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In one of the darker aspects of Nazi Germany, churches and universities - generally respected institutions - grew to accept and support Nazi ideology. Robert P. Ericksen explains how an advanced, highly-educated, Christian nation could commit the crimes of the Holocaust. This book describes how Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders enthusiastically partnered with Hitler's regime, thus becoming active participants in the persecution of Jews, and ultimately, in the Holocaust. Ericksen also examines Germany's deeply flawed yet successful postwar policy of denazification in these institutions. Complicity in the Holocaust argues that enthusiasm for Hitler within churches and universities effectively gave Germans permission to participate in the Nazi regime.
- Sales Rank: #587106 in Books
- Published on: 2012-02-06
- Released on: 2012-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .63" w x 5.98" l, .95 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 280 pages
Review
"Based on decades of his own research and complete mastery of both German- and English-language scholarship in the field, Robert Ericksen demonstrates convincingly how a critical mass of churchmen and academics in Germany enthusiastically embraced the Nazi regime and provided the rationalizations and adjustment of moral norms that permitted ordinary Germans to accept and even implement the regime's brutal and murderous policies."
Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
"Robert P. Ericksen has given us a masterful comparative study of the churches and the universities in Nazi Germany. Two institutions entrusted to foster the collective conscience and intellect of the German people are revealed to have compromised their integrity by collaborating in the Holocaust, despite the fact that Jews had been crucial in creating Christianity (Jesus and Paul) and enhancing German academic scholarship."
Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (2008)
"Robert P. Erickson's reputation as an important authority on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is based not only on his careful and original scholarship, but also on his insistence on moral clarity. He does not shirk from assigning individual and collective responsibility for the crimes of Nazism. This book makes compelling reading, and will most certainly stimulate debate among its many readers."
Alan E. Steinweis, University of Vermont
"This book deserves to be celebrated for its moral courage, lucid prose and splendid craftsmanship - in spite of its complex and emotive content, it reads with beguiling simplicity."
Times Higher Education
"Highly recommended."
Choice
"... a thoroughly successful summary ..."
Dirk Schuster, Arbeitstitel
"Ericksen's book is helpful because it begins the story of complicity not in 1933, with the rise of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship, but instead in 1923, with the decade-long religious and ideological tumultuousness that marked the Weimar Republic."
Charles Gallagher, German Studies Review
"... a compelling piece of scholarship that is eminently readable, frequently thought-provoking, and deeply insightful."
Derek Hastings, The Catholic Historical Review
About the Author
Robert P. Ericksen is Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University. Ericksen is also a Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Kirchliche Zeitgeschicte (Contemporary Church History) and Association of Contemporary Church Historians. Ericksen is the author of Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (1985) and co-editor of Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (1999).
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A failure of leadership?
By Amrit
The question of how far responsibility for the Holocaust can be attributed to ordinary Germans as opposed to the Nazi leadership has been debated ever since 1945. For the Allies in 1945, especially the Americans, it appeared clear in their own minds that responsibility lay not with a narrow circle of leaders but more broadly with German society as a whole so that a thoroughgoing process of de-Nazification was needed. Ericksen considers that the American assessment at the time was largely correct and addresses specifically the question of complicity of Churches and universities in the Nazi state and the Holocaust. His study concludes that both these parts of society were deeply complicit in what happened. Despite individual dissidents, "institutional approval of church and university for the Nazi state" was expressed openly and never recanted. Therefore it was not surprising that when individual Germans who were members of Churches and graduates of universities who were asked to do terrible things by the State, they "presumably had a right to think they were given permission by their pastors and professors".
The study begins with the role of the Churches. Germany in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century led the world in many areas including biblical scholarship, exerting enormous influence through theologians such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich. 97 per cent of Germans identified themselves as Christian, mostly Protestant, many of whom were active in their Churches and fervent believers. Many Christians however developed a strong hostility to Weimar which they saw as too permissive and liberal, in opening up opportunities to groups that were kept outside the circles of power in Imperial times such as Socialists, Communists, Jews, women - and for Protestants who saw themselves as custodians of "true" German identity, Catholics. The bastions of Church and University dominated by the old establishment found these changes threatening and were happy to throw their lot in with Hitler.
The pro-Nazi "Deutschen Christen" ("DC") formed even before 1933 adopted an ultra-nationalistic and anti-Semitic stance. The theology and practices they developed included excising the entire Old Testament from the Bible and putting forward a belief that Jesus was not Jewish but "Aryan". Paul on account of being Jewish was also a target of this group - even though excising Paul from the Scriptures cut the ground under Luther who relied heavily on Paul in formulating his own theology during the Reformation.
The Confessing Church formed in opposition to the heretical positions of the DC also in the end fell in line behind the Nazi state - for example in reducing or eliminating readings from the Old Testament during Church services. Their efforts of behalf of "Jews" were largely confined to trying to protect Jewish converts to Christianity - while nothing was said and done to support their Jewish neighbours and work colleagues when they started disappearing. Many leaders of the Confessing Church expressly welcomed the rise of Hitler. Fear of Communism also played in large part in their preference for the Nazis. The Nazis themselves in their platform expressed a belief in "positive Christianity" as a plank of the German nation. Despite some small victories by the Confessing Church, for example in resisting DC appointments to Episcopal Sees, the Church largely fell behind the Nazi state. Dissidents such as Martin Niemoller and Bonhoeffer exercised little influence - even if after the War, both were held up as heroic examples of German resistance to the Nazis.
In the case of the Catholic Church the situation was a little different. The Catholic Church was hostile to the ideology of Nazism, as being too "racist and materialistic". Catholics were initially told by their Bishops not to join the Nazi Party. Theologically, strong criticism was made of "positive Christianity" in its tendency to distance itself from ideas of the centrality of sin and the restraints on behaviour that the theology of sin and its avoidance could in theory place. In the end, however, the Catholic Church also caved in, more afraid of Communism than of Nazism, with the signing of a Concordat with Germany in 1933. Under Pope Pius XII, the silence of the Church on the fate of Jews remains deeply problematic to this day. During the War, Catholic bishops supported the war effort - even if a tense relationship existed between the Nazi State and the Catholic Church during the Nazi period. While Protestants were happy to shake Hitler's hand "warmly", Catholics did so "with their fingertips".
Universities even more than Churches embraced the Nazis. Drawn from the conservative upper tiers of German societies, this was perhaps "natural" for the professors and students. German student organisations were dominated by Nazis even before 1933. German historians were as early as the 20s leading a drive for expansion to the East. After 1933, German universities (the author uses Gottingen as his main case study), rapidly came under the control of Nazis with Jewish and politically "unreliable" teachers driven out - with the complicity of the Faculty. The period was characterised by the domination of student and professorial life by Nazi organisations. Professorial appointments could be determined by the ideological reliability of the candidate rather than academic qualifications - despite the long tradition of academic freedom and rigour in the process of academic appointments in Germany. Students and Faculty participated enthusiastically in book burnings. Syllabuses were rewritten. For example, Spinoza on account of his Jewish origins, was removed from the Philosophy syllabus and new areas of study, such as Volkskunde (to show the greatness of the German people) and racial science (to show their biological superiority) took root. Legal historians sought to place German law within the context of its Teutonic origins, downplaying the historical importance of Mesopotamian law codes and Roman law. Einstein exited the physics syllabus.
Universities in the end provided not only the technical skills for industrial scale killing but also the ideological mindset to make it possible. Resistance in the Universities to the Nazis was almost non-existent unlike in the case of the limited resistance of the Churches. Many of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando groups were led by highly educated men and the Holocaust could not have been possible without the skills of the young educated Germans who ran the systems required for it to happen. There was "no other genocide in which the killing process employed architects, chemists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and a vast bureaucracy, both civilian and military".
Following the War, the Allies in the author's view, correctly assessed the deep roots of Nazism within German society and attempted to embark on a wide de-Nazification process. This was deeply resented by most Germans who instead sought to deny their recent past. One Church leader complained that Allied films of the death camps were even being shown in "Black Villages" in Africa bringing shame to Germany. Churches handed out certificates of "cleanliness" to parishioners with a Nazi past, actively sabotaging the process of de-Nazification. There was little or no institutional willingness to face up to the Nazi period, for example for Christians through the well established theological framework for confession and repentance of sin.
It was only in the 80s that scholars in Germany began to dig deeper into the Nazi past and accept that the roots of the Nazi State lay deep within German society rather than being an imposition by the leadership. This now appears accepted as the dominant paradigm and the author's work sits within that paradigm. He develops the argument further to place Churches and Universities in a central position in bringing about the Nazi state and the Holocaust.
Ericksen notes that the clergymen and professors who were most enthusiastic in their support of Hitler were marked by a particularly intense nationalism which may have compromised the values that they may have otherwise derived from the ethos of their religion and universities. Churches after all were supposed to cultivate spiritual and ethical insight and universities intellectual acuity, both of which failed badly in their supposed roles.
The author makes the oft repeated observation that the Nazi state and Holocaust was perpetuated by a "nation and culture most deeply rooted in the modern west and thus much like the United States and other Western nations today". In this regard, he does not accept the view of German "otherness", sometimes articulated in terms of the view that Germany displayed a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism. Good historians in the author's view see the Holocaust as not outside history but within it. The Nazis grew out of a particular historical context. That makes the Holocaust a "human problem, not a German problem". He ends on a sober note that though we have a "right to find fault with those who succumbed to Hitler's charms and followed his lead .... pointing fingers should leave us concerned about where our [own] steps might go astray".
The conclusion from current trends in scholarship may be that German society as a whole rather than a narrow group of leaders should in the end carry most of the responsibility for what happened. However, Ericksen's focus on Church leaders and universities might also raise an additional question, namely the specific role of elite groups in society and the results of kind of leadership they give. In his study of the origins of persecution of Jews, heretics and others in Europe during the Middle Ages, RI Moore finds those origins not in general mentalites of society as a whole but in the specific direction given to society by intellectual elites (RI Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society). Moore argues that the origins of persecuting behaviour in Europe lie in this period (which also saw the birth of the European university) with a continuous history since that time - culminating in the Holocaust. Ericksen's study too stands as a warning of the importance of ethical and intellectual rigour that is required for leaders who take upon themselves the role of shaping the soul and the mind of any society - and of the far reaching effects of that leadership in determining how society thinks - and consequently what it does.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Too much like us
By LBG
This is a history of many themes. The depravity of the Holocaust itself is a given for Ericksen; instead he focuses on the moral and ethical leaders of the Churches and Universities of Germany from the beginning to the end of the Nazi regime. What happened, he asks, when ordinary Germans, seeing the growing atrocities of their government, looked for guidance from their churches and schools, filled with the moral and intellectual leaders of their society? Did these pastors and teachers take the side of morality? Of ethics? Of law? Or human rights and integrity? No, says Erickson, instead they almost exclusively defended and actively participated in the Nazi distortions of all of these ideals.
Ericksen's answer is emphatic and his evidence (mostly in the very words of the leaders themselves) is specific, convincing and deeply disturbing. The majority of the religious and academic leaders helped "justify" even the worst of the Nazi crimes.
We see Paul Althaus, a leading theologian of his day, calling the rise of Hitler "a gift and miracle of God." Illustrating another theme of this work, specifically the failure of Denazification to eliminate even the worst of the Nazi supporters from the schools and churches, most of Althaus's postwar students never learned of his Nazi support until after his death in 1966.
We see Hitler's appointed Reich Bishop Muller and his cohort August Jager rule the congregation on Germany, first eliminating all Jews, baptized Jews, many theologians, priests, and pastors, from all Church positions. Purging of the few remaining leaders who did not fervently support Hitler followed this.
Ericksen illustrates these very same processes and outcomes in the University System, with specific convincing details from Gottingen University.
This researched work tells me on almost every page something I did not know about Hitler's Germany and its acceptance by the leading institutions of his day. More important, almost every page has a lesson for us today as the threat of global terrorism threatens our very constitution, our freedoms of thought, speech, religion; threatens our respect for all peoples of our nation, all to often in the name of homeland security.
As Robert Ericksen more aptly put this, "Germany by the early twentieth century stood well within the traditions of Western society; it participated in, contributed to and professed much of the package of Western values--Christian and otherwise--still held dear. Most of us blanch at the idea of massive and heartless killing, the sort of killing we find in any example of genocide. However. I think we find it even more disturbing if we examine the killers and find that they look very like us."
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
complicity
By tgcrawford
I gave this book 5 stars not because "I loved it"--because I don't--but because I think it is a very important and well-written book. Erickson shows tremendous grasp of the material and puts together a powerful picture of the "complicity" (a kind word for some of the activity he cites) of the churches and universities. The book is not overly long, but it is an important scholarly--yet accessible--case for complicity that paints a clear picture of the activities and attitudes of the subjects. It left this reader persuaded.
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