Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust
"Ericksen and Heschel's collection of articles provides concise access to cutting-edge scholarship on an important and sensitive topic. Their authors share a common starting point of placing the 'church struggle' in a demythologized context. It was a struggle for the preservation of church autonomy within the Nazi dictatorship, not a struggle against either the regime or the mass murder of the Jews. They then confront the far more crucial questions: Why and how did so many Christians in Germany---both Protestant and Catholic---reconcile their religious beliefs with National Socialism and embrace the Hitler's regime? How did this accommodation and enthusiastic support facilitate the Holocaust? The answers are careful and qualified, disheartening and convincing." ---Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and author of Ordinary Men"After more than fifty years, the wounds of the Holocaust remain---as do the questions. These important and insightful essays remind us of Christian complicity in the Holocaust and the difficulty of coming to grips with that complicity. The contention of this volume---that the German churches played a far more important role in the Nazi atrocities than has been hitherto realized---is convincingly documented here in a readable and provocative way." ---Marc H. Ellis, Baylor University