Desert Hawk Books

And the Witnesses Were Silent
The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews

Wolfgang Gerlach

Translated and Edited by
Victoria J. Barnett

 

 

304 pages
5 Tables
6" x 9"
Hardcover

Quantity:   $45.00 & S/H

 

An endlessly perplexing question of the twentieth century is how "decent" people came to allow, and sometimes even participate in, the Final Solution.  Fear obviously had its place, as did apathy.  But how does one explain the silence of those people who were committed, active, and often fearless opponents of the Nazi regime on other grounds - those who spoke out against Nazi activities in many areas yet whose response to genocide ranged from tepid disquiet to avoidance?  One such group was the Confessing Church, Protestants who often risked their own safety to aid Christian victims of Nazi oppression but whose response to pogroms against Jews was ambivalent.

"Gerlach tenaciously pursues evidence of anti-Jewish attitudes among confessing Church leaders, and he ties these attitudes to their Christian suppositions. This helps to establish the overlap of Christian and racial antisemitism.  It also helps us understand how the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany could evoke so little opposition, so much acceptance, and , in many cases, such ready participation.  This book is an important contribution to a very important trend in the historiography of modern Germans." - Robert P. Ericksen, coeditor of Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust.

Wolfgang Gerlach is a retired pastor in the Evangelical Church of Germany.  Victoria J. Barnett is a consultant for the Department of Church Relations at the U/S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the editor of Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust.