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Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 344 Pp., ISBN: 9781487503437.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

For every Marian apparition approved by the Vatican, such as at Guadalupe, Mexico (1531), La Salette, France (1846), and Lourdes, France (1858), there are numerous that remain under study or are refused recognition by the Church. Nevertheless, the lack of approbation cannot contain the fervor of many believers from seeking an intimate connection with the supernatural or, put in theological terms, miraculous intervention for the relief of malady or burden. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, Michael E. O’Sullivan, associate professor of history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, examines the nature and impact of Marian apparitions and the phenomena of stigmatic ecstasies on German Catholicism from the time of the establishment of the Weimar Republic up through the middle of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Though these occurrences are notable in nature and unique in theological understanding, they share a supernatural commonality that O’Sullivan recounts as events of “miraculous faith” (4). O’Sullivan rightly argues that historians, even those who specialize in church history, have for too long neglected incidents of miraculous faith in their analysis of German history. In his fascinating study, O’Sullivan endeavors to fill this void. For him, miraculous faith events both reflect and intensify the institutional, political, cultural, and gender tensions within German Catholicism.

O’Sullivan concurs with historians, such as Oded Heilbronner, who view post-WWI Catholicism already in decay, documented, in part, by communion statistics and lessening of participation in urban male Catholic associations. At the same time, for O’Sullivan, the miraculous faith events also reveal, “an upsurge in devotion and a revolt by traditionalists against mainstream religious and political leaders that ultimately contributed to the church’s fragmentation and transformation of Christianity’s role in politics” (4). To this end, the events of miraculous faith “disrupted three major elements of German history: religious secularization, Christian politics, and patriarchal gender roles” (4).

Disruptive Power departs from standard secularization theories and posits a “braided,” twisting path of secularization, which O’Sullivan defines as “the process by which religion becomes less central to the world view, mentalities, and institutions that shaped the everyday lives of modern historical subjects” (5). Explaining further, O’Sullivan writes, “secularization followed a hybrid path in the modern age where the secular and sacred existed side by side” (5). To clarify this point, O’Sullivan turns to Robert Orsi’s concept of “lived religion,” which focuses on how generations transmitted, subordinated, or rediscovered devotional practices. According to O’Sullivan, Orsi surmises that “religious worlds, subcultures, and mentalities” need not be portrayed as “isolated and separate from other aspects of society and experience” (8). Rather, twentieth-century German Catholicism reflected German society and its regional differentiation. In this respect, it is incorrect to portray it as a rigid monolith or a single all-encompassing milieu.

Such insight on milieu reflects similar perspectives argued in other recently published works on German Catholicism, most notably by Jeffrey Zalar in Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914. However, O’Sullivan emphasizes the role of milieu much less than Zalar.

More important for O’Sullivan is the conflict among and between competing groups for influence over differentiated Catholic milieus. To illustrate such struggles, O’Sullivan makes use of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “‘religious field’ of competition” between clergy and laity over “legitimation and the ‘goods of salvation’” as various groups and individuals vie for power and authority within Catholicism (11). Such applications enable O’Sullivan to make connections between miraculous faith events and the fluctuations of power in and influence of Catholic political parties, especially during Weimar and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Similarly, tensions in ecclesial power play often uncovered cracks in the gender dynamics of the church as religious authority vacillated between traditional female and male ecclesiastical roles. In particular, O’Sullivan makes it clear that he rejects anachronistic portraits of “piously Catholic women” and instead endeavors to present them “as empowered agents negotiating a perilous but evolving patriarchal power structure” (15).

In twentieth-century Germany, the Catholic woman who best negotiated the patriarchal structure of German society and the German Catholic Church was the stigmatic, seer, and mystic, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, from Bavaria, in the Regensburg diocese. She serves as the focus of O’Sullivan’s study by offering a lucent example of how “pious women negotiated spheres of power while embracing strict moral codes and paternal hierarchy” (7). Unlike Neumann, lesser-known mystics, such as Anna Maria Goebel, failed to maneuver adroitly through the numerous obstacles facing them and, generally, have been forgotten. By contrast, Neumann is still quite well known. In 2005, after much debate and at least forty-thousand requests, Bishop Gerhard Müller of Regensburg had Therese Neumann declared a “Servant of God” by opening an official beautification process for her (https://www.bistum-regensburg.de/news/eroeffnung-des-seligsprechungs-verfahrens-von-therese-neumann-296/). O’Sullivan’s study uncovers why Therese Neumann and her supporters – commonly identified as the “Konnersreuth Circle” – are unique and so memorable.

In Chapter One, “Germany between Apocalypse and Salvation: Bloody Images and Miraculous Cures,” O’Sullivan describes the rise of events of miraculous faith in post-World War I Germany. Existing Marian pilgrimage sites at Neviges (Ruhr district) and Kevelear (Rhineland) received an upsurge in visitors as Catholics visited them out of a quest for meaning amid a changing political landscape and rising secularism in German society. New events of miraculous faith also took place in Aachen and Bickendorf (Eifel), all of which captured the imagination of German Catholics. In 1920, in Aachen, a visiting excommunicated French priest, Argence Vachère, who had a history of seeing images of Christ and consecrated hosts bleed, together with several lay Catholics, witnessed a picture of Jesus and a religious statue shed blood for several days. This “Blood Miracle” of Aachen also attracted the attention and support of the followers of Barbara Weigand of Schippach (near Würzburg), a mystic, who, following her beatific visions, criticized clerical authority and advocated for a less patriarchal church. Around the same time, in the tiny village of Bickendorf, Anna Maria Goebbel began to endure profuse bleeding and experienced religious visions.

For O’Sullivan, these seemingly disparate phenomena illustrate larger tensions for Catholics in German society. The eccentric unwieldy nature of the mystics made them problematic for the German bishops of their respective dioceses, fearing that they might “jeopardize Catholic attempts to integrate nationally” (29). O’Sullivan argues that the bishops preferred to uphold their hierarchical, patriarchal power structure by organizing their own contained celebration of events of miraculous faith, such as when the Trier diocese placed the Holy Tunic of Christ on display in the summer of 1933. In the chapter’s conclusion, O’Sullivan posits that this struggle over the control of the “goods of salvation” unintentionally “reduced the power of the formal church and its leadership” (52). An interesting claim, one repeated often in the book, but one for which clearer evidence is needed.

In Chapter Two, “The Rise of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth during the Weimar Republic,” O’Sullivan introduces the miraculous story of Neumann, nicknamed, “Resl.” Beginning in 1926, Neumann experienced the stigmata following years of sickness and personal tragedy. Like clockwork, on Friday afternoons, Neumann would experience “suffering” from a mixture of stigmata, head wounds imitating Jesus’ crown of thorns, and ecstatic visions of Christ’s Passion. Thousands journeyed to her humble family home to wait in line for hours to witness personally the spectacle. Neumann also claimed to subsist solely on consecrated hosts.

Unlike other mystics whose cause floundered, Neumann attracted a powerful group of male supporters who publicly defended her against criticism and doubters. The list of hierophants is significant, including Father Joseph Naber, the pastor of St. Laurentius, the Catholic parish in Konnersreuth; Erwein Freiherr von Aretin, an editor with the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten; Father Franz Xaver Wutz, a professor of Old Testament at the Philosophical-Theological College in Eichstätt; Friedrich von Lama, an eccentric conservative free-lance journalist; and Fritz Gerlich, an author and journalist who subsequently founded the anti-Nazi, Der gerade Weg.

O’Sullivan devotes the greatest attention to Gerlich who left his Calvinist faith and hedonistic lifestyle (yes, the two are mutually contradictory) after meeting Neumann and joined the Catholic Church. He argues that these advocates, along with thousands of other supporters, were able to experience “God directly through Neumann without confession, communion, and other sacramental formalities” (55). In turn, for those Catholics who positively encountered Neumann, she “replaced the church as the primary focus of their prayers and they set their own rules with flexibility regarding official doctrine” (75-76). O’Sullivan repeatedly emphasizes this point about the usurpation of power by Neumann and the Konnersreuth Circle from the institutional Church. Indeed, Neumann’s witness and testimony became the impetus for many individuals to return to the practice of their Catholic faith. Many Catholics also turned toward Neumann to have clearer access to the “sacred.” As O’Sullivan instructs, such avenues fell outside official Church channels, becoming of great concern to the bishops. Nevertheless, while many Catholics sought out the guidance and counsel of Neumann, in the end, they practiced their faith through the traditional sacramental forms of worship—a point that O’Sullivan describes but neglects to make.

In Chapter Three, “Saving Souls and Making Enemies: The Struggle over Konnersreuth and the Downfall of Political Catholicism,” O’Sullivan builds upon Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933, which examined intellectuals, such as Jacques Maritain and Georges Rouault, who turned to Catholic mysticism to cope with the aftermath of the First World War. O’Sullivan believes the Konnersreuth Circle did the same in Germany. Despite such support, Neumann also encountered numerous critics, including Father Johann Baptist Westermayr, a priest of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising and the Freising seminary rector, and Father Georg Wunderle, a priest of the Eichstätt diocese (O’Sullivan incorrectly identifies him as a Franciscan), a professor of apologetics at the University of Würzburg, and, from 1932-1933, rector of the university [Wolfgang Weiß, “Wunderle, Georg,” BBKL 36 (2015): 1538-1550]. Both desired to protect the “church’s control of the ‘goods of salvation’” (85).

Likewise, Bishop Michael Buchberger of Regensburg, in whose diocese Konnersreuth resided, remained skeptical and arranged, in July 1927, for an official medical exam of Neumann. After a fourteen-day observation in Neumann’s family home, and in the presence of four nuns, the doctors concluded that the religious nature of her experiences were in doubt and should be explained through “the growing field of parapsychology” (86). O’Sullivan suggests that the doctors desired “to defend the faith from embarrassment” and thus chose to define Neumann’s experiences through a “genuinely modern belief system” (87). Despite this verdict and the urging of a representative from the Apostolic Nunciature in Munich, Buchberger never excommunicated Neumann nor did he transfer Father Naber from the Konnersreuth parish.

Other factors, too, supported Neumann and her circle. Her family had strong ties with local and state politicians from the Bavarian People’s Party. In turn, the Konnersreuth Circle regularly directed its defense of Neumann primarily against left-wing criticism, while generally ignoring that of the right. O’Sullivan concludes that such forms of defense, “bolstered Catholic conservatives that opposed Centre Party republicanism, and contributed to the Nazi rise to power” (107). While one might draw this conclusion, the evidence presented does not firmly support such a definitive interpretation.

Chapter Four, “Between Feminine Agency and Moral Utopia: Gender and Sex in Konnersreuth,” examines the role of gender in the events surrounding Neumann and the Konnersreuth Circle. According to O’Sullivan, Neumann was “neither a feminist advocate of emancipation nor a powerless pawn of traditional patriarchs” (116). Instead, he argues that Neumann “manipulated the gender norms of her time to survive as a public and holy figure where other mystics faded and accumulated more spiritual capital than just about any other Catholic female of her era” (116).

What is not completely clear is the distinction between Neumann’s manipulation of the gender norms and the existing gender dynamics within Bavarian society. For example, though Neumann “expressed her own willingness” to submit to Bishop Buchberger’s request for a second medical examination, at the same time, she remained obedient to her father, Ferdinand, who forbade any additional examinations (119). Her family and the Konnersreuth Circle also weaponized Neumann’s chastity to prevent medical investigation and to discredit her critics. Evidence for this may be seen when the Neumann family accused Father Georg Wunderle of “touching Neumann’s breasts inappropriately during an examination of her stigmata” and thereby denied him “future access to their home” (136). Despite the pressure placed upon Neumann, her family, and upon the Konnersreuth Circle, no second examination was ever undertaken.

In Chapter Five, “Disruptive Potential: Catholic Miracles under the Third Reich,” O’Sullivan first briefly presents previous interpretations of Neumann and the Konnersreuth’s response to the National Socialist state. Popular opinion has presented Neumann and her Circle as a “‘nest of resistance.’” By contrast, anthropologist Ulrike Wiethaus believes Neumann “represented the resistance of a rural culture against a modernizing and centralizing nation-state.” Historian Thomas Breuer adds, “rural Catholic discord with Nazism constituted a protest against modernity rather than NS ideology.” O’Sullivan finds neither completely satisfying and argues that the response of Neumann and her Konnersreuth Circle to National Socialism “contained too many layers of ambiguity to be exclusively labeled anti-Nazi or anti-modern” (141).

Elaborating on this conclusion, O’Sullivan embraces traditional interpretations on the response of Catholics to Nazism. He writes, “While the vast majority of Catholics supported the regime’s campaign of law and order and aggressive foreign policy, they bristled as the Third Reich limited the role of organized Christian churches” (142). Such limitation on the churches resulted in the temporary destruction of many of its traditional supportive structures such as associations, youth ministry, and charitable programs. O’Sullivan finds that from this dismantling evolved “a more personalized and private faith that possessed dynamism but became increasingly free of formal church control” (142). For him, Neumann is a perfect example of this occurrence. Unfortunately, neither the remaining church institutions nor the personalized private faith did much to “obstruct vast human rights violations against Jews, communists, and others” (143).

Still, the Konnersreuth Circle did not survive National Socialist rule unscathed. The SS murdered Gerlich during the Röhm Purge in retaliation for his anti-Nazi journalism. Other members endured arrest, Gestapo interrogations, internment in concentration camps, and death.

Nevertheless, the legacy of Konnersreuth leaves more than a vestige of ambiguity in connection with National Socialism. Therese Neumann, for example, had contacts in the Gestapo and local Nazi Party who protected her from arrest and informed her about impending house searches. Similarly, like her Church, Neumann continually perpetuated religious antisemitism through her Friday “sufferings” by including “anti-Judaic themes of Jews as tormenters of Christ” (160). Still, O’Sullivan points out that “none of this evidence indicates an alignment between the Konnersreuth Circle and the Third Reich on racist antisemitism” (160).

Chapter Six, “Miraculous Times in West Germany: Marian Apparitions during the Early Federal Republic,” discusses the increased number of Marian apparitions across Europe following the aftermath of the Second World War. Eleven such instances occurred in Germany alone. O’Sullivan argues that these events of miraculous faith emerged not only as a “reaction to the Cold War, but also to anxieties about Americanization, consumerism, and Catholic narratives about the Nazi past” (174).

Such events of miraculous faith were not the only response to the new world order. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which brought together the former Centre and conservative and liberal Protestant political parties, sought to redefine the political landscape by projecting the image of West Germany as the “New Christian Occident (Abendland) defined by rigid social hierarchy, religious morality, and…opposition to materialist forces in modernity.” Coupled with this outlook was a fear of “growing consumerism and Americanization,” which “threatened clerical control of moral values.” Such a worldview led to the “reassertion of patriarchy and normative gender roles for women,” and, at the same time, to a reassessment of the “ambiguous Nazi past by inaccurately depicting religion as the exclusive bulwark against National Socialism” (175).

To illustrate these themes, O’Sullivan examines Marian apparitions in Heroldsbach (Bavaria), Fehrbach (Rhineland-Palatinate), Niederhabbach (Rhineland-Westphalia), and Rodalben (Rhineland-Palatinate). These events of miraculous faith shared similar characteristics with previous ones, including supporters usurping authority traditionally held by bishops and priests, the encouragement of the conversion of sinners to a life of faith, and vocal support by strong male figures, acting as “spiritual advisors and publicists” (192).

Interestingly, neither Church authorities nor Christian political parties supported the apparitions and their adherents. To counter such resistance, those devoted to Marian apparitions “drew parallels between the Nazi suppression of free speech and institutional efforts to discourage miracles not sponsored by the Vatican” (201). Repeating the failed 1933 Trier (Holy Tunic) attempts to control the miraculous, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne organized a “traveling Madonna” linked to Fatima to more than three-hundred parishes in the Rhineland. Despite a successful “tour,” the archdiocesan controlled Marian celebrations failed to produce any lasting positive effects among Rhineland Catholics. Likewise, O’Sullivan notes that such enthusiasm for miraculous apparitions and visions “faded with the growing economic and political stability of the Federal Republic” (210).

In the final chapter, “Therese Neumann between Catholic Traditionalism, Cold War, and Economic Miracle,” O’Sullivan recounts the uniqueness of Neumann’s experience that transcended the epochs of twentieth-century Germany to survive political upheaval, National Socialism, World War, and American occupation. Neumann became an unofficial ambassador to the American troops, as well a sign of German-American reconciliation in post-war Germany as GIs of all ranks flocked to Konnersreuth to see the miraculous stigmatic in action. Moreover, O’Sullivan argues that in Neumann’s projection of a regional Bavarian identity “where local traditions and modern economics intermingled,” she “assisted the secular turn of the CSU and fostered some of the consumerist trends that overwhelmed clerical authority by the time of her death” (212).

Disruptive Powers deals with a myriad of themes in a complex, ambitious narrative based to a great degree on primary sources from numerous state and church archives. O’Sullivan also valiantly endeavors to offer equal attention to the three major issues: religious secularization, Christian politics, and patriarchal gender roles. At times, the balance works well; at other times, the narrative integration of all three together seems forced. Still, O’Sullivan gives us much to ponder in his thought-provoking, challenging work. In the end, whether or not the Church will ever declare Therese Neumann a saint remains to be seen. For now, however, one may conclude that O’Sullivan offers a convincing work to show that Therese Neumann, her Konnersreuth Circle, and other miraculous faith events cannot remain on the periphery of this time, but are essential to interpreting gender dynamics and power structures within twentieth-century German Catholicism.

Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19th and 20th century Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19^th and 20^th century Germany,” German Studies Association, 2017

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

Thirteen historians, religious studies scholars and literary specialists gathered at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association from October 6-8 in Atlanta to examine the impact of religious revivals in Germany in the 19^th and 20^th century. The seminar analyzed phenomenon as distinct as the early-to-mid 19^th Century revivals, Marian apparitions, the youth, liturgical and bible movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, the political religions of the 1920s and 1930s, and the cults, sects and lifestyle movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic. In different ways, all of these different events and movements challenged understandings of confessional orthodoxy, hierarchy and authority.

Convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Wilhelm-Westfälische-Universität in Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, the seminar analyzed the circumstances under which these movements emerged as well as their impact. Why did the Protestant and Catholic churches contest, at least initially, all of these revival movements, sects and cults, some emerging from inside the church walls but most from outside? Why did some remain on the margins, while others were appropriated by the major church bodies? Answering these questions led the participants to grapple with definitions of religion and to examine those put forward, explicitly or implicitly, by churchmen in the past. All forced churchmen to engage with societal currents with which most would have preferred not to engage. Most unfolded against a backdrop of fear—of secularization, societal unrest, state persecution.

The first day’s discussion focused on highly contested conceptions of “secularization,” “modernization” and “resacralization.” They focused on the conflicting interpretative frameworks put forward by Steve Bruce, a proponent of traditional secularization paradigms, and Grace Davie, who has championed the notion of “believing without belonging.” Bruce’s and Davie’s works from the 1990s and 2000sprimarily discussed religious changes in the post-1945 era, but the definitions they put forward are easily applicable to the religious revivals and transformations of the long 19^th century because of their conflicting understandings of religious “cults” and “sects.” Seminar participants subsequently discussed excerpts from David Blackbourn’s now classic work, Marpingen, which analyzed Marian apparitions in a small Saar village. Though popular pressure mounted to have the Marpingen apparitions officially recognized by the church, church leaders refused to do so, even amid the atmosphere of fear and violence generated by the Kulturkampf and stationing of troops in this village in the borderlands.

For the second day, the seminar discussed a chapter from the Marist College scholar Michael O’Sullivan’s forthcoming book with the University of Toronto Press, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965. Participants compared his analytical analysis of the miracles associated with Terese Neumann with that of Blackbourn. Since the miracles associated with her and her circle took place in the 1930s (and later), they also took up two seemingly timeless question: To what extent did National Socialism represent a “political religion” and to what extent did movements like the German Christians represent the flourishing of a sect?

The third day brought forward some of the most intense discussions. Did the 1960s represent an era of “secularization” or of “religious revival?” What meanings and significance can be ascribed to New Age movements, occultism and esoterica? Were these movements indicative of a fundamental transformation in religion or were they in the tradition of movements and cults from earlier decades and centuries? What distinguished those movements that were incorporated into the churches from those that remained outside? The seminar closed with a discussion of a controversial document, the final report of the Enquete-Kommission from 1998 detailing the role of sects and “psycho-groups” within the landscape of the Federal Republic. The controversies engulfing Scientology in Germany were repeatedly raised as an example of a new group challenging definitions of what constituted religion.

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 2011), 344pp. ISBN: 978-3-89971-690-0.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, University of Toronto

This volume represents the first collective attempt by the German Free Churches to come to terms with the Nazi past and specifically address their relationships with Jews and Judaism. The connecting themes, presented in the subtitle, are familiar to those who study the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches in this era: manipulated theology, long-standing traditions of antisemitism, and unwillingness to admit wrongdoing in the postwar period.

As a collection of essays written by different authors, each chapter addresses an individual denomination. After an opening essay by Wolfgang Heinrichs on the Free Churches’ views on Jews in the nineteenth century, there are contributions by Claus Bernet (Quakers), Diether Götz Lichdi (Mennonites), Andreas Liese (Plymouth Brethren or Brüderbewegung), Michel Weyer (Methodists), Gottfried Sommer (Pentecostals), Andrea Stübind (Baptists), Hartmut Weyel (the Free Evangelical Association), Volker Stolle (Independent Evangelical Lutherans), Dietrich Meyer (Moravian Brethren or Brüdergemeine), and Daniel Heinz (Seventh-Day Adventists). In an appendix, Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer offers geographical breadth with a discussion of two Free Church pastors in Austria (Baptist and Methodist).

Although the scope and richness of sources varies among the essays, the exercise of placing these largely independent narratives alongside each other proves fruitful. In some cases a pattern emerges across the groups: the formation of an image of “the Jew” in the heyday of late-nineteenth-century racial antisemitism, from which essential elements were adapted by the Free Churches. In other cases it is a group’s unique characteristics that are highlighted. Regarding aid and rescue, the proverbial exception that proves the rule is most certainly the Quakers. No other group engaged in organized assistance, solidarity and protest as did the German Quakers, although Claus Bernet argues that they could not have done it without the support networks of the international Quaker community.

It is nearly impossible to draw broad conclusions about the Free Churches as a category since they come together by shared status not shared histories. Still, Daniel Heinz offers a few important observations in his forward. Because of their minority status, the Free Churches lived in the shadow of the complicated relationships between the larger churches and the Nazi state. Many of them experienced relative freedom and acceptance in the form of corporation status in the early years of dictatorship, 1933-38 (10). This is not to say that their experience under Nazism was easy, as they had their share of repression and harassment, but the temptation of legitimacy in the eyes of the state turned out to be too big to resist. For the most part, the Free Churches were not only uncritical of the political developments in their country but appreciated them (10).

Not surprisingly, the available sources are uneven. Much is written in church publications about what the clergy and academics thought about the Jews before 1933 but not so much on how they interacted with them and even less about what the laity thought and did. This situation often leads to a reliance on the earlier material. In some cases the chronology gets lost in the analysis. Most of the authors in this present volume choose to engage three topics, which could broadly be described as: what members of a particular group thought about the Jews, how they reacted to Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and what they did (or did not do) about it.

The Judenfrage was a scholarly topic with immediacy among all the Free Churches in the early twentieth century, as it was in the mainline Protestant church. Of particular value in this volume are the discussions of those groups with a strong pre-millennial eschatology that assigned a special place to the Jews in the end-times (the Pentecostals, the Adventists, and the Brethren). Not one of these groups fostered any sense of kinship with modern Jews. Instead, they rejected the theological concept of Israel’s eternal election and appropriated many of the arguments of contemporary racial antisemitism.

Although it is difficult to demonstrate that there are concrete connections between theology and behaviour, more than one author makes this case. In the context of the Free Lutherans, Volker Stolle argues their discriminative categorizations of Jews had a direct impact on their evaluation of Nazi Jewish policy, especially the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (226). In the case of the Pentecostals, their strong pietistic tradition led them to interpret political happenings as the hand of God, with which they should not interfere (133).

The second way in which many of the authors engage the topic is to discuss how the Free Churches acted and reacted to anti-Jewish measures after 1933, such as the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht. Andrea Stübind does an exceptionally good job at placing the Baptists in the wider framework of persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. She also grapples with the particularly thorny issue of the persecution of Baptists of Jewish origin.

A common explanation among the Free Churches for their public support of the Nazi regime—either passive or active—was the fear of being shut down. Virtually every group’s leadership lived under this fear but it seems as though this argument cannot be made for the laity. Daniel Heinz points out that while most Seventh-Day Adventists “did not find the courage to swim against the storm” of anti-Jewish policy, there are several cases of Adventists who opposed the state for religious reasons: refusing to work on Sunday, refusing to give the Hitler salute, and in a few cases, refusing military duty (287). These acts of insubordination did not carry over to opposing anti-Jewish legislation. Sometimes they led to personal penalties such as fines and jail sentences but they did not cause the organization to be shut down. In a similar manner, the Quakers were openly assisting Jews and concentration camp inmates well into the 1940s, and as Claus Bernet shows, it was all done in public (64). These examples show that there was some room for protest in Germany, even in the war years.

Nearly every group has a few anecdotal accounts of people within their ranks who helped Jews in one way or another. The most important point that emerges from these ten separate groups is that outside of the Quakers, aid and rescue happened only on an individual level, not an institutional level. People helped both strangers and neighbours, devout and secular Jews, within Germany and elsewhere in Europe, but they did so on their own initiative and with their own funds. When questioned later about their motivation, they often spoke of a common humanity rather than any theological connections to Judaism, a sentiment reminiscent of the famous Protestants of Le Chambon (63).

Especially pertinent to current trends in Holocaust research is Diether Götz Lichdi’s discussion of the Mennonite connection to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Many Mennonites lived in the immediate area and benefited from prisoner labour on their farms and in their factories (72). Until 1942 there were only a few Jews among the prisoners but that changed as the ghettoes in the cities were emptied and many more prisoners were brought to Stutthof. There are numerous reports of Mennonites sneaking food and clothing to Jewish prisoners. These complicated dynamics are revealed to us today only because of the fact that the Mennonites had become a de facto ethnic group in Central Europe—in many cases it is “Mennonite-sounding names” that Lichdi uses for evidence. This characteristic puts the Mennonites in a unique position among the Free Churches, making it easier to analyze their grassroots participation in and resistance to the Holocaust.

Brief mention should be made of which Free Churches were included in this volume. Many of those that today consider themselves to be Freikirchen are included. The chapter on the Pentecostals was especially useful, as there is very little written on them elsewhere. A notable absence was the Salvation Army (Heilsarmee), which was similar to many of these other groups in size, status, and origin.

Overall, this book is indicative of the maturation of the field of German church history of the Nazi period. Its contributors bring the Free Churches into current scholarly discussions on Christian antisemitism, aid and rescue during the Holocaust, grassroots participation and postwar processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 18 no. 1 (January 2007): 43-65.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Pratt and Göb argue that Christian-Muslim relations in Germany are basically sound, but “a growing sense of unease keeps public interest closely attentive to any conflicts between Muslim habits and secular laws and customs” (44). Such fears have had an impact on inter-religious dialogue, where the focus has shifted from “theological rapprochement” to “questions of acceptance of democratic and liberal values” (53). The notion that Islam might be incompatible with the modern, secular state mirrors suspicions about German Catholics during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s.

The authors describe a wide range of organizations involved in dialogue activities within Germany, including the Intercultural Council, the Round Table of World Religions, Abrahamic Forums, the Christian-Islamic Society, the World Council for Religion and Peace, and the Coordination Council of Associations of Christian-Islamic Dialogue in Germany. The challenges of this work are significant. Christian theologians are often more theologically liberal than the Islamic laypersons they encounter in interfaith conversations. Nominal Muslims and Christians are less hung up on theological differences but have little interest in interreligious dialogue as such. The prevalence of hostile media images of Islam is also a barrier to productive discussion, as are some misguided attempts to use dialogue as a way to pressure Muslims to make symbolic, public affirmations of “Western values”.

The authors see Catholic theologian Heiner Bielefeldt’s recommendations as a more promising approach. Bielefeldt, director of the German Institute for Human Rights from 2003 to 2009 and UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief since 2010, argues that the best defense of the secular, constitutional state is to guarantee religious freedom. For Muslims, this includes Islamic religious education in state schools (comparable to what is already offered for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish students), the right to build mosques without undue hindrances, and legal accommodations to Islamic burial practices. In the end, the authors caution that there is no simple answer to current controversies, but careful and sustained work aimed at mutual understanding will be more productive than sensationalism and stereotyping.

Journal issue: Religion, State and Society 39, no. 1 (March 2011). The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Journal issue: Religion, State and Society 39, no. 1 (March 2011). The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

This whole issue is devoted to the topic: The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy. Ever since the days of Emperor Constantine, Christian clergy have been engaged with armies, usually as chaplains, providing pastoral care of the soldiers, raising morale, offering spiritual nourishment and often burying the dead. This task, however, has always presented major moral problems, when chaplains appear to be justifying violence and hatred of the enemy, in strong contrast to the Christian Gospel of love. How this dilemma has been faced over the centuries is the subject of the six articles in this issue of the above journal, each of which has a useful bibliography attached. These describe military chaplaincies in a variety of historical and geographical settings, and reflect on the tensions, challenges and benefits that the system has engendered and still continues to bring. Despite the above title, the most noteworthy aspect is actually on the continuity of the issues involved.

David Bachrachs’ article on the wars in Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries depicts chaplains developing the same kind of spiritual support for secular warfare as prevailed until the twentieth century. Rulers of all kinds have considered the mobilization of such resources by the clergy to be a vital prerequisite for victory But as Oliver Rafferty shows in his account of Catholic chaplains in the British forces in the First World War, the clergy on both sides preached imminent victory for their armies, championed mutually incompatible claims that God was on their side, and even legitimized mass slaughter. Such steps only discredited the office of military chaplaincy, often irreparably.

The moral dilemmas faced by chaplains in Hitler’s armies in the Second World War, as Doris Bergen has shown, were even more acute. They worked hard to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their officers and men. But in so doing they also legitimized the Nazi war aims and thereby sanctioned even the more atrocious war crimes. As Bergen noted, the chaplains contributed to the “spiritual numbing” of the Third Reich. Angelika Dörfler-Dierken’s examination of the post-1945 Lutheran chaplaincies in the reconstituted West German armed forces is therefore valuable in pointing to the changes made. Today the German Protestant Church expects chaplains to be the moral conscience of the army. They no longer hold military rank, hence are not compromised in advance. Their role is to sharpen the consciences of individual soldiers and to question whether the military operations are actually conducive to peace or whether they only add to the spiral of violence. Such a prophetic ministry, promoting the church’s peace ethic, may easily cause conflict with both the military leaders and civilian politicians. How to maintain such a stance in war-like situations, such as Afghanistan, remains to be seen.

In the case of Canada, as Joanne Rennick shows, the military chaplaincy used to be a bastion of Caucasian, male, predominantly Christian conservatism. But after 1945 drastic changes took place, both in the armed forces and demographically in the wider population. The effects of secularization and immigration, as well as the deliberate inculcation of the idea of Canada as a nation of peacekeepers, altered the armed forces’ understanding of their mission, and hence of the role of chaplains. Today chaplains face increasing pluralism among their charges, deinstitutionalized beliefs and a loss of moral consensus. So too chaplains are now obliged by law to accept a wider set of values and lifestyles, which makes conventional forms of religious ministry more difficult. Yet, as elsewhere, chaplains continue to meet the basic needs of military personnel and offer their pastoral services.

Military chaplains in Afghanistan, where Canada also had its share of troops, have faced momentous challenges, as is made clear in the final article by Gutkowski and Wilkes. Chaplains have often had to act as interpreters for soldiers facing a religious “frontier” in a majority Muslim country, where language and cultural barriers, let alone opposition to the foreign military presence, make for almost insuperable hurdles. Christian military chaplains require special training in cultural sensitivity to encounter Muslim populations at the same time as carrying out their traditional roles of providing for the support and pastoral guidance of their own troops.

As these articles show, the ethical and religious challenges of today are not so very different from those of earlier years. But the today’s extra range of encounters, both geographical and ideological, have only made the chaplains’ opportunities for service more demanding as they seek to influence the hearts and minds not only of their soldiers but of the local populations as well. The danger still exists that the chaplains’ religious tasks will be instrumentalized by the military commanders for tactical or propaganda purposes. On the other hand, their good intentions may easily be misconstrued. Using the chaplains’ religious authority to persuade locals of the good intentions of international forces, as in Iraq, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, may lead to ambiguous results. But such problems are not new. We can be grateful to the editors of Religion, State and Society for providing this comprehensive look at the contemporary perceptions of the issues connected with military chaplaincies.

Article Note: New Research on Churches in Postwar Germany

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Article Note: New Research on Churches in Postwar Germany

Francis Graham-Dixon, “A ‘Moral Mandate’ for Occupation: The British Churches and Voluntary Organizations in North-Western Germany, 1945-1949,” German History 28, no.2 (2010): 193-213.

Ian Connor, “The Protestant Churches and German Refugees and Expellees in the Western Zones of Germany after 1945,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 15, no.1 (April 2007): 43-63.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

The extraordinary transformation of Germany after 1945 from Nazism to peaceful integration into international systems continues to draw considerable interest, as scholars attempt to render clarity to the complexities of postwar reconstruction. By looking at the various motives and actions of British government representatives, churchmen, and relief workers in Germany—and the interplay between them—Graham-Dixon’s study of the British zone sheds new light on the nature of occupation, and aspects of reconstruction, in this part of Germany.

The author argues that Britons agreed, in general, about their ‘moral mandate’ in Germany after the Second World War. However, some believed that the mandate “embodied a moral, Christian purpose,” whereas others wished to merely “exploit its use for propagandistic purposes” (193). Regardless of motive, the moral campaign proved useful for all British activities in Germany, especially when British policies and actions proved questionable, or even immoral. Focusing on the humanitarian crisis of the 1945-1946 population transfers (which was particularly acute in Schleswig-Holstein), Graham-Dixon asserts that it was church leaders and voluntary organization personnel (e.g., Bishop Bell of Chichester, Victor Gollancz) who ensured maintenance of the moral component in British policy, devoid of the exploitative component. Rather than resenting this action, British policy makers (e.g., Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin)—who were generally less optimistic than churchmen about German rehabilitation—made good use of church leaders and relief workers in forging peaceful relations with a generally disgruntled German public, and in “validat[ing] … the worthiness of the British cause” (201).

The fusing of these two viewpoints became evident in 1947, when British troubles were at a peak. Some British church leaders (e.g., British Anglican Church head, Geoffrey Fischer) and some politicians (e.g., Lord Pakenham), openly tied the work of the Church and the Crown. Most politicians disavowed the connection and relied on voluntary organizations to work directly in aiding, and rehabilitating, the German people. Voluntary organizations (e.g., Save Europe Now!) labored in concert with German church organizations (e.g., Hilfswerk, Innere Mission, Caritas) to fulfill the occupiers’ goal of solving the humanitarian crisis in Germany. The British government hoped that this work would embed “higher spiritual and moral values within German society,” (208) and foster general goodwill. With demonstrable success in material aid and improved relations between Britons and the German people, these organizations filled the “policy vacuum,” and fulfilled the moral mandate claimed by the British government.

This is an important article that exposes new aspects of British occupation politics. It also reveals the significance that voluntary organizations can (and did) have in post-conflict stabilization. In this case, the British government exploited the goodwill of voluntary organization personnel by having them alleviate the humanitarian crisis it had helped create. In the end, good things came of their combined efforts regardless of motive and despite the misallocation of credit. One wonders how these elements of occupation appeared in the other zones, and about their long-term impact in Germany, and in British-German relations.

Ian Connor is well-known for his 2008 book Refugees and Expellees in Post-War Germany, in which he describes how the millions of displaced persons in occupied Germany posed numerous challenges to German reconstruction after 1945. This article is an offshoot of that larger project. It examines how some leading German Protestant churchmen and relief personnel feared that ethnic German expellees would stray from mainstream Protestantism to embrace Communism or Catholicism. Playing an “active role in the reconstruction of Germany” (44) by employing their “wide-ranging autonomy” (43), Protestant Church elites prevented, in a few cases, the escalation of political radicalism, even while operating on some misguided assumptions.

Connor argues that the central concern of Protestant elites (i.e., some pastors, but mainly key figures in Protestant relief work) was “the political and ideological implications of the refugee problem” (60). Protestant churchmen viewed the expellees as not only physically, but spiritually, dislodged and impoverished. Protestant churchmen founded the Hilfswerk of the Protestant Church in August, 1945 to assist the expellees, and to keep them from turning to political and religious alternatives. The idea was that the material aid and spiritual support of the organization would keep the expellees on the right track by providing them with stability and hope for a brighter future.

The Hilfswerk provided shelter, food, and clothing for expellees primarily in the western zones, while its eastern office operated under the wary surveillance of Soviet authorities. Indeed, fused into its material aid campaign was the Hilfswerk’s political agenda of expunging Soviet influence in the political unification of Germany. Whereas Protestant churchmen were overly concerned about the refugees embracing Communism (few voted for the KPD), they “ignored or failed to recognize the refugees’ undoubted susceptibility to the slogans of radical right-wing parties” (60). With questions lingering about the ideological and political foundation and motives of the Hilfswerk, the author offers an example of the organization’s success. When Trek Association leaders threatened to lead thousands of expellees on marches to less crowded areas within western Germany, Hilfswerk personnel intervened. Negotiations between the two organizations averted what one Protestant aid leader called, “a terrible catastrophe” (57).

Study of the immediate postwar period reveals widespread concern over political radicalism in western Germany. For example, the formation of the Catholic Kirchliche Hilfstelle in October 1945 stemmed, in part, from concerns about Catholic expellees turning to political extremism. Questions arise regarding German attitudes and agency under occupation, particularly concerning the establishment of the Federal Republic (and the GDR). Connor argues that relief organizations, like the Hilfswerk, played an important role in German reconstruction by fostering peaceful relationships. Still, the political agenda of the Hilfswerk, and other relief organizations, remains unclear. So does the broader implications of their work. Laudably, the author has contributed a significant component of an under-researched portion of the postwar development of Germany, and has opened doors for further examination of the role of relief organizations and other NGOs in the construction of the two Germanies.

Conference Report: “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Conference Report: “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011, Boston, MA.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

Sponsored by the American Catholic Historical Association as a contribution to its annual meeting, the panel, “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” put on display the work of three scholars of German Catholicism who directed their attention to the thirty-year span from 1933 through 1963. Ulrike Ehret of the University of Erlangen in Germany analyzed the attitudes of German Catholics towards the Nazi state. Kevin Spicer of Stonehill College honed in on the small number of German Catholic priests who spoke out on behalf of the beleaguered Jewish population. Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University moved ahead to the postwar period to analyze the efforts of the Berlin Prelate, Walter Adolph, to commemorate the German Catholic martyrs from the Nazi era. Beth Griech-Pollele, professor at Bowling Green State University, chaired the panel.

In her paper, “Negotiating ‘Volksgemeinschaft:’ Roman Catholics and the NS-State.” Ulrike Ehret discussed how the National Socialist ideal of Volksgemeinschaft (national unity) became so persuasive to ordinary Catholics. Ehret argued that ordinary Catholics, like most Germans, nurtured and supported the idea of a revived and strengthened nation, even if it meant establishing a German nation without Jews. Drawing on her examination of government reports on public opinion as well as of petitions and denunciations addressed to the government as well as to the bishops, Ehret suggested that the Catholic bishops and clergy turned the concept of Volksgemeinschaft into a means to protect particular Roman Catholic interests and traditions. To warn their flock about divisive state politics, Catholic leaders frequently revived the memories of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf. Most of their protests were directed against Nazi religious policies; relatively few focused on Nazi racial policies. Yet most German Catholics, according to Ehret, insisted that the Volksgemeinschaft needed to be properly rooted in religious traditions. In popular opinion, this meant ignoring National Socialist midsummer festivals, attending mass and participating in pilgrimages in growing numbers. One needs to look at what Catholics did rather than at what they said.

Compared to Catholic anti-Semitism during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, Catholic publications rarely reverted to anti-Jewish images. However, Catholic popular defense literature clung to traditional creeds and values of the Catholic Church. It defended biblical Jewry but failed to defend modern Jewry against contemporary anti-Semitic prejudices. Indeed, the Catholic defense was often clad in the language of the time and consequently used images of Jews that strikingly resembled those used in the Nazis’ notorious racial rhetoric. The defense drew on images of Jews as the sources behind Bolshevism, as usurers and as men and women of a different race. These were all images that may have been the essence of how Catholics viewed Jews at the time.

In his paper, “Catholic Clergy and Jews under National Socialism,” Kevin Spicer continued his examination of the relationship of Jews and Catholic priests during the Third Reich. In particular, he examined the portrayal of Jews in priests’ sermons and public addresses.

Mark Edward Ruff’s paper, “Walter Adolph and the Construction of Catholic Martydom” analyzed how one leading Catholic chronicler of the past constructed images of Catholic martyrdom. Between 1945 and 1965, Adolph penned more than six books that described Catholic opposition to Nazism and the suffering of Catholic victims of National Socialism, including Bernhard Lichtenberg and Erich Klausener. As the editor of the diocesan newspaper for Berlin, Das Petrusblatt, he composed and put the finishing touches on many additional commemorative articles. In addition, he spearheaded the effort to build a church to memorialize Catholic victims, Maria Regina Martyrum, which was consecrated in 1963.

Yet Adolph’s commemorative efforts were inextricably bound up with the political and ideological battles of the postwar era. His diocese straddled both the Western and Eastern zones of Berlin. From the former, he was confronted by an array of church critics who denounced Catholic resistance during the Third Reich as feeble. From the latter, he was confronted by regular articles in the Communist press that argued that the church had been in league with Fascism. These articles extolled Communist victims of the Third Reich as the sole legitimate martyrs of the past and typically couched their suffering in a quasi-religious language. To defray the charges of Western church critics like Rolf Hochhuth, he and others claimed that Maria Regina Martyrum was the answer to Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy.

Ruff’s paper argued that Adolph’s created a hermeneutic of martyrdom that was, in fact, a combination plate. It was written in a language equal parts theological, journalistic, and political. But it also necessitated glossing over the less savory aspects of those Catholic victims of National Socialism he placed into the category of martyrs. In his profile of Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action who was murdered on the night of the Röhm purge in 1934, he carefully deleted all of the sentences from the original manuscript that described Klausener’s sympathies in 1933 and 1934 for the National Socialist movement.

The comments were offered by James Bernauer, SJ, professor of philosophy at Boston College, who expounded upon the theme of martyrdom that linked the three papers. At the end of the war, he noted, Pope Pius XII spoke of the “sorrowful passion of the Church” and of the “incessant opposition maintained by the Church” in the Nazi years. “But did the German Bishops,” he asked, “ever summon Catholics to heroic resistance? Did the Bishops themselves ever risk real as opposed to symbolic martyrdom?” Pope John Paul II’s numerous apologies, he suggested, might be thought of as a “corrective embrace of reality for Church responsibility in what had happened to Jews, women, Protestant reformers, American Indians, the Eastern Churches and so forth.”

Article Note: Research on German Free Churches and Sects

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

Article Note: Research on German Free Churches and Sects

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia and Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Andrea Strübind, “German Baptists and National Socialism,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 8 no. 3 (May 2008): 5-20.

Carl Simpson, “Jonathan Paul and the German Pentecostal Movement—the First Seven Years, 1907-1914.” JEPTA: Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 28, no. 2 (2008): 169-182.

Andrea Strübind’s article provides the English-speaking audience with a valuable summary of her earlier findings in her book on the Baptist Church during the Nazi era, Die unfreie Freikirche: der Bund der Baptistengemeinden im “Dritten Reich” (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991). Strübind is Professor of Church History in the Protestant Faculty of Oldenburg University, and an authoritative, but not uncritical, observer of her denomination’s chequered record during the turbulent years of Nazi rule.

German Baptists were among those small groups of free churches which had to struggle throughout the nineteenth century to gain a foothold in Germany against the intolerant pressures of the established Lutheran church. By the twentieth century they had become a conditionally recognised religious community on the edges of society. They sought to encourage the ideal life of true believers, separated from the rest of sinful society and its politics. Hence abstention from all worldly associations was coupled with the demand for freedom from all state interference in church life.

Hitler’s rise to power was greeted by most Baptists as a welcome development. His stress on a healthy and purified society and his anti-communism drew much support. At the same time the Baptist leadership under the strongly nationalist and conservative Paul Schmidt adopted an emphatic affirmation of the state and took no action in support of those in the Protestant Confessing Church who recognised the dangers of Nazi totalitarianism. For instance, in 1937, German Baptists were permitted to attend the Oxford Ecumenical Conference on Life and Work, at which they spoke up loyally in favour of the Nazi regime and its seeming tolerance of Free Church activity.

Despite the increasing evidence of political repression against many of the small sects in Germany, the Baptists remained staunchly loyal to the state. At the same time, the leadership sought to concentrate on the missionary task at home, exclusively concerned with the personal salvation of its adherents.

Given such a stance, it is hardly surprising that German Baptists behaved passively towards the Nazi persecution of the Jews, all the more since there were virtually no Jewish converts in their community. By contrast Hitler’s military victories were hailed as an opportunity for new missionary endeavours. Only one Baptist is known to have become a conscientious objector and was hanged in 1943 for subversion of the armed forces. No protest on his behalf was made. In 1944, after the attempted assassination plot against Hitler, the Baptist leadership sent a congratulatory telegram to prove their unbroken loyalty to their Führer.

This attitude of uncritical support undoubtedly saved the Baptists from the repression and closure meted out to other small sects. But Strübind rightly points out that the narrow focus on such biblical precepts as Romans 13 meant that the Baptists were wholly unequipped to tackle questions of resistance to Nazi tyranny on Christian grounds. Obedience to the state was upheld even after the anti-Christian character of the regime had become terribly evident. Indifference to the political system and individual passivity were this biblically legitimised. The protection of the church’s existence and the survival of local churches were perceived to be the highest aims. And since the same leadership under Schmidt continued in office for many years after 1945, there was never any acknowledgment of these shortcomings or apologies for the enthusiastic loyalty paid to Hitler and his regime.

Like other small sects and Free Churches, German Pentecostals in the Third Reich were both more vulnerable to state repression than the large Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic churches and less likely to attract the concerted attention of police or party authorities. Indeed, judging by correspondence in the files of the Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Gestapo and other state officials were often highly confused about the identity of obscure Pentecostal groups, regularly confusing them with various pseudo-Christian spiritualist movements.

But who were the German Pentecostals, and how did they get their start? This is what Carl Simpson sets out to explain as he introduces us to Jonathan Paul, the early leader of Pentecostalism in Germany. Simpson describes the dramatic conferences which led to the organization of the German Pentecostals in 1907, then outlines the early opposition from other German churches, and the creation of the Mülheimer Verband (the largest Pentecostal Association). Along the way, he argues that, while the American Azusa Street Revival was an important factor, the Pentecostal movement developed a unique and largely independent identity across Europe, with German leaders like Jonathan Paul, Emil Meyer, and Emil Humburg, and Carl Octavius Voget leading the way.

Pentecostalism arrived in Germany from Norway when German evangelist Heinrich Dallmeyer and two Norwegian sisters, Dagmar Gregersen and Agnes Thelle, held evangelistic meetings in Kassel. Conversions, healings, and experiences of speaking in tongues soon aroused a great deal of interest, scandal, and controversy, so that city officials eventually ordered the meetings ended. Within eighteen months, however, Pentecostalism had spread to at least eighteen different German communities, in part through the influence of the pietistic and revivalistic Gemeinschaftsbewegung loosely associated with Lutheran and Reformed churches. By the end of 1908, German Protestant pastor Jonathan Paul had assumed the leadership of German Pentecostals, largely through his position as editor of its official organ, the Pfingstgrüße. Paul set an independent course for his movement, affirming glossolalia as a spiritual gift but not a necessary sign of spirit-filling, asserting that a fruitful Christian life was a more important measure of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Despite Paul’s efforts to chart a moderate course, most German church leaders decisively rejected Pentecostalism, regarding the speaking in tongues as a manifestation of evil, not a divine gift. Other points of controversy were the leadership of women in the Pentecostal movement and the doctrine of Christian perfection, the holiness teaching that asserts spirit-filled Christians can be free from the taint of knowing sin (a “purity of intention,” to use a Wesleyan phrase). On September 15, 1909, this opposition reached a head, when members of the Gnadauer Verband (of the Gemeinschaftsbewegung), the Evangelical Alliance, and other German Free Churches overwhelmingly repudiated the Pentecostal Movement. In response, Pentecostals issued the Mülheim Declaration, a document carefully defining the role of glossolalia and affirming their desire to work with other evangelical movements in Germany. Soon Mülheim became the important centre for German Pentecostals, as evidenced by annual conferences and the name it gave to the association of German Pentecostal churches. By forming as an association rather than as a denomination, Pentecostals could retain membership in their Lutheran or Reformed church homes, while cultivating a more vibrant Christianity among their spirit-filled brothers and sisters in Pentecostal assemblies. Thus it was that Pentecostalism remained in an anomalous position, growing up alongside but not officially connected to other sects and Free Church associations in Germany.

September 2009 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

September 2009 — Vol. XV, no. 9

Dear Friends,

As we start the new academic year in the northern hemisphere, it is good to know that our subject of contemporary church history continues to be of interest to so many people, even though, institutionally, it is established in the curriculum of all too few universities. But judging by the publications in this field, or by the controversies which still swirl around to challenge or intrigue us, we can surely believe that there is still much more of interest and value to come.

So I hope that you will find future issues of this Newsletter to be of help and encouragement, and will of course be delighted to have your comments on the contents if you care to send them to my home address as indicated at the end of each month’s issue.

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Sheehan, Where have all the soldiers gone?
b) Lichti, Pacifist denominations in Nazi Germany
c) Coupland, Britannia, Europa and Christendom

2) Book notes:

a) Churches in Europe and Africa
b) Steinacher, Nazis auf der Flucht

3) Journal issue: Ecumenical review: The Barmen Declaration

1a) James J. Sheehan, Where have all the soldiers gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 2008. 284 Pp. ISBN-13 978-0-618-35396-5.

Historians of twentieth century Europe have rightly stressed the discontinuity between the first half of the century and the second. Before 1945, Europe was racked by wars and violence, political extremism and propaganda, ideological fanaticism, economic dislocations, mass murder and genocide, and unprecedented physical destruction and devastation. In the subsequent fifty years, the record is one of peace, political cooperation and integration, economic recovery and prosperity, and a remarkable overcoming of the multiple antagonisms which had marked Europe’s history for so long. In his valuable and perceptive study, Jim Sheehan, the distinguished American scholar from Stanford University, seeks to account for this notable change. Principally, he suggests, it is due to the obsolescence of the military establishment and its replacement by a “civilian” mentality in virtually all of Europe.

This extended essay examines the physical and also the psychological conditions which governed the conduct of both war and peace in Europe during the past century. It was, in his view, the terrible destructiveness of the second German war which convinced the European leaders to abandon their cultivation of the mentality of war, and instead to embrace and hold fast to the cause of peace. Together this metanoia has led to the creation of a dramatically new international order in Europe and a new kind of European state.

War and bloodshed had always been endemic in Europe. Every state had responded by maintaining its own army for national defence. But in the nineteenth century, the technological advances in military hardware, and the spread of new communications systems, such as railways, had brought major changes. No longer was it enough to forge armies from the ranks of the peasantry, turning these unwillingly conscripted recruits into soldiers by brutal discipline and endless drill. Modern armaments required their users to have some education, and even more significantly some incentive. By the end of the nineteenth century, each state had made massive investments in its armed forces, had altered the structures of government in order to mobilize its male populations, and had devoted an increasing proportion of its national wealth to the provision of armaments. Such steps required justification. An increasingly educated public had now to be convinced of the necessity of such sacrifices.

Before 1914, the military and political leaders had successfully organized mass publicity campaigns which stressed the individual’s patriotic duty to defend the existing political order, and to offer his services to King and Country, when the call came, without hesitation or regret.
In such a climate, only a few percipient voices, such as those of Ivan Bloch or Norman Angell, recognized that modern weaponry would make any war unprofitable, even unwinnable These opinions were however dismissed as the naive outpourings of men unable to recognise the heroism which the call to battle demanded.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Sheehan’s view, a relatively peaceful Europe lived in a dangerously violent world. A good deal was due to the aggressive measures taken by Europeans to extend their control over, or gain access to, resources or riches in other parts of the world. This was the violent face of globalization. Sheehan does not argue that the militarism which justified such expansion was diverted back to Europe in 1914. But he does point out that the endemic instability on Europe`s periphery, especially in the Balkans, along with the great power rivalry, was a major contributing factor. Given the almost certain demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the probable collapse of Austria-Hungary, some violent clash between the major European states seemed highly likely. But war was certainly not inevitable, nor did it have to take the form it did. Sheehan rightly points out that none of the leading figures chose they war they got. It was more the result of mistakes and miscalculations by all concerned. For many, fighting a war was the least unattractive alternative. But Sheehan also claims that belligerency for war only came after it broke out, and cannot be seen as a major causal factor.

This public enthusiasm for the war undercut hopes of organizing any opposition. Even the members of the international socialist movement, which had long denounced aggressive nationalism and promoted international cooperation, fell into disarray, and many ended up by supporting their country`s war effort. Too many young men were caught up by the prospect and glamour of military adventure. But it was to be short-lived. As the poet Peter Larkin said: `Never such innocence again`.

The actual course of the war after August 1914 demolished the reputation of the military leaders, shattered the careers of the politicians who had promoted hostilities, and destroyed the credibility of those, like the Christian clergy, who had proclaimed that God was on their side and would grant them immediate victory. The horrendous losses of so many of Europe`s youth, and the many instances of civilian deaths, even genocide, forced a change in mentalities. A biting pessimistic climate of opinion received with scepticism the more positive suggestions for a new world order, as proposed by President Woodrow Wilson, and undermined the values and institutions which had served Europe until 1914.

The consequent disillusionment, and the failure of the victor powers to enforce a viable peace settlement, can be seen as the root causes of the second European war. Sheehan rightly points to the role of Germany, but could possibly have made more of the responsibility of the German conservative elites for their refusal to accept the verdict of 1918 or to learn the lessons of their defeat. In fact, already by the early 1920s, these Germans had united their fellow countrymen in their determination to get their revenge. Their propaganda campaign was particularly successful in stirring up outrage against the so-called punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty. It attacked reparations as ruinous and unjust. It mobilized widespread fears of the dangers of a world Communist revolution. It invented the convenient myth that the German army had been stabbed in the back by treacherous civilian elements, particularly the Jews, It sabotaged attempts to rebuild German society on democratic lines, and as Sheehan notes, continued to believe in the regenerative value of violence. All these sinister developments were in place before Adolf Hitler began his meteoric rise to power. His contribution was to build effectually on these beliefs, to bring an inflexible determination to restore Germany to greatness, and to provide the political framework for Germany`s renewed aggression in 1939.

Hitler`s success, as Sheehan notes, was symptomatic of the fact that millions of European were attracted by the extremism of fascism and communism, no longer believing in a peaceful or liberal future, but persuaded that bold and radical measures were required to usher in a new political and social order. For millions of other Europeans, however, the memory of their dead weighed more heavily. The disenchantment with war and its glorification, which was amply reflected in the post-war literature and art, led to deeper political overtones. Pacifism was no longer an eccentric opinion but an unavoidable response to the logic of history. But the hopes for European peace were too shallow to offset the militancy of the extremists, which was only heightened by the financial collapse and social disorders of the 1930s. In Sheehan`s view, it was this legacy of violence left by the war which Hitler exploited in consolidating his totalitarian control over Germany and encouraged his limitless ambitions.

1939-1945 was, in Sheehan’s view, the last European war. Germany’s aggressive thrusts were overthrown, and the country was militarily occupied and subsequently politically divided. But the keystone of the post-war order was the superpowers’ sometimes perilous, occasionally precarious, and always problematic answer to the German question. For decades Germany was the source of crises usually involving the militarily vulnerable but symbolically potent city of Berlin. But the dangers of nuclear catastrophe now honed the realization that war was too disastrous to be an instrument of political statecraft. Europe’s small national armies were an irrelevance in face of intercontinental missiles. The overwhelming power of extra-European powers in a bipolar political landscape made it possible for Europeans to live at peace with one another. The goals of economic prosperity, technological progress and social modernization now superseded the appeal of military and imperial grandeur across all of Europe.

These developments enabled what Sheehan calls the rise of the civilian state. He then charts the political and institutional steps which saw the switch of government priorities from military expenditure to social programmes. At the same time the significance of Europe’s conscript armies diminished dramatically. Discipline, self-sacrifice and patriotism were no longer prized values. Organized violence, both internally or internationally, no longer enjoyed public support as a legitimate political weapon. Military symbolism, except for once or twice a year, no longer resonated. The change was made peacefully, without much protest, almost imperceptibly.

This process spread across Europe from west to east. The civilian demands for a better standard of living mobilized political opposition throughout the Soviet-controlled states, and eventually secured the overthrow of all its repressive regimes. The overthrow of the Soviet Empire led to complete collapse, but also offered the opportunity to build a more democratic civilian system of government. It was a transformation which had no historical precedent.

Since 1989 this peace process has continued unabated, despite the outbursts of awful but localized violence in the former Yugoslavia. The stages of peaceful integration have proved robust enough to flourish, and clearly Sheehan expects they will continue. His final concluding paragraph is therefore worth quoting in full:

“Since the 1950s, Europeans have enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity unparalleled in their history. Never before have so many of them lived so well and so few died because of political violence. Dreams of perpetual peace, born in the Enlightenment and sustained through some of the most destructive decades in history, seem finally to be realized. Of course there are no resting places in human affairs, nowhere to hide from the insistent pressure of change. To sustain their remarkable achievements, Europeans must face a number of economic, political, cultural and environmental challenges. Many of these challenges come from, or are influenced by, that long and ill-defined frontier that joins Europe to its neighbours,. Along this frontier, where affluence and poverty, law and violence, peace and war. continually meet and uneasily coexist, the future of Europe’s civilian states will be determined.”

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1b) James I. Lichti, Houses on the Sand?. Pacifist denominations in Nazi Germany. (Studies in modern European History, Vol. 31). New York/Bern/Oxford: Peter Lang 2008. ISBN 978-0-8204-6732-3 292 Pp.

James Lichti, who now teaches in California, and is of Mennonite extraction, has now provided us with a well-researched account of the witness of three of Germany’s smaller Protestant free churches, the Mennonites, the Seventh-day Adventists and the Quakers, during the traumatic and repressive years of National Socialism. This revised doctoral dissertation is largely drawn from a thorough examination of the political commentary contained in these societies’ periodicals, at least until most of them were suppressed during the Second World War. Essentially this is a study of the gradual accommodation made by two of these communities to the prevalent Nazi pressures, and of the compromises to their Christian faith in which they more or less willingly participated.

In actual fact, the book’s sub-title is somewhat misleading. Only the Quakers could be described as a pacifist denomination at this time. German Mennonites had already, before the First World War, largely abandoned the pacifist teachings of their founders, or the religious traditions they had shared with the long-persecuted Anabaptists. The ideal of non-resistance shifted from being a community-binding principle to an affair of the individual conscience. Nonetheless, as small minority denominations, they counted themselves as free churches and not tied to the official state-influenced or -regulated main churches, such as the German Evangelical Church or the Roman Catholics. As such, they stood for freedom of worship and of the individual conscience. They campaigned for the separation of church and state, and gave priority to their own denominational loyalties and heritage.

The Mennonite tradition combined piety and persecution, industry and isolation. In the eighteenth century, a significant number had been resettled in Russia, successfully building agricultural colonies, while fully separated from the local inhabitants both religiously and linguistically. But after the Revolution of 1917 these settlements became the target of Communist revolutionary zealotry. Violence, spoliation, persecution and expulsion spread widely. Only with the aid of the German government was a large-scale emigration possible in 1929. The shocking sufferings they endured dominated the political attitudes of the whole denomination for many years to come. Those who returned to Germany were not surprisingly imbued with a deep-seated hatred of the Bolshevism which had destroyed their lives. They were therefore easily susceptible to Nazi propaganda and its various anti-Communist overtones and mythologies, all of which came to be influential in the political commentary of their denomination’s otherwise highly pious periodicals.

At the same time, Mennonites saw it as their duty to uphold a Christian state. Too many were ready to perceive Nazism as upholding Christianity, and hence were increasingly drawn to affirming the unity of Volk and state, as Nazi propaganda proclaimed. On the other hand, they still clung to the idea that church and state should be separated, which led to what Lichti rightly calls a stunning incoherence in their discourse.

Very similar divisions occurred among the Seventh-day Adventists, who similarly sought to prove their loyalty to the new regime by declaring their support, especially for the Nazi health programmes, which ran parallel to their own opposition to narcotics, drugs and alcohol. Not surprisingly, these Adventists also admired Adolf Hitler for his personal example and championship of these same health goals. They even extended their praise to the Nazi eugenics programmes and projects. Only the Quakers maintained their own independent line by never affirming Nazi church-state policies, or supporting the ethnic nationalism displayed by so many German Protestants. German Quakers instead sought to guide the state towards conduct in line with the “inner light”, and all too often allowed their propensity to naive optimism to sway their minds. But since their numbers were so small, their influence was negligible.

Given the heightened political consciousness of the early Nazi years, all the small Protestant groups, especially those who derived from non-Germanic origins, such as the Baptists, the Mormons, the Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were at pains to stress their national loyalty. The Mennonites had the advantage of being ur-deutsch, so had no difficulty in conforming to the ethnic concepts of the new German state. They also readily enough subscribed to the “orders of creation” theology, propagated by noted Lutheran theologians. They proclaimed the view that the distribution of humanity into higher and lower nations and races was part of God’s creative will, which it was the Christian’s duty to uphold. Such opinions easily coincided with the Nazi views on racial purity and segregation, and led to the encouragement and spread of the kind of anti-judaic and even anti-semitic vocabularies, already present in these anti-liberal Protestant ranks. The Mennonites could easily see themselves as the upholders of German culture and racial stock. So too they could portray themselves as champions of a defensive alignment against the dangerous forces of modernity, such as those derived from the Enlightenment, or associated with Jewish influences, or culminating in Bolshevism. Thus the public face of German Mennonitism consistently supported the Nazi regime, and failed to provide their constituents with any perspective transcending their culture or their era.

By contrast the German Quakers were unrepentant in maintaining their internationalist and humanitarian ideals, despite the restrictions imposed on their activities and the harassment they suffered for their cause.

Lichti’s chapter on the policies pursued by these three communities towards the Nazis’ virulent anti-semitic campaigns is important and illuminating. Mennonites and Adventists both had a long history of anti-judaic indoctrination, so were highly susceptible to the kind of pressures brought by the Nazis. Even though horrified by such outbursts of brutality as the November 1938 pogrom, the Kristallnacht, they lacked any prophylactic theology, and like the other major churches were silent in face of these injustices. Only the Quakers sought to provide immediate assistance to the victims, or to help with their plans to emigrate. Too often, however, Mennonites and Adventists shared the age-old view that Jews stood under a divine and on-going curse for their failure to accept Jesus as Christ. Mennonite discourses on the fate of the Jews were therefore well positioned to accommodate Nazi propaganda. Already in 1933, one editor of a pious Mennonite magazine had warned his readers that” all calamity comes from the Jews”. He was to remain editor for more than thirty years from 1925 t0 1956, and even afterwards showed no sign of remorse or regret for such a stance.

In Lichti’s view, given the expression of such widely-held opinions, it would be too tidy to characterize these free churchmen as merely bystanders to the subsequent genocide. At worst they were unwilling actors but nonetheless accessories to these crimes. Their deep-seated anti-judaic prejudices and projections have to be seen as providing a legitimating source of reassurance and even motivation for Germans directly engaged in the Final Solution.

In summary, Lichti argues that, given the unremitting hostility and the draconian measures imposed by the Nazi regime, the churches in Nazi Germany can be seen as having done all that could be expected of them. On the other hand, they failed to witness more courageously to the transcendent beliefs of their Christian faith, but rather retreated into policies of self-preservation. Lichti therefore concurs with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s verdict that such a retreat rendered them “incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world”. This was to be their tragedy in the awful and turbulent years of Nazi tyranny.

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2c) Philip M.Coupland, Britannia, Europa and Christendom. British Christians and European Integration. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006. 284 pp ISBN 987-1403-39128

(This review first appeared in European History Quarterly, April 2009, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author.).

The growth of interest in the role of religion in international politics has since 9/11 been huge. Media focus on “Islam”, in practice meaning the radicalized element associated with the Al Qaida network, has increased exponentially as politicians and diplomats have struggled to devise effective foreign, defence and security policies to deal with the threat posed by this enemy, which is at the same time everywhere but apparently nowhere. From the academic world, Samuel Huntingdon’s badly flawed ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis has been dredged up both to support and explain contemporary conflicts, with religions identified as a key source of global tensions.

The danger with these highly ‘presentist’ security discourses is that they ignore the part religion has always played, positively or negatively, in the political life of states the world over, in times of war and peace. From Kosovo to 9/11, Afghanistan to Iraq, religion only seems to get noticed when it is factored in to explain inter-state or intra-state conflicts which in and of themselves might have very little to do with religion. A broadly secular “Western” academic community working in rational, Enlightenment epistemologies might well have played a part in this, with scholars relying on empirical observation and reporting rather than on notions of Divine Providence to explain the interactions among states. Take the discipline of International relations, for example. Nowhere do we see a better example of the triumph of modernist empiricism than in the establishment of the field in the aftermath of the First World War, and especially after 1945 with the intervention of the American Realists. It is only in the last two decades or so that the field has opened up to be a genuinely pluralist encounter with post-positivist methodologies, and even then religion has played a bit part until relatively recently.

By contrast, in the realm of European integration history, the impact of religion has been researched far better. The European project was at heart a Christian Democratic enterprise and there have been ongoing and publicised disputes over the enlargement of the notional “borders” of Europe – religious, geographical, ethnic and cultural. Philip Coupland’s book seeks to embed the religious angle within the wider historiography of Britain’s relations with the nascent European Communities, which he believes has wrongly tended to overlook this wider input into the” politics determining the nation’s relationship to continental Europe” (3). In so doing, he follows the conventional periodization by studying the growth of religious thinking on a unified Europe during the Second World War and then moves on to the early post-war years and the Christian churches’ inputs to British decision-making on the thorny question of Europe in the 1950s. A much shorter and less detailed chapter takes the story through both the failed British applications in the 1960s and accession in 1973.

The story Coupland tells is one of “retreat” (11). The churches like politicians in Downing Street and civil servants in Whitehall gradually lost their wartime fervour for a unified Europe with active British participation and ended up accepting that the British could not and would not confine themselves to a regional role. Contradictions, he suggests, ran right through the British approach in the later 1940s and beyond. “At different times and in different ways Britain was European and not European, part of the (European) Movement but not part of the movement” (89) The onset of the Cold War did little to help the cause of the Europeanists in Britain as national security increasingly became dependent upon the involvement of the United States in European affairs, while a the same time exaggerating Britain’s global focus. Coupland suggests that by the time the British had come round to the idea of joining “Europe” they were already entering the era of a “post-Christian society” (171), although the voice of the churches could and sometimes did make itself heard in national debates.

The relevance of the story told in this book for events today is obvious and important in at least three respects. First of all, it highlights the historical theme of Britain’s ambiguous attitude to Europe. Compare, for example, Blairite rhetoric about giving Britain a leadership role in the European Union with what he actually achieved after a full decade in office. Secondly, it casts valuable light on the role of religion in constructing ideas about British national identity and on the part these ideas played have played in keeping the British psychologically isolated from integrative developments on the continent. Finally this book reminds us of the sheer ideological dominance of the British state in the post-war era. It is striking to read in this book how the inertia and muddled thinking among politicians and diplomas sapped the life out of the British Europeanists. By the time of the applications in the 1960s, it was more a case of choosing the least harmful option for Britain rather than proactively pursuing a positive, principled foreign policy strategy. One suspects that Gordon Brown and his successor might soon be faced with the same conundrum over the Euro.

Oliver Daddow, Loughorough University, England

2a) eds. Katharina Kunter. Jens Holger Schjorring. Changing Relations between churches in Europe and Africa. The Internationalization of Christianity and Politics in the 20th century. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2008 vii+223 Pp. ISBN 978-3-447-05451-5

These collected essays result from a conference held in Tanzania five years ago, under the auspices of the distinguished Danish church historian, Jens Holger Schjorring. The international contributors deliberately sought to look beyond the usual national or denominational horizons, and here tackle the broad picture of the role of the European churches, particularly in relation to Africa. The preliminary essays look back on the era of the European missionaries and their impact. This colonial survival can be said to have come to end with the All Africa Lutheran conferences in the period 1955-1965. The second section deals with the political dimensions of church life in such troubled societies as Zimbabwe, South Africa and Ethiopia, showing the difficult paths the European and African churches had to follow steering between the hazards of the Cold War, communism, imperial dismantling and the search for human rights. The final section invites larger questions, such as the future role of women in the life of Africa’s churches, as well as a concluding essay of African churches in Europe.

2b) Gerald Steinacher, Nazis auf der Flucht. Wie Kriegsverbrecher ueber Italien nach Uebersee entkamen. Inssbruck: Studien Verlag 2008. 379 pp. ISBN 978-3-7065-1026-1

This thoroughly-researched study examines the means and the routes by which Nazi war criminals managed to evade their due fate by escaping abroad, mainly to Latin America or the Near East, in the years after the defeat of the Nazi regime. Among those agencies which helped in these escapes, as has been well known for some time, were both the Vatican’s Commission for Assistance to Refugees and the American Counter Intelligence Agency. Steinacher devotes a whole chapter to the Vatican network, detailing the operations of this pontifical commission and its various branches, as well as to the more dubious activities of the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, who had been in charge since 1925 of the German College in Rome. He had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s rule, including the seizure of Austria in 1938. He had even written a book advocating that Catholicism and Nazism should collaborate, since their political goals were so similar. Such partisanship was however not approved by his superiors, particularly Cardinal Pacelli, soon to become Pope Pius XII. In fact Hudal was frozen out of the Vatican’s establishment and was eventually dismissed from his positions in 1952.

On the other hand, there is clear evidence that Hudal assisted numerous refugees arriving in Rome, including former Nazis, by easing their way to the Vatican’s Refugee Committee. It is however far from clear that he was fully aware of the criminal records of any of those he helped. Steinacher does not produce any such proof. The fact was that approximately 100,000 such refugees passed through Italy to Latin America in these years. The fact also was that the Vatican Refugee Commission had neither the desire nor the means of checking on each individual’s true identity, let alone their past war-time record. It was enough that they claimed to be good Catholics, were declared anti-.Communists and sought refugee from being repatriated to any part of Communist-controlled Europe. In such circumstances we can certainly agree with Steinacher that the Vatican’s assistance was exploited and misplaced. But the evidence is lacking that the Vatican’s leading officials, apart from Hudal, were knowingly aware that some of those they helped to get to Latin America, and thus escape retribution, were war criminals.

3) Journal articles: Ecumenical review. Vol. 61, no. 1, March 2009
To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the notable Barmen Declaration issued in May 1934 by the section of the German Evangelical Church, later known as the Confessing Church, this journal, which is the house organ of the World Council of Churches, devotes this whole issue to what it calls ‘The Barmen Declaration: Global Perspectives”. Three articles are particularly interesting for historians, namely those by Keith Clements, Victoria Barnett, and Heino Falcke. In line with the journal’s purpose, the emphasis is on the historical significance of this statement for the wider ecumenical fraternity, but these authors show that, even after so many years, consensus is hard to achieve.

To some, like Keith Clements, the Barmen Declaration was part of a wider realization of the dangers of National Socialism and its attempt to subvert Christian doctrines in the service of its racial ideology. The Barmen Declaration’s resolute defence of Christian orthodoxy and its clear refusal to let other sources of inspiration or control seep into the church’s witness was a vital step to prevent the kind of creeping compromise with Nazism to which a good proportion of the German Evangelical Church membership, and its clergy, had already succumbed. It was also important that, for the first time, Lutherans, Reformed and United German churchmen were able to agree on a declaration, which was in fact to become the guiding document for their principled resistance to the exaggerations of Nazi theological claims, as advanced by such distinguished theologians as Emanuel Hirsh, Paul Althaus or Gerhard Kittel. To be sure, the authors of this Declaration did not intend to make any political statement against the regime. In fact, most of them approved the purely secular goals which Hitler was so loudly proclaiming. But the actions of the pro-Nazi “German Christians” in watering down of the traditional faith in order to be on the winning political side, the repressive measures taken against any dissenting voices, and the readiness to accept Nazi propaganda attacks on the Jews, were the main causative factors, which led to a unified determination to protest. As Keith Clements shows, this clear theological pronouncement was well received outside Germany, especially by the leaders of the ecumenical movement, such as Bishop George Bell, the chairman of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work. This international Christian community, which met in Denmark only a few months later, was explicit in its condemnation of the official German church leadership, largely due to the guidance provided by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And the long-term effects of the Barmen Declaration played a significant role in the post-war willingness to receive the German Evangelical Church back into the wider ecumenical fellowship.

Victoria Barnett, who is now attached to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, takes a more critical view. She points out that, despite the months of increasingly obvious discrimination and even persecution of the Jewish population in Germany, these Protestant church leaders took no stand whatsoever against such tactics. Protests from abroad were rejected as unwarranted interference in Germany’s internal affairs. The Barmen Declaration said nothing about the Nazi racial ideology, nor did it express any sympathy for the victims of the Nazis’ violence. In fact, many years later, even some of its authors regretted that they had not added a further clause dealing with the Jewish question But at the time, and indeed even four years later, after the Kristallnacht, the Evangelical Church’s silence was stunning. So, in Barnett’s view, the Barmen Declaration cannot be seen as symbol, of resistance, a cry of conscience, let alone an act of solidarity or sympathy with the Nazis’ victims. Yet it was a theologically articulate foundation for the future of the church over against ideological demands, reminding Christians of where their ultimate allegiance should be.

Heino Falcke, who has been a leading member of the Protestant church in East Germany draws on his own experience of the relevance of the Barmen Declaration for his ministry and witness in the German Democratic Republic in the years after 1952. To be sure, the East German Protestants were never tempted to regard the ruling ideology of Marxism-Leninism as a tempting creed to follow for Christians in the churches. They had been too well indoctrinated by anti-communist propaganda. Nevertheless they were faced with the institutional pressures exercised by this totalitarian regime seeking to expunge or at least minimize the churches’ influence in society. Falcke points out that the Barmen Declaration gave impetus to a positive theological response in such a critical political situation. Defeatism, resignation or merely “inner emigration” were not to be encouraged. Rather, he suggests, the Barmen Declaration was received and interpreted in the churches of the G.D.R. in the light of Bonhoeffer’s Christology, being there for all people whether Marxists or Methodists. For Christians, all areas of life belong to Jesus Christ.

There should be no separation or handover to other political or ideological loyalties. This opened the way for an active role for the Churchwithin Socialism, for which Falcke himself was a prominent spokesman. This included a strong witness for peace and social justice, which became in fact the basis for the churches’ participation in the revolutionary movement, culminating in 1989 and the non-violent overthrow of the regime. Above all, Falcke suggests, the Barmen Declaration’s call for the church to witness fearlessly to all people, and to proclaim the free grace of God, was and is a continuing force in the subsequent life of the German Evangelical Church.

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With all best wishes to you all,
John Conway

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 344 Pp., ISBN: 9781487503437.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19th and 20th century Germany,” German Studies Association, 2017

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im “Dritten Reich”: Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 2011), 344pp. ISBN: 978-3-89971-690-0.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, University of Toronto

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Douglas Pratt and Barbara Göb, “Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Germany: Recent Developments and Continuing Issues,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 18 no. 1 (January 2007): 43-65.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Journal issue: Religion, State and Society 39, no. 1 (March 2011). The Changing Nature of Military Chaplaincy.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Article Note: New Research on Churches in Postwar Germany

Francis Graham-Dixon, “A ‘Moral Mandate’ for Occupation: The British Churches and Voluntary Organizations in North-Western Germany, 1945-1949,” German History 28, no.2 (2010): 193-213.

Ian Connor, “The Protestant Churches and German Refugees and Expellees in the Western Zones of Germany after 1945,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 15, no.1 (April 2007): 43-63.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Conference Report: “German Catholics negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011, Boston, MA.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

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

Article Note: Research on German Free Churches and Sects

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia and Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Conference Report: “Religious Revivals in 19^th and 20^th century Germany,” German Studies Association, 2017