Zoom link: https://go.wisc.edu/12if5x
George L. Mosse First Book Prize Recipient: Christian Internationalism and German Belonging: The Salvation Army from Imperial Germany to Nazism – Rebecca Carter-Chand
Comment by: Brandon Bloch (UW-Madison)
Chaired by: Ofer Ashkenazi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Ever since the Salvation Army, a British Protestant social welfare organization, arrived in Germany in 1886, it has navigated overlapping national and international identities. After existing on the margins of the German religious landscape while solidifying its role as a social service provider, the Salvation Army proactively shaped its public profile during the Nazi rise to power. Accepted into the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (ethnonational community) and made an auxiliary member of the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), the organization continued limited operations throughout the Nazi period before returning to its international affiliations in the immediate postwar period, thereby bypassing denazification and rehabilitating its reputation.
In this groundbreaking reevaluation, Rebecca Carter-Chand argues that the Salvation Army was able to emphasize different aspects of its identity to bolster and repair its reputation as needed in varied political contexts, highlighting the variability of Nazi practices of inclusion and exclusion. In that way, the organization was similar to other Christian groups in Germany. Counter to common hypotheses that minority religious groups are more likely to show empathy to other minorities, dynamics within Nazi Germany reveal that many religious minorities sought acceptance from the state in an effort to secure self-preservation.
Rebecca Carter-Chand is the director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, which fosters scholarship, teaching, and reflection on the intersections between religion and the Holocaust. In this role, she serves as the staff director of the Committee on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust. Dr. Carter-Chand’s research focuses on Christian minority groups in Nazi Germany, including the Salvation Army, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Sponsored by: George L. Mosse Program in History, Department of History, European Studies