In this path-breaking book, Benjamin Ziemann does for the Protestant Churches what military historians have done for the “Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht.” After many decades of mythologizing, we know that the German Army in WWII was neither innocent nor honorable. That they had their hands as red with genocidal blood as the SS, even if they did not run the death camps. And we know that American politicians after the war were actively part of the whitewashing campaign to help cleanse the German military—part of the bargain to get the Federal Republic's military participation in NATO. “Collective perjury” as one historian has put it (“Zähe Legenden,” Die Zeit, June 1, 2011, 22).

And yet, church history scholars continue to perpetuate the “Myth of the Clean Church.” A church that we are told either protested against or awkwardly accommodated the Nazis state and its practices, when in fact those churches were a central ideological prop to Nazism—particularly the majority Protestant churches. Ziemann's new, definitive biography of Martin Niemöller does far more than any other work of late to deflate this myth. Bar no one save Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller has for decades stood as a symbol of “Christian resistance” to Nazism. The readers of this journal are of course well versed with his enduring “then they came for me” quote, which more than any other shines a light on the failings of bystanding in the Third Reich. As salutary as that moral lesson was, however, as Ziemann shows us it could only be redeemed at the expense of perpetuating a falsehood: that Niemoeller was guilty of merely a “sin of omission.” Far from “saying nothing,” Ziemann shows us how Niemoeller was guilty of a much more damning “sin of commission.” With an unstinting eye, Ziemann unveils how deeply antisemitic Niemöller was, right up until the last years of the Third Reich—and demonstrates how much of a staunch nationalist he remained well after WWII.

Ziemann has done the profession a great service, pushing past an insidious postwar narrative so carefully curated by Niemoeller himself, as well as his family and friends. In the wake of Nazism's defeat, a central and grossly overlooked part of the Stunde Null was the systematic white washing of the Protestant establishment's involvement in the Nazi enterprise. This was abetted by a tendency in the Western occupation zones—particularly by Americans—to believe on face the claims of Protestant pastors that they had been victims of Nazism simply by being Christian. In the context of an emerging global cold war against atheistic Bolshevism, Western authorities were too eager by half to believe this victim narrative. Whereas the rest of the German professions all faced some kind of denazification process, one of Nazism's most ardent constituencies—the Protestant pastorate—was given an entirely free pass. Of all the failures of justice for the victims of Nazi terror after WWII, this was surely the most guileful.

Almost 20,000 men who had for decades sung the praises of a voelkisch nationalism born of a “Gott mit uns” theology of divine chosenness could suddenly turn on a dime and profess they had been following “love they neighbor” humanism, with American occupation authorities in particular proving their deep suggestibility along the way. Ziemann does exemplary work investigating the ideologies as well as milieus that made it so easy for these men to pull off such a volte-face. As much as readers will appreciate his reappraisal of the Nazi period, Ziemann takes as much time and effort to scrutinize Niemoeller's religious-cum-political activity afterward. Not least, he reveals how under the guise of cold war tensions, Niemoeller could refashion his nationalism for pacifistic and putatively neutralist purposes. Stating that the West German government “was conceived in the Vatican and born in Washington,” Niemoeller also revealed his adherence to his old anti-Catholic sectarianism.

Ziemann does what historians are always supposed to do: get to the truth. By deploying a fact-driven methodology concerned with scrutinizing old claims, Ziemann delivers the kind of probing reevaluation of Niemoeller that we have waited literally decades to read. Ziemann does us a favor of another kind as well; by replacing a biographical approach with a microhistorical one, he shows us Niemoeller not as a man alone heroically facing tyranny, but rather as part of a broader ecosystem, whose choices were in equal parts lamentable yet explicable. This is a Niemoeller who is obstinate in the wrong ways as well as the occasional right ways. Whose self-image as a lone voice of morality comes undone once his actions are contextualized and understood in terms of his fellow pastors and theologians. The Churches Under Hitler Industry will never be the same.