German Catholicism at War, 1939–1945 by Thomas Brodie (review)

Thomas Brodie's German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 contributes admirably to the voluminous literature about the relationship between National Socialism and Catholicism. The book establishes its originality through a commitment to social history and a chronological focus on the war years, which have surprisingly been left out of most other academic studies on the theme. Applying a similar approach to that of Thomas Breuer in Verordneter Wandel? (1992), a study of Bavarian Catholics, Brodie shares evidence about how the Catholic community responded to the important events of the war in the church strongholds of the Rhineland and Westphalia.

This monograph advances three major arguments. First, Brodie contends that fractures emerged during the war between bishops, priests, and the laity in a region with a previously cohesive confessional subculture. Furthermore, he shows that despite examples of regime disapproval, no significant element of the church offered extended opposition to Nazism despite the growing rift between congregants and their spiritual leaders about how to react to the war. Finally, Brodie demonstrates how the Catholic milieu possessed very fluid boundaries, especially regarding National Socialist ideology. Many Catholics mixed their religious identity with the symbols, rhetoric, and ideology of the Third Reich.

Throughout most of the book, Brodie examines the attitudes of bishops in western Germany, including Joseph Schulte of Cologne, Clemens August von Galen of Münster, and Josef Frings of Cologne, and then analyzes the sometimes cacophonous public reaction to them. Schulte, like many clergy, greeted the outbreak of war with much more apprehension than had been the case in 1914. Church leadership remained particularly unenthusiastic about the Non-Aggression Pact that preceded the invasion of Poland, given their anticommunism. Although this stance created discord with their followers, bishops and clergy aligned with their coreligionists in passivity about German brutality toward Polish Catholics, in largely accepting the National Socialist othering of eastern Europeans, and in harboring excitement about the fall of France. Despite these points of convergence, Rhineland and Westphalian Catholics reacted positively to Karl Adam's theological writings that attacked the hierarchy and called for more coherence between Nazi racial ideology and religious teaching. Here, Brodie adds to our understanding of how younger Catholics, including some clergy, viewed the traditional nationalism of their religious shepherds as outdated in comparison with that of their fascist political leaders.

One of Brodie's contributions includes his treatment of von Galen's famous sermons of protest in the summer of 1941. While reliant on document collections by von Galen defender Joachim Kuropka and conversely Beth A. Griech-Polelle's critical Bishop von Galen (2002), Brodie adds to this debate by exploring public responsiveness with the objective distance needed for the emotional debate about the churchman's legacy. Confirming that these sermons indeed disrupted the regime at a sensitive time, the book also shows how von Galen's popularity emanated from the rhetoric of German nationalism in his critique. The limited scope of this protest enhanced its appeal with those who agreed with the criticism without questioning the dictatorship's legitimacy. Nonetheless, the response became "contested and divided" (85) because even this constrained dissent threatened the morale of the home front. In the end, von Galen accommodated the regime and aligned himself with the more cautious Frings in silence about the resumption of the T-4 killings and the mass murder of the Jews on the eastern front.

The latter chapters of the book argue that the chasm between church leaders and the laity grew due to the abstract neoscholasticism that influenced formal public declarations about the impact of war. Frings particularly seemed out of touch in his concern about threats to hierarchical authority caused by the Allied bombing campaigns, even encouraging housekeepers not to eat with priests in the midst of disorder caused by war destruction (124). While bishops warned followers that bombs were punishment for the sins of secular modernity and threatened class structures and sexual mores, many people young...