Bystanders to the Holocaust

When considering the meaning of ‘Western Civilisation’ in 1951, the then Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, struggled to find a positive definition of such a vast and amorphous concept. Ultimately Garbett concluded that the best way to understand its meaning was to consider what ‘Western Civilisation’ was not. ‘Belsen and Dachau’ he argued, as ‘expressions of cruelty’ were the opposite of the aims and values of the West. By using the memory of Nazi concentration camps as anti-symbols, Garbett drew on a rich heritage of attempts to explore the meaning of the Third Reich in the Church of England. Invariably churchmen concluded, from 1933 onwards, that Nazism was the inversion of all that the Church held dear. It is those efforts at the interpretation and understanding of Nazism, and particularly the persecution of the Jews, that are the subject of this book.

There is now a plethora of studies concerned with institutional and individual responses to the Holocaust. Governmental reactions to Nazi persecution have been explored exhaustively, and recently the institutions of the ‘free world’ have come under particular scrutiny. We have seen monographs on IBM and the Holocaust, the Red Cross and the Holocaust and on the Swiss banks and the Holocaust to name but a few. Along with investigations of the perpetrators and the victims, such studies of the bystanders form the trinity that constitutes Holocaust studies. The Church of England and the Holocaust may appear to be just another book in this tradition – just another book about the bystanders, another ‘… and the Holocaust’ book. But it is hoped that it is more than that. This is a book about memory, about beliefs, about how the world is understood, about how we construct the past and how we make history.

What is at issue here is how a particular community in the past, the Church of England, understood and reacted to the Nazi state and its persecution and murder of Europe's Jews. This is a question made more important by the moral priorities of our own age, which has retrospectively found the murder of Europe's Jews to be the ultimate atrocity.