Nazi Germany (Short Oxford History of Germany) by Caplan Jane

Author:Caplan, Jane [Caplan, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

The implications of these various theological positions for institutional relations in the Third Reich are revealing. Whereas the Catholic Church was often treated as an enemy in the Nazi state, the Protestant churches were treated, in the main, significantly better. In Dachau, the primary destination for priests and pastors persecuted by the Nazis, 447 German clergymen were interned: 411 were Catholic, 36 Protestant. When the numbers of these clergymen are further broken down, the disparity becomes even greater: 8 Catholics executed, no Protestants; 3 Catholics sentenced to death, no Protestants; 47 Catholics sent to concentration camps, 2 Protestants; 99 Catholics imprisoned, 8 Protestants; 163 Catholics detained, 24 Protestants. Members of the Confessing Church, while clearly the theological and institutional adversaries of the German Christians, were not regarded as opponents of Nazism as such. Nor did they regard themselves in this light, except in those instances when the Nazi authorities put them under arrest or worse, and even then not always. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, easily the most lauded member of the Confessing Church for his heroic resistance to Nazism, and executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, was highly singular in this regard. The more books that are written on Bonhoeffer and his exemplary conduct, the more starkly emerges the contrast with how the solid majority of the Confessing Church behaved.

Research by Manfred Gailus has found that most Protestant pastors were, in fact, members of or ideologically in sympathy with the German Christians, and were not the storied resisters of the ‘Dahlem circle’ around Bonhoeffer and Niemöller (Dahlem was a suburb of Berlin where Niemöller had his parish). More typical, this research suggests, was the milieu around another group of Berlin pastors who to varying degrees saw in the Third Reich a restoration of German national greatness and mission. At the level of social history, Gailus also reveals a strong tendency for the German Christian parishes to come from working-class districts of Berlin—an important complement to Shelley Baranowski’s finding of some years ago that the Confessing Church drew its support mainly from the upper and upper-middle classes.

By contrast with the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, which could lay some claim to be facing down the threat of Nazism by simply holding the line, in the Protestant churches we see a different situation: among the members of the Confessing Church, support or neutrality on nearly all government actions outside of occasional state involvement in the ‘church struggle’, and among the German Christians a desire to be an active part of the Nazi movement. Regarding the German Christians, the feeling was to a considerable extent mutual: at least in the initial years of the Third Reich, the Nazis hoped the German Christians would achieve a full Gleichschaltung of the Protestant state churches. This was not just an alliance between two discrete institutions. Whereas the Catholic Church could claim no prominent Nazis within its ranks, the Protestant churches could and did claim prominent Nazis within their parishes, most notably Wilhelm Kube,

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