Tag Archives: Kristallnacht

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

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

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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

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

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

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

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

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in its Interpretive Context”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in its Interpretive Context,” Scottish Journal of Theology 71, no. 3 (2018): 253–266.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s complex relationship to Jews and Judaism continues to preoccupy both historians and theologians. To give just one example, although Bonhoeffer has been lauded for his concern for Jews and calls for ecclesiastical resistance against the state on their behalf in his famous 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” scholars have also criticized other aspects of that same writing, including expressions of theological anti-Judaism and Bonhoeffer’s use of “Jewish Christianity” as a term of derision for a kind of legalism practiced by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement.

In this article, Ph.D. candidate David A.R. Clark revisits Bonhoeffer’s response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. Clark begins by noting that Bonhoeffer had no pulpit from which to respond to the pogrom, nor did he make a public comment. Bonhoeffer did react, though, and the evidence is in the margin of his Bible, where he wrote the date of the pogrom (November 9, 1938) beside Psalm 74:8, underlined the text, “They burn all the houses of God in the land.”[1] Clark notes that Bonhoeffer friend and scholar Eberhard Bethge described this reference to a contemporary event is unique in the marginalia of Bonhoeffer’s Bible. He adds that Bonhoeffer wrote his Finkenwalde students about a week later, explaining that he had been pondering and praying about Psalm 74, Zechariah 2:8, Romans 9:4-5, and Romans 11:11-15 in the previous few days—all passages relating to God’s special relationship to the Jews.

While other scholars have noted the political importance of Bonhoeffer’s Psalm 74 marginalia, Clark aims “to examine this annotation more thoroughly in the context of Bonhoeffer’s then-burgeoning commitment to figural interpretation of the Psalter” (255).[2] By 1935 at least, he argues, Bonhoeffer was open to drawing allegorical or symbolic meanings from biblical texts, not least because of Bonhoeffer’s conviction that the whole of Scripture was a witness to Christ and also on account of his particular interest in the relationship of Christ to the Psalms.

Clark develops Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christ in the Psalms from two of Bonhoeffer’s writings: Life Together (September/October 1938) and Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms (1940). He finds that Bonhoeffer argued that the Psalms essentially expressed the voice of Christ, and that it was most important to understand the Psalms as the prayers of the suffering and dying Christ (259). As Clark puts it, quoting Bonhoeffer, “‘No single human being can pray the psalms of lamentation out of his or her own experience.’ Rather, Bonhoeffer advocates hearing these psalms as the prayers of Christ, who ‘has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than we have’” (260). Importantly, as Clark argues, Bonhoeffer then went further, “claiming additionally that the voice of Christ in psalms of suffering discloses the presence of Christ in human suffering today: ‘psalms of lament’, [Bonhoeffer] states, ‘proclaim Jesus Christ as the only help in suffering, for in Christ God is with us’” (260).

Based on this analysis of Bonhoeffer’s interest in figural interpretation, then, Clark reinterprets Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht annotation next to Psalm 74:8 not merely as an expression of sympathy based the similarity of contemporary and ancient cases of the abandonment of Jews, à la Eberhard Bethge, but as something more. Moving from the level of historical to christological interpretation, Clark argues “that our understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation will be enriched by attending more closely to Bonhoeffer’s figural work, which reveals the deeper theological resonance of connecting Kristallnacht with Psalm 74. As David McI. Gracie states in his brief discussion of the annotation: ‘It is important to note at the outset that Bonhoeffer taught that the psalms were to be prayed, prayed with Christ, whose prayers he believed they really were – in this case with the Christ who was being driven out of Germany when the Jews were driven out.’” (262). Clark also draws on the work of Geoffrey B. Kelly to make the point that it was as if historical distance had collapsed and Christ suffered anew in the brutalization of the German Jews.

With this Clark concludes that Bonhoeffer’s Psalm 74 annotation “entails christological presence: Bonhoeffer heard the voice of Christ praying in despair in Psalm 74:8, and – in keeping with the revelatory simultaneity of figural interpretation – he heard this voice not in the distant past of Israelite history but in the contemporary persecution of present-day Jews” (263). He closes by reminding us not to make too much of one marginal notation—it was not a public protest—but adds that it “introduces added complexities” to our understanding of Bonhoeffer’s personal solidarity with Jews (265).

Notes:

[1] Bonhoeffer also placed a vertical line and bold exclamation point alongside the following verse, Psalm 74:9, which reads: “We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long.” (ESV), but as Clark notes, the date of the Kristallnacht pogrom is written only beside verse 8, and specifically beside the underlined words, “They burn all the houses of God in the land,” so that we cannot be sure that the marginalia pertaining to verse 9 relate to the events of November 1938.

[2] German-Jewish literary scholar Eric Auerbach defined the term in his work Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 73: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”

The Great Silence: How the Churches Behaved When the Synagogues Burned in November 1938

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

The Great Silence: How the Churches Behaved When the Synagogues Burned in November 1938

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This article was originally published in zeitzeichen, November 2018, p.45-47. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher. You can view the original German article with images here.

In the course of the excesses of November 1938, 1400 synagogues were destroyed, hundreds of homes and apartments devastated, and their residents humiliated, injured and robbed. The terror operation and its consequences claimed ca. 1400 deaths. And the churches, Protestants and Catholics alike, were silent, explains the Berlin historian Manfred Gailus.

***

“When we were silent on April 1, ‘33,” the Berlin historian and pedagogue Elisabeth Schmitz reminded Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer in Berlin-Dahlem shortly after the events of November1938 pogrom, “when we were silent about the public display cases of Der Stürmer, about the satanic agitation of the press, about the poisoning of the soul of the people and of the youth, about the destruction of lives and marriages through so-called [Nuremberg]‘Laws,’ about the methods of Buchenwald—there and a thousand other times were we guilty on the 10th of November 1938. And now? It appears that once again the church, where even the stones are crying out, is leaving it up to the discretion and the courage of the individual pastor to decide if he wants to say anything and, if so, what.”

Elisabeth Schmitz thanked the pastor for his courageous penitential sermon of the 16^th of November, which she had heard together with her “non-Aryan” friend Martha Kassel. Already, she reported to him, rumors were circulating that a mark was planned for the clothing of Jews: “There is nothing impossible in this country, we know that. (…) We have experienced the destruction of [Jewish] property, for which purpose the shops were called in the summer. If one goes over to labelling people—a conclusion suggests itself, which I do not want to specify. And no one will claim that these orders would not be as promptly, as unconscionably and as stubbornly, as evilly and as sadistically carried out as the present ones. I have heard of gruesome bloody excesses already this time.”

Disgusted by the excesses of violence, in protest the lecturer refused to continue teaching in a state school after November 9, 1938, for a government that allowed the synagogues to burned down. At the age of 45, she applied for her retirement on grounds of conscience.

Since 1933, she had agonized over the notorious “policy of silence” of her church, the Confessing Church (BK), and persistently opposed it through talks, letters, a memorandum on the situation of German “non-Aryan” (1935), and finally with her resignation from her profession as teacher and her commitment to rescue-resistance of persecuted Jews and “non-Aryan” Christians. But the “protesting Protestant” Schmitz was an exception.

Protesting Protestant

According to current research, about 1,400 synagogues were destroyed in the course of the November excesses of 1938. Hundreds of homes and a much larger number of apartments were wrecked and their inhabitants humiliated, injured, and robbed. Up to 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and in some cases looted. More than 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps in the days after November 10. The violence and its immediate consequences claimed 1,400 deaths, as far we know up to now. Even 80 years after the November pogroms, the exact number is still unclear.

And the churches—both Protestant and Catholic—were silent. The two major confessions were the only remaining institutions in the Nazi state that were not immediately coordinated and therefore could have spoken. In the shadow of the violent events, bishops and provosts, general superintendents, professors of theology, synods, the vast majority of pastors, the parishes, and the people of the church were silent. Silence was the salient feature of church behavior in the face of violence.

This silence, however, could have various motivations: there was an embarrassed silence, a silence of shame, a dumb horror. Often there was a silence of fear, because those who opened their mouths in criticism risked a lot. There was, finally, a silence of secret agreement or approval of the excesses of violence.

The Elberfeld Confessing Church pastor, Hermann Klugkist Hesse, noted in his diary on November 11: “The synagogue is burning down completely. The chapel in the Jewish cemetery also burned last night. The gravestones were overturned. (…) They played football with the Hebrew Bibles in the Genügsamkeits Street.” And on November 12: “Yesterday, Tudi [his wife Gertrud] took a walk to the Weinberg. Many, many people standing there before the rubble, but all silent. Silent.”

A few days later, in a letter to his son Franz, it says: “On the one hand, I was quite happy that I did not have to preach on the Day of Repentance, especially since many calls from the congregation urged caution … On the other side, I’m sorry that, for example, in the sermon that Pastor Rabius gave this morning, not a word was spoken about that which worries everyone. I mean, I would have bowed with the congregation during the sermon in bitter sorrow for those things that were happening in our midst, in the midst of the Christian community, in the midst of a people that still wants to be Christian after all. Pain, suffering, sadness—that should have marked the Repentance Day sermon this time—not about the events as such, but that they happened among us. Should not we have been light and salt in a different way so that would not have happened?”

Völkisch Theology

In the Protestant churches of the Hitler era—in contrast to the Catholic Church—German Christian “faith movements,” which propagated a völkisch theology and crass antisemitism, had gained considerable influence. Many of their followers, including many pastors, had welcomed the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 and not a few German Christians (DC) left November 1938 with quiet approval.

Pastor Friedrich Peter, for example—a leading member of the German Christians, bishop in Magdeburg from 1933 to 1935, then transferred to the Berlin Cathedral by Reich Church Minister Hanns Kerrl—gave the funeral address in Dusseldorf for the state funeral of the Parisian Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath a week after the pogroms: “And today, at this open grave, we ask the peoples of the earth, we ask the Christians around the world: What do you wish to do against the spirit of that people of whom Christ said, ‘Your God has been a murderer from the beginning and did not exist in the truth.’ We Germans have learned that one should ask for great thoughts and a pure heart from God. But what about Judah, whose god is a murderer from the beginning?”

The Stuttgart DC theologian Immanuel Schairer wrote a sympathetic commentary on the pogroms on November 20. He relied on Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” and cited the recommended seven measures of a “sharp mercy,” including the burning of their synagogues and the destruction of their homes. The Thuringian Regional Bishop Martin Sasse sent out his writing Martin Luther and the Jews: Away with Them! as a set of talking points for Thuringian pastors immediately after the pogroms. In the November 24 “Church Gazette for Mecklenburg,” there appeared a “reminder on the Jewish question”: no Christian German could “lament” the measures against the Jews in the Reich.

Our Christian compassion, it was said, was not to apply to the Jews, but to the peoples of Europe deceived and exploited by Judaism. The fight against Judaism was a vital issue for the German soul. In a late November 1938 communication to his friend, the journalist Wilhelm Stapel, the Göttingen theologian Emanuel Hirsch, a master’s student of the church historian Karl Holl (who died in 1926), responded to the violent events: He was “keen” to force the Jews into emigration by any brutality required for that purpose. If it wasn’t enough, there would be more to come. He did not believe that the “events” were folly, but rather clear and expedient political will.

Even in purely Catholic regions of southern and western Germany, the violence took place unhindered in front of everyone. No public statement on the pogrom came from Pope Pius XII in Rome or from the German Catholic bishops. Here too official silence was the predominant reaction from the institutions. What was missing from Catholics, however, was that explicit and sometimes public approval, as can be demonstrated from many Protestants. Within the Catholic Church, there was—a serious difference—no mass Christian movement comparable to the German Christians (DC). Catholic clergy kept noticeably farther away from the Hitler party (NSDAP party membership under one percent) than Protestant pastors, who had joined the NSDAP in the order of 15 to 20 percent, depending on the regional church.

Against this background, Catholic behavior was comparatively more reserved in November 1938, and the papal motto of an ecclesiastical silence was maintained almost completely. Courageous individuals such as the Catholic provost Bernhard Lichtenberg in Berlin were the exception here.

Papal Motto

Open your mouth for the mute. Examples show that this could be risky in the shadow of the Kristallnacht events and dangerous for individuals who protested. The Württemberg pastor Julius von Jan denounced the crimes that had just taken place in his Repentance Day sermon in Oberlenningen (November 16) and was attacked by a pack of motorized SA-men, physically mishandled and later imprisoned. The Stuttgart Special Court sentenced him to one year and four months in prison, citing the “Law Against Treacherous Criticism of the Government” (“Heimtücke-Gesetz”) and the “Pulpit Law” (“Kanzelparagraphen”).

In early December 1938, the “Pastor Grüber Bureau” in Berlin took up its work. This institution of the Confessing Church helped racially-persecuted people in the then often life-saving emigration process. This was an ecclesial response to the pogroms, sustained by the decidedly “Dahlemite” wing of the church opposition, a minority in the Protestant churches. But this was not the only response from the church: at the beginning of May 1939, a meeting was held at the Wartburg near Eisenach to found the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life.” German Christian (DC) pastor Walter Grundmann, a pupil of the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel and professor of “völkisch Theology” in Jena, spoke about “The dejudaization of religious life as a task of German theology and church.”

In both major confessions, great ecclesiastical silence predominated as the synagogues burned. Alongside that, there were unspeakable acclamations of the antisemitic excesses of violence from circles of Protestant German Christian (DC) theologians. Open opposition to the November pogroms remained the rare exception of courageous individuals such as pastor Julius von Jan in Württemberg or Dean Bernhard Lichtenberg in Berlin.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

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

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Note: Vera K. Fast, ed., Companions of the Peace Diaries and Letters of Monica Storrs, 1931-1939

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Book Note: Vera K. Fast, ed., Companions of the Peace Diaries and Letters of Monica Storrs, 1931-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), ISBN 0-8020-8254-8, 246 Pp.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In November 1938, one of the more remarkable responses to Hitler’s brutal pogrom against the German Jews—the Kristallnacht—came from a remote Anglican parish in distant northern British Columbia.
Monca Storrs, the parish worker at St Martin’s Church, Fort St. John, in the newly settled Peace River District, was so outraged that she spontaneously contacted George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester and chairman of the Church of England Committee for non-Aryan Christians, and offered to sponsor and act as guardian to two young victims, if the bishop could arrange for them to be brought to England, and if they were willing to come out and live in what she described as “the very western edge of the British Empire”.

Fast-Companions Monica was a cultured English gentlewoman who had volunteered in 1931 to come out to western Canada to help build up the Anglican Church amongst the isolated and often impoverished homesteaders of the Peace Dictrict. Luckily, at the end of 1938, Monica was taking a home leave, so she was able to meet the two German boys when they arrived in England on one of the “Kindertransporte” which rescued several thousand children in the few short months before the outbreak of war.
Horst, later Hugh, Schramm and Arwed, later David, Lewinski had been selected through the Society of Friends office in Berlin, where Bishop Bell’s sister-in Law, Laura Livingstone, took care of the transport and the paperwork involved. The children had to say goodbye to their parents on the Berlin railway station platform, not knowing when or if they would ever meet again. In Hugh’s case, his father was killed fighting in Russia, but his mother managed to escape to Shanghai. She and her son were later reunited when she migrated to the United States after the war was over. In David’s case, both his parents were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother died but his father survived. In 1953 David was at last able to fly over to Germany to meet his father again, after fourteen cruel years of separation.
Monica had hoped to bring the boys back with her to Canada when she returned in 1939, but bureaucracy intervened. The Canadian government was still reluctant to admit Jewish refugees, even Christian ones. On her way home, she stopped off in Ottawa to intervene personally with the immigration officials and even secured an interview with the Governor-General, Lord Tweedsmuir, to ask for his help. But it took a year before permission was granted for the boys to accompany a group of English children being evacuated to Canada. Eventually they arrived in British Columbia to be greeted most warmly by Monica and her colleagues in the community she had established as the Companions of the Peace.

This generous response undoubtedly saved the lives of these two refugee boys. But for years this international and humanitarian gesture remained unknown. This book shows us this inspiring example of one woman’s resolute service and outreach from furthest western Canada to help alleviate the terrible crimes of the Holocaust.