Hitler and the Holocaust (19 page)

The Roman Catholic Church in Germany was to prove more resistant to the incursions and blandishments of Nazi ideology.
²⁶
In contrast to the Protestants, they did not have a Trojan horse in their ranks comparable to the Nazified German Christians. Moreover, they could look to the Vatican for institutional support and powerful moral encouragement. True, in the 1930s the Vatican under Pius XI did feel some affinity (like many Catholics in Europe and beyond) for anti-Communist authoritarian regimes that espoused corporatist, military, or clerico-fascist dictatorship. Moreover, in July 1933, in response to Hitler’s own urgent requests, the Holy See took a more fateful step, signing a concordat with the Third Reich, giving a degree of much-desired international legitimacy to the Nazi regime and restricting the church to its religious, educative, and caritative roles. From the Nazi point of view, the concordat neutralized the Catholic Center Party (which consented to its own dissolution after agreeing to give Hitler special “emergency powers” in 1933), and thus removed a potential source of opposition. The Vatican, for its part, believed that the concordat could help secure the religious
freedoms and legal status of the large Catholic minority in the Third Reich.
²⁷

In his first policy statement in the Reichstag, Hitler had set out to be as reassuring as possible, proclaiming that the new Reich government saw “in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society.”
²⁸
In April 1933, in his first conversation as Reich Chancellor with the Catholic bishop Wilhelm Berning from Osnabrück, Hitler reaffirmed this intention and insisted that his anti-Jewish policy was based on principles that had been pursued for fifteen hundred years by the Catholic Church. However, he deplored the fact that in the modern liberal era the church no longer appeared to grasp the reality of the Jewish danger as clearly it had in the past.
²⁹
Hitler still seemed hopeful that he could win over the Catholic Church, and the fact that Berning said not a single word of criticism in response to Hitler’s claims that Nazi antiSemitism was based on Catholic principle and practice, could only have encouraged him.

Not only had the concordat inhibited church opposition to the regime, but numerous Catholics now began to flock to the Nazi Party, attracted like their Protestant counterparts to the call for a national renaissance. Nevertheless, there were limits to this
Gleichschaltung
, and there was some unease in the German Catholic hierarchy. Shortly before Christmas 1933, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, preached a series of bold sermons to overflowing crowds at Saint Michael’s Church in which he defended the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish origins of Christianity against vilification by
völkisch
racists. The sermons, published under the title
Judentum, Christentum, Germanentum
(1934), eloquently condemned unbridled nationalism and racial intolerance in theological terms.
³⁰
At the same time, Faulhaber insisted that the indispensability of the Old Testament to Christianity had no bearing on “antagonism to the Jews of today,” which he did not seek to oppose. Indeed, he denied suggestions made
abroad that his public addresses had constituted a defense of German Jews or implied any criticism of Nazi policy.
³¹
Cardinal Faulhaber’s ambivalence continued in the coming years, mirroring that of the German Catholic hierarchy as a whole and of the Vatican itself. On 4 November 1936, he visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden for a three-hour discussion. The Reich Chancellor demanded, among other things, that the Catholic Church openly support the Nuremberg Race Laws. (There had been no clear official response.) Against the background of the Spanish civil war, Hitler shrewdly warned the cardinal that if National Socialism did not triumph over Bolshevism, then there would be no future for Christianity and the Roman church in Europe.
³²

Faulhaber evidently came away impressed by Hitler’s diplomatic finesse, believing that he would continue to respect the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany. This proved to be a fatal illusion, one that the Vatican itself corrected in the 1937 papal encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
(With deep anxiety), issued in German by Pope Pius XI.
³³
This was the only serious and unequivocal public criticism of National Socialism that the Vatican ventured. The encyclical was essentially authored by Archbishop Faulhaber himself (helped by his German Catholic colleagues) with the active assistance of Eugenio Pacelli, the cardinal secretary of state in Rome (and the future Pope Pius XII). The encyclical did contain a sharp condemnation of Nazi racism as a form of atheistic “neo-paganism” and also a denunciation of totalitarian doctrines, but no mention was made of either antiSemitism or the persecution of German Jews. A year later, neither the German Catholic hierarchy nor the Vatican officially protested the devastating Kristallnacht pogrom, though it seems that Cardinal Faulhaber did privately aid the chief rabbi of Munich in trying to salvage some religious articles from his burning synagogue.

But the ambivalence toward National Socialism did not end there. Like the Protestant churches, the leading German
Catholic bishops appeared to be generally supportive of German foreign policy at the time of the
Anschluss
and of the Czech crisis of 1938. Furthermore, both Cardinal Faulhaber and Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau found it appropriate to congratulate Hitler on “miraculously” surviving Johannn Georg Elser’s assassination attempt on 8 November 1939, with a “Te Deum” being sung in Munich’s cathedral to give thanks to divine providence at the Führer’s escape. Cardinal Bertram had already distinguished himself earlier in 1939 with a congratulatory telegram on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday, his fiftieth, a gesture that he repeated in the following years.
³⁴

The German Catholic hierarchy fell silent during the war in face of the horrifying atrocities against Poles and Jews, with only a few honorable exceptions. This lack of response was not due to ignorance of what was happening in their midst or in the German-occupied territories. Bishop Berning noted on 5 February 1942 that “the plan for a total elimination of the Jews clearly exists” (
“Es besteht wohl der Plan, die Juden ganz auszurotten”
).
³⁵
He plainly wondered whether he and his fellow bishops should launch a public protest from their pulpits. Conrad Gröber, archbishop of Fribourg, informed the pope on 14 June 1942 about the massacres of Jews being perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen in Russia and concluded ominously: “The Nazi conception of the world is characterised by the most radical antisemitism, going as far as the annihilation [
Vernichtung
] of Jewry, not only in its spirit but also in its members.”
³⁶
But despite the efforts of a small minority, including the valiant Margerete Sommer (head of a Catholic relief organization attached to the Berlin curia), who vainly insisted on a public denunciation of the Nazi murders, silence was maintained.

At a conference of Bavarian bishops on 30–31 March 1943, Cardinal Faulhaber reminded his audience that “nothing could render a better service to the greatest adversaries of the Church than to have recourse now to heavy artillery. At a
moment when we are in difficulty that would allow once again the stab in the back to be revived. My impression is that this is precisely what they are waiting for.”
³⁷
Faulhaber believed that the German bishops would be accused of treason, of breaking national solidarity and serving enemy propaganda, with irreparable consequences for German Catholicism. When the mass deportations of German Jews had begun in October 1941, the episcopate had limited its intervention with the government to Catholic “non-Aryans.” It was significant that in late 1941, when the German bishops had brought themselves to protest proposed legislation that would force partners in mixed marriages to divorce, Cardinal Bertram had felt obliged to emphasize that he was by no means deficient in love for the German
Volk
and for its dignity, “or [guilty] of underestimation of the harmful Jewish influence upon German culture and national interests.”
³⁸

Even the most outspoken of all the high-ranking German prelates, the aristocratic Clemens August Graf von Galen, cardinal archbishop of Münster, was very careful to emphasize his patriotism. Galen consistently exhorted the faithful to defend the Fatherland and “to fight against the external enemy,” though he did preach against vindictiveness, the killing of hostages, and the murder of unarmed prisoners of war.
³⁹
In the summer of 1941, Galen began a series of blistering sermons against the government’s euthanasia program (the so-called mercy killings), which he bluntly called “plain murder”—probably the most effective, single episcopal protest against the Nazi regime in the twelve years of its rule.
⁴⁰
The strong public echo his words aroused sufficiently rattled the Nazi leadership (which to that point had put to death more than seventy thousand predominantly ethnic Germans suffering from a variety of congenital mental or physical defects) that it felt obliged to officially suspend the program of mass gassing. Henceforth, euthanasia was conducted in such a way that the killings would be easier to conceal. Hitler, who still wanted to avoid a public confrontation with the Catholic
Church, swore to exact retribution from Galen but only after the end of the war—a vain threat, as it turned out.

Neither Galen nor the ecclesiastical establishments in Germany (Catholic or Protestant) made any comparable pronouncements or interventions in favor of unconverted Jews or Gypsies.
⁴¹
Nor, when German bishops eventually received reports about the mass murder of Jews in the death camps (from officers serving in the east, from civil servants, or from other sources) did their subsequent vague pronouncements specifically mention Jews. The harsh truth is that few Protestants or Catholics in Germany and Austria were ready to expose the menacing horror of bloodthirsty Nazi antiSemitism, not least because the boundaries had long been blurred by the churches’ “teaching of contempt” toward Judaism. When the genocide began, they appeared to be paralyzed. Even more striking was their failure to grasp how dangerous racist antiSemitism was to the future of Christianity.

For at the heart of Nazism, despite its cunning pretense of “positive Christianity,” there was a deep-seated rejection of the entire civilization that had been built on Judeo-Christian ethics. Indeed, the leading Nazis—Hitler, Himmler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Bormann—were all fanatically anti-Christian, though this was partly hidden from the German public. Had ordinary Germans been privy to Hitler’s table talk, some of them might have been deeply shocked. On 17 February 1942, for example, shortly after the first gassings of Jews, the Führer proclaimed, in the presence of Himmler: “The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains.… The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—reopened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight of hand as before. Just as Saul has changed into St Paul, Mordechai became Karl Marx.”
⁴²

The conviction that Judaism, Christianity, and Bolshevism represented one single pathological phenomenon of decadence
became a veritable leitmotif for Hitler around the time that the “Final Solution” had been conceived of as an operational plan. On the night of 11–12 July 1941, shortly after the invasion of Soviet Russia, Hitler asserted that the coming of Christianity had been “the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity.”
⁴³
It had been responsible for the extinction of the Roman Empire and the destruction of fifteen hundred years of civilization at a single stroke. In comparison with the tolerance of the Greco-Roman world, Christianity was “the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love.”
⁴⁴
Worse still, Bolshevism was “Christianity’s illegitimate child,” and both were “inventions of the Jew.”
⁴⁵
Christianity had introduced the deliberate lie of religion into the world, but Bolshevism was based on a similar kind of lying “when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them.”
⁴⁶

It is indeed striking that as he launched the Holocaust Hitler increasingly sought to emphasize the parallels between Christianity and Bolshevism as subversive doctrines destructive of all human culture. In both cases, he insisted that they derived their “leveling” inspiration from the same tainted Jewish “ferment of decomposition.” On 21 October 1941, he gave another variant on this theme: “Whilst Roman society proved hostile to the new doctrine, Christianity in its pure state stirred the population to revolt. Rome was Bolshevised, and Bolshevism produced exactly the same results in Rome as later in Russia.”
⁴⁷
Under the influence of the Germanic spirit, Christianity had for a time lost its “openly Bolshevistic character” during the Middle Ages and become almost tolerable. But with the contemporary collapse of culture, “the Jew restores to pride of place Christianity in its Bolshevistic form.”
⁴⁸
Under Jewish-Marxist rule in Russia, for example, hundreds of thousands of men had been deported and their women delivered “to males imported from other regions.” In Hitler’s fevered imagination, deliberate race mixing had become one of the primary features of the Judeo-Christian-Bolshevik
Unkultur
, which National Socialism was committed to destroying. Hitler also blamed the vandalizing of the arts and civilization in ancient Greece and Rome on Judeo-Christian influence, drawing a parallel with Soviet Communism in the present as a way to justify the Holocaust.