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

The link between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism remains tenuous in the eyes of many—perhaps most—German theologians to this day. This perception allows these scholars to protect the church from responsibility for the Holocaust and maintain the fiction that the theology of the altar is not affected by the politics of the throne. Matthew Hockenos presents a critical examination of the German Protestant Church's immediate postwar reflection on its responsibility for the Third Reich and the Holocaust. His conclusion will come as no surprise to scholars of the church's history: church leaders presented the church as having stood at the forefront of the resistance to Hitler. Moreover, they viewed postwar Germans as victims of Allied aggression, and were unconcerned with the murder of the Jews.

This first extensive English-language study of the postwar German Protestant Church, is clearly written, lively, and informative. Hockenos examines the most important church statements formulated between 1945 and 1950 in response to the crimes of the Third Reich. He provides many interesting details and illustrations, though the material he presents will already be known to scholars from earlier studies in German.

What is odd about this book is the omission of any mention of the major German monographs that have already appeared on this topic, including those of Frederic Spotts, Siegfried Hermle, Clemens Vollnhals, and particularly Christoph Raisig. The author does not credit those scholars for their archival discoveries, nor does he present and engage their sharp criticisms of the material that he, too, is criticizing. The names of these German scholars appear neither in the book's index nor in the pages of its text, but only in the bibliography, which indicates that while Hockenos is well aware of these works, he chooses not to discuss them. That is unfortunate for the quality and fairness of Hockenos's scholarship, as well as for the English-speaking reader who might want to learn about the state of the historiography. Most regrettable is the omission of the late Christoph Raisig's 2002 monograph, which was based on his habilitation. Raisig examines precisely the same documents as Hockenos, but carries his study further—into the 1980s. He also provides a larger political, theological, and scriptural context, examining the church in the Netherlands as well, for example, and giving each document a close exegesis. Here is one example: Raisig notes that the emphasis on Jesus as a Jew in church declarations from 1948 and 1950 was intended to refute any remnants of Nazi Aryan theology and repudiate the exclusion of baptized Jews from the church (p. 85); Hockenos might have found this helpful.

Of the three major theological tendencies in the Third Reich—the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (DC, the antisemitic and anti-doctrinal German Christian movement), the theologically more conservative Bekennende Kirche (BK, the Confessing Church, whose leaders were often influenced by Reformed theological traditions), and the conservative Lutherans—Hockenos focuses exclusively on the last two, arguing somewhat misleadingly that the DC exerted no influence after the war. Hockenos demonstrates that within the two theological groups that he examines, there were divisions and clashes on a range of issues—from the reorganization of the church and its relationship to the state to its view of the Jews. Conservative Lutherans, rejecting the DC's attempted merger of the church with the state, wanted a return to a religious orthodoxy that would focus on spiritual matters and withdraw from politics. Others, emerging from the experience of the BK and the theological tendencies of Reformed Protestantism, called for a politically engaged church that would serve as a prophetic witness against the state's misuse of its power.

The central question that the church leaders failed to ask, Hockenos points out, is why large sections of the church's membership had identified so comfortably with the Nazis. Yet Hockenos errs in stating that members of the pro-Nazi DC movement, which had gained control of numerous...