Tag Archives: Kevin Spicer

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 2 (Summer 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Review of Jonathan Huener, The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation. The Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Jonathan Huener, The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation. The Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2021). 353 pages. Cloth $90.00, ISBN: 978-025305402-9; Paperback $42.00, ISBN: 978-025305404-3; Ebook $41.99 ISBN: 978-025305406-7.

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

Jonathan Huener, professor of history at the University of Vermont, has produced a definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation. Identified by the Germans as the Reichsgau (district) Wartheland or Warthegau, it encompassed 45,000 square kilometers (“roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire,” Huener notes) with a “population of more than 4.9 million, including approximately 4.2 million Poles, 400,000 Jews, and 325,000 Germans.” Of this demographic, 3.8 million were Catholic and ninety percent were ethnic Poles. The German Reich incorporated the territory even though its borders remained guarded and not easily crossed. Ecclesiastically, it was expansive, encompassing the “prewar archdioceses of Poznań (Posen) and Gniezno (Gnesen), nearly all of the Włocławek (Leslau) diocese, the majority of Łodź (Lodsch/Litzmannstadt) diocese, and fractions of the Częstochowa (Tschechenstochau), Warsaw (Warschau) and Płocl (Schröttersburg) dioceses.” It included 1,023 parishes, served by 1,829 diocesan priests, 277 male religious, and 2,666 women religious (2). Before World War II ended, the German occupiers would close more than ninety-seven percent of the churches, dissolve all Catholic organizations, deport or imprison most women religious, and arrest more than 1,500 priests, of whom 815 they murdered directly or indirectly. In eighteen succinct and exceptionally well-written chapters, Huener uncovers the history of the church in the Warthegau, masterfully contextualizing it in the politics of the Nazi occupation. It is the first English language study on this topic, extensively based upon sources from both church and state archives.

Many studies on the existence of churches under National Socialism point to the Warthegau as a blueprint of the Nazi state’s plans of actions for the future of all churches in Germany. Generally, however, historians have drawn such conclusions prematurely, basing them on select archival documents without examining the broader context of Nazi policies for the Warthegau and for Poland as a whole. By setting right these ill-considered assumptions, Huener situates his analysis of the church’s plight in the Warthegau clearly in the Nazi state’s Kirchenpolitik and Volkstumskampf or ethno-racial struggle. Dominating this regional policy was Arthur Greiser, a native of the region and the Warthegau’s long-serving (1939-1945) Gauleiter (district leader) and Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor), and his deputy, August Jäger, whom historian Klaus Scholder had previously identified as instrumental in intensifying state involvement in Protestant Church affairs in the initial years of Nazi rule. Huener mentions but does not explore this connection. Greiser and Jäger did not act alone. From Munich, Martin Bormann, chief of staff in the Office of the Deputy Führer and, after May 1941, head of the party chancellery, and from Berlin, Heinrich Himmler, SS Leader and Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, influenced Warthegau church policy while also allowing Greiser freedom to craft and implement it locally. The result revealed competing concerns between the ethno-racial struggle against Poles and an existing distrust of Catholicism. What historians have traditionally interpreted as attacks on Christianity by limiting or prohibiting Masses, Huener explains, were primarily security measures implemented by the occupiers to “prevent Poles from congregating and fomenting dissent or resistance” while they continued their policy of  “undermin[ing] Poles’ sense of national identity and community” (6). Amid such motivations, strong anti-church sentiments also existed.

Despite the multiplicity of motivations for curtailing the church’s freedoms, the German occupiers’ actions against the Polish Catholic Church were drastic. From the outset, the Germans targeted the church and its priests, especially viewing the latter as instigators of Polish nationalism and extremely hostile to Germany. Huener explores the origins of Nazi anti-Polish, bias, tracing it in significant depth. While clergy were not specifically signaled out for imprisonment or execution, he shows how the Einsatzgruppen (operation groups) included them among the more than sixty-thousand Polish citizens that they massacred during Operation Tannenburg, following the invasion of Poland. After the military handed governing to a German civilian administration in late October 1939, clergy continued to be counted among the intelligentsia chosen for execution or imprisonment. In chapter three, Huener delves deeper into the reasons for the Germans’ anticlerical outlook, tracing it back to the 1870s Kulturkampf in Polish regions under Prussian rule. According to Huener, the church “functioned as a vector of Polish nationalism,” with the clergy often supporting right-wing nationalist politics, including the Endecja or National Democracy movement. He describes this movement as “socially conservative, generally antisemitic, hostile to minorities,” and advocating “the Polonization of the German minority in Poland” (47).

Whether the Polish clergy did or did not embody such nationalistic anti-German sentiments, Reichsstaathalter Greiser obsessively believed they did and planned to purge his Mustergau (model Gau) of such unwanted elements. As chapter four reveals, he had a monumental task as the region was predominantly Polish; and even its Jewish minority was larger than its ethnic German inhabitants. Huener recalls that in 1944, despite countless arrests, murders, and deportations, only thirteen percent of the Warthegau’s population was ethnically German. Such percentages did not bode well for Greiser, considering that the neighboring Gau of Danzig-Westpreu­ßen was fifty-eight percent German.

To carry out his purge, Greiser and other Gau authorities initiated a series of actions against the church, becoming more draconian and ruthless over time. Chapter five discusses the 5 October 1939 “invasion” of the Ostrów Tumski island enclave of the Poznań diocesan administration. Popularly known as the “Cathedral Island Action,” the Gestapo and various police units raided the diocesan archive seeking files that might reveal “potentially dangerous clergy and church institutions” and arresting four priests who worked in the diocesan chancery. Although August Hlond, archbishop and primate, left Poland in late September 1939 at the request of the Polish government, his auxiliary, Walter Dymek, remained in Poznań and was placed under house arrest. At first, German officials promised Dymek that the church would be left unharmed. In return, Dymek issued a memorandum calling on diocesan clergy to “care for the poor and to maintain social peace, and also to comply with the orders of the authorities” (78). Huener stresses that this should not be “seen as an expression of sympathy or eager compliance” but rather an “attempt to ensure that Polish Catholics would continue to have access to ‘word and sacrament’” (79). Such promises meant nothing, of course, as the occupiers began to restrict the number and times of Masses and enforce further limitations on the church’s ministries. Huener argues such restrictions were part of a threefold plan to incarcerate and deport a significant number of clergy, restrict Poles’ access to churches and parish facilities, and take “economic and legal measures to undermine the unity, integrity, and structure of the Polish church as an institution” (82).

Chapters six, eleven, and twelve detail the specific actions Nazi authorities took against Polish priests that nearly deprived Warthegau Catholics of the sacraments. These actions took place in four stages: (1) immediately following the fall 1939 invasion; (2) in early 1940 (aimed primarily against priests of the Gniezno and Poznań archdiocese); (3) in August 1940, when the Gestapo and police rounded up two hundred priests and deported them to Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald; and (4) in early October 1941 when more than 500 Warthegau priests were arrested in a move meant to destroy the Polish clergy (86). Priests of religious orders were rounded up and exiled at higher rates than diocesan priests. Before deportation to the General Government (non-incorporated part of occupied Poland) or to a concentration camp, many clergy were held in confiscated monasteries or friaries appointed for such purposes. Life in these transitional sites was not ideal but significantly less harsh than that experienced in camps such as the notorious Fort VII, located on the western outskirts of Poznań. Huener recounts numerous tragic tales of the brutal torture of interned clergy. Such horrible and murderous experiences reached their apex at Dachau, the subject of chapter twelve, where more than 1,700 Polish Catholic priests were incarcerated, of whom 850 perished, accounting for eighty-three percent of all clergy who lost their lives there (185).

As state authorities ended priests’ freedom to minister in a variety of pastoral settings, parish worship was also affected, as chapters seven through nine reveal. Memorandums from Berlin forbade the use of Polish in worship and called for “‘specially selected, German-conscious German clergy’” (104). Huener points out that generally, the implementation of such commands was more radical than initially proposed. Interestingly, he notes that this was not only to curb Polish nationalism, but also, in the Warthegau, to restrain the Catholic Church, which “remained a foreign and hostile element, regardless of whether its clergy were patriotic Germans or allegedly subversive Poles” (105). Evidence of restrictions on religion affecting ethnic Catholic Germans residing in the Warthegau appears at several points in the narrative. Not only were Masses and the sacraments limited, but state authorities also systematically destroyed roadside devotional sites throughout the Warthegau. Vivid photos reproduced alongside the narrative visually document such desecration. Likewise, both the Gestapo and police confiscated churches, cloisters, friaries, and parish buildings, converting them to secular use by organizations such as the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV).

Prohibition of the Polish language in worship and parish ministry was intertwined in the Nationalitätenprinzip or national principle calling for racial segregation in church life. Following the National Socialist racial principle, Germans and Poles were strictly separated in all religious contexts, designating separate churches for each demographic. Huener incorporates the memoir of Father Hilarius Breitinger, a German Franciscan who served in Poznań as the apostolic administrator for German Catholics from 1942-1945, to recount the obsession of Nazi authorities to implement this form of segregation. Interestingly, Huener also reveals that such regulations were, at times, challenging to enforce as religious practice appears to have superseded racial segregation. Extremely harsh penalties could be imposed on both Germans and Poles who failed to follow segregational ordinances. An August 1943 report of the Polish underground resistance recounts, German parishioners formed a cordon to prevent Poles from entering their “German” church before an impending search by the Gestapo during Mass (129). Huener clarifies that the guards’ motives were not apparent but appeared to have an altruistic motive of concern for their Polish co-religionists. He concludes, “for some of the population (and some clergy among them), the church could erase, or at least blur, the linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and racial frontiers that the regime so rigorously imposed and defended” (131). Huener here points to the research of James Bjork on Upper Silesia, which draws similar conclusions. Unmentioned is that John J. Delaney previously reached the same conclusion regarding Polish forced laborers living among rural Bavarian Catholics.

Behind the segregation and anti-church policy stood thirteen points articulated in September 1939 by Jäger and Gerhard Klopfer, the latter a representative of Martin Bormann. Huener reconstructs the thirteen points from various primary documents. They include destroying denominational associations, upholding the national principle, prohibiting religious instruction in schools, limiting church offertory collections, forbidding religious organizations to engage in social welfare activities, abolishing religious orders, dismantling theological studies at Posen University, and turning the priesthood into a part-time profession. Without mentioning the thirteen points, Albert Hartl, an SD official and a former priest of the Munich and Freising archdiocese, and a Dr. Fruwirth, incorporated the spirit of the thirteen points into a fourteen-page memorandum to guide future state ecclesiastical policy. Huener argues that this document revealed, “a basic synergy with respect to church policy between the party leadership, SD, and Warthegau administration” (144). Such insights highlight the importance of Huener’s well-grounded argument and his exceptional ability to integrate National Socialism’s political and social history into church history.

Although much of the information In Huener’s work will be new, at least for English-speaking readers, chapter thirteen is especially ground-breaking. In it, Huener describes the persecution of women religious in the Warthegau and their internment in Bojanowo Labor Camp, located near the southern border of the Wartheland. During the occupation, women religious often had to take up the ministry left unfulfilled by the arrested and murdered priests. Though they could not administer the sacraments, women religious still provided essential pastoral care and spiritual enrichment to Catholics throughout Poland. Such activity, coupled with the Nazis’ hatred of religious orders, resulted in more than six hundred women religious being incarcerated in the camp. Conditions in the camp were hard but not as brutal as other concentration camps and prisons in the Warthegau. In Bojanowo, women religious had to engage in labor, including manufacturing munitions. Unlike their male counterparts, they were granted brief furloughs to venture into the local village. In some cases, their captors released them to return to live with their relatives. Huener reports that deaths were rare, with only eight to eleven sisters perishing in the camp.

As with almost any discussion on the Catholic Church under National Socialism, Huener addresses the silence of Pope Pius XII, in this case, his silence toward the persecution of Poles and the Polish Catholic Church. Huener emphasizes that by the fall of 1939, Pius XII had already been well informed about German atrocities against the Poles and the Polish Catholic Church. Huener concludes that the pope “preferred expressions of sympathy and avenues of diplomacy over overt protest, condemnation, or calls for resistance” (273). For him, Pius chose “impartiality” over “neutrality” (283). Still, Huener points out that the Poles and their religious leaders were not cognizant of the extent of intervention exerted on their behalf, for example, by Cesare Orsenigo, the Berlin papal nuncio. He acknowledges such intervention as remarkable, especially considering Orsenigo’s checkered history under National Socialism. At the same time, he also emphasizes the limitations of such an approach.

Huener concludes his study by again recounting the devastating losses among the Polish clergy. Though such emphasis might seem hagiographic, it is far from it. Throughout the work, Huener balances his presentation and judgment, describing the Polish church’s strengths and weaknesses, including its antisemitism, as it sought to exist under German occupation. In the end, he concludes that unlike the German Catholic Church and the papacy that “emerged from the Second World War as institutions compromised,” the Polish Catholic Church “survived more than five years of Nazi occupation and emerged in 1945 as an institution with significant moral capital” (311). Huener has provided excellent documentation of this ecclesiastical and human narrative of survival.

 

Share

Article Note: Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann, “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 3 (September 2020)

Article Note: Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann, “Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis,” American Journal of Political Science 62:1 (January 2018): 19-36.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Amid the current emphasis on Catholic complicity with Nazism, Jörg Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann assess the Church’s ability to immunize its members against Nazism at the end of the Weimar era. Whereas researchers like Thomas Childers, Richard Hamilton, Jürgen Falter, and John O’Loughlin have already determined who voted for Hitler, Spenkuch and Tillmann address “the deeper question of why some groups radicalized while others did not” (20). They maintain that Catholic underrepresentation among Nazi voters was due primarily to the influence of the “Catholic Church and its dignitaries” rather than Catholic subculture or economic conditions in regions with a Catholic majority (22).

To make their case, they use a combination of county-level and municipal-level election results along with census data from 1925-1933. Controlling for other variables like demographic characteristics, unemployment rates according to occupation, workforce composition, and geographic differences, they find that “by itself, counties’ religious composition accounts for about 58% of the variation in the share of Nazi votes” (22). Using an Instrumental variables approach and ecological regression, they determine that “the ratio of Protestants to Catholics among NSDAP voters is about 8 to 1, relative to a population ratio of only 2 to 1” (27) and that “this difference cannot be attributed to systematic socioeconomic differences between both groups, as assumed in much of the prior literature” (28).

Having demonstrated the primacy of Catholic religious identity as an independent variable, the authors test their theory that elite influence shaped political choices by comparing the voting behavior of Catholics subject to the influence of pro-Nazi clerics with that of other Catholics.[1] They find that in such cases, the gap between Protestant and Catholic support for the NSDAP narrowed by 32-41%. In other words, “Catholics and Protestants voted considerably more alike in areas where the Catholic Church’s official warnings about the dangers of National Socialism were directly contradicted by the local clergy” (27).

The authors also address an anomaly that appears to undermine their claim of elite influence—the fact that Catholics were just as likely as Protestants to vote for the communist party despite the Church’s opposition. They attribute this asymmetry to the Catholic Center Party’s “ideological position” on the center-right of the political spectrum (31). While Protestant voters were free to choose the political party closest to their “ideal point,” Catholics faced sanctions if they supported the Nazis or the communists. However, Catholic voters who preferred the NSDAP found it easier than communist supporters to settle for the Center Party because it was closer to their “ideal point.”

Though Spenkuch and Tillmann are not the first to recognize the influence of the Catholic Church and its clergy on the political behavior of lay Catholics, their method quantifies and clarifies the nature of that influence in a discrete historical context. Applying their framework to “radicalized electorates” in the present, they posit that elite influence is most effective when warnings or penalties are accompanied by viable alternatives to extreme political movements: “Depending on the circumstances, a populist but influential elite may ultimately be preferable to a weak, principled one. Paradoxically, our work suggests that it may take a populist to save democracy from the fanatics” (35). They do not explain why populism is the only viable alternative, nor do they clarify the difference between populists and fanatics, but given the timing of their research and its publication, it is clear they have the United States and its religious and political landscapes in mind.

Notes:

[1] For their data set, they took the 138 priests identified by Kevin Spicer in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2008), geocoded their locations at the end of the Weimar Republic, and included all communities within a ten-mile radius.

Share

Book Note: “Religion” in Lisa Pine, ed., Life and Times in Nazi Germany

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Book Note: “Religion” in Lisa Pine, ed., Life and Times in Nazi Germany (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Pp. xv + 307. ISBN: 9781474217927 (Paperback).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lisa Pine’s Life and Times in Nazi Germany brings together an interesting set of contributions on “the history of everyday life” in the Third Reich. With three sections—“Food and Health,” “Lifestyle,” and “Religion”—she aims to assess “the extent to which a regime with totalitarian aims and ambitions succeeded in permeating different areas of social and cultural life in Germany” (15/357; all references are to the pdf electronic edition). Pine provides a thorough historiographical overview of the social history of Nazi Germany, then turns things over to her contributors. The section on “Religion” is the chief concern of this note, and is comprised of three chapters on Protestantism, Catholicism, and Christmas.

In his chapter “Protestantism in Nazi Germany: A View from the Margins,” Christopher Probst draws on church sources (newsletters, conference papers, ecclesiastical correspondence, and published works) to consider how Protestants responded to the Nazi regime and living in Nazi Germany produced profound religious divisions among Protestants. Probst begins with the issue of antisemitism, noting that “many, perhaps most, German Protestant ministers and theologians had decidedly deprecating views of Jews and Judaism,” and that most were “deeply nationalistic” (244/357). He goes on to ask three main questions: “What tack did Protestant pastors and theologians take towards the Nazi regime? How did the pressures and strictures of living in the Nazi state help to fracture the Protestant church into competing factions with distinct views on myriad issues? How did Protestant clergy and theologians confront the so-called ‘Jewish Question’?” (244/357)

Probst argues that most Protestants supported the Nazi state, whether eagerly or with mixed emotions, and that well before 1933, Protestantism was permeated with antisemitism and anti-Judaism. He develops these ideas through an overview of German Protestantism in the Third Reich and then a comparison of the views of two opposing Protestants towards Jews: Theodor Pauls, a historian and professor of religious studies who celebrated Luther’s antipathy towards Jews (adding a layer of Nazi racial antisemitism to the views of the reformer) and who worked to de-Judaize Christianity; and Heidelberg pastor Hermann Maas, a member of the Confessing Church and an ardent defender of “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews against anti-Judaism and Nazi persecution. Along the way, he draws on the work of Alon Confino (A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide) to establish the ubiquity of antisemitic sentiment among Germans, including Protestants, as the context within which clergy and theologians lived and worked. Overall, Probst focuses on explicating the range of Protestant opinions on Jews and Judaism, but says little about Protestant responses to Nazism or the pressures which split Protestantism into the competing factions of the Confessing Church and German Christian Movement, generating the church-political struggles that dominated Protestant life in the Third Reich.

Kevin P. Spicer’s chapter, “Catholic Life under Hitler,” traces the difficult choices faced by German Catholics over four phases of their relationship with National Socialism: “(1) 1930-1933, when German bishops publicly opposed National Socialism; (2) 1933-1934, when the German bishops jointly reversed their stance towards National Socialism, while holding on to the delusion that they could work with the state; (3) 1934-1939, when the state directly attacked the Church’s value system and worked to remove it from the life of the Volksgemeinschaft (‘national community’); (4) 1939-1945, when the state, while threatening to blot out the Church as a matter of policy, engaged in an annihilative war that simultaneously carried out the murder of thousands of physically handicapped and mentally ill people, as well as the deportation and murder of millions of European Jews” (273/357).

With memories of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in mind, Catholics worried about the danger of marginalizing themselves from the political mainstream through a rejection of Nazism. And besides, both Hitler’s promise that the churches would be foundational to his rule and the emerging economic recovery made the Nazi regime popular. The Centre Party’s support for the March 1933 Enabling Act and the July 1933 Concordat between the German state and the Vatican only seemed to confirm the belief that Hitler and his government might well form an effective partnership with the Catholic Church.  After all, both Catholics and Nazis rejected the cultural modernity of the Weimar era, promoted traditional gender roles and forms of family life, opposed Bolshevism, and expressed antipathy towards Jews. Though Catholic religious antisemitism differed from Nazi racial antisemitism, in practice these were mutually reinforcing, as clergy rarely differentiated clearly between the two.

Spicer demonstrates how easily clerical attempts to protect the Church from state attacks could lead to accusations of political subversion against Catholic clergy. Indeed, “one-third of Germany’s diocesan priests came into conflict with the Gestapo or other police agencies” (272/357). Few of these would have understood themselves as opponents of the regime. They were merely attempting to fulfill their liturgical, educational, and associational roles. On the side of the laity, over half attended services faithfully and almost all who married within the faith did so in Catholic churches (274/357). By the middle 1930s, however, tensions were rising as Nazis and Catholics sparred over access to Germany’s youth. Hermann Goering forbad all non-spiritual youth activity (including the popular hiking and camping trips taken by church youth groups), in violation of the Concordat. Over time, simultaneous membership in Catholic and Nazi youth groups was forbidden and eventually Catholic youth groups themselves were disbanded, while the Hitler Youth was made mandatory (281/357). Many priests and Catholic religious instructors faced Gestapo investigation or incarceration for their continuing engagement in youth work. Similar battles were fought over the continuing existence of Catholic schools in the Third Reich.

Spicer explains how Pope Pius XI and Vatican officials wrote well over 350 pages of correspondence to the German government over various church-state conflicts, following those private complaints with the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (‘With Burning Concern’) in 1937.  The German state responded with an increase in the judicial persecution of Catholic clergy by means of the so-called “morality trials,” to which the bishops responded with pastoral letters critical of state attacks on the Church. While the number of Catholics exiting the Church increased somewhat in the later 1930s, all in all, the Church was able to maintain the loyalty of most Catholics and maintain its church taxation system.

Finally, during the war, Spicer argues that Catholics were “disturbingly silent” in response to the Kristallnacht Pogrom, with the exception of Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg. More notable was Münster Bishop Clemens von Galen’s public protest against the Nazi euthanasia campaign, which “became the central topic of conversation among the Catholics of Münster and far beyond” (287-288/357). In the end, though, Spicer maintains that Catholic resistance was normally limited to blocking state interference with traditional church practices. Similarly, Catholic lay people—perhaps especially in the countryside—were able to accommodate the everyday practice of their faith to their patriotism and loyalty towards the Hitler regime.

Finally, Joe Perry’s chapter, “Christmas as Nazi Holiday: Colonising the Christmas Mood,” demonstrates how “Nazi functionaries cast Christmas as a celebration of the German Volk that had deep roots in the solstice worship of pre-Christian Germanic tribes.” Decorations, family celebrations, carol singing, Christmas markets, and Christmas trees “were stripped of their Christian content and were reworked to insert Nazi ideology into popular festivity” (31/357). Perry draws on the history of emotions to assess the extent to which Hitler and his movement successfully co-opted the traditional Christian holiday and the “‘Christmas mood’, which turned on moving feelings of Gemütlichkeit (comfort, cosiness), Innerlichkeit (inner warmth, soulfulness), family love and deeply felt spirituality” (301/357). As Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels put it in 1935, Christmas was “the most German of all holidays. It is a Christian celebration,” but “also in the truest sense of the words a National Socialist holiday. Because, when we consider the great ideals of community that bind together the entire German Volk, the commandment ‘love thy neighbour’ has gained a new and surprising significance for us all” (303/357).

Perry traces the nazification of Christmas through three stages: (1) attempts to reshape the holiday along völkisch lines in the 1920s, (2) the campaign to popularize the Volksweihnachten (‘People’s Christmas’) between 1933 and 1939, and (3) the promotion of a Kriegsweihnachten (‘War Christmas’) during the Second World War. Often, December 21—winter solstice—was emphasized over December 25 as the time to celebrate, and public celebrations outshone family holidays.

An important part of this Nazi colonization of Christmas was the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NS-Volkswohlfahrt) charity initiative carried out by the Winter Relief Agency (Winterhilfswerk). Heavy advertising and aggressive collection campaigns focused on promoting charity because, as Goebbels stated, “we must possess a healthy Volk so that we can assert ourselves in the world” (313/357). The Hitler Youth played a large role in the collection of Winter Relief, giving out badges to those who had donated and shaming those who hadn’t. As “the human face of an inhuman regime” (Herbert Vorländer), the Winter Relief generated large sums of money which went to holiday gift packages and Christmas trees to those in need (314/357).

Similarly, other Nazi organizations such as the Hitler Youth, National Socialist Women’s League, and German Labour Front, along with the German Army, also sponsored significant Christmas celebrations. All of these events were designed to celebrate and strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, or racial community. Perry also mentions the role of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement in fostering this nazified version of Christmas. German Christians attempted to strip the story of Jesus’ nativity of its “Jewish-Christian accretions.” Indeed, German Christian pastor Wilhelm Bauer’s Celebrations for German Christians (1935) described the rising of a “morning star” on December 25, but left out any mention of Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph, or even Jesus, and renamed Jerusalem “the heavenly abode” (307/357). Nazi party presses produced a wide array of similar publications with instructions for celebrating Christmas, many of them directed to women, boys, and girls. The Ministry of Propaganda also produced many Christmas-themed radio programs and newsreels, while the National Socialist Teachers’ League produced curriculum material emphasizing the “blood and soil” aspects of the holiday, including the winter solstice, Nordic rituals, and female fertility (312/357).

Other Nazi writers worked to reshape even family celebrations of Christmas, by emphasizing primordial Germanic Christmas customs and rewriting Christmas carols along völkisch-racial lines. Here too, German Christians played significant roles. They replaced the lyrics “Rejoice, Rejoice, O Christianity” with “Rejoice, rejoice to be the German Type,” and added the lines, “Christmas! Blood and soil awake! Volk, from God’s light and power; your honour and heroism come” to another Christmas song (318/357).

During the war, Christmas took on new meaning, linked to suffering and sacrifice. “Light oaths” to the sun, mother love, Hitler, the Fatherland, and the German army mixed with “Bringing Home the Fire,” a ceremony where lit candles would be taken from the public, Nazi celebrations into the family home. More ominously, “Heroes’ Remembrance” ceremonies were designed to comfort grieving families at Christmastime (323/357).

Though the nazification of Christmas had its limits—the dechristianization of the holiday was particularly unpopular, and “National Socialist attempts to colonise Christmas and the Christmas mood turned the holiday into a site of cultural-political conflict” (326/357)—Perry effectively demonstrates how it was one means among many through which National Socialists worked to reconstruct social solidarity and national identity along racial lines.

 

Share

Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Conference Report: “Synagogue and Church: The Role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust.” The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education, Pacific Lutheran University, November 1-3, 2017.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The 10th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education conference began with Steve Pressman, documentary filmmaker, showing clips of his soon-to-be released film, “Holy Secrets.” Pressman discussed his process in making the documentary which explores the actions and inactions taken by the Vatican during the Holocaust.

The first panel session continued this theme by exploring the “Pius Wars,” with papers by Robert Ventresca and Jacques Kornberg. Both presented critical re-assessments of Pius XII, suggesting the need for a framework for the proper historical and ethical evaluation of the choices made by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Further panels included the exploration of Catholic antisemitism, with Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara co-presenting their recent work on Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage. Martin Menke presented research on Weimar Catholic leaders who differentiated between being anti-racist and being anti-Semitic.

Jonathan Huener shared his latest research on the Reichsgau Wartheland and the diverse ways in which the Nazi occupation regime persecuted the Catholic Church in occupied Poland. This was followed by Brenda Gaydosh analyzing why Bernhard Lichtenberg resisted and protested Nazi anti-Semitic measures and why he prayed for the Jews.

The final presentation of the first day of panels was a keynote address by John Connelly: “How the Catholic Church Overcame Its Own Theology and Proclaimed God Loves Jews.” Connelly argued that Vatican II’s new teaching about God loving the Jews came about because of Nazi racism. Many of the theologians who advised the bishops at Vatican II were opponents of Hitler in the 1930s. Some of them were converts from Judaism and many had been targets of antisemitism themselves. Yet for them, the Church’s new teaching about Jews was not a revolution; it was a return to the ideas of the Jewish thinker, Saul of Tarsus. Far from a revolution, the new teaching of Vatican II was a return to the Church’s origins.

The final day of the conference featured a panel on post-Holocaust theology and the Jews with a presentation by Zuzanna Radzik, a Catholic theologian specializing in Christian-Jewish relations and feminist theology. Karma Ben Johanan from the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute then presented on the way in which the Catholic discourse on the Holocaust functioned in the construction of the Church’s identity and in the reforging of Jewish-Christian relations from the Second Vatican Council to the present.

Raymond Sun brought the conference into the present by analyzing the rhetoric, symbolism, and historical precedents employed by church leaders in urging Catholics to oppose the persecution or exclusion of targeted groups. He explored possible reasons for the absence of direct references to the Holocaust and pondered the implications of this for Catholic memory of the Holocaust. This was followed by Gershon Greenberg’s presentation on the restoration of Jewish faith in the displaced persons camps, beginning with the survivor’s question: “Why was I still alive?” The survivors’ answer was: in order to study Torah—which in turn nourished life. The fact that Jewish faith was revived necessitates the conclusion that somehow, some way, sacramental existence never totally disappeared, even in the midst of catastrophe.

The conference closed with a presentation from Marie-Anne Harkness, whose family members rescued Jews in France during the war. Mrs. Harkness’s grandmother, Madame Celine Morali, used the family’s hardware store to smuggle Jews out of danger. She and her daughter worked with Monsignor Joseph Moussaron, Bishop of Albi, and other Catholics to rescue Jews.

Share

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars, University of Toronto, May 21-23, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This symposium assembled an extraordinary group of twenty scholars from twelve different countries to discuss the roles of religious individuals, institutions, and networks in the conflicts and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, the three-day event was organized by Victoria Barnett (USHMM), Doris Bergen (University of Toronto), Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College), and Rebecca Carter-Chand (University of Toronto and Clark University). The wide range of cases and issues discussed made the symposium highly stimulating (although that same quality makes it difficult to summarize). Most fundamentally the symposium showed the value of taking a global perspective, not only to compare but to connect developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas; and it demonstrated the power of in-person interactions. Having time to talk, in lengthy sessions, over meals, and outdoors, proved very fruitful and will, we hope, lead to a publication and future initiatives.

The symposium built on a 2015 summer research workshop on “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945,” held in Washington, DC and initiated by Barnett and Spicer. Now the goal was to expand the conversation by bringing in more people and looking beyond Europe. A call for papers yielded three times more abstracts than we could accept—an indication of the topic’s significance—and a team of experts in History, Religion, Islamic Studies, and Jewish Studies helped choose among them. Four facilitators—Devi Mays (University of Michigan), Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), and Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen)—worked with us to organize the fifteen participants into panels and identify themes. All papers were pre-circulated.

After an opening party on Sunday, we had a full day of sessions on Monday, May 22. The first panel was organized around the theme of “Transnational Religion and Diaspora Communities.” Francesco Pongiluppi (University of Rome), Burçin Çakir (Glasgow Caledonian University), John Eicher (German Historical Institute, Washington DC), and Stefan Vogt (Goethe University) presented their research on, respectively, Fascist Italians’ cultural activities in interwar Turkey; debates about the Armenian genocide in Turkey one hundred years later; Mennonites in South America and their relationships to Nazism; and the tensions and connections between Jewish religion and German nationalist discourse in Martin Buber’s thought. Devi Mays identified several issues to think across these disparate topics. She noted the centrality of different locations in articulating nationalism, including transnational sites. Homeland, she observed, has to be articulated, too. Of the many questions that arose in this discussion, two stand out because they recurred throughout the symposium: What is the role of religion in narratives of the nation under attack? How do visions of religious ethics as a unifying force subvert or reinforce the exclusive claims of nation and land?

The second panel explored “Religious Leadership and the Role of Clergy.” Paul Hanebrink structured the session around four questions: 1) How are enemies and threats defined? 2) How do we understand theology? Religious language can be mobilized but it also has a weight of its own. 3) How do churches’ internal debates interact with outside forces? 4) What, if anything, is distinctive about European Christianity? Francesca Silano (University of Toronto), Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont), Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem), and Brandon Bloch (Harvard University) shared highlights of their research on, respectively, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon and his condemnation of pogroms in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution; Vatican responses to Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in the Warthegau; The Religious of Our Lady of Sion, a Catholic order in France that reported assaults on Jews; and Protestant theologies of law and human rights in occupied Germany. In addition to big thematic issues, the discussion revealed some intriguing details, including Anna Shternshis’s observation that Soviet anti-religious propaganda depicted Tikhon as a Jew.

The third panel, facilitated by Milena Methodieva, was titled “Mobilization of Religion for National and Political Projects.” It featured the work of Roy Marom (University of Haifa), Peter Staudenmaier (Marquette University), Kateryna Budz (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Irina Ognyanova (Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Their research took us from Palestine in the 1930s to the Rome-Berlin Axis, and explored Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the Holocaust, and the Roman Catholic Church and Ustasha in Croatia. Methodieva raised issues about the role of religion in projects of national mobilization. She also noted how much can be learned from examining the so-called fringe or considering inconsistencies and tensions, for example, between an individual’s ideology and conduct.

These themes anticipated Tuesday’s session on “Religion and Violence.” Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya (University of Delhi), Ionut Biliuta (Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Romanian Academy), and Jason Tingler (Clark University) all addressed the period of the Second World War, but with a focus on Buddhism and ethno-nationalism of Japan, the Romanian Orthodox Exarchate from southern Ukraine, and genocidal violence in Chelm. Christhard Hoffmann offered six tips for making comparisons: 1) In each case we are dealing not with religion per se but religion in a social context; 2) Look at the history of ethno-religious conflict in a region; 3) Pay attention to expectations for the future; 4) Consider different forms of violence; 5) What were the roles of religious people and leaders? 6) How did ethno-religious groups react when they became targets of violence?

The value of taking a global perspective was especially evident from the intense interest in Mukhopadhyaya’s paper, the symposium’s only examination of religion in a non-western context. Yet her work had many points of contact with the other papers. The importance of prophecies was one and proselytization, also central to Biliuta’s analysis, was another. Certainly Mukhopadhyaya’s insight that any religion can become implicated in violence resonated across all the sessions.

The roundtable of facilitators provided another opportunity to make connections. Kevin Spicer led off by noting that a central question in the 2015 workshop—Christian antisemitism or Christian anti-Judaism?—had not featured in any of the presentations here. Mays raised the issue of absence: what does it mean when religion is not discussed? that it is not there or is so pervasive it goes unarticulated? She highlighted two areas that got short shrift in our deliberations: gender and lay people. Hanebrink drew attention to the question as to exactly how religious concepts are harnessed and what determines whether that project succeeds or not. He wondered about the divide between private and public religious discourses and commented that the symposium as a whole did not have much to say about Jews. For her part, Methodieva emphasized the multiple forms of each religion examined and the role of individuals, including particular personalities, in driving developments. Hoffmann returned to the thorny question of the boundaries of religion: what is religion and what is non religion? He also pointed to the importance of narratives of victimization and decline in situations of violence.

The group discussion that followed raised more big questions. Spicer asked about comparative approaches: When are comparisons helpful and when are they counterproductive and even irresponsible? Marom pointed out that we had failed to question the assumptions built into the symposium title. Hanebrink observed that the term “ethno-nationalism” is a product of the 1990s, and Mukhopadhyaya explained that ethno-nationalism can complicate a bigger nationalist project, as in India where it works against civic nationalism. Bloch urged us to think about religious language as shaping how people understand the world. Silano remarked on the importance of material support: where do the funds come from and who controls the finances? Vogt warned against essentializing religion, and Budz emphasized how religious identity substitutes for ethnic identity when there is no national state. Susannah Heschel pointed to the importance of the imperialist context and referred to John Kucich’s book, Imperial Masochism (2009), to draw attention to imperialists’ insistence on their own abjection: “Look how we suffer.” Tingler encouraged expanding the scope not only geographically but chronologically, for instance, to explore religious roots of nationalism in the Middle Ages. Carter-Chand highlighted the significance of conversion and the diversity of what being “Christian” meant, even within Central and Eastern Europe, and Biliuta added the dimension of competition between religions and religious groups.

The final component was a public program featuring Susannah Heschel and Victoria Barnett and moderated by Doris Bergen. Titled “Religion, Ethno-Nationalism, and Violence: Probing the Intersections,” it was an opportunity to hear from two people who have shaped the field. Barnett and Heschel responded to three questions: 1) How do you understand the relationship between religion, ethno-nationalism, and violence? 2) How do you respond to the Holocaust and the violence of our own times without despairing? 3) How has your thinking changed in the decades since you began your work?

Their reflections were personal, profound, and often funny. Barnett described her childhood in West Virginia and her formative experience with liberation theology at Union Theological Seminary and the Puebla Conference in the late 1970s. She also invoked Jonathan Fox’s study of the “salience of religious issues in ethnic conflicts” to underscore that religion is not always or solely a factor, but it becomes powerful when “things fall apart.” Heschel challenged us to be more concrete and precise, and she set an example by defining “religion”: a communal system of propositional attitudes related to the superhuman. She poked fun at what she called the “ghostbusters” approach to comparative genocide studies—“Find the ten factors and you win!”—and asked what happens to religion in a democracy. Does it lose its enthusiastic quality? Both she and Barnett observed that pluralism is not enough. Do we come together as liberals of different faiths or within each faith? Both speakers, and the two of them together, made a powerful impression. David Clark, a PhD student at Wycliffe College who is writing his dissertation on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called the event his “bibliography on stage.”

The full program of the symposium may be found at https://www.ushmm.org/research/scholarly-presentations/symposia/religion-and-ethno-nationalism-in-the-era-of-the-world-wars.

Share

Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference, sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University and Claremont McKenna College, November 3-6, 2016, Claremont, CA

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

At this year’s Lessons & Legacies Conference, a number of scholars presented on the Catholic Church in Europe under Nazism and Fascism.

On Friday, Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont) presented his study on the little-known Nonnenlager Schmückert, a labor camp for Polish nuns in the Reichsgau Wartheland. Between February 1941 and January 1945, the Gestapo, in collaboration with the Reichsstatthalter’s office of Arthur Greiser (via the Gau Self-Administration), imprisoned over six hundred nuns in the camp. In his analysis of the camp, Huener emphasized the intersections and conflicts “between ideology and economic rationality” in the Nazis’ anti-Church policies in the Warthegau. Initially, the regime’s persecution of the Polish Catholic Church, that included the dissolution of cloisters and the imprisonment of nuns, was crucial to germanization measures in the Gau. As a key symbol of “Polish national consciousness,” the Nazis viewed the destruction of the Polish Catholic Church as tantamount to the destruction of the Polish nation. Nuns in their conspicuous habits thus represented the dual threat of Catholicism and fanatical Polish nationalism and animated the Gestapo’s efforts to imprison the women in 1941. But if the initial imprisonment of nuns was driven by ideology, Huener argued that by 1942, severe labor shortages became the main impetus for the Gau administration’s renewed efforts to round up and incarcerate the remaining nuns in the Warthegau. Attempts to use nuns as forced laborers at Schmückert failed, however. Still, although most of the women were simply too ill to work, Huener concluded that the camp’s continued existence shows both the “regime’s commitment to incarcerating and exploiting its alleged enemies,” and its “obsession with Polish Catholicism as an inherently dangerous and conspiratorial locus of anti-German, Polish-national sentiment.”

On Saturday, the panel “Antisemitism and Catholicism during the Holocaust” focused on manifestations of and responses to antisemitism in the Catholic Church in Germany, France, and Italy under Nazism.

Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College) and Martina Cucchiara (Bluffton University) explored the topic through the lens Erna Becker-Kohen, a Catholic of Jewish heritage, whose writings the presenters have translated and annotated. The volume, The Evil that Surrounds Us: The Writings of Erna Becker Kohen, is forthcoming in 2017 from Indiana University Press. Overwhelmed by fear and isolation in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Erna converted to Catholicism in 1936. The history of Catholics of Jewish heritage primarily has been told from the perspective of the Catholic hierarchy. Focusing on the experience of one Catholic of Jewish heritage, Spicer and Cucchiara lowered their gaze to illuminate the consequences of the Catholic hierarchy’s refusal to take a clear stance on Jews, even Catholics of Jewish heritage, in Nazi Germany. Largely leaving their flock to their own devices, Church leaders did little to check the pervasive antisemitism and malice that Erna routinely encountered in Catholic parishes and women religious communities. Nonetheless, Erna, along with a small number of German Jews, did benefit from the Catholic Church’s feeble intervention on their behalf when the regime refrained from dissolving marriages between Jews and non-Jews. On account of her “privileged” marriage to a non-Jewish man, Erna therefore was exempt, for a time, from the most severe anti-Jewish decrees, including deportation. But, as Spicer and Cucchiara argued, the Church’s contribution to the protection of “privileged” Jews was incidental, as the episcopate first and foremost sought to defend its traditional right to govern marriage. The Church did not intervene when the Nazis deported Catholics of Jewish heritage or when they imprisoned the “Aryan” partners of Jews in the fall of 1944 to force them to divorce their Jewish spouses. Erna felt the full brunt of this policy of silence when the regime imprisoned her “Ayran” husband Gustav in a labor camp. Erna and her young son Silvan struggled to survive the war and the Holocaust in southern Germany and Tyrol. Gustav, too, survived but eventually succumbed to severe injuries he sustained during his time of imprisonment.

In her presentation “Catholic Antisemitism in France and Italy during the Holocaust,” Nina Valbousquet (Sciences Po Paris) also raised the issue of intermarriage, albeit in post-Fascist Italy in 1943. Following Mussolini’s fall, Father Tacchi Venturi, a member the Italian Catholic clergy, advocated for the abolition of provisions of the Fascist racial laws of 1938 that forbade intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews. At the same time, he also lobbied the Italian Ministry of the Interior to retain certain antisemitic provisions that in his estimation were consistent with Catholic traditions and principles. Valbousquet argued that Venturi’s position was representative of members of the Catholic clergy in Fascist Italy and Vichy France who disavowed Nazi antisemitism as un-Christian but continued to spread “acceptable” forms of antisemitism. In their promotion of Catholic antisemitic propaganda that conflated traditional Christian anti-Jewish prejudices with modern secular antisemitic stereotypes, the Church became complicit in legitimizing anti-Jewish laws and measures in France and Italy. From here it was but a small step for some Catholic activists during World War II to cast Fascist antisemitic laws as “a legitimate self-defense of Christian civilization” against World Jewry. At the very least, Valbousquet concluded, Catholic antisemitic propaganda contributed to widespread indifference to the suffering of Jews, and for this reason the topic deserves far greater scholarly attention that it has received so far.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) also sought answers to the Catholic Church’s apparent indifference to the persecution of Jews in the months following Hitler’s ascension to power. In particular, she examined the intersection between the Catholic Church’s response to the regime’s treatment of Jews and Catholics in 1933. Brown-Fleming argued that scholars must consider the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and Catholics together in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Church’s silence about the escalating persecution of Jews in 1933. Drawing on files from the Vatican secret archives, Brown-Fleming painted a vivid picture of discussions between the Vatican and the German episcopate on how to respond to the new regime’s persecution of Jews. In the end, Church leaders remained silent because, in the words of Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, should the Church defend Jews, “the war against the Jews would also become a war against the Catholics.” Whereas Brown-Fleming attributed the Catholic Church’s silence about Jews mainly to fears for its own flock, implicitly, she raised yet another intriguing reason for the Church’s public indifference to the suffering of Jews. It appears that upon Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, many Catholics were not fearful but enthusiastic about the new regime. Some younger Catholics chafed against the ban on Catholic membership in the NSDAP that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference had issued in 1930. Cesare Orsenigo the Vatican nuncio in Berlin, went so far as warning the Vatican in 1933 that the Church should take care not to alienate the many “National Socialist Catholics,” lest they left the Church. Although Brown-Fleming did not explicitly make the argument, she nonetheless raised the question whether the Catholic Church remained silent about the persecution of Jews not just because they feared a war against Catholics but because they feared losing the support of large segments of Catholics whose enthusiasm for the new regime clearly outweighed their trepidations about Nazism.

 

 

 

Share

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group.  What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share?  How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments?  While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals.  The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic  Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews.  While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

  • Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
  • Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
  • Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
  • Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
  • James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
  • Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
  • Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
  • Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
  • Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”
Share

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust: “The Holocaust Today: New Directions in Research and Teaching,” November 1-4, 2012, Northwestern University.

By Lauren Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

Professor Emeritus Jacques Kornberg, from the University of Toronto, began his introduction to the panel on the German Protestant churches with the following observation: “I have been studying the Catholic Church in Germany for a long time. I’m happy to say, the Protestant churches were worse.” Kornberg drew a laugh from the sizeable audience, but it would be one of the very few moments of levity for the two panels of the conference devoted to investigating the German churches during the Third Reich.

Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and Northwestern University, Lessons and Legacies continues to be a major conference for Holocaust scholars in North America and Europe. This year’s theme emphasized new research and teaching methods, and the scholars giving papers on the German churches set out to emphasize this in their investigations.

The panel chaired by Kornberg consisted of Robert Ericksen from Pacific Lutheran University, Christopher Probst from Saint Louis University, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ericksen’s paper, entitled “Antisemitism Under the Faulty Gaze of Early Postwar Germans,” took the case study of Klaus-Wilhelm Rath, professor of economics at the University of Göttingen, to complicate the current understanding of the denazification process. Using the example of Rath, who was part of the “terror group” of pro-Nazi academics at Göttingen, Ericksen outlines the process: an initial charge by the Allies led to relatively severe penalties, followed by years of appeals and a gradual softening of the penalties. Rath was dismissed summarily from his position in 1945. He lost his first appeal; second and third appeals led to his classification as a category III offender (assigned to those who had enthusiastically supported the regime). He appealed one final time, in 1950, sensing the change in mood towards denazification in West Germany, and taking advantage of the fact that denazification proceedings were now controlled by Germans. The final appeal resulted in a category IV classification, as a so-called Mitläufer, or “fellow traveler” of the regime. Rath was not satisfied – he wanted a full exoneration – but the change in status meant that he was no longer deemed an antisemitic agitator. This for a professor whose 1944 publications included a book depicting the Jews as responsible for the manipulation of the economy aimed at world domination, and who was designated in 1944 by the Nazi regime as one of the most important Nazi professors at Göttingen!

Like Ericksen, Probst presented material that comes in part from his recently published book on the demonization of Jews in Nazi Germany. Unlike Ericksen, whose focus is on members of the higher levels of the academy, Probst is interested in lower-level clergy in rural areas. In “German Protestant Attitudes Towards Jews and Judaism in Württemberg,” he explores the changes in antisemitism exhibited by Protestant pastors from the end of the Weimar Republic to the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. This snapshot across the conventional time periods is useful in presenting threads of continuity that otherwise are more difficult to follow. Probst shows that distinctions between religious and racial antisemitism are important insofar as the former identified Jews as a religious “other” capable of redemption through conversion, while the latter employed racial or biological language to describe an irredeemable, immutable “other.” The problem he underscores in his paper is that the Lutheran pastors he examines in and around Stuttgart used both modes of expression in their discussions of Jews before, during, and after the Third Reich. These same men, who used antisemitic tropes in their lectures and sermons, ultimately became part of a “rectory chain” that hid some seventeen Jews in their parsonages between 1943 and 1945. One of his subjects, the Heimsheim pastor Heinrich Fausel, delivered a lecture on “the Jewish question” in 1934. Seeking to distance himself from biological and racial notions of Jewishness, he borrowed liberally from the Bible and the writings of Martin Luther to emphasize the failings of Jews across centuries. At the same time, he insisted that the rejection of Christ was the pivotal moment for the Jews as a Volk, and that the German Volk must defend itself against the “terrifying foreign invasion” that began in the nineteenth century, with the emancipation of the Jews. By 1943, Fausel was hiding Jews in his home. There is no evidence to indicate that he changed his mind about them, leading Probst to argue that people often behave in ways that contradict their own beliefs, and that German pastors during the Nazi period are no exception.

Schmidt’s essay, “The Dilemma of being a Good Neighbor and a Good Citizen in the Protestant Village of Süssen,” based on research for her book about rural Judaism during the Holocaust, asks the same probing questions that anchor Probst’s study. Süssen was (and continues to be) a small town not far from Stuttgart. Her subjects are civil servants, in this case the mayor, Fritz Saalmüller, and the town’s pastor, Martin Pfleiderer. Both had deep associations with Lutheranism in the area, and both were early Nazi enthusiasts. Pfleiderer later changed his mind and left both the Nazi Party in 1936, claiming he had been ignorant of the “true” ideology at play. He did not, however, mention the Jews of Süssen, who were deported and killed. Saalmüller, who became mayor in 1933, did not share Pfleiderer’s change of heart, and as mayor he was definitively antisemitic, enforcing the regime’s policies that forced Süssen’s Jews to sell their property before they were deported. Like the pastor, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht upon the outbreak of war in 1939, but served for its duration. In 1944, he was ordered by a superior to shoot an American POW, which he did; in 1946, it was for this crime that he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Petitions for clemency came from all corners on his behalf, including from the bishop of Württemberg, who described Saalmüller as a “good, upstanding Christian” and loyal to his community. No mention was made of his dealings with the Langs and Ottenheimers, the Jewish families in Süssen who had been killed in the East. The postwar mayor of Süssen, August Eisele, was also not interested in pursuing these matters, and in fact for thirty years (!) suppressed Jewish reparations files submitted to him by three children of the deported Jewish families who had survived the Holocaust.

The panel analyzing the Catholic Church in Germany also treated antisemitism as its main focus. Panel members included Beth Griech-Polelle of Bowling Green State University, as chair; Martin Menke of Rivier College; Martina Cucchiara from Bluffton University; Kevin Spicer from Stonehill College; and commentator Suzanne Brown-Fleming, from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like those who presented on Protestantism, these scholars aimed to complicate traditional notions of Catholic antisemitism and the ways it manifested itself during the Third Reich. The panelists limited their explorations to the pre-1939 period.

Menke’s paper, “German Catholicism and Nazi Racism, 1933,” highlighted a pressing question iterated recently by Thomas Brechenmacher: where is the agency in the Catholic Church in twentieth century Germany, particularly where antisemitism is concerned? Menke considered multiple answers: the individual bishops, the bishops as a whole, the Center Party leaders, and German Catholic laity. Although he did not tender an explicit answer to this thorny question, his paper made clear that he judged all parties at least partly responsible. He related what historians now commonly accept: following the examples of their Catholic bishops, Catholics in Germany rejected Nazi racism – understood distinctly here from antisemitism – as an intrinsically un-Christian ideology. On this ground, the episcopate condemned the Nazi movement as a whole. Antisemitism, however, was a different matter: In fact, the only public figure to denounce racism and antisemitism officially was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Austria, who stressed Nächstenliebe vis-à-vis the Jews. (Innitzer was an active proponent of the Austrian fascist government of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg; he also endorsed the 1938 Anschluß, signing a declaration with an approving “Heil Hitler!”.) Menke is particularly hard, and justifiably so, on the bishops. They stated frequently, both during and after the Third Reich, that their priority was to defend the Church. Properly understood, this should have extended to a condemnation of any immoral action undertaken by the state. The bishops did not do this for several reasons: the Nazis did not take over the state until 1933; by that time, communism was accepted as the greater evil to be combatted; and finally, the Church treated Nazism as it did any other heresy, calling for a slow, unhurried examination. However, by the end of March 1933, when Hitler consolidated his hold on power, the bishops were ready to cooperate with his government, and set an example that permitted the acceleration of latent antisemitism among the Catholic populace.

Cucchiara’s work on Catholic nuns in Nazi Germany introduces women agents to a scene that frequently focuses on men as the exclusive subjects. In “Jewish Girls in Catholic Schools in Nazi Germany,” she studies the German-based School Sisters of Notre Dame, whose motherhouse was located in Munich until the 1950s. Their behavior between 1933 and 1938 complicates the conventional understanding of Catholic nuns as rescuers and convents as good hiding places for Jews. Cucchiara finds that convent-run schools were spaces of fusion, in which Catholicism and Nazism co-existed with the full knowledge, even open support, of the nuns. Jewish girls did experience more safety hidden in convents in comparison to other hiding places they may have discovered, but this does not follow, she argues, that Nazism failed to penetrate. The nuns in question worked to preserve their classrooms as distinctly Catholic spaces in the Third Reich. However, preservation often occurred with the least difficulty through integration with the state. As a result, they worked hard to highlight the positive, good works of Hitler and his regime, and emphasized continuity and sacrifice, bringing the regime more closely in line with their own religion. Cucchiara reports that Jewish girls remembered later that there was a remarkable absence of antisemitism exhibited by their religious caretakers, but this does not mean that the convents were hotbeds of anti-Nazi activity. Cucchiara concludes by urging historians to avoid imposing a false separation of religion, as represented by Church members and leaders, and Nazi Germany, and to treat witnesses who testify to this separation with care.

Kevin Spicer’s paper, “The German Catholic Church and the ‘Judenfrage’ in Weimar Germany” rounded out the panel, concerned explicitly with the connection between religious and racial antisemitism during the Weimar era. He identifies the dual pillars of the “Jewish question” for Catholics at that time: the theological pillar, identifying conversion as a possible remedy, and the societal pillar, lamenting and fearing the influence of Jews on German-Christian culture and society. During the years of the republic, a third pillar evolved, identifying Jews as a racial and biological enemy, though many Catholics continued to adhere to the more traditional, culture- and social-based aversion to Jews. Spicer’s most intriguing revelations involve Augustin Bea, the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Germany from 1921 to 1924. Bea was convinced that antisemitism was inextricably linked to anti-Catholicism; occasionally using anti-Jewish and antisemitic language, he and others defended Jews insofar as they, like Catholics, were a persecuted religious minority in Germany, and that the problem could be better solved by working with, not against, them. Otherwise, they would continue to pose a distinct potential danger to future German prosperity. His role in the production of Nostra Aetate at Vatican II, and his work to bring Jews and Christians into greater and more open dialogue in the post-Holocaust world, present Bea as a staunch opponent of discrimination and prejudice and a champion of ecumenism (unusual for a Catholic). However, in the early 1920s in Germany, Bea had not yet found this orientation.

It was fitting that Suzanne Brown-Fleming began her comments with Nostra Aetate, that great and necessary Church document promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of Vatican II. Its importance to the post-Holocaust Church is undeniable, but Brown-Fleming adeptly highlighted the individuals presented by the panel, who in the 1920s and 1930s were still mired in anti-Jewish, antisemitic ways of thinking, but who nonetheless began to grope toward reforming their interactions with their Jewish neighbours. Although Menke, Cucchiara and Spicer present historical figures who found ways to accommodate a regime that ultimately tried to solve the “Jewish problem” by physically exterminating them, the Catholic bishops, the School Sisters, and Bea never condoned the extreme racial rhetoric of Nazism. She concluded by citing one of the most significant questions that calls for further investigation, that could easily be applied to the Protestant context as well: why did some Catholics resist and other did not, and of those who resisted, what prompted them to do so?

By way of concluding this report, I want to relate an unexpected occurrence that unfolded outside of the two panels devoted to the study of the German churches, that nevertheless has a direct bearing on scholars of the German churches. Immediately preceding the panel on German Catholicism was a workshop on new cultural approaches to the Holocaust. The afternoon workshop, featuring Doris Bergen, Alon Confino, Mark Roseman, and Amos Goldberg, attracted a large audience and engendered a lively discussion, following remarks that concentrated on the role of agency and that called for the decentering of “race” from the story of the Holocaust. Religion, Christianity specifically, was identified as an element that needed to be reinserted vigorously into the narrative to make the Holocaust imaginable and representable. In the Q&A, Alan Steinweis questioned the presentation of this as innovative and “new”, pointing to Bergen and several others in the audience, including Kevin Spicer, Robert Ericksen, and Dagmar Herzog, who have contributed substantial and acclaimed works on the role of religion and the Christian churches in the Holocaust. As a spectator who had listened closely to the remarks, I found myself in agreement with Steinweis: surely those of us who work on the German churches did not produce our work in a vacuum?  Hasn’t the field of modern German history been moving for a while now towards the full integration of religious history into its narratives? The workshop is perhaps a good reminder that this integration has not yet been achieved, and that studies of the German churches, both Protestant and Catholic, must continue to present themselves as vital to the study of German society and culture as a whole, and not simply as “church history” or “religious history,” in order to explain as accurately as possible how attitudes about “otherness” can lead to persecution and genocide. In Nazi Germany, racism and Social Darwinism is part of this, but Christian belief that for centuries had depicted the Jews as “other” is just as culpable. In the wake of the turbulent exchange, as the scholars for the panel on German Catholicism settled into their seats and awaited their audience, Kevin Spicer summarized it best: “Our colleagues who don’t normally deal with the churches are discovering religion, and we’re all very excited about that.”

Share

January 2008 Newsletter

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.

JSC

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.

JSC

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

Share