Rebecca Carter-Chand's Christian Internationalism and German Belonging joins a growing body of scholarship on twentieth-century German religious history that shifts the focus away from the official Protestant and Catholic churches—whose members comprised 95 percent of the German population in 1933—toward the minority “free church” denominations. Naturally, this literature has been preoccupied by the question of complicity with National Socialism. Due to their smaller size and deep international links, the “free churches” long avoided the critical scrutiny over their Nazi-era actions that the large Protestant and Catholic churches faced already in the 1960s. Here, Carter-Chand does for the Salvation Army what historians such as Andrea Strübind, Benjamin Goossen, and James Irvin Lichti have done for the Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. The Heilsarmee (the German branch of the Salvation Army), Carter-Chand conclusively shows, readily adapted itself to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. In fact, the Heilsarmee was granted auxiliary membership in the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV), the party's social welfare organization.
At the same time, Carter-Chand moves productively beyond two generations of critical historiography on religious institutions in Nazi Germany that have challenged postwar myths of widespread resistance. Instead, Christian Internationalism and German Belonging uses this little-studied organization to shed light on a host of wider issues in modern German and European society: the salience of religion in a supposedly secular age; the meaning of accommodation in dictatorial regimes; and the struggles of international organizations to survive in a world of rising nationalist extremism. As Carter-Chand notes, the Heilsarmee's status as both “a culturally specific movement and a global one” makes it “an illuminating historical subject in the contexts of imperialism, internationalism, humanitarianism, international relations, and war” (17). Carter-Chand's study offers a model of the insight that can be gleaned by setting religious organizations in these wider frames.
Following an introduction that outlines the origins of the Salvation Army in London's East End, the first two chapters address the Heilsarmee's presence in Imperial Germany. Formed in 1865 by Methodist preachers William and Catherine Booth, the Salvation Army distinguished itself among the period's Christian revivalist movements with its assertive public fundraising and military-style structure (preachers were termed “officers,” while congregations were “corps”). Eschewing theological dogma, the Salvation Army centered its activities on providing food aid and shelter to the poorest inhabitants of Western Europe's urban slums. Following the establishment of the first German corps in 1886, the organization became a visible public presence in German cities, opening a spate of meeting halls, Samaritan centers, and rescue homes. Carter-Chand's evidence is striking: Despite competition from the established churches as well as the Social Democratic Party, by 1914, “An estimated one million people a year attended Salvation Army meetings, and its newspaper, Der Kriegsruf, had a circulation of over two million” (25). Like other international groups in Germany, the Heilsarmee felt compelled to prove its patriotism during the First World War, temporarily dissociating from its British parent organization and transforming Der Kriegsruf, true to the name, into a fount of war propaganda.
A highlight of the book is the third chapter, which reveals the Heilsarmee's surprising presence in the avant-garde art, literature, and theater of the Weimar Republic. Here Carter-Chand takes an outside-in view on the Heilsarmee, flipping the traditional methodology of religious history. Carter-Chand has compiled a breadth of references to the Heilsarmee (helpfully indexed in an appendix) that permeated the works of Weimar cultural icons, from Bertolt Brecht to Alfred Döblin to Käthe Kollwitz. The organization served these artists and writers as a metaphor through which to explore themes of human corruptibility, the fragility of virtue, and the limits of humanitarianism in a capitalist society.
The book's second half turns to the National Socialist and early postwar years. Here, the advantages of Carter-Chand's long chronological lens come to fruition. The highly public nature of the Heilsarmee made the organization useful for Nazi emulation and co-optation, while the Heilsarmee's efforts to negotiate its relationship to the regime built upon strategies developed in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. At the outset of the Nazi dictatorship, the Heilsarmee faced suspicion for its international connections as well as the longstanding but false rumor of William Booth's Jewish heritage. However, as they had done under earlier German states, Heilsarmee leaders successfully emphasized their organization's nonpolitical character and its social mission. Moreover, much of the Nazi Party's ideology resonated with German Salvationists—less the party's antisemitism than its anti-Communism, cultural conservatism, and ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft. Although a radical minority of Heilsarmee officers sought to join the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement within the Protestant Church, Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller rebuffed the maneuver. Instead, the Heilsarmee accepted auxiliary status in the NSV, while leaders privately petitioned authorities in frustration over state incursions into the Heilsarmee's own welfare initiatives and fundraising efforts.
Unlike the large Protestant and Catholic churches, strikingly little investigation into its Nazi past was asked of the Heilsarmee until recent years. Carter-Chand convincingly argues that the Heilsarmee's ability to recall its internationalist roots was a critical factor. After again breaking contact with the International Salvation Army during the war, Heilsarmee officers communicated a highly selective narrative to their British counterparts who arrived in postwar occupied Germany. Conveniently, many of the Heilsarmee's wartime records were destroyed in an Allied bombardment of January 1945, while what survived were letters from 1942–44 protesting “the government's takeover of its social institutions” (169).
In the end, what stands out is less the Heilsarmee's participation in National Socialism and the subsequent cover-up—consistent with virtually every institution and professional group in German society—than the ambivalence of the story. Carter-Chand does not reveal smoking-gun evidence of the kind that has come to light in recent works on Wehrmacht chaplains or Pope Pius XII. The reader does not encounter Heilsarmee officers joining the Nazi Party en masse or placing a swastika in their shelters and meeting houses. Instead, much of the book's evidence comprises sins of omission, rather than systematic complicity. The Heilsarmee did not support Jewish emigration from Germany, but as Carter-Chand notes, the Heilsarmee lacked the resources and networks to aid in emigration. In Western European countries where Jews arrived as refugees, Salvation Army corps had the means to help and often did so, providing food and temporary shelter. Capacity rather than ideology, Carter-Chand suggests, was often critical for rescue decisions. Perhaps Carter-Chand's most damning finding is that Heilsarmee shelters were likely requisitioned late in the war as interment sites for foreign forced laborers. But although Heilsarmee officers did not inquire into the reasons for the Interior Ministry's takeover of their facilities, they could have done little to block this. It is a virtue of Christian Internationalism and German Belonging to sit with such ambiguities. Carter-Chand prompts an overdue reckoning with the most painful chapter of this unique organization's history, without resorting to polemics or anachronistic judgment.
