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Review of Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Großbölting, eds., Was glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 and 1945? Religion und Politik im Nationalsozialismus

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 1 (March 2021)

Review of Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Großbölting, eds., Was glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 and 1945? Religion und Politik im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2020). 540 pages. ISBN 978-3-593-51077-4 (paperback); 978-3-593-44223-5 (eBook).

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

In December 2018, at their home institution, the Westphalian Wilhelm University in Münster, Olaf Blaschke, a professor of nineteenth-century European history, and Thomas Großbölting, a professor of modern and contemporary European history, convened a diverse group of scholars to examine “What did the Germans believe 1933-1945, a New Perspective on the Relationship between Religion and Politics under National Socialism.” The conference resulted in the publication of the present volume, What did the Germans Believe 1933-1945? Religion and Politics under National Socialism, consisting of twenty unnumbered chapters divided into three parts. Blaschke’s and Großbölting’s collection follows an approach initially begun by Manfred Gailus and Armon Nolzen in their influential 2011 edited volume, Estranged ‘Ethnonationalist Community’: Faith, Denomination, and Religion under National Socialism (Zerstritten ‘Volksgemeisnchaft’ Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). The essays in the Gailus and Nolzen collection examined the implications of the data that more than ninety-five percent of the German population belonged to either the Catholic or Protestant Church until National Socialism’s collapse in 1945, while, at the same time, at least two-thirds of these individuals also belonged to at least one National Socialist organization. The essays explored the intersection of these stark realities as Germans negotiated what it meant to be Christian and likewise members of the Volksgemeinschaft in the National Socialist state.

The essays in Blaschke and Großbölting’s volume continue this investigation in a similar vein by widening and deepening it. They ask: Where did the churches and National Socialism interact with each other? In what ways did they stand in each other’s way? How did they compete for members or prominence? And how did they promote each other’s particular concerns? For the editors, an apologetic and mistaken emphasis on resistance – “cross versus sword” narrative – has dominated the interpretative framework of studies on Christianity in Germany under National Socialism. By contrast, however, they view the period fluidly, recognizing that few Germans rejected Nazism entirely. They claim a closer tie between the two than previously articulated in the Gaius and Nolzen collection as well as by others. If one concludes that religion was a significant factor in German society in the 1920s and 30s, they raise the following questions: did National Socialism arise despite Christianity, as many historians have suggested, or did Nazism develop and establish itself precisely because of society’s Christian character? The essays of this volume primarily support the latter by exposing the interplay of National Socialism and Christianity in a variety of historical situations.

The approach is not driven by examining the hierarchy of the churches nor by scrutinizing the nature of the institutions themselves. Instead, the chapters seek to uncover individual voices and actions of ordinary Christians both inside and outside traditional church settings. As with any volume, the results are mixed. Some are thoroughly convincing, while others offer the reader only a preview of an undeveloped argument. At the same time, the essays are not as original or groundbreaking in their field as the editors suggest. Although, since the turn of the century, apologetic and simplistic works have appeared, many studies on the churches under National Socialism have parted from the “cross versus sword” narrative to uncover elements of Christian complicity that lent support to the National Socialist state and abetted its crimes. Likewise, the authors have generally ignored the role of theology as a motivational factor and neglected the legacy of the Kulturkampf on Catholics. Still, this present volume advances our knowledge of the continuity of “brownness” among Christians prior, during, and after National Socialism officially existed in Germany.

The editors title the first section of their work as “Protagonists and their Practices.” Here the essays seek to reveal the interconnectedness and “entanglement” of National Socialism and Christianity in the different “social strata and milieus” in which Christians went about their daily existence (19-20). Unfortunately, the essay by Detlef Scheichen-Ackermann, which begins this section, rambles on, as it were, as he first attempts to elucidate alternate theories to explain the attraction of Germans toward the Volksgemeinschaft before presenting five concrete reasons for political reorientation to arise among them in the first place. These events include the failed experiment in councils coupled with the 1918-1919 civil upheaval that led to a “primal fear” of Bolshevism, the disgrace of Versailles, the loss of the talents and mediating influence of Gustav Stresemann upon his untimely death in 1929, fluctuating economic crisis, and, finally, the failure of Heinrich Brüning amid the bankruptcy of political Catholicism (50). In the following chapter, Jürgen W. Falter revisits his impressive, earlier 1991 research on the voting behavior of Catholics and Protestants that led to Hitler’s ascension to power and recalls his previous hypothesis, “if there had only been Catholics, there would probably never have been a National Socialist takeover, because then the NSDAP would not have easily managed to move beyond the status of a minority party” (61). While support for the NSDAP was always significantly higher among Protestants, Falter also concludes that in the last months of the Weimar Republic, the “relatively considerable resistance of the Catholic population to National Socialism diminished” (61).

Markus Raasch, in his contribution, attempts unsuccessfully to reveal how the relatively small city of Eichstätt and its surrounding communities evolved from a clerical-inspired “black” characterization of a staunchly Catholic community to a National Socialist “brown.” He argues that a “real resilient opposition between Catholicism and National Socialism never existed” (90). In his analysis, he gives almost no consideration to the impact of Konrad von Preysing (bishop, 1932 to 1935) on Eichstätt’s interaction with National Socialism. Likewise, he interprets the appropriation of National Socialist terminology by Catholics as a “Catholicization of National Socialism based on the Nazification of Catholicism” (94). Other authors, including myself, have interpreted the Catholic leaders’ adoption of such Nazi idiom in a different light, especially when faced with the repressive tactics against such use by Prussian Minister-President Hermann Göring in 1935. Raasch’s use of evidence is also selective, ignoring relevant studies and seemingly drawing from others without citation.

Sarah Thieme’s insightful chapter examines the metamorphosis of Advent and Christmas celebrations in the south Westphalian city of Bochum as they increasingly departed from their Christian roots. Before January 1933, an influential Protestant pastor, Philipp Klose, embraced the National Socialist “struggle” rhetoric and portrayed Christ as a militant soldier. Both Protestant and Catholic laywomen, for example, intertwined their roles in church associations, charity work, and, as individual members, in the National Socialist Women’s Organization. Such interaction resulted in cooperation between these groups in charity efforts such as the Winter Relief Program of the National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare (NSV). Church, state, and party organizations in Bochum, Thieme notes, also maintained traditional manners of celebrating Advent and Christmas, including nativity plays. In 1938, apparent national trends led the National Socialist Women’s Organization local leader to push for a reorientation of the celebrations. Ostensively, in an effort to avoid any denominational tensions, festivals of “light and joy” and adoration of a Nazified sacralized ideal for German mothers replaced Advent rites and “veneration of the blessed mother.” The war, however, brought an end to most public celebrations of the holiday season, Thieme concludes, as such events were relegated to the churches and private spheres.

Thomas Brodie’s essay on Catholic Faith during the Second World War summarizes his recent work, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 2018), which I reviewed in CCHQ (25:2, June 2019). In that study, he sought to understand what religion meant to the German Catholic faithful during the war. For Brodie, a central contention is that Catholicism’s legitimization of the war outside of National Socialist ideology enabled Germans to support the battle on the homefront. This, of course, is not a new insight as Gordon Zahn and Heinrich Missilla came to a similar conclusion many years back. Next, Armin Nolzen contemplates the understanding of religion within the League of German Girls (BDM). He points out that there has been little investigation of this topic in the studies of this period. Although, for example, in December 1933, Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller enabled Protestant youth groups to merge with the Hitler Youth and, four years later, in 1937, the state forbade dual membership in denominational youth groups and the Hitler Youth (under which the BDM falls), there were still, by November 1939, thirty Protestant and twenty-five Catholic youth groups in existence. While Nolzen does not entirely succeed in uncovering the role of religion in the BDM, he does raise important questions for researchers to pursue.

In chapter seven, Christiane Schröder studies Protestant women’s religious communities in the Lower Saxony former regions of Calenberg and Lüneburg under National Socialism. Schröder explains that these communities have seldom been the topic of study and admits that they consisted of only 240 women. Remnants of pre-Reformation Catholic religious life, these communities required that women be Lutheran, unmarried, and at least fifty-five years old. Most came from the Hanoverian lower nobility and bourgeoisie classes. Overseen by the Klosterkammer in Hannover, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Reich and Prussian Ministry of Science, Education, and Culture, the communities were not entirely free of state supervision. Members of these communities no longer had to partake in a traditional monastic routine, but nevertheless were required to participate in a Sunday service, evening meals in common, and select prayer services while receiving rent-free apartments and a monthly allowance. For many women, these communities raised their social prestige and freed them from living with parents or relatives. Schröder freely admits that her research is in its initial stages directed toward her dissertation-in-progress. Thus far, her research has uncovered approximately twenty-six women who were members of the NSDAP, with a handful who were “old fighters.” By 1936, the state ordered the denomination requirement for entrance to be dropped, and, in its place, merely proof of Aryan ancestry. The institutions’ chronicles, Schröder’s central source, reveal the women’s collective gratitude and appreciation for Hitler, especially for destroying Bolshevism in Germany and for his initial gains in foreign policy. Support for the war, however, was mized among the women, with the chronicle authors heralding victories, but also expressing concern for the well-being and safety of German soldiers.

Martina Steber introduces the story of Augsburg’s second, possibly third-ranked composer Arthur Piechler, whose mother’s heritage was from a Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. Steber’s interpretation is multilayered. Obtaining civil servant status in 1934 while being of mixed racial background, Piechler was an anomaly to the norm experienced by so many other Germans of similar heritage. Though persecuted on the national level by expulsion from the Reich Chamber of Music and forced labor under Organization Todt, Piechler became a pawn in the power struggle among the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Gau (NSDAP district) and city officials. Steber views the defense of Piechler as partially ideological – his work embodied the “ideological disposition” of Gau Schwaben, which enabled the Catholic cultural conservative traits of “nationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-modernism” to connect forces with National Socialism (212). Augsburg officials and bourgeoise citizens embraced Piechler’s music as representative of German art, arguing that his Ayran roots superceded his Jewish heritage. Piechler survived the war and was soon promoted by the allied occupiers to the director of Augsburg’s conservatory. He remained a “star” in Augsburg, but never gained national recognition as critics deemed his musical composition style outdated.

Finishing out the first section is Olaf Blaschke’s impressive chapter on the faith of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. Although Stauffenberg has been the subject of numerous studies, according to Blaschke, none have convincingly examined his religious motivations. Likewise, no historian has provided a “single motif for his affinity to National Socialism” (255). Blaschke concludes that if faith is credited for his resolute choices after 1943, then his faith must also be seen as active in his decisions before this point. He finds no “direct evidence” against such a conclusion, especially when one acknowledges the anti-liberalism of both National Socialism and Catholicism as a point of convergence.

The editors designate the essays in section two, “Ideological and Religious Motives,” though, in many ways, they continue themes present in the first part. Klaus Große Kracht, for example, investigates five large gatherings of Catholics in Berlin in 1933. In my 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press), I covered the same ground and reached similar conclusions. During these events, Catholics appropriated Nazi language and imagery, expressing nationalistic language and a desire to serve the German Reich. Große Kracht argues that this is the period before anticlericalism dominated the politics of the National Socialist state. He also highlights the nationalistic rhetoric of Father Marianus Vetter, a Dominican religious and celebrated preacher, who, I too, covered, making similar points, in Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). As previous studies have shown, once the bishops lifted their prohibition against membership in the National Socialist Party, many Catholics worked for a positive relationship between the state and church. Große Kracht’s essay affirms these earlier findings.

Miloslav Szabó’s essay reaches beyond the borders of the German Reich to Slovakia to examine priests’ affinity for National Socialism. He is fond of Roger Griffin’s 2007 term “clerical fascism” that distinguishes between those priests who defended “fascist ideology” and those clergymen who only succumbed to the “temptations of ‘national rebirth’” to combat Bolshevism and liberalism. Szabó takes significant issue with my use of the term “brown priest” and the discussion thereof by Thomas Forster in Priests in the Era of Radical Change: Identity and Life of Catholic Parish Clergy in Upper Bavaria 1918 to 1945 (Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs: Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbazern 1918 bis 1945, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Evidently, Szabó did not read Hitler’s Priests theoretical first chapter that covers analogous ground or Forster’s insightful contextual discussion of the term. Szabó divides “brown priests” into two categories: “clerical National Socialists” who, in their support of National Socialism, turn against the Church and eventually replace doctrine with ideology and “clerical fascists” who agitate for National Socialism but remain loyal to Catholicism and their ordinaries. To illustrate his use of the terms, Szabó presents three case studies. He identifies the first two priests of his study, Fathers František Boháč and Viliam Ries, as “clerical National Socialists” who worked tirelessly to implement National Socialist ideology radically. Szabó’s third cleric, Father Josef Steinhübl, is labeled a “clerical fascist” who endeavored to reconcile Catholicism with National Socialism, especially as a prominent agitator for the Carpathian German Party that represented the German minority in Slovakia. Szabó’s essay is informative and well-researched, though, I believe, he could have been more aware in his analysis of the geographical and situational uniqueness of the clerics that he studies. His categorization of Monsignor Jozek Tiso as a “clerical fascist minimum” (clerical-faschistisches Minimum) is also somewhat perplexing and not entirely helpful.

In chapter twelve, Holger Arning invites the reader to ponder the difference between trust (vertrauen) and faith (glauben) in the year 1934, specifically as it appears in the articles in Unser Kirchenblatt, the Münster diocese’s newspaper. He informs us that the term trust can “inspire true confidence” both in the Church and the leader (322). By 1934, the relationship between Church and state, however, had radically altered following the murder of Erich Klausener during the Röhm Purge – a turning point on which Arning and I agree. While the word Führer (leader) repeatedly appears in the pages of the newspaper, affirming the validity of the National Socialist leadership principle (Führerprinzip), authors of the newspaper articles use it more often in a Catholic context, reinforcing the Church’s authoritarian ideal and hierarchical system and aligning it with the kingship of Christ. (In 1925, Pope Pius XI had established the feast of Christ the King in response to anti-clericalism, secularism, and nationalism). Arning interprets this as the “adaptation of the editors to the new political circumstances” without specifically approving National Socialist ideology (326). In its rhetoric about Hitler, the newspaper was positive, but more often than not, referred to him by his official title as Chancellor. Arning concludes that in 1934 in the articles in Unser Kirchenblatt, Catholic trust “in Hitler and National Socialism was unstable,” and any confidence expressed in National Socialism was self-serving (343).

In a chapter on religious rites under National Socialism, Hans-Ulrich Thamer offers an insightful point about the nature of worship and ritual. For those who withdrew membership in their respective Christian denominations and legally became “believers in God” (Gottgläubigen), they did not immediately forfeit public expressions of their ingrained religious traditions. They brought these with them and, in turn, consciously or unconsciously influenced the structure of newly created National Socialist rites. Ample photos illustrate Thamer’s captivating argument. The second section ends with Christopher Picker’s ambitious essay on the belief and convictions of Palantine Protestants from 1933-1945. Focusing on the March 1934 Resolution of Palatine Protestants that proclaimed support for Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller as well as for the German Christians and placed the Palatine regional church “entirely at the disposal of the National Socialist state and its aid organizations,” the essay uncovers the overwhelming support of Protestant Christians in this region for National Socialism and the Nazi state (371). Picker devotes much of the article to National Socialism’s initial years of rule with little emphasis on the later years. Perhaps a more balanced focus would yield a more nuanced portrait of Palentine Protestantism under National Socialism.

The third part of the book focuses on “Interpretive Discourse,” as each essay connects themes and underlying patterns in the belief of Christians under National Socialism. Uwe Puscher examines the role of völkisch (ethnonationalist) religion in Nazi Germany. According to him, there were at most five thousand individuals who adhered to some form of völkisch religion under Hitler. Puscher chooses specifically not to focus on völkisch religion itself, but on Oskar Stillich, an economist, sociologist, and pacifist who dedicated a part of his career to studying völkisch thought and religious ideology, uncovering its racist and nationalistic aims. Removed in 1933 from his position at Humbolt University in Berlin, Stillich went into inner emigration, as it were, though he continued to research and write. He died on January 1, 1945. Though the chapter is informative on Stillich, it does not connect particularly well to the overall themes of the volume. Likewise, in an ambitious and wildly focused essay, Christoph Auffarth writes about contradictions in the theological interpretations he found among various professors at the University of Marburg under National Socialism. Despite the presence of National Socialist supporter Ernst Benz on its faculty, Marburg University’s faculty of theology maintained its allegiance to the Confessing Church, the branch of German Protestantism that sought freedom from Nazi state oversight and interference. In the next chapter, Manfred Gailus offers reflections on Christians in Nazi Germany by emphasizing both the impact of the 1933 Reich Concordat on Catholics and the high percent of Protestant clergy embracing National Socialism. For him, there should be “no talk of a block of ‘Christian resistance’ or Catholic resistance” (449). At the same time, there was “no clear strategy of religious policy on the part of the NSDAP or the Nazi state.” Instead, both entities approached religion with a “trial and error” mentality (455). Gailus is also one of the few authors who directly addresses the link between Christian and racial antisemitism. Then he concludes, “faith, denomination, and religion were hotly debated topics since 1933, and they occupied most Germans during this epoch more than before and more than afterward in the twentieth century” (461).

Lucia Scherzberg’s essay continues her ongoing study of the National Socialist Priests’ Circle that was the focus of her recent book, Between Party and Church: National Socialist Priests in Austria and Germany 1938-1944 (Zwischen Partei und Kirche: Nationalsozialistische Priester in Österreich und Deutschland 1938-1944, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2020), which I reviewed in the last issue of CCHQ (26:3, September 2020). In her chapter, she focuses on Father Franz Sales Seidl, a priest of the Passau diocese and one of a few Catholic priests involved in the Eisenach based Institute to Research and Eradicate the Jewish Influence on German Church Life. An active and enthusiastic member, Seidl contributed a three-part study, “Ethnonationalist Elements in the Roman Liturgy,” in which he proposed how to purify the Catholic liturgy of Jewish elements and to recover its so-called Germanic and Nordic roots. Despite the antisemitic and radical nature of his ideas, Seidl and his fellow National Socialist-inclined priests remained traditionally clerical, entirely opposed to any changes in the priesthood.

Mark Edward Ruff offers a thought-provoking essay by comparing the similarities between the “political and religious landscapes of the present with that of National Socialism” to uncover the hybridism of religious belief (493). He asks, “If a 66-year old evangelical Christian spends two hours a week in his church and twenty hours watching Fox News, the question arises which institution has the decisive influence on him. To draw a parallel with the National Socialist era, the following example may be given: If a 28-year old Protestant…in the Nazi era attended church once a month and was politically active for ten hours a week, one wonders what influence had the greatest impact on him” (508). To this end, he concludes, “in many cases, it is much more the political actors who not only draw the line between the religious and the secular but also determine and change the context of faith and its forms” (510).

Finally, Isabel Heinemann offers an overview of the volume by providing a summary of the arguments. She points out five areas of connection: First, although Germany was overwhelmingly Protestant, Catholicism dominated the subjects of the collection’s essays. In part, she believes this fact rests on the need for historians to challenge and dismantle interpretations that emphasize the fundamental resistance of the Catholic Church and Catholics to National Socialism. Second, the connection between faith and racism enabled Christians to integrate racist ideology into the practice of their faith easily. Third, during wartime, most Christians had “no problem with violence against Jews or Bolsheviks” (521). Fourth, the interplay between faith and gender appeared conspicuously, especially the relationship between Christian men and women during the war. Fifth, the interaction of religion and politics highlights the fact that the regime used “sacred symbolism and religious ritual to legitimize its rule and to exalt its own worldviews” (526). Upon pointing out these five areas of connection, Heinemann proposes topics for further study, which include moving beyond Germany to the occupied regions; expanding the time-period of focus (beyond 1933-1945); studying the relationship between faith and war as they tie to the question of annihilative ideology; and investigating the ties between Christian antisemitism and racism, empirically. Lastly, Heinemann recommends exploring the relationship of ethnonationalism to religion, the topic that Rebbeca Carter-Chand and I explore in our upcoming edited volume on ethnonationalism, antisemitism, and Christianity in the era of the two world wars.

Overall, this worthwhile volume provokes more questions than it answers. Still, this posture of inquiry is important as it will advance our understanding of Christian belief under National Socialism. Likewise, as we ponder the convergence of politics and faith in the essays of this volume, Mark Edward Ruff’s chapter, in particular, make for essential reading during this polarized election season.

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Ordinary Men and Ordinary Bishops: The Catholic Church during the Second World War

By Olaf Blaschke, University of Münster

The following commentary examines the April 29, 2020, publication of “Deutsche Bischöfe im Weltkrieg. Wort zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs vor 75 Jahren” (“German Bishops in the World War: Statement on the 75th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War”) by the German Roman Catholic Bishops Conference.

Despite rumors to the contrary, this is not the first statement by German Catholic bishops on the behavior of the shepherds in the time of National Socialism and in the Second World War. Other reflections have already been uttered several times in collective pastoral letters and those written by certain bishops or in certain statements.

In January 1945, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen (Münster) conceded mistakes of the hierarchy in a letter to the archbishop of Cologne, and at the same time Bishop Johannes Joseph van der Velden of Aachen admitted to the US-Psychological Warfare Division, the Church itself had failed.¹ Four weeks after the total capitulation (May 8, 1945), the north-western German bishops of Cologne, Aachen, Limburg, Münster, Osnabrück, Trier, Paderborn, Fulda and Hildesheim, covering most of Germany (except the south), came together in Werl and decided to write a petition to the Military Government, to the bishops in the USA and Great Britain, and to the Pope. In this text, the bishops critically considered why they kept silent, also concerning the atrocities against Jews. Looking back, they got the impression “that it would have served our church and our people more if we had kept silent less.”²

It was a fatal event that the speech of Pius XII on June 2, 1945 – not known by the bishops meeting in Werl on June 5 – caused the bishops to change their course for the coming decades. In his address to the college of cardinals the pope praised the “great qualities of the people” in Germany, among which he had spent twelve years between 1917 and 1929, and condemned the “satanic specter raised by National Socialism,” which was persecuting the Church. “To resist such attacks millions of courageous Catholics, men and women, closed their ranks around their bishops, whose valiant and severe pronouncements never failed to resound even in these last years of war. These Catholics gathered around their priests to help them adapt their ministry to the ever-changing needs and conditions. And right up to the end they set up against the forces of impiety and pride their forces of faith, prayer and openly Catholic behavior and education.”³ This was the sentence which from now on was quoted in several pastoral letters. Backed by the authoritative voice of the pope in a context of a world condemning the Germans, the bishops felt encouraged to present themselves as victims, not as part of the system, being involved in resistance, not in collaboration, and to discard any claim of a collective guilt.⁴

In their first pastoral letter after the war, the Bavarian bishops referred to the pope’s speech, emphasizing that the bishops had warned against National Socialism and that the German “Volk” had suffered immensely.⁵

Accordingly, in the first pastoral letter of the joint German bishops of August 23, 1945, the Catholic people were praised because they had kept away from the “idolatry of brutal power.” Certainly, “terrible things” had happened before and during the war “by Germans in the occupied countries. We deeply regret it: Many Germans, even from our ranks [!], have let themselves be seduced by the wrong teachings of National Socialism and have remained indifferent to crimes against human freedom and human dignity; many of them promoted crimes through their attitude, many have become criminals themselves.” This admission of guilt is famous, but only made up 4.4 percent of the entire document. Whether “our ranks” also included the bishops is highly questionable.⁶ The bishops took the course of seeing themselves and the faithful as victims. The statements were shaped by dualism (Church vs. National Socialists), opposition (the Church resisted the regime), and exculpation. For years, this position remained mainstream.

The pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops in April 1946 claimed: “We bishops have fought ‘the satanic specter of National Socialism’ [again quoting Pius XII] so decisively and suffered so much from it that we cannot be suspect that we now want to wash away all his followers of guilt and free them from punishment.” The letter was about commitment for the “political prisoners” and former party members.⁷

Later statements spoke more frankly: In 1976 the Common Synod of Bishoprics complained that the ecclesial community had kept silent about the murder of the Jews. After the TV series “Holocaust” had been broadcast, the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference explained in 1979 a certain complicity, because the Church didn’t comment on the boycott, the Nuremberg race laws, or the pogroms of 1938. When the outbreak of the war commemorated its 40^th anniversary in 1979, the Church acknowledged the co-responsibility of the German people, including the guilt “in the church” – but not of the Church. On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it was confirmed that “failure and guilt was common among Catholics.”

Contrasted with earlier documents, the present shepherds’ word breathes a completely different spirit. Its creation was advised by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte and the German Commission Justitia et Pax. The document knows about the decades of apologetic tendencies in the Catholic Church and is not afraid to “name misconduct,” which however only becomes clear from the middle of the document onwards (p. 12 of 23). Despite all the well known distance to National Socialism, “the Catholic Church in Germany was part of the war society.” This is clearly stated. It was the Church, not only people in the Church.

In the controversy that has been going on for 75 years, whether the bishops have “proven themselves”⁸ or whether they have “failed,” this document emphasizes in a balanced way of argumentation that they were actually “complicit in the war.” Between 1933 and its last meeting in 1943, the Bishops Conference was “not up to the challenge of National Socialism.”⁹

The document is immune from ahistorical moralization. Rather, it recognizes the need to explain the historical circumstances: the shared belief at the time that state power came from God, the teaching of just war, nationalism, and anti-Bolshevism. Wolfgang Böckenförde identified these elements in 1961 as the interface between Catholicism and National Socialism, holding it against ecclesiastical apologetic, while now it is part of an ecclesiastical document.¹⁰

To conclude: the recent statement of the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference corresponds to the well-established tendency of historical research to no longer search for the genocidal and war “program” of Nazi leaders in an intentionalist way, placing the guilt on a handful of “outcasts”, viewing the Germans as seduced by a brown clique. Rather, research into perpetrators (“Täterforschung”) expanded down to “ordinary men,” as Christopher Browning put it.¹¹ Now the bishops also turn out to be “ordinary churchmen.” They no longer adorn themselves with the narrative of exculpation and dualism, sacrifice and resistance, but admit their “own entanglements” which have to be interpreted in their historical context. Even the interpretation that the war against the Soviet Union in 1941 was felt and endorsed as a “crusade” against “godless Bolshevism” can be found in this document. It gave the bishops “an additional meaning to the war.”¹²

What remains unclear is the choice of the date of publication, commemorating the 75^th year of the liberation of the Dachau concentration-camp on April 29, 1945. Why is Dachau never mentioned in the document? 2700 clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, were imprisoned there, among them 1700 Polish priests. Many felt abandoned by their bishops, treated as disobedient, and suffered from their bishops’ de-solidarization. In 1945, the bishops told them they should not act as martyrs. Dachau is not the topic of the document, rather the 75^th commemoration of the end of the Second World War nine days later. The statement explicitly marks the 8^th of May as a day of liberation, but its authors chose another day to make it public. This, however, is a minor objection in the face of a document which has made great progress.

Notes:

¹Vera Bücker, Die Schulddiskussion im deutschen Katholizismus nach 1945, Bochum 1989, p. 89; Wolfgang Löhr, Bischof Johannes Joseph van der Velden und die Schuldfrage nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Kirche im Bistum Aachen, Jahrbuch 7, 2004, p. 247-257, 255, quoted in: Ulrich Helbach, Es hätte unserer Kirche und unserem Volk mehr gedient, wenn wir weniger geschwiegen hätten … Die “Schuldfrage” im Frühjahr 1945 im Lichte eines neuen Quellenfundes: Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Papst Pius XII., in: Siegfried Schmidt (Hg.), Rheinisch – Kölnisch – Katholisch. Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Landesgeschichte, FS H. Finger, Köln 2008, p. 341-372, 344. For the context: Damian van Melis / Joachim Köhler (ed.), Siegerin in Trümmern: Die Rolle der katholischen Kirche in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1998. Olaf Blaschke, Olaf, Die Kirchen und der Nationalsozialismus, Bonn 2019 (Stuttgart 2014), p. 231-244.

²[Probably Lorenz Jaeger], Entwurf für eine Eingabe der westdeutschen Bischöfe an Pius XII. zur Kollektivschuldfrage, Paderborn, ca. 5. 6. 1945, in: Ulrich Helbach (Bearb.), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945. Westliche Besatzungszonen 1945-1947, vol. 1, Paderborn 2012 (Veröffentlichungen der KfZG, Reihe A: Quellen, Bd. 54), p. 115-120 (EA Paderborn, NL Jaeger, Sachgruppe 1 [Rom], Hefter: Eingaben/Verfügungen). The story of this document is told by its discoverer: Helbach, Schuldfrage.

³Pius XII, Ansprache an das Kardinalskollegium, 2. 6. 1945, in: Wilhelm Jussen (ed.), Gerechtigkeit schafft Frieden, Reden und Enzykliken des Heiligen Vaters Pius XII., Hamburg 1946, p. 201-216.

⁴Officialla, the collective guilt was never announced. Cf. Norbert Frei, Von deutscher Erfindungskraft. Die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit, in: Gary Smith (ed.), Hannah Arendt revisited. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” und die Folgen, Frankfurt 2000, p. 157-170.

⁵Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Erstes gemeinsames Hirtenwort nach dem Krieg, Eichstätt, June 28^th 1945, in: Wolfgang Löhr (Bearb.), Dokumente deutscher Bischöfe 1945-1949, vol. 1: Hirtenbriefe und Ansprachen zu Gesellschaft und Politik 1945-1949, Würzburg 1985, S. 29-32.

⁶Hirtenbrief der deutschen Bischöfe, 23. 8. 1945, in: Löhr (ed.), p. 40-45.

⁷Die bayerischen Bischöfe: Hirtenwort über das Glaubensleben und Zeitprobleme, Eichstätt, 9. 4. 1946, in: Löhr (Bearb.), p. 99-103, 102.

⁸Heinz Hürten, Deutsche Katholiken 1918 bis 1945, Paderborn 1992, p. 550.

⁹Here, the scholarly findings of Antonia Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens. Der Ausschuss für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945, Frankfurt 1996, find their way into the document.

¹⁰Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933. Eine kritische Betrachtung, in: Hochland 53 (1961), p. 215-239.

¹¹Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York 1992.

¹²Cf. Antonia Leugers, Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung, Paderborn 2009.

Conference Report: “Germany and the Confessional Divide, 1871-1989,” Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: “Germany and the Confessional Divide, 1871-1989,” Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, 2016, San Diego, California

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

On the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, twenty-five historians and theologians gathered at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association from September 30 through October 2 in San Diego to examine a confessional divide between Catholicism and Protestantism characterizing the social, political and religious landscape of Germany from the Kaiserreich through German reunification in 1990.

Convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Wilhelm-Westfälische-Universität in Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University, the seminar grappled with how confessional identity is created and upheld. How and why did theologians, church leaders and politicians define themselves negatively against confessional enemies? To what extent was this process of definition influenced by geography, and in particular, the degree to which their regions were confessionally homogenous or heterogeneous? How did population shifts alter processes of confessionalization? How was this process of self-definition affected by encounters with non-Christian religions, including Jews and Muslims? And finally, which voices sought to counter such confessionalization processes and what impact did they have on received identities?

The seminar began the first day by focusing on the deepening of confessional tensions in the nineteenth century. The sociologist, M. Rainer Lepsius, spoke of the concept of “socio-moral miliuex,” borrowing the concept of a “Catholic milieu” from the Catholic publicist, Carl Amery. Some of Lepsius’ disciples, in turn, referred to a “conservative Protestant milieu.” The historian, Olaf Blaschke, calls much of the nineteenth century a “second confessional era,” one marked by the intensity of passions found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the wake of the Reformation. A participant in the seminar, Blaschke described the origins of his approach in his study with the renowned Bielefeld social historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Seminar participants, examining Blaschke’s thesis as well as objections from his critics, nonetheless remained divided over whether parallels with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hold up for the nineteenth. All nonetheless agreed that the era represented an era of significant and troubling confessional tensions, even if some pointed out that the forces driving these tensions varied significantly between the early modern and modern eras.

On the second day, participants examined attempts to overcome these confessional tensions in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis had striven to create a “positive Christianity,” a recognition of how deeply these confessional fault lines cut through German society. The discussion centered on Richard Steigmann-Gall’s classic and contested monograph, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Participants focused less on Steigmann-Gall’s claims that the Nazis, contrary to later mythologizing, understood themselves as good Christians and acted on the basis of their Christian faith. They focused instead on Steigmann-Galls’s analysis of how the Nazis exploited the goals of “positive Christianity” in hopes of standing above the confessions and bridging the confessional divide.

Even so, and spite of attempts to put aside these confessional differences through the creation of interconfessional movements of Christian Democracy, confessional fault lines persisted through the Adenauer Era in the Federal Republic—and in some regions, even longer. Only in the German Democratic Republic did these differences recede, the region being home to only a tiny minority of Catholics and under the control of an officially atheistic regime. The third session accordingly analyzed forces that ultimately closed these confessional rifts in the second half of the twentieth century. They began with a discussion of Maria Mitchell’s seminal article in the Journal of Modern History, “Materialism and Secularism. CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945-1949,” (67, no. 2 (June 1995): 278-308) which showed how Catholics and Protestants found common ground in the CDU through their shared hostility to materialism. Mitchell was also present and provided an overview of her article’s genesis while she was at graduate school at Boston University. Participants also examined the second chapter of Mark Edward Ruff’s forthcoming monograph, The Battle for the Catholic Past: Germany, 1945 -1980. This chapter examined the fights over the validity of the Reichskonkordat in the postwar era that culminated in a landmark case before the Constitutional Court in June, 1956. The seminar concluded with a discussion of Thomas Mittmann’s article in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, “Säkularisierungsvorstellungen und religiöse Identitätsstiftung im Migrationsdiskurs. Die kirchliche Wahrnehmung ‘des Islams’ in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit den 1960er Jahren“ (51 (2011): 267-289).

The fruitful conversations will lead to an edited volume, likely under the title, Germany and the Confessional Divide, 1871-1989. The 500^th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation provides the ideal opportunity to take stock of the Reformation legacy, not just in Germany but throughout the world.

Article Note: Olaf Blaschke, “Geschichtsdeutung und Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Kommission für Zeitgeschichte und das Netzwerk kirchenloyaler Katholizismusforscher, 1945-2000”

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2012

Article Note: Olaf Blaschke, “Geschichtsdeutung und Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Kommission für Zeitgeschichte und das Netzwerk kirchenloyaler Katholizismusforscher, 1945-2000,” in Thomas Pittrof and Walter Schmitz, eds., Freie Anerkennung übergeschichtlicher Bindungen. Katholische Geschichtswahrnehmung im deutschsprachigen Raum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2009), 479-521.

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

In this massive forty-two page article, the German historian, Olaf Blaschke, sets his sights on the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte (Commission for Contemporary History). This Roman Catholic historical association founded in the fall of 1962 and now based in Bonn is perhaps best known in historical circles for having produced the so-called “Blue Series,” more than 175 documentary volumes and monographs on the history of German Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has served as a nexus for historical research, bringing together historians for research on many projects including many pertaining to the history of the Roman Catholic Church during the Nazi era. The Commission has also emerged as a public relations outpost, dispatching its team of historical experts or the names of trusted colleagues to the press when pressing questions about the church’s past arrived in the headlines.

For Blaschke, the Commission provides the ideal example of a network that for decades succeeded in determining how the church’s past would be viewed. Or in his words, this is the account of “how a well positioned group stabilized a social network of support and succeeded in establishing hegemony over a specific discourse and partially maintaining this until today.” Its approach, he argues, was “apologetic.” By this term, Blaschke means that the historians writing about the church’s past during these terrible years tended to underscore the church’s positive achievements rather than to focus on its failings, omissions and missteps. They were also more likely to underscore resistance rather than collaboration and to put the church on the side of the victims and martyrs rather than the oppressors. And hence his goal: reconstructing the inner workings of the network at the heart of the Commission.

This task leads him to pore over lists of the Commission’s board members put together by one of the Commission’s founders, Rudolf Morsey, in 2004. Blaschke draws three diagrams for the intervals 1965-1976, 1977-1988, and 1989-2000, showing the frequency with which network members thanked each other in the introductions and forewords to their works. He notes constants and changes over nearly fifty years. The proportion of churchmen and politicians shrank over the decades, while the ranks of professional academics, mostly but not exclusively historians, accordingly rose. Two founders remained fixtures: the historians Konrad Repgen and Rudolf Morsey, who helped direct the institute itself and oversaw many of its publications. Other men played central roles: Dieter Albrecht, Ludwig Volk, SJ, Klaus Gotto and Ulrich von Hehl. Blaschke hones in on the network’s mechanisms of exclusion. The board was the terrain of men. Only one woman took part (whom he does not name), and her role was peripheral. Voices particularly critical of the church’s past were not permitted entry. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, whose critical article about German Catholicism in 1933 published in Hochland sparked something of a firestorm, was not invited to a conference held in Würzburg in May 1961 that provided momentum for the Commission’s founding. Indeed, he did not receive an acknowledgment of thanks in a volume from the Blue Series until 1998.

Written from the hand of an outsider, Blaschke’s analysis represents an admirable first stab into the mechanics of this network, even if an aggrieved tone reveals something of the author’s motives. Blaschke correctly anchors the founding of this network in the political and ideological currents of the 1950s—in the spat over the validity of the Reichskonkordat which culminated in a widely-publicized and massive hearing before Germany’s Constitutional Court in June, 1956, into the rediscovery of the Nazi past from the second half of the 1950s and in attempts to overcome educational deficits amongst German Catholics.

Blaschke’s foray into the politics of history nonetheless has to rely predominantly on published sources. He repeatedly turns to Rudolf Morsey’s insider account of the Commission’s founding, the forwards to the volumes in the Blue Series and other retrospective glimpses offered by Commission members. More meticulous archival research into his topic, however, makes clear that the Commission, all outward appearances notwithstanding, was actually less homogeneous and united than portrayed here. Strategies and tactics varied. Personalities clashed. As Blaschke himself observes, founding members like Morsey and Repgen had to fight their own battles of sorts against the politicians of past and present like Heinrich Krone of the CDU in their effort to bring “truth to light.” Volk’s papers in the Jesuit Archives in Munich leave little doubt that his connections to the other Commission members were less substantial than a reading of acknowledgments might reveal. Though a tireless researcher, the more solitary Volk moved in intellectual and social circles that did not always overlap with those of other prominent members of this network.

Its many noteworthy volumes notwithstanding, the Commission also did not succeed in painting the definite discourse on the church’s role in the Third Reich—neither in the academy nor in the mainstream press. In the sweeping surveys of the Third Reich, its research was often eclipsed by the findings of church critics, its documentary editions less frequently consulted. Against the critical writings of the Hochhuths, Cornwalls and Lewys, its fervent protests had a lesser impact, undoubtedly because the mechanisms of the international press rarely intersected with this network formally anchored in the church. The mainstream news media, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, tended to bypass the findings of the Commission and to give print and air time instead to the exposes of church critics. Language was one obvious barrier. The works of the Commission have not been translated into English. But the Commission’s dense monograph and documentary editions have proven nearly impossible to distill into easily digestible nuggets. In hindsight, the outcome of battles between critical sound-bytes and dense works of scholarship was never in dispute.

Further limiting the Commission’s impact on the mainstream historical profession was the fact that its members were exclusively Roman Catholic. Most of its authors sought to write “objective” history in a Rankean sense by letting the sources speak for themselves in a strict reconstruction of the past. To no great surprise, the Commission’s publications were not absorbed into the great initial waves of social and cultural history that began sweeping through the German historical landscapes in the 1970s and 1990s respectively. By the 1990s, however, social history became part of the Commission’s corpus of literature, as evidenced by volumes produced by Antonius Liedhegener on Protestants and Catholics in Bochum and Münster or by Christoph Kösters on youth organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. These volumes, along with others from the 1990s and 2000s, were heavily informed by the model of the “Catholic milieu.” Inspired by the work of the sociologist, M. Rainer Lepsius, this model was first used by historians to explain the history of the German Empire (1871-1914). But only in 2006 did the Commission publish its first volume of cultural history, an account of Catholic students in the postwar era by Christian Schmidtmann.

These volumes notwithstanding, many of the earlier volumes of the Commission, particularly those pertaining to the late Weimar and National Socialist eras were most likely to be cited by fellow network members. But this was true, as Blaschke notes, of the other side as well. Operating with an equal degree of methodological insularity, the advocates of social and cultural history emerging from bastions like Bielefeld preferred the output of their friends, colleagues and mentors as models of inspiration and citation. Blaschke’s essay thus opens the door for an analysis of the mechanics behind other historical networks including the Bielefelders or the Protestant Commission for the History of the Church Struggle during the Nazi Era. Were they also male-dominated? Did they foster ties to politicians and the media? And was their work an offshoot of larger ideological and political struggles?

Blaschke ultimately paints a picture of a parallel universe, even while acknowledging that the bunker mentality of the past is history. New networks like the Schwerter Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung, he points out, have emerged to supplant the Commission’s research monopoly, and leaders of the Commission have joined in the discussions that they have launched. Blaschke is right in calling for those in the field to bury the hatchets from the past. The battles from the 1950s through the 1990s need to be historicized and given their proper place in history. But will the ongoing controversies over the Roman Catholic past and the divergent moral lessons so many have drawn from these harrowing years allow this to happen?