Ordinary Sailors: The French Navy, Vichy, and the Second World War Alexander John Upward After the debacle of the Fall of France in 1940, the one organization that managed to maintain its discipline and functionality virtually intact was the French Navy. This is the story of how subsequently that navy was able to exert a disproportionate influence on the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. Such influence achieved its apogee between February 1941 and April 1942 when the navy’s Commander-in-Chief Admiral Darlan served simultaneously in several of the regime’s highest offices. During this period France continued to flirt with the possibility of actively engaging Great Britain in war on the side of Nazi Germany. It was also the period when Vichy introduced some of its most repressive measures against its own citizens and entered upon policies that led ultimately to active collaboration in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz.

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7893&context=etd

Ordinary Sailors: The French Navy, Vichy and the Second World War

The Jewish leftist lawyer Ernst Fraenkel was one of twentieth-century Germany's great intellectuals. During the Weimar Republic he was a shrewd constitutional theorist for the Social Democrats and in post-World War II Germany a respected political scientist who worked to secure West Germany's new democracy. This book homes in on the most dramatic years of Fraenkel's life, when he worked within Nazi Germany actively resisting the regime, both publicly and secretly. As a lawyer, he represented political defendants in court. As a dissident, he worked in the underground. As an intellectual, he wrote his most famous work, The Dual State – a classic account of Nazi law and politics. This first detailed account of Fraenkel's career in Nazi Germany opens up a new view on anti-Nazi resistance – its nature, possibilities, and limits. With grit, daring and imagination, Fraenkel fought for freedom against an increasingly repressive regime.

Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany

The paper examines three historical situations where Christian churches confessed their guilt for their implication in episodes of extreme violence, whether by acts of omission or commission: post-Second World War Germany, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda. In Germany and in South Africa several churches confessed their guilt rapidly and fairly comprehensively. In Rwanda only the Presbyterian Church did so. The other churches either abstained from making any statement or only acknowledged the crimes committed by some of their members. This paper argues that, for a large part, the political and military context explains the difference. In Germany the war was irremediably lost and in South Africa the apartheid government had accepted the necessity of a regime change. In Rwanda, by contrast, the government which had orchestrated the genocide had withdrawn to a neighbouring country and vowed to continue the fight. A second factor is the quality of the church leadership, strong in the first two cases, weak and divided in Rwanda except for the Presbyterian Church.

https://www.upjournals.co.za/index.php/SHE/article/download/2721/1819

Germany, South Africa and Rwanda: Three Manners for a Church to Confess its Guilt

Fraenkel as a Scholar Condemning the Nazi Regime’s Dual State

Setting the Scene of a Jewish Lawyer, Like Fraenkel, in Nazi Germany

This article traces the German church struggle form 1933 to 1945 with particular emphasis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s role. Although Bonhoeffer’s status in the world today is that of a great theologian and courageous opponent of the Nazi regime, he did not have much of an impact on the direction of the Confessing Church during the church struggle. Bonhoeffer’s striking albeit marginal role in the German church struggle and his inability to affect significantly the direction of the Confessing Church was due to many factors, including his young age, his liberal-democratic politics, his absence from Germany from October 1933 to April 1935, his vacillating and at times contradictory positions on central issues, his radical theological critique of the Nazi state, his friendship with and family ties to Christians of Jewish descent, and ultimately his willingness to risk his life to destroy Hitler’s regime.

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The Church Struggle and the Confessing Church: An Introduction to Bonhoeffer's Context

German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory, K. Hannah Holtschneider (Münster: LIT, 2001), 225 pp., cloth $34.95.

Matthew D. Hockenos

Papers

The Church Struggle and the Confessing Church: An Introduction to Bonhoeffer's Context

German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory, K. Hannah Holtschneider (Münster: LIT, 2001), 225 pp., cloth $34.95.