For the past eighty years, historians and commentators on Nazi Germany have wrestled with the need to explain why large sections of the German population supported or at least condoned the heinous and violent crimes associated with the persecution and mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Various overarching theories, such as the national perversity of all Germans, or more limited attempts to pin the blame on certain key individuals or organizations, have been rejected as insufficient. But Robert Ericksen focuses on the narrower band of the educated bourgeoisie—the pastors and professors—whom he sees as the intellectual and spiritual leaders of generally supported institutions, and as such blameworthy for their complicity in the Holocaust. His contention is that the early enthusiasm of these groups for Hitler and his policies gave effective permission to their followers to participate willingly in the subsequent Nazi drive for national expansion and racial “purity.” He also points out that the attraction of Nazi ideas had a long pre-history. Like most of their contemporaries, these men had been brought up in the nationalist fervor of the Bismarckian era, had been deeply disillusioned by the nation's humiliations of 1918 and 1919, and readily saw Hitler and the Nazi Party as the means for regaining national power and prestige. Their enthusiastic endorsement of the new regime in 1933, and their subsequent support for and commitment to Hitler's ideas were in no way forced, or the result of any desire to ingratiate themselves with their new rulers. Rather, their anti-liberal, anti-alien, and anti-Semitic stances predisposed them, and their audiences, to approve the later policies of conquest, deportation, and mass annihilation of those regarded as the nation's dangerous enemies.

The results were soon seen. Already in early 1933, in the universities, Nazi intrusions led to the dismissal of Jewish professors, the purging of left-wing faculty, and the public burning of “treasonable” books. Few if any objections were raised before their fellow academics, even those with established positions and international reputations, who readily enough adapted themselves to serve their new political masters, and provided the justifications which supported Nazi extremist positions.

In the churches, to be sure, the utterances of the more radical pro-Nazi Protestant pastors, known as Deutsche Christen, aroused opposition from those who upheld traditional Christian orthodoxy, and later formed the Confessing Church. But this resistance was limited to a defense of the church's autonomy. The Confessing Church refused to attack or even criticize the Nazi state. The majority of its pastors continued to see themselves as loyal citizens of the Third Reich, and acquiesced in the Nazi wartime policies of violent brutality and extermination. In Ericksen's view, such behavior meant that the overall Church struggle was lost, or at best that it reveals a pattern of small victories and large defeats.

The Confessing Church's 1934 statement of Christian theological principles, known as the Barmen Declaration, might be seen as a small victory. But Ericksen points out that it represented the views of only a minority of the German Protestants. It was widely attacked at the time. It issued no condemnation of the imposition of totalitarian rule, and said nothing at all about the most sensitive issue of the Nazis' mistreatment of the Jews. The striking silence of the churches at the time of the notorious pogrom of November 1938 showed that Nazi propaganda had succeeded in its goal of isolating and stigmatizing the Jews. No open protest was made on their behalf, which can be taken as significant evidence of the churches' early complicity in the subsequent Holocaust.

Another small victory can be seen in the outspoken public protests raised by the Catholic bishop of Munster, Graf Galen, in the summer of 1941, against the Nazis' so-called “euthanasia” of adults and children in state-run mental hospitals. The publicity given to Galen's sermons was immense, and led to a partial suspension of this infamy. But, at the same time, Galen affirmed his support for the Nazi state, and his passionate anti-Bolshevism. He too failed to raise his voice in support of the Jews.

Such episodes cannot, however, detract from the widespread acceptance of Nazi ambitions with their murderous consequences. The willingness of the majority of the population, even before the outbreak of the Nazi-induced war in 1939, to obey the increasingly discriminatory laws and to use the churches to provide evidence of their own “Aryan” purity, makes the charges of complicity even more convincing. At the same time, Ericksen could have laid more stress on the fact that the pastors and professors were regarded as role models. Their actions and utterances were always subject to close scrutiny and criticism. The consequences for the few who attempted to take a stand against the regime were draconian, and led to imprisonment in concentration camps, to exile, or in a few cases to summary execution.

More crucial was the fact that neither the academics nor the clergy had any ideology or theology adequate to sustain any critical attack on the Nazi policies. Christianity had been widely discredited by the fervent support its ministers had given to the war efforts after 1914, promising victory because God was on their side. The academics' liberal optimism had been shattered by the disasters of the trenches. The consequent intellectual discord left them with no sufficient barriers against Nazi extremism. When war broke out again in 1939, the claims of national loyalty once again took precedence and silenced hesitations and doubts about the role the churches and universities should play. Ericksen joins with other western and Israeli postwar critics in deploring their failure to condemn the Nazi mistreatment of the Jews, and suggests that ordinary Germans would possibly not have participated so willingly and ruthlessly in the killings of the Holocaust without what appeared to be religious sanction or professorial encouragement to do so. Such wishful thinking has, however, to be matched against the trenchant evidence of collaboration and complicity here described, and the widespread postwar patterns of prevarication and self-justification. But his conclusion is surely justified that the Nazi experience is a warning about how to respond to national crises, when a commitment to the nation, plus some bending to the prevailing wind, could lead to a disastrous distortion of moral values and to the perpetration of unprecedented criminal injustices.