This chapter follows the role of
Protestant intellectuals in the transformation of West German public opinion on
Europe's postwar territorial settlement and West German reconciliation with
Eastern Europe from the mid-1950s through mid-1960s. In 1965, a commission of
the German Protestant Church issued a memorandum calling on the West German
government to recognize the Oder-Neisse line established by the Potsdam
Agreement as the legitimate German-Polish border. The Protestant Church thereby
became the first major German organization to publicly champion the
renunciation of Germany's former Eastern territories and recognize the
nonreversibility of the postwar expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, at a
time when all of the major West German political parties continued to assert
the Federal Republic's sovereignty over Germany's 1937 borders. The Protestant
memorandum is widely regarded as catalyzing a turning point in West German
foreign policy, yet historians have yet to explore its roots in the Protestant
intellectual milieu. This chapter analyzes the prehistory of the Protestant
Church's so-called Ostdenkschrift, showing how the document reflected a
transformation in Protestant theological thinking about questions of national
identity, territory, and human rights with roots in the early postwar period. It
also argues that the revival of Nazi criminal trials in West Germany during the
early 1960s gave rise to a new Protestant appraisal of law as a medium of
reconciliation, which contributed crucially to debates about German territorial
rights.