Nazi views on Catholicism
The Hitler regime permitted various persecutions of the Church in the Greater Germanic Reich, though the political relationship between Church and state among Nazi allies was varied. While the Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler's public relationship to religion in Nazi Germany may be defined as one of opportunism, his personal position on Catholicism and Christianity was one of hostility. Hitler's chosen "deputy", Martin Bormann, an atheist, recorded in Hitler's Table Talk that Nazism was secular, scientific, and anti-religious in outlook.[4]
Biographer
The 1920 Nazi Party Platform had promised to support freedom of religions with the caveat: "insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the moral sentiments of the Germanic race", and expressed support for so-called "
Background
Roman Catholicism was widespread among European and Germanic people, but
Early Nazi movement
Catholic Bavaria resented rule from Protestant Berlin, and Hitler at first saw revolution in Bavaria as a means to power - but an early attempt proved fruitless, and he was imprisoned after the 1923 Munich
Hitler combined elements of autobiography with an exposition of his racist political ideology in
Nazis take power
A threatening, though initially mainly sporadic persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany followed the Nazi takeover.[25] The Nazis claimed jurisdiction over all collective and social activity, interfering with Catholic schooling, youth groups, workers' clubs and cultural societies.[26] "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties", wrote Phayer, "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".[27]
Hitler moved quickly to eliminate
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.
— Extract from An Honourable Defeat by Anton Gill
Richard J. Evans wrote that Hitler believed that in the long run National Socialism and religion would not be able to co-exist, and stressed repeatedly that Nazism was a secular ideology, founded on modern science: "Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition". Germany could not tolerate the intervention of foreign influences such as the Pope and "Priests, he said, were 'black bugs', 'abortions in black cassocks'".[32] He believed in a world Jewish conspiracy operating through social democracy, Marxism and Christianity.[33]
Views of leaders of Third Reich
The Nazis disliked the Catholic and Protestant churches.[35] They wanted to transform the subjective consciousness of the German people—their attitudes, values and mentalities—into a single-minded, obedient "national community". Kershaw wrote that they believed they would therefore have to replace class, religious and regional allegiances by a "massively enhanced national self-awareness to mobilize the German people psychologically" for the coming struggle and war.[36] Gill wrote that their long term plan was to "de-Christianise Germany after the final victory".[35]
Aggressive anti-Church radicals like
In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.
— Extract fromHitler: a Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock
Hitler possessed radical instincts in relation to the
Once in power, the Nazi leadership co-opted the term
In January 1934, Hitler appointed
We now realize that the central supreme values of the Roman and the Protestant Churches [-] hinder the organic powers of the peoples determined by their Nordic race, [-] they will have to be remodeled
—The Myth of the 20th Century, Alfred Rosenberg, 1930.
Church officials were perturbed by Hitler's appointment of Rosenberg as the state's official philosopher. The indication was that Hitler was endorsing Rosenberg's anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, and neo-pagan philosophy. The Vatican directed the Holy Office to place Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century on the Index of Forbidden books on February 7, 1934.[48] Joachim Fest wrote of Rosenberg as having little or no political influence in making the regime's decisions and as a thoroughly marginalized figure.[49]
Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Propaganda, was among the most aggressive anti-clericalists.[3] The son of a Catholic family from Rheydt in the Rhineland, he became one of the regime's most relentless Jew-baiters.[50] Goebbels led the Nazi persecution of the clergy. On the "Church Question", he wrote "after the war it has to be generally solved ... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a heroic-German world view".[3]
Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich headed the Nazi security forces and were key architects of the Final Solution. Both believed that Christian values were among the enemies of Nazism: the enemies were "eternally the same" wrote Heydrich: "the Jew, the Freemason, and the politically-oriented cleric." Modes of thinking like Christian and liberal individualism he considered to be residue of inherited racial characteristics, biologically sourced to Jewry—who must therefore be exterminated.[51] According to Himmler biographer Peter Longerich, Himmler was vehemently opposed to Christian sexual morality and the "principle of Christian mercy", both of which he saw as a dangerous obstacle to his plans battle with "subhumans".[52] In 1937 he wrote:[53]
We live in an era of the ultimate conflict with Christianity. It is part of the mission of the SS to give the German people in the next half century the non-Christian ideological foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the German heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense.
— Heinrich Himmler, 1937
Himmler saw the main task of his Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation to be that of "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a 'Germanic' way of living" in order to prepare for the coming conflict between "humans and subhumans":[52] Longerich wrote that, while the Nazi movement as a whole launched itself against Jews and Communists, "by linking de-Christianisation with re-Germanization, Himmler had provided the SS with a goal and purpose all of its own."[52] He set about making his SS the focus of a "cult of the Teutons".[54]
Hitler's chosen deputy and private secretary from 1941, Martin Bormann, was a rigid guardian of National Socialist orthodoxy.[39][55] He believed, and said publicly in 1941 that "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable".[9]
Following the failure of the pro-Nazi
The Party stands on the basis of
Hans Kerrl, Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, 1937
During the war
Hitler called a truce in the Church conflict with the outbreak of war, wanting to back away from policies likely to cause internal friction in Germany. He decreed at the outset of war that "no further action should be taken against the Evangelical and Catholic Churches for the duration of the war". According to John Conway, "The Nazis had to reckon with the fact that, despite all Rosenberg's efforts, only 5 per cent of the population registered themselves at the 1930 census as no longer connected with Christian Churches."[57] The support of millions of German Christians was needed in order for Hitler's plans to come to fruition. It was Hitler's belief that if religion is a help, "it can only be an advantage". Most of the 3 million Nazi Party members "still paid the Church taxes" and considered themselves Christians.[58] Regardless, a number of Nazi radicals in the hierarchy determined that the Church Struggle should be continued.[59] Following victory in Poland, the repression of the Churches was extended, despite their early protestations of loyalty to the cause.[60]
Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda issued threats and applied intense pressure on the Churches to voice support for the war, and the Gestapo banned Church meetings for a few weeks. In the first few months of the war, the German Churches complied.[61] The Catholic bishops asked their followers to support the war effort.[62] But the Nazis strongly disapproved of the sentiments against war expressed by the Pope through his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus and his 1939 Christmas message, and were angry at his support for Poland and the "provocative" use of Vatican Radio by Cardinal Hlond of Poland. Distribution of the encyclical was banned.[63]
Conway wrote that anti-church radical Reinhard Heydrich estimated in a report to Hitler of October 1939, that the majority of Church people were supporting the war effort - though a few "well known agitators among the pastors needed to be dealt with".[59] Heydrich determined that support from church leaders could not be expected because of the nature of their doctrines and internationalism, so he devised measures to restrict the operation of the Churches under cover of war time exigencies, such as reducing resources available to Church presses on the basis of rationing, and prohibiting pilgrimages and large church gatherings on the basis of transportation difficulties. Churches were closed for being "too far from bomb shelters". Bells were melted down. Presses were closed.[60] With the expansion of the war in the East from 1941, there came also an expansion of the regime's attack on the churches. Monasteries and convents were targeted and expropriation of Church properties surged.[64]
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.[65] Mary Fulbrook wrote that when politics encroached on the church, Catholics were prepared to resist, but that the record was otherwise patchy and uneven, and that, with notable exceptions, "it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship".[66] 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.[67] 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.[68] This reflected also the cautious approach adopted by the hierarchy, who felt secure only in commenting on matters which transgressed on the ecclesiastical sphere.[69]
The bishop of Münster,
See also
- Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
- Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany
- Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany
- Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland
References
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