Pastors and Professors: Assessing Complicity and Unfolding Complexity

Abstract

Moment #1: in September 1980, I flew from Seattle to London and stayed in remarkably cheap accommodation off the Strand, not far from the decidedly more upscale Charing Cross Hotel. This was a residence reached by a narrow back alley pungent with unwelcome aromas. It cost me £2 a night, a very cheap price even then. The next day I appeared at the London School of Economics for the oral defence of my doctoral dissertation. I remember two things quite clearly. The first is that James Joll, my doctor father, started the proceedings by telling me I had passed. We would simply discuss a few ideas, plus where I should publish. My second distinct memory involves a question posed by my outside examiner from Oxford. Near the end of our conversation, he asked me whether Gerhard Kittel, a very important Professor of Theology at Tubingen University, could possibly have believed all those terrible things he said about Jews and all those wonderful things he said about Hitler. Was it not likely that he had acted under duress and said what needed to be said? Fortunately, James Joll had already indicated that my passing or failing did not hang in the balance. Therefore, I felt no anxiety in saying what I had come to believe: that Gerhard Kittel really did support Adolf Hitler and the Nazi ideology and really did see the Jews as a threat to Germany. His statements and publications from 1933 to 1945, in my view, were far more energetic, frequent and consistently pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish than mere conformity or ducking for cover would have required.