- A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past
Matthew D. Hockenos argues that in the immediate aftermath of World War II most Germans did not focus on the war that Germany had started in Europe or on the murder of millions of Jews and other non-combatants by German soldiers and police. Rather, the majority of Germans were primarily concerned with their own suffering, measured in cubic meters of rubble in cities leveled by Allied bomb attacks, staggeringly high military and civilian death tolls, the raping of German women (particularly by Soviet soldiers), and the displacement of millions from bombed-out housing or from their homes in Eastern Europe as they fled in advance of the Red Army in late 1944 and early 1945. Those to whom many Germans turned for guidance in troubled times—Protestant ministers—tended most often to confirm, not challenge, their parishioners' image of themselves as victims of measures no less severe than those perpetrated by the Nazi regime against Jews. In the words of Bishop Theophil Wurm, writing in an open letter "To the Christians of England" in December 1945: "To pack the German people into a still more narrow space, to cut off as far as possible the material basis of their very existence, is no different, in essentials, from Hitler's plan to stamp out the existence of the Jewish race" (p. 150). Allied charges that the Germans were collectively responsible for Nazi crimes were met by Germans' insistence that the Allies had plenty of blood on their own hands.
Hockenos establishes that conservative Protestant clerical leaders grounded this rhetoric of German victimization in an understanding of scripture and theology: Christians could not be held responsible for the Nazi regime because of "the doctrine of two kingdoms"—a spiritual kingdom to which Christians owed allegiance and a temporal kingdom over which they could have little influence. Although the "Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt" in October 1945 confessed a "great solidarity of guilt" for the "endless suffering . . . brought to many peoples and countries" (p. 187), Hockenos reminds us that this pronouncement was directed primarily at a foreign audience—representatives of the World Council of Churches—and triggered an enormously negative domestic response. Conservatives in Germany argued that Nazism triumphed because too many Germans had turned away from the faith, leaving themselves susceptible to the temptations of an all-too-worldly regime. Germany's devastating defeat was a sign of "God's righteous judgement" (p. 3). But God could mete out not only judgment but forgiveness, and whatever guilt Germans should confess was to [End Page 155] heavenly powers, not to the Allies. By the late 1940s, conservative church leaders were also more focused on containing the threat of Communism than on explaining their responsibility for National Socialism.
Such self-exculpatory views were prevalent among a majority of Protestant leaders after the war. However, as Hockenos demonstrates, their views came under vehement challenge from reform-minded theologians like Martin Niemöller, himself a concentration camp inmate from 1937 to 1945, and Karl Barth. These critical theologians described a troubling legacy that could be overcome only by a commitment to become involved in politics as well as theology. Barth's call in the 1930s for Protestants to reject the separation of "Gospel and Law" resounded through the early postwar years, and Hockenos carefully describes how postwar splits within Protestantism were prefigured in the Third Reich. It is not surprising, he argues, that immediately after the war Germans were far more likely to see themselves as victims than as perpetrators. This entrenched outlook makes all the more remarkable the moral courage of those who were calling for acknowledgment of past crimes, accountability, and a thoroughgoing reform of the church, lest past mistakes be repeated. The lesson of National Socialism, reformers argued after 1945, was that Protestants should not permit the "two kingdoms" to remain distinct. Not many Germans took part in the crimes of the Nazi regime, but all Germans were accountable because they had looked the other way or...