Thompson, Robert William; (2023) Liberators, Pastors, Witnesses: Christian Encounters with Holocaust Survivors in Post-War Occupied Germany. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Liberators, Pastors, Witnesses Thesis, Robert Thompson.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 January 2026. Download (3MB)

Abstract

Encounters with survivors of the Holocaust in post-war occupied Germany changed how ordinary Christians understood Jewish experience, and impacted their Christian faith. This thesis establishes a distinct approach to the study of Christian responses to the Holocaust. Scholarship identifies the 1960s and 1970s as decades of change in theological and institutional Church attitudes to the Holocaust and Judaism. However, reorientating understanding towards the lived religion of ordinary people demonstrates that Christians first negotiated knowledge of the Holocaust through encounters with survivors in its immediate aftermath. In local settings Christians engaged with Jews who recounted stories of persecution, and who faced emerging post-war challenges. The first chapter, Liberation, studies Christian army chaplains who accompanied liberating troops into the western concentration camps. Through burials, prayer, tracing survivors, and listening to testimony, chaplains learned about how Jews specifically experienced Nazi persecution. In Chapter Two, Relief, female Christian relief workers demonstrate how work in Displaced Persons camps and the kinship of women across religious dividing lines developed Christian understanding as survivors rebuilt Jewish life. Chapter Three, Occupation, examines the Religious Affairs branches of the British and American occupation governments. It reveals the work of branch officers, including the future Holocaust theologian Franklin Littell, in promoting interfaith relations to challenge antisemitism. The fourth chapter, Exodus, traces Christian activism in Jewish emigration from the DP camps. It focuses on the symbolic Exodus ship’s only Christian crew member whose role as spokesperson for its passengers helped shape memory and mythology of the aftermath of the Holocaust. As liberators and pastors, and as witnesses, Christians interacted with Jews and with legacies of the Nazi past, and with greater variance than has previously been supposed. For these Christians it was encounters with Jews that was the decisive factor for change, inspiring a turn in their understanding of the Holocaust.

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