Bystanders to the Holocaust

Studies of British reactions to the Holocaust have not, by and large, focused on the Church of England. They have thereby neglected a community that has a great deal to tell us about the roles that Britain played as bystander. Focusing on the Church of England further illuminates the understandings and interpretations that underpinned the British response to the Holocaust; it also reveals a community which, in its own way, felt and articulated the pain of European Jewry, in other words a community which meets our present-day expectations of the bystanders. In addition, the example of the Church of England demonstrates that it is impossible to interpret an institutional or communal response to the Holocaust unless one first excavates that institution's understanding of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews.

The Anglican understanding of Nazism conditioned the Church's response to the Holocaust. That perception witnessed Nazism, first and foremost, as part of a totalitarian war against religion. Nothing symbolised this more than the suffering of Martin Niemöller, who became the Church's hero after his arbitrary imprisonment in 1937 and remains so to this day. Nazism became the negation of Christianity. Yet at first, despite outrage at the suffering of Niemöller, the Church remained an avowed opponent of war with Germany – and a supporter of the moral politics of appeasement.

Again, such a response to Nazism is only explicable with reference to the nuances of perception. Prior to the spring of 1939 the Church viewed Nazi foreign policy separately from the domestic politics of the dictatorship, and as a part of the traditions of European politics and diplomacy. The sins of the Treaty of Versailles were deployed to justify German expansion and to relate the ambitions of the Nazis to European and German history, to suggest that German aggression was correcting an historical injustice. But when the Germans marched into Prague in March 1939 Anglicans ceased dividing Nazism in their imagination.

The argument that war with Nazi Germany in 1939 was righteous and just, articulated particularly by William Temple, signified the dominance of a new interpretation of Nazism.