Notwithstanding the guarantees of freedom of religious education in the Concordat, the Nazis attacked confessional schools as deleterious to the unity of the ‘national community’. Parents were pressured by the prospect of losing their jobs in the state and municipal sectors, or by propaganda campaigns, into voting at registration meetings for the transformation of their schools into non-denominational ‘community schools’. Home visits from Nazi block wardens helped them make up their minds. Since it is otherwise inexplicable how a solidly Catholic region like Bavaria could end up having no Catholic schools by 1939, one must assume these votes were rigged. Thus a vote held on 25 October 1937 in an Upper Palatinate village produced a 47 :9 majority for community schooling. In fact, of the sixty-five qualified voter parents, twenty were absent, eleven left the meeting because discussion was prohibited, and, of those who remained, sixteen voted for community education and nine against. Sixteen became forty-seven by counting all these absentees as present. Another way of achieving the laicisation of education was simply to dismiss nuns from the profession, as the Ministry of Education in Bavaria did in May 1936. This caused sporadic protests. In the village of Glonn, for example, straw-filled images of the two Nazi replacement teachers (wearing red shirts and with Soviet hammer-and-sickle cap badges) were attached to the school’s lightning conductor by way of popular protest.

Having frequently promised to maintain religious instruction in the non-denominational sector, the regime contrived the laicisation of religious instruction and the curtailment of the time devoted to this subject. The flow of qualified instructors was interrupted by closing all religious teacher-training colleges at the same time as the number of students reading theology at university fell from 6,388 in 1933 to 1,335 five years later. Since only four of Germany’s theology faculties were regarded as being ideologically sound, considerable effort went into reallocating posts in this discipline to such burgeoning fields as racial science. In 1939 Romano Guardini, one of Germany’s most distinguished Catholic philosopher–theologians, was dismissed from his Berlin professorship in the Christian worldview on the ground that Nazism had its own worldview which brooked no rivals.

Within schools the time devoted to religious instruction was cut, while that given over to gymnastics or sport rose. Nazi irreligion and racial dogmas could be insinuated into children’s minds through a variety of subjects, such as biology, history and mathematics, where children were encouraged innocently to compute how many houses could be built for ‘healthy national comrades’ if one eliminated the ‘unhealthy’ population of ‘luxury’ lunatic asylums. If all else failed, religious instruction could be damaged, simply by scheduling rival Hitler Youth events simultaneously. State subsidies to private schools were abolished, and, when this sector was ‘co-ordinated’ in 1939, Catholic institutions were forbidden to belong to the association that controlled them. The public presence of the Catholic Church, which was highly visible at certain times of the year in western and southern Germany, was reduced. Impossibly high visa charges—designed to wreck the Austrian tourist economy—made it impossible for German Catholics to attend the major Catholic rally which in 1933 was scheduled to be held in Vienna. Insofar as Catholic religious processions could not be banned, the presence of Nazi photographers who would then display their handiwork in a person’s workplace was an attempt to deter participants. Uniformed hooligans disrupted respectable religious gatherings. There was no point in appealing to policemen among the onlookers, given that, as a banner on the police headquarters of Essen proclaimed, ‘The police stand by the Hitler Youth.’101 Religious processions were rerouted or passed along streets devoid of decorations. In some regions, wayside shrines and crucifixes were vandalised, while in entire areas the authorities sometimes sought to remove religious images from school classrooms, replacing them with portraits of the Führer. Such a bold step was essayed by the government in north-west German Oldenburg in November 1936. Civil disobedience spread very rapidly and led to ugly scenes at the public meetings organised to persuade people of the desirability of removing religious images. Gauleiter Röver received such a rough ride at one such gathering in Cloppenburg that he immediately ordered the restoration of these images to the Catholic Münsterland’s classrooms. That the protesters were Lower Saxon farmers of racially unimpeachable stock, and included at least one holder of the NSDAP’s gold insignia, only added to the regime’s desire to backtrack as quickly as possible.

In the mid-1930s these various measures were given a more vicious accent by government-sponsored campaigns against the Catholic Church involving those old standbys of money and sex. Much of the responsibility for these campaigns can be traced to Himmler’s SS, specifically SD Office II 113, which was responsible for religious affairs, in tandem with the executive arm of the security services, in this case the Gestapo’s parallel office called II 1 B 1. The SD religious affairs office included two former priests and four former monks. Its first leader was an elderly former priest, who was a cousin of Himmler’s, and then the renegade priest Albert Hartl, who in 1937 married one of Heydrich’s cast-off girlfriends. Hartl had been ordained in 1929 by Munich’s cardinal Michael Faulhaber and went to work in the seminary at Freising. Hartl opportunistically joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1933 having become disillusioned with the Church. Late that year, he denounced the director of the seminary for frustrating his transfer to a teacher-training college. At a private supper the director Josef Rossberger had said that Nazi Party members were ‘the scum of humanity’. Rossberger was jailed for eight months on Hartl’s testimony.

In 1934 Hartl joined the SS and became head of the section of the SD that dealt with religious affairs, including sects as well as Churches. As Faulhaber accurately surmised, Hartl’s SS colleagues neither respected nor trusted him, partly because he seemed so short, bespectacled and bloated in the company of the sleek. He spent the later 1930s writing attacks on the Christian Churches and pamphlets outlining the religious–political ideology of an SS whose spiritual avatars eclectically included the Jesuits, the Samurai, the Teutonic Knights and Bolshevik commissars. In early 1941 he became the nominal chief of section IV B of the Reich Main Security Office, which dealt with ecclesiastical affairs, freemasonry and Jewish issues, although the officer responsible for the latter—Adolf Eichmann—could bypass him whenever he chose. That summer Hartl was accused of improper contact with a female staff member. In early 1942 he was assigned to the staff of Einsatzkommando C in Kiev, although his first brief was to report on ‘the nature of the Russian soul’. After being wounded by a landmine, he was sent home. For the last two years of the war, he worked for the foreign intelligence service of the SD, which regarded his reports as unreliable. Old habits resurfaced in US captivity. After 1945 Hartl emerged as a key prosecution witness in countless trials of his SS colleagues, his preferred pose being that he himself had been too weak to carry out the atrocities in the East that they were convicted of. He was also the source of the unfounded rumours that the Catholic bishops had given the green light to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, claims that gullible commentators have taken at face value.

As Hartl’s unit included seven theology graduates, it was jokingly said that they had transferred ‘from the heavenly to Himmler’s host’, a play on Himmel, the German word for heaven, and the name of the SS leader. Hartl’s team relied on the usual secret-police techniques of blackmail, disguise, eavesdropping and infiltration, even despatching suitably attired agents to the 1937 Oxford World Ecumenical Conference. They usually had the texts agreed at the Fulda Bishops’ Conference in their hands by the same evening, although they eventually managed to plant bugging devices in the room where the Conference was convened. These techniques were brought to bear on the Catholic Church, whether against its clergy or lay affiliates, since ‘political Catholicism’ was their chief obsession. 102

In 1935 the SD intercepted a letter permitting the steering body for Catholic overseas missions to send foreign currency to Rome. The SD instructed the Gestapo to block such permissions in future, and to investigate past instances where currency had gone abroad.¹⁰³ This resulted in several senior members of religious orders—which of course were international—being convicted of illegally transferring monies abroad in breach of Germany’s strict foreign currency laws. The SD regarded this as a deliberate attempt to ‘force the Third Reich to its knees’. The guilty received long jail sentences and hefty fines running into hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks. These convictions fuelled an avalanche of snide commentary which claimed that the Catholic Church was a gigantic money-making operation. The trials gave rise to so-called ‘currency ditties’: like this ‘Song of Religious Life’: ‘Oh the cloistered life is jolly! Nowadays, instead of prayer, Smuggling money is the business; Forth on this sly sport they fare. / Swift they say a Paternoster, Priest and monk and pious nun. Swifter then with zealous purpose, Smuggling currency they run.’ One obvious objective of these trials was to discourage people from donating money to Catholic charities—because it would end up being embezzled or improperly sent abroad—while encouraging them to give to Nazi charitable and welfare organisations. The next step was a major investigation of the entire finances of the Catholic Church in Germany, the explicit intention being to destroy its economic viability through a sort of death by a thousand cuts.¹⁰⁴

Well-publicised investigations into these currency violations in turn triggered denunciations of the Catholic clergy for mostly homosexual, but also paedophile offences. Between May 1936 and July 1937 there were 270 prosecutions of such men, of whom 170 monks and 64 priests were convicted. A major trial was held in Koblenz in May 1936 which resulted in the conviction of past and present members of a lay nursing order, most of the evidence coming from a former member of the order who had joined the SD. The intervening Olympic Games led Hitler to drop further trials, which were resumed with a vengeance after Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge was released in early 1937. Hitler immediately instructed the minister of justice to give priority to these ‘morality trials’. The Ministry of Propaganda urged the press to treat these trials as evidence of pervasive perversity within the Catholic Church. The press, and caricaturists in particular, had a field day with illicit intimacies in the confessionals or tubby monks whose capacious cassocks concealed several pairs of dainty female feet. That summer Nazi publications also attacked secretary of state Pacelli, accusing him of using a visit to Lisieux in France to organise the ‘moral encirclement’ of Germany with the aid of ‘friends’ in the French Communist Party, who were shown holding his cloak. Pacelli responded to this when he had a three-hour meeting in Berlin with the former US consul Alfred W. Klieforth, whose papers are at Harvard. Klieforth reported: ‘He [Pacelli] opposed unilaterally every compromise with National Socialism. He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person. He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, in spite of appearances, and he fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand.’105

Tendentious reporting of a small number of sex crimes (involving mainly lay staff) in Catholic boarding schools or religious houses enabled members of the government to claim that the Catholic Church was awash with sex fiends. There were few holds barred in gathering the evidence, which involved the SD and Gestapo interviewing disgruntled religious drop-outs, ex-pupils and orphans, with offers of sweets alternating with a head bashed into a wall or the threat of concentration camp to secure the appropriate testimony. On this basis, minister for the Churches Kerrl could claim that seven thousand clergy had been convicted of sex crimes between 1933 and 1937, whereas the true figure seems to have been 170, of whom many had left the religious life prior to their offences. This deliberate inflation of statistics was a favoured Nazi device for ramping up hysteria, as they would do in 1939 when they turned five thousand ethnic German victims of the Poles whose country the Nazis had invaded into ‘50,000’. There was no reporting of similar sexual transgressions involving members of Nazi formations.

Article 31 of the Concordat had said: ‘Those Catholic organisations and societies which pursue exclusively charitable, cultural, or religious ends, and as such are placed under the ecclesiastical authorities, will be protected in their institutions and activities.’ However, the same article left it to future talks to decide which organisations were to receive this ‘protection’. These negotiations dragged on into 1935 and were characterised by mounting mistrust between the interlocutors. The German government used the threat of tearing up the Concordat to force the Vatican to devolve negotiations to the German bishops, who promptly divided on how to respond to the Nazis’ combination of concessions and menaces. Bishop Berning was the most accommodating, offering to dissolve labour and sports organisations and drastically to curtail the activities of Catholic youth. Bishop Galen was the most hardline, recommending that if Hitler did not tone down Nazi attacks on Catholic organisations the Church should reinstate its earlier prohibitions on Catholic involvement with Nazi organisations.106

Continued Nazi infractions of the Concordat required a concerted response from the Church. In the autumn of 1936 the Fulda Bishops’ Conference sought a collective audience with Hitler to discuss matters of common concern. After a month’s silence, they were told their request was out of the question, and that the letter had been referred to the minister of Church affairs. The Ministry of Church Affairs suppressed a joint pastoral letter that sought to establish common ground on the issue of anti-Bolshevism while criticising Nazism itself. The German bishops also thought that it was time for Rome to issue an authoritative statement about events in Germany. On 4 November 1936 Hitler nonetheless decided to grant cardinal Faulhaber a lengthy private audience on the Obersalzberg to see whether a compromise could be reached. Hitler did most of the talking, using a global tour d’horizon to avoid any discussion of details concerning Christians in Germany. He warned Faulhaber that, in the light of a possible Communist victory in Spain, the fortunes of the Church and National Socialism were bound together. He was especially disappointed in the Church’s responses to Nazi racial policies. Whenever Faulhaber tried to steer the conversation on to the present, Hitler raised the subject of the Church’s hostility to Nazism before 1933, while dismissing attacks on the Church as ‘small and risible bagatelles’. The conversation petered out in mutual incomprehension—‘I won’t conclude any cattle deals. You know I am the enemy of compromises, but there will be a last attempt,’ being the Führer’s parting shot.

The German bishops discussed this dismal encounter at a plenary Fulda conference on 12–13 January 1937, once again issuing a statement condemning Nazi infractions of the Concordat. Immediately afterwards a deputation of the more resolute German Catholic prelates left for Rome, where they had meetings with the secretary of state. Pacelli discussed the problems of the German Church with these men, who reported that ‘at that moment it was a matter of life or death for the Church; they want our destruction’. They argued that a letter to Hitler from the pope would be less effective than an encyclical. When the five German prelates and Pacelli met the pope on 17 January, it was Pacelli who recommended an encyclical dealing with German affairs. The fact that other encyclicals were being drawn up dealing with Mexico and Russia meant that the papacy would be seen to be politically neutral. It is also likely that while in Rome Faulhaber was informed of the contents of a ‘syllabus of contemporary errors’ which the Holy Office of the Inquisition had been developing between 1934 and mid-1937. The extraordinary length of time it took senior theologians to elaborate such a document was indicative of the way in which the wheels of Vatican bureaucracy turned very slowly. Ironically, by the time they had finished, the Congregation of the Holy Office, mindful of the disastrous precedent from 1864, decided not to issue the syllabus at all, but rather insisted that the pope himself speak out.107

The release of the preparatory documents enables us to see how the Holy Office extrapolated a series of propositions from Nazi and Communist ideology, many of them based on passages in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which were then systematically condemned as ‘social heresies’.¹⁰⁸ The propositions condemned included:

The races of mankind are so different from one another through their innate and unchangeable character that the lowest of them is more different from the supreme race of men than from the highest species of animal.

The ‘battle of selection’ and the ‘stronger force’, if successful, by that fact give the victor the right to dominate.

A religious cult, in the strict sense of the term, is due to the nation.

The state has the absolute, direct, and immediate rights over everyone and everything that has to do with civil society in any way.¹⁰⁹

Although this document was never issued as a formal decree, it did work its way into the major papal encyclical which Pacelli had in hand. First, he instructed Faulhaber to convert some notes he had made on developments in Germany into a draft document that could become the basis of a German-language encyclical. The Holy Office had already had extreme difficulty in translating terms like ‘race’ or ‘totalitarianism’ into Latin, and it was felt that use of the language of the offenders would have greater resonance. Faulhaber spent three nights working on a draft which condemned the Nazis’ making a fetish of race and state, as well as their aspiration to extend Caesar’s province into an empire. Pacelli then rewrote drafts of Faulhaber’s text, probably in conjunction with the pope, and certainly incorporating themes identified by the Holy Office—of which he was an ex-officio member. He transformed Faulhaber’s draft into the extremely trenchant but subtle condemnation of National Socialism, which the encyclical contrived never to name, but which was omnipresent in spirit. Pacelli was responsible for converting Faulhaber’s ‘with great concern’ into the encyclical’s more memorable opening ‘with burning concern’.

Mit brennender Sorge complemented the encyclicals on Mexico and Russia. The latter was a forceful rejection of Communism, which was described as ‘bad in its innermost core’. What may have seemed to some to be ‘good’ ideas merely masked Communism’s evil intentions, as when leading Communists espoused peace ‘while at the same time instigating a class struggle in which streams of blood have been spilled’. As in his encyclical to the German Catholics, Pius XI emphasised the primacy of Natural Law, the importance of the individual human personality, and of the sacrosanctity of the family when it came to such matters as a child’s education. Communism reduced the complexity of each individual to a mere ‘cog in a machine’ while propagating the doctrine of class struggle as a form of ‘crusade’ whose reality was ‘hatred and a madness to destroy’. In sum, Communism, according to Pius XI, was ‘a new Gospel, that offers Bolshevik and atheistic Communism as a message of salvation and deliverance for humanity’, though in fact it represented ‘the taking away of rights, the debasement and the enslavement of the human personality’. As the Mexican encyclical also makes clear, the pope believed passionately in socio-economic justice, arguing that the social encyclicals of his predecessor Leo XIII were the best guide for how to ‘rescue today’s world from the sad collapse resulting from an unbridled liberalism’ while avoiding the twin pitfalls of class conflict based on Marxist–Leninist terror or the arrogant misuse of the state’s power—a veiled reference to Fascist ‘statolatry’.

The German encyclical is an immensely astute critique of everything that Nazism stood for. It anticipates virtually all of the themes that contemporary scholars of Nazism, especially in continental Europe, are currently pursuing to comprehend this phenomenon. Consider these passages:

Immortality in the Christian sense is the survival of man after temporal death as a personal individual for eternal reward or punishment. Whoever uses the word immortality to mean only collective survival in the continuity of one’s own people for an undetermined length of time in the future perverts and falsifies one of the fundamental verities of the Christian faith and shakes the foundations of every religious outlook which demands a moral ordering of the universe. Whoever does not wish to be a Christian ought at least to renounce the desire to enrich the vocabulary of his unbelief with the heritage of Christian ideas.

That dismissed both the Nazis’ notion of collective racial immortality (and by implication liberal Protestant notions of orders of creation) and their attempts to dress up their ghastly doctrines in the language of religious belief. Pacelli returned to this theme in a discussion of grace:

Grace in a wide sense can be said to be everything which comes to the creature from the Creator…The repudiation of this supernatural elevation to grace because of the alleged particular nature of the German character is an error, an open declaration of war on a fundamental truth of Christianity. To put supernatural grace on a level with the gifts of nature is to do violence to the language created and sanctified by religion. The pastors and guardians of the people of God will do well to oppose this spoliation of sacred things and this work of leading minds astray.

Worse, from the Nazi point of view, Pacelli pinpointed the tendency of the Führer-cult to elevate a man into a god:

Since Christ, the Messiah, fulfilled the work of redemption, broke the dominion of sin, and merited for us the grace to become the sons of God, ‘there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved’ but the name of Jesus. Thus though a man should embody in himself all wisdom, all might, all the material power in the world, he can lay no other foundation than that which is already laid in Christ. He who sacrilegiously misunderstands the abyss between God and creation, between the Godman and the children of men, and dares to place beside Christ, or worse still, above Him and against Him, any mortal, even the greatest of all times, must endure to be told that he is a false prophet to whom the words of Scripture find a terrible application: ‘He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them.’

The Nazis’ contempt for Christianity’s emphasis upon human suffering was robustly rebuffed: ‘By foolishly representing Christian humility as a self-degradation and an unheroic attitude, the repulsive pride of these innovators only makes itself an object of ridicule.’ Pacelli also found time to condemn the Nazis’ obsessions with greatness, heroism, strength and so forth, not to speak of their athletic cult of the body, often cultivated at the expense not only of the mind but of those unfortunates the Nazis were compulsorily sterilising. He found a moment for a shaft of sarcasm: ‘The Church of Christ, which in all ages up to those which are nearest to us counts more heroic confessors and martyrs than any other moral society, certainly does not need to receive instruction from such quarters about heroic sentiment and action.’ Pacelli used Natural Law doctrine to confound the Nazi philosophy of ‘Right is what is advantageous to the people.’ The encyclical stated that ‘the believer has an inalienable right to profess his faith and to practise it in the manner suited to him. Laws which suppress or render difficult the profession and practice of this faith are contrary to natural law.’ Nazi attempts to monopolise the education of children at the expense of their parents or the Churches were attacked too: ‘Laws or other regulations concerning schools, which take no account of the rights of the parents given them by natural law, or which by threats or violence nullify them, contradict the natural law and are essentially immoral.’110

Meanwhile, the Holy Office issued a general appeal to nuncios and bishops, calling for conferences and courses at which Nazi doctrines would be confounded. This was withdrawn once cardinal Faulhaber had warned of the potential consequences for German Catholics.

Copies of the encyclical were smuggled into Germany by couriers, enabling local printers to run off as many as three hundred thousand pamphlet copies before it was read from the pulpits. This thwarted the efforts of the Gestapo to stop dissemination of the pope’s message. Hitler vented his fury at the incompetence of the security services which had let such a subversive document slip into the country. When the Gestapo struck at the printing firms—thirteen of which were closed down and nationalised—the intrepid resorted to hectographing the encyclical, or typing out multiple copies. Anyone caught disseminating or reading the encyclical beyond a certain date was liable to arrest. A chaplain in Berlin received a sentence of one hundred days’ solitary confinement for distributing a thousand copies. A secretary employed by the German Labour Front who typed out eight copies in her lunchbreak was denounced to the Gestapo. A Munich teacher was dismissed from his post simply for reading out the encyclical to a class, entirely ignorant of the ban on extending the encyclical’s impact after its initial reading.111 On 12 April the German ambassador to the Vatican delivered a protest, which blamed the Church for infringements of the Concordat and accused the pope of ‘attempting to summon the world against the new Germany’. In his response secretary of state Pacelli remarked that the German protest addressed none of the themes raised by the encyclical.¹¹²

In Germany the encyclical provided an opportunity for heightened harassment of Catholic clergy and laity as they went about their lawful business. Clerical residences were covered with graffiti along the lines of ‘Hang the Jews, put the Blacks against the wall’, ‘Blacks’ being the pejorative term for both clergy and the Catholic Centre Party. Services were interrupted and banners were snatched from those carrying them during processions. On 28 May 1937 Goebbels weighed in with a characteristically snide commentary on the ‘morality trials’ in a speech he delivered in Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle. He seized the moral high ground: ‘Today I speak as the father of a family whose four children are the most precious wealth I possess—as a father who therefore fully understands how parents are shocked in their love for the bodies and souls of their children, of parents who see their most precious treasure delivered to the bestiality of the polluters of youth. I speak in the name of millions of German fathers.’ Seven years later he and his wife Magda poisoned all four of their ‘most precious treasures’.¹¹³

Such vilification led bold Catholic activists to issue pseudonymous letters which dwelled upon the moral corruption within the NSDAP. Individual Catholic priests who spoke out against Nazi iniquities felt the force of the regime’s terror. The priest in Lower Franconian Mömbris protested in 1936 against anticlerical and antisemitic slanders in the copies of Julius Streicher’s notorious Der Stürmer that were displayed in public showcases. The holder of an Iron Cross, the priest refused to play the church organ, celebrate the mass or ring the church bells until these cases were emptied of this offensive material. He encouraged his parishioners to protest to the local mayor. They organised a petition which four hundred people presented to the mayor. The latter—himself the local Nazi chief—was ‘insulted and threatened’. When forty SA men ventured a counter-demonstration, replete with a new Stürmer showcase, their marching songs were drowned out by catcalls and whistles. This sort of incident could not pass unnoticed. On 28 December the priest was arrested along with various of his parishioners. While awaiting his trial he was fêted as a local hero, a view confirmed when his bishop visited Mömbris later in the year.114

The Catholic Church is a worldwide institution. Nazi harassment of German clergy resulted in a forthright denunciation of the regime by cardinal Mundelein in the US at a well-attended diocesan conference:

Perhaps you will ask how it is that a nation of 60,000,000 people, intelligent people, will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that, I am told, and a few associates like Goebbels and Goering, who dictate every move of the people’s lives, and who can, in this age of rising prices and necessary high cost of living, say to an entire nation: ‘Wages cannot be raised’.

Perhaps because it is a country where every second person is a government spy, where armed forces come and seize private books and papers without court procedures, where the father can no longer discipline his son for fear that the latter will inform on him and land him in prison.¹¹⁵

Comments like that deserve to be included in any account of how the Catholic Church responded to Nazism. It is worth noting that they had no effect on those responsible for the persecution.

Catholic opposition to the regime in Bavaria crystallised around the figure of Rupert Mayer, a Munich-based Jesuit priest who had been badly wounded in the Great War, and who had been decorated with the Iron Cross. A renowned spiritual adviser to men, Mayer had already come to the attention of the Gestapo, on account of the oppositional content of his sermons. In April 1937 the Berlin Gestapo decided to ban him from preaching anywhere in the Reich, a ban which the Munich Gestapo interpreted as a prohibition on him preaching outside his own church. Mayer carried on preaching regardless, until in late May the Reichsführer-SS and the minister of justice specified a ban on him preaching ‘in ecclesiastical or profane areas’. Mayer had to put his signature to a document acknowledging this ban. Oral permission was given to continue preaching in the Munich Jesuit church of St Michael’s. Mayer’s Jesuit superior Augustinus Rösch immediately recognised that this ban contravened the Concordat, and authorised Mayer to continue preaching. So did cardinal Faulhaber, who protested to the Ministry of Church Affairs. When Mayer let it be known that he intended to continue preaching, the Gestapo arrested him, a development that led to disturbances among the congregation at St Michael’s and four hundred demonstrators outside the Munich police headquarters. Although these people were dispersed, 150 of them descended upon the Munich Gestapo headquarters where there were fights with local Nazi supporters. In the evening 250 more people mobbed the Gestapo headquarters. Cardinal Faulhaber tried to negotiate a tricky course between supporting Mayer and defusing a popular mood that was turning ugly. Mayer refused to compromise with the Gestapo and declared that if he were released he would preach throughout Bavaria. As his trial commenced, his superiors persuaded him to sign a document to the effect that he would obey the law, although he orally reserved the right to act in accordance with his conscience. The court sentenced him to six months’ imprisonment, but this was suspended once the court had seen his declaration that he would obey the law and the Jesuit provincial had agreed to post Mayer elsewhere. In fact, Mayer immediately began preaching again, being arrested once more in early 1938. Upon his release in May, he ostentatiously left his Iron Cross First Class upon the table in his cell. The Gestapo rearrested him in November, after he refused to tell them the names of visitors he had received whom they suspected of treason. Mayer was eventually released from Dachau two years later, a sick man, and retired to the monastery at Ettal.

Under a regime which tried either to tempt the masses into its own liturgical spaces or to leave them alone and frightened if they would not play ball, any large-scale public event that was not instigated by the Nazis was an implicit assertion of spiritual autonomy. In countless villages the Primizfeier, when a newly ordained priest celebrated his first mass in his home parish, became an occasion for demonstrations of Catholic solidarity. Supra-regional events, such as the St Viktorstracht in Xanten held from 18 August to 18 September 1936, took on the character of mass demonstrations. What happened in Xanten was a very public affair, consisting of two huge processions, meetings of various Catholic associations, and four Sunday pilgrimages. The SD and Gestapo, having failed to have the celebrations banned, monitored every event, on the look-out for illegal political activity. Seventy thousand people were bussed in or caught special trains to attend the septennial celebrations of the consecration of Bamberg cathedral in May 1937, and an amazing 750,000 to 800,000 Catholics attended the Heiligtumsfahrt in Aachen in July of the same year. One hundred thousand people watched the final procession consisting of twenty to twenty-five thousand men.

The SD was also responsible for a large part of the work of ‘public enlightenment’ designed to undermine Catholicism through a slew of books and brochures whose content was then recycled in Nazi newspapers. No issue of the SS journal Schwarze Korps was complete without sensational revelations about the Catholic Church. Some of this was quite cleverly pitched. The mass processions in Xanten were used as evidence that the Church was not being persecuted, even though the SD had done its best to prohibit them. Articles on the Jesuits falsely attributed to them the maxim ‘the end justifies the means’ and praised the Order for turning an idea into organisation, before attacking ‘Jesuit’ casuistry and the Order’s designs on ‘conquering the world’.116

Under a police dictatorship, it was dangerous for people to express their opinions freely, but no such constraints affected exiles abroad. One of the most distinguished was Waldemar Gurian.¹¹⁷

A freelance writer and journalist, Gurian initially specialised in writing about Bolshevism, which he regarded as ‘a new religious faith’.¹¹⁸ Because in July 1933 a Nazi journal used him as an example of how ‘German Catholicism has allowed itself to be heavily judaised’, he decided to emigrate to Switzerland. Together with another exiled German journalist, he published the ‘German Letters’, chronicling conditions in Nazi Germany. These tracts, which total over two thousand pages, were then smuggled into the Reich. Some of them were remarkably prescient. For example in 1935, the year Gurian was stripped of German citizenship, he wrote: ‘The Nuremberg Laws appear to be only a stage on the way to the full physical destruction of Jewry.’¹¹⁹ In August 1934 he published a pamphlet which pointedly contrasted the reactions of the German bishops to Hitler’s murder of the SA leaders and several prominent Catholics with St Ambrose’s condemnation of the emperor Theodosius’ slaughter of people who rioted at a Roman circus. In 1936 Gurian published Hitler and the Christians, which astutely saw that the Nazis’ bleak racial doctrines would be camouflaged for popular consumption in the charitable guise of ‘positive Christianity’. He also realised that the Churches’ preoccupation with Rosenberg and the neo-pagans was mis-directed, as it might propel them into the arms of a more reasonable-seeming Hitler, who was not slow, as we have seen, with public professions of goodwill towards the Churches. The neo-pagans were just reconnoitring ‘robber bands’ used to conceal the real deployments of the main Nazi army.120

Exiled Catholic clergy and laity were also responsible for the journal Kulturkampf. Reports from the Reich, which was disseminated from Paris, and then London and New York. Separate issues dealt with such themes as the ‘idolisation of Hitler’ in the Führer cult, shrewdly pointing out to foreign observers that beyond the scenes of mass orgiastic jubilation there were ‘the tears of shame, the bitterness and the suffering, of those who stayed at home, hiding themselves behind their flag-bedecked windows’. Kulturkampf also devoted several pieces to whether or not Nazism was a religion; disputing the claims of more secular commentators that the ideology was a ‘stage set’ or smokescreen for more common concerns with raw power. Cogently, the journal argued that Nazism was not some heretical deviation from Christianity, nor merely a ‘substitute for religion’, but rather a ‘substitute religion’, an Ersatzreligion rather than a Religionsersatz. The Germans were not living in an atheistic state, but in one where a religion other than Christianity had burgeoned within the public domain. This religion of Nazism may have been incoherent and as flimsy as a ‘house of cards’, but it was the daily reality for those who lived within its shadow, as palpable as a cathedral dwarfing the neighbouring houses of its close. Despite all their rhetorical invocations of God, not to speak of neo-pagan sectarians, the Nazi ‘God’ was the power of nature, conceived of as the brutal rule of the strong, with the Führer as a tangible focus for a party that was like a religious order or Church. The Party’s function was totally to conquer the state, converting this into another ‘member’ of the cult. When this Church had achieved its dystopian ambition of restoring natural inequalities and hierarchies, then God’s kingdom would have been partially realised on earth: the kingdoms of nature, empire and heaven would be one.¹²¹

Pius XI was over eighty in the year he died. Having abolished the corps of papal physicians, he refused to acknowledge that he was ill. When a cardinal gently suggested that he might need to rest, Pius acidly replied: ‘The Lord has endowed you with many good qualities, Salotti, but he denied you a clinical eye.’¹²² Despite repeated cardiac arrests, he continued to condemn Nazi persecution of the Church and both Fascist and Nazi racism literally until the very end, since just before he died he compared Hitler to the emperor Julian the Apostate. Every writer who claims that this racism was simply an outgrowth of Christian anti-Judaism has to reckon with the fact that this argument was much favoured by the Fascists and Nazis themselves, and was robustly rebuffed by the Church. Roberto Farinacci’s newspaper constantly unearthed embarrassing evidence from the early modern papacy, to demonstrate that ‘the Church today finds itself in strident contradiction with its past’. That version of the Church’s history was highly selective, omitting as it did those popes—Innocent IV, Gregory X, Martin V and Paul III—who had condemned such notions as the ‘blood libel’. It also had to omit such modern popes as Pius X, Leo XIII and Benedict XV, who by any criteria could not be called antisemitic. That Farinacci’s paper came to resemble Der Stürmer was no coincidence, since he and Julius Streicher were close friends. Quite why Mussolini suddenly decided to emulate the racism of his northern counterpart need not detain us, but it was in marked contrast to previous Fascist policy. After all, about ten thousand Italian Jews belonged to the Fascist Party, including the only Italian university professor to belong to the Party before 1922, who went on to be rector of Rome university, and Carlo Foa, the editor of the Fascist paper Gerarchia—not to speak of Guido Jung, Mussolini’s minister of finance down to 1935, and one of Mussolini’s many mistresses—a subject passed over in silence by the critics of the papacy. Although the Fascist media had begun to adopt a more favourable tone towards Nazi racism a year before, it seems to have been Hitler’s visit to Rome in May 1938 that led the Italian Fascists to abandon any residual cultural snobberies regarding lessons on ‘race’ from people whose ancestors were living in forests when the glories of imperial Rome were built. Hitler arrived with an entourage of five thousand. He watched army, air force and navy displays of might, including a march past by troops doing the passo romano on the Via dell’Impero, with trips to the Bay of Naples and Florence.

Hitler ostentatiously avoided a courtesy call to the Vatican, which led the pope to bring forward his summer escape to Castel Gandolfo, leaving instructions not to admit the German dictator’s entourage to the Vatican’s treasures in his absence. His parting shot, published in the Vatican newspaper, was ‘The air here makes me feel sick.’ Pius condemned the public display of ‘another Cross which is not the Cross of Christ’, while the Vatican newspaper published extracts from German racist tracts in which the Latin races were treated disparagingly. The pope was consistently opposed to racism, under which rubric he subsumed antisemitism. Unless one assumes that the only racism abroad in the world in the 1930s was antisemitism, which would hardly encompass the gamut of racism around in, say, the European colonial empires or the US, then there is no reason why the pope should have registered disapproval solely of that phenomenon rather than ‘racism’ in general. In April 1938 Catholic universities and theological faculties were informed that the pope condemned certain propositions. These included the notion that ‘purity of blood and race had to be maintained with every means; everything that serves that goal is justified and permitted’, or the view that the aim of education was ‘to develop racial quality and passionate love of one’s own race as the highest good of mankind’.123

This became urgent when Mussolini introduced racial laws in 1938. These were a shock to the highly assimilated Italian Jewish minority, especially to the quarter of adult Italian Jews who were Fascists. Two hundred and thirty Jewish Fascists were proud of having participated in the March on Rome, while three Jews were counted as Ur-Fascist martyrs. Fascist Italy had been a haven for Jews fleeing totalitarian persecution. Refugees included the Russian ancestors of the historian Alexander Stille, and the German ancestors of the historian George Mosse.¹²⁴ This climate changed as the regime introduced racial laws—primarily, it seems, to provide a harsh definition of race relations in its instant colonies, although those Fascists who were antisemitically inclined soon ensured that the Jews were also encompassed.

The response of the Church was unequivocal. Pius condemned a report on ‘Fascism and Racial Problems’ produced in July 1938 by a number of Fascist academics, as being contrary to fundamental Catholic doctrine. Later that month he told chaplains of Catholic youth organisations: ‘If there is anything worse than the various theories of racialism and nationalism, it is the spirit that dictates them. There is something peculiarly loathsome about this spirit of separatism and exaggerated nationalism which, precisely because it is unChristian and irreligious, ends by being inhuman.’¹²⁵ Both the pope and secretary of state Pacelli materially assisted Jewish scholars who were affected by these laws. When the cartographer Roberto Almagia was dismissed from a post at Rome university which he had held since 1915, he was immediately appointed director of the cartographical section in the Vatican Library, in charge of reproducing a fine sixteenth-century map. Another appointee in the library was professor Giorgio del Vecchio, who, despite having been a Fascist since the Party’s inception and a former rector of the university, had been dismissed from his chair in the law school. He was joined by the leading Arabist Giorgo Levi della Vida, who was given a post cataloguing the Vatican’s Arabic manuscripts. When the Fascist Academy of Science refused membership to Tullio Levi-Civita, a Jewish physicist, Pius XI insisted he become a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Pacelli personally invited him to speak on Vatican Radio about the latest developments in his field.126 Pacelli was also quietly active in helping Italian Jewish academics to emigrate. He helped the leading mathematician Vito Volterra, who worked in the Vatican Library, to flee to the US, and he persuaded a Latin American university to offer a job to his childhood friend Guido Mendes, in whose family home the young Pacelli had celebrated the Jewish sabbath. As pope he would help Mendes to get immigration certificates enabling him to go to Palestine, where he would develop a successful medical practice. This rather militates against the notion that either cleric was antisemitic.¹²⁷

That summer Pius read a book called Inter-Racial Justice by an American Jesuit called John La Farge, about the dire state of race relations in the US. Pius commissioned La Farge and two other Jesuits, Gustave Desbuquois and Gustav Gundlach, to prepare drafts of an encyclical to be entitled Humani generis unitas. This occupied them from July to September 1938.

In mid-September, and despite mounting Fascist attacks on his stance on this issue, Pius told a group of Belgian pilgrims: ‘The Promise made to Abraham and his descendants was realized through Christ, of Whose mystical Body we are the members. Through Christ and in Christ we are Abraham’s descendants. No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in antiSemitism. Spiritually we are Jews.’ This message was taken up even by senior clerics who were regarded as sympathetic to the Fascist regime, such as the patriarch of Venice, and Milan’s cardinal Schuster, who attacked ‘the heresy born in Germany and now insinuating itself almost everywhere’. Like the pope, Schuster was especially exercised by the thought of Italians being slavishly imitative of mere Germans, echoing Pius in ascribing to the ancient Roman Empire a spirit of tolerance it certainly never possessed.

The pope kept up his attacks on Fascist and Nazi racism until he ceased to draw breath. While the Fascists were careful to shape their antisemitic enactments around the rock represented by the Church, their decree-law of November 1938 signified a collision since it banned ‘intra-racial’ marriages in flagrant violation of both the Concordat and canon law. The pope planned to make this a central feature of the speech he was to make in February 1939 on the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaties. However, during that winter of 1938–9, Pius XI’s health rapidly declined. Despite heart attacks, diabetes and a persistent cold, he insisted on sitting up all night working on this address. This exertion resulted in his death on 10 February 1939. In a message of condolence to cardinal Hinsley, the British chief rabbi Hertz wrote: ‘Jews throughout the world will revere the Pope’s noble memory as a feared champion of righteousness against the powers of irreligion, racialism and inhumanity.’ The London Jewish Chronicle mourned ‘the loss of one of the stoutest defenders of racial tolerance in modern times’. Those sober contemporary verdicts seem to be lost on Pius XI’s modern detractors—verdicts which, it should be noted, predate the founding of the state of Israel.128

III THE MIRAGE OF PROTESTANT UNITY.

In 1933, almost 67 per cent of the German people described themselves as Protestants. This designation concealed a bewildering array of possibilities, including what is called cultural Protestantism, that is, a set of attitudes that were not necessarily accompanied by any religious practice. The Protestant Churches included major denominations, some of which brought Lutheranism and Calvinism together in a Union that existed only in the largest state of Prussia, or observed separation for reasons of doctrinal purity; others, and the list is long (it includes the Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Methodists), hovered on the borderlines between Church and sect. These denominational niceties need not over-occupy an account of the politics of the main groupings.

Book after tendentious book traduces the (worldwide) Catholic Church for its alleged responses to Hitler. Since they were not a monolith, the German Protestant Churches are harder to group, beyond a few highly atypical figures who resisted. Of course these resistors sometimes had views that many might find questionable were they to know anything of them beyond a few selective quotations from Martin Niemöller which have entered into the contemporary sermoniacal repertory. This imbalance may strike many readers as curious, as will the near-total ‘silence’ that greeted Richard Steigman-Gall’s study of how liberal Protestantism and Nazism interacted with one another. US Protestant Christians have so far not been asked to conduct a ‘moral reckoning’ for what their co-religionists did, or did not do, in Germany more than seventy years ago. Perhaps the fact that conservative Protestant Christians are stalwart supporters of Israel, while the Catholic Church has to weigh the interests of Arab Christians, may have much to do with this.

There is no evidence that the Nazis persecuted the Protestant Churches, as distinct from some of the fundamentalist sects, despite what happened to a few dissenting individuals. They did not object to ‘political Protestantism’ in the way they sought to destroy ‘political Catholicism’, meaning the dispersed wreckage of the Centre Party and Catholic Action, because most ‘political Protestants’ were either Nazis or conservatives—and many of the latter’s views were hard to distinguish from those of the former. All the evidence speaks of a keen desire, on the part of senior Nazi leaders, to find some accommodation with fractious Protestant clerics, and points to a restraining of the security services, which, because of their obsession with Catholicism, had little knowledge of how Protestant Churches even operated.

At their own request, the Federal Organisation of Protestant State Churches had met with Franz Stöhr of the executive of the NSDAP in 1931 to ascertain the Party’s position on religion. They were told that the Party was ‘supported and led by Christian people who seriously intend to implement the ethical principles of Christianity in legislation, and to bring them to bear on the life of the people’. Entirely contradicting what Hitler would tell Catholic bishops a few years later, Stöhr explained that ‘the party leadership was shaped by Protestantism’. Even the Catholics in that leadership, he alleged, inclined more to Protestantism. The Protestant League was the first Christian organization to give its support to the Nazis; there was no equivalent support from Catholic organisations.129

Conservative German Protestants overwhelmingly welcomed the ‘government of national concentration’ in January 1933, with some bishops issuing too fulsome statements. It appeared to be a regime of the conservative elite that had merely co-opted Hitler and the Nazi Party to lend itself the appearance of popularity. Even if both the chancellor and vice-chancellor were thought to be Roman Catholics, which Papen indubitably was, there was a solid Protestant as president, field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, to whom former corporal Hitler seemed to doff his hat. Moreover, at one time or the other, over the next few years, the cabinet included Göring, Frick, Blomberg, Dorpmüller, Rust, Seldte, Neurath and Schwerin-Krosigk, who were all Protestants, clearly still outnumbering such lapsed or nominal Catholics as Goebbels and minister of justice Gürtner.130

Although members of the elite, including Papen, imagined they could exploit and jettison Hitler, in fact he both altered the constitutional framework to ensure his dominance and skilfully broadened his support beyond the Nazi Party. Hitler constantly stressed an entirely spurious apostolic succession, from Frederick the Great, to Bismarck, to Hindenburg and on to himself, which reassured the historically minded that all was back in order after the chaotic interregnum of the preceding fourteen years. The Day of Potsdam symbolised those continuities. The religious, who thought their values had been mocked under the Weimar Republic—from which in reality they had not done badly at all—further liked the sound of the Decree for the Protection of the German People and State of February 1933. This criminalised assemblies or demonstrations that offended the religious.¹³¹ In one of his many speeches that spring, Hitler’s rhetoric became indistinguishable from a sermon:

I cannot divest myself of my faith in my Volk, cannot disassociate myself from the conviction that this nation will one day rise again, cannot divorce myself from my love for this, my Volk, and I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.

If Protestants appreciated Hitler’s claim finally to have overcome the ideology of Marxism, they also liked the bluntness with which he told political Catholics ‘what’s what’. If the Catholic Centre Party was so concerned about threats to religion, he asked, what had they been doing in coalition governments with Marxists? Having had a prolonged period of ascendancy under Weimar, political Catholicism was abruptly returned to the cold. Protestants also welcomed the end of the ‘Party-state’, in which the Centre Party had played a leading role, and the onset of a moral revolution that would reverse the excessive individualism, whether in the arts, gender roles or sexual mores, that characterised a few urban enclaves during the Weimar Republic. Since much Weimar culture was deeply tedious in its puerile provocations, who can blame them?

German Protestantism was subjected to three pressures after 1933, which were designed to de-Judaise it, to heroise it and to unify it. These came from within, although beyond the Churches there were clusters of neo-pagans whose clamorous agitations encouraged Protestant Nazi sympathisers to ‘Nazify’ their own Churches before they were replaced by something wholly unrelated to Christianity.

The idea of fusing extreme racist nationalism with Christianity was not new; a League for a German Church had been founded in 1921 precisely for that purpose. Some 120 Protestant pastors belonged to the Party by 1930, eight having stood as candidates in elections. Wilhelm Kube, the gauleiter of Brandenburg, was both leader of the Nazi caucus in the Prussian parliament and an active member of the synod of the diocese of Berlin. In late 1931 he suggested the formation of ‘Protestant National Socialists’, a Church party not formally integrated with the NSDAP itself. Hitler thought that ‘German Christians’ would be less contentious. From their inception in 1932, the German Christians, a group of clergy and laity, sought to impose an ecclesiology defined by race rather than grace, blending ‘traditional’ anti-Judaism with new-fangled scientific racism to establish a new ‘Church of blood’. They wished to revivify Protestantism by incorporating those things that had made Nazism itself such a potent force. Their banner consisted of a cross and the initials DC with a swastika in the centre. This was not the first or the last time that a Protestant Church inclined towards a secular creed in the expectation that its adoption might fill empty pews, a cycle those Churches have endlessly repeated with environmentalism, campaigns against the Bomb and soft Marxism ever after.

Since the German Christians seemed to give empty churches a new lease of life—albeit by introducing the lurid razzamatazz of Nazism into places of worship—they were welcomed by some senior Protestant clergy as a way of restoring the popularity of religion. Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg was not alone in imagining that Nazism might represent a revival of the fusion of nationalism and religiosity that had last been seen in Germany during the Wars of Liberation.

The democratic electoral structures of many of the Protestant Churches served to give the most radical German Christian faction control, as a prelude to introducing the ‘Führer-principle’ to Church governance. Instead of sparking a spiritual awakening, the German Christians seemed bent on the total politicisation of religion. A sweaty, militarised and uniformed pastorate, in brown shirts with swastika armbands, would remasculinise Christianity, thereby counteracting the notion—often grounded in various European realities—that the faith had become feminised as men had turned to politics and the pub. Their preferred example of a Christian was Horst Wessel, the son of a Protestant pastor and war veteran, who despite being killed in a squalid brawl over a prostitute was immortalised by Goebbels as a Nazi martyr, his story being turned into the infamous ‘Horst-Wessel-Song’. Finally, and this was the sticking point for their opponents, they sought to disbar ‘non-Aryan’ Christians from the ministry (this measure affected about thirty-seven individuals in a pastorate of eighteen thousand) and to downgrade or expunge anything that reminded Christians of the Jewish fundaments of their religion.

Since the German Christians promised not only to simplify and Nazify a bewilderingly complex landscape of Protestant Churches, but to create one supraconfessional Church including Catholics, they initially received the regime’s backing. In May 1933 Hitler supported a moderate German Christian, the former naval chaplain Ludwig Müller, for the new post of Reich bishop. Wits shortened his title to ‘the Reibi’ a play on ‘rabbi’. Müller was a protégé of gauleiter Koch of East Prussia, himself president of a regional Protestant synod. The appointment of a Reich bishop would be the prelude to uniting Germany’s twenty-eight provincial Protestant Churches, some of which were ruled by bishops, others by more democratic consistories.132 While Müller was backed by the Lutheran provincial bishops, a rival candidate, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, of the renowned Inner Mission charitable institutions at Bethel, garnered the support of the Churches in Prussia. German Christian and Nazi Party protests led Bodelschwingh to abandon his candidacy. Müller returned to the fray in Church elections that summer. He managed to convince Hitler that those clergy who were hostile to his own candidacy were also opposed to the Führer’s regime. This was untrue, since many who objected to the Nazification of the Protestant Churches, either through the German Christians or by ‘co-ordination’, often had no difficulties with other parts of the Nazi platform, whether this meant reducing the putative influence of Jews in German life or restoring the nation’s position within the European system. The German Christians received two-thirds of the vote, especially since Nazis had been encouraged to reacquaint themselves with their Church’s democratic procedures. Müller was elected Reich bishop at Reich Synod that September.

This coup d’église, which was followed by the introduction of an ‘Aryan paragraph’, triggered a response on the part of those classes customarily used to governing the Protestant Churches, namely senior clergy and civil servants, academics, doctors and lawyers, major landowners, bankers and businessmen.133 A Young Reform Movement, which in some places had stood in the July elections as ‘Gospel and Church’, metamorphosed that autumn into the Pastors’ Emergency League consisting of about sixty members. Its leading light was the former U-boat commander Martin Niemöller, pastor to the great and the good in Berlin’s fur-coated suburb of Dahlem. It should be noted that these pastors objected not to antisemitism, but to the state’s arrogation of the right to dismiss pastors on racial grounds. Otto Dibelius, a leading figure in the Confessing Church, had denounced those countries that had objected to the Nazis boycott of Jewish enterprises.¹³⁴ One final straw broke the camel’s back. The German Christian leader in Berlin, Reinhold Krause, addressed a monster rally in the Sportspalast, at which he got carried away with his own rhetoric. ‘Those people [Nazis] need to feel at home in the Church,’ to which end he demanded ‘liberation from everything unGerman in the worship service and the confessions—liberation from the Old Testament with its cheap Jewish morality of exchange and its stories of cattle-traders and pimps’. If Nazis refused, in good conscience, to buy a tie from a Jew, ‘how much more should we be ashamed to accept from the Jew anything that speaks to our soul, to our most intimate religious essence’. The negative response to this forced Müller to abandon introduction of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ and to dismiss the German Christian leader.

In early January 1934, Hitler held a meeting with Müller, Niemöller and various other opponents of the Reich bishop. He took the rug from under Niemöller by asking Göring to read out the morning’s intercepts of a telephone conversation in which Niemöeller had revealed that he hoped to play off Hitler against Hindenburg. Affirming that ‘inwardly he stood closer to Protestantism’, Hitler upbraided Niemöller, shouting at him: ‘You leave concern for the Third Reich to me and look after the Church!’ Reich bishop Müller’s star was back in the ascendant, which meant that the German Christians moved aggressively to capture Church governments or to dragoon provincial Churches into his Reich Church. He also reintroduced the ‘Aryan paragraph’, thereby alienating all those who thought that baptism conferred equal membership of the Church regardless of a person’s ethnicity.

By 1934 the Emergency League had developed into the Confessing Church. This was a network of between five and seven thousand like-minded pastors, whose 138 delegates held their first synod at Barmen. The Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, then teaching at Bonn, who regarded the authoritarian Niemöller as almost as bad as the German Christians, took the lead in drafting the Barmen Declaration which defined the respective spheres of Church and state, rejecting the claim that the state should be ‘the single and totalitarian order of human life’. Article 5 read:

We reject the false doctrine that the state, over and above its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well. We reject the false doctrine that the Church, over and above its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the state, thus itself becoming an organ of the state.

By asserting that the ‘Church must remain the Church’, the Confessing Church implicitly rejected the totalitarian claims of the Nazis, as well as the German Christian attempts to incorporate the Church within the Nazi state. This forthright stand was compromised by the Confessing Church’s refusal to form a ‘free Church’, that is one financed by its own congregations rather than through Church taxes that the state collected. Their concern to maintain the Church undefiled by Nazi Christians sat uneasily with their continued espousal of teachings of which the Nazis would scarcely have disapproved. In 1935, for example, Niemöller told his Dahlem congregation: ‘the Jews have caused the crucifixion of God’s Christ…They bear the curse, and because they rejected the forgiveness, they drag with them as a fearsome burden the unforgiven blood-guilt of their fathers.’135

If the Confessing Church thwarted attempts to Nazify Protestantism, simply by taking German Christians to court to establish the illegality of their actions, so the opposition of some ‘intact’ south German Lutheran Churches that had not been taken over by German Christians frustrated Müller’s attempts to force the Protestant Churches into a single structure. This conflict became one between local people and outsiders. On 23 August 1934 the Bavarian Provincial Synod unanimously supported bishop Meiser in resisting amalgamation with the Reich Church. The Reich Church struck back by seizing bishop Wurm of Württemberg, who together with Meiser, apprehended a few days later, was placed under house arrest. Civil disobedience ensued, especially in Protestant Franconia, where Nazi support was stronger than in Bavaria as a whole, beginning with a demonstration by ten thousand people in Julius Streicher’s Nuremberg. Farmers sent deputations; Party offices were inundated with letters and telegrams; and even holders of the Party’s Golden Badge of Honour, as well as ordinary ‘national comrades’, handed in their Party membership cards. This was a catastrophe in the making, which Hitler resolved as quickly as possible by ordering the release of the two bishops.136

German Protestants were part of a wider ecumenical community that stirred at the thought of bishops under house arrest. Some US Lutherans, not to mention anti-Communist Canadian Mennonites and francophone Canadian Catholics, took an indulgent stance towards Nazism. But the vast majority of official Christian opinion in Canada and the USA was condemnatory. The influential Christian Century condemned Nazism for a ‘Christian nationalism’ worthy of ‘ancient Israel’ in its virulence; while in 1934 the World Baptist congress ‘deplored and condemns as a violation of the law of God, the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world’.¹³⁷ One of the most informed and intelligent critics of totalitarian political religions was the Swiss Calvinist theologian Adolf Keller, who took upon himself the task of enlightening Americans about events in Europe at the time. His published lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, Religion and the European Mind, and a major book, Church and State on the European Continent, were extraordinary explorations of the political consequences of mass insecurity:

The multitudes tremble in such a situation. They have fear in their hearts, and fear is hatred; fear is defiance; fear is superstition; fear is the ghastly flight of men running for their lives. They feel behind them the lash of an invisible whip. They feel homeless. The soul of this generation is like Noah’s raven, which went forth to and fro and found rest nowhere, because the earth was still covered with water, as in the beginning when creation began.138

Another influential voice was the acerbic Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who in 1935 fled his post at the university of Bonn for a life of exile in Basle. He was one of the main influences upon Frederick Voigt, the former Manchester Guardian foreign correspondent turned High Tory, whose 1938 book Unto Caesar was one of the most perceptive English-language commentaries on totalitarian political religions.¹³⁹ These perspectives found their way into political currency, as when addressing the Leeds Chamber of Commerce in 1937 Winston Churchill said:

It is a strange thing that certain parts of the world should now be wishing to revive the old religious wars. There are those non-God religions Nazism and Communism…I repudiate both and will have nothing to do with either…They are as alike as two peas. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were violently contrasted compared with them. You leave out God and you substitute the devil.¹⁴⁰

The Anglican clergy were deeply hostile towards totalitarianism, with the sole exception of bishop Headlam of Gloucester, the former professor of divinity at Oxford, who not only urged German Protestants to find a ‘modus vivendi’ with Hitler, but even in 1938 continued to believe that the latter was ‘profoundly religious’. So he was, though not in terms comprehensible to an Oxford professor.¹⁴¹ No Anglican leaders were sympathetic to Nazi views on race. In 1930, the Lambeth Conference officially welcomed the stance in J. H. Oldham’s 1924 Christianity and the Race Problem, which took the view that all men are brothers under the skin. Leading laymen, such as the vice-chancellor of Birmingham university, Sir Charles Grant Robertson, denounced the totalitarian claims of the Fascist and Nazi states with as much passion as the exiled Luigi Sturzo.¹⁴² In general, the English clergy were attracted to social radicalism, and repelled by Fascist and Nazi violence, especially when they witnessed the Mosleyites in action on their own turf. Explicitly Tory bishops, a minority in the Church of Lang or Temple, were in the vanguard of denouncing Nazi antisemitism.

The most outspoken Tory bishop was Herbert Hensley Henson of Durham, who as early as May 1933 attended a meeting in Sunderland to protest the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In the mid-1930s Henson opposed the Italian invasion of Abyssinia—justified in some appeasing circles in Britain by Abyssinia’s practice of slavery—taking advantage of the Vatican’s silence on the issue to traduce the Roman Catholic Church too. In November 1935 he spoke passionately at the Church Assembly about events in Germany, recalling that as a boy he had lived two miles from Sir Moses Montefiore, a great Jewish philanthropist, whose largesse had benefited the people of East Kent. The news from Germany put Henson into a ‘blind rage’, making him wish to draw the sword to help the lowly against the mighty. He regarded the Nazis as neo-pagan ‘pederasts’ and the Fascists as ‘bullies’ on a par with British trade unionists. When the English socialist publisher Victor Gollancz published a collection of documents on Nazi Jew-baiting, Henson provided the introduction, even though as a High Tory he did not care for the book’s red cover. He wrote a blurb for the journalist Konrad Heiden’s brilliantly deflationary Der Führer, which remains the most outstanding biography of Hitler. In letters to The Times Henson sought to have British universities break all contacts with German institutions, including Durham university, of which he was official visitor. Remarkably, for a clergyman, Henson had few qualms about political assassination. In February 1936 he wrote: ‘Who could deny the morality of a patriotic Italian who, for public reasons, killed Mussolini? Or who would not applaud the German who, in the interest of elementary morals, killed Hitler? I should give them Christian burial without hesitation.’ In 1938 his rebuke to archbishop Lang during a debate in the Lords on appeasement was so intemperate that he was reminded of his august ‘position’ by foreign secretary Halifax.143

Bell and Henson were so forthright against the treatment of Niemöller that Hitler bearded the British ambassador about the two outspoken English bishops. The Anglican bishops were particularly exercised by the arrest of Meiser and Wurm. Bell and Cosmo Lang made forceful representations to the German embassy, threatening to break off contacts with the ‘official’ Protestant Church. Since English, French and Swedish protests against the imprisonment of the two bishops might have adversely affected the outcome of the plebiscite in the Saar, foreign minister Neurath—himself a prominent Protestant—prevailed on Hitler to restrain bishop Müller in his zeal to incorporate the two south German Lutheran Churches in the emergent Reich Church. Hitler ordered the release of Meiser and Wurm, granting them an audience to reassure them of his moderate intentions.

When he retired from Durham in 1938, Henson summed up:

I shared in full measure the sentiments of disgust and detestation which the abominable persecution of the Jews in Germany stirred in generous minds throughout the English-speaking world; and I did not hesitate to give public expression to my feelings. Less barbarously cruel but, perhaps, even more luminously suggestive of the ethical quality of Hitler’s regime, was the cunning and continuous oppression of the Christian Churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. I did my best to bring home to the English people the fact and the significance of a religious persecution within modern Christendom that reproduces the policies and procedures of ancient pagan violence. Indeed Hitler was showing himself to be the true successor of Decius, Diocletian, and Julian the Apostate, though wholly without their excuses.144

In 1935 Hitler tried one last time to reconcile the warring Protestant clerics, whose quarrels, he claimed, had spoiled too many of his breakfasts. On a tour of inspection, during which he talked about the ‘Church Struggle’, he took up the suggestion of Hanns Kerrl, the former Prussian minister of justice, that he be allowed to sort the Protestant Church out. Kerrl’s appointment as minister of Church affairs was supposed to mean that clerical heads were going to be bashed together. Actually, Kerrl was too politically lightweight to achieve a goal which underestimated the fractiousness of the clergy.

He tried to establish a Reich Church Committee and committees for the provincial Churches, which sidelined the Reich bishop, who kept his title and salary but lost his office and official limousine. Kerrl sought to introduce proportional representation of the various factions in the governance of the Churches, while also rationally deciding which faction was most entitled to use Church buildings. He sought to find common ground between the factions while restraining the Gestapo from persecuting Confessing Church pastors. His moderation split the Confessing Church between moderates and ‘Dahlemite’ radicals, or between those like the Lutheran bishops of ‘intact’ Churches who would co-operate in Kerrl’s committees and those who would not.

The more radical Dahlemites occasionally ventured criticism of the regime, albeit addressed to Hitler, whom they mistakenly regarded as a moderate man surrounded by maniacs. In May 1936, they sent Hitler a memorandum seeking clarification whether the ‘de-Christianisation’ of schools, the persecution of the Jews and the use of concentration camps for political opponents were official government policy. The memo even challenged the deification of the Führer: ‘Only a few years ago the Führer himself disapproved of placing his pictures on Evangelical altars. Today his opinions are increasingly accepted as normative not only in political matters, but in matters of morality and law, and he is being surrounded with the religious dignity of a national priest and hailed as an intercessor between God and the Volk.’ This memo, which went unanswered, was leaked to the foreign press, appearing in the New York Herald Tribune on 16 July, and then circulated in Germany. Three of those responsible for the memorandum and its distribution were sent to concentration camps, where one of their number—a lawyer—was murdered for being Jewish while the other two were released.145

Having failed to achieve Protestant unity through Reich bishop Müller, by 1937 Hitler was wearying of minister Kerrl too. In the spring he unleashed the power of the state upon the more radical pastors within Prussia, including Martin Niemöller, who, despite being acquitted at his trial, was incarcerated, none too onerously, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Theology courses and seminars where the Confessing Church line was dominant were closed down. Effectively, Hitler abandoned the quest to unite the Protestant Churches at this point. He would build his own rival religion instead.

Sneering at the ambivalences of authority has become habitual since the 1960s. There is almost a will to believe that something sinister is always afoot. In fact relationships between the Churches and the totalitarian political religions were infinitely complicated and require considerable effort to reconstruct. At the time some of the greatest intellects found themselves revising their own views, the capacity which made them great in the first place. On the eve of war, two men wrote about a Catholic Church that neither had greatly admired or liked. Indeed Sigmund Freud had written a powerful polemic against religion as such, even as he established a discipline that has become a modern cult. In February 1938, he wrote that it was the Catholic Church ‘which puts up a powerful defence against the spread of this [totalitarian] danger to civilisation’. In a second letter to his son, he added the hope that ‘the Catholic Church is very strong and will offer strong resistance’, although a month later Austrian church bells would peal welcoming the return of the prodigal Führer.146 Two years later the exiled physicist Albert Einstein would make a remarkable admission in Time magazine: ‘Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I had never any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess, that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.’ The following chapter explores whether the Church deserved such unqualified praise.¹⁴⁷