Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

Hitler with Cesare Orsenigo, nuncio to Germany, in 1935.

Under the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, which sought to establish totalitarian control and coordination of all aspects of German society, the Catholic Church in Germany faced a number of restrictions. Although most Germans were either Protestant or Catholic, the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and senior lieutenants including Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg were hostile to Christianity, and ultimately intended to eradicate the churches under a Nazi future. The Catholic Church sought to preserve its position in Germany by signing a Concordat in 1933. Thus, despite various Nazi violations of the Concordat, the Church was among the very few institutions in Germany which retained a measure of independence from the state.

The Vatican issued two encyclicals opposing the policies of Mussolini and Hitler: Non Abbiamo Bisogno in 1931 and Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937, respectively. Mit Brennender Sorge was written partially in response to the Nuremburg Laws and included criticisms of Nazism and racism. Following the outbreak of World War Two, the Vatican, under Pope Pius XII pursued a policy of neutrality. The Holy See advocated for peace and spoke against racism, selfish nationalism, atrocities in Poland, the bombardment of civilians and other issues. The Pope's policies were shot through with "uncompromising anticommunism". Early in 1940, Myron C. Taylor, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's personal representative to the Vatican, urged him to condemn Nazi atrocities - instead Pius "obliquely referred to the evils of modern warfare". The Pope allowed national hierarchies to assess and respond to their local situations, but established the Vatican Information Service to provide aid to thousands of war refugees, and saved further thousands of lives by instructing the church to provide discreet aid to Jews.

Around one third of Germans were Catholic when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party took control of Germany in 1933. Previously, the Catholic Center Party had competed against the Nazis in German elections, and Catholic leaders had been among the major opponents of Nazism in Germany. Amidst economic collapse, by 1930, the Nazis and the German Communists controlled over 50% of the German Parliament. Both opposed parliamentary democracy and Germany entered an extended constitutional crisis. Unable to secure a majority in German elections, Hitler, excluded the Communist Party from the Reichstag and, through a mixture of negotiation and intimidation, convinced the Catholic Centre Party, led by Ludwig Kaas, and all other parties in the Reichstag save the Social Democrats to vote with the Nazis for the Enabling Act on 24 March 1933. The Act granted Hitler "temporary" dictatorial powers. By July, Hitler had outlawed all other political parties in Germany and commenced a wide program of persecutions.

The Reichskonkordat was signed on July 20, 1933. Under the Concordat, the church was promised autonomy of ecclesiastical institutions and their religious activities but had to cease political activities (political Catholicism) and German Bishops were to swear an oath of loyalty to Nazi Germany (Article 16). Hitler welcomed the agreement, but it was the first of many international treaties he would violate, and proceeded to repress the activities of the Church along with all other non-Nazi institutions.

Hitler, had contempt for the central teachings of Catholicism, but was impressed by its organisational power and position. The official Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg strongly opposed Christianity. With German conservatives - notably the army officer corps - holding the churches in high regard however, in office, Hitler restrained the full force of his anti-clericalism out of political considerations. The Nazis nevertheless arrested thousands of members of the German Catholic Centre Party, as well as Catholic clergymen and closed Catholic schools and institutions.

The German bishops were divided on how to respond to Hitler: Cardinal Bertram , favoured a policy of concessions, whilst Bishop Preysing of Berlin called for more concerted opposition, including public protests. The Bishop of Munster led condemnations of euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The German bishops issued a collective pastoral on 19 August 1936 to endorse Hitler's support for Franco. They did not collectively speak against the Nazi Holocaust until after World War Two.

As the Third Reich expanded, thousands more Catholic priests and other religious were imprisoned or killed and Catholic institutions disbanded. Though Catholics fought on both sides through the war, the Catholic Church and many of its members protested Nazi ideology and policy in various ways. Among the many thousands of Catholic religious sent to the Nazi death camps were Saints Edith Stein and Maximillian Kolbe, who died at Auchwitz. The Polish church suffered mass persecution with around 3000 clergy killed.

In 2000 the Catholic Church acknowledged its use of some forced labour in the Nazi era and Cardinal Karl Lehmann stated, "It should not be concealed that the Catholic Church was blind for too long to the fate and suffering of men, women and children from the whole of Europe who were carted off to Germany as forced laborers". Though both Catholics and Protestants were subject to oppression under the Nazis, and some notable figures notwithstanding, it has been argued that they largely conformed to the regime's demands.Joachim Fest, a noted biographer of Adolf Hitler, wrote that; "At first the Church was quite hostile and its bishops energetically denounced the "false doctrines" of the Nazis. Its opposition weakened considerably in the following years [after the Concordat] [-] Cardinal Bertram developed an ineffectual protest system [-] Resistance..remained largely a matter of individual conscience. In general they [both churches] attempted merely to assert their own rights and only rarely issued pastoral letters or declarations indicating any fundamental objection to Nazi ideology."

Background

Further information: Catholic bishops in Nazi Germany and Roman Catholicism in Germany

Catholicism in Germany

In the 1930s, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Centre Party, were major social and political forces in majority Protestant Germany, although weakened by the Kulturkampf and challenged by socialism, communism and the rise of National Socialism.

The Bavarian region, the Rhineland and Westphalia as well as parts in south-west Germany were predominantly Catholic, and the church had previously enjoyed a degree of privilege there. North Germany was heavily Protestant, and Catholics had suffered some discrimination. In the late 1800s, Bismarck's Kulturkampf had been an attempt to almost eliminate Catholic institutions in Germany, or at least their strong connections outside of Germany.

The revolution of 1918 and the Weimar constitution of 1919 had thoroughly reformed the former relationship between state and churches.

Through the period of the Weimar Republic, the Catholic aligned Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democrat Party had maintained the centre ground against the rise of extremist parties of the left and right. With the collapse of Germany's post-World War One Economic recovery, and the stain of defeat laying heavily on the German psyche, right-wing extremism ultimately won out against the centre and the extreme left, through a combination of shrewd politics and terror tactics. The German churches received tax support and were dependent on state support in a manner which made them vulnerable to Government changes.

With this background, Catholic officials wanted a concordat strongly guaranteeing the church's freedoms. In 1929, Eugenio Pacelli's brother, Francesco, had successfully negotiated a concordat with Mussolini as part of an agreement known as the Lateran Treaty. A precondition of the negotiations had involved the dissolution of the parliamentary Catholic Italian Popular Party.

Therefore, the Holy See represented in Germany by Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, made unsuccessful attempts to obtain German agreement for such a treaty, and between 1930 and 1933 he attempted to initiate negotiations with representatives of successive German governments. Catholic politicians from the Centre Party repeatedly pushed for a concordat with the new German Republic. In February 1930 Eugenio Pacelli became the Vatican's Secretary of State, and thus responsible for the Church's foreign policy, and in this position continued to work towards this 'great goal'.

Political Catholicism

Main article: Political Catholicism

Controversial author John Cornwell claims that Pius XI disliked political Catholicism because it was beyond his control. According to Cornwell, a succession of Popes took the view that Catholic party politics "brought democracy into the church by the back door". Cornwell asserts that the result of the demise of the Popular Party was the "wholesale shift of Catholics into the Fascist Party and the collapse of democracy in Italy".

Catholic opposition to Communism

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow during its 1931 demolition by the Communist regime.

The Catholic Church held grave fears as to the consequences of Communist conquest or revolution in Europe. The ambivalent views held by 19th century German sociologist Karl Marx on religion had pitted Communist movements against religious organisations like the Catholic Church. The Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin had energetically pursued the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church through the 1920s and 1930s. Militant Marxist‒Leninist atheism took hold in Russia following the 1917 Communist Revolution, where Communists set about the systematic eradication of religion, with lootings, lynchings, executions, the banning of church rites and orchestrated mockery of priests, popes and rabbis. Lenin wrote:

Every religious idea, every idea of God... is unutterable vileness...of the most dangerous kind, 'contagion' of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions... are less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest 'ideological' costumes.

— Vladimir Lenin.

In his anti-Pius XII polemic Hitler's Pope (1999), John Cornwell asserts that Pius XI and his new secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII) were determined that, at a time that saw the church persecuted by Communists and socialist regimes from Russia to Mexico and later Spain, no accommodation was to be reached with Communists. At the same time, Cornwell alleges that Pius XI and Pacelli were more open to collaboration with totalitarian movements and regimes of the right.

Rise of Nazism

See also: Adolf Hitler's rise to power

With Germany deep in financial crisis, the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and German Communist parties made great gains at the 1930 German Election. Both sides were pledged to eliminate German democracy, but between them had obtained over 50% of seats in the Reichstag, requiring the Social Democrats and Catholic Centre Party to consider negotiations with non-democrats. The Centre Party had been an important player in Weimar democracy, aligned with both the Social Democrats and the leftist German Democratic Party against right wing parties like the Nazis. Initially, Papen did speak out against some Nazi excesses, and only narrowly escaped death in the night of the long knives, whereafter he ceased to criticize the regime.

At the July 1932 German Elections, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, though their vote declined at the November 1932 Election. The conservative President Paul von Hindenburg appointed the Catholic monarchist Franz von Papen Chancellor in June 1932, and sacked him in December. Papen returned to office in Coalition with the Nazis in January 1933 - falsely believing he could tame Hitler by stacking the Cabinet with fellow non-Nazi nationalists.

Hitler was appointed chancellor by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on January 30, 1933. Still requiring the vote of the Centre Party and conservatives in the Reichstag to obtain the powers he desired, in an address to the Reichstag on March 23 he said that Christian belief was the "unshakeable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people". On March 24, 1933, with Nazi paramilitary encircling the building, and threatening war if his demands weren't met, Hitler was granted dictatorial powers "temporarily" by the Reichstag, through the Enabling Act. Hitler promised not to threaten institutions like the churches if granted the powers, He promised to honour the Holy See's concordats with individual German states, to maintain government support for church-related schools, uphold religious education in the public schools and promised he would secure a good working relationship with the papacy. After Hitler's speech his government was given dictatorial powers through an Enabling Act, - the Weimar Constitution formally set aside,- passed by all parties in the Reichstag except the Social Democrats and Communists (whose deputies had already been arrested).

Hitler had obtained the votes of the Centre Party, led by Prelate Ludwig Kaas, by issuing oral guarantees of the party's continued existence and the autonomy of the Church and her educational institutions. I had been split on the issue of the Enabling Act. Chairman Kaas advocated supporting the bill in parliament in return for government guarantees. These mainly included respecting the Church's liberty, its involvement in the fields of culture, schools and education, the concordats signed by German states, and the continued existence of the Centre Party itself. Via Papen, Hitler responded positively and personally addressed the issues in his Reichstag speech, but he repeatedly put off signing a written letter of agreement.

Kaas was aware of the doubtful nature of such guarantees, but when the Centre Party assembled on 23 March to decide on their vote, Kaas advised his fellow party members to support the bill, given the "precarious state of the party". He described his reasons as follows: "On the one hand we must preserve our soul, but on the other hand a rejection of the Enabling Act would result in unpleasant consequences for faction and party. What is left is only to guard us against the worst. Were a two-thirds majority not obtained, the government's plans would be carried through by other means. The President has acquiesced in the Enabling Act. From the DNVP no attempt of relieving the situation is to be expected."

A number of Centre Party parliamentarians opposed the chairman's course, among these former Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Joseph Wirth and former minister Adam Stegerwald. Brüning called the Act the "most monstrous resolution ever demanded of a parliament", and was sceptical about Kaas' efforts: "The party has difficult years ahead, no matter how it would decide. Sureties for the government fulfilling its promises have not been given. Without a doubt, the future of the Centre Party is in danger and once it is destroyed it cannot be revived again."

Cardinal Bertram, on March 28, announced that the bishops had dropped their prohibitions against Nazi membership. The Catholic Centre Party party was disbanded and thousands of its members rounded up. Several of the leaders of the Party were murdered in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. The bishops' decision opened the way for a Concordat between the Holy See and Hitler's government.

According to the historian Alan Bullock, in Weimar Germany, the Catholic Centre Party had been "notoriously a Party whose first concern was to make accommodation with any government in power in order to secure the protection of its particular interests", and, having obtained promises of non-interference in religion, joined conservatives in the Reichstag vote giving Hitler dictatorial powers.

Catholic opposition to rise of Nazi Party

During the 1920s and 1930s, Catholic leaders made a number of forthright attacks on Nazi ideology and the main Christian opposition to Nazism in Germany had come from the Catholic Church. Before Hitler came to power, German bishops warned Catholics against Nazi racism and some dioceses banned membership of the Nazi Party. The Catholic press condemned Nazism.

John Cornwell wrote of the early Nazi period that:

Into the early 1930s the German Centre Party, the German Catholic bishops, and the Catholic media had been mainly solid in their rejection of National Socialism. They denied Nazis the sacraments and church burials, and Catholic journalists excoriated National Socialism daily in Germany's 400 Catholic newspapers. The hierarchy instructed priests to combat National Socialism at a local level whenever it attacked Christianity.

At a basic philosophical level, Catholic theology clashed in various respects with key tenets of Nazism. The Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century outlines some of these clashes from the Nazi point of view and Pope Pius XI's planned encyclical, Humani generis unitas ("The Unity of the Human Race") addressed various clashes from the Catholic point of view. Catholicism's internationalism, was at odds with Nazism's uber-nationalism. The position of reverence given by the Church to the Jewish patriarchs and Old Testament contradicted Nazism's racial ideology which classed Jews as sub-human. The Nazi glorification of war and the "survival of the fittest" clashed sharply with the Beatitudes of Jesus that "blessed are the peacemakers". While Catholicism preached of the primacy of conscience, Hitler denounced conscience as a contemptible "Jewish invention". Thus Hitler intended ultimately to eradicate the Christian Churches. Throughout the Nazi period Catholic institutions continued to preach the Beatitudes - in cultural opposition to Nazism.

At the beginning of 1931, the Cologne Bishops Conference condemned National Socialism, and were followed by the bishops of Paderborn and Freiburg. With ongoing hostility to the Nazis from the Catholic press and the Catholic Center Party, few German Catholics voted Nazi in the elections preceding the Nazi takeover in 1933.

Nevertheless, in Catholicism, as in other German churches, there were clergy and lay people who openly supported the Nazi regime.

Nazi opposition to Christianity

The attitude of the Nazi party to the Catholic Church ranged from tolerance to near total renunciation. Many Nazis were anti-clerical in both private and public life. The Nazi party had decidedly pagan elements. Hitler himself held Catholic teaching and the notion of a Christian God in contempt, but had some regard for the organisational power and position of Catholicism.

In his 1925 manifesto, Mein Kampf, Hitler criticised political Catholicism for failing to recognise what he described as Germany and Europe's "racial problem". The official Nazi Party philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg was strongly opposed to Christianity. The SS was especially anti-Christian, instigated its own neo-pagan rituals and encouraged its members to leave the Church . Soon after his election to the Reichstag, Joseph Goebbels ( the future Nazi Minister for Propaganda) wrote in his diary in 1928 that National Socialism was a "religion" that needed a genius to uproot "outmoded religious practices" and put new ones in their place: "One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel."

According to Hitler's biographer Alan Bullock, Hitler was a "man who believed neither in God nor in conscience ('a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcission')". Bullock wrote that Hitler had some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". German conservative elements, such as the officer corps opposed Nazi efforts against the churches and, in office, Hitler restrained his anticlerical instincts out of political considerations. Bullock wrote that "once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian churches, but until then he would be circumspect":

Hitler had been brought up a Catholic and was impressed by the organisation and power of the Church. For Protestant clergy he felt only contempt... It was the 'great position' of the [Catholic] Church that he respected; towards its teaching he showed only the sharpest hostility. In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.

One position is that the Church and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic Weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person.

Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anticlerical, they both understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, being put off while they dealt with other enemies.

John Cornwell wrote that Hitler was continually preoccupied by "the fact that German Catholics, politically united by the Centre Party, had defeated Bismarck's Kulturkampf -- the "culture struggle" against the Catholic Church in the 1870s". According to Cornwell, Hitler was convinced that his movement could succeed only if political Catholicism and its democratic networks were eliminated.

According to Matthew Bunsen, on 6 June 1941, Martin Bormann, the private secretary to Hitler, issued a secret decree for all regional party leaders regarding Nazi policy towards the Christian churches:

The official Nazi philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg wanted to replace traditional Christianity with the neo-pagan Nazi "myth of the blood".

More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs the pastors . . . Just as the deleterious influences of astrologers, seers and other fakers are eliminated and suppressed by the State, so must the possibility of church influence also be totally removed . . . Not until this has happened, does the state leadership have influence on the individual citizens. Not until then are the people and Reich secure in their existence for all time. ("Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity")

Despite such fundamental hostility between Christianity and Nazism, most German Christians still either accepted or welcomed the arrival in power of the Nazis, amidst a backlash of the failures of the Weimar Republic, widespread anti-Semitism, strong anti-Communist sentiment, surging nationalism, and ongoing resentment at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and Germany's loss of World War One. The 1920 Nazi Party Platform also promised to support freedom of religions with the caveat: "insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the moral sentiments of the Germanic race". It further proposed a definition of a "positive Christianity" which could combat the "Jewish-materialistic spirit".

Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg was the original draftsman and spokesman of the Nazi Party program and official ideologist of the Nazi Party. He was a rabid anti-Semite and anti-Catholic who wrote the Catholicism was a promoter of "prodigious, conscious and unconscious falsifications". In his "Myth of the Twentieth Century", published in 1930, Rosenberg proposed to replace traditional Christianity with the neo-pagan "myth of the blood":

We now realize that the central supreme values of the Roman and the Protestant Churches, being a negative Christianity, do not respond to our soul, that they hinder the organic powers of the peoples determined by their Nordic race, that they must give way to them, that they will have to be remodeled to conform to a Germanic Christendom. Therein lies the meaning of the present religious search.

— The Myth of the 20th Century, Alfred Rosenberg, 1930.

On January 24, 1934 Hitler appointed Alfred Rosenberg as the state's official philosopher. Church officials were perturbed - the indication was that Hitler was officially espousing the anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, and neopagan ideas presented in Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century.

Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli directed the Holy Office to place Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century on the Index of Forbidden books on February 7, 1934. Cologne's Cardinal Schulte met with Hitler, and protested at Rosenberg's role in the government. Ignored by Hitler, Schulte decided that the church needed to respond and appointed the Reverend Josef Teusch to direct a defence against the Nazi anti-Christian propaganda. Teusch eventually produced 20 booklets against Nazism - Catechism Truths alone sold seven milion copies. Later in 1934 Studien zum Mythus des XX, a pamphlet of essays attacking Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century, was released, in Bishop Clemens von Galen's name. "Studien was a defence of the church. A concern for the preservation of Catholicism had apparently eclipsed a commitment to the protection of human rights in general."

Rosenberg and Bormann actively collaborated in the the Nazi program to eliminate Church influence - a program which included the abolition of religious services in schools; the confiscation of religious property; ciculating anti-religious material to soldiers; and the closing of theological faculties.

Reichskonkordat

Negotiations with Hitler

In January 1933, Hitler achieved his Machtergreifung seizure of power and was appointed chancellor of a coalition government of the NSDAP-DNVP Party. The Nazi Revolution had begun and the Nazis began to suspend civil liberties and eliminate political opposition. Within a few months, a one-party dictatorship had been installed in Germany (see Gleichschaltung).

In February 1933, Hermann Goering banned Catholic newspapers in Cologne, on the basis that political Catholicism would not be tolerated (after protests, the ban was lifted) and the SA began breaking up meetings of the Centre Party and Christian trade unions. By June, thousands of Centre Party members would be incarcerated in concentration camps. In this threatening atmosphere, Hitler called for negotiations to be begin on a Concordat. According to Karol Josef Gajweski, "Pope Pius XI and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII) were faced with a dilemma. If they refused to negotiate with the legally appointed government, Hitler would undoubtedly publicise his terms and claim that the Vatican was anti-Nazi and obstructionist. Any written agreement, Pacelli maintained, would offer a better basis for the protection of civil and religious rights than no legally constituted agreement at all".

The episcopacy kept silent when the Nazis called for a national boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, and again on April 7, when Hitler's 'Aryan Clause' excluded Jews from all employment related to the government. The bishops announced on April 6 that negotiations toward a concordat between the Holy See and Germany would soon begin in Rome. On April 10, Francis Stratmann O.P., who was a chaplain to students in Berlin wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber, "The souls of the well-intentioned are deflated by the National Socialist seizure of power - the bishops' authority is weakened among countless Catholics and non-Catholics because of their quasi-approbation of the National Socialist movement." Some Catholic critics of the Nazis soon chose to emigrate - among them Waldemar Gurian, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Hans A. Reinhold.

Hitler began enacting laws restricting movement of funds (making it impossible for German Catholics to send money to missionaries, for instance), restricting religious institutions and education, and mandating attendance at Hitler Youth functions (held on Sunday mornings to interfere with Church attendance).

Reichskonkordat

Cardinal Pacelli (seated, center) at the signing of the Reichskonkordat on 20 July 1933 in Rome with (from left to right): German prelate Ludwig Kaas, German Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs Giuseppe Pizzardo, Alfredo Ottaviani, and Reich minister Rudolf Buttmann

On April 8 Hitler sent his vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, to Rome to negotiate a Concordat with the Vatican. Von Papen, a Catholic nobleman, had formerly been a member of the right-wing of the Catholic Centre Party, and led his own right-wing government during 1932. On behalf of Cardinal Pacelli, Ludwig Kaas, the out-going chairman of the Centre Party, negotiated the draft of the terms with Papen.

Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists had always been a staunch opponent of such an agreement, but now Hitler intended to deal a decisive blow against Political Catholicism and at the same time gain international recognition of his fledgling regime.

The Centre Party's chairman Kaas had arrived in Rome shortly before Papen; because of his expertise in Church-state relations, he was authorized by Cardinal Pacelli to negotiate terms with Papen, but pressure by the German government forced him to withdraw from visibly participating in the negotiations.

He met the representative of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, -who held favourable views of Hitler- on April 26. At the meeting, Hitler declared:

“I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.”

The notes of the meeting do not record any response by Bishop Berning. In the opinion of the Opus Dei priest Martin Rhonheimer; "This is hardly surprising: for a Catholic Bishop in 1933 there was really nothing terribly objectionable in this historically correct reminder. And on this occasion, as always, Hitler was concealing his true intentions." The issue of the concordat prolonged Kaas' stay in Rome, leaving the party without a chairman, and on 5 May Kaas finally resigned from his post. The party now elected Heinrich Brüning as chairman. At that time, the Centre party was subject to increasing pressure in the wake of the process of Gleichschaltung and after all the other parties had dissolved (or were banned like the SPD), the Centre Party dissolved itself on 6 July, and was not mentioned in the concordat.

The bishops saw a draft of the Reich Concordat on May 30, 1933 when they assembled for a joint meeting of the Fulda bishops conference, (led by Breslau's Cardinal Bertram), and the Bavarian bishops' conference, (whose president was Munich's Michael von Faulhaber). Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabruck, and Archbishop Conrad Grober of Freiburg - both admirers of Hitler - presented the document to the bishops. The strongest critics of the concordat were Cologne's Cardinal Karl Schulte and Eichstatt's Bishop Konrad von Preysing who pointed out that since the Enabling Act had established a dictatorship, the church lacked legal recourse if Hitler decided to disregard the concordat. Notwithsatnding, the bishops approved the draft and delegated Grober, a friend of Cardinal Pacelli and Monsignor Kaas, to present the episcopacy's concerns to Pacelli and Kaas. On June 3, the bishops issued a statement, drafted by Grober, that announced their support for the concordat.

Though the Vatican tried to hold back the exclusion of Catholic clergy and organisations from politics, it accepted the restriction to the religious and charitable field, which effectively meant acquiescing to end the Centre Party. During the concordat negotiations, Cardinal Pacelli had acquiesced in the party's dissolution but he was nonetheless dismayed that it occurred before the negotiations had been concluded. The day after government issued a law banning the founding of new political parties, thus turning the NSDAP into the party of the German state.

One of Hitler's key conditions for agreeing to the concordat, in violation to earlier promises, had been the dissolution of the Centre Party, which occurred on July 5.

On 14 July 1933 Hitler accepted the Concordat, which was signed a week later. Shortly before signing the Reichskonkordat on 20 July, Germany signed similar agreements with the major Protestant churches in Germany. The concordat was finally signed, by Pacelli for the Vatican and von Papen for Germany, on 20 July. The Reichskonkordat was ratified on September 10, 1933.

Article 16 required bishops to make an oath of loyalty to the state. Article 31 acknowledged that while the church would continue to sponsor charitable organisations, it would not support political organisations or social and political causes. Article 31 was supposed to be supplemented by a list of protected catholic agencies but this list was never agreed upon. Article 32 excluded clergy and the members of religious orders from political and social activities.

Effect of the concordat on Hitler's prestige

Most historians consider the Reichskonkordat an important step toward the international acceptance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Guenter Lewy, political scientist and author of The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, wrote:

"There is general agreement that the Concordat increased substantially the prestige of Hitler's regime around the world. As Cardinal Faulhaber put it in a sermon delivered in 1937: "At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."

The Catholic Church was not alone in signing treaties with the Nazi regime at this point. The concordat was preceded by the Four-Power Pact Hitler had signed in June 1933.

The controversial anti-Pius XII polemicist John Cornwell has written that "millions of Catholics joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope."

Effects

After the signing of the treaty on 14 July, the Cabinet minutes record Hitler as saying that the concordat had created an atmosphere of confidence that would be "especially significant in the struggle against international Jewry." Controversial author John Cornwell has interpreted Hitler's statement as "claiming that the Catholic Church had publicly given its blessing, at home and abroad, to the policies of National Socialism, including its anti-Semitic stand".

Cornwell wrote that Hitler made the support of the Centre Party for the Enabling Act a precondition of his signing the Reichskonkordat. This legislation would give him dictatorial powers. According to Cornwell, "[i]t was Kaas... who bullied the delegates into acceptance." Next, Hitler insisted on the "voluntary" disbanding of the Centre Party, the last truly parliamentary force in Germany.

Cornwell writes:

The fact that the party voluntarily disbanded itself, rather than go down fighting, had a profound psychological effect, depriving Germany of the last democratic focus of potential noncompliance and resistance: In the political vacuum created by its surrender, Catholics in 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, and German Catholic democrats found themselves politically leaderless.

In the Reichskonkordat, the German government achieved a complete proscription of all clerical interference in the political field (articles 16 and 32). It also ensured the bishops' loyalty to the state by an oath and required all priests to be Germans and subject to German superiors. Restrictions were also placed on the Catholic organisations.

In a two-page article in the L'Osservatore Romano on 26 July and 27 July, Cardinal Pacelli said that the purpose of the Reichskonkordat was:

"not only the official recognition (by the Reich) of the legislation of the Church (its Code of Canon Law), but the adoption of many provisions of this legislation and the protection of all Church legislation."

Pacelli told an English representative that the Holy See had only made the agreement to preserve the Catholic Church in Germany; he also expressed his aversion to anti-Semitism.

Violations

According to John Jay Hughes, church leaders were realistic about the Concordat’s supposed protections. Cardinal Faulhaber is reported to have said: "With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are hanged, drawn and quartered." In Rome the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII), told the British minister to the Holy See that he had signed the treaty with a pistol at his head. Hitler was sure to violate the agreement, Pacelli said — adding with gallows humor that he would probably not violate all its provisions at once.

When the Nazi government violated the concordat (in particular article 31), German bishops and the Holy See protested against these violations. Between September 1933 and March 1937 Pacelli issued over seventy notes and memoranda protesting such violations. When Nazi violations of the Reichskonkordat escalated to include physical violence, Pope Pius XI issued the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. quotation "Violence had been used against a Catholic leader as early as June 1934, in the 'Night of the Long Knives' ... by the end of 1936 physical violence was being used openly and blatantly against the Catholic Church.

Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Nazi-Catholic relations

The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) followed a conservative coup against the Spanish Republican government and saw a bloody conflict between the Nationalists (aided by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany) and the Republicans (aided by the Soviet Union, Mexico, as well as International Brigades, of volunteers from Europe and America - with most under the command of the Comintern). In a bitterly divided Spain, the majority of Catholics, landowners and many businessmen, together with some of the military backed the Nationalists, while urban workers, most agricultural workers, and many intellectuals backed the republicans. The Republican president for most of the war was Manuel Azaña, an anticlerical liberal. General Francisco Franco came to lead the Nationalists. Extremist elements emerged on left and right, including the Falange Nationalists, the militant anarchists, and small groups of Communists (themselves divided between Stalinists and Trotskyists). The Nazi aerial bombing of Guernica foreshadowed the coming conflict of World War Two. Following the war, the victorious Franco established a long lasting fascist dictatorship - though avoided committing Spain to join the Axis Powers in World War Two. He restored some of the Catholic Church's traditional privileges in Spain.

In the early period of the war, anticlerical violence led to the sacking of churches and the murder of priests. The idealistic British socialist George Orwell arrived as a correspondent on the war and stayed to fight for the Republicans, believing them to be a native Spanish movement with hostility against a church perceived as corrupt and whose influence was on the side of the wealthy. Coming into conflict with Communists at Barcelona, however he was later forced to flee, sparking a "lifelong dread of Communism" (see Homage to Catalonia (1938) Animal Farm (1945).

In Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalance and the Holocaust, Beth Griech-Poleele, wrote that the Nazis portrayed the struggle as a contest between civilization and Bolshevism and many church leaders at this moment now "implicitly embraced the idea that behind the Republican forces stood a vast Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy intent on destroying Christian civilization." Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment served as the main source of German domestic coverage of the war. According to Griech-Poleele, Goebbels, like Hitler, frequently mentioned the so-called linked between jewishness and communism. Bolshevism was pathological criminal nonsense, demonstrably thought up by Jews. In Salamanca, Willi Kohn, German propaganda attaché, played up the war as a crusade to sweep away Judeo-Bolshevism.

In August 1936 the German bishops met for their annual conference at Fulda. The German bishops produced a joint pastoral letter in which they fundamentally accepted the Nazi presentation of the Spanish Civil War:

"Therefore, German unity should not be sacrificed to religious antagonism, quarrels, contempt, and struggles. Rather our national power of resistance must be increased and strengthened so that not only may Europe be freed from Bolshevism by us, but also that the whole civilized world may be indebted to us."

Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo arranged for Cardinal Faulhaber to have a private meeting with Hitler. On November 4, 1936, Faulhaber travelled to Hitler's Berchtesgaden mountain retreat. According to Griech-Poleele, over three hours Hitler told Faulhaber that religion was critical for the state, that his goal was to protect the German people from congenitally afflicted criminals such as now wreak havoc in Spain. Faulhaber replied that the Church would "not refuse the state the right to keep these pests away from the national community within the framework of moral law." On November 18, Faulhaber met with leading members of the German hierarchy of cardinals to ask them to warn their parishioners against the errors of communism. On November 19, Pius XI announced that communism had moved to the head of the list of "errors" and that a clear statement was needed. On November 25 Faulhaber told the Bavarian bishops that he had promised Hitler the bishops would issue a new pastoral letter in which they condemned "Bolshevism which represents the greatest danger for the peace of Europe and the Christian civilization of our country". In addition, he stated, the pastoral letter "will once again affirm our loyalty and positive attitude, demanded by the Fourth Commandment, toward todays form of government and the Fuhrer." On December 24, 1936 the German joint hierarchy ordered its priests to read the pastoral letter, entitled On the Defense against Bolshevism, from all their pulpits on January 7, 1937. The letter revealed the capitulation of Faulhaber to Hitler's wishes : "the fateful hour has come for our nation and for the Christian culture of the western world - the Fuhrer and Chancellor Adolf Hitler saw the march of Bolshevism from afar and turned his mind and energies towards averting this enormous danger from the German people and the whole western world. The German bishops consider it their duty to do their utmost to support the leader of the Reich with every available means in this defense." Hitler's promise to Faulhaber, to clear up small problems between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state, never did materialize. Faulhaber, Galen, and Pius XI, continued to preach against Bolshevism.

Deteriorating relationship with the Nazi regime

Anti-Nazi sentiment grew in Catholic circles as the Nazi government increased its repressive measures against their activities.

Appearing before 250,000 pilgrims at Lourdes in April 1935, Cardinal Pacelli said:

[The Nazis] are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of the social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.

In 1936, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, Papal Nuncio to Germany, asked Cardinal Pacelli, then Vatican Secretary of State, for instructions regarding an invitation from Hitler to attend a Nazi Party meeting in Nuremberg, along with the entire diplomatic corps. Pacelli replied, ”The Holy Father thinks it is preferable that your Excellency abstain, taking a few days’ vacation.”

In 1937, Orsenigo was invited along with the diplomatic corps to a reception for Hitler’s birthday. Orsenigo again asked the Vatican if he should attend. Pacelli’s reply was, “The Holy Father thinks not. Also because of the position of this Embassy, the Holy Father believes it is preferable in the present situation if your Excellency abstains from taking part in manifestations of homage toward the Lord Chancellor,”

During Hitler’s visit to Rome in 1938, Pius XI and Pacelli avoided meeting with him by leaving Rome a month early for the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo.

The Vatican was closed, and the priests and religious brothers and sisters left in Rome were told not to participate in the festivities and celebrations surrounding Hitler’s Visit. On the Feast of the Holy Cross, Pius XI said from Castel Gandolfo, “It saddens me to think that today in Rome the cross that is worshipped is not the Cross of our Saviour.”

Catholic opposition inside Germany: 1933-1945

In the Nazi police state, the ability of the Church and its members to oppose Nazi policy was severely restricted. In 1935, when protestant pastors read a protest statement from the pulpits of Confessing churches, the Nazi authorities briefly arrested over 700 pastors and the Gestapo confiscated copies of the 1937 anti-Nazi papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge from diocesan offices throughout Germany.

The position of open Catholic opposition to the Nazi movement inside Germany decreased following Hitler's emergence as dictator of Germany and the signing of the Concordat of July 8, 1933. The Treaty had been negotiated by Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) without informing the German bishops in advance. Pacelli hoped the Treaty would secure the rights and privileges of the church under the new regime. The Treaty restrained the Church from interfering in politics.

Following the Treaty, Catholics were free to join the Nazi Party, which many did. The Gestapo began rounding up opponents of the Nazi policy of eliminating political dissent, including hundreds of priests and thousands of members of the Catholic Centre Party. Show trials were launched against Catholic clergy and nuns who protested Nazi polices.

The Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of Munster, condemned euthanasia in Nazi Germany from the pulpit.

Alan Bullock wrote that the Churches and the army were the only two institutions to retain some independence in Nazi Germany and "among the most courageous demonstrations of opposition during the war were the sermons preached by the Catholic Bishop of Munster [ Clemens August Graf von Galen ] and the Protestant Pastor, Dr Niemoller..." but that "Neither the Catholic Church nor the Evangelical Church, however, as institutions, felt it possible to take up an attitude of open opposition to the regime".

Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber delivered three Advent sermons in 1933 that condemned the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis. Erich Klausener, the President of Catholic Action in Germany, delivered a speech to the Catholic Congress in June 1934, criticizing the regime. He was shot dead in his office on the Kristalnacht of June 30. His entire staff was sent to concentration camps. Klausener had assisted former Catholic Centre Party member Franz von Papen (by now Hitler's non-Nazi Vice Chancellor) draft his 17 June Marburg speech which had denounced Nazi terror and the suppression of the free press and the church. Papen's staff were murdered in the purge, but he himself escaped execution. The Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen defiant sermons included this 1941 denunciation of the Gestapo:

Many times, and again quite recently, we have seen the Gestapo arresting blameless and highly respected German men and women without the judgment of any court or any opportunity for defense, depriving them of their freedom, taking them away from their homes interning them somewhere. In recent weeks even two members of my closest council, the chapter of our cathedral, have been suddenly seized from their homes by the Gestapo, removed from Munster and banished to distant places. -- Bishop August von Galen, homily, 1941

— Bishop August von Galen, homily, 1941

The 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge was part drafted by the German Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a critic of Nazism. The encyclical accused the Nazi government of "systematic hostility leveled at the Church", and criticised a range of Nazi actions and beliefs - notably racism. Despite the efforts of the Gestapo to block its distribution, the church distributed thousands to the parishes of Germany. Hundreds were arrested for handing out copies, and Goebells increased anti-Catholic propaganda including a show trial of 170 Franciscans at Koblenz.

Following the outbreak of war, conscientious objectors were executed for treason, as with the Blessed Franz Jagerstatter. The Kreisau Circle was one of the few clandestine German opposition groups operating inside Nazi Germany, among its number were 2 Jesuit priests. The Bavarian Catholic Count Claus Von Stauffenberg, was moved to oppose the regime in part by its oppression of the Church. In 1944, he led the 20 July plot (Operation Valkyrie) to assassinate Hitler .

The Church clashed with the Nazi regime over the implementation of a programme of euthanasia in Nazi Germany in the name of "racial hygiene". Prominent clergymen, including the Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen and Cardinal Bertram vocally denounced the policy.

"Euthanasia"

File:EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg

This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP." Catholic protest forced the government to take the program underground.

Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be "unworthy of life"From 1939, the regime began its program of euthanasia in Nazi Germany, which included the killing of children, and under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be "euthanased".

The mentally handicapped were taken from hospitals and homes and taken to gas chambers to be killed. August von Galen, the Bishop of Munster accused the government of breaking the law and publicly condemned the policy. Fr Bernhard Lichtenberg protested the policy to the Nazis chief medical officer. The regime took the program underground.

Mit brennender Sorge

Main article: Mit brennender Sorge

The Catholic Church officially condemned the Nazi theory of racism in Germany in 1937 with the Encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge", signed by Pope Pius XI. Smuggled into Germany to avoid prior censorship and read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches, it condemned Nazi ideology as "insane and arrogant". It denounced the Nazi myth of "blood and soil", decried neopaganism of Nazism, its war of annihilation against the Church, and even described the Führer himself as a 'mad prophet possessed of repulsive arrogance.'

Although there is some difference of opinion as to the impact of the document, it is generally recognized as the "first ... official public document to criticize Nazism".

Impact and consequences

According to Eamon Duffy "The impact of the encyclical was immense, and it dispelled at once all suspicion of a Fascist Pope."

The "infuriated" Nazis increased their persecution of Catholics and the Church by initiating a "long series" of persecution of clergy and other measures.

Gerald Fogarty asserts that "in the end, the encyclical had little positive effect, and if anything only exacerbated the crisis." The American ambassador reported that it “had helped the Catholic Church in Germany very little but on the contrary has provoked the Nazi state...to continue its oblique assault upon Catholic institutions.”

Nazi retaliation

Frank J. Coppa asserts that the encyclical was viewed by the Nazis as "a call to battle against the Reich" and that Hitler was furious and "vowed revenge against the Church".

Thomas Bokenkotter writes that, "the Nazis were infuriated, and in retaliation closed and sealed all the presses that had printed it and took numerous vindictive measures against the Church, including staging a long series of immorality trials of the Catholic clergy."

The German police confiscated as many copies as they could and called it “high treason.” The Gestapo confiscated 12 printing presses that had printed the encyclical for distribution and the editors were arrested.

According to Owen Chadwick, the "infuriated" Nazis increased their persecution of Catholics and the Church. According to John Vidmar, Nazi reprisals against the Church in Germany followed thereafter, including "staged prosecutions of monks for homosexuality, with the maximum of publicity".

Shirer reports that, "[d]uring the next years, thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped-up charges of 'immorality' or 'smuggling foreign currency'."

The "Conspiracy of Silence"

While numerous German Catholics, who participated in the secret printing and distribution of Mit brennender Sorge, went to jail and concentration camps, the Western democracies remained silent, which Pope Pius XI labeled bitterly as "a conspiracy of silence".

Condemnation of anti-Semitism

Pius XI asserted to a group of pilgrims that antisemitism is incompatible with Christianity:

"Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.

German Catholics and the Holocaust

Catholic bishops in Nazi Germany differed in their responses to the rise of Nazi Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust during the years 1933-1945.

Cardinal Adolf Bertram, ex officio head of the German church from 1920-1945

Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg was known as the “Brown Bishop” because he was such an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. In 1933, he became a “sponsoring member” of the SS. In 1943, Grober expressed the opinion that bishops should remain loyal to the "beloved folk and Fatherland", despite abuses of the Reichskonkordat. After the war, however, he claimed to have been such an opponent of the Nazis that they had planned to crucify him on the door for the Freiburg Cathedral.

Bishop Wilhlem Berning of Osnabrück sat with the Protestant Deutsche Christen Reichsbishop in the Prussian State Council from 1933 to 1945, a clear signal of support for the Nazi regime.

Cardinal Adolf Bertram ex officio head of the German episcopate also had some affinity for the Nazis. In 1933, for example, he refused to intervene on behalf of Jewish merchants who were the targets of Nazi boycotts, saying that they were a group “which has no very close bond with the church.”

Bertram sent Hitler birthday greetings in 1939 in the name of all German Catholic bishops, an act that angered bishop Konrad von Preysing. Bertram was the leading advocate of accommodation as well as the leader of the German church, a combination that reigned in other would-be opponents of Nazism.

Bishop Buchberger of Regensburg called Nazi racism directed at Jews “justified self-defense” in the face of “overly powerful Jewish capital.”

Bishop Hilfrich of Limburg said that the true Christian religion “made its way not from the Jews but in spite of them.”

Bishops von Preysing and Frings were the most public in the statements against genocide. According to Phayer, "no other German bishops spoke as pointedly as Preysing and Frings".

Cardinal Faulhaber asserted that "History teaches us that God always punished the tormenters of…the Jews. No Roman Catholic approves of the persecutions of Jews in Germany."

During the war, the Fulda Conference of Bishops met annually in Fulda. The issue of whether the bishops should speak out against the persecution of the Jews was debated at a 1942 meeting in Fulda. The consensus was to "give up heroic action in favor of small successes". A draft letter proposed by Margarete Sommer was rejected, because it was viewed as a violation of the Reichskonkordat to speak out on issues not directly related to the church.

Knowledge of the Holocaust

According to historians David Bankier and Hans Mommsen a thorough knowledge of the Holocaust was well within the reach of the German bishops, if they wanted to find out. According to historian Michael Phayer, "a number of bishops did want to know, and they succeeded very early on in discovering what their government was doing to the Jews in occupied Poland". Wilhelm Berning, for example, knew about the systematic nature of the Holocaust as early as February 1942, only one month after the Wannsee Conference. Most German Church historians believe that the church leaders knew of the Holocaust by the end of 1942, knowing more than any other church leaders outside the Vatican.

However, after the war, some bishops, including Adolf Bertram and Conrad Grober claimed that they had not been aware of the extent and details of the Holocaust, and were unsure of the veracity of the information that was brought to their attention.

Nazi persecution of German Catholics

File:Survivors liberation dachau.jpg

Surviving prisoners at Dachau concentration camp wave on liberation day. Of the 2700 ministers who were ultimately imprisoned there during World War II, over 2600 were Roman Catholic priests, 2000 were ultimately put to death.

After obtaining power, the Nazis moved to suppress the Church, in violation of their Concordat with the Vatican. The Nazi Government closed down Catholic publications, dissolved the Catholic Youth League and charged thousands of priests, nuns and lay leaders on trumped up charges. The Gestapo violated the sanctity of the confessional to obtain information.

The Nazis arrested thousands of members of the German Catholic Centre Party, as well as Catholic clergymen and closed Catholic schools and institutions. Church kindergartens were closed, crucifixes were removed from schools, the Catholic press was closed down and Catholic welfare programs were restricted on the basis they assisted the "racially unfit". Parents were coerced into removing their children from Catholic schools. In Bavaria, teaching positions formerly allotted to nuns were awarded to secular teachers and denominational schools transformed into "Community schools".

1935-6 was the height of the "immorality" trials against priests, monks, lay-brothers and nuns. In the United States, protests were organised in response to the sham trials, including a June 1936, petition signed by 48 clergymen, including rabbis and Protestant pastors: "We lodge a solemn protest against the almost unique brutality of the attacks launched by the German government charging Catholic clergy with gross immorality... in the hope that the ultimate suppression of all Jewish and Christian beliefs by the totalitarian state can be effected."

Intimidation of clergy was widespread. Cardinal Faulhaber was shot at. Cardinal Innitzer had his Vienna residence ransacked in October 1938 and Bishop Sproll of Rottenburg was jostled and his home vandalised. In 1937, the New York Times reported that Christmas would see "several thousand Catholic clergymen in prison." Propaganda satirized the clergy, including Anderl Kern's play The Last Peasant.

Many German clergy were sent to the concentration camps for voicing opposition to the Nazi regime, or in some regions simply because of their faith; these included the pastor of Berlin's Catholic Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg and the seminarian Karl Leisner. Many Catholic laypeople also paid for their opposition with their life, including the mostly Catholic members of the Munich resistance group White Rose around Hans and Sophie Scholl.

In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in the German Reich, many of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the Allgemeine SS under Himmler. However, on July 30, 1941 the Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Monastery) was put to an end by a decree of Hitler, who feared the increasing protests by the Catholic part of German population might result in passive rebellions and thereby harm the Nazi war effort at the eastern front. Over 300 monasteries and other institutions were expropriated by the SS.

Nazi persecution of Polish Catholics

According to Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." Nazi ideology viewed ethnic "Poles" - the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland - as "sub-humans". Following their 1939 invasion of West Poland, the Nazis instigated a policy of genocide against Poland's Jewish minority and of murdering or suppressing the ethnic Polish elites: including religious leaders. In 1940, Hitler proclaimed: "Poles may have only one master – a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed."

The Catholic Church was brutally suppressed in Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. During the 1939 invasion, special death squads of SS and police arrested or executed those considered capable of resisting the occupation: including professionals, clergymen and government officials. The following summer, the A-B Aktion (Extraordinary Pacification Operation) further round up of several thousand Polish intelligentsia by the SS saw many priests shot in the General Government sector.

Historically, the church had been a leading force in Polish nationalism against foreign domination, thus the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their terror campaigns. Treatment was at its most severe in the annexed regions, where churches were systematically closed and the majority of priests were were either murdered, imprisoned or deported. Seminaries and convents were closed.

1,992 Polish clergy died in concentration camps. Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Around 1.5 million Poles were transported to work as forced labor in Germany. Treated as racially inferior, they had to wear purple P's sewn in to their clothing - sexual relations with Poles was punishable by death. Beyond the genocide of the Polish Jews, it is estimated that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians were killed during the German Occupation and the war.

Nazi persecution of Catholics in other regions

In Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were killed.

Catholic resistance outside Germany: 1939-1945

As the Nazi Third Reich expanded following the outbreak of war, a number of Catholic nations - notably Poland, France and Belgium - were subjugated and large Catholic minorities existed in other conquered and annexed nations. Many church officials and lay people generally complied with the Nazis, but a great many Catholic resistors were killed.

Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe, stained glass by Alois Plum in Kassel. The two saints died as prisoners of the Nazis at Auchwitz.

The invasion of predominantly Catholic Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939 ignited the Second World War. The Polish Church honours 108 Martyrs of World War II. In the regions of Poland annexed to Greater Germany, the Nazis set about systematically dismantling the Church - arresting its leaders, exiling its clergymen, closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Many clergymen were murdered. Adam Sapieha, Archbishop of Lvov, became the defacto head of the Polish church following the invasion and openly criticised Nazi terror. A principle figures of the Polish Resistance, Sapieha opened a clandestine seminary in an act of cultural resistance. Among the seminarians was Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II.

Poland had its own tradition of anti-Semitism, but Polish literature asserts that hundreds of clergymen and nuns were involved in aiding Poland's Jews during the war, though precise numbers are difficult to confirm. Karol Niemira, the Bishop of Pinsk, co-operated with the underground maintaining ties with the Jewish ghetto and sheltered Jews in the Archbishop's residence. In late 1942 the Zegota (codename for the Council to Aid Jews - Rada Pomocy Żydom) was established in co-operation with church groups. Instigated by the writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Catholic democrat activists, it saved thousands, often placing Jewish children in church orphanages and convents. Oscar Schindler, a German Catholic businessman came to Poland, initially to profit from the German invasion. He went on to save many Jews, as dramatised in the film Schindler's List. Among the most revered Polish martyrs was the Franciscan, Saint Maximillian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, having offered his own life to save a fellow prisoner who had been condemned to death. During the War he provided shelter to refugees, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid in his friary in Niepokalanów. Under the Papacy of the Polish born Pope John Paul II, the Polish Church asked for forgiveness for failings during the war, saying that, while noble efforts had been made to save Jews during World War II, there had also been indifference or enmity among Polish Catholics.

In the Low Countries, the Dutch Bishops condemned the Nazi abduction of Jews. The Nazis retaliated with a series of repressive measures. Many Catholics were involved in strikes and protests against the treatment of Jews, and the Nazis offered to exempt converts and Jews married to non-Jews if protests ceased. The Archbishop of Utrecht and other Catholics refused to comply, and the Nazis commenced a round up of all ethnically Jewish Catholics. Some 40,000 Jews were hidden by the Dutch church and 49 priests killed in the process. Among the Catholics of Holland abducted in this way was Saint Edith Stein who died at Auchwitz. The Belgian Catholic Church, under leaders like Jozef-Ernst Cardinal van Roey and Dom Bruno OSB, opposed the rise of fascism in Belgium and the Nazi regime which occupied Belgium from 1940. Dom Bruno was active with the Belgian Resistance and organised escape routes for allied pilots and for Jews in monasteries, schools and the homes of Catholics. About 3000 Jews were hidden in Belgian convents during the Nazi occupation. 48 Belgian nuns have been honoured as Righteous among the Nations. Others so honoured include the Superior General of the Jesuits, Jean-Baptiste Janssens.

Charles de Gaul's Free French chose the Catholic symbolism of Joan of Arc's standard, the red Cross of Lorraine as the symbol of their cause.

In France, Marshal Petain, the leader of Nazi aligned Vichy France had no religious convictions, but courted Catholic support. His great rival, and leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaul was a devout Catholic. De Gaul's Free French chose the Catholic symbolism of Saint Joan of Arc's standard, the Cross of Lorraine as the symbol of Free France. Collaboration in France was widespread, and the French bishops were initially cautious in speaking out against mistreatment of Jews. In 1997, the French church issued a Declaration of Repentance for this approach. During the War, Cardinal Tisserant, called on the Vatican to forcefully condemn Nazism by name. Following the Velodrom d’Hiver roundup of Jews of July 15, 1942, the Northern assembly of cardinals and archbishops sent a protest letter to Petain, and following round ups of Jews in Vichy France in 1942, several Bishops - Archboshop Saliège of Toulouse, Bishop Théas of Montauban, Bishop Delay of Marseille, Cardinal Gerlier (Archbishop of Lyon), Monseigneur Vanstenberghe of Bayonne and Monseigneur Moussaron of Albi - denounced the roundups from the pulpit and through parish distributions, in defiance of the Vichy regime. The move sparked greater Catholic resistance and thousands of priests, nuns and lay people acted to assist French Jews. Catholics protected large numbers in convents, boarding schools, presbyteries and families. According to the New York Times, "The defiant attitude of those churchmen after 1942 contributed to the fact that that three-quarters of France's Jewish population survived, many of them protected by French Catholics". Catholic religious among the Righteous among the Nations include: the Capuchin friar Père Marie-Benoît, Cardinal Gerlier, the Archbishop of Toulouse Jules-Géraud Saliège and Bishop of Montauban Pierre Marie Théas.

Historical evaluation

Some German bishops have been praised for their wartime actions. According to Phayer, "several bishops did speak out". Heinrich Wienken (a post-war bishop) very likely personally hid Jews in Berlin during the war. Clemens August Graf von Galen was a well-known public opponent of the Nazi "euthanasia" program. Professor Robert Krieg has argued the Church's model of itself "as a hierarchical institution intent on preserving itself so that God's grace would be immediately available to its members" prevailed over other models, such as the model of mystical communion, or moral advocate.

Phayer asserts that the German episcopate—as opposed to other bishops—could have done more to save Jews. According to Phayer, "had the German bishops confronted the Holocaust publicly and nationally, the possibilities of undermining Hitler's death apparatus might have existed. Admittedly, it is speculative to assert this, but it is certain that many more German Catholics would have sought to save Jews by hiding them if their church leaders had spoken out". In this regard, Phayer places the responsibility with the Vatican, asserting that "a strong papal assertion would have enabled the bishops to overcome their disinclinations" and that "Bishop Preysing's only hope to spur his colleagues into action lay in Pope Pius XII".

Papacy of Pius XII

Main article: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Further information: Pope Pius XII and Judaism

Pius XII assumed the papacy in 1939. In the build up to war he sought to act as a peace broker, and following the outbreak of war, followed Vatican practice of neutrality. A cautious diplomat, he did not name the Nazis in his wartime condemnations of racism and genocide, but intervened to save the lives of thousands of Jews through sheltering them in church institutions and ordering his church to offer discreet aid. Upon his death in 1958, he was praised by world leaders and Jewish groups for his actions during World War Two, but his refusal to specifically condemn the Nazi Holocaust during the course of the war has become a matter of controversy.

Election

Dr. Joseph Lichten wrote: "Pacelli had obviously established his position clearly, for the Fascist governments of both Italy and Germany spoke out vigorously against the possibility of his election to succeed Pius XI in March 1939, though the cardinal secretary of state had served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929."

The day after Pacelli's election, the Berlin Morgenpost said: ‘The election of cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.’ Der Angriff, the Nazi party organ, warned that Pius' policies would lead to a “crusade against the totalitarian states”.

According to Karol Jozef Gajewski, Heinrich Himmler's Das Schwarze Korps ('The Black Corps'), house newspaper of the SS, had formerly labelled Pacelli a "co-conspirator with Jews and Communists against Nazism" and decried his election as "the "Chief Rabbi of the Christians, boss of the firm of Judah-Rome."

Hidden encyclical

Some historians have argued that Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State, dissuaded Pope Pius XI — who was nearing death at the time — from condemning Kristallnacht in November 1938, when he was informed of it by the papal nuncio in Berlin. Likewise the prepared encyclical Humani Generis Unitas ("On the Unity of Human Society"), which was ready in September 1938 but, according to the two publishers of the encyclical and other sources, not forwarded to the Vatican by the Jesuit General Wlodimir Ledochowski. On January 28, 1939, eleven days before the death of Pope Pius XI, a disappointed Gundlach informed author La Farge,."It cannot continue like this" The text has not been forwarded to the Vatican. He had talked to the American assistant to Father General, who promised to look into the matter in December 1938, but did not report back.

It contained an open and clear condemnation of colonialism, racism and antisemitism. Some historians have argued that Pacelli learned about its existence only after the death of Pius XI and did not promulgate it as Pope. He did however use parts of it in his inaugural encyclical Summi Pontificatus, which he titled "On the Unity of Human Society."

Invasion of Poland

Main articles: Pope Pius XII and Poland and Reorganization of dioceses during World War II

In his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus (October 20, 1939), Pius XII publicly condemned the invasion, occupation and partition of Poland.

The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.
- Summi Pontificatus, 106.

In Poland, the Nazis murdered over 2,500 monks and priests and even more were imprisoned.

A monument to Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, among the estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy who were killed by the Nazis; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps.

Protest of Dutch bishops

The Archbishop of Utrecht was warned by the Nazis not to protest the deportation of Dutch Jews. In defiance, he published a letter on April 19, 1942, which was read in every Catholic church in the country. The bishops of Holland jointly denounced "the unmerciful and unjust treatment meted out to Jews by those in power in our country." The Nazis responded by revoking the exception that had been given to Jews who had been baptized and a round up was ordered. The Gestapo made a special effort to round up every monk, nun and priest who had even a drop of Jewish blood. Some 300 victims were deported to Auschwitz and immediately sent to the gas chambers. Among them was Saint Edith Stein. According to John Vidmar, "The brutality of the retaliation made an enormous impression on Pius XII." Henceforth, he avoided open, confrontational denunciations of the Nazis.

Dr. Peter Gumpel writes:

The action of the Dutch bishops had important repercussions. Pius XII had already prepared the text of a public protest against the persecution of the Jews. Shortly before this text was sent to L’Osservatore Romano, news reached him of the disastrous consequences of the Dutch bishops’ initiative. He concluded that public protests, far from alleviating the fate of the Jews, aggravated their persecution and he decided that he could not take the responsibility of his own intervention having similar and probably even much more serious consequences. Therefore he burnt the text he had prepared. The International Red Cross, the nascent World Council of Churches and other Christian Churches were fully aware of such consequences of vehement public protests and, like Pius XII, they wisely avoided them.

Aid to Jews during Holocaust

Main article: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Following Kristalnacht (1938), the Vatican took steps to find refuge for Jews and at the outbreak of the war, local bishops were instructed to assist those in need. Catholic institutions across Europe were opened as shelter for Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, and the institutions of the Vatican itself were employed in this purpose. Pius XII allowed the national hierarchies of the Church to assess and respond to their local situation under Nazi rule, but himself established the Vatican Information Service to provide aid to, and information about, war refugees and saved thousands of Jewish lives by directing the church to discreetly provide aid to Jews. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Pius chose to "use diplomacy to aid the persecuted" and upon his death was "praised effusively by world leaders and especially by Jewish groups for his actions during World War II on behalf of the persecuted".

In his 1942 Christmas message, Pius expressed sympathy for those suffering racial persecution: “who without fault… sometimes only because of race or nationality, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.” According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he refused to say more "fearing that public papal denunciations might provoke the Hitler regime to brutalize further those subject to Nazi terror — as it had when Dutch bishops publicly protested earlier in the year—while jeopardizing the future of the church".

The Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide interviewed war survivors and concluded that Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands". Most historians dispute this estimate while Rabbi David Dalin called Pinchas Lapide's work "the definitive work by a Jewish scholar" on the holocaust.

Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione received a request from Chief Rabbi of Palestine Isaac Herzog in the Spring of 1940 to intercede on behalf of Lithuanian Jews about to be deported to Germany. Pius called Ribbentrop on March 11, repeatedly protesting against the treatment of Jews. In his 1940 encyclical Summi Pontificatus, Pius rejected anti-semitism, stating that in the Catholic Church there is "neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision."

On January 2, 1940, the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs in Chicago sent the Pope a contribution of $125,000 toward the Vatican's efforts to save "all those persecuted because of religion or race." The Pope kept in place an emigration program established by his predecessor, Pius XI, which helped Jews gain admittance to Brazil. Between 1939 and 1941, 3,000 Jews reached safety in South America.

Giovanni Ferrofino is credited with saving 10,000 Jews. Acting on secret orders from Pope Pius XII, Ferrofino obtained visas from the Portuguese Government and the Dominican Republic to secure their escape from Europe and sanctuary in the Americas.

Between 1939 and 1944, Pius XII supplied passports, money, tickets and letters of recommendation to foreign governments so Jewish refugees could receive visas. Through these actions, another 4,000-6,000 Jews reached safety.

Alleged antisemitism

In the summer of 1942, Pius explained to his college of Cardinals the reasons for the great gulf that existed between Jews and Christians at the theological level: "Jerusalem has responded to His call and to His grace with the same rigid blindness and stubborn ingratitude that has led it along the path of guilt to the murder of God." Historian Guido Knopp describes these comments of Pius as being "incomprehensible" at a time when "Jerusalem was being murdered by the million".

In 1963, The Deputy, a fictional play by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth depicted the Pope as indifferent to the Nazi genocide. In 1999 the highly controversial Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell, depicted the Pope as an anti-Semite. In the assessment of the Encyclopedia Brittanica: "Both depictions, however, lack credible substantiation" and "though Pius's wartime public condemnations of racism and genocide were cloaked in generalities, he did not turn a blind eye to the suffering but chose to use diplomacy to aid the persecuted. It is impossible to know if a more forthright condemnation of the Holocaust would have proved more effective in saving lives, though it probably would have better assured his reputation."

Alleged silence regarding the Holocaust

Pius XII has been accused of not making strong enough protests against the murder of the Jews.

The Vatican was prohibited by the Lateran Treaty from intervening in political matters, and likewise by the German concordat – any breach of which by the Vatican would justify further breaches by the Nazis. The Italians themselves argued that any criticisms of Germany were political interventions in breach of the Lateran treaty, since Germany was Italy’s ally.

Another reason proffered for Pius' reluctance to do so was a perceived need for firm proof that would be sustainable in any diplomatic exchanges or in the court of world opinion; unproven (and demonstrably false accusations) had been made regarding atrocities allegedly committed by German troops during World War I. Furthermore, without being even-handed and condemning Stalin’s atrocities against Soviet and Polish citizens, the Pope would be vulnerable to accusations of bias against the Nazis; such an accusation could have seriously undermined the influence the Vatican might have over German Catholics. The Allies were exceedingly anxious to prevent a Papal condemnation of Stalin, which would have hurt the Allied effort.

Pius XII also never publicly condemned the Nazi massacre of 1.8 - 1.9 million mainly Catholic Poles (including 2,935 members of the Catholic Clergy), nor did he ever publicly condemn the Soviet Union for the deaths of 1,000,000 mainly Catholic Polish citizens including an untold number of clergy.

In a letter to Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, Pius referred to the Nazi retribution in Holland as one reason why he offered only muted criticism in his public statements:

"We leave it to the [local] bishops to weigh the circumstances in deciding whether or not to exercise restraint, ad maiora mala vitanda [to avoid greater evil]. This would be advisable if the danger of retaliatory and coercive measures would be imminent in cases of public statements of the bishop. Here lies one of the reasons We Ourselves restrict Our public statements. The experience We had in 1942 with documents which We released for distribution to the faithful gives justification, as far as We can see, for Our attitude."

In a conversation with Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI), Pius said, "We would like to utter words of fire against such actions; and the only thing restraining Us from speaking is the fear of making the plight of the victims worse"

In December 1942, when Tittman asked Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione if Pius would issue a proclamation similar to the Allied declaration "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race", Maglione replied that the Vatican was "unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities." However, in his Christmas address the Pope expressed his concerns for the “hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.”

A month later Ribbentrop wrote to the German Ambassador to the Holy See: “there are signs that the Vatican is likely to renounce its traditional neutral attitude and take up a political position against Germany . You are to inform him (the Pope) that in that event Germany does not lack physical means of retaliation.” The Ambassador reported that Pius indicated that “he did not care what happened to himself, but that a struggle between Church and State could have only one outcome – the defeat of the State. I replied that I was of the contrary opinion….. an open battle could bring some very unpleasant surprises for the Church. … Pacelli (Pius XII) is no more sensible to threats than we are. In event of an open breach with us, he now calculates that some German Catholics will leave the Church but he is convinced that the majority will remain true to their Faith. And that the German Catholic clergy will screw up its courage, prepared for the greatest sacrifices.”

On April 30, 1943, Pius wrote to Bishop Von Preysing of Berlin to say: "We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals and of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations... ad maiora mala vitanda (to avoid worse)... seem to advise caution. Here lies one of the reasons, why We impose self-restraint on Ourselves in our speeches; the experience, that we made in 1942 with papal addresses, which We authorized to be forwarded to the Believers, justifies our opinion, as far as We see.... The Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance. To say nothing of the substantial sums which we spent in American money for the fares of immigrants."

Conversions of Jews to Catholicism

The conversion of Jews to Catholicism during the Holocaust is one of the most controversial aspects of the record of Pope Pius XII during that period.

According to Roth and Ritner, "this is a key point because, in debates about Pius XII, his defenders regularly point to denunciations of racism and defense of Jewish converts as evidence of opposition to antisemitism of all sorts. The Holocaust is one of the most acute examples of the "recurrent and acutely painful issue in the Catholic-Jewish dialogue", namely "Christian efforts to convert Jews".

Persecution of Catholics by Nazi Germany

Catholic clergy, religious orders and laity, especially converted Jews, all suffered persecution under the Nazi regime. Many were deported to concentration camps and were either murdered or died from hardship and privation.

Criticism of Pius XII

After the war, some historians accused the Church of encouraging centuries of antisemitism, and Pope Pius XII of not doing enough to stop Nazi atrocities. A leading proponent of this criticism is David Kertzer. However, many scholars dispute Kertzer's findings. Jose Sanchez, history professor at St. Louis University criticized Kertzer's work as polemical and exaggerating the papacy's role in anti-Semitism. Scholar of Jewish-Christian relations Rabbi David G. Dalin criticized Kertzer for using evidence selectively to support his thesis. Ronald J. Rychlak, lawyer and author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope, also decried Kertzer's work for omitting strong evidence that the Church was not anti-Semitic.

However, many others including prominent members of the Jewish community have refuted these criticisms of Pius and spoken highly of his efforts to protect Jews.

After the war, Pius XII's efforts to protect their people were recognised by prominent Jews including Rabbi Isaac Herzog. However, the Church has also been accused by some of encouraging centuries of antisemitism and Pius himself of not doing enough to stop Nazi atrocities. Prominent members of the Jewish community have contradicted these criticisms. Lichten, Lapide, and other Jewish historians report that the Catholic Church provided funds totalling in the millions of dollars to assist Jews during World War II.

In 1999, British journalist and author John Cornwell published Hitler's Pope, a book that examines the actions of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi era and explores the charge that he assisted in the legitimization of Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany through the signing of the Reichskonkordat. The book is critical of Pius' conduct during the Second World War, criticizing him for not doing enough, or speaking out enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argued that Pius's entire career as the nuncio to Germany, cardinal secretary of state, and pope was characterized by a desire to increase and centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He further argued that Pius was anti-Semitic and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews.

Cornwell has been praised for attempting to bring into the open the debate on the Catholic Church's relationship with the Nazis, but also accused of making unsubstantiated claims and ignoring positive evidence. The Encyclopedia Britannica addressed Conrnwell's book in the following terms: "John Cornwell's controversial book on Pius, Hitler's Pope (1999), characterized him as anti-Semitic. [The depiction], however, lack[s] credible substantiation".

Other commentators have characterized the book as having since been "debunked"., The author, himself, has since retracted his accusations in substantial part, saying that it is "impossible to judge the motives" of the Pope. but that "Nevertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did."

Historian John Toland noted: “The Church, under the Pope’s guidance…saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined…the British and Americans, despite lofty pronouncements, had not only avoided taking any meaningful action but gave sanctuary to few persecuted Jews.”

The Ratlines: Helping Nazis to flee

Main article: Ratlines (history)

At the end of the war, top Catholic officers organized the so-called ratlines that allowed Nazi war criminals to flee towards South America and other destinations via Francoist Spain. Bishop Alois Hudal and Cardinals Luigi Maglione, Eugene Tisserant and Antonio Caggiano, as well as the seminary in San Girolamo degli Illirici of Father Krunoslav Draganović were specially active in this task. Thousands of presumed European Catholic immigrants, actually Nazis in disguise, were able to escape from Europe using these networks.

Post war attitudes to Nazi Germany

Since the end of the Second World War, the Catholic Church has moved to honour Catholic resistors and victims of Nazism through canonisation of saints, beatification of the virtuous and recognition of martyrs. The Church has also issued statements of repentance for its failings and the failings of its membership during the Nazi period.

Apology of Pope John Paul II

In 2000 Pope John Paul II on behalf of all people, apologized to Jews by inserting a prayer at the Western Wall that read "We're deeply saddened by the behavior of those in the course of history who have caused the children of God to suffer, and asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant." This papal apology, one of many issued by Pope John Paul II for past human and Church failings throughout history, was especially significant because John Paul II emphasized Church guilt for, and the Second Vatican Council's condemnation of, anti-Semitism. The papal letter We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, urged Catholics to repent "of past errors and infidelities" and "renew the awareness of the Hebrew roots of their faith."

Notes

See also

• Kirchenkampf
• Holy See – Germany relations

References

Sources

• Bokenkotter, Thomas (2004). A Concise History of the Catholic Church. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-50584-1.
• Chadwick, Owen (1995). A History of Christianity. Barnes & Noble. ISBN 0-7607-7332-7.
• Coppa, Frank J. (1999). Controversial Concordats. Catholic University of America Press. ISBN 978-0-8132-0920-3.
• Courtois, Stephane (1999). The Black Book of Communism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Duffy, Eamon (1997). Saints and Sinners, a History of the Popes. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07332-1.
• Falconi, Carlo (1967). The Popes in the Twentieth Century. Feltrinelli Editore. 68-14744.
• McGonigle (1996). A History of the Christian Tradition: From its Jewish roots to the Reformation. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-3648-3.
• Norman, Edward (2007). The Roman Catholic Church, An Illustrated History. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25251-6.
• Pham, John Peter (2006). Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517834-3.
• Phayer, Michael (2000). The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21471-8.
• Rhodes, Anthony (1973). The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators (1922-1945). Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• Shirer, William L. (1990). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-72868-7.
• Vidmar, John (2005). The Catholic Church Through the Ages. Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-4234-1.

External links

• German Historic Museum: Das Reichskonkordat Template:De icon
• The Vatican Concordat With Hitler's Reich by Robert.E. Krieg