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  • Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany by Robert P. Ericksen
  • Charles Gallagher
Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. By Robert P. Ericksen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xviii + 261. Paper $28.99. ISBN 978-1107663336.

When George Fox undertook his seventeenth-century travels, a number of groups stood out as primary obstacles to his Quaker reform. “Priests and professors,” according to Fox, were two of the most important social groups worthy of conversion, but they were also the ones least impressed by the spirit of reform. For Fox, an “earthly [End Page 455] and airy spirit” held them back from true enlightenment. While Robert P. Ericksen’s Complicity in the Holocaust makes no mention of Quakers (who remained viable religious players under the Nazis; see Hans Schmitt Quakers & Nazis [2008]), Ericksen’s work heartily agrees with Fox‘s main contention that priests, ministers, and university professors represented classes of experts who had the potential to bring about social change on a large scale.

As Christopher Browning has shown, Nazi killing squads were comprised of “ordinary Germans.” The ranks of university professorships and church pastorates did not necessarily consist of ordinary Germans, but rather “good” ones. They were “good Germans” because, by the very force of their professional and vocational status, they could be expected to be moral arbiters within modern German Christian society. When Erickson examines the question of Holocaust complicity, he does so by indicating that these two categories of persons—priests and professors—possessed vast potential for social impact, leadership for resistance, and the possibility of leading a national conversation about the morality of Nazi policy. The picture Erickson paints is one of double failure: a failure to identify the evils of Nazi policy, and a refusal to speak out against Nazi measures.

Throughout his work, Ericksen tussles with the question of whether or not supine behavior in the face of Nazi social encroachment amounted to active Holocaust complicity. For Ericksen, because neither group “recanted [its] early endorsement of Nazism or harbored significant instances of resistance within their ranks” (xvi), the complicity narrative certainly applies. Ericksen shows that prior to 1980, much of the historiography connected to the churches and universities highlighted singular and isolated instances of resistance, such as the White Rose student resistance group in Munich, which hoped that its moral critique of Nazism would inspire other students to resist. No such movement materialized because of entrenched student empathy with Nazism. Likewise, the case of Martin Niemöller offered merely a single instance of resistance within the Confessing Church. His profile as a Protestant hero obscures the vast multitude of theology professors who quickly and enthusiastically embraced the Nazification of their faculties.

Ericksen‘s book is helpful because it begins the story of complicity not in 1933, with the rise of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship, but instead in 1923, with the decadelong religious and ideological tumultuousness that marked the Weimer Republic. For Ericksen, the ecclesiastical and academic struggles of the 1930s cannot be assessed without understanding the impact of World War I and Weimar. For Christians, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 created an “idealism” in which Christians could believe. At the same time, the Hitlerian rant “against prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality, while blaming the modern moral decadence on Jews” (46), appealed to many German Christians. [End Page 456]

The Roman Catholic Church, already entrenched in a battle against Bolshevism, found much to like in Hitler‘s program. One specific contribution in this regard was the role of the Catholic Center Party in bringing Hitler to power: for Ericksen, the political jockeying supported by the Zentrum was the very mechanism by which Hitler gained legal credence. Catholics, then, played the role of political midwife at Hitler‘s birth. In the beginning, neither the Vatican—after the Concordat of 1933—nor ordinary Catholics in the pews “wanted to condemn the Nazis out of hand” (59). While Pope Pius XI would later criticize specific Nazi atrocities against the church, there was no condemnation of Hitler as Führer. Part of this, it seems, may be explained by the importance of Roman Catholic Thomistic philosophy regarding...

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