The Historiography of the Holocaust

The German Churches and the Holocaust 303
widespread antisemitism and an anti-Jewish theology even among members
of the BK.
The German Christian Movement
In the mid-1960s Kurt Meier made the first attempt to write an historical survey
of the DC. 17 Meier, a church historian in the former East Germany, was
hampered in his efforts by the church archives, which had not organized all
the relevant documents at the time he was conducting his research. What
emerges in his book is a picture focusing primarily on the organizational structure
of the movement, confined to the years 1933–39, with little attention
given to the philosophy of the movement and its position within National
Socialist ideology.
Strikingly, antisemitism is virtually ignored, although it was a consistently
central issue on the various platforms issued by the DC leadership. Just as troubling
is Meier’s apologetic tendency. 18 He warns against moral censure, citing
the difficult circumstances of a totalitarian state. 19 Instead of criticizing the
Churches for failing to speak out on behalf of the Jews, he suggests that the
Jews and the Churches were joint victims of the Nazis. Although active resistance
on the part of the Churches was minimal, Meier argues that the very
existence of the Churches in the Third Reich was a form of resistance.
More recent studies have tried to compensate for the deficiencies in Meier’s
work. One of the first regional studies to appear examined the DC in Bremen,
which developed an independent movement under the direction of Bishop
Weidemann. In his study Anpassung und Identität, Reijo Heinonen is thorough
and critical in his reconstruction of the theology and church politics in
Bremen during the Third Reich. 20 He describes in detail, for example, church
leaders’ development of a new version of the New Testament, one that was
more acceptable to the Nazis, which incorporated work by Emanuel Hirsch,
professor of theology at the University of Göttingen and one of the most
highly respected German Protestant theologians of his day.
The Bremen New Testament and other liturgical materials were intended to
provide a ‘Germanized’ version of Christianity and carried a strongly anti-Jewish
bias, influenced, according to Heinonen, by the writings of the Protestant theologian
Adolf Schlatter. One of the most distinguished New Testament scholars of
the early twentieth century, Schlatter was known in particular for his studies
on early Judaism and he wrote the most widely used German commentary on
the New Testament. Heinonen discusses the anti-Judaism in Schlatter’s work
and his belief in the religious foundations of the Volk, expressed most blatantly
in his 1935 essay, ‘Will the Jew Triumph over Us?’ Here Schlatter argues that
Jesus was the strongest opponent Judaism ever encountered. In the twentieth
century, Schlatter claims, Judaism is the ‘corporality’ that must be overcome
through Christian ‘spirit’, a struggle all the more necessary under National