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Review of Michael Brenner, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

Review of Michael Brenner, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022). 378 pages, ISBN: 978-0-691-19103-4.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

Midway in his study, Michael Brenner writes, “In this kind of atmosphere, Hitler had it easy” (162), exploiting for his own ends the antisemitic, ultraconservative, and pogrom-like madness drowning post-World War I Munich. No longer did the city stand for tolerance, erudite culture, and cosmopolitanism but, instead, had turned into a haven for violent right-wing extremism. In his immensely readable and well-searched study, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism, Brenner investigates the individual actors and events behind this change.

Brenner first focuses on the background of the revolutionaries and their relationship to Judaism – a relationship that spanned a broad spectrum. The most influential was Kurt Eisner, who, on November 8, 1918, became minister-president of the Free State of Bavaria. Historian Sterling Fishman, whom Brenner quotes, described “the full-bearded” Eisner as speaking “like a Prussian,” sound[ing] like a socialist, and look[ing] like a Jew” (31). Eisner’s Judaism was not of particular importance to him but, at the same time, he did not bear any “feelings of hatred for his Jewish background” (32). Nevertheless, Jewish spirituality influenced Eisner through the mentorship of the Jewish scholar Hermann Cohen, whose writings emphasized a messianic theology, yearning for earth’s renewal and a heralding of God’s kingdom. The legislation he promoted, such as eight-hour workdays and women’s suffrage, concretized this spiritual hope. Eisner was unsuccessful in translating his ideas into reality and ultimately failed to win the support of the Bavarian population. For example, only one percent of Bavarian women voted for Eisner’s Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (42). His term was brief, ending on February 21, 1919, with a bullet from the gun of Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, a rejected applicant to the antisemitic Thule Society. Though many antisemites praised the assassination, Count Arco’s act failed to gain him admittance to the Society due to his mother’s Jewish background.

Of all the revolutionaries, Gustav Landauer most embraced Jewish spirituality, especially the biblical prophets and their hope for a better world. Like Hermann Cohen’s relationship with Kurt Eisner, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was an intellectual mentor to Landauer, who, more than his peers, “recognized a Jewish dimension to the revolution” (61). On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Council Republic appointed Landauer the People’s Commissioner for Public Education, Science, and Arts. In leadership, he was joined by Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, both of whom had Jewish backgrounds. Mühsam had officially left the organized Jewish community as a religious denomination in 1926 but remained in solidarity with fellow Jews. The much younger Toller came from the “border region between Germany and Poland, where Eastern European Jews intersected with West European Jewry” (77). He rarely referred to his Jewish background during the revolutionary period but, in later writings, reflected positively on it.

All the revolutionaries under discussion suffered at the hands of the right-wing Freikorps. On May 1, 1919, Freikorps members arrested Landauer and “brutally murdered” him the following day in Munich’s Stadelheim prison (67). Mühsam, too, was arrested and imprisoned in a Franconian abbey, a fact that Brenner states more than likely spared him from the same fate. Still, he was not released until December 20, 1924. Toller was active in almost all the revolutionary governments and only survived the Freikorp’s wrath by hiding. In June 1919, he was captured, tried, and sentenced to a five-year prison term.

The final leader that Brenner writes about is Eugen Leviné-Nissen, who he describes as a “‘Jewish Bolshevik’ that antisemites could not have done a better job inventing” (87). Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, his native language was German, a fact that antisemites neglected to recognize. Leviné turned away from his Jewish faith early in life and embraced Communism. Editor of Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Party newspaper, he led the final Communist Council in Munich. Captured on June 3, 1919, at thirty-six years of age, he was sentenced to death and executed two days later, leaving a wife and children.

Although other individuals had various degrees of attachment to Judaism among the revolutionary leadership, chroniclers of the revolution failed to mention that most Munich Jews did not readily identify with radical socialism or support the council-style republics. Brenner quotes Werner Cahnmann, a Munich native and sociologist who later immigrated to the United States, “The council republic was represented as ‘Jewish’ from the outset…. On the other hand, the much more characteristic involvement of Jews on the other side was hardly ever mentioned” (94). Indeed, Brenner reminds us that historian Thomas Weber’s research found that “the percentage of people in the Freikorps with Jewish ancestry roughly corresponded to their percentage in the overall population” (96).

Chapter Three, “A Pogrom Atmosphere in Munich,” recounts the intensification of antisemitism following the Freikorps capture of Munich in early May 1919. The provincial Münchener Stadtanzeiger followed this worsening pattern, deteriorating from its tolerant stance toward Jews to comparing them with vermin – a charge also made later by National Socialists. The linguistic scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer also chronicled antisemitism’s increase, noting, “In truth, the Jews have it no better than the Prussian here; they share the fate of being blamed for everything, and depending on the situation they are either the capitalists or the Bolshevists” (130).

Catholic leaders did not help the situation for Munich’s Jews. Utilizing the online reports from the Vatican’s Bavarian Nunciature, Brenner details how Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, embraced and spread lies about Kurt Eisner’s Eastern European origins – he was born in Berlin – labeling him a “Galician Jew” (119). His assistant, Monsignor Lorenzo Schioppa, likewise defamed the revolutionaries by writing to the Vatican, “The Munich Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council is made up of the dregs of the population, of lots of non-Bavarians from the navy, Jews, natives who have long been rebelling against the nobility and the clergy, and hardly of citizens and soldiers who were actually at the front” (120-121). Schioppa ignored Toller’s thirteen months in the front-line trenches of World War I. Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, joined this clerical maligning bandwagon by describing Eisner as a “foreign Galician writer.” He also refused to meet with council republic representatives. However, Faulhaber granted an audience to Count Arco, Eisner’s assassin. Building on the research of the German historian Antonia Leugers, Brenner quotes extensively from Faulhaber’s diaries, recently transcribed from their original Gabelsberger shorthand and made available online, to reveal the archbishop’s conviction that the revolution was the work of Jews.

For their part, most of Munich’s Jews made every effort to disassociate themselves from the revolutionaries. Brenner stresses that they were not alone in wanting to avoid situations that had the potential to fuel antisemitism. For example, he describes how the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and the Zionist Association for Germany’s Chair Kurt Blumenfeld counseled Walter Rathenau in Berlin to decline the post of German Foreign Minister. Rathenau was murdered in June 1922 by right-wing assassins less than five months after he took office. Still, Brenner emphasizes there was a “wide range of views…inside the Jewish community” (148).

Chapter Four details the violence that followed the revolution’s end. Brenner notes that “between 670 and 1,200 people” were murdered following the final breakdown of the revolutionary governments (163). Eventually, Gustav von Kahr was elected Bavarian Prime Minister in March 1920, supported by the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), of which he was a member even though he was a Protestant. An antisemite, one of his first acts was to target East European Jewish immigrants for expulsion. His first effort was relatively unsuccessful, though he would implement a similar policy more successfully during his later tenure as Bavarian State Commissioner. Kahr surrounded himself with right-wing politicians such as Franz Gürtner, who would also later serve in Hitler’s government as Reich Justice Minister. Kahr’s government enabled the intensification of Munich’s antisemitic atmosphere. Brenner recounts the newly arrived Helene Cohn’s letter to the editor of Das Jüdische Echo, “Never before in my life have I sensed around me such a degree of hate-filled passion as in the streets of this city. When I buy newspapers on the street corner, look at bookstore displays, hear a conversation in a tram or restaurant – everyone is filled with hate and inflammatory defamations of Jews” (185). One of the perpetrators of this hatred was Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, the publisher of Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, the city’s most influential newspaper. Cossmann was a convert from Judaism to Catholicism who worked overtime to distance himself from his background. He served as a chief propagator of the stab-in-the-back myth and zealously propagated antisemitism. He went out of his way to defame Kurt Eisner’s former secretary, Felix Fechenbach, initiating a legal proceeding against him that some compared to France’s trial of Alfred Dreyfus.

This seething cesspool of hatred and mindless violence made Hitler’s rise possible. In Chapter Five, Brenner briefly recounts the 1923 Putsch and its aftermath due to its extensive coverage in other works. He is more interested in capturing the climate in Munich that led to the Putsch. Brenner returns to Archbishop Faulhaber, whom the Holy See elevated to a cardinal in March 1921. In 1922, speaking at the dedication of a Catholic school, Faulhaber declared, “In Bavaria there is still an army that won’t let the Christian denominational school be robbed by the revolutionary Jews. The people ha[ve] people now, and now we will see if we live in a people’s state or in a Jews’ state” (247). The following year, in a sermon on All Saints’ Day, Faulhaber seemingly spoke against Munich’s overarching antisemitic climate by proclaiming, “With blind hatred against Jews and Catholics, against peasants and Bavaria, no wounds will be healed. …Every human life is something precious” (248). Just over a month later, the Central Committee of Munich Catholics issued a statement printed in the Bayerischer Kurier: “The Herr Cardinal said nothing in his sermon other than what the commandment to love your neighbor announces and demands, that excludes no human being from love. Of course, he never wanted to excuse the sins committed by Jewish revolutionaries and profiteers against the German people and their well-being over the last few years” (248). Brenner is convinced that the cardinal had a hand in the statement’s release. His clerical secretary would make a similar about-face on behalf of Faulhaber following the cardinal’s well-known 1933 Advent sermons.

The antisemitic climate in Munich would eventually lessen after Heinrich Held became Minister President of Bavaria in July 1924 and brought stability. Still, no Jewish politician would hold government office in Bavaria following the revolution or even after 1945. Brenner’s work brilliantly reveals how antisemitism rose from Munich’s gutters to dominate early interwar society and politics. As he points out, even today, Kurt Eisner remains an outsider, commemorated only on a street sign in Neuperlach, far outside central Munich. On the other hand, Cardinal Faulhaber and Eugenio Pacelli’s names remain on centrally located street signs in the city’s center.

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Public Lecture: “‘The Church is not Afraid of History’: The Opening of the Vatican Archives, 1939-1958”

By: Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This lecture, the Hal Israel Endowed Online Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations, was delivered for Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization on November 5, 2020.

Before we begin, I would like to note for the record that the views expressed in this lecture are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization. It is such an honor and pleasure to be invited by the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University to deliver the Hal Israel Endowed Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Relations. I especially want to thank Dr. Anna Sommer Schneider, Associate Director for the Center for Jewish Civilization. I have had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Schneider since we met at an important conference on antisemitism held at Indiana University over a decade ago and I know a kindred spirit when I see one!

I am going to start my comments today in the summer of 1996. As a blissfully naïve late-twenty-something Ph.D. candidate in modern German History at the University of Maryland, I had finally landed on a dissertation topic and had arrived at the Catholic University’s Archives in Washington, D.C. I had learned that Catholic University housed the personal papers of Cardinal Aloisius Muench. American-born Cardinal Muench was the most powerful American Catholic figure and influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and subsequent West Germany between 1946 and 1959. Cardinal Muench held the diplomatic positions of apostolic visitor, then regent, and finally Pope Pius XII’s nuncio, or papal diplomat to Germany. I was delighted to have access to his personal papers, for the personal papers of papal diplomats are typically held in the Vatican’s own archives in Rome. In one of those accidents of history, Cardinal Muench had shipped the bulk of his papers to the United States so that a young American priest could utilize them to write a biography of the cardinal. Happily for me, his papers stayed in America, and so I arrived on my first day, put on my white gloves, and requested the collection. I came across 1957 correspondence between Cardinal Muench and Monsignor Joseph Adams of Chicago. Muench was describing his most recent audience with Pope Pius XII on a spring day in Rome. Muench and Pius were close, bonded by their ties to and love of Germany and its people. They were at ease with one another and, by the time of this audience, had worked together for over 11 years. In this particular May 1957 audience, the pope – and I’m quoting now – told Muench […a] “story…with a great deal of delight.” I continue to quote here: “Hitler died and somehow got into heaven. There, he met the Old Testament prophet Moses. Hitler apologized to Moses for his treatment of the European Jews. Moses replied that such things were forgiven and forgotten here in heaven. Hitler [was] relieved,” continued the pope, and “said to Moses that he [Hitler] always wished to meet [Moses] in order to ask him an important question. Did Moses set fire to the burning bush?” Let me stop here and explain the two references in the “joke.” The pope was making an equivalency between two historical events. The first: the Jewish prophet Moses’ arbitration of the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people after an angel of God appeared to him in a burning bush. The second: Hitler’s rumored involvement in the 1933 Reichstag (parliament) fire, an event that facilitated consolidation of Hitler’s dictatorial powers. Muench closed his letter to Monsignor Adams with this line: “Our Holy Father told me the story with a big laugh.”

So here I was, feeling dumbfounded among other things. The “delight” and “laughter” described by Cardinal Muench indicated to me that neither he nor the pope appeared to understand the inappropriateness of telling a joke relating to the murder of six million European Jews. To my eyes, this exchange between them – one a prince of the church and the other in the chair of Saint Peter as God’s representative on earth for faithful Catholics like myself – demonstrated that neither placed much importance on the Jewish experience under National Socialism. Some might say it captures the failure of the institutional Roman Catholic Church to undertake a strong and public position of sensitivity, respect, and positive action vis-à-vis Jews and Judaism during the papacy of Pius XII.

But what could be carefully researched was limited by the fact that at that time (the late 1990’s), the full archives of Pius XII were still closed. No longer. On March 2, 2020, these archives fully opened. Announced by Pope Francis on March 4, 2019, on the 80th anniversary of the election of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) to the office of pope, these new archives consist of an estimated 16 million pages in dozens of languages, spread across multiple archives in Rome and Vatican City. In an ironic twist of history, the much-anticipated archives had to close after four days due to the COVID 19 pandemic. They reopened in early June, and, considering normally scheduled summer closures in July and August, researchers have so far had less than 90 days in the archives. Today I will reflect on their early research findings and the meaning of the archives for Christian-Jewish relations.

The church is complex and so are its archives. Nor are the archives that opened this year completely new. Important but incomplete documentation has been available beginning in 1965 as part of the published series Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War. Also already available are archives from the pontificate of Pius XI, available in full since 2006, and those of the Vatican Office of Information for Prisoners of War, available since 2004.

For scholars of the churches during World War II, the Holocaust, and the postwar period, we are witnessing an exciting moment. I’m going to first talk about findings in the archives from the perspective of what we learned this last decade from the archives covering the years 1922 to 1939. I will then move to preliminary early findings that have begun to appear since last March.

No modern pope has been as scrutinized as Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Soft spoken, aristocratic, and trained in law and diplomacy, scholars have only been able to study Pius XII through Vatican documents up to 1939 (the date of the end of Pius XI’s reign). Sometimes called “Il Papa Tedesco” (the German Pope) Pius XII was enormously popular with the German people during his time as papal diplomat to Germany from 1917-1929. From 1930 to 1939, he served Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, as Secretary of State, the second most powerful position in the Vatican hierarchy. When he became pope in 1939, he controlled the worldwide Catholic Church and the tens of millions of Catholics in a Europe on the brink of war.

Portions of the Vatican’s archival record for the 1922-1939 period are available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With thousands of archival pages at my disposal in the Museum’s reading room, three growing children and a full-time job, I decided to approach the material by looking at two key events in Holocaust history: the response of the Vatican and the German Catholic church to the first anti-Jewish laws in 1933 and to the Night of Broken Glass pogrom in 1938. My detailed findings are published elsewhere. Here, let me try to capture some highlights. Let us go back to March 1933. On March 23, 1933, the German parliament passed the so-called “Enabling Law,” abolishing democracy and the constitutional state in Germany. For our purposes, of especial interest is the statement German Chancellor Adolf Hitler made, promising to “respect all treaties between the Churches and the states” and that the “rights” of the Churches would “not be infringed upon.” In response, on March 28, the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference seated in the city of Fulda removed the current ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. On the same day that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference reversed the ban on Nazi Party membership for German Catholics, the Nazi party leadership ordered a boycott, to begin on April 1, at 10 a.m., directed against Jewish businesses and department stores, lawyers, and physicians. A second discriminatory law swiftly followed. On April 7, the passage of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service contained the so-called Arierparagraph, stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service. State-sponsored Nazi persecution of its Jewish population had begun.

I was curious about the correspondence going to and coming back from the Vatican around these two extremely sensitive issues. Most surprising to me were letters to German bishops, the nuncio, or to the pope himself from German Catholics, including priests, who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. I will give just one example. Princess Georg von Sachsen-Meiningen, who had joined the Nazi party already in May 1931 on her thirty-sixth birthday, tried to explain her distress in a letter to the Holy Father. She was responding to the fact that in the fall of 1930, the pastor of Kirchenhausen bei Heppenheim in the Diocese of Mainz declared in a sermon that no Roman Catholic could be a member of the Nazi Party, and, further, any active member of the Nazi party could be refused the sacraments. Countess Klara-Maria wrote to her pope, “as a good Catholic, I fear to end up in a conflict of conscience and to be in danger of punishment by the Church. If these measures and rules of the Mainz diocese are taken up by other dioceses, I will not be the only one to find myself in this conflict, but joined by hundreds and thousands of men and women who have decided to heroically fight for any culture or world opinion that will destroy Marxism and Bolshevism.”

While letters like this must be weighed against a population of nearly thirty million German Catholics, what they tell us is that fear of losing their flock to the growing Nazi movement was a factor for the Vatican and the German Catholic Church when making decisions. In lifting their ban on Nazi membership for Catholics, a decision was made to compromise, especially if, as Hitler stated in his March 23 address, the Church would be left alone.

This thinking was at play – alongside prejudiced views of Jews buttressed by 2,000 years of Church teachings – when the next test came: the April laws of 1933. Pope Pius XI himself was asked to intervene in a letter from unnamed – I am quoting here – “high-ranking Jewish notables.” In an internal memorandum, the pope transmitted this request to Secretary of State Pacelli. The precise language Pacelli, the future pope, used is as follows: “It is in the tradition of the Holy See to fulfill its universal mission of peace and love for all human beings, regardless of their social status or the religion to which they belong […].” The memorandum then asked for the advice of the papal nuncio in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, and of the German bishops in formulating a response. The answer sent back from Berlin was clear: the Church should not intervene beyond conveying “the will of Catholicism for universal charity.”

Why this response? Fear of alienating Catholics attracted to Nazism; fear of losing the independence of Church practices in the new Nazi state, and, finally the mentality best captured by the response of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich. In a letter dated April 10, Cardinal Faulhaber, like Orsenigo, discouraged the Holy See from intervening. He wrote to Pacelli: “Our bishops are also being asked why the Catholic Church, as often before in history, has not come out in defense of Jews. This, at present, is impossible, because the war against the Jews would also become the war against the Catholics; also, the Jews can defend themselves, as the quick end to the boycott has shown.”

Five years later, after the devastating Night of the Broken Glass pogrom, Secretary of State Pacelli would again receive a missive asking the Vatican to denounce what many consider to be the opening act of the Holocaust – total destruction of every Jewish man, woman and child. This time, the missive was from one of his own. Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, 5^th archbishop of Westminster, wrote to Pacelli requesting papal condemnation of the pogrom. Pacelli refused on behalf of the pope, who had recently suffered a heart attack. The official Vatican response read as follows: “The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

We have here another unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church. He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

To wrap up on the topic of the 1922-1939 archives, these millions of documents still have so much potential. Open since 2006, fourteen years have not nearly exhausted the possibilities. For me, I learned the lesson that the response of the Catholic Church to Nazi treatment of Jews cannot be separated from the Church’s response to Nazi treatment of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. What do I mean? The last weeks of March and first weeks of April 1933 make painfully clear that the Catholic Church’s decisions and responses to persecution of their own co-religionists influenced and even dictated their tepid response to the mistreatment of Jews. Another lesson: the role that 2,000 years of Catholic prejudice against Jews played from the lowest to highest levels of the Church during these fraught years should and must be studied beyond the person of the pope himself. The 1922-1939 archives are rich with material from ordinary Catholics, their priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals and from their Jewish neighbors, grasping for any help they might find and typically not finding it.

Fast-forward to March 2020. Since their opening on March 2, the fascination with the 1939-1958 materials has only grown. A documentary by award-winning director Steven Pressman, titled Holy Silence, premiered in January of this year. It garnered over 3,000 views when shown as part of a recent joint program between the Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Film Institute of San Francisco. An interview with Hubert Wolf, a historian at the University of Münster whose team was among those in the archives that first week in March went viral. More recently, Brown University historian David Kertzer’s article in The Atlantic on his and his research collaborators’ findings resulted in a counter-article in none other than L’Osservatore Romano. This is the daily newspaper of the Vatican City State which reports on the activities of the Holy See and events taking place in the Church and the world.

Earlier this month, I stood in the Vatican Apostolic Archive for the first time in my life. Where does one begin with the many questions that I have been accumulating since that first day in the Catholic University archives? With limited time to work in the archive, I decided to follow up on an old question that has nagged at me since those early days at the Catholic University Archives – that of Pius XII’s thought process as he pleaded for clemency for Germans indicted and convicted for war crimes by Allied courts in occupied Germany. Scholars have already established that Pius XII and his key advisors involved themselves in clemency efforts for convicted German war criminals, most especially Catholic ones. I recalled that even Muench had questioned this practice, telling U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy in 1950 that some championed by the Vatican “were up to their elbows in blood.”

Selecting a folder labeled “Prisoners of War, 1950-1959” from the papers of the Vatican’s diplomatic headquarters in Germany, I started to turn the fragile pages in the beautifully appointed “Pius XI Study Room.” Midway through the folder, the subject heading “Case Oswald Pohl” caught my eye. Oswald Pohl joined the Nazi party in 1926 and the SS in 1929. The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was an elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party that served as Hitler’s personal guard and as a special security force in Germany and the occupied countries. Pohl became chief of administration at SS headquarters in February 1934, responsible for the armed SS units and the concentration camps. Ultimately, he headed a sprawling organization that was responsible for recruiting millions of concentration camp inmates for forced labor units, and also responsible for selling Jewish possessions—jewelry, gold fillings, hair, and clothing—to provide funds to Nazi Germany. On November 3, 1947, in the “U.S. versus Oswald Pohl et al,” the U.S. Army sentenced Pohl to death. During the three-year confinement in Landsberg prison that followed the trial, Pohl converted to Catholicism. This, however, did not prevent his execution by hanging on June 8, 1951.

The dates in the folder sitting in front of me also caught my eye – April 1951, less than 8 weeks before Pohl’s execution date. There are three memos written (in Italian) from Muench, headquartered in Kronberg, Germany, to the Vatican’s Substitute Secretary of State Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Saint Pope Paul VI and at that time, Pius XII’s closest advisor and friend. On April 2, Muench wrote to Montini, “I consider it my duty to remit to Your Excellency […] newspaper articles which report news of the Holy Father sending a Papal Blessing to Mr. Oswald Pohl, former General of the SS., sentenced to death in Landsberg.” Muench’s 2^nd memorandum to Montini got even more interesting and confirmed that indeed, Pohl had received a Papal Blessing via telegram. Let me pause to briefly explain that The Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death is part of the Last Rites in the Catholic tradition. The Christian News Service in Munich issued a clarification that, according to Landsberg prison chaplain Carl Morgenschweis, the telegram conferring the Papal Blessing was “purely private, and not a diplomatic step or a Vatican stance.”

Specifically, a Father “Costatino Pohlmann” sent an urgent request to Pius XII with a request that a Papal Blessing be sent to Pohl on the eve of his death, in keeping with Catholic practice, and the pope did so. In Muench’s view, this was “not at all a matter of a telegram from the Vatican, much less a position taken by the Pope on the Pohl case.”

In the third and final memo from Muench to Montini on the matter, Muench took the time to send to Montini – second only to the pope in terms of power and position – a copy of an essay Pohl had written while imprisoned. The essay was titled “My Way to God.” Muench ensured Montini that the essay had come from the heart. Father Morgenschweis “closely followed the radical change of Pohl,” and wrote the preface, confirming that in Father Morgenschweis’ eyes, Pohl converted “only for the beneficial influence of God’s grace” and marked “the sincere return to the Lord of a misguided soul.”

What are we to make of Pius XII granting the Apostolic Blessing or Pardon at the Hour of Death to Oswald Pohl, a recently converted Catholic condemned to death as one of the greatest Nazi overlords of the slave labor system? A week in the new archives cannot answer such a question of moral, ethical and theological significance. It did provide, at least for me, a sense that more historical evidence exists in other parts of this or another of the newly opened archives. I believe the core story we tell now about the Vatican, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust will be fundamentally altered after historians have done their work. But it will take time.

To conclude, why all the intense interest in these archives, 75 years after the end of World War II? And what might they mean for Christian-Jewish relations, which have been on a steady and positive path since the Church’s rejection of antisemitism as a sin with the Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965? There is no doubt that some documents will bring to the fore very tough conversations. Other documents will bring cause for celebration. The vast majority will engender elements of both. It is an overdue conversation, and one that must be approached with humility before our Jewish brothers and sisters – for our Church (my Church) has much to answer for that the Nostra Aetate declaration does not erase. When announcing the opening of these archives, His Holiness Pope Francis said, “the Church is not afraid of history; rather, she loves it … I open and entrust to researchers this documentary heritage.” This is our moment to study the past in a clear, responsible, precise way. This is our moment to accept we will find stories across the full spectrum of the human condition, from the most depraved to great acts of kindness. This is our moment to be equally honest about both the failings and triumphs we are already finding, from top to bottom. Thank you.

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2017), XII + 817 Pp., ISBN: 9783402132289.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

This hefty tome, running past eight hundred pages, is a valuable contribution to the fields of German history, church history, and theological studies. Its inception was a conference held at the Catholic Academy Stapelfeld, in Cloppenburg in November 2016. Considering its subject – individual biographies of the Catholic bishops of Germany between 1933 and 1945 – its length is perhaps not surprising, though its editors caution us against treating it as exhaustive or comprehensive. For this reason, the reader may notice some sizeable gaps or curious omissions: Lorenz Jaeger, archbishop of Paderborn from 1941 into the postwar period, is not included (though his predecessor, Caspar Klein, is), nor are the bishops of Speyer, Aachen, Limburg, and Augsburg. Some chapters seem relatively cursory or incomplete: the chapter on Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber by Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising and an expert on this subject, runs a scant twelve pages, only six of which deal specifically with the Third Reich; similarly, the chapter on Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, focuses mostly on his pre-1939 biography.

The editors, Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, discuss significant forthcoming works on both von Faulhaber and Jaeger to account partly for the brevity of the studies here (13). And while there is a detailed chapter by Raphael Hülsbömer on Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli – later Pope Pius XII – and his relations with the German bishops, there is no attempt to integrate the episcopate into Vatican politics or consider the complicated, at times strained relationship between the wartime pope and the bishops as a collective. The editors justify this in part by referencing the closed archives covering the wartime pontificate of Pius XII; they could not have known that the year following this volume’s publication, the Vatican would finally announce the much-anticipated opening of these “secret archives” in 2020.[1]

Taken together, though, these gaps fail to significantly undermine what the volume brings to existing scholarship. Twenty-six German scholars, the majority with doctorates in history or theology (or both), several of whom direct diocesan archives or affiliated institutes, have produced twenty-one biographical chapters on twenty-three bishops.[2] Conscious that historical literature over the past seven decades has focused consistently on the political behaviour of the bishops, sometimes individually but more often as a group, and particularly on what the bishops failed or neglected to do – namely, explicitly condemn the Nazi regime’s human rights abuses and especially its persecution of the Jews – the contributors to this volume concentrate instead on studying the central purpose of the bishops: the exercise of their priestly, magisterial, and pastoral offices, which encompassed their zeal to preserve the teachings of the church and its values from distortion, and to immunize Germany’s Catholics against the Nazi world view.

In this, the contributors build on Antonia Leugers’ seminal 1996 study, which pointed to the bishops’ remarkably homogeneous backgrounds as a partial explanation for their lack of collective resistance to the regime’s policies during the war.[3] This volume goes further and acknowledges the distinctions not just between the bishops but also between their dioceses, exploring such diverse factors as age, health, the size of non-Catholic or non-German populations, the varied impact of industrialization and secularization, even the regional nature of German Catholicism, contrasting north versus south and centre versus periphery.

Despite these strong differences, the editors emphasize that the bishops remained united in thinking that the real lapse (Sündenfall) of Nazism was not its turn away from democracy, but its rejection of God and complete disregard for his commandments (11). They were not ignorant of the broader arena in which the Church was under attack by those intent on exterminating religion: events in Russia, Spain, and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s urged the bishops to prepare for an existential battle within Germany up to the outbreak of war, a point made by Joachim Kuropka (to whom the volume is dedicated) in his introductory chapter.

This underscored the bishops’ commitment, at once individual and collective, to maintaining their office as pastoral care providers, even at the expense of becoming political actors. As pastors, they consistently identified their primary goal as confronting and limiting the insidious impact of Nazi ideology on German Catholics. They recognized Nazism, with its absolute political rule and its feverish attempts to claim universal jurisdiction over the construction of all worldly meaning, as a grave threat to the autonomy of the Church in Germany. They wielded an array of methods, from sermons to pastoral letters to a rigorous defense of the independence of Catholic youth organizations, to try to keep their flocks immunized against Nazism (die Immunisiering gegen die NS-Ideologie, 7). In this they were successful: there was no steep drop in the number of Germans identifying as Catholic throughout this period, to which the useful diocesan statistics in the appendix testify. Kuropka references Gestapo reports that describe a spiritual battle between the regime and German Catholics, which, he insists, the former lost (27).

Despite this uniform commitment to pastoral work, the bishops were not a uniform group, as their biographies emphasize. In his study of the two bishops of Fulda (Joseph Damian Schmitt and Johannes Baptist Dietz), Stefan Gerber argues that the most prominent members of the episcopate – Clemens von Galen, Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Freising, Konrad von Preysing in Berlin, Joannes Baptista Sproll in Rottenburg – were in many ways exceptions and therefore are not helpful in reconstructing the self-perceptions, motives, expectations, and frictions of the “so-called second row” bishops (347). Indeed, von Galen, bishop of Münster, spoke publicly and forcefully against the regime’s euthanasia program in the summer of 1941 (Kuropka, the chapter’s author, gives this incident short shrift, more interested in other aspects of von Galen’s personality; he does not stress that von Galen spoke on his own, and not as a representative of the bishops), but he was the only Catholic bishop to do so. Other bishops designated assistants to spearhead efforts to help the victims of Nazism, particularly Catholics who had converted from Judaism and who were thus Catholic in the eyes of the Church, but Jewish in the eyes of the regime: Conrad Gröber in Freiburg, Cardinal Adolf Bertram in Breslau, and von Preysing in Berlin all took this route.

Other authors wrestle with source-based or historiographical problems. Thomas Flammer’s study of Joseph Godehard Machens, in the diaspora diocese of Hildesheim (its population in 1933 was less than 10% Catholic; the only diocese smaller than this, according to 1933 numbers, was Berlin) points to contradictory descriptions of the bishop’s personality: scholars have called him warmonger and Nazi and, according to his employees, he was both vain and humble, egotistical and shy, and “trusted very few people and counted even fewer among his friends.” (381) But upon his death in 1956, the Bundestag held a moment of silence, calling him a warrior against Nazism, and the Jewish community of Lower Saxony spoke of him as a friend and a great Catholic bishop.

Christoph Schmider wrestles with the legacy of Conrad Gröber, archbishop of Freiburg, which swings between the poles of “brown Conrad” (for his early openness to working with Hitler’s regime) and of “warrior of the resistance” (411). Schmider concedes ultimately that such a personality abjures a simple black-and-white characterization but instead requires “numerous gray tones so that, depending on the view of the observer, sometimes the gloomy and sometimes the brighter nuances prevail” (433).

Ulrich Helbach writes about how Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne who died during a bomb attack in 1941, has been consistently overshadowed in scholarship by his successor, Josef Frings, and his detailed analysis of Schulte centers on his personality, the challenges of leading one of Germany’s larger dioceses, and the impact of a serious heart attack (at the relatively young age of fifty-six, in 1927, six years into his tenure as archbishop) on his vocation and his reactions to Nazism. His observation about Schulte’s tendency towards compromise and conflict reduction (161), strengths which served him well in the 1920s, were a completely different matter under Nazism, and one that might be applied to other bishops as well.

All contributors treat diocese and region as integral to understanding the personality and behaviour of the bishop in question, and do not shy away from posing difficult historical and theological questions. In one of the longest chapters, Bernhard Schneider situates Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser’s particular difficulties partly in the task of shepherding the peripheral diocese of Trier. So, on the one hand, Bornewasser was deeply involved in formulating a church-based approach to the pro-German campaign of the 1935 Saar plebiscite, a task for which his ardent love for the Fatherland (which he distinguished from “unchristian nationalism”) prepared him well and which seemingly put him in step with the regime (260). On the other hand, in September 1941 he preached about the prohibition against killing, referring to the T4 program and referencing other episcopal writings (including von Galen’s, indirectly), apparently willing to risk the wrath of the regime in doing so.

Andreas Hölscher writes of Jacobus von Hauck as decisive in shaping the archdiocese of Bamberg for the twentieth century; in 1933, when he was seventy-one, he was the second-oldest and second-longest serving of all the German bishops, having been archbishop since 1912. Since the 1990s his reputation has been shaped by accusations of accommodation with Nazism and a failure to speak out on behalf of human rights. But as Hölscher argues, these questions can, and should, be asked of all the bishops, and of the Church as a whole: what was, and is, the Church’s mission in connection to the defense of human rights? Does the Church have a clearly defined mission beyond the recognized and accepted ecclesiastical milieu (kirchliches Umfeld, 615)? Hölscher and other contributors address these issues, but mostly by way of concluding remarks, and do not attempt to wrestle with them at length. It should be noted that these questions have risen largely in hindsight, after 1945, and that it is far from clear that any of the German bishops at the time entertained them, either in the safety and security of their own minds or, with less security, in conversation with each other.

While the volume fails to tackle these questions directly, its contributors and editors might claim, with justification, that they lie beyond the scope of their objective, which is to consider each bishop in the context of his diocese. They have eschewed overly moral or hagiographic narratives in favour of critical historical analyses of how each bishop approached his office as pastor, and how this shaped his interactions to the Nazi regime, from accommodation to opposition. In some cases, this spectrum is apparent even within an individual case (the best example is Gröber). This is the real strength of the book as a whole: each chapter demonstrates the significance of background (birthplace, education, family history, friendships) and location in helping to determine the course of action a bishop took. Ultimately the image of the episcopate as a group that emerges is not simply one of collective silence in the face of murder and atrocity, as previous histories stress, but also of collective concern for the preservation of the Church in Germany, a concern that co-existed, sometimes with considerable tension, alongside individual hopes and fears, private dissent and frustrations, and physical and emotional limitations. United they may have been in presenting a unified front to Hitler, but behind this façade these men were individual humans, with myriad strengths and weaknesses.

The tendency throughout the volume is to rely on archival material, though the contributors and editors have also relayed relevant historiographical information, detailing shifting interpretations of episcopal actions and reactions across several decades. Michael Hirschfeld’s introductory essay is particularly illuminating in this regard, tracing the post-1945 history of the bishops under Nazism through three distinct phases that affected the broader narrative of the history of the Catholic Church under Nazism between the end of the war and twenty-first century. In this he echoes, though with far less detail, some of Mark Ruff’s findings in his recent book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980, which appeared in print a year before this volume. Hirschfeld does not cite Ruff (likely the book was not available in time), and the secondary literature included in the bibliographies is entirely in German. This reflects the state of the field, in which – predictably – German scholars have undertaken the great bulk of writing the history of their Church leaders.

This book is currently the most up-to-date collection of biographical chapters on the German Catholic bishops during the Third Reich. Its dedication to highlighting revelatory contextual information by plumbing their personal backgrounds and integrating them more fully into their diocesan environments is invaluable, and is rendered explicitly, as Hirschfeld tells us, to reflect a growing trend: the rejection of the easy, unambiguous understandings of historical figures that our contemporary information society peddles in order to “embrace the grey tones that make possible a nuanced image of the respective personalities of the bishops” (49-50). Many contributors acknowledge this trend as well, and reference research projects of various sizes that are underway, for example of Jaeger and Faulhaber, as already mentioned, but also of Machens and Sproll. Thus the volume will hardly be the final word on many of the individual histories. So too we must anticipate that the opening of Pope Pius XII’s “secret archives” next year will generate a new wave of questions and challenges about the Catholic Church’s leaders in Germany and their relationship with the Vatican during the war. Until then, Hirschfeld and Zumholz and their host of contributors have given those of us interested in the Catholic bishops and their historical legacy much to consider.

[1] “Pius XII: Vatican to Open Secret Holocaust-Era Archives,” BBC World News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47444293, last accessed 30 May 2019.

[2] Hirschfeld and Zumholz define the German episcopate from 1933 to 1945 as consisting of 9 archbishops and 25 bishops, using the Altreich (1937) borders of Germany (pg. 2). The study therefore excludes the Austrian bishops and dioceses integrated into Germany following the 1938 Anschluss.

[3] Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens : Der Ausschuß für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945 (J. Knecht Verlag, 1996).

Review of Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Pp. 408. ISBN 9781107190665.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Mark Edward Ruff, Professor of History at Saint Louis University, has spent the past eleven years completing The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980. This includes four years working in Germany, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the NEH, and the ACLS, as well as visits to a total of “two continents, six nations, and seventy-seven archives” (vii). The result is an important book that takes its place alongside John Connelly’s recent From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Connelly devotes more than half of his book to the period pre-1945; however, the importance of his book culminates in the 1960s, when, according to his argument, converts to Catholicism, several with German or German language roots, and especially Catholics of Jewish origin, inspired the remarkable transition in Catholic theology found in Vatican Two and Nostra Aetate.[1] Ruff’s book is more completely based in the postwar period. However, it also deals with the most salient issue addressed by postwar historians of Germany and of Catholicism: a measuring of the Catholic Church’s response to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, and especially to the Shoah, the murder of six million Jews by a Christian nation within a Christian Europe. Connelly describes the incubation of ideas that led to a dramatic change in universal Catholic doctrine. Ruff describes the first thirty-five postwar years within Germany and the struggle over how to understand the history of Catholics, especially their place within and their relationship to the Nazi regime and its crimes.

Ruff begins with the assumption that both churches, Catholic and Protestant, share a compromised history within the Nazi state. He also acknowledges that both churches from 1945 to 1949 worked to polish their reputations: “Not wishing to further damage Germany’s reputation abroad …,” both Catholics and Protestants “elevated to orthodoxy the picture of the church triumphant, of clear-headed leaders valiantly resisting and the faithful unflinchingly following” (243). Not until the 1980s did historians of the Protestant Church seriously begin to redraw this rosy picture. However, Catholic behavior came under widespread attack already in the 1950s, “Doubts about the moral fitness of Catholic bishops, Cardinal Secretary of States and pontiffs of the Nazi era were cascaded before the public. They screamed from front-page headlines, the magazine covers of the most influential newsweeklies, the glossy pages of illustrated magazines and the best-seller lists in Germany and the United States.” Why did this happen? “This has been a guiding question for this book, since by almost all objective yardsticks, the German Protestant leadership left behind a more troubling record of collaboration than their Catholic counterparts” (244).[2]

Ruff clarifies early on his basic explanation of how the microscope quickly became focused on Catholics rather than Protestants in postwar Germany. First it has to do with demographics. Catholics had been an embattled minority in Germany since the aggressive Protestant, Otto von Bismarck, founded modern Germany. After 1945, millions of German Protestants were left behind in Poland and in the Soviet Union, but especially in the Russian Zone of Occupation that became East Germany. As a result, the percentage of Catholics rose from just over one-third in all of Germany prior to the war to 45 percent in postwar West Germany.

More importantly, Konrad Adenauer and his newly-created Christian Democratic Union—primarily a Catholic party, even though it invited Protestant participation—dominated the early years of West Germany, from the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949 until 1969. Ruff concludes (as “the central finding of this book”) that “controversies over the church’s relationship to National Socialism were frequently surrogates for a larger set of conflicts over how the church was to position itself in modern society—in politics, international relations, the media and the public sphere” (2). Because Catholics were powerful in the first two decades of the Federal Republic, questionable Catholic behavior under Hitler came under close inspection, an attractive target for any opponent of the Adenauer agenda. Protestants, by contrast, not exercising national power, were able to nurture their misleading claim that the Confessing Church had represented the Protestant stance in the Third Reich, and that it had been a church of resistance.

Ruff compresses the massive volume of postwar debates surrounding Catholic behavior in the Nazi era into seven chapters, each devoted to a specific controversy. Chapter 1 on the period 1945-1949 describes both Protestant and Catholic efforts to produce “postwar anthologies.” Each church strove in those years to prove their persecution under Nazism and their supposedly triumphant response. Ruff comments, “They knew—how could they not?—that the church had lost its decisive battles against the National Socialist juggernaut, its resistance notwithstanding” (13). Johannes Neuhäusler, author of the massive Cross and Swastika (1946), a story of Catholic suffering and resistance, personally resisted and suffered himself. He spent the last four years of the war in Dachau as a neighbor to Martin Niemoeller.[3] However, Ruff shows that Neuhäusler’s approach to writing history came “straight out of the playbook of a skilled intelligence operative. He presented evidence rife with omissions and manipulations …. In ambiguous documents that showed evidence of both support for the Nazi regime and opposition, he cut out passages professing support, leaving out the ellipses that would have indicated the cuts.” Later, a younger Catholic historian, Hans Müller, “discovered this cut-and-paste job … and publicly took the author to task” (34-35).

Chapter 2 describes a legal battle before the FRG’s Constitutional Court in 1956 that Ruff compares in significance to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 in the United States. Ironically, however, this German case involved trying to protect the separation of students along denominational lines. The SPD-led government of Lower Saxony had written a law maintaining the option of faith-based public schools, but insisting they be interfaith rather than denominational. Adenauer and the CDU filed a lawsuit, wanting to protect the right of Catholic parents to send their children to publicly-funded Catholic schools. Unfortunately, the CDU had to base its case on the Reichskonkordat of 1933, which had guaranteed such schools. This opened a can of worms. The Reichskonkordat represented Hitler’s first foreign policy success and also a widely questioned “accomplishment” of Eugenio Pacelli and the Vatican. Furthermore, a close 1950s-look at the Reichskonkordat and its origins required also a close look at the Enabling Act of March 1933 that made the Reichskonkordat possible. This Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial power, had only happened with the support of every vote within the Catholic Center Party faction. Critics of Adenauer’s position began to see a corrupt bargain in the Reichskonkordat’s provision of denominational schools and the Catholic votes that had given Hitler his Enabling Act. They also accused Catholics in West Germany of wanting to keep one foot in the authoritarian past, rather than accept the democratic concepts of religious liberty and an open society. In a fine example of Ruff’s ability to describe complex events, he builds this chapter upon six episodes within the schools conflict, from battles under the Weimar Republic, through the writing of the Basic Law of the FRG, to the networks built up by each side during the public relations battles of the 1950s, and finally to the decision of the Constitutional Court.

The Court ruling in May 1957, handed down by a nine-person court with five Catholic members, confirmed the Reichskonkordat’s legal standing. On the other hand, in a complicated balancing act, it also confirmed the right of Lower Saxony to order its own school affairs, since the Basic Law of the FRG had handed all control of education to the states. Ruff notes that this climactic event in the mid-1950s set the battle lines among church historians for years to come, especially the tendency to focus on Catholic rather than Protestant behavior in Nazi Germany. It also hardened political stances, with Catholics and their allies defending the past, including the authoritarian and (to outside eyes, at least) intolerant nature of Catholic hierarchy. On the other hand, critics hardened their stance in favor of a more extensive (and increasingly secular) view of civil society, civil rights, and religious liberty.

Chapter 3 takes us into the 1960s, with a dramatic February 1961 article by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “German Catholicism in 1933: A Critical Examination.” Ruff describes this as “a bolt of lightning,” given Böckenörde’s “array of devastating quotations from cardinals, bishops, theology professors and lay presidents” in support of the Nazi state (86). The young Böckenförde, a conscientious Catholic headed for an impressive career in constitutional law, inspired other members of the “1945 generation” to undertake a rigorous inquiry into the stance of those Catholic leaders. This also inspired opponents of Böckenförde’s critique to organize, including their creation of the Association for Contemporary History, a Catholic body attempting to emulate the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and soon led by the young and “pugilistic” Catholic historian, Konrad Repgen (116-19).

Two American scholars entered the fray at about this time, first the young sociologist, Gordon Zahn, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Zahn spent the academic year 1956-57 in Germany, supported by a Fulbright grant. This placed Zahn in Germany just as the quarrel over denominational schools reached the Constitutional Court and grabbed his attention. Also, as a long-time member of the Catholic peace movement, he chose to interview former Catholic peace advocates in Germany during the Nazi era. In September 1959 he delivered a paper on this topic at a meeting of the American Catholic Sociological Association. In the published version, “The Catholic Press and the National Cause,” he showed how newspapers and journals had preached a hyper-nationalism that, in his view, represented a “critical failure” in their message to German Catholics. Catholics in late-1950s Germany, from Johannes Neuhäusler to the German bishops, reacted angrily to this article, as did the Vatican and the German Foreign Office. These opponents successfully barred Zahn’s ability to publish in Catholic venues, though they failed in their attempt to get Loyola University to violate his tenure rights and release him. Ruff says, however, that they made his life at Loyola “perfectly miserable” until he moved to the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1966. Despite powerful efforts to block Zahn’s impact, he got his book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, into print in 1962, with a German translation in 1965 (143-46). He also inspired the next American thorn in the flesh of the German Catholic Church.

Guenter Lewy, born into a Jewish family in Breslau in 1923, fled Germany with his family, spent some time on a Palestinian kibbutz, and became part of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army. This gave him a chance to shout—in German—while his unit was taking their first German prisoners, “Surrender, the Jews are here!” (195) There is no record that he gave the same warning when he published The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany in 1964. However, the books by Zahn and Lewy in 1962 and 1964 were outside entrants into a field of criticism that raised alarms among defenders of the church in Germany. Among other things, church officials and archivists decided never again to give outsiders easy access to the sort of documents used by Zahn and Lewy, as Ruff highlights in his title to Chapter 6, “Guenter Lewy and the Battle for Sources.”

The most famous of all the early 1960s battles involved Rolf Hochhuth and his play, The Deputy, first performed in 1963. We all know this to be an early entry into the “Pius Wars,” with its condemnation of the pontiff’s alleged silence in the face of the Holocaust. Ruff gives a useful background on Hochhuth, the original production of the play, and the bitter conflicts that ensued. He concludes that “counter-strikes by the defenders of the beleaguered pontiff transformed a debate about the silence of the wartime pope into something more injurious to their cause. This was a debate about freedom of expression, civil liberties and tolerance, when in the early to mid-1960s societal attitudes on these subjects were fundamentally shifting” (156). In fact, Ruff says controversy about The Deputy “marked the fundamental turning point in the battles for the Catholic past. It represented the last gasp of the Catholic milieu, the final extraordinary mobilization of organizations, politicians and clerics. But this time it was unable to prevent a fundamental taboo from being not just infringed but shattered” (192).

Chapter 7 brings us into the 1970s and 1980s, with two powerful antagonists, Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen, squaring off against each other. They did so in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in their scholarly publications, and with assistance from their graduate students. Scholder, in Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Band 1 (Frankfurt, 1977), did begin to see weaknesses in the Protestant response to the Nazi takeover in 1933. However, he also attempted to write about the Catholic Church, and, in his opening salvo, an article in the FAZ, he resuscitated what he had to admit was a speculative claim about linkage between Catholic Center Party votes for the Enabling Act and Hitler’s decision to negotiate a Reichskonkordat. This article, a sort of advertisement for his forthcoming book, “focused exclusively on the ignominious role played by Catholic politicians and ecclesiastical leaders in the catastrophe of 1933. Nowhere was the Protestant past from 1933 to be found in either headline or article” (226). Repgen, leader of the Association for Contemporary History of the Catholic Church, responded with vigor and tenacity, leading to a set of exchanges from 1977 to 1979. In those years Scholder, a professor of church history at Tübingen had several advantages. These included his strong political contacts to the FDP, his easy access to the press, and his role as a frequent commentator on television.

Even if Adenauer and the Catholic CDU dominated the first twenty years of the Federal Republic and even if Catholics represented 45 percent of the population, certain advantages fell not just to Scholder but to Protestants in general throughout the period from 1945 to 1980. This included the fact that Protestant behavior in Nazi Germany did not yet fall under close inspection, as did Catholic behavior. It included advantages such as that which Scholder enjoyed in his relationship to German media and the German establishment in his conflict with Repgen, despite Repgen’s ability to identify weak areas in Scholder’s arguments. It is also possible to gain from this very fine book by Mark Ruff the sense that first-generation defenders of the Catholic Church in Germany had to struggle not just with the past, but also with the future.

When Böckenförde or Hochhuth or even Klaus Scholder seemed to prevail in the court of public opinion, it had a great deal to do with the path toward our modern world and the way in which democratic ideals of religious liberty and an open society came to prevail. Mark Ruff’s well researched, well written, and cogently argued book adds significantly to our understanding of how early postwar views of churches in Nazi Germany developed. First for Catholics and eventually for Protestants, this topic moved past a struggle to defend church behaviors into an effort to understand and to learn from them. Mark Ruff makes a fine contribution in that undertaking.

[1] For my take on the remarkable nature of Nostra Aetate, see Robert P. Ericksen, “Jews and ‘God the Father’ after Auschwitz: American Responses to Nostra Aetate,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 29/2 (2016), 323-36.

[2] In support of this claim, Ruff cites Manfred Gailus, “Keine gute Performance. Die deutsche Protestanten im ‘Dritten Reich,’” in Manfred Gailus and Armin Nolzen, eds., Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft.” Glaube, Confession, und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011), 96-121.

[3] Neuhäeusler also participated in the famous June 5, 1945 Naples interview in which Niemoeller admitted he had been ready to fight for Germany during the war. He, Neuhäeusler, and Josef Müller all agreed that Germany was not ready for democracy, adding to the very critical press response to this interview in the West.

Review Article: The Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review Article: The Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews

Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 277 Pp., ISBN 9780233008414.

Paul O’Shea, A Cross too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli, Politics and the Jews of Europe 1917-1943 (Kenthurst, NSW: Rosenberg Publishing, 2008). 392 Pp., ISBN 9781877058714.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Two recent books have again stirred up the long-standing debate about the policies of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican in the face of the genocidal slaughter of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. This controversy has now flourished for more than fifty years, and shows little sign of having reached any acceptable consensus. It has often been conducted more with political partisanship or religious loyalty than with a detailed examination of the evidence. Moreover this debate has suffered from the long delay in opening the most important sources held by the Vatican. Nevertheless most commentators express the confident hope that, when eventually the archives are revealed, their hypotheses will be found to be accurate. They therefore demonstrate a commendable integrity in allowing their findings to speak for themselves even where they differ in their interpretations. They show that there are still new aspects of the church’s rescue efforts on behalf of the persecuted Jews which deserve fuller consideration. These books will undoubtedly add to the wider corpus of scholarship which continues to be of interest to scholars of modern diplomacy and statecraft.

zucotti-pere Susan Zuccotti is an established American scholar who has written a number of studies of the Holocaust, particularly dealing with events in France and Italy. Her latest contribution provides us with a well-researched biography of a little-known French Capuchin friar, Fr. Marie-Benoît, who was to play a significant role in rescuing Jews first in Marseilles in 1942 and then in Rome in 1943-4. Although he was to live for several decades after the war, his exploits were only recorded in French and remained largely unnoticed in remote French archives. Zuccotti was able to interview him in 1988 shortly before he died, but he was clearly a reticent witness, and it has taken her another twenty-five years to piece together his full story and to explore the determining factors which led him to play such an active role in assisting the Jewish refugees and victims of Nazi tyranny. The result is a portrait of a valiant and courageous priest whose witness in the cause of Christian-Jewish relations deserves to be better known to an English-speaking audience. So we can be grateful to Zuccotti for this helpful addition to the debate about how much (or how little) was done by various sectors of the Catholic Church to assist the Jewish victims of Nazism.

Fr. Marie-Benoît was born the son of a country miller in that part of western France which saw violent persecution of faithful Catholics in defense of the ancient regime by agents of the Revolution in the 1790s. Zuccotti suggests that this may have been the source of his opposition to any state-directed persecution of religious minorities. In fact he wanted to join the Capuchins, a branch of the Franciscan order, but was called up in 1914 and served throughout the war at the front. Later he was called to Rome and taught at the Capuchin seminary there until 1940. He returned to France just as his nation was defeated and divided into the German-occupied north and the Vichy-led unoccupied south. It was here in Marseilles that he first became involved with helping refugees, particularly foreign-born Jews, fleeing from the Nazis. He was able to help some to escape to Switzerland or Spain, or to move to the safer area of the Italian-controlled region around Nice. He established good relations with Jewish organizers of relief efforts, and continued these after he was recalled back to Rome in early 1943. The situation grew far more perilous after Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943 and when the German army took control of Italy’s civil government in September. It was at this point that Fr. Marie-Benoît and his Jewish backers had the idea of using his presence in Rome to seek an audience with Pope Pius XII. As recorded in the printed Vatican documents, he was able to present the Pope with requests to help these foreign Jewish refugees, even though nothing came of his grander scheme to have these foreign Jews evacuated to North Africa. But, as he recorded later in his own memoirs, he successfully managed to help these stranded Jews by supplying them with forged identity documents, forged permissions to reside in Rome, and forged ration cards.

The few months between September 1943 and the liberation of Rome in June 1944 were particularly dangerous, and eventually forced Fr. Marie-Benoît himself into hiding. In October there followed the infamous round-up of the Roman Jews from Trastevere, when more than a thousand were deported to Auschwitz and only sixteen survived. As word spread through the foreign refugees’ ranks, the need for secure hiding places grew more urgent. Fr. Marie-Benoît was active in seeking assistance from various convents and monasteries, despite being warned of the danger that these institutions could well be searched by German agents.

Zuccotti deals succinctly with the question, addressed in her earlier books and articles, about the extent to which the Vatican and its officials—including the Pope—knew about these clandestine relief efforts. She concludes that the Pope and other Vatican officials were certainly aware of these developments, even if they did not know the extent or the details. She rightly denies the claims made afterwards by eager papal supporters that the Pope had issued explicit directions or had directed Vatican funds for such efforts. As Fr. Marie-Benoît himself testified, he never thought of himself as carrying out the Vatican’s instructions let alone receiving financial help. In fact the Vatican documents print some of the reservations felt towards Fr. Marie-Benoît on the grounds that his illegal activities endangered the Vatican’s carefully guarded stance of neutrality. One official who repeatedly urged him to be more prudent was recorded as being gravely disappointed by the Capuchin’s reckless readiness to engage in what he called his mission of mercy. Particularly grim was the fact that in these final weeks under German domination, several of Fr Marie-Benoît’s protégés were victims of informers, playing along with the Germans. At the same time, though, he and his partners amongst the Jewish community were aware of the broad support they enjoyed from much of the non-Jewish population. Zuccotti’s conclusion is that together they saved the lives of at least twenty-five hundred men, women and children, most of them refugees without resources in a nation controlled by Nazis determined to destroy them.

Rob Ventresca’s authoritative essay on the same subject, recently published in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations lends support to the same conclusions. (“’The Vatican was for us like a mountain’: Reassessing the Vatican’s Role in Jewish Relief and Rescue during the Holocaust. Settled Questions and New Directions in Research,” SCJR 9, no. 1 (2014): http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/5601/4957). In his view the Vatican’s response to the plight of so many million Jewish victims of Nazism conformed to a familiar pattern of self-imposed restraint and self-serving resignation. While on the one hand, the Pope and his advisors consistently avoided the explicit papal condemnations being requested, yet Catholic rescuers on the ground, such as Fr. Marie-Benoît, might count on some modest measure of papal support, usually moral rather than financial. Such moves hardly amounted to a policy or a directive for Jewish rescue and could be curtailed if the results seemed to increase the likelihood of reprisals or damaging repercussions for papal diplomacy.

The limitations placed on the Vatican’s efforts to support Jewish victims of Nazism have long since been recognized. Direct protests to the German authorities were never answered. Requests to friendly governments, such as Brazil, to provide entry visas for Catholic converted Jews were ignored or only reluctantly accepted. Nevertheless the Pope’s clear preference was to continue his diplomatic representations as a means of exercising the Vatican’s leverage, limited as it might be, for the longer term issue of securing an eventual peace settlement.

It is within this envelope of diplomatic caution and restraint that the Vatican’s efforts to assist Jewish refugees, such as those supported by Fr. Marie-Benoît, have to be judged. But undoubtedly the supplies of food and other material goods given to these people were approved by the Vatican’s higher officials, and benefitted the numerous Jewish refugees hidden in Catholic institutions. But to date, no written order from the Pope has been discovered, let alone a “secret plan” as propounded recently in a journalistic account by a British writer. Yet Fr. Marie-Benoît’s activities were not prohibited by his superiors, despite the urging of certain officials to be more cautious. He emerged as the main contact with the Jewish organization DELASEM and as such paved the way for a new and much more positive relationship in the post-war years. It was in this new climate that the Vatican subsequently tried to claim that much more aid had been given, and that Fr. Marie-Benoît was supported by their instructions. This led the good friar, as Zuccotti notes, to deny any such approval or assistance. As he recorded in his memoir: “I received no mission from the Vatican, because I was unknown there…. The Vatican was for us like a mountain. We were in a hurry.” The only sum described in the Vatican published documents refers to a small amount dedicated for the support of converted Jews, but it is clear that the ingenuity of Fr. Marie-Benoît and his DELASEM colleagues enabled them to access other sources of financial support for which they did not need explicit Vatican approval. By such methods the Vatican did not appear to be engaging in questionable or possibly illegal financial activities, even if such aid was designed to assist poverty-stricken refugees.

In the post-war period, Fr. Marie-Benoit became one of the foremost champions of a new relationship between Christians and Jews. But Pius XII clearly had other priorities. It was only after two decades that these ideas found a new and much more favorable reception at the time of the Second Vatican Council, and in particular in its noteworthy statement Nostra Aetate of 1965. Fortunately Fr. Marie-Benoît was still alive at this time, and rejoiced. But there is no evidence that his war-time services played any part in the theological repudiation of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism. He was never again to play any significant role even in his own Capuchin order. He died in 1991 at the age of 95.

Paul O’Shea is one of the small group of Australian scholars who have become interested in the Catholic response to the traumatic events of the twentieth century, and particularly in the career of Pope Pius XII, as he sought to deal with the crises brought on by the totalitarian regimes of Europe. Like all of his predecessors, O’Shea suffers the handicap that many of the relevant documents have yet to be released from the Vatican archives, so despite his assiduous survey of Pius’ earlier life as a Vatican diplomat and later as Cardinal Secretary of State, we still have to acknowledge the tentative evaluation of all hypotheses about his war-time policies, and especially about his so-called “silence” concerning the victimization of the Jews of Europe.

O’Shea, like his fellow biographer, Robert A. Ventresca (see my review of Soldiers of Christ. The Life of Pope Pius XII in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65, no. 1 (January 2014): 230-1) lays great emphasis on Eugenio Pacelli’s integration and identification with the corporate Catholic community of the later nineteenth century. But he fails to stress the fact that, under both Pope Pius IX and Pius X, the Vatican was going through a highly conservative, even reactionary, phase, as could be seen in the vicious attacks on Catholic Modernism. O’Shea believes that there can be little doubt that Pacelli was affected by the affair. “But the fact that he remained an exceptional favourite through the crisis … and continued to be promoted while others were cast aside, tells us much about his discretion, his resilience and his survival skills” (P. 144), though also about his deeply conservative mentality. The fact is that by 1914 the Vatican had reached a nadir in its theological and political influence. Its hostility to the modern world was well known. And although new Pope Benedict XV wisely decided to adopt a policy of neutral impartiality during the First World War, the Vatican was pointedly excluded from the peace process in Paris in 1919. The 1920s saw vigorous efforts to reach legally binding treaties, known as Concordats, with many of the European states in order to safeguard the Catholic Church’s interests. Pacelli was in the forefront of such attempts, which however revealed the limits, obstacles and frustrations in dealing with such powers as the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The experience can hardly be said to have led Pacelli to a more liberal view of his fellows. He remained convinced of the superiority of the Catholic vision and of the need for centralized control over its affairs through cautious diplomacy, which would avoid confrontation but would harness the Vatican’s limited influence at a time of turmoil.

When Pius was elected Pope in March 1939, the war clouds were ominously threatening. Pius was horrified by the idea of the blood-bath of twenty-five years earlier being repeated. The Church’s duty was to serve the cause of peace. And for his first six months, Pius engaged in a ferment of diplomatic activity to this end. In vain. By September, he was forced to recognize not only the Vatican’s impotence, but also the impossibility of calling Catholics to a higher ethos than national loyalty. He therefore retreated to the same stance of neutral impartiality as advocated by his predecessor Benedict XV. He continued to hope, or possibly to indulge his illusions, that the Vatican’s mediation would eventually be required at the point when both warring sides recognized the need to halt hostilities and seek a truce or even a peace settlement. As Europe’s most experienced diplomat, Pius believed that his services would be vital at such a moment. No steps should therefore be taken, or seen to be underway, which would prevent such an efficacious intervention from taking place. Hence the strenuous efforts to preserve the Vatican’s neutrality throughout the course of the war, especially during the traumatic years 1943 and 1944 when the Vatican was surrounded by three changes of political-military regime. Despite all the pressures and pleas on behalf of the war’s victims, including the Jews, Pius consistently believed that unwise and intemperate language would only make matters worse. In O’Shea’s view, this was a leadership of reaction.

It is clear that Pius was deeply affected by the daily reports that flowed into the Vatican about the murderous practices of the Nazis, especially against the Jews. He agonized long and fervently about what he might say or do, but was continually restrained by the fear that such action would invite reprisals which would make matters worse. In a remarkably frank letter to his friend and colleague the Bishop of Berlin in April 1943, Pius expressed both his horror and frustration. “The seemingly limitless cruelty of the war machines makes the thought of a long drawn-out period of mutual slaughter unbearable. And what we have heard, day in and day out, of atrocities that are far beyond anything which could be ascribed to the necessities of war is even more horrifying and shocking.” The frustration of not being able to decide which course of action would be less damaging to the cause of peace was an unavoidable and recurrent challenge, and lay constantly upon the Pope’s conscience. It is small wonder that he concludes his letter to the Bishop of Berlin with the words: “In constantly striving to find the right balance between the mutually contradictory claims of his pastoral office, the path ahead for the representative of Christ is becoming daily more overgrown, beset with difficulties and full of thorns” (Actes et Documents du Saint Siege, Vol. 2, document 105, letter of 30 April 1943).

But to O’Shea this conscientious and pain-ridden policy of public neutrality and personal sympathy was not enough. To be sure, he acknowledges that as the war went on, we have a profoundly moving picture of the Vicar of Christ wanting to share the sufferings of the persecuted. But in the case of the Jews O’Shea suspects that Pius was the inheritor of a long and ancient tradition of suspicion and contempt towards a religion deemed “superseded”. The Jews were thus among the “lesser victims” for whom no especially dangerous actions or pronouncements were called for. For O’Shea the turning point came in October 1943, when the Germans rounded up the Jews of Rome and transported 1000 to their deaths in Auschwitz. The fact that the Pope did not protest in clear words which could not be misunderstood was an unforgivable moral failure. He believes that Pius did not speak out because he did not want to. His actions and words up to this Nazi atrocity in October 1943 are defensible. After October 1943, they are not. For this reason O’Shea closes his narrative at this point.

Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives,” The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, 23 October 2013.

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

For more information or documentation relating to this lecture at the Wiener Library, please contact Dr. Brown-Fleming at sbrown-fleming [at] ushmm.org. The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

In March 1943, in his final public statement before his death and speaking to the World Jewish Congress in New York, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster and as such, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales (1935-1943) said the following: “I denounce with utmost vigor the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors.” Even the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, nor Pope Pius XI before him, had ever, or would ever, publicly voice objection to persecution of Jews specifically by the Nazis specifically by name. Tonight I will discuss the concerns and preoccupations that shaped the Holy See’s muted response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. My talk today is based on the records of the Vatican nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) in Munich and Berlin during the 1930s. In February 2003, in an unprecedented break with Vatican Secret Archives policy, the Holy See opened those records pertaining to the Munich and Berlin nunciatures (Vatican diplomatic headquarters) for the period 1922 to 1939. During these years, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), served as nuncio to Bavaria (1917), nuncio to Germany (1920), and Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI (1930–1939). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s archives now hold microfilm copies of this subset of critical new primary source material.

Discussions about the plight of European Jewry swirled in the offices of the Secretary of State in the months before the November pogrom. Secretary of State and future Pope Eugenio Pacelli and his lieutenants received many, many requests for help. Internal exchanges reveal a certain level of sympathy, tinged still by anti-Jewish sentiment. In February 1938, Apostolic Inter-Nuncio to the Netherlands Father Paul Giobbe wrote to Undersecretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs Domenico Tardini to softly encourage a petition from president of the Dutch Zionist Committee H.B. van Leeuwen, asking for the Holy See’s support in favor of Jewish emigration to Palestine. “Under the current difficult political and social circumstances, the Jews, declared undesirables in some European countries and in the face of… blood and violence that currently dissuade the pursuit of systematic emigration to Palestine, [yet] obstinately imbued…with the utopia of the reconstruction of the Jewish Kingdom, now want to find territories that are safe and easily accessible…the Holy See should at least support them by smoothing the way,” he wrote. Apostolic nuncio to Switzerland Fillippo Bernardini sent a detailed report concerning the persecution of Austrian Jewry and a proposal for the emigration of 10,000 Viennese Jews to Lebanon in May 1938. The September 1938 Italian racial laws were discussed in great detail in the Secretariat of State before their passage, to the point where the Vatican’s emissary to Benito Mussolini, Father Tacci Venturi, brokered a deal between Pope Pius XI and the Duce that the pope would agree to decline any public condemnation of the Italian racial laws as long as the Duce would give his word to stop persecution of the Italian Catholic youth group Catholic Action, and to agree not to subject the Jews to “bad treatment of the kind that was customary for centuries”—a promise, needless to say, Mussolini did not keep.

The Reichskristallnacht folio is small, containing only 15 documents: 10 letters from private individuals, some addressed to Secretary of State Pacelli and some to Pope Pius XI and all written in August 1938, and 5 pieces of official correspondence. Small in number, letters from private individuals illuminate the atmosphere in Europe and the United States in the months before the November pogrom. On August 12, 1938, German American Catholic Dr. Gotthold Steinführer of Chicago, Illinois wrote a brief and impassioned letter to Pope Pius XI in Rome. “Permit me to make Your Eminence aware of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ regarding the Jewish question, for example in Matthew 8:11[1] and Revelation 2:9.[2] Your Eminence should not defend the Jews, who [belong to] the Synagogue of Satan. Referring to the above words of Christ, those who defend the Jews defend for Satan. The entire Gospel of John shows the fight of the Jews against Christ. The greatest enemies of all Christendom are the Jews, from Paul until today. Yours Faithfully, Dr. Gotthold Steinführer,” he wrote.

I should note that letters to the Holy See filed in other folios also require systematic examination, as they offer interesting insights into popular Catholic thinking, such as the one from Maria Theresa Bauer of Paris to Pope Pius XI noting that a gesture of protection from the Holy Father “would make many [Jews] inclined to convert to Catholicism in these painful hours.” As to those who had done so already, decades earlier, they, too, wrote to their pope. These were Catholics whose families were affected by the 15 September 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Law to Protect German Blood and Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law) and other Nazi legal restrictions.

Mrs. George Marse described herself as “a German Catholic wife to a Jewish German doctor.” Their four children, baptized as Catholics and raised in Catholic schools, were now defined by the Nazi state as “half Aryans.” Mrs. Marse wrote to Pope Pius XI as a last measure following years of unsuccessful attempts to find financial support for emigration. “I have found no help. The Jewish committees are only responsible for purely Jewish cases! Our family consists of but one Jew and five Catholics! How can my husband expect help from the Jews with his Catholic wife and his [four] Catholic children!?” she wrote in her impassioned letter. Another letter, addressed to Pope Pius XI and received by the Holy See in August 1938, made the same argument: “I am one of the many thousands of my comrades in fate… so-called “Half-Jews” [Halbjuden]…our coreligionists leave us in the lurch—no one cares about us!! One wants to shout to all the world, Christians, where are you?” Such letters reflect the general need for further research on discussions and concrete aid efforts within the Holy See regarding those Catholics who were defined as Jews by the Nazi state. Currently, no monograph treats this important subject.

Of greatest interest are 2 official reports from Vatican nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to the Secretary of State in Rome, Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII). They are dated 15 and 19 November 1938, respectively. A brief word Cesare Orsenigo, author of the reports, is in order. An Italian national who was Pacelli’s successor as nuncio to Germany in 1930, 56 years of age when he was appointed to Berlin, Archbishop Orsenigo has thus far not fared well in the historiography for the 1933-1945 period. His contemporary, George Shuster, described Orsenigo as “frankly, jubilant” about Hitler’s election to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933. Other documents across the Vatican archives demonstrate Orsenigo’s admiration for many aspects of the Nazi regime. This is why the tone of these two reports, decidedly sympathetic to beleaguered Jewry, is surprising. Let us begin with Orsenigo’s first report about Reichskristallnacht, dated 15 November 1938. His description of the events themselves openly acknowledged the reality of anti-Semitic vandalism (as he titled the report), and, the Nazi and German popular role therein:

The destructions have been initiated, as if by a single order… The blind popular revenge followed one identical method everywhere: in the night, all display windows were shattered and the synagogues were set on fire; the day after, shops that did not have any defense were looted. Doing this, [the looters] destroyed all the goods, even the most expensive ones. Only towards the afternoon of the 10^th, when the masses, having vented their wildest feelings, and not being restrained by any policeman, did Minister Goebbels give the order to stop, characterizing what happened as venting by “the German people…” All of this easily leaves the impression that the order or permission to act came from a higher authority… The hour is to follow of ministerial laws and dispositions in order to isolate Jews more and more, prohibiting them every commerce, every [ability to frequent] the public schools, every partaking in places of public diversion (theaters, cinemas, concerts, cultural meetings), with a fine totaling one billion [Reichsmarks] to be paid [by Jews themselves].

In the remainder of the report, Orsenigo noted the strong temptation of German Jewry to commit suicide in the wake of these terrible events, noted the positive if limited efforts by the embassies of Columbia, England, and Holland to document these events and protect the assets of Jewish nationals, and openly criticized Poland, writing, “it was… Poland that provoked the violent action of Germany” by refusing to extend the expired passports of Polish Jews from Germany, prompting Germany to “suddenly sen[d] back to Poland tens of thousands of Jews, and among these and also the parents the young exasperated boy [Polish Jewish student Herszel Grynszpan], that then assassinated the German ambassador in Paris [Ernst vom Rath].” In reading the report as a whole, Orsenigo is critical of the events of Kristallnacht, critical of the Nazi state, and critical of the German population.

The second report, dated 19 November 1938, concerned impending legislation declaring “null and void all marriages already conducted” between “Aryans” and Jews, including those marriages in which the Jewish spouse had converted to Catholicism after the marriage. Not surprisingly, Orsenigo objected to the legislation, due to its disregard for Canon Law, but he also added critical commentary about the increasingly radical nature of the Nazi state, noting that “serenity and competence” were “more and more lacking in high places of command” and that there existed a “state of mood that [Orsenigo thought] greased the anti-Semitic events[, a state of mood that] reveals always more and more turbulence and agitation, and is increasingly less able to be controlled,” he wrote.

Let us turn to Eugenio Pacelli’s (the future wartime pope’s) response. We know that he received both of Orsenigo’s reports of 15 and 19 November, and, hence, received direct and detailed information about the pogrom. While no documentation of Pacelli’s response to the two Orsenigo reports has yet been discovered, we do have available Pacelli’s response to a request from Cardinal Hinsley that Pope Pius XI make a statement about the pogrom. The story was this: in late November, Cardinal Hinsley sent to Pacelli a request from Lord Rothschild, whom Hinsley described as “the most famous and highly esteemed amongst Jews in England.” On 26 November 1938, Cardinal Hinsley wrote to Pacelli the following:

…There will be a public gathering in London in order to ask [for] aid and attendance to all those who suffer from persecution [for reasons of] religion or race… If [in] principle [it] were possible to have an authentic word of the Holy Father being declared that in Christ discrimination of race does not exist and that the great human family must be joined in peace [by] means of respect of the personality of the individual, such message would [be] sure [to] have in England and America, [and] nevertheless through the entire world, the [effect of] leading to good will towards the [Catholic] Religion and the Holy See.”

Cardinal Hinsley was, as far as I have found, the only head of a bishops’ conference to ask Pope Pius XI to protest Kristallnacht. Perhaps we can attribute this to his particularly British world view? University of Chichester scholar Andrew Chandler recounts a conversation between Cardinal Hinsley and Winston Churchill after the fall of France in 1940: “I’m glad we’re alone [in this fight],” he was said to have remarked. When Churchill asked why, Hinsley responded that “Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.”

It is worth recounting Pacelli’s response to Hinsley’s letter, dated December 3, 1938, in full. Pacelli’s notes on the matter read as follows:

If the [matter] were of substantially private character, it would be easier. On the other hand, it is necessary to remove the appearance of fearing that which does not need to be feared. Cardinal Hinsley could speak [if] saying he is surely interpreting the thought of the Sovereign Pontiff saying that the [matter] not only finds the Pope in a moment of much worry for his health, but also overwhelmed by the amount of matters before him. It is therefore not possible for [the Holy Father] to [respond] personally. He [Cardinal Hinsley] can say that he is interpreting the thoughts of the Holy Father which view all aid to those who are unhappy and unjustly (unworthily or dishonorably) suffering with a humane and Christian eye.

This response was telegraphed to Cardinal Hinsley on December 3rd. Were Pacelli’s comments about the health of Pope Pius XI accurate? David Kertzer’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that the pope suffered a heart attack on November 25^th. We will return to this point—the pope’s health and the impact it had on the ability of Secretary of State Pacelli to maneuver—later in this lecture.

On December 10th, illustrious figures that included Cardinal Hinsley; William Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury; Lord Rothschild; Clement R. Attlee, leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons; Sir Alan Anderson, Conservative MP; and General Evangeline Booth, representative of the Salvation Army, gathered at the invitation of Sir Frank Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House. A resolution “offering whole-hearted support” for the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees was “unanimously adopted.” The Baldwin refugee fund for victims of religious and racial persecution, first announced by former prime minister, Lord Stanley Baldwin, 1^st Earl of Baldwin, during a radio address on the evening of December 8th, was expressly meant to provide financial aid to both Jews and “non-Aryan Christians:”

Tonight, I plead for the victims who turn to England for help, the first time in their long and troubled history that they have asked us in this way for financial aid…the number of these so-called non-Aryan Christians, who, according to German law, are regarded as Jews, certainly exceeds 100,000; in addition there are some half a million professing Jews, and no words can describe the pitiable plight of these 600,000 human souls. What can be done to help?

A brief article in the New York Times, entitled, it is interesting to note, Pope Backs Britons on Aid to Refugees, appeared that same day. According to the article, “one of Pope Pius [XI]’s rare messages to an interdisciplinary body was read at a meeting representing all faiths and political parties, called by the Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House today to support the Earl Baldwin Fund for the victims of religious and racial persecution.”

It was Lord Rothschild who read the Vatican telegram to the assembled. Before reading the telegram, Lord Rothschild remarked that “Cardinal Hinsley had written to Rome on his behalf,” and that “everyone respected the Pope for his courage and unswerving adherence to the principles which the whole civilized world knew must be maintained if civilization was to persist.” The Vatican telegram, as reproduced in the London Times, read as follows:

The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

Cardinal Hinsley’s presence at the Mansion House meeting made headlines, as did the fact that Pacelli’s message was read at a high-level public meeting with the specific purpose of support for Jews—I remind us that Lord Baldwin’s December 8^th radio appeal was quite clear as to the need for funds for approximately 500,000 Jews and 100,000 “non-Aryan Christians.” Yet, here we have an unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church. He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

Let us return for a moment to the issue of the pope’s health and one major implication of it: Pacelli’s personal response could dictate the Holy See’s official institutional response in the months before Pius XI’s death on February 10, 1939. On December 6, four days before the Mansion House gathering, Pacelli received Italian ambassador to the Holy See Bonfiacio Pignatti, who implored him, on behalf of Mussolini, “to instruct all of Italy’s bishops not to criticize the anti-Semitic campaign.” Of that meeting, Pignatti wrote, “Cardinal [Pacelli] observed that it would be very easy to give the advice I was suggesting orally, but that having to put it in writing would be more difficult.” In the end, Pacelli agreed to do so in the case of the diocese of Rome and to “study the best way to take care of Italy’s other dioceses.” In this context, it should come as no surprise that Pacelli was not willing to aggressively and specifically condemn the 9-10 November Nazi pogrom against Jews. Pacelli was only willing to authorize (on behalf of the pope) a reminder of the church’s broad commandment and mission to aid the suffering and the persecuted. It is quite the understatement to say that in these troubled times, such a response was not enough.

The Vatican archives also offer us glimpses into the broader popular response to the plight of European Jewry. In the interest of time, I have chosen only a few. On December 7, 1938, Berlin Protestant Gerda Erdmann took it upon herself to write to Pope Pius XI. “Please permit me, as a non-Catholic Christian, to address you regarding a matter that has called much attention: the question of the Jews (Es handelt sich um die Judenfrage). With this letter, I want to make a suggestion which seems to me could be a solution to this [and one] coming from Christianity,” she wrote, satisfaction and eagerness dripping from her pen. “It is basically God’s hand that weighs so heavily on the Jews; God’s judgment has reached them as has already occurred several times before, during history since the time of Christ. Since that time, God’s message through his son is: Jews are guilty.” Erdmann took many more lines to explain why, in her perception, “Jews [were] guilty.” Her solution: “…huge empty territories are available (for instance in South America…) where:

“if the Jewish immigrants were baptized in their new homeland…the local population would in every way show their acceptance and open their doors. There would be no closed gates. The children of the baptized would be raised since childhood in the Christian faith; they would grow up within the church and the nation, end up in mixed marriages and create a new population. Among the colorful racial mixture overseas, the entire European Jewish people would be absorbed without danger. The refreshing influence of European intelligence could be a gain in many places.”

Erdmann understood herself as a faithful Christian and understood her solution as a Christian one: “What a great and beautiful task opens up for world Christianity! What a bright future! United, Christianity can achieve a colossal purpose of love for they fellow man…A task achieved, which will go down in history as a shining example of selfless Christian love performed for the Honor and Glory of God,” she concluded. When I first came across this letter in the Vatican archives, I could not resist sending it to several close colleagues under the heading: “with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Most letters came from Jews begging for help, and left wanting. In December 1938, German Jew Franz Knüppel wrote to the Secretariat of State on the eve of his forced expulsion from his current residence in France. The recipient of many such letters daily, Secretary of State Pacelli directed his undersecretary to contact the nunciature in France, for, as his undersecretary put it, “the abovementioned gentleman is not known by the Secretary of State;” and thus his undersecretary would “therefore leave it up to [the nuncio] to judge whether it is opportune to deal with Mr. Franz Knüppel’s request in the way that he wishes.” In short-hand, the process was as follows: when a letter requesting aid arrived in the Secretariat of State, if Secretary of State Pacelli did not know the individual personally, he asked his undersecretary to forward it to the appropriate nuncio, to handle as he saw fit. This in and of itself is a revelation about how the Vatican bureaucracy and communications between Catholic countries and the Vatican worked at this juncture.

In the interest of allowing for time for questions, I will conclude. I fear I have thoroughly depressed this audience; as a Catholic, I certainly depress myself when I see, document after document, diplomacy and self-interest and even anti-Semitism chosen over the basic value of charity and love of neighbor. A tiny handful of Catholics—unfortunately neither Pope Pius XI nor Pope Pius XII among them—did see the light. With regard to Nazi and Axis crimes against Jews, Cardinal Hinsley is one of them. “Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race,” Cardinal Hinsley told his audience at the World Jewish Congress. His words were not weak and his heart was not cold. Thank you.

[1] Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 8, Verse 11: “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1450.

[2] Book of Revelation, Chapter 2, Verse 9: “I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1927.

Conference Report: Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Conference Report: Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland, March 24-26, 2010, Münster,Germany.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

The most controversial pontiff of the 20^th century was the focus of a three-day symposium assembled and hosted by Professor Hubert Wolf and sponsored by the European research network, Pio XI, and the Excellence Cluster, Religion and Politics, at the University of Münster. Bringing together more than thirty researchers between March 26 and 28, this symposium honed in on Eugenio Pacelli’s years as the Nuncius in Germany between 1917 and 1929. Participants came from more than eight nations, including Italy,Germany,Poland, the Czech Republic,Israel, the United States,Austria and Switzerland. All presentations were translated simultaneously into Italian and/or German, the two official conference languages.

Keynote addresses were delivered by Romano Prodi, the former Prime Minister of Italy and current President of the European Commission and Mordechai Lewy, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican. In very general terms, Prodi underscored the significance of the disastrous interwar years for the creation of the European Union and the importance of the European Union for the European future. Lewy, on the other hand, spoke much more critically of the conference subject. While dismissive of the epithet, “Hitler’s Pope,” Lewy spoke sharply of Pacelli’s own lack of interest in the fate of European Jews, particularly in the postwar era. The Vatican, he pointed out, was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel, regarding it as the dangerous creation of Communist and atheist forces. The curia, he added, was a bastion of anti-Semitic attitudes. Pius himself greeted the news of Israel’s creation “with mixed feelings,” and called for a “crusade of prayer” for “the sacred land.”

The centerpiece of the symposium was the formal presentation of a massive critical online edition of the approximately 7000 reports that Pacelli transmitted from Germany to the Vatican during his years as Nuncius from 1917 through 1929. Based on software developed through the assistance of the German Historical Institutes in Rome and London, this online edition places these reports into an online databank, allowing scholars to search for documents by name, date or keyword. This software – DENQ (Digitalle Editionen neuzeitlicher Quellen) – will allow scholars to compare drafts of Pacelli’s reports with the final versions he dispatched to Rome through multiple windows and color-coded texts. Observing often subtle changes provide valuable glimpses into Pacelli’s thought processes. In one such report, Pacelli altered his description of Kaiser Wilhelm II from “nondeltutto equilibrato” to “nondeltutto normale.” By allowing users to open multiple windows, this software also provides user with valuable biographical information, e.g. birth and death dates, about those to whom Pacelli refers in his reports. To make optimal use of these features, users will need to use browsers based on Webkit or Gecko, including Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. While it will ultimately take twelve years to bring this project to fruition, the project directors will not wait until then to open up this edition to scholars. Beginning with the year 1917, Pacelli’s reports will be released in regular intervals.

Following the unveiling of this online edition, three papers subsequently examined aspects of Pacelli’s tenure as nuncius. The German scholar, Klaus Unterburger, described Pacelli’s skepticism vis-à-vis many German theologians as well as attempts to muzzle potentially critical voices. In describing Pacelli’s love for Germany, Phillip Cheneaux, Professor at the Lateran University, underscored the continuities between Pacelli’s years as Nuncios and his later pontificate. The Italian historian Emma Fattorini emphasized the wartime influence of the German Center Party politician, Matthias Erzberger, on Pacelli’s understanding of German politics. Though chronologically far removed from the interwar years, the scandals put in motion by the German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, in the mid-1960s were at the center of Mark Edward Ruff’s presentation. Ruff focused on the missteps of Catholic defenders of Pacelli and, in particular, of the German Catholic media, whose clumsy counterattacks played into the hands of Hochhuth and his champions.

On the third day of the symposium, a panel of six scholars compared nuncios throughout Europe during the interwar era. Thomas Brechenmacher, Professor in Potsdam, focused on Alberto Vassallo-Torregrossa (1925-1934) and the better known Cesare Orsenigo (1930-1945). Rupert Klieber, Gianfranco Armando, Alberto Guasco, Emilia Hrabovec, Stanislaw Wilk provided respective portraits of the nuncios in Vienna, Paris, Rome, Prague and Warsaw. Of these nuncios, the most notable was Achille Ratti, Nuncio in Warsaw between 1919 and 1921 before being anointed Pope in 1922.

A final panel provided an overview of political Catholicism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Urs Altermatt, Professor in Fribourg, sketched the history political Catholicism in Switzerland, while Karsten Ruprecht laid out the trajectory of the Roman Catholic Center Party in Germany. Walter Iber summed up the history of the Christian Socialist Party in Austria: Stefano Trinchese provided the same for the Partito Popolari in Italy. Jaroslaw Sebek, finally, described the papal policies towards interwar Bohemia.

The conveners intend to publish the conference proceedings within the next year. More details will provided here at a later date.

May 2009 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

May 2009 — Vol. XV, no. 5

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Obituary: Albrecht Schoenherr
2) Book reviews:

a) Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 10
b) Söderblom, Letters
c) Spicer, Hitler’s Priests
d) Shea, A Cross Too Heavy

1) It is with regret that we learn of the death at the age of 97 of Albrecht Schoenherr, the retired Protestant bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg in Potsdam on March 9th.He was the last surviving student of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, near Stettin in 1936-7, and subsequently was the leading figure in the postwar life of the church in what was then East Germany.
The present Bishop, Wolfgang Huber, described Schoenherr as an impressive witness to Jesus Christ whose steadfastness had enabled his church community in East Germany to resist the attacks of the Communist state authorities, and defended the integrity of the gospel from encroachments from political interests. He was born in 1911, and as a student attended both Tuebingen and Berlin universities where he met Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a young lecturer. After the Nazi seizure of power, and the outbreak of the Church Struggle, Schoenherr was influenced by Bonhoeffer to join the Confessing Church, the minority group which strongly opposed all attempts to introduce Nazi ideas into the church. He then joined the first course given under Bonhoeffer’s direction at the seminary at Finkenwalde, near Stettin in 1935, and subsequently stayed for a second year as Bonhoeffer’s assistant. In later years he referred to this experience as the most valuable in his career.

Like most of his contemporaries, Schoenherr was conscripted for the army during the war, and served in Belgium and Italy. He was there taken captive, and then became chaplain to two German POW camps until his release in 1946. On returning to East Germany he established a similar seminary for Brandenburg and led this for seventeen years. In 1963 he became General Superintendent for Berlin-Brandenburg, during the period of severe repression by the Communist government of what had become the German Democratic Republic. One of the most serious contentions arose over the continuing links between the Evangelical Church there and its partners in West Germany. Otto Dibelius, for example, who was Bishop of Berlin and Brandenburg, but resided in West Berlin, was forbidden to exercise his functions in East Germany, and militantly attacked the Communist regime in the eastern part of his diocese. Schoenherr had then the unenviable task of trying to cope with the political and pastoral problems which ensued. He recognised that the political divisions of the country were too strong for the church to overcome, and hence sought to persuade his following in East Germany to declare their independence from their western partners for the sake of their better witness to the new political reality. This came to be called “The Church in Socialism” but remained a controversial step, since it appeared to welcome the idea of collaboration with the Communist regime. In fact Schoenherr’s steadfastness was a staunch defence against any such capitulation. In 1969 he was elected founding president of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the German Democratic Republic, and in 1972 was elected to be Bishop of (East) Berlin and Brandenburg after the diocese was split. He vigorously defended his churches’ interests, and in so doing earned the respect of the political regime. In 1978, he negotiated an agreement with the then leader of the East German government, Erich Honecker, which brought the church major alleviations, and official recognition of its situation. This included permission to make religious broadcasts on radio and television, pastoral visits to prisons, and other advantages. These undoubtedly prepared the way for the church in East Germany to play such an active role in the turbulent events of 1989.

But Schoenherr retired from these church responsibilities in 1981, though he continued for twenty years to travel widely lecturing on Bonhoeffer’s legacy and teaching courses for the laity called Conversations on Faith. He was naturally active in the International Bonhoeffer Society and was a co-editor for the comprehensive German edition of Bonhoeffer’s collected works. He himself wrote his autobiography in German “But the time was not lost”.

He married twice, had six children, 20 grandchildren and 29 great-grandchildren. He will be remembered as a stalwart upholder of Protestant church orthodoxy during times of great political tensions, and a leader who set a standard of uncompromising faithfulness to the gospel of Christ.

2a) ed. C. Green (English edition), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barcelona, Berlin, New York 1928-1931. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 10) Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2008. 764 pp. ISBN -13-978-0-8006-8330-6.

The English translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s collected works proceeds apace. The latest to appear is volume 10, which introduces us to the young Bonhoeffer, covering the period from his twenty-second birthday until he is twenty-five, i.e. from 1928 to 1931. During these years he spent two extensive periods abroad, first in Barcelona, as assistant to the Chaplain of the German Protestant community, and second, as a post-doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1928, Bonhoeffer had just completed his PhD thesis for the theological faculty of the University of Berlin, and was faced with the decision whether to seek his vocation as a pastor in the German Evangelical Church, or to turn to an academic career in theology. It was in part to test this choice that he accepted the posting to Barcelona. He was in any case too young to be ordained, and a certain prompting to see beyond Germany’s borders led him to accept. His subsequent visit to the United States was far more purposeful. It arose from his agreement with his mentors’ view that any future German theologian should be aware of the theological currents in the New World.

During both of these absences from home, Bonhoeffer maintained a lively correspondence with his family and friends, almost all of which has been astonishingly preserved. Together with various surviving papers containing the texts of addresses and sermons he delivered, along with lecture notes taken in New York, this volume brings together a remarkable corpus of over 600 pages. This material has all been carefully edited by Bonhoeffer’s friend Eberhard Bethge, and is now most skilfully translated into a fluent and comprehensible English. Clifford Green adds a valuable introduction to the English edition. The volume serves to show us an interesting stage in the development of this talented, even precocious young man.

Life in the German expatriate community in Barcelona, consisting of businessmen and merchants, offered little or no stimulus to Bonhoeffer’s theological development. He commented wickedly on his Pastor’s never reading any theological book, and on the disastrous tone of his sermons. By contrast Bonhoeffer preached lengthy and dense sermons, mainly reflecting the teachings of Karl Barth. He did however make himself popular through his work with the community’s children. His lack of Spanish, of course, was a barrier to assessing conditions in Spain. But his letters contain no explicit comments on the political or social conditions he found there. It was not until he returned to Berlin a year later that he could resume work on his post-doctoral thesis, needed to qualify for an academic position in his own department of systematic theology.

His sojourn in America eighteen months later was far more productive, both personally and theologically. At first he was shocked to find how undogmatic and indeed superficial was the kind of preaching offered in most of the main-stream churches in New York. An optimistic immanentism, coupled with a pragmatic desire to build up their congregations, seemed to be the main preoccupation of the Protestant clergy. He was equally shocked by the absence of dogmatic teaching at Union Seminary. It was only when he was introduced by a fellow student of Afro-American descent to the black churches in Harlem, especially the Abyssinian Baptist Church, that his enthusiasm was aroused. Here, he said, “one could really still hear someone talk in a Christian sense about sin and grace and the love of God. The black Christ is preached with captivating passion and vividness”. This experience of the religious fervour among an oppressed people deeply affected his personal beliefs. So too he learnt much from the insights of his fellow student, the Frenchman Jean Lasserre, who confronted him with the claims of Jesus, especially those recorded in the Sermon on the Mount, which was to become so central in Bonhoeffer’s own thinking. It was the beginning of an inspiring but costly discipleship.

Bonhoeffer’s disdain for the weaknesses of American religiosity, and his condescension about the teaching of theology at Union, can be attributed to the widespread feelings of superiority held by the European elite about American life and customs. Bonhoeffer himself came from an elite academic family, he had studied at Germany’s foremost university, under Adolf von Harnack, generally acknowledged as Europe’s most notable scholar.

His theological cogitations, especially on the philosophy of religion, were highly esoteric, abstract and demanding of great intellectual comprehension. He was unlikely to find any counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic. Some of his fellow students were undoubtedly put off by his aloofness, his conservatism and his German origin. But that is what he was. His class-based political sympathies can be seen in the notes he left for an address on the subject of “Germany” given to a mass rally of schoolchildren shortly after his arrival. In this talk he rehearsed the well-worn litany of complaints by German conservatives, beginning with Germany’s disastrous loss of the war, the cruel imposition of a hunger blockade by the Allies, the scandal of the Versailles Treaty, the loss of German territory and colonies, the harshness of the burden of reparations, the economic hardships of the inflation and then of the depression, and above all the humiliation of the so-called War Guilt Clause, blaming Germany for the origins of the war. He made no mention of the sweeping German aggressions, or of the innumerable victims and sufferings these actions had caused, especially in France and Belgium. It is probable that at the time Bonhoeffer was not aware how far these views were being exploited by the Nazis.

It was only after he returned from America that he was forced to see how readily his fellow middle-class Germans were letting themselves be seduced. But his own national sympathies remained. When, eight years later in 1939 he returned to New York, and was offered a chance to escape from Nazi tyranny, he famously replied: “I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the tribulations of this time with my people”. Exile or emigration was not a real option. He remained rooted in his German and Christian heritage.

This volume ends when Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin in mid-1931. He was immediately caught up in new and challenging engagements in the ecumenical movement, in social work projects in the Berlin slums, and in his teaching responsibilities at the Berlin University. All made him aware of the growing crisis in Germany, which was to culminate with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power on January 30th, 1933. While it is tempting to believe that Bonhoeffer’s stay in America influenced his political stance thereafter, this would not seem to be borne out by the evidence. But this volume depicts a highly thoughtful young professional enlarging his horizons in a number of different directions, such as his newly found interest in pacifism, which later on were to have a significant impact on his subsequent career.

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2b) Dietz Lange (ed.) Nathan Söderblom: Brev – Lettres – Briefe – Letters. A selection from his correspondence, 528 pp. incl. frontispiece, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006, ISBN 13:978-3-525-60005-4; ISBN 10:3-525-60005-4

This stout volume certainly does something to maintain the presence of its illustrious subject in the modern academic catalogues. Söderblom, the prophetic guiding spirit of early twentieth-century ecumenism and the guiding spirit behind the 1925 Stockholm conference, was deeply admired in Britain and the United States. At least one official photograph of Bishop Bell of Chichester places him purposefully beside a portrait of his Swedish hero. If this long shadow has since receded, it reflects a good deal upon a decline in our interest in themes which once excited both the idealist and the scholar. It is surely time that we retrieved them.

Dietz Lange, a German scholar, here edits a great variety of materials with authority. This is a valuable compendium, designed to reveal the richness of Söderblom’s fascinations and the diversity of his friends and allies. It is, as its title pronounces, an international collection for which the committed reader will need English and German. The admirable introduction is in English; the Swedish letters are duly presented in the original and translated into English.

Lange finds his Söderblom at large in three guises: the pastor, the professor and the archbishop. In all respects, an editor has his work cut out for him: Söderblom, Lange remarks patiently, was ‘a tireless letter writer’, who would busily dictate letters even as he walked along the street (p. 9). The shelves of Uppsala University Library now stagger under the weight of no less than 38,000 letters, dairies and notes. And yet what accumulates here is not merely official and dry, but lively and rich. For Söderblom enjoyed people and he inhabited many distinct dimensions with apparent ease. Church historians might note his conviction – in contradiction to Harnack – that the history of religion belonged not solely in the history department, but in the theological faculty.

The great bulk of this collection lies, very naturally and properly, with the Söderblom’s years as archbishop of Uppsala. Although his appointment came as a shock to the politicos of his church, it was a public role for which he was brilliantly qualified. A convinced internationalist, his public work now coincided with the outbreak of the First World War and, subsequently, a new, bustling age of conferences and movements. It was in this landscape that those from the English-speaking world encountered him. In this collection, it is no surprise to find him in eager dialogue with the assorted giants of German Protestantism: Otto Dibelius, Adolf von Harnack, Rudolf Otto and Frierich Heiler (quite a collection in itself). But here, too, are the Scandinavians, Gustaf Aulén, Eivind Berggrav and Birger Forell, the American, Henry Atkinson, the Scot David Cairns and Archbishop Davidson.

Altogether, this is a valuable volume which deserves the international readership for which it is so clearly designed. Both the tenacious editor and his committed publishers have every right to our gratitude.

Andrew Chandler, George Bell Institute at the University of Chichester

2c) Kevin P. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests. Catholic Clergy and National Socialism. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. 369 Pp. ISBN978-0-87580-380-5 (published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
(This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, April 2009)

In 1933 the majority of Germans enthusiastically welcomed Hitler’s takeover of power. Amongst the Catholic population, there was a small number of priests who had already demonstrated their support of the man whom they believed would lead Germany into a new era of national greatness. Kevin Spicer has now provided us with a commendable account of the ideas and careers of 138 such men, who he designates as “brown priests”. His diligent and perceptive research in both the ecclesiastical and government archives in Germany examines these men’s motives, describes their advocacy of Nazi ideas and assesses the influence of their political activism.

Needless to say, Spicer, with all the advantages of hindsight, is highly critical of these priests, but also makes clear that, for the most part, so were their bishops at the time. Many were disciplined by their ecclesiastical superiors, not so much for their political zealotry, but for their failure to obtain the appropriate approval. Spicer gives numerous examples to show how these priests refused to give up their pro-Nazi political agitation, even when ordered to do so. And he draws attention to the difficulties such well-publicized activities caused to their bishops.

Most of these brown priests were convinced that their advocacy for the Nazi Party was fully compatible with their personal Catholic faith. And they had little difficulty in backing the Nazis’ antisemitism and racism, making use of the church’s traditional hostility towards Judaism, and their own prejudices against the alleged malevolence of German Jewry.

It is notable that over a third of these priests had doctorates in philosophy or theology, which they used to advance their mixture of German Catholicism and National Socialism. The more prominent of these promoters of the Nazi cause, such as the former Abbot Alban Schachleiter, have already appeared in earlier histories of the German Church Struggle. But Spicer gives us the fullest account in English of these individuals’ waywardness. Schachleiter, for instance, made much of his personal acquaintance with Hitler, championed an extreme German nationalism which had led to his expulsion from his abbey in Prague in 1918, was frequently the main speaker at Nazi rallies, and used his contacts to evade the restrictions placed on him by his superiors. When he died in June 1937, Hitler ordered that he should be given a state funeral, and sent his deputy, Hess, to attend.

Equally notorious were those brown priests who believed that their Nazi sympathies had thwarted their careers in the church and denied them their due recognition. Some even left the church and became ideological crusaders against their former colleagues. Albert Hartl, for example, whom Spicer scarcely mentions, held a high position in Himmler’s security intelligence service, and in 1941 was busy preparing plans for eradicating church influence in Germany once victory was achieved. (More information on Hartl’s nefarious activities can be found in the authoritative German companion volume by Wofgang Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger,Paderborn 2003).

Spicer also provides information about lesser-known figures,. many of whom were sent to obscure rural parishes, where they eagerly enough supported the Nazi Party in their pastoral ministry and parish activities for many years. Particularly difficult to assess is the extent to which these men’s fervent attachment to Nazi ideas was affected by the Nazis’ own anti-Catholic extremism. Spicer is not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and thus perhaps exaggerates their single-minded determination to conflate Nazism and Catholicism. At any rate, as he shows, in the aftermath, many brown priests were exculpated by denazification courts, and almost all eventually made their way back into public ministry.

Writing for an English-speaking audience about events on another continent which took place seventy or more years ago presents real difficulties, all the more since Spicer clearly has no sympathy at all for his subjects. But his purpose is clear: to draw attention to the folly and danger of allowing political fervour to distort the orthodox heritage of the church, or to sanction the fanaticism which only encouraged the Nazis in their radical campaigns, especially against the Jews. Such a theological mindset, he claims, closely paralleled the designs and actions of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. He also criticizes the bishops for focusing solely on the survival of the church and its sacramental mission, and for their failure to take a stronger stand against the antisemitic tirades of these brown priests. Even though their number was small, and by no means representative, and even though their influence clearly remained marginal, Spicer’s well-argued warnings against this trahison des clercs are indeed apposite in this sad chapter of German Catholicism’s history.

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2d) Paul O’Shea, A Cross too heavy. Eugenio Pacelli. Politics and the Jews of Europe, 1917-1943. (Kenthurst, NSW, Australia: Rosenberg Publishing. 2008 Pp 392 ISBN 978-1877-058714).

Dietmar Paeschel, Vatikan und Shoa (Friedenauer Schriftenreihe. Reihe A: Theologie, Band 9) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2007 Pp 150. ISBN 978-3-631-56828-6).

(This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, April 2009)

The flood of books about Pope Pius XII continues unabated. But since no new documentation has appeared in the last ten years, and a major indispensable source, the papers of the Vatican Secretariat of State, are still secreted in the Vatican archive and are not yet released for public scrutiny, it is clear that many of these new books are not the result of new historical analysis or research. Instead, the character and policies of Pius XII are used as part of an on-going controversy about the authority and governance of the Roman Catholic Church. The participants seek to prove either the urgent need for reform of an outdated authoritarian institution, or regard Pius as an example of prudent leadership at a time of great political and military danger. With regard to his stance towards the Nazis` persecution and mass murder of the Jews, many vocal critics have turned Pius into a scapegoat. A less silent pope, with more active engagement, they believe, could and should have prevented, or at least mitigated the Nazi Holocaust. But is there historical evidence to substantiate such far-reaching claims, or is this purely the product of wishful thinking? On the other hand, are those seeking to defend Pius doing so in order to exonerate the institution at whatever cost to historical candor?. Both books under review attempt to answer these questions.

Paul O`Shea is a young Australian scholar who rejects as superficial those widespread accusations which have depicted Pius as Hitler`s Pope, too lenient towards the Germans, an antisemitic bigot, insensitive to the fate of Hitler`s victims, or motivated only by a calculating political opportunism. Instead, O`Shea concentrates on seeing Pacelli as the inheritor of a long theological tradition, enshrined in the Vatican`s centuries-old stance, whereby the Jews were seen as a renegade people, deserving of conversion but remaining a witness to God`s eternal mercy. O`Shea`s main contention is that centuries of Christian Judeophobia and antisemitism culminated in the papal silence during the Holocaust. On the other hand, O`Shea notes, Pius cannot be dismissed as a bystander. He agonized over every word he uttered on the fate of the Jews, and his discreet actions on behalf of individuals saved many lives. But the widely-held perception that the Papal moral influence would be resolutely and loudly deployed was disappointed. And the burden of O`Shea`s critique is that he shares this disappointment. He is therefore critical of Pius for not protesting more forcefully, since `there is a moral duty to speak out in the face of evil, regardless of the consequence` (p. 28).

O`Shea is hardly the first to advance such an opinion, but he fails to point out one all-important factor. For any far-reaching, let alone successful, measures to assist the Jews in war-torn Europe, the Catholic magisterium would have had to undertake a major reversal of its theological position, to abandon its historic anti-Judaic stance, and to embrace the theology first adumbrated in 1965. But no such alteration took place. Nor is there any evidence that Pius XII would have supported such a major theological revision. This process only began after his death. O`Shea`s contribution is to show how the Vatican`s mind-set, its entrenched conservatism, and Pacelli`s own theological training, all combined to reinforce a consistent, if now regrettable, attitude of regarding Jews as second-class citizens or the victims of history. The result was a theological rather than a moral failure.

Dietmar Päschel`s short account of the relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people during the course of the twentieth century, is clearly designed for German students. It includes a useful German translation of some of the important documents, as well as a German bibliography. Dominated by the horrifying events of the Shoah, his narrative divides into two separate halves. The first seeks to explain the failure of the Vatican and the German Catholic hierarchy to prevent, or at least alleviate, the Nazis` ferocity against the Jews, while the second outlines the steps taken to draw up a new and more sympathetic stance by the Catholic authorities, beginning with the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

In Päschel`s view, the Nazis` radical hostility to both Jews and Catholics put the latter on the defensive. The Vatican`s attempt to obtain safeguards through the 1933 Concordat was largely a failure, and led German Catholics to concentrate on defending their own autonomy. Because of the deeply-rooted antisemitism in Catholic ranks, there was little sympathy for their fellow victims, the Jews. This reluctance was a contributing factor for the Vatican`s equal lack of strong protest against the Nazi atrocities. Those Catholic voices raised on behalf of the Jews, such as Edith Stein or Provost Lichtenberg, were too few to be effective. The Holy See maintained its silence, regarding the persecution of the Jews as a secular matter beyond its mandate. The readiness of the German Catholic hierarchy to support Hitler`s nationalist goals showed their capacity for complicit compromise. Despite the Vatican`s attempt to mobilize opposition to the errors of Nazi ideology, through its 1937 Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, the result was poor. And the events of 1938 culminating in the November pogrom, demonstrated not only the Nazis` political mastery, but the failure of Catholics to take a stand, either through the Vatican or locally. Like O`Shea, Päschel deplores Pius` failure to protest, and is equally critical of the German Catholics` cowardice. Neither, he says, earned a halo.

In the second half of the book, the tone is warmer. Päschel presents the various stages of the far-reaching, if belated, change in Catholic attitudes, brought about by the impact of the Shoah,and also by the encouragement of Pope John XXIII. He gives an excellent summary of the debates in the Vatican Council, from which there finally emerged in October 1965, the significant document Nostra Aetate. The revolutionary achievement of this text, he rightly observes, was to remove any Catholic foundation for anti-Judaism. The ancient slander that Jews were responsible for Christ`s crucifixion was repudiated. Jews remain chosen by God. It was, Päschel argues, a unique and unprecedented paradigm change in Catholic theology.

This initiative in Catholic-Jewish relations was taken further by the decisive leadership of Pope John Paul II. During his long reign, he made dramatic visits to Israel, Auschwitz and the Roman synagogue. On each occasion he stressed the change in Catholic attitudes. But a 1998 document entitled We remember. A reflection on the Shoah seems to Päschel to be more of a Vatican bureaucratic defence than an acknowledgement of Catholic guilt. He justly criticizes the tendency to distort the lamentable record of Catholic prejudice for apologetic reasons. Much, he believes, still remains to be done. The historic guilt of the institution, rather than of individual Catholics, still remains to be acknowledged. Yet the reversal of the age-long anti-Judaic doctrines must be regarded as epochal, and hopefully irreversible. New theological impulses by the Vatican are, in Päschel`s opinion, indispensable to maintain the momentum, for improved Catholic-Jewish relations.

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With every best wish,
John Conway