Between 'national community' and 'milieu': German Catholics at war, 1939-1945

This article examines German Catholics’ senses of community and identity during the Second World War. It analyses how far they were able to reconcile their religious faith with support of Nazism and the German war effort, and questions the extent to which Catholicism in the Rhineland and Westphalia either represented a sealed confessional subculture, or part of a homogenizing Nazified ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). The article argues that, in their pure forms, neither of these analytical paradigms accounts for the complexities of German Catholics’ attitudes during this period, which were far more contested and diverse than outlined by much existing historiography, featuring to varying degrees influences derived from Nazi propaganda as well as religious socialization and older nationalist traditions. At the level of lived experience, Catholics’ memberships of religious and national communities revealed themselves to be extensively compatible, a tendency which in turn exerted a restraining influence on church-state conflict in wartime Germany