Tag Archives: Church Struggle

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “From Liberal Theology to Völkisch Christianity?: Heinrich Weinel, the Volkskirchenbund, and the Church Struggle in Thuringia”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “From Liberal Theology to Völkisch Christianity?: Heinrich Weinel, the Volkskirchenbund, and the Church Struggle in Thuringia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 328-350.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this interesting article, Heath A. Spencer explains how Heinrich Weinel, professor of New Testament and systematic theology at Jena University from 1904 until his death in 1936, could combine “theological liberalism, progressive politics, and humanitarian ideals” (328) with support for the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement in Thuringia. As Spencer notes, in many respects, Weinel was something of a conundrum. He defended “Protestant freedom” against conservative theology, but supported the idea of a Protestant Volkskirche (people’s church). He strove for peace and disapproved of the “national religion” of the First World War era, yet volunteered for military service and promoted “total mobilization” towards the end of the war. During the Weimar period, he was one of the minority of Protestant clergy who supported the new republic, but as the völkisch movement grew stronger through the later 1920s, he called on his fellow religious liberals to work with those on the right (328-329).

Spencer argues that Weinel’s story helps us understand how not only ideology but also “situational factors” drew German Protestants towards völkisch Christianity. Further, it reveals the motives, decision-making processes, and hopes of Protestants (especially in 1933), while illustrating the importance of local and regional factors in the history of the German churches under Hitler (330).

Weinel believed in German exceptionalism and Germany’s cultural mission in the world, and in the importance of Christianity to both. Indeed, it was his fear of losing the völkisch movement to organized religion—just as the educated elites and the industrial working classes had been lost—that drove him to want “to combine Christianity and the völkisch movement together in the right way” (335).

As Spencer explains Weinel’s journey through the war, the Weimar era, and the early years of the Third Reich, what emerges so clearly is Weinel’s tolerance for and desire to understand and even work with those of differing religious and political inclinations. Though he criticized aspects of Nazism, he approved of Hitler’s “national renewal.” Similarly, though he disapproved of the German Christians’ antisemitism and elevation of German-ness over the Gospel, he chose to set aside his long participation in the Thuringian Volkskirchenbund and to support the German Christians in the 1933 Protestant church election. His rationale was that the German Christians were a dynamic force that was winning the hearts of the masses and that they were the party that could establish a centralized Protestant Reich Church, a cause Weinel championed but knew that religious liberals could not accomplish (339).

In the final section of the article, Spencer explains how Weinel’s support for the German Christians entangled him in the antisemitic politics of Nazi Germany. Though Weinel had positive things to say about historic Judaism and though he criticized the antisemitism of the völkisch movement, he also favoured ethnic segregation, celebrated the nation as a creation of God, and failed to speak in defense of Jews and Jewish Christians who were suffering under Nazi political rule and German Christian ecclesiastical rule. Ultimately, though Spencer argues that Weinel’s support for the German Christian Movement was largely a tactical decision born of “frustration and desperation,” he also concludes that “Weinel’s story is a depressing reminder that intelligent, devout, compassionate people can make disastrous political and moral choices” (344).

Review of Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, “Möge Gott unserer Kirche helfen!” Theologiepolitik, Kirchenkampf und Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime: Die Evangelische Landeskirche Badens 1933-1945

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, “Möge Gott unserer Kirche helfen!” Theologiepolitik, Kirchenkampf und Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime: Die Evangelische Landeskirche Badens 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2015).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This book on the Protestant regional church in Baden during the time of the Third Reich is the product of a research project from the early 2000s which focused on the theological milieu and mentality of the pastors and church leaders. The goal was not to write a social history of the “church struggle” in Baden, but to use the rich archival resources on Baden’s pastors to understand their experience and self-understanding, including an exploration of the ways in which political and church-political ideas were codified theologically (17). Continue reading →

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds, Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Göttingen: V&Runipress, 2013). Pp 280, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783847101734.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The history of the Protestant women involved in resistance against the Nazi regime is well-documented, but it remains under-examined in the broader literature about the German Church Struggle and the resistance movements. Manfred Gailus, a contributing editor to this journal and co-editor of the book under review here, has devoted much of his recent work to correcting this.[1]

Mit Herz und Verstand is one of his recent additions to the literature. In addition to the fine overview of the topic in the introduction by Gailus and co-editor Clemens Vollnhals, it consists of biographical and historical profiles of Agnes and Elisabet von Harnack, Elisabeth Abegg, Elisabeth Schmitz, Elisabeth Schiemann, Margarete Meusel, Katharina Staritz, Agnes Wendland and her daughters Ruth and Angelika, Helene Jacobs, Sophie Benfey-Kunert, Elisabeth von Thadden, and Ina Gschlössl.

Only a few of these women are recognizable names (notably Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, but usually in conjunction with her more famous father, theologian Adolf von Harnack), yet even a brief description of who they were and what they did illustrates why their stories are deserving of greater scholarly attention. In addition to achieving their doctorates, both Harnack sisters were active feminists during the 1920s. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack (who held a doctorate in Germanistics and philosophy) helped found the Deutsche Akademikerinnenbund and became the chairwoman for the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, and Elisabet von Harnack (who had studied political economics and church dogmatics) was a leader on women’s issues and school reform. Elisabeth Abegg was a Quaker who had worked with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze during the 1930s and helped hide almost 80 Jews during the Nazi era (for which she has been honored by Yad Vashem). Abegg taught at the Luisenschule, a Gymnasium for young women in Berlin when Elisabeth Schmitz also taught. Schmitz of course was the author of the 1935 memorandum to Confessing Church leaders urging them to speak out in solidarity with the persecuted Jews; she subsequently resigned her teaching position in protest after the November 1938 pogroms. Elisabeth Schiemann was one of the first German women to attain a doctorate in botany and genetics, published several well-received studies and was affiliated with Friedrich-Wilhelms University and the Botanical Museum in Berlin. She joined the Confessing Church in 1934 (she was a member of the Dahlem parish) and became one of its most vocal members, writing letters to Martin Niemoeller urging him to speak out more forcefully. She personally delivered Elisabeth Schmitz’s memorandum to Karl Barth in Basel, and Franz Hildenbrandt used excerpts from a 1936 memorandum written by Schiemann in the 1937 statement on the Jews that he submitted to the 1937 Confessing synod (he acknowledged her text). While we now know that Elisabeth Schmitz was the author of the famous 1935 memorandum, Margarete Meusel (to whom it had been attributed) wrote a similar memorandum and worked throughout the Nazi era helping and hiding “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews. Katharina Staritz, a Confessing Church theologian of Jewish descent who worked with the Grüber office, is known for her protest against the Breslau church authorities’ decision to bar people wearing the yellow star from the churches—for which she immediately lost her job. With no cover from the church, she became the target of Nazi propaganda and ended up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Agnes Wendland, wife of a Confessing Church pastor in Berlin, hid several Jews in their parsonage and was helped by her daughters Ruth and Angelika. Helene Jacobs was one of the few Germans to make no compromises with the regime, beginning with her refusal in 1933 to fill out the Aryan certificate for university study and ending with her participation in the Kaufmann resistance circle that forged false documents for Jews and helped them escape (Jacobs, too, spent the final war years in Nazi prisons). Sophie Benfey-Kunert was a staunch feminist who became the first woman in Hamburg to take the theological exams; she was chaplain in a women’s prison before she married Bruno Benfey. Benfey, one of the “non-Aryan” pastors in the Hannover church, became the target of Nazi propaganda and found no support from Bishop August Marahrens; the Benfeys finally emigrated to the Netherlands in 1939 and returned to Göttingen after 1945. Elisabeth von Thadden founded a small private school that continued to accept Jewish students until the regime took it over in 1941; she then became involved in various resistance activities and was arrested in early 1944. She was beheaded in the Plötzensee prison in September 1944. Ina Gschlössl, who founded the Association of Protestant Women Theologians in 1925, was fired from her teaching job as a religious educator in 1933 after making critical remarks about Hitler; she eventually worked for the Confessing Church’s Inner Mission.

The story of each woman is important in its own right, but the real value of this volume is that the essays go beyond the biographical, portraying the women in a broader historical context that records both their significant achievements before 1933 and the scandalous treatment of them after 1933, particularly within the church. It also includes the post-1945 period, which shows that their contributions were largely forgotten and dismissed. This volume illustrates why the study of these women offers some important correctives to our general understanding of the larger issues in the German churches, the emergence and nature of different resistance movements, and the early postwar dynamics. It is impossible to understand these women separately from the historical, social, and political context of early twentieth century Germany. They were among the first generation of women in western societies (not only in Germany) to mobilize politically, study for advanced degrees, and enter traditionally male professions. The social shifts of the Weimar years opened the way for them to enter the political sphere in Germany; almost 7 percent of the Reichstag representatives in 1926, for example, were women. Their stories show how very different the experiences of these women were from the young men in their generation. This is especially evident in the essay on Agnes von Zahn-Harnack. During the 1920s she published and spoke widely on the women’s movement; organized German academic women and was the German delegate to the meetings in Amsterdam and Geneva of the International Federation of University Women and was elected to its board. In that international context she became one of the leading German voices on the “peace question.” The accounts in this volume of their various activities throughout the 1920s reveal a “Who’s Who” of early German feminist leaders.

Thus, although many of the women studied here sought careers or were active in the German Evangelical Church, they also shared a history of feminist and political activism in the interwar period. A number of them (both Harnack sisters, Abegg, Schmitz, Wendland, and von Thadden) had worked in Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze’s social ministry in east Berlin during the 1920s. Others were involved in early German feminist organizations like the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein (which Agnes von Zahn-Harnack led) and the religious socialist movement. In each of these three organizations, they had contact with Catholics and Jews, which was a factor in their active help for Jewish friends and colleagues after 1933.

Their interwar activities offered a different foundation in 1933 for political opposition to National Socialism. Not surprisingly, it also made the women easy targets. They were attacked not only by Nazi newspapers and party leaders, but also by male Confessing Church leaders who dismissed them. The introduction to this book opens with a vivid account of a 1937 pamphlet, Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott, written by Otto Dibelius and Martin Niemoeller, which in addition to defending the Confessing Church attacked the feminist movement, particularly women with advanced academic degrees, criticizing them for the declining birth rate and changing social values. Although women comprised seventy to eighty percent of the Confessing Church membership in Berlin, there were no women in church governance and only one woman (Stephanie von Mackensen) attended the Barmen Synod in May 1934. The 1930s saw an ongoing battle for the right to ordination that received scant attention or support among Confessing Church leaders. (It should be noted that were a few male Confessing Church leaders who supported the women theologians’ battle for ordination; according to the women I interviewed for my book, these included Kurt Scharf, Hermann Diem, and Martin Albertz.)

The issue where the historical record of these women really casts a poor light on their male counterparts in the Confessing Church, however, is in their political clarity and their willingness to take early stands with respect to the persecution of the Jews. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and other board members dissolved the Bund Deutsche Frauenvereine in March 1933 after being confronted with the demand to dismiss “non-Aryan” members and merge the organization with the Nazi Deutsche Frauenfront. Even more impressively, when the Frauenbund was reconstituted in 1945, women who had been Nazi party members or members of Nazi women’s’ organization were barred from membership. Despite their impressive record of political consistency, attacks on these early feminists continued into the 1980s, when they were accused of having somehow prepared the ground for the Nazi ideological precepts about women such as the “Mutterkult.”

The authors of each of these biographical essays bring different strengths and insights to the studies of these women. One of the most valuable aspects of the volume is the authors’ detailed examination of the papers and correspondence many of the women left behind. This material shows that they were critical not just of the sexism but the antisemitism within the Confessing Church. In addition to the aforementioned memoranda and protests, for example, Schmitz and Schiemann publicly criticized Walter Kunneth’s anti-Semitic attacks on Judaism They were also critical of the Confessing Church’s inherent political and theological conservatism. As the daughter of Adolf von Harnack, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack had grown up in an atmosphere of liberal, humanistic Protestantism that she feared was abandoned by the Confessing Church. Although she supported it in the Church Struggle, she criticized its conservatism, writing that “if we don’t pay attention, (the confessional front) could conjure up a new orthodoxy that would be the opposite of what we want.”

By looking at the culture and perspective of German feminism throughout this era, this volume makes an important contribution that goes beyond simply documenting the role played by these women. There continues to be a gendered division of history that runs through most of the literature on the Protestant Kirchenkampf, including the numerous books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (For those readers who are wondering, Bonhoeffer made no reference to the ordination debates and related feminist issues and showed no public solidarity with the Confessing Church women, despite the fact that he had taught several of them in Berlin and his close friend Elisabeth Zinn was among them.) The integration of these women’s lives into the scholarship could give us some new perspectives on the internal church debates. By portraying their political clarity and courage, particularly with regard to the persecution of Jews, this volume illustrates that there were people in the Confessing Church who stood up to the Nazi regime when it counted—many of them were women.

The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

Notes:

[1] In my 2011 review in this journal of Gailus’s study of Elisabeth Schmitz (Mir aber zerriss es das Herz), I noted the three volumes of documentation that came out of a project at Göttingen University during the 1980s and 1990s, the Frauenforschungsprojekt zur Geschichte der Theologinnen. The three volumes are “Darum wag es, Schwestern…”: Zur Geschichte evangelischer Theologinnen in Deutschland (1994); Der Streit um die Frauenordination in der Bekennenden Kirche: Quellentexte zu ihrer Geschichte im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1997); Lexikon früher evangelischer Theologinnen: Biographische Skizzen (2005). Works in English that have incorporated research on these women include my For the Soul of the People (1992) and Theodore Thomas’s Women Against Hitler: Christian Resistance in the Third Reich (1995)

Conference Abstract: “Confessions of a Protestant Past: The Memorialisation of the Kirchenkampf in Contemporary Berlin”

Leave a reply

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Conference Abstract: “Confessions of a Protestant Past: The Memorialisation of the Kirchenkampf in Contemporary Berlin”

By Diana Jane Beech, University of Cambridge

Anyone visiting Berlin for the first time will be struck by the wealth of heritage sites dedicated to remembering the tyranny of Germany’s Nazi past. From the haunting spectres of the sinister strength of the Third Reich (as epitomised by the Olympiastadion or the former home of the Reichsluftfahrtministerium) to the plethora of memorials commemorating the various victims of Nazi atrocities around the Reichstag, Berlin is a city with a showcase on both the perpetrators and the casualties of its dark history. But what of those institutions in the Third Reich like the Protestant Church, which comprised both pro- and anti-Nazi movements and, as such, do not fit neatly into Berlin’s dualistic memorial landscape?

At first glance, one would be forgiven for focusing on the bombed-out shell of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church located in the centre of Berlin’s main shopping district, which presents the Protestant Church as an innocent bystander and a tragic casualty of Allied bombings—a convenient illusion perhaps for an institution whose resistance to Nazism was less than glorious, save for the heroism of Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer or outspoken leader of the Confessing Church resistance group, Martin Niemoeller? A closer examination of Berlin’s Protestant landscape off the ‘tourist track’ nonetheless reveals the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Mariendorf, which is a lesser-known place of worship kept under lock and key due to its Nazi-inspired interior, demonstrating only too well the complicity of the Protestant Church in furthering the Nazis’ hold over the German nation. Even the St. Annen Church in Dahlem, famous for its associations with the Confessing Church, cannot escape the shadow of guilt of its fellow Protestant institutions when counterbalancing its visible, outdoor memorial against racial fanaticism, war and dictatorship with a concealed, indoor display of Doris Pollatschek’s critique of the churches’ ambivalent conduct in the Third Reich: the ‘Triptych for Auschwitz’.

And it is not just Berlin’s churches that have been affected by the parallel need to acknowledge the resistance efforts of some of their members yet, all the while, emphasising their overall ineffectiveness in preventing Nazi crimes and, in some cases, even facilitating them. Physical memorials, too, erected to honour the Confessing Church, have paled in significance against their more prominent counterparts and have been left to decay just like the reputation of the churchmen they were designed to uphold. The plaque erected opposite the ‘Topography of Terror’ at Wilhelmstrasse 36 to commemorate the meeting place of the Protestant resistance movement demonstrates this perfectly. Inconspicuously placed on a graffitied and now boarded-up YMCA building and hardly noticed by the throngs of visitors at the ruins of the SS headquarters nearby, it reflects a paradoxical obligation to remember but also to relativise this contentious aspect of Third Reich history.

By focusing on the Berlin cityscape as a whole, then, my paper seeks to show how the debate over the significance of the Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) in the Third Reich has come to be reflected both in patterns of heritagisation and memorialisation. As well as examining the preservation of sites of historical interest, my paper will explore how aspects of Kirchenkampf history have permeated Berlin’s urban landscape, through street names, building dedications and commemorative plaques. It will explore the nature and location of the sites used, and question how in the long term these sites can not only come to shape public perceptions of the history of the Kirchenkampf, but also transmit powerful ideological messages about the value of virtue and morality in modern society.

Review of Richard Bonney, ed. and trans., Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936-1939

1 Reply

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Richard Bonney, ed. and trans., Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936-1939. Studies in the History of Religious and Political Pluralism, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 578 pp. ISBN 978-3-03911-904-2.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This volume presents a fascinating primary source on church-state relations in National Socialist Germany from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in early 1936 to the eve of World War II. The full title of the newsletters collected here was “Kulturkampf: News Bulletin of the Religious Policy of the Third Reich.” As Bonney explains in his introduction, these newsletters were published in London in English by the Kulturkampf Association, also known as the League for the Defence of Christianity, with funds from Erwin Kraft and encouragement from Bishop George Bell. Bonney estimates a circulation of about 2,500 copies. The English edition was translated from a French original, the work of German Catholic exiles in France. Karl Spiecker, a former chief of the German press service, was the editor. No doubt his experience was key in giving the bulletin its professional quality. Some of the newsletters have already been published in German, edited by the distinguished church historian Heinz Hürten: ‘Kurturkampf, Berichte aus dem Dritten Reich, Paris’. Eine Auswahl aus den deutschsprachigen Jahrgängen 1936-1939 (Regensburg: F. Pustet, 1988). Bonney’s book now makes this material available in English, along with some portions that Hürten did not include.

The newsletters are remarkable in their depth of coverage and analytical sophistication. Spiecker and his contributors, none of whom are identified, were surprisingly well informed on everything from international affairs to local developments. They devote what comes to almost 150 pages in the book to the Anschluß of Austria and its ramifications for the churches yet also note the significance of quotidian matters, such as the July 1938 attempt by a German merchant to “Aryanize” his daughter’s name, Judith, by lopping off the “h.” Consideration at three levels of courts left the outcome uncertain (416-7). Many of the newsletters reproduce passages, some of them extensive, from Nazi speeches and publications: Der Stürmer and Das Schwarze Korps, but also others that are no longer well known. Readers interested in any aspect of life in Nazi Germany in its understudied “middle period” are certain to find pertinent tidbits and possibly even major insights here.

The broad outline of the position presented in the newsletters is fairly predictable. Informed readers will be able to anticipate the central claims already from the titles – of Bonney’s volume, with its reference to the “Nazi War on Christianity” and of the newsletter, with its invocation of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. The newsletters depict National Socialism as an ideological, institutional, and moral assault on Christianity that evolved from crude frontal attacks led by pagans and neo-pagans to a much more dangerous scheme to create a nazified, national church. For the people who assembled and distributed the bulletins, what must have been incredibly difficult and also risky work held out the promise of rallying forces beyond Germany in support of the churches, in particular the Roman Catholic Church and its most beleaguered elements. For Bonney, publishing this material now is a way to pay tribute to clergy who did not give in to Nazism (the book, like the German edition of Raul Hilberg’s Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer, is dedicated to Bernard Lichtenberg). It also appears to be a response to Richard Steigmann-Gall’s “revisionist position” (23), to which Bonney refers at numerous points.

Like every rich primary source, the Kulturkampf newsletters also contain surprises. The authors demonstrate an impressive grasp of the complex and dynamic connections between Nazi treatment of the churches and Hitler’s foreign policy. They devote a significant amount of space and understanding to developments within German Protestantism and to fostering a spirit of Christian solidarity. Rather than preaching the now familiar contention that the Roman Catholic hierarchy, led by an anti-CommunistVatican, settled for Hitler as the “lesser of two evils,” the newsletters explicitly reject that view. National Socialism was totalitarian, they insist, and as an ideologically conceived religion or substitute for religion, it posed an absolute and mortal threat with which there could be no compromise. The authors of the newsletters clearly recognized the centrality of antisemitism to the Nazi program, but in their analyses, the persecution of Jews is always a point of departure for discussion of the position of institutionalized Christianity. Most telling perhaps is the lengthy coverage of Hitler’s infamous speech of January 30, 1939, in which he “prophesied” that the next world war would result in the annihilation of Jewry. That part of Hitler’s tirade goes unremarked here, as the newsletters focus on another threat he made: that continued “misbehaviour” on the part of the churches would result in complete separation of church and state in Germany (488).

The usefulness of Bonney’s volume is unfortunately limited by the brevity of the introduction – much more could have been done to explain exactly what the newsletters were and how they were produced and received – and the paucity and unevenness of the footnotes. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution that provides much to ponder for all students of National Socialism.