The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (review)

As Richard Steigmann-Gall points out, "the insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years" (p. 266). In The Holy Reich, Steigmann-Gall seeks to correct that view. National Socialism had many connections to Christianity, as Steigmann-Gall demonstrates. There were personal ties—Nazi leaders who considered themselves good Christians and were active in their churches, including some, like Wilhelm Kube and Erich Koch, who held high offices in the Protestant Church. There were institutional links too, from Hitler's early attempts to unify German Protestants into a national, Nazified church, to women's organizations that used the rhetoric, methods, and even personnel of church groups to serve the Nazi state and its goals. Most important in Steigmann-Gall's analysis, there was ideological common ground. Members of the Nazi elite—even "paganists" like Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler—used biblical allusions in their private and public pronouncements; retained an affection for Jesus and found a place for him in their world views; and supported a Christian social ethic of sacrifice, service, and charity. We cannot understand the Nazi movement, Steigmann-Gall concludes, without admitting its close, if ambiguous, relationship to Christianity.

Steigmann-Gall's first chapter analyzes the Nazi concept of "positive Christianity" and introduces some of its key proponents within the Party, particularly in the years before Hitler came to power in 1933. Many scholars dismiss "positive Christianity" as an opportunistic slogan coined to conceal Nazism's intrinsic hostility toward the churches. Using the words of leading Nazis, Steigmann-Gall shows that, to the contrary, many Nazi spokesmen saw their movement as pred-icated on a specific kind of Christianity: anti-Semitic, socially engaged, and committed to German unity. These "Nazi elites" showed by their examples that it was not only possible but desirable to be both a loyal Christian and a devout follower of Adolf Hitler. This attempt to delineate Nazi views of Christianity is the most original part of Steigmann-Gall's book.

A subsequent chapter describes Nazi efforts to bridge the confessional divide between Germany's Protestant majority and substantial Roman Catholic minority. Here Steigmann-Gall returns to well traveled ground to address relations between Hitler's new regime in 1933 and Germany's Protestant churches. Hitler's initial efforts to "co-ordinate" German Protestantism were not products of antagonism or precursors to an eventual destruction of Christianity in Germany, Steigmann-Gall argues. Instead such initiatives—from support of the "German Christian" movement in 1933 church elections to attacks on confessional schools—reflected the anti-doctrinal nature of "positive Christianity" and expressed Nazism's "clear ideological preference for Protestantism over Catholicism" (p. 84). Indeed, Steigmann-Gall contends, with their admiration for Martin Luther, their suspicion of Ultramontanism, and their anticlericalism, Nazi leaders built on liberal Protestantism in the preceding century. Even nominal Catholics such as Hitler and his propaganda master Joseph Goebbels revealed affinities for Protestantism that sharply contrasted their vituperations against their own faith tradition.

Some readers may be pleased to see how easily Steigmann-Gall lets Catholicism off the hook—especially after recent, more critical studies of Catholic anti-Semitism, Catholics in the Third Reich, and the papacy and the Holocaust (by Olaf Blaschke, Michael Phayer, Oded Heilbronner, Kevin Spicer, Beth Griech-Pollele, Susan Zucotti, Daniel Goldhagen, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, and others). But before heaving a sigh of relief, one should note that Steigmann-Gall pays much more attention to German Protestantism than to Catholicism, as his notes and bibliography reveal. Engagement with Catholic issues would not explode the book's main argument, but it would add nuance to Steigmann-Gall's claims about Nazism and Christianity.

The remaining chapters focus on neo-paganism within National Socialism, which Steigmann-Gall shows was neither as powerful nor as anti-Christian as outside observers have assumed; on the Party's turn away from Protestantism by 1937 after failure to create a national church...