Galen became the pastor of
St. Lambert's Church, Münster, where he initially upset some parishioners with his political conservatism. At a meeting in Münster of the Association of Catholic Academicians in June 1933, Galen spoke against those scholars who had criticised the Nazi government and called for "a just and objective evaluation of [Hitler's] new political movement". In October 1933, Galen wrote approvingly of the Nazis' efforts to "eradicate" the "open propaganda for godlessness and immorality". Galen was named bishop by
Pope Pius XI on 5 September 1933. On 28 October, he was consecrated as bishop in Münster's cathedral by Cardinal
Karl Joseph Schulte. In 1933, when the Nazi school superintendent of Münster issued a decree that religious instruction be combined with discussion of the "demoralising power" of the "people of Israel", Galen refused, writing that such interference in the school curriculum was a breach of the Concordat and that he feared children would be confused as to their "obligation to act with charity to all men" and as to the historical mission of the people of Israel. In January 1934, he criticized Nazi racial policy in a sermon and, in subsequent homilies, equated unquestioning loyalty to the Reich with "slavery". He spoke against Hitler's theory of the purity of German blood. Bishop Galen also derided the neo-pagan theories of Rosenberg in
The Myth of the Twentieth Century as perhaps no more than "an occasion for laughter in the educated world", but warned that Rosenberg's "immense importance lies in the acceptance of his basic notions as the authentic philosophy of National Socialism and in his almost unlimited power in the field of German education. Herr Rosenberg must be taken seriously if the German situation is to be understood." In retaliation, two senior SS officers visited Galen to pressure him into endorsing Rosenberg's doctrines publicly, threatening the confiscation of Church property and an anti-Catholic propaganda campaign. One of them was the future SS General
Jürgen Stroop, who later recalled, "Bishop von Galen was a great gentleman, a true aristocrat, a Renaissance prince of the Church. He welcomed us politely but with reserve." Galen began by commending Stroop's mother for her devout Catholicism, then categorically refused to accept or praise Rosenberg's doctrines of euthanizing or forcibly sterilizing disabled people. He denounced the Nazis for trying to introduce
Germanic neo-paganism into his diocese. He scoffed at marriage ceremonies and funerals conducted before altars dedicated to
Wotan, surprising Stroop, who had attended such a ceremony only days before. Galen closed by assuring the officers that the Church would remain loyal to the state in all lawful matters. He expressed his deep love for Germany and reminded them that he had been the first bishop to publicly acknowledge the new regime. By late 1935, Galen was urging a joint pastoral letter from the German bishops to protest about an "underground war" against the church. By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with the Nazi government, had become highly disillusioned. In March, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge (
With Burning Concern), accusing the Nazi government of violating the 1933 Concordat and of sowing the "tales of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church". Galen was part of the five-member commission that prepared the papal encyclical. The Nazis responded with an intensification of their campaign against the Catholic Church. There were mass arrests of clergy and church publishing houses were expropriated, followed by widely spread abuse allegations and staged morality trials against members of religious orders and priests. In 1941 Galen welcomed the German war against the USSR as a positive development as he had rallied also to the cause of Germany when Hitler invaded Poland, offering a patriotic benediction.
Euthanasia While the Nazi
extermination of Jewish people took place primarily on Polish territory, the
murder of people with disabilities (viewed by the Nazi regime as "invalid" individuals) became public knowledge because it took place on German soil and interfered directly in Catholic and Protestant welfare institutions. Church leaders who opposed it – chiefly Bishop Galen and
Theophil Wurm, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg – were able to rouse widespread public opposition. The regime initiated its euthanasia program in 1939. It targeted people with dementia, cognitive/mental disabilities, mental illness, epileptic, physical disabilities, children with
Down's Syndrome and people with similar afflictions. The programme systematically murdered more than 70,000 people between September 1939 and August 1941. In 1941, with the
Wehrmacht still marching on Moscow, Galen, despite his long-time nationalist sympathies, denounced the lawlessness of the Gestapo, the confiscations of church properties, and the Nazi euthanasia programme. He attacked the Gestapo for converting church properties to their own purposes – including use as cinemas and brothels. He protested the mistreatment of Catholics in Germany: the arrests and imprisonment without legal process, the
suppression of monasteries, and the expulsion of religious orders. But his sermons went further than defending the church; he spoke of a moral danger to Germany from the regime's violations of basic human rights: "the right to life, to inviolability, and to freedom is an indispensable part of any moral social order", he said – and any government that punishes without court proceedings "undermines its own authority and respect for its sovereignty within the conscience of its citizens". Hitler's order for the
Aktion T4 Euthanasia Programme was dated 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. As word of the programme spread, protest grew, until finally, Galen delivered his famous August 1941 sermons denouncing the programme as "murder". On 3 August 1941, in one of his series of denunciations, Galen declared:
1941 sermons Galen's three powerful sermons of July and August 1941 earned him the nickname of the "Lion of Münster". The sermons were printed and distributed illegally. His attacks on the Nazis were so severe that Nazi official
Walter Tiessler proposed in a letter to
Martin Bormann that Galen should be executed. In a second sermon on 20 July 1941, Galen said that all written protests against the Nazi hostilities had proved to be useless. The confiscation of religious institutions continued unabated. Members of religious orders were still being deported or jailed. He asked his listeners to be patient and to endure, and said that the German people were being destroyed not by the Allied bombing from the outside, but from negative forces within. On 3 August 1941, Galen's third sermon described the continued desecration of Catholic churches, the closing and confiscation of convents and monasteries, and the deportation of mentally ill people to undisclosed destinations, while a notice was sent to family members stating that the person in question had died. This is murder, he exclaimed, unlawful by divine and German law, a rejection of the laws of God. He said he had forwarded his evidence to the State Attorney. "These are people, our brothers and sisters; maybe their life is unproductive, but productivity is not a justification for killing." If that were indeed a justification for execution, he reasoned, everybody would have to be afraid to even go to a doctor for fear of what might be discovered. The social fabric would be affected. Galen then remarked that a regime which can do away with the
Fifth Commandment ("Thou shalt not kill.") can destroy the other commandments as well. Galen went on to raise the question of whether permanently injured German soldiers would fall under the programme as well. Thousands of copies of the sermons were circulated throughout Germany. The local Nazi Gauleiter was furious and demanded Galen's immediate arrest.
Joseph Goebbels and party pragmatists preferred to wait until the end of hostilities to avoid undermining German morale in a heavily Catholic area. A year later, the euthanasia programme was still active, but the regime was conducting it in greater secrecy. According to
Robert Jay Lifton, "[t]his powerful, populist sermon was immediately reproduced and distributed throughout Germany — indeed, it was dropped among German troops by British
Royal Air Force flyers. Galen's sermon probably had a greater impact than any other one statement in consolidating anti-'euthanasia' sentiment."
Howard K. Smith called Galen "heroic", writing that the movement he represented was so widespread that the Nazi government could not arrest the bishop.
Ian Kershaw called Galen's "open attack" on the government's euthanasia programme in 1941 a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism". According to
Anton Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state." The sermons influenced the
Scholl siblings in founding the
White Rose pacifist student resistance group. One of von Galen's sermons of 1941 was the group's first pamphlet. Generalmajor
Hans Oster, a devout Lutheran and a leading member of the German Resistance, once said of Galen: Galen suffered virtual house arrest from 1941 until the end of the war. Documents suggest the Nazis intended to hang him at the end of the war. Despite Galen's opposition to Nazism and its racial theories, he nonetheless believed Germany was the last bulwark against the spread of atheist
Bolshevism. Parts of a sermon he gave in 1943 are said to have been used by the Nazis to aid in the enlistment of Dutch men to voluntarily join the
Waffen SS against the Soviet Union. Galen feared that German Catholics were being relegated to second-class status in Hitler's Germany and believed Hitler was missing the point that the Catholic Church and the state could be aligned against Bolshevism. Although von Galen boldly spoke out against Nazi policies and the euthanasia programme, historian Beth A. Griech-Polelle wrote that Galen remained silent on other issues such as the roundup, deportation and mass murder of Jews. German historian
Joachim Kuropka dismissed this allegation as a "misjudgment". Kuropka, referring to
Wilhelm Damberg's discovery which in his opinion had not received enough attention so far, pointed out that the diocesan leadership in Münster had instructed all its pastors in June 1938 to recommend a brochure against anti-Semitism titled "The Nathanael Question of Our Days" ("Die Nathanaelfrage unserer Tage") to all faithful to read. and he was partly responsible for the German bishops' conference condemnation of racial persecution in the 1943 pastoral letter
Dekalog-Hirtenbrief. After the war, Münster
rabbi Fritz Steinthal recorded Galen's support after
Kristallnacht, while expressing his firm conviction as rabbi that most Catholics in his city of Münster were horrified by the pogrom and in fact feared that they would be the next victims. During a commemoration in 2012, Jewish Holocaust survivor and witness Hans Kaufmann of Münster reminded of the fact that von Galen had offered a helping hand to Steinthal after the 1938 Kristallnacht, but deplored that other Jewish victims in Münster did not receive much aid from neighbours the day after. While not as explicit and not as effective as the vocal German episcopate's 1941 protests, in September 1943, von Galen and his fellow bishops in Germany drafted another condemnation of Nazi racial persecution and ordered it to be read from all pulpits in the diocese of Münster and across
Germany, therein denouncing the killing of "the innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped and mentally ill, the incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of foreign race or descent". In his history of the German Resistance,
Theodore S. Hamerow characterised the resistance approach of Galen as "trying to influence the Third Reich from within". While some clergymen refused ever to feign support for the regime, in the Church's conflict with the State over ecclesiastical autonomy, the Catholic hierarchy adopted a strategy of "seeming acceptance of the Third Reich", by couching their criticisms as motivated merely by a desire to "point out mistakes that some of its overzealous followers committed" in order to strengthen the government. Thus when Bishop Galen delivered his famous 1941 denunciations of Nazi euthanasia and the lawlessness of the Gestapo, he also said that the Church had never sought the "overthrow of the Reich government". ==Post-war positions==