A Perpetrator's Confession: Gender and Religion in Oswald Pohl's Conversion Narrative‪.‬

Ideally, Christian confessional writings are a public testimony, in which a sinner exposes his shameful past to others, namely to God and the public, so that a reconciliation and transformation can occur. This article pursues the question of whether genocidal perpetrators are capable of such a confession, using the example of Oswald Pohl's conversion narrative, Credo: My Path to God. Pohl had overseen the economic exploitation of slave laborers in the Nazi concentration camps. While in Allied imprisonment after the war, he converted to Catholicism. This article analyzes Credo's religious and gendered rhetoric within the larger political discourse of postwar Germany. Commenting on the conspicuous absence of women in Pohl's confessional testimony, I argue that religion assisted in negotiating a crisis of postwar German masculinity. On February 12, 1950, in the American War Crime Prison of Landsberg (Bavaria), the former Nazi leader Oswald Pohl officially converted to Catholicism. Shortly after his conversion, he published Credo: Mein Weg zu Gott (Credo: My Path to God), a small booklet containing his public confession. In this largely apologetic text, Pohl presents himself as a new man, who, purged of his sins, has received God's grace. In this article, I will take a closer look at select aspects of this confessional narrative. I will pay attention specifically to the interplay of religious and gendered rhetoric, which assisted in the attempt at normalizing a National Socialist (NS)-perpetrator and at portraying Pohl as a decent human being. The essay will proceed in three steps: After a short biographical sketch, I will first show that it took the collaborative effort of the accused Pohl and his Catholic prison chaplain to turn a religious conversion into a public testimony of a Nazi perpetrator; second, I argue that the absence of women in Credo is not coincidental but a central element of confessional writings in which men try to take account of their past selves; third, I will suggest that the religious rhetoric of Credo negotiates a crisis of postwar German masculinity.