30036441

Christianity and the Nazi Movement: A Response
Author(s): Richard Steigmann-Gall

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 185-211
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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright
@ 2007 SAGE Publications, Los
Angeles,
London, New Delhi
and
Singapore,
Vol
42(2), 185-211 I.
ISSN 0022-0094.
DOI: 10.1 177/0022009407075560
Richard
Steigmann-Gall
Christianity
and the Nazi
Movement:
A
Response
When I first
began
to research on the
topic
of nazi
conceptions
of
Christianity,
I understood the revisionist
potential
of
my findings.
The archives
brought
forth some
surprising discoveries,
which I knew would
probably
be taken as
controversial
by many,
and which would elicit
strong counterarguments.
Reviews in the
scholarly
and
popular press
have so far
ranged
from
laudatory
-
with
many applauding
the book as a corrective to
long-held
conventions
-
to
disdainful,
with the
majority
to date
falling
much closer to the former end
of the continuum. Positive reviews can be found both in secular and Christian
periodicals,
some of them written
by
self-described Christians of both liberal
and conservative orientations. There has also been a
lively
debate on various
internet
websites, many
of which
attempt
to use the
book,
either
negatively
or
positively,
to forward a
particular cultural,
social or
political agenda,
and
some of which
seriously misrepresent my
own
arguments
while
making
theirs.
Colleagues
and friends both in and out of the historical
profession
had antici-
pated
that some of the reactions both within the academic
community
and at
large
would be less
dispassionate
than others. And
indeed,
much of the discus-
sion which the book has
generated
reveals a clear emotional attachment to the
subject
-
among
those who
praise
the
book, certainly,
but also
among
those
who condemn it.
On that continuum of critical
response
to
my work,
it is safe to
say
that the
four critics I have been asked to
respond
to in this
symposium easily represent
the new extreme of the
negative
end. To
varying degrees they challenge
both
my arguments
and
my findings. They
take issue with
my methodology, point-
ing
to what
they
believe are fundamental
mistakes, egregious errors,
and fatal
shortcomings. They
accuse me of tendentiousness and a lack of
originality,
of
a refusal to
explore countervailing
evidence or to
acknowledge
work
prior
to
my
own. It is
suggested
that in
my
effort to turn a blind
eye
to inconvenient
realities,
I
selectively pick through
the
quote
mines of
history. By
turns various
aspects
of
my
book are described as
'afflicted', 'crass', 'astonishing',
'conde-
scending',
'deficient' and 'ridiculous'. What
they
see as
lapses
are
speculatively
explained
-
by
one of them with a
foray
into
psychoanalysis
-
as deliberate
oversight,
wilful
ignorance,
or
unhealthy
fixation.
Reading
these
criticisms,
it
might appear
that the condemnations are
simply
insurmountable.
However,
what
appear
to be
comprehensive
and authoritative
critiques
of
my
book are
too
often, upon
closer
inspection,
a series of
misinterpretations,
efforts to erect
straw
men, and,
with
disturbing frequency,
distortions and fabrications. In
186
Journal
of
Contemporary History
Vol 42 No 2
their
attempts
to
paint my
work as
tendentious,
these authors
frequently give
free rein to their own tendentiousness.
Claiming
that I overlook
countervailing
evidence, they repeatedly
overlook evidence in
my
book when it hinders their
ability
to
critique
me.
Gailus
in
particular
accuses me of
extrapolating
and dis-
torting; yet
his
lengthy
accounts of
my scholarly wrongdoings
are laden with
extrapolations, caricatures,
and
misrepresentations
of fact and
argument
so
repetitive
and unbridled that one
begins
to wonder whether the
'strange
obsession' he
speaks
of is not a case of Freudian
projection.
Some of
my respondents
take
greater
care than others to
explain
what
they
believe
my
book does and does not do. Given that the reader has now received
four different
interpretations
of The
Holy
Reich (Stowers' piece,
while
thematically
vital to the issues
approached by
these
critics,
does not in itself
analyse my work),
it is
important
to remind the reader of
precisely
what
my
book
attempts
to
do,
how it
goes
about
it, and,
most
vitally,
what it does and
does not
argue.
In a
phrase, Holy
Reich
attempts
to revise our
understanding
of the nazi movement as
intrinsically
anti-Christian. It does this
by examining
the views of
leading nazis,
defined both in terms of their overall
position
in the
movement's
hierarchy
and
by
their
positions
as
designated party
authorities in
matters of
ideological oversight
and
articulation,
or
public
and
party
education
and indoctrination. In other
words,
those nazis I
explore were,
in one
way
or
another, designated
as
part
of an
ideological
elite or milieu
within
the move-
ment: at the
very least,
as arbiters of which idea or
concept
counted as
National Socialist and which not.
I
found,
based on evidence obtained
through
archival
materials, printed pri-
mary sources,
and
secondary sources,
that the nazi movement as
such,
either as
a
party seeking power
or as a
government
in
power,
could not be called anti-
Christian. Based
primarily
on
private
and often secret
documents, closely
matched with
public pronunciations,
I demonstrate with abundant
empirical
evidence that a wide swath of the
party
believed themselves and their move-
ment to be Christian.
They
demonstrated this
through
both their words and
their
actions,
as individuals and as decision-makers in the nazi
party
and later
the nazi state. The individuals who exhibited a commitment to the Christian
religion
I describe as
'positive Christians',
based on their adherence to the
'positive Christianity'
which the
party
referenced in Point 24 of its official
programme
-
which,
it should be
pointed out,
was never revoked. Even while
many
of these
'positive
Christians' could be
highly anticlerical,
and
strongly
antagonistic
in
particular
to the Catholic Church and its
traditions, they
main-
tained that
through personal
belief as well as
through government policy,
the
movement was
guided by
Christian
principles
-
most
obviously
in its anti-
Semitism, but also in its
anti-marxism, anti-liberalism,
and erection of a
people's community exalting
an 'ethical socialism' while
excluding
those
deemed
racially
unfit.
Since I
interrogate precisely
what these nazis meant when
they
claimed their
Steigmann-Gall: Christianity
and
the
Nazi Movement
187
movement was a Christian
one,
I also
gauge
their truth claims
against
the
views of
leading
churchmen and
theologians
of the
day.
Not to discover
whether there were Christians who
supported nazism;
an exhaustive literature
has
already
established the breadth and
depth
of this
support, among
both
Protestants and Catholics in
Germany. Rather,
to discover
if,
and if so what
kind
of, clergy
and
theologians accepted
the claims of the nazis to be Christian.
In the
process
of this
investigation,
I contend that while no one
variety
of
Christianity
can be seen as the
theological
antecedent of
positive Christianity
(Holy Reich,
hereafter
HR, 262-3),
the cornerstones of
-
the belief that
Jesus
was not a
Jew
and the call for the removal of the Old
Testament as two of the most central
-
also found
expression
within
Germany's kulturprotestantisch
milieu. In other
words,
Christian nazis did
not
just
'distort' or 'infect' Christian ideas to suit their
party;
such ideas had
existed in varieties of
Christianity
which
-
and this is vital
-
were articulated
by acknowledged theologians
and Christian intellectuals
before
nazism ever
came into existence.
Standing opposed
to the
positive
Christians were the so-called
'neo-pagans'
of the nazi
party (I
refer to them as
'paganists'
in
my book),
who have been
much more
closely
scrutinized in historical
scholarship
and about whom a
great
deal is
already
known. I confirm the conventional view that their
pres-
ence in the
party
was
very real,
and
among
their members included some
extremely powerful
men.
However,
I make two
arguments
in
particular
which
stray
from
accepted
convention:
first,
the
paganist
cohort did not achieve the
religious
dominance or at least
hegemony they
lusted after. While this
goes
against
much church
historiography,
I indicate in
my
book that other scholars
have made this
argument
as well.
Second,
and more
originally,
I contend that
as a set of ideas and
precepts,
the content of
paganism
was
highly
ambivalent
toward and
quite partial
in its
rejection
of
Christianity. Having
said
that,
I also
make it clear that their
presence
in the
party elite,
and their
intraparty rivalry
with
'positive
Christians'
throughout
the Third
Reich, precludes
nazism as a
whole from
being
considered a Christian movement.
Finally,
in the last and
longest chapter
of
Holy Reich,
I demonstrate how
anticlericalism took
greater
hold within the nazi worldview as well as in state
practice,
and that
opposition
not
just
to the institutions but also to the tradi-
tions of
Christianity grew
as the Third Reich neared its close.
Through
the
example
of
intraparty factionalism,
I demonstrate the
ways
in which
many
Christians in the
party
elite lost their
positions
of
power.
At the same
time,
their
ability
not
only
to
practise
their faith as
individuals,
but
additionally
to
propagate positive Christianity
as a
religion
for the
movement, was,
in
spite
of
paganist challenges,
for the most
part upheld.
I also demonstrate how
positive
Christians in
many
cases were able to retain their
positions
of
power
within
the
party
and state. For their
part,
whatever
momentary strategic advantages
they may
have
gained, paganists
were never able to
exploit
the
growing
anti-
clericalism of the state or Hitler's
growing
disenchantment with the Christian
religion
itself. In
fact,
the views and
policies
of the nazi state could be
very
188 Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
hostile to both
paganist organizations
and individual
paganists
within the nazi
party.
At the same
time,
some who had
previously expressed
a commitment to
Christianity increasingly expressed
a
rejection
of
it,
even as
they
continued
to
uphold Jesus
and his
message,
and adhere to other
signifiers
of Christian
commitment.
Given what
my
book does and doesn't
argue,
the careful reader will
already
find
ways
in which
Holy
Reich has been
misrepresented
in the
preceding
criti-
cisms. I will address these criticisms in two
ways: by exploring
the
larger points
that arise
repeatedly
between one reviewer and the
next,
and
by addressing
more isolated criticisms author
by
author. I will conclude
by considering
another
critique recently published
in another venue.
We can
begin
with
political religion theory.
I am accused of
fatally
overlook-
ing, through
either wilfulness or
ignorance,
the debates on nazism as a
politi-
cal
religion.
It is no accident that Manfred
Gailus
and Ernst
Piper,
both
German
scholars, reproach
me for
leaving
this
theory
out of
my analysis
-
even if
Piper
does not subscribe to it himself
-
whereas the North American
scholar
Irving Hexham,
even
though
an advocate of
political religion theory,
is
much less
reproachful;
and fellow North American Doris
Bergen gives
no
mention to it at all. As Hexham himself
suggests,
there is much less
English-
speaking scholarship
on nazism as a
political religion
than there is in
Germany,
notwithstanding
the notable
exceptions
of Michael
Burleigh's
The Third
Reich: A New
History
and
George
Mosse's The Nationalization
of
the
Masses,
neither of
which,
while considered
major works,
has
spurred
a
significant
monographic
trend.' For the
record,
I find
myself
in
complete agreement
with
Stowers' deconstruction of
political religion
-
for its
inability
to
truly
define
what a
religion is, among
other
problems.
In its current
scholarly application,
political religion theory
is
primarily
concerned with
demonstrating
how
nazism could be considered a
replacement
faith for
Christianity. My goal
in
exploring
nazi
conceptions
of
Christianity
was
quite
different
-
namely,
to
reconsider the
relationship
between
politics
and established
religion.
In this
sense,
I contend that
nazism,
in the view of
many
of its
adherents,
could be
I would like to thank Richard Evans for his invitation to
participate
in this
symposium
on
my
book.
It is a rare and
privileged opportunity
when a historian's work
-
especially
that of a
junior
one
-
becomes
the
subject
of this kind of attention. It was not a difficult decision when he asked
me if I would like to contribute.
My
thanks as well to Doris
Bergen,
Manfred
Gailus, Irving
Hexham,
Ernst
Piper
and
Stanley
Stowers for their
lively
and
challenging
comments.
1 Michael
Burleigh,
The Third
Reich:
A New
History (New
York
2000); George Mosse,
The
Nationalization
of
the Masses: Political
Symbolism
and Mass Movements in
Germany from
the
Napoleonic
Wars
through
the Third Reich
(New
York
1975).
Recent
English-language contribu-
tions have been isolated cases: see David
Redles,
Hitler's Millennial Reich:
Apocalyptic Belief
and
the Search
for
Salvation
(New
York
2005)
and Karla
Poewe,
New
Religions
and the Nazis
(London 2005).
See as well
Jane Caplan, 'Politics, Religion
and
Ideology:
A Comment on
Wolfgang Hardtwig',
Bulletin
of
the German Historical
Institute,
28
(2001),
3-36.
and the Nazi
Movement 189
qualified
as
religious
without itself
being
a
religion.
I also demonstrate how
Hitler,
as the ultimate arbiter and articulator of nazi
ideology, actively rejected
repeated attempts
to transform his movement into a
religion.
I do not
engage political religion
in
Holy
Reich
because it does not address
my problematic
-
not,
as Gailus and
Piper
would have the reader
believe,
because
doing
so would undermine
my
claims to
originality. (Birsch's
1998
book
explores many
of the same nazis I do and uses much the same source
material,
but I
explore
a much
greater range
of nazis'
opinion.
Birsch
also
pro-
ceeds from
fundamentally
different
conceptualizations,
and his
argument
that
the nazis made the nation 'divine' differs
markedly
from
my
own
findings.
Piper
will
hopefully forgive
me if
my manuscript
was
already
with the
pub-
lisher
by
the time
RiLfmann's
book
appeared
-
perhaps
the same reason
my
book
gets
no mention in his new
Rosenberg biography.) My
critics can rest
assured that I know the
political religion literature,
and in fact have con-
tributed to it in two articles
-
one in a volume edited
by
Hartmut Lehmann
and Michael
Geyer published by
Wallstein
Verlag.2
That neither Gailus nor
Piper
seem aware of this
piece
is
particularly puzzling, given
their
sharply
worded criticism that I
ignore
whole
historiographies,
let alone individual
authors. This
oversight
is
particularly extraordinary
in Gailus' case in
light
of
his
exacting
efforts to cite
practically
the entire
political religion corpus;
the
fact
that,
in her contribution to a
special
issue of
Geschichte
und
Gesellschaft
which Gailus
edited, Bergen
cites the conference
paper
I
gave
in
Gottingen
in
2001 that formed the basis of
my
Wallstein
article;
and the fact that Lehmann
is
Gailus' collaborator,
he
having
co-edited a volume with Lehmann
just
after
my piece
in
Geyer's
and Lehmann's volume
appeared.
Was he not familiar
with this article?
I will not
recapitulate
either Stowers' deconstruction of
political religion
theory
or
my own,
since these are available in full
already.
I
will, however,
make two
points
of
particular
salience for this
symposium. First,
the evidence
is irrefutable
that,
whereas a
recognized minority
of nazis had wished in one
way
or another to turn their movement into a
political religion
-
or what in
Gailus'
sense could be termed
political religion
-
their efforts were consist-
ently
refuted
by
a more effective cohort of nazis
who,
whether
'positive
Christian'
or of some other
religious persuasion,
were
actively opposed
to such
plans.
For some
nazis,
this ran
contrary
to their own vision of nazism as a
'religious politics'.
For
others,
it was a matter of calculation. For still
others,
the vision of nazism as a
political religion
was deemed
laughable
and
contrary
to the
very meaning
of the movement. There is
simply
far too much archival
evidence, analysed by
Reinhard
Bollmus,
Robert
Cecil,
and
myself among
others,
that demonstrates how often
Rosenberg
in
particular
lost internecine
2 Richard
Steigmann-Gall,
'Was National Socialism a Political
Religion
or a
Religious
Politics?'
in Michael
Geyer
and Hartmut Lehmann
(eds), Religion
und
Nation,
Nation und
Religion:
Beitriige
zu einer
unbewdiltigten
Geschichte
(G6ttingen
2004), 386-408;
Richard
Steigmann-Gall,
'Nazism and the Revival of Political
Religion Theory',
Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions,
5
(2004),
376-96.
190
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
battles over
implementation
of his
religious agenda (Hexham implies
that
Bollmus'
findings
are too old to be
relevant;
in
fact,
his book is now in its
second
edition).3
Second, things
like 'commemorations of the
dead',
'cult
cycle',
and 'sacred
actions',
as Gailus describes
them,
do not constitute the 'actual area of NS
religiosity'.
These
may
all be
rituals,
in the same sense that
every political
movement articulates for itself a set of rituals and
practices
around which it
formulates a sense of
identity
and
solidarity.
One could
point
to several con-
temporary
instances of
politicians engaging
in rituals or other acts which touch
the
emotional,
non-rationalistic
impulses
of the audience. The
question is,
are
these moments
symptomatic
of a
religion
and/or
'religiosity'?
When
Franqois
Mitterrand laid a rose at the tomb of
Jean Juares upon becoming
the new
President of France in
1981,
was he
engaging
in cult behaviour? When
George
W. Bush walked
solemnly
to his
podium
in the middle of the convention hall
to
give
his
acceptance speech
at the 2004
Republican
National
Convention,
replete
with
spotlights
and
impassioned audience,
was he
articulating
the creed
of a new faith? Without
citing any examples,
or
explaining
how commemora-
tion of the dead
among
other
public
acts can be considered rivalrous to
Christian
tradition,
Gailus
simply
asserts the conventional truism that such
behaviour,
of
necessity,
had to be un- or anti-Christian. I do not
dispute
that
there were some nazis who wanted
very
much to found a new cult and tried to
create a set of rituals to
embody
it. But the most
compelling
evidence we have
of their failure is the utter
rejection
of such efforts
by Hitler, Goebbels,
and
Goering, among
others.
That is not to
say
there was no such
thing
as nazi
ceremony
or ritual. Here
too,
the nazis
staged highly choreographed spectacles
such as
Speer's
famous
Cathedral of
Light.
The
question
that needs to be asked is not whether
the nazis tried to win new
supporters using
such
methods;
aside from
highly
dubious testimonials from those
claiming
to have
'skeptically'
attended a
rally
only
to be 'born
again' by
the charismatic
Fiihrer,
there is no
empirical
evi-
dence of
any numerically significant
'conversion
experiences'. Instead,
the
question
is whether the nazis
regarded
such
ceremony
as
being religious.
There
is no reliable evidence that Hitler believed he was
creating
a
religion through
the use of such
choreography
-
not that this has
stopped
innumerable com-
mentators from
claiming
so. If Hitler
occasionally
made references to 'convert-
ing'
his audience to
nazism,
of
getting
the idea of
night
rallies from his Catholic
youth,
or of his followers
being
Christ-like in their determination
-
all
points
I raise in
my
book
-
that
hardly
means he viewed himself as a new messiah.
In
fact,
as I demonstrate
repeatedly,
on such occasions Hitler
actually
con-
tended that he was
following
Christ's
example,
not
attempting
to
replace
Christ as a new
object
of
worship.
That Hitler borrowed from Christian ritual
3 Reinhard
Bollmus,
Das Amt
Rosenberg
und seine
Gegner:
Studien zum
Machtkampf
im
nationalsozialistischen
Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart 1970;
2nd edn
2006);
Robert
Cecil,
The
Myth
of
the Master Race:
Alfred Rosenberg
and Nazi
Ideology (London 1972).
and
the Nazi Movement
191
to embellish nazi
theatricality
does not mean he
sought
to
replace
the Christian
faith. A vital distinction between form and
content, style
and
substance,
is
elided when
political religion theory
is
applied
to the nazi movement.
Gailus and
Piper essentially ignore
evidence that
Hitler, Goebbels,
and other
high-ranking
nazis esteemed
Jesus
as
only
the most obvious
signifier
of the
Christian
faith,
instead
(in
Gailus'
case) admitting only
to a few isolated cases
of 'dual-faith' nazis like Hans Schemm and otherwise
explaining away
evi-
dence of Christian commitment
by choosing
to
argue
that whatever Christian
religiosity
existed in the nazi elite was
simply residual,
the
lingering
trace of a
typically
Wilhelmine
'bourgeois/petty bourgeois family background'
in which
these nazis were raised. Gailus
suggests they
had little choice but to start life as
Christians,
but that this
atrophied
with adulthood. There are far too
many
false
assumptions
for this line of
argument
to sustain itself. For
one,
the
Kaiserreich
(Imperial Germany)
in this
conception
is
essentially
cast as a
pre-
modern
society,
in which individual
agency
in
religious
choice is
apparently
surrendered to a state-mandated social sanction
enforcing
church attendance
and belief. Even the most caricatured
Sonderweg (Special Path)
thesis would
not
go
so far as to
depict Imperial
German
society
in such anachronistic terms.
Second,
there were innumerable instances in the Kaiserreich of
hostility
to
Christianity
at a
variety
of levels
-
political, cultural, social, institutional,
and
intellectual. To make his
argument
Gailus must overlook centuries of
German,
not to mention
European
intellectual
history,
never mind the obvious
ways
in
which whole
segments
of German
society rejected
either church or
religion
itself at
precisely
this
period.
The fact that the
republic
which rose from the
ashes of the
empire
was such a hotbed of cultural
change
not
only points
to
Gailus' failure to
recognize Germany's
cultural and
religious 'marketplace'
and
the
ways
in which Germans could alter their
views;
he also removes a
very
important
factor
which, among others, brought
nazism into
being
in the first
place.
As I
contend,
it was the
question
of the
place
of
religion
in German
society that, among
other
factors, helped
determine
popular
reaction to
nazism. As a last
point,
the view that one's class status
necessarily
informs
one's
religious
beliefs is
highly deterministic; only
the most unreformed
secularization theorist would
any longer
make such an assertion.
This
point
turns us to a second
charge
made
repeatedly by my
critics: that I fail
to
properly
understand
Germany's
confessional divide. Doris
Bergen
contends
that I 'misconstrue' the confessional differences that existed in
Germany,
and
that I
pay
'scant attention to
developments
on the Catholic side' and even let
Catholicism 'off the hook'. Gailus
goes further, suggesting
that I
'exculpate'
Catholicism and am a victim of the Catholic Church's 'in-house'
apologetics.
I
can think of not a
single
in-house Catholic
apologist
who would view as excul-
patory my argument
that Catholic
bishops
were hesitant about
'turning
their
backs on a movement
[nazism]
that
fought Marxism, liberalism,
and the
"Jewish danger"' (HR, 67).
As this
passage indicates,
I am aware that nazism
192
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
and
politicized
Catholicism could have found common cause in
anti-Semitism,
anti-Marxism,
and anti-liberalism. I am also aware of the
huge
amount of
literature
detailing
the various
ways
in which Catholics in
Germany
and else-
where have
propagated Jew-hatred
and
antipathy
to
parliamentary
dem-
ocracy,
and the
roaring
debate this has
generated (HR, 4-5).
It is not an issue of
my 'protecting' Catholicism; given
that
my primary
aim
in the book is to
explore
nazi attitudes toward
Christianity,
not the other
way
around,
I found
compelling
and
overwhelming
evidence of nazi
antagonism
to
Catholicism. Whether and to what
degree
German Catholicism lent its
endorsement to nazism is not the
point.
I do not take issue with the contention
that some
segments
of
Germany's
Catholic milieu found the
message
of nazism
amenable
-
though
it should be
pointed
out that Gailus'
description
of
Bavaria as
'purely
Catholic' is a
sophomoric mistake,
all the more
troubling
given
the amount of research
showing
that the Protestant
region
of Franconia
was
arguably
the nazis' true
stronghold
in
Bavaria.4
Rather,
the
question
is
what were the nazis' views. And here I found a
striking degree
of
uniformity:
whether
they
were
nominally
Protestant or
Catholic,
Christian or
paganist,
members of the nazi elite
consistently expressed antagonism
towards not
just
the Catholic
Church,
but also the Catholic
religion.
It
was,
in their
view,
not
sufficiently nationalist; indeed, given
its institutional
structure,
Catholicism
was lambasted as one of the three internationals
seeking
to undermine German
nationhood. It was also
insufficiently
racist. That members of the German
episcopacy
were known to be
highly
nationalist and anti-Semitic did not
change
nazi minds. If I make reference to the
ideological engagement
of
with the doctrinal
positions
of liberal Protestantism
(Kulturprotestantismus)
or confessional
Lutheranism,
the reader can rest
assured that it is because I found no evidence of Catholicism
embracing
the
idea that race was one of God's orders of
creation;
that the Old Testament
ought
to be removed from the Christian
canon;
or that confessional schools
should be
phased
out
-
all views articulated at one
point
or another
by
the
NSDAP's
'positive
Christians' as well as within
Germany's
Protestant milieux.
As to
Bergen's point
about 'nuance': the evidence I
bring
to bear on nazi
preference
for Protestantism over
Catholicism,
as well as the active
hostility
towards the Catholic Church and its
traditions,
is insurmountable.
My
treatment of Protestantism
is,
in the
main, judged
to be less
problematic.
For all his
unyielding criticism,
Gailus
occasionally permits
himself a note of
agreement, stating
in his
closing
remarks that he
agrees 'entirely'
with
my
assessment of the
presence
and effectiveness of 'National Socialist Christians'
-
a
bewildering
conclusion after such a
long
indictment of
my
misdeeds.
4 Rainer
Hambrecht,
Der
Aufstieg
der NSDAP in Mittel- und
Oberfranken (1925-1933)
(Nuremberg 1976);
Wolfram
Pyta, Dorfgemeinschaft
und
Parteipolitik,
1918-1933: die
Verschrdinkung
von Milieu und
Parteien
in den
protestantischen Landgebieten Deutschlands
in der
Weimarer Republik (Dilsseldorf 1996).
On Bavaria's Protestants
during
the Third
Reich,
see
Bj6rn
Mensing, Pfarrer
und Nationalsozialismus: Gechichte
einer
Vertrickung
am
Beispiel
der
Evangelisch-Lutherischen
Kirche
in
Bayern
(G6ttingen
1998).
and
the
Nazi Movement
193
Bergen
is somewhat less
charitable, suggesting
that I 'condescend' to her in her
treatment of German Christian
religiosity.
She also makes detailed references
to the broad literature that
already
exists on Protestants in the Third
Reich,
repeatedly suggesting
that
my analysis
is not
nearly
so novel as I claim. As with
their comments on
my
treatment of
Catholicism, again
I must
point
out that
Bergen
and
Gailus
misconstrue the
goal
of
my
book. It is not
my
task to
explore
the
variety
of
ways
in which Protestants reacted to the nazi
movement;
there has been a colossal amount of work
already
done on
this,
work which I
explore
and
acknowledge
in the book's introduction. I add
perhaps
a few
nuances and additional details of
my
own to this
already
immense
historiogra-
phy. My
main
goal
when
exploring
the Protestant side of the nazi-Protestant
relationship
in
chapter
five is to reveal how Protestants
gauged
the nazis'
claims. To
allege
that the nazis looked
favourably
on Protestantism and con-
sidered it the 'natural'
religion
of the
Germans,
and not
explore
this
aspect
of
nazi
policy,
would have been a substantial
oversight.
This
chapter
shows that
a
large segment
of institutional Protestantism welcomed the assistance that the
nazi state
gave them,
whereas other
segments,
most
obviously
centred around
Niemoller and the
Confessing Church,
criticized not nazism itself so much as
nazi endorsements of their
opponents.
I
say
'assistance' because the
struggles
between the German Christians and the
Confessing
Church were not
simply
a
proxy
war between nazism and
Christianity,
but an 'in-house'
conflict,
one
that the NSDAP
largely stayed
out of and which
ultimately
led to the nazi
endorsement of the German Christians
being
withdrawn.
Having
said
that,
this
chapter
is
only secondarily
concerned with the Church
Struggle
itself as an
intra-Protestant
fight
between the German Christians and the
Confessing
Church. There
already
exists a
huge
literature that
explores
this
issue,
and I
might point
out that while I
disagree
with some of the
arguments
of other
historians,
I make no
particular
claim to
originality
on the
disputes
between
these two
groups.
While I
explore
moments of Protestant resistance to nazi church
policy, given
the
pivotal
role this
played
in
altering
that
policy by 1937,
it is true that I do not
explore
the
Alltag (daily life),
as it
were,
of Christian resistance. Pace
Bergen,
it
could
certainly
be
argued
that a
dialogic relationship
between
representatives
of
the nazi
party
and the Christian churches
helped shape
nazi attitudes toward
Christianity. Ideologically
ramified as
they were, however,
the nazis showed
little
appreciation
for the Catholic Church's
history
of
anti-Semitism,
anti-
Marxism and anti-liberalism. Their intention to create their own
reality
meant
that the nazis were
quite capable
of
neglecting reality
when it interfered with
their
predetermined
worldview. Which makes their
willingness
to
engage
with
the Protestant churches
up
until 1937
-
including
the
planning
of church
elections four
years
after the extinction of
every
other
vestige
of
democracy
in
Germany
-
all the more remarkable in its
implications.
Staying
with Protestantism for the
moment, it is
necessary
to address Gailus'
many
criticisms of
my analysis
of
Protestantism, particularly concerning chap-
ter five. Given his
scolding approach
of
providing
a
laundry
list of
my alleged
194
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
inaccuracies and
mistakes,
I have little choice but to address them
point by
point.
First of
all,
I do not
dispute
Harnack's credentials as a non-nazi or his
refusal to
approve
nazi anti-Semitism
(HR, 41).
On the other
hand,
Harnack's
engagement
with Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the late
years
of the
Kaiserreich,
as well as his own
rejection
of the Old Testament as
'Jewish
carnal law' at the
beginning
of the Weimar
Republic,
are
entirely germane
to a
central
point
of mine:
'positive
Christian' calls for the removal of the Old
Testament cannot be taken as
intrinsically
anti-Christian. As much as Gailus
might
wish it were
so,
this is not
simply
a case of
my rummaging through
the
quote
mines of
history, looking
for some Christian or other who can be blamed
for
yet
another
aspect
of nazi
ideology;
as I
point out,
'National Socialist
Christians' made
explicit
references to Harnack when
explaining
their own
theological positions (HR, 74, 151).
Gailus
suggests
that a more fruitful line of
inquiry
would be to
interrogate
the brand of Lutheranism associated with
St6cker
-
apparently overlooking
those
many
instances in the book where I
do
just
that
(HR, 36, 38-9, 42, 43-4, 48, 69, 78-80, 181, 204, 262-3). Gailus'
unambiguous
statement that German Christians were
'extremely untheologi-
cal' can be made
only by overlooking
the
very important Theologians
Under
Hitler
by
Robert
Ericksen,
one of the most
prominent monographs exploring
this
question.'
To answer Gailus'
question
as to
'why
should there have been
resistance motivated
by
Christian
principles'
if National Socialism were 'as
Christian as the
author,
here and
there, purports
to
suggest',
one would have
to recount the
very many
instances in the
history
of Christendom when
Christians were at odds
-
or,
more to the
point,
at war
-
with each
other,
regardless
of the
many
exhortations to love and
peace
found in their shared
religion.
I am
very
inclined to
agree
with
Bergen's point
that we need to avoid
ideal definitions in such discussions.
Gailus
professes
that
'error-spotting'
does not
appeal
to him: I can under-
stand
why, given
the defective
way
he
goes
about it. I do not claim that
Dibelius'
speech
on 'Potsdam
Day'
took
place
in Berlin
(HR, 69); I
am accused
of
mischaracterizing
the German Christian
meeting
of November 1933 in
Berlin as a
'controversy'
when
apparently
the accurate
descriptor
is 'scandal'
(my
reference to that event is not on
p.
73 but
p.
75.
Apparently
Gailus
is
taking
me to task for
saying
'at' instead of
'after',
while
overlooking
the fact
that on
p.
164 I refer to the
'outrage
that
ensued').
Gailus claims Prince Eitel
Friedrich did not
join
the NSDAP in
1930,
but
apparently
does not himself
know the actual
date; failing
to note that
Ziegler
turned to the
study
of folk-
lore after
leaving
the Protestant faith in no
way
contradicts
my
characteriza-
tion of his
prior
activities or his association with
Rosenberg.
Gailus criticizes
my interpretation
of church
membership figures
for 1933 as
'rash',
and
yet
concedes that one
way
to
protect
oneself in the totalitarian nazi state was to
join (or rejoin)
a Christian denomination.
5 Robert
Ericksen, Theologians
Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel,
Paul Althaus and Emmanuel
Hirsch
(New Haven,
CT
1985). Gailus'
otherwise extensive
bibliographical
footnotes
fail
to cite
Ericksen's book.
and
the
Nazi Movement 195
Gailus' ire reaches a climax when
discussing
a
passage
about the esteem
for Chamberlain felt
by
what I term 'members of the
Confessing
Church'. He
flatly
states that I have no
support
for this
claim,
that I 'fill in the blanks
entirely speculatively',
and then
triumphantly
announces: 'These are illustra-
tions of the
slapdash approach
to sources and
quotations,
the overused
practice
of indirect
quotation
and the constant
tendency
to
exaggerate interpretations
of
evidence to fit in with his basic thesis.'
However,
instead of a detective
finally
discovering
the
smoking gun,
what we
get
is the
pot calling
the kettle black.
After
complaining
that I 'fill in the
blanks',
he concedes that I
accurately
refer-
ence
my source,
Richard
Gutteridge.
Not satisfied with
this,
he claims to
unearth more
slipshod scholarship (Gutteridge's
at this
point), finally
establish-
ing
that the
original
reference was
actually
an editorial note without attribution
in the
periodical Junge
Kirche.
Gailus makes the
point
that I should not have
relied on
Gutteridge's
own
description
in this case since it ended
up being
speculative
-
a
point well-taken, except
that he then
proceeds
to
speculate.
In
all 'likelihood' the author is Fritz
S6hlmann,
Gailus avers. Then he
engages
in
conjecture
a second
time; having
filled in the blanks of who the author
might
be,
he
speculates
that his candidate would be 'difficult to
identify'
as a member
of the
Confessing
Church because of his
prior
association with
Germany's
Christian-national
youth
movement.
First,
S6hlmann
was
actually
a member of
the
Young
German Order.
Second,
as
Gailus
may know,
the
Confessing
Church
accommodated a broad
range
of
political opinion,
much of it
surprisingly
supportive
of
nazism.6
Third,
the
journal Junge
Kirche
was
strongly
associated
with the
Confessing
Church and its
theological leanings. Fourth,
no one less
than Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a
professional relationship
with
S6hlmann. Fifth,
S6hlmann
was the editor of
Treysa 1945,
a
report
of the
July
1945
Confessing
Church
synod.7
At a bare minimum the evidence
quite firmly points
to
S6hlmann's
strong sympathy
for the
Confessing Church.8
Gailus
repeatedly
attempts
to demonstrate the carelessness of
my scholarship;
it
appears
he does
not feel the need to lead
by example.
On some
points
of detail Gailus has me:
first,
I concede that 'street brawl'
does not
accurately
describe the context of Horst Wessel's
death,
since
Gailus
rightly points
out that the event in
question
did not take
place
on a street.
Second,
in the
process
of
describing
a
revealing
letter of
complaint
about Hans
Schemm sent to the Bavarian
governor
Franz Ritter von
Epp,
I did not
point
6
See,
for
example,
Victoria
Barnett,
For the Soul
of
the
People:
Protestant Protest
Against
Hitler
(New
York
1992); Wolfgang Gerlach,
Als die
Zeugen schwiegen:
Bekennende Kirche und die
Juden (Berlin 1987).
7 Fritz
S6hlmann
(ed.), Treysa
1945: Die
Konferenz
der
evangelischen Kirchenfiihrer 27.-31.
August
1945. Mit einem Bericht iiber die
Synode
der Bekennenden Kirche in
Berlin-Spandau
29.-
31.
Juli
1945 und
iiber
die unmittelbar
vorangegangenen Tagungen
des Reichsbruderrates und das
Lutherischen Rates
(Luneburg 1946).
8 Susanne
Ben6hr,
'"... ohne Zweifel ist der Staat
berechtigt,
hier neue
Wege
zu
gehen":
Die
"Judenfrage"
aus der Sicht von Dietrich
Bonhoeffer,
Gerhard Liebholz und Carl
Schmitt', unpub-
lished
ms. My
thanks to Dr
Ben6hr-Laqueur
for
providing
me with a
copy
of her
paper.
196
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
out that the
complainant
misidentified a date on the Christian calendar:
I concede
my
failure to correct the
complainant's
mistake. I
accept
the
corrections of detail
regarding
the
church-political
events of autumn 1933
-
it
was the Prussian
synod,
not the national
synod,
that
passed
the
Aryan
Paragraph,
and the November
meeting
of the German Christians was a Greater
Berlin
Region assembly,
not a national
assembly.
It is notable that while
Gailus
infers that such mistakes are
symptomatic
of
larger problems,
not one of
these errors is claimed in
any way
to have wider
analytical repercussions:
indeed,
Gailus
'agrees entirely'
with
my
assessment of the 'National Socialist
Christian' milieu.
A third
pressing
issue which
my
critics raise
repeatedly
is
my
use of sources.
Gailus
and
Piper
accuse me of
avoiding
vast swaths of
printed primary sources,
and of
being slipshod
with those I do use. Hexham accuses me of
negligence,
sloppiness
and
oversight,
and
reproaches my
use of translated
primary
sources.
Bergen
makes the mildest criticism of the
four, suggesting
I veer into tenden-
tiousness but not otherwise
questioning my
basic
training
as an historian.
Particularly
notable are the
repeated,
strident assertions that I mishandle the
evidence
regarding Rosenberg.
Much is also made of
my
sources on Goebbels
and Hitler.
Once
again,
Gailus leads the
charge, accusing
me of
credulity
when
using
the
"'What Hitler
really
said" literature'. To make this
point,
Gailus
must mislead
the reader. As it
happens,
I
explore
the
very
issue of
reliability
when
using
such
sources, including
the
Tischgespriiche (HR, 28-9, 253).
In
my
evaluation of
which could be taken as reliable and which
not,
I follow the
analysis
of
Henry
Ashby Turner,
whose edited volume of the Otto
Wagener
memoirs contains an
incisive
methodological
introduction.9 I
agree entirely
with
Gailus' point
about
'slippery ground', pointing
out that the source used over and over
again
by
historians to
'prove'
that Hitler was an anti-Christian is
Rauschning's
extremely
dubious Hitler
Speaks.
Ian Kershaw
agrees
with Turner that
Rauschning
is so unreliable that he should not be
used;
some German scholars
go
even
further, accusing Rauschning
of fraudulence.
Gailus
and Hexham both
fault me for
using Speer's self-exculpatory
Inside the
Third Reich,
once
again
choosing
to
ignore my
own evaluation of
Speer's reliability: 'Speer's
book has
been
critiqued
for
myth making,
but this
critique
has been limited to
Speer's
justification
of his own role in the nazi State. None of the authors who con-
vincingly point
to the fallacies found in
Speer's
memoirs
dispute
the
picture
he
paints
of other
nazis,
and none
specifically
refer to the
portrayal
of Hitler's
religious
views as
spurious' (HR, 257).
Gailus
suggests
the memoirs of Felix
Kersten are
similarly tainted,
but without
citing any scholarly interrogation
of
9 Otto
Wagener,
Hitler: Memoirs
of
a
Confidant,
edited
by Henry Ashby
Turner
(New Haven,
CT
1985), ix-xxvi.
and the
Nazi Movement 197
Kersten's book.10 After
criticizing
me for
using Speer,
Hexham allows himself
to
rely heavily upon
the unreliable 'memoir'
by
Kurt
Liidecke
titled I Knew
Hitler. Hexham thinks that
by grudgingly acknowledging
Arthur Smith's
deconstruction of Liidecke's book he has inoculated himself from criticism.
Quite
the
contrary;
Smith's article is
damning.
And it is not
alone;
over 30
years ago
Dietrich Orlow called
Liidecke's
book
'highly
unreliable' and
urged
that it be used with 'extreme caution'." Roland
Layton's
1979
article,
'Kurt
Ludecke and I Knew Hitler: An
Evaluation',
a
guarded
defence of the
veracity
of
Liidecke's claims,
must nonetheless concede:
'it
can
hardly
be denied that
much is
exaggerated.'12
Gailus accuses me of
leaving
aside
huge
collections of Hitler's and Goebbels'
printed primary material, implying
once more that I do so to avoid evidence
contrary
to
my theory.
Not
only
do I
exhaustively probe through
the
single
most
important printed primary source,
Hitler's Mein
Kampf,
I
go through
a
great
deal of additional
printed primary
material on
Hitler, including
the
Domarus, Jdickel-Kuhn, Maser, Nicolaisen, Tyrell
and
Wagener
volumes. I
also use the
Tischgespriiche,
but not before
addressing
the
question
of its
reliability.
Between these sources and the substantial archival research under-
taken at the Institute for
in
Munich,
the Federal
Archives at the time located in Potsdam and
Berlin-Zehlendorf,
and four other
archives central to the
study
of National
Socialism,
I stand
by my
claim to
have
authoritatively
established Hitler's
religious
views. I
agree
that one
should
always
strive to be exhaustive when
possible;
but Gailus cites not a
single
instance where the
compendia
I did not use would have undermined
my
analysis
based on the
very
substantial material I do use.
The same
point applies
to Goebbels.
Gailus
simply
asserts without further
explanation
that the Goebbels references I
employ
are 'weak and
dubious',
then
reproaches
me for not
using
the 1996 edition of
Fr6hlich's
diary
materials. It must be said that I use two other volumes edited
by
Fr6hlich,
the
standard 1987 collection and the newer 1998 collection. He believes that he
'catches'
me once more
by quoting
at
length
from a December 1941
entry
in
Goebbels'
diary.
But I
point
out
myself
that two
years earlier, by
December
1939,
Goebbels'
diary
entries were
already revealing
anti-Christian sentiment
(HR, 252). Again,
Gailus
provides
not a
single
instance where
using Fr6hlich's
1996 collection would have
challenged my findings.
Gailus then
proceeds
to
misleadingly
take
my
words out of context:
'According
to
Steigmann-Gall
Goebbels showed "no diminution of his
religious
convictions" after the seizure
of
power.'
The most
cursory reading
of that
passage (HR, 124)
shows this
statement is made for the
period immediately following
the Seizure of
Power,
10
Ian Kershaw, by contrast,
uses the memoir without critical comment in the second volume of
his recent two-volume
biography
of Hitler:
Ian Kershaw, Hitler,
1936-1945: Nemesis
(New
York
2001), 1027,
1033.
11 Dietrich
Orlow,
The
History of
the Nazi
Party,
1919-1933
(Pittsburgh,
PA
1969),
323.
12 Roland V.
Layton, Jr,
'Kurt Ludecke
[sic]
and I Knew Hitler: An
Evaluation',
Central
European History,
12
(1979):
372-86.
198
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
not
simply
'after the seizure of
power',
which without further comment could
be taken to mean the entire Third Reich. Gailus decontextualizes a second
time:
'Elsewhere,
he
repeats
that Goebbels showed "little
change
in his
religious
attitudes" in the later
years
of the
regime' (emphasis mine).
Here too
he
misleads, adding
'later
years
of the
regime'
when I
point
out
through
the
sources which follow that this statement holds for 1937
(5 years
into a
12-year
regime)
in the case of
Christianity,
and 1941 in the case of Goebbels' anti-
paganism.
Hexham devotes most of his
critique
to
questioning my methodology,
chal-
lenging my
use of source material and
defending Rosenberg
from evidence of
his
political impotence.
Whereas Gailus
attempts
a
summary
execution of
my
work,
Hexham
prefers
death
by
a thousand cuts.
Mistakes,
false
arguments
and overstatements of
my analysis
saturate his
piece.
Hexham
misleadingly
transforms
my
declaration that I intend a
'close
reading'
of
my
sources into the
groundless
assertion that I claim that earlier scholars failed to
interpret
nazism
correctly
because
they
did not read archival and
published
works
carefully.
If there are instances where I
point
out errors or
oversights
on behalf of
other
scholars,
I do not
extrapolate
from this and
impugn
their methods of
investigation.
In his effort to turn the
tables,
Hexham
frequently impugns
my methods, criticizing me, among
other
things,
for
my
use of translated
primary sources;
to drive his
point home,
when
citing
these sources himself
he
pointedly
adds
lengthy
footnotes
containing
the
original
German text. If I
use Manheim's translation of Mein
Kampf
instead of the
original German,
as
just
the most obvious
example,
then so too do scores of
English-language
scholars of the Third Reich. I cannot here
provide
Hexham with an exhaustive
list,
but
among
a few of the more recent
examples
are the works of Michael
Burleigh,
Claudia
Koonz,
Saul
Friedlander,
Alan Steinweis and Paul
Weindling.13
The list of scholars who use translations of other
printed primary
sources could
go
on and on.
Another error of Hexham's is to
suggest
that I underestimate
Rosenberg
because I do not take
ideology seriously.
It is difficult to determine
against
whom he is
arguing
when he states 'it is safe to
say
that
many
scholars now see
ideology
as an
important
element in
motivating
individual National Socialists.'
This is a sentence which could have come out of
my
own book. Whether or not
Bollmus diminishes the role of
ideology
in the nazi
regime hardly disproves
the
larger point
Bollmus
makes,
and which
my
own research
confirms; namely,
that
Rosenberg consistently
lost his
polycratic
battles for
supremacy
in
religious questions.
Based on
quotes
from
public
NSDAP
ceremonies,
Hexham
would have us believe that
Rosenberg's
beliefs were
hegemonic
in the nazi
party
and held
sway
over
Hitler,
even as he lost all the internecine
struggles
he
13
Burleigh,
Third Reich, op. cit.;
Claudia
Koonz,
The Nazi Conscience
(Cambridge,
MA
2003);
Saul
Friedlander,
Nazi
Germany
and the
Jews:
The Years
of
Persecution,
1933-1939
(New
York
1997);
Alan
Steinweis, Art, Ideology
& Economics in Nazi
Germany:
The
Reich Chambers of
Music, Theater
and the Visual Arts
(Chapel Hill,
NC
1996);
Paul
Weindling, Health,
Race and
German Politics between National
Unification
and
Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge 1989).
and
the
Nazi Movement 199
entered into and was
subjected
to scorn and ridicule within the nazi elite.
Hexham would do well to examine other
spheres
of
Rosenberg's
life where he
similarly
lost to those who held real
sway.
Alexander Dallin demonstrated
with
overwhelming empiricism
how another of
Rosenberg's ideological pet
projects
lost out
heavily:
his vision of a series of
tributary
Slavic nation-states
surrounding
a core Russian
rump
in the
occupied
Soviet Union was
contemp-
tuously disregarded by
Hitler's much more
powerful satraps
-
even
if,
or
perhaps precisely because,
men like Erich Koch were
nominally
under Rosen-
berg
in his
capacity
as Minister for the
Occupied
East.14 The kinds of
disrespect
which his associates
heaped upon him,
both as an administrator and as an
intellectual,
make it
abundantly
clear that
Rosenberg
was not a man with a
large following.
That he did have a cohort of fellow
paganists
who took him
seriously
I
myself point out;
but to
extrapolate
from this and
argue
that
Rosenberg's religious
ideas influenced Hitler or were
hegemonic
in the nazi
movement or
party
is
utterly
without foundation.
Hexham nit
picks
on
points
of
detail,
for
example, belabouring
the
question
of which edition of
Rosenberg's Mythus
I have in fact used. He
says
I
'repeat-
edly
claim'
to be
using
the 1930
edition,
then informs me that I have
actually
used the 1935 edition. I do not
'repeatedly
claim' to use
any particular edition;
I indicate the
original publication
date and
place
of
Rosenberg's
book in rele-
vant footnotes and
again
in the
bibliography.
I make no mention of an edition
one
way
or another. Hexham insists that I must be
using
the 1935
edition;
in
fact I use the 1942 edition. If he is
suggesting
that
my
reference should have
been to the date of the
edition,
not the
original
date of the
publication
of
Mythus,
I
accept
his
suggestion. However,
his
argument
that
Rosenberg
defends himself
against resurrecting
a dead
religion only
in a later edition
because he had to defend his work
against
hostile criticism since it first came
out in 1930
-
in other
words, Rosenberg
had to backtrack
-
hardly
dis-
proves my larger point
about
Rosenberg's
weak
position
vis-a-vis his col-
leagues
or his defensiveness about his
paganistic
ideas. Hexham
helps
himself
to a
reading
of
Speer
-
after
criticizing my
use of
Speer's
book! And the
point
he makes is
wrong:
as with the above discussion
concerning Speer's
Cathedral
of
Light
or Hitler's own comment on
night
rallies as nazi
choreography,
there
is not the
slightest proof
that the
building
of monumentalist architecture
was in
keeping
with
Rosenberg's paganism.
Hexham's conclusion includes a
point
about Mark Twain
which,
while
amusing,
is a false
parallel:
Twain's
relationship
to the Book of Mormon was not
analogous
to Hitler's
relationship
to
Mythus.
Where Hexham is at his most untenable and even
puzzling
is in his
lengthy
defense of
Rosenberg
as someone more than a
fringe ideologue. Page
after
page
of Hexham's article is devoted to
demonstrating
not
just
the relevance of
Rosenberg's writings,
but the need to take
seriously
the
comparable writing
of
14 Alexander
Dallin,
German Rule in Russia: A
Study of Occupation
Policies
(New York,
1957).
200
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
cult
religious
writers of the
contemporary
era with whom
Rosenberg
is com-
pared.
Hexham insists that
Rosenberg's high
sales numbers for his
Mythus
are
a reflection of the
genuine popularity
of his
religious
ideas in nazi
Germany
-
overlooking
Hitler's own dismissal of those numbers
(HR, 257).
We should
not,
Hexham
warns,
underestimate
Rosenberg's dangerous
ideas
simply
because
they
strike us
today
as ridiculous or
badly
written 'drivel.' A
strange
plea indeed, given
that I
engage
in a
lengthy analysis
of
Mythus (HR, 91ff).
As
I state
myself:
'.. . the views found in the book are worth our consideration'
(HR, 94). I
take
ideas
seriously
because he articulated
the
religious
views of a
group
of nazis
who,
whether dilettantes or
not,
consti-
tuted a discernable
religious
milieu within National Socialism.
However,
what
Hexham
simply
cannot allow himself to see is that it was other
nazis,
not this
author,
who found him ridiculous. The
many
instances in
Holy
Reich in which
I
repeatedly
demonstrate Hitler's disdain for
ideas are
simply ignored by
Hexham.
Rosenberg
had a
long-standing
institutional inter-
est in
exaggerating
his own
importance:
it is
hardly surprising
if Hitler occa-
sionally played along.
The
private correspondence
from Hitler which Hexham
quotes
demonstrates that he is
actually praising Rosenberg's loyalty,
not his
influence;
the
passage
demonstrates Hitler's
sympathy
and
reciprocation
for
years
of
Rosenberg's
commitment and
loyalty.
It does not demonstrate Hitler's
fealty
to
Rosenberg's mysticism, only
his maladroit reassurance that his ser-
vices are
appreciated.
Hexham tries to
explain away postwar testimony
of
Rosenberg's
irrelevance
by
fellow
nazis, claiming that, owing
to its
'genocidal
ideas,
few were
prepared
to admit to
having
read the book'
-
a conclusion
hard to take
seriously given
the number of
unrepentant
nazis at
Nuremberg,
who showed no remorse for their
loyalty
to nazi
ideology
or its
genocidal
con-
sequences.
The fact which Hexham refuses to face is that I do not dismiss
Mythus
as unreadable - Hitler did.
Note how more than once Hexham feels he must work
against
what he
per-
ceives as
my
efforts to 'discredit'
Rosenberg.
Does Hexham feel some need to
save
Rosenberg
and his fellow
paganists?
It
appears so, given
the
way
in which
he resorts to the most narrow
criticisms.0
I wonder which
dictionary
Hexham
used to
get
'world-view
authority'
from
'Weltanschauungsprokurist';
and does
using
'executive
secretary'
instead of 'administrative clerk'
really change
the
larger point
Bracher is
making
in the
lengthy quote
that follows? Notice
how Hexham chooses to
ignore
Bracher's conclusion that
Rosenberg
'did not
succeeded in
becoming
either a
leading power-political figure
or founder of a
15 Hexham has revealed such a
tendency elsewhere,
for instance in an
exchange
with an inter-
viewer for an online
publication
called
'Sociology
of
Science', concerning
critical comments on the
book New
Religions
and the Nazis
by
his wife Karla Poewe
(http://www.sociologyesoscience.com/
ChrNazi.html,
retrieved 17
August 2006).
At one
point
the interviewer emails Poewe for her
thoughts, only
to have Hexham
respond instead, attacking my
book as unreliable
-
again
over the
canard of
using
translated source material - and
concluding
somewhat
worryingly:
'What is
your
interest in Hauer and the Nazis?
Why
is it so
important
for
you
and
your colleagues
to distance the
Nazis from German
neo-pagans
like Hauer?'
and
the Nazi
Movement 201
religion'!
I
agree
with Bracher that
Rosenberg spent
his entire career
'justify-
ing'
nazi
ideology,
but Hexham
gives
us no
proof
as to how
many people
were
really listening, certainly
not
among
the elites of the
NSDAP,
where it would
have mattered in this context.
Trotting
out a list of
Zeitgenossen (eyewitnesses)
to
prove Rosenberg really
was
important, including
the
very
dubious memoirs
of
Liidecke
and Otto
Strasser,'6
and an
allegedly 'expert'
list of American visi-
tors to
Germany totally
unconnected to Hitler's inner
sanctum,
demonstrates
that Hexham is
pleading
rather than
proving
his case.
Aside from
saving Rosenberg
from his own
marginality,
Hexham concerns
himself with what kind of alternative
analysis might
be derived from one
particular
source: Goebbels' novel Michael. Given restrictions of
space
I
cannot
go
head to head with Hexham on each
example
he raises.
However,
looking
at one instance in
particular displays
the distorted and
faulty
nature of
his
analysis.
Hexham contends that a
quote
I use to
express
Goebbels' view on
Christianity
'reads as
though
it is a direct statement made
by
Goebbels' when
in fact it is the words of Goebbels'
protagonist
in the
novel,
Michael Vormann.
Unfortunately
for
Hexham,
I indicate on the
very
same
page
that this
quote
comes from a novel.
Elsewhere,
when
comparing
Michael with Dinter's Sin
against
the
Blood,
I state: 'Goebbels created a fictional
protagonist,
Michael
Vormann, through
whom he voiced his views'
(HR, 31).
Hexham wants to
have it both
ways:
on the one
hand,
his
lengthy
excursus informs me that
novels are not the most reliable
insight
into their authors'
thinking;
but he then
allows himself to
analyse
Michael for
precisely
such
insight!
As Helmut Heiber
points
out in the liner notes to the
English
translation of
Michael,
Goebbels
almost
certainly adapted
this novel from his own diaries of the
early 1920s;
even without this
'endorsement', however,
even the most
desultory reading
of
Michael demonstrates that it is laden with coarse and
authentically
nazi views
- most
obviously
a
raging antisemitism,
but also
hostility
to
parliamentary
democracy
and his own 'socialist' vision of 'National Socialism.'
The
larger problem
with Hexham's contention that Vormann 'liberates'
himself from
Christianity
is that he
simply
never demonstrates this. Vormann/
Goebbels is
being anticlerical,
as I
point
out in
my
own
analysis (HR, 21),
but
his reference to Christ makes it
plain
he is
referring
to
Christianity,
however
revolutionary
his
reading
of it. Hexham
attempts
a translation of 'Wieder
komme ich zu
Christus', coming up
with 'Once
again
I return to the issue of
Christ.' The
English-language
version I
use, by Joachim Neugroschel,
is much
more
felicitously
translated as 'I find Christ
again'.
A more verbatim trans-
lation, 'Again
I come to
Christ',
still bears little resemblance to Hexham's
much more convoluted and
misleading
'return to the issue
of
Christ'. Hexham
continues to translate
conveniently
but
poorly.
A
pivotal passage
in this
16 Like
Rauschning,
Otto Strasser was concerned with
currying
favour
among
the
Allies,
to
whom he had defected: his resultant
self-exculpatory
'memoirs' are described
by
Kershaw as 'a
biased and often unreliable source
...
the fanciful anti-Hitler
propaganda
of an
outright political
enemy': Ian Kershaw, Hitler,
1939-1956: Hubris
(New York, 1999), 241, 352,
683.
202
Joumal
of
Vol 42 No 2
lengthy
Michael
quote
would seem to clinch his case: 'Yet millions await a
new
religion.' However,
the
original
German which Hexham
provides
reads
'Millionen warten
darauf,
und ihre Sehnsucht bleibt
unerfiillt'.
'Sehnsucht' is
not the German word for
'religion',
but for
'longing'. Against
Hexham's
remarkable
display
of artistic licence we have
Neugroschel's
much more felici-
tous translation: 'Millions of
people
are
waiting
for this new
formation,
and
their
yearnings
remain unfulfilled'
(quoted
in
HR, 21).
If this is Hexham's idea
of how to use
original-language
source
material,
I'll stick with the
published
translations.
Staying
for a moment with this
pivotal passage
from
Michael,
Hexham
charges
me with
'leaving
out the final
passage
about a new God'. He is refer-
ring
to the
passage
in Michael that reads: 'But we should allow the broad
masses to
worship
their idols until we can
give
them a new God.'
Although
it
is true that I do not make reference to this
passage,
elsewhere in
my analysis
I
point
to Goebbels' sometimes
contradictory
views on
religion during
the
Kampfzeit,
or 'Time of
Struggle' (HR, 53-54). But, having
accused me of leav-
ing
out evidence which
disproves my thesis,
Hexham
proceeds
to leave out the
very
next sentence: 'I take the
Bible,
and all
evening long
I read the
simplest
and
greatest
sermon that has ever been
given
to mankind: The Sermon on the
Mount!'
(Original
German: 'Ich nehme die Bibel und lese einen
ganzen
Abend
die
einfachste,
gr6f8te
Predigt,
die her Menschheit
je gehalten
wurde: die
Bergpredigt!'17) Only by leaving
out inconvenient
passages, incorrectly
trans-
lating others,
and
taking
Goebbels'
quotes
out of context can Hexham make
his absurd case that Michael demonstrates not
Christian,
but
'neo-pagan'
thinking.
This is
only
the most obvious case of Hexham's
slapdash approach
to sources and
quotations
and a
repeated tendency
to distort evidence to fit in
with his
preconceived
notions. Hexham does have me on one
point,
however:
I
gave
the
wrong page
number when
citing
one of the
epigraphs
from
Mythus
that
begin chapter
three.
Piper's analysis
on
my
book rivals Gailus' for
being
the most caustic
-
but it
is
easily
the most
perfunctory
of all four. Before the first sentence ends he has
already
made a
mistake, wrongly stating
that I
argue
'National Socialism was
a Christian movement'. I
challenge Piper
to
produce
evidence that I
say
this
anywhere
in
my
book.
Unfortunately Piper's piece
does little to
engage my
arguments
from
there, simply synopsizing
the more relevant
passages
of his
own
biography
of Alfred
Rosenberg
rather than
addressing
either
my
sources
or
my findings.
In the
process,
he
certainly says
much that I
agree
with
-
as
Piper
should have
immediately recognized. My
discussion of
responses
to
Rosenberg's Mythus similarly points out, for
instance,
that Catholic
opinion
of
17
Joseph Goebbels, Michael:
Ein
deutsches Schicksal
in
Tagebuchbliittern (Munich 1929;
7th
edn, 1935),
145.
and
the
Nazi Movement
203
his book was
very negative (HR, 127-8); I
agree entirely
that in
Mythus
Rosenberg rejects
both the Protestant and Catholic establishments
(HR,
98-100),
and
point
out
myself
how 'so much of
Christianity'
was
rejected
in it
(HR, 98);
that Himmler and
Rosenberg
were allies is
something
I refer to more
than once
(HR, 129, 131);
like
Piper,
I
place
Wichtler
among
those on
Rosenberg's
side
(HR, 241); I
use Goebbels'
quote
of
1939,
and include the
next sentence of his
diary:
'He
[Hitler] regards Christianity
as a
symptom
of
decay' (HR, 252); I
discuss at
length
and in much the same terms the
signifi-
cance of
Rosenberg leaving
the Protestant church in 1933
(HR, 165); Piper
casts the
Gottgliiubiger (believers
in
God)
in terms
very
similar to
my
own
(HR, 219); I
entirely agree
with his assessment of the failures of the
paganist
'German Faith Movement'
(HR, 149-53).
The list could
go
on.
However,
Piper
makes mistakes as well. He
wrongly
asserts that Martin Bormann was a
'powerful ally'
of
Rosenberg's, disregarding
the substantial evidence that
they
were in fact rivals
(HR, 247-8).
He characterizes Dinter's
religion
as anti-
Christian, incorrectly suggesting
that the
only proof
to the
contrary
is Dinter's
admiration of Christ. As I
demonstrate,
Dinter's own
description
of his
Christian
feelings points
to more than this
(HR, 19-20, 24, 27, 30-1, 58).
Incredibly, Piper suggests
that
only
a few isolated individuals like
Johannes
Stark and Hanns Kerrl
sought
a 'reconciliation' between nazism and Christian-
ity,
and that
they
were 'of
necessity
outsiders'. To make this claim
Piper
had to
studiously
avoid
reading
the first two
chapters
of
my book,
in which I demon-
strate what kinds of
powerful
nazis
-
including
Wdichtler's
predecessor
Hans
Schemm,
the
party's supreme judge
Walter
Buch,
and a host of Gauleiter
including
Wilhelm Kube and Erich Koch
-
far from
seeking
a 'reconciliation'
between nazism and
Christianity,
were of the firm conviction that the two
formed a
synthesis. Amazingly,
nowhere in
Piper's 831-page biography
of
Rosenberg
do the
religious
views of these men once receive even the most
cursory
treatment.18
In the
12-page chapter
in his book on
'Religion
und
Politik'
during
the
Kampfzeit, Piper
chooses to focus
solely
on Hitler's and
Rosenberg's dealings
with Ludendorff and
Dinter, wrongly casting
those
episodes
as
symptomatic
of a
pan-nazi opposition
to all
things
Christian.
If
Piper begins by creating
a straw
man,
he ends
by caricaturing my
state-
ments:
against my
'ridiculous' claim that Bouhler's PPK is a
commonly
over-
looked
office, Piper
cites a
single
reference which is not even a
monographic
treatment of the PPK. While Bouhler is known
among
historians for his role in
the infamous T-4
killings,
I stand
by my
assertion that his role as rival to
Rosenberg
in the
oversight
of nazi
ideology,
let alone his
place
in the
party's
internal
religious struggles,
is much less commented on.
Piper
tries to
prove my
ignorance by accusing
me of
being
unaware that the
publisher Hoheneichen,
which
published Rosenberg's Mythus,
was owned
by
nazis' Eher
Verlag.
He believes he is
correcting my information,
when in fact
I
state that 'it was
published
as a
private work,
never
becoming
an
official guide
to nazi
thinking
18 Ernst
Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich 2005).
204
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
6
.
. It never received the
official stamp
of the
NSDAP,
nor did the
party's
official publisher publish
it'
(HR, 92; emphasis mine).
The
sloppiness
of
Piper's
accusations
grows
from there. I am accused of
spelling
Alfred
Biumler's
last
name 'three different
ways',
when in fact I
consistently spell
it one
way, except
on a
single
occasion when I
quote
another scholar
(which happens
to be the
spelling Piper employs).
He furthermore claims that I 'fail to do
justice
to the
part played' by
Biumler.
Since he doesn't indicate what he means
by this,
I can
only
assume he believes I understate Bdiumler's
importance
in the Third Reich.
If
so, Piper again
read
past my
book:
'Along
with
Heidegger,
Biumler
was the
most notable
philosopher
to back the nazi
regime
with his intellectual
prestige
... Biumler
maintained and indeed
strengthened
his links with the nazis well
into the Third Reich
...
as Hans
Sluga puts it, "Biumler
was ... more than
any
other German
philosopher,
the
typical
fascist intellectual"'
(HR, 105).
One
could
argue
these
attempts
to make mountains out of molehills would have
some
value,
were it not for the fact that each of them is so
obviously wrong.
I would like to address some of the
problems
I see in
Bergen's
otherwise
much more
temperate piece.
She
suggests
I treat 'somewhat
condescendingly'
her book Twisted
Cross,
and
expresses surprise
that I believe I am
revising
her own view. I believe that as an
analysis primarily
of nazi attitudes to
Christianity, my
book in
many ways
serves as a natural
complement to, among
other
works,
her own
probing analysis
of Christian attitudes to nazism.
However,
the
point
of
departure
for the two of us concerns whether or not the
Christianity
these 'National Socialist Christians' and 'Christian National
Socialists' both subscribed to can
really
be called Christian.
Naturally
it would
be an enormous burden to demonstrate
just
what
'real
Christianity' is,
even as
a number of
prior
historians
have,
without
sanction,
left undefined the
concept
of 'infected
Christianity'.
I
agree completely
with
Bergen's larger point
that
historians do well to remember the tension between the 'external/historical'
and the 'internal/ideal'.
I would
cautiously agree
with her assertion that 'German
Christians did not fit most standard
theological
criteria for Christians'
-
a
formulation which is nuanced
enough
to allow for the
complexity
of the
ques-
tion
-
or that 'most
people
would describe'
the German Christians she
explores
'as un-Christian'.
However,
what she fails to
point
out is that
she
described them this
way: 'ultimately
non-Christian ... no church at
all.'"
It
seems to me she
puts
her case
quite plainly:
the German Christians
-
whether
laymen, pastors
or
theologians
-
did not
properly
understand their
religion.
If Gailus faults me for
wanting
too
much, Bergen
claims I have not done
enough.
For all her
charges
of tendentiousness and
'collecting
of
quotes',
she
claims that had I
only played
the 'ace' of church
membership statistics,
I would
have 'nailed'
my
case. I must remind her that I address
precisely
this
question
when
explaining why
I translate the German
Konfession
as 'confession' instead
of 'denomination': 'In
Germany,
where to this
day religion nominally
remains
19 Doris
Bergen,
Twisted Cross: The German
Christian
Movement in the
Third Reich (Chapel
Hill,
NC
1996),
192.
and
the
Nazi Movement 205
an
obligatory
state affair and not
voluntaristic,
there are no denominations in
the strict sense of the word. Its use in the German context
incorrectly suggests
an
American-style religious "marketplace"
and attendant
separation
of church
and state'
(HR, xv).
Nominal church
membership
is a
very
unreliable
gauge
of
actual
piety
in this
context, especially given
the
very
circuitous route one had
to take before one could
officially
leave one's church - unless there were
sudden, propitious drops
or
increases,
as was the case in 1933. Church attend-
ance, by contrast,
would have been a much more
revealing gauge,
if much
more difficult to ascertain.
It is most
peculiar
that
Bergen
would make such an
argument, given
that
my
goal
is to
explore
nazi attitudes to
Christianity,
not the other
way
around.
Would I have nailed
my
case
by simply pointing
out that
Hitler, Goebbels,
and
Goering always
remained members of their churches? That Goebbels had his
children
baptized?
That in 1935
Goering
wedded his second wife
Emmy
in a
Lutheran service? I make all these
points
in
my book,
but could not contend
that
by
themselves
they prove
much about a
larger ideological relationship.
Indeed,
Hitler's
ongoing membership
in the Catholic Church stands
very
much
at odds with his
private
comments about Catholicism and its traditions.
Bergen
herself
points
to the
highly incomplete picture
such statistics
provide
when she
asserts that 'a
growing
exodus from the church in the
Imperial
and Weimar
eras, coupled
with the loss of
credibility
after the debacle of the Great
War,
convinced
many
church leaders that
Christianity
was
losing ground'.
To her
claim that Protestant
theologians grudgingly
felt
obliged
to
stay
with the times
by endorsing nazism,
I would
point
out that for
every
Protestant who
expressed misgivings privately,
there was another who believed nazism meant
a return to
Christianity.
Furthermore
-
and this is at the centre of
my
work -
this was not
just
a case of Protestants
giving
their
blessings
to nazism from
afar; many
nazis were themselves
believing
Protestants.
At the conclusion of her article
Bergen charges
me with
leaving
out 'the
crucial element of tension in nazi-Christian relations. Without
conceding
at
least some nazi
hostility, however,
the
dynamic generated by
Christian defen-
siveness cannot be understood.' This is
speculatively
attributed to 'an effort to
make his evidence fit
neatly'. First,
I
point
to
repeated
instances of
hostility
between nazism and institutional
Christianity,
both Catholic
and,
as the Third
Reich wears
on, increasingly
Protestant. It was the consistent resistance of the
Dahlemites
against
the
plans
for a
Reichskirche that,
after
all,
made Hitler turn
sharply against
institutional Protestantism in 1937
(HR, 183-8).
That
Bergen
claims I 'left out' such evidence is a
mystery. Second,
I
point repeatedly
to the
many
instances of
hostility
to
Christianity among
the
paganist cohort,
from
Rosenberg, Himmler,
and all the other
paganists
of the
party.
I also make
reference to the
hostility
with which these attacks were met in Christian circles.
Bergen
ends her
piece
with a list of
my
indiscretions. She claims I
pay
insuf-
ficient attention to the
key
issue of
anti-Semitism;
while I
very
much
agree
that
analysing
the
potential
of
religiously inspired
anti-Semitism
among
the
murderers/perpetrators
remains a
scholarly desideratum,
I do
explore
anti-
206
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
Semitism in
my
book
very extensively (HR, 3-4, 8-10, 13, 20, 24, 27, 29-41,
43-4, 49, 51-4, 60, 105, 107, 117-18, 125-6, 136, 141, 176-7, 182, 185-6,
195, 235, 248, 254-5, 258, 260, 262-3, 265, 267).
She claims I fall 'into the
trap
of confessional
competition';
this is false. I do not seek to uncover who is
'more
guilty',
Protestant or
Catholic,
but whom the nazis esteemed more. I do
not
say
'nazism was at times identical to
Christianity';
I
explore
those nazis
who did
-
and those who said 'no'. Even if I claim that
paganist hostility
to
Christianity
was
fraught
with
ambiguity
and
ambivalence,
such anti-Christians
were
clearly antagonistic enough
for me to
preclude
ever
claiming
that nazism
and
Christianity were,
even in the worst of
instances, 'always
able to coexist
harmoniously'
-
a
particularly puzzling
assertion
given
that she elsewhere
faults me for not
finding enough
in common between nazism and Catholicism.
She
urges
us to remember that 'some nazis were
openly
and
actively
anti-
church: remember the
uproar
over Alfred
Rosenberg's Myth of
the
Twentieth
Century':
I do. She reminds us that nazis restricted some church activities
(HR,
chapter 5, passim).
She
suggests
we not
forget
that Hitler's
plans
for the future
capital
of 'Germania' left no room for churches
(HR, 247). Finally,
she informs
us that Hitler believed he was God.
By
her tone
here, Bergen
seems to believe
she has
played
her
ace. The evidence demonstrates
beyond
doubt that this is a
claim that Hitler never once made.
Occasionally megalomaniacs
of world
history
are known to believe
they
are
literally
divine: the leader of China's
Taiping Rebellion,
for
instance, thought
he was Christ's
younger
brother.20
Bergen
relishes an
opportunity
to make fun of Hitler
-
and who doesn't? But
while Hitler believed that God had a
special plan
for
him,
that he
represented
God's will on
earth,
and that those who went
against
him went
against God,
he did not believe he was divine.
Aside from the
pieces
included in this
symposium,
there are
-
so far
-
three
other
published
review articles that
attempt
a
longer exploration
of
my
book.
One is
by George Williamson,
a
very
favourable
historiographical essay
incor-
porating many
works in addition to
my own,
which
appears
in
Church
History.21
Another is
by
Milan Babik in
History
and
Theory,
on the theoretical
underpinnings
of
Holy Reich,
and how the
concept
of
'secular
religion' might
still be seen as relevant to it.22 The other is Mark Ruff's
piece
on 'Nazi
Religionspolitik'
in
Catholic
Historical
Review, which,
while
strictly speaking
a
comparison
of two
works, my
own and Himmlers
Glaubenskrieger by
Wolfgang Dierker, spends
less time on Dierker's work than on
mine.23
There is
20
Jonathan Spence,
God's
Chinese
Son: The
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
(New
York
1996).
21
George Williamson,
'A
Religious Sonderweg?
Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the
Historiography
of Modern
Germany',
in
Church History,
75
(2006),
139-56.
22 Milan
Babik,
'Nazism as a Secular
Religion', History
and
Theory,
45
(2006),
375-96.
23 Mark Edward
Ruff,
'The Nazis'
Religionspolitik:
An Assessment of Recent
Literature',
The
Catholic Historical
Review,
92
(2006),
252-66. That CHR should have devoted an article to
my
and the Nazi Movement 207
much in Ruff's
piece
to
commend, including
a
sophisticated
discussion of
secularization
theory
and the
ways
in which
my
work can be seen as
part
of a
larger rethinking
of
'canonicity' among
scholars like
Hugh McLeod, Jeffrey
Cox,
and others over the last decade or
more,
even as his own
interpretation
clearly upholds
a traditional model. Ruff
thoughtfully explores
the
ways
in
which Dierker's work both resembles and
departs
from
my
own. He
insight-
fully
discusses the
question
of
nazism's
ideological incoherence,
even if he fails
to demonstrate his assertion that I am an intentionalist. While I take
ideology
seriously
-
something functionalists,
it should be
pointed out,
are on occasion
known to do
-
I also deal
centrally
with the
contingencies
of internecine
party
warfare,
and the role it
played
in the
party's decision-making
on
religion
and
the churches.
However,
while the tone of his
piece
is
certainly
much more even-handed
and
dispassionate
than
Gailus', Hexham's,
or
Piper's,
Ruff
unfortunately
re-
iterates
many
of their fallacies. As one
example,
he accuses me of
making
'absolute
pronouncements'
for
suggesting
a
scrutiny
of
Christianity's
dark
past
of sacralized
violence, given
the commitment to
Christianity among
some nazis
and their
profession
that their anti-Semitism could be
explained
in Christian
terms.
Meanwhile,
Dierker
apparently
'refrains from absolute
pronounce-
ments',
even when he 'takes it as a
given'
in absolute terms that the nazis
harboured no Christians in their ranks
(Ruff, 255).
As another
example,
Ruff
suggests
that it is credulous to take
seriously
the nazis'
public
statements on
religion, given
their
mendacity
on other issues. To make this
charge
Ruff
apparently
overlooked the
systematic comparisons
I undertake
throughout my
book between what nazis uttered
publicly
and what
they
said
privately.
To his
point
that Hitler made false
promises
to the Catholic Church
-
he
apparently
missed the
many
occasions in which I demonstrate Hitler's
public
stance
regarding
Catholicism contrasted
sharply
with
privately-expressed antago-
nism. He faults me for not
engaging
in a 'more careful
analysis
of the context
in which
they
were articulated to determine whether the statements
affirming
Christianity
were made in a
setting
that was both
religious
and
public
or
whether the anti-Christian invective was
overwhelmingly private' (Ruff, 259);
a
reading
of the first four
chapters
of
Holy
Reich reveals that I do
precisely
this. Those I label
'positive Christians',
while
certainly
aware of the
political
advantage
of
appearing
Christian for
political purposes,
affirmed their identi-
ties as Christian behind closed doors as well.
By contrast,
whole sections of
my
book
explore
the
ways
in which anti-Christian
paganists
in the
party
refused to
appear
as Christians for the sake of
public consumption.
If the
party
schechthin
displayed
a
contradictory
attitude towards
Christianity,
nonethe-
less one can chart distinct
religious
tendencies within the
party
at least until
book is somewhat
unusual, given
that it had
already published
a review
by
Doris
Bergen (91
[2005], 841-3), essentially
a condensation of her contribution to this
symposium,
albeit more
posi-
tive. Ruff claims in his
essay
to be
examining my
Wallstein
piece
on
political religion
as
well;
in
fact,
this
gets perfunctory
treatment.
208
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
1937
(and
for
many nazis, beyond),
as well as a turn to
increasingly
anti-
Christian sentiment in
general
as the war neared its close. Ruff's
inability
to
acknowledge
that I treat both sides of an intra-nazi debate on
religion
leads
him to the false assertion that I
try
to debunk 'a
myth
of resistance to hostile
paganists'
that arose after the second world war
(Ruff, 266, emphasis added).
In
fact,
the
myth
I
speak
of in the conclusion of
my
book is one of Christian
resistance to
nazism,
not
paganism.
Not
only
do I
point
out instances of
Christian resistance to
paganism
from the
churches,
but also the battle
between Christians and
paganists
within the nazi movement itself.
Ruff makes several more
points concerning
method and sources. For
instance,
he claims that Dierker's work is more
meticulous,
since he visited 23
archives
against my
7. Ruff seems to take a
quantitative
rather than
qualitative
approach
when
inferring
from this that Dierker's
findings
are therefore more
reliable. What Ruff
fails
to
appreciate
is that the
subjects
of
my
historical
analysis
are
just
as defined as Dierker's. Whereas Dierker
pores
over the insti-
tutional
history
of one SD
office,
I
explore
the
conceptions
of
Christianity
found
among
the elites of the nazi
party.
The archives I
consulted, huge
collec-
tions that
they are,
constitute far and
away
the most
important
for this
purpose. Many
of those views are found in
printed primary
sources as
well,
of
course,
some of which Ruff somewhat
condescendingly
refers to as
'ephemera',
even as elsewhere he takes me to task for not
having
utilized the
leading piece
of
'grey
literature'
which is
truly beyond
the
pale
of
reliability, Rauschning's
Hitler
Speaks.
While on the
subject
of
sources,
Ruff
mistakenly argues
that I
impugn
the
reliability
of Hitler's Table
Talk,
when in fact I refer to the con-
troversies
surrounding
this source but
ultimately presume
its
authenticity.
Ruff
seems to follow
Hexham's
lead in his
imprecise critiquing, claiming
I
ignore
the
monologues
of Heinrich Heim and
intimating
that I do so to
help
further
my arguments.
In
fact,
the standard version of Table Talk which I use incor-
porates
Heim's version of the
monologues
as well as Picker's
-
as the intro-
duction to Table Talk
reveals.24 Ruff
proceeds
to
highlight
a
quote
Dierker uses
to demonstrate Hitler's hatred of
Christianity
in 1941
(Ruff, 258), apparently
not
realizing
that I use a
quote very
similar to this in
my
own
analysis (HR,
254).
Like
Hexham,
he
pointedly
adds a footnote
providing
the
original
German. Ruff also allows himself to
quote
from
Speer's biography, presum-
ably
another
example
of
'ephemera' (Ruff, 257).
He uses this
particular
example
to
argue
that I
attempt
but
fail
to
'explain away'
anti-Christian
moments in nazism
-
once more
overlooking
whole swaths of the book when
I
explore
anti-Christian sentiment at
length.
Dierker
presumably
has no
explaining away
to
do,
for the
simple
reason that he chose to examine an office
where he would find no Christian sentiment.
Aside from
addressing
methods and use of
sources,
Ruff also makes some
larger analytical points regarding my
work.
Unfortunately,
these are some of
24 Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private
Conversations,
trans. Norman Cameron and
R.H.
Stevens,
introduction
by Hugh Trevor-Roper (London 1953), vii-xxxvi.
and the
Nazi
Movement 209
the most
problematic parts
of his article.
First,
he
compounds
his undemon-
strated assertion that I am an intentionalist
by making
an erroneous claim that
I need to
engage
in a functionalist
'day-to-day
treatment
by
state and
party
of
the churches and
Christianity' (Ruff, 260)
-
indicating
that he had
given only
the most
cursory glance
at
depictions
of the
vagaries
of nazi
decision-making
in
precisely
such terms
(HR, 156-89, 236-54).
Ruff errs once more when he
suggests
that the nazis 'did little to advance the cause of those committed
Christians who embraced
nazism, including
most
notably
the
ardently pro-
nazi German Christians.' In an
attempt
to demonstrate this
point,
he
quotes
Dierker to the effect that Himmler ordered all Christian
clergy
out of the SS
by
1934
(Ruff, 263).
Once
more,
Ruff
displays
a rather
desultory comprehension
of
my analysis: first,
I
point
out at
length
the
many
forms of
support
which the
NSDAP
gave
the German Christians in the church elections of
1933;
Ruff's
claim that there was no such
support
is
simply
false
(HR, 159-64). Second,
I
clearly
and
repeatedly place Himmler,
as head of the
SS, among
those
pagan-
ists in the
party
who were the most anti-Christian and therefore anti-church.
At the same
time,
I
clearly
demonstrate how Himmler's anticlericalism was
tempered by
moments of
surprising ambiguity regarding
the Christian
religion
itself
-
including
esteem for Martin
Luther,
the
Virgin Mary,
and Christ.
Himmler also talked
repeatedly
and with
surprising
tolerance on the
persistent
presence
of
lay
Christians within the SS
membership (HR, 131-3, 233-5).
Ruff's
greatest analytical fallacy, however,
is to insist that the anti-Christian
zealotry
of Dierker's SD men was
typical
of nazism. When
describing
their
voracious hatred of
Christianity
and the
churches,
he takes a
faintly
intention-
alist
approach by speaking
of these SD men as the 'true
believers' of the nazi
Weltanschauung (Ruff, 263). I
have no
problem
with the
category
of the nazi
'true believer'
-
as I
point
out in
my book,
distinctions need to be made
between those whose commitment to nazi
ideology
was
beyond question,
and
those in the lower ranks of the
NSDAP,
which was known to include a smat-
tering
of members of the
Confessing Church,
after all
(HR, 163-4, 223,
227-8). Having
said
that,
it strains
credulity beyond
the
breaking point
for
Ruff to describe an office staffed
overwhelmingly
with
disgruntled
Catholic
ex-priests, clearly
on a vendetta
against
their one-time
spiritual home,
as
nazism's 'true believers'. Ruff undermines his own
argument
about their status
as the avatars of nazi
ideology by elaborating
on the
entirely non-ideological
sources of their resentment
-
failed academics and students who did not or
could not
pursue
their academic
aspirations;
Mittelstdndler
(petty bourgeois)
with an
inferiority complex
vis-a-vis the more
highly-regarded Gestapo;
hot-
heads with
something
to
prove 'chafing'
at the
unwillingness
of their
superiors
to let them even the score for their failed
private
lives
(Ruff, 261). Against
these
lowly
individuals Ruff would
apparently
have us believe that Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, owing
to his
dismantling
of this band of
vengeful ex-priests,
somehow counts as 'less nazi' than
they.
Ruff
directly challenges
me
by sug-
gesting
that these defrocked
clergymen
'lead us to
question just
how central
these beliefs
[positive Christianity] were,
in
fact,
to the Nazi
ideology' (Ruff,
210
Journal
of
Vol 42 No 2
263)
-
a line of
argument which,
if followed to its
logical conclusion,
means
that not
just
the head of the
RSHA,
but
apparently
Reichsmarschall
Goering,
several Reichsleiter and
Gauleiter,
as well as Hitler's
mentor in
Munich,
must
perforce
have been 'less nazi' when
compared
to the
occupants
of
Department
IVB
of the SD. To
top
off this
scenario,
Ruff then revives the
completely
unproven
but in some circles
popular
truism that the nazis were
going
to tar-
get
the Christians of
Europe
after the
genocide
of the
Jews: 'those
who had
been active in the
Religious Opponents
division of the SD
[Department IVB]
were
directly supervised by
those
co-ordinating
the
deportations
of the
Jews
to
the
East,
an ominous
precedent
should these hard-liners have
gained
further
power
at the close of the war'
(Ruff, 264).
I
should
point
out
again
that Ruff is not
nearly
as cantankerous as Gailus or
Piper. Still,
for all his mildness of
tone,
he
helps
himself to some
wry jabs: my
work
apparently
'bears the burden of
unusually high praise', implying
that it
has received as much attention as it has not on its
strengths,
but because of its
'eulogists'
as Gailus
puts
it.
By
the end of his article Ruff makes it clear that he
believes this is a burden too
heavy
for the book to
carry. By concentrating
as
he does on what he
regards
to be the excessive
praise by
others for
my book,
instead of
looking
at the actual
arguments
I
make,
Ruff concludes his article
by
attempting
to accuse me of sensationalism. The
ways
in which Ruff mirrors the
type
of
approach
utilized
by
Hexham are
striking:
fallacious
methodological
criticisms, extrapolations
based on
fragmentary
and minute
evidence,
distortions and omissions of
my analysis,
and
bypassing
the
larger ideological
issue of
Christianity
and nazi anti-Semitism in the name of 'meticulousness'.
Not
entirely surprising, perhaps,
since Ruff
points
out that he had access
to Hexham's article
-
before it was
published
-
when
writing
his own
(Ruff, 254).
I
thank Richard Evans and the editors of the
Journal of Contemporary History
for the
opportunity
to
respond
to these
interesting
and
very bracing critiques.
And I thank
my
critics for their
commentary. However,
with
disturbing
frequency,
these
critiques
contain fundamental
mistakes, glaring errors,
and
credulous distortions. When such an
inventory
of
scholarly
malfeasance is
proven correct,
it can be said the author under
scrutiny brought
it
upon
him-
self. When it is
proven incorrect,
as is so often the case
here,
it results in a
hatchet
job.
Since Gailus
gives
himself free rein to
judge my motives,
let me
speculate
on motive as well. I believe obvious and
easily
avoided
errors,
mis-
characterizations of
my argument,
and overzealous
attempts
to sink
my
entire
thesis with whatever minutiae come to hand
(Bergen's piece being
the notable
exception) speak
to a need for
my
book to be
wrong.
Such
shortcomings
are
particularly
inexcusable in Gailus' case,
who in the
process
of
labelling
me
sloppy
and
slapdash
hoists himself with his own
petard.
What motivates this
need is
something
I can
only speculate
on
-
though
in Hexham's instance we
seem to be
dealing
with
something
of an
open
book. Whereas Gailus and
Piper
and
the
Nazi Movement
211
hold their cards closer to their
chests,
there is a
palpable
emotional tension
just
under the surface.
Bergen begins
her
piece by agreeing
that 'the insistence that
nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most
enduring
truisms of the
past fifty years'.
Given the
ways
in which these critics
generate
more heat than
light, frequently shooting
themselves in the foot in the
process,
it seems that advocates of this truism are not
ready
to
question
their beliefs
just
yet.
Richard
Steigmann-Gall
is an associate
professor
of
History
and Director of the
Jewish
Studies
Program
at Kent State
University,
Ohio. His
book,
The
Holy
Reich: Nazi
Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945,
was
published
by Cambridge University
Press in
2003,
and has been translated into
Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian and Greek. He will contribute the
chapter
on
'Religion
and the Churches' to the
forthcoming Oxford
Short
History of Germany:
The
Third Reich.

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Christianity and the Nazi Movement: A Response

Author(s): Richard Steigmann-Gall

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