Betrayal Read online

  This period of relative calm, which continued through 1937, would prove deceptive, but at the time many Jews hoped that it marked the end of antiJewish measures by the Nazi state. By 1938, as Germany began accentuating militarism and war talk, the number and severity of antisemitic incidents increased. A program of "Aryanization" led to the expropriation of Jewish property and its transfer into suitably Aryan hands. Schools and universities expelled Jewish students. Jewish families became subject to house searches and individuals subject to arrest, Jewish stores were defaced, and Jews were required to take the name "Sarah" or "Israel" and have the letter J stamped on their identity card. In late October thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany were sent back to Poland. The young son of one such family, Herschel Grynspan, responded to his parents' plight by shooting an official in the German embassy in Paris, whereupon the Nazi leadership made this minor act the pretext for a nationwide pogrom. On November 9 and 10-the so-called Kristallnacht-Nazi thugs smashed windows in Jewish shops and homes throughout Germany, burned and destroyed almost all synagogues, humiliated and beat countless individual Jews, and arrested ten thousand Jewish men, who were then sent to concentration camps.

  No one in Germany could be unaware of these events, which transpired in cities, towns, and villages across the nation and received widespread press coverage. How did people react? According to Gestapo reports, most Germans were shocked by the violence, even though, Bankier argues, they remained antisemitic. They had expected a government of law and order and found instead shattered glass in the streets, Nazi thugs beating Jews, massive destruction of property, and a disturbing economic question: Who would pay for the damage? Yet there were neither protests nor demonstrations against Kristnllnncht. The following Sunday, most pastors and priests in their pulpits did not mention it, not even the widespread destruction of houses of worship that had occurred in their communities. As Bankier notes, aversion to unseemly violence did not equate with moral outrage: "We rarely find rejection of Nazi anti-Semitism on ethical principles, or indignation based on humanitarian values.""

  As anti-Jewish measures continued to grow in number in the aftermath of Kristnllnncht, the Ministry of Propaganda poured out antisemitic messages to explain and justify harsh actions. Jews were portrayed as a danger to Germany, a threat to all Germans. They were compared to parasites and bacilli that could infect and destroy innocent Aryans. When war broke out, it was portrayed as a Jewish assault on Germany, especially after 1941, when the participation of both the capitalist Americans and the communist Soviets was attributed to Jewish influence. Thus, it was suggested, German attacks on the Jews were not hostile and aggressive, but defensive efforts to protect the Aryan race.

  By this time there were few Jews left in Germany, of course, since Nazi terror had produced massive emigration. By the fall of 1941, only one hundred and fifty thousand Jews remained from a pre-Nazi population of five hundred thousand. These remaining Jews became suddenly more visible, however, when a new decree required them to wear a yellow badge. They produced a mixed reaction among their Christian neighbors. Most of the Jews still in Germany were elderly and poor, and their miserable condition evoked sympathy in some, but contempt in others. Churches were not immune to the latter response-when Christians of Jewish descent, who were considered Jewish under Nazi law, appeared with their yellow badges, some Aryan Christians complained that they did not want to pray or take communion next to Jews." Yet Bankier argues that many Germans exhibited compassion in response to this visible evidence of Jewish hardship. Joseph Goebbels himself is said to have complained about "idiotic sentimentality" among Germans, and the government issued a decree: From 24 October 1941, anyone who showed public sympathy for the Jews would be sent to a concentration camp for three months."

  It is important to gauge the response of Germans not only to Jews in their proximity-whether suffering during Kristallnacht or donning the yellow star-but also to the millions of Jews in eastern Europe. Bankier tries to measure German attitudes and the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda while rumors of brutality and murder began to spread. Throughout the Nazi period, propaganda had been ubiquitous. Bankier argues, however, that during the war years, especially when rumors of mass murder proliferated, Germans increasingly distanced themselves from the antisemitic propaganda of the state.

  Assessing Bankier's claim requires knowing what Germans knew about the murder of Jews and when they knew it, as well as how they reacted to this news. According to Heinz Boberach, already in 1939 in the aftermath of the German invasion of Poland, rumors circulated in some German cities about atrocities and even murders committed against Polish Jews. In the summer of 1941, when the real murder campaign began with the invasion of the Soviet Union, rumors increased, and during 1942 it became difficult to avoid hearing rumors or even gaining direct knowledge of murders and atrocities.

  Goebbels intensified antisemitic propaganda during those years, equating Bolsheviks with Jews in the "crusade" against Russia. Ian Kershaw notes that the general public refused to respond to this propaganda barrage, and he suggests that antisemitism was simply a low priority in the face of more important hardships and concerns. Bankier prefers the argument of Martin Broszat, who suggests that Germans tried to distance themselves from the anti-Jewish propaganda of the Nazis because they knew of crimes being committed and wanted to evade complicity." Bankier makes no concession regarding the antisemitic attitudes of the German people, suggesting that popular opinion often pushed harder against the Jewish population than did Nazi edicts. However, Gestapo reports and other evidence suggest a public aversion to antisemitic propaganda by late 1941.

  Bankier explains this paradox as based upon self-interest. Aryan Germans, broadly antisemitic in their attitudes, accepted any anti-Jewish policies that hurt Jews, especially when they opened opportunities for Aryan Germans, unless the policies might seem counterproductive. For example, hooliganism against Jews bred anxiety about law and order, implicitly suggesting that other Germans might be targeted next. Hooliganism might also hurt Germany's prestige abroad or inspire countermeasures. According to this theory, rumors of genocide prompted not moral outrage but the worry that Germany might suffer revenge, especially if the war should turn in the Allies' favor."

  Until the fall of 1941, German troops prevailed wherever they turned. That fall, however, their failure to win a victory over Russia presaged a series of frustrations and defeats. By late 1942 and ear1V 1943, Germany suffered major military losses in North Africa and at Stalingrad, while at the same time Allied bombing of German cities grew in intensity. Some Germans viewed this change of circumstances as punishment for what they had done to Jews, perceiving the bombing of Cologne Cathedral in 1942, for example, as retribution for the destruction of synagogues during Kristallnacht.'h Others believed that Jews themselves dominated American and British policy and picked out targets for bombing specifically in terms of punishment and revenge. Finally, Jews and their allies could be expected to take a particularly harsh revenge should Germany actually lose the war. Under these circumstances, Bankier believes, average Germans refused to accept Nazi antisemitic propaganda, refused to associate themselves with the policies of murder, and tried to avoid knowing or at least to pretend they did not know about what was happening. "People chose to turn a deaf ear to anti-Semitic preaching in order to bury their unpleasant awareness of the extermination. They made a conscious decision to withdraw from it, suppress it and make it taboo, in the belief, whether conscious or not, that they could absolve themselves of collec tive guilt by dissociating themselves from the social consensus that had sanctioned so horrible a crime."17

  By 1943 both police reports and the Nazi press shed light on the predicament facing Goebbels' propaganda machinery. It encouraged Germans to ever greater intensity of effort, with the threat of Jewish and Allied revenge should the German war measures now fail. This was meant to promote a commitment to fight to the finish, a sense that all Germans were in the struggle together. Having embarked upon
a solution to the Jewish question, they must prevail in that effort too or suffer retribution. Stressing the danger, however, included the risk that Germans would be tempted more toward defeatism than toward greater effort. Bankier believes that defeatism prevailed. Instead of greater commitment, Germans rejected and distanced themselves from the propaganda, not out of indifference toward antisemitism, but because Nazi policies now seemed to endanger average Germans. As Bankier concludes, "During the war the public sensed collective guilt, since its awareness of killing-operations exceeded mere suspicion. Outward passivity and apathy were the way the public chose to minimize discomfort.""

  During the years immediately following the war, the common response of Germans to the Holocaust was to deny any knowledge of the murder of the Jews. The collective response was to claim the crimes had been committed far away, that they had been undertaken in great secrecy and without the consent of the general population. It Wasn't Us, Hitler Did It is the title of a satirical play written by Hermann von Harten and produced in Berlin during the 1980s. The satire of the title reflects a significant truth: Nearly everyone, even the most prominent figures arrested and tried at Nuremberg, denied personal responsibility for Nazi crimes. Army officers blamed the SS, and the SS blamed commanding officers, who in turn claimed they had to follow orders or they would have been shot. The denial of responsibility was a continuation of the wartime effort to avoid complicity. Knowledge of the murder of Jews was dangerous; to know about the atrocities would demand a response, a protest, yet none had ever been expressed. It was better not to know and to hope that charges of complicity could be avoided.

  The Response of the Churches

  Christian churches have often been placed outside the framework of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In some segments of the German churches, this distancing was accomplished with a myth, which quickly developed after the war, of Christian resistance to Hitler and of Nazi persecution of the churches." Even the Allies proved susceptible to this myth, allowing churches an independent self-examination, rather than a rigorous, external denazification procedure. As a result, few pastors or church leaders lost their positions because of their Nazi past. Even those whose Nazi involvement had been most outrageous found they could leave this past behind. For example, Siegfried Leffler, a leader of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement who joined the Nazi Party in 1929, achieved rehabilitation by 1949 and subsequently served as a leading personality and spokesperson for the Protestant church in Bavaria.'" The fact that the churches had not taken an active role in protesting the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews was explained as a result of a lack of knowledge about the fate of the Jews or the fear of retaliation by Hitler against Christian leaders. Such were the common explanations given by church leaders and laypeople in the years following the war.

  A second approach to the involvement of the churches has been to deny the significance of churches in modern life, either directly or by inattention. Secular historians tend to ignore churches, as well as Christian teachings, in their attempts to explain the relation between the German people and the Nazi regime. This book assumes, by contrast, that the Christian component in Nazi Germany is worthy of careful consideration. A few figures help clarify the picture. The German census of May 1939 indicates that 54 percent of Germans considered themselves Protestant and 40 percent considered themselves Catholic, with only 3.5 percent claiming to be neo-pagan "believers in God," and 1.5 percent unbelievers.' This census came more than six years into the Hitler era. Both Catholic and Protestant churches remained official state churches throughout the Nazi regime, which meant that the state collected a church tax and funded church expenses. Religious education remained a part of the state education system, chaplains served the military, and theological faculties remained funded and active within the state universities. Article 24 in the Nazi Party Program always professed "positive Christianity" as the foundation of the German state.

  Clearly, the Nazi regime had no real sympathy for Christianity and little use for theologians, but we may still ask how the churches themselves experienced the regime. Certainly, Hitler's effort to separate church from state was perceived correctly by many church leaders as an effort to reduce their power and influence, yet the separation of church from state is hardly an act of persecution. In 1936, when the Nazi Party demanded that the swastika be removed from church newspapers and from church altars, there were loud protests from church leaders." Pastors who had placed the swastika on the altar, next to the cross, claimed the swastika was a key element in the religious life of their congregants. Church officials who placed the swastika on the masthead of their church newspapers meant thereby to proclaim their support for the regime. At the time, the Nazi policy prohibiting church use of the swastika was most likely experienced as an act of persecution, denying churches full participation in the life of the Third Reich. Yet this is hardly the persecution that church leaders complained of in the postwar years. For historians seeking to evaluate the churches' intentions, the important point is that the church itself did not forbid the swastika.

  Did the churches only pretend to be enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism in order to protect themselves? If the churches had truly been persecuted victims, we might expect to have heard a cry of relief when the war ended and Hitler came to his bad end. By the summer of 1945, we would expect to have seen church proclamations vehemently denouncing Nazism and condemning the murder of the Jews. But we do not. This silence is one strong indicator of the attitudes held during previous years.

  As subsequent chapters indicate, there were many enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism in both the Catholic and Protestant churches. Conversely, there were few church figures who exhibited a stance, by word or deed, in opposition to the regime. Carl Amery, a Catholic reflecting back upon what he labels the "capitulation" of the Catholic church to the Nazi regime, describes a "milieu Catholicism" that made this capitulation possible." Milieu Catholics believed in discipline, punctuality, cleanliness, and respect for authority; and the Nazi Party advocated all of these traditional virtues. The Catholic and Protestant churches both fervently opposed godless communism, and Hitler professed himself the most powerful anticommunist in Germany. Christians tended to be stridently antimodern, rejecting the modern tendencies toward urban, secular culture that had begun to permeate Germany in the 1920s. They did not like the fast lifestyle of the roaring twenties or the open, democratic practices of Weimar Germany, which advocated freedom of speech and belief and practiced tolerance toward the culturally diverse.

  Hitler attracted Christians by criticizing the liberalism of democratic government and by advocating a tougher, law-and-order approach to German society. He opposed pornography, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, and the "obscenity" of modern art, and he awarded bronze, silver, and gold medals to women who produced four, six, and eight children, thus encouraging them to remain in their traditional role in the home. This appeal to traditional values, coupled with the militaristic nationalism that Hitler offered in response to the national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, made National Socialism an attractive option to many, even most Christians in Germany.

  By way of contrast, one tiny Christian group proved very resistant to the charms of National Socialism, largely because of the militaristic nationalism espoused by Hitler. Jehovah's Witnesses," adherents of a religious movement founded in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, refused to participate in violence or the use of military force. National Socialism would not tolerate such a refusal, and this placed male members in harm's way. Furthermore, Jehovah's Witnesses believed in political neutrality, which meant they would not vote for Hitler nor give the Hitler salute, again provoking anger. Finally, Jehovah's Witnesses used Hebraic language and customs, which associated them with Jews, and they did so without apology or a willingness to change. This religious movement had already suffered discrimination in Germany prior to 1933, but it increased under Nazi rule. Adherents continued to distribute pamphlets and
otherwise maintain their faith, in opposition to government regulations, which left them open to imprisonment and/or placement in concentration camps. They were never singled out for death, and they were always given an option to renounce their faith and avoid further persecution; thus they cannot be compared to Jews or other racial victims of the regime. However, Jehovah's Witnesses largely held to their faith in the face of trouble, and thus they represent a religious group that refused to endorse or collaborate with the

  Catholics and Protestants in general showed more hostility than sympathy for Jehovah's Witnesses, and they shared Hitler's harsh values more than the Witnesses' pacifist ones. We should acknowledge, however, a distinction between Hitler's successful appeal to traditional values and his policies of murder: the Holocaust did not occur because he gave medals to women who stayed home and bore children. Actual genocide requires direct implementation of a policy of death. In the German case, the chief implementers included the SS, the Gestapo, the police, the military, arms and gas manufacturers, transportation experts, maintenance workers for the crematoria, plumbers, electricians, and other technicians who maintained the mobile killing units and the death camps. Banks financed construction of the camps, architects designed them, railroad engineers brought the victims to their deaths. Physicians, nurses, and orderlies carried out the Euthanasia Program, and many SS doctors played crucial roles in the death camps, both in the process of "selection" and in medical experiments on human subjects. Is it appropriate to speak of church leaders, pastors, or priests in the same breath? Did they contribute to genocide?