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Maria Zumholz und Michael Hirschfeld (Hg.), Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik. Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit, Münster 2018, Aschendorff Verlag, XII u. 817 S., 29.80 €, ISBN 978-3-402-13228-9
In this impressive edited volume on Catholic bishops in Nazi Germany,
the editors and contributors succeeded in presenting a critical and
erudite historical discussion on a topic long beset by polemical and
apologetic debates. Although the analyses of individual bishops vary in
depth and focus, the chapters are linked by a number of common threads
that lend the work considerable depth and coherence. In recent years,
scholarship on the Catholic Church under Nazism increasingly has
shifted to the Church’s pastoral mission as a key category of analysis,
which also is a central focus of this volume. Most contributors thus
answered Joachim Kuropka’s challenge “das Handeln der Bischöfe zu
verstehen in erster Linie aus ihrem Amtsverständnis als Seelsorger
und im weiteren aus den je persönlichen Prägungen, den
diözesanen und natürlich auch politischen Rahmenbedingungen
und Handlungsspielräumen” (p. 17).
The volume aptly begins with Sascha Hinkel’s portrait of Adolf Cardinal Bertram (1859-1945), prince bishop of Breslau and chair of the Fulda Conference of Bishops. Situating Bertram’s conception of the state within a broader historical context is central to Hinkel’s excellent analysis of the cardinal, whose Staatsverständnis rested on the principle common among bishops at the time, according to which all governments were ordained by God and consequently, “ein einträchtiges Band” should reign between state and Church (p. 55). But the cardinal was as principled as he was pragmatic, and in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals of 1918, Bertram offered the new Weimar government his “tiefgreifende Mitarbeit,” not least because “[z]ur Pflicht der Prinzipientreue kommt die Pflicht, tunlichst das Erreichbare anzustreben” (p. 62). Yet, what was one of Bertram’s strengths in 1919 became his key weakness in 1933 when he, caught between his role as bishop and his convictions about secular authority, pursued a modus vivendi with Hitler rather than defending human rights and Jews or activating the Catholic potential for resistance. Bertram’s enduring loyalty to Hitler has been the subject of particularly fierce controversies over the decades, and in a separate contribution, Winfried Töpler takes up Bertram’s much-debated instructions for a requiem for Hitler. In this intriguing piece of historical sleuthing, Töpler makes a convincing case that the cardinal penned the note in July 1944 rather than in May 1945 but refrains from speculating how his findings might reshape discussions about Betram.
Bertram’s best-known detractor was Konrad Graf von Preysing (1880-1950), Bishop of Berlin, who repeatedly tried to move bishops towards a clear and vocal stance of resistance against the Nazi regime. Josef Pilvousek agrees that this central aspect of Preysing’s biography remains undisputed and undiminished. But readers no doubt will appreciate his insightful analysis of Preysing after 1945 that illuminates clearly the bishop’s limits, “seine Überforderung und wohl auch seine Durchsetzungsschwäche” (p. 103). Indeed, Pilvousek shows that once the bishop was largely removed from Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli’s direct influence, little remained of the past audacious churchman, who, like Bertram before him, now resorted to a cautious Eingabenpolitik in his dealings with the Soviets and the East German regime.
The common juxtaposition of Bertram and Preysing in past research has at times obscured the fact that the latter was not alone in seeking alternate and bolder retorts to Nazism. The volume is in part so important because, in presenting myriad biographies of bishops side by side, it allows for a broader and more nuanced assessment of the episcopate’s history in Hitler’s Germany. In their chapter on Maximilian Kaller (1880-1947), Bishop of Ermland, Rainer Bendel and Hans-Jürgen Karp argue, for instance, that after his initial enthusiasm for the Nazi regime cooled, Kaller set himself apart in that he was the first bishop who no longer was satisfied with just sending written petitions to the regime. Rather, in 1934 he started to appeal to the laity directly. Addressing Catholics in the German and the Polish language in the Catholic press and at grandiose pilgrimages, the bishop admonished his flock to remain steadfast in the Catholic faith. Thomas Flammer writes that Joseph Godehard Machens (1886-1956), Bishop of Hildesheim, was also among those bishops who “deutlich in der Öffentlichkeit gegenüber dem Nationalsozialismus Stellung bezogen“ (p. 402). Machens went further than most bishops, when, in the 1940s, he publicly condemned concentration camps and the persecution and killing of Jews and Sinti and Roma.
Throughout the volume, contributors illuminate how seriously bishops took their role as pastors, even at the risk of escalating tensions with the regime. Thus, in 1938, the Gestapo banished Johannes Baptista Sproll (1870-1949), Bishop of Rottenburg, from Württemberg and Hohenzollern, after he repeatedly condemned the regime's irreligious ideology. In Hildesheim, the regime labeled Bishop Joseph Machens a “Hetzprediger” and “Volksverräter” (p. 406). The editors conclude in turn that the bishops did not labor in vain, and that “[a]ls die unbestrittene Leistung der katholischen Bischöfe in Deutschland muss gewürdigt werden, dass es ihnen gelang ihre Diözesanen mehrheitlich gegen den Kern der NS-Ideologie zu immunisieren und die katholische Kirche als eine die Menschen prägende Lebensmacht zu erhalten“ (p. 12). Unfortunately, the meaning of “immunization” remains unclear beyond statistical considerations of church membership and attendance. Should it also be understood in a milieu-specific sense in that Catholics remained loyal to the Church and could be mobilized to defend it? Or does it imply the uncompromising embrace of the core tenet of Christianity “to love thy neighbor as thyself” that necessitated the rejection of the Nazis’ teachings on antisemitism, race, and blood?
It seems that most Catholics failed on both counts. Michael Buchberger (1874-1961), Bishop of Regensburg, for his part recognized that the episcopate could not rely on the steadfastness of the laity even on core Catholic issues. Thus, Klaus Unterberger writes, in the course of the Church’s fierce conflict with the regime over confessional schools in the mid-1930s, Buchberger found that “in diesem Loyalitätskonflikt ihm die katholischen Gläubigen überwiegend die Gefolgschaft verweigert haben” (p. 573). In the case of Rottenburg, Jürgen Schmiesing cautions that more research is needed to answer questions such as, “Unter welchen Bedingungen fand beispielsweise die erhebliche Mobilisierung der Katholiken statt, die [Bischof Johannes] Sprolls Predigten erreichte?” and “Welche Konsequenzen hatte diese Mobilisierung für den Alltag in der Diktatur?” (p. 485).
Christiane Hoth and Markus Raasch asked these very questions in their superb contribution that situates the tenure of the Bishop of Eichstätt, Michael Rackl (1883-1948), within the context of “sozialer Praxis von Volksgemeinschaft in einem katholischen Milieu” (p. 623). The authors found that despite the bishop’s generally critical stance toward the regime, there is little evidence that he succeeded in immunizing the laity against core Nazi teachings. Thus, the Nazification of Eichstätt proceeded smoothly and in cooperation with the Catholic population, and, moreover, “[d]ie antijüdischen Maßnahmen konnten in Eichstätt reibungsloser umgesetzt werden als andernorts” (p. 657). Rackl’s response was ambiguous. Although he rejected Nazi teachings on race and blood, he showed little concern for persecuted Jews.
Rackl was far from the only bishop whose response to National Socialism at times was vague or contradictory. Mathias Ehrenfried (1871-1948), Bishop of Würzburg, recognized early on the dangers of Nazism and expected from the laity uncompromising loyalty to the Church, even if it meant bloody martyrdom. At the same time, he admonished the laity to remain loyal to a criminal regime, writing as late as 1 February 1945 in a pastoral letter that “’[w]er sich der rechtmässigen Obrigkeit im Staate unteordnet, ordnet sich Gott unter’” (p. 686). Readers no doubt will agree with Wolfgang Weiss that, “[a]ngesichts der nationalsozialistischen Gräuel erscheint es heute schwer nachvollziehbar, wie Ehrenfried die Treue zum Vaterland und zum Glauben verbinden konnte“ (p. 687).
Equally equivocal and no less problematic were Franz Rudolf Bornewasser’s (1866-1951) messages to the laity about race in 1934. Even as the Bishop of Trier declared Nazi ideology as incompatible with Christianity, he also called the engagement with the topics of race and blood as “’ernste und wichtige Fragen für ein Volk.” He continued that the Church, too, approved of efforts that preserved “die Eigenart eines Volkes,” adding that measures which served the “ehrlichen Rassenpflege” und the “Gesundung des Blutes” corresponded to the will of God, unless these measures violated natural and divine laws (p. 299). Bernhard Schneider concludes that it would not have been easy for the laity listening to the bishop’s ambiguous statements to determine whether the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws constituted a violation of natural and divine law or fell under what the bishop termed “ehrliche Rassenpflege” (p. 299). Here and throughout the volume, readers encounter Bornewasser and the other bishops as complex human beings, whose actions were shaped not just by their pastoral mission but also by their conservative and nationalist political views, traditional loyalty to authority, suspicion of democracy, and antisemitism. Peter Pfister aptly captured this sentiment when he posited that “Die graue Farbe ist das Symbol für die geschichtliche Situation, in der jeder Mensch lebt” (p. 45). This in turn raises the question of whether the bishops’ ambiguous responses to National Socialism modeled for the laity how to remain loyal both to the Catholic Church and an increasingly criminal regime, rather than immunized them against that regime.
Even as this question remains unanswered, such does not diminish the work’s overall importance. Maria Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld have produced an ambitious and significant work that does much to further our understanding of the grim and complex challenges bishops faced in Hitler’s Germany.
Zur Rezensentin:
Dr. Martina Cucchiara ist Assistant professor of history, Bluffton
University (USA).
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