Tag Archives: Day of Potsdam

Review of Matthias Grünzig, Für Deutschtum und Vaterland. Die Potsdamer Garnisonkirche im 20. Jahrhundert

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Matthias Grünzig, Für Deutschtum und Vaterland. Die Potsdamer Garnisonkirche im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Metropol, 2017). Pp. 383. ISBN: 978-3-86331-296-1.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Für Deutschtum und Vaterland is an unusual and unusually important book. Its author, Matthias Grünzig, is a journalist, but the meticulous and resourceful research makes the book a significant contribution to historical scholarship. Its topic is the past—specifically the history of the Garrison Church in Potsdam from the end of World War I to its final demolition in Walter Ulbricht’s German Democratic Republic—but it constitutes a major intervention into recent debates over plans to rebuild the Garrison Church. As an activist effort, the book cannot be judged a success: Grünzig’s introduction is dated “March 2017,” and construction at the site officially began at the end of October 2017. But as a work of scholarship—if the goal of “scholarship” is to inform, enlighten, surprise, and inspire critical reflection—it succeeds brilliantly. Anyone who cares about the history of Christianity, the German past, church-military relations, the architecture of Potsdam, or the politics of public memory should read this book.

Grünzig’s central question is about a building. What was the place of Potsdam’s Garrison Church in twentieth-century Germany? His answer is striking and sobering. Over a fifty-year period, the Garrison Church was the site of nationalist, National Socialist, military, and militaristic activity. Members of the congregation from Imperial Germany to the last days of Hitler’s regime loudly supported those causes, and the Protestant clergy, many of them military chaplains or veterans, promoted them from the pulpit. The church building was the site of memorials, rallies, processions, and ceremonies—to commemorate the Battle of Sedan, to mourn ten years since the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, to honor the anniversary of the death of Friedrich II, and to bless the banners of the Hitler Youth. It was both a symbol of an aggressive Fatherland and itself a force in creating and empowering that version of Germany.

Grünzig’s book is organized in three main sections: the Garrison Church in the Weimar Republic, the Garrison Church in the Nazi Era, and the Garrison Church after 1945. Between the first two parts, a pivotal segment explores “The Day of Potsdam,” March 21, 1933. Each section is illuminating—every reader, whether an expert on the German churches or a novice in the field, will learn something new—and each section also brings surprises.

Among the shocks in the discussion of the Weimar Republic is the extent to which the Garrison Church was a hotbed of support not only for the DNVP (German National People’s Party) but for the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party). Military chaplains, left over from World War I, stirred up trouble, and anti-democratic activists intimidated members of the congregation who did not share their views. In April 1932, even before Hitler became Chancellor, the church opened its doors, or at least its doorway, to a torchlight parade of SS, Stormtroopers, and Nazi Party members.

Anyone with even superficial knowledge of Hitler’s rise to power is familiar with the photograph of the Chancellor bowing over the hand of President Hindenburg in front of the Garrison Church. Grünzig’s presentation of the so-called Day of Potsdam shows much more. He reveals an astonishing amount of stage managing, not only by Goebbels, as one would expect, but by General Superintendent Otto Dibelius, who actively lobbied for the Garrison Church to play a key role in legitimating the new regime. No detail was too minor to merit lavish attention. The Garrison Church earned the dubious distinction of being the only Protestant church where Hitler himself spoke from the pulpit.

That inauspicious beginning set the tone for the Nazi period. After rearmament in 1935, Wehrmacht chaplains enjoyed a prominent place in the life of the church. Also notable was the appeal of the Garrison Church as a pilgrimage site both for Germans and for international visitors. Italian dignitaries were frequent visitors, and friendly luminaries also showed up from Hungary, Slovakia, and Japan, along with humbler travellers, including representatives of the League of German Girls from Romania. Grünzig provides a tantalizing list of concerts at the venue: works by Verdi, Bach, Brahms, Haydn, and others were performed there, as was Mozart’s Requiem in November 1944, all part of the ways Christianity and “culture” worked together at the church to legitimate Nazi rule and support Nazi German warfare. A Sunday service with a special performance by the Music Corps of Military District III was scheduled for April 15, 1945, but Royal Air Force bombs the evening before put an end to that.

Yet even in the form of ruins, and long after defeat and division of Germany, the Garrison Church remained a troublesome site. The final section of Grünzig’s book surveys the decades after the war, with an emphasis on the 1960s. He focuses in particular on one question: did East German leader Walter Ulbricht order the building torn down? Although widely accepted, this claim, Grünzig demonstrates, is false. He does not develop the implications of that finding, but it certainly weakens one of the arguments advanced or implied by some advocates of rebuilding: that restoring the prominent place of the historic Garrison Church, with its 90-meter steeple, to the Potsdam city-scape represents the triumph of re-Christianization after destruction of East German Communism.

The straightforward, unadorned style of Grünzig’s book is contrasted by the ostentatious website of the Wiederaufbau Garnison Kirche Potsdam (Reconstruction of the German Church in Potsdam). “We create space to remember history,” the Guiding Idea promises. Visitors can track progress of reconstruction on a webcam or make a donation to restore a building described as “national silverware.” The historian Manfred Gailus, one of the editors of this journal, has suggested calling the church something else. If it must be rebuilt, he wants it named after Friedrich Weißler. Beaten to death by a guard at Sachsenhausen in 1936, Weißler has become known as the “first martyr of the Confessing Church.” He was not killed because of his church politics, however, but because he was born Jewish. Grünzig does not address Gailus’s suggestion, nor does he directly engage the contemporary debate at all. Nevertheless, his patient, detailed, and relentless account speaks for itself: any efforts toward peace and reconciliation associated with the building, the site, or the name of the Potsdamer Garnisonkirche will carry the indelible stain of its history. Honoring Friedrich Weißler’s memory would not erase that stain but, like Grünzig’s book, it would be a meaningful acknowledgment.

1933 as a Protestant Experience and the “Day of Potsdam”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

1933 as a Protestant Experience and the “Day of Potsdam”

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

Lecture at the joint meeting of the Martin Niemöller Foundation and the Initiative “Christians Need No Garrison Church,” Potsdam, March 18, 2017.

Vortrag auf der Gemeinsamen Tagung der Martin-Niemöller Stiftung und der Initiative “Christen brauchen keine Garnisonkirche” am 18. März 2017 in Potsdam.

German original available at https://www.christen-brauchen-keine-garnisonkirche.de/files/opensauce/scss/gailus_potsdam%20m%C3%A4rz%202017.pdf.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, the “Day of Potsdam,” which will see its 84^th anniversary in three days, was no singular derailment of the churches in the fatal year of 1933. Everywhere, Hitler’s Weltanschauung was present in the churches of 1933. But the unique feature of the ecclesiastical and also highly politically symbolic ceremony of March 21, 1933, in the Potsdam Garrison Church was this: it was the only church in which Hitler himself gave a speech during the twelve-year Nazi regime. The new Catholic Reich Chancellor was often praised in the Protestant churches of 1933: very often, brown uniforms and Nazi symbols such as the swastika were seen in churches and parish halls; and not only church songs were sung, but also frequently the “Horst Wessel Song.” On occasion, at the altar, alongside the crucified Christ was also a portrait of Hitler, whom the members of the German Christian Movement venerated in the churches as a saviour of the Germans sent by God. But that Hitler himself would make a speech in the church—as far as we know, that only happened once in the “Third Reich,” and that on the memorable day in the Potsdam Garrison Church, which now, after its destruction in Hitler’s war, is supposed to be rebuilt. Continue reading →

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Pp. 260. ISBN 9783835316492.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Manfred Gailus’ newest contribution to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich is a collection of case studies of theologians, church leaders, and clergy whose writings or activities place them into the categories of perpetrators in or accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The various contributions are the product of a series of public lectures at the Topography of Terror in Berlin in 2013 and 2014. As such, none of the chapters in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 represent new research. Nonetheless, the volume is more than the sum of its parts, in the way that it demonstrates the depth and breadth of the Christian support for and participation in Nazi Germany. As Gailus notes at the end of his introduction, millions of tourists come to Berlin every year, eager to see the sites of Nazi power and commemorations of Jewish suffering. When they come to the Berlin Cathedral or other historic church buildings in central Berlin, they ask questions about the role of the churches in the Third Reich. Gailus argues it is vitally important that the churches work through the issue of Christian complicity in Hitler’s Germany, in order to provide honest answers to these questions and find a healthy way forward.

Gailus-Taeter Following Manfed Gailus’ introductory chapter, there are nine chapters (three by Gailus, six by a variety of other scholars) and a theological afterward by Christoph Markschies, church historian, theologian, and former president of Humboldt University. The various chapters link thematically with one another in fruitful ways. Gailus starts things off with an analysis of the Day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), the day on which Adolf Hitler opened the German parliament in the Garrison Church which had served Prussian monarchs for two hundred years. Drawing on his work in the 2011 book Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, Gailus describes the Day of Potsdam as a great, joyful “Yes” spoken by German Protestantism to Hitler and his National Socialism government. He describes in particular the key role played by Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and leading Protestant churchman in the region. It was Dibelius who was the main speaker at a special worship service in the Nikolaikirche in central Berlin, attended by a majority of Protestant members of parliament and Reich President Hindenburg before they made their way to Potsdam for the opening of the Reichstag. Dibelius chose Romans 8:31 as his text: “If God be for us, who can be against us.” Since this was the same text used by the imperial court preacher at the outset of the Great War in 1914, Dibelius was consciously connecting the patriotic spirit of the First World War to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. While there were quiet notes of criticism in Dibelius’ message, none other than Hermann Goering shook his hand afterwards and declared it to be the best sermon he had ever heard (35-37).

Gailus makes a strong case for the Day of Potsdam as an important component in the revival of institutional Protestantism during the opening months of Nazi rule. Here the German Christian Movement played the leading role. One of example of this is Gailus’ description of a special “patriotic thanksgiving service” held by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Parish on March 22. Meant to be an “ecclesiastical Potsdam,” the event depicted the German Christians as a mass movement parallel to National Socialism and celebrated the salvation of Germany from the “hell” of the godless Weimar Republic (41-42). In the end, Gailus explains the victory of the German Christians in the July 1933 church elections as the result of the fact that the majority of clergy and church people wanted this völkisch transformation, while the forces of opposition within the church were weak (46). “On the ‘Day of Postdam,’ half of society celebrated and acclaimed their ‘national awakening,’ while the other half of society was on the verge of being excluded, shackled, muzzled, and displaced” (47).

Film historian Ralf Forster follows up Gailus’ examination of the Day of Potsdam with a chapter analyzing the occasion as a propaganda event. Forster assesses the media coverage, particularly on radio and in newsreel footage. He notes the importance of the live radio broadcast of the day’s events and the many “special editions” of newspapers, some of which were printed later that same day, and were thus almost as current as the radio broadcasts. He also provides a detailed description of the newsreel footage of the Day of Potsdam, which brought the spectacle of the events at the Garrison Church to German moviegoers (57-60).

Next, editor Manfred Gailus contributes a second chapter, which shifts attention from the Day of Potsdam to the history of the takeover of Protestant church governments by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, especially in Berlin. German Christians united the National Socialist world view with the Christian tradition of belief, seeking to make belief in Jesus and belief in Hitler fully compatible. Gailus explains how the German Christian Movement cultivated mass ritual as its centerpiece, focusing of the Germanization of Protestant liturgy and the introduction of an ecclesiastical cult of flags (74). While the German Christians were initially successful in seizing the reigns of Protestant church governments, by 1934 they faced serious opposition, and over time they fell out of favour among the Nazi elites. This, Gailus suggests, makes it easy to believe they were insignificant. Rather, he argues they were a mass movement which dominated North Germany, Middle Germany, and East Elbian Prussia during the 1930s (78).

Horst Junginger, a professor of religious studies at Leipzig University, draws on his research on religion and antisemitism during the Nazi era to recount the career of theologian Gerhard Kittel, who joined both the German Christian Movement and the Nazi Party in 1933. Kittel’s publication The Jewish Question committed him to the antisemitic struggle against emancipation and equality for Jews in Germany and in turn elevated racial research to a central place in the University of Tübingen, making it into a “bulwark against Judaism,” as Kittel himself declared (87). As the “Jewish Question” became a subject of scientific and scholarly research, Kittel followed this agenda throughout the Third Reich, publishing articles and giving lectures as late as 1943 and 1944 for the Ministry of Propaganda and German universities. In doing so, he brought Christian anti-Judaism into the service of racial antisemitism (103-105).

Thomas Forstner, who recently published Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945, contributes a chapter on the phenomenon of the so-called Brown Priests. These pro-Nazi clergy were few in number compared to their Protestant counterparts—Forstner discusses fewer than 150 of them (123-124). He notes that the Roman Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from these priests, who were drawn to Nazism out of national sentiment or opportunism (not least to shed their celibacy) (129). Forstner discusses Joseph Roth and Albert Hartl as two examples of Catholic priests who engaged deeply with National Socialism.

Hansjörg Buss, author of “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950), carries the Protestant story forward with an assessment of the role of Hanns Kerrl, Hitler’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and his assistant, Hermann Muhs. He portrays Kerrl as a loyal servant, trying to accomplish the impossible task of unifying German Protestantism under church committees into order to fashion a centralized Reich Church adapted to National Socialism (148-149). This effort collapsed by 1937, and Christians like Kerrl lost favour year by year in the face of opposition from anti-Christian ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann. Kerrl’s assistant Muhs, a member of the radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement, suggested “an administrative dictatorship” to “annihilate the Confessing Church” (162). This he attempted to do in part through the use of the church finance office to put serious pressure on Confessing Church pastors and parishes.

Susannah Heschel, whose book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany has received extensive attention in this journal (here, here, and here), provides a useful overview of her important work on Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Through the Institute, Grundmann and others worked to develop an aryanized Christian confession for the Third Reich. Despite his leadership in such an obviously antisemitic venture, Grundmann retained his position within the Protestant church after 1945, even serving as an informer for the East German regime.

Manfred Gailus follows Susannah Heschel with a chapter on Karl Themel, Berlin pastor and race researcher. Themel was a member of the German Christian Movement, the SA, and the Nazi Party, eagerly taking up the position of “Expert for Race Research” with the Reich Interior Ministry. Working closely with the Reich Office for Geneological Research, Themel created an Office of Church Registers, Old Berlin. There they transferred the genealogical information of thousands of Berliners from these church records onto new identification cards, which were in turn used to check the Aryan ancestry of those who needed to prove their racial purity in order to take up various government positions. By 1941, Themel’s office had processed over 160,000 requests involving over 330,000 individuals, and had discovered over 2600 cases of Jewish ancestry—almost two cases per day, as Themel boasted late that year (209). Despite this direct participation in the implementation of Nazi antisemitic policy, Themel was rehabilitated by 1949, eventually taking up a pastorate in rural Brandenburg, then migrating back into archival work for the Berlin-Brandenburg church province! Upon his death, his work collecting and copying church registries in Berlin during the Third Reich was lauded as a service to the archival branch of the church (213). Not until 2002 was Themel’s work publicly denounced by church leaders (215).

Thomas Kaufmann’s chapter on influential church historian Erich Seeberg’s connections to the Nazi Party and the German Christian Movement offers another window into the ways individual theologians and church leaders navigated the Nazi era. In Seeberg’s case, his career revolved around research into transconfessional “German piety” which could be adapted easily to Nazi ideology (228). Seeberg studied Meister Eckhart and German mysticism, then applied his völkisch approach to the study of Martin Luther. Seeberg wanted to turn the Luther Renaissance into a “Luther Revolution.” This meant preaching a Luther who was “dangerous” and not “bourgeois” (229). Importantly, Seeberg also sought to recast theological education in a Nazi mold. His plans included revising theological curricula by abandoning historical-critical methodology and the study of the Hebrew language, replacing them with a “history of German piety” (241).

Finally, to complete the volume, Christoph Markschies writes on behalf of the Humboldt University Faculty of Theology, arguing that his institution still needs to engage in a thorough assessment of its activities during the Third Reich. This is a call very much in line with Gailus’ purpose for this volume, which is to demonstrate the extent to which German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Catholics voluntarily adapted themselves to Hitler’s regime and participated in the National Socialist quest to eliminate German Jewry and thereby “purify” the German racial community. Gailus is driven by the conviction that the German churches still have much work to do in coming to terms with this history. This volume contributes substantially to his project, by compiling some of the best of current research into the German churches in the Nazi era. It also demonstrates that there is still much to do before those Berlin tourists receive proper answers to their questions about the German churches in the time of Hitler.