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Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism, November 4, 2021

By Alain Epp Weaver, MCC

Since its inception in the second half of the nineteenth century, modern humanitarianism has operated within fields of power, with humanitarian actors seeking to carve out space to carry out their work in accordance with their principles such as impartiality and neutrality. Humanitarian practice has always run the danger of becoming entangled in different ways with government agendas and with the complicated histories of individuals and communities displaced by war that humanitarian agencies seek to assist. On November 4, 2021, a group of historians gathered at a virtual roundtable convened by the University of Winnipeg on the theme, “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” to discuss one example of such humanitarian entanglements before, during, and after the Second World War. The roundtable built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections (a publication of Mennonite Central Committee, or MCC), that featured examinations by 12 historians from Canada, the United States, Paraguay, France, Germany, and the Netherlands of the complex ways in which MCC, as a Christian humanitarian agency, interacted and was bound up with Nazism and its legacy from the 1930s into the mid-1950s. Several articles featured in Intersections benefited from extensive consultation of MCC’s archives in Akron, Pennsylvania.

At the roundtable, four authors from the Intersections issue highlighted key findings from their research on MCC’s postwar resettlement efforts with displaced Mennonites, with Anna Holian, author of a landmark study of uprooted groups in Germany after WWII, offering a response.[1] This roundtable also drew on sustained scholarly attention from the past few years on transnational Mennonite intersections, entanglements, and even complicity with Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s.[2] This brief report highlights findings from both the November 4 roundtable and the fall 2021 issue of Intersections, outlining the various ways that MCC entanglements with Nazism were bound up with broader Mennonite entanglements with Nazism.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged as a byproduct of the organization’s efforts to assist Mennonites seeking to leave the Soviet Union.[3] MCC was founded by Mennonite churches in the United States in 1920 to respond to the call of Mennonites in southern Russia (soon to become part of the Soviet Union) who, along with their neighbors, faced both war and a devastating famine. In the first half of the 1920s, MCC operated feeding and agricultural development programs in parts of southern Russia home to Mennonite communities. While MCC distributed humanitarian assistance, other actors, such as the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBC), worked to help Soviet Mennonites migrate to Canada, with Soviet officials sometimes suspecting MCC of supporting and encouraging such migration efforts.[4]

The conditions facing Soviet Mennonite communities progressively worsened in the 1920s, with the Soviet state dispossessing Mennonite landholders and imposing increasingly strict restrictions on religious expression. By 1929, the situation had worsened to the point that up to 15,000 German-speaking Soviet citizens (Mennonites, but also Catholic, Lutherans, and others) descended on Moscow to demand that they be allowed to migrate. This pressure eventually led to 4,000 Mennonites receiving permission to leave the Soviet Union for Germany—with financial loans from the German government (guaranteed by MCC), these Mennonites then migrated to Paraguay where, with MCC assistance, they established the Fernheim colony in the country’s Gran Chaco region.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged from this period. Once the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, MCC de facto became a debtor to the Nazi government. To help with negotiations with the German government to postpone payment on this debt, MCC relied on pro-Nazi Mennonites, including Benjamin Unruh (one of the Mennonites from Russia who had appealed to U.S. Mennonites for help in 1920 and who had ended up in Germany).[5]

Strongly anti-Communist, Unruh also dreamed of Mennonite settlement in eastern European lands to be conquered by the Nazis and helped nourish the hopes of some in the Mennonite Fernheim colony in Paraguay of a return to Europe following anticipated Nazi victories. MCC grew increasingly concerned throughout the 1930s and into the war years by the growing pro-Nazi feeling within this Paraguayan Mennonite colony it had helped to set up and continued to support. MCC sought to nurture commitment to the traditional Mennonite doctrine of nonresistance among Fernheim’s colonists, while also avoiding direct involvement in Fernheim’s governance. However, once the tension within Fernheim between the völkische (German nationalist) and wehrlose (unarmed, or nonresistant) factions erupted into violent conflict in 1944, MCC, under pressure from the U.S. government, in turn pushed colony leadership to expel the völkische leaders.[6]

Mennonites and other groups classified as German by the Soviet authorities faced sustained and harsh persecution under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s, including the deportation of half of the Mennonite population from what is now Ukraine to Siberia. The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine in 1942 brought a reprieve for Mennonites and others identified as Volksdeutsche who were viewed favorably within the Nazi racialized hierarchy. During the Nazi occupation period, not only did Mennonites receive favored treatment, but some also actively implemented Nazi genocidal policies, including the massacre of Soviet Jews.[7]

As German forces retreated from the Soviet Union, many Soviet Mennonites fled with them. Nazi authorities settled some of these Mennonites in Germany and some in occupied Poland, depending on how ideologically trustworthy the Nazis viewed specific individuals. Mennonite men of eligible age served in German military units; some served in the Waffen-SS and in the paramilitary death squads of the Einsatzgruppen. These displaced Mennonites received houses and other goods stolen by Nazi authorities from Poles, Jews, and others. The vast majority of these displaced Mennonites accepted German citizenship.

After the Allied defeat of Nazi forces, these displaced Mennonites found themselves in a precarious situation, under threat during the first couple years after the war of deportation back to the Soviet Union. [And, in fact, around half of these displaced Mennonites were returned to the Soviet Union, where they faced a deeply precarious future.] Mennonite refugees seeking options within the emerging postwar international refugee system had multiple strikes against them—their acceptance of German citizenship, service in the German military, and the assessment by international refugee bodies that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union voluntarily.

Alongside broader postwar humanitarian efforts, including active participation in the joint efforts of the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany (CRALOG), MCC worked to assist displaced Soviet Mennonites (along with Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region who had fled after the war) and to help them migrate to the Americas (especially Canada and Paraguay). To counter the strikes that displaced Mennonites had against them, MCC workers advanced different arguments in different contexts, making a variety of arguments regarding Mennonite “nationality” (e.g., that they were Dutch, or that Mennonites should be viewed as having their own nationality, similar to Jews), contending that Mennonites had been coerced into accepting German citizenship, and downplaying Mennonite participation in Nazi military bodies. When one argument failed, MCC staff advanced others in their sustained lobbying efforts for Mennonite refugees. Over the course of the decade following the war, MCC succeeded in resettling around 15,000 displaced European Mennonites in the Americas, including approximately 12,000 Mennonites from the Soviet Union.[8]

The University of Winnipeg’s November 2021 roundtable on “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” chaired by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, the co-director of the university’s Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies, examined this latter part of the story of MCC entanglements with Nazism, with four historians who contributed to the fall 2021 issue of Intersections briefly sharing key highlights from their research.

Benjamin W. Goossen, affiliated with Harvard University, initiated the roundtable with remarks underscoring the importance of contextualizing Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism within broader and longer histories of Mennonite antisemitism. Goossen highlighted how antisemitic attitudes can be found in the writings of leading anti-Nazi Mennonites in the United States, Canada and Europe—not only among overtly pro-Nazi Mennonites. MCC’s postwar comparison of Mennonites to Jews, deployed as part of efforts to secure Mennonite migration, was, Goossen contended, disingenuous, covering over the complex, multifaceted ways that Soviet Mennonites had not only benefited from Nazism but had in different ways been actively complicit with it, including, in some cases, participation in the Holocaust. The postwar public narrative promulgated by MCC workers among Mennonite communities in Canada and the United States of the providential, Exodus-like rescue of a persecuted Mennonite community not only grossly simplified a much more complicated reality but also chilled Mennonite postwar grappling with legacies of antisemitism and investigation into Mennonite involvement in Nazism’s genocidal program.

Many MCC workers in postwar Europe expended considerable time and effort to convince groups such as the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) of Soviet Mennonite eligibility to migrate from Europe (and to receive international assistance to do so). In her presentation, Erika Weidemann of Texas A&M University traced how IGCR officials debated internally about Soviet Mennonite eligibility for Displaced Persons (DP) status and examined the evolving arguments MCC workers advanced to convince the IGCR and IRO of that eligibility. On the whole, Weidemann noted, these MCC efforts proved successful. International refugee bodies sought to articulate an unambiguous approach to Soviet Mennonite refugees, but in practice the approach was constantly shifting, with MCC adjusting to those shifts in its efforts to interpret Mennonites to international refugee agencies and to advocate for their favorable treatment.

Steve Schroeder of the University of the Fraser Valley focused his intervention on MCC’s assistance to uprooted Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region. To help secure Mennonite emigration from Europe, Schroeder explained, MCC workers argued that Danziger Mennonites had an identity that transcended Germanness and portrayed these Mennonites as victims. In reality, Schroeder continued, these Mennonites had fully assimilated into German society decades before the war.[9] During the war, Danziger Mennonites voluntarily served in the army, some worked as concentration camp guards, and some used enslaved labor from concentration camps on their farms. Like Goossen, Schroeder underscored how MCC’s constructed narratives about displaced Danziger Mennonites contributed to and furthered a distorted narrative of European Mennonites having been removed from or above the fray of the war (or of having been victims of the war), a narrative that covered over the varied forms of Danziger (and broader European) Mennonite complicity with Nazism.

The final panelist, the University of Winnipeg’s Aileen Friesen, began by urging historians to recall the individual toll of the Holocaust, naming the individuals murdered by people carrying out Nazism’s genocidal program. On the Yad Vashem website, one can search the towns and villages in Ukraine once home to large Mennonite communities like Molochansk and find the names of Jewish people like Maria Sheffer and Mendel Ioffe who were murdered in the Holocaust. Friesen discussed how MCC’s postwar attempts to present Soviet Mennonites as having “Dutch” nationality was a reinvention of older arguments and discussion about where Mennonites fit into the emerging order of nation-states. Drawing from her Intersections article, Friesen suggested that the assessment of international refugee organizations after the war that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union “voluntarily” did not square with how the Mennonite refugees perceived their departure. Interpreting Soviet Mennonite actions during the Nazi war-time occupation and as German forces retreated cannot, Friesen stressed, be divorced from the backdrop of two decades of increasingly harsh persecution faced by Soviet Mennonites.

Building on her research in MCC’s archives, Friesen discussed how MCC workers providing humanitarian assistance to displaced Soviet Mennonites sought to make sense of those Mennonites as they learned about the ways those Mennonites had been entangled and had collaborated with Soviet authorities and then with the Nazi regime. Tensions among displaced Mennonites in MCC-operated camps in post-war Germany simmered and sometimes erupted with recriminations about different forms of collaboration. The response of MCC workers as they learned in piecemeal fashion of these Mennonite entanglements with both Soviet communism and Nazism was to “let it all go”—rather than seeking to establish a true account of what choices different individuals under MCC’s care had made during the war, MCC instead focused on constructing general accounts of Mennonite victimhood in efforts to secure Mennonite emigration from Erope. This hands-off MCC approach enabled someone like Heinrich Wiebe, who served as mayor of Zaporizhzhia during the German occupation, to present himself to MCC and CMBC as a pillar of the Mennonite community who had remained distant from Nazism, when in fact he had been involved in the ghettoization of the city’s Jewish population and the expropriation of their property and was active as mayor when the city’s security apparatus, which included Mennonites among its leaders, executed the city’s remaining Jews in 1942.

In her response to the panel, Anna Holian of Arizona State University placed MCC’s postwar refugee resettlement efforts within the broader context of the emerging international refugee regime in which “nationality” functioned as the key concept. Holian explained that in this postwar system, one’s “nationality” (understood in both political and cultural terms) determined where one supposedly belonged, even if that was not where one had previously lived or was where one wished to be. Mennonites were not the only group seeking to classify themselves as a distinct nationality as they sought favorable outcomes for themselves in this postwar system: Jews and Ukrainians also sought to disentangle themselves from other national identities.

Holian’s response and the discussion that followed pointed to questions for further research: How did MCC postwar work with displaced Mennonites change over time? How did MCC understand (or fail to understand) the Mennonites whom it sought to assist? Mennonites were not free of the varied forms of antisemitism that marked Christianity in Europe, the United States, and Canada—what role did that antisemitism play in MCC (and broader Mennonite) entanglements with Nazism? To what extent did MCC shape or dictate Mennonite refugee narratives about themselves and their war-time experiences—and to what extent were MCC narratives about these Mennonite refugees shaped by how the refugees narrated their experiences to MCC? The rich conversation at the November 2021 roundtable on these and other questions highlighted that much fertile scholarly ground remains to be explored regarding Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism and its legacies before, during, and after the Second World War.

Alain Epp Weaver directs strategic planning for Mennonite Central Committee. He is the author of Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation: A Missiological History of Mennonite Central Committee, C.H. Wedel Series No. 21 (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2020).

Notes:

[1] Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

[2][2] See especially Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen, eds., European Mennonites and the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

[3] For an analytical overview of MCC entanglements with National Socialism, see Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazsim, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021):

[4] Esther Epp-Tiessen, “MCC and Mennonite Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920-1932,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 13-17.

[5] Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Benjamin Unruh, Nazism, and MCC,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 17-27.

[6] See John Eicher, Exiled among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Eicher, “MCC and Nazi Impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite Colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 27-32; John D. Thiesen, Mennonite and Nazi? Attitudes Among Mennonite Colonists in Latin America, 1933-1945 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1999); Daniel Stahl, “How the Fernheimers Learned to Speak about the Nazi Era: The Long Historical Echo of a Conflict,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 285-298; Stahl, “Paraguay’s Mennonites and the Struggle against Fascism: A Global Historical Approach to the Nazi Era,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 273-284; and Stahl, “Between German Fascism and U.S. Imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2022): 32-35.

[7] See Martin Dean, “Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 248–71 and Aileen Friesen, “A Portrait of Khortytsya/Zaporizhzhia under Occupation,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Janzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 229–249.

[8] For examinations of MCC’s efforts to resettle displaced Mennonites after the Second World War, see Ted Regehr, “Of Dutch or German Ancestry? Mennonite Refugees, MCC, and the International Refugee Organization,” Journal of Mennonite Studies (1995): 7-25; Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazism, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 3-12; Erika Weidemann, “Identity and Complicity: The Post-World War II Immigration of Chortitza Mennonites,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 269-289; Weidemann, “Facing the Future, Reinterpreting the Past: MCC’s Solutions for Successful Mennonite Immigration after the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 45-50; Aileen Friesen, “Defining the Deserving: MCC and Mennonite Refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 50-54; Steven Schroeder, “National Socialism and MCC’s Post-War Resettlement Work with Danziger Mennonites,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 54-60; and John D. Thiesen, “John Kroeker and the Backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,’” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 40-45.

[9] See Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

Conference Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Conference Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018

By Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

Scholars, students, community and church leaders, and members of the general public gathered in mid-March 2018 at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, for two intense days of presentations and discussions on the subject of “Mennonites and the Holocaust.” Conference organizers Mark Jantzen, John Thiesen, and John Sharp put together a stimulating program featuring speakers from the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Ukraine. Around 200 people registered, and more attended the keynote address and the film showing, which were open to the public, so that the conversation continued beyond the formal sessions, over meals, during coffee breaks, and subsequently online. As the conference demonstrated, it is worth the time, effort, and expense to bring people physically together when the issues involved are so important and the stakes so high.

Joel H. Nofziger, Ben Goossen, Aileen Friesen, and Jason Kauffman prepared thoughtful summaries of all the sessions for the “Anabaptist Historians” blog. You can find those, along with additional commentary by Lisa Schirch, at https://anabaptisthistorians.org/tag/mennonites-and-the-holocaust-conference/page/1/.

This report focuses on three insights from the conference: one historical, another methodological, and the third programmatic.

History

Mennonites were directly involved in the destruction of Jews as witnesses, beneficiaries, and perpetrators. Already from John Thiesen’s opening remarks it was clear that the conference would unsettle the myth of Mennonite innocence. Thiesen’s research on the reception of National Socialism among Mennonites in Paraguay dates back to the 1980s; the title of his book, Mennonite and Nazi?, articulated a key question twenty years ago. Still, even for those familiar with the research of the late Gerhard Rempel (“Mennonites and the Holocaust: From Collaboration to Perpetration,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 84 [Oct 2010]: 507-49) and recent work by Ben Goossen, the conference produced shock after shock.

In her contribution to a panel titled “Mennonite-Jewish Connections,” Aileen Friesen described a massacre of Jews in Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine in 1942, just miles from the church where Mennonites from the Khortytsia colony gathered to celebrate Easter. Among the local police who did the killing were two Mennonite brothers. Using the recently opened KGB Archive in Kiev, Dmytro Myeshkov provided chilling accounts of Mennonite collaborators. For example, Ivan Klassen, a physician in the service of the SS, examined disabled patients in a hospital in the Mennonite Molotschna settlement. A killing squad followed up by shooting more than 100 children, women, and men whom Klassen had deemed unable to work. Erika Weidemann’s paper analyzed the experiences of two Khortytsia Mennonite women. One of them, an informant for the SS killing squad Einsatzgruppe C, used her language skills to rat out potentially subversive forced laborers.

Weidemann, Myeshkov, Friesen, and Victor Klet all noted the disastrous impact of the Soviet experience on Mennonite communities in Ukraine. But those victimized by Stalin were not the only Mennonites who joined the Nazi cause. Colin Neufeldt’s paper, on “Jewish-Mennonite Relations” in the Masovian Voivodeship, shifted attention to German-occupied Poland. At least twenty Mennonites, including Neufeldt’s grandparents, left their village of Deutsch Wymyschle to take over properties from which Jews had been expelled in nearby Gąbin. Papers by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and Pieter Post identified Mennonite theologians in Germany and the Netherlands who embraced and propagated National Socialist ideology; Joachim Wieler added a poignant personal note, reading a letter by his father, a Wehrmacht officer, who in 1941 exulted from France, “The Lord is visibly on our side.”

Methodology

In her keynote address, “Neighbors, Killers, Enablers, Witnesses: The Many Roles of Mennonites in the Holocaust,” Doris Bergen called for more scholarship, and from as many angles and disciplines as possible. The conference illustrated how fruitful multiple approaches can be but also revealed many unexplored perspectives.

Jim Lichti’s presentation, “An Illusion of Freedom: Denominationalism, German Mennonites, and Nazi Germany,” compared Mennonites with other “free” churches, notably Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists. Like Imanuel Baumann and Astrid von Schlachta in their papers, Lichti was careful to point out the range of Mennonite positions, public and private, on everything from the Hebrew Bible to antisemitism and Nazi racial policies. At the same time, he observed that the lack of centralized structures made it almost impossible to develop a coherent Mennonite voice of opposition. Alle Hoekema’s discussion of Dutch Mennonites recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous among the Nations” confirmed this point. The forty individuals identified are, as Hoekema put it, not insignificant, but they are few. Nor do their accounts highlight Mennonite identity or beliefs as key factors. Instead they emphasize their networks and commitment to humanity as what motivated them to help Jews.

Several speakers noted that common narratives about Mennonite suffering and survival can serve to conceal negative assumptions about Jews and Judaism. Hans Werner analyzed how Mennonites frame their memories to produce “usable” versions of the past, for example, by writing only about the Soviet years or balancing sadness about the Holocaust with joy at Nazi German “liberation” of Christianity. Viewing the 1935 movie, Friesennot (“Frisians in peril”) showed how Mennonites, real and imagined, were mobilized for Nazi purposes. That theme of mobilization also came across in Ben Goossen’s paper on scholarship about Mennonites in the Third Reich. Mark Jantzen, who introduced the film and prepared the subtitles, pointed out that it does not explicitly refer to “Mennonites” or “Jews.” Nonetheless, antisemitic canards about Jews-Bolsheviks as the lascivious, blasphemous, brutal foe of pure and noble “Aryan”-Christian-German-Mennonites are embedded in the story.

The cultural components of the conference encouraged reflection on issues that tend to be neglected or repressed. Connie Braun’s poetry and prose invited listeners to contemplate “the missing pieces of our narratives”: Mennonite prejudices and the suffering and losses experienced by others. Helen Stoltzfus’s reading from “Heart of the World,” a play she co-wrote with Albert Greenberg in 1999, raised the topic of intermarriage as a way to explore what divides and connects Mennonites and Jews, and indeed all people. Stoltzfus’s performance of four different characters showed the value of multiple perspectives and reinforced an earlier moment in the conference. During the Q&A, an audience member had identified herself as Jewish, possibly the only Jew present she said, and challenged the rest of the room to consider how the light-hearted tone taken by some speakers sounded and felt to her.

Looking Ahead

Although the conference was academic and focused on the geographically and chronologically delineated subject of Mennonites and the Holocaust, it raised even broader questions with far-reaching implications. Some of these were spelled out explicitly, others remained below the surface of the formal proceedings or spilled over into discussions off-site. David Barnouw’s paper about Jacob Luitjens, “From War Criminal in the Netherlands to Mennonite Abroad and Back, to Prison in the Netherlands,” suggested the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a widely respected relief organization, actively helped a Nazi conceal his past and use his Mennonite ties to gain refuge. Does this history pose a challenge to the MCC’s ongoing efforts in Israel/Palestine? Some people present at the conference want an examination of these issues in advance of the upcoming 100-year anniversary of the MCC. Some also echo Arnold Neufeldt-Fast’s call for a Mennonite “post-Holocaust theology.” Already in the works is another conference, to be held in 2020 at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Indiana, on “Reading the Bible after the Holocaust.”

In his paper, “Selective Memory: Danziger Mennonite Reflections on the Nazi Era,” Steven Schroeder called for “truth-telling” about Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust and also about the ways that Mennonites participated in and continue to benefit from colonial systems. Schroeder, who teaches in western Canada, noted that his institution, University of the Fraser Valley, is located on unceded Indigenous Territory. Several members of the audience signaled an interest in future engagement with this aspect of the Mennonite past and present. As Bergen mentioned in her keynote, thinking critically about history does not imply that I would do better. But it might open possibilities to listen, understand, and care.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

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

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on the Indian Residential Schools and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Reflections on the Indian Residential Schools and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) will convene in Vancouver, British Columbia for one week this month (18-21 September 2013) to hear survivors tell of their experiences in the Indian Residential Schools, and to encourage reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.^{^[1]} The work of the TRC has exposed weighty historical problems for all Canadians, but it has also provided Canadians opportunities to re-examine their country’s colonial policies, processes of nation-building and national identity formation, and its human rights record. For Christians, this work has evoked reason for critical reflection concerning mission work, evangelism, the role of the church in society, church-state relations, and how to best atone for past misdeeds.

For over a hundred years (1880s-1996), the Canadian government partnered with the mainline churches — Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United (and unofficially with Mennonite and Baptist organizations) – in running the Indian Residential School system. The 140 schools that comprised the system were found in every province and territory, even the northernmost regions of the Canadian arctic. The Indian Act, which mandated that Aboriginal children attend the schools, and court injunctions that threatened parents with arrest if they did not comply, ensured school enrollments.^{^[2]} In all, over 150,000 Aboriginal children – beginning at the age of six – were forcibly removed from their homes to attend state-sponsored, church-run schools. Hundreds of lawsuits stemming from abuses in the schools have led to numerous actions, including the establishment of the TRC. The first task of the TRC was to establish and disseminate the facts regarding the school system. The 2012 book They Came for the Children: Canada, Aboriginal Peoples, and Residential Schools is a product of the commission’s work.

TRC-Report The book explains how the churches in Canada began their missionary work of converting Aboriginals to Christianity and to western cultural practices long before confederation. This foundation proved useful to Canadian government officials who found accord with the church leaders’ intent “to civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children.^{^[3]} Together, the government and the churches expanded the existing church education infrastructure to all of Canada with the intent to, as government officials put it, “kill the Indian in the child.” The campaign to eliminate Canada’s “Indian problem” was to be achieved through assimilation, extinguishing Aboriginal culture, and eliminating Aboriginal interest in land claims. Although Canada’s population would be multi-racial, the success of the assimilation campaign would ensure that all Canadians were sufficiently “civilized” (i.e., westernized and Christian), thereby reducing the government’s treaty obligations considerably.^{^[4]}

The horrible accounts in the book reveal terrible abuses that the vast majority of these students experienced in the dysfunctional, ill-planned, and under-funded school system. Students were abused emotionally, physically, and sexually, and they were punished for using their language.^{^[5]} Tuberculosis and other serious illnesses were rampant, and the death rate was very high (at school, and after release). For instance, during the first decade of operations at the residential school at Qu’Appelle, 174 of 344 students died from a variety of illnesses.^{^[6]} Funding was woefully inadequate, leaving students undernourished and tasked with all sorts of labour jobs, thus sidelining school work. The utter failure of the residential school system was obvious to all by the early 1900s, and many people – even some government officials – supported closing the schools decades prior to their actual closure.^{^[7]}

The history of the residential schools has only partly been realized by the Aboriginal community, and has been almost entirely unknown to the non-Indigenous population in Canada. It seems that the churches and the government intended for the abuses of the failed campaign to fade away with the schools themselves. However, the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ 1996 report documented the suffering of the students in the residential schools, which gave rise to hundreds of legal claims aimed at the churches and the federal government. The resulting 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement totaled $1.9 billion, $60 million of which was designated for the establishment and activities of the TRC.

The mandate of the TRC – to find facts and foster reconciliation – has been frustrated from the outset of its mission due to the Canadian government’s refusal to open its archives to the commission’s researchers (They Came for the Children is based mostly on published materials).^{^[8]} Even though Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a formal apology on behalf of the Canadian government in 2008, one has to wonder about what the apology actually addressed, and what remains overlooked. Withholding the documents has added to past indignities, deepened the distrust between Canadians and their government, and limited the scope of reconciliatory work. In response, Aboriginal writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson recently called on the Canadian government to: “Honour the apology. Release the documents. Be on the right side of history on this one. It’s the very, very least you can do.”^{^[9]}

The government’s resistance to full cooperation with the TRC has not kept other researchers from finding new information on human rights violations in the residential schools. Recent research by food historian Ian Mosby has revealed that Canadian nutritionists partnered with government agencies and church personnel in conducting nutritional and pharmaceutical experiments on malnourished Aboriginal children in six residential schools.^{^[10]} Food rations were kept low intentionally, and any useful findings were to benefit non-Indigenous Canadians (which they did). One wonders about what other accounts exist in the archival documents that have remained under lock and key, but it appears that we may soon find out. An Ontario court injunction of January 2013 forced the hand of the government, and in August 2013 the first researchers from the TRC gained access to the federal government’s records of the residential schools. The research team now finds itself on a tight schedule, as the TRC’s mandate expires in mid-2014.

The residential school system is truly Canada’s national shame. At stake is the integrity of the government, the churches, and the very fabric of Canadian society. The government’s lack of cooperation in the fact-finding stage of the TRC’s work has impeded reconciliation. How can Canadians address their past appropriately, when they don’t know the facts? Without the facts, how can all Canadians work together toward a better future? Head of the TRC, Chief Wilton Littlechild, has rightly claimed: “People just don’t know the history [of the residential schools], and once they know the history, they’ll make the connection as to why there is such a high rate of addiction, and why there is such a high rate of suicide and unemployment [in some Aboriginal communities].”^{^[11]} Also at stake is the integrity of the churches. Some Christian pacifists in Canada who claimed Conscientious Objector status during the Second World War, satisfied their alternative service requirement by joining the teaching staff in the racist, abusive residential schools. This, and related accounts of Christian reasoning for complicity in the school system brings into question aspects of Christian pacifism, Christian missions, evangelism, the role of the church in society and nation building, and the relationship between church and state. Some Christians have begun to address these issues positively, and in new ways. During 1991-1998, all of the churches involved in the schools issued formal apologies for their respective roles in the schools, and the churches have continued to work toward reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.^{^[12]} These efforts will be encouraged at the TRC events in Vancouver, where one will find church tents for conversation, healing, and reconciliation.

Even if Aboriginal survivors of the residential school system were left to initiate the processes of reconciliation through airing grievances, lawsuits, and court injunctions, the results of these actions have been promising. With the TRC publicly revealing these facts and raising awareness among Canadians, Canadians now have the opportunity to respond, and to act in keeping with their long, proud history of being “peacekeepers.” There is plenty of peacebuilding work to be done within their own communities, between peoples of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and worldviews. To date, the response in Canadian cities to the work of the TRC has been mostly positive, evident in thousands of people attending the TRC events, including walks for reconciliation. It would appear that the public is on board.^{^[13]} Sustaining and growing this interest among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada is crucial to moving forward the reconciliatory work that is already underway.

Notes:

^{^[1]} For information on the Vancouver Truth and Reconciliation Commission events in September 2013, see: http://www.myrobust.com/websites/vancouver/index.php?p=719#. For events at universities in the Vancouver area, see: University of the Fraser Valley: http://www.ufv.ca/indigenous/day-of-learning/ University of British Columbia: http://irsi.aboriginal.ubc.ca/ Simon Fraser University: http://www.sfu.ca/reconciliation.html

^{^[2]} Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, They Came for the Children: Canada, Aboriginal Peoples, and Residential Schools. (Winnipeg: TRC, 2012), 18.

^{^[3]} TRC, They Came for the Children, 10.

^{^[4]} TRC, They Came for the Children, 6.

^{^[5]} TRC, They Came for the Children, 1,2,10,37-45

^{^[6]} TRC, They Came for the Children, 17

^{^[7]} TRC, They Came for the Children, 17, 19.

^{^[8]} Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Interim Report (Winnipeg: TRC, 2012), 15-16.

^{^[9]} Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Honour the Apology,” blog entry (23 July 2013): http://leannesimpson.ca/2013/07/23/honour-the-apology/#more-866 (p.3)

^{^[10]} See Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952,” Food Deprivation and Aboriginals,” Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. XLVI, 91 (Mai/May 2013): 145-172

^{^[11]} Jamie Ross, “Littlechild: Commission will uncover the truth – Residential schools: Head of commission says system tore apart families,” May 30th, 2011 http://media.knet.ca/node/11250

^{^[12]} See TRC, They Came for the Children, 81. Official apologies regarding the Residential Schools were as follows: Roman Catholic Oblate (1991), Anglican Church of Canada (1993), Presbyterian Church of Canada (1994), and United Church of Canada (1998). For publications and websites, see: The United Church of Canada, Justice and Reconciliation: The Legacy of Indian Residential Schools and the Journey Toward Reconciliation. (United Church: 2001); Jeremy Bergen, Ecclesial Repentance: The Churches Confront their Sinful Pasts. (Continuum: 2011); Mennonite websites: http://bc.mcc.org/whatwedo/TRC; http://mcbc.ca/trc-2013/ ; Anglican website: http://www.anglican.ca/relationships/trc ; Presbyterian website: http://presbyterian.ca/healing/more/; Roman Catholic website: http://www.cccb.ca/site/eng/media-room/archives/media-releases/2008/2590-launching-of-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-an-opportunity-for-healing-and-hope

^{^[13]} Environics Research Group, 2008 National Benchmark Survey, Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada

and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2008. This survey revealed that “Fully two-thirds (67%) of Canadians believe that individual Canadians have a role to play in efforts to bring about reconciliation in response to the legacy of the Indian residential schools system, even if they had no experience with Indian residential schools.” (29)

Conference Report: German Studies Association Conference, October 4-7, 2012, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Conference Report: German Studies Association Conference, October 4-7, 2012, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

GSA Once again this past year, the German Studies Association conference included a number of interesting panels or papers devoted to contemporary church history.

The panel “Questioning Nazism as a ‘Political Religion'” offered new research relating to debates around the questions: was National Socialism a fundamentally anti-Christian political movement? Was Nazism itself a political religion, a rival to traditional forms of Christianity? Or, as Richard Steigmann-Gall has argued, was the Nazi Party led by politicians who understood themselves as Christians and even attempted to forge an unorthodox partnership with German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) German Catholics? Three papers approached these questions from complementary directions. Beth Ann Griech-Polelle examined how Nazi ideologues viewed one of Germany’s allies, General Francisco Franco, whose collaboration with the Spanish Catholic Church inspired commentary which was sharply critical of “political Catholicism.” Daniel A. McMillan argued that secularization constituted a significant cause of the Holocaust, in part because the concept of Nazism as a political religion helps explain why the Holocaust, more than any other genocide, was driven by ideology divorced from “practical” considerations. Kyle Jantzen explored the efforts of a Berlin Protestant pastor to fuse Christianity and National Socialism, provoking opposition from both Nazi Party activists and leaders of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, in the process revealing the many complexities of the relationship between National Socialism and organized religion.

In all, four members of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly editorial team presented papers in three panels scattered throughout the conference. Along with Griech-Polelle and Jantzen, mentioned above, Robert P. Ericksen presented “Antisemitism through the Lens of Denazification: Examples from Göttingen University,” as part of a panel which considered postwar assessments of pro- or anti-Nazi activities during the Third Reich. Here Ericksen continued to develop his recent research on the failings of the denazification process, highlighted by cases concerning German academics. Finally, Steven Schroeder presented “‘The World Will Not Leave Us Alone’: Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Germany, 1945-1949,” one of the papers in a panel on “Discourses of Victimization and Reconciliation Amid the Rubble.”

Another panel of interest was “The Work of the State and the Work of God: Religious Groups, Social Vocation, and State Violence.” Martina Cucchiara of the University of Notre Dame presented her paper, “Beyond the Concordat: Women’s Religious Negotiation of Free Spaces in Hitler’s Germany.” She discussed the notion of selective accommodation–complying with externals such as the Hitler Greeting and embracing the Nazi vision of community, nationalism, and heroism, while downplaying racial and antisemitic aspects of the regime. Stephen Morgan, also from the University of Notre Dame, contributed the paper “Between Reservation and Extermination: Rhenish Missionaries and the Herrero Genocide,” which explored the complex and compromised relationship between the German missionaries and the Herrero people. Missionaries approved of the reservation system, because it made the Christianization of the African people somewhat easier to accomplish. When the Herrero War ended this experiment, missionaries adapted to the changing conditions, but in the process lost credibility both with Europeans who found them too friendly to the Herrero and with the Herrero, who did not appreciate the missionaries’ encouragement to cease their rebellion. In the end, the missionaries were caught between their Christian interest in evangelism and the government’s interest in mobilizing colonial labour. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, another member of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly editorial team, commented ably on the papers, noting the common process of Christian adaptation to state interest and ideology and pointing out that–at some point–selective accommodation simply turns into assent.

One other paper of interest was James McNutt’s “‘They sought world domination … so he died’ Adolf Schlatter, Deicide, and Der Stürmer.” McNutt compared Streicher’s and Schlatter’s racial and theological attitudes towards Jews, noting linkages between racial hatred and religious antipathy. He argued that Schlatter was an important figure in German Protestantism, and that his social alienation of Jews contributed to their defamation as the evil other, enemies of God, and allies of Satan.

Review of Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), 276 Pp.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

Proponents of the secularization thesis have long-asserted that religion has been sequestered to the private realm, but the authors of God’s Century claim this view is outdated. Drawing on a plethora of events spanning the last few decades, the authors argue that “major religious actors throughout the world enjoy greater capacity for political influence today than at any time in modern history – and perhaps ever” (49). The authors set out to explain the resurgence of religiously-fuelled political action on the world stage by examining what is behind the phenomenon: the religious actors; their beliefs; and, the ramifications of actions.

Political scientists Monica Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Shah provide the necessary historical backdrop for their study, which also problematizes succinctly the oversimplified narratives that portray religion exclusively as friend, or foe, of democracy and peace. Moving on to foreground the global impact of religion in today’s world, the authors’ two central arguments are that religion has played an increasingly significant role on the world stage during the last forty years, and that this increase is due to shifts in political theology and the mutual independence of political and religious actors (9-10). They argue that the onset of religion’s resurgence in global politics began in the 1960s. Aided by modern communications, religious actors have made good use of their independence in creating “transnational civil societies,” (24) resulting in their increased strength in the political realm (81).

The measured increase in significance of political actors is based nearly exclusively on data gathered by the U.S.-based NGO Freedom House, which examined the ties between religion and democratization during the last four decades. In numerous cases involving Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, the data reveals a significant relationship between religion and democratization, which the authors measure according to specific criteria (e.g., open opposition to authoritarian regimes, supporting resistance groups, brokering mediation between combatants). Generally, they determined that “the democratization role of religious actors between 1972 and 2009 was massive,” (93) due to the liberal, democratic political theology—and independent action—of the religious actors (112).

To be sure, many examples of religion fuelling terrorism and war are also found in the world during this same period. Chapters five and six deal directly with the violence inherent in various political theologies, and how certain conditions render plausible the outbreak of this religiously-inspired violence. Citing numerous cases as evidence, the authors utilize their categorical approach to conclude that religious actors are more likely to use violence to alter the status quo when they are “not privileged by the state [and hold] political theology that runs counter to the interests of the state” (132). States that privilege one religious group over others (i.e., integrated states) often witness violence and even civil war, which is evident in recent conflicts in Sudan, Chechnya, Algeria, Tajikistan, and Iraq. Radical domestic and international terrorist groups (e.g., Al Qaeda) broaden this thinking to the point that a specific state—or the world, generally—is seen as ignoring or threatening their cause. Terrorist actions result when this view is fused with a political theology that endorses violence for the “right” cause.

The authors conclude the book with two chapters that focus on religion’s positive potential to promote peace in the world, and on prescriptive measures for us to apply in light of their discoveries. Religious actors can serve and even lead the way in peacebuilding they argue, but again this depends on the actors’ political theology and their relationship to state actors, and the belligerents in the conflict. The most effective peacebuilders are religious actors who: act independent from the state and from warring factions; are popular leaders; and, hold a political theology of justice, peace, and reconciliation (206). The authors identify peaceful components in the respective religious traditions and highlight many cases of religious actors brokering peace. Here, Catholic organizations (and mainly the lay organization, Sant’Egidio) get the most attention. Additional cases involving NGOs rooted in other traditions like the Muslim-based Afghan Institute of Learning, discussed in chapter seven, would have broadened the scope and strengthened the points of this section. Nevertheless, when the essential components are present together, religious actors—at times “with fervor equal to the religiously violent” (176)—are shown to advance peace through work in mediation, transitional justice, and reconciliation.

The prescriptive conclusion first reiterates the central role of religion in contemporary politics, and then suggests ten ways to address this role. “God’s partisans are back, they are setting the political agenda, and they are not going away,” (207) say the authors, and the best way to deal with this reality is to acknowledge and embrace it, and allow for religious freedom and autonomy. Conversely, the state will encounter significant problems—even violence—if it privileges one religion and excludes others, if it represses religious actors, or, if it doesn’t take religious actors seriously. Essentially, the authors recommend that educators and government leaders inform themselves of the role of religion in local and global politics so that political actors will learn to “treat their religious citizens in a way that promotes their best civic, democratic, productive and peaceful energies” (222).

The authors have done well in highlighting numerous cases from all parts of the globe. Additional details for some cases would have rendered clarity to numerous assertions and strengthened their conclusions. The study’s categorical approach serves to illuminate general tendencies and trends, but it is insufficient for a deeper understanding of the respective cases highlighted in the book. For example, Soviet and East German church leaders are portrayed as having been completely subservient to their respective governments, but no time frame or details of the church-state relationships are provided to explain these assertions. The limitations of the study’s main approach also became evident. Partly due to the Freedom House’s categorization of Israel as a “free” nation, the authors concluded that “Judaism has lacked the demographic opportunity…to mount serious pro-democratic activism in politically volatile and dynamic parts of the world” (104). To be sure, also identified in the book is the need to address seriously the “motivations” including “sociopolitical factors” of Palestinian suicide bombers (145). The clarity of other cases presented (e.g., Iran, Mozambique, and Guatemala) was excellent, and the authors did well to maintain their necessary, though ambitious, global approach throughout the book.

God’s Century is a compelling overview of a complex phenomenon that will be of great interest to a wide readership. The book’s focal points resonate in contemporary headlines that reveal religion as a powerful force in the world, a force that shows no sign of retreat. (For example, religious actors have had some role in the events of the Arab Spring, which the book pre-dates.) The numerous ways that religion can be employed for good or ill are handled in a balanced manner and reveal what is at stake in the relationship between religious and political actors. The authors conclude that religious actors serve democratic peacebuilding best when they enjoy independence from political authorities, and hold a political theology centered on impartial, peaceful activism. Fostering these qualities in ongoing, constructive engagement between political and religious actors seems to be the best way forward for those who want to see democracy and peace furthered in the 21^st century.

Article Note: New Research on Churches in Postwar Germany

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Article Note: New Research on Churches in Postwar Germany

Francis Graham-Dixon, “A ‘Moral Mandate’ for Occupation: The British Churches and Voluntary Organizations in North-Western Germany, 1945-1949,” German History 28, no.2 (2010): 193-213.

Ian Connor, “The Protestant Churches and German Refugees and Expellees in the Western Zones of Germany after 1945,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 15, no.1 (April 2007): 43-63.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

The extraordinary transformation of Germany after 1945 from Nazism to peaceful integration into international systems continues to draw considerable interest, as scholars attempt to render clarity to the complexities of postwar reconstruction. By looking at the various motives and actions of British government representatives, churchmen, and relief workers in Germany—and the interplay between them—Graham-Dixon’s study of the British zone sheds new light on the nature of occupation, and aspects of reconstruction, in this part of Germany.

The author argues that Britons agreed, in general, about their ‘moral mandate’ in Germany after the Second World War. However, some believed that the mandate “embodied a moral, Christian purpose,” whereas others wished to merely “exploit its use for propagandistic purposes” (193). Regardless of motive, the moral campaign proved useful for all British activities in Germany, especially when British policies and actions proved questionable, or even immoral. Focusing on the humanitarian crisis of the 1945-1946 population transfers (which was particularly acute in Schleswig-Holstein), Graham-Dixon asserts that it was church leaders and voluntary organization personnel (e.g., Bishop Bell of Chichester, Victor Gollancz) who ensured maintenance of the moral component in British policy, devoid of the exploitative component. Rather than resenting this action, British policy makers (e.g., Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin)—who were generally less optimistic than churchmen about German rehabilitation—made good use of church leaders and relief workers in forging peaceful relations with a generally disgruntled German public, and in “validat[ing] … the worthiness of the British cause” (201).

The fusing of these two viewpoints became evident in 1947, when British troubles were at a peak. Some British church leaders (e.g., British Anglican Church head, Geoffrey Fischer) and some politicians (e.g., Lord Pakenham), openly tied the work of the Church and the Crown. Most politicians disavowed the connection and relied on voluntary organizations to work directly in aiding, and rehabilitating, the German people. Voluntary organizations (e.g., Save Europe Now!) labored in concert with German church organizations (e.g., Hilfswerk, Innere Mission, Caritas) to fulfill the occupiers’ goal of solving the humanitarian crisis in Germany. The British government hoped that this work would embed “higher spiritual and moral values within German society,” (208) and foster general goodwill. With demonstrable success in material aid and improved relations between Britons and the German people, these organizations filled the “policy vacuum,” and fulfilled the moral mandate claimed by the British government.

This is an important article that exposes new aspects of British occupation politics. It also reveals the significance that voluntary organizations can (and did) have in post-conflict stabilization. In this case, the British government exploited the goodwill of voluntary organization personnel by having them alleviate the humanitarian crisis it had helped create. In the end, good things came of their combined efforts regardless of motive and despite the misallocation of credit. One wonders how these elements of occupation appeared in the other zones, and about their long-term impact in Germany, and in British-German relations.

Ian Connor is well-known for his 2008 book Refugees and Expellees in Post-War Germany, in which he describes how the millions of displaced persons in occupied Germany posed numerous challenges to German reconstruction after 1945. This article is an offshoot of that larger project. It examines how some leading German Protestant churchmen and relief personnel feared that ethnic German expellees would stray from mainstream Protestantism to embrace Communism or Catholicism. Playing an “active role in the reconstruction of Germany” (44) by employing their “wide-ranging autonomy” (43), Protestant Church elites prevented, in a few cases, the escalation of political radicalism, even while operating on some misguided assumptions.

Connor argues that the central concern of Protestant elites (i.e., some pastors, but mainly key figures in Protestant relief work) was “the political and ideological implications of the refugee problem” (60). Protestant churchmen viewed the expellees as not only physically, but spiritually, dislodged and impoverished. Protestant churchmen founded the Hilfswerk of the Protestant Church in August, 1945 to assist the expellees, and to keep them from turning to political and religious alternatives. The idea was that the material aid and spiritual support of the organization would keep the expellees on the right track by providing them with stability and hope for a brighter future.

The Hilfswerk provided shelter, food, and clothing for expellees primarily in the western zones, while its eastern office operated under the wary surveillance of Soviet authorities. Indeed, fused into its material aid campaign was the Hilfswerk’s political agenda of expunging Soviet influence in the political unification of Germany. Whereas Protestant churchmen were overly concerned about the refugees embracing Communism (few voted for the KPD), they “ignored or failed to recognize the refugees’ undoubted susceptibility to the slogans of radical right-wing parties” (60). With questions lingering about the ideological and political foundation and motives of the Hilfswerk, the author offers an example of the organization’s success. When Trek Association leaders threatened to lead thousands of expellees on marches to less crowded areas within western Germany, Hilfswerk personnel intervened. Negotiations between the two organizations averted what one Protestant aid leader called, “a terrible catastrophe” (57).

Study of the immediate postwar period reveals widespread concern over political radicalism in western Germany. For example, the formation of the Catholic Kirchliche Hilfstelle in October 1945 stemmed, in part, from concerns about Catholic expellees turning to political extremism. Questions arise regarding German attitudes and agency under occupation, particularly concerning the establishment of the Federal Republic (and the GDR). Connor argues that relief organizations, like the Hilfswerk, played an important role in German reconstruction by fostering peaceful relationships. Still, the political agenda of the Hilfswerk, and other relief organizations, remains unclear. So does the broader implications of their work. Laudably, the author has contributed a significant component of an under-researched portion of the postwar development of Germany, and has opened doors for further examination of the role of relief organizations and other NGOs in the construction of the two Germanies.

Program and Conference Report: Mennonite Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Program and Conference Report: Mennonite Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

The Fraser Valley, nestled between Vancouver and the coastal mountains of British Columbia, is home to a diverse population of which Mennonites comprise roughly 20 percent. Wishing to reflect the regional population in its academic curriculum, the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), in cooperation with the local Mennonite community, has launched a program in Mennonite Studies. January 2011 marked the implementation date for the Mennonite Studies Certificate. Currently, the University is working toward the establishment of a Centre, and a Chair, in Mennonite Studies.

To raise awareness for the program, the University launched a speakers series in Mennonite Studies in fall 2010. Two events took place in Abbotsford, on the main campus of UFV. The first, entitled “Perceptions,” took place on October 19, 2010. A panel of Royden Loewen, Chair of Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Marlene Epp, Associate Professor of History at Conrad Grebel University College, and Bruce Guenther, Associate Professor of Church History and Mennonite Studies at Trinity Western University addressed the question: what constitutes Mennonite Studies? In various ways, all three panelists responded by tackling the thorny, but central, question of Mennonite identity. Loewen identified seven categories of Mennonites, all of which related in some way to how the individual situates him/herself vis-à-vis the Mennonite faith tradition and Mennonite ethnicity. Riding above this taxonomy was Loewen’s notion that: “if you say you are a [Mennonite], you are one,” which underscored the diversity of the Mennonite community, and study of it. Epp agreed with Loewen’s assertion of Mennonite diversity, and focused her talk on aspects of Mennonite ethnicity. Referring to her own work, Epp posited that studying Mennonite culinary practices is a useful way to understand Mennonite ethnicity, particularly as food and cookbooks have been used to preserve Mennonite traditions amidst acculturation. Finally, Guenther addressed Mennonite diversity and identity differently, asserting that Mennonite ethnicity, like all ethnicities, is dynamic. In his view, academics building Mennonite Studies programs must broaden their scope beyond focus on the Dutch-German roots of the Anabaptist movement to reflect the diverse worldwide Mennonite community—including its many ethnicities—and to foster dialogue with non-Mennonites.

The second event, held on November 23, 2010, centered on the theme “Reflections,” and the question: what is the reciprocal relationship between Mennonite writing and Mennonite culture? Responding to this question were Andreas Schroeder, Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Hildi Froese Tiessen, Professor of English at Conrad Grebel University College, and Rudy Wiebe, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta. Schroeder provided an historical overview of Mennonite literature from the inauguration of its “golden age,” with the advent of Rudy Wiebe’s work in the 1960s, to the present. Therein, he revealed how Mennonite writers—most of whom are not affiliated with, or interested in promoting, the Mennonite faith community—have, for decades, represented the Mennonite community to the outside world. Tiessen agreed, but blurred Schroeder’s demarcation locus by pointing out that this “outsider’s group” also included people who were members of Mennonite churches, and that negative stereotypes of Mennonite writers are inaccurate. Pointing to the “insider’s knowledge” of the writers, she stressed the positive contributions that they have made to understanding Mennonite life—including its many ethnic sub-groups—both inside, and beyond, the Mennonite community. Finally, Wiebe offered an historical narrative that complimented Schroeder’s and stressed Tiessen’s focus on the positive. Wiebe pointed out that the “the origins of Anabaptism is rooted in anything but fundamentalist, conservative, rural, uneducated people,” and that Mennonites owe their very existence to the scholarly acumen of people like Felix Manz, Conrad Grebel, and Menno Simons. Over the centuries, Mennonites worked as artisans and architects throughout Europe, often shaping the local landscape and culture. Moreover, Mennonite communities had songwriters and poets who commemorated Mennonite experiences and crafted the Mennonite heritage. All three panelists encouraged the University to promote the Mennonite literary tradition, which contributes significantly to Mennonite, and Canadian, culture.

These events provided useful information and engendered important discussion at a timely juncture, as UFV administrators and faculty move forward the Mennonite Studies program. During the question period after each event, the panelists offered specific recommendations for the new program, all of which were well-received. A third event in the speakers series, with the theme “Engagement,” will take place at UFV’s Abbotsford campus in fall 2011.

Please visit the following websites for additional information:

For details on the event to be held at UFV in fall, 2011:

http://www.ufv.ca/MarCom/newsroom.htm

For details about the Mennonite Studies Certificate at UFV: http://www.ufv.ca/arts/Arts_Programs/Certificates/Mennonite_Studies.htm

Review of Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 367 Pp. ISBN: 9780807833445.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

In Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land, Shalom Goldman highlights the work of a wide variety of Zionist sympathizers—from diplomats, humanitarians, and literary figures, to mystics, rabbis, Christian preachers, and religious radicals—who served the goal of Jewish statehood, albeit with varied intentions. He argues that “Jewish Zionism would not have succeeded without the help of Christian Zionism” (p. 99), and illustrates this claim in six accounts; three from ca. 1850 to the founding of Israel in 1948, and three from 1948 to the present day.

An introductory chapter precedes these accounts, in which the reader will find a thorough historical overview of Christian and Jewish views of the Holy Land. Goldman stresses the less studied aspect of how the diverse, but overlapping, religious views of Christian and Jewish Zionists served the Zionist cause. He asserts that the two groups started out in very different positions in the late nineteenth century—with Christians focusing on pre-millennial dispensationalism, and Jews on the security of the Jewish people—but slowly merged their efforts in a more intentional and overt way from the 1970s on.

The first half of the book focuses on the century leading up to the creation of the state ofIsrael, highlighting the work of Christian and Jewish Zionists, the relationships forged between these two groups, and the results of their individual, and combined, efforts. The central figures in this section, and throughout the book, reveal many atypical thoughts and actions vis-à-vis the traditional views of their co-religionists, and the status quo at the time. For instance, the first chapter focuses largely on the work of British journalist and politician Laurence Oliphant, who attempted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine via Zionist settlement and diplomacy. Oliphant was a gentile humanitarian who claimed to have left Christianity in the 1850s in favor of a self-styled eclectic mysticism (p. 61). His unqualified support for the establishment of a Jewish state was an anomaly during a time when nearly all Christian Zionists assumed the accompanying conversion of Jews to Christianity.

Reverend William Hechler, Herbert Danby, and Arminius Vambery were other key Christian Zionists who stood out due to their pioneering work. Hechler, a chaplain in the British embassy in Vienna during the late nineteenth century, had joined forces with Oliphant in supporting Jewish pogrom victims in Russia during the 1880s. In Vienna, he utilized his position to further the Zionist cause by brokering meetings between his friend Theodor Herzl and the Grand Duke of Baden, as well as Kaiser William II. Unlike Oliphant but like most Christian Zionists, Hechler’s interest in Jewish affairs and Zionism was steeped in Christian dispensationalism. He declared that Jewish Zionists “were unaware that they were fulfilling Christian messianic expectations” (p. 103). Continuing in this vein in the next chapter is the work of Herbert Danby, who published works (e.g. in Bible Lands, a journal he founded) that explicated Christian Zionism. He also translated, from Hebrew to English, Rabbi Joseph Klausner’s path breaking book, Jesus of Nazareth. Klausner’s book and Danby’s translation were intended to defuse Christian-Jewish antagonism and convince Jews and Christians that they served the same God and the same political goals of the Zionist movement. Arminius Vambery held similar beliefs while serving as a British agent in the Ottoman Empire, where he furthered Hechler’s ambitions by arranging for Herzl an audience with Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1901. To be sure, Vambery, like Oliphant, was not a typical Christian Zionist, but rather a man of Jewish descent who adhered to a wide range of spiritual beliefs.

Nearly all of the Jews in this study had abandoned their assimilationist views to embrace Zionism in the wake of antisemitic pogroms throughout Europe during the late 1800s. The author stresses that these Zionists benefitted from Christian Zionist support. Jews who are highlighted in the first half of the book were mostly secularists, reflecting the majority Zionist view during the period in question, and they are presented as secondary figures to the Christian Zionists at this time. Nephtali Imber was a marginal Zionist figure, claiming fame for writing Hatikvah, a famous Zionist anthem that became the Israeli national anthem in 2004. Theodor Herzl’s and Joseph Klausner’s writings and work factored more significantly, but the author stresses that they relied heavily on gentile support (e.g. Hechler and Danby).

The second half of the book focuses on numerous individuals who continued to support the state of Israel after its founding in 1948, along with some present day figures who have taken up the cause. Most of the cases in this section reveal the significance, and continuance, of the work highlighted in the previous section and feature some individuals who broke with tradition and some who deepened it. Catholics Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton and Jacques Maritain are credited for breaking the mould of Vatican anti-Zionism and contributing to the radical shifts in postwar Catholic teaching, particularly during the 1960s (p. 198). Conversely, we find in the Protestant camp a strengthening and deepening of Hechler and Danby’s teachings in the thought and action of the likes of Pat Robertson and John Hagee, who unequivocally support the state of Israel—including the expansion of settlements in Palestinian territories—seeing it as a harbinger of the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity and the second coming of Christ. Ignoring these latter components, adherents of the Jewish settler movement (e.g., Gush Emunim, p. 286), find strong allies in these fundamentalist Christians.

Zeal for Zion is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that examines both Christian and Jewish contributions to the Zionist enterprise. To be sure, some readers will question how representative of each respective group these individuals were, how cooperative Christian-Jewish Zionist work has been, and what, particularly, binds all of the disparate people and groups in the overall development of the Zionist project. Still, each account reveals important details and many surprising elements of Zionist history. Taken together with the author’s personal experiences (e.g. the influence of gentile pro-Zionist writers like Jorge Luis Borges during the 1960s and 1970s), it makes for a fascinating, significant book.

The valuable findings in this book provide numerous possibilities for future researchers, including further exploration of the ambivalent, if not antagonistic, base of this Christian-Jewish relationship in the Zionist movement. Indeed, the bases for Christian and Jewish Zionism have changed little since the nineteenth century, with each side serving its own purposes, with few exceptions. Religious radicals from both faiths have not fostered peace and mutual recognition in the Palestine/Israel conflict, or in Christian-Jewish relations. Moreover, the long-term ramifications of their views have not been explored in much depth. Within this book, Goldman has provided numerous examples of exceptional individuals who, while serving their respective goals, inadvertently engendered innovative engagement in Christian-Jewish dialogue—innovations that could be explored further and utilized for peaceful purposes.

May 2008 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

May 2008— Vol. XIV, no. 5

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) DVD review: Theologians under Hitler, Storm Troopers of Christ
2) Book reviews

a) Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. an introduction to his thought
b) Dramm, Dietrich Bonoeffer: und der Widerstand
c) Anglicanism and Orthodoxy

3) Dissertation Research – Reconciliation efforts in post-1945 Germany
1) Two new hour-long documentary films now available on DVD, and produced by Steve Martin of Vital Visuals Inc of Oak Ridge Tennessee, depict in an excellently scholarly mannner the more regrettable side of the Protestant church in Germany during the Nazi regime. Theologians under Hitler is virtually an illustrated version of the book with the same title written by Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Ericksen himself introduces the film and is assisted by an expert team of scholars, both German and American. He describes the careers of three of Germany’s most illustrious theologians, Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch and Gerhard Kittel. Photographs from the archives are melded in with the campus scenery, along with commentary on their writings by today’s church historians. These men backed the Nazi cause as the answer to Germany’s political problems in an effort to restore the national self-confidence after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler’s energetic leadership appeared to them. the long-sought-after remedy. At the same time they urged German Protestants to abandon their engrained pietistic distaste for politics and to become relevant to the vibrant national community being forged by the Nazis. These views undoubtedly gave support to the Nazi cause, including its racial antisemitism.

None of these men were to express remorse in the post-war situation or to have changed their views. The commentators naturally deplore this scandalous heresy. They share a presentist view which points out the dangers of theologians providing justifications for nationalist or imperialist aggressions. They likewise warn against the intolerance displayed by these German Christians towards members of other faiths, especially Jews. They call for the lessons of the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany to be learnt by today’s Christians, especially in the United States. Storm Troopers of Christ records an even sadder chapter of the Protestant experience in the Nazi era. Its subject is the betrayal of true Christian values by the so-called “German Christians” and particularly their attempt to root out all Jewish influences and elements from the church. These pro-Nazi forces, led by their Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller and by such theologians as Walter Grundmann, argued that only a Germanized Christianity could attract their fellow Germans back to the churches, and restore the church’s credibility by following Hitler’s political lead against the pernicious effects of Jewry. Church archives were therefore diligently searched to discover long-lost Jewish ancestors and to treat these Jewish-Christians as second class, expel them from leadership roles, or even turn them over to the Gestapo. Only a few brave souls stood out against this heretical tendency. Among them was Pastor Martin Niemöller who early on recognized the centrality of the issue of baptism. If the church capitulated to Nazi demands and excluded baptized Jews, then the Gospel’s validity would be destroyed. But the majority of German Protestants placed their national loyalties above sympathy with their fellow Christians of Jewish origins. The film’s commentators are undertandably indignant at this lamentable capitulation to Nazi pressures, which they rightly see as a deplorable breach of faith and a warning to others. JSC

2a) Sabine Dramm. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, An introduction to his thought. Peabury, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers 2007. 255 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-56563-762-7.

In 2001, Sabine Dramm published this book in German, which has now appeared in English in a most attractive translation, put out unchanged by a small publisher in Massachusetts. This forms a prequel to her second book reviewed below by Victoria Barnett, which deals more specifically with Bonhoeffer’s role in the German resistance.

The present volume is indeed an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s ideas, and the story of his life is only tangentially referred to. But Dramm acknowledges that the exceptional features of his career were due more to his experiences in Nazi Germany than to the development of his thought. However, she provides an excellent summary of his theological progress, beginning with the bases of his Christian creed, and then giving short summaries of his writings, She follows, in the main, the interpretations given by Bonhoeffer’s premier biographer, Eberhard Bethge. But in the forty years since that biography appeared, times have moved on. Dramm shares today’s majority view, which finds it increasingly difficult to understand why so many German Protestants supported Nazism. So Bonhoeffer’s refusal to pay allegiance to that system of terror no longer has to be justified. On the other hand she is also aware that, as we enter the twenty-first century, there is a danger that Bonhoeffer and his theology may be written off as passé, or no longer relevant. But her succinct introduction should help to off-set such considerations. It will be of value especially to theological students or those new to Bonhoeffer. One problem is that, where she cites Bonhoeffer’s writings, the references are taken from the 17 volumes of the German edition of Bonhoeffer’s complete works. Not all of these have yet been translated into English, while the complete German set is not readily available abroad. But her translator has done such a good job that the original sense is neatly captured. So too the footnotes are nicely translated but include no references to any of the numerous English-speaking commentators, who are equally excluded from the bibliography. Since the book is intended to be sold to English readers, this omission is curious. JSC

b) V-Mann Gottes und der Abwehr? Dietrich Bonhoeffer und der Widerstand. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005. (This review appeared first in the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 2007/2 and is reprinted by kind pemission of the author.)

Bonhoeffer’s path into the resistance tends to be viewed either as the logical culmination of his theological course through the Kirchenkampf or as a politically grounded decision that contradicted his early theology. At least some of those who studied under him in the early 1930s and the Finkenwalde period didn’t know what to make of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activities or his prison writings. In the context of the Kirchenkampf, of course, Bonhoeffer’s resistance stands in stark contrast to most of his Protestant colleagues, and is read back into his early writings and actions, giving them a greater political clarity and significance than they may have actually had. In the popular literature, as well as most films on Bonhoeffer, his resistance provides the dramatic frame that has led all too often to a kind of mythology that portrays him as a central figure in the German resistance. As Dramm notes, the role of Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge has decisively shaped our understanding of Bonhoeffer the resistance figure, giving Bonhoeffer a centrality in this story (particularly in the portrayals of ecumenical and resistance circles) that is not always borne out by the historical literature. In his later writings and lectures, Bethge was actually more circumspect about Bonhoeffer’s role.

In this book Sabine Dramm explores “the story behind the story”: what did Bonhoeffer actually do in the resistance, and what does this mean for our understanding of Bonhoeffer, theologically and historically? Dramm has read and incorporated most of the pertinent literature in the field, drawing both on Bonhoeffer’s own writings from the 17-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke and on newer research, including the works by Klemens von Klemperer, Marikje Smid, Christine-Ruth Müller, and Winfried Meyer, as well as earlier publications by Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries, such as Jørgen Glenthøj and Josef Müller. Much of the book is simply a recapitulation of the relevant material from these various sources – a useful and very readable synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activities.

The concluding chapter, in which Dramm identifies ten main issues that deserve further study and research, is actually the strongest section of the book, and one wishes that she had focused more on developing each of these points throughout the narrative. Here, Dramm’s conclusions offer some provocative but very legitimate points for further discussion. There may be some truth to her conclusion that Bonhoeffer’s entry into the resistance was essentially a ploy developed by Hans von Dohnanyi to keep his brother-in-law out of military service, yet surely the central involvement of other family members in the conspiracy (not just Dohnanyi, but Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus and his other brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher), was also a factor. This, as well as Bonhoeffer’s own wartime writings, would suggest a more deliberate decision to participate in the conspiracy. Regarding his resistance activities, Dramm correctly notes that while Bonhoeffer was indeed involved in the “Operation 7” rescue of 14 “non-Aryans” to Switzerland, his actual role was peripheral. The July 20 resistance circles in which he moved were indeed largely “national conservative” and tend to be treated more critically by historians of the period than by the theologically-trained Bonhoeffer scholars, and I would also concur with her that these conservative tendencies inform many of the passages in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Given this latter fact, Dramm is intrigued by the way in which his theological legacy has shaped progressive and liberation movements in the Christian world. As she notes, the political consequences drawn by the Protestant left after 1945 differ considerably from the worldview of many of Bonhoeffer’s fellow resisters. Dramm also notes the critique by Holocaust scholars of Bonhoeffer’s theological writings on the Jews and argues that here, too, the significance of his resistance activity deserves a more critical and contextual analysis.

Dramm concludes that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not “the theologian of the resistance” but a “theologian in resistance” – that his importance ultimately rests more in what he said (and wrote) throughout the resistance years, and less in what he actually did. I would concur, even as I would argue that this is precisely what opens the way for a reading of Bonhoeffer’s texts from that era as a critique, not affirmation, of the “national conservative” circles in which he moved. His role in the actual resistance may have been minor, and his colleagues in that resistance may have been nationalists and monarchists. But his theological reflections on the challenges that confronted Christians under Nazism, including his reflections on the role of the Church in an ideological dictatorship and the consequences this has for the Church’s very identity, are powerful reminders to all Christians of the dangers of an alliance between Christianity, state authority, and ideology. As a “theologian in resistance”, Bonhoeffer ended his life imprisoned and pondering the very viability of religious faith in an ideological age.

There are a number of interesting comments and insights throughout this work; Dramm is an observant reader of Bonhoeffer and the historical literature, and in addition to her closing chapter, she offers good suggestions for deeper analysis or new avenues to pursue in the endnotes. Given her earlier comparative study of Camus and Bonhoeffer (1998), it would have been interesting had she incorporated some of that analysis or pondered Bonhoeffer’s thought in the larger context of European intellectual resistance. She suggests, but offers no real analysis of the larger issues: how his resistance affected his theology, how this history fits in (or doesn’t) in German Protestantism. Another aspect would be to ponder the compromises and delays made by the July 20 resistance – by all accounts a source of real anguish to Hans von Dohnanyi – and what influence this had upon Bonhoeffer’s prison writings as well as the Ethics.

This is a good synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s role in the resistance, however, and a very readable book for both general audiences and students interested in learning the details of this history – and Dramm’s concluding questions are certainly worthy of further study and examination.

Victoria Barnett, Washington, D.C.

c) Anglicanism and Orthodoxy – an on-again, off-again relationship

(The following review doesn’t really fall within the time frame of the majority of our contributions. But I thought it was so delightful that I wanted to share it with you all. JSC)

When I was a student at Cambridge, nearly sixty years ago, I joined a group known as the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, which sought to know more about the affairs, and particularly about the spirituality, of the Orthodox Churches in eastern Europe. Unfortunately, since this was the height of the Cold War, visits to Russia were almost impossible. Some of us went on pilgrimages to Greece, but unfortunately I never got the chance to go to Mount Athos, that spectacular rocky peninsular in the northern Aegean Sea, on whose crags are built a bevy of Orthodox monasteries, visitable only by men, which pride themselves as being the spiritual power houses for the whole Orthodox communion. But the chaplain of my college, St. John’s. Henry Hill, who was a young Canadian, was greatly impressed. After he returned to Canada, he subsequently became the Bishop of Ontario, and was then invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to become the Commissary for the whole Anglican Communion in its relations to the Orthodox Churches. So he spent all of his holidays visiting eastern Europe, especially Roumania, where he got to know many of the Orthodox hierarchs and visited the wonderfully decorated monasteries in the northern province of Moldavia, which are some of the most precious relics of Orthodoxy’s great days.

At the time, I didn’t realize that the links between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy go back a long way – four hundred years or so! But this fascinating relationship is the subject of a new book, which is the record of a conference held a few years back in Oxford, and now edited by the former chaplain of Worcester College. The title is Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 years after the “Greek College” in Oxford (Peter Lang 2006). The high point of these essays is the story of the establishment of a College for Greek Orthodox students in Oxford. This experiment enjoyed only a brief existence from 1699 to 1705, but was an example of how lively and inclusive ecumenical relations were three hundred years ago. Though long forgotten, even in Oxford, the home of lost causes, this incident has now earned a learned Festschrift which will undoubtedly enrich our understanding of how these two faithful communities can and should relate to each other.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the first generation of Anglican theologians, having just rejected the supremacy of the Pope, were very conscious of the example of the Orthodox churches which had done the same five centuries earlier. Here, they thought, were allies who could be useful in giving them international support against the papal pretensions of Rome. Furthermore they regarded the Orthodox as faithful witnesses to ancient tradition. The new Church of England was eager to show that it adhered to the doctrines of the early church. Its theologians admired the Greek fathers and the Greek liturgy, and had maintained the ancient practice of the apostolic succession for its bishops. This affinity was all the more attractive in the first years of the reign of King James I, when he authorized the translation of the whole Bible into English. The English scholars naturally looked for help from their counterparts who still spoke Greek, the very language in which the New Testament had been written so long ago. Despite the distances of land and sea, and the significant differences of language, culture and religious traditions which separated the Orthodox Church in the east from the reformed Church of England in the west, nevertheless the two communions sought each other out.

In 1615 a letter was received by the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril Lukaris, asking for support to send young Orthodox priests to take advantage of the theological resources of England as part of their training. Lukaris himself was a native of Crete, had studied in Venice and Padua, and had even journeyed to Poland where the Orthodox community was being vigorously attacked by the zealous proselytizing efforts of the Jesuits. He knew very well that the poorly educated Orthodox clergy were at an immense disadvantage when confronted by skilled Jesuits, who had even penetrated as far as Constantinople itself.

Archbishop Abbott was a staunch opponent of Roman Catholicism, as was the monarch King James, though his interest was more for the promotion of reunion among the churches. Both looked favorably on this initiative, and in 1617 the first such scholar. Metrophanes Kritopoulos arrived from Mount Athos and took up residence in Balliol College. He stayed for five years, and then went to London to collect books before setting off overland to his homeland in 1624. It was another twenty years before he was followed by Nathaniel Konopios, also chosen by Lukaris, who had now become Patriarch of Constantinople. Konopios was sponsored by both King Charles I and by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

Unfortunately political events both in Turkey and in England interrupted this scheme. In 1638 Patriarch Lukaris was deposed and subsequently executed by the Ottoman Sultan, while Konopios’ stay in Balliol College was cut short by the English Civil War. Nevertheless both Kritopoulos and Konopios wound up in conspicuous ecclesiastical positions, the former as Patriarch of Alexandria and the latter as metropolitan of Smyrna. However, the distressed condition of Europe during the disastrous Thirty Years War, and of England when the monarchy was overthrown and the king executed, unsettled relations with the Orthodox communities for several decades.

However, in the late 1660s and 1670s several scholars from Oxford and Cambridge served as chaplains to the Levant Company, or to the British envoy to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. This gave them the opportunity to see at first hand the Orthodox community, two centuries after the catastrophic fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, as well as to note the depredations and persecutions suffered at the hands of the Muslim rulers. Their reports and books published after their return kept the subject alive.

Not until after the deposition of King James II in 1688 was the idea of bringing young Orthodox theologians to England raised again. In 1692, a new advocate in Oxford took up the task of promoting this idea. Dr. Benjamin Woodroffe, a Canon of Christ Church, was elected Principal of Gloucester Hall, one of the newer foundations on the edge of the city. Unfortunately, due to the recent political turmoil, Gloucester Hall was largely a ruin and had only a few students in attendance. But Woodroffe, who was clearly an Oxford “character”, had other ideas. Shortly after he was elected, he went to London and secured an interview with the directors of the Levant Company. He must have been persuasive, since they agreed to provide free transport in their ships from the eastern Mediterranean for up to twenty students who should be brought to London, where they would be met by Dr. Woodroffe and escorted to Oxford. It is not clear just who was going to support them while in England. And in any case, various factors led to delays. Not until February 1699 did the first group of five students arrive to be part of what was now to be known at the Greek College.

Woodroffe gave as much publicity as he could to this innovation, and indeed then proceeded to a further striking endeavour in building up good relations with the Orthodox Church. Together with Edward Stephens, another champion of the reunion of the churches, he persuaded the Oxford University authorities to invite a distinguished Greek churchman, the Archbishop of Philippopolis, to come to Oxford. Not only that, but he obtained their support to offer the Archbishop the honorary degree of D.D. – a very seldom honor. The day of conferment of this degree in September 1701 was a great day for Woodroffe. He delivered a speech of welcome in Greek – to the astonishment of his colleagues – and proudly showed his guests around the newly refurbished Gloucester Hall, introducing them to his prize Greek students. The next year, 1702, Queen Anne herself came to Oxford on her way from Windsor to Bath, and was received with all due honors. Included with the numerous addresses was an ode in Greek hexameters spoken by the senior Greek student, Simon Homerus. It was all very impressive.

Woodroffe was boastful of his students’ progress. Writing in 1703 to Lord Paget, one of his patrons, he reported that they had not only picked up ancient Greek and Latin but were now able to speak English as if they were natives, “even disputing with us in Divinity in the Chappel”. Unfortunately, however, there were dissentions. Three of the students were lured away from Oxford by emissaries from the Roman Church, who promised them a still better education if they converted. They were passed on to Brussels and later were put on their way to Rome. However, two now came to regret their haste, and sought to return to Gloucester Hall. Woodroffe forgave them but they appear to have been sent home to Smyrna later in the year. And then the three new students who arrived with Lord Paget began to complain that their studies were too scrappy, and took themselves off to Halle in east Germany where they were offered much better conditions of accommodation and study by the Saxon Protestants. This defection effectively killed off the Greek College in Oxford, and the Levant Company refused to accept any more students. Woodroffe now found himself in financial difficulties, which were eventually to land him for a time in the Fleet prison – a singularly unpropitious fate for such a flamboyant clergyman. He died in 1711.

Despite this setback, interest in the Orthodox Churches continued among some Anglicans, particularly those known as the Non-Jurors, who refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs after 1689, William and Mary, on the grounds that they had already taken an oath to serve King James II and his heirs. Most of them were deprived of their offices and positions, so now looked elsewhere for support, in particular from the eastern Orthodox patriarchs. Their abhorrence of the Roman pretensions led them to look back to the roots of the Church in Britain which had been established even before the departure of the Roman legions in the fourth century. They revered the Christian traditions derived from the ancient Church in Jerusalem, and the faith delivered by the Apostles and confirmed by the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople. On the other hand, there were still doctrinal differences, between the Church of England and Orthodoxy, particularly over the doctrine of transubstantiation and the worship of ikons. And on these points, the Orthodox leaders refused to make any concessions, or to agree that the goal of a full and perfect union required mutual accommodations. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, heard about these negotiations in 1724, he wrote off to the Patriarch of Jerusalem denouncing these Non-Jurors as schismatics and in no way representative of the Church of England. That put an end to the correspondence for a good many years.

One interesting legacy of the Non-Jurors, which shows their desire to link their worship to the days of the early church fathers – a tradition shared by the Orthodox – was the Liturgy of St James, printed in full as an appendix in Doll’s book. This was entitled: “An Office for the Sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist being the ancient liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem”, and was researched and used by a bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the middle of the eighteenth century. The patristic spirituality of the Anglicanism of the day is profoundly present. The reordering of the Eucharistic liturgy particularly emphasizes the spirit of adoration of the triune God, thanksgiving for the gifts of the whole created order, and the joining together of heaven and earth, of time and eternity. It makes for a powerfully effective and accessible rite.

In the twentieth century, the Orthodox Churches bore the brunt of the violent onslaught of the Communists, first in Russia after 1917, and then, after 1945, in Roumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In Constantinople, the new secular rulers of Turkey after 1922 proved to be somewhat more tolerant than the Sultans, but the great days of the Byzantine Church could not be restored. The great Church of the Hagia Sophia having been a mosque for four centuries, is now a museum. In Jerusalem, the Orthodox patriarchate became embroiled in the bitter conflicts between Arab and Jew. Not until the overthrow of the Soviet Empire in 1989 did a new era begin. The Russian Orthodox Church, buried for more than seventy years under the scorched earth of Marxist domination, now started to put forth shoots of new growth. In the past twenty years, thousands of churches have been restored or rebuilt, the seminaries are attracting younger recruits, and the artistic revival in the liturgies and icon-painting has been notable. Even in remote Macedonia, monastic life has experienced a remarkable rebirth, witnessing to the priority given to such spiritual endeavors At the same time, the church has begun to undertake the task of coming to terms with the darker side of its past, through the unfortunate but enforced collaboration and even complicity with the former dictators. All these developments have stimulated the interest of numerous Anglicans who seek to share their heritage and insights with these long-estranged fellow Christians. The basis is now once more established for a strengthening of Anglican-Orthodox relations, which we hope will bear fruit in the years to come.

John Conway

3) Dissertation Research: Steven Schroeder, Fraser Valley College, Abbotsford, British Columbia
(Steven Schroeder successfully defended this thesis at Notre Dame University, Indiana, last February, under the direction of Professor Doris Bergen. Congratulations, Steven!)

Reconciliation in Occupied Germany: 1944-1954

This dissertation examines how, from 1944 to 1954, a wide variety of individuals and groups in all four occupation zones began the processes of reconciliation between Germans and their wartime enemies. Reconciliation is defined as the process of establishing peaceful — or at least non-hostile — relations between former enemies. This dissertation argues that reconciliation was encouraged through interactions between the Allies and Germans from the outset of the occupation of Germany and that non-government organizations (NGOs) were able to foster reconciliation in ways that governments and military personnel did not.

After the collapse of the Third Reich, most Germans were unwilling to engage critically with the recent past. Still, the conditions of Allied occupation and demands of the international community led Germans to acknowledge, however reluctantly, the crimes of the Nazi era. In all parts of occupied Germany, German and international NGOs — aided by a disparate array of individuals and groups — played a key role in shaping public memory of the past. In western Germany, Germans engaged in discussions and negotiations that acknowledged Nazi crimes and recognized and compensated victims of Nazism. Discourses created in eastern Germany also acknowledged Nazi crimes but did not admit that Germans in the Soviet zone/GDR bore any responsibility for them. Instead, they categorized and ranked victims according to Stalinist ideology and Soviet conventions, a method that left tens of thousands of victims, including thousands of Jews, without official recognition or compensation. In general, the motives of people involved in initiating dialogue between former enemies and between perpetrators and their victims mattered less than actions and their repercussions.

This NGO diplomacy achieved numerous positive results for both the short and long-term stability of Europe — most notably in Franco-German and Christian-Jewish reconciliation — and occurred when Germans had no means of conventional diplomacy. Indeed, the combination of early domestic and international efforts that produced these discourses of victimhood that contributed to recognition and compensation of victims of Nazism also served German reconstruction, and assisted German integration internationally. In approaching this little-explored realm of the history of occupied Germany, this project sheds new light on the understanding of postwar German political developments, both democratization and Stalinization, and offers insights into the significant roles that NGOs can have in post-conflict reconstruction.

Most surprising, perhaps, is the finding that the achievements of NGO diplomacy in postwar Germany did not rely on altruism or lofty ideas. Instead, idealism was only one part of a combination of outside pressure, German self-interest, and the participation of former victims that produced lasting results.

In examining the many dimensions of reconciliation, numerous standpoints must be considered. A wide variety of sources were consulted to address the central questions posed in this project, including the records of Allied personnel, German and non-German relief workers and other NGO operatives, German and international religious and political figures, and victims of Nazism, both within Germany and abroad. The primary material that informs this dissertation is found in numerous archives and private holdings in the United States, and Canada. The Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) in Koblenz was consulted for the records of the Allied Control Authority, the files of the western Allies, and the files of German administrative bodies and governmental ministries. The Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (Archives of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the German Democratic Republic) in Berlin provided the basis for research on corresponding groups in the Soviet zone and the GDR.

The focus on NGOs in this dissertation necessitated vital research on many groups, whose records are scattered throughout Germany and Switzerland, including the records of: the Catholic Church Aid Society; the Societies of Christian-Jewish Cooperation; the Pax Christi group; and the Moral Re-Armament Group. In Berlin, research was conducted at the Archiv des Diakonischen Werkes der EKD (Protestant Relief Work archives), and the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv (Evangelical Central Archives), which holds the files of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze’s personal papers, and those of numerous Protestant NGOs. Together, these resources informed the details regarding the personnel, vision, and practice of the NGOs that were most effective in reconciliatory work in occupied western Germany.

The records of the NGOs that were most active in numerous aspects of reconciliation in the Soviet zone — the Victims of Fascism group, the Association of Victims of Nazism (VVN), and the Society of German-Soviet Friendship — are all located in the Federal Archives in Berlin. These files revealed the control that both the Soviet Administration and the eastern German governmental bodies had on NGOs, and correspondence between the groups shows the priorities and goals of each. Other useful resources consulted for this project include: the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Central Archives for Research on the History of Jews in Germany) in Heidelberg; the Centrum Judaicum (Central Jewish Archives) in Berlin; the Archives of the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana; and the John Conway Collection located in the John Richard Allison Library (Regent College) in Vancouver, Canada, which holds a wide variety of primary documents on the German churches.

Steven Schroeder, History Department, University College of the Fraser Valley, Canada
steven.schroeder@ucfv.ca

The June issue of this Newsletter will be edited by Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College, New York. I am most grateful for his being willing to take this responsibility while I am on pilgrimage to the Middle East.

With very best wishes
John Conway