The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

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STUDIES IN MODERN BRITISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Volume 12

The Church of England and the Holocaust Christianity, Memory and Nazism

This is the first book to consider the Anglican church’s response to the Nazi persecution and then murder of Europe’s Jews. Acting as a critique of the historiography of the ‘bystanders’ to the Holocaust, it reveals a community that struggled to understand the depravity of Nazi antisemitism. The author outlines Anglican attitudes to war, antisemitism and many related issues, demonstrating the extent and the limits of the Church’s engagement with European politics, and shows how Christian interpretations of Nazi persecution contributed to much wider assumptions about Germany and German history in Britain during the war years. He then moves on to the post-war world, indicating the important role played by the Church of England in forging memories of the Nazi era and especially the suffering of Europe’s Jews. Overall, this book offers a challenging new interpretation of the Holocaust and its wider context, and of the history of the Church of England and its role in the intellectual life of the nation. DR TOM LAWSON is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Winchester.

STUDIES IN MODERN BRITISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY ISSN 1464–6625 General editors Stephen Taylor Arthur Burns Kenneth Fincham

This series aims to differentiate ‘religious history’ from the narrow confines of church history, investigating not only the social and cultural history of religion, but also theological, political and institutional themes, while remaining sensitive to the wider historical context; it thus advances an understanding of the importance of religion for the history of modern Britain, covering all periods of British history since the Reformation. Volumes already published in the series are listed at the back of the book.

The Church of England and the Holocaust Christianity, Memory and Nazism

TOM LAWSON

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Tom Lawson 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Tom Lawson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2006 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 1 84383 219 4

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: Contexts

1

Part I: Responses 1. ‘The Struggle for Religious Freedom’: The Myth of Martin Niemöller and the Anglican Understanding of Nazism

31

2. ‘A Crusade to Deliver our Fellow Men from a Sub-Human Barbarism’: 55 Nazism and War in the Anglican Imagination 3. ‘Burning Indignation’: The Church of England and the Murder of Europe’s Jews

81

Part II: Memories 4. ‘The Trades Union of Bishops’: The Church of England and the Search for a Usable Past at the Beginning of the Cold War

111

5. ‘To Whom Vengeance Belongeth’: The Church of England, Christianity and Opposition to War Crimes Trials

139

Conclusions

167

Bibliography

181

Index

203

For Mum and Dad

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has taken a long time to write and along the way I have accumulated many debts. The task of writing and researching it has been made easier by a number of people and institutions. First, thanks are due to the University of Southampton, which provided financial support through its archive studentship scheme for the doctoral research on which this book is, in part, based. Without that support this research would not have begun and my life would have been very different indeed. The University of Winchester, where I am now employed, has also provided a great deal of financial assistance towards the completion of this project. Various research and conference trips have been paid for by the University’s research funding scheme and I am very grateful for them. The University has also provided a semester’s study leave to complete this project, for which I am again very grateful, especially to my colleagues in History. Thanks are also due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a matching leave grant which extended that study leave. Without either this book would not have been published. In completing this research I have been helped around a number of archives by any number of patient people. The staff of the Archives and Special Collections at Southampton were always kind to me and I thank them warmly. Thanks are also due to those at: Lambeth Palace Library, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, the Public Record Office, Churchill College Archives Centre at the University of Cambridge, the Dean and Chapter Library at Durham Cathedral, the Borthwick Institute at the University of York, York Minster Library and Archives, the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, and finally the British Library. Dan Stone and David Cesarani were exacting but ultimately kind examiners of the Ph.D. on which this work is based, and their comments have immeasurably improved the finished book. Neil Gregor and Jo Reilly also made observations which were helpful and their support has been important. The anonymous referees for earlier versions of this work, which appeared as articles in Twentieth Century British History, and History and Memory, were also always insightful. Philippa Shimrat’s editorial comments for History and Memory were particularly so. Arthur Burns and the other editors of the series in which this book appears have made invaluable comments, and the final reviewer for Boydell and Brewer’s painstaking and invariably pertinent comments have again improved this work beyond measure. The comments of many who have sat through a variety of conference and seminar papers have also been welcomed, and I wish I knew your names so that I could thank you too. vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Inevitably most of my debts are personal. Tony Kushner has offered support, advice and friendship that has gone way beyond his obligations as my doctoral supervisor. Despite a Benny Hill shaped blindspot, Tony has been an intellectual inspiration throughout the life of this project and no thanks could be enough for the contribution that he has made. I am also particularly grateful to Donald Bloxham, David Brown, James Jordan, Nick Kingwell, Simon Payling, Gemma Romain, Graham Stevens and Jo Stevens all of whom provided friendship and laughter during sometimes arduous times in Southampton. Chris Aldous, Mark Allen, Neil Curtin and Colin Haydon have done the same in Winchester. Laughter, rather than cricket, has also been a speciality of the Cavaliers, so thanks to you all. Thanks to Andrew Schütte, and latterly his wife Sarah; and to Stephen Dawes and Nicola Hunter, all of whom provided accommodation and firm friendship throughout the project. Thanks to Patrick Vieira, for the memories. I must also thank my family. Bernadette, Michael, Joshua and Bethany; Kate, Edward, Alice and Joseph, have all provided a constant source of diversion from research, which has always been welcome and at times invaluable. Kate and Edward also put me up in London during various periods, which was particularly appreciated. To Elisa, my wife, thanks are not really enough but they are offered anyway. Especially in the last months of writing the thesis on which this work is based, and during the period of research leave in which it has been completed, Elisa has given me constant and unstinting love and support, despite completing, respectively, her own M.A. and then Ph.D. theses at the same time. Elisa also read the finished manuscript with enthusiasm and made many valuable changes at that late stage. Thank you my love. And finally to my parents, Peter and Linda Lawson. They too have supported me with immeasurable love throughout my life, for which there can be no adequate repayment. As a very small start I have dedicated this book to them. It might not be very good, and its mistakes are all mine, but I couldn’t have done it without you.

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ABBREVIATIONS

ARAC BCC CA CCG CCJ CDU CFM CMJ COPEC CRE EKD EU GDR IMT LNU LPL MRC NCRNT OKW PEL PPU PRO SA SCM SD SEN SS SUA USSR WCC WRB YMLA

Allied Religious Affairs Committee British Council of Churches Christian Action Control Commission Germany Council of Christians and Jews Christlich Demokratischen Union Deutschlands Council of Foreign Ministers Church Mission to the Jews Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, 1924 Christian Reconstruction in Europe Evangelische Kirche Deutschland European Union German Democratic Republic International Military Tribunal League of Nations Union Lambeth Palace Library Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Pastor’s Emergency League Peace Pledge Union Public Record Office (The National Archives), Kew Sturmabteilung Student Christian Movement Sicherheitsdienst Save Europe Now! Schutzstaffel Southampton University Archive Union of Soviet Socialist Republics World Council of Churches War Refugee Board York Minster Library and Archives

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INTRODUCTION: CONTEXTS

Bystanders to the Holocaust When considering the meaning of ‘Western Civilisation’ in 1951, the then Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, struggled to find a positive definition of such a vast and amorphous concept. Ultimately Garbett concluded that the best way to understand its meaning was to consider what ‘Western Civilisation’ was not. ‘Belsen and Dachau’ he argued, as ‘expressions of cruelty’ were the opposite of the aims and values of the West.1 By using the memory of Nazi concentration camps as anti-symbols, Garbett drew on a rich heritage of attempts to explore the meaning of the Third Reich in the Church of England. Invariably churchmen concluded, from 1933 onwards, that Nazism was the inversion of all that the Church held dear. It is those efforts at the interpretation and understanding of Nazism, and particularly the persecution of the Jews, that are the subject of this book. There is now a plethora of studies concerned with institutional and individual responses to the Holocaust. Governmental reactions to Nazi persecution have been explored exhaustively, and recently the institutions of the ‘free world’ have come under particular scrutiny. We have seen monographs on IBM and the Holocaust, the Red Cross and the Holocaust and on the Swiss banks and the Holocaust to name but a few.2 Along with investigations of the perpetrators and the victims, such studies of the bystanders form the trinity that constitutes Holocaust studies.3 The Church of England and the Holocaust may appear to be just another book in this tradition – just another book about the bystanders, another ‘. . . and the Holocaust’ book. But it is hoped that it is more than that. This is a book about memory, about beliefs, about how the world is understood, about how we construct the past and how we make history. What is at issue here is how a particular community in the past, the Church of England, understood and reacted to the Nazi state and its persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. This is a question made more important by the moral priorities of our own age, which has retrospectively found the murder of Europe’s Jews to be the ultimate atrocity. We shall seek to enter the Anglican mindset in order to 1

Cyril Garbett, ‘Western Civilisation’, an undated sermon (c. 1951), Garbett Papers, York Minster Library and Archives (YMLA), COLL 1973/1/P, Vol. 60. 2 For example Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (New York, 2002); Jean Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999); and any number of accounts of the Swiss banks such as Tom Bower, Nazi Gold: The Full Story of the Fifty Year Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe’s Jews and Holocaust Survivors (Oxford, 1998). 3 As defined by Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (New York, 1992).

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THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND THE HOLOCAUST

interrogate how its understanding of the German dictatorship impacted upon active responses to Jewish suffering, in terms of protest and prayer; how it affected Anglicans’ views of both themselves and the world around them; and what wider impact this very particular view of Nazism had in Britain.4 Ultimately we shall see how a community constructed an interpretation of the recent past by filtering events through the assumptions, prejudices, hopes and fears that made up its worldview. This book is a contribution to the historiography of the bystanders, in the context of which it will no doubt be read. Bystander historiography has always been problematic, posing particular challenges to the historian’s craft. As I have already stated, it is an area of history and historiography which seems particularly determined by the present rather than the past. The condemnation of the perceived failure to respond adequately to the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka articulates a very contemporary revulsion at the crimes of the Nazis. We in the present stand helpless as, with the aid of survivors and surviving testimonies, we look into the nightmarish deathscapes of the Holocaust, unable to intervene. Anger at our own impotence has often been voiced in the condemnation of those in the past that could surely have done what we cannot and at the very least tried to stop the suffering. The first investigations which articulated this impotence and anger were produced in the 1960s. They looked into how the outside world responded to the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews and excoriated, in particular, the British and American governments for the inadequacies of that response to the genocide. First it was argued they had suffered from a failure of imagination, an inability to grasp the peculiar threat that Nazism posed to Europe’s Jews; and second that they failed to provide succour to those victims.5 These perceptions of failure are in themselves problematic. The argument that the Vatican’s response to Jewish suffering was overly diplomatic and lacking in compassion, or that the British and US governments could have rescued more Jews if their policies had been governed by more humanitarian concerns, are commonly heard. These are moral judgements of which the historian should be nervous. Indeed the very idea of the ‘bystander’ is morally conceived, based on a potentially religious conception of the obligations of witness.6 Consequently, the questions that have dominated bystander historiography are steeped in the language of universal moral obligation, suggesting what individuals in the past 4

I use the term Anglican here specifically to refer to the Church of England in England. I realise that the diverse Anglican communion is spread world-wide but it would be neither feasible nor practicable to conduct a study of this global community. References to the Anglican mindset are to a way of thinking, discerned by the author, within the Church in England. Sometimes churchmen is used to refer to the clergy, rather than the wider church. However, the Anglican communion consists of much more than just the clergy and the mindset identified is certainly not confined to it. 5 Perhaps the quintessential example is Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died (New York, 1968); see also David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–41 (Amherst, 1968). 6 Victoria Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, Connecticut, 1999), p. 10.

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‘could’ or indeed ‘should’ have done when faced with Nazi antisemitism. Indeed, some historians are content to go beyond the traditionally conceived limits of the methods of historical investigation and proclaim our ‘right to judge’ the actors in the drama of history as moral agents, and against a universal moral criteria.7 Previous investigations of the Church of England’s response to the Holocaust have fallen prey to this temptation to move outside the boundaries of history, praising members of the Church who protested against Nazi antisemitism for behaviour worthy of the representatives of Christ, an antidote to the failings of other Christian contemporaries of Nazism.8 The idea of the bystanders’ limited imagination, of their failure of understanding, is also problematic. The central question has always been: what did they know and when?9 How far were institutions and individuals aware of the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in Europe? But such questions are apparently anachronistic; they are very obviously constructed by the demands of the present. Added to this such questions assume that the past is flat, that there is a single narrative of Nazi policy towards Europe’s Jews which can be understood and can inform our investigations of when they ‘knew’. However, the development of the politics of mass annihilation remains a matter of controversy. Asking how a bystander community responded to the development of that policy is therefore not an objectively answerable question – it requires a specific and interpretative understanding of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’. Historians have often used an apparently inadequate interpretation. The first investigation of British responses to Nazi persecution and murder policies, for example, lambasted the British press for its inability to ‘understand the full meaning of the German Jewish Question’ and ‘appreciate . . . that from the beginning they [the Nazis] were putting into practice, stage by stage, a deliberately worked out plan’ to exterminate the Jews of Europe.10 But, the existence, or otherwise, of such a plan and the point at which it began to be enacted is, at the very least, contested and would probably be rejected by most Holocaust scholars. This has not just been a problem for the very first studies of the bystanders; later interventions in the debate have been similarly flawed. A recent article suggested that the British ‘knew’ of Auschwitz early in 1942,11 yet it is a matter of consensus

7 Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: the Role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York, 2002), pp. 6, 15. 8 Richard Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth for the Dumb! The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879–1950 (Oxford, 1976), p. 267, where Gutteridge describes his search for a response to the Holocaust ‘worthy of the representatives of Christ’. This search later led him to the survey of the Anglican response in Richard Gutteridge, ‘The Churches and the Jews in England, 1933–45’, Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes Flohr (eds), Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 353–380. 9 See, for example, one of the original contributions in this area, Yehuda Bauer, ‘When did they know?’, Midstream, April 1968, pp. 51–58. 10 Andrew Sharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (London, 1964), p. 56. 11 See Barbara Rogers, ‘Auschwitz and the British’, History Today (Vol. 49, No. 10, 1999), pp. 2–3.

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that this was before the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau became a decisive part of the machinery of mass murder.12 It is clear that studies which rest on such caricatures of the development and progress of the murder of Europe’s Jews are problematic because they require the contemporaries of genocide to have responded to events that did not occur or of which they could not have known. It is not, however, enough simply to return to the past with a nuanced understanding of Holocaust history and a renewed commitment to objectivity. A sophisticated understanding of the vagaries of the development of genocide does not offer a route out of this methodological quagmire. History is a construct of the present. Nowhere is this more the case than with the history of the Holocaust. The term ‘Holocaust’ itself was related retrospectively to a particularly extreme case of ‘genocide’, a crime which itself did not legally exist prior to 1945. We cannot simply go back to the past with a developed sense of the Nazi Holocaust and ask how individuals and institutions responded to the events that we now see. Even if the information which makes up that interpretation were available at the time, we cannot assume that it should have been put together in a certain way just because we have; such a monolithic interpretation of the past cannot survive in the postmodern age. But, if the chronology of the Holocaust, sophisticated or simplistic, cannot set the agenda for research into the bystanders then what can? By what methodology can the historian proceed? In order to answer this question and to move forward, I need to return to first principles. What is the purpose of studying the bystanders? The primary aim is to set the Holocaust in its local, national, international and global contexts. However there can be no doubt that such a project is designed by the perceptions of the present – this is the anomaly of the historian’s task. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the Holocaust is perceived as the central event of the violent century that has just passed, and full understanding of this trauma can only be provided by an analysis which includes the bystanders and those contexts. The historian’s first task in this search for context must be to establish how Nazism, the Third Reich and then the persecution of the European Jews – the events we now know as the Holocaust – were understood by the bystanders, a variation of the question of what and when did they know. It is only by reconstructing what the nomenclature of Nazism meant to the bystanders that the problem of anachronism can be avoided. The book that follows takes this as its fundamental starting point. To ask how an institution responded to the Nuremberg Laws or the Euthanasia programme is meaningless if those events meant little to the bystanders under scrutiny; they are only meaningful inside a chronology constructed by the Nazis in their destruction of the European Jews. The bystanders project should be concerned with providing an alternative chronology and context for the Holocaust, one centred around the bystander institutions and individuals themselves. 12

Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington, Indiana, 2002), p. 80.

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To take an example from the subject of this book, the Church of England did not understand fully the significance of the Nuremberg Laws, as we now see them. These edicts, passed in September 1935, denied Jewish Germans the rights of citizenship and were by any estimation a giant leap along the ‘road to Auschwitz’, be it twisted or otherwise.13 There were some public protests by English churchmen – most notably by Hensley Henson, the outspoken Bishop of Durham.14 However, in the main the Nuremberg Laws passed without comment in the Anglican community, which was at the time preoccupied with Christian ‘resistance’ to the Nazi state. To read too much into this silence, based on our own understanding of the significance of the laws, would be anachronistic. Much more important is the fact that the Anglican community publicly interpreted the antisemitic violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the Nazis’ murderous occupation policies after September 1939 as parts of a totalitarian attack on Christian culture. The lack of response to the Nuremberg Laws does not tell us much more than that the past was different to the present; but to deconstruct the Anglican understanding of antisemitic violence begins to tell us something of the intellectual priorities of the Church of England and how those priorities began to shape a narrative of Nazi antisemitic policies for English eyes. It is thus only by establishing how events were understood that we can begin to engage with the ‘responses’ to those events. In studies of the British government’s response to the Holocaust it is important to establish not only that the British knew of, for example the camps at Auschwitz and Belsen, but what Auschwitz and Belsen meant inside British state and society and how that understanding impacted on perceptions and policy. Furthermore, it is not important whether or not the British government could have saved more Jews from the Nazis, but why they did not try.15 By proceeding in this manner the study of bystanders does not only allow us to further engage with the context for the destruction of the European Jews but also, importantly, the institution under scrutiny. As Tony Kushner’s The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination showed, the British reaction to the Holocaust can tell as us much about British mentalities – especially attitudes to race, immigration and nationhood – as it can about Britain as bystander.16 This study is therefore concerned as much to contribute to the understanding of the Anglican Church as it is the global context of the Holocaust. This book begins then, with an investigation of the Anglican understanding of 13

Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews (Urbana, Illinois, 1970). 14 Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson: A Study in the Tension between Church and State (Oxford, 1983), pp. 255–256. 15 There have been studies which previously used this approach – see, as a particular example on Auschwitz, Tony Kushner, ‘The Meaning of Auschwitz: Anglo-American Responses to the Hungarian Jewish Tragedy’, in David Cesarani (ed.), Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944 (London, 1997), pp. 159–178. 16 Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (London, 1994).

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Nazism, an understanding which was filtered through an obsession, at various levels of the Church of England, with the perceived Nazi persecution not of Jews but of Christians. The image of Nazism that emerged was of a totalitarian brutality, innately comparable to Soviet Communism. Such a totalitarianism was seen as a threat to the Christian world, and after 1939 the previously anti-war Church became convinced that war with Nazism was a war for Christianity and indeed the very survival of Christendom. Such rhetoric provided the crucial context in which Nazi anti-Jewish action was understood. Kristallnacht was the first in a series of violent attacks which the Church witnessed and interpreted as attacks on Christian culture. This denigration of Christian culture was then seen to culminate in the mass murders carried out on the Eastern front after 1941. The extent and the limits of Anglican reactions to those murders, which we now think of as the Holocaust, are inexplicable without contextual knowledge as to the shape that Nazism formed in the Anglican imagination. I will explain below why understanding the Church’s reaction to the Third Reich is an important part of the history of British response to Nazism more generally. But, the context-driven methodology which provides that understanding has a further benefit which should be identified first, namely its contribution to understanding the formation of Holocaust history and memory. Often those memories are studied as if they emerged from an intellectual vacuum. But 1945 should not be regarded as year zero and focusing on the manner in which the Holocaust was understood and indeed how those perceptions were articulated before the end of the war, allows us to trace the intellectual foundations of post-war memory. The second half of the Church of England and the Holocaust does just that. And by beginning to draw links between the post- and pre-war understandings of Nazism and the Holocaust, we can begin to perceive how and why the Holocaust has become the moral touchstone of twenty-first-century perceptions of the past. In doing so we can come full circle – and understand why it is that we needed to ask anachronistic questions of twentieth-century history in the first place. The Church of England But why the Church of England? After all the Church has largely been absent from investigations of the British response to the Holocaust. These have invariably concentrated on the government and its reactions to the refugee crisis precipitated by Nazi racism, or on the possibilities, or otherwise, of intervention to hamper the Nazi murder project.17 Clearly a community of faith distanced from the killing fields by geography and war could do little to intervene, or even to 17

See for example Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned and the British and Americans Knew (London, 1998); Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London, 1981); Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, and Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–48: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2000).

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facilitate rescue. Even those studies which have sought to illuminate how the murder of Europe’s Jews was filtered through the assumptions and ideologies of British state and society have not dwelt at any length on the church.18 Of course the logic of Christian antisemitism has ensured that Christian responses to the Holocaust have been extensively examined, indeed it is commonly perceived that the Holocaust epoch saw a ‘collapse of Christian leadership’ witnessed, variously, in Vatican and papal silence, the involvement of Hungarian and Slovakian bishoprics in the development of the politics of antisemitism, and the silent complicity of the German evangelical churches.19 But, until now, the Church of England, and its role in the shaping of the Holocaust story in Britain, has not been studied in great detail. For many this historiographical absence is easily explained: the Church simply does not matter.20 General historiography has long since declared that organised Christianity was irrelevant by the middle of the secular twentieth century, an assumption apparently supported by the most important sources for the study of British social and cultural history.21 It was traditionally argued that the Church of England underwent ‘organisational decay’ in the twentieth century and became marginal to the concerns of a secular society.22 And until recently secularisation has been assumed to be the natural bedfellow of modernisation.23 Where the Church has warranted serious attention it was soon dismissed as an adjunct to Conservatism, a political creed demonstrated to be both outdated and swimming against the march of twentieth-century progress by the triumph of Labour in 1945.24 Traditionally then, far from viewing the Church of England as important, historiography has perceived it as little more than an anachronistic irrelevance. Statistically these arguments are irrefutable – the first half of the twentieth 18 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, does deal with the Christian churches in Britain, but more with individuals rather than the Anglican community as a whole; the Anglican contribution to memory is not dealt with. London, Whitehall and the Jews, is exhaustive, but deals only with the Church and refugees. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe (Oxford, 1979), does not deal with the response of the Church of England at all. 19 David P. Gushee, ‘Learning from Christian Rescuers: Lessons for the Churches’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Vol. 548, Nov. 1996), p. 153; for a sensational account of the failings of the Catholic church see Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning. For the role of the German Evangelical churches see Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2000), on the Confessing Church; and more generally Gutteridge, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb! 20 For example Raul Hilberg argues that the churches of Europe reached the ‘nadir of their influence’ in the middle of the twentieth century – see Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 260. 21 See for example A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–45 (London, 1965), p. 259, and for the impression of the irrelevance of the Church in the life of war-time Britain from the Mass Observation archive see Tom Harrison, Living through the Blitz (London, 1970), p. 309. See also the survey of historiography in S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 1–23. 22 Alan Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularisation of Modern Society (London, 1980), p. 2. 23 For references to secularisation theories and for a refutation of them see Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2000), pp. 8–10, 30–36. 24 John Davis, A History of Britain 1885–1939 (London, 1999), p. 238; Keith Robbins, ‘Prime Ministers and their Primates’, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), p. 216.

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century did see a massive decline in church attendance, and from the Edwardian period onwards there was an assumed crisis in the Church, precipitated by declining numbers.25 The Church also extricated itself from some of its state controls after the First World War which, as well as awarding greater independence introduced greater distance between the political and religious establishments.26 More seriously the Church perceived a gap between itself and its people.27 A Mass Observation survey of popular religiosity agreed, finding that Christianity and Anglicanism were irrelevant in the ‘mental and moral chaos . . . of mass democracy’. A ‘puzzled people’ distanced from the Church were left in a vacuum caused by the ‘disintegration of orthodox’ beliefs by the 1940s.28 During the 1930s the Church of England suffered from something of a crisis of identity and began even to question its own earthly significance.29 To an extent its polyglot nature ensures that this problem of identity was endemic; the Church is to this day preoccupied by the question of self-definition, of what exactly is Anglicanism.30 At any time, in any era, the Anglican community holds together a number of different theological and political traditions. As Cyril Garbett wrote in 1947 when he was Archbishop of York: ‘an intelligent foreigner . . . would find it very hard to give a clear and concise description of the Church of England’.31 The Anglican community was certainly politically divided, something demonstrated by a brief look at the Church’s bishops. From one angle the Church appears to have emerged from the First World War dominated intellectually by Christian social radicalism committed to the pseudo-socialisation of British society – apparently a long way from the notional ‘Tory party at prayer’. William Temple and George Bell were the most influential figures in this social Christianity. Temple, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 after he had been Bishop of Manchester and Archbishop of York, was the towering figure of the interwar Church. He had chaired the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC) in April 1924 which set out, vaguely, the social programme of the Church’s political left. While not immediately

25 Hugh Mcleod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (London, 1996), p. 170; Robbins, ‘The Churches in Edwardian Society’, History, Religion and Identity, p. 119. 26 B.G. Worrall, The Making of the Modern Church: Christianity in England since 1800 (London, 1988), p. 253. 27 Church Commission on Evangelism, Towards the Conversion of England (London, 1943), p. 2. 28 Mass Observation, A Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics and Progress in a London Borough (London, 1947), p. 7. 29 Such were the intellectual divisions of the Church in this period that in 1937 the Church of England published a report on its own doctrine precisely to document the theological diversity in established English Christianity, and to discover exactly what the church actually was. See doc. 97, ‘Doctrine in the Church of England’, in R.P. Flindall (ed.), The Church of England 1815–1948: A Documentary History (London, 1972), pp. 416–420. 30 Stephen Sykes, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’, in Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992), p. 228. Sykes argues that the first refuge of those that wish to attack the Anglican Church is to allege that it is little more than a hotch-potch of distinct Christian traditions, failing to bridge a gap between Protestantism and Catholicism. 31 Cyril Garbett, The Claims of the Church of England (London, 1947), p. 13.

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influential, and like Temple’s ill-fated efforts to arbitrate in the General Strike of 1926 dismissed as irrelevant by some, COPEC helped ensure that a generation of churchmen were ‘weaned off High Tory attitudes to an acceptance of the Christian case for massive social reform’.32 Much more influential statements of social Christianity were to follow in the 1930s, for example Cyril Garbett’s The Challenge of the Slums, published in 1938. Garbett would be made Archbishop of York when Temple assumed the leadership of the Church in 1942. 1938 also saw the publication of Pilgrim Trust’s Men Without Work, an influential study of the corrosive impacts of unemployment. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester since 1929, was a part of the commission that produced Men Without Work, and was also the Church’s foremost commentator on matters European, thanks in the main to his prominent position in the movement for Christian unity.33 From another angle, however, the interwar Church and Episcopate looked decidedly Conservative. The Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, although dedicated to disestablishment, was politically a Tory; Temple’s predecessor at Lambeth Palace, Cosmo Lang, equally so. The Bishop of Gloucester, Arthur Headlam, as Chair of the Church Council for Foreign Relations was the unofficial foreign secretary of the Church of England and was equally deeply conservative in outlook. The publicly influential Dean of St Paul’s and political and social commentator William Ralph Inge was perhaps the public face of this Anglican politics, although his conservatism had a more radical hue. Inge was especially contemptuous of Temple’s brand of social Christianity, something he articulated for example in his regular columns for the Daily Express and the Evening Standard. Inge saw Temple and his ilk as, in part, responsible for the forward march of secularism,34 and the deprecation of the value of the individual.35 As figures such as Stanley Baldwin and the war-time foreign secretary Lord Halifax show, even if the intellectual vibrancy of the interwar Church came from the political left, its links with political conservatism continued to flourish.36 Theologically the Episcopate of the Church appeared more unified. The post-First World War Church of England remained inherently hopeful about the future and theological liberalism dominated across the church’s political spectrum,37 not withstanding the continued importance of Anglo-Catholicism within the broad Church of England.38 Yet even the triumph of hopeful liberalism was challenged by domestic and international crises between the wars. By the time the generation of Christian social radicals came to dominate the church hierarchy in the 1940s, symbolised by William Temple’s enthronement at Canterbury, their 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, 1985), p. 179. E.R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770–1970 (Oxford, 1976), p. 362. W.R. Inge, Christian Ethics and Modern Problems (London, 1930), p. 235. W.R. Inge, Outspoken Essays (London, 1920), p. 47. Hastings, English Christianity, p. 251. Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform: War, Peace and the English Churches (London, 1986), p. 88. B.G. Worrall, The Making of the Modern Church: Christianity in England since 1800 (London, 1988), pp. 115–134.

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particular brand of incarnation theology and their effort to construct the Kingdom of God in England’s green and pleasant land appeared increasingly anachronistic. Europe was in the midst of a war that had emerged from a period of economic dislocation which had bequeathed Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Hitler and the politics of power. The hopefulness of Christian sociology appeared meaningless when faced with both the religiosity of political dictatorship on the continent and the prospect of national annihilation in war. Lower levels of the Church, clergy and laity for example, seemed to take refuge in a quite different, pessimistic theology of redemption which emphasised the otherness of God and the sin of man.39 As early as the mid-1930s William Temple was himself to admit that liberal Christianity and the search for the earthly redemption of man had little relevance to modern politics or theology. The Report on Doctrine published in 1937, prefaced by Temple, charted a drift from the Victorian theology of social radicals immersed in the mindset of the nineteenth century and the inevitability of theosophical progress, to the uncertainties of a twentieth century beset by the pestilence of war. Temple acknowledged that ‘the security of the nineteenth century’ was ‘already shattered in Europe’ and that its crumbling in Britain had forced the Anglican Church to learn the impotence of man and ‘how deep and pervasive is that corruption which theologians call original sin’. Far from hopeful for mankind, on the eve of war, the dominant position of the Anglican Church appeared to be that ‘man needs above all to be saved from himself’.40 Indeed Anglican thought from the later 1930s onwards, especially that coming from the clergy and the laity, reflected this apparently pessimistic theological turn – articulating the death of hope and bemoaning God’s Judgement on Europe and the imminent threat to Christian life on earth.41 To reiterate, the Church, it appeared, was increasingly questioning its own earthly relevance. None of this makes the importance of a study of the Church’s response to the Holocaust any clearer. Indeed it would appear that the study of the Church of England’s understanding of Nazism and the Holocaust could be described as esoteric and at worst contrived. The Church is absent from studies of Britain as bystander because it did not matter, perhaps not even to itself. It is not clear, however, that declarations as to the irrelevance of Christianity in the twentieth century are actually based on the most reliable of indicators. And the Church’s concern for its own identity and future masks an enduring, if changing, influence. The fact of declining church attendance is, as I have said, irrefutable; but to chart the influence of the Church simply by numbers is to ignore the wider intellectual impact of, if not the Church, then Christian discourse in the modern, apparently

39 40 41

Norman, Church and Society in England, p. 372. ‘Doctrine in the Church’, p. 419. A.R. Vidler, God’s Judgement on Europe (London, 1940). Alan Wilkinson contends that the ultimate expression of Anglican pessimism came from Nicodemus (the pseudonym of an Anglican layman), who described man as a ‘crawling mass of corruption’, see Wilkinson, Dissent and Conform, p. 222.

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secular twentieth century. During his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1945 Geoffrey Fisher was, for example, still able, despite acknowledging the parting of Church and nation, to affirm the centrality of the Church in national life.42 Fisher’s faith in the importance of the Church was not entirely misplaced. In many ways the ceremony in which he was taking part was an eloquent testament to its continuing role in the ritual life of the nation – something confirmed by the coronation, the invocation of God at the end of the opening of parliament, and the seats for the Lord Bishops in the legislature’s second chamber.43 So, could some of the declarations of the death of faith and hope, and with them the assumed irrelevance of church and Christianity in the middle of the twentieth century, be exaggerated? An historiography which challenges the relationship between secularisation and modernisation has now developed. Sarah Williams has argued recently that religion and particularly Christianity played a continued and important role in popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century;44 while Callum Brown has also identified the linguistic importance of Christianity in people’s lives in modern Britain.45 This enduring Christianity included a close identification between Church and nation, which certainly increased in war-time; population and politics tended to turn to the Church at times of crisis. It played a prominent role in the rituals of remembrance for the fallen soldiers of the First World War for example. These soldiers are still important in the popular imagination but represented nothing less than a national trauma in the decades following the conflict, a trauma which was both articulated using Christian vocabularies and through the Church.46 At the end of the following decade people crammed into churches after the Munich agreement appeared to have saved the nation from war in September 1938. The national conversation surrounding the crisis caused by Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland was heavily laden with Christian rhetoric. The King offered thanks to ‘the Almighty for His mercy in sparing [Britain] the horrors of war’, while an editorial in The Times argued both that the Munich agreement was the result of national prayer and that such prayers belied the declining importance of Christianity in England.47 During the Second World War itself the Church and the language of Christianity remained at the heart of national discourse. Christian rhetoric became crucial to the formation of the national community that stood alone against the perceived Nazi devil.48 National days of prayer (announced by the King) 42 See Geoffrey Fisher’s sermon from 19 April 1945, reprinted in Charles Smyth, The Church and the Nation (London, 1962), pp. 13–17. 43 Worrall, The Making of the Modern Church, p. 291. 44 Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture, p. 167. 45 Brown, Death of Christian Britain. 46 Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1978), pp. 295–300; see also Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–45 (London, 1994). 47 See The Times, 3 October 1938, for an account of the King’s thanksgiving and praise of the power of prayer. 48 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1991), p. 43.

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followed the defeat in the battle of France in May 1940, the beginning of the battle of Britain in September of that year and continued throughout the conflict. Collective worship of this kind cemented the sense, which had been constructed in government propaganda and rhetoric, that Britain was fighting a war as a Christian nation. Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee were all prepared to publicly declare that Britain’s was a war for Christian civilisation, as was J.B. Priestley, the BBC’s most prominent voice of war.49 The Ministry of Information produced a weekly publication dedicated to highlighting that God was on Britain’s side throughout the war.50 Even Winston Churchill, who has been dismissed by Christian historians as a harbinger of secularisation, relied on a religious rhetoric in the speeches of 1940 and 1941 that are now collectively remembered as having saved the nation.51 According to the Prime Minister in June of 1940, Britain’s purpose was the defence of ‘Christian Civilisation’ and by August 1941 he was able to identify Britain as ‘serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet had sounded from on high’.52 Churches dominated the physical landscape of Britain during the Second World War, as they do today. But, more importantly, they also loomed large in the conceptual landscape under attack from Nazi bombers, in ‘deep England’. Prominent in all press coverage of the aerial onslaught was the devastation wreaked on them, which was used to demonstrate the extent of the Nazis’ anti-Christian ambitions.53 The symbols of British suffering and defiance during the blitz were Christian too. The destruction of Coventry Cathedral became (and to a certain extent remains) the ultimate symbol of Nazi barbarity; while the nation’s survival was encapsulated in the enduring survival of St Paul’s Cathedral. In the context of a press coverage that was generally content to rely on the language of Christianity – references to the apocalypse, hell and the day of judgement were for example common54 – the protection of Wren’s masterpiece was, according to Angus 49

For Halifax’s depiction of war as a ‘crusade for Christianity’ in a speech broadcast on the BBC, see Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 39, 27 July 1940; and for Eden’s statement that only British victory could ‘restore . . . Christian Civilisation’ see Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 83, 5 June 1941. Attlee’s description of the war as a ‘spiritual contest between good and evil’, between Hitler and ‘the teachings of Christ’ adorns the front of Newmann Watts, The Spiritual Issues of the War (London, 1942). See Nick Crowson, Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–1940 (London, 1997), p. 182, for a general description of the Conservative Party and the idea of a war for Christianity. Priestley’s weekly broadcasts were important in creating the sense of the British as a ‘religious people’ at war. See J.B. Priestley, Out of the People (London, 1941), p. 69. 50 This publication, Spiritual Issues of the War, was distributed to all interested Churchmen as a guide for ‘informing’ readers and their communities of the spiritual issues of the war, which amounted to the close identification of the Nazi enemy and the devil. 51 See Paul Addison, ‘Destiny, History and Providence: The Religion of Winston Churchill’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 1993), p. 237. 52 These quotations are taken from two speeches. The first, made to parliament on 18 June 1940, was later broadcast. The second was a broadcast address on 24 August 1941. See Winston Churchill, War Speeches (London, 1946), pp. 11, 79. 53 See The Times, 8 September 1940, and The Illustrated London News, 14, 21, 28 September 1940 for examples. 54 Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London, 2000), p. 80.

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Calder, portrayed as the triumph of ‘Christianity . . . over neo-paganism’.55 British film propaganda also portrayed Christianity as the essential backdrop to British life, central to the communities under attack from the bestial Nazis.56 In Went the Day Well, for example, it was the murder of the parish priest that really signified for the audience the gap between themselves and their enemies, while at the end of Mrs Miniver ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was sung without irony.57 Many of the ways in which the national community was being constructed in Britain therefore placed great emphasis on her Christian character. The crisis that the Church saw in private conversation – which all indicators suggested was increasingly unchristian – may also have been overblown. There is evidence of the continued discursive importance of Christianity in private lives. If one rejects the signifiers of Christianity which the church itself identified – ‘church going’ and ‘Christian moral standards’ – as too dogmatic, then one can begin to locate Christianity in the assumptions and behaviour of a population which may even have not regarded itself as Christian. Surrounded by the rhetoric of Christianity, ordinary people testified that they too turned to God, if not to the churches, in times of crisis. For example, the Mass Observation survey of the erosion of Christianity reported, as evidence for the decline of its importance, a man who confessed he believed in neither God nor the afterlife. But, that same man had prayed around the time of Dunkirk. Such professions of faith were common in ‘unbelievers’ interviewed by the anthropological survey group. Such people appeared to have shed the doctrinal and orthodox trappings of religiosity and their identification with particular churches, while at the very least hanging on to some of the superstition. Therefore, while there can be little doubt that the subscription to orthodox Christian notions such as the divinity of Christ may have declined, God did feature in the private lives of individuals who saw themselves as separated from the churches. As was commented at the time, atheism and agnosticism did not actually penetrate much further than the ‘verbal surface’.58 Of the manifold institutional churches active in Britain it was the Church of England that was most associated with what might be called this linguistic turn to Christianity. All of the churches celebrated the national days of prayer in September of each year of the war, but it was the activities of the Church of England that were reported as representative, for example in The Times – which generally provided a mouthpiece for Anglican bishops throughout the war.59 The most prominent of those bishops was William Temple, who after moving to Canterbury in 1942 was cast as the leader not just of the Anglican community but all British Christians and was universally accepted as the ‘spokesman of the 55 56

Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, p. 250. Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, 1997), p. 110. 57 Alberto Cavalcanti, Went the Day Well (1942); William Wyler, Mrs Miniver (1942). 58 Mass Observation, A Puzzled People, p. 56. 59 For example, The Times would consistently report the public statements of the Episcopate, including those made at internal Church events such as the Canterbury and York convocations.

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whole church’.60 Temple’s ecumenical position embedded the sense of the Church of England as the national church. The end of the war again saw Christianity feature heavily in public and political discourse. The announcement of Germany’s unconditional surrender was greeted in biblical terms by Churchill when he announced that the ‘evildoers . . . are now prostrate before us’. Both houses of parliament headed for the Church of St Margaret in Westminster immediately after the announcement of victory.61 And the influence of Christianity and the Anglican Church cannot only be detected in the pomp and circumstance of the conservative British establishment. The left wing post-war consensus reflected the desires of the war-time Christian social democratic movement, to which Temple and Bell had given such leadership.62 Labour’s festival of Britain, held in 1951 in part to celebrate British victory and survival, was also opened, in a gesture rich in symbolism, at St Paul’s Cathedral.63 In a nation schooled on the heroism of the Second World War, the close association between the Church and the British war-time community has also endured in memory.64 However irreverent the war nostalgia of Dad’s Army is, it is noticeable that the church is an important part of the defence of the imaginary Walmington-on-Sea – a thinly disguised metaphor for Britain.65 The surviving St Paul’s also maintains its war-time significance in memory. Despite the decline in Church attendance across the beginning of the twentieth century then, Christianity remained at the heart of self definition and identity of the British nation at war. The importance of doctrine and orthodoxy may have declined, but the linguistic role of Christianity and therefore the national Church of England should not be underestimated. Considering this discursive climate the omission, for the most part, of the Church of England from accounts of the British response to the Holocaust is a mistake. The Church of England and the Holocaust will correct this and will demonstrate the importance of the Anglican Church in shaping other facets of the national public conversation. It is not simply in the identification of English national identity that the Church was important between 1933 and 1953, the years which are the major focus of this book, but in the understanding of others – including Germany and Nazism. It is in those definitions we will find the Anglican understanding of the Third Reich and its attack on the European Jews. In turn this will allow us to reflect on the formation of the memory of what we now call the Holocaust, and the importance of Christian 60

William Paton to Temple, 20 January 1943, in F.S. Temple (ed.), Some Lambeth Letters (London, 1963), pp. 56–57. This mantle was also awarded publicly in the House of Lords by the Methodist Lord Rochester, see Hansard (HL) Vol. 126 (832) 23 March 1943. 61 Churchill, Speeches, p. 246 62 Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998), p. 325. 63 Becky Conekin, ‘The Autobiography of the Nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003), pp. 117–118. 64 Calder, Myth of the Blitz, p. 250; and David Cesarani, ‘Lacking in Convictions: British War Crimes Policy and National Memory of the Second World War’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997), pp. 27–42. 65 Richards, Films and British National Identity, pp. 351–366.

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discourse in shaping perceptions inside the intellectual history of the secular twentieth century. The Church’s turn to pessimistic theology and sense of her own irrelevance may also have been overstated, despite it being apparently a matter of historiographical consensus.66 Indeed there is some evidence that the Church revelled in a perceived revival of religion during the war.67 As I have argued Anglicanism is best understood as a discourse between differing, and often opposed, social, political, theological, and religious traditions. So, while neo-orthodox biblical Christianity may have reflected the fears of the laity and a popularised theology which came to dominate a post-war church fearful of political participation and preoccupied by questions of personal morality,68 the public face of the Church in war-time at least, was still shaped by the previous generation. George Bell and William Temple are the most notable figures in this generation and they dominated the official and semi-official voice of the Church in the 1930s and 1940s. During the war, for example, a Christian press charged with the responsibility of interpreting the world for their Christian readership relied on Temple and Bell, who were seen as encapsulating Anglicanism, especially for authority on matters European.69 Bell and Temple’s action and teachings suggested an enduring commitment to a political theology concerned overwhelmingly with the physical rather than transcendent future, passionately committed to the importance of the Church.70 George Bell’s tireless work for the Christian victims of Nazism, for example, although not the subject of this volume, has been celebrated as the very epitome of Christian obligation in action.71 In line with the contextual approach to the study of the bystanders, the study of the Church of England and the Holocaust has then much to tell us about the Church itself and will allow extended investigation of the nature of Anglicanism. Bell and Temple will, of course, loom large in this study. However, because the focus of this book is on the Anglican mindset in general, the intellectual 66

See for example: Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England 1900–1965 (London, 1965), p. 121; Norman, Church and Society, p. 372; Hastings, English Christianity, p. 295; Worrall, Making of the Modern Church, p. 262. 67 See Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 113, 1 January 1942. 68 See, for example, Edward Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher: His Life and Times (Norwich, 1991), for an account of Temple’s successor at Canterbury who, although engaged with Europe, was more concerned with the level of venereal disease amongst, and sexual mores of, British occupying forces than wider questions. 69 See Adrian Hastings, ‘William Temple’, in Rowell, English Religious Tradition, p. 213. Bell was unquestionably the leading Anglican authority on Europe and especially Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. See the rather hagiographical Ronald Jasper, George Bell: Bishop of Chichester (London, 1963) for details of Bell’s career-long engagement with Europe; also Kenneth Slack, George Bell (London, 1971), pp. 40–112. 70 Both Bell and Temple, for example, in the context of war and despair, published theological and political prescriptions for the future, drenched in the rhetoric of liberal theology and hope. See George Bell, Christianity and World Order (London, 1940), and William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London, 1942). 71 On Bell’s refugee work, see James Radcliffe, ‘Bishop Bell and the Victims of Nazism’, in Paul Foster (ed.), Bell of Chichester: A Prophetic Bishop (Otter Memorial Paper, No. 17, 2003), pp. 89–107.

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accommodation and understanding of Nazism, it is concerned to be broader than simply these personalities – and will attempt to engage with the many voices of the Anglican community. As such, the views of many churchmen are represented and analysed here, through their public and private statements on Nazism and the Holocaust. The views of lay members of the Church have been gleaned indirectly through their representation in newspapers and publications.72 While the book does not seek to shy away from the differences and conflicts in Anglican discourse surrounding Nazism and the Holocaust, it is possible to pick out dominant, unifying themes and ideas publicly negotiated within the wider Church and to uncover the majority, and minority, voice of the Anglican community. At the same time the book will explore at length some of the major themes in the history of the modern Church of England: for example the development of Anglican war discourse; its direct relationship with government and the limits and extent of its formal influence over politics; the tension between its institutional and communal identity; its theological relationship with Judaism and antisemitism; as well as exploring its impact on the emergence of a particular historical and memorial understanding of the Holocaust. The Church’s understanding of Nazism and its impact on the memory of the Holocaust is especially important. Perhaps unusually in war-time Britain, the Church was an institution with a self-consciously European outlook. George Bell was just one of many figures within the Anglican community that was active in the international ecumenical movement – J.H. Oldham and William Paton were at the forefront of the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Arthur Duncan-Jones, Bell’s Dean at Chichester, was passionately committed to the international role of the Church, and James Parkes, the Church’s chief campaigner on Christian-Jewish relations was inspired by his work with the Student Christian Movement (SCM) in Europe in the 1920s. In war-time, William Temple’s voice reverberated throughout Christendom, often literally through his broadcast activities with the overseas service of the BBC. The rhetoric of post-war reconstruction forged in the Anglican community spoke openly of the need for European unity and the revival of Christendom. Such rhetoric was the linguistic coating on personal and institutional relationships which located the Church of England inside a western European mindset. The interrogation of the Church’s understanding of Nazism will therefore enhance our understanding of its ecumenical relationship with continental Europe. At the same time considering the European Church of England’s contribution to the memory of the Holocaust, will begin to illuminate not only an English, but also an occidental narrative of the murder of Europe’s Jews.

72

The major publications considered are the Church Times, The Guardian and The Record, which became the Church of England Newspaper. The ecumenical Christian News Letter is also considered.

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The Memory of the Holocaust Studies of memory, and especially the memory of the Second World War, are an increasingly common part of the effort to delineate the intellectual history of the twentieth century. As the Cold War era has closed it appears that a final accounting for the crimes committed in Nazi occupied Europe has begun. Previously established narratives are being challenged and ideological assumptions about the past are being deconstructed. Infamously, for example, the myth of Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis has been complicated by the re-discovery of Polish involvement in murderous attacks on Jews previously blamed simply on ‘the Nazis’,73 the British myths of Dunkirk and the blitz have been re-examined,74 while studies of the French lieux de mémoire have concentrated on the Nazi occupation in their diagnosis of the ‘Vichy syndrome’ and the gap (or otherwise) between resistance and complicity.75 This process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ has fostered an increasing awareness that history is constantly passed through filters made up of the ideologies and desires of the present. This has had a particular impact on the understanding of the Holocaust. Numerous studies have charted the development of memories and histories of the Shoah, and have concluded that the events we now know as the Holocaust have been constructed time and again in a great variety of guises. Different societies and cultures have developed a version of the Holocaust useful to them. The communist nations of the Eastern bloc held on to an Holocaust which conformed to the anti-fascist meta-narrative with which they characterised the Second World War;76 the USA has had a number of Holocausts all of which have confirmed the worth of western civilisation and the barbarity of America’s enemies; and Israel has developed an Holocaust which confirms the necessity of Zionism and the importance of Israeli power.77 A standard chronology of the construction of the Holocaust has also emerged. According to this orthodoxy, genuine interest in the Holocaust only really began (in Israel, USA and Europe) in the 1960s – after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In eastern Europe the Nazi campaign against the Jews remained subsumed within the memories of brutal occupation by the Nazis until the end of the Cold War. While not denying the Holocaust, for example, non-Jewish Soviet historians

73

See Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001). 74 See Calder, Myth of Blitz, which spawned Smith, Britain and 1940; also see the sensationalist Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (London, 1990). 75 See, for example, Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), and Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations (26, 1989), pp. 7–24. 76 On perceptions of the Holocaust in the USSR see Zvi Gitelman, ‘History, Memory and Politics: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1990), pp. 23–37. 77 For the USA see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999), and Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle, 2001); and for Israel see Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993).

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downplayed the specificity of the Nazi campaign against Jewish civilians.78 But in the West, after Eichmann’s appearance in the glass booth, the Holocaust rose to prominence. Threats to the security of Israel in the late 1960s and 1970s affirmed the status of the Holocaust in the popular imagination there, while a TV mini-series introduced a mass audience in Europe and the USA to the Holocaust in 1978 and 1979. Although there are inevitable disagreements about what each of these different vectors of Holocaust memory means, there is consensus regarding this chronology of enlightenment. This narrative of the emergence of the Shoah within western consciousness suggests that the concept of the Holocaust replaced silences surrounding the murder of Europe’s Jews predominating after the end of conflict in 1945. The Nazi attack on the Jews, so the story goes, was ignored, neglected, and downplayed in history, popular culture and memory after the end of war with Nazism. Survivors who settled in Britain, USA and Israel have testified that little interest was shown in their harrowing pasts during the reconstruction era, as communities faced the task of rebuilding for the future.79 Silences regarding the past were not simply due to a perception that the future was more important, although this view was widespread.80 An alternative historical narrative was also being forged alongside European reconstruction. By the time the Berlin air lift confirmed the bi-polar division of the post-war world in 1948, this narrative, which remembered Nazism as a form of totalitarianism directly comparable to Soviet tyranny, was already being popularised especially in Britain and the USA. The Nazi movement was portrayed as having been only concerned with power and domination, and the German population as simply the victims of a monolithic dictatorship.81 According to this Cold War narrative, a ruthless mechanism of political control enforced that dictatorship. The Gestapo was portrayed as the German NKVD, and it was alleged that the spirit of the Nazi concentration camps lived on in Stalin’s Gulags.82 It is argued that the Nazi’s specific crime – the attack on the Jews – was downplayed within this understanding because

78 79

Gitelman, ‘History, Memory and Politics’, pp. 23–24. See Kitty Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London, 1983) for the harrowing account of her reception in England, which she described as ‘one of the unhappiest times of my life . . . probably the closest I ever came to total despair’, in part because she was prevented from speaking about her experiences in Auschwitz. Trude Levi, A Cat Called Adolf (London, 1995) is another account of oppressive silence in post-war society, first in France then South Africa, Israel and finally Britain. 80 For example it was employed as an argument against continuing war-crimes trials programmes. See Hans Erhard, ‘The Nuremberg Trial against the Major War Criminals and International Law’, American Journal of International Law (Vol. 43, No. 2, 1949), p. 244. 81 Perhaps the most famous, and popular, example of this caricature is William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London, 1959), although the author accepts that this was not published until later. 82 The comparison between the Gestapo and the Soviet secret police had been extant since the war-time alliance between Nazi Germany and the USSR, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995), pp. 55–57, for a discussion of the implicit comparison in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (New York, 1968).

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antisemitic cruelty was specific to Nazism, which was after all yesterday’s enemy, and therefore the ‘wrong atrocity’.83 For the most part the silences surrounding Nazi antisemitism in the 1940s and 1950s are identified as the consequence of the politics of the new Cold War with the Soviet Union (although there has been some scholarship that has pointed to the continuities in interpreting Nazism and the attack on the Jews from before and after the war, particularly in Germany).84 However, religious discourses have largely been excluded from this causal matrix, much as Christian understanding has been absent from analyses of Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust. This is despite the importance of Christian narratives in shaping the understanding of the Second World War as it was being prosecuted in Europe. Both Axis and Allied powers portrayed their cause as God’s, often supported by their churches,85 churches which then also took a leading role in memorialising the conflict in the reconstruction era.86 Because of the assumed secularity of the modern world, it is not surprising that accounts of the history and memory of war and Holocaust ignore the influence of Christian discourses. But, the importance of Christianity in shaping and constructing the sense of the Holocaust now dominant in the West, and the central role that Christian institutions now play in a wider Holocaust historiography, suggests that it is problematic that memory has been cast in such terms. Christianity’s role in Holocaust historiography has been assured by the churches’ tradition of antisemitic doctrine and the perceived complicity of the churches in Nazi occupied Europe. The deicide myth – the idea that the Jews bore collective responsibility for the murder of Christ – the attendant notion of the broken covenant between God and the Jewish people, and the suggestion that Christianity has superseded Judaism; all (it is suggested) helped prepare the ground for a murderous antisemitism that not only denied the validity of Judaism but also the individual Jew’s right to life.87 Worse than this, institutional churches from the Vatican through Berlin to Budapest and Bucharest all failed to protest loudly enough against the massacres of Jews,88 while in Croatia, Romania, 83

Novick, The Holocaust, p. 87. This orthodox chronology is provide in numerous places – one of the first examples is Leon Jick, ‘The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse within the American Public’, Yad Vashem Studies (No. 14, 1981), p. 307; it is then repeated in Novick, The Holocaust; Mintz, Popular Culture; and Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the Shoah Business (London, 1999). 84 Jeffrey Herf, ‘Multiple Restorations: German Political Traditions and the Interpretation of Nazism 1945–6’, Central European History (Vol. 26, No. 1, 1993), pp. 21–59, and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). 85 See above for a discussion of the Church of England’s role in shaping British war discourse. In Germany, for example, even the dissenting Protestant Confessing Church was able to support the German war against the Soviet Union as the defence of Christian civilisation, see Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York, 1992), p. 163. 86 See the second section of this book for a discussion of the role of the Church of England and the German Evangelical Church in the forging of memories of war. 87 The most extreme proponent of this interpretation is also the most recent, see Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning. 88 For an up to date survey of different historiographical perspectives on the Catholic churches see John K. Roth and Carol Rittner (eds), Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust (London, 2002); for a critical review of

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Hungary and Slovakia it is strongly suspected that the clergy assisted those murderous operations.89 Protestant Christians sought theological justifications for mass murder in Germany; while the interface of Ukrainian nationalism and orthodox Christianity provided a willing army of volunteers in the killing fields of the western Soviet Union.90 That the Vatican is alleged to have aided the escape of Nazi criminals from the Allies adds further disgrace to Christianity’s relationship with the Holocaust, as does the simple fact that the vast majority of the perpetrators were themselves Christians.91 Christian institutions have also been central to the study of bystanders. Although not scholarly, Rolf Hochuth’s The Deputy – the play which depicted a cold and brutal Pope unmoved by Jews suffering at Nazi hands – was the first representation of the Holocaust to lambast those who failed to react to Nazi genocide. Catholic silence remains a central concern for Holocaust historians – as demonstrated by the ever-growing library of books devoted to the issue.92 The Holocaust is then Christianity’s shame, a Christian crime, and has been represented as such by theologians and historians alike.93 Attempts have been made to lighten this gloom and to save Christianity from the ‘shame and dread’ surrounding its relationship with the Holocaust. Theologians have sought to demonstrate that Christian antisemitism was based on a profound theological error, and have attempted to reconceive the Christian/ Jewish relationship accordingly.94 Institutional churches themselves have promoted Christian heroes of the Holocaust, aided and abetted by the long search for righteous gentiles sponsored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s remembrance museum.95 Holocaust historians have also discovered the category of rescuers to

those perspectives see Tom Lawson, ‘New (and Old) Perspectives on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History (Vol. 11, No. 3, 2005). 89 See Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning, for a review (slightly sensationalised) of the murderous complicity of Catholic clergy; see Moshe Herczl, Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry (New York, 1993), pp. 190–205, on the complicity of Hungarian clergy. 90 Robert Erickson, ‘Genocide, Religion and Gerhard Kittel’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001), p. 71. 91 For an account of Vatican assistance to escaping Nazis see Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London, 1974), pp. 277–303. 92 In recent years we have seen Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning; Roth and Rittner, Pius XII; Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–65 (Bloomington, 2000); and Susan Zuccotti, Under his very windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, 2002) to name but a handful. 93 For a recent survey of Christian theological accommodation of the Holocaust see Richard Harries, After the Evil: Christianity and Judaism in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2003); for an explicit identification of the Holocaust as a Christian crime see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition (New Haven, 2003), p. 1. 94 James Parkes was the first Christian theologian to identify this theological mistake; this practice continues to this day – for example Thomas Bluger, ‘Following Mary to Auschwitz: Embryology, Pius IX and the Mediate Theory of Animation’, a paper presented at ‘Ethics After Auschwitz: The Legacy of the Holocaust, the 33rd Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches’, 1–4 March 2003. Bluger attempted to identify the turning point for Christian theology towards antisemitism and an alternative heritage that could have engendered a theological sympathy for the Jewish victims of Nazism. 95 The Roman Catholic Church was, of course, the first with the promotion of Edith Stein. See Jean de Fabregues, Edith Stein: Philosopher, Carmelite Nun, Holocaust Martyr (London, 1965).

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add to the established trinity of Holocaust studies. Such studies commonly portray the rescuers as motivated by Christian ethics.96 The historiography of Christian bystanders also contains some invocations of Christian goodness too. As has been said, investigations of the Church of England’s response to the Holocaust have found ‘impressive evidence of the moral concern’ of the Anglican Church for the sufferings of Europe’s Jews, even leading one historian to argue that the example of the failings of the continental churches and the Vatican should not be allowed to stand as representative of the Christian record.97 George Bell’s campaigning for the Christian victims of Nazism has, along with his criticisms of the British bombing of German cities and civilians, ensured that posterity has marvelled at the clarity of his moral vision.98 The validity of such praise will be scrutinised throughout this book.99 Why then, despite this prominent role in all aspects of Holocaust historiography and theology, have Christianity and Christian discourse commonly been excluded from investigations of the memory of the Shoah? Why have Christian perceptions of the Holocaust not been incorporated into the orthodox chronology of the development of that memory? This may simply be due to the widespread assumption that the twentieth century was exclusively secular and the attendant dismissal of religious ways of seeing as unimportant. But, it can also be explained by the shape of perceptions of the Shoah itself and specifically the concept of the Holocaust’s uniqueness. The idea that the Holocaust remains unrepresentable, that we lack a suitable vocabulary with which to articulate the horror of Auschwitz,100 has been proposed alongside and inside the essentially political claim that the Holocaust is unique.101 The notion of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust derives from the assumption that our imagination and understanding somehow fail with Nazism – 96

Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi Occupied Poland (Oxford, 1986) – Tec concludes her study by suggesting that the very existence of Christian rescuers ‘must give us hope’ (p. 193). 97 See Andrew Chandler, ‘A Question of Fundamental Principles: The Church of England and the Jews of Germany 1933–37’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1993), pp. 221–62, and by the same author, ‘Lambeth Palace and the Jews of Germany and Austria in 1938’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1995), pp. 225–50. Owen Chadwick also praises the Church’s indignance at the ‘maltreatment of the Jews’, see Chadwick, Hensley Henson, p. 254. 98 See, for example, Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), pp. 86–87, 405. 99 There have also been some more critical reviews of the Church of England’s relationship with the Jewish tragedy – and this book can be seen in the same tradition. For example Adrian Hastings was critical of the Church’s reaction to the 1930s refugee crisis, and Chana Kotzin’s thesis problematises even further the Church’s role in giving succour to the victims of Nazism. See Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 344–345; Chana Kotzin, ‘Christian Responses in Britain to Jewish Refugees from Europe 1933–39’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southampton, 2000. 100 Beginning with Theodor Adorno’s oft cited suggestion of the impossibility of artistic expression in the shadow of Auschwitz, such claims have become axiomatic to the study of Holocaust representations and narrative. See Lawrence Langer’s analysis of the search for a ‘vocabulary of annihilation’ in Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (Oxford, 1995). 101 Gavriel Rosenfeld, ‘The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 13, No. 1, 1999), pp. 28–61.

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that the concentration camp represents a uniquely horrific environment. Indeed some interpretations of the Shoah suggest that the murder of Europe’s Jews was nothing less than a cataclysm which transformed the very essence of the human condition. Alvin Rosenfeld has for example speculated that the ‘Holocaust marks the end of one era of consciousness and the beginning of another . . . the human imagination is simply not the same as it was before’.102 Such hyperbole is supported by the orthodox chronology of Holocaust memory which we have already discussed. That account of the development of Holocaust consciousness suggests a period of evasion and avoidance of Nazi crimes in the western imagination engendered by the Cold War during the 1940s and 1950s. This was a period in which, orthodoxy maintains, the murder of Europe’s Jews was either forgotten, or abandoned by a world unable to disseminate such horror. When Nazism was confronted in this post-war era it was only as a form of totalitarianism; interpreted as such using the new language and assumptions of the battle with communism. That the murder of Europe’s Jews evaded the gaze of those anchored in language and assumptions of the past in the immediate aftermath of war, in discourses designed before the cataclysm is fundamental to both these orthodoxies of Holocaust studies. Such discourses included Christianity. Claims as to our inability to represent and essentially understand the Holocaust articulate our revulsion at the Nazi death machine but they ignore the degree to which the assumptions of the pre-Holocaust world were used to interpret the murder of Europe’s Jews. Nazism has, for example, been consistently understood inside Christian discourse. Let us consider some brief examples. Prior to 1945, the propaganda film, None Shall Escape, presented American audiences with a Christianised interpretation and understanding of the unfolding Nazi persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews.103 In Andre De Toth’s film Nazism was portrayed as the antithesis of Christianity. Crucially the Nazis’ Jewish victims were claimed for Christianity at the moment of their sacrifice, their crucifixion at Nazi hands. It could also be argued that it was Christian discourse that helped shape the concept of the Holocaust itself. The label ‘Holocaust’ was not applied to the murder of Europe’s Jews until the late 1950s – various scholars have observed that its first use in the New York Times came in May 1959.104 Yet this biblical phrase was common currency during the Second World War, and the notion of the war itself as a holocaust was widespread. Before the emergence of the ‘Holocaust’, a holocaust denoted the offering of a sacrifice, wholly consumed by fire, to God. The 1950s saw no publications on the Nazi genocide which used the term, but it was applied variously: for example in a sensational account of a fire in a Boston 102

Alvin Rosenfeld, quoted in Michael R. Steele, Christianity, Tragedy and Holocaust Literature (Westport, Connecticut, 1995), p. 18. 103 Andre de Toth, None Shall Escape (1944) – many thanks to James Jordan for his transcript of the film’s dialogue. 104 Isabel Woolaston, A War Against Memory: The Future of Holocaust Remembrance (London, 1996), p. 2; Cole, Images of the Holocaust, p. 7.

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nightclub, and to the murder (by fire) of Christian converts in Africa.105 To force the genocide of the Jews into this kind of narrative structure alone implied a similar meaning to that explored in None Shall Escape. That the term was in part popularised by a publication on Edith Stein, the Catholic church’s Christian Holocaust martyr, is to reinforce this sense of cultural appropriation.106 It is impossible to fully excavate the archaeology of the term or concept ‘Holocaust’. There is certainly no established version of its development but it is clear that the label ‘Holocaust’ fixed the genocide of the Jews in popular memory. Popularisation only occurred after the application of the Holocaust metaphor which coincided with those events, such as the Eichmann trial, already identified as transformative.107 The term ‘Holocaust’ did not define the Nazi campaign against Europe’s Jews using the memorial language of the Nazis’ principal victims. It has been argued that it was adopted as the signifier of the murder of the European Jews because it implied the uniqueness of Jewish victims, and helped relate the Holocaust to the Jewish tradition.108 But, Judaism could (and did) apply existing terms, Shoah and Churban, to the Nazi genocide. ‘Holocaust’ represented and defined the Shoah using, if not a specifically Christian semantic, then at least a universal language subject to Christian interpretation. This tendency to use Christianity to interpret the murder of Europe’s Jews has continued since the almost universal adoption of the Holocaust metaphor. John Paul II, a Pope more concerned than many of his predecessors by Christian-Jewish relations, moved the process on to its logical conclusion in a sermon delivered on the ramp at Auschwitz in 1979. He claimed the camp as the ‘Golgotha of the modern world’.109 The Pope’s words foreshadowed a series of acrimonious controversies regarding the role of Christianity at the preserved Auschwitz – and more generally within the memory of the Holocaust. The establishment of a Carmelite convent, essentially devoted to the conversion of Jews, on the grounds of Auschwitz I in 1984 led to the effective suspension of dialogue between Judaism and the Catholic Church by 1989. Although the convent was eventually moved, a sea of crosses emerged in its stead, planted around the cross used during the Pope’s mass in 1979, outside the execution block at Auschwitz I. This was a Polish nationalist campaign to lay claim to the memory of Auschwitz and turn it into a site of Christian remembrance, and a deliberately unsubtle form

105 Paul Benzaquin, Holocaust! The Story of the Boston Coconut Grove Fire (New York, 1959); John Faupel, African Holocaust: The Story of the Ugandan Martyrs (London, 1962). 106 See Fabregues, Edith Stein. 107 James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, Indiana, 1998), p. 88. 108 Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, ‘Why do we call the Holocaust ‘the Holocaust’: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels’, Modern Judaism (May 1989), pp. 197–211. 109 See George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (Glasgow, 1999), pp. 314–315 for details of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Auschwitz in 1979.

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of Christianisation; yet such actions were not entirely removed from the linguistic appropriation implicit in the term ‘Holocaust’.110 Christian discourse continues to influence popular constructions of the Holocaust, for example in the use of narrative structures which emphasise hope and redemption. ‘The Christian vision of life and death, suffering and its meaning that promises eventual fulfilment, transcendence, triumph over death . . . full revelation of the universe’s moral order and a transmutation of suffering into subliminal personal gain’, has been used to construct some of the figures who have become iconic to the version of the Holocaust residing in the popular imagination.111 Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler for example, perhaps the two most important popular signifiers of the Holocaust in the post-war west, have certainly been constructed according to this Christianised vision. Anne Frank was the first hero of the Holocaust to become a symbol of Christian hope when her diary was first adapted as a play during the 1950s. This theatrical representation ended with Anne’s observation that despite it all ‘people were good at heart’ – allowing one reviewer to leave ‘the theatre exhilarated, proud to be a human being’.112 A redemptive Christian message is also central to Steven Spielberg’s epic Schindler’s List. Spielberg presents Schindler’s tale as a simple battle between good and evil, in which the cartoon Nazi, Goeth, is outwitted by the at times Christ-like Schindler.113 Carrying a message of hope from the Holocaust, all of Schindler’s Jews survive. Those that die during the film, for example the infamous girl in the red coat, inspire Schindler to rescue. Their sacrifice both enables other Jews to live and ensures that the previously fallen Schindler is redeemed – being transformed from casual Nazi to dedicated opponent of fascism.114 Spielberg’s narrative has become central to the popularisation of the Holocaust, seen by many more people world-wide than any other representation of the Shoah. Much like those survivors who testified that it was the Eichmann trial that first allowed them to speak publicly about their experiences during the Holocaust,115 it was after Schindler’s List, others report, that there was a public

110

For a narrative of the Auschwitz controversy see Isabel Wollaston, ‘Sharing Sacred Space: The Carmelite Controversy and the Politics of Commemoration’, Patterns of Prejudice (Vol. 28, Nos 3 and 4, 1994), pp. 19–27; and, for the period before the formation of the sea of crosses, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, The Convent at Auschwitz (London, 1990). 111 Steele, Christianity, Tragedy and Holocaust Literature, p. 7. 112 Quotation from New York World Telegram and Sun, 15 October 1955, cited in Alvin Rosenfeld, ‘The Americanisation of the Holocaust’, Thinking about the Holocaust after Half a Century (Bloomington, Indiana, 1997), p. 125. 113 For an analysis of Schindler as Christ see M.A. Bernstein, ‘The Schindler’s List Effect’, The American Scholar (No. 63, 1994), pp. 429–432. 114 Cole, Images of the Holocaust, p. 90. 115 Halina Birenbaum testifies to the fact that it was the Eichmann trial that made her record her memoir of Auschwitz and Majdanek because it was at this moment that the enforced post-war popular silence was irrevocably broken. See Halina Birenbaum, Hope is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age Under Nazi Terror (New York, 1971), pp. x–xi.

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demand for their stories.116 The film has been used, at the behest of its creators, as a tool of Holocaust education in schools throughout the USA and Europe.117 Such is its ubiquity that some critics have even argued that the cinematic techniques used in Schindler’s List, especially its documentary style, mean that it has potential to replace memory and stand in for the historical record – to become ‘historical knowledge’ itself.118 While the question of whether Schindler’s List has infected or affected perceptions of the Holocaust to such a degree that it has given ‘visual concreteness’ to memory is moot; it is remarkable that it is a film employing a Christian narrative structure that has succeeded in packaging the Holocaust for a generation.119 Other artistic renderings of the Holocaust have relied on Christian narrative strategies. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful is another redemptive film in which the central character may well be an allegory for Christ. The protagonist, Guido, is transported to Auschwitz with his son whom he shields from the worst excesses of the camp. By doing so Guido saves ‘the spirit as well as the life of his son’ and gives testament to ‘love’s abilities to sustain and transform’.120 Benigni’s film follows a long tradition of the use of Christ in visual representation of Jewish suffering at Nazi hands. Since the 1930s Jesus has been portrayed as a victim of the Nazis and in the paintings of Jan de Ruth and Gerhart Frankl, Holocaust victims have been depicted as Christ.121 Günter Fischerman’s painting for Germany’s 2001 Holocaust memorial day also depicted Christ following Jewish victims of the Nazis to their graves.122 Although man’s search for meaning is a Christian discourse, it is not exclusively so. Finding redemption and revival in the Holocaust has, therefore, not simply been a Christian concern. There have, for example, been several alternative attempts to attach significance to the Shoah within Israel, and indeed Schindler’s List contains a Zionist narrative too. The very creation of the state has, in some forms of Jewish identity, given meaning to the Holocaust – conforming to the ‘classical biblical paradigm of catastrophe and redemption’.123 Israel’s ambiguous early relationship with the passivity of Holocaust victims and survivors has produced a memorial culture apparently much more concerned with Jewish resistance than elsewhere in the west. Yad Vashem, the state-funded 116

For example Trude Levi, Did you ever meet Hitler miss? A Holocaust Survivor Talks to Young People (London, 2003), p. 2. 117 Cole, Images of the Holocaust, pp. 73–74. 118 Elazar Barkan, ‘Review of Schindler’s List’, American Historical Review (Vol. 99, No. 4, 1994), p. 1248. 119 Mintz, Popular Culture, p. 149. 120 Ruth Ben Ghiat, ‘The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful’, The Yale Journal of Criticism (Vol. 14, No, 1, 2001), p. 254. 121 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘Faith, Ethics and the Holocaust: Christological Symbolism of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 3, No. 4, 1988), pp. 466–467. 122 Tania Oldenhage, ‘Tainted Shapes of Memory: Christian Holocaust Commemorations in Germany’, a paper presented at ‘Ethics After Auschwitz: The Legacy of the Holocaust, the 33rd Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches’, 1–4 March 2003. 123 Wollaston, War Against Memory, p. 82.

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institute of Holocaust research and remembrance, is for example subtitled the ‘heroes and martyrs remembrance authority’ and acts, like war memorials elsewhere, as a reminder of bravery and heroism.124 Within such a memorial culture there is then, in the State of Israel and the eschewing of passivity and non-resistance, a form of redemption found in the Holocaust story.125 Finding meaning in the Holocaust is thus not simply a Christian motif. However, for Christian observers in the West redemption narratives capture the essence of the Christian outlook. As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, ‘the God of the Christian faith is not only creator but redeemer. He does not allow human existence to end tragically.’126 As such it is possible to argue that the tenor of western Holocaust memorialisation and representation conforms to a Christian narrative structure and importantly that we can trace versions of that representational discourse to the 1940s. Do we then need to revise some of the assumptions that make up the orthodox understanding of the development of Holocaust consciousness? It is commonly stated that ‘the nature of the Holocaust’ was not fully grasped until the 1960s – because it was at this point, in both popular and scholarly terms that the Nazi antisemitic imperative began to be understood.127 We already know that the new political language of the day produced the narratives of totalitarianism by which Nazism and the Soviet Union were compared, and which downplayed the importance of specific Nazi racism in the Cold War. But, at the same time Christian discourses were being employed to find the meaning of the murderous antisemitism placed at the heart of an interpretation of Nazism. Rather than the Holocaust being misunderstood, it might only be possible to say that contemporary interpretations of the meaning and significance of the Holocaust were not developed until the 1960s. In turn such observations challenge the idea that the Holocaust heralded a watershed in the human condition. So much for the Shoah challenging the imagination, or rendering the language and assumptions of modernity useless; so much for our imagination balking at the Nazi divide. Extant ways of seeing have actually shaped perceptions of the murder of the European Jews, and have done so since the 1940s. In the light of this, the rhetoric which surrounds Holocaust memorialisation and memory, even within popular culture, and argues that the Shoah exposed a crisis of civilisation, appears to be empty. Christian discourses, the languages at the very heart of many of that civilisation’s identities, have actually helped construct the shape and texture of the Holocaust that we now see. The Church of England and the Holocaust takes up these observations as to the importance of Christian discourses in shaping the Holocaust. It will show how a 124

Rochelle G. Saidel, ‘The Role of the Holocaust in the Political Culture of Israel’, in Yehuda Bauer, Alice Eckardt, Franklin Littell and Elisabeth Maxwell (eds), Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda (Oxford, 1989), p. 1389. 125 Segev, Seventh Million, pp. 509–517. 126 Reinhold Niebuhr quoted in Steele, Christianity, Tragedy and Holocaust, p. 93. 127 Cole, Images of the Holocaust, p. 2.

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community, at the heart of the British nation, in the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s perceived, evaluated and understood Nazism and the murder of the European Jews according to its established perceptions and ways of seeing. Karl Marx observed that ‘individuals can only think thoughts that are thinkable in their society’; the Anglican Church for the most part was only able to think about the murder of the European Jews according to established assumptions, and within existing discourses. Naturally these assumptions were anchored in Christianity. Part I of this book will outline the contours of that interpretation, while Part II will consider specifically its contribution to memory. In doing so this book will first demand some revision of our understanding of Britain as bystander, and second will challenge some of the assumptions regarding the history of the Church of England in the middle of the twentieth century. By investigating the relationship between Christianity, memory and Nazism, The Church of England and the Holocaust will also complicate the established chronology of Holocaust memory. It will demonstrate that some perceptions of the murder of Europe’s Jews, if not the Holocaust as we know it, in the 1940s and 1950s were conditioned by a Christian discourse, with links throughout Europe, and not only by the political context of the burgeoning Cold War.

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Part I RESPONSES

Chapter One ‘THE STRUGGLE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM’: THE MYTH OF MARTIN NIEMÖLLER AND THE ANGLICAN UNDERSTANDING OF NAZISM

Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Holocaust dominates our understanding of the Third Reich. The Nazi state was, quintessentially, the racial state and it is the ‘Final Solution’ that seems to encapsulate the unique horrors of Nazism. Yet for most interested observers in Britain during the 1930s it was not racism, and certainly not the treatment of Germany’s Jews, that captured the iniquity of the new Nazi state. Indeed, where Nazism was seen as dangerous, racism and antisemitism, far from being understood as the central crime of the Third Reich, were interpreted (if they were seen at all) as instruments of a much wider attack on the culture and politics of the West. Similarly the Hitler regime was not interpreted as unique or singular, but part of a general dictatorial alternative to democracy that was flourishing in the ‘dark valley’ of continental Europe. News from Hitler’s Germany, at least before the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 in which Jews and Jewish property were attacked by agents of the state, was dominated by the sufferings and resistance of the Protestant churches. The German church struggle or Kirchenkampf, as the battle between parts of the churches and the state became known, was played out for English eyes in the pages of a daily press which promoted the importance of Christianity in Britain. There was fascination with the privations of German Christians, as the Nazi struggle with organised Christianity appeared to symbolise the nascent conflict between democracy and dictatorship. Central in the version of the church struggle constructed in Britain was the image of Martin Niemöller – a heroic ‘man on fire’ in the English imagination. A priest from the wealthy Berlin suburb of Dahlem, Niemöller was the leader of the Bekennende Kirche, or Confessing Church, which was set up in opposition to the state Church in 1934. That Niemöller was essentially acquitted at his trial for treason in February 1938 but then arbitrarily imprisoned in Sachsenhausen by the increasingly infamous Gestapo, appeared to eloquently articulate the growing iniquity of the German dictatorship. 31

RESPONSES

The story was no different inside the Church of England, where Anglicans, perhaps unsurprisingly, were particularly concerned by the suffering of German Protestants. Since the end of the First World War, through the burgeoning ecumenical movement, churchmen had become much closer to their continental brethren. This was particularly true for the German churches, and attempts had been made to bridge the gap between the distinct German and English theological traditions since the end of the 1920s.1 Consequently both Anglican clergy and laity followed the trials and tribulations of Niemöller and his Confessing Church with anxiety and interest – captivated by their ‘brethren in adversity’.2 Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that it was Niemöller – ‘the splendid image of a Christian conscience unbowed before a cruel and soulless tyranny’ – and the struggle he represented that shaped the Anglican understanding of the Third Reich during the 1930s.3 Analysing the way in which the Church of England constructed an image of Niemöller will therefore allow us to understand the context in which Nazism, and later the Nazi attack on first German and then European Jews, was understood. Because Niemöller was so often viewed not only in the specific context of Nazism but also in the general European context of the emerging conflict between democracy and dictatorship, between Christian civilisation and totalitarianism, deconstructing his image will demonstrate the degree to which the Church of England’s engagement with Nazism needs to be understood as interacting with its perceptions of Soviet Communism. Martin Niemöller remains ‘anti-Nazi champion’ today.4 The famous admonition of his own failings in the face of Nazi oppression is, perhaps, the most quoted statement of the Nazi era: First they came for the Communists, but I was not a communist so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat – so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews – so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.5

These words remain central, for example, to educational narratives of the Third

1 For details see Edwin Robertson, Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches (London, 1995). 2 An observation recorded in Blauenfeld to Bell, 5 February 1938, Bell Papers, Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), Vol. 10, f. 40 – Blauenfeld was the President of the administrative committee of the ecumenical ‘Life and Work’ organisation. 3 Andrew Chandler, Brethren in Adversity: Bishop George Bell, the Church of England and the Crisis of German Protestantism, 1933–39 (London, 1997), p. 23. 4 Robert Michael, ‘Theological Myth, German Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: The Case of Martin Niemöller’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 2, No. 1, 1987), p. 105. 5 The text of this speech is taken from Ruth Zerner, ‘Martin Niemöller, Activist as Bystander: The Oft Quoted Reflection’, in Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer (eds), Jewish Christian Encounters over the Centuries (New York, 1994), pp. 327–340, esp. 330. There is some dispute as to both the origins of the text and its exact make up. The speech that this confession was taken from was given to the American

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NIEMÖLLER AND ANGLICAN UNDERSTANDING OF NAZISM

Reich prominent in Britain today,6 apparently symbolising the gap between Nazism and the values of ‘Christian civilisation’.7 But this myth of Martin Niemöller was not designed solely in the post-war era, nor by Niemöller himself, but was extant throughout the later 1930s and 1940s – forged, in part, inside the Church of England. This myth, and the degree to which the Anglican Church helped construct its contours, are the focus of this first chapter; at the same time as illuminating the roots of the Anglican understanding of Nazism and its dictatorship, the interrogation of the Niemöller myth will begin to uncover the contribution that images constructed in the Anglican community have made to memory. Adolf Hitler’s appointment at the helm of a new ‘revolutionary’ government in Germany at the end of January 1933 worried churchmen and the wider Anglican community. The new government appeared, because of the totality of its demands on citizens and the extent of its ideological claims, to be on course for an inevitable conflict with the Christian faith.8 Such anxiety was originally tempered by the suggestion that Hitler was shackled by his conservative coalition partners.9 Combined with a belief that the Treaty of Versailles had been morally unjust, this originally clouded some views of Nazism. Indeed many in the Church of England were concerned that England, and the international community, held a particular moral responsibility for German national bitterness and therefore the rise of Hitler.10 But, the onward march of German dictatorship soon dispersed this confusion, and the Church became increasingly forthright in public criticism of the Nazi state. In the first months of 1933 it was particularly the suffering of Jews which perturbed, especially the bishops of the Church. Cosmo Lang, for example, protested publicly in the House of Lords against the boycott of Jewish shops in April of 1933.11 Yet by the end of 1933 more general subjects had captured the Anglican imagination. The concentration camps, the progress of dictatorship and the sufferings of German Protestants were added to the vices that Anglican

congress in 1963. However, Niemöller’s words were not contemporaneously recorded. As such elements have been added, and subtracted, in various accounts. For example dominant in America in the 1960s was the removal of the communists, conversant with the demands of McCarthyist propaganda, and (incredibly) the addition of the Catholics – the fact that the Nazis never ‘came’ for the Catholics notwithstanding. 6 See for example Remembering Genocides: Lessons for the Future, an education pack produced by the Department for Education and Employment, 2000, p. 18. This pack was sent to all schools for use on the first Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2001. 7 Daphne Hampson, ‘The British Response to the German Church Struggle’, D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1973, p. 306. 8 Cosmo Lang to H.N. Bate (Dean of York), 30 April 1933, printed in Chandler, Brethren, p. 45. 9 See for example The Guardian, 3 February 1933, p. 67 – in which Hitler is described as being ‘imprisoned’ in a responsible conservative coalition. 10 Catherine Ann Cline, ‘Ecumenism and Appeasement: The Bishops of the Church of England and the Treaty of Versailles’, The Journal of Modern History (Vol. 61, No. 4, Dec. 1989), pp. 683–703. 11 See Andrew Chandler, ‘A Question of Fundamental Principles: The Church of England and the Jews of Germany 1933–37’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1993), p. 234.

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commentators saw in Nazism.12 Interest in the Reichstag Fire trial was, for example, incessant. The suggestion that the defendant, Marius van der Lubbe, had been framed by the German government seemed to be representative of Nazi ruthlessness, something that could be compared directly with the behaviour of Fascists in Italy.13 Protests from the Anglican archbishops gave expression to this general sense of unease at the Nazis’ dictatorial methods. At the end of 1933 William Temple set in motion a letter writing campaign against the perceived and generalised brutality of the concentration camps, expanding on the particular suffering of the Jewish community that Lang had drawn attention to. Temple’s protests by ‘Friends of Germany’ articulated disappointment that such uncivilised methods were being employed at the German heart of European civilisation.14 Whatever the focus of Anglican protests in the first months of the Hitler dictatorship, they were often tortuous in their development and perhaps seem rather timid. The political responsibilities of being the established Church in England seemed to proscribe more vociferous intervention. The Church perceived itself as, and more importantly believed that others regarded it as, the official moral conscience of the nation. As such, she often behaved in a manner one might expect of a branch of the state.15 The possible diplomatic effects of protests against the actions of any sovereign foreign power were constantly, and agonisingly, weighed before any public statement could be made. Before Lang could articulate concern over anti-Jewish measures in 1933 for example, he was involved in countless meetings with the Foreign Office to discuss the possible ramifications of his protest.16 Equally, William Temple’s protest over Nazi brutality was hampered by continual procrastination while the diplomatic impact of protest from the Archbishop of York was assessed.17 Yet from the beginning of 1934 many bishops were inspired by a single issue in

12

As an example of the shifting focus of Anglican interest in the Third Reich see The Guardian throughout 1933. Although originally Nazism was seen as primarily anti-Jewish, by the end of the year anti-Jewishness is just proposed as an example of the Nazis’ repressive control tendencies. See The Guardian, 31 March 1933, p. 215; 7 April 1933, p. 246; and 28 April 1933, p. 291, for examples of representations of Nazism where anti-Jewishness is at the forefront, while The Guardian, 20 October 1933, p. 719, and 29 December 1933, p. 903 show the beginnings of a tendency to represent Nazism through the treatment of the German churches. 13 See The Guardian, 3 November 1933, p. 751 for a report on the fire and the subsequent trial which suggested that this was an indicator of the new style of government in Germany. 14 For Temple’s letters of protest regarding the concentration camps see Temple Papers, LPL, Vol. 25, ff. 7–94. Temple attempted to organise a letter to be sent to Hitler, signed by notable British figures concerned with Germany. Other signatories were to include J.M. Keynes and G.M. Trevelyan. See also Alan M. Suggate, William Temple and Christian and Social Ethics Today (Edinburgh, 1987), p. 174. 15 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, 1986), pp. 252–258. 16 For Lang’s prevarication see Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (Oxford, 1994), p. 149, and for a contemporary observation of Canterbury’s concern for ‘diplomacy’ in the response to the Nazi campaign against the Jews see the Samuel Rich Diaries, 30 March and 18 April 1933, MS 168/AJ217/30, Southampton University Archives (SUA). 17 For example Temple wrote to George Bell seeking reassurances about the possible ramifications of his leading a protest against the Nazi concentration camps, see Temple to Bell, 3 March 1934, Temple Papers, Vol. 25, f. 8.

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Germany, and began to operate outside this diplomatic mindset, protesting loudly over the suffering of German Protestants – which by then seemed to demand the attention of the Anglican community. The Canterbury Convocation, in effect the law making body of the Church, unambiguously declared the ‘Christian faith imperilled’ in Germany in June 1934, and several speakers spoke candidly of a struggle for the soul of Germany between paganism and Christianity.18 Protests over the issue continued to be heard in Convocation throughout the 1930s.19 There remained sporadic engagement with the subject of antisemitism throughout 1934 and 1935: for example the Bishop of Durham suggested, in response to the Nuremberg Laws, that Christianity must bear its share of responsibility for the development of racially based anti-Jewish prejudice.20 But attention given to the persecution of Germany’s Christian community far outweighed any interest in Jewish suffering.21 Attention to the problems facing the German churches was consistent. The ecclesiastical press disseminated all publicly available information, while the institutional church received constant reports on the situation of the German Protestant churches via the Council for Foreign Relations and in the later 1930s the German Church Committee – bodies through which it drew attention to the German Protestant plight.22 George Bell was particularly influential in galvanising opinion in favour of the Confessing Church in Germany. He kept up a consistent letter writing campaign in The Times highlighting the detention of Protestant ministers in the Third Reich. Utilising his position as chair of the ecumenical ‘Life and Work’ movement, Bell even sought to intervene directly in the crisis of German Christianity. Letters to the German churches warned of the ‘deepening concern’ of the international Christian community at the limits the state seemed to be placing on Christian freedoms. Bell also pursued various trips to Germany to seek information on the church struggle for those thirsty for detail at home.23 He met Niemöller on a number of occasions, a man whom he considered to be a ‘real inspiration . . . like a man on fire’.24 Bell also set up a refugee organisation to campaign for Protestant victims of Nazi racial policy, the Church of England Committee for Non-Aryan Christians.25 18 19 20

Chronicle of Convocation, 7 June 1934 (Vol. XLV), pp. 283–296. Chandler, Brethren, pp. 29–30. For example, Henson berated the Church Assembly in 1935 as to the dangers of Nazi antisemitism, and suggested that Christianity had to bear some responsibility for the development of that antisemitism. See Church Assembly Report of Proceedings (Vol. XVI, 1935), p. 464 – cited in Richard Gutteridge, ‘The Churches and the Jews in England, 1933–45’, in Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes Flohr (eds), Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism (Jerusalem, 1987), p. 357. 21 Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39 (Oxford, 1983), p. 251. 22 Chandler, Brethren in Adversity, p. 14. 23 Robertson, Unshakeable Friend, p. 32. 24 Bell, ‘Memorandum on a visit to Germany’, February 1937, printed in Chandler, Brethren in Adversity, p. 123. 25 Ronald Jasper, George Bell: Bishop of Chichester (London, 1967). p. 146. For further details see Chana Kotzin, ‘Christian Responses in Britain to Jewish Refugees from Europe 1933–39’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southampton, 2000.

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In the historiography of the church struggle, Bell is remembered as having had both a galvanising effect on protests and as having convinced members of the Nazi administration that the Kirchenkampf was damaging their international reputation.26 The Bishop of Chichester was by no means alone in his efforts, Archbishop Lang in particular sought to bring pressure to bear on the German embassy in London and thereby impact on church policy in Berlin.27 Other members of the Episcopate spoke candidly, and publicly, about their outrage at the German government’s treatment of the Protestant churches. For example Basil Staunton Batty, the Bishop of Europe, warned Germans that the concerns of the Christian faith were international and therefore that any attack on Christianity would cause international indignation.28 So what was it that captivated the Anglican imagination? A very brief description of the church struggle is necessary here, for the sake of context. For the most part the German Protestant community, and certainly its clergy, had been attracted to the Nazi regime in 1933.29 Although institutionally and doctrinally diverse German Protestantism was broadly conservative.30 The Lutheran commitment to the two kingdoms of ‘throne and altar’ and the attendant abdication of political participation ensured it was also susceptible to the siren calls of political authoritarianism. The National Socialist idea of ‘positive Christianity’,31 for example, appeared to promise German Protestants the restoration of links between church and state after the secular constitution of the Weimar era and was therefore very appealing.32 There were also less benign ideological links between religious conservatism and radical nationalism in the late 1920s. German Protestants commonly welcomed Hitler’s defence of the fatherland against the degeneracy of the Weimar Years, and many, including Martin Niemöller, also shared 26 27 28 29

John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (London, 1968) p. 83. Chandler, Brethren in Adversity, pp. 24–31. Ibid., p. 21. Doris L. Bergen, ‘Between God and Hitler: German Military Chaplains and the Crimes of the Third Reich’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Religion and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), p. 128. See also J.R.C. Wright, Above Parties: The Political Attitudes of the German Protestant Church Leadership: 1918–1933 (Oxford, 1974), p. 110. Wright places emphasis on the tension between ecclesiastical and secular visions of the relationship between church and state, rather than the uniformity of their secular political outlook. 30 At this point German Protestantism was in no way unified, and indeed reflected the federalism of the 1871 German constitution as each state had its own, at times theologically distinctive, Protestant church. See Andrew Chandler (ed.), The Moral Imperative: New Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist Germany (Boulder, 1998), p. 5. 31 See point 24 of the programme of the National Socialist German Workers Party, Doc. 3 in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Nazism 1919–45, Vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–34 (Exeter, 1983), p. 16. For an analysis of the idea of ‘positive Christianity’ see Richard Steigman-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 13–51. 32 James Bentley, ‘British and German High Churchmen in the Struggle against Hitler’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1972), pp. 233–50. It would be a misrepresentation to imply that the Weimar state had been entirely secular. The constitution indeed theoretically denied the existence of a ‘state church’, but in practice the legislation to affirm this secularity was never put in place. As such on a practical level the Protestant evangelical church in Weimar Germany still levied a compulsory church tax, despite this being contrary to the constitutional spirit of the state.

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Hitlerian assumptions regarding the pernicious influence of German Jews. There is little doubt that the German Protestant community welcomed the salvation offered by the Führer. Otto Dibelius, superintendent of Berlin and future leading member of mainstream Protestant opposition, hailed the opening of the new parliament in March 1933 (the parliament which would acquiesce in the construction of the Nazi dictatorship) as offering a return to ‘rul[e] in God’s name’ against ‘those who bury the foundations of state order, above all against those who destroy honour with vituperative and cruel words that scorn faith, [and] vilify death for the Fatherland’.33 Despite this undoubted enthusiasm for the new Germany in 1933, large swathes of Protestant clergy were soon drawn into conflict with the new regime. Ironically, friction emerged over Nazi attempts to alter the relationship between state and church. In part Nazism had been attractive to Protestants because of their desire for a state that acknowledged the existence of the churches, and indeed their role at the centre of German national life.34 However, the majority of German Protestant clergy remained as committed to the independence of the church from the state. The historic mission of state and church were viewed as interdependent, but the new Nazi state wished to assert the supremacy of the state, the triumph of the throne over the altar.35 As a part of their general project to bring all public organisations under state control, the Nazis sought to unify the diverse Protestant churches in a single Reich Church and under the leadership of a single Bishop or Reichbischof. Despite Lutheran unease, protests did not emerge over the co-ordination of the churches but in the restriction of freedoms inherent in this process of Gleichschaltung. The new state strongly favoured one of the candidates in the election for the Reichbischof. Ludwig Müller was reputedly a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, who consequently tried to ensure that the former Army chaplain was elected to this new office. Müller was a member of the Deutsche Christen, or the German Christians, who formed in 1932 as a Christian auxiliary to the Nazi party – the logical fulfilment of the commitment to positive Christianity. The Deutsche Christen embraced 1933 as a moment of revelation, proclaimed the salvific qualities of the Führer and essentially believed that the new state was divine. They also sought accommodation with Nazi antisemitism through the de-judaisation of Christianity and the removal of references to its Jewish heritage, most notably of course the entire Old Testament.36 33

Cited in Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York, 1992), p. 28. 34 For a brief analysis of the development of German Protestant thought and the essential unity of conceptions of the state despite the variety of theological developments since the reformation see Alastair Mcgrath (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Modern Christian Thought (Oxford, 1993), pp. 489–510. 35 See John Conway, ‘The Political Theology of Martin Niemöller’, German Studies Review (Vol. 9, No. 9, 1986), pp. 521–546, in which Conway discusses how Niemöller justified the subversion of the state within his theological conviction of the centrality of that state. 36 Doris Bergen, The Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, 1996), and for a specific discussion of the theology and theological perversion of the Deutsche Christen see

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It was Deutsche Christen theology, the attempt to design a new distinctively German theology in which God was perceived incarnate in the new German state, combined with the attempts by the state to directly shape the practical and theological make-up of the new Reich church, that first raised the ire of dissenting Protestant pastors in the Third Reich. Such theology came close, for its opponents, to the doctrinal indulgences that the Reformation had originally reacted against. The elevation of the state and the concomitant denial of the validity of scriptural revelation appeared to place a barrier between the individual and God. That the state sought to intervene in the elections for Reich Bishop also politicised this theological dispute. Intervention in the Reich Church elections was only the first Nazi attempt to co-ordinate German Protestantism within a wider process of Gleichschaltung. On 5 September 1933, simultaneous to Müller’s acclamation as head of the unified church, the Prussian synod passed a resolution applying the ‘Aryan paragraph’ of the new civil service legislation to the church. The ‘Aryan paragraph’ denied the right of Jewish converts to Christianity to practise the ministry.37 Whilst the legislation had minimal practical impact (there were very few ‘non-Aryan Christian’ pastors) the church’s adoption of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ amounted to a racial redefinition of the Kingdom of God. Such state intervention in the community of the Church challenged the central tenets of Christian doctrine by biologically defining who could or could not be regarded as Christian. For the non Deutsche Christen majority the ‘Aryan paragraph’ questioned not only the divinity of ordination, but also the idea that the proselytising church could offer salvation to all through the sacrament of baptism.38 Ultimately it was the ‘Aryan paragraph’ that prompted action from inside the Protestant Churches. Martin Niemöller formed the Pastor’s Emergency League (PEL) on 21 September 1933 as a focus for dissent. The league was the kernel of ecclesiastical opposition to Hitler, and would become the Confessing Church – the central dissenting Christian organisation in the Third Reich. Those joining the league were called to protest by Niemöller’s invocation of Matthew xxviii: ‘go ye out therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy Ghost’,39 and were also instructed to make a solemn undertaking ‘to acknowledge the binding authority of the Holy Scripture’ which the

Susanne Heschel, ‘When Jesus was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda’, in Bartov and Mack, In God’s Name, pp. 79–105. 37 See the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’, 7 April 1933, Doc. 151 in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Nazism, Vol 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Exeter, 1984), pp. 29–13. 38 For a narrative of the passage of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ see Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent: The Persecution of the Jews (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2000), pp. 8–96. See also Richard Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth for the Dumb! The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879–1950 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 91–152. 39 Memo from George Bell to the Church of England Council for Foreign Relations in which Bell reports on a visit to Berlin 28 January – 1 February 1937, in Chandler, Brethren in Adversity, p. 123.

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‘Aryan paragraph’ appeared to challenge.40 The essence of Confessing church protest against the imposition of the Aryan paragraph was then theological, in defence of baptism, and not a political attack on the Nazi regime, nor a defence of ‘non-Aryans’ or Jews. Consequently, Niemöller’s call to arms also included a pledge of allegiance to Hitler which greeted ‘this decisive hour for Volk and Fatherland’ with ‘thanks’ to ‘the Führer . . . for the manly deed and clear word which preserve Germany’s honour.’41 Niemöller’s assertion of political loyalty indicated the anomaly of his, and all ecclesiastical, protest during the Third Reich: that it coexisted with genuine enthusiasm for the new political era and the defence of ‘Germany’s honour’. A Confessing Church pastor told an Anglican observer of the church struggle in July 1933 that his objection to Nazi church policy was an expression of belief in the ‘spiritual independence of the church’ which did not temper his ‘whole hearted support’ for Hitler.42 Indeed dissenting Christians appeared to approve of much that the new state was undertaking, including its campaign against German Jews. Some German Protestants, who would later be cast as dissidents, for example, welcomed the 1 April 1933 boycott of Jewish shops,43 while later racial definitions of German secular society such as the Nuremberg Laws drew no condemnation from dissenting churches.44 Continual efforts by the state to regulate the churches, through the appointment of a Minister of Church Affairs, or the creation of committees to standardise and therefore limit Christian teaching, did however cause protests from the pulpits of the Confessing Church. In their efforts to demonstrate that opposition to the state was not political, Confessing Church pastors were often involved in active co-operation with the state. For example, church administrations and parish registrars actively co-operated with the redefinition of the political (if not spiritual) community of Germany in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws.45 During 1936 the Confessing Church invited the Gestapo to investigate the leak of a document which apparently pointed to a more fundamental opposition on the part of the church. A Jewish lawyer, Friedrich Weissler, acting on behalf of the Church, was alleged to

40 41

Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth for the Dumb!, p. 99. Cited in Wolfgang Gerlach, ‘From Pirate on the High Seas to Angel of Peace: Submarine Commander, “Freikorps” Officer, Pastor, Hitler Opponent, Concentration Camp Prisoner, Conscience of the Nation’, in Hubert Locke and Marcia Sachs Littell (eds), Remembrance and Recollections: Essays on the Centennial Year of Martin Niemöller and Reinhold Niebuhr and the Fiftieth Year of the Wannsee Conference (Lanham, 1996), p. 45. 42 From an interview with an anonymous pastor quoted by A.S. Duncan-Jones in a memo prepared for the Church of England Council for Foreign Relations, 26 July 1933. This document is reprinted in Chandler, Brethren in Adversity, pp. 16–19. 43 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, p. 35. 44 Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth for the Dumb!, p. 153. 45 Annegret Ehrman, ‘From Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy: The Case of the Mischlinge’, in Michael Berenbaum (ed.), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Re-examined (Bloomington, 2002), p. 126. Ehrman outlines the contribution that Churches, including Confessing Churches, made to the definition of the Mischlinge.

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have been responsible and was arrested. He was subsequently murdered in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Weissler has been celebrated as the first martyr of the Confessing Church.46 But his martyrdom could be argued to have been a direct consequence of the desire of the Confessing Church to be seen as apolitical. The 1938 confessional synod’s decision to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer is another example of an ostentatious attempt by the Church to demonstrate the non-political nature of their protest. Seen collectively, declarations of political loyalty, and co-operation with organisations which enforced the homogeneity of the Third Reich can hardly be regarded of themselves as apolitical acts.47 In fact they are acts which were laced not with protest, or even abdication, but with tangible co-operation in the pursuit of the goals and achievements of the Nazi regime; eloquent examples of the self regulating and denunciatory atmosphere of the consensual German dictatorship.48 Despite such efforts to combine spiritual and theological opposition to Nazi church policy with political co-operation with other aspects of the state, the Confessing Church was regarded as a source of political opposition by the authorities. As Karl Barth noted at the time ‘in the totalitarian state, any real assertion of the first commandment, any assertion of the freedom and sovereignty of the Gospel, any activity incidental to a proper and independent life of the church is bound to be given the character of political rebellion’.49 Martin Niemöller ultimately paid the price for this when, as leader of the Confessing Church, he was arrested for active political agitation in July 1937. Niemöller was certainly not the first pastor to be arrested: many (whose sermons were surveyed by the Gestapo) had been detained since 1933, many more had fled abroad, for example to Britain, however, Niemöller was the most famous. In Britain, concern for the German Protestant church reached fever pitch after Niemöller’s arrest. News of his incarceration was greeted with outrage by the secular and religious press.50 Appalled bishops celebrated their hero Niemöller as a defender of Christianity itself. Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, described him as one of the ‘leading spirits of the resistance’ in Nazi Germany.51 George Bell wrote of Niemöller’s defence not of his church but of ‘Christian ethics’.52 The Dean of Chichester, Arthur Duncan-Jones, portrayed Niemöller and Hitler as implacable foes ‘struggling for the soul of Germany’. Hitler represented the

46

For Dorothy Buxton, for example, Weissler is the first martyr of the war of extermination against Christianity. See Dorothy Buxton, The Church Struggle in Germany: A Survey of Four Crucial Years by an English Christian (London, 1937), pp. 32–34. 47 Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth, p. 287. 48 See Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–45 (Oxford, 1992), and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001). See also Eric Johnson, The Nazi Terror: Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 2000). 49 Karl Barth, The German Church Struggle: Tribulation and Promise (London, 1938), p. 3. 50 See The Times, 2 July 1937, p. 10. 51 Henson to The Times, 2 July 1937. 52 Bell to The Times, 3 July 1937.

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‘forces of ruthless domination which fears neither God nor man’, Niemöller ‘the forces of a fearless Christian faith’.53 Niemöller was tried behind closed doors from the beginning of February 1938, charged with being ‘one of the most extreme members of the Confessing Church’ who indulged in ‘malicious criticism’ of members of the government ‘calculated to undermine the confidence of the people in their political leaders’.54 Apparently sympathetic to Niemöller, his judges effectively acquitted him of these crimes, finding him a ‘tragic example of divided loyalties’ between state, confession and church – his sentence amounted to less than the time that he had already served.55 But there was to be no freedom for Niemöller, and he was taken by the Gestapo to Sachsenhausen immediately following his trial. He would be incarcerated for the next eight years, designated the personal prisoner of the Führer. Sachsenhausen, along with Dachau, had symbolic meaning for British observers of Germany as the representative institutions of Nazism.56 As the most high-profile victim of these iniquitous establishments Niemöller’s image carried the weight of that symbolism, and he became represented as Nazism’s primary, and universal, victim. Niemöller appeared to be the archetype of resistance in Hitler’s Germany,57 which it was accordingly suggested came only from the churches.58 For George Bell, for example, Niemöller symbolised ‘all those who are persecuted for their faith and their race’ (my italics).59 Elevating Martin Niemöller to the status of primary victim of the Nazi regime captured none of his, or his churches’ ambiguous relationship with authority or ideology in the Third Reich. His sanctification also implied that the defining feature of Nazism lay in its opposition to Christianity. Dorothy Buxton, one of the most influential lay members of the Church,60 for example identified a Nazi ‘war of extermination’ against Christianity, suggesting that Nazism was effectively a ‘war against Christian theology’ and that Martin Niemöller was a casualty of that conflict.61 Britain was thus presented with a Niemöller who stood tall against the sinister forces of

53

A.S. Duncan-Jones, ‘Introduction’ to Martin Niemöller, From U-Boat to Concentration Camp: The Autobiography of Martin Niemöller with his Further Story by the Dean of Chichester (London, 1939), cited in Hampson, ‘The British Response’, p. 302. 54 Schmidt, Pastor Niemöller, p. 108. 55 Ibid., p. 114. 56 Andrew Sharf, The British Press and the Jews under Nazi Rule (London, 1964), pp. 80–84. 57 Keith Robbins, ‘Martin Niemöller, the German Church Struggle and English Opinion’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Vol. XXI, No. 2, April 1970), p. 167. 58 The Berlin correspondent of The Times for example reported that the ‘only resistance’ in Nazi Germany ‘came from the Churches’. The Times, 3 July 1937, p. 14. 59 Bell to McCormick, 12 August 1938, Bell Papers, Vol. 10, ff. 129–130. 60 Dorothy Buxton had the ear of the Episcopate. The files of George Bell and William Temple at Lambeth Palace are full of correspondence with her. Consistent in her interest in the affairs of continental Europe, which was facilitated by her marriage to Charles Buxton – Chairman of the Labour Party Foreign Affairs Advisory Committee – Buxton worked tirelessly to bring attention to the sufferings of the ‘non-Aryan’ Christians in Germany. See Keith Robbins, ‘Church and Politics: Dorothy Buxton and the German Church Struggle’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Church, Society and Politics (Oxford, 1975), pp. 419–433. 61 Buxton, The Church Struggle in Germany, p. 6.

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repression in an authoritarian Germany, something at root explicable by the identification of Nazism as the antithesis of Christianity.62 Although the unambiguous and resistant image of Niemöller did dominate, this is not to say that there were no alternative interpretations put forward inside the Anglican community. Arthur Headlam, pre-war chairman of the Church of England Council for Foreign Relations and Bishop of Gloucester, was, for example, quick to defend the incarceration of the Dahlem minister. As part of his remit as Council for Foreign Relations chair Headlam was dispatched to Germany on a fact-finding mission in the summer of 1938, where he met members of the Nazi government to discuss the sufferings of the German churches and represent the concerns of the Church of England. Headlam’s subsequent report endorsed Nazi criticism of the ‘political parsons’ of the Confessing Church.63 Headlam’s interpretation of Christian protest in Germany did not differ, at root, from that which underpinned the image of Niemöller that dominated the Anglican imagination. Those who lionised Niemöller massively expanded the significance of his protest as a general, and political opposition to the state. Headlam, and his secretary Edwyn Hoskins,64 agreed – they simply dissented as to the desirability of that protest. In other words there appeared no fundamental disagreement over the nature of Niemöller’s activities, just their meaning. Headlam had previously argued publicly that politics had no part in the remit of any church and that the Nazi state had every right to define Niemöller’s activities as political.65 He also held a wider political sympathy with the Nazi project and a well documented antipathy toward the ‘not altogether pleasant’ Jews, whom he believed were ‘infecting’ Germany with Bolshevism.66 Headlam’s antipathy to Niemöller and the Confessing Church provoked anger amongst fellow Anglicans, because it seemed based on an attraction to Nazi authoritarianism. Attempts were made to distance the Church community from Headlam’s rhetoric, not least by George Bell who became embroiled in an angry exchange in the Church Assembly and then more publicly in The Times, which as so often in the 1930s provided a forum for Anglican interpretations of the world. 62

See Dorothy Buxton’s introduction to Christendom on Trial: Documents of the German Church Struggle, published in the Friends of Europe series. The publication date of the pamphlet is unclear; for a copy see the Singer Papers, MS 94, Parkes Papers, 29/3/4, SUA. 63 11 July 1938. Confidential. ‘Visit to Germany’ by A.C. Headlam. Lang Papers, LPL, Vol. 320, f. 170. I warmly thank Chana Kotzin for drawing my attention to this reference. 64 Sir Edwyn Hoskyns was Dean of Corpus Christi in Cambridge and a theologian of international repute. He was particularly close to Gerhard Kittel, the German Protestant theologian, who was close to the Nazi party (he lectured in Cambridge in 1937 wearing his party badge) and developed a theological justification for the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Hoskyns died in 1937. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 321–324. 65 Cited in Ronald Jasper, Arthur Cayley Headlam: Life and Letters of a Bishop (London, 1960), pp. 296–298. 66 Headlam to The Gloucester Diocesan Magazine, August 1933, see Kirsty Patterson, ‘The Church of England and the Nazi Regime: The Bishop of Gloucester, Sympathiser or Appeaser?’, B.A. Dissertation, University of Southampton, 1994.

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But, Bell’s argument against Headlam’s accusation that Niemöller was a political activist seemed to contradict his own, and the general Anglican faith, in the totality of Niemöller’s rejection of the Nazi state. ‘What is his crime?’ Bell asked rhetorically. ‘The truth’, he answered, ‘is that he is a preacher of the gospel of God, and that he preaches without flinching.’67 Bell’s suggestion was clearly that Niemöller was not acting politically at all, but simply defending religious teaching. This was of course a defendable position, but it seemed to sit rather awkwardly with the previously discussed unambiguous Anglican celebrations of Niemöller as an ‘out and out resistor’. After the controversy and disagreements between the Bishops of Chichester and Gloucester, contradictions and confusions were all too evident in the Church’s portrayal of the Kirchenkampf. The ecumenical German Church Committee was even convened with the specific purpose of fostering a greater public understanding of the church struggle. Its report attacked the portrayal of the Confessing Church as political opponents of the Hitler regime.68 The committee stated ‘it is a struggle that we usually misunderstand. The Confessing church is not consciously defending freedom against absolutism or democracy against dictatorship; it is not in political opposition to the German state in any sense we normally assume’69 (my italics). Despite appearances to the contrary then, the ambiguities and ambivalences of the Confessing Church’s relationship with authority were not lost on those concerned within the Church hierarchy, only in the narratives of protest that they publicly constructed. Indeed, Niemöller had himself sought to disavow them of the idea that his was a political protest. He stated starkly in a report for the Church of England that his opposition to the Nazi state was the rejection of ‘the new and false meaning of salvation’, nothing more.70 Niemöller had also previously recorded his ‘anger’ at his characterisation as a political agitator in the foreign news media.71 George Bell had also personally discovered the limits of Church protest in Germany in his dealings with German Protestants in the ecumenical movement.72 It is hardly remarkable therefore, that Niemöller’s Anglican supporters were prepared to confirm and further his claims of political neutrality, and throughout the course of the church struggle the Anglican Church searched for the reaction that would provide the most help for their German brethren.73 Not that Anglicans were prepared to articulate simply the self-image of the Confessing Church. Instead an interpretation was offered which supported the idea of political neutrality, but which highlighted the deeper significance of 67 68 69 70 71

Bell to The Times, 3 July 1937. Hampson, ‘The British Response to the German Church Struggle’, p. 272. ‘The Lessons and Claims of the German Church Conflict’, in Bell Papers, Vol. 10, f. 174. Martin Niemöller, ‘What we mean by the Confessing Church’, undated, Bell Papers, Vol. 10, ff. 13–14. Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth, p. 131 – this is anger directed at a profile of Niemöller in the Morning Post in 1934. 72 Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent, pp. 49–63. 73 Robbins, ‘Martin Niemöller’, p. 157.

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Christian resistance in the Third Reich. It was this ultimate meaning which held together all positive interpretations of Niemöller from inside the Anglican community. In the introduction to a book designed to re-educate the public as to the theological basis of the Kirchenkampf, George Bell acknowledged that the conflict was misunderstood in Britain. Nonetheless, Bell argued that this misunderstanding was irrelevant. The essence of the struggle, he wrote, transcended the nature of the conflict itself. The fact that the protest was resistance against authoritarianism was the crucial factor, Niemöller’s assertion of the ‘faith of the gospel’ in the face of the totalitarian threat was enough to ensure that he became a ‘counter symbol’ to Hitler, regardless of their shared politics.74 Duncan-Jones concurred, writing in his misleadingly titled The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany, that: what gives it [the Kirchenkampf] so great an importance, a significance that reaches far beyond the limits of the particular conflict, is that it has been maintained when every other freedom of thought has been subdued . . . It is seen to be true that in the last resort the dignity of the human spirit can only be preserved by those who are anchored in eternity and that its greatest heights are reached precisely by those who, conscious of their own infirmities, commit their cause to a higher power.75 (my italics)

It seems then that Niemöller’s supporters within the Church of England achieved two mutually exclusive interpretations of his protest. These interpretations were reconciled by universalising his battle. By defining protest through its most obvious characteristic, that it was an opposition to Nazism or more precisely the more universal authoritarian or totalitarian enemy, the ambiguities of opposition ceased to be important for the 1930s’ Anglican imagination: any opposition would do. Indeed the Confessing Church’s assault on authoritarianism dictated that the Anglican Church manufacture an image of Martin Niemöller barely conversant with either reality or the self-image of the Confessing Church. Bell’s campaign of letter writing to The Times across the period of Niemöller’s incarceration and trial was, the Bishop of Chichester himself admitted, motivated by an appreciation of ‘the importance of keeping Niemöller’s name and life before the public’.76 It is in this sense of the wider import and significance of Niemöller’s protest that one can begin to identify the basic contours of the Anglican understanding of Nazism. The construction of Christianity and Nazism as polar opposites flattened both in the Anglican imagination. The fundamental differences between Anglican 74

Hampson, ‘The British Response’, p. 301 – the book was written by the German Lutheran pastor who spent much of the Third Reich in London, Klaus Hildebrandt (although Hildebrandt, who had served under Niemöller, insisted that the book be published anonymously) in order to reverse popular misconceptions as to the nature of the struggle, although this was a purpose that was hardly served by Bell’s dismissal of the actualities of the protest in the introduction. Klaus Hildebrandt, Pastor Niemöller and his Creed (London, 1939). 75 A.S. Duncan-Jones, The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany (London, 1938), p. 269. 76 Bell to Elmhurst, 8 April 1938, Bell Papers, Vol. 10, f. 93.

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and Confessing Church theologies were ignored, as Niemöller was disassociated from the theological particularities of Confessing Church conflict with the Nazi state and painted as the defender of general values of ‘freedom and Christianity’.77 Such a general understanding of Christianity suggests the increasing importance of ecumenical thought within the Church after the end of the First World War. The particularity of Nazism was also simplified, using the idea of ‘totalitarianism’. This was again representative of a more general tendency, an ecumenical interpretation of the dictatorial alternatives to democracy. The ecumenical movement had, for example, deliberately defined itself as opposed to the values of the ‘totalitarian’ state at the Rengsdorf conference of the ‘Life and Work’ group in March 1933.78 And, in the aftermath of the Munich agreement Archbishops Lang and Temple had set about a systematic articulation of the essential incompatibility of the Christian faith and the ‘totalitarian’ state.79 Lang and Temple echoed American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding that the evils of totalitarianism were to be found in the state’s inherent self-glorification of man as a replacement for God.80 ‘Power politics’ were, it was argued, an ‘essential contradiction of Christianity’,81 because the all conquering and dictatorial state, as the organised will of man, necessarily obscured God. William Temple went on to explain this contradiction fully: the totalitarian state involved a conception of personality incompatible with the Christian doctrines of God, and of man, for it was bound to regard and to treat the individual man as having this meaning and value of his relationship to itself. . . . [in the totalitarian state] man existed for the state, which was itself regarded as the community organised as a self conscious unit. Such a theory conflicted directly with the conception of man as having his ultimate meaning and value in his direct relationship with God.82

Such a definition of totalitarianism obviously had an inherent similarity to the Confessing Christian diagnosis of the evils of Nazism. It was also something around which the disparate Anglican community could unite. William Ralph Inge, who was so contemptuous of Temple’s politics, agreed entirely with this theological rendering of the totalitarian threat.83 Such a manipulation also highlighted both that Nazism was understood as a manifestation of a wider

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George Bell to The Times cited in Andrew Chandler, ‘The Church of England and Nazi Germany 1933–45’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1990, p. 61. 78 This statement was made unambiguously at the Rengsdorf conference of ‘Life and Work’ in March of 1933. See Jasper, George Bell, p. 98. 79 For Lang see Norman, Church and Society, p. 361, and for Temple see The Times, 5 October 1938, p. 9. 80 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘The Christian Church in the Secular Age’, in Robert McAfee Brown, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven, 1986), pp. 79–92. 81 Lang quoted in Norman, Church and Society, p. 361. 82 Temple quoted in The Times, 5 October 1938, p. 9. 83 William Ralph Inge, Our Present Discontents (London, 1938), p. 26.

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phenomena and that racial policy was not at the forefront of the Anglican interpretation of the Third Reich. In actual fact, as it was in the 1950s, the totalitarian concept was employed by interwar Anglicans as a means of equating the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships as the epitome of ‘all that was abhorred in the modern world’.84 Since 1917 Soviet Communism had provoked a great range of reactions in Britain – engendering extreme fear and inspiring utter devotion.85 Reactions within the British Christian community while still diverse, were perhaps less evenly divided than in the secular sphere, with predictably a large anti-Communist majority. For English Christians the most significant feature of the Russian dictatorship was its naked atheism, and as such its anti-Christian orientation. That such atheism was presented as a crusading matter only added to the concern. Christian intellectuals warned throughout the 1930s that it was not the secularism of the communist faith that represented its challenge to Christianity, but the religiosity of that secularism. As Inge wrote in unequivocal terms, the threat of communism was born from the fact that it was a ‘satanic anti-religion’,86 and an inherent threat to the continent of Europe.87 Inevitably self-avowed atheism meant that the Soviet Union had few open supporters in the Anglican Church, with Hewlett Johnson, the so called ‘Red’ Dean of Canterbury virtually alone in his enthusiasm for Stalin.88 In fact the Soviet dictatorship was, for English Christians, a much less ambiguous proposition than the pseudo-Christian rhetoric of the Hitler state. Indeed, at least before the open divisions between the Nazi government and the Confessing Church, Nazism had inspired some praise in the Anglican Church for its open anticommunism. Such anti-communism was of course much less ambiguous than Nazi anti-Christianity, as the ideological touchstone of the movement. Nazism’s popularity amongst German Christians and its oblique commitment to ‘positive Christianity’ obscured the undoubted anti-Church bent of some of its ideological authors. A marginal but not insignificant example is provided by the youthful evangelical organisation the Oxford Group Movement which celebrated Hitler as the buttress against communism. Their leader Frank Buchmann declared in 1936, ‘I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler’.89 Arthur Headlam’s famed support of Nazism was largely based on his own fears of communism, which he represented as the ‘creed of the German Jew’.90 Less problematic Anglican figures also praised the Nazi state for its opposition to the Soviet Union. Cyril Garbett, when

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R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945–1990 (London, 1993), p. 21. 85 Hastings, English Christianity, p. 311. 86 See Norman, Church and Society, pp. 350–353. 87 Adam Fox, Dean Inge (London, 1960), p. 204. 88 Ibid. 89 D.W. Bebbington, ‘The Oxford Group Movement between the Wars’, Studies in Church History (Vol. XXIII, 1986), pp. 495–507. 90 Cited in Norman, Church and Society, p. 330.

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Bishop of Winchester,91 specifically praised Germany as the western barrier against communism.92 Even in the wake of Anglican recognition of the apparent anti-Christianity of the Nazi state, Christian silences regarding communist opposition to Nazism were also telling. For example, in November 1938 the Church Times aired the following appraisal of the Third Reich. ‘If Germany had gone Bolshevist, the Communist international may have swept the continent. Since the Hitler triumph its influence has been steadily waning.’ This came in the context of a discussion of Nazism’s campaign against three ‘internationals’, the Communist International, the Jewish international, and international Christianity. The second was dismissed as a figment of the Nazi imagination, while the triumph of the latter was prayed for. The silences regarding Nazi attitudes to communism spoke loudly: there was no condemnation of this international campaign.93 Much of the discussion of Nazism’s evil in the latter 1930s involved explicit association with the evils of the Soviet Union. In actual fact Dean Inge had first made comparisons between Germany and Russia, militarism and bolshevism, during the First World War.94 In the 1930s the incompatibility of Nazism and Christianity was affirmed by comparison with communism: ‘like Bolshevism, Nazism [was] a religion’.95 The Godlessness of the Soviet Union was used as the prism through which the failings of Nazism were explained.96 The specificities of the individual dictatorships, in the Nazi case its racial discourse, were thus made irrelevant: ‘it matter[ed] nothing whether man is set up as God through an interpretation and adoption of Karl Marx, or Nordic Man as set up by Herr Rosenberg; we must denounce it’.97 At base such atheistic totalitarian instincts were for the English Christian, identical: the ‘worship of false Gods, bowing down for example to an absolute nationalism or to an absolute communism . . . [bring] ruin and death’.98 Such doctrines were equivalent and, crucially, were the opposite of the values of western civilisation.99 For Anglicans then the world was stringently bi-polar, divided between God and anti-God, between western civilisation and the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships. This division of the world was not confined to the Church of England. Stanley Baldwin and other Christian conservatives were, for example, using the concept

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Cyril Garbett was to be the Archbishop of Winchester from 1932 until 1942 when he replaced William Temple as Archbishop of York. 92 Cyril Garbett quoted in Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform: War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–45 (London, 1986), p. 97. 93 Church Times, 18 November 1938, p. 547. 94 William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays (London, 1920), p. 48. 95 Church Times, 30 September 1938, p. 323. 96 The Guardian, 30 December 1938, p. 865. 97 The Guardian, 11 March 1938, p. 155. 98 From a proposed ecumenical statement of peace in 1934, although this extract was in fact removed from the final draft sent to the press on 15 May 1934. See Lang Papers, Vol. 54. 99 See, for example, Temple’s draft document for the post-Munich conference on international relations at Lambeth Palace in November 1938. Lang Papers, Vol. 54, ff. 309–318.

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of totalitarianism in their articulation of the challenges of European politics in the 1930s. The political application of the totalitarian label rested on the provision of Christianity (and liberal democracy) as an alternative, indeed antithetical, mindset to that embodied in European dictatorship.100 Baldwin and Lang have been described as being as close as any Primate and Prime Minister could be, and on the issue of the totalitarian threat to Christian civilisation, Downing Street and Lambeth Palace were certainly united.101 Nor was an interpretation of the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships as totalitarian equivalents confined just to Britain. Christian intellectuals throughout the ecumenical West employed totalitarianism as a means of comparing the Nazi and Soviet dictatorial experiences. Paul Tillich, the German émigré theologian, compared the Russian and German assault on the rights of the individual, as did the English Catholic Christopher Dawson, and left wing intellectuals in the USA. Significantly American Protestants too attacked both the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships as interfering in individual relationships with God.102 Former Nazi sympathiser, Hermann Rauschning, followed suit with a characterisation of the Nazi state as an ‘expansion of the doctrine of socialism’, which found Nazism and Stalinist Communism as springing from the same well. Nazism, Rauschning argued, was a more complete form of the communist attack on the rights of the individual.103 In tandem both dictatorships continued, according to Rauschning, ‘the process of secularisation and revolutionisation of the last four hundred years . . . entirely alien . . . complete nothingness . . . the absolute negation of the west, of civilisation’104 (my italics). Under the influence of this discourse surrounding totalitarianism the ambivalent protest of a Protestant preacher against the theoretical freedoms of the Christian faith, became nothing less than an apocalyptic battle for western civilisation itself. Christianity and Niemöller were represented as the victims of the totalitarian vision of Nazism. As George Bell wrote in 1936, ‘the most important thing happening in the world today is the process of destruction of Christianity in Central Europe’.105 For secular commentators too, Niemöller was a ‘martyr’ the like of which were ‘too scarce’.106 For The Daily Telegraph whether ‘free or in prison’ Niemöller’s ‘moral courage will serve as a reminder to all who seek the 100

See Philip Williamson, ‘Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge 1933–40’, English Historical Review (Vol. 115, No. 462, June 2000), pp. 607–642, and Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 294–335. 101 Keith Robbins, ‘Prime Ministers and their Primates’, History Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), p. 233. 102 See Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995), pp. 32–50, for a discussion of comparisons between the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships as totalitarian in the English-speaking world in the 1930s. 103 See the extract from Hermann Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, reprinted in Neil Gregor, Nazism (Oxford, 2000), pp. 24–27. 104 Hermann Rauschning, The Beast from the Abyss, cited in Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz, p. 22. 105 Jasper, Bell, p. 231. 106 Oswald Garrison Villard, Inside Germany (London, 1939), p. 56. Villard’s reflections on Germany were published in The Daily Telegraph and broadcast to Germany on the BBC in November 1939.

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truth – in Germany or outside – that dictatorships are transient and the human soul is eternal’.107 Dissenting exiled Germans also celebrated Niemöller as symbolic of an ‘other German’ spirit, and saw his incarceration as indicative of Nazi cruelty. German refugee playwright Ernst Toller’s Pastor Hall was based on the life, and importantly imprisonment, of Martin Niemöller.108 Toller’s hero Hall (Niemöller’s alias), ‘defend[ed] the teaching of Christ against His opponents’, while other institutions capitulated in the face of Nazi domination.109 Niemöller’s status as an anti-Nazi icon ensured that his image was selected as an appropriate symbol for British war propaganda after September 1939. A white paper of 1939 proposed using ‘Aryan’ victims of Nazism like Niemöller, precisely because he met with the well-documented British desire to avoid associating their war effort with a defence of Europe’s Jews, but allowed the representation of Nazi evil.110 The Boulting brothers followed such advice and Toller’s Pastor Hall was the inspiration for their first feature film. Christianity and Nazism were portrayed as implacable opposites in the Boultings’ film, where Hall was allowed to speak for Christianity as a whole. In one memorable scene, Hall confronted the leading Nazi with these words, which emerge from a familiar narrative pattern: you and I stand face to face unmasked in the sight of God, the words I speak will belong to another not to me but they shall be spoken . . . I denounce you in the name of God and with you I denounce the rulers of this country, their whole system, this vile growth bred in darkness and in hate, which tortures bodies while it murders souls, decrees men should be kicked and beaten like beasts of the field . . . flogged to death while they whisper the words of God . . . I denounce this Hitler, architect of evil, creator of human misery.111

Contributors to a Mass Observation film directive thought Pastor Hall outlined the ‘crisis of our age’,112 others observing that it had strengthened their resolve to defeat the bestial Nazis.113 The inspirational image of Niemöller was not even confined to the British or European imagination. Niemöller was a hero of the Protestant American press from 1935 onwards and also proved to have a propaganda value in the US after it

Villard’s lament on Niemöller’s scarcity was extremely brief and as such relied on his meaning as symbol. Praise for Niemöller was combined with comparison between Germany and the Soviet Union, ‘elemental forces’ that were ‘exactly akin’. 107 The Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post, 3 March 1938. 108 Ernst Toller, Pastor Hall: A Play in Three Acts (London, 1939). 109 Ibid., p. 30. 110 Roberts to Stevens 16 Oct. 1939, PRO, FO 371/23105 C16788, cited in Tony Kushner, ‘Different Worlds: British Perceptions of the Final Solution during the Second World War’, in D. Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London, 1992), p. 250. 111 John and Roy Boulting, Pastor Hall (London, 1940). 112 Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), p. 239. 113 Mass-Observation File Report, no. 172, SUA.

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entered the war in December 1941.114 Pastor Hall was heavily censored in its original American release but this did not prevent Eleanor Roosevelt from recognising the universal significance of Niemöller’s story as ‘the story of all men who love freedom and justice so deeply that they are prepared to live eternally for their convictions’ and are the ‘common hope of humanity’.115 On both sides of the Atlantic during the war, supporters of Niemöller promoted his cause and his suffering as the ‘common, immediate concern of every Christian’.116 An American biographer went so far as to argue that Christ ‘gave his life so that Martin Niemöller, U-Boat Captain, dynamic preacher, concentration camp prisoner, might live’.117 In Britain too George Bell continued to use the image of Niemöller in war-time – claiming he was representative of the ‘single Christian front’ against Nazism.118 Services of commemoration were held annually for Niemöller as the ‘symbol of Christian fidelity in resistance to oppression’.119 For those hungry for news of Niemöller’s condition, Ministry of Information publications kept them informed of his physical and spiritual well being.120 In the immediate post-war world, it was once more the totalitarian concept that ensured that the image of Martin Niemöller escaped the paradox of his own relationship with the Nazi state. Initially Niemöller was received with suspicion. On 5 June 1945 he gave a press conference after being liberated near to the German-Italian border, in which he explained why an enduring devotion to his Fatherland had led him to offer his services as a U-Boat Captain to Hitler in 1939.121 Niemöller also declared his intention to seek material help for a destitute German population. Suddenly, for the English-speaking world, a ‘hero with limitations’ emerged. That Niemöller was willing to declare he had had no ‘political quarrel’ with Hitler was clearly disturbing for, at the very least, the British and American press.122 May and June 1945 became months in which the correspondence pages of the serious press in Britain were preoccupied with Niemöller, the fallen idol. Ultimately a debate in The Daily Telegraph over Niemöller was solved using the concept of resistance not to Nazism but to totalitarianism to explain the paradoxes in his relationship with the Nazi state: 114

Robert Ross, ‘Martin Niemöller: An American Hero’, in Locke and Littell, Remembrance and Recollections, p. 29. 115 Cited on – March 2000. 116 Hildebrandt, Pastor Niemöller, p. 11. 117 Basil Miller, Martin Niemöller: Hero of the Concentration Camp (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1942), p. 160. 118 George Bell, ‘A Single Christian Front’, The Church and Humanity (London, 1946), pp. 58–66 – a speech delivered in Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 2 December 1941. 119 William Temple’s description of Niemöller at his birthday service 14 January 1943, as quoted in Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 168, 21 January 1943. 120 See for example Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 230, 30 March 1944. 121 Niemöller’s offer of service to the German army in 1939 did cause momentary consternation in the Anglican Church amongst his defenders, see Chandler, Brethren, p. 155, which reprints George Bell’s letter to Karl Barth in November 1939, which expressed his concern at rumours of Martin Niemöller’s offer. 122 Cited in Bentley, Niemöller, p. 160.

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he [Martin Niemöller] might approve of the Nazi regime politically, he might even, when the die was cast and war had come, be prepared to sacrifice his life for his country. But he would not and indeed never did accept the Nazis’ claim to dictate what he should believe . . . that is why he is entitled to be regarded as an authentic enemy of totalitarian dictatorship, whose greatest ill is not the conduct it imposes so much as its insistence on rendering unto Caesar the things that are God’s.123

Suddenly Niemöller’s politics were again irrelevant. Nazism’s greatest crime was defined as the universal expression of the totalitarian will and its suppression of the individual, and Niemöller’s heroism lay in his challenge to that nefarious project. His defenders in the Church of England had used similar rhetoric to justify Niemöller’s heroism since 1934. After May 1945 Niemöller was himself crucial in promoting this narrative of his, and general Christian, opposition to Nazism. He was the author of a series of controversial confessions on behalf of the German churches, touring the nation in 1946 preaching a message of collective responsibility to an unwilling audience. In October 1945, Niemöller, in negotiation with other dissenting Protestant voices from the Nazi era and the wider ecumenical community including representatives of the Church of England, produced the Stuttgart declaration. Stuttgart was one of the first declarations of responsibility for the crimes of Nazism produced in the months after the war by any German community or institution. Contemporaneously controversial for its dissent from a culture that emphasised the responsibility of a tyrannical few, the text of the declaration was in fact kind to both laity and clergy in the evangelical churches, emphasising the eternal incompatibility of Nazism and Christianity, in keeping with the ecumenical narrative that underpinned the Niemöller myth. The declaration lauded the Christian ‘struggle [of] many years in the name of Jesus Christ against the spirit which has found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of violence’ but also confronted German Protestant failings for ‘not being more courageous, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously and for not loving more ardently’124 (my italics). There is a remarkable continuity between the spirit of Stuttgart, and that of Niemöller’s later ‘First they came for’, personal redress. In both acts of contrition repentance was sought for the sins of inaction, for not doing enough. The sub-text was clear: the Church and Nazism were implacable and eternal foes, although the Churches should have sought to intervene further. One can see within these self-representations echoes of his image as hero from the 1930s and 1940s which had been moulded by among others, prominent members of the Church of England. Some Kirchenkampf historiography has continued to celebrate an unambiguous Niemöller leading the ecclesiastical challenge to the ‘essence’ of the Third 123 124

M.L. Peters to The Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1945. The full text of the Stuttgart declaration can be found in Barnett, For the Soul of the People, p. 209. For a further discussion of the declaration see chapter four of this book.

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Reich.125 For those historians, as it was for the Anglican Church, this essence is captured by Nazi expressions of the totalitarian will. John Conway found significance in the Confessing Church (despite acknowledged ambiguities) because it provided rare ‘ideological free spaces’ in which thinking independent of that totalitarian will could survive.126 Franklin Littell was also explicitly aware of the ambiguity of Martin Niemöller’s protest, describing him as ‘opposed to political resistance’ and simply protecting the ‘church’s area of competence’.127 However Niemöller’s significance for Littell was not in the ambiguity of this protest, nor his location in the ideological milieu from which Nazism grew and then flourished. Familiarly, Littell found Niemöller’s significance despite the reality and ambiguity of his protest. In writing of his encounter in 1939 with a Dutch theological student who feared Niemöller dead, Littell demonstrated that his version of the Niemöller myth had direct links with the ecumenical community of the 1930s: in his [the student’s] tone of voice and in his attachment, in his identification with Niemöller and with other German brethren who were resisting the Nazis, I had a sudden feeling that nothing the Nazis could do would defeat what Martin Niemöller then represented. In life or death, his message would triumph over the princes and powers of the world’s darkness.128

In the mid-1930s Arthur Duncan-Jones proposed an image of Martin Niemöller as fighting ‘the oldest struggle in the history of civilisation, the struggle which raged in the Roman Empire, broke the mediaeval empire, and defeated Bismarck. The modern conception of the totalitarian state is an absolute more rigid than that of earlier dictatorships. So, too, Christianity in the last resort is an absolute which postulates a recognised sphere of freedom’.129 Exactly forty-five years later, Niemöller’s English biographer (who was also an Anglican priest) defined Confessing Christian protest in starkly similar terms, as more than simply an ecclesiastical protest against Nazism, but part of ‘the greater war against dark powers’.130 For our understanding of the manner in which the Anglican Church conceived of Nazism in the 1930s then, its use of the image of Martin Niemöller is crucial. Although sporadically concerned with the Nazi attack on the Jews, Niemöller was 125

For example, see the arbitrary distinction drawn between the resistant Niemöller and ‘supporters’ of the Nazi state in Locke and Littell, Remembrance and Recollections, p. ix; also Hampson, ‘The British Response to the German Church Struggle’, p. 304. 126 This was a term developed by Eberhard Bethge, friend and biographer of Dietrich Bonhöffer, and cited in Conway, ‘The Role of the Churches’, p. 32. 127 Franklin H. Littell, ‘Foreword’, in Hubert G. Locke (ed.), Exile in Fatherland: Martin Niemöller’s Letters from Prison (Michigan, 1986), p. viii. 128 Ibid., p. ix. 129 Duncan-Jones, Niemöller, p. 278. 130 Bentley, Niemöller, p. 135.

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the centrepiece of an understanding of Nazism that regarded the Hitler dictatorship as the manifestation of a wider totalitarianism, also exhibited in the Soviet State. In such a formulation Nazism was understood purely through its methods of punishment and control, and Niemöller was understood as a representative victim of a Nazism defined through its attempts to control the individual. Such an understanding was achieved despite both the reality of Niemöller’s protest and a contemporary understanding of the reality of that protest. Martin Niemöller’s image was deliberately manipulated because the actuality of his protest was deemed irrelevant. Structurally this understanding of Nazism had little place for appreciation of the racial specificities of Nazi ideology or the nature of the Nazi racial project, and consequently in the early years of the Third Reich antiJewishness was not proposed as central in the definition of the iniquity of the Nazi menace. It is crucial that the historian of ‘responses’ to what we now call the Holocaust must be constantly aware of the haphazard development of Nazi racial policy, and avoid inflating a failure to place antisemitism at the heart of an understanding of Nazism in the 1930s into a misunderstanding of mass murder. But, it is also clear that in the early years of the Third Reich the Anglican Church actively proposed an understanding of Nazism that might have been unable adequately to confront the post-1938 developments in Nazi anti-Jewish policy. In July 1937, for example, George Bell proclaimed that despite the persecution of the Jews there was in fact ‘no distress deeper in Germany than the non-aryan Christians’.131 The following chapter will discuss how this understanding of Nazism did accommodate the radicalisation of Nazi anti-Jewish action from 1938 onwards. Taking the Anglican conversion from anti-war appeasers to celebrators of the brave morality of the British war effort as a case study, the changing conception of Nazism will interrogated in relation to these developing attitudes to war. Already, however, we can see the degree to which the Church of England, as part of a much wider ecumenical community, helped design narratives and modes of understanding Nazism that are still employed. There is a remarkable continuity of interpretation from contemporary religious and secular interpretations of Niemöller’s significance through to historiographical evaluation some forty or fifty years later. In all examples Niemöller’s presentation as hero was not predicated on a misunderstanding of his ambiguity with regard to the terms of his protest against the Nazi state. Such declarations of heroism seemed to be almost consciously contradictory. Reliant upon the universalisation of both Nazism and Christianity, the concept of totalitarianism was employed to recruit Niemöller in a universal battle against Nazism. The myth of Niemöller also demonstrates the degree to which the Church of England was both important in constructing ideas which were held in much wider communities, and was reflective of a much wider communal set of interpretations. From Stanley Baldwin’s perception of the

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George Bell, ‘Foreword’, in Charles Singer, The Christian Approach to the Jews (London, 1937), p. ii.

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problem of European power politics, to the image of Niemöller carefully constructed by campaigners in Britain, Europe and the USA, the Church of England designed and adopted an occidental interpretation of Nazism as a general totalitarianism, the antithesis of Christian civilisation.

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Chapter Two ‘A CRUSADE TO DELIVER OUR FELLOW MEN FROM A SUB-HUMAN BARBARISM’: NAZISM AND WAR IN THE ANGLICAN IMAGINATION

Despite dark fears of the totalitarian anti-Christ, the interwar Church of England actually believed that the primary danger to the civilised world came from war. Anglican leaders had been deeply scarred by the First World War, both by the complacency of their own nationalist rhetoric and by the horrors of the battlefield and the ‘lost generation’. As a consequence, the Church formed the backbone of anti-war feeling in Britain after 1920. This rejection of warfare culminated, in September 1938, in a celebration of the Munich agreement, both inside and outside the Anglican Church, as a divine deliverance from the ‘devil devised’ evils of modern warfare. Just a year later however, in September 1939, Britain and Nazi Germany were at war. The Church of England, in common with the majority of the wider nation, welcomed that conflict as righteous; Nazi totalitarianism had by then replaced war as the greatest threat to Christian civilisation. This narrative raises many questions for our investigation of the Anglican understanding of Nazism. First, how did the Church reconcile its celebrations of Munich with the fact that it was, after all, an agreement with a force understood to be the enemy of Christianity? In other words how, in general, did Anglicans’ understanding of Nazism interact with their fears of war? Second, and more importantly, the Church’s conversion from opponents to supporters of war requires explanation. What informed this moral revolution? What allowed Nazism to supersede war as the primary evil in the Anglican imagination? It has previously been argued that the violent attack on German Jews in November of 1938 precipitated the Anglican conversion; was this the case? And, if so, how did such violent antisemitism impact upon perceptions of Nazism as the antithesis of Christianity? By answering these questions, a fuller picture can be painted of the manner in which Nazism was publicly understood by the Anglican Church and set in the context of more general perceptions of the outside world. How far, for example, was the Anglican embrace of war symptom or cause of the more pessimistic view of the world that emerged from the crises of the 1930s? 55

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* The Church of England was left traumatised by the First World War. It had participated in the narrow celebrations of national arrogance in 1914, and had urged young men to volunteer for the defence of national honour. The Church had also been prepared to proclaim the conflict with Germany as a crusade, although the most extreme exponent, the Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, did represent a more general tendency when he heralded war with Germany as God’s conflict. Ingram called upon the Church to ‘help the nation . . . realise that it is engaged in a Holy War’ in June 1915, exhorting British soldiers to ‘kill Germans . . . not for the sake of killing, but to save the world’.1 The Church was also one of many voices in Britain which counselled against negotiated peace. The sense of moral certainty implicit in the idea of crusade, the absolute vision of guilt and innocence, also dictated initial Anglican support for a punitive peace in 1918.2 The simplicity of this easy, crusading rhetoric was a painful memory for post-war churchmen. As the new narrative of the First World War as an insane sacrifice was constructed in Britain after 1919, the Church was forced to confront its role in the beatification of belligerence. Church leaders were left feeling partially responsible for the brutality of the First World War and the horrors revealed on the fields of Flanders.3 As a result the post-war Church generally resolved to prevent a repeat of the human suffering witnessed between 1914 and 1918 and remained implacably opposed to the principle of warfare virtually until September 1939, clinging to the desperate faith that the First World War had indeed been the ‘war to end all wars’. In the words of Randall Davidson, the post-war Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Church had seen with its ‘own eyes . . . the awful, the horrible, devil devised barrier of war . . . its unspeakable, unlimitable horrors’ and desperately desired that there ‘would be no next time’.4 Anglicans’ sense that the First World War was ‘greatest calamity which has ever befallen the civilised world’ committed the Church to a co-operative international future, both in religious and political terms.5 For example, the post-war Church was seized with the spirit of ecumenism. The 1920 Lambeth conference had redefined the terms of Christian reunion and the ecumenical goal was no longer simply the ‘absorption of one communion by another, but rather the fellowship of many communions’.6 Such amelioration hastened the development of co-operation between diverse European Protestant churches, although 1 2

George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (Oxford, 2002), p. 114. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, North Carolina, 1974), pp. 252–59. 3 See Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1978), for a discussion of the Anglican reaction to the war which includes its initial attitude to post-war remembrance and memorialisation. 4 Cited in Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform? War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–45 (London, 1986), p. 87. 5 William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays (London, 1920), p. 1. 6 Cited in Ronald Jasper, George Bell: Bishop of Chichester (Oxford, 1967), p. 57.

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intellectual exchange was chiefly centred around a relationship between English and Northern European Protestants.7 The ecumenical spirit of partnership was institutionalised in the aftermath of the First World War in organisations such as ‘Life and Work’ of which George Bell was chair. The ecumenical impulse became so embedded in the Anglican imagination that it remained active across the interwar period and would dominate Protestant prescriptions for post-1945 society.8 As the body which appeared to institutionalise international political co-operation, the League of Nations received the enthusiastic support of the Anglican community as the guarantor of a kind of secular ecumenism. Clergy were active in the League of Nations Union (LNU) and the ecclesiastical weekly, The Guardian, declared in March of 1933 that the Church was the ‘main bulwark’ supporting the League in Britain.9 The extent of that support was manifested in the degree of political lobbying undertaken by the Episcopate on behalf of the League.10 Cosmo Lang openly heralded its divine potential in 1934 when he declared that the ‘reign of Law [of God]’, was a ‘practical possibility [only] if the principles of the covenant of the league . . . [were] seriously fulfilled’.11 For Anglicans to reject the League would have been to ignore ‘the lesson of the great war’ which had been ‘written large – in letters of blood.’12 Such views were shared across the Church’s political spectrum. The COPEC conference declared war fundamentally contrary to the principles of Jesus Christ.13 While on the political right, Inge, who had been bellicose in 1914, shared the COPEC vision of war.14 This wholesale Anglican rejection of war as a part of international politics, did not mean that the Church of England was pacifist after 1919. Although the belief that there would and could ‘be no next time’ was universal there was not actually a uniform attitude to war, either in the Church or in the wider nation. Although a generalisation, anti-war rhetoric in Britain between the wars actually consisted of 7

See George Bell, Christian Unity: The Anglican Position (London, 1948), for a statement of Anglican attitudes to ecumenism. Bell’s collection of essays also acts as an illustration of the northern European dominance of the ecumenical movement – the essays are the text of lectures given by Bell to the University of Uppsala in 1946. See also Norman Goodall, The Ecumenical Movement: What it is and what it does (London, 1964), in which the author describes the enduring strength of ecumenism in wartime through recounting his own trips to neutral Sweden. 8 See Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, 1986), pp. 302–10. 9 The Guardian, 3 March 1933, cited in Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 88, where Wilkinson argues that The Guardian’s analysis was correct, see also Andrew Chandler, ‘Munich and Morality: The Bishops of the Church of England and Appeasement’, Twentieth Century British History (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1994), pp. 77–99. 10 Alan Suggate, William Temple and Christian and Social Ethics Today (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 30, 180. 11 Lang to Lord Davies, 9 May 1934 – Lang Papers, Vol. 54, f. 185. 12 Cosmo Lang, ‘Disarmament’, in Percy Dearmer (ed.), Christianity and the Crisis (London, 1933), p. 502. 13 Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 88. 14 Indeed Inge was prepared to find war a rejection of Christianity in 1917, albeit at the same time as labelling the Germans a nation of war-mongers, see Inge, ‘The Indictment against Christianity’, Outspoken Essays, p. 258 .

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two largely distinct moral and political traditions, pacifism and pacificism,15 and to suggest that there was a pacifist consensus would be to repeat a confusion over the nature of pacifism which abounded at the time. The situation was no different inside the Church. Christian pacifism was a narrow and sectarian faith that had reference and relevance to personal morality rather than the practical realities of international politics.16 It was popularised by an Anglican, Dick Sheppard, in the mid-1930s through his mass Peace Pledge Union movement (PPU). But, as a result of its scant regard for political pragmatism, pacifism never took a dominant hold in the Anglican Church.17 It is true that the PPU reached a peak of subscriber numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but ultimately the threat of war in Europe, felt keenly from the beginning of 1938, caused it to wither as a practical political movement. Pacifism could provide no substantive ideas that might negate the aggression of the European dictators, and the PPU as a movement was also shattered by, and ultimately unable to survive, the death of its charismatic leader in 1938.18 Many of its members discovered, just as the Quaker ‘peace society’ had in 1914 when their leadership endorsed the First World War,19 that in the face of dictatorial aggression they were not pacifists at all, merely pacificists.20 Pacificism was a self-consciously political discourse. It perceived the purpose of politics as the avoidance of war. However, pacificistic thought did allow the possibility of war, in that it was conceivable that there could exist a greater evil than warfare, and therefore that war could be just and that ‘killing could be Christian’.21 Equally, pacificistic politics had no direct bearing on the morality of individual action. As the Church Times instructed in February of 1938, ‘the Christian’s first concern in the world, as it is today, is the preservation of peace, we are above all things opposed to war’ (my italics), but that political imperative had no bearing on the justifiability of the individual Christian’s participation in war.22 If Christian pacifism was the ultimate expression of theological liberalism, in that it required the personal repudiation of violence and as such the imitation of Christ, pacificism was a peculiarly Anglican version of that liberalism through the application of a political reality. Such politicisation mirrored the practical 15

The latter term was in fact first coined by A.J.P. Taylor, but Martin Ceadal has used it to develop a comprehensive history of anti-war rhetoric in the Christian church in the period between the wars. See Martin Ceadal, Pacifism in Britain 1914–45: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford, 1980); and by the same author ‘Christian Pacifism in the Era of the Two World Wars’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and War: Papers Read at the Twenty First Summer Meeting and the Twenty Second Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (London, 1983), pp. 391–392 for a specific definition. 16 See Ceadal, ‘Christian Pacifism’; Ceadal, Pacifism in Britain; and Wilkinson, Dissent and Conform, pp. 101–136 for discussions of Christian pacifism. 17 Hastings, English Christianity, p. 332, and Ceadal, ‘Christian Pacifism’, p. 393. 18 For an anecdotal account of the popular grief felt at Sheppard’s death see Carolyn Scott, Dick Sheppard: A Biography (London, 1977), pp. 240–246. 19 Ceadal, ‘Christian Pacifism’, p. 394. 20 Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 248. 21 Ceadal, Pacifism in Britain, p. 122. 22 Cited in Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 173.

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political interventionism of Anglican political theology; consequently pacificism held greater attraction for much of the Church of England. However at times during the 1930s the differences between anti-war discourses were difficult to discern, most notably in the celebrations that greeted the Munich agreement as deliverance from the horrors of another conflict. Proclaimed as heralding ‘peace in our time’, the Munich agreement signed in September 1938 secured German annexation of the Sudetenland, and a pledge that Britain and Germany would never go to war again. A popular consensus welcomed the treaty as a ‘great service to humanity’.23 The Daily Mail hailed the ‘foundations of peace in Europe’, whilst The Times lauded Chamberlain’s service to the ‘supreme interest’ of the preservation of peace. Even The Manchester Guardian concurred with the moral consensus regarding the absolute necessity of avoiding war. While admitting that Czechoslovakia ‘suffered . . . great . . . injustices . . . under the Munich agreement’ which were ‘calamitous’, these were deemed irrelevant in comparison with the ‘horrors that might have extinguished not only Czechoslovakia, but the whole of western civilisation’ in the event of war.24 The welcome for Munich from within the Anglican Church was even more emphatic. Joy was unconfined for a peace that was literally believed to be heaven sent. The Archbishop of Canterbury paid lip service to his ‘sympathy [for] the Republic of Czechoslovakia’, but still ecstatically welcomed the ‘God sent opportunity’ of the apparently divine Munich settlement. William Temple echoed Lang’s thanksgiving, hailing Munich as a ‘deliverance’. He even detected the direct intervention of ‘the hand of God’.25 In order to give public expression to this spirit of celebration immediate plans for services of thanksgiving were made after the agreement had been concluded. Services were held on the Sunday after Chamberlain’s return and attracted unprecedented crowds of worshippers.26 The nation apparently united in praise for the divine act of deliverance which Chamberlain had extracted from Hitler, and with which Europe had been saved from the fires of hell. Munich was interpreted as divine because it had prevented war – the highest imaginable evil – and these moral priorities were evident in the evaluation of the agreement. George Bell wrote to The Times, prior to the conference, in order to set out the moral position of the Anglican Church regarding the possible outbreak of war. Arguing that in his forthcoming meeting with Hitler, Chamberlain should see the avoidance of war as his guiding principle, the Bishop of Chichester advised the Prime Minister that ‘even a defeat in negotiation . . . however

23 24

The Times, 1 October 1938, p. 13. Quotations from The Daily Mail and The Manchester Guardian are cited in Keith Robbins, Munich 1938 (London, 1968), p. 327; and see The Times, 1 October 1938, pp. 13–14. 25 Temple writing in a preparatory document for a conference of leading Anglican figures to discuss the international situation at Lambeth Palace on 21 October 1938, Lang Papers, Vol. 54, f. 193. 26 Chandler, ‘Munich and Morality’, p. 80.

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humiliating would be better than a war’.27 The ecclesiastical press used similar language and directly compared the evils of the European crisis, and particularly Nazism, with the evils of warfare as a means of evaluating the justice of a possible conflict. The Church Times was unambiguous in its conclusion, confirming the impossibility of destroying the evils of the world with the greater maleficence of modern warfare,28 and advising that it was ‘difficult to conceive of too high a price for peace.’29 The sacrifices of Czechoslovakia figured little in the immediate ecclesiastical commentaries on the new peace. Churchmen consistently argued that war would threaten the very existence of ‘civilisation’, a fear based explicitly on the traumatic memories of the 1914–18 conflict. The Church of England newspaper, The Record, celebrated Munich by arguing that ‘what [was] of paramount importance to millions of people in this hour is that the dogs of war are under control . . . [and] our sons and brothers are not involved in the unspeakable horrors of a war which would certainly have meant the end of civilisation’.30 Alan Don, Lang’s chaplain at Lambeth, recorded in his diary that Munich had given rise to the ‘real chance that civilisation might be saved’,31 a chance that war, by implication, would have destroyed. Lang himself celebrated deliverance from a war ‘that might have destroyed civilisation itself’,32 imagery which repeated the language the Archbishop was using at the beginning of the 1930s when he had stated that the ideal of peace was the basis of ‘civilisation’.33 What did the church understand by ‘civilisation’, which it was claimed Munich had saved? In keeping with the diversity of Anglicanism, the term was employed in a variety of ways. By 1939, William Temple could write that the contemporary world was not Christian in anything but a rudimentary sense, but he still referred to the modern West as ‘civilisation’. This suggests that he used the term to denote the contemporary political and social reality, not as an exclusively Christian concept.34 Alternatively, when Nazism and the Soviet Union were portrayed as anti-civilised or anti-Christian, ‘civilisation’ seemed to denote a set of values rather than a tangible reality. At Munich it was war rather than Nazi expansion that was seen as the aggressive threat to ‘civilisation’, suggesting a meaning rooted in values. However that Czechoslovakia was sacrificed to an anti-civilised power also suggested that ‘civilisation’ denoted a geography outside the sphere of Nazi expansion. The term was also employed within war discourse to denote a construct embedded in history and tradition. Declarations

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Bell to The Times, 27 September 1938, cited in Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 173. Church Times, 7 October 1938, p. 355. Church Times, 11 November 1938, p. 515. The Record, 7 October 1938, p. 635. Don cited in Chandler, ‘Munich and Morality’, p. 88. Lang, ‘The Deliverance and After’, The Times, 3 October 1938, p. 17. Lang, ‘Disarmament’, p. 501. William Temple, A Conditional Justification of War (London, 1940), p. 23.

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that the contemporary world had lost its Christian basis were not uncommon,35 and were suggestive of an understanding of ‘civilisation’ as both an expression of values and a tangible entity. This erosion of ‘civilisation’ was allegedly evident internationally through the growth of the Nazi-Soviet menace and domestically in a decline in religiosity.36 Importantly the very idea that a ‘civilisation’ ‘once existed in the Christian sense’ carried with it suggestions of an historical entity, anchored in institutions, rituals and values associated with the Christian faith. Further still this historical definition was rather contradicted by the general tenor of the socially radical liberal theological project – the earthly realisation of the kingdom of God – which suggested that the search for ‘civilisation’ was a continuing aspiration and based on the ongoing march of progress, a construct of the future rather than the past. This sense of ‘civilisation’ as aspiration was perhaps the most commonly articulated within the Anglican community. The Munich agreement, it was often argued, was a potential agent of evangelisation that could precipitate the Christian future, the vector through which ‘civilisation’ could be reclaimed.37 It was on this basis that those Anglicans less enthused by Munich argued that the opportunity provided by the agreement would be lost unless modern society reaffirmed a Christian basis.38 Indeed soon after the euphoria surrounding the agreement had dissipated, the Episcopal enthusiasts for ‘peace in our time’, who gathered for the 1938 Lambeth Conference on International Relations, offered a more sober reflection on agreement with Hitler in similar terms – as the beginning, rather than the end, of the road to salvation.39 The Anglican leaders gathered at Lambeth (including Bell, Lang, and Temple) concentrated soberly on the responsibility of the post-Munich world and argued that the opportunity to revivify Christian life was now.40 This sense of evangelical opportunity demonstrates the priority that the Anglican Church gave to avoiding war, which was seen as a moral act in and of itself – whatever the inherent compromises involved. To go to war in defence of Czechoslovakia, and put all of ‘civilisation’ at risk would have been a nonsensical act. To quote Lang again: ‘it would have seemed incredible . . . that the calamity of war should have been inflicted upon many nations merely because of the troubles of three million people in a small district in the centre of Europe’.41 Lang’s utilitarian logic may appear morally questionable, but it was entirely consistent with a mindset which posited war as the supreme evil and saw the avoidance of war as the embodiment of the progress of man. William Temple’s 35

See, for example, The Guardian, 24 March 1939, p. 185, where the editorial wondered whether there was any point in saving civilisation through avoiding war because presently it was ‘unworthy’ of ‘our creator’. 36 Hastings, English Christianity, p. 254. 37 See Lang’s statement in The Times, 1 October 1938, p. 14. 38 See J.H. Oldham to The Times, 5 October 1938, p. 15. 39 Conference of Representative Members of Christian Churches in England and Scotland, Some Principles of Christian Policy (London, 1938). 40 See ‘Lest We Forget’, Lang Papers, Vol. 54, f. 231. 41 Lang speaking in the House of Lords and cited in The Times, 4 October 1938, p. 7.

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assertion that ‘whatever the ugly circumstances involved’ Munich had been a deliverance, a moral act, offers a neat summary of the Anglican position.42 Cosmo Lang was also well aware of the compromise involved in endorsing or even celebrating the annexation of the Sudetenland. During the period of negotiation he had been subject to campaigning from various organisations that wished to secure his denunciation of any potential assent to annexation.43 Lang refused that support, and effectively endorsed the moral cost of the agreement. Despite the language of Anglican acclaim for Munich being shrouded in the rhetoric of morality, there was also a political rationality to that support. This pragmatic vein within Anglican anti-war discourse reflected both the inherent contradictions of pacificism and the close Anglican relationship with the state. First, Anglican celebrations of the Munich agreement were an endorsement of one element of government policy and therefore one half of a political and moral debate which had divided the political community.44 Munich brought not only the promise of peace but the promise of rearmament, and as such an increase in planning for war. There is little in the speeches and sermons of those concerned with Munich to suggest that they found this an uncomfortable association – the Church Times, which largely articulated the views of the Anglican majority on matters of war, argued that ‘Nations which do not threaten force because of their love of peace . . . [need] to be ready . . . to meet force with force.’45 In the aftermath of Munich, albeit couched in the language of faith and deliverance, Anglican opposition to warfare remained pacificistic and fundamentally grounded in rational politics, despite being represented as a moral position. Despite the claims of national thanksgiving at the conclusion of the agreement, there was, of course, considerable opposition. Criticisms were often based on the mirror image of the moral absolutes which had been employed in support of the agreement. In secular terms, Clement Attlee led the Labour party’s dissent from the Munich consensus by invoking the idea of civilisation, which he identified as a system of values. Attlee argued that the agreement had enshrined a ‘victory . . . for brute force [in which] the cause of civilisation [had] received a terrible defeat’.46 The Jewish Chronicle provided the only significant press questioning of 42

From a discussion document presented to the ‘Conference at Lambeth Palace on the International Situation’, Lang Papers, Vol. 54, f. 193. 43 Lang received two impassioned telegrams to fight annexation from the Federal Council of Protestant Churches, and from the Student Christian Movement in Czechoslovakia. The Federal Council appealed to Lang in the ‘name of Christ’ to lobby Chamberlain not to accede to any Hitlerian demand, or revision of the boundaries of the Czech state. The SCM equally compelled Lang to ‘defend liberty’ and the ‘independence of Czechoslovakia’. Telegram Federal Council of Protestant Churches in Czechoslovakia to Lang, 29 September 1938, Lang Papers, Vol. 55, f. 133. Telegram, SCM to Lang, 30 September 1938, Lang Papers, Vol. 55, f. 139. 44 For an account of Labour Party objections to the agreement, and their contact and alliance with dissident conservatives in the Munich debate in the House of Commons in October 1938, see Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (London, 1977), pp. 162–169; and the conclusion of Keith Robbins, Munich 1938 (London, 1968). 45 Church Times, 28 October 1938, p. 451. 46 Attlee quoted in The Times, 4 October 1938, p. 8.

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Chamberlain’s actions, articulating the despair of the Jewish community at the apparent pandering to Hitler. Once again this protest was proposed in absolute moral terms, but offered little practical political advice. For both the Jewish community and the Labour party the proposal of genuine political alternatives was problematic, as neither could be seen as explicitly calling for war.47 Some criticisms of the agreement were also articulated within the Church. Whilst the approval of the vast majority of the ecclesiastical press and the Episcopate ensured that opposition to the agreement was limited, it did come from formidable quarters, led by Hensley Henson. The irascible Bishop of Durham consistently dismissed the moral foundations of Munich. Like Attlee, Henson interpreted Nazism as the greatest threat to ‘civilisation’, which he defined ethically. He argued that Munich simply postponed an inevitable war between the two ideologies of ‘brutal force and ‘human reason’.48 By understanding civilisation and European tradition wholly as ethical constructs, Henson was unable to avoid reflecting on the degree of moral compromise involved, noting in his diary: ‘peace is welcome, but may be disgraceful’.49 Similarly to Henson, Arthur Duncan-Jones, the Dean of Chichester, was uncompromising in his opposition to Munich which he described as the triumph of violence and a ‘shameful betrayal’.50 Did those opposing Munich perceive Nazism differently to those who celebrated agreement with Hitler? After all, the Anglican community, and certainly its leaders, shared a vision of Nazism as the totalitarian antithesis of Christian civilisation. How was it that the majority of the Church managed to reconcile this with a celebration of Munich as divine? As has already been discussed, the most important factor was an understanding of the world in which war was simply the pre-eminent evil. But if we are to fully understand the Anglican position, we must also acknowledge a complexity in the Church’s rendering of Nazism. It appears that those Anglicans who celebrated Munich evaluated the domestic and international actions of the Nazi dictatorship in quite different ways. As discussed in chapter one, domestic policies, such as the persecution of the churches, seemed to Anglicans to mark Nazism out as a new political force, equivalent to the Soviet beast. But Nazi foreign policies were seen quite differently. Despite the unilateralism of events such as the re-entry into the Rhineland, the Anschluß, and ultimately the annexation of the Sudetenland, the Nazis’ international adventures were not seen as a new or a particularly radical threat to order. They were understood as part of the traditions of European power politics. Indeed, the foreign policy ambitions of the Third Reich were viewed with some sympathy, rather than as a challenge to the endurance of ‘civilisation’. 47

See David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo Jewry (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 164–165 for an analysis of the Jewish Chronicle and the Anglo Jewish response to the Munich agreement and the consensus behind it. 48 Henson cited in Chandler, ‘Munich and Morality’, p. 89. 49 Henson cited in Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 178. 50 Lang Papers, Vol. 54, f. 202, and Hastings, English Christianity, pp. 348–349.

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A central feature of Anglican discussions of those international politics was the memory of the Treaty of Versailles. For William Temple Versailles was nothing short of a ‘disaster’,51 while Hensley Henson echoed the sentiments of many when he interpreted it as an allied moral failure, a ‘great crime’.52 Archbishop Lang remembered at the time of the Anschluß that the terms of Versailles had been ‘vindictive and arbitrary’,53 a sentiment shared by the ecclesiastical press.54 George Bell also lamented Versailles as one of history’s ‘grievous mistakes’ while justifying the German annexation of sovereign territory.55 Such memories of the treaty entirely obscured Anglican views of outward Nazi German aggression, as they did for other appeasement politicians and their supporters in the press.56 It was as if German territorial expansion was not expansion at all, if (and only if) it directly revised the punitive terms of Versailles. Under the influence of this historical opinion, spokesmen of the Church used the treaty to justify all German expansionism. The failings of Versailles were invoked explicitly in support of the morality of Munich. For Temple the settlement in which he traced the hand of God was made ‘morally tolerable’ only because the agreement made at Versailles was ‘at best mistaken’.57 In Cosmo Lang’s statement, broadcast after the Munich agreement was signed, he berated the audience with reminders of their responsibility for the crisis that Munich had solved, asking ‘can we think . . . without shame of the way in which, blinded by the passions of the struggle, we treated our enemies after the Great War?’ Lang further instructed that Munich was in many ways ‘repentance’ for the sins committed by Britain and the other victorious powers.58 This religious rhetoric echoed many secular commentators. In the House of Lords Munich was justified as ‘putting right what was indeed a wrong’ for which Chamberlain and his supporters would be well remembered ‘at the bar of history’.59 Henson and the Anglican opponents of Munich, however, seemed not to hold this rather contradictory view of Nazism which separated its international and domestic politics. By September 1939 the majority of their brethren agreed with them, and the Anglican Church embraced the idea of war with Nazi Germany, albeit with a heavy heart. The question for us is, what changed? What persuaded Anglicans that all of the ambitions of Nazism, domestic and international, posed a threat to their Christian world; and therefore convinced them that war was no longer the primary evil in the world? 51 52 53

William Temple, ‘The Conclusion of the Matter’, in Dearmer, Christianity, p. 601. Cited in Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 92. Lang in the House of Lords 29 March 1938, and cited in Owen Chadwick, ‘The English Bishops and the Nazis’, The Friends of Lambeth Palace Library Annual Report (1973), p. 17. 54 Church Times, 30 September 1938, p. 327. 55 Bell to The Times, 27 September 1938, p. 13. 56 See Oliver Woods and James Bishop, The Story of The Times (London, 1983), p. 293. 57 William Temple from a sermon given at Bristol Cathedral, quoted in the Church Times, 7 October 1938, p. 376. 58 Lang, ‘The Deliverance and After’, p. 18. 59 Lord Mottistone, quoted in The Times, 4 October 1938, pp. 7–8.

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On the night of the 10 November 1938, for the first time, the Nazi regime physically attacked the German Jewish population. While of course there had been sporadic acts of violence since 1933, the events of Kristallnacht, as that evening has become known, were on an unprecedented and national scale. At the behest of the central government in Berlin, Nazi storm-troopers took to the streets throughout urban and rural Germany in order to attack Jewish communities. Jewish property was ransacked, businesses and synagogues destroyed, often by fire. Over 20,000 Jewish men were arrested, others were beaten and indeed some were murdered, in what Saul Friedlander has described as an ‘explosion of sadism’.60 For many Jewish Germans all hope of life in their motherland died that evening, and there was an unprecedented increase in the number of people trying to emigrate. These brutal events took place in the full glare of publicity and in view of the watching world. Britain was appalled. Newspapers were filled with reports of the pogrom and Germany’s apparent return to barbarism.61 Government eased overbearing immigration restrictions in order to provide some succour to those attempting to flee.62 The English Christian community reacted with vocal outrage. Archbishop Lang wrote to The Times in order to give ‘immediate expression to [his] indignation’.63 Hensley Henson attempted to articulate his ‘moral repugnance’.64 These vociferous Episcopal condemnations were echoed in the ecclesiastical press, which, with one voice, condemned the ‘orgy of savagery’, which had left English Christians ‘appalled and shocked’ struggling to ‘find anything with which to compare the persecution of the Jews in Germany’ which appeared to be a return to the ‘dark ages’.65 Andrew Chandler has argued that these events transformed the Anglican moral evaluation of the relative dangers of Nazism and war; suggesting that the Church of England saw that there was no hope of reconciliation with Nazism in the burning synagogues: ‘the pogrom represented to English Christians a horrifying and unashamed repudiation of their fundamental principles. Their hopes of European redemption were confounded. There could be no rebirth.’66 Such a thesis is admittedly attractive. Post-Holocaust morality justifies the Second World War with reference to the campaign against the Jews as confirmation of the malevolence of the Nazi enemy.67 Although historiographical consensus holds that the 60

Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London, 1999), p. 277. 61 Andrew Sharf, The British Press and the Jews under Nazi Rule (London, 1964), p. 58. 62 For a detailed investigation of the government response to Kristallnacht, in terms of refugee policy, see Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–48: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 97–111. 63 Lang to The Times, 12 November 1938, p. 13. 64 See The Times, 14 November 1938, p. 9. 65 See The Record, 18 November 1938, p. 728; Church Times, 18 November 1938, p. 547; and The Guardian, 18 November 1938, p. 747. 66 Chandler, ‘Munich and Morality’, p. 94. 67 For example in June 2000 Britain gained a permanent reminder of the morality of its Second World War

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persecution of the Jews played a minimal role in secular moral justifications of war against Nazism at the time, to find that the Church of England realised the extent of Nazi depravity could be comforting. It would suggest that the true justice of Britain’s war, as defined in the twenty-first century, was not only retrospectively understood. It would also perpetuate English Christianity’s ascribed role within the historiography of the Holocaust. If the Anglican Church fully understood the potential and implications of Nazi antisemitism after Kristallnacht, then the image of English Christians as the antidote to the general failings of their European brethren in the Holocaust era is confirmed. Such an interpretation also plays down some of the moral compromises that the Church made in its appraisal of Munich. Anglican justifications of the agreement were grounded in a specific understanding of the Nazi menace which failed to appraise either Nazism’s revolutionary or racist character. But in Chandler’s thesis as soon as that revolutionary and racist character was fully revealed – in Kristallnacht – support for the agreement was withdrawn. After the pogrom Nazism was recognised as an entirely new historical phenomenon, one that could not be understood with reference to the injustices of Versailles. In other words, war became justified only when the reality of Nazism was revealed. The Church supported Munich but only when she did not, and perhaps could not, realise the extent of the compromises being made. However comforting the thesis is, the persecution of the Jews was not the reason that the Church supported war. Kristallnacht actually changed little about the way in which Anglicans understood Nazism. Further analysis of Anglican attitudes to the November pogrom demonstrates deep disquiet, but not wholesale rethinking of the justice of European appeasement. The Church Times, for example, did suggest that the pogrom provoked doubts as to the character of Nazism, arguing that the pledges secured from Hitler at Munich were less believable after Kristallnacht: ‘this week’s events make it clear that the crisis, that the country believed had come to an end with the Munich agreement, still continues’.68 But, this did not reflect an acceptance of the morality or utility of war with Germany. The conviction, which Temple defined as having to change before war could be morally tolerated, that ‘evil cannot be destroyed by [the] evil’ of war, was repeated in the same editorial.69 The Anglican community also continued to reject war as a means of solving international problems in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. The rhetoric used to support this pacificism relied upon the same moral calculations that had been made after Munich. While the ‘sufferings of Germany’s Jews’ had ‘both appalled with the opening of a Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. The Holocaust exhibition was opened to exultant press coverage. See The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent, 7 June 2000. For a critical review see Tom Lawson, ‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (Vol. 4, No. 2, 2003), pp. 173–183. 68 Church Times, 18 November 1938 – Andrew Chandler uses this quotation in support of his thesis, ‘Munich and Morality’, p. 95. 69 Church Times, 18 November 1938, p. 547.

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and shocked the world’, the Church Times instructed its readers, such suffering ‘would not be ended by war . . . which would merely mean pain piled on pain’.70 Neither Germany’s Jews nor the Sudeten Czechs were evaluated as worthy reasons for provoking the chaos of war – the ‘high minded’ policy of appeasement continued to be the moral course according to the ecclesiastical The Guardian.71 While there was also a general agreement that the risk of war still abounded and as such the pragmatism of rearmament should continue, this actually represented no significant change in the rhetoric of war, or the appraisal of Nazism from the previous month and the outbreak of peace.72 The bishops of the Church used the same kind of rhetoric in the days after the pogrom as they had in the days before. On 14 November 1938, for example, Cosmo Lang repeated the church’s ‘thanksgiving that their land had been mercifully delivered from the horrors of war’.73 Similarly, in a debate on the sufferings of the Jews in the Church Assembly, while great sympathy was expressed for their plight, there was no effort to relate such suffering to the validity of Munich.74 A second conference convened at Lambeth Palace to discuss the Munich agreement also released a statement that was decisively phrased in the language of hope, rather than despair, despite the German pogrom. Anglican bishops declared that ‘the recent crisis [over the Sudetenland] disclosed . . . a fear and hatred of war, [and] a longing for peace’; the Lambeth Conference then repeated the hopes of the evangelistic potentiality of the new peace suggesting that ‘the dawn of a new day may be nearer than we suppose. The opportunity is now.’75 The enduring hopefulness of the Anglican outlook in the aftermath of Kristallnacht contains little hint of the pessimism inherent in the conversion to war and contradicts the notion that the pogrom constituted a fundamental cognitive turning point for the Church. Similarly in ecclesiastical reviews of 1938 at the turn of the year, the press were once again united in the hope that war would (and indeed should) be avoided.76 As the pogrom did not challenge or force a reappraisal of existing views of Nazism in the Church, the escalating persecution which provided its context was not interpreted by English Christians as an expression of the racial character of Nazism and its particular threat to the Jews. Nor should we be surprised at this. Nazism was regarded as, primarily, an anti-Christian ideology and regime. Although Kristallnacht does indeed contain many clues pointing to the post-war 70 71 72 73

Ibid. The Guardian, 18 November 1938, p. 747. See Church Times, The Guardian, and The Record, 18 November 1938. Lang speaking at the Autumn session of the Church Assembly, Wednesday 16 November 1938. Church Assembly Report of Proceedings (Vol. XIX, No. 3), p. 424. 74 See the debate initiated by Canon Guy Rogers, Church Assembly Report of Proceedings (Vol. XIX, No. 3), pp. 543–546. 75 Extract from ‘Some Principles of Christian Policy’, the agreed statement from the conference which took place on 1 December 1938, see Lang Papers, Vol. 54, ff. 350–353. 76 See Church Times, The Guardian, and The Record, 30 December 1938. The latter contends that while the European situation remained dangerous, war could be prevented.

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and post-Holocaust understanding of Nazism and the centrality of race in the Nazi project, the historian cannot assume that such an event revealed the future significance of Nazi antisemitism to contemporary observers. In fact Kristallnacht was interpreted in the Anglican community within the intellectual scheme employed to understand the significance of Martin Niemöller, the Kirchenkampf and other domestic policies of the Nazi dictatorship. Accordingly the vast majority of English Christians were only able to see the escalating persecution of the Jews as an element of an ongoing, and more general campaign against Christian faith and culture in Germany. The metaphors employed by the ecclesiastical press to capture the spirit of Kristallnacht invoked images of a savage and pre-Christian era. The Anglican Episcopate concurred with such imagery and situated Kristallnacht not within the boundaries of Nazi racial teaching, legislation and violence, but the continuing Nazi affront to Christian civilisation.77 Antisemitism simply became viewed as the new disguise for the anti-Christ.78 In fact there was some concern articulated amongst English Christians that vocal anti-Jewish actions should be prevented from obscuring the actual nature of diabolic Nazism, which it was suggested was a ‘crusade against culture . . . [in which] the Jewish Question is of small importance’.79 Equally, behind the press outrage at the violence in November of 1938 was a barely disguised desperation that such actions should not be allowed to distort an understanding of the true nature of Nazi depravity: ‘the calculated and spectacular savagery towards the Jews must not lead us to forget the suffering of others. There are Christians in the concentration camps.’80 Arguing that Kristallnacht forced Anglicans to rethink the morality of war also ignores the fact that the German invasion of Prague in March 1939 was identified at the time as the moment when the hope of a lasting European peace died. In what was the most vigorous investigation of the ethics of war by an Anglican, William Temple referred directly to the ‘rape of Prague’ as having forced a reconsideration of the relative evils of Nazism and war, but not to the persecution of the Jews.81 Again we should not be surprised here. It was Prague, after all, which revealed that the Nazis’ international ambitions might go beyond the revision of the Versailles treaty and the liberation of the Czechoslovak German-speaking minority. Cosmo Lang’s immediate response to the crisis of spring 1939 unambiguously related the contemporary developments in international relations to the celebration of Munich the previous autumn, in a way that reactions to Kristallnacht conspicuously had not. Preaching on the Sunday after German troops had entered Prague, Lang declared that: 77

See an account of a speech Temple gave attacking Nazi racial policy – ‘Racial and Religious Persecution: A London Protest Meeting’, The Guardian, 9 December 1938, p. 816. See also Temple and others to The Times, 22 November 1938, p. 10. I thank Chana Kotzin warmly for these references. 78 The Guardian, 30 September 1938, p. 627. 79 Church Times, 25 March 1938, p. 339. 80 The Guardian, 18 November 1938. 81 Temple justifies war because, and this is admittedly a rather oblique phrase, ‘what is happening in Bohemia and Moravia’ demonstrated the perils of Nazism. Temple, A Conditional Justification, p. 21.

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the clouds which we hoped had rolled away last September, have reformed in even more menacing form . . . plainly challenge has come to the whole basis of the civilised order of mankind . . . plainly if such a challenge were to go unanswered we should never be able to be assured of peace again . . . We all know that the people of the world is [sic] longing for peace, but it cannot be had when there is let loose among us this assertion of force . . . They [the Nazis] must be made to learn that in the hands of those who value the sacred principles of justice and freedom there is force enough to meet them . . . our nation and like minded nations are prepared to put sufficient might on the side of right.82

The contrast between his response to Prague, and Lang’s response to the November pogrom could hardly be more marked. The invasion revealed the profound threat that Nazism posed to the values of civilisation, and challenged any absolute commitment to the avoidance of war. The November pogrom evoked no such response, and the outrage it inspired was articulated in the context of continuing thanksgiving for peace. The press reacted in the same manner as the Archbishops to the invasion of Prague. The Times declared that it was actually beneficial because such aggression had revealed the full extent of Nazi depravity ‘in all its cunning and ruthlessness’ as a ‘revolting system’ which was a genuine threat to the ‘hard won gains of civilisation’.83 The Church Times repeated this sentiment when it recognised that ‘Czechoslovakia’s fate [was] a solemn warning that nothing [would] stop Nazi aggression unless it is faced by overwhelming military strength’ – a stance only justified by the fact that the ‘rape of Czechoslovakia [was] the most important and menacing event . . . since the end of the Great War’.84 For The Guardian, after the events of March 1939, war with Nazism was the only way to ‘save our race and make it worthy of our creator’.85 This tendency was further emphasised in December 1939 when the Church Times recognised retrospectively the importance of this particular act of aggression: ‘the hope of a rational . . . solution was restored [at Munich]. But in March . . . this hope was seen to be illusory.’86 Prague was thus acknowledged at the time as precipitating a change in the Anglican understanding of the meaning of Nazism. The Treaty of Versailles could no longer be used as a sufficient explanation for German outward expansion. In part this is simply explicable as the Anglican realisation that German aggression might not stop with the revision of Versailles and the righting of historical wrongs, and that this expansion had a force and a logic of its own. No longer could Nazi foreign policy be related to history, to the traditions of European power politics. Once foreign policy went beyond Versailles it became 82

Lang, from a sermon delivered in Folkestone on 19 March 1939, quoted in The Guardian, 24 March 1939, p. 187. 83 The Times, 17 March 1939, p. 17. 84 Church Times, 17 March 1939, p. 271. 85 The Guardian, 24 March 1939, p. 185. 86 Church Times, 29 December 1939, p. 348.

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antithetical both to the traditions of a civilisation that was understood as a construction of the past and to a civilisation that was an aspiration for the future. Kristallnacht had further confirmed the alien anti-Christian injustice of Nazi domestic politics, but Prague appeared to the Anglican Church to challenge the increasingly untenable notion that they could interpret the internal and external behaviour of authority in the Third Reich as different from one another. As such, it was Prague that appeared to begin the process of re-conceiving Nazism, and therefore justifying war, because it forced consideration of Nazi foreign policy within the same rhetorical framework as Nazi domestic policies, which were already considered to be alien and beyond the Anglican historical experience. Despite all of this, however, perhaps the most significant cause of the Anglican reappraisal of the morality of war was the beginning of the war itself. The idea of war as a moral necessity did not fully emerge until after 3 September 1939. Until the very last moment the Anglican community held hopes for peace in Europe, reflecting the power the pacificistic repudiation of armed conflict held over the Anglican imagination. Throughout 1939 the Archbishop of Canterbury continued his personal pursuit of peace. As late as August, Lang was prepared to warn against war using the rhetoric of the Munich consensus and arguing that war would be absurd because ‘force’ could not be removed from international politics ‘by counter measures of force’.87 In the same month the Church called for a day of prayer that ‘the crime and horror of war may be averted’, again using language similar to that employed before the Munich agreement.88 The last week of August 1939 witnessed a chorus of anguish which included plaintive cries that ‘heaven [would] avert the suffering that man’s wickedness draws upon his head and shield our hard won civilisation from a staggering blow [i.e. war]’,89 and sarcastic indictments of the ‘sad reflection on our unreadiness to learn the lessons of history’ as man continued to ‘imagine that war’ was a potential solution to dispute.90 Had war been prevented in 1939 this might have been met with similar rejoicing to that which greeted Munich in the previous year. The first publications after 3 September however, appeared to reflect a different set of moral priorities. War (by then a reality) was suddenly capable of defending the ‘principles fundamental to Christian civilisation . . . [and] the right of mankind to develop according to the will of God’.91 Elsewhere confident assurances were made that ‘never has Britain engaged in a conflict with a more righteous cause . . . the cause of Christ is at stake’.92 The Church’s acceptance of, and enthusiasm for, war may therefore have had more to do with her practical

87

From a second draft of a statement that Lang attempted to get the leaders of Christianity to unite around, attempts to persuade the Vatican were continually in vain and ultimately the project was shelved. See Lang Papers, Vol. 56, ff. 62–143. 88 Lang to The Times, 25 August 1939, p. 13. 89 The Guardian, 25 August 1939, p. 541. 90 The Record, 1 September 1939, p. 542. 91 The Guardian, 8 September 1939, p. 571. 92 The Record, 8 September 1939, pp. 549–554.

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relationship with the British state than the delicacy of evaluating the morality of war as opposed to the morality of an enduring Nazi presence in Europe. For many in the Church of England, the accommodation of warfare was a retrospective act, the post-hoc justification of political reality. But, retrospective or otherwise, war was accepted by the Church of England. Once accepted it also had to be accommodated theologically and politically, as the pacificistic repudiation of war had, along with Christian social radicalism, given political expression to the faith of the majority of the church. We shall now turn to a discussion of the justifications for war voiced in the Anglican Church – which reveal much about the understanding of Nazism that were embedded within them. The historiography of the Church of England in the twentieth century holds that the Church’s acceptance of war was a concrete manifestation of its retreat from liberal theology. It is understood as having signalled the death of Anglican hope, the rejection of liberal optimism in man and the idea of progress, and crucially contained an admission of an inability to interpret or shape the contemporary world through Christian faith.93 Theological justifications of war did indeed bear the imprint of transcendentalism, and especially the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Unlike Karl Barth, the inspiration for continental pessimism, Niebuhr appeared aware of the degree to which transcendentalism had been a response to the European political crisis, and therefore had more appeal for Anglicans as he eschewed Barth’s efforts to find Christianity politically irrelevant. Niebuhr had long rejected the notion that war was the ultimate evil, arguing that the idea that the brutality of modern tyranny was favourable to the ‘anarchy’ of war was ‘morally perverse’.94 When William Temple suggested that although it was still his firm belief that ‘no positive good’ could be done by force, he now believed it possible that evil could be ‘checked and held back by force’95 – and when the Church Times, just days before the declaration of war, suggested there was ‘no warrant in the teaching of the church or the lessons of history for the belief that war, however horrible it may be, is necessarily the worst of alternative evils’96 – the imprint of Niebuhr seems unmistakable. Temple’s more extended justifications of war, which were published after September 1939, are similar. He preached that ‘war [was] a monstrous evil of that there can be no doubt’, but, he argued, ‘its occurrence is a manifestation of the sin of man. If there were no sin then there would be no war.’97 The Church’s conversion to pessimism should not be overstated. There was no transcendentalism in the Anglican justification of war, which continued to express a liberal faith in the possibility of intervention. George Bell argued 93 94 95

Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, pp. 193–231. Ibid., pp. 110–112. Temple’s broadcast address of August 1939, cited in F.A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (London, 1948), p. 540. 96 Church Times, 1 September 1939, p. 198. 97 Temple, A Conditional Justification, p. 3.

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(retrospectively) that to refuse to use force ‘in the world’ was, in the face of Nazi aggression, illogical and would be to shun the Christian concept of order and to resign oneself to the forces of anarchy.98 Similarly for William Temple, pacifism, although aspiring to the highest moral purpose, would have effectively meant in the contemporary international climate the ‘continued obliteration of the Czech and Polish states’,99 which, after the reconceptualisation of war and Nazism, could no longer be a moral choice for Anglicans. In fact, Temple argued that the pacifist was undermining the cause of civilisation: ‘the British pacifist is not merely taking no part [in the war]; he is weakening the British capacity to fight and so far is increasing Hitler’s chance of victory’, and abdicating from the political participation which was an obligation in the liberal Christian’s quest for a better world.100 If Munich had offered the chance of saving civilisation in 1938, of evangelising the world – by September 1939 it was war that fulfilled that role. Although war was given a graver welcome from the Anglican community, the scale of the consensus supporting it was certainly comparable with that which celebrated the agreement twelve months previously. War aims were defined in spiritual rather than territorial terms – this was a war for a Christian future. The Church Times’ first leader column after the beginning of hostilities for example, intoned that Britain was ‘not fighting for Danzig [or] fighting for Poland, [but] for the independence of nations, [and] the liberties of mankind’. War aims presented Nazism as alien, and directly opposing the ‘vital ideals of the Christian religion’. ‘Europe’, it was suggested, was threatened with destruction not by war, but by Nazism.101 Other commentators echoed this revolution in the presentation of Nazism. The Times described Nazism as a ‘truculent and degraded and bankrupt faith’ and celebrated the fact that ‘it [was] civilisation itself which is mobilising to crush it’.102 Whereas previously war was presented as the inevitable death knell of ‘civilisation’ it was at this time, paradoxically, cast as its saviour. For William Temple the potential of war with Nazism was that it could be the precipitator of the evangelism that could save an uncertainly Christian civilisation. Temple argued that the worth of ‘civilisation’ was that it allowed ‘free course to the Christian message and to Christian experiment’. A just war, Temple explained, amounted to ‘fighting to keep open the opportunity of making civilisation increasingly Christian’. Britain’s war was, in these terms, just, because it was being fought ‘against a system ruthlessly opposed to any such enterprise’.103 Such rhetoric does not seem to fit entirely with an image of a newly pessimistic church obsessed with the sin of man. The Anglican justification of war was as much phrased in the theology and the politics of hope as its pacificism had been. 98 99 100 101 102 103

George Bell, Christianity and the World Order (London, 1940), p. 81. William Temple, ‘August Broadcast’, quoted in Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 266. Temple, A Conditional Justification, p. 4. Church Times, 8 September 1939, p. 216. The Times, 4 September 1939, p. 9. Temple, A Conditional Justification, p. 23.

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Within Temple’s formulation, Nazism had become the primary evil threatening mankind. Indeed he was unambiguous as to the intellectual shift that had been necessary to allow Anglicans to approve of Europe’s descent into another conflict. War, Temple argued, had now been replaced as the principal enemy of humanity. Temple asked ‘is the Nazi threat to civilisation so serious that the evil of allowing it to develop is greater than the monstrous evil of war?’ ‘About the answer to that question’, Temple had no doubts, declaring that ‘most of the elements in life which we reckon of the highest value are incompatible with Nazi rule’.104 But was Nazism conceived singularly? After all, during the 1930s the domestic politics of the Third Reich had, using the concept of totalitarianism, been understood through comparison with the Soviet Union. Even Kristallnacht had led The Guardian to wonder: ‘the pogrom . . . makes us think how much barbarism Germany borrows from . . . Russia’.105 The Church’s justification of war had relied on it seeing the international actions of the Nazi state in the same terms – and these were also now understood in comparison to the Soviet Union. Such a comparison was validated when, in August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet alliance was formalised in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. There had been some public discussion of a potential British compact with Sovietism throughout the 1930s in the Anglican community, a prospect which was always regarded with scepticism. The Church Times lampooned objections to the Munich agreement which suggested that an alternative coalition, including Soviet Russia, would have been preferable to the appeasement of Hitler. Military co-operation with either totalitarian, it was suggested, would have involved Britain in a ‘war in hell, with one devil pitted against another’.106 Such understanding of the essential similarity of the twin totalitarian devils dictated that the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact was greeted with an almost tangible relief in the Anglican community. Anglican understanding of the absolute division of a bi-polar world was awarded political legitimacy by the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, which appeared to range the totalitarian states in unambiguous opposition to the forces of western civilisation, and crucially Christianity.107 After war began the English Christian imagination continued to universalise and generalise its enemy as the totalitarian threat to the Christian world. As George Bell wrote, the Second World War was ‘the war of the barbarian tyrant against civilisation . . . order and liberty’ and consequently ‘this was a moment in history when it was impossible for the just man to be neutral’.108 The ‘German war against religion’ underpinned this justification of war.109 The irreligious Nazi

104 105 106 107 108 109

Ibid., p. 22. The Guardian, 18 November 1938, p. 747. Church Times, 7 October 1938, p. 355. Church Times, 25 August 1939, p. 171. Bell, Christianity, pp. 81–83. Church Times, 17 January 1941, p. 30.

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state was seen as the partner of the contemptuous Soviets,110 something confirmed by the Soviet invasion of Finland, which had a generally destructive impact on the image of the Soviet Union in Britain.111 The Anglican community was outraged by the attack on ‘Christian Finland’, which it alleged revealed the full depravity of the Communist regime and could be directly compared with the Nazi actions in Poland.112 The Third Reich and the Soviets were portrayed as ‘partners in international crime’ and the war against freedom.113 The Church Times was fixated with the idea that ‘the blood brothers’ in wickedness, Stalin and Hitler, were engaged in a diabolical alliance to destroy European civilisation and culture.114 Repeating a commentary by Cardinal Hinsley115 which had awarded the Nazi-Soviet pact a biblical or even apocalyptic significance, this unholy partnership of identical ideologies was argued to have been ‘anticipated by the pact between Pilate and Herod before the crucifiction of Christ’.116 The noticeable silences in the British war in 1939 and the early part of 1940 dictated that for Anglicans it was Soviet guns in the Baltic that heightened their sense that the ‘grim shadow of Stalin and Hitler [was] darkening the decent everyday lives of all the European peoples’.117 Anglican perceptions of the Nazi-Soviet equivalence and co-operation also awarded the Finns the rhetorical status as allies in the just war against Hitler and in defence of Christian civilisation.118 Cosmo Lang beseeched Anglicans to pray for the ‘brave’ Finnish defence of the ‘cause’ of civilisation.119 Leader comment in The Record sought inspiration from the Finnish defence of ‘freedom’ against Sovietism, in order to bolster the Anglo-French efforts to deliver Europe from the ‘hateful nightmare’ of totalitarianism in its battle with Hitler.120

110 111

Church Times, 10 January 1941, p. 15. See P.M.H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, and the Soviet Union (London, 1990), pp. 25–33. Bell argues that the invasion of Finland seriously weakened the standing of the USSR in Britain. The British government’s view of the Soviet Union was also seriously challenged, and as a consequence there was half-hearted consideration of military engagement with Russia. See also Martin Kitchen, British Policy towards the Soviet Union during the Second World War (London, 1986), p. 11, where Chamberlain’s concern that the government would have to condemn Soviet actions in the Baltic is recorded. Chamberlain felt that the Soviet invasion was the same as German aggression in Poland. 112 See for example The Record, 8 December 1939, ‘Russia Unmasked’, p. 705, which described Stalin’s ‘mask’ as having been ‘torn off’ in the course of the invasion. 113 The Record, 15 December 1939, p. 721. 114 See any edition of the Church Times after the invasion of Finland from November 1939 for examples of the fixation with Nazi and Soviet alliance in Church Times. For the specific quotation describing Hitler and Stalin as ‘blood brothers’ see the Church Times, 1 December 1939, p. 459; see also 8 December 1939, p. 479, and 15 December 1939, p. 507. 115 Arthur Hinsley was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster from 1937 until his death in 1943. See John Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley (London, 1944). 116 Church Times, 15 December 1939, p. 507. 117 Church Times, 10 November 1939, p. 395. 118 The Record, 9 February 1940, p. 67. 119 Lang quoted in The Record, 29 December 1939, p. 749. 120 See The Record, 9 February 1940, p. 69, also for an account of Lang’s sermon at a service of intercession for Finland in St Paul’s on 1 February 1940, which praised the Finnish defence of the cause of civilisation.

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Grouping Nazism and Soviet Communism did little for the understanding of either as a specific ideology. Consequently, little or no attention was paid to the campaign against the Jews as an indicator of Nazi barbarity. It was the general forces of the ‘anti-Christ’ that it was again argued were amassed against Christian Europe.121 Anglicans commonly suggested, in a manner that echoed later historiographical controversy, that the roots of the Nazi menace and the attack on Christian culture could be found in Moscow rather than Berlin. For some of the ecclesiastical press the ‘persistent uprooting of Christian tradition’ embodied in the German fall from grace was simply the continuation of the ‘process which [had] been going on in Russia for twenty years’.122 ‘Hitlerism’, along with the Soviet invasion of Finland, was argued to be the potential precipitator of the communisation of Europe.123 Such aversion to the Soviet Union were the ecclesiastical equivalents of general suspicions of communism. For example elements of ecclesiastical and governmental opinion were united in a campaign for the internment of leading British communists, who it was suggested should be treated in the same way as Mosley’s fascists.124 When German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the diabolical alliance between Communism and Fascism appeared to break down. Europe no longer appeared to conform to the Church’s vision. The editorial pages of the Church Times crackled with disbelief and resentment that ‘Hitler’s genius for treachery’ had made ‘Britain with its jealous regard for personal liberty and an inheritance traditionally Christian’ the unwilling ‘associate in arms of the Godless and persecuting Soviets’.125 The Nazi invasion was a direct challenge to the Anglican view of the world. The Church, chastened by its self-perceived moral failure in the First World War, had designed a justification of war that was ultimately very simple; based around the arbitrary division of the world into Christian and anti-Christian blocks. After the launch of Operation Barbarossa this division of the world logically collapsed. The Anglican community was suddenly faced with a new war, and was forced to confront the uncomfortable question as to whether a war that involved alliance with one of the already defined forces of the anti-Christ could any longer be ‘the kind of war in which a Christian could take part without violating the dictates of his own conscience’ since the ‘Christian citizens of Britain [were] called to stand as allies alongside the atheist citizens of Soviet Russia’.126 Britain and the Soviet Union now had common enemies and yet, incongruously, ‘Bolshevism as a creed [was] as unacceptable to Britain . . . as . . . Fascism’.127 121 122 123 124

Church Times, 3 November 1939, p. 375. Christian News Letter, No. 16, 14 February 1940. See the Church Times, 1 December 1939, p. 459, and The Record, 8 December 1939, p. 705. See the Church Times, 10 January 1941, p. 15, and for a summary of pressure within the government for the internment of communists, Ian Maclaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979), pp. 187–194. 125 Church Times, 27 June 1941, p. 367. 126 See, for example, the Church Times, 1 August 1941, p. 442. 127 The Record, 27 June 1941, p. 233.

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It was not only the Anglican Church that was faced with the need to re-evaluate the war. The government had continually employed religious language in its rhetorical construction of the war. Churchill declared that the survival of Christian civilisation depended on the outcome of the ‘Battle of Britain’, while Eden declared that Britain would find her route to peace with God’s help.128 In the aftermath of the German invasion of Russia Winston Churchill was prepared to declare, with an emphasis that suggested an enduring faith in the originality of the Soviet menace, that the ‘Nazi regime was indistinguishable from the worst features of communism’.129 Thus secular authorities and propagandists also needed to reconceive (publicly at least) Britain’s war. How then could the British war effort, which appeared to have moved outside the boundaries of a just war fought against Godless totalitarianism and in defence of Christian civilisation, have remained morally defensible for the Anglican Church? As ever, the essential pragmatism and diplomatic mindset of the Archbishops signalled a way out of the ‘confusion’ which had begun to surround the Church’s war.130 Lang accepted that the prospect of alliance with ‘Bolshevist Russia’ was met with ‘not unnatural misgivings’ within the Church, but ultimately found such unease ‘misplaced’.131 Lang’s justification, albeit couched in the language of morality (for the experience of the First World War had dictated that for the Anglican Church to support the war it had to be moral), was essentially based on the lines of military rationality, but also involved a subtle redefinition of the now singular Nazi enemy. Lang wrote that ‘the first and essential aim of the whole widespread struggle [was] to overthrow the tyranny of evil embodied in the rulers of Germany, and all engaged in the cause must needs be our allies’ (my italics).132 Lang’s justification of the new war in alliance with the Soviet Union rested on the seamless transformation of Nazism from an element of the totalitarian alliance into the specific ‘supreme enemy of mankind’.133 Lang’s immediate recasting of Nazism as a singular enemy in response to the invasion of the Soviet Union reflected the Anglican Church’s propensity for the tendentious translation of political reality into moral certainty. But although the moral consensus behind the British war effort may have been retrospectively designed, it was not just a thinly veiled defence of political reality. There is no

128

Keith Robbins, ‘Britain, 1940 and Christian Civilisation’, Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (eds), History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 279–280. 129 In fact Churchill had the previous day privately asserted that if Hitler attacked the devil then he would be prepared to form an alliance, as such it may be assumed that his assertion of the incongruity of British alliance with the Soviet Union was largely a rhetorical defence of Churchill’s previous claims that Britain’s war was a defence of Christian civilisation. For the remarks on alliance with the devil see Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London, 1969) pp. 259–260. 130 See Christian News Letter, 1 July 1941, No. 88, which commented that ‘the participation of Russia brings a new confusion into the issues of war’. 131 Cosmo Lang in the Canterbury Diocesan Gazette, cited in The Record, 1 August 1941, p. 287. 132 Lang in The Record, 1 August 1941, p. 287. 133 The Record, 27 June 1941, p. 233, see also the latter half of the leader comment of the Church Times, 27 June 1941, p. 367.

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doubt that the righteousness of the war with Nazism was keenly felt within the Anglican Church, and this was a righteousness that was awarded by the image of Nazism as a negation of Christianity. As such, the argument that Soviet Russia was a justifiable ally simply because it was an ally, could not endure if the moral basis of the war was to survive. Consequently, writing before the formal conclusion of an Anglo-Soviet alliance, the Church Times effectively set out a blueprint for the adoption of the Soviet Union as a political ally. An editorial instructed that the British war was for Christianity, and therefore unless the Soviet Union accepted such a principle alliance would be impossible.134 In order to avoid this problem longer term appraisal of the Anglo-Soviet alliance did not cast the Soviet Union as friend, but depicted Russia as a moral ally. ‘Russia’ wrote the Church Times, ‘is fighting Hitler, the avowed and inveterate public enemy of Christian civilisation’.135 Russia was a credible ally because, as readers of the Church Times were reminded, it was the ‘cradle of Christianity’.136 Bolshevism may have been an ‘atheistic philosophy’, one of the forces of ‘irreligion’ for Anglicans. But the ‘heritage’ of the Russian people was the ‘Christian tradition’. If Britain’s ally could be Russia rather than the Godless Soviets then the moral basis of the war could remain intact.137 Church and state adopted a united attitude to the new alliance – separating Russia and the Soviet Union. Government propagandists also consciously recognised that Britain regarded Soviet Communism with some suspicion, and resolved that in order to ‘sell’ the new alliance, ‘it would be well to suggest that Russia is a communist country in name only; and that it is essentially a Russian patriotic, nationalist country’.138 In line with this propaganda tactic secular authorities in Britain attempted to concentrate attention on ‘pre-revolutionary Russian cultural achievement’.139 In the broadcast to the nation in which Churchill sought to justify the Anglo-Soviet alliance, a distinct effort was made to ‘Russianise’ the former ‘Soviet’ foe: the past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away . . . I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardily from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play . . . the cause of any Russian fighting for his heart and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.140

134 135 136 137 138

Church Times, 27 June 1941, p. 367. Church Times, 4 July 1941, p. 383; see also The Record, 11 July 1941, p. 248, and 18 July, p. 261. Church Times, 29 August 1941, p. 493. Christian News Letter, 26 November 1941, No. 109. Memo by Alexander Werth (Ministry of Information), undated, PRO INF/1/913, cited in Maclaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 198. See also Bell, John Bull, pp. 40–56, for an investigation of the initial development of the propaganda image of the Soviet Union after the invasion of June 1941 foisted a common enemy on Britain and ‘Russia’. 139 Maclaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 197. 140 Cited in Calder, People’s War, p. 260.

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The Christianisation of Russia was not confined to the idea of Russia as an historical construct; the process was equally employed with reference to the communist present. The easing of restrictions on Christian worship in the Soviet Union was vociferously celebrated within the Anglican Church.141 When Cosmo Lang defended the alliance he justified it exclusively with reference to the Russian adoption of policies of religious freedom.142 The actuality of these religious freedoms was irrelevant; Lang’s purpose was to Christianise the former Godless enemy and he was supported in his efforts by an ecclesiastical press which continually sought to draw attention to a resurgence of Russian religiosity.143 Also, implicit within this recognition of contemporary religious freedom was the hope for the Christianisation of the Russian future.144 The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, led a delegation to the USSR in October 1943 in order to promote religious links between the unlikely allies. The Archbishop’s trip was organised by the Ministry of Information and is further evidence of the close links between state and Church in the justification of war. Garbett, who had previously drawn attention to the suffering of Russia at the hands of the Nazis,145 found on his visit to Moscow that the ‘terrible losses and sufferings of the war have brought again into the open what was always latent – the deep religious strain in the Russian national character’.146 Emphasis on Russia’s Christian tradition ensured that the justification of war as a defence of a Christian past remained viable. In the aftermath of the war Brendan Bracken of the Ministry of Information thanked Garbett for his valuable work.147 Despite alliance with Russia, communism remained part of the Godless totalitarian alliance and therefore an enemy. Like Nazism, it was a ‘doctrine of man’ that denied the revelation of God through the promotion of man as God and of the earth as paradise.148 Through its racial thinking and its Führer, Nazism was portrayed as promoting the idea of man as God, in terms of both adulation of an earthly leader and Nazism’s belief in the ability to establish a racial utopian paradise. Communism, it was alleged, similarly exalted man by envisioning the 141

For a wide-ranging review of changing policies toward religion and religious groups in the Soviet Union see Richard Marshall (ed.), Aspects of Religion in the Soviet Union 1917–67 (Chicago, 1971). 142 Hansard (HL), Vol. 120 (389–92), 23 October 1941. See also Lang’s more immediate reactions, which noted that on ‘the outbreak of war thousands flocked to the Churches in prayer in Moscow’ as a basis for the future alliance (on moral grounds) between Britain and the Soviet Union, The Record, 1 August 1941, p. 287. 143 See Christian News Letter, 1 April 1942, No. 127, and 20 May 1942, No. 134. 144 See Church Times, 15 May 1942, p. 279; The Record, 22 January 1943, p. 30; The Record, 15 December 1944, p. 511. 145 For example in an article on post-war relations with Russia in the York Diocesan Leaflet, printed in Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 174, 4 March 1943. 146 ‘Archbishop of York on his Moscow visit’, Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 206, 14 October 1943. For further details of Garbett’s visit see his travel diary, ‘Visit to Russia’, Garbett Papers, COLL 1982/5/A, York Minster Library and Archives (YMLA). 147 Bracken to Garbett, June 1945, which can be found in Garbett’s ‘War Journal’, Garbett Papers, COLL 1982/5/B. 148 For an example of this characterisation of the Soviet Union, after the invasion and Anglo-Soviet alliance, see Bell Papers, Vol. 75, f. 100.

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establishment of a purely economic utopia. Nazism and communism remained fundamentally similar for Anglicans, despite military alliance with the Soviet Union. It is clear then that there was a fundamental paradox within Anglican thinking after the Nazi invasion of June 1941. ‘Russia’ and the ‘Soviet Union’ were simultaneously portrayed as both exclusive and identical. Russia was both moral and political ally in the defence of Christian civilisation, whereas the Soviet Union was subsumed within the concept of a totalitarian enemy which underpinned the Anglican justification of war. But, this paradox did not trouble the Anglican imagination. At the same time as condemning the Soviet doctrine of man, George Bell invited his congregation to ‘pray with [him] . . . for our nation . . . its forces and its cause for God, for Russia . . . that we may be so prospered that the principles for which we stand may be granted victory’.149 In this we can see the importance of the process of Christianising Russia in Anglican rhetoric and in unifying the idea of the Allied ‘cause’. This paradoxical or confused perception of the Soviet Union indicates that it was the geographical certainties of the divided world which evaporated with the Nazi invasion of Russia. No longer could the totalitarian world which so threatened civilisation be identified in geographical territory, as it had been after the Nazi-Soviet alliance carved up Eastern Europe. But, conceptually the world did remain divided, between Christian and totalitarian – hence the ability to separate Russia and the Soviet Union. This new complex sense of the war was characterised by George Bell as a ‘war of ideals’, a construct which echoed Hensley Henson’s sense of an impending war of ideologies in the later 1930s.150 Cyril Garbett went further than many of his colleagues when he claimed that the war was a ‘crusade’ in 1943, but his description of the enemy in general terms, as ‘sub-human barbarism’, was typical.151 This narrative of the Church’s shifting intellectual relationship with war and its interaction with Nazism in the Anglican imagination is important for all of this book’s central themes. First, in terms of the intellectual history of the Anglican Church itself, it is clear that the Church’s attitude to warfare articulated an enduring commitment to optimistic liberal theology until a moment of political conversion after March 1939. Anglicans then abandoned the political manifestation of a liberal understanding of the world, completing a theological journey which had already seen all levels of the Church embrace the idea of the sin of man in a way that it had not done before. But, even when convinced of the necessity of war, the Church’s leaders maintained an ongoing faith in civilisation as aspiration, rather than reality. Such noble dreams suggest that liberal theology endured 149 George Bell, ‘A War of Ideals’, in The Church and Humanity 1939–46 (London, 1946), p. 218 – this is taken from a sermon delivered in Chichester in September 1941. 150 Ibid. 151 York Diocesan Leaflet, January 1943, Garbett Papers, COLL 1973/1/0.

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in the Church of England. The acceptance of the need for war once war had begun engendered a post-hoc justification, continued by historians, which explained the conversion of the Anglican Church in terms of the immorality of the Nazi menace. There is no doubt that by the outbreak of war the Anglican Church did clearly conceive of Nazism as a menace, but the definition of that menace as anti-Christian and allied with Soviet Communism reveals a stark contrast with the twenty-first-century conceptualisation of Nazism and the campaign against the Jews as the central indicator of Nazi barbarity and criminality. This then tells us much of the manner in which the war was morally appraised in Britain, and the degree to which popular memorialisation and mythology of the Second World War reflects the demands of present-day morality and understanding of the nature of the Nazi state, rather than the intellectual realities of the past. Such conclusions also have profound implications for the manner in which Nazism, and specifically the Holocaust, was understood during wartime. The Church of England understood Nazism as an attack on Christian culture prior to 1939. This was the result of an inevitable interest in the sufferings of German Protestants in the Third Reich. However, when faced with a very public act of violent antisemitism, Kristallnacht, the Church forced these events inside its existing interpretation of the Nazi state and the nature of Nazism. The dominant narrative was not challenged, and antisemitism was not seen as a Nazi imperative. Events in wartime were also domesticated in the same manner. Such a narrative ensured a ready-made structure for the development of an exaggerated understanding of the profundity of Christian resistance in the Third Reich after 1939. The idea that Christianity was the only resistant force to Nazism predominated, with several books published to highlight the ongoing opposition of Christians to the Nazi menace.152 The Anglican understanding of Nazism also had implications for the dissemination of reports of the escalating privations of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Understanding anti-Jewish polices as evidence of Nazism’s essential opposition to Christianity dictated that at the very least the Anglican Church would struggle to conceive of reports of Jewish suffering as important in and of themselves. The following chapter explores the history of the Church’s understanding of and reaction to the ‘Final Solution’, and the growing realisation that Nazism, while an inversion of Christian culture, had slated the Jews and Judaism for extermination.

152

See Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform, p. 254 – works included Eivind Berggrav, With God in the Darkness (London, 1943); Hugh Martin (ed.), Christian Counter Attack: Europe’s Churches against Nazism (London, 1943); Henry P. Van Dusen, What is the Church Doing? (London, 1943).

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Chapter Three ‘BURNING INDIGNATION’: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND THE MURDER OF EUROPE’S JEWS

On the 21 June 1941 Nazi forces began the invasion of the Soviet Union. Following in their wake, SS troops sought, in the name of security and in line with Nazi plans for the redistribution of the population of eastern and central Europe, to pacify the newly occupied territories by killing all Jewish men of fighting age. These men were taken from the communities in which they lived, and murdered, often being shot into graves that they had dug themselves. By late August these SS Einsatzgruppen and other itinerant killing squads were murdering Jewish men, women and children. During the autumn, pressure built throughout Nazioccupied Europe for local administrators and governors to deal with their Jewish populations as radically as the murder squads in the east. In December the first of the six death camps constructed on former Polish territory began operation at Chelmno, murdering Jews who had been incarcerated in the ghetto at £odz in specially constructed ‘gas vans’. By the time the leaders of German ministries met with Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS security main office, to discuss the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in Berlin in January 1942, plans for the construction of three more purpose-built murder facilities had been established. At that meeting, known as the ‘Wannsee Conference’, the principle that the Nazi state would seek to transport Jews from throughout occupied Europe to the east for use in slave labour or to be murdered was disseminated throughout the German ministerial bureaucracy. By late July 1942 Heinrich Himmler had determined that the destination for most deported Jews would be the camp and death facility, Auschwitz-Birkenau, although it would not become the centre of the Nazi extermination campaign until the middle of 1943, when the death camps at Be»zéc, Sobibór and Treblinka began to be dismantled. By that time the majority of the Polish Jewish population had been murdered; the camp at Treblinka alone consumed nearly a million people by the time it closed in autumn 1943. Deportations from throughout Europe to Auschwitz-Birkenau were ongoing, culminating in the spring and summer of 1944 with the frenzied attack on Hungary’s Jews. Despite the wishes of the Nazi leadership that it would be an unwritten page of history, this murderous ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ could not be kept 81

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secret, either from the wider population of Germany or the watching world. From 1939 information on Nazi barbarity had trickled from German-occupied Europe. Despite, for example, a propensity to disbelieve atrocity stories in Britain (because First World War propaganda had exaggerated the bestiality of the German enemy), by autumn 1942 a clear picture of the Nazi extermination campaign could be constructed. Reports of gassings and mass executions appeared in the newspapers, and a variety of organisations from the Polish Government in Exile to the World Jewish Congress bombarded the government with information regarding the annihilation of Jews in Nazi-occupied territories. The suffering of French Jews was seen particularly clearly from across the Channel. How did the Church of England respond to this information? To postHolocaust generations the death camps appear an unambiguous demonstration of Nazi racism and the unique iniquity of the German dictatorship, but as we now know, prior to 1941 the Church of England did not understand Nazism through the prism of antisemitism. So, how did a community that interpreted Nazism as part of a collective deviation from Christian civilisation react to and understand the Nazi mass murder project? There is no doubt that the Church was explicitly aware of the annihilation, as its leaders were in receipt of detailed reports throughout the war. In fact, the Church was rather more ready than the government to admit that the Nazis were engaged in what we would now call genocide. What is at issue here is the question of how the Church of England understood the ongoing Holocaust. Did the mass murder of Jews force a reappraisal of Nazism, and the nature of its threat? Beyond the issue of how reports of mass murder impacted on Anglican appraisals of Nazism, there is a broader question that we must also confront. Because of the logic of some Christian teaching, much historiography concerned with Christian bystanders looks for evidence of antisemitism with which to explain reactions to Jewish suffering. For example the leaders of the Catholic Church have earned the condemnation of posterity for their failure to fully appreciate the gravity of Jewish suffering and protest against the ‘Final Solution’; and this is often explained as a result of Catholics being locked into a cultural denigration of Judaism by their faith, in other words as a result of some form of antisemitism. What about the Church of England? Notwithstanding the previously noted antipathy of Arthur Headlam or William Ralph Inge’s belief in the collective power of ‘international Jewry’,1 there was little antisemitism there, or at least none that was publicly expressed, especially not after Kristallnacht. But, an important part of understanding how the Church understood Nazi antisemitism, is to engage with how, if at all, it was related to the Anglican faith – especially when Christianity is often regarded as, by default, antisemitic. Because members of the Church of England, notably the campaigner on Christian-Jewish

1

William Ralph Inge, Our Present Discontents (London, 1938), p. 29.

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relations James Parkes, were telling anyone who would listen that Christians were responsible for the development of the antisemitism that had informed Nazism, this is an all the more important question for our understanding of the Church’s response to the Holocaust. Holocaust historians have been kind to the Church of England. No sign of animosity to the Jewish victims of Nazism has been found, and the Church’s loud protests against the menace of Nazi antisemitism have earned it much praise. In the main, the Church has been found at the forefront of a public campaign in Britain which first sought to draw attention to the plight of the Jews,2 and then demanded government implement some schemes of rescue.3 The ‘burning indignation’ of the leaders of the Church appears to articulate our own horror at the death camps and is a welcome change in studies of the bystanders that are more used to uncovering governments and institutions that were unable to find morally adequate responses to mass murder.4 There is then, on the surface, little sign that the Church’s understanding of Jewish suffering was limited by the narrative of Nazism that they themselves had constructed. As they had during the 1930s crisis of German Christianity, Church leaders sought to directly intervene on behalf of the Jews of Europe in any way that they could. Because war meant that there was little the Church could do to influence the Nazis themselves, its leaders confined themselves to attempting to shape the British response to the suffering of Europe’s Jews. William Temple was at the very centre of these efforts at intervention. He consistently demanded, for example, that the British government shape rescue and refugee policy, such as it was, from an humanitarian perspective. Temple believed that it was only by doing this that the government and indeed the British nation could fulfil their moral obligations to the persecuted. On 28 October 1942 Temple led a delegation of MPs to the Home Office for a meeting with Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, to plead that the government intervene to help a group of Jewish refugee children in Vichy France. Morrison refused, citing legal and administrative difficulties which Temple described as so ‘trifling to be almost profane’.5 At the increasingly hostile meeting,6 Morrison expressed his (and the government’s) doubts that the Nazis were actually enacting a programme of extermination. The very next day Temple declared publicly, at a protest meeting at the Royal Albert Hall which had been organised to draw attention to the Jews’ plight, that the Nazis were indeed 2

William Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could not have Saved more Jews from the Nazis (London, 1997), p. 131. 3 Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York, 1998), p. 168. 4 Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London, 1981), p. 100, records William Temple’s ‘burning indignation’ at the reports of murder, which he expressed in a letter to The Times, 5 December 1942. 5 F.A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (London, 1948), p. 564. 6 For details of the meeting see Temple Papers, Vol. 54, ff. 129–145. See also Eleanor Rathbone to Herbert Morrison, 5 December 1942, PRO HO 213/1827.

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involved in a deliberate campaign of extermination.7 Temple’s words were given widespread publicity, and forced the Prime Minister to make public reference for the first time to the Nazis’ ‘systematic cruelty’ to the Jews.8 Throughout November and December 1942 Temple kept up pressure on the government, both publicly and privately, to take some action with regard to Jewish suffering, such as opening the borders of Britain and the empire to any who could escape the Nazis. He spoke in parliament on behalf of refugee Jewish children in France,9 as did Cyril Garbett, his counterpart at York.10 He wrote to The Times to express his anguish at the treatment of Jews and to urge government initiative,11 and then led a further delegation to the Foreign Office, this time made up of prominent members of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ). In a meeting with Richard Law, the junior minister, Temple’s delegation urged that the government issue a statement on the extermination of Jews which declared both that those responsible would face punishment for their crimes and that any Jews that could escape the clutches of the Nazis would be given refuge in Britain, the empire or the Commonwealth.12 Law conceded nothing to the assembled gathering of Church and Synagogue leaders – but he clearly found defending the inaction of the Home Office uncomfortable, because of the perceived moral weight of the lobbyists.13 Just a day after this meeting, on 17 December 1942, the British government, along with the rest of the United Nations, issued the declaration on the extermination of the Jews which outlined the Nazis’ destruction policies and promised punishment for the perpetrators. The declaration was welcomed by Temple and other Church leaders, but it fell well short of their demands for an active policy to combat the ensuing ‘Final Solution’. There was, for example, no commitment to giving refuge or relief to the victims.14 Buoyed by public anger at the crimes of the Nazis, the Church, through its leader, continued to demand concrete measures. Temple wrote to Churchill at the beginning of January asking that the victims’ right of asylum in Britain be made publicly clear.15 Two weeks later Temple, Bell and Garbett led an all-party meeting in parliament to prepare protest against inaction and again to suggest that the government declare ‘its readiness to find temporary refuge’ for the victims of Nazism.16 On 25 January the Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Wales sent a joint letter to The Times suggesting that the suffering of Europe’s Jewish population ‘constituted an appeal to 7 8 9 10 11 12

The text of Temple’s speech at the Albert Hall, Temple Papers, Vol. 69, f. 107. The Times, 30 October 1942. Hansard (HL), Vol. 125 (21–24), 11 November 1942. Ernest Hearst, ‘The British and the Slaughter of the Jews’, Wiener Library Bulletin (1, 21, 1967), p. 36. The Times, 5 December 1942. See Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–45: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2000), p. 202. 13 For Law’s account of the meeting see PRO FO 371/32682 W17401. 14 London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 203. 15 Temple to Churchill, 8 January 1943, PRO HO 213/1827. 16 From the proposed motion from the All-Party Refugees group, PRO HO 213/1827.

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humanity’ that was ‘impossible to resist’; and again urged the government to provide ‘sanctuary for these victims’. Above all the Church demanded that the government approach the problem with a humanitarian outlook.17 William Temple was actually the public face and voice of a widespread campaign for rescue that had been sparked into life by the government declaration of 17 December 1942. Victor Gollancz, the Anglo-Jewish publisher, rapidly produced a pamphlet which set out the various possibilities of rescue, Let My People Go, in late December. By the end of January 1943, it had sold over 100,000 copies. Gollancz and protesting MPs led by Eleanor Rathbone, went on a relentless tour of public meetings in the first months of 1943 in order to raise awareness of Jewish suffering, and money for aid. These protest efforts became co-ordinated through the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror (NCRNT). Churchmen contributed too. Cyril Garbett, the Archbishop of York, spoke angrily and passionately to a public meeting in Leeds on 14 March 1943. Garbett referred to Nazism as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, declaring that the ‘persecution of the Jews is . . . unique in its horror. It has characteristics which make it stand by itself in the long history of cruelty and tyranny.’18 Lord Lang addressed a prayer meeting in Westminster, also in March, and declared that the Nazi attack on the Jews was ‘without precedent in human history’.19 It was not simply the leaders of the English Christian community that were outraged. Large numbers packed these public meetings, and the government also received the protests of private individuals and local churches urging action on behalf of the Jews.20 At the beginning of February 1943, William Temple again approached the government urging that British borders be opened indiscriminately to the Nazis’ victims.21 This approach was made on behalf of the Council of Christians and Jews, which had been formed, in part, to combat antisemitism. The CCJ became an important institution for galvanising protest. Indeed it was in the formation of a protesting constituency that the CCJ made its most tangible contribution to cross community relations – allowing, for example, Jewish communal leaders to bring pressure to bear on figures such as Temple to articulate publicly their shared anguish. It was, for example, the Chair of the British Board of Deputies, Selig Brodetsky, who, in September of 1942, had first convinced Temple of the Nazis’ determination to ‘exterminate the Jews of Europe’.22 In March 1943 Temple was again lobbied by Jewish leaders, this time to lend his public weight to the rescue

17 18 19 20

‘Empire as Refuge from the Massacre’, Temple Papers, Vol. 54, f. 225. Garbett’s speech cited in Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 176, 18 March 1943. Lang cited in The Record, 19 March 1943. For example the resolution of Clitheroe Methodist Group, 30 January 1943, PRO FO 371/26651; Bishop of Hereford to Anthony Eden, 24 February 1943, PRO FO 371/36654; and Eleanor Rathbone’s document ‘Evidence of Public Concern’ which contains the protests of many churchmen of various denominations, PRO FO 371/36653. 21 Temple to Eden, 8 February 1943, PRO FO 371/36652. 22 Brodetsky to Temple, 20 September 1942, Temple Papers, Vol. 54, f. 111.

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campaign by speaking in a debate on refugee policy in the House of Lords. Temple’s contribution was secured after discussions with the leader of the British Orthodox Jewish community, Solomon Schonfeld.23 Schonfeld no doubt felt that Temple carried more influence in government than he did, and he was perhaps right – Anthony Eden’s only response to a letter from Schonfeld in February 1943 had been that he ‘knew nothing of this man’.24 Temple’s intervention in the refugee debate of 23 March 1943 is certainly the most famous of Anglican protests, both against Nazi bestiality and the refusal of the British government to operate a more humanitarian refugee policy which met moral as well as political obligations. Adrian Hastings described it as ‘very probably the most memorable speech that Temple ever made’.25 Speaking in support of his own motion, which called upon the government to ‘offer help and temporary asylum to persons in danger who are able to leave enemy and enemy occupied countries’,26 Temple protested: against procrastination of any kind. The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days . . . we cannot rest as long as there is any sense among us that we are not doing all that might be done. We have discussed the matter on the footing that we are not responsible for this great evil, that the burdens lie on others, but it is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The Priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller’s wounds as he lay there by the roadside, and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.

Historiographical consensus also holds that Temple’s passionate and moving words had little or no practical effect,27 and they certainly precipitated no change in government refugee policy which continued, theoretically, to operate restrictions on entry to all British territories. The government proclaimed that no change in policy could be considered unilaterally and convened a joint conference with the USA to discuss action to aid refugees – to be held later in the year in Bermuda. In fact the British privately made it clear to the US administration that the purpose of the conference was actually to ensure that no change in policy was necessary.28

23

Pamela Shatzkes, Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry 1938–1945 (London, 2002), pp. 123–124. 24 Eden’s note on a letter from Schonfeld, 7 February 1943, PRO FO 371/36652. 25 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, 1985), p. 377. 26 The full text of the motion was given to Temple by a campaigning MP: Professor A.V. Hill to Temple, 9 February 1943, Temple Papers, Vol. 54, f. 238. 27 Hastings, English Christianity, p. 378; see also Ian Kershaw, ‘The Churches and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews – A Review’, Yad Vashem Studies (No. 19, 1988), p. 434. 28 London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 206.

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The conference was, at the behest of the Americans, delayed until late April 1943 – perhaps demonstrating the minimal impact of Temple’s warnings with regard to procrastination. In the run up to Bermuda the Church of England and indeed the wider English Christian community continued to demand action from the government. The ecumenical British Council of Churches (BCC) passed a resolution on the iniquities of antisemitism in April of 1943, which also urged that the government use the Bermuda conference as a means of securing material assistance for any refugees from Nazism.29 Despite this pressure, however, few movements in policy were won at the conference and there was certainly no commitment to an opening of British, or any other, borders as argued for by the Church and groups such as the National Committee.30 The British protesting community, including members of the Church of England, were left devastated by the pitiless attitude adopted at Bermuda. George Bell found it ‘impossible to conceal’ his disappointment at the ‘meagreness’ of the conference.31 Eleanor Rathbone, the leading parliamentary campaigner for rescue, declared that the campaign had simply reached ‘a dead end’, with few or no concessions won from a government whose policy continued to lack any sense of urgency.32 Faced with the brick wall of government intransigence, the public campaign on behalf of the Jews of Europe waned in the second half of 1943. At the same time the Church’s focus on Jewish suffering became blurred. Cross community groups such as the CCJ, who were focused on the sufferings of Europe’s Jews in the first half of the year, concentrated more and more of their time on combating domestic prejudice. When the developing Holocaust was mentioned, it was simply used as a device to galvanise action on issues much closer to home.33 The National Committee for Rescue scaled down its public campaign, impotent in the face of a government resolved not to act. The Church, and its leading campaigners, turned their attention to the post-war world. In effect the government had convinced them that they were unable to influence events. However, at the beginning of 1944 the rescue lobby was given new impetus and was galvanised for action once more. With the establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB) US rescue policy underwent a fundamental transformation – because it now had an agency in government whose purpose was the rescue of Jews.34 What Louise London has described as the ‘Anglo-American consensus on a policy of inaction’ came to an end.35 It was clear to the British rescue lobby 29 30

Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 181, 22 April 1943. For a summary of the outcomes of the conference see Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (London, 1994), pp. 181–187. 31 Cited in London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 222. 32 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, p. 183; for Rathbone’s critique of government policy see ‘A Confidential note on the Position’, 28 June 1943, Parkes Papers, MS 60/15/57, SUA. 33 Statement on European Antisemitism prepared by the policy sub-committee of the CCJ, 18 November 1943, CCJ Papers, MS 65/2/1, SUA. 34 On the formation of the War Refugee Board, see Breitman, Official Secrets, pp. 200–209. 35 London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 230.

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then that it was now possible that concessions could be won from the government and a new, humanitarian, policy could be constructed. The National Committee immediately woke from the depression that followed Bermuda. Rhetorically at least, the WRB committed the US to doing all it could to rescue the perishing – which had been a key demand of the National Committee. The Church was once more placed at the forefront of a revived public campaign for rescue. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, spoke at the first of a new series of mass public meetings held at Westminster Central Hall on 29 February 1944 under the banner ‘They shall not Perish’.36 The campaign was given further energy by the whirlwind engulfing the Jews of Hungary following the beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ there in March 1944. More so than the other Nazi anti-Jewish campaigns, the Hungarian ‘Final Solution’ took place with the explicit knowledge of the watching world. Daily news reports on the ghettoisation and deportation of the Hungarian Jewish community accurately depicted the ongoing tragedy in Britain and the USA.37 This explicit knowledge, and the approaching defeat of the Nazis, even further enhanced the possibilities of positive action on the part of Allied governments in terms of rescue, as did the desire of the Hungarian government to seek a separate peace. Consequently, the National Committee lobbied the government in the spring and summer of 1944 with a new vigour, and again Church leaders were crucial in this campaign. By July the executive committee of the NCRNT resolved that the Hungarian situation precipitated the need for the ‘organisation of an extremely influential deputation’ to lobby the Foreign Secretary. That deputation was led by William Temple, who was thought most able to win concessions at this decisive moment.38 Temple had already, in private and in public, resumed campaigning on behalf of the stricken Jews of Europe. In April of 1944 he issued an appeal to Hungarian Christians on the BBC European service, urging that they ‘play the part of the good Samaritan’ and help the suffering.39 Temple also continued to lobby the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. At the beginning of July he had reminded Churchill of ‘the obligation lying upon us to do all that we can’ to alleviate the suffering of Hungary’s Jews.40 Soon afterwards Temple issued a further appeal to his Hungarian co-religionists.41 On 26 July 1944 he led a delegation to the Foreign Office, which included the Chief Rabbi, to demand that action be 36

National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror (NCRNT) Executive Committee Minutes, 10 February 1944, Parkes Papers, MS 60/15/57, folder 3. 37 See Robert Rozett, ‘International Intervention: The Role of Diplomats in Attempts to Rescue Jews in Hungary’, in Randolph L Braham and Scott Milner (eds), The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit, 1998), pp. 138–139, for a brief survey of knowledge. 38 NCRNT Executive Committee Minutes, 19 July 1944, Parkes Papers, MS 60/15/57, folder 3. 39 Temple Papers, Vol. 55, f. 117. The appeal was actually the response of the CCJ. See CCJ Executive Committee Minutes, 4 April 1944, CCJ Papers, MS 65/2/2. 40 Temple to Churchill 3 July 1944, Hertz Papers, MS 175 139/6, SUA. 41 Temple Papers, Vol. 55; see also Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 245, 13 July 1944. See Temple to Francis House at the BBC, 28 June 1944, for the letter which led to this intervention, FO 371/42807.

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taken. But the need for urgency, despite a change in tone from government officials, was not recognised in action. Despite assurances to the contrary, government ministers failed to seize the initiative and realise the possibilities for rescuing Hungarian Jews in a proposal made by Admiral Horthy. The Hungarian regent offered to allow Jews to escape as an element of peace negotiations with the allies, but by the time action and the allies announced that they would accept his offer, he had been deposed by the Germans.42 William Temple died suddenly in December 1944, and with him Anglican involvement in specific campaigns for the rescue of the Jews of Europe waned. Although Cyril Garbett, Geoffrey Fisher (Temple’s successor at Canterbury) and George Bell all continued to serve as Vice-Presidents of the National Committee, the moral attention of the Anglican Church was turned towards the post-war world. It could be that the relationship to Temple’s death was coincidental. The government had throughout 1944 made clear that no substantial change in policy could be won. In private the government was still motivated by the fear of a ‘flood’ of refugees. As it had done in the aftermath of Bermuda, the protesting community realised their limited possibilities in the face of government inertia and after the German invasion of Hungary, the extremely limited possibilities for intervention. In the case of the Church, they turned their attention elsewhere in the latter half of 1944. However, there is no doubt that Temple was the chief agent of the Church of England’s campaign for the Jews of Europe, seized with a ‘burning indignation’ at their suffering. Temple has also seemed to offer an eloquent summary for historians of the significance and the meaning of the Anglican campaign. He was impassioned, angry and eloquent – but ultimately impotent to affect any change at all. Temple wished to play the part of the good Samaritan, a parable he invoked time and again in relation to the Jewish tragedy, and in that sense lived up to the responsibilities of Christian leadership. But the realities of war meant that he was unable to intervene personally and was reduced to lobbying those that could, to succour the victims of Nazism. That the British government especially made very few concessions to a humanitarian response to the Jewish crisis, is, for some, further confirmation of the political irrelevance of the twentieth-century Church.43 Although Temple’s pleas for humanitarianism did, ultimately, go unanswered, it would, however, be quite wrong to say that the Church had no influence on government. There is no doubt that the British government felt under pressure to act in the first months of 1943, and that the moral weight of the Church greatly contributed to that sense of unease. Richard Law, junior minister in the Foreign Office, was for example made aware of the inadequacy of the government’s policy response in the aftermath of the declaration on the extermination of the 42 43

London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 242. It would certainly concur with Raul Hilberg’s contention in Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (New York, 1993), p. 260.

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Jews by the anger of the deputation led by Temple.44 The campaigners of the National Committee certainly felt that churchmen added weight to their campaign. Temple was the author of the moral discourse with which campaigners beat the government. When Chief Rabbi Hertz reminded Foreign Office officials that they stood at the ‘bar of history, humanity and God’ in July 1944 he did so in the belief that it was Temple’s words that had most struck a chord with the apparently intransigent government.45 Hertz and the other campaigners for rescue may well have been right. Lobbying from the Christian churches and particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury was frequently cited by the British government in their efforts to compel the US into adopting a multilateral policy response to the ‘Final Solution’.46 At the Bermuda Conference, Law sought to impress upon his American counterparts the difficulty that the ‘alliance of Jewish organisations and Archbishops’ was posing for the British.47 There are also some indications at Bermuda that the moral case for action, constructed so memorably by Temple in the House of Lords, weighed heavily on government officials. In his report for the war cabinet, Law again expressed his moral evaluation of government policy in terms of which Temple would have approved: ‘is it really beyond the bounds of possibility that we should find one ship [on which to transport refugees]? I know all the arguments, but I believe too, that bread does come from the waters and that the story of the Good Samaritan is still valid.’48 Until now historians have been content to leave this narrative of the Anglican response to the ‘Final Solution’ there. The nagging conscience of the British nation protested powerlessly on behalf of the Jews. But we must explore the subject further. After all, the central contention of the first two chapters of this book has been that the Church did not possess an appreciation of Nazism that was capable of recognising its anti-Jewish imperative. Yet we have apparently found a protesting church, appalled by the unparalleled crime of Nazi antisemitism. However, the reality is somewhat more complex than the historiography, and the picture painted above, allows. Appreciation of that complexity can only be achieved by considering further the communal and intellectual contexts within which protests against Nazism, the persecution of the Jews, and the failure of the British government to enact schemes of rescue, were made. If up to now we have considered the action taken to combat Nazi antisemitism, we must now deconstruct the picture of that antisemitism that was publicly painted by the Church. First, it is clear that articulated outrage at the Nazi treatment of the Jews, and especially the sense that this was a singularly heinous crime, was not found 44 45 46

See PRO FO 371/32682 W17401; see the discussion of this meeting on p. 84 below. For the report on the delegation, see FO 371/42812. See Foreign Office Telegram to Washington, 27 January 1943, PRO FO 371/36649; and Foreign Office Memo to the US Embassy, 19 February 1943, PRO HO 213/1827. 47 Richard Law’s memo from the Bermuda conference which was submitted to the War Cabinet 3 May 1943 (ref. WP (43) 191), PRO FO 371/36731. 48 Ibid.

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throughout the church community. William Temple blocked any debate in the Church Assembly regarding the refugee question, for example, because he feared that it would portray a Church that was not united in anguish.49 Equally, despite the flurry of secular and ecclesiastical concern for the Jews in the first months of 1943, the Church Times, a paper which devoted its first pages every week to a survey of international political developments, made no mention of Jewish suffering.50 The National Committee for Rescue often passed on to government statements of concern for Jews it received from clergy, but was less keen to give publicity to those who wrote of their frustration at their congregation’s lack of sympathy for Jewish pain.51 Second, it is not at all clear that, despite the statements made by churchmen about the unparalleled depravity of Nazi antisemitism, Anglicans ever really appreciated the Nazi antisemitic imperative or the centrality of antisemitism to the National Socialist project. It remained very difficult for the Church community as a whole, for example, to separate Nazi anti-Judaism from what was perceived as their general campaign against Christian culture, as discussed in previous chapters. Despite the apparent acknowledgement that reports of Jewish suffering represented something new, that here the Nazis had plumbed hitherto unimagined depths, there is little sign that this had forced a reappraisal of the meaning of Nazism. That meaning continued to be explained and understood in the threat National Socialism posed for the Christian world. I shall now spend some time exploring this latter point further. Edward Norman has sought to explain Anglican outrage at Nazi antisemitism in terms of the Church’s wider objections to racism.52 It would, however, be wrong to suggest that Anglicans disapproved, unanimously, of racial thinking. William Ralph Inge’s dismay at the Nazi idea of Nordic man was, for example, based on his eugenicist perception that it was scientifically flawed. There were no ‘pure races’ Inge argued.53 Inge had no problem with racial difference but thought the notion of racial superiority ‘insane’.54 Perhaps he felt the notion of German superiority paid too little attention to their ancestral roundheadedness.55 Arthur Headlam’s dismissal of the evil of racism was equally predicated on a disapproval of the idea of race superiority. Headlam ardently believed that races were different, some more culturally advanced than others.56 However, in the main the Church of England did indeed operate within a discourse which assumed that an

49 50 51

Temple to Bell, 25 February 1943, Temple Papers, Vol. 54, f. 274. See the Church Times, January to March 1943. See ‘Evidence of Public Concern’ (a compendium of responses to reports of Jewish suffering) in the Parkes Papers, MS 60 15/57, folder 2. 52 E.R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770–1970: A Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), p. 355. 53 William Ralph Inge, ‘Alien Immigrants’, A Pacifist in Trouble (London, 1939), p. 225. 54 Inge, Our Present Discontents, p. 29. 55 See William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays (London, 1920), p. 83. 56 Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 271, 27 January 1944.

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understanding of man in which all were not equal in the eyes of God was contrary to a Christian vision of the world.57 This objection to race thinking did not require a perception of Nazism which appreciated its antisemitic imperative in the manner that might be assumed. In March 1941, a Liverpool Rabbi made a specific plea to the Church to help combat antisemitism as the ‘wooden horse’ that carried race hatred into the ‘European troy’.58 Such studied language appears to have been a deliberate attempt to tap into the discourse with which Christians engaged with Nazism, and it was indeed on these universal terms that the Church constructed its efforts to combat Nazi anti-Judaism. As an example, let us consider the formation of the Council of Christians and Jews. During negotiations for the formation of the council in the first half of 1941, William Temple insisted that combating antisemitism should not be seen as its founding task because its concerns had to be much wider than that. Antisemitism, Temple argued, was simply a manifestation of a much greater problem.59 When the decision to formally constitute the CCJ was taken in March 1942 the motivation provided by the ‘Nazi attack on Jewry’ was acknowledged, but only because it had ‘revealed that antisemitism is part of a general and comprehensive attack on Christianity and Judaism’.60 In the face of intensifying persecution the council later refined this interpretation of Nazi antisemitism and argued that ‘in the forefront of efforts to create division within every community the Nazis have always placed antisemitism, which is repugnant to the moral principles common to Christianity and Judaism’.61 Nazi antisemitism was therefore not being promoted as important for its own sake, even in the context of mass murder. It was seen as both illustrative of nefarious Nazi ambitions and as the device which the Nazis used to usher in more general injustice. The rhetoric of the CCJ was typical. The secular and ecclesiastical press offered similarly universalising understandings of Nazism. The Times explained that the Jews were simply the first victims of the ‘doctrine of violence’, and as such not ideologically imperative for the Nazis.62 Similarly in February 1943 the Christian News Letter instructed its readers not to be confused by the Nazi persecution of the Jews. This was ‘not’, they reminded readers, ‘a crime against the Jews alone, but against mankind; in this act of calculated inhumanity human nature itself is degraded and desecrated’. In the light of this, it was argued that ‘the 57

See, for example, Geoffrey Fisher (Bishop of London), Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 104, 30 October 1941; and Albert David (Bishop of Liverpool), Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 166, 7 January 1943; and the statement of the Conference of Missionary Societies (commended by Geoffrey Fisher), Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 280, 22 March 1945 – the last two are condemnations of the use of a colour bar. 58 Rabbi S.M. Lehrman, quoted in Spiritual Issues of the War, No. 71, 13 March 1941. 59 Marcus Braybrooke, Children of One God: A History of the Council of Christians and Jews (London, 1991), p. 11. 60 Minutes for a meeting to work toward the formation of a Council of Christians and Jews, 20 March 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60/15/22, file 4. 61 Statement of the aims of the CCJ on formation, released to the press 1 October 1942, CCJ Papers, MS 65/2/1. 62 Cited in Calder, People’s War, p. 499.

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sufferings of Jews [could not] be isolated from the sufferings of the peoples of Europe as a whole’.63 There was equally little need for the Church Times to concentrate on Nazi antisemitism when, as its editor believed, this was simply the prelude to a much wider barbarism: the significance of antisemitism [is that] while the Jews have been the first victims of insensate persecution they have never been the last and that in the countries in which it is not safe for Jews to live, no free men can live for very long.64

Other church institutions agreed. In April 1943 the British Council of Churches passed the resolution ‘Relief for Jewish and Other Persecuted Peoples’ which stated that ‘anti-Semitism of any kind is contrary to natural justice, incompatible with the Christian doctrine of men and a denial of the Gospel’ (my italics).65 The discourse in which antisemitism was considered then, was unable to see the persecution of the Jews as important for its own sake, as an attack on Jews and Judaism. Antisemitism seemed only to gain importance when it could be universalised. Even at times when the persecution of the Jews was at the forefront of the imagination Anglicans conceded to this culture. For example, in his 1944 appeal to Hungarian Christians, William Temple originally complied with government advice to avoid mention of the Jewishness of Nazism’s victims.66 The Hungarian broadcast bears direct comparison to his interpretation of Kristallnacht which saw anti-Jewish action as an attack on Christianity. Temple pleaded that Hungarians should not ‘allow themselves to be turned away from the path of Christian discipleship by order given to you from German sources or a government set up by Germans’. On the contrary Temple impeached them to ‘play the part of the Good Samaritan, and be sure that for every such act of kindness and mercy the Lord will bless you’.67 Temple’s appeal emphasised the incompatibility of Nazism and Christianity but made only oblique reference to the Jewishness of the Nazi victims: as ‘people whose only fault is the race from which they were born, or the independence of their minds and the constancy of their convictions’.68 Temple’s appeal was also issued under the auspices of the Council of Christians and Jews, further suggesting the breadth of the Anglican interpretation of Nazi murder policy during 1944.69 This was confirmed by the rendering of the 63 64 65

Christian News Letter, 17 February 1943, No. 173. Sidney Dark’s response to James Parkes, December 1943, Parkes Papers, MS 60/9/5/10. See the resolution of the BCC April 1943, ‘Relief for Jewish and Other Persecuted Peoples’, Temple Papers, Vol. 69, f. 205. 66 Temple issued a broadcast to Hungarian Christians in April 1944 which pleaded with them to help Nazism’s victims – see Temple Papers, Vol. 55, f. 117. This appeal did not mention the word Jew, following the advice of the Ministry of Information – see Francis House to Temple, 6 April 1944, Temple Papers, Vol. 55, f. 111. 67 See the text of the speech appended to minutes of the Executive Committee of the CCJ, 4 April 1944, CCJ Papers, MS 65/2/2. 68 Ibid. 69 The CCJ response to the Hungarian crisis was to request the appeal from Temple, see minutes of the Executive Committee of the CCJ, 4 April 1944, CCJ Papers, MS 65/2/2.

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deportation and murder of Hungary’s Jews in the ecclesiastical press. When comment was passed at all,70 it fitted seamlessly into the tradition of Anglican thinking that interpreted the persecution of Jewry as ‘a contradiction of Christian morality’71 and as ‘flouting the basic principle of civilisation’.72 But what about those leaders of the Church of England who referred directly to the particularity of the Jewish plight, such as George Bell? In a parliamentary debate on the refugee question in July 1943, he challenged the government on its lack of action following the Allied declaration in the previous December. The declaration itself had been, according to Bell, an inestimable step forward precisely because it had focused attention on the Jewish victims of Nazism alone.73 Bell declared his sympathy for all the victims of Nazism, but argued that ‘none of these people have been singled out by the Nazis for mass murder because of their race, as the Jews have been’.74 According to Bell, the government had subsequently retreated from understanding the particularity of the Jewish plight, and this had caused a ‘deterioration in their determination’ to provide aid for Nazism’s victims. But Bell’s acknowledgement of the singularity of Jewish suffering at Nazi hands was short-lived and incongruous. There is no sign that he engaged with the murder of Jews in this manner after summer 1943. Indeed, the picture he and others consistently drew of both Nazism and Germany during the war constructed the Hitler regime as an inversion of Christian culture. If any group was painted as the primary victims of Nazism, it was the Christian churches and not the Jews. Cyril Garbett similarly referred to the singularity of Jewish suffering in January 1943, but at the same time subsumed that suffering into the ‘agony of Poland’ in his public pronouncements about Nazism. Using familiar language, Garbett labelled the perpetrators of atrocity in Poland as ‘Satanists’.75 In fact declarations as to the uniqueness of Jewish suffering are cast in a quite different light when they are considered in context, for example in relation to the image of Nazism and Germany constructed by the Church. The Church of England consistently painted a picture of Nazism and Christianity as the antitheses of one another. Consider, for example, the wider Anglican vision of Germany. Anglicans understood ‘as a simple matter of fact that Germany [had been] the first country in Europe to be occupied by the Nazis’, in

70

Astonishingly in 1944 there is no mention of the Jews in the Church Times again despite the journal’s constantly European focus. 71 The Record, 14 July 1944, p. 285. 72 The Record, 21 July 1944, p. 293. 73 George Bell, ‘The Refugee Problem’, in The Church and Humanity (London, 1946), pp. 123–128. This is the text of a speech delivered in the House of Lords on 28 July 1943. 74 Bell, ‘The Refugee Problem’, p. 125. 75 York Diocesan Leaflet, January 1943, Garbett Papers, COLL 1973/1/0. In later speeches Garbett’s concentration on the Jews disappeared. For example, in the House of Lords in March 1945, he called for Nazis to be punished, but during his description of Nazi depravity made no mention of antisemitism. See Hansard (HL), Vol. 135 (671–73), 20 March 1945.

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other words that Germany was victim of the Nazis.76 This occupation had left the population at the mercy of the tyrannical Gestapo.77 But why was the Church convinced of this? Because, in short, Germany was known to be a ‘Christian country’. Because the Nazis had imposed themselves on, or occupied, this Christian Germany, the Church of England consistently promoted the idea that an ‘other Germany’ existed alongside the Nazi state. This Germany rejected all that Nazism stood for – symbolised, for example, by Martin Niemöller.78 In line with these assumptions, influenced especially by Bell, the Church held a self-fulfilling belief that it was the other Christian churches which offered the only hope of resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe because they were necessarily opposed to the ruling ethos. Christianity was therefore portrayed as the only light in the darkness of wartime Germany and Europe by the Anglican Church.79 Christians in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, were constructed as the eternal opponents of the Nazi menace, necessarily oppressed,80 and silently opposed to Nazi crimes.81 This view of Christianity as the primary opponent of Nazism helped obscure Anglican views of the perpetrators of Nazi criminality. Within Germany any institution perceived as being linked to a traditional Christian past was praised by the Anglican Christian community as apart from the alien Nazi dominators. Infamously, for example, the Wehrmacht was considered above the ‘party’ and an element of a Christian tradition. George Bell had held intimate knowledge of the Wehrmacht conspiracy which ultimately ended in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. Bell had been advised of the conspiracy at a meeting with Dietrich Bonhöffer in Sweden in July 1942, where Bonhöffer passed on information from Adam von Trott in the German Foreign Office. On his return to Britain, Bell lobbied the British Foreign Office to act on, and publicly welcome, Bonhöffer’s blueprint for a post-Hitler Germany. Such a vision of the German future saw the Wehrmacht joining the church as the agencies through which Germany could be morally regenerated.82 Bell continued to campaign on such a basis. In efforts to draw attention to the divergence between Germany and Nazism in March 1943 he deliberately attempted to distinguish between the army and the state in order to bolster the image of an honourable Christian, anti-Nazi,

76

George Bell, ‘Germany and the Hitlerite State’, in Church and Humanity, p. 99. This article was in fact a speech made by Bell in the House of Lords on 10 March 1943. This was a claim that was made continually by Bell, see also ‘The Unifying Forces of Europe’, in Church and Humanity, p. 163 – from a speech delivered on 19 December 1944. 77 George Bell, ‘German Atrocities’, in Church and Humanity, pp. 86–87. 78 See the Church Times, 11 May 1945, p. 263. 79 Christian News Letter, 23 April 1941, No. 78. 80 George Bell, ‘A Christmas Broadcast to Germany’, in Church and Humanity, p. 67 – a broadcast originally made in December 1941. 81 Cyril Garbett, quoted in Christian News Letter, 13 October 1944, p. 545. 82 See Rainer Blasius, ‘Waiting for Action: The Debate on the Other Germany in Great Britain and the Reaction of the Foreign Office to German Peace Feelers’, in F.R. Nicosia and Lawrence D. Stokes (eds), Germans Against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich (New York, 1990), p. 290.

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Wehrmacht.83 Bell’s faith in the Wehrmacht was shared in the ecclesiastical press who sought to identify the cultural continuity between the Wehrmacht leadership and the traditions of Christendom.84 The faith in the Christian Wehrmacht infected Anglican perceptions of the theatre in which the Nazi campaign against the Jews took place – the Eastern front where the German and Soviet armies clashed. First, Anglicans were aware that their rhetorical understanding of the war as battle for civilisation, and for Europe, echoed the rhetoric of the Nazi war in the East against Godless JudeoBolshevism.85 Such claims were dismissed as a ‘hollow pretension’.86 However, communism remained a Godless ideology for Anglicans and therefore an enemy (if an unspoken one) in the war with totalitarianism.87 Christian Germans, subjugated by their Nazi tormentors, thus became allies in the battle for civilisation.88 The tendency to find Nazi dominators and indigenous populations entirely separate and Christian institutions resistant was reflected in Anglican assessments of all occupied Europe, especially, and significantly in western areas. The factors conditioning understanding of the war and occupation of Europe allowed only a specific and glorious role for European Christianity, reflection on the failings of Europe’s Christian institutions was noticeable only in its rarity.89 The Ministry of Information publication Spiritual Issues of the War devoted most of its pages from 1941 onwards to detailing the spiritual opposition to the Nazis found in Europe’s Churches. Dutch and French Christians, for example, were continually praised (especially within the ecclesiastical press) as the bulwark of resistance to the totalitarian state.90 The essence of Nazism for the Church of England appeared to be in its negation of Christianity, not its attack on Europe’s Jews. 83

George Bell, ‘Germany and the Hitlerite State’, in The Church and Humanity, pp. 95–109. This is the text of a speech originally made in the House of Lords in March 1943. Previously Bell had corresponded on the need for him to draw a distinction between the resistant Wehrmacht and the Nazi SS and SA in any speech. Bell to Schutz, 22 January 1943, Bell Papers, Vol. 51, f. 93. 84 See Christian News Letter, 1 April 1942, No. 127 and 5 May 1943, No. 181. 85 See The Record, 15 August 1941, p. 297, and Christian News Letter, 10 December 1941, No. 111. 86 Christian News Letter, 23 February 1944, No. 202. 87 Anglicans continually invoked the possibility that the war would have a further evangelistic effect in the Soviet Union, and would precipitate the reintegration of Russia as a European, Christian nation. See The Record, 1 August 1941, p. 287; Christian News Letter, 23 July 1941, No. 91; 5 November 1941, No. 106; and 28 January 1942, No. 118. 88 This echoed the understanding of the Confessing Church, for example an unnamed former member of the Confessing Church explained that it was possible to maintain a self image as resistant to the Nazi regime whilst fighting on the Eastern front against the Soviet Union, because that war was not regarded as a war for Hitler, and as such could be ‘justified . . . before [one’s] own conscience’, Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York, 1992), p. 300. 89 Although there was sustained criticism of the Deutsche Christen movement in ecclesiastical circles, there is very little focus on the less prominent of Christian failings. In this regard the Bishop of Chelmsford’s condemnation of ‘the behaviour of so-called Christian nations in Europe’ as ‘not a very edifying example of Christianity in action’ is remarkable in its isolation. See The Record, 25 July 1941, p. 279. 90 Christian News Letter, 8 April 1942, No. 128; 20 May 1942, No. 134; 16 September 1942, No. 151; and 3 May 1944, No. 207. Similarly the Church in Poland was continually portrayed as resistant, see the Church Times, 14 August 1942, p. 444

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In keeping with Anglicans’ tendency to see Nazism as part of a wider totalitarianism, and therefore comparable to Soviet Communism, there was very little mention made of communist resistance to Nazism in occupied Europe. Comparison with the assessment of Christian resistance is a comparison between silence and noisy celebration. The ecclesiastical press made no reference to the communist ‘other’ Germany. Where indeed such activity warranted a mention within Anglican reflections on Europe, it was portrayed in negative terms. For example in 1943 Gerhard Leibholz and William Temple lamented in correspondence that the communist threat to Nazi power within Germany was ‘not a very comfortable thought’ as it might precipitate the formation of a ‘solid’ Central European ‘anti-Christian block’. Such language is reminiscent of the definition of Nazi barbarity and threat, and also further demonstrates the enduring suspicion of communism, despite alliance with ‘Russia’.91 Anglican attempts to separate Nazism and Germany were at odds with the official presentation of the German enemy constructed by government through the Ministry of Information. Following the ‘anger campaign’ of 1940 designed to cement public animosity towards the Germans, much government propaganda attempted to paint a picture of Nazis and Germans as identical. The most extreme example was provided by the radio broadcasts of Lord Vansittart, the Foreign Office’s chief diplomatic advisor in the first two years of the war. Vansittart’s picture of the Germans and the ‘Black Record’ of their history was the inverse of the Christian assessment of Nazism. Cyril Garbett, when Archbishop of York, typically referred to the Nazis as ‘pagan conquerors’ – conjuring an image of the Hitler regime with roots outside Christian European traditions.92 Vansittart, on the other hand, found Nazism rooted very specifically in the continuities of German history. Germany was, according to the government propagandist, a nation raised on ‘envy, self pity and cruelty’ whose historical development through various forms of violent governance had ‘prepared the ground for Nazism’. And it was Nazism which had finally given expression to the blackness of the German soul.93 By equating Nazis and Germans, Nazism and Germany, the government constructed a picture of the war in which there was a tangible enemy. But the Anglican justification had never found a tangible or at least geographically confined opponent. The Church, as we saw in chapter two, conceived of the war as a battle between mindsets. This quotation from the Christian News Letter is typical: it would be a fatal mistake, which would defeat our hopes, to equate the spiritual struggle between the forces of death and life with the armed conflict between the two groups of powers. The mistake would be fatal, because it would be completely unrealistic. Good and evil in life are 91 92 93

Leibholz to Temple, 23 February 1943, Temple Papers, Vol. 51, f. 90. Garbett in The Record, 19 March 1943, p. 91. Sir Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans, Past and Present (London, 1941), pp. 4, 20.

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inextricably mixed; they never separate themselves out into two sharply opposed camps. The forces of life are not extinct amongst those with whom we are at war.94

For the Anglican Church the German population, and specifically the Christian and traditional institutions in Germany were the ‘forces of life’, and the potential hopes for the Christian future, Nazism the alien ‘forces of death’. Anglicans’ understanding of the enemy and through this the war brought some members of the Church into conflict with the government over the manner in which the war was fought. George Bell, for example, protested vociferously over the use of area bombing as a weapon of war. Bell remained true to his original prescription of the church’s function in war time in which he claimed that ‘the church must guard and maintain [the] moral principles [that Bell found in the Gospel] in the war itself. It must not hesitate . . . to condemn the infliction of reprisal, or the bombing of civilian populations.’95 Yet it was not simply because Bell objected to the targeting of civilians that he opposed the bombing. It was also because of the manner in which he defined the enemy. It was senseless to bomb Christian Germany and Germans, destroying the Christian cultural heritage of cities such as Köln and Dresden, because these were not enemies. Obliteration bombing, according to Bell, both morally and physically undermined the cause of civilisation for which the war was being fought.96 It must be acknowledged that Bell’s condemnation of the actions of ‘Bomber Command’ was not met with universal praise in the wider Anglican world. Others were less willing to participate in a comprehensive engagement with the internal morality of the British war effort.97 Many felt that the most moral course of action was to win the war (by any means) and that a speedy victory would further the cause of civilisation.98 However, that the morality of the British war effort was constantly appraised by the Church of England is itself evidence that this was seen as a ‘war of ideals’.99 The defence of civilisation was for the Church both a physical and a moral process: ‘the present war is not a war of nation against

94 95

Christian News Letter, 17 December 1941, No. 112. George Bell, ‘The Church’s Function in War Time’, Church and Humanity, p. 28 – the essay was originally published in November of 1939. 96 George Bell, ‘Obliteration Bombing’, in Church and Humanity, pp. 129–141; this is the text of a speech delivered in the House of Lords on 9 February 1944. See also Jasper, Bell, pp. 256–270, and Andrew Chandler, ‘The Church of England and Obliteration Bombing of Germany in the Second World War’, English Historical Review (Vol. 108, No. 429, 1993), pp. 920–946. 97 For example see The Record, 18 February 1944, p. 61, which declared that ‘it may be taken for granted that British Airmen have never deliberately attempted to terrorise the population [of Germany], their one purpose has been to destroy Germany’s war potentials’. 98 This was the position reluctantly held by William Temple. See Temple’s introduction to Stephen Hobhouse, Christ and Our Enemies: An Appeal to Fellow Christians (London, 1944), and Temple to Davies, 7 August 1944, Temple Papers, Vol. 51, f. 171. Cyril Garbett also refused to condemn the bombing of Germany, see York Diocesan Leaflet, July 1943, Garbett Papers, COLL 1973/1/0. 99 For an evaluation of the whole debate see Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform: War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–45 (London, 1986), pp. 260–270.

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nation, it is a revolutionary war, it is a war of faiths’ argued George Bell.100 Those faiths were decisively ‘Christianity and anti-Christ’.101 It is true that other communities also constructed similar pictures of Nazism. The leaders of Anglo-Jewry, with whom the Archbishop of Canterbury collaborated so extensively to oppose Nazism, also understood Nazism as a totalitarian breach with civilisation. Chief Rabbi Hertz was often content to describe Nazism as the ‘Brown Bolshevism of Berlin . . . the negation of God erected into a system’.102 But, the use of such rhetoric within the Anglo-Jewish community has been argued to have been, in part, an attempt to widen the significance of Nazism, to convince others of the profundity of the threat posed. Hertz’s rhetoric certainly employed an intellectual structure that allowed Anglicans and British Jews to unite in condemnation of the Nazi menace. Such rhetoric was not however confined to England. North American Protestants also publicly universalised the Nazi threat as the inversion of a Christian moral structure.103 As a final example, the Church’s response to the discoveries liberating forces made when they entered the western concentration camps in the latter stages of the war was not constructed around a perception of Nazism as an antisemitic ideology. Rather the camps were interpreted as definitive evidence of Nazi anti-Christianity. It has long been argued by historians that secular society misunderstood the significance of the appalling conditions revealed in Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Understanding of the camps lacked context and the Jews discovered in them, especially in Belsen, were not related to the reports of extermination that had surfaced in 1942 and 1943.104 For the Church of England too the camps were the ‘brutal facts of the secular twentieth century’ (my italics):105 the lesson which these horrors ought to burn into our minds is that the real fight is against Satanic powers that possess and corrupt the soul of man and seek nothing less than universal dominion . . . the difference between the votaries of unbridled power and those who cherish the democratic values of liberty, law and toleration is so fundamental that even this war [has not been] too high a price to pay to decide the issue. But it is sheer delusion to suppose that the dividing line in the real struggle runs straight and clear between the embattled forces. Each cause has allies in the opposing camp . . . All pride, selfishness and callous indifference to the

100 101 102 103

George Bell, ‘Germany and the Hitlerite State’, in Church and Humanity, p. 108. George Bell, ‘The Basis of Christian Co-operation’, in Church and Humanity, p. 222. Cited in Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust (Oxford, 2003), p. 43. Robert W. Ross, So it Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews (Minnesota, 1980), p. xvii. Similar sentiments were expressed in Canada: see Watson Thomson, ‘The Jews of Europe’, a broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 25 April 1943 (Easter Sunday), the text of which can be found at Parkes Papers, MS 60/15/57, folder 3. 104 Church Times, 18 May 1945, p. 278. See Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London, 1998), for a general survey of British reactions to liberation. 105 Church Times, 27 April 1945.

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needs of others, wherever they are found, are a siding with the enemies of Christ.106

It is clear then, despite the ‘burning indignation’ of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Anglican leaders, that knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ did little to transform Anglicans’ general understanding of the nature of Nazism – despite the brief acknowledgement of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering made around the time of the Allied declaration. Nor did it challenge the Church’s construction of the world as a battle between Christ and anti-Christ. But, what about the Church’s view of itself, of Christianity? What impact did knowledge of the mass murder of Jews and the murderous excesses of war and Nazism in general have on faith in the Church of England? There is certainly no evidence of the mainstream of the Church finding the ‘Final Solution’ much of a challenge to its fundamental faith. As we have seen the crimes of Nazism were seen as the result of the absence, not the presence of Christianity. While twenty-first-century theologians may wish to speculate whether or not God died in Auschwitz – the observers of genocide in the Church of England did not undergo such theodic soul searching. Indeed the end of the war found much of the Anglican Church bolstered in its faith in the utility of Christianity in the world. In other words, despite suggestions that war had left the Church of England pessimistic, the prospect of a post-war world found the Church sure of Christianity’s power to shape and transform the world. Such a faith in the Christian future was also directly related to the Anglican community’s understanding of the present and the immediate past – and specifically the meaning of Nazism. All Anglican hope was, for example, based on faith in the ‘other Germany’. ‘If Germany and National Socialism are completely identical’ George Bell wrote, then ‘the “resurrection of Christendom” in Europe is no more than a . . . dream, but if they are not then that ideal may not be altogether utopian.’107 The resurrection of Christendom required aggressive evangelism, ‘nothing less than a crusade, by all the churches working together, for the conversion, the re-Christianising, of Europe’ as the antidote to Nazi poison.108 Again it was George Bell who represented Anglican enthusiasm for the Pope’s Christian peace proposals when he wrote that ‘nothing can do more to save mankind from barbarism than the preaching and acceptance of the cross as salvation of the world’, and called for a ‘crusade of conversion’ as the only way to safeguard the European future.109 Cyril Garbett agreed, noting, three years after the war, an enduring age of ‘perplexity and bewilderment’ which heightened the continued ‘urgency of missionary work’.110 106 107

Christian News Letter, 2 May 1945, No. 233. Christian News Letter, 20 March 1940, No. 21. See also Christian News Letter, 1 November 1944, No. 220. 108 George Bell, ‘A Visit to Sweden’, in Church and Humanity, p. 77. 109 George Bell, ‘The Church and the Future of Europe’, in Church and Humanity, p. 121. 110 Cyril Garbett, ‘The Urgency of Missionary Work’, a sermon delivered in Manchester 12 May 1948. Garbett Papers, COLL 1973/1/P, Vol. 48.

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The Church of England participated in institutions which would supervise this crusade of conversion, for example the ecumenical Committee for Christian Reconstruction in Europe in 1944, which would later become simply Christian Reconstruction in Europe (CRE). An agency of the British Council of Churches, CRE involved significant figures in the Anglican Church. William Temple was central to its establishment, while George Bell became its driving force after Temple’s death. The institutional manifestation of the ecumenical faith in the regenerative powers of Christianity, the remit of CRE was both practical and moral. Practically the organisation was dedicated to raising money to support the material reconstruction of German (Protestant) Christianity.111 This aid to the literal rebuilding of church institutions was to provide practical impetus to the CRE’s moral and spiritual raison d’être: the establishment of ecumenical contact in Germany as a precursor to the re-Christianisation of Europe.112 The CRE was founded upon myths which were an explicit echo of the assumptions of the ‘war of ideals’: Christian churches throughout Europe have been in the forefront of the fight against Barbarism. Their struggle has not been for themselves but of the Church of Christ and as guardians of human values of justice liberty and truth . . . God, our shepherd, give to the Church a new vision, and a new charity, new wisdom, and fresh understanding, the revival of her brightness and the renewal of her unity; that the eternal message of thy son undefiled by the traditions of man may be hailed as the good news of the new age.113

At the heart of the CRE’s envisioned Christian revival lay the resistant German church which it was argued had proved to be almost ‘the only bulwark against the penetrating influence of National Socialist ideology’ in Germany. This resistance was, argued the Anglican Church, a ‘living reminder to the nation that there exist forces which have deeper roots and greater permanence than National Socialism’.114 The historical narrative at work was unmistakable: the German past was rooted in the western tradition, which alien Nazism had failed to destroy. Nazi antisemitism and its murderous excesses did not then challenge either the Church of England’s understanding of the role of Christianity in the world, or its sense that Nazism could be best understood as a negation of Christianity. But what about its sense of the Christian relationship with Judaism? After all, the Holocaust was, in part, a Christian crime. As early as 1935 the Bishop of Durham had argued that Nazism flourished in a seed bed of antisemitism that was provided, in part, by the traditions of the Christian faith. Did the Church of

111 112

See The Record, 26 May 1944, p. 215. See the BCC submission to the Foreign Office for official recognition of CRE, February 1944, PRO FO 371/40752. 113 Pamphlet of CRE in Temple Papers, Vol. 7, ff. 383–386. 114 From a report prepared for CRE (unattributed), ‘The Situation of the Protestant Church in Germany’, Temple Papers, Vol. 7, ff. 209–216.

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England challenge some of the assumptions that made up this fertile ground for Nazism? It is, after all, often asserted that it took the horror of the Holocaust to ‘jolt Christian consciences thoroughly [and] to open Christian eyes’ as to the historical injustices of Christian-Jewish relations.115 Did Nazi antisemitism have any impact on Anglican views of Christian-Jewish relations? In addition to Hensley Henson, there were voices in the Church of England calling for a re-appraisal of the Christian-Jewish encounter in the light of the persecution of Jews on the continent. Indeed one of the authors of what is today called ‘post-Holocaust’ theology – the attempt to design an equanimous relationship between Christians and Jews – was an Anglican Priest. James Parkes dedicated his career to redesigning the relationship between Christians and Jews, both through researching the history of Christian-Jewish relations and by proposing a new theology of Christian-Jewish relations for the future. During the war he centred this campaign around an attempt to place the Jews at the heart of any plans for the post-war European future and an effort to create a world in which it was safe for a ‘Jew to be a Jew’.116 According to Parkes the way in which this safe future could be secured was if Christians abandoned their missionary attitude to the Jews. Parkes argued that mission was the root cause of the historical problems of the Christian-Jewish encounter. ‘The Missionary attitude’ he wrote, was ‘inevitably coupled with . . . the denigration of Judaism.’ The apogee of this denigration was the accusation that the Jews had been responsible for the death of Christ.117 Furthermore, according to Parkes, it was the denigration of Judaism central to Christians and Christianity’s faith that the Jews must convert to restore their broken covenant with God, which was, in part, responsible for their contemporary suffering in Nazi-occupied Europe. The ‘church’s persistence in teaching its anti-Jewish tradition from the pulpit’ contended Parkes, ‘kept the masses of Europe conscious and suspicious of the Jews even in the modern period’,118 and had left a ‘still unbroken’ line between the pulpit and the death camps.119 Parkes’ was both a theological argument based on Christian principle and a humanitarian response based on empathy with the persecuted Jews. Parkes’ life in the church had been devoted to the investigation of Christian-Jewish relations since he first took employment with the Student Christian Movement in the 115

Sarah Pearce, ‘Attitudes of Contempt: Christian Anti Judaism and the Bible’, in Sian Jones, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Pearce (eds), Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt: Studies in Jewish–Non-Jewish Relations (London, 1998), p. 69. 116 Quoted in Tony Kushner, ‘James Parkes, the Jews and Conversionism: A Model for Multi-Cultural Britain?’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Christianity and Judaism, Studies in Church History 29 (London, 1992), p. 457. 117 James Parkes, ‘Christianity and Judaism: Conversion or Co-operation?’, April 1942, p. 2, Parkes Papers, MS 60 17/10/02. 118 Quoted in Robert Everett, Christianity without Antisemitism: James Parkes and the Jewish Christian Encounter (Oxford, 1993), p. 239. 119 Quoted in Robert Everett, ‘James Parkes: A Model for Christians in the Time after the Holocaust’, in Bauer et al., Remembering for the Future, p. 330.

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1920s. The entire thrust of his theology was geared towards exposing what he saw as the profound theological error of Christian anti-Judaism. Christians, Parkes argued, fundamentally misunderstood Christ’s relationship with the Jewish community from which he came. They generally failed to appreciate that Jesus’s objections to religious orthodoxy were part of dialogue within a community, rather than an attempt to break from that community. As Christ’s teaching had not been designed as a break away from Judaism, Parkes believed that Christianity and Judaism were different forms of a single faith. According to Parkes the mistaken belief in the separation of Christianity and Judaism had distorted Christian theology because it encouraged the groundless faith that each successive stage of God’s revelation superseded that which had preceded it. Conversely, according to Parkes, the theological reality was that ‘the stages of God’s revelation, once revealed are never lost’.120 Of course, Parkes’ view of the historical relationship between Christianity and Judaism inevitably impacted upon his perception of the contemporary relationship between the two faiths. If Christianity and Judaism were equally valid stages of God’s revelation then the idea of Christian missions to the Jews was supremely illogical. According to Parkes, far from having superseded Judaism, Christianity, without the Jewish faith, was missing a part of its revelation.121 Dominant conceptions of Jewish-Christian relations were for Parkes both cause and consequence of a much wider theological error within Christianity. Assumptions as to the death of Judaism in the light of Christ had encouraged an overt reliance on one element of the trinity, which had obscured, rather than enhanced, the Christian relationship with God. Parkes held that mission perpetuated this theological travesty because it prevented Christians from having access to the revelatory power of Judaism. That revelation, Parkes believed, would provide a complement to the Christian theology of the individual’s relationship with the divine by exploring the relationship of a community to God. In what was a peculiarly Anglican view, Judaism, Parkes contended, was a religion in which man as a social being reached fulfilment, Christianity a religion in which the individual could come closer to perfection.122 Indeed Parkes’ attraction to Judaism can also be seen as a part of his general theological liberalism, and conversant with his search for a socio-political relevance for Christianity. He wrote in praise of Judaism that ‘one did not desire to be saved from the world in Judaism; rather, one was taught the proper way in which to live in the world’.123

120

John Hadham, Good God: Sketches of His Character and Activities (London, 1940), p. 92. John Hadham was the pseudonym under which Parkes wrote popular theology. 121 See Everett, Christianity without Antisemitism, pp. 45–46, for a deeply personal statement of his theology of the Jewish Christian relationship; from the post-war period see James Parkes, ‘A Theology of the Jewish Christian Relationship’, in James Parkes, Prelude to Dialogue: Jewish Christian Relationships (London, 1969), pp. 188–201. 122 James Parkes, ‘A Christian Looks at Christian Mission to the Jews’, May 1944, Parkes Papers, MS 60/9/5/16. 123 Quoted in Everett, Christianity without Antisemitism, p. 184.

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Parkes’ views were always unlikely to be taken seriously inside a community that looked forward to a peace based on the re-birth of Christendom. But, nevertheless, in the midst of the murder of European Jews Parkes challenged his fellow Anglicans, and indeed Christians in general, to reform their attitude to Judaism. He circulated a paper to leading churchmen – including Bell and Temple – in which he argued that the Church must abandon its commitment to mission. Inspired by recent discussions for the formation of the Council of Christians and Jews, Parkes argued that if the Church was to formally commit itself to combating antisemitism then it could not simultaneously promote either the idea that Jews needed to be converted, or that they remained inferior.124 Parkes set out his argument that Christians were responsible for antisemitism because of their enduring faith in the missionary relationship.125 Perhaps predictably, Parkes’ theological revisionism inspired derision and disbelief amongst his correspondents from the Church of England and the wider Christian community. William Paton126 felt Parkes ‘barely Christian’ and remained committed to the principle that whatever may be said about the Jews they ‘did miss the way’ which had been provided by Christ.127 John Mcleod Campbell128 was equally dismissive of Parkes, suggesting that his was an overemotional and irrational response to the Jews’ present plight.129 Alec Vidler, the editor of Theology, believed that ‘it does make all the difference in the world whether you believe that Jesus is the messiah’ and that one was bound to have a ‘sense of mission to those who rejected’ such a conviction.130 Parkes wrote to George Bell in November 1941, arguing that there ‘clearly can be no real change in relations so long as the official policy of the church towards Judaism is the conversionist one . . . once we were prepared to approach Judaism on the basis that our separation was a schism which left truth divided, a new era would open’.131 There is no record of Bell’s response to Parkes on this occasion. But Bell’s mono-cultural plans for the post-war European future and his looking forward to a crusade of conversion, suggest that he rejected Parkes’ call for inclusiveness and the creation of a future in which it was safe for Jews to be Jews. The least negative response to Parkes from within the Anglican establishment 124

See p. 1 of the April 1942 version of ‘Christianity and Judaism – Conversion or Co-operation?’, Parkes Papers MS 60/17/10/ 02. This became an article in Theology (Vol. XLVII, No. 292, 1944), pp. 218–224. 125 See Parkes Papers MS 60/17 which contains various versions of Parkes’ memo ‘Christianity and Judaism – Conversion or Co-operation?’, and the response of those correspondents that Parkes invited comments from. These included George Bell, William Temple and William Paton. 126 William Paton was active in the Student Christian Movement, and became instrumental in the creation of the World Council of Churches. He was also Secretary of the International Missionary Council. See Eleanor M. Jackson, Red Tape and the Gospel: A Study of the Significance of the Ecumenical Missionary Struggle of William Paton (Birmingham, 1981). 127 Paton to Parkes, 19 May 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60/17/10/02. 128 John McLeod Campbell was the General Secretary of the Missionary Council of the Church Assembly. 129 McLeod Campbell to Parkes, 8 May 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60/17/10/02. 130 Alec Vidler, ‘Editorial’, Theology (Vol. XLVII, No. 292, 1944), p. 217. 131 Parkes to Bell, 10 November 1941, Parkes Papers, MS 60/16/051.

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came from Temple, with whom he engaged in lengthy correspondence.132 Temple was receptive to the validity of Parkes thought, and was even willing to entertain the idea that certain passages of scripture had antisemitic potential. He could not accept that any Christian teaching was fundamentally prejudicial toward the Jews but he did concede that some passages could be interpreted as such.133 Temple certainly felt that the issue of Jewish affairs in the post-war world should be given some careful thought that went some way beyond the perpetuation of mission and the recommendation of conversion. Indeed Temple even suggested that Parkes be appointed to the House of Lords and made Minister for Jewish Affairs in any post-war administration;134 Parkes rejected the idea.135 But with regard to mission, even Temple could not agree with Parkes. He was keen that missionary activity be conducted in a ‘Christian spirit’ in a manner that did not denigrate;136 but he was unable to see the fundamental incongruity of Christian concern at the growth of antisemitism and the endurance of missionary attitudes. Temple refused Parkes’ request that he resign his commission at the head of the Church Mission to the Jews (CMJ). Parkes argued that this office contradicted Temple’s endorsement of the Council of Christians and Jews and the fight against antisemitism;137 Temple replied that on the contrary he felt mission to the Jews to be a ‘Christian obligation’.138 Indeed Temple was seemingly unable to criticise the principle of mission even when it was articulated in the most lurid terms. Confronted with CMJ publication The Jewish Expellees in our Midst139 in 1943, which described Jews as suffering a ‘disease of the soul’ for which conversion was the only cure, Temple was unable to dismiss the document as offensive.140 Such rhetoric may have borne Jews no actual ill, but it appeared, at the very least, to be anchored in a negative conception of the Jew. Temple was of course not alone among Church leaders in maintaining associations with missionary groups. Garbett remained Chair of the Church Assembly Missionary Council for example. Nor was the Church of England alone in its renewed commitment to mission in the face of the Holocaust. The perpetuation of the image of Jewish inferiority was employed as a response to the Jewish crisis 132 133

For example see the exchange of correspondence in Temple Papers, Vol. 31, ff. 282–296, from 1944. For example Temple to Sherman, 6 April 1944, Temple Papers, Vol. 31, f. 397, in which Temple states that he ‘does not think that the reading of the passages in the New Testament describing the crucifiction can themselves without comment create ill feeling against the Jews . . . I think the damage comes entirely from the way in which people have treated them’. 134 See Parkes to Temple, 31 January 1942, Temple Papers, Vol. 54, f. 61. 135 Colin Richmond, Campaigner against Antisemitism (London, 2005), pp. 297–298. 136 Temple’s message of support for the 1942 summer school of the Church Mission to the Jews suggested that it ‘is no doubt possible to conduct missions to the Jewish people in such a way as to alienate those we do not win, but this will not result from an approach [that] is truly Christian in spirit’. Taken from a letter from W.W. Simpson to Parkes, 15 October 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60 17/10/02. 137 Parkes to Temple, 16 April 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60 17/10/02. 138 Temple to Parkes, 19 April 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60 17/10/02. 139 J.H. Adeney, The Jewish Expellees in our Midst (London, 1943); see Temple Papers, Vol. 31, ff. 273–278, for a copy. 140 Temple to the CMJ, 16 April 1943, Temple Papers, Vol. 31, f. 279.

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across the ecumenical community. Robert Ross has noted the ‘perverse’ response of American Protestantism to Jewish refugees and the attempts at conversion as an expression of sympathy for their suffering in Europe.141 Equally one of Parkes’ major critics was the American Conrad Hoffman, Chair of the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (a committee of the International Missionary Council). Hoffman even disapproved of efforts to build cross cultural co-operation through groups such as the Council of Christians and Jews because they undermined the ‘basic task and responsibility of the church . . . to win all men to faith in Christ’.142 Wolfgang Gerlach and John Conway have also identified the endurance of the missionary attitude in the German Protestant churches in the post-war era,143 which was in line with the original objections of the Confessing Church to Nazi racial legislation as a denial of Christianity’s missionary purpose. Tony Kushner has written that Parkes’ attitude to Judaism provided a model for a multi-cultural Britain, through its emphasis on understanding and cultural equality.144 In its rejection of Parkes, and its interrelated preparation of culturally exclusive visions for the post-war world, the Anglican Church rejected this model, and with it the principle of cultural equality. Consequently the understanding that the Anglican Church achieved of the persecution of the Jews in Europe can be further problematised. Conversant with an understanding of Nazism as a whole, and in particular the Nazi attack on the Jews, as an attack on Christian values and culture, Anglican Christians effectively refused to entertain any notion of Christian responsibility for antisemitism by refusing in the later war years and immediate aftermath of the war to countenance any change to the Christian-Jewish relationship. In fact the response to the Jewish crisis, was, through the design of aggressive and evangelistic peace plans, an acceleration of the missionary relationship and effectively an endorsement of the culture that Parkes identified as contributing to the antisemitic cultural milieu. The limited historiographical acknowledgement of the existence of the Council of Christians and Jews argues that it was formed because it was understood that the fundamental injustices of the Christian-Jewish relationship had prepared the seed bed for the murderous excesses of Nazism. But, as has already been argued, the council was a part of Christian culture which understood Nazism as essentially opposed to Christianity, rather than its bastard child.145 Thus not only did the murder of Europe’s Jews not alter Anglican views of Nazism, it also made little impact on Anglicans’ views of themselves and their own faith. 141

Robert Ross, ‘Perverse Witness to the Holocaust: Christian Missions and Missionaries’, Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker (eds), The Churches’ Response to the Holocaust (Florida, 1986), pp. 127–140. 142 Hoffman to Parkes, 5 March 1942, quoted in Parkes to Temple, 16 April 1942, Parkes Papers, MS 60 17/10/02. 143 Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2000), p. 211; John Conway, ‘The German Church Struggle and its Aftermath’, in Abraham J. Peck (ed.), Jews and Christians After the Holocaust (Philadelphia, 1982), p. 48. 144 Kushner, ‘James Parkes, the Jews and Conversionism’. 145 Wilkinson, Dissent and Conform, p. 161, and Braybrooke, Children of One God, p. 13.

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These observations are central to an understanding of the extent and the limits of the Anglican response to the Holocaust. Consider Parkes’ understanding of both Nazism and its attack on the Jews. The degree of Parkes’ intellectual engagement with Judaism and his perception of the problems of the Christian-Jewish encounter allowed him to go beyond his brethren’s interpretation of the significance of the ensuing Holocaust. As Parkes wanted to make the world safe for Jews to be Jews, he saw that Nazism was attacking Jews and Judaism for their own sake. It was not, Parkes’ argued, Christian civilisation that was under attack from Nazism – but a Jewish civilisation. He recognised the Nazi determination to destroy ‘not only men, but a religion and civilisation of which the world has need’.146 Parkes’ contemporaries could not have understood the conflict that they saw between Christ and anti-Christ in this manner.147 The implications of this chapter are manifold. The leaders of the Church of England protested loudly against the murderous Nazi persecution of Jews in occupied Europe. At times those leaders also suggested that antisemitism was the Nazi imperative. But such an interpretation and the protests that articulated it were lost in an understanding of Nazism, dominant throughout the Anglican community, as a threat to and an attack on Christian culture. This narrative constructed Nazi antisemitism as either part of, or a precursor to, a campaign against Christianity. Crucially this narrative found Nazism alien to European, Christian, cultural traditions. This allowed the separation of Germans and Nazis in the Anglican imagination and ensured that the suggestion, made by James Parkes, that the roots of antisemitism, and Nazi antisemitism at that, lay with Christianity was met with incredulity. The rhetorical rendering of Nazi antisemitism within the Anglican Church was a publicly constructed narrative by an organisation that, far from irrelevant, was capable of authoring the moral discourse around government politics. The idea that Nazism was at root antiChristian meant that its antidote lay, for the Church, in the re-Christianisation of the post-war world. In the mainstream there was simply no sense that the consequences of antisemitism dictated any need for a re-thinking of the ChristianJewish encounter or a theological rapprochement with Judaism. Such conclusions are important for their own sake, and bring to an end the first section of this book. They demonstrate the degree to which an institution or an individual’s understanding of Nazism conditioned their response to the ‘Final Solution’. The Church of England, for the most part, understood Nazism consistently as an anti-Christian ideology and movement directed against Christian culture and history. The arrest of Martin Niemöller was one of the first blows of

146 147

James Parkes, ‘A Christmas Message’, December 1944, Parkes Papers, MS 60/9/5/18. For a more detailed investigation of Parkes’ interpretation of the Holocaust see Tony Kushner, ‘James Parkes and the Holocaust’, in John Roth et al. (eds), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 575–586; and Richmond, Campaigner against Antisemitism, pp. 291–302.

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this campaign, and the furnaces at Auschwitz were seen as its ultimate conclusion. The facts of the ‘Final Solution’ did not then challenge the manner in which the Anglican community viewed the world. They simply confirmed what it already knew – that the world was divided between Christian and anti-Christian blocks and that the route out of the nightmare of the secular century was the re-birth or resurrection of Christendom. The Church’s innate sense of the progress of history was not disrupted by the Nazis or their attack on the Jews, because both were, according to the Church, born outside Christian European traditions. The triumph of totalitarianism could be, according to the rhetoric of reconstruction, just a blip in the progress of man if, and only if, Christianity was placed at the centre of the post-war world. Following from this, it made no sense for Anglicans to examine their own faith in the light of the revelations of the death camps, because, like all of the suffering inflicted by the Nazi totalitarians, they had been caused not – as James Parkes argued – by the logic of Christian teaching but by the complete opposite, by ignoring Christian teaching. As such, Nazism, and the Holocaust, affirmed the validity of the Church’s world. Such conclusions are also crucial for the questions of memory that are central to the second section of this book. We have already seen in the understanding of the Wehrmacht, for example, the contours of an interpretation that would, after 1945, obscure Anglican views of German military involvement in ‘Nazi’ crimes. It is also commonly perceived that understanding of the Holocaust and the centrality of Nazi antisemitism was obscured or warped by the political priorities of the Cold War after 1945. An obsession with the crimes of the Soviet Union meant that the specific crimes of Nazism from the recent past were ignored so that the two dictatorships could be compared. But, it is clear that the Church of England, and others, already understood the world like that before 1945. A structure was in place which allowed Nazism to be constructed as part of a totalitarian antithesis of Christian civilisation. This foreshadowed Cold War rhetoric by dividing the world between God and anti-God. Part II of this book will explore how Nazi antisemitism and the murder of Europe’s Jews seemed to get lost somewhere in between.

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Part II MEMORIES

Chapter Four ‘THE TRADES UNION OF BISHOPS’: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND THE SEARCH FOR A USABLE PAST AT THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR

Towards the end of October 1945 the leaders of the newly unified Protestant Church in Germany, the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (EKD), met at Stuttgart. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, joined them. The meeting produced the famous ‘Stuttgart declaration’ on German Christians’ responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This declaration admonished Christians and churches in Germany, asking why they ‘did not confess more courageously, did not pray more faithfully, did not believe more joyously, and did not love more passionately’ during the Third Reich.1 Yet Bell, the representative of both the Church of England and a member of an ecumenical delegation, was keen that German Christians did not just take memories of their own guilt away from the conference. After all, he passionately believed that German Christians had been, first and foremost, victims of the Nazi regime. Accordingly, when Bell addressed them, he reminded the assembled of his ‘solidarity’ with German Christians and of the universal suffering that had been brought by Nazism and war. Crucially he also reminded the German pastors that for some Germans the pain brought by war continued: War is a terrible scourge for all who take part – terrible in its hatred, terrible in its devastation, its slavery. No humane person could fail to be stirred to the depths by the cruelties done to Jews, to displaced persons, to political prisoners in their millions. And we are now deeply stirred at the present time by the cruelties now proceeding in the East, the deportations, cruel, unjust, inhuman both in themselves and in the manner of there carrying out.2 1

The full text of the Stuttgart declaration can be found in Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Under Hitler (New York, 1992), p. 209. An account of the meeting can be found in Matthew D. Hockenos, A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004), pp. 75–100. 2 George Bell’s address to the Stuttgart Conference, 18 October 1945, Bell Papers, Vol. 45, ff. 311–316.

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What Bell and his ecumenical colleagues were engaged in at Stuttgart might be called the ‘politics of memory’. They were, collectively, attempting to find a ‘usable past’ – a collective sense of the meaning of the events of recent history which would allow them to move forward and to rebuild. The ecumenical community wished, for example, to find a way of understanding the past which allowed German Christians to be welcomed back into the international community of churches. The version of the past agreed at Stuttgart was consequently critical of German Christians, but it also offered a relatively comforting narrative of the Nazi era. It reminded them that they had perhaps not done all that they could for the victims of Nazism, but it also reassured that any mistakes had been passive, the sins of inaction rather than action. Bell went even further. He sought to compare Nazi criminality with the perceived criminality of the new regimes of Soviet influenced eastern Europe, which were deporting ethnic Germans back into Germany. In doing so, Bell offered the EKD an understanding of the past where totalitarian regimes were comparable and crucially where German suffering was as – if not more – important than German guilt. The leaders of Protestantism were just one community that was trying to find a workable meaning for the Nazi era in the aftermath of the Third Reich’s destruction. The years immediately after 1945, as well being the period of crucial post-war reconstruction in which the division of Europe was cemented for nearly the next fifty years, were also the years in which the memories of the Second World War were forged; both in public events and in declarations like Stuttgart, or in war-crimes trials, and also in public and private conversation. The narratives written in this period would dominate perceptions of the wartime past for the next two generations.3 This process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ saw the development of myths and memories around which both new national and international ‘imagined communities’ could coalesce throughout all of the nations affected by war. In Britain the myths of Dunkirk and the Blitz, for example, remembered a unified and united population fighting for freedom against almost impossible odds which, in turn, underpinned the post-war social democratic consensus.4 In continental terms, the most significant meta-narratives were apparently the Cold War appropriations of the Second World War in which the West remembered the conflict with Nazism as part of the wider war between freedom and totalitarianism, and eastern Europe recalled a struggle against a fascism which represented the fully revealed logic of capitalism. Bell’s lament for the victims of Communist totalitarianism could certainly be accommodated in the western version of that story. Current historiography holds that some national pasts were explicitly designed 3

There is now a plethora of studies dealing with the various memories of war; for a pan-European survey, see Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000). 4 See Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1991).

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from outside by these internationally constructed narratives. Austria was, for example, pardoned by the allies who declared her the first victim of Nazism. Austrian suffering at Nazi hands was, as a consequence, able to dominate memory there.5 But, in the main, the Cold War meta-narratives have been seen as providing the landscape on which the architecture of more locally meaningful versions of that past were constructed on the ground – in which the nascent nations of the new Europe remembered their resistance, in their own ways and on their own terms, to fascist occupation. In Germany, so the story goes, developing conflict between the East and West had a profound impact on memory. First the western allies, armed with an understanding of Nazism as rooted in the traditions of German history, sought to force Germans and Germany to face the reality of their wretched past. The allied denazification, trial and re-education programmes attempted to root out Nazism from the German population. The logic of denazification – which proposed to survey the political history and affiliation of every German public servant – was that Nazism was a German cancer that needed to be forcibly cut from the body-politic itself.6 But, the story continues, the collapse of the anti-Nazi alliance led to the abandonment of both denazification and re-education, and the image of Nazism that underpinned them. The Soviet Union replaced Nazism as the enemy of the West, and the German population was recast as an ally in the new fight against this Soviet totalitarian threat, just as ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was transformed from ally into the new Hitler.7 The Nazi past, we are told, was jettisoned – as Peter Novick has written, ‘symbols that reinforced the old view [of Nazism] were no longer functional. Indeed they were seriously dysfunctional’.8 As the international community turned away from the Nazi past Germany was left to develop its own memories to fill the void.9 In order to heal the fissures of a painful past, Germans shaped a public discourse in which the past, if it was talked about at all, could be discussed by emphasising their own suffering at the hands of the Nazis. These pasts were, as a consequence, frequently selective and evasive and failed to come to terms with Germany as the perpetrator of violence and destruction; seeing her only as a victim.10 Viewing the local imperatives that shaped memory has demonstrated that the versions of the past that emerged after 1945 cannot simply be explained with reference to global political narratives. They were the result of indigenous cultures of interpretation too, for example in Germany a western-looking element

5 6 7

Herbert Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill, 1995), p. 28. Alfred Grosser, Germany in our Time: A Political History of the Post-war Years (London, 1970), p. 41. David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Re-armament in the Adenauer Era (North Carolina, 1996), pp. 32–38. 8 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999), p. 88. 9 See, for example, Jeffrey Herf, ‘Multiple Restorations: German Political Traditions and the Interpretation of Nazism 1945–6’, Central European History (Vol. 26, No. 1, 1993), pp. 21–59. 10 Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001), p. 6.

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to a traditionally eastern oriented conservatism.11 Yet, as I have said, the Cold War is still almost universally acknowledged as shaping the landscape of postwar memory, if only because it created the vacuum which the newly constructed pasts had to fill. But, if memories in Germany were forged using pre-1945 cultural assumptions, is it not feasible that the same is true outside Germany? It seems that we must take some account of the possibility that the international context for the memory of Nazism was also anchored in cultures of understanding that pre-dated the Cold War. Returning to Bell’s speech at Stuttgart, the picture of Nazism that he painted there – of a totalitarian regime emerging from a denial of Christianity and comparable to other regimes, especially the Soviet Union – was a picture that had been painted time and again in the Church of England since 1933 and certainly did not just emerge after the diplomatic breakdown with the USSR. That the same language and vocabulary was being used to characterise Nazism after 1945 suggests that the Nazi past was not abandoned or forgotten in the immediate post-war era. There is increasing evidence of continuities of interpretation, for example it has been recently argued that the crimes of the Nazis were not being ignored in the post-war USA but were being interpreted and understood – albeit in a manner that we may not recognise.12 In Britain too, there was no loss of interest in the Nazi past but an ongoing and developing conversation over the manner in which it could be best understood. The Church of England was a vital contributor to that conversation, and it is its role in constructing a Christian history, in the process of ascribing meaning to the Nazi past, that this book now attends to. Looking back from the beginning of a new century, one of the crucial questions for historians of post-war memory is how the murder of Europe’s Jews was represented. It is commonly argued that one of the consequences of these Cold War pasts was that what we now call the Holocaust was suppressed as an indicator of Nazi barbarity. In the East the Nazis’ racial crime had to be downplayed because it could not be explained by the imperatives of capital; and in the West, the argument goes, the murder of Europe’s Jews as Jews made comparisons between the Nazi and Soviet regimes difficult, so the Shoah was also marginalised in memory there. The Holocaust was not relevant to western Cold War warriors because it was a crime specific to the ideology of yesterday’s enemy, whereas the general barbarity of totalitarian domination could be used to indict an emasculated Nazism portrayed as the forerunner to the, by 1948, primary Soviet danger.13 Considering the difficulties the Church had in prioritising the anti11

Maria Mitchell, ‘Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History (Vol. 67, No. 2, June 1995), pp. 278–308. 12 Lawrence Baron, ‘The Holocaust and American Public Memory 1945–60’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2003), pp. 62–69. 13 See, for example, John H. Herz, ‘Denazification and Related Policies’, in John H. Herz (ed.), From Dictatorship to Democracy: Coping with the Legacies of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism (Westport, 1982), p. 28; Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 85; Ian Turner, ‘Denazification in the British Zone’, in Ian Turner (ed.), Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and Other

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semitic imperatives of Nazism prior to 1945 it is necessary to outline the Christian contribution to these apparently secular narratives. This is a case study with much wider importance. Placing the Church of England within the context of developing conversations about Nazism inside British state and society from 1939 will further problematise and complicate the accepted idea that the Cold War was responsible for shaping the landscape on which memories of Nazism were constructed or in which they were buried, as it will extant ideas about the development of Holocaust memories. Equally, as Bell’s intervention at Stuttgart makes clear, because of Anglican involvement in the occupation of Germany and her ecumenical links with German Protestantism, the Church’s version of the past had some impact on the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past in Germany itself. We shall begin by reviewing debates about the nature of Nazism going on inside government and wider society in Britain throughout the war – in order to demonstrate that the new versions of Nazism which dominated in the midst of the burgeoning Cold War, were perhaps not new at all. In 1939 the British government, propagandistically at least, articulated an understanding of the Nazi state as imposed on an innocent German population – an interpretation which the Church of England could of course support. Both the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that the war was ‘a war for the liberation of the German people’ drawing a sharp distinction between the German people and their Nazi dominators.14 After the invasion of France and the Benelux countries, however, the propagandistic portrayal of the German nation was transformed.15 The idea of the population as victims of Nazism was abandoned, and propagandists sought refuge in the certainties of the First World War portrayals of the savage, cultureless Hun in the grip of the Prussian militarist conspiracy for Western Zones (Oxford, 1989), pp. 239–267; and David Welch, ‘Priming the Pump of German Democracy: British “Re-education” Policy in Germany after the Second World War’, in Turner, Reconstruction, pp. 215–238; Robert Cherry, ‘Holocaust Historiography: The Role of the Cold War’, Science and Society (Vol. 63, No. 4, 1999), pp. 459–477. The suppression of memory was not, however, confined to the West, and the Jewish tragedy was equally eschewed in what was to become the Soviet bloc, due to a complex amalgam of ethnic tensions and dogmatic Marxist-Leninist interpretations of fascism. See Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999); and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 106–200, for a discussion of the suppression of the history and memory of the Holocaust in the GDR. See D. Romanovsky, ‘The Holocaust in the Eyes of Homo-Sovieticus: A Survey Based on North Eastern Belorussia and North Western Russia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 13, No. 3, 1999), pp. 355–382; Jay Bergman, ‘Dissidents on the Holocaust, Hitler and Nazism: A Study of the Preservation of Historical Memory’, Slavonic and East European Review (Vol. 70, No. 3, 1992), pp. 477–504; and Zvi Gitelman, ‘History, Memory and Politics – The Holocaust in the Soviet Union’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1990), pp. 23–67 for similar discussions for the Soviet Union. 14 Halifax quoted in Kurt Jürgensen, ‘British Occupation Policy after 1945 and the Problem of “Re-educating” Germany’, History (Vol. 68, No. 223, 1983), p. 226, which also notes the consensus between members of the government over this interpretation of the nature of the war. 15 Jill Jones, ‘Eradicating Nazism from the British Zone of Germany: Early Policy and Practice’, German History (Vol. 8, No. 2, 1990), p. 146.

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world domination.16 Lord Vansittart’s radio broadcasts, which were subsequently available in print, were both the most extreme and the most widely disseminated of these accounts of Germany’s ‘Black Record’. Vansittart explicitly sought to relate the Nazi devil to its alleged Prussian forebears, and portrayed the previous century as a continuous battle against various forms of German aggression.17 In such a formula, Nazism was simply the newest and ultimate manifestation of innate German hatefulness.18 That the government, publicly at least, subscribed to this interpretation of the development of German history was confirmed when the House of Lords was informed that British war aims were the ‘extermina[tion] of this horrible and hateful system from the world. By that system [the government meant] not only Hitler, but the whole Prussian regime’ (my italics).19 Although Vansittart’s rantings were extreme, other government policies implicitly constructed very similar versions of German history. An apparent loathing for the German nation and belief in the irredeemability of the German soul was, for example, reflected in both the policy of interning German refugees and then in the rather vague notion of the German future anchored within the concept of unconditional surrender declared by Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943.20 Although the latter was an American policy about which Churchill, in particular, had grave misgivings, the British did share the vision of Germany’s future that it constructed: an entirely occupied, politically subjugated nation.21 Unconditional surrender also implicitly denied that there could be any anti-Nazi force in Germany at all. Accordingly, the British government refused to undertake any negotiations with non-Nazi military or political resistance organisations and personnel in Germany prior to the achievement of that surrender.22 The logic of such policies suggested that the German population could be closely identified with its government, because it was impossible to envisage an untainted German administration. The close identification between Germans and Nazis, the population and the state was, of course, also the logic which underpinned brutal allied bombing policies which directly targeted German civilians as enemies.23 16

See Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998), pp. 231–235, for a discussion of the portrayal of Germany and the Germans in First World War propaganda. For a detailed discussion of British War propaganda see Rebecca Lewis, ‘The Planning, Design and Reception of British Home Front Posters of the Second World War’, Ph.D Thesis, University College Winchester, 2004. 17 Lord Vansittart, Lessons of my Life (London, 1943), p. 208. 18 Sir Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London, 1941). 19 Viscount Simon, Lord Chancellor, Hansard (HL), Vol. 126 (580), 10 March 1943. 20 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London, 1969), p. 493. 21 Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the World Crisis of 1943–45 (London, 1968), p. 24. See also A.E. Campbell, ‘Franklin Roosevelt and Unconditional Surrender’, in Richard Langholme (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 219–244. 22 Rainer A. Blasius, ‘Waiting for Action: The Debate on the “Other Germany” in Great Britain and the Reaction of the Foreign Office to German Peace Feelers in 1942’, in F.R. Nicosia and Lawrence D. Stokes (eds), Germans Against Nazism: Non-Conformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich: Essays in Honour of Peter Hoffman (New York, 1940), pp. 279–304. 23 Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing (Boulder, 1995), p. 156.

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By the end of the war variations of this theme were widespread. For press and public the Allied discoveries in Belsen and Buchenwald were constructed in a similar light and seemed to reveal the true depravity of Germany.24 Although, for example, A.J.P. Taylor contended that a total ‘misconception of the sense and meaning’ of German history abounded in ‘English thought’, he was also content to repeat the claims of what was government sponsored rhetoric, that Nazism represented the ‘deepest wishes’ of the German people.25 However, these readings of the German past and its relationship to the Nazi present were not actually the only historical narratives which abounded in wartime. As we know they were the polar opposite of the Anglican sense of separate German and Nazi pasts. Alternative narratives were also proposed and discussed within the British government and indeed the wider anti-Nazi alliance during the war. Stalin made reference to his faith in the ‘other Germany’ and its divergence from the Nazi State as early as 1943, and the idea that the German government was separate from the general population featured in Soviet propaganda – and underpinned, for example, the Soviet National Committee for a Free Germany, which certainly envisaged an indigenous German government independent of the Nazi spirit (if not of Moscow).26 Even the British Foreign Office appears to have been more than prepared to privately countenance a more nuanced reading of German history. Anthony Eden, on occasion, questioned whether the German dictatorship was the result of German historical tendencies – arguing in one report that the Nazis might be better seen as a manifestation of the new ‘ideological’ turn in the European politics of power, and that they therefore bore comparison with the Soviet Union.27 In January 1944 the Foreign Office’s Advisor on Germany, John Troutbeck,28 counselled that Nazism was the product of German alienation from the western historical tradition, from Christianity and (rather paradoxically) the roots of German Kultur. Troutbeck advised that ‘the real foundation of the Nazi system has been the teaching of . . . people who have gradually diverted German thought away from the Western and Christian traditions’.29 In August 1945 a further report on the failure of German democracy concluded that the collapse of Weimar had not been the inevitable result of the failings of the German character and the German predilection for vicious authoritarianism. In fact, the report argued, the collapse had been the result of a ‘particular constellation of contemporary political,

24

Michael Balfour, ‘In Retrospect: Britain’s Policy of Re-Education’, Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (eds), The Political Re-education of Germany and her Allies after World War II (Worcester, 1985), p. 140. 25 A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London, 1945), pp. 7, 213. 26 See Aleksei M. Filitov, ‘Problems of Post-War Construction in Soviet Foreign Policy Conceptions during World War II’, in Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons (eds), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943–53 (London, 1996), pp. 3–22, in order to place the existence of the National Committee for a Free Germany and attendant rhetoric in the context of Soviet policy ambitions towards Germany. 27 Eden’s report is dated 8 March 1943, PRO CAB 66/34 WP (43) 96. 28 Appointed in October 1943, with responsibility for the co-ordination of policy. 29 Troutbeck, ‘The Regeneration of Germany’, 3 December 1943, PRO FO 371/39093.

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economic and cultural factors’ which did not therefore suggest that the ‘Germans are by nature incapable of self government’.30 Ultimately the Foreign Office rejected the latter argument, which failed to convince Troutbeck ‘that there [was] the faintest possibility of their [the Germans] succeeding in a second attempt [at democracy] . . . even in the somewhat unlikely event of their trying to do so’.31 Indeed, the continued refusal of the government to negotiate with non-Nazi Germans demonstrated the marginality of these rather more ameliorative narratives of the German present, past and future. Nevertheless it is clear that as the war came to a close, and as external events appeared to confirm Vansittart’s appraisal, alternative versions of the German past were flourishing inside government.32 Despite Lord Vansittart’s belief in the irrelevance of the Church of England, it was also able to contribute to these discussions in government, by outlining its vision of the German future.33 As we have seen in the first half of this book, many Anglican voices in Britain had suggested an alternative understanding of the relationship between Nazism, the German population and German history to that articulated publicly by the politics and propaganda of the government. The vision of the future it articulated rested on a similar understanding, wishing to build fruitful relationships with those elements of German society that the Church understood as separate from the ruling ethos – primarily, of course, the churches. For example, William Temple met with the Foreign Secretary in May 1944 in order to gain official sanction for the early establishment of ecumenical contact with Germany after the end of the war, to be achieved through the deployment of representatives of Christian Reconstruction in Europe in occupied Germany.34 Not that the Church spoke with one voice. The Archbishop of York, for example, was much more prepared to lambast the German population than some of his colleagues. Towards the end of the war he spoke of the guilt of the German people, and as late as 1946 was suspicious of their repentance. He was equally suspicious of the complicity of some German Christians. However, Garbett’s was a lonely voice amongst a Church predisposed to the idea of the ‘other Germany’ and Germans as victims of the Nazi regime.35 And of course Garbett himself would have agreed that figures such as Martin Niemöller were unimpeachable. And many in government agreed with the Church’s identification of the ‘other Germany’. In May 1944 German Protestantism had been highlighted by the Foreign Office as a ‘constructive element in social and political life in 30 31 32 33 34

E.R. Dodds, ‘The Failure of Democracy in Germany’, 14 August 1945, PRO FO 371/46880. Troutbeck’s notes accompanying the Dodds report, PR0 FO 371/46880. Jürgensen, ‘British Occupation Policy’, p. 230. Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession: The Autobiography of Lord Vansittart (London, 1958), p. 18. Temple to Eden 13 March 1944, Temple Papers, Vol. 7, f. 260. See also the notes on the meeting, PRO FO 371/40752. 35 See, for example, Garbett in the House of Lords, Hansard (HL), Vol. 135 (671–73), 20 March 1945, where he refers to the guilt of the population. See also York Diocesan Leaflet, November 1946, Garbett Papers, COLL 1973/1/O where he describes a visit to Germany in which he finds ‘no evidence of a religious revival’ or the repentance of Germans.

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Germany’.36 The Ministry of Information had, also in wartime, similarly instructed that the Protestant Churches in Germany were potentially important to any future occupation because they would ‘help people to find their bearings again and devote themselves to constructive effort’.37 This message was in keeping with the Ministry of Information publication Spiritual Issues of the War which continually laid emphasis on the separation of Christianity and Nazism. Anglican plans for ecumenical contact in a post-war Europe were approved by the government. In fact consultative meetings between agencies responsible for the planning and direction of future re-education policy and representatives of the Anglican Church continued throughout the latter stages of the war.38 Although some individual personalities, notably Bell, were at first distrusted by government officials – primarily because of his public criticism of the morality of British methods of warfare – institutional co-operation between government and church regarding the future of Germany continued in the post-war era. Anglican leaders were routinely consulted during the occupation of Germany over appointments within the education and religious affairs branches of the British Control Commission,39 which in turn facilitated the direct exchange of personnel between government and ecclesiastical organisations.40 Anglican leaders were also routinely escorted on tours of occupied Germany, George Bell and Cyril Garbett visiting several times in 1945 and 1946. The Church was therefore given plenty of room to articulate its interpretation of German history and its faith in the ‘other Germany’. As well as being under pressure from the Church, the practical demands of administering the subjugated Germany and the lifting of the burden of war upon government rhetoric complicated the narratives of the past which were articulated by policy after unconditional surrender had been achieved. The Potsdam agreement of July 1945, for example, gave expression to a developing nuance in Allied conceptions of the German future, as it became increasingly clear that the certainties of propaganda were of little use. The rhetoric of Potsdam remained harsh, stressing the necessity of ‘convinc[ing] the German people that they cannot 36

Briefing for the Secretary of State: ‘The Re-Establishment of Contact between British Churches and Christian Organisations on the Continent of Europe’, PRO FO 371/40752 U3788. The briefing was a response to the request from William Temple that CRE be able to establish contact with the German churches. 37 Memo from the Religious Division of the Ministry of Information, 3 May 1944, PRO FO 371/40752 U3788/32–36. 38 See Gayre (Chair of the Education and Religious Affairs Subsection) to Temple, 1 May 1944, Temple Papers, Vol. 7, ff. 307–308. 39 See Bell Papers, Vol. 43, ff. 1–43: various documents attesting to the involvement of George Bell and Geoffrey Fisher in the internal organisation of the Religious Affairs branch of the CCG. See also Bell to Fisher, 18 March 1946, f. 37; Bell to Fisher, 19 March 1946, f. 37; Bell to Fisher, 23 March 1946, f. 45; and Fisher to Bell, 30 March 1946, f. 46 – for an extended exchange regarding the appointment of personnel to occupied Germany. See also correspondence at PRO FO 945/180 regarding consulting George Bell over Religious Affairs policy. 40 For example Iain Wilson, who worked in Occupied Germany both for the CCG and the WCC Department of Reconstruction. See Bell Papers, Vol. 54, f. 523.

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escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves’ and equally the absolute priority of ‘destroy[ing] the National Socialist Party’.41 But the agreement did introduce the possibility of redemption for the German soul when it suggested that the elimination of ‘Nazi and militarist doctrines’ would make possible the ‘successful development of democratic ideas’ in Germany.42 This altered view of the possibilities of the German future did not present an entirely new version of the German past; Nazism remained anchored in German historical continuity. It was simply suggested that 1945 could be Germany’s new zero hour. Potsdam set in motion the process of denazification which established the principle that all Nazi officials would be removed from office and Nazism therefore expunged from the German administrative and political community. A system of trials and tribunals were instituted in order to decide both who was and was not a ‘Nazi’, and indeed how ‘Nazi’ any individual was – or, at least how far an individual was implicated in the crimes of the regime. Although the principle of denazification was applied across the entirety of occupied Germany, the practical machinery of removing former Nazi officials differed from zone to zone.43 Practical and ideological considerations also combined to ensure that denazification was also unevenly applied. It saw the immediate rehabilitation of those officials deemed useful to the occupation apparatus, for example, following the introduction of economic rationale to occupation in the aftermath of Potsdam.44 This ensured the re-appointment of economic officials, who would otherwise have been categorised as offenders.45 As time went on, the vision of the past articulated by the denazification programme shifted. The establishment of indigenous denazification panels in the British zone in January 1946, for example, certainly moved away from any idea of collective guilt and accepted the ability of Germans to judge their fellow countrymen. Ultimately it was decided from the beginning of 1947 to abandon the policy of denazification as soon as was practicable, not least because of the vast administrative burden that it represented.46 However burdensome though, the decision to transfer denazification to the regional or Lander governments, also reflected changing perceptions of the German past. It was not just the importance of the German past that was being challenged, the shape of that history was also being revised. Another plank of the British occupation programme which was transformed in the years 1945–48, the ‘re-education’ scheme, highlights this further. Similar to plans for denazification 41 42

Cited in Grosser, Germany in our Time, p. 49. Cited in Arthur Hearnden, ‘Education in the British Zone’, in Arthur Hearnden (ed.), The British in Germany: Educational Reconstruction after 1945 (London, 1978), p. 11. 43 Ian Connor, ‘Denazification in Post War Germany’, European History Quarterly (Vol. 21, 1991), p. 397. 44 Turner, ‘Denazification in the British Zone’, p. 246. 45 See Grosser, Germany in our Time, p. 74, and Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany: A Pledge Betrayed (London, 1981), pp. 22–25. 46 Ian Turner, ‘Denazification in the British Zone’, in Turner, Reconstruction in Post-War Germany, p. 253.

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re-education had been predicated, originally, on the ideas about the German character articulated at Potsdam. It began as a unique political experiment to fundamentally change the political behaviour and outlook of the German population, in effect to alter the course of national development by redrawing its collective mentality. Practically the re-education programme meant the organisation and administration of education in Germany, in the most trying of circumstances, along with other, more obviously didactic schemes such as the re-education of German prisoners of war in institutions like the camp at Wilton Park.47 Although government considered re-education a priority throughout the immediate post-war years, those operating the policy began to reject the fundamental notion that they should be seeking to change German perceptions. This is not to say officials on the ground denied Britain’s responsibility for education policy, just that they moved away from an understanding of that responsibility as transformative. Robert Birley, the educational advisor in the British zone from the beginning of 1947, serves as an illustrative example. Birley came to Germany from Charterhouse, where he was headmaster. When he left Germany in 1949 it was to become head at Eton. An ecumenical Anglican, he was convinced of the importance of religion in education – as was evident in his faith that Christianity could effect the rehabilitation of former Nazis.48 Birley absolutely rejected the term re-education with regard to his work in Germany.49 From the outset he argued that that the task of the occupiers was not the imposition of a new mindset on the vanquished but, in fact, the recovery of lost intellectual and cognitive traditions50 Birley sought to satiate the ‘spiritual and intellectual famine’ in Germany51 by restoring the ‘cultural links between Germany and the civilised world’.52 He placed great emphasis on the cultural similarity of Britain and Germany, whom he saw as brethren inside western civilisation.53 Indeed Birley agreed with the leaders of the Church of England that it was Germany’s Christianity that tied her to Britain.54 He presided over a period in which education policy developed with the changing demands of the global political situation. As the Grand Alliance fell apart, and the Cold War emerged, re-education’s new narrative of the past, which found Germany far from the irredeemable savage, but in fact part of the European cultural community, allowed a revolution in the emphasis of this policy. With the need for the eradication of Nazism forgotten, re-education became part of the policy to transform Germany into a ‘potential bulwark against the USSR’.55

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Jürgensen, ‘British Occupation Policy’, p. 238. See Arthur Hearnden, Red Robert: A Life of Robert Birley (London, 1984), pp. 136, 176, 236. Welch, Priming the Pump, p. 223. Robert Birley, ‘British Policy in Retrospect’, in Hearnden, The British in Germany, p. 46. Robert Birley, ‘Memo on Re-education’, PRO FO 371/64386. Birley quoted in Welch, ‘Priming the Pump’, p. 223. Birley, ‘Memo on Re-education’, PRO FO 371/64386. Jürgensen, ‘British Occupation Policy’, p. 236. Birley to Robertson (Military Governor in the British Zone), 24 July 1948, PRO FO 371/70716.

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Clearly Birley’s Anglican understanding of the Nazi past was legitimated by the changes in British foreign policy and outlook. In January 1948 Ernest Bevin, the post-war Labour Foreign Secretary, had informed the House of Commons of Britain’s spiritual union with western Europe and her enmity to the Soviet East.56 Yet Birley’s understanding of the Nazi past could hardly be described as new. Compare, for example, Troutbeck’s understanding of Nazism as the negation of Christianity, Birley’s view of the German cultural famine, and the Anglican understanding of Nazism outlined in the first half of this book. Nor did any of these narratives ignore or abandon the Nazi past. A very specific understanding of Nazism was constructed. Let us consider as an example the Christian history of Nazism constructed and articulated in and by the Church of England in more detail. From the outset the Church of England largely opposed the policy of denazification. This was not because it disapproved in principle of investigating the past: the Church had actually been committed in the war to facilitating German confrontation with the past in any post-war settlement. The denazification programme, however, appeared to churchmen to force Germany to come to terms with a past that they could not recognise. In the Anglican formulation the German people had been separate from the Nazi state, and as such the idea of denazification was flawed. There was, for Anglicans, no-one to denazify, apart from the leading criminals who were being dealt with by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and war-crimes trials. The suggestion that the wider population needed to be denazified was ‘contrary to all Christian principles’ and, it was argued, would simply give rise to justifiable feelings of indignation and injustice on the part of the German populace.57 One of the Christian principles denazification violated was that which had been used by Anglicans to justify war with Nazism. The Church of England’s war had been a ‘war of liberation’, but denazification was interpreted as the action of conquerors, not liberators, because it failed to recognise the ordinary Germans’ status as first victims of the Nazi regime.58 In turn denazification threatened the Church’s understanding of the future of Europe. During the post-war years the Church continued to hold and further develop a vision of Europe based upon Christian co-operation and which reasserted the Christian commonality of formerly belligerent nations. This Europe would be organised like the ecumenical movement and based on the values that underpinned it. European Protestantism’s post-war ecumenical drive began immediately following the cessation of hostilities, when the pre-war structures created to 56

Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford, 1990), p. 223. 57 Guy Clutton Brock (Field Officer of CRE) to John Hynd (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster), 16 June 1946, PRO FO 1050/1579. 58 Stewart Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church (London, 1946), pp. 95–97. Although Herman was an American Protestant, he worked for the WCC with responsibility for the establishment of ecumenical contact with the German churches and had a close intellectual relationship with the Anglican Church.

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work towards the institution of the World Council of Churches (WCC) were reinvigorated. The provisional committee of the WCC celebrated its ‘ecumenical fellowship in Christ’, rejoicing that Christians had ‘been able to come together again after the trials of [the war] years and . . . found [that their] hearts [were] knit together in Christian love’.59 The inaugural meeting of the WCC eventually took place in Amsterdam in August 1948.60 The Anglican embrace of the WCC was predicated on the belief that ecumenism offered this unified future which avoided the divisions of the past. For the Church of England such communion was the very embodiment of the principles of Christianity – avoiding the national divisions of the immediate past and acknowledging no ‘distinction between victor nations, vanquished nations and neutral nations’.61 Much of the Church regarded ecumenism as the dominant and most important Christian concern in the post-war world,62 and it provided Christians with a narrative of the future which placed its emphasis not on German difference but on the commonality between Christian nations. Denazification challenged the post-war project of reconciliation and was seen potentially endangering that future as a ‘festering source of bitterness’ for ordinary Germans.63 Because they were shared inside the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland, Anglican fears on this issue were an example of ecumenism in action. Theophil Wurm, who was the chair of the newly unified Church, for example agreed with George Bell’s ‘misgivings’ over denazification on the basis that proceedings could only inspire bitterness within the German population.64 Indeed Wurm wrote an open letter to English Christians expressing such convictions at the end of 1945.65 A report written for the Foreign office agreed. Analysing the popular reaction to the Nuremberg trials, this report argued that the International Military Tribunal had provided the German population with an intellectual alibi for the crimes of Nazism by placing all guilt on the ‘shoulders of the twenty two men in the dock’, and that denazification challenged that narrative.66 But, importantly, ecumenical objections to denazification were not simply amnesiac; they did not simply envisage the removal of the past. On the contrary, there was a past which they wished to celebrate. Churchmen throughout the 59

The declaration of the WCC is printed in Church Assembly Report of Proceedings, Spring 1946, Vol. XXVI, p. 75. 60 George Bell, The Kingship of Christ: The Story of the World Council of Churches (London, 1954), pp. 35–50, for an account of the creation of the WCC in the aftermath of the Second World War. 61 27 February 1946, Church Assembly Report of Proceedings, Spring 1946, Vol. XXVI, p. 75. 62 The leading article in The Guardian, 12 April 1946, p. 175, complained that the decisive ‘import [of ecumenism] does not seem to have been appraised by the rank and file of Christian people in this country’. 63 Bell, The Task of the Churches, p. 18. 64 See PRO FO 1050/1455. The report is dated 14 January 1946. See also Connor, ‘Denazification in Post-War Germany’, pp. 400–401. 65 Theophil Wurm, ‘To the Christians in England’, 14 December 1945, printed in Hockenos, A Church Divided, pp. 189–191. 66 See C.E. King, ‘German Reactions to the Nuremberg Trials’, Foreign Office Report, 22 January 1947, PRO FO 371/66559 U 95.

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ecumenical community were, for example, repulsed by the prospect of the process being applied to the German churches. In the Anglican account of Nazism the church had remained the central institution of the ‘other Germany’ and therefore could not be tarred with the implication of complicity inherent in denazification. As such, a natural complement to the criticism that denazification took no account of the German population’s status as the first victims of Nazism was the argument that applying the process to the churches took no account of their position as the first opponents of the Nazi state. The very idea that the clergy of the German Protestant churches should have to account for their activities during the Third Reich, by answering the denazification questionnaires or Fragebogen, was anathema, precisely because it failed to conform to a narrative of the Nazi past that emphasised, even mythologised, the role that the church had played in resisting Nazism.67 As an example, Hans Lilje of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland objected to the denazification of the Churches because Protestants had resisted state interference during the Nazi era. Lilje was therefore incredulous as to why they should submit to it now.68 Fears regarding the treatment of the post-war Protestant churches in Germany were actually unfounded. The British occupation authorities, and the western occupiers in general, were extraordinarily accommodating toward the Protestant Churches, in part because of the influence of the Anglican understanding of the Nazi era. Although government was suspicious of ecumenical contact, or the ‘trades union of Bishops’ as it was disparagingly referred to, occupation authorities did all they could to promote Christian life in Germany.69 Indeed, such was the meeting of minds between occupation officials and the Church of England that just a year after the beginning of an occupation based originally on the principles of Potsdam, the Chief of Staff of the British authorities in Germany described George Bell’s report, The Task of the Churches in Germany, as a ‘model statement’ with which he was ‘in full agreement’.70 Bell’s report was the classic Anglican statement on the German past, present and future, and envisaged the restoration of Christianity as a panacea. The Allied Religious Affairs Committee, accordingly, actively encouraged the formation of a unitary and nationally organised Protestant Church,71 while all other indigenous trans-zonal organisations

67

See Bell, The Task of the Churches, p. 9. See also Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church, p. 108. Herman berated the occupation forces for not showing ‘any indication or appreciation of the fact that the church had stood alone as the only national institution which successfully resisted Nazism’. 68 Lilje’s objections were relayed to George Bell by Julius Rieger of the German Lutheran Church in London. Rieger to Bell, 23 May 1946, Bell Papers, Vol. 45, f. 8. 69 This is a quotation from a note added by a Foreign Office Official to a letter from Cardinal Josef Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, to the King. The note is dated 3 March 1949. See FO 371/77054. 70 Major General W.H.A. Bishop (Deputy Chief of Staff Control Commission Germany) to Bell, 6 March 1947, Bell Papers, Vol. 46, f. 263. 71 The Allied Religious Affairs Committee (ARAC) approved the creation of the singular EKD (within the western zones) as ‘the sole responsibility of the qualified German ecclesiastical authorities’. See Allied Religious Affairs Committee to Wurm, 26 February 1946, PRO 1050/1455. This was an approval that had been suggested before the end of the war. A report prepared within the Foreign Office on ‘Allied Policy

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were rejected. And, in the aftermath of the war the churches did unify themselves in the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland.72 This can be contrasted with the degree of political organisation sanctioned by the western powers. Political activity in the western zones was confined to localities until elections were held at regional or Land level in April 1947. By the same time the Soviet zone had a solid structure of zonally organised politics.73 Western reluctance to allow anything but local political activity was based on a profound distrust of the prospect of national or even zonal indigenous German organisations, which in turn articulated the remnants of a Vansittartist conception of the German past and the ability of Germans to participate in a mature democracy.74 Conversely the approval given to Evangelische Kirche Deutschland autonomy reflected the fact that the clergy had already been identified as essentially exempt in the denazification programmes, in keeping with an alternative reading of the past. While the EKD was instructed to confine itself to church matters,75 the implication of the portrayal of the German church as ally and the policy it informed was clear. According to the military governor of the British zone, Brian Robertson, it was because ‘the churches in Germany are unquestionably capable of giving considerable assistance to putting our ideas across to the German people’ (my italics).76 When denazification was applied, the Church was treated gently. The clergy were given their own particular Fragebogen, the returns of which were to be regulated not by the occupation authorities but by the Church itself. This was to ‘avoid upsetting the sensibilities of churchmen’.77 The self regulation of the EKD was confirmed by the instruction to denazification officials that they must ‘take no action against any member of the German clergy’.78 Even the Fragebogen themselves were set up to conform to the Church’s own understanding of its behaviour

towards the Church in Germany after the War’, 20 June 1944, stated that ‘the Allied intervention [in Germany] would be confined to such political action as implied in the liquidation of the Nazi regime, it being left to the evangelical church to determine its future’. This paragraph was ultimately rejected, because it was resonant of an alternative reading of the German past, only to be adopted as policy after the war. See PRO FO 371/39094 C8257. 72 Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2000), pp. 222–225, on deliberations on guilt towards the Jews within the formation of the new church constitution. See also Frederic Spotts, The Churches and Politics in Germany (Middletown, Connecticut, 1973), pp. 9–21. 73 Political parties and ‘mass organisations’ on a zonal level were permitted in the Soviet Zone from 9 June 1945. By the spring of 1946 the communist and social democratic parties had merged to form the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED – German Socialist Unity Party), which heralded the de facto inauguration of the one-party state. See David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet Occupied Germany (Stanford, 1992). 74 Barbara Marshall, ‘British Democratisation Policy in Germany’, in Turner, Reconstruction in Post War Germany, p. 194. 75 ARAC to the EKD, 6 Feb. 1946, PRO FO 1050/1455. 76 Robertson to Street, 12 June 1946, PRO FO 945/180. 77 Riddy to Halland (Public Safety Branch Director) 5 July 1945, PRO FO 1050/1267. 78 ‘Appendix J’, ‘Notes by the Secretariat of the Control Commissions Conference: Removal from Office of Nazis and German Militarists’, PRO FO 1050/1267.

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in the Third Reich. Questions included ‘Did you ever in speech or writing lend active support to National Socialism?’ and ‘Have you ever been imprisoned, dismissed from your post, prevented from freely exercising your calling or had your movements restricted for active or passive resistance to the Nazis or their ideology?’79 This arbitrary division between support and resistance displayed little awareness of the reality of the National Socialist dictatorship or its relationship to the German church. As we saw in chapter one, resistance and complicity were not distinct categories. Encouraged by this occupation culture which identified the Christian churches as both the future allies of the West and as the past enemies of Nazism, the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland was able to construct its own narrative of the Nazi past aided and abetted by the Church of England and the ecumenical community. The practical impact of ecumenical thought dictated that the appraisals of the past written by the EKD demonstrated an incredible coincidence with those offered by the Anglican Church and throughout the ecumenical community. Reflecting an understanding of Nazism as anti-western and the antithesis of Christian culture for example, the EKD was able to paint a picture of itself as the flawed agent of ‘civilisation’ within Germany.80 Martin Niemöller wrote in language reminiscent of Anglican rhetoric, that ‘to my mind there is just one institution which [during the Third Reich] never wholly yielded up faith and which, though without practical results kept alive in people their recollection of morality and hope for a better world – the Christian church’.81 In the event members of the German Protestant community actually went much further in engaging with the Nazi past than was required of them by either the British occupation authorities or indeed the Church of England. The EKD provided several considerations of German ‘guilt’ for Nazi misdemeanours across the immediate post-war period, culminating in the collective statement made at Stuttgart in October 1945. Like the Stuttgart declaration, the common theme of these confessions was an emphasis on the failure of German Protestants to act against the Nazi state. Hans Asmussen82 stated in a sermon delivered in June 1945 that ‘our guilt lies in the fact that we have remained silent’.83 Similarly at its founding conference in Treysa in August of 1945, the EKD berated German Christianity’s failure to condemn loudly enough what was ‘manifestly sinful’ during the lifetime of the Third Reich.84 Although contemporarily unpopular with some elements of the Church 79 80

See PRO FO 1050/40 for a copy of the Fragebogen for the German clergy. A letter in which Bishop Wurm accused the Nazi state of ‘violating the fundamental principles of all western thought and practice’ was celebrated by the English Christian Community, see Christian News Letter, ‘The Church in Germany’, Supplement to No. 241. 81 Martin Niemöller, ‘Introduction’, in Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church, p. 7. 82 Asmussen was President of the Chancellery of the EKD. 83 The text of Asmussen’s sermon can be found at Bell Papers, Vol. 43, ff. 195–201. 84 See Hockenos, A Church Divided, pp. 185–186, for the declaration made at Treysa. See Hockenos’s work in general for a detailed discussion of the contested process of coming to terms with the past in the EKD.

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leadership and the wider population, German Protestant acknowledgements of guilt were hardly candid. They have been described as morally inadequate.85 The emphasis laid on ‘inaction’ within confessions ensured that they demanded no reflection on the active participation of the churches in the racial redefinition of the state after the Nuremberg Laws, or their contribution to the creation of an antisemitic milieu which identified the victims of Nazi extermination policies, or indeed their rather ambiguous support of the war in the east as a war for Germany rather than for Hitler.86 Equally, none of the confessions suggested particular responsibility to the Nazi’s Jewish victims, and as such further avoided the church’s chequered record on race. A controlling trope of EKD admissions was their construction of German Protestants as victims of the Nazi regime. Asmussen ended his confession with the acknowledgement that Christians had been ‘the victims of a fearful nightmare’ in the Third Reich, and as such offered justification for the inaction he had just condemned. Later in his career he would go on to describe ‘what happened to the churches under Adolf Hitler’ as ‘a methodical, well planned, persecution of Christians’.87 Similarly Martin Niemöller commonly diluted the acceptance of Protestant failings during the Nazi era with the reminder that the Third Reich had been an age ‘of suffering’ for the church, in which Christians had ‘passed through a sea of affliction and persecution’.88 EKD narratives of responsibility were also undermined by the German Church’s rhetorical constructions of the past which dealt with issues other than ‘guilt’. As we have seen the German Church rejected denazification, especially if directed towards itself (which it was not). Simultaneously with proclaiming guilt, the EKD could also declare themselves against denazification on the basis that the resistant church had ‘carried the struggle against [the] influence’ of National Socialism.89 Thus if we are going to understand where the narratives of the past which developed in the aftermath of war came from, it is crucial that we understand that the narratives designed by the EKD did not develop in a vacuum. In fact they were designed in tandem with and alongside the ecumenical community and with the tacit approval of, in the British zone at least, the occupation authorities. When the English ecclesiastical community, for example, dwelt upon the German past at all in this era the focus was continually the ‘martyrdom’ of the Christian church as a resistant organisation.90 The most explicit example of this can be found in the 85

See John Conway, ‘The German Church Struggle and its Aftermath’, in Abraham J. Peck (ed.), Jews and Christians after the Holocaust (Philadelphia, 1982), p. 40. 86 Barnett, For the Soul of the People, pp. 155–196, Barnett utilises oral testimony from former Confessing Christians in the Third Reich in which they detail the degree to which the war in the East was (and indeed still is) supported in good conscience. 87 From the text of a lecture given by Asmussen on 12 January 1947, which can be found at Bell Papers, Vol. 43, ff. 290–311. 88 Martin Niemöller, ‘Introduction’, in Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church, p. 7. 89 EKD declaration on denazification, 2 May 1946, PRO FO 1050/1456. 90 See ‘The Churches Stand in Hitler’s Germany’, The Record, 24 January 1947, p. 49.

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reactions of the ecclesiastical press to the Nuremberg trials. Even after the verdicts had been passed, and the focus of the world was on Nazi criminality, the ecclesiastical press chose to concentrate upon the glories of Christian resistance.91 Such emphasis reflected the foundation myths of Anglican concern for the German churches. For example, Christian Reconstruction in Europe had argued that its goal of physical rehabilitation was driven by the ‘gratitude’ felt for the ‘war time record of the Christian churches’ and ‘for the constancy of the [Christian] witness during the holocaust of war and resistance’.92 And it was not just Anglicans. Stewart Herman, an American priest who had been in Berlin until 1942, also sought to cast Christianity as Nazism’s victim: ‘it is the example of the resisting church in Germany which helped phrase a world wide prayer that the church of Jesus Christ may become the cornerstone of the next world community’.93 Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, agreed with Herman, declaring that it was the fact of the German church having come through the ‘fire of . . . persecution’ that gave Anglicans faith in the future of Europe.94 For George Bell the German church’s record of resistance clearly demonstrated that no German Christian ‘harboured any doubts that the Weltanschauung for which National Socialism stood was the very opposite of Christianity’. Anglicans were confident that no German Christians had ‘approved of Hitler’s war’.95 However, the ecumenical community knew that not all Christians had resisted the Nazi state. But acknowledging this did not challenge the Protestant narrative of the Nazi era; quite the contrary. The Church of England, in particular, used the co-operation of some German Christians with the Nazis to help the EKD embed the myths of resistance with which they framed their reflection on the past. The clearest example of this was provided when the British government decided, in the summer of 1947, to recognise former Deutsche Christen groups as members of the German Evangelical community. The Deutsche Christen were problematic. During the Third Reich they had embraced Nazism as revelatory and argued that Nazi racial teaching was compatible with Christianity and the call to love thy neighbour.96 In allowing such groups to be submerged back into the German Protestant mainstream, the British government was indeed working toward the future’s demand for a pliant, western-looking, Germany by whitewashing the 91 92 93

The Record, 4 October 1946, p. 562. See ‘Renewal in Church Life in Europe’, a 1946 CRE pamphlet, in Bell Papers, Vol. 54, f. 227. Herman, Rebirth of the German Church, p. 17. For more details on Herman see Ronald Webster, ‘Stewart H. Herman, Pastor of the American Church in Berlin 1935–42, and Hitler’s Persecution of the Jews’, John Roth et al. (eds), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 635–649. 94 Geoffrey Fisher broadcast to Christians in Germany on the occasion of the arrival of a delegation of the BCC in Germany 28 November 1945. Reprinted in Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church, pp. 251–253. 95 George Bell, ‘A Letter to my Friends in the Evangelical Church in Germany’, in Church and Humanity, p. 188. 96 Susanne Heschel, ‘When Jesus was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Religion and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), pp. 79–105.

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Nazi past. Given the Church’s ambivalent relationship with the process of confronting the past, the Anglican community might have been expected to have welcomed this building of bridges with German Protestantism. But, in failing to distinguish the Deutsche Christen the British government challenged the Anglican interpretation of the past, which, as noted, presented Nazism as entirely anti-Christian. Their reaction to the Deutsche Christen shows how important this version of the past really was. Responding to the official recognition of the German Christians as an element of the EKD, George Bell berated occupation authorities for tolerating ‘Nazis in disguise’.97 In doing so Bell once again demonstrated the uniformity of ecumenical opinion by echoing the rhetoric employed by Wurm to protest over the same matter.98 The Church of England also made vigorous protests, again chiefly through Bell, regarding the continued involvement of August Marahrens in the EKD. Marahrens had been the Lutheran Bishop of Hanover during the Third Reich, and although he professed loyalty to Müller in the church struggle, he did resist efforts to incorporate the Hanoverian church into the single Reich Church. However, Marahrens was felt to have had too ambivalent a relationship with the Nazi ideology to be a suitable figure to rebuild German Protestantism. He had, according to Bell, ‘especially in 1939, said some terrible things for a churchman to say in favour of the Führer’.99 Bell’s assessment of Marahrens was correct. His welcoming of the German invasion of the USSR in which he called upon ‘God to give our hearts a ruthless determination’ in order to ‘fight devoid of all sentimentality’ was certainly unfortunate, especially considering the nature of that conflict.100 The question arises, however, as to why it was Marahrens in particular who was problematic for the Anglican Church. Martin Niemöller was an Anglican hero, despite acknowledged antisemitism and, of course, his offer to fight for Germany in 1939. Bishop Wurm was equally celebrated by Anglicans despite publicly welcoming the Führer in 1933 as the saviour of the (racially conceived) German Volk and his enduring employment of antisemitic rhetoric throughout the Third Reich.101 Bell objected to Marahrens’ silence over the Jewish issue,102 yet those statements of guilt that had been so enthusiastically welcomed by the Church of England had almost entirely failed to appraise Christian failings with regard to the Jews and their murder. 97 98 99

Bell to Gwynne (ARAC), 1 August 1947, Bell Papers, f. 231. Wurm to Robertson, 30 April 1947, Bell Papers, f. 234. Bell to Macready (Regional Commissioner in the Military Government), 17 June 1946, Bell Papers, Vol. 45, f. 377. 100 Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent, p. 203. 101 Ibid., p. 230. 102 Bell to Macready, 17 June 1946, Bell Papers, Vol. 45, f. 377. Richard Gutteridge also notes Marahrens’ rather grudging statements of guilt regarding the treatment of the Jews made in the post-war period, and speculates that these statements – which include the caveat that ‘a succession of Jews may have caused grievous harm to our people’ – thinly veiled an enduring antipathy to the Jews. Richard Gutteridge, Open thy Mouth for the Dumb! The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879–1950 (Oxford, 1996), p. 300.

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Ultimately the Church of England used the examples of Marahrens and the Deutsche Christen to defend their interpretation of the significance of Nazism. Anglicans thus ensured that the ambiguity of the evangelical record in the Third Reich was not allowed to affect the narrative framework within which the Church of England considered the German Protestant past. Paradoxically, official engagement with the past through denazification could be shown to be unnecessary if prominent Nazis were removed. Having lobbied for the right of the EKD both to regulate itself and to carry out its own comprehensive purge of Nazi elements, scapegoating the Deutsche Christen and Marahrens appeared to be the fulfilment of this faith. Ignoring them might also have satisfied government demands for the future, but it challenged ecclesiastical interpretations of the past by allowing obvious Nazis to be subsumed within non-Nazi organizations. This had the effect of blurring the distinction between Nazis and Christians – something that the Anglican understanding of the Third Reich could not tolerate. By focusing anger on the Deutsche Christen and Marahrens, the ecumenical community promoted a history of German Christianity that allowed for no ambiguity. Christians and Nazis were always separate, and the EKD demonstrated this by lancing the Nazi boil from its own body. In reality, despite promoting a specific understanding of the past, the Anglican campaign acted against the appraisal of the wider role of the churches in the Third Reich. For example, the contribution that Christianity made to Nazi rhetoric and the success of that rhetoric, not least through the identification and stigmatization of the Nazis’ primary Jewish victims, was lost within this process of ‘coming to terms with the past’. Marahrens and the Deutsche Christen deflected attention from the ambivalent relationship between Nazism and mainstream Christianity in the Third Reich. But this silence was not evasive – it was in line with a genuinely held interpretation of Germany’s recent history, according to which Nazism and Christianity were entirely separate and Christians were victims of the Nazi regime. The Church of England did not just passively allow a culture which emphasised German victimhood to develop; it actually became involved in direct campaigning in Britain to promote the idea of Germany and Germans as victims. In September 1945 Victor Gollancz had launched his campaign Save Europe Now! (SEN) to draw attention to the plight of post-war Germany and specifically the suffering of German civilians being expelled back into Germany from eastern Europe. While Gollancz’s campaign was launched by a group of MPs, including Eleanor Rathbone and Michael Foot, it was soon enthusiastically supported by members of the Anglican hierarchy – many bishops, for example, attended the organisation’s first public meeting in October 1945 which was addressed by the Bishop of Chichester.103 Save Europe Now! began life as a campaign for extra food provision, and a 103

For details of the beginning of the campaign and the full text of Bell’s speech to the first meeting, see Gollancz Papers, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (MRC), MSS 157/3/SEN1/1–7.

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charitable drive amongst the British population to send food to stricken Germany. In those aims it was incredibly successful, its founder Gollancz perhaps being responsible for changes in occupation policy which allowed food parcels to be sent from Britain to Germany. However it was also part of a much wider campaign to infuse post-war politics with a new morality and to force the ‘majority of people everywhere [to] feel strongly their individual responsibility for suffering anywhere’.104 For the Church of England, such a call was part of their general desire to see a re-christianisation of politics in the post-war world, which was further articulated in the formation of the group Christian Action (CA) organised by Lewis John Collins, who would become Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1948. George Bell was originally the Chair of Christian Action.105 In addition, the Europe being saved was understood as a Christian Europe, resting on a Christian past. In many ways the sense of obligation articulated by Christian Action and Save Europe Now! was very similar to the understanding of obligation that had driven the Church’s bishops to protest against German persecution of Jews in wartime. William Temple frequently explained his action over that issue by arguing that he was, as a Christian, obligated to do all that he could. Indeed, it was no coincidence that the MPs and campaigners who established SEN were often the very same people as had campaigned against the intransigence and inadequacies of government rescue policy. It is ironic therefore that such a sense of obligation helped to create a culture in the immediate post-war world which downplayed the Jewish experience as victims, a further Anglican contribution to memory. George Bell’s earlier mentioned report ‘The Task of the Churches in Germany’ concentrated on the German and European peoples as victims in 1946. Jewish victims of Nazism literally did not feature in this survey of the European present.106 Part of the raison d’être for the report had been the thirst of English Christians for information about those suffering on the continent after the end of hostilities.107 Anglican activists satiated this thirst with a steady flow of information, but Jews were not included in these litanies of suffering. Concern for the spiritual and religious well-being of Displaced Persons in the British zone also excluded Jews. A large number of Displaced Persons in the British zone were Jewish but the concept of spiritual wealth was employed as an entirely Christian one. So spiritual support – in terms of the organisation of worship – was only provided for Christians.108

104

Peggy Duff, Save Europe Now! Three Years Work 1945–1948. This is a pamphlet originally published in 1949 to mark the winding up of the campaign. A copy is held at Gollancz Papers, MSS 157/3/SEN1/1–7. 105 See Edward Carpenter, ‘Man and God’, in Ian Henderson, Man of Christian Action: Canon John Collins – The Man and his Work (London, 1976), p. 38. 106 See George Bell, The Task of the Churches in Germany (London, 1947). The text of the report, and correspondence pertaining to its preparation and reactions to it, can be found in Bell Papers, Vol. 46. 107 Report of the Church of England Commission on Christian Reconstruction, October 1945, Bell Papers, Vol. 54, f. 170. 108 For example see W. Lack (Religious Advisor on DPs in the Religious Affairs Branch) to L.W.

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It would, however, be wrong to suggest that Jewish victims and survivors entirely disappeared from Anglican and ecumenical rhetoric after the war. Curiously, the notion of the specificity of Jewish suffering was employed, but in negative terms. Victor Gollancz suggested, with reference to his diminishing concern for Jewish victims of Nazism in later 1945, that one reason Jews disappeared from view was simply that they were replaced with new victims, and as such new objects of sympathy and outrage.109 The civilians that had so affected Gollancz, and had been left starving and homeless by apocalyptic conflict, were in the post-war era continually augmented by the literally millions of ethnic Germans being deported from the east by the new Polish, and Soviet regimes.110 This undoubted human tragedy caused indignation within the Anglican community, a ‘grave shock to a great body of Christian opinion’.111 In articulating that shock, however, Christian opinion often sought to appropriate Jews’ status as primary victim by comparing contemporary German suffering with the historical privations of the Jews. George Bell’s words at Stuttgart, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, were typical of this tendency. Stewart Herman, like Bell, also sought to compare deportations directly with the fate of the Jews by writing that ‘the Poles were deliberately starving the Germans into emigrating’. He even claimed that ‘not even the Jews in Germany had been so badly treated’ and that ‘there was not a great deal of difference discernible between the Nazi measures and the Polish measures later’.112 Government and Anglican organisations in occupied Germany also attempted to appropriate the Jews’ status as victims. Instructions were issued to field officers of the Religious Affairs Branch of the Control Commission, for example, that they should avoid giving special dispensation to any Jewish victims of Nazism that they may encounter. A draft directive to officials advised that ‘there will probably be some professing Jews in your region, whom it is your duty to help in the same way as Christians’. Although these people were victims of Nazism, the directive admitted, officers should not ‘afford them undue privileges . . . [as] they are already receiving material assistance’ which should have been taken into ‘consideration as well as their past sufferings’. Christian victims, however, needed to be given special attention because their influence (unlike that of the Jews) would work against the dominance of Russia and the undermining of Hartland (Secretary of CRE) 23 June 1948, in which religious provision is discussed with no reference to Jews. 109 See Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London, 1987), pp. 404–464, for a discussion of Gollancz’s post-war campaign to highlight the plight of German civilians through the organisation Save Europe Now! 110 See James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation 1944–50 (London, 1997), for an account of the sufferings of the German population under four-power control. The partiality of the Bacque narrative is, however, disturbing and as such the book, which is an effort to shift focus from the crimes of the Holocaust and thereby reduce responsibility, should be treated with caution. 111 George Bell to Wurm, quoted in The Record, 21 September 1945, p. 475. 112 Herman, Rebirth of the German Church, p. 219.

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religious life in Europe.113 Similarly in July 1946 a Christian Reconstruction in Europe report on the situation in Germany sought to borrow Jews’ status as Nazism’s primary victims for the non-Aryan Christians of the British zone: ‘steps necessary to give relief to non-Aryan Christians should be taken at the earliest possible [opportunity, they] should have the same privileges as Jews’.114 Jewish victims were thus either ignored by the ecumenical community, or their image was employed in order to bring into focus the sufferings of other victims which it was felt the Jewish experience should not be allowed to obscure. In these rare considerations of the Jewish victims of Nazism, there was something of a paradox at work. Implicitly the specificity of the Jewish victims, and as such the Jewish experience at Nazi hands, was recognised in the effort to borrow the assumed power of their status as victims. The cry appeared to have been that Christians were victims as well, but this point was emphasised with the implicit recognition of specifically Jewish suffering. Coupled with silence, this apparent jealousy of the status of victimhood awarded to Jews suggested a fundamental inability on the part of the English Christian community to cope intellectually with the anti-Jewish nature of Nazism. Anglicans also demonstrated an inability to cope with the Jews as victims.115 One is reminded of the Anglican treatment of Kristallnacht. By 1949 Cyril Garbett appeared to find it very difficult to think of Jews as victims at all. In his account of a visit to Germany he lamented the tragic condition of German and Ukrainian Displaced Persons as ‘very moving and pathetic’. Jewish Displaced Persons, however, had lost their status as victims and, Garbett commented, had succeeded in turning Belsen into the ‘centre of the black market of Europe’.116 Why then did the Anglican community struggle to cope with the Jewishness of victims of Nazism or with Nazism’s anti-Jewishness? The various elements that made up the Anglican world view were intimately interconnected and indeed interdependent. Justifications of war had depended upon a specific interpretation of the evils of Nazism as an element of anti-Christian totalitarianism, which in turn informed plans for the Christian future, which then added further justification to war. Recognition of the Jews as the primary victims of Nazism would have challenged the basis of this entire mindset by introducing the idea that Nazism was something other than simply the negation of Christianity, and the denial of a Christian God. Although implicitly present, this recognition of Jewish victimhood was, in the context of campaigns to elevate the status of the Christian victim, played down. The Church of England also used Jewish victims of Nazism to highlight the 113 114 115

Draft Directive to Religious Affairs Regional Officers, undated, PRO FO 945/180. Report of Guy Clutton Brock’s visit to Germany, PRO 1050/1579. See Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London, 1998), on the struggle of Displaced Persons in the British zone to achieve recognition as Jews. See also Arieh J. Kochavi, ‘Britain’s Image Campaign against the Zionists’, Journal of Contemporary History (Vol. 36, No. 2, 2001), pp. 293–307. 116 Travel Diary of a Visit to Germany April 1949, Garbett Papers, COLL 1973/1/L/10.

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continuity of criminality after 1945, although the appearance of new victims brought the arrival of a new locus of that criminality – the Soviet empire in the east. By interpreting the experience of German deportees within the continuum of suffering resulting from war, the Anglican community considered such an experience within the overarching context of a Christian battle against anti-Christianity. Anglican comment on the Nuremberg trial echoed Bell’s words at Stuttgart and spoke of the disappointment that it was only the ‘vanquished that have been put on trial’. During this lament, an unbroken line of suffering was presented – a suffering that had not been halted by the end of war with Nazism. ‘The destruction of Nazi power has not brought to an end the deportation and enslavement of vast populations, or political, racial or religious persecution . . . Sauckel’, the Church Times contended, ‘is not the last employer of slave labour, nor Frank the last exploiter of a subject population.’117 The German victims of communism pouring over Germany’s eastern borders were then employed as symbols of the enduring criminality of dictatorial regimes despite the judicial accounting at Nuremberg. German deportees were promoted as victims of the same struggle as the victims of Nazism and war – a conflict that had never been perceived by the Anglican community as simply the physical war against Nazism. The Anglican understanding of the enemy in wartime in intellectual or ideological rather than geographical or physical national terms – as the totalitarian opposite of Christianity – ensured that the Soviet Union, portrayed as an ideological power, could replace Nazism as the enemy of Christian civilisation. Such a reorientation of the rhetorical image of the Soviet Union did indeed begin in the immediate aftermath of German surrender and the disappearance of the shared Nazi enemy which had cemented alliance with ‘Russia’. This reorientation was contemporary with the attempted recasting of the image of the German population and their portrayal as victims, often (as in the case of the deportees) at the hands of the Soviet totalitarian foe. Importantly the intellectual structure provided by the Anglican worldview dictated that the reorientation of the Soviet Union was a process that required no reconceptualisation of the enemy. ‘Stalin’, it was argued, moved quickly into the ‘throne compulsorily vacated by Hitler’.118 The defeat of Hitler had in some areas of the world brought no victory in the Anglican war: ‘the spread of Russian power has reinforced the hold of authoritarian government in Eastern Europe’, and therefore although ‘the actors in the political drama had changed’, fundamentally for the Anglican Church ‘the roles [were] the same’. Christian civilisation faced totalitarian evil in Europe.119 The similarity between the former and present enemy was such for the Anglican Church that their emblematic institutions were directly compared; the Soviet State, it was contended, rested on the ‘methods of the Gestapo’.120 117

Fritz Sauckel was the Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilisation in the Third Reich, and Hans Frank the Governor of the General Government area of occupied Poland. Church Times, 4 Oct. 1946, p. 596. 118 The Record, 28 November 1947, p. 731. 119 Christian News Letter, 9 July 1947, No. 289, p. 3. 120 Church Times, 27 June 1947, p. 379.

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The ‘evil’ of the Soviet Union was defined by post-war Anglicans on two basic levels, which echoed previous characterisations of Nazism. First that the state was involved in the active persecution of the churches: ‘the muscovite [attempt] to crush out all Christian faith’.121 Second, the Soviet disregard for individual liberty was interpreted as demonstrating the innate opposition of the Communist and Christian views of the world. The Soviet Union, it was argued, practised a ‘view of personal value’ that ‘differ[ed] radically from that which springs from Christianity’.122 The Soviet state, Anglicans declared, was actively participating in the ‘denial of God’, and was rejecting the values of ‘civilisation’.123 Cyril Garbett declared that whereas ‘western civilisation teaches the value of the individual; Marxian Communism holds [the individual] has no rights except those which the state confers upon him’.124 Such a campaign against the individual and his or her relationship with God was, for Anglicans, the post-war equivalent of that which had been pursued by ‘the other totalitarian, Hitler’.125 While the idea of an ideological battle with communism was an ever-present image within Anglican rhetoric in the post-war period,126 it reached new heights during the Berlin crisis. Following the breakdown of four-power control of Germany and the announcement of the economic integration of the western zones, the Soviets attempted to reform the economy of the eastern zones – including the whole of Berlin. This effectively led to the cutting of supplies to western sectors of Berlin, which was blockaded and only accessible by air. The Soviet authorities calculated that the western allies would abandon the city, settling for the concrete division of Germany. The allies air lifted supplies to Berlin throughout the second half of 1948, finally securing agreement in May 1949 for working access to the western sectors of the city. The Church of England was an enthusiastic supporter of the air lift. George Bell, using the kind of imagery deployed against Nazism during the war, argued that the ‘western powers must not leave Berlin but resist Soviet pressure [as] the . . . conflict was a reflection of the universal struggle between light and darkness’.127 Similarly his colleague at York, Cyril Garbett, revived the rhetoric of the war in defining the new conflict as between the ‘forces of those who deny the value and the rights of an individual, and deny therefore, that he has any freedom’ and ‘the democracies which believe that every individual is of value and therefore should have freedom [and who] recognise there are absolute moral laws’.128 121 122 123 124

Church Times, 21 March 1947, p. 155. Church Times, 11 April 1947, p. 204. Christian News Letter, 9 July 1947, No. 289, p. 3. Cyril Garbett addressing the York Diocesan Conference 22 June 1948, quoted in The Record, 25 June 1948, p. 373. 125 Church Times, 21 March 1947, p. 155. 126 See for example The Record, 28 November 1947, p. 731, for a characterisation of the battle with communism which is familiarly titled, ‘From Belief into Action: How the Ideological Conflict Works in Practice’. 127 Cited in Jasper, George Bell, p. 306. 128 Cyril Garbett, Hansard (HL), Vol. 158 (285), 24 September 1948.

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On this issue the ecumenical community was again united. Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian who had exercised profound influence on William Temple, characterised the Berlin crisis as part of an historical continuity that began with the battle against Hitler and was now manifested in the battle over Berlin. These two conflicts were according to Niebuhr, part of a bitter world ‘civil war’ between the forces of Christian civilisation and those of totalitarian oppression.129 This leader comment from the Church of England newspaper, The Record, from November 1947, agreed: Fascism, Nazism, Communism . . . have been alike in that they have flourished best in ground that has been cleared of the obstacle of morality. That is why of necessity they have started with attacks and intrigues against religion. Nihilism and religion cannot be together in the same world, let alone in the same country, and must remain in conflict until one or the other is driven off the field.130

Interpreting Nazi and Soviet criminality in this way had a concrete impact on the understanding of the specificities of both. When allied soldiers entered Belsen and Buchenwald the horrors which greeted them were, for the Christian community, confirmation of the evils of secularism as embodied by the Nazi regime.131 For that community those evils continued, rhetorically at least, to be practised in the post-war era: ‘these [communists] are the barbarians that a thorough going secularism has bred and nurtured for the destruction of everything that Europe has hitherto secured’.132 Nazi violence, especially toward Jews, had been traditionally interpreted as a regression to barbarism, and as such alien to the Christian tradition. That the same formula was then applied to the interpretation of Sovietism demonstrates why so little priority could be given to what we now call the Holocaust within such a mindset. Neither the event of Jewish mass murder, nor the idea of the primary status of Nazism’s Jewish victims, sat comfortably in this perceived European war against nihilism. Jeffrey Herf has argued that previous historiography has laid too much emphasis on the imposition of new political narratives on post-war Germany from external forces in the context of the Cold War. Herf argues that the political discourses which became dominant in both the East and the West were in fact latent German political traditions revived.133 However it is clear from the analysis of ecumenical narratives of Nazism explored here that the role of the Cold War in the formation of the history and memory of Nazism needs to be even further problematised.

129

Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘The Christian Witness in the Social and National Order’, in Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven, 1986), p. 94. 130 The Record, 7 November 1947, p. 680. 131 See the Church Times, 3 August 1945, p. 435, which reflected on the fact that Nazism had ‘only been made possible by the complete secularisation of society’. 132 The Record, 5 December 1947, p. 739. 133 Herf, ‘Multiple Restorations: German Political Traditions and the Interpretation of Nazism 1945–6’.

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First the narratives that the Cold War legitimated outside Germany were not new. The ecumenical understandings of Nazism explored here were articulated in government during the later war years, and had been proposed inside the Church of England since the very beginning of the Nazi era. In that sense the obfuscation of the Nazi past in the immediate post-war era was not a purely secular story. Nor were German understandings of the past created entirely in a vacuum. During that period the Anglican Church, and indeed the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland, were engaged in promoting a specific image of the past. The concentration on the Nazi past and criminality implicit within the concept of denazification and the trial process was rejected by both institutions because of its potential effect on a Christian future.134 But, this prioritisation of the future simultaneously rested on a specific interpretation of a mythologised past. It was Christian resistance that had an important historical legacy, not Nazi criminality. In turn, government treatment of the German Protestant Church reflected this narrative. The occupation regime allowed the Anglican-defined institutions of the ‘other Germany’ to design analyses of the Nazi past which, reliant on the division of the world between Christian and Nazi, emphasised Christian resistance.135 As such, the Christian community, both prompting and supported by the drift of government understanding of the past away from Vansittartism, actively promoted a version of the Third Reich that did not concentrate on Nazi criminality. When criminality was acknowledged in any sphere wider than the Nazi clique, it was seen as a passive sin, and no specific mention was made of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews. These were ecclesiastical, not secular, narratives, based on religious, not political, visions of both the future and, importantly, the past. As well as demonstrating the importance of religious narratives in the secular twentieth century, such observations also demonstrate that the idea that the Nazi past was abandoned in the Cold War era is misleading. Nazism was understood as anti-Christian, as was the Soviet Union after 1945. Within such a narrative the significance of the Nazi era was reduced to Nazi and Soviet similarities, in their methods of control and in their literal and temporal attack on the Christian churches. The specificities of particular ideologies were lost within such readings of the past. However, the deep roots of this interpretation suggest that the instrumentalisation of the history of Nazism after 1945 cannot be seen as just a political manipulation of history, but reflected a genuine and honest understanding of the Nazi past and a perception of the importance of that past. These are not the only contributions to memory that the Church made. As well as constructing an image of the German churches and wider population as victims, the Church also helped construct a specific image of German

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In fact George Bell was thanked by Martin Niemöller for his assistance in the campaign against denazification; see Jasper, George Bell, p. 305. 135 The impact of this separation of Christian and Nazi pasts in this project of memory formation is discussed in Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London, 2002), pp. 16–19.

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perpetrators as well. By taking part in a campaign against war-crimes trials after 1946, churchmen helped mould an image of, especially, German soldiers as European allies in the battle with communism. The next chapter will explain, and then explore the implications of, this palpable contribution to the memory of the Nazi era.

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Chapter Five ‘TO WHOM VENGEANCE BELONGETH’: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, CHRISTIANITY AND OPPOSITION TO WAR-CRIMES TRIALS

War-crimes trials were a crucial aspect of the search for a usable past. The meaning of genocidal conflict was shaped in courtrooms and on gallows throughout what had been Nazi-occupied Europe. Judgements declared who had been a criminal and what their crimes were and why. Those that went unpunished or uninvestigated spoke just as eloquently about the nature of the suffering that had just passed. Trials have also been written into narratives charting the development of historical memories after 1945. The western allies appeared to demonstrate a commitment to working through the past in their trials programmes. But, when those trials were abandoned towards the end of the 1940s, and those convicted in them released from the beginning of the 1950s, this seems to have articulated a turning away from the past and a prioritisation of the future. Unsurprisingly, this waning interest has commonly been explained as the result of Cold War politics, and the need to re-orient the world for new challenges, in which the West, especially, had a new enemy. However, the abandonment of the trials programme was more than simply the abandonment of the past in favour of the future. It also articulated a specific understanding of that past and constructed a narrative which attached significance to this history. In Britain, for example, the ending of the trials, and the incremental release of Nazi war criminals thereafter, satisfied the desires of a vociferous group of protestors opposed to the principle of war-crimes trials. Those protests never articulated a sense that the past was unimportant; instead they offered a different narrative which suggested that the trial of Germans was an inadequate mechanism for rendering the Second World War meaningful. Just as the decision to first change and then bring to an end the denazification and re-education programmes, as well as plotting a particular route to the future, had given prominence and priority to narratives of the recent past which helped recast the German population as victims, so too the decision to end the trials conformed to an alternative historical narrative to those which had underpinned the trials themselves. In abandoning the trials of Nazi war criminals, a particular understanding of the perpetrators was constructed, and it is that image of the 139

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perpetrators and the significance of their crimes, that will ultimately be the subject of this final chapter. Representatives of the Church of England were prominent amongst those voices which challenged the justice of the trials. In contributing to that discourse Anglicans, and especially George Bell, made a palpable contribution to the memory of the Nazi era, and therefore the Holocaust, in post-war Britain. Because of their ecumenical links it was a memorial discourse that had influence in continental Europe too. The wider purpose of this chapter is to investigate this contribution to memory by analysing the Church’s attitudes to the punishment of Nazi war criminals, and how it interacted with the trials and then with the movement that opposed them. First however, in order to understand the attitudes of the Church to the principle of post-war trials, we must review ideas about punishment articulated in the Anglican community during the war. This will, in turn, allow us to understand the criteria by which the Church evaluated the specific trials programmes which emerged, and ultimately why churchmen opposed warcrimes trials after the conclusion of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This is not to say, by any means, that all of those who made up the eclectic group opposing war-crimes trials would have identified themselves as Anglicans, they would not. What is uncovered here, however, is Anglican involvement in a memorial discourse which constructed a particular image of the perpetrators of criminality during the Second World War. Many campaigners against the trials used discourses approved and established in the Church of England, or indicted a notional Christianity in support of their arguments against trials, even if they did not locate themselves within the church. Therefore the story told here of interaction between Anglican and non-Anglican campaigners against war-crimes trials, between the religious and the secular, is itself testament to the enduring centrality of Christianity in post-war political discourse. By extending the source material considered in this chapter beyond the Church of England, by analysing rhetoric the provenance of which is not directly Anglican but which called on Christian vocabularies, we can again question the apparent triumph of secularism in mid-century Britain. Throughout the war Church leaders had been suggesting that the Nazis should be held to account for their crimes. George Bell was, predictably, at the forefront of this campaign for judicial recompense. From 1943 onwards he had been vociferous in his desire for the ‘Nazi men of terror’ to be brought to justice in ‘properly appointed tribunals’.1 Bell’s was not a lone voice among the Episcopate. William Temple also argued that those who ‘are really guilty’ should be held to account, 1

See George Bell, ‘A Visit to Sweden’, in The Church and Humanity (London, 1946), p. 77; and George Bell, ‘The Future in Europe: Germany’ – A memo for the International Round Table ‘Commission to study the bases of a just and durable peace’, held in the USA, 8–11 July 1943. This memo can be found in the Liddell Hart Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Kings College London, 1/58, f. 41.

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THE CHURCH AND OPPOSITION TO WAR-CRIMES TRIALS

and Cyril Garbett demanded several times that Nazi ‘criminals receive their punishment’ for the ‘sake of justice’.2 The Church’s view on punishment was, however, complex – often because of the interaction between Christian theologies of punishment and forgiveness. For a Christian, to live in an orderly society dictated the acceptance of the principle of punishment and atonement. But, for the liberal Christian – and despite the crises of the 1930s and wartime it was the liberal tradition that predominated – the purpose of life was the attempted imitation of Christ. Such perfection involved aspiring to forgiveness rather than punishment. Anglican pacifist, Stephen Hobhouse, engaged with this very problem in wartime, and considered the relationship of Christian ideals of ‘forgiveness’ to possible post-war trials.3 Hobhouse wrote that whatever the principle behind judicial retribution it was not a ‘fitting task for the Christian’ because it did not promote Christian love. Retribution, he argued, was only the responsibility of the divine; the aspiration of the Christian had to be toward unconditional forgiveness.4 The support for Hobhouse’s view in the Christian community, clerical or lay, must not be exaggerated. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, was, for example, a reluctant supporter of the retributive function of area bombing, a position far removed from Hobhouse’s essential pacifism.5 Cyril Garbett also disagreed with Hobhouse, arguing with specific reference to trials, that ‘retribution is an element in justice and justice is the primary expression of love’.6 Despite being rejected however, Hobhouse’s position does indicate that there was a ready made theological and philosophical structure which Anglicans could use to criticise trials. That structure would become important in framing Anglican engagement with the trials after the end of the war. Some calls for punishment issued by churchmen articulated reservations and even ambivalence regarding any future trials programme. William Temple noted in 1942 that punishment and retribution had to be ‘short term’, while the long-term approach to Germany had to be found in forgiveness. In November 1943, the Christian News Letter stated that despite the moral obligation to punish war criminals it was ‘forgiveness’ that could make a ‘creative’ contribution to the 2

William Temple addressed the idea of punishment in a sermon delivered on 18 October 1942, reported in Spiritual Issues of the War, 22 March 1942. Cyril Garbett called for trials publicly on a number of occasions. In the York convocation 22 January 1942, reported in Spiritual Issues of the War, 29 January 1942, Garbett delivered a similar message to convocation in October 1944, see the Church Times, 13 October 1944, and Spiritual Issues of the War, 19 October 1944. Garbett also spoke in the House of Lords in March 1945, the source of the quotations. See Hansard (HL), Vol. 135 (672), 20 March 1945. 3 Stephen Hobhouse was a leading pacifist in the interwar period, and had been a contemporary of Temple’s at Oxford. Vacillating between the Church of England and the Society of Friends, Hobhouse returned to the Anglican fold in 1944 but remained absolute in his pacifist faith. See Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform: War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–45 (London, 1986), pp. 271–272. 4 Stephen Hobhouse, Retribution and the Christian (London, 1942), pp. 1–12. 5 On Temple’s reluctant support for the area bombing campaign see Andrew Chandler, ‘The Church of England and the Obliteration Bombing of Germany in the Second World War’, English Historical Review (Vol. 108, 1993), pp. 920–946. 6 Garbett, quoted in Spiritual Issues of the War, 29 January 1942.

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future.7 Cyril Garbett agreed, adding to his calls for retribution the important caveat that forgiveness was the handmaiden of punishment. In addition, Anglican calls for punishment commonly contrasted the measured justice that they desired with ‘revenge’. For example, a joint statement issued by Temple and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, John Baillie, warned in March 1944 against a ‘spirit of vengefulness’. Garbett similarly tempered his support for punishment with warnings about the evils of vengeance.8 A further caveat in Anglican support for trials was that they should rest on an understanding of Nazism that the Church could recognise – in terms of who was investigated and for what. The rhetoric of calls for punishment from within the church placed emphasis on the guilt and responsibility of the Nazi leadership corps, consistent with the Church’s continual efforts to draw a distinction between the Nazi criminal clique and the German population. George Bell defined the utility of any possible or forthcoming trials in these terms – that they might allow the allies to ‘plainly fix [the] guilt’ for Nazi atrocities on the shoulders of the criminal elite and, therefore, draw attention to the fact that the allies viewed the German population wholly differently and removed from the Nazi leadership.9 The Bishop of Rochester, Christopher Chavasse, agreed, arguing that the ‘only hope is to regard and treat the great mass . . . as having been misled, deceived and very largely helpless’.10 While Cyril Garbett was more prepared to find the German people guilty, he agreed that trials were designed to deal with the ‘master criminals’. The mass of the German population, he argued, were suffering enough already.11 Anglicans appear to have believed that the trials could be used to bolster their understanding of the Nazi state and therefore to undermine the narratives of the past inherent in some of the occupation policies, like denazification, to which they were opposed. But, the post-war trials constructed their own versions of the past, which did not necessarily concur with the Church’s, thus ensuring, at the very least, that the Church would be ambivalent about them. Let us look first at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, the trial of the, so-called, ‘major war criminals’. Four charges were levelled at those in the dock: the common plan or conspiracy, the waging of aggressive war, war crimes as already understood (for example the mistreatment of prisoners of war), and crimes against humanity.12 The charges of conspiracy, crimes against the peace and 7 8

Christian News Letter, ‘Punishment of War Criminals’, Supplement to No. 194, 3 November 1943. For the joint statement see Spiritual Issues of the War, 30 March 1944; for Garbett’s speeches on punishment and revenge, see note 2 above. 9 George Bell, ‘German Atrocities’, Church and Humanity, p. 92. This article is the text of a speech given in the House of Lords, 11 February 1943. 10 See Spiritual Issues of the War, 14 September 1944. 11 Hansard (HL), Vol. 135 (672), 20 March 1945. 12 Anthony Glees, ‘The Making of British Policy on War Crimes: History as Politics in the U.K.’, Contemporary European History (Vol. 1, No. 2, 1992), p. 178. See also Anne and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (London, 1983), pp. 85–90, for a discussion of the London charter, the agreement that cemented the charges and the manner in which they were framed within it.

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crimes against humanity were novel and gave expression to an understanding of Nazism as a specifically insidious historical phenomenon.13 Crimes against the peace or the waging of aggressive war were proposed as the ultimate transgressions and it was contended that all other charges flowed from them.14 In this, Nazism was also presented as a consequence and culmination of the traditions of Prussian militarism. As such the version of the past inherent in the IMT prosecutions reflected the consensus adopted at Potsdam. A consensus which, as we know, the Church of England rejected. The charges levelled at Nuremberg also attempted to indict the entire organised community as complicit; chiefly through the second central charge of conspiracy or ‘common plan’. To achieve this, as well as leading Nazis such as Göring, Kaltenbrunner and Speer, those indicted before the IMT included representatives from the Army High Command.15 It was also intended that a representative from German private industry would be arraigned, although this did not in fact happen.16 Where Britain was the sole prosecutorial authority, the trials articulated a somewhat different understanding of Nazism. It appears that the British, Churchill included, had been reluctant to agree to the concept of an international trial because of the breadth of the proposed charges.17 Consequently, the purely British trials never went as far as the IMT in their definition of Nazi criminality. Governed by the Royal Warrant issued in June 1945,18 the British sought only the prosecution of those accused of crimes against British nationals,19 and only then those directly responsible for the commission of war crimes. The only action the British could or would take against those accused of crimes against persons other than British nationals was extradition. The commitment to extradition was in line with the provision of the Moscow declaration, the original tripartite commitment to war-crimes trials signed in November 1943, which had envisaged that Nazi criminals could simply be returned to the theatre of their crimes and tried there by national governments accounting for national victims.20

13 14 15

Telford Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (London, 1993), p. 626. Michael Marrus, ‘The Holocaust at Nuremberg’, Yad Vashem Studies (Vol. 26, 1998), p. 7. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, was sentenced to death and executed at Nuremberg. Alfred Jodl, Chief of operations staff of the Army High Command, was also hanged, although he was posthumously exonerated by a German court in 1953. Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz – both of the Command Corps of the Navy – were sentenced to prison terms by the IMT. The Army High Command (OKW) was declared not to be a criminal organisation by the tribunal, on the basis that the prosecution had failed to demonstrate that it was homogeneous. 16 Gustav Krupp was originally supposed to stand trial, but did not because he was declared unfit. Ultimately there was therefore no representative from the German industrial community at the IMT. Alan S. Rosenbaum, Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals (Boulder, 1993), p. 19. 17 See, for example, Ariel J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill, 1998), pp. 4–6, on the attitude of the Foreign Office. 18 Glees, ‘The Making of British Policy’, p. 178. 19 Priscilla Dale Jones, ‘British Policy towards German Crimes against German Jews 1939–45’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Vol. 36, 1991), p. 348. 20 Tusa, Nuremberg Trial, pp. 23–24, for the text of the Moscow declaration.

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The British trials also constructed a specific historical understanding of Nazism. The concentration on traditional definitions of war crimes tied the malevolence of Nazism to militarism as traditionally understood, and did not suggest (as the charges at the IMT had done) that Nazism was a new historical phenomenon.21 After all, similar trials had been attempted at the end of the First World War.22 The Royal Warrant trials’ concentration on the foot soldiers of criminality – which was the implication of their insistence that direct evidence of the carrying out of criminal violence be proven – also did not concur with the IMT’s indictment of German elites.23 While British officials’ concern to limit prosecutions to crimes involving British subjects may have been chiefly jurisdictional, the commitment to extradition expressed an understanding that national trials could, if carried out by all nations affected by Nazi criminality, theoretically offer complete judicial accounting for Nazi misdeeds. This vision of Nazism defined its victims only in national terms, and reflected an understanding of the Third Reich that failed to account for its attack on members of its own population, and indeed stateless persons. Of course the majority of these victims were Jews.24 That the British, either through the Royal Warrant trials or through extradition, had no mechanisms in place for accounting for crimes perpetrated against Jews reflected the ambivalence of the British government, and prominent elements in British society (which included the Church of England) towards the Jewish victims of Nazism. Through the medium of British trials Nazism continued to be presented as somehow dangerous but, crucially, not as a specifically antisemitic movement or political project. This became abundantly clear at the Belsen trial, which began in September 1945,25 when the charges related only to victims of specific nationalities and did not deal with the Jews, despite the proliferation of Jewish victims in the camp that had been the final stopping point for many death marches. However, the failings of the Belsen trial to deal with the scope of Nazi anti-Jewish ambition were arguably repeated in the American inspired prosecution at the IMT. The centrality of the aggressive war charge dictating that the ‘Final Solution’ was simply seen as a consequence of aggression, rather than as a project in and of itself.26 Both the IMT and the British trials articulated a somewhat limited and at times contradictory understanding of the nature of Nazism – both on their own terms 21

Aaron Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis: The Controversy over “Vansittartism” in Britain during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History (Vol. 14, No. 1, 1979), p. 163. 22 Rosenbaum, Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals, p. 29. 23 A series of differences between the scope of the British trials and the IMT are noted in Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001), p. 8. 24 Jones, ‘British Policy towards German Crimes against German Jews’, p. 348. 25 For an account of the Belsen trial see Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany – A Pledge Betrayed (London, 1981), pp. 197–201. For an account of the limited impact of the Belsen trial on the memory of the Holocaust see Tony Kushner, ‘The Memory of Belsen’, in Jo Reilly et al. (eds), Belsen in History and Memory (London, 1997), pp. 181- 205. 26 See Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 101–128; 185–220.

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and through their interaction with each other. Crucially for our purposes though, the versions of recent history proposed in courtrooms and in trial policies also both concurred with and contradicted the Church’s understanding of the past. As we know the Church had envisaged only a narrow guilt and responsibility embodied in an elite ideological clique, as could be seen by their indictment of only ‘Adolf Hitler and his co-assassins’.27 The idea of the conspiracy proposed at Nuremberg also situated the locus of Nazi criminality within the leadership and governmental corps. But, the attempt to indict diverse German elites was something which Anglican observers were unlikely to agree, because it articulated an understanding of Nazism as the latest manifestation of the shared ambition of the historical power bases of the German past. In part the Royal Warrant offered the Anglican imagination a more palatable version of the Nazi past, because it confined the idea of Nazi criminality rather than attempting the indictment of large swathes of German society or culture. However, the Royal Warrant also contradicted the limited Anglican vision of Nazi criminality, by situating responsibility for Nazism below the elite. Equally the association, in all prosecutions, of Nazi criminality with a form of militarism clashed with the Anglican understanding of Nazism as an entirely alien totalitarian force imposed upon German history and traditions. The Church was also impatient that trials be completed speedily, so that the long-term business of reconciliation could begin. Both these tendencies were reflected in its reception of the trials themselves. The Belsen trial was, for example, impatiently welcomed in September of 1945, and although there were no voices in the Church that doubted the justice of the trial, there was some unease at the length of proceedings. This was viewed as an impediment to the pressing task of reconstruction. Anglican commentators contended that there was no need for extended investigation of the Nazi past because the ‘facts’ of the ‘hell’ of Belsen were ‘not in dispute’.28 Accordingly it was urged, that convictions should be speedy in order that hell could be left behind. Other European trials were similarly regarded. The Record wished, for example, that the trials of Petain and Laval in France would be over as soon as possible, in order that France could concentrate on the ‘rebuilding of her national life’.29 Anglican commentators were not actually suggesting the abandonment of the past. Indeed the Belsen trial was supported by the Church precisely because it presented a picture of Nazism that it could recognise. The established facts of hellish Belsen for the Anglican community were, at the time of the trial, understood in the manner that those same horrors had been perceived at the time of liberation. Belsen, and the cruelty exposed therein, had been interpreted as the worst excesses of a criminal totalitarianism and as a result of the Nazi regime’s

27 28 29

George Bell, ‘German Atrocities’, p. 92. The Record, 28 September 1945, p. 417. The Record, 24 August 1945.

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brutal control and punishment policies.30 Throughout the trial, Belsen was viewed within this framework. The ecclesiastical community interpreted the revelations of the practices of the camps as an ‘indictment of civilisation’. The cruelty exposed at liberation and then in the courtroom was not understood as the consequence of a racist Nazism, but the general moral collapse that the war had been waged against.31 And even the prosecution of the foot soldiers of Nazi criminality revealed, for example to The Church Times, that the ‘real criminals . . . were Hitler and Himmler’.32 By the time the IMT at Nuremberg began, much of the Anglican community seemed to have lost interest in war-crimes trials, perhaps because of their impatience to turn and face the future. However, where it was noticed, the tribunal was given a limited welcome, interpreted as a ‘noble’ exercise in its effort to provide a moral dimension to international politics.33 Yet, this welcome should not be overstated. As the tribunal progressed any ecclesiastical commentary that did appear,34 became increasingly sceptical and was especially concerned with the trials’ ability to play a constructive role in the creation of a better future for Europe.35 The forging of a more secure future had, of course, been one of the primary moral motivations of the trials project.36 For example Telford Taylor, who was assistant to Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the IMT and then head of the American prosecution team at the so called ‘subsequent proceedings’, candidly explained that alongside exposing the horror of Nazism, the IMT was concerned to build an international legal code and outlaw war.37 And Nuremberg has often been seen in these terms; as one element of a project also involving the establishment of the United Nations.38 According to this interpretation Nuremberg attempted to give expression to a global set of values for the regulation of 30 31 32

Church Times, 28 December 1945, p. 746. The Guardian, 28 September 1945, p. 375. Church Times, 28 December 1945, p. 746. For details of sentencing in the Belsen trial see Raymond Phillips (ed.), Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty Four Others (The Belsen Trial) (London, 1949). 33 Church Times, 23 November 1945, p. 667. 34 A review of the Church Times, The Guardian, The Record (latterly The Church of England Newspaper) and Christian News Letter between 1945 and 1953 revealed no sustained engagement with the issue of trials after the inception of the Nuremberg trials in 1945. Although there was comment on the judgements delivered at Nuremberg this was an isolated break in the curtain of silence regarding the issue of trials and is discussed below. Trials did inspire some historical reflection on the Nazi state within the ecclesiastical community, but this was often directed at celebration of the extent of Christian resistance. Isolated commentaries on the Manstein trial of 1949 will also be discussed below. The lack of interest may have reflected a broader trend – see Peter Calvocoressi, Nuremberg: The Facts, the Law and the Consequences (London, 1947), p. 123, and David Cesarani, Justice Delayed (London, 1992), p. 170. 35 Church Times, 11 October 1946, p. 378. 36 Michael Biddiss, ‘The Nuremberg Trial: Two Exercises in Judgement’, Journal of Contemporary History (Vol. 16, No. 3, 1981), p. 610. 37 Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trial, p. 41. 38 Geoffrey Best, Nuremberg and After: The Continuing History of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity (The Stenton Lecture, University of Reading, 1983), p. 5. Best cites Conor Cruise O’Brien and Felix Topolski, The United Nations: Sacred Drama (London, 1968), pp. 281–282. See also Tom J. Garer, ‘The UN and Human Rights: More than a Whimper, Less than a Roar’, in Adam Roberts and Benedict

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international politics, while the UN was established to institutionalise those values.39 The charge of ‘crimes against the peace’ reflected the international community’s theoretical repudiation of force, while the equally novel ‘crimes against humanity’ asserted ambitions of global community and the existence of eternal standards of behaviour.40 The post-war churches were, as we have seen, engaged in their own future-oriented project. The ecumenical movement envisioned a future of Christian co-operation, which reasserted the commonality of the formerly belligerent nations. That future, to a certain extent, rested on mercy and forgiveness rather than trial and retribution. As a consequence the Church’s concern that the trial process could be read as a form of revenge began to surface more often the longer the trials went on. In September 1945 the proposal that war-crimes trials might fall some way short of a Christian ideal was beginning to be articulated regularly in the ecclesiastical press. The Guardian, for example, sought to highlight the tension between the Christian aspiration of ‘mercy’ and war-crimes trials as a retributive expression of hate.41 Prior to the announcement of the Nuremberg judgement, a correspondent of the Church Times similarly criticised the trials, warning that the duty of the Christian in the aftermath of war was to eschew ‘retribution’ and seek meaningful ‘reconciliation’ as a ‘creative’ contribution to the future.42 Because the trials offered both versions of the past and routes to the future about which Anglicans were sceptical, the Church was likely, from the outset, to have been ambivalent about the specific forms of judicial investigation that emerged after May 1945. This ambivalence did not manifest itself in outright opposition to specific trials before the conclusion of the IMT at Nuremberg, but it did mean that event was greeted with some relief in the Church of England. The Church Times, for example, welcomed the judgements, but called for an end to the preoccupation with the past in order that the challenges of the future, chiefly the continuing need for the eradication of totalitarianism, could be met head on.43

Kingsbury, United Nations, Divided World: The UN’s Roles in International Relations (Oxford, 1988), pp. 98–99, on the relationship between the IMT and the UN, and the definition of human rights in the post-war era. 39 See, for example, Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations, Vol. 1: The Years of Western Domination, 1945–1955 (London, 1982), p. 3, which states that all those involved in the establishment of the UN shared the hope that it would be a ‘means of abolishing war from the earth’. 40 Indeed there is some conflict regarding whether or not the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ was actually novel at all. Geoffrey Best lauded what he saw as the ‘resounding affirmation of humankind’s revulsion from such a systematic reversal of its highest values’. Yet those seeking to justify the legitimacy of the IMT serially sought (and seek) to deny the novelty of the crimes against humanity charge in order to avoid challenges regarding the extent of the tribunal’s jurisdiction. See Calvocoressi, Nuremberg, p. 58; for a later attempt to justify the legitimacy of the trial on the same basis see Rosenbaum, Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals, p. 23; and for a review of the debate see Dale Jones, ‘British Policy toward German Crimes’, pp. 342–346. 41 The Guardian, 7 September 1945, p. 345. 42 The Guardian, 6 September 1946, p. 420 – letter from C.A. Littler. 43 Church Times, 4 October 1946, p. 596.

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There was a general sense that the end of the trials heralded the end of the Nazi project and that they should be the final acts in the drama of the Second World War: and so ends the greatest and most deliberately planned and the most foul conspiracy against civilisation that history has yet recorded . . . with the end of the trial the curtain falls upon a tragedy worked out relentlessly to its climax.44

Thus the IMT appeared to have achieved closure for the Church. The past had been faced and accounted for. The Nazi leadership corps had been dealt with, the Nazi era, as defined by the Anglican imagination, was over. The ecumenical future could begin. The Church had been committed to the prosecution of an identifiable Nazi elite. The Nuremberg judgement heralded the destruction of that elite, the last vestiges Nazi criminal clique. The moral imperative behind the further judicial investigation of the past had thus been removed. But, importantly, this turn to the future was only allowed because a specific interpretation of the Nazi past, which saw a narrow Nazism imposed upon the German population appeared to have been enshrined in memory. But the curtain did not fall. The IMT was not even the last act at Nuremberg, let alone in the Second World War. As we know, although there was no second collective tribunal, trials continued.45 The Americans enacted the ‘subsequent proceedings’ and continued their pursuit of the German ‘military industrial complex’. Through the Royal Warrant trials, the British too continued to indict their more limited vision of Nazi criminality. Despite the growing ambivalence of the British government to the continuation of the trial process from the end of 1946,46 the last British trial, that of German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein did not actually take place until 1949.47 The conditions upon which Christian approval for the IMT judgements had been predicated were therefore not met. As a consequence, between 1946 and 1949 leading members of the Church, most notably George Bell, became involved in a moral and political campaign against these trials which articulated 44

The Guardian, 4 October 1946, p. 469. See also The Guardian 25 October 1946, p. 507, which intoned that as ‘the curtain falls and the last act of the long drama has come to its close. The crisis . . . has reached its climax, and dissolved’; and The Record, 11 October 1946, p. 578, in which Dulwich vicar and regular commentator D.R. Davies declared that there was literally ‘no more to be said’. 45 See Donald Bloxham, ‘ “The trial that never was”: why there was no second international trial of major war criminals at Nuremberg’, History (Vol. 87, 2002), pp. 41–60. 46 For details of the ending of the trials and the progression of clemency see Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg, pp. 242–246. 47 That the British government was extremely reluctant to bring about this prosecution can be seen in J.H. Hoffman, ‘German Field Marshals as War Criminals? A British Embarrassment’, Journal of Contemporary History (Vol. 23, No. 1, 1988), pp. 17–35. For an example of the dilemma the government found itself in regarding the prosecution of Manstein see Hynd to F.J. Bellenger (War Office), 2 January 1947, in which the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster agonises over the problem of prosecution, explaining that the government had to marry ‘public opinion [which would not] tolerate the continuance of trials’ and its own reluctance that ‘serious criminals [could] escape retribution’, PRO FO 371/66559 U52.

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forcefully all of the doubts about the trials which have already been discussed, regarding their justice, and their use as mechanisms for uncovering the past and revealing the future. Qualified support became, for some Anglicans, outright opposition, in a campaign that often drew not just on Christian individuals but on Christian language and imagery. What was at stake in this conflict was not just the future but the past, and therefore the history and memory of the war and the Nazi era. It is to the analysis of what became, in some senses, a movement against the memory of Nazism and Nazi criminality that we now turn. In actual fact a hail of criticism was aimed at the ongoing trials process immediately after the conclusion of the IMT. This was an international protest which united British, American and indeed German, legal, religious and political figures. Together they attacked both the jurisdiction of Allied courts and the moral principle behind trials.48 In Britain this movement against the trials crystallised around the proposed prosecution of Erich von Manstein.49 This had been mooted from late 1946 onwards along with the trials of several other prominent military leaders – including von Brauchitsch, one of the authors of German brutality on the Eastern front. Manstein’s trial was then enacted from August 1949.50 Criticism of the Manstein trial was intended as a general indictment of the practice and principle of all post-war trials and the very concept of judicial investigation of the Nazi past. The campaign was fought privately and publicly, in press, parliament and in print. Individuals railed against further prosecutions in the chambers of both houses at Westminster, and continually lobbied government departments over the fate of specific individuals. Letters to the press decrying

48

American opponents to the trials centred around lawyers writing in the American Journal of International Law. See for example George A. Finch, ‘The Nuremberg Trial and International Law’, American Journal of International Law (Vol. 41, No. 2, 1947), pp. 153–171; Josef L. Kunz, ‘Revolutionary Creation of Norms of International Law’, American Journal of International Law (Vol. 41, No. 1, 1947), pp. 119–126; F.B. Schlisk, ‘The Nuremberg Trial and International Law of the Future’, American Journal of International Law (Vol. 41, No. 4, 1947), pp. 119–126. Some US politicians, most notably Senator Robert Taft, also opposed the prosecutions. Taft’s opposition to the trials was originally deeply unpopular but it drew more and more sympathy on the Republican right as the Cold War developed. From 1948 onwards, for example, Senator Joe McCarthy was alleging that the trials were a communist inspired plot. See Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 159–60, and Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, p. 287–289, the latter for the genesis of McCarthy’s objections to the trials. The German evangelical churches were vociferous defenders of convicted and accused war criminals, with an entire department given over to providing relief for prisoners, which acted essentially as a focus for protest against convictions. See Ronald Webster, ‘Opposing Victor’s Justice: German Protestant Churchmen and Convicted War Criminals in Western Europe after 1945’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 15, No. 1, 2001), pp. 47–69. The German Catholic Episcopate were also quick to defend convicted war criminals (although Cardinal Faulhaber was an exception). See the analysis of the ‘bleak’ record of the German Catholic bishops with regard to war crimes prosecution, in Frank Buscher and Michael Phayer, ‘German Catholic Bishops and the Holocaust 1940–52’, German Studies Review (Vol. 11, 1998), pp. 463–485. 49 Manstein had been Chief of Staff in the Army Group East in the invasion of Poland in September 1939, had been in a command position in the invasion of France in 1940, Commander of 11th Army in the Russian Campaign from summer 1941, and then Commander of Army Group South in the Crimea until retirement in November 1943. See Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (Chicago, 1958) for his own account. 50 Hoffman, ‘German Field Marshals’, p. 29.

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both the principle of prosecutions and the justice of individual investigations were common. Detailed book length anti-trial tracts were numerous, and, when Manstein’s trial was announced, a fund-raising campaign was launched in the House of Commons to finance the independent defence of the German general. Prominent in campaigns, particularly against the Manstein trial, were members of the military establishment, parliamentarians of various affiliations, and importantly, members of the Episcopate. Most vociferous among anti-trial activists was Maurice Hankey. Hankey had been secretary to the 1914–18 war cabinet and briefly Minister without Portfolio in the wartime Churchill government. He has been described as a ‘part of the furniture of the British establishment’.51 Other significant individuals within anti-trial campaigns were Richard Stokes, the right-wing and even antisemitic Labour MP;52 historian and military strategist Basil Liddell Hart; Reginald Paget, another Labour MP who ultimately was Manstein’s defence counsel; the journalist and former German prisoner of war Montgomery Belgion; and the author F.J.P. Veale. Ultimately current, former, and future members of government such as Lord Pakenham and Winston Churchill could be added to this list of publicly active trial opponents. Figures on the extreme right of politics such as the Duke of Bedford were also engaged in attacks on war-crimes trials, although in the case of Bedford and his British Peoples Party this was a part of a general nihilism.53 The most prominent representative of the Church of England in the campaign was George Bell. Such a collective appeared at first glance to be an ideologically and socially diverse group. However, there is little doubt that regarding the issues of war crimes, this collection of individuals formed an homogenous group of political campaigners who, with the exception of those operating from the lunatic fringes of the political spectrum, often spoke with one voice, using one language. Campaigns on behalf of those accused of war crimes were, for example, closely co-ordinated,54 while campaigners corresponded regularly, discussing the tactics of their bid to undermine the trials, and were often scarcely able to conceal their admiration for one another and one another’s writing.55 From 1946 onwards the 51 52

Cesarani, Justice Delayed, p. 171. See Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester, 1989), p. 85. 53 For an introduction to the wartime activities of Bedford see Kushner, Persistence of Prejudice, pp. 24, 32, 35, 85. 54 For example the campaign on behalf of von Neurath, in which tactics were discussed between a range of correspondents. See Bell Papers, Vol. 45, for a sample of that correspondence. The ultimate example was provided by the Manstein trial, in which there was, for example, a fund-raising campaign for his defence. See also Donald Bloxham, ‘Punishing German Soldiers during the Cold War: The Case of Erich von Manstein’, Patterns of Prejudice (Vol. 33, No. 4, 1999), pp. 25–45. 55 It appears, for example, that George Bell and Maurice Hankey, who corresponded for over fifteen years, did so only with regard to the issue of war crimes. See various volumes of the Bell Papers for Hankey’s correspondence with Bell and the Hankey Papers, 18/4, Churchill Archives, Churchill College, University of Cambridge. For examples of the mutual admiration between the group see Veale’s dedication to Hankey in his anti-war-crimes trials tirade, F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: How the Reversion to Barbarism

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‘Gentleman’s Clubs’ of post-war London were employed as the ad-hoc committee rooms of this co-ordinated attack on the post-war trials.56 Perhaps the definitive example of the collegiality of British anti-war-crimes trials campaigners was provided by Montgomery Belgion’s ‘dinner on war crimes’ held on 20 February 1952.57 We shall now briefly review the objections of this group to the trials, asking why the judicial investigation of the Nazi past provoked such anger? As early as 1942 George Bell, despite his public endorsement of the principle of trying war criminals, articulated grave misgivings regarding the practical and jurisdictional problems that an international court might face.58 Central to these perceived flaws was the concern that any post-war trials could amount to ‘victor’s justice’. Bell’s concern prefigured a recurring motif of the campaign against trials: that Germans were being punished for losing the war.59 The allegation of ‘victor’s justice’ centred around the contention that allied ‘war crimes’ would not be investigated.60 According to Montgomery Belgion this broke with a central plank of Anglo-American jurisprudence and suggested that all were no longer equal in the eyes of the law.61 The focus for this objection was the presence of the Soviet Union at the IMT and the failure of the trials process to take account of the allegedly criminal Soviet invasion of Finland,62 and the confusion over the murder of Polish soldiers in the Katyn forest.63 More muted objections were raised as to the non-investigation of British and American crimes such as the bombing of Dresden.64 For its critics, this failure to account for Soviet criminality exposed the hypocrisy of the IMT, as perceived Soviet deviance was ongoing and demonstrated by the westward deportation of ethnic Germans,65 an issue Bell had seized on in October 1945. Opponents of the trials also contended that the charges levelled had no basis in

in Warfare and War Trials Menaces our Future (Appleton, Wisconsin, 1953); Liddel Hart and Bell’s correspondence – Liddell Hart Papers, 1/58; Bell and Belgion’s correspondence, Belgion Papers, Churchill Archives, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, 7/3; Belgion and Hankey’s correspondence, Hankey Papers, 18/1. This mutual appreciation was in fact not confined to British trial opponents: George Bell, for example, informs H.A. Smith, author of American anti-trial tract The Crisis in the Law of Nations (London, 1948), that his is a most ‘valuable book’, see Bell to Smith, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 253. 56 The Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall appears to have been at the centre of anti-war-crimes trials activity: see, for example, Bell Papers, Vol. 48, f. 34 for Bell’s notes on a meeting held there on 22 February 1949. 57 Those invited were: Lord Hankey, Bishop Bell, Major General Fuller, Captain Russel Grenfell, Reginald Paget, F.J.P. Veale, Lord Pakenham, Basil Liddell Hart and Lord Winster. See Belgion to Hankey 4 February 1952, Hankey Papers, 18/1. 58 Bell to Cecil Hurst, 25 September 1942, Bell Papers, Vol. 69, f. 2. 59 Field Marshal Montgomery, cited in Hofmann, ‘German Field Marshals as War Criminals’, p. 31. 60 Lord Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors (Oxford, 1950), p. 4. 61 Montgomery Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg (London, 1946), p. 21. 62 Undated memo by Lord Hankey which notes that the Soviet invasion of Finland was illegal. Hankey Papers, 18/1. 63 Belgion, Epitaph, p. 61. In fact the German army was originally charged with responsibility for the liquidation of the Polish army at Katyn. 64 Belgion, Epitaph, p. 64; Smith, Crisis in the Law of Nations, p. 86. 65 Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 156.

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law. For example, the central charge of crimes against the peace, or waging of aggressive war, was rejected as meaningless.66 The concept of aggressive war rested on the assumption that the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1929 had effectively outlawed aggression as a tool of international politics, and that the signatories had agreed that in the future they would only wage war defensively. The German invasions of Poland, France, Norway, the northern European nations, and finally the Soviet Union were thus interpreted as aggressive and therefore illegal actions.67 Objections to this reading of the past centred around two major contentions. First, it singled out Nazi violations of international order without condemning similar Soviet actions. Second, and rather contrarily, the KelloggBriand pact was seen as having been misinterpreted by the prosecutorial authorities and it was argued that it actually contained no outlawing of the uncodifiable crime of aggression.68 Trial critics also pointed out that the Kellogg-Briand treaty had never been regarded by the allies as having outlawed war prior to 1939. Allied failure to deal effectively with the Italians in Abyssinia, and their confirmation of the fruits of German aggression in the Munich agreement, seemed to demonstrate this. For opponents then, the Nuremberg interpretation of the 1929 agreement as the basis of international law was a post-hoc justification for the prosecution of victor’s justice. By denying the validity of the Nuremberg interpretation of previous international agreements, Hankey et al alleged that the crimes of which the German war criminals were accused actually had no basis in law at the time of their commission, and that therefore the law was being applied in a retrospective manner.69 It was in turn contended that this ‘ex post facto’ application of a new law further undermined central tenets of the Anglo-American legal tradition and rejected the assumption that without an extant law there could be no crime. Those opposed to war-crimes trials frequently sheltered behind the idea that there was a moral imperative for punishing Nazi crimes, if only suitable legal mechanisms had existed. Paying lip-service to the theoretical desirability of prosecution allowed campaigners to claim that their objections to the trial process were not an effort to minimise or deny Nazi brutality.70 Yet the effect of the campaign was often to draw attention away from Nazi crimes, and protestors showed little or no concern for the crimes being investigated. George Bell’s protests act as a case in point here, and demonstrate his profound contribution to the campaign against the judicial investigation of Nazi crimes. Bell was central to the effort to oppose war-crimes trials. His status as a famed 66

Tadeusz Cyprian and Jerzy Sawicki, Nuremberg in Retrospect: People and the Issues of the Trial (Warsaw, 1967), pp. 150–152. 67 The Judgement of Nuremberg (London, 1946), p. 54. 68 Smith, Crisis in the Law of Nations, pp. 85–88; Viscount Maugham, U.N.O. and War Crimes (London, 1951), pp. 64–83. 69 Hankey, Politics, Trials, and Errors, p. 16. 70 Hankey, Politics, Trials, and Errors, p. 124; Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 124; George Bell in the House of Lords, Hansard (HL), Vol. 156 (1166), 23 June 1948.

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humanitarian awarded the campaign moral capital. He was consequently prominent in active public and private lobbying on behalf of the accused and convicted. Yet Bell never actually withdrew his support for the principle of trying Nazi criminals. For example, in a November 1946 address to the Church Assembly, Bell emphasised his apparent belief in the punishment of ‘those who committed crimes against [international] law’.71 But his lobbying on behalf of accused and convicted Nazi war criminals was literally tireless. He lobbied both the Foreign Office, and where appropriate the American occupation authorities, on behalf of specific individuals, while publicly addressing the general issue of trial policy through his seat in the Lords and in correspondence with the press.72 Crucially, Bell’s campaigning also demonstrated a disregard for the crimes of which defendants were accused, or indeed had been convicted of. Martin Niemöller, for example, enlisted Bell’s help to lobby the Foreign Office on behalf of Erich Koch. Koch, the former Gauleiter of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, has been described as ‘one of the most brutal of all National Socialist politicians’ and was personally responsible for the commission of genocide in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.73 George Bell made no effort to understand the crimes that Koch stood accused of. When he reluctantly abandoned his campaign on Koch’s behalf, it was because the weight of evidence made Koch’s extradition inevitable. But accepting Koch’s prosecution as inevitable did not mean that Bell approved of it: quite the contrary. It simply was an acknowledgement that further campaigning was fruitless.74 Despite knowing that there was substantial evidence to link Koch with ‘crimes against humanity’, Bell wrote to Martin Niemöller regretting that their campaign for his release had to come to an end. In the same letter Bell advised Niemöller that he remained opposed to all war-crimes trials.75 That at no point during his enquiries on behalf of Erich Koch did Bell think to ask what he stood accused of, suggests that he really did not believe it to be relevant. Koch was also a professing Christian.76 The case of Erich Koch is an instructive example. Throughout all of Bell’s various enquiries on behalf of Nazi criminals, it appears that he regarded the facts 71

George Bell, 14 November 1946, Church Assembly, Report of Proceedings, Autumn 1946, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, p. 382. 72 See Vols 48 and 49 of the Bell Papers for the majority of Bell’s surviving correspondence objecting to war-crimes trials. 73 See Christian Gerlach, ‘German Economic Interests, Occupation Policy, and the Murder of the Jews in Belorussia, 1941–43’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (London, 2000), pp. 210–239. For Bell’s correspondence on behalf of Koch see Bell to Henderson, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 269. Henderson rebuffed Bell’s efforts on behalf of Koch because there was substantial evidence of his involvement in mass murder: Henderson to Bell, 22 December 1949, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 270. 74 Bell replied to Henderson that he regretfully understood the decision to proceed with Koch’s extradition: Bell to Henderson, 2 January 1950, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 271. 75 Bell to Niemöller, 2 January 1950, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 273. 76 Indeed he was President of his local Church synod when Gauleiter of East Prussia in 1933, see Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 1–2, 72–3.

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of any particular case as irrelevant. Bell wrote to the Foreign Office on behalf of Solms Wittig who had been convicted of war crimes in a British military court. In the course of his enquiry he admitted that he did not ‘know anything of the facts of the case’.77 Bell lobbied the Foreign Office on behalf of Eberhard von Mackensen, the German military commander in Rome sentenced to death by a British military tribunal, but freed as an act of clemency in 1952.78 Von Mackensen was implicated in the reprisal actions of the German army for which Field Marshal Keselring was also sentenced to death. The victims of these actions were civilians, including Jews.79 Bell equally campaigned on behalf of von Neurath;80 Ewald von Kleist, head of Panzer 1 of Army Group South which was, at the bare minimum, responsible for providing administrative support to the SS death squad Einsatzgruppe C;81 Schwerin von Krosigk, Nazi Finance Minister, released in 1951 who had been privy to the pre-war expropriation of Jewish capital in Germany;82 and Ernst von Weizsäcker of the German Foreign Office whose co-operation with the ‘Final Solution’ earned him an SS rank.83 Bell wrote to the Dutch Justice Minister to plead for clemency on behalf of Wily Lages, an SD (Sicherheitsdienst) official in Amsterdam who co-ordinated Nazi relations with Dutch Jewish Groups in the administration of the Final Solution in the Netherlands.84 Bell accepted that Lages was guilty.85 In all of the enquiries made on behalf of these men, Bell made no reference to their alleged crimes, and displayed no concern as to their guilt or otherwise. This sense of the irrelevance of Nazi crimes can be contrasted with extravagant detailing of the crimes of the Soviet Union which defined the criticism of trials, especially from Bell’s co-conspirators.86 More muted references were also made to the crimes of the western allies, for example the inside cover of Veale’s Advance to Barbarism displayed a photograph of the destroyed city of Dresden.87 It can also be contrasted with the self-avowedly moral arguments proposed in support of the trials, which rested on the continual invocation of Nazi barbarousness. For supporters of the trials it was precisely the ‘enormity’ of Nazi crimes

77 78 79 80

Bell to Henderson, 28 June 1950, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 428. See Bell to Wurm, 24 May 1947, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 15. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1985), p. 677. von Neurath was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment by the IMT, and released in 1954. See Bell Papers, Vol. 45, f. 218, and Vol. 49, ff. 285–326. 81 Kleist was extradited to the USSR from Yugoslavia in 1949, where he died in 1954. See Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1098. See Bell Papers, Vol. 49, ff. 265–266, for Bell’s correspondence on behalf of Kleist. 82 See Charles Snydor jr, ‘Reinhard Heydrich and the Planning for the Final Solution’, in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Re-examined (Bloomington, 1998), p. 163. See Bell Papers, Vol. 48. 83 See Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–45 (London, 1968), pp. 100, 332. See also Bell to President Truman 19 May 1949, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 379. 84 See Hilberg, Destruction, p. 580. 85 Bell to Molderije (Netherlands Minister of Justice) 5 June 1952, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 277. 86 Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. xiv. 87 See Veale, Advance to Barbarism. There is no such graphic illustration of Nazi brutality.

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that morally justified trials.88 But for opponents, including George Bell, it appears those crimes were unimportant. According to Bell’s biographer, Ronald Jasper, his sympathy for war criminals was based on his universal objection to injustice.89 However Bell’s lack of concern for the substance of any case against his charges, or indeed the solidity of any conviction, suggests that Jasper’s explanation hardly goes far enough. Bell regularly claimed that the worst and most nazified of offenders should be punished.90 But, his refusal to investigate the facts of a case suggests he was uninterested in the degree to which any individual was implicated. It appears that Bell viewed the very idea of war-crimes trials as essentially an injustice. He wrote as much to Montgomery Belgion arguing that anyone interested in ‘justice’ was necessarily an opponent of the trials.91 In June 1948 Bell began an attack on trials in the Lords by directing objections against the idea of extraditing alleged criminals to the Soviet Union or its sphere of influence because, he argued, it would have been impossible for the extradited to receive a fair trial.92 It could be argued that such sentiments, as they were expressed in June 1948, were a symptom of the emerging Cold War and reflected a growing distrust of the Soviet Union and her satellites. Nevertheless, Bell went on to list his objections in principle to trials, and as such suggested that there could, in his eyes, have been no such thing as a ‘fair’ war-crimes trial. It was not just through George Bell that Christianity played a role in the campaign against the trials, although he was by far the most prominent Anglican. Christianity provided much of the rhetoric and the language of opposition to the trials too – and this appropriation of a Christian discourse was not challenged from within a Church of England that also provided no enthusiastic supporters of the trials. The principles at stake in war-crimes trials were, according to their opponents for example, not just legal. Trials offended morality too. Despite, for example, Lord Hankey’s efforts to portray his criticism of the trials as objectively legal, he could scarcely avoid reference to the ‘immorality’ of the entire process.93 Attempting to expose the Nuremberg project as a set back for the rule of law, and objectively wrong, Hankey tellingly claimed to have ‘morally demolished the validity of the Nuremberg sentences’.94 Perceptions of Christianity were central to these principled and moral objections, and the central figures of the campaign were also content to be identified with Christianity. Indeed during the 88 G. Schwarzenberger, ‘The Judgement of Nuremberg’, Yearbook of World Affairs (1948), p. 101; see also Eric Fletcher, MP for Islington East, who savaged Richard Stokes’ criticism of the IMT and the general trials process with details of the Nazi crimes, Hansard (HC), Vol. 445 (684–87), 4 December 1947. 89 Ronald Jasper, George Bell: Bishop of Chichester (Oxford, 1967), p. 309. 90 Bell to Hankey, 23 February 1952, Hankey Papers, 18/4. Bell argued that he still wanted to see ‘extreme’ Nazis prosecuted, but as Bell was prepared to defend someone like Erich Koch it is difficult to identify who was regarded as ‘extreme’. 91 Bell to Belgion, 4 April 1949, Belgion Papers, 7/3. 92 Hansard (HL), Vol. 156 (1168), 23 June 1948. 93 Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors, p. xiii. 94 Ibid., p. 131.

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war Hankey had refused to abandon the hope that Britain was a Christian nation.95 According to Montgomery Belgion Christians had to find the trial process ‘deplorable’ precisely because of their theological commitment to ‘mercy’ both for themselves and for others.96 A continuing and generally employed trope in the criticism of trials was to contrast them with the ideal of Christian mercy, which, as discussed earlier in this chapter, was also to adopt the language of the Church on this subject.97 The idea of revenge was deliberately employed against the trials in an effort to portray them as exercises antithetical to Christianity.98 The proximity of the language of revenge to antisemitic rhetoric will be discussed later in the chapter. Trial critics commonly quoted predictable scripture to support their case and to deny the moral validity of war-crimes prosecution: ‘vengeance is mine saieth the Lord’.99 Even critics who attempted to confine their criticism to the purely legal sphere could scarcely avoid mention of trials’ proximity to revenge and therefore their essentially anti-Christian nature.100 American trial opponents also employed the trope of revenge, and the attendant allegation that the trial project was anti-Christian.101 For the ecclesiastical press in Britain meanwhile, the failure to end the trials after the IMT meant that, by the time of the Manstein trial, the entire exercise could be retrospectively labelled as vengeful. The Record, for example, criticised the Manstein trial in an article entitled ‘to whom vengeance belongeth’.102 In addition to being regarded as anti-Christian, trials were also portrayed as antithetical to the idea of ‘Britishness’ – an identity, in turn, built around a perception of Christianity and indeed the importance of the Church of England.103 The Manstein trial was criticised in parliament as ‘repugnant to [the British] sense of fair play’, as ‘unworthy of the great country’ of Britain and offending the British sense of good taste.104 For George Bell the trial undermined the British reputation for ‘justice and humanity’,105 a sentiment with which Lord Hankey concurred.106 Hankey later argued in print that the British, as a ‘race’ were not ‘good haters’, 95 96

See Hankey quoted in Spiritual Issues of the War, 19 March 1942. Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg, p. 7. Belgion also claimed in a letter to George Bell that the trials were actually motivated by a spirit of revenge: Belgion to Bell, 29 April 1949, Belgion Papers, 7/3. 97 Rosenbaum, Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals, p. 20. 98 A.R. Blackburn (MP for Birmingham, Kings Norton), Hansard (HC), Vol. 445 (688), 4 December 1947. 99 This was a favourite tactic of Lord Hankey’s, see Hansard (HL), Vol. 162 (404), 5 May 1949, and Hankey, Politics Trials and Errors, p. 69. 100 P.F. Gault, ‘Prosecution of War Criminals’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (No. 1, 1945), pp. 180–183. Gault’s arguments were entirely legalistic, but then ended with the accusation that trials ‘exhibited the spirit of revenge’. 101 Smith, Crisis in the Law of Nations, p. 97; see also Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 90. 102 The Record, 23 December 1949, p. 2. 103 See Bloxham, ‘Punishing German Soldiers during the Cold War’, p. 32. 104 Richard Stokes, General Sir George Jeffreys (MP for Petersfield), and Reginald Paget in the debate on the proposed trial, Hansard (HC), Vol. 457 (57–84), 26 October 1946. 105 Hansard (HL), Vol. 162 (377), 5 May 1949. 106 Hansard (HL), Vol. 162 (404), 5 May 1949.

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and that the trials undermined this proudly held tradition.107 Montgomery Belgion argued that the British involvement was anomalous precisely because Britain was a Christian country: ‘Britain’, he wrote, ‘has an established Christian church [and] the [British] government is committed more than any of its great associates to some acknowledgement of Christian standards of justice and decency.’108 Again, nobody within the Church, publicly at least, objected to this rhetoric. In virtually all cases opposition to war-crimes trials was also underpinned by a strongly held anti-communism. But, this was not an anti-communism born of political expedience, or reactive to the decline of the grand alliance, but an element of a Christian world-view that had supported the war against totalitarianism. For the Anglican community the realisation that its ‘war of ideals’ had not ended with the fall of Berlin had come rapidly in the winter of 1945. It was argued in the ecclesiastical press that a ‘mighty totalitarian power’ in the Nazi state had been defeated in the war and yet ‘totalitarian tyranny, with its police state’ remained alive in the shape of the Soviet Union.109 For opponents of the trials, live Soviet dictatorship was a more disturbing and deep-rooted tyranny than the recently defeated Nazism. In a 1948 debate on the war criminals question, it was contended that the trials had to be ended because of the Soviet enemy facing Europe. With a silence pointedly directed at the Nazi past, Soviet Communism was declared to be ‘a form of tyranny the like of which Europe has not seen since the dark ages’.110 Readers of anti-trial tracts were reminded that not only were the trials the repudiation of British, Christian justice but that the Bolsheviks ‘recognise[d] no Christian . . . standards of behaviour’.111 The similarity of rhetoric was of course no coincidence: war-crimes trials were interpreted as essentially Soviet exercises conversant with the ‘Marxist’ conception of justice.112 With imagery employed to invoke the purges of the 1930s, F.J.P. Veale informed his readers that the IMT had been a ‘mock trial’.113 Hankey took these objections to their logical conclusion in arguing that the trials were in fact a vehicle headed towards the communisation of the world.114 In the context of the new Cold War, calls for the cessation of the trials programme undoubtedly reflected a wider desire for reconciliation between Germany and the West. Ecumenical Christian leaders, for example, used a narrative of the future to criticise the verdict delivered at the Manstein trial. Jacques Courvoisier, of the World Council of Churches, confided in George Bell that he was ‘deeply shocked’ at the Manstein judgement because it did not reflect the 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors, p. 6. Belgion, Epitaph, p. 36. The Guardian, 21 December 1945, p. 515. Earl of Selbourne, Hansard (HL), Vol. 156 (1156), 23 June 1948. Belgion, Epitaph, p. 34. Smith, Crisis in the Law of Nations, p. 88. Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 163. Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors, pp. 124–129.

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reconciliatory ‘spirit’ which ‘should [have] reigned amongst the different peoples of Western Europe’.115 Post-war trials were understood as a mechanism for prolonging the war, whereas, trial critics suggested, if ‘people were able to forget what happened’ then there was the possibility of a ‘happier future’.116 George Bell, who was also ‘staggered’ by Manstein’s conviction,117 intoned that, conversant with the institution of the UN, future peace and prosperity rested on leaving the past behind and former belligerents joining together.118 Lord Pakenham agreed, arguing in the House of Lords in March 1948 that the West could no longer be preoccupied with the Nazi past because it had to solve the question of ‘how the western world would be saved from communism without war’.119 The argument that opposition to war-crimes trials was a Cold War narrative in which the anti-Communist future was all important, is therefore very persuasive. In the atmosphere of Cold War crisis, opponents of war-crimes trials (including Anglicans) enthusiastically embraced bi-polarity, finding the world divided between ‘two opposing philosophies’.120 At the 1948 Lambeth Conference the Anglican Episcopate took the opportunity to declare the institutional opposition of the Church of England to communism, and the essential and eternal incompatibility of the Christian and communist ideals.121 But, just as the Anglican welcoming of the IMT had been based on a specific narrative of the Nazi past,122 so too opposition to the trials constructed an understanding of the Third Reich which it demanded people confront.123 The narrative which trial critics proposed was very similar to that which the Church had endorsed since the 1930s, and which the ecumenical community had more recently adopted. That understanding of Third Reich rested on two central contentions. The first was that the German people had been separate from the Nazi regime. Hankey argued, for example, that the German population were predominantly Christian, necessarily non-Nazi and non-Communist.124 The second major plank of this historical narrative was that Christianity and Christian institutions had resisted the Nazi state. In conclusion to this chapter, we shall now explore in more detail the specific understanding of the Nazi past constructed in opposition to war-crimes trials, and consider what was, in part, an Anglican contribution to memory. 115

Courvoisier to Bell, 7 January 1950, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 148. Courvoisier was Chair of the Ecumenical Commission of the Chaplaincy Service to Prisoners of War. 116 Hansard (HC), Vol. 445 (687), 4 December 1947. 117 Bell to Courvoisier, 21 January 1950, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 152. 118 Bell, Hansard (HL), Vol. 156 (1166), 23 June 1948. 119 See Hansard (HL), Vol. 154 (326), 3 March 1948. 120 Cyril Garbett in the House of Lords 25 September 1948, reported in the Church Times, 1 October 1948, p. 549. 121 For a summary of the Lambeth Conference resolution on Christianity and communism see The Record, 20 August 1948, p. 480. 122 See George Bell, Hansard (HL), Vol. 162 (379), 5 May 1949. 123 Earl of Perth, Hansard (HL), Vol. 156 (1160), 23 June 1948. See also George Bell, ‘The Future in Europe’. 124 Lord Hankey, Hansard (HL), Vol. 174 (469), 21 November 1950.

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According to critics, one of the major sins of the post-war trials was to deny the validity of the defence of having obeyed orders. In Nuremberg Law, all individuals were deemed responsible for their actions in wartime. Here was another example, critics alleged, of where the Nuremberg charter had invented a new law, that had not been extant at the time any offences were carried out.125 Until the IMT obeying orders was not, and never had been, a crime.126 These arguments rested on a very specific understanding of the functioning of the Third Reich: where obeying orders had not, according to trial critics, been a matter simply of duty, but of life and death. After all, they argued, Hitler’s Germany had been a ‘police state’.127 In this interpretation the coerced and the coercive had been fundamentally separate in the Third Reich, divided between the Nazis and the ‘other Germany’. To deny the defence of having obeyed orders, was then to deny this fundamental distinction. Legal premise was supported by moral historical principle. Critics accordingly found the indictment of members of the German military particularly offensive. The idea of the depoliticised military had been raised in the criticism of the verdicts of the IMT,128 and it became absolutely central to the rhetoric of opposition to the Manstein trial. These ‘honourable’ men, it was argued, had had no executive role and therefore could not be found guilty for simply obeying the orders of their criminal and civilian superiors. It was consistently argued that the army was a part of the ‘other Germany’, and should not be confused with the Nazis themselves. Reginald Paget, in justifying his defence of Manstein, assured his readers that the German army had ‘despised the SS, and in return the SS had hated the army’.129 Contrarily it was also contended, despite the claim that the army had resisted the criminal excesses of Nazism, that Manstein, and by implication the Wehrmacht as a whole, knew nothing of the criminality of the Nazi regime. Such an argument confirmed the separation of army and state in the minds of trial critics.130 Throughout the war the Church of England had argued that the German armed forces had been absolutely separate from the Nazi state: a body of professional soldiers obedient to their political masters, and loyal to their nation.131 Indeed the Church had always included the Wehrmacht as one 125

See Smith, Crisis in the Law of Nations, p. 47, and for a further example see Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago, 1949), pp. 162–181; and Hankey, Politics, Trials, and Errors, p. 59. Maugham, U.N.O. and War Crimes, pp. 43–46. 126 For example Brigadier Head (MP for Carshalton) questioned in the Commons the proposed trial of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, who had issued the infamous ‘commissar order’ which directed German ground troops to ignore the normal conventions of warfare and as such did much to promote a genocidal atmosphere on the Eastern Front, on the grounds that he had been forced to obey orders. Brauchitsch died awaiting trial. Hansard (HC), Vol. 457 (64), 26 October 1948. 127 Bell, Hansard (HL), Vol. 162 (379), 5 May 1949. 128 For example Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 4 – which described the sentence passed on the ‘professional soldier’ Keitel at the IMT as a ‘reversion to primitive practice’. 129 Paget, Manstein, p. 9. 130 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 131 This idea is, of course, still widely held. See for example Hannes Heer, ‘The Difficulty of Ending a War: Reactions to the Exhibition “War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–44” ’, in

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of the Christian organisations resistant to the Nazi state – if only because of George Bell’s limited awareness of a variety of plots against Hitler. Opponents of the trials shared this faith.132 For George Bell, and indeed for his colleague in the EKD, Theophil Wurm, Manstein’s membership of the German armed forces and his Christianity was enough to confirm his opposition to the Nazi state and therefore the absurdity of his trial.133 The Church held an image of the Nazi war criminal – and he wore the insignia of the SS and not the medals of a conservative, aristocratic, Christian army officer. Geoffrey Best has rationalised anti-trial campaigners, almost pathological, attraction to Germany military war criminals as the consequence of a ‘transnational sense of affinity’ between two, largely military, establishments. This affinity was based upon a general interpretation of European history. For example, Reginald Paget suggested that Manstein was a ‘representative of the oldest and purest military caste’ of Europe.134 Similarly Allen Welsh Dulles’ account of military resistance in the Third Reich was welcomed enthusiastically by anti-trial campaigners. Dulles’ narrative of resistance demonstrated the faith of American conservatives in the Wehrmacht as agents of European values.135 This religious and historical construction of ‘Europe’ was central to the imagery and rhetoric of attacks on trials. But what did ‘Europe’ mean in this context? The term was employed interchangeably with others such as the West, Christendom, and civilisation in anti-trial rhetoric, but was never adequately defined.136 This failure to define Europe is, it appears, typical: political and historiographical accounts of the development of the concept of Europe continually point to the lack of fixity of this intellectual construction.137 Attempts from the 1930s to define Europe historically do however give some clues as to what Hankey et al. meant. Europe, it seems, had largely been employed as a direct

History Workshop Journal (Vol. 46, 1998), pp. 187–203, which outlines the controversy caused by the German exhibition attesting to the role of the ordinary German armed forces in the perpetration of genocide. 132 Paget, Manstein, p. 4. 133 See PRO FO 371/6659 for the report on Manstein that Wurm forwarded to Bell, and that he then passed to the Foreign office. 134 Paget, Manstein, p. 2. 135 See Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground: The Anti-Nazi Resistance (New York, 1947). George Bell enthusiastically endorsed Dulles’ narrative, see Bell to Pakenham, 6 June 1947, Bell Papers, Vol. 47, f. 290. 136 American trial opponents for example employed the idea of the West, or civilisation, in the place of Europe. This reflected a general promotion of ideas of the West in the USA, for example the growth in universities of courses on the history of western civilisation. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 281–316. The rhetoric of those attacking the post-war trial programmes could be used as a case study to illustrate Norman Davies’ observations that the idea of Europe has for the ‘best part of two hundred years [been] frequently confused with the heritage of “western civilisation” ’. See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford, 1996), pp. 1–46, for a discussion of ideas of Europe. 137 For a discussion of the development of the idea, and the difficulty of defining this process as an event, see Ezra Talmor, ‘Reflections on the Rise and Development of the Idea of Europe’, in History of European Ideas (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1980), pp. 63–66.

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replacement for Christendom.138 In turn the antithesis of a modern Christendom was found in the Soviet Union.139 Echoing such sentiments in 1945 T.S. Eliot, himself opposed to the trials process, informed a German audience that Europe was culturally unified through its common Christian faith, using rhetoric reminiscent of that employed by Robert Birley.140 The post-war English Christian community and proponents of the idea of European unity141 concurred in their definition of the European past, and future, as ethically Christian.142 Institutionally the Anglican Church also defined the concept of Europe in mono-cultural terms as ‘a spiritual inheritance . . . embodied in the belief in the sacredness of the human personality and the absolute claims of truth justice freedom and love’,143 or, in other words, the embodiment of Christian teaching. Trial opponents used Europe as a decisively ideological and exclusive term, embodying Christian tradition. Recalling the trial opponents’ construction of Britishness, ‘Europe’ it appears was employed as a wider manifestation of Christian heritage, a ‘spiritual conception’ resting on Christian values.144 When Anglican trial opponents looked forward to ‘the liberation of the soul of Europe’,145 this was something which the wider Anglican community dictated was only achievable with the re-establishment of the Christian faith.146 In general, trial critics agreed. The German military was then, by being located within this idealised sense of Europe, constructed as an agent of the ‘West’, of ‘civilisation’, in precisely the same terms that German Christianity and the Christian Churches had been by their Anglican brethren since the 1930s.147 By seeking to locate the Wehrmacht and those accused of war crimes within the history of this idealised Europe, anti-trial campaigners were again attacking the Potsdam and Nuremberg narratives of Nazism as the ultimate manifestation of Prussian militarism, or of German traditions. Prussia was even cast as the final barrier of Europe against Asia, rather than as her premier danger in some anti-trial literature.148 With this reversal of the negative image of Prussia and of Germany, critics of the trials 138

For a discussion of the replacement of the moniker ‘Christendom’ by ‘Europe’ see M.E. Yapp, ‘Europe in the Turkish Mirror’, Past and Present (Vol. 137, 1992), pp. 134–155. 139 See H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe, Vol. II: From the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century to 1937 (London, 1949), p. 1246 – this volume was originally published in 1938. 140 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Unity of European Culture’, in Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), cited in Davies, Europe, p. 9. For a discussion of Robert Birley see pp. 121–122 in chapter four above. 141 For example, Winston Churchill, who also opposed war-crimes trials after 1946 and contributed to Manstein’s defence fund: Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 47. 142 The Guardian, 21 May 1948, p. 246. 143 Taken from the text of a motion passed by the Church Assembly, 21 June 1951, Church Assembly Report of Proceedings, Summer 1951, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, p. 266. 144 The Record, 27 June 1947, p. 369. 145 Bell, ‘A Letter to my Friends in the Evangelical Church’, The Church and Humanity, p. 192. 146 See, for example, the Church Times, 4 July 1947, p. 395, which declares that Christianity ‘alone’ has the answer to the future of Europe. 147 Bell, Hansard (HL), Vol. 154 (351), 3 March 1948. 148 Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 131.

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portrayed German soldiers during the Third Reich, who had inherited the mantle of the Prussian military tradition, not as Nazis but as defenders of a western Christian culture. Military war criminals were therefore being placed within a culturally homogenous European past which included the trial opponents themselves. Typically Lord Hankey argued robustly that trials must end, to allow the essential AngloGerman reconciliation for the defence of the ‘civilisation’ which he contended was their ‘joint birthright’.149 George Bell agreed, his defence of Manstein was predicated on the identification of Manstein as a Christian and therefore based on his sense of communion with the accused. In February 1947 Bell pleaded that Manstein not be extradited to the USSR (this was prior to the public knowledge of proposals that the British try Manstein themselves), because he came with the recommendation of Bishop Wurm of the EKD – who as a perceived anti-Nazi was regarded by Bell as unimpeachable. Wurm’s defence of Manstein was, in turn, based on an account given by another German Protestant, whom Wurm regarded as having been resistant to the Nazis. This source professed Manstein’s Christianity. All those involved subscribed first to an acknowledgement of their common Christian or European heritage, and second relied on myths of Christian resistance to justify Manstein’s release. ‘Evidence’ of Manstein’s Christianity was seen as enough to disqualify the possibility of his being a war criminal.150 To accept someone like Manstein as a war criminal, and therefore tainted by Nazism, would then have raised awkward questions about the provenance of the violence and brutality of the Third Reich. Trial opponents wished to find the source of Nazi brutality elsewhere, outside European Christian traditions. George Bell, for example, in 1948 actively sought to recast the period 1914 through 1945 as the ‘thirty years war of the twentieth century’. This war was fought between civilisation and totalitarianism. But Bell was unsure, because of the enduring enemy in the east, as to whether that war was in fact over.151 Others went further than Bell, developing his rhetoric to its logical conclusion. Paget, for example, implied that Manstein’s war and Britain’s war had been equivalent – both ranged against a totalitarian foe.152 This did not simply obscure the crimes of Nazism, but allowed them to disappear. Responsibility for the brutal war in the east was, for example entirely reversed in anti-trial campaigns. Paget declared that Manstein’s army had behaved as well as they could when faced with Soviet brutality.153 Liddell Hart concurred, writing to George Bell that Manstein had done more than could be expected when faced with an enemy, in the Red Army, ‘who did not keep to the rules’.154 Veale equally was happy to award the Red Army, rather than the 149 150 151 152 153 154

Hankey to International Affairs, 2 November 1950. See Bell to Mayhew (Foreign Office), 4 February 1947, PRO FO 371/6659. Bell, Hansard (HL), Vol. 154 (349), 3 March 1948. Paget, Manstein, p. 182. Ibid. Liddell Hart to Bell, 26 January 1950, Bell Papers, Vol. 49, f. 149.

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German invading force, responsibility for the brutality of the Eastern Front. ‘This struggle’, he wrote, ‘had commenced on the first day the German armies crossed the Russian frontier and Stalin announced that the “war was not only a war between two armies but at the same time a war of the entire Soviet people against the Fascist German troops” ’.155 The logic of such an argument is clear: it was the Soviets that were responsible for the brutality of the war which German security forces were involved in, and in which they themselves had then been compelled to take extreme measures. It was those measures for which they were now, unjustly, being tried.156 As we know these measures included the wholesale murder of civilians, especially Jews. Of themselves these observations construct a vivid picture of the contribution that opposition to trials, and the members of the Church of England that participated in that campaign, made to the memory of Nazism in the post-war world. In fact there was a striking similarity between the trial critics’ account of the Nazi past and several more sinister political renderings of that history. The idea that the Soviet Union was responsible for the brutality of the Eastern Front, for example, closely followed the justification of invasion and mass murder as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against Soviet aggression which Otto Ohlendorf had employed in his defence at the Einsatzgruppen trial.157 Most notoriously Ohlendorf argued that when he supervised the murder of many thousands of unarmed (mostly Jewish) civilians, while leader of Einsatzgruppe D, he had been defending European culture. These civilians were in the Nazi imagination the foot soldiers of the Bolshevik hordes that threatened Europe, and as such their extermination was the first blow in the European Civil War against the communist menace.158 William Ralph Inge articulated an Anglican version of history which echoed this Nazi narrative when he made an aggressive call for the recasting of popular understanding of the past in his introduction to Veale’s attack on the trials project. Describing the Soviet Union as a ‘polar despotism, a tyranny such as the world has not yet known’, Inge pleaded that ‘in times to come . . . it may not be so readily forgotten that this was the enemy against who the Germans fought’.159 The imagery of ‘vengeance’ has already been identified as having been employed in order to portray trials as the tool of a dangerous alien force. Such language was not conceptually far removed, especially when in concert with anti-bolshevism, from contemporary anti-Jewish discourses, and indeed those of what was the recent past.160 On the self-consciously extreme political right that 155 156 157 158

Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 223. Ibid., p. 128. Donald Bloxham, ‘The Holocaust on Trial’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southampton, 1998, p. 211. Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, IV (Washington, 1953). 159 William Ralph Inge, ‘Introduction’ to Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. vii. 160 Lord Hankey, for example, noted, for reasons unknown, that Douglas Reed had argued that as judgement and execution at the IMT coincided with Jewish New Year this demonstrated that ‘the executions [were an act of] tribal vengeance under Old Testament law’: see note dated 17 July 1949, Hankey Papers, 18/1.

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anti-trial rhetoric was explicitly linked with a racially informed ‘negative semitic discourse’.161 The Duke of Bedford, for example, combined an opposition to war-crimes trials based on the same moral, philosophical and legal arguments proposed by the Hankey set and the Anglican Church, with an unpleasant anti-Jewishness.162 War-crimes trials were, for Bedford, one element of the hypocrisy of the contemporary world underscored by conspiratorial ‘financiers’. Bedford’s prescription for a better world included the racial cleansing of the British nation, and, using language familiar to the ecumenical critics of the war-crimes trials, the adoption of ‘real Christianity’ and reconciliation with former belligerents.163 The efforts critics of the trial process made to downplay the profundity of the Jewish experience under Nazi occupation were also later adopted by the pseudo-historians of the racist right. In a paradoxical effort to deny the crime of which he argued Manstein was in any case unaware, Reginald Paget questioned the numbers of Jewish dead from the Einsatzgruppen massacres. Paget’s book was subsequently described, by the British Holocaust denier Richard Harwood, as ‘the best book’ published on war crimes.164 Anti-trial literature from the 1940s is republished as part of the present-day campaign of Holocaust denial.165 Montgomery Belgion himself denied the Jewish experience in 1959, when he attacked the Federal Republic of Germany’s own war-crimes investigations. In doing so Belgion praised the father of French Holocaust denial, Paul Rassinier, whom he claimed had thrown into doubt the revelations of the Nazi concentrations camps.166 This is not to say that opponents of the trials were intentionally denying what we now know as the Holocaust, although clearly some did go on to do so. It is certainly not the case that churchmen who opposed trials can be labelled the forerunners of this falsifying of history. However, versions of the past they proposed have appealed to deniers precisely because they had little room for the specific 161

See Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1874–1945 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 268, for a discussion of this concept. 162 For example see Duke of Bedford, Why Blunder on? First Steps in an Emergency Programme to End War, Disease and Poverty (Glasgow, 1942), and In a Nutshell (Glasgow, 1951), which echo very closely the Church’s readings of Unconditional Surrender as a misunderstanding of the German present and past and a threat to Europe’s future. 163 The Duke of Bedford’s work is replete with allusions to the ‘financiers’ and their control of the Nuremberg trials process. The financiers, surely a less than subtle reference to mythical organised Jewry, wanted an ‘international police force’ according to The Financiers Little Game or The Shape of Things to Come (Glasgow, 1950). Bedford directly tackles the connections between the IMT and the international financial system in Hope: Not Dope (Glasgow, 1950). 164 Richard Harwood, Nuremberg and Other War Crimes Trials: A New Look (Chapel Ascote, 1978). 165 For example, Veale’s Advance to Barbarism has been republished by the infamous Institute for Historical Review. See Best, Nuremberg and After, p. 7. See Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, 1993), for a discussion of the development of the Institute for Historical Review. 166 Belgion to The Manchester Guardian, undated 1959, Belgion Papers, 7/3. For an analysis of the work of Rassinier and his disciple Robert Faurisson see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York, 1992).

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crimes of the Nazis. The murder of the European Jews was almost entirely marginalised within their narratives. Montgomery Belgion instructed that those concentration camps discovered by the Allies were echoed by similar institutions in the Soviet bloc, apparently ignorant of the specificities of elements of the Nazi camp structure and the death camps in the east.167 Other critics boldly stated that they were not interested in the crimes against the Jews, of which too much had already been said, confident that when the historical record of the period were complete it would be Soviet crimes that would dominate.168 George Bell argued that judicial investigation of Nazi crimes was absurd when the same crimes were still being perpetrated by the Soviet Union.169 This down-playing of the crimes of Nazism was not an act of deliberate distortion on the part of the opponents of trials. It was a simple consequence of their world-view. Central to the Christian future was the idea of ecumenism and co-operation. But that co-operation was the restoration of a past communion, not the invention of a new communion for the future. Accordingly Erich von Manstein, the German military, and indeed all the Germans – save for the criminal Nazis – were seen as a part of this idealised past and future. So were the opponents of trials, churches and all the traditions which the post-war world had to embrace. Accepting the criminality, or even the potential criminality, of men that came from this community, would have challenged this entire world-view. Nazism would no longer have been part of a totalitarianism, currently embodied in the Soviet Union, but would have been a consequence of the world in which the opponents of the trials lived. Worse still it would have been a consequence of the values of the community that they were trying to build. There is now a tradition in Holocaust studies which seeks to probe the meaning of the Holocaust for the West.170 It poses questions such as how does this crime, perpetrated by a modern, and, in some senses, western nation, impact upon our understanding of the structures and organisations of western modernity? How does the massacre of the Jews disrupt, for example, what has been described as the ‘etiological myth of western civilisation’ and the belief in the inevitability of human progress?171 For many scholars of the Holocaust the answer has been stark – that the Nazi killing fields must actually challenge our very understanding of that progress. In the words of Raul Hilberg, the pre-eminent Holocaust historian: ‘our evolution has outpaced our understanding; we can no longer assume that we have a full grasp of the workings of our social institutions, bureaucratic structures or technology’.172 Such a contention would have been met with utter incredulity by either Christian critics of war-crimes trials or those that employed Christian 167 168 169 170

Belgion, Epitaph, p. 24. Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. xv. Bell, quoted in Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors, p. 54. For a review of these see Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, ‘A Distant Shore: The Holocaust and Us’, in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History (Vol. 11, No. 1, 2005), pp. 5–26. 171 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989), p. 13. 172 Cited in Bauman, Modernity, p. 83.

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rhetoric in opposing trials. The structures they had erected for interpreting the nature of Nazism were not capable of relating its crimes to any of the traditions identified as anti-totalitarian, civilised, western or European. The crimes of Nazism had not been committed by men which hailed from these traditions – for they had opposed the Nazi state – but by men who were alien, espousing a type of socio-economic organisation that was equally alien, comparable only to the Soviet Union. At the time of the war-crimes trials George Orwell wrote that the ‘really frightening thing about totalitarianism [was] . . . that it attack[ed] the concept of objective truth: [and] . . . claim[ed] to control the past as well as the future’.173 In truth Christian anti-totalitarian Europeans also sought to control both the past and the future. When the allies continued to try Nazi war criminals after the end of the Nuremberg trial, the Anglican community – represented largely by George Bell – withdrew their support for those trials. They became seen as an impediment to the future co-operation between the nations of Christian Europe. That vision of the future also rested on a specific interpretation of the past and the role of Nazism in that past. A campaign against war-crimes trials, fought using a Christian semantic and from within the Church of England, designated Nazism as an alien force, imposed upon the German population and not the result of continuities or tendencies in German history. Nazism was the negation of Christianity, in the same way that the Soviet Union was. Christian Germans were, according to this narrative, necessarily the opponents of the Nazi state and could have even been seen as the allies of the West. Such narratives implicitly downplayed the anti-Jewish imperatives of Nazism. Some who articulated them went even further, and explicitly negated the Jewish experience at Nazi hands. Christian Europeans became allies in the thirty years war between totalitarianism and the West. This was, in part, an Anglican contribution to memory. Such an account of Christian opposition to war-crimes trials has reinforced the sense that it is too simplistic to argue that the Cold War engendered a reorientation away from the Nazi past at the end of the 1940s. Clearly that prevailing political atmosphere gave fresh impetus to the theoretical equivalence of the totalitarian spirit, awarding such narratives an increasing political legitimacy. Equally, it was indeed a concern over the role of Germany in the future ideological struggle with communism that actually brought the trial process to an end, and allowed what has previously been interpreted as the jettisoning of the past. But, when the trials were abandoned, a particular understanding of Nazism triumphed – that which was proposed by opponents of trials. The Nazi past was not forgotten; it was remembered. Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-first century it may be difficult to recognise this understanding of Nazism, but this does not mean that it was not there.

173

Quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 290.

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Bystanders to the Holocaust Studies of British reactions to the Holocaust have not, by and large, focused on the Church of England. They have thereby neglected a community that has a great deal to tell us about the roles that Britain played as bystander. Focusing on the Church of England further illuminates the understandings and interpretations that underpinned the British response to the Holocaust; it also reveals a community which, in its own way, felt and articulated the pain of European Jewry, in other words a community which meets our present-day expectations of the bystanders. In addition, the example of the Church of England demonstrates that it is impossible to interpret an institutional or communal response to the Holocaust unless one first excavates that institution’s understanding of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews. The Anglican understanding of Nazism conditioned the Church’s response to the Holocaust. That perception witnessed Nazism, first and foremost, as part of a totalitarian war against religion. Nothing symbolised this more than the suffering of Martin Niemöller, who became the Church’s hero after his arbitrary imprisonment in 1937 and remains so to this day.1 Nazism became the negation of Christianity. Yet at first, despite outrage at the suffering of Niemöller, the Church remained an avowed opponent of war with Germany – and a supporter of the moral politics of appeasement. Again, such a response to Nazism is only explicable with reference to the nuances of perception. Prior to the spring of 1939 the Church viewed Nazi foreign policy separately from the domestic politics of the dictatorship, and as a part of the traditions of European politics and diplomacy. The sins of the Treaty of Versailles were deployed to justify German expansion and to relate the ambitions of the Nazis to European and German history, to suggest that German aggression was correcting an historical injustice. But when the Germans marched into Prague in March 1939 Anglicans ceased dividing Nazism in their imagination. The argument that war with Nazi Germany in 1939 was righteous and just, articulated particularly by William Temple, signified the dominance of a new interpretation of Nazism. Post-hoc or otherwise, Nazism was re-conceptualised as entirely outside the boundaries of history and civilisation and alien to the 1

For example Canon Jeffrey John recently used Niemöller’s ‘first they came for’ speech to highlight the experience of homosexual priests in the contemporary Church: The Guardian, 27 December 2004.

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Anglican imagination. In common with the interpretation of Martin Niemöller and the Kirchenkampf, Nazism was depicted as anti-Christian and subsumed within a conception of an alien totalitarianism, the definition of which included and was inspired by, a fear of the Soviet Union. Although challenged by the occurrence of war between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Anglican view of Nazism as an alien anti-Christianity endured throughout the Second World War. The Soviet Union’s membership of the perceived totalitarian alliance was suspended after June 1941, and the concept of Russia was promoted within Anglican rhetoric and imagery in order to justify the Anglo-Soviet alliance against Hitler. Yet Nazism, although perceived alone, continued to be viewed in general terms by the Anglican community. The nefarious practices that had been highlighted by Anglican rhetoricians as totalitarian, such as punishment and control mechanisms and the lack of respect for the individual, were still employed to characterise the singular Nazism. At the same time, Christianity was still promoted as the opposite of this totalitarianism – the shining light in a Europe dominated by fear and repression. Faith in Martin Niemöller became generalised within the Anglican imagination into a fervent belief in the goodness of the ‘other’ German population who were understood as carriers of Christianity, and with their Anglican brethren, the hope for a post-war future. Churches throughout occupied Europe were hailed as resistant to Nazism, and therefore the torch bearers of human freedom. Seeing Nazism as an attack on Christian culture inevitably had an impact on the Anglican view of Nazi antisemitism and then the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe. Anglican outrage at the violence of Kristallnacht was, for example, accompanied in the Anglican press by the jealous insistence that Jewish victims of the Nazi totalitarians should not be allowed to obscure the antiChristianity of that dictatorship. The particularity of the Nazi persecution of the Jews gained a fleeting recognition in the winters of 1942 and 1943, but such perception of the Jewish tragedy was short-lived and superficial. Although members of the Anglican Church who were able to engage with Jewishness more sympathetically achieved, to varying degrees, more sophisticated understandings of the significance of Nazi antisemitism, in the main the Anglican Church subsumed Jewish suffering within a generalised picture of the totalitarian war on Christianity and universal morality. Despite this, perceptions of Christian obligation drove an Anglican campaign for the victims of Nazism during the war which was led by William Temple. Temple sought to hold the British government to account for their policies of rescue, or lack of them, and consistently demanded that the politics of government reflect the demands of morality too. Even Temple, however, was not truly able to understand and articulate the importance of Jews suffering as Jews in Hitler’s Europe. The geographical amorphousness of the Anglican ‘war of ideals’ provided an ambiguous legacy for the historical understanding of the Jewish experience under Nazi occupation. The absolute divergence of the Nazi state and the ‘other 168

CONCLUSIONS

German’ population and the identification of ideological alliances which transcended military fronts dictated that Anglicans implicitly regarded the eastern theatre of war as a battle between both Christian Russians and Nazi devils, and atheist communists and ‘good’ Christian Germans. The ambiguity of the Anglican interpretation of the Eastern Front would contribute little to the understanding of the emergence of genocide in the Nazi war of aggression. Thus neither the limits of the British imagination nor the campaign for rescue from Nazi terror was an entirely secular affair. In addition, the importance of Anglican voices in Britain’s response to the Holocaust suggests that we should not underestimate the role of the Church in the middle of the twentieth century. The Church of England Although Temple and his fellow Anglicans’ protests had a minimal impact on rescue policy, it is clear that, even in the middle of the secular twentieth century, Christianity, and Anglicanism in particular, did have some impact on government and politics. Temple, and the Church of England that he led, provided the moral language with which government was held to account. The limited movement that the government did make, for example in calling the ultimately fruitless Bermuda conference, was made under the perceived moral weight of Anglican protests. It was not just in the protests against government inaction regarding the rescue of persecuted Jews that the Church of England provided the moral language of the British war. Justifications of the entire war effort were articulated by the Church – which joined the state in the battle for Christian civilisation. Despite Anglicans’ rejecting the vision of the German future seemingly articulated by government policy, the manner in which the government approached the problems of post-war Germany was also at times mediated through the Church of England. The British government had mainly provided an historical reading of Nazism as embedded within German history. Anglican fixation with the ‘other Germany’ and the essential Christianity of German historical tradition provided an alternative narrative – which in George Bell’s case led the Church into conflict with the state over the way in which the war was fought. Along with marginal accounts of the German past surfacing in government in the latter part of the war, Anglican narratives of the Nazi break with German history proposed Germany as the European, Christian ally and victim of the Nazi totalitarians which, in their amalgamation of the Nazi and Soviet devils, prefigured the narratives of the past sponsored by the political machinations of the early Cold War. In adopting the language and assumptions of a Christian view of German history, the state demonstrated the ongoing Christian influence on secular politics. As well as a new perspective on the importance of the Church in the twentieth century, we have also been led to nuance some of the existing characterisations of the Church itself. First, despite the diversity of the Anglican community, we have discovered a Church which spoke largely with one voice and thought with one 169


mind regarding matters European. It is true that there was significant debate over the meaning of Nazism in the 1930s: for example Headlam and Bell’s public disagreement over the treatment of the German churches. Yet from the beginning of the war onwards the understanding of Europe, and especially Nazi Germany, was filtered through a single set of assumptions as to the anti-Christianity of that dictatorship, and the degree to which the world was divided between Christ and anti-Christ. Second, this book has challenged the history of the Church which finds only a pessimistic community in the late 1930s and 1940s. As Anglicans viewed so hopefully a future of European harmony and co-operation at the end of war, that interpretation appears exaggerated. Indeed from the very beginning of this study, we have found a Church which, despite the crises surrounding it, saw the seeds of hope for the future. In the 1930s the bright light of Martin Niemöller’s resistance, and the more general resistance that he symbolised, embodied Anglican hopes for the post-totalitarian Christian Europe. The Anglican embrace of war at the end of the 1930s might be seen as evidence that the pessimistic view of the world had even spread to the hopeful hierarchy of the Church – if nothing else it did signal the end of their efforts to view Nazism as understandable. However, that war was seen as the defence of, at the very least, the aspiration of civilisation. As such the Anglican embrace of war, and acceptance of the imperfections of mankind that it implied, was just a brief interregnum in their faith in the onward march of humanity. The ending of war certainly brought the pessimistic hiatus in Anglican theology to an end, and the ecumenical vision of the post-war world allowed George Bell and Anglican observers of Europe to aggressively re-assert notions of progress. The Soviet Union was re-conceived within the totalitarian block as Christian Russia disappeared from Anglican conversation after the cessation of hostilities, while the defeat of Nazism brought the readmission of Germany into the boundaries of a Christian civilisation. A further re-consideration of the historiography of Anglicanism in the mid-twentieth century is also warranted. The heroes of that historiography (or should that be hagiography?) need to be reconsidered. George Bell for example, the saviour of the refugees, needs to be awarded a more nuanced historiographical legacy. While this is not the place to reconsider Bell’s contribution to refugee organisations, we can offer a limited critique of his contribution to the understanding of Nazism. Bell has often been praised for the clarity of his moral vision – it was that which allowed him to protest so ardently against the Nazi persecution of the Churches and then Jews, it was that which allowed him to speak as an almost lone voice against the area bombing policy which, because of its targeting of German civilians, we can now recognise as a war crime. Yet like us all, Bell’s sight, while always clear, could also be myopic. He, and his brethren, through their concern for German Protestants, articulated an understanding of Nazism that gave no priority to the Nazi antisemitic imperative. This narrative of Nazism obscured the suffering of Jews in the 1930s and in the early stages of war. Even when, under the weight of evidence, churchmen did see the full implications of 170

CONCLUSIONS

the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign they did so only briefly. Even William Temple, whose campaign for the Jews of Europe earned him the praise of the World Jewish Congress, could not fully appreciate, or articulate, Nazi antisemitism as anything other than part of an attack on Christianity in Europe. In part that limited imagination was a consequence of the Church’s theological relationship with Judaism – the stubborn insistence of the majority of the Church of England that this could only ever be an association between missionary and convert. Far from the Holocaust jolting the Christian conscience in England, James Parkes’ pleas for a new ecumenism fell on deaf ears. Although in the Lambeth declaration of 1988,2 the Church did recognise Parkesian theology, this was not until some forty years after the end of the Holocaust. Even when that declaration was made, it was still opposed within large sections of the Anglican community.3 The contemporaries of genocide still continued to discuss Christian-Jewish relations in the same language, despite the shadows cast by the death camps and the pall of their links, as Parkes described it, to the pulpit. Indeed even as late as 1985 theological commentators recognised the degree to which the Holocaust had not punctured the Anglican view of the world.4 So much for the Holocaust requiring a new language or disrupting established ways of seeing and believing. In a more conventional sense, it is hoped that this book has revealed a Church with a truly ecumenical gaze. Concerned for its ‘brethren in adversity’, the Church of England consistently celebrated both the German churches and then, during wartime, all of the Churches in Europe that experienced Nazi occupation. It was, after all, this perceived Christian light in the Nazi darkness that provided the Church of England with its hopes for the future. The Church’s vision was also fixed on a wider and co-operative world to come in the immediate aftermath of war. This meant that the Church of England played a significant role in the process of ‘coming to terms with the past’. The leaders of the Church of England, in tandem with their colleagues in the World Council of Churches and the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland, articulated, for example, a specific understanding of the significance of Nazism after the end of war. Appreciation of these narratives adds further nuance to our understanding of the development of Holocaust history and memory, as well as emphasising the role that bystanders could and did play in that process. The shape and texture of these memories demonstrates that the manner in which Nazism was viewed in the aftermath of war cannot simply be understood as part of a Cold War story, adding further weight to the suggestion that the rhetorical importance of Christianity has not always been recognised in historiography. Equally, understanding the Church 2

The Lambeth Conference, The Truth Shall Make You Free: The Reports, Resolutions and Pastoral Letters from the Bishops (London, 1988), see appendix 6, ‘Jews, Christians and Muslims: The Way of Dialogue’, pp. 299–308. 3 Richard Harries, After the Evil: Christianity and Judaism in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2003), p. 4. 4 The Times, 4 March 1985. Many thanks to James Jordan for this reference.

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of England’s conception of the immediate past in the later 1940s and early 1950s, can act as a window through which we can engage with a much wider, ecumenical and indeed occidental, interpretation of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The Memory of the Holocaust In these ecumenical narratives, the Nazi era was portrayed as an anti-western interruption in the progress of German and European history. The German population, and the institutions which made up the ‘other Germany’ were remembered as only the victims of the Nazi regime. Indeed, they were remembered not simply as victims of Nazism but also of an ongoing totalitarianism – still represented in the Soviet East. A sense that the true significance of the Nazi era lay in its opposition to Christianity was also created. Christians were themselves seen as resistant to authority in the Third Reich and occupied Europe; and Nazism was understood as the inversion of Christian values. Those Christian values were in turn seen as synonymous with the West. This narrative of Nazism was no different to that which the Church of England had constructed around Martin Niemöller in the 1930s. At the same time, such an overt concentration on Christian victimhood dictated that Jews rather disappeared from this Christian history of Nazism. Such was the Anglican faith in the ‘other Germany’ and consequently in the validity of this particular interpretation of the past that the Church of England attempted to reorient understanding of the Nazi era along these lines. It became, for example, co-opted in a variety of ways in what amounted to a campaign against memory and more particularly against the morality of the post-war trials. Ideas of progress were employed alongside rhetorical visions of European history, community, and commonality, in an effort to recast Nazi criminals as Europeans, guilty of little more than defending God’s heritage from the atheistic eastern hordes. As Jewish victims had been replaced by the German and European victims of Soviet totalitarians in Anglican rhetoric, so Nazi and German criminality was removed from Anglican and Anglican-inspired historical consciousness and, in the rhetoric of opposition to trials, replaced with Soviet barbarity. The Church of England’s narrative of Nazism helped, in a small way, the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland to construct its own exculpatory narratives of the past. The ideas proposed in opposition to the Manstein trial, in however limited a way, also helped embed myths about the German armed forces which still resonate. These observations alone constitute a significant Anglican contribution to memory. The degree to which the Church understood rather than avoided Nazi anti-Jewishness, even if it was seen as less important than, or as part of, Nazi anti-Christianity is also significant. In the light of this, chronologies of memory which stress the abandonment of Nazi past in the aftermath of war require revision. In addition, the Church’s version of the significance of Nazism, in all its facets, has been repeated time and again since the late 1940s. Some of these repetitions 172

CONCLUSIONS

bear the direct influence of Anglican rhetoric, others simply repeat the narrative strategies employed by the Church. Together, these Anglican or ecumenical narratives of the past demonstrate the full implications of the Church’s understanding of Nazism for memory. Consider, first, interpretations of the significance of Nazism which drew directly on the techniques of interpretation used by the mid-century Church. Its domestication of the murder of Europe’s Jews as an attack on Christian culture and its understanding of Nazism as the antithesis of Christianity, has, for example, endured. A version of this narrative was articulated in British commentaries on the Eichmann trial in 1961. Victor Gollancz’s suggestion that Israel could essentially redeem herself, and the Jews, by forgiving Eichmann, was welcomed enthusiastically in the Anglican and the wider English Christian community.5 Despite Gollancz’s Jewishness, it was recognised as a ‘Christian’ sentiment.6 Gollancz wrote: I cannot escape the conviction that if Israel conditioned though she may be, by a wrong unique in history, to revenge herself for it – could leap into spiritual freedom and choose mercy, then, by very reason of that uniqueness, the prophecy might yet be fulfilled. ‘Salvation is of the Jews’.7

Although Gollancz’s effort to find redemption in the Holocaust recognised Eichmann’s crimes as an attack on Jews and Judaism, English Christians attached an Anglican understanding of Nazism to that interpretation. For example one parish magazine argued that the Eichmann trial was a test for all humanity. Should we turn the other cheek and forgive Eichmann, they asked, and thereby follow the path of Jesus; or should the vengefulness of the Old Testament prevail?8 By the 1960s then, Nazism still represented a test of faith for the Christian community. The only way for Jews themselves to triumph, to emerge from the shadow of Nazi barbarousness, was to embrace a Christian morality. As such, Nazism still appeared to be the inversion of Christianity. Elsewhere in Britain Eichmann’s crime was predictably universalised. The Times, for example, saw ‘totalitarianism on trial’ in Jerusalem.9 Historiography provides more direct examples of the repetition of Anglican understandings of Nazism. Adrian Hastings’ History of English Christianity, for example, perceived the significance of Nazism and the Holocaust in a manner that members of the wartime Church of England would have readily agreed with. Hastings was actually rather dismissive of the simplicities of the mid-century Anglican imagination, which he memorably depicted as akin to the mindset of 5

See Diana Collins, Review of Gollancz’s Eichmann pamphlet, Gollancz Papers, MSS 157/3/LI/E/2/277. 6 A comment made in the Baptist Times, 15 June 1961, see cutting in Gollancz Papers, MSS 157/3/LI/E/2/151. 7 Victor Gollancz, The Case of Adolf Eichmann (London, 1961), p. 61. 8 ‘The Eichmann Trial: The Christian Attitude’, Parish Magazine of All Saints Church, Otley, June 1961; a copy of this can be found in Gollancz Papers, MSS 157/3/LI/AE/2/129. 9 The Times, 18 December 1961, and also Jewish Chronicle, 14 April 1961.

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‘middle earth’.10 However, Hastings developed Anglican denials of the antiJewish imperative of Nazism, celebrating that Nazi anti-Christianity had actually absolved Christianity of the sins of its own antisemitism – by casting both Jew and Christian as victim: the Carmelite Nun . . . Edith Stein was taken from her convent on 2 August [1942] and murdered in Auschwitz just one week later. We can, perhaps, reflect that so noble a victim of Auschwitz was at once fully Jewish and wholly Christian, and that the linking of Christians and Jews together in a common holocaust . . . did much to end a millennium of Christian anti-Semitism. What had been for generations a common and accepted element in Christian life . . . was now almost cut out of the body, revealed at last in its innate infamy: too late to save European Jewry, admittedly, but at least the post-war churches would no longer be afflicted by the moral running sore from their medieval past.11

For Hastings, the Church’s decision to forego detailed examination of its faith in the light of the Holocaust appeared vindicated. Because the Church was a part of a much wider ecumenical community, its narratives of the immediate past were expressed beyond the boundaries of the Church of England and beyond the borders of Britain. The ideas proposed by the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland, for example, which had been designed in tandem with the Church of England, also reflected a much wider German conservative understanding of the significance of the Nazi era. The German Christian Democratic party (CDU), whose control of politics allowed it to write the account of Nazism which dominated German society until the 1960s, conceptualised the Third Reich as Germany’s departure from the European norm. Associated not with the traditions of conservative Europe but with the materialism of modernity, Nazism (according to the CDU) was a consequence of atheism and the rejection of European tradition.12 Some accounts of German military resistance to the Nazi state have also, since the 1940s, articulated an understanding of the significance of the Nazi era which will be very familiar – operating a discourse on totalitarianism which bears direct comparison to that articulated by the wider ecumenical community. The German military has continually been characterised as anchored in the traditions of European history, and as such eternally separate from the Nazi state. This understanding of the past is evident in historians’ acceptance of the self-definition of the men of the 20 July,13 and through their regurgitation of some of the ideas 10 ‘Middle earth’ is the imaginary landscape for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. See Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, 1985), p. 427. 11 Ibid., p. 371. 12 Maria Mitchell, ‘Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History (Vol. 67, No. 2, 1995), pp. 278–308. 13 See, for example, essays in Andrew Chandler (ed.), The Moral Imperative: New Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialism, 1933–1945 (Boulder, 1998). This volume acknowledges the impact of George Bell on resistance historiography in the dedication, which reads: ‘Dedicated to the memory of

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articulated by those opposed to the trial of German military war criminals. The idea of the Europeanness of the Wehrmacht has been as much a trope of resistance historiography as it was of the campaign against the trials.14 This is not the only point of comparison. As Anglicans found in the ‘other Germany’ the validation of their idea of historical progress and the inspiration for a vision of war which circumvented military reality and left an ambiguous legacy for the memory of the eastern front, so resistance historiography has continued this process. The idea that the German military operated a ‘front beyond the frontiers’ is common, waging the war against totalitarianism from within. Accordingly the ‘German opposition to Hitler’ was given ‘its special meaning’ and the ‘problem of resistance itself its far reaching and undiminished importance’ because the ‘world [was] still threatened by totalitarianism’.15 Of course such rhetoric was legitimated by the Cold War, but it had a religious as well as secular and political heritage. Further examples can be found in scholarship apparently much further removed from the Church of England, but which repeated directly some of the interpretations articulated by the Church. In the mid-1980s the then German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and his historical advisor Michael Stürmer, argued that it was time to reconceive German history and to locate the Nazi period within a wider historical context, chiefly Germany’s progress to democracy.16 This effort to normalise the German past was awarded international significance by the intervention of the then US President Ronald Reagan. In 1985 Reagan joined Kohl in public appearances at the Bitburg Military Ceremony. This event was organised under the maxim of a choice between ‘Freedom and Totalitarianism’. Most infamously, in his speech at Bitburg, Reagan recast members of the Waffen SS buried there as the victims of totalitarian evil.17 The sense, which abounded at the time, that Reagan’s intervention in history had been unwitting or borne of ignorance should have been dispelled by the reluctance with which the President, engaged in an effort to recruit West Germany as allies in his new Cold War, visited Belsen in the aftermath of the controversy. Such a visit was seen as fixing unnecessary guilt on the shoulders of Germany, which, whatever its past, was presently fighting totalitarianism in the ‘evil’ Soviet empire.18 George Kennedy Allen Bell, Bishop of Chichester 1929–58, Friend and advocate of those who resisted National Socialism in Germany, 1933–45’. 14 The republication of Allen Welsh Dulles’ Germany’s Underground acts as a case in point here. The original volume was written in 1947, but the new edition contains an introduction written in 2000 by Peter Hoffmann that celebrates the Europeanness of the Military resistance. Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground: The Anti Nazi Resistance (New York, 2000). 15 Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler: An Assessment (London, 1961), p. 9. 16 See, for example, Michael Sturmer, ‘History in a Land without History’, in James Knowlton and Truett Cates (eds), Forever in the Shadow of Hitler: Original Documents from the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Surrounding the Singularity of the Holocaust (New Jersey, 1993), pp. 16–17. 17 See Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, 1986) for a collection of reflections on the Bitburg controversy. 18 Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London, 1989), pp. 16–18.

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Reagan’s rhetoric helped revive a definition of Europe as the opposite of Soviet tyranny. He also provided an opportunity to revisit the significance of the Nazi era in the context of the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union. An opportunity which was seized by conservative historians in Germany, in a debate which became known as the Historikertstreit. Andreas Hilgruber, an ally of Stürmer’s in the debate, used Reagan’s revival of the Cold War to justify his empathetic reconstruction of the experience of German soldiers on the eastern front, who were portrayed (with an almost Nazi rhetorical flourish) as the defenders of European tradition against the Soviet hordes.19 Ernst Nolte used language directly comparable to that of George Bell some forty years earlier, when he recast the twentieth century as a ‘European Civil War’.20 Nolte argued that the Soviet Union provided the international context for the Nazi dictatorship. The memorable phrase that the Gulag Archipelago was ‘more original’ than Auschwitz came to stand for an analysis which essentially proposed that Nazi atrocities had been inspired by the Soviet anti-Europeans. Going beyond this, Nolte (and indeed Hilgruber) argued that Operation Barbarossa, and the ensuing violence, had indeed been a preemptive strike designed to save European order from Bolshevik tyranny. Such a narrative revised the German-Soviet Eastern Front into the last frontier of European Christianity, and, like the opponents of war-crimes trials had done forty years previously, awarded causal impetus for the brutality of that front to the Red Army.21 All of these interpretations proposed in the Historikerstreit would have been endorsed by the wartime Church of England. The essence of arguments employed by Anglicans, and those that employed the central tenets of their rhetoric in opposition to war-crimes trials in the 1940s, were also repeated in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s. After investigations had revealed that a number of suspected war criminals were living in Britain, a campaign was launched for a British War Crimes Act that would allow the retrospective prosecution of these men for crimes committed in continental Europe during the Second World War.22 Objections to this legislation, articulated in the press and in parliament, followed a familiar line when they suggested that it would be both un-British and un-Christian to enact any prosecutions.23 Members 19

Andreas Hilgruber, Zweirlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Berlin, 1986). 20 Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt, 1987). 21 See Ernst Nolte, ‘The Past that will not Pass’, ‘Between Historical Legend and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of 1980’, and ‘Standing Things on their Heads: Against Negative Nationalism in Interpreting History’, all in Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler. For an evaluation of the significance of the Historikerstreit see Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, 1988). 22 For a survey of both the entry of war criminals into Britain and the passage of the War Crimes Bill in the 1980s and early 1990s, see David Cesarani, Justice Delayed (London, 1992), pp. 190–267. 23 Hansard (HC), Vol. 163 (869–909), 12 December 1989. Several MPs, including Ivor Stanbrooke (Orpington), and Winston Churchill (Davyhulme) invoked the idea of Christian justice, and Britishness against prosecution. Churchill, following Hankey’s lead some forty years previously, used the biblical quotation ‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord’ to bolster his case.

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of both houses of Parliament invoked ideas of Christian forgiveness in opposition to the War Crimes Bill. In the House of Lords, George Bell’s opposition to war-crimes trials in the 1940s was even specifically remembered in an effort to undermine the morality of the new legislation.24 This is not to suggest that the Church itself institutionally opposed the new war-crimes legislation, indeed the Bishop of Southwark, Ronald Bowlby, spoke in favour of the principle of bringing war criminals to justice, and he appeared to speak on behalf of Archbishop Runcie of Canterbury when he did so.25 However, it is notable that those who did oppose the legislation did so using language and interpretative techniques which, again, the mid-century Church would have approved of. As they had been in the 1940s, ideas of the European past and future were central to the rhetoric of those opposed to trials in the late 1980s. Conservative Europeans echoed their forebears in proposing that war-crimes legislation and the investigation of the European past would be ‘infinitely damaging at a time when . . . Europe [was] looking to the future’.26 However, the legislation was passed, and the ensuing war-crimes prosecutions have often been evaluated using equally familiar language. The ‘vengeance’ of the trials has been contrasted with the ideal of Christian mercy,27 often completely ignoring the scale and depravity of the crimes at issue.28 None of these attempts to render Nazism meaningful are directly the result of the Anglican interpretations reviewed in this book, although the latter examples certainly drew on their memory. However they are all conservative, if not directly Christian then Christian informed, European interpretations of the significance of Nazism. Their authors all regarded themselves as members of a Christian civilisation and sought to find Nazism the result not of the traditions of the West, of civilisation, but its antithesis. They are, so to speak, ecumenical and occidental interpretations of the Nazi era. In turn, all of these interpretations blur the focus on Europe’s Jews as the primary victims of the Nazi state. All cast Christianity, civilisation – in other words themselves – as the victims of Nazism and of totalitarianism. It is, then, not justifiable to interpret the evasion of the murder of Europe’s Jews as simply the consequence of the new politics of the Cold War. Nor is it really correct to refer to what we now call the Holocaust being ignored in the aftermath of the war: the murder of Jews was, after all, being understood as an attack on a Christian, western culture. These observations take us back to the discussion which began this book about the methodological quagmire surrounding the investigation of the ‘bystanders’ to 24 25 26 27

Hansard (HL), Vol. 513 (623), 4 December 1989. Hansard (HL), Vol. 519 (1094–97), 4 June 1990. Edward Heath, MP (Old Bexley and Sidcup), Hansard (HC), Vol. 169 (926), 19 March 1990. See, for example: Brian Sewell, ‘Vengeance would Demean us All’, Evening Standard, 11 January 2000. 28 Donald Bloxham, ‘Punishing German Soldiers during the Cold War: The Case of Erich von Manstein’, Patterns of Prejudice (Vol. 33, No. 4, 1999), p. 45.

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the Holocaust. To ask how an institution or individual responded to the Holocaust appeared anachronistic, an act dictated by a contemporary mindset and imagination – in this case about the importance of the Holocaust. Yet perhaps the study of the Church of England and the Holocaust has revealed why such questions are not anachronistic at all, and how, in fact, they help us to nuance our sense of how the past has been made, how history has been shaped. The Church of England constructed a version of Nazism, and implicitly a version of the Holocaust, which was affirmative. Despite the rhetoric of the Holocaust as a challenge to language, imagination and understanding, we have seen that watching Anglicans used Nazism to bolster and support their worldview. What we call the Holocaust did not disrupt the world that the Anglican community saw in the 1930s and 1940s, or remembered after the Second World War had ended. It just confirmed what it already knew – that the enemies of civilisation needed to be understood as the enemies of Christ and Christianity. Seeing the Church construct these narratives of the past, seeing it, as it were, make history, forces a certain scepticism about our own construction of the past. The Church’s interpretations were not dishonest, they were simply the inevitable consequences of a worldview, a mindset, which Anglicans could not escape. The Shoah actually plays a rather prominent role in memory and memorialisation in the contemporary world. The memory rituals of the European Union now remember the Holocaust specifically. Britain holds an annual Holocaust memorial day too. In 2005 the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was remembered with a similar intensity to the commemorations of the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day some six months before. The debate about the centrality of the Holocaust in American life is, of course, also ongoing. Yet, as we have seen with the example of the Church of England, institutions, communities and individuals can shape the past in their own image. Might that not be the same for ‘us’? Let us look very briefly at the role of Holocaust memory in the present-day West. The murder of Europe’s Jews is undoubtedly represented as a crime that was committed a long time ago, in a land a long way away. Consider the reporting of the trial of Antony Sawoniuk, one of those tried under the aegis of the War Crimes Act discussed above. During the course of his trial in 1999, at which Sawoniuk was accused of murdering Jewish civilians in Belarus in 1942, the jury had to visit the killing fields as part of the case for the prosecution. This was a journey which, for the national media, symbolised the almost unbridgeable chasm of time and space which separated contemporary Britain from these atrocities.29 Some other appropriations of the murder of the European Jews in the contemporary world develop this separation of time and space from the Holocaust. Memorial structures such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, and the British Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum 29

See The Daily Express, 9 February 1999, which commented on the ‘flight to the Holocaust’; and The Daily Telegraph, 17 February 1999, which remarked that the Jury had had to ‘trudge back 57 years’.

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appear to be geared towards the invocation of the Holocaust as the antithesis, the consequence of the inversion of the values of the (implicitly Christian) West. As Tim Cole argues, in effect the USHMM is an anti-museum to Nazism – the equivalent of Himmler’s planned Jewish museum in Prague.30 European and British Holocaust memorials are similarly geared to the celebration of western culture as the antithesis of Nazism and the Holocaust.31 In 2001 the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for example, called on Britons to build a tolerant society so that the lives sacrificed in the Holocaust were not in vain, while in 2005 he argued that the horrors revealed at Auschwitz demonstrated why racial prejudice had no part to play in a liberal democracy.32 The European Union’s declaration on the Holocaust similarly imputed the murder of the European Jews with redemptive meaning – calling upon citizens ‘to plant the seeds of a better future in the soil of a bitter past’ and not allow the Holocaust to pass into history, but to rescue it in a narrative of redemption and hope.33 For the then EU President Romano Prodi, the destruction of the European Jews was given meaning by the emergence of the European Union as a guarantor of peace from the ashes of the destruction most symbolised by the Shoah.34 This use of the Holocaust as antithesis is familiar. Although these modern hymns to liberalism may be more able to articulate the Holocaust as an attack on Jews and Judaism, they are not that far removed from the Church of England’s labelling of the same events as the inversion of Christian culture. They certainly confine the Holocaust and render it more palatable than it might be if it were considered the consequence of tendencies within European, Christian politics and culture – where its European Christian perpetrators, for example, acted under the influence of a heady mix of European racism and nationalism. However desirable the contemporary prioritisation of the Holocaust might be, it is perhaps not the inevitable consequence of the incontestable moral case for remembering the Nazi genocide, but simply another example of the tendency for the past to be shaped in the service of the present – tendency which, as this investigation of the Church of England has demonstrated, has had an impact upon understandings of Nazism and the Holocaust from the very outset.

30 31

Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the Shoah Business (London, 1999), p. 158. Donald Bloxham, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days: Reshaping the Past in the Service of the Present’, in Sue Vice (ed.), Representing the Holocaust (London, 2003), pp. 41–62. 32 ‘Blair Tells Britain to Learn from the Holocaust’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 2 February 2001; The Guardian, 28 January 2005. 33 EU Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, 27 January 2000. 34 Romano Prodi to the International Forum on the Holocaust, 27 January 2000; the full text of his speech is reproduced at , 4 February 2003.

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Young, James, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, 1998) Zerner, Ruth, ‘Martin Niemöller, Activist as Bystander: The Oft Quoted Reflection’, Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer (eds), Jewish Christian Encounters over the Centuries (New York, 1994), pp. 327–40 Zuccotti, Susan, The Holocaust, The French and the Jews (Nebraska, 1999) ———, Under his very windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, 2002) Unpublished Works Bloxham, Donald, ‘The Holocaust on Trial: The War Crimes Trials in the Formation of History and Memory’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southampton, 1998 Bluger, Thomas, ‘Following Mary to Auschwitz: Embryology, Pius IX and the Mediate Theory of Animation’ a paper presented at ‘Ethics After Auschwitz: The Legacy of the Holocaust, the 33rd Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches’, 1–4 March 2003 Chandler, Andrew, ‘The Church of England and Nazi Germany 1933–45’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1990 Hampson, Daphne, ‘The British Response to the German Church Struggle’, D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1973 Kotzin, Chana, ‘Christian Responses in Britain to Jewish Refugees from Europe, 1933–39’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southampton, 2000 Lewis, Rebecca, ‘The Planning, Design and Reception of British Home Front Posters of the Second World War’, Ph.D. Thesis, University College Winchester, 2004 Oldenhage, Tania, ‘Tainted Shapes of Memory: Christian Holocaust Commemorations in Germany’ paper presented at ‘Ethics After Auschwitz: The Legacy of the Holocaust, the 33rd Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches’, 1–4 March 2003 Patterson, Kirsty, ‘The Church of England and the Nazi Regime: The Bishop of Gloucester, Sympathiser or Appeaser?’, B.A. Dissertation, University of Southampton, 1994 Ruotsila. Markku, ‘The Racialist Origins of the Totalitarian Image: The First World War Discourse’, Unpublished Paper presented at the 68th AngloAmerican Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London 1999 Websites http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/news/01_00/ip_00_84.htm http://www.milestonefilms.com/blurb/Fpastor.html http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~holoweb/ 202

INDEX

Allied Religious Affairs Committee (ARAC), 124 Antisemitism, 80, 82, 87, 92–93, 101, 107–8, 163–64 Aryan Paragraph, 38–39 Asmussen, Hans, 126–27 Attlee, Clement, 12, 62 Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2, 3–4, 5, 81, 100 John Paul II’s visit in 1979, 23–24 Bailie, John, 142 Barth, Karl, 40 Batty, Basil Staunton, 36 Bedford, Duke of, 150, 164 Bekennende Kirche (See Confessing Church) Bell, George, 8, 170–71, 176, 177 and Arthur Headlam, 42–43 and Deutsche Christen, 129 and evangelism, 100 and German churches, 35, 43 and German resistance to Nazism, 95 and James Parkes, 104 and Martin Niemöller, 35, 40, 41, 44, 50 and opposition to bombing of Germany, 98 and post-war Germany, 119, 124, 128, 130, 135 and the Munich agreement, 59–60 and the punishment of Nazi war criminals, 140, 142, 148–49, 151, 152–56, 158, 161, 165 and the Treaty of Versailles, 64 and refugees, 15, 35, 94 and the Soviet Union, 165 attitudes to war, 72, 79, 98–99 historians opinions of, 21 Belgion, Montgomery, 150, 151, 156, 157, 164–65 Belsen, 5, 99–100, 117, 133, 136, 175 Belsen Trial, 144–45 Berlin Air Lift, 18, 135–36

Bermuda Conference, 86–87, 89–90 Best, Geoffrey, 160 Bevin, Ernest, 122 Birley, Robert, 121–22, 161 Bitburg controversy, 175 Blair, Tony, 179 Bonhöffer, Dietrich, 95 Bowlby, Ronald , 177 British Council of Churches (BCC), 87, 93 Brodetsky, Selig, 85 Brown, Callum, 11 Buchenwald, 99, 117 Buchman, Frank, 46 Buxton, Dorothy, 41 Bystanders, idea of, 1–6, 167–69 Calder, Angus, 12–13 Canterbury Convocation, Protests against Nazism in, 35 Catholic Church, and the Holocaust, 2, 7, 19–20, 82 Chamberlain, Neville, 59–60, 115 Chandler, Andrew, 65 Chavasse, Christopher, 142 Chief Rabbi (see Hertz, Joseph H.) Christian Action (CA), 131 Christian News Letter, 92, 97, 141 Christian Reconstruction in Europe (CRE), 101, 128, 133 Christlich Demokratischen Union (CDU), 174 Churchill, Winston, 12, 76, 116, 150 Church Assembly, 42 Church of England Newspaper, The (See Record, The) Church of England and Jews / Judaism, 101–107, 132–34, and Ecumenism, 31, 35, 56–57, 122–23, 147, 171 and the German Churches, 101 and German invasion of Prague, 68–70, 167 and Kristallnacht, 5–6, 65–69, 79, 168

203

INDEX

and pacifism, 57–59 and post-war Germany, 122, 124 and Social Christianity, 8 and totalitarianism, 46–49, 53–54, 73–75, 134–35 and the Confessing Church, 31–32 and the First World War, 8, 11, 33, 55–59, 64 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, 75, 96 and the memory of the Holocaust, 178 and the Munich Agreement, 55, 59–65, 67 and the Second World War, 12, 16, 70, 76–79 and war crimes trials, 145–46 Anglo-Catholics in, 9 Antisemitism in, 82 attitudes to Communism and Soviet Union in, 5, 46–49, 73–79, 134–38, 158, 168 attitudes to Nazism in, 5, 33, 63–70, 75–79, 91, 94–100, 136–38, 166, 167–69 attitudes to war in, 11, 55, 56–80, 98–99 Council for Foreign Relations, 35 divisions in, 8–9 German Church Committee, 43 historiography of, 83 politics of, 8–9 position in British state and society, 6–16, 34, 169–72 protests on behalf of the Jews of Europe, 82–90, 168 theology of, 9–10, 15–16, 58–59, 71–73, 79–80, 100–7, 141, 169–72 understanding of Antisemitism, 75, 91–95, 107–08 Church Mission to the Jews (CMJ), 105 Church Times, 47, 58, 66–67, 69, 75, 77, 93, 134, 146, 147 Christianity, antisemitic traditions of, 19, 101–107, 171 and Holocaust historiography, 19–20 and the idea of the Holocaust, 22–26 and the language of opposition to war crimes trials, 155–57 and resistance to Nazism, 38–40, 41–43, 94–96, 109, 126–28, 172 and war crimes trials, 141–42, 147–49, 155–63, 173, 176–77

Collins, Lewis John, 131 Courvoisier, Jacques, 157–58 Cold War, and the memory of the Holocaust, 17–19, 22–23, 26, 112–15, 136–37, 171–73, 177–78 Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC), 8–9, 57 Confessing Church, 31, 38–40, 43–45 Conservative Party, The and the Church of England, 8–9 Control Commission Germany (CCG), 132 Council for Christians and Jews (CCJ), 84–85, 92–94 Coventry Cathedral, 12 Dachau, 41, 99 Dad’s Army, 14 Daily Mail, The, 59 Daily Telegraph, The and Martin Niemöller, 48–49, 50–51 Dawson, Christopher, 48 Denazification, 113, 120 Deutsche Christen, 37–38, 128–30 Dibelius, Otto, 36 Don, Alan, 60 Dulles, Allen Welsh, 160 Duncan-Jones, Arthur, 40, 44, 52, 63 Eden, Anthony, 12, 86 Eichmann, Adolf, 173 Eliot, T.S., 161 Europe, idea of, 160–61 European Union (EU), 178–79 Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (EKD), 111–12, 123, 124, 125–28, 171 Festival of Britain, 14 Fisher, Geoffrey, 11, 89, 128 Foreign Office, 117–19 Fragebogen, 125–26 Frank, Anne, 24 Friedlander, Saul, 65 Garbett, Cyril, 1, 8, 89, 100, 105, 133 and the ‘guilt’ of Germany, 118, 119 and Nazism, 79, 94, 97 and Soviet Union, 46–47, 78–79, 135 and the bombing of Germany, 141 and the punishment of Nazi war criminals, 141–42 justification of war, 79

204

INDEX

protests on behalf of Jews of Europe, 84–85, 88 German Christians, The (see Deutsche Christen) Germany, Protestantism in, 36 memories of the Nazi era in, 113 Gestapo, 18 Gollancz, Victor, 85, 130–32, 173 Guardian, The (Church Newspaper), 57, 67, 69, 147

Jews portrayal as victims, 131–3 John Paul II, 23–24 Johnson, Hewlett, 46 Kellog-Briand Pact, 152 Kirchenkampf, 31, 36–40, 168 historiography of, 52 Koch, Erich, 153 Kohl, Helmut, 175 Kristallnacht, 5–6, 65–69, 79–80 Kushner, Tony, 5, 106

Halifax, Lord, 9, 12, 115 Hankey, Maurice, 150, 152, 155, 157–59, 161, 164 Hastings, Adrian, 86, 173–74 Headlam, Arthur, 9, 91 and antisemitism, 43, 82 and communism, 46 and George Bell, 42–43 and Martin Niemöller, 42–43 Henson, Hensley, 9, 101–02, protests against Nazi antisemitism, 35, 65 and Martin Niemöller, 35, 40 opposition to the Munich Agreement, 63 Herf, Jeffrey, 136 Herman, Stewart, 128, 132 Hertz, Joseph H., 88–90, 99 Hilberg, Raul, 165 Hilgruber, Andreas, 176–77 Hitler, Adolf, 33, 40–41 Hinsley, Arthur, 74 Historikerstreit, 175 Hobhouse, Stephen, 141 Hoffman, Conrad, 106 Holocaust development of the term, 22–23 memory of, 17–27, 171–79 Christian responses to, 7, 19–20 Holocaust, 18

Labour Party, The, 62 Lambeth Conference, 1920, 56 1938, 61 1948, 158 1988, 171 Lang, Cosmo, 9 and the German invasion of Prague, 68–69 and the League of Nations, 57 and the Munich agreement, 59, 61–62, 67 and the Treaty of Versailles, 64 attitude to the Soviet Union, 78 justification of war, 76 protests against Nazism, 33–34, 65 protests on behalf of the Jews of Europe, 85 relationship with Stanley Baldwin, 48 Law, Richard, 84, 89–90 League of Nations Union (LNU), 57 Liddell-Hart, Basil, 150, 162 Life is Beautiful, 25 Lilje, Hans, 124 Littell, Franklin, 52 London, Louise, 87

Imperial War Museum, 178–79 Inge, William Ralph, 9, 45–46, 82, 91 and war, 57 and war crimes trials, 163 attitude to Soviet Union, 47 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT), 122, 123, 142–48, 159

Manchester Guardian, The, 59 Manstein, Erich von, 165 and Christianity, 161–62 trial of, 148, 149, 156, 159 Marahrens, Hans, 129–30 Mass Observation, 8, 12, 49 Ministry of Information, 96, 119 Morrison, Herbert, 83 Mrs Miniver, 12 Müller, Ludwig, 37 Munich Agreement, 11, 45

Jasper, Ronald, 155 Jewish Chronicle, The, 62–3

National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror (NCRNT), 85, 87–89, 91

205

INDEX

Nazism, and Christianity, 6, 36–37 attempts to define the meaning of, 1, 26, 96–97, 100, 106–7, 142–3, 166–8, 172–3 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 26, 45, 71, 136 Niemöller, Martin, 31–32, 38–39, 48, 68, 89, 167 and antisemitism, 37 and the memory of the Nazi era, 126 and the Stuttgart declaration, 51, 111 and war crimes trials, 153 arrest and trial, 40–42 in American press, 49–50 in British government propaganda, 49 meeting with George Bell, 35 post-war image, 50–52 Nolte, Ernst, 176 None Shall Escape, 22–23 Norman, Edward, 91 Novick, Peter, 113 Nuremberg Laws, 39 Oldham, J.H., 16 Orwell, George, 166 Pacifism, 57–59 Paget, Reginald, 150, 159, 162 Parkes, James, 82, 101–107, 171 Pastor’s Emergency League (PEL), 38 Pastor Hall, Boultings’ film, 49, 50 Töller’s play, 49 Paton, William, 15, 104 Peace Pledge Union (PPU), 58 Pius XII, 100 Potsdam Agreement, 119–120, 143 Priestley, J.B., 12 Prodi, Romano, 179 Rathbone, Eleanor, 85, 87, 130 Rauschning, Hermann, 48 Reagan, Ronald, 175 Record, The, 60, 74, 145, 156 Re-education Programme, 121 Reichstag Fire, Anglican reactions to, 34 Robertson, Brian, 125 Ross, Robert, 106 Runcie, Robert, 177 Russia, and Anglican understanding of the Soviet Union, 77–79

Sachsenhausen, 41 Saint Paul’s Cathedral, 12, 14 Save Europe Now! (SEN), 130–31 Sawoniuk, Antony, 178 Schindler’s List, 24–25 Schonfeld, Solomon, 86 Secularisation, 7–15 Sheppard, Dick, 58 Soviet Union, 6, 26, 176 and opposition to war crimes trials, 162–64 Anglican attitudes to, 45–48, 60, 73–79, 134–38, 168, 178 comparison with Nazi Germany, 47–48, 53–54, 63, 73, 117, 172 Spiritual Issues of the War, 96, 119 Stalin, Josef, 74, 117 Stein, Edith, 23, 173 Stokes, Richard, 150 Stürmer, Michael, 175 Student Christian Movement (SCM), 102–03 Stuttgart declaration, 51, 111–12, 126 Taylor, A.J.P., 117 Temple, William, 13–14, 15, 60, 131 and the CCJ, 92 and Christian reconstruction 118 and communism, 97 and COPEC, 8–9 and James Parkes, 105 and the bombing of Germany, 141 and the Munich agreement, 59, 61 and the punishment of Nazi war criminals, 140–41 and the Treaty of Versailles, 64 and totalitarianism, 45 justification of war, 66, 71–73, 167 organises protest against concentration camps, 34 political attitudes, 8–9 protests on behalf of Jews of Europe, 83–90, 93–94, 171 theology of, 10 The Deputy, 20 Tillich, Paul, 48 Times, The, 11, 69, 72, 84, 92, 173 role of Church of England in, 13 Totalitarianism, concept of, 6, 26, 45–48, 53–54, 73, 97, 134, 162 Treblinka, 2, 81 Troutbeck, John, 117–18

206

INDEX

Unconditional Surrender, concept of, 116 United Nations (UN), 146–47 Declaration on Nazi extermination of the Jews, 84 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 179 USSR (see Soviet Union) Vansittart, Lord Robert, 97, 116, 118 Vansittartism, 97–98, 115–16, 137 Vatican, The (see also Catholic Church) reactions of to Nazi Persecution of the Jews, 2, 7, 19–20 Veale, F.J.P, 150, 154, 157, 162–63 Vidler, Alec, 104 War Crimes Trials (also see under IMT) and Holocaust denial, 164

and the memory of Nazism, 139, 142–45, 158–60 British Royal Warrant Trials, 143–44, 148 War Crimes Act, 176, 178 War Refugee Board (WRB), 87–88 Wehrmacht, 95–96, 159–162 historiography of resistance to Nazism, 174–75 Weissler, Friedrich, 39–40 Went the Day Well, 12 Williams, S.C., 11 World Council of Churches (WCC), 16, 123, 157–58, 171 Wurm, Theophil, 123, 129, 160, 161 Yad Vashem, 20, 25–26

207

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