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Following Germany’s defeat in 1945 and its occupation by the Allied powers, the German Protestant Church assumed critical social and political roles as both a provider of humanitarian aid and a mediator between the German population and the occupying authorities. This presentation examines the fraught interactions between German Lutheran pastors and their American Protestant counterparts, as well as U.S.-based faith organizations. These encounters helped pave the way for the German Protestant Church’s evolution from its historic association with German nationalism to a new postwar orientation toward peace, human rights, and democracy.
At the same time, engagement with American pastors enabled German church leaders to cultivate international support for their own, often self-serving narratives of the war, which frequently overstated or misconstrued the extent and nature of Christian resistance to the Nazi regime. The talk also addresses the role played by U.S. pastors and theologians in supporting the German church’s campaign against Allied denazification policies and war crimes trial programs.
Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy, was published by Harvard University Press in August 2025.
This lecture is sponsored by the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies with co-sponsorship by the Friends of the Max Kade Institute.