© 2000, Gregory Zabielski

“Centuries of deeply ingrained Christian anti-Semitism erupted into violence under cover of war”

—The Complete Reference Collection, 1997, The Learning Company, Inc.



“Pius XII’s tenure was characterized by a reluctance to take the moral high ground by voicing outrage”

–American Jewish Congress, 1998



“An institution that would only criticize the Holocaust in the 1940’s in a boxed whisper.”

–USN&WR, 1/25/99, “A Pontiff in Winter”



“The newspaper La Republica suggested Pope John Paul II will apologize for the failure to resist the Nazis, but without implicating Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of ignoring the Holocaust during World War II.”

–The Guardian, Feb, 4, 2000



[Christianity is to blame for] “the engineered slaughter of the Jews in Europe.”

–E. L. Doctorow, City of God, 2000







I. "Cornwell's Pope": AN INTRODUCTION

In the fall of 2000, John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope broke onto the scene and immediately raised the debate on the role of Pius XII during World War II to a new, more intense level.

The title alone was provocative, shocking, and indicting. Two little words were all it took to sear into public consciousness that the revered head of the Catholic Church, a man of austere holiness, the vicar of Christ, was, somehow, a collaborator, a tool, a henchman of the greatest evildoer in the history of the world.

The solid merits of Cornwell's case were secondary. They didn't matter. Impact is not a function of facts. It is a function of getting into print by the right publishing house accompanied by a skilled promotional campaign. And this book had impact wide-ranging and in the highest places. Cornwell's text apparently has attained to the status of operative resource on the subject: it is available in the “audio-books” format. And even more telling, only weeks after the book appeared on the shelves, the Vatican convened an international committee of scholars –three Catholics; three Jews– to study the compiled archives on the matter.

Along the way, defenses of Pius XII have not been few. However, these, too, have in common their own deficiencies. For the most part they have come to reiterate what is now a stock, recycled defense, sometimes complemented by reference to peripheral issues –discrediting Cornwell by citing the numerous misrepresentations made by, or of, himself. They rarely address the main issues he raises, and so these survive unscathed. This study directly addresses those issues. In so doing, it demonstrates the several flaws fatal to Cornwell’s case, while at the same time appraising some of the now-common points of the papal defenses.

John Cornwell, of course, did not invent the issue. He has merely taken it to new and expansive forms. The incipient school of thought blamed or pointed the finger at Christiainity, Catholicism in particular, as responsible in some critically seminal way for National Socialism. Such a phenomenon as Nazism, was the tacit presumption, couldn’t have happened in so Christian a country as Germany unless Christianity were somehow at the root of it. Nazism and the Holocaust happened, it commonly and facilely argued, because people “followed orders.” And that, because they had a culture of obeying authority. And that culture of obedience was Christianity. So, it seemed evident, without Christianity, Nazism might have existed, but it could never have succeeded. Once settled, these older theories were evolved into the consensus that antisemitism was to blame, and that Christianity, after all, was to blame for that, too. All were eventually subsumed, to one degree or another, into the attack on Pius XII. They reached a new, broad plateau in Hitler’s Pope.

Cornwell’s indictments are so broad, so severe, that one would think –the provocative and daring title alone suggests it– he presents a taught case loaded with facts and documentation, solidly rooted in objective history. This, however, does not prove to be the case. Only by the broadest of definitions can this book even be considered a work of history. It is, essentially, a polemic against Pius XII and the Catholic Church camouflaged in an historical wrapping. Any discerning reader taking but moderate care to weigh the author’s evidence, investigate his sources, examine his facts –who just takes a moment to glance at the footnotes– should easily realize he is being had.

With the Cornwell book, there are three points in particular which jut out as historical deformations:

“We are obliged,” asserts Cornwell, “to ask not only whether the institution of the papacy was inadequate to the challenge of the Final Solution, but also in some shocking way it was hospitable to Hitler’s plans from as early as 1933. Was there something in the modern ideology of papal power that encouraged the Holy See to acquiesce in the face of Hitler’s evil rather than oppose it?”2 [my emphases]

And “Papalism”, in turn, is a derivitive of the Church, all of it, prior to “the Council” –the Church of the Imitation of Christ, the remarkable spiritual book, second only in popularity to the Bible, which lifted untold numbers over some six centuries to pursue the path of sanctity, but which for Cornwell is merely “suited to the ascetic aspirations of . . . an interiority that was funnelled directly to God without social mediation.”3 It was that Church which was unable, or

unwilling, to make even a peep at the greatest evil the world has known, which, in effect, collaborated with it, enabled it. It is that Church, which survives still, under “its current authoritarian commitment” (as one reviewer awkwardly put it), or in Cornwell’s words, under “Pius XII Redivivus.”

“Pacelli’s failure,” Cornwell thus concludes, “was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism . . . implicit in the rifts Catholicism created and sustained —between the sacred and the profane, spiritual and secular, the body and soul, the exclusive truth of Catholicism over all other confessions and faiths.”4

Given all this, Cornwell has sustained an extraordinary charge, seized the day, and apparently scored a facile victory over many reader. He has no reason to.

We will attempt to show why.



II. WAS PIUS A NAZI?

Before he even begins, Cornwell hands down the final judgement: Pius XII’s “influence on the history of this century” was “fatal and culpable.”5 His

conclusion is clear: without “Hitler’s Pope”, there would have been no Hitler. For Pius XII was not merely guilty of “silence.” He “acquiesced in Hitler’s plans.”

“In pursuit of absolute power,” Vanity Fair summarized its publication of Cornwell’s promotional piece in October 1999, “Pius XII helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20th-century devil.”

Everything that makes Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope” revolves around that “cynical pact” –the long-sought Concordat– which Pacelli (always finding dictators amenable and expedient, according to Cornwell) worked out with Hitler. It was a deal, Cornwell contends, which crushed the Catholic Center Party, and thereby undermined the “impressive, independent democratic constituency,” a bloc of “23 million faithful” “steadfast in its condemnation of National Socialism,” solidifying the Nazis. Pius then remained unforgiveably silent in the face of the greatest crime in human history. Cornwell’s final, damning blow, the deepest affront he can muster –that rather than canonize him, Pius XII is a “deeply flawed human being from whom Catholics . . . can best profit by expressing our sincere regret”6 – seems fully justified. The only question remaining seems to be whether Pius XII was, directly or indirectly, a Nazi himself.

The reader has been lead to presume the facts indisputably and overwhelmingly support this contention. It is worth making a preliminary examination of them.

Doing so, rather than support Cornwell’s central thesis of a Catholic Center Party formidably arrayed against Nazism, we find that rather than present the facts he has skewered them. A brief overview shows how.

To begin with, the 1932 Center Party –a pivotal but never a numerically large bloc– not only had grossly underestimated the Nazi electoral threat but was itself a tragically anemic political force. After extensive and heavy campaigning by the bishops, it was able merely to hold its ground. It came in fifth out of five. Cornwell’s imaginary anti-Nazi bloc of “23 million faithful” translated into a meager 4.5 million votes. Far from “impressive”, it was a pitiful showing. Their 4.5 million votes amounted to barely more than one third of the 12.5 million Catholic voters. Cornwell’s purported “vehement front” mustered fewer votes even than the Communists. For that matter, though Nazi support in the election was generally lower than the national average in Catholic areas, Nazi support had even doubled –from 20% to 40%– in some of them, such as Lower Bavaria.7

There was no “vehement front.”

The Center Party’s critical electoral weakness has not gone unnoticed by Catholic historians. But they are at a loss to explain it. Forty years ago, Mother Mary Alice Gallin, for instance, simply reckoned “the Catholic voters failed to hold together.”8 In fact, however, they did “hold together” –by the same

numbers of party faithful as they had in immediately prior years, continuing the steady erosion from the 6 million votes they polled in 1920.

The salient point, however, is that Cornwell’s portrait of a “vehement” Catholic front is at once shown to be wholly erroneous. There was no “united and forthright response,” in the manner he implies. The electoral returns alone render his thesis void.

Likewise, the accusation that Pacelli gummed up the strident opposition of the German bishops is also without foundation. The very notion of a united, strident opposition by German bishops is wholly misleading, for even in their so-called “active opposition” period prior to 1933, never did they issue a blanket condemnation of National Socialism.

Efforts had been made to do just that. In 1931 a proposal for just such a condemnation was introduced at the Fulda bishops’ conference. But the bishops were split. They were facing millions of “faithful Catholics” –members of Cornwell’s “impressive, independent, democratic constituency”– who were already siding with the Nazis and wanted to join the party. (When the Nazis took power it would be they who decreed that party membership was incompatible with membership in Catholic organizations.) There was a wide range of opinion about how to deal with that. The Bavarian bishops, for instance, far from seeking a general condemnation of Nazism and Party membership by Catholics, wanted each application for Party membership judged separately. (Typically, rather than permit this fact to undo his “vehement front,” Cornwell simply brushes it over as “a more pluralistic, grassroots approach.”) The condemnation proposal failed. The best the conference could do was pass a proposal to fight “against extreme nationalism, as against Socialism and Communism . . . from the standpoint of the faith.”9

Cornwell’s Catholic anti-Nazi bloc “in the press and from the pulpits” likewise followed this same line. There was no wholesale condemnation, but a zeroing in on the objectionable “planks” in the Nazi platform –i.e., “positive Christianity” and a “national” faith, the “grave error” of glorifying the Nordic race, and “contempt for divine revelation” (which condemnations, though not wholesale, nevertheless struck the essence of Nazism).

Now it is critical to note that the German bishops would follow the exact same pattern after the Concordat, thus collapsing the next component of Cornwell’s portrayal. His contention that, after “vehement and sustained criticism,” “at the insistence of Rome, they fell silent,” is completely groundless.

Yes, it is true that, in mid-February 1933, one month before Hitler’s ascent, the bishops issued an instruction against racism and a statement regarding the Old Testament, and priests were instructed to declare from the pulpit that the Nazis were engaged in “Kulturkampf, irreconcilable with Catholic teaching.”

But that “vehement criticism” was only issued by direct orders from Pius XI.

So, was Pius XII a Nazi?

That such a question is even half-seriously posed shows to what an absurd level the issue has descended.

It is not a difficult question to answer. The answer is unequivocably No. And, for the record, Cornwell himself shows Pius XII was no Nazi. And what he shows quite unravels the embroidery of “Hitler’s Pope.” Pius XII, for instance, told British ambassador Ivone Kilpatrick of his “disgust” with Nazis.10 And while he supposedly hungered for the Concordat, signing it left Pacelli “in a state of near collapse.”11 In addition, he consented to the remarkable and

precarious role of a go-between in the 1939 anti-Hitler conspiracy (an anomaly which so misfits Cornwell’s “Hitler’s Pope” that he strains to explain it). Cornwell himself frankly admits of Pacelli’s “hatred of Hitler.”12 Finally, Pius XII’s extraordinary act of undertaking rites of exorcism on Hitler from afar demonstrates the depth to which he understood the evil involved.

“It is unlikely,” Cornwell states, “that Pacelli was not intimately involved in its commissioning.”13

Cornwell, however, massages these things into the background. Instead, the picture he paints of one consistently indulgent to Nazi Germany is designed to inculcate the impression of a sympathy for Nazism itself, accentuated by a hidden anti-Semitism. Besides being specious, the anti-Semitic charge is an unusual one to make: the true anti-Semites of Nazi Germany accused Pacelli of just the opposite. He was repeatedly vilified by the Nazi press, both as envoy and pope, as their enemy and the friend of the Allies. Pacelli’s election as pope, William Shirer noted at the time, was “a very popular choice, except in Germany.”14

Nevertheless, Cornwell persistently tries to tar Pacelli with a “crypto-Nazism”, as, for instance, by attempting to associate him with the “hidden Encyclical”, Humani Generis Unitas, solely to link him to so-called “anti-semitic” passages.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Pacelli, scholars say, was so isolated from the the encyclical he didn’t even know about it.15 (The encyclical, which was

never published, is generally characterized as Pius XI’s deathbed attempt to condemn Nazism definitively. Most writers use Pacelli’s isolation from it as proof of his “Germanophilia.” In a typical treatment of material, Cornwell twists this all around to try to prove both.)

No, Pius XII was neither Nazi, Nazi-sympathizer, nor anti-Semite. The vicious distortion of his character and his record which Cornwell brings to the scene is perhaps best brought out by a passage from Carlo Falconi, generally cited as writing the “primer” on Pius’ “silence.” It is worth quoting here.

“It is beyond dispute,” he says, “that Pacelli did everything possible to free the Germans from the Nazi yoke and paralyze its plans.”16



III. HOW HITLER WAS RECEIVED

Cornwell paints a flourishing idyll of a 1.5 million member Catholic Youth movement, 800 Catholic newspapers and periodicals, a vigorous Center Party, all part of that “vehement front” opposed tooth and nail to National Socialism, which Pacelli undermined and ruined.

To be sure, Catholic groups were active. But, again, they formed no “vehement front.” Very few were sounding foreboding alarms. By quoting these few, Cornwell creates the illusion of a broad front. More typically representative of these groups was the World Catholic Youth League. At the very moment Hitler rose to power in March 1933, the League leader, 26-year old “wunderkind” Dr. Wilhelm Solzbache, was on an international speaking tour. Far from sounding alarms, this extraordinary polyglot expressed complete naiveté regarding the events unfolding in his own country, speaking of his organization’s work as “contributing to the building of a new mankind based upon justice and love”, enjoining his listeners, “let us all learn Esperanto.”17

Actually, from July 1932, more and more Catholics in Germany were calling for the bishops to retract, not intensify, their opposition, arguing that “devout Catholics” by the hundreds of thousands were already members of the National Socialist movement.18

And so the Catholic bishops, who had consistently condemned National Socialist errors piecemeal, were under increasing pressure to attenuate their criticism further. And, truth be told, most Church people wish to employ their Christian principles to restrain criticism, not invoke it. They rejected the role of standing outside the new government fostering a negative environment as critics. The great Catholic newspaper of Augsburg –a prime example of Cornwell's vigorous Catholic press-- exemplifies this very deeply held Catholic approach: “We want to be inside the German community, for we love Germany. And it is unworthy especially of the Catholic attitude of mind to persist in negativistic opposition, when the hour calls for work and positive goals.”19 There were the

superior values of tolerance, even of the most wicked –separate the sin from the sinner, the ideas from the thinker, reach out, be compassionate, patient, kind, turn the other cheek, be like St. Francis, St. Anthony. Indeed, these very principles were to be invoked by leading prelates as the proper attitude for Catholics to assume under the Nazi regime. (Perhaps they shall form the basis of Cornwell’s follow-up, “Hitler’s Beatitudes.”)

It should shock no one that only a rarefied few at the outset saw National Socialism as irredeemably evil. Those that did were generally of two kinds –the pure abstractionist, who lives by principles which the average mind routinely compromises in order to survive, and the pure religious, the kind we blithely dismiss today as “religious fanatics” because their rigorous devotion puts them so far out of any mainstream. They were, as they usually are, a scattered, not a unified group, and not a few ultimately paid with their lives. To refuse to call these people heroic, because, as one historian says, “they failed to prevent the Holocaust, World War II and the destruction of Germany,”20 is not only unjust but a testimony to how supercilious the view of this period has become.

Why, it is often asked, didn’t opponents “speak out.” Some did. Yet even the reflex to “speak out” is not wholly sufficient. There was, for example, the Protestant pastor who, upon the Nazi ascent, stood up and protested the SA attacks on Jews in his town. He had not, however, fully calculated the consequences of such boldness. Soon, the pastor fell under enormous pressure. He was ordered to resign. He became distraught. Fearing concentration camp for himself and his family, he saw only one way out. His bold act of conscience ended in suicide.



Misperceptions of just how Hitler rose rest on common errors formed in people’s minds by overexposure to tabloid filmmaking and documentaries, portraying “Hitler the Mad” who, ranting about Jews, cast a hateful, bloodthirsty spell over the nation. But this is an erroneous picture.

“If a people is to become free it needs pride and will power and hate, and once again hate.” That was Hitler of 1923. The Hitler of the ‘30’s was considerably different.

Since 1928, Hitler had deliberately toned down anti-Semitism in order to appeal to voters. He even proclaimed he had nothing against “decent Jews” and was limiting criticism to those who played a role in military defeat. This was at a point when the Nazis were hardly a party to be reckoned with. They captured only 2.6 per cent of the vote.

The Depression changed everything. To draw more support, the Party realized it had to turn attention to economics. And the National Socialist “Rescue Germany” program hardly sounded radical. Fixed agricultural prices, jobs for the jobless, liberation from big business, careers to suit the talents of the young –this was the Nazi formula.

“In effect,” historian David Shoenbaum says of Hitler, “he promised a New Deal.”21

“What set Hitler’s movement apart was above all its image of activism, dynamism, èlan, youthfullness, vigor,” says Ian Kershaw.22 Young and new voters

found the National Socialists were as the party of “dynamism and youth”, as opposed to the old, stodgy SDP or the aged Hugenburg, or the Weimar parties which had brought nothing but anarchy and gridlock. Support for the Nazi Party was “above average” among university students.23 And “workers joined en masse.”24 With pride and vigor, they were reviving the nation, bringing it national unity.

While all other parties more or less stagnated, the National Socialists soared to a near 10-fold increase in the Reichstag in 1930. Suddenly, they were a force to be reckoned with. In the next election, two years later, they became not only the largest party in the Reichstag, but the largest party ever in the Reichstag.

And by the time of his first speech to the nation in February 1933, Hitler sounded openly conciliatory and moderate. He appealed to the best in people in very trying times, promising a nation reborn under a “program of national revival,” a “new German Reich of greatness and honor and strength and glory and justice.” He spoke of “securing the necessities of life” for the workingman, peasant, unemployed, and farmers –necessities which “will include the performance of social duties to the sick and the aged”25 (my emphasis). He talked about arms reduction and “overcoming the destructive menace of

communism in Germany.” He said Christianity was the foundation of the country’s morals. He spoke of the “reconciliation” of nations. He spoke, too, of term limits. “Give us four years,” he appealed, “then judge and sentence us  . . . . I will then be willing to go.”26

His electoral draw was never stronger. In the March election, in a stunning electoral turnout of nearly 90 per cent, he polled 44% of the vote. It wasn’t the coveted majority, but it was more than double the nearest opponent.

Democracy had spoken. It had elected Adolf Hitler.

The turning point came, however, on March 23, 1933, when he gave a stunning speech to the Reichstag which Cornwell makes far too little of.

It was a speech which made even cautious Churchmen take notice: he referenced the decadence of the Weimar years and called for a “thorough moral purging of the body corporate of the nation.”27 The nation had been crushed in war, and there had followed years of appalling social, moral, political, and,

ultimately, economic, decay, anarchy, and collapse. But Hitler declared that he rejected war and armaments, and –a remarkable turnabout– even declared he was “ready to cultivate friendly relations with the Soviet Union.”

But Hitler was even more compromising. First, he declared the churches’ rights “are not to be infringed.” Again he forthrightly proclaimed that “the Reich regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation.” This was stunning: Adolf Hitler, leader of the Party which put race above all else, was admitting that Christianity, not race, was the foundation of the German nation. Why, this was almost a repudiation of Nazism (and not a few Nazis thought so, the increasingly alienated radicals whom Hitler later took care of with Long Knives). Could one imagine Lenin making such an admission, or Stalin? (And Hitler would be even more solicitous to Christianity in private interviews with prelates.) Wasn’t it an indication that Hitler was acknowledging cultural reality and “moderating his stance”, as observors were saying? Was this the time for dogmatic ideologues and intransigent brinkmanship? Could reasonable men, concerned about the welfare of people, about the unity of the nation, be confined to “condemnatory prejudice”?

Or should they seek “dialogue”?

Dietrich Von Hildebrand believed that “in 1933, there is no doubt that if the Bishops had condemned National Socialism with an absolute non-possumus and had stood like a rock . . . millions could have been converted to the Church.”28 But they already had their non-possumus. It was called the “ballot
box.” Are we to believe that, with less than 12% of the vote, they could have mounted an effective opposition, avoiding the immediate charge of thwarting the elective will of the people by meddling in politics, by causing trouble when the Fürher had offered peace? They had lost the election, were they now to preach resistance and revolt?

But even if effective, then what? Who would lead them? Who had a plan to end unemployment and cure the Depression, to revive and unify the nation? This was where the Hitlerite votes were coming from.

So this “outstretched hand” was grasped. And a change would now take place. The bishops would not become Nazis. But persistently now they would look for the “healthy core” in National Socialism –viz., moral clean-up, patriotic renascence. For three full years Cardinal von Galen, to attain legendary renown as the “lion of Munster,” would support the Nazis for bringing a “new and better social order,” protecting the nation against “godlessness and immorality,” urging Catholics to be grateful for these “gifts of divine Providence” and pledging all Catholics to “stand united behind our Fürher.”29 (In later years, when played out by prelates with the other side of the fence –even after tens millions had already died in an avowedly atheistic system– such an approach would be termed, with generously positive connotations, as realpolitik.)

At this point –Hitler cresting to power– we have further demonstrated that a cornerstone of Cornwell’s thesis, i.e., the Catholic “vehement front”, is an illusion. The simple truth is that many prominent Catholic and Protestant leaders –even many revered later as anti-Nazi heroes– were themselves caught up in the swell of strident nationalism, of the hope of a new era of unity, order, and purpose, and welcomed the National Socialists enthusiastically. Neither war mongers or rabid anti-semites, theirs was a fervid patriotism which extended far across confessional lines. Historian Crane Brinton went so far as to say that many Jews –who had been fully assimilated, fought in the Great War, and considered themselves staunchly German– probably would have become Nazis if they had been permitted. “They would have supported Hitler in everything but anti-Semitism.”30 That is how strong the draw was.

Thus theologian Karl Adam, later held up as “hero” for being fired from Tübingen for preaching the Jewish contribution to Christianity, heroized the Führer in the most rotund of terms when he arrived, defended German pure blood, and proclaimed that National Socialism and Catholicism not only were not in conflict, but belonged together as nature and grace.

“Now he stands before us, he whom the voices of our poets and sages have summoned, the liberator of the German genius,” the great Adam wrote of Hitler in the Theological Quarterly. “He has removed the blindfolds from our eyes . . .”31

And Erich Klausener, the Catholic Action president whom Cornwell calls one of the “Catholic opponents to Hitler’s rise” was, in March 1933, describing the new movement as a “momentous awakening of the German nation.”32 His enthusiasm did not quickly wane. Only six days before his murder he addressed a huge rally of Catholics in Berlin, urging them to remain loyal to “Volk and fatherland,” following it up with a personal telegram to Hitler. After he was shot in his Transportation office on the “night of the long knives” in June 1934 –earning his place as an exemplary Catholic martyr and witness to the active Catholic resistance– his bishop wrote personally to the Führer, insisting that Klausener “repeatedly, both in private and public, professed his support to the existing National Socialist state.”33

Right in step with this enthusiasm was the American Catholic press. The NCWC correspondent –none other than Dr. Max Jordan, correspondent for ABC and colleague and friend of William Shirer, who always speaks admiringly of him– described the “Hitler movement” as “standing for a moderate sort of state socialism” and a “conservative policy in all matters pertaining education.” “It fights ‘Godlessness’,” he summarized Nazism, “and seeks a cultural regeneration of morals.”34

Jordan informed his Catholic readers in the U.S. that it was seen as “most desirable from Catholic point of view that some form of cooperation be established between the Center, Bavarian People’s Party and Hitlerites.”35

As for that “vehement front” of Cornwell’s, Jordan, the journalist on the scene, reported there was “no doubt” that Catholics, especially young ones, preferred Hitler to Hugenburg. And despite condemnation by the hierarchy, “quite a few Catholics thought that the Nazis stand for principles more in harmony with Catholic doctrines than Socialism ever was.”36 Papen himself, he said, was “known to be a devout Catholic” and “has advocated for some time cooperating with Hitler rather than Socialists.”37

Hitler –this was the big point– never criticized the Church.

In the coming months, the image of Hitler was polished even brighter. “Unreserved satisfaction” was now reported in “high church quarters” for the “spirit displayed by Chancellor Hitler” in regards the Church’s rights. By the end of July, Dr. Jordan was proclaiming that as far back as March he had reported that Hitler “felt very strongly about his Catholic origins” and “had the interests of the Church at heart.”38

Fears were stoked only by those inveterate doomsayers. Our NCWC reporter admonished them that “the observer will do well to reserve final judgement on National Socialism until it has had a chance to prove its abilities in practical government.”39



Now this welcome reception was by no means a “Catholic thing.” It crossed denominational lines. Lutheran Bishop Wurm praised the regime without reserve, and gave thanks that the nation had come under “united, purposeful leadership.”40 The celebrated Pastor Martin Niemöller, now remembered for his victim-status under the Nazis, initially accepted both National Socialism’s goals and political methods, seeing the regime as a repudiation of the spirit of Weimar and the beginning of a return to “faith and morality.” In 1933 the Nazi press commended him for writing in March:

Both as Christians and as a Church, we clearly find ourselves today at an altogether unique turning point. . . We may feel, like Jesus’ disciples . . . that the cause must now go forward and that a new beginning has been made which cannot really fail to achieve success.41

Niemöller was to sustain this support for the “new beginning” Nazism brought for months to come. Indeed, fifty years later, he still recalled that the establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship had appeared to him as a “’liberation’, a restoration of traditional values, religious belief, political stability, national pride.”42 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another Christian martyr of the Nazis, openly professed views which would brand him “anti-semitic.” His Freiburg Circle, in early 1943, proposed a post-Nazi state in which the “Solution to the Jewish Problem” would be a Germany without Jews, or with Jews without rights.43 At the same time, other church leaders, like the great Karl Barth, who’d shrugged the Nazi ascent off saying he didn’t think it would “signify the start of great new things in any direction at all,”44 was, in Advent, 1933, describing the Jews as “an obstinate and evil people.”45 Bishop Dibelius, after the Jewish boycott, openly declared, that “notwithstanding the evil sound that the term has frequently acquired, I have always considered myself an anti-Semite.”46

Yet Cornwell describes none of this. His target is Pacelli. He blackens him with the spurious charge of “anti-semitism,” based on nothing more than some descriptions in a 1918 report of Bolshevist revolutionaries as Jewish. For the record, the report was accurate. “A number of the [Bavarian] revolutionary leaders happened to be Jewish,” says Ian Kershaw, “some of them were east European Jews with Boshevik sympathies and connections.”47 But the report, Cornwell's sole “anti-semitic”evidence, was not even authored by Pacelli. And no one cries foul.



IV. HITLER: DICTATOR

It was in such a political atmosphere that Hitler was made dictator in 1933 by the passage of the Enabling Act only a few weeks after his electoral victory. Expediency even more than enthusiasm, however, was the prime factor.

“The Republic was dead,” as Kershaw says.48 It had ground to a halt in parliamentary gridlock, setting the stage for passage of the Enabling Act.

Such action was not entirely new. Gridlock had led to similar measures before. Center Party leader Heinrich Brüning himself had ruled with decree power for two years, backed not by a parliamentary vote but only by the President and the army. (Cornwell’s exemplary hero was so unpopular and ineffective, his policies so misguided, that his leadership led directly to the first Nazi electoral landslide.) The idea for the Enabling Act was von Papen's. Nor was it a secret, sprung on the voters after the election: it was what the election was about.

The general thought was that giving Hitler dictatorial powers would only be temporary. (”Give us four years . . . and I will be willing to go.”) Whatever the case, the attitude in the Center Party at this time was not one of “vehement resistance”, but resignation and equivocation. It was best summed up by Party historian Karl Bachem, who acknowledged “a lot of dubious things in the National Socialist movement . . . but that has to be put up with for the time being.”49 Seasoned politicians, the Center thought it struck a deal with Hitler. They wrung from him promise to put in writing that there would be no persecution of Center Party government officials and ecclesial rights would be untouched. He promised. They were still waiting for the letter on March 23, 1933 when the vote on the Enabling Act came up.

Events followed in rapid order.

Hitler gave his Reichstag speech.

The Center delivered its vote. The letter from Hitler never came.

Then, word from the Bishops. An about-face.

“Prior universal interdictions and warnings,” announced the German bishops regarding the Nazi Party, “must no longer be considered necessary.”50

In mere days, the German bishops shifted 180 degrees. So pronounced was this shift, that bishops such as Konrad Groeber of Freiburg –known as “Brown Konrad” until his belated awakening (but scorned and vilified by the Nazi’s nevertheless)– soon were exhorting their clergy to “maintain peace and support the authority of the Government by avoiding all seeming criticisms of its leaders.”51 Cardinal Faulhaber sent an effusive, handwritten letter “from the bottom of my heart” to the Fuhrer saying, “May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.”52 Catholic organizations followed the lead. The German Association of Catholic Teachers began negotiating to “join hands with” the National Socialist Teachers’ Union. Headlines in the Catholic Press from the ensuing months tell the story. “German Bishops Lift Ban on Hitler Party.” “German Bishops Seek Peace With Nazi Regime.” “German Bishops Laud Concordat, Pledge Reich Aid.”53

As to what brought about this shift, Church defenders, such as Mother Gallin, are at a loss to explain it.

Critics such as Cornwell exploit it. Of course, he blames it all on Cardinal Pacelli: “Catholics by the millions joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope. The German bishops capitulated to Pacelli’s policy of centralization.” (At the same time, however, Cornwell contradit this, saying Catholics were “confused, perplexed” and didn’t know what to do . . . .”54)

We have already seen how distorted this picture is. No amount of manipulation by Pacelli or anyone in the Vatican could stir the patriotic fervor which was rousing the bishops to the expressions of support they would make in the coming years, despite the unrelenting Nazi attempt to destroy the Church. It was not Pacelli who commanded Bishop Berning at the Prussian Council meeting, under Göring’s lead, to throw the raised arm in the air in “Sieg-Heil!,” while enthusiastically singing “Horst Wessel.”55 Neither was Pacelli found cheering this action. In fact, his reaction was, typically, quite contrary to Cornwell’s depiction. Pinchas Lapide records that when the bishops made their announcement, he “exclaimed angrily . . . ‘Could they have not kept them waiting for at least another month?’”56



Now lest this all be perceived as some aberrant frenzy Christianity was caught up in, a few things must be firmly kept in mind.

First, the great bulk of the supporters of the Nazi Party were the workers –it was to the workers Hitler constantly appealed. It must never be lost sight of that the party’s roots “combined socialism, anticapitalism and anticlericalism with German nationalism,” as Richard Pipes says.57

Second, despite the sustained policy of the “annihilation and eradication of Marxism,” it was Socialism, not Christianity, to which such Nazi leaders aspired. Josef Goebbels, for instance, throughout the 1920’s openly stated, “I believe in proletarian socialism” and called the party “revolutionary socialists.”58 The Nazi daily newspaper called for “socialist dictatorship.” It was only later, following the world economic crisis, that they began to develop the “Rescue Germany” program that deliberately exploited Christianity, motherhood, and family. (It is thus as absurd to blame “kirche” as it would be to blame “küche” or “kinder” for “engineering the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.”) They had not abandoned socialism. In the 1930’s Gregor Strasser continued talking about “undiluted socialist principles.”

Hitler always professed himself a socialist and scorned individualism and the free economy. In 1934, Hitler himself said in an interview that the Nazi creed derived its “vital, creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism.” “What Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” Hitler said privately, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”59 It was thus that the Nazi flag was red and May 1 declared a national holiday. He aimed for, and by the mid-30’s claimed he had achieved, the socialist goal of a truly classless society.

Nor was it the Church the Nazis modelled themselves on. Goebbels’ and Strasser’s model –centralized power and elimination of rival parties– was Communist Russia. “The influence of Marxism in both its original and Bolshevik guises,” says Richard Pipes, “is unmistakable.”60 And though the rationale for the Holocaust came from Hitler’s linkage of the Jews with Russian Bolshevism, he still, in 1941, said “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.”61

All these points go unrecorded by Cornwell. For him, there were only two actors on the stage –Hitler and Pacelli, who were essentially authoritarian think-alikes (”how well these two men seemed to understand each other.”62 In essence, co-enablers.

And while the current intellegentsia –itself long enamored with Marx– persists in heaping upon Christianity a wholesale responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust, as in the fatuous declaration from the “hero” in E. L. Doctorow’s latest book, City of God, that Christianity is responsible for “engineering the slaughter of Jews in Europe,” it conveniently forgets the fascination, admiration, and respect for the Führer which lapped over the entire political and cultural world in the 1930’s.

Arnold Toynbee, for instance, the world’s foremost historian, at that moment assaying all the permutations of human history into a five-volume, 2,500 page tome on the genesis and disintegration of civilizations, talked face to face with Hitler for nearly two hours. The great historian emerged from that personal meeting convinced of Hitler’s sincerity for peace and friendship with England.63

Martin Heidegger, the philosophical grandfather to Bultmann’s biblical criticism, coordinated students and professors in support of Hitler, and put his own rootless philosophical language of “Dasein” to the service of the new Nazi state.

In late 1936, Lloyd George gushed, “Hitler is one of the greatest men I have ever met.”64

Leftist Gertrude Stein would later propose Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize.

And after Hitler’s ascent, right after the dictatorship, right after the Jewish boycott, the premier American journalist, Walter Lippmann, a Jew himself, said: “The outer world will do well to accept the evidence of German goodwill and seek by all possible means to merit it and justify it.”

Winston Churchill, renowned as Hitler’s greatest enemy, on numerous occasions from 1933-38, expressed his willingness to live with Nazi Germany firmly fixed in Europe. He refused to “use harsh words about Germany” (4/14/33); urged the British to “welcome the tone of Hitler” (5/22/35); admired Hitler as a “Great Leader of the country, who has raised it so high” (3/26/36); declared that if the Nazis “tread the path of peace and prosperity, they will certainly find on every side . . . goodwill of friendly nations” (1/22//37); and told the nation that Hitler’s assurances regarding Czechoslovakia “must be welcomed in a sincere spirit” (7/26/38).

Finally, in November 1939 –after the invasion of Poland– the Princeton freshmen class overwhelmingly voted Adolf Hitler the “greatest living person.”65 More tellingly, far less than half the vanguard of “the greatest generation” said they would fight overseas.

Eleven months earlier, by contrast, il Osservatore Romano, the voicebox of the pope, describing Nazism as “the most inhumane of all heresies,” declared that “Hitler is true to his role of anti-Christ.”66 And Pius XII –”Hitler’s Pope”– for his part, would soon be performing rites of exorcism on the Fürher from afar.



JEWISH BOYCOTT

The boycott of Jewish businesses was staged for the first days of April 1933. It was a piqued Hitler’s response to the American Jewish Congress’ call for a boycott of German goods. As such, it is very illustrative. For it is the prime example of the Hitlerian reaction to “speaking out.”

Cornwell, intent on showing Pacelli-Catholicism alone on the side of evil, takes history into his own hands. He doesn’t bother to mention how the boycott started. He simply implies it was a window Pacelli and the Concordat opened for Hitler. Then he reports, erroneously, that there was “no word of protest” from Germany or from Rome. In fact, Pius XI issued a protest against the boycott on April 1, the first day. And this was in marked contrast to other leading churchmen whom Cornwell neglects to mention, such as Lutheran Bishop Dibelius, who supported Hitler’s action, actually calling the boycott a justifiable defensive action.

Then, retreading old material, Cornwell reports Cardinal Faulhaber’s letter to Pacelli after the Jewish boycott, in which he raises the question asked of him, “why the Catholic Church . . . does not intervene on behalf of the Jews.” (That the question was raised at all is proof that the Church’s alleged “anti-Semitism” was not shadowing opinion at the time.)

The Cardinal’s reply, “the Jews can take care of themselves,” is one of the most oft-quoted remarks by historians. Few –Cornwall, of course, included– bother to quote it whole. His entire statement –“the Jews can take care of themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows”67– is understood only full

context. He was referring to the international Jewish community, which had responded effectively in its own way.

Yet, here, too, history muddies on closer examination. For the Jewish response was far from united. Far from appealing for aid against the boycott, many Jewish groups scrambled to distance themselves from it. When massive rallies were being planned in New York, the president of the Zion Federation of Germany cabled the American Jewish Committee on March 25, 1933 to “protest categorically against demonstrations and unequivocally demand energetic efforts to obtain an end to demonstrations hostile to Germany.”68 The Jews in Palestine went further. They actually cabled Hitler’s Chancellery directly to assure it that no one there “had declared or intended to declare a trade boycott with Germany.”69

At any rate, the boycott ended in a matter of days, a failure for Hitler.



V. THE CONCORDAT

Cornwell’s book is built around a simple, central thesis: “Pacelli was the prime mover in the tragic Catholic surrender” of the rock-solid bulwark of the Center Party, trading necessary votes to pass the Enabling Act in exchange for the Concordat, which enabled Hitler to become dictator and Pacelli to “centralize” power.

Now to believe the Center Party could be “traded away” involves not a small amount of credulity, viz., that, after abolishing all other parties, Hitler would have permitted the Center Party –if it had opposed him and voted against the Enabling Act– to survive, with its “democratic networks” active and intact, leading a “vehement” opposition, while the Nazi regime swept everything else, from the enormously powerful Reich Association all the down to the local Singing Society and Garden Club, into the national unity of Gleichschaltung. Credulity aside, since this “trade-off” is what makes Pius XII "Hitler’s Pope", one is poised for a load of archival evidence gleaned from the author’s supposed long and laborious months of poring through the Vatican archives.

But Cornwell provides none. Not a single shred.

Indeed, in this, the critical chapter of his book, there is not even a single reference to ADSS source material. That is the overwhelmingly significant thing. Cornwell spent “13 months” in the Vatican archives and came up with absolutely nothing to support his central thesis. (It is not surprising. For Cornwell didn’t even have access to records after 1922. They have not been released yet.)

Unfortunately, this critical fact seems to have gone wholly unnoticed by many reviewers. Typical is Toledo Blade reviewer Eileen Foley. Cornwell, she wrote, “applied for and won access to Vatican archives. . . . . His effort has resulted in this book.”70 Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all,

there is nothing to “win.” Second, not only did he not have access to the Nazi years, the Vatican Archive records show him present, not over a span of “13 months”, but only three, and then not even every day. A mere scan of his footnotes shows that his whole book is derived not from the Vatican archives but from a reworking of old material, largely drawn from Klaus Scholder. His is a hyped re-write of Scholder’s book.

Furthermore, regarding the alleged “trade-off” itself, there is a trail of anomalies in Cornwell’s account.

To begin with, he describes the Führer as “dealing directly” with Pacelli. This is a blur. Pacelli never once “dealt directly” with Hitler. The intermediary was always the Catholic, ex-Center Party member, Papen. It was, in fact, Papen's initiative. But hardly a blue-sky original: Pacelli had been in concordat negotiations since 1920. These pre-Nazi drafts were what Papen carried to Rome and used as a basis for the Concordat.

Next, the idea of a “trade-off” itself is quite problematic. There was, actually, nothing to trade. At least 14 Center Party members were going to vote for the Act, and that was enough for its passage. The only issue was whether the Party would vote as a bloc. Thus, many critical researchers, foremost among them Carlo Falconi, do not even mention a “trade-off.” At any rate, Lewy says Concordat talks did not even begin until after the Enabling Act.71 And others, such as the expert Rudolf Morsey, explicitly deny it.72 Moreover, according to Holburn, there were only two opinions in the Center Party at the time: a) that the Center could not survive; b) that it could survive only by closely cooperating with the Nazis.73 (Papen's uniquely “upbeat” reading of it was

that since the Center Party was born of the Kulturkampf, and now the Kulturkampf was over, the Center Party was unnecessary.)

The fact is, the Party, which had been losing members “at an alarming rate,”74 was in no position to resist. At the height of the crisis, July 1933, Carl

Bachem openly admitted this. “Would it have been any use to call on the Catholic population and the whole Center Party to offer united resistance?” he asked. “Such resistance would have at once shown up the physical powerlessness of the party and would have been brutally suppressed.”75

There are other anomalies. For instance, Cornwell directly quotes Papen laying out the terms for a Concordat to Kaas, trading the “religious rights of Catholics in exchange for the . . . disbanding of the Center Party.” But no source is given. And the footnote is missing. Elsewhere, he has Papen informing Cardinal Bertram on March 24 of the need for a conciliatory statement from the bishops to “aid the process of the Reich Concordat.” Only four pages later, however, he asserts that the bishops were “even denied information about the fact of the negotiations.” Yet by far the strangest anomaly occurs when Cornwell tries to nail down the quid-pro-quo once and for all by quoting Brüning –who, after the Enabling Act, had himself remodelled the Center Party directly on the Nazi fürher-prinzip– in 1935 as having “no doubts about the connection”:

[Pacelli] visualized an authoritarian state and an authoritarian Church directed by the Vatican bureaucracy, the two to conclude an eternal league with one another. For this reason Catholic Parliamentary parties, i.e., the Center in Germany, were inconvenient to Pacelli and his men, and were dropped without regret in various countries.76

This certainly appears open-and-shut. There is only one thing peculiar about it. Cornwell’s footnote attributes it not to ex-Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, but to “Count Kessler of Brüning .”

In the end, the only thing his entire quid-pro-quo thesis hangs on is a bald statement by Scholder himself regarding Pius XII’s own explicit denial: “From what we know now, it is not true . . . .”

And he never establishes just “what we know now” is.



The whole issue is actually moot. For the choice, clearly, was not between Center Party or Concordat. The choice was between Concordat-and-no-Center Party, and no Center Party.

Furthermore, at this critical juncture, the Church found herself entirely outflanked. At this very moment, the three great European powers, France, England, and Italy were themselves about to sign the Four Powers Pact with Nazi Germany pledging “mutual entente, collaboration, and solidarity.” Needless to say, protection of the Church was not part of this pact. The Church was completely vulnerable.

Contrary to Cornwell’s contention, Pacelli didn’t eagerly seize upon the Concordat offer, and Pius XI himself later openly stated that the agreement was entered into “despite many serious misgivings.”77 Papen, surely one of the most abject of fellow-travelers in history, declared to Catholic academics at the

great Maria Laach monastery that the Concordat marked the “final conclusion of the Kulturkampf in Germany.” In fact, it marked the beginning of a brand new “kulturkampf.” Thus, most historians –even the severest critics– have recognized, however, that the Concordat was needed for the Church’s legal survival. Without it, she neither had a right to exist or a legal existence at all. Thus critical Catholic historian Thomas Bokenkotter concurs that “there was no way church rights in Germany could be saved except through a Concordat.”78 Likewise, Gordon Zahn admited that the Concordat “spared the Church in Germany a far greater measure of hardship.”79 Yes, there was “prestige” to be gained by Hitler for concluding the Concordat, but he had achieved prestige

already by portraying himself as the victim of an international gang-up at Geneva two months prior. To that achievement he once again owed a debt of thanks to Cornwell’s hero Brüning, who paved the way.

Yet Cornwell not only presents the Concordat “as a papal endorsement of the Nazi regime and its policies,”80 he even says it “indicated . . . Catholic moral approval of Hitler’s policies.”81 This a totally absurd assertion. The purpose of the Concordat wasn’t to endorse the Nazi regime, but to protect the Church

from it. Cornwell here is merely parroting the Nazis themselves, who tried to exploit the Concordat in such ways. But Pacelli himself, via articles in l'Osservatore Romano for which he was the source, and openly before European delegations, directly refuted these “interpretations,” denied any such “recognition” or “approval” of Nazi doctrines –expressed his disgust with the Nazi reign of terror, and declared it was entered into to protect the Church's rights and freedom.82 That is why Pacelli had increaing misgivings over the Concordat and wanted to put off its ratification. That is why, depending on the

German bishops' opinion as the “determing factor,” Pacelli set aside those misgivings and followed their urging that it be signed at once. And that is, after all, why after the Catholic Concordat, the Protestant Church sought one of its own. Had the Jews had the mechanism for so doing, they, too, would have endeavored to do so.

But not in Cornwell’s view. It is essential to his thesis that he depict the Concordat as a Pacelli power scheme over the faithful, “a capitulation to the will of the Holy See,”83 and Canon Law, something always and everywhere the Church “imposes” –he never uses any other word– on the faithful, as its tool. The Concordat thus becomes, in Cornwell’s prism, a “collusion”, a “compact”, “an eternal league”84 of the Catholic Church with the Nazis, which “legally bound the Church to silence on outrages against Jews;”85 “imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazi rulers”86 and “confined itself to the sacristy” (another error –he means “sanctuary”). Such characterizations impart the wholesale illusion that, if only for the Concordat, 23 million Catholics, under the uncompromising leadership of their bishops, would have risen up as a body in united protest, terminating Hitler and the Third Reich forthwith. As Lewy himself says, “the number of Catholics prepared to do battle with the Nazi regime was small.”87 Quoting Carl Amery, he concedes that the foremost factor in any “reconciliation” or “capitulation” the Concordat yielded, was not Pacelli, not the papacy, not the German episcopacy, but the “juste milieu of German Catholicism.”88

Despite the “prestige” he earned, the Concordat was not a simple, one-sided victory for Hitler. Papen's terms after all had offered the Church “more than all the governments of Weimar had been willing to grant”89 Not only had the Concordat given legal standing to the Church for the first time in 500 years and given the minority, non-German Catholic Church alone a unique, independent status within the unified Reich, but it even allowed it independent schools. His fellow Nazis had serious misgivings. For the sake of the Führer's “prestige” they had just been, as it were, “trapped into accepting the Catholic Church.” Where was the vaunted Revolution? Thus, Hitler had to justify the Concordat both to his party and to himself.

And he did, in his typical peremptory way. Full of pride at having reached “an agreement with the Curia”, he deflected all criticism by describing it as “an indescribable success” and commanded “all misgivings should be withdrawn.”

Deploying yet another mischaracterization, Cornwell contends that “the potential in the Reich Concordat for sanctioning the destruction of the Jews was acknowledged by Hitler himself . . .”90 In fact, Hitler’s triumphant remark at the signing of Concordat described the “struggle against international Jewry.” That did not mean then what we now know as “Holocaust”. For years, the plan was to move Jews from Germany to Madagascar. Goebbels himself is explicit about this in his diary all the way through 1940. In fact, the Jews themselves cooperated in this. Right up until 1939, the SS had colluded with the Jewish Mossad in a covert operation of shipping thousands of Jews out of Germany to Palestine.91

The Concordat also, Cornwell contends, immediately “trapped the Catholic Church into accepting” the Law for Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, the sterilization laws. Not only does he fail to mention that Pacelli issued numerous protests to the Reich or that, again, it was the German bishops who temporized, but he paints a picture whose analogical equivalent would be contending the U.S. Constitution “trapped” the Church into accepting Supreme Court decisions on these same matters.

Actually, the Nazis were fertilized with notions widely circulating from the turn of the century and by the ‘30’s were “widespread and by no means a preserve of the radical right.”92 By the 1930’s, sensible and humane leaders of the progressive world had already advocated and implemented them. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Holmes heartily endorsed them (“It is better for the world”). More than half the states in the U.S. had already enacted sterilization laws. They were central to the cause of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood –Hitler’s own Sterilization Director and founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene had actually written articles in her magazine.93 Eugenics, whose purpose was to “maintain the purity of the American pioneer stock,” and whose U.S. researchers declared the Jews, among others, “genetically inferior” and posing a dangerous “racial mixture,”94 was widely supported and was funded by the nation’s greatest philanthropists –Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman.

It is no small point that these tools for the Holocaust, legal, material, and philosophical, were active, not only in Nazi Germany, where Social Darwinism was “transposed into the sphere of State policy”95 but in the freest nation in the world, promoted by her most progressive and vocal activists and backed by the wealthy elite. It was, in fact, from these that Hitler crafted his design, having “studied with great interest” U.S. laws “concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would . . . be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”96 They thrived in a cultural laboratory where absolutes were being tossed aside in favor of progress and pragmatics. And from them, the personnel were to be directly recruited into the building and administering the gas chambers. To carry it out, a rationale sufficed which fit human aspirations to improve the world. Hitler had no difficulty formulating his own consisely.

“All measures were justified,” Hitler told the Cabinet, “which served to uphold nationhood.”

The only transcendence was to be found, not in absolutes, in dogmas, but in “community.”



VI. CATHOLIC RESISTANCE

Critics who link Christianity or “Church teaching” to the inception and support of Nazism (e.g., Goldhagen) –Cornwall especially– have failed to answer why, if Christianity, Catholicism especially, was so compliant to Nazi goals, was so relentless a war waged on it for its annihilation?

Quite uncritically, however, the one is linked causally to the other. This linkage is universally taken as fact and reported as such in standard resources as the General Reference collection –”centuries of deeply ingrained Christian anti-Semitism erupted into violence under cover of war.”

“Is it so astonishing then,” says Jules Isaac in this vein, “that there should emerge out of German Catholicism the cruellest, most relentless advocates of Nazi racism — a Himmler, an Eichmann, a Hitler, a Heydrich? These men have only taken and carried to its logical conclusion a tradition which, since the Middle Ages, has been well established throughout the Christian world.”97 Strange it is to find then, that this never occurred to Gestapo leaders Himmler and Heydrich. The Gestapo said in 1937: “Between the National Socialist state and the Catholic Church there can be no peace.”98 And Heydrich told his subordinates in late spring 1943: “We should not forget that in the long run the Pope in Rome is a greater enemy of National Socialism than Churchill or Roosevelt.”99 Nevertheless in the highest and most respected of academic and publishing circles, such outrageous statements as the following from Daniel Goldhagen go not only unchallenged, but are accepted writ large.

“The underlying need to think ill of Jews, to hate them, to derive meaning from this emotional stance,” Goldhagen writes, is “woven into the fabric of Christianity itself.” “Without a doubt, the definition of the moral order as a Christian one” makes anti-Semitism essential to “the foundational Christian cause.”100

This would no doubt come as a surprise to the head of the Nazis himself, Adolf Hitler. He spoke of “tearing up Christianity and annihilating it in Germany.”101 Repeatedly and succintly, we hear Hitler asserting: Christianity and Nazism have nothing in common; they are in mutual enmity. “One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both.” Having very forcibly extracted himself from the very devout Catholic upbringing his mother gave him, he explicitly told Herman Rauschning, whether Old Testament or New, it was “still the same Jewish swindle.”102

It is a strange and intolerable abuse for historians to accuse the Church of an anti-semitism which made it compatible with –if not the source of– Nazism. For the very reason the Nazis openly declared Christianity as incompatible with National Socialism was because of its inherent semitism, i.e., that it was a “Jewish-derived faith . . . reinforced by money-grubbing clerics.”103 It was unceasingly denigrated as a “Jewish, oriental religion.”

Messrs. Isaac and Goldhagen et al. might learn valuable insights by spending some time informing themselves of what it was like for the devout Christian to live under Nazism.

Hitler’s own anti-semitism and racism were not derived from any Church teaching. Quite the opposite. He hated the faith as much as he hated the Jews. His anti-Semitism was spawned by the vitriolic nationalists of the late 19th century, whose scathing anti-Catholicism was woven into their anti-Semitism. His political awakening, as he himself described it, came when he realized “Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association.”104

Historians, too, have recognized that in the Nazis’ anti-Semitism “Catholics could hear the unmistakable echoes of anti-Catholicism.”105 They didn’t have to listen hard. The Nazi press repeatedly linked the Catholic Church to the Jews, describing the Pope as the “Rabbi of all Christians” and the Church as the “Firm of Juda-Rome.”106 Streicher accused priests of “sheltering corrupters of our race [i.e., Jews] in Franciscan habits”107 and even tried to smear Archbishop Groeber with an accusation of writing love letters to a young Jewess. The violent explosion of Kristalnacht, reported the Manchester Guardian, was significant “as a warning”, especially for Catholics, who were “now being classified, most ominously, as ‘White Jews.’”108

Faulhaber’s remark, then, of how easily “Jew-baiting could turn to Jesuit-baiting” was quite to the point. Such motives, in fact, compelled many who joined the Nazi’s early on. Von Fritsch, for example, (head of the military until he was expended by the Nazis) wanting to make Germany powerful again, pledged to battle against three things: Socialism; the Catholic Church; and the Jews.109 It was, in fact, the Nazi plan to destroy the Catholic Church after the war. Hitler and Goebbels each stated this. Had Germany won the war, this plan would have proceeded.



VII. HITLER & THE CHURCH

From the outset, however, Hitler had the cunning to know the futility of a frontal assault on the Church in Germany. He held Bismarck in contempt for having tried it. According to Speer,110 he did not see direct destruction of the Church as possible or as a goal and even sharply condemned the campaign against the Church, calling it a crime against the future of the nation, for it was impossible, he said, to replace Christianity with “party ideology.” Thus, around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the Church –because it was obstinately opposing his plans– he nevertheless craftily ordered his chief associates, above all Göring and Goebbels, to remain members.

He, too, remained a member of the Catholic Church, he said, although he had no real attachment to it. (Thereby, some, with incredible naiveté, believe Hitler could have been “stopped” through excommunication.) According to Rauschning, Hitler saw his Catholic birth as “fated from the beginning, for only a Catholic knows the weaknesses of the Church.”111 “If I wished to,” Hitler boasted, “I could destroy the Church in a few years; it is hollow and rotten and false through and through. . . . its day is gone. It will not fight. I’m quite satisfied.”

The Church could only be attacked gradually, incrementally, piecemeal. A Concordat –with its opportunity for being made a legal arena for piecemeal violation– was quite suited to this approach. But it was by no means the primary instrument.

“I shall certainly not make martyrs of them,” he told Rauschning of the tactics against ecclesiastics. “We shall brand them as ordinary criminals. . . . I shall make films of them. . . Let the whole mass of nonsense, selfishness, repression and deceit be revealed. The young people will accept it –the young people and the masses. I can do without the others.”

Trials of priests, monks and nuns, had begun in 1936, stimulated by Nazi propaganda which relentlessly blamed “the system adopted by the Catholic church and more especially on its monastic life” and the “alien” things the Church taught “our race”, such as the “terrifying bogey of belief in sin.”112 Using the progressive creeds of Modernism and syncretism, they dismissed Christ as a “most complicated construction, arising from sources in the Near East and Babylonia.”113 The Blessed Mother was scorned as a “harlot” and Christ as her “illegitimate offspring.” The slightest offense, such as preaching love of neighbor, (Schwarze Korps declared it “completely contradicting our moral conscience”) could land a cleric in the concentration camp –once two priests were sent to Dachau for not saluting Göring in a restaurant. Later, priests would be thrown into camps for being suspected of the “wrong attitude.” Innumerable episodes of individual courage and martyrdom did indeed occur.

Sharing both the hatred of many an intellectual for the faith and the aspirations of the “New Age,” Hitler viewed the old heathenism, latent beneath the surface of peasantry, as “true religion rooted in nature and blood.”

“The peasant will be told what the Church has destroyed for him: the whole secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the shapeless, the demonic. The peasant will learn to hate the Church on that basis.”

Hitler had complete contempt of Protestantism and saw Liberal Christianity as readily aiding his cause, having little doubt its ministers “will replace the cross with our swastika.”

As Rauschning said, “Thoroughly and systematically, with iron logic, the war of annihilation against Christianity was being waged.”



VIII. CATHOLIC RESISTANCE & Mit Brennender Sorge

We would think this treatment led to sustained, uncompromising resistance from the Catholic hierarchy and people. Some great historians leave the implication that it did.

Peter Hoffmann, for instance, says “until the outbreak of the war, Catholic resistance stiffened until its most eminent spokesman was the Pope himself.”114 The Encyclopedia Britannica describes Cardinal Faulhaber as a “prominent opponent of the Nazis” who vigorously criticized Nazism despite governmental opposition and worked with American occupation forces after the war, receiving the West German Republic’s highest award, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit. (Others receiving post-war honors included Bishop Berning, made Archbishop in 1949; and Franz von Papen, one of the greatest dupes in history, made Papal Privy Chamberlain in 1959.)

Assembling a portrait of united, resolute resistance from such data, however, would be a serious distortion. True, there was always some form of Catholic “resistance” to Nazism, however selective, and any such resistance, was invariably courageous, often fatal. But while selective Nazi policies met protest, the Reich as a whole did not. Quite the opposite. Major Nazi national political initiatives, weighed as national policies, always elicited very supportive responses. For instance, when Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations in October 1933 –insisting he hated and would not wage war– he did so with the very vocal support of most churchmen and prominent Catholics (such as Klausener of Catholic Action). Likewise, his march into the Rhineland was cheered and blessed by the clergy, led by Cardinal von Galen, who described Hitler as “the Fürher to whom divine Providence has entrusted the direction of our policy,” the one who “has by his courageous resolve broken the chains in which . . . hostile powers kept our nation permanently imprisoned.”115 Galen and Cardinal Schulte, in another burst of nationalistic fervor, issued an unsolicited declaration on the Saar plebiscite, instructing that German Catholics were “duty bound to stand up for the greatness, welfare, and peace of the fatherland,” and mandating special prayers be said on plebiscite Sunday that will bring “blessings for our German people.” World War II would meet the same, fervent support.

Even when made, protests were measured and equivocal. Faulhaber’s oft-cited 1933 Advent sermons defending the Old Testament, for instance, were done strictly as a defense of divinely inspired Scripture. He made it quite clear that he was not talking about the “Israel of today” and later protested directly to Hitler that an alleged sermon of his against anti-Semitism –which had received Jewish commendation– was in fact a “Marxist forgery.”116 In Advent the following year, he openly commended Hitler as one who “has committed himself to peace” against “demonic forces.”117

Faulhaber actually met with Hitler at Obersalzburg in 1936 for three hours –discussing mostly the danger of Bolshevism. The future recipient of the Grand Cross was so impressed with Hitler that he reported “the Führer commands diplomatic and social form better than a born sovereign.”118

At this date, Faulhaber was apparently still quite convinced of the “March 23 Hitler” who “recognizes Christianity as the foundation of western culture.” And though the Cardinal found Hitler “not as clear in his conception of the Catholic Church as a God-established institution,” Germans were assured that there was “no doubt the Chancellor lives in faith in God.”119 But Faulhaber also experienced another critical aspect of Hitler’s persona –mad rage. Significantly, it occurred when euthanasia and sterilization were brought up and was accompanied by dire warnings against political meddling. (The exact same thing, if not worse, happened in the presence of other ecclesial prelates, such as Nuncio Msgr. Orsenigo.)

Protests were largely aimed at direct issues of infringement of Church rights, of which there were many, since the Nazis were waging a war of attrition against the Church, and it was these which led up to the papal encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge –the composition of which Cardinal Faulhaber played a major role.

The odd thing about the papal encyclical is that it is almost universally mischaracterized, by critics and defenders of Pius XII alike. Cornwell mischaracterizes it as an “encyclical on anti-racism,” oddly putting himself in the same camp as papal defenders, who describe it as a “bold manifesto against Nazism.”120

It wasn’t exactly that.

The encyclical’s “burning anxiety” was over violations of the Concordat, which had begun immediately in 1933 and never ceased, and the consequent “suffering of the Church” and the “growing and steady oppression” of the faithful. The encyclical was blunt enough. It cited “machinations from the beginning that had no other aim than a war of extermination”, conducted through an overall effort “to change the meaning of the agreement, to evade the agreement, to empty the agreement of all its significance, to violate the agreement.”

As for Nazism itself, objections to it were familiar: its “myth of blood and race”, its “pantheistic vagueness” and “ancient pan-Christian German concepts” which “takes the race or state” as “ultimate norm of all” and “deifies them with idolatrous worship,” along with the “heresy of speaking of a national God” and the “manifest apostasy” of the German National Church. It also protested the banishing of Biblical history and the wisdom of the Old Testament from Church and school; “leaving the Church . . . to profess loyalty to the State”; mandatory Hitler Youth; and the “cult of physical fitness.” As for those responsible, it described them as “enemies of the Church,” “enemies of Christ,” and declared the state obliged to cleanse the “spirit hostile to Church and Christianity.” (It described as a “false prophet” anyone who would place any mortal alongside, or above, Christ, but the encyclical did not call Hitler himself a “mad prophet”, as some contend.)

Though its impact was great owing to the fact that it came from the Pope, and had to be smuggled into Germany at great risk, and though it stated in stark terms that the “time of spiritual profanation of the temple is at hand,” and though it furnished yet another lesson in the consequences of “speaking out” in that it so enfuriated Hitler that he resumed the immorality trials and increased attacks on the Church, it was nevertheless nothing like the “vast campaign of the Church against Atheistic Communism” put forth in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris only five days later.

One other aspect of this encyclical, rarely, if ever, touched on illustrates this great contrast. It is that, quite remarkably, Mit Brennender held out great hope. Despite the long trail of grievances and “machinations from the beginning”, it insisted that “we have no more wish than true peace between Church and State in Germany,” and so purposefully avoided “needless severity” in the express hope that “homesickness will drive back into the Church” the “erring sons of today.” Perhaps with this happy eventuality in mind, to the suffering faithful, “some even in concentration camps and prison”, it gently counseled “heroic fortitude.”

Cornwell says the encyclical “arrived late in the day.”121 But Cornwell himself is “late in the day.” Berlin Catholics, it was already reported in 1937, felt the document was “Too Late to Help” in the fight for the rights of the Church. “The German bishops lost one fight after another,” the New York Times reported. “The Church’s cultural activities are virtually liquidated.”122 Late or not, harsh or not, this official act of “speaking out” did carry with it one consequence –it changed nothing.

The German Bishops continued the same theme of very patient, restricted protest, complemented with solicitous appeal.

“The Church can support the Third Reich the more strongly . . . the more it enjoys the legal freedom guaranteed in the concordat,” they said shortly after Mit Brennender. “Blasphemy and mockery of the Catholic faith is spreading,” they grieved, adding in “tones which do not aid the Führer’s work of reconstruction.”123

And the Nazis, of course, continued their same aggressive course.

“We are armed and prepared to continue the battle against Catholicism,” declared the official Party newspaper, Volkische Beobachter, “until the final, frightful decision, until the point of total annihilation.”124

Despite the onslaught, the Church in Germany turned the other cheek. An open declamation of the Nazi Government per se was certainly not possible at this point. Nor was there ever a call whatsoever to either revolt or open resistance. (Faulhaber denounced anti-Hitler plots as immoral.) And this restraint cannot be read as a stratagem to avoid any semblance of provocation, for the Third Reich was not met with diffident, stone-cold silence. Instead, over all the protests, over all the objections, over the relentless vilification of the Church and the faith in the Nazi press, the bishops repeatedly instructed the faithful that the Reich Government was to be embraced and supported. While maintaining their earlier criticisms of the Nazi creed, they repeatedly went to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate that the Church in no way politically threatened the regime and to profess their unswerving loyalty to and faith in the beloved fatherland and Reich.

The operative rule behind this was plain: “Wherever authority exists, it is ordained by God.”125 Such authority is expressed in a legitimate government, and from the beginning, the Nazi government was accepted as legitimate. There simply was no legitimate way to oppose a legitimate government. Acceptance of this principle was universal in Germany. It included the full range of Catholic activists, as Klausener demonstrates. And undergirding the principle, it must be conceded, was the Concordat. Not only did it require support of the government, Article 16 obliged the bishops to profess an “oath of fealty” to the government, actually swearing on the Holy Gospels “loyalty to the German Reich.” Given what we now know of the Reich, this was truly an obscene price to pay for the freedom of the Church. But it was a price prelates such as Berning –Sieg-Heiling and Horst Wesseling with Herman Göring – were quite willing to pay.



At this point we must be clear. What occurred in the Germany hierarchy was not a love affair with Nazism, nor a paralysis brought on by the Concordat which required loyalty of them, or by “Roman centralization”, but the bishops’ unbroken efforts to stress, together or singly, their unimpeachable love for their nation. “One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both,” said Hitler. This struck the bishops heart and soul. “We are patriotic because we are German and Catholic,” Archbishop Groeber wrote emphatically in his book.

This fervant patriotism, coupled with their devout effort to avoid the charge of “Reichsfeinde” levelled against them in the Great War, led the Church in Germany to go so far in gradually seeking out and co-opting the “healthy core” in National Socialist ideas and transposing “Nazi martyrs” into “staunchly Catholic men” that the Nazis actually began to suspect it of “fifth columning” and put a stop to it.

The turning point of this patriotism came with the annexation of Austria.

The devout Catholic socialist, Kurt Schussnigg, literally caved in under Hitler’s overt bullying (which, according to Speer, was “a pretended fit of passion . . . probably carefully staged”126). Instead of reflexive indignation, he agreed to hand over his country to the Nazis.

Yet when it came, Anschluss was widely supported in Catholic Germany and Austria, and priests who protested by staying away from the “plebisite” were variously punished and disciplined by their dioceses. Bishop after bishop hailed it ecstatically. They permitted the ringing of the church bells for the occasion. (This very act of annexation, so applauded by the two countries’ hierarchies, was exactly what Sister Lucia, the visionary of Fatima, said indicated that War was inevitable.) The German bishops, Faulhaber at their head, went even deeper into blindness, (they were not alone!) applauding the Munich accord and thanking God “for his goodness” in hearing “the prayer of all Christendom for peace.” In the Munich diocese’s own paper, in the name of the entire Catholic community, on Sunday, October 16, 1938, they thanked the Führer “for the act of peace.”127 Six months later they would be ordering the bells be peeled again, this time for Hitler’s birthday.

It was, at best, pathetic naiveté. Love for nation blinded their discernment. The German Church, in this strange and seductive way, had become an “unwanted ally whom the Nazis intended to destroy as a force in Germany as soon as the war was over.”128

Complementing their burning patriotism was another factor. Surprisingly, it is another facet of the Concordat Cornwell fails to mention. It was found in the Concordat’s two secret clauses.

“First remove the dangers of Communism,” said Karl Bachem early on, reasoning regarding Nazism which would be amplified by the bishops through the Reich years, “then everything will sort itself out.”

Such a view summed up the substance of these secret clauses. The first clause pledged a common front against Russia; the other –insisted on by the German bishops– regarded duties of conscripted priests, indicating Pacelli was conceding violation of Versailles on conscription before it even took place.129 These clauses colored everything.

Let no one consider it at all unreasonable. Fascism was something threatening Europe. The Church had to, and could, survive under it. Communism was something else entirely. It was militantly, murderously atheistic. Under it, tens of millions had already died and were dying of starvation and incredible persecution (although the premier press, The New York Times, was neatly covering all this up). The threat of it spreading across Europe was increasingly real. In the summer of 1937, back from a trip to France, Bishop Fulton Sheen was informing American audiences that dangerously unstable France was right then on the verge of a Communist revolution. Everyone knew that in Russia the Bolsheviks had openly declared war on religion and confiscated every last church in the country; in Germany, Hitler had marched the SA to church services, carrying charity collection cans.

So, in their January 1938 pastoral, while decrying “religious Bolshevism” and the “whispering campaign” against the Church by National Socialism, the German bishops nonetheless commended Hitler for having “sighted the approach of bolshevism from afar” and took it as their duty to support the Führer in this “crusade against Bolshevism” “with all the holy means at their disposal.”130

“Bolshevism,” they told the faithful regarding the war, “in its innermost essence and its deepest roots is the negation of all religion. It is godlessness organized by the State, the gate of Hell, the advance guard of the anti-Christ . . .” Having as “their basic misunderstanding” the totalitarian nature of Nazism,131 never could they fathom that the same described the Reich of their beloved Germany. They could not fathom an anti-Christ was in their midst, leading their nation.

So, when Hitler crushed Poland in two weeks –his one explicit extermination statement was the order to “liquidate Poland and Poles”-- church bells were rung in celebration at midday throughout the land for seven days. The rape of Poland had begun immediately. SS troops rounded up intelligentsia and executed them. Polish priests by the hundreds were the first victims. Entire dioceses were being emptied of them. Many were simply shot on site. Auschwitz –for two full years– would be used primarily for the execution of Polish Catholics. And the German hierarchy jubilantly rang the bells for seven days.

Totally, unswervingly convinced of the cause, the German bishops professed “we pray that God grant us victory” in pastoral letters, hoping for an honorable peace guaranteeing Germany “the necessary Lebensraum.” And they declared, unashamedly: “inspired by God’s love, we faithfully stand behind our Führer.”

From the first shot, Cardinal Faulhaber defended Hitler’s wars with such terms as “Christian duty”, “heroism”, “death with honor”. “May God protect our Heimau, our holy Church, our brave soldiers, our beloved children on the battlefield,” he prayed. He allowed Church bells confiscated for use in Reich war production.

After the 1939 assassination attempt, he led a Te Deum to “Thank Divine Providence for the Führer’s fortunate escape . . . We Catholic Christians are joined with the entire German Volk in the burning wish that God may protect our Führer and Volk.”132 Faulhaber vehemently insisted he knew nothing about the officers’ 1943 assassination attempt and, though Hitler was by then indiscriminately murdering innocents by the millions, this “prominent opponent of the Nazis” prepared a statement regarding the 5th Commandment regarding the assassination attempt that killing is wrong.133 In the end, when the grisly Holocaust photos were circulated, he protested that the American bombings of civilian areas showed equivalent mass killing and carnage, and those “pictures would be no less horrifying.”134 He even issued a pastoral letter which insisted on the equivalence of the crimes.

In the same vein we find Cardinal von Galen, “typical of the many fearless Catholic speakers”135 by enraging the Nazis with his anti-euthanasia campaign, at the same time saying, “we Christians make no revolution. We will continue to do our duty in obedience to God, out of love for our people and fatherland. Our soldiers will fight and die for Germany . . . .”136

This genre of episcopal support continued right to the very end, when, at Hitler’s suicide, Cardinal Bertram said a Requiem Mass for the “faithful departed.”

One can only wonder how, given this atmosphere, the Catholic with serious misgivings was to “resist”, or why “apologies” are now made for German Catholics “not doing enough”? How could the solemn ringing of bells throughout the land create anything but a solemn injunction that the Third Reich was to be devoutly embraced and supported; that its goals were, overall, legitimate? How could any Catholic be expected to “stand against” it? It wasn’t a matter of standing only “against Hitler,” or “defying the Nazis.” One would be resisting legitimate government. One would be standing against one’s own whole people. One would be standing against the express, repeated instruction of the bishops, in a matter which he was told he had no Christian right to do, against the explicit instruction to be “ready to sacrifice their whole person” to Hitler’s war. As sympathetic an observor as Mother Gallin clearly noted this dilemma. And Zahn himself concedes that to stand against such a “flood would have required an extraordinary degree of self-determination –and more.”137

Thus, Catholics would serve in the army, and fight in the War, bravely, and with the intention of victory for the Reich. And they served, as all soldiers served, under this oath: “I swear by God . . . unconditional obedience . . . to Adolf Hitler . . . .” So unquestioned were the underlying principles, so strong the love of country, that during the entire Reich, only seven refused to serve, and six of them were Austrian. The celebrated German, Edward Jagerstätter, was not merely “atypical”; he was singular. Six paid with their lives; one with his mind. (As an excellent example of this, see The Shadow of His Wings, the Franciscan priest Fr. Gereon Goldmann's experiences as a chaplain –even, for a time, an SS officer– in the German army.)

Cornwell feasts on this. To him, all this was the German Church giving “its blessing . . . to the policies of National Socialism” at Rome’s direction.

It is evident from the above that is exactly what did not happen. No one outside of Germany could possibly have directed the fulsome support of the Reich which emanated from the episcopacy. Nor were these nationalistic effusions limited to the hierarchy. Our great “hero” theologian Karl Adam criticized the hierarchy for not being nationalistic enough, saying in 1939 that Catholicism in Germany should be “German to the core.”138 Such sentiments flowed from the beginning of the Reich. But not from Pacelli. In October 1933, when the bishops –and everyone from Klausener to the Catholic Students Association– were cheering Hitler for the Geneva pullout, Pacelli was already protesting “open violations of the Concordat,” looking impatiently to the bishops for “words of fearless remonstrance.”139

These facts alone undermine Cornwall’s thesis of Rome-directed submission. But it is wholly overturned by a subsequent incident.

As time, went on –despite the “war of extermination” against the Church– the Germany hierarchy was preparing to go even further. In fact, it came frighteningly close to achieving wholesale integration. And it was thwarted only by direct intervention of the Vatican.

This near-turning point occurred at the Fulda conference, August, 1940.

By this time the German bishops had gone so far that the international press was reporting the stunning news that their forthcoming pastoral letter “will indicate a reorientation of the Catholic Church in its relations with the National Socialist regime.” Earlier that year, in probably one of the most grotesquely shameful distortions in all of history, a Catholic Cardinal –Bertram– not only declared the justice of war for “Lebensraum” but called World War II, and thus the victory of the Third Reich, a “holy struggle” whose purpose was the highest of earthly goals: “life in accordance with God’s commands.” Archbishop Schulte –another one of Cornwell’s “heroes”– had given thanks in a special proclamation for the blitzkrieg victory over France. In the meantime, Bishop Wilhelm von Berning had been saying “since his 1933 meeting with Hitler that the Church should give up its opposition to the National Socialist regime.” And the bishop’s influence was said to be “ascending.”140

Berning’s motivations? He loved his country, his volk. The movement which would unite nation and people was a healthy correction to the self-empowering individualism of the 18th and 19th centuries. He’d written a book on this and sent it to Hitler “as a token of my devotion.”

Others in the German episcopacy expressed similar beliefs. In 1935, Cardinal Bertram told his clergy that many Nazi ideas –specifically, the significance given to blood, race, soil– were found in Catholic thinking.

The synod letter “reorienting the Church” was on the verge of being published. Suddenly, it vanished into oblivion. Two weeks later, in an extremely brief announcement, it was reported that the “Vatican forbids publication of the German bishops’ letter.” Nothing was ever heard of it again. The Vatican’s “centralized, authoritarian” power –namely, “Hitler’s Pope”– had prevented the German bishops from taking a stand from which they, and probably the Church in Germany, may never have recovered.



So muted had the German bishops’ criticism been that it would not be until mid-1941 that headlines would read “Catholic Bishops in Germany Assail Nazis For Church Policy in First Protest Since War.”141 By then, schools had been closed, cloisters and monasteries taken over, and the Catholic press shut down. Having nearly endorsed the Nazi state in 1940, now they were declaring the “existence or non-existence of Christianity in Germany is at stake.” And though again the bishops hastened to praise the German soldiers and their “achievements” which “encouraged constant prayers” and –yet again– forswore that the Catholic Church in Germany was “loyal to the government,” their stance was considered so courageous it won unsolicited praise from Jewish observers. Rabbi Louis Newman of New York, for instance, commended the bishops who “dared to speak out against the excesses of the regime against their religion and their schools.”142

It was at this time that other heroic resisters came forth –Lichtenberg, von Galen, White Rose, Franz Reinish, Rupert Mayer, et al. Most stand as solitary witnesses. They offer eloquent testimony to the fruits of “speaking out.”

Fr. Franz Reinisch, who sought to “extend the Marian kingdom of Christ throughout the world,” was one such solitary witness. He refused the military oath. “For me,” he said bluntly, “there can be no oath of allegiance to such a government.” He was condemned to death July 7, 1942, declaring the government “not an authority willed by God” but one attaining power “through force, lies, and deceit.”143

Bl. Msgr. Bernard Lichtenberg was another witness. He publicly prayed daily for the Jews. And then he wrote directly to the Reich’s physician leader, demanding he account for the “crimes. . . which invite that the Lord who rules over life and death will impose retribution on the German people.”144 He was arrested, sentenced to two years in camp, and died, near the end of his sentence, on the way to Dachau.

WHITE ROSE

Probably the most graphic example of “speaking out”, however, is the group The White Rose, a brother and sister, a professor, and a few others at the University of Munich. They surfaced as Nazi opponents in mid-1942, when news was received that 300,000 Jews were cut down in cold blood in the eastern offensive. All hint of prudence succumbed