Christian Internationalism and German Belonging: The Salvation Army from Imperial Germany to Nazism

Carter-Chand (coeditor of Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars), a director of programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers a fine-grained study of how the Salvation Army compromised its ostensible values while operating in 20th-century Germany. Founded in 1865 London by William and Catherine Booth to give aid to the “unsaved” (both spiritually and charitably), the Salvation Army arrived in Germany in 1886. The Heilsarmee, as it was called, began as a marginal organization severed from national “centers of power and influence,” but became “more demographically and culturally German” as leaders worked to frame it as a “patriotic German organization with an internationalist mission.” That strategy took a darker turn, according to the author, during WWI and under Hitler, with the organization engaging in “proactive public relations efforts,” forging Nazi alliances, and failing to offer organized aid to Jews. Dismantling narratives of the organization’s wartime virtue, Carter-Chand argues that it benefited from its simultaneous “national and international identities”—it could adopt German values while retaining a benevolent, internationalist image—and points to the organization’s postwar failure to reckon with its own complicity. It’s a rigorous and sobering reminder of how faith organizations can serve alternately as agents of compassion and instruments of accommodation. (Oct.)