A note from Reich Ambassador to the Holy See
Diego von Bergen, dated 29 August 1941, demanded that "all ecclesiastical appointments to important posts in annexed or occupied regions be first communicated to Berlin". Tardini wrote in August 1940: The present historical moment is very serious from this point of view: Hitler, the persecutor of the Church and the master of much of Europe, wishes in one way or another to impose the appointment of German bishops within non-German territories, and he wants to exercise and influence on the appointments, more so than previously agreed to.... What can the Holy See do? It can do what it has always done: reaffirm and defend its liberty, firmly maintain its rights against government coercion when such pressure is detrimental to the good of souls. The people will joyfully greet such apostolic firmness on the part of the Holy See and will stand close around it as the sole herald of divine truth and the sole protector of human dignity. By the end of the war, most of the surviving Catholic priests in Albania were of Italian origin an had been used by the fascist regime for the expansion of Italian culture and influence. Following the Italian invasion, "the Catholic Church enjoyed a position of favour and influence throughout the Second World War".
Czechoslovakia (western part) The heartland of Western Czechoslovakia became the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia of the Reich in 1939. In October 1938, the western border regions of Czechoslovakia had been dissected and annexed mostly by
Nazi Germany (
Sudetenland) and, to a small extent, by the
Second Polish Republic (
Trans-Olza, an area of
Czechoslovak Silesia). These annexations had only partially been internationally recognised at the time and were reversed after World War II. Most of the people in the
Budejovice diocese were of Czech ethnicity (
with a small German minority). A. Eltschkner was appointed bishop and the German government was notified even before an announcement appeared in ''
L'Osservatore Romano''. On 24 July von Bergen demanded a bishop of German ethnicity or nationality for Budejovice (hinting his favor for J. Remiger), referencing the appointment of French bishops to
Metz and
Strasbourg in 1919. After the Polish takeover of Trans-Olza, never internationally recognised, the Polish government had requested the Holy See to disentangle the parishes there from either the
Archdiocese of Breslau (northerly Trans-Olza) or the
Archdiocese of Olomouc (southerly Trans-Olza), respectively, both traditionally comprising cross-border diocesan territories in Czechoslovakia and Germany. The Holy See complied and
Pope Pius XI then subjected the Catholic parishes in Trans-Olza to an
apostolic administration under
Stanisław Adamski, Bishop of Katowice, who held that position until 31 December 1939. On 23 December 1939 Orsenigo appointed – with effect of 1 January 1940 – Breslau's Archbishop
Adolf Bertram and Olomouc' Archbishop
Leopold Prečan as apostolic administrators for exactly those Catholic parishes of Trans-Olza, where Pius XI had deposed them in 1938.
Estonia Eduard Profittlich,
S.J., the apostolic administrator of
Estonia, was one of many Catholic clergy victims of the
Soviet deportations from Estonia in 1941.
Poland Following the
occupation of Poland (1939–1945), the government of dioceses was "one of the first questions the Holy See had to face". Many of the main sees were vacant prior to the war, including Warsaw, where Cardinal
Aleksander Kakowski had died in December 1938. Other bishops had been forced out of their dioceses in the first days of the war such as
Stanisław Okoniewski, the bishop of
Chełmno-
Pelplin, and
Karol Mieczysław Radoński, the
bishop of Włocławek. Along the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line, established by the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, rather than appointing new bishops in the newly dissected dioceses, the bishops of neighboring diocese were made to serve as
apostolic administrators. Almost immediately, the Reich's ambassador to the Holy See,
Diego von Bergen, made it clear that Nazi Germany would like to see German prelates made temporary administrators of the sees whose bishops had been deposed. Orsenigo suggested to Pius XII it would be "opportune to appoint" Splett as apostolic administrator to Chełmno-Pelplin. That made Pius XII agree for Orsenigo to designate Splett as apostolic administrator to Chełmno-Pelplin with effect of 5 December 1939. The government-in-exile, now in London, saw this as a betrayal of the 1925 concordat between the Holy See and Poland, which prohibited placing any Polish territory under the jurisdiction of a bishop outside Poland. On 22 June 1940, Orsenigo informed Splett that he would appoint him also apostolic administrator for the diocesan territories of Płock (Lipno county) and
of Włocławek (Rypin county) within
Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, if the respective bishops would consent. Bishop
Antoni Julian Nowowiejski of Płock agreed. However, the Holy See refused. After Stryż's death, the exiled Adamski secretly invested as new vicar general Franz Wosnitza (1902–1979) on 3 June 1942. He started a career as priest also serving the minority of Poles who had German as a native language. The Consistorial Congregation, pretending the late Stryż had chosen Wosnitza, confirmed the latter as vicar general, an act not required by canon law for a vicar general appointed by his bishop, to help Adamski conceal that he was still acting in secret as bishop of Katowice. the apostolic administrator to the Reichsgau Wartheland for the Catholic parishioners of German language. The Polish government-in-exile protested the appointments of Breitinger and Splett as violations of the concordat. Relations between the Holy See and the government-in-exile appreciably worsened, and the Holy See countered that the government-in-exile itself had abrogated the concordat by not ensuring communication between the Vatican and the Polish clergy. According to Phayer, "betrayal was exactly what Poles felt when Pius appointed the German Franciscan Breitinger the apostolic administrator to the Wartheland in May 1942". However, Pius XII appointed foreigners Splett and Breitinger to fill the Polish bishoprics in parallel with the Polish incumbents, complying with German demands, originating from Wartheland's Reichsstatthalter
Arthur Greiser, that only German clergy could fulfill the spiritual needs of ethnic Germans. While the bishops living under German occupation, like Adamski, Teodor Kubina (1880–1951;
Częstochowa), Nowowiejski, and Sapieha considered their agreement to and the appointments of administrators for (parts of) their dioceses as the only way to maintain some precarious, though, modus vivendi for the Catholic Church under the anti-Christian and anti-Polish ideology of Nazism, bishops in exile like Hlond and Radoński were more concerned about these emergency measurements because Polish Catholics could resent them as additional humiliation, and Germany could gain from them a propagandist benefit, misinterpreting them as complaisances by the Holy See. ==Postwar legacy==