The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 [Paperback]

Richard Steigmann-Gall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 12, 2004

Analyzing the previously unexplored religious views of the Nazi elite, Richard Steigmann-Gall argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it. In contrast, Steigmann-Gall demonstrates that many in the Nazi movement believed the contours of their ideology were based on a Christian understanding of Germany's ills and their cure. He also explores the struggle the "positive Christians" waged with the party's paganists and demonstrates that this was not just a conflict over religion, but over the very meaning of Nazi ideology itself. Richard Steigmann-Gall is assistant professor of history at Kent Sate University. He earned his BA and MA at the University of Michigan, and PhD at the University of Toronto. He has earned fellowships and awards from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Israel, and the Max-Planck Institut fur Geschichte in Göttingen. His research interests include modern Germany, Fascism, and religion and society in Europe, and he has published articles in Central European History, German History, Social History, and Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A number of studies have examined the relationship between Nazism and the German Christian churches (most notably Klaus Scholder's well-known The Churches and the Third Reich). There are, of course, also studies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth and others that explore the relationship between the Reich and the church in terms of the Christian protest against Nazism. Steigmann-Gall, a history professor at Kent State, adds a new chapter to the story by investigating the way that Christianity functioned within the Nazi party itself. Using party pamphlets and writings of key members, he demonstrates that as early as 1920 the group declared that it represented the standpoint of a positive Christianity, which provided the tenets of its anti-Semitic and antimaterialist stance. Many of the Nazi elite believed that their own party doctrine and Christianity shared common themes such as the opposition of good against evil, God against the devil and the struggle for national salvation from the Jews and Marxism. This positive Christianity enfolded both Catholicism and Protestantism, for the Nazis believed that confessional disunity presented the greatest challenge to national unity. Steigmann-Gall examines the leaders of the party and shows how many of them contributed to the view of an intimate relationship between Nazism and Christianity. He also explores how the Nazis identified the Jews with the Devil and believed that God would liberate them from this evil. Although this revised dissertation plods along in workmanlike fashion, Steigmann-Gall uncovers new information and helpful insights about the period.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Uncovers new information and helpful insights..." Publishers Weekly

"In the crowded field of Third Reich History, The Holy Reich really does have something original to say...The Holy Reich should prompt a critical re-evaluation of the nature of Nazi ideology...an uncomfortably thought-provoking work of admirable scholarship." Times Higher Education Supplement

"The Holy Reich is a brilliant and provocative work that will recast the whole debate on Christianity and Nazism. We have come to realize that Christianity embraced Nazism more than we used to believe. Now, in a work of deep revisionist import, Richard Steigmann-Gall shows us that the embrace was more than reciprocated." Helmut Walser Smith, author of The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

"The Holy Reich is both deeply researched and thoughtfully argued. It is the first comparative analysis of the religious beliefs of leading Nazis and a timely reminder of the intimate relations between liberal Protestantism and National Socialism. This is an important and original book by a talented young scholar that deserves as wide a readership as possible." Michael Burleigh, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University and author of The Third Reich: A New History

"There has been a huge amount of research on the attitude of the Christian Churches to the Nazis and their policies, but astonishingly until now there has been no thorough study of the Nazis' own religious beliefs. Richard Steigmann-Gall has now provided it. He has trawled through a lot of very turgid literature to show that active Nazis from the leadership down to the lower levels of the party were bitterly opposed to the Catholic Church, but had a much more ambivalent attitude to Protestantism and to Christianity in a wider sense...Far from being uniformly anti-Christian, Nazism contained a wide variety of religious beliefs, and Steigmann-Gall has performed a valuable service in providing a meticulously documented account of them in all their bizarre variety." Richard J. Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge

"The Holy Reich is both deeply researched and thoughtfully argued. It is the first comparative analysis of the religious beliefs of leading Nazis and a timely reminder of the intimate relations between liberal Protestantism and National Socialism. This is an important and original book by a talented young scholar that deserves as wide a readership as possible." Michael Burleigh, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University and author of The Third Reich: A New History, winner of Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2001

"A vast and important subject has finally received the comprehensive analysis it deserves. Steigman-Gall's fundamental argument--that the Nazi movement was both intimately and intricately, positively and negatively related to Christianity--will hearten those who see Nazi Germany not as an efficient totalitarian system, but as a nonsystem of constant institutional and personal conflicts.... Highly recommended." Choice

"Steigmann-Gall makes an important argument and supports it energetically and resourcefully" The Catholic Historical Review - Doris I. Bergen, University of Notre Dame

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (July 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521603528
• ISBN-13: 978-0521603522
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #444,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hitler's god?, November 22, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Hardcover)

Recent years have brought forth several efforts to examine the attitude of Christian leaders in Germany toward the Nazis as they came to power in Germany. Equally interesting, but much more difficult to uncover, is the attitude of the Nazi leaders towards Christianity. As Richard Steigmann-Gall makes clear in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, the difficulty comes from the fact that there was not a unified "Nazi view" of Christianity. Some Nazis were pagans, others considered themselves to be Christians, and many shifted their views over time. As for the official position of the regime, Steigmann-Gall finds no evidence of a Nazi plan to rid Germany of all forms of Christianity. Rather, the plan was to eliminate Catholicism and to reshape Protestantism. Indeed, many National Socialists actually considered themselves to be good Christians. They were able to do so because they rejected the traditions and lines of authority within the existing Protestant and Catholic churches. Thus freed from hierarchy and tradition, they were able to interpret Scripture according to their own views. Bolstered by some extremely harsh writings by their German hero Martin Luther, the Nazis reformulated biblical teachings to serve their racial doctrine. They elected a hand-picked Reich bishop to unify Protestant Churches into a single new confession of "German Christians" whom they then hoped to exploit. This plan for "positive Christianity" failed, however, because too many conservative Protestant ministers rejected the core values of Nazism. By 1937, it became clear that the Nazis would not be able to construct a single German, Protestant Church, and relations soured. Hitler's position in all this is somewhat ambiguous. His few clear anti-Christian statements relate to specifically Catholic doctrine, not to Christianity more generally. One is left with the impression that Hitler fully rejected the teachings of the Catholic faith into which he had been baptized as a child, but that he never truly rejected his own warped view of Protestant Christianity. An extremely valuable contribution. THis is a First Things review

41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Christianity-Nazi style, May 27, 2003

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Hardcover)

Richard Steigmann-Gall's new book offers an important re-evaluation of German history. For years scholars have argued that Nazism was fundamentally anti-Christian. In recent years we have become more aware of the moral failure of Christianity to oppose the Nazis, whether it is over the recent controversies over the Vatican and the Pope, or from the disproportionate support given the Nazis by rural Protestant believers, or from the complete failure of German chaplins to oppose war crimes while assigned to the Wehrmacht. Now Steigmann-Gall reminds us that the Nazis themselves were not uniformly, or even mainly, anti-Christian.

Steigmann-Gall starts off with telling us that one prominent Nazi war criminal, Erich Koch, was in 1932 the president of a provincial Protestant Church synod. Other Nazis were also Christian believers, such as William Kube and Walter Buch, the head of the Nazi Party Court, and Martin Boorman's father-in-law. More typically, many Nazis were believes in "positive Christianity," which was fiercely nationalist and anti-Jewish. Goebbels spoke of the struggle "between Christ and Marx," and Hitler spoke well of Jesus (supposedly an Aryan Christ) and The Ten Commandments to the end of his life. Goering had his children baptized, as well as Goebbels. These Nazi Christians disliked Catholicism-it was too powerful and internationalist a movement to be incorporated into Nazi doctrine-but at least until 1937 many Nazis were keen with working on organizing the Protestants into a more unified Church. Nor was this simply a sign of the Nazi lust for power. There were many elements within German Protestant doctrine that made a rapport with the Nazis plausible-a shared anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, nationalism and pseudo-socialist demagoguery. Steigmann-Gall, in his discussion of the struggle between the "German Christians" and the less Nazi "Confessing Church," makes good use of his knowledge of the chaos and confusion, the polyocracy of the Nazi state. He points out that many of the "German Christians" moves were made on their own initiative, not the Nazi Party's, that many Nazis, including Hitler, were opposed to their rashness and crudity, that much of the opposition to their hamhandedness came from loyal and viciously anti-Semitic Nazis from Franconia. He also reminds us of the fundamental loyalty of most of the Confessing Church. (No Protestant publicly protested the Euthanasia campaign and one Confessing Church member lauded that only 0.3% of clergymen were non-Aryan.)

There was a paganist element among the Nazis from the very beginning, and it continued right to the end. For much of the twenties and thirties this was personified by the figure of Alfred Rosenberg, whose sinister stare and vicious ideology blurred the fact, as Steigmann-Gall shows, that he was a stupendously ineffective politician and player in the Nazi regime. Indeed, refutations of his pompous "Myth of the Twentieth Century" were allowed to circulate freely in the thirties. Heinrich Himmler was also a powerful "pagan", and it is striking that both Hitler and Goebbels viewed his nostalgia for the Ancient German Past and his enthusiasm for Occultist and Asian religions as very silly. As time went on there would be bans on clergymen becoming Nazis, and restrictions on SS members holding Church Office. But these restrictions also applied to professional pagans. In the war years, Martin Boorman, the power beyond the throne asserted his own fierce anti-Christian views. These views seemed to be based, as Steigmann-Gall points out, not on any coherent Nazi anti-Christianity, but on spite towards his in-laws. Nor was he always successful in his struggles in the Nazi's chaotic bureaucracy. Goebbels prevented him from having Bishop Galen executed for denouncing euthanasia, and also prevented him from removing religious music from the air. Even Boorman could not remove churches altogether from his dark plans for the Warthegau. Himmler's deputy, Heydrich, was also a powerful pagan, but after his assassination his replacement, Kaltenbrunner, eased snooping of Christians noticeably. Steigmann-Gall makes some important points about Hitler's rage against Christainity. First off, Hitler was not an atheist, despised atheism and of course despised the Enlightenment Liberalism and Marxist Socialism that are the main sources for modern atheism. Secondly, one should be cautious about Hitler's "Table Talk." Richard Carrier has argued that it has been unscrupulously translated: while in English Hitler denounces Christianity as the greatest idiocy, in the actual German it is clear that Hitler's target is transubstantiation. Steigmann-Gall points out that Hitler had the habit of telling people what they wanted to hear, and his most venomous comments were made in front of Bormann and Himmler. Third, Steigmann-Gall also makes the suggestion that instead of seeing Hitler's anger at Christianity as a revelation of Nazism's basic antipathy, it should be seen as the bitter rage of a defeated megalomaniac, a rage Hitler also directed at the army, some of his closest associates, and indeed the German people themselves.

There is one major flaw with the book. "Positive Christians" spoke of getting rid of the Old Testament and described Jesus as an Aryan. While Anti-Semitism can be compatible with Christianity, these beliefs clearly aren't. Steigmann-Gall does not really deal with this point. It is not enough for him to show that many Liberal Protestants had a dim view of Judaism. The connections he does draw, between the liberal scholar von Harnack's sympathy with the anti-Jewish heretic "Marcion" are too small and too obscure to bear the weight Steigmann-Gall places on them. Liberal biblical scholarship clearly showed that Jesus was a Jew. How anyone could have thought otherwise is not something that Steigmann-Gall explains. Nevertheless, this is an important revision that simply goes beyond what leading Nazis happened to think. Instead of viewing Nazi anti-Semitism as a new "racial" variety we can see its continuity with other religious and conservative ideologies. Instead of viewing totalitarianism as fundamentally anti-Christian we can see it is as similar to other expressions of "post-Christian" moralisms. It is, as Steigmann Gall's says "much closer to us than we dare allow ourselves to believe."

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nazis as "Positive Christians", April 21, 2004

By 

Fr Phillip Bloom "parish priest" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Hardcover)

In his book *The Holy Reich* Richard Steigmann-Gall argues persuasively that the Nazis did not reject Christianity, but reinterpreted it to fit their own ideology. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most Nazi leaders, including Hitler, were not keen on reviving paganism. Rather, they talked about something which at first glance seemed very appealing - "positive Christianity." Also referred to as "active" or "practical" Christianity, it emphasized deeds over doctrine.

The Nazis contrasted "positive Christianity" with "negative Christianity." The former evoked good feelings - and was quite adaptable. The latter, with its doctrines such as original sin, made people feel bad and did not adapt so easily. The Nazis particularly despised the dogma, ritual and internationalism of the Catholic Church. Those things they saw as evidence it had been "corrupted by Jews." In the early years of his regime, Hitler worked hard to establish a Protestant *Reich Church* (modeled after the Church of England) but eventually dropped the project because of resistance from Evangelicals who valued doctrine.

The "positive Christianity" of the Nazis gave them no firm ground for approaching Jesus. They actually went so far as to deny that Jesus was a Jew and to cast him as the model anti-Semite.

As a Catholic priest, the book gave me a lot to think about. Even though we live in a society very different from Germany of the 1930's, still we face some similar challenges, particularly regarding the worth of each human life. And we see similar efforts to recast Jesus without consideration of early Christian creeds.