Constructing a Christian History of Nazism: Anglicanism and the Memory of the Holocaust, 1945-49

Perceptions of the Third Reich forged in Western Europe and the USA immediately after 1945 were constructed according to the relationship between the West and the Soviet Union. By the time the Berlin airlift confirmed the bipolar division of the world in 1948, a historical narrative had been developed that explained Nazism as a form of totalitarianism directly comparable to the tyranny of the Soviet East. Comparison produced a caricature of Nazism, especially in the intellectual and popular cultures of Britain and the USA. ¹ The Nazi movement was portrayed as having been only concerned with power and domination, and the German population as simply the victims of a monolithic dictatorship. ² According to this Cold War narrative, a ruthless mechanism of political control enforced that dictatorship. The Gestapo was portrayed as the German NKVD, and it was alleged that the spirit of the Nazi concentration camps lived on in Stalin's gulag. ³ This account of the birth of historical understanding of the Nazi era is now a matter of historiographical and popular consensus. ⁴

Consensus also has it that, as a result of the dominance of this politically inspired narrative of the Third Reich, the West abandoned the Holocaust as an indicator of Nazism's evil. The murder of the Jews was either ignored in Western Europe after 1945 or understood as an element of the Nazi culture of violence and control. At no point was what we now know as the Holocaust interpreted as peculiarly significant, or important, in and of itself. ⁵ The general barbarity of totalitarian domination was emphasized at the expense of Nazi anti-Semitism because cruelty was not specific to yesterday's enemy. "Totalitarianism" could be used to indict both an emasculated Nazism and more importantly the new Soviet danger.

According to the consensus, historical accounts of Nazism proposed during the early Cold War were entirely distinct from pictures of Nazism painted in World War II. The Nazism of Allied war propaganda had been a Nazism rooted in the German population. ⁶ "Nazis" were seen as the latest carriers of the spirit of Prussian militarism within a war propaganda that emphasized the blackness of the German soul. ⁷ This wartime understanding of the Third Reich also obscured the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but for very different reasons to its Cold War successor. Throughout the war, again especially in Britain and the USA, there had been a desire to downplay Nazi anti-Jewishness in order that Nazism could be presented as the universal enemy of humankind, and war as a crusade of universal protection rather than for the benefit of a particular ethnic group. The war was for all humanity and Nazism was all humanity's enemy. ⁸

The understanding of the Third Reich dominant in wartime, so the story goes, was then manifested in occupation policies enacted by the Western Allies in postwar Germany. For example, the Allied trial, denazification and reeducation programs sought to root out Nazism from the German population. The logic of denazification—which proposed to survey the political history and affiliation of every German public servant— was that Nazism was a German cancer that needed to be forcibly cut from the body-politic itself. ⁹ But, the story continues, the collapse of the anti-Nazi alliance led to the abandonment of both denazification and reeducation, and the image of Nazism that underpinned them. The Soviet Union replaced Nazism as the enemy of the West, and the German population were recast as allies in the new fight against the Soviet totalitarian threat, just as "Uncle Joe" Stalin was transformed from ally into the new Hitler. ¹⁰ The Nazi past, we are told, was jettisoned—as Peter Novick has written, "symbols that reinforced the old view [of Nazism] were no longer functional. Indeed they were seriously dysfunctional." ¹¹

Despite the strength of this consensus, there are significant problems...