Nazis take power In January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor. The passing of the
Enabling Act on 23 March, in part, removed the Reichstag as an obstacle to concluding a concordat with the Vatican. In the discussion of the Act, Hitler offered the Reichstag the possibility of friendly co-operation, promising not to threaten the Reichstag, the President, the States, or the Churches if granted the emergency powers. With Nazi paramilitary encircling the building, he said: "It is for you, gentlemen of the Reichstag to decide between war and peace." The Act allowed Hitler and his Cabinet to rule by emergency decree for four years, though Hindenburg remained President. German Catholics were wary of the new government: In early 1933, Hitler told
Hermann Rauschning that Bismarck had been stupid in starting a
Kulturkampf and outlined his own strategy for dealing with the clergy which would be based initially on a policy of toleration: We should trap the priests by their notorious greed and self-indulgence. We shall thus be able to settle everything with them in perfect peace and harmony. I shall give them a few years' reprieve. Why should we quarrel? They will swallow anything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognise a firm will, and we need only show them once or twice who is the master. They will know which way the wind blows. An initially mainly sporadic
persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany followed the Nazi takeover. Hitler was
hostile to the Catholic Church, but he was also mindful that Catholics were a large proportion of the population in Germany: almost 40% in 1933. As such, for political reasons, Hitler was prepared to restrain his
anticlericalism and did not allow himself to be drawn into attacking the Church publicly as other Nazis would have liked him to do. Kershaw wrote that, following the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor by President von Hindenberg, the Vatican was anxious to reach agreement with the new government, despite "continuing molestation of Catholic clergy, and other outrages committed by Nazi radicals against the Church and its organisations". In March 1933, the British Roman Catholic periodical
The Tablet in an article titled "The Ides of March" said: [Hitler's] Dictatorship is a usurpation and his enforcement of it is a brutality. While we write these lines, with news of more arrests and repressions coming to us every hour, we remember that we have reached the Ides of March and the anniversary of a never-forgotten assassination. But Nazism's daggers cannot slay what is noblest and best in Germany. The Church, now that the Centre is no longer the key-group in German politics, may be persecuted; but HITLER will not succeed where BISMARCK failed. Robert Ventresca wrote that because of increasing harassment of Catholics and Catholic clergy, Cardinal Pacelli sought quick ratification of a treaty with the government, seeking in this way to protect the German Church. When Vice-Chancellor Papen and Ambassador to the Vatican
Diego von Bergen met Pacelli in late June 1933, they found him "visibly influenced" by reports of actions being taken against German Catholic interests. The Church was keen on coming to terms with Hitler as he represented a strong resistance against Communism. The Papal Nuncio in Berlin (Cesare Osenigo) is reported to have been jubilant about Hitler's rise to power and thought that the new government would soon be offering the same concessions to the Church that Mussolini had made in Italy. Historian Michael Phayer balances Lewy and author and journalist John Cornwell stating:
Negotiations The Catholic bishops in Germany had generally shown opposition to Hitler from the beginning of his rise to power. When the
Nazi Party polled six million votes during the
14 September 1930 election, the Catholic hierarchy called on its people to examine their consciences. During the next two years, bishops continued to pronounce against unacceptable policies of the Nazi Party. When
Hindenburg appointed Hitler as
Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the bishops maintained support for the Catholic
Centre Party (), which in turn refused to assent to a proposal that would allow Hitler to assume full power. On 12 March 1933, Pope Pius XI received the German Cardinal
Faulhaber in Rome. On his return Faulhaber reported: After my recent experience in Rome in the highest circles, which I cannot reveal here, I must say that I found, despite everything, a greater tolerance with regard to the new government. ... Let us meditate on the words of the Holy Father, who in a consistory, without mentioning his name, indicated before the whole world in Adolf Hitler the statesman who first, after the Pope himself, has raised his voice against Bolshevism. At a cabinet meeting on 20 March 1933, Hitler was confident that the Centre Party had now seen the necessity of the Enabling Act and that "the acceptance of the Enabling Act also by the would signify a strengthening prestige with regard to foreign countries." Early in March 1933, the bishops recommended that Catholics vote for the Centre Party in the
elections scheduled for 5 March 1933. However, two weeks later the Catholic hierarchy reversed its previous policy: allowing the Centre Party and the Bavarian Catholic Party to vote for the
Enabling Act which gave Hitler dictatorial powers on 23 March. German Catholic theologian Robert Grosche described the Enabling Act in terms of the 1870 decree on the infallibility of the Pope, and stated that the Church had "anticipated on a higher level, that historical decision which is made today on the political level: for the Pope and against the sovereignty of the Council; for the Fuhrer and against the Parliament." On 29 March 1933 Cardinal Pacelli sent word to the German bishops to the effect that they must change their position with regard to National Socialism. On 28 March 1933, the bishops themselves took up a position favourable to Hitler. According to Falconi (1966), the about-face came through the influence and instructions of the Vatican. Pope Pius XI indicated in
Mit brennender Sorge (1937) that the Germans had asked for the concordat, and Pope Pius XII (the former Cardinal Pacelli) affirmed this in 1945. Falconi viewed the Church's realignment as motivated by the desire to avoid being left alone in opposition and to avert reprisals. After the leader of the Centre Party, Monsignor
Kaas, had persuaded the party members to vote for Hitler and the Enabling Act, he left immediately for Rome, and on his return on 31 March he was received by Hitler. He returned to Rome accompanied by the Catholic Vice-chancellor von Papen on 7 April with a mandate from Hitler to sound out a concordat with the Vatican. On the day they set out for Rome to prepare the way for the concordat, the first two anti-Semitic laws (
excluding non-Aryans from public office and from the legal profession) were issued in Germany, but this did not impede the discussions. Papen recorded in his memoirs that on his arrival in Rome, the Pope "greeted me with paternal affection, expressing his pleasure that at the head of the German State was a man like Hitler, on whose banner the uncompromising struggle against Communism and Nihilism was inscribed." In Falconi's opinion the concordat was the price paid by Hitler to obtain the support of the German episcopate and the Catholic parties.
Ian Kershaw viewed the loss of political Catholicism as the sacrifice needed to protect the position of the Catholic Church in Germany. According to historian Michael Phayer, the view "that the Concordat was the result of a deal that delivered the parliamentary vote of the Catholic Center Party to Hitler, thereby giving him dictatorial power (the Enabling Act of March 1933) ... is historically inaccurate". Cardinal Faulhaber wrote to Cardinal Pacelli on 10 April 1933 advising that defending the Jews would be wrong "because that would transform the attack on the Jews into an attack on the Church; and because the Jews are able to look after themselves"—the latter assertion based on the outcome of the
April boycott, which in spite of Nazi efforts had been mostly ignored and abandoned after only one day. On 22 April 1933, the British Minister to the Vatican recounted what the Vatican Under-Secretary of State had told him: "The Holy See is not interested in the Centre Party. We are more concerned with the mass of Catholic voters in Germany than in the Catholic deputies who represent them in the Reichstag." Previously, as part of the agreement surrounding the 1929 Lateran Treaty with the
Fascist government in Italy, the Vatican had consented to the dissolution of
Partito Popolare, which had seen support among the Italian clergy. It had been previously dissolved in 1926. At a 26 April meeting with Bishop
Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, representative of the
German Bishops' Conference, Hitler declared: I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.
Edith Stein—later canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross—wrote a letter to Pius XI in April 1933 about the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Her letter was sent personally via the Arch-Abbott of Beuron. The text of the letter is easily accessible on the internet. She never asked him to issue an encyclical on the matter, as some have contended. The Arch-Abbott received an answer from Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII. See above, Hubert Wolf. (Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at
Auschwitz on 9 August 1942). The issue of the concordat prolonged Kaas's stay in Rome, leaving the Centre Party without a chairman, and on 5 May Kaas finally resigned from his post. The party then elected
Heinrich Brüning as its chairman. At that time, the Centre party was subject to increasing pressure in the wake of the process of
Gleichschaltung and after all the other parties had dissolved (or were banned, like the SPD). The Centre Party dissolved itself on 5 July 1933, as the concordat between the Vatican and the Nazis had dealt it a decisive blow by exchanging a ban on the political activities of priests for the continuation of Catholic education. Cardinal Pacelli and von Papen initialled the concordat in Rome three days later, with signing taking place on 20 July. On 2 July, the Vatican daily newspaper ''
L'Osservatore Romano'' insisted that the concordat was not an endorsement of Nazi teachings. On 13 July, a British minister had an interview with Cardinal Pacelli and reported: "His Eminence said that the Vatican really viewed with indifference the dissolution of the Centre Party." At the 14 July cabinet meeting, Hitler brushed aside any debate on the details of the concordat, expressing the view "that one should only consider it as a great achievement. The concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust which was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry."
Saul Friedländer said that Hitler may have countenanced in this "area of trust" what he perceived as the Christian Church's traditional theological antipathy towards Jews (see Hitler's comments above to Berning on 26 April) converging with Nazi aims. On 22 July 1933, von Papen attended a meeting of the Catholic Academic Union during which he first made the connection between the dissolution of the Centre Party and the concordat. He said the Pope was particularly pleased at the promised destruction of
Bolshevism and that Pius XI had agreed to the treaty "in the recognition that the new Germany had fought a decisive battle against Bolshevism and the atheist movement." Papen stated "an undeniable inner connection between the dissolution of the German Center party that has just taken place and the conclusion of the Concordat" and ended his speech with a call for German Catholicism to put away former resentments and to help build Nazi Germany. Abbot Herwegen told the meeting: What the liturgical movement is to the religious realm, fascism is to the political realm. The German stands and acts under authority, under leadership – whoever does not follow endangers society. Let us say 'yes' wholeheartedly to the new form of the total State, which is analogous throughout to the incarnation of the Church. The Church stands in the world as Germany stands in politics today. Cardinal Pacelli did sound a note of caution in that his satisfaction was based on the assumption that the German Government "remained true to its undertaking", but said also that Hitler "was becoming increasingly moderate". On 24 July, Cardinal Faulhaber sent a handwritten letter to Hitler, noting that "For Germany's prestige in the East and the West and before the whole world, this handshake with the papacy, the greatest moral power in the history of the world, is a feat of immeasurable importance." On 4 August 1933, the British Minister reported "in conversations I have had with Cardinal Pacelli and Monsignor Pizzardo, neither gave me the feeling of the slightest regret at the eclipse of the Centre [Party], and its consequent loss of influence in German politics". On 19 August,
Ivone Kirkpatrick had a further discussion with Cardinal Pacelli in which he expressed his "disgust and abhorrence" at Hitler's reign of terror to the diplomat. Pacelli said "I had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich." Pacelli also told Kirkpatrick that he deplored the persecution of the Jews, but a pistol had been held to his head and that he had no alternative, being given only one week to decide.
Pinchas Lapide said that while negotiations for the concordat were taking place, pressure had been put on the Vatican by the arrest of ninety-two priests, the searching of Catholic youth-club premises, and the closing down of nine Catholic publications. The Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter wrote: "By her signature the Catholic Church has recognised National Socialism in the most solemn manner. ... This fact constitutes an enormous moral strengthening of our government and its prestige." Meanwhile, although the Protestant churches, being local congregations, remained unaffected by restrictions on foreign support, Hitler's government negotiated other agreements with them which in essence put Nazi officials, most of whom were Catholics, into positions of influence or outright authority over Protestant churches. Foreseeing the potential for outright State control of their churches which these agreements portended, many Protestant church leaders simply reorganized their congregations out of the agreements, causing a schism within the Protestant Churches. These Protestant resisters attempted to rally Catholic prelates to the dangers portended by these agreements, but were simply rebuffed when the
Reichskonkordat was ratified. Many of the Protestant clergy who opposed the Nazi religious program (
Bekennende Kirche or Confessing Church) later suffered imprisonment or execution. Church leaders were realistic about the concordat's protections. Cardinal Faulhaber is reported to have said: "With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are
hanged, drawn and quartered." After the signing of the concordat, the papal nuncio exhorted the German bishops to support Hitler's régime. The bishops told their flocks to try to get along with the Nazi régime. According to Michael Phayer, the concordat prevented Pius XI from speaking out against the Nazi
Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and though he did intend to speak out after the nationwide
pogrom of 1938, Cardinal Pacelli dissuaded him from doing so. On 20 August 1935, the Catholic Bishops conference at Fulda reminded Hitler that Pius XI had: exchanged the handshake of trust with you through the concordat – the first foreign sovereign to do so. ... Pope Pius spoke high praise of you. ... Millions in foreign countries, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have overcome their original mistrust because of this expression of papal trust, and have placed their trust in your regime.
Preamble His Holiness Pope Pius XI and the President of the
German Reich [
Paul von Hindenburg], led by their common desire to consolidate and enhance the existing friendly relations between the Catholic Church and the state in the whole territory of the German Reich in a stable and satisfactory manner for both parties, have decided to conclude a solemn agreement which will supplement the concordats already concluded with some particular German States (Laender) and secure for the others the principles of a uniform treatment of the questions involved. His Holiness Pope Pius XI has appointed as his plenipotentiary [
a diplomat granted full power to represent] His Eminence the Most Revered Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, His Holiness' Secretary of State; and the President of the German Reich [
Paul von Hindenburg] has appointed as plenipotentiary the Vice-Chairman of the German Reich, Herr Franz von Papen; who, having exchanged their proper form have agreed to the following articles.
Additional Protocol {in brackets} When the signing of the concordat concluded today between the Holy See and the German Reich, the undersigned, being duly empowered to do so, have formulated the following explanations which form an integral part of the concordat itself. •
Article 1 The
German Reich guarantees freedom of profession and public practice of the Catholic religion. It recognizes the right of the Catholic Church to regulate and manage her own affairs independently within the limits of the law applicable to all and to issue – within the framework of her own competence – laws and ordinances binding on her members. The vagueness of the article would later lead to contradictory interpretations. •
Article 2 The concordats concluded with Bavaria (1924), Prussia (1929) and Baden (1932) and the rights and privileges of the Catholic Church recognized therein remain unchanged within the territory of the States (Laender) concerned. For the rest of the states provisions of the present concordat shall be fully applicable. These provisions shall also be binding for the said three states in so far as they are relative to matters not regulated by the concordats concluded with those states, or in so far as they complete the arrangements already made. •
Article 5 The clergy enjoy in the discharge of their spiritual activities the same protection of the state as state officials. The state will proceed according to general provisions of its law in case of any outrage directed against any clergy personally or against their ecclesiastical character or in case of any interference with duties of their office and, if necessary, will provide official protection. It applies to the period of the
Weimar Republic which did not officially and fully collapse until the death of President Paul von Hindenburg
2 August 1934 with the passing of a
national referendum vote 19 August 1934 consolidating the Office of Chancellor and President, thereby, declaring Adolf Hitler
Führer of Germany. •
Article 17 The property and all other proprietary rights of the publicly recognized corporations, institutions, foundations and associations of the Catholic Church will be guaranteed according to the common law of the state. No building used for public worship can be demolished under any pretext or for any reason whatsoever, except if a mutual agreement has been reached beforehand with the competent ecclesiastical authority. (With regard to Art. 17. In so far as building or land belonging to the state have been devoted to ecclesiastical purposes, they will continue to be devoted to them, with due regard, however, to the contracts which might have been concluded about them.) Catholic clergy outside Germany mostly rejected the concordat as well; for instance the British Roman Catholic periodical
The Tablet openly reported the signing of the concordat negatively: Already it is being said that THE POPE OF ROME thinks of nobody save his own adherents and that he does not care how Lutherans are dragooned and how Jews are harried so long as Popish bishops, monastic orders, confessional schools, and Catholic associations are allowed full freedom. We beg our Protestant and Jewish friends to put away such suspicions. As we suggested at the outset of this brief article, the Catholic Church could have done little for other denominations in Germany if she had begun thrusting out wild hands to help them while her own feet were slipping under her. By patience and reasonableness she has succeeded in re-establishing herself, more firmly than before, on a Concordat which does not surrender one feather's weight of essential Catholic principle. She will straightway set about her sacred task, an important part of which will be the casting out of those devils which have been raging – and are raging still – in the Reich. But "this sort" of devil is not cast out save by prayer. Political action (from which the German clergy are debarred under the Concordat) by the Church would drive matters from bad to worse. We are confident, however, that Catholics will abhor the idea of enjoying complete toleration while Protestants and Jews are under the harrow, and that, quietly but strongly, the Catholic influence will be exerted in the right direction. One German out of three is a Catholic; and Catholic prestige is high in Germany's public life. Criticism of the concordat was initially from those countries who viewed Germany as a potential threat.
Le Temps wrote: "This is a triumph for the National Socialist government. It took Mussolini five years to achieve this; Germany has done it in a week." ''L'Ere Nouvelle
wrote: "The contradiction of a system preaching universalism making an agreement with a highly nationalistic state has been repeated throughout Vatican history. The Church never attacks existing institutions, even if they are bad. It prefers to wait for their collapse, hoping for the emergence of a higher morality. The Polish newspaper Kurjer Poranny
wrote on 19 July 1933: "Once again we see the methods of the Vatican – intransigent with the passive and amenable, but accommodating with the high-handed and ruthless. In the last century it rewarded its persecutor, Bismarck, with the highest Papal decoration, the Order of Christ. ...The Centre Party, which most courageously resisted the Nazis, has been disowned by the Vatican." Ex-Chancellor Bruning reported that 300 Protestant pastors who had been on the verge of joining the Catholic Church on account of the stand it had taken against the Nazis abandoned the plan after the signing of the concordat. On 24 July, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter'' commented: The provocative agitation which for years was conducted against the NSDAP because of its alleged hostility to religion has now been refuted by the Church itself. This fact signifies a tremendous moral strengthening of the National Socialist government of the Reich and its reputation. On 26 and 27 July 1933, the Vatican daily newspaper ''
L'Osservatore Romano stressed the advantages gained by the church through the concordat but also said that the church had not given up her traditional neutrality towards different forms of political government nor did it endorse a "specific trend of political doctrines or ideas." The Nazis replied through the German press on 30 July by correcting perceived false interpretations of the concordat and "reminding the Vatican" that the concordat had been signed with the German Reich which "as Rome should know, is completely dominated by the National Socialist trend" and therefore "the de facto
and de jure'' recognition of the National Socialist government" was signaled by the concordat. Hitler had a "blatant disregard" for the concordat, wrote Paul O'Shea, and its signing was to him merely a first step in the "gradual suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany".
Anton Gill wrote that "with his usual irresistible, bullying technique, Hitler then proceeded to take a mile where he had been given an inch" and closed all Catholic institutions whose functions were not strictly religious: Within the same month of signing the concordat, the Nazis promulgated their sterilization law – the
Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring – a policy the Catholic Church considered deeply offensive. Days later, moves began to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. Clergy,
religious sisters, and lay leaders began to be targeted with thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or immorality. From 1940, a dedicated
Clergy Barracks had been established at
Dachau concentration camp. Intimidation of clergy was widespread.
Cardinal Faulhaber was shot at.
Cardinal Innitzer had his Vienna residence ransacked in October 1938, and
Bishop Sproll of
Rottenburg was jostled and his home vandalised.
William Shirer wrote that the German people were not greatly aroused by the persecution of the churches by the Nazi Government. The majority were not moved to face death or imprisonment for the sake of freedom of worship, being too impressed by Hitler's early foreign policy successes and the restoration of the German economy. Few, he wrote, "paused to reflect that the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists." Anti-Nazi sentiment grew in Catholic circles as the Nazi government increased its repressive measures against their activities. In his history of the German Resistance, Hoffmann writes that, from the beginning: After constant confrontations, by late 1935, Bishop
Clemens August von Galen of Münster was urging a joint
pastoral letter protesting against an "underground war" against the church. When the Nazi government violated the concordat (in particular Article 31), the bishops and the Papacy protested against these violations. Pius XI considered terminating the concordat, but his secretary of state and members of the curia, who feared the impact upon German Catholics, dissuaded him, as they believed it would result in the loss of a protective shield. Cardinal Pacelli acknowledged his role in its retention after the war. The flourishing Catholic press of Germany faced censorship and closure. Finally in March 1941, Goebbels banned all Church press, on the pretext of a "paper shortage". Catholic schools were a major battleground in the
kirchenkampf campaign against the Church. When in 1933 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", Bishop
Clemens August Graf von Galen of Münster refused, writing that such interference in 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. Galen protested directly to Hitler over violations of the concordat. When in 1936, Nazis
removed crucifixes in schools, protest by Galen led to public demonstrations. Church kindergartens were closed, crucifixes were removed from schools and Catholic welfare programs were restricted on the basis they assisted the "racially unfit". Parents were coerced into removing their children from Catholic schools. In Bavaria, teaching positions allotted to sisters were awarded to secular teachers and denominational schools were transformed into "community schools". When in 1937 the authorities in Upper Bavaria attempted to replace Catholic schools with "common schools", Cardinal Faulhaber offered fierce resistance. By 1939 all Catholic denominational schools had been disbanded or converted to public facilities.
World War II From 1940, the Gestapo launched an intense persecution of the monasteries, invading, searching and appropriating them. The Provincial of the Dominican Province of Teutonia,
Laurentius Siemer, a spiritual leader of the German Resistance, 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. In 1941, an expansion of the regime's attack on the churches grew as did the war in the East. Monasteries and convents were targeted and expropriation of Church properties surged. The Nazi authorities said that the properties were needed for wartime necessities such as hospitals, or accommodation for refugees or children, but in fact used them for their own purposes. "Hostility to the state" was another common cause given for the confiscations, and the action of a single member of a monastery could result in seizure of the whole. The Jesuits were especially targeted. The Papal Nuncio
Cesare Orsenigo and Cardinal Bertram complained constantly to the authorities but were told to expect more requisitions owing to war-time needs. Figures like Bishops
Clemens August Graf von Galen and
Konrad von Preysing attempted to protect German priests from arrest. In Galen's 1941
anti-euthanasia sermons, he denounced the confiscations of church properties. He attacked the Gestapo for converting church properties to their own purposes – including use as cinemas and brothels. He protested against the mistreatment of Catholics in Germany: the arrests and imprisonment without legal process, the suppression of the monasteries, and the expulsion of religious orders. 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 Catholic soldiers: In July 1942, Hitler said he viewed the concordat as obsolete, and intended to abolish it after the war, and only hesitated to withdraw Germany's representative from the Vatican out of "military reasons connected with the war": In fact the
Operation Anthropoid commandos were besieged in the Orthodox
Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral. ==After World War II==