19
Hitler and the Churches
“The war will run its course, and then I will see it as my life’s work to sort out the problem with the Churches,” Hitler said over lunch at his main headquarters in mid-December 1941, by which point it was clear that Germany would not achieve a Blitzkrieg victory against the Soviet Union. “Only then will the German nation be safe. I do not care in the slightest about articles of faith, but I’m not having clerics sticking their noses in worldly affairs. This organised lie has to be broken in such a way that the state becomes the absolute master.” He added: “When I was young, my view was: use dynamite! Today I see that you can’t rush things. It has to rot away like a gangrenous limb. We need to get to the point where only idiots stand behind the pulpit and only old women sit in front of it, and the healthy youths are with us.”1
These statements were anything but exceptional. On the contrary, they expressed Hitler’s deep-seated enmity towards Christianity. The Christian Churches were the only institutions in the “Führer state” that escaped National Socialism’s claims on total ideological power. Hitler wanted to subjugate the Churches to his will, reducing them to a shadow of themselves, but he postponed the attack until after the war had been successfully concluded. “In the long term, National Socialism and the Churches won’t be able to coexist,” he proclaimed in another of his monologues.2
At the same time, however, Hitler realised that he could not achieve this goal by using brute force. A certain tactical flexibility was needed, since the Christian Churches remained influential in German society. “It makes no sense to artificially create further difficulties,” he admitted. “The cleverer we act, the better.”3 The dictator wanted to avoid an all-out war on the Christian faith and Christian culture at all costs. He remembered all too well Bismarck’s failed “cultural struggle”—the Kulturkampf—against the Catholic Church, and he thought that the time was wrong, at least in 1941, to engage in a battle against the Churches. “The best thing is to let Christianity gradually fade out,” he said in October of that year. “A long phase-out has something conciliatory. The dogma of Christianity will collapse in the face of science.”4
The same ambivalence had characterised Hitler’s behaviour prior to 1933. On the one hand, he staged National Socialism as a secular religion, presenting himself as a messianic leader sent by the Almighty to deliver the German people from all evil. His own sanctification went hand in hand with the stylisation of his followers into “disciples,” who unconditionally submitted to the Führer and who were willing, if necessary, to lay down their lives for him. Hitler constantly invoked the idea that faith could move mountains, and he rarely missed an opportunity to inject Christian phrases and notions, in pseudo-liturgical fashion, into his speeches.5 Particularly in his Christmas addresses, he liked to cite Jesus as a model for himself and his followers. Just as the Christian saviour, whip in hand, had driven the usurers from the temple, Hitler promised, he would expel “international Jewish finance capital” from Germany.6
On the other hand, however, Hitler saw his movement as religiously neutral and equally far removed from both of the main Christian faiths. Article 24 of the party programme stipulated: “The party as such represents the standpoint of positive Christianity without declaring its allegiance to any particular confession.”7 Political parties had nothing to do with religious problems, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, while conversely religions should not meddle in “political party nonsense.” He added: “The mission of the movement is not that of a religious reformation, but rather the political reorganisation of our people.” Hitler was enough of a realist to see that he could never come to power without support from Christian voters. Extending a hand to them in Mein Kampf, he described the “two religious confessions as equally valuable pillars for the continued existence of our people.”8
For that reason, when the party was reconstituted in 1925, Hitler vehemently resisted all attempts to pursue religious quarrels. Attacks on Christian communities and institutions were expressly prohibited. In 1928, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Arthur Dinter, who violated this prohibition by promoting the formation of a new ethnic-popular religion, was fired from his post and kicked out of the NSDAP.9 In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg was forced to publicly identify his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century—a synthesis of neopagan beliefs circulating among the Far Right—as “a personal confession” that had nothing to do with the party.10 Even as late as 1942 in his military headquarters, Hitler distanced himself from Rosenberg’s work, which he claimed to have only read “bits of.”11
After coming to power as chancellor, Hitler initially posed as a Christian statesman who wanted nothing more than to cooperate with Germany’s two main Churches in carrying out the country’s “national rebirth.” “At no point during his rule did Hitler invoke God as often and passionately as during the first eight weeks,” the historian Klaus Scholder has correctly asserted. “Never again did he give himself over to Christian figures of speech or appropriate Christian sites and attributes as greatly as in this period.”12 In his very first official declaration on 1 February 1933, he promised that Christianity “as the basis of our entire morality” would enjoy the “committed protection” of his nationalist government.13 In his speech on the Enabling Act on 23 March, he took a further step towards the Churches. The new government, Hitler assured them, “considered the two Christian confessions as factors of paramount importance for preserving our identity as a people” and would leave their traditional rights untouched.14 This declaration was directed primarily at the Catholic Centre Party, whose support he needed to get the necessary two-thirds majority for the Enabling Act in the Reichstag.
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Prior to 1933, German Catholics had been relatively resistant to Hitler’s lures. Beginning in September 1930, Catholic bishops had constantly warned against the teachings of National Socialism in their pastoral letters, and even as late as August 1932, with Hitler on the threshold of power, the German Bishops’ Conference in Fulda reiterated their rejection of Nazi ideology and declared that Catholics were “not allowed” to be members of the NSDAP.15 The Reichstag election of 5 March 1933 confirmed the solidity of political Catholicism, as the Centre Party and its Bavarian sister party, the BVP, only suffered small losses. Hitler considered prising apart Catholic resistance one of the most urgent tasks of the early phase of his rule.16 He achieved an initial success on 28 March, when the Catholic bishops responded to his seemingly conciliatory attitude with an equally conciliatory declaration. “Without revoking our earlier rejection of certain religious and ethical errors,” it read, “the episcopate believes it can conclude that the general prohibitions and warnings are no longer needed.” This was followed by an appeal to “loyalty towards legitimate authority and a conscientious fulfilment of civic duty.”17 With that, the ban on Catholics being National Socialists was lifted. Among pious Catholics too, enthusiasm for Hitler and his “national uprising” grew. “The cassock-wearers are very small and crawl before us,” Goebbels boasted.18
Hitler, who grew up in a Catholic environment and never officially left the Catholic Church, maintained a lifelong respect for the power of the institution and its thousands of years of tradition. He coveted an agreement with the Vatican along the lines of the Lateran Accords Mussolini had concluded in 1929. Such an agreement was a way of reaching a modus vivendi with Catholic clergymen, and it was also a method of undermining political Catholicism. The traditional constituencies of the Centre Party and the BVP, Hitler told his cabinet on 7 March 1933, could only be conquered “when the Curia abandons the two parties.”19 It only took a few months for the negotiations that Franz von Papen, at Hitler’s request, began conducting on 10 April with Cardinal State Secretary Eugenio Pacelli, the former papal nuncio in Germany, to yield concrete results. A treaty between the National Socialist government and the Holy See was drawn up on 8 July, the signing ceremony took place on 20 July, and the concordat took effect on 10 September.20 It prohibited C
atholic clergymen from engaging in any kind of political activity, which essentially meant that the Catholic Church was abandoning the Centre Party and the BVP. The two parties subsequently decided to dissolve. In return, the Nazi regime agreed to guarantee Catholics’ freedom to practise their religion, to protect Catholic lay organisations and to allow Catholic schools and religious instruction.
The conclusion of Nazi Germany’s first international treaty gave the regime legitimacy and represented a personal triumph for Hitler. The fact that agreement with the Curia had been reached so much more quickly than even he himself had thought possible on 30 January, Hitler told his cabinet on 14 July 1933, was “such an indescribable success that all critical objections must be withdrawn in the face of it.” Hitler also saw the agreement as “creating a chance and a sphere of trust that will be particularly significant in the more important fight against international Jewry.”21 Letters of gratitude from Catholic clergymen poured into the Chancellery. Munich’s Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, for instance, was fulsome in his praise of Hitler. “What the old parliaments and parties failed to achieve in sixty years, your statesman’s foresight has turned into reality, to the benefit of world history, in six months,” the cardinal wrote on 24 July. “For Germany’s reputation in East and West and before the entire world, this handshake with the Pope, the greatest moral authority in world history, is a gigantic achievement and an immeasurable blessing.” Nonetheless, Faulhaber did not neglect to insist “that the articles of the concordat must go beyond just words on paper” and that subordinated religious authorities not be relegated “too much in the shadow of the statesmanlike greatness of the Führer.”22
The bishops were to be sorely disappointed on precisely this score. The concordat had barely been signed when violations of its spirit and letter started occurring. In many places in Germany, party functionaries and police began targeting Catholic associations. There were bans and attempts to intimidate the Catholic press. Catholic civil servants were fired, and Catholic youth organisations were disbanded and their assets confiscated. Complaints and protests were slow to materialise. Neither Cardinal Pacelli nor the German episcopate wanted to endanger the agreement reached with the Nazi regime.23 Nonetheless, Cardinal Faulhaber did voice disappointment in his sermons between the first Advent weekend and New Year’s Eve. He rejected the Nazis’ contempt for the Old Testament and distanced himself from their racist beliefs. “We should never forget that we were not saved by German blood,” he preached. “We were saved thanks to the precious blood of our crucified Lord.”24 Such sentiments did not go unnoticed among the Nazi leadership. “The preachers are trying to stir people up against us!” Goebbels noted in late December 1933. “Beware!”25
Catholic dignitaries were put on high alert in late January 1934, when Hitler charged Rosenberg with “monitoring all aspects of ideological training and education by the party and Nazified associations.” The author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century was considered the embodiment of all the NSDAP’s anti-clerical tendencies. In February, the Vatican blacklisted that book, and in the pastoral letters of Easter 1934 the faithful were urged to fight against the “new paganism.”26 Yet the debate about Rosenberg’s anti-Christian theses had an unwelcome side effect for the Catholic clergy. Interest in the book rose, and it became the second-biggest bestseller in the Third Reich after Mein Kampf. “Rosenberg’s ‘Myth’ is doing brisk business,” complained Goebbels, who deeply hated the editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter. “The Churches are creating propaganda for it.”27
Among the casualties of the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934 were two prominent Catholics: Erich Klausener, the director of Catholic Action, one of the most important Catholic lay organisations, and Fritz Gerlich, the publisher of the Catholic weekly Der gerade Weg (The Straight and Narrow). In July 1932, the latter had subjected Hitler’s movement to a scathing analysis in an article under the headline “National Socialism is a Plague.” Gerlich had written:
National Socialism…means hostility towards our foreign neighbours, a reign of terror domestically, civil war and wars between peoples. National Socialism means lies, hatred, fratricide and boundless misery. Adolf Hitler is preaching the legitimacy of lying. It is time for those of you who have fallen for the swindle of this power-mad individual to wake up!28
Hitler’s thugs took brutal revenge for these courageous words, and the Catholic bishops held their tongues. In fact, along with Protestant leaders and a large section of the public, they were relieved that Hitler had seemingly reined in the radicals in the SA.29
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Hitler’s dealings with the Protestant Church seem to have been relatively easy right from the start. Prior to 1933, the NSDAP had been most popular and celebrated their biggest electoral triumphs in the Protestant sections of Germany. The receptivity of nationalist Protestants to Hitler’s ethnic-popular agenda was particularly evident in the “Faith Movement of German Christians.” In June 1932, this organisation publicly demanded that the structure of the Church “be adapted to the natural conditions ordained by God and…still recognisable today…in ethnic identity and race.” The German Christians added: “On the basis of this insight, we call for a battle to create a truly German Church. Only genuine German Christians belong to its community. Every German by blood belongs to it…but baptised Jews do not.” In the spirit of “positive Christianity,” the German Christians proclaimed their belief in “an affirmative, racially appropriate faith in Christ that accords with the German spirit of Luther and his heroic piety.”30 In Church elections in Prussia in November 1932, these “brown Christians,” who occasionally referred to themselves as “Jesus Christ’s SA,” won a third of all seats. In some regions of East Prussia and Pomerania they took almost 50 per cent of the vote.31
Thus it comes as no great surprise that the vast majority of Protestant leaders welcomed the political caesura of early 1933. In his Easter missive, the senior diocesan administrator in Prussia proclaimed himself in agreement with all his Protestant brethren in his “joy at the uprising of the most profound strengths of our nation to patriotic awareness, true ethnic community and religious renewal.”32 Few within the Protestant camp refused to be blinded in this fashion. One of them was the historian Friedrich Thimme, who in a letter from mid-February 1933 demonstrated rare prescience about the true nature of Hitler and his henchmen: “To my mind, everyone who believes in their grand promises and indeed their Christian beliefs is a fool. You should recognise them by the fruit of their deeds, and those fruits are murder, manslaughter, violence of every sort and ruthless careerism.” In the same breath, Thimme branded the attitude of the Protestant Church “towards this organised hatred, murder and forced expulsion” as “simply shameful.”33 “How can God’s blessing be upon a movement that is a slap in the face to the simplest and clearest tenets of Christianity?” he asked in May 1933. “The Church has an absolute duty to repeatedly raise a voice of caution and warning about all the injustice coming down from above.”34 And in November 1934, Thimme wrote to the British historian George Peabody Gooch: “I cannot approve in any way of raising the purported Aryan race to the status of an idol and driving Jews, among whom I have many highly intelligent friends, from all positions of authority, making life in Germany almost impossible for them.”35 But Thimme’s voice was an exception to the rule among Protestants. Typical was the general superintendent of Kurmark, Otto Dibelius, who wrote in a church newsletter about the anti-Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933 that the Reich government “had admitted that in the stormy first days of the great transformation there has also been transgression. Things like this can and will happen in such times.”36
Hitler wanted to amalgamate the twenty-eight regional Protestant Churches into a single Reich Church that could serve as a counterweight to the Catholic Church. For this aim, he could count on the support of the German Christians. On 25 April 1933, he appointed the sycophantic Königsberg military chaplain Ludwig Müller as his “representative on matters co
ncerning the Protestant Church” and charged him with finishing plans for the Reich Church as soon as possible.37 On 11 July, the new Church constitution was signed by the chosen representatives of the regional Protestant Churches, and on 14 July, it was approved by Hitler’s cabinet. It proclaimed the amalgamation of all regional Churches into a “unified German Protestant Church” headed by a Reich bishop to be named by a national synod. New elections for the Church bodies were scheduled for 23 July.38
The German Christians enjoyed massive help from the regime in the run-up to this election. On the eve of the vote, in an address from Bayreuth broadcast on all German radio stations, Hitler came out in clear support of the religious movement. Under these circumstances it is hardly astonishing that the Protestant Church elections were a huge triumph for the German Christians, who ended up winning around 70 per cent of the vote.39 Müller’s election as Reich bishop at the first national synod in Luther’s home city of Wittenberg on 27 September was a mere formality: he had achieved all his goals. As his post-war biographer has noted: “As Prussian state bishop and German Reich bishop, he was undoubtedly the most important figure in the Church hierarchy of German Protestantism.”40
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