Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective

2. The Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany, 1948-1952

18 Chapter 2 The Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany, 1948–1952 JonDavid K. Wyneken At the end of the Second World War in Europe, few could have predicted just how quickly quadripartite cooperation would deteriorate. The priorities of the superpowers shifted rapidly away from punishing Nazis and coming to terms with the catastrophe of the war and moved toward fighting a new Cold War, which divided Europe and much of the world into opposing ideological , political, and military camps. The defeated nation of Germany proved to be the literal and figurative divider between these opposing blocs. Shattered , occupied, and without sovereignty, Germans understandably believed that their fate in this burgeoning global conflict was not in their own hands and therefore cultivated authorities who could lobby the quadripartite powers on their behalf. The Allies, meanwhile, also sought out individuals and organizations that might support their objectives for the postwar occupation. Developments in the occupation of Germany influenced the broader international relations between the quadripartite Allied powers, while those relations symbiotically helped shape the occupation and the processes that characterized the developing Cold War. These factors all proved to be quite volatile, as a largely ambivalent and occasionally hostile German population caused difficulties for the Western Allies on a number of fronts, making inter-Allied cooperation even more difficult and feeding the tensions that steadily drove the wartime alliance apart and into a confrontational framework that would span several more generations. In the three Western occupation zones, Allied authorities to varying Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany | 19 degrees sought the support of German Catholic and Protestant leaders to help ensure wider German acceptance of occupation reforms. German church leaders , for their part, feared that Germany might be subjected to humiliations worse than those that had followed its defeat in 1918 and abhorred the presence of Communism on German soil. They therefore hoped to work closely with the Western Allies to restore German sovereignty quickly and prevent further expansion of Communist influence in Germany. To the surprise of all sides, often-heated conflicts between ecclesiastical and Western Allied authorities emerged quickly after the end of the war. At issue were occupation policies meant to purge Nazism from public and private life and disagreements over relations with the Soviets. From 1945 to 1948, the Western Allies’ policies governing denazification, the prosecution of German war criminals, and the treatment of displaced persons and other refugees from Eastern Europe (including German expellees and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust) drew the most ire from German church leaders, who considered them all to be motivated by “victor’s justice” and the widespread Allied belief in the collective guilt of all Germans for Nazi crimes. German church leaders feared that these policies only strengthened the power of the Soviets and pushed more and more Germans to embrace Communism . Such conflicts taxed the few material resources the Western Allies had incorporated into their occupation departments to deal with religious affairs. Making matters worse, German church leaders made their complaints known internationally, which put increased pressure on the Western Allies to change their policies in Germany and Western Europe. Presenting a historically rare unified front against occupation policies, German Catholic and Protestant clerics quickly established themselves as among the most vociferous and high-profile critics of the occupation, a development that the Western Allies viewed as a serious risk to successful reform and reeducation in Germany.1 An open break between the Western Allies and the German churches indeed might have occurred—with all the deleterious effects that would have resulted from such a schism—had matters in Germany and among the quadri­ partite partners not changed significantly in 1948 with the promulgation of the new deutschmark in the Western zones, the resulting Soviet blockade of Berlin, and the subsequent airlift. In the years prior, the Western Allies’ growing concern about the Soviets had converged with the German churches’ long-standing fear of Communism. Despite all the aforementioned conflicts between them, this issue nonetheless steadily shifted the Western Allies toward assessing how they could assist the churches’ political and propaganda efforts against the Soviets and East Germans. This new focus on building a new West German state around “good Germans”—in particular, the Christian Demo- 20 | Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective cratic Union, made up in large part by German religious leaders and parishioners...