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Review of Dirk Schuster, Die Lehre vom ‘arischen’ Christentum: Das wissenschaftliche Selbstverständnis im Einseacher ‘Entjudungsinstitut’

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Dirk Schuster, Die Lehre vom ‘arischen’ Christentum: Das wissenschaftliche Selbstverständnis im Einseacher ‘Entjudungsinstitut’ (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2017)

By Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

Scholarship on the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (DC), the German Christian Movement, began slowly in the postwar years, but has been growing and adding considerable new information to our understanding of the history of Christian theology and the role of the German churches during the Third Reich,

With the excellent new book by Dirk Schuster, the scholarship reaches an important milestone. The apologetic tone is entirely absent and instead we have a work by a very thoughtful scholar who examines archival data, weighs and evaluates new evidence, and draws sharp and strong conclusions. Schuster represents a new generation of young German scholars seeking historical accuracy rather than defending the church or making excuses for individual theologians.

Breakthroughs in the scholarship on the churches during the Third Reich came with publications by several North American scholars for whom racism and antisemitism were central to the history of National Socialism and whose academic careers were not dependent upon pleasing church officials. The first breakthrough was Robert Ericksen’s masterful and widely read 1985 book, Theologians Under Hitler, that described in clear and careful detail the work of three highly influential Protestant theologians in Germany: Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch. Ericksen analyzed the writings of each, demonstrating the nature of the theological support given by each man to the Nazi regime, as well as the consequences each suffered after the war. The second major contribution was a study of overall DC theology by Doris Bergen in her magisterial 1996 book, Twisted Cross, which made extensive use of published and unpublished DC materials that had been deposited after the war in an archive in Minden, Germany. Bergen argued that three elements characterized the theology of the DC: it was anti-doctrinal, antisemitic, and wanted a manly church. A third breakthrough was the massive and detailed study of the Protestant churches in Berlin undertaken by Manfred Gailus, the German social historian, that demonstrated far greater support for the DC than anyone had ever imagined. More recently we have additional important work: Kyle Jantzen’s analysis of the pastorate, Charlotte Methuen’s study of church architecture during the Third Reich, Anders Gerdmar’s study of German biblical interpretation, among many others.

I came to the topic during the late 1980s, as I was finishing my doctoral dissertation about the German-Jewish theologian Abraham Geiger and the reception of his work among Protestant theologians in the nineteenth century. While browsing in a Berlin library, I came across a volume of articles by German Protestants edited by Walter Grundmann and published in 1942 by the “Institut zur Erforschung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche christliche Leben.”

At a conference convened by Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz at the Evangelische Akademie in Arnoldshain in 1990 on the German Protestant theological faculties during the Third Reich, I asked several senior scholars, including Kurt Meier and Kurt Nowack, both from Leipzig, about the Institute. The answer was uniform: this was a marginal, unimportant Institute; the archives had entirely disappeared; the topic was not worth pursuing. I received a similar response a few months later from the Canadian historian John Conway. Nonetheless, I persevered and discovered material about the Institute in the central church archives in Berlin. In 1991 I traveled to Eisenach, where the Institute had been headquartered, and found additional bits of material in the church archives of Thuringia. The archivist was discouraging, claiming to have nothing substantial, but as I traveled to university, state, and local archives around Germany in subsequent years, thanks to a series of travel grants, I discovered more and more documentation, especially at the University of Jena archives. The archivist in Eisenach, managed to locate additional documents–bits of letters, memoranda, manuscripts. Little of the material had been formally catalogued by the archive, and no one had as yet asked to read it. I gradually pieced together an ugly story of antisemitic propaganda, written by theologians and pastors, in support of the Nazi war effort.

During the years of my research on the book I eventually published, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, I would show copies of the documents I had unearthed to an older, prominent Protestant theology professor in Berlin whom I had long viewed as a mentor. As someone deeply engaged in Christian-Jewish relations, he was surprised and shocked to discover that Grundmann, whose Gospel commentaries had long been required reading of pastors and theologians, had been a Nazi propagandist. However, I soon discovered that this professor appropriated my topic, went to the archives I had discovered, and published the material without crediting or thanking me.  An unpleasant and not unique academic experience but heightened by the nature of the topic and by the history of German treatment of Jews, including of my own family.

Now, a new generation has taken up the topic. Oliver Arnhold’s two-volume study ignores the English-language scholarship entirely and claims the Institute was formed in opposition to neo-pagan groups rather than its stated purpose, to rid Germany of Jewishness. Roland Deines, a New Testament scholar, blames the Jews for Grundmann’s antisemitism. Deines argues that Grundmann took his claim that Jesus was Aryan from Heinrich Graetz, the noted German-Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, who presented Jesus as a Galilean. The obvious difference between a nineteenth-century Jewish scholar calling Jesus a Galilean and a Nazi-era Protestant scholar calling Jesus an Aryan–precisely in an era when “Aryan” was lifesaving and “Jew” was a death sentence–seems to have evaded him.

Schuster’s book is all the more refreshing thanks to his pointed critique of prior, apologetic scholarship, a critique fully supported by the evidence he carefully presents. Situating the Institute squarely in its time and place–Nazi Germany–he does not try to hide its antisemitism under the fig leaf of nationalism as so many others have done, from Kurt Meier to Robert Morgan. There are moments when he might have added relevant data, such as Nazi party, SA, or SS membership, that is easily procured from my own book, but such data is often missing from German publications about the church because it is still not easy to secure such membership information.

In these days of ‘fake news,’ Schuster points to a similar concept employed by some of the pro-Nazi DC theologians. That Jesus was thought to be a Jew was a falsification that occurred, they claimed, because Jews had inserted fake, pro-Jewish passages into the Gospel texts in antiquity; they now promised to restore the “correct” text. Schuster demonstrates that Nazi racism regarding “the Jew” was transported by Institute theologians to antiquity and claimed as objective, scientific “reality” demonstrated by their “scholarship”–whereas all other scholarship that demonstrated the Jewishness of Jesus and early Christianity was false. Thus, the Institute created Christianity as a religious expression of Aryans–that is, the religion of the German Volk–and Judaism as its negative opposite (249). Creating an understanding of Christianity as Aryan involved a host of scholars from a range of fields, including theology, history, linguistics, archeology, and more.

Some of the material that Schuster presents has already been discussed by other scholars, yet he is able to reframe the material in such a creative and original way that his book is a must-read even for those familiar with the antecedent studies. The “Aryan Christianity ” that he examines is not simply an expression of an over-zealous German nationalism, nor the outgrowth of an inner-Protestant conflict, nor an effort to protect the church from Nazi hostility, but rather an outgrowth of new scholarly methods, including the methods of the History of Religions School and the “Erforschung der Judenfrage” that flourished during the Nazi era, as Dirk Rupnow has magnificently delineated in his important 2011 book, Judenforschung im Dritten Reich. Schuster examines members of the Institute and uncovers their shared roots as former students and researchers at the Universities of Leipzig and Tübingen whose academic orientation was rooted in History of Religions methods. Most important, Schuster reveals antisemitic structures of argumentation in their “scholarship.”

The History of Religions methods were thought by many theologians to provide a tool for overcoming divisions within Germany (e.g., Catholic-Protestant). This was not simply a field or division within a faculty, but scholarship with a social and political purpose. It was diverse, to be sure, but it was politicized and fit comfortably with the National Socialist regime.

Schuster notes that German nationalism from the outset was bound up with theological and biblical motifs, as numerous scholars have demonstrated. Indeed, the series of wars that led ultimately to German unification were conducted against Catholic countries–Austria-Hungary and France. Unification, moreover, brought renewed calls for unifying German Catholics and Protestants into a “Volkskirche” or “Nationalkirche” (46). Calls came from the beginning of the twentieth century, growing during World War One, to liberate the German Protestant church from foreign influences. Standing behind the call for a “Verdeutschung des Christentums” was an antisemitic worldview and a call to eliminate the OT from liturgy and sermons and understand Jesus to have been an Aryan, not a Jew (49). This was not only, Schuster writes, a rejection of Jewish influences within Christianity, but far more, a direct Bekämpfung (fight) against Judaism.

No distinction remained between religion and politics as the notorious Thuringian German Christian movement took shape under the leadership of the two Bavarian pastors who moved to the Werra Valley, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, both of whom served as Leiter of the local Nazi party Gau. Hitler was viewed as a continuation of Jesus and Luther, and the Nazi movement as a divine revelation that would resurrect Germany out of the Weimar Republic; Hitler was God’s tool, they believed. The Thuringian DC came to dominate through the late 1930s and its orientation was thoroughly racist. There should be a church for each Volk, and the church for the German Volk should finally overcome the division between Catholic and Protestant in one Nationalkirche.

The November 1938 pogrom left the remaining Jews marginalized and, as Hans Mommsen put it, under the jurisdiction of the Gestapo (70). Germany was to be rid of its Jews, and the formation of a dejudaization institute by theologians in 1939 was a logical culmination of the virulent idea of a Christian “Entjudung” that had circulated since the beginning of the twentieth century as well as a consequence of the Nazi policy of making Germany Judenrein.

Schuster emphasizes the Institute’s origins as an enthusiastic response to the 1938 November pogrom, demonstrating its “direkt Reaktion auf die antisemitischen Gewaltmassnahmen des NS-Staates” (74). Furthermore, the Institute was no marginal phenomenon with a brief lifespan, but “an integral component of the Protestant theological scholarly community” (83). Copies of its dejudaized New Testament and hymnal were sold widely throughout the Reich–500,000 copies of the hymnal were sold by early 1944 (86).

Throughout its conferences and numerous publications intended for both lay and clerical audiences, members of the Institute developed a racist hermeneutics. Heinz Eisenhuth (1903-83), professor of systematic theology at the University of Jena, argued that the Old Testament expressed a “foreign racial soul” (99) and that Jews, after baptism, nonetheless remain Jews (89). Such arguments were translated into policy by many of the regional churches. On December 17, 1941, the churches of Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Nassau-Hessen, Anhalt, and Lübeck issued an official notice that “racially Jewish Christians” had no place in the church (91). Note the date: precisely on the eve of Nazi deportations of Jews from the Reich, just when the death camps were beginning their operations, Christians were told that baptized Jews were not Christians; moral duty toward them was not necessary.

Was this a theological effort to distance Christianity from Judaism, a revision of New Testament scholarship? The roots of the scholars who participated in Institute-sponsored conferences and publications were mostly within liberal Protestant historical-critical method, but it would be a mistake to understand their efforts as sincere but misguided scholarship. In an extremely important section of his book, Schuster presents conclusive evidence from letters as well as published materials that the ultimate goal of the Institute, as its own members understood it, was as an “integral component of the entire political development” of the Nazi regime and offer “respectability” to its antisemitic measures. (122). They saw themselves contributing to the war effort: just as Germany was fighting on the military battlefield, they were fighting on the spiritual battlefield, they would say.

Schuster is careful not only to examine the writings of Walter Grundmann, the academic director of the Institute, but also to detail the writings of several of its members and to evaluate the contribution each one made to the goals of the Institute. He uncovers important new information. For example, Grundmann planned an Institute-sponsored German translation of the Talmud Yerushalmi and engaged a young scholar, Rudolf Meyer, who had training in Hebrew, to work with him on that project–though it was never completed due to Meyer’s conscription into the Nazi military. Schuster notes that similar such Talmud projects had been undertaken by other antisemitic “pseudo-research” institutes supported by the Nazi regime and helpfully links the work of the Institute with the widespread “Judenforschung” of the Nazi era that Rupnow analyzes. Another young scholar, a student of Meyer’s, who was going to participate in the projected Talmud project was Siegfried Morenz, though Schuster notes that his involvement may have been motivated by an effort to promote his career than by antisemitic motivations. Schuster gives careful attention not only to the motivations of each scholar, but also to their postwar publications, noting continuation of Nazi-era arguments, purged of Nazi language (such as “Aryan”), that insist on an essentialized and negative “Judaism.” That they continued to argue for a dejudaized Christianity even after 1945 makes it clear that they were not simply responding to the politics of the moment, but sincerely believed in the theology they were presenting.

Schuster has done an excellent job placing the theological effort to dejudaize Christianity into larger contexts, including the Judenforschung that Rupnow outlines; German nationalism’s reliance on religion, as demonstrated by Hartmut Lehmann; and the History of Religions School, as discussed by Horst Jünginger. He is clear that the Institute was antisemitic and a direct response to Nazi antisemitic politics. Still, there are questions left regarding motivations. What did these theologians ultimately hope to accomplish? Certainly there was a desire to achieve recognition from the regime–to become “Bonzen” (big shots)–which did not happen, and yet they persisted despite the lack of recognition and even efforts by the regime against them (spying by the Gestapo, conscription into military service). Perhaps they were hoping for recognition from their colleagues, considering themselves theological pioneers paving new methods of historical analysis and textual exegesis. Yet their methods were ultimately neither new nor particularly sophisticated, but, rather, tendentious, built on speculation rather than evidence and driven by a pervasive, demagogic insistence on the degeneracy and danger of Judaism. In that respect, their work coalesced not only with what Hitler was doing at the moment, but with a longer tradition regarding Judaism within Christian scholarship that had not been challenged by any leading theologian. To have objected would have required support from some sort of authority, whether from Luther or from more recent theologians or from the New Testament itself. Yet no positive affirmations of Judaism could be mustered within the Christian theological tradition, and the Old Testament itself had been so terribly marginalized and even denigrated that its elimination brought a sense of religious relief.

One of the important accomplishments of Schuster’s contribution is his emphasis on the role of the Institute. This was not a marginal phenomenon. On the contrary, its influence was widespread, as he demonstrates by pointing to the enormous success of its publications, its large membership, the postwar careers of its members, but, most important, because its effort to dejudaize fit so easily into the wider framework of German antisemitism and Christian theological arguments against Judaism.

What motivated these scholars? Schuster agrees with what has already been argued by other scholars: they were motivated by career advancement, by antisemitism, by an opportunistic desire for publicizing their ideas, by anti-Communism, by loathing for the Weimar Republic, and by a Nazi regime that was both thrilling, at least in its early years, and practical, creating new academic opportunities by firing Jewish academics.

The postwar years brought new prospects and few hindrances to denazification. Jobs were lost, jobs were gained, politics of state and church were manipulated, and exculpatory self-justifications were written–most were successful. These theologians were no different from other scholars who lost or retained their university positions and academic stature–except that the theologians could appeal not only to state officials but to church officials as well. Thus, Grundmann lost his university professorship, but the church of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) employed him as professor at various seminaries, his numerous books were published and sold throughout German-speaking Europe, and he was regarded at the GDR’s most prominent theologian. Success was achieved by claiming “resistance” as a Christian against the Nazi regime, despite the fact that these theologians flourished thanks to that very regime.

The DC has been explained in a variety of ways. Its members presented themselves after 1945 as defenders of the church against Nazi anti-Christian efforts. They were at times exonerated for their pro-Nazi efforts by postwar state officials who described them as “naïve” theologians who did not understand politics. Church officials and theologians rarely recognized the antisemitism at the heart of their writings, accepting the self-defense of DC members that they were historians who were simply clarifying Christianity’s distinctiveness from Judaism, despite the fact that Grundmann, for instance, warned of the “syphilization” of Germany by the Jews, hardly a theological argument.

Schuster is clear about the different motivations of the seven theologians whose careers and writings he examines in detail–career opportunism and antisemitism were prime among them. Yet he is also clear about his most important claim: that the effort to create an Aryan Christianity was not simply a product of Nazi politics, but an outgrowth of Protestant theology. Not only was it not simply a Nazi product; the ideas he traces during the Nazi era continued after 1945. Schuster’s study leads to the question of why these (mostly) Protestant (mostly Lutheran) theologians, primarily in Germany, but also in Scandinavian countries, were so committed to antisemitic theology. For Schuster, the answer is twofold. Protestantism had long denied a continuity from Old to New Testament, preferring to see the Old Testament as a “foreign text” and Judaism as overcome and negated through Christianity’s supersessionism (286). Moreover, he argues, what the Nazi era accomplished was to make possible the ultimate “proof” of an Aryan Christianity by granting DC theologians professorships and by promoting the work of the Institute. I would add additional motivations, including the sense within the church at the turn of the century that racial theory was new and sophisticated, so that racializing theology was seen as a method for modernizing Christianity. Racial theory was also a way to preserve the uniqueness of Jesus from claims by Jewish historians that his teachings were no different from those of other rabbis of his day. Inflammatory antisemitism was a way to arouse the pews to emotional engagement, in contrast to fine points of exegesis or doctrine. Given the mood in Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century, antisemitism provided a scapegoat, a mood of excitement, and an explanation for problems.

Very little theological opposition to the Institute was published during the war years–some negative book reviews–and once former Confessing Church members took control of the Thuringian church after the war, efforts to keep it going were not successful, despite disingenuous claims that its dejudaization program was a purely scholarly effort. However, the continuation of its arguments into acceptable language was not difficult, as Schuster demonstrates, and Institute members published major works of scholarship in the postwar decades, as he notes. The reception of those works deserves further attention, as does the involvement of some Institute members in Dead Sea Scroll scholarship. Nor should their dejudaization efforts be understood solely as a product of DC scholarship; plenty of their opponents in the Confessing Church articulated highly negative claims about Judaism, though not with an intention of dejudaizing Christianity or removing the Old Testament from the Christian Bible.

That leads to the postwar question awaiting future scholarship: why were such Christian antisemitic ideas promoted after 1945 in both the anti-fascist German Democratic Republic and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany? Why does the negation of the Old Testament continue, exemplified by the recent call by Notger Slenczka, professor of theology at the Humboldt University, to remove the Old Testament from the Christian Bible. Schuster concludes with caution, noting that what passed for theological scholarship in the 1930s would not be acceptable scholarship today, and also warning of the danger of attributing an inherent, indelible “character” to any religion. The mixture of politics and theology, and a political regime that fosters inhumane theological claims is the heart of the danger, one that requires careful monitoring. The wish to remove Judaism from Christianity was not limited to the Third Reich, and Schuster has written a thoughtful and insightful analysis probing the danger of what happened when that wish was fulfilled.

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Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Für ein artgemässes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologen im “Dritten Reich”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Für ein artgemässes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologen im “Dritten Reich”, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2016, 329 pp.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book, as indicated in its title, deals with what must be the most crucial flaw within German Protestant theology in the lead-up to the Nazi era, perhaps a “sickness unto death,” to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard. This flaw involves a völkisch theology, emphasizing the tight bond between Christian belief and the German people. It involves an artgemäss theology, claiming the necessity of certain racial and cultural qualities for any Germans claiming faith in Jesus and the Christian God. And, though it does not appear in the book title, this flaw involves an “orders of creation” theology, in which certain cultural, political, and racial qualities of the German Volk, as celebrated by Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, could be seen as a binding revelation from God. After an introduction to the topic, fifteen chapters of this book deal with sixteen individuals who help us better understand the complicity of Protestant Christians in the crimes of the Nazi state.

One of the editors of this volume, Manfred Gailus (a member of the editorial board of CCHQ), is a historian known to many or most of us as a prolific author and editor of books on Protestant churches in Nazi Germany. These include his Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des Sozialmilieus Berlin (Berlin, 2001), plus books such as Mir aber zerriss es das Herz: Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen, 2010), and Friedrich Weissler: Ein Jurist und bekennender Christ im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Göttingen, 2017). He also has co-edited books with colleagues, such as Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten in Deutschland—1870-1970 (Göttingen, 2005), co-edited with Harmut Lehmann; Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft:” Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 2011), co-edited with Armin Nolzen; as well as this volume co-edited with Clemens Vollnhals.

The second editor, Vollnhals, also has a career full of important contributions to our understanding of churches in Nazi Germany, beginning with his early study on denazification, Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifizierung, 1945-1949: Die Last der nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich, 1989). He too has been prolific in co-edited projects, including Mit Herz und Verstand—Protestantische Frauen im Widerstand gegen die NS-Rassenpolitik (Munich, 2013), co-edited with Manfred Gailus; and Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte (Göttingen, 2012), with Uwe Puschner; plus more than a dozen additional edited volumes. Taken together, the work of Gailus and Vollnhals could be the stuff of several seminars on the response of Protestants in Germany to the Nazi state, including analyses of some of the heroes, but especially with an attempt to understand those who found the Nazi state so very attractive. This volume, with its depiction of sixteen völkisch theologians, explores the attraction of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism for German Protestants. It takes us deeply into that Christian stance which, post-1945, strikes so many as so counter to an appropriate understanding of the teachings of Jesus.

All the theologians in this volume had some sort of relationship to the Deutsche Christen, of course, that group of German Protestants who welcomed and cheered the rise of Hitler, waved the Swastika, often wore brown uniforms in church, and tried to disguise or even remove all Jewish elements within the Christian tradition. Some of these stories are well known. Oliver Arnhold writes on Walter Grundmann and his “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” a topic also described for us in the work of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 2008). Grundmann and his so-called “Dejudaization Institute,” supported by the German Protestant Church and its notorious “Godesberg Declaration,” included a large number of seemingly reputable theologians in his project to deny the Jewish origins of Christianity, and even the Jewish origins of Jesus.

A chapter by Dirk Schuster describes Johannes Leipoldt, a professor of New Testament who, after stints at Kiel and Münster, arrived at Leipzig in 1916. Schuster emphasizes in his chapter title Leipoldt’s effort to deny Jesus’ Jewishness, including the quote, “Jesus is far removed from any sort of Jewishness” (189).[1] Leipoldt worked closely with Walter Grundmann, a former student, and became one of the most active co-workers in Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute, especially influencing the argument—important within the Nazi world—that Jesus could not really have been of Jewish blood. Despite this antisemitic activity, Leipoldt sailed through the transition of 1945. The fact that he never actually joined the Deutsche Christen or the NSDAP allowed him to be fully exonerated by the denazification process, with no attention placed on the heavily antisemitic elements in his scholarship (197). He remained at Leipzig until his retirement in 1954 (190). With his ongoing position at Leipzig and his national and international reputation, including for translations and for work on original sources, Leipoldt’s many antisemitic stereotypes, assumptions, and arguments remained fully “citationable” into the 1980s (201).

We also get a chapter by Hansjörg Buss on Gerhard Meyer. He was a simple pastor in Lübeck, rather than a theologian with a university position; but Buss shows us how completely Meyer was able to develop a church in Lübeck, the Martin Luther Parish, into a place where Germanness counted for far more than received tradition. Catholics had no place in a German church, according to Meyer, nor did Protestants who quarreled over doctrine. Jews had no place whatsoever, whether within the Christian tradition or within Germany. This all grew out of the idea of a “Deutschkirche,” advocated by the antisemitic Bund für Deutsche Kirche (League for a German Church), founded in 1921, which had an especially strong following in Lübeck and Schleswig-Holstein. Meyer, born in Lübeck in 1907, was ordained in 1932 and received his appointment in the Martin Luther Parish in September 1933. Soon he was baptizing with these words, “The Meaning of Baptism is this: Bestowed by the mother’s womb of the world, bound with God from the beginning, this child shall stride as a man of God over German soil” (131). He celebrated a group of confirmands in March 1939, alongside Reichbishop Ludwig Müller, with a similar theology: “We believe that Germany, the land and the community of German brothers and sisters, represents the order of life to which we alone are bound by body and soul” (130). Some months later, in September, shortly before his wedding, this 31-year-old pastor and enthusiast for Hitler and the Nazi ideal, recently called up for military service, died in the invasion of Poland (131).

Stephan Linck describes another pastor from Schleswig-Holstein, Ernst Szymanowski, who quickly gravitated toward the Deutschkirche and its overtly German, racist, and antisemitic concept of Christianity. Born in 1899 and after one year of active duty during World War I, he completed his theological training, was ordained in 1924, and joined the NSDAP already in 1926. He then sought to work his way up within the church, including an attempt to be selected as bishop of Lübeck in 1934, though this effort failed (242-45). Pastor Szymanowski is now better known to us as Ernst Biberstein. This is the name he legally acquired only in 1941, as a way to jettison his Slavic name and solidify his German credentials, which he claimed extended back one thousand years (250). The name-change came after he had joined the SS in 1936, and after he withdrew from church membership in 1938 (248-49), but Biberstein is the name by which he became famous after 1945.

Among Biberstein’s activities during wartime, working under Reinhard Heydrich in the RSHA, Biberstein spent several months as leader of Einsatzkommando 6, murdering thousands of Jews. When placed on trial at Nuremberg in 1948, he explained that he joined the SS because he thought it the most idealistic Nazi organization. When asked about the killing by his Einsatzkommando 6, he said, “Due to my theological development, I found it not only extremely unpleasant, but almost unreasonable, that death sentences should be ordered and enforced under my command.” Did he offer the victims “spiritual assistance,” he was asked, as they were being murdered? No, these victims were Bolsheviks, he said, who advocated godlessness. It was not his role to try to convert them: “One should not throw pearls before swine” (252).

Amidst a great deal of press interest in this pastor/murderer, who acknowledged that at least 2000-3000 victims were shot or gassed to death under his authority, Biberstein was sentenced to death (253). As often happened, that sentence gradually got reduced to incarceration at Landsberg Prison. Working for his release from prison, by 1956 Biberstein denied his own admission at Nuremberg about the thousands of deaths under his command. He also claimed to a representative from the Protestant Church in Neumünster that, despite his having left the church in 1938, “he had always felt himself to be and handled himself as a Christian and a theologian.” Furthermore, “He said . . . simply as his own inner conviction, that it would be good if every pastor’s personal attitude in life would be as decent as his had been” (256). Linck makes clear that the interlocutor reporting on the state of Biberstein’s conscience had been a fellow member of the Nazi Party and an advocate for the Deutsche Christen back in Schleswig-Holstein in the 1930s. Biberstein failed to get his hoped-for permanent return to a clergy position; however, he did gain his release from Landsberg in 1958 and had an opportunity to live outside prison another twenty-eight years before his death in 1986. Linck then quotes Raul Hilberg on Biberstein, “For Biberstein moral boundaries were like the receding horizon. He went toward them but never reached them” (259).

The sixteen chapters in this volume contain many additional examples of völkisch Protestant theologians and clergy who followed the path of German nationalism, racism, and an increasingly aggressive attack upon the Jewish place within the Christian tradition, or even within Germany itself. Rainer Hering describes Franz Tügel, the Bishop of Hamburg, who joined the Nazi Party in 1931, after a careful reading of Nazi documents, including Mein Kampf. In 1932 he expressed hope for a “rebirth of the German nation” under Hitler’s leadership. As for the projected harsh treatment of Jews, he saw no reason for the church to criticize Nazi intentions, describing Jews as a “pestilence” and “the great danger” for Germany (141-42).

Gerhard Lindemann describes a parallel example, Martin Sasse, the Bishop of Thuringia. Born in 1890, Sasse fought in World War I from 1914-1918. Then, after the war, he joined in Freikorp battles against communists and revolutionaries. After these years in uniform, Sasse returned to his theological studies and received an appointment and ordination in 1921. In March 1930 he joined the NSDAP and that fall he accepted a pastorate in Thuringia, a very brown region with an especially strong cohort of Deutsche Christen. By January 1934 Sasse had risen to Bishop of the Thuringian Church (156). From this position he gave full support to the Nazi state and Nazi ideology. This included, for example, praise for the November 1938 Pogrom as a necessary measure and part of the “world historical struggle against the Volk-destroying spirit of the Jews” (161). He was among those bishops who signed the Godesberg Declaration of 1939, which led to the creation of Walter Frank’s Dejudaization Institute. Sasse supported the radical Thuringian Deutsche Christen, even agreeing with their claim that the Jewish Old Testament had no place in the Christian Bible (163). As for the Holocaust, by August 1941 Sasse’s office produced a public announcement describing this as the “moment in which God’s hand reaches out to destroy precisely this people” (167), apparently blaming the murder of Jews on God, rather than Germans. Sasse held his position as bishop until his death in 1942, an early demise caused by problems with his heart.

Dagmar Pöpping tells the complex story of Herman Wolfgang Beyer, born in 1898, who “grew up” serving in World War I from 1916-1918 and watching all his friends die. He returned to Germany a pacifist and idealist, with high hopes for the Weimar Republic and a peaceful future. Then began a series of lurches to the right and left. The Versailles Treaty cost him his pacifism and his support of Weimar, but, while studying theology, he first stood on the left with a group who designated themselves “readers” of Die Christliche Welt, a liberal Protestant journal. He completed his theological training, however, with Karl Holl in Berlin, the founder of a “Luther Renaissance” and teacher of many of the most völkisch of the next generation of Protestant theologians, men such as Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus. Beyer befriended both men by the mid-1920s, a useful step in his career, and by the age of twenty-eight, he secured a professorship in church history at Greifswald (262-65). In 1933 he greeted the rise of Hitler with an enthusiasm as exuberant as that of his two mentors, beginning and ending every future lecture with “Heil Hitler.” As for the Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle), Beyer joined the Deutsche Christen in the spring of 1933, and also joined the SA (Nazi Stormtroopers) that fall. Surprisingly, though, Beyer became disillusioned with the harsh tactics of the DC under Reichbishop Müller in 1934 and switched his allegiance to the Confessing Church, which he maintained also when he moved to a chair at Leipzig in 1936. Throughout these changes in his church politics, he remained loyal to the Nazi state, a position not entirely uncommon among his fellow members of the Confessing Church.

When World War II broke out, Beyer volunteered to serve as a chaplain. He is interesting to us at least in part because he kept a detailed diary of his experiences on the Eastern Front. This included his personal observation of the murder of innocents, whether the shooting of 400 disabled residents of a hospital for convenience sake, or the murder of thousands and thousands of Jews. Pöpping reports on Beyer’s efforts to explain and justify these murders. Regarding the 400 disabled people dispatched by bullet, he writes, “I understand that the poor guys must be killed. One cannot simply let them run free. They would then only perish, naturally” (272). As for the mass murder of Jews, he comments, “The struggle against Jews must occur. But it has assumed a terribly hard shape…. The curse under which these people live is being fulfilled in a horrible manner” (273). Despite the horrors, Beyer taught his troops that killing Russians and Jews was necessary. He blamed the Enlightenment as a root cause, with its emphasis on equality and human rights, which finally led to Bolshevism and atheism. “We see it on the dull, staring, expiring faces of the Soviet prisoners of war who pass us by. The human being in this world has stopped being truly human” (270). True to the most hateful antisemitism of the early twentieth century, especially in its Nazi version, Beyer then made the connection to Jews, the most intensively victimized group being murdered by German forces. He explained to his troops that Jews had invented Bolshevism and, without attachment to the Christian God, both Jews and Bolsheviks had lost their souls, were no longer human. Pöpping then summarizes Beyer’s conclusion: “A human without a soul is no longer required to be treated as human” (271).

This self-description by Beyer of his work as a Protestant chaplain at the center of the Eastern Front, which was also the center of the Holocaust, could be understood simply as the rather ugly final result of völkisch theology, a theology which elevated Germany’s wounded and intense self-identity above prior Christian norms and ideals that had developed over two millennia. I appreciate Pöpping’s work on this man. I do wonder, however, whether her stance at the start of this chapter is too gentle, too understanding of the man under her gaze. She cites two historians, Doris Bergen and Felix Römer, who she accuses of describing chaplains “as ‘propagandists’ and ‘accomplices’ of the Vernichtungskrieg.”[2] In Pöpping’s view, “That would be too simple, to be content only with exposing what is morally unacceptable from today’s point of view” (261). She also cites the work of Antonia Leugers and Martin Röw for presentations of this softer approach, authors who raise the possibility of Catholics and chaplains staying moral within an immoral war.[3] These are hardly simple issues, but I am left wondering what could be seen as deficient in a “morality of today” that suggests murder and genocide are immoral. Was Beyer’s complete commitment to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state a good decision? Should we approve of his extra effort to encourage troops not to shrink from their task? Is it wrong to connect the dots in his complicated development as a theologian and suggest that something has gone dreadfully wrong when his loyalty to Germany and to Hitler have him defending the murders perpetrated and/or viewed by troops under his spiritual guidance?

This brings me to two of the most prominent theologians dealt with in this volume, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, theologians who befriended Hermann Wolfgang Beyer and may well have inspired his virtually complete loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi state. I am familiar with Althaus and Hirsch, since I focused on these two plus Gerhard Kittel in my Theologians under Hitler more than thirty years ago.[4] Tanja Hetzer’s chapter on Paul Althaus is based on her 2009 book him.[5] She begins with one of my favorite quotations from Althaus, at least in terms of its importance: his notable claim that Protestant churches in Germany “greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle from God” (69). He published that statement in 1933 and it certainly guided his overall response to the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. Hetzer argues that Althaus’s völkisch nationalism, a central aspect of his theology, was heavily influenced by his experience as a wartime pastor in Lodz during World War I, as well as his marriage to Dorothea Zielke, born in Warsaw to a German family long-settled in Poland. Of course, Althaus also was influenced by his bitterness over Germany’s loss in that First World War. During the war and throughout the 1920s, Althaus preached a love for the Fatherland and a claim that the Protestant church should speak to the bond between Germans, the German Lutheran tradition, and the beleaguered German nation. Hetzer does a very nice job of showing that Althaus’s “Orders of Creation” theology and his emphasis on “Order” and “Authority”—all developed in the early years of his career—made him ready to proclaim Hitler a “gift and miracle from God” and to give mostly enthusiastic support to the regime.[6] Hetzer shows that this stance was rooted in his völkisch obsession: “With Althaus it is vital to observe how the concept of the Volk became a new ethical reference point for theology” (76).

As for Althaus’s view of Jews, Hetzer points out that he often spoke in “cultural codes” and avoided the crudest expressions of antisemitism; but she effectively shows that a harsh antagonism toward Jews lay deeply embedded within his work.[7] During Weimar he apparently had no personal connection to important figures, such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, but he spoke of them like a “schoolmaster” and without respect (76). Hetzer effectively shows that Althaus’s “Orders of Creation” theology lays the groundwork for antisemism in its insistence that God created the various “orders” in existence, including nations and races. So it is no surprise that in the opening battles of the Church Struggle in 1933, when Deutsche Christen demanded the application of the Aryan Paragraph within the Protestant church, Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, his colleague at Erlangen, agreed that Germans had every right to include race among the requirements for clergy in the German Protestant Church (85-88). Althaus and Elert then co-authored the Ansbacher Ratschlag, an attack against the Barmen Declaration that was enthusiastically greeted by Deutsche Christen.

Hetzer concludes her chapter by pointing out that a “loyalty of the second generation” remains in place, giving Althaus a softer treatment than he deserves. This includes Walter Sparn, a systematic theologian, who claims “Althaus without doubt was never a National Socialist,” though he may have been a “political romantic” who advocated a “revolution from the right.”[8] Such a view gives little weight to Althaus’s assessment of Hitler as “a gift and miracle from God.” Hetzer also critiques the recent biographer of Althaus, Gotthard Jasper of Erlangen University.[9] The subtitle of his 2013 book, “Professor, Prediger und Patriot seiner Zeit,” certainly buries Althaus’s enthusiastic and very public support of Hitler and National Socialism with that innocuous use of “patriot,” as does Jasper’s treatment of Althaus in general. Hetzer credits Jasper with his presentation of much material, “without, however, considering problematic statements by Althaus according to his actual words or requiring of Althaus posthumous responsibility for what he actually wrote and said” (95).

I quite agree with Hetzer’s conclusion that, despite his clear political stance, “Althaus was viewed in the history of theology after 1945 not as a participant in history, but as a victim of his own ideas, above all when it involved his antisemitic undertakings” (95). I would only mention that my book from 1985 on Althaus, Hirsch and Kittel gets but one footnote in this chapter, and that is to substantiate Althaus’s “reputation as a mediator” and the fact that he is “viewed still today as a theologian with a self-chosen stance in the middle” (70). I do use the term “mediator,” and I describe him as less radical in his support of Nazi politics than either Emanuel Hirsch or Gerhard Kittel. However, this by no means hides my criticism of his very important and enthusiastic place in support of Hitler and Nazism. A large number of the quotations used by Hetzer in this chapter also appear in my book. Furthermore, Hetzer does show Althaus as a moderate of sorts, at least for his place and time. He tended to use coded and vague language. Many or most could see his attack on Jews, but he was not as outspoken or blatant as many others treated in this volume by Gailus and Vollnhals. I appreciate Hetzer’s analysis of Althaus’s work, which I think takes an important step forward in recognizing the antisemitic foundations of his scholarship. I also agree that Sparn from 1997 and Jasper from 2013 are too apologetic in their treatment of Althaus, but I remain a bit disappointed that my work in 1985 is not clearly separated from those two.

Heinrich Assel writes about Emanuel Hirsch, who was one of the main figures in his 1994 book on the Luther Renaissance from 1994.[10] This chapter also builds upon Assel’s very thorough reading of appropriate additional sources and documents to which he has gained access, even though Hirsch’s own Nachlass has been carefully restricted from public view or scholarly use. In particular, Assel has accessed a massive correspondence between Hirsch and the right-wing publicist, Wilhelm Stapel, which extended from 1931 until Stapel’s death in 1954 (47). In my view, Assel rightly places Hirsch at the very center of the völkisch theology that is at the heart of Gailus and Vollnhals’ book, and which drew Hirsch to his enthusiastic public support of Hitler by April 1932.

Hirsch became the leading theological advisor to and supporter of the Deutsche Christen and Reichbishop Ludwig Müller in 1933. He then openly designated himself a “political theologian” by 1934, taking the side of Ludwig Müller’s church government. As the Müller phase of church politics proved ineffective, Hirsch worked to support the “Gleichschaltungspolitik” of the Nazi state, privileging Hitler’s totalitarian rule over his two other loyalties, those to church and state (44). As for the Nazi stance on Jews, Hirsch moved from his earlier prejudice against Jews, which was primarily religious and cultural, to “an openly racist antisemitism.” Though others blanched at the destructiveness of the November Pogrom in 1938, he was “passionately in favor,” welcoming it as a way to push Jews toward emigration. As the murderous nature of the war in Eastern Europe and the specific annihilation of Jews developed, Hirsch was kept informed by his contacts in the Nazi Party and the SS. His response was to “give unlimited support to this politics of annihilation” (56).

Assel’s access to the Hirsch/Stapel correspondence, often comprising several letters per week and sometimes more than one letter per day, illustrates for us the overwhelming confidence placed by Hirsch and Stapel in the German Volk and the Nazi state, a convergence designed to bring Germany back to its rightful place in the world. We also learn about their harsh antisemitism. However, we do see Wilhelm Stapel losing at least some of his nerve in the last, more brutal years of the Nazi regime, while Hirsch remained firm. After the failed July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, Stapel wrote of his sympathy for the plotters. Hirsch wrote back with ten full pages, expressing unapologetic approval of Nazi church politics, Nazi foreign policy, and also the harsh judgments of the People’s Court against the conspirators. He speculated in that letter, written in the bleak summer of 1944, on two possible outcomes of the war: a German victory, leading to a healthy nation and national church, or a German defeat and the collapse of Christianity in Germany (60-64).

In an attempt to understand the uncompromising persistence of Hirsch’s stance, Assel points out one very important factor in his life, poured out in this long letter to Stapel. That is his deep grief over his son, Peter, fallen in 1941. Assel places this in the context of a “Myth of the Fallen,” the belief that only a German victory would justify the many deaths spread over the two costly wars in Hirsch’s lifetime (63-64). In my work on Hirsch, I point to his medical deferment in August 1914 at the start of World War I. This embarrassed or even haunted him, and I speculate that it might help explain the aggressive nationalism and militarism in his work.[11] The World War II loss of his son would only have multiplied that psychological impact, of course. Even though Stapel and Hirsch each lost some of their influence during the last years of the Nazi regime, Stapel more so than Hirsch, we learn from their letters that Hirsch refused to blame Hitler or the Nazi state, even after 1945, and even after the horrors of the Nazi regime had been condemned by most of the world. In my work on Hirsch, I quoted colleagues who said he never changed his politics after 1945 or admitted that he had been mistaken.[12] I was criticized for this by some friends of Hirsch. Assel’s chance to read portions of Hirsch’s correspondence now confirm I was right on that score (49).

Before leaving Assel’s treatment of Hirsch, I will once again mention my Theologians under Hitler from 1985, which dealt extensively with Hirsch. I also wrote about Hirsch in my chapter on the Göttingen Theological Faculty, first published in Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus in 1987.[13] Neither is cited by Assel. This is obviously a minor complaint. In one instance, however, I believe that Assel’s treatment of Hirsch’s postwar circumstances would benefit from my work. In May 1945, Hirsch grabbed the chance of a medical retirement, justified by his failing eyesight, in order to avoid removal for his pro-Nazi stance. This meant he circumvented his essentially certain dismissal by the English occupiers, without pay, followed by a denazification process of uncertain outcome. Instead, besides avoiding the humiliation of being thrown out of his university, he also secured a life-long pension, even if reduced by his choice of an early medical retirement, and he secured the right to stay in his beautiful, large home on the Schiller Meadow. Assel refers to a brief postwar period when the Hirsch family did not receive funds as a “bureaucratic mistake,” which is probably true. But then he adds, “Without having to go through a denazification process, Hirsch was rehabilitated as emeritus” (57).

This version of Hirsch’s postwar transition slides past an experience that was traumatic for many university professors whose politics had been enthusiastically pro-Nazi, and especially so for Hirsch. It also ignores my extensive treatment of the actual, bitter process that ensued. His medical retirement left him without any connection to his university. At the age of fifty-seven, he was not ready to retire. As he had been nearly blind since the 1920s, he clearly hoped to reverse the convenient medical excuse used in May 1945 and resume his career. Furthermore, the eventual return of most Nazi-tinged professors to their positions would have encouraged his hopes. However, despite his own efforts and energetic attempts by a few of his friends, he never could bring himself back into the good graces of Göttingen University or its Theological Faculty. From May 1945 until his death in 1972, Hirsch was never rehabilitated. He never received emeritus status, he never received announcements of events or invitations, his name was never included in university publications, and he had no formal connection whatsoever with his former faculty.[14] (He also never received the blue plaque on his home, marking the place where very important university scholars, such as his rival, Karl Barth, had lived.) This postwar result placed Hirsch among the very few, most heavily implicated Nazis not able to return to their positions at Göttingen, part of a similar pattern at other universities as well. The only students with whom Hirsch came in contact in those postwar years met with him in his home for regular meetings of an irregular, unofficial, private seminar. Some within that informal coterie became known as the “Hirsch Circle.” This group long hoped to resurrect Hirsch’s reputation as a theologian from his loss of respect in the postwar era, but largely without success. Was the postwar denial of honor or respect appropriate? Assel’s work goes a long way toward establishing that Hirsch’s devotion to Adolf Hitler was thoroughgoing. If we do not approve of Hitler’s judgment, ideas and politics, it is difficult to approve of Hirsch’s. Furthermore, the völkisch nature of the Protestant theology at the center of Hirsch’s work made his politics far more than a side issue in his career.

In the context of the Hirsch-Stapel correspondence, I will also mention Clemens Vollnhals’ chapter on Wilhelm Stapel. During the Weimar Republic, Stapel edited and wrote prolifically in the right-wing, nationalistic journal, Deutsches Volkstum. He also rose to leadership within the Hanseatic Verlag, the publisher of Deutsches Volkstum and later the publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications. Though Stapel never had an academic career, he and Hirsch were natural allies in their commitment to a völkisch Protestant theology and a nationalistic, right-wing revolution against the Weimar Republic. In 1933 Stapel greeted the rise of Hitler with Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers (“Christ’s Church and Hitler’s State”).[15] He supported the Deutsche Christen, even after the Sports Palace Scandal of November, 1933, in which 20,000 enthusiasts applauded the removal of the Old Testament and other proposed steps into open heresy (110). All of this fit into Stapel’s understanding of a special law, a Volksnomos, given by God to every nation, and, in the German case, God’s creation of a leading nation among nations, ready to build a new European empire in the manner of ancient Rome (101-04). There was no place for Jews in this venture. Stapel praised the May 1933 burning of Jewish books. He accepted the total separation of Jews from the German nation, even before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In 1938 he wrote, “Jews in the German Reich are inferior. Their place in Germany is a result of the stance they have taken against us in our struggle for German honor” (113-14). Stapel also worked within Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute. Vollnhals does show that Stapel’s stomach for harsh measures had its limits. He regretted the disorderly broken glass of November 1938. In a letter to Paul Althaus in January 1942, as deportations of Jews had begun, he admitted that what was happening to Jews was horrible. Despite the horrors, however, even in 1942 he stood by his earlier, harsh assessment of the Jewish question, “so that later it is not lost … why the symbiosis pushed for by the Jews was impossible” (114). Both Hirsch and Stapel represented the radical vision of a special place for the German Volk within God’s plan, along with a willingness to bind the resulting völkisch Protestant theology to the brutal, totalitarian regime created by Adolf Hitler.

Für ein artgemässses Christentum der Tat is a very useful book. Besides the chapters described above, it includes an excellent introductory chapter by Gailus and Vollnhals, plus additional treatments of men like Reinhold Seeberg, described by Stefan Dietzel as an important professor at Berlin in the age of Harnack, who lived into the first two years of the Nazi state and gave both eugenics and the NS racial ideology his support. Andre Postert offers us a chapter on Wolf Meyer-Erlach, the famously antisemitic and under-qualified professor who became Rektor at the University of Jena and later worked in Grundmann’s Dejudaization Institute. Ulrich Peter writes about Walter Schultz and Heinrich Schwartze, two Protestant pastors, the latter also a bishop, who negotiated complicated transitions from their support of National Socialism to their place in the postwar German Democratic Republic. Isabella Bozsa describes the career of Eugen Mattiat, a small-town pastor awarded for his political reliability with a professorship at Göttingen University. Remarkably under-qualified, he quickly lost that position under denazification, but eventually became once again a small-town pastor. Manfred Gailus gives us a final chapter, describing Walter Hoff, an enthusiastic pro-Nazi pastor in Berlin. After volunteering at nearly fifty to serve in his second World War, he returned on leave to brag about his exploits. Then, responding angrily to an “unwarlike” circular letter sent to Berlin pastors in 1943, he emphasized the need to fight against “World Jewry and its evil representatives,” uninhibited by any soft Christian ideal of “mercy.” He added that in Soviet Russia he himself had “helped liquidate” hundreds of Jews (311).

Not all stories in this volume include Protestant pastors bragging about murdering Jews! All of the stories, however, provide examples of Protestants who idolized the German Volk, gave their heart to Adolf Hitler, and both accepted and promoted the antisemitism of the Nazi state. From our present perspective, these stories give us good reason to rethink our understanding of the Christian relationship to Jews, to nation, to race, and to the compassionate side of Jesus’ ethic. Gailus and Vollnhals have assembled a useful and convincing treatment of the problems that arise when Christians think someone like Adolf Hitler is on their side.

 

[1] Please note that all translations are by the author of this review.

[2] Pöpping cites as representatives of this point of view, Doris Bergen, “’Germany is our Mission – Christ is our Strength!’ The Wehrmacht Chaplaincy and the ‘German Christian’ Movement,” in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 66 (1997), 522-36; and Felix Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl: Wehrmacht und NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront 1941-42, Paderborn, 2008, 510 ff.

[3] See Antonia Leugers, “Opfer für eine grosse und heilige Sache: Katholisches Kriegserleben im nationalsozialistischen Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieg,” in Friedhelm Boll, ed., Volksreligiosität und Kriegserleben, Münster, 1997, 157-74; and Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz. Die Katholische Feldpastoral 1939-1945, Paderborn (2014), who, according to Pöpping, suggests (p. 448) that chaplains were “unwilling instruments” in the war of extermination.

[4] Robert P Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, New Haven, 1985.

[5] Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde.” Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus, Munich, 2009. It should be noted that most of the chapters in this book by Gailus and Vollnhals are based on book-length treatments by the authors, so that this volume becomes a useful distillation of a broad range of work.

[6] Hetzer does not mention my treatment of a possible change of heart in Althaus by 1938. His blatantly political publications cease after 1937 and family stories suggest some disillusionment. Althaus’s son Gerhard, born in 1935, told me of a family memory according to which Althaus at the dinner table denounced the November 1938 Pogrom. Gerhard himself remembered a conversation on holiday at Tegernsee in August 1943, when an officer returned from the Soviet front came back with the family from a Sunday service. As an eight-year-old boy, he overheard a story of camps at which civilians, women and children, and unarmed Soviet prisoners were shot. Afterwards, according to Gerhard, his father no longer spoke of winning the war, but of “bloodguilt,” including toward Jews. See Ericksen, 94-98.

[7] In the above-mentioned interview, Gerhard Althaus, who studied theology with his father and became a pastor, told me he questioned his father in the 1950s about the antisemitism rife in Nazi Germany. His father simply responded, “You have not experienced the Jews.” See Ericksen, 109.

[8] See Walter Sparn, “Paul Althaus,” in Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, ed., Profile des Luthertums, Gütersloh 1997, 1-26.

[9] Gotthard Jasper, Paul Althaus (1888-1996). Professor, Prediger und Patriot seiner Zeit, Göttingen, 2013.

[10] Heinrich Assel, Die Lutherrenaissance – Urspringe, Aporien und Wege: Karl Holl, Emanuel Hirsch, Rudolf Hermann (1910-1935), Göttingen, 1994.

[11] See Ericksen, 127.

[12] See Ericksen, 193.

[13] See Robert P. Ericksen, “Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät im Dritten Reich,” in Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, and Cornelia Wegeler, eds., Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, Munich, 1987 and 1998, 75-101.

[14] See Ericksen, Theologians, 191-93. See also Ericksen, “Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät im Dritten Reich,” 90-93.

[15] Wilhelm Stapel, Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers, Hamburg, 1933.

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Conference Report: “Not Without the Old Testament”: The Importance of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity and Judaism, French Church of Friedrichstadt, Berlin, 8-10 December 2015

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Conference Report: “Not Without the Old Testament”: The Importance of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity and Judaism, French Church of Friedrichstadt, Berlin, 8-10 December 2015

By Gerhard Naber, Nordhorn, and Oliver Arnhold, University of Bielefeld and University of Paderborn; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Note: Normally Contemporary Church History Quarterly publishes historical rather than theological material. However, given the relevance of any German theological debate concerning the validity of the Old Testament to the antisemitic history of the German Christian Movement in the Nazi period, it seemed useful to publish this report from a noteworthy conference. The following account demonstrates that the conference “Not Without the Old Testament” grappled not only with contemporary theological problems, but also with the shadow of this history. Translator’s additions appear in square brackets.

Conference organizers: Protestant Academy of Berlin; Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies; Moses Mendelssohn Foundation; Protestant Church of Berlin, Brandenburg, and Silesian Upper Lusatia; Church and Judaism Institute (Humboldt University).

Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), by Joshua Koffman

Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), by Joshua Koffman

On the invitation to this conference and also on the huge display wall at the front side of the French Church of Friedrichstadt, we see two young women with crowns (princesses, perhaps?). They are similarly clothed, level with one another, and facing each other—each of them occupied with a scripture: the left one with a scroll, and the right one with a book marked with a cross—clearly a Torah and a Bible. What is special, however, is that neither looks (only) at her own scripture, but—in this moment—is interested in the scripture of the other.

The picture fascinates and confounds.

Such a composition is well known from medieval imagery. On almost all gothic churches we can find Ecclesia and Synagoga, an image of anti-Jewish theology with the message: Israel has been rejected; the Church has triumphed. But here, both figures are on the same level, made equal. They read their writings, but are also interested in the things that concern the other. This image of dialogue between Israel and the Church, created by Joshua Koffman, is entitled “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” (2015).

This representation symbolizes better than any other the protocol for the conference “Not Without the Old Testament.”

The background for this conference was the current, so-called “Slenczka Debate.” In 2013, the Berlin systematic theologian Dr. Notger Slenczka published a treatise in which he expressed concern that it might be time—in the intellectual tradition of Schleiermacher, Harnack, and Bultmann—to decanonize the Old Testament, i.e. perhaps to downgrade it to the status of the Apocrypha and in any case not to grant it the same status as the New Testament for Christian theology and for the Church.

This was certainly impetus enough to fundamentally reexamine the importance of the Old Testament for Christians and the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible] for Jews.

After greetings from Dr. Eva Harasta of the Protestant Academy and Dr. Julius H. Schoeps of the Moses Mendelssohn Center, the first session revolved around the question “Text and Politics.” Dr. Rolf Schieder spoke first on the theme of “The Political Responsibility of Christian Theology towards the Old Testament.” He criticized the fever of the debate, the style of the confrontation. It was important that technical questions be kept at the center. Slenczka’s thesis should therefore be taken seriously, insofar as he sees his position within the realm of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Christians should not worm their way into the covenant with Israel; they should respect the Old Testament as a record of Jewish faith. Finally, the speaker proposed a “dogmatic disarmament”—not to understand the canon as normative, but as a collection of texts for use in worship, teaching, and personal devotion. In this sense, the Old Testament is certainly part of the Christian canon.

Dr. Oliver Arnhold, Department Head for Protestant Religious Instruction in Detmold and Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Paderborn and Bielefeld, examined aspects of the “Ecclesiastical and Theological Treatment of the Old Testament among the German Christians (DC).” Arnhold made it clear that the DC were no unified block, and provided various examples of gradations in the question of the status of the Old Testament. On the one hand, Friedrich Wienecke advocated for the maintenance of the Old Testament, while, on the other hand, Reinhold Krause called for a radical separation from the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament at the “Sport Palace Rally” [in Berlin in November 1933].

Arnhold gave a detailed outline of Walter Grundmann’s position in the “28 Theses of the DC”: The Old Testament is not of the same value as the New Testament; rather, it should serve as an example of the failure of the Jewish way (Thesis 12). The abandonment of the Jews by God resulted in the curse of God on this people—up to the present day (Thesis 13). And for his part, Siegfried Leffler, co-founder of the Thuringian Church Movement of the German Christians, wanted to replace the Old Testament with stories from German history.

A key institution for this movement was the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life” (“Dejudaizing Institute”), founded [by Grundmann] in 1939 in Eisenach. By 1941, Grundmann had managed to win about 180 associates for the scholarly work of the Institute, including 24 university professors from 14 Protestant theological faculties, along with ecclesiastical dignitaries and emerging scholars. These served voluntarily in working groups, research projects and publishing activities. A total of 46 research projects and workshops aimed to erase Jewish elements from theology and Church, among other things. In place of the Old Testament, personnel in the Grundmann Institute proposed the legends of German heroes and saints as the model and ideal for religious life.

“The Combination of Politics and Theology in the Controversy concerning the Old Testament: A Jewish-Civil Society Perspective”—this was the topic of the evening lecture by the Jewish Education scholar Dr. Micha Brumlik, who went into great detail about the life and thought of the theologian Emanuel Hirsch. Hirsch understood “Volk” as the concrete place, where the message of God is encountered. Thus he became a member of the German Christian Movement out of conviction, and the National Socialist Party too. In 1933 he proclaimed “a YES to the German year!” and praised Hitler “as an instrument of the Lord of all.” The Old Testament served for him as a demonstration of a false, inadequate understanding of God that should crumble. Brumlik pointed out that the line of tradition in which Slenczka stands includes not only Schleiermacher and Harnack, but also theologians like Hirsch, who fawned over National Socialism.

The second day of the conference—Wednesday, December 9, 2015—was devoted to the theme of “Text and Hermeneutic.” It was opened by Dr. Andreas Schüle, Professor of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis at the University of Leipzig, under the title “Bible Minus Old Testament: A Blind Alley.” At the outset he demonstrated that uncertainty arises if faith becomes “questionable” and people insist upon resources of certainty. The Bible is one such resource, but that idea is hard to understand outside of a worship service and outside of church. Along with Niklas Luhmann, Schüle describes the Bible as a “communications medium,” that with its diverse histories, ideas, images, and motifs can be understood in diverse ways and can withstand selective attacks. This is a very “low threshold” approach to the Bible: it is not understood as a norm; no dogmatic determinations are made; and so there is no strong awareness of a canon.

The attempt to decanonize the Old Testament or place it at the same level as the Apocrypha always results in a crisis situation: “The Old Testament will be up for debate when the gospel becomes murky.” So it is a crisis phenomenon, that we have to depart from the (seemingly!) murky in order for the (supposedly!) essentials to become clearer. The subject of the “Old Testament” has contributed to this crisis, in that it is understood essentially as a historical subject, oriented towards the past rather than the future. In this context, reference was made later in the discussion to the approaches of Frank Crüsemann und Jürgen Ebach.

The speaker listed several components of Schleiermacher’s thought which related to the Old Testament: the New Testament was the faith document of the early Christians; there were references to the Old Testament in the New Testament, but these concerned only historical aspects, not grounds of faith; the Old Testament was the legacy of a less developed religion, possessed therefore less dignity, and was perceived as somewhat alien, while the New Testament was understood to be distinct from the Old; the brilliance of the gospel was dulled by the proximity of the Old Testament.

Von Harnack took a more positive stance towards the Old Testament, particularly the Prophets. He sees in the Old Testament, however, a religion steeped in legalism and ritualism which was only broken by Christ; with Christ, the Old Testament had become irrelevant.

Gerhard von Rad thought very differently from this. For him, the Torah was not a monolithic block; rather, it witnessed to a movement “forwards,” because tradition had to be reinterpreted again and again. So also, the Jesus-event required interpretation, and this through recourse to the Old Testament, namely the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature; this was not “e-mancipation” (leaving the Old Testament) but “mancipation” (taking the Old Testament in hand). Schüle’s closing point was that the question of Jesus Christ must once again be a component of Old Testament research. The influence of the Old Testament on the New Testament scriptures must be researched. Therefore, we can learn from Jewish biblical research.

The retired Württemberg state rabbi Dr. Joel Berger gave a lively presentation exploring “How Jews Read and Understand the Bible: An Orthodox Perspective.” Jews, as he began by asserting, do not “read” the Torah; they “study” it. Moreover, the Torah is not only “text” but also “revelation.” As he put it, “If Slenczka wants to leave us alone with the Old Testament—okay!” Scripture study is not about knowledge, but about living devotion, about imitating the saints. To learn from Abraham means to learn action.

After the Orthodox rabbi, a representative of the liberal wing of Judaism spoke: Rabbi Dr. Edward van Voolen of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam. His theme was “Love of Teaching: Jewish Exegesis of the Tanakh.” According to the rabbi, the Torah establishes tradition; the Torah was given to Moses, who passed it on to Joshua, who passed it on to the Elders and so on from generation to generation. Based on section Baba Mezi’a 59b of the Babylonian Talmud, van Voolen explained that the text of the Torah must be interpreted anew again and again, which represents our adulthood and with it our fundamental rejection of any dogmatism or fundamentalism. The interpretation of the Word of God is given into human hands. According to the Talmud Chagigah 3b, texts always contain several possible interpretations—even different ones. Does this lead to anarchy in exegesis? Not when the doctrine is being constantly renegotiated. Dialogue is necessary here.

The section on “Texts and Community” was opened by Dr. Alexander Deeg, Practical Theologian from Leipzig, and his paper “Hermeneutical Problems and Homiletical Opportunities: Preaching Texts from the Old Testament.” At the outset he introduced the discussion process with the compilation of a new series of pericopes. In doing so, he noted that there was great interest in including more Old Testament texts. Old Testament texts were not now perceived as foreign, but as true-to-life and of direct concern to people. In connection to this, he referred to the Protestant practice of reading daily watchwords: the nucleus of the watchwords is comprised of an Old Testament verse, to which a New Testament verse is matched. Moreover, self-selected scriptures for baptism, confirmation, and wedding ceremonies are often taken from the Old Testament. There are also countless examples of art and culture with Old Testament echoes. For instance, he found 3750 instances of biblical traces in modern lyrics alone.

One ground for this was that the Old Testament includes a wide variety of genres, and contains texts originating from an extremely long span of time and out of diverse life experiences. Exodus stories, lamentations, and biblical laws are not abstract treatises, but texts with great earthiness.

Concerning the “professorial problematization” of this enthusiasm for the Old Testament, the speaker stated that Jews are the first ones to whom these texts are addressed, and so it is easy to run the risk of monopolizing or even expropriating them. Beyond that, the choice of texts is rather selective: people choose “nice” selections and avoid “nasty” ones (displays of violence, psalms that curse). For many Christians, the Psalms constitute a natural supplement to the New Testament—baptized as quasi-Christian.

In dialogue between Jews and Christians, there must be an unlearning of the traditional Christian methods of handling the Old Testament, which rest on categories like “promise and fulfilment,” “universalist” versus “particularist,” “antithetical,” as in “christological interpretations.”

A new hermeneutic must be followed:

  1. The Old Testament is a necessary background of Christ, without which we do not know what we are talking about.
  2. The Old Testament describes a history into which we listen, in which we belong, but which, at the same time, is the history of Israel and Judaism.
  3. The Old Testament is the “No” to Jesus as the Messiah, which we have to hear and which protects us from any triumphalism.

To the last point, the texts of Israel illustrate that where there is a spillover of the promise [from Judaism to Christianity], there is also a void in the fulfillment, which makes it clear that we are both waiting, expecting—both separately and together.

From the Jewish side, Rabbi Dr. Andreas Nachama, Director of the Topography of Terror in Berlin, addressed the theme: “The Reception of the Biblical Text in the Community: Preaching on Texts from the Tanach.” His basic thesis concerning the debate at hand was that Jews can actually be, in the first instance, indifferent to the ways in which Christians see the texts of the Old Testament. Studying the Torah and the other scriptures forms the basis for the cohesion of the Jewish community. Studying the Torah means, in the first instance, that the text is carefully recited, intensively read. To understand, we have “to read not only the black of the letters, but also the white between them.” If we read the Old Testament only as a historical text, it is rather uninteresting; if, however, we read the text in such a way as to be personally involved, then the Passover story from Exodus, for example, becomes immediately existential: it is as if we ourselves are being liberated from slavery and bondage.

Jewish stories attempt to make the text come alive approximately in the manner of the Midrash. In this stream of tradition, the year 70 after that time is particularly important: the loss of the temple demands a paradigm shift. Religion can no longer be based on temple worship, priestly service, and sacrifice, but must now “work anywhere.” Out of the traditional religion of sacrifice, two new developments have emerged: Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

After the French Revolution, a liberal stream arose alongside the orthodox life of faith. Nachama explained the liberal approach using the example of dealing with homosexuality: the texts must be maintained, but the interpretation will change due to the fundamental changes in the cultural context, and after that the corresponding conduct will change. It is important in Jewish-Christian dialogue that Jews and Christians compare notes on their respective ways of handling the texts of the Tanakh.

The conference section “Text and Controversy” was cancelled, since the anticipated discussion participant Professor Slenczka refused to take part. In a letter to the speakers, he mentioned that the program—unlike what was previously discussed—ultimately pursued the goal of a “statement” of his position in order to arrange an “ostracism,” without him having the opportunity to adequately defend himself against “misinterpretations” and “insinuations.” He accused the Protestant Academy of “fear of debate.”

As a result, the final day—Thursday, December 10, 2015—began under the heading “Text and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” with a presentation by Dr. Rainer Kampling, Professor of Biblical Theology at the Free University of Berlin. It was entitled, “‘For the One God is the Creator of Both’: A Roman Catholic Perspective.” Based on the document “Decretum de librissacris” from the Council of Trent (1546), the speaker explained that, without the Old Testament, not only would Christians be rid of their God, but also they would run into a linguistic homelessness in their religious existence. At the time of the Reformation, neither Protestants nor Catholics ever considered whether the Old Testament was fully valid, but rather only considered which scriptures could be taken in a more or less binding way. Thus the representative of the old belief, Eck, argued that the Maccabean Books were indeed not in the canon, but had to be believed canonically, while Luther retorted that only the canon is canonical.

On the question of the validity of the Old Testament and New Testament, the council determined that “Unus deus sit auctor” (“God alone is the author”), where “auctor” means “originator” and not “writer.” To fix the canon, the council decreed once and for all that the specified scope of the canon itself become an object of faith, and not only the content of the canon. Thus the Old Testament is in a full sense the Word of God, meaning that, in the Roman Catholic Church, no theology can modify this principle. This issue could well revolve around ways of reading.

So then the formula of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scripture in the Christian Bible” (2001): “The Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures [from the Second Temple period].”

The closing session of the conference was comprised of a discussion round under the question “Where does Jewish-Christian dialogue stand, and where is it going?” with the participants: Bishop Markus Dröge, Professor Julius H. Schoeps, Professor Christoph Markschies, Rabbi Joel Berger, Professor Rainer Kampling und Professor Micha Brumlik, moderated by Dr. Werner Treß und Dr. Eva Harasta.

Brumlink began from the concept of “shyness with strangers” (“Fremdelns”), which—in the development of a child—is always noticeable when fears arise due to changes in the environment and the child has to form new relationships. The stranger can appear as a source of fascination or trembling.

Bishop Dröge showed—starting with the image of a pulpit with Moses as a fundamental pillar—that Judaism has a continuing importance as a sign of God’s faithfulness. Moreover, the Church must repeatedly “make clear the fundamental role of the Jewish faith for the Christian faith.”

Schoeps referred to the “Rhenish Synodal Resolution” of 1980. At that time, he was full of hope for the dawn of better times; but then the resolution was repeatedly criticized by various parties (and immediately by the Bonn and Münster theological faculties), who fundamentally rejected the resolution. For Schoeps, this aroused a skepticism over the sense of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

State Rabbi Berger was intensely critical of the behavior of specific parts of the Protestant Church (“Pietcong” [i.e. radical Pietists] in Württemberg parlance), asserting that dialogue would be used as a cover for pure Jewish mission, and that with highly questionable methods. Along the way, he called attention to the destructive activity of the so-called “Messianic Jews.”

The church historian Christoph Markschies pointed to the guilty history of theology at German universities. At the “Institutum Judaicum” [a preparatory course for Protestant theologians intending to engage in missionary work among Jews], the Old Testament was taught as a “placeholder of pre-Christian experience of God.” He expressed the wish that an information sign would be placed beside the memorial plaque for Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Berlin’s Humboldt University, which would indicate that in 1936 this university dismissed Dietrich Bonhoeffer as private docent, and moreover that the church historian Erich Seeberg energetically campaigned for the abrogation of the Old Testament and its replacement with texts from Meister Eckhart.

Professor Kampling stressed that since the [Second Vatican] Council resolution “Nostre aetate”—promulgated exactly 50 years ago and just now this day again realized through a Vatican pronouncement—it has become increasingly clear that Judaism is in salvation; Jesus as the mediator of salvation remains a mystery. “There is a thin trace of friendliness towards Jews in the history of theology!”

Overall, it was agreed that Jewish-Christian dialogue has generated many positive things. Bishop Dröge brought forth as evidence “Study in Israel” [a year-long study program for German theology students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem], new exegesis (“Preaching Meditations in Christian-Jewish Context” [a publication from “Study in Israel”]), various meetings and significant changes in preaching and religious education. Brumlik even spoke of a “success story.”

More critically, Professor Markschies noted that the departure taken in 1980 had not been carried on decisively enough, especially in the direction of the theological education of the following generations. Many emerging theologians simply lack a solid study of the Old Testament. Correspondingly, Micha Brumlik asserted that it is necessary for more Jewish people, especially from the younger generation, to become interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue. The Reformation jubilee of 2017 would surely illustrate this—there are still aspects [of the Jewish-Christian relationship] to be negotiated that revolve around more than simply narrowly religious matters.

Finally, it must be noted that despite the refusal of Slenczka to attend the meeting, a productive exchange of views took place, in which both Jews and Christians highlighted the importance of the Old Testament. The presentations illustrated how much the question of the importance of the Old Testament relates to the very core of Christian theology. It became clear that not the detachment but the engagement with the diversity and the richness of the canon is not only theologically necessary but also illustrative of the great benefit derived for Christianity from the participation in the Hebrew Bible. Thus the title image for the conference—the sculpture “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman—was very well chosen. The artwork illustrates how Jews and Christians can enter into a dialogue on eye level with one another on the foundation of a common collection of texts, and how the will of God can be rightly understood in their sacred scriptures.

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Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Pp. 260. ISBN 9783835316492.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Manfred Gailus’ newest contribution to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich is a collection of case studies of theologians, church leaders, and clergy whose writings or activities place them into the categories of perpetrators in or accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The various contributions are the product of a series of public lectures at the Topography of Terror in Berlin in 2013 and 2014. As such, none of the chapters in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 represent new research. Nonetheless, the volume is more than the sum of its parts, in the way that it demonstrates the depth and breadth of the Christian support for and participation in Nazi Germany. As Gailus notes at the end of his introduction, millions of tourists come to Berlin every year, eager to see the sites of Nazi power and commemorations of Jewish suffering. When they come to the Berlin Cathedral or other historic church buildings in central Berlin, they ask questions about the role of the churches in the Third Reich. Gailus argues it is vitally important that the churches work through the issue of Christian complicity in Hitler’s Germany, in order to provide honest answers to these questions and find a healthy way forward.

Gailus-TaeterFollowing Manfed Gailus’ introductory chapter, there are nine chapters (three by Gailus, six by a variety of other scholars) and a theological afterward by Christoph Markschies, church historian, theologian, and former president of Humboldt University. The various chapters link thematically with one another in fruitful ways. Gailus starts things off with an analysis of the Day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), the day on which Adolf Hitler opened the German parliament in the Garrison Church which had served Prussian monarchs for two hundred years. Drawing on his work in the 2011 book Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, Gailus describes the Day of Potsdam as a great, joyful “Yes” spoken by German Protestantism to Hitler and his National Socialism government. He describes in particular the key role played by Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and leading Protestant churchman in the region. It was Dibelius who was the main speaker at a special worship service in the Nikolaikirche in central Berlin, attended by a majority of Protestant members of parliament and Reich President Hindenburg before they made their way to Potsdam for the opening of the Reichstag. Dibelius chose Romans 8:31 as his text: “If God be for us, who can be against us.” Since this was the same text used by the imperial court preacher at the outset of the Great War in 1914, Dibelius was consciously connecting the patriotic spirit of the First World War to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. While there were quiet notes of criticism in Dibelius’ message, none other than Hermann Goering shook his hand afterwards and declared it to be the best sermon he had ever heard (35-37).

Gailus makes a strong case for the Day of Potsdam as an important component in the revival of institutional Protestantism during the opening months of Nazi rule. Here the German Christian Movement played the leading role. One of example of this is Gailus’ description of a special “patriotic thanksgiving service” held by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Parish on March 22. Meant to be an “ecclesiastical Potsdam,” the event depicted the German Christians as a mass movement parallel to National Socialism and celebrated the salvation of Germany from the “hell” of the godless Weimar Republic (41-42). In the end, Gailus explains the victory of the German Christians in the July 1933 church elections as the result of the fact that the majority of clergy and church people wanted this völkisch transformation, while the forces of opposition within the church were weak (46). “On the ‘Day of Postdam,’ half of society celebrated and acclaimed their ‘national awakening,’ while the other half of society was on the verge of being excluded, shackled, muzzled, and displaced” (47).

Film historian Ralf Forster follows up Gailus’ examination of the Day of Potsdam with a chapter analyzing the occasion as a propaganda event. Forster assesses the media coverage, particularly on radio and in newsreel footage. He notes the importance of the live radio broadcast of the day’s events and the many “special editions” of newspapers, some of which were printed later that same day, and were thus almost as current as the radio broadcasts. He also provides a detailed description of the newsreel footage of the Day of Potsdam, which brought the spectacle of the events at the Garrison Church to German moviegoers (57-60).

Next, editor Manfred Gailus contributes a second chapter, which shifts attention from the Day of Potsdam to the history of the takeover of Protestant church governments by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, especially in Berlin. German Christians united the National Socialist world view with the Christian tradition of belief, seeking to make belief in Jesus and belief in Hitler fully compatible. Gailus explains how the German Christian Movement cultivated mass ritual as its centerpiece, focusing of the Germanization of Protestant liturgy and the introduction of an ecclesiastical cult of flags (74). While the German Christians were initially successful in seizing the reigns of Protestant church governments, by 1934 they faced serious opposition, and over time they fell out of favour among the Nazi elites. This, Gailus suggests, makes it easy to believe they were insignificant. Rather, he argues they were a mass movement which dominated North Germany, Middle Germany, and East Elbian Prussia during the 1930s (78).

Horst Junginger, a professor of religious studies at Leipzig University, draws on his research on religion and antisemitism during the Nazi era to recount the career of theologian Gerhard Kittel, who joined both the German Christian Movement and the Nazi Party in 1933. Kittel’s publication The Jewish Question committed him to the antisemitic struggle against emancipation and equality for Jews in Germany and in turn elevated racial research to a central place in the University of Tübingen, making it into a “bulwark against Judaism,” as Kittel himself declared (87). As the “Jewish Question” became a subject of scientific and scholarly research, Kittel followed this agenda throughout the Third Reich, publishing articles and giving lectures as late as 1943 and 1944 for the Ministry of Propaganda and German universities. In doing so, he brought Christian anti-Judaism into the service of racial antisemitism (103-105).

Thomas Forstner, who recently published Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945, contributes a chapter on the phenomenon of the so-called Brown Priests. These pro-Nazi clergy were few in number compared to their Protestant counterparts—Forstner discusses fewer than 150 of them (123-124). He notes that the Roman Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from these priests, who were drawn to Nazism out of national sentiment or opportunism (not least to shed their celibacy) (129). Forstner discusses Joseph Roth and Albert Hartl as two examples of Catholic priests who engaged deeply with National Socialism.

Hansjörg Buss, author of “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950), carries the Protestant story forward with an assessment of the role of Hanns Kerrl, Hitler’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and his assistant, Hermann Muhs. He portrays Kerrl as a loyal servant, trying to accomplish the impossible task of unifying German Protestantism under church committees into order to fashion a centralized Reich Church adapted to National Socialism (148-149). This effort collapsed by 1937, and Christians like Kerrl lost favour year by year in the face of opposition from anti-Christian ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann. Kerrl’s assistant Muhs, a member of the radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement, suggested “an administrative dictatorship” to “annihilate the Confessing Church” (162). This he attempted to do in part through the use of the church finance office to put serious pressure on Confessing Church pastors and parishes.

Susannah Heschel, whose book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany has received extensive attention in this journal (here, here, and here), provides a useful overview of her important work on Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Through the Institute, Grundmann and others worked to develop an aryanized Christian confession for the Third Reich. Despite his leadership in such an obviously antisemitic venture, Grundmann retained his position within the Protestant church after 1945, even serving as an informer for the East German regime.

Manfred Gailus follows Susannah Heschel with a chapter on Karl Themel, Berlin pastor and race researcher. Themel was a member of the German Christian Movement, the SA, and the Nazi Party, eagerly taking up the position of “Expert for Race Research” with the Reich Interior Ministry. Working closely with the Reich Office for Geneological Research, Themel created an Office of Church Registers, Old Berlin. There they transferred the genealogical information of thousands of Berliners from these church records onto new identification cards, which were in turn used to check the Aryan ancestry of those who needed to prove their racial purity in order to take up various government positions. By 1941, Themel’s office had processed over 160,000 requests involving over 330,000 individuals, and had discovered over 2600 cases of Jewish ancestry—almost two cases per day, as Themel boasted late that year (209). Despite this direct participation in the implementation of Nazi antisemitic policy, Themel was rehabilitated by 1949, eventually taking up a pastorate in rural Brandenburg, then migrating back into archival work for the Berlin-Brandenburg church province! Upon his death, his work collecting and copying church registries in Berlin during the Third Reich was lauded as a service to the archival branch of the church (213). Not until 2002 was Themel’s work publicly denounced by church leaders (215).

Thomas Kaufmann’s chapter on influential church historian Erich Seeberg’s connections to the Nazi Party and the German Christian Movement offers another window into the ways individual theologians and church leaders navigated the Nazi era. In Seeberg’s case, his career revolved around research into transconfessional “German piety” which could be adapted easily to Nazi ideology (228). Seeberg studied Meister Eckhart and German mysticism, then applied his völkisch approach to the study of Martin Luther. Seeberg wanted to turn the Luther Renaissance into a “Luther Revolution.” This meant preaching a Luther who was “dangerous” and not “bourgeois” (229). Importantly, Seeberg also sought to recast theological education in a Nazi mold. His plans included revising theological curricula by abandoning historical-critical methodology and the study of the Hebrew language, replacing them with a “history of German piety” (241).

Finally, to complete the volume, Christoph Markschies writes on behalf of the Humboldt University Faculty of Theology, arguing that his institution still needs to engage in a thorough assessment of its activities during the Third Reich. This is a call very much in line with Gailus’ purpose for this volume, which is to demonstrate the extent to which German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Catholics voluntarily adapted themselves to Hitler’s regime and participated in the National Socialist quest to eliminate German Jewry and thereby “purify” the German racial community. Gailus is driven by the conviction that the German churches still have much work to do in coming to terms with this history. This volume contributes substantially to his project, by compiling some of the best of current research into the German churches in the Nazi era. It also demonstrates that there is still much to do before those Berlin tourists receive proper answers to their questions about the German churches in the time of Hitler.

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Review of Hans-Joachim Döring and Michael Haspel, eds., Lothar Kreyssig und Walter Grundmann. Zwei kirchenpolitische Protagonisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in Mitteldeutschland

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of Hans-Joachim Döring and Michael Haspel, eds., Lothar Kreyssig und Walter Grundmann. Zwei kirchenpolitische Protagonisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in Mitteldeutschland (Weimar: Wartburg Verlag, 2014). 132 Pp., ISBN 9783861602520.
By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Over the past twenty-five years, an enormous amount of interest has grown about the role of German Protestantism and its representatives during the period of the Third Reich. All sorts of new findings are appearing. One of the focuses of research has been on the so-called “German Christians” and their theological conflation of Protestantism and National Socialism; another is the fact that in recent years many of the provincial churches have begun to examine their own histories. For example, a conference held in 2012 and organized by the Lothar Kreyssig Ecumenical Center and the Evangelical Academy in Thuringia discussed the role of two controversial figures whose impact could hardly have been more different, namely Lothar Kreyssig and Walter Grundmann. The former was a member of the Confessing Church, who took a stand as a judge against the Nazi euthanasia program, while the latter was the ideological leader of the “German Christians” and academic director of the notorious Institute in Eisenach dedicated to the eradication of Jewish influence from German church life. The present volume which prints some of the papers given at that conference, as well as other contributions, demonstrates very clearly the ambiguous legacy the present German Protestant churches have to deal with.

Doering-HaspelAnke Silomon’s introductory chapter provides biographical details about both men. Even though she relies on already published research, the author does give a survey of their careers, which will be of value to those readers not familiar with the subject. Both men were born during the reign of the last Kaiser, and their careers spanned the whole period up to and including the time of the German Democratic Republic, i.e. after 1949. This is followed by an article by Oliver Arnhold, who in 2010 published a comprehensive study of the “German Christians” as well as of the Eisenach Institute, which took the title of“The Institute for the Research and Removal of Jewish influence on German church life”. This contribution was drawn from a lecture Arnhold gave in 2014, which was subsequently included in this volume, and concentrated primarily on the ill-fated Institute. Hence unfortunately this means that his portrait of Walter Grundmann, who is supposed to be the main topic of this volume, is too condensed.

For his part Tobias Schüfer discusses Grundmann’s understanding of the Church and the Law. He takes the view that for Grundmann freedom and equality were to be seen as “negative qualities, urgently needing to be abandoned” (p. 68). Such a pejorative opinion is not false, but also not new. More significantly, Schüfer’s article shows, on the basis of Grundmann’s post-war writings, the lack of any admission of guilt. Even though it was already clear that Grundmann never felt any personal guilt for his activities during the Nazi period, Schüfer confirms this conclusively by examining his post-war writings and his subsequent treatment of his earlier publications.

The most interesting and rewarding article in this book is that provided by Torsten Lattki, who proves, through a detailed examination of Grundmann’s depictions of the Pharisees, both before and after 1945, that Grundmann never abandoned his anti-Jewish opinions. In all of his writings the Pharisees are seen as being the true Jews, and excerpts are produced from both pre-and post-war publications, which clearly show that Grundmann continued to hold and express his polemical opinions. To be sure, his antisemitism and his attempts to depict Jesus as “un-Jewish” were more subtly voiced in his later years of teaching in East Germany. These points have already been made in the large-scale studies by Susannah Heschel and Oliver Arnhold, but Lattki has produced the most convincing evidence that Grundmann continued to expound his antisemitic views even after the end of the Third Reich. Equally significant is Lattki’s contention that Grundmann’s works and methods of study were all part of the contemporary Zeitgeist, which found a considerable following among theologians, students, and lay people in both east and west Germany (p. 92). It will be one of the task of future researchers to establish just how influential was Grundmann’s antisemitic picture of Judaism.

The essay by Karl Wilhelm Niebuhr stands in a marked contrast to the above scholarly contributions by Schüfer and Lattki, since it is largely a repeat of an earlier article from a 2007 collection. He is trying to show that, even though Grundmann did express anti-Jewish sentiments, he was largely being misled and misused by the Nazis. Thus he seeks to prove that the Eisenach Institute was only a marginal operation, and that Grundmann and his closest colleagues were “only a relatively small minority, never taken seriously in the academic world” (p.37). This reviewer is not convinced. The evidence surely shows well enough that articles by the leading figures in this Institute were accepted by prestigious journals such as the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft or the Theologische Literaturzeitung. Grundmann’s picture of a non-Jewish Jesus or the claim that the positions of Christianity and Judaism were incompatible and contradictory found a considerable following in the academic community of the 1930s and 1940s? We have only got to think of his teacher Johannes Leipoldt or the later director of the Institute Georg Bertram to see that both the Institute, its staff and its findings were widely known. In addition we could cite the activity of the well-known scholar of Persia Hans Hermann Schaeder who quite deliberately used the Institute’s facilities in order to propagate his conclusions about the racial connections between Eastern and Western religions. His attempt to reach a wider academic community by this means, however, failed to gain much support even from the “German Christians” with whom he had little or nothing in common ideologically. Niebuhr’s contention that Grundmann never argued in the sense of a “biologically-based racism” (p. 39), but believed that the separation between Jews and Christians was due solely to religious factors, is not provable. But we have to remember that such pioneers of this kind of völkisch thinking as Houston Stewart Chamberlain saw religion as one of the central characteristics of racial identity, and equally accounted for religious differences as being derived from racial characteristics, in exactly the same way as Grundmann was later to argue. The latest research, for example by Horst Junginger, whom Niebuhr quotes in a footnote, has convincingly proved that the so-called racial antisemitism was based on religious factors. And Grundmann, like other well-known researchers in the field of religious studies, such as Karl Georg Kuhn or Carl Schneider, sought to show that Jews had singular racial characteristics which Jesus allegedly and diametrically opposed. According to Niebuhr, Grundmann never enjoyed any following among the proponents of “a biologically-based racial antisemitism.” Indeed his views were perhaps rejected by such men (p. 42). It would have been good if Niebuhr had provided some quotations to back up such risky claims. The same is true for his suggestion that Susannah Heschel’s study of Grundmann and the Eisenach Institute has now been “largely superseded”.

The second protagonist in this volume, Lothar Kreyssig, is unfortunately described in only two articles, which are not enough to do him justice. He was after all one of the most active members of the anti-Nazi opposition, whose behavior demonstrated how churchmen could have behaved differently. And he continued the same oppositional stance against the dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic after 1949. Axel Noack describes his activities in the post-1945 era, such as his leadership in founding the Aktion Sühnezeichen (a religiously motivated German Peace Corps), or his attempts to establish a collaboration between Catholics and Protestants, which ran into considerable opposition among the more rigidly-minded church authorities. Erardo C. Rautenberg presents his findings about Kreyssig’s views on legal matters during the Third Reich. Written from a juristic perspective, this is a promising subject, but could have been more fully developed.

It is a pity that Lothar Kreyssig was not given more space in this volume of collected essays instead of the superfluous pieces about Walter Grundmann which can in any case be found elsewhere. It was an opportunity missed.

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Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2010): 431–94.

Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 257–79.

Many of our readers will be familiar with Susannah Heschel’s important and widely-reviewed work, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Fewer may know of these two articles from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, which take up the long-standing debate over the use of “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” in the context of Christian hostility towards Jews and Judaism, whether in pre-modern Christian history or in the history of the Holocaust. This exchange between New Testament scholar Robert Morgan and Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel highlights key disciplinary differences between theological and historical approaches to this question. Morgan hopes to distinguish between various theoretical categories of Jew hatred, while Heschel focuses on the historical confluence of theological, cultural, and racial attitudes and language of hostility towards Jews.

In his sixty-page critique of Heschel’s book, Morgan argues that The Aryan Jesus presents a one-sided impression of 1930s German church history,” based on a “failure to distinguish clearly between the churches and the völkisch movement that stands behind Nazi antisemitism.” (431) In contrast to her, he makes the case for a conceptual distinction between medieval Christian antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and modern secular antisemitism.

Morgan minimizes the connection between modern German theological developments and the participation of masses of German Protestants and Catholics in the Holocaust–simply put, for Morgan, the failure of Christians of the Nazi period to live up to their beliefs was nothing unusual in the history of Christianity, and didn’t require an associated failure of theology. In that vein, he argues that the efforts of theologian Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established in 1939) had little if anything to do with the Holocaust (434).

With this as his starting point, Morgan raises the broader question of the historical relationship between theological anti-Judasim and secular antisemitism. His answer revolves around setting theological scholars like Grundmann and those involved in the Institute, who “introduced the racial issue into their older liberal Protestant theology,” into a separate category from the masses of Christians who supported the Hitler movement during and after 1933. He maintains that Heschel fails to examine Grundmann’s theological context in sufficient detail or to assess carefully enough his relationship to and responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In contrast, Morgan argues that the Institute was an outgrowth of a particular radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement. Apart from this development, most Germans were caught up in “a pervasive antisemitism” which was fueled by factors like “nationalism, hostility to modernity, to secularism, to left-wing politics, resentment against rich bankers at a time of national distress, and a perceived disproportionate influence of assimilated Jews in the professions and national life. But little of this passive antisemitism was ideologically driven, as it was in the völkisch movement and its political expression in the National Socialist party” (441). Morgan goes on to distinguish what he calls “this (passive) cultural antisemitism” from both “the more aggressive völkisch racist antisemitism” and “theological anti-Judaism” (441). Morgan admits that “some modern antisemitism surely included religious and tribal echoes and memories along with its more obvious social, political and economic ingredients,” but argues we still need more investigation about “how far (when at all) it was fuelled by theological anti-Judaism” (441). As a way to distinguish between older and newer eras, he introduces a new term for medieval and Reformation-era Jew hatred, which he calls “theological antisemitism,” and which occurs “where monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ lead directly to antisemitism.” Moving forward to the Nazi era, Morgan argues that theologians like Grundmann and Gerhard Kittel were not guilty of this “medieval ‘theological antisemitism'” but rather promoted a “poisonous modern antisemitism” which was “distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship” (441). Their scholarship, which contained a measure of “theological anti-Judaism,” was “less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism” (441-442).

What emerges from this detailed process of categorization is the sense that Morgan would like to rescue the term “theological anti-Judaism” and redefine it to mean simply the disagreement of Christians with Jews concerning the one God they both worship–in other words, criticisms of the religion, not the people. As an example of his granular approach to categories of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, Morgan describes the Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller as “untouched by racial theory,” but sharing in “the pervasive cultural antisemitism of the time, which was presumably reinforced by the tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism and even contained residual traces of ‘theological antisemitism’.” This was, Morgan adds, “social and cultural non-violent antisemitism” (444).

Morgan continues in this vein throughout the rest of the article, criticizing Heschel for not distinguishing clearly between various scholarly theological developments, cultural antisemitism, the rise of the völkisch movement and Nazi party, nationalism, and racism (461). He is willing to admit to the indirect influence of theology on popular belief, but attempts to keep these areas as distinct as possible (465). In his conclusion, he reasserts that Heschel has not properly demonstrated the “contributions of theological anti-Judaism to Christian antisemitism,” that Christianity is not racialist, nor a kind of anti-Judaism, nor antisemitic, though Christians themselves have acted in those ways (488-489).

Not surprisingly, Heschel disagrees with Morgan’s critique, particularly with respect to his categories of theological anti-Judaism, and modern, racial antisemitism. In her article, she argues “that the texts of pro-Nazi German Protestant theologians integrate race and religion with a fluidity that obviates a sharp distinction between the two terms. Antisemitic propaganda produced by Christian theologians during World War II leaves the strictly theological realm in its use of Nazi language and concepts, even when framed in a Christian context, and demands a different kind of conceptualization by historians” (257).

In the first instance, Heschel highlights the significant difference between her approach and that of Morgan, noting how she and many other scholars “no longer find the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and antisemitism to be helpful.” She argues this categorization tends to “mask rather than illuminate the historical material we are studying,” and that she and many other scholars are now “less interested in establishing definitions and boundaries than in finding slippages, similarities, influences and parallels” (258). More concretely, Heschel demonstrates how intertwined Christian and Nazi racial ideas were with one another. For instance, she characterizes Morgan’s view that Martin Niemöller exhibited cultural antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and theological antisemitism as “quite a brew” (258). To drive this home, she asks how we should understand the mixture of ideas in the speech of Siegfried Leffler, a well-known leader in the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, who stated in 1936: “Even if I know ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God or ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ” (258-259). Simply put, Heschel doesn’t find Morgan’s taxonomy useful as a means to historical explanation. Instead, she points out how the historical context of Leffler’s words–the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between “Aryan” Germans and Jews and the widespread fear-mongering about the dangers of Jewish impurity–goes a long ways to explaining the passion in Leffler’s outburst against the dangers of Jews and Judaism for German Christianity.

Heschel also questions Morgan’s chronological differentiation between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with theological anti-Judaism giving way to secular racism and antisemitism. Indeed, she notes how this view has been abandoned by many scholars, who prefer to describe all hostility to Jews and Judaism as antisemitism. Religious hostility, which might be called anti-Judaism, is just another kind of antisemitic discourse, alongside economic, political, nationalistic, or racial modes of speech. For instance, Heschel quotes a New Testament scholar, who explained: “The problem is that even in the patristic and medieval eras, long before the coinage of the term antisemitism as such, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the racial and religious/ethnic elements. Form many of these authors, as I’ve seen in my Caiaphas research, Jews were by their nature evil, and their rejection/killing of Christ is evidence of that evil nature” (260). Heschel adds that racial language and imagery were used to describe Jewish degeneracy in the Middle Ages, creating “an otherness of the Jewish body … that, already by the thirteenth century, was believed to be immutable and incapable of erasure even by baptism” (260).

As for the Nazi era, Heschel lists four reasons why scholars increasingly employ “antisemitism” to describe Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism: 1) explicitly Nazi language plays a central role in Christian discussions of Jews, while older terms took on new connotations in the Third Reich; 2) negative theological statements about Jews have to be understood in their wider social and political context; 3) “‘das Judentum’ is an ambiguous term in German,” meaning “Judaism, the Jews, or Jewishness,” which in turn creates an ambiguity in German theological language; and 4) “given the Nazi regime’s policies towards the Jews, terms such as ‘Entjudung’ (dejudaization) of Christianity or ‘Beseitigung’ (eradication) of Jewish influences insinuate practical implications and not just theoretical allusions” (261).

Heschel goes on to criticize Morgan for an outdated historical understanding of the German Christian Movement and an outdated theoretical understanding of the relationship between racism and nationalism, providing examples to show how racially-oriented German Protestant leaders were. For instance, she notes how Walter Grundmann “spoke about fighting on the ‘spiritual battlefield’ to protect Germans from Jews, Christianity from Judaism,” how he described “Jews as the underlying enemy of Germany,” and how he wrote that “‘the Jew’ is ‘the Antichrist [who] wants to unleash itself and overthrow the Reich’ through the war, Bolshevism and liberalism” (264). Heschel adds that this mixture of theological and racial antisemitism can be found in Grundmann’s scholarly and popular writing, making it impossible to separate his words and ideas into different categories of antisemitism.

Heschel restates the interpretation she puts forward in The Aryan Jesus: Grundmann and his colleagues “were theologians predisposed to accept the nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler and to view politics through religious lenses.” They viewed Nazism as a means to revitalize Christianity and sought to support Nazism with spiritual means. “To that end, Nazism had to be defined as embodying Christian values, and Christianity as embodying Nazi values.” They sought “to eradicate Jewishness from Christianity, just as the Reich sought to eradicate Jews from Europe” (265). And Nazi theologians need to be understood not only in their theological context, but also in their political and social context. She illustrates this last point by reminding Morgan (and her readers) of the wide-ranging evidence of Grundmann’s Nazi affinities and activities and the broad consensus of scholars such as Robert Ericksen, Guenter Lewy, and Kevin Spicer. In the end, Grundmann and his theological allies provided Hitler with ideological and propaganda support for “the disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews,” (268) just as so many other academics and functionaries did throughout German institutional life.

To summarize, Heschel argues persuasively that the older distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism is increasingly difficult to sustain, given current scholarship on either historic Christianity or the churches in the Third Reich. This is certainly the interpretive path most historians now follow. Taken together, the Morgan and Heschel articles outline the two main perspectives in this terminological debate.

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April 2009 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

April 2009 — Vol. XV, no. 4

 Dear Friends,

O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid!
Ist das nicht zu beklagen
Gott des Vaters einigs Kind
Wird ins Grab getragen

O grosse Not!
Gotts Sohn liegt tot
Am Kreuz ist er gestorben
Hat dadurch das Himmelreich
Uns aus Lieb erworben

O Jesu, du
Mein Hilf und Ruh
Ich bitte dich mit Tränen:
Hilf, dass ich mich bis ins Grab
Nach dir möge sehnen.
Johann Rist, 1607-1667

At this Eastertide, we rejoice in the hope given to us in the Resurrection of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, but also we recall His sufferings on the Cross, and those of His Church during its long and troubled history. The Lutheran hymn above, written four centuries ago, surely attests to these two realities, as do the books reviewed below.

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Gailus, Kirchliche Amtshilfe
b) Vromen, Hidden children of the Holocaust in Belgium
c) Heschel, The Aryan Jesus
d) Wickeri, Reconstructing China – K.H.Ting
e) Clark, Allies for Armageddon

2) Journal issue, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Contemoporary Church History, 2008, no. 2

1a) ed. Manfred Gailus, Kirchliche Amtshilfe. Die Kirche und die Judenverfolgung im “Dritten Reich”. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008. 223 Pp. ISBN 978-3-525–55340-4.

One of the earliest discriminatory measures taken by the Nazis against German Jews was the passing in April 1933 of the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. This prohibited anyone having Jewish ancestors from holding positions in the state civil service. including the judiciary, the universities, schools and hospitals. Hundreds of thousands were affected. Many of them were church-goers, who now found it necessary to seek clarification as to whether they had any Jewish forebears. The only way this could be done was by consulting the parish registers, which by long standing decrees of the Prussian monarchy, had been carefully maintained for several hundred years. Births, marriages, deaths and particularly baptisms were all recorded. So in 1933, the local parishes were inundated with requests to examine these registers, since anyone seeking a job in the public service needed to provide proof that he was of “pure” German origin. At the same time, there were various zealots among the parish clergy who wholeheartedly welcomed the Nazi attempt to “purify” German society by discovering the extent to which their congregations had become “polluted” by intermarriage with, or baptism of, “foreign elements”, particularly Jews. These pastors readily gave support to the idea that the “pure” German community of blood “should safeguard Germany’s eternal future”, or alternatively that “mixed” marriages, even in the distant past, had been a disastrous development which should now be rectified.

In the mood of 1933, when the vast majority of pastors and their congregations welcomed Adolf Hitler as Germany’s saviour from national humiliation and/or the danger of racial contamination, the search for alleged Jewish miscegenation was seen as a national duty. No pastor objected. Soon enough, the genealogical zealots, all confessing their devotion to the Nazi cause, took over the organization of this nation-wide investigation. Thousands of parish records were gathered together in centralized regional offices, where huge card indexes were prepared, carefully listing the names and dates when “alien elements’ had crept into the church. In the view of some of these fanatical pastors, this process had been part of a deliberate Jewish plot to undermine the “pure German” character of the church. Their duty was to oppose this subtle and dangerous process. As one bigoted pastor from Schleswig-Holstein declared: “it was the duty of the priest to record with diligence this past pollution of our nation’s purity, and to ensure that it never happens again.”
In most cases, pastors receiving requests to search their registers obediently complied, since they were officially the keepers of the state’s records and statistics. It was their patriotic duty to obey the law, which they then conscientiously carried out. Of course, in 1933, no one could have known what such discriminatory measures would later lead to. But none could have failed to realize the portentous effect of this kind of discrimination and exclusion from the majority in the church. It was all willingly enough undertaken.

Those who collaborated in these endeavours, which were often to have such fatal consequences for those affected, had no regrets at the time. Nor any since. After 1945, these activities were all covered over with a blanket of amnesia and the bureaucratic paper trail was carefully buried.

This is a story without any redeeming features, all the more since the majority of the pastors involved returned, after 1945, to regular parish work. Their pro-Nazi participation and/or sympathy, even if investigated, was largely brushed under the carpet. Some were even complemented on their “diligent and energetic genealogical researches”.

We therefore owe Professor Manfred Gailus and his team of authors a debt of gratitude for writing up so competently this disgraceful story, and for describing the stages by which church officials assisted the Nazi racial campaign of persecution at one of its most intrusive points. As they note, the only opposition to this Nazi-induced enterprise came from the reluctance of several pastors, especially in the rural areas, to be parted from their parish registers; alternatively some argued that they could not spare the time to undertake the necessary researches, or that they lacked the financial resources to employ people with sufficient skills in the use of dusty and long-forgotten records. In some parts of Germany, this desire to co-ordinate and centralize the discovery of Jewish forebears amongst the parishioners had only meagre results. Nevertheless the attempt remains a sad stain upon the church’s history. We can surely be grateful to Professor Gailus for his continuing efforts to undertake the task of coming to terms with this and other portions of the German Evangelical Church’s problematic past.
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1b) Suzanne Vromen, Hidden Children of the Holocaust. Belgian Nuns and their daring rescue of young Jews from the Nazis. Oxford University press, 2008. 178 Pp. ISBN 078-0-29.318128-9

The saga of the Jewish children saved from the Nazis’ persecution during the Holocaust is always heart-wrenching. In Belgium, which figures only occasionally in holocaust historiography, little is known about the rescue work undertaken mainly by nuns, who hid the children in numerous convents across the land. Suzanne Vromen’ s account breaks new ground and is therefore valuable in filling this gap.

Compiled principally from the survivors’ testimonies, Vromen has interviewed many of these, both boys and girls, whose names were later recorded. She has produced a systematic and comparative evaluation of their treatment and eventual rescue, and does so with a sympathetic stance, since she herself only narrowly escaped the same experience. She pays particular tribute to the courage and foresight of the Mothers Superior of the convents, and their readiness to extend help to these children, despite their knowledge of the risks they ran. At the same time, this was all the more unexpected, since these convents were among the most traditional institutions in a strongly Catholic country. Pre-Vatican II attitudes were widespread. Anti-semitic stereotypes were commonly expressed, but aversion to the German occupation and its repressive policies prevailed. At the same time, Vromen takes care to refute the accusations that these nuns were motivated either by the desire for financial gain, or by proselytizing motives. Certainly, as she notes, many of these hidden children were baptized so that they could more fully participate in the numerous daily Catholic rituals. But, in Vromen’s estimation this was primarily in order to make them inconspicuous, and succeeded in this attempt.

The testimonies she gathered show a wide spectrum amongst the children from those who gladly adopted a new Catholic identity to those who resisted any loss of their Jewishness. After the war very considerable efforts were made to reconnect the children with their parents. If the parents had not survived, the children were given to a Jewish agency, necessarily impersonal and eager only to preserve them as a precious remnant. Undoubtedly many of the nuns were reluctant to see their charges depart to such an uncertain future. But Vromen gives the benefit of doubt about their intentions.

The convents varied greatly in size and character. But all shared in a very traditional institutional style, laced with Catholic piety, which imposed on all inmates an often rigid conformity. Vromen estimates that approximately two hundred such institutions were involved in this rescue work. She provides an excellent account of the daily lives in war-time. Like all such schools and homes, the children and their caretakers were obliged to suffer the rigours of war-time conditions, with the oppression of the foreign occupation forces, the dangers of bombing raids, the scarcity of food, the cold of winters and the absence of recreation. For the Jewish children there were the added dangers of detection and the lack of knowledge about their parents’ fate. At the same time, accepting these children demanded special qualities and competence from the convents and their staffs. Particularly the role of the Mother Superior was crucial. The burden placed on these women for the success of their rescue missions here receives due acknowledgment.

The fact that, in later years, many of these nuns were awarded the title of “Righteous Gentiles” speaks favourably about how their loving care was remembered by their charges. Vromen was fortunate in being able to interview many of these nuns, whose memories were still sharp, despite their advanced ages, fifty or more years after the events recalled. Necessarily, since no records were kept at the time, these recollections are now indispensable. Vromen’s research therefore helps to break the silence which so long veiled the story of these hidden children and pays tribute to the courageous and steadfast nuns who sheltered and cared for them . The regrettable fact is that these women have only received belated recognition in recent years in post-war Belgium, in contrast to the men who participated in the more dramatic armed resistance. It is also regrettable that the Belgian Catholic Church has not seen fit to make any institutional commemoration of their humanitarian endeavours. Vromen’s tribute is therefore both timely and appropriate.
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1c) Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton Univ. Press. 384p $29.95

(This review appeared in America Magazine, February 16, 2009, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author)

Founded in 1939 against the background of Nazi dominance by a group of German Protestant theologians, pastors and churchgoers, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life sought to redefine Christianity as a Germanic religion whose founder, Jesus, was not a Jew but rather an opponent of Judaism who fought valiantly to destroy Judaism but fell victim in that struggle.

This volume presents the history of that institute: how it came into being and won approval and financing from church leaders, the nature of the “dejudaized” New Testament and hymnal that it published, the many conferences and lectures that it organized, and those who joined and became active members especially from the academic world and in particular its academic director, Walter Grundmann (1906-74).

Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, is the daughter of the famous Jewish scholar and religious activist, Abraham Heschel. She grew up hearing from her father and his friends about the German academic scene in the 1920s and 1930s. Her interest in Grundmann’s institute was piqued in the late 1980s, and she has worked on this project for many years, especially since the pertinent archives became accessible. She has an interesting and important story to tell about the political corruption of academic Christian theological scholarship, and she tells it very well. She offers abundant quotations from the publications and correspondence of the major figures. Just when the reader feels the need for more background information about a particular person or topic, Heschel supplies it. She retains the objectivity appropriate to a historian without glossing over the horror of her topic and the scoundrels who perpetrated it.

One of the institute’s preoccupations was to dejudaize Jesus. Along with some other distinguished German biblical scholars of the time, Grundmann and his colleagues contended that Jesus descended from the non-Jewish population of Galilee, that he struggled heroically against Judaism, and finally fell into the hands of the Judean officials who had him put to death. For Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s who were struggling against what they were told was an international Jewish conspiracy, the “Aryan Jesus” was proposed as a symbol of their own struggle. Their task was to complete successfully the struggle that the Aryan Jesus had begun. As a means toward that end, some “German Christians” saw the need to divest Christianity of its Jewish elements and to produce a purified Christianity fit for the future thousand-year Reich.

The impetus for this project came first of all from the long German tradition of theological anti-Judaism. Added to that tradition were the “race” theories that had emerged more recently and the rise to political power of Hitler and the Nazi party. Moreover, there had developed within German Protestantism a split between the “German Christians” and the “Confessing Church.” The “German Christians” took more eagerly to the task of ridding Christianity of its Jewish elements and developing a new kind of Christianity supposedly more consistent with the Nazi ideology that they saw coming to power before their eyes. One of the strongholds of the German Christian movement was the region of Thuringia, and the institute dedicated to eradication of Jewish influence on the German church had its home in Jena. While not officially sponsored by the University of Jena, Grundmann and several of his co-workers were faculty members there.

Grundmann became the institute’s academic director and driving force. In his mid-30s he had been lecturing and writing about “Jesus the Galilean” and drawing parallels between Jesus’ alleged struggle against Judaism and the contemporary German situation. He was a popular teacher and lecturer, and had many contacts in the German academic world. His own teachers included Adolf Schlatter and Gerhard Kittel, very distinguished scholars whose writings were often tinged with anti-Judaism. In his work for the institute Grundmann organized conferences that attracted other scholars, and so widened the institute’s influence. Even when paper was scarce, Grundmann managed to get published his own writings and those of scholars sympathetic to the institute’s goals.

One of the institute’s first projects was the production of a dejudaized translation of the New Testament. This involved purging the Synoptic Gospels of positive references to Judaism, eliminating the biographical and autobiographical notices about Paul’s Jewishness and highlighting the negative comments about “the Jews” in John’s Gospel. Another project was a dejudaized hymnbook, in which Jewish language and concepts were eliminated and replaced by songs about war and the “fatherland.” A dejudaized catechism presented Jesus as a Galilean whose message and conduct stood in opposition to Judaism. These publications were widely circulated and had great influence.

Two issues central to the Christian Bible presented problems for Grundmann and his colleagues: the Old Testament and Paul. While many in the German Christian movement wanted to jettison the Old Testament, some (mainly professors of Old Testament) wanted to retain it as evidence of Jewish perfidy and degeneracy, often using the ancient Israelite prophets’ denunciations against the Jewish people of the present. Since Paul had been the theological hero in Luther’s Protestant Reformation, he could not be so easily purged. The solution was to use Paul’s general ideas and play down or omit what seemed too “Jewish” about his person and theology.

The Nazis’ reception of Grundmann’s institute was mixed. Some officials welcomed the support of the German Christians and of the institute in particular. However, other highly placed Nazis did not want to encourage a renewed German Christianity that might rival their own plans for a Nordic paganism entirely without Christian elements. For members of the Confessing Church and the Catholic Church (despite their own forms of anti-Judaism), the goals and projects of the institute and the German Christians seemed too radical. While this mixed reception was a great disappointment to Grundmann and his colleagues, it became their salvation after the defeat of the Nazis.

In the superficial “denazification” process after the war, Grundmann and his colleagues portrayed themselves as scholars of Judaism, victims of Nazi persecution and heroes responsible for the church’s survival. They wrote recommendations for one another, attested to one another’s integrity and took up former or new positions in the church and the university. Grundmann continued to publish books and articles without apology, and even turned up as an informant for the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Heschel has a remarkable story to tell. Her reliance on primary sources and her objectivity are impressive. One comes away from her account wondering how such apparently intelligent and learned Christian scholars could have been so foolish and craven. While there were several causes, Heschel’s narrative demonstrates once more the noxious power of Christian theological anti-Judaism, especially among those who should have known better.

Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., is professor of New Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry and editor of New Testament Abstracts.

1d) Philip Wickeri, Reconstructing Christianity in China – K. H. Ting and the Chinese Church, Maryknoll NY, Orbis Books, 2007, 516 pp., US$ 50.00, American Society of Missiology Studies, no. 41.

(This review appeared first in the International Review of Missions, September 2008)

This is a most remarkable book, about a remarkable Christian man and leader, living through some of the most remarkable upheavals, threats and in the end resurrection developments of the Christian Church in China. It is also written by a remarkable disciple, the only foreigner to date to be ordained in China to the Christian ministry within the Chinese Protestant Church. Like many earlier studies in this North American Series, it is not quick, still less easy reading, but will deserve to be read and studied for many years.

Wickeri first met Bishop Ting in 1979, when he was invited to serve ‘as an interpreter for the Chinese inter-religious delegation at the Third World Conference on Religion and Peace’ (p.4) which took place at Princeton Theological Seminary where Wickeri was a doctoral student. The thesis he wrote became in 1988 the comparably full and important study Seeking the Common Ground – Protestant Christianity, the Three-Self Movement and China’s United Front (Maryknoll, Orbis Books) which remains a key study of the more general inter-action between Chinese Communist rule and the faith and practice of Chinese Protestant Christians over the 40 years following the Communist taking of power in 1949. The new book is all the more interesting both for covering the same history through the faith and thinking of a particular person and leader, while also continuing the story into the present when Bishop Ting, now 92 and restricted to a wheelchair, is still taking a lively interest in all that is happening in and around the Church he has served so well.

The book is a biography of a particular person, yet also takes the reader through a richly documented story of what was happening at each stage both to China as a nation and to the total Protestant community within which K. H. Ting grew up and of which he became a major leader as it was allowed to rediscover itself and its vocation under the government led by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. He was born in Shanghai, into a family attached to St Peter’s Church, a congregation of the then Anglican Church in that city’s International Settlement, where his maternal grandfather had been a deacon and priest in the early part of the century. His university studies were in the Anglican foundation, St John’s University, Shanghai, where after one year in engineering he transferred to theology, almost all of his studies being taken in the English language which he has spoken and written perfectly ever since.

The three main sections of the book take the reader through the three very different periods of Bishop Ting’s long life: that of the Japanese occupation, the Second World War, and his five years of international service in Canada, New York and Geneva during the civil war in China and the war in Korea; then the years of ‘Deconstructing Christianity in China’ while settling into living under Communist rule and the upheavals that the chaotic ‘cultural revolution’ of 1966-76 consisted of and was followed by; and then the restoration, indeed rebirth, of Christianity since the late 1970s until today. In each period we are taken deeply into Bishop Ting’s own experience and handling of all the uncertainties and tensions, thanks in particular to recorded interviews that he gave Wickeri in the early 1990s when the latter was serving in the Hong Kong office of the Amity Foundation that has proved to be one of Bishop Ting’s most creative initiatives. Wickeri insists in his Introduction that the book is ‘not an approved or authorized biography’, though Bishop Ting ‘has cooperated with me at different stages in the process of writing and research’ (p. 9), and that he takes responsibility himself for his interpretation and evaluation of major themes within it all – with 64 crowded pages of Notes and a Bibliography of 43 pages indicating just how much care he has taken !

Space forbids any attempt to enter into the fascinating detail of this whole story, for instance the crucial role in Ting’s career played more than once, above all during the ‘cultural revolution’, by Chairman Mao’s second-in-command, Zhou Enlai, whom Ting may have met in his boyhood, and whose secretary in the 1940s was a schoolmate of his wife’s (p.53) ! Or into Ting’s relationship with the Buddhist leader Zhao Puchu, a close companion in membership of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference from 1959 onwards, and whose commitment to Ting is movingly reflected in an Ode (a Ci in Mandarin) the monk wrote for him, probably at a particularly low moment in 1973, which, in English, is printed – and ‘translated’ in the appended footnote – on p. 197f.

Yet of course it is Bishop Ting’s ever-growing responsibilities in and for the Christian (which is how Protestants are identified, in distinction from Catholics, in Mandarin) Church(es) in China, which provide the bulk of the material of this rich book, from Ting’s early, short pastorate after graduation from St John’s in a wartime and occupied Shanghai, all the way through an extraordinarily demanding life, to his efforts after ‘retirement’ to re-shape the theological outlook of the Church by a long series of articles, addresses and other writings devoted to ‘Theological Reconstruction’ (see pp. 346ff.). By this, which has not been always popular among Ting’s many colleagues around the country, he means above all looking out more widely, more lovingly and more exploringly, on to the total human scene in and beyond the People’s Republic.

Throughout, the book is centrally interested in the development of Ting’s theological understanding and the practical principles and decisions to which that has led, not least in the endless weighing during most of the story of what can and cannot be openly said or done in the light of the political leadership and its sensitivities at each different stage. One would like to think that the weight of care Ting has shown throughout his life in this field could be softening in these latest years. Yet what has been happening around Taiwan, Tibet and the Olympic games in 2008 surely indicates that the Christian leaders of today and tomorrow are likely to find themselves facing a no less care-filled and sensitive set of roles to play than those faced by Bishop K.H. Ting over the 60 and more years so fully documented here.

Dr Martin Conway, Oxford, chairman of the Friends of the Church in China from 1994 – 2000.

1e) Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon. The Rise of Christian Zionism. New Haven an London: Yale University Press. 2007. 331 Pp. ISBN 978-0-300-11698-4

Victoria Clark is a British writer, who earlier gave us an insightful study of the Christian churches in the Balkans in the aftermath of Communist rule. She now turns to a more lurid subject, the often spectacular witness of the so-called Christian Zionists, who form part of the contemporary American Religious Right. This community with its extreme views, both theological and political, is best known for its successful mobilization of assistance for the State of Israel, and the remarkable amount of financial support it has garnered for Israel’s cause. This significant minority among American Protestant fundamentalists derives its beliefs from certain early Puritans with their addiction to taking biblical prophecies literally, if selectively. These included an unshakable eschatological belief in the immanence of Jesus’ Second Coming, along the lines fervently preached by the early nineteenth century British evangelist, John Nelson Darby. His advocacy was based on a time frame which included the restoration of all Jews to their promised biblical homeland, the rise of the Anti-Christ, the seven years of Tribulation, the devastating Battle of Armageddon, the Rapture of the saved Christians into heaven, followed by the Last Days and then the End of the World. It was all part of God’s prophetic and immutable plan.

The first part of Clark’s book is devoted to a well-researched study of the origins and development of these beliefs, and their impact on Christian society, especially in Britain and America. Even before the rise of the modern secular Zionist movement, this Protestant faction under such leaders as the Earl of Shaftesbury had fostered the idea of restoring Europe’s Jews to their ancient territories. Such concepts undoubtedly played a significant part in the British Government’s issuing of the 1917 Balfour declaration in support of a Jewish national home in Palestine, and later led to President Truman’s immediate recognition of the newly-established State of Israel in 1948. Such steps were all interpreted by this sect as proof of their correct discernment of the signs of the pre-millennial age.

The second half of the book describes Clark’s personal interviews with a number of American Christian Zionist leaders. She becomes increasingly dismayed by the rigidity and dogmatism of their biblically-based eschatology, even if the leaders are coy about the exact methods or timing when their predictions will take place. But all can agree on the American Christians’ duty to aid and abet the Jewish state, even suggesting the desirability of using nuclear strikes to attack such implacable enemies of Israel as Muslim fundamentalists or the Iranian nation. They have no sympathy at all for the Christian Arabs of the Middle East, whose plight is ignored even while huge Christian resources are deployed to sponsor new Jewish settlements in the West Bank territories, as well as to assist in the return of more Jews from exile elsewhere. Any talk of compromise with Israel’s opponents, or any suggestion that a two-state solution on the soil of Palestine would be preferable, is regarded as a sign of weakness, comparable to the appeasement of Nazism practised by the ill-fated British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. It must be resolutely and utterly condemned.

Clark also devotes considerable space in describing the highly organized tactics of this group on the American political scene. A plethora of lobbying organizations in Washington and elsewhere has developed a significant political impact, assisted by the sympathetic hearings they received from President George W. Bush. Such agencies are backed by the effective rallying of support at the local parish level, especially in such hard-line areas as Texas and Colorado. Clark’s forays to meet such crusading pastors on their home ground only revealed the chasm in understanding between her liberal and balanced agnosticism and the dogmatic bible-based certitudes of her hosts. She rightly wonders how such flamboyant displays of religious nationalism can be described as Christian, and makes clear her increasing distaste of such apocalyptic aggressiveness. Even if the most recent political developments in the United States have seen a decline in the fortunes of these militant and dedicated campaigners, nevertheless the pressures to maintain the flow of vast American resources, both private and public, to Israel will almost certainly continue. Since the Democratic Party also gains much of its support from American Jews, no reversal of such a policy is to be expected. As Clark concludes: “If the influence of Christian Zionism on western policy continues to exert the hold it does today {2007} there is a chance that we will all become allies for Armageddon” (p. 289).
JSC

2) Journal issue: The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, Volume 21, no. 2, 2008 is devoted to the Church of England Bishop George Bell. Fifty years after his death in 1958, a commemorative conference was held in his diocesan city, Chichester, organized by the Director of the George Bell Institute, Andrew Chandler, who is also a co-editor of this journal. The papers read at this international and bilingual conference are now printed, and provide a valuable survey of Bell’s career, with particular emphasis on his international and ecumenical witness. At the same time, these scholars have been able to use a larger and more up-to-date range of sources than was possible for Bell’s official biographer, Canon Jasper, forty years ago. Charlotte Methuen (Oxford) begins by describing Bell’s early entry into the ecumenical arena in the aftermath of the first world war. Like many others, he was appalled by the disastrous consequences for Christian witness caused by the violent hatreds of the war, and drew the conclusion that all the churches should now unite in combating the evil forces which had led to this slaughter and destruction. They should also combine in binding up the wounds of war rather than keep on stressing their doctrinal differences. Such ideas led him to become involved with other leading European Protestant churchmen, such as the Swedish Archbishop, Nathan Söderblom, who was the key figure in promoting the Stockholm conference in 1925, out of which grew the Life and Work movement of the ecumenical church. Bell was to play a leading role in guiding its destinies. At the same time, he recognized that more was needed in tackling the harmful effects of unbridled nationalism, particularly in Germany. He organized a series of theological conversations between German and British theologians, which in fact only showed how far apart their theologies still were. But Bell’s liberal nature led him to hope that, with good will and the abandonment of war-time hostility, the British public could be persuaded that there was another Germany, apart from the militaristic and aggressive forces so often portrayed in British propaganda Naturally he was an ardent champion of all peace endeavours seeking to reconcile the two sides, and warmly supported Prime Minister Chamberlain throughout the Munich crisis in 1938. He had for example, made strenuous efforts to help those Germans persecuted by the Nazis, especially “non-Aryans”, and Quakers, He offered hospitality in Britain to some twenty German Protestant pastors and their families turned out by Nazi pressures, as described by James Radcliffe. When war was declared, he took a leading role in caring for the refugees, many of whom in 1940 were interned on the Isle of Man, even though they had fled from Hitler’s prisons to the supposed safety of Britain. Bell’s advocacy and personal involvement on their behalf are well described by Charmain Brinson (London). Even more notable were his public stances during the war against the Royal Air Force’s unlimited bombing campaigns and the unwarranted vilification of the enemy which he rightly feared would repeat the mistakes of the first world war, and make impossible the kind of rebuilding of a new Europe based on a new era of reconciliation and peace. Philip Coupland’s essay on Bell’s vision of post-war Europe shows both his far-sighted and idealistic stance, as well as the opposition he had to face. It was this belief that, despite all, the “better” Germans should be allowed to play their part in the reconstruction of the continent which made him argue against vindictive policies even for convicted German war criminals. In Tom Lawson’s view, this was too generous, and showed that Bell was not sympathetic enough to the victims, especially Jewish victims, and their desire for restitution and justice. In these efforts, Bell was to work closely with the General Secretary of the new World Council of Churches, the Dutchman, Visser ‘t Hooft, as described in an excellent portrait by Gerhard Besier. Both collaborated in recognizing the danger of Soviet communism. Dianne Kirby gives a clear evaluation of Bell’s stance during the Cold War, when he played a prominent part in outlining the clash between democracy and dictatorship, and identifying the Christian churches with those seeking to find a new path of mutual understanding without compromising their detestation of totalitarian regimes. As the editors suggest, Bell’s witness can be described as “Bridge building in desperate times”. JSC

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John Conway

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