Betrayal Read online

  Protestant denazification efforts targeted the German Christian Movement as a whole but showed less stringency in dealing with individual members. Lay adherents encountered few barriers to reintegration. And despite initial disciplinary actions (often complete with pensions for those removed from their posts""), by 1950 even the hard-liner Buschtons had to admit that almost all German Christian clergy had reentered the service of the church or were in the process of doing so."" But how did German Christians as individuals deal with their past?

  Given the sources available, that question is difficult to answer. The most common public responses to past involvement with the German Christian movement ranged from rationalization to silence and denial. German Christians found that some of the very arguments they had used to defend themselves or to justify their beliefs and behavior during the Nazi years also served as effective postwar rationalizations. In 1953, a former German Christian seeking a church post boasted that the denazification commission of West Berlin had rehabilitated him. He possessed a certificate from the Protestant Consistory testifying that, through his "efforts for positive Christianity and for a just treatment of the Jews," he had been active as an "antifascist," ejected from the Nazi Party, and called to account by the Gestapo."' Eleven years earlier that same man had sought to extricate himself from the very party criticism he later presented as evidence of resistance by sending Nazi authorities a copy of an anti-Jewish confirmation sermon he had delivered."8

  In the Third Reich, German Christians had sought to justify the dejudaization of Christianity by pointing to their desire to build a church that met the needs of the Volk. After the war, they returned to that same line of argumentation. In the 1970s, one sympathizer of the movement described its revised liturgy, hymns, and scriptures as its greatest achievement, with no reference to the antisemitism that had motivated those innovations. Echoing the vocabulary of the 1930s and 1940s, he decried the continued use of the "language of Canaan" in the church. The church has always adapted its preaching, he argued, pointing to the example of "the mission to the Eskimo." Eskimos, he explained, could not understand the term "lamb of God." Missionaries substituted the "seal of God," an ethnic adaptation appropriate to "Greenlander Christianity."" German Christianity, he concluded, had been no different.

  The German Christian Movement's frenzied activities up until 1945 stand in stark contrast to most members' postwar silence. Many showed particular reticence about the very issues that had been at the heart of their agenda: their stance on Judaism, Jews, and non-Aryan Christians. It was as if they had forgotten their efforts to purge Jewish elements from Christianity, as if they had never read, heard, or uttered the scathing denunciations of Jews and Judaism that had made up the core of their agitation.

  Guida Diehl, in memoirs she wrote in the 1950s, dismissed aggression against Jews as an inexplicable quirk of Hitler's. She described the Kristallnacht pogrom of 9 November 1938 as "the blackest day in the history of National Socialism" and claimed she did not see "one single that approved of this cruel corruption.""" Diehl said nothing about the fact that at least since the 1920s, she herself had been an active proponent of dejudaized and anti-Jewish Christianity. Her silence was rewarded. Arguably the most prominent female German Christian, after the war Diehl was able to reestablish her New Land League, first in Thuringia, and subsequently in Hesse, with the support of none other than Martin Niemoller."'

  The most effective silence, as Diehl's memoir proved, was selective. Another prominent German Christian provided further evidence of this principle. One of the most explicit postwar recantations from within the movement came from Siegfried Leffler, former leader of Thuringian German Christians and director of the Institute for Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life. In 1947, Leffler, incarcerated in Ludwigsburg, performed public penance in a widely circulated letter. Since soon after the war began, he claimed, he had been "haunted" by guilt that his actions and words had "harmed" the "Christian church and the German as well as the Jewish people." But Leffler refused to take any responsibility for the antiJewish teachings of the movement he had headed. It was not the case, he insisted, that he had "personally hated or stirred up hatred!""' Protestant publications printed his letter with sympathetic commentary,"' and by 1949, he too was back in the service of the church."'

  Silence could represent defiance, shame, remorse, or even a kind of solidarity between former German Christians who did change their ways and their colleagues who did not. In postwar retrospect, the widow of a prominent German Christian recognized that the movement's ideals, pure as they seemed to her at the time, were illusions, branded such by "euthanasia, concentration camps, persecutions of Jews." She had been wrong, she confessed, but she made that admission in private and concluded that for her, nothing remained "but silence.""`

  A minority of German Christians eschewed silence in favor of blatant defiance. In 1947, a clergyman from the Rhineland told a denazification tribunal that he had been a committed antisemite before National Socialism and remained so after its collapse. To defend his stance he pointed to Luther's hostility toward Jews. The board then produced an antisemitic poem he had written in 1937 for the birth announcement of his daughter. When asked if, with such sentiments, he had not entered the ranks of those guilty of murdering millions of Jews, the pastor dismissed the poem as a "harmless private joke.""" In 1948, a church member in Ludwigsburg complained about a pastor who had once "preached the ideas of Rosenberg and the party with fiery zeal and rejected Christ as a Jew." Unharmed by denazification measures, he was still stirring up those ideas among church groups."7

  Self-interest ensured that German Christians who took a public stance of defiance after 1945 were exceptions rather than the rule. But in more private contexts many expressed defiance of developments that had discredited their movement. In 1953, Buschtons denounced denazification efforts, especially those in the church, with the words, "if the Nazis burned the Jews, so the others have not shown any less hatefulness.""' Despite their own eager participation in efforts to expunge Jewish influences from Christianity, after the war Buschtons and his Westphalian colleague Walther Fiebig decided they had not even been aware that concentration camps existed."' Buschtons discounted the murder of the Jews as a rumor, one more indication of the "injustice" Germans now suffered.

  After 1945, German Christians and their sympathizers could no longer fulminate openly against Jews. But the new situation provided its own possibilities for continuity. One of the most chilling illustrations of German Christian racial thought years after World War II comes from the former German Protestant bishop in Rumania, Wilhelm Staedel. Staedel's postwar comments on what he called the "race issue" revealed continued endorsement of chauvinistic biological determinism. In a telling sleight of hand, however, he adjusted the old Nazi dichotomy of "Aryan/non-Aryan" to a polarization he expected would find more resonance in the postwar world: "white/nonwhite."

  To Staedel it was "an unprecedented tragedy of world history that the white people of the world called forth the two last wars with each other and thereby weakened each other and themselves." Hitler's involvement in the "race question," he theorized, reflected an assumption he presumed his reader shared as well, that, "contrary to the well-known enlightenment idea, and despite a basic similarity of structure, people are not all the same, but are different." Given that fact, he argued, "preservation of one's own Volk, of one's own race," became a "serious duty," and the "mixing of races" was to be "checked." Staedel closed his diatribe by citing none other than Martin Niemoller, then president of the Protestant Church in Germany, on the subject of race: "According to a report of the American newspaper The Virginian in October 1957, Niemoller said: 'The crucial issue was not whether the USA or the USSR would win the next war. The big question rather was whether there would still be a white race in thirty or forty years.""'"

  It is tempting to dismiss Staedel's analysis as the bitter rantings of a disillusioned old man. Yet his comments show how t
he social construct of race itself provided some German Christians with a vehicle to normalize and legitimize their anti-Jewishness, casting it as part of a cosmic struggle for white, Western, Christian purity. At the same time, Staedel's diatribe suggests how easily old Nazi Christian ways of thinking could blend into revised strands of racism.

  The German Christians rose to prominence in 1933. They survived their fall from political favor and endemic fragmentation to make a comeback by the mid-1930s. From then the German Christian Movement grew out of and fed back into the religious and social context of the Holocaust. During the war, activity intensified as the German Christian project of dejudaizing Christianity meshed with the Nazi assault on the Jews. After 1945, most former German Christians, including prominent spokespersons of the movement, were reintegrated into the church.

  The German Christian Movement persisted for as long as it did because it was embedded in the culture around it. German Christians did not invent the core ideas that they represented. The ideal of a people's church, Christian anti-Jewishness, racial antisemitism, an antidoctrinal, romantic understanding of religion-those were all familiar themes to Germans of the 1920s and 1930s. German Christians pulled them together into a movement dedicated to the creation of a church that would provide spiritual expression to a racially pure nation. Defeat and the debacle of the Third Reich discredited some German Christian ideas, particularly their vehement anti-Jewishness. But even their ideas about race needed only a bit of tinkering to make them again appear to be within the mainstream. In some ways, the differences between the German Christians and many of their fellow Protestants were never very great after all.

  The persistence of the German Christian Movement may also reflect a more general crisis of Christianity in modern Europe. The German Christians' retention of certain aspects of Christian practice and tradition meant that the movement appeared both revolutionary and familiar to fellow Protestants. In that way, it offered a welcome compromise for Germans who embraced the new Nazi ideology yet were unwilling to abandon completely their Christian heritage. German Christians jettisoned every inconvenient theological and moral aspect of Christianity and reduced it to a handful of cultural symbols and practices from their childhoods. Yet they clung to these with a tenacity that suggested both genuine dedication and profound spiritual confusion.

  B!istoriography and Suggestions for Further Reading

  The Protestant church struggle (Kirchenkampf) in Nazi Germany is extremely well-chronicled. Overviews by Klaus Scholder (in German) and John Conway (in English) have become staples on undergraduate and graduate reading lists.''' Collections of documents, local studies, and hefty series on specific issues record and analyze developments in the Protestant church in Nazi Germany."Until the 1980s, this abundant literature was notably one-sided; scholars examined the Confessing Church in meticulous detail but spent little time on the German Christian Movement, often dismissing it as a Nazi creation or assuming that its story ended with the Sports Palace Affair in November 1933. The myriad biographies and autobiographies of Confessing Church members contrast to the few firsthand accounts by German Christians. Only Guida Diehl, the nationalist women's leader in Eisenach; Christian Kinder, German Christian Reich leader in 1934 and 1935; and Franz Tugel, German Christian bishop in Hamburg, have published memoirs."' Diehl skims over the Nazi years, Kinder seeks to justify his involvement, and Tiigel's account appeared after his death.

  Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, secondary literature on the German Christians was equally sparse. Hans Buchheim's 1953 analysis of the movement discusses it together with neopagan groups as part of a broad spiritual crisis in National Socialist Germany. 12' But Buchheim pays little attention to the German Christians as part of the church. A number of dissertations have explored facets of the movement, from its propaganda to differences among splinter groups,"' and regional studies such as Helmut Baier's 1968 work on Bavaria fill in more of the picture.12' For decades, however, the definitive word on the movement remained Kurt Meier's Die Deutschen Christen (1964). Meier, a church historian, offered a detailed organizational study up to 1939. But not only did he leave out the war years, he devoted almost no attention to antisemitism or Christian-Jewish relations.

  It is not surprising that studies of the German Christian Movement were rare while literature on the Confessing Church burgeoned. Many of the early chroniclers of the church struggle were themselves participants in the events they described; their personal and institutional interests lay in presenting the Protestant church in the most anti-Nazi light possible.117 Former German Christians stood to gain little from exposure of the past and were reluctant to attract attention that might jeopardize chances of employment in the postwar church. 121

  The last decade and a half have seen the situation change as a number of works on the German Christian Movement have appeared. Several factors explain this development. The new, critical generation of Germans that came of age some thirty years after the war has shown less interest in continuing what John Conway once called the "hagiographical" tradition of writing about the church struggle.''" Reijo E. Heinonen's 1978 study of the German Christians of Bremen, Hans-Joachim Sonne's 1982 exploration of the move ment's political theology, and Thomas Schneider's recent account of Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller typify the work of such scholars.""

  Even more transformative have been publications that brought to the forefront the centrality of antisemitism to German Protestant thought in the 1930s and 1940s. Studies by the Israeli scholar Uriel Tal, as well as by the Germans Detlef Minkner, Wolfgang Gerlach, and Hans Prolingheuer, have revealed how broad segments of German Protestantism, including the Confessing Church, were implicated in Nazi crimes against the Jews.'"I Suddenly the German Christians appeared as more than just a marginal aberration. The fifty-year commemoration of Kristallnacht-the November Pogrom of 1938generated further interest in the relationship between the Christian churches and Jews in the Third Reich, a subject long neglected."' Susannah Heschel's discussion of the German Christian-dominated Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life is a recent contribution in this area."'

  Participation by scholars from outside Germany as well as methodological developments have enriched the field enormously. The American scholar Robert P. Ericksen broke new ground by focusing on the so-called neutrals in the church struggle."' At the same time, his 1985 work demonstrates the impact of German Christian ideas at the very centers of theological scholarship. Rainer Hering has made similar discoveries."' Studies by Sheila Briggs and Jochen-Christoph Kaiser introduce gender to the analysis of German Protestant theology in the recent past."" Shelley Baranowski's examination of the Confessing Church with an eye to social class and elitism has helped bring church history into social historical discussions of the Third Reich." Germans like Manfred Gailus have followed her lead."" Rainer Lachele's 1993 look at the German Christian Movement in Wurttemberg indicates the extent to which the subject of Christianity under National Socialism has come out of isolation and into dialogue with cultural, social, intellectual, and political history."" My own work on the German Christians pays attention to gender while keeping the movement's racial antisemitism at the forefront of the analysis.'' Taken together, all of these studies offer a complex, nuanced picture of German Protestantism in the Third Reich that breaks down a simple resistance-collaboration dichotomy and explodes the myth of the churches as passive victims of Nazi aggression.

  n Germany the combination of racial theory with religion, beginning in the nineteenth century and blossoming during the early decades of the twentieth, led to the creation of Aryan Christianity, a phenomenon Saul Friedlander has described as "redemptive anti-Semitism." Born, Friedlander writes, "from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption," Aryan Christianity advocated Germany's liberation from the Jews and from the Jewish.' An authentic Germany would be free of all Jewish accretions, those that had entered via modernity and those that had entered via Ch
ristianity. If the contemporary savior was Hitler, his mission was that of Christ. The redemption of Christianity itself was at stake, and could only be accomplished by purging Jesus of all Jewish associations and reconstructing him as he allegedly really was, as an Aryan.

  The implementation of Aryan Christianity within the institutional Protestant church was the goal of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, described in chapter 3 by Doris Bergen. The movement reached its zenith in 1939 with the establishment of an antisemitic research institute, known as the Institut zur Erforschung and Beseitigung des ji dischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben (Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life), named herein as "the Institute." Several of the major figures within the Institute had met as students of Gerhard Kittel and had worked under him at the University of Tubingen during the early 1930s on the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Data from church archives allow us to reconstruct the establishment, activities, membership, funding, and theology of the Institute, which was located in central Germany, in the town of Eisenach (Thuringia), and to trace the postwar careers of its leaders within the church and the theological faculties. Until now, the very existence of the Institute, from 1939 to 1945, was barely known as a result of postwar efforts to hide all of the church's pro-Nazi activities.

  The significance of the Institute lies in its efforts to identify Christianity with National Socialist antisemitism by arguing that Jesus was an Aryan who sought the destruction of Judaism. Its members proclaimed, "We know that the Jews want the annihilation [Veruicittung] of Germany."' Even after they were aware of the deportations and murders, they continued to justify mistreatment of the Jews on Christian grounds. In 1942, Walter Grundmann, professor of New Testament at the University of Jena and academic director of the Institute, declared: "A healthy Volk must and will reject the Jews in every form. This fact is justified before history and through history. If someone is upset about Germany's treatment of the Jews, Germany has the historical justification and historical authorization for the fight against the Jews on its side!"'