Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
"Popes Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958) led the Catholic Church during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Around a third of Germans were Catholic in the 1930s, most of them lived in Southern Germany; Protestants dominated the north. The Catholic Church in Germany opposed the Nazi Party, and in the 1933 elections, the proportion of Catholics who voted for the Nazi Party was lower than the national average.
Nevertheless, the Catholic-aligned Centre Party voted for the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Adolf Hitler additional domestic powers to suppress political opponents as Chancellor of Germany. President Paul Von Hindenburg continued to serve as Commander and Chief and he also continued to be responsible for the negotiation of international treaties until his death on 2 August 1934.
Hitler and several other key Nazis had been raised as Catholics but they became hostile to the Church in their adulthoods; Article 24 of the National Socialist Program called for conditional toleration of Christian denominations and the 1933 Reichskonkordat treaty with the Vatican guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics, but the Nazis sought to suppress the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. Catholic press, schools, and youth organizations were closed, property was confiscated, and about one-third of its clergy faced reprisals from authorities; Catholic lay leaders were among those murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
During the rule of the regime, the Church frequently found itself in a difficult position. The Church hierarchy (in Germany) tried to work with the new government, but Pius XI's 1937 encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, accused the government of hostility to the church. Catholics fought on both sides during the Second World War, and Hitler's invasion of predominantly-Catholic Poland ignited the conflict in 1939. In the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, as in the annexed regions of Slovenia and Austria, Nazi persecution of the church was intense; many Polish clergy were targeted for extermination.
Through his links to the German Resistance, Pope Pius XII warned the Allies about the planned Nazi invasion of the Low Countries in 1940. The Nazis gathered dissident priests that year in a dedicated barracks at Dachau, where 95 percent of its 2,720 inmates were Catholic (mostly Poles, with 411 Germans); over 1,000 priests died there. The expropriation of church properties surged after 1941. Although the Vatican (surrounded by Fascist Italy) was officially neutral during the war, it used diplomacy to aid victims and lobby for peace; Vatican Radio and other Catholic media spoke out against the atrocities.
Particular clerics stridently opposed Nazi crimes, as in Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen's 1941 sermons in which he expressed his opposition to the regime and its euthanasia programs. Even so, Hitler biographer Alan Bullock wrote: "Neither the Catholic Church, nor the Evangelical Church ... as institutions, felt it possible to take up an attitude of open opposition to the regime". Mary Fulbrook wrote that when politics encroached on the church, Catholics were prepared to resist; the record was patchy and uneven, though, and (with notable exceptions) "it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship".
However, even as the Church hierarchy attempted to tread delicately lest the Church itself be destroyed, actively resisting priests such as Heinrich Maier sometimes acted against the express instructions of his church superiors to found groups that, unlike others, sought actively to influence the course of the war in favor of the Allies.
According to Robert A. Krieg, "Catholic bishops, priests, and lay leaders had criticized National Socialism since its inception in the early 1920s", while The Sewanee Review remarked in 1934 that even "when the Hitler movement was still small and apparently insignificant, German Catholic ecclesiastics recognized its inherent threat to certain beliefs and principles of their Church".
Catholic sermons and newspapers vigorously denounced Nazism and accused it of espousing neopaganism, and Catholic priests forbade believers from joining the NSDAP. Waldemar Gurian noted that the upper Catholic bishops issued several condemnations of the NSDAP starting in 1930 and 1931, and describing the relations between the National Socialism and the Catholic Church, concluded that "though there has been no legal declaration of war, a war is nevertheless going on." Ludwig Maria Hugo was the first Catholic bishop to condemn membership in the Nazi party, and in 1931 Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber wrote that "the bishops as guardians of the true teachings of faith and morals must issue a warning about National Socialism, so long as and insofar as it maintains cultural-political views that are not reconcilable with Catholic doctrine."
Cardinal Faulhaber's outspoken criticism of National Socialism gained widespread attention and support from German Catholic churches, and Cardinal Adolf Bertram called German Catholics to oppose National Socialism in its entirety because it "stands in the most pointed contradiction to the fundamental truths of Christianity". According to the Sewanee Review, "Catholics were expressly forbidden to become registered members of the National Socialist party; disobedient Catholics were refused admission to the sacraments; groups in Nazi uniform and with Nazi banners were not admitted to church services". The condemnations of Nazism by Bertram and von Faulhaber reflected the views of most German Catholics, but many of them were also disillusioned with the institutions of the Weimar Republic.
Nazi anti-Semitism embraced pseudoscientific racial principles, but ancient antipathies between Christianity and Judaism also contributed to European antisemitism. Anti-Semitism was present in both German Protestantism and Catholicism, but "anti-Semitic acts and attitudes became relatively more frequent in Protestant areas relative to Catholic areas".
Even so, in every country under German occupation, priests played a major role in rescuing Jews. The church rescued thousands of Jews by issuing false documents to them, lobbying Axis officials, and hiding Jews in monasteries, convents, schools, the Vatican and the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo. Although Pius XII's role during this period was later contested, the Reich Security Main Office called him a "mouthpiece" for the Jews and in his first encyclical (Summi Pontificatus), he called the invasion of Poland an "hour of darkness". In his 1942 Christmas address, he denounced race murders, and in his 1943 encyclical Mystici corporis Christi, he denounced the murder of disabled people.
In the post-war period, false identification documents were given to many German war criminals by Catholic priests such as Alois Hudal, frequently facilitating their escape to South America. Both Protestant and Catholic clergy routinely provided Persilschein or "soap certificates" to former Nazis in order to remove the "Nazi taint"; but at no time was such aid an institutional effort. According to a Catholic historian Michael Hesemann, Vatican itself was outraged by such efforts, and Pope Pius XII demanded removal of involved clergy such as Hudal …"
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