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Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 322 pp. ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Matthew Hockenos, a mid-career historian of modern Germany, has provided us with a new and much-needed book about Martin Niemöller, one of the best-known Protestants to speak out against Nazi church policies, who then suffered imprisonment from 1937 to 1945 as a result. This work, published by Basic Books, is carefully researched, well argued, very nicely written, and deserving of a broad audience. It also will reward academics and others interested specifically in the role of German Protestants in Nazi Germany.

For those of us focused on contemporary church history and Nazi Germany, Martin Niemöller is a pretty famous guy. Matthew Hockenos (one of the editors of this Contemporary Church History Quarterly) is fully aware of that. However, he begins his book by acknowledging that Niemöller’s so-called “confession” is far, far better known than Niemöller himself. Beginning “in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” he argues, human rights activists and secondary school teachers made these lines ubiquitous. “College students adorn their dorm-room walls” with these words, he writes, and the statement is “prominently displayed” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and elsewhere (2-3). Hockenos borrows a small portion of these famous words from Niemöller for his title. The more complete version also forms his epigraph for the book:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. (1)

Hockenos is certainly correct to assume that millions of people who know these words do not know Niemöller. His book also makes the implicit claim that many who know Martin Niemöller do not know him well enough.

Part of the problem with “knowing” Niemöller involves hagiography. In our postwar search for Christian heroes within the confines of Nazi Germany, he naturally attracted attention. Niemöller was an important co-founder of the Confessing Church, that 20 percent of Protestants in Germany who resisted the Nazified distortions of Christian theology pushed by the enthusiastically pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen. Within the Confessing Church, he was a leader in what became known as the “radical Niemöller wing,” a rump group that also included the even more famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They were less willing than many in the Confessing Church to combine opposition to Nazified heresies (such as throwing the Old Testament out of the Bible or removing Christian pastors “of Jewish descent” from the clergy roster) with ongoing enthusiasm for the political leadership of Hitler. Hockenos comments, “Previous biographies (two in German and three in English, to date) have done little to probe the depths of this complicated man, preferring instead to present him in a mostly heroic light.” He then describes his book as,

a revisionist biography that weaves together Niemöller’s personal story with the great dramas of the twentieth century that drove his moral and political evolution. It seeks neither to vilify him nor to add to the existing hagiographies, but rather to understand him and his confession and to reveal what his transformation from Nazi sympathizer to committed pacifist tells us about how and under what circumstances such reversals are possible. (3)

The second part of the problem in Niemöller’s biographical treatment, according to Hockenos, is also rooted in the hagiographic impulse: a tendency to focus primarily upon Niemöller’s life from 1933-1945. Hockenos devotes about one-third of his book to Niemöller’s life before 1933. During this period, Martin Niemöller mirrored virtually all of the characteristics that led so many Christians to welcome Adolf Hitler as a savior of Germany from its many troubles. Martin’s patriotism and reverence for authoritarian leadership had been nurtured by his father, Heinrich, a Lutheran pastor in Lippstatt and then in Elbersfeld, both in northwestern Germany. In 1892, the year of Martin’s birth, his father visited Wittenberg to attend the 375th anniversary of the Reformation, organized as a special, national celebration by the recently installed Kaiser Wilhelm II. “With the crowds cheering, a young pastor in his robe and collar, overwhelmed by the patriotic religious experience, hurled his hat toward the kaiser’s entourage, where it landed amid the honorary guard.” This was Martin’s father. Though chastised by the captain of the honor guard, Heinrich later would tell this story and add, “But I would do the same again” (15).

In 1898 Martin’s father again had the unexpected pleasure of sharing an event with the Kaiser. Wilhelm II, nurturing the robust expansion of Germany’s military and colonial place in the world, organized a trip to Jerusalem to inaugurate on Reformation Day the German-built Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Heinrich had to travel on a British steamer, hired by the German Protestant Church, rather than Wilhelm’s royal yacht. However, though only a simple pastor among more important church officials, he was awarded the last spot on this steamer by the Protestant Consistory of Prussia. Mostly thanks to donations from his parishioners to pay the necessary fee, this chance to visit the Holy Land for such an auspicious occasion became one of the most treasured memories of Heinrich Niemöller. Hockenos then fits this early event in Martin’s life, his awareness of his father’s deep love for Germany and respect for the Kaiser, into the story as follows:

The German Protestant pastorate claimed that it was apolitical and above party politics, but in fact the vast majority of pastors were intensely loyal to the Hohenzollern monarchy and supported right-wing anti-Semitic parties. To celebrate Reformation Day in Jerusalem in the presence of His Majesty was an unforgettable benchmark in Heinrich Niemöller’s life. That his trip was as much a celebration of German power and prestige as a religious pilgrimage is evident in certain entries in his ornate memory book, Up to Jerusalem. . . . The consecration of the Redeemer Church itself was a milestone in the history of German Protestantism . . . . Nothing could better demonstrate the alliance of throne and altar, in his view, and that of many others. (18-19)

A second phase of Martin Niemöller’s political education came when he joined the German navy, an experience he later described in his 1934 memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit. Martin had dreamed of joining the navy ever since his toddler years when he wore his sailor suit to church on Sundays. He became a naval cadet at the age of eighteen, after finishing at the “top of his class” at Gymnasium (a common experience for the intelligent and disciplined Martin). He graduated and received his rank of lieutenant in 1913 at the age of twenty-one (22-25). One year later this placed him at war, and Hockenos’s chapters on World War One and its aftermath show us how the milieu and attitudes Niemöller imbibed from his father shaped him during that fraught period of German history.

Hockenos introduces the background to World War One by describing Kaiser Wilhelm’s great desire to make Germany a world power, especially including the creation of a navy to rival that of Great Britain. He then uses a quotation from Admiral von Tirpitz to give us a window on the logic: “The pressure exerted on England, just by the presence of our fleet—the threat to their position as a world power–better than anything else, ensures peace.”[7] This came in April 1914, so that the peace von Tirpitz thought Germans were ensuring by their aggressive naval build-up and their challenge toward England lasted a bit less than four months. Hockenos also highlights both the irony and the complexity of Niemöller’s exultant response, as a naval officer, the son of a pastor, and a future pastor, to his part in the sinking of British ships and the toll of the dead. He listed death tolls in individual actions from dozens to hundreds. In one case of 1916, after laying underwater mines which sank nine ships, Niemöller later wrote in his memoir (long after the heat and adrenalin of battle), “Revenge is sweet” (36).

Niemöller did not approve of Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication and flight from Germany, to the extent that he himself considered his naval officer’s oath of loyalty to the Kaiser still in place until Wilhelm’s death in 1941. He also resented the advent of democracy and creation of the Weimar Republic. He and his brother Wilhelm, a (soon-to-be) fellow pastor and future historian of the Confessing Church, both sympathized with and participated briefly in the Freikorps, rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the Weimar Republic. Then, though it might seem jarring to those who know Niemöller as an opponent of Hitler, both Martin and Wilhelm gave early support to Hitler, Wilhelm even joining the Nazi Party in 1923. Both of them voted for Hitler and celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Refusing to give Niemöller too easy an out for his early politics, Hockenos writes,

He was a middle-aged man who had read Mein Kampf and knew very well what Hitler stood for. And even after he watched Hitler abolish the national parliament, ban political parties and trade unions, and persecute his opponents, Niemöller refused to distance himself from radical nationalism and anti-Semitism—even on occasion after 1945. (264)

However, Hockenos also admires Niemöller’s gradual change in the years after 1945:

His transformation from nationalist to internationalist, from militarist to pacifist, and from racist and anti-Semite to champion of equality all evinced a more general transformation—from provincial, narrow-minded chauvinist to compassionate, open-minded humanitarian. In this, Niemöller is to be admired and his evolution celebrated. Committed as most of us are today to particular beliefs, we would do well to engage with the life of a man who changed his—even if that effort ultimately falls short of the truly heroic. (5)

I have focused here on that early portion of Martin Niemöller’s life, that which tied him most closely to the world of his father’s German nationalism and rightwing politics. This is the sort of thing that helps explain his early willingness, and that of very many Christians in Germany, to accept the leadership of Adolf Hitler, even with enthusiasm. These products of Wilhelmine Germany faced the high costs and wrenching defeat of World War One, followed by the challenge of democratic norms and cultural openness under the Weimar Republic, including specific difficulties and disappointments experienced during that period. Hockenos tells us that, and it tends to put Niemöller and many of his colleagues on the wrong side of history. Hockenos also tells us, however, of the heroic Martin Niemöller, especially his courage and intransigence in the face of Nazi ideologues interfering with church government and his freedom of belief. Then Hockenos gives us four chapters devoted to Martin Niemöller after 1945.

I like this choice: three important chapters on Niemöller before 1933; three chapters on Niemöller’s struggle against and suffering under the Nazi state, for which he is rightly famous; and then four chapters on those nearly four full decades in which he was a world celebrity. Beginning with his release from Dachau, Niemöller was an important figure in helping the postwar German Protestant Church deal with its past. This began with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945, followed by gradually facing up to the implications of the Holocaust and leading finally to a dramatically new theological stance on the relationship between Christians and Jews. Niemöller served as President of the Church in Hessen and Nassau from 1947 to 1964 and as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968. He was active in the international peace movement already in the 1950s, becoming friends with the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, among others. He became known for his support of the 1968 generation and its liberalizing efforts, his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, his visits to Hanoi, and his visits to Russia.

It is no surprise that Hockenos extends his examination of Niemöller into these postwar years and beyond. This was the time in which Christian churches began a dramatic reckoning with the past, spurred on, of course, by the reality that a Christian nation had murdered six million Jews. Hockenos shows respect for Martin Niemöller as he describes the nine tumultuous decades of his life, but he is right to say that this is no hagiographic treatment. It is rather, a clear-eyed, well-informed look into nine dramatic decades in German history and in the history of the German Protestant Church, nine decades that corresponded with and were impacted by Niemöller’s ninety-two years.

 

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On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

This month marks the 80th anniversary of the Confessing Church’s most courageous act of opposition to Hitler’s regime. On June 4, 1936, Pastor Wilhelm Jannasch of the Confessing Church delivered to the Reich Chancellery a memorandum addressed to Adolf Hitler that stands out in the history of the Church Struggle for its frank criticism of Nazi church policy and, more remarkably, the Nazi attempt to force racial anti-Semitism on the Christian population. It is both unfortunate and highly illuminating that this extraordinary act of resistance remains tarnished by the Confessing Church’s decision to distance itself from Friedrich Weißler, a Christian of Jewish descent, who the Nazis arrested for his role in the publication of the memorandum and eventually murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Following the decisive break in the confessional front at the fourth confessional synod in Bad Oeynhausen in February 1936, the Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church represented by the Second Provisional Church Administration and the “Dahlemites” in the Council for the German Evangelical Church drafted the memorandum to Hitler. The memorandum went through several renditions and, as is often the case with statements written by committees, it lost some of its sharpness as the process went on for several weeks. In Martin Greschat’s book on the memorandum, Zwischen Widerspruch und Widerstand, he identifies the theologian Hans Asmussen as one of its principal authors; other signees included Fritz Müller, Martin Albertz, Hans Böhm, Bernhard Heinrich Forck, and Otto Fricke of the Provisional Administration and Karl Lücking, Friedrich Middendorf, Martin Niemöller, and Reinhold von Thadden of the Council for the German Evangelical Church.

The primary focus of the memorandum’s seven sections was to criticize Nazi church policy, especially the state’s interference in the affairs of the church. Instead of providing the churches with the freedom and protection Hitler promised in 1933, the authors claimed that the Nazi state and party were guilty of publically assailing the Christian faith, muzzling church leaders, and trying to de-Christianize the nation. Church leaders had complained about all of these incursions in the religious life of the population before but never with such transparency and brutal honesty, calling out Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Hanns Kerrl, and even Hitler for harsh criticism.

But by far the most impressive and distinctive section of the document is the one in which the Confessing Church turns its sight on Nazi racial thought and in two succinct sentences rejects the Nazi racial worldview and racial anti-Semitism:

When blood, ethnicity, race, and honor here receive the rank of eternal values, then the Evangelical Christian is forced by the First Commandment to reject this valuation. When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

These are extremely courageous words in the context of the mid-1930s when Hitler was cracking down on dissent with increasing brutality. Prior to the memorandum only a few lone voices from within the Confessing Church had the courage to condemn racial anti-Semitism toward unbaptized Jews.  We should be clear, however, that while the fifth section calls on Christians to counter Nazi hatred toward Jews by following the commandment to love one’s neighbor, the memorandum does not condemn the religious anti-Semitism prevalent within the churches that viewed unbaptized Jews as “erring brothers” who crucified Jesus and lived under God’s eternal damnation.

The authors of the memorandum had hoped to keep its contents confidential until after Hitler had an opportunity to read the document and to respond. Despite their efforts, the document was leaked and published in the foreign press in July, just as Berlin was gearing up for the summer Olympics. Nazi officials were irate, as was the leadership of the Confessing Church. Among those responsible for its publication was Ernst Tillich, a down-and-out 26-year-old former theology student with connections to the press. He had borrowed a copy of the memorandum from Friedrich Weißler, the bureau chief and a legal consultant for the Provisional Church Government, copied it verbatim, and shared it with journalists for a fee. When the Provisional Church Government learned that it was Weißler who provided Tillich with a copy of the memorandum, it suspended Weißler for breach of trust.

In October and November 1936 the Gestapo arrested Tillich, his friend Werner Koch, and Weißler on “suspicion of illegal activity,” i.e., colluding with the foreign press against the Nazi regime. All three were sent to the police prison at Alexanderplatz, where they were interrogated, and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937. Because Weißler was a Jew as defined by the Nazi state, he was immediately separated from Tillich and Koch and, after six days of torture at the hands of the SS camp guards, Weißler died. Koch and Tillich, on the other hand, were released in 1938 and 1939, respectively.

During the crucial weeks and months of Weißler’s internment—when intervention by leading churchmen might have been effective—leaders of the Confessing Church, including Martin Niemöller, deliberately distanced themselves from their colleague in order to protect the reputation of the Confessing Church from the political charge that Weißler had acted treasonably by publishing the memorandum. Let there be no misunderstanding: Hitler’s racial state was responsible for the murder of Friedrich Weißler—not the Confessing Church—but it is a shame that his brothers in Christ did not even attempt to intervene on his behalf, being well aware of his special status as baptized Jew.

The Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church should be applauded for the unequivocal stance it took in June 1936 against Nazi racial anti-Semitism. At no time before or after did the Confessing Church repeat this rebuke with such clarity. But in the aftermath of the memorandum’s premature publication, fearing a Nazi crackdown, they disassociated themselves from their most vulnerable of colleagues, leaving Weißler to his fate at the hands of the SS. The legacy of the “Hitler Memo” is in many ways the legacy of the Confessing Church, a legacy that includes courage and cowardice, opposition and accommodation, and resistance and complicity.

 

 

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Review of Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ralf K. Wüstenberg, and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen. Das Politische in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Review of Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ralf K. Wüstenberg, and Jens Zimmermann, eds., Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen. Das Politische in der Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers. A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Guetersloher Verlagshaus, 2014), 464 pages. ISBN: 9783579081687.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

A Spoke in the Wheel: The Political in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a collection of thirty essays first presented as plenary lectures and papers at the XI International Bonhoeffer Congress held in Sigtuna, Sweden in June 2012. The collection is structured in three parts under the headings: Political Resistance; Christian Anthropology and the Political; and Church and Civil Society. The first part, which is most relevant to church historians, contains essays that contextualize Bonhoeffer’s political resistance to Nazism historically and theologically. The second part contains an assortment of theological essays that examine Bonhoeffer’s theology through a variety of interpretive lenses, including his understanding of prayer, grace, guilt, discipleship, redemption, reconciliation, divine mandates, and his critique of religion, among other things. The essays in the third part return to more concrete matters by examining Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between the church, civil society, and the state in the 1930s and 40s, but also in particular postwar contexts, such as South Africa and Brazil. The overall quality of the essays is exceptional and the collection should be seen as a showcase for recent research in Bonhoeffer studies.

Dem Rad in die Speichen fallen A Spoke in the Wheel vonSome of the highlights of the collection include the lead essay by Wolfgang Huber in which he provides a theological profile of Bonhoeffer’s political resistance, particularly his involvement in Hans von Dohnanyi’s conspiracy in the Abwehr. Despite the limitations placed on what Bonhoeffer could put into writing during the Third Reich, Huber believes a “theology of resistance” can be teased out of Bonhoeffer’s writing during this time. His call for the Church to take a public stand in solidarity with the Jews against the repressive state; his formulation of a confession of guilt in the name of the church; his theory of a responsible life; and his trust in God’s guidance—all indicate the rudiments of a theology of resistance, Huber believes.

Josef Außermair suggests that in addition to the texts identified by Huber that more attention needs to be paid to Bonhoeffer’s teaching at Finkenwalde to understand his political resistance. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis in his teaching on witnessing to Christ in the world, Außermair argues, was his way to prepare his students to participate in the Church Struggle and to confront the political challenges of the day. Sven-Erik Brodd and Björn Ryman both maintain that Bonhoeffer’s trips to Sweden in 1936 and 1942 played a significant role in the development of his political resistance, especially through his contact with British and Swedish members of the ecumenical movement. And Gerhard den Hertog examines how the success of Hitler’s 1940 military campaigns influenced Bonhoeffer’s reflections in Ethics and his decision to participate in the conspiracy.

Andreas Pangritz, in his examination of Bonhoeffer’s April 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” makes several provocative and perceptive points. First, he points out that in an earlier draft of the essay Bonoeffer had inserted the sub-heading “Ahasuerus peregrinus” or wandering Jew above the section with the offensive anti-Judaic passages that have gotten so much attention. Pangritz concludes that the sub-heading “represents authentically the main focus Bonhoeffer wanted to give to this part of the final edition [of his essay].” Second, he argues that Bonhoeffer’s association of “modern Jewish Christianity” with the alleged Jewish emphasis on a religion of law leads Bonhoeffer to refer to the Nazi-backed German Christians—and their desire to implement racial laws in the church—as guilty of Jewish Christianity. Third, he believes that Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase—best translated as “to fall within the spokes of the wheel,”—comes from the 18th-century writer Friedrich Schiller and was meant by Bonhoeffer to convey an act of “counter-revolutionary resistance” against the Nazi revolution. Pangritz maintains that Bonhoeffer’s political resistance “is aimed at defending the old order against its revolutionary transformation.” Pangritz concludes, that Bonhoeffer’s theological anti-Judaism “provides an ambiguous source for political solidarity with the Jews,” although Bonhoeffer’s rethinking of the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, enables him to call for direct political against the state by the church on behalf of the Jews.

Keith Clements essay focuses on Bonhoeffer and the Bruay Conference of September 1934. Clements maintains that the Bruay report, authored by Bonhoeffer and few other Germans and British representatives from the ecumenical youth movement, should be seen as more than a simple affirmation of the Fanø conference report from the previous month. Although both Fanø and Bruay call on Christians to study the social and political questions of the day and to take action “based upon the responsibility of the church members for the social order according to the Will of God,” the Bruay report offers some eminently practical—read British—steps that can be taken by church members to “reproduce the Christian life to-day.” Thus Clements believes that Bruay created “a contextual ethic of responsibility,” which foreshadows the 1937 Oxford Conference on “Church, Community, and State” and the World Council of Churches.

Wolf Krötke and Victoria Barnett both take up the question of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between church and state and its implications for civil society. Krötke argues that although Poles and East Germans struggling for a more democratic society in the 1970s and 1980s appropriated aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology, his notion of the state as a divinely sanctioned order of preservation has little to offer proponents of democracy. Unlike his more conservative colleagues, Bonhoeffer saw a crucial role for the church in limiting the state’s totalitarian ambitions in Nazi Germany. His understanding of the church-state relations may have provided Bonhoeffer with the foundation for his resistance to Nazism, but the more widely accepted Lutheran understanding of the relationship between the two kingdoms also provided many of his Lutheran colleagues with a theological defense of the Nazi state and after 1945, the GDR state. Krötke concludes that democracy activists would be better off embracing Bonhoeffer’s concept of “genuine worldliness” rather than his views on the state.

Barnett understands Bonhoeffer’s views on the state similarly to Krötke but focuses her essay on Bonhoeffer’s reaction—politically and theologically—to the Nazi state’s dual suppression of the church and civil society. Especially during his time at Finkenwalde and after, Bonhoeffer reflected on the nature of the church under National Socialism—not only on the church’s role in limiting the state’s totalitarian ambitions—but also the role of the church and individual Christians in fostering a functioning civil society. After the war began and Bonhoeffer joined the Resistance he increasingly reflected on what would come after the defeat of National Socialism and what role the church would play in these changes. The church, he maintained, could no longer concern itself only with its own self-preservation—it had to become a church that demonstrated its concern for “justice among human beings.” “All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing,” Bonhoeffer wrote in 1944, “must be born anew out of prayer and action.” Barnett suggests that Bonhoeffer’s nearly twenty years of wrestling with how to understand the nature of the church and its relationship with the state and civil society culminated in some of his most provocative theological concepts such as the “world come of age” and “religionless Christianity.”

This is just a sampling of the excellent essays contained in A Spoke in the Wheel, all of which deserve a careful reading. The collection brings together for the first time a wide variety of scholarly contributions to the debate over the relationship between Bonhoeffer’s theology and his role in the Resistance.

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Review of Mark R. Correll, Shepherds of the Empire: German Conservative Protestant Leadership 1888-1919

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Mark R. Correll, Shepherds of the Empire: German Conservative Protestant Leadership 1888-1919 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 283pp. ISBN: 978-1-4514-7295-0

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Mark Correll’s Shepherds of Empire is a study of a particular stream of conservative Protestant theology and preaching in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany. It is not, as the subtitle suggests, a book about the conservative Protestant church leadership as much as an in-depth theological study of what Correll calls “believing” Christians or Christians for whom the Scriptures remained authoritative despite the challenges of biblical criticism. In the first four chapters Correll examines how two conservative Protestant theologians, Martin Kähler (1835-1912) and Adolf Schlatter (1852-1938), and two conservative Protestant preachers, Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) and Christoph Blumhardt (1842-1919), sought—in different ways—to make conservative theology and preaching compatible with the modern age. Kähler and Schlatter sought to create a modern conservative theology by bridging the divide between traditional Protestant doctrine and modern critical scholarship, while Stoecker and Blumhardt engaged in the social question. In two final chapters, Correll examines the theological nature of preaching in Wilhelmine Germany and during the First World War. He concludes that of the four men examined in the first four chapters only Stoecker had a significant influence on the practical Christianity of pastors in Germany. Blumhardt, Kähler, and Schlatter, however, deserve to be read, studied, and admired—not for the influence they had on practical Christianity—but for their important theological and spiritual advances in attempting to overcome the modernist-traditionalist divide that defined Protestantism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany.

Correll-ShepherdsCorrell begins with the court preacher Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909), who created the church networks and organizations that provided believing theologians and church leaders with a community of likeminded churchmen in which they could expound their modern conservative responses to the crisis of Protestantism at the turn of the century. Although Adolf Stoecker is best known for popularizing political anti-Semitism, his conservative political vision of a triumphant Germany, united in thrown and altar, and fending off Germany’s multiple enemies —Austria, France, Catholics, Socialists, Liberals, as well as Jews—appealed to more than just anti-Semites. While he saw the defeat of Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 as the beginning of a great awakening in Germany, he became increasingly disappointed that the Prusso-German leaders failed to rally the growing working-class to participate in this national and Protestant awakening. In addition to founding the Christian Social Workers’ Party to harness the poor for his conservative Christian cause, another central concern of his was to combat the threat of liberal or critical theology in the church, which was gaining ground at the time. To this end he founded the “Positive Union,” an organization bringing together believing church leaders, theologians, and pastors, with the purpose of maintaining control of the key leadership positions within the church and thereby limiting the destructive influences of liberal theology on the pastorate. While the Positive Union was mostly a success, his conservative and anti-Semitic political party never gained any traction among workers. Nor did his idea to do away with the state church and found an ultra-nationalist—albeit independent of the state—Volkskirche, which would work side-by-side with the state to further the cause of a conservative Christian Germany.

Despite these two failures, Correll believes that Stoecker played a crucial role in not only organizing the believing community but in establishing “a template for a general nationalist sermon” in which “God blessed Germany in direct proportion to the obedience of the nation.” (43)

Adolf Stoecker’s brother-in law, the systematic theologian and Halle professor Martin Kähler, consciously identified with the collective of conservative or believing theologians and preachers assembled in Stoecker’s Positive Union. Like Stoecker, Kähler feared that the Bible was losing its centrality in church life and the life of the nation primarily due to the attacks by theological liberals and critical scholars. Over his lifetime Kähler sought to developed a theology that occupied a middle ground between the critical scholars for whom the Bible was just one of a number of ancient texts that needed to be scientifically studied and the conservative biblicists or fundamentalists for whom every word of the Bible emanated directly from God—the so-called doctrine of verbal inspiration. Kähler worried that this schism was tearing the Protestant church apart and weakening it ability to shepherd the German population and to ward off the challenges from Catholicism and modern Enlightenment thought.

At the center of Kähler’s theology was a defense of the Bible’s authority for Protestantism—an authority that he believed transcended human reason. But in contrast with the adherents of verbal inspiration, Kähler did not believe that the Bible was an infallible text. In fact, he valued the critical scholars’ study of the ancient languages and the history of the ancient Middle East for providing a more nuanced understanding of the history surrounding the Bible. For Kähler the authority of the Bible did not rest on its historical verifiability but in its efficacy to change lives. The purpose of the Bible was to inspire faith in God, to transform the life of the faithful, and to stimulate Christians to live an ethical life and to encourage others to do so as well.

Kähler’s junior colleague, Adolf Schlatter, took Kähler’s project to create a believing theology suitable to the modern world to a whole other level. To begin with, Schlatter’s dissertation and principal interest was in interpreting the texts of first-century Palestinian Judaism using the methodologies of historical criticism. By emphasizing Jesus’ Jewish heritage Schlatter both engaged the field of historical criticism and challenged the prevailing view of Jesus as a product of the first century Greek movements. For much of his life Schlatter found himself at the center of the modernist-traditionalist controversy because of his belief in the importance of the historical study of the Bible. Ultra conservative traditionalists viewed Schlatter with suspicion because of his openness to modern criticism. Liberals, such as von Harnack, found Schlatter’s conservative theology and support of Stoecker’s Positive Union mired in the past.

Correll argues that Schlatter was “the first Protestant believing scholar to set out to define conservative Protestantism wholly in modern terms.” (106) In contrast to many of his conservative colleagues who interpreted the Scriptures through the Reformation confessions or read the Scriptures as the unambiguous and unerring word of God, Schlatter recognized the temporal nature of Jesus’ revelation of God and asked the question, “What does the Scripture man for us?” Schlatter’s modern believing theology was built on the recognition that God’s revelation took temporal forms. This did not, however, stop him from maintaining at the same time that the Bible was the revealed word of God. God, Schlatter argued, chose to reveal himself through the historical narratives presented by the Bible’s authors. The authority of the Bible was evident to those who made the choice to accept it as the word of God.

Christians who read the Bible as the reveled word of God, Schlatter maintained, would be inspired to practice Christian ethics by their recognition of God’s gifts of love and mercy for his creation. In Schlatter’s ethics, Christians act ethically when they offer their gifts and services for the good of the whole community. Schlatter’s conservative nationalism was on display in his ethical system when he described the first and most important community in the life of a Christian as the ethnic community or Volk.

Whereas there were obvious similarities between the believing theologies and ethics of Kähler and Schlatter—not to mention their close political and organizational connections to Stoecker—it is much more of a reach to include Christoph Blumhardt, the social democratic preacher from Bad Boll, within this group. But Correll makes a convincing argument that Blumhardt “showed one extreme in the spectrum of possibility for conservative Christian thinkers at the turn of the century.” (142)

Blumhardt’s theological conservatism is certainly not hard to pin down. He seems to have had absolutely no interest in engaging seriously the critical scholarship of the time and was, in fact, an enthusiastic advocate of the miraculous events in the Bible and even the presence of miracles in the modern world. Although he had little patience for academic theology—critical or believing—his view of the Bible as the means by which the word of God come to believers was in line with Kähler and Schlatter. But for Blumhardt the Bible was not absolutely essential to faith. One could have faith in God by simply recognizing all the ways in which God intervened regularly in the world.

Blumhardt saw his primary calling as preaching the coming kingdom of God and the need for every Christian to work toward this end. In contrast to Kähler, Schlatter and particularly Stoecker, he harbored little if any nationalism and did not give Germany any particular role in the coming of the kingdom. He associated the kingdom of God with the struggle of the working class and the coming of God’s righteousness to earth. He defended his membership in the Social Democratic Party by claiming that socialists were doing more to establish God’s kingdom on earth than many Christians. He believed that Christianity and socialism were fully compatible in that they both wanted to change the world for the better. Socialists did this through their political actions and Christians did this through ethical behavior inspired by their relationship with God. Theologically it makes some sense to include Blumhardt in the same circle with Kähler, Schlatter, and Stoecker, but in all other respects they had little in common.

In Correll’s final two chapters he examines the nature of preaching in Germany from the 1880s through the First World War. These chapters are particularly useful for church historians interested in the theological and spiritual message of the Protestant pastorate to their congregations. Here Correll maintains that although theological liberalism reigned supreme in most of the university theology departments—Erlangen and Greifswald were the exceptions—the pastorate remained largely conservative, as did their sermons. Neither critical theologians nor believing theologians seemed to have had much impact on the practical Christianity of the clergy. Theology students were certainly introduced to the debates between modernists and traditionalists during their university training—and were likely to take the side of their mentor—but they made little effort to engage their congregation in the basic tenets of the debate. Instead their sermons were marked by “traditional Lutheran platitudes and nationalist enthusiasm,” associated with Stoecker. Central to most sermons in the decades leading up to the war was the simple notion that God bestowed on the German people blessings and curses in proportion to their obedience and faithfulness. During the war pastors told their congregations that God was on their side and that victory was inevitable. Correll argues that the failure of the church’s leaders and clergy to develop a more honest and critical assessment of the war and to offer a credible interpretation of Germany’s defeat and postwar plight led parishioners to leave the church in droves.

Correll’s study of the theological debates from the 1880s to 1918 is a heavy read—especially the chapters on Kähler, Schlatter, and Blumhardt—but in the end proves quite useful and enlightening. He introduces readers to the traditionalist-modernist debate that dominated German theology in the late nineteenth-century and provides an in-depth analysis of how a select group of theologians and preachers tried to address the theological crisis by incorporating some modernist elements into what was an otherwise very conservative theological and spiritual outlook. Correll is clearly disappointed that the theological innovations of Kähler and Schlatter failed to have much of an impact on the pastorate but his perceptive examination of the sermons from the time nevertheless provide the reader with a better understanding of how the German Protestant clergy utterly failed to prepare the populace for the coming century.

 

 

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Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013), xii + 203p., ISBN 978-0-8028-6902-9.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Defining “resistance” to the Nazi regime is notoriously difficult because of the vast array of individual and specific factors underlying the acts that could be deemed resistance. Factors such as race, nationality, religion, occupation, gender, and age, as well as time and place, complicate arriving at a comprehensive definition. Broad definitions of resistance that include all acts of defiance no matter how small are appropriate for certain groups in specific times and places but not for others. In Nechama Tec’s most recent book, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford, 2013) she chooses a very broad definition that tries to account for the wide variety of Jewish acts of defiance in Nazi occupied Poland. She defines resistance as, “a set of activities motivated by the desire to thwart, limit, undermine, or end the exercise of oppression over the oppressed.” This definition is broad enough to include armed and unarmed resistance, small acts of defiance and assassination plots, and, most importantly for her, resistance by Jews, who were simply trying to survive in the forests, camps, and ghettos in Eastern Europe. But broad definitions of resistance like this are problematic for those of us interested primarily in German resistance because a good deal of resistance by Germans was directed at specific Nazi policies. Tec’s broad definition of resistance works well for her consideration of Jewish resistance in Poland, where a morale-building activity in the Warsaw Ghetto counted as resistance, but it lacks the nuance necessary for making distinctions between acts of resistance, opposition, single-issue dissent, and non-conformity in Germany.

stroud-preachingDean Stroud’s Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich uses a broad definition of resistance along the lines of Tec’s definition. This is problematic, because his focus is preaching in the German Confessing Church. In his 48-page introduction to the historical context, Stroud does not engage the vast literature on resistance in Germany or offer his opinion on the competing definitions of resistance by scholars such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Peter Hoffmann, Detlev Peukert, and many others. But one can easily ascertain that he considers pastors in the Confessing Church to be a part of the Resistance, that he believes resistance among pastors was more wide spread than is acknowledged, and that he views Christianity as a radical alternative to Nazism. It is self-evident to Stroud that the thirteen sermons he includes in his book are “sermons of resistance.”

Of the thirteen sermons, twelve are by Protestants, and include such luminaries as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Martin Niemöller. Paul Schneider, who was murdered in Buchenwald, and Helmut Gollwitzer, who took over Niemöller’s parish after his arrest, each have two sermons. Julius von Jan’s famous sermon in the wake of Kristallnacht is included as is a 1944 sermon by the Confessing Church pastor, Wilhelm Busch. The final Protestant sermon is by Gerhard Ebeling, who studied under Bultmann and Brunner, and later Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde. The sole Catholic contribution comes from Bishop von Galen and is his famous August 3, 1941 sermon against euthanasia. Stroud also includes as an appendix a sermon written for pastors in the Prussian church on the loyalty oath to Hitler, the authorship of which is unclear.

The thirteen sermons vary widely in their topics and in their degree of condemnation of the Nazi regime. In my mind what they have in common is not that they are all “resistance sermons” but rather sermons that in diverse ways seek to provide Christian guidance at a time of confusion and crisis brought about by Nazi rule and the rise of the German Christians. Paul Schneider’s January 1934 sermon rages against the German Christian heresy, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and “leading figures of the new Germany” who embraced racial thinking in the church. He reminds his parishioners of the error of placing “blood and race alongside the will of God revealed alone in the words of the Scripture.” But he also mentions aspects of the new regime that he finds appealing, i.e., “the will for political unity, for national honor, for a social community [Volksgemeinschaft].” Stroud comments in a footnote that Schneider “seems to be looking for areas of cooperation between church and state, as one would expect of a good Lutheran pastor nourished by the ‘two kingdoms’ teaching of Protestantism.” This type of observation, which is extremely rare in Stroud’s book, is of central importance to understanding the weaknesses of the Christian resistance to National Socialism. Stroud would have better served his readers had he chosen to use his considerable knowledge about Christianity, preaching, and the German language to analyze the sermons in greater detail with particular focus on how many of the leading figures of the Confessing Church forcefully opposed Nazi intrusions into the affairs of the church while at the same time found areas of agreement with National Socialism.

Despite Stroud’s background as a Presbyterian minister and German literature professor, he does not provide more than snippets of his own interpretation of the sermons. His 2-3 page introductions to each sermon are mostly concerned with providing historical and biographic background information. His rather long introduction to the book has over twenty subsections on well known topics such as Hitler’s notion of “positive Christianity,” the German Christian movement, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Barmen Declaration. He relies heavily on Klaus Scholder and John Conway to provide the historical context to the Church Struggle and Michael Burleigh for general background to the Nazi period. The most interesting and original sections of the introduction are when Stroud abandons the secondary sources and provides his own analysis or commentary. For example, his analysis of the essay, “Was ist positives Christentum?” by pastor Wilhelm Rott and his commentary on an essay that appeared in Barth’s series Theologische Existenz heute by theology student Max Lackmann introduce readers to two men who engaged in the Church Struggle, who have received very little attention thus far. Stroud also provides at the end of his introduction some useful tips on how to read the thirteen sermons with an eye to how Christian vocabulary could serve as subversive language.

If there is one underlying thesis to the book it is “Christianity’s total incompatibility with Nazi doctrine.” And herein lies the biggest problem. For Stroud Christianity and Nazism are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. He does not address the role that Christian anti-Semitism and nationalism played in Christian complicity, including by the Confessing Church, in Nazi rule and the Holocaust. He writes, “Although the Nazi program included a counterfeit ‘positive Christianity’ and although Hitler peppered speeches with references to God, neither he nor Nazism had a single thing in common with traditional Christianity.” The pastors and theologians in the Confessing Church are portrayed as the representatives of traditional Christianity in complete opposition to the Nazis and German Christians. Although Stroud does mention Niemöller’s early anti-Judaism, he concludes without equivocation that after 1934 Niemöller was an opponent of Nazism. Besides this brief mention of Niemöller’s anti-Semitism, Stroud does not give any serious consideration to the ways that Nazi rule might appeal to a faithful Christian.

The Confessing Church as a whole was never opposed to Nazism as a whole. The authors of the thirteen sermons were unique in their courage and the Nazis viewed them as such a threat that they banned, exiled, jailed, or murdered several of them. Publishing beautiful translations of their sermons honors them and provides a wonderful resource of scholars and students. But if there is one thing that the scholarship on the Confessing Church over the past two decades has uncovered it is that the Confessing Church and its leaders had a complicated relationship to National Socialism that involved different levels of consent and dissent at various times during the 12 years of Nazi rule.

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Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Historical Perspectives/Emerging Issues (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013),  Pp. xvi + 258,  ISBN 978-4514-6541-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The time has come, the editors said, for a synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s theology and witness. So Clifford Green and Guy Carter invited an international gathering of theologians, translators and historians for a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in November 2011. The papers from that meeting have now been published in this book. But since they were presumably prepared in advance, it is not clear how much resulted from this meeting. The reader is left to make his or her own synopsis.

greencarter-interpretingbonhoefferThe tone is of course laudatory, rather than critical. But at least these papers help to set the boundaries within which Bonhoeffer scholarship can flourish today, and thus exclude some of the more exaggerated theories. For example, in recent years, Bonhoeffer has been characterized as a revolutionary, an assassin and an American Evangelical. None of these authors was invited. On the other hand, it is also clear that the theologians and the historians are not always talking on the same wave-length. The latter’s approach is empirical, concrete and historical, whereas the former seem often to engage in highly theoretical, even metaphysical interpretations, which rarely touch down on the solid earth of Nazi Germany. So this book should help to encourage some cross-fertilization in the debates about Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

Victoria Barnett leads off for the historians, along with three other members of our CCHQ team. She has been the general editor of the English translations of the sixteen volumes of Bonhoeffer’s papers, but still feels that this is only a work-in-progress. And just because the epoch in which he lived is gone, so the challenge is to try and understand the church and faith which shaped him and his students. In the thousands of pages which survived–his biographer Bethge collected everything–it is easy to get lost in the forest and not to see the trees. His life and work remain fragmentary and unfinished. And, as he himself admitted, he was never completely clear about his motives. Barnett rightly states that, contrary to his later fame, Bonhoeffer was a marginal figure in the German Church and the Resistance Movement. For the most part, as he himself admitted, he was amongst those who were “silent witnesses to evil deeds.” His life was cruelly cut short at an early age. His theological enterprise was barely begun. Yet his contribution–at a time when European Christianity suffered drastic blows–was an authentic witness to a world come of age.

Doris Bergen takes up the question of why the churches made so few protests against the Nazis’ crimes. Their silence in face of the Nazi persecutions and outrages has been a charge frequently leveled against Christianity. The question, she thinks, is inadequate. It is not the silence, but the noisy and enthusiastic support for the Nazi regime which concerns her most. Much more pertinent would be to question why the churches so readily backed the Nazi state. Why did they engage in pro-Nazi ceremonies, lend their religious support to Hitler’s wars of aggression, indulge in antisemitic propaganda, and even expel Jewish-Christian members from their parishes? She gives numerous and shocking examples of how the majority of churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, subordinated or distorted Christian teachings in order to provide ringing and voluntary endorsements as loyal Germans, and genuine Nazis. This was the very opposite of silence. She clearly does not have much time for those who were later to argue that churchmen were intimidated by the ruthless police state tactics of the regime, and were fearful lest they be taken off to be imprisoned in one or other concentration camp. As she rightly points out, silence or martyrdom were not the hallmarks of the majority of German Christians, though all honour is due to those who chose this latter path. But she might have considered more fully the principal reason for what seems to us now as widespread apostasy. In my view, the root cause lies in the churches’ shattering loss of credibility in the years after 1918 when their strident preaching of an imminent German victory with God’s blessing was proved false, and their proclamation of God’s beneficence had to come to terms with the millions of corpses lying in Flanders Fields. In the subsequent years, the attempt to regain the allegiance of those they had so grievously misled was their principal concern. Enthusiastic support for a popular political movement seemed to be the avenue to make the church relevant again. For Catholics, who had for so long been regarded as second-class citizens, the opportunity to upgrade their status by joining the Nazi bandwagon seemed to secure their institutional position in the wider society. Protestants too were eager to celebrate their national loyalties and to swallow their reservations about the tactics employed by their new rulers. Their complicity in the regime’s crimes cannot be doubted, even if many of them deluded themselves as to its true nature or intentions. The silence of the churches after 1945 was all the more obvious when, for the most part, they showed no remorse or repentance.

Bob Ericksen echoes the same themes in his short chapter, in which he too strongly criticizes the readiness of so many church people to concur with Nazism, including the majority of the Confessing Church, at least on national grounds. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few pastors of his generation who differed from the majority. This only led to his isolation both during his life, and even more so afterwards. For many years after 1945 the majority of nationally-minded churchmen took exception to his political or to his theological views, or to both. It was at least twenty years before the impact of his “new theology” and the prodigious efforts of his biographer, Eberhard Bethge, paid off. Ericksen has more recently written extensively about the complicity of both the pastors and the professors in serving the Nazi regime, mainly for nationalistic reasons. In this essay he correctly criticizes the churches’ readiness to praise Hitler’s brutal imposition of repressive measures, especially against the Jews, for whom churchmen showed relatively little or no empathy, and all too readily accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews were a threat to German values. Their predisposition to anti-Judaic theological biases rendered them, even Bonhoeffer, incapable of changing to a much more positive evaluation of their Jewish heritage.

Matthew Hockenos gives an excellent summary of how the Protestant churches eventually came to terms with this deficient legacy. He rightly questions the extent to which Bonhoeffer himself changed his theology about the Jews, since we lack any substantial evidence after his very tradition-bound statement of supersessionist theology from 1933. Hockenos points out that the leaders of the Evangelical Church after 1945 were all survivors of the Confessing Church struggle, and still politically and theologically nationalistic. When it came to addressing the church’ share of responsibility for the policies of the Third Reich, these leaders “demonstrated more trepidation than courage, more equivocation than clarity, and more obstruction than determination.” Most of them were shocked by Bonhoeffer’s readiness to take part in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and regarded him as a national traitor not a Christian martyr. They stressed the post-war indignities and sufferings of their own people at the hands of the occupying powers, rather than the far greater sufferings their countrymen had imposed on so many other nations and peoples. It took years before Bonhoeffer’s reforming ideas could take hold. Similarly, years were to pass before a new climate of repentance for Christian prejudice against the Jews could emerge. Hockenos provides a notable if brief description of the slow and often reluctant process of “metanoia” in the Evangelical Churches on the subject of attitudes towards the Jews, and contrasts this with the much more vibrant contributions of such Catholics as John Oesterreicher and Gertrud Luckner, whose pioneer efforts were to find fruition in the Second Vatican Council. But thanks to Bonhoeffer’s biographer, Eberhard Bethge, the same route was finally taken by the German Protestants too.

Keith Clements’ fine contribution focuses on Bonhoeffer’s postwar reception in Britain, which was much more friendly and sympathetic than in his homeland. This was largely due to the friendships he had established with the ecumenically-minded community during his earlier visits to England. Principally it was the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, with whom Bonhoeffer had collaborated in the Life and Work Movement, and who warmly welcomed him on his arrival to look after the German-speaking churches in London. Bell found Bonhoeffer a most valuable source of information about the German Evangelical Church, and resolutely backed the Confessing Church in its struggle to block the Nazi plans. It was also Bell, who most courageously defied public opinion and organized the first memorial service for Bonhoeffer–a dead German–in a large London church in July 1945. So too Bonhoeffer found an ally in Joe Oldham, one of the chief architects of the future World Council of Churches, and in Ronald Gregor Smith, the Editor of the Student Christian Movement Press, which was the first to publish Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in English translation. Its impact caused sensational reactions in the early 1950s. All of these men had a deep sense of the crisis facing Western Civilization, and the need for new visions, not just for the church, but for the world and humanity. Bonhoeffer’s message from his prison cell exactly matched their hopes, and gave a pragmatic concreteness to their witness in those years.

Other essays in this collection explore the impact of Bonhoeffer’s theology in such far distant societies as Japan and Brazil, thus giving a world-wide dimension to his legacy. Of course, this global appearance of his ideas and life-story owed much to the successes of his translators, especially into English. Several papers in this book show how this task was undertaken, and how the translators had to wrestle with Bonhoeffer’s cultivated, upper-class, but somewhat dated German, and to find up-to-date and more colloquial expressions in English for his much wider audiences. A very good instance of their dilemmas comes in trying to translate the well-known poem Christen und Heiden. They were also perplexed by Bonhoeffer’s continual use of masculine pronouns for “God” or “Man”, and wondered how appropriate it would be to turn these gendered expressions into some more modern form of inclusive language. It was a delicate course to steer between the Scylla of Bonhoeffer the proto-feminist and the Charybdis of Bonhoeffer the hopeless chauvinist.

The theologians’ contributions focus very largely on Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “public ministry” and are drawn from close studies of his Ethics. As the epoch of European-centered Christianity is increasingly replaced by global diversification, and as his homeland Germany, like other parts of historic Christian Europe, becomes more and more pluralistic in its religious allegiances, so Bonhoeffer’s insights will undoubtedly continue to be of value in guiding us forward in fashioning new forms of discipleship for the years ahead.

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Review of Steven M. Schroeder, To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Steven M. Schroeder, To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 237 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4426-1399-7.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

In To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954, Steven Schroeder provides a lucid account of the grassroots efforts of Germans from 1944 to 1954 to foster reconciliation with the former victims and enemies of Nazi Germany. Although the reconciliatory activities of these rather marginal grassroots figures in the churches, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other groups were not broadly endorsed by Germans and had little direct impact on the major geopolitical questions of the day, Schroeder maintains that they were surprisingly successful in overcoming the seemingly insurmountable barriers to reconciliation. More often than not the success was due to the willingness of the victims of Nazi aggression to take the first step in the reconciliation process by extending an invitation to Germans to begin a dialogue. It also helped to have the support of one or more of the Allies.

SchroederToForgetUnlike most of the studies of postwar Germany that focus on the origins of the Cold War and high stakes political maneuvering of the Allies, Schroeder takes a bottom-up approach that illuminates the less conspicuous reconciliation work of German groups such as the Association of the Victim of Nazism (VVN) and religiously-affiliated international groups such as International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), Moral Re-Armament (MRA), Pax Chrisiti, the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), and the World Council of Churches (WCC). His study compares and contrasts reconciliation, defined as “the establishment of peaceful – or at least non-hostile – relations between former enemies” in the four zones of occupation in the immediate postwar years and in East and West Germany after 1949.

The book’s title as well as the epigraph by Victor Gollancz, “For what matters is not a man’s motive but any practical result that may follow from his work,” makes clear that Schroeder does not believe that the success of German efforts at reconciliation were primarily the result of German altruism or good will. In most cases, reconciliatory work by Germans was calculated to placate the Allies by demonstrating that Germans had learned their lesson, wanted to contribute to postwar stability, and were ready to govern themselves. Schroeder refers to this as “pragmatic reconciliation” because the motive was not altruism but rather self-interest, particularly the desire to move on from the Nazi past.

During the first stage of reconciliation from 1944 to 1947 pragmatic reconciliation dominated. The Allied policies of non-fraternization, expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, and de-Nazification treated Germans like pariahs, focusing on punishment and forced democratization. Allied policies did little to engender genuine feelings of contrition among a mostly unrepentant population. Reparation policies imposed by the Allies were another sore spot for many Germans, who were focused on their own needs.

Hans Asmussen, a Lutheran churchman and head of Protestant Church Chancellery, serves as Schroeder’s prototype of this type of pragmatic reconciliation. A central player in the Confessing Church’s struggle against the Nazis and their supporters in the churches from 1933 to 1945, Asmussen resented deeply the severity of Allied postwar policies, especially the Allies’ persistent efforts to compel Germans to atone for their Nazi past. Like so many of his countrymen, Asmussen believed that most Germans were not only innocent of Nazi crimes but were, in fact, victims of the Nazis and thus did not deserve to be bullied by the occupation authorities. In a January 1946 letter to the Allied Control Council he bemoaned that the world would not allow Germans “to forget it all and begin anew.” Instead the Allies insisted that Germans acknowledge their responsibility, accept their punishment, and engage in reconciliatory activities. Asmussen regretted this state of affairs but conceded that Germans had no choice but to appease the Allies.

The priority of the German churches in the immediate postwar years was to provide material and spiritual relief for their worshippers. To this end, the Protestant and Catholic churches created relief agencies in 1945 that offered food, shelter, and clothing to gentile Germans suffering from deprivations caused by the loss of the war and Allied postwar policies. Leaders of these agencies were willing to extend their aid to Christians of Jewish descent but not to Jews. Schroeder believes that these agencies and others like them contributed to interpretations of the Nazi past that ignored German responsibility for the plight of Jews in the postwar years.

Christian-Jewish reconciliation was rare indeed but not entirely absent. Pastors for the most part ignored Jewish suffering or if they had contact with Jews at all it was in an effort to convert them. There were exceptions such as Gertrud Luckner and Karl Thieme in the Catholic Church and Ernst Lichtenstein and Otto von Harling in the Protestant Church, who made significant strides in building bridges to the Jewish community and in bringing to light Christian anti-Judaism and its ties to modern anti-Semitism. The Western Allies played an important role in encouraging German participation in Christian-Jewish cooperation. Between 1948 and 1953 the American Religious Affairs Branch helped to establish thirteen Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. The response by German Jews was understandably suspicious at first but they warmed up to the idea when they realized that their Christian counterparts were not interested in proselytizing but rather were serious about eradicating anti-Semitism in the churches and society at large. Prominent German Jews such as Benno Ostertag, Alfred Mayer, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, and Norbert Wollheim participated actively. Schroeder argues that the societies successfully launched Christian-Jewish reconciliatory work into the public sphere in West Germany, where it became part of the official agenda in 1949 when president Theodore Heuss called on Germans to take responsibility for Germany’s crimes against the Jewish people.

In Stalinist East Germany reconciliation efforts had little chance of getting off the ground if they didn’t coincide with the political interests of the Soviet Union.  The Association of the Victims of Nazism (VVN), the most active group in the East, advocated for reparations, including lump sums of money, food, clothing, and shelter, for Nazi victims. But in keeping with Communist ideology, VVN was concerned primarily with compensating those who had politically resisted the Nazis. Marginalized in the group’s discussions as “second-class victims,” Jews were forced to seek assistance from international Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Schroeder believes that although VVN and other groups operating in the Soviet zone were mostly fronts for Communist power, they did serve the reconciliation process in their own small way by bringing attention to Nazi crimes.

When the initiative for reconciliation came from non-Germans, often former enemies or victims, or from international organizations with religious affiliations, German participation tended to be more genuine and less forced. But as Schroeder points out “the effectiveness of all the organizations depended on their ideological alignment with the guiding politics in their sphere of operation” (98). The pacifist organization International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), founded by the British Quaker Henry Hodgkin and German Protestant Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze in 1914, opened three chapters in Germany in 1948. Although the German chapters had several dedicated members committed to a religiously based reconciliation, their influence was not terribly significant. The World Council of Churches (WCC) also reached out to German Protestants after the war and sought to incorporate Germans into the growing ecumenical movement. German Protestants reacted warmly to this initiative with their famous Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945 and participated in all of the postwar meetings of the WCC. Christian ecumenism was certainly a significant tool for breaking down old animosities but alone was only a partial answer. The Catholic movement Pax Christi had more success in West Germany than either IFOR or the WCC because its political affiliation was more in line with the western Allies. Although Pax Christi was a pacifist organization it was also decidedly anti-Communist and it focused on a central goal of the Allies, Franco-German reconciliation. German Catholics found Pax Christi attractive because its leader, the French Bishop Théas, did not focus on the Nazi past and encouraged French and German Catholics to focus on deepening personal piety and fostering international solidarity.

The most successful of the Christian-based international organizations was Moral Re-Armament (MRA). MRA strove for the moral rehabilitation of all Europeans, the advancement of Christian Democracy, and countering the spread of Communism. Schroeder believes that the Allie’s encouragement of MRA work was crucial to its success and coincided with the shift in U.S. foreign policy towards aggressively confronting the Soviet Union and containing Communism. MRA was particularly active in pursuing Franco-German reconciliation and even helped to arrange some of the early meetings between the German chancellor and French foreign minister that eventually led to the Schuman Plan of September 1950. Both Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman credited MRA with having done the groundwork that led to peaceful relations between the two countries.

With the exception of the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, none of the above-mentioned groups focused on reconciliation with Jews. German politicians and church leaders showed very little leadership when it came to Jewish reconciliation work. It was left to Jewish groups in Germany and abroad as well as the state of Israel to pressure the German government to recognize Germany’s responsibility to compensate Jewish victims of Nazism. Political pragmatism, Schroeder believes, more than anything else led to the West German government’s 1952 reparations agreement with Israel, in which the Federal Republic agreed to pay Israel for the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime and to compensate for Jewish property that was stolen. Politics also explains why the East Germans refused to pay reparations to Jewish victims.

By examining the grassroots reconciliatory efforts of Germans during the decade following the end of the Second World War, Schroeder’s book offers a fresh approach to studying the period. His extensive archival digging has also yielded valuable new information about a number of the groups and individuals engaged in forging better relationships between German and her former enemies. The central thesis of the book, that reconciliation work pursued out of self-interest or compulsion could be as successful as altruistic acts of reconciliation, is counter-intuitive but Schroeder argues it persuasively and defends it with ample evidence.

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Conference Report: Reassessing Contemporary Church History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-27, 2013

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Conference Report: Reassessing Contemporary Church History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-27, 2013

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

This three-day conference brought twenty scholars from Canada, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany to the campus of the University of British Columbia on the shores of Vancouver Bay to take stock of the current state of German church history in the 20th century, plot out the future direction for the new electronic journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly and to honor the eighty-three year old Anglo-Canadian scholar and pioneer in the field, John Conway.

The keynote address from Thursday evening, “The Future of World Christianity” was delivered by Mark Noll, Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. In his hour-long presentation, Noll contrasted the situation of Christianity in the Western and non-Western worlds for the years 1910 and 2010. Christianity has exploded numerically in Africa, Asia and Latin America, eclipsing its presence in what had at just a century earlier had been its European heartland. Noll began by highlighting the dramatic scope of recent changes. In 1970, there had been no legally open churches in China in 1970;  China may now have more active believers attending church regularly than does Europe.  Noll  argued that it was raw life-and-death struggles of poverty, disease, tribal warfare, social dislocation, and economic transformation that help explain this surge in religiosity outside of the western world.  He urged historians of Christianity to learn more about the work of African prophet-evangelists of the early 20th century like William Wadé Harris and Simon Kimbangu instead of focusing exclusively on better-known western theologians and churchmen.

Friday’s proceedings were divided into three distinct panels. The first, “The Changing Historiography of the Church Struggle, 1945 – 2013” highlighted the changing hermeneutics, value-systems, theological categories and historical methodologies that have been employed to instill meaning into the struggles of the churches against the National Socialist state. Mark Edward Ruff’s paper, “The Reception of John Conway’s, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches” analyzed why Conway’s pioneering work evoked profoundly different reactions in the English-speaking world and in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Anglo-American world, it garnered praise; in Germany, it was largely met with criticism or indifference. Ruff argued that the very factors that ensured its mostly positive appraisals in the United States guaranteed its harvest of criticism and silence in Germany from those professional historians or churchmen charged with compiling the history of the churches under Nazi rule. Three dynamics contributed to the divided response to the work of a practicing Anglican – a confessional divide, a national divide and a methodological divide. Reflecting ongoing confessional fissures, non-Catholic politicians, churchmen, journalists, playwrights and scholars had shown a consistent willingness to enter into or launch public discussions about the Catholic past in the Third Reich, while their Roman Catholic counterparts in the press, ecclesia, intelligensia and academy rarely, if ever, spoke out openly about the Protestant past.  Negative reviews in Germany, moreover, reflected a heightened sensitivity to criticism not just from non-Catholics but from the Anglo-Saxon world, from where the majority of the non-German critical accounts of the recent past had come. And finally, Conway’s German critics assailed him for what they regarded as deficient methodologies, and in particular, his unwillingness to show the necessary empathy for his subjects and to employ what can be described as a Quellenpositivismus and refrain from making larger moral and historical judgments not born directly out of the sources he used.

Ruff’s account of the confessional dynamics in the German historical profession of the 1960s set the stage for Robert Ericksen’s paper, “Church Historians, “Profane” Historians, and our Odyssey Since Wilhelm Niemöller.” Wilhelm Niemöller was the younger brother to Martin Niemöller, an important leader of the Confessing Church during the Nazi era and a widely known prisoner of the regime after his arrest in 1937. Martin went on to serve in various church leadership positions after 1945, while Wilhelm emerged as the most important historian of the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or “Church Struggle,” in the first postwar decades. He quite consciously styled himself a “church historian,” separating himself from those historians designated “profane” in the German usage. In the 1960s he wrote, “It almost seems as if one could be satisfied with the rather shortsighted conclusion that church history and ‘profane’ history do not differ from one another.” Ericksen argued that Wilhelm Niemöller, in his effort to bring his faith to the task of writing history, distorted the history of the German Protestant Church under Hitler. He described the history of the Confessing Church, representing approximately 20% of Protestants, as if it were the history of the entire church. He also ignored those within the Confessing Church who supported Adolf Hitler and those who shared the antisemitic prejudices of the regime. Finally, Wilhelm Niemöller ignored the fact that both he and Martin had voted for the Nazi Party, and that he had joined the Party as early as 1923. Ericksen concluded by insisting that historians of churches must work as “profane” or secular historians, if they are to create a more usable and reliable history.

Manfred Gailus’ paper,  “Ist die “Aufarbeitung” der NS-Zeit beendet? Anmerkungen zur kirchlichen Erinnerungskultur seit der Wende von 1989/90,” examined how the Protestant church dealt with its own past from the Third Reich.  Focusing on the state church of Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische-Oberlausitz (EKBO), Gailus focused on how Bishop Wolfgang Huber, one of the leaders of the Protestant church, practiced a politics of the past that can be regarded as representative for the Protestant church as a whole. In November 2002, Huber delivered a  committed and self-critical sermon for the annual  „day of repentance,“ a sermon which he dedicated to the memory of those Christians of Jewish heritage who had suffered and died in the Third Reich. This sermon can be regarded as a sign of Huber’s committed engagement with the past, one comparable with his efforts to compensate church slave laborers from the Second World War.  But his subsequent efforts to come to terms with the past began to flag almost immediately thereafter. In 2005, he chose to take up the theme of the „church and the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s“ – and not the church struggle of the 1930s – as the major theme for the fiftieth anniversary of the „Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.“ He also stayed out of the longstanding debates about the future of the Martin-Luther-Memorial- Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a church that had been built during the Third Reich, decorated with sundry Nazi symbols and now enjoyed the protective status as a „historical landmark.“  The church under Huber, Gailus concluded, has certainly come a long way forward in its approach to the Nazi past but still lags behind the standards set not only by professional historians but by the larger public. It remains in urgent need of powerful initiatives to kick-start its reassessment of the past.

The second panel, „Theology, Theological Changes and the Ecumenical Movement“ brought to the table the fruits of recent research. Victoria Barnett’s paper, “Track Two Diplomacy, 1933-1939: International Responses from Catholics, Jews, and Ecumenical Protestants to Events in Nazi Germany,” showed how events that unfolded in Nazi Germany and Europe between 1933 – 1939 sparked a number of significant and ongoing initiatives among international religious leaders. This was particularly true of religious bodies whose scope was international and touched on ecumenical or interfaith issues; such bodies included the Holy See in Rome, ecumenical offices in Geneva and New York, and the conferences of Christians and Jews in the UK and the United States.  Such initiatives were also driven by individual Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were committed to fighting against National Socialism and helping its victims.  Many of these individuals, Barnett pointed out, became involved early in refugee-related issues.  Other issues of common concern included the ideological and political pressures on both Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany and the desire to prevent another European war.  After the war began, many of these same circles had contacts with different German resistance circles, and some of these leaders wrote “think pieces” on the necessary moral foundations for a postwar peace.  Although the Catholics and Protestants involved in these activities represented a distinct minority within their respective churches, an examination of their interactions, including their contacts with representatives of Jewish organizations, offers a much fuller picture of the international religious responses to Nazism and show the extent of interreligious communication even before 1939 as an attempt at “track two diplomacy.”

Matthew Hockenos’ paper “‘Blessed are the Peacemakers, for They Shall be called Sons of God’: Martin Niemöller’s Embrace of Pacifism, 1945-55”  focused on the theological transformations in the decade from 1945 to 1955 for the former Confessing Church leader and hero, Martin Niemöller. Niemöller, Hockenos showed, jettisoned the Zwei–Reiche–Lehre (Doctrine of Two Kingdoms) and championed a political role for the Church.  He abandoned German nationalism and became a leader of the ecumenical movement. He denounced war and the remilitarization of Germany and gradually came to adopt pacifism. Hockenos, however, made clear that Niemöller’s embrace of pacifism did not occur over night, as Niemöller had implied in his own account of his meeting with the German scientist Dr. Otto Hahn. It was a gradual process that one can trace from the time of his liberation to 1955. It appears to have been the result of a number of factors and events. These included including his own reflection on the destructiveness of WWII and the imminent danger that the Cold War posed to Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, contact with ecumenical-minded church leaders abroad, and the deliberate efforts of pacifists in the United States and in Europe to convince Niemöller that the only position a true Christian could take on war was to be against because it was inimical to the message of Christ.  From 1954 on Niemöller made it his primary goal to expand the circle of pacifists person by person through education and example. Just as his pacifist colleagues had slowly reeled him in through conversations and dialogue, he traveled the globe, frequently visiting Communist nations, preaching the way of non-violence and extolling the teachings and example of Mahatma Gandhi.

Wilhelm Damberg’s paper, „Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Theologie nach dem Konzil:  J.B. Metz, die politische Theologie und die Würzburger Synode (1971-1975),” drew the attention of conference participants to a major theological paradigm shift in how the Roman Catholic Church in Germany came to terms with its past under National Socialism. Ironically, Damberg noted, this seismic shift has largely remained unknown to historians. It took place during the Würzburg Synod of 1971 to 1975, which was charged with implementing the resolutions and decrees of the Second Vatican Council in Germany. The central document for these changes was one bearing the name „Our Hope: A Commitment to Faith in our time.“ It prepared by the renowned German theologian, Johann Baptist Metz, and bore the hallmarks of Metz’s own so-called „Political Theology.“ This document met with the overwhelming approval of the synod.  Metz shaped its content around the concept of a collective „examination of conscience,“ which confessed the guilt and failure of „a sinful church“ particularly towards the Jews of the Third Reich. In the formal debates about this document, disagreements broke out about the appropriate way to understand history. Metz defended himself against criticism of his historical judgments by insisting that historical consciousness and actual reconstructions of the past remained two separate things. For the church of the present, it was the former that matter. Metz, Damberg argued, was deconstructing historical narratives that Metz himself saw as being in direct opposition to the epochal theological change of „theology after Auschwitz.“

The third panel on Friday, “Expanding the Borders: Inter and Intra-National, Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Narratives” pointed out new directions for historical research. Thomas Großbölting led off with his paper„‚Kirchenkampf gibt es immer‘: Memory Politics as a Point of Reference for an inner-ecclesiastical Counter-culture.” Großbölting made his focus those moments in the 1960s and 1970s when special groups within the churches and individual Christians referred to the Nazi past.  How, he asked, did they draw connections between themselves and the church struggle from the 1930s?  He argued that the silence of the 1950s regarding the Nazi past was replaced in the second half of the 1960s by greater openness – and even bluntness. For the new social movements and special interest groups within the churches, in particular,  the politics of remembrance became a major point of orientation and mobilization. Organizations as disparate as Una voce, Unum et semper, the confessional movement “No other gospel”, the German branch of Opus Dei and “Christians for socialism” all sought to find new ways of living the personal faith and to radicalize the Christian Gospel.  For conservatives, radicalization meant bring the Christian Gospel back to its roots; for left-wingers, it meant rediscovering the communist ideals of the early church. Großbölting, in turn, showed how such groups like Catholic student parishes and Protestant confessional movements referred to the Nazi-past in general and to the Church struggle, in particular, as a way to realize these aims.  In spite of the enormous attention they found from the media at the end of the 1960s, the impact of these movements remained limited. The Protestant counter-movement took up the battle cry, “Kirche muss Kirche bleiben” –Church must remain the Church.” But even these stirring words, Großbölting concluded, never found much resonance among the ordinary members of the Protestant and the Catholic Church.

In his paper, “Conflict and Post-Conflict Representations: Autobiographical Writings of German Theologians after 1945,” Björn Krondorfer showed how the questions of gender, and male gender in particular, and of retrospective historical representatives, are central to our analyses of the postwar church. Krondorfer argued that gendered roles and identifications allowed German men in institutions like the church to adjust to a new environment after 1945. His paper critically analyzed the autobiographies of two Protestant German male theologians published after 1945, and in particular, those of  Walter Künneth ( Lebensführungen: Der Wahrheit verpflichtet; 1979) and Helmut Thielicke (Zu Gast auf einem schönen Stern; 1984.) Realizing that their autobiographical act of remembering placed them into a morally and politically charged historical context, these two theologians carefully crafted their memoirs, employing apologetic and eluding strategies when accounting for their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The theme of “German suffering” often looms largely in these memoirs, while Jews are mostly absent; hence, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator are constantly blurred. As “helpless victims,” these men might run the risk of being effeminized, as “acting subjects” they might run the risk of being accused of moral failure. Versions of this mental split, Krondorfer argued, are to be found in almost all post-1945 autobiographies of German male theologians.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s paper, “Real-Time Narrative Responses to Nazism: March/ April 1933 in Germany and Rome” focused on the Catholic diplomatic response to the earliest antisemitic measures of the Nazis. On April 1, the Nazis ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses, department stores, lawyers and physicians on April 1, 1933, the first centrally directed action by the National Socialists against Jews after the Seizure of Power.  The Civil Service Law of 7 April was the first to contain the so-called “Aryan Paragraph,” stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service.  Brown-Fleming Using drew upon the recently-released records of the Vatican nunciature in Munich and Berlin during the tenure of Pope Pius XI. She discussed the exchanges between Pope Pius XI, then-Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII, 1939-1958), his diplomat in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, German bishops, and ordinary Catholics and Jews. The elections of March 5, 1933, she argued, revealed a dissonance between the Nazi party, Catholic Center Party voters, and Catholics who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. That dissonance, she concluded, affected the response of the Vatican Secretariat of State and German bishops to the first anti-Jewish laws in April 1933 in ways that still need to be further explored.

The third day of the conference was devoted to a discussion of the future direction of the electronic journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This journal had its origins in the electronic brainchild of John Conway, what he upon his retirement from the University of British Columbia in 1995, modestly called “The Newsletter.”  This was an eclectic mixture of book reviews and notices about events dealing with contemporary international and ecumenical church history. A recipient of a Humboldt Research fellowship in 1963-4 and a founding member of the Scholars’ Conference on the German Church and the Holocaust in 1970, Conway was best known for his masterwork from 1968, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945, the first extensive history in English of the National Socialists’ campaign against the German churches and the responses of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. He developed this free monthly electronic newsletter to provide a speedier flow of information on new publications on the history of the churches in the 20th century. Traditional quarterly journals were far too slow in informing readers of new publications and works in progress. In addition, they tended to reach only specialized academic audiences – and not the lay and religious audiences just as keenly interested in the highly charged topic of the churches’ conduct during the Nazi era such as the conduct of Pope Pius XII and the responses of the churches to the Holocaust.  Sent out by email to a list-serve of subscribers, Conway’s newsletter went by the name of the Association of Contemporary Church Historians (ACCH), or Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler.

In 2009, Conway turned over the helm of the Newsletter to an editorial board, which now includes sixteen theologians and historians based in Germany, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. The editorial board members, almost all of whom were gathered in Vancouver, discussed future directions for the journal, and in particular, how to further transatlantic cooperation. Kyle Jantzen, who almost single-handedly engineered the journal’s technical transformation from a newsletter sent out by an email list-serve to a web-based presence, gave an overview of the journal’s new features and the number of hits recent issues and articles have been receiving. Members also discussed the possibility of developing a continuously updated on-line data base that will compile the new publications in the field – journal articles, articles in edited volumes, edited volumes and monograph – from both sides of the Atlantic.

Last and most significantly, the concluding evening of the conference honored the pioneering work of John Conway, who has distinguished himself not only through his scholarly work but in his tireless efforts to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and nations. Doris Bergen, Robert Ericksen, Steven Schroeder, Kyle Jantzen, and Gerhard Besier offered formal tributes in the course of Saturday evening.

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Review of Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Review of Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective, (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), xxii + 314 Pp., ISBN 978-0-8265-1853-8.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective is a collection of essays that establishes not only that religion influenced Cold War disputes and policies in significant ways but more importantly that the Cold War was profoundly religious in nature. The very fact that the Cold War was not a “hot” war but rather a war between competing ideologies and systems of governance meant that victories were won not on the battlefield but rather by convincing peoples and states that life was better, freer, and more fulfilling on one side or the other of the Iron Curtain. Consequently, it was advantageous for Americans and West Europeans to contrast their devotion to Christian values and the free expression of religious belief with Communism’s repression of religion and spiritual bankruptcy. For the Western Allies, the Cold War was from the very start conceived of as both a war over religion and a religious war. Although this review will not address the global manifestations of the role of religion in the Cold War, one way that this collection breaks new ground is by expanding the traditional focus on the Christian Churches in Europe and America to examine some states affected by the Cold War in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, where Christianity was not always the dominant religion.

Muehlenbeck-ReligionThree essays from this collection that focus on the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe and America will be of particular interest to CCHQ readers. In his essay, “The Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany, 1948-1952,” JonDavid Wyneken maintains that the political leaders in the US, Britain, the Soviet Union, and in East and West Germany paid close attention to the stance of German church leaders and at times shaped their policies with the churches in mind. At the end of WWII the German churches believed that they deserved a prominent role in postwar reconstruction and promoted themselves to the Allies as offering a faith-based alternative to the appeals of atheistic Communism. Although the Allies, especially the Americans, found this appealing, they refused to grant the churches the comprehensive role they desired and imposed harsh occupation and denazification programs in their zones of occupation. Church leaders voiced strong opposition to what they called “victors’ justice” and bemoaned that the Western Allies were just making Communism more appealing to a desperate and disgruntled population.

As the Cold War heated up American policy shifted its focus from punishing Germany to addressing the Communist threat in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and the Anglo-American response to the Berlin Blockade all made clear the West’s commitment to fighting Communism. Under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, Catholics in Germany, the vast majority of whom lived in the western zones, rallied behind the new anti-Communist policy and eventually embraced the division of Germany between East and West and the rearming of West Germany. Many Protestant leaders, however, undermined American objectives by refusing to offer their full endorsement of the anti-Communist policies of the West and instead advocated a dialogue between East and West. Distressed by the prospect dividing Protestant lands between two Germanies, they hoped to avoid or undo division and rearmament. Even a staunch anti-Communist like Bishop Dibelius of Berlin, who criticized Communist control of youth activities and political arrests of religious leaders, championed a less aggressive approach toward the East German state fearing reprisals against Protestants in the Eastern zone. He offered to mediate between Adenauer and Ulbricht but this never materialized.

Far more critical of the Allies were Protestants who gathered around the leadership of Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth, and Gustav Heinemann. They earned the wrath of American policy makers because of their vocal opposition to Adenauer’s leadership, the division of Germany, and rearmament. They advocated neutrality and reunification. East German authorities and the USSR believed that they could use Niemöller’s soft stance on Communism to their advantage. The Western Allies worried that Niemöller and his colleagues had become dupes and sought to win over more conservative Protestants. The 1951 Protestant Kirchentag in Berlin heightened their concerns when Wilhelm Pieck, the East German president, gave a speech at its opening calling for unification. Adding fuel to the fire, Niemöller traveled to Moscow in January 1952 at the invitation of the Russian Orthodox patriarch. He said his visit was for ecumenical purposes and that he had undertaken the trip to promote peace through church channels. When he returned he reported on the vitality of Russian church life. Washington was not happy. Adenauer was furious. Bishop Meiser was apoplectic. One Bundestag member ridiculed Niemöller’s visit and called the Moscow patriarch “nothing more than Hitler’s Reichbischof Mueller.”

With the rejection of the Stalin Note by the Western Allies in the spring of 1952, the Russians and East Germans no longer needed to court the churches or cultivate Dibelius and Niemöller for publicity. The election of Eisenhower in 1953 and the crushing of the June 1953 East Berlin uprising just solidified the complete break between East and West and any chance that Germany would act as a bridge between the two sides as Niemöller had hoped. Wyneken concludes that, “Although this series of events ended any ability of the German churches to independently affect changes in East-West relations, the Western Allies continued to believe that both church bodies could still play a role in undermining Communism in East Germany.”

If Niemöller’s refusal to condemn Communism and to endorse the Christian West in the early years of the Cold War caused headaches for many of his church colleagues, they could be grateful that they did not have Hewlett Johnson the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral as a colleague. David Ayers’ essay, “Hewlett Johnson: Britain’s Red Dean and the Cold War,” describes Johnson as an ardent Communist who failed completely to grasp the true nature of Communism despite the growing list of well-documented crimes and atrocities carried out by Stalin and other Communist leaders. Although he never joined the British Communist Party, he repeatedly praised Stalin and believed that Communism was the practical realization of Christianity.

Appointed Dean (not Archbishop) of Canterbury in 1931 by Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, Johnson could not be fired and remained in the position of relative importance until 1963 when he retired at the age of 89. His colleagues in the Anglican Church frequently tried to oust him from his position but he always refused to resign.

Communist countries understood his usefulness in improving the image of Communism and invited him frequently to dinners and public events. He was a popular and frequent contributor in the public sphere in England and America, where spoke to large audiences on the affinity between Communism and Christianity. He praised Stalin’s anti-racism, nationalist policy, and the 1936 constitution, which Johnson called, “the most liberal the world has yet seen.” He ignored any reports that mentioned Stalin’s reign of terror and he claimed that religion could be practiced relatively freely in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. He also defended the Left’s attacks on the Church by arguing that the Church was sometimes on the wrong side.  Foreigners often confused his position as dean with that of the archbishop and so thought he was speaking on behalf of the Anglican Church.

When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 and Russia became England’s ally, Johnson was in great demand as a speaker and was able to say, “I told you so” to his many critics. His position was further boosted by Stalin’s friendly overtures to the Orthodox Church in 1943, when Stalin restored the Moscow Patriarchate. Johnson went to Moscow in May 1945 to celebrate Russia’s victory.

Like Niemöller, he tried to foster good relations between East and West after the war. But unlike Niemöller, Johnson made patently absurd claims about Communism and sided unapologetically every time with Communist regimes. Although Niemöller was sometimes referred to as “Germany’s Red Dean,” the two men had very little in common. In contrast to Niemöller, Johnson’s thought progressed very little in his lifetime and had very little influence on the Cold War strategy of either the Anglican Church or the British Government. From the time of the Russian Revolution until his death in 1966 his loyalty to Moscow never wavered. Ayer’s concludes, “He essentially regarded religious freedom as secondary to the progression toward Communism.”

Jonathan P. Herzog’s essay, “From Sermon to Strategy: Religious Influence on the Formation and Implementation of US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War,” makes the case most convincingly that religion was central to Cold War strategy, at least for the United States. He begins his excellent essay with the anecdote of the US in 1953 launching 1000’s of balloons bearing Bible verses over the skies of Eastern Europe with the hope that oppressed Eastern Europeans would find some solace from the verses or perhaps even inspire some to rebel against their Communist oppressors. Although two fundamentalist Protestant radio preachers conceived the project, it was the recently inaugurated President Eisenhower who rescued the project from the trashcans of the State Department and gave the project his authorization. Although the balloon project seems small and insignificant, it demonstrates the extent to which the president had come to view the religious struggle between East and West as an integral part of the Cold War. As Herzog argues, with Eisenhower’s imprimatur, “the balloons became less the half-backed notion of two evangelists and more the long arm of US foreign policy.”

Herzog shows how it was religious leaders from various denominations who first interpreted Communism as a type of religion. In the 1930s church leaders from Cardinal Spellman to Billy Graham, “portrayed Communism as a spiritual threat and bemoaned the secularization sapping US society of its sacred vigor.” Communism was an “arch-heresy” that had its own missionaries, theologians, songs, and faith.

Policy makers such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze and John Foster Dulles as well as presidents Truman and Eisenhower were thoroughly convinced by this reasoning. They picked up on the narrative created by religious leaders and portrayed the Cold War as a war between the Godless and Satanic Communists and the God-fearing and God-loving Americans. Various policies, strategies, and tactics were developed to translate this belief into foreign policy. As early as January 1946 position papers were circulated within the security community that viewed the USSR as a nation with a Messianic goal that held great appeal for people suffering the effects of a devastating war. Nitze in 1950 maintained that the Soviets were “animated by a fanatical faith.” In this “perverted faith” Communist society “becomes God, and submission to the will of God becomes submission to the will of the system.” Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board declared that, “The potentialities of religion as an instrument for combating Communism are universally tremendous.” And Eisenhower campaigned on the belief that, “our battle against Communism is a fight between anti-God and a belief in the almighty?”

Herzog concludes that alongside the military-industrial complex created by Truman and Eisenhower there was a “religious-industrial complex” that consisted of “a fusion of religious ideas, national resources, and state policy.”

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Article Note: Benjamin Pearson, “The Pluralization of Protestant Politics: Public Responsibility, Rearmament, and Division at the 1950s Kirchentage”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Article Note: Benjamin Pearson, “The Pluralization of Protestant Politics: Public Responsibility, Rearmament, and Division at the 1950s Kirchentage” Central European History 43 (2010), 270-300.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-25414-0111 / CC-BY-SA

Kirchentag 1954 in Leipzig. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-25414-0111 / CC-BY-SA

After WWII and twelve years of Nazi rule Catholic and Protestant church leaders in Germany agreed that at the center of Germany’s reconstruction needed to be a renewal of Christian values. They urged church members to take active, personal responsibility for political life. This was an especially strong sentiment among members of the former Confessing Church. The churches participated in the establishment of the Christian Democratic Union so that Christian values could have a more influential role in the political sphere and Reinhold von Thadden-Trieglaff founded the Kirchentag in 1949 to strengthen the faith and public responsibility of Protestant laity. Although Catholics and Protestants co-existed in the CDU it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s an uncomfortable co-existence because they differed on several issues, such as division, rearmament, and confessional schools. Adenauer’s policies challenged Christian unity. He won over Catholics and many conservative Protestants but lost the Protestant Left associated with Karl Barth, Gustav Heinemann, and Martin Niemöller. Pearson traces the manifestations of this split in the political debates that took place in the 1950s Kirchentage. The debates in the early 1950s were so caustic that “rather than promoting public responsibility and Christian unity for the transformation of German society, the churches were instead tearing themselves apart.” Eventually, however, the split among Protestants, he argues, forced the Protestant Church “to accept-even embrace-the liberal democratic value of political pluralism.” Protestants from both sides came to see political disagreement and debate as a positive sign of a working democracy.

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Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

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

Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

Plenary Session: Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness, 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

From the mid-1930s to the early 1980s Martin Niemöller was a cause célèbre in the United States. He is best known in America as the pugnacious Prussian minister who Hitler imprisoned in a concentration camp for eight years and after his liberation made the famous postwar confession:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

From 1946 until his death in 1984 Niemöller visited the United States regularly. None of his visits was as wrought with controversy as his very first. Niemöller first set foot in the U.S. in late 1946 to embark on a speaking tour sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). For the next five months his every move was followed closely in the local and national media including the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine as well as in religious publications like The Christian Century. The average American was more likely to know more about Martin Niemöller than about any other German living in the immediate postwar era. When Hitler locked him up in the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938 as his own private prisoner, churches across America and the world prayed for his release. When he toured the United States after gaining his freedom, many American Protestants greeted him like a rock star. Tens of thousands of enraptured fans attended his addresses and listen to him on the radio. But many other Americans, including some very prominent ones, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Stephen Wise, called into question Niemöller’s resistance credentials and voiced their adamant opposition to his visit.

In the1930s Niemöller became a hero in the U.S. almost overnight as word spread about his leadership of the Confessing Church and his defiance of Hitler. Under sensational headlines declaring “Protestants Push Fight Upon the Nazis” and “Insurgent Pastors Disobey the Reich Bishop’s Orders” the print media followed the dramatic events of the German Church Struggle and its increasingly famous personality. Although much of the early reporting was misinformed and often hagiographic, Americans were inundated with news about Niemöller’s plight and the Church’s “resistance.”

On July 1, 1937 the Gestapo arrested Niemöller and held him for eight months in Moabit prison. He was tried in early 1938 for “causing unrest among the people” among other things. Although exonerated of the charges later that month, Hitler ordered him re-arrested in March 1938 and imprisoned him in Sachsenhausen as his own private prisoner. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ reacted to Niemöller’s imprisonment by calling on the churches of America to hold special prayer vigils and ring the church bells. Throughout his years of captivity American Protestants commemorated various Niemöller anniversaries: his birthday, the original date of his arrest, the day Hitler declared that Niemöller was his private prisoner, etc.  Henry Smith Leiper, executive secretary for church relations in the FCC, exhorted Protestant ministers to “preach sermons on the modern Luther.”[2] On Sunday March 5, 1939, the second anniversary of Niemöller’s imprisonment in Sachsenhausen, Presbyterian Rev. John Paul Jones of the Union Church in Bay Ridge Brooklyn took it one step further by re-enacting Niemöller’s arrest. When pastor Jones mounted his pulpit that Sunday morning he appeared to be seized and dragged away by two men wearing Nazi uniforms. He then proceeded to give his sermon from behind a replica of a prison door with a barred window and “Sachsenhausen” inscribed over the door.[3]

Although there seemed to be no limit to the exaltation bestowed on Niemöller’s acts of defiance, there were, to be sure, some critics who pointed to his ardent love for his Fatherland and his enthusiastic participation in the unrestricted submarine warfare in World War One, for which he received an Iron Cross. Samuel Volkman, a rabbi in Chicago, however, took aim at Niemöller’s antisemitism, a topic rarely discussed in the American press. In a letter to The Christian Century Rabbi Volkman wrote:

I note from your issue of March 1, 1939, that the Federal Council of Churches is inviting the churches across America to give special recognition to Pastor Martin Niemöller and the cause for which he stands. As a rabbi, nothing would give the writer greater pleasure than to join Christian brethren in honoring one of the few exemplars of true religious heroism in our day. But in thumbing through the sermons of Niemöller [collected in the book Here I Stand], I came upon this passage “We speak of the ‘eternal Jew’ and conjure up the picture of a restless wanderer who has no home and can find no peace. We find a highly gifted people which produces idea after idea for the benefit of the world, but whatever it takes up becomes poisoned, and all that it ever reaps is contempt and hatred because ever and anon the world notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way.” (Here I Stand, p. 195) . . . [Rabbi Volkman then goes on to ask] Is the spiritual heritage of Israel a well of poison? . . . Who but the bigot will deny that [this] is as malevolent as it is unjust? Nor is this the only passage of its kind in the book. It is hoped that when the churches of America unite to do honor to the spirit of Niemöller, they will dissociate themselves from what can be regarded as nothing less than a particularly obnoxious kind of sanctimonious froth.[4]

What many Americans found more distressing than Niemöller’s antisemitism was his decision at the outbreak of the Second World War to volunteer his services to the German Navy to fight for his Fatherland. The editors of The Christian Century and Karl Barth in The Watchman Examiner tried to explain to their readers that Niemöller was, in fact, not an out-and-out anti-Nazi but rather a critic of Hitler’s church policy and that his offer to enlist in the Navy was simply proof of this.

If the American public was troubled by Niemöller’s “latest adventure,” as Karl Barth put it, it didn’t seem to dampen their overall enthusiasm for him. On December 23, 1940, Niemöller’s image appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline: “Martyr of 1940: In Germany only the cross has not bowed to the swastika.” The accompanying article quoted Niemöller’s famous challenge to Hitler, ”Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer.”

A flurry of books on Niemöller appeared in U.S. bookstores in the early 1940s. Popular biographies such as Basil Miller’s Martin Niemoeller: Hero of the Concentration Camp (1942) and Leo Stein’s fabrication I Was in Hell with Martin Niemoeller (1942) exalted his piety and courage. “Hitler may break his body, but never his soul,” Miller proclaimed to her enthusiastic readers. Ads appeared in newspapers proclaiming: “He Wouldn’t ‘Heil Hitler’ so Rev. Martin Niemoller begins his 7th year in a German Prison Camp – Remember Martin Niemoller!!” Films, such as Pastor Hall, and plays, such as God is my Fuehrer depicted his heroic struggle.

Churches across America breathed a collective sigh of relief when they learned that Niemöller had survived Dachau and had been taken into American custody after nearly being executed by the SS in northern Italy. The Washington Post reported that “When Americans read that their own troops . . . had found the celebrated Pastor Martin Niemöller, it was as though a grave had opened.” The Post predicted Niemöller would become “the advocate of his people in their hour of disillusion and despair, a witness to the world that, if German human nature is capable of the most bestial evil, it is also capable of great moral heroism.”[5]

On June 5, 1945 Niemöller granted an interview to dozens of British and American war correspondents gathered at a hotel in Naples, Italy, where Niemöller was awaiting authorization by the Americans to return to his family in Germany. In the interview he acknowledged that prior to the Nazis coming to power he “had nourished the hope that National Socialism, if it had gone the right way, might have developed into a system for creating good for the German people.”[6] He told the reporters that Hitler had deceived him. He insisted that most Germans, including himself, were ignorant of the scale of the atrocities that the Nazis had carried out and shocked by what they saw when the Allies liberated the camps. And because most Germans were ignorant of the atrocities, Niemöller explained, they don’t feel guilty. He declared that his own objections to Nazism were religious and not political. He claimed that he was not interested in politics but opposed the state’s encroachment in the affairs of the church. He admitted that from his cell in Dachau he offered his services to the German Navy when the war began. “If there is a war,” Niemöller declared, “a German doesn’t ask is it just or unjust, but he feels bound to join the ranks.” He claimed that the German people were ill suited to live under a Western form of democracy and even suggested that Germans preferred authoritarian rule. And finally, he said that what Germans needed now was help, not punishment, and that he hoped to visit England and the United States to enlist Brits and Americans in his efforts to secure food and proper clothing for Germans. He concluded, “The world will be astonished when it sees how many good people are left in Germany.”[7]

Although many of Niemöller’s devotees remained faithful to him despite the interview, the new Niemöller had his share of critics now, and some in very influential positions. Marshall Knappen, Director of the Education & Religious Affairs Branch of the American Occupation Forces, had a sit down with Niemöller on June 18 and concluded that “Niemöller, the religious leader and Confessional martyr is to be clearly distinguished from Niemöller the politically-minded retired naval officer. The one is to be accorded the freedom and respect which is due. The other . . . is to be watched carefully.”[8] Sylvester C. Michelfelder, President of the Council of Lutheran Churches in the United States, recorded in his diary on July 26, 1945, “Niemöller has come into disfavor pretty much because of his unfortunate interview with the Press in Italy. There he said, ‘My Soul belongs to God but my body to the State.’ This in America and Britain has caused much offense.”[9] General Lucius Clay, the American military governor, expressed reservations in September 1945 about Niemöller’s politics, stating: “While permitting Niemöller to take active leadership in religious affairs, we have not felt it is advisable to utilize his services in other fields as yet. While his anti-Nazi stand was demonstrated fully by his own actions, it is still too early to predict as to his wholehearted rejection of the militaristic and nationalistic concepts of the former German state.”[10]

Ewart E. Turner, an American Methodist pastor who had served as minister of the American Church in Berlin from 1930-34, visited the Niemöllers in Germany after the interview and found him to be deeply depressed. His wife, Else, said that “He sees everything black.”[11] There were several reasons for his despair, including the harsh treatment of the U.S. Occupational Forces, the unrepentant nature of the clergy and the German population in general, the death of one son and the unknown status of another in a Soviet POW camp.

The reaction of the American was scathing. The debacle of Naples interview severely tarnished Niemöller’s reputation and led some to conclude, along with the New York Times, that he was not suited “to be a leader in the moral reconstruction of his country.”[12] His assertion that Germany was unsuited for democracy caused the greatest concern. “If a democratic system cannot be erected in Germany Europe will be right back where it started from, and Germany must be continuously policed or periodically chastened by war.”[13] He was, as the New York Times article concluded, a hero but “a hero with limitations.”[14] Time magazine opened its article on the interview with the following: “Pastor Martin Niemöller, the one German whom Christians everywhere had respected, shocked a lot of people last week” (emphasis added). The editors of the San Jose News concluded, “We think that Rev. Niemöller is correct in saying that the Germans are not repentant and have learned little or nothing from their defeat. He may be correct in saying they are incapable of democracy. If they are thus unrepentant and incapable of democracy, then it is up to the Allies to provide them for a long time with the authority and leadership for which Rev. Niemöller says they yearn-an authority and leadership that will keep them out of further mischief.”[15] Niemöller’s disastrous interview led many Americans to conclude that if Niemöller was the best that Germany had to offer then a long and severe occupation of the country would be necessary.

Eleanor Roosevelt went so far as to describe Niemöller’s statements as “almost like a speech by Mr. Hitler.” And she went on to say, “Pastor Niemöller sounds to me like a gentleman who believes in the German doctrine of the superiority of race.”[16]

Amid the controversy over the interview, Niemöller and his wife accepted an invitation to visit the United States in late 1946 and early 1947 under the auspices of the Federal Council of Churches. During the lecture tour the Niemöllers spoke to enraptured church groups in more than a dozen states from the Northwest to the Southeast. Ewart E. Turner accompanied the Niemöllers on their American tour and described the Niemöller’s visit as “a spiritual atomic eruption.” Turner advised local church leaders scheduled to host a Niemöller visit, “Don’t let this spirit of Pentecost take you by surprise. Prepare for it with all the traditional ingenuity and foresight of American church life at its best.”[17]

Although the Federal Council of Churches received hundreds of requests for Niemöller to speak in various cities and churches across the United States, the visit was laden with controversy. Even before he arrived, opinion about his impending visit was polarized. Despite the flood of protests received by the Secretary of State, the Niemöllers were the first German civilians to be allowed entrance into the U.S. under auspices other than U.S. Armed Forces. Niemöller came to the United States as the vice-president of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and the head of its department for relations with foreign churches. The stated purpose was to thank American churches for their support and assistance during Hitler’s reign and in the immediate postwar years. But attacks by such prominent figures as Eleanor Roosevelt resulted in a widely publicized debate over Niemöller and the purpose of his trip. On the day of Niemöller’s first public address in the U.S. Mrs. Roosevelt again raised her voice in protest. “One may applaud his bravery and his devotion to his church, but one can hardly applaud his attitude on the Nazi politics, and I cannot quite see why we should be asked to listen to his lectures. I am sure he is a good man according to his lights, but his lights are not those of the people of the United States who did not like the Hitler political doctrines.”[18]

Abundantly aware of the need to win over the American people, Niemöller did his best to avoid the mistakes he made in Naples. First, he refused to partake in any impromptu interviews where he might go off message. Second, all of his lectures and sermons were written down in advance and read virtually verbatim rather than ad-libbed. And finally, in the dozens of lectures, speeches, and sermons he gave in cities across the United States he continually returned to several themes that American churchgoers would likely find reassuring. That is not to say that his addresses lacked any fire or controversy, but rather that he tried to steer clear of any overtly political message that might offend his audience.

So what did Niemöller say to his American audiences? From his very first address at the biennial meeting of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in early December 1946 to his last in May 1947, he typically began by thanking Americans for their prayers of support during his period of imprisonment and thanking the FCC for inviting him to United States. He emphasized that it was a combination of the prayers from abroad and his faith in God that sustained him during his years of imprisonment. He described how Hitler’s persecution of the German churches sparked an opposition movement within the churches and a new sense of faith in the Word of God. He highlighted the resistance mounted by the Confessing Church against the Nazi state while acknowledging that it was a minority of pastors and congregations that took part in the opposition; he drew attention to the 1934 Barmen Declaration and its proclamation of the absolute sovereignty of Christ as the backbone of the Confessing Church. He often told audiences of his own personal acts of defiance like preaching the Word of God to fellow inmates in the concentration camps or how he directly confronted Hitler at a 1934 meeting, telling him, “Mr. Chancellor, God himself has entrusted us with the responsibility for our nation, and no power and no authority in the world is entitled to take it from us.”[19] To his audience in Davenport Iowa he declared that despite Hitler’s attempt to destroy the churches, “the Word of God can’t be bound and can’t be murdered.”[20]

Although he devoted greater space to the Church opposition than to its complicity in Nazism, he frequently acknowledged his share of guilt and the guilt of his church and the German nation for the devastation in Europe; he pointed to the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 as evidence that the leaders of the Protestant Church recognized their share of guilt. He emphasized the importance of reconciliation between God and man, between nations that had recently been at war, and between German and foreign churches. One important reason for his trip to the United States was to demonstrate that “God’s plan for Christian brotherhood doesn’t stop short at the boundaries of nations nor at the borders of continents.”[21] In addition to the ecumenical vitality of the universal church, he commended the non-denominational character of the Confessing Church and criticized the barriers set up that divide denominations.

When he met with groups of pastors or other churchmen and women, a prominent message was the need for the church to play a role in public affairs. Over and over he lamented that since the French Revolution religion had become a private affair resulting in an absence of moral and ethical responsibility in public matters. The absence of the commandments in public life, Niemöller explained, left people without any sense of direction leading them to embrace demagogues, who seemed to have all the answers. In his address to pastors in Rochester, N.Y. on February 25, 1947, he exclaimed that, “Because the commandments, the moral commandments and ethical commandments of God, were no longer acknowledged as valid for public life, humanity tried in a last decisive step to establish a new moral basis for public life in installing one person, Adolph Hitler.” The church, he went on, was particularly to blame for allowing this state of affairs to develop. Christianity, he insisted, was responsible for the disaster in central Europe because it did not carry out its duties to remind the world about the commandments.[22]

Niemöller tried to reassure his audiences that the German churches – at least those associated with the Confessing Church – had learned this lesson but he was worried about whether or not the average German was really learning any lessons from the past. The reason for this concern was that Germans were suffering horribly and that the danger existed that in their wretchedness they might easily fall pray to this or that ideology or person who claimed to have easy solutions to their problems. Or they may simply lose all hope and fall into despair. They wanted food on their plates and coal to heat their apartment. The church, however, could not offer easy solutions to their empty cupboards and unheated homes and so he worried about the appeal of the churches over time. He urged his American audiences to help mitigate this situation and to show Germans that Christians abroad cared about their plight by sending relief packages. And he urged American pastors to consider travelling to Germany to see for themselves the situation and to preach in a German church.[23]

On some occasions Niemöller would briefly address Nazi racial persecution and the state sponsored mass murder of Jews. He usually presented the church (and sometimes the German people) as opposed to the Nazis’ racial program. For instance, in a radio address over WMCA in New York in January 1947, he said, “When Hitler tried to extinguish the Jews, the Church had to pronounce and proclaim, ‘Thou shalt not Kill.’” In a speech delivered in New York, Niemöller reassured his audience that antisemitism was at its end in Germany and would never recur. On another occasion he described German suffering in the immediate postwar years as revenge for Jewish suffering. In his address to the FCC he exclaimed, “We saw guilt accumulate through twelve years [of Nazi rule] and culminate in the planned murder of millions of Jews – a guilt now being revenged according to the rule of human punishment “eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

So how did Americans, especially his critics, respond to his speaking tour and his multi-faceted message?  The outgoing president of the FCC, Bishop Oxnam, with the unanimous and enthusiastic support of the FCC, sent a telegram to Mrs. Roosevelt the day after Niemöller’s first address. The telegram stated that the FCC deeply regretted her remarks that Niemöller’s opposition to the Nazis was not political. “The record clearly shows,” the telegram read, “that he repeatedly spoke against political aims of the Nazis as early as 1933. He was forbidden to preach as [a] result of his speaking against Hitler’s racialistic program.”[24] The FCC went on to urge Mrs. Roosevelt to correct the erroneous impression of Niemöller she had created. The telegram as well as a subsequent letter from Bishop Oxnam did not sway Mrs. Roosevelt. She wrote back that bringing Niemöller to the United States and allowing him to speak to huge audiences would only create sympathy for Germany and mask the threat that Germany poses to world peace. She concluded her letter to Oxnam stating, “I want us to be vividly aware of the fact that the German people are to blame, that they committed horrible crimes. Therefore, I think you are doing something which is stupid beyond words in bringing this gentleman here and having him touring the country, no matter how much you like him.”[25]

Mrs. Roosevelt was not alone in holding these views. Several prominent rabbis voiced similar concerns. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of The Temple in Cleveland, Ohio, and a key figure in the mobilization of American support for the founding of the State of Israel, called Niemöller unfit to lead postwar Germany because he did not oppose Nazi racism but only the Nazi persecution of the church. He agreed with Mrs. Roosevelt that Niemöller’s speaking tour “may be used to allay the fears held by many American people that Germany will be rebuilt without a real moral regeneration of the German people.”[26]

Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, told the FCC that he deplored its sponsorship of Niemöller’s speaking tour and considered it a great disservice to the country. Rabbi Wise criticized Niemöller’s “lamentable past of unequivocal support of Hitler until his own church was hurt. … The record is that neither before nor during his incarceration in a concentration camp did Niemöller speak one word of protest against one of the foulest crimes in history.” He expressed concern that Niemöller’s visit would only lead to a further softening of American occupation policy and that Germans would regard this as a sign of forgiveness and acceptance of their anti-democratic and antisemitic outlook.[27]

Responses to these and similar criticisms by leading representatives of the FCC such as Dr. Samuel McCrea Cavert, Dr. Henry Smith Leiper, Bishop Oxnam and others did not always fall on deaf ears. Estelle Sternberger, a well-known radio commentator in NYC and outspoken critic of the Niemöller visit, changed her mind about Niemöller after she was inundated with materials from the FCC providing “proof” of Niemöller’s anti-Nazi credentials. She went on the airwaves to tell her listeners about the abundant evidence “that the German pastor did do whatever he could to mobilize public opinion against the racial policies of the Nazis.”[28]

Although there most certainly were others like Sternberger who changed their minds, Niemöller’s visit seems to have done very little to overcome the disputed memories of complicity and righteousness. Both sides in this dispute inflated and distorted their evidence. Niemöller’s support for the Nazis in the 1924 and 1933 elections was inflated by his critics to the accusation that he had been a member of the Nazi Party and an unequivocal supporter of Hitler and his racial policy. Likewise, that Niemöller defied Hitler, opposed the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the Church, and was imprisoned by Hitler was inflated by his supporters to suggest that Niemöller opposed not just Hitler’s church policy but also his political and racial policies from day one. These misconceptions and misrepresentations of Niemöller can be traced to the dual lgacy of the Church Struggle – a legacy that included both courageous opposition to the Nazi assault on the churches and the attempt to Nazify all facets of German society, and at the same time an acceptance of aspects of the Nazi political and racial program.

Niemöller’s subsequent visits to the United States were less fraught with controversy. But Niemöller still managed to stimulate lively debate through his criticisms of American occupation policy in Germany and the rearmament of West Germany under the pro-American Adenauer government. Charges and counter-charges were made that he was an unrepentant ultra-nationalist on the one hand and a communist sympathizer on the other. His advocacy of a “third way” during the Cold War led the U.S. State Department to consider him a man to be watched. Later he would support the civil rights movement in the U.S. and would meet with Ho Chi Mihn in North Vietnam to express his opposition to the war and Western imperialism. In the 1970s and 80s he was a leading voice in the nuclear disarmament movement. Long after Niemöller died, his name and, in particular, his poetic confession “First they came for” has been appropriated by American activists of every political persuasion for just about every political cause.

[1] This is the version insisted upon by Sybil Niemöller von Sell, Martin Niemöller’s wife.

[2] “Niemoeller of I,” Time (July 10, 1939).

[3] “For Niemoller,” Time (March 20, 1939).

[4] “Letters,” The Christian Century (March 15, 1939), 355.

[5] “Niemoeller,” The Washington Post (May 13, 1945), B4.

[6] George Palmer, “Niemoeller Tried to Join the Navy in 1939,” The Lewiston Daily Sun (June 6, 1945), 9.

[7] “For What I am,” Time (June 18, 1945).

[8] Clemens Vollnhals, Die evangelische Kirche nach dem Zusammenbruch: Berichte ausländischer Beobachter aus dem Jahre 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 21.

[9] Vollnhals, XXV.

[10] Vollnhals, XXVI.

[11] Ewart Turner, Christian Century (April 25, 1984), 445.

[12] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[13] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[14] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[15] San Jose Times (June 11, 1945), 12.

[16] Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (August 7, 1945).

[17] Ewart Turner, WCC Archives WWII Era.

[18] Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (December 4, 1946).

[19] Martin Niemöller, radio address, Seattle, (Dec. 5, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[20] Martin Niemöller, address in Davenport, Iowa, (Dec. 22, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[21] Martin Niemöller, address to FCC in Seattle (Dec. 5, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[22] Martin Niemöller, address in Rochester (Feb. 25, 1947) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[23] Martin Niemöller, address in Rochester (Feb. 25, 1947) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[24] “Message Sent on Niemoeller,” New York Times (Dec. 6, 1946).

[25] Eleanor Roosevelt to Bishop Oxnam in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers edited by Allida M. Black (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), 419.

[26] “Niemoeller Called ‘Unfit’ as a Leader,” New York Times (Feb, 3, 1947).

[27] “Rabbi Wise Deplores Niemoeller Favor,” New York Post (Jan. 25, 1947).

[28] “Sternberger Reverses Position on Niemoeller in Light of Evidence” in WCC Archives WWII Era.

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Conference Report: 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012

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

Conference Report: 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

The 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches (ASC) was held in Rochester, NY, this year on the beautiful campus of Monroe Community College (MCC) from May 12-14. The ASC is an interfaith, interdisciplinary, and international organization founded by Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke, both professors and clergymen, in 1970. Littell, who died in 2009, founded the first doctoral studies program on the Holocaust in 1976 at Temple University, where he taught for many years and where his extensive papers, correspondence, and books are now housed in Paley Library. His wife, Professor Marcia Sachs Littell, a Holocaust scholar at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and the Executive Director Emerita of ASC, was present at the conference and chaired a thought-provoking panel on “Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women in the Holocaust.” Hubert Locke, Professor and Dean Emeritus of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, opened the conference with a greeting and encouraged participants and Holocaust scholars to think more broadly about the role of racial, religious, and national intolerance and prejudice.

Professor of Psychology Charles Clarke, the 2012 ASC Conference Chair and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project at MCC, did a superlative job organizing this year’s conference, which consisted of nearly 20 panels of scholars.

In line with this year’s conference theme, “70 Years Later: The Lingering Shadow of Wannsee,” the first plenary session included a presentation by Dr. Wolf Kaiser, Deputy-Director of The House of the Wannsee Conference, as well as a breakout session on “Genocidal Decision-Making and its Implications for Contemporary Genocide.” In addition to the panels on the churches and religion, there were a number of excellent presentations on Holocaust education, arts and literature, reparations, antisemitism, torture, and genocide.

The panels that addressed the churches and religion included a fascinating and troubling set of papers by John Pawlikowski of Catholic Theological University and Marvin Wilson of Gordon College, on the challenge of intractable supersessionary thinking. Willi Graf’s resistance and Emanuel Hirsch’s complicity were the topic of two papers by Stephani Richards-Wilson of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jeremy Koop of York University respectively. There was a panel devoted entirely to Catholics and the Shoah with two papers addressing Pius XII and one by Joseph G. Kelly, professor emeritus of Nazareth College, on the Rochester Agreement, a joint Catholic-Jewish statement issued in 1996 that encouraged dialogue, respect, and combating religious intolerance. And finally, a plenary session, chaired by Hubert Locke, on “Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness,” which included papers on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and Rolf Hochhuth by Vicki Barnett, Matthew Hockenos, and Mark Ruff respectively.

The conference closed with a tribute to Richard Rubenstein, a long-time participant in the ASC and acclaimed author and theologian, and a keynote address, “Is the Shoah the Perfect Storm of Genocide?,” by Michael Berenbaum, director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University.

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