Betrayal

by Robert P Ericksen

  Most institute members continued their careers unhampered after the war. Grundmann, Meyer-Erlach, and Eisenhuth lost their professorships at the University of Jena because of their early membership in the NSDAP, but all were given positions of distinction within the postwar church. Jena replaced them with other Institute members, Herbert Preisker and Rudolf Meyer. Other Institute professors and instructors retained their academic positions. Georg Bertram moved from Giessen to Frankfurt, Gerhard Delling left Leipzig for Greifswald, Rudi Paret left Heidelberg for Bonn and then Tubingen. Martin Redeker remained at Kiel, Johannes Leipoldt at Leipzig, Wilhelm Koepp at Greifswald, Fritz Wilke and Gustav Entz at Vienna. Other members who retained their professorships include Johannes Hempel, Hartmut Schmoekel, and Carl Schneider, among others. Grundmann, who had joined the NSDAP in December 1930, protested the loss of his professorship in a letter to the new rector, claiming that he had been not a perpetrator but rather the victim of a struggle by the Nazi party against his work and his

  Grundmann's return to the church came as a result of support from state officials. In January 1946, state officials in Thuringia had refused Grundmann's request for support in securing a church position.77 Less than a year later, however, they reversed their stance. In the fall of 1946, the state urged Grundmann's retention by the church on the grounds that he had waged a "manly struggle" against National Socialist ideology. Testimony came from Grundmann's erstwhile colleagues, Eisenhuth and Meyer-Erlach, who declared that Grundmann had been persecuted by anti-Christian Nazi officials. His early membership in the NSDAP was dismissed as the error of an "unworldly" theologian who recognized his mistake soon after 1933. His value as an internationally recognized scholar was cited by pointing to his membership in the distinguished Society of New Testament Studies, which had offered him membership in 1938.

  Like so many other leaders of the German Christians, Grundmann emerged from the denazification process relatively unscrutinized. Yet his Nazi-era activities were known to East German officials. As late as 1990 an East German secret police (Stasi) document lists his name among other Nazi supporters and war criminals who had eluded responsibility by receiving a church position. Gerhard Besier suggests that the information was used by the Stasi to control Grundmann."

  Few members of the Institute expressed any public repentance for their Nazi-era activities. In the later years of their lives, both Meyer-Erlach and Grundmann continued to present themselves as persecuted victims of the Nazi regime. Meyer-Erlach claimed that "despite threats and temptations," he had never abandoned the church and that he had "fought the Party" in his writings. Further, he had been mocked by regime officials because his name, Meyer, sounded Jewish and because he had once attended a synagogue service in Wurzburg in 1929, which had led Nazi officials to mock him as "der Synagoge-Meyer. He was no antisemite, he further stated, since he retained his Jewish family physician until November 1933 and once permitted a Jewish doctor to operate on two of his children.

  By contrast, Grundmann's postwar defenses do not even mention antisemitism, and in his 1969 unpublished autobiography he barely acknowledges that he erred during the Third Reich: "We attempted to pose the questions raised by the period and not to avoid them. I admit that in so doing we made [big (this word is crossed out in the manuscript)] mistakes." While most of the materials pertaining to Grundmann's denazification remain closed, he writes in his autobiography that he had stood in real danger of Nazi retribution as the result of his writings criticizing Alfred Rosenberg."" In meetings with church officials of Thuringia in late 1945, to clear himself of any Nazi suspicions, Grundmann had insisted that his fundamental commitment to Christ never wavered during the Nazi years. Church leaders asked him to express an acceptance of the Barmen Declaration as a sign that he accepted the ultimate sovereignty of Christ, rather than political leadership. Grundmann agreed. He was never asked to repudiate antisemitism, nor did he ever mention the Holocaust in his postwar publications.

  In subsequent years Grundmann was appointed rector of the seminary in Thuringia that trained religion teachers and church organists, he taught at the ministerial seminary in Leipzig, and he served as adviser to the Protestant publishing house of the German Democratic Republic, a powerful position. He also continued to publish extensively and his commentaries on the Synoptic Gospels became highly regarded reference works in the postwar theological communities of East and West Germany. Shortly before his death in 1976, he was appointed Kirchenrat of Thuringia, an honorary position that indicates the esteem with which he was regarded by the postwar church in East Germany. Meyer-Erlach also escaped serious retribution for his antisemitism and his support of the Nazi regime. On the contrary, by January 1962, now living in Hesse, he received the Federal Republic of Germany's award, the Verdienstkreuz, First Class."

  Church Opposition to the Institute

  The Institute was not without its critics within the church. The so-called church struggle refers to the ongoing clash for control of the church that developed between two Protestant factions, the German Christian Movement and the Confessing Church. Members of the Confessing Church came from a more conservative theological tradition that objected to alterations in the biblical text, liturgy, and catechism, although many were sympathetic to the Hitler regime. Their opposition to the Institute and its theology was based on its radical changes of traditional Christian teachings and was not directed primarily against its antisemitism. Indeed, Wolfgang Gerlach has documented the failure of the Confessing Church to take a stand in support of Jews other than those who had already converted to Christianity, and he has also exposed the theological anti-Judaism in the writings of many Confessing Church theologians .12 For example, the Godesberg Declaration of April 1939, which created the Institute, evoked Confessing Church hostility and resulted in a counterdeclaration. However, that document-issued on 31 May 1939 and signed by leading neutral bishops, including Theophil Wurm (Wurttemberg), Hans Meiser (Bavaria), and August Marahrens (Hanover)-showed little respect for Jews or Judaism: "In the realm of faith there exists the sharp opposition between the message of Jesus Christ and his apostles and the Jewish religion of legalism and political messianic hope, which is already emphatically fought against in the Old Testament. In the realm of the volkisch life an earnest and responsible racial politics is required for the preservation of the purity of our people."" As argued in this statement, elimination of the Old Testament is unnecessary because it is not a Jewish book, but an anti-Jewish book. Racial policies are acceptable and necessary, according to these bishops, and Christianity stands in opposition to Judaism, as the Godesberg Declaration had also formulated.

  Opposition to the Institute's publications also came from some of Grundmann's colleagues in the field of New Testament studies who sided with the Confessing Church. For example, Grundmann's 1940 study of Jesus' racial background, Jesus der Galilaer, which argued that Jesus could not have been a Jew, was reviewed negatively by Hans von Soden, professor of New Testament and church history at the University of Marburg and an active member of the Confessing Church." Yet von Soden simply argued that the racial question was theologically irrelevant and criticized Grundmann for his sloppy scholarship; he did not fault Grundmann's negative presentation of Judaism.'

  Most striking in the Confessing Church opposition to German Christian measures is the negative attitude toward Judaism shared by both sides. For example, in a pamphlet issued by the Confessing Church in 1939 to repudiate the Institute, von Soden distinguished between the historical phenomenon of Judaism, which formed the basis of early Christianity, and a spiritual "Jewishness," which fails to understand religion because it "confuses outward and inward." This "Jewishness," he wrote, "shudders before every Hebrew word in the liturgy or hymnal, but has itself fallen victim to the Jewish antiChristian spirit."", The German Christian Movement was infected with this "Jewishness," according to von Soden, an infection illustrated by the dejudaization efforts called for in the Godesberg Declaration. That is, trying to dejudaize Chris
tianity by banning the Old Testament and rewriting the hymnal and New Testament actually threatened "a spiritual Judaization" of the church. While von Soden, along with the majority of Confessing Church members, vigorously opposed German Christian measures, they agreed with the basic assumption that Judaization represented a real threat to Christianity. The difference between the two groups lay in their definition of what constitutes Judaization. For von Soden, the threat came not from the Old Testament, Hebrew words, and other elements within traditional Christian theology, but from what he saw as an antispiritual, materialistic theology promoted by Grundmann and his German Christian colleagues.

  The response of the Confessing Church represents a tradition that does not repudiate antisemitism, but redefines it. Judaism is a recognizable religion that can be debated, opposed, or accepted. Jewishness, however, was seen as an evil that potentially can afflict all people, even Christians, and must therefore be opposed with the strongest means available. Just as German antisemitism toward the end of the nineteenth century considered the greatest danger to be assimilated Jews, because they could inflict a nefarious influence before they were ever recognized as Jews, this tradition of antisemitism feared that Jewishness could infiltrate Christian theology and poison it. The great danger for modern Christian anti-Judaism was not its opposition to the religion of Judaism, nor to Jews themselves, but rather the imaginary danger associated with the loosely defined but far more threatening concept of "Jewishness."

  Eistoriographical Observations

  The history of the Institute calls into question postwar interpretations of developments in the Protestant church during the Third Reich. The relatively few studies of the German Christian Movement have not examined its effective exploitation of antisemitism after 1938 to gain adherents and win support from the Nazi regime. Through the Institute, the German Christians achieved an effective structure for disseminating their theology and avoiding disintegration after the onset of the war. Moreover, the German Christian Movement can no longer be considered an insignificant element within the church, given the support it won through the Institute from professors of theology at prominent German universities and the popularity of its liturgical materials among churches throughout the Reich. The Institute's effectiveness is also shown by the individuals who at first kept themselves at a distance from the German Christians but who eventually became supporters of the Institute, such as Werner.

  How should the Institute's relation to the Nazi regime be evaluated? On the one hand, viewing the Institute primarily as a creation of Nazi antisemitic ideology would sever its links to pre-1933 theological tendencies and would not explain why church members found its theology respectable. On the other hand, without the Third Reich and its intensification of anti-Jewish policies after 1938, German Christian leaders might well have developed a different ideology; they clearly realized antisemitism would be politically advantageous. The Institute made effective use of traditional Christian anti-Judaism to support Nazi policy, offering theologians for the service of the regime. Institute membership included a few well-known theologians, but also a large number of less-well-known but still influential scholars in all fields of theology representing universities from throughout the Reich. Finally, it is significant that Institute associates continued to work within the churches and university theological faculties after 1945. Many records of the churches' denazification proceedings remain closed to scholars; examining them would help determine just how admissible the Institute's theology remained even after the Third Reich collapsed.

  The conventional treatment of the German Christians as a marginal phenomenon within the German churches is called into question by the accomplishments of the Institute. Its popular and academic publications, their wide distribution to churches throughout the Reich, and the representation on Institute membership rolls from the ranks of university faculties and church hierarchies all indicate that the German Christians attained a higher level of influence than has been previously recognized. Finally, the Institute's theology should be analyzed as a phenomenon parallel to Nazism itself, that is, one with roots within the history of German antisemitism and Christian theological anti-Judaism, taken to radical extremes out of both genuine conviction and the quest for political power. Within Christianity, the Institute undertook the goals of National Socialism: As the Nazi regime was creating an Aryan Germany, the Institute was creating an Aryan Christianity.

  Conclusion

  What motivated the Institute's members to seek the eradication of Jewish influence on German religious life? Two factors predominated. First, there were purely political interests: Nazi antisemitic policies were defined as Christian and given the support of the church, with the hope that the Nazi regime would respond by giving its support to the church. If the Nazis wanted a Judenrein Germany, the church would create a Judenrein Christianity. Church leaders never gave any thought of opposition to Nazi antisemitism, even though they were uncomfortable with some of the regime's other policies. On the so-called Jewish question, the church's response should be measured not in degrees of resistance, but of enthusiasm.

  Second, for many German theologians racial theory was a gift, a way to solve a central dilemma raised by historical Jesus scholarship. Since the nineteenth century, New Testament historians had examined the gospels within the context of first-century Judaism and discovered that Jesus' teachings were not new, but repeated ideas common to the rabbis of his day. Yet that recognition led to a crisis: What was original and unique about Jesus and Christianity? One way of solving that dilemma was to draw on racial theory, insisting that although Jesus' teachings may not have been Jewish, his racial identity was Aryan, thus marking his difference from the Jews. Jesus' use of Jewish teachings, Institute members argued, did not demonstrate his Jewishness, but his clever manipulation of the enemies' ideas against them.

  For some historians today, the Institute's activities remain a marginal phenomenon, limited to a small group of theologians. Yet the issue is not so much how many individuals were involved in the Institute, but how large a role was played by the collective literature they produced. To what extent did the Institute's theologians, by means of their epistemological tools and sense of scholarly and moral purpose as theologians, helped to effect the Nazification of Germany theologically?" At issue is not only the Nazi politics of each individual theologian, his party or SA membership, or whether his scholarship directly shaped Nazi decisions regarding the murder of the Jews, but the nature of the larger theological discourse Institute members helped to create. Theologians from a wide range of political backgrounds, ranging from Bultmann and Barth to Kittel and Grundmann, shaped a theologically based ideology of the degeneracy of "Judentum"-a German term designating Judaism, the Jews, and Jewishness. Their position as scholars gave their ideology the masquerade of Wissenschaft, giving substance to the politics and rhetoric of the state. As Sheldon Pollock has pointed out in his study of similar developments within the field of Indology in Germany, scholars produced "objective truth" that they asserted was independent of political interests and values. Whether theologians after 1933 were motivated by opportunism or cynicism is far less important than the role played by a broad group of theologians before and after the advent of Hitler. Theological Wissenschaft produced an accepted knowledge of "Judaism," and the imprimatur of Wissenschaft provided a warrant of objective truth that constituted it as scholarship. Under the protection of such claims, Protestant theologians could use Wissenschaft to disguise the racism of their depictions of "Judaism" as objective truth rooted in scholarship. After a while, it was no longer clear whether New Testament scholarship was a search for the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity, or a scholarly legitimation of antisemitism and an ideological legitimation of National Socialism. The goals became so intertwined that at a certain point they could no longer be separated.

  Postwar New Testament scholarship in Germany did not make a clean break with the theological writings of the Nazi era. While postwa
r German scholars may not have been self-consciously racist, many continued working within some of the same parameters as the literature produced by the Institute. Although certain terms, such as "Aryan," were dropped, the presentation of a degenerate Judaism that was anathema to Jesus remained vivid in postwar publications. Such continuities with the Third Reich are not surprising, since the halfhearted denazification program allowed most members of the Institute to retain their teaching posts, as well as their positions of authority within the church, so that they continued to train a new generation of ministers and theologians.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt has analyzed in detail the use of Nazi language in the postwar writings of several major postwar theologians, including Gunter Bornkamm, Gunter Klein, and Karl Barth." Marquardt notes that Bornkamm, in his book on Paul, describes the "aggressive vehemence" of Paul's critique of Judaism as a "machine gun." In his 1956 book, Jesus of Nazareth, Bornkamm compares Jesus' aggressive assault on the Judaism of his day to that of the Nazis. Similar examples can be found in religious best-sellers in Germany, by Gerda Weiler, Christa Mulack, and Franz Alt, among others. Suggestions that Judaism is a violent religion, to which Jesus was opposed, repeats themes popularized by the Institute; what is new is that postwar writers claim that Judaism is analogous to National Socialism and even responsible for the blind obedience to authority that led to genocide.

  On the other hand, the Holocaust has sparked other New Testament scholars in Germany, such as Peter von der Osten-Sacken and Dieter Georgi, to undertake an energetic repudiation of those traditions and demand of their students a commitment to serious study of early Judaism. Indeed, despite the continued perpetuation of anti-Jewish stereotypes in certain theological literature, Germany today is witnessing a widespread, concerted effort by scholars to overcome Christian theological anti-Judaism. Perhaps in a future generation, the influence of the Institute and all its theological forebears and offspring will diminish and theological affirmations of Christianity will take shape alongside an affirmation of Judaism.