German and American Protestant Pastors in Occupied Germany

This presentation examines the fraught interactions between German Lutheran pastors and their American counterparts, which 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, the engagement enabled German church leaders to cultivate international support for their own, self-serving narratives of Christian resistance to the Nazi regime.