Friday, January 2, 2009: 1:20 PM
Empire Ballroom East (Sheraton New York)
In a 1939 directive, the German Naval High Command decreed that forthwith naval units had the option of holding traditional Christmas festivities (but under no circumstances with the active participation of naval chaplains) or of reconfiguring the occasion into a novel “Celebration of the German Tree of Life.” In essence, Nazi ideologues succeeded in pressuring the German Navy into abandoning time-honored Christmas traditions in favor of activities and rituals devoid of Christian substance that instead centered on murky, vitalistic notions linked to pre-Christian Germanic tribal cults or vague renewal rites associated with the winter solstice. Many naval units ashore and afloat actually took up-and-down votes on how to go about their Christmas ceremonies.
This repaganization of the service went beyond efforts to redefine what Christmas meant and how it should be celebrated. It manifested itself in numerous ways, from the exclusion of clergy and Christian hymns at swearing-in ceremonies of new recruits to the ever-growing number of officers and sailors who designated themselves as gottgläubig, i.e. purporting to have faith in God but specifically rejected Christianity and the Christian churches as the carriers of God's will and message.
Based on the papers of Senior Naval Chaplain Friedrich Ronneberger and other primary records in Germany's Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, and on the holdings of the Central Archives of the German Protestant Churches in Berlin, this paper argues that efforts at ideological conformity with the Nazi movement, such as the "Christmas Directive of 1939" cited above, briefly took hold in the late 1930s and the early years of the war amid much confusion over to how to apply them in practice, but then were largely played down or ignored in later years (1941-1945) as, predictably, winning the war took priority over redefining and reorganizing Christmas activities and related service traditions.
This repaganization of the service went beyond efforts to redefine what Christmas meant and how it should be celebrated. It manifested itself in numerous ways, from the exclusion of clergy and Christian hymns at swearing-in ceremonies of new recruits to the ever-growing number of officers and sailors who designated themselves as gottgläubig, i.e. purporting to have faith in God but specifically rejected Christianity and the Christian churches as the carriers of God's will and message.
Based on the papers of Senior Naval Chaplain Friedrich Ronneberger and other primary records in Germany's Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, and on the holdings of the Central Archives of the German Protestant Churches in Berlin, this paper argues that efforts at ideological conformity with the Nazi movement, such as the "Christmas Directive of 1939" cited above, briefly took hold in the late 1930s and the early years of the war amid much confusion over to how to apply them in practice, but then were largely played down or ignored in later years (1941-1945) as, predictably, winning the war took priority over redefining and reorganizing Christmas activities and related service traditions.
See more of: Warrior Faith: Religion and the Military in the Twentieth Century
See more of: AHA Sessions
See more of: AHA Sessions