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Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies XV, The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies XV, The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives, Washington University in St. Louis, November 2018

By Lauren Rossi, Simon Fraser University

The Holocaust Educational Foundation’s biennial conference, Lessons and Legacies, met this November in St. Louis, Missouri. This international conference continues to draw scholars from across North America and Europe, with some representation from Israel, Australia, Mexico, and Colombia. Because the focus of the conference is relatively narrow but the quality of the research presented is generally quite high, the loyalty of the attendees is evident—many have been attending for decades. Panels are mixed with both luminaries from the field as well as young scholars presenting their work for the first time to a professional audience.

This year, the quality of the work on display was no exception. The conference featured a mix of traditional panels, closed seminars with pre-circulated papers, video and poster presentations, workshops, and three dinner presentations: a keynote by Omer Bartov, whose most recent book, Anatomy of a Genocide, is a devastatingly powerful microhistory of the Ukrainian town Buczacz before and during the Holocaust (Bartov’s mother was born there and emigrated to Palestine with her parents in 1935); an awards ceremony for distinguished service and retirements; and a film screening about the Warsaw Ghetto archive. The conference, and the foundation itself remain firmly committed to the Holocaust as its primary research and pedagogical focus, but the panel content was wide-ranging. An abbreviated list of topics includes perpetrator ideology, cultural production in the camps, Holocaust memory in science fiction, museums, wartime relief, relationships between Jews and “non-Aryans,” Holocaust memory in Poland, photography and spectatorship, victimhood, and the Frankfurt-Auschwitz trials. At least two panels were devoted to situating the Holocaust within the broader context of genocide studies, one of which provoked a valuable discussion with the audience about comparative studies of cultural genocide and the Holocaust. The re-emergence of extremist movements in Europe and the far right on both sides of the Atlantic was also on display. One panel in particular, about legislating and criminalizing the history of the Holocaust, featured a conversation between Elzbieta Janicka, Jan Grabowski, and Jan T. Gross, the latter whose work is directly involved in Poland’s current history debates and has been much maligned by critics on the right.

The HEF, and especially its founder, Theodore “Zev” Weiss, has long been an ardent supporter of the importance of researching and teaching about the Holocaust and the role of the churches. So it was noticeable that the program, although heavy on the theme of antisemitism (most of it regionally focused, on Bavaria, the Ustasha, Florence, Odessa, Italy, Latvia, and Poland), offered no panel about religion or Christianity or the current state of research in the field. Only one paper explicitly addressed the topic of Catholicism, and that was my own presentation, “Catholic Seminarians and Vernichtungskrieg, 1939-1945: Masculinity, Complicity, Resistance”, in a panel about the Holocaust and masculinities. (The paper was well received, but the panel was more about gender than about religion, and much of the commentary reflected this.) This could reflect a lack of proposals for the conference organizers to choose from, though several of our editors were in attendance and I have learned that at least one proposed panel about the churches was declined. The lack of this theme certainly should not be taken as a suggestion that the field is exhausted. Our own newsletter’s quarterly installments showcase the most recent scholarship in both English and German about the various facets of Christianity and the Third Reich as well as the churches confronting postwar challenges such as secularization and their histories under fascism. The editors usually have a lengthy list of articles and books to choose from for review.

So perhaps it is a sign of other challenges, two of the most obvious being that many of those scholars currently working in the field of Christianity and the Holocaust do not attend Lessons and Legacies (or do not attend regularly), and that those scholars who do attend are not actively working in the field. Like many academic institutes that host regular conferences, the Holocaust Educational Foundation does some advertising but relies largely on word of mouth to reach new scholars, including overseas. It might be a question of making stronger appeals to those scholars whose work merits showcasing in this venue. The organizers of the next Lessons and Legacies conference, meeting in Ottawa, Canada, in 2020, might also be persuaded to consider accepting more papers and panels about religion and Christianity if it was the case that this year’s organizers turned down such proposals. There are some among the editors of the CCHQ, myself included, who could be more proactive about putting such panels together and pitching them to the organizers. In this manner, a third challenge—persuading the current decision-makers on the foundation’s academic council that the Holocaust, religion, and the churches is still an important topic producing innovative research—might be relatively easily overcome.

Another challenge, and one potentially more difficult to master, given the HEF’s ongoing and obvious commitment to the Holocaust, is a suggestion that was voiced at one of the panels that I attended, of including more papers and panels that engage with the field of genocide studies. (The audience at this panel was enthusiastic about the idea.) Increasingly over the past few conferences, Lessons and Legacies has featured papers that address genocide beyond the Holocaust, but these are always exceptions and most panels are devoted specifically to the genocide of Europe’s Jews. The debate about the Holocaust as the paradigmatic genocide, traditionally a non-starter for the specialist in Holocaust studies, contuse to loom large in genocide studies. In accepting that the Holocaust features as one of several twentieth-century genocides, Lessons and Legacies could make an important pivot that does nothing to diminish the importance of studying the Holocaust while at the same time appealing to a larger array of scholars, some of whom are doing valuable work on the role of institutional religion, its actors and adherents, and mass violence and genocide. (My own research currently tends in this direction.) And the field of genocide studies, which grew out of Holocaust studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, is a rapidly-growing field that reaches all corners of the globe. Traditionally, such comparative approaches have yielded some of the strongest, most thought-provoking presentations at Lessons and Legacies. This opinion will not be shared by all who attend Lessons and Legacies, and my suggestion is not meant to indicate that either the conference or the foundation’s work are somehow lacking because their focus is specific to the Holocaust. Indeed, this is the fifteenth Lessons and Legacies, the sixteenth is already being planned, and it continues to attract scholars both well established (Dagmar Herzog presented new findings in the T4 archive; Marion Kaplan discussed Jewish refugees in Portugal) and emerging (Sebastian Huebel analyzed Jews and gender in prewar concentration camps; Lorena Sekwan Fontaine spoke about cultural genocide in Canada). I do feel it worth noting that a conference already producing such diverse research can only be enriched by engaging more consistently with research from genocide studies.

Conference Report: 14th biennial Lessons & Legacies Conference

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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.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

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

By Stacy Hushion, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conference Note: Lessons and Legacies 2014, Boca Raton, Florida

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Conference Note: Lessons and Legacies 2014, Boca Raton, Florida

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, University of Notre Dame

The thirteenth biennial Holocaust conference, sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation, took place from October 30 to November 2 in Boca Raton, Florida. The conference prides itself on being the premier gathering of scholars across North America and Europe who share teaching and research interests in the subject of the Holocaust. This year’s theme, “The Holocaust After 70 Years: New Perspectives on Persecution, Resistance, and Survival”, echoes themes from previous years, emphasizing expanding perspectives (2010) and new directions (2012) in connection with the Holocaust’s continued relevance today. The Holocaust as a subject of historical inquiry continues to sustain immense scholarly interest, which makes it challenging to craft truly original or groundbreaking arguments. However, the scholars who meet at Lessons and Legacies are as devoted to revisiting and improving older arguments as they are to producing brand-new ones. Consequently, the quality of the papers is generally extremely high.

Gershon Greenberg delivered a keynote address on the first night, speaking about Jewish religious thought through the Holocaust. Marion Kaplan, discussing her research on Jewish refugees in Portugal, gave a second keynote address on the conference’s third night. There were two plenary sessions, the first considering new generational approaches to Holocaust studies, the second, featuring pre-circulated papers, about the impact of feminism and gender studies on Holocaust studies. Over the course of two and a half days, the conference held twenty-three panels, several special sessions, and four workshops geared towards teaching and discussion of sources.

As is often the case at this conference, panel topics were both specific – a discussion of the digital collections of the International Tracing Service, the Holocaust documentation center in Bad Arolsen, Germany; a consideration of the place of the Kindertransport in commemoration and literature; the role of Spain in the Holocaust – as well as broad, with panels on culture and memory, new cultural approaches to the Holocaust, gender, violence, resistance in camps and ghettoes, and the Holocaust in photographs as well as representations of the Holocaust in film and literature. While there were no panels devoted specifically to the churches or religion under Nazism, a paper by Joanna Sliwa of Clark University recounted the role of Krakow nuns in the rescue of Jewish children. Staying true to the general theme, several panels featured topics under revision or reconsideration, including scholars rethinking Nazi Germany beyond the racial state, a panel investigating the writing of Holocaust history beyond the “linguistic turn”, and a discussion of new conceptions of collaboration and perpetration.

The conference was well attended by many of the field’s established scholars, junior scholars, and graduate students. Four scholars – Steven T. Katz, Dagmar Herzog, Roger Brooks, and Francis Nicosia – received distinguished achievement awards from the Foundation for their contributions to Holocaust Studies. The conference’s book series also launched its most recent volume, Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, with essays drawn from papers presented at the 2010 conference.

The next Lessons and Legacies conference will take place in November 2016 at Claremont-McKenna College, in southern California.

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust

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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.”