Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany by Robert P. Ericksen (review)

Robert Ericksen has studied complicity among ordinary Germans in the Holocaust for many years. His groundbreaking 1985 monograph Theologians Under Hitler revealed the extent to which leading Protestant theologians embraced the racial ideology of National Socialism. In subsequent articles, Ericksen broadened his focus to the universities' involvement in the promotion of Nazi ideology. Complicity in the Holocaust seems to culminate Ericksen's research on the churches' and universities' role in promoting lethal antisemitism. Ericksen concurs with Konrad Jarausch, who argued that German lawyers, teachers, and engineers "perpetrated callous injustice, engaged in stultifying indoctrination, and created engines of death for their own gratification and benefit." Ericksen believes such judgments also apply to "pastors and professors," many of whom he characterizes as perpetrators (p. xv): "is it possible . . . that ordinary Germans who became killers for the Nazi state felt they had received permission from their churches or from their universities?" (pp. 22-23).

Convincingly answering such a bold question requires the author to document the actions of pastors, priests, and professors, as well as the reactions of congregants, parishioners, and students. It involves capturing in words an almost undocumentable social milieu and mindset that sustained antisemitism in the German ecclesiastical and academic worlds. Ericksen deftly accomplishes both by reexamining more well-known events and highlighting individual case studies. If pastors and professors helped shape "public attitudes and behavior," he asks, "does that mean they should take credit for the 'ordinary men' who went to Poland and murdered Jews?" While Ericksen does not place "specific culpability" on "those who dealt only in words," he suggests that such individuals cannot escape responsibility (p. 22).

Likewise, for Ericksen, the churches' postwar portrayal of themselves as victims of National Socialism appears fundamentally false. He attributes this posture, especially on the Protestant side, to the use and exploitation of the term Kirchenkampf (church struggle) to describe the allegedly combative relations between church and state. As he shows, however, even those pastors, such as Martin Niemöller, who opposed state intrusion into church life by forming the Confessing Church, refused to stand up resolutely for Jews. At most, they helped Christians of Jewish heritage, sheltering behind the bulwark of baptism: "Christians standing up for Christians of Jewish descent was far different from Christians standing up for Jews" (p. 28).

Throughout, Ericksen emphasizes the buttressing role of Christian antisemitism in an order that placed Jews outside the category of "neighbor." Indeed, this Christian antisemitism went far beyond any dislike or ostracism based on religiously grounded anti-Judaism. As Ericksen argues, "Christian hostility . . . was almost never a purely religious complaint based on the refusal of Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah or the extraordinarily exaggerated claim that 'Jews' killed Jesus. . . ." (p. 36). A public Easter letter by leading Protestant clergyman Otto Dibelius in 1928 provides Ericksen with an example: "All of us will not only understand but have complete sympathy for the final motivations behind the völkisch movement. Despite the evil ring that the word has acquired in many cases, I have always considered myself an antisemite. It cannot be denied that Judaism plays a leading role in all the corruptive phenomena of modern civilization" (p. 29).

Generally, Ericksen's critique of Protestantism is much stronger than his portrayal of Catholicism, which receives less attention. Still, this does not weaken his conclusions. Like their Protestant counterparts, Catholics were strongly concerned for their Church and its sacramental mission. Such concerns enabled cooperation between church and state, and eventually led to the signing of the Reich Concordat in July 1933. And yet, while highly critical of Catholic bishops such as Clemens von Galen of Münster and Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Freising (and especially of the latter during postwar denazification), Ericksen is surprisingly less accusatory toward Pope Pius XII: "We do know that the world looked differently through the eyes of Pius XII in 1942...