CONCEPTUALIZING CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTIAN NAZIS AFTER THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

Abstract

��� In the 2008 study The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel does a Wrstrate analysis of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish InXuence on German Church Life, the Nazi-era think tank of the German Christian movement, which had a cozy relationship with the theology faculty at the University of Jena. Striking is the degree to which the institute’s Christian theology aligned with the Nazis’ political objectives, as Heschel so skillfully demonstrates. Through brief biographical sketches of institute leaders and members, careful analyses of the institute’s ofWcial program and conference proceedings, and insightful discussions of key publications and doctoral dissertations, Heschel gives readers a comprehensive and nuanced sense of the institute and its mission. And her conclusions are staggering. Put succinctly, the institute members were doing in the realm of the religious what the Nazis were doing in the realm of the political, which took the form of linking “the theological anti-Judaism that had long pervaded German Protestantism with the racist antisemitism promoted by the Nazis” (166). Despite the superior quality of Heschel’s research, striking is her failure to cite point 24 of the Nazi Party Program, which reads: “The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession. It Wghts the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us” (qtd. in Steigmann-Gall, 14). 1 Notice how the Nazis deWne their Christian agenda in opposition to Jewish materialism. The implication is this: the Nazis’ version of Christianity can only be realized insofar as it purges itself internally and externally of all that is Jewish (“Sie [the Party] bekampft den judischmaterialistischen Geist in und auser uns”), a formulation that is similar