Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany
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Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany was a component of
An estimated one-third of German Catholic priests faced some form of reprisal from authorities and thousands of Catholic clergy and religious were sent to concentration camps. 400 Germans were among the 2,579 Catholic priests imprisoned in the clergy barracks at Dachau. While the head German bishop generally avoided confronting the regime, other bishops such as Preysing, Frings and Galen developed a Catholic critique of aspects of Nazism.[1] Galen led Catholic protest against Nazi "euthanasia".[2]
Catholic resistance to mistreatment of Jews in Germany was generally limited to fragmented and largely individual efforts.[3] But in every country under German occupation, priests played a major part in rescuing Jews.[4] Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide estimated that Catholic rescue of Jews amounted to somewhere between 700,000 and 860,000 people – though the figure is contested.[5] The martyrs Maximilian Kolbe, Giuseppe Girotti and Bernhard Lichtenberg were among those killed in part for aiding Jews. Among the notable Catholic networks to rescue Jews and others were Hugh O'Flaherty's "Rome Escape Line", the Assisi Network and Poland's Żegota.
Relations between the Axis governments and the church varied. Bishops such as the Netherlands'
Author Klaus Scholder writes: "There was no Catholic resistance in Germany, there were only Catholics who resisted."
Background
Nazis rise to power
In the 1920s and 1930s, Catholic leaders made a number of forthright attacks on Nazi ideology and the main Christian opposition to Nazism had come from the Catholic Church.
The Nazis disliked universities, intellectuals and the Catholic and Protestant churches. Hamerow writes that many Nazis suspected Catholics of insufficient patriotism, or even of disloyalty to the Fatherland, and of serving the interests of "sinister alien forces".[15] Various historians surmise that the long-term plan of the Nazis was to de-Christianise Germany after final victory in the war.[16][17][a] Nazi ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment, whose legitimacy did not spring from the government, and the Nazis desired the subordination of the church to the state.[18] In his history of the German Resistance, Hamerow wrote:
The Catholic Church... had generally viewed the Nazi Party with fear and suspicion. It had felt threatened by a radical ultranationalist ideology that regarded the papacy as a sinister, alien institution, that opposed denominational separatism in education and culture, and that at times appeared to promote a return to Nordic paganism. The establishment of the Third Reich seemed to portend the coming of a bitter conflict between church and state.
— Theodore S. Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf's Lair: German Resistance to Hitler[19]
- The Centre Party and Hitler
The
A middle class liberal party strong enough to block the Nazis did not exist; the Centre Party was preoccupied defending its own particular interests.
Church Struggle commences
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When the Nazis won power in 1933, Catholics were apprehensive and a threatening, though initially sporadic persecution of the Catholic Church commenced.[28][29] Leading Nazis like Goebbels and Hitler's war-time deputy Martin Bormann saw the conflict with the churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anti-clerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.[9] But Catholics constituted a third of the population, and Hitler was prepared to restrain the full extent of his anti-clerical ambitions out of political considerations, intending instead to have a showdown after the war.[10][30] Hitler moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism, rounding up thousands of functionaries of the Bavarian People's Party and Centre Party, before outlawing non-Nazi political parties.[31]
- Concordat signed and breached
Amid continuing molestation of its clergy and organisations, the church was anxious to reach agreement securing its rights in Germany with the new Reich Government.
It quickly became clear that [Hitler] intended to imprison the Catholics, as it were, in their own churches. They could celebrate mass and retain their rituals as much as they liked, but they could have nothing at all to do with German society otherwise. Catholic schools and newspapers were closed, and a propaganda campaign against the Catholics was launched.
— Anton Gill, An Honourable Defeat[36]
- Catholics targeted
In the
The Nazi official philosopher Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book
Goebbels believed that there was an "insoluble opposition" between the Christian and Nazi outlooks, and became one of the leaders of the persecution of the clergy.[9] In his 1936 campaign against the monasteries and convents, the authorities charged 276 members of religious orders with the offence of "homosexuality".[42]
Rosenberg and Bormann also actively collaborated in the Nazi program to eliminate church influence – a program which included the abolition of religious services in schools; the confiscation of religious property; circulating anti-religious material to soldiers; and the closing of theological faculties.[43] Hitler feared the idealism of Christians.[44] In the Nazi security forces, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler wanted to suppress "political churches", such as Lutheran and Catholic clergy who opposed the Hitler regime.[45]
By 1940, a dedicated clergy barracks had been established by the Nazis at Dachau Concentration Camp.[46] Catholic schools in Germany were phased out by 1939 and Catholic press by 1941. With the expansion of the war in the East from 1941, there came also an expansion of the regime's attack on the church. Monasteries and convents were targeted and expropriation of church properties surged.[47]
Within Germany
Foundations
Though neither the Catholic nor Protestent churches as institutions were prepared to openly oppose the Nazi State, the churches provided the earliest and most enduring centres of systematic opposition to Nazi policies, and Christian morality and the anti-church policies of the Nazis motivated many German resistors and provided impetus for the "moral revolt" of individuals in their efforts to overthrow Hitler. Hoffmann writes that, from the beginning:
[The Catholic Church] could not silently accept the general persecution, regimentation or oppression, nor in particular the sterilization law of summer 1933. Over the years until the outbreak of war Catholic resistance stiffened until finally its most eminent spokesman was the Pope himself with his encyclial Mit brennender Sorge ... of 14 March 1937, read from all German Catholic pulpits. Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of Münster, was typical of the many fearless Catholic speakers. In general terms, therefore, the churches were the only major organisations to offer comparatively early and open resistance: they remained so in later years.
— Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945[50]
Ernst Wolf wrote that some credit must be given to the
The shattered freedom of spirit, conscience, faith and opinion will be restored. The churches will once again be given the right to work for their confessions. In future they will exist quite separately from the state ... The working of the state is to be inspired, both in word and deed by the Christian outlook ..."
— Intended "Broadcast of Government" of the 1944July Plot conspirators.[53]
Limitations
The German Episcopate had various disagreements with the Nazi government, but it never declared an official sanction of the various attempts to overthrow the Hitler regime.[54] The German bishops hoped for a quid pro quo that would protect Catholic schools, organisations, publications and religious observance.[55] The Vatican too persisted in seeking to maintain a "legal modus vivendi" with the regime.[54]
Clergy in the German Resistance had some independence from the state apparatus, and could thus criticise it, while not being close enough to the centre of power to take steps to overthrow it. "Clerical resistors", wrote Theodore S. Hamerow, could "indirectly at least, articulate political dissent in the guise of pastoral stricture", but the problem for them lay in determining how far they should go in their criticism: "Should they confine themselves to religious and moral issues or should they deal with political and racial issues as well ...". Faced with such questions, the German clergy generally determined that their first duty lay in the protection of their own church and its members, remaining within the limits of formal legality. Thus during the early years of Nazi Germany, clerical dissenters usually spoke out not against the established system, but "only against specific policies that it had mistakenly adopted and that it should therefore properly correct".[56]
Before moving toward resistance, German Catholics and Protestants were also faced with overcoming nationalist sentiment, and an instinct to respect authority which was the inheritance of their religious and national outlooks.[57] In predominantly Protestant Germany, many Catholics were determined to prove that they were "good Germans" too, and avoid the trauma of another Kulturkampf.[58] Thus when Bishop August von Galen of Münster delivered his famous 1941 denunciations of Nazi euthanasia and the lawlessness of the Gestapo, he also said that the church had never sought the overthrow of the regime.[54] Yet from the early stages of Nazism, the Nazis moved early against the church's organisational interests – attacking Catholic schools and the Catholic press.[57]
Hastings wrote that the early Nazi movement founded in Munich was essentially Catholic in religious orientation with Catholic student groups being influential in the founding of the movement and Catholic priests providing spiritual guidance.[59] The events surrounding the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 caused a rift between Catholic and Protestant members and thereafter the movement became predominantly Protestant. Archbishop Bertram sought to join the Nazi Party in 1932 with Archbishop Groeber joining the SS as a promotive member in 1933 and Bishop Hudal helping Nazi war criminals to escape after the war.[60][61][b]
According to Kershaw, the German church leadership expended considerable energies in opposing government interference in the churches and "attempts to ride roughshod over Christian doctrine and values", but this vigour, was not matched against all areas of "Nazi barbarism". Thus for example, what protests the bishops did make regarding anti-Jewish policies, tended to be by way of private letters to government ministers.[63] Kershaw wrote that, while the "detestation of Nazism was overwhelming within the Catholic Church", it did not preclude church leaders approving of areas of the regime's policies, particularly where Nazism "blended into 'mainstream' national aspirations" – like support for "patriotic" foreign policy or war aims, obedience to state authority (where this did not contravene divine law); and destruction of atheistic Marxism and Soviet Bolshevism. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism was "no bulwark" against Nazi biological antisemitism, wrote Kershaw, and on these issues "the churches as institutions felt on uncertain grounds". Opposition was generally left to fragmented and largely individual efforts.[3]
Historian
Institutional resistance
By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with the new government, had become highly disillusioned. In March, Pope Pius XI issued the Mit brennender Sorge encyclical – accusing the Nazi Government of violations of the 1933 Concordat, and further that it was sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church". The Pope noted on the horizon the "threatening storm clouds" of religious wars of extermination over Germany.[35] The Nazis responded with, an intensification of the Church Struggle, beginning around April.[9] There were mass arrests of clergy and church presses were expropriated.[67] Goebbels noted heightened verbal attacks on the clergy from Hitler in his diary and wrote that Hitler had approved the start of trumped up "immorality trials" against clergy and anti-church propaganda campaign. Goebbels' orchestrated attack included a staged "morality trial" of 37 Franciscans.[9]
Institutionally, the Catholic Church in Germany offered organised, systematic and consistent resistance to the policies of the Third Reich which infringed on ecclesiastical autonomy.
German Hierarchy
The 1933
A senior cleric could rely on a degree of popular support from the faithful, and thus the regime had to consider the possibility of nationwide protests if such figures were arrested.[1] While hundreds of ordinary priests and members of monastic orders were sent to concentration camps throughout the Nazi period, just one German Catholic bishop was briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp, and just one other expelled from his diocese.[71] This reflected also the cautious approach adopted by the hierarchy, who felt secure only in commenting on matters which transgressed on the ecclesiastical sphere.[72]
While some clergymen refused ever to feign support for the regime, in the church's conflict with the state over ecclesiastical autonomy, the Catholic hierarchy adopted a strategy of "seeming acceptance of the Third Reich", by couching their criticisms as motivated merely by a desire to "point out mistakes that some of its overzealous followers committed" in order to strengthen the government.
On 22 March 1942, the German Bishops issued a pastoral letter on "The Struggle against Christianity and the Church".[76] The letter launched a defence of human rights and the rule of law and accused the Reich Government of "unjust oppression and hated struggle against Christianity and the Church", despite the loyalty of German Catholics to the Fatherland, and brave service of Catholics soldiers. It accused the regime of seeking to rid Germany of Christianity:
For years a war has raged in our Fatherland against Christianity and the Church, and has never been conducted with such bitterness. Repeatedly the German bishops have asked the Reich Government to discontinue this fatal struggle; but unfortunately our appeals and our endeavours were without success.
— 22 March 1942 Pastoral Letter of the German Bishops[77]
The letter outlined serial breaches of the 1933 Concordat, reiterated complaints of the suffocation of Catholic schooling, presses and hospitals and said that the "Catholic faith has been restricted to such a degree that it has disappeared almost entirely from public life" and even worship within churches in Germany "is frequently restricted or oppressed", while in the conquered territories (and even in the Old Reich), churches had been "closed by force and even used for profane purposes". The freedom of speech of clergymen had been suppressed and priests were being "watched constantly" and punished for fulfilling "priestly duties" and incarcerated in Concentration camps without legal process. Religious orders had been expelled from schools, and their properties seized, while seminaries had been confiscated "to deprive the Catholic priesthood of successors".[77] The bishops denounced the Nazi euthanasia program and declared their support for human rights and personal freedom under God and "just laws" of all people:
We demand juridical proof of all sentences and release of all fellow citizens who have been deprived of their liberty without proof ... We the German bishops shall not cease to protest against the killing of innocent persons. Nobody's life is safe unless the Commandment, "Thous shalt not kill" is observed ... We the bishops, in the name of the Catholic people ... demand the return of all unlawfully confiscated and in some cases sequestered property ... for what happens today to church property may tomorrow happen to any lawful property.
— 22 March 1942 Pastoral Letter of the German Bishops[77]
- Faulhaber
Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber gained an early reputation as a critic of the Nazi movement.[14] Soon after the Nazi takeover, his three Advent sermons of 1933, entitled Judaism, Christianity, and Germany, affirmed the Jewish origins of the Christian religion, the continuity of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and the importance of the Christian tradition to Germany.[14] Though Faulhaber's words were cautiously framed as a discussion of "historical" Judaism, his sermons denounced the Nazi extremists who were calling for the Bible to be purged of the "Jewish" Old Testament as a grave threat to Christianity: in seeking to adhere to the central tenet of Nazism, "The anti-Semitic zealots ..." wrote Hamerow, were also undermining "the basis of Catholicism. Neither accommodation, nor acquiescence was possible any longer; the cardinal had to face the enemy head on."[78]
Hamerow wrote that Faulhaber would look to avoid conflict with the state over issues not strictly pertaining to the church, but on issues involving the defence of Catholics he "refused to compromise or retreat".[79] On 4 November 1936, Hitler and Faulhaber met. Faulhaber told Hitler that the Nazi government had been waging war on the church for three years and had instituted laws the church could not accept – like the sterilization of criminals and disabled people. While the Catholic Church respected the notion of authority, he told the Dictator, "when your officials or your laws offend Church dogma or the laws of morality, and in so doing offend our conscience, then we must be able to articulate this as responsible defenders of moral laws".[41] When in 1937 the authorities in Upper Bavaria attempted to replace Catholic schools with "common schools", he offered fierce resistance.[79]
During the 1938 Kristallnacht, Faulhaber supplied a truck to rabbi of the
- Preysing
Among the most firm and consistent of senior Catholics to oppose the Nazis was
- Galen
The Bishop of Münster, August von Galen was Preysing's cousin. Himself a German conservative and nationalist, in January 1934 he criticised Nazi racial policy in a sermon and in subsequent homilies, equated unquestioning loyalty to the Reich with "slavery" and spoke against Hitler's theory of the purity of German blood.[84] Galen derided the neo-pagan theories of Rosenberg as perhaps no more than "an occasion for laughter in the educated world", but warned that "his immense importance lies in the acceptance of his basic notions as the authentic philosophy of National Socialism and in his almost unlimited power in the field of German education. Herr Rosenberg must be taken seriously if the German situation is to be understood."[85]
When in 1933, the Nazi school superintendent of Münster issued a decree that religious instruction be combined with discussion of the "demoralising power" of the "people of Israel", Galen refused, writing that such interference in curriculum was a breach of the Concordat and that he feared children would be confused as to their "obligation to act with charity to all men" and as to the historical mission of the people of Israel.[86] Often Galen directly protested to Hitler over violations of the Concordat. After constant confrontations, by late 1935, Bishop August von Galen of Münster was urging a joint pastoral letter protesting an "underground war" against the church.[86] Hamerow characterised the resistance approach of senior Catholic clergy like August von Galen of Münster as "trying to influence the Third Reich from within". When in 1936, Nazis removed crucifixes in school, protest by Galen led to public demonstration. Like Presying, he assisted with the drafting of the 1937 papal encyclical.[84]
In 1941,with the Wehrmacht still marching on Moscow, Galen, the old nationalist, denounced the lawlessness of the Gestapo, and the confiscations of church properties.[87] He attacked the Gestapo for converting church properties to their own purposes – including use as cinemas and brothels.[88] Galen protested the mistreatment of Catholics in Germany: the arrests and imprisonment without legal process, the suppression of the monasteries, the expulsion of religious orders. But his sermons went further than defending the church, he spoke of a moral danger to Germany from the regime's violations of basic human rights: "the right to life , to inviolability, and to freedom is an indispensable part of any moral social order", he said – and any government that punishes without court proceedings "undermines its own authority and respect for its sovereignty within the conscience of its citizens".[89] Bishop von Galen led denunciation of Nazi euthanasia and the most widespread public protests against any Nazi policy up to that time.
"There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives."
— August von Galen, Bishop of Münster, 1941 Sermon[90]
His three powerful sermons of July and August 1941 earned him the nickname of the "Lion of Münster". Galen's sermons appealed to Christian conscience as the well for opposition. The sermons were printed and distributed illegally.[88] Hitler wanted to have Galen removed, but Goebbels told him this would result in the loss of the loyalty of Westphalia.[88] Documents suggest the Nazis intended to hang von Galen at the end of the war.[87] In a "Table Talk" from 1942, Hitler is quoted as having said: "The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing".[91]
- Frings
Josef Frings became Archbishop of Cologne in 1942 and his consecration was used as a demonstration of Catholic self-assertion. In his sermons, he repeatedly spoke in support of persecuted peoples and against state repression. In March 1944, Frings attacked arbitrary arrests, racial persecution and forced divorces. That autumn, he protested to the Gestapo against the deportations of Jews from Cologne and surrounds.[92] In 1943, the German bishops had debated whether to directly confront Hitler collectively over what they knew of the murdering of Jews. Frings wrote a pastoral letter cautioning his diocese not to violate the inherent rights of others to life, even those "not of our blood" and even during war, and preached in a sermon that "no one may take the property or life of an innocent person just because he is a member of a foreign race".[13] Following war's end, Frings succeeded Bertram as chairman of the Fulda Bishops' Conference in July 1945 and in 1946 he was appointed a cardinal by Pius XII.[92]
"Euthanasia"
From 1934, the Nazis began to compulsorily sterilise the hereditarily diseased. Based on pseudoscientific eugenic theories, they sought to "cleanse" the German nation of "unhealthy breeding stock" and was taken a step further in 1939, when the regime commenced its mass-murder program, euphemistically referred to as "euthanasia". This was the first of the regime's infamous series of mass extermination programs, which saw the Nazis attempt to eliminate "life unworthy of life" from Europe: first the handicapped, then Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others deemed "subnormal". Ultimately, the Jews suffered most in numerical terms, while Gypsies suffered the greatest proportional loss.
While the Nazi
From 1939, the regime began its program of "
The Papacy and German bishops had already protested against the Nazi sterilization of the "racially unfit". Catholic protests against the escalation of this policy into "euthanasia" began in the summer of 1940. Despite Nazi efforts to transfer hospitals to state control, large numbers of disabled people were still under the care of the churches.
Bishop von Galen had the decree printed in his newspaper on 9 March 1941. Subsequent arrests of priests and seizure of Jesuit properties by the Gestapo in his home city of Munster, convinced Galen that the caution advised by his superior had become pointless. On 6, 13 and 20 July 1941, Galen spoke against the seizure of properties, and expulsions of nuns, monks and religious and criticised the euthanasia programme. In an attempt to cow Galen, the police raided his sister's convent, and detained her in the cellar. She escaped the confinement, and Galen, who had also received news of the imminent removal of further patients, launched his most audacious challenge on the regime in a 3 August sermon. As word of the program spread, protest grew, until finally, Bishop August von Galen delivered his famous 1941 sermons denouncing the program as "murder". He declared the murders to be illegal, and said that he had formally accused those responsible for murders in his diocese in a letter to the public prosecutor. The policy opened the way to the murder of all "unproductive people", like old horses or cows, including invalid war veterans: "Who can trust his doctor anymore?", he asked.
On 3 August 1941, in one of his series of denunciations, Galen declared:
"Thou shalt not kill." God engraved this commandment on the souls of men long before any penal code ... God has engraved these commandments in our hearts ... They are the unchangeable and fundamental truths of our social life ... Where in Germany and where, here, is obedience to the precepts of God? ... As for the first commandment, "Thou shalt not have strange gods before me," instead of the One, True, Eternal God, men have created at the dictates of their whim, their own gods to adore: Nature, the State, the Nation, or the Race.[98]
He declared, wrote Evans, that Catholics must "avoid those who blasphemed, attacked their religion, or brought about the death of innocent men and women. Otherwise they would become involved in their guilt".[99] Galen said that it was the duty of Christians to resist the taking of human life, even if it meant losing their own lives.[100] Thousands of copies of the sermons were circulated across Germany.
"The sensation created by the sermons", wrote Evans, "was enormous".[95] Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's euthanasia program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism".[63] According to Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state."[88] Galen had the sermons read in parish churches. The British broadcast excerpts over the BBC German service, dropped leaflets over Germany, and distributed the sermons in occupied countries.[95]
There were demonstrations across Catholic Germany – Hitler himself faced angry demonstrators at Nuremberg, the only time he was confronted with such resistance by ordinary Germans.[96] The regime did not halt the murders, but took the program underground.[13] Bishop Antonius Hilfrich of Limburg wrote to the Justice Minister, denouncing the murders. Bishop Albert Stohr of Mainz condemned the taking of life from the pulpit. Some of the priests who distributed the sermons were among those arrested and sent to the concentration camps amid the public reaction to the sermons.[95] The regional Nazi leader, and Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann called for Galen to be hanged, but Hitler and Goebbels urged a delay in retribution until war's end.[101] With the programme now public knowledge, nurses and staff (particularly in Catholics institutions), now increasingly seeking to obstruct implementation of the policy, Hitler ordered a halt to the murder of adults (though maintained the easier to conceal murder of children).[102] Following the war, Pope Pius XII hailed von Galen a hero and promoted him to Cardinal.[103]
In 1943, Pius issued the
German Priests and religious
While Hitler did not feel powerful enough to arrest senior clergy before the end of the war, an estimated one third of German priests faced some form of reprisal from the Nazi government. Bishop von Preysing was protected from Nazi retaliation by his position, his cathedral administrator and confidant, Provost
Rupert Mayer, a Bavarian Jesuit and World War I army chaplain, had clashed with the National Socialists as early as 1923. Continuing his critique following Hitler's rise to power, Mayer was imprisoned in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As his health declined, the Nazis feared the creation of a martyr and sent him to the Abbey of Ettal, but Mayer died in 1945.[109][110]
Also involved in the German Resistance was Christian workers' movement activist and Centre Party politician
Parish priests such as the Lübeck martyrs – Johannes Prassek, Eduard Müller and Hermann Lange, and the Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink were partly inspired by August von Galen's anti-euthanasia homilies.[113][114][115] They shared disapproval of the Nazi regime, and the four priests spoke publicly against the Nazis – initially discreetly – distributing pamphlets to friends and congregants.[116] Although church federation work with young people was banned, Müller worked with youth groups and led a discussion circle whose topics included National Socialism, political events and the military situation – using information from British radio and from leaflets including the sermons of Bishop Clemens August von Galen, which he duplicated with Lange and Prassek.[114][117] Then, following a March 1942 RAF raid, after which Stellbrink tended wounded, he delivered a Palm Sunday sermon which attributed the bombing to divine punishment. Stellbrink was arrested, followed by the three Catholic priests, and each was sentenced to death. Resigned to martyrdom, Prassek wrote to his family: "Who can oppress one who dies". The mingling of the blood of the four guillotined martyrs has become a symbol of German Ecumenism.[116]
Max Josef Metzger, a World War I military chaplain and holder of the Iron Cross, had founded the German Catholics' Peace Association in 1919 and sought links to the international pacifist movement. As a leading German pacifist, he was targeted by the Nazi authorities and arrested on several occasions by the Gestapo. He was arrested for the last time in June 1943 after being denounced by a mail courier for attempting to send a memorandum on the reorganisation of the German state and its integration into a future system of world peace to Erling Eidem, the Swedish Archbishop of Uppsala. Sentenced to death, he was executed on 17 April 1944.[118]
An old guard of national-conservatives aligned to Carl Friedrich Goerdeler broke with Hitler in the mid-1930s. According to Kershaw, they "despised the barbarism of the Nazi regime. But were keen to re-establish Germany's status as a major power ...". Essentially authoritarian, they favoured monarchy and limited electoral rights "resting on Christian family values".[119] "Hitlerism is poison for the German soul", wrote Goerdeler, "Hitler is determined to destroy Christianity".[120]
A younger group, dubbed the "Kreisau Circle" by the Gestapo, did not look to German imperialism for inspiration.[119] Religious motivations were particularly strong in the Kreisau Circle of the Resistance.[121] Formed in 1937, though multi-denominational, it had a strongly Christian orientation, and looked for a general Christian revival, and reawakening of awareness of the transcendental. Its outlook was rooted both in German romantic and idealist tradition and in the Catholic doctrine of natural law.[122] The Circle looked to a federalised Europe along the lines of the United States as the desirable "new order", resting heavily on German Christian and social ideals, with self-governing communities rooted in social justice. The Circle pressed for a coup against Hitler, but being unarmed was dependent on persuading military figures to take action.[119]
Among the central membership of the Circle were the Jesuit priests
According to Gill, "Delp's role was to sound out for Moltke the possibilities in the Catholic Community of support for a new, post-war Germany".[126] Rösch and Delp also explored the possibilities for common ground between Christian and socialist trade unions.[126] Lothar König SJ became an important intermediary between the Circle and bishops Grober of Freiberg and Presying of Berlin.[127]
The Kreisau group combined conservative notions of reform with socialist strains of thought – a symbiosis expressed by Delp's notion of "personal socialism".[128] The group rejected Western models, but wanted to "associate conservative and socialist values, aristocracy and workers, in a new democratic synthesis which would include the churches."[128] Delp wrote: "It is time the 20th Century revolution was given a definitive theme, and the opportunity to create new and lasting horizons for humanity", by which he meant, social security and the basics for individual intellectual and religious development. So long as people lacked dignity, they would be incapable of prayer or thought.[129] In Die dritte Idee (The Third Idea), Delp expounded on the notion of a third way, which, as opposed to Communism and Capitalism, might restore the unity of the person and society.[130]
Another non-military German Resistance group, dubbed the
Priests of Dachau
In effort to counter the strength and influence of spiritual resistance, Nazi security services monitored Catholic clergy very closely – instructing that agents be set up in every diocese, that the bishops' reports to the Vatican should be obtained and that the bishops' areas of activity must be found out. A "vast network" was established to monitor the activities of ordinary clergy: Nazi security agents wrote "The importance of this enemy is such that inspectors of security police and of the security service will make this group of people and the questions discussed by them their special concern".[135] Priests were frequently denounced, arrested and sent to concentration camps, often simply on the basis of being "suspected of activities hostile to the State" or that there was reason to "suppose that his dealings might harm society".[136]
By far the greatest number of priest prisoners came from Poland – in all some 1,748 Polish Catholic clerics, of whom some 868 died in the camp.[134] Germans constituted the next largest group – 411 German Catholic priests were sent to Dachau, of whom 94 died in the camp and 100 were "transferred or liquidated".[63][134] France contributed the next main group, with 153 Catholic clerics, among whom ten were murdered at the camp.[134] Other Catholic priests were sent from Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Hungary and Rumania, while from outside the Nazi Empire – 2 British and one Spaniard were incarcerated at Dachau, as well as one "stateless" priest.[134]
In December 1935, Wilhelm Braun, a Catholic theologian from Munich, became the first churchman imprisoned at Dachau. The annexation of Austria saw an increase in clerical inmates. Berben wrote: "The commandant at the time, Loritz, persecuted them with ferocious hatred, and unfortunately he found some prisoners to help the guards in their sinister work".[138] Despite SS hostility to religious observance, the Vatican and German bishops successfully lobbied the regime to concentrate clergy at one camp and obtained permission to build a chapel, for the priests to live communally and for time to be allotted to them for the religious and intellectual activity. From December 1940, priests were gathered in Blocks 26, 28 – and 30, though only temporarily. 26 became the international block and 28 was reserved for Poles – the most numerous group.[139]
Conditions varied for prisoners in the camp. The Nazis introduced a racial hierarchy – keeping Poles in harsh conditions, while favouring German priests.
Religious activity outside the chapel was totally forbidden.[142] Priests would secretly take confessions and distribute the Eucharist among other prisoners.[143]
Amid the Nazi persecution of the Tirolian Catholics, Otto Neururer, a parish priest was sent to Dachau for "slander to the detriment of German marriage", after he advised a girl against marrying the friend of a senior Nazi. After agreeing to perform a forbidden baptism at Buchenwald, Neururer was sent to the punishment block, where he was murdered by being hanged upside down on 30 May 1940.[144] This was reportedly conducted at the orders of the sadistic SS Hauptscharführer Martin Sommer – the "Hangman of Buchenwald".[145] He was the first priest murdered in the concentration camps.[144]
Among the priest-martyrs killed at Dachau were many of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II.[146]Gerhard Hirschfelder died of hunger and illness in 1942.[147] Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite, was murdered by a lethal injection in 1942. The Nazis murdered Alois Andritzki, a German priest, by lethal injection in 1943.[148] Engelmar Unzeitig, a Czech priest died of typhoid in 1945.[149] Giuseppe Girotti died at the camp in April 1945.[150]
In December 1944,
Among other notable Catholic clerics sent to Dachau were:
Nationality | Total number | Total Catholic | Total Released | Total Transferred | Total Liberated 29 April 1945 | Total Deceased |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Poland | 1780 | 1748 | 78 | 4 | 830 | 868 |
Germany | 447 | 411 | 208 | 100 | 45 | 94 |
France | 156 | 153 | 5 | 4 | 137 | 10 |
Czechoslovakia | 109 | 93 | 1 | 10 | 74 | 24 |
Netherlands | 63 | 39 | 10 | 0 | 36 | 17 |
Yugoslavia | 50 | 35 | 2 | 6 | 38 | 4 |
Belgium | 46 | 46 | 1 | 3 | 33 | 9 |
Italy | 28 | 28 | 0 | 1 | 26 | 1 |
Luxembourg | 16 | 16 | 2 | 0 | 8 | 6 |
Total | 2720 | 2579 | 314 | 132 | 1240 | 1034 |
Lay resistors
In his history of the German Resistance to Hitler, Anton Gill wrote that "more than anyone else, the Catholics showed their disapproval of the regime by huge gatherings" but that "this was the only collective resistance Catholics showed".[154] In 1935, in Hagen, Catholics gathered to protest against a performance of the Nazi playwright Edmund Kiss's anti-Christian play Wittekind. Police crushed the riot.[155] In November 1936, the Oldenburg Nazis removed crucifixes from schools. Bishop Galen protested, which led to a public demonstration, and the cancellation of the order.[87] In 1937, amidst harassment of the church and following the hundreds of arrests and closure of Catholic presses that followed the issuing of Pope Pius XI's Mit brennender Sorge encyclical, at least 800,000 people attended a pilgrimage centred on Aachen – a massive demonstration by the standards of the day – and some 60,000 attended the 700th anniversary of the bishopric of Franconia – about equal to the city's entire population.[154]
Following the outbreak of war, conscientious objectors were executed for treason, as with
Early resistance
In the year following Hitler's "seizure of power", political players in Germany began wondering how the regime might be overthrown. The old political opponents of Nazism faced their final opportunity to halt the Nazification of Germany. The formerly influential Catholic aligned
The political temperature was also raised when the Conservative Catholic nobleman Franz von Papen, who had helped Hitler to power and was serving as the Deputy Reich Chancellor, delivered an indictment of the Nazi government in his Marburg speech of 17 June 1934.[157][158] Papen's speech writer and advisor Edgar Jung, a Catholic Action worker, seized the opportunity to reassert the Christian foundation of the state and the need to avoid agitation and propaganda.[159] "It is time", the speech declared "to join together in fraternal friendship and respect for all our fellow countrymen, to avoid disturbing the labours of serious men and to silence fanatics". The speech was banned from the press.[159] Jung had been a tireless opponent of the Nazis, and took every opportunity to undermine them. His speech pleaded for religious freedom, and rejected totalitarian aspirations in the field of religion. It was hoped the speech might spur a rising, centred on Hindenberg, Papen and the army.[160]
Hitler decided to strike at his chief political opponents both within and without the Nazi movement in a bloody purge: the Night of the Long Knives. The purge lasted two days over 30 June and 1 July 1934.[161] Leading rivals of Hitler in the Nazi movement were murdered, along with over 100 opposition figures, including high-profile Catholic resistors. Erich Klausener became the first Catholic martyr. Hitler personally ordered the arrest of Jung and his transfer to Gestapo headquarters, Berlin. Like Klausener, he was murdered in the Long Knives purge.[159] Papen, who was probably also listed for execution, protested, but fell back in line and did not challenge Hitler again.[160]
The church had resisted attempts by the new Nazi Government to close its youth organisations and Adalbert Probst, the national director of the Catholic Youth Sports Association, was also eliminated in the purge – abducted and later found dead, allegedly "shot while trying to escape".[38][162]
On 2 August 1934, the aged President von Hindenberg died. The offices of President and Chancellor were combined and bestowed upon Hitler by the "Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich".[163] The German armed forces were required to swear an oath of loyalty, not to the constitution or the state, but to Hitler personally. Hitler declared his "revolution" complete.[164]
Catholic writers
The flourishing Catholic press of Germany faced censorship and closure under the Nazis. In 1933, the Nazis established a Reich Chamber of Authorship and Reich Press Chamber under the Reich Cultural Chamber of the Ministry for Propaganda. Writers had to be registered with the relevant chamber. On 10 May, "degenerate literary works" were burned by the thousand at the public squares of Berlin and other cities. As the Nazis asserted themselves, non-conformist writers were terrorised, their works burned, and fear pervaded. The June–July 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge was the culmination of this early campaign.[165] Fritz Gerlich, the editor of Munich's Catholic weekly, Der Gerade Weg, was killed in the purge for his strident criticism of the Nazi movement.[38]
The poet
Writer and theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand was a vocal opponent of Hitler and Nazism. Blacklisted by the Nazi movement in the 1920s, he ran religious discussions in his Munich home from 1924 to 1930, which were attended by distinguished theologians such as Erich Przywara, S.J., Mgrs Martin Grabmann and Konrad von Preysing. Following Hitler's seizure of power, he fled from Germany, first to Italy, and then to Vienna, Austria, where, with the support of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat ("The Christian Corporative State"). For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, von Hildebrand was once again forced to flee, spending time in Switzerland, France (where he taught at the Catholic University of Toulouse until the Nazis invaded France in 1940), then to Portugal and finally to New York in 1940. There he taught philosophy at the Jesuit Fordham University.[169][170]
Hundreds of arrests and closure of Catholic presses followed the issuing of Pope Pius XI's Mit brennender Sorge anti-Nazi encyclical.[154]
Catholic Aid Agencies
Members of Catholic aid agencies such as
Social worker Margarete Sommer had been sacked from her welfare institute for refusing to teach the Nazi line on sterilization. In 1935, she took up a position at the Episcopal Diocesan Authority in Berlin, counselling victims of racial persecution for Caritas Emergency Relief. In 1941 she became director of the Welfare Office of the Berlin Diocesan Authority, under Bernhard Lichtenberg.[173] Following Lichtenberg's arrest, Sommer reported to Bishop Konrad von Preysing.[173] While working for the Welfare Office, Sommer coordinated Catholic aid for victims of racial persecution – giving spiritual comfort, food, clothing, and money. She gathered intelligence on the deportations of the Jews, and living conditions in concentration camps, as well as on SS firing squads, writing several reports on these topics from 1942, including an August 1942 report which reached Rome under the title "Report on the Exodus of the Jews".[173]
White Rose
The
Catholics in the German Resistance
Though Catholics were prominent in the German Resistance, according to Fest, it essentially consisted of a "motley collection of individuals who differed greatly in their social origins, habits of thought, political attitudes and methods of action" and was by and large slow to accept the need for violence to displace Hitler.[179] A few civilian resistance groups developed, but the Army was the only organisation with the capacity to overthrow the government, and from within it a small number of officers came to present the most serious threat posed to the Nazi regime.[180] The Foreign Office and the Abwehr (Military Intelligence) also provided vital support to the movement.[181] But many of those in the military who ultimately chose to seek to overthrow Hitler had initially supported the regime, if not all of its methods. Hitler's 1938 purge of the military was accompanied by increased militancy in the Nazification of Germany, a sharp intensification of the persecution of Jews, and daring foreign policy exploits, bringing Germany to the brink of war and it was at this time that the German Resistance emerged.[182]
The Resistance members were motivated by such factors as the mistreatment of Jews, harassment of the churches, and the harsh actions of Himmler and the Gestapo.[183] In his history of the German Resistance, Peter Hoffmann wrote that "National Socialism was not simply a party like any other; with its total acceptance of criminality it was an incarnation of evil, so that all those whose minds were attuned to democracy, Christianity, freedom, humanity or even mere legality found themselves forced into alliance ...".[184] The Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (forced conformity to the Nazi Party) met with such forceful opposition from the German churches, that Hitler decided to delay confrontation until the end of the war.[69] The truce constituted a rare win of sorts for an opposition movement in Nazi Germany. The standoff fed the will of many German resistors, but the churches as institutions stopped short of ever offering a general resistance to Nazi rule.[54]
During the summer of 1938, wrote Hamerow, small groups of dissidents from the armed forces and civil service began to meet informally, the most prominent figure in these early days being
Pius XII and the Resistance
In Rome, the Pope had continued to lobby world leaders for the avoidance of a conflict up until the very eve of war, and expressed his dismay that war had come in his October 1939
The Vatican considered Müller to be a representative of Colonel-General von Beck and agreed to offer the machinery for mediation.
Negotiations were tense, with a Western offensive expected, and on the basis that substantive negotiations could only follow the replacement of the Hitler regime. Hoffmann wrote that, when the
The negotiations ultimately proved fruitless. Hitler's swift victories over France and the Low Countries deflated the will of the German military to resist Hitler. Muller was arrested during the Nazis first raid on Military Intelligence in 1943. He spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, ending up at Dachau.[198]
July Plot
On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters in East Prussia. The plot was the culmination of the efforts of several groups in the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi-led German government. The failure of both the assassination and the military coup d'état which was planned to follow it led to the arrest of at least 7,000 people by the Gestapo.[199] According to records of the Führer Conferences on Naval Affairs, 4,980 of these were executed.[199] During interrogations or their show trials a number of the conspirators cited the Nazi assault on the churches as one of the motivating factors for their involvement. The Protestant clergyman Eugen Gerstenmaier said that the key to the entire resistance flowed from Hitler's evil and the "Christian duty" to combat it.[200]
The Bavarian Catholic Count
The planned Cabinet which was to replace the Nazi regime included Catholic politicians Eugen Bolz, Bernhard Letterhaus, Andreas Hermes and Josef Wirmer. Wirmer was a member of the left of the Centre Party, had worked to forge ties between the civilian resistance and the trade unions and was a confidant of Jakob Kaiser – a leader of the Christian trade union movement, which Hitler had banned after taking office.[203] Lettehaus was also trade union leader. As a captain in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command), he had gathered information and become a leading member of the resistance.[36] The proposed radio announcement of the failed July putsch of 1944 revealed the Godly outlook of the leading conspirators:
Let us once again tread the path of justice, decency and mutual respect! In this spirit each of us will do his duty. Let us follow the commands of God which are engraved on our conscience, even when them seem hard to us: let us do everything to heal wounded souls and alleviate suffering.
— Proposed radio broadcast to follow theJuly Plot against Hitler of 1944.[52]
Following the failure of the plot, Stauffenberg was shot and Moltke, Yorck and Delp, among others, were executed. Philipp von Boeselager, the last surviving member of the conspiracy, wrote that Catholicism influenced anti Nazi feeling in the German army – to such an extent that Christmas celebrations in the army were banned in 1943. Author Nigel Jones believed that Catholicism and Christian conscience were central to Stauffenberg's decision to move against Hitler.[115] 5000 people were tortured and killed over the plot – and the Gestapo linked a number of Bishops to knowledge of the German Resistance: Von Galen, Von Faulhaber, Frings, and Johannes Dietz of Fulda – though did not arrest the men.[96]
To the Holocaust
The Catholic Church resisted the Holocaust by rejecting the racial ideology underpinning the mass exterminations; making public pronouncements against racial persecutions; and by lobbying officials, providing false documents, and hiding people in monasteries, convents, schools, among families and the institutions of the Vatican itself, leading many leading Jews to offer thanks to the Roman Church at the completion of the war.[204] In every country under German occupation, priests played a major part in rescuing Jews.[4] Catholic historian Michael Phayer wrote that "Rescuers and perpetrators were but a slight minority of Europe's Catholic population."[205]
Prelude
On 11 November 1938, following Kristallnacht, Pope Pius XI joined Western leaders in condemning the pogrom. In response, the Nazis organised mass demonstrations against Catholics and Jews in Munich, and the Bavarian Gauleiter Adolf Wagner declared before 5,000 protesters: "Every utterance the Pope makes in Rome is an incitement of the Jews throughout the world to agitate against Germany". On 21 November, in an address to the world's Catholics, the Pope rejected the Nazi claim of racial superiority, and insisted instead that there was only a single human race. Robert Ley, the Nazi Minister of Labour declared the following day in Vienna: "No compassion will be tolerated for the Jews. We deny the Pope's statement that there is but one human race. The Jews are parasites." Catholic leaders including Cardinal Schuster of Milan, Cardinal van Roey in Belgium and Cardinal Verdier in Paris backed the Pope's strong condemnation of Kristallnacht.[206]
Unlike the Nazi euthanasia murder of invalids, which the church led protests against, the Final Solution liquidation of the Jews did not primarily take place on German soil, but rather in Polish territory. Awareness of the murderous campaign was therefore less widespread.[94] Such protests as were made by the Catholic bishops in Germany regarding anti-Semitic policies of the regime, tended to be by way of private letters to government ministers.[63] But the church had already rejected the racial ideology underpinning the Nazi Holocaust.
The
[T]heories began to appear which denied the unity of the human race, affirming an original diversity of races. In the 20th century, National Socialism in Germany used these ideas as a pseudo-scientific basis for a distinction between so called Nordic-Aryan races and supposedly inferior races. Furthermore, an extremist form of nationalism was heightened in Germany by the defeat of 1918 and the demanding conditions imposed by the victors, with the consequence that many saw in National Socialism a solution to their country's problems and cooperated politically with this movement. The church in Germany replied by condemning racism.
From the Papacy
In the 1930s, Pope
The document noted on the horizon the "threatening storm clouds" of religious wars of extermination over Germany.[35][210]
Following the Anschluss and the extension of antisemitic laws in Germany, Jewish refugees sought sanctuary outside the Reich. In Rome, Pius XI told a group of Belgian pilgrims on 6 September 1938, "It is not possible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. Spiritually we are Semites."[212] Following the November Kristallnacht of that year, Pius XI condemned the pogrom, sparking mass demonstrations against Catholics and Jews in Munich, where the Bavarian Gauleiter Adolf Wagner declared: "Every utterance the Pope makes in Rome is an incitement of the Jews throughout the world to agitate against Germany".[80] The Vatican took steps to find refuge for Jews.[204] On 21 November, in an address to the world's Catholics, Pius XI rejected the Nazi claim of racial superiority, and insisted instead that there was only a single human race.[80]
Pius XI's Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, made some 55 protests against Nazi policies, including its "ideology of race".
His Summi Pontificatus first papal encyclical followed the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland, and reiterated Catholic teaching against racism and anti-Semitism and affirmed the ethical principles of the "Revelation on Sinai". Pius reiterated church teaching on the "principle of equality" – with specific reference to Jews: "there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision".[215] The forgetting of solidarity "imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men" was called "pernicious error".[216] Catholics everywhere were called upon to offer "compassion and help" to the victims of the war.[217] The letter also decried the deaths of noncombatants.[218] Local bishops were instructed to assist those in need.[204] Pius went on to make a series of general condemnations of racism and genocide through the course of the war.[204][219]
- 1942 Christmas address
After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany commenced its industrialised mass murder of the Jews, around late 1941/early 1942. At Christmas 1942, once evidence of the mass slaughter of the Jews had emerged, Pius XII voiced concern at the murder of "hundreds of thousands" of "faultless" people because of their "nationality or race" and intervened to attempt to block Nazi deportations of Jews in various countries. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, he refused to say more "fearing that public papal denunciations might provoke the Hitler regime to brutalize further those subject to Nazi terror – as it had when Dutch bishops publicly protested earlier in the year – while jeopardizing the future of the church".[214] Regardless, the Nazi authorities were distressed by the papal intervention. The Reich Security Main Office, responsible for the deportation of Jews, noted:
In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order ... Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals
- Germany
Pacelli was among those who helped draft the 1937 papal anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, repudiating Nazi racial theory and the "so-called myth of race and blood".[223] Pacelli became Pope in 1939, and told Vatican officials that he intended to reserve the all important handling of diplomacy with Germany for himself.[224] He issued Summi Pontificatus which spoke of the equality of races, and of Jew and Gentile. Following a 21 June 1943 Vatican Radio broadcast to Germany which spoke in defence of Yugoslav Jews, Pius XII instructed the papal nuncio to Germany, Cesare Orsenigo to speak directly with Hitler about the persecution of the Jews. Orsenigo later met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, but when the subject of the Jews was raised, Hitler reportedly turned his back, and smashed a glass on the floor.[225]
In Italy
In Italy, where the Pope's direct influence was strongest, the Pope ordered Catholic institutions to open themselves to the Jews when the Nazi roundups finally came to the country following Fascist Italy's capitulation and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Italy by Nazi German forces. Unlike in Germany, anti-Semitism was not a popular or pervasive concept in Italy, and anti-Semitism had not been a founding principle of Italian Fascism, although Mussolini's regime eventually moved closer to Hitler's with time following the Pact of Steel. On 27 June 1943, Vatican Radio is reported to have broadcast a papal injunction: "He who makes a distinction between Jews and other men is being unfaithful to God and is in conflict with God's commands"[226] In July 1943, with the Allies advancing from the south, Mussolini was overthrown, and on 1 September, the new government agreed an armistice with the Allies.[227] The Germans occupied much of the country, commencing an effort to deport the nation's Jews.[228] The Pope had helped the Jews of Rome in September, by offering whatever amounts of gold might be needed towards the 50 kg ransom demanded by the Nazis.
According to
As German round-ups continued in Northern Italy, the Pope opened his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, to take in thousands of Jews and authorised institutions across the north to do the same.[213]
Pius assisted various noted rescuers. From within the Vatican, and in co-operation with Pius XII,
Vatican diplomatic corps
Pius XII allowed the national hierarchies of the church to assess and respond to their local situation under Nazi rule, but himself established the Vatican Information Service to provide aid to, and information about, war refugees.[214] He gave his blessing to the establishment of safe houses inside the Vatican and in monasteries and convents across Europe and oversaw a secret operation for priests to shelter Jews by means of fake documents – with some Jews made Vatican subjects to spare them from the Nazis. On papal instructions, 4,000 Jews were hidden in Italian monasteries and convents, and 2,000 Hungarian Jews given fake documents identifying them as Catholics.[230]
Vatican neutrality through the war permitted the Holy See's network of diplomats to continue to operate throughout the occupied territories of the Nazi Empire, enabling the dissemination of intelligence back to Rome, and diplomatic interventions on behalf of the victims of the conflict. Pius' diplomatic representatives lobbied on behalf of Jews across Europe, including in Nazi allied
Angelo Rotta, the wartime Papal Nuncio to Budapest and Andrea Cassulo, the Papal Nuncio to Bucharest have been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
- Bulgaria
Bulgaria signed a pact with Hitler in 1941 and reluctantly joined the Axis powers. Mgr
In 1943, Pius instructed his Bulgarian representative to take "all necessary steps" to support Bulgarian Jews facing deportation and his Turkish nuncio Angelo Roncalli arranged for the transfer of thousands of children out of Bulgaria to Palestine.[213] The Bulgarian Orthodox Church lobbied firmly against the deportations of Jews, and in March 1943, the King rescinded the order to deport them, and released Jews already in custody – an event known in Bulgaria as the "miracle of the Jewish people".[238]
- Romania
Angelo Roncalli advised the Pope of Jewish concentration camps in Romanian occupied Transnistria. The Pope protested to the Romanian government and authorised for funds to be sent to the camps.[213] In 1944, the Chief Rabbi of Bucharest praised the work of Cassulo and the Pope on behalf of Romania's Jews: "the generous assistance of the Holy See ... was decisive and salutary. It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme Pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews – sufferings which had been pointed out to him by you after your visit to Transnistria. The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."[233] Cassulo has been honoured as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.[233]
- Hungary
The Hungarian Regent,
Angelo Rotta, Papal Nuncio from 1930, actively protested Hungary's mistreatment of the Jews, and helped persuade Pope Pius XII to lobby the Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy to stop their deportation.[243] In 1944 Pius made a direct intervention in Hungary to lobby for an end to Jewish deportations in 1944. On 4 July, Horthy told Berlin's representative that deportations of Jews must cease, citing protests by the Vatican, the King of Sweden and the Red Cross for his decision.[244]
The Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944, and commenced widescale deportations of Jews.[245] The process began with Jews sent to Ghettos, and though local leaders of the Catholic, Protestant Reform Churches tried to help the Jews, Jews from all across Hungary outside of Budapest were deported to Auschwitz.[246] As rumor spread of the murder of the deportees, the Hungarian Ministry for the Interior criticised clergymen for issuing fake baptismal certificates. By June 1944, the neutral powers in Budapest were issuing protective visas. Rotta received approval from the Vatican to begin issuing protective passes to Jewish converts and was eventually able to distribute more than 15,000 such protective passes, while instructing the drafters of the documents not to examine the recipients credentials too closely.[247]
The pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Arrow Cross seized power in October, and a campaign of murder of the Jews commenced. A Red Cross official asked Rotta for pre-signed blank identity papers, to offer to the sick and needy fleeing the Arrow Cross, and was given the documents, along with Rotta's blessing.[243][248] Like the celebrated Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Rotta became a leader of diplomatic actions to protect Hungarian Jews.[243]
Rotta encouraged Hungarian church leaders to help their "Jewish brothers", and directed Fr
Rotta, led a citywide rescue scheme in Budapest.[204][213] According to Martin Gilbert, "With Arrow Cross members killing Jews in the streets of Budapest, Angelo Rotta, the senior Vatican representative in Budapest, took a lead in establishing an "International Ghetto", consisting of several dozen modern apartment buildings to which large numbers of Jews – eventually 25,000 – were brought and to which the Swiss, Swedish, Portuguese, and Spanish legations, as well as the Vatican, affixed their emblems."[250]
On 15 November, the Hungarian Government established the "Big Ghetto" for 69,000, while a further 30,000 with protective documents went to the International Ghetto.[247] On 19 November 1944, the Vatican joined the four other neutral powers – Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland – in a further collective protest to the Hungarian Government calling for the suspension of deportations.[248] The government complied, and banned the "death marches" – but Budapest was by that stage near anarchy, and deportations continued from 21 November. The Arrow Cross continued their orgy of violence, raiding the international Ghetto and murdering Jews, as Soviet forces approached the city. Rotta and Wallenberg were among the few diplomats to remain in Budapest. Following the Soviet conquest of the city, Wallenberg was seized by the Russians and taken to Moscow, from where he was never released. Gilbert wrote that of the hundred and fifty thousand Jews who had been in Budapest when the Germans arrived in March 1944, almost 120,000 survived to liberation – 69,000 from the Big Ghetto, 25,000 in the International Ghetto and a further 25,000 hiding out in Christian homes and religious institutes across the city.[251]
Leading church figures involved in the 1944 rescue of Hungarian Jews included Bishops Vilmos Apor, Endre Hamvas and Áron Márton. Primate József Mindszenty issued public and private protests and was arrested on 27 October 1944.[252][253]
The Jews of the Hungarian provinces were decimated by the Nazis and their Fascist Hungarian allies, but many of the Jews of Budapest were saved by the extraordinary efforts of the diplomatic corps.
Local church men and women were also prominent in rescue efforts. Jesuit Prior Jakab Raile is credited with saving around 150 in the Jesuit residence of the city.[250] Margit Slachta told her Sisters of Social Service that the precepts of their faith demanded that they protect the Jews, even if it led to their own deaths. Following the Nazi occupation, Slachta's sisters arranged baptisms in the hope it would spare people from deportation, sent food and supplies to the Jewish ghettos, and sheltered people in their convents.[245] One of the sisters, Sára Salkaházi, was among those captured sheltering the Jews, and executed.[254] Slachta herself was beaten and only narrowly avoided execution. The sisters are credited with rescuing at least 1000 Hungarian Jews.[245]
In his study of the rescuers of the Jews, Martin Gilbert recounts that the monks of the Champagnat Institute of the Order of Mary in Budapest took in 100 children and 50 parents as boarders. Discovered, the Jews were killed, and six monks tortured, but released.[255] Similar numbers were protected and then discovered in the convents of the Sisters of the Divine Saviour and the Order of the Divine Love, with many of the Jews dragged out and murdered by the Arrow Cross.[255] The prioress of the Sisters of the Eucharistic Union was captured and tortured for sheltering Jews in her hospital. Despite warnings, she resumed her rescue efforts in the apartment of the Prelate Arnold Pataky.[255] Hundreds more Jews were saved at the Convent of the Good Shepherd, the home of the Sisters of Mercy of Szatmar and the Convent of Sacre Coeur.[255]
- Assessments of Pius XII
Upon the death of Pius XII in 1958, the Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir said: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace."[213] Leading historian of the Holocaust, Sir Martin Gilbert, has said that Pope Pius XII should be declared a "righteous gentile" by Yad Vashem.[256] But his insistence on Vatican neutrality and avoidance of naming the Nazis as the evildoers of the conflict became the foundation for contemporary and later criticisms from some quarters.[257] Hitler biographer John Toland, while scathing of Pius' cautious public comments in relation to the mistreatment of Jews, concluded that nevertheless, "The Church, under the Pope's guidance, had already saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined ...".[193] Assessing Pius' role as a protector of Jews during the war, David Klinghoffer wrote for the Jewish Journal in 2005 that "I'm not sure it's true, as Dalin argues, that Pius saved more Jews than any other Righteous Gentile in World War II. But it seems fairly certain that he was, overall, a strenuous defender of Jews who saved tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. While 80 percent of European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, 85 percent of Italian Jews survived, thanks in large part to the Vatican's efforts."[258]
Susan Zuccotti has written that the Vatican was aware of the creation of the Nazi extermination camps, and that she believed that with an "open condemnation of racism and the persecutions (of Jews)" by the church, "other results could have been achieved." With regard to the work done by the Vatican, "much more was requested by many," indeed, "much more was hoped for by the Jews."[259]
Episcopal protests
The Netherlands
On 11 July 1942, the Dutch bishops, joined all Christian denominations in sending a letter to the Nazi General Friedrich Christiansen in protest against the treatment of Jews. The letter was read in all Catholic churches against German opposition. It brought attention to mistreatment of Jews and asked all Christians to pray for them:
Ours is a time of great tribulations of which two are foremost: the sad destiny of the Jews and the plight of those deported for forced labor. ... All of us must be aware of the terrible sufferings which both of them have to undergo, due to no guilt of their own. We have learned with deep pain of the new dispositions which impose upon innocent Jewish men, women and children the deportation into foreign lands. ... The incredible suffering which these measures cause to more than 10,000 people is in absolute opposition to the divine precepts of justice and charity. ... Let us pray to God and for the intercession of Mary ... that he may lend his strength to the people of Israel, so severely tried in anguish and persecution.
— Protest of the Dutch Bishops, 1942[260]
The joint Catholic-Protestant letter objected to the murder of baptised and non-baptised Jews alike.[261] The protest angered the Nazi authorities and deportations of Jews only increased[204] Many Catholics were involved in strikes and protests against the treatment of Jews, and the Nazis offered to exempt converts and Jews married to non-Jews if protests ceased.[21] When Archbishop Johannes de Jong refused to relent to Nazi threats, the Gestapo rounded up all the Catholic-Jews they could find. 92 were sent Auschwitz.[261] Among the Catholics of the Netherlands abducted in this way was Edith Stein who was murdered at Auschwitz.
During the
Belgium
Belgium's senior cleric,
Vichy France
When round-ups of foreign Jews in France first commenced, the French Catholic bishops, and the leading representative of French Jewry alike, took little action. The largely conservative French hierarchy was initially broadly sympathetic to the Vichy Government.[266] A meeting of the Cardinals and Bishops of 21 July 1942, resulted in a letter to Marshall Petain calling for better treatment of internees. But when the authorities began to round-up French Jews, attitudes changed. And when the Nazis pressured the Vichy Regime to reclassify French Jews as "foreigners", the bishops declared their opposition.[266]
Bishops began to speak out and some encouraged secret rescue efforts of Jews, especially of Jewish children.
Other bishops –
The protest of the bishops is seen by various historians as a turning point in the formerly passive response of the Catholic Church in France.[270] Marie-Rose Gineste transported a pastoral letter from Bishop Théas of Montauban by bicycle to forty parishes, denouncing the uprooting of men and women "treated as wild animals", and the French Resistance smuggled the text to London, where it was broadcast to France by the BBC, reaching tens of thousands of homes.[270] The protests encouraged other clerics like the Capuchin priest Père Marie-Benoît, who saved many Jews in Marseille and later in Rome where he became known among the Jewish community as "father of the Jews".[271]
Croatia
After the 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia, a puppet state was created in Croatia. In the spring of 1942, following a meeting with Pius XII in Rome, Stepinac declared publicly that it was "forbidden to exterminate Gypsies and Jews because they are said to belong to an inferior race".[272] In July and October 1943, Stepinac denounced race murders in the most explicit terms, and had his denunciation read from pulpits across Croatia.[273] Nazi envoy Siegfried Kasche advised Berlin that Italian forces were not willing to hand over Jews and had "apparently been influenced" by Vatican opposition to German anti-Semitism, and no Jews were deported from Italy prior to the 1943 Nazi occupation.[274]
When Himmler visited Zagreb a year later, indicating the impending roundup of remaining Jews, Stepinac wrote Pavelić that if this occurred, he would protest for "the Catholic Church is not afraid of any secular power, whatever it may be, when it has to protect basic human values". When deportatation began, Stepinac and Marcone protested to
The Vatican used Benedictine abbot, Giuseppe Marcone, its apostolic visitor, together with Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb – to pressure the Pavelić regime to cease its facilitation of race murders.[236] Martin Gilbert wrote that "In the Croatian capital of Zagreb, as a result of intervention by [Marcone] on behalf of Jewish partners in mixed marriages, a thousand Croat Jews survived the war", while "Stepinac, who in 1941 had welcomed Croat independence, subsequently condemned Croat atrocities against both Serbs and Jews, and himself saved a group of Jews in an old age home".[277] Stepinac tried to wield influence upon the regime and had modest success in preventing atrocities. Many of the other bishops, like Saric of Sarajevo and Aksamovic of Djakovo, eagerly collaborated with the regime and were openly antisemitic.[278]
The Apostolic delegate to Turkey,
Slovakia
Slovakia was a new rump state formed by Hitler when Germany annexed the western half of Czechoslovakia. Hitler was able to exploit Czechoslovakia's ethnic diversity—in particular the presence of the German-speaking Sudetenlanders, and the independent minded Slovaks.[279] The Fascist Slovak Republic became a nominally independent Nazi puppet with Joseph Tiso, a Catholic priest, as president.[280] The Vatican began to worry that this Tiso's government was taking legislative stands contrary to Catholic principles. Between April and October 1942, some 60,000 Jews were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz and Majdanek, and the Catholic-dominated government of Slovakia did little to stop the deportations.[278]
Pius XII protested to the Bratislava government the deportations of Slovakian Jews from 1942. Giuseppe Burzio, the Apostolic Delegate to Bratislava, protested the anti-Semitic and totalitarianism of the Tiso regime.[281] Burzio advised Rome of the deteriorating situation for Jews in the Nazi puppet state, sparking Vatican protests on behalf of Jews.[282] Burzio also lobbied the Slovakian government directly.[283] In 1942 Burzio and others reported to Tiso that the Germans were murdering Slovakia's deported Jews. Tiso hesitated and then refused to deport Slovakia's 24,000 remaining Jews.[284] When the transportation began again in 1943 Burzio challenged Prime Minister Tuka over the extermination of Slovak Jews. The Vatican condemned the renewal of the deportations on 5 May and the Slovakian episcopate issued a pastoral letter condemning totalitarianism and anti-Semitism on 8 May 1943.[281] Pius protested that "The Holy See would fail in its Divine Mandate if it did not deplore these measures, which gravely damage man in his natural right, mainly for the reason that these people belong to a certain race."[213]
In August 1944, the Slovak National Uprising rose against the People's Party regime. German troops were sent to quell the rebellion and with them came security police charged with rounding up Slovakia's remaining Jews.[284] Burzio begged Tiso directly to at least spare Catholic Jews from transportation and delivered an admonition from the Pope: "the injustice wrought by his government is harmful to the prestige of his country and enemies will exploit it to discredit clergy and the Church the world over."[281]
Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, saved thousands of Slovakian Jews by signing visas for immigration to Palestine, crediting this work to the orders of Pope Pius XII.[258]
Bishop
Catholic networks
Direct action by Catholic institutions saved hundreds of thousands of Jews during the
Belgium
Dislike of Germans and Nazism was strong in Belgium, and self-help by Jews was well organised.
Benedictine monk, Dom Bruno (Henri Reynders) developed a disdain for Nazi anti-Semitism when exposed to it on a 1938 visit to Germany. He was captured as a prisoner of war while serving as an army chaplain in 1940, and in 1942 was sent by the head of the Benedictines to a Home for the Blind, operating as a front for hiding Jews. From small beginnings assisting families, assisted by Albert Van den Berg Dom Bruno's rescue efforts grew, dispersing hundreds.[290] Van den Berg secured refuge for the Grand Rabbi of Liege and his elderly parents at the Capuchin Banneux home, cared for by monks.[291] Bruno rejoined the Belgian Army as a chaplain after Liberation.[292] He was active with the Belgian Resistance and organised escape routes for downed allied pilots and for Belgian Jews. Jews were hidden in monasteries, schools and the homes of Catholics at Dom Bruno's request. He was declared Righteous Among the Nations by Israel in 1964.[293] He is credited with finding refuge for 320 Jewish children.
Hubert Célis of Halmaal was arrested for harbouring Jewish children, but was released after confronting his interrogator with the following words: "You are a Catholic, and have forgotten that the Virgin was a Jewess, that Christ was Jewish, that He commanded us to love and help one another ... That He told us: 'I have given you an example so that you do as I have done' ... You are a Catholic, and you do not understand what a priest is! You do not understand that a priest does not betray!".[271]
Many Belgian convents and monasteries sheltered Jewish children, pretending that they were Christian – among them the Franciscan Sisters in Bruges, the Sisters of Don Bosco in Courtrai, the Sisters of St Mary near Brussels, the Dominican Sisters at Lubbeek and others. About 3000 Jews were hidden in Belgian convents during the Nazi occupation.48 Belgian nuns have been honoured as Righteous among the Nations.[295] Others so honoured include the Superior General of the Jesuits, Jean-Baptiste Janssens.[296]
- Baltic states
In Lithuania, priests were active in the rescue of Jews, among them Dambrauskas of Alsedziai (who acted against the wishes of his bishop), the Jesuit Bronius Paukstis, Lapis from Siauliai and Jonas Gylys of Varena, who delivered sermons against the murder of Jews, and sought to comfort Jews marked for murder.[297]
In Scandinavia, the Catholic presence was small, but here the Christian Churches firmly opposed the deportations of Jews – Church of Norway bishops gave stern warnings, and the Danish Churches published strong protests and urged their congregations to assist Jews. A unique operation in Denmark saw almost all of Denmark's Jews smuggled into Sweden and safety.[298]
Poland and the Zegota Council to Aid Jews
Poland had a large Jewish population, and according to Davies, more Jews were both killed and rescued in Poland, than in any other nation: the rescue figure usually being put at between 100,000 and 150,000.
A number of Bishops provided aid to Polish Jews, notably Karol Niemira, the Bishop of Pinsk, who cooperated with the underground organization
maintaining ties with the Jewish ghetto and sheltered Jews in the Archbishop's residence.
The Jews of Warsaw, who prior to the war numbered some half a million people, were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. By November 1941, the Nazi governor of the city had decreed that the death penalty would be applied with utmost severity to those sheltering or aiding Jews in any way.[305] Matylda Getter, mother superior of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary took the decision to offer shelter to any Jewish children who could escape the Ghetto.[306] Getter's convent was located at the entrance to the Ghetto. When the Nazis commenced the clearing of the Ghetto in 1941, Getter took in many orphans and dispersed them among Family of Mary homes. As the Nazis began sending orphans to the gas chambers, Getter issued fake baptismal certificates, providing the children with false identities. Living in daily fear of the Germans, the Family of Mary rescued more than 750 Jews.[245]
When
God requires this protest from us, God who does not allow murder. It is required of a Catholic conscience. Each being, calling itself human, has a right to brotherly love. The blood of the innocent calls for vengeance to the heavens. He, who does not support this protest – is not Catholic.
— 1942 protest ofZegota[309]
Wladyslawa Choms, "The Angel of Lvov", headed Zegota in
In the 1948-9 Zegota Case, the Stalin-backed regime established in Poland after the war secretly tried and imprisoned the leading survivors of Zegota, as part of a campaign to eliminate and besmirch Catholic resistance heroes who might threaten the new regime.[313] Bartoszewski was imprisoned until 1954.[301]
France
Many French clergy and religious have been honoured by
Two-thirds of the 300,000 Jews living in France at the outbreak of war survived the Nazi holocaust.[319] Thousands of priests, nuns and lay people acted to assist French Jews. The majority of French Jews survived the occupation, in large part thanks to the help received from Catholics and Protestants, who protected them in convents, boarding schools, presbyteries and families.[268] The Amitiés Chrétiennes organisation operated out of Lyon to secure hiding places for Jewish children. Among its members were the Jesuit Pierre Chaillet and Alexandre Glasberg, a priest formerly of the Jewish faith.[267] The influential French theologian Henri de Lubac was active in the resistance to Nazism and to antisemitism. He assisted in the publication of Témoinage chrétien with Pierre Chaillet. He responded to Neo-paganism and antisemitism with clarity, describing the notion of an Aryan New Testament standing in contradiction to a Semitic Old Testament as "blasphemy" and "stupidity". In 1988, Lubac returned to writing about the era in Résistance chrétienne à l'antisémitisme, souvenirs 1940–1944 (Christian Resistance to Antisemitism: Memories from 1940 to 1944)[320]
Mother Superiors of many convents provided safe haven to many French Jews.
On the Swiss border, various priests and parishes helped Jews escape to safety.[323] Raymond Boccard and other priests assisted hundreds of refugees, including many Jews across the border into Switzerland.[321] Abbé Simon Gallay hid Jews at Evian-les-Bains, and assisted passage to Switzerland, until arrested and deported to Germany never to return.[323]
Italy
Despite the Italian dictator Mussolini's close alliance with Hitler's Germany, Italy did not adopt Nazism's genocidal ideology towards the Jews. The Nazis were frustrated by the Italian forces' refusal to co-operate in the round-ups of Jews, and no Jews were deported from Italy prior to the Nazi occupation of the country following the Italian capitulation in 1943.[324] In Italian occupied Croatia, Nazi envoy Siegfried Kasche advised Berlin that Italian forces had "apparently been influenced" by Vatican opposition to German anti-Semitism.[274] As anti-Axis feeling grew in Italy, the use of Vatican Radio to broadcast papal disapproval of race murder and anti-Semitism angered the Nazis.[325] Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943, and the Nazi moved to occupy Italy, and commenced a round-up of Jews. Though thousands were caught, the great majority of Italy's Jews were saved. As in other nations, Catholic networks were heavily engaged in rescue efforts.
According to Martin Gilbert, the Pope had helped the Jews of Rome in September 1943, by offering whatever amounts of gold might be needed towards the 50 kg ransom demanded by the Nazis. At the same time, wrote Gilbert, the Capuchin Père Marie-Benoît had saved large numbers of Jews by providing them with false identification papers, helped by the Swiss, Hungarian, Rumanian and French embassies, and a number of Italian officials. A few days before the 15/16 October roundup, Pius XII personally directed Vatican clergy to open the sanctuaries of the Vatican to all "non-Aryans" in need of refuge.[229] 4715 of the 5715 Roman Jews listed for deportation by the Nazis were sheltered in 150 institutions – 477 in the Vatican itself. As German round-ups continued in Northern Italy, the Pope opened his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, to take in thousands of Jews and authorised institutions across the north to do the same.[213]
From his Vatican office, and in co-operation with Pius XII,[230] Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, an Irishman, operated an escape operation for Jews and Allied escapees. The Irish Independent credited him with having saved more than 6,500 people during the war.[231] From 1943, he began to offer shelter to allied servicemen seeking sanctuary in the Vatican. Using fake documents and a clandestine communications network, O'Flaherty defied the Gestapo's war criminal commander of Rome, Herbert Kappler, and evaded capture through the German occupation of Rome. O'Flaherty's '"Rome Escape Line" hid British and American soldiers and Jews in safe houses around the city.[231] Kappler had a white line drawn around the boundary of the Vatican and offered a bounty on O'Flaherty's head. O'Flaherty forgave Kappler after the war, and became a regular visitor to his prison cell – eventually presiding at his conversion to Catholicism. O'Flaherty's story was dramatised in the 1983 film The Scarlet and the Black and Ireland honours his work with the Hugh O'Flaherty International Humanitarian Award.[326][327]
Swedish born
The churches, monasteries and convents of Assisi formed the
The Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants DELASEM Jewish welfare, turned resistance organisation operated with the assistance of various Catholic clergymen, including Cardinal Pietro Boetto, who headed the diocese of Genoa, and his secretary Francesco Repetto; Archbishop Giovanni Cicali and Bishops Elia Dalla Costa of Florence, Giuseppe Placido Nicolini of Assisi, Maurilio Fossati of Torino, and Antonio Torrini of Lucca. Many priests also assisted the mainly Jewish led organisation, including the Capuchin Maria Benedetto (Pierre-Marie Benoit) in Rome and the Papal Nuncio in Switzerland Filippo Bernardini. When the Jewish president of the DELASEM was arrested, Fr Benoit was named the acting president, and its meetings were held at the Capuchin College in Rome.[335]
From the Vatican
Two Popes served through the Nazi period: Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). The Holy See strongly condemned Nazism through the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, with Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) being a particularly outspoken critic. However, following the outbreak of war, Vatican pronouncements became more guarded and Rome pursued its ancient policy of neutrality and openness to the role of peacebroker.[204] During the war, Pius XII was praised by Western media as a "lonely voice" against tyranny in Europe and scorned by Hitler as a "Jew lover"[336] and a blackmailer on his back, whom he believed constricted his ally Mussolini and leaked confidential German correspondence to the world.[337]
Pope Pius XI
The pontificate of Pius XI coincided with the early aftermath of the First World War. The old European monarchies had been largely swept away and a new and precarious order formed across the continent. In the East, the Soviet Union arose. In Italy, the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini took power, while in Germany, the fragile Weimar Republic collapsed with the Nazi seizure of power.[338]
In 1929, Pius signed the Lateran Treaty and a concordat with Italy, confirming the existence of an independent Vatican City state, in return for recognition of the Kingdom of Italy and an undertaking for the papacy to be neutral in world conflicts. In 1933, Pius signed a Concordat with the Germany – hoping to protect the rights of Catholics under the Nazi government. The terms of the Treaty were not kept by Hitler. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "From 1933 to 1936 [Pius XI] wrote several protests against the Third Reich, and his attitude toward fascist Italy changed dramatically after Nazi racial policies were introduced into Italy in 1938."[338]
Pius XI saw the rising tide of Totalitarianism with alarm and delivered three papal encyclicals challenging the new creeds: against Italian Fascism
Non abbiamo bisogno condemned Italian fascism's "pagan worship of the State" and "revolution which snatches the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence and irreverence."[339]
Pius XI's Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli (future Pius XII), made some 55 protests against Nazi policies, including its "ideology of race".[213] As Cardinal Pacelli, Pope Pius XII had assisted Pius XI, draft the Mit brennender Sorge encyclical powerful critique of Nazi ideology. Pius XI commissioned the American Jesuit John La Farge to draft an encyclical demonstrating the incompatibility of Catholicism and racism: Humani generis unitas ("The Unity of the Human Race"). Following the death of Pius XI however, the less confrontational Pius XII did not issue the encyclical. He feared it would antagonize Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at a time where he hoped to act as an impartial peace broker.[192]
Mit brennender Sorge
By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with the new government, had become highly disillusioned. In March, Pope Pius XI issued the Mit brennender Sorge (German: "With burning concern") encyclical. The Pope asserted the inviolability of human rights and expressed deep concern at the Nazi regime's flouting of the 1933 Concordat, its treatment of Catholics and abuse of Christian values.[340] It accused the government of "systematic hostility leveled at the Church" and of sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church" and Pius noted on the horizon the "threatening storm clouds" of religious wars of extermination over Germany.[35][210]
The Vatican had the text smuggled into Germany and printed and distributed in secret.[340] Bishop Konrad von Preysing was an advisor in the drafting of the document.[341] Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) also helped draft the encyclical, which was written partly in response to the Nuremberg Laws. The document does not refer to Hitler or the Nazis by name, but condemned racial theories and the mistreatment of people based on race.[192]
Written in German, not the usual Latin, it was read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches on one of the church's busiest Sundays, Palm Sunday. According to Gill, "Hitler was beside himself with rage. Twelve presses were seized, and hundreds of people sent either to prison or the camps."[340]
Pope Pius XII
With Europe on the brink of war, Pius XI died on 10 Feb 1939 and
Encyclicals
- Summi Pontificatus
Summi Pontificatus was the first papal encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII, in October 1939 and established some of the themes of his pontificate. During the drafting of the letter, the Second World War commenced with the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Catholic Poland – the "dread tempest of war is already raging despite all Our efforts to avert it". In a challenge to Nazism, the papal letter denounced racism, anti-semitism, war, totalitarianism, the attack on Poland and the persecution of the church.[218] Pius reiterated church teaching on the "principle of equality" – with specific reference to Jews: "there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision".[215] The forgetting of solidarity "imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men" was called "pernicious error".[216] Catholics everywhere were called upon to offer "compassion and help" to the victims of the war.[217] The Pope declared determination to work to hasten the return of peace and trust in prayers for justice, love and mercy, to prevail against the scourge of war.[342] The letter also decried the deaths of noncombatants.[218]
Following themes addressed in Non abbiamo bisogno (1931); Mit brennender Sorge (1937) and Divini Redemptoris (1937), Pius wrote of a need to bring back to the church those who were following "a false standard ... misled by error, passion, temptation and prejudice, [who] have strayed away from faith in the true God".[343] Pius wrote of "Christians unfortunately more in name than in fact" showing "cowardice" in the face of persecution by these creeds, and called for resistance:
Who among "the Soldiers of Christ" – ecclesiastic or layman – does not feel himself incited and spurred on to a greater vigilance, to a more determined resistance, by the sight of the ever-increasing host of Christ's enemies ... who ... wantonly break the Tables of God's Commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of the Revelation on Sinai, standards in which the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Cross has no place?
Pius wrote of a persecuted church and a time requiring "charity" for victims who had a "right" to compassion.[c] Against the invasion of Poland and killing of civilians he wrote:
[This is an] "Hour of Darkness" ... in which the spirit of violence and of discord brings indescribable suffering on mankind ... The nations swept into the tragic whirlpool of war are perhaps as yet only at the "beginnings of sorrows" ... but even now there reigns in thousands of families death and desolation, lamentation and misery. The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.
With Italy not yet an ally of Hitler in the war, Italians were called upon to remain faithful to the church. Pius avoided explicit denunciations of Hitlerism or Stalinism, establishing the "impartial" public tone which would become controversial in later assessment of his pontificate: "A full statement of the doctrinal stand to be taken in face of the errors of today, if necessary, can be put off to another time unless there is disturbance by calamitous external events; for the moment We limit Ourselves to some fundamental observations."[345]
- Mystici corporis Christi
Later in the war Pius issued
Pius' statement of "profound grief at the murder of the deformed, the insane, and those suffering from hereditary disease ... as though they were a useless burden to Society" was a condemnation of the ongoing Nazi euthanasia program, under which disabled Germans were being removed from care facilities and murdered by the state as "life unworthy of life". It built upon the high-profile condemnations offered by the Archbishop of Münster, August von Galen and others. It was followed, on 26 September 1943, by an open condemnation by the German Bishops which, from every German pulpit, denounced the killing of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent".[104]
Vatican media and information services
Pope Pius used the Vatican newspaper, L'
- Vatican Radio
Vatican Radio was the mouthpiece of the Vatican, but was officially run by the Jesuits, who were in turn commanded by the Polish count Wladimir Ledachowski. Hebblethwaite wrote that the Nazis "regarded the German Jesuits to be their main enemy within, as Pius's Secretary, [the German Jesuit] Robert Leiber, as a traitor". In January 1940, the Pope authorised the details of the Polish situation to be broadcast on Vatican Radio's German service. The German ambassador protested the German language broadcasts, and the Pope directed a pause. Other language services were still more explicit, leading the British press to hail Vatican Radio as "tortured Poland's" powerful advocate.[349]
Following the Pope's first war time Christmas address of 1939, Goebbels noted in his diary: "The Pope has made a Christmas speech. Full of bitter, covert attacks against us, against the Reich, and against National Socialism. All the forces of internationalism are against us. We must break them".[350]
The Nazis considered Vatican Radio to be anti-German, and Germans were forbidden to listen to it. In broadcasts to Spain and France, it denounced the "wickedness of Hitler" and Nazi racial theories and lies.[348] In his Easter 1941 radio address, the Pope denounced "atrocious forms of fighting and mistreatment of prisoners and civilians".[348] Following the Pope's 1941 Christmas address,The New York Times editorial wrote that Pius had placed himself squarely against Hitlerism: "The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas."[348]
- 1942 Christmas address
By 1942, the Nazis had commenced their industrialized slaughter of the Jews of Europe—the Final Solution.[351] Gypsies and others were also marked for extermination. In his Christmas address of that year, Pius acknowledged the genocide.[351] He again warned against the evils of worshipping the state, and forced labor and addressed the racial persecutions in the following terms:"Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline". The New York Times called Pius "a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent." The speech was made in the context of the near total domination of Europe by the armies of Nazi Germany at a time when the war had not yet turned in favour of the Allies. Holocaust historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, assesses the response of the Reich Security Main Office calling Pius a "mouthpiece" of the Jews in response to his Christmas address, as clear evidence that all sides knew that Pius was one who was raising his voice for the victims of Nazi terror.[213][348]
- Holocaust
Following Archbishop
Aid to German Resistance and Allies
Following the outbreak of war, Pius followed Vatican precedent and pursued a policy of "impartiality" and sought to act as an intermediary peace broker. Despite this official policy, Pius passed intelligence to the Allies and made a series of condemnations of racism and genocide through the course of the war.[204][219] Germany regarded Pius as an Allied sympathizer who had violated his own policy of neutrality.[257]
With Poland overrun but France and the Low Countries yet to be attacked, Colonel
Hoffmann wrote that, when the
At a special mass at St Peters for the victims of the war, held in November 1940, soon after the commencement of the
- Relations with leaders of the Axis and Allies
Through the early stages of the war, Pius continued to hope for a negotiated peace to prevent the spread of the conflict. The similarly minded US President
On 4 May 1940, the Vatican advised the Netherlands envoy to the Vatican that the Germans planned to invade France through the Netherlands and Belgium on 10 May.
When, in 1940, the Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop led the only senior Nazi delegation permitted an audience with Pius XII and asked why the Pope had sided with the Allies, Pius replied with a list of recent Nazi atrocities and religious persecutions committed against Christians and Jews, in Germany, and in Poland, leading the New York Times to headline its report "Jews Rights Defended" and write of "burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop about religious persecution".[213]
Unsuccessfully, Pius attempted to dissuade the Italian Dictator
Pius had met President Roosevelt before the war. Despite profound fears of Stalinist Totalitarianism, Pius assured American Catholics working in armaments factories that it was acceptable to assist Russia with armaments, as the Russian people had been attacked.
Following the Liberation of Rome and prior to the collapse of Vichy France, Pius met General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French. At this time, he also held an audience with the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Despite his long career in Germany, and as a Vatican diplomat, he never once met Adolf Hitler. Following 4 June 1944 Liberation of Rome by the Allies, Cardinal Tisserant delivered a letter from De Gaulle, assuring the Pontiff of the filial respect and attachment of the French people, and noting that their long wartime suffering had been attenuated by the Pope's "testimonies of paternal affection". Pius thanked De Gaulle for his recognition of the charity works of the papacy for the victims of the war, and offered an Apostolic blessing upon De Gaulle and his nation.[360] De Gaulle himself came to meet the Pope on 30 June, following which, the French leader wrote of great admiration for Pius, and assessed him to be a pious, compassionate and thoughtful figure, upon whom the problems of world situation weighed heavily.[360] De Gaulle's visit was reported by the Vatican Press in the manner of a head of state, though the Vichy Regime had not yet been toppled.[361]
Outside Germany
Central Europe
Austria
Austria was overwhelmingly Catholic.
The invasion was a reply to a courageous sermon the Cardinal had preached in the Cathedral earlier in the evening, in which the Cardinal told his packed congregation that " in the last few months you have lost everything!' This sermon marked the end of Cardinal Innitzer's attempt to establish a religious peace with the Nazis. The attempt has failed. Cardinal Innitzer is now in line with his German brothers openly urging Catholics to resist anti-Catholic measures.
— Extract from Britain's Catholic Herald, Oct. 1938[364]
In a "Table Talk" of July 1942 discussing his problems with the Catholic Church, Hitler singles out Innitzer's early gestures of cordiality as evidence of the extreme caution with which church diplomats must be treated: "there appeared a man who addressed me with such self-assurance and beaming countenance, just as if, throughout the whole of the Austrian Republic he had never even touched a hair of the head of any National Socialist!"[365]
Following the Nazi annexation of Austria, many priests were arrested.[366] The Austrian priests Jakob Gapp and Otto Neururer, both executed during the Third Reich were beatified in the 1996.[367] Neururer was tortured and hanged at Buchenwald and Jakob Gapp was guillotined in Berlin.[368]
A Catholic resistance group led by the later executed chaplain Heinrich Maier very successfully resisted the Nazi regime. On the one hand, the group wanted to revive a Central European Habsburg confederation after the war and very successfully passed on plans and production facilities for V2, tiger tanks and aircraft to the Allies. This allowed the Allied bombers to target important armaments industries and spare residential areas. In contrast to many other German resistance groups, the Maier Group informed very early about the mass murder of Jews through their contacts with the Semperit factory near Auschwitz – a message the Americans in Zurich initially did not believe in the scope of. After the war, the group around Maier was largely forgotten and displaced by the Catholic Church.[370][371][372][373][374] Much of its information was important to Operation Hydra and Operation Crossbow, both critical operations to Operation Overlord. Maier, who was often referred to as Miles Christi, supported the war against the Nazis on the principle "every bomb that falls on armaments factories shortens the war and spares the civilian population."[375]
Czechoslovak area
Catholicism had had a strong institutional presence in the region under the
Karel Kašpar, the Archbishop of Prague and Primate of Bohemia was arrested soon after the occupation of his city, after he refused to obey an order to direct priests not to discontinue pilgrimages. Kaspar was repeatedly arrested by the Nazi authorities and died in 1941.[379] In announcing the Archbishop's death on radio, Josef Beran, the director of the Prague diocese main seminary, called on Czechs to remain true to their religion and to their country.[378]
Poland
The invasion of predominantly Catholic Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939 ignited the
German policy towards the church was at its most severe in the territories it annexed to Greater Germany. Here the Nazis set about systematically dismantling the Catholic Church – arresting its leaders, exiling its clergymen, closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Many clergymen were murdered. Elsewhere in occupied Poland, the suppression was less severe, though still harsh.[302]
- 1944 Uprising
Catholic religious fervour was a feature of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. General Antoni Chruściel issued instructions on how front-line troops could continue to pray, recite the rosary and offer confession, and that religious festivals be celebrated. Churches were destroyed, but congregations were not deterred. The religious orders, particularly nuns, devoted themselves to praying for the Uprising. Clergy were involved on many levels – as chaplains to military units, or tending to the ever-increasing wounded and dying. "Nuns of various orders", wrote Davies, "acted as universal sisters of mercy and won widespread praise. Mortality among them higher than among most categories of civilians. When captured by the SS, they aroused a special fury, which frequently ended in rape or butchery".[387] According to Davies, the Catholic religion was integral to the struggle:
Any description of the Rising which does not present the role of religion in the experiences both of soldiers and civilians is not worth reading. As death in all its forms grew ever more prevalent, the Roman Catholic religion, with its emphasis on redemption and its belief in the afterlife, grew ever more relevant. Religious observance stood at unusually high level throughout the Rising, among both insurgents and civilians. Priests held regular masses in all parts of the city, often in abbreviated open-air services among the ruins. They were on constant call to administer the last rites, and to conduct funerals ...
— Norman Davies, Rising '44: the Battle for Warsaw[384]
Among the hundreds of chaplains attached to the Home Army was Stefan Wyszyński, who later served as Cardinal Primate of Poland in the Communist era. His parish of Laski was a centre of liberal Polish Catholicism, located in the area of operations of the Home Army's Kampinos Group. The religious communities in general remained during the Uprising, converting their crypts and cellars to bomb shelters and hospitals, and throwing themselves into social work. The enclosed Convent of the Benedictine Sisters of Eternal Adoration lifted a centuries-old ban on male visitors to serve as a strategic base for the Home Army and threw open its doors to refugees, who were nursed and fed by the sisters. The prioress received an ultimatum from the Germans, but refused to leave for fear of impact on morale. Davies wrote that the sisters began their evening prayers gathered around the tabernacle, surrounded by a thousand people, as German aircraft flew overhead and "the church collapsed in one thunderous explosion ... rescue teams dug to save the living ... a much diminished convent choir was singing to encourage them. At dawn a handful of nuns ... filed out. Lines of insurgents saluted. And the German guns reopened fire."[388]
- 108 Polish Martyrs
The Polish Church honours
Among the most revered Polish martyrs was the Franciscan,
In Slonim, the Jesuit Adam Sztark rescued Jewish children by issuing back-dated Catholic birth certificates. He called on his parishioners to assist fleeing Jews and is believed to have secretly entered the Jewish ghetto to assist those inside. He was arrested by the Germans in December 1942, and shot.[271]
Western Europe
Netherlands
The
A significant Dutch Catholic dissident was the Carmelite priest and philosopher, Titus Brandsma.[393] Brandsma was a journalist and a founder of the Netherlands' Catholic University, who publicly campaigned against Nazism from the mid-1930s. Chosen by the Dutch Bishops as spokesmen in the defence of freedom of the press, he was arrested by the Nazi authorities in January 1942 – telling his captors: "The Nazi movement is regarded by the Dutch people not only as an insult to God in relation to his creatures, but also a violation of the glorious traditions of the Dutch nation. If it is necessary, we, the Dutch people, will give our lives for our faith." Transferred to the brutal Amersfoort penal depot, he continued to minister to the other prisoners and challenged them to pray for their captors. He was later transferred to Dachau Concentration camp, where he was the subject of Nazi medical experiments and was issued with a lethal injection on 26 July 1942.[394] A total of 63 Dutch priest were incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp.[392] Of them, 17 died in the camp. In the KL Bergen-Belsen, 10 priests who had taken part in the Dutch resistance died. The official list in the Dutch houses of Parliament names 24 priests who died in Nazi hands.[395]
Belgium
The
France
Predominantly Catholic France surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940. Following the French defeat, the nation was divided in two, with the north governed by the occupying Germans, and the south established as
After initial public silence, significant Episcopal protests against the mistreatment of Jews began in France 1942, following the acceleration of anti-Jewish activities by the government. Many church organisations came to work to protect Jews from the Nazis, encouraged by the public declarations of Archbishop Jules-Géraud Saliège and others.[267]
Notable Catholics involved in the
Important figures in the French
Nazi allies
Italy
In 1943, the Italian government, no longer under the helm of Mussolini, rejected
Around 4% of Resistance forces were formally Catholic organisations, but Catholics dominated other "independent groups" such as the
As Italy lurched towards a civil war, the Vatican urged moderation. At Easter 1944, Italian bishops were directed from Rome to "stigmatise every form of hatred, of vendetta, reprisal and violence, from wherever it comes". 191 priests were murdered by fascists and 125 by the Germans, while 109 were murdered by partisans. Though some joined pro-fascist bands, the Vatican backed the so-called anti-Fascist 'partisan chaplains' and 'red priests' fighting with the partisans, hoping that they would provide religious guidance to partisans being exposed to Communist propaganda.[402] Peter Hebblethwaite wrote that, by early 1944, some 20,000 partisans had emerged from Catholic Action, supported by sympathetic provincial clergy in the North, who pronounced the Germans to be "unjust invaders", whom it was lawful and meritorious to repel. "Bishops tended to be more cautious", wrote Hebblethwaite, Maurilio Fossati, the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin "visited partisan units in the mountains, heard their confessions and said Mass for them."[403]
The armed
Around 4% of Resistance forces were formally Catholic organisations, but Catholics dominated other "independent groups" such as the
When "unarmed resistance" is considered, the role of Catholics becomes even more significant: with hiding of fugitives such as Jews and Allied PoWs, sabotage, propaganda distribution, graffiti and failure to report for military duty.[404] From within the Vatican, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, operated the Rome Escape Lineoperation for Jews and Allied escapees.[231] The churches, monasteries and convents of Assisi formed the Assisi Network and served as a safe haven for several hundred Jews during the German occupation.[331] Catholic Convents and hospitals gave food and shelter to partisans, and some even stored arms, and, wrote Hebblethwaite, "Those who helped the partisans also helped the allied airmen escape ... They also concealed Jews, Franciscan Rufino Niccaci organized the convents of Assisi so that they not only concealed Jews but were the link in the escape line to Florence."[403]
Salvo D'Acquisto, an Italian military policeman is remembered as a martyr of the period, having saved the lives of 22 villagers whom the Nazi SS intended to shoot in reprisal for an explosion. D'Acquisto convinced them he was responsible for the explosion, and so, at the age of 22, was executed in their place. The church has commenced the process of beatification for D'Acquisto.[408] In Fiume, the Italian police chief, Giovanni Palatucci and his uncle, Bishop Giuseppe Palatucci saved 5000 Jews from deportation by providing documentation allowing them to pass to the safety of the bishop's diocese in the south. Giovanni was sent to Auschwitz and executed.[213]
Hungary
Hungary joined the Axis nations during the war, in part with the hope of regaining territories it had lost at the close of the First World War. However, the Regent,
Margit Slachta of the Hungarian Social Service Sisterhood became the first female elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 1920 and later engaged her sisters in the protection of Jews, and lobbied the leaders of the church to do the same. Slachta told her sisters that the precepts of their faith demanded that they protect the Jews, even if it led to their own deaths.[245] One of Slachta's sisters, Sára Salkaházi, was among those captured sheltering the Jews, and executed by the Arrow Cross.[254] Slachta herself was beaten and only narrowly avoided execution. The sisters rescued probably more than 2000 Hungarian Jews.[245] In 1944 the Vatican acted to halt the deportation of the Jews of Hungary.[204] Pius XII appealed directly by an open letter to Admiral Horthy to protect Hungary's Jews and brought international pressure to bare.[396] Slachta also protested forced labour.
Under Cardinal Serédi, Hungary's bishops and Catholic institutions expressed opposition to Nazism.[409] When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, Mgr Rotta issued passports and baptismal certificates to Hungarian Jews and, with the encouragement of the Pope, repeatedly and publicly protested against their mistreatment and called for the repeal of racist laws. Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, preached civil disobedience from Hungary's Catholics against Nazi anti-Semitism. Horthy cabled the Pope that he would work to stop the deportations of Jews and signed a peace agreement with the Allies – but was arrested by the Nazis, a Nazi government installed and the deportations were resumed.[396] In 1944 Pius appealed directly to the Hungarian government to halt the deportation of the Jews of Hungary and his nuncio, Angelo Rotta, led a citywide rescue scheme in Budapest.[204][213] Other leading church figures involved in the 1944 rescue of Hungarian Jews included Bishops Vilmos Apor, Endre Hamvas and Áron Márton. Primate József Mindszenty issued public and private protests and was arrested on 27 October 1944.[252][253]
Others
Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb, originally sympathetic to the Croatian Ustase Government, came to be known as jeudenfreundlich (Jew friendly) to the Nazis and Croat regime. He suspended a number of priest collaborators in his diocese.
See also
- Persecutions of the Catholic Church and Pius XII
- Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
- Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust
- Rescue of Jews by Catholics during the Holocaust
- Jesuits and Nazi Germany
Notes
- ^ Notes on Hitler's plan to de-Christianise Germany:
- "Once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian churches, but until then he would be circumspect."[10]
- "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties, church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion. Since the overwhelming majority of Germans were either Catholic or Protestant. this goal had to be a long-term rather than a short-term Nazi objective."[13]
- "[the Nazis planned to] de-Christianise Germany after the final victory".[410]
- "There is no doubt that in the long run Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Himmler intended to eradicate Christianity just as ruthlessly as any other rival ideology, even if in the short term they had to be content to make compromises with it."[411]
- "Had the Nazis won the war their ecclesiastical policies would have gone beyond those of the German Christians, to the utter destruction of both the Protestant and the Catholic Church."[412]
- "And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists."[413]
- "The objective was to either destroy Christianity and restore the German gods of antiquity or to turn Jesus into an Aryan."[414]
- "It seems no exaggeration to insist that the greatest challenge the Nazis had to face was their effort to eradicate Christianity in Germany or at least to subjugate it to their general world outlook."[415]
- The Nazis sought "to eradicate Christianity in Germany root and branch."[416]
- "Consequently, it was Hitler's long range goal to eliminate the churches once he had consolidated control over his European empire."[417]
- ^ "from the time Hitler came to power all the German bishops began declaring their appreciation of the important natural values of race and purity. This led German Catholics to dutifully obey and forget the warnings of the Bishops regarding immoral means in the defence of ones race".[62]
- ^ "In the midst of this world which today presents such a sharp contrast to "The Peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ," the church and her faithful are in times and in years of trial such as have rarely been known in her history of struggle and suffering".[344]
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References
- Berben, Paul (1975). Dachau, 1933–1945: the official history. Norfolk Press. ISBN 978-0-85211-009-6.
- Blett, Pierre (1997). Pie XII et la Seconde Guerre mondiale [Pius XII and the Second World War] (in French). Tempus. ISBN 978-2-262-02362-1.
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- ISBN 978-0-06-092020-3.
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- ISBN 978-1-4299-0036-2.
- ISBN 978-0-06-112135-7.
- ISBN 978-0-8050-3515-5.
- Graml, Hermann; ISBN 978-0-520-01662-0.
- ISBN 978-0-674-63680-4.
- ISBN 978-0-8091-0461-1.
- Hitler's Table Talk: His Private Conversations. Translated by Cameron, Norman; Stevens, R.H. Enigma. 2000. ISBN 1-929631-05-7.
- Hoffmann, Peter (1977). The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945 (Third, First English ed.). London: McDonald & Jane's.
- ISBN 978-0-393-07562-5.
- ISBN 978-1-4742-4094-9.
- Lapide, Pinchas (1967). Three Popes and the Jews. Hawthorn Books.
- ISBN 978-0-7867-5161-7.
- O'Shea, Paul Damian (2008). A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli : Politics and the Jews of Europe, 1917–1943. Rosenberg. ISBN 978-1-877058-71-4.
- ISBN 0-253-21471-8.
- Pius XI (14 March 1937). "Mit brennender Sorge: Encyclical of Pop Pius XI on the Church and the German Reich". Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
- Pius XII (20 October 1939). "Summi Pontificatus: Encyclical of Pope Pius XII on the Unity of Human Society". Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
- Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. London: Secker & Warburg.
Further reading
- ISBN 978-1-84954-506-8.
- Levai, Jenő (1968). Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy. Pope Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent. Reports, Documents and Records from Church and State Archives. Translated by Foster, J.R. London: Sands.
- DiGiovanni, Stephen M., Msgr (2001). "Pius XII and the Jews: The War Years as Reported by the New York Times" (PDF). Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 September 2016.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Frain, John (2009). The Cross and the Third Reich: Catholic Resistance in the Nazi Era. Family Education Trust. ISBN 978-1-871217-95-7.
- ISBN 978-0-307-27075-7.
- Fleming, Brian (2008). The Vatican Pimpernel: The World War II Exploits of the Monsignor Who Saved Over 6,500 Lives. Skyhorse. ISBN 978-1-62087-756-2.
- ISBN 978-1-59698-185-0.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - Hastings, Derek (2010). Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-988924-2.
External links
- Resisting on the Basis of Catholic Beliefs; The German Resistance Memorial Centre.
- Encyclopedia Britannica – Reflections on the Holocaust: Pius XII
- The Record of Pius XII's Opposition to Hitler; published by CatholicCulture.Org
- "They Must Never Be Forgotten: Priests and Nuns Who Rescued People From the Holocaust" published by Catholic Education Resource Centre.
- Catholic Martyrs of the Holocaust Archived 12 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine published by Catholic Education Resource Centre
- The Record of Pius XII's Opposition to Hitler; published by CatholicCulture.org
- Mit brennender Sorge on the Vatican Website.
- Summi Pontificatus on the Vatican Website.
- Mystici corporis Christi on the Vatican Website.
- The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis; a talk by Rabbi David Dalin on YouTube.