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AMERICAN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND NAZI GERMANY

The German Church under Attack

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, most Americans were more concerned about the collapsing domestic economy than what he might do with or to the German people because of their ethnic backgrounds or religious views. But the vigorously antireligious Nazi movement made it clear that German religious communities would face challenges to their beliefs and actions. In 1933 Paul Tillich, already recognized as one of the most distinguished German theologians, was dismissed from his position at the University of Frankfurt. He was invited to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York, eventually becoming an American citizen and continuing his contributions to theology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another distinguished German theologian, had studied at the Union Theological Seminary in 1930-1931. His friends in the United States also invited him to accept a visiting professorship in 1939, and he traveled to New York intending to remain. But after two weeks he decided to return to Germany to work with and guide his fellow Germans in the anti-Nazi German Confessing Church. He was imprisoned and killed before the war was over. Catholics also found the antireligious actions of the Hitler government offensive but found some comfort in its anticommunism. The Left developed a deep suspicion of the relations between the Vatican and the fascist governments of Europe, including Nazi Germany.

The Response to Anti-Semitism

The Nazi government's arrest, imprisonment, and harassment of German Jews was of great concern to the religious. Nazi anti-Semitism attracted the attention not only of Jews but of Protestants and Catholics. Initially, Christians primarily expressed concern for German Christians who happened to have some sort of Jewish ancestry, but they gradually extended their concerns to all German Jews.

Speaking Out against the Nazis

In March 1933 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the Free Synagogue in New York, founder of the Zionist American Jewish Congress, organized a meeting in Madison Square Garden to protest the new German government's persecution of Jews. An estimated fifty thousand people, more than the arena could hold, showed up to hear former New York governor Alfred E. Smith, current New York senator Robert Wagner, Bishop William Manning of the Episcopal Church, and Methodist bishop Francis McConnell join Rabbi Wise in condemning Nazi atrocities.

Different Responses

Many leading Jews, however, opposed the rally. They feared attracting attention to themselves, desiring to avoid the rising anti-Semitism in the United States. These Jews, many of whom had emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century and had now assimilated to the United States, sought to blend into the larger community and block old charges that they were more concerned with their coreligionists in Germany than with their fellow Americans. For some time Jews in the United States as well as in Germany and other central European nations saw the outrages of the decade as simply another example of their centuries-old mistreatment, which could be endured and even over-come, Few had any notion that the long-range Nazi goal was the eradication of the Jewish people. At the time the concept of genocide was incomprehensible. Throughout the decade the American Jewish community was divided and unclear on how to respond to the worsening situation in Europe,

No United Front

While religious figures and publications noted the intensifying persecution of German Jews, there seemed no American solutions for their plight. In the isolationist, antiwar climate of the decade, few Americans wanted to involve themselves in the internal affairs of Germany, even after the promulgation in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws that excluded Jews from German citizenship and protection under the law. While some Christians, such as Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers, joined Jews and leftists in protests outside German facilities and boycotted German products, they also did not know of effective ways of alleviating the worsening plight of German Jews.

Inaction

The issue was not simply a lack of knowledge about German barbarism. The liberal Protestant journal The Christian Century called attention to the plight of German Jews by publishing the report of James McDonald, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, when he resigned in frustration in 1935 and spelled out his condemnation of Nazi actions. But even those who saw the moral evil of the antireligious and racist policies of the Hitler government could think of no effective way to change those policies. Dreadful as the regime was, no one knew how to interfere with Germany's internal affairs short of war, which was unacceptable to many.

Attempts at Aid

If nothing could be done in Germany, what could be done for those who sought to flee or were forced from that country? In spite of the example of Protestants such as Tillich and Bonhoeffer, refugees generally meant Jews. There were some attempts, led by Wise and other prominent Jewish leaders, to raise funds to aid Jewish refugees. Most of this money was administered by the Joint Distribution Committee, but until the end of the decade the Joint, as it was called, focused on helping the poverty-stricken Jews of Poland and eastern Europe rather than the more prosperous Jews of Germany,

Seeking Refuge

The major problem concerning the refugees was finding them a haven. Some Jews sought to merge Zionist interests with their plight by trying to gain a refuge for them in Palestine, but the British government first tried to limit immigration and then blocked access to the territory to avoid enraging its Arab population. Others, including some Christians, tried to ease the admission of Jewish refugees to the United States by encouraging them to fill the German immigration quota. (The Immigration Act of 1924 not only limited the number of immigrants admitted to the United States each year but also restricted their country of origin to keep out "undesirables," emigrants from southern and eastern Europe). The German quota was only filled for the first time during the decade in 1938.

Resistance to Refugees

Most Americans, even those sympathetic to the people fleeing Germany, saw the plight of German-Jewish refugees as a less important problem than domestic unemployment and wanted no refugees looking for the few jobs that existed. Increased immigration was opposed by labor unions and others who called attention to the estimated eleven million unemployed as late as 1938. This attitude was callously exploited by nativists and anti-Semites, who used any excuse to keep Jews, even children, from sanctuary in America. Among the most outspoken and effective of these were Father Charles E. Coughlin and his Christian Front; Rev. Gerald B. Winrod's Defenders of the Christian Faith, a fundamentalist Protestant group; and Gerald L. K. Smith, who organized a variety of anti-Semitic groups at the end of the decade.

The Evian Conference

The refugee problem became greater and more daunting with the German annexation of Austria in 1938, which brought even more Jews into the Nazi maelstrom. Other nations in central Europe also began to take actions against their Jewish populations. In response to the growing desperation of the situation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped organize a conference on refugees to meet at Evian, France, in the fall of that year. The rising tide of intolerance around the world, not just in Europe and the United States, caused the conference to center on the general question of refugees, rather than only the plight of the Jews. The Evian Conference was futile. No nation was willing to accept the hundreds of thousands of people who were being forced from their homes, and diplomats spent their time charging each other's country with failing to take responsibility for the problem.

Kristallnacht

In November 1938, in response to the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat by a Jewish youth desperate over the plight of his refugee parents, the Nazi regime in Germany instituted a nationwide pogrom, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues were burned, and Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Jewish businesses were looted and destroyed, and Jews were attacked in an orgy of violence. American Jews were joined in their horror and outrage by other religious leaders and groups. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the large interdenominational Protestant organization, was prominent in its condemnation of German actions, pointing out that while the pogrom was clearly organized by the government, the German people had enthusiastically participated as well. The Episcopal journal The Churchman engaged in a series of reports and editorials on the situation in Germany. The Christian Century, the leading liberal Protestant publication, reported on Germany also, but few were as critical as Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker,

Not to Decide

… Condemning Germany was one thing; deciding what to do was another. Inaction was an action itself, as seen in the ill-fated voyage of the S.S. Saint Louis, which sailed for Havana in 1939 with more than nine hundred Jews fleeing Europe among its passengers. They hoped the tourist visas to Cuba they had secured would give them enough time in that country to find a haven in the United States or some other country in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban government, however, refused to honor the visas, and the ship was forced to leave harbor. It delayed off the coast of Florida for several days, hoping some sort of arrangement could be made with the American government. When no permission to enter the United States was granted, the Saint Louis sailed back to Europe. While various western European countries finally agreed to accept the refugees, only those admitted to Britain escaped the camps of the Holocaust.

Political Responses

Religious leaders often joined the political opponents of Nazism in condemning anti Semitism. Left-wing groups, particularly front organizations of the Communist Party, were able to draw upon a sense of religious anger as the party opposed Nazism. The American League for Peace and Freedom, the reorganized League Against War and Fascism, offered a place for religious leaders such as Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary. At its peak, just before the Soviet-German nonaggression pact in 1939, the American League for Peace and Freedom claimed an inflated membership of six million, many of them affiliated with churches and religious groups. When war erupted in September that year, the league collapsed.

The Problem of War

World War II created an enormous problem for religious people. The clear Nazi aggression of the past seven years had culminated in outright war, and most religious people condemned the aggressor. Few, with the exception of Coughlin, offered support for the Axis powers, but just as few were eager for the United States to enter the war. People could now only wait, watch, and pray.