Tag Archives: Holocaust

Review of Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

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

Social scientist Robert Braun has made an important contribution to the study of rescue during the Holocaust, up-ending much of the conventional wisdom and modes of analysis about rescue and rescuers. Braun argues that most studies of rescue are insufficient because they focus too much on motivation, overlook the rescuers’ capacity to effectively carry out the rescue, and do not account for regional variation. This book addresses all three of these factors. Braun is especially skeptical of religious teachings as primary motivating factors, illustrated by a compelling opening anecdote about two Dutch towns in the region of Twente with similar sociocultural profiles but very different responses to the deportation of Jews in 1941. In Almelo many Jews were able to evade deportation with the help of the local Catholic church and 42% of the town’s Jews survived the war. In the nearby town of Borne, the local Catholic churches did not engage in rescue efforts and only 22% of the town’s Jews escaped deportation. Catholic theology and social teaching cannot account for this variation, nor can political or wartime circumstances. Herein lies the guiding question of this study: why are some religious communities willing and able to protect victims of mass persecution and others are not?

Because this is a work of social science, it employs a methodology very different from how historians approach research and thus warrants some explanation. Braun begins with a hypothesis that religious minorities are more likely to assist or rescue persecuted groups from mass violence or genocide. In this framing, religious minorities could hold minority status on a national level because of their small size (e.g., Quakers) or they could be a minority in a given region—Catholics in a majority Protestant region and vice versa. This minority theory is based on the idea that religious minorities recognize a shared vulnerability with other minorities, which triggers empathy. Braun posits that all religious communities seek security and self-preservation. When they cannot achieve this through religious dominance, then pluralism is the next safest option to ensure survival. So, a commitment to pluralism accounts for the willingness factor but minority status also enables capacity. Minority communities are able to engage in clandestine collective action while reducing exposure because of their members’ commitment and their relative isolation (more on isolation below). (40)

Braun proceeds to test this hypothesis through detailed geocoding of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands and Belgium, combining spatial statistics, archival sources, contemporary newspapers and other published materials, and postwar testimony, including materials from Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations program. Numerous graphs, charts, and maps are included throughout these chapters, as well as an insert of ten colour figures. The maps help to explain the story yet the technical presentation of the data makes these chapters largely inaccessible to those not familiar with social scientific methodologies.

Compelling as it is, the limitations of Braun’s thesis are just as important to understand as the argument itself and the data that supports it. There are a number of significant qualifications, the most important being that it is not just minority status that motivates and enables rescue but a certain level of isolation. (112) To illustrate this point, Braun offers the case of a Catholic chaplain in a majority Catholic area of Belgium who carried out a successful rescue operation because he used farmers in remote locations to hide Jews. The farmers were not socially isolated but rather geographically isolated. (170-171) Another crucial factor to consider is that Jews were more likely to survive when their individual networks overlapped with those of isolated minority groups—when doctors and patients and business owners and business patrons interacted on regular basis.

The book’s concluding chapter considers the applicability of the minority theory in other countries during the Holocaust. Here we see that the seemingly straightforward thesis posited in the book comes with some significant exceptions and qualifications. In order for Braun’s theory to work, the rescue must be collective and clandestine. He outlines three exceptions that suggest why we do not necessarily find religious minorities rescuing Jews to the same extent in other settings during the Holocaust and other modern genocides. Religious minorities may not engage in higher levels of successful rescue where: 1) majority elites, both secular and religious, openly object to persecution and cooperate to stymie the persecution; 2) the rescue is highly individualized and does not require coordination, as in Poland; and 3) the minority groups are closely aligned with the repressive apparatus undertaking the violence. (236) This third point is paramount to understanding the actions of religious minorities in Nazi Germany, where most Christian minorities responded to their perceived vulnerable status by aligning themselves with the Nazi state rather than responding with empathy for other persecuted minorities. Yet the book’s thesis may shed light on German religious minorities if we consider how the Volksgemeinschaft offered belonging and affirmation for previously marginalized groups in German society, thus eclipsing the recognition of shared vulnerability and the promotion of pluralism.

As the author points out, studying clandestine behaviour is hard. (116) Due to the extensive documentation available for the Netherlands, this book is able to compare situations on a granular level and isolate individual factors. Although its applicability may not be as broad as the author explores, he has offered a sophisticated methodology and way of thinking about rescue that moves far beyond religious motivation.

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Article Note: Jouni Tilli, “’Deus Vult!’ The Idea of Crusading in Finnish Clerical War Rhetoric, 1941-1944”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Article Note: Jouni Tilli, “’Deus Vult!’ The Idea of Crusading in Finnish Clerical War Rhetoric, 1941-1944,” War in History 24, no 3 (2017): 363-385.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Jouni Tilli’s illuminating article invites readers to take a closer look at what seems an obscure topic: Finnish military chaplains in World War II, and more specifically, their rhetoric. Historians of the war and the Holocaust, if they mention Finland at all, invariably present it as exceptional. Though the Finns fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944, famously only eight Jews were deported from Finland to be killed, and Jewish men served in the Finnish army, some in its officer corps. This positive story, captured in the title of Hannu Rautkallio’s 1987 book, Finland and the Holocaust: The Rescue of Finland’s Jews – often described as the only English-language study of the topic – complements the so-called “separate war thesis.” That interpretation, prevalent in Finnish public discourse since the 1940s, presents Finland’s participation in the war against the Soviet Union as a Finnish-Soviet matter, occurring parallel to but not as part of the German-Soviet War. Tilli’s article counters this familiar version of events and contributes to a critical body of writing that extends back to Elina (Suominen) Sana’s 1979 book, “The Ship of Death” (in Finnish), and forward to works by Antero Holmila, Oula Silvennoinen, Tiina Kinnunen and others. Finland, it turns out, may not have been so exceptional.

Tilli’s analysis draws primarily on the sermons and writings of Finland’s Lutheran clergy during the so-called Continuation War. They uniformly preached a crusade against the Soviet Union and Communism and portrayed Germany as God’s gift to the Finnish nation, he shows. In the process, they lent religious legitimacy to violence. Their influence was considerable: 96 percent of Finns were Lutheran, and almost half of the country’s 1000 Lutheran pastors served as military chaplains, 280 of those at the front. Senior chaplain Rolf Tiivola, in a sermon to soldiers in July 1941, evoked the crusaders of the eleventh century in words that provided the title for Tilli’s article: “’God wills! God wills to make Finland great …’” Readers may be shocked, disappointed, and embarrassed by this rhetoric, reminiscent as it is of the Christian jingoism so prevalent during World War I. Similar language also occurred among the Wehrmacht chaplains, as Martin Röw has shown, although paradoxically, restrictions on “political” involvement muffled the full-throated endorsements of the Nazi German war effort that many would gladly have offered.

Finnish chaplains spoke in one voice, Tilli demonstrates, but that voice was not robotic. Indeed, their rhetoric proved to be quite supple and adaptable, and it changed with the course of events. In 1941, as the Finnish army advanced rapidly, crusading rhetoric invoked a holy war against Bolshevism, its knights clad in the armor of Christ. By late 1942, as military success gave way to setbacks and ultimately defeat, the crusade turned inward, to sermons lamenting “national sins.”

Tilli’s article was published before release in early 2019 of a report prepared by the National Archives of Finland, on “The Finnish SS-Volunteers and Atrocities 1941–1943.” Finns, it found, very likely participated in mass murder of Jews, other civilians, and prisoners of war in Ukraine and the Caucasus region. Unlike Tilli, who focused on soldiers fighting on the Finnish front, the report dealt with the 1,408 Finns in the SS Panzer Division Wiking. But those men, too, were served by chaplains: Ensio Pihkala, until his death in August 1941, then Kalervo Kurkiala. According to church historian André Swanström, Pihkala expressed horror at massacres of Jews, whereas Kurkiala had nothing but praise for the SS. One wonders whether they and the other pastors discussed by Tilli included genocide under the crusading slogan, “God wills it!”

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Digital Humanities Highlight: American Christians, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust in the USHMM’s Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Digital Humanities Highlight: American Christians, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust in the USHMM’s Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Experiencing History is a digital teaching and learning tool developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Organized thematically, the tool provides carefully curated collections of primary sources intended for classroom use. Sources are contextualized with brief introductions and users can view the original sources, translations, and transcriptions.

In March 2019, Experiencing History launched a new collection, “American Christians, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust,” which is part of the Museum’s current emphasis on Americans and the Holocaust (see also the current special exhibition, much of which can be viewed at https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/americans-and-the-holocaust).

Developed by the USHMM’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust (with helpful feedback from CCHQ Managing Editor Kyle Jantzen), the collection explores American Christians’ responses to events in Europe in the 1930s and 40s and the ways in which many Americans viewed the rise of Nazism, World War II, and news of the Holocaust through the lens of their Christian identity. The collection presents a cross-section of American Christian life, with sources by Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Quakers, as well as ecumenical and interfaith bodies and faith-based relief organizations. Taken together, the sources point to a number of broad trends, including an early focus on the German Church Struggle (and a tendency to interpret Jewish persecution as part of a broader Nazi hostility to religion), the widespread outrage at Nazi antisemitism and violence in the wake of Kristallnacht (users can listen to a fascinating radio broadcast excerpt from Catholic University of America), and the lack of organized aid to Jewish refugees (with the exception of the American Friends Service Committee).

Several sources also illuminate the ways in which Christian leaders from both sides of the Atlantic shaped Americans’ perceptions of Nazi Germany. Protestant minister Henry Leiper is one example of an American church leader who traveled to Europe in 1932­-33 and subsequently published a personal reflection of his experience. Germans also travelled to the United States in the 1930s, sometimes with support of the German government, to shape public opinion of Nazi Germany. The collection includes a letter by an American Adventist woman who was the interpreter for one such German representative, pointing to the difficulties that Christian denominations faced in navigating international relationships with co-religionists.

More collections on topics relating to religion may be developed in the future. The Experiencing History team welcomes feedback, especially from professors who have used the tool in the classroom. The tool can be found here: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/american-christians-nazi-germany-and-the-holocaust.

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Review of Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 284 pp. ISBN: 9781472586919.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Beth A. Griech-Polelle’s book enters the market of Holocaust history as a thoroughly accessible and carefully constructed overview of the Shoah, beginning quite properly in the long history of antisemitism that lay behind the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. The author states from the outset that she is interested in “the theme of the power of language and how language and rhetoric can result in deadly actions” (1). Drawing on the work of the French political scientist Jacques Semelin, Griech-Polelle notes that a society’s ideological concerns around “identity, purity, and security” can be impacted by “destructive legends, myths, and stereotypes” that generate caricatures which create fears that “enemy outsiders” will “defile, pollute, and destroy … us” (1). In like manner, she uses Thomas Kühne’s work on persecution as community-building and Saul Friedländer’s notion of redemptive antisemitism to argue that “language and rhetoric influenced the construction of ‘the Jew’ as eternal enemy” and that “language led to the violence and annihilation of European Jewry in the Holocaust” (2). Anyone familiar with Alon Confino’s insightful book A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) will recognize Griech-Polelle’s approach and be reminded of the ways in which language contributed to the creation of a culture—a social imaginary, to invoke Charles Taylor’s term—that made possible the Nazi persecution of the Jews and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

Griech-Polelle begins with the rise of religious antisemitism—rooted in the concept of Jews as “Christ-killers’’—in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ arrest, death, and resurrection. With the emergence of Christianity came the belief that the Early Church was the “New Israel” which replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people (10-11). Tracing the loss of Jewish rights in the late Roman Empire, the author shows how the Codex Theodosianus began to impose restrictions on Jews and to generate the segregating language that would shape the medieval era. Through the period of the crusades and on into the Middle Ages, Griech-Polelle explains important incidents in the history of Jewish persecution, but beyond that, she endeavours to outline the way a particular kind of antisemitic language emerged in, for example, tropes like the Wandering Jew or the blood libel. A short section on Thomas Aquinas shows how he built on Augustine’s notion of the preservation of the Jews as a witness to the truth of both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian gospels, adding that the Jews were people with souls that needed to be saved. “Somehow, Jews were to be converted voluntarily—despite the persecutions and horrendous depictions of Jews as being in league with the devil, desecrating the Host, and reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus” (20). This chapter on the history of religious antisemitism continues with the medieval expulsions of Jews from various European countries and follows the story through the Renaissance and Reformation, the emergence of a substantial Jewish community in Poland, and the impact of the Enlightenment, French Revolution, modern nationalism, and post-1848 reactionary politics. It closes with the persecution faced by Jews in Tsarist Russia.

I’ve focused closely on this opening chapter (chapter 2 in the book, since the Introduction is chapter 1) to indicate how Griech-Polelle—a scholar both of German Catholicism in the Third Reich and of the Holocaust—handles this important topic of the Christian antisemitic foundation upon which later antisemitisms and (in the end) the Holocaust itself rested. A third chapter follows the story of how cultural and especially political antisemitism developed from the nineteenth century through the First World War and the Weimar era in Germany. Key concepts are the coining of the term antisemitism itself, the notion of “scientific” antisemitism, and “the Jew” as the outsider. What becomes clear is that antisemitism was a tool used by European political parties to spur the growth of nationalism within European mass society.

Other chapters cover the topics one would expect in an introduction to the history of the Holocaust, though in ways that enable Griech-Polelle to highlight her theme of the role of antisemitic language and rhetoric. Chapter four includes everything from the rise of Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to Hitler’s views on Jews, the seizure of power and early phase of Nazi rule, and Nazi Jewish policy through 1935. Chapter five is called “Turning Points,” and argues that although Jewish life had been deteriorating from 1933 onwards, the period from 1936-1938 was marked by exclusionary policies which reinforced “the notion that to create the Volksgemeinschaft [national community], anti-Jewish actions were required” (111). Emigration, the growing refugee crisis, expulsion, the Kristallnacht Pogrom, and the beginning of the Second World War are all surveyed here. Chapters six to eight cover the heart of the Holocaust, from “Resettlements, Deportations, and Ghettos” to “Einsatzgruppen, Executions, and ‘Evacuations’ to the East,” to “The Final Solution,” with its emphasis on the death camps in Poland. Throughout, Griech-Polelle treats a host of subtopics briefly but conscientiously, meaning that her history of both antisemitism and the Holocaust comes to only 232 pages of nicely formatted text, making it easy to read.

Two features of the book are worthy of note. First, throughout her work, Griech-Polelle employs material from various volumes of the important new series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Series Editor: Jürgen Matthäus), and in particular the five volumes entitled Jewish Responses to Persecution. The result is that she is able to present the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust from multiple perspectives, incorporating the experiences of Jewish victims along with those of Nazi perpetrators. For instance, in her description of the opening phase of Nazi antisemitic policy, she recounts the reflections of Mally Dienemann, whose diary describes the “unvarying … fate” of the Jews: “now we are [supposedly] harming Germany with fairy tales about atrocities, while in the Middle Ages it was we who were supposed to have poisoned wells, etc…. Could people really do this to each other?” (89, editorial insertion and ellipsis in the original). Likewise, during her account of the Kristallnacht Pogrom, Griech-Polelle uses the testimony of Margaret Czellitzer, whose home was invaded, radio broken, china smashed, beds overturned, mattresses ruined, and valuables stolen (124). In this sense, Griech-Polelle’s introduction to the Holocaust reflects current best practices in the field of Holocaust Studies, which attempt to balance perpetrator accounts with victim voices.

Second, at the close of each chapter, the author includes a short section entitled “For your consideration,” in which she combines short primary source texts with reflection questions. For instance, in chapter 2 on religious antisemitism, she offers biblical texts from Matthew 27 and John 8 and excerpts from Martin Luther’s “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” (1543). On the gospel texts, questions revolve around the descriptions of Jews, their role in the sentencing of Jesus, the naming of particular groups of Jews, and the link between these depictions and the rise of the myth of deicide. With respect to the Luther text, questions involve Luther’s picture of the Jews, his use of medieval prejudices, and the potential influence his writings might have had. These texts and questions at the close of each chapter would work well for undergraduate classroom discussions or reflection assignments.

Rooted in the history of antisemitism, written in accessible prose which encompasses multiple perspectives on the events of the Holocaust, accompanied by primary texts, reflection questions, suggestions for further reading, and a helpful glossary, Griech-Polelle’s Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will serve uninitiated laypeople and undergraduate students as a helpful introduction to the events of the Holocaust and the discourse of antisemitism which prepared the way for the annihilation of the Jews.

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Conference Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Conference Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018

By Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

Scholars, students, community and church leaders, and members of the general public gathered in mid-March 2018 at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, for two intense days of presentations and discussions on the subject of “Mennonites and the Holocaust.” Conference organizers Mark Jantzen, John Thiesen, and John Sharp put together a stimulating program featuring speakers from the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Ukraine. Around 200 people registered, and more attended the keynote address and the film showing, which were open to the public, so that the conversation continued beyond the formal sessions, over meals, during coffee breaks, and subsequently online. As the conference demonstrated, it is worth the time, effort, and expense to bring people physically together when the issues involved are so important and the stakes so high.

Joel H. Nofziger, Ben Goossen, Aileen Friesen, and Jason Kauffman prepared thoughtful summaries of all the sessions for the “Anabaptist Historians” blog. You can find those, along with additional commentary by Lisa Schirch, at https://anabaptisthistorians.org/tag/mennonites-and-the-holocaust-conference/page/1/.

This report focuses on three insights from the conference: one historical, another methodological, and the third programmatic.

History

Mennonites were directly involved in the destruction of Jews as witnesses, beneficiaries, and perpetrators. Already from John Thiesen’s opening remarks it was clear that the conference would unsettle the myth of Mennonite innocence. Thiesen’s research on the reception of National Socialism among Mennonites in Paraguay dates back to the 1980s; the title of his book, Mennonite and Nazi?, articulated a key question twenty years ago. Still, even for those familiar with the research of the late Gerhard Rempel (“Mennonites and the Holocaust: From Collaboration to Perpetration,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 84 [Oct 2010]: 507-49) and recent work by Ben Goossen, the conference produced shock after shock.

In her contribution to a panel titled “Mennonite-Jewish Connections,” Aileen Friesen described a massacre of Jews in Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine in 1942, just miles from the church where Mennonites from the Khortytsia colony gathered to celebrate Easter. Among the local police who did the killing were two Mennonite brothers. Using the recently opened KGB Archive in Kiev, Dmytro Myeshkov provided chilling accounts of Mennonite collaborators. For example, Ivan Klassen, a physician in the service of the SS, examined disabled patients in a hospital in the Mennonite Molotschna settlement. A killing squad followed up by shooting more than 100 children, women, and men whom Klassen had deemed unable to work. Erika Weidemann’s paper analyzed the experiences of two Khortytsia Mennonite women. One of them, an informant for the SS killing squad Einsatzgruppe C, used her language skills to rat out potentially subversive forced laborers.

Weidemann, Myeshkov, Friesen, and Victor Klet all noted the disastrous impact of the Soviet experience on Mennonite communities in Ukraine. But those victimized by Stalin were not the only Mennonites who joined the Nazi cause. Colin Neufeldt’s paper, on “Jewish-Mennonite Relations” in the Masovian Voivodeship, shifted attention to German-occupied Poland. At least twenty Mennonites, including Neufeldt’s grandparents, left their village of Deutsch Wymyschle to take over properties from which Jews had been expelled in nearby Gąbin. Papers by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and Pieter Post identified Mennonite theologians in Germany and the Netherlands who embraced and propagated National Socialist ideology; Joachim Wieler added a poignant personal note, reading a letter by his father, a Wehrmacht officer, who in 1941 exulted from France, “The Lord is visibly on our side.”

Methodology

In her keynote address, “Neighbors, Killers, Enablers, Witnesses: The Many Roles of Mennonites in the Holocaust,” Doris Bergen called for more scholarship, and from as many angles and disciplines as possible. The conference illustrated how fruitful multiple approaches can be but also revealed many unexplored perspectives.

Jim Lichti’s presentation, “An Illusion of Freedom: Denominationalism, German Mennonites, and Nazi Germany,” compared Mennonites with other “free” churches, notably Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists. Like Imanuel Baumann and Astrid von Schlachta in their papers, Lichti was careful to point out the range of Mennonite positions, public and private, on everything from the Hebrew Bible to antisemitism and Nazi racial policies. At the same time, he observed that the lack of centralized structures made it almost impossible to develop a coherent Mennonite voice of opposition. Alle Hoekema’s discussion of Dutch Mennonites recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous among the Nations” confirmed this point. The forty individuals identified are, as Hoekema put it, not insignificant, but they are few. Nor do their accounts highlight Mennonite identity or beliefs as key factors. Instead they emphasize their networks and commitment to humanity as what motivated them to help Jews.

Several speakers noted that common narratives about Mennonite suffering and survival can serve to conceal negative assumptions about Jews and Judaism. Hans Werner analyzed how Mennonites frame their memories to produce “usable” versions of the past, for example, by writing only about the Soviet years or balancing sadness about the Holocaust with joy at Nazi German “liberation” of Christianity. Viewing the 1935 movie, Friesennot (“Frisians in peril”) showed how Mennonites, real and imagined, were mobilized for Nazi purposes. That theme of mobilization also came across in Ben Goossen’s paper on scholarship about Mennonites in the Third Reich. Mark Jantzen, who introduced the film and prepared the subtitles, pointed out that it does not explicitly refer to “Mennonites” or “Jews.” Nonetheless, antisemitic canards about Jews-Bolsheviks as the lascivious, blasphemous, brutal foe of pure and noble “Aryan”-Christian-German-Mennonites are embedded in the story.

The cultural components of the conference encouraged reflection on issues that tend to be neglected or repressed. Connie Braun’s poetry and prose invited listeners to contemplate “the missing pieces of our narratives”: Mennonite prejudices and the suffering and losses experienced by others. Helen Stoltzfus’s reading from “Heart of the World,” a play she co-wrote with Albert Greenberg in 1999, raised the topic of intermarriage as a way to explore what divides and connects Mennonites and Jews, and indeed all people. Stoltzfus’s performance of four different characters showed the value of multiple perspectives and reinforced an earlier moment in the conference. During the Q&A, an audience member had identified herself as Jewish, possibly the only Jew present she said, and challenged the rest of the room to consider how the light-hearted tone taken by some speakers sounded and felt to her.

Looking Ahead

Although the conference was academic and focused on the geographically and chronologically delineated subject of Mennonites and the Holocaust, it raised even broader questions with far-reaching implications. Some of these were spelled out explicitly, others remained below the surface of the formal proceedings or spilled over into discussions off-site. David Barnouw’s paper about Jacob Luitjens, “From War Criminal in the Netherlands to Mennonite Abroad and Back, to Prison in the Netherlands,” suggested the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a widely respected relief organization, actively helped a Nazi conceal his past and use his Mennonite ties to gain refuge. Does this history pose a challenge to the MCC’s ongoing efforts in Israel/Palestine? Some people present at the conference want an examination of these issues in advance of the upcoming 100-year anniversary of the MCC. Some also echo Arnold Neufeldt-Fast’s call for a Mennonite “post-Holocaust theology.” Already in the works is another conference, to be held in 2020 at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Indiana, on “Reading the Bible after the Holocaust.”

In his paper, “Selective Memory: Danziger Mennonite Reflections on the Nazi Era,” Steven Schroeder called for “truth-telling” about Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust and also about the ways that Mennonites participated in and continue to benefit from colonial systems. Schroeder, who teaches in western Canada, noted that his institution, University of the Fraser Valley, is located on unceded Indigenous Territory. Several members of the audience signaled an interest in future engagement with this aspect of the Mennonite past and present. As Bergen mentioned in her keynote, thinking critically about history does not imply that I would do better. But it might open possibilities to listen, understand, and care.

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Review of Lee B. Spitzer, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust: The Hand of Sincere Friendship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Lee B. Spitzer, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust: The Hand of Sincere Friendship (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2017). Pg. xiv + 482. ISBN: 9780817017828.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lee B. Spitzer, General Secretary of American Baptist Churches, USA, has written a comprehensive study of the relationship between Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust. Long curious about Baptist attitudes and responses during that time on account of his own secular Jewish background and his relatives’ reluctance to discuss their Holocaust experiences, Spitzer traces Northern, Southern, and African American Baptist engagement with both US and European Jews, the latter under threat of annihilation by Hitler’s Nazi regime. The book’s subtitle comes from a 1935 London speech by Dr. J.H. Rushbrooke, President of the Baptist World Alliance, in which he reaffirmed a declaration against racial persecution issued by the 1934 Baptist World Congress in Berlin. Quoting the declaration’s condemnation of “the placing of a stamp of inferiority upon an entire race” and “every form of oppression or unfair discrimination towards the Jew” as “a violation of God the Heavenly Father,” Rushbrooke lamented the suffering of European Jews. “To my Jewish brothers and sisters under such conditions I extend the hand of sincere friendship,” he avowed (3).

Despite the initial impression that the author’s ecclesiastical position and the book’s subtitle might suggest, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust is no simple glorification of Baptist-Jewish history. Rather, it is a thoroughly researched analysis of diverse Baptist responses to the plight of Jews during the Nazi era. Spitzer’s sources include a wide array of archival material: annual convention or conference books of Northern, Southern, Swedish, Regular, African American, and Seventh Day Baptists; minutes and correspondence from the Baptist World Alliance; papers from various Baptist boards, societies, and personnel; and several dozen national and regional Baptist periodicals. This is complemented by three main Jewish sources—The Jewish Chronicle, The American Hebrew, and The American Jewish Yearbook—and a solid collection of relevant secondary sources. Surveying the existing accounts of scholars like William E. Nawyn, E. Earl Joiner, and Robert W. Ross, Spitzer finds only brief, negative assessments of the two large, national, and white Baptist conventions. Omitted are the African American and the regional, state, and local facets of the history.

Convinced of the need for a fresh assessment, the author begins by considering historic Baptist commitments to both democracy and religious toleration, then turning to Baptist-Jewish encounters during times of Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here we find fears of immigrant criminality from “this European sewer” but also compassion for “God’s own people” (22, 24). This background is useful, because it contextualizes the unruly mixture of Baptist concerns and responses to Jews later, in the 1930s and 1940s.

For example, Northern Baptists provided relief at Ellis Island, funded city missions to convert Jews, and developed “the Christian Americanization movement organized by the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society” (34). In the 1920s, they also passed resolutions against war and condemned the Turkish genocide against Armenian Christians. As the Committee on Interracial Relationships put it in 1928:

In racial prejudices and false nationalism are to be found the sources of such curses of the human race as wars, oppressions, and the exploitations by the stronger races of the weaker. … Only in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and in the common Fatherhood of God and the Universal Brotherhood of man which he reveals, is there a remedy for race antagonisms. (48)

Statements like these simultaneously asserted racial difference—even hierarchy—affirmed a Baptist commitment to the primacy of Christianity, and expressed a desire to live in peace and harmony with other peoples.

As for Southern Baptists, already in the nineteenth century they “recognized the role of the Jews as the Old Testament people of God, acknowledged a missionary call toward them, demonstrated ambivalence toward the restoration of Israel as a nation, and imagined a responsibility for mission work among Arabs as well” (55). Like their northern counterparts, Southern Baptists expressed fear that the immigration of “Roman Catholics, Jews and heathen,” who were “enemies of the evangelical faith,” would flood American cities and threaten both American and Christian institutions (59). More surprisingly, Southern Baptists called for an international conference in 1919 to alleviate Jewish suffering and emphasized a core Baptist commitment to religious liberty (60-61).

With respect to the Nazi era, Spitzer asks three questions that form the basis of his study: “was the Baptist offer of friendship to Jews really sincere? Did Baptists throughout the United States reach out to Nazi victims through individual and corporate expressions of caring and compassion? Were Baptists in the United States truly concerned, or were they apathetic in the face of the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people?” (5). He formulates his answers in sections covering Baptist periodicals and then Northern, Southern, and African American Baptists, each in their turn, before turning to the Baptist World Alliance towards the end of the book.

As Spitzer examines reports and editorials on the plight of the European Jews, he expands on Robert W. Ross’ research on the Protestant church press by scrutinizing a wide variety of Baptist publications, most importantly Missions and The Watchman-Examiner. The latter reported extensively on Nazi antisemitic campaigns, Jewish emigration, attacks on eastern European Jews, deportations, camps, and the scale of the killing in the Holocaust. Also important were the editors’ interest in Zionism and Jewish migration to Palestine (in light of biblical eschatology) and numerous condemnations of Nazism and antisemitism (139). Complementing this examination of the Baptist church press was a chapter on The American Hebrew, which covered the 1934 Baptist World Congress, considered Christian-Jewish relations, and praised Baptist and other Protestant expressions of sympathy, only growing more critical after 1943, when it censured both Christian antisemitism and Baptist suggestions that Jews convert (135).

Having concluded that Baptists were well-informed about Jewish suffering, Spitzer moves into the heart of his study, seeking to determine whether Baptists responded to the Holocaust and, if so, how. He finds that Northern Baptists, who were used to addressing domestic and international social and political issues, repeatedly issued national statements condemning Nazism and sympathizing with persecuted Jews. In 1939, for instance, the Committee on Race Relations denounced American antisemitism, while the Resolutions Committee affirmed that “God hath made of one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and that we are His offspring” (152). The committee then condemned prejudice against African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews. Various regional and state assemblies did likewise, though none of these sentiments were translated into personal, practical aid.

In contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention made much less of Jewish persecution, in part because some of the key leaders, like President M.E. Dodd and missionary leader Everett Gill, were antisemitic or racist, but also because “Southern Baptist complicity in Jim Crow culture opened them up to charges of hypocrisy” (439). Indeed, its Social Service Commission described the race problem quite unsympathetically in 1940:

Whenever two races live along side each other or come into necessary contact with each other there is, as always in the history of the world, a race problem. Sometimes it is the Aryan and the Jew; sometimes it is the Arab and the Jew; sometimes it is the White man and the Negro, but always wherever two races have to deal with each other you have a race problem…. (276)

Spitzer explains how Southern Baptists criticized the Nazi regime primarily for its attempt to overthrow “all the things for which men have fought, bled and died for” since the time Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount, namely the “idea of the worth and dignity of the individual, which is the basis of democracy” (277). Still, Southern Baptists did support the racism resolution at the 1934 Baptist World Congress, as well as its reiteration in 1939. At the state level, apart from Missouri, Southern Baptist Conventions did not express sympathy for persecuted Jews until after the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938. Then, however, six state conventions were outspoken in their denunciations of Nazism and their support for Jews, and two others expressed some sympathy (303-324). Overall, though, the author concludes that Southern Baptists were more concerned to convert Jews than to work for justice for them (343).

One of the strengths of Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust is the attention Spitzer gives to African American Baptists, who, he writes, “experienced a competitive friendship with the Jewish community” (440). African American Baptists identified with Jews for two reasons. They saw them as fellow victims of prejudice and marginalization within American society, and they identified strongly with the biblical account of Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. Still, there were perhaps stronger reasons for rivalry: Jewish immigrants were far more likely to prosper economically than African Americans; Jews were often landlords where African Americans were tenants, as in Harlem; and international sympathy for the persecuted Jews of Europe stood in marked contrast to the absence of compassion for the plight of African Americans. As Nannie Helen Burroughs of the Women’s Auxiliary put it:

… we confess that our sympathy is mixed with sadness, fear and suspicion. We wonder if when the Czech and the Pole and the Jew, of all nations, eventually achieve freedom from fear, they will join the rest of the white world in appropriating and reserving for themselves this freedom for which black men, too, have fought, bled and died? Freedom for all men, everywhere, is the only thing worth fighting for (363-364).

Internationally, Spitzer argues, the responses of the Baptist World Alliance to the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews were an amalgam of all of these diverse Baptist perspectives. “While passing resolutions that voiced Baptist opposition to Nazism, the persecution of Jews, and anti-Semitism, the BWA never developed a strategy for assisting Jewish victims of Nazism or resettling Jewish exiles in the aftermath of the Holocaust” (441).

In the end, Spitzer’s analysis uncovers the good, the bad, and the ugly about Baptist responses to the Holocaust. Writing for his coreligionists, he concludes that “the hand of sincere friendship” was not really offered by Baptists towards Jews. He makes the appropriate judgment that “Baptists felt solidarity with Jews because of their status as a persecuted minority and not because they were involved in caring relationships with Jewish neighbors. … Baptist recognition of Jewish victimhood did not compel comprehensive, concerted, or practical action on their behalf, which friends might expect from friends” (455). We can only hope, with the author, that his thorough analysis of this history bears fruit in contemporary Baptist and wider Christian responses to antisemitism in the twenty-first century.

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Workshop Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Workshop Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust–and Gerhard Rempel’s Unfinished Book, Dove and Swastika: Russian Mennonites under Nazi Occupation, University of Toronto, June 12, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

On June 12, 2017, the University of Toronto hosted an intense and unusual event that brought together a small group of historians to discuss issues around the role of Mennonites in the Holocaust. The specific focus was on the manuscript written by Gerhard Rempel and under revision for publication at the time of his death in 2014. In a series of closed sessions in the morning and afternoon, Mark Jantzen (Bethel College, Kansas), Rebecca Carter-Chand (Clark University), Diana Dumitru (New Europe College, Bucharest), Aileen Friesen (University of Waterloo), Robert Nelson (University of Windsor), and Robert Teigrob (Ryerson University) presented their reflections on selected chapters. Doris Bergen (University of Toronto) chaired the conversation, and Richard Ratzlaff (University of Toronto Press, now McGill-Queen’s University Press) observed and contributed questions and insights.

Many important issues were raised, and what follows are only a few examples. Jantzen observed that Mennonites in the nineteenth century proved remarkably adaptable. He also emphasized that refusal to serve in the military was not central to Soviet Mennonite identity. Nelson noted that Rempel’s uncritical approach to his sources led to some problematic juxtapositions and assumptions about postwar Mennonite history. Friesen drew attention to translators, a job that opened the way to collaboration for many Mennonites, and police, the main role in which Mennonites would have participated in killing of Jews. Carter-Chand found that how Mennonites acted was quite typical of other small Christian groups (Quakers, Mormons). She wondered whether the Reich Germans treated Mennonites differently from other Volksdeutschen. Teigrob noted that the ways Mennonites in North America talk about things sometimes gets echoed in the scholarship (including in Rempel’s work.) Dumitru pointed out that in the manuscript the desire to defend the Mennonite community comes across as stronger than the desire to talk about the Holocaust. Mennonites seem to need a narrative to shield them from the Soviet past and ways they participated in that system as well as from the Nazi past. Jantzen mentioned that the Reich German Mennonites and their involvement in Nazism could use more study, and Ratzlaff mentioned Stutthof, where at least judging from the names on the records, Mennonites were deeply involved.

In the late afternoon, the room was opened to the public for a panel discussion. Bergen posed questions to each of the invited guests, who spoke from their areas of expertise to the topic. Jantzen and Friesen addressed why the issue of “Mennonites and the Holocaust” is currently “in the air” (Jantzen is hosting a major conference under that title at Bethel College in Kansas in March 2018). Dumitru situated the subject in the context of studies of collaboration, and Nelson linked it to transatlantic histories of colonialism. Teigrob looked at transnational and comparative commemorations of the war, and Carter-Chand reflected on Mennonites as one of many small, Christian minority groups active in Central and Eastern Europe.

The capacity audience included undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and members of the local community, among them some who identified themselves in the question and answer period as Mennonites, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, or people with no direct connection but a strong interest in the topics at hand.  At least one Holocaust survivor was present as were authors and editors of significant works in the field, notably Anne Konrad (Red Quarter Moon: A Search For Family in the Shadow of Stalin, 2012); and Harvey Dyck (editor and translator with Sarah Dyck of Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule, by Jacob A, Neufeld, 2014).

The event was sponsored by the University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies/DAAD; Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair of Holocaust Studies, and an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For more information on the conference in March 2018, click here.

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Conference Report: 8th Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Conference Report: 8th Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, July 6-9, 2015

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

The experiences of Christians defined as “non-Aryans” by Nazi and Axis racial laws remain among the most fascinating and under-researched aspects of the Holocaust, not least because this very specific category of Christians, made so by the sacrament of baptism, is sometimes still misunderstood/misrepresented. They are seen as Jews and are (literally) counted as “Jews” rescued or aided by Christian institutions, NGOs, and individuals.  In July 2015, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem organized a workshop for seventeen scholars from eight countries (Austria, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, the United States), to present their work-in-progress and compare their findings on this issue.

Monday, July 6, began with stimulating opening remarks by Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Dan Michman. The first panel focused on Christians defined as non-Aryans by Nazi laws residing in Germany. Assaf Yedidya (Yad Vashem and Efrata College, Israel) presented his research on hundreds of converts from Christianity to Judaism, and their treatment under Nazi law. True to the Nazi racial definition of a Jew as someone with Jewish parents and/or grandparents, a Christian of “Aryan” descent who asked to convert to Judaism was not only permitted to do so, but was shielded from deportation by state authorities on the basis of his or her “Aryan” race credentials. Nor could a religious convert to Judaism who was an “Aryan” marry another (racial) Jew, since this was prohibited by the Nuremberg Laws.

Maria von der Heydt (Centre for Antisemitism Research, Technical University Berlin, Germany) followed with her research on so-called “Geltungsjuden,” defined in Nazi racial law as those born into mixed marriages and who met three conditions: if they belonged to a Jewish religious community after September 1935; if they were married to a Jews; or if they were born out of wedlock to a Jewish mother after July 1936. The number of Germans meeting this set of criteria was small, numbering only about 2,000 in 1943, at which time essentially they were subjected to the same fate as so-called “Mischlinge.”

In a session moving across the Vatican city-state, France, and Romania, Suzanne Brown-Fleming (USHMM) opened with her early findings from Vatican records generated during the key latter half of 1938, when the annexation of Austria, the Italian racial laws, and the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany drove many Catholics in mixed marriages or who were themselves defined as “non-Aryan” to write to the Vatican for aid and succor. Many of these letters reflected a feeling of belonging neither to the Catholic nor to the Jewish communities. As such letters mounted rapidly in the latter half of 1938, Pope Pius XI contacted the United States National Catholic Welfare Conference to request aid for Catholics impacted by the racial laws and attempting emigration. Internal correspondence between the Vatican and various nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) around the world revealed a clearly stated lack of willingness to offer help to either practicing or secular Jews.

Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem) followed with a nuanced and fascinating presentation about rescue of Jews, Catholics defined as such by Nazi/Axis racial laws, and so-called “Mischlinge” by the Congregation of Priests of Notre Dame de Sion and their sister community, the Congregation for Religious of Notre Dame de Sion. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Jewish converts to Catholicism, both communities were originally founded to seek the conversion of Jews. Nidam Orvieto examined the broader issues of conversion and the motivations for it, the preference given or not given to the baptized, and the way Catholics impacted by the racial laws were treated in the case of Notre Dame de Sion in France.

Ion Popa (Free University Berlin, Germany) discussed the case of Romanian Jews who sought conversion to Roman Catholicism, and attempted to do so in large numbers after 1941 in the hopes for Vatican protection. Describing the bans on conversion in Romania issued in 1938 and 1941 and the fight against these measures by papal nuncio Andrea Cassulo, Popa highlighted the acceptance of the ban against conversation by the Romanian Orthodox Church and the open opposition to it by the Roman Catholic Church. He also described the particular case of Bukovina, where Jews converted in large numbers to a small Evangelical Church before 1940, providing the context of the vicious persecution of Jews in Romania in the 1930s driving such trends.

On Tuesday, July 7, the case of Poland was the focus of three presentations, the first by Rachel Brenner (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). Brenner gave a moving presentation on the interwar “intellectual-artistic Polish-Jewish” milieu in Warsaw and rescue efforts by three Polish-Gentile members of this circle: Zofia Nałkowska, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and Aurelia Wyleżyńska, focusing specifically on the psychological crises, emotional stresses, and intellectual justifications used by the Polish-Gentile diarists under study as their behavior toward friends considered as equals prior to the stresses of the war and Holocaust changed, often not for the better. Katarzyna Person (Jewish Historical Institute Warsaw, Poland) presented her research on the Jewish Order Service in the Warsaw Ghetto, often described in contemporary accounts by other Jews as consisting largely of “converted” or “highly assimilated” Jews. Using lists of members in the Jewish Order Service in Warsaw, Person found that its membership also included orthodox Jews and Jews with strong Zionist backgrounds. Emunah Nachmany Gafny (Independent Scholar, Israel) discussed Jewish children in hiding on the “Aryan side” in Poland, their experiences in formulating a false Christian identity, their reception by Polish Catholics, and their own conflicted feelings as they professed to become part of the Christians community.

A session on Serbia followed. Jovan Ćulibrk (Jasenovac Committee of the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church) presented a picture of the small Jewish community in pre-war Yugoslavia, which consisted of the Zagreb Jewish community that in large numbers converted in Roman-Catholicism in 1938; the Sephardi community with its strong identification with the Serbian national cause; and the “new” generation that embraced Zionism. Ćulibrk argued that where one understood oneself–and was understood by others–to fall on this spectrum had a distinct impact on one’s fate. Bojan Djokic (Museum of Genocide Victims, Belgrade, Serbia) presented a list of over 657,000 individuals who died during World War II, some of whom had at least one Jewish parent but are not understood to be “Jewish” victims. Djokic outlined the complex research required to better document which victims were, in fact, of Jewish origin.

Wednesday, July 8, began with a set of presentations on Austria and Germany. Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Austrian Academy of Sciences) focused on the living conditions of those classified as so-called “Halbjuden” (half-Jews) and their parents in so called “Mischehen” (mixed marriages) during the Nazi regime in Austria. With dramatic changes to their situation and status in 1938 with the Anschluss, in 1941 with the introduction of the yellow star, and during the war with the deportations of Jews, the remaining population of Christians defined as Jews by the racial laws could suddenly find themselves in positions of authority in the Jewish Council of Elders, even though they held no religious ties to the Jewish community.

Maximilian Strnad (Ludwigs-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany) presented his research on the over 12,000 Jews in “privileged” mixed marriages who had been spared deportation and were still living in the so-called Altreich in September 1944. In the final year of the war, the Nazi regime established labor battalions in the Rhineland, Westphalia and Breslau, followed by orders for deportation to Theresienstadt in the spring of 1945. Strnad laid out the internal dynamics within the Nazi regime driving the increasingly radical, though not necessarily successful, policy in the final months of the war.

Geraldien Von Frijtag (Utrecht University, Netherlands) discussed the fascinating case of Hans Georg Calmeyer, the figure within the German administration in the Netherlands authorized to decide upon 5,500 cases of Jews who petitioned for a change in their administrative status from so-called “Volljude” (full Jew)  to “Mischling” or non-Jew. Von Frijtag discussed how Calmeyer treated these cases, based on his own background and political inclinations.

Jaap Cohen (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) presented a large-scale rescue operation, the Action Portuguesia, set up by a group of Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands in order to evade deportation. The Action Portuguesia formulated an argument that because they were of a different “race” than Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardim should not be regarded as Jews under Nazi and Axis racial law. Cohen examines the precedents, arguments and ultimate fate of this school of thought as espoused by members of the d’Oliveira family.

The final day of the workshop, July 9, began with a presentation by Susanne Urban (International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen, Germany), who examined the postwar fates of so-called “Halbjuden” and “Mischlinge.” She discussed their own “self-understanding/self-perception” as expressed in their applications to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) for displaced persons (DP) status, and analyzed how IRO officials categorized such applicants. This depended on many factors, including whether they had spent the war years in forced labor, in a concentration camp, or even as draftees into the German Wehrmacht.

Joanna Michlic (University of Bristol, United Kingdom and Brandeis University, United States) presented what she called “atypical” histories of Polish Jewish children during and after the war. The children she studied came from highly culturally assimilated middle-class Jewish families, from ethnically mixed marriages between Polish-Jews and ethnic Poles, and from relationships between Jewish fugitives and their rescuers.

The workshop concluded with two presentations relating to Italy. Valeria Galimi (University of Tuscia, Italy) examined the Italian racial laws of 1938 and how they were understood and implemented by the Mussolini regime and during the Republic of Salò. Especially interesting was her analysis of petitions for exemption in “cases of special merit” (benemerenze particolari), which often contained letters directly to Mussolini reflecting the petitioner’s thoughts on the “Fascist cause” and their own place within it. Maura de Bernart (University of Bologna, Italy) examined the fate of Jews and Christians defined as such in Forlì, culminating in the massacres at the Forlì airport (June to September 1944).

Dina Porat (Chief Historian, Yad Vashem and Tel Aviv University, Israel) offered closing comments, remarking on the difficulties of making any broad generalizations about those Nazi and Axis victims who found themselves defined, in whole or in part, as Jews under the racial laws. Factors included conversion to Christianity (and the date at which it took place), level of implementation at the local level, attitudes of the local population and religious institutions, radicalization of the Nazi and Axis regimes in the face of defeat, and many other influences discussed over the four days of the conference. Workshop participants agreed on the need to continue study of what the organizers called “non-Jewish Jews” at the city/community, regional and national levels, so as to be able to best contextualize these victims within the larger history of the Holocaust.

 

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

 

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Response to William Doino Jr. and the Film Lo vuole il Papa

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Response to William Doino Jr. and the Film Lo vuole il Papa

By Susan Zuccotti, Independent Scholar

In the June 2015 edition of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly, William Doino Jr. discussed a documentary televised in Italy on April 1 entitled Lo vuole il Papa. Based on the work of historian Antonello Carvigiani, the film argued that Pope Pius XII was personally involved in the opening of convents and monasteries in Rome to thousands of Jews and other fugitives who were trying to escape arrest by the German occupiers of the Eternal City after September 1943. The film portrayed the oral testimonies of four nuns who, when they arrived as novices at four different religious houses in Rome years ago, were told by some of the older sisters about rescue efforts during the war. Accompanying each of the testimonies were brief filmed excerpts from the wartime chronicles of their institutions, recording a papal role in rescue. In addition, the documentary presented the oral testimonies of two men hidden as boys in two of the convents. Doino found the film persuasive, described it as new, and related it to other documents, accounts, and testimonies that he has discussed elsewhere and believes to be evidence of a clear papal directive for Jewish rescue in Rome.

When examined closely, the testimonies of the nuns and the chronicles are diverse in content and questionable as evidence. Let us begin with content. The first nun represented the cloistered Augustinian Sisters of the Santi Quattro Coronati, where 24 people, including at least 6 and perhaps as many as 17 Jews, were hidden. She explained that she was told that the pope had ordered the convent to open its doors to fugitives, including Jews. Relevant lines from that convent’s handwritten wartime chronicle, first made public in 2006 and thus not particularly new, confirmed her words, stating, “In this painful situation [of the German arrests and torture of fugitives beginning, the chronicler’s account, in November 1943] the Holy Father wants to save his children, including the Jews, and orders that hospitality in monasteries be given to the persecuted, and also the cloistered convents must adhere to the desire of the Supreme Pontiff [emphasis mine].”[1]

The film’s second witness was from the cloistered Cistercian Sisters of Santa Susanna, where roughly 18 military and political refugees and 26 Jews had been sheltered. This nun also referred to a papal directive for rescue, but added that the order had gone to all superiors of all Catholic institutions in Rome. How could she have known that? The accompanying lines from Santa Susanna’s handwritten war chronicle, made public in 2014, differed significantly from the nun’s testimony. The chronicler wrote, “In this situation the ecclesiastical authorities exhort and encourage and give their consent (with a maximum of caution) to opening the doors of the holy cloistered places to hide and receive as many persons as possible…[emphasis mine].”[2] Encouragement and consent from individual unknown prelates are important, but they are not the same as a papal order to all Church institutions. Words matter, and the implications differ. It is also important to note that Jews were not mentioned here, and caution was urged.

The third witness, from the convent of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori which had sheltered 150 refugees including perhaps as many as 103 Jews, did not evoke a papal order.[3] Instead, she declared that she had been told that “The Holy Father wanted, desired, that the convent welcome these people.[emphasis mine]” Her testimony, in other words, resembled the written account from Santa Susanna. The accompanying handwritten chronicle from Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori confirmed her words, recording simply that the pope wanted institutions to take in fugitives, but “without obligation.” The fourth and final witness was from the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina, which sheltered 123 people, including Jews. This nun was even more general, testifying simply that the sisters admitted fugitives because the pope appealed to them for charity. The accompanying typed chronicle also did not refer to a precise papal order, but it did provide insight on how rescue probably developed. It declared that at various times during the autumn of 1943 someone at the Vatican Secretariat of State requested the director of this particular institution to take in specific endangered individuals or families. The chronicle added that such a request could not be refused. But, significantly, it also declared that some 120 people, refugees or families made homeless by bombing raids, had already been accepted at the Istituto by the end of September 1943, well before the roundup of Jews in Rome on October 16 and the mass flight of surviving Jews into Catholic institutions.

We shall return to the issues of content raised in the film, but let us next examine the nature of the evidence. It is not easy to question the oral testimonies, filmed in the beautiful settings of their convents, of four elderly nuns, earnest, articulate, and confident of the accuracy of their information. But these women are providing hearsay, not first-hand, evidence. Their information apparently reached them at unspecified times for unknown reasons from unnamed associates, about whose personal histories we know nothing. The older sisters who passed along the information may have been young novices themselves during the war, with no special knowledge at that time about which fugitives were Jews or why they were there. Their own superiors may have told reluctant or fearful younger sisters that the pope wished or even ordered rescue measures to convince them to help fugitives, including atheists, Communists, and, especially, Jews, but the telling did not make it true. This evidence would not hold up in a court of law, and historians should apply similar criteria. Second, why were the young incoming nuns told such things privately in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s at all, at a time when no such accounts were being made publicly, despite the fact that Pius XII had long been criticized for not helping Jews? And why did the nuns wait until now to come forward? And why do they (and those who write about them, like Doino) stress help given to Jews, when it is clear from other records that at least half of those sheltered in religious institutions were political or military fugitives or non-Jewish civilian war refugees?

The written evidence presented in Lo vuole il Papa is equally problematic. The film provides a cursory glimpse of the volumes of war chronicles from the four convents, and then zooms in on the few lines relevant to the shelter of outsiders in each case. It gives no information about when, why, and by whom the rescue accounts were written or why they have not been made public sooner. With this technique it is impossible to detect what is obvious from a more careful study of the accounts—that they were not written during the war, and were often not even recorded by the chronicler who wrote the previous or subsequent entries. Examples abound. In the pages for 1943 and 1944 of the chronicle of the Santi Quattro Coronati, the author wrote in an entry for June 6, 1944, when Rome was liberated, that a general in the army of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic wanted for war crimes after the conflict was sent to hide in the convent by the Vatican Secretariat of State (this attribution very specific) and stayed for five years. The war chronicle of the Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori referred to gas chambers, which would not have been understood with certainty in the first half of 1944, and to papal efforts to hide fugitives in the Pontificio Seminario Romano Maggiore (referred to as the Laterano) and Castel Gandolfo, equally secret at the time. The chronicles, then, are not wartime diaries but subsequent secondary accounts. Who wrote them, and when, and where did the information come from?

The testimony in Lo vuole il Papa of two fugitives hidden during the war is no more enlightening. Piero De Benedetti Bonaiuto found shelter at the convent of the Santi Quattro Coronati. In that convent’s war chronicle, which recorded the presence of five political fugitives or “patriots,” six Jews, and thirteen unspecified individuals, he was listed as a “patriot.” In his filmed testimony, he briefly discussed his experience in hiding and offered an opinion that special authorization would have been needed because the convent was subject to the rules of strict cloister. As a boy, he would have known nothing about a papal order. The second survivor-witness, Renato Astrologo, hid with his parents, grandmother, and three siblings in the convent of Santa Susanna. According to an article in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano on June 3, 2014, the women entered the convent on October 24, 1943, while the men hid elsewhere until the end of January 1944. The article also stated that Astrologo was a convert from Judaism to Catholicism. In his testimony, Astrologo expressed his gratitude to the sisters who had saved him and stated his understanding that an order had “come from a high place.” He also could have known nothing more specific at the time.

Lo vuole il Papa might be more persuasive if it were confirmed by the other sources Doino mentioned in his article, but that is decidedly not the case. For example, Doino refers to an article in the Palestine Post on June 22, 1944, in which a correspondent wrote that “several thousand refugees, largely Jews” had been sheltered in the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo “during the recent terror.” This allegation has been repeated endlessly, but there is no evidence that the refugees were “largely Jews.” The pope did offer shelter and sustenance at Castel Gandolfo to hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of refugees escaping Allied bombing raids and German attacks on villages near Rome in the late winter and spring of 1944. Some of those refugees may have been Jews with false papers and not known to be Jewish. But no evidence has yet been unearthed to indicate that those involved in providing assistance believed that they were helping Jews. There is, furthermore, no personal testimony from Jews about receiving such shelter, although Jewish accounts of being hidden in other religious institutions in Rome are plentiful.[4]

Doino also alludes to statements about a papal directive from priest-rescuers Paolo Dezza, Pietro Palazzini, Hugh O’Flaherty and John Patrick Carroll-Abbing; the Jewish survivor Michael Tagliacozzo; and historians Andrea Riccardi, Anna Foa, Sister Grazia Loparco, Antonello Carvigiani, and Pier Luigi Guiducci. His list is not exhaustive; he could have mentioned other secondary sources. Each of these cases must be examined carefully, in more detail than is possible here. Looking briefly at the first four primary sources, however, the Jesuit Father Dezza, rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University during the war and later a cardinal, wrote on June 28, 1964, during the controversy concerning Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy critical of Pius XII, that the pope had instructed him to accept persecuted civilians and Jews.[5] Strangely, Dezza never repeated the claim in his other writings, and it is not clear if refugees were in fact hidden in his institution.

Father Palazzini, also later a cardinal, published a book in 1995 describing his role in helping hide some 145 non-Jews and 55 Jews at the Pontificio Seminario Romano Maggiore. He made no reference to a papal order in his book, but he did refer to “the guidelines provided by Pope Pius XII…to save human lives.” He added that during the war, “to rediscover [the sense of reciprocal charity], one voice was often raised among the din of arms: it was the voice of Pius XII. The refuge offered to so many people would not have been possible with his moral support, which was much more than a tacit consent.”[6]As evidence of the guidelines and support, Palazzini referred to eight papal speeches. Three of the eight, at Christmas 1942 and on June 2, his name day, in 1943 and 1944, included brief references to the pope’s compassion for those persecuted because of nationality and race, but did not directly mention religion or Jews. The other five speeches simply stressed the need for charity to all victims of war.[7]

The Irish Father Hugh O’Flaherty took enormous risks to aid escaped Allied prisoners of war during the German occupation of Rome, but Jews are rarely mentioned among those he helped.[8] The story of the American Father John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, later a monsignor, is much the same. In addition to prisoners of war, Father Carroll-Abbing worked with political fugitives, partisans, civilian refugees, homeless children, and the poor in general. In 2000, he apparently informed Doino that the pope told him many times to help Jews, but his two books about his wartime activities, published in 1952 and 1966, rarely mentioned Jews at all. He never wrote that he took personal initiatives to help Jews, that the pope told him to hide Jews, or even that Jews were hidden in Vatican properties. His single written reference to papal involvement in Jewish rescue was an indirect observation rather than a personal experience. Without declaring that the statement affected his own work, he observed that after the roundup of Jews in Rome on October 16, 1943, “word came from the Vatican that, because of the emergency, nuns would be allowed to give hospitality in their convents to Jewish men as well as their families [emphasis mine].”[9] He added that the permission was given specifically to the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion, who passed it along to other convents.

There is little doubt that some 187 Jews were among those hidden by the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion. Many of the Jews fled there on October 16, 1943, as the Germans were rounding up their families and friends in the nearby former ghetto of Rome and throughout the city. The initial rescue effort was spontaneous. Since the convent was not cloistered and operated a girls’ boarding school that was virtually empty because of the war, there was no need for immediate papal authorization to receive outsiders. The sisters have never claimed to have received a papal directive for rescue, although they stress that they informed the head of their order and that the pope ultimately knew what they were doing.[10] The situation was similar at the Istituto Pio XI, a boarding school for some 200 to 250 boys run by the Salesians. In his study of more than 80 Jewish boys sheltered there during the war, Francesco Motto found no evidence of a papal order. He too emphasized that Vatican authorities had some idea of what was happening, and that the Salesian brothers immediately involved were convinced that they were acting according to the wishes of the Holy Father.[11]

In addition to many more accounts of Jewish rescue in Church institutions that do not mention a papal directive, there are some that specifically deny it. One example of the latter is Brother Maurizio, the steward at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital that hid some 46 Jews during the German occupation. Brother Maurizio related that after admitting Jewish fugitives on October 16, 1943, the directors duly notified Vatican officials. When they received no response, they took the silence for approval and increased their efforts.[12] Father Elio Venier, later a monsignor, recalled his work at the parish church of Santa Maria della Divina Provvidenza, where about 65 Jews were sheltered. He declared that officials at the Vicariate were informed of the rescue activities because parish churches were under their jurisdiction, but he added that the pope did not get involved in such matters.[13] The French Capuchin Father Marie-Benoît who, working with Jewish and non-Jewish friends and associates, placed and supported some 2,500 Jewish refugees in both religious and secular institutions in Rome, agreed.[14] After the war, but only when asked, he explained that he had received no money and no mission from the Vatican.[15]

Other reasons to doubt the existence of an order from Pius XII for rescue relate to known papal directives that seem contrary to it. Both Francesco Motto, writing about the Salesians, and the spokeswomen for the convent of Nostra Signora di Sion refer to a letter received on October 25, 1943, declaring, “The secretary of state of His Holiness expresses the confidence that [your] conduct…will be inspired by diligent observation of the dispositions and instructions provided by the Holy See and by that discreet and prudent correctness that is always, but now more than ever, necessary.”[16] Such a call was not conducive to extensive rescue. Two months later, on December 27, six days after Italian Fascist and German SS raids on three Vatican properties, Pius XII told the director of La Civiltà Cattolica that it was necessary to be more prudent with regard to refugees and added, “Yes, exercise charity with the many piteous cases that arise, but avoid the use of false documents and any even slight appearance of fraud.”[17] The pope may not have understood that it was almost impossible for fugitives, Jewish or not, to hide in any institutions without false documents.

Another German-Fascist raid on February 3-4, 1944, this time on the huge extraterritorial Basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura, caused some at the Vatican to pull still further away from support for the rescue of fugitives. Little could be done for the 64 victims of the raid, including five Jews, but Vatican officials publicly and vehemently protested the violation of extraterritoriality to the Germans. Privately, however, they were terrified of additional and still more brutal raids, the arrests of more of their protégés, and the possibility of diplomatic incidents. On February 6, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Maglione wrote that he had “instructed the abbot [of the monastery at San Paolo], in the name of the Holy Father, not to permit disguises in other clothing: no one should wear religious habits if he is not a priest or monk.”[18] It is not clear how broadly this prohibition was distributed, but it was not an encouragement for rescue.

Far more serious, sometime that same February a message went out from the Vatican ordering that all non-clerics sheltered in a number of properties of the Holy See be asked to leave. Strict penalties for disobedience were specified. Again, all the recipients of this order are not known, but the message clearly went to the Seminario Lombardo, the Seminario Romano Maggiore, and the Collegio dei Sacerdoti per l’Emigrazione Italiana. Directors of the institutions reluctantly obeyed, although they never left their guests in the lurch. New hiding places were found, and in some cases the fugitives returned after a time.[19] Similar orders were issued within the Vatican City itself, where at least 50 outsiders were being sheltered in the private apartments of prelates living in the Canonica di San Pietro.[20] In this case, the prelates engaged in sheltering fugitives appealed, and the order was not enforced.[21]

There is no question that thousands of Jews were sheltered in church institutions in Rome during the German occupation. One survey conducted soon after the war placed the number at 4,447, in 220 female and 60 male religious houses.[22] Another more recent analysis refers to 4,169 Jews in 234 religious houses.[23] While numbers vary, the phenomenon of rescue is clear; what is unclear is how it happened. Historians and other scholars study the story not to glorify or vilify Pope Pius XII but to try to understand the events themselves. To do so, they look to the evidence, both written and oral. When the evidence is conflicting, they examine its validity—its authenticity; the motives of those who supply it; the timing; the possibility of error, bias, or misunderstanding. They also analyze the plausibility and consistency of the evidence within a wider context—in this case, with consideration of the pope’s other actions, statements, and concerns during the Second World War. Finally, they study the precise words used in testimonies. With this in mind, let us return to the documentary film Lo vuole il Papa, examine it in the context of other evidence mentioned here, and attempt to formulate an hypothesis about Jewish rescue in Rome.

Judging from the conflicting evidence in the film and from the other testimony discussed in this article, it seems unlikely that Pius XII ordered Catholic institutions in Rome to open their doors to Jews and other fugitives. It is possible that in some cases he was involved in granting permission to cloistered convents to suspend their rules regarding outsiders, but it is not probable that he ordered them to do so.[24] We have seen here indications of the pope’s hesitancy regarding rescue, his counter-instructions, and his requests for prudence, as well as the denials of a papal directive by some religious spokesmen and the failures to mention it by others. We know from the internal discussion concerning fugitives sheltered within the Vatican City that some prelates opposed their presence and tried to make them leave. Would they have taken that position if the pope had ordered all Catholic institutions in the city to accept them? And in the broader context, Pius XII was anxious to preserve Vatican neutrality and diplomatic privileges, and protect his institution and the Catholic faithful from German reprisals. Why would the pope jeopardize these priorities when a directive for rescue in Rome was not necessary? Romans who followed the pope’s public statements knew that he had urged charity and compassion for the victims of war on many occasions. They had read the articles in L’Osservatore Romano on October 25-26 and 29, 1943, following the roundup of 1,259 Jews in Rome, which referred to “the universally paternal charity of the Supreme Pontiff…which does not pause before boundaries of nationality, or religion, or race [emphasis mine]”—a clear reference to Jews that had not been used in previous papal speeches. They were aware that after Mussolini’s puppet regime ordered Italian police and carabinieri to arrest and intern all Jews in the country on November 30, 1943, two more articles in the Vatican daily newspaper had objected vigorously, though without mentioning German measures of deportation and destruction.[25] Catholics who wanted to hear all this could hear. In rescuing Jews and other fugitives, they firmly believed they were heeding the will of their pope.

But if there was no comprehensive papal order, how did rescue develop? In many cases, as for the Salesians and the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion, it was initially spontaneous—fugitives came to the school or convent and asked for help. Authorization came later. But to explain many other cases, it is useful to look again at two of the written testimonies presented in Lo vuole il Papa. The chronicler for Santa Susanna wrote, “In this situation the ecclesiastical authorities exhort and encourage and give their consent (with a maximum of caution) to opening the doors of the holy cloistered places to hide and receive as many persons as possible…[emphasis mine].” Similarly, the chronicler for the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina recorded that on several occasions during the autumn of 1943, someone at the Vatican Secretariat of State requested the director of the institution to take in specific endangered individuals or families. These claims are credible. Many individual priests and even high-ranking prelates in Rome had their own personal protégés, perhaps an anti-Fascist activist or partisan, or the Jewish spouse of a friend or family member, or a former Jewish teacher or classmate, employer or employee, doctor or nurse—the possibilities are endless. Catholic institutions taking in outsiders needed recommendations about the backgrounds, personal integrity, and, sometimes, economic reliability of prospective guests. Priests and prelates, sometimes at a high level, supplied those recommendations and undoubtedly implied that rescue was the will of the pope. Although directors of religious houses were not unwilling in any case, such recommendations and reassurances were hard to refuse.

The pope did not oppose the opening of religious houses in Rome to fugitives unless he believed that the risks to rescuers and rescued alike were excessive. Although he certainly understood much of what was going on in his own diocese (the pope was the bishop of Rome), he probably did not know the details. He did not wish to become personally involved. And while he allowed some of his advisors to act on behalf of Jews and other fugitives, he was well aware that others close to him opposed rescue.

Does it matter whether there was a broad order for Jewish rescue from Pius XII or whether rescue was rather either spontaneous or the result of the private initiatives of individual priests and prelates? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, understanding private individual initiatives helps us better comprehend the complexities and risks of the pope’s situation on an international level and the pressures he was under from within. We may learn more about these internal pressures when the Vatican archives of the papacy of Pius XII are opened. Until then, the study of Jewish rescue in Rome provides some clues. But above all, examination of the origins of rescue helps us to appreciate how and why it happened. As we consider the nuns described in Lo vuole il Papa, along with Cardinals Pietro Palazzini and Elio Venier, the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion, the Salesian brothers, Father Marie-Benoît, and so many others, we see the true nature of courage, generosity, and commitment to religious and human values. It is to be hoped that Pope Pius XII himself would be among the first to want that heroism recognized.

[1]For more on the chronicle of the Sisters of the Santi Quattro Coronati, see especially 30giorni, n. 7/8, August 2006, pp. 32-46. See also Antonello Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte, salvate i perseguitati,” Nuova Storia Contemporanea, September-October 2014, 131-44. The estimate of 17 Jews sheltered is from an often-cited list published in Renzo De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy, trans. Robert L. Miller, (1961 and 1993; New York: Enigma Books, 2001), 751-56, 752. De Felice indicated that the list came to him from the German Jesuit Father Robert Leiber, Pius XII’s close advisor and friend, who in turn stated that it was compiled after the war by another Jesuit priest and verified in 1954. For details on the list, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 199-200.

[2]For more on Santa Susanna, see Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte,” 131-44. The number 26 is from De Felice, 752.

[3] The number 103 is from De Felice, 751.

[4] For details on what is known about refugees at Castel Gandolfo, see Susan Zuccotti, “Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy,” in Joshua d. Zimmerman, ed., Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 287-307, 306. It is noteworthy that Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte,” 132, cites as an authority, and with approval, statistics by Dominiek Oversteyns, De geschiedenis van de Hebreeërs in Rome tijdens de nazibezetting en vervolging in Rome (Rome: Privata, 2013), n.p., which declare that there were no Jews at Castel Gandolfo. I am not able to verify the Oversteyns citation.

[5] Dezza had been asked to contribute to a special edition of L’Osservatore della Domenica dedicated to the memory of Pius XII. His contribution is on pp. 68-69. Originally titled Der Stellvertreter, The Deputy opened in Berlin in 1963, in London as The Representative in the same year, and in New York in 1964.

[6]Pietro Palazzini, Il Clero e l’occupazione tedesca di Roma: Il ruolo del Seminario Romano Maggiore (Rome: Apes, 1995), 17 and 35.

[7] Palazzini did not mention articles in L’Osservatore Romano on October 25 and 29 and December 3 and 4, 1943, to be discussed below, which did refer to religion and Jews.

[8]See, for example, J.P. Gallagher, Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican (London: Souvenir, 1967).

[9]Carroll-Abbing, But for the Grace of God (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966), 55-56. The first book is A Chance to Live (New York: Longmans, Green, 1952). For Doino’s account of his conversation with Carroll-Abbing, see William Doino, “ The Pope Gave Me Direct Orders to Rescue Jews,” Inside the Vatican, August-September 2001, special insert, x. For details, see Susan Zuccotti, “Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy,” in Zimmerman, p. 298.

[10]The number 187 is from De Felice, 752. For details on rescue efforts at the convent of Nostra Signora di Sion, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 189-93.

[11] De Felice, 754, puts the number of boys sheltered at 83. For details on the Salesian rescue effort, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 191-92.

[12]The number 46 is from De Felice, 754. For Brother Maurizio’s testimony, see Federica Barozzi, “ ‘I percorsi della sopravvivenza,’ (8 settembre ’43-4 giugno ’44): Gli aiuti agli ebrei romani nella memoria di salvatori e salvati,” unpublished thesis, Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1995-96, 156.

[13]Monsignor Elio Venier, interview with this author, Rome, November 13, 1996. The number 65 is from De Felice, 755.

[14] For this estimate of refugees assisted, see Settimio Sorani, L’assistenza ai profughi ebrei in Italia (Rome: Carucci, 1983) , pp. 150-51; and Centro di documentazione ebraica contemporanea (CDEC), Milan, b. 8-A-I, f. Delasem—Settimio Sorani, “Attività della ‘Delasem’ dopo l’8 settembre 1943” by Sorani, May 16, 1944. The number given by De Felice, 755, for “Father Benedict of Bourg d’Iré” (Father Marie-Benoît, or, as he was known in Rome, Father Maria Benedetto) was too high.

[15] For details, see Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2013), 179-80 and 223. Vatican documents published in Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale (ADSS), eds. Pierre Blet, Robert A. Graham, Angelo Martini, and Burkhart Schneider (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1975), IX, docs. 433 and 487, reveal that at least one high-ranking Vatican official disapproved of Father Marie-Benoît’s dealings with the Jews and tried to get him to stop.

[16]This appeal accompanied a protective placard issued by General Rainer Stahel, German military commander of Rome, to many religious institutions throughout the city on October 25, 1943. The placard, to be posted outside each institution, read, “This building serves religious objectives, and is a dependency of the Vatican City. All searches and requisitions are prohibited.” As we shall see, this placard did not always prevent raids. For details, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 193.

[17]Giovanni Sale, “Roma 1943: occupazione nazista e deportazione degli ebrei romani,” La Civiltà Cattolica, IV, quaderno 3683, December 6, 2004, 417-29, 426, from a document in the archives of La Civiltà Cattolica. The pontifical institutions raided were the Seminario Lombardo, the Collegio Russo, and the Istituto Orientale.

[18]ADSS, XI, doc. 30, notes of Maglione, 126.

[19] Reference to this order may be found in the archives of the Seminario Lombardo, b.7.A.73, Diario, “Appendice,” 17-18. For details, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 225-28.

[20] The number 50 is from ADSS, X, doc. 53, Monsignor Guido Anchini, head of the Canonica, to Pius XII, February 13, 1944, 127-29. Nearly all the guests were men. Roughly 24 of the 50 were non-Jews, another 17 were described as non-Aryan Catholics, and 7 were described as Jews with no mention of religion. There is no record of any guests being hidden elsewhere in Vatican City.

[21] Ibid.

[22] De Felice, 751-56.

[23] Dominiek Oversteyns, De geschiedenis van de Hebreeërs in Rome tijdens de nazibezetting en vervolging in Rome (Rome: Privata, 2013), n.p, cited in Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte,” 132

[24]Rules of cloister are far more complex than is usually stated. Depending on the congregation, the rules often could be temporarily lifted by the head of the order. Also, some cloistered convents operated public spaces like guest houses, where the same strict rules did not apply. Some such convents may have employed Catholic laypersons to work in their public spaces.

[25]The articles in October were on page 1. The later articles, “Carità civile,” and “Motivazione,” appeared on December 3 and 4, both on page 1.

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Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvii+270 pp.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Probst, University College at Washington University in St. Louis

This review appeared originally in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 10 (2015), available at http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/8852. It is reproduced here with permission.

Faithful-MotheringMothering the Fatherland is a focused and sympathetic study of the life and work of a unique group of women who were so haunted by the Holocaust that, in the wake of the Second World War, they formed a Protestant sisterhood focused on intercessory repentance by the “true” Christians of Germany for the sins committed by the nation during the Third Reich. It is an absorbing work of historical theology that is especially significant for the effective manner in which the author situates the theology and practice of the sisterhood in their historical and intellectual contexts and for the author’s thoughtful analysis of the theology of the sisterhood’s co-founder.

George Faithful argues that the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary (Ökumenische Marienschwesternschaft), which was founded in 1947 by Klara (later Mother Basilea) Schlink and Erika Madauss (later Mother Martyria), sought to prevent via intercessory prayer the judgment of God on Germany, which both believed would come unless the nation repented for its sins, chief of which was its involvement in the Holocaust. The idea that Germans, much less Protestant Germans, should repent for the Shoah, was not widely shared in the early post-war era. This fact alone makes the sisterhood a fascinating case study. That the sisterhood also exhibited affinities with elements of German Pietism and (later) with the Charismatic movement enhances the curiosity all the more.

As Faithful recognizes, many Protestants held views that were consonant with some crucial aspects of Nazi ideology, including ardent nationalism and antisemitism. During the Third Reich, a substantial, outspoken minority of Protestants avidly and openly supported the Nazis in their reprehensible goals concerning the Jewish Question. Even so, open resistance to Nazism and secret assistance for Jews living under Nazi oppression and threat of murder were found among small groups of German Protestants. The “Büro Grüber” (Grüber Office), based in Berlin, provided Jews (in­cluding Jews who converted to Christianity) who were under dire threat from the Reich with advice about emigration, finding employment abroad, social assistance, legal matters, and educational support. For example, in Württemberg (in southwest Germany), a group of pastors and parishioners sheltered at least seventeen Jew­ish refugees in sixty church parsonages in a so-called “Rectory Chain.”

Though Schlink published numerous theological works after the war, including books that emphasized the collective guilt of the German nation for the Holocaust, she does not seem to have viewed her work as part of a broader theological discussion that might have included participants in such war-time Protestant rescue groups. Despite their differences, where the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations is concerned, there is a congruence of views between groups such as the Büro Grüber, the Württemberg rectory chain, and the sisterhood. A comparative scholarly study of such groups would be welcome.

The most intriguing chapter of the book is titled “Schlink’s Pseudo-Judaic, Germanic Vision of Nationhood,” in which Faithful examines, among other things, Schlink’s theological outlook on peoples (Völker), in particular “Germans” and “Jews.” Faithful finds that Schlink’s views of peoples, nations, and ethnicities were derived in the main from the Hebrew Bible and from (chiefly nineteenth and twentieth century) German views of nationalism. Ironically, for Schlink, Faithful writes, “To be a Jew was to be a member of a God-ordained, uniquely blessed people whose long centuries of suffering were over. To be a German was to be a self-professed Christian and a Gentile. For Schlink, Jew and German were two mutually exclusive categories, and this, more than any of her ideas, resonated with the worldview of the German nationalists. … That Schlink so comprehensively inverted which pole was positive, elevating the Jewish people to a status above what even many German nationalists had claimed for Germany, marks her thought as definitively anti-Nazi” (p. 132). Faithful highlights here incisively some of the ironies inherent in the thought of a remarkably unique woman – a philosemitic, anti-Nazi theologian and Protestant nun.

On occasion, the main argument is hampered by assertions that are a bit too tentative. Yet, this is mitigated by succinct chapter conclusions and helpful sub-headings within chapters, both of which make the book very readable. Mothering the Fatherland will be of interest to anyone engaged in the study of the Holocaust, twentieth-century German Protestantism, Jewish-Christian relations, and, more broadly, historical theology in the modern era. Caveats aside, this work substantially deepens our knowledge of a previously unknown and fascinating corner of German Protestantism.

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Review of Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, eds., Lessons and Legacies, Volume XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, eds., Lessons and Legacies, Volume XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Xxii + 372 Pp., ISBN 9780810130906.

By Stacy Hushion, University of Toronto

The eleventh volume of the Lessons and Legacies series reflects on the study of the Holocaust in a shifting political, social, economic and scholarly landscape. Editors Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes point out that, some seventy years after the end of World War II, fundamental issues pertaining to the origins and history of the Holocaust remain divisive. The book highlights the remarkable diversity of scholarship on the Holocaust and is instructive reading for anyone seeking to keep abreast of developments and current research in Holocaust studies.

earl-schleunesThe bookend essays by senior scholars Omer Bartov and Timothy Snyder offer both critiques of current trends in the field and directions for future research. In his introductory piece, Bartov evaluates scholarly efforts of the last decade to situate the Holocaust as part of a broader phenomenon of genocidal violence in the modern world; in other words, the Final Solution is not the genocide but a genocide among others. Bartov is unsettled by attempts to compare the Holocaust to other genocides, arguing that such comparisons often obscure the particularities of the Nazi genocide and result in the erasure of the experiences of its primary victims, European Jews. Rather than understanding the Holocaust – with its enormous arsenal of scholarship and domination of popular culture – as a barrier to the study of other genocides, Bartov invites us to conceptualize it as a singular historical example of extreme violence that can in fact enrich the field of genocide studies.

Snyder likewise addresses the place of the Holocaust in a changing world but from the vantage point of geography. Snyder encourages scholars to shift the geographical centre of Holocaust research eastwards to Poland and the Soviet Union, the central homelands of prewar Jewish life and the primary landscapes in which the Final Solution was executed. In so doing, Snyder provocatively argues that the analysis of the Holocaust would necessarily move away from a disproportionate focus on German perpetrators and German-Jewish victims, who amounted to approximately three percent of those killed. However, one wonders if a primary focus on the killing (and its geography) runs the risk of reducing the Holocaust to its final murderous stage, rather than viewing it as a much longer and larger process that began in 1933. German Jews of course suffered Nazi discrimination first and for the longest amount of time, a point highlighted by Mark Roseman’s essay in this volume. Tying the Holocaust more closely to the Nazis’ expansionist and military agenda – a relationship Snyder insists is crucial to understanding how the Germans came to control the majority of European Jews – may be one way in which to balance a focus on Jewish life and death in eastern Europe without losing sight of Jewish experiences in other parts of Europe, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia, whose Jews fell under the Nazi yoke already in 1938. In shifting the research program of Holocaust studies eastwards, scholars must also take care to not erase Jewish history from Western Europe. It may alternatively be more fruitful to investigate the political, economic, social and military-strategic dynamics between the different spaces of German-occupied Europe, rather than conceptualize them as completely disconnected.

Snyder concludes with an incitement to return Holocaust studies to its “firm foundations” – traditional subjects of study such as diplomacy, foreign policy, economics, geography and military and social history – and away from the focus on culture, representation and memory of recent years. While he astutely acknowledges that our understanding of the Holocaust can only be enriched by more knowledge about its basic geographical and chronological parameters, it is worth observing that many of the essays in the volume owe something to the “cultural turn” and were only possible due to new and non-traditional theoretical and research approaches. The essays by Regina Mühlhäuser, Pascale Bos and Robert Sommer all investigate the place of sexual violence in the Holocaust, a subject largely ignored until recently. Mühlhäuser challenges historical assumptions that Nazi racial ideology (unintentionally) “protected” Jewish women from sexual assault by German men, whereas Bos demonstrates how sexual violence against Jewish women became mythologized in postwar memory culture. Sommer’s analysis of situational homosexual relationships in the camps opens up the discussion of sexual violence to include men, although it is unclear precisely what is to be gained by comparing male and female sexual slavery and the ethics of doing so.

At the same time as scholars have addressed aspects of the Holocaust previously marginalized, they have also reopened older debates and questions. Rebecca Margolis and Toni-Lynn Frederick reconsider central films of the Holocaust canon: Allied (here Canadian) footage of the liberated concentration camps in 1945 and Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah. Both contributions demonstrate how films construct narratives of atrocity and suggest that there is still much to glean from studies of the representation and cultural transmission of Holocaust history. Margolis shows how the Canadian reels struggled to present the particularity of Jewish suffering in a national context far-removed from the actual events. Moving forward in time, Frederick recognizes the visual power of Shoah but questions the ethics of forcing survivors to relive their experiences for dramatic impact.

The impetus to reflect backwards is evident in the renaissance of the contemporary historical record. Shulamit Volkov reassesses German ideas of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that Jews, including the philosopher Martin Buber and prominent state figures like Walter Rathenau, found essentialist notions of race useful in conceptualizing a multi-faceted Jewish identity. Volkov’s findings prompt a reconsideration of the seemingly direct line from nineteenth-century theories of race to the Holocaust; racial discourse neither necessarily nor unilaterally signified racist ideology. Robert D. Rachlin shifts the dialogue from racial to legal discourse in his chapter and offers an expansive definition of de-Judaization, arguing that it signified not only the prohibition of Jews from the legal profession but also the excision of allegedly “Jewish ideas” from German jurisprudence. The twist was that the de-Judaization of law in fact showcased the important contributions of German Jews to long-celebrated legal discourses and institutions.

The histories of everyday life, social networks and individual experience during the Holocaust are also reflected in a scholarly hearkening back to more “personal” contemporary sources, such as correspondence, personal papers and diaries. Mark Roseman’s chapter uses diaries to argue that German Jews in the 1930s were better informed and more attuned to the political, social and cultural changes uprooting their daily lives than scholars have hitherto suggested. Relying primarily on correspondence, Manfred Gailus’s essay examines the intellectual relationship between Karl Barth, Germany’s most prominent Protestant theologian, and Elizabeth Schmitz, a theologian and schoolteacher. Deeply distressed about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, Schmitz encouraged Barth and his students to take a firm stance against Nazi actions and policies. In 1935-6, Schmitz reproached the Protestant Church for its silence on the persecution of German Jewry in a memorandum influenced by Barth’s 1934 Barmen Declaration. Though not widely circulated, Schmitz’s text became one of the most explicit protests of the situation of all non-Aryans (and not just non-Aryan Christians). Gailus illustrates how one ordinary individual could help create a space – however limited – for protest against injustice.

The volume also draws attention to some of the ways in which present-day concerns about the “uses and abuses” of the Holocaust stimulate academic inquiry. Joanna Beata Michlic analyzes the dynamic “boom of the ‘theater’ of Jewish memory” in Poland since 1989, which has yet to slow (p. 145). She aptly demonstrates the multiple representations of the Holocaust that veer from genuine commemorative efforts to superficial mea culpas in order to gain international stature to the outright whitewashing of the past. Even today, there is not yet a clear public consensus on how to remember the Holocaust in Poland. James E. McNutt’s contribution is similarly motivated by twenty-first century politics, but in the realm of religion. McNutt returns to the figure of Adolf Schlatter, a leading German Protestant theologian and professor at the University of Tübingen. A specialist in the New Testament, Schlatter argued that Jews bore responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ and thus could not be “God’s chosen people.” Though Schlatter’s argument was by no means original, his prominence and close relationships with other important religious scholars, including Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, helped widen his influence and spread his anti-Jewish hostility in Protestant circles after 1933. Disconcerted by the current revival of Schlatter’s scholarship by evangelical theologians, McNutt insists that Schlatter’s anti-Jewish theological legacy is not one that should be rehabilitated.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the volume is its recognition of the growing interdisciplinarity of Holocaust studies. Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano and Waitman Wade Beorn all take seriously Snyder’s call to attend to geography. Cole and Giordano’s essay uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies to map spatial patterns of dispersed ghettoization in Hungary. Their work highlights how qualitative and quantitative approaches can be complementary and offer new insights; for example, the continued presence of non-Jews in “ghetto houses” in Budapest meant that the ghetto wall was actually often the apartment wall. Beorn’s spatial approach, prompted by his visit to Krupki in Belarus to retrace the footsteps of the town’s Jewish victims, reconsiders the relationship between the scholar and his/her place of study. Beorn argues that fieldwork – a word not often associated with the historical discipline – can illuminate how space and place shaped the experience of the Holocaust. After all, the perpetrators were the first to consider geography in assessing their actions, often connecting the level of their complicity to their physical location in relation to the killing sites.

The geography of the Holocaust has expanded in other ways too, as Wolf Gruner and Esther Webman’s essays on precedents and responses to the Holocaust outside of Europe proper demonstrate. Gruner shows that by 1933, newspapers, memoirs and books had so successfully embedded knowledge of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the German consciousness that Jews and other social commentators were able to make explicit parallels between the fate of the Armenians and the persecution of Jews under Nazism. It would be interesting to know if Hitler and the other architects of the Holocaust also reflected on the Armenian genocide in their planning. Shifting to the Middle East during the Holocaust, Webman analyzes how Egyptian intellectuals and politicians vacillated between recognition of the genocide as a human tragedy and concern about the political ramifications of Jewish immigration to Palestine. By 1945, the political approach won out, and the fate of European Jews was minimized or relativized in Egyptian public discourse.

The field of Holocaust studies is simultaneously expanding and changing. Perhaps the most jarring shift is that the age of the survivor is almost at an end. What is left when there are no survivors remaining to bear witness to the past, both in terms of public education and academic research? The essays published in this volume highlight that, in fact, there is plenty left, including innovative approaches and perspectives as well as a re-thinking of questions and sources long since worked over. The mournful end of the survivor era by no means marks the end of Holocaust studies and perhaps instead offers a new resonance to this wide-ranging and dynamic field of study.

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Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

By Victoria J. Barnett, Director of Church Relations, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Jens Gundlach, Heinz Brunotte 1896-1984: Anpassung des Evangeliums an die NS-Diktatur. Eine biographische Studie (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 2010).

The issue of complicity has become a major focus of Holocaust historiography in recent years, fueled by the research of historians like Christopher Browning, Robert Gellatelly, Peter Hayes and many others. While the very word “complicity” connotes a more secondary, passive role, the work of these scholars has documented the extent to which complicity was in fact an active and participatory process, particularly with regard to the persecution of the Jews. Germans from every walk of life participated in and benefited from these measures. Continue reading →

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Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church

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

Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010). 489 pp. ISBN 978-0739132937.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book is a somewhat surprising entry in the ongoing wars over Catholics, the Holocaust, and Pius XII, especially in terms of the background and experience of its author. David Cymet, born and raised in Mexico City, traveled to the United States in 1944 as one of the first two Latin American students to study at an American rabbinical school. After four years at the Mesivta Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, he returned to Mexico to study architecture, followed by an academic career teaching architecture at his alma mater, the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, and then at the National University of Mexico. He also served the Mexican government in various capacities from the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, in the National Housing Institute and in the Ministry of Human Settlements. In the 1980s he moved to the United States, where he began working for the New York City Department of Education in 1986, also earning a doctorate at the University of Delaware in 1991. Described in his author’s note as “a student of the Holocaust since his earliest youth,” Cymet spent the first decade of the twenty-first century – presumably retired from his multiple careers – researching and writing this book.

We might be surprised when a trained architect from Mexico, after a distinguished public and academic career, writes a 500-page book on history for Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. We will be less surprised when the subject is the Holocaust. Furthermore, though it is almost fifty years since Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy became a first salvo in the Pius XII wars, the level of controversy has scarcely diminished. Thus we will not be surprised that David Cymet, a Jewish man raised in a Catholic country, has chosen to concentrate on the Catholic Church, theVatican, and the wartime Pope, and that he comes to harsh conclusions.

Cymet begins with the observation that Jews were not in a position to critique the Catholic Church in the first years after 1945. They had much more pressing concerns, such as immediate assistance to survivors, finding visas for DPs, and securing the place of Jews inPalestine(xi). Cymet then gives credit to major authors who began to probe the role of the Catholic Church, including Hochhuth, Saul Friedlander, Guenter Lewy, Klaus Scholder,  and Carlo Falconi, as well as later figures such as Michael Phayer, Gitta Sereny, and Fr. John Morley, SJ (xiv-xvi). “The aim of this study,” he says, “is to look critically at the polemic and present a view of the issues within the wider context of their contemporary political and ideological background” (xvi).

There is no doubt that Cymet tilts toward the more critical observers within the “wider context.” His opening statement about “defenders” of the Catholic Church, who provide the “apologetics” mentioned in his title, is harsh indeed: “Unlike their not-so-distant cousins – the Holocaust deniers – they did not claim that the Holocaust never happened, but rather chose to take cover behind half-truths, misrepresentations, and subtle distortions. At the margin of legitimate discussion beholden to historical truth, the defenders of all sorts aimed at derailing the discussion by creating a thick cloud of confusion and doubt” (xvi).

Flaws can be found in this book. In one chapter he mentions Guenter Lewy correctly, but then calls him Lewy Güenther in endnotes, repeating this mistaken last name and mistaken spelling through a sequence of five notes (13). He praises Doris Bergen’s work, but in his bibliography he cites her as the author of In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (2000), rather than correctly noting the editors, Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (461). He is careless of chronology at times, such as when he says Guenter Lewy “reacted” to We Remember (1998) and its claim that Cardinal Faulhaber was a defender of Jews. When Lewy, as quoted, called it “little short of falsification of history when Faulhaber’s sermons in 1933 are hailed . . . as a ‘condemnation of the persecution of Jews,’” Lewy may have been right; but his statement in 1964 was not a reaction to aVatican publication of 1998 (9).

Despite these lapses and despite Cymet’s occasionally impassioned prose, with words such as “mean-spirited” and “diabolical” signaling his point of view, his thorough and detailed telling of the story makes for a sobering read. He accepts David Kertzer’s view (The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2001) that Christian anti-Judaism cannot be seen as significantly different from racial antisemitism, and he finds many Catholic statements in Germany and elsewhere in which common cause with racial antisemites is clearly expressed. His chapter on “Catholic Europe ‘Defends’ Itself from the Jews” begins with Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI’s unfinished encyclical often regarded as a significant attack on antisemitism. But Cymet notes the residual antisemitism in those parts which justify the “social separation” of Jews and the justification for Christians defending themselves against Jews, “as long as the unbelief of the Jewish people persists” (142). He then describes anti-Jewish legislation written with Catholic support in Poland,Italy,Hungary, and Slovakia prior to the war (150-63). In a chapter on “The Final Solution in Christian Europe” (305-74), he emphasizes the obvious, that this murder took place in Christian countries. He also points out the instances in which Catholic leaders protested in favor of Catholics of Jewish descent, but not, despite many entreaties, against the deportation and murder of Jews as Jews.

Cymet’s chapter on “Vatican Response to the Final Solution” first notes that the Klerusblatt in Germany described the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 as an “indispensable safeguard for the qualitative make-up of the German people” (375). He also describes Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Vichy France as “clero-Fascist” countries which increased the severity of their anti-Jewish laws from 1938 to 1942, until they fed into the killing process itself. What was the Vatican response? Here Cymet points out the many avenues of information available to the Vatican, while stressing the silence that ensued. In a segment on “The Rome Deportations, a Paradigm of Vatican Policy,” he quotes Michael Phayer: “No other event placed Pius XII in greater physical proximity to the Holocaust than the deportation of the Roman Jews.” The paradigm for Cymet is seen in his conclusion that, here as elsewhere, “the Church stood calmly at the sidelines” (387).

Cymet makes extensive use of Kertzer, Morley, Lewy, Phayer, Saul Friedlander, and a host of others. I do not think he approached this project from a place of neutrality, with the thought that he might end up defending the Catholic Church, for example. However, he prepared his brief energetically. Those who would argue for the defense must acknowledge that his evidence for the prosecution weighs heavily. He identifies a burden of anti-Jewish prejudice, human insensitivity, and silence in the face of evil which fitted itself too comfortably within the Catholic nations, the “bloodlands,” of Central Europe.

 

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Article Reprint: Iael Nidam-Orvieto, “New Research: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Article Reprint: Iael Nidam-Orvieto, “New Research: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem Jerusalem Quarterly Magazine, Vol. 56, Tevet 5770, January 2010.

After the long-standing hostility displayed by various Israeli and Jewish authorities towards Pope Pius XII, the following article written by Dr Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Director of the Department of the Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, and printed in its January 2010 quarterly magazine, is notable:

Dilemmas, silence, active rescue, passivity. These words are often mentioned when dealing with the controversial figure of Pius XII and his papacy during WWII. The debate over his attitude and actions regarding the persecuted Jews of Europe began during the 1960s following the release of the play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, and continues even today, splitting public opinion as well as generations of scholars.

The critics emphasize that Pius’ main failing was his silence – his lack of a clear and direct condemnation of the annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany. Backing up this opinion is his famous radio speech of Christmas 1942, in which the Pope failed to mention the Jews or the Germans, referring more generally to the demise of hundreds of thousands of people “who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or descent, have been consigned to death or to slow decline.”

Scholars bring many explanations for this public silence: political, ideological or even personal. Some claim that Pius was pro-Nazi or antisemitic, even calling him “Hitler’s Pope.” They emphasize the failure of the Pontiff to fulfill his moral duty officially to denounce the Holocaust, or to remind the Catholic community of its ethical responsibilities.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that Pius’ speeches clearly referred to the Jews and their suffering, and claim that the varied rescue activities carried out by Catholic clergy throughout Europe is clear proof of the inspiration they received from the Pope. These defenders maintain that the lack of a direct confrontation with the Nazi regime was a strategic choice meant to avoid worse catastrophe and enable further clandestine rescue activity.

As much of the relevant source material remains unavailable to historians – the archives of the Vatican for the period of WWII have yet to be opened – explanations on both sides are often based on assumptions or unsystematic documentation. However, over the last few years, certain archives containing relevant material have been opened, leading to an increased interest in the topic. For example, the archive of Pius XI’s papacy has been recently opened to the public, enabling research that sheds new light, among other things, on the policy of the Holy See during the 1930s and on Eugenio Pacelli’s (later Pope Pius XII) operations as Vatican Secretary of State. Documentation revealed in other archives across the world has led to the publication of new books on the topic, as well as important new insights into the existing historiography.

In March 2009, the International Institute for Holocaust Research and the Salesian Theological Institute of Saints Peter and Paul in Jerusalem organized a scholarly workshop at Yad Vashem to discuss the current state of research on Pius XII and the Holocaust.

The academic discussion was based on specific questions presented to specialized scholars from around the world expressing the range of opinions on Pius XII. The closed forum enabled a dynamic and open discussion, soon to be released as a pathbreaking publication on the topic.

One of the most innovative pieces of research presented at the workshop dealt with the rescue of Jews in Italy, especially in Rome. Thanks to vast material recently opened to some researchers, new insights were presented as to refuge activities of the “religious houses,” suggesting a more direct involvement of the Holy See, albeit one that also aided evacuees, orphans, partisans and soldiers of all nationalities, in the name of Christian charity.

A topic that revealed the gap between the participants concerned converted Jews who, as is shown in published documentation, were afforded much help by the Vatican. Since the Nazis considered them still Jewish, should the help given to those who converted be considered as aiding Jews? Or must one claim that this assistance is dubious, considering that those Jews who chose not to abandon their faith were less likely to receive the help of the Vatican?

Another debate was whether Pius XII was responsible for actions taken by clerics, both in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust and in its aftermath, during the escape of Nazi criminals from Europe along the so-called “ratlines.” If Pius XII was involved in, encouraged or even initiated one activity, does that mean that he had equal involvement in the other?

What is undeniable is that the new documentation enables scholars to better understand the Pope’s background and opinions vis-à-vis Nazism and antisemitism. Much clearer is his aversion to National Socialism, which he considered one of the worst heresies of the modern age. While his upbringing was rooted in traditional anti-Judaism, his branding as an antisemite must be called into question.

Several scholars have suggested a new approach, one that views the complexity of the responses and how the Pope’s operations were understood and accepted by his followers and his contemporaries – both the Allied and Axis powers. The workshop was certainly the first step towards more open and sincere academic collaboration on the topic, albeit many questions remain unresolved and his legacy controversial. Only the full opening of the Vatican Archives and continued cooperation among the scholarly community will enable a more comprehensive understanding of Pius XII and the Holocaust.

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January 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

January 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 1

Dear Friends,

Jesu, nimm dich deiner Glieder
Ferner in Genaden an;
Schenke, was man bitten kann,
Zu erquicken deine Brüder:
Gib der ganzen Christenschar
Frieden und ein selges Jahr!
Freude, Freude über Freude!
Christus wehret alle, Leide.
Wonne, Wonne über Wonne!
Er ist die Genadensonne.

J. S. Bach, Cantata BWV 40

A very warm welcome to you all in the New Year. I trust you had a blessed and refreshing holiday and are now about to resume you manifold interests in your different parts of the globe. I am always glad to hear from you, but please do NOT press the reply button above unless you want your remarks to be shared by all of our Newsletter subscribers. Instead, send me word to my private address = jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

I am hoping in the coming year that the reviews and notices I send you will continue to be of interest. I try to be as ecumencal as possible, and not to concentrate too much on any one subject. But I will admit that I may possibly have some hobby-horses, and some of you rightly commented earlier that I gave these too much free rein! Your comments and suggestions are very much apprreciated.
We were saddened to learn this month of the death of two distinguished members of our fraternity, who made significant contributions to our field of church history. Their obituaries are printed below.

Contents:

1) Obituaries:

a) Rev. Edwin Robertson;
b) Professor Gordon Zahn

2) Book reviews –

a) Ed. Spicer, Antisemitism, Christian ambivalence and the Holocaust
b) Plokhy/Sysyn, Religion and Nationalism in modern Ukraine

3) Conference report – American religious responses to the Kristallnacht

List of books reviewed in Vol. XIII – 2007

1a) Paul Oestreicher wrote the following tribute in The Guardian, London:

The Rev Edwin Robertson, who has died of bronchial pneumonia aged 95, was a renaissance man with a breadth of knowledge and a sharpness of wit that never diminished and never ceased to delight. He was a Baptist minister, broadcaster, author, translator and editor, notably in making known the life and work of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis just before the end of the war.

Born in West Ham, London, Robertson saw little of his father, a ship’s cooper, but was devoted to his deeply religious mother. Life was spartan and he never ceased being a puritan in the best sense of the word. His politics were shaped by the harsh reality of his early environment. In 1938 he began his ministerial life in Stopsley, Luton, and married Ida Bates the following year. They moved to Luton and later St Albans, but war intervened. Having gained a first-class degree in physics and chemistry at London University before training for the Baptist ministry at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, he was directed into oil research, specifically on fuel for Spitfires.
Robertson took a deep interest in German Christians who resisted Hitler and befriended those exiled to England as well as German prisoners of war. Like George Bell of Chichester who, alone among the English bishops, was close to Bonhoeffer and the resistance inside Germany, Robertson deplored the bombing of German civilians. That perhaps made him the ideal person to head the religious affairs branch of the British military administration of occupied Germany, with the rank of brigadier. Speaking fluent German, this involved everything from getting food to the undernourished, setting up clergy training schemes and befriending survivors of the opposition, such as Martin Niemoeller, who were now Germany’s church leaders. In 1949 Robertson was made assistant head of religious broadcasting at the BBC, the start of his broadcasting career. He helped to shape the Third Programme and was a distinctive voice on Any Questions.

From 1956 he spent six years in Geneva as study secretary of the United Bible Societies and consultant to the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council. He then introduced to England, during a brief spell in Yeovil, the Bible weeks he had encountered in Germany.

The years 1964-75 were a natural progression from his work at the BBC. He was executive director of the World Association of Christian Broadcasting, responsible for the mass-media training of students from around the world. Together with the Evangelical Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church – a hitherto unheard of combination – he set up the churches’ advisory committee for local broadcasting. Based from 1975 at Westbourne Park Baptist church, he continued this work with his own radio studio, tutoring many students. To this he added a commitment to psychotherapy.

The author of nearly 100 books, Robertson wrote biographies of John Wycliffe, Paul Schneider, Lord Tonypandy, Chiara Lubich and Igino Giordani. Discovering that the only serious biography of Bell neglected his involvement with Germany and Bonhoeffer, he put that right with Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches (1995). Robertson treated academic theology with scepticism and the growth of religious fundamentalism disturbed him. Like Neville Cardus, he was dedicated both to cricket and to music. He was confident that Bach was not the only composer he would meet in heaven, where the angels would surely be singing Mozart. He was made a Lambeth doctor of divinity two years ago.

Edwin Hanton Robertson, clergyman, writer and broadcaster, born February 1 1912; died November 3, 2007.

1b) Gordon Zahn (1918-2007)

Gordon Zahn, an internationally known Catholic peace activist and scholar, died on December 9th in Wisconsin, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He leaves behind a significant legacy which deeply influenced the Catholic Church’s teaching on conscientious objection, and helped propel Zahn’s hero, Franz Jagerstatter, on the path to sainthood.

Born in Milwaukee in 1918, Zahn took the highly unpopular stand during World War II of refusing to serve in the United States army, and served in a Civilian Public Service camp in New Hampshire. He would later write about that experience in his memoir, Another Part of the War: the Camp Simon Story (1979).

After the War, Zahn went on to earn a doctorate in sociology from the Catholic University of America, and then to teach, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, until his retirement. He also served as president and director of the Center on Conscience and War in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of his career, Zahn published and edited numerous works, the most famous beingGerman Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (1962) and In Solitary Witness: the Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter (1965).The first book—which argued that the German Catholic hierarchy had provided moral support to the German war effort, even as it rejected the evils of the Nazi regime—provoked a firestorm of criticism, which led him to move from the Jesuit Loyola institution to the more secular University of Massachusetts. Paradoxically, however, it was there that he completed his most important Catholic work, notably his biography on Franz Jagerstatter. In Solitary Witness revealed the now-famous Austrian martyr’s story to the world—and most importantly, to the attention of the Catholic Church. Had Zahn never unearthed Jagerstatter’s witness—discovered while he was researching his book on German Catholics—it is unlikely that this humble Austrian farmer, who stood up to Hitler and died for his Catholic convictions, would ever have been beatified (as he was in October, 2007)—a fact Jagerstatter’s own widow, Franziska (still living at 94), has gratefully acknowledged. Zahn was too ill to attend the beatification ceremony in Linz, Austria; but those who did were made aware of Zahn’s indispensable role in bringing it about.

Zahn, at his best, influenced the Catholic Church in a profound and positive way. The progressive National Catholic Reporter commented: “Without Zahn’s work, one can hardly imagine the publication of the American bishops, ‘The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response’ in 1983. There, for the first time in Catholic history, nonviolence received equal billing with the just war tradition. The pastoral letter’s foundation, acknowledged in its footnotes, was the scholarship and research by Zahn.” More importantly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while clearly affirming traditional just war teaching, also strongly defended the rights of conscientious objectors: “The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community.” Many believe this passage vindicates Zahn’s entire life’s work.

Despite the gravity of his subject matter, and the many rebuffs he suffered, Zahn never lost faith in the justice of his cause. He always believed education could enlighten and persuade people to promote the Gospel’s mandate for peace. As one of his friends told the Chicago Tribune: “Gordon had a deep sense of the pain of the world, but he also had hope and optimism.”

Gordon Zahn was, by all counts, a pious and gentle man, who touched the hearts of all those who knew him, including those who sometimes disagreed with his positions.

William Doino Jr.

2a) ed. K. Spicer C.S.C,. Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. 2007 xxi + 329 pp.
ISBN 113: 978-0-253-34973-9 cloth)

This review first appeared on H-German on December 6th 2007 (revised) Reviewers do not like coping with collections of essays. Either the topics covered are too diverse, or the quality of the contributions varies too widely. Some essays are abbreviated versions of books their authors have already written, others are a foretaste of books yet to be undertaken. The present volume, edited by Kevin Spicer, who now teaches at Notre Dame University, shares all these characteristics. But it is held together by the common thread of how the European churches of the twentieth century reacted to the ideology of antisemitism and to the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust which resulted from it.

The contributors, both historians and theologians, are suitably ecumenical, including Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Most are younger scholars, and are united in a highly critical view of Christian theology and prejudice in the early twentieth century, particularly in its propagation and encouragement of antisemitism. They all share the new perceptions about Judaism adumbrated since the Second Vatican Council, though some argue that the earlier pejorative antisemitic views still persist The editor, Kevin Spicer, maintains that even today antisemitism is present in Christian ranks because of the failure to understand and acknowledge Judaism on its own terms.
These essays are therefore designed both to record the fateful role antisemitism played in the Christian churches of the past, especially in their responses to National Socialism, and also to warn against any relapse into similar attitudes in the future.

The essays are grouped in four sections: Christian theology, clerical pastoral practices, Jewish-Christian dialogue and popular perceptions which Jews and Christians have of each other. The authors of the first group of essays predictably condemn the theological antisemitism of earlier centuries with its emphasis on Jewish disobedience, deicide and divine punishment, along with the accompanying claim that Christianity had superseded Judaism, leaving only the hope of conversion as the remedy. But they equally take issue with the argument put forward by some theologians of the twentieth century that a sharp dividing line should be drawn between Christian anti-Judaism, which was regrettable, and racial antisemitism, which was still more regrettable. In these authors’ eyes, following the lead given by Uriel Tal forty years ago, the two overlap and reinforce each other, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish the precise sources of prejudice and antipathy. There can be no doubt that ideological intolerance provided a fertile seedbed for Nazi propaganda. The real question is how far, or to what extent, were the Nazi attacks on the Jews supported, or at least not opposed, for theological reasons.. This remains much more difficult to estimate.

These authors may be criticized for assuming that theology or theologically-based anti-Judaic resentment, played a more substantial role than other factors. Alternatively, where sentiment favorable to Jews was expressed, as in Denmark, they seek to show that this can be attributed to an anti-German or nationalist pride rather than to any sympathy with Jews as such. This suggests that national and political factors rather than theology were determinant, both for or against the Jews. In Thorsten Wagner’s view, it was only after the protests against the Nazis’ actions against the Jews became an act of national resistance that the process of rethinking began in milieus affiliated with the church. But, as Robert Krieg points out, none of the theological factors which earlier fueled prejudice against Jews and Judaism, specifically the notion of supersessionism, the rejection of historical reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry and Jewish world, and the disavowal of religious freedom, are accepted any longer by the Catholic Church or by mainstream Protestants.. The second group of essays asks why certain churchmen demonstrated support for extreme right-wing political views and parties. Examples are quoted from Germany, Poland and Romania, though no essay deals with either Italy or Iberia. The reason is simple. Liberal democracy had never caught on east of the Rhine. The disasters of the first world war discredited all liberal panaceas. The violence and bloodshed in the newly-established Soviet Union destroyed belief in a socialist alternative. Security and safety could best be found in the historical rootedness of one’s own community. Dictators could be regarded as father figures. Antisemitism was only part of the much wider anti-alienism, which sought to exclude all baneful influences from abroad. Right-wing parties appeared to support the churches against the dangers of godless communism. As Donald Dietrich notes, the abstract neoscholastic theology taught in seminaries seemed totally inadequate to build up resistance to totalitarian movements. And, as the experience of the Vatican under Pope Pius XII shows, the church lacked an institutional platform to identify and resist political extremism or racial policies leading to extermination.

The third group of essays describes the attempts at Christian-Jewish dialogue in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Matthew Hockenos analyses the German Protestants who finally, after five years, came to realize the need for a full metanoia. So too Elias Füllenbach records the similar process of shock, renewal and crisis in the Catholic Church which culminated in the path-breaking Declaration of Nostra Aetate (1965). Füllenbach notably outlines the contributions made by the journalists Waldemar Gurian and Karl Thieme in the 1930s warning German Catholics against any concessions of the racial question. After 1945, Thieme linked up with Gertrud Luckner, a redoubtable social worker, whose efforts on behalf of the Jews during the war had led to her being incarcerated in Ravensbrück. Together they began from their base in Freiburg to campaign for a renewed Catholic attitude, despite warnings and even prohibitions from the Vatican. Luckner’s main achievement was the annual publication of the notable Freiburger Rundbriefe, which collected all statements and documents relating to the theme of improved Catholic-Jewish relations. At first, these authors still cling to the view that, because of the Holocaust, Jews would be psychologically disposed to accept Christianity. But later they went through a painful internal development to rid themselves of any anti-Judaic stereotypes and theological concepts, and instead to welcome Jews and Judaism on their own terms.

The final section describes Jewish reactions. Understandably there were and are still strong reservations to any encounter with Christians. Some Jewish scholars believe that distance has to be maintained since Jewish monotheism can never be reconciled to any other creeds, all of which are idolatrous. But other scholars argue that, given the churches’ new stance, there are now avenues of collaboration open to all those who seek to oppose any possible resurgence of the destructive antisemitism of the past. Gerson Greenberg’s article relates the various views put forward in the aftermath of the Holocaust. both assessing the significance of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the way forward while still living in a largely hostile world. He quotes with approval Maimonides’ exhortations to his people to ensure that they remembered the singular destiny of the Jewish people and religion.

To sum up, these essays are motivated by the eirenical desire to improve Christian-Jewish relations. They are therefore written with a “presentist” agenda, with all the benefits of enlightened hindsight, an approach that runs the danger of distorting the historical balance of past events. On the other hand, they do serve to remind us that the Holocaust’s legacy is not purely historical. The Church’s past ambivalence towards Judaism need now to be replaced with a much greater sensitivity and awareness, which is largely happening thanks to contributions such as those provided by these authors. While the book offers little new historical research, it will be pedagogically useful for undergraduates and for those who believe that analyzing the Church’s former and mistaken views of Jews and Judaism offers a means of achieving a more positive relationship in the future.

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2b) Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn, Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. 2003. 216 pp. ISBN 1-895571-45-6 (bound); 1-895571-36-7 (pbk.) $39.95 (bound) $27.95 (paper)
Religion und Nation: Die Situation der Kirchen in der Ukraine. edited by Thomas Bremer, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2003. 147 pp. ISBN 3-447-04843-3. Euro.36. (paper)

This review appeared first in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol 41, no 4, Winter 2007.

The early history of Scotland was once described as murder tempered by theology. The more recent history of Ukraine could also qualify. No other part of Europe during the past hundred years has been so convulsed by turbulent political events, with horrendous and massive losses of life and property. In fact, as a crossroads between East and West, Ukraine has long been involved in a continuous struggle to obtain independence and identity. In its repeated attempts to achieve a national revival, the local churches have played a significant role, not only as inheritors of past traditions, but also as active participants in fashioning new intellectual and ideological agendas, as they relate to the indigenous religious populations.

The complexity and conflictual character of much of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical scene has long deterred western scholars from any evaluative surveys. In fact, the most comprehensive account is by the German scholar, Friedrich Heyer, who recently updated his initial study written fifty years ago. So it is all the more welcome to have the short analysis by two former Ukrainian scholars now resident in Canada, which will help to sort out some of the entangled religious and political questions of the current period.

Because of its earlier history, Ukraine was always multi-ethnic and hence pluralistic in its religious loyalties. At the same time, its rulers – then and now – have sought to mobilize religious forces to advance their particular cause. The Tsarist monarchs promoted the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, while in the western parts of the country, the Uniate Church, which is familiarly but misleadingly known as the Greek Catholic Church, owing its allegiance to the Pope in Rome, predominated under the sponsorship of the Austro-Hungarian emperors. In the twentieth century, further religio-political alliances resulted during and after the first world war. The rise of Communism in the Soviet Union and the subsequent persecutions led to the growth of local groupings such as the breakaway Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox church. During the Nazi occupation, both this splinter group and the Greek Catholics sought to regain ground. But after the Soviet victory, both were liquidated, and the remnants compulsorily amalgamated under the Moscow-dominated Patriarchate.

After 1989, the Greek Catholics almost spontaneously resurrected themselves and reclaimed their former churches and constituents. At the same time, another section of the Orthodox community sought to re-establish its own patriarch in Kiev. But for political reasons they refused to acknowledge the autocephalous group, and both are spurned by those who still acknowledge Moscow’s ecclesiastical authority.

These internal struggle,as the authors make clear, are intimately related to the different concepts of national autonomy upheld by rival political groups. Some look back to the past as a model for the revival of Ukrainian cultural and political independence, seeking to promote the Orthodox Church as the upholder of a specific Ukrainian destiny. But the political record of the autocephalists during the second world war continues to leave a bitter legacy. On the other side, the long subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate, with its frequent execution of the Soviet leaders’ demands, has also caused deep resentments. For example, after 1989, a large number of Orthodox priests and congregations switched over, or back, to the Greek Catholic Uniates. But these Uniates, in turn, seek to establish their independence from their Polish neighbors, who maintain the Latin rite and equally see their Roman connection as a vital part of the Polish national revival. Since there is a great intermingling of these respective populations and no clear acceptance of any one model for national resurgence, the result is still one of unresolved tensions and religious divisions.

Plokhy and Sysyn provide ample evidence of the close interaction between state building and religious movements. The politicians seek to enlist, or even to exploit, the churches in pursuit of their particular view of national identity. This, however, still remains illusory. These same problems are explored in the collection of essays, edited by Thomas Bremer, which resulted from a Berlin conference in 2001. These authors also stress the need for western scholars to be fully acquainted with the origins and development of each individual Ukrainian church in order to understand its particular contribution to the task of forging religious and political identity. They also provide a useful multi-lingual bibliography.

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2) Conference Report – North American responses to Kristallnacht

Three scholars recently unveiled new research into American religious responses to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 at the Middle Tennessee State University Holocaust Studies Conference this past November 8-10, 2007.

Dr. Maria Mazzenga, Education Archivist at the American Catholic History Research Center and Adjunct Instructor of History at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., examined Catholic institutional responses to Kristallnacht, by contrasting the antisemitic bombast of Father Coughlin with the penetrating critiques offered by Catholic clerical and lay leaders in a national radio broadcast held on November 16, 1938. The speakers on the broadcastFather Maurice Sheehy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Education at Catholic University and assistant to the University Rector; Archbishop John J. Mitty of San Francisco, California; Bishop John M. Gannon of Erie, Pennsylvania; Bishop Peter L. Ireton of Richmond, Virginia; former Democratic Presidential Candidate and Governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, and Catholic University Rector, Monsignor Joseph M. Corriganargued that the violence unleashed on Jews and Jewish property in Germany was immoral, contrary to Christian teaching, and out of step with the religious and civic freedom valued by Americans. As Sheehy asserted, “The Catholic loves his Jewish brother, because, as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, we are all spiritual Semites.”

Dr. Patrick Hayes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology at St. John’s University in Staten Island, presented an explanation of the relationship between National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and the refugee policy of the United States government. Hayes focused on the work of the NCWC’s Bureau of Immigration Affairs, staffed by Bruce M. Mohler and Thomas F. Mulholland , two Catholic laymen, and its cooperative efforts alongside the Committee for Catholic Refugees from Germany (CCRG), headed up by Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans. The result was that Mohler and Mulholland were able to facilitate the immigration of almost four thousand Catholic non-Aryans to America in 1938 and 1939.

Kyle Jantzen, Associate Professor of History at Ambrose University College in Calgary, analyzed the immediate responses of mainline North American Protestants to Kristallnacht, finding them to be both swift and decisive. In keeping with liberal traditions that emphasized the “fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” church leaders in the Episcopalian/Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist traditions protested the Kristallnacht pogrom in ways that were both similar to and deliberately embedded in the broader American and Canadian outcry. In doing so, they emphasized the barbarism of Hitler and his Nazi movement and called upon government officials to make complaints to their German counterparts. This Protestant reaction was centred on four key moments: first, the Armistice Day remembrance services and hastily organized Anti-Nazi League radio broadcast on November 11; second, the Sunday worship services and public denunciations of Germany made by Protestant denominational leaders on November 13; third, the national radio broadcast sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) on November 14; and fourth, the ecumenical and interfaith rallies held to mark the FCC day of prayer held throughout the United States on November 20 and echoed in at least seventeen rallies held that same day across Canada. Many of these protests not only condemned Nazi Germany for lapsing into barbarism, but also expressed sympathy for Jewish “brethren,” lamented the loss of human rights in Germany, and called for the defence of freedom of religion, liberal democracy, and western civilization. In some cases, leaders also called for the Canadian and American governments to open the doors of their nations for Jewish refugees to find new homes.

Much of this new research was facilitated by support from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Mazzenga, Hayes, Jantzen, and seven other scholars (Michael Berkowitz, University College, London; Matthew Burton Bowman, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.; Gerald P. Fogarty, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Gershon Greenberg, American University, Washington, D.C.; Karen Riley, Auburn University, Montgomery; and Victoria Barnett and Suzanne Brown-Fleming of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM) met together in a USHMM Summer Research Workshop this past August, under the theme, “American Religious Organizations and Responses to the Holocaust in the United States: Reichskristallnacht as a Case Study.” Comparing Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant reactions to the pogrom of November 1938, the members of the workshop converged on four interpretive questions. First, they noted that the problem of American antisemitism influenced the responses of American religious leaders to Kristallnacht, raising questions about whether protests were focused on the particular issue of Jewish as victims or the universal problem of the violation of human rights and the creation of a refugee crisis. Second, the workshop participants discovered that most protests drew on the American values of religious freedom and pluralism, contrasting their liberal democratic world with the fascist (and communist) dictatorships of men like Hitler. Third, the scholars found that many of the religious protests against Kristallnacht were ecumenical and even interfaith in nature. This was particularly true of a number of significant radio broadcasts involving important public and religious leaders in the days and weeks following the Nazi attack on the Jews. Fourth and finally, the members of the workshop discovered that at least in some circles the Kristallnacht pogrom became, among other things, a significant moment of theological Kairos. Members of the workshop plan to publish their research in two volumes: a collection of essays drawn from the summer institute itself, and a primary source volume collecting and analyzing the various radio broadcasts organized in protest against the Kristallnacht pogrom.

Kyle Jantzen, Calgary

List of books reviewed in 2007.

Ackermann, S Christliche Frauen in der DDR May
Allen, J. Rabble-rouser for peace. a biography of Desmond Tutu November
Austin A. and Scott, J. S. Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples July
Berkman, J.A. ed Contemplating Edith Stein January
Böttcher, M. Gratwanderungen einer Freikirche im totalitären Regime
Die gemeinschaft der Sieben-Tags-Adventisten in der DDR May
Brechenmacher, T. Der Vatikan und die Juden February
Carter, R., In search of the lost. Martyrdom in Melanesia March
Chandler, A. The Church of England and the politics of reform 1948-1998 November
Chertok, H. He also spoke as a Jew. The Life of James Parkes April
Coupland, P. Britannia, Europa and Christendom October
Franz Jägerstätter December
Gailus, M. and Krogel, W. eds. Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft
der Kirche im Nationalen June
Heinecke, H. Konfession und Politik in der DDR January
Humel, K-J and Kösters, C. eds. Kirchen im Krieg.Europa 1939-1945 July
Krondorfer, B., von Kellenbach, K. Reck, N. Mit Blick auf die Täter March
Kushner, T. and Valman, N eds. Philosemitism, antisemitism and the Jews April
Lawson, T. The Church of England and the Holocaust February
Linker, D. The Theocons. Secular America under Siege June
Mau, R. Der Protestantismus im Osten Deutschlands May
Mitzscherlich, B. Diktatur und Diaspora. Das Bistum Meissen 1932-1951 December
Munro, G. Hitler’s Bavarian Antagonist: Georg Moenius May
Parkes, James End of an Exile. Israel, the Jews and the Gentile world April
Peart-Binns, J.S. A heart in my head. A biography of Richard Harries September
Raina, P. Bishop George Bell. The greatest Churchman May
Richmond, C. Campaigning against antisemitism April
Scherzberg, L. ed. Theologie und Vergangenheitsbewältigung May
Schmidtmann, C. Katholische Studierende 1945-1973 October
Snape, M., God and the British Soldier. Religion and the British Army October

With all my good wishes for the start of the New Year

John Conway

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