief in a national revival under the Nazis” and “belief that Nazi Germany was a state in support of religion” (120).

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: Samuel Koehne

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: Samuel Koehne

By Samuel Koehne, Deakin University

Sam Koehne is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute (Deakin University, Australia). He is working on the official Nazi positions on religion and on his first book, Nazi Germany as a Christian State: Liberal and Conservative Christian Responses from the Great War to the Nazi State.

I would like to outline my research in two fields, one being that of the Christian response to the rise of the Nazi Party and the other being my most recent research into the Nazis’ official views on religion. The concern of my doctoral work was to ascertain how ‘ordinary’ Christian Germans of the Protestant tradition responded to the rise of the Nazis. It was a close study of two German Protestant communities (based near Stuttgart) from 1914-1939 to understand Christians’ responses to the Nazis in the context of their experiences of the First World War and the Weimar Republic.

In this sense, it fits with the recent trend in scholarship (as in works like those of Manfred Gailus and Kyle Jantzen) towards examining the complex and heterogeneous nature of German Protestantism and the question of the particularity of response. My aim was to examine the response at a local community level and provide the contrast between theologically liberal and theologically conservative Christian communities. Given this, my central questions were threefold: How did Christians at opposite ends of the theological spectrum respond to National Socialism and the changes engendered by it when the Nazis came to power? Why did they respond as they did? What difference (if any) did their faith position make?

The two groups that were chosen as case-studies represented fairly neatly one of the major sections of society that were likely to vote for the Nazis: nationalist and politically conservative Protestants. However, they were also both ‘free church’ communities located near Stuttgart whose origins lay in Württemberg Pietism: the conservative Christian Brethren in Korntal (Evangelische Brüdergemeinde Korntal) and the liberal Christian Temple-Society in Degerloch (Tempelgesellschaft). The Temple-Society had actually split from the Brethren in the nineteenth century and established further communities in Russia and Palestine (under Turkish rule and the British Mandate).[1]

Such communities formed fixed points of reference for their members. As micro-societies that were already self-defined and focused inward, they constitute particularly interesting subjects in their responses to wider changes, especially as spheres of the public and private became blurred in the Third Reich. Their Christian faith was integral to their identity and their members’ lives were dictated by religious belief, as they were mean to demonstrate an ‘active’ or lived Christianity in everyday life. This included a direct concern with politics, given a chiliastic focus on reading current events through a ‘religious lens.’

Some of the most interesting discoveries were precisely how aware both communities were of the Nazi agenda before 1933, and how little this mattered in 1933 itself, which they tended to call a ‘year of wonder.’ There are some interesting links to recent work that has been reviewed in the ACCH Quarterly. By 1932 the perception of Nazism in both groups was very similar to that of the Kulturkampf bulletin during the Nazi regime itself (ACCH Quarterly Vol.16, no.4, December 2010): that Nazism was ‘totalitarian…an ideologically conceived religion or substitute for religion’ and fundamentally antisemitic.

Those living in Korntal were advised by 1930 that Nazism was built ‘upon an anti-Christian glorification and absolutism of race,’ that its ideology was inherently violent, revolutionary, and formed an ‘ersatz religion.’ One prominent Korntaler even called it a ‘blasphemy’ for the ‘hate-filled’ Nazis to claim they adhered to ‘positive Christianity.’ The Templers reached similar conclusions by 1932: that the Nazis were fundamentally antisemitic and adhered to a racial ideology, that Nazism itself was a new faith, that Hitler sought to establish a dictatorship and was relying on mass-psychology and a time of crisis in order to rise to power. Yet both communities embraced the rise of a ‘new Germany’ under Hitler in 1933. Although they first believed they were supporting a DNVP-NSDAP coalition government, a fascination with Hitler quickly developed and he was described consistently as having been ‘given by God.’

There is also a link to the recent work by Robert P. Ericksen on the question of complicity (ACCH Quarterly 18, no.2, June 2012). There were certainly instances of antisemitism in both groups, although the best characterization of the response to the Nazis’ violence and antisemitism in 1933 itself was an ‘active’ passivity. The most enthusiastic support was for the perceived national and spiritual rebirth of Germany, a perspective deriving very much from pre-1933 experiences. From this initial enthusiasm, the two groups gradually moved in opposite directions, to a point where those in the Korntal Brethren were saying ‘No’ to the Nazi state at the same time that leading Templers were just as emphatically saying ‘Yes.’ Generally the dominant trends in the Temple-Society by 1939 were at least in line with the German Christian Movement although some leaders were going so far as to link the community to the neo-pagan German Faith Movement. The Brethren position became one of retreat in the face of what was increasingly seen to be an ‘anti-Christian’ state. The situation was complex, but these final positions were largely dictated by the theological stance of the two communities.

My most recent research has considered the question of the official Nazi position on religion. While there are many excellent studies regarding church responses to the Nazis, or leading Nazis’ religious beliefs, there exists somewhat of a gap as to what the Nazis themselves chose to represent with respect to religion in their official publications. Given this, my current project is driven by the query: how did the Nazi Party present its official position on religion and what was promoted in those texts that were viewed (both within and outside the Nazi movement) as representing the official stance? This clearly carries the burden of ascertaining what was considered ‘official.’ A necessary second component of such research is to examine the reception of such official texts and how they were interpreted, though this will form the next stage of my work.

Given the very vigorous debates of recent years on the Nazi Program, especially Point 24 and ‘positive Christianity,’ the first stage of this research has been to consider the origins of the Nazi Program (undertaken through detailed research into the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP) as well as examining the two official commentaries (by Alfred Rosenberg in 1922 and Gottfried Feder in 1927) and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The commentaries have sometimes been overlooked, even though they were official statements and aimed to describe to both the Party faithful and a broader public what “Nazism” was (and was not). Though also clearly serving a promotional or propaganda purpose, these were statements that people at the time could turn to in understanding the Nazi Party.

The initial results of this research are that Point 24 appears to have been designed principally to serve an antisemitic function, illustrated by the fact that there is consistency from the first ‘Foundational Principles’ or Grundsätze of the German Workers’ Party through the 25 Point Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to the commentaries and also Mein Kampf on this major point: religious teachings or doctrines (Religionslehren, Glaubenslehren) would be opposed if they failed to satisfy German ‘laws of morality and ethics,’ (Grundsätze) or the ‘ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race’ (Program).

There does not seem to have been any comprehensive sense to ‘positive Christianity.’ The first commentary certainly argued more in favor of the idea that both religion and class would act to splinter rather than cohere Nazism as a movement, which seems to have been maintained in official statements. For instance the ‘Fundamental Regulations for the Re-Formation of the NSDAP’ that were issued when the Nazi Party was formed again in 1925 stated: ‘Religious or class conflicts will not be tolerated in the Movement.’ This was reconfirmed at the Bamberg Conference of 1926, as reported in the Völkischer Beobachter: ‘Religious problems have no role to play in the National Socialist Movement and are only suitable for undermining its political effectiveness. It is incumbent on every individual to sort out such problems for themselves.’[2] What this means is that when Rudolf Hess caused controversy in October of 1933 by arguing that the Nazi Party adhered to ‘freedom of conscience’ in religion, it was not a new concept.

What was essential (at least in official statements) was that religion meet racial requirements. The official position on religion was not principally about the form of faith, but the actual content of faith. Further research is required, yet this appears to help towards explaining the great disparity that was to be found amongst the Nazi leaders, from those advocating a ‘Germanized’ Christianity through to the ‘pagans’ or ‘paganists.’ Rosenberg’s commentary was explicit that ‘Morality is completely racially conditioned, and not abstract Catholic, Protestant or Muslim.’ It has been fascinating to find (as indicated by Rosenberg’s statement) that there was opposition to the notion of revealed religions in favor of the view that what was repugnant or acceptable in religious teaching would be ‘revealed’ through the response of one’s moral conscience, itself supposedly conditioned by race.

To use the example of Christianity and such a conception of ‘Germanic’ morality: depending upon how one measured the cloth of religious belief against such a racial yardstick, it was possible to cut out sections (the Old Testament, parts of the New Testament), create a patchwork (joining fairy-tales or the Nordic sagas to the story of Christ), or throw it away and sew a new garment altogether (neo-paganism, German Faith). ‘Germanizing and dejudaising’ religious teachings was a major concern––as it was in movements amongst the German Christians (see the reviews of Susannah Heschel’s work in ACCH Quarterly Vol.16, no.4, December 2010).

This perhaps takes us beyond current discussions, which have tended to focus on the promotion of ‘German Christianity’ or an ‘Aryan’ Christianity, or alternatively on the ‘new faiths’ of neo-pagan organizations, both of which topics have a number of studies examining such questions ‘from below’ or ‘from above.’ The official position may provide us with insight into what was meant to be common to all Nazis, regardless of the faith they professed.

[1] Some of my previous research considered the internment of many members of the Temple-Society under the British Mandate of Palestine in WWII and their subsequent deportation to and internment in Australia. The major history is Paul Sauer, The Holy Land Called: The Story of the Temple Society, trans. Gunhild Henley (Melbourne: Temple Society Australia, 1991). I have dealt with the literature on the Korntal Brethren at greater length in S.P. Koehne, “Pietism as Societal Solution: The Foundation of the Korntal Brethren,” in Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, ed. Jonathan Strom (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic, 2010). The major history remains the account in Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1969).

[2] Translations from Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Voice: The Völkischer Beobachter, 1920–1933, vol. 1: Organisation & Development of the Nazi Party (Oxford: P. Lang, 2004), 125, 149.