Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany was a component of German resistance to Nazism and of Resistance during World War II. The role of the Catholic Church during the Nazi years remains a matter of much contention. From the outset of Nazi rule in 1933, issues emerged which brought the church into conflict with the regime and persecution of the church led Pope Pius XI to denounce the policies of the Nazi Government in the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. His successor Pius XII faced the war years and provided intelligence to the Allies. Catholics fought on both sides in World War II and neither the Catholic nor Protestant churches as institutions were prepared to openly oppose the Nazi State.
An estimated one-third of German Catholic priests faced some form of reprisal from authorities and thousands of Catholic clergy and religious were sent to concentration camps. 400 Germans were among the 2,579 Catholic priests imprisoned in the clergy barracks at Dachau. While the head German bishop generally avoided confronting the regime, other bishops such as Preysing, Frings and Galen developed a Catholic critique of aspects of Nazism. Galen led Catholic protest against Nazi "euthanasia".
Catholic resistance to mistreatment of Jews in Germany was generally limited to fragmented and largely individual efforts. But in every country under German occupation, priests played a major part in rescuing Jews. Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide estimated that Catholic rescue of Jews amounted to somewhere between 700,000 and 860,000 people and credited that to Pope Pius XII.though the figure is contested. The martyrs Maximilian Kolbe, Giuseppe Girotti and Bernhard Lichtenberg were among those killed in part for aiding Jews. Among the notable Catholic networks to rescue Jews and others were Hugh O'Flaherty's "Rome Escape Line," at the behest of Pope Pius XII, the Assisi Network and Poland's Żegota.
Relations between the Axis governments and the church varied. Bishops such as the Netherlands' Johannes de Jong, Belgium's Jozef-Ernest van Roey and France's Jules-Géraud Saliège issued major denunciations of Nazi treatment of Jews. Convents and nuns like Margit Slachta and Matylda Getter also led resistance. Vatican diplomats like Giuseppe Burzio in Slovakia, Filippo Bernardini in Switzerland and Angelo Roncalli in Turkey saved thousands. The nuncio to Budapest, Angelo Rotta, and Bucharest, Andrea Cassulo, have been recognised by Yad Vashem in Israel. The nationalist regimes in Slovakia and Croatia were pro-clerical, while in Slovene, Czech, Austrian and Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, repression of the church was at its most severe and the Catholic religion was integral to much Polish resistance.
Author Klaus Scholder writes: "There was no Catholic resistance in Germany, there were only Catholics who resisted."Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, p. 131 The Vatican policy meant that the Pope never challenged Catholics to side either with Nazism or with Catholic morality, and Pius XII was so adamant that Bolshevism represented the most terrible threat to the world that he remarked "Germany are a great nation who, in their fight against Bolshevism, are bleeding not only for their friends but also for the sake of their present enemies."Beth A.Griech-Polelle, von Galen, p. 144 In a letter of autumn 1941 Pius XII wrote to Bishop Preysing, "We emphasise that, because the Church in Germany is dependent upon your public behaviour...in public declarations you are duty bound to exercise restraint" and "requires(d) you and your colleagues not to protest."Lettres de Pie XII, no.76, 230
Background
Nazis rise to power In the 1920s and 1930s, Catholic leaders made a number of forthright attacks on Nazi ideology and the main Christian opposition to Nazism had come from the Catholic Church. German bishops were hostile to the emerging movement and energetically denounced its "false doctrines". They warned Catholics against Nazi racism and some dioceses banned membership of the Nazi Party, while the Catholic press criticized the Nazi movement. Figures like Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, appalled by the totalitarianism, neopaganism, and racism of the Nazi movement, had contributed to the failure of the Nazi Munich Putsch of 1923.
The Nazis disliked universities, intellectuals and the Catholic and Protestant churches. Hamerow writes that many Nazis suspected Catholics of insufficient patriotism, or even of disloyalty to the Fatherland, and of serving the interests of "sinister alien forces". Various historians surmise that the long-term plan of the Nazis was to de-Christianise Germany after final victory in the war. Nazi ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment, whose legitimacy did not spring from the government, and the Nazis desired the subordination of the church to the state. In his history of the German Resistance, Hamerow wrote:
The Centre Party and Hitler
The German Centre Party (Zentrum) was a lay Catholic-aligned political party that had been a force in Weimar politics and competed against the Nazis through the 1920s and 1930s for parliamentary representation. In the lead up to the Nazi takeover, Catholic regions stayed largely loyal to Zentrum and did not vote Nazi. Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, greatest gains for the Nazis came in the Protestant, rural towns of the North. Nazis and Communists pledged to eliminate democracy and secured over 50% of Reichstag seats.
A middle class liberal party strong enough to block the Nazis did not exist; the Centre Party was preoccupied defending its own particular interests. Requiring the votes of the Centre Party and Conservatives, Hitler told the Reichstag on 23 March that Positive Christianity was the "unshakeable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people", and promised not to threaten the churches or the institutions of the Republic if granted plenary powers. Employing negotiation and intimidation, the Nazis called on the Reichstag to vote for the Enabling Act on 24 March 1933. Zentrum, having obtained promises of non-interference in religion, joined with Conservatives in voting for the Act (only the Social Democrats voted against).
Church Struggle commences
When the Nazis won power in 1933, Catholics were apprehensive and a threatening, though initially sporadic persecution of the Catholic Church commenced. Leading Nazis like Goebbels and Hitler's war-time deputy Martin Bormann saw the conflict with the churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anti-clerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists. But Catholics constituted a third of the population, and Hitler was prepared to restrain the full extent of his anti-clerical ambitions out of political considerations, intending instead to have a showdown after the war. Hitler moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism, rounding up thousands of functionaries of the Bavarian People's Party and Centre Party, before outlawing non-Nazi political parties.
Concordat signed and breached
Amid continuing molestation of its clergy and organisations, the church was anxious to reach agreement securing its rights in Germany with the new Reich Government. Conservative Vice-Chancellor Papen negotiated the Reich concordat with the Holy See which guaranteed the Church's rights in Germany, but prohibited clergy from participating in politics. Clerical opposition diminished following the agreement, but Hitler had a blatant disregard for the concordat, which he incorporated into steps to suppress the church in Germany. The Nazis immediately breached the treaty, interfering with Catholic schooling, youth groups, workers' clubs and cultural societies, instigating sterilisation laws, and targeting clergy, nuns and lay leaders, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or "immorality":
Catholics targeted
In the night of the long knives purge of 1934, Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action, was assassinated by the Gestapo. Adalbert Probst, national director of the Catholic Youth Sports Association, Fritz Gerlich, editor of Munich's Catholic weekly and Edgar Jung, one of the authors of the Marburg speech, were among the other high-profile Catholic opposition figures targeted for assassination in the purge.
The Nazi official philosopher Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book Myth of the 20th Century had nominated Christianity and Catholicism as one of the enemies of Nazism. The church put the book the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1934 for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, indeed the very fundamentals of the Christian religion".
Goebbels believed that there was an "insoluble opposition" between the Christian and Nazi outlooks, and became one of the leaders of the persecution of the clergy. In his 1936 campaign against the monasteries and convents, the authorities charged 276 members of religious orders with the offence of "homosexuality".
Rosenberg and Bormann also actively collaborated in the Nazi program to eliminate church influencea program which included the abolition of religious services in schools; the confiscation of religious property; circulating anti-religious material to soldiers; and the closing of theological faculties. Hitler feared the idealism of Christians. In the Nazi security forces, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler wanted to suppress "political churches", such as Lutheran and Catholic clergy who opposed the Hitler regime.
By 1940, a dedicated clergy barracks had been established by the Nazis at Dachau Concentration Camp.Paul Berben; Dachau: The Official History 1933–1945; Norfolk Press; London; 1975; ; p. 143 Catholic schools in Germany were phased out by 1939 and Catholic press by 1941. With the expansion of the war in the East from 1941, there came also an expansion of the regime's attack on the church. Monasteries and convents were targeted and expropriation of church properties surged.John S. Conway; The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945; Regent College Publishing; p. 255
Within Germany
Foundations Though neither the Catholic nor Protestent churches as institutions were prepared to openly oppose the Nazi State, the churches provided the earliest and most enduring centres of systematic opposition to Nazi policies, and Christian morality and the anti-church policies of the Nazis motivated many German resistors and provided impetus for the "moral revolt" of individuals in their efforts to overthrow Hitler. From the outset of Nazi rule in 1933, issues emerged which brought the Catholic church into conflict with the regime, and the historian Wolf cites events such as the July Plot of 1944 as having been "inconceivable without the spiritual support of church resistance". The German Opposition saw National Socialism as standing in "radical opposition to the Western, Christian tradition". Hoffmann writes that, from the beginning:
Ernst Wolf wrote that some credit must be given to the resistance of the churches, for providing "moral stimulus and guidance for the political Resistance ...". Virtually all of the military conspirators in the July Plot were religious men. Among the social democrat political conspirators, the Christian influence was also strong, though humanism also played a significant foundational roleand among the wider circle there were other political, military and nationalist motivations at play. The Kreisau leader Helmuth James Graf von Moltke declared in one of his final letters before execution that the essence of the July revolt was "outrage of the Christian conscience". The "Declaration of Government" that was to be broadcast following the coup on 20 July 1944 appealed unambiguously to Christian sensibility:
Limitations