bergen - nazism and christianity

http://jch.sagepub.comJournal of Contemporary History

DOI: 10.1177/0022009407071629 2007; 42; 25 Journal of Contemporary History

Doris L. Bergen 19191945

Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? A Response to Richard

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by taja kramberger on October 27, 2008 http://jch.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Doris L. Bergen

Nazism and Christianity: Partners andRivals? A Response to Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. NaziConceptions of Christianity, 19191945

According to Richard Steigmann-Gall, the insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the pastfifty years.1 Steigmann-Gall is right: popular opinion and much of the olderscholarship assume an explicit and persistent antagonism between the two systems of belief and practice that is not borne out by the historical record. InThe Holy Reich, Steigmann-Gall sets out to correct that misconception, evenas he anticipates opposition to his books central claims. Given the horrificdestruction that nazi Germans and their accomplices wrought the murderof millions of European Jews, the enslavement of staggering numbers of menand women, the physical and moral destruction of most of Europe it ishardly surprising that Christians both in Germany and elsewhere might preferto deny or downplay affinities between National Socialism and their faith tradition. As Steigmann-Gall indicates in his conclusion: The discovery that somany Nazis considered themselves or their movement to be Christian makesus . . . uncomfortable. But the very unpleasantness of this fact makes it all themore important to look it squarely in the face.2 In this regard, too, Steigmann-Gall is right. But his compelling arguments notwithstanding, the case he makesis surprisingly incomplete, and he stops short of a full engagement with all ofthe troubling and contradictory ways in which National Socialism andChristianity were intertwined.

We cannot understand the nazi movement, Steigmann-Gall contends, with-out admitting its close, if ambiguous, relationship to Christianity. There were

Journal of Contemporary History Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA andpersonal ties nazi leaders who considered themselves good Christians andwere active in their churches, including some, like Wilhelm Kube and ErichKoch, who held high office in the Protestant Church. Steigmann-Gall includesphotographs of both men and brief sketches of their early careers.3 There wereinstitutional links too, from Hitlers early attempts to unify GermanProtestants into a national, nazified Church, to womens organizations thatThe Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 19191945 (New1 R. Steigmann-Gall,

York 2003), 26.

2 Ibid., 267.3 Ibid., 12, 703.New Delhi, Vol 42(1), 2533. ISSN 00220094.DOI: 10.1177/0022009407071629 by taja kramberger on October 27, 2008 http://jch.sagepub.comDownloaded from

26 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 42 No 1used the rhetoric, methods and even personnel of Church groups to serve thenazi state and its goals. Steigmann-Gall describes those phenomena in detail inchapters 5 and 6 (Completing the Reformation: The Protestant Reich Church,and Public Need before Private Greed: Building the Peoples Community).Most important in Steigmann-Galls analysis, there was ideological commonground. Members of the nazi lite even paganists like Heinrich Himmlerand Alfred Rosenberg, one of the key protagonists in Steigmann-Galls book used biblical images and allusions in their private and public pronounce-ments; retained an affection for Jesus and found a place for him in their worldviews; and supported a social ethic of sacrifice, service and charity that wouldhave been familiar to anyone raised in a Christian setting. Summed up this way, Steigmann-Galls book can be seen as an expression perhaps even the culmination of a trend in the scholarship over the pastseveral decades. Indeed, claims of his projects originality notwithstanding,4

with The Holy Reich Steigmann-Gall entered a lively and well-established con-versation on both sides of the Atlantic. Like many other misconceptions aboutNational Socialism, the anti-Christian notion has long been disputed byhistorians and scholars of religion, even if they have not succeeded in changingpopular views. In different ways and to different extents, John Conway, ErnstHelmreich, Richard Rubenstein, Gordon Zahn, Robert Ericksen, SusannahHeschel, Rainer Laechele and many others have pointed to connections andaffinities between National Socialism and Christianity.5 I consider my work onthe German Christian movement part of this broad historiographical develop-ment.6

Inside Germany, at least until the 1990s, the professional stakes for scholarsin the area were rather high. It is hard not to notice that the earliest, criticalstudies were written by people outside the academic mainstream: for example,Wolfgang Gerlach and Hans Prolingheuer.7 As is well known, Gerlachsimportant dissertation on the Confessing Church and the Jews went unpub-lished from 1970 until 1987, while its author worked as a pastor in a small

4 Ibid., 410.5 John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (London 1968); Gordon Zahn, GermanCatholics and Hitlers Wars (New York 1969); Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz. History,Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd edn (Baltimore, MD 1992); Ernst ChristianHelmreich, The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit, MI1979); Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler (New Haven, CT 1985); Susannah Heschel,Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study andEradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, Church History, 63 (1994), 587605;Rainer Laechele, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Glaube. Die Deutschen Christen in Wuerttemberg19261960 (Stuttgart 1994).6 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross. The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (ChapelHill, NC 1996); Bergen, Die Deutschen Christen 19331945: ganz normale Glaeubige undeifrige Komplizen?, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003), 54274.7 W. Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen. Bekennende Kirche und die Juden (Berlin 1993); H.Prolingheuer, Wir sind in die Irre gegangen. Die Schuld der Kirchen unterm Hakenkreuz nachdem Bekenntnis des Darmstaedter Wortes von 1947 (Cologne 1987).


Bergen: Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? 27Lutheran congregation.8 Even more recent, hardhitting accounts of Christianantisemitism and accommodation to National Socialism have tended to comefrom scholars early in their careers or from people working as journalists,archivists, administrators or otherwise outside the centres of Germanacademic history and Church history: for example, Clemens Vollnhalls, ErnstKlee, Rainer Hering, Gerhard Lindemann and Manfred Gailus.9

Outside Germany, the situation has been easier, and studies critical ofChristianitys ties to nazism have found ready, if not universal, reception.Authors of such works have not had trouble finding publishers, including the most prestigious academic and trade presses: some books, like JohnCornwells Hitlers Pope, have sold millions of copies.10 There has been helpfulinstitutional support, for example, from the United States Holocaust

Memorial Museums Committee on Church Affairs, whose current directorVictoria Barnett is a distinguished scholar of the Churches in the ThirdReich.11 Augsburg Fortress, a Lutheran-affiliated press in Minnesota, pub-lished the critical collection of essays edited by Robert Ericksen and SusannahHeschel and tellingly titled Betrayal. German Churches and the Holocaust.12

Steigmann-Galls argument is bound to rattle some readers, but for those withany knowledge of the field, it will hardly come as a total shock.

What is newest and most valuable about The Holy Reich is its reversal ofthe usual direction of argumentation. Much of the related scholarship focuseson those who might be called nazi Christians: historians like Conway,Ericksen and Gerhard Besier examine theologians and lay Church people anddemonstrate ways they internalized, responded to or accommodated nazi ideology and practice. The first part of Steigmann-Galls book picks the stickup from the opposite end by interrogating Christian nazis: Steigmann-Galllooks at what he calls the nazi lite mid- to high-level Party and stateactivists and tries to determine the extent and nature of their ties toChristianity. His first chapter analyses the nazi concept of positive

8 See W. Gerlachs preface in the English edition, And the Witnesses Were Silent. TheConfessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, trans. and ed. Victoria J. Barnett (Lincoln, NEand London 2000), viiix.9 C. Vollnhals, Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifizierung, 19451949. Die Last der national-sozialistischen Vergangenheit. Studien zur Zeitgeschichte, vol. 36 (Munich 1989); E. Klee, Die SAJesu Christi. Die Kirchen im Banne Hitlers (Frankfurt am Main 1989); R. Hering, Theologie imSpannungsfeld von Kirche und Staat. Die Entstehung der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultt ander Universitt Hamburg 1895 bis 1955 (Berlin 1992); G. Lindemann, Typisch juedisch. DieStellung der Ev.-luth. Landeskirche Hannovers zu Antijudaismus, Judenfeindschaft und Anti-semitismus 19191949 (Berlin 1998); M. Gailus, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus.Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des protestantischen Sozialmilieus in Berlin(Cologne 2001).10 J. Cornwell, Hitlers Pope. The Secret History of Pius XII (New York 1999).11 Victoria J. Barnett, For the Soul of the People. Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York1992); idem, Bystanders. Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, CT 1999).12 R.P. Ericksen and S. Heschel (eds), Betrayal. German Churches and the Holocaust(Minneapolis, MN 1999).


Christianity and introduces some of its key proponents within the Party, par-ticularly in the years before Hitler came to power. Most scholars dismiss positive Christianity as nothing but an opportunistic slogan coined to concealnazisms intrinsic hostility toward Christianity and the Churches. Using thewords of leading nazis, culled from the primary sources, Steigmann-Gallshows that, to the contrary, many nazi spokesmen saw their movement (orchose to present it) as predicated on a specific kind of Christianity: antisemitic,socially engaged and committed to German national unity. These nazi litesdid not ask German Church people to choose whom they would serve, in thebiblical words of Joshua; rather they showed by their own example that it was not only possible but desirable to be both a loyal Christian and a devoutfollower of Hitler. One can fault Steigmann-Galls selective and often uncriti-cal use of evidence he tends to take the words of nazi leaders at face value,especially when doing so fits his analysis but it would be hard to deny thatmany nazis, lite and rank-and-file, regarded themselves as good Christiansand continued to do so throughout the Third Reich.

Given my research on the German Christian movement, a group of people Ihave characterized as both nazi Christians and Christian nazis, I was surprisedto find that Steigmann-Gall considers me one of the people whose views of therelationship between National Socialism and Christianity he is revising or evenoverturning. A talk that I have given to many audiences, most of them atChristian liberal arts colleges in the USA, is titled Twisted Cross: Were theNazis Christians?. Often I have taken considerable heat for my response, aqualified yes. At least in a statistical sense, I tell my listeners, the nazis cer-tainly were Christians. The answer gets more complicated when one approachesthe question ideologically (there were significant links, but Christianity andNational Socialism were not identical) or institutionally (some nazis wereChristians and vice versa; others were not). My critics usually counter thatreal Christians do not hate, persecute or murder. But as I remind my inter-locutors, there is a difference between historical/institutional categories andideal definitions that groups establish for their members. When we write ortalk about Muslims or communists, the French or any other groups of historical actors, we rarely pause to ask whether those Muslims who besiegedVienna in 1683, or communists who set up and maintained the gulags, orFrench who fought in Indochina in 1954, were real or ideal representativesof those groups, as those on the inside understood them. Instead, we employhistorical/institutional categories even as we remain aware of what one mightcall internal, theological or idealistic definitions.

As I suggested in my book Twisted Cross, the German Christians did not fitmost standard theological criteria for Christians: that is, they rejected basicChristian teachings about the divinity and humanity of Jesus and renouncedthe canonicity of Christian scripture. Nevertheless, they remained self-consciously Christian, members of Christian Churches whose fellow Churchpeople, inside and outside Germany, accepted them as such. One can dismissthat dichotomy of Christians engaging in a movement and activities that

28 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 42 No 1


most people would describe as un-Christian as false consciousness, asSteigmann-Gall somewhat condescendingly does. To do so, however, is tomiss the point that it is precisely the tension between those two definitions the external/historical and the internal/ideal that makes the GermanChristian movement both historically and theologically significant. The sametension abounds throughout the history of Christianity (and perhaps of allother utopian religions and movements), where the ironic and often violentcontradictions between ideals (love of neighbour; liberty, equality and frater-nity; from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs) andrealities (slavery, racism, terror, ethnocide) is the everyday stuff of humanhistory.

Steigmann-Gall has been criticized for overstating his evidence and inplaces he does so but he also downplays some facts that would support hisbasic claims. Like many of our contemporaries, Steigmann-Gall assumes thatreligion, or at least Christianity, is primarily a matter of belief. Accordingly, helooks for the intellectual and ideological links between Christianity, especiallyits liberal, Protestant variant, and National Socialism. This method createstwo problems. First, it ignores the fact that belief is only a small part ofreligion. Tradition, ritual, community and institutions are much more impor-tant than belief or doctrine in most peoples religious identities. Second, belief,as Michel de Montaigne indicated over 400 years ago, is inherently unstable.People change their beliefs all the time and adapt them to fit their surround-ings. For historians, belief is notoriously difficult perhaps impossible togauge from most of the sources available. How do we separate sincere state-ments of belief from opportunism or efforts to curry favour with an intendedaudience? Steigmann-Gall claims to be able to distinguish private frompublic pronouncements, but that boundary is not clear with regard to manyof the sources he uses. By focusing on belief and the words of nazi lites,Steigmann-Gall neglects what in my view is a much firmer measure ofChristianity: membership statistics.

The overwhelming majority of Germans remained baptized, tax-payingmembers of the official Christian Churches throughout the 12 years of nazirule. In hindsight, it may seem impossible to reconcile the vicious hatreds ofnazism with Christianitys injunction to turn the other cheek or to square thecircle of nazi antisemitism with Christianitys obvious origins in Judaism. Butthe vast majority of Germans over 95 per cent by the last count in 1939 evidently had no problem doing so. That fact alone speaks to a coexistence ofChristianity and National Socialism that Steigmann-Galls accumulation ofquotations from nazi lites who used Christian-like language cannot prove.Even with nazi anti-Christian propaganda and it existed, contrary to theimpression Steigmann-Gall creates Germans chose not to abandon theirchurches. They voted with their feet and with their church-tax-paying pocket-books and their participation in rituals such as baptism, to remain Christian. Itwas not under nazi rule that the Christian Churches lost ground in Germanybut after the war, particularly in the Soviet zone and subsequently in the

Bergen: Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? 29


German Democratic Republic, and now in the decade-and-a-half since the uni-fication of East and West Germany.

Steigmann-Gall does consider the movement within nazism after 1936 toleave the Churches and observes that here one finds ambivalence. In his finalchapter, he indicates that most Germans chose to retain their Church member-ship, and even those who left clung to vestiges of Christianity: belief in God, anattachment to Jesus, a sense that the Churches were a permanent feature ofGerman life. Rather than clinching his case, however, his discussion underminesit with confusing treatment of the evidence. For example, Steigmann-Gall main-tains that Martin Bormann, the loudest anti-clerical and anti-Christian voiceamong the nazi lite, remained extreme in his positions. By 1937, however,Bormann or someone else had influenced his father-in-law Walter Buch, pre-sented earlier in the book as the paragon of a nazi Christian, to leave theProtestant Church. Hitler, as Steigmann-Gall points out, never left the CatholicChurch. In this fact, coupled with Hitlers frequent use of biblical symbols andlanguage and vague allusions to Providence, Steigmann-Gall somewhatimprobably finds limits to Hitlers apostasy (260). Would it not make moresense to see Hitlers decision to remain in the Church as a prudent calculationattesting to his assumption that indeed nazi Germany was still Christian?Instead of clarifying his argument, Steigmann-Gall relies on sliding definitions.At times his assertion of naziChristian closeness boils down to demonstratingthe absence of hostility; elsewhere he claims that nazism was itself Christian; andin the end he settles for the incontrovertible claims of ambivalence and contra-diction.

Given the emphasis on ideas in the first part of the book, it is somewhat puzzling that Steigmann-Gall devotes so much of the middle part to organiza-tional and institutional politics, ground that has already been exhaustivelycovered in other work, especially hefty tomes by such German Churchhistorians as Klaus Scholder and Kurt Meier. Stiegmann-Gall investigates neo-paganism within National Socialism, which he shows was neither as powerfulnor as anti-Christian as outside observers have tended to believe; he examinesthe Partys turn away from Protestantism by 1937 after failure to create anational Church, and he explores work among youth and women as indica-tions of nazisms overlap with a Protestant social ethic. Missing in these discussions is an extended analysis of Christian anti-Judaism and its links tonazi antisemitic ideology and especially practice. What exactly did it mean forthe nazi assault on Jews that members of the nazi lite were Christians? Didtheir involvement in Church activities inform the zeal with which theyattacked Jews or initiated anti-Jewish measures? The detailed studies byGerhard Lindemann and Manfred Gailus of Protestant Church life in Hanoverand Berlin reveal much more about these matters than does Steigmann-Gallsapproach.

Steigmann-Galls failure to contextualize his evidence leads him to mis-construe the role of Germanys confessional divide in the nazi era. He devotesa chapter to nazi efforts to bridge the confessional divide between Germanys



Protestant majority and large, Roman Catholic minority. Here, too,Steigmann-Gall returns to well-covered ground. Hitlers initial efforts to co-ordinate and co-opt German Protestantism were not products of antagonismor precursors to an eventual destruction of Christianity in Germany, he argues.Instead such initiatives from the support of the German Christian move-ment in the 1933 elections to attacks on confessional schools reflected theanti-doctrinal nature of positive Christianity. So far, so good, but Steigmann-Gall goes on to conclude that such overtures expressed nazisms clear ideo-logical preference for Protestantism over Catholicism (84). Indeed, he

Bergen: Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? 31contends, with their admiration for Martin Luther, their suspicion of ultra-montanism, and their anti-clericalism, nazi leaders built directly on the lega-cies of liberal Protestantism in the preceding century. Even nominal Catholicssuch as Hitler and his propaganda master Joseph Goebbels revealed affinitiesfor Protestantism that were in sharp contrast to their vituperations againsttheir own faith tradition, Steigmann-Gall holds.

Some readers may be pleased to see how easily Steigmann-Gall lets Catholi-cism off the hook especially after recent, more critical studies of Catholicantisemitism, Catholics in the Third Reich, and the papacy and the Holocaust(by Olaf Blaschke, Oded Heilbronner, Michael Phayer, David Kertzer, SusanZucotti, Daniel Goldhagen, Beth Griech-Polelle, Kevin Spicer, SuzanneBrown-Fleming and others).13 But before heaving a sigh of relief, one mightnote that Steigmann-Gall bases his assessment on incomplete evidence: hisknowledge of German Protestantism is considerably wider than his familiaritywith Catholicism, as perusal of his notes and bibliography reveals; and he paysscant attention to developments on the Catholic side. Engagement withCatholic issues would not explode the books main argument, but it wouldadd nuance to Steigmann-Galls claims about nazism and Christanity.

In part, Steigmann-Galls misreading of the confessional situation inGermany stems from his use of chronology. The books subtitle promises dis-cussion of the period 1919 to 1945, but Steigmann-Galls analysis rarelyextends past 1937. In this regard, his work replicates a weakness in much ofthe older, German church history that stopped on the eve of the second worldwar. Yet it was precisely in the war years that the partnership between

13 Guenther Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York 1964); Olaf Blaschke,Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Goettingen 1997); OdedHeilbronner, Catholicism, Political Culture, and the Countryside. A Social History of the NaziParty in South Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 1998); Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and theHolocaust, 19301965 (Bloomington, IN 2000); Susan Zucotti, Under his very Windows. TheVatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, CT 2000); David Kertzer, The Popes against theJews. The Vaticans Role in the Rise of Modern Antisemitism (New York 2001); Daniel JonahGoldhagen, A Moral Reckoning. The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and itsUnfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York 2002); Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bishop von Galen. GermanCatholicism and National Socialism (New Haven, CT 2002); Kevin Spicer, Resisting the ThirdReich. The Catholic Clergy in Hitlers Berlin (DeKalb, IL 2004); Suzanne Brown-Fleming, TheHolocaust and Catholic Conscience. Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question inGermany (Notre Dame, IN 2005).


Christianity and National Socialism achieved its firmest form. For the sake ofnational solidarity and wartime exigencies, even the Confessing Church andall but the most recalcitrant parish priests rallied to the flag and the fightingVolk. Likewise, for the sake of preserving domestic peace, Hitler curbed theanti-Church activities of some of his deputies, among them Martin Bormann.The Churches were useful indeed, indispensable in wartime, and exami-nation of the archival record suggests that this was as true for the Catholic asthe Protestant Church, both of which remained loyal pillars of support.

Perhaps the topic in most urgent need of study is Christians as perpetratorsof nazi crimes. So much existing historiography has focused on the silence ofthe Pope, the Churches and ordinary Germans. Very few studies consider thefact that it was Christians who carried out the actions that constituted the warand the Holocaust. Steigmann-Gall brings us a step closer by pointing out thatsome high-profile killers, like Kube and Koch, had been active in theProtestant Church hierarchy. But we still lack a sense of what those overlap-ping (or contradictory? or mutually reinforcing?) commitments to Christianityand National Socialism meant. Jonathan Steinberg has drawn attention tosome Catholic priests among the Croatian Ustasha killers, and we know thatthere were theologians in the Einsatzgruppen. Gitta Serenys masterful studyof Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, pays valuable atten-tion to the role that his ties to the Catholic Church played in facilitating hisdescent into that darkness and easing his escape from postwar justice.Manfred Desalaerss theological biography of Rudolf Hoess, commandant ofAuschwitz, is another significant addition to the scholarship. Is there more tounderstand here? Perhaps reflecting on the roles of religion in other genocideswill help formulate the questions to be asked.

Steigmann-Gall misses a number of opportunities to nail his case that thenazis were Christians. He fails to play the ace of church membership statistics;he pays insufficient attention to the key issue of antisemitism, and he falls intothe trap of confessional competition: who was worse, the Protestants orCatholics? He ignores the war and barely treats the issue of Christians as prac-titioners of nazi violence. Ironically, he also misses an important element of thenaziChristian nexus by denying the existence of tensions between the twoworld views. In Steigmann-Galls depiction, nazism was at times identical toChristianity, at least ambiguous, and always able to coexist harmoniously withit. That picture obscures some important facts: some top nazis were openly andactively anti-Church: remember the uproar over Alfred Rosenbergs Myth ofthe Twentieth Century. Nazi regulations did restrict some Church activities:youth work among Catholic priests, use of Church buildings by Protestants ofall affiliations. Hitlers model of the future city of Germania left no room forchurches, and as Gerhard Weinberg has pointed out, it is hard to take seriouslythe vague religious utterances of a Fuehrer who thought he was God himself!Such hostility toward Christianity was not enough to qualify as full-blown per-secution, but it was sufficient to put the Churches in a defensive position that inturn made their leaders eager to co-operate in nazi projects.



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Bergen: Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? 33 defensiveness was nothing new in German Church history. Manyrs have noted how the Kulturkampf placed German Catholics on theve: that is, Bismarcks attack on Catholic institutions succeeded aboveonvincing Catholics that they needed to redouble their efforts to provelves good Germans. According to Beth Griech-Polelle, the memory oflturkampf, in turn, made Catholics eager to co-operate with Hitlersment half a century later. No Kulturkampf haunted German Protest-ho had enjoyed the benefits of the Kaiserreichs marriage of throne andevertheless, in this case too, a mood of impending doom seems to haveced official responses to nazism. A growing exodus from the Church inperial and Weimar eras, coupled with the loss of credibility after the of the Great War, convinced many Church leaders that Christianitysing ground. Hence in 1933, even some Protestant theologians whomisgivings in private embraced Hitlers new government in public, onmise that if the Church stood aside in the world historical moment itbe doomed to irrelevance. Likewise, neo-pagans mockery of Christian-originating in Judaism convinced many Christians, and not only then Christians, that they needed to prove that they too were reliable, con-and active enemies of the Jews.ng the war, a similar dynamic made the Wehrmacht chaplains eagermen for the national cause, no matter how steeped in blood it became.uthorities were suspicious of the chaplaincy and chipped away at itsce and prestige, not enough to shut it down, but enough to push chap- protest that they too were 100 per cent behind the war; they too wereenemies of Jews and Bolsheviks; they too were real men who stood withader and his soldiers. aps in an effort to make his evidence fit neatly, Steigmann-Gall left outcial element of tension in naziChristian relations. Without concedingt some nazi hostility, however, the dynamic generated by Christianveness cannot be understood. This and other shortcomings will reduceann-Galls ability to convince sceptics of his arguments, but they cannotthe significance of his call to confront the presence of Christianity inal Socialism.

Doris L. Bergenis the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studiesat the University of Toronto. She is the author of War and Genocide:

A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003) and Twisted Cross: TheGerman Christian Movement in the Third Reich (1996) and editor of

The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to theTwenty-First Century (2004).


bergen - nazism and christianity

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