Read Heinrich Himmler : A Life Online
Authors: Peter Longerich
This policy of distancing himself set certain limits to attacks on the churches. In September 1934 Himmler issued an SS order ‘strictly’ banning ‘any disturbance or any tactless behaviour during the religious ceremonies of all denominations’.
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In October 1935 he reassured Hitler, who was evidently concerned about the well-known hostile attitude of the SS to the churches, that ‘he valued highly peaceful relations between state and church’.
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In July 1937 he noted in an SS order that he had had to expel a Platoon Leader (
Scharführer
) from the SS for ‘a speech that was riddled with tactless remarks about Church matters’.
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A month earlier, during a course of ‘ideological indoctrination’, he had banned ‘any attacks on the person of Christ’, since ‘such attacks or the abuse of Christ as a Jew [are] unworthy of us’ and ‘definitely historically untrue’; which showed that he shared the notion of an ‘Aryan Jesus’ that was widespread in völkisch circles.
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He also declined to attack Christianity publicly as ‘Jewish-Roman’.
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In 1941 he wrote to a corporal in the Wehrmacht, who wanted to become a theology student, that he was unable to grant his wish ‘to remain a member of the SS as a theologian on principle’. The basic regulation had been passed in order to keep the SS ‘out of the conflicts among the religious denominations’.
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The fact that the SS leadership did not demand that its members leave their churches, however much this was considered desirable, fitted in with this public image of neutrality vis-à-vis the churches. At the end of 1938 21.9 per cent of SS members described themselves, like Himmler, as ‘believers in God’ (
gottgläubig
); in other words, they did not belong to any Christian denomination. Significantly, the figure was 53.6 per cent for the
armed SS formation, and in the case of the Death’s Head units as much as 69 per cent.
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Officially Himmler emphasized that he left it up to his members whether or not they belonged to a Christian denomination. In 1936 he advised the leader of the Düsseldorf Oberabschnitt, Fritz Weitzel, not to ask SS leaders during their indoctrination course to produce essays on the topic of ‘How I Came to Leave the Church’. He considered that ‘dangerous’; instead, he suggested ‘Is Belief in God the Same Thing as Membership of a Religious Denomination?’
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In February 1937 he told the Gruppenführer that he was strongly against forcing people to leave the church—it should not be made into a ‘sport’ within the SS.
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In 1937 he wrote to a pastor, in reply to a query: ‘Every SS man is free to be a member of a church or not. It is a personal matter, which he has to answer for to God or his conscience.’ SS men should not, however, be atheists, for ‘that is the only world- or religious view that is not tolerated within the SS’.
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‘I have nothing to do with denominations,’ he told army officers in July 1944, ‘I leave that to each individual. But I have never tolerated an atheist in the ranks of the SS. Every member has a deep faith in God, in what my ancestors called in their language Waralda, the ancient one, the one who is mightier than we are.’
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At the Gruppenführer meeting in November 1936 he stated that, in particular, they should not ‘rip out from old people’s hearts what they consider holy’, and illustrated this with a personal example: ‘My father [Gerhard Himmler had died that same year] was—in accordance with the tradition of our family—a convinced Christian, in his case a convinced Catholic. He knew my attitude very well. But we never discussed religion apart from a conversation about the political harmfulness and perniciousness of the Christian churches, about which we both agreed. I never challenged his viewpoint and he didn’t mine.’ He could ‘sympathize’ with someone who said: ‘I’ve got to christen my child for the sake of my parents. By all means. Go ahead. One can’t change 70-year-olds.’
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However, the anti-Christian remarks by Himmler quoted above, which were based on fundamental ideological considerations, indicate that his repeated comments about religious tolerance in the SS were purely tactical. When, at the end of 1940, he remarked in a speech that after the war he envisaged a ‘clear and peaceful separation of church and state’,
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in fact he did not consider that to be the final goal of Nazi church policy; in reality he was bent on the destruction of Christianity, which was opposed to his biological-völkisch aims. But in this case the pure doctrine could not
be implemented; despite various anti-church initiatives, the regime could never bring itself to make the removal of the Christian churches and Christian doctrine official policy. And so Himmler was obliged to be cautious.
During the first years of the regime the Gestapo and SD concentrated their surveillance and persecution measures against the churches above all on the Catholics. Although the Nazi state and the Vatican had made a Reich Concordat in July 1933, which guaranteed the existence of the Catholic Church, two years after the seizure of power the radical elements within the Nazi movement set about altering the status quo to their advantage. Apart from Hess and his chief of staff, Martin Bormann, above all Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg and Himmler were the key figures among these anti-church hardliners. As the elimination of the Christian churches was not opportune, their strategy in the medium term was to remove the privileged position of the churches as far as their status as public institutions was concerned. Reduced to the status of private institutions, the churches were to be gradually excluded from public life.
Himmler, however, was rarely involved publicly in the anti-church measures of the Gestapo and SD. He left this sphere largely to Heydrich, who was in full agreement with Himmler on church matters. Himmler’s public caution was probably largely determined by his unwillingness to appear as a radical opponent of the churches and for the SS in general to be equated with anti-church fundamentalism. Ironically, between 1935 and 1941 the SD department dealing with church matters was headed by a former Catholic priest, Albert Hartl. Having joined the party in 1933, Hartl finally burnt his bridges in 1934 and joined the SD. Because of a denunciation his position within the church had become untenable.
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In 1935 the Nazi state began to target the Catholic religious orders with a wave of criminal trials, which were accompanied by a massive anti-church campaign in the press. The focus of the investigations was twofold: first, infringements of the currency laws (evidence was provided by the cross-frontier financial transactions made by various orders); secondly, alleged sexual misdemeanours involving members of the orders. The investigations concerning currency violations started at the beginning of 1935 and were systematically expanded in March 1935. The Gestapo and SD were actively involved, and utilized the searches of monasteries in particular to confiscate all sorts of material. The actual trials were prepared centrally by a special department of the Berlin prosecutor’s office. The first trials took place in
May 1935. By the end of 1935 almost seventy priests and members of orders had been found guilty in thirty trials. Some trials continued into the war.
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The prosecuting authorities, however, considered that the cases of alleged sexual misdemeanours by Catholic priests and members of orders were of far greater propaganda value. From spring 1935 onwards the prosecuting authorities, the criminal police and the Gestapo, collected material concerning alleged homosexual activity, making extensive use of the material that had been confiscated in the cases involving currency offences.
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In 1935 the Gestapo set up a special commando in its section dealing with cases of homosexuality.
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The SD also became involved in these.
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The comprehensive investigations led to a wave of trials, lasting, with a pause during the summer Olympics, until the summer of 1937. In the end there were 250 so-called ‘morality trials’, in which more than 200 members of Catholic orders, mostly laymen, were convicted.
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In addition, three more lines of attack on the churches emerged during the course of 1935. In the middle of that year the Nazi state restricted Catholic youth organizations to purely religious activities,
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and through regulations issued by the Reich Press Chamber a large part of the Catholic press was eliminated during 1935–6.
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Finally, the party began a campaign, initially in Bavaria but then in other states, which aimed at encouraging parents no longer to send their children to church schools (in which, although they were state schools, the churches had traditionally enjoyed a considerable amount of influence), but instead to ‘community schools’, in other words, state schools without a denominational ethos.
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The Gestapo and SD also had a hand in these measures.
The surveillance of the Protestant Church was, by contrast, of secondary importance for the Gestapo and SD.
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During 1935–6 the regime had initially attempted, with the help of loyal German Christians, to get control of the state churches and to establish a centralized Reich church regime. This, however, failed in the face of internal church opposition. There were major conflicts between the German Christians and the emerging opposition movement of the Confessing Church, which were resolved only by Hans Kerrl, who was appointed Reich Church minister in July 1935. There was a fundamental difference of viewpoint between Kerrl on the one hand, and Himmler and the anti-church hardliners on the other. Whereas Kerrl wished in the first instance to strengthen the German Christians, the hard-liners considered this an unwarranted enhancement of the Christian elements. They wanted rather to distance themselves from all Christian
groups.
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The Gestapo and SD thus kept out of these church conflicts; instead, they tried to undermine Kerrl’s position within the regime by tenacious intrigue, which was assisted not least by the gathering of information from Kerrl’s ministry.
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In any case, Himmler succeeded, together with Hess and the support of Goebbels among others, in preventing Kerrl’s plans for the coordination of the Protestant Church.
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‘Kerrl wants to conserve the Church, we want to liquidate it’, noted Goebbels in February 1937, after a long conversation with Himmler and Wilhelm Stuckart on the eve of a discussion on the Obersalzberg about the churches issue. And he concluded that ‘the differences between us are not just tactical but fundamental’.
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In July 1937 there was a change in the regime’s policy towards the churches.
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The papal encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
(‘With Burning Anxiety’) removed all illusions that the Catholic Church would submit to the regime’s church policies without a fight. And, as far as the Protestant Churches were concerned, the leadership of the regime had to recognize that the German Christians did not have the potential to coordinate the church from within. However, the impending shift to an expansionist foreign policy made it advisable to make peace on the home front. Therefore Hitler gradually withdrew from church policy. The fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the Nazi state and the churches sought by radical party elements was postponed. In view of this situation, the birthday gift Himmler presented to Hitler on 20 April was significant: he gave his Führer Otto Rahn’s book
Lucifer’s Courtiers
, a history of heretics, bound in the finest pigskin.
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The strategy of forcing the churches out of public life by a series of measures was continued, however. Thus, during the years 1937 to 1939 the Gestapo gradually banned the Catholic youth organizations, often on the basis of ‘information’ provided by the SD, because they had not adhered to the ban on taking part in non-religious activities. It refrained, however, from spectacular actions, a tactical move that was also evident when Himmler introduced further measures against Catholic institutions.
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When, in April 1937, Kerrl’s suggestion that the Catholic Young Men’s Associations should be banned was passed on to Himmler, he told the security police to seek Hitler’s opinion before taking action.
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In the autumn of 1937 Himmler got to see the internal minutes of the Fulda Conference of Catholic bishops for the first time, and so was informed about the proceedings of what was the highest-level committee of the German Catholic Church.
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As a ‘sign of close cooperation’ he allowed
Heydrich to pass them on to Kerrl during a conference dealing with church matters at the beginning of November.
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Apart from such individual successes, however, despite all their attempts, despite their spies and listening devices, the Gestapo and SD were poorly informed about the internal discussions being carried on at the top of the German Catholic Church.
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On the other hand, on Hitler’s orders the Gestapo devoted a lot of attention to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the small faith community of so-called ‘Serious Bible Students’, who numbered approximately 35,000.
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The Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to take part in elections, to give the Hitler salute, to join Nazi organizations, or to perform military service.
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All these things were incompatible with their strict religious commandments. The Bible Students were banned in Prussia
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and dismissed from public service as early as June 1933.
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But despite the ban the group continued their missionary work in several places.
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In the course of 1936 the Gestapo increased its persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with torture being used during their interrogations.
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The first nationwide wave of arrests took place in August and September 1936.
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The Bible Students reorganized themselves in secret, and in December 1937 distributed leaflets in a number of places, but the subsequent comprehensive wave of arrests in practice led to the destruction of the whole organization. Since the Jehovah’s Witnesses consistently refused to perform military service, they were persecuted particularly harshly during the war.
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