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The Varieties of Protestantism in Nazi Germany by Franz G. M. Feige Pdf
Examines the history of Christianity in the area of the relationship between theology and politics, particularly as applied to the encounter of German Protestantism and National Socialism, a topic usually treated as the German church struggle.
Protestant and Catholic Women in Nazi Germany by Michael Phayer Pdf
Describes the attitudes and activities of women's church organizations in Nazi Germany. Antisemitism and support for Nazism were more widespread among Protestant than among Catholic women. Most members of the largest Protestant women's organization, the Evangelische Frauenhilfe, identified with the Confessing Church. Though they negated racism within the Church, they never publicly protested against Nazi antisemitic measures. Describes aid to Jews by a Catholic circle in Berlin, centered around Bishop Konrad von Preysing and Margarete Sommer, director of a diocesan bureau affiliated with the St. Raphael Society. The bureau also gave welfare aid to non-Aryans and sent teams to help those rounded up for transport. After it became clear that the Jews were going to their deaths, Sommer organized a network which helped many Jews to hide. She relayed information about the extermination of the Jews to Cardinal Adolf Bertram, urging him to issue a forceful protest, but the Cardinal regarded her as unreliable and refused to take action.
"Under Hitler, Germany's state-linked provincial churches functioned as seedbeds of nationalism. A smaller and independent church form - the "free church" or denomination - offered greater promise of nonconformity. Linked by pacifist traditions, German Mennonites, Seventh-day Adventists, and Quakers promoted a range of liberal principles: empowerment of the individual conscience, respect for confessional diversity, and separation of church and state. Nonetheless, two of these denominations used these same principles to defend and even embrace the Nazi regime. This book examines what makes Christian communities - when meeting the harsh challenges of modernity - viable entities of faith or hollow forms."--BOOK JACKET.
Complicity in the Holocaust by Robert P. Ericksen Pdf
In one of the darker aspects of Nazi Germany, churches and universities - generally respected institutions - grew to accept and support Nazi ideology. Complicity in the Holocaust describes how the state's intellectual and spiritual leaders enthusiastically partnered with Hitler's regime, becoming active participants in the persecution of Jews, effectively giving Germans permission to participate in the Nazi regime. Ericksen also examines Germany's deeply flawed yet successful postwar policy of denazification in these institutions.
Conflicts, Compromises and Mutual Self-interest - how the Nazis and the Catholic and Protestant Churches Dealt with Each Other During the Third Reich by Sebastian Dregger Pdf
Essay from the year 2008 in the subject History Europe - Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 71 = A, Oxford Brookes University, course: The Nazi Dictatorship, 1933-1945, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Free from any apologetic or debunking fuss, the essay depicts the complex relationship between the Nazi state and the Catholic and Protestant Churches during the Third Reich. Focussing on three major areas of conflict between the Churches and the Nazis(sychronization ('Gleichschaltung'), the Nazis' anti-church policies, the churches and euthanasia) the essay's argument is that a pragmatic approach by both Churches and the Nazis based on the preservation of mutual self-interest is the key to understand their dealing with each other in each individual case of conflict. In a second part, the essays seeks to explain why both protagonists preferred a pragmatic instead of a more radical and uncompromising approach to each other, stating that three factors are accountable for this: First, mutually shared political views based on anti-liberalism and anti-Marxism; second, a tremendous mispercerption of the regime's nature by both churches; third, the limits of anti-church policies among a population still being deeply Christianized.
This book closely examines the turmoil in the German Protestant churches in the immediate postwar years as they attempted to come to terms with the recent past. Reeling from the impact of war, the churches addressed the consequences of cooperation with the regime and the treatment of Jews. In Germany, the Protestant Church consisted of 28 autonomous regional churches. During the Nazi years, these churches formed into various alliances. One group, the German Christian Church, openly aligned itself with the Nazis. The rest were cautiously opposed to the regime or tried to remain noncommittal. The internal debates, however, involved every group and centered on issues of belief that were important to all. Important theologians such as Karl Barth were instrumental in pressing these issues forward. While not an exhaustive study of Protestantism during the Nazi years, A Church Divided breaks new ground in the discussion of responsibility, guilt, and the Nazi past.
The acquiescence of the German Protestant churches in Nazi oppression and murder of Jews is well documented. In this book, Christopher J. Probst demonstrates that a significant number of German theologians and clergy made use of the 16th-century writings by Martin Luther on Jews and Judaism to reinforce the racial anti-semitism and religious anti-Judaism already present among Protestants. Focusing on key figures, Probst's study makes clear that a significant number of pastors, bishops, and theologians of varying theological and political persuasions employed Luther's texts with considerable effectiveness in campaigning for the creation of a "de-Judaized" form of Christianity. Probst shows that even the church most critical of Luther's anti-Jewish writings reaffirmed the anti-semitic stereotyping that helped justify early Nazi measures against the Jews.
Nazism, Liberalism, and Christianity by Kenneth C. Barnes Pdf
The Great Depression devastated the economies of both Germany and Great Britain. Yet the middle classes in the two countries responded in vastly different ways. German Protestants, perceiving a choice among a Bolshevik-style revolution, the chaos and decadence of Weimar liberalism, and Nazi authoritarianism, voted Hitler into power and then acquiesced in the resulting dictatorship. In Britain, Labour and Tory politicians moved gingerly together to form a National Government that muddled through the Depression with piecemeal reform. In this troubling book about troubled times, Kenneth Barnes looks into the question of how theologians and church leaders contributed to a cultural matrix that predisposed Protestants in these two countries to very different political alternatives. Holding fast to the liberal social gospel, British churchmen diagnosed the problems of the 1920s and the Depression ao solvable and called for genuine reforms, many of which foreshadowed the coming welfare state. German leaders, in contrast, were terrified by the socioeconomic and political problems of the Weimar era and offered no social message or solution. Despairingly, they referred the problems to secular politicians and after 1933 beat the drum for obedience to the Nazi state. Based on extensive research in European archives, especially the rich papers of the interwar ecumenical movement housed at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, this book examines key intellectual figures such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Archbishop William Temple, as well as many lesser known church officials and theologians. Barnes brings to life the intellectual struggles and dilemmas of the interwar period to help explain why good people could, for moral and religious reasons, choose opposing courses of political action.
The Sanctity of Rural Life by Shelley Baranowski Pdf
In this ground-breaking study, Shelley Baranowski not only explores how and why church-going Protestants in eastern Prussia turned to Nazism in large numbers, but also shows that the rural elite and the church propagated a myth of the stability, the wholesomeness, and the class-harmony--in short, the "sanctity"--of rural life, a myth that was a key component of Nazi propaganda that helped secure support for the Third Reich in rural areas. Of great interest to historians and students of the period as well as anyone interested in how a fringe radical movement gained wide popular support.
Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center. Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years. The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.
For the Soul of the People by Victoria Barnett Pdf
The Confessing Church was one of the rare German organizations that opposed Nazism from the very beginning, and in For the Soul of the People, Victoria Barnett delves into the story of the Church's resistance to Hitler. For this remarkable story, Barnett interviewed more than sixty Germans who were active in the Confessing Church, asking them to reflect on their personal experiences under Hitler and how they see themselves, morally and politically, today. She provides a haunting glimpse of the German experience under Hitler, but also gives a provocative look into what it has meant to be a German in the twentieth century.
The Church Confronts the Nazis by Hubert G. Locke Pdf
A collection of working papers published in preparation for the American conference at Seattle observing the 50th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration. In the paper by J.S. Conway, the struggle between the churches and the Third Reich is detailed. The author argues that the Barmen Declaration was not intended as a political protest against the Hitler state, but only the nazified Church, that the Confessing Church was never really the spearhead of resistance to the tyranny that engulfed Germany, that the Roman Catholic Church was essentially neutralized and that the churchgoing population did not realize the implications of Nazism until it was too late.
Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity by Richard Bonney Pdf
Contemporaries and historians have found it difficult to interpret the ambiguous relationship between National Socialism and Christianity. Both the Catholic and Protestant Churches tended to agree with National Socialists in their authoritarianism, their attacks on socialism and communism, and their campaign against the Versailles Treaty; but the doctrinal position of the Churches could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or a domestic agenda involving the complete subservience of Church to State. Important sections of the Nazi Party sought the complete extirpation of Christianity and its substitution by a purely racial religion, but considerations of expediency made it impossible for the National Socialist leadership to adopt this radical anti-Christian stance as official policy. The Kulturkampf Newsletters, which have not appeared in English since the 1930s, were produced by German Catholic exiles in France. They scrupulously document the tensions between various strands of Nazi policy, and the nature of the policy eventually adopted: this was to reduce the Churches' influence in all areas of public life through the use of every available means, yet without provoking the difficulties - diplomatic as well as domestic - which an openly declared war of extermination might have caused.
The Nazi Religion and the Rise of the French Christian Resistance by Kathleen Burton Pdf
If asked to define “Nazism,” most people think of fascism, racism, antisemitism, and the use of propaganda. Few people know that Nazism also included a strong religious component. Yet it did. The Nazi religion was termed Positive Christianity, and it is directly cited in Hitler’s Nazi Party Platform of 1920. But what was Positive Christianity? In this book, Kathleen Burton details when and where this religion was embraced; how it was received and critiqued by the prominent theologians of the 1930s; and how a combined effort of rogue Catholic priests and Protestant pastors in France, aware of the religious threat, worked together to fight Nazism during World War II. This contributed to the survival of seventy-five percent of France’s Jewish population. Burton concludes by describing what work still needs to be done to fully understand, clarify, and debunk Nazism’s Positive Christianity. Today’s world is fascinated by the tragic events of World War II, yet Hitler’s propaganda coup against traditional Christianity is not well-known or understood. This book closes that gap.