Corporate Christian Nationalism: Konrad Möckel and the Saxon National Socialists of Romania. An Interpretative Essay. Part One
Corporate Christian Nationalism: Konrad Möckel and the Saxon National Socialists of Romania. An Interpretative Essay. Part One

Summary/Abstract: Nazism may have found its earliest and deepest resonance in eastern Europe within the sizable German minority of Romania. The ideology of Adolf Hitler had begun to attract disciples among the Saxons in their ancient Transylvanian settlements as early as the mid-1920s, even though Hitler’s party made no effort, then or later, to found a Saxon affiliate. While Hitler consolidated his authority in the homeland throughout 1933, Saxon National Socialists, fired by his success, managed to gain majority control of the Saxon Folk Council (Volksrat). Five years later, in 1938, the Third Reich enforced unity between the two feuding Nazi political parties in Romania. That forced merger facilitated the steps that Berlin took two years later, in 1940, to assume political and economic control of the German minority with the coerced consent of the Romanian government. Without much internal disruption, Saxon settlement areas passed from the considerable influence of the unified Nazi party to the control of the Third Reich. There were individual Saxons, however, who remained true in varying degrees to their tradition of corporate Christian nationalism. They deplored the escalating trend of these events, but, in the end, felt powerless to organize any significant resistance. Yet the path that the Saxon National Socialists followed before the initial intervention of the Third Reich in 1938 was far from smooth and serene. Saxon and other German-Romanian Nazis fell to fighting amongst themselves over differing strategies for “coordinating” the German minority in the face of Romanian hostility on the one hand and the hesitation of the Third Reich on the other. Added to the crippling effect of this internecine conflict were two other impediments that confronted Saxon National Socialists: One was the historical self-consciousness of the Saxon folk (Volk, loosely translated as “ethnic community”), which took exception to the aggressive behavior and pan-Germanism of the National Socialists comprehensive scope of the Saxon church, which comprised the larger part of the German Protestant (Lutheran) Territorial Church of the Augsburg Confession in Romania.[…]

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