by Peter Watson
THE NAZI FORM OF CHRISTIANITY
For a while after taking office, Hitler was careful to offer some comfort to the churches. He confided to Goebbels that the best way to treat them was to “hold back for the present and coolly strangle any attempts at impudence or interference in the affairs of state…”37 In reality the Führer was contemptuous of the Lutheran clergy, “insignificant little people…They have neither a religion they can take seriously nor a great position to defend, like Rome.”38
Catholicism, however, as this comment makes clear, was a different matter. Hitler recognized the Catholic Church’s institutional force and, despite the fact that Pope Pius XI had condemned Mussolini’s species of fascism in 1931 as “pagan worship of the state,” the Führer signed a concordat with the Vatican two years later. On the Vatican side, the agreement was chiefly the work of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state and the future Pius XII, who had been nuncio in Munich in the 1920s and had lived in Berlin. Pacelli managed to retain autonomy for the German see and some control over education, at the price of diplomatic recognition for the new regime.*
The Nazis moved swiftly in religious education. New regulations stipulated that all parents must enroll each of their children in religious instruction. Seven Catholic feast days were sanctioned as public holidays, and Nazi Party members who had left the church were ordered to rejoin. Until 1936 the German army stipulated that every serving soldier must belong to either the Catholic or Evangelical denominations.39
But a lot of this, in retrospect, can be seen as tactical maneuvering. Many thought that the real founding moment of Nazism was the Nietzschean “death of God.”40 More recently, however, Richard Steigmann-Gall has shown how the National Socialists—Hitler as much as anyone—never really followed through on their earlier intentions, in particular the much-advertised attempt to introduce, or reintroduce, “pagan” ideas. Instead, the original plan of the Nazis in the religious sphere was for a concept expressed as “positive Christianity,” which had three key ideas: “the spiritual struggle against the Jews, the promulgation of a new social ethic, and a syncretism designed to bridge the confessional divide between Protestant and Catholic.”
Hitler, like many leading Nazis, held the view that Jesus was not a Jew and that the Old Testament should be discarded from Christian teaching.41 The second aspect of Positives Christentum (Positive Christianity), its social ethic, was embodied in the phrase “public need before private greed.” This perhaps inevitably glib slogan enabled the Nazis to present themselves in an ethical-moral light in regard to their supervision of the economy. They could advertise as one of their main aims the desire to end class strife in Germany and create, or more properly re-create, a “People’s Community,” an organic, harmonious whole.42 The final element of Positive Christianity, the attempt to create a “new syncretism,” was in some ways the most important aspect, because many leading Nazis viewed the divide between Catholics and Protestants as the greatest stumbling block to the national unity they needed. Himmler put this view most clearly when he said, “We have to be on our guard against a world power which makes use of Christianity and its organisation to oppose our own national resurrection by methods of which we’re everywhere conscious.” He added that he was anti-clerical but not anti-Christian.43 The elevation of the Volk, the community, as a mystical, almost divine entity, was the main device to overcome sectarian divide and, at the same time, a political maneuver to combat the rival analyses of Marx and the materialist economists of the West.44 More than theology, or paganism (which many leading Nazis, despite Himmler, thought was laughable), Positive Christianity stressed active Christianity—helping the Volk, preserving the sanctity of the family, keeping healthy, practicing anti-Semitism, getting involved in the Winter Relief program to feed the poor—rather than reflection. Indeed, these activities seemed designed to prevent contemplation, and again this suggests that the Nazis’ real worry over Christianity was that it represented the most powerful force that might be used against them.
NAZI THEOLOGIANS
By no means all religious leaders were as courageous as Barth or Bonhoeffer, and some theologians accommodated themselves—and their theology—to the new regime. Robert Ericksen has studied three who, he says, advanced theology at the time but now seem little more than opportunists.
Gerhard Kittel was professor of New Testament Theology at Tübingen. Born, like the other two, in 1888, he was the son of a famous Old Testament scholar, Rudolf Kittel. Gerhard joined the National Socialists in May 1933 and his main theological contribution concerned the Jewish background to the origins of Christianity. He wrote that Jesus, “if he was a Galilean,” might have had “a couple of drops” of non-Jewish blood in his veins.45 Over time, throughout the Weimar years, Kittel became more and more anti-Semitic to the point where, in June 1933, he delivered a public lecture in Tübingen titled The Jewish Question in which he considered “what should be done with the Jews in Germany?” He ruled out extermination, but on the grounds of expedience—“It has not worked before and it will not work now.” He rejected Zionism and assimilation and, on account of the Diaspora, opted for “guest status,” the forcible separation of the Jews from the people with whom they lived, including the prohibition of “mixed” marriages.46 The theological basis for his argument was the “transition” that took place in Jewry between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., since which time the race had “degenerated.” The Diaspora, he said, made the Jews a “perpetual problem” for their neighbors, one consequence being that they were always “trying for World Power.” His lecture caused an uproar and a heated exchange with Martin Buber. Theologically, Kittel was looking for a “spiritual basis” for anti-Semitism. He was imprisoned in 1945.
Paul Althaus (1888–1966) achieved distinction as a Lutheran scholar at Göttingen. He believed God speaks to man through nature and history, and he derived a concept of Ur-Offenbarung or natural revelation, one element of which may be summed up by saying that “God created and approves the political status quo.”47 God’s will, according to Althaus, equals the situation at any given moment, and obedience toward God means accepting one’s allotted position in life “as handed down by years of tradition.” A second element was his idea of Ordnung, order, a primary element of which was the Volk. The Volk, he said, were ordained by God according to a mysterious process: “We have no eternal life if we do not live for our Volk.”48 A third element was a return to Luther’s idea of the two realms, the kingdom of God, ruled by love, and the kingdom of man, ruled by the sword. All these came together, he said, in a great German “turning point,” the National Socialist völkisch movement. Althaus was removed from teaching at Erlangen at the end of the war but reinstated a few months later.
Emanuel Hirsch was also the son of a pastor. He studied with both Althaus and Paul Tillich and theologically was much exercised by what he saw as the crisis of modernity. His philosophy, first revealed in his book, Deutschlands Schicksal (Germany’s Fate), published in 1920, was that revelation teaches us universal values and “internal certainty.” Two of the “certainties” that Hirsch identified were the failure of rationalism and the evolution of the state. These were not particularly new ideas in a German context, as will be apparent, but they had never had a theological stamp of approval before. In particular, he thought that “Germany can now create a new form of authoritarianism in which people freely give their obedience to the state so long as the state properly represents the Volk.” Christianity, he said, fitted admirably into “the German concept of leader and follower.”49
As Robert Ericksen has observed, Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch were not isolated or eccentric figures. They were probably typical of many others who held their tongues.
Despite such eloquent and sophisticated ideas and rationalizations for Nazi practices from the Protestant theologians, assaults on Christianity grew in intensity as Nazi confidence solidified.50 Having begun by insisting on religious instruction, attendance at school prayers was later
made optional, and religion was dropped as a subject from school-leaving examinations. Then priests were forbidden to teach religious classes. In 1935, by Bryan Moynahan’s count, the Gestapo arrested 700 Protestant pastors for condemning Nazi neopaganism from the pulpit. In 1937 the Gestapo declared that the education of candidates for the ministry of the Confessing Church was illegal and Martin Niemöller, its leading light, was condemned to a concentration camp, refusing the offer of release because it required his collaboration.51 (The medical orderly in Sachsenhausen found him to be “a man of iron.”)*
In 1936 the assault on Catholic monasteries and convents was begun—they were accused of illegal currency trading and sexual offenses. In that year too, the Nuremberg rallies took on an aura of paganism, where the songs—or hymns—were redolent pastiches of traditional Christian worship:
Führer my Führer
Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress
I thank thee for my daily bread
Abide thou long with me, forsake me not
Führer my Führer, my faith and light.
This was built on by the Nazi-backed German Faith Movement, one of its aims being to “dechristianize” rituals and festivals. At weddings, for example, the bride and groom would be blessed by “Mother Earth, Father Sky and all the beneficent powers of the air,” with extracts from Nordic sagas being read out. The celebration of Christmas—the word itself being replaced by “Julfest,” yuletide—was exchanged for a “festival of the winter solstice” held on December 21. The cross was never abolished; attempts were made in 1937 to take it out of school classrooms, but the measure had to be rescinded (perhaps confirming Himmler’s view that Christianity was the only force powerful enough to threaten Nazi aims). The Vatican complained formally to Berlin on almost a monthly basis, but the regime took next to no notice.
From Hitler’s point of view, probably his greatest achievement was in nullifying the oppositional potential that the church—had it so minded—could have mustered.
37.
The Fruits, Failures, and Infamy of German Wartime Science
Shortly after war broke out in September 1939, Paul Schmitthenner, the rector of the University of Heidelberg, announced that the university would become “der Waffenschmied der Wehrmacht des Reiches,” the armorer of the Reich’s army. His rhetoric was supported by the powers-that-be in that, throughout the war, academic research—and not just “hard” science—was well funded. The budget of the Education Ministry rose from 11 million Reichsmarks in 1935 to 97 million in 1942. The research budget of the Interior Ministry likewise rose from 43 million Reichsmarks in 1935 to 111 million in 1942, while the funding for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society jumped from 5.6 million Reichsmarks in 1933 to 14.3 million in 1944.1
The universities were temporarily closed toward the end of 1939 but Heidelberg was one of those allowed to reopen in January 1940, when courses picked up where they had left off, offering “Frontkursen” and research to support hostilities. The language and literature seminar was recast “to strengthen the nation’s intellectual and spiritual powers of resistance” and courses about Britain reworked to explain why she was “the great enemy.” In politics and history, courses were introduced that highlighted the links between geopolitics, war, and race, such as “East Asia as Living Space,” “Foreign People’s Economics,” and “The Nature of Journalism Abroad.” Not to be left out, the theology faculty offered “War and Religion in the History of Germany Piety.”2 In early 1940, Paul Ritterbusch, the rector of the University of Kiel, masterminded a series of sixty-seven publications on war-related issues, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Titles included Great Britain: Hinter-land of World Jewry and Economic Liberalism as a System of the British Worldview. In a sense this was a re-run of some of the arguments broached in World War I, that Britain was shallow and hypocritical, that the English national character knew no calling higher than exploitative profit making. Another theme was Alsace which, it was claimed, was a much more successful culture when it was German than when it was French.
There was not much resistance inside the universities, save for the Weisse Rose (White Rose) group in Munich. This very small group—its core consisted of five students and a philosophy professor, who distributed six different leaflets in 1942 and 1943 calling for the overthrow of Hitler—was eventually found out, and all were beheaded by the Gestapo. The text of their sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany, and copies dropped by Allied aircraft later in 1943. At Heidelberg there was a group of between thirty and seventy professors (membership varied), led by Alfred Weber and his sister-in-law Marianne Weber, many of whom had been dismissed but kept working and met to exchange ideas.3 Some were conservative rather than radical, but they formed what was later called “Resistenz,” a somewhat elusive term that involved refusing to accept Nazi ideology without publicly criticizing the regime’s policies and could hardly be said to involve any kind of bravery. Many were reduced to what Leo Strauss later called “writing between the lines.”4
Despite Leo Szilard’s warnings, on March 18, 1939, the French scientists, the Joliot-Curies, insisted on publication in Nature of their observation that nuclear fission emitted on average 2.42 neutrons for every neutron absorbed, meaning that energy was released in sufficient quantities to maintain a chain reaction. In Germany, the article was read by Paul Harteck, a thirty-seven-year-old chemist at the University of Hamburg and an expert on neutrons. Harteck immediately recognized the implications of the paper, and he approached the weapons research office of the German Army Ordnance, to say that a weapon of mass destruction, derived from uranium fission, was a distinct possibility. After the war, as John Cornwell tells the story, Harteck said it was only the “opportunistic quest for scarce funding” for research that caused him to set the ball rolling, rather than belligerence.5 Whatever the truth of that, the effect was the same.
In any case, by then Werner Heisenberg had already discussed the possibilities of an atomic bomb, and Abram Esau, a physicist in Bernhard Rust’s Department of Education, had called a meeting to set up a “Uranium Club,” prompted by physicists at Göttingen who also saw the potential of nuclear power in uranium.6 A second, more important meeting was held at the office of Army Ordnance in Berlin in September 1939, the month the war began, at which Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Hans Geiger, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Paul Harteck were all in attendance.7 The “club” discussed nuclear power in general, in addition to its use as a weapon, and as a result the KWI for Physics, in Berlin, was requisitioned for war work.
This sounds decisive, but the uranium team in Germany was never to exceed a hundred members, compared with tens of thousands in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in the United States. Whereas Germany had the largest supply of uranium reserves—at the Joachimsthal mines in now-occupied Czechoslovakia—it had no cyclotron for the study of the properties of nuclear reactions.
The development of the German bomb—or rather the pace at which its research developed—has been the subject of much controversy (not least in Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen). The Germans concentrated in the beginning on isotope separation though later they explored plutonium. These approaches involved the participation of two equally controversial and even mysterious characters, Werner Heisenberg and Fritz Houtermans. Heisenberg would become notorious for his meetings with Niels Bohr in 1940, in which the two men fenced over how far each side had gone in the race to produce a bomb, and for whether or not Heisenberg was letting Bohr know that Germany was exploring nuclear power and whether he, Heisenberg, was trying to slow down developments. Houtermans was a brilliant physicist who in 1941 confirmed that a chain reaction was possible using plutonium, element 94. Houtermans had trained at Göttingen but, having socialist sympathies, had gone to work in the Ukraine, despite Stalin’s purges. There he had been arrested as a German spy, had given a false confession and been imprisoned.8 Released during the brief Hitler-Stalin pact, he returned to Germany where he was suspected of s
till having leftist leanings but was given a job by Max von Laue, helping another physicist, Manfred von Ardenne, study chain reactions. After reading the Joliot-Curie paper in Nature in 1939, Houtermans concluded that plutonium was a possibility for a chain reaction and was so disturbed when his calculations confirmed this that he smuggled a message out of the country with a refugee bound for America. Although he didn’t know how far the Allies were advanced in their bomb, his message had two elements—to “hurry” and to say that Heisenberg was trying to slow things down.9
Given the actions of these two men, it is perhaps not surprising that the German bomb project was not successful, though there were other reasons for the failure. After the occupation of Norway, the world’s only heavy water plant, at Vermork, became available to the Germans, but when they tried to transport a large load south, the Danish Resistance (at the request of British Intelligence) blew up and sank the ferry carrying the canisters (several Danes lost their lives in the sinking).10 When Speer took over as armaments minister (from Fritz Todt, who had been killed in a mysterious airplane crash), he told Heisenberg he could have a cyclotron bigger than anyone else; Heisenberg replied that the Germans were so inexperienced that they would first need to learn on a smaller one.11 Nor could they use the one in occupied Paris, he said, because the conditions of secrecy hampered their work, all of which has been used to suggest he was deliberately sabotaging Germany’s nuclear program.12 Speer eventually decided, or said he decided (after the war) that Germany could not have a bomb before 1947.13 Since it was consuming chromium ore at such a pace that the war could not be prosecuted beyond January 1946, and since the sums needed were also draining its rocket program (much nearer to Hitler’s heart), Germany’s attempt to construct an atom bomb was abrogated in the autumn of 1942.14
