A Suppressed History

The postwar silence of the Catholic and Protestant Churches about the Holocaust was almost as disturbing as their silence during the Nazi era. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Churches’ moral abdication in the Thirties and Forties first emerged as a matter of scholarly and public scrutiny, and even that scrutiny did not prompt Christian leaders to discuss, in depth, the conduct of their institutions from 1933 to 1945. The situation today is dramatically different.

The Rev. John F Morley, author of Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 1939-1943, opens this issue with a discussion of Catholic and Jewish reactions to the Vatican’s landmark document on the Holocaust, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (issued in March 1998). The scope and force of these reactions suggest that public, theological and scholarly discussions of the Catholic Church’s policies during the Nazi era will continue to be impassioned and controversial. Father Morley also offers his own measured analysis of We Remember. The Rev. John T. Pawlikowski, the author of The Challenge of the Holocaust for Christian Theology, believes that We Remember is a decisive turning point in Catholic-Jewish relations. Father Pawlikowski argues that the document’s willingness to reflect on the moral failure of many Catholics in the Thirties and Forties emphasizes the significance of the Holocaust for Catholic theology.

Rabbi Leon Klenicki, the Director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Interfaith Affairs Department, believes that one shortcoming of We Remember is its failure to connect the misdeeds and apathy of Catholics during the Nazi era to earlier Church teachings. Rabbi Klenicki also points out that in the past few years Catholic bishops in France and Germany have issued assessments of their Church’s conduct in the Thirties and Forties that are much bolder and more incisive than similar analyses in We Remember. However, Rabbi Klenicki is heartened by the document’s endorsement of the importance of interfaith dialogue.

Michael Dobkowski, author of Genocide and the Modern Age, explores We Remember’s antecedents in the 1960s. Amidst the general questioning of authority and institutions in that era, papal policies during the Thirties and Forties became the subject of intense examination and criticism. And of course, in 1965, Vatican Council II issued Nostra Aetate, a landmark investigation of the Catholic Church’s historical relationship with the Jewish people.

Victoria J. Barnett discloses that the Catholic Church was not the only segment of organized Christianity to remain passive during the Nazi assault on Europe’s Jews. Drawing on her 1992 seminal study, In the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, Ms. Barnett maintains that in the Thirties and Forties most Protestant Churches in Europe were concerned, above all, with protecting their institutional autonomy. And those Churches believed that challenging the Nazi authorities would jeopardize their autonomy.

Doris L. Bergen, the author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, also examines the conduct of the Protestant Churches during the Nazi era. (Germany, during that period, was two-thirds Protestant.) Prof. Bergen examines Protestants who cooperated with the Nazis and Protestant institutions and individuals who challenged the Third Reich.

Helping students understand the motives and policies of the Christian Churches in the Thirties and Forties is a difficult but important task for educators. Karen Friedman, the Director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Braun Holocaust Institute, offers classroom activities designed to help teachers introduce young people to a complex, sensitive subject.

Anthony Storr, the eminent British psychiatrist and writer, reviews Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s study of Nazism’s legacy, Hitler ~ Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism. Anthony Heilbut, the author of Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930’s to the Present, reviews Peter Gay’s My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin