Complicity in the Holocaust

by Robert P. Ericksen

In one of the darker aspects of Nazi Germany, churches and universities generally respected institutions grew to accept and support Nazi ideology. Robert P. Ericksen explains how an advanced, highly-educated, Christian nation could commit the crimes of the Holocaust. This book describes how Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders enthusiastically partnered with Hitler's regime, thus becoming active participants in the persecution of Jews, and ultimately, in the Holocaust. Ericksen also examines Germany's deeply flawed yet successful postwar policy of denazification in these institutions. Complicity in the Holocaust argues that enthusiasm for Hitler within churches and universities effectively gave Germans permission to participate in the Nazi regime.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, Germany, Christianity, Politics

280 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2011

Reviews

[Alison]

*****
Ericksen is an expert in the history of theologians and churches in Nazi Germany. In this important volume, he adds in a consideration of universities to produce a work that asks how those we might expect to have taken the lead in the moral opposition to Hitler and Nazism failed to do so.

If you thought that people who voted for or supported the Nazis were ignorant bigots, you're only half right. The Nazis were most popular in Protestant areas, rural areas, and among the so-called petty bourgeoisie -- artisans, schoolteachers, low-ranking civil servants, shopkeepers -- but they were also popular in universities and within the hierarchy of the Protestant Church. That is, among the most educated people in Germany, among those who believed their lives to be guided by the principle of loving one's neighbor.

Ericksen outlines the ways that professors (and, for that matter, students) responded to the rise of the Nazis and to the regime as it settled into power in 1933. He does the same for priests and pastors and leaders of the Christian churches (admittedly he spends more time and provides more detail on the Protestant churches than on the Catholic church).

While acknowledging many motives -- including self-preservation -- for silence that fall short of full-throated approval by everyone at all times, and while acknowledging important moments of resistance, such as when the bishop of Münster publicly rebuked the Nazis for the murderous program they dishonestly labeled "euthanasia", Ericksen is clear about this: "Regular" Germans would have no reason to believe that their leading intellectuals in universities or their pastors or church leaders considered support for Hitler and the Nazi party to be incompatible with being a "good German" or even a good person.

[11811 (Eleven) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The overwhelming Christian support for National Socialism in Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler came down to the following:

1.  Hitler was going to make Germany great again.
2.  Hitler constantly referred to the Christian heritage of Germany and his desire to retain that Christian identity.  (Code for no Jews.)
3.  He said horrifying things sometimes but the economy is awesome.  All forms of immorality can be excused in light of a booming economy.   (Too bad about kids in cages on the border but my stocks are doing well.)
4.  My personal favorite:  God wanted Hitler to be the leader of the country at that time in history.  Good Christians don't oppose the leader God chose for them.  (Worth noting the recent quote by Paula White:  "Saying no to Trump would be like saying no to God.")

The rationale is hauntingly familiar in the wake of 2016.  Reading the book was eerily like reading the news.  I sincerely hope we're living in a simulation and this is just a glitch waiting to be corrected by tech support in tomorrow's update.  It's the only hope I have left.

[Bruce Strom · Rating 4 out of 5]

In our blog on how Christians coped under the Nazi regime in Germany we consulted the main sources referenced in the Wikipedia article on this topic:
For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, Victoria Barnett, 1992.
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, Guenter Lewy, 2000, 1964
Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany, Robert P Ericksen, 2012.
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/christians-under-hitlers-german-nazi-regime/

At the time of Hitler about 97% of Germans were registered as Christians, a third were Catholic, two-thirds were Protestant, most were Lutheran or Reformed Christians. The histories of how the Protestant Church and Catholic Church coped under Nazi Germany, though they overlap considerably, are two very different histories.

My main criticism of all three of these books is they assumed the reader is already acquainted with the detailed history of Nazi Germany. We felt compelled to include many references to the Wikipedia articles on the many key events that signaled turning points in the social history of Nazi Germany. We wonder why Victoria Barnett did not include a chapter with detailed biographies of the two leading members of the Confessing Church, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
We picked up some insights in the book Complicity in the Holocaust, which covers the history of both the churches and the universities during the rise of Hitler, consent and collaboration with the Nazi regime, and how these institutions processed their past during post-war de-Nazification.
Guenter Lewy’s book, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, is on its second edition, reissued to incorporate the Catholic archives opened by the Vatican on the role of the Catholic Church during World War II. Lewy also used the Gestapo archives as a source. We found this to be a compelling narrative on a specialized topic, the Catholic Church under Hitler.

We found Victoria Barnett’s book on the Protestant Confessing Church movement to be absolutely captivating. She used as a primary source countless interviews with many in the Confessing Church movement. Many people think that the Nazi death camps were mainly in Poland, most people do not realize that Nazi Germany had thousands of labor and death camps, there were many labor camps in Germany. The reason why Germany never asked their housewives to be Rosy Riveters was because they enslaved many Jews, political prisoners, French POW’s, and many Poles and Eastern Europeans in their labor camps. Although these labor camps had a high mortality rate, few labor camps in Germany had gas chambers disguised as showers.

Victoria Barnett includes many excerpts from these interviews. This is from the interview describing a German labor camp near a parish (p. 101):
When the prisoners were taken to their work-place, one saw them- emaciated, wraith-like. Parish members and school children often put bread unobtrusively on the street curb, out of pity, so that the prisoners could grab it and get a little more nourishment. This happened even during the war, when food was rationed.

These interview excerpts relate how one German remembered how her lessons as schoolchild made her ashamed to be a German after her defeat (p. 27.):
We had the feeling we had no future. We suffered the consequences of World War I, which had broken out before we could walk, and we thought that we would never have a chance.

She tells of her thoughts as a teenager of how Hitler caused many Germans to be proud of their Fatherland (pp. 27-28):
We didn’t exactly have the wish for revenge, I don’t think it was about that, but we wanted to regain our national importance. We didn’t’ want to be somebody again- that sounds so much like ambition, it wasn’t that either- but we wanted to be German brothers alongside German brothers. Then along came this man who could hit things right on the target, and who stood for a united, great German Reich. That was the sweetest sound to our ears.
The interviews that described how Hitler was able to turn the German people against their Jewish neighbors are particularly chilling.

Many of the books I have consulted for my blogs on how Christians cope under Fascist regimes have interesting histories of their own, some even have these histories on their own Wikipedia pages.
These books are also a source for a summary blog on the lessons learned from histories of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, the Spanish Civil War, and Apartheid South Africa:
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/christians-coping-under-fascism-in-wwii-warnings-for-christians-under-trump/

This blog also references a blog on the Vatican II decree on Religious Freedom, which discards the medieval notion that the absolute monarchies and the Catholic Church are partners, and the modern notion that since the Communism is the enemy of the Catholic Church, and since Fascism is the deadly enemy of Communism, then the Church can tolerate Fascism. Vatican II embraces democracy and rejects fascism.

[Reichnekov · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The more Nazis resemble monsters without forebears or progeny, the less they resemble us, and the less we must worry that we will resemble them" (12).

Chapter 1 is a fantastic introduction (minus the Zimbardo legitimisation) that situates the reader in the kind of mindset required to engage in the history of the Holocaust in more than a one-off, historically-unique way. With the reality that genocides have continued, it is important to understand where their legitimacy comes from to understand points of rupture (or alternatively, complicity).

Chapter 2 remains high quality, but Eriksen relies too frequently and restrictively on the AELKZ (Luthern newspaper) for his claims about widespread German Protestant support for Hitler and the Nazi party in the early 1930s--more details about the confessing church and its turmoil would be helpful. I think this is contrasted with his very detailed and sourced argument for the Catholic Church and the Centre Party's capitulation to the rise of Hitler, his consolidation of power through the Enabling Act and the role of the Vatican.

Questions: How did the National Socialist Student Association (NSDStB) interact with the left-wing student groups/individuals? Did they share a space or did they exchange critiques and fight over the future of the university and the country? The book merely talks about how the NSDStB created an archive to target and remove Jewish professionals from public life but not ideological-based removals or their relations to other student movements (74).

It is fascinating the ways in which Hitler struggled to maintain full control of Nazi Germany, despite the story told of his untold totalitarianism. The story of the protestors defending the bishops shows how even small victories generated by the regime supporters (and non-supporters alike) can reel in the process of power consolidation even if not completely--nor nearly--enough (106).
"It is remarkable that people stood up for their bishops in the face of official threats and in the face of the Gestapo. They spoke out openly and marched in the streets. Manifestly, however, they did not direct their anger against the politics of the Nazi regime. They never spoke out against the brutal treatment of Jews [is this true?]. They never marched in the streets for causes central to our postwar condemnation of the Nazi state. Rather, they were content to be supporters of that state. It is also worth noting that when the state stepped in, it was on the side of the church protestors, not on the side of what we would perceive as the harsh Nazi policies of Muller and Jager" (106).

"The Evangelical conscience, which feels itself responsible for people and government, is hardest hit of all by the fact that in Germany, which calls itself a law-abiding state, concentration camps can still exist and the activities of the Gestapo are not subject to any legal scrutiny" (107).

"However, no one in Germany at the outbreak of war should have expected that the policies of the Fuhrer would be restrained or soft or benign, mindful of human rights and human dignity. His rhetoric had been harsh, his peacetime policies had been harsh, and now so was his war" (128).

One of the more striking moments of the text was chapter 6 where Eriksen clearly states how Church members defended quite indefensible people during the so-called denazification process.

With the story of Rath in Chapter 7, it is a fascinating look at how one individual defended himself in the face of the denazification process. From my point of view, however, it also shows how complicity is frequently the result of cowardly individuals doing whatever they can in the face of institutional power. There is that tendency in us all, the tendency to forego the moral in favour of the imminently practical (and always, so it happens, in what we perceive to be in our own favour!). It says something that people, in general, will find themselves constantly defending themselves from any attack than they ever will apologising for any potential wrongdoing--and those in power find themselves especially prone to self-defence and claims of innocence!

Eriksen effectively does something historians are best equipped to do--demystifying the myths we allow ourselves and others to tell about the past.

[Iami Menotu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Explores the role of academic and religious support to Nazism during the Third Reich.

[Jaymie Lacombe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some history churches and universities of Germany leading up to WW2. It is shocking to learn what was going on and how many were influenced by the Nazi party, even when their evils became apparent.

[Jacob Lehman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written, lucid, and sobering exhibition of how organizations with noble missions blew it when it mattered most.

I read this as part of my project to read one book from every aisle of Olin Library at Cornell; you can read more of my thoughts on this book here: https://jacobklehman.com/2019/07/20/i...