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In the years after 1945, German Protestant church leaders and lay intellectuals emerged as ubiquitous critics of the war crimes trials conducted by the Allied occupation governments. Marshaling the financial resources and international connections of the newly formed Protestant Church in Germany, a network of church administrators, theologians, and jurists petitioned occupation authorities for the release of hundreds of convicted Nazi perpetrators. While a generation of critical scholarship has linked the campaign against war crimes trials to the persistence of Protestant nationalism in Allied-occupied Germany, this article argues that the campaign also marked an inflection point in postwar German politics. Protestant church leaders and jurists not only echoed popular attacks on Allied "victors' justice" but also developed a novel language of human rights that would shape their later interventions in West German politics. Rejecting the dominant contemporary discourses of human rights, rooted in Catholic natural law or American exceptionalism, Protestant trial opponents recentered human rights around a theology of human fallibility in order to criticize the alleged excesses of political justice. Yet even as they promoted tendentious accounts of the Nazi past, Protestant leaders contributed to institutionalizing human rights in West German politics. By the 1950s, veterans of the postwar amnesty campaigns would defend the rights of conscientious objectors and recognition of Germany's territorial losses. The Protestant campaign against war crimes trials demonstrates how human rights gained power in postwar Germany as a political language that bridged nationalist and internationalist commitments, with ambiguous consequences for the consolidation of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postwar Germany, Allied personnel and displaced populations competed with local Germans for housing. Examining group interactions and conflicting interests in this competition sheds light on issues of responsibility and reconciliation in the occupied country. In the East, Germans quickly grasped the key political interests of the Soviet occupiers: inhospitable landlords were denounced as "Nazis," and many East Germans rewrote their pasts to claim "victim-of-fascism" status. In the West, Germans cast themselves as allies in the battle against Communism. Wartime and postwar victims in both East and West struggled to gain a moral status that would facilitate access to resources and authority; yet in neither East nor West did they create united fronts. Meanwhile, the alliance between local Germans and ethnic German expellees against the DPs and Communists did facilitate integration of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into western German society, changing the social and political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a case study of the Protestant churches in the British zone in occupied Germany after the Second World War, the article explores church responses to an often-neglected aspect of the Allies' purge of post-Nazi Germany: their mass internment of German civilians. Whereas the literature is critical of church support for former Nazis and opposition to Allied measures, the article argues for differentiation. Church assistance for internees was even more extensive than previously recognized and erred on the side of assisting undeserving former Nazis, while also being somewhat selective and discerning. Much church activity was in opposition to the British, yet there was also a degree of cooperation and negotiation. The article argues that ecclesiastical criticism of civilian internment was not merely a symptom of a refusal to confront the past or an expression of nationalist ideology. Internment was a genuine object of criticism in its own right and a source of wider church objections to denazification. Ultimately, Allied internment policy, pressure from below, interconfessional rivalry, national solidarity and the lack of a German government all contributed to the Protestant churches becoming outspoken critics of the Allies and advocates for those members of the German people who found themselves in civilian internment camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]