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Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 488

By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College

Raul Hilberg famously employed a tripartite schema in his Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. Subsequent works have often divided German society in the Third Reich along these lines. Some have lumped most of the population in the perpetrator category. Others have portrayed German society as a neat bell curve in which perpetrators and victims make up the extremes and the vast majority fit within the bell as bystanders. While categorizations have heuristic value, simple categorical divisions fail to adequately describe the complexity of human activity and change over time. In Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Mary Fulbrook probes the complexity of the concept of “bystanders”— a group she describes as “the muddled middle.”

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She is a familiar and respected contributor to scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In this work she avoids teleological interpretations of events and rejects simplistic categorizations. She endeavors to tell the story of German bystanders “from the inside out” through “selected accounts of personal experiences” (16). She tells the stories of individuals. In so doing, she humanizes history. Victims and bystanders had names. They had stories. They were not a grouping of data points on a chart. Fulbrook’s subjects are profoundly human, and their complex stories challenge facile characterizations of society in Nazi Germany. Fulbrook’s primary sources for Part I are autobiographical essays from 1939 written on the theme “My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933.” These essays give a broad range of everyday experiences before such memories were shaped by knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. Likewise, in Part II she employs a variety of firsthand accounts and memoirs to tell stories from the ground level. Fulbrook argues well for the value and limitations of her source base in her introduction.

Fulbrook divides her analysis into two parts. Part I, “The Slippery Slope: Social Segregation in Nazi Germany,” analyzes German society from the First World War until the beginning of Hitler’s territorial expansions. Periodization matters in historical argumentation, and Fulbrook tells a fuller story of German society by beginning her narrative well before Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship. She gives a rich account of German society and the experience of German Jews before the racialization of the Nazi period. She demonstrates the shift from pre-1933, when “social class, gender, regional, family, or individual issues had been far more significant than religious affiliation or Jewish ancestry”, to the enforcement of (and voluntary conformity with) the dichotomy of “Aryan”/”non-Aryan” divisions in the first years of the Third Reich (27).

Three out of the five chapters in Part I detail societal changes before the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. Fulbrook demonstrates that, well before the Nuremberg Laws, “Germans were already learning and practising distinctions between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’ in everyday life, and with far-reaching consequences” (91). She asserts, “widespread acceptance and more or less willing enactment… was key to the broader impact of Nazi racism over time” (103). In account after account, Fulbrook illustrates the complexities of conformity and concern. Many victims of National Socialist racial policies recorded moments of kindness from their “Aryan” compatriots, but these were nearly always marked by fear and considerations of self-preservation. Fulbrook contends that this mixture of public conformity and private misgivings allowed non-Jewish Germans to enjoy “both the benefits of public conformity and the moral glow of private dissidence,” but “in the process, this pre-emptively conformist behaviour only served further to define and deepen the rifts that Nazi ideology introduced” (118). The implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 further solidified broad conformity with mandated racial discrimination. Part I demonstrates the shift from voluntary conformity to compulsory conformity to Nazi racial policies within Germany.

Part II – “The Expansion of Violence at Home and Abroad” – traces the broader and devastating reach of Nazi racial policies as the Nazi regime began to dominate its neighbors. Chapter six examines the spread of Nazi racial ideology among the German-speaking populations throughout Europe with particular attention on the Baltic states and Austria. Regarding Austria, Fulbrook concludes “the progression from conformity through compliance to complicity was massively accelerated” compared to the early years of Nazi Germany (193). Chapter seven highlights Kristallnacht as a definitive turning point for the “bystander society” in Germany. If non-Jewish Germans feared the potential violent response if they protested mistreatment of “non-Aryans” from 1933-1934, the unrestrained violence of November 9-10, 1938 demonstrated the danger of not conforming with state definitions of the Volksgemeinschaft. Fulbrook asserts, “In November 1938, it was neither ignorance nor indifference that shaped the polarization of popular responses, but perceptions of the relative risks versus potential benefits of different forms of action” (232). Simply put: Kristallnacht changed the math for those calculating the reasonableness of aiding their “non-Aryan” neighbors, diminishing the already small minority of those willing to not conform.

The next two chapters detail the horrific escalation of violence resulting in genocide. Chapters ten and eleven examine the category of “bystander” for Germans from 1941-1945. Chapter ten, “Inner Emigration and the Fiction of Ignorance,” demonstrates the widespread awareness of extreme violence against Jews committed in the East. Auschwitz often functions as a metonym for the Holocaust. Fulbrook explores how German “bystanders” employed this practice to claim ignorance: “The popular refrain ‘we knew nothing about it’ generally restricted the ‘it’ to a very narrow focus, such as the chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The focus on ‘Auschwitz,’ or ‘gas chambers,’ effectively excluded the discrimination and persecution of the peacetime years, with which the majority of people had been forced to comply, in which many had more actively participated, and from which many had also benefitted” (311). Fulbrook covers a wide array of personal cases where non-Jewish Germans learned of the murderous atrocities against Jews. At this point in the regime’s power (and usage of violence), she acknowledges the great difficulty facing citizens who ran the risk of becoming victims of extreme violence if they expressed dissent, “yet remaining silent meant in effect condoning brutality and murder, even if this strategy was a form of ‘muddling through’ in existentially threatening times” (339).

Fulbrook concludes with an indictment of both German elites and the wider society, but with elites bearing the greater burden. She faults elites for not standing against Hitler at an early stage, which left members of the wider society in “an arena of repression and violence, in which it was easier to conform” (341). Fulbrook identifies gradual societal change rather than a driving ideology as the crucial feature of the creation of a “bystander society” that acquiesced to (and often benefitted from) the persecution of Jews. She argues that the greatest lesson is to “explore how very small changes in everyday life that seem anodyne or justifiable at the time can have catastrophic consequences within a matter of just a few years” (374). The pre-war Nazi years are more than the “Seizure of Power,” the Nuremberg Laws, and Kristallnacht. Fulbrook’s careful narration of everyday shifts and accommodations to Nazi racial policy in German society show the complexity of human agency and possible choices in the face of growing violence.

Mary Fulbrook’s account of German bystanders reflects both sympathy for the difficulty of choices made under the shadow of violence as well as grief that courage was the exception and not the rule. She reflects upon the emergence of a “bystander society” — “a society in which social relations and political conditions are such that most people would either not want or not dare to intervene on behalf of victims, and in which most people learned to look away” (381). With hindsight, one can see that the early years of the Nazi regime were the years in which dissidence would have proven most effective, yet in those early months and years when so many Germans expected National Socialism to be a passing fad, many opportunities were missed as people just muddled through. Fulbrook closes her book with a final charge that the best way to enact the cry of “never again” is to be aware enough to enact “earlier or more effective intervention. It is, then, vital that we extend our understanding of the historically contingent conditions for the production of a bystander society” (399). Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society enriches the scholarship on German society in the Third Reich and serves as a helpful reminder of the gradual developments that lead to nightmarish catastrophes.

While not directly addressing the scholarship of the modern German churches, this book will help inform future studies addressing the everyday experience of otherwise anonymous members of German society in the Nazi era. Scholars of the German churches will recognize the growth of state power in the mid-1930s that made dissidence far less probable or effective than it was in 1933. Fulbrook’s concept of the “muddled middle” may find particular resonance in studies of German Protestantism, which have often focused on the Confessing Church and Deutsche Christen minorities to the neglect of the majority.

 

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New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

By David A. R. Clark, University of Toronto

From time to time, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly invite a young scholar to profile his or her work. Here we are pleased to introduce you to David A. R. Clark, a PhD candidate in Theological Studies at the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology.

Broadly, my research examines the intersection between theology, biblical interpretation, and Christian responses to Nazism and the Holocaust. More specifically, my dissertation, “Jewish Scriptures in Nazi Germany: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Old Testament, 1932-1945,” examines Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Old Testament during the Nazi period, particularly in the context of antisemitic efforts by the “German Christian” movement to discredit and decanonize these Jewish Scriptures. Centrally, this three-part dissertation considers whether Bonhoeffer’s exegesis presented a theological alternative or protest to the claims of the “German Christian” movement.

Part I of the dissertation builds on historiographical research by Doris Bergen and Susannah Heschel in order to analyze the place of the Old Testament in Nazi Germany. I recently presented on this research area at the Canadian-American Theological Association interdisciplinary conference, “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology”: my paper received the conference prize, and is now a forthcoming article in the Canadian-American Theological Review entitled “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933.” Part II of the dissertation examines the significance of Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of the Old Testament in the political and theological context of the Nazi period, focusing especially on Bonhoeffer’s approach to the Psalms. My article in this research area, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in Its Interpretive Context,” was recently published in the peer-reviewed Scottish Journal of Theology, an imprint of Cambridge University Press. (For readers without institutional access to the journal, a read-only version can be accessed here.) Part III of the dissertation considers the implications for post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations of Bonhoeffer’s Nazi-era exegesis. Within the scope of the dissertation, I can only begin to trace these wide-ranging implications; accordingly, I intend a fuller treatment of this topic as a postdoctoral project.

My research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Additionally, in 2017, I was a Seminary Fellow with Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. For more information or to contact me, readers can visit www.davidarclark.ca.

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Review of Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz: die katholische Feldpastoral, 1939-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz: die katholische Feldpastoral, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014).

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Martin Röw’s Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz is among the newest contributions in a sudden flurry of work on chaplaincy and pastoral care during the Nazi period. Published in 2014, Röw’s text is the first rigorous, intensive analysis of the Catholic military chaplaincy during the Third Reich. At more than 450 pages, it is also the most detailed, even exhaustive. As such, Röw has provided the definitive book on this subject that is essential reading for anyone with an interest in religion in the military, pastoral care, and the world of German Catholic chaplains during the Second World War.

Röw’s intentions are to deliver a comprehensive structural and experiential history of Catholic military pastoral care in Germany, with a particular emphasis on providing a systematic study of chaplaincy (12). He has oriented himself solidly in the available historiography on the subject in both German and English and his archival research is impressively broad, gathering material from four archdiocesan archives (including Salzburg), eight diocesan archives (including one in Austria and one in the Netherlands), and several other state and private collections in Germany. His main source for primary documentation is the Archive of the Catholic Military Bishop, in Berlin, notably the Georg Werthmann collection. Until relatively recently, this rich compilation of chaplaincy-related material, produced by the man who served as second-in-command of the Catholic chaplaincy during the Second World War, was strikingly understudied; in the past four years, three books have appeared whose authors have extensively mined its records.[1] Röw articulates a concern with several facets of the chaplaincy’s existence, including the chaplains’ relations to military authorities, their understanding of the regime’s politics and ideology, the daily life of chaplains and their interactions with civilian populations, and their witness to war crimes. He is especially attuned to the challenges of accessing and interpreting mentality, and is determined “to drill into the mental dispositions” of chaplains wherever possible in order “to illuminate [their] self-conception and their mindset” (13). To some extent, he acknowledges the bias in and limitations of his main source, as Werthmann was the “nerve centre” of the chaplaincy (39), and his numerous judgments should not automatically be taken as balanced or neutral.

Beyond the introduction, Röw dedicates a short chapter to constructing the Catholic milieu of Germany. In passing, he recognizes the minority position that German Catholics held in a newly united German empire after 1871, but he focuses more on the impact of the First World War and the Weimar era on German Catholics, the ascent of Nazism and the relationship between the regime and the Church, and the meaning of the war’s outbreak for the German Catholic community in 1939. Much of this work is summation of earlier, mostly German historiography; because this is the backdrop to Röw’s main focus, he introduces nothing revelatory or original about the larger context of German Catholicism. The bulk of his work, nearly four hundred pages, is devoted to the Catholic chaplaincy during the war.

Röw divides his analysis of the chaplaincy into six main sections, the first two of which sketch the contours of the chaplaincy and the roles that chaplains expected themselves to fill as well as those that military officers asked them to take on. The first section considers the structures and individuals of the chaplaincy under Nazism, including general and specific chaplaincy statistics. There were “about 760” priests who served as chaplains over the course of the war, with 410 serving simultaneously at its peak, in the summer of 1942 (84). In a different section, Röw delves briefly into a quantitative social analysis of chaplains, offering statistics about regional background and generational variation; the leadership of the chaplaincy; the recruitment process and training; and the Nazi regime’s persistent, often explicit hostility towards the chaplaincy, culminating in the infamous 1942 order not to fill any vacant chaplain positions (120). The second section focuses on the context of the chaplaincy within the Wehrmacht, proclaimed at the time as “the pillar of the regime” (127). Röw depicts the military’s conceptions of pastoral care; the different kinds of relationships between chaplains and their officers, both positive and negative; the introduction of the much-detested National Socialist Leadership Officers (NSFOs) at the end of 1943; and Catholic chaplains’ interactions with their Protestant counterparts, both cooperative and competitive.

The final four sections are dedicated to the war’s impact on the chaplains and contain some of the richest material from the Werthmann collection to be introduced in one book. The third section confronts the duties of a chaplain, highlighting the divine service as “the centerpiece of pastoral care” at all times (173); Catholic chaplains’ reactions to the mandated, and controversial, nondenominational services (interkonfessionelle Gottesdienste); the significance of chaplains’ presence at the frontlines; equipment and available literature; care for the wounded, the fallen, and the imprisoned; and “deviant chaplains,” those who Werthmann labelled “weak brothers” (232).

The fourth section is Röw’s most sustained drive into the issue of mentality, considering how chaplains crafted meaning out of the war for themselves and the soldiers with whom they served, including nationalist and anti-Bolshevik impulses; displays of ambivalence, distance, and powerlessness, as well as affinity with the regime’s wartime goals; and the significant influence of a highly-developed sense of duty.

The fifth section, on communication and interactions between chaplains and their various environments, includes Röw’s scrutiny of the impact of the chaplains (and religion) on the fighting troops; their roles as guides, mentors, and helpers for soldiers in the thick of battle; the community of chaplains, however nebulous, that existed throughout the war; and their relationships with other identifiable groups, including seminarians and priests serving in the Wehrmacht (the so-called Priestersoldaten), foreign chaplains and priests, and indigenous populations.

The sixth section sees Röw endeavour to capture the kind of “everyday life in war” (“ein Alltag im Krieg”) that chaplains attempted to make for themselves, while admitting the challenges and controversy in introducing that word into the context of a war of annihilation (380-381). Thus Röw examines the typical official activities of a chaplain within his regiment or division; the peaks and ebbs of war as determined by active battle and proximity to the front; the experiences on different fronts, with a lengthy excursion into life on the Eastern Front; and their witnessing of atrocity (Röw uses the term Verbrechen for this section). This includes chaplains’ reactions to the maltreatment and murder both of Soviet POWs as well as of Jews. The almost-scant attention paid to this topic—fifteen pages—as well as Röw’s dependence on secondary sources and postwar published memoirs to flesh out the half-dozen or so eyewitness accounts that he has uncovered underscore the paucity of recorded testimony from the chaplains themselves. While many undoubtedly witnessed something, chaplains simply did not write about such things.

For scholars who have studied the Catholic chaplaincy in the Wehrmacht, Röw’s analysis does not necessarily bring anything ground-breaking to the subject of chaplains and pastoral care during the Second World War, or the hostility of the Nazi regime towards the Catholic Church in general and priests in the Wehrmacht in particular, or to the nature of the war and how devout Catholic clergy tried to makes sense of it. The identification of Bolshevism as an enemy provided a convenient overlap between Catholic and Nazi ideologies (260-270). Chaplains were dependent on good relations with the military authorities to be able to work effectively. Röw argues that “outspoken opponents of pastoral care, such as Nazi supporter General Schörner, commander of the 6th Mountain Troop Division, appear to be an exception” (145). Written or explicit criticisms of the regime or the Führer were—not surprisingly—non-existent, given the lethal reaction they would have provoked (291, 298).

The significance of Röw’s work is not its originality; it is that his study is the first methodical, systematic treatment of the chaplaincy, from the top of its hierarchy—the relatively feeble field bishop, Rarkowski, isolated from the other bishops and supported by the Nazis, alongside his field vicar-general Werthmann, judicious, active, energetic, willing to take risks (103)—to the chaplains standing next to soldiers on the field of battle. For this reason alone, the text is indispensable.

Röw’s objective is to produce a study of Catholic pastoral care during the war “in its various spheres and facets, but always viewing pastoral care as a whole” (442), and in this he has succeeded, though he has had to sacrifice depth in order to achieve breadth. The character of individual chaplains is underemphasized in favour of the institution in which they served, so that one is hard-pressed to keep track of the names (which are not always given in the footnotes). Despite the brief foray into the social and regional background of some chaplains, there is only a passing understanding of how old, or conversely how young, the chaplains tended to be, how long they had been priests when they were recruited, how their familial and regional histories moulded their pastoral behaviour in the military, or how many came from Austria or other annexed territories of the Reich. (Curiously, one of the most striking omissions in Röw’s list of archival resources is the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising, one of the largest archives of its kind in Germany). Werthmann is very present throughout, but remains as slippery and enigmatic as ever. Röw admits, “Whether [Werthmann’s] motto actually was, ‘good German and above all Catholic, but not and in no way National Socialist,’ as Heinrich Missalla alleges, cannot be said with certainty.” (103) Although the collection that bears his name is at last receiving the scholarly attention it has long deserved, we still await a definitive biography of its creator. One might have wished for a clearer sense, too, of change over time within the wartime chaplaincy, particularly given the turning-point of 1942, when no new chaplains were recruited.

Röw is undoubtedly correct when he claims that his work challenges the older interpretation of chaplains as unpolitical, and their military service as merely “care (Fürsorge) for men mired in the misery of war” (445). It is difficult to disagree with his conclusions about the motivation of so many chaplains, composed of an amalgam of “Catholic idealism, fueled by a specifically Catholic inferiority complex with deep historical roots, and a patriotism that convinced them that they were in no way second to non-Catholic Germans” (446). Röw is unflinching in his final assessment of the effect that chaplains had on the kind of war fought on the Eastern Front, articulating what those of us long familiar with these sources have known: their very presence encouraged soldiers to justify their behaviour as legitimate, even necessary, in an existential battle against an enemy—Bolshevism—that sought to annihilate German and Catholic culture. In this manner, priests in chaplain uniform “became, however involuntary, instruments of normalization of the war of annihilation” (448). And Röw has sifted his sources thoroughly to provide demonstrable proof of this. Although the regime worked doggedly to nullify the influence that a relatively small number of chaplains (760, says Röw, in an army in which some 18 million men served) had on the troops, the chaplains ultimately rendered a vital service in sustaining the Wehrmacht’s fighting fervor, especially on the Eastern Front.

Yet the number here might give one pause: how could so few chaplains possibly have motivated millions of men over a span of several years? They could not possibly be everywhere at once, and Werthmann, Röw’s primary resource, acknowledges that some divisions went months, or more, without access to a chaplain.[2] Does this not suggest that the chaplains inflated their own importance, precisely to justify their presence at the front, both at the time and after 1945? Undoubtedly the Priestersoldaten—more than 17,000 Catholic priests, members of religious orders (Ordensleute), and seminarians who were conscripted but did not serve in the chaplaincy—helped to fill in some gaps, though these individuals fell outside the chaplaincy and Röw accords them only a few pages.

What will really answer this question is testimony from the soldiers themselves about the impact of religion and the men who represented it: chaplains, as well as priests and other religious outside the chaplaincy wearing military uniforms. This is, admittedly, beyond Röw’s focus. His milieu is the chaplaincy, and while he begins to address the issue of reception, he does so in somewhat cursory fashion, referring to what responses to pastoral care military authorities told chaplains to expect from soldiers (326-329), and then to the perspectives of chaplains themselves (329-336). Röw does not claim to have answered all outstanding questions about the Catholic chaplaincy with this work. Indeed, he lists several areas for further research in the final pages, including theological themes in wartime sermons and other writing, comparative studies of chaplaincies in different militaries during the war, and the much-desired critical evaluation of Werthmann. But it might be time to shift focus in order to address more fully the questions that this research engenders. Perhaps we should begin to look less narrowly at the men who brought religious care to the troops, and instead scrutinize more attentively what the troops themselves did with that religious care. Röw has provided an exceptional overview of the former in the German context, and it should be considered essential reading for any scholar asking questions about religious care in the German military during the Second World War.

 

 

[1] Chronologically, Röw’s book was the first published, predating my own work by only several months. Röw was aware of my doctoral dissertation and cites this briefly in his introduction, though I was not aware of his work until it was published. While we both worked in the same archive in Berlin at roughly the same time, we never met each other. He did not have access to my book on the subject, Wehrmacht Priests (2015), prior to publishing his work. The third book is Dagmar Pöpping’s Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront, a comparative study of the Protestant and Catholic chaplaincies, which appeared in 2017.

[2] This dearth was made even worse by the 1942 prohibition to fill vacant chaplain positions, as Röw details. See 120-122.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2014). 473 pages, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783766842992.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The history of “non-Aryan Christians” under National Socialism has been a peripheral issue in much of the historiography and a notoriously fuzzy one even in works that focus on the German churches, reflecting the ambiguities of the category itself as well as the unpredictable fates of those who were so labelled. In Nazi Germany the term “non-Aryan” was often used interchangeably with “Jew,” yet for many Germans there was a distinction. Jews had been persecuted throughout European history, but the Emancipation laws of the nineteenth century opened the way to greater opportunity and assimilation, often but not only through conversion to Christianity.  For some, the decision to assimilate through conversion was a pragmatic one, made in the belief that it would lead to a better career and firmer standing in German society; for others, it was made for reasons of marriage or conviction. In any case, it was a double-edged sword, creating a dividing line in German society that became very evident after 1933.  Christians of Jewish ancestry did not think of themselves as Jews and were not viewed as such by religiously observant Jews, and many of these Christians shared the antisemitism of the times. After 1933, however, Nazi law designated anyone with Jewish ancestry as “non-Aryan,” blending the religious and racialized categories, and as a result many baptized Christians suddenly found themselves categorized as Judenchristen, Nichtarier, or nichtarische Christen.

Estimates of the number of people who fell into this category under Nazi law vary. This volume gives the total figure as around 400,000 (a figure that includes members of Christian churches as well as secular Germans with some Jewish ancestry). A 1945 World Council of Churches publication that quoted German governmental figures from 1933 put the number at 250,000 (and the number of religiously observant or secular Jews at 550,000), but some ecumenical leaders in the U.S. and Europe who were involved in refugee work in the 1930s gave numbers as high as one and a half million—based, I suspect, on the total numbers of refugees (not just Christians) that these organizations sought to assist.

The Nazi regime began to pass anti-Jewish laws immediately.  The two major 1933 laws—the April 1, 1933, “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” and the September 1933 law dis-barring “non-Aryan” lawyers—had sweeping effects. In both instances, there were exemptions for Jewish veterans of the First World War as well as for people who had been practicing law or serving in the civil service as of August 1, 1914, and throughout 1933 and 1934 these laws were irregularly implemented, particularly where so-called Mischlinge, or Germans of partial Jewish ancestry, were concerned.  It wasn’t really until the 1935 Nuremberg laws that the categories and degrees of “racial Jewishness” were legally defined.

In the instance of the April 1 law there was another important exemption, elucidated in the May 6 Reichsgesetzblatt: the churches. The April 1 law essentially left the implementation of the law up to the regional and provincial church governments, and in the case of the Protestant churches, of course, the German Christian Movement was eager to introduce a church version of the Aryan paragraph throughout Germany.  Their attempts to do so sparked the widespread theological and ecclesial debate that culminated in the Protestant Kirchenkampf.  As opponents of the Aryan paragraph argued, it directly contradicted church teachings on universal salvation, baptism, conversion, and ordination.  There were of course other church teachings, such as the centrality of love for one’s neighbor, that should have led to a broader solidarity with everyone persecuted under the Nazi regime, but for the most part Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany drew a clear distinction between secular and religiously observant Jews on the one hand, and baptized Christians who fell under the Nazi racial laws on the other.  Solidarity with the former group was virtually non-existent (on the contrary, Protestant leaders like Otto Dibelius rushed to justify the Nazi anti-Jewish measures). Concerns for the latter group proved to be erratic and short-lived, as the initial controversies about the Aryan paragraph dissipated and support for those affected crumbled under internal and external pressures.

Ludwig-EvangelischEvangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt is not a comprehensive history of this topic; nonetheless it is a valuable contribution to the literature.  As its subtitle indicates, it is primarily a Gedenkbuch with brief biographies of 180 German Protestants whose lives were changed by the racial laws and the responses of their church. The editors have cast a wide net. The individuals profiled here include not only theologians and members of the Christian clergy, but individuals who were barred from studying theology before 1945 and others who, barred from other professions, decided to study theology in exile. Also included are teachers of religious education, Christians in “mixed” marriages, Austrians who came under Nazi law after 1938, and even several individuals who were Deutsche Christen or members of the Nazi party. While most of those profiled were members of the German Evangelical Church, there are also several profiles of individuals from Methodist, Baptist, and other free churches.

The editors’ introduction is an admirably clear overview of the subject, portraying the complexities of the Nazi laws and the gradual intensification of pressures on these individuals, and concluding with a brief but devastating portrait of the churches’ responses up to and after 1945. There are several very useful appendixes, including a table that locates these individuals by Landeskirche and “racial” category as defined by the 1935 Nuremberg laws, a bibliography organized by name that gives the sources for the information about each individual, and an extensive bibliography of the relevant literature. An additional appendix is a compilation of all the various measures against each individual as well as their fates and subsequent careers—a listing that gives a poignant overview of the numerous ways in which many of these people suffered. Pastors and teachers were forced into retirement, spouses were publicly humiliated, anonymous threats were sent. A number of people were betrayed by colleagues; some were sent to prisons, concentration camps, or forced labor. Some found safety for a time in one of the Confessing Church institutions.  Most of them emigrated and many—though not all—remained abroad after 1945. Those who returned encountered a mixed reception by church leaders and had to wage legal and procedural battles in some instances in order to re-enter their careers. Several people briefly returned to Germany before deciding to leave again.

The 180 biographical studies, written by a number of clergy and scholars, comprise the heart of the book. By extending their study beyond the names of the clergy already known from the literature on the Kirchenkampf, the authors and editors demonstrate the diversity of this sector of the population and have included many women in their profiles, which gives a portrait of the gendered dynamics surrounding the issue. While some of these individuals were familiar names from existing studies of the Confessing church and the Gruber office, there were a number of individuals that I hadn’t realized were affected by the racial laws and there were other names that were completely new to me.  There are a number of individuals from “brown” regional churches, and the accounts of their experiences offer important information about how the actions of church leadership in those regions affected both opposition voices and “non-Aryan” Christians.

While some of these people found refuge and solidarity in the Confessing Church, for examples, others found it lamentably passive and silent. Ernst Althausen, the Russian-born grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, worked in the interwar period with ethnic German refugees in the east, leading him to study theology in Berlin. He joined the Pastors Emergency League but complained to Martin Niemoeller that it wasn’t enough to stand up to the German Christians. Althausen worked for the Berlin Judenmission and came under pressure from the Nazi party and the church alike. After he had to wear the yellow star in 1941 his Confessing Church colleagues in Berlin stopped allowing him to hold church services and (at the age of 80), he was banned from public speaking.

The stories of “non-Aryan Christians” who were either sympathetic to Nazism or married to such people are particularly striking. Pastor Georg Börner, a supporter of the Deutsche Christen and the Nazi Party, didn’t join either organization only because his wife was one of the daughters of Kurt Eisner, the Jewish social democrat who was assassinated after leading the 1919 German revolution in Bavaria. Throughout the 1930s Börner was publicly attacked in Der Stürmer and the SS Schwarze Korps, but Nazi party members in his parish defended him, Bishop Hans Meiser stood behind him, and during the war the Bavarian governmental president issued a special order permitting him to stay in his pastorate.  His wife remained unscathed, and after 1945 the Börners remained in their parish until his retirement in 1968. One pastor who did become a member of the Deutsche Christen as well as the Nazi Party was Hellmut Fischer, who successfully hid the fact that he had a Jewish grandmother until 1938, when the Bavarian government decided to require Aryan certificates for clergy. Fischer quietly requested to be transferred to a non-pastoral position, but in December 1938 Landeskirche officials told Fischer he would have to leave the ministry.  His parish council stood up for him, declaring that he was a good pastor and “politically reliable.” The outbreak of the war resolved things: Fischer was drafted, the Landeskirche tabled the proceedings against him, and he was able to return to a parish after the war in Würzburg.

As these examples illustrate, many of these people are so interesting and surprising that readers will be tempted to do additional research (I found myself wondering, for example, where Eisner’s daughter stood politically in all this, and what happened to Eisner’s other children). The volume as a whole illustrates that those designated as “non-Aryan” Christian represented a broad spectrum of backgrounds and theological and political perspectives. As such it is a major contribution to our understanding of the complexity of the issue. The range of Germans affected by the Nazi racial laws was wide and their fates varied widely. Some people came under immediate pressure in 1933; others retained their positions until the late 1930s. Some of the people portrayed here moved toward a broader solidarity and engagement on behalf of all persecuted Jews, in contrast to the rest of their church. And, as the editors note in the introduction, the stories of these individuals attest to the widespread antisemitism not only during the Nazi era but afterward, when some of them continued to suffer under their church leadership and the antisemitism of friends and colleagues.

(The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.)

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Review of Michael Wermke, ed., Transformation und religiöse Erziehung: Kontinuitäten und Brüche der Religionspädagogik 1933 und 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Michael Wermke, ed., Transformation und religiöse Erziehung: Kontinuitäten und Brüche der Religionspädagogik 1933 und 1945 (Jena: IKS Garamond, 2011), 390 pp.  ISBN 978-3941854376.

Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Standard works on German church history during the Nazi era often focus on the extent to which theologians, clergy, church administrations and church-run institutions supported, complied with, or resisted the aims of the Nazi state.  Also of interest is the degree to which Nazi ideology permeated, shaped or undermined religious life among ordinary Protestants and Catholics.  Transformation und religiöse Erziehung, edited by Michael Wermke, makes a valuable contribution on both levels through its investigation of the theory and practice of religious education before and during the Third Reich.  The research included in this volume was originally presented at the annual conference of the Arbeitskreis für Historische Religionspädagogik in 2010.  Although a few of the chapters are aimed solely at specialists in the history of religious education, most will be of wider interest to contemporary church historians as well.

WermkeTransformationTwo of the chapters are biographical studies of individual religious educators or professors at teacher training institutions.  Thomas Martin Schneider’s “Die Umbrüche 1933 und 1945 und die Religionspädagogik” takes up the story of Georg Maus, a religion teacher at an Oberschule in Idar- Oberstein.   Maus, who was associated with the Confessing Church, was accused of undermining the war effort because he failed to properly manage a class discussion of Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies.  He received a two-year sentence and died while being transported to Dachau.  Schneider contrasts Maus’ story with that of Reinhold Krause, also an educator, but most famous for his address to members of the German Christian Movement at the Berlin Sport Palace Rally in 1933.  Schneider finds that Krause both appropriated and violated aspects of liberal Protestant thought.  The cases of Maus and Krause, Schneider argues, call into question both the “conservative decadence model” that blames liberal Protestant theology for Nazi conceptions of Christianity and the “progress- optimistic model” that exonerates it of all charges.  Theological orientations, including diverse political theologies in the twentieth century, cannot be judged apart from their historical contexts.  Likewise, one should not reduce contemporary religious education to the narrow range of options that were present in the Third Reich, nor should one assume that those options will have the same value in all historical settings.

The second biographical study is Folkert Rickers’ “’Vom Individuum zum Volksgenossen’: Helmuth Kittel und die Jugendbewegung.”  In this work, Rickers explores the ideological orientation of Kittel, a youth movement leader, theologian, and professor of pedagogy.  Kittel’s postwar autobiography minimizes his association with Nazism, but his writings from the 1920s and 1930s (more than 90 titles) indicate enthusiasm for völkisch ideology well before Hitler came to power.  Contrary to his postwar claims, he seems to have experienced the Third Reich as the fulfillment of the goals of the German youth movement in which he played such a prominent role.

Jonas Flöter’s “Von der Landeschule zur Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalt” examines the transition of the Landesschule Pforta, established in 1543, from an elite secondary school with a religious orientation to a de-Christianized training ground for political soldiers.  The Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung exploited internal conflicts and scandals at the school in order to replace most teachers and administrators, and in 1935, SS member Dr. Adolf Schieffer was entrusted with the transformation of the school into an NPEA.  However, religious services and religious instruction, including lessons in Hebrew and the Old Testament, were not abolished until 1937, and up to that point approximately two thirds of the students continued to participate in religion classes.  In order to carry out the transformation of the school, the Reichserziehungsministerium had to work around school personnel, parents, students, and alumni who were not always fully compliant.

Five of the chapters in the collection focus on trends in Protestant and Catholic religious education at the regional and national levels.  Werner Simon’s “Nationalpolitische Erziehung im katholischen Unterricht?” examines the writings of prominent Catholic theorists and contributors to Katechetische Blätter, a Catholic journal devoted to religious education.  Simon finds considerable interest in 1933 and 1934 for “national-political education in Catholic religious instruction” (77), but there was little emphasis on such themes before or after that two-year period.  In fact, articles published after 1934 were more likely to express opposition to what was seen as a Germanic narrowing of the faith or conflict between demands of the state and universal Christian ethics.

Joachim Maier’s “Traditionsbruch und Wandel religiöser Erziehung: Schule und katholischer Religionsunterricht in Baden 1933-1945” also suggests a blend of opposition and complicity on the part of German Catholics.  After the Nazis came to power, church holidays and school prayers were replaced with National Socialist holidays and slogans.  The new Hochschule für Lehrerbildung in Karlsruhe offered only minimal training in methods of religious education, and most teachers refused to teach religion in any case, especially if the Old Testament was part of the curriculum.  As a result, many pious Catholics who initially had expressed enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime now viewed it with suspicion.  Catholic leaders in Baden responded by publishing Katechismuswahrheiten (1936), a document that challenged Nazi racial ideology and stressed the importance of both the Old and New Testaments.  Unfortunately, it also reinforced a number of anti-Jewish stereotypes and declared that German Catholics should give special consideration to their own Volk.   Archbishop Conrad Gröber (Freiburg) sent mixed messages to the faithful by stressing obedience to the state and warning that “from the depravity and loss of faith among the youth  it is only a very small step to the world view of our bitterest enemies in the east” (115).  Nevertheless, Catholic authorities in Baden put up a more spirited defense of traditional religious instruction than Protestant leaders in the same region.

Desmond Bell’s “Ein Fehler im System? Das Alte Testament im preussischen Religionsunterricht nach 1933” illustrates the extent to which Prussian school curricula were stripped of religious content, especially that which was seen to be the result of Jewish influences.  The National Socialist Teachers’ Association opposed religious instruction in general and the Old Testament in particular, whereas guidelines from the Protestant Reich Church administration called for removal of the Old Testament from religious instruction except those cases where it could be used to “demonstrate” that Jesus came to do battle with Judaism.  Bell finds evidence that, in spite of these pressures, Old Testament material was still included in some religion texts as late as 1942.  However, the content was reduced dramatically over time, and what was left was severed from Judaism and reframed in such a way as to promote an antisemitic and National Socialist worldview.

Johannes Wischmeyer’s “Transformationen des Bildungsraums im bayrischen ‘Schulkampf’ 1933-1938” focuses less on the religious curriculum within schools and more on the abolition of Protestant denominational school in Bavaria.  In addition to curtailing religious instruction and removing clergy from teaching positions, both the state and the National Socialist Teachers’ Association put tremendous pressure on parents to send their children to Gemeinschaftschulen rather than denominational schools.  This pressure included multiple home visits by teachers who denounced confessional schools as “residual schools” or “peasant schools” (128).  The regional Bavarian Protestant Church responded with its own campaign to shore up support for denominational schools, but by 1936 only 2000 Protestant students remained enrolled, and the last denominational school was forced to close in 1937.

One of the most interesting contributions to the volume is David Käbisch’s, “Eine Typologie des Versagens? Das Personal und Lehrprofil für das Fach Religion an den nationalsozialistischen Hochschulen fur Lehrerbildung.”  In this article, Käbisch surveys the available data on 818 religion courses offered at teacher training institutes throughout Germany, comparing what was taught before and after 1933.  In addition to recommending approaches for further research, Käbisch identifies patterns that are already apparent.  For example, after 1933 it was more common to see topics such as “The Protestant Faith as a Particular Expression of the German Character, Demonstrated by Great Men of German History (Luther, Bach, Arndt, Lagarde, Bismarck, Hindenburg, etc.)” (175).  Of the courses offered between 1939 and 1945, 8 addressed explicitly Christological themes, 26 focused on Martin Luther, and 43 dealt with “contemporary problems.”  It is also possible to track changes in the priorities of individual professors.  For example, Fritz Hoffmann of the Pädagogische Akademie in Elbing taught courses on “The Kingdom of God in the Sermons of Jesus” and similar topics before 1933, but after 1933 he was teaching subjects like “German Christianity: State, Church and School” and “The German Concept of Honor  and Christian Morality” (169, 185-189).  Following Käbisch’s analysis, Appendix II (pages 174-214) includes a complete list of the individual courses, identifying the instructors, denominations, institutions, and dates.

One other chapter of interest to church historians is Hein Retter’s “Protestantische Milieus vor und nach 1933. Der Christlich-Soziale Volksdienst und der Reichsverband deutscher evangelischer Schulgemeinden e.V.”   Both the political party and the school association in this study emerged out of free-church, Biblicist, and Pietistic circles in Württemberg, Westphalia, Hanover, and the Rhineland.  Their supporters opposed rationalism, liberalism, and Marxism, yet they were also loyal to the Weimar Republic and willing to advance their culturally conservative agendas through a democratic process.  Although many in the Schulgemeindeverband initially expressed enthusiasm for the Nazi state, seeing it as a solution to moral decline, it was not long before they moved toward a more oppositional stance.  Retter applauds their publication of an agenda for religious instruction that was inspired by the Barmen Declaration, affirmed the important of both the Old and New Testaments, and refused to make National Socialism the standard for religious education.

Altogether, the contributors to this volume present a fascinating account of both continuity and change in religious education following the Nazi revolution in 1933.  A few chapters address the postwar era as well, but overall this period receives less attention and the results are less striking.  Several contributors mention the challenges posed by incomplete records and the limited range of the sources.  For example, it is easier to identify the content of text books and course plans than to know what actually happened in the classroom and how it was experienced by children and youth.  In spite of such limitations, this collective effort by the Arbeitskreis für Historische Religionspädagogik provides important insights into how the policies of state and church played out at the local level among ordinary people.   They take us beyond institutional histories and church politics and into the world of students, teachers, professors, and parents, all of whom had their own role to play alongside religious and political leaders.

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Review of Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Review of Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), xiv + 251 Pp., ISBN 978-0-253-00098-9.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Probst-DemonizingChristopher Probst has written an insightful analysis of the ways in which Protestant reformer Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings were used by German Protestants during the Third Reich. Fundamental to Probst’s work is his consistent use of Gavin Langmuir’s distinction between non-rational anti-Judaism (antipathy rooted in theological differences or other symbolic language which stand apart from and not against rational thought) and irrational antisemitism (antagonism rooted in factually untrue and slanderous accusations against Jews). In contrast to the idea that pre-modern anti-Jewish thought was generally religious and therefore anti-Judaic while modern anti-Jewish thought is political or racial and therefore antisemitic, Probst sees both anti-Judaic and antisemitic elements in the language of Luther and the twentieth-century German theologians, church leaders, and pastors who invoked him (3-4, 6, 17-19). In light of this, Demonizing the Jews is a book about historical continuity.

One of Probst’s important contributions is to show how complex and paradoxical antipathy towards Jews could be in Nazi Germany. Indeed, Demonizing the Jews begins with two snapshots from the life of Pastor Heinrich Fausel of Heimsheim, Württemberg. First, we learn that in 1934 Fausel gave a public lecture on the “Jewish Problem” in which he recycled Martin Luther’s harsh pronouncements against the Jews of his day. Then, we discover that in 1943 Fausel and his wife sheltered a Jewish woman during the Holocaust. What was it about his attitudes towards Jews, Probst wonders, that enabled him to condemn Jews as a “threatening invasion” of a “decadent” people and yet rescue one of them? (1) Was Fausel antisemitic or anti-Judaic?

More importantly, Probst asks what role Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism might have played in the life of Fausel. More broadly, he wonders: “Was the generally anemic response to anti-Jewish Nazi policy on the part of German Protestants due at least in part to the denigration of Jews and Judaism in Luther’s writings, to a more general traditional Christian anti-Judaism, or to some other cultural, social, economic, or political factors particular to Germany in the first half of the twentieth century?” (8). Here Probst has identified an important gap in the literature, for he has found no study which has thoroughly analyzed the use of Luther’s anti-Judaic and antisemitic writings in Nazi Germany (6). This he sets out to do, employing not the classic texts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Karl Barth, but rather less prominent writings which he argues more completely capture the “conventional views” of German clergy (7, 19-20). No doubt many scholars will assume, with the author, that “surely many Protestants in Hitler’s Germany might have read Luther’s recommendations and sensed the congruities with the gruesome antisemitic program unfolding around them” (13).

Probst analyzes the history of German Protestant anti-Judaism and antisemitism in six well-organized chapters. And overview of Protestantism in Nazi Germany and a careful examination of Luther’s writings about Jews set the stage for his analysis of the twentieth-century appropriation of the sixteenth-century reformer’s ideas. Four chapters make up the heart of the work—one devoted to academic theologians from across the church-political spectrum and three devoted to clergy from the Confessing Church, the German Christian Movement, and the non-affiliated “middle”—the largest group within the German Protestant clergy of the Nazi era.

Overall, what Probst finds is that German Christian clergy, theologians, and church leaders “consistently embraced Luther’s irrational antisemitic rhetoric as their own, frequently pairing it with idealized portraits of ‘Teutonic’ or ‘German’ greatness, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment” (14). Confessing Church clergy and theologians tended to emphasize “Luther’s non-rational anti-Judaic arguments against Jews” but generally remained silent about his antisemitic outbursts and usually tried to distance themselves from the racial antisemitism of the German Christians and the Nazi state. Clergy from the middle of the church-political spectrum drew on both anti-Judaic and antisemitic aspects of Luther’s Jewish writings, often sliding into xenophobic stereotypes of Jews, such as the Jew as usurer (14).

In his opening chapter on Protestantism in Nazi Germany, Probst draws on Shulamit Volkov’s argument that antisemitism became a “cultural code” in Wilhelmine Germany, deeply embedded in society even during times when political antisemitism waned. He also highlights the importance of the ongoing publication of the Weimar edition of Luther’s Werke, including volume 53 containing On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ, which was published in 1919. Probst also explains the importance of the “Luther Renaissance,” the revival of scholarly interest in Martin Luther which unfolded in the interwar era, noting its openness to nationalistic and antisemitic sentiments (26). As an example of the nationalistic, political, and even racial nature of German theology in the Weimar and Nazi eras, Probst assesses three works of the Erlangen theologian Paul Althaus: “The Voice of the Blood” (1932), Theology of the Orders (1934), and Völker before and after Christ (1937).  What stands out here is the importance Althaus gave to the notion of the racial or blood-bound Volk as an elevated community established by God. It is in this context that Luther became important for German Protestants during the interwar era, both as national hero and (less so) as an antisemitic model (37-38).

Many readers will appreciate Probst’s careful analysis of Luther’s Judenschriften. Importantly, Demonizing the Jews strives to place Luther and his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in proper historical context, noting the prevalence of negative stereotypes of Jews in the later Middle Ages, the frequency of accusations of host desecration leveled against Jews, the extent of anti-Jewish prejudice among church leaders (including reformers like Martin Bucer and Andreas Osiander), and the presence of important anti-Judaic and antisemitic publications, including Anthonius Margaritha’s The Whole Jewish Faith, in which a converted Jew made numerous provocative charges about his former coreligionists. Probst surveys Luther’s writings on Jews from the moderate and somewhat philosemitic That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) to the sharply anti-Judaic and crudely antisemitic On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ (both 1543), demonstrating both the importance of Luther’s theological opposition to Judaism and the extent to which his harsher attacks were “steeped in late medieval anti-Jewish paranoia” (50). While Probst places Luther carefully in his sixteenth-century context and cautions against various simplistic interpretations of Luther’s anti-Jewish writings (early vs. late Luther, anger over the absence of Jewish conversions, declining health and increasing upset in old age), he refrains from offering a decisive explanation for Luther’s antipathy towards Jews and Judaism (51-58). What is clear is that the Luther’s antisemitic social program was ignored for over three hundred years, until it was revived in a completely decontextualized manner by Nazi propagandists and Weimar-era Protestant writers.

Turning his attention to academic theologians from both the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement in chapter three, Probst again sets his historical discussion carefully in context, briefly explaining the politicization of German universities and academic theology in the Third Reich. Surveying four theologians—Eric Vogelsang of Königsberg University; Wolf Meyer-Erlach of Jena University; Hermann Steinlein, pastor of Ansbach; and Gerhard Schmidt of Nuremberg Seminary—the author finds that “German Christian theologians usually adopted Luther’s irrational antisemitic rhetoric as their own, often coupling it with notions that included idealized portraits of ‘Teutonic’ or ‘German’ greatness and anti-Enlightenment sentiment” (81). Confessing Church theologians tended to employ Luther’s anti-Judaic arguments only but still usually supported the Nazi state’s antisemitic program, which mirrored Luther’s own antisemitic recommendations. As Probst concludes, “We have seen here that a Confessing Church pastor, a Confessing Church theologian, and two German Christian theologians all agree that Luther was ‘correct’ to be antisemitic, or at least ‘anti-Jewish’” (82).

Chapters four through six ask how Confessing Church, German Christian, and non-aligned parish and higher clergy used Luther’s anti-Jewish writings in the course of their parish duties or church leadership. Probst returns to the subject of the opening pages of the book, Pastor Heinrich Fausel, who was in fact a member of the Confessing Church. The Heimsheim pastor espoused a relatively apolitical theology, though one marked by the theology of the orders of creation. Like so many of his colleagues from across the Reich, Fausel advocated the close connection between the German Volk and the Christian God. The resurrection of Germany “after bad times” (Probst’s words, not Fausel’s) depends on Christian devotion to God, which Probst describes, perhaps optimistically, as “explicitly scriptural and spiritual—and in no way political.” (94) Probst goes on to explain how, in the course of wartime suffering and the destruction of property, Fausel proclaimed the name of Jesus to be the source of forgiveness, healing, and victory. Statements like these, I would argue, are in fact much more political than the author suggests, given the context in which they arise.

When Fausel gave a public lecture on the Jewish Question in 1934, he refused to engage with biological notions of Jewishness but limited his discussion to the spiritual realm, where the person of Christ determined the fate of the Church, the peoples of the world, and the Jews. Fausel highlighted Jewish disobedience and stubbornness, using Isaiah 5 and its description of God’s vineyard, which Israel neglected to care for. Even as he began to discuss Jews in the New Testament, Fausel explained the “Jewish Question” as a “besetting” problem and described the “terrifying foreign invasion” of Jews since the nineteenth century as a threat Germany had to defend itself from. That said, Fausel affirmed that opposition between Jews and gentiles in the New Testament was only about Christ and not about race. Still, Israel’s rejection of Christ was, in Fausel’s words, a “unanimous rejection by an entire Volk, its leaders included,” even though (as the pastor explained) Jesus came to earth as part of the Jewish Volk (96). When Fausel discussed Luther’s views about Jews, he noted the reformer’s early positivity, but then explained how Luther dissociated himself from Jews and later unleashed his “full wrath” on them (96-97). Fausel noted how Luther saw the Jews as Christ’s enemies, how he recommended that the political authorities undertake severe measures against them, and how he lost hope for their conversion (97).

Throughout this section, Probst is careful to note that Fausel drew not only on Luther’s theological (non-rational) anti-Judaic sentiments, but also on his socio-political (irrational) antisemitic recommendations. Indeed, Fausel went on to speak approvingly of the state’s efforts to protect the German Volk from the Jews. He opposed Jewish-gentile intermarriage and supported restrictions to the number of Jewish civil servants in Germany. Though his arguments derived primarily from theology (for Probst, non-rational anti-Judaism), the practical outworking of this theology was Fausel’s approval of the distinctly antisemitic social and political measures undertaken by the Nazi state.

Most curiously (again), despite these views, Fausel and his wife later hid and cared for a Jewish woman during the Second World War, an act Probst has no real explanation for, on account of the lack of clear evidence. Rightly, he notes that people often act at variance with their stated beliefs, noting also that Fausel may have had something of a change of heart, given that he later signed the Württemberg Ecclesiastical-Theological Society’s 1946 Declaration on the Jewish Question—a frank confession of collective guilt from Protestants who realized they had been bystanders to the persecution of Jews (97-99, 171-172).

Probst agrees with Wolfgang Gerlach that even Confessing Church clergy did not support protection for Jews in Nazi Germany (113). Though he argues that they focused primarily on the biblical or theological aspects of Luther’s anti-Jewish writings, he adds that they reached “too easily for irrational and/or xenophobic reasoning in their writings and lectures” (116). If this was the case for Confessing Church clergy, Probst demonstrates that German Christian clergy were even more likely to draw on the explicitly antisemitic aspects of Luther’s writings. “The German Christian literature is overwhelmingly laden with strident attacks on Jews based on irrational conceptions about them. They are said to possess ‘fanatical hatred’ and ‘pernicious power.’ They are the ‘scum of mankind.’” Indeed, German Christians used terms like “Jewish Bolshevism” while urging the Nazi state to wage a “defensive struggle” against Jewish “Volk-disintegrating” power. Probst concludes: “Ultimately, many in the German Christian movement believed it was a matter of annihilate or be annihilated.” (142) As might be expected, non-aligned clergy from the Protestant middle landed somewhere between the Confessing Church and German Christian positions—more likely to invoke Luther’s non-rational anti-Judaic arguments against Jews but also more likely to elevate the German Volk as an order of creation and generally ready to support National Socialism and to identify Jews with Bolshevism (168-169).

One criticism of Demonizing the Jews might be its limited research base. It is to the author’s advantage that he analyzes individual anti-Jewish writings in good depth, but it is somewhat problematic to draw nuanced conclusions about the differences between Confessing Church, German Christian, and non-aligned clergy from such a small sampling of theological writings. That said, nothing I have seen in the parish archives of church districts from diverse regions of Nazi Germany would contradict Probst’s findings.

In the end, it is easy to agree with Probst’s conclusion that the anti-Judaic and antisemitic writings and lectures of German Protestant clergy “reinforced the cultural antisemitism and anti-Judaism of many Protestants in Nazi Germany” (172). Most importantly, however, by applying Langmuir’s more sophisticated definitions of anti-Judaism and antisemitism—both sentiments existed in the writings of Martin Luther and in those of his twentieth-century followers in Nazi Germany—Probst has demonstrated how deeply the continuities of anti-Jewish sentiment stretch from Nazi Germany back through the centuries to Luther and beyond. Surely there can be little question that Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism contributed significantly to the dehumanization of the Jews, fueling the ideological fire that became the Holocaust.

 

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Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im Dritten Reich. Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im Dritten Reich. Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld. Kirche – Konfession – Religion, 54 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), Pp. 344, ISBN: 9783899716900.

By Nicholas Railton, University of Ulster

This review was originally published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History Volume 63, no. 1 (January 2012): 202-203, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and journal.

This volume of papers dealing with ten Free Church denominations in the so-called Third German Empire is an excellent study of key issues related to the themes of prejudice and guilt in Christians’ dealings with Jews. Being denominations organised and financed independently of the state, the Free Churches were not faced with some of the pressures challenging larger mainstream denominations. No constitutional bar to Jews becoming pastors or members was imposed on their ranks, but this did not necessarily signify that Jewish Christians experienced solidarity and protection. Notices on the doors of Adventist churches, for example, told Jews that they were not permitted to enter. There were indeed righteous Gentiles who dissented from official or semi-official statements made by their ecclesiastical leaders and sought to alleviate the suffering of Jews and Jewish Christians. Yet too many representatives of Free Church organisations conformed to the spirit of the age. The authors of these studies weigh their former leaders in the balance and find them wanting. The book concludes with an appendix which primarily deals with a single pastor in Vienna. Graf-Stuhlhofer regurgitates his fanciful speculations about the Viennese Baptist whom he incongruously considers to have been the single most vocal public critic of the National Socialist regime (p. 311). He achieves this by reading political messages back into innocuous sermon notes, which form his primary source base. Graf-Stuhlhofer’s feverish imagination transfigures Arnold Köster into a prophet of righteousness, standing out, Moses-like, against the diabolical forces of Nazism. This essay is certainly the weakest contribution to the volume. Whereas all the other chapters make an attempt to unearth the roots of prejudice and spiritual blindness, the appendix highlights a Free Churchman who, the reader is led to believe, was miraculously untouched by Austrian antisemitism. The author fails to explain how Köster could refer to Jews as ‘hook-nosed creatures’ (p. 326) and why he apparently believed that Germany was a divinely chosen rod to chastise Israel (p. 327). Throughout the volume, moreover, the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung receives little treatment. We learn nothing about why some Free Churches took decades before issuing paper statements about the sins of their fathers. Yet, even with these defects, this volume is an important addition to the literature on antisemitism and the shoah and will hopefully encourage more research on how and why members of minority religious groups internalised antisemitic views. The purely typological reading of the prophetical books favoured by Köster and other Free Churchmen was, and is, an essential ingredient of all anti-Judaism. Given that Bishop Wenner (p. 7) and Professor Heinrichs (p. 29) both misquote the Bible one wonders whether Free Church leaders are, however, in a position to correct traditional ecclesiastical exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet Bonhoeffer’s view is still valid today: only those who speak up for Jews (and the Jewish state) have a right to sing hymns or Gregorian chants.

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