Christian Internationalism and German Belonging: The Salvation Army from Imperial Germany to Nazism
Rebecca Carter-Chand (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
George L. Mosse First Book Prize Recipient
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.
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History
University of Wisconsin-Madison European Studies
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.
Brandon Bloch is a historian of modern Europe, with an emphasis on Germany and its global entanglements. His research and teaching foreground themes of democracy, human rights, memory politics, and social thought. He is especially interested in how European national and religious identities have evolved against the backdrop of territorial conflict, divided sovereignties, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. His first book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy (Harvard University Press, August 2025), takes a fresh look at the formation of West Germany’s post-1945 democracy on the ashes of Nazi dictatorship. It argues that political transformations in Germany’s Protestant churches—historically aligned with conservative ethno-nationalism—were central to the construction of post-Nazi democratic institutions and national identities. The book follows a cohort of Protestant pastors and lay intellectuals who served as collaborators, witnesses, and occasional resisters under National Socialism. After 1945, Protestant activists recast a long tradition of German Protestant nationalism to imagine their church as a source of democratic values. Protestant political movements played critical roles in the expansion of West Germans’ constitutional rights during postwar debates about family law, conscientious objection, and executive emergency powers. At the same time, these campaigns relied upon highly selective accounts of the church’s history under Nazism, thereby contributing toward the persistence of antisemitism, xenophobia, and confessional animosities in postwar Germany.
Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. He is the author of four monographs that explore Jewish contribution to German “national culture” throughout the twentieth century. They include Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (2020); and the forthcoming (co-authored) Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany. He has published articles and edited books on various topics in German and Jewish history, including memory culture in Germany and Israel; Nazi-related humor in Germany; Jewish youth in Nazi Germany; German-Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine; the German antiwar movement; and exile photography.