Conway presents a landmark text on the history of German churches during the Nazi era.

First published in 1968, and subsequently translated into German, French, and Spanish, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945 has become a landmark text on the history of the German churches during the Nazi era. Based on a careful examination of documents dealing with church affairs from the Nazi archives that survived the collapse of the Third Reich, J.S. Conway gives the reader a detailed account of the methods by which Hitler and his followers sought to deal with the Christian churches in the 1930s and the 1940s. - Back cover.

How much did American Protestants know about the Nazi persecution of European Jews before and during Word War II? Very little, many of them claimed in the postwar years. Robert W. Ross challenges that answer in this analysis of the ways in which Protestant journals ranging from The Christian CenturyÓ to The Arkansas BaptistÓ reported and editorialized on the subject from 1933 through 1945.

”The subject matter of this book is controversial,” Guenter Lewy states plainly in his preface. To show the German Catholic Church’s congeniality with some of the goals of National Socialism and its gradual entrapment in Nazi policies and programs, Lewy describes the episcopate’s support of Hitler’s expansionist policies and its failures to speak out on the persecution of the Jews. To this tragic history Lewy brings new focus and research, illuminating one of the darkest corners of our century with scholarship and intellectual honesty in a riveting, and often painful, narrative.

In one of the darker aspects of Nazi Germany, churches and universities - generally respected institutions - grew to accept and support Nazi ideology. Complicity in the Holocaust describes how the state's intellectual and spiritual leaders enthusiastically partnered with Hitler's regime, becoming active participants in the persecution of Jews, effectively giving Germans permission to participate in the Nazi regime. Ericksen also examines Germany's deeply flawed yet successful postwar policy of denazification in these institutions.

This book closely examines the turmoil in the German Protestant churches in the immediate postwar years as they attempted to come to terms with the recent past. Reeling from the impact of war, the churches addressed the consequences of cooperation with the regime and the treatment of Jews. In Germany, the Protestant Church consisted of 28 autonomous regional churches. During the Nazi years, these churches formed into various alliances. One group, the German Christian Church, openly aligned itself with the Nazis. The rest were cautiously opposed to the regime or tried to remain noncommittal. The internal debates, however, involved every group and centered on issues of belief that were important to all. Important theologians such as Karl Barth were instrumental in pressing these issues forward. While not an exhaustive study of Protestantism during the Nazi years, A Church Divided breaks new ground in the discussion of responsibility, guilt, and the Nazi past.

An endlessly perplexing question of the twentieth century is how ?decent? people came to allow, and sometimes even participate in, the Final Solution. Fear obviously had its place, as did apathy. But how does one explain the silence of those people who were committed, active, and often fearless opponents of the Nazi regime on other grounds?those who spoke out against Nazi activities in many areas yet whose response to genocide ranged from tepid disquiet to avoidance? One such group was the Confessing Church, Protestants who often risked their own safety to aid Christian victims of Nazi oppression but whose response to pogroms against Jews was ambivalent.

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