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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

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

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

GSAOnce 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.

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Article Note: Roman Catholics and the Establishment of the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Article Note: Roman Catholics and the Establishment of the Third Reich

Larry Eugene Jones, “Franz von Papen, Catholic Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1933-1934,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 272-318, and Martin R. Menke, “Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 236-264.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum[1]

For the German Catholic Church—her princes, her politicians, her clergy and her laity—the period from January 30, 1933, to June 30, 1934 was replete with decisions which would impact and even dictate the path of her faithful until May 8, 1945. During these seventeen months until the shock of the so-called Blood Purge, most dramatic and decisive were the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April 1933.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Law (Ermächtingungsgesetz), or formally, the Law to Relieve the Distress of Volk and Reich (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich) by a vote of 441-94. Only the Social Democrats voted against the law which abolished democracy and the constitutional state.[2] On that same day, in his speech to the Reichstag, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler promised to “respect all treaties between the churches and the states” and stated that the “rights” of the churches would “not be infringed upon.”[3] In response, on March 28, the Fulda Bishops’ Conference (Fuldaer Bischofskonferenz) lifted the ban on Catholic membership in the NSDAP.[4]

That same day (March 28), Nazi party leadership ordered a boycott, to begin on April 1, at 10 a.m., directed against Jewish businesses and department stores, lawyers, and physicians. Everywhere in Germany, the NSDAP established local action committees which were to disseminate and organize the boycott.[5] On April 7, the passage of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service abolished the status of the nonpartisan civil servant with life-long tenure. The law specified Communists and Jews, though ultimately, it also affected Socialists and other opponents of the regime (some 30,000 persons total). It contained the so-called Arierparagraph, stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service.[6]  Lest we imagine today that no individual living in the midst of these events could possibly have understood their enormity and their relationship to German and universal Catholicism, in mid-April 1933, contemporary observer Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI:

All of us who are true children of the Church and observe the events in Germany with open eyes fear the worst for the reputation of the Church, if the Church continues to remain silent. We are also convinced that this silence will be not able to buy long-term freedom from the German government [for the Catholic Church] in the future.  For the time being, the [Nazi] fight against Catholicism will be fought in secret and in less brutal form than the fight against Jewry, but it will be no less systematic.  It will not be long until no Catholics in Germany have a position unless they prescribe to the new course unconditionally.[7]

Professors Larry Jones and Martin Menke provide us with two fine articles that speak to the question that Catholics across Europe increasingly faced from the nineteenth century on: how should Catholics engage what Menke calls “the modern evolving secular state,”[8] and, for German Catholics, the National Socialist state? Menke offers analysis of the German Catholic Center Party’s decision to vote for the March 23 Enabling Act—this after rejecting National Socialism as “incompatible with Catholic teaching”[9] during the Weimar Republic and in the early months of National Socialist rule.  Jones provides the perspective of the right wing German Catholic nobility, whom he calls “Catholic conservatives,” the majority of whom rejected the Center Party as too liberal and opted to support the right wing parties of the DNVP and NSDAP. Jones focuses especially on the political decisions and initiatives of devout Catholic Franz von Papen. Papen, notes Jones, bears the distinction of being “the one person more responsible than anyone else for Hitler’s installation as chancellor on January 30, 1933”[10] and “the driving force behind the negotiations that culminated in the conclusion of the concordat” between the Holy See and National Socialist Germany.[11]

In responding to the German National Socialist state, German Catholic Centrists rejected it before March 1933. German Catholic conservatives embraced it. Both did so in pursuit of the same end—to ensure that the secular state espoused their (quite different) understandings of Catholic values. Menke argues convincingly that scholars must look at the events surrounding the Center Party’s vote for the Enabling Law in March 1933 and the subsequent negotiations between Rome and Berlin to conclude the concordat from early April to late July 1933 in the context of the key encyclicals Diuturnum Illud (1881) and Immortale Dei (1885). These encyclicals “defined Catholic teaching about the state and the role of Catholics as subjects and citizens of the state.”[12] In what became known as the principle of “Accidentalism,” governments were “accidents of history” while the “Church was eternal.” Catholics “should accept any existing authority as legitimate and deserving of Catholics’ loyalty and service as long as the life of the Church remained intact.”[13] One should look also, argues Menke, at the pattern of Center Party decision-making that came to characterize the Weimar years:

The Center Party had developed a well-practiced if uncomfortable pattern of crisis-management. First, the party maintained a principled position determined by the party members’ own perception of Catholic values as well as by a deeply emotional German patriotism characterized largely by nationalist outrage at Germany’s fate since its defeat in 1918. Then, as a given crisis mounted, the party shied away from any position of responsibility that not only would be incompatible with the Center’s professed values, but also would expose the Center to future recriminations on the political right. Once a crisis threatened the welfare of millions of Germans by risking foreign occupation or economic collapse and anarchy, in other words when a crisis threatened the German people itself, the Center forced itself to accept the unacceptable and bear the unbearable and supply the German government with parliamentary majorities and cabinet leadership to resolve the crisis. Until 1933, this proved largely successful.[14]

For Catholic conservatives, argues Jones, decision-making was driven by “a deeply conspiratorial conception of history that required them to act (emphasis mine) to protect the values and institutions they held dear” and to embrace “an organic theory of the state and society in which the rights and privileges of the individual were limited by the welfare of the whole and in which the illusory equality of the democratic age would be replaced by respect for the authority of God’s moral law.”[15]

Centrists who voted for the Enabling Law hoped their vote would protect the cultural life and religious life of the church; Catholic conservative support for the Enabling Law, and Papen’s participation in the National Socialism government as vice chancellor, reflected an active “desire to create a power base” within the structure of the Nazi state.[16] From such a base, Papen and other Catholic conservatives could build, promote, and incorporate with National Socialism their understanding of Catholic values. Both the Centrists and the Catholic conservatives were to be bitterly disappointed, for Edith Stein’s prophetic words of April 1933, that Catholics in Germany would need to “prescribe to the new course unconditionally,” meant they had sold their souls in vain.

Jones brings personal papers from archives across Germany to the table for his rich and detailed account of the Catholic conservative encounter with Nazism from January 1933 until the Blood Purge of 1934, including the personal papers of Engelbert Freiherr von Kerckerinck zur Borg, Max Buchner, Alexander von Elverfeldt, Franz Graf von Galen, Max ten Hompel, the Krupp family, Ferdinand Freiherr von Lüninck, August von Mackensen, Paul Reusch, Emil Ritter, and Otto Schmidt-Hannover. Jones writes that “there is no study of the Catholic aristocracy in the Third Reich” (313, f.159) and he is well-poised to fill this gap. He is among the first U.S. scholars to use the records of the Vatican archives released in 2003/2006 and available in microfilm at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and his findings demonstrate their promise to add yet greater nuance and complexity to the bedeviled months between January 30, 1933 and June 30, 1934.

Both Menke and Jones demonstrate a mastery of the vast secondary source literature, the majority of which is published in German. Here they bring what has been an incredibly dense and robust debate in Germany for decades to this side of the Atlantic, citing the work of Gerhard Besier, Thomas Brechenmacher, Heinz Hürten, Rudolf Morsey, Konrad Repgen, Karsten Ruppert, Klaus Scholder, Ludwig Volk, and Hubert Wolf, to name only some of the important scholarship available in German since the late 1960s.

For scholars of the German Catholic Church during the Third Reich, these two articles are must-reads. Too often in current historiography, the response of German Catholics to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews is viewed separately from their response to Nazi treatment of Catholics. In reality, their own embattled state deeply influenced and affected their decisions with regard to mistreatment of Jews. Nazi anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish policy must be studied together for the most nuanced understanding of the German Catholic church in these years. Precisely such pain-staking and detailed analysis of strands of German Catholic thinking, in this case Centrists and Catholic conservatives, must be placed side-by-side with analysis of German Catholic responses, or lack of response, to persecution of Jews and other non-Catholics.


[1] The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

[2] Christian Zentner and Friedemann Bedürftig, eds., Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 237.

[3] Larry Jones, “Franz von Papen, Catholic Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1933-1934,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 290; citing excerpts from Hitler’s statement to the Reichstag, March 23, 1933, reprinted in Hubert Gruber, ed., Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus 1930–1945: Ein Bericht in Quellen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 34–35 (Jones, footnote 69).

[4] Jones, “Franz von Papen,” 291.

[5] Zentner and Bedürftig, eds., Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, 104.

[6] Ibid., 154-155 and 145-146.

[7] Original German: “Wir alle, die wir treue Kinder der Kirche sind und die Verhältnisse in Deutschland mit offenen Augen betrachten, fürchten das schlimmste für das Ansehen der Kirche, wenn das Schweigen noch länger anhält. Wir sind auch der Überzeugung, dass dieses Schweigen nicht imstande sein wird, auf die Dauer den Frieden mit der gegenwärtigen deutschen Regierung zu erkaufen. Der Kampf gegen den Katholizismus wird vorläufig noch in der Stille und in weniger brutalen Formen geführt wie gegen das Judentum, aber nicht weniger systematisch. Es wird nicht mehr lange dauern, dann wird in Deutschland kein Katholik mehr ein Amt haben, wenn er sich nicht dem neuen Kurs bedingungslos verschreibt.” Letter from Dr. Edith Stein to Pope Pius XI, No Date. AA.EE.SS. (Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari) Germania (Germany), Anno (Years) 1933-1945, Hitler’s Chancellery 1933-45. Pos. 643, Fasc.158-161. RG 76.001M: Selected Records from the Vatican Archives, 1865-1939, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. An English translation of the April 1933 letter appears on the website of the International Council for Christians and Jews (ICCJ) at the following link: http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=1897 (accessed 8/31/11). Historians knew of the existence of the letter, which Edith Stein referenced in her 1938 autobiography, but it could only be read for the first time with the opening of the Vatican Archives in 2003, when the petition could be read and tracked for the first time (Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 183). The April 1933 letter is referenced and discussed in the following works: Gerhard Besier with the collaboration of Francesca Piombo, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, translated by W. R. Ward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 125-126; Guenther Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000, original edition 1964), 295-296, Konrad Repgen, “Hitlers ‘Machtergreifung,’ die christlichen Kirchen, die Judenfrage und Edith Steins Eingabe an Pius XI. Vom [9.] April 1933,” in Edith-Stein-Jahrbuch 10 (2004), 31-69; Wolf, Pope and Devil, 182-190 and 193-194; and numerous other works. Dr. Stein’s letter was attached to a cover letter dated 12 April 1933 from Archabbot Raphael Walzer, OSB, of Beuron monastery. Cardinal Pacelli did present her petition to the pope in a private audience on 20 April 1933. The heading above his six agenda items for that meeting reads “the archabbot of Beuron sends letters against the National Socialists.” There exists “no evidence in the archives of any other letters that Walzer might have sent.” Pacelli did not note down under this heading any instructions from the pope. See Wolf, Pope and Devil, 188, citing “Audience of April 20, 1933; ASV, A.E.S., Germania, 4 periodo, post. 430a, fasc. 348, fol.30r-v.” Wolf notes that if Pius XI did not articulate any specific instructions, Pacelli would not have made any notes, and thus the task of responding to a submission would have been assigned to Pacelli, the secretary of state, as a “routine matter” (Wolf, Pope and Devil, 188). Cardinal Pacelli answered Archabbot Walzer’s letter in a response dated 20 April 1933. It stated: “May I thank your Grace especially for the safe arrival of the kind letter of the 12th inst. and the attachment which came with it. I leave to your discretion to let the sender know in a suitable way that her message has been duly put before His Holiness. With you I pray God to take his holy church into his especial protection in these difficult times, and grant all the children of the Church the grace of courage and splendor of mind which are the presuppositions of ultimate victory.” See Besier and Piombo, The Holy See and Hitler’s Germany, 126; and Wolf, Pope and Devil, 189-190. For a discussion of the contents of the letter, see Freiburger Rundbrief: Zeitschrift für christlich-jüdische Begegnung, Neue Folge Heft 1-4 (2003), especially essays by Werner Kaltefleiter (“Der Vatikan öffnet sein Geheimarchiv”) and Elias H. Füllenbach (“Dass die Kirche Christi ihre Stimme erhebe”).

[8] Martin R. Menke, “Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 236.

[9] Ibid., 238.

[10] Jones, “Franz von Papen,” 280.

[11] Ibid., 294.

[12] Menke, “Misunderstood Civic Duty,” 236.

[13] Ibid., 237.

[14] Ibid., 257.

[15] Jones, “Franz von Papen,” 275.

[16] Ibid., 300.

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Conference Report: 40th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Conference Report: 40th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, March 6-8, 2010, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA.

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Plenary Session: “Three Institutional Responses to the Early Persecution of the Jews and to Kristallnacht: The Canadian churches, the Vatican, and the Federal Council of Churches in the United States.”

This plenary session, organized by the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, featured three presentations. The first, by Victoria J. Barnett, Staff Director of Church Relations in the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, was titled, “Seeking a United Voice: The Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the Kirchenkampf, 1933-1938.” Barnett argued that some of the most activist early responses, both to the German Kirchenkampf and the Nazi measures against the Jews, came from the Protestant ecumenical Federal Council of Churches in New York. FCC officials worked with Jewish organizations in the United States, visited Germany and issued public statements, and in particular pressed their German colleagues to condemn the Nazi anti-Jewish measures. As the Kirchenkampf progressed, however, the FCC position shifted to a more neutral tone.  Her comments focused particularly on the reasons why the FCC reactions changed and the way in which FCC officials helped shape the U. S.reaction to Kristallnacht.

Barnett’s presentation was followed by Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Director of Visiting Scholar Programs in the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Brown-Fleming’s paper, “The View from Rome: The Vatican’s Response to Reichskristallnacht,” contextualized the decision by the Holy See to decline an open condemnation of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, despite receiving full reports about this landmark event. While many U.S. religious groups responded swiftly and sharply, Brown-Fleming offered, in contrast, insight into the concerns and preoccupations that shaped the Holy See’s muted response to Kristallnacht.

The final paper, by Kyle Jantzen, Associate Professor of History at Ambrose University College, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and Jonathan Durance, Graduate Student, University of Calgary, was entitled “‘Our Jewish Brethren’: Christian Responses to Kristallnacht in Canadian Mass Media.” Jantzen and Durance examined the early responses of Christian clergy and lay people in the Canadian Protestant churches to Kristallnacht through an analysis of newspaper coverage from across the nation in November and December, 1938. In contrast to the “silence” often attributed to Canadian churches, they presented evidence that many Canadian Christian clergy and lay people engaged in principled protests against Nazi brutality and made energetic calls for government action to alleviate the growing refugee crisis in Germany by allowing Jews into Canada.

The session was lively and well-attended, with many questions raised (perhaps inevitably) concerning the record of Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) during the Third Reich. While (also perhaps inevitably), no definitive conclusions could be reached on the topic, the discussion pointed to the need for more research not only on the role of the Roman Catholic Church, but also on the Protestant Churches worldwide during the Nazi era.

 

 

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