Foundations Though neither the Catholic nor Protestent churches as institutions were prepared to openly oppose the Nazi State, the churches provided the earliest and most enduring centres of systematic opposition to Nazi policies, and Christian morality and the anti-church policies of the Nazis motivated many German resistors and provided impetus for the "moral revolt" of individuals in their efforts to overthrow Hitler. From the outset of Nazi rule in 1933, issues emerged which brought the Catholic church into conflict with the regime, and the historian Wolf cites events such as the
July Plot of 1944 as having been "inconceivable without the spiritual support of church resistance". The German Opposition saw National Socialism as standing in "radical opposition to the Western, Christian tradition". Hoffmann writes that, from the beginning: Ernst Wolf wrote that some credit must be given to the
resistance of the churches, for providing "moral stimulus and guidance for the political Resistance ...". Virtually all of the military conspirators in the July Plot were religious men. Among the social democrat political conspirators, the Christian influence was also strong, though
humanism also played a significant foundational roleand among the wider circle there were other political, military and nationalist motivations at play. The Kreisau leader
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke declared in one of his final letters before execution that the essence of the July revolt was "outrage of the Christian conscience". The "Declaration of Government" that was to be broadcast following the coup on 20 July 1944 appealed unambiguously to Christian sensibility:
Limitations The German Episcopate had various disagreements with the Nazi government, but it never declared an official sanction of the various attempts to overthrow the Hitler regime. The German bishops hoped for a
quid pro quo that would protect Catholic schools, organisations, publications and religious observance. The Vatican too persisted in seeking to maintain a "legal modus vivendi" with the regime. Clergy in the German Resistance had some independence from the state apparatus, and could thus criticise it, while not being close enough to the centre of power to take steps to overthrow it. "Clerical resistors", wrote Theodore S. Hamerow, could "indirectly at least, articulate political dissent in the guise of pastoral stricture", but the problem for them lay in determining how far they should go in their criticism: "Should they confine themselves to religious and moral issues or should they deal with political and racial issues as well ...". Faced with such questions, the German clergy generally determined that their first duty lay in the protection of their own church and its members, remaining within the limits of formal legality. Thus during the early years of Nazi Germany, clerical dissenters usually spoke out not against the established system, but "only against specific policies that it had mistakenly adopted and that it should therefore properly correct". Before moving toward resistance, German Catholics and Protestants were also faced with overcoming nationalist sentiment, and an instinct to respect authority which was the inheritance of their religious and national outlooks. In predominantly Protestant Germany, many Catholics were determined to prove that they were "good Germans" too, and avoid the trauma of another
Kulturkampf. Thus when Bishop August von Galen of Münster 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 regime. Yet from the early stages of Nazism, the Nazis moved early against the church's organisational interestsattacking Catholic schools and the Catholic press. Hastings wrote that the early Nazi movement founded in Munich was essentially Catholic in religious orientation with Catholic student groups being influential in the founding of the movement and Catholic priests providing spiritual guidance. The events surrounding the
Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 caused a rift between Catholic and Protestant members and thereafter the movement became predominantly Protestant. Archbishop Bertram sought to join the Nazi Party in 1932 with Archbishop Groeber joining the SS as a promotive member in 1933 and Bishop Hudal helping Nazi war criminals to escape after the war. According to Kershaw, the German church leadership expended considerable energies in opposing government interference in the churches and "attempts to ride roughshod over Christian doctrine and values", but this vigour, was not matched against all areas of "Nazi barbarism". Thus for example, what protests the bishops did make regarding anti-Jewish policies, tended to be by way of private letters to government ministers. Kershaw wrote that, while the "detestation of Nazism was overwhelming within the Catholic Church", it did not preclude church leaders approving of areas of the regime's policies, particularly where Nazism "blended into 'mainstream' national aspirations"like support for "patriotic" foreign policy or war aims, obedience to state authority (where this did not contravene divine law); and destruction of atheistic Marxism and Soviet Bolshevism. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism was "no bulwark" against Nazi biological antisemitism, wrote Kershaw, and on these issues "the churches as institutions felt on uncertain grounds". Opposition was generally left to fragmented and largely individual efforts. Historian
Karl Dietrich Bracher has called 'the idea that the Catholic Church almost universally opposed Nazism, 'as questionable as the contrary thesis of a Communist mass movement against Hitler', and attributed the Centre Party's paralysis to Catholicism's 'flirtation with the new regime'. Mary Fulbrook wrote that when politics encroached on the church, Catholics were prepared to resist, but that the record was otherwise patchy and uneven, and that, with notable exceptions, "it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship".
Pinchas Lapide wrote that in 1939 close to half the population of the Greater German Reich was Catholic and despite pressure to leave 22.7% of the
SS were Catholics.
Institutional resistance By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with the new government, had become highly disillusioned. In March,
Pope Pius XI issued the
Mit brennender Sorge encyclicalaccusing the Nazi Government of violations of the 1933 Concordat, and further that it was sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church". The Pope noted on the horizon the "threatening storm clouds" of religious wars of extermination over Germany. The Nazis responded with, an intensification of the Church Struggle, beginning around April. There were mass arrests of clergy and church presses were expropriated. Goebbels noted heightened verbal attacks on the clergy from Hitler in his diary and wrote that Hitler had approved the start of trumped up "immorality trials" against clergy and anti-church propaganda campaign. Goebbels' orchestrated attack included a staged "morality trial" of 37 Franciscans. Institutionally, the Catholic Church in Germany offered organised, systematic and consistent resistance to the policies of the Third Reich which infringed on ecclesiastical autonomy. As one of the few German institutions to retain some independence from the state, it was able to continue to co-ordinate a level of opposition to Government, and the churches, more than any other institutions, continued to provide a "forum in which individuals could distance themselves from the regime". In the words of Kershaw, the churches "engaged in a bitter war of attrition with the regime, receiving the demonstrative backing of millions of churchgoers. Applause for Church leaders whenever they appeared in public, swollen attendances at events such as Corpus Christi Day processions, and packed church services were outward signs of the struggle of ... especially of the Catholic Churchagainst Nazi oppression". While the church ultimately failed to protect its youth organisations and schools, it did have some successes in mobilizing public opinion to alter government policies. The churches challenged Nazi efforts to undermine various Christian institutions, practices and beliefs and Bullock wrote that "among the most courageous demonstrations of opposition during the war were the sermons preached by the
Catholic Bishop of Münster and the Protestant Pastor,
Dr Niemoller ..." but that nevertheless, "Neither the Catholic Church nor the Evangelical Church ... as institutions, felt it possible to take up an attitude of open opposition to the regime".
German Hierarchy The 1933
Reich concordat between Germany and the Vatican prohibited clergy from participating in politics and in the aftermath of the Nazi takeover and signing of the Concordat, the outspoken nature of opposition by German Catholic leaders towards the Nazi movement weakened considerably. But it was from the clergy that the first major component of the German Resistance to the policies of the Third Reich emerged. "From the very beginning", wrote Hamerow, "some churchmen expressed, quite directly at times, their reservations about the new order. In fact those reservations gradually came to form a coherent, systematic critique of many of the teachings of National Socialism." Later, the most trenchant public criticism of the Third Reich came from some of Germany's religious leaders, as the government was reluctant to move against them, and though they could claim to be merely attending to the spiritual welfare of their flocks, "what they had to say was at times so critical of the central doctrines of National Socialism that to say it required great boldness", and they became resistors. Their resistance was directed not only against intrusions by the government into church governance and to arrests of clergy and expropriation of church property, but also to matters like Nazi euthanasia and eugenics and to the fundamentals of human rights and justice as the foundation of a political system. A senior cleric could rely on a degree of popular support from the faithful, and thus the regime had to consider the possibility of nationwide protests if such figures were arrested. While hundreds of ordinary priests and members of monastic orders were sent to concentration camps throughout the Nazi period, just one German Catholic bishop was briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp, and just one other expelled from his diocese. This reflected also the cautious approach adopted by the hierarchy, who felt secure only in commenting on matters which transgressed on the ecclesiastical sphere. 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. Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, the chairman of the German Conference of Bishops, developed a protest system which "satisfied the demands of the other bishops without annoying the regime". Firmer resistance by Catholic leaders gradually reasserted itself by the individual actions of leading churchmen like
Joseph Frings,
Konrad von Preysing, August von Galen and
Michael von Faulhaber. But the German Episcopate was divided over relations with the Nazi regimefigures like Cardinal Bertram, favoured a policy of concessions, while figures like Bishop Preysing called for more concerted opposition. According to
Michael Phayer, in relation to the mistreatment of Jews, "no other German bishops spoke as pointedly as Preysing and Frings". Fest nominates Presying and Galen, but also Archbishop
Conrad Gröber among the individual clerics who led broader Catholic resistance. On 22 March 1942, the German Bishops issued a pastoral letter on "The Struggle against Christianity and the Church". The letter launched a defence of human rights and the rule of law and accused the Reich Government of "unjust oppression and hated struggle against Christianity and the Church", despite the loyalty of German Catholics to the Fatherland, and brave service of Catholics soldiers. It accused the regime of seeking to rid Germany of Christianity: The letter outlined serial breaches of the 1933 Concordat, reiterated complaints of the suffocation of Catholic schooling, presses and hospitals and said that the "Catholic faith has been restricted to such a degree that it has disappeared almost entirely from public life" and even worship within churches in Germany "is frequently restricted or oppressed", while in the conquered territories (and even in the Old Reich), churches had been "closed by force and even used for profane purposes". The freedom of speech of clergymen had been suppressed and priests were being "watched constantly" and punished for fulfilling "priestly duties" and incarcerated in Concentration camps without legal process. Religious orders had been expelled from schools, and their properties seized, while seminaries had been confiscated "to deprive the Catholic priesthood of successors". In 1938, he became one of the co-founders of the
Hilfswerk beim Bischöflichen Ordinariat Berlin (Welfare Office of the Berlin Diocese Office). He extended care to both baptised and unbaptised Jews and protested the Nazi euthanasia programme. He attacked the Gestapo for converting church properties to their own purposesincluding use as cinemas and brothels. Galen protested the mistreatment of Catholics in Germany: the arrests and imprisonment without legal process, the suppression of the monasteries, 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 saidand any government that punishes without court proceedings "undermines its own authority and respect for its sovereignty within the conscience of its citizens". Bishop von Galen led
denunciation of Nazi euthanasia and the most widespread public protests against any Nazi policy up to that time. His three powerful sermons of July and August 1941 earned him the nickname of the "Lion of Münster". Galen's sermons appealed to Christian conscience as the well for opposition. The sermons were printed and distributed illegally. Hitler wanted to have Galen removed, but Goebbels told him this would result in the loss of the loyalty of
Westphalia. Documents suggest the Nazis intended to hang von Galen at the end of the war. In 1943, the German bishops had debated whether to directly confront Hitler collectively over what they knew of the murdering of Jews. Frings wrote a pastoral letter cautioning his diocese not to violate the inherent rights of others to life, even those "not of our blood" and even during war, and preached in a sermon that "no one may take the property or life of an innocent person just because he is a member of a foreign race". The Papacy and German bishops had already protested against the Nazi sterilization of the "racially unfit". Catholic protests against the escalation of this policy into "euthanasia" began in the summer of 1940. Despite Nazi efforts to transfer hospitals to state control, large numbers of disabled people were still under the care of the churches.
Caritas was the chief organisation running such care services for the Catholic Church. After Protestant welfare activists took a stand at the Bethel Hospital in August von Galen's diocese, Galen wrote to Bertram in July 1940 urging the church take up a moral position. Bertram urged caution. Archbishop
Conrad Groeber of Freiburg wrote to the head of the Reich Chancellery, and offered to pay all costs being incurred by the state for the "care of mentally people intended for death". Caritas directors sought urgent direction from the bishops, and the Fulda Bishops Conference sent a protest letter to the Reich Chancellery on 11 August, then sent Bishop Heinrich Wienken of Caritas to discuss the matter. Wienken cited the commandment "thous shalt not kill" to officials and warned them to halt the program or face public protest from the church. Wienken subsequently wavered, fearing a firm line might jeopardise his efforts to have Catholic priests released from Dachau, but was urged to stand firm by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber. The government refused to give a written undertaking to halt the program, and the Vatican declared on 2 December that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law: "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed". Bishop von Galen had the decree printed in his newspaper on 9 March 1941. Subsequent arrests of priests and seizure of Jesuit properties by the Gestapo in his home city of Munster, convinced Galen that the caution advised by his superior had become pointless. On 6, 13 and 20 July 1941, Galen spoke against the seizure of properties, and expulsions of nuns, monks and religious and criticised the euthanasia programme. In an attempt to cow Galen, the police raided his sister's convent, and detained her in the cellar. She escaped the confinement, and Galen, who had also received news of the imminent removal of further patients, launched his most audacious challenge on the regime in a 3 August sermon. As word of the program spread, protest grew, until finally, Bishop August von Galen delivered his famous 1941 sermons denouncing the program as "murder". He declared the murders to be illegal, and said that he had formally accused those responsible for murders in his diocese in a letter to the public prosecutor. The policy opened the way to the murder of all "unproductive people", like old horses or cows, including invalid war veterans: "Who can trust his doctor anymore?", he asked. On 3 August 1941, in one of his series of denunciations, Galen declared: He declared, wrote Evans, that Catholics must "avoid those who blasphemed, attacked their religion, or brought about the death of innocent men and women. Otherwise they would become involved in their guilt". Galen said that it was the duty of Christians to resist the taking of human life, even if it meant losing their own lives. Thousands of copies of the sermons were circulated across Germany. "The sensation created by the sermons", wrote Evans, "was enormous". Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's euthanasia program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism". According to Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state." Galen had the sermons read in parish churches. The British broadcast excerpts over the BBC German service, dropped leaflets over Germany, and distributed the sermons in occupied countries. There were demonstrations across Catholic GermanyHitler himself faced angry demonstrators at Nuremberg, the only time he was confronted with such resistance by ordinary Germans. In 1943, Pius issued the
Mystici corporis Christi encyclical, in which he condemned the practice of murdering disabled people. He stated his "profound grief at the murder of the deformed, the insane, and those suffering from hereditary disease ... as though they were a useless burden to Society", in condemnation of the ongoing
Nazi euthanasia program. The Encyclical was followed, on 26 September 1943, by an open condemnation by the German Bishops which, from every German pulpit, denounced the murder of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent".
German Priests and religious While Hitler did not feel powerful enough to arrest senior clergy before the end of the war, an estimated one third of German priests faced some form of reprisal from the Nazi government. Bishop von Preysing was protected from Nazi retaliation by his position, his cathedral administrator and confidant, Provost
Bernard Lichtenberg, was not. A strong opponent of Nazism, Lichtenberg had been active with the Catholic Centre Party. Lichtenberg served at
St. Hedwig's Cathedral from 1932, and was under the watch of the Gestapo by 1933, for his courageous support of prisoners and Jews. He became a confidante of Bishop von Preysing from 1935. was sent to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939.
Rupert Mayer, a Bavarian Jesuit and World War I army chaplain, had clashed with the National Socialists as early as 1923. Continuing his critique following
Hitler's rise to power, Mayer was imprisoned in 1939 and sent to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As his health declined, the Nazis feared the creation of a martyr and sent him to the Abbey of Ettal, but Mayer died in 1945.
Laurentius Siemer, Provincial of the Dominican Province of Teutonia, became a steadfast opponent of the Nazi regime and had contacts with the Resistance. The Gestapo arrested Siemer in Cologne in 1935, as part of the "Currency Fraud Cases" targeting Catholic clergy, and held him in custody for several months. He was influential in the Committee for Matters Relating to the Orders, which formed in response to Nazi attacks against Catholic monasteries and aimed to encourage the bishops to intercede on behalf of the Orders and oppose the Nazi state more emphatically. He spoke to resistance circles on the subject of Catholic social teaching as the starting point for the reconstruction of Germany, and worked with
Carl Goerdeler and others in planning for a post-coup Germany. Following the failure of the July Plot, Siemer evaded capture and hid out until the end of the war. of the German Resistance was arrested following the 1944
July Plot, and died in police custody. Also involved in the German Resistance was Christian workers' movement activist and Centre Party politician
Otto Müller. Müller was among those who argued for a firm line from the German bishops against legal violations of the Nazis. In contact with the German military opposition before the outbreak of war, he later allowed individual opposition figures the use of the
Ketteler-Haus in Cologne for their discussions and was involved with Catholic politicians and July Plotters
Jakob Kaiser,
Nikolaus Groß and
Bernhard Letterhaus in planning a post Nazi-Germany. After the failure of the
July Plot, the Gestapo arrested Müller, who was imprisoned in the Berlin Police Hospital, where he died. Parish priests such as the
Lübeck martyrsJohannes Prassek,
Eduard Müller and
Hermann Lange, and the Lutheran pastor
Karl Friedrich Stellbrink were partly inspired by August von Galen's anti-euthanasia homilies. They shared disapproval of the Nazi regime, and the four priests spoke publicly against the Nazisinitially discreetlydistributing pamphlets to friends and congregants. Although church federation work with young people was banned, Müller worked with youth groups and led a discussion circle whose topics included National Socialism, political events and the military situationusing information from British radio and from leaflets including the sermons of Bishop Clemens August von Galen, which he duplicated with Lange and Prassek. Then, following a March 1942 RAF raid, after which Stellbrink tended wounded, he delivered a Palm Sunday sermon which attributed the bombing to divine punishment. Stellbrink was arrested, followed by the three Catholic priests, and each was sentenced to death. Resigned to martyrdom, Prassek wrote to his family: "Who can oppress one who dies". The mingling of the blood of the four guillotined martyrs has become a symbol of German
Ecumenism. An old guard of national-conservatives aligned to
Carl Friedrich Goerdeler broke with Hitler in the mid-1930s. According to Kershaw, they "despised the barbarism of the Nazi regime. But were keen to re-establish Germany's status as a major power ...". Essentially authoritarian, they favoured monarchy and limited electoral rights "resting on Christian family values". "Hitlerism is poison for the German soul", wrote Goerdeler, "Hitler is determined to destroy Christianity". (centre) was the wartime Jesuit Provincial of Bavaria and one of three Jesuits in the inner
Kreisau Circle of the German Resistance. A younger group, dubbed the "
Kreisau Circle" by the Gestapo, did not look to German imperialism for inspiration. Religious motivations were particularly strong in the
Kreisau Circle of the Resistance. Formed in 1937, though multi-denominational, it had a strongly Christian orientation, and looked for a general Christian revival, and reawakening of awareness of the transcendental. Its outlook was rooted both in German romantic and idealist tradition and in the Catholic doctrine of
natural law. The Circle looked to a federalised Europe along the lines of the United States as the desirable "new order", resting heavily on German Christian and social ideals, with self-governing communities rooted in social justice. The Circle pressed for a coup against Hitler, but being unarmed was dependent on persuading military figures to take action. Among the central membership of the Circle were the Jesuit priests
Augustin Rösch,
Alfred Delp and
Lothar König. Bishop von Preysing had contact with the group. The Catholic conservative
Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg brought the Jesuit Provincial of Southern Germany Augustin Rösch into the Kreisau Circle, along with Alfred Delp. For figures like Rösch, the Catholic trade unionists
Jakob Kaiser and
Bernhard Letterhaus and the
July Plot leader
Klaus von Stauffenberg, "religious motives and the determination to resist would seem to have developed hand in hand". was an influential member of the
Kreisau Circleone of the few clandestine
German Resistance groups operating inside Nazi Germany. He was executed in February 1945. According to Gill, "Delp's role was to sound out for Moltke the possibilities in the Catholic Community of support for a new, post-war Germany". Rösch and Delp also explored the possibilities for common ground between Christian and socialist trade unions. Lothar König SJ became an important intermediary between the Circle and bishops Grober of Freiberg and Presying of Berlin. The Kreisau group combined conservative notions of reform with socialist strains of thoughta symbiosis expressed by Delp's notion of "personal socialism". The group rejected Western models, but wanted to "associate conservative and socialist values, aristocracy and workers, in a new democratic synthesis which would include the churches." Delp wrote: "It is time the 20th Century revolution was given a definitive theme, and the opportunity to create new and lasting horizons for humanity", by which he meant, social security and the basics for individual intellectual and religious development. So long as people lacked dignity, they would be incapable of prayer or thought. In
Die dritte Idee (The Third Idea), Delp expounded on the notion of a third way, which, as opposed to Communism and Capitalism, might restore the unity of the person and society. Another non-military German Resistance group, dubbed the
"Frau Solf Tea Party" by Gestapo, included the Jesuit Fr
Friedrich Erxleben. The purpose of the Solf Circle was to seek out humanitarian ways of countering the Nazi regime. It met at either Frau Solf or
Elizabeth von Thadden's home. Von Thadden was a Christian educational reformer and Red Cross worker.
Otto Kiep and most of the group were arrested in 1941 and executed.
Priests of Dachau , where the Nazis established a dedicated
clergy barracks for clerical opponents of the regime In effort to counter the strength and influence of spiritual resistance, Nazi security services monitored Catholic clergy very closelyinstructing that agents be set up in every diocese, that the bishops' reports to the Vatican should be obtained and that the bishops' areas of activity must be found out. A "vast network" was established to monitor the activities of ordinary clergy: Nazi security agents wrote "The importance of this enemy is such that inspectors of security police and of the security service will make this group of people and the questions discussed by them their special concern". Priests were frequently denounced, arrested and sent to concentration camps, often simply on the basis of being "suspected of activities hostile to the State" or that there was reason to "suppose that his dealings might harm society".
Dachau was established in March 1933 as the first
Nazi Concentration Camp. Chiefly a political camp, it was here that the Nazis established in 1940 a dedicated
Clergy Barracks. Of a total of 2,720 clergy recorded as imprisoned at Dachau, some 2,579 (or 94.88%) were Catholic and a total of 1,034 clergy were recorded overall as dying in the camp, with 132 "transferred or liquidated" during that timealthough R. Schnabel's 1966 investigation found an alternative total of 2,771, with 692 noted as deceased and 336 sent out on "invalid trainloads" and therefore presumed dead. . By far the greatest number of priest prisoners came from Polandin all some 1,748 Polish Catholic clerics, of whom some 868 died in the camp. Germans constituted the next largest group411 German Catholic priests were sent to Dachau, of whom 94 died in the camp and 100 were "transferred or liquidated". France contributed the next main group, with 153 Catholic clerics, among whom ten were murdered at the camp. Other Catholic priests were sent from Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Hungary and Rumania, while from outside the Nazi Empire2 British and one Spaniard were incarcerated at Dachau, as well as one "stateless" priest. In December 1935,
Wilhelm Braun, a Catholic theologian from Munich, became the first churchman imprisoned at Dachau. The annexation of Austria saw an increase in clerical inmates. Berben wrote: "The commandant at the time, Loritz, persecuted them with ferocious hatred, and unfortunately he found some prisoners to help the guards in their sinister work". Despite SS hostility to religious observance, the Vatican and German bishops successfully lobbied the regime to concentrate clergy at one camp and obtained permission to build a chapel, for the priests to live communally and for time to be allotted to them for the religious and intellectual activity. From December 1940, priests were gathered in Blocks 26, 28and 30, though only temporarily. 26 became the international block and 28 was reserved for Polesthe most numerous group. Conditions varied for prisoners in the camp. The Nazis introduced a racial hierarchykeeping Poles in harsh conditions, while favouring German priests. Many Polish priests simply died of the cold, not given sufficient clothing. A large number were killed in horrific
Nazi medical experiments. Several Poles were killed via the "invalid trains" sent out from the camp, others were murdered in the camp and given bogus death certificates. Some died of cruel punishment for misdemeanorsmurdered by beatings or
worked to death. Religious activity outside the chapel was totally forbidden. Priests would secretly take confessions and distribute the Eucharist among other prisoners. Amid the Nazi persecution of the Tirolian Catholics,
Otto Neururer, a parish priest was sent to Dachau for "slander to the detriment of German marriage", after he advised a girl against marrying the friend of a senior Nazi. After agreeing to perform a forbidden baptism at Buchenwald, Neururer was sent to the punishment block, where he was murdered by being hanged upside down on 30 May 1940. This was reportedly conducted at the orders of the sadistic SS
Hauptscharführer Martin Sommerthe "Hangman of Buchenwald". He was the first priest murdered in the concentration camps.
Gerhard Hirschfelder died of hunger and illness in 1942.
Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite, was murdered by a lethal injection in 1942. The Nazis murdered Alois Andritzki, a German priest, by lethal injection in 1943. Engelmar Unzeitig, a Czech priest died of typhoid in 1945.
Giuseppe Girotti died at the camp in April 1945. In December 1944,
Karl Leisner, a deacon from Munster who was dying of tuberculosis received his ordination at Dachau. Leisner had been active in the Christian Youth Movement under Bishop von Galen, bringing him to the attention of the Gestapo. His fellow prisoner
Gabriel Piguet, the
Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand presided at the secret ceremony. Leisner died soon after the liberation of the camp. Among other notable Catholic clerics sent to Dachau were:
Jean Bernard of Luxembourg,
Hilary Paweł Januszewski (d.1945),
Lawrence Wnuk,
Ignacy Jeż and
Adam Kozłowiecki of Poland;
Josef Lenzel,
August Froehlich,
Georg Häfner and Bernhard Heinzmann of Germany. Following the war, the Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel and a convent for Carmelite nuns were built at Dachau in commemoration.
Lay resistors , the head of
Catholic Action, was assassinated in Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives" purge of 1934. In his history of the German Resistance to Hitler,
Anton Gill wrote that "more than anyone else, the Catholics showed their disapproval of the regime by huge gatherings" but that "this was the only collective resistance Catholics showed". In 1935, in Hagen, Catholics gathered to protest against a performance of the Nazi playwright
Edmund Kiss's anti-Christian play
Wittekind. Police crushed the riot. In November 1936, the Oldenburg Nazis removed crucifixes from schools. Bishop Galen protested, which led to a public demonstration, and the cancellation of the order. On 2 August 1934, the aged President von Hindenberg died. The offices of President and Chancellor were combined and bestowed upon Hitler by the "
Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich". The German armed forces were required to swear
an oath of loyalty, not to the constitution or the state, but to Hitler personally. Hitler declared his "revolution" complete.
Catholic writers , editor of Munich's Catholic weekly,
Der Gerade Weg, and critic of the Nazies, was among the high-profile Catholic opposition figures targeted for assassination in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. The flourishing Catholic press of Germany faced censorship and closure under the Nazis. In 1933, the Nazis established a Reich Chamber of Authorship and Reich Press Chamber under the Reich Cultural Chamber of the Ministry for Propaganda. Writers had to be registered with the relevant chamber. On 10 May, "degenerate literary works" were burned by the thousand at the public squares of Berlin and other cities. As the Nazis asserted themselves, non-conformist writers were terrorised, their works burned, and fear pervaded. The June–July 1934
Night of the Long Knives purge was the culmination of this early campaign.
Fritz Gerlich, the editor of Munich's Catholic weekly,
Der Gerade Weg, was killed in the purge for his strident criticism of the Nazi movement. The poet
Ernst Wiechert delivered a speech at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, calling for love, compassion, truth, freedom and the law. He protested the government's attitudes to the arts, calling them "spiritual murder". He was arrested and taken to
Dachau Concentration Camp.
Nikolaus Gross was a Christian trade unionist, member of the Centre Party and director of the West German Workers' Newspaper
Westdeutschen Arbeiterzeitung, the newspaper of the Catholic Workers' movement. From early days an opponent of Nazism, he was declared an enemy of the state in 1938, and his newspaper was shut down. He continued to publish an underground edition and worked to rouse resistance among Catholic workers. Arrested in the
July Plot round up, he was executed on 23 January 1945. He was declared a martyr and beatified by
Pope John Paul II in 2001. Writer and theologian
Dietrich von Hildebrand was a vocal opponent of Hitler and Nazism. Blacklisted by the Nazi movement in the 1920s, he ran religious discussions in his Munich home from 1924 to 1930, which were attended by distinguished theologians such as
Erich Przywara, S.J., Mgrs
Martin Grabmann and Konrad von Preysing. Following Hitler's seizure of power, he fled from Germany, first to Italy, and then to Vienna, Austria, where, with the support of Austrian Chancellor
Engelbert Dollfuss he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat ("The Christian Corporative State"). For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, von Hildebrand was once again forced to flee, spending time in Switzerland, France (where he taught at the Catholic University of Toulouse until the Nazis invaded France in 1940), then to Portugal and finally to New York in 1940. There he taught philosophy at the Jesuit
Fordham University. Hundreds of arrests and closure of Catholic presses followed the issuing of
Pope Pius XI's
Mit brennender Sorge anti-Nazi encyclical.
Catholic Aid Agencies Members of Catholic aid agencies such as
Caritas provided relief to victims of the Nazis and gathered intelligence on the fate of prisoners of the regime. Among the German laity,
Gertrud Luckner, was among the first to sense the genocidal inclinations of the Hitler regime and to take national action. A pacifist and member of the German Catholics' Peace Association, she had been supporting victims of political persecution since 1933 and from 1938 worked at the head office of the German Association of Catholic Charitable Organizations, "Caritas". Using international contacts she secured safe passage abroad for many refugees. She organized aid circles for Jews, assisted many to escape. She cooperated with the priests
Bernhard Lichtenberg and
Alfred Delp. Following the outbreak of the war, she continued her work for the Jews through Caritas' war relief officeattempting to establish a national underground network through Caritas cells. She personally investigated the fate of the Jews being transported to the East and managed to obtain information on prisoners in concentration camps, and obtain clothing, food and money for forced labourers and prisoners of war. Following Lichtenberg's arrest, Sommer reported to Bishop Konrad von Preysing. From 1942, White Rose published leaflets to influence people against Nazism and militarism. They criticised the "anti-Christian" and "anti-social" nature of the war. Among the leaders of the group,
Willi Graf had been involved with the banned Catholic Youth movement and
Christoph Probst was baptised into the church on the day of his execution. The Lutheran
Hans Scholl had read Bishop von Galen's 1941 sermons and had worked for Professor
Carl Muth, editor of the Catholic Magazine
High Land, which had been banned in 1941. His sister
Sophie Scholl had been influenced by
Theodor Haecker to read
John Henry Newman's writings on conscience, sentiments echoed by Galen. The
Scholl siblings,
Kurt Huber, Willi Graf and
Alexander Schmorell were caught and executed in 1943.
Catholics in the German Resistance Though Catholics were prominent in the
German Resistance, according to Fest, it essentially consisted of a "motley collection of individuals who differed greatly in their social origins, habits of thought, political attitudes and methods of action" and was by and large slow to accept the need for violence to displace Hitler. A few civilian resistance groups developed, but the Army was the only organisation with the capacity to overthrow the government, and from within it a small number of officers came to present the most serious threat posed to the Nazi regime. The Foreign Office and the
Abwehr (Military Intelligence) also provided vital support to the movement. But many of those in the military who ultimately chose to seek to overthrow Hitler had initially supported the regime, if not all of its methods. Hitler's 1938 purge of the military was accompanied by increased militancy in the Nazification of Germany, a sharp intensification of the persecution of Jews, and daring foreign policy exploits, bringing Germany to the brink of war and it was at this time that the German Resistance emerged. The Resistance members were motivated by such factors as the mistreatment of Jews, harassment of the churches, and the harsh actions of Himmler and the Gestapo. In his history of the German Resistance, Peter Hoffmann wrote that "National Socialism was not simply a party like any other; with its total acceptance of criminality it was an incarnation of evil, so that all those whose minds were attuned to democracy, Christianity, freedom, humanity or even mere legality found themselves forced into alliance ...". The Nazi policy of
Gleichschaltung (forced conformity to the Nazi Party) met with such forceful opposition from the German churches, that Hitler decided to delay confrontation until the end of the war. The truce constituted a rare win of sorts for an opposition movement in Nazi Germany. The standoff fed the will of many German resistors, but the churches as institutions stopped short of ever offering a general resistance to Nazi rule. During the summer of 1938, wrote Hamerow, small groups of dissidents from the armed forces and civil service began to meet informally, the most prominent figure in these early days being
Ludwig Beck, the Army Chief of Staff, who began to contemplate a palace coup against Hitler. He wanted, among other liberal aims, to avoid war and bring back "peace with the church". The back down of the Western Powers over the Sudeten crisis was a diplomatic triumph for Hitler, and the conspiracy did not progress.
Carl Goerdeler wondered if anything could now oppose "the growing dangers to our Christian world", and the dispirited would-be conspirators were muted when Hitler marched into the remainder of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The early course of war stirred some of the conspirators back into action. But many resistors rallied to the cause of Germany when Hitler invaded Poland, Bishop Galen among them, who offered a patriotic benediction. But with the defeat of Poland, and undoing of the last "injustices" of Versailles, many Opposition members could no longer see a need to continue the war, and looked to ways to negotiate a peace, and to oust Hitler. Hamerow wrote that the "decline of the anti-Nazi movement during the period of German military successes from 1939 to 1941 and its revival during the period of German military reverses from 1942 to 1944 reflected the primary concern of most of the resistors for the security of their nation."
Pius XII and the Resistance In Rome, the Pope had continued to lobby world leaders for the avoidance of a conflict up until the very eve of war, and expressed his dismay that war had come in his October 1939
Summi Pontificatus encyclical. The Pope's Private Secretary,
Robert Leiber acted as the intermediary between Pius and the Resistance. He met with Müller, who visited Rome in 1939 and 1940. Later in the war, Leiber remained the point of contact for communications from Colonel-General
Ludwig Beck in the lead up to the 1944
July Plot. The Vatican considered Müller to be a representative of Colonel-General von Beck and agreed to offer the machinery for mediation. Oster,
Wilhelm Canaris and
Hans von Dohnányi, backed by Beck, told Müller to ask Pius to ascertain whether the British would enter negotiations with the German opposition which wanted to overthrow Hitler. The British agreed to negotiate, provided the Vatican could vouch for the opposition's representative. Pius, communicating with Britain's
Francis d'Arcy Osborne, channelled communications back and forth in secrecy. The Vatican agreed to send a letter outlining the bases for peace with England and the participation of the Pope was used to try to persuade senior German Generals Halder and Brauchitsch to act against Hitler. Negotiations were tense, with a Western offensive expected, and on the basis that substantive negotiations could only follow the replacement of the Hitler regime. Hoffmann wrote that, when the
Venlo Incident stalled the talks, the British agreed to resume discussions primarily because of the "efforts of the Pope and the respect in which he was held. Chamberlain and Halifax set great store by the Pope's readiness to mediate." Pius, without offering endorsement, advised Osbourne on 11 January 1940 that the German opposition had said that a German offensive was planned for February, but that this could be averted if the German generals could be assured of peace with Britain, and not on punitive terms. If this could be assured, then they were willing to move to replace Hitler. The Pope admitted to "discomfort" at his role as mediator, but advised that the Germans involved were not Nazis. The British government had doubts as to the capacity of the conspirators. On 7 February, the Pope updated Osbourne that the opposition wanted to replace the Nazi regime with a democratic federation, but hoped to retain Austria and the Sudetenland. The British government was non-committal, and said that while the federal model was of interest, the promises and sources of the opposition were too vague. Nevertheless, the resistance was encouraged by the talks, and Muller told Leiber that a coup would occur in February. Pius appeared to continue to hope for a coup in Germany into March 1940. The negotiations ultimately proved fruitless. Hitler's swift victories over France and the Low Countries deflated the will of the German military to resist Hitler. Muller was arrested during the Nazis first raid on Military Intelligence in 1943. He spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, ending up at Dachau.
July Plot On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, inside his
Wolf's Lair field headquarters in
East Prussia. The plot was the culmination of the efforts of several groups in the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi-led German government. The failure of both the assassination and the military ''coup d'état
which was planned to follow it led to the arrest of at least 7,000 people by the Gestapo. According to records of the Führer Conferences on Naval Affairs'', 4,980 of these were executed. During interrogations or their show trials a number of the conspirators cited the Nazi assault on the churches as one of the motivating factors for their involvement. The Protestant clergyman
Eugen Gerstenmaier said that the key to the entire resistance flowed from Hitler's evil and the "Christian duty" to combat it. The Bavarian Catholic Count
Claus Von Stauffenberg, had initially looked favourably on the arrival of the Nazis in power, but came to oppose the regime because of its persecution of the Jews and oppression of the church. In 1944, he led the
20 July plot (
Operation Valkyrie) to assassinate Hitler. He had joined the resistance in 1943, and commenced planning coup, in which he personally placed a time bomb under Hitler's conference table. Killing Hitler would absolve the German military of the moral conundrum of breaking their oath to the Fuehrer. Faced with the moral and theological question of
tyrannicide, Stauffenberg conferred with Bishop
Konrad von Preysing and found affirmation in early Catholicism, and through Luther. In the lead up to the assassination, Stauffenberg had taken to reciting
Stefan George's poem
The Antichrist, which, wrote Fest, suggested he had elevated "resistance into a sacred deed". at the
People's Court.
Staatspräsident of Württemberg in 1933, he was overthrown by the Nazis. Later arrested for his role in the
20 July Plot to overthrow Hitler, he was beheaded in January 1945. (far right) in the People's Court, 1944. Wirmer has worked to forge ties between the
German Resistance and the trade unions. The planned Cabinet which was to replace the Nazi regime included Catholic politicians
Eugen Bolz,
Bernhard Letterhaus,
Andreas Hermes and
Josef Wirmer. Wirmer was a member of the left of the Centre Party, had worked to forge ties between the civilian resistance and the trade unions and was a confidant of
Jakob Kaisera leader of the Christian trade union movement, which Hitler had banned after taking office. Lettehaus was also trade union leader. As a captain in the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command), he had gathered information and become a leading member of the resistance. The proposed radio announcement of the failed July putsch of 1944 revealed the Godly outlook of the leading conspirators: Following the failure of the plot, Stauffenberg was shot and Moltke, Yorck and Delp, among others, were executed.
Philipp von Boeselager, the last surviving member of the conspiracy, wrote that Catholicism influenced anti Nazi feeling in the German armyto such an extent that Christmas celebrations in the army were banned in 1943. Author Nigel Jones believed that Catholicism and Christian conscience were central to Stauffenberg's decision to move against Hitler. 5000 people were tortured and killed over the plotand the Gestapo linked a number of Bishops to knowledge of the German Resistance: Von Galen, Von Faulhaber, Frings, and
Johannes Dietz of Fuldathough did not arrest the men. == To the Holocaust ==