Until 1942, half-Jews and quarter-Jews, the so-called Mischlinge, as well as non-Aryans married to Aryans, had been exempt both from wearing the yellow star and from deportation. (The number of such persons in the Reich-Protektorat area was estimated at above 150,000.5') Though the Nuremberg laws had forbidden marriages between Jews and Aryans, they had not annulled existing mixed marriages. With the progress of the Final Solution, however, this loophole was now to be closed. A conference of experts in March 1942 decided upon the compulsory dissolution of racially mixed marriages, to be followed by the deportation of the Jewish partner. If the Aryan partner failed to apply for a divorce within a certain period of time, the public prosecutor was to file a petition for divorce which the courts would have to grant.
The bishops heard of the contemplated measure through Dr. Globke in the Ministry of the Interior, and they reacted promptly. On November 11, 1942, Archbishop Bertram in the name of the episcopate addressed a letter of protest against the planned compulsory divorce legislation to the Ministers of Justice, the Interior, and Ecclesiastical Affairs. The intervention of the bishops, he insisted, was not due "to lack of love for the German nationality, lack of a feeling of national dignity, and also not to underestimation of the harmful Jewish influences upon German culture and national interests." The bishops merely felt called upon to emphasize that the duty of humane treatment also existed toward the members of other races. Among the persons affected by the contemplated measure, Bertram went on, were many thousands of Catholics whose marriages, according to Catholic doctrine, were indissoluble. Respect for the religious rights of the Catholic Christians was an indispensable condition for the peaceful cooperation of church and state, which had never been as necessary as in the present situation. The bishops therefore hoped, the letter ended, that the government would withdraw the planned divorce ordinance."
Despite the fact that the ordinance was still tied up in bureaucratic difficulties, the Gestapo in February 1943, in the course of deporting the last German Jews, seized several thousand Christian non-Aryans, partners of mixed marriages. In Berlin alone about 6,000 such men were arrested on February 27. But then something unexpected and unparalleled happened: Their Aryan wives followed them to the place of temporary detention and there they stood for several hours, screaming and howling for their men. With the secrecy of the whole machinery of destruction threatened, the Gestapo yielded, and the non-Aryan husbands were released."
A few days after this unique event, Bertram composed another letter. This time he also sent copies to the chief of the Reich Chancellery and to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), Himmler's headquarters. About 8,000 non-Aryan Catholics, Bertram complained, had been seized and deported. The episcopate could not silently accept these measures. He then repeated what he had said in November 1942 about the illegitimacy of compulsory divorces` On April 16 Bishop Preysing informed his fellow bishops that the contemplated divorce decree was soon to be made public. He urged that for the time being the matter be treated as strictly confidential; but in the event that the order should be issued, a statement drawn up by Bertram was to be read from the pulpits. The statement reaffirmed the indissolubility of Christian marriage and the validity of this principle even in the case of racially mixed marriages, and it asked for prayer for the unfortunates affected by the decree."
About two months later Preysing sent word to his colleagues through a messenger that the threatened decree had been postponed. The bishops were asked to write letters to all the ministries; they should inquire in strong language as to the whereabouts of the deportees, demanding pastoral care for the Christians and threatening a public protest. The point of departure should be concern for the Christian Jews, "but beyond this one should speak clearly about the outrages inflicted upon the Jews generally. We do not know how many bishops acted upon Preysing's request.
In November 1943, Bertram sent out another appeal in the name of the entire episcopate to the Minister of the Interior and to the RSHA. The episcopate, he wrote, had received information according to which the non-Aryans evacuated from Germany were living in camps under conditions that would have to be called inhuman. A large number of the sufferers had already succumbed. "In view of the reputation of the German name at home and abroad," and in view of the commands of the Christian moral law concerning the duties owed fellow men even of foreign races, the bishops considered it necessary to plead for an amelioration of conditions in these camps. In particular, Bertram continued, the bishops wished to demand the benefit of pastoral care for the imprisoned Catholics. The episcopate would gladly designate priests for divine services and the administration of the sacraments in the camps."
Bertram's letter neither employed strong language nor said anything very definite about the outrages against the Jews, as Bishop Preysing had suggested. Such vagueness was typical of the few public pronouncements the bishops made on this matter in the years following the adoption of the Final Solution. They spoke of the right to life and liberty, not to be denied even those "who are not of our blood,""' to "men of foreign races and descent," and to "the resettled,"' but the word "Jew" never once appeared in any of these documents.
In his next and last letter to the government, dispatched in January 1944, Bertram wrote that reports had been received to the effect that measures which had previously been applied only to Jews were now to be applied also to the Mischlinge. These Christians had already been barred from military service and institutions of higher learning, but now, it seemed, they were to be conscripted into special formations for labor service. "All these measures," Bertram continued, "aim clearly at segregation, at the end of which extermination threatens." In the name of the episcopate he felt obligated to point out that any change in the meaning of the term "Jew"-when the Nuremberg statutes had been accepted as the final word on this question for almost ten years-would seriously undermine confidence in the law. The Mischlinge were Germans and Christians and had always been rejected by the Jews. "The German Catholics, indeed numerous Christians in Germany," Bertram warned, "would be deeply hurt if these fellow Christians now had to meet a fate similar to that of the Jews." The bishops would not be able to reconcile it with their conscience to remain silent in the face of such measures.,'
As against the case of the euthanasia program of the early war years, then-when the episcopate did not mince words and succeeded in putting a stop to the killings [Ed. note: we now know the killing did not stop, even though the regime changed its public face on euthanasia policy]-the bishops continually played it safe where the Jews were concerned. Such public protests as they did register could, indeed, have been seen as referring to the Jews, but any Catholic who chose to interpret them otherwise (as referring, say, only to Slavs) was left free to do so. Close to half the population of the Greater German Reich (43.1 percent in 1939) was Catholic and even among the SS, despite all pressures to leave the Church, almost a fourth (22.7 percent on December 31, 1938) belonged to the Catholic faith. Yet while the episcopate had in the past issued orders to deny the sacraments to Catholics who engaged in dueling or agreed to have their bodies cremated, the word that would have forbidden the faithful, on pain of excommunication, to go on participating in the massacre of the Jews was never spoken. And so Catholics went on participating conscientiously, along with other Germans.
There was, however, at least one Catholic churchman in Germany for whom the Christian duty to love one's neighbor amounted to more than a pious formula-the sixty-six-year-old Provost Lichtenberg of Berlin, who, right through the stepped-up antisemitic agitation, continued to say a daily prayer for the Jews. He was finally arrested on October 23, 1941, a week after the first of the mass deportation of Jews had begun. During questioning by Himmler's henchmen, the Provost asserted that the deportation of the Jews was irreconcilable with the Christian moral law, and asked to be allowed to accompany the deportees as their spiritual adviser. Sentenced to two years imprisonment for abuse of the pulpit, Lichtenberg was seized by the Gestapo upon his release
in October 1943 and shipped off to the concentration camp at Dachau. He died during the transport on November 5, 1943.°'
The passivity of the German episcopate in the face of the Jewish tragedy stands in marked contrast to the conduct of the French, Belgian, and Dutch bishops. In Holland, where the Church as early as 1934 had prohibited the participation of Catholics in the Dutch Nazi movement, the bishops in 1942 immediately and publicly protested the first deportations of Dutch Jews," and in May 1943 they forbade the collaboration of Catholic policemen in the hunting down of Jews even at the cost of losing their jobs."; In Belgium members of the episcopate actively supported the rescue efforts of their clergy, who hid many hundreds of Jewish children."" And in France, the highest dignitaries of the Church repeatedly used their pulpits to denounce the deportations and to condemn the barbarous treatment of the
Throughout western Europe untold numbers of priests and members of the monastic clergy organized the rescue of Jews, hid them in monasteries, parish houses, and private homes. Many lay Catholics in France, Holland, and Belgium acted in a similar fashion, thus saving thousands of Jewish lives. The concern of the Gentile populations of these countries for their Jewish fellow citizens was undoubtedly one of the key factors behind the bold public protests of the French, Dutch, and Belgian bishops-just as the absence of such solicitude in Germany goes a long way toward explaining the apathy of their German counterparts. In France, Belgium, and Holland, declarations of solidarity and help for the Jews were almost universally regarded as signs of patriotism; in Germany, on the other hand, the bishops in so acting would have incurred new charges of being un-German and of being in league with Germany's mortal enemies. Their own parishioners, moreover, would probably have failed to understand or support any signs of sympathy for the Jews-whom the Church, after all, had herself long been branding as a harmful factor in German life. Consequently, at the very moment when the bishops might perhaps have wanted to protest the inhuman treatment of the Jews, they found themselves the prisoners of their own antisemitic teachings. Indeed, in Germany only a handful of Jews were hidden by the clergy or otherwise helped by them in their hour of distress."' In Freiburg there was Dr. Gertrud Luckner, an official of the Caritas (the large Catholic philanthropic organization) who helped Jews get across the Swiss border, sent packages to deportees, and distributed money from a special fund established by the episcopate for non-Aryans. She was arrested in November 1943, while trying to bring a sum of money to the few remaining Jews in Berlin, and spent the rest of the war in a concentration camp." A few cases are also recorded of individual Catholics hiding and saving Jews,70 but only in Berlin did a significant number of Jews find refuge with friends and neighbors; according to Provost Gruber, most of these courageous people were workers, many of them were unconnected with any church.'
There were, then, exceptions, but the overall picture was one of indifference and apathy. "Among the Christians," a group of German Protestant and Catholic theologians concluded in 1950, "a few courageously helped the persecuted, but the large majority failed disgracefully in the face of this unheardof provocation of the merciful
4. The Role of the Papacy
In April 1933 a communication reached Pope Pius XI from Germany expressing grave concern over the Nazis' antisemitic aims and requesting the Supreme Pontiff to issue an encyclical on the Jewish question. The letter was written by the philosopher Dr. Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and later known as Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce of the Order of the Carmelites.' Edith Stein's request was not granted and nine years later, in August 1942, she was seized by the Gestapo from a Dutch monastery in which she had sought refuge, and sent to Auschwitz to be gassed. The debate over whether the Papacy could have prevented or should at least have vigorously protested the massacre of the Jews of Europe, of which Edith Stein was one of the victims, has been going on ever since and has acquired new vigor as a result of the Hochhuth play.
In response to Hitler's antisemitic drive, Pius XII's predecessor, Pius XI, like the German episcopate, seems to have limited his concern to Catholic non-Aryans. At the request of Cardinal Bertram, the Papal Secretary of State in September 1933 put in "a word on behalf of those German Catholics" who were of Jewish descent and for this reason suffering "social and economic difficulties."7' In the years that followed, the Holy See often took issue with the Nazis' glorification of race, but the Jewish question specifically was never discussed. In 1934 the influential Jesuit magazine, Civilta Cattolica, published in Rome and traditionally close to Vatican thinking, noted with regret that the antisemitism of the Nazis "did not stem from the religious convictions nor the Christian conscience ... but from ... their desire to upset the order of religion and society." The Civilta Cattolica added that "we could understand them, or even praise them, if their policy were restricted within acceptable bounds of defense against the Jewish organizations and In 1936 the same journal published another article on the subject, emphasizing that opposition to Nazi racialism should not be interpreted as a rejection of antisemitism, arguing-as the magazine had done since 1890-that the Christian world (though without un-Christian hatred) must defend itself against the Jewish threat by suspending the civic rights of Jews and returning them to the
Pius XI's encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge" of March 1937 rejected the myths of race and blood as contrary to revealed Christian truth, but it neither mentioned nor criticized antisemitism per se. Nor was antisemitism mentioned in the statement of the Roman Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, issued on April 13, 1938, and attacking as erroneous eight theses taken from the arsenal of Nazi doctrine." On September 7, 1938, during a reception for Catholic pilgrims from Belgium, Pius XI is said to have condemned the participation of Catholics in antisemitic movements and to have added that Christians, the spiritual descendants of the patriarch Abraham, were "spiritually Semites." But this statement was omitted by all the Italian papers, including L'Osservatore Romano, from their account of the Pope's address.'"
The elevation of Cardinal Pacelli to the Papacy in the spring of 1939 brought to the chair of St. Peter a man who, in contrast to his predecessor, was unemotional and dispassionate, as well as a master of the language of diplomatic ambiguity. "Pius XII," recalls Cardinal Tardini, "was by nature meek and almost timid. He was not born with the temperament of a fighter. In this he was different from his great predecessor."' But whether, as Hochhuth has speculated, Pius XI would have reacted to the massacre of the Jews during World War 11 differently from Pacelli, is a question to which no definite answer is possible.
That the Holy See had no intrinsic objection to a policy of subjecting the Jews to discriminatory legislation again became clear when in June 1941 Marshal Petain's Vichy government introduced a series of "Jewish statutes." The Cardinals and Archbishops of France made known their strong disapproval of these measures, but Leon Berard, the Vichy ambassador at the Holy See, was able to report to Petain after lengthy consultations with high Church officials that the Vatican did not consider such laws in conflict with Catholic teaching. The Holy See merely counseled that no provisions on marriage be added to the statutes and "that the precepts of justice and charity be considered in the application of the law."" In August 1941 the consequences of this discriminatory policy could not yet be clearly seen, but when mass deportations from France got under way in 1942, the Papal Nuncio, without invoking the authority of the Holy See, requested Laval to mitigate the severity of the measures taken against the Jews of Vichy France." By that time, however, such pleas could no longer halt the machinery of destruction.
Meanwhile, there was growing criticism of the Pope's failure to protest publicly against Nazi atrocities, and especially against the murder of the Jews in the Polish death factories. In July 1942, Harold H. Tittmann, the assistant to Roosevelt's personal representative at the Holy See, Myron C. Taylor, pointed out to the Vatican that its silence was "endangering its moral prestige and ... undermining faith both in the Church and in the Holy Father himself."" In
September 1942, after authorization by Secretary of State Hull, Tittmann and several other diplomatic representatives at the Vatican formally requested that the Pope condemn the "incredible horrors" perpetrated by the Nazis. A few days later Taylor forwarded to the Papal Secretary of State, Luigi Maglione, a memorandum from the Jewish Agency for Palestine reporting mass executions of Jews in Poland and occupied Russia, and telling of deportations to death camps from Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Slovakia, etc. Taylor inquired whether the Vatican could confirm these reports, and if so, "whether the Holy Father has any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities."" On October 10 the Holy See, in reply to Taylor's note, said that up to the present time it had not been possible to verify the accuracy of reports concerning the severe measures that were being taken against the Jews. "It is well known," the statement added, "that the Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the suffering of non-Aryans."' After the Western Allies in December 1942 had vigorously denounced the cold-blooded extermination of the Jews, Tittmann again asked the Papal Secretary of State whether the Holy See could not issue a similar pronouncement. Maglione answered that the Holy See, in line with its policy of neutrality, could not protest particular atrocities and had to limit itself to condemning immoral actions in general. He assured Tittmann that everything possible was being done behind the scenes to help the Jews.'
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