Beyond the Concordat: Women Religious, the Negotiation of Free Spaces, and Popular Consent in Nazi Germany

In modern Germany, nuns forged close relationships with the emerging nation state to build educational and health care infrastructures. But the state remained ambivalent about nuns and their position in Germany was never secure. In response to repeated threats to their existence, German women religious congregations developed a pragmatic institutional culture that served them well in Nazi Germany. The Nazis wished to remove nuns from the public sphere. I focus on the teaching congregation of the Poor School Sisters of Notre Dame to show that despite increasing pressures in the Third Reich, the women managed to preserve important free spaces for themselves and remained an integral part of German society even after the loss of their schools. My work adds important new insights to the scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church. The concordat between Germany and the Vatican as an instrument of defense against Nazism remains a central but contested focus of this research.  I highlight the fact that in the case of nuns, the regime was less constrained by the concordat than by political considerations. The women formulated an independent response to Nazism that utilized their flexible organizational structures and drew on their popularity with both Catholic and Protestant Germans to carve out important free spaces for themselves in Germany for the duration of the Third Reich.  On account of their popular alliances with the population, the women could often exert an extraordinary amount of leverage in their negotiations with the state, and in some cases, they even succeeded in increasing their presence in certain communities. The Poor School Sisters of Notre Dame’s story in Nazi Germany adds to the understanding of the contested history of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich and once again highlights the fact that Hitler’s regime was a dictatorship of consent.