The next shock in this unresolved situation was the papal encyclical “With Burning Anxiety.” Faulhaber had written the first draft, which was then edited by Cardinal Pacelli and approved by Pope Pius XI. Clandestine couriers brought the document to Germany, where it was printed and read out from pulpits on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1937. The encyclical excoriated the “open and concealed violence” against the Church in Germany. The articles of the concordat were being violated, the document complained, and the pressure being applied to the faithful was “both illegal and inhuman.” The encyclical once again highlighted the incompatibility between the Christian faith and National Socialist teachings: “Whoever removes race or a people or a form of government, those who exercise power or any other basic foundations of human society…from the secular scale of values, and makes them the highest norm of religious values too, worshipping them in idolatrous fashion, is wrong and is falsifying the divinely ordained order of things.”76
The evening before the encyclical was read out, Reinhard Heydrich informed Goebbels about its existence. “It’s a provocation in the true sense of the word,” the propaganda minister noted, although he advised the head of the Gestapo to “play dead” and ignore it rather than react harshly. “Economic pressure instead of arrests,” Goebbels wrote. “Confiscation and prohibition of the Church newsletters that publish this bit of impudence. Otherwise keep your nerve and wait until the hour comes to shake off these provocateurs.”77 But ignoring the encyclical was not good enough for Hitler. In early April 1937, he phoned Goebbels from the Obersalzberg. “He wants to move against the Vatican,” Goebbels noted. “The preachers do not realise how patient and mild we’ve been. Now they’re going to become acquainted with our strictness, severity and determination.”78 On 6 April, Hitler ordered Justice Minister Gürtner to restart and prioritise the sexual abuse trials, which had been suspended the previous July.79 They were accompanied by a frenzied anti-Catholic press campaign directed by Goebbels. “Heavy artillery is being deployed,” he noted in late April. “One wink from me, and a diabolical concert has commenced. The preachers will be squirming now.”80
Once again, Hitler was satisfied with his propaganda minister’s work, and the latter registered with pleasure: “The Führer is becoming more and more radical on the Church issue…[He knows] no mercy any more…We’re going to smoke out this band of pederasts.”81 In his annual 1 May speech, Hitler also took aim squarely: “If they try to usurp rights that exclusively belong to the state with letters, encyclicals and the like, we will force them back into the spiritual and ministerial activity that is rightfully theirs.” In a reference to the pederasty trials, Hitler declared: “It is not appropriate for these quarters to criticise the morality of a state when they have more than reason enough to be concerned about their own morality.”82
The low point of the defamation campaign was a speech by Goebbels in Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle arena on 28 May. He had discussed the content of the speech for days with Hitler—indeed, the Führer even dictated several key passages himself, which was unprecedented. “Very cutting and drastic,” Goebbels confided to his diary. “I would not have gone that far.”83 The speech was broadcast on all of Germany’s radio stations, and German newspapers received the transcript an hour before Goebbels began speaking, along with instructions to print it “as prominently as possible.”84 Goebbels pulled out all the demagogic stops, referring to a “general decline in morals such as had hardly been known throughout civilised history to such a horrible and outrageous extent.” “Animalistic sexual degeneracy was widespread among the Catholic clergy,” Goebbels raged, and the entire brotherhood was covering up this “filth.” Everywhere “sex offenders in priestly robes” were pursuing their “repulsive urges.” This “sexual pestilence,” Goebbels concluded, “must be removed by the roots.”85 After the speech, which drew standing ovations from more than 20,000 party members, Goebbels hurried back to the Führer in the Chancellery. “He shook my hand,” Goebbels related. “He listened to the entire speech on the radio and told me that he couldn’t sit still for a moment.”86
In the days that followed this mass event, Hitler continued to vent his hatred to his entourage. “The Führer is raging against the preachers,” Goebbels noted.87 The propaganda minister constantly fanned the flames while the Gestapo took care to suppress any contrary opinions in the Catholic press and strictly monitored the sermons of Catholic clergymen. “In Germany, the pious Catholic is subject to emergency law,” complained the bishop of Berlin, Konrad von Preysing. “He is forced to endure mockery and scorn, constraint and pressure without being able to defend himself, while the enemies of the Church enjoy freedom of speech, the freedom to attack and the freedom to scoff.”88
But the trials ended in disappointment for the regime. In many cases, judges acquitted the defendants or only handed down light sentences. “The courts are failing to do their job,” an outraged Goebbels complained in early July 1937. “They’re only giving these preachers laughably tiny fines or a few days in jail for the worst sorts of crimes against the state. We need to take this to a special court.”89 Goebbels was able to convince Hitler of this too.90 Nonetheless, in late July, the dictator told his justice minister to suspend the trials again, and although Goebbels repeatedly lobbied for their resumption, Hitler stuck by this decision. He may have assured Goebbels in December 1937 that he was only waiting for the right moment to “reopen the spigot with the preacher trials,” but as the propaganda minister noted, “right now he wants peace and quiet on the Church issue.”91 Most likely, the change of course was related to the regime’s transition, which we will examine below, from a policy of overturning the Treaty of Versailles to one of aggressive foreign expansion. In this phase, in which Hitler decided to realise his foreign-policy ambitions, it would not have seemed advisable to further ratchet up tension with the Vatican or the Catholic clergy in Germany.92
Furthermore, Hitler had likely realised that he would not be able to subjugate the Churches to his rule in the short term. He was going to have to be patient. He described his plans for the future to a small circle after a cabinet meeting on 11 May 1937:
We will have to bend the Churches to our will and make them serve us. The vow of celibacy must be eradicated. Church assets must be confiscated, and no one should be allowed to study theology before the age of twenty-four. With that, we will rob them of their next generation. The monastic orders will have to be dissolved. In this way, and only in this way, will we be able to break them down. It will take decades. But then we will have them eating out of our hands.93
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Hitler also refused to let things come to a complete head with the Protestant opposition. In late 1936, it gradually became clear that Hanns Kerrl’s experimental attempts to make peace between the German Christians and the Confessing Church had failed. In January 1937, Hitler gave him a dressing-down over lunch in the Chancellery, taking “a hard line against the Churches.” The “primacy of the state” had to be enforced “by all means,” Hitler declared, dismissing Kerrl’s policies as “too soft.”94 On 12 February, the Reich Church committee, the central body for restoring the unity of the Protestant Church, resigned en masse. Without consulting his ministerial colleagues, Kerrl therefore announced a decree that would have subjected the Church to increased state monitoring. Hitler was enraged by his underling going it alone, and refused to allow the decree to be made public. He also ordered Kerrl, Frick, Hess, Himmler, Goebbels and Deputy Interior Minister Wilhelm Stuckart to the Obersalzberg on 15 February to discuss the Church issue. “The Führer wants a clear line,” Goebbels noted. “Kerrl made a huge mistake not consulting us.”95
Goebbels travelled to the meeting by night train with Himmler and Stuckart, which gave them plenty of time to agree upon a mutual position. All three concurred that strict state regulation of the sort Kerrl envisioned would only create “martyrs.” They also emphasised a fundamental long-term difference: “Kerrl wants to preserve the Church while we want to l
iquidate it.”96 The conference on the Obersalzberg lasted seven full hours, which indicated the significance Hitler attached to it. He sharply criticised Kerrl’s ideas, saying that they amounted to making him a “summus episcopus” and that they could only be enforced violently. In view of the expected “great global struggle,” Germany “did not need a battle over the Churches.” After a long debate, Goebbels made a suggestion he had discussed previously with Himmler and Stuckart: “Either a separation of Church and state—for which in my opinion it is too early—or fresh elections of a constitutional synod, complete withdrawal of the party and state in this matter, entirely free proportional representation, and lucrative salaries for the synod delegates. In a year, they will come begging the state to save them from themselves.” Hitler adopted the suggestion, according to Goebbels, “eagerly.” The details were discussed, and the plan was approved by everyone present, including Kerrl. “A historic day,” Goebbels crowed. “A turning point in the Church quarrel.”97
Hitler’s decree was announced in the evening papers, where it created a stir. It read: “After the Reich Church committee failed to produce an agreement between the groups within the German Protestant Church, the Church shall now autonomously and completely freely give itself a new constitution and, with it, a new order.” The Reich Church minister was empowered “to prepare the election of a general synod for this purpose and take all necessary accompanying steps.”98 The following day, Goebbels called a press conference on the topic of “the Führer’s step towards making peace on the Church issue.”99
But any progress was mere propaganda. It soon became clear that the Church elections were only going to cause further unease instead of encouraging agreement between the opposing Protestant factions. Parts of the Confessing Church even threatened to boycott the elections, and in late 1937 preparations for them were halted. It was one of the rare occasions when a decree by Hitler simply came and went with no results.100 For a time, the dictator considered forcibly separating Church and state, an idea supported by Kerrl, who, as Goebbels put in, had undergone a “remarkable about-turn.”101 But this plan, too, was abandoned. In December 1937, Hitler expressed his concern that “Protestantism would be completely destroyed, and we would have no counterweight any more to the Vatican.”102 Fundamental decisions on the Church issue were postponed amid intensifying preparations to go to war, and Kerrl was explicitly “prohibited from instituting any reforms.”103 Nonetheless this latest volte-face did not end the persecution of prominent representatives of the Confessing Church.
On 1 July 1937, on Hitler’s orders, Martin Niemöller was arrested. Again and again he had condemned the Nazis’ totalitarian world view in his sermons and read out lists of names of affected pastors.104 “Pastor Niemöller finally arrested,” noted Goebbels. “Small mention of this in the press. The thing now is to break him so that he can’t believe his eyes or ears. We must never let up.”105 The propaganda minister and the Führer were in total agreement on this point. In December 1937, while the two were travelling together to attend Erich Ludendorff’s funeral in Munich, Hitler confirmed: “[Niemöller] will not be released until he has been broken. Opposition to the state will not be tolerated.”106
But Niemöller’s trial, which began on 7 February 1938 and was closed to the public, ended as a defeat for the regime. Niemöller and his defence emphasised his nationalist past. The defendant described not only his sacrifices as a submarine commander in the First World War, but also his activities as a Freikorps member after 1918 and his early sympathies for the post-war German nationalist movement. A series of respected character witnesses testified on his behalf, assuring the court of the pastor’s patriotic beliefs. In the end, Niemöller was sentenced to seven months in prison and fined 2,000 marks. But since he had already spent eight months in investigative custody in solitary confinement in a Berlin prison, he was considered to have served his sentence.107
Goebbels, who followed all phases of the trial with growing anger, was livid at the verdict, which was a de facto acquittal. He raged: “That takes the cake. I’m only going to give the press a brief announcement. The Führer will order Himmler to have this guy immediately taken to Oranienburg.” While foreign journalists waited outside the courtroom for Niemöller to appear, Gestapo agents hurried him out a side entrance and took him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near the town of Oranienburg. “There he’ll only be able to serve God by working and looking deep within himself,” Goebbels noted.108 The day after the verdict, Hitler expounded about “the case of Niemöller” over lunch in the Chancellery: “He’s in the right place in a concentration camp. It will be quite some time before he gets out. That’s how it is now for all enemies of the state. Anyone who thinks kindly old Hitler is a weakling will get acquainted with the hard-nosed Hitler.”109 And indeed Niemöller remained incarcerated, first in Sachsenhausen and as of 1941 in Dachau, as Hitler’s “personal prisoner” until the demise of the Third Reich.
Aside from the spectacular trial of Niemöller, however, the ceasefire that Hitler ordered on the Church front in late 1937 held throughout 1938 and the first half of 1939. While he was redirecting his foreign policy towards a war of expansion, Hitler had no use for a major conflict with Germany’s two main Churches. “The boss knows all too well that the Church issue is very touchy and could have very negative effects domestically in case of war,” Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder wrote in a letter to a friend.110 The Nazis’ final reckoning with the Churches was thus put off until after the war. The regime behaved quite differently concerning the “Jewish question.” On that issue, 1938 was the decisive milestone on a path towards removing Jews entirely from Germany. In early December, when Hanns Kerrl made a renewed attempt to subjugate the Protestant Church to state control, Hitler—as Goebbels noted—ordered him to “back off.” The propaganda minister added: “First things first, and now’s the time for us to solve the Jewish question.”111
20
Prelude to Genocide
“The final goal of our overall policy is clear to all of us,” Hitler explained to NSDAP regional directors at the Nazi educational camp Ordensburg Vogelsang on 29 April 1937 about how he intended to proceed against Jews.
With me the main thing is never to take a step that I may have to withdraw or that will damage us. You know, I always go to the extreme of what I feel I can risk but no further. You have to have a nose for what you can and cannot do. In a struggle against an enemy as well.1
The recording of this secret speech was interrupted at this point by cheers and applause. Hitler continued:
I do not intend to immediately challenge my enemy to a physical fight. I do not say “Fight!” because I believe in fighting for fighting’s sake. I say “I want to destroy you. And now, I’ll ask my wits to help me to manoeuvre you into such a corner that you cannot lash out at me because you would suffer a fatal blow to the heart.” That’s how it is done.2
Hitler had raised his voice to maximum volume so that the words “That’s how it is done” positively exploded from his lips in what Saul Friedländer called an “orgiastic spasm.” It earned him frenetic applause from his audience.
Nonetheless, even when he seemed to be losing rhetorical self-control, Hitler knew exactly what he was saying. In fact, he was precisely describing his method for achieving all of his ends after he became chancellor. Just as he had always gone to the limit of what he could get away with in foreign policy, he gradually, step by step, worked his way towards radical measures of persecution in his anti-Jewish policies. In the spring of 1935, he gave the signal to start tightening the thumbscrews, whereas in the Olympic year of 1936, he ordered them relaxed somewhat. Even if his paladins fell over one another trying to “work towards the Führer” by suggesting their own initiatives to achieve his anti-Jewish aims,3 it was ultimately Hitler who made the final decisions and upon whom everything depended. He always made sure that he pulled the strings and determined when action would be taken. Yet despite showing tactical f
lexibility, he never lost sight of his “final goal”—the eradication of European Jews. In the beginning, however, “eradication” meant displacement and not mass murder. In later November 1937, after a long discussion with Hitler about the “Jewish question,” Goebbels noted: “Jews must leave Germany and all of Europe. That will take a while, but it will and must happen. The Führer is utterly decided on that.”4
In the first half of 1937, Nazi domestic policy focused on the Churches. In the second half of that year, Hitler’s concluding speech at the Nuremberg rally on 13 September introduced a new, radicalised phase of the persecution of the Jews. As he had the previous year, Hitler invoked the spectre of the “global peril” of “Jewish Bolshevism.” But in 1937, he combined his attacks with enraged rants against the “Jewish race,” which he tar-brushed as “inferior through and through.” Because this race was incapable of any sort of cultural or creative productivity, Hitler claimed, it had to pursue the “imminent extinction of the heretofore upper intellectual classes of other peoples” in order to establish a domination spanning the globe. “In the current Soviet Russia of the proletariat,” Hitler claimed, “more than 80 per cent of leading positions were occupied by Jews.” The fact that in his show trials of 1936 and 1937, Stalin also had Jewish Communists like Karl Radek killed, something which, a puzzled Goebbels noted in his diary,5 did not seem to have disturbed Hitler. He merely repeated, using nearly identical turns of phrase, what he had said in his speech “Why are we anti-Semites?” from 1920—a revealing example of the continuing of his paranoid hatred. It was no accident that he repeatedly referred to the German revolution of 1918 and 1919 as a purported Jewish grab for power: “Who were the leaders of our Bavarian Soviet republic? Who were the leaders of Spartacus? Who were the true money men and leaders of our Communist Party?…They were Jews and Jews only!”6
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