The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  The controversy over Rosenberg’s ideas soon began to take on what the Nazi leadership regarded as more dangerous forms as the German bishops issued public rebukes to the Nazi ideologue and called on the faithful to reject his ideas.55 In his Easter message, written on 19 March 1935, Clemens von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, launched a fierce attack on Rosenberg’s book. ‘There are heathens again in Germany,’ he noted in alarm, and he criticized Rosenberg’s idea of the racial soul. ‘The so-called eternal racial soul’, declared Galen, ‘is in reality a nullity.’ Early in July 1935, Rosenberg took the opportunity to criticize Galen at a rally in Münster, and in response, the Catholic faithful in Münster appeared in unprecedented numbers at the annual July procession through the streets held to commemorate the local Church’s survival of Bismarck’s persecution half a century before and - on this occasion - the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Anabaptists who had instituted a reign of terror in the town during the Reformation. Nineteen thousand Catholics, double the usual number, came out to cheer their bishop, who issued a ringing declaration that he would never give in to the enemies of the Church. In response, the local Party put up notices denying any intention of renewing the Bismarckian attempt to suppress the Church’s independence, while local officials reported to Berlin that Galen was stirring up discontent and accused him of meddling in politics.56 Galen wrote personally to Hitler complaining about attacks on the clergy by leading Nazis such as Baldur von Schirach.57 Compromise was clearly not in the air. Tightening the screws on the Church, Himmler and the Gestapo now began to introduce tougher measures against Catholic lay organizations and institutions, limiting public meetings, censoring the remaining Catholic newspapers and magazines and banning particular issues, and putting proven Nazis into editorial positions in the Catholic press. Both Hermann Goring and Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Interior Minister, spoke out against ‘politicizing Catholicism’, declaring that the continued existence of Catholic lay organizations was incompatible with the spirit of the age.58 Towards the end of 1935, Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry took a hand in the controversy, releasing a flood of accusations against Catholic organizations for financial corruption, just as they had done in 1933 with the trade unions.59

  These new tactics failed altogether to have the desired effect in weaning the Catholic community away from its faith. The Gestapo reported that the priesthood, through the confessional and through a whole programme of house visits, was so successful in countering the allegations that the laity, especially in rural areas, ‘regards what stands written in the newspapers as a falsehood, or at least a great exaggeration’.60 The drive to recruit young people to the Hitler Youth and its female equivalent, the League of German Girls, ran up against tough opposition from Catholic priests, who were reported in some areas to be refusing absolution to girls who joined the League instead of a Catholic girls’ organization.61 Incidents began to multiply. Catholic congregations reacted with undisguised fury at the attempts of local Party bosses to remove religious statuary from public buildings such as mortuaries, and demonstratively flew Church flags instead of swastika banners to welcome visiting Catholic dignitaries. The brownshirts staged public demonstrations such as one in Rosenheim, where they demanded the sacking of a teacher who had been disciplining his pupils for failing to attend Church (‘to Dachau with him!’ was the cry).62 The Church, complained the regional government in Upper Bavaria in July 1937, was becoming a ‘state within a state’, and local Nazis were angry ‘that the Church is propagating an ongoing opposition in the most public way from its pulpits’.63 The regime’s policy even had repercussions near the centre of government: when Hitler held a ceremony to pin the golden party badge on the remaining non-Nazis in the cabinet on 30 January 1937, the Postal and Transport Minister, Peter Baron von Eltz-Rübenach, a staunch Catholic, refused to accept it and told Hitler to his face to stop repressing the Church. Furious at the embarrassment, Hitler stormed out of the room without saying a word, while the quick-witted Goebbels secured the refractory Minister’s resignation on the spot.64

  In one area the conflict erupted into open protest. Villagers in a rural, deeply Catholic part of southern Oldenburg had already been upset by a reduction of religious education in the schools and the regional Education Minister’s defence of Rosenberg’s anti-Catholic diatribes. On 4 November, the Minister made matters far worse by banning the religious consecration of new school buildings and ordering the removal of religious symbols such as crucifixes (and, for that matter, portraits of Luther) from all state, municipal and parish buildings, including schools. The local Catholic clergy protested from the pulpit. On 10 November, 3,000 war veterans assembled to celebrate Remembrance Day heard a priest swear never to tolerate the removal of crucifixes from the schools. He would, he told the crowd, fight the decree and if necessary die for the cause, just as the veterans had in the First World War. Parish bells were rung everywhere in the morning and evening as a further sign of protest. Mass petitions were handed in ceremoniously to the regional Education Ministry. Crosses on people’s houses and in the schools were decorated, and large crosses were affixed to church towers and lit up at night with electric light bulbs. Parishioners began to resign from the Nazi Party and one branch of the brownshirts dissolved itself in protest. At a meeting attended by 7,000 ordinary citizens, the Party’s Regional Leader was forced to announce the decree’s withdrawal. It was followed by the renewed ringing of church bells all over the district, services of thanksgiving and the publication in the whole diocese, far beyond the immediate locality, of a pastoral letter by Bishop von Galen recounting the affair, celebrating the victory, and vowing to have no truck with enemies of Christ. The affair did lasting damage to the standing of the Nazi Party in southern Oldenburg, where despite massive manipulation and intimidation it gained a strikingly low vote in the Reichstag election of 1938 - 92 per cent as against 99 per cent in the same district in the election of March 1936.65

  Already since even before the Concordat had been ratified, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State in Rome, had been sending a steady stream of lengthy and circumstantially detailed complaints to the German government about such violations, listing hundreds of cases in which the brownshirts had closed down Catholic lay organizations, confiscated money and equipment, engaged in anti-Christian propaganda, banned Catholic publications, and much more. In response, the German government repeatedly told the Vatican that its fight against Marxism and Communism demanded the unity of the German people through the ending of confessional divisions. Catholic priests were hindering this struggle, publicly branding the swastika as the ‘Devil’s cross’, refusing to use the Hitler greeting, expelling brownshirts from church services and continuing to violate the Concordat by including political attacks on the regime in their sermons. The regime therefore continued the war on the cultural infrastructure of the Catholic community on many fronts. Catholic youth organizations, which in May 1934 numbered 1.5 million members, and ranged from the Catholic equivalent of the Boy Scouts to Catholic sports clubs of many kinds, were an obvious target, especially since there were frequent clashes with the Hitler Youth, though these were mostly confined to the shouting of insults. Catholic youth organizations in the eyes of the regime were ‘anti-nationalist and anti-National Socialist’ and had to be suppressed. Members of these organizations came under growing pressure to resign and join the Hitler Youth instead.66 The Reich Theatre Chamber began from 1935 onwards to ban Church-sponsored musical and also theatrical events, arguing that they were competing financially and ideologically with Nazi-sponsored concerts and plays. By 1937 it was banning Nativity plays, arguing they were a form of Catholic political propaganda and so contrary to the provisions of the Concordat.67

  In these as in many other areas, Pacelli continued to remonstrate with the German government in a stream of lengthy, detailed and strongly worded memoranda. After the beginning of Goebbels’s campaign against alleged financial corruption in the Church, the tone of the exchanges b
etween Berlin and Rome became much sharper. Relations seemed to be plunging into open hostility.68 Church services and sermons in Germany were now, the Vatican complained, being subjected to constant surveillance by the authorities: ‘The repellent phenomenon of informers hovers around every step, every word, every official act.’69 In many parts of the country, Catholic priests were engaging in a largely spontaneous war of words with local Party leaders and officials over continuing Party attempts to co-ordinate denominational schools and Catholic youth organizations. These struggles were indeed, regional state officials reported, the only cause of open political dissent within Germany by the mid-1930s.70 Matters came to a head when, alarmed at the escalating conflict, a delegation of senior German bishops and cardinals, including Bertram, Faulhaber and Galen, went to Rome in January 1937 to denounce the Nazis for violating the Concordat. Meeting with a favourable response from the Pope, Faulhaber drafted a Papal Encyclical which was considerably extended by Pacelli, drawing on his lengthy correspondence with the German government and summing up the complaints that the Vatican had now been making for several years. The document was approved by the Pope, smuggled into Germany, secretly printed at twelve different locations, distributed to parish priests by boys on bicycles or on foot, and read out from virtually every Catholic pulpit in the land on 21 March 1937.

  Written in German and entitled Mit brennender Sorge, ‘with burning concern’, it condemned the ‘hatred’ and ‘calumny’ poured on the Church by the Nazis.71 Although much of the document was cast in theological language not easily comprehensible to laypeople, some of it at least was clear enough. When it came to the regime’s policies towards the Church, Pope Pius XI, using language supplied to him by Cardinal Pacelli, certainly did not mince words. ‘Anyone’, he thundered, who unties the race, or the people, or the form taken by the state, the bearers of state power or other basic values of human social construction - which claim a significant and honourable place within the earthly order of things - from this, its temporal scale of values, makes it the highest norm of all, including religious values, and deifies it with an idolatrous cult, overturns and falsifies the order of things created and commanded by God.72

  For the faithful, the eternal values of religion had to be paramount. In order to undermine them, however, the Encyclical went on, the German government, was conducting an ‘annihilatory struggle’ against the Church:With measures of compulsion both visible and concealed, with intimidation, with threats of economic, professional, civic and other disadvantages, the doctrinal faithfulness of Catholics and in particular of certain classes of Catholic civil servants are being placed under a pressure that is as illegal as it is inhumane.73

  Enraged at this condemnation, and alarmed at the evidence it provided of the Catholic Church’s ability to organize a nationwide protest without arousing the slightest suspicion in advance even from the Gestapo, Hitler ordered all copies of the Encyclical to be seized, anyone found in possession of it to be arrested, any further publication of it to be banned and all the firms who had printed it closed down.74

  Armed since 1936 with his new powers as Head of the German Police, Himmler now stepped up the campaign against the Church. Together with his deputy Reinhard Heydrich, he placed secret agents in Church organizations, and escalated police harassment of clerics. There was a further clamp-down on the diocesan press, restrictions were placed on pilgrimages and processions, even Catholic marriage guidance and parenthood classes were banned because they did not convey the National Socialist view of these things. By 1938 the majority of Catholic youth groups had been closed down on the grounds that they were assisting in the dissemination of ‘writings hostile to the state’. Catholic Action, whose leaders in Germany allegedly maintained communications with Prelate Kaas, the former leader of the Centre Party, was also banned in January 1938.75 State subsidies for the Church were cut in Bavaria and Saxony, and monasteries were dissolved and their assets confiscated. House-searches and arrests of ‘political’ priests underwent a sharp increase, with a steady stream of well-publicized cases of ‘abuse of the pulpit’ brought before the court. The arrest and trial of one Jesuit priest, Rupert Mayer, led to angry public demonstrations in court by his supporters and special prayers for him being defiantly said in Munich’s St Michael’s church. Some priests continued to refuse to knuckle under, and there were reports of priests refusing to give the Nazi salute and telling children to say ‘Praised be Jesus Christ’ instead of ‘Hail, Hitler’.76 In the course of this struggle, more than a third of Catholic priests in Germany were subject to some form of disciplining by the police and state authorities, up to and including imprisonment, over the whole course of the Third Reich.77 The Encyclical had clearly failed to have any immediate effect apart from further worsening relations between the Church and the regime.

  The campaign was not confined to the police and the judicial administration. Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels also played his part. After the Encyclical, he intensified the publicity campaign against alleged sexual scandals involving Catholic priests that had already begun in the middle of 1935. Fifteen monks were brought before the courts in November 1935 for offences against the law on homosexuality in a home for the mentally ill in western Germany, revealing, as the press put it, a state of affairs that was ‘worse than Sodom and Gomorrah’.78 They received severe prison sentences and the attention of endless column-inches in the press. Other priests were soon being tried for alleged sexual offences against minors in Catholic children’s homes and similar institutions. By May 1936 the press was reporting the trial in Koblenz of over 200 Franciscans for similar crimes.79 Such stories meshed with the Nazi disapproval of homosexuality. They often took up the whole of the front page of national newspapers. Less publicity was given to incidents of Catholic priests and monks arrested for sexual offences against girls. Focusing on allegations of pederasty, the press claimed that the monasteries were ‘breeding-grounds of a repulsive epidemic’ which had to be stamped out. By April 1937 over a thousand priests, monks and friars were said - with what degree of truth is uncertain - to be awaiting trial on such charges.80 The tabloid press had no hesitation in leading these stories with headlines such as ‘Houses of God degraded into brothels and dens of vice’, and demanding of the Catholic Church ‘off with the mask!’, more than hinting that homosexuality and paedophilia were endemic in the Church as a whole, and not merely in isolated instances.81 These trials were created above all by the Propaganda Ministry, which supplied detailed reports to the Reich Justice Ministry and pressed for the supposed culprits to be brought before the courts in such a way that would allow it to draw the maximum publicity.

  Particularly offensive, declared the press, was the fact that the Church stood behind the accused and treated them as martyrs.82 As more trials followed, the Propaganda Ministry built up a steady campaign to portray the Church as sexually corrupt and unworthy of being entrusted with the education of the young. Reporting on other sexual offences was largely suppressed, in order to convey the impression that such things only went on in the Church, where, it was suggested, they were an inevitable by-product of the celibacy that was required of the priesthood by the Church. The Catholic Church was a ‘sore on the healthy racial body’ that had to be removed, declared one article in the Nazi press.83 The campaign culminated in a furious speech by the Reich Propaganda Minister himself, delivered to an audience of 20,000 of the Party faithful, and broadcast on national radio, on 28 May 1937, denouncing Catholic ‘corrupters and poisoners of the people’s soul’ and promising that ‘this sexual plague must be exterminated root and branch’.84 These were not show trials on trumped-up charges, as the Catholic Church had complained, he told his audience, but a necessary ‘reckoning’, as the press put it, with the ‘hereditarily diseased wearers of the monk’s habit in monasteries and brotherhoods’ in the name of the moral rectitude that was inborn in the true German. The state was confronting a systematic undermining of the morality of the German people. And if the bishops co
ntinued to dispute the facts, they too would be brought before the courts. ‘It is not the law of the Vatican that rules here amongst us,’ he warned the Church, ‘but the law of the German people.’85

  The campaign was a typical product of the Propaganda Ministry - drawing on what may have been an element of truth in some of the allegations, but then blowing it up out of all proportion in the service of a political aim that had little or nothing to do with the cases at issue. Goebbels’s intention was to convince ordinary Catholics that the Church was corrupt and immoral as an institution. More specifically, however, the trials provided a constant backdrop of propaganda, backed by police harassment and intimidation, against which the Nazis now launched a sustained campaign to close denominational schools and replace them with non-religious ‘community schools’, backed by votes from parents that followed the familiar pattern of elections organized by the Nazis. Parents were forced to sign prepared statements declaring that they ‘did not want the education of my child at school to be misused by stirring up religious unrest’ and supported the slogan ‘One Leader, One People, One School’. Already at the beginning of 1936, Cardinal Bertram had complained directly to Hitler of the ‘unheard-of terror’ which was being practised ‘in Bavaria, Württemberg and elsewhere. Those who vote for the denominational school are branded as enemies of the state.’ His appeal fell on deaf ears. The campaign, backed up by massive local propaganda, continued.86 ‘We don’t want to let the chaplain teach us any more!’ children were reported as saying by the leading Nazi daily paper on 25 May 1937 under the headline: ‘Entire school class defends itself against sex offender in priest’s clothing’.87