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Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

Translated from the German by Martin R. Menke

Editor’s note: the translation has hewed closely to the original German of the conference report. In a few instances some linguistic liberties were taken to ensure readability in English, but we have tried to minimize these. On occasion the original German terms are retained in square brackets to clarify a translation.

From October 5 to 7, 2022, an international conference on [Otto] Dibelius took place in Marburg. LUKAS BORMANN of the Phillips University Marburg and MANFRED GAILUS of the Technical University Berlin organized the event. The organizers selected talks by sixteen scholars active in Protestant theology and historical, cultural, and religious scholarship on Otto Dibelius (1886-1967). The conference’s purpose was to develop a new understanding of this extraordinary personality in German Protestantism for the first time since the publication of his first and, so far, only biography thirty years ago.

The conference program consisted of seven thematic sessions. The first session featured contributions to the historiography concerning Dibelius. MARTIN STUPPERICH (Hannover) reported as a witness to the creation of the Dibelius biography written by his father, Robert Stupperich. In 1967, a group around Kurt Scharf had tasked the elder Stupperich with writing a biography to honor their esteemed teacher. The publisher, however, rejected the first draft. Subsequently, the son, Martin, took on the difficult task of revising the first draft with his father. Working with his wife, the doctorally qualified historian Amrei Stupperich, Martin Stupperich claimed to have composed a significant part of the [published] manuscript. He centered the biography on the theme of the church’s independence after 1919, one of Dibelius’s most important concerns. Martin Stupperich sought to mention the persecution of the Jews because originally Robert Stupperich had not focused on accusations of antisemitism against Dibelius. When the biography appeared in 1989, Dibelius was not perceived as an antisemite.

The two following presentations were dedicated to the intellectual formation of Dibelius in late Imperial Germany. ALBRECHT BEUTEL (Münster) traced Dibelius’ development before the First World War and described him as an ambitious church reformer who oriented his thinking about parishes and parish activities on the work of Emil Sulze. Pleading for a form of preaching easily understood by the people, which Dibelius connected to a differentiated parish organizational program, he engaged the ideas of Calvin and his experience gained while studying abroad in the Church of Scotland and its small parishes. Dibelius sought to encourage parishes actively to participate in the life of the church. In his work, Dibelius considered himself a modern Lutheran and kept his distance from pietism. Dibelius embraced much of the Prussian tradition from Queen Louise to Bismarck, which to him embodied Germany. While he interpreted the outbreak of war in 1914 as a divine epiphany, his writing from the period reveals no trace of antisemitism.

WOLF-DIETRICH SCHÄUFFELE (Marburg) analyzed Dibelius’ activities during the First World War. Schäuffele concluded that his wartime sermons concerned pastoral concerns but were influenced by nationalist phraseology and far removed from the reality of the front. As a superior pastor in Lauenburg, he served soldiers’ needs. A year later, he conducted patriotic rallies in the Protestant Berlin parish of Heilsbronnen. The Christian state was his ideal, whose morality should be guaranteed by the church and Christianity. He also considered Germany’s status as a world power to be essential. Dibelius believed in a Christian German mission, and he understood the war as a just and holy war in which God, as the Lord of history, was continuing his work of creation. It seemed incredible to him that God should permit the political might of Germans to break. In 1918, Dibelius joined the DNVP.[1] At war’s end, he advocated the stab-in-the-back legend and decried the Treaty of Versailles as a satanic construct.

In the next session, which concerned itself with the church as guardian after 1919, BENEDIKT BRUNNER (Mainz) presented a talk online in which he analyzed the public and publishing activity of Dibelius in the Weimar Republic. For more than fifty years, Dibelius called for a people’s church (Volkskirche). In 1919, he considered it time for a free, strong people’s church. Dibelius claimed he was the best-informed man of the Prussian Church, who published until 1933 in seven journals. Furthermore, he supported religious instruction in public schools and called upon the people to gather around the Protestant church to resist secularization. In 1925, Dibelius became General Superintendent of the Kurmark and assumed the leadership of the Prussian church. In a much discussed and observed debate with Karl Barth, Dibelius used triumphalist language to defend the imperial church and its responsibility for the people.

TODD H. WEIR (Groningen), whose presentation had been prepared in part and translated by MAURICE BACKSCHAT (Münster), addressed the work of Dibelius at the Apologetical Center, founded in Berlin Spandau in 1921. From a Protestant perspective, the center engaged with secularization and the German atheist [Gottlosen] movement. It advocated a Christian worldview. Karl Barth considered the language of apologetics dangerous. Dibelius saw in Barth a dogmatic, disconnected from the world’s reality, who hardly understood the church’s mission. After 1945, Dibelius continued his apologetic work during the Cold War. Dibelius conceived the people’s church [Volkskirche] as a counterpoint to secular culture, which the church should engage. Dibelius recognized positive religious energies in nationalism but envisioned himself on the apologetic front against National Socialism and the German Christian movement. Until 1933, he found it increasingly difficult to delimit the boundary between his apologetics and the right-wing margins.

The fourth session analyzed Dibelius’ engagement in public debate. LUKAS BORMANN (Marburg) opened the session with a presentation about Dibelius’ most influential work, The Century of the Church, which was first published in 1926 and appeared in six further editions. Dibelius addressed his work to the educated reading middle class. Dibelius’ thesis held that the Lutheran Reformation had eliminated the church. He saw a wave of churches on a global scale and developed a Protestant cultural program that employed racial and national socialist terminology.[2] He identified freethinkers, Jews, and Catholics as demons. He argued that, while sects and the German free churches formed distinct groups, the church aimed to include everyone. At the time, Dibelius claimed that the Protestant church could co-exist with any form of government; later faced with the GDR, he relativized that position. More recent research (for example, from Wolfgang Huber, Hartmut Fritz, and Benedikt Brunner) is more critical of Dibelius’ program. He did not reach the broader masses. Instead of recognizing the church as polysemous, he polarized it and thus found himself between the fronts of a diverse Protestantism.

BRANDON BLOCK (Wisconsin) gave a virtual presentation in which he concentrated on the West German reception of Dibelius’ work Authority [Obrigkeit], published in 1959. As bishop and chairman of the Council of the Protestant Churches (EKD) in Germany, Dibelius took a traditional anti-communist position. At the same time, the Councils of Brethren sought a new role for the church. In 1958, the East German bishops professed their loyalty to the GDR. Given the situation, Dibelius wanted to make a statement about the nature of state authority. The term “authority” [Obrigkeit] (Romans 13) no longer seemed to be an adequate interpretation. Dibelius’ new work sparked a debate in which conservative Lutherans recognized an analogy between the GDR and the Third Reich. The circle around Karl Barth and the Councils of Brethren rejected Dibelius’ text. They claimed that, with his reactionary conservatism, Dibelius may have strengthened counter-reactions, which encouraged the transformation of the Protestant church into a church open to democracy and society.

JOLANDA GRÄSSEL-FARNBAUER (Marburg) addressed Dibelius’ position on women’s issues. She analyzed the work We Call Germany to God [Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott] (1937), published by Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. She also studied critical reactions by contemporary female readers. We Call Germany responded to National Socialist church politics and criticized the German Christian movement. In the last chapter, the authors explained their view of the women’s movement. They thought women had contravened their destiny when they went to work for pay and sought education and public works. First and foremost, they were to be wives and mothers. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack contradicted this view, and theologians Meta Eyl and Gertrud Eitner identified an affinity of the text with National Socialist ideology. Although many women were active in the Confessing Church, it remained ambivalent on the question of women’s roles. Dibelius conceded to theologically educated women a role of service in the church but not the proclamation [of the gospel] in religious worship. Until the end, he refused to ordain women.

The fifth session focused on National Socialism and the church struggle [Kirchenkampf]. According to MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin), at the opening of Parliament in Potsdam (March 21, 1933), Dibelius welcomed the National Socialist regime’s initial antisemitic policies. Using racist rhetoric, he [claimed] he had expected the “inflow of fresh blood” [“das Einströmen frischen Blutes”] as early as April 1932 and believed in a resurgence of faith. For him, the solution to the Jewish question was to prevent immigration from Eastern Europe. Dibelius’ antisemitic attitude, Gailus claimed, was amply documented. He did not encounter problems with the German Christian movement until he lost his administrative power. As an advisor to the regional Confessing Church of Brandenburg, he remained a man in the middle. He was never a Confessing Church pastor in a Confessing Church parish. Dibelius desired a large, strong, autocratically governed Germany but rejected the hierarchy of the German Christians. After 1945, a negative understanding of Dibelius developed in East Germany; in West Germany, he was seen more positively.

ANDREAS PANGRITZ (Osnabrück) studied the poorly-explored relationship of Dibelius to Jews. Pangritz considered him an antisemite with a clear conscience. After 1945, Dibelius sought to relativize his views. In an article published in 1948, in a retrospective on the Reichspogrom,[3] he did not explain why the church had remained silent. Still, he did emphasize that it was a duty of honor for the Confessing Church to help persecuted Jews. He also claimed that, after euthanasia,[4] he could no longer acknowledge the National Socialist state as an authority. He declared that he had employed two non-Aryans. Since 1934, he had employed a “half-Jew” as a secretary. Already in 1928, Dibelius confessed that he had always been an antisemite. Regarding the boycott of Jewish stores in 1933, Dibelius wrote on April 9 in the Protestant Sunday newspaper of Berlin [Evangelischen Sonntagsblatt Berlin] that the international economy and the international press were in Jewish hands. He continued that Jews abroad were rallying against Germany. He concluded that Jews were a foreign race and Eastern Jews were of questionable moral character.

TETYANA PAVLUSH (Cardiff) had been scheduled to speak on Dibelius’s attitude towards denazification. Because she canceled her talk, MICHAEL HEYMEL (Limburg) presented a talk on the relationship between Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. In a sketch of their personalities, he pointed out that there had been no conflict of authority until both occupied high leadership posts in the church. Both were Prussians, convinced monarchists, and homeless [heimatlose] national Protestants. They welcomed Hitler’s seizure of power but found themselves in ecclesiastical opposition to the German Christians. During the Kirchenkampf, they acted as allies for a time. Dibelius was initially only an observer of the Confessing Church and began his full cooperation only in June 1934. The opposition position that Niemöller assumed after the war’s end originated in the Confessing Churches’ internal fissures. This is evident in the differing evaluations of the church conference at Treysa. Niemöller considered Dibelius the bureaucratic leader of an ecclesiastical administration, while Dibelius considered Niemöller the representative of a superseded ecclesiastical minority.

The three papers of the following session were devoted to the post-war era. CLAUDIA LEPP (München) analyzed the work of Dibelius as a bishop of Berlin (1945-1966) under four aspects. First, in 1945, when he resumed his office in the Prussian Council of Brethren, Dibelius acted as a strongman, solidified old structures, and prevented a reorganization as the Council of Elders around Niemöller intended. In his work, he included both German Christian and National Socialist pastors. Second, in his sermons and pastoral letters, he assumed the position of someone who could analyze and interpret contemporary affairs, in order to frame and structure the life of the people. He also compared the Federal Republic with the Weimar Republic and the GDR with the National Socialist state. Thirdly, he acted as an anti-communist engaged in a church struggle, insisting on the rule of law and freedom of opinion in the GDR. At the time, ninety percent of the GDR’s population belonged to a Christian church. Dibelius struggled in vain against the Socialist Youth Ceremony of Jugendweihe, since most Protestants were unwilling to resist the government’s ritual. Fourth, he acted as a national Protestant activist for the reunification of Germany. By 1957, he was banned from entering the GDR but formally remained a bishop of East and West Berlin until 1966.

HANSJÖRG BUSS (Siegen) focused on the East German political and ecclesiastical opponents of Dibelius as bishop of Berlin. He was the only East German representative on the Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany and, during the 1950s, he was the face of the Protestant church. During this time, the Protestant church in the GDR lost public support. In a film produced by East German television, Dibelius was portrayed as a cold warrior based on his notorious sermon at Potsdam in 1933. This reflected the East German regime’s tendency to see him as an ideological opponent. In East German media, he was portrayed in caricatures as a NATO bishop and purveyor of the hydrogen bomb. While the East German polemic against Dibelius included antisemitic overtones, it increased his support in the West. In 1958, opposition among the pastors of Berlin-Brandenburg increased. Günter Jacob, Superintendent of the Neumark since 1946, became his primary opponent. Jacob did not insist on a unified Protestant church in Germany and, after 1960, turned against the structure of the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, which was tailored to Dibelius and the office of the bishop.

SIEGFRIED HERMLE (München) used the annual reports written by Dibelius to analyze his tenure in office as chair of the Council of the Lutheran Church in Germany [Rat der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland] (1949-1961). The council consisted of eleven members and was intended to lead and administer. Eleven individuals ran for the chair’s position in the 1949 elections. A clear majority voted for Dibelius and Lilje as his deputy. Niemöller was no longer capable of gaining a majority. For Dibelius, the churches in the German states represented the central points of German Protestantism. The individual churches did not want a strong central leadership. The Council of the Lutheran Church in Germany should only occasionally speak publicly in the name of the individual churches. In the eight annual reports filed by Dibelius, relations between church and state took up much space. He believed Bonn protected the church while, in the GDR, the church was increasingly exposed to propaganda. He argued that the Church should not let itself be abused in the competition of political forces. He acknowledged differences of opinion in military matters but disagreed with the Councils of Brethren. This was a contrast that influences debates concerning peace to this day. The conservative majority of the Councils of Brethren agreed with him.

The last session concerned Dibelius on the international stage. THEA SULMAVICO (Halle) characterized Dibelius’ position in the rearmament debate as ambivalent. The GDR press responded with polemics when he signed the agreement on pastoral care in the military (1957). Dibelius, in The Boundaries of the State [Die Grenzen des Staates] of 1949, criticized modern war. His criticism of the secular state was aimed only at the GDR, not against the Federal Republic. For Dibelius, the Fatherland had a higher priority than the state. It was a matter of national honor to provide for the defense of one’s own country. He warned against the great danger from the East. After atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, he believed the Soviet Union to possess superiority over the West. He accused Niemöller and Heinemann[5] of political propaganda. He claimed Lutherans were better than the followers of Barth in keeping separate political questions and questions of faith. Neither side ever entirely accepted Dibelius’ claim that he was unpolitical.

BERND KREBS (Berlin) discussed Dibelius’ relationship with Poland. In the 1920s, the primary focus was on Germans under Polish rule. Two-thirds of these Germans left Poland. General Superintendent Juliusz Barsche advocated the integration of all Protestants in the Polish state. Dibelius was convinced of a German mission in the East. Using strongly nationalist tones, he represented the interests of German Protestants in Poland. Before 1914, the region included a million Protestant Christians; after the war, only 350,000 remained. German pastors [in Poland] followed the DNVP party line and were considered leaders in ethnic German circles. In the mid-1920s, tensions worsened. National Socialist policies exerted massive pressure on the Protestant church in Posen. German Protestants in Poland were disappointed by National Socialism. Poland remained a realm of different cultures, in which the desired Germanification failed. After 1945, Dibelius concerned himself with the Lutherans in Poland.

A promised presentation on Dibelius’ active participation in the Ecumenical Movement had to be canceled because KATHARINA KUNTER (Helsinki) could not attend. HARTMUT LEHMANN (Kiel) summarized the conference and asked if anyone actually knew who Dibelius was. Did the presentations together constitute a new understanding of Dibelius? Three facets, Lehmann argued, were recognizable: 1. Dibelius was a prince of the church who always claimed leadership roles. 2. He was a man of the political right who consistently combated the left. Like the average German Protestant of his age, he supported antisemitism and initially also National Socialism. He integrated individuals from different backgrounds into the Council of the Protestant Churches of Germany. 3. After 1945, Dibelius missed the opportunity for a new orientation of the Protestant Church. One could at least imagine an alternative behavior marked by repentance and reversal. The question of what might have happened if Dibelius, as leader of the church, had acted differently before and after National Socialism would go beyond historical scholarship. LEPP and HERMLE remarked that, in such an instance, Dibelius would not have been himself and would not have risen to the church leadership positions he held.

The conference took place with relatively good participation by female scholars within a mixture of several generations of scholars and a constructive atmosphere. Nonetheless, in evaluating the work of Robert Stupperich’s discussion of antisemitism, tensions became evident. Relating to ecumenicism and denazification, gaps in the scholarship were regrettably noticed. New were the investigations of Dibelius during the Kaiserzeit[6] and his relationship to the Weimar era. On the question of antisemitism and Dibelius’ “tragic” post-war role between polemics and his slow distancing from them, the final word has not been spoken. The contributions to the conference are to be published in an edited volume.

[1] Editor’s note: German National People’s Party, a right-wing conservative nationalist party.

[2] Translator’s note: the preceding two sentences are contradictory in the original German.

[3] Editor’s note: the pogrom of November 9, 1938.

[4] Editor’s note: the Nazis’ T-4 “euthanasia” program.

[5] Editor’s note: Gustav Heinemann, at the time President of the Synod of German Churches and Minister of the Interior under Konrad Adenauer.

[6] Editor’s note: refers to the period 1871-1918.

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Conference Report: Otto Dibelius. New Research on a Protestant Figure of the Century

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

From October 5-7, 2022, an international conference devoted to new research on the German Protestant leader Otto Dibelius took place in Marburg. It was organized by LUKAS BORMANN (Philipps University of Marburg) and MANFRED GAILUS (TU Berlin). Sixteen scholars of Protestant theology, history, culture, and religion presented papers on Otto Dibelius (1880-1967), contributing to a new perspective on this outstanding personality of German Protestantism, more than 30 years after the publication of the first and so far only biography.

The conference program, which was divided into seven thematic blocks, began with an overview of the scholarship on Dibelius. MARTIN STUPPERICH (Hannover), whose father Robert Stupperich wrote a Dibelius biography, spoke as a personal witness. In 1967, his father was commissioned by a group around Kurt Scharf to write a biography in which he tried to capture the merits of the honoured teacher. This the publisher rejected, and so Martin then took on the difficult task of revising the first version together with his father. By his account, he and his wife, the historian AMREI STUPPERICH, wrote a significant part of the text. The emphasis was now on Dibelius’ main theme, namely the new independence of the church after 1919, insisting also to include the persecution of the Jews, since the accusation of antisemitism had been neglected by Robert Stupperich. Even in 1989, per Martin, when the biography was published, Dibelius was not perceived as an antisemite.

The next two lectures were devoted to the mentalities of the Imperial era. ALBRECHT BEUTEL (Münster) traced Dibelius’ career up to the First World War and described him as an ambitious church reformer who based his parish program on that of Emil Sulze. Appealing to a popular preaching style while organizing the complexity of his parish, he adopted ideas not only from Calvin but also from the Church of Scotland and its small congregations, which he knew from a study visit. His aim was to encourage active participation in the parish community. Dibelius saw himself as a modern Lutheran and kept his distance from Pietism. For him, the epitome of Germanness was Preussentum (Prussianism, like Bismarck and Queen Luise) was the epitome of Germanness. He interpreted the outbreak of war in 1914 as a “revelation from God”. During the Imperial period, Dibelius showed no signs of antisemitism.

WOLF-FRIEDRICH SCHÄUFELE (Marburg) went into more detail about Dibelius’ work in the First World War and came to the conclusion that although his war sermons had expressed pastoral concerns, they were strongly influenced by nationalistic phraseology and were far removed from reality. As head pastor in Lauenburg, Dibelius looked after soldiers in 1914, and a year later organized patriotic rallies in Berlin-Heilsbronnen. His ideal was the Christian state, whose morality was to be guaranteed by the church and Christianity. He considered it vital for the Wilhelmine Empire to exist as a world power. Dibelius believed in a Christian-German mission, interpreting the Great War as a just and holy war in which God was at work as Lord of History. It seemed hardly conceivable to him that God could work in such a way that would break the political power of Germans. In 1918, Dibelius joined the German National People’s Party (DNVP). At war’s end, he promoted the stab-in-the-back legend and denounced the Versailles Treaty as a satanic construct.

In the next thematic section, which revolved around the church as guardian after 1919, BENEDIKT BRUNNER (Mainz) examined the public and journalistic activities of Dibelius during the Weimar Republic in an online presentation. Dibelius stood for the national church [Volkskirche] for more than fifty years. In 1919, he saw the time had come for a free, powerful people’s church [Volkskirche]. He was the most highly informed man in the Prussian Church, publishing in seven journals by 1933. He also campaigned for religious education in state schools and called on people to rally around the Protestant church to resist de-Christianization. In 1925, Dibelius became General Superintendent of the Kurmark, at the top of the Prussian Church. In a widely publicized debate with Karl Barth, he defended the empirical church as one that bears responsibility for the people, while Barth criticized Dibelius’ triumphalist language and attitude.

TODD H. WEIR (Groningen), whose lecture was co-written and translated into German by MAURICE BACKSCHAT (Münster), examined Dibelius’ work in the Apologetische Centrale founded in Berlin-Spandau in 1921, which grappled with secularism and the ‘godless’ movement and advanced a ‘Christian world view’. Karl Barth found the language of the apologists dangerous. Dibelius considered Barth a dogmatist who was disconnected from the reality of the world and who could barely see the mission of the church. After 1945, Dibelius continued his apologetics into the Cold War. He understood the people’s church [Volkskirche] as the antithesis to secular culture and the institution which could confront secularism. In nationalism he saw positive religious energy, even as he himself participated on the apologetic front against Nazism and the German Christians (DC). By 1933, he found it increasingly difficult to distinguish himself from the right-wing fringe in his apologetics.

The fourth thematic section, which dealt with Dibelius in public debate, was opened by LUKAS BORMANN (Marburg), who gave a lecture on Dibelius’ most influential publication, the book Das Jahrhundert der Kirche [The Century of the Church] (1926), which went through six editions. It was written for an educated middle-class readership. According to Dibelius’ argument, the Lutheran Reformation purged the church. In contrast, he saw a global wave of the church and developed a Protestant cultural program that used ethnic (völkisch) and nationalist terminology. By demons he meant freethinkers, Jews, and Catholics. While sects and free churches focused on specific groups, the Protestant church encompassed the whole people. Dibelius later distanced himself from his view that the Protestant church could live with any state system. More recent research (e.g. Wolfgang Huber, Hartmut Fritz, and Benedikt Brunner) judges his program critically. It didn’t reach the general public. Instead of understanding the church as a polyseme, he polarized it and got caught between the fronts of a many-sided Protestantism.

In his online lecture, BRANDON BLOCH (Wisconsin) focused on the West German reception of Dibelius’ writing Obrigkeit [Authority] (1959). As bishop and Council Chair in the Protestant Church in Germany [EKD], situated between the divided German states, Dibelius represented a traditionally anti-communist position, while the [Confessing Church] Councils of Brethren in the EKD pleaded for a new role for the church. In 1958, East German bishops declared their loyalty to East Germany. In this context, Dibelius wanted to say something about the nature of state authority in the modern age. The term “government” (Romans 13) no longer seemed to him to be a correct translation for this. His authority document unleashed a debate in which conservative Lutherans saw an analogy between the GDR and the Third Reich, while the circle around Karl Barth and the Councils of Brethren rejected the document. Through his reactionary conservatism, Dibelius may have strengthened counter-reactions that promoted the transformation of the Protestant church into a church open to democracy and society.

JOLANDA GRASSEL-FARNBAUER (Marburg) dealt with Dibelius’ attitude to the “women question.” In doing so, she referred to the text Wir rufen Deutschland zu Gott [We call Germany to God] (1937) published by Dibelius and Martin Niemöller and to critical reactions from contemporary readers. The writing reacted to Nazi church politics and settled accounts with the German Faith Movement. In the last chapter, the authors commented on the women’s movement. They felt that women had defied their destiny when they took up paid work and sought education and public work because they were wives and mothers first. Agnes von Zahn-Harnack and the theologian Meta Eyl contradicted this, while Gertrud Eitner noted that the writing ran close to Nazi ideology. Although many women were active in the Confessing Church (BK), there was an ambivalent attitude towards women. While Dibelius allowed theologically educated women to serve in the church, they were not allowed to preach in church services and he refused to the end to ordain women.

The fifth section focused on National Socialism and “Church Struggle.” According to MANFRED GAILUS (Berlin), on the day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), Dibelius welcomed the National Socialist Jewish policy of the first weeks of Nazi rule. Using völkisch rhetoric, he had already expected “the influx of fresh blood” in April 1932 and had seen the reawakening of faith. For him, too, the solution to the Jewish question was not to allow any immigrants from the East. Dibelius’ antisemitic attitude is well documented. He only had problems with the German Christians [DC] when he was deprived of administrative power. As an adviser to the regional Confessing Church [BK] of Brandenburg, he remained a man of the middle and did not stand for a BK parish, as the BK pastors did. Dibelius desired a great, strong, and autocratically-governed Germany but opposed the DC church government. After 1945, in the context of the Cold War, a negative image of Dibelius emerged in Eastern Germany and a positive one in Western Germany.

ANDREAS PANGRITZ (Osnabrück), who described Dibelius as an antisemite with a clear conscience, examined Dibelius’ relationship to Judaism, which is still little researched. After 1945, Dibelius glossed over his attitude. In an article from 1948, looking back on the Kristallnacht Pogrom, he did not say why the church was silent at the time, but only that it had become a duty of honor in the BK to help persecuted Jews. He also claimed that, after the euthanasia program, he had no longer been able to recognize the Nazi state as an authority, adding that he had employed two non-Aryans. A half-Jewish woman had been working for him as a secretary since 1934. As early as 1928, Dibelius admitted that he had always been an antisemite. Regarding the boycott of Jewish businesses, he wrote on April 9, 1933, in the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt Berlin that international business capital and the press were in Jewish hands and that Jewry abroad was stirring up anti-Germany sentiment, that Jews were a foreign race, and that Eastern Jews were of dubious moral quality.

TETYANA PAVLUSH (Cardiff) was scheduled to contribute on Dibelius’ stance on denazification. She was unable to attend.

Instead, MICHAEL HEYMEL (Limburg) followed with a lecture on the relationship between Dibelius and Martin Niemöller. In a sketch of their personalities, he pointed out that a conflict of authority between the two only emerged when they met in church leadership positions. Both were Prussians, convinced monarchists and homeless national Protestants who welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, but then found themselves in the church opposition to the DC. In the Church Struggle they had acted as temporary allies, since Dibelius was only involved in the beginnings of the BK as an observer and his involvement only began in June 1934. The contrary position that Niemöller took after the end of the war was rooted in the BK’s internal divisions. This can be seen in the different assessments of the Treysa church conference. Niemöller saw Dibelius as the administrator of a church apparatus, while his opposite number saw him as a representative of an outdated church minority position.

The three lectures in the following thematic section were dedicated to the post-war period. CLAUDIA LEPP (Munich) analyzed the work of Dibelius as Bishop of Berlin (1945-1966) from four angles. In 1945, Dibelius acted as a mover and shaker in the Prussian Council of Brethren by taking up his old office again, consolidating the old structures and preventing a new order in the spirit of the Dahlemite Council of Brethren. He also took on DC and NS pastors. Secondly, in his sermons and pastoral letters, he took on the role of an interpreter of times who wanted to shape the life of the people. He compared the Federal Republic with Weimar and the GDR with the Nazi state. Thirdly, he acted as an anti-communist church fighter who valued legal security and freedom of expression in the GDR. At that time, 90 percent of the GDR population belonged to a Christian church. Dibelius fought in vain against the [Communist] Youth Consecration (Jugendweihe) because the majority of the church people were not prepared to resist. Fourthly, as a national Protestant unity fighter, he campaigned for German reunification. After 1957 he was no longer allowed to enter the GDR, but remained formally Bishop for both East and West Berlin until 1966.

HANSJÖRG BUSS (Siegen) dealt with the political and ecclesiastical opponents of the Berlin Bishop Dibelius in East Germany. He was the only East German church representative on the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany) Council and the face of the Protestant church in the 1950s. During this time, the Protestant Church in the GDR lost support. In memory of the infamous Potsdam sermon in 1933, an actor portrayed him as a cold warrior in a GDR television film. This corresponded to the tendency of the regime, which saw him as an ideological opponent, and of the press media, which caricatured him as a “NATO bishop” and the person who brought the H-bomb. With its somewhat antisemitic undertones, the GDR polemic actually strengthened Dibelius’ support in the West. In 1958, opposition to him increased among pastors in the working group in Berlin-Brandenburg. Günter Jacob, General Superintendent of Neumark since 1946, became his opponent. He did not adhere to a unified EKD and after 1960 turned against the basic order of Berlin-Brandenburg, which was tailored to Dibelius and the episcopal office.

SIEGFRIED HERMLE (Munich) examined Dibelius’ time as EKD Council Chair (1949-1961) based on his reports to the EKD Synod. The eleven-member council was intended to provide leadership and administration. Eleven people ran for the position of chair in 1949, with the clear majority of votes going to Dibelius, with Lilje as deputy. Niemöller was no longer someone about whom people could agree. For Dibelius, the focus of church life was on the regional churches. They did not want central management; only occasionally did the council need to speak publicly on their behalf. In Dibelius’ eight reports, the church-state relationship took up a lot of space. He saw that the church in Bonn was protected, but in the GDR it was increasingly exposed to propaganda. It should not allow itself to be exploited in the play of political forces. On military issues, he recognized different opinions but positioned himself against the Brotherhoods (Bruderschaften), a contrast that continues to have an impact in debates on peace issues to this day. The conservative majority of council members followed his lead.

The last thematic section dealt with Dibelius in international relations. THEA SULMAVICO (Halle) characterized Dibelius’ stance in the rearmament debate as ambivalent. The GDR press reacted to the military pastoral care contract he signed (1957) with polemics. In his 1949 work The Limits of the State, Dibelius criticized modern war. However, his criticism of the secular state was only directed against the GDR, not against the Federal Republic. For him, the Fatherland ranked higher than the state. For Dibelius, it was a question of national honor to ensure the defense of his own country. He invoked the great danger from the East and, after atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, judged the Soviets militarily superior over the West. He accused Niemöller and Heinemann of political propaganda and said that Lutherans were better at distinguishing between political questions and questions of faith than the Barthians. However, Dibelius’ unpolitical nature was not always accepted by both sides.

BERND KREBS (Berlin) spoke about Dibelius and Poland. In the 1920s, the theme was Germans under Polish rule. Two thirds of them left Poland. General Superintendent Juliusz Bursche advocated the integration of all Protestants into the Polish state. Convinced of the German mission in the East, Dibelius presented himself as strongly nationalistic in support of the interests of German Protestants in Poland. Before 1914 there were a million Protestant Christians there; after the war 350,000. German pastors were oriented to the DNVP and were considered political leaders of German identity (Deutschtum). Tensions increased in the mid-1920s. At that time, Nazi politics put the Protestant church in Posen under massive pressure. German Protestants were therefore disappointed with National Socialism. Poland remained an area of diverse cultures, and the desired Germanization failed. After 1945, Dibelius turned to the Lutherans in Poland.

An announced lecture on Dibelius’ commitment to the ecumenical movement had to be canceled due to the absence of KATHARINA KUNTER (Helsinki/Finland).

HARTMUT LEHMANN (Kiel) concluded by asking whether we now really knew who Dibelius was and whether what we had heard was coming together to form a new picture. Three facets can be recognized: 1. The pragmatic church prince Dibelius, who always claimed leadership positions. 2. The man of the political right who consistently fought the left. Like the average German Protestant of his time, he supported antisemitism and, at the beginning, also National Socialism. He integrated various positions in the EKD council. 3. Dibelius missed the opportunity to reorient the Protestant Church after 1945. An alternative approach in the sense of repentance and conversion was at least conceivable. The question of what would have happened if Dibelius had behaved differently as a church leader before and after National Socialism obviously went beyond historical research. LEPP and HERMLE noted that in this case Dibelius would not have been himself and would not have risen to the church leadership positions he held.

The conference took place with a mixture of several generations of research and a constructive atmosphere, although tensions were noticeable in the evaluation of Robert Stupperich’s work and the topic of antisemitism. One complaint would be “gaps” with regard to ecumenism and denazification. The statements about the imperial Dibelius, his relationship to Weimar, the still open question of antisemitism and Dibelius’ “tragic” post-war role between Eastern polemics and his slow retreat from it were noteworthy. The conference contributions are to be published in an anthology.

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition (Munich: DVA, 2019). 640 pages. ISBN: 978-3-421-04712-0.

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

At Christmas 1940, Martin Niemöller appeared on the front page of Time Magazine as the “Martyr of 1940.” Since that same autumn, the film Pastor Hall, inspired by a drama by the playwright Ernst Toller, had been showing in American cinemas. It captured the story of the “Church Struggle” in Germany on celluloid, with little attempt to conceal Niemöller’s biographical details. Since his arrest in the summer of 1937 and subsequent transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller had become a worldwide symbol of church resistance to the National Socialist dictatorship. Interest in his person continued even after his liberation at the beginning of May 1945. Despite the irritation that Niemöller provoked by making nationalistic statements in his first public postwar interview, he and his wife travelled to the United States for several months in 1946 and 1947, where he gave over 200 public lectures in 22 states.

To this day, Martin Niemöller remains one of the most famous German churchmen of the twentieth century. He is regarded as an upright resistance fighter against Hitler, who testified to his stance with seven years of incarceration in concentration camps, as a preacher who admonished German “guilt” and as someone who had transformed from an imperial submarine commander of the First World War into a pacifist, who during the 1950s eloquently and powerfully opposed the Federal Republic of Germany’s Western alliance, its remilitarization, and nuclear weapons. Now, 35 years after Niemöller’s death in 1984, Benjamin Ziemann, Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, cuts through the thicket of legend concerning Niemöller’s story and uncovers important strands of his life.

Born in 1892, Niemöller came from the home of a Westphalian pastor and chose the career of naval officer. Caught up in the national Protestantism of his time, he experienced the German defeat in the First World War as nothing less than a catastrophe. Only then did he decide to study theology, which he successfully completed in Münster. The book chapter on the völkisch and German national “student politician” is one of the most striking. Niemöller belonged to various far-right parties and associations such as the antisemitic German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbund) and the National Association of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere) and counted himself among the enemies of Weimar democracy. He also personally held, as Ziemann comprehensively proves for the first time, an aggressive attitude of racial antisemitism. As a father of several children and with his entry into civilian professional life, Niemöller became more moderate in the second half of the 1930s, but initially his political stance did not change. In 1931, after seven years as the organizer of the Westphalian Inner Mission, he moved to Dahlem, a well-to-do parish in Berlin’s southwest. Like many German nationalist pastors of his generation, Niemöller welcomed Hitler’s chancellorship, the “Third Reich,” and the emergence of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) founded on Christianity.

Those disputes, which are treated today under the term “church struggle,” were crucial tests. As head of the Pastors’ Emergency League, founded in mid-September 1933, Niemöller became one of its most important protagonists in the second half of 1933 and gained importance throughout the Reich. Ziemann expertly describes the activities of Niemöller in the conflicts of the “church struggle,” accompanied by ecclesiastical, political, and personal tensions and breaks, and ascribes to him a key role in the debates of the Confessing Church concerning the inevitable consequences of Barmen Theological Declaration of the end of May 1934. He experienced the February 1936 division of the Confessing Church into a Dahlemite wing led by Councils of Brethren and a Lutheran wing led by regional bishops not only as a loss, but also as an opportunity for the (Confessing) Church.

His involvement, which led him to become increasingly opposed to the Nazi state and the growing state pressure on the church, ended abruptly on July 1, 1937, with his arrest. After a comparatively mild judgment by the Special Court at the regional court level, which would actually have resulted in his release, he was transferred directly to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. In the detailed description of his concentration camp imprisonment in the almost fifty-page chapter on Niemöller’s time of suffering as the “personal prisoner of the Führer,” two themes stand out. One was the almost-two-year deliberation about conversion to the Catholic Church, which he only finally decided against at the urging of his wife, in February 1941, a few months before his transfer to Dachau. The other was the “empathy for communists and other victims of Nazi terror,” which Ziemann exposes as a subsequent self-stylization of the postwar period. Rather, he demonstrates an ongoing anti-Bolshevik and nationalist stance: “Even at the moment of liberation from the concentration camp, he interpreted the defeat of the German nation as the fall of the West” (p. 356).

Up to the 1970s, Niemöller remained a public figure and a noticeable and by no means uncontroversial voice in the social debates of the early Federal Republic. Ziemann goes into great detail about Niemöller’s disappointment at the development of the postwar Protestant Church, which he accused of episcopal and confessional tendencies and of supporting Konrad Adenauer’s policies, which he characterized as restorationist. Rooted in his understanding of a “prophetic guardian role” for the church, this went hand in hand with his keen criticism of the founding of the Federal Republic (“conceived in Rome and born in Washington”), the decision to ally with the West, and West German rearmament. Biographically, Niemöller’s sharpest break occurred at the end of the 1950s over the question of war and peace. Under the impact of the destructive force of hydrogen bombs, the former naval officer—who, despite his pacifist criticism of politics and the West German military, felt committed to the ethos of an officer throughout his life—became the most outspoken leader of the West German peace movement, in the campaign “Fight Against Nuclear Death” (“Kampf dem Atomtod”) and after 1957 as president the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft). Only then did Niemöller’s Protestant nationalist guiding principles wear off, which in the immediate postwar period were still expressed in nationalist speeches and manifest in his participation in the mythology of German victimhood. Ziemann’s portrait of the post-war Niemöller is extremely multifaceted, describing how Niemöller, increasingly shaped by international and ecumenical concerns, dramatically shifted his stance toward the church and underwent a political transformation.. Ziemann, however, does not lose sight of the continuities: Niemoller’s persistent unease (which he never completely abandoned) with representative party democracy and media diversity , his latent anti-Catholicism and anti-Americanism, as well as his persistent culturally and socially fueled antisemitic resentment.

Anyone interested in Martin Niemoeller’s eventful life cannot ignore Ziemann’s extremely rich, brilliantly written, critical, yet balanced account. In the controversial and polarizing person of Niemoller—the “volcano” Niemöller, as the Bishop of Württemberg Theophil Wurm once put it—he also depicts the fundamental conflicts that marked the four political systems of the late empire, the unpopular and defeated Weimar Republic, the National Socialist ideological dictatorship, and the Federal Republic, which was in search of new ways forward. Using the example of the “belated” pastor, the “church fighter” (“Kirchenkämpfer”), the church president of the postwar Hesse-Nassau Regional Church, and the internationally-recognized ecumenist, Ziemann also reflects the fundamental upheavals of twentieth-century religious life.

The strength of his biography is also a result of the fact that he does not stop at the public Martin Niemöller. Without committing any indiscretions, Ziemann writes about the strict “patriarch” and family man; the restless, often overwhelmed and driven worker; the impatient, polemical, and self-opinionated disputant who also offended those who were on his side; and, last but not least, the one who was challenged, who repeatedly suffered severe personal crises. And he writes about Else Niemöller, his wife who died in a car accident in 1961 and with whom Martin had been married for almost forty years. One of Ziemann’s great achievements in his publication is that he acknowledges her role as a discussion partner and advisor, editor of his sermons, emotional support during his term in prison, and, last but not least, as the one who took care of the family during Niemöller’s extremely time-consuming activities as an organizer of the Inner Mission, as a pastor, and as a church politician. Benjamin Ziemann’s Niemöller biography is already a standard work.

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Für ein artgemässes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologen im “Dritten Reich”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Für ein artgemässes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologen im “Dritten Reich”, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2016, 329 pp.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book, as indicated in its title, deals with what must be the most crucial flaw within German Protestant theology in the lead-up to the Nazi era, perhaps a “sickness unto death,” to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard. This flaw involves a völkisch theology, emphasizing the tight bond between Christian belief and the German people. It involves an artgemäss theology, claiming the necessity of certain racial and cultural qualities for any Germans claiming faith in Jesus and the Christian God. And, though it does not appear in the book title, this flaw involves an “orders of creation” theology, in which certain cultural, political, and racial qualities of the German Volk, as celebrated by Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, could be seen as a binding revelation from God. After an introduction to the topic, fifteen chapters of this book deal with sixteen individuals who help us better understand the complicity of Protestant Christians in the crimes of the Nazi state.

One of the editors of this volume, Manfred Gailus (a member of the editorial board of CCHQ), is a historian known to many or most of us as a prolific author and editor of books on Protestant churches in Nazi Germany. These include his Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des Sozialmilieus Berlin (Berlin, 2001), plus books such as Mir aber zerriss es das Herz: Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen, 2010), and Friedrich Weissler: Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Göttingen, 2017). He also has co-edited books with colleagues, such as Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten in Deutschland—1870-1970 (Göttingen, 2005), co-edited with Harmut Lehmann; Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft:” Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 2011), co-edited with Armin Nolzen; as well as this volume co-edited with Clemens Vollnhals.

The second editor, Vollnhals, also has a career full of important contributions to our understanding of churches in Nazi Germany, beginning with his early study on denazification, Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifizierung, 1945-1949: Die Last der nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich, 1989). He too has been prolific in co-edited projects, including Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Munich, 2013), co-edited with Manfred Gailus; and Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte (Göttingen, 2012), with Uwe Puschner; plus more than a dozen additional edited volumes. Taken together, the work of Gailus and Vollnhals could be the stuff of several seminars on the response of Protestants in Germany to the Nazi state, including analyses of some of the heroes, but especially with an attempt to understand those who found the Nazi state so very attractive. This volume, with its depiction of sixteen völkisch theologians, explores the attraction of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism for German Protestants. It takes us deeply into that Christian stance which, post-1945, strikes so many as so counter to an appropriate understanding of the teachings of Jesus.

All the theologians in this volume had some sort of relationship to the Deutsche Christen, of course, that group of German Protestants who welcomed and cheered the rise of Hitler, waved the Swastika, often wore brown uniforms in church, and tried to disguise or even remove all Jewish elements within the Christian tradition. Some of these stories are well known. Oliver Arnhold writes on Walter Grundmann and his “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” a topic also described for us in the work of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 2008). Grundmann and his so-called “Dejudaization Institute,” supported by the German Protestant Church and its notorious “Godesberg Declaration,” included a large number of seemingly reputable theologians in his project to deny the Jewish origins of Christianity, and even the Jewish origins of Jesus.

A chapter by Dirk Schuster describes Johannes Leipoldt, a professor of New Testament who, after stints at Kiel and Münster, arrived at Leipzig in 1916. Schuster emphasizes in his chapter title Leipoldt’s effort to deny Jesus’ Jewishness, including the quote, “Jesus is far removed from any sort of Jewishness” (189).[1] Leipoldt worked closely with Walter Grundmann, a former student, and became one of the most active co-workers in Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute, especially influencing the argument—important within the Nazi world—that Jesus could not really have been of Jewish blood. Despite this antisemitic activity, Leipoldt sailed through the transition of 1945. The fact that he never actually joined the Deutsche Christen or the NSDAP allowed him to be fully exonerated by the denazification process, with no attention placed on the heavily antisemitic elements in his scholarship (197). He remained at Leipzig until his retirement in 1954 (190). With his ongoing position at Leipzig and his national and international reputation, including for translations and for work on original sources, Leipoldt’s many antisemitic stereotypes, assumptions, and arguments remained fully “citationable” into the 1980s (201).

We also get a chapter by Hansjörg Buss on Gerhard Meyer. He was a simple pastor in Lübeck, rather than a theologian with a university position; but Buss shows us how completely Meyer was able to develop a church in Lübeck, the Martin Luther Parish, into a place where Germanness counted for far more than received tradition. Catholics had no place in a German church, according to Meyer, nor did Protestants who quarreled over doctrine. Jews had no place whatsoever, whether within the Christian tradition or within Germany. This all grew out of the idea of a “Deutschkirche,” advocated by the antisemitic Bund für Deutsche Kirche (League for a German Church), founded in 1921, which had an especially strong following in Lübeck and Schleswig-Holstein. Meyer, born in Lübeck in 1907, was ordained in 1932 and received his appointment in the Martin Luther Parish in September 1933. Soon he was baptizing with these words, “The Meaning of Baptism is this: Bestowed by the mother’s womb of the world, bound with God from the beginning, this child shall stride as a man of God over German soil” (131). He celebrated a group of confirmands in March 1939, alongside Reichbishop Ludwig Müller, with a similar theology: “We believe that Germany, the land and the community of German brothers and sisters, represents the order of life to which we alone are bound by body and soul” (130). Some months later, in September, shortly before his wedding, this 31-year-old pastor and enthusiast for Hitler and the Nazi ideal, recently called up for military service, died in the invasion of Poland (131).

Stephan Linck describes another pastor from Schleswig-Holstein, Ernst Szymanowski, who quickly gravitated toward the Deutschkirche and its overtly German, racist, and antisemitic concept of Christianity. Born in 1899 and after one year of active duty during World War I, he completed his theological training, was ordained in 1924, and joined the NSDAP already in 1926. He then sought to work his way up within the church, including an attempt to be selected as bishop of Lübeck in 1934, though this effort failed (242-45). Pastor Szymanowski is now better known to us as Ernst Biberstein. This is the name he legally acquired only in 1941, as a way to jettison his Slavic name and solidify his German credentials, which he claimed extended back one thousand years (250). The name-change came after he had joined the SS in 1936, and after he withdrew from church membership in 1938 (248-49), but Biberstein is the name by which he became famous after 1945.

Among Biberstein’s activities during wartime, working under Reinhard Heydrich in the RSHA, Biberstein spent several months as leader of Einsatzkommando 6, murdering thousands of Jews. When placed on trial at Nuremberg in 1948, he explained that he joined the SS because he thought it the most idealistic Nazi organization. When asked about the killing by his Einsatzkommando 6, he said, “Due to my theological development, I found it not only extremely unpleasant, but almost unreasonable, that death sentences should be ordered and enforced under my command.” Did he offer the victims “spiritual assistance,” he was asked, as they were being murdered? No, these victims were Bolsheviks, he said, who advocated godlessness. It was not his role to try to convert them: “One should not throw pearls before swine” (252).

Amidst a great deal of press interest in this pastor/murderer, who acknowledged that at least 2000-3000 victims were shot or gassed to death under his authority, Biberstein was sentenced to death (253). As often happened, that sentence gradually got reduced to incarceration at Landsberg Prison. Working for his release from prison, by 1956 Biberstein denied his own admission at Nuremberg about the thousands of deaths under his command. He also claimed to a representative from the Protestant Church in Neumünster that, despite his having left the church in 1938, “he had always felt himself to be and handled himself as a Christian and a theologian.” Furthermore, “He said . . . simply as his own inner conviction, that it would be good if every pastor’s personal attitude in life would be as decent as his had been” (256). Linck makes clear that the interlocutor reporting on the state of Biberstein’s conscience had been a fellow member of the Nazi Party and an advocate for the Deutsche Christen back in Schleswig-Holstein in the 1930s. Biberstein failed to get his hoped-for permanent return to a clergy position; however, he did gain his release from Landsberg in 1958 and had an opportunity to live outside prison another twenty-eight years before his death in 1986. Linck then quotes Raul Hilberg on Biberstein, “For Biberstein moral boundaries were like the receding horizon. He went toward them but never reached them” (259).

The sixteen chapters in this volume contain many additional examples of völkisch Protestant theologians and clergy who followed the path of German nationalism, racism, and an increasingly aggressive attack upon the Jewish place within the Christian tradition, or even within Germany itself. Rainer Hering describes Franz Tügel, the Bishop of Hamburg, who joined the Nazi Party in 1931, after a careful reading of Nazi documents, including Mein Kampf. In 1932 he expressed hope for a “rebirth of the German nation” under Hitler’s leadership. As for the projected harsh treatment of Jews, he saw no reason for the church to criticize Nazi intentions, describing Jews as a “pestilence” and “the great danger” for Germany (141-42).

Gerhard Lindemann describes a parallel example, Martin Sasse, the Bishop of Thuringia. Born in 1890, Sasse fought in World War I from 1914-1918. Then, after the war, he joined in Freikorp battles against communists and revolutionaries. After these years in uniform, Sasse returned to his theological studies and received an appointment and ordination in 1921. In March 1930 he joined the NSDAP and that fall he accepted a pastorate in Thuringia, a very brown region with an especially strong cohort of Deutsche Christen. By January 1934 Sasse had risen to Bishop of the Thuringian Church (156). From this position he gave full support to the Nazi state and Nazi ideology. This included, for example, praise for the November 1938 Pogrom as a necessary measure and part of the “world historical struggle against the Volk-destroying spirit of the Jews” (161). He was among those bishops who signed the Godesberg Declaration of 1939, which led to the creation of Walter Frank’s Dejudaization Institute. Sasse supported the radical Thuringian Deutsche Christen, even agreeing with their claim that the Jewish Old Testament had no place in the Christian Bible (163). As for the Holocaust, by August 1941 Sasse’s office produced a public announcement describing this as the “moment in which God’s hand reaches out to destroy precisely this people” (167), apparently blaming the murder of Jews on God, rather than Germans. Sasse held his position as bishop until his death in 1942, an early demise caused by problems with his heart.

Dagmar Pöpping tells the complex story of Herman Wolfgang Beyer, born in 1898, who “grew up” serving in World War I from 1916-1918 and watching all his friends die. He returned to Germany a pacifist and idealist, with high hopes for the Weimar Republic and a peaceful future. Then began a series of lurches to the right and left. The Versailles Treaty cost him his pacifism and his support of Weimar, but, while studying theology, he first stood on the left with a group who designated themselves “readers” of Die Christliche Welt, a liberal Protestant journal. He completed his theological training, however, with Karl Holl in Berlin, the founder of a “Luther Renaissance” and teacher of many of the most völkisch of the next generation of Protestant theologians, men such as Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus. Beyer befriended both men by the mid-1920s, a useful step in his career, and by the age of twenty-eight, he secured a professorship in church history at Greifswald (262-65). In 1933 he greeted the rise of Hitler with an enthusiasm as exuberant as that of his two mentors, beginning and ending every future lecture with “Heil Hitler.” As for the Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle), Beyer joined the Deutsche Christen in the spring of 1933, and also joined the SA (Nazi Stormtroopers) that fall. Surprisingly, though, Beyer became disillusioned with the harsh tactics of the DC under Reichbishop Müller in 1934 and switched his allegiance to the Confessing Church, which he maintained also when he moved to a chair at Leipzig in 1936. Throughout these changes in his church politics, he remained loyal to the Nazi state, a position not entirely uncommon among his fellow members of the Confessing Church.

When World War II broke out, Beyer volunteered to serve as a chaplain. He is interesting to us at least in part because he kept a detailed diary of his experiences on the Eastern Front. This included his personal observation of the murder of innocents, whether the shooting of 400 disabled residents of a hospital for convenience sake, or the murder of thousands and thousands of Jews. Pöpping reports on Beyer’s efforts to explain and justify these murders. Regarding the 400 disabled people dispatched by bullet, he writes, “I understand that the poor guys must be killed. One cannot simply let them run free. They would then only perish, naturally” (272). As for the mass murder of Jews, he comments, “The struggle against Jews must occur. But it has assumed a terribly hard shape…. The curse under which these people live is being fulfilled in a horrible manner” (273). Despite the horrors, Beyer taught his troops that killing Russians and Jews was necessary. He blamed the Enlightenment as a root cause, with its emphasis on equality and human rights, which finally led to Bolshevism and atheism. “We see it on the dull, staring, expiring faces of the Soviet prisoners of war who pass us by. The human being in this world has stopped being truly human” (270). True to the most hateful antisemitism of the early twentieth century, especially in its Nazi version, Beyer then made the connection to Jews, the most intensively victimized group being murdered by German forces. He explained to his troops that Jews had invented Bolshevism and, without attachment to the Christian God, both Jews and Bolsheviks had lost their souls, were no longer human. Pöpping then summarizes Beyer’s conclusion: “A human without a soul is no longer required to be treated as human” (271).

This self-description by Beyer of his work as a Protestant chaplain at the center of the Eastern Front, which was also the center of the Holocaust, could be understood simply as the rather ugly final result of völkisch theology, a theology which elevated Germany’s wounded and intense self-identity above prior Christian norms and ideals that had developed over two millennia. I appreciate Pöpping’s work on this man. I do wonder, however, whether her stance at the start of this chapter is too gentle, too understanding of the man under her gaze. She cites two historians, Doris Bergen and Felix Römer, who she accuses of describing chaplains “as ‘propagandists’ and ‘accomplices’ of the Vernichtungskrieg.”[2] In Pöpping’s view, “That would be too simple, to be content only with exposing what is morally unacceptable from today’s point of view” (261). She also cites the work of Antonia Leugers and Martin Röw for presentations of this softer approach, authors who raise the possibility of Catholics and chaplains staying moral within an immoral war.[3] These are hardly simple issues, but I am left wondering what could be seen as deficient in a “morality of today” that suggests murder and genocide are immoral. Was Beyer’s complete commitment to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state a good decision? Should we approve of his extra effort to encourage troops not to shrink from their task? Is it wrong to connect the dots in his complicated development as a theologian and suggest that something has gone dreadfully wrong when his loyalty to Germany and to Hitler have him defending the murders perpetrated and/or viewed by troops under his spiritual guidance?

This brings me to two of the most prominent theologians dealt with in this volume, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, theologians who befriended Hermann Wolfgang Beyer and may well have inspired his virtually complete loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi state. I am familiar with Althaus and Hirsch, since I focused on these two plus Gerhard Kittel in my Theologians under Hitler more than thirty years ago.[4] Tanja Hetzer’s chapter on Paul Althaus is based on her 2009 book him.[5] She begins with one of my favorite quotations from Althaus, at least in terms of its importance: his notable claim that Protestant churches in Germany “greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle from God” (69). He published that statement in 1933 and it certainly guided his overall response to the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. Hetzer argues that Althaus’s völkisch nationalism, a central aspect of his theology, was heavily influenced by his experience as a wartime pastor in Lodz during World War I, as well as his marriage to Dorothea Zielke, born in Warsaw to a German family long-settled in Poland. Of course, Althaus also was influenced by his bitterness over Germany’s loss in that First World War. During the war and throughout the 1920s, Althaus preached a love for the Fatherland and a claim that the Protestant church should speak to the bond between Germans, the German Lutheran tradition, and the beleaguered German nation. Hetzer does a very nice job of showing that Althaus’s “Orders of Creation” theology and his emphasis on “Order” and “Authority”—all developed in the early years of his career—made him ready to proclaim Hitler a “gift and miracle from God” and to give mostly enthusiastic support to the regime.[6] Hetzer shows that this stance was rooted in his völkisch obsession: “With Althaus it is vital to observe how the concept of the Volk became a new ethical reference point for theology” (76).

As for Althaus’s view of Jews, Hetzer points out that he often spoke in “cultural codes” and avoided the crudest expressions of antisemitism; but she effectively shows that a harsh antagonism toward Jews lay deeply embedded within his work.[7] During Weimar he apparently had no personal connection to important figures, such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, but he spoke of them like a “schoolmaster” and without respect (76). Hetzer effectively shows that Althaus’s “Orders of Creation” theology lays the groundwork for antisemism in its insistence that God created the various “orders” in existence, including nations and races. So it is no surprise that in the opening battles of the Church Struggle in 1933, when Deutsche Christen demanded the application of the Aryan Paragraph within the Protestant church, Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, his colleague at Erlangen, agreed that Germans had every right to include race among the requirements for clergy in the German Protestant Church (85-88). Althaus and Elert then co-authored the Ansbacher Ratschlag, an attack against the Barmen Declaration that was enthusiastically greeted by Deutsche Christen.

Hetzer concludes her chapter by pointing out that a “loyalty of the second generation” remains in place, giving Althaus a softer treatment than he deserves. This includes Walter Sparn, a systematic theologian, who claims “Althaus without doubt was never a National Socialist,” though he may have been a “political romantic” who advocated a “revolution from the right.”[8] Such a view gives little weight to Althaus’s assessment of Hitler as “a gift and miracle from God.” Hetzer also critiques the recent biographer of Althaus, Gotthard Jasper of Erlangen University.[9] The subtitle of his 2013 book, “Professor, Prediger und Patriot seiner Zeit,” certainly buries Althaus’s enthusiastic and very public support of Hitler and National Socialism with that innocuous use of “patriot,” as does Jasper’s treatment of Althaus in general. Hetzer credits Jasper with his presentation of much material, “without, however, considering problematic statements by Althaus according to his actual words or requiring of Althaus posthumous responsibility for what he actually wrote and said” (95).

I quite agree with Hetzer’s conclusion that, despite his clear political stance, “Althaus was viewed in the history of theology after 1945 not as a participant in history, but as a victim of his own ideas, above all when it involved his antisemitic undertakings” (95). I would only mention that my book from 1985 on Althaus, Hirsch and Kittel gets but one footnote in this chapter, and that is to substantiate Althaus’s “reputation as a mediator” and the fact that he is “viewed still today as a theologian with a self-chosen stance in the middle” (70). I do use the term “mediator,” and I describe him as less radical in his support of Nazi politics than either Emanuel Hirsch or Gerhard Kittel. However, this by no means hides my criticism of his very important and enthusiastic place in support of Hitler and Nazism. A large number of the quotations used by Hetzer in this chapter also appear in my book. Furthermore, Hetzer does show Althaus as a moderate of sorts, at least for his place and time. He tended to use coded and vague language. Many or most could see his attack on Jews, but he was not as outspoken or blatant as many others treated in this volume by Gailus and Vollnhals. I appreciate Hetzer’s analysis of Althaus’s work, which I think takes an important step forward in recognizing the antisemitic foundations of his scholarship. I also agree that Sparn from 1997 and Jasper from 2013 are too apologetic in their treatment of Althaus, but I remain a bit disappointed that my work in 1985 is not clearly separated from those two.

Heinrich Assel writes about Emanuel Hirsch, who was one of the main figures in his 1994 book on the Luther Renaissance from 1994.[10] This chapter also builds upon Assel’s very thorough reading of appropriate additional sources and documents to which he has gained access, even though Hirsch’s own Nachlass has been carefully restricted from public view or scholarly use. In particular, Assel has accessed a massive correspondence between Hirsch and the right-wing publicist, Wilhelm Stapel, which extended from 1931 until Stapel’s death in 1954 (47). In my view, Assel rightly places Hirsch at the very center of the völkisch theology that is at the heart of Gailus and Vollnhals’ book, and which drew Hirsch to his enthusiastic public support of Hitler by April 1932.

Hirsch became the leading theological advisor to and supporter of the Deutsche Christen and Reichbishop Ludwig Müller in 1933. He then openly designated himself a “political theologian” by 1934, taking the side of Ludwig Müller’s church government. As the Müller phase of church politics proved ineffective, Hirsch worked to support the “Gleichschaltungspolitik” of the Nazi state, privileging Hitler’s totalitarian rule over his two other loyalties, those to church and state (44). As for the Nazi stance on Jews, Hirsch moved from his earlier prejudice against Jews, which was primarily religious and cultural, to “an openly racist antisemitism.” Though others blanched at the destructiveness of the November Pogrom in 1938, he was “passionately in favor,” welcoming it as a way to push Jews toward emigration. As the murderous nature of the war in Eastern Europe and the specific annihilation of Jews developed, Hirsch was kept informed by his contacts in the Nazi Party and the SS. His response was to “give unlimited support to this politics of annihilation” (56).

Assel’s access to the Hirsch/Stapel correspondence, often comprising several letters per week and sometimes more than one letter per day, illustrates for us the overwhelming confidence placed by Hirsch and Stapel in the German Volk and the Nazi state, a convergence designed to bring Germany back to its rightful place in the world. We also learn about their harsh antisemitism. However, we do see Wilhelm Stapel losing at least some of his nerve in the last, more brutal years of the Nazi regime, while Hirsch remained firm. After the failed July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, Stapel wrote of his sympathy for the plotters. Hirsch wrote back with ten full pages, expressing unapologetic approval of Nazi church politics, Nazi foreign policy, and also the harsh judgments of the People’s Court against the conspirators. He speculated in that letter, written in the bleak summer of 1944, on two possible outcomes of the war: a German victory, leading to a healthy nation and national church, or a German defeat and the collapse of Christianity in Germany (60-64).

In an attempt to understand the uncompromising persistence of Hirsch’s stance, Assel points out one very important factor in his life, poured out in this long letter to Stapel. That is his deep grief over his son, Peter, fallen in 1941. Assel places this in the context of a “Myth of the Fallen,” the belief that only a German victory would justify the many deaths spread over the two costly wars in Hirsch’s lifetime (63-64). In my work on Hirsch, I point to his medical deferment in August 1914 at the start of World War I. This embarrassed or even haunted him, and I speculate that it might help explain the aggressive nationalism and militarism in his work.[11] The World War II loss of his son would only have multiplied that psychological impact, of course. Even though Stapel and Hirsch each lost some of their influence during the last years of the Nazi regime, Stapel more so than Hirsch, we learn from their letters that Hirsch refused to blame Hitler or the Nazi state, even after 1945, and even after the horrors of the Nazi regime had been condemned by most of the world. In my work on Hirsch, I quoted colleagues who said he never changed his politics after 1945 or admitted that he had been mistaken.[12] I was criticized for this by some friends of Hirsch. Assel’s chance to read portions of Hirsch’s correspondence now confirm I was right on that score (49).

Before leaving Assel’s treatment of Hirsch, I will once again mention my Theologians under Hitler from 1985, which dealt extensively with Hirsch. I also wrote about Hirsch in my chapter on the Göttingen Theological Faculty, first published in Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus in 1987.[13] Neither is cited by Assel. This is obviously a minor complaint. In one instance, however, I believe that Assel’s treatment of Hirsch’s postwar circumstances would benefit from my work. In May 1945, Hirsch grabbed the chance of a medical retirement, justified by his failing eyesight, in order to avoid removal for his pro-Nazi stance. This meant he circumvented his essentially certain dismissal by the English occupiers, without pay, followed by a denazification process of uncertain outcome. Instead, besides avoiding the humiliation of being thrown out of his university, he also secured a life-long pension, even if reduced by his choice of an early medical retirement, and he secured the right to stay in his beautiful, large home on the Schiller Meadow. Assel refers to a brief postwar period when the Hirsch family did not receive funds as a “bureaucratic mistake,” which is probably true. But then he adds, “Without having to go through a denazification process, Hirsch was rehabilitated as emeritus” (57).

This version of Hirsch’s postwar transition slides past an experience that was traumatic for many university professors whose politics had been enthusiastically pro-Nazi, and especially so for Hirsch. It also ignores my extensive treatment of the actual, bitter process that ensued. His medical retirement left him without any connection to his university. At the age of fifty-seven, he was not ready to retire. As he had been nearly blind since the 1920s, he clearly hoped to reverse the convenient medical excuse used in May 1945 and resume his career. Furthermore, the eventual return of most Nazi-tinged professors to their positions would have encouraged his hopes. However, despite his own efforts and energetic attempts by a few of his friends, he never could bring himself back into the good graces of Göttingen University or its Theological Faculty. From May 1945 until his death in 1972, Hirsch was never rehabilitated. He never received emeritus status, he never received announcements of events or invitations, his name was never included in university publications, and he had no formal connection whatsoever with his former faculty.[14] (He also never received the blue plaque on his home, marking the place where very important university scholars, such as his rival, Karl Barth, had lived.) This postwar result placed Hirsch among the very few, most heavily implicated Nazis not able to return to their positions at Göttingen, part of a similar pattern at other universities as well. The only students with whom Hirsch came in contact in those postwar years met with him in his home for regular meetings of an irregular, unofficial, private seminar. Some within that informal coterie became known as the “Hirsch Circle.” This group long hoped to resurrect Hirsch’s reputation as a theologian from his loss of respect in the postwar era, but largely without success. Was the postwar denial of honor or respect appropriate? Assel’s work goes a long way toward establishing that Hirsch’s devotion to Adolf Hitler was thoroughgoing. If we do not approve of Hitler’s judgment, ideas and politics, it is difficult to approve of Hirsch’s. Furthermore, the völkisch nature of the Protestant theology at the center of Hirsch’s work made his politics far more than a side issue in his career.

In the context of the Hirsch-Stapel correspondence, I will also mention Clemens Vollnhals’ chapter on Wilhelm Stapel. During the Weimar Republic, Stapel edited and wrote prolifically in the right-wing, nationalistic journal, Deutsches Volkstum. He also rose to leadership within the Hanseatic Verlag, the publisher of Deutsches Volkstum and later the publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications. Though Stapel never had an academic career, he and Hirsch were natural allies in their commitment to a völkisch Protestant theology and a nationalistic, right-wing revolution against the Weimar Republic. In 1933 Stapel greeted the rise of Hitler with Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers (“Christ’s Church and Hitler’s State”).[15] He supported the Deutsche Christen, even after the Sports Palace Scandal of November, 1933, in which 20,000 enthusiasts applauded the removal of the Old Testament and other proposed steps into open heresy (110). All of this fit into Stapel’s understanding of a special law, a Volksnomos, given by God to every nation, and, in the German case, God’s creation of a leading nation among nations, ready to build a new European empire in the manner of ancient Rome (101-04). There was no place for Jews in this venture. Stapel praised the May 1933 burning of Jewish books. He accepted the total separation of Jews from the German nation, even before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In 1938 he wrote, “Jews in the German Reich are inferior. Their place in Germany is a result of the stance they have taken against us in our struggle for German honor” (113-14). Stapel also worked within Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute. Vollnhals does show that Stapel’s stomach for harsh measures had its limits. He regretted the disorderly broken glass of November 1938. In a letter to Paul Althaus in January 1942, as deportations of Jews had begun, he admitted that what was happening to Jews was horrible. Despite the horrors, however, even in 1942 he stood by his earlier, harsh assessment of the Jewish question, “so that later it is not lost … why the symbiosis pushed for by the Jews was impossible” (114). Both Hirsch and Stapel represented the radical vision of a special place for the German Volk within God’s plan, along with a willingness to bind the resulting völkisch Protestant theology to the brutal, totalitarian regime created by Adolf Hitler.

Für ein artgemässses Christentum der Tat is a very useful book. Besides the chapters described above, it includes an excellent introductory chapter by Gailus and Vollnhals, plus additional treatments of men like Reinhold Seeberg, described by Stefan Dietzel as an important professor at Berlin in the age of Harnack, who lived into the first two years of the Nazi state and gave both eugenics and the NS racial ideology his support. Andre Postert offers us a chapter on Wolf Meyer-Erlach, the famously antisemitic and under-qualified professor who became Rektor at the University of Jena and later worked in Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute. Ulrich Peter writes about Walter Schultz and Heinrich Schwartze, two Protestant pastors, the latter also a bishop, who negotiated complicated transitions from their support of National Socialism to their place in the postwar German Democratic Republic. Isabella Bozsa describes the career of Eugen Mattiat, a small-town pastor awarded for his political reliability with a professorship at Göttingen University. Remarkably under-qualified, he quickly lost that position under denazification, but eventually became once again a small-town pastor. Manfred Gailus gives us a final chapter, describing Walter Hoff, an enthusiastic pro-Nazi pastor in Berlin. After volunteering at nearly fifty to serve in his second World War, he returned on leave to brag about his exploits. Then, responding angrily to an “unwarlike” circular letter sent to Berlin pastors in 1943, he emphasized the need to fight against “World Jewry and its evil representatives,” uninhibited by any soft Christian ideal of “mercy.” He added that in Soviet Russia he himself had “helped liquidate” hundreds of Jews (311).

Not all stories in this volume include Protestant pastors bragging about murdering Jews! All of the stories, however, provide examples of Protestants who idolized the German Volk, gave their heart to Adolf Hitler, and both accepted and promoted the antisemitism of the Nazi state. From our present perspective, these stories give us good reason to rethink our understanding of the Christian relationship to Jews, to nation, to race, and to the compassionate side of Jesus’ ethic. Gailus and Vollnhals have assembled a useful and convincing treatment of the problems that arise when Christians think someone like Adolf Hitler is on their side.

[1] Please note that all translations are by the author of this review.

[2] Pöpping cites as representatives of this point of view, Doris Bergen, “’Germany is our Mission – Christ is our Strength!’ The Wehrmacht Chaplaincy and the ‘German Christian’ Movement,” in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 66 (1997), 522-36; and Felix Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl: Wehrmacht und NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront 1941-42, Paderborn, 2008, 510 ff.

[3] See Antonia Leugers, “Opfer für eine grosse und heilige Sache: Katholisches Kriegserleben im nationalsozialistischen Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieg,” in Friedhelm Boll, ed., Volksreligiosität und Kriegserleben, Münster, 1997, 157-74; and Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz. Die Katholische Feldpastoral 1939-1945, Paderborn (2014), who, according to Pöpping, suggests (p. 448) that chaplains were “unwilling instruments” in the war of extermination.

[4] Robert P Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, New Haven, 1985.

[5] Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde.” Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus, Munich, 2009. It should be noted that most of the chapters in this book by Gailus and Vollnhals are based on book-length treatments by the authors, so that this volume becomes a useful distillation of a broad range of work.

[6] Hetzer does not mention my treatment of a possible change of heart in Althaus by 1938. His blatantly political publications cease after 1937 and family stories suggest some disillusionment. Althaus’s son Gerhard, born in 1935, told me of a family memory according to which Althaus at the dinner table denounced the November 1938 Pogrom. Gerhard himself remembered a conversation on holiday at Tegernsee in August 1943, when an officer returned from the Soviet front came back with the family from a Sunday service. As an eight-year-old boy, he overheard a story of camps at which civilians, women and children, and unarmed Soviet prisoners were shot. Afterwards, according to Gerhard, his father no longer spoke of winning the war, but of “bloodguilt,” including toward Jews. See Ericksen, 94-98.

[7] In the above-mentioned interview, Gerhard Althaus, who studied theology with his father and became a pastor, told me he questioned his father in the 1950s about the antisemitism rife in Nazi Germany. His father simply responded, “You have not experienced the Jews.” See Ericksen, 109.

[8] See Walter Sparn, “Paul Althaus,” in Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, ed., Profile des Luthertums, Gütersloh 1997, 1-26.

[9] Gotthard Jasper, Paul Althaus (1888-1996). Professor, Prediger und Patriot seiner Zeit, Göttingen, 2013.

[10] Heinrich Assel, Die Lutherrenaissance – Urspringe, Aporien und Wege: Karl Holl, Emanuel Hirsch, Rudolf Hermann (1910-1935), Göttingen, 1994.

[11] See Ericksen, 127.

[12] See Ericksen, 193.

[13] See Robert P. Ericksen, “Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät im Dritten Reich,” in Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, and Cornelia Wegeler, eds., Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, Munich, 1987 and 1998, 75-101.

[14] See Ericksen, Theologians, 191-93. See also Ericksen, “Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät im Dritten Reich,” 90-93.

[15] Wilhelm Stapel, Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers, Hamburg, 1933.

Conference Report: 500 Years of Reformation: Jews and Protestants – Judaism and Protestantism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: 500 Years of Reformation: Jews and Protestants – Judaism and Protestantism, Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, February 12-14, 2017

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This year’s annual conference of the Leo Baeck Institute featured the theme of the Protestant Reformation and its impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Some 40 scholars took part in sessions that followed the evolution of Jewish-Protestant relations from the time of Luther and the Reformation era, through the Enlightenment and emergence of modernity to the cataclysm of Nazism and the Holocaust to the postwar era. Most panels were comprised of German and Israeli scholars, though a handful of North American academics were also present. Topics included Jewish perspectives on Christians and Christianity, Christian missions to Jews, conversion (in both directions), music and the arts as a sphere of Jewish-Protestant relations, and Jewish-Protestant relations during and after the Third Reich and Holocaust. The keynote speaker was Professor Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College, who challenged the audience with a provocative lecture entitled, “Is God a Virgin? Theological Benefits and Problems in the Protestant-Jewish Relationship.”

The second last panel of the conference tackled the theme of Jewish-Protestant relations “in the shadow of racism and fascism.” Dirk Schuster of the University of Potsdam spoke on the theme “Protestantism and Racial Boundaries: Jews, ‘Aryans’ and Divine Salvation at the German Christian Church Movement.” Drawing on the history of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, Schuster examined the way in which race can function as an exclusive (and excluding) space, sociologically speaking, with respect to religious salvation. Race, a collection of ethno-cultural differences and an imaginary collective which draws up borders against “the other” in the process of defining a national identity.

Schuster is particularly interested in the way in which Jews were denied access to Christian community, sacraments, and salvation on account of their Jewish racial identity. This was certainly the intention of the German Christian movement, when they focused on Martin Luther as a uniquely German holy man, or Adolf Hitler as the “Führer” sent by God to Germany in its fateful hour. Similarly, the German Christian (and Nazi) loathing of “miscegenation” in not only the biological sense but also the spiritual or religious sense. Even Catholics, whom many Protestants scorned, were eligible for salvation in a way that Jews, who could not (in the German Christian mind) be Germans, were not. The irony in all of this, as Schuster noted, was that the Nazis themselves defined race based on church records–religious criteria!

Still, German Christians believed whole-heartedly in Hitler’s mission as the latest example of the revelation of God in and through German history. Under Hitler, Luther’s Reformation would be completed. All this meant that the political measures to socially and economically isolate Jews and drive them from the German Volk community were mirrored by the application of the Aryan Paragraph in the churches and the exclusion of Jews from the Christian community. Yet one problem remained: how could the German Christians isolate Judaism from Christianity? Here Schuster referred to Susannah Heschel’s book The Aryan Jesus and its account of the Grundmann Institute’s attempt to dejudaize Christianity. For Schuster, this was another way in which the German Christians attempted to create a space in which Jews would be excluded from Christian salvation.

Hansjörg Buss of Göttingen University followed, assessing “The Reception and Instrumentalization of Martin Luther’s ‘Judenschriften’ in the ‘Third Reich.'” Buss explores part of the terrain marked out by Schuster, namely, the ways in which Martin Luther’s antisemitic writings were employed by Nazi Protestants to justify their own antisemitism. National Socialist Protestants responded to those who expressed concern for Jews by reminding them that the founder of their church had advocated burning down Jewish synagogues, destroying Jewish houses, taking away Jewish prayer books, confiscating Jewish money, and forcing Jews to work. Luther, so argued National Socialist Protestants, developed a uniquely German piety that made it impossible to preach a Jewish Christianity to Protestants from the German racial community.

Buss explained that current research on Luther and the Jews emphasizes the continuity in his thinking, rather than the different consequences he proposed in That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523) and On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, Luther was idealized as a heroic German nationalist–by the time of the First World War, he was regularly invoked by propagandists. It was in this context that Paul Althaus described the reformer as Germany’s “secret emperor.” As antisemitism increased in the later 1800s, Luther was widely quoted, as in Theodor Fritsch’s Catechism for Antisemites (1887). In the Third Reich, Der Stürmer quoted Luther to criticize the churches for being too friendly towards Jews.

During the Nazi era, the German Christian Movement invoked Luther regularly, beginning with the first German Christian “Guidelines” of 1932, which confessed “an affirmative faith in Christ, one suited to a truly German Lutheran spirit and heroic piety.”[1] Buss explained how Luther’s 450th birthday in 1933 turned into a national festival of Protestant nationalist and Nazi ideas, an expression of a “commitment to Luther and Hitler.”

The German Christians built on this Protestant nationalism and emphasized Luther as a nordic fighter against the Jews. Buss noted that virtually all of the publications about Luther referred to the changed political situation under Hitler, and it was not uncommon for Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies to be reprinted and distributed to German Protestants. The Confessing Church, in contrast, avoided Luther’s antisemitic writings, but consistently affirmed both the Nazi state’s authority and its antisemitic policies. As clear as the Second Provisional Church Leadership’s 1936 memo to Hitler was in its condemnation of the state’s hatred of Jews, this was an exceptional occurance. More common were statements from clergy affirming Nazi policy and even noting that Luther had advocated even harsher measures than those taken by the Nazi state of the middle 1930s.

Finally, Buss examined the November 1939 publication of Thuringian Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse, called Martin Luther and the Jews: Away With Them! In this work, Sasse celebrated the way the German people had crowned the Hitler’s divinely-sanctioned fight for the liberation of the German people by attacking the Jews on Martin Luther’s birthday (November 10). Believing that Luther was the greatest antisemite of his time, Sasse went on to ask Nazi officials whether On the Jews and Their Lies could be used as a weapon in the current struggle against the Jews. Similarly, Walter Grundmann’s Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life drew on and twisted Luther’s ideas to advocate for a German racial and dejudaized Christianity. In sum, Buss demonstrates that both Christians and non-Christians used Luther’s antisemitic writings as “mental resources” (quoting Thomas Kaufmann) in support of Nazi antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University, Calgary, provided a North American perspective on the relationship between Jews and Protestants in his paper on “Nazi Racism, American Antisemitism, and Christian Duty: U.S. Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938.” Jantzen began by explaining how earlier historical accounts of U.S. Protestant responses to Hitler and his persecution of the Jews criticized Protestants for what they didn’t do, at times holding U.S. church leaders to the unrealistic expectations of stopping Hitler themselves or at least convincing the U.S. government to intervene in German domestic affairs.

Rather, Jantzen surveyed U.S. mainline Protestant church publications to discover what writers and editors, many of whom were influential church leaders, had to say about Jews and Judaism. He argued five main points: 1. that Protestant spokespersons viewed Nazism with great alarm and foreboding, sensing crisis in the air; 2. that they were primarily concerned with Nazi persecution of Christians; 3. that they also cared about the persecution of Jews; 4. that they both condemned and perpetuated forms of antisemitism in the United States; and 5. that, above all, they understood the challenge of Nazism in terms of a cosmic battle between Christianity and irreligion.

Even the staunchest mainline Protestant defenders of the Jews–men like Guy Emery Shipler of The Churchman–tended to reframe the persecution of the Jews into an attack against both Jews and Christians, or against religion in general. In part, this was a strategic move to rouse Christian support for Jewish refugees. Similarly, when W. Russell Bowie of the American Committee for Christian German Refugees solicited support, he consistently made the point that over half of the estimated 660,000 would-be refugees still in Germany and Austria were Christians, even if the Nazis defined them as racial Jews, and that the Jewish refugee crisis was very much a Christian problem.

Finally, Jantzen concluded that in 1938, in a context of German racism, American antisemitism, and a growing Jewish refugee crisis, Protestant church leaders understood their Christian duty as a call to respond to a profound sense of crisis. Democracy, civilization, Christianity, and all religion were under attack from the forces of war, totalitarianism, racism, and paganism. Clergy writing in mainline church periodicals responded by naming the evils of war and totalitarianism, in particular the threat that Hitler and Nazi Germany posed to the civilized world. They also fought against antisemitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without slipping into the language of long-standing anti-Jewish prejudices sometimes, and also not without reframing the persecution of Jews and the Jewish refugee crisis as the persecution of Christians and Jews and the Christian and Jewish refugee crisis. Most important to these church leaders, however, was the reaffirmation that Christianity was the only force that could ultimately save the world from self-destruction. Liberal Protestant writers and editors warned their readers about the forces of barbarism, totalitarianism, and war which threatened to destroy civilization, democracy, and freedom, while conservative Protestants focused more narrowly on apolitical Christian spiritual renewal and prayer as solutions for the world’s ills.

A lively discussion followed, as was the case throughout the three-day conference. Along with the host Leo Baeck Institute, the other conference sponsors included the Goethe University of Frankfurt’s Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD); the Minerva Institute for German History and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, both of Tel Aviv University; and the Center for the Study of Christianity at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There are plans for a publication of conference papers in the coming months.

Notes:

[1] Mary M. Solberg, A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), p. 49.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Carsten Linden, Die Bedeutung des Beziehungsgeflechts der Osnabrücker ev.-luth. Pastoren für den Verlauf der Osnabrücker Kirchenpolitik 1907-1936

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Carsten Linden, Die Bedeutung des Beziehungsgeflechts der Osnabrücker ev.-luth. Pastoren für den Verlauf der Osnabrücker Kirchenpolitik 1907-1936 (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac Verlag, 2012), 2 Vol., 960 Pp.

By Hansjörg Buss, Universität des Saarlandes

Carsten Linden’s work, accepted by the University of Osnabrück as a doctoral thesis in 2012, examines the networks of protestant pastors in the Osnabrück church district in the first third of the twentieth century. As to method, it is based on social network analysis (in the sense that concept is used by German historian Wolfgang Reinhard), attributing to the interpersonal relationship between these pastors great importance in determining issues of church policy (p. 17). Despite some changes in these relationships, there was a lot of continuity: of nine pastors serving their parish in 1910, four still held their ministry in 1936.

The work is divided into four “complexes” which Linden has assigned to the years 1907-1910, 1920, 1926-1930 and 1933-1936 respectively. According to the author, these times saw greater changes in inter-pastoral relationships than did the political watersheds of 1914, 1918 and 1933. Linden explains the beginning of the time period considered by referring to comprehensive changes in the churchly life of Osnabrück, especially the increasing passivity of the laymen and therefore the increasing importance of the pastor in the parish. By contrast, why the time period ends in 1936 is not explained. According to the attached short biographies, there was no significant change to church staffing in that year with the exception of Rudolf Detering, who went to Goslar for a better position. However, Linden states at the end that the intensity of the relationships had decreased since 1935, with increasing isolation leading to fewer opportunities for networking or cooperation (p. 793).

Linden first quickly introduces the history of the Protestant Church in Osnabrück, reaching back into the reformation years in 1542/1543, and explains the standing of local Protestantism in the early twentieth century. He then describes certain main events and conflicts concerning the several chapters, which he analyzes in terms of his chosen method of social network analysis. Examples for the years 1907-1910 are the reorganisation of churchly offices and changes in church staff. For the “complex 1920”, he refers to the public conflicts between the minority of so-called churchly “Positivives” and the majority of liberal pastors. Finally, for the years 1926-1930, he refers to the reorganization of pastoral care in special care institutions, the use of the Apostles’ Creed in worship, and (once again) the staffing of pastoral offices. In the expansive fifth chapter (1933-1936), which forms the main part of the book, Linden provides an overview of the general development of church affairs in the Reich as well as the church of Hannover, before turning to their impact on the Osnabrück church district. Above all, this concerns the formation of religious and church-political groups and the attitude of the church towards the NSDAP and the Nazi state. This is followed by a short review of the position of Osnabrück superintendent Ernst Rolffs, by a survey of conflicts in the Luther-Gemeinde, a newly independent parish, in the years from 1929 to 1933, and finally by the longest sub-chapter (one single section of two hundred pages) on “process and relationship structures” during that time period. In sum, the way the book is structured is unconvincing, a problem that extends down into individual sections. Furthermore, Linden is unable to give a short and concise statement of his results beyond a repetitive and somewhat tiresome recapitulation.

From this reviewer’s perspective, the main problem is that the method chosen by the author cannot carry the work. It is of course true that group building processes and networks, interpersonal relationships, the enforcement of common interests, and not least personal sympathy or antipathy play an important role in social processes, especially in a more or less clearly defined socio-moral milieu. This is well known from the research of contemporary church history. There is also no doubt that these processes strongly influence decisions and actions. But the very narrow way in which the topic is considered here, exhausting itself in an isolated and decontextualised observation of relevant actors, does not do much to help enlighten the social and historical decision-making processes. The voluminous and detailed description of the historical background does not seem to be linked to the real object of the study, the structure of relationships of protestant pastors of Osnabrück, and remains a mere accessory part. Even the pastors are hardly made tangible beyond their position as actors within a social network, since explanations for their actions are not provided.

If non-consideration of the existing results of research into social history and history of mentalities is generally a problem of Linden’s work, this is exacerbated by the fact that he does not offer any guidance or orientation, refusing to put his results into context. To give one example, Linden describes in quite some detail the social commitment of liberal pastor Friedrich Grußendorf against the widespread abuse of alcohol, which he convincingly explains as a result of the pastor’s personal experiences (pp. 134-154). But the social function of this ecclesial commitment remains unmentioned, as does its being a part of a romanticized and backward-looking utopia propagated by the church under the popular term of “morality”. This lack of context becomes quite clear in the consideration of the play ‘It will be fine in the end’ (Es wird noch werden gut), penned by Grußendorf and first shown in 1914, on the well-known closure of the mine in neighbouring Piesberg (1898). Grußendorf, in a work containing some anti-catholic undertones, had explained this closure as the result of a strike which in turn was caused by a witch seducing the coal miners with a poisoned drink (i.e. alcohol). Linden does mention contemporary criticism of Grußendorf’s “falsification of history”, but he does not state that the closure was in fact approved by the shareholders simply because the mine was not profitable anymore after several water leaks. But the social significance of the play lies precisely in the fact that it misrepresents a calculated business decision as a necessity caused by (alleged and real) alcohol abuse of the coal miners.

Such inadequate classifications as well as other assessments which invite questioning can be found throughout the work. For example, the interpretation of a local protest event of the Protestant League against a meeting of the Catholic Church (1901) as motivated “primarily” by the need to express the displeasure of Osnabrück’s liberals with the positivism of the church (i.e. as primarily motivated by intra-protestant reasons) is hardly convincing (pp. 106-108). Another example is the early (September 1917) membership of liberal pastor August Pfannkuche in the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei, DVLP); shortly before the end of the war Pfannkuche even found himself on the national executive committee of the party. Linden describes this engagement as a change in political attitude which “gave more consideration to the interests and ideological motives of the traditional conservative centre, without however formulating a break with the working class” (p. 131). He does so unaffected by the nearly undisputed results in research literature, according to which the function of DVLP was that of a bridge between the conservative right of the German Empire and the extreme and strictly antidemocratic right of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, well-known German historian Ulrich Wehler has characterized the DVLP as the “first right-wing proto-fascist party of the masses”. Such an understanding is absolutely vital in order to define the standing and actions of the Protestant Church in Osnabrück society along with the relationships within the protestant milieu and between pastors.

The second volume, which deals with the early years of the Nazi state, also suffers from inaccuracies, lack of classification and unlinked narrative threads. This is exacerbated by a failure to consider the research literature on the topic. The big syntheses of Kurt Meier and Klaus Scholder are named, but hardly considered in fact, and numerous recent studies do not find any attention at all. For example, on the issue of the “German Christian Movement,” the standard works of by Kurt Meier, Doris Bergen, Peter von der Osten-Sacken and Manfred Gailus are not considered at all. The same holds true for the issue of “Protestantism, Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism”.

It should also be mentioned that the author employs a style of writing which this reviewer found quite exhausting. Many sections are full of details, but devoid of structure and largely have the character of a retelling, losing the sense for what’s important. Also, it would have been desirable for the summaries to include more than a repetition of what has already been said, namely a targeted synthesis and, where applicable, a few words on new questions arising from the results. The permanent description of the pastoral relationships with words like “clique”, “prestige”, “activation”, “integration”, “insurance”, “coalition building”, “disturbance”, “resource development”, “weak” and “strong ties” , “in-“ and “outdegrees”, etc. are not only exhausting to read in their almost formal-seeming clustering, they also do not help one gain a better understanding of the relationship structures considered. It seems that a nomenclature is over-used without leading to any new insights, rather ending up in the middle of nowhere.

This criticism also extends down to the smallest details of the book. In one case, Linden acknowledges a critique, formulated in 1925 by a female social democratic journalist, of a church event with former papal chaplain Bruno Doehring, known for his national-conservative and anti-catholic views and thus controversial even within the Protestant Church, with the following words: “Especially her classification of the sermon as ‘inciting the people to hatred’ was hardly suitable to begin an open-minded communication with the Osnabrück pastors” (p. 293). This fails entirely to consider the relationship between the Protestant Church and the Social Democrats, or the anti-democratic, largely nationalist and revanchist actions of prominent representatives of German Protestantism, of which Doehring was a very eloquent example. Doehring’s public appearances were no more likely to foster an “open-minded conversation” than was the coverage in the social democratic press. Indeed, neither party intended to have an “open-minded communication,” something Linden does not seem to recognize.

Elsewhere, one wonders whether certain formulations can be considered appropriate. For instance, Linden refers to Osnabrück pastor Paul Leo, who was forced into retirement by the church in 1938, was later incarcerated in Buchenwald and finally emigrated from Germany, as a “Jew” rather than as a baptized “non-Aryan” (this is still the most correct terminology), despite being aware of the importance of this difference (p. 822, 866). To give one last example, after the spate of arrests in March 1935 (at the very latest), large parts of the Protestant Church, especially in and around the Confessing Church, no longer held any illusions about the Gestapo. For many pastors, even beyond the borders of the churches of the Old Prussian Union, sometimes existential experiences and a variety of pressures would follow, to which they reacted with a variety of strategies. The author’s formulation that Osnabrück’s pastors tried, by way of “anticipatory good conduct”, to “reduce to a minimum” acts by the Gestapo (p. 810) does not do justice to this situation.

In sum, the present reviewer can find hardly anything positive in the work under review. The author has conducted intensive and meticulous research into the historical sources and he introduces many new people and events from local church history, but he does not succeed in binding his results together into a well-thought-out whole. Because he refrains from classifying his results or comparing them to others, his study floats in a vacuum and raises more questions rather than it answers. Certainly, the work did nothing to dispel this reviewer’s general doubts whether social network analysis is suitable for furthering historical research.

Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950)

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

Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950). (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011), 559 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-506-77014-1.

By Christopher J. Probst, Saint Louis University

Hansjörg Buss’s comprehensive, fascinating study of the machinations of the Protestant church in Lübeck during the Weimar, Nazi, and immediate post-war eras is a highly original work that takes seriously predominant social, cultural, and intellectual currents over a tumultuous three-decade period of German history. With a focus on the views of Lübeck’s Protestants toward Jews and Judaism, the author manages to weave together “sacred” and “secular” threads of history in seamless and effective fashion. In the process, numerous important issues are addressed, including: the question of continuities and ruptures, the interaction between local and national issues and points of view, and the nature of anti-Jewish hostilities and how their various manifestations should be understood.

While the political ruptures of the period under study are obvious—Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the dissolution of the Kaiserreich, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazis, the collapse of the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War, the Allied occupation of Germany in the wake of the war—Buss rightly and deftly emphasizes the nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten that were consistently present during these troubled times. The divinely-sanctioned “inextricable connection” of church, Volk, and nation espoused by many Lübeck pastors during the Kaiserreich (50), a complex of ideas embraced by scores of their theological descendants during the succeeding decades, is just one example of this phenomenon. The prevalence of anti-Judaism and antisemitism among German Protestants, beginning especially with the rise to prominence of the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, is another.

One of the most significant contributions of the book is its regional focus, which, to Buss’s credit, is set firmly within the broader national context. After a prologue in which he examines the church, civil (especially bourgeois) society and nationalism during modern German history prior to 1918, he devotes significant space to each of the three most relevant timeframes (Weimar, the Third Reich, and the early post-war period). For each era, we are made intimately familiar with important areas of Lübeck society, including demographics, economics, and politics. Those seeking only a narrowly focused examination of Protestant views of Jews and Judaism from 1918-1950 will be disappointed. But, those who are patient enough to follow Buss on this thoroughly contextualized journey will be rewarded handsomely.

The ways in which Lübeck Protestants dealt with Jews and Judaism is at the heart of the book. Fearing a deeper descent into secularization and immorality—not to mention their perceived drift into irrelevance—during the Weimar era, most Lübeck Protestants, like many of their co-religionists in other parts of Germany, espoused conservative, anti-democratic, and anti-Jewish views. The outcome of the Church Struggle in Lübeck, according to Buss, was a church government take-over by “radical” German Christians. The radicals who led this regional church ardently supported the Nazi State, the National Church Movement of German Christians (NDC), and the virulently antisemitic Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life (commonly called the “Eisenach Institute”).

Yet, all of this masked the fact that the Confessing Church in Lübeck, together with other Protestants who, despite their initial enthusiasm for the Hitler regime, largely rejected National Socialist incursions on Protestant autonomy (but did not openly protest anti-Jewish measures promulgated by the regime), actually represented a majority of Lübeck Protestants. As a result, from April 1937 to the end of the war, there were in Lübeck essentially two independent churches, joined only administratively (485).

On the one hand, Buss argues that a striking feature of the history of the Lübeck Church during the Nazi period was a radical antisemitism, which led under Bishop Erwin Balzer to adopt the goal of creating a “Jew-free” church to correspond to the “Jew-free” state that the Nazi Party was striving for (490). Buss suggests that this radical antisemitism was most prevalent among the leaders of the Lübeck church government.

On the other hand, however, he asserts that antisemitism and the state persecution of Jews was a non-issue in parish life. For the most part, Lübeck Protestants explicitly recognized and welcomed the state regulatory authority to limit the influence of Jews in politics, society, and culture. “There also were no reactions to the increasing restrictions on the Jewish community, to the open exclusion of Jewish Lübeckers, to the November 1938 pogrom, and finally to the beginning of the deportations.” There is simply little evidence, Buss argues, to suggest that these exclusionary policies aroused special concern among knowledgeable Protestants, even in the Confessing Church (493).

This lack of expressed concern was based at least in part on the “totalitarian” nature of the Nazi government and the “theological-ideological orientation” of the Balzer church government, both of which would have inhibited significant Protestant protest. Yet, he stresses that a lack of consciousness for the plight of Jews and Protestant “anti-Jewish resentments” (as well as some other church-political dynamics) played the greatest role. These conclusions are nuanced, but there may be some reluctance here to attribute antisemitic attitudes to Protestants who were not aligned with the German Christians and/or the Nazis. At the national level, certainly anti-Judaism and xenophobia seem to have been more prevalent in the Confessing Church and the Protestant “middle.” Yet, antisemitic ideas can be found in those camps as well. It is a bit surprising that such attitudes were seemingly less prevalent in Lübeck.

In the post-war era, cautious rapprochement between Protestants and Jews predominated in Lübeck, as elsewhere in Germany. Despite all that had transpired, Lübeck Protestants were not ready to welcome their Jewish neighbors with open arms. The differentiated description of events at the local level over three decades presented here helps to nuance our prior understanding of Lübeck Protestantism as a purely German Christian stronghold.

Buss’s inclusion of the experience of Lübeck Jews is commendable. Rather than a one-sided conversation featuring the dim views of Jews and Judaism purveyed by most German Protestants, Buss deals with the lived experience of Lübeck’s tiny Jewish minority during all three eras. He also consciously sets the actions and attitudes of Lübeck Protestants in their context; that is, he is careful to demonstrate the marked contrast between their often narrowly constructed abstract theological arguments about Jews and Judaism with the horrific terrestrial events being perpetrated against Jews in Europe at the same time.

This excellent study significantly broadens our previous knowledge about the Lübeck Protestant church. Buss’s judgments are measured and his analysis acute. He is also cognizant of the sensitivities involved in the issues being discussed. “Entjudete” Kirche is important reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century German Protestantism, and would be similarly useful for those interested in the history of Christian antisemitism.