The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  The campaign was not long in bringing results. In 1934, 84 per cent of children were still registered in denominational schools in Munich; but by the end of 1937, the proportion had fallen to a mere 5 per cent, a result achieved, as the Munich Diocesan Administration complained, ‘by means that were entirely unjust and illegal’ and involved ‘indescribable terrorism that contravened every principle of law and justice’, including the withdrawal of welfare support for those who refused to vote for the schools’ abolition. By the summer of 1939, all denominational schools in Germany had been turned into community schools, and all private schools run by the Churches had been closed down or nationalized, and the monks and priests who staffed them dismissed. Pastors and priests were prevented from teaching in primary schools in increasing numbers. At the same time, religious instruction classes were reduced in number. Later the same year, the Nazi teachers’ organization told its members not to take over religious instruction classes from the now-banned clergy, though not all obeyed. By 1939 religious instruction in vocational schools had been reduced to half an hour a week, and in many areas it had to follow guidelines that described Jesus as non-Jewish. Parents who objected to these moves - and there were many of them, Protestant as well as Catholic - were obliged by the local authorities to withdraw their objections, summoned to special meetings at the school to pressure them to sign their children up for ideological instruction instead of religious education, or even threatened with dismissal from their jobs if they refused. In similar vein, the Education Ministry drew up plans to merge or close down many of the theological faculties in the universities, while from 1939 theology posts in teacher training colleges that fell vacant were no longer filled, by order of the Education Ministry in Berlin. In a few areas, notably in Württemberg, where the Education Minister Mergenthaler was strongly anti-Christian, there were attempts to abolish religious instruction and replace it with classes on the Nazi world-view. The regime did not succeed in abolishing religious education altogether by 1939, but its long-term intentions had become abundantly clear by this date.88

  The power and influence of the Catholic Church in Germany, like that of its Protestant counterpart, had been severely dented by 1939. It had been intimidated and harassed until it began to scale down its criticisms of the regime for fear that even worse might follow. Widespread threats of imprisonment, reported a local government official towards the end of 1937, had produced a ‘cautious restraint on the part of the clergy’.89 In some areas, the Gestapo took over the anti-Church campaign and rapidly succeeded in driving the Catholic Church out of public life.90 Elsewhere, there were reports by mid-1938 of a general ‘pacification in the area of Church affairs’.91 From Rome, Cardinal Pacelli continued to send interminable letters of complaint to the German government charging it with continued violations of the Concordat.92 Yet although he contemplated doing so in September 1937, Hitler in the end refrained from openly repudiating the Concordat. It was not worth the risk of arousing the hostility of the Vatican and the protests of Catholic states, particularly Austria, in the increasingly delicate state of international relations in the late 1930s. Privately, however, the Foreign Ministry made no bones about the fact that it regarded the Concordat as ‘out of date’ because many of its provisions, particularly concerning education, were ‘fundamentally opposed to the basic principles of National Socialism’. 93 It was easier to proceed piecemeal and by stealth and avoid all mention of the Concordat. In public, Hitler continued to call for the Church’s loyalty and to point out that it still received substantial state support. In the long run, however, he made it clear in private that it would be completely separated from the state, deprived of income from state taxes, and become a purely voluntary body, along with its Protestant equivalent. Catholics by and large were unaware of such intentions. For all the bitterness of the conflict, it did not result in any general alienation of the Catholic community from the Third Reich. Many Catholics were highly critical of the Nazi Party, and especially of zealots such as Rosenberg, but Hitler’s standing even here was only mildly affected. The deep-seated desire of the Catholic community since Bismarck’s time to be accepted as a full part of the German nation blunted the edge of its hostility to the anti-Christian policies of the regime, which many imagined were being pushed by radicals without the knowledge or approval of Hitler himself. This was an illusion. In the long run, as Rosenberg declared in September 1938, since young people were now almost completely under the control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazified education system, the hold of the Church over its congregation would be broken and the Catholic and Confessing Churches would disappear from the life of the people in their present form. It was a sentiment from which Hitler himself did not dissent.94

  III

  Dramatic though the escalation of this conflict may have appeared, it was in fact neither new in kind nor exclusive to Germany. Like the older generation of Social Democrats in the 1930s, older Catholic priests at the same time had experienced persecution before. In the 1870s, Bismarck had launched a determined assault on the Catholic Church in Germany that had resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of Catholic priests and the imposition of a wide range of secular checks and controls over the clergy. Similar policies were pursued at around the same time by secularizing governments in Italy and France, where the newly created states - the unified Italian monarchy and the French Third Republic - had wrested control of education from the clergy and placed it in the hands of state-appointed teachers in state-funded schools. Such policies were justified, too, by massive secularist propaganda against the supposed sexual immorality of the Catholic priesthood, above all in the use of the confessional to discuss the intimate secrets of young Catholic women. Pope Pius IX had partly sparked these conflicts, partly fuelled them, by issuing his denunciation of secularism and modernity through the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and by claiming first call on the allegiance of his flock through the Declaration of Papal Infallibility (1871). In the twentieth century, secularist persecution of the Christian Church had reached a new intensity in Mexico and Russia in the wake of the two countries’ respective revolutions. Crushing an international organization like the Church, which downgraded the state in its thinking, could form part of the process of building a new nation or a new political system. At a local level, village schoolteachers and village priests were engaged in a battle for supremacy over the minds of the young all across western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bitter Church-state struggles were nothing new, therefore, in the 1930s. What was new, perhaps, was the Nazi rejection of rationalistic secularism. In all these other cases the persecution of the Church was not tied to the promotion of an alternative religion. However powerful the claim of the state’s ideology might be, it was the claim of a secular, earthbound ideology. In the case of the Third Reich, however, the matter was not so clear.95

  What would replace the Churches in Germany when they finally disappeared? Leading Nazis took a variety of positions on this issue. Hitler and Goebbels’s religious beliefs retained a residual element of Christianity, albeit an eccentric one that became notably weaker after the failure of the German Christian project in 1934-5. Even Rosenberg qualified his anti-Christian stance with support for the German Christians until their failure to take over the Evangelical Church had become clear. Initially at any rate, he admired Luther, adapted doctrines from the medieval mystic Master Eckhart and thought that a racially amended Christianity could be merged into a new Germanic religion, which would dispense with the services of priests and dedicate itself to the interests of the Aryan race. Still, by publicly advocating such a new religion in the mid-1930s, Rosenberg became the most prominent spokesman for the anti-Christian tendency within the Nazi Party.96 The Myth of the Twentieth Century sold over a million copies,97 though Hitler subsequently rejected any idea that it was an official statement of Party doctrine. ‘Like many Regional Leaders’, he remarked, ‘I have myself only read a little bit of it.’ It was, he said ‘w
ritten in a style too difficult to understand’. It only began to sell, he claimed, when it was publicly condemned by Cardinal Faulhaber and placed on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.98 Yet leading Nazis, despite having failed to plough all the way through the Myth, were not averse to using its ideas in support of their policies, as when Baldur von Schirach, urging young people in 1934 to leave Catholic youth organizations and join the Hitler Youth, declared that ‘Rosenberg’s path is the path of German youth’.99 In July 1935, at the height of the controversy over Rosenberg’s attacks on the Churches, a speaker told a meeting of the Nazi Students’ League in Bernau: ‘One is either a Nazi or a committed Christian.’ Christianity, he said, ‘promotes the dissolution of racial ties and of the national racial community . . . We must repudiate the Old and the New Testaments, since for us the Nazi idea alone is decisive. For us there is only one example, Adolf Hitler and no one else.’100

  Such anti-Christian ideas were widespread in the Hitler Youth and formed an increasingly important part of the Party’s programme for the indoctrination of the young. Children receiving lunches from the National Socialist welfare organization in Cologne, for example, were obliged to recite a grace before and after the meal which substituted the Leader’s name for God’s when thanks were given.101 At one training camp for schoolchildren in Freusberg, the inmates were told that the Pope was ‘a half-Jew’ and that they had to hate the ‘oriental-Jewish, racially alien teaching of Christianity’, which was incompatible with National Socialism. The mother of a twelve-year-old Hitler Youth found the following text in his pocket when he came home one evening; it was also sung in public by the Hitler Youth at the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally:We are the jolly Hitler Youth,

  We don’t need any Christian truth

  For Adolf Hitler, our Leader

  Always is our interceder.

  Whatever the Papist priests may try,

  We’re Hitler’s children until we die;

  We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel.

  Away with incense and holy water vessel!

  As sons of our forebears from times gone by

  We march as we sing with banners held high.

  I’m not a Christian, nor a Catholic,

  I go with the SA through thin and thick.

  Not the cross, they sang, but ‘the swastika is redemption on earth’.102

  Such propaganda emerged at least in part out of the drive to abolish Catholic youth organizations and enrol their members in the Hitler Youth instead. Yet it also propagated a fiercely anti-Christian ethic whose virulence and potency should not be underestimated. Watching a young Hitler Youth member enter a Munich classroom in August 1936, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

  observed how his glance fell on the crucifix hanging behind the teacher’s desk, how in an instant his young and still soft face contorted in fury, how he ripped this symbol, to which the cathedrals of Germany, and the ringing progressions of the St Matthew Passion are consecrated, off the wall and threw it out of the window into the street . . . With the cry: ‘Lie there, you dirty Jew!’103

  And there were other outspokenly anti-Christian figures within the Nazi leadership besides Schirach. Open paganism in the Party, championed by Erich Ludendorff in the mid-1920s, did not disappear with Ludendorff’s foundation of the Tannenberg League in 1925 and his expulsion from the Party two years later. Robert Ley, leader of the Labour Front, went even further than Rosenberg in his disdain for Christianity and his rejection of the Divinity of Christ, though he did not follow him down the road of creating a substitute religion.104 A more consistently paganist figure in the Nazi elite was the Party’s agricultural expert Richard

  Walther Darré, whose ideology of ‘blood and soil’ made such a powerful impression on Heinrich Himmler. Darré believed that the medieval Teutons had been weakened by their conversion to Christianity, which he claimed had been foisted on them by the effete Latins from Southern Europe.105 Himmler in his turn abandoned his early Christian faith under Darré’s influence. In Himmler’s plans for the SS after 1933, the black-shirted racial elite was to become a kind of quasi-religious order, modelled to some extent on the Jesuits. The ideas that were to cement it together were drawn from supposed Germanic pagan rituals and beliefs of the Dark Ages. As an SS plan put it in 1937: ‘We live in the age of the final confrontation with Christianity. It is part of the mission of the SS to give to the German people over the next fifty years the non-Christian ideological foundations for a way of life appropriate to their own character. ’ These were to be a mixture of bits of Viking or Teutonic pagan religion with Wagnerian symbols and pure invention. The SS devised its own marriage service, with runes, a bowl of fire, Wagnerian music playing in the background and symbols of the sun presiding over the whole bizarre ceremony. The families of SS men were ordered by Himmler not to celebrate Christmas, but to mark Midsummer instead. Christianity, Himmler was to declare on 9 June 1942, was ‘the greatest of plagues’; true morality consisted not in exalting the spirit of the individual but in abnegating oneself in the service of the race. Moral values could be derived only from consciousness of one’s place in, and duty to, the chain of ‘valuable’ heredity.106

  Once it became clear that there was no real possibility of fulfilling the Nazis’ early ambition of creating a unified state Church along German Christian lines for the whole of the Third Reich, leading Nazis began to encourage Party members to declare their formal renunciation of Church membership. Rosenberg, predictably, had already left the Church in 1933; Himmler and Heydrich resigned in 1936, and a growing number of Regional Leaders now followed suit. The Interior Ministry ruled that people leaving their Church could declare themselves to be ‘Deists’ (gottgläubig), and the Party decreed that office-holders could not simul taneously hold any office in the Catholic or Protestant Church. In 1936, stormtroopers were forbidden to wear uniforms at Church services, and early in 1939 the ban was extended to all Party members. By 1939, over 10 per cent of the population in Berlin, 7.5 per cent in Hamburg, and between 5 and 6 per cent in some other major cities were registered as Deists, a term which could encompass a variety of religious beliefs including paganism. The great majority of these are likely to have been Party members; the proportion of Deists in the SS had reached over 25 per cent by 1938, for instance. This process was accelerated by an escalating series of measures pushed by the energetic and strongly anti-Christian head of Rudolf Hess’s office, Martin Bormann, banning priests and pastors from playing a part in Party affairs, or even, after May 1939, from belonging to it altogether. Still, there was a long way to go before the population as a whole took part in this movement. ‘We won’t let ourselves be turned into heathens,’ one woman in Hesse was heard to say by a Gestapo agent.107 The German Faith Movement, which propagated a new, racial religion based on a mishmash of Nordic and Indian rites, symbols and texts, never won more than about 40,000 adherents, and other neopagan groups, like Ludendorff’s esoteric Tannenberg League, were even smaller.108 Nevertheless, for all the general unpopularity of the movement, it remained the case that the Nazi Party was on the way to severing all its ties with organized Christianity by the end of the 1930s.109

  Whether this process was leading in the direction of a heavily amended form of ‘German Christianity’ or out-and-out paganism was the subject of an ongoing struggle between Rosenberg, whose office repeatedly tried to clamp down on publications sympathetic to the old idea of a Reich Church based on a synthesis of Nazism and Christianity, and Goebbels, who, as so often, took a more relaxed view. Goebbels teamed up with the head of the Leader’s Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, who ran the ‘Official Party Examination Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature’. Its task, endorsed by Goebbels, was to check Nazi Party publications for their ideological correctness. Rosenberg’s Office for Ideological Information repeatedly tried to take over Bouhler’s commission, which it considered ideologically lax, but without success, despite the occasional tactical victory in getting Hitler to intervene agains
t particular publications.110 Another, far less adept player in these complicated games, the Church Minister Hans Kerrl, tried to propagate the idea of a reconciliation of Protestantism and Nazism, but this had already had its day by the time of his appointment in 1935, and the obdurate refusal of the Confessing Church to go along with his plans made him seem weak and rendered him vulnerable to the attacks of more radical figures like Himmler and Rosenberg. His Ministry’s attempt to get the Concordat with the Catholic Church annulled met with similar failure, as Hitler considered it diplomatically inadvisable. By 1939, Kerrl’s influence was on the wane. He had proved quite unable to assert the monopoly over policy towards the Churches that his Ministry had ostensibly been set up to exercise.111