A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (review)

Dense, packed with detail, and exceedingly well researched, Matthew D. Hockenos’s fine study is the first English language book to thoroughly address how German Protestants came to terms with their complicity in and complacency toward Nazi rule. By examining key Protestant leaders and theologians including Hans Asmussen, Karl Barth, Otto Dibelius, Hermann Diem, Hans Iwald, Hans Meiser, Martin Niemöller, Helmut Thielicke, and Theophil Wurm, Hockenos builds a master narrative of the key 1945–1950 period detailing the sometimes heartening, but more often times disappointing, postwar response of German Protestantism to its own actions and inactions during the Third Reich.

Hockenos does an admirable job of delivering in a clear and concise manner the divisions within German Protestantism from 1933 through 1950. In 1933, there existed three Protestant traditions in Germany: Lutheran, United, and Reformed (Calvinist). Twenty-seven regional churches comprised the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche, DEK), and approximately 41 million Germans were officially registered as Evangelical. Roughly half belonged to the Lutheran regional churches, and the other half to the United Churches, save the 900,000 parishioners of the two small Reformed regional churches. The ascension of the Nazi regime brought the formation of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, the oppositional Confessing Church, and what Hockenos calls “the uncommitted neutrals,” each group supported by clergy and laity from all three traditions (pp. 4–5). After World War Two ended in 1945, three groups would emerge: ultraconservative Lutherans aligned with Hans Meiser and the Lutheran council; conservatives from Lutheran and United churches aligned with Bishop Wurm; and a reform- minded group of churchmen from all three Protestant traditions associated with Niemöller, Barth, and the Councils of Brethren (p. 38).

In discussing the Nazi period, Hockenos is forthright in his argument— heard far too infrequently—that “it is imperative to understand the church’s opposition to the state for what it really was: occasional critiques by a small group of churchmen against particular state policies, such as the Nazi euthanasia program and, most importantly, Nazi church policy,” not opposition to Nazi anti-Jewish policy (p. 16). Hockenos attributes the infrequency of public protests by conservative churchmen between 1933 and 1945 to “their empathy for a nationalist, anticommunist, and anti-Semitic agenda” (p. 47). Aside from the well-known and complex case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, there were other remarkable exceptions, including Confessing Church member Hans Asmussen’s letter to Adolf Hitler, dated early June 1936, arguing that “when, within the compass of the National Socialist view of life, an antisemitism is forced on the Christian that binds him to hatred of the Jew, the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor still stands . . .” (p. 32).

After the war, conservatives developed what Hockenos calls “the myth of conservative churchly resistance,” which, he aptly notes, “was one part fact and many parts fiction.” His analysis of postwar Protestant reckoning with the Nazi period is organized chronologically, following seven important statements by Meiser’s ultraconservative Lutherans, Wurm’s conservatives, and the Councils of Brethren: the Brethren Coucil’s “Message to the Pastors” (August 1945); the Treysa Conference statement, “Message to the Congregations” (August 1945); the Evangelical Church of Germany Council’s famous “Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt” (October 1945); Bishop Wurm’s 14 December 1945 “To the Christians in England;” the August 1947 “Statement by the Council of Brethren of the Evangelical Church of Germany Concerning the Political Course of our People,” or Darmstadt Statement; the 8 April 1948 “Message Concerning the Jewish Question,” issued in Darmstadt by the Council of Brethren; and the April 1950 Berlin-Weissensee Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany’s “Statement on the Jewish Question.” Hockenos historically and theologically contextualizes each of these important statements, and the text for each appears in full in a very useful series of appendices.

In an overall excellent and original study, the most impressive section of A Church Divided is Hockenos’s fascinating discussion of grassroots Protestant objections to the...