Stukes
Lecturer at Erskine College Asks "Were the Nazis
Christians?"
The ranks of Germany's Nazi regime included many
Christians, and perverted versions of Christian
themes pervaded Nazi propaganda, according to Dr.
Doris Bergen of the University of Notre Dame, who
delivered this year's Joseph T. Stukes Lecture at
Erskine College Nov. 8. Bergen illustrated the
tension inherent in her topic, “Twisted Cross:
Were the Nazis Christians?” by describing three
scenes, two from the Second World War, and one from a
Vermont teachers' workshop Bergen conducted in 1994.
The first scene is a small town in the Ukraine in
the summer of 1941, where the Nazis had sent a mobile
killing squad to rid the town of its Jewish
population. The squad had duly killed all the adult
Jews, but, uncertain what to do with the Jewish
children, kept them captive in a school building
without food or water in the August heat. German
military chaplains, Catholic and Protestant,
intervened on behalf of the children, who were
nonetheless taken from the school to be killed.
“Christians were involved in the center of
things—where killing occurred,” said
Bergen.
The second scene is a transit camp in the
Netherlands in December of 1942, the peak year of the
Holocaust killings. Bergen said that a group of S.S.
men in the camp took time out from their grisly tasks
to celebrate Christmas. “We know that they sang
Christmas carols paying homage to the child in the
manger,” said Bergen. They then resumed their
work, arranging the transportation of Dutch Jews to
the death camps.
The third scene is a 1994 teachers' workshop led
by Bergen. Bergen gave the participants
“identity cards” in an exercise designed to
trace a chain of causality for the events chronicled
in The Diary of Anne Frank. One was given a
card for Adolf Hitler, one for the member of the
group in hiding who made too much noise, one for the
neighbor who betrayed the group, and so on.
Bergen asked the teachers to line up in order of
how significant a role they believed the person
described on their “identity card” had
played in the tragic outcome of the story. A teacher
who had received a card describing “a pastor who
preached anti-Semitic sermons” took a place at
the head of the line “and refused to
budge,” said Bergen, “though the teacher
with the card designating `Adolf Hitler'
understandably thought she should be first.” The
teacher at the head of the line saw “the
importance of moral sanction as a foundation for
atrocities,” Bergen said.
The question of whether the Nazis were Christians
can be approached statistically, theoretically, or
institutionally, Bergen explained, and each approach
yields its own answer.
Statistically and institutionally, many Nazis were
Christians, dues-paying members of established
churches (97 percent of the German population was so
identified in 1933, 95 percent in 1940), and both the
Catholic and Protestant churches remained
institutionally intact under Nazi rule.
On a theoretical level, the Nazis were not
Christians. Many leading Nazis were explicitly
anti-Christian and wanted to destroy the Christian
church—“Hitler's vision for the future had
no room for the Christian church,” said Bergen.
But there were some theoretical connections between
Nazism and Christianity. Nazi ideologues used
Christian symbols to promote ideas of racial purity
and German expansion, describing Hitler as a savior
and referring to a German `exodus' from the `bondage'
of the Treaty of Versailles. The Passion Play,
extremely popular during the Nazi years, was
performed as a struggle between an Aryan Jesus and a
Jewish Judas.
The so-called German Christian movement injected
Nazi ideology into Christianity, denying the Jewish
ancestry of Jesus, denigrating the Hebrew scriptures,
trying to create a Christianity that was “Aryan,
German, manly, and anti-Jewish,” said Bergen.
Within 10 years of its inception, the German
Christian movement controlled theological education
as well as regional church government, affecting all
Protestants, even members of the “Confessing
Church,” the group opposing the German Christian
movement. As for the Catholic clergy who might have
opposed the Nazis, the 1933 Concordat with the
Vatican “pulled the rug out from under Catholic
political opposition,” said Bergen.
A history of Christian anti-Jewishness laid the
groundwork for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazi
years, and the statistical and institutional presence
of Christians in the Third Reich was strong.
“Not all Christians were Nazi perpetrators,
but all the perpetrators were in some sense
Christians,” said Bergen. “The question of
whether the Nazis were Christians is an important one
to consider in coming to a responsible understanding
of the past.” She challenged her audience to
look at recent examples of genocidal
atrocities—those in Rwanda, for example—
and examine the involvement of Christians in those
killings. These troubling issues are critical
“for all people of faith.”
An associate professor of history at Notre Dame,
Bergen teaches courses on modern Germany, European
history, European women's history, and the Holocaust.
She is the author of Twisted Cross: The German
Christian Movement in the Third Reich, published
by the University of North Carolina Press in 1996,
and has also written numerous articles and essays on
issues related to religion, ethnicity, and gender in
the Nazi era in Europe.
Bergen is presently completing a study of German
military chaplains in World War II. She is also
working on a short textbook entitled Race and
Space: Nazism, War, and the Holocaust as
well as on a project about the ethnic German
communities of eastern Europe and their roles in the
Second World War.
Bergen earned her B.A. degree at the University of
Saskatchewan, Canada, and her M.A. degree at the
University of Alberta, also in Canada, and received
the Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill in 1991. She has taught at the University
of Vermont and has lectured in the United States and
Europe. She is a member of the academic advisory
board of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C., and recently received a grant from the German
Marshall Fund of the United States.
The Joseph T. Stukes Lecture Series brings a
distinguished lecturer in history to Erskine College
each year. This fund was established by students and
colleagues of Dr. Stukes, who served as Professor of
History (1966-74) and Vice President for Academic
Affairs (1966-71) at Erskine College.
Erskine College was founded by the Associate
Reformed Presbyterian Church in 1839 and has been
dedicated to “Christian Commitment and
Excellence in Learning” for 160 years.
