Betrayal Read online

  The most important relation of the German churches to the Holocaust lies in the production of a powerful kind of propaganda, a propaganda underscored by the moral authority of the church. While the German government established a Ministry of Propaganda under the notorious Joseph Goebbels, the evidence presented by Bankier and others suggests that Goebbels could not entirely control people's minds. There will always be some people who are suspicious of governments and politicians. For many, religious leaders are a higher and more reliable source of moral authority. A pastor standing in the pulpit and preaching in the name of God carries a weight of authority and respect hard to find in any other segment of society.

  The Nazi regime was not unaware of the churches' authority in the eyes of the civilian population, nor were the Nazis unconcerned about the churches' potential for contradicting or undermining the policies of the regime. Hitler himself evidenced this concern, and police reports regularly highlighted the churches as possible sources of trouble. In 1938 the Gestapo warned that two sources of potential resistance to the regime existed: the political enemies of National Socialism and the churches. Whereas the former had been decimated in the early years of the Reich through the imprisonment, forced exile, and murder of communists, socialists, and trade unionists, the churches had remained relatively intact as institutions.

  In some ways the churches had seemed to strengthen their position in the early years of National Socialism. The Protestant church had developed a new national organization accompanied by a transfer of power in most regional churches to those pastors and bishops who supported Hitler. In the first months of the regime, the Roman Catholic Church achieved a longstanding goal, a Concordat with the German government by which both sides agreed to work cooperatively and with respect for their individual spheres. In neither case did these acts of support by the churches achieve what they had hoped for: Hitler's support and respect for them. The Concordat of 1933 never created the safe place for Catholic belief and practice that Catholics had expected from the agreement, but rather led to months and years of political interference and quarrelsome negotiation. On the Protestant side, Hitler had initially spoken out on behalf of the "German Christian" Movement (Deutsche Christen), the group of Protestants who called for an overhaul of Christian teachings in line with National Socialist principles. But after 1934 his recognition of intractable quarrels within the Protestant church led him to ignore church affairs. Such neglect left his supporters within the church feeling frustrated. What could the German Christians do to win the attention of Hitler and earn more important places for themselves within the regime? In 1938 they hit upon a plan-a concerted effort to produce antisemitic propaganda from a Christian perspective.

  Not all church leaders actively supported the Nazi regime, and some vehemently opposed specific policies. Nonetheless, support of the regime was common among Christians, and the vast majority failed to raise any objection to Jewish persecution. Silence, in this case, speaks loudly. The violation of moral norms that is inherent in the Holocaust requires us to pose questions regarding Germany as a Christian nation. Churches had a high profile in Germany. They exerted formative influence on German culture and German individuals. We know that church leaders expressed praise and enthusiastic support for the "rebirth" of Germany under Hitler's authority. Did they also countenance the Holocaust? Did the moral reassurance experienced by Franz Stangl during his unease over the Euthanasia Program find its counterpart in Germans killing Jews? Such questions require close attention to the specific subject of Jewish-Christian relations.

  Christian Attitudes toward Judaism

  The connection between Christian theology and antisemitism is complex, with a massive historiography debating the issues. To begin with, the relationship between Jesus and Judaism is fraught with problems, with some New Testament scholars arguing that Jesus himself acted fully in accord with the Jewish religious beliefs and practices of his day, while the majority present Jesus as rejecting one or another central aspect of Judaism. Paul's writings are similarly debated. The vast majority of New Testament scholars present Paul as a sharp critic of Judaism, while others understand him as a proponent of Jewish theology seeking to include pagans within the community of Jews.

  Early Christianity, in its struggle to establish itself as a religion and community independent of Judaism, often engaged in harsh polemics against Jewish religious practices and beliefs, even when some of those Christian polemicists were themselves Jewish. As Christianity rose to dominance, however, its attacks on Judaism became ominous, since they too often transmuted from verbal to physical assaults. Christian attacks against Jews were motivated in part by social and economic factors, to be sure, yet they were all too frequently spurred by Christian theological claims, such as the contention that all Jews were to blame for the death of Jesus. During the Middle Ages, Jews in Christian lands were increasingly demonized-accused, for example, of killing Christian children in order to use their blood to bake matzo, or of desecrating the eucharistic wafer in an effort to wound the body of Christ. Jews were accused of poisoning wells, of mocking Christianity, of performing sexual abominations, of being in league with the devil. It is not surprising that such charges often led to riots against Jews, resulting in the destruction of their property and in beatings, torture, rape, and murder.

  At the same time, there were also periods of harmony, in which Jews and Christians cooperated in business ventures and intellectual exchange. Jews, for their part, held an ambivalent attitude to Christianity. Most viewed Jesus and the claims about his virgin birth, the incarnation, and the resurrection as absurd, yet some were also fascinated by the image of the Virgin Mary, the Trinity, and the union of divine and human. Some Jewish religious writing, particularly mystical literature, displays the distinct influence of those Christian concepts.

  The Protestant Reformation brought new developments to ChristianJewish relations. In Germany, Martin Luther had hoped for the conversion of Jews to his movement, now that he had clarified "true" Christianity, and he became enraged when he realized that the vast majority of Jews repudiated his mission. Late in life he wrote an attack on Jews virtually unsurpassed in its brutality." Theologically, Luther introduced a sharp distinction between law and gospel, identifying the former with the Old Testament and Judaism, the latter with Jesus and Christianity. The affirmation of Christian gospel entailed a denigration of Jewish law, a theological view that Luther claimed to find in Paul. Lutheran theology, as it developed in Germany, became increasingly sharp in its depiction of the misery of the Jews' "life under the law." Judaism, particularly the Talmud, was held up as the quintessence of the kind of religion Christians rejected.

  As German Protestant theology developed in the nineteenth century, Jewish theology in Germany also flourished, with Jewish theologians attempting to refute the negative depictions of Judaism in Christian literature. Indeed, one of the central preoccupations of modern Jewish thought has been the attempt to overcome negative images of Judaism in Christian teachings. That effort began in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, as Jewish theologians began to examine Christian claims about Jesus and his relationship to first-century Jewish life. The most prominent among them was Abraham Geiger, a scholar and rabbi who carefully monitored Christian depictions of Judaism.' Geiger noted that Christian theologians' unjustified description of the Pharisees as hypocrites had led to all sorts of twisted readings of ancient texts, just as the failure of New Testament scholars to read rabbinic literature left them unable to place Gospel passages within what he saw as their proper context. He noted numerous errors in Christian interpretations of the New Testament and related texts that arose because the commentators assumed the legalism of early Judaism and the hypocrisy of Pharisaic religion.

  Based on his own reading of rabbinic literature, Geiger concluded that the Pharisees and Sadducees, the major groups within first-century Palestinian Judaism, were liberals and conservatives, respectively. According to Geiger, Jesus was
a Pharisee who preached the typical religious and moral teachings of the Pharisaic movement. If anything, Jesus' approach was somewhat conservative, colored most likely by his background in the Galilee-a region characterized, according to Geiger, by its simple, lower-class, nationalistic, uneducated people. In a phrase that made Geiger notorious among Christian theologians, he wrote that Jesus "did not utter a new thought, nor did he break down the barriers of nationality.... He did not abolish any part of Judaism; he was a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel."2x

  The idea that Jesus might be identified with the Pharisees, those exemplars of hypocrisy, legalism, and religious degeneracy, proved an outrage to Christian theologians, who minced no words in condemning Geiger. The difficulty, however, lay in refuting Geiger's evidence. The parallels he demonstrated between Jesus' words and those of the rabbis were striking and conclusive. Yet if Jesus said nothing new, what sort of Christian theological claims could be based on his ministry? Further, if liberal Protestants were true to their nineteenth-century goal of looking for the faith of Jesus, rather than the faith about Jesus, what would it mean to discover that Jesus' faith was Pharisaic Judaism? From Geiger's perspective, Pharisaic Judaism was the liberal, progressive tradition that democratized the aristocratic tendencies of the priestly prerogatives. Only later, with the rise of Christian persecutions of Judaism, Geiger argued, did Pharisaic liberalism deteriorate into the rigid halakhic religion of the Talmud. The Reform Judaism that he helped to establish in the nineteenth century was, for Geiger, a revival and restoration of Pharisaic liberalism. Thus, if a Christian of the nineteenth century truly wanted to find the faith of Jesus, namely, Pharisaic Judaism, the best place to find it would be not within the Christian dogma constructed about Jesus, but among modern Reform Jews of Germany.

  Geiger was not alone in claiming Jesus as Jew, rabbi, and even Pharisee. Indeed, most modern Jewish theologians and rabbis have sought to emphasize Jesus' Jewishness as a way to smooth Jewish entry into Christian society; this was, after all, the era of Jewish emancipation and secularization. Yet the more Jewish their depictions of Jesus, the more annoyed their Christian colleagues became. Yes, Jesus was a Jew, Christians acknowledged, but he was an exceptional Jew. Ernest Renan, author of the most widely read book on the life of Jesus published during the nineteenth century, cited Geiger's work on the Pharisees positively, agreeing that Jesus' life had to be placed within the context of his historical setting. Renan, however, then proceeded to describe the Pharisees negatively and to define Jesus in contrast to them: "Jesus recognized only the religion of the heart, whilst that of the Pharisees consisted almost exclusively in observances.""' Moreover, Renan argued, "One of the most prominent faults of the Jewish race is its bitterness in controversy, and the abusive tone which it always throws into it.... Jesus, who was almost exempt from all the defects of his race, was led against his will into making use of the style used by all the polemics."" Although Jesus began by trying to reform Judaism, he eventually gave up, Renan argued, and after visiting Jerusalem, "he appears no more as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism.... Jesus was no longer a Jew.""

  Geiger criticized Renan in an "Open Letter," which he published as an appendix to one of his most popular books, a survey of Jewish history. Geiger wrote that Judaism functioned in Renan's work as a negative background to "let the picture of a rising Christianity stand out in more dazzling brilliancy," and as the brunt of the blame for "whatever in Christianity did not please [him]."'' Geiger identified that same technique in the work of most of the Christian New Testament scholars writing during the 1860s and 1870s, a period that inaugurated a revival of interest in the historical background of the New Testament." Although New Testament scholars cited the research of Geiger and other Jewish historians, they consistently elevated Jesus as a superior religious figure whose message constituted not a reform within Judaism, but an utter rejection of it.

  By the early twentieth century, Protestant theologians and scholars conceded that Jesus' moral message was derived historically from Judaism. Adolf von Harnack made such a concession, but he immediately insisted that it was precisely a sign of Jesus' extraordinary religious genius that he had been able to extract moral teachings from the sterile legalism of his day. Harnack enshrined this idea in 1900, in his classic statement of liberal Protestantism, Das Wesen des Clhristentums, in which he wrote that although the religious message Jesus proclaimed had already been stated by the Pharisees, nonetheless the Pharisees "were in possession of much else besides. With them [religion] was weighted, darkened, distorted, rendered ineffective and deprived of its force by a thousand things which they also held to be religious and every whit as important as mercy and judgment.... [T]he spring of holiness ... was choked with sand and dirt, and its water was polluted." With Jesus, "the spring burst forth afresh, and broke a new way for itself through the rubbish."" For Harnack, then, the significant fact was not that Jesus' teaching was unoriginal but that it was pristine.

  Harnack's portrayal of a legalistic Judaism was countered by the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck, who distinguished between Jesus' criticism of Pharisaic Judaism and Paul's rejection of rabbinic law. Christianity, by following Paul, violated Jesus' own adherence to the law and created, in Baeck's words, a "romantic religion" of mysticism in which human beings remain trapped by their sinful nature, passively awaiting salvation through grace: "In this ecstatic abandonment, which wants so much to be seized and embraced and would like to pass away in the roaring ocean of the world, the distinctive character of romantic religion stands revealed-the feminine trait that marks it. There is something passive about its piety; it feels so touchingly helpless and weary, it wants to be seized and inspired from above, embraced by a flood of grace which should descend upon it to consecrate it and possess ita will-less instrument of the wondrous ways of God."" Feminine Christianity, Baeck argued, fails to foster moral responsibility, in contrast to the masculine "classical religion," Judaism, which places ethical commandments at the forefront and demands no belief in irrational dogma.

  The Jewish critique of Christian theological portrayals of Judaism continued vigorously until the Nazi era, but without making a serious impact. In Germany, there were no Jewish studies faculties at universities, and few Christian theologians were interested in studying classical Jewish texts. As a result, the denigrating stereotypes continued unabated. The highly influential and widely respected German theologian Rudolf Bultmann published in 1944 a study of early Christianity that contained the same kinds of distortions that Jewish scholars had been protesting for a hundred years. Bultmann argued that the Jews' observance of the commandments "meant making life an intolerable burden." He went on in this vein: "The motive of ethics was obedience. ... The ritual commandments having lost their original meaning, man's relation to God was inevitably conceived in legalistic terms"; "For Judaism God has become remote."'^ By contrast, Jesus was "a tremendous protest against contemporary Jewish legalism"; in Jesus' teachings, God is concerned with "inner motive"; Jesus "brought God out of the false transcendence to which he had been relegated by Judaism and made him near at hand again." The uniqueness of Jesus is that he taught that "God is near, and hears the petitions we address to him as a father listens to the requests of his children"-as if no other Jew had experienced closeness to

  The debates over the relationship between Jesus and Judaism continue to this day. Ernst Kasemann's recent "Protest!" in the journal Evangelische Theologie is a case in point, arguing that to call Jesus' teachings Jewish is insulting and renders Christianity meaningless. Kasemann is one of the most highly respected and liberal figures in the field of German Protestant New Testament scholarship. That he would continue to feel so threatened by Jesus' Jewishness indicates the depth and persistence of the theological dilemma."

  We need to view German attitudes toward Jews in a larger context in order to realize that they did not develop in a vacuum. On the contrary, the growth of a significant community of Jewish scholars in Germany during the ni
neteenth century gave rise to a two-sided discussion. Geiger and his colleagues did not write for a Jewish audience alone; their work was also read and studied and discussed by Christians. Yet the fact that the discussion was two-sided makes the question of culpability even stronger: Those Christian theologians who produced damning stereotypes about Judaism cannot claim they knew no better, or had no access to Jewish historical scholarship.

  The Postwar Era

  Equally troubling is the long delay after 1945 before the churches began to consider their culpability in the Holocaust. The initial response of German church leaders was to claim that Christians had been involved in the resis tance against Hitler. The 1945 Stuttgart Declaration, the earliest Protestant postwar response, says nothing about the murder of the Jews, just as the 1934 Barmen Declaration, the strongest anti-Nazi statement issued by the Confessing Church during the Third Reich, had said nothing about Nazi antisemitism. Only in the 1960s and again in the late 1970s did a few Protestant theological voices begin to suggest that Christianity had to revise its attitude toward Judaism and the Jewish people. The Second Vatican Council, convened in the early 1960s, caused some change in Catholic attitudes, as did the enormous controversy over Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy. An international sensation, the play condemned both the Vatican and the German Catholic church for deliberately turning away from reliable reports about the death camps and failing to exert moral or diplomatic efforts to intervene.

  In the first years after the war, German churches were unable to muster even a strong condemnation of the murder of the Jews, much less an expression of responsibility for its horrors. This should not surprise us, perhaps, for church leadership remained, with a few exceptions, in the same hands that had guided the churches under Hitler. Furthermore, German theologians writing after 1945, even those who had opposed some aspects of National Socialism, had all been trained in an environment hostile to Judaism. Few were untainted by the antisemitic mentality of Nazi propaganda or the formidably anti-Jewish slant within the universities' theological teachings. Even a generally admired figure such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop of Wurttemberg, illustrates the problem. In a January 1949 letter to lay church members meeting at Darmstadt to formulate a declaration about the Holocaust, he wrote: "Can anyone in Germany speak about the Jewish question without mentioning how Jewish literature sinned against the German people through its mockery of all that is holy, since the days of Heinrich Heine? Or of the suffering endured in numerous regions by German farmers at the hands of Jewish money-lenders? And if one wants today to speak out against antisemitism, can one remain silent on the misfortune caused by the Occupying Forces, who have given power to emigre Jews, so that they might give expression to their understandable feelings of rage?""' Not surprisingly, given the tone of Wurm's advice, the Darmstadt Declaration ultimately blamed the Holocaust on the Jews' refusal to become Christians.