by Therese Down
We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self-defence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy. No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live”, because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”… The facts I have stated are firmly established…
“Thou shalt not kill!” God wrote this commandment in the conscience of man long before any penal code laid down the penalty for murder, long before there was any prosecutor or any court to investigate and avenge a murder… And now the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”, is set aside and broken under the eyes of the authorities whose function it should be to protect the rule of law and human life, when men presume to kill innocent fellow-men with intent merely because they are “unproductive”, because they can no longer produce any goods… Little man, that frail creature, sets his created will against the will of God!… Foolishly and criminally, they defy the will of God! And so Jesus weeps over the heinous sin and the inevitable punishment. God will not be mocked!
This sermon by Cardinal von Galen was considered by the Nazi Office of Propaganda (in its own words) “the fiercest frontal attack unleashed on Nazism in all the years of its existence”. It was circulated far and wide, reached soldiers on the frontline, was bought secretly by Jews and Christians throughout Germany. Those who heard it in their churches are reported to have leapt to their feet, crying out in agonized relief and support, many bursting into tears as it went on:
Now defenceless innocents are killed, barbarously killed; people also of a different race, of different origins are suppressed… We are faced with a homicidal folly without equal… With people like this, with these assassins who are proudly trampling our lives, I can no more share belonging to the same people!
And he threw at the Nazi authorities the words of the apostle Paul: “Their God is their belly.”
In August of 1941, Hitler ordered the cessation of T4 programmes, following public outcry. The denouncement from Catholic and Protestant pulpits was largely responsible for the cessation of this horror – although the euthanasia of children and psychiatric patients continued secretly to the end of the war. Simultaneously with his T4 cancellation order, Hitler issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters (regional leaders of election districts) that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war. Instead, he vowed, once the war was won, he would exact a cold and merciless revenge against those bishops and priests – the “Blacks”, as he called them – who had dared to speak out against him.
However, on 31st July 1941, Hermann Goering wrote this memo to Reinhard Heydrich:
To Gruppenführer Heydrich:
Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.
Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate. I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.
Göring
The White Rose German Resistance Movement (1942–3) was championed by students, in particular three young people: a brother and sister in their early twenties, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and Alexander Schmorell – all passionate Christians. They leafleted extensively, depositing their flyers in prominent places where ordinary Germans would find them and thereby some hope against Hitler’s tyranny. Alexander, Hans and Sophie were beheaded in 1943. Alexander, just twenty-six when he died, was canonized in Munich in 2012. An extract from his first White Rose flyer appears at the start of this book. Here is his last:
When he [that is, Hitler] blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war. Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist. Everywhere and at all times demons have been lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in the order of Creation as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate. Everywhere and at all times of greatest trial men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil. He is like a rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.
The final word should, I think, go to the extraordinarily courageous White Rose activist Sophie Scholl, executed by beheading in February 1943 at the age of twenty-one:
I will cling to the rope God has thrown me in Jesus Christ, even when my numb hands can no longer feel it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With immeasurable thanks to Tony Collins of Lion Hudson, for deeming my work publishable and making a reality of a lifelong dream.