— CLEMENS AUGUST, BISHOP OF MÜNSTER AND GRAF VON GALEN —
The Lion of Münster
‘Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat!’
It was with these words that Hermann Göring tried to prepare the German people for the privations of the war that Nazism was about to unleash upon the world. It was an attempt to frame the Fascist struggle as a national one, requiring as much willpower on behalf of the housewife in the kitchen as the soldier at the front. Ironically, Göring himself, largely due to his own refusal to forswear rich food even at the height of wartime shortages, weighed in at eighteen and a half stone (118kg). Indeed, he was so corpulent that the American pilot who captured him had to request a more substantial plane to carry him, as the light aircraft originally tasked with the journey couldn’t take his weight. But butter did, in fact, cause real trouble for the Nazis. Had it not been for butter, it is quite possible that Clemens von Galen would never have come to public prominence in quite the way he did.
Clemens August was the eleventh of thirteen children born to a devout Roman Catholic family in Westphalia in 1878, at the height of the Second German Empire. His parents made it their habit to attend Mass daily and were determined that their children would do so too. Clemens was not a thin child (indeed, he had a substantial waistline and a commanding height as an adult too, just about the only things he had in common with Göring). Knowing that he could also be stubborn, his parents decided that a very particular approach was needed in order to foster Catholic devotion in their antepenultimate child. When Clemens turned up late for morning worship, he would suffer the penalty of eating his morning collation without his favourite dairy product. The thought of going without butter was too much for young Clemens to bear and so he became a regular attendee of Mass, leading to a vocation to ordained ministry.
It was in this ministry that he was to find a role that led him to become ‘The Lion of Münster’ and, in his position as outspoken bishop of that city, draw the ire of the Nazi regime as well as the praise of resistance fighters, Jewish leaders and the Allied high command. Not that any of these necessarily affected him; it was no coincidence that, when he was made a bishop, he chose as his motto Nec laudibus, nec timore, meaning ‘swayed by neither praise nor fear’. Having initially been written off as a tubby reactionary who owed his appointment to the fact that the Nazis thought he would make a pliable ally, he became a personal bête noire for the Führer and a symbol of resistance to Fascism, not least because his opposition to Nazism was not in spite of the fact that he was a German, but because of it. Butter may well have made Bishop von Galen fat, but he was a living witness in the very midst of Nazism that power is not only achieved by wielding a gun.
Other than the occasional threat of butterless breakfasts, Clemens August had, by all accounts, a happy childhood. The von Galen family were a fixture in the aristocratic circles of north-west Germany, where, in the small town of Dinklage, they had owned a castle since the mid-seventeenth century. Young Clemens enjoyed a youth punctuated by all the activities expected of his class at the time. He was sent to an elite Austrian boarding school run by the Jesuit order (where pupils were forbidden to speak any language other than Latin) and, when he returned home for holidays, spent long summers tromping around the countryside, hunting and fishing with his brother Franz. The family were not, however, out of touch with the rest of the world; his father was a Member of Parliament for the Centre Party, a political grouping that tried to steer a socially conscious middle course between left and right in the politically volatile climate of the newly united Germany. Clemens’ brother Franz was to become the only Centre Party politician to oppose the Enabling Act that brought the Nazis to power (under the foolish premise that the Centre Party’s leader, Franz von Papen, could exert a controlling influence on Hitler) and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp for his trouble. The von Galen clan, therefore, gained a reputation as loyal public servants, but ones who could dig their heels in and cause difficulties if and when they so wished. This familial stubbornness was evident in Clemens too; one of his school reports contained the following sentences from an exasperated Jesuit: ‘Infallibility is the main problem with Clemens, who under no circumstances will admit that he might be wrong. It is always the teacher who is mistaken.’
This single-mindedness was to be a defining feature of the bishop’s life. Moving back to Germany to attend a less precocious secular public school in Lower Saxony wasn’t enough to tempt the young Clemens to abandon his deeply held faith. When he graduated, he found that, in the yearbook presented to students as a leaving present, his entry read, ‘Clemens doesn’t chase girls or get drunk.’ Even during the more strait-laced days of 1896, this was considered unusually chaste behaviour for an eighteen-year-old. He spent the next eight years immersed in study and, in 1904, was finally ordained a priest.
After a year or so working as a secretary for a clerical relative (there were von Galens dotted across Germany), he moved to become the priest of a deprived parish in Berlin, where his dominating figure and strong pastoral instinct won him a devoted following among the poor. Initially, von Galen focused exclusively on the immediate pastoral needs of those around him. Indeed, he had only two stated interests other than his parish work: pipe-smoking and listening to marching bands. His fellow clergy routinely commented on the spartan atmosphere of his rooms and the unpretentious nature of his dress, both attempts by the son of a Westphalian count to blend in with the gritty environment of Berlin.
Parish work ruled his life until the outbreak of the First World War, when he, in common with clergy across the western world, toed the line that it was a duty to fight for the fatherland. Defeat in 1918, therefore, represented the crumbling of the order that had been such an integral part of the worldview of von Galen’s youth. He was appalled at the loss of the monarchy and, as political instability and food shortages devastated Berlin, he threw himself into social programmes and soup kitchens. These were projects he supported as much to prevent the ferment of revolutionary anti-clerical ideas (he had been horrified by reports of the mass slaughter of clergy in Russia after the revolution there) as to distract himself from a world now turned upside down. While von Galen’s day-to-day work consisted of much the same practical help for the poorest as it had prior to the First World War, his political alignment shifted significantly to the right. He even went as far as to openly criticise the party his father and brother had served so assiduously, stating that it was far too left wing. The violent instability of interwar Germany only affirmed von Galen’s reactionary opinions and, therefore, it was no surprise that, when he was announced as the new Bishop of Münster in 1933, local Nazis joined in the celebrations, even sending stormtroopers to his first service in a show of support.
Von Galen was a controversial choice as bishop. He only received the nomination after the favourite and a number of subsequent nominees turned down the offer of the role. Even then, the Vatican’s chief diplomat in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, tried to block the appointment, referring to von Galen as ‘a bossy paternalist’. Ironically, it was Orsenigo who would later become close to the Nazis and von Galen who would turn his fire onto the Fascist government as tales of their crimes became known. Clemens August von Galen was nothing if not a man of surprises.
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It took von Galen just under a month to fall foul of the governing party which had sent its armed goons to celebrate his enthronement; a turnaround which, even for a figure as combative and stubborn as the new Bishop of Münster, is pretty impressive. His first clash with the Nazis came over their efforts to shape schools around an entirely new curriculum, a move that serves as evidence of how Fascism sought to control the minutiae of public life, as well as how seriously it took the indoctrination of the young with a message of hate. Not long after von Galen’s consecration on 28th October 1933, the Nazi superintendent of education for the Münster district ordered that all schools should teach their pupils about the fundamental inferiority of the Jewish race and warn them of the threat posed by ‘the People of Israel’ to the morale and structure of the German state. Bellicose as ever, von Galen refused to allow any change to the curriculum, immediately sending out precisely the opposite message to that intended by the Nazi reforms by composing a pastoral document to be read out in all churches and schools, emphasising the need to ‘act with charity toward all men’.
Von Galen then went further, mocking the pseudo-religious ideological viewpoint of Nazi policy. One group, calling themselves Deutsche Christen, or ‘The German Christians’, tried to fuse Nazi anti-Semitism with the thought of the early Christian thinker Marcion of Sinope (despite the fact that all Churches had long since declared him a heretic) and demanded the removal from the Bible of both the Old Testament and any Jewish references in the New Testament (tricky given Jesus’ birthplace, race, religion, etc.). Alongside these academically dubious figures stood a key guiding figure in German governmental religious policy at the time, a man known as the intellectual godfather of Nazism, Dr Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was looking to eradicate Christianity in favour of a new Reich religion, based around a pseudo-pagan concept almost entirely of his own devising that he called ‘Nordic Blood Soul’. Unsurprisingly, the combative von Galen found plenty to mock in these ideas. In an official response for a Catholic publication, he stated that such theories were worthy ‘only of laughter in intellectual circles’ and made a robust defence of the Hebrew scriptures and their absolutely essential role in both Christianity and Judaism. This public derision earned him the lifelong hatred of Rosenberg, who referred to the bishop as ‘the greatest religious enemy of Nazi Germany’ and later pushed for his execution. In the short term, his mockery also earned him a visit from high-ranking SS officer Jürgen Stroop. When Stroop told him in no uncertain terms that he must fall into line, Galen first mocked him for attending a Neo-Aryan Pagan service earlier that week, then suggested he ought to be more like his elderly mother, whom the bishop knew to be a devout Roman Catholic.
As the darkest sides of the Nazi regime became clearer and more public, von Galen was forced to move to riskier, more public action. In 1937, he made the journey to Rome and there helped compose a document on behalf of Pope Pius XI. Called Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern), it marked the high-water mark of official diplomatic pronouncements by the Papacy against the Nazis. In it, not only were the rights of the Church asserted but, with a clear sign of von Galen’s hand, Nazi theories of race were strongly condemned, the role of Jewish culture and the Old Testament defended and, in a move that caused Hitler to fly into an explosive fit of rage, it not so subtly referred to the Führer as ‘a prophet of nothingness … at whom Heaven laughs’. The document was smuggled back into Germany and distributed; the Nazi response was swift. Printing presses were seized, clergy arrested and imprisoned and laws against the Church tightened. It was a salutary lesson to von Galen about the ruthlessness of the regime and the risks that even minor resistance would bring with it. Privately conceding that the path he had chosen might well lead to his own execution, he steeled himself for what was to come.
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The first person killed under the Nazi ‘Aktion T4’ involuntary euthanasia scheme was a disabled baby called Gerhard Kretschmar, injected with an overdose of barbiturates. Hitler personally signed the order to begin the killing of social undesirables (beginning with the mentally and physically disabled) in October 1939 but, tellingly, backdated it to a month earlier, although Gerhard had in fact been killed in July (as the first trial case in a scheme that eventually numbered about 300,000 people). The scheme began with children, whose parents were informed that they were being taken to centres where they could receive better care than they received either at home or in the existing network of nursing homes (which were almost entirely run by churches). After a couple of weeks, the parents would receive a letter informing them that their child had died of pneumonia or similar common conditions. In fact, they had been murdered by the Nazi state, designated as ‘lebensunwertes Leben’ (‘lives that are unworthy of life’). What began with disabled children soon progressed to adults, who by 1940 were being moved to specially built euthanasia centres and killed. The adults often proved more resistant than the children and so the Nazis began to experiment with the use of poison gas, enabling them to kill people from nursing homes, asylums and sanatoriums by the batch load as they arrived. It was a system that was to be repeated with grim efficiency after the Wannsee Conference of early 1942 when the Final Solution was set in motion.
While resistance was not immediate (the Nazi claim to be simply enacting administrative reorganisation was initially believed in a nation with a censored press), by late 1940 reports had begun to emerge of what was really happening at the sanatoriums. Von Galen and other bishops lobbied the Vatican to release a formal protest, restating that, by the laws of God and Man, ‘the killing of an innocent person because of physical or mental defects is forbidden’. The protest fell on deaf ears, with one senior Nazi commenting, ‘Thou shalt not kill is no commandment of God at all, but a Jewish invention.’ Frustrated at progress through the official channels, and increasingly shocked by the stories that were brought to him day by day, by 1941 von Galen had decided that he needed to take the initiative himself.
In the summer of that year, he preached a series of sermons that were to result in the most widespread period of peaceful protest against the government during the whole of the Third Reich and the only one to result in an actual reversal (in public at least) of Nazi policy. It also resulted in von Galen being placed under effective house arrest, and those around him being imprisoned or killed. In his first sermon, he railed against abuses of rights, especially focusing on the tactics of the Gestapo and the climate of fear that they had created. He observed that no one was safe from their violations of freedom, from their prison cells and their concentration camps. At the end of the address, the enormous figure of the bishop leaned over the pulpit and bellowed, ‘I, as a German, as a citizen, demand justice!’
The next week, he climbed into the pulpit again, a huge congregation having gathered, bringing together devout Christians, but also those committed to resistance, from secret Communists to Jews, attending undercover. It also attracted Nazi informers, Gestapo agents and party officials, all waiting for another attack on the regime that could be used against the bishop. They did not have to wait long. In his second sermon, von Galen moved from the evil deeds of the secret police to the injustice of the regime itself; it was not, he observed, Allied bombers who were destroying Germany (though the first raid to hit Münster had been a few weeks before, on 5th July, and, by the end of the war, nearly 90 per cent of the old city, including most of the cathedral, would be reduced to rubble). Rather, it was the poison and hatred that Fascism had sown from within.
Von Galen waited two weeks before preaching his third, final and most famous sermon. The summer light streamed through Münster Cathedral’s hotchpotch of architecturally stylised windows – from narrow arched openings in the great Romanesque west front to the great pointed arches of the Von Galen chapels (named for a previous von Galen Prince-Bishop) – as the current bishop of that name climbed to his pulpit again and delivered a blistering attack. He decried the ‘universal distrust’ at the centre of the Nazi regime, as it forced neighbour to testify against neighbour, doctor to kill patient, German to denounce German. ‘Woe on Germany,’ he cried, ‘woe to humanity itself!’ His booming voice filling the rafters of the heaving cathedral, he announced to faithful and faithless alike that the Nazi regime was ‘infected by Godlessness’ and that their actions were so sinful that it would be better to resist and be executed than be complicit: ‘Our motto must be Death rather than Sin.’ He also revealed the actual details of the Aktion T4 programme. He told the story of a man receiving treatment for trauma in a sanatorium whose son was fighting on for the regime on the Eastern Front and of how that very same regime callously put to death the soldier’s father as he was ‘unproductive’. ‘These are human beings, our brothers and sisters,’ the bishop cried, ‘productivity is no justification for killing.’ He warned his audience that, if the Nazis could break the Ninth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, they would be sure to break every other commandment as well.
The effect of the sermon was electrifying. Within days, thousands of copies had been circulated around Germany, despite immediate Gestapo attempts to suppress it. Copies reached soldiers at the front, many of whom wrote back to von Galen about the horrors they were experiencing there. Copies reached the University of Munich, where, inspired by the bishop’s challenge, a group of young students led by Sophie Scholl formed ‘The White Rose’, a group dedicated to non-violent resistance to Nazism. Copies reached the underground Protestant seminary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who expressed his deep regard for the Roman Catholic bishop’s stand. Copies even reached London, where the BBC began to broadcast them over their German service, in the hope of convincing the German population to reject Nazism. Copies also, of course, reached Nazi officials. Hitler was apoplectic and was said to be considering the suggestion of Martin Bormann (his secretary) and the pseudo-academic Rosenberg, von Galen’s old nemesis, that the bishop should be hanged. Von Galen himself told his confidants that he had accepted what was about to come and was ready to die a martyr and so live out his exhortation to ‘death rather than sin’ in his own circumstances.
Bizarrely, it was Joseph Goebbels who saved von Galen. He had received numerous reports about rising opposition to the Aktion T4 programme, with stories of mobs storming government euthanasia centres in order to liberate loved ones, and was fearful that executing the respected cleric, who was now known as ‘The Lion of Münster’, would precipitate open rebellion, especially given the heavy casualties from the newly launched campaign on the Eastern Front. The Propaganda Minister convinced the Nazi leadership that executing the bishop immediately would be a mistake; ‘in politics,’ he said, ‘one must know how to wait.’ Hitler was eventually persuaded not to take action against ‘that sly fox, Bishop von Galen’, although he made a solemn vow that, when the Reich’s supposedly inevitable victory came, retribution would be demanded from the bishop, and that he would pay with his life. In the meantime, the Führer called a halt to the public execution of the Aktion T4 programme (although it, of course, continued to operate with lower numbers and in secret). It was, arguably, the only successful domestic act of resistance within Germany during the Second World War.
While von Galen escaped execution, there was, naturally, retribution. He was placed under constant surveillance, his correspondence was checked and his movements were limited. The bishop’s own sister, herself a nun, was imprisoned by the Gestapo and locked in a cellar to await a swift trial and probable execution, only to be rescued through a window and smuggled away into hiding. His brother was deported to a concentration camp, an ordeal he also managed to survive. Others were not so lucky, with the numbers of clergy and lay Church members (including the young resistance members of the White Rose) rounded up and executed by the regime rising sharply in the following months. Thirty-seven priests and members of religious orders were arbitrarily selected from the bishop’s own diocese of Münster to enter concentration camps in von Galen’s stead, with a third of them dying there.
This consequence of his outspokenness haunted von Galen for the rest of his life. At the end of the war, in recognition of his resistance, the Pope supposedly congratulated him on his bravery in the face of such barbarity, at which the newly minted cardinal replied that the truly brave ones were those who had been imprisoned and murdered for words and deeds that were not theirs but his: ‘Many of my best priests died in concentration camps, and all because they distributed my sermons.’ He was heartbroken by the arrests and executions, and, for the rest of his life, routinely questioned if resistance truly had been the best path. For his own part, he spent the rest of the war under effective house arrest. By the time Allied victory came in 1945, von Galen had endured captivity, the destruction of his cathedral in a bombing raid and the deaths of many of his family and friends. His health and spirit seemed broken but, as new problems began to arise in the rubble of a defeated nation, the lion stirred again.
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As British, American and Soviet troops swept across Germany in 1945, tales of looting, murder and, especially, rape, against a predominately female civilian population began to be reported. Political or religious leaders with a shred of moral authority were few and far between in Germany at the time, but von Galen had now been liberated from the enforced silence that the Nazi regime had inflicted on him. A group of women appealed to him for justice. Fortified by his pipe and his brass band records, the von Galen of old awoke and took up the cause with gusto. He badgered Allied generals constantly to keep their troops in line, much to their chagrin, as they had expected to find a willing and pliable figurehead. Instead, they got a blistering response from von Galen, who informed the international press who had come to quote the influential words of the lion of German resistance that ‘just as I fought against Nazi injustice, so will I fight any injustice, no matter where it comes from’. He set to work exactly as he had at the end of the First World War, visiting prisoners, setting up soup kitchens and finding hostels for those dispossessed by the violence.
At Christmas 1945, it was announced that von Galen, as a reward for his actions resisting the Nazis, would be made a cardinal in Rome. Despite attempts to prolong the turbulent prelate’s house arrest and prevent the honouring of such an outspoken German figure, he made it to the Vatican and there announced that the achievement would stand as evidence that Germany could begin on a path of rehabilitation and return to ‘the family of nations’. He returned to Münster and, outside the bombed-out ruins of his cathedral, addressed the city, making sure to thank those in the resistance and in the ordinary ranks of the clergy who had made his own resistance possible. A couple of days later, the Lion of Münster was dead. Lack of medical supplies and facilities in a desolate city meant that a perforated appendix went undiagnosed and became fatal. He never got to see the new Germany free from the twin horrors of Communist and Fascist totalitarianism, for which he so dearly longed. And so, the city, and the nation, mourned its lion; a man who, be it for love of nation, love of humanity, love of God, or just love of butter, always sought to stand up for the weak and poor and to serve justice as he saw it.
Could von Galen have done more? Should he even have done what he did? Was he a selfish reactionary, looking out for the interests of the Church alone? Did he even, at times, exhibit some of the deep-rooted anti-Semitism of his class that made it easier for Nazism to take root in Germany? The answer may well be yes, although not, it must be said, an unqualified, absolute ‘yes’, to each of these questions. In the twenty-first century, we demand our public figures to be perfectly good or perfectly evil. Bishop von Galen was at neither extreme – he was a complex and imperfect figure, rooted in the attitudes of a particular time and place. And yet, regardless of his motives or the scale of his rebellion against Nazism, such were the horrors of that time and place, the absolute lack of hope, that von Galen’s acts of resistance, small though they were, must be counted. He bears witness, better than any other in this collection, to the power of the symbolic act and the ability of words to provide a focal point for resistance as much as any action. He may not have directly saved as many lives as others, but his words exerted such power that he forced even the supposedly unstoppable force of the Thousand-Year Reich to change its plans. He may not have blown up bridges or freed prisoners, but his charisma inspired those, from Bonhoeffer to the White Rose, who sought to keep a flame alive in Germany’s darkest days. He may not have died alongside those who perished in the concentration camps, but the power of his witness clearly made its mark even among those who survived them. Perhaps his most remarkable epitaph came from the regional association of Jewish communities, who made a public statement of mourning on the bishop’s death. The German Jewish population had fallen from half a million in 1933, when von Galen began his resistance, to just over thirty thousand by the time he died; if anyone knew the failings of internal German resistance, it was them. And yet they honoured von Galen thus: ‘he was one of the few upright and conscientious men who fought against racism in a most difficult time. We shall always honour the memory of the deceased bishop.’