Betrayal Read online

  Acknowledgments

  1 Introduction Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel

  2 Assessing the Heritage: German Protestant Theologians, Nazis, and the "Jewish Question" Robert P. Ericksen

  3 Storm Troopers of Christ: The German Christian Movement and the Ecclesiastical Final Solution Doris L. Bergen

  4 When Jesus Was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda Susannah Heschel

  5 The Confessing Church and Antisemitism: Protestant Identity, German Nationhood, and the Exclusion of Jews Shelley Baranowski

  6 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hitler's Persecution of the Jews Kenneth C. Barnes

  7 Pius XII, the Jews, and the German Catholic Church Guenter Lewy

  8 Joseph Lortz and a Catholic Accommodation with National Socialism Michael B. Lukens

  9 Post-Holocaust Theology: German Theological Responses since 1945 Micha Brunnlik

  Notes

  Index

  Contributors

  he role of the German churches during the Third Reich is a topic that emerges out of our deepest concerns. Both of us were raised in religious households, Bob as a Lutheran, Susannah as an Orthodox Jew. As students we strove to integrate our studies, our religious roots, and the ethical issues of our day. As a child, Susannah was deeply influenced by the role of religious leaders in the Civil Rights Movement and the effort to end the war in Vietnam. Bob, growing up in the Pacific Northwest, came of age as the Civil Rights Movement gradually undermined comfortable assumptions about the moral quality of American life, assumptions further called into question by the escalation of America's role in Vietnam. For both of us, political engagement has been an essential component of religious commitment and a test of the moral integrity of religious leaders.

  We first met in December 1992, at a conference where we each presented our research on pro-Nazi Protestant theologians. During the summer and fall of 1993 we collaborated on an article reviewing the historiography on German churches during the Third Reich. By 1994 we had become good friends as well as colleagues and began to plan an edited volume of essays, which eventually became this book.

  We are very grateful to our contributors to this volume. Shelley Baranowski, Kenneth Barnes, Doris Bergen, Micha Brumlik, and Michael Lukens each produced valuable contributions. Victoria Barnett, a close friend and colleague who also works in this field, was kind enough to translate Brumlik's article from German into English. Guenter Lewy graciously gave us permission to reprint an article he published some years ago on the German Catholic church; we also thank Commentary magazine for granting us permission to reprint that article. The contributors to this volume constitute a core group of scholars concerned with the history of the German churches, paying particular attention to the churches' attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. We appreciate their willingness to synthesize the findings of their archival research for a broader audience.

  We are also indebted to Marshall Johnson, recently retired editor in chief of Fortress Press and himself a scholar of theologians in the Nazi era, for his support of this project. As all scholars in our field know, we have been lucky to have him as our editor. We also want to thank Michael West, who became our very able editor after Marshall's retirement; Patricia Heinicke, for her superb editing of the manuscript; and Julie Odland Smith for producing the book.

  We would like to express our thanks to the many archivists who have helped us gather material, at the Berlin Document Center, the Hauptstaatsarchiv Niedersachsen, the Universitatsarchiv Giessen, the Universitatsarchiv Gottingen, the Universitatsarchiv Jena, the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and in Potsdam, the Landeskirchlichesarchiv in Hanover, the Landeskirchenarchiv of Thuringen, the Zentralarchiv der Kirche in Berlin, the YIVO Institute archives in New York City, and the Wiener Library of Tel Aviv University. In particular, Susannah would like to thank Rev. Heinz Koch, director of the Landeskirchenarchiv of Thuringen and himself an expert on church activities during the Third Reich, and Rev. Beatrix Jessberger of Berlin, whose friendship made possible the many arduous trips to archives throughout Germany.

  Many colleagues have contributed suggestions and advice, including Hans-Joachim Dahms, Louis Graham, Jorg Ohlemacher, Philip Schaeffer, David Toren, Donald Niewyk, Michael A. Meyer, Richard Cogley, David Bankier, Dieter Georgi, Irmtraud Fischer, Peter von der Osten-Sacken, Christian Wiese, Siegfried Virgils, Joseph Tyson, and Christoph Raisig.

  Both of us have been allowed research time through the generosity of several fellowships. Bob would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Susannah would like to thank the Cleveland Foundation, the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University, and the National Humanities Center, which granted her a fellowship during the academic year 1997-98, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lucius Littauer Foundation.

  Most important, we thank our partners, Judith Meyers and Jacob Aronson, for their constant support and encouragement. As academic colleagues as well as spouses, they have given thoughtful consideration to our research and have raised important and critical insights. They are the two finest human beings we know.

  ranz Stangl, the future commandant at the death camp Treblinka, worked during the early war years in the so-called Euthanasia Program of the German Reich. Far from "mercy killing," this program permitted the murder of patients (children as well as adults) who were deemed mental, physical, or social burdens on society-"life unworthy of life," as they were designated. "No law compelled the killings"; rather, a bureaucratic structure was established that permitted medical personnel to transfer certain patients to designated killing centers. Physicians, nurses, and orderlies participated voluntarily in the program, while the patients themselves often pleaded for their lives or tried to flee the hospital. Patients' families were told that the patients had died of natural causes. Stangl himself apparently had some moral doubts about the murders. In November 1940, he took the time to visit a hospital, run by a Catholic order of nuns, in order to locate a keepsake belonging to a child patient who had been put to death. The child's mother had received notice of the supposedly natural death and had also been sent the child's toys and other effects, but a candle she had given her daughter was missing and she wanted it back.

  That's why I had to go there: to find the candle. When I arrived, the Mother Superior, who I had to see, was up in a ward with the priest and they took me up to see her. We talked for a moment and then she pointed to a child-well, it looked like a small child-lying in a basket. "Do you know how old he is?" she asked me. I said no, how old was he? "Sixteen," she said. "He looks like five, doesn't he? He'll never change, ever. But they rejected him." [The nun was referring to the medical commission.] "How could they not accept him?" she said. And the priest who stood next to her nodded fervently. "Just look at him," she went on. "No good to himself or anyone else. How could they refuse to deliver him from this miserable life?" This really shook me. . . Here was a Catholic nun, a Mother Superior, and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I then, to doubt what was being done?'

  The story is gruesome, as was the entire murder program, and it must have made a significant impression on Stangl, who remembered the details of his hospital visit quite vividly even many years after the war. It also makes an impression today, this claim that his moral qualms about the murder of sick children were laid to rest by a nun and a priest who fervently supported the program. If these representatives of the church found it morally acceptable to put handicapped children to death, how could he, as a Catholic, disagree? Not political ideology or government propaganda, but the moral stamp of approval by clergy played the crucial role in alleviating the pangs of his conscience. By 1942 he was running Treblinka, one of the six major death camps in P
oland, where he became responsible for the murder of nine hundred thousand people. What did he think of his role? He later told the journalist Gitta Sereny that he had viewed the Jews who were gassed as so many cattle being slaughtered.

  Stangl was certainly not the only German who suffered qualms of conscience when confronting euthanasia, or the murder of Jews, or the slavelabor program. Whereas Stangl was reassured by a nun and a priest that the murder of handicapped children was morally acceptable, others found alternative sources of reassurance. A study by historian Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, examines a troop of reserve police officers from Hamburg who were taken to Poland to murder Jews. Browning reveals that even though the process of mass murder by inexperienced killers involved the most unimaginable horror, including blood and brain matter splashed upon the perpetrators, most of the men willingly participated in the murders. In fact, their commanding officer gave them the chance to opt out, but most carried on with their grisly task.' The recent best-seller by Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, claims that these murderers were eager and enthusiastic because of long-standing antisemitic traditions in Germany that advocated the elimination of Jews from German society, even at the price of extermination.'

  Despite differences in interpretation, both Browning and Goldhagen make it clear that the widespread belief that Germans were forced to follow orders on pain of death is nothing more than fantasy. In reality, we have no reports of any German being court-martialed, shot, or seriously punished for refusing to carry out an order to kill civilians. A few, of course, did refuse such orders, but it now seems clear that fear of punishment was not the primary motivation of those who complied. Browning finds peer pressure at work within the battalion of police officers he studied, while Goldhagen, who studied the same battalion, argues that the murderers killed Jews out of conviction-because they wanted to kill Jews. There may have been additional motives at work as well, some of which we may never fully understand. What is striking is that at least some of the murderers felt no qualms about inviting their wives, girlfriends, or other family members to visit and observe the shootings firsthand. Secrecy about the carnage was not maintained by those in charge, and no sense of shame or guilt seems to have hindered the murderers. Gotz Aly, Ernst Klee, Goldhagen, and others have gathered personal letters and diaries written by the perpetrators in which they describe the killing as if it were ordinary work.' Given the many photographs taken of Jews just before they were shot, one also wonders about the photographerswhat they thought and felt and how they could so calmly take pictures of people being murdered.

  The willingness of Germans to be executioners applied not only to Jewish victims. Europe's Sinti and Roma, derogatorily termed Gypsies, were also targeted by the Nazis. Even if they were not regarded in terms quite as unredeemably negative as those applied to Jews, they were often shipped to Jewish ghettos in eastern Europe and killed in the same gas chambers in the death camps. Thousands of the Polish intellectual and political elite were also murdered. So were over three million Soviet soldiers, held by the Germans as prisoners of war and either killed outright or forced to die through starvation. Germans were willing to kill fellow "Aryans"' as well. Nearly half the mental patients in Germany were among the one hundred and twenty thousand German Aryans put to death during the Third Reich in the Euthanasia Program. While most were selected for death by their doctors, some were turned over to authorities by family members. All were killed against their will. Also against their will, approximately three hundred thousand Germans were sterilized. Carrying out such large-scale atrocities was no simple matter. Hundreds of thousands became involved, directly or indirectly, as perpetrators.'

  Yet some refused to participate in the murders. Within Reserve Police Battalion 101, Browning estimates, 10 percent or more requested and were granted reassignment, some of them even being allowed to go home to their civilian jobs and families. We can find other examples of refusal to participate in the murder of the Jews: an SS officer in the French town of Le Chambon who looked the other way when the townspeople hid large numbers of Jews; Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer responsible for supplying Zyklon B, the gas used to murder Jews in the death chambers of Auschwitz, who informed Catholic church officials about the death camps in the vain hope of arousing protests." Such examples of actual resistance to the murder program, unfortunately, remain only a handful, and we may well ask why.

  Some of those who resisted tell us that they did so for religious reasons. The very low incidence of resistance, however, prompts questions about how religious beliefs and attitudes related to the program of death. What religious convictions sparked resistance in some and compliance in others, and why did so many people simply fail to react? While Franz Stangl encountered a nun and a priest who supported the murder of children, not all clergy were outspokenly supportive of government atrocities. Very few, however, were outspokenly opposed, particularly to the Nazi policies of disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews. The question posed by this book is Why? What can we identify in the history, institutional structure, and teachings of the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany that hindered their active protest against the persecution of the Jews? What led them, instead, to a general support of Adolf Hitler and his policies? How did the churches' attitudes change during the course of the Third Reich, particularly during the war? What could the churches have done, had they wished to protest the treatment of the Jews?

  The contention of this book is that the German churches played a far more important role in Nazi atrocities than has hitherto been supposed. Most important, their role involved moral suasion: Through the support for Nazi policies articulated by many religious leaders, ordinary Germans were reassured that those policies did not violate the tenets of Christian faith and morality. This role was actively encouraged by the Third Reich, which viewed propaganda as central to meeting its goals and at first courted the churches as powerful shapers of public opinion. A minister wearing long black robes, preaching from the church pulpit on Sundays, could be far more effective than a politician, especially for believers. A minister claims to be God's voice on earth, while politicians are notorious as nearly universal symbols of duplicity.

  In addition, we will present evidence that large and powerful segments of the Catholic and Protestant churches supported Nazism with enthusiasm, under circumstances in which silence would have been morally preferable and politically more judicious. Indeed, the passion for National Socialism witnessed among some theologians and pastors indicates their fervent belief that Nazism was beneficial for church as well as state. Such evidence forces a reevaluation of the churches' role and a new judgment of their behavior during the Third Reich.

  The Nature of the Nazi state

  During the years immediately following the war, National Socialism was viewed as an iron cage, a totalitarian state that locked its citizens in a grip of terror. In that view, the end of the war in the spring of 1945 came as a liberation to the German people, freed from Adolf Hitler's tyranny. That image is no longer viable. The Nazi government was not absolute, but a maze of intrigue, as various factions within the government, the SS, and the National Socialist Party fought for power and influence. This was no well-oiled machine, methodically crushing all in its path, but a lurching mechanism, striking more haphazardly. Karl Schleunes has shown, for example, how different officials struggled for control of Jewish policy, with some advocating radical measures to appropriate Jewish property, while others cautioned that such measures would backfire against German efforts at economic reconstitution."

  The totalitarian image implies oppression as well as efficiency. While personal liberties were curtailed shortly after Hitler came to power, it would be wrong to view most German citizens as prisoners of the Nazi state. Rather, there was widespread support for Hitler and satisfaction with most of his policies, at least until the later war years began to undermine public confidence. Some of the most frightening aspects of the Nazi regime were not imposed f
rom above but functioned with the cooperation and active support of average citizens. Take, for example, the Gestapo, the very image of the Nazi police state. Robert Gellately has shown that the number of official personnel employed by the Gestapo was shockingly small, given the large German population it kept under surveillance. In Nuremberg in September 1941, there were 150 Gestapo officials responsible for keeping watch over 2,771,720 people spread out over 14,000 square kilometers."' Yet the Gestapo managed to write thorough and frequent reports about citizens' actions and beliefs, carry out investigations, and arrest, torture, and try their suspects. Such activities were made possible, Gellately reveals, only by relying upon normal citizens to observe and disclose the activities of their neighbors, co-workers, friends, and family members. This cooperation came readily: The vast majority of investigations undertaken by the Gestapo were initiated by civilian denunciations. Thus, to inspire terror among some Germans, the Gestapo depended upon the enthusiastic teamwork of their ordinary fellow citizens.

  If the Nazi state, even in its most frightening manifestations, was a cooperative venture of its citizens, what does this suggest about the German people's relationship to the "Jewish question"? What did they know about the persecution and murder of the Jews? How did they react to the information they received? What guidance did they receive from churches in shaping their responses?

  David Bankier provides helpful answers to these questions. According to his examination of Gestapo reports, which attempted to measure the attitude of German citizens in response to Nazi policies, most Germans were pleased in the early years of the regime to see Jews expelled from their jobs in the civil service. The Jews, it seemed to them, were receiving what they deservedthey had become too "uppity" and were now being put in their place. The random and occasional physical attacks against Jews in Germany proved distasteful to many-not, it seems, because of a lack of antisemitic attitudes but because of discomfort over street violence and the breakdown of orderliness. When the German Jews lost their citizenship on the basis of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, there was general indifference. Some Jews actually responded to these laws with a sense of relief; having any kind of legal status seemed a protection against the hooliganism of SA thugs. Moreover, in preparation for the Berlin Olympic Games in early 1936, street violence and visible signs of antisemitic agitation were suppressed by the regime.