Two days later, in the course of a lengthy Christmas message broadcast by the Vatican radio, Pope Pius made another of his many calls for a more humane conduct of hostilities. Humanity, the Pope declared, owed the resolution to build a better world to "the hundreds of thousands who without personal guilt, sometimes for no other reason but on account of their nationality or descent, were doomed to death or exposed to a progressive deterioration of their condition."' Again, addressing the Sacred College of Cardinals in June 1943, the Pontiff spoke of his twofold duty to be impartial and to point up moral errors. He had given special attention, he recalled, to the plight of those who were still being harassed because of their nationality or descent and who without personal guilt were subjected to measures that spelled destruction. Much had been done for the unfortunates that could not be described yet. Every public statement had had to be carefully weighed "in the interest of those suffering so that their situation would not inadvertently be made still more difficult and unbearable." Unfortunately, Pius XII added, the Church's pleas for compassion and for the observance of the elementary norms of humanity had encountered doors "which no key was able to open.""
The precise nature of these interventions has not been revealed to this day. We do know, however, that Nuncio Orsenigo in Berlin made inquiries several times about mass shootings and the fate of deported Jews. (Ernst W< rmann, the director of the Political Department of the German Foreign Ministry, recorded on October 15,1942, that the Nuncio had made his representation with "some embarrassment and without emphasis."") State Secretary Weizsacker told Monsignor Orsenigo on another such occasion that the Vatican had so far conducted itself "very cleverly" in these matters, and that he would hope for a continuation of this policy. The Nuncio took the hint and "pointed out that he had not really touched this topic and that he had no desire to touch it.""
The Pope's policy of neutrality encountered its most crucial test when the Nazis began rounding up the 8,000 Jews of Rome in the fall of 1943. Prior to the start of the arrests, the Jewish community was told by the Nazis that unless it raised 50 kilograms of gold (the equivalent of $56,000) within 36 hours, 300 hostages would be taken. When it turned out that the Jews themselves could only raise 35 kg, the Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, asked for and received a loan from the Vatican treasury to cover the balance. The Pope approved of this transaction." But the big question in everyone's mind was how the Supreme Pontiff would react when the deportation of the Jews from the Eternal City began.
The test came on the night of October 15/16. While the roundup was still going on, a letter was delivered to General Stahel, the German military commander of Rome. Bearing the signature of Bishop Hudal, the head of the German Church in Rome, it said:
I have just been informed by a high Vatican office in the immediate circle of the Holy Father that the arrests of Jews of Italian nationality have begun this morning. In the interest of the good relations which have existed until now between the Vatican and the high German military command ... I would be very grateful if you would give an order to stop these arrests in Rome and its vicinity right away; I fear that otherwise the Pope will have to make an open stand which will serve the anti-German propaganda as a weapon against us."'
A day later, Ernst von Weizsacker, the new German Ambassador at the Holy See, reported to Berlin that the Vatican was upset, especially since the deportations had taken place, as it were, right under the Pope's window:
The people hostile to us in Rome are taking advantage of this affair to force the Vatican from its reserve. People say that the bishops of French cities, where similar incidents occurred, have taken a firm stand. The Pope, as supreme head of the Church and Bishop of Rome, cannot be more reticent than they. They are also drawing a parallel between the stronger character of Pius XI and that of the present Pope.
Contrary to Hudal's and Weizsacker's apprehensions, however, the man in the Vatican palace remained silent. On October 18, over one thousand Roman Jews-more than two-thirds of them women and children-were shipped off to the killing center of Auschwitz. Fourteen men and one woman returned alive. About 7,000 Roman Jews-that is, seven out of eight-were able to elude their hunters by going into hiding. More than 4,000, with the knowledge and approval of the Pope, found refuge in the numerous monastaries and houses of religious orders in Rome,"' and a few dozen were sheltered in the Vatican itself. The rest were hidden by their Italian neighbors, among whom the anti-Jewish policy of the Fascists had never been popular. But for the Germans, overwhelmingly relieved at having averted a public protest by the Pope, the fact that a few thousand Jews had escaped the net was of minor significance. On October 28 Ambassador Weizsacker was able to report:
Although under pressure from all sides, the Pope has not let himself be drawn into demonstrative censure of the deportation of Jews from Rome. Although he must expect that his attitude will be criticized by our enemies and exploited by the Protestant and Anglo-Saxon countries in their propaganda against Catholicism, he has done everything he could in this delicate matter not to strain relations with the German government, and German circles in Rome. As there is probably no reason to expect other German actions against the Jews of Rome, we can consider that a question so disturbing to German-Vatican relations has been liquidated.
In any case, an indication for this state of affairs can be seen in the Vatican's attitude. L'Osservatore Romano has in fact prominently published in its issue of October 25-26, an official communique on the Pope's charitable activities. The communique, in the Vatican's distinctive style, that is, very vague and complicated, declares that all men, without distinction of nationality, race, or religion, benefit from the Pope's paternal solicitude. The continual and varied activities of Pius XII have probably increased lately because of the greater suffering of so many unfortunates.
There is less reason to object to the terms of this message ... as only a very small number of people will recognize in it a special allusion to the Jewish question."'
Since the end of World War II, Pius XII has often been criticized for his silence. It has been argued-and most recently by Hochhuth-that the Pope could have saved numerous lives, if indeed he could not have halted the machinery of destruction altogether, had he chosen to take a public stand, and had he confronted the Germans with the threat of an interdict or with excom munication of Hitler, Goebbels, and other leading Nazis belonging to the Catholic faith. As examples of the effectiveness of public protests, it is possible to cite the resolute reaction of the German episcopate to the euthanasia program. Also, in Slovakia, Hungary, and Rumania, forceful intervention of Papal nuncios, who threatened the Quisling governments with public condemnation by the Pope, was able, albeit temporarily, to stop the deportations.'' At the very least, it has been suggested, a public denunciation of the mass murders by Pius XII, broadcast widely over the Vatican radio, would have revealed to Jews and Christians alike what deportation to the East actually meant. The Pope would have been believed, whereas the broadcasts of the Allies were often shrugged off as war propaganda. Many of the deportees who accepted the assurances of the Germans that they were merely being resettled, might thus have been warned and given an impetus to escape; many more Christians might have helped and sheltered Jews, and many more lives might have been saved.
There exists, of course, no way of definitively proving or disproving these arguments. Whether a papal decree of excommunication against Hitler would have dissuaded the Fi.ihrer from carrying out his plan to destroy the Jews is very doubtful, and revocation of the Concordat by the Holy See would have bothered Hitler still less. However, a flaming protest against the massacre of the Jews coupled with an imposition of the interdict upon all of Germany or the excommunication of all Catholics in any way involved with the apparatus of the "Final Solution" would have been a more formidable and effective weapon. Yet this was precisely the kind of action which the Pope could not take without risking the allegiance of the German Catholics. Given the indifference of the German population toward the fate o
f the Jews and the highly ambivalent attitude of the German hierarchy toward Nazi antisemitism, a forceful stand by the Supreme Pontiff on the Jewish question might well have led to a large-scale desertion from the Church. When Dr. Eduardo Senatro, the correspondent of L'Osservatore Roniano in Berlin, asked Pius XII whether he would not protest the extermination of the Jews, the Pope is reported to have answered, "Dear friend, do not forget that millions of Catholics serve in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?"""
The Pope knew that the German Catholics were not prepared to suffer martyrdom for their Church; still less were they willing to incur the wrath of their Nazi rulers for the sake of the Jews, whom their own bishops for years had castigated as a harmful influence in German life. In the final analysis, then, "the Vatican's silence only reflected the deep feeling of the Catholic masses of Europe.""
Some Catholic writers have suggested that a public protest by the Pope would not only have been unsuccessful in helping the Jews but might have caused additional damage-to the Jews, to the Mischlinge, to the Church, to the territorial integrity of the Vatican, and to Catholics in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. So far as the Jews are concerned, it is tempting to dismiss this argument by asking what worse fate could possibly have befallen them than the one that actually did. But in any case, the Catholic bishops of Holland tried the gamble and failed. In July 1942, together with the Protestant Church, they sent a telegram of protest against the deportation of the Dutch Jews to the German Reichskommissar (commissioner) and threatened to make their protest public unless the deportations were halted. The Germans responded by offering to exempt from deportation non-Aryans converted to Christianity before 1941 if the churches agreed to remain silent. The Dutch Reformed Church accepted the bargain, but the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht refused and issued a pastoral letter in which he denounced the wrong done to the Jews. The Germans retaliated by seizing and deporting all the Catholic non-Aryans they could find, among them Edith Stein." There was thus some basis for the fear that a public protest, along with any good that could come of it, might make some things worse, if not for the Jews, at least for the Mischlinge and the Catholics themselves.
The Pope had other, perhaps still weightier, reasons for remaining silent. As Mr. Tittmann was told by highly placed officials of the Curia, the Holy See did not want to jeopardize its neutrality by condemning German atrocities, and the Pope was unwilling to risk later charges of having been partial and contributing to a German defeat.' Moreover, the Vatican did not wish to undermine and weaken Germany's struggle against Russia. In the late summer of 1943, the Papal Secretary of State declared that the fate of Europe depended upon a German victory on the Eastern front;" and Father Robert Leiber, one of Pius XII's secretaries, recalls that the late Pope had always looked upon Russian Bolshevism as more dangerous than German National Socialism.""
Finally, one is inclined to conclude that the Pope and his advisers-influenced by the long tradition of moderate antisemitism so widely accepted in Vatican circles-did not view the plight of the Jews with a real sense of urgency and moral outrage. For this assertion no documentation is possible, but it is a conclusion difficult to avoid. Pius XII broke his policy of strict neutrality during World War II to express concern over the German violation of the neutrality of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in May 1940. When some German Catholics criticized him for this action, the Pope wrote the German bishops that neutrality was not synonymous "with indifference and apathy where moral and humane considerations demanded a candid word.""" All things told, did not the murder of several million Jews demand a similarly "candid word"?
The Dramatic Shift in Catholic Position
h 30 September 1930, the vicar general of the diocese of Mainz, Monsignor Mayer,' wrote a response to an inquiry that had come three days earlier from the Nazi district office in Offenbach. The question was whether a Catholic could be enrolled in the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). The Nazi inquiry was prompted by a sermon given in the village church of Kirschhausen by a certain parish priest, Fr. Weber, who had absolutely denied the possibility that a person in that parish could be both a Catholic and a Nazi. Further, Fr. Weber had proclaimed that Nazis could not attend church functions in uniform or in formations and that a Catholic who acknowledged belief in Nazi principles would be denied access to the sacraments. In his response to the complaint of the Nazi office, the vicar general, with the obvious approval of the bishop of Mainz, first confirmed that these judgments were in accord with Mainz diocesan instructions.
Mayer then inveighed in general against the Nazi program's understanding of religion in its infamous Article 24.2 He criticized specifically the Nazi notion of "positive Christianity," the Nazi Party's conceptual umbrella for understanding not only Christianity but also, in fact, all religion as being necessarily in accord with both state policy and accepted social rules and cultural norms. For Mayer, true Catholic moral and theological beliefs transcended particular times and historical movements, and therefore, it would be "a great error to demand that the Christian creed be made to conform with the ethical and moral sense of the Germanic race." He went on to attack the concept of a German God and a German Christianity and any understanding of a national church that was somehow distinctive in its Germanic character. National Socialism and Catholicism were wholly incompatible, and hence, there was no way a person could be both a Nazi and Catholic.'
Three years later, on 10 November 1933, this same vicar general of Mainz, Monsignor Mayer, wrote to the same Nazi district office offering a church burial for Peter Gemeinder, a Nazi Gauleiter (district chief) who had died in 1931 and who had been denied a Catholic funeral. Mayer offered not only to bless the grave but also to hold a special funeral mass in which representatives of the district NSDAP in Nazi uniform would have a special place of honor. In a very short time, Mayer had completely reversed his previous decision.
The jarring discrepancy between these two incidents within the local history of but one diocese reflects the larger history of German Catholicism in relation to the National Socialist movement in the critical years between 1930 and 1934. In 1930 Mayer was simply reflecting the wider judgment of the German Catholic bishops in resisting National Socialism, taking a tough stand not only against Nazi beliefs but also against any compromise on Catholic membership in or adherence to the Nazi movement. Certainly his stance did not reflect the unanimous judgment of the German episcopacy, for a few bishops had advocated toleration, if not support, of the National Socialists. But these bishops were few in number and not particularly influential. In the main, the German Catholic leadership developed a strong resistance to Nazism in the latter years of the Weimar Republic, as Nazi political strength was growing, and it retained this view even after Hitler came to power in January 1933.
Yet by May and June of 1933, only a few months later, the general assembly of Catholic bishops, the Fulda Conference, was joining a flood tide of support for the Nazis, or at least it was proclaiming official cooperation with and implicit support for National Socialism.' Surely this change was due in part to direct and extreme political pressure, but it cannot be explained simply or exclusively by coercion, because German Catholicism had a substantial range of social and institutional support. As a religious institution almost equal to Protestantism in membership and organizational size, it was not some marginal or lightweight movement. We are speaking of an immense church with a highly organized and effective hierarchy and an institutional structure extending throughout the society and, in some provinces, into every town and village. How, then, is one to explain this change, in a very short period, from strong official resistance to a seemingly supportive posture? How did this radical shift in the Catholic relationship to National Socialism come about? What influences shaped this dramatic movement? These are the questions that need to be examined if we are to understand the story of Catholicism under the Third Reich, with its all-too-few moments of heroic resistance and its more common experience of comprom
ise with and acceptance of National Socialism.
From Resistance to capitulation
The complex story of this change has been the subject of considerable research, from the work of Guenter Lewy in the early 1960s to the more recent work of German scholars such as Klaus Scholder, Heinz Hi.irten, and Ludwig Volk, and from North American scholars such as John Conway and Ernst Helmreich.' These and other studies have together revealed four central elements in the adjustment of German Catholicism to an acceptance of National Socialism, or at least to a posture of submission, especially in the critical years of 1933-34. Only a brief and general review of these factors is possible here.
First, German Catholicism was under pressure to exhibit and encourage nationalism. The long legacy of the "cultural struggle" (Kulturkampf) is an essential background piece here. Beginning in 1871, Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian Protestant elite implemented a series of efforts intended to suppress the influence of Catholics and reduce their public role. Although this anti-Catholic policy gradually diminished until it was eventually overturned in the 1880s in an agreement with Pope Leo X1II, it left behind deep social wounds. Catholics emerged from this struggle with the self-perception of an embattled minority under wholly unjustified suspicion. In an effort to disprove the charge that German Catholics were somehow less than true Germans, they tended to develop an urgent patriotism. Later, in the supercharged atmosphere of post-World War I Germany-a time of extraordinary national sensitivity based upon a widespread feeling of victimization and international abuse-German Catholics were eager to demonstrate an appropriately zealous degree of patriotic fervor. As is often true of minorities out to confirm a common cause with the majority, there was a tendency to overdo it. In the Germany of the 1920s, German Catholics had just such a tendency toward hypernationalism. The more the Nazis became the chief proponents of German nationalism, especially after National Socialism took over the German state, the more difficult it became for Catholics to resist giving their approval.
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