The Historiography of the Holocaust

The German Churches and the Holocaust 301
Together with his more famous brother, the Berlin pastor Martin Niemöller,
a leader of the BK, Wilhelm had fought in the right-wing Freikorps during the
early Weimar years, having joined the Nazi Party in 1923. Both he and Martin
supported Hitler in elections from 1924 until he came to power. They both
greeted Hitler’s taking power with enthusiasm and lost confidence only when
the regime’s political interference in the Churches emerged as a problem. After
the war, Niemöller quickly set up an archive at Bielefeld and produced major
studies of the Kirchenkampf. The Protestant Church (EKD) then established an
Arbeitsgemeinschaft für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, a counterpart to the Institut für
Zeitgeschichte on the other side of town. Soon, a large body of church history
emerged, providing a wealth of material on the BK. In effect, if not by design,
the complexity of Christian responses to National Socialism tended to disappear.
None of his Nazi sympathies are found in Wilhelm Niemöller’s post-war
histories of the Churches, and there is almost no mention of the Holocaust.
The wide-ranging and important enthusiasm on the part of Protestants for
Hitler disappears. Indeed, when Conway’s book appeared in German translation
in 1969, including a brief mention of the Niemöller brothers’ enthusiasm for
Hitler, Wilhelm denied it, insisting that the book include a ‘correction’. 12
Alongside this ‘history of heroes’ tendency, several German scholars have
produced a corrective. In 1959 Friedrich Baumgärtel published Wider die
Kirchenkampf-Legenden (1959), the first book to expose Wilhelm Niemöller as
a Nazi Party member. Clemens Vollnhals, in a study of the Protestant Church
and denazification, also highlights the baggage carried into the post-war period.
When Martin Niemöller and Bishop Wurm, perhaps the two most important
Protestants in post-war Germany, attacked the Allied denazification policy,
they also had family members in mind. Wurm’s son had been imprisoned for
falsifying his Fragebogen (questionnaire), by trying to conceal that he had joined
the Nazi Party in 1922, and Martin must have been keenly aware of his brother’s
vulnerability as an alte Kämpfer. 13 The work of Gailus, among others, represents
an important continuation of this unmasking process.
While the Third Reich was still in power, the BK became well known abroad.
Hoardings in the US called for the release of Martin Niemöller from prison, for
example, and Karl Barth’s fame as a theologian included widespread awareness
of his authorship of the 1934 Barmen Declaration and his flight to Switzerland
the following year. Thus the BK, based on the Barmen Declaration, at the end
of the war was able to parlay ‘opposition’ and victimhood into a legendary
status. When the Allied armies swept into a defeated and demoralized Germany,
membership in the BK became one of the surest signs of a ‘good German’ and
one of the safest paths to smooth denazification.
Victoria Barnett captures this atmosphere in the prologue to her popular
history, For the Soul of the People. She introduces the reader to Stefanie von
Mackensen, fleeing Breslau for Hannover in May 1945. When stopped by US troops,