Abstract
One of the many tragic aspects of the period between 1933 and 1945 is the failure of the Christian churches, in the United States and in Europe, to rescue more Jews from Nazism. This failure is especially striking since a few religious leaders in both North America and Europe tried to create genuine interfaith cooperation to help those fleeing Nazism. In addition, some of the earliest and most forthright condemnations of the persecution and genocide of the European Jews came from religious leaders, including Christian leaders, in both continents.
This chapter is based upon a paper originally delivered at the twenty-eighth Annual Scholars Conference on the Churches and the Holocaust at the University of Seattle, Washington, in 1998.
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Notes
Several studies on this topic already exist, and there is a considerable amount of literature on the specific issues that faced the churches on both continents. The works of Haim Genizi (American Apathy) and William Nawyn (American Protestantism’s Response to Germany’s Jews and Refugees, 1933–1941) offer detailed studies of Christian refugee attempts in the United States. J. N. Nichols’s study of religious refugee work (The Uneasy Alliance) has an analysis of work in this field before 1933, as well as an excellent chapter on the Nazi era. Robert Ross’s study of the U.S. religious press (So It Was True) during the period, while not about refugee efforts per se, offers much insight into the mentality and apathy of church members. In Europe, the role played by the churches in refugee work and rescue is usually discussed in the broader context of their ties to the Confessing Church and the church struggle and, during the war, to the German resistance. In addition to the numerous memoirs and accounts of individual Christian rescue activities, Adolf Freudenberg’s Rettet sie doch and Armin Boyens’s two-volume work Kirchenkampf und Ökumene look at the ecumenical efforts to help refugees. Winfried Meyer’s Unternehmen Sieben and Klemens von Klemperer’s German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad shed additional light on the German resistance’s attempts to use church connections to gain support abroad and to assist the small networks in Europe that were rescuing Jews from Nazism. More recently, two excellent studies of ecumenical networks in Europe have appeared: Uta Gerdes, Ökumenische Solidarität mit christlichen und jüdischen Verfolgten: Die Cimade in Vichy-Frankreich 1940–1944 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005)
Jörg Ernesti, Ökumene im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Bornifatius, 2007)
The minutes of U.S. Executive Committee of the World Alliance. Federal Council of Churches (FCC) papers, Presbyterian Historical Archive (PHA), RG 18 Box 44 F 10: “World Alliance for International Friendship, Correspondence, Jan 1917-Dec 1945.” For a study of earlier interfaith efforts in this country, see Lawrence G. Charap, “‘Accept the Truth from Whomsoever [sic] Gives It’: Jewish-Protestant Dialogue, Interfaith Alliances, and Pluralism, 1880–1910,” American Jewish History 89, no. 3 (Sept. 2001): 261–77.
Lerond Curry, Protestant-Catholic Relations in America: World War II through Vatican II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 23.
Andrew Chandler, ed., Brethren in Adversity: Bishop George Bell, the Church of England, and the Crisis of German Protestantism, 1933–1939 (Suffolk: Church of England Record Society, 1997), 3.
Adolf Keller, Church and State on the European Continent (London: Epworth, 1936), 361.
See A. James Reimer, The Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Tillich Debate: A Study in the Political Ramifications of Theology, Toronto Studies in Theology, vol. 42. (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1989).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Communion of the Saints (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 189.
William J. Schmidt, Architect of Unity: A Biography of Samuel McCrea Cavert (New York: Friendship Press, 1978), 120.
Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad 1938–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 45.
See Boyens, Kirchenkampf und Oikumene 1933–1939 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1969), 43–44
Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times, New revised English edition, ed. Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 315.
See John S. Conway, “Pacifism and Patriotism: Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze,” in Nicosia and Stokes, eds., Germans against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition, and Resistance in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 1990), 91–92
J. Bruce Nichols, The Uneasy Alliance: Religion, Refugee work, and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 53.
Armin Boyens, Kirchenkampf und Ökumene 1939–1945 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1973), 45–46.
Henry Feingold, “Who Shall Bear Guilt for the Holocaust: The Human Dilemma,” in Michael Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust, vol. 8, Bystanders to the Holocaust (Westport: Meckler, 1989) 141–142.
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© 2009 Maria Mazzenga
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Barnett, V. (2009). Christian and Jewish Interfaith Efforts During the Holocaust: The Ecumenical Context. In: Mazzenga, M. (eds) American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623309_2
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