Suzanne Brown-Fleming is Senior Program Officer in the University Programs Division of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C.
"In this revealing study, Suzanne Brown-Fleming takes us back to a
post–World War II Catholic world that had yet to come to terms with
either Nazism or the Holocaust. One of the leading Catholic clerics
in postwar Europe, Cardinal Aloisius Muench both reflected and
helped promote German Catholic failures in this regard. Anchored in
Cardinal Muench's private papers, this book conducts a fair-minded,
but rigorous and morally animated assessment of a Catholic
conscience that was later transformed by Vatican II. I recommend it
highly." —Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe
Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto
"This is an excellent book that will be of great interest to all
historians in the fields of church history, Christian-Jewish
relations, and American Catholicism." —Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth
College
"Brown-Fleming argues quite effectively that attitudes such as
these espoused by Muench and so many others in the Catholic
hierarchy gave rise to a culture in which German Catholics could
deny involvement in Nazi criminality, thus providing fertile ground
for Catholic denial. Brown-Fleming has provided historians with a
thoughtful reminder that leaders of the American church shared in
the shaping of post-World War II German Catholic memory." —H-GERMAN
Digest
"Suzanne Brown-Fleming's short study of the post-1945 career in
Germany of Bishop, later Cardinal, Aloisius Muench seeks to rectify
some shortcomings she finds in F. Colman Barry's biography written
in the 1960s. . . In her view, Muench, as the Vatican's leading
representative in Germany from 1946 to 1959, contributed to the
lack of self-examination and the perpetuation of anti-Semitic
prejudices among German Catholics. In this way, he was emblematic
of the Catholic Church's failure in this period to confront its own
complicity in Nazism's anti-Jewish ideology." —The Catholic
Historical Review
"Suzanne Brown-Fleming has made a critical contribution to the
growing research on the question of the Roman Catholic Church's
policies and actions with regard to the Holocaust during World War
II. . . Through the author's socio-historical, contextual analysis
of these documents, the reader is brought into this shocking
narrative of German Catholicism's post-war discourse on the issue
of Germany's and the Church's own guilt and/or responsibility for
the antisemitic horror inflicted on European Jews throughout the
war." —Shofar
“In a concise and clearly written book that will surely arouse
polarizing responses, [Brown-Flemming] argues that the
American-born Aloisius Muench helped shape the Catholic Church's
rejection of guilt for the persecution of Jews under the Nazis. . .
. She convincingly shows that Muench worked much more rigorously on
behalf of the defeated Germans than for their victims.” —Central
European History
“The import of this book is not only its critical historical
analysis of the legitimizing, self-preserving, and anti-Semitic
'conscience' of the Roman Catholic Church in the immediate
aftermath of World War II and the increasing world-wide awareness
of the Holocaust horror. Through a critical reading of the text, it
also forewarns of an all too similar contemporary trend developing
now on a global scale in the form of the U.S.-led neo-conservative
notion of a 'clash of civilizations.'” —Shofar
“Brown-Flemming's work deepens our understanding of how Catholics
coped in the postwar period, as anti-Semitism not only lingered,
but also continued to shape Catholic responses to the past.”
—Holocaust and Genocide Studies
“This book draws on Muench's papers and offers the first assessment
of his legacy. It 'argues that Muench legitimized the Catholic
Church's failure during this period to confront the nature of its
own complicity in Nazism's anti-Jewish ideology.'” —Theology
Digest
“Brown-Fleming paints a portrait of Cardinal Muench as a man who
did not want to face the reality of Nazism. According to her
account, Muench portrayed almost all Germans either as victims,
both of the Nazis and of the Occupation forces, or as heroes who
had resisted the Nazis. Certainly, Muench did nothing to lead
Catholic self-examination of the Church’s role during the
Holocaust. Rather, he defended Germans against any attribution of
collective guilt.” —Human Rights and Human Welfare: An
International Review of Books and Other Publications
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