For historians studying the Holocaust, many questions still remain, including how Christian theologians grappled with their beliefs under National Socialism.
Dr. Victoria Barnett offered insight to that phenomenon, during a Nov. 9 speaking engagement at Saint Leo University.
Barnett is the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust.
Her local appearance was timed to observe the anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass.”
On Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, 1938, a series of violent attacks against Jewish temples, businesses, property and individuals were launched in Germany and nearby occupied areas. The episode is considered to be the start of the Holocaust.
Barnett’s presentation centered on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a compelling figure who emerged at a young age as an influential Christian thinker, author, and an operative in a covert resistance movement against the Third Reich — including a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and about 30 other Nazi leaders. After resistance activities were discovered, the Nazis executed the 39-year-old Bonhoeffer in 1945, just days before the end of World War II.
Barnett, though, pushed back on Bonhoeffer’s legacy, suggesting the celebrated theologian actually endured a “slow movement towards certainty” in opposing the Third Reich.
More recent historiography yields a varying perspective of the theologian, she said.
Regarding Nazi resistance in the early 1930s, Barnett described Bonhoeffer as “sometimes doubtful about what he was doing.”
This uncertainly, Barnett explained, was exemplified in 1933 when Bonhoeffer initially refused to perform a funeral procession for his twin sister’s husband, who was Jewish.
“One of the interesting things in his personal papers and his letters is how often he talks about how much trouble he has making a decision, how doubtful he is that something’s the right thing to do,” Barnett said.
“It’s a very human moment where you see that kind of uncertainty under pressure of not knowing what to do,” she said.
Barnett, too, argued there’s little evidence to suggest Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the resistance “was motivated purely out of his concern for the persecution of the Jews.”
One of his primary motives, instead, may have been related to the church — such as converting and baptizing people of Jewish descent.
“One of the big questions for historians,” the scholar said, “is understanding how the church treated such people who were baptized very differently from members of the Jewish community or secular Jews.
“…The Confessing Church was very often willing to speak out for people who were in the church who were baptized Christians and now affected by the racial laws, but refused to do so when it came to the Jewish community itself or the secularized Jews,” she said.
Barnett referenced Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” where he addressed the new problems the church faced under the Nazi dictatorship.
Despite the essay’s “brilliant Lutheran deconstruction of why the Nazi state is not a legitimate form of leadership,” it also includes what Barnett defined as “one of the most anti-Jewish paragraphs that you can find in the literature of that era.”
Barnett explained: “You have the deicide charge—the so-called Christ-killer charge, you have supersessionism — the argument that the Jews are suffering because they still need to convert. It’s an incredibly offensive paragraph and — in the shadow of the Holocaust — one can’t read it without really cringing and thinking, ‘What is that doing in this essay?’”
Barnett also argued that Bonhoeffer’s role in the assassination attempt of Hitler in July 1944 has been exaggerated.
“The mythology about Bonhoeffer…kind of has him laying the bomb or pulling the trigger or being the one who was going to assassinate Hitler. That’s simply not the case. He’s brought in, and he’s simply one of about 6,000 people, somewhere in this broader network of conspiracy circles,” Barnett said.
“His role is central in that he’s related to several figures by family who were very central in the conspiracy, so he knows what’s going on,” she added.
New revelations aside, Barnett acknowledged Bonhoeffer as “a person of real decency, real integrity” and “an extraordinary individual who died much too young.”
She added: “Life, especially in dictatorships like that, can get complicated, very quickly, and I think realizing that is very important when we study this era.”
The tale of Bonhoeffer, meanwhile, leads to the broader issue of the church structure during the Nazi regime.
Barnett explained the portrayal of the Confessing Church — a movement within German Protestantism during Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi Protestant Reich Church — is “more complicated than people had initially thought.”
While Protestant and Catholic churches in 1945 were the two German institutions the allied military trusted in denazification proceedings, Barnett said history shows many in both churches enabled the Nazi regime.
Said Barnett: “There were indeed figures both in the Protestant and Catholic churches, like Bonhoeffer, who did stand up briefly, who did oppose National Socialism, who fought back against them, but, there were very, very many people in both churches who went along with it. Some of them became Nazi party members. Some of them actually betrayed colleagues. Some of them defended National Socialism.”
She also noted German churches and monasteries employed thousands of forced laborers during the Third Reich, raising additional questions of moral ambiguity, complicity and guilt.
The paradox illustrates how Nazism fully pervaded German society by the early 1940s, Barnett said.
“You could not get away from what was happening,” Barnett said. “It was so thoroughly permeated in German society that was no way for anyone to step outside of it.”
Barnett’s presentation was organized by the university’s Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies (CCJS).
Published November 29, 2017