Based on interviews with more than sixty German Protestants active in the Confessing Church, a thoughtful examination of this splinter group from the Nazi-controlled Protestant Church reveals the extent of Nazi anti-Christian persecution.

For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler

History

Barnett, Victoria

Europe

Oxford University Press

The Confessing Church was one of the rare German organizations that opposed Nazism from the very beginning, and in For the Soul of the People, Victoria Barnett delves into the story of the Church's resistance to Hitler. For this remarkable story, Barnett interviewed more than sixty Germans who were active in the Confessing Church, asking them to reflect on their personal experiences under Hitler and how they see themselves, morally and politically, today. She provides a haunting glimpse of the German experience under Hitler, but also gives a provocative look into what it has meant to be a German in the twentieth century.

The Holocaust did not introduce the phenomenon of the bystander, but it did illustrate the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others. Although the term was initially applied only to the good Germans―the apathetic citizens who made genocide possible through unquestioning obedience to evil leaders―recent Holocaust scholarship has shown that it applies to most of the world, including parts of the population in Nazi-occupied countries, some sectors within the international Christian and Jewish communities, and the Allied governments themselves. This work analyzes why this happened, drawing on the insights of historians, Holocaust survivors, and Christian and Jewish ethicists. The author argues that bystander behavior cannot be attributed to a single cause, such as anti-Semitism, but can only be understood within a complex framework of factors that shape human behavior individually, socially, and politically.

Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust

Barnett, Victoria J.

Religion & Spirituality

Praeger

Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Contributions to the Study of Religion: Christianity and the)

World

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Books by Barnett, Victoria