Language:
English
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
Studies in Contemporary Jewry
Angaben zur Quelle:
24 (2010) 46-70
Keywords:
Christianity and other religions Judaism 1945-
;
History
;
Judaism Relations 1945-
;
Christianity
;
Jews History 1945-
;
Jews
;
Judaism Relations
;
Christianity
;
Christianity and other religions Judaism
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
Abstract:
During the Nazi era, both movements in the German Protestant Church, the German Christian movement and the Confessing Church, accommodated the Nazi regime and its antisemitism, as did most of German society; the Christian theologians even inserted changes into the doctrine. Within German Protestantism, there was no "Stunde Null" in 1945 and no genuine denazification; the church continued to be governed by clergy who had, for the most part, supported the ideology of the Third Reich. The first postwar declarations of the Protestants made no mention of Nazi antisemitism, the Holocaust, or even the Jews. When the subject did come up in the 1950s-60s, the tone toward Jews was generally disparaging: Jews and Judaism were seen as sharing the guilt for the Holocaust with the Nazi regime. The Church was ready to acknowledge its guilt of complacency before the regime, but not its co-responsibility for the anti-Jewish measures. Even in the 1970s, supersessionism remained a core of Protestant theology. While the Rhineland Church's declaration of 1980 recognized Christian co-responsibility and guilt for the Holocaust, this declaration was not accepted by many Protestants. The Protestant Church still cannot solve the question of whether it was guilty of collaborating with the evil regime or whether it was a victim of the devilish and "pagan" regime, on a par with the Jews. This question, with all its theological consequences, remains a subject for future generations to debate.
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