Nazi Germany

The regime moved on the churches in its first months. In July 1933 it signed a concordat with the Vatican guaranteeing the freedom of Catholic worship and schooling in exchange for the withdrawal of clergy and Catholic organisations from politics, and the Centre Party, the main Catholic political vehicle, dissolved itself as the negotiations closed. In the Protestant churches the German Christian movement, which sought a church purged of what it called Jewish elements, with an Aryan Jesus and a shortened Bible, won control of most regional churches in the rigged elections of that summer and installed a Reich bishop. Doris Bergen's study shows how large and how popular that movement was, and how far its project ran ahead of anything the state required.

Opposition formed at once but narrowly. The Pastors' Emergency League and then the Confessing Church, whose Barmen Declaration of 1934 asserted that the church belongs to Christ alone, resisted the state's control of doctrine and appointments; most of its statements concerned church autonomy rather than the fate of Jews, and members who went further, among them Dietrich Bonhoeffer, acted largely on their own account. Martin Niemoller was imprisoned in 1937 and Bonhoeffer executed in 1945.

Rome protested the breaches of the concordat in the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, read from Catholic pulpits in Germany; and in 1941 the sermons of Bishop von Galen against the killing of disabled patients forced that programme out of its institutional form.

Alongside the churches the movement generated religious material of its own. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke traced the volkisch and ariosophical currents of Austria and Germany before 1914, occult racial doctrines that fed into the milieu from which the party grew, though he was careful to describe them as one tributary and not a cause. Himmler built the SS around a ceremonial of oaths, name-giving and midwinter rites and refitted the castle at Wewelsburg for it; Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century proposed a religion of blood against Rome; and the small German Faith Movement pressed for an explicitly non-Christian national religion. The party programme, meanwhile, professed a positive Christianity it never defined.

How to read all this is genuinely disputed. Richard Steigmann-Gall argued that many leading Nazis understood themselves as Christians of a kind and that treating the movement as simply anti-Christian is too easy, a case that drew sustained criticism; the more usual reading holds that the leadership tolerated the churches tactically and intended to supplant them once the war was won. Both positions are argued from the same speeches and diaries.

What is not disputed is the record against religious minorities: Jehovah's Witnesses were banned in 1933 and imprisoned in thousands for refusing military service and the salute, and the synagogues, schools, libraries and communal institutions of German and then European Jewry were destroyed.