In May of 1948 a letter from Major J. C. Thompson, chief of the Religious Affairs Section of the American Military Government in Berlin, arrived at the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists in Washington, D.C. Major Thompson's office was responsible for seeing that all Nazis were removed from leadership positions, and his letter was part of an ongoing correspondence about the denomination's need to come to terms with its Nazi past. The Adventist denomination, he complained, was “one of the very few in Berlin which have not cleaned house politically to date. Most of the denominations finished this task long enough ago to have forgotten about it.” The letter must have been particularly embarrassing to Adventist leaders as it went on to compare Adventists to Catholics, who “actually had little housecleaning to do because of their strong opposition during the reign of Hitler to the entire Nazi regime.”

We began the war, not the Germans and even less the Entente— that I know.” So begins a recently discovered and published account of the events of July 1914, Der Kriegsbeginn, written in December 1918 by Baron Leopold von Andrian–Werburg, the respected and influential Austro-Hungarian Consul-General in Warsaw (1911–1914). He was in Vienna after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, and belonged to that small circle of diplomats privy to the discussions in the Ballhausplatz that followed that event. Andrian-Werburg's ringing confession of Austro-Hungarian responsibility for the outbreak of World War I is much more direct than one that first came to light more than a decade ago: that of Count Alexander Hoyos, Foreign Minister Count Leopold Berchtold's chef-de-cabinet. Andrian-Werburg's avowal of Austro-Hungarian responsibility is paradoxical in the context of the controversy over German policy in July 1914 sparked by the publication of Fritz Fischer's 1964 book on Germany's war aims. As Fritz Fellner pointed out in an essay on Hoyos's mission to Berlin to garner benützt werden, urn die Rechnung zu prasentieren. Entgegenkornmen so lange wie möglich, aber zurückschlagen beirn nächsten Schlag. Dieser nächste Schiag ist jetzt da—alle Welt sieht, weiche Gesinnungen in Serbien die Führung an sich gerissen haben. Nicht urn Rache handelt es sich, sondern urn Sicherung für die Zukunft. Rache mag das, für das Gefühl der einfachsten Menschen in unserern Volke verständlichste Motiv sein, für viele andere wird es heissen, dass Serbien uns sein böses Trachten jetzt enthüllt hat—die Politik aber hat Bürgschaft oder Unterwerfung zu fordern.

The nature of Catholicism in early modern Central Europe did not result solely from a conflict between elite reform endeavors and popular traditionalism. Instead, the Catholic population and influential elements within the German Imperial church (Reichskirche) shared a devotion to particularism, privilege, and local religious traditions. This convergence of popular and elite religious attitudes underscores the local character of German Catholicism and helps explain the failure of Tridentine universalism to capture the German church.

In the summer of 1992, I was able to return to the Osoby Archive, now the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections. At that time, we completed the selection process for microfilming for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive and reviewed many of the opisi, or finding aids. Consequently, I can report corrections on some errors that inevitably resulted from our first, rushed review and can provide more accurate German-language titles for some of the agencies described obscurely in English in my original report.