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Review of William Skiles, Preaching to Nazi Germany: The Pulpit and the Confessing Church

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review of William Skiles, Preaching to Nazi Germany: The Pulpit and the Confessing Church (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023). 293 Pp. ISBN: 9781978700635.

By Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont

Historians of the churches under National Socialism have long been preoccupied by opposition and conformity among pastors and theologians who identified with the Confessing Church. While much of the scholarship has focused on the actions and public statements of Confessing Church leaders in the public arena, William Skiles’ highly readable new monograph is concerned with the ministry of pastors at the parish level. Analyzing more than 900 sermons delivered by ninety-five pastors, Skiles sheds new light on how clergy of the Confessing Church responded to the National Socialist ideology and the regime’s persecutory policies toward its opponents, toward the churches, and toward Jews. While this study conforms to the broader historiographical consensus that the German Protestant churches failed to mount effective opposition or resistance to National Socialism, it also emphasizes that Confessing Church pastors did succeed in articulating, if in non-explicit ways, nonconformity and opposition by characterizing National Socialism as a false and fundamentally anti-Christian ideology, by criticizing the Nazi regime’s persecution of Christians and the German churches, and by challenging Nazi anti-Jewish ideology and policy.

After setting his agenda in the introductory chapter, Skiles outlines in Chapter 2 the religious conflicts under National Socialism, and more specifically, the division in German Protestantism between the German Christian movement, which sought to align Protestant theology and praxis with Nazi ideology, and the Confessing Church. For Skiles, at the foundation of that conflict was “a profound disagreement about the nature of divine revelation,” (p. 28) with the German Christians claiming to find divine revelation in history, national identity, and racial “science.” By contrast, the Confessing Church, in the spirit of the Reformation, held to the doctrine that knowledge of God is to be found in scripture alone. This chapter provides important context as it guides the reader through some of the early milestones in the regime’s conflict with the Confessing Church: the controversy over the “Aryan Paragraph” of 1933, which excluded clergy of alleged Jewish heritage from the pastorate; the subsequent formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League, which formed the basis for the Confessing Church; and the issuing of the Barmen Declaration in 1934. Skiles also effectively challenges in this chapter two common and simplified interpretations: that the Confessing Church was an anti-Nazi resistance group, and that the Confessing Church’s conflict with the regime was essentially about ecclesiastical freedom.

Chapter 3 accounts for the “historic unmooring” (p. 64) of the Gospel from the scriptures under the influence of the German Christians. For Skiles, the antecedents for this are to be found in the development and traditions of liberal Protestant theology in the nineteenth century. This provides the foundation for Chapter 4, an analysis of the “new school” of homiletics emerging in the early twentieth century. Led by the theologians Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others, this trend elevated the importance of preaching, emphasized the authority of scripture, linked homiletics to the sacraments, and affirmed the indispensability and relevance of the Hebrew scriptures. Focusing especially on the writings of Barth, Skiles contends in this chapter that “while the German Christians wished to use the gospel to advance the National Socialist ideology for national and spiritual renewal, Confessing Christians wished to unleash the gospel as a power unto itself [emphasis in original] to achieve spiritual regeneration” (p. 97). While Skiles’ reading of this theological reorientation may be sound, his argument that it “gave Confessing pastors a foothold to express non-conformity and opposition to the German Christian movement and the Nazi regime” (p. 86) remains unconvincing.

Forming the core of Skiles’ study, the next four chapters examine the ways in which Confessing Church pastors voiced in their sermons dissent and opposition to the Nazi regime by challenging its ideology (Chapter 5), its persecution of the churches (Chapter 6), and its antisemitism and persecution of Jews (Chapters 7 and 8). The author is quick to emphasize in Chapter 5 the latitude available to pastors in their preaching, even as he acknowledges that the voicing of dissent or opposition was infrequent and, when it did occur, often implicit and issued “from a posture of obedience to the state” (p. 118). Criticism of the regime was often veiled in the use or aversion of certain words or phrases (e.g., “Bürger” as opposed to “Volksgenosse“), and at times decried National Socialism’s elevation of the “false idols” (p. 129) of nation, race, or Hitler. Skiles also cautions against uncritical acceptance of Dean Stroud’s claim that faithful preaching of the Gospel was, in the context of Nazi Germany, in and of itself an act of resistance,[1] for in this claim Stroud makes a theological assertion rather than posing a sufficient and effective historical argument based on analysis of sources.

As one would expect, pastors and theologians of the Confessing Church also voiced criticism of the Nazi regime’s persecution of Christians and the churches, but again in limited and often implicit ways. They did so by, for example, emphasizing God’s love and justice (in contrast to the obvious injustices of the Nazi state), by relating information about the persecuted (this often accomplished via intercessory prayers), and by invoking God’s judgement on evildoers. It is striking, however, that of the more than 900 sermons analyzed, only thirty-seven condemned the persecution of the churches; and of the ninety-five clergy in Skiles’ sample, only twelve voiced such criticisms, and in so doing only a few were willing to identify the regime in clear terms. Skiles’ numbers regarding Confessing pastors’ criticisms of Nazi policy against Jews, although perhaps not surprising, are equally remarkable: of some 900 sermons analyzed, only sixteen contained criticisms of the persecution of Jews. Skiles considers in Chapter 8 some of the reasons behind this disturbing reality, including Nazi propaganda, concern about the war, a sense of powerlessness vis-a-vis the regime, moral desensitization, antisemitism, and what Peter Fritzsche has described as “general silence” reflecting the German people’s “limits on empathy” (p. 228). The author confronts Confessing pastors’ antisemitism in the preceding chapter, in which he considers the symbiosis between racial prejudice and Christian hostility toward Judaism. Thirty-five of the 900 sermons analyzed contained expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice, and Skiles’ reading reveals that pastors, paradoxically, also made use of conventional anti-Jewish themes and tropes (e.g., the Jews as tribal, the Jews as God-forsaken and cursed, the Jews as idolatrous) to condemn the Nazis and their ideology.

The ninth chapter of this study addresses the efforts of the Nazi Secret State Police (Gestapo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) to monitor what was said within the walls of churches led by Confessing pastors. The reports of these organizations confirm that pastors did on occasion preach in ways that undermined Nazi ideology and policy, and they reveal the regime’s concern over these sermons. The reports, however, also invite consideration of a broader issue that Skiles raises in this chapter: the problem of reception. How did parishioners apprehend and respond to the rare expressions of dissent or opposition from the pulpit? We lack the sources to respond effectively to that question, and while Skiles’ acknowledges this challenge, he also takes an interpretive leap in asserting that “[c]lergymen’s sermons contributed to a public conversation about the moral nature and truth claims of National Socialism” (p. 242). We do not know how extensive that conversation was; nor is it clear that such a conversation was inspired or influenced by what average Germans experienced in church.

In engaging the theological realm and giving the reader a glimpse into what forms of dissent and opposition occurred within the walls of the church, Skiles accomplishes much in this monograph. Yet questions remain. The author’s source base initially appears extensive, but the number and provenance of the sermons analyzed are not effectively problematized, leaving the reader questioning if some 900 sermons are, in fact, sufficiently representative to support his conclusions. When one considers that some 6,000 pastors were affiliated with the Confessing Church in the early years of the regime, his sample of ninety-five pastors remains troublingly small. Skiles also sets out “to demonstrate the extraordinary possibilities for oppositional preaching in Nazi Germany” (p. 15) via sermons that, he concludes, were “a prominent means by which Confessing Church pastors criticized the regime and its ideology and sought to reorient the perspectives and values of their congregants” (p. 255). But how prominent were the means, and how successfully did pastors reorient the perspectives and values of parishioners? And if the possibilities for oppositional preaching were indeed extraordinary, why did so few pastors avail themselves of such opportunities? Skiles concedes that the vast majority of sermons did not voice opposition, and when they did so, criticism of the regime was seldom explicit. His elevation of the importance of the Confessing Church sermon appears, then, based in hope as much as evidence, for this is as much the story of what was not said from the pulpit, as it is the story of what was.

Notes:

[1] Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013).

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 322 pp. ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Matthew Hockenos, a mid-career historian of modern Germany, has provided us with a new and much-needed book about Martin Niemöller, one of the best-known Protestants to speak out against Nazi church policies, who then suffered imprisonment from 1937 to 1945 as a result. This work, published by Basic Books, is carefully researched, well argued, very nicely written, and deserving of a broad audience. It also will reward academics and others interested specifically in the role of German Protestants in Nazi Germany.

For those of us focused on contemporary church history and Nazi Germany, Martin Niemöller is a pretty famous guy. Matthew Hockenos (one of the editors of this Contemporary Church History Quarterly) is fully aware of that. However, he begins his book by acknowledging that Niemöller’s so-called “confession” is far, far better known than Niemöller himself. Beginning “in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” he argues, human rights activists and secondary school teachers made these lines ubiquitous. “College students adorn their dorm-room walls” with these words, he writes, and the statement is “prominently displayed” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and elsewhere (2-3). Hockenos borrows a small portion of these famous words from Niemöller for his title. The more complete version also forms his epigraph for the book:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. (1)

Hockenos is certainly correct to assume that millions of people who know these words do not know Niemöller. His book also makes the implicit claim that many who know Martin Niemöller do not know him well enough.

Part of the problem with “knowing” Niemöller involves hagiography. In our postwar search for Christian heroes within the confines of Nazi Germany, he naturally attracted attention. Niemöller was an important co-founder of the Confessing Church, that 20 percent of Protestants in Germany who resisted the Nazified distortions of Christian theology pushed by the enthusiastically pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen. Within the Confessing Church, he was a leader in what became known as the “radical Niemöller wing,” a rump group that also included the even more famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They were less willing than many in the Confessing Church to combine opposition to Nazified heresies (such as throwing the Old Testament out of the Bible or removing Christian pastors “of Jewish descent” from the clergy roster) with ongoing enthusiasm for the political leadership of Hitler. Hockenos comments, “Previous biographies (two in German and three in English, to date) have done little to probe the depths of this complicated man, preferring instead to present him in a mostly heroic light.” He then describes his book as,

a revisionist biography that weaves together Niemöller’s personal story with the great dramas of the twentieth century that drove his moral and political evolution. It seeks neither to vilify him nor to add to the existing hagiographies, but rather to understand him and his confession and to reveal what his transformation from Nazi sympathizer to committed pacifist tells us about how and under what circumstances such reversals are possible. (3)

The second part of the problem in Niemöller’s biographical treatment, according to Hockenos, is also rooted in the hagiographic impulse: a tendency to focus primarily upon Niemöller’s life from 1933-1945. Hockenos devotes about one-third of his book to Niemöller’s life before 1933. During this period, Martin Niemöller mirrored virtually all of the characteristics that led so many Christians to welcome Adolf Hitler as a savior of Germany from its many troubles. Martin’s patriotism and reverence for authoritarian leadership had been nurtured by his father, Heinrich, a Lutheran pastor in Lippstatt and then in Elbersfeld, both in northwestern Germany. In 1892, the year of Martin’s birth, his father visited Wittenberg to attend the 375^th anniversary of the Reformation, organized as a special, national celebration by the recently installed Kaiser Wilhelm II. “With the crowds cheering, a young pastor in his robe and collar, overwhelmed by the patriotic religious experience, hurled his hat toward the kaiser’s entourage, where it landed amid the honorary guard.” This was Martin’s father. Though chastised by the captain of the honor guard, Heinrich later would tell this story and add, “But I would do the same again” (15).

In 1898 Martin’s father again had the unexpected pleasure of sharing an event with the Kaiser. Wilhelm II, nurturing the robust expansion of Germany’s military and colonial place in the world, organized a trip to Jerusalem to inaugurate on Reformation Day the German-built Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Heinrich had to travel on a British steamer, hired by the German Protestant Church, rather than Wilhelm’s royal yacht. However, though only a simple pastor among more important church officials, he was awarded the last spot on this steamer by the Protestant Consistory of Prussia. Mostly thanks to donations from his parishioners to pay the necessary fee, this chance to visit the Holy Land for such an auspicious occasion became one of the most treasured memories of Heinrich Niemöller. Hockenos then fits this early event in Martin’s life, his awareness of his father’s deep love for Germany and respect for the Kaiser, into the story as follows:

The German Protestant pastorate claimed that it was apolitical and above party politics, but in fact the vast majority of pastors were intensely loyal to the Hohenzollern monarchy and supported right-wing anti-Semitic parties. To celebrate Reformation Day in Jerusalem in the presence of His Majesty was an unforgettable benchmark in Heinrich Niemöller’s life. That his trip was as much a celebration of German power and prestige as a religious pilgrimage is evident in certain entries in his ornate memory book, Up to Jerusalem. . . . The consecration of the Redeemer Church itself was a milestone in the history of German Protestantism . . . . Nothing could better demonstrate the alliance of throne and altar, in his view, and that of many others. (18-19)

A second phase of Martin Niemöller’s political education came when he joined the German navy, an experience he later described in his 1934 memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit. Martin had dreamed of joining the navy ever since his toddler years when he wore his sailor suit to church on Sundays. He became a naval cadet at the age of eighteen, after finishing at the “top of his class” at Gymnasium (a common experience for the intelligent and disciplined Martin). He graduated and received his rank of lieutenant in 1913 at the age of twenty-one (22-25). One year later this placed him at war, and Hockenos’s chapters on World War One and its aftermath show us how the milieu and attitudes Niemöller imbibed from his father shaped him during that fraught period of German history.

Hockenos introduces the background to World War One by describing Kaiser Wilhelm’s great desire to make Germany a world power, especially including the creation of a navy to rival that of Great Britain. He then uses a quotation from Admiral von Tirpitz to give us a window on the logic: “The pressure exerted on England, just by the presence of our fleet—the threat to their position as a world power–better than anything else, ensures peace.”[7] This came in April 1914, so that the peace von Tirpitz thought Germans were ensuring by their aggressive naval build-up and their challenge toward England lasted a bit less than four months. Hockenos also highlights both the irony and the complexity of Niemöller’s exultant response, as a naval officer, the son of a pastor, and a future pastor, to his part in the sinking of British ships and the toll of the dead. He listed death tolls in individual actions from dozens to hundreds. In one case of 1916, after laying underwater mines which sank nine ships, Niemöller later wrote in his memoir (long after the heat and adrenalin of battle), “Revenge is sweet” (36).

Niemöller did not approve of Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication and flight from Germany, to the extent that he himself considered his naval officer’s oath of loyalty to the Kaiser still in place until Wilhelm’s death in 1941. He also resented the advent of democracy and creation of the Weimar Republic. He and his brother Wilhelm, a (soon-to-be) fellow pastor and future historian of the Confessing Church, both sympathized with and participated briefly in the Freikorps, rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the Weimar Republic. Then, though it might seem jarring to those who know Niemöller as an opponent of Hitler, both Martin and Wilhelm gave early support to Hitler, Wilhelm even joining the Nazi Party in 1923. Both of them voted for Hitler and celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Refusing to give Niemöller too easy an out for his early politics, Hockenos writes,

He was a middle-aged man who had read Mein Kampf and knew very well what Hitler stood for. And even after he watched Hitler abolish the national parliament, ban political parties and trade unions, and persecute his opponents, Niemöller refused to distance himself from radical nationalism and anti-Semitism—even on occasion after 1945. (264)

However, Hockenos also admires Niemöller’s gradual change in the years after 1945:

His transformation from nationalist to internationalist, from militarist to pacifist, and from racist and anti-Semite to champion of equality all evinced a more general transformation—from provincial, narrow-minded chauvinist to compassionate, open-minded humanitarian. In this, Niemöller is to be admired and his evolution celebrated. Committed as most of us are today to particular beliefs, we would do well to engage with the life of a man who changed his—even if that effort ultimately falls short of the truly heroic. (5)

I have focused here on that early portion of Martin Niemöller’s life, that which tied him most closely to the world of his father’s German nationalism and rightwing politics. This is the sort of thing that helps explain his early willingness, and that of very many Christians in Germany, to accept the leadership of Adolf Hitler, even with enthusiasm. These products of Wilhelmine Germany faced the high costs and wrenching defeat of World War One, followed by the challenge of democratic norms and cultural openness under the Weimar Republic, including specific difficulties and disappointments experienced during that period. Hockenos tells us that, and it tends to put Niemöller and many of his colleagues on the wrong side of history. Hockenos also tells us, however, of the heroic Martin Niemöller, especially his courage and intransigence in the face of Nazi ideologues interfering with church government and his freedom of belief. Then Hockenos gives us four chapters devoted to Martin Niemöller after 1945.

I like this choice: three important chapters on Niemöller before 1933; three chapters on Niemöller’s struggle against and suffering under the Nazi state, for which he is rightly famous; and then four chapters on those nearly four full decades in which he was a world celebrity. Beginning with his release from Dachau, Niemöller was an important figure in helping the postwar German Protestant Church deal with its past. This began with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945, followed by gradually facing up to the implications of the Holocaust and leading finally to a dramatically new theological stance on the relationship between Christians and Jews. Niemöller served as President of the Church in Hessen and Nassau from 1947 to 1964 and as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968. He was active in the international peace movement already in the 1950s, becoming friends with the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, among others. He became known for his support of the 1968 generation and its liberalizing efforts, his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, his visits to Hanoi, and his visits to Russia.

It is no surprise that Hockenos extends his examination of Niemöller into these postwar years and beyond. This was the time in which Christian churches began a dramatic reckoning with the past, spurred on, of course, by the reality that a Christian nation had murdered six million Jews. Hockenos shows respect for Martin Niemöller as he describes the nine tumultuous decades of his life, but he is right to say that this is no hagiographic treatment. It is rather, a clear-eyed, well-informed look into nine dramatic decades in German history and in the history of the German Protestant Church, nine decades that corresponded with and were impacted by Niemöller’s ninety-two years.

Book Note: Against the Mainstream of the Hitler Era: The Wuppertal Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Book Note: Against the Mainstream of the Hitler Era: The Wuppertal Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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

The following is an excerpt from Manfred Gailus’ book Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit: Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916–1943) (Bremen/Wuppertal: de Noantri, 2018), published on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of the death of the Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse, November 24, 2018.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or Sophie Scholl enjoy today an at least moderately interested following. But who knows the young Elberfeld theologian Helmut Hesse, who was arrested 75 years ago for his courageous preaching for persecuted Jews and imprisoned Confessing Christians and who died on November 24, 1943, at the age of 27, in the Dachau concentration camp? In 1980, in a vivid appreciation of Hesse’s fate, Günther van Norden bemoaned the fact that Hesse’s name had been forgotten and his courageous struggle was almost unknown in his community.

Hesse was born in Bremen in 1916 and grew up in Elberfeld (today Wuppertal) as the youngest son of the renowned Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Like his three brothers, he studied theology from 1935 on and actively participated in the conflicts of the church struggle during his student years. He was significantly influenced by Karl Barth, with whom he studied two semesters (1937-38) in Basel. In March 1938, he undertook a visiting mission to Austria and Hungary on behalf of the Confessing Church (BK), along with his close friend Ruth Wendland, a Berlin pastor’s daughter and theology student. The two travelers were eyewitnesses to the “Anschluss” of Austria to Hitler’s German Reich. Hesse vividly described the experiences in a travel journal. The overall impression of the two young theologians must have been depressing—partly, as Hesse states, the Austrian Protestant congregations knew little of the German church struggle, and partly, the opportunistic backing of the German Christian church governments and the Nazi regime dominated.

In February 1940, Hesse completed his first theological examination before the board of examiners of the Rhenish Council of Brethren (BK). Subsequently, Hesse vehemently rejected the “legalization agreement” concluded by the Council of the Rhenish Confessing Church with the consistory in Dusseldorf in June 1941, which provided for future examinations of BK parish candidates by the consistory. He saw in it a deviation from the spirit of the confessional synods of Barmen and Dahlem (1934). Tragically, the gap between Hesse and the Rhenish BK leadership widened during these years (1941-43) to the breaking point. In the spring of 1943, there was a singular event in the Elberfeld Reformed parish: a council not authorized by the leadership of the BK examined the young pastoral candidate and, in the church service that followed, Helmut Hesse was ordained by his father Hermann Albert Hesse as a “servant of the Word in the Reformed Church, according to God’s Word.”

Helmut Hesse served for a short time as a preacher in the Reformed parish of Elberfeld. On May 23 and June 6, 1943, together with his father, he led the services for that circle in the parish which remained faithful to the two Hesses, in spite of all the quarrels. In the invocation on May 23, the persecuted Jews were remembered. In his sermon on the resurrection of Lazarus (John 10:39-11:57), the young Hesse spoke critically about church politics, including the compromising behavior of the BK. During the intercessory prayer, the names of imprisoned Christians such as Martin Niemöller, Heinrich Grüber and Katharina Staritz were read out. One week later, large parts of Wuppertal-Barmen were reduced to rubble and ruin during night bombing raids. The service on June 6 was dedicated to this catastrophe. Father Hermann Albert Hesse saw the ruined Wuppertal “under the mighty judgment of God.” As in previous sermons, Helmut Hesse addressed the “Jewish question” and talked about it in a way that probably happened nowhere else during a worship service in the “Third Reich”: “As Christians, we can no longer bear that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us is the simple commandment to love one’s neighbour. The Jewish question is a gospel question and not a political question. The church has to resist every antisemitism in the community. In contrast to the state, the church must testify to the salvific significance of Israel and put up resistance against any attempt to annihilate Judaism. In Germany today, every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, is one fallen among the murderers.” In his unusually courageous words, Hesse leaned on formulations from the so-called “Letter from Munich Laity,” written by pastor Hermann Diem of Stuttgart. The report of the Gestapo, which recorded this sermon, concluded that the approximately 150 visitors on this evening were visibly impressed by the preacher’s remarks.

Two days later, the Gestapo arrested father and son Hesse. As the basis for detention, they named “anti-state attitudes” and repeated public prayer for the Jews. After extensive interrogations, the Gestapo summed up the charges against Helmut Hesse as follows: in intercessory prayers, he had read out the names of the imprisoned pastors, which was forbidden; he spoke in prayer against the authorities, that is, the current government; he also prayed for the Jews; finally, on June 6, he made public statements on the Jewish problem in a manner derogatory to the state. His comments on the “Jewish question” are offenses against §2 of the Treachery Act (Heimtückegesetz).

After months of imprisonment in Wuppertal, father and son Hesse were transferred in November 1943 to the Dachau concentration camp. By this point, Helmut Hesse was severely weakened from long-term detention and the withdrawal of essential medicine. He died on November 24, 1943, in a hospital barrack in the Dachau concentration camp.

There were not many Protestants who, as contemporaries in the “Third Reich”, on the recognizable road to disaster, protested and joined the Christian resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of them; the “non-Aryan” lawyer Friedrich Weißler, who was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937, is one of them; the Breslau city vicar Katharina Staritz, with her commitment to the Christians of Jewish origin, and the Berlin historian Elisabeth Schmitz, with her early memorandum of 1935/36 against the persecution of the Jews, are included; and finally, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl in Munich. This list also includes the Elberfeld protesting Protestant Helmut Hesse. Anyone who surveys Protestants in Germany today and asks about Helmut Hesse will generally hear the answer: we do not know! The time is ripe for today’s Protestants to include the life and work of Helmut Hesse in their memory and in their commemorative culture. In Wuppertal, where, in memory of the Barmen Theological Declaration, a monument was erected in a prominent place in the city in honour of the First Confessing Church Synod, one day a monument remembering the young Reformed preacher Helmut Hesse, who died in the Dachau concentration camp at the age of 27, will have to stand next to it.

Review of Peter Gbiorczyk, Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling (1891-1966): Jugendbewegter, reformierte Theologe im “Zeitalter der Extreme”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Peter Gbiorczyk, Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling (1891-1966): Jugendbewegter, reformierte Theologe im “Zeitalter der Extreme” (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2016). Pp. 769. ISBN 978-3-8440-4772-1.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

This is a biography of a little-known figure in the German church, Pastor Wilhelm Wibbeling, a Reformed pastor and church leader in the church of eastern Hesse. Wibbeling’s life and career spanned what the title accurately describes as “the age of the extreme,” and author Peter Gbiorczyk relates this life story on the much larger stage of the theological, political, and ideological movements, divisions, and debates that shaped twentieth century German church history.

Wibbeling had just completed his theological examinations and practical training for the ministry when the First World War began. He fought, eventually becoming an officer, married shortly after the war ended, and was ordained in 1919. His subsequent career showed his lifelong commitment to the renewal and stability of his church as well as his own strong social-political convictions. His political leanings were socialist. He began his ministry as a youth pastor in the coal-mining town of Bochum in the Ruhr valley, where he reached out to working class, Catholic, socialist, and other youth organizations in the region, creating a coalition that focused especially on the problems of alcoholism among youth. A non-church colleague described him in those years as someone “who didn’t act like a pastor at all, avoided church language and was familiar with and understood the socialist movement.”

By the early 1920s Wibbeling had become part of the Neuwerk Bewegung, which he later described as a movement emerging from the “stormy aftermath of the First World War,” the goal of which “was a decisive breakthrough … toward a reshaping of our entire life.” The focus was social renewal and church reconciliation; the context was the Protestant church. Early leading figures in the movement included pacifists like Eberhard Arnold, who went on to found the Bruderhof movement. The Neuwerk group was one of many church, social, and political movements in interwar Germany, and this book gives an in-depth portrait of Protestant engagement in these different groups and the role played by theologians like Karl Barth, Günther Dehn, and Paul Tillich.

Wibbeling served several small parishes during the 1920s, working with a population that was working class and decidedly anti-church (a member of his church council warned him that “if Jesus himself were to preach, there still wouldn’t be anyone coming to church.”) In the village of Hellstein, where he served from 1928 to 1932, the population’s politics were evident in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, in which over 40 percent of the vote went to the Communist party (with ca. 12 percent going for the Nazi party and 35 percent for the Social Democrats). From 1932 to 1945 he served in Langendiebach, a village of around 1000 people near the town of Hanau. The political demographics were similar to those of his previous parish: 51 percent of the population voted for the Social Democrats in the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections (as compared to 18 percent nationally) and 15 percent for the Communists (compared to 12 percent nationally). The Nazi party received 28 percent of the local vote. Despite the fact that Wibbeling fit right in as a Social Democrat, his application for the pastorate initially met with resistance from the parish council itself, indicating the gap between the political demographics within the church and those of the broader populace. On March 23, 1933, the Social Democrat mayor of Langendiebach was ousted and replaced by a Nazi. Shortly thereafter, Pastor Wibbeling joined in the wider church struggle in the German Protestant church. A local chapter of the Deutsche Christen formed, and the national battles about the church Aryan Paragraph and the Reich bishop election began to unfold on the local level. In November 1934 Wibbeling led his parish to join the Confessing Church and became a member of the regional Confessing Bruderrat.

Wibbeling became drawn into the ongoing battles of the church struggle about youth work, pulpit proclamations, and church governance. Although he came under Gestapo surveillance for his Confessing Church activities, he doesn’t seem to have become more broadly engaged politically, and there was a marked contrast between his more outspoken statements and his actual record. The chapter on the persecution of the Jewish citizens and political opponents (including the arrests and imprisonment of prominent Social Democrats) in Langendiebach is a scant nine pages, and while it thoroughly documents what happened in the village there doesn’t seem to be any record of Wibbeling’s taking a public stand. In 1936 he was visited by Elisabeth Schmitz, who gave him a copy of her memorandum about the persecution of the Jews; in 1947, in fact, it was Wibbeling who signed the affidavit that she was indeed the author of the memorandum. At the time Schmitz was trying to mobilize the Confessing Church to protest the anti-Jewish measures, yet there is no indication that Wibbeling brought the matter before the regional Bruderrat. Similarly, there’s no record of Wibbeling being directly engaged on behalf of the 39 Jewish residents of Langendiebach, most of whom emigrated. After 1939, a heart condition kept Wibbeling out of active military duty and he spent most of the war focused on church youth work and regional Confessing Church politics.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany Wibbeling was soon drawn into the debates about denazification. He was outspoken on the issue: after a June 1945 memorandum to the pastors of the Kurhessen-Waldeck regional church announced the need to eradicate the “National Socialist remnants” from the church, Wibbeling responded caustically that many of those still serving in the church leadership, including its president, had been Nazi party members and had signed the 1939 Godesberg Declaration, which sought to “de-Judaize” the church and create separate congregations for Christians of Jewish descent. “Whoever was co-responsible for these decisions is among the remnants that now should be eradicated,” he wrote, and he argued that anyone who had been a member of the Nazi party or the German Christians should be removed from the ministry.

Wibbeling’s stand became part of the wider postwar debate among Protestant leaders about denazification, and this section is certainly one of the most detailed and interesting accounts in the book. Wibbeling became provost of the church district in 1946 and chaired the Hanau denazification commission for church employees (including not only clergy but deacons, organists, and religious educators). Clergy who had been party members (and those sympathetic to them) argued that only those who had failed to fulfil their pastoral obligations and “acted against scripture and confession” could be removed—i.e., that their political views per se were no criteria for removal from office. (This of course undermined the very purpose of denazification.) A striking number of those who came up before the Hanau denazification board had been members of the German Christian movement before joining the Confessing Church.

Most of the clergy who came before the Hanau denazification commission were pushed into early retirement but were able to retire with their pensions; the outcomes of denazification were more severe for non-clergy church employees, many of whom were suspended or fired. The case of Pastor Bruno Adelsberger illustrates the church’s passivity on the matter. Adelsberger was an early Nazi party member and avid German Christian who was described as a “notoriously zealous agitator” for Nazism who supported the “dejudaization” of the church. Unrepentant before the denazification board, Adelsberger was told that he could not remain in his parish but would have to apply to another parish for a position “independently,” and the matter of any further disciplinary action was turned over to the bishop. The bishop decided not to pursue the case, Adelsburger found a parish willing to give him a position, and so he remained in the ministry until he retired in 1967.

The remainder of the book chronicles Wibbeling’s postwar career until his retirement. Like others on the Protestant political left he became involved in the debates about the Cold War and the antinuclear movement. He also spearheaded local initiatives to address the Nazi past, and in 1961 led efforts to create and dedicate a memorial site where the Jewish synagogue in Hanau had stood, joining with the rabbi of Hesse, Isaak Emil Lichtigfeld. Wibbeling received the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany’s highest civilian honor, in 1961 and died in 1967.

Only about 200 pages of this book are devoted to the Nazi era, and while Wibbeling emerges as an intriguing and often outspoken figure, in much of the book he is treated almost as a minor player over against the major historical events of his times. In contrast, there are extensive descriptions of the Neuwerk movement and the political debates of the 1920s such as the 1926 plebiscite calling for the expropriation of property belonging to the former ruling nobility, which drew much support in the working class regions where Wibbeling worked. The result is a remarkably exhaustive portrait of working class Germany and of Protestant church life in such circles, giving an unusual vantage point for the events of the interwar period and the German church struggle between 1933 and 1945. The treatment of the postwar political issues and the debates of the 1950s is equally thorough. This book’s real value may be in its wealth of detail about this sector of German life and society during the first six decades of the turbulent twentieth century, as a backdrop for understanding the events in the Protestant churches.

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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

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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 →

Conference Report: “The Confessing Church’s Memorandum of May 28, 1936 and the Murder of Friedrich Weißler (1891-1937) in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Topography of Terror

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: “The Confessing Church’s Memorandum of May 28, 1936 and the Murder of Friedrich Weißler (1891-1937) in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Topography of Terror, Berlin, May 28, 2016

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

On May 28, 1936, the Second Provisional Directorate of the German Evangelical Church sent a now famous memorandum directed to Hitler personally. This protest, signed by ten members of the various wings of the Confessing Church, drew Hitler’s attention to the fact that in the fourth year of Nazi rule, the church was being repressed by the state “to a very large extent” in what seemed to be an attempt to “de-Christianize” Germany. Secondly, it refuted the Nazi interpretation of “positive Christianity” as theologically unsound. The Memorandum further attacked the Nazi ideology with its divination of “Blood “, ”Race” and “National Identity”. Above all, the authors criticized the arbitrary police measures which had undermined the rule of law, as well as leading to the erection of the system of concentration camps. The memorandum further declared that:

When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

This Memorandum was not without its consequences. Originally it was sent to Hitler privately without publicity, in the expectation that such a private remonstrance would lead Hitler to abandon the policies to which its authors took exception. But less than six weeks later the whole memorandum appeared in a Swiss newspaper, the Basler Nachrichten, and shortly afterwards was printed in the New York Herald Tribune. At the beginning of October the Gestapo arrested the Confessing Church’s collaborator Dr. Friedrich Weißler, who came under suspicion for having authorized the publication in Switzerland. On February 19, 1937, shortly after he had been transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he was found dead as a result of a severe bodily assault. Since then he has become regarded as the Confessing Church’s first ‘martyr’. At the same time, there can be no doubt that his murder was sparked by anti-semitism, since, although a strong supporter of the Confessing Church, Weißler came from a Jewish family. By the Nazi definition, he was counted as “fully Jewish”, and as such had already been dismissed from his post of Provincial Court judge in Magdeburg in July 1933.

To mark this Memorandum’s 80th anniversary, a lecture series was organized at the Topography of Terror Foundation by the Berlin-Brandenburg Evangelical Church in co-operation with Dr. Manfred Gailus. The title of this series was “’With Deep Concern’ over De-Christianization, Anti-Semitism and Arbitrary Breaches of Law”, and was designed to draw attention to the Confessing Church’s Memorandum and to Weißler’s fate. The high point was a public forum in which some 130 guests took part. Martin Greschat, now an emeritus professor of church history at Giessen University and author of the standard history of this Memorandum, described the origins and composition of the Memorandum in its various stages.[1] Afterwards Hansjörg Buss outlined Weißler’s biography and his role in the Memorandum’s composition and publication. In Michael Germann’s view, this was the high and catastrophic turning point in Weißler’s life. Manfred Gailus then took up the story by claiming that no evidence exists that Weißler’s murder was ‘organized’ by higher elements in the Nazi bureaucracy. One could conclude therefore that the motive for this brutal mishandling was the anti-semitic attitudes of Jew-hatred among lower echelons of the SS guards. It is possible, so Greschat suggested, that this murder stalled the launching of a full-scale trial of the Confessing Church leadership, which numerous signs suggest was being planned.

The final contribution was made by Peter Steinbach, long-time director of the German Resistance Memorial Center and emeritus professor of history at Mannheim University. His title was “Treason – Breach of Confidence – Resistance: Reflections on the Memorandum and on Friedrich Weißler”. He believes that Weißler suffered from deeply-felt feelings of isolation, like many other people who were deprived of their positions and rights during the Nazi period. This led to a total disorientation. The destruction of his bourgeois life-style, and the social exclusion which he experienced even within his church connections took an enormous toll. As a consequence he was to pay with his life for this hurtful rejection.

In conclusion, Friedrich Weißler’s grandson, Wolfgang Weißler, reflected spontaneously on how the family reacted to his fate. His grandmother had never spoken about the circumstances of his death. Only in the 1980s when this case was ‘discovered’ both in the church and society more generally was his fate also discussed in his own family circle.

Many details about the Memorandum and Weißler’s arrest still remain open. Above all, there is the question as to how this Memorandum was smuggled out to the foreign press in the summer of 1936, which was the immediate cause of Weißler’s detention. Did he give his consent to its publication? Was there any consultation with or backing from the Confessing Church leadership? (This would seem unlikely, given the speed with which these leaders dissociated themselves from his actions.) If no further sources turn up, then such questions may remain unsolved. But any such new information will not be decisive. In fact, Weißler’s murder meant that the staunchly opposing wing of the Confessing Church, known as the “Dahlemites”, could no longer have any illusions about the character of the Nazi state.

In recent years this incident has become better known both generally and in church circles. Weißler is no longer a completely unknown figure. And the keen participation in the symposium described above means that there is a continuing interest in what Gailus depicts as a modern twentieth century Passion Story. In Steinbach’s view, the whole tragedy and catastrophe of the early twentieth century in Germany is summed up in Weißler’s fate. Manfred Gailus has now completed a full biography which will appear in February 2017, and on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of his death on February 19, 2017, a memorial service will be held on the grounds of the Sachsenhausen Camp.

Notes:

[1] Manfred Gailus, Friedrich Weißler: Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (forthcoming, Goettingen 2017). See also Martin Greschat, Widerspruch und Widerstand: Texte zur Denkschrift der Bekennenden Kirche an Hitler (Munich: Kaiser, 1987); Greschat, “Friedrich Weißler. Ein Jurist der Bekennenden Kirche im Widerstand gegen Hitler,” in Ursula Buettner and Martin Greschat, Die verlassenen Kinder der Kirche: Der Umgang der Kirche mit den Christen jüdischer Herkunft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 86-122; John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), 162-64.

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

This month marks the 80^th anniversary of the Confessing Church’s most courageous act of opposition to Hitler’s regime. On June 4, 1936, Pastor Wilhelm Jannasch of the Confessing Church delivered to the Reich Chancellery a memorandum addressed to Adolf Hitler that stands out in the history of the Church Struggle for its frank criticism of Nazi church policy and, more remarkably, the Nazi attempt to force racial anti-Semitism on the Christian population. It is both unfortunate and highly illuminating that this extraordinary act of resistance remains tarnished by the Confessing Church’s decision to distance itself from Friedrich Weißler, a Christian of Jewish descent, who the Nazis arrested for his role in the publication of the memorandum and eventually murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Following the decisive break in the confessional front at the fourth confessional synod in Bad Oeynhausen in February 1936, the Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church represented by the Second Provisional Church Administration and the “Dahlemites” in the Council for the German Evangelical Church drafted the memorandum to Hitler. The memorandum went through several renditions and, as is often the case with statements written by committees, it lost some of its sharpness as the process went on for several weeks. In Martin Greschat’s book on the memorandum, Zwischen Widerspruch und Widerstand, he identifies the theologian Hans Asmussen as one of its principal authors; other signees included Fritz Müller, Martin Albertz, Hans Böhm, Bernhard Heinrich Forck, and Otto Fricke of the Provisional Administration and Karl Lücking, Friedrich Middendorf, Martin Niemöller, and Reinhold von Thadden of the Council for the German Evangelical Church.

The primary focus of the memorandum’s seven sections was to criticize Nazi church policy, especially the state’s interference in the affairs of the church. Instead of providing the churches with the freedom and protection Hitler promised in 1933, the authors claimed that the Nazi state and party were guilty of publically assailing the Christian faith, muzzling church leaders, and trying to de-Christianize the nation. Church leaders had complained about all of these incursions in the religious life of the population before but never with such transparency and brutal honesty, calling out Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Hanns Kerrl, and even Hitler for harsh criticism.

But by far the most impressive and distinctive section of the document is the one in which the Confessing Church turns its sight on Nazi racial thought and in two succinct sentences rejects the Nazi racial worldview and racial anti-Semitism:

When blood, ethnicity, race, and honor here receive the rank of eternal values, then the Evangelical Christian is forced by the First Commandment to reject this valuation. When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

These are extremely courageous words in the context of the mid-1930s when Hitler was cracking down on dissent with increasing brutality. Prior to the memorandum only a few lone voices from within the Confessing Church had the courage to condemn racial anti-Semitism toward unbaptized Jews. We should be clear, however, that while the fifth section calls on Christians to counter Nazi hatred toward Jews by following the commandment to love one’s neighbor, the memorandum does not condemn the religious anti-Semitism prevalent within the churches that viewed unbaptized Jews as “erring brothers” who crucified Jesus and lived under God’s eternal damnation.

The authors of the memorandum had hoped to keep its contents confidential until after Hitler had an opportunity to read the document and to respond. Despite their efforts, the document was leaked and published in the foreign press in July, just as Berlin was gearing up for the summer Olympics. Nazi officials were irate, as was the leadership of the Confessing Church. Among those responsible for its publication was Ernst Tillich, a down-and-out 26-year-old former theology student with connections to the press. He had borrowed a copy of the memorandum from Friedrich Weißler, the bureau chief and a legal consultant for the Provisional Church Government, copied it verbatim, and shared it with journalists for a fee. When the Provisional Church Government learned that it was Weißler who provided Tillich with a copy of the memorandum, it suspended Weißler for breach of trust.

In October and November 1936 the Gestapo arrested Tillich, his friend Werner Koch, and Weißler on “suspicion of illegal activity,” i.e., colluding with the foreign press against the Nazi regime. All three were sent to the police prison at Alexanderplatz, where they were interrogated, and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937. Because Weißler was a Jew as defined by the Nazi state, he was immediately separated from Tillich and Koch and, after six days of torture at the hands of the SS camp guards, Weißler died. Koch and Tillich, on the other hand, were released in 1938 and 1939, respectively.

During the crucial weeks and months of Weißler’s internment—when intervention by leading churchmen might have been effective—leaders of the Confessing Church, including Martin Niemöller, deliberately distanced themselves from their colleague in order to protect the reputation of the Confessing Church from the political charge that Weißler had acted treasonably by publishing the memorandum. Let there be no misunderstanding: Hitler’s racial state was responsible for the murder of Friedrich Weißler—not the Confessing Church—but it is a shame that his brothers in Christ did not even attempt to intervene on his behalf, being well aware of his special status as baptized Jew.

The Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church should be applauded for the unequivocal stance it took in June 1936 against Nazi racial anti-Semitism. At no time before or after did the Confessing Church repeat this rebuke with such clarity. But in the aftermath of the memorandum’s premature publication, fearing a Nazi crackdown, they disassociated themselves from their most vulnerable of colleagues, leaving Weißler to his fate at the hands of the SS. The legacy of the “Hitler Memo” is in many ways the legacy of the Confessing Church, a legacy that includes courage and cowardice, opposition and accommodation, and resistance and complicity.

Review of Rudolf von Thadden, Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of Rudolf von Thadden, Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948, translated by Stephen Barlau (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 235 Pp., ISBN 978-0-85745-927-5.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Trieglaff is a small village in rural Pomerania, now in the north-west corner of present-day Poland. Following the Napoleonic wars, it was situated in the kingdom of Prussia and was the seat of the aristocratic family von Thadden, who for a hundred-and-fifty years used the castle and estate as their home base for very active participation in the wider spheres of church and politics. The author of this sympathetic account is a direct descendant in the fifth generation of this remarkable family. He was born and lived in Trieglaff until it was overrun by the advancing Soviet troops in March 1945, bringing to an end this era of Junker ascendancy. His narrative has been drawn from the surviving records, along with personal contacts with relations and tenants, both in Germany and the United States, to give us an attractive and instructive description of Trieglaff and its owners across the years. In contrast to many other books written by Germans exiled from their eastern homelands, Thadden avoids both nostalgia and recriminations, and instead adopts an irenic tone, seeking to stress the virtues of all those involved.

The patriarch, Adolf von Thadden, inherited the estate after Napoleon’s defeat and was greatly influenced by the wave of pietistic fervor which swept across Germany in those years. He turned Trieglaff into a center for revivalist meetings for the whole of Pomerania. This was a strongly conservative faith which maintained an uncritical biblical fundamentalism and often expressed itself in sectarian excesses. But it sought to uphold the witness of the individual believer and to prevent the incursion of rationalist or secular ideas. In particular, the Trieglaffers resented the top-heavy controls exercised over the church by state officials, who obeyed the commands of the monarch King Frederick William III in uniting the Lutheran and Reformed adherents into one United Prussian Church. The result was a clash in the village and the secession of a group true to their former loyalties and calling themselves Old Lutherans. They even built their own church at the other end of the village which still survives today.

This determination to maintain the historic orthodoxy of their faith and to thwart all attempts at modernization for liberal or political reasons remained the hallmark of Trieglaff’s conservatism. It was to be revived again a hundred years later, after the Nazis came to power, when the so-called “German Christians” attempted to change both the doctrine and the practices of the church to accommodate Nazi ideology. The then owner Reinhold von Thadden became a leading figure in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in the 1930s, and made Trieglaff a bastion in this cause. As a young student he had been attracted by the witness of the World Student Christian Federation and by the theological writings of Karl Barth, which he saw as a call to return to the deep roots of the Christian faith which alone could counter the current crises in the political and international arenas.

But at the same time, the whole Thadden family was imbued with the Prussian tradition of loyalty to the state. In both wars they loyally sought to enlist in the best regiments, and fully accepted Hitler’s justifications for the campaigns against the godless communists of the Soviet Union. In fact, three of the author’s elder brothers lost their lives while fighting against the Soviet troops on the eastern front.

By contrast, Reinhold’s elder sister Elisabeth demonstrated her obstinate conservatism by strongly disdaining the whole Nazi movement. In September 1943, while at a private tea party, she made some incautious remarks for which she was denounced to the Gestapo. This led to her arrest, imprisonment in Ravensbrück, and in September 1944, to her execution. This heart-wrenching news only increased the conflict of loyalties which assailed the whole Thadden family. As Reinhold later meditated, these events forced him to “consider the share contributed by our Christian conservatives, our patriotic classes to the political conceptions and the monstrous repercussions of the former regime, down to our militaristic thinking and acting, in a word, our share in the actual guilt of our people.”

As it happened, Reinhold had served as a senior officer in the German military occupation forces in Belgium and France. But when he returned to Trieglaff he was immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities and taken off to serve time in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Archangel. Luckily he was released after several months there, and repatriated to Berlin. Only a few days later he was joined by his wife and young son Rudolf, who had been expelled from their home in Trieglaff by the newly arrived Polish authorities. The joy of being reunited was however marred by the awareness that they could never hope as a family to return to Trieglaff again.

In later years, Reinhold dedicated himself to the new venture in German Protestant life, namely the institution of biennial Church Rallies, which drew adherents from all parts of the country, including to begin with East Germans, for a week of discussions about the witness and future commitments of the church. These rallies proved to be highly popular, and indeed still continue. Reinhold’s service in this cause was marked by his determined advocacy of both repentance and reconciliation. He came to be revered as the patron of the now much humbler Protestant church, which sought out ecumenical contacts and adopted policies of social reform in deliberate repudiation of the nationalistic and militaristic attitudes of the past.

His son Rudolf, the author of this book, studied history and theology, and opted to enter academic life. He has since had a distinguished career as a professor of modern European history at Göttingen University. As this reminiscence of his family’s connection with Trieglaff shows, he also wanted to bring his father’s message of reconciliation and international friendship back to the place of his early years. But until 1978 Germans were forbidden to go back across the Oder River and revisit Pomerania. Once that restriction was lifted Rudolf found opportunities to take his wife and family to see his original home and to strike up friendships with the new occupants of the village and estate. Despite the denominational and language barriers, he succeeded in this aim, and returned on a number of occasions in later years. Largely at his initiative, and in memory of all those Germans forcibly expelled in the immediate post-war years, Rudolf arranged for a large-sized bronze plaque to be installed at the entrance of the Old Lutheran, now Catholic Church, which was unveiled in September 2002. The text of the plaque reads, in both Polish and German:

Pax vobis (Peace to you)

In memory of the many generations of German Trieglaffers who lived here and found happiness,

And with all good wishes that things might go well for those

Who make their home in Trieglaff today.

This plaque surely stands as a witness to the power of Trieglaff’s historic traditions to overcome the legacy of domination, conflict, ethnic cleansing and exile, and to build new bridges of hope for the future.

The book has been excellently translated into English by Stephen Barlau, and includes a useful glossary of terms used to describe the structures of the German Protestant Churches.

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: William Skiles

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

New Research on Nazism: William Skiles

By William Skiles, University of California, San Diego

William Skiles is a Ph.D Candidate in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego. Here is a brief description of his dissertation research. Mr. Skiles can be reached at wskiles@ucsd.edu.

Historians of the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany have closely examined the establishment of the oppositional Confessing Church (die Bekennende Kirche) in 1934, as well as the institutional conflicts between factions and figures within the movement and also with the regime and its supporters. Yet the approach of most historians has focused on the institution, its leaders, and its persecution by the Nazi regime, leaving essentially unexamined the most elemental task of the pastor – that is, preaching. My research explores the Confessing Church through the sermons its pastors preached Sunday after Sunday, for holidays and weddings and funerals, and even in the dark corners of concentration camps.

I am concerned with finding answers to a few key questions. First, do the sermons of the Confessing Church reveal expressions of condemnation or support for National Socialism or Adolf Hitler? In other words, did the pastors enter into a public debate about the Nazi regime from their position of influence behind the pulpit? Second, how do these sermons express views either in support or antagonistic towards Jews and Judaism? How often do we see cases of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism preached, or conversely, how often do we see the Jews encouraged or esteemed as religious cousins in Nazi Germany? And lastly, just how often do we see Confessing Church sermons offer dissent, opposition, or even resistance to the Nazi regime. Given their unique role in Nazi Germany as professionals who had the opportunity to speak to the German population about Jews and their tradition, what did they say and how did they say it? And in answering these questions, I aim to understand how these sermons may have contributed to the social and religious milieu of the Protestant Church and, in a wider scope, Nazi Germany.

Of course, one of the most difficult problems is determining what constitutes opposition or resistance. I have examined over 900 sermons to find any expressions about Nazism or Hitler, and also about Jews and Judaism. Categorizing comments about Adolf Hitler and National Socialism is much more straight-forward, as political comments in a sermons stand out as unusual and purposeful in a sermon. For example, a pastor might condemn National Socialism as a false ideology or an ideology in direct opposition to Christianity; or a pastor would criticize Hitler as a false messiah or leader, or condemn other Nazi leaders for their persecution of the German churches.

On the other hand, analyzing comments about Jews and Judaism is more complicated. Naturally, we expect Christian pastors to preach on the Old Testament, to tell the stories contained in this book. Often the pastors’ presentations of these stories is without implication for the support or prejudice of Jews in Nazi Germany, they are simply re-iterations of old stories for a new audience. Therefore, I pay particular attention to comments that reflect views of Jews and Judaism relevant to the current situation in Nazi Germany. I did not catalogue more mundane examples of pastors discussing the traditions of the Jewish people, such as reiterations of the story of Jonah and the whale, for example. Nevertheless, the fact that these Confessing Church pastors preached on the Old Testament and held up Hebrew and Jewish figures as heroes or moral and spiritual examples demonstrates not only their appreciation of the Old Testament as a sacred text, but differentiates them from the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christian movement (Glaubensbewegung “Deutsche Christen”).

This research is an original contribution to the historiography because for the first time we will have an in-depth analysis of a variety of messages delivered by Confessing Church pastors in their sermons to their communities of faith. This will give us greater insight into the nature and the degree of dissent, opposition, and resistance in the everyday ministry of the church, and also provide some insight about public opinion expressed from the pulpit from week to week, whether explicitly or cryptically. In addition, I am interested in how the Nazi regime perceived these sermons and dealt with pastors who were deemed too vocal – the Gestapo repots are superb documents in this regard. Lastly, my research will advance our understanding of the social world of Germans in the Nazi dictatorship, particularly the values and priorities of their communities of faith, and how sermons may have informed political, social, and theological perspectives. In the end, we may better be able to answer to what extent Confessing Church pastors spoke out for the Jews or against the Nazi regime, or as was too often the case, simply kept silent.