Catholics, Protestants, and Christian Antisemitism in Nazi Germany

Somerecent trends in the study of National Socialism tend to downplay the significance of antisemitism*—in particular of Christian antisemitism—in producing the Holocaust. Indeed, it would be inaccurate and misleading to present the Christian legacy of hostility toward Judaism and Jews as a sufficient cause for Nazi genocide. Christianity, however, did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the rank-and-file—the people who actively carried out the measures against Jews as well as those who passively condoned their implementation. In his analysis of pre-Nazi forms of German antisemitism, Donald Niewyk concludes that, “The old antisemitism had created a climate in which the ‘new’ antisemitism was, at the very least, acceptable to millions of Germans”.