The Holocaust was carried out in a Europe that was overwhelmingly Christian. The Catholic Church and the Protestant churches of Germany and the occupied countries were not bystanders at a distance: they were institutions embedded in the same societies from which the perpetrators came, with access to information, with moral authority, and with choices to make. With rare exceptions, they chose accommodation over public resistance. The record is one of the most troubling aspects of the history of the genocide.
Theological antisemitism and its consequences
Christian hostility to Jews predated the Nazi movement by nearly two millennia. The charge of deicide, the teaching that Jews bore collective responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ, had been embedded in Catholic theology since the patristic period. Medieval canon law had produced many of the discriminatory structures, the ghetto, the yellow badge, the exclusion from guilds and professions, that the Nazis later redeployed in secular form. The Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965 formally rejected the deicide charge, acknowledging implicitly that the Church’s own teaching had contributed to the conditions that made the Holocaust possible.
This does not make the churches responsible for the Holocaust. Nazi racial antisemitism was a pseudo-scientific secular doctrine that departed from traditional Christian religious antisemitism in important respects. But the centuries of Christian teaching that had defined Jews as alien, dangerous, and deserving of suspicion created a cultural environment in which racial antisemitism could find ready purchase, and in which many Christians found little in their faith to motivate resistance.
The Catholic Church
Pope Pius XII, who led the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958, chose a policy of public silence about the deportations and killings. His defenders argue that private diplomatic interventions were more effective than public condemnation would have been, and cite the case of the Dutch Catholic bishops: their 1942 pastoral letter protesting deportations led the Germans to extend deportations to Catholic Jews who had previously been exempt, including Edith Stein, who was killed at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942. His critics point to the failure of the Vatican to use its moral authority at any moment when it might have made a difference, and to the Vatican’s postwar role in providing escape routes for Nazi war criminals through the ratlines.
At the local level the Catholic record was mixed. Individual priests and Catholic institutions sheltered Jews at personal risk in France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In Poland, where the Catholic Church was also a national institution under occupation, the record is more complicated: some clergy helped, some actively colluded with denunciations, and the institutional church was largely silent.
The Protestant churches in Germany
The German Protestant churches split under Nazi pressure. The German Christian movement, a pro-Nazi faction, sought to purge the Old Testament from Christian scripture and to Aryanise the church. The Confessing Church, whose most prominent figure was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, resisted the German Christian movement on theological grounds: it objected to Nazi interference in church doctrine, though it did not consistently object to Nazi persecution of Jews. The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, issued by the Confessing Church in October 1945, acknowledged a general failure of resistance without specifying the failure to protect Jews.
Bonhoeffer himself moved from theological resistance to active involvement in the conspiracy against Hitler and was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, three weeks before the German surrender. He remains the most significant Protestant figure of principled resistance to the Nazi regime, though his resistance was primarily political rather than specifically motivated by the fate of the Jews.
Exceptions
The exceptions matter. The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France, led by the Huguenot pastor André Trocmé, sheltered between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews during the occupation. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church resisted the deportation of Bulgarian Jews in 1943, contributing to the survival of most of Bulgaria’s Jewish population. Individual clergy across Europe provided false papers, hiding places, and escape routes at significant personal risk. These exceptions are documented on their own pages elsewhere on this site. They demonstrate that resistance was possible, which makes the silence of the institutions harder to excuse.
See also
Sources
- Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Indiana University Press, 2000
- Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, McGraw-Hill, 1964
- Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1992
- Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, Fortress Press, 2000
- Robert Eriksen and Susannah Heschel (eds), Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, Fortress Press, 1999
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Churches and the Holocaust, encyclopedia.ushmm.org