Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition

Donald Dietrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765803788
• eBook ISBN: 9781351514323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the French Revolution to Vatican II, the institutional Catholic Church has opposed much that modernity has offered men and women constructing their societies. This book focuses on the experiences of German Catholics as they have worked to engage their faith with their culture in the midst of the two world wars, the barbarism of the Nazi era, and the uncertainties and conflicts of the post-World War II world.German Catholics have confronted and challenged their Church's anti-modernism, two lost wars, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich, the Cold War, German reunification and the impulses of globalization. Catholic theologians and those others nurtured by Catholicism, who resisted Nazism to create their own private spaces, developed a personal and existential theology that bore fruit after 1945. Such theologians as Karl Rahner, Johannes Metz, and Walter Kasper, were rooted in their political experiences and in the renewal movement built by those who attended Vatican II. These theologians were sensitive to the horrors of the Nazi brutalization, the positive contributions of democracy, and the need to create a Catholicism that could join the conversation on human rights following World War II. This dialogue meant accepting non-Catholic religious traditions as authentic expressions of faith, which in turn required that the sacred dignity of every man, woman, and child had to be respected. By the twenty-first century, Catholic theologians had made furthering a human rights agenda part of their tradition, and the German contribution to Catholic theology was crucial to that development. The current Catholic milieu has been forged through its defensive responses to the Enlightenment, through its resistance to ideologies that have supported sanctioned murder, and through an extensive dialogue with its own traditions.In focusing on the German Catholic experience, Dietrich offers a cultural approach to the study of the religious and ethical issues that ground the hum

1
The State of the Question: Nazi Terror, the Holocaust, and Resistance

I

The Holocaust launched a decades-long reflection on what it means to be human. To nurture this type of reflection has demanded that scholars engage in nuanced studies of Nazism, resistance, and theology. How are we, for example, to understand the terror practiced by the Nazis as well as the roles of the bystanders and those who resisted?¹ An historical assessment of the event, locating it accurately in the context of its culture, has been in the process of construction since 1945.² Scholars engaged in reconstructing the history of everyday life in the Third Reich have become more interested recently in analyzing specific dimensions of resistance. Noncompliance was not always perceived by the Nazis as ideological opposition, but rather, frequently, as “single issue dissent.” Although the Nazis may have considered everyone a potential enemy, general complicity with the regime for the sake of personal survival seems to have been the order of the day.³ While in the view of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, virtually every German was a virulent eliminationist antisemite, other scholars have pointed to examples of the banality of evil as well as to the activity of ordinary men.⁴ Still others have worked to uncover the many layers and types of resistance. As a prelude to analyzing the Catholic experience, the nature of the Holocaust, and of Nazi terror has to be briefly examined along with the general spectrum of resistance. Relating resistance to Nazi terror has helped support the post-1945 paradigm shift that can make possible a more explicit discussion of human rights issues.⁵

II

The realization that the Holocaust was an unprecedented, dissonant break in the civilization that produced it and the fact that the main targeted people were the Jews with their marginalized place in European civilization and in Christian culture has convinced many that Western civilization has been permanently ruptured.⁶ Such scholars as Karl Dietrich Bracher, Martin Broszat, and Eberhard Jäckel stand out for their early efforts.⁷ Other historians narrowed their scope to focus on such discrete areas as Hitler himself as well as the diplomatic, military, and economic developments that helped to explicate the challenges posed by Nazi Germany.⁸ Most scholars have now come to realize that it is difficult to present any comprehensive synthesis due to the incredible complexities of human behavior under stress during this period.⁹ What has tended to restrict scholars in finding a definitive Gestalt is that the questions change as our own culture confronts new problems, surprises, and possibilities, which have compelled scholars to engage the Nazi horrors from revised perspectives. Ongoing interpretative change seems itself to be the essence of history.¹⁰

Such earlier scholars as Gerald Reitlinger and Paul Hilberg viewed the Holocaust as a German and in some sense Christian project with the Jews as the unfortunate victims. These scholars have asked provocative questions over the years. Was antisemitism the result of forces set in motion from early Christianity? Was racial antisemitism something radically new? Why were the Jews especially, but others as well, persecuted? Why and how did Christians develop this antisemitic hatred? How was religious antisemitism grafted onto Nazi racism? Given the singularity of the Nazi regime and the fact that it joined the ongoing religious antisemitism with its biological racism, scholars have also tried to isolate the other factors that facilitated the Shoah. Economic, social, political, and cultural issues that surrounded the rise of Hitler have been studied. Answers have been offered to these and other questions, but the exclusionary and racist politics of the Third Reich seem to have played a critical role in supporting genocide.¹¹

Intentionalists, such as Eberhard Jäckel, have felt that it was Hitler’s intention to work toward a radical, murderous solution. Functionalists, such as Karl Schleunes, have felt that fear concerning the social, political, and economic crises made the murder of the Jews into a unifying project supported by the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia, whose viewpoints resonated with those of their Führer. The Shoah, it also has been maintained, was caused by technological modernity with its stress on cost-effectiveness.¹² This modernity argument was favored by Zygmunt Baumann, who took the position that the Shoah developed out of the encounter between an ideologically obsessed power elite and the tremendous capabilities of modern technological and instrumentalizing systems.¹³ The intentionalists and functionalists, who for several years have tended to invalidate one and other’s arguments, have now begun fusing their insights.

The structuralist, i.e., functionalist, argument supported by such scholars as Karl Schleunes and Hans Mommsen dissected the Third Reich into its varied bureaucratic components and catalogued the interactions that led to mass murder. Scholars in this camp exposed the complicated development of bureaucratic and problematic policies in the twenties and thirties that seduced mid-level, educated bureaucrats into realigning governmental structures and political institutions according to principles of economic and social rationalization. Studying bureaucratic efforts, however, only made the case more convincing that the dynamics toward destruction were coming from the ideological center. In the final analysis, blending the theses of the intentionalists and functionalists has yielded a more accurate picture. Auschwitz was the result of the collaboration of Nazi leaders (intentionalists) and the bureaucrats (functionalists).¹⁴ The leaders and the followers were concretely joined in an actual and a symbolic connection. Germans before and during the Nazi era had been indoctrinated for years with an unrelenting culture of antisemitism. The average German in the Third Reich felt a heightened degree of antipathy toward the Jews. What is at issue for historians and psychologists is whether antisemitism is sufficiently potent to rule out other historical factors and psychological processes, since even intense prejudicial hatred toward the victims of sanctioned murder might not have been sufficient enough to produce the extreme violence that was the Holocaust in the absence of other sociopolitical, economic, and cultural situations.¹⁵ Dehumanization, however, does seem to be the crucial component needed for sanctioned murder.

At the core of National Socialism insidiously lies a potent ideological need to transform not just a regime or a system, but the world order itself. The elite groups of this society pursued their own agendas and joined the genocidal Nazi elite. Subordinate elites for their own political survival as well as career mobility identified and cooperated with the regime. The Nazi elite, therefore, could count on the unstinting support of major groups. Both Kershaw and Friedländer have suggested that this was the dynamic environment that made the Holocaust possible. Support for eliminationist, and in some cases exterminationist, policies was developed slowly and nurtured the continuum of destruction that allowed Germans to move along the “twisted road to Auschwitz,” so aptly labeled by Schleunes.¹⁶ Until it was too late, most Germans in these groups did not realize that the Nazis wanted something totally revolutionary—a biomedical solution to sociopolitical problems. National Socialism was an ontological as much as a political development. The Holocaust derives its characteristics from the contours of the regime’s concern with social welfare, medicine, the meaning of community, and the framework of a regime dedicated to governance through terror as it tried to reshape its world.¹⁷

III

From the perspective of such scholars as Eric Johnson, individuals were necessary to assist the Nazi terror work as it permeated all levels of society.¹⁸ Individuals were victims and collaborators, even though the Gestapo and courts initiated and implemented the process. Several studies have recently revealed the types of persons who became instrumental in fulfilling the goals of the state to make the regime’s control ubiquitous. The Gestapo was small compared to the size of the population that was to be policed. To extend the terror widely, a host of citizens who were not members of the security organizations had to police and to control their neighbors. Under such circumstances, even nonconformity and dissent became much more dangerous than earlier scholars of resistance have suggested since minimal refusal to support the ideological line also could have immediate repercussions.

Germans were told that a secret police and a concentration camp system existed. The process of building a consensus to support Nazism was complex, and gray areas remain in virtually all of the current scholarly efforts focused on the functioning of the Third Reich. Hitler was quite successful in obtaining general support for his policies. The basic consensus formed quickly, but still remained pluralistic, differentiated, and, at times, inconsistent. Most Germans, at least until 1941, seemed proud and pleased that Hitler was removing “undesirables,” outsiders, asocials, criminals, and “useless eaters.” He wanted a subservient people, but also hoped to win their allegiance by building on popularly historical images, cherished ideals, and traditional phobias. Even as Hitler tightened his hold on the country, he also sought to maintain a broad level of popularity.¹⁹ Such an approach was bound to restrict resistance efforts, since the regime expended an enormous amount of energy and resources to control public opinion, to sustain its popularity, and to fortify ambivalent situations to constrain individual initiatives.

An effective resistance could be mounted only slowly. Even the most educated Germans²⁰ discerned reasons for supporting the Nazi system. Apparently, many Germans supported the crackdown on those whom the Nazis branded as political criminals and were pleased to see such persons sent off to the camps. Daily experiences of everyday racism left its effects all over Germany. Although not all Germans obeyed the regime, the majority seemed to accept the racist, ethnocentric ideology. Scholarship on this Nazi terror has progressed through three distinct stages. Work on the first two stages each lasted for about two decades. The third stage has proven very attractive during the last few years. During these stages scholars have focused on several neuralgic issues: the role of Hitler as Führer, the pervasive power of the Gestapo, the focus of the leaders who implemented the terror, the nature of the Nazi state’s ruling apparatus itself, the nature and extent of protest and dissent, and, finally, the role played by common citizens in their own policing.²¹

The first stage began immediately with the end of the Second World War and continued into the 1960s. It was nourished by the many eyewitness accounts and tended to analyze the significant plots that were hatched to take over the state. A monolithic totalitarian system powered by a Gestapo-led system of terror was the key actor.²² The guiding assumption of this leader-oriented history was that Hitler was firmly in command of a smoothly functioning state and party. Central to this theme was an omnipotent, omniscient, and ubiquitous Gestapo.²³

The second stage of understanding the Nazi terror began in the mid-1960s and lasted until the end of the Cold War. This stage highlighted a feudalistic, i.e., polycratic, regime—a German society shredded by disharmony and an antisemitic population whose apparent lack of virulent hatred was coupled with a willingness to follow political orders. This phase was highlighted by Ralf Dahrendorf’s study of the endemic weakness of democracy in German society, which helped predispose Germans to Nazi rule. Additionally, the Historikerstreit in the late 1980’s powered the debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and how it and Germany’s exclusionary past had to be studied together.²⁴ Hitler’s minions were portrayed as engaged in a competitive struggle for power as they established overlapping jurisdictions and pushed aggressively for their divergent goals. The German Volk (people) was seen as composed of a variety of men and women who sought ways to express their disagreements with the feudalistic leadership of the Reich through almost daily expressions of unhappiness, nonconformity, and dissent. Only a few committed Nazis had probably been animated by the “Jewish problem,” and most Germans, it was thought, actually cared little about the matter, since they were understandably more concerned with “bread and butter” issues and national renewal.²⁵

Ian Kershaw has evaluated the extent of the German population’s so-called hatred of the Jews. His study of local opinion formation in the Third Reich, which focused even more on the issues of the daily compliance and noncompliance by average Germans, has proven significant in understanding the daily intera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The State of the Question: Nazi Terror, the Holocaust, and Resistance
• 2. Catholic Ambivalence in the Third Reich
• 3. The Scope of the Christian Resistance in Germany
• 4. Resistance in the Daily Lives of German Catholics
• 5. The Construction of the Modern Catholic Theological Milieu
• 6. The Meaning of Person Developed by Catholic Theology
• 7. Catholic Theology Responds to the Challenge of Nazism
• 8. Theology, the Turn to History, and Human Rights
• Conclusion
• Index