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Response to William Doino Jr. and the Film Lo vuole il Papa

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Response to William Doino Jr. and the Film Lo vuole il Papa

By Susan Zuccotti, Independent Scholar

In the June 2015 edition of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly, William Doino Jr. discussed a documentary televised in Italy on April 1 entitled Lo vuole il Papa. Based on the work of historian Antonello Carvigiani, the film argued that Pope Pius XII was personally involved in the opening of convents and monasteries in Rome to thousands of Jews and other fugitives who were trying to escape arrest by the German occupiers of the Eternal City after September 1943. The film portrayed the oral testimonies of four nuns who, when they arrived as novices at four different religious houses in Rome years ago, were told by some of the older sisters about rescue efforts during the war. Accompanying each of the testimonies were brief filmed excerpts from the wartime chronicles of their institutions, recording a papal role in rescue. In addition, the documentary presented the oral testimonies of two men hidden as boys in two of the convents. Doino found the film persuasive, described it as new, and related it to other documents, accounts, and testimonies that he has discussed elsewhere and believes to be evidence of a clear papal directive for Jewish rescue in Rome.

When examined closely, the testimonies of the nuns and the chronicles are diverse in content and questionable as evidence. Let us begin with content. The first nun represented the cloistered Augustinian Sisters of the Santi Quattro Coronati, where 24 people, including at least 6 and perhaps as many as 17 Jews, were hidden. She explained that she was told that the pope had ordered the convent to open its doors to fugitives, including Jews. Relevant lines from that convent’s handwritten wartime chronicle, first made public in 2006 and thus not particularly new, confirmed her words, stating, “In this painful situation [of the German arrests and torture of fugitives beginning, the chronicler’s account, in November 1943] the Holy Father wants to save his children, including the Jews, and orders that hospitality in monasteries be given to the persecuted, and also the cloistered convents must adhere to the desire of the Supreme Pontiff [emphasis mine].”[1]

The film’s second witness was from the cloistered Cistercian Sisters of Santa Susanna, where roughly 18 military and political refugees and 26 Jews had been sheltered. This nun also referred to a papal directive for rescue, but added that the order had gone to all superiors of all Catholic institutions in Rome. How could she have known that? The accompanying lines from Santa Susanna’s handwritten war chronicle, made public in 2014, differed significantly from the nun’s testimony. The chronicler wrote, “In this situation the ecclesiastical authorities exhort and encourage and give their consent (with a maximum of caution) to opening the doors of the holy cloistered places to hide and receive as many persons as possible…[emphasis mine].”[2] Encouragement and consent from individual unknown prelates are important, but they are not the same as a papal order to all Church institutions. Words matter, and the implications differ. It is also important to note that Jews were not mentioned here, and caution was urged.

The third witness, from the convent of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori which had sheltered 150 refugees including perhaps as many as 103 Jews, did not evoke a papal order.[3] Instead, she declared that she had been told that “The Holy Father wanted, desired, that the convent welcome these people.[emphasis mine]” Her testimony, in other words, resembled the written account from Santa Susanna. The accompanying handwritten chronicle from Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori confirmed her words, recording simply that the pope wanted institutions to take in fugitives, but “without obligation.” The fourth and final witness was from the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina, which sheltered 123 people, including Jews. This nun was even more general, testifying simply that the sisters admitted fugitives because the pope appealed to them for charity. The accompanying typed chronicle also did not refer to a precise papal order, but it did provide insight on how rescue probably developed. It declared that at various times during the autumn of 1943 someone at the Vatican Secretariat of State requested the director of this particular institution to take in specific endangered individuals or families. The chronicle added that such a request could not be refused. But, significantly, it also declared that some 120 people, refugees or families made homeless by bombing raids, had already been accepted at the Istituto by the end of September 1943, well before the roundup of Jews in Rome on October 16 and the mass flight of surviving Jews into Catholic institutions.

We shall return to the issues of content raised in the film, but let us next examine the nature of the evidence. It is not easy to question the oral testimonies, filmed in the beautiful settings of their convents, of four elderly nuns, earnest, articulate, and confident of the accuracy of their information. But these women are providing hearsay, not first-hand, evidence. Their information apparently reached them at unspecified times for unknown reasons from unnamed associates, about whose personal histories we know nothing. The older sisters who passed along the information may have been young novices themselves during the war, with no special knowledge at that time about which fugitives were Jews or why they were there. Their own superiors may have told reluctant or fearful younger sisters that the pope wished or even ordered rescue measures to convince them to help fugitives, including atheists, Communists, and, especially, Jews, but the telling did not make it true. This evidence would not hold up in a court of law, and historians should apply similar criteria. Second, why were the young incoming nuns told such things privately in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s at all, at a time when no such accounts were being made publicly, despite the fact that Pius XII had long been criticized for not helping Jews? And why did the nuns wait until now to come forward? And why do they (and those who write about them, like Doino) stress help given to Jews, when it is clear from other records that at least half of those sheltered in religious institutions were political or military fugitives or non-Jewish civilian war refugees?

The written evidence presented in Lo vuole il Papa is equally problematic. The film provides a cursory glimpse of the volumes of war chronicles from the four convents, and then zooms in on the few lines relevant to the shelter of outsiders in each case. It gives no information about when, why, and by whom the rescue accounts were written or why they have not been made public sooner. With this technique it is impossible to detect what is obvious from a more careful study of the accounts—that they were not written during the war, and were often not even recorded by the chronicler who wrote the previous or subsequent entries. Examples abound. In the pages for 1943 and 1944 of the chronicle of the Santi Quattro Coronati, the author wrote in an entry for June 6, 1944, when Rome was liberated, that a general in the army of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic wanted for war crimes after the conflict was sent to hide in the convent by the Vatican Secretariat of State (this attribution very specific) and stayed for five years. The war chronicle of the Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori referred to gas chambers, which would not have been understood with certainty in the first half of 1944, and to papal efforts to hide fugitives in the Pontificio Seminario Romano Maggiore (referred to as the Laterano) and Castel Gandolfo, equally secret at the time. The chronicles, then, are not wartime diaries but subsequent secondary accounts. Who wrote them, and when, and where did the information come from?

The testimony in Lo vuole il Papa of two fugitives hidden during the war is no more enlightening. Piero De Benedetti Bonaiuto found shelter at the convent of the Santi Quattro Coronati. In that convent’s war chronicle, which recorded the presence of five political fugitives or “patriots,” six Jews, and thirteen unspecified individuals, he was listed as a “patriot.” In his filmed testimony, he briefly discussed his experience in hiding and offered an opinion that special authorization would have been needed because the convent was subject to the rules of strict cloister. As a boy, he would have known nothing about a papal order. The second survivor-witness, Renato Astrologo, hid with his parents, grandmother, and three siblings in the convent of Santa Susanna. According to an article in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano on June 3, 2014, the women entered the convent on October 24, 1943, while the men hid elsewhere until the end of January 1944. The article also stated that Astrologo was a convert from Judaism to Catholicism. In his testimony, Astrologo expressed his gratitude to the sisters who had saved him and stated his understanding that an order had “come from a high place.” He also could have known nothing more specific at the time.

Lo vuole il Papa might be more persuasive if it were confirmed by the other sources Doino mentioned in his article, but that is decidedly not the case. For example, Doino refers to an article in the Palestine Post on June 22, 1944, in which a correspondent wrote that “several thousand refugees, largely Jews” had been sheltered in the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo “during the recent terror.” This allegation has been repeated endlessly, but there is no evidence that the refugees were “largely Jews.” The pope did offer shelter and sustenance at Castel Gandolfo to hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of refugees escaping Allied bombing raids and German attacks on villages near Rome in the late winter and spring of 1944. Some of those refugees may have been Jews with false papers and not known to be Jewish. But no evidence has yet been unearthed to indicate that those involved in providing assistance believed that they were helping Jews. There is, furthermore, no personal testimony from Jews about receiving such shelter, although Jewish accounts of being hidden in other religious institutions in Rome are plentiful.[4]

Doino also alludes to statements about a papal directive from priest-rescuers Paolo Dezza, Pietro Palazzini, Hugh O’Flaherty and John Patrick Carroll-Abbing; the Jewish survivor Michael Tagliacozzo; and historians Andrea Riccardi, Anna Foa, Sister Grazia Loparco, Antonello Carvigiani, and Pier Luigi Guiducci. His list is not exhaustive; he could have mentioned other secondary sources. Each of these cases must be examined carefully, in more detail than is possible here. Looking briefly at the first four primary sources, however, the Jesuit Father Dezza, rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University during the war and later a cardinal, wrote on June 28, 1964, during the controversy concerning Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy critical of Pius XII, that the pope had instructed him to accept persecuted civilians and Jews.[5] Strangely, Dezza never repeated the claim in his other writings, and it is not clear if refugees were in fact hidden in his institution.

Father Palazzini, also later a cardinal, published a book in 1995 describing his role in helping hide some 145 non-Jews and 55 Jews at the Pontificio Seminario Romano Maggiore. He made no reference to a papal order in his book, but he did refer to “the guidelines provided by Pope Pius XII…to save human lives.” He added that during the war, “to rediscover [the sense of reciprocal charity], one voice was often raised among the din of arms: it was the voice of Pius XII. The refuge offered to so many people would not have been possible with his moral support, which was much more than a tacit consent.”[6]As evidence of the guidelines and support, Palazzini referred to eight papal speeches. Three of the eight, at Christmas 1942 and on June 2, his name day, in 1943 and 1944, included brief references to the pope’s compassion for those persecuted because of nationality and race, but did not directly mention religion or Jews. The other five speeches simply stressed the need for charity to all victims of war.[7]

The Irish Father Hugh O’Flaherty took enormous risks to aid escaped Allied prisoners of war during the German occupation of Rome, but Jews are rarely mentioned among those he helped.[8] The story of the American Father John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, later a monsignor, is much the same. In addition to prisoners of war, Father Carroll-Abbing worked with political fugitives, partisans, civilian refugees, homeless children, and the poor in general. In 2000, he apparently informed Doino that the pope told him many times to help Jews, but his two books about his wartime activities, published in 1952 and 1966, rarely mentioned Jews at all. He never wrote that he took personal initiatives to help Jews, that the pope told him to hide Jews, or even that Jews were hidden in Vatican properties. His single written reference to papal involvement in Jewish rescue was an indirect observation rather than a personal experience. Without declaring that the statement affected his own work, he observed that after the roundup of Jews in Rome on October 16, 1943, “word came from the Vatican that, because of the emergency, nuns would be allowed to give hospitality in their convents to Jewish men as well as their families [emphasis mine].”[9] He added that the permission was given specifically to the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion, who passed it along to other convents.

There is little doubt that some 187 Jews were among those hidden by the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion. Many of the Jews fled there on October 16, 1943, as the Germans were rounding up their families and friends in the nearby former ghetto of Rome and throughout the city. The initial rescue effort was spontaneous. Since the convent was not cloistered and operated a girls’ boarding school that was virtually empty because of the war, there was no need for immediate papal authorization to receive outsiders. The sisters have never claimed to have received a papal directive for rescue, although they stress that they informed the head of their order and that the pope ultimately knew what they were doing.[10] The situation was similar at the Istituto Pio XI, a boarding school for some 200 to 250 boys run by the Salesians. In his study of more than 80 Jewish boys sheltered there during the war, Francesco Motto found no evidence of a papal order. He too emphasized that Vatican authorities had some idea of what was happening, and that the Salesian brothers immediately involved were convinced that they were acting according to the wishes of the Holy Father.[11]

In addition to many more accounts of Jewish rescue in Church institutions that do not mention a papal directive, there are some that specifically deny it. One example of the latter is Brother Maurizio, the steward at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital that hid some 46 Jews during the German occupation. Brother Maurizio related that after admitting Jewish fugitives on October 16, 1943, the directors duly notified Vatican officials. When they received no response, they took the silence for approval and increased their efforts.[12] Father Elio Venier, later a monsignor, recalled his work at the parish church of Santa Maria della Divina Provvidenza, where about 65 Jews were sheltered. He declared that officials at the Vicariate were informed of the rescue activities because parish churches were under their jurisdiction, but he added that the pope did not get involved in such matters.[13] The French Capuchin Father Marie-Benoît who, working with Jewish and non-Jewish friends and associates, placed and supported some 2,500 Jewish refugees in both religious and secular institutions in Rome, agreed.[14] After the war, but only when asked, he explained that he had received no money and no mission from the Vatican.[15]

Other reasons to doubt the existence of an order from Pius XII for rescue relate to known papal directives that seem contrary to it. Both Francesco Motto, writing about the Salesians, and the spokeswomen for the convent of Nostra Signora di Sion refer to a letter received on October 25, 1943, declaring, “The secretary of state of His Holiness expresses the confidence that [your] conduct…will be inspired by diligent observation of the dispositions and instructions provided by the Holy See and by that discreet and prudent correctness that is always, but now more than ever, necessary.”[16] Such a call was not conducive to extensive rescue. Two months later, on December 27, six days after Italian Fascist and German SS raids on three Vatican properties, Pius XII told the director of La Civiltà Cattolica that it was necessary to be more prudent with regard to refugees and added, “Yes, exercise charity with the many piteous cases that arise, but avoid the use of false documents and any even slight appearance of fraud.”[17] The pope may not have understood that it was almost impossible for fugitives, Jewish or not, to hide in any institutions without false documents.

Another German-Fascist raid on February 3-4, 1944, this time on the huge extraterritorial Basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura, caused some at the Vatican to pull still further away from support for the rescue of fugitives. Little could be done for the 64 victims of the raid, including five Jews, but Vatican officials publicly and vehemently protested the violation of extraterritoriality to the Germans. Privately, however, they were terrified of additional and still more brutal raids, the arrests of more of their protégés, and the possibility of diplomatic incidents. On February 6, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Maglione wrote that he had “instructed the abbot [of the monastery at San Paolo], in the name of the Holy Father, not to permit disguises in other clothing: no one should wear religious habits if he is not a priest or monk.”[18] It is not clear how broadly this prohibition was distributed, but it was not an encouragement for rescue.

Far more serious, sometime that same February a message went out from the Vatican ordering that all non-clerics sheltered in a number of properties of the Holy See be asked to leave. Strict penalties for disobedience were specified. Again, all the recipients of this order are not known, but the message clearly went to the Seminario Lombardo, the Seminario Romano Maggiore, and the Collegio dei Sacerdoti per l’Emigrazione Italiana. Directors of the institutions reluctantly obeyed, although they never left their guests in the lurch. New hiding places were found, and in some cases the fugitives returned after a time.[19] Similar orders were issued within the Vatican City itself, where at least 50 outsiders were being sheltered in the private apartments of prelates living in the Canonica di San Pietro.[20] In this case, the prelates engaged in sheltering fugitives appealed, and the order was not enforced.[21]

There is no question that thousands of Jews were sheltered in church institutions in Rome during the German occupation. One survey conducted soon after the war placed the number at 4,447, in 220 female and 60 male religious houses.[22] Another more recent analysis refers to 4,169 Jews in 234 religious houses.[23] While numbers vary, the phenomenon of rescue is clear; what is unclear is how it happened. Historians and other scholars study the story not to glorify or vilify Pope Pius XII but to try to understand the events themselves. To do so, they look to the evidence, both written and oral. When the evidence is conflicting, they examine its validity—its authenticity; the motives of those who supply it; the timing; the possibility of error, bias, or misunderstanding. They also analyze the plausibility and consistency of the evidence within a wider context—in this case, with consideration of the pope’s other actions, statements, and concerns during the Second World War. Finally, they study the precise words used in testimonies. With this in mind, let us return to the documentary film Lo vuole il Papa, examine it in the context of other evidence mentioned here, and attempt to formulate an hypothesis about Jewish rescue in Rome.

Judging from the conflicting evidence in the film and from the other testimony discussed in this article, it seems unlikely that Pius XII ordered Catholic institutions in Rome to open their doors to Jews and other fugitives. It is possible that in some cases he was involved in granting permission to cloistered convents to suspend their rules regarding outsiders, but it is not probable that he ordered them to do so.[24] We have seen here indications of the pope’s hesitancy regarding rescue, his counter-instructions, and his requests for prudence, as well as the denials of a papal directive by some religious spokesmen and the failures to mention it by others. We know from the internal discussion concerning fugitives sheltered within the Vatican City that some prelates opposed their presence and tried to make them leave. Would they have taken that position if the pope had ordered all Catholic institutions in the city to accept them? And in the broader context, Pius XII was anxious to preserve Vatican neutrality and diplomatic privileges, and protect his institution and the Catholic faithful from German reprisals. Why would the pope jeopardize these priorities when a directive for rescue in Rome was not necessary? Romans who followed the pope’s public statements knew that he had urged charity and compassion for the victims of war on many occasions. They had read the articles in L’Osservatore Romano on October 25-26 and 29, 1943, following the roundup of 1,259 Jews in Rome, which referred to “the universally paternal charity of the Supreme Pontiff…which does not pause before boundaries of nationality, or religion, or race [emphasis mine]”—a clear reference to Jews that had not been used in previous papal speeches. They were aware that after Mussolini’s puppet regime ordered Italian police and carabinieri to arrest and intern all Jews in the country on November 30, 1943, two more articles in the Vatican daily newspaper had objected vigorously, though without mentioning German measures of deportation and destruction.[25] Catholics who wanted to hear all this could hear. In rescuing Jews and other fugitives, they firmly believed they were heeding the will of their pope.

But if there was no comprehensive papal order, how did rescue develop? In many cases, as for the Salesians and the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion, it was initially spontaneous—fugitives came to the school or convent and asked for help. Authorization came later. But to explain many other cases, it is useful to look again at two of the written testimonies presented in Lo vuole il Papa. The chronicler for Santa Susanna wrote, “In this situation the ecclesiastical authorities exhort and encourage and give their consent (with a maximum of caution) to opening the doors of the holy cloistered places to hide and receive as many persons as possible…[emphasis mine].” Similarly, the chronicler for the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina recorded that on several occasions during the autumn of 1943, someone at the Vatican Secretariat of State requested the director of the institution to take in specific endangered individuals or families. These claims are credible. Many individual priests and even high-ranking prelates in Rome had their own personal protégés, perhaps an anti-Fascist activist or partisan, or the Jewish spouse of a friend or family member, or a former Jewish teacher or classmate, employer or employee, doctor or nurse—the possibilities are endless. Catholic institutions taking in outsiders needed recommendations about the backgrounds, personal integrity, and, sometimes, economic reliability of prospective guests. Priests and prelates, sometimes at a high level, supplied those recommendations and undoubtedly implied that rescue was the will of the pope. Although directors of religious houses were not unwilling in any case, such recommendations and reassurances were hard to refuse.

The pope did not oppose the opening of religious houses in Rome to fugitives unless he believed that the risks to rescuers and rescued alike were excessive. Although he certainly understood much of what was going on in his own diocese (the pope was the bishop of Rome), he probably did not know the details. He did not wish to become personally involved. And while he allowed some of his advisors to act on behalf of Jews and other fugitives, he was well aware that others close to him opposed rescue.

Does it matter whether there was a broad order for Jewish rescue from Pius XII or whether rescue was rather either spontaneous or the result of the private initiatives of individual priests and prelates? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, understanding private individual initiatives helps us better comprehend the complexities and risks of the pope’s situation on an international level and the pressures he was under from within. We may learn more about these internal pressures when the Vatican archives of the papacy of Pius XII are opened. Until then, the study of Jewish rescue in Rome provides some clues. But above all, examination of the origins of rescue helps us to appreciate how and why it happened. As we consider the nuns described in Lo vuole il Papa, along with Cardinals Pietro Palazzini and Elio Venier, the Sisters of Nostra Signora di Sion, the Salesian brothers, Father Marie-Benoît, and so many others, we see the true nature of courage, generosity, and commitment to religious and human values. It is to be hoped that Pope Pius XII himself would be among the first to want that heroism recognized.

[1]For more on the chronicle of the Sisters of the Santi Quattro Coronati, see especially 30giorni, n. 7/8, August 2006, pp. 32-46. See also Antonello Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte, salvate i perseguitati,” Nuova Storia Contemporanea, September-October 2014, 131-44. The estimate of 17 Jews sheltered is from an often-cited list published in Renzo De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy, trans. Robert L. Miller, (1961 and 1993; New York: Enigma Books, 2001), 751-56, 752. De Felice indicated that the list came to him from the German Jesuit Father Robert Leiber, Pius XII’s close advisor and friend, who in turn stated that it was compiled after the war by another Jesuit priest and verified in 1954. For details on the list, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 199-200.

[2]For more on Santa Susanna, see Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte,” 131-44. The number 26 is from De Felice, 752.

[3] The number 103 is from De Felice, 751.

[4] For details on what is known about refugees at Castel Gandolfo, see Susan Zuccotti, “Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy,” in Joshua d. Zimmerman, ed., Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 287-307, 306. It is noteworthy that Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte,” 132, cites as an authority, and with approval, statistics by Dominiek Oversteyns, De geschiedenis van de Hebreeërs in Rome tijdens de nazibezetting en vervolging in Rome (Rome: Privata, 2013), n.p., which declare that there were no Jews at Castel Gandolfo. I am not able to verify the Oversteyns citation.

[5] Dezza had been asked to contribute to a special edition of L’Osservatore della Domenica dedicated to the memory of Pius XII. His contribution is on pp. 68-69. Originally titled Der Stellvertreter, The Deputy opened in Berlin in 1963, in London as The Representative in the same year, and in New York in 1964.

[6]Pietro Palazzini, Il Clero e l’occupazione tedesca di Roma: Il ruolo del Seminario Romano Maggiore (Rome: Apes, 1995), 17 and 35.

[7] Palazzini did not mention articles in L’Osservatore Romano on October 25 and 29 and December 3 and 4, 1943, to be discussed below, which did refer to religion and Jews.

[8]See, for example, J.P. Gallagher, Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican (London: Souvenir, 1967).

[9]Carroll-Abbing, But for the Grace of God (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966), 55-56. The first book is A Chance to Live (New York: Longmans, Green, 1952). For Doino’s account of his conversation with Carroll-Abbing, see William Doino, “ The Pope Gave Me Direct Orders to Rescue Jews,” Inside the Vatican, August-September 2001, special insert, x. For details, see Susan Zuccotti, “Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy,” in Zimmerman, p. 298.

[10]The number 187 is from De Felice, 752. For details on rescue efforts at the convent of Nostra Signora di Sion, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 189-93.

[11] De Felice, 754, puts the number of boys sheltered at 83. For details on the Salesian rescue effort, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 191-92.

[12]The number 46 is from De Felice, 754. For Brother Maurizio’s testimony, see Federica Barozzi, “ ‘I percorsi della sopravvivenza,’ (8 settembre ’43-4 giugno ’44): Gli aiuti agli ebrei romani nella memoria di salvatori e salvati,” unpublished thesis, Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1995-96, 156.

[13]Monsignor Elio Venier, interview with this author, Rome, November 13, 1996. The number 65 is from De Felice, 755.

[14] For this estimate of refugees assisted, see Settimio Sorani, L’assistenza ai profughi ebrei in Italia (Rome: Carucci, 1983) , pp. 150-51; and Centro di documentazione ebraica contemporanea (CDEC), Milan, b. 8-A-I, f. Delasem—Settimio Sorani, “Attività della ‘Delasem’ dopo l’8 settembre 1943” by Sorani, May 16, 1944. The number given by De Felice, 755, for “Father Benedict of Bourg d’Iré” (Father Marie-Benoît, or, as he was known in Rome, Father Maria Benedetto) was too high.

[15] For details, see Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2013), 179-80 and 223. Vatican documents published in Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale (ADSS), eds. Pierre Blet, Robert A. Graham, Angelo Martini, and Burkhart Schneider (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1975), IX, docs. 433 and 487, reveal that at least one high-ranking Vatican official disapproved of Father Marie-Benoît’s dealings with the Jews and tried to get him to stop.

[16]This appeal accompanied a protective placard issued by General Rainer Stahel, German military commander of Rome, to many religious institutions throughout the city on October 25, 1943. The placard, to be posted outside each institution, read, “This building serves religious objectives, and is a dependency of the Vatican City. All searches and requisitions are prohibited.” As we shall see, this placard did not always prevent raids. For details, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 193.

[17]Giovanni Sale, “Roma 1943: occupazione nazista e deportazione degli ebrei romani,” La Civiltà Cattolica, IV, quaderno 3683, December 6, 2004, 417-29, 426, from a document in the archives of La Civiltà Cattolica. The pontifical institutions raided were the Seminario Lombardo, the Collegio Russo, and the Istituto Orientale.

[18]ADSS, XI, doc. 30, notes of Maglione, 126.

[19] Reference to this order may be found in the archives of the Seminario Lombardo, b.7.A.73, Diario, “Appendice,” 17-18. For details, see Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, 225-28.

[20] The number 50 is from ADSS, X, doc. 53, Monsignor Guido Anchini, head of the Canonica, to Pius XII, February 13, 1944, 127-29. Nearly all the guests were men. Roughly 24 of the 50 were non-Jews, another 17 were described as non-Aryan Catholics, and 7 were described as Jews with no mention of religion. There is no record of any guests being hidden elsewhere in Vatican City.

[21] Ibid.

[22] De Felice, 751-56.

[23] Dominiek Oversteyns, De geschiedenis van de Hebreeërs in Rome tijdens de nazibezetting en vervolging in Rome (Rome: Privata, 2013), n.p, cited in Carvigiani, “Aprite le porte,” 132

[24]Rules of cloister are far more complex than is usually stated. Depending on the congregation, the rules often could be temporarily lifted by the head of the order. Also, some cloistered convents operated public spaces like guest houses, where the same strict rules did not apply. Some such convents may have employed Catholic laypersons to work in their public spaces.

[25]The articles in October were on page 1. The later articles, “Carità civile,” and “Motivazione,” appeared on December 3 and 4, both on page 1.

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A Past that Will Not Pass Away: A Contribution to the 850th Anniversary of the Brandenburg Cathedral

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

A Past that Will Not Pass Away: A Contribution to the 850th Anniversary of the Brandenburg Cathedral

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

The following article was adapted from a public lecture concerning the 850th anniversary of the Brandenburg Cathedral and is used by permission of the author. Our thanks to John S. Conway, University of British Columbia, for his translation and abridgment of Manfred Gailus’ text.

Brandenburg’s 850 year old cathedral, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, is a noted historic site, picturesquely and sedately situated on the banks of the Havel River. But eighty years ago, it was the scene of a very different celebration. Shortly after the general election of 5 March 1933 there was a rambunctious parade in the Cathedral Square led by Nazi Party units, including veterans’ formations and the SA, as they paraded to celebrate Hitler’s victories and his coming to power in Germany. They were addressed by Dr. Ludwig Ziehen, the Principal of the Cathedral School (“Ritterakademie”), who gave a speech in which he celebrated the “liberation of Brandenburg by the forces of the nationalist movement” and thanked everyone who had helped to bring this about. At the same time, he expressed the hope that the “brave national flags” (including the swastika) would never disappear from Brandenburg’s flagpoles, and called for three Nazi cheers before the marchers dispersed back to the city centre.

Ludwig Ziehen was to play a crucial role in Brandenburg’s fortunes during this period. He had served as Principal of the Cathedral School since 1916 and was also chairman of the Cathedral Chapter (“Domkapitel”), which included laymen. As early as 1923 he had created a club of extreme right-wing sympathizers and after 1930 had emerged as a leading campaigner for the Nazi Party. Officially he joined the Party in November 1932, and in March 1933 was their leading candidate in municipal elections. In the following month he became chairman of the Brandenburg city council. One of the first actions it took under his leadership was to proclaim President Hindenburg and Adolf Hitler to be honorary citizens of Brandenburg. The session closed with the singing of the national anthem and the popular Nazi Horst Wessel song. Those socialist members of the council who had refused to stand for this song were escorted by SA marshals from the room and beaten up outside.

Ludwig Ziehen was thus a prominent political figure and at the same time manager of the Cathedral’s religious and business affairs. The Cathedral had over the centuries accumulated a great number of valuable pieces of property, including the renowned school, so that the legal position had become confused and complicated. In 1930 the responsible Ministry in the Prussian state government had issued a new constitution, which established a legally-recognized Foundation, which transferred authority from the clergy and placed it under the regional secular authority. The former Cathedral Chapter was then dissolved.

The Cathedral’s congregation was quite small, around 1000 members. In the July 1933 church elections, the overwhelming majority decided for the so-called “German Christians” who eagerly supported the Nazis’ ideology, and sought to combine this with their Lutheran inheritance. They then claimed 80 percent of the seats on the church council, and were vocal in support of their ideas. But this group was not given the authority to make appointments to the cathedral’s clerical staffing, which still rested with higher levels of the state and church administrations. The result was that, for several years, the question of new clergy appointments led to continuing problems, especially after one of the senior ministers, Superindendent Schott, decided to retire in 1934. Ziehen was one of those who complained that the seemingly endless controversies about who should be appointed in his place was unworthy of so distinguished and historic a parish as the Brandenburg Cathedral. In fact, in 1936, a provisional appointment was made of Reverend Bruno Adler. But he was one of the more extreme “German Christians”, who had already become notorious as a Nazi sympathizer in Westphalia and had even been made Bishop in Münster. But his rigid and domineering behavior there had made his position impossible.

In 1935-36 a new chapter opened, largely due to the actions of the new Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl. A new Cathedral Chapter was selected with retired naval officer, Adolf von Trotha, as chairman. He was known as a staunch opponent of the previous democratic governments, and in 1933 was chosen by the Nazi authorities to be a member of the distinguished Prussian State Council. In 1939 he wrote his own profession of faith, which included the statement: “I believe that Jesus Christ had fully cut his ties to the Jewish people. He told the Jews the truth, and they cast it back in his teeth and rejected him.” Amongst the other appointments to the Cathedral Chapter were Provost Konrad Jenetzky, a leading “German Christian” from Silesia, and the prominent “German Christian” pastor in Berlin and temporarily Bishop in Magdeburg, Friedrich Peter. The Church Ministry had tried to give Peter a leading position in the Berlin Cathedral, but the church council there had refused to accept him. So they obliged the Brandenburg Cathedral to give him a position, along with the local leader of the Nazi Party, Karl Scholze, who had already joined the Party in 1930 and was employed full-time in propagating the Party’s cause. In fact, because of the outbreak of war, only Ziehen was permanently present in Brandenburg, but was himself – as a member of the Cathedral Chapter – fully engaged in managing Cathedral affairs. In the Cathedral School, numerous festivities celebrated the Nazi Party’s achievements, including listening to the radio speeches of Nazi leaders such as the Propaganda Minister Goebbels and singing the praises of the Reich Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.

The war-time circumstances and the lack of clergy made for more difficulties. After Bishop Bruno Adler left in 1940, Ziehen was obliged to write to the regional church administration, because “for the last six months we have had no clergy available. Church attendance threatens to become depleted. This is a deplorable result of the previous squabbles.” Finally in April 1942 a young pastor, Dr. Rudolf Biedermann from Pomerania, was called to join the Cathedral. Ziehen assured his colleagues that he had found Biedermann to be filled with a true National Socialist spirit, and that he would rely not only on the Bible and his Protestant heritage, but also on his “loyalty to the Führer of the German people”.

An extensive correspondence between Ziehen and the various members of the Cathedral Chapter who were serving in the army gives a good impression of their attitudes during the period of hostilities. For instance, Bishop Peter was engaged for two years in the blockade of Leningrad, during which over a million civilians died of starvation and cold. His letters from the front showed him as still believing in eventual victory, with a loyal greeting to the Führer and “Heil Hitler”. But after the downturn in Germany’s military fortunes at the end of 1942, a change of tone occurs. Ziehen even expressed a sense of distance in his attitude towards the regime. He could no longer accept the over-optimistic forecasts put out by the Propaganda Ministry. But of course these doubts could not be expressed in public: that was – he conceded – much too dangerous a topic.

The end of the war was also a difficult and dangerous time for the Cathedral. The synthesis of Nazi Party ideology and Christian belief which had been so eagerly pursued since 1933 was now falling apart. In the end, Ziehen’s biography seems rather tragic as though he was involved in a Götterdämmerung leading to a fatal ending over which he had no control. But no one was prepared to admit that the whole experience of nazification since 1933 was a ghastly error. Now – 70 years after the end of the war and 25 years after Germany’s reunification – this would seem an appropriate time to reflect on these events.

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Papal Rescue in Wartime Rome: A New Documentary and Commentaries

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Papal Rescue in Wartime Rome: A New Documentary and Commentaries

By William Doino Jr.

On April 1st, a documentary was televised in Italy entitled, “Lo vuole il Papa” (The Pope Wants It), exploring the role Pius XII played during the German occupation of Rome, when thousands of Jews were given shelter by Catholic institutions in and around Vatican City. The film is based upon the enterprising work of historian Antonello Carvigiani, who cites new evidence indicating  Pius XII personally supported these rescue efforts.

Last year, Carvigiani published a scholarly essay, “Aprite le porte, salvate i perseguitati,” (“Open the Doors, Save the Persecuted,”) published in Nuova storia contemporanea (September-October, 2014) one of Italy’s leading academic journals.

In his essay, Carvigiani examined the histories of several female religious communities in wartime Rome, and– analyzing the texts and records they left behind– found evidence that each acted under a common directive of Pius XII to take in persecuted Jews and other endangered people. Though some critics of Pius XII have questioned whether such instructions were ever given, Carvigiani maintains that he has “found evidence of a written or oral order” which was “delivered to all religious houses in Rome, as well as to all parishes and ecclesiastical structures.”

The documentary, based upon Carvigiani’s essay, expands upon his findings, with new testimony of individuals connected to these wartime events.

Dr. Andrea Tornielli, one of Italy’s leading Vatican commentators and author of a major biography on Pius XII, praised the documentary: “The story of the docu-film is not told by a narrator but by the actual images and testimonies of two survivors, only boys at the time, and by the nuns of the cloisters who had heard from the older sisters what had happened….The director chose to concentrate on the cloisters of SS Quattro Coronati, Santa Susanna, and Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, and the community of the Istituto di Maria Bambina, whose walls still harbor diaries and chronicles handwritten by the people at the heart of the stories. All of them vouch that the call to offer charity and refuge to the persecuted came from above. Written and oral testimonies refer repeatedly to the Pope, but also to the Deanery of Rome or to Giovanni Battista Montini [the future Pope Paul VI] and close collaborator with Pius XII.”

The aim of Carvigiani’s documentary is “not to be apologetic,” writes Tornielli. Rather, it is to “shed light on an, until now, little-known aspect of it.”

In the war diary of the community of Maria Bambina, continued Tornielli, “every day there was another request [and] every so often a telephone call from the Secretariat of His Holiness from the Vatican, and the reason was always the same: someone on the run, a persecuted family to take in, to protect, to help. One could not have refused a request from the representatives of the Pope…”

The wartime diary of the Augustinian Nuns of the convent of the Santi Quattro Coronati, first publicized in 2006, is one of the most explicit on record regarding Pius XII’s assistance. Relating events in the Fall of 1943, we read:

“Having arrived at this month of November, we must be ready to render services of charity in a completely unexpected way. The Holy Father, Pius XII, of paternal heart, feels in himself all the sufferings of the moment. Unfortunately, with the Germans entry into Rome which happened in the month of September, a ruthless war against the Jews has begun, whom they wish to exterminate by means of atrocities prompted by the blackest barbarities. They round up young Italians, political figures, in order to torture them and finish them off in the most tremendous torments. In this painful situation, the Holy Father wants to save his children, also the Jews, and orders that hospitality be given in the convents to these persecuted, and that the cloisters must also adhere to the wish of the Supreme Pontiff….”

In the register of the cloister of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, we read: “At this time, Jews, fascists, soldiers, caribinieri and nobility sought refuge with religious institutions, who, at great risk to themselves, opened their doors to save human lives.”  This was the desire of Pius XII, “who was the first to fill the Vatican with refugees, using the Villa of Castel Gandolfo and the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.”

The reference to Castel Gandolfo is significant, since many historians have overlooked, or are unaware that Pius XII protected many refugees there, including Jews. During the war years, contemporaneous reports put the number of refugees at Castel Gandolfo at 10,000 or more desperate and frightened people who were clothed, fed and protected there (a number of women even gave birth). Moving pictures of the overflowing refugees survive, and highlight one of the Church’s most significant humanitarian accomplishments during the War.

Of special significance is a dispatch   published in the June 22, 1944 issue of the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post), from a correspondent reporting directly from Vatican City, just weeks after the liberation. Under the headline, “Sanctuary in the Vatican,” the correspondent wrote:

“Several thousand refugees, largely Jews, during the weekend left the Papal Palace at Castel Gandolfo–the Pope’s summer residence near Marino–after enjoying safety there during the recent terror. Besides Jews, persons of all political creeds who had been endangered were given sanctuary at the palace. Before leaving, the refugees conveyed their gratitude to the Pope through his majordomo.”

Since only Pius XII had the authority to open the doors of Castel Gandolfo, it is unreasonable to maintain that these “several thousand refugees, largely Jews,” were given aid only by other Catholic officials, acting without a clear directive from Pius XII. The sincere gratitude expressed by Jews in Vatican City that day was not misplaced, but given to the man who had supreme authority over Castel Gandolfo, Pius XII, who obviously made their survival possible.

Carvigiani’s new research and documentary is consistent with the testimonies of  priest-rescuers like Cardinals Paolo Dezza and  Pietro Palazzini (honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations)  and Msgr. John Patrick Caroll-Abbing, who testified to Pius XII’s active support for the Jews of Rome, and to their rescuers. (There is also evidence and testimony that Pius helped the famous anti-Nazi Irish priest, Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, as well). Carvigiani also builds  upon the work of noted historians Michael Tagliacozzo, a survivor of the Nazi raid on Rome’s Jews, and one of the outstanding authorities on it; Andrea Riccardi, author of  L’inverno piu lungo, 1943-1944: Pio XII, gli ebrei e I nazista I Roma (The Longest Winter, 1943-1944: Pius XII, the Jews and the Nazis in Rome, 2008); Anna Foa, Professor of Modern History at the University of Rome; and Sr. Grazia Loparco, who has done extensive research on papal rescue in Rome. Foa has written: “Precisely with regard to Rome, the ways in which the work of sheltering and rescuing the persecuted was carried forward were such that they could not have been simply the fruit of initiatives from below, but were clearly coordinated as well as permitted by the leadership of the Church.” Similarly, Sr. Loparco has stated: “From the documentation and testimonies emerges evidence of the full support and instruction of Pius XII…Many concrete events, such as the opening of monasteries and convents, prove the fact that many Jews were lodged because of the direct concern of the Vatican, which also provided food and assistance.” More recently, Loparco has written an article entitled, “An Order from the Top,” for the Osservatore Romano, (English-language edition, January 30, 2015)  in which she gives additional evidence of specific instances where papal instructions were given to rescue persecuted Jews in Rome.

It should also be noted that, after the liberation of Rome but before World War II ended, Vatican Radio was already broadcasting the life-saving assistance of the Holy See. A review of Pius XII’s charity was broadcast on March 12, 1945 and stated:  “During the occupation of Rome, between 8th September, 1943 and 5th June 1944, he gave shelter in 120 institutes for women and 60 institutes for men, as well as in other houses and churches in Rome, to more than 5,200 Jews who were thus able to live free from fear and misery.”(Cited in Reginald F. Walker, Pius of Peace (London: M.H. Gill and Son, 1945), p. 94).

No examination of the Vatican and the German occupation of Rome would be complete without a careful study of the most important primary documents available; such a collection has fortunately been produced by Pier Luigi Guiducci, in his work, Il terzo Reich contro Pio XII: Papa Pacelli nei documenti nazisti (The Third Reich Against Pius XII: Pope Pacelli in Nazi Documents). Though not yet translated, Professor Guiducci has given an interview in English revealing his findings.

While scholarly research continues around the record of Pius XII during the Holocaust and doubtless will be further assisted when the Vatican releases its remaining wartime archives, it is encouraging that researchers like Carvigiani have brought forth fresh evidence which provides a more complete and balanced picture of Pius XII’s pontificate.

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A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This article is based on “Ein Gott, der Fahnen entrollt,” zeitzeichen: Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, 7 July 2014, available at http://www.zeitzeichen.net/schwerpunkt/fruehere-schwerpunkte/kirchen-und-1-weltkrieg/ . Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation of Manfred Gailus’ text.

For the Berlin Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, preaching to a large crowd from the steps of the Reichstag in a spontaneous service on 2 August 1914 was the high point of his life. The war had hardly got underway, but Doehring expressed in his inflammatory address all the main themes of Protestant war theology. This war, he told the crowd, had been forced on Germany. As a result, this could be seen as a perfectly justified war of defense against a conspiracy of surrounding enemies.

Yes, if we didn’t have justice and a clear conscience on our side, if we didn’t feel – I should almost say implicitly – God’s presence, which encompasses our flags and leads our Kaiser to take up his sword and call for a crusade and a holy war, then we should be shaking in our shoes with timidity. But now we will boldly give a defiant answer, one which is the most German of all: We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world.

This patriotic war-time euphoria which gripped so many Germans in the late summer of 1914 was accompanied by a wave of religious enthusiasm. In the church the heightened sense of comradeship brought about by the events of August was seen as the beginning of a new era. The outbreak of war was enthusiastically greeted by many Protestants (and hardly less by many Catholics). The war raised the level of religious fervor and was theologically justified as a “holy war” or “righteous war” undertaken by Christian Germany against an imagined world of enemies, consisting of sinners or heathen or godless barbarians. Pastors, theological professors and publicists all took this historic moment to be a clear signal from God calling the people back to faith and the church from the allurements of faithlessness.

On 11 August 1914, the leaders of the Prussian Protestant Church, which was by far the largest in the country, issued the following declaration: “Seemingly lifeless signs of faith are awakening once more….The fields are white and ripe for a spiritual harvest.” But what did these leaders mean by conjuring up this somewhat questionable image? Clearly they could expect a great deal of suffering, death and distress, which would lead to a new and more realistic sense of the need to take life seriously. This would put an end to the too long period of peace since 1870-71 which had induced indifference and a frivolous superficiality of life. Now the need for faith, the church, communion, pastoral care and prayer would once more be recognized.

Early reports in the first days and weeks of the war seemed to confirm such expectations. Years later, Pastor Paul Vetter, in Berlin Friedenau, recalled almost nostalgically the enthusiasms of those late summer days. On 5 August, in response to an edict sent out by the Kaiser ordering a “day of prayer in war-time,” his church was almost overwhelmed by the number of those who wanted to participate.

At first we planned to have an overflow evening service, then an extra early morning service. In fact we had to have five services. When the church was filled up by 10 a.m. the parishioners got the off-duty pastors to leave their studies and hold an extra service in the parish hall, and even to have the children’s room opened up, because everyone was so eager to have the chance of hearing God’s word. And this continued Sunday by Sunday, even though we organized every evening special war-time prayer services.

The desire to take part in communion services was enormous. Quite often there would be a spontaneous request to have a special communion service if a sudden command to march off was ordered. Or someone would knock on the church office door and call out: “Pastor, I can’t stay for the communion service. But please give me a comforting word to live and die by.” Young couples now sought to have a church war-time wedding, including quite a number who had already been married by a civil rite and who now “because of the shattering seriousness of the outbreak of the war wanted to have God’s blessing for their union and for the baptism of their children, which for so long they had neglected or despised.”

The Protestant churches put all their spiritual and material resources behind the war effort. There was even talk of a spiritual mobilization campaign. As evidence of this hugely patriotic enthusiasm, we can point to the petition signed by 172 Berlin pastors in which they protested against the clergy’s exclusion from active military service, and sought to obtain permission to have the honor, like other professions, of defending their country in the front lines. But in general this strongly expressed desire to take up arms was rejected by the church bureaucrats. Only young ordinands were allowed to volunteer their services, i.e. those who were not yet fully established or had families. Pastors in office were to stay there and serve the cause on the home front. They were called as preachers, pastors and publicists to advance the nation’s collective cause by upholding the people’s patriotism, readiness to sacrifice, and maintaining confidence in the final victory. If pastors were called up, they would be serving as chaplains or ambulance workers, i.e. not with weapons. And in fact, during the course of the war approximately 1400 pastors were posted as chaplains.

On the home front, the pastors’ contributions consisted mainly of highly morale-boosting services, with special “war sermons” or “prayers in time of war”, which were often held every evening. Later on, a carefully organized system of pastoral care was developed through letters sent to the soldiers at the front, which brought greetings from home as well as uplifting spiritual messages. On top of this, a service for sending parcels was arranged to bring the soldiers gifts from loved ones. At the same time, the pastors were keen to demonstrate their care for the families affected by the war, and especially for the war widows. Finally we should note the very considerable financial support given by churches, church organizations or well-endowed parishioners to the government-sponsored War Loans, as well as the numerous occasions on which parishes donated their church bells to be melted down for the war effort.

War sermons were very much in demand, and became the hall-mark of Protestant responses to the outbreak of the war. Pastor Ferdinand Vogel was one of those who had taken his wife to join the crowds rejoicing on the main street Unter der Linden on the evening of July 31. In his memoirs, he made a point of describing the scene, and then on August 23 he had preached his first war-time sermon in the Sophia Church on the text of Romans 8. 31-9, with the stirring words: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” This was the spirit, the pastor claimed, which prevailed throughout the country in those weeks.

Of course the number of those who are against us is not small. Not only in Europe, but even in Japan, an island nation in far east Asia, there are those who hate us or are envious. So we won’t be surprised if others also join in. But we have Luther’s great hymn to comfort us: ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, which is so appropriately used by our congregations in this time of war.

At the same time, in contrast to many other pastors, Vogel did not allow himself to overly indulge in patriotic rhetoric, since his sermon also included prudent passages calling for circumspection. “What right do we have as a people, he asked his parishioners, to claim that God is on our side? Why should we expect God to be with us, and not with those who oppose us? Of course we know that God deals not just with individuals but also with the destinies of whole peoples. Up to now God has given the Germans a great deal of support with which to build up his Kingdom. Look at Luther’s deeply spiritual powers of belief, the lofty flights of thoughts which are to be found in Schiller and Kant, or the depth of commitment to our people as seen in Bismarck or the old Kaiser, which they turned into legislated steps for social improvements. Yes, God has indeed called the German people to a great and glorious destiny.”

Very frequently these pastors referred in their sermons to the heroic spirit of the “Wars of Liberation” against Napoleon a hundred years earlier. The significant difference was that in 1914-18 it was not German territory which was occupied by foreign troops, but rather that all the most important theatres of war lay outside Germany’s borders. This fact was ignored in the fervor of patriotic enthusiasm. One of those in the forefront of jingoistic preachers was Bruno Doehring, already mentioned above, and his various colleagues in the Berlin Cathedral. He was born in 1879 in Mohrungen in East Prussia, the son of a farmer. In 1914 as a young pastor he was promoted by the Kaiser to be a Court and Cathedral Preacher. During the war, and because of it, this young and hitherto unknown country pastor became one of the best known preachers in the nation’s capital. His sermons were printed with large circulations. The titles of his collected war-time sermons say it all: A Mighty Fortress. Sermons from a Testing Time (1915), Religion on the Battlefield. Impressions and Reflections (1916), and God and the Germans. Thoughts for the Present Day (1917). Particularly notable was his sermon of 15 April 1917 when he preached to a congregation of between two and three thousand people in the Cathedral. The original enthusiasm of August 1914 for a quick victory had been replaced by a disillusioned sober assessment of the war’s experiences. Great controversy was raging about Germany’s war aims and about possible negotiations for peace. “Our enemies,” so Doehring claimed, “are trying to shatter our innermost faith and trust in God for our mission. But Germany will never capitulate, even when we fall in heroic sacrifice for our nation. If Christ dwells in our people, then even if we are murdered as the Jews murdered Jesus, then a new faith in Germany will arise from our graves.” Indeed, in his address Doehring painted a picture of the German people as a redemptive force, whose nearness to God had given them the mission of calling a lost world back to God.

What other people could undertake this task to save the world from the chaos around them? There can be no doubt that only a strong and courageous people can do this. So we must remain united and be led by men filled with God’s spirit. We have got to find those courageous elements who demonstrate exactly the opposite from the materialist-minded English, or the blindly hateful French, or the violence-loving Russians, or the treacherous Italians, or the bestial Rumanians, let alone the mendacious and greedy followers of the so-called mighty American dollar.

Doehring appealed to his hearers to remain strong in their faith and love, since God still had great things in hand for Germany and the Germans. In fact the tone of this sermon presaged the party line of the Fatherland Party which was to spring up a few months later, and which campaigned with fanatical zeal for the retention of all annexations in a truly imperialistic confidence of eventual victory.

This was the prevailing tone of war sermons. Only a few pastors adopted a more peaceful line. Amongst these men were the five Berlin pastors—Karl Aner, Walter Nithack-Stahn, Otto Pless, Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Rudolf Wieland—who in October 1917 issued a declaration in support of the Peace Resolutions passed by the majority of the Reichstag in July 1917. In view of what they called the “catastrophic consequences of war” they called on all Christians to reject the idea of using war as a means of settling international disputes, and instead to campaign for peace. The great majority of their clerical colleagues found such ideas to be outrageous. They immediately drafted up a counter-blast, which was signed by 160 of the capital’s pastors . “There are only two things in store for Germany: victory or defeat. Once we have achieved victory, that will be the time to show the English and French that we are ready to practice reconciliation. But in the meantime we are still entitled in the sight of God and man to righteous anger against our enemies. And therefore we will hold off from any offers of reconciliation until the enemy is defeated and ourselves and our children have secured peace and freedom.”

Such was the prevailing tone amongst these pastors in the fourth year of the war. Anyone who did not subscribe to such a view of the need for victory was quickly accused of being un-Protestant, even un-German. And it was this tone of unyielding militancy which could be seen in the founding of the Fatherland Party on the anniversary of Germany’s victory at Sedan on 2 September 1917. Numerous pastors, even some complete synods, church organizations and clubs were quick to join. And it is easy enough to trace a direct line between this kind of nationalist-conservative mentalities to the later German National People’s Party of the Weimar Republic, or to the militia groups and the subsequent radical nationalist associations such as the Stahlhelm and other supporters of the new Nazi Party in the post-war years.

“The fields are white and ready for a spiritual harvest” was the joyful proclamation made by the Prussian Protestant Church Council when war was declared. But at the end of the war many branches of the Protestant Churches experienced a collective spiritual collapse. Defeat had brought to an end the 500 years of Hohenzollern rule. And the subsequent democratic revolutions of 1918-19 seemed to be wholly disastrous. Many shattered people wanted to know from their pastors how God could have allowed this to happen. The pastor of the Good Shepherd Church in Friedenau, who had recorded the throngs coming to church in August 1914, was now obliged to deal with his own reservations about preaching at the end of the war in 1918. “The question, what should I preach about, seemed so easy and yet was so difficult, all the more because the nation’s defeat was so sudden after we had put so much effort into maintaining hope and trust.” The end of the war raised agonizing questions amongst the members of the congregations about God’s righteousness, which were not easily answered in either sermons or pastoral counseling.

The young Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, already prominent for his fanatical war sermons, now at the end of the war became one of the significant propagators of the so-called “stab-in-the-back” theory. This attributed Germany’s defeat not only to the military superiority of their known enemies on the battle fields, but also to the decisive contribution of those treacherous and secretive elements who had betrayed Germany at home. The only way to regain Germany’s political resurrection would be to return to those values which had made Germany great, namely God, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, Bismarck and Adolf Stoecker. It was in this sense that Doehring was to use his position as a political preacher and to combat Germany’s new and first democratic experiment in the years that lay ahead.

Comment by John Conway:

But what could the pastors say? They held a position of authority and stature in the parish, and were easily accessible. They were supposed to provide not only personal moral uplift to individuals but to nourish the parish’s corporate loyalty to the state. In any case, they lacked the knowledge or the capacity to be critical of the nation’s political or military leaders. The pastors’ conservative milieu, their nationalist sympathies and their loyalty to their God-given Emperor all induced them to play the expected role of spiritually equipping their parishioners for war. To have uttered a dissenting voice against the widespread feelings of the majority would have evoked tremendous resentment or even hostility. No pastor, even today, wants to play that role. To be sure, their readiness to predict Germany’s imminent victory, or to ascribe this to divine approval, or to demonize Germany’s enemies as agents of Satan, were regrettable features, which for the most part were replaced by more appropriate lamentations. But the inevitable conflation and contradiction of political and pastoral claims in war-time needs to be reckoned with. After all, I can myself recall that in September 1939 we all went to church to pray for God’s guidance and protection for our armed forces. And Bob Dylan surely expressed a widespread opinion when he wrote:

The First World War, boys

It came and it went

The reason for fighting I never did get

But I learned to accept it

Accept it with pride,

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side.

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15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

By Hubert Wolf, University of Münster [1]

Ever since 2012, a corpus of sources has become accessible in the Archdiocesan Archive of Munich and Freising, which historians have long awaited: the diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952), which were predominantly written in a shorthand called “Gabelsberger.” Johannes Waxenberger (1915-2010), the last secretary of the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had taken the diaries – against the archbishop”s testamentary will – and kept them in a cardboard box under his bed for decades. That the cardinal had kept a diary was known to researchers. Waxenberger, however, refused to release the records and only transcribed singular pages of the diaries for the purpose of a few academic studies. It was only in 1999 that he concluded an agreement with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich until 2008, according to which the diaries were to be restored to the Archiepiscopal See of Munich after his death, which occurred on June 25, 2010.

This longtime-hidden treasure will now be edited by researchers and made accessible online for anyone to view. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a long-term project for a duration of twelve years, for which the historian Prof Dr. Andreas Wirsching, head of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), and I are responsible. Concise but elaborate annotations will furnish information on the individuals and the most important issues recorded in the diaries. The edition is not only intended for use by historians and theologians, but also by scholars from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Sources edited online are also suitable for the use in university teaching, which the “Critical Online Edition of the Nuncial Reports of Eugenio Pacelli (1917-1929)” in Münster has already proven. The new project will profit from this in many ways. The first texts that Faulhaber wrote during the eventful period from 1917 to 1919, which are of utmost importance for his biography, will be available online by late 2014 at www.faulhaber-edition.de.

A close look behind the scenes of official correspondences

Michael Faulhaber was bishop of Speyer from 1911 to 1917 and archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1917 until his death in 1952. He was of humble birth, being the son of a baker and farmer from the Lower Franconian village of Heidenfeld near Schweinfurt. In 1913, however, he was ennobled and created a cardinal in 1921. Faulhaber was an excellent theologian, an articulate pioneer of political Catholicism, and a champion of Catholic interests. His influence reached far beyond Germany”s borders and those of the Catholic Church. Faulhaber had marvelous connections with the Bavarian people and with the elites of Church, politics, nobility and the media at home and abroad. He was a close friend of Pope Pius XII, but also negotiated with Adolf Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer. The numerous interlocutors that Faulhaber received day by day came from all social classes. It is especially through his published sermons that he reached a mass audience. Already in his lifetime, church members admired him, but he remained highly controversial, especially due to his stance during the period of National Socialism.

The fact that a representative of the Church wrote down his experiences and thoughts in a detailed diary for over four decades is a stroke of luck for historians. Since the Catholic Church is a “global player” and Faulhaber had excellent foreign contacts, there are various possibilities to approach the issues mentioned in the diaries on an internationally comparative level.

The diaries represent a corpus of sources that is unique in terms of quality and quantity. They have been fully preserved for the period from 1911 to 1952. The diaries consist of 32 volumes in notebook format comprising more than 4,000 pages that primarily contain succinct entries on the individuals Faulhaber met as well as brief summaries of their conversations. In total, Faulhaber recorded about 52,000 visits. These diaries are often referred to as a “visitors’ diary,” in order to distinguish them from other, less comprehensive diaries that Faulhaber kept. He, however, used it also to record information he considered important with regard to his views on key political, social or religious events. Whenever he considered such issues to a greater depth or had particularly important conversations, he added ample supplementary sheets, of which approximately 1,000 have been recorded so far. The average length of a supplementary sheet ranges from one to four pages in octavo. The edition will thus offer a detailed view of approximately 15,000 days of Faulhaber”s life.

According to what is known about him so far, Faulhaber was a great and reliable observer, who mostly wrote soberly, but sometimes used very frank words to phrase his opinions. His records were not only influenced by his own observations and experiences, but also by messages received orally and by letter and by reports from newspapers and radio transmissions. He then enhanced such communication with his own interpretations. The entries are usually brief, being written down shortly after the depicted event had taken place. The notes apparently served him as a sort of reminder, not being intended for publication, which is why Faulhaber had the possibility to write down confidential and maybe even incriminating contents of his conversations.

The source is therefore to be considered a highly authentic relic that was transmitted unintentionally. The private records allow for an exciting view of a church dignitary”s emotional world and behind the scenes of official correspondences and official statements. They complement the corpora of sources already accessible, so that new perspectives and motives for his actions may be discovered, which could so far scarcely be delineated. The diaries represent a key to open up his comprehensive papers and to analyze them from particular perspectives. Ahead of schedule, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter made the larger part of Faulhaber”s papers in the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising available to research in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is easily accessible, but has only been analyzed rudimentarily. There is no comparable corpus for other important German church representatives.

The supplementary sheets are scattered among Faulhaber’s papers, but many of them emerged recently in the records turned over by Waxenberger. So far, only a few supplementary sheets have been edited by Ludwig Volk (Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917-1945, 2 vol., Mainz 1975/1978). These documents are frequently quoted by researchers and give proof of this source’s potential for historical research. Ludwig Volk saw only a brief selection of the many items Waxenberger withheld from Faulhaber’s papers. It may thus be assumed that those supplementary sheets that are politically charged are only casino online now soon to be made accessible to researchers and the general public.

Gabelsberger Centre of Excellence is to make accessible further archival holdings

The historical analysis of the diaries and supplementary sheets is complicated by the fact that it was only the dates and names of his interlocutors that he wrote down in longhand, as well as geographical, political and ecclesiastical or religious terms, though often in abbreviated form. For the rest he used Gabelsberger, which was the most widespread short hand in Germany before the introduction of the German Unified Shorthand (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) in 1924. Today, only few experts know how to decipher Gabelsberger. The long-term project therefore also comprises stenographic training, which pursues the aim of establishing a centre of excellence for shorthand in Munich. This training was financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which in general sponsored the preliminary work of the long-term project. With the help of those newly trained experts on the cultural technique of reading Gabelsberger further comprehensive archival holdings will be made accessible to researchers. A survey has revealed that German archives hold ample collections of the nineteenth and twentieth century written in Gabelsberger.

Online edition offers numerous advantages

The online edition aspires to offer a flexible, multidimensional technique of editing, which permits the contemporary display of two textual versions of each diary entry in arbitrary combination: first, the scanned facsimile; second, the precise transcription; and third, an extensive reading version that contains references to supplementary sheets, spelled-out abbreviations, other possible readings and indications of the respective stages. Annotations will appear as pop-ups. The database-based online edition offers numerous advantages compared to a printed volume:

(1) Accessibility: the project supports the principle of Open Access. The diaries and the supplementary sheets will be accessible all over the world, for free and comparably fast and easy.

(2) Efficiency: an online edition is considerably more low-priced and resource-efficient, especially given the amplitude of sources.

(3) Flexibility and velocity: the texts and the pertaining annotations are to be uploaded in sections – and thereby accessible more quickly. Moreover, particularly interesting parts of various years can be transcribed and made accessible online together with the respective supplementary sheets, even before the other documents of that particular year are transcribed and all supplementary sheets have been retrieved. Belated additions and modifications are not a problem, for instance in case further relevant documents are found among Faulhaber”s comprehensive papers.

(4) Transparency and meticulousness: an online edition offers the opportunity to mark cases of doubt as well as various readings more thoroughly than a traditional print edition. This is a huge advantage considering the complexity of the material”s content and the difficulties that are to be expected when deciphering Gabelsberger. The multidimensional technique of editing allows for excellent attention to detail as well as for legibility.

(5) Linking possibilities: the documents in the database can be linked with each other, but also with external corpora of sources, such as image or audio files.

(6) User-friendliness: among the most important advantages of the online edition are the comprehensive search options, the possibility to copy the texts easily and the multi-linking with the entries in the biographical as well as in the keyword databases. Moreover, online editions are comparably easy to analyze from a statistic point of view, which may raise new questions, e.g. as far as writing processes and the development of terminologies are concerned.

(7) Interactivity: online editions make it easier for users to forward advice and recommendations to the project team. There is going to be a contact form on the website of the Faulhaber-edition.

The online edition is based on software called “DENQ” (Digital edition of contemporary sources), which was developed by Dr. Jörg Hörnschemeyer from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome in cooperation with the DHI London. The IFZ assumes the hosting of the database and of the website as well as of the project”s internal server platform, which contains a protected area. Long-term storage is secured within the frame of the Institute”s close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library.

State of research and possible questions

The biographical literature on Faulhaber”s fellow bishops is not very broad yet. Nonetheless, it offers a basis to compare what is representative and what is specific of Faulhaber”s biography. Neither a biography based on source material nor partial biographies of Munich”s spiritual leader have been published so far. A history of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the first half of the twentieth century is missing as well.

What is more, the edition is going to be illuminating on many fundamental questions of Germany’s and Europe’s history. In his notes, Faulhaber reported on the German Empire, the First World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation period as well as on the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. This period saw several surges of secularization and re-confessionalization as well as fundamental theological developments. Many questions that Faulhaber was confronted with are still current today, and essential for the self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

Faulhaber”s diaries and the pertaining supplementary sheets are of particular interest as far as several fundamental issues are concerned, which are in various ways interlinked: the relationship of religion and politics, especially that of the Catholic Church and the “Third Reich,” the relationships with other religions and confessions, and the Church”s structures and networks. Moreover, it is concerned with questions of cultural, religious, and theological history and deals with issues such as emotions and piety.

The interdisciplinary team of the long-term project began its work on October 31, 2013 and cooperates closely with Dr Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising. Members are Dr. Erich Ruff, an expert on Gabelsberger, Dr. Philipp Gahn, a Catholic theologian, Dr. Peer Oliver Volkmann, a historian, Matthias Bornschlegel, a computer scientist, and Carina Knorz and Franziska Nicolay, graduate students, who will critically examine the diaries in their dissertations.

Links related to the project:

Hubert Wolf: http://www.uni-muenster.de/FB2/personen/mnkg/seminar/wolf.html

Andreas Wirsching: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/andreas-wirsching/

Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis: http://www.pacelli-edition.de/

Jörg Hörnschemeyer: http://dhi-roma.it/team.html

Peter Pfister: http://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/Page005788.aspx

Erich Ruff: http://www.erichruff.gmxhome.de/

Philipp Gahn: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/philipp-gahn/

Peer Oliver Volkmann: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/peer-oliver-volkmann/

Matthias Bornschlegel: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/matthias-bornschlegel/

Carina Knorz: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/carina-knorz/

Franziska Nicolay: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/franziska-nicolay/

 

[1] I would like to thank Elisabeth-Marie Richter for translating the present article and Holger Arning for his contributions to the concept of the text.

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Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Public Lecture: “November 1938: Perspectives from the Vatican Archives,” The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, 23 October 2013.

By Suzanne Brown-Fleming, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

For more information or documentation relating to this lecture at the Wiener Library, please contact Dr. Brown-Fleming at sbrown-fleming [at] ushmm.org. The views as expressed are the author’s alone and no not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization. 

In March 1943, in his final public statement before his death and speaking to the World Jewish Congress in New York, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster and as such, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales (1935-1943) said the following: “I denounce with utmost vigor the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors.” Even the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, nor Pope Pius XI before him, had ever, or would ever, publicly voice objection to persecution of Jews specifically by the Nazis specifically by name.  Tonight I will discuss the concerns and preoccupations that shaped the Holy See’s muted response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.  My talk today is based on the records of the Vatican nunciatures (diplomatic headquarters) in Munich and Berlin during the 1930s. In February 2003, in an unprecedented break with Vatican Secret Archives policy, the Holy See opened those records pertaining to the Munich and Berlin nunciatures (Vatican diplomatic headquarters) for the period 1922 to 1939. During these years, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), served as nuncio to Bavaria (1917), nuncio to Germany (1920), and Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI (1930–1939). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s archives now hold microfilm copies of this subset of critical new primary source material.

*

Discussions about the plight of European Jewry swirled in the offices of the Secretary of State in the months before the November pogrom. Secretary of State and future Pope Eugenio Pacelli and his lieutenants received many, many requests for help. Internal exchanges reveal a certain level of sympathy, tinged still by anti-Jewish sentiment. In February 1938, Apostolic Inter-Nuncio to the Netherlands Father Paul Giobbe wrote to Undersecretary for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs Domenico Tardini to softly encourage a petition from president of the Dutch Zionist Committee H.B. van Leeuwen, asking for the Holy See’s support in favor of Jewish emigration to Palestine. “Under the current difficult political and social circumstances, the Jews, declared undesirables in some European countries and in the face of… blood and violence that currently dissuade the pursuit of systematic emigration to Palestine, [yet] obstinately imbued…with the utopia of the reconstruction of the Jewish Kingdom, now want to find territories that are safe and easily accessible…the Holy See should at least support them by smoothing the way,” he wrote. Apostolic nuncio to Switzerland Fillippo Bernardini sent a detailed report concerning the persecution of Austrian Jewry and a proposal for the emigration of 10,000 Viennese Jews to Lebanon in May 1938. The September 1938 Italian racial laws were discussed in great detail in the Secretariat of State before their passage, to the point where the Vatican’s emissary to Benito Mussolini, Father Tacci Venturi, brokered a deal between Pope Pius XI and the Duce that the pope would agree to decline any public condemnation of the Italian racial laws as long as the Duce would give his word to stop persecution of the Italian Catholic youth group Catholic Action, and to agree not to subject the Jews to “bad treatment of the kind that was customary for centuries”—a promise, needless to say, Mussolini did not keep.

The Reichskristallnacht folio is small, containing only 15 documents: 10 letters from private individuals, some addressed to Secretary of State Pacelli and some to Pope Pius XI and all written in August 1938, and 5 pieces of official correspondence. Small in number, letters from private individuals illuminate the atmosphere in Europe and the United States in the months before the November pogrom. On August 12, 1938, German American Catholic Dr. Gotthold Steinführer of Chicago, Illinois wrote a brief and impassioned letter to Pope Pius XI in Rome. “Permit me to make Your Eminence aware of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ regarding the Jewish question, for example in Matthew 8:11[1] and Revelation 2:9.[2]  Your Eminence should not defend the Jews, who [belong to] the Synagogue of Satan. Referring to the above words of Christ, those who defend the Jews defend for Satan. The entire Gospel of John shows the fight of the Jews against Christ. The greatest enemies of all Christendom are the Jews, from Paul until today. Yours Faithfully, Dr. Gotthold Steinführer,” he wrote.

I should note that letters to the Holy See filed in other folios also require systematic examination, as they offer interesting insights into popular Catholic thinking, such as the one from Maria Theresa Bauer of Paris to Pope Pius XI noting that a gesture of protection from the Holy Father “would make many [Jews] inclined to convert to Catholicism in these painful hours.” As to those who had done so already, decades earlier, they, too, wrote to their pope. These were Catholics whose families were affected by the 15 September 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Law to Protect German Blood and Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law) and other Nazi legal restrictions.

Mrs. George Marse described herself as “a German Catholic wife to a Jewish German doctor.”  Their four children, baptized as Catholics and raised in Catholic schools, were now defined by the Nazi state as “half Aryans.” Mrs. Marse wrote to Pope Pius XI as a last measure following years of unsuccessful attempts to find financial support for emigration. “I have found no help. The Jewish committees are only responsible for purely Jewish cases! Our family consists of but one Jew and five Catholics!  How can my husband expect help from the Jews with his Catholic wife and his [four] Catholic children!?” she wrote in her impassioned letter.  Another letter, addressed to Pope Pius XI and received by the Holy See in August 1938, made the same argument: “I am one of the many thousands of my comrades in fate… so-called “Half-Jews” [Halbjuden]…our coreligionists leave us in the lurch—no one cares about us!! One wants to shout to all the world, Christians, where are you?”  Such letters reflect the general need for further research on discussions and concrete aid efforts within the Holy See regarding those Catholics who were defined as Jews by the Nazi state. Currently, no monograph treats this important subject.

Of greatest interest are 2 official reports from Vatican nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, to the Secretary of State in Rome, Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII). They are dated 15 and 19 November 1938, respectively. A brief word Cesare Orsenigo, author of the reports, is in order. An Italian national who was Pacelli’s successor as nuncio to Germany in 1930, 56 years of age when he was appointed to Berlin, Archbishop Orsenigo has thus far not fared well in the historiography for the 1933-1945 period. His contemporary, George Shuster, described Orsenigo as “frankly, jubilant” about Hitler’s election to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933.  Other documents across the Vatican archives demonstrate Orsenigo’s admiration for many aspects of the Nazi regime. This is why the tone of these two reports, decidedly sympathetic to beleaguered Jewry, is surprising. Let us begin with Orsenigo’s first report about Reichskristallnacht, dated 15 November 1938. His description of the events themselves openly acknowledged the reality of anti-Semitic vandalism (as he titled the report), and, the Nazi and German popular role therein:

The destructions have been initiated, as if by a single order… The blind popular revenge followed one identical method everywhere: in the night, all display windows were shattered and the synagogues were set on fire; the day after, shops that did not have any defense were looted. Doing this, [the looters] destroyed all the goods, even the most expensive ones. Only towards the afternoon of the 10th, when the masses, having vented their wildest feelings, and not being restrained by any policeman, did Minister Goebbels give the order to stop, characterizing what happened as venting by “the German people…” All of this easily leaves the impression that the order or permission to act came from a higher authority… The hour is to follow of ministerial laws and dispositions in order to isolate Jews more and more, prohibiting them every commerce, every [ability to frequent] the public schools, every partaking in places of public diversion (theaters, cinemas, concerts, cultural meetings), with a fine totaling one billion [Reichsmarks] to be paid [by Jews themselves].

In the remainder of the report, Orsenigo noted the strong temptation of German Jewry to commit suicide in the wake of these terrible events, noted the positive if limited efforts by the embassies of Columbia, England, and Holland to document these events and protect the assets of Jewish nationals, and openly criticized Poland, writing, “it was… Poland that provoked the violent action of Germany” by refusing to extend the expired passports of Polish Jews from Germany, prompting Germany to “suddenly sen[d] back to Poland tens of thousands of Jews, and among these and also the parents the young exasperated boy [Polish Jewish student Herszel Grynszpan], that then assassinated the German ambassador in Paris [Ernst vom Rath].” In reading the report as a whole, Orsenigo is critical of the events of Kristallnacht, critical of the Nazi state, and critical of the German population.

The second report, dated 19 November 1938, concerned impending legislation declaring “null and void all marriages already conducted” between “Aryans” and Jews, including those marriages in which the Jewish spouse had converted to Catholicism after the marriage. Not surprisingly, Orsenigo objected to the legislation, due to its disregard for Canon Law, but he also added critical commentary about the increasingly radical nature of the Nazi state, noting that “serenity and competence” were “more and more lacking in high places of command” and that there existed a “state of mood that [Orsenigo thought] greased the anti-Semitic events[, a state of mood that] reveals always more and more turbulence and agitation, and is increasingly less able to be controlled,” he wrote.

Let us turn to Eugenio Pacelli’s (the future wartime pope’s) response.  We know that he received both of Orsenigo’s reports of 15 and 19 November, and, hence, received direct and detailed information about the pogrom. While no documentation of Pacelli’s response to the two Orsenigo reports has yet been discovered, we do have available Pacelli’s response to a request from Cardinal Hinsley that Pope Pius XI make a statement about the pogrom. The story was this: in late November, Cardinal Hinsley sent to Pacelli a request from Lord Rothschild, whom Hinsley described as “the most famous and highly esteemed amongst Jews in England.” On 26 November 1938, Cardinal Hinsley wrote to Pacelli the following:

…There will be a public gathering in London in order to ask [for] aid and attendance to all those who suffer from persecution [for reasons of] religion or race… If [in] principle [it] were possible to have an authentic word of the Holy Father being declared that in Christ discrimination of race does not exist and that the great human family must be joined in peace [by] means of respect of the personality of the individual, such message would [be] sure [to] have in England and America, [and] nevertheless through the entire world, the [effect of] leading to good will towards the [Catholic] Religion and the Holy See.”

Cardinal Hinsley was, as far as I have found, the only head of a bishops’ conference to ask Pope Pius XI to protest Kristallnacht. Perhaps we can attribute this to his particularly British world view? University of Chichester scholar Andrew Chandler recounts a conversation between Cardinal Hinsley and Winston Churchill after the fall of France in 1940: “I’m glad we’re alone [in this fight],” he was said to have remarked. When Churchill asked why, Hinsley responded that “Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.”

It is worth recounting Pacelli’s response to Hinsley’s letter, dated December 3, 1938, in full. Pacelli’s notes on the matter read as follows:

If the [matter] were of substantially private character, it would be easier. On the other hand, it is necessary to remove the appearance of fearing that which does not need to be feared. Cardinal Hinsley could speak [if] saying he is surely interpreting the thought of the Sovereign Pontiff saying that the [matter] not only finds the Pope in a moment of much worry for his health, but also overwhelmed by the amount of matters before him. It is therefore not possible for [the Holy Father] to [respond] personally. He [Cardinal Hinsley] can say that he is interpreting the thoughts of the Holy Father which view all aid to those who are unhappy and unjustly (unworthily or dishonorably) suffering with a humane and Christian eye.

This response was telegraphed to Cardinal Hinsley on December 3rd.  Were Pacelli’s comments about the health of Pope Pius XI accurate? David Kertzer’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that the pope suffered a heart attack on November 25th. We will return to this point—the pope’s health and the impact it had on the ability of Secretary of State Pacelli to maneuver—later in this lecture.

On December 10th, illustrious figures that included Cardinal Hinsley; William Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury; Lord Rothschild; Clement R. Attlee, leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons; Sir Alan Anderson, Conservative MP; and General Evangeline Booth, representative of the Salvation Army, gathered at the invitation of Sir Frank Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House.  A resolution “offering whole-hearted support” for the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees was “unanimously adopted.”  The Baldwin refugee fund for victims of religious and racial persecution, first announced by former prime minister, Lord Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Baldwin, during a radio address on the evening of December 8th, was expressly meant to provide financial aid to both Jews and “non-Aryan Christians:”

Tonight, I plead for the victims who turn to England for help, the first time in their long and troubled history that they have asked us in this way for financial aid…the number of these so-called non-Aryan Christians, who, according to German law, are regarded as Jews, certainly exceeds 100,000; in addition there are some half a million professing Jews, and no words can describe the pitiable plight of these 600,000 human souls. What can be done to help?

A brief article in the New York Times, entitled, it is interesting to note, Pope Backs Britons on Aid to Refugees, appeared that same day.  According to the article, “one of Pope Pius [XI]’s rare messages to an interdisciplinary body was read at a meeting representing all faiths and political parties, called by the Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House today to support the Earl Baldwin Fund for the victims of religious and racial persecution.”

It was Lord Rothschild who read the Vatican telegram to the assembled.  Before reading the telegram, Lord Rothschild remarked that “Cardinal Hinsley had written to Rome on his behalf,” and that “everyone respected the Pope for his courage and unswerving adherence to the principles which the whole civilized world knew must be maintained if civilization was to persist.” The Vatican telegram, as reproduced in the London Times, read as follows:

The Holy Father Pius XI’s thoughts and feelings will be correctly interpreted by declaring that he looks with humane and Christian approval on every effort to show charity and to give effective assistance to all those who are innocent victims in these sad times of distress. [Signed] Cardinal Pacelli, Secretary of State to His Holiness.

Cardinal Hinsley’s presence at the Mansion House meeting made headlines, as did the fact that Pacelli’s message was read at a high-level public meeting with the specific purpose of support for Jews—I remind us that Lord Baldwin’s December 8th radio appeal was quite clear as to the need for funds for approximately 500,000 Jews and 100,000 “non-Aryan Christians.”  Yet, here we have an unambiguous example that Pacelli, despite being informed about the horrendous details of the pogrom in Germany, was not encouraging of a public statement by the Holy See condemning Nazi Germany specifically, or the November pogrom specifically, or singling out suffering Jews specifically by name—even when asked to do so by a prince of his own church.  He was comfortable only with a statement broad enough to apply to all “innocent victims.”

Let us return for a moment to the issue of the pope’s health and one major implication of it: Pacelli’s personal response could dictate the Holy See’s official institutional response in the months before Pius XI’s death on February 10, 1939. On December 6, four days before the Mansion House gathering, Pacelli received Italian ambassador to the Holy See Bonfiacio Pignatti, who implored him, on behalf of Mussolini, “to instruct all of Italy’s bishops not to criticize the anti-Semitic campaign.” Of that meeting, Pignatti wrote, “Cardinal [Pacelli] observed that it would be very easy to give the advice I was suggesting orally, but that having to put it in writing would be more difficult.” In the end, Pacelli agreed to do so in the case of the diocese of Rome and to “study the best way to take care of Italy’s other dioceses.” In this context, it should come as no surprise that Pacelli was not willing to aggressively and specifically condemn the 9-10 November Nazi pogrom against Jews. Pacelli was only willing to authorize (on behalf of the pope) a reminder of the church’s broad commandment and mission to aid the suffering and the persecuted. It is quite the understatement to say that in these troubled times, such a response was not enough.

*

The Vatican archives also offer us glimpses into the broader popular response to the plight of European Jewry. In the interest of time, I have chosen only a few. On December 7, 1938, Berlin Protestant Gerda Erdmann took it upon herself to write to Pope Pius XI. “Please permit me, as a non-Catholic Christian, to address you regarding a matter that has called much attention: the question of the Jews (Es handelt sich um die Judenfrage). With this letter, I want to make a suggestion which seems to me could be a solution to this [and one] coming from Christianity,” she wrote, satisfaction and eagerness dripping from her pen. “It is basically God’s hand that weighs so heavily on the Jews; God’s judgment has reached them as has already occurred several times before, during history since the time of Christ. Since that time, God’s message through his son is: Jews are guilty.” Erdmann took many more lines to explain why, in her perception, “Jews [were] guilty.” Her solution: “…huge empty territories are available (for instance in South America…) where:

“if the Jewish immigrants were baptized in their new homeland…the local population would in every way show their acceptance and open their doors. There would be no closed gates. The children of the baptized would be raised since childhood in the Christian faith; they would grow up within the church and the nation, end up in mixed marriages and create a new population. Among the colorful racial mixture overseas, the entire European Jewish people would be absorbed without danger. The refreshing influence of European intelligence could be a gain in many places.”

Erdmann understood herself as a faithful Christian and understood her solution as a Christian one:  “What a great and beautiful task opens up for world Christianity! What a bright future! United, Christianity can achieve a colossal purpose of love for they fellow man…A task achieved, which will go down in history as a shining example of selfless Christian love performed for the Honor and Glory of God,” she concluded. When I first came across this letter in the Vatican archives, I could not resist sending it to several close colleagues under the heading: “with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Most letters came from Jews begging for help, and left wanting. In December 1938, German Jew Franz Knüppel wrote to the Secretariat of State on the eve of his forced expulsion from his current residence in France. The recipient of many such letters daily, Secretary of State Pacelli directed his undersecretary to contact the nunciature in France, for, as his undersecretary put it, “the abovementioned gentleman is not known by the Secretary of State;” and thus his undersecretary would “therefore leave it up to [the nuncio] to judge whether it is opportune to deal with Mr. Franz Knüppel’s request in the way that he wishes.” In short-hand, the process was as follows: when a letter requesting aid arrived in the Secretariat of State, if Secretary of State Pacelli did not know the individual personally, he asked his undersecretary to forward it to the appropriate nuncio, to handle as he saw fit. This in and of itself is a revelation about how the Vatican bureaucracy and communications between Catholic countries and the Vatican worked at this juncture.

In the interest of allowing for time for questions, I will conclude. I fear I have thoroughly depressed this audience; as a Catholic, I certainly depress myself when I see, document after document, diplomacy and self-interest and even anti-Semitism chosen over the basic value of charity and love of neighbor. A tiny handful of Catholics—unfortunately neither Pope Pius XI nor Pope Pius XII among them—did see the light. With regard to Nazi and Axis crimes against Jews, Cardinal Hinsley is one of them. “Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race,” Cardinal Hinsley told his audience at the World Jewish Congress. His words were not weak and his heart was not cold. Thank you.


[1] Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 8, Verse 11: “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1450.

 

[2] Book of Revelation, Chapter 2, Verse 9: “I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Kenneth Barker, General Editor. The NIV [New International Version] Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 1927.

 

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Crosses and Swastikas

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Crosses and Swastikas

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

The following article was written to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power. It was published in Der Tagesspiegel on February 2, 2013. The original can be viewed at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/kreuze-und-hakenkreuze/7722926.html. Translation from German by John S. Conway.

Nazi flags on the altars, Nazi songs in the pews, Nazi greetings at the church doors—this was the scene in “German Christian” churches in 1933. Eighty years later, the Church is still shying away from facing up to this fateful and heretical perversion.

Many churchmen were only too glad to see a “national Saviour” rise to power. They encouraged and applauded this belief, wherever it might lead. This was not just a handful of misguided bigots, but churchmen of all shades, men of faith and pillars of the Church.

One of them was Pastor Bruno Marquardt, pastor in the Friedenau parish of Berlin. For him, 1933 was the “year of greatness” when Adolf Hitler came to power and changed the country into a dictatorship. For him, it was a year when Germany regained its lost heroic qualities. Instead of being discriminated against as a downtrodden nation, Germany was once again able to hold its head high. “The proud heroism of these men—from the Führer to the least SA-man—who have campaigned for the soul of the people during the years of degradation and shame, who have committed every ounce of their life and blood for a new Germany, this proud heroism has finally won in the ‘victory for faith.’” Despite all the malignancy and devilry of the years before 1933, so the Pastor thought, “this new national revival has shown that the German soul has not been broken, but is now embarking on a new intensification of faith.”

Many other pastors thought the same during the exciting events during this “turning point of history.” And so naturally did a great many of their parishioners. In Berlin, the nation’s capital, the Protestant churches were overwhelmed by a newly established movement, calling itself “The Faith Movement of German Christians.” For instance, four days after Hitler came to power, a special service of celebration and thanksgiving was held in the packed church of St Mary, one of Berlin’s most historic sanctuaries in the city centre. Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder of Christ Church, Kreuzberg, the leader of these “German Christians,” preached on 1 Corinthians 15: 57: “Thanks be to God, who has given us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He praised President Hindenburg for choosing the best possible person to lead the country and its new government. Hossenfelder even went so far as to characterize the new Chancellor, who was by birth a Roman Catholic, as “one of a kind, forged from purity, piety, energy and strength of character—our Adolf Hitler.”

Only a few days later, on 5 February, the “German Christians” were given permission to hold a funeral service in the Berlin Cathedral. This was to say farewell to a murdered SA-leader Hans-Eberhard Maikowski, one of the notorious gang of SA rowdies in the Berlin back streets. Together with a policeman, he had been shot during a SA demonstration on 30 January in Charlottenburg. For this funeral requiem not only did Adolf Hitler himself appear, but also Marshal Hermann Goering, numerous SA and SS leaders, as well as the Crown Prince of the exiled Hohenzollern family, and many German Christian pastors in full ceremonial vestments. Once again Pastor Hossenfelder preached. He spoke of the “great grey army” in the beyond who were, ”maintaining a watchful guard in heaven.” Standing by the coffin placed in front of the altar, he proclaimed: “You were one of the best. Your coffin is draped with the swastika flag, and in the first row sits our supreme leader, Adolf Hitler. So to say goodbye, we sing the beloved old military song: ‘When the seed is so fine, then the harvest will be abundant and golden.’”

In the course of the year 1933, hardly any of Berlin’s Protestant churches remained free from such Memorial, Thanksgiving or Jubilee celebrations. There were indeed plenty of opportunities. In March, Remembrance Services were held for the fallen, in April the Führer’s birthday was celebrated, on 2 July, special Thanksgiving services were organized for the “National Revival,” in October Harvest Festivals were turned into celebrations of “Blood and Earth,” and in November the same themes were noted to mark Martin Luther’s 450th birthday. The spill-over from such ceremonies was all too frequently reflected in the Sunday worship services.

In the short week between the Nazi-organized boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April and the passage of the new law banning Jews from the civil service on 7 April, the “German Christians” held their first national assembly in the Prussian House of Lords. Pastor Siegfried Nobiling of Friedenau gave the key-note address on the topic of “Church Leadership,” and pleaded for the creation of a new generation of theologians who would be fully committed to the values of “family, clan, race and nation.” Anyone who did not recognize these categories as God’s holy creation should not be admitted to the ordained clergy ranks. No “Jew or part-Jew” should be allowed to hold the honorable office of pastor or leader in the congregation. Pastor Karl Themel of the Luisenstadt Parish called for the “annihilation of the atheist movement.” All Christians should welcome the clean-up measures taken by the state. And he saw the “German Christian” parishes as “healthy cells in the sick body of the German people.”

These sentiments were to be long-lasting. Even though the “German Christian Movement” fell apart into separate rival factions after 1936-7 and disappeared almost without trace after 1945, yet the Berlin Churches in the post-war world, despite all the damage they had suffered, and the years they had been caught up in a Cold War situation, still now decades later have shown little willingness to come to terms with this Nazi legacy.

It was only very late, namely in the era when Wolfgang Huber was Bishop, that the process of re-examining the past begin. But even now, in most recent times, one frequently meets the sentiment in church circles: “Enough is enough!” So, for example, the now richly established Theological Faculty at the Humboldt University in the twenty years since the overthrow of the Communist regime has done almost nothing to deal with the record of the Berlin churches’ Nazi past, or with its own appalling theologies of that era. It is also notable that the Berlin Protestant Academy, one of the notable public affairs institutions, does not include any such topic as the performance of Berlin churches during the Nazi period in its 2013 programme. One would think that 80 years after 1933 would be a highly suitable time to take stock, and particularly to ask: how could the Christian churches have been so blind, or allowed such blatant Nazi propaganda to be proclaimed from their pulpits?

In 1933 the churches were often fuller than ever before. The services often became spectacular ceremonies. For example, on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April, one local Nazi Party group and two SA formations marched to the Stephen Church in the Wedding district. Pastor Walter Aner preached on 1 John 5:4: “His is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” At the end of the service, many of the congregation were deeply stirred when prayers of remembrance were made for those who “following in the ranks of the Führer had died for the rebirth of our nation and people,” while in the background the organ quietly played Nazi “hymns.” In this parish no fewer than 17 of the Church Elders, all four pastors, and most of the church officials, the parish nurses and care-givers, all joined the “German Christian Movement.”

The question has to be asked: was this astonishing perversion shared by all Protestants in 1933? The answer is: not all, but very many. On 23 July, new elections were decreed for the representative church bodies which had been dissolved by command of the fanatical Nazi Commissar August Jäger. Only two lists of candidates were put up, one for the “German Christians” and one for the “Gospel and Church” party. This latter group was made up of the various rather weak and dubious opposition elements. In Berlin it was particularly notable that a large number of parishes (43%) adopted a unity list, whereby the “German Christians” were assured of between 75 and 100% of the available places. The result was that about half of the parishes were taken by storm by the “German Christians” without any struggle at all. In those 75 parishes where elections were held, the “German Christians” achieved on average two thirds of the votes. This electoral triumph was due to the fact that many of the pastors and church members clearly supported such a result, and because the opposing forces were appallingly weak.

At the beginning of September, as a result of these elections, a new Synod for the Prussian Church was convened, usually called the “brown synod” because of the dominance of Nazi Party members. Because of their two-thirds majority, the “German Christians” enacted their desired plan to exclude “non-Aryan Christians” from holding clerical offices.

It was only at this point that the church opposition which had been so lacking in foresight became alarmed. A few days later a core group led by Pastor Martin Niemöller, Gerhard Jacobi and Martin Albertz founded the Pastors Emergency League to mobilize support for those pastors who wanted to unite in opposition against the perverted plans of the “German Christians.”

A few months later, the “German Christians” planned to hold a giant rally in the Berlin Sports Palace. It was to include a mass march which would be both a demonstration of their strength and a victory parade. On the evening of 13 November, the Sports Palace was filled to the roof with over 20,000 participants. A large number of prominent “German Christian” pastors from all over Berlin took their places on the platform. The main speaker was Reinhold Krause, who called on the Church to undertake the “completion of the German Reformation in the Third Reich.” In this new “German Church” the same rules for life should apply as in the new state, namely “heroic piety” and “nationally-appropriate Christianity.” Most important of all was to get rid of all un-German aspects in the worship services, such as the use of the Old Testament with its “Jewish morality.” So too St Paul’s deplorable theology of scapegoats and inferiority complexes must be removed. What was needed was to preach a manly picture of Jesus which would be in line with the concepts of National Socialism. When he had finished the speaker received numerous rounds of applause from the thrilled audience. But at the same time this speech aroused considerable irritation among some of the “German Christians,” and even some resignations, which could only be of help to swell the ranks of the still incipient church opposition.

By the end of 1933 the “German Christians” had conquered a significant portion of the Berlin churches, but not all. Indeed there soon developed a fierce competition between the opposing factions which led to Berlin’s churches being caught in a deadly fight for supremacy. This “Church Struggle” was to continue to dominate the church scene for years. At first the Berlin “German Christian” pastors were in the majority, since more than 40% of the parish pastors belonged in this group (at least temporarily). A good 20% of all Berlin pastors joined the Nazi Party. It would have been more except that the Party refused to take any more applications from clergy in order to prevent denominational divisions within its ranks.

In those parishes where the “German Christians” held sway, new forms of liturgies soon appeared. First, the service began with a parade of Nazi flags entering the church, followed by the dedication of these flags on the altar, and the singing of the Nazis’ anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. In their sermons, these “German Christian” pastors painted a picture of the “heroic figure of Jesus” as a model for today’s Christians. Anything Jewish or seemingly Jewish had to be eliminated from the church or the worship services. Hence the words “Zion” or “Hosanna” were to be cut out and not again heard in German churches. Parish educational activities were expressly encouraged to organize indoctrination sessions at which these new ideas for a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity could be propagated. Such special topics as “Luther and the Jews,” “The Struggle for the German Soul” or “Christianity and the Nordic Faith” were widely promoted. So too portraits of Hitler or other Nazi symbols were given prominent places in the church rooms, and the Hitler greeting was appended to all correspondence without fail.

If one looks at the total record of the Protestant Church in Berlin, or indeed for the whole of Germany, during the Nazi era, one has to paint a very dark picture. Of course there were a few bright spots. The Berlin parish of Dahlem where Martin Niemöller officiated was one of them; or one could mention the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was unable to find any parish in Berlin to serve; or there was the formidable Superintendent in Spandau, Martin Albertz, whose remarkably consistent Christian witness needs to be remembered; or the still largely unrecognized historian Elisabeth Schmitz who wrote a very courageous memorandum against the persecution of the Jews in 1935-6; and surely there were many other individuals of like mind.

The Nazi era left a legacy which will not go away, and which the Church today still has to reckon with. Even now, 80 years later, much remains to be done on this historical building project.

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Franz Stock and the “Barbed-Wire Seminary” at Le Coudray, France

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Franz Stock and the “Barbed-Wire Seminary” at Le Coudray, France*

By Lauren N. Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

“Abbé Franz Stock – that is no name, it is a program!”[1]

Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Franz Stock died alone in a Parisian hospital in February 1948, not yet forty-four years old. Born in Neheim (now part of the city of Arnsberg) in Rhineland-Westphalia in 1904, he had spent most of his adult life in France, working as a priest, a prison chaplain and, beginning in 1945, the director of a “barbed-wire seminary” in a French POW camp for German soldiers wanting to become priests. He was an ardent Catholic and a devout Francophile. His story, in particular his contributions to Franco-German rapprochement after 1945, remains relatively separate from mainstream historiography, with only one recently-published account in English.[2] Those who know of him on both sides of the Franco-German border insist that no complete account of postwar rapprochement, and the laying of the groundwork for the European Union itself, can be proffered without acknowledging Stock’s vital role. Who exactly was this priest, then?

 Boniface Hanley’s 2010 biography is more hagiographic than academic, but it contains a helpful account of Stock’s family life and spiritual influences, and Stock’s significance as a German in France during the Nazi occupation and the first few years of the post-occupation period. Hanley conducted interviews with individuals who had known Stock personally, or did extensive research on him; his book is the culmination of several decades of work. Stock was the oldest of nine children born to a working-class couple, and he knew by the time he was twelve years old that he wanted to become a priest. He attended the seminary at Paderborn and joined the Quickborn (Catholic youth) movement, with which he was first able to visit France during the summer of 1926, for an international peace conference held at Bierville. He was deeply influenced by the example of Marc Sangnier, a militant French Catholic pacifist who was in favor of progressive reform for the Church, who had organized the conference. As a result of this love affair with France, Stock applied to spend three semesters at the Institut Catholique in Paris; he was the first German to be admitted since the Middle Ages. It was during this impressionable stage of his life, Hanley writes, that Stock became determined to dedicate his life Franco-German reconciliation, a devotion all the more extraordinary for the reality Stock faced when he gave himself over to it: this was arguably the most intensely hostile period of the two countries in their centuries-long history of rivalry, enmity, and bloodshed.

Stock was ordained a priest in 1932, and two years later was appointed to run the Boniface Mission, Paris’ German Catholic center, in the Latin Quarter of the French capital. However, it is between the 1940 fall of France to Nazi Germany and the final months of 1947 that Stock’s life would find its fullest meaning. His arrival back in Germany upon the outbreak of the Second World War was only temporary; he applied for and received permission to return to Paris in June 1940. Eventually he procured from the German ambassador to Vichy France a pass allowing him to visit imprisoned Frenchmen and women, to give them pastoral care. Subsequently he was given the title of auxiliary Wehrmacht chaplain, with the honorary rank of Major, and assigned to tend the souls in the prisons of Fresnes, La Santé and Cherche-Midi, all of the Wehrmacht prisons in the greater Paris area (used to hold German soldiers charged with breaches of discipline), and La Pitié Hospital. He also retained his position as director of the Boniface Mission. With the exception of two relatively brief periods when he had junior chaplains assisting him, Stock was the sole provider of pastoral care for three of France’s largest prisons, a hospital, a myriad of smaller prisons, and his own church. As part of his pastoral duties, he accompanied hundreds of prisoners, mostly members of the French Résistance, to their execution site at the infamous Mont Valérien between 1940 and 1944.[3] During the occupation of France, he also served as a clandestine intermediary between the prisoners and their families, and often was the only link through which they could communicate with each other.

The religious figures involved in getting the “barbed wire seminary” off the ground. From left to right: Georges Le Meur; Wilhelm Delbeck, Stock’s main assistant at the seminary; Jean Rodhain (?); Angelo Roncalli, Vatican nuncio to France; Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

The religious figures involved in getting the “barbed wire seminary” off the ground. From left to right: Georges Le Meur; Wilhelm Delbeck, Stock’s main assistant at the seminary; Jean Rodhain (?); Angelo Roncalli, Vatican nuncio to France; Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

This remarkable individual, and his equally remarkable life, are remembered less for the inestimable services he performed as a chaplain during the Occupation, and more for the responsibility he took on at the end of the war, when he was already physically and emotionally fatigued. In the winter of 1944/45, after France had been liberated from Axis control, Abbé Jean Rodhain, French chaplain-general in charge of all German and Axis POWs, took note of the presence of young prisoners in various POW camps across the country who had been studying in seminaries before being conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Together with his assistant Georges Le Meur, another priest who had been active in the Résistance, Rodhain received permission from the military authorities to organize a temporary seminary in one camp and began to search for volunteer attendees from among the POW population. They did so in the interests of revitalizing the Catholic Church in Germany, in the hopes that the Church would play a role in the reconstruction – and re-Christianization – of Germany after the fall of Nazism. Rodhain and Le Meur did not hesitate to choose a German priest to head the seminary. It was Le Meur who nominated Stock for the position. Stock was himself a POW at a camp near Cherbourg; despite his physical illness, he readily assented to his new position.

Plan of Block 1, the “barbed wire seminary” at Le Coudray. The main barrack, housing the dormitory, refectory, and chapel, is at the bottom. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Plan of Block 1, the “barbed wire seminary” at Le Coudray. The main barrack, housing the dormitory, refectory, and chapel, is at the bottom. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

What began as an experiment with a few seminarians near the POW camp at Orléans became by Christmas 1945 an impressive, smoothly-running operation at Le Coudray, on the outskirts of Chartres, with more than 380 enrolled seminarians. The seminary was moved after encountering increasingly severe problems with the other German POWs at Orléans. The camp’s military commander and supporter of the seminary project, Laurent Gourut, was transferred to Le Coudray and arranged for the seminary to go with him. In addition to the seminarians, the project also involved forty lay brothers (also culled from the German POW population in France) who served as cooks and cleaners, Chartres’ bishop, Monsignor Thomas Harscouet, who knew of and approved of what was going on, and the Vatican’s nuncio in France, Angelo Roncalli, who gave his blessing to the camp in person. In 1946, Stock added several volunteer faculty members from the University of Freiburg, who came of their own free will – and became POWs as a result – to teach courses on moral theology, pastoral theology, canon law, scripture, and others. In the two years that the “barbed wire seminary” (French: séminaire de barbelés; German: Stacheldrahtseminar) existed, more than 1,000 Germans benefitted from its courses, and more than 600 of these went on to be ordained priests.[4]

The refectory of the “barbed wire seminary.” Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

The refectory of the “barbed wire seminary.” Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

What is even more astonishing was the secrecy that remained relatively intact around the entire affair: few ministers in the de Gaulle provisional government knew of the seminary (excepting Michelet and Boisseau, director-general of prisoners of war in France) because Rodhain and Le Meur feared the reaction of the communists if they learned of what was going on. The majority of the French ecclesiastical hierarchy who knew of the seminary did not approve, but kept silent about its existence. And finally, the inhabitants of Chartres did not know much, either of the seminary or of the camp itself. Consumed with the business of surviving in the post-war chaos, few interested themselves in the detested German POWs languishing indefinitely behind barbed wire on the outskirts of their city.

Taking in the air outside the barracks. Franz Stock is the priest seated in the middle of the picture. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Taking in the air outside the barracks. Franz Stock is the priest seated in the middle of the picture. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

The camp’s remaining seminarian internees were liberated on 1 May 1947, shortly after they had completed their final examinations. Le Coudray was shut down in December of that year. During the summer, Stock returned to Paris, a paroled POW whose could not even obtain an identity card that would have allowed him to leave Paris for short periods of time. He began to reorganize the Boniface Mission in the Latin Quarter and helped whoever came to his door, which included both French and German priests but mostly former German POWs (now called “free workers”) unable or unwilling to make the journey back to a devastated Germany.[5] On 22 February 1948, he collapsed and was hospitalized, diagnosed with pulmonary edema. He died two days later. Because of his POW status, he was not permitted a public funeral, nor was his family allowed to make the journey from Neheim to attend. Still, some one hundred people appeared for the private service that his friends had organized. Those who attended included Abbé Rodhain, Angelo Roncalli as nuncio, the auxiliary bishop of Paris, and government ministers Michelet and Francisque Gay. He was buried in a simple grave marked only with an unpainted wooden cross in Paris’s large Thiais cemetery.[6]

One side of the original gate to the camp, Depot #501, Le Coudray, France. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

One side of the original gate to the camp, Depot #501, Le Coudray, France. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Today the camp at Le Coudray still stands, but is much diminished. Originally occupying thirty-two hectares and known as POW Depot #501, today the camp is just under eight hectares (the size of the original camp, first opened in 1912). The Franz Stock Committee, in its French and German manifestations, Les Amis de Franz Stock and Franz-Stock-Komitee, is dedicated to preserving the site, renamed the Franz Stock European Meeting Center (Centre Européen de Rencontre Franz Stock; Europäische Begegnungsstätte Frankz Stock). It is composed of a single preserved barrack, which housed the main building of the seminary and its chapel, and the land immediately around it. The rest of the site and the half-dozen or so remaining barracks are owned by various local collectivities. The military has not been associated with the site since 2001.

Much of the association’s successes have come only in the last two decades. In March 1998, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany visited Chartres and the former POW camp to honor Stock on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It was only in June 2005 that the association succeeded in securing the buildings as historical monuments. In February 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy marked the sixtieth anniversary of Stock’s death with a ceremony at Mont Valérien, where he had accompanied so many Résistance prisoners to be executed; the plaza in front of the memorial set up there had been renamed after Stock in 1990. In November 2009, the process of beatification was opened for Stock in his birthplace in Neheim, and is currently ongoing.[7]

Stock’s Pietà, post-war. Note the barracks of the camp and, behind that, the town of Chartres on the left, and two cathedral spires (presumably Chartres Cathedral) behind trees on the right. The grieving Mary is flanked by the POW seminarians, and Stock has inserted himself where the Apostle John is often depicted. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

The interior of the seminary chapel today, complete with Stock’s original (restored) murals. Saint Michael slaying the dragon on the left, Saint Boniface on the right. Both are patron saints of Germany. Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

Most of the exhibitions about Franz Stock and the seminary are set up in the barrack that once served as the refectory, sleeping hall, and chapel. Since it is unheated, one gets a sense if one visits in late January of how brutally cold the seminarians’ lives must have been in the winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47, and also of how intimate, since dozens of men would have been crowded against each other. The chapel has received the most concerted restoration efforts thus far; Stock’s murals on the wall behind the altar have been repainted recently, and some of the original Stations of the Cross, also painted by Stock, have been returned. It is still used for masses on special occasions, and the site receives a healthy does of visitors annually, mostly schoolchildren of various ages from France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, but also Catholics who have heard of Stock.

Stock’s own paintings of The Stations of the Cross graced the seminary chapel. Station 12, the death of Christ on the cross. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

Stock’s own paintings of The Stations of the Cross graced the seminary chapel. Station 12, the death of Christ on the cross. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission.

It is difficult to argue convincingly that Stock had a direct impact on postwar Franco-German rapprochement; there is no evidence that draws a straight line from him to de Gaulle and Adenauer in 1963, and during his lifetime there was no interest in French political circles to extend to Germans the hand of friendship. But this misses the true impact of Stock’s life and work. He was a quiet, behind-the-scenes worker, proving by his own example rather than through force of words that French and Germans could co-exist peacefully, even amicably. This devotion produced a trickle-down effect, demonstrating to the French families who suffered the execution of loved ones during the occupation that not all Germans were evil, and to the German POWs in French camps after the war, many of whom went on to become priests in post-war Germany, that not all Frenchmen were focused on revenge against Germany. It is more than seventy years now since France and Germany were at war with each other. Stock may have been out of step with his time, as a German who loved the French and wished to live among them, but this failed to daunt him. It is time that his life and his influence were introduced to a wider audience.

 

Stock’s shrine and grave at St. Jean-Baptiste Rechèvres Church, in Chartres. The inscription on the headstone reads: To Franz Stock Priest of the diocese of Paderborn 1904-1948 Chaplain of the prisons of Fresnes La Santé and Cherche-Midi 1940-1944 The families of the French prisoners and executed are appreciative The inscription on the ground reads on the left: Rector of the German parish of Paris 1934-1944; on the right: Superior of the barbed-wire seminary of Chartres 1945-1947 Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

Stock’s shrine and grave at St. Jean-Baptiste Rechèvres Church, in Chartres. The inscription on the headstone reads:
To Franz Stock
Priest of the diocese of Paderborn
1904-1948
Chaplain of the prisons of Fresnes
La Santé and Cherche-Midi
1940-1944
The families of the French prisoners and executed are appreciative
The inscription on the ground reads on the left: Rector of the German parish of Paris 1934-1944; on the right: Superior of the barbed-wire seminary of Chartres 1945-1947
Source: Lauren N. Faulkner; used with permission.

* The author would like to thank Monsieur Hubert Briand, of Les Amis de Franz Stock, for his time and patience in introducing the camp and answering all manner of questions about Franz Stock, German POW seminarians, and Chartres, and for his permission to use several camp photos.

[1] Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, at a private funeral service after Stock’s death, 28 February 1948. At the time he was nuncio to France.

[2] This report is based on Boniface Hanley, The Last Human Face: Franz Stock: A Priest in Hitler’s Army (self-published, 2010), and on the author’s visit to Chartres in January 2013. This was a preliminary research trip to gather information for a future book-length project on the barbed-wire seminary at Le Coudray and the French treatment of German POWs between 1945 and 1948.

[3] Mont Valérien is a small rise in Suresnes, a western suburb of Paris. Before the Nazi occupation of France, it had part of the city’s fortifications. The Nazis used it almost exclusively as an execution site. More than 1,000 Frenchmen were executed there between 1940 and 1944 (French law, which the occupiers observed in this instance, prohibited the execution of women by firing squad, so there were no women victims). Stock’s wartime diary, which he used to record his daily ministrations for the condemned prisoners, and which Hanley indicates he kept quite faithfully, mentions 863 of these victims, the majority by name.

[4] The author is still researching information about what kinds of courses were offered, by whom they were taught, how long they were, and of what the examinations consisted. All information at the time of writing indicates that the exams were recognized in Germany, and presumably the Vatican, because the seminarians did not have to repeat these courses after their release.

[5] It is not clear how long after the war the Boniface Mission in Paris remained open for Germans, or how it was funded. Today there is a small plaque on the wall of the building at 21-23 Rue Lhomond identifying it as the former home of Franz Stock. It appears now to be a private residence.

[6] After a concerted effort led by former barbed-wire seminarians, Stock’s remains were exhumed and transferred in June 1963 to a small shrine built for the purpose in the new St Jean-Baptiste church, just outside the city of Chartres, in Rechèvres. Six months earlier, Charles de Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer of West Germany had signed the Treaty of Élysée, more commonly known as the Friendship Treaty. It formally ended centuries of hostility between the two countries. Stock’s tomb at Rechèvres draws many visitors, but his empty grave at Thiais is still honored with a plaque, and often with flowers.

[7] Neheim is also home to the Franz Stock Museum in the Fresekenhof, a former aristocratic dwelling dating to the fourteenth century, which contains a permanent exhibition dedicated to Stock’s life and works. Documentation about Franz Stock is also housed at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and a more limited amount in Germany, at the National Military Archives in Freiburg im Breisgau and the Catholic Military Bishop’s Office in Berlin. The author has yet to see Stock’s diary, which she believes is in Neheim.

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Catholicism, Dictatorship and the World at War: The Significance of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935-1943

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Catholicism, Dictatorship and the World at War: The Significance of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935-1943

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

This month brings the seventieth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster. Hinsley’s time at the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England coincided with the appeasement of continental dictators, the final tumbling of all of Europe into war, the crisis of those critical months of 1940 when France fell and Britain faced catastrophe, the relentless expansion of the conflict across the face the world and then the turning of the tide against the Axis powers and the growing confidence of victory. It was the intensity with which Hinsley identified with the colossal dramas of his times that made him a national – and international – figure.

To any scholar of the relationship of religion and politics Hinsley presents an obvious interest. Yet this man who became archbishop of Westminster for eight tumultuous years has not attracted as much attention as he might have. Within a year of his death there was something like an ‘official’ biography by John Heenan, one of his students in Rome who would one day follow his master to that high office. This is very much a work of a particular kind and its judgments show the author to be working within the various confinements of his day and interest. There is a good drenching of piety, an emphasis on laudable qualities, and some firm avoidances. But Heenan knew the force of what his subject had established. In beginning with the weighty funeral which Church and State accorded to Hinsley in March 1943, he shows a Roman Catholic Church that had truly arrived as a dimension of national life. For this was a great occasion and a vast congregation. The Government, he exults, was not merely represented. It actually came, altogether. Even so, the wait for a second biography would be a long one. James Hagerty’s admirable 2008 study, Cardinal Hinsley: Priest and Patriot, provided a more dispassionate analysis, and often a more extensive one.

Hinsley has attracted only sporadic attention from scholars. Adrian Hastings paid a warm tribute in his lively History of English Christianity, 1920-1985 (London, 1986) while Thomas Moloney placed Hinsley firmly in the framework of solid diplomacy, in Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley 1935-1943 (in 1985). Moloney’s often elegant book leaves the historian of international politics much in his debt, for he clearly did a good deal of honest toil in the archives and, in so doing, widened and developed our picture. There is now a valuable overview by Michael Gaine in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. To extend the range of this will not be quite straightforward because, as Heenan found in 1944, there is not very much to go on. Hinsley was not a man who thought of filing papers and meeting the requirements of future historians. He did not bother to preserve his correspondence once a matter was settled. Heenan suspected that he would not even have expected a biography. He was private, modest and utterly given to the present moment. But he was observed sympathetically by a few who were prepared to commit something of the man to paper. The Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, recorded a significant tribute in the pages of Blackfriars in May 1943. This friendship of a Cardinal and an Anglican bishop is suggestive. Later that great insider, David Mathew, wrote wisely and sensitively of Hinsley in the later editions of his striking study, Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: its Culture and Tradition (third edition, 1955).

The verdict that the great weight of Hinsley’s long life came to rest in those late, crucial years, between 1935 and 1943, is irresistible, although in his biography of 2008 James Hagerty does well to retrieve the earlier years and readjust at least some of our perspectives. In fact, this was really rather an odd career, much of it committed to one modest institution, the Venerabile in Rome and then to a long, roving brief as Apostolic Delegate in Africa. There was not a great deal in all this to make any historian of great affairs sit up sharply and take note. But, crucially, Hinsley was enough of an insider in Rome to be in the way of something splendid if it happened to occur. In 1935, when he was 69 years old, it certainly did.

The leadership of the English Roman Catholic community had for over thirty years rested in the hands of capable Cardinal Bourne. But the impression left by those decades is something dour, brittle, dry and introverted. This was a Catholic community still not quite at home in national society; one often defined by a deeply regional character, a particular sociology (Irish, working class, aristocratic and rather little in between), a rather petulant striving for legitimation and a bristling grievance that the Establishment still refused to acknowledge its existence at State occasions. Nor was it was not a community always at peace with itself. The English bishops were notoriously querulous – and Rome knew about it. In 1935 many English Catholics may have been baffled by the appointment as Archbishop of Westminster of a man so little known in his home country. But Pius XI knew his man and would have no other. When Hinsley himself had recovered from the shock he quite simply took on a new lease of life. This sudden emergence from the background at such a doom-laden hour had something of the Churchillian epic about it.  Hinsley must have wondered if the whole of his life had been merely a preparation for this moment.

Hinsley looked like a safe pair of hands. He was devoted to the Papacy. He had done nothing disconcerting. He was amiable and had friends in high places. Moreover, he was theologically a conservative who had no time for Modernism. None of this indicated any bracing, liberalising attitudes or obvious liabilities. Yet there were quiet hints of something bolder. His sympathies were too deeply rooted in the conditions of the poor to accept too readily the blandishments of the Right. When a politician had visited the Venerabile and amiably told the ordinands that on their return to England it would be their duty to vote Conservative Hinsley brusquely ended the occasion. The Church was not his whole world: he was perfectly capable at ecclesiastical affairs but they did not excite him. He was stirred by the spectacle of oppression and he hated to see righteousness persecuted. Wherever the Church was threatened his ears pricked up and he was all attention and involvement. Yet we still know too little of what he made of Italian Fascism when he lived in Rome itself. Mathew thought he did not really understand Italians altogether. Heenan simply observed that when the Mussolini regime sought to redesign the centre of Rome and gobble up at least part of the Venerabile Hinsley did his best to thwart the plan. He would, not doubt, have done the same if a comparable civic engineering project had been dreamed up by any other power.

The personal traits of an archbishop are bound to be eulogized, but Hinsley’s characteristics were suggestive. Mathew thought that he simply lacked pride or vanity. He lived as simply as he could; he needed, and relished, the company of all sorts and conditions of people; as a friend he was found to be kindly, loyal, paternal. He listened well. It seems that Hinsley was quite at home with Chapel as well as Church people. Mathew thought Hinsley ‘never thought in denominational terms’. He did not much care for great churches – and Westminster Cathedral is something strenuous in these terms – but grumbled about mere ‘bricks and mortar’ and sought active apostolic work. Instead he was happiest in settings that were modest or quietly domestic. He sought never to waste time; some found him always in a hurry to use well what was left to him. He worked like a Trojan and prayed constantly. When George Bell stayed with him in his home in Hare Street he found ‘the next morning I felt a richer man, richer spiritually as well as richer in wisdom’. He could be stern but was more often found to be compassionate. He was uninterested in splendour and pageantry. When he left a note for his executors it was found to request no pomp at his funeral but only a low Mass, ‘no profusion of candles’, ‘the least expense possible’, a burial ‘wherever most convenient’. None of this, of course, he got.

Hinsley was devoted to the Papacy and this must have been at least one reason why Pius XI put him in Westminster. But he was not over-fascinated by church affairs and the perspectives that he brought to the job were generous ones. Hinsley disavowed purely clerical company and his view of the Roman Catholic Church was by conviction a laicizing one. He looked for things of substance, in whatever form they arose, not the mere presentation of clerical appearances. Hastings observed, ‘No archiepiscopate was effectively less ultramontane or clericalist.’ Hinsley was ardent in his support for Catholic Action. The Tablet had long ago been incarcerated by a defensive clerical caste; now he promptly turned it over to the laity and watched it prosper under Douglas Woodruff. He enjoyed G.K. Chesterton, looked up to Christopher Dawson and Arnold Toynbee and fostered the work of the young Barbara Ward. He would have liked Ronald Knox to be a bishop.

Above all, Hinsley brought something of the world to Westminster – but the world was just about to shout its demands at the politicians in Parliament and the diplomats in Whitehall anyway. He lost no time in pinning his colours to the shaky mast of the League of Nations but this brought no strong reassurance. His arrival had coincided with the hour of its most severe test. When Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in October 1935 Hinsley faced a fundamental challenge. What should he now say? If British opinion was indignant should he join the chorus and show the loyalty of the Church? If he stood firmly by the Pope he must know that the neutrality of the Vatican was incomprehensible to the critics of dictators and aggressors. The Archbishop of Canterbury was powerful against the invasion; a senior Anglican bishop like Henson of Durham was positively incandescent. To make matters worse for Hinsley he was caught up in a clumsy, botched attempt at intervention in Britain by the Vatican itself. For his part he had no illusions about Abyssinia, whatever his calculations. This was an act of aggression and, as Hagerty shows, he was ready to say so publicly. There was a letter to the Times. And then there was a sermon in Golders Green.

‘Indignation’, Hinsley declared at Golders Green, ‘knows no bounds when we see that Africa, that ill-used continent of practically unarmed people, is made the focus and playground of scientific slaughter.’ But what could the Pope actually do?

He is a helpless old man with a small police force to guard himself, to guard the priceless art and archaeological treasures of the Vatican, and to protect his diminutive state which ensures his due independence in the exercise of his universal right and duty to teach and guide his followers of all races. Can he denounce or coerce a neighbouring power – a power armed with absolute control of everything and with every modern instrument of force? He could excommunicate and place under interdict! Yes! And thus make war with his neighbour inevitable, besides upsetting the peace and consciences of the great mass of Italians with the result of a fierce anti-clerical outbreak. Spiritual penalties are for the correction of those who are knowingly guilty. And spiritual penalties for a world daily more godless are of little avail.

The Pope was not an arbitrator. He was explicitly excluded from any such role by the secret London pact of 1915. Only if both sides of a dispute invited him to judge them could he do so.

Parts of the British press made much of this characterisation of the Pope. Pius XI himself was not flattered. But what really caused the ecclesiastics in Rome to fidget nervously was Hinsley’s condemnation of the ideology which launched this invasion. Fascism, he had pronounced, deified Caesar, showed tyranny, made ‘the individual a pawn on the chessboard of absolutism’. This also alienated a significant number of English Catholics, bishops among them, who openly favoured the Duce. There was talk of bringing the Archbishop of Westminster to heel – and Hinsley did indeed fall silent, for a time. When he turned to Heenan for advice in writing speeches he was seen to be shaken by the controversy. But in retrospect the sermon at Golders Green sounds like the stray, opening shot in a far longer war.

Abyssinia was a cause of much heart-searching amongst British Catholics and Protestants alike. The Spanish Civil War presented dilemmas no less painful. Heenan the careful biographer buried this quietly; Moloney and Hagerty offer sustained reflections. Hinsley, they find, had to find a credible place between that position held by many English Catholics, who trembled at the growth of communism and cheered for Franco, and a vigorous left-leaning public opinion which deplored fascism and the forces of reaction. Above all, he was horrified by the onslaught against the Church in Spain and knew a good deal about it. He let it be known that he thought the Nationalist cause a crusade. But beyond this he was decidedly circumspect, maintaining a purposeful neutrality, refusing to indulge those who lauded Franco or accept the criticisms of those who deplored the Right and raged at any evidence of complicity. Meanwhile, he turned his attentions to the plight of refugee children. When Franco was victorious Hinsley received a signed photograph, a gift arranged by an English admirer. ‘I look upon you as the great defender of true Spain, the country of Catholic principles where social justice and charity will be applied for the common good under a firm peace-loving government.’ For all this, Moloney insists that Hinsley was ‘no third order Falangist’. In 1942 he would take up the cause of persecuted Spanish protestants too. It was often heard that to condemn Communists involved a support for Fascists. Although he had favoured Franco, Hinsley was determined not to accept that anti-communism revealed any shade of Fascism. He viewed both as enemies. His task now was to show that Catholicism voiced the cause of liberty and the maintenance of the common good.

At home Hinsley the Archbishop appeared rudely caught between the campaigns of conflicting parties. Some parts of the Catholic press was likely to shout any embarrassment when it came to foreign affairs. Abroad, the troubled consistencies of Vatican policy had made life no easier for him. But when he looked at Germany Hinsley was far more the critic.  He was ready to follow the lead given by Mit brennender Sorge in March 1937. That September he published a protesting letter in the Times. Hinsley himself had been present when on Christmas Eve in 1937 Pope Pius XI said to a gathering of cardinals. ‘We know that there is in Germany a grievous persecution, and more, that there has rarely been a persecution more serious, so painful, and so disastrous in its widespread effects. This is a persecution in which neither the exercise of force, not the pressure of threats, not the subterfuges of cunning and artifice have been spared.’ By December 1938 he was taking to the platform at the Albert Hall to protest against the persecution of the Jews where he deplored that Nero was ‘a model of justice compared to the Führer of the German Reich’. He approved thoroughly of Chamberlain and applauded him as a peace-maker. But he did not want Hitler accommodated at the price of justice. In a private meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang (with whom he had much in common and in whom he found a growing friendship) he agreed that no colonies could be returned to a government which persecuted other races. But unlike Lang he could have nothing to do with the idea that to rein Hitler in a new diplomatic understanding with the Soviet Union might be deemed necessary. There were other public speeches, no less vigorous and confrontational. National opinion was thickening against appeasement and now the archbishop of Westminster was positively stirring the pot.

After the painful ambiguities and compromises of the age of appeasement, the coming of war brought some vital clarifications. Hinsley set to work with a will, making public speeches and BBC broadcasts which were unequivocal in their denunciations of the enemy and rich in their confidence in British justice. And Hinsley certainly was patriotic. He had grown up with patriotism; he must have taken on something of the patriotic yearning of the long-term ex-patriate;  he had admired British colonial administration in Africa; he viewed national institutions with great loyalty. Now a robust patriotism in high office in the circumstance of 1935-43 was a high virtue, indeed a basic necessity. Hinsley was realistic enough to know that it was patriotism which in no small measure stood between Hitler and Whitehall. ‘I’m glad we’re alone’, he remarked to Churchill after the fall of France. When Churchill asked ‘Why?’ Hinsley replied, ‘Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.’ There is more than a sense of rejoicing at the coming of superbly heroic moment in all this. But if Hinsley’s patriotism is firmly acknowledged there is at least a danger that it confines him to a national landscape and merely exposes him to suspicions of another kind; that he was a prelate too close to the governing powers (even if they happened, on that occasion, to be right and just). But Hinsley does present a bigger argument than this and he does belong to a wider picture.

Heenan observed that Hinsley was a convinced democrat who preferred to live among the poor. The age of the dictators stirred deeply his affinity with the heroic and the just cause. Mathew found that Hinsley positively thirsted after justice and was ‘a great hater of oppression’. There remains something visceral in this palpable hatred of tyranny, a restless determination to stand against it, an abiding compassion for its victims. When an English edition was prepared of the reports documenting the German occupation of Poland sent by Cardinal Hlond to Rome it was Hinsley who contributed the foreword. In his last years Mathew thought that the new book which affected him most deeply was Professor Binchy’s Church and State in Fascist Italy. Mathew recognized that ‘the quality that most appealed to the Cardinal was reckless and self-sacrificing moral goodness, and it was this that led to his always deepening affection for the Bishop of Chichester’. Bell was convinced that the churches must sink their differences over doctrines and questions of order and unite urgently against against the new foe of totalitarianism. Hinsley promptly agreed. For a while, at least, there was the ecumenical excitement of the ‘Sword of the Spirit’ movement and a glimmer of authentic ecumenical progress in wartime. When, at a meeting of the movement in May 1941, Bell whispered to Hinsley that perhaps Protestants and Catholics might say together the Lord’s Prayer, Hinsley was ready to lead it – a quiet revolution, no doubt, but an authentic one, even so. His bishops disagreed with most of this and yet they never squabbled with him. It was enough, after 1943, to pretend that it had never happened. Without Hinsley the Sword of the Spirit had nowhere to go and it was soon only the pious memory of a few stranded progressives.

Hinsley in wartime took his place in a national consensus against Nazism and Fascism. In no way did he see himself as an individualist or a prophet. He was equally adamant that his views found their place within the body of Catholic thought, as history and international life revealed it, not on the margin. In a broadcast of 10 December 1939 Hinsley justified his own conviction that Britain’s cause was just by asserting, ‘I have before my mind the lessons of history and also the great traditional body of doctrine which sets forth for the moral guidance of mankind principles which are above both national and racial interests. These principles are clearly stated in the great pastoral letters of the Popes from Leo XIII to the present pontiff ….’ It was Benedict XV who had issued the ‘peace note’ of 1917, affirming the ‘supremacy of right over might, and also for a real and agreed peace between combatants whether victors or vanquished.’

Bell found Hinsley eager for the regeneration of Europe. What had made Europe great in civilization? It was Christianity. And it was Christianity which had formed a reverence for the individual, a belief in the family and, out of this, the very nation which had created Europe. In March 1940 he found much of significance in the anniversary of St Gregory the Great, a Pope who inherited a civilization in chaos and ruins and yet claimed a vision of Christendom. Now in the Soviet Union ‘the individual and his conscience, and therefore God and His supreme rights, are to be “liquidated,”’ not even with a nod to any theory at all, whereas in Nazi Germany the same effect was sought in the name of Race, ‘of the physical blood which courses pure, according to the Myth, in the veins of Aryans alone, and, among Aryans, of Germans only.’ If a society rejected God this was the kind of thing that might be expected. ‘Rome only has been the source of full civilization, that is, the perfect harmonious relating of individual to Society, of State with Church, of time with eternity.’

This was what Moscow and Berlin sought to destroy, in Poland and in Finland. With such powers as these there could be no compromise. He viewed the ‘martyrdom’ of Poland with ‘deep indignation’: it was his duty to ‘protest aloud’ against such persecution of Catholic and Orthodox Christians as he had against such persecution in Germany itself. ‘Liberty must be our goal, liberty which is not now possible in Russia and in Germany. The thirty-seven million Catholics living under the Government of the Reich are constantly in my thoughts. They, and the members of the Evangelical Confessional Church, have been among the principal victims of the Nazi regime.’

Hinsley insisted that in all of this he stood by the Popes, not against them. First there was Mit brennender Sorge in 1937, then the encyclical Divini Redemptoris. Both of these were the work of Pius XI. To them Pius XII had added Summi Pontificatus and the Five Peace Points of Christmas 1939. When it was asserted that other Catholics spoken in contradiction of his views he simply denied it. He could turn to Mit brennender Sorge again. He could look at the letter issued by the German bishops at Fulda in August 1938. ‘I am’, he maintained, ‘in good company when I denounce the principles and methods of Nazism in its tramp through Europe.’ What Hinsley took from Summi Pontificatus was the defence of the ‘sacred rights’ of the family against ‘the aggression of the State and against the doctrines of immoral propaganda’. He was clear that it was the place of the Catholic Church to stand firmly against this fundamental enemy and he knew that he occupied a significant place within an international argument, one that concerned the credibility of the whole Church. When he heard that Nazi propaganda in Germany and in the Netherlands had complained that he had merely converted the words of two popes to the service of the cause of Britain he was more than ready to confute them.

Hinsley had been as much a denouncer of the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany. As James Hagerty acknowledges, the new alignment of powers after Barbarossa ‘seriously compromised’ him and he made no easy accommodation. Indeed, he would not conform to the new official line if he could possibly help it. He sought to distinguish between the Russian people and their state, insisting that all expressions of support were for the former and not the latter. On this he came to rely rather heavily. How he would have managed if he had lived to see the end of the war is difficult to judge. Heenan found that Hinsley ‘loved the Jewish race’. When he heard that he was scored by Nazi propaganda as a ‘friend of the Jewish people’ he was evidently proud of the title. He was ready to join the new Council of Christians and Jews with Archbishop Temple and the Chief Rabbi, J.H. Hertz. His final public statement was produced when he was dying, on 1 March 1943, not for a British audience but for the World Jewish Congress in New York: ‘In unison with the voice of indignant protest that cries aloud from all human hearts and in accord with the declarations of the Church, I denounce with utmost vigour the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors … Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race ….’

The historian may turn again to Hinsley with many questions. What remains clear is that Hinsley played a vivid part in the international encounter between Catholicism and totalitarianism, that he sought to show the two as implacable enemies and that he sought to claim an alignment between the Church and democracy and liberty. Within this he struggled as much as most to find a lasting consistency, not least in juggling his responsibilities to Vatican policy, national diplomacy and domestic opinion. Arguably, he would have wished to be remembered as an archbishop who stood resolutely against tyranny and persecution, for it was in this landscape in which he truly found himself. He did much to deserve this. Those who seek to condemn the Church at large for its acquiescence in the evils of dictatorship during the Second World War still have something in him to reckon with. Insofar as he drew justification from the words and interventions of the Papacy he might, too, shed at least some light on the value of that much disputed record.

 

 

 

 

 

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Editorial: Pope Benedict XVI: The Humble servant of the Lord, or God’s Policeman?

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Editorial: Pope Benedict XVI: The Humble servant of the Lord, or God’s Policeman?

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The sudden and totally unexpected announcement on Monday 10 February that Pope Benedict XVI was intending to retire caught everyone by surprise. It has caused a flurry of speculation ever since. But this breach with the past, as the first Pope to resign the Chair of St Peter for six hundred years, prompts us to examine the career of this pontiff over the past eight years, and to assess his place in the wider history of the Papacy.

Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 in a staunchly Catholic family in a small town in rural Bavaria. This was a part of Germany which had endured much persecution during the period of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, when Catholic life had been safeguarded and fostered by a very active flourishing of pilgrimages, worship at shrines, way-side crucifixes and votif-churches. These had formed a valued defence against the onslaughts of anti-Catholic forces, and were to prove to be of value again when the same persecution was resumed under the Nazis. The Ratzinger family took a reserved attitude towards Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, which later became more hostile when radical Nazis began to encroach on Catholic life and impose restrictions on Catholic organizations. For instance, in 1939, all Catholic youth organizations were banned and all young Germans were obliged to join the Hitler Youth movement, though it seems that Josef managed to evade attending many of the sessions. However, in 1943, when he was still only 15, he was conscripted to serve in the Airforce Auxiliary, which involved guard duty around endangered factories near Munich. In the following year he was obliged to join the Reich Labour Force, but in a non-combatant role.

Shortly after his eighteenth birthday in April 1945, the Third Reich was overthrown, and he became a prisoner held by the American occupation troops for some three months. It was then that he, like many other Germans, first learnt of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the concentration camps. This led to a lifelong sense of shame at what misdeeds had been carried out in Germany’s name. From then on, he recognized the need for repentance and atonement, particularly for the sufferings of the victims of the Holocaust.

In January 1946 he and his older brother George were allowed to begin their training for the priesthood in the diocesan seminary near Munich. But a year later he was promoted to the Faculty of Theology at Munich University, still being rebuilt after the war. In 1951 both brothers were ordained, and Josef served a short time as a curate in a down-town parish in Munich city. But in 1952 he was recalled to the seminary and asked to teach dogmatic and fundamental theology, which remained his interest thereafter. In 1959 he was promoted to the Faculty of Theology at Bonn University in the heart of the Catholic Rhineland, and subsequently became Dean of the Faculty at Munster in north Germany. In 1966 he was invited, at the suggestion of his colleague Hans Kung, to move to the venerable university of Tubingen, but then three years later preferred to return to Regensburg in his native Bavaria.

It was during this period that he was summonned to be an advisor to Cardinal Frings of Cologne at the Second Vatican Council, and subsequently a member of the International Theological Commission. At first he shared much of the excitement at the new ideas which the Council produced, but subsequently became alarmed by what he believed were the prevalence of humanistic notions, which obscured the orthodox traditions of the Catholic faith. Thus he welcomed the reform of the Catholic liturgy including the introduction of the vernacular for the Mass, but deplored what seemed to him to be the loss of the sense of transcendence.

In May 1977 he was appointed Archbishop of Munich, and a month later was made a Cardinal. He was obviously regarded as a steady hand, who would keep in check some of the more turbulent hotheads even among the clergy, while opening up new avenues for spiritual formation which had been abandoned during the Council’s repercussions. A year later he was summoned to Rome twice to take part in the Conclaves which elected both John Paul I and John Paul 11. The latter Pope soon found that Ratzinger would make an excellent working partner, and in 1981 called him back to Rome to become the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is one of the more important of the Vatican’s positions, since it entails making sure that bishops and priests are upholding the Church’s traditions in their sermons and writings. The office is committed to maintaining the orthodoxy of Catholic traditions, and ensuring that the Church in all parts of the world is keeping in step with each other and with the Pope as its spiritual head in Rome. Formerly this office was called the Holy Inquisition, and had an evil reputation. But in the past century its function is limited “to promote sound doctrine, to correct errors, and to guide back to the right path those who are in error.” The office has no physical or disciplinary powers, no police force, and needless to say no jails. All it can do is to appeal to the bishops to call any alleged offender to heel. Ultimately, it has no weapons besides argument and appeals to the faith.

Necessarily, such an office, and such a function, however gently exercised is bound to seem repressive. Ratzinger’s authority appeared to be too conservative to the more liberal or radical thinkers in the Catholic ranks. Hence he gained the description of being God’s policeman. His first controversy came with the liberation theologian from Brazil Leonardo Boff, who ardently championed the so-called Liberation Theology, which made extensive use of Marxist theory. He was called to Rome and urged to keep silent – a reproach which many of his followers resented. So too some of the more controversial issues affecting the church, such as celibacy of priests, the ordination of women, abortion, papal dogma and homosexuality, soon enough came to rest on Ratzinger’s desk. Frequently the critics believed that their views would have prevailed if only God’s policeman had not suppressed them. But he made clear that Church doctrine was not something which could be altered to suit any one’s special interests or wishes. The Church did not and does not exist as a kind of self-service supermarket for the purpose of self-realization. Ratzinger’s task was to ensure that this truth was upheld.

In some ways, he was a perfect foil to Pope John Paul II, whose charismatic personality, especially in the early years of his reign, proved most appealing.The Pope from Poland had an uncomplicated human directness, openness and warmth, which made him immediately likeable. By contrast, Ratzinger was far more reserved, studious, careful in his speech, and not at all gregarious. The media played up this difference, depicting John Paul in the star role, while his right-hand man could be depicted as a cold, repressive and conservative German. The fact is, however, that for twenty-three years the two worked in close harmony. On several occasions, as he grew older, Ratzinger begged John Paul to allow him to retire. He hoped to be able to return to Bavaria, and to share his house there with his brother who had been the conductor of the famous Cathedral Choir in Regensburg. But John Paul would not permit this, so he was obliged to soldier on. If, one the one hand, this lengthy period of office enhanced his authority, it also gave rise to increased criticism from those who believed the Church was caught up into an inflexible, or outdated, pattern of operation. Particularly in Germany, the media and much of the avant-garde intelligentsia regarded the Church as having failed to seize the opportunities for complete reform after the Second Vatican Council, or were increasingly hostile to any form of transcendent belief. Even some German Catholics were notoriously critical of the Pope and opposed to Rome. These were burdens which Ratzinger had to bear.

In April 2005 Pope John Paul II died. By this time Ratzinger had become Dean of the Cardinals, and hence was responsible for both the funeral and for the organization of the subsequent conclave to elect a successor. In his funeral sermon he gave his listeners a sharp warning against relativism and ideological fads, when nothing was recognized as having ultimate value, and the only final standard was the individual and his wishes. A faith that follows the movements of fashion and of the latest novelties, he observed, is not a constructive attitude. Instead a mature faith is one that is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ.

On 19 April, on the third ballot in the Conclave, Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope, and took the name Benedict XV1. The choice was momentous in several ways. Firstly, he was only the second non-Italian after 500 years to hold this office. Secondly, the choice of a German Pope after an even longer period marked a significant change and rehabilitation in Germany’s international status. No longer would the awful shadow of Hitler’s misdeeds be attributable to the whole nation. Thirdly, he had only three days before celebrated his 78th birthday. There could be no danger that his reign would last as long as John Paul II’s. He was not going to rival John Paul’s journeys around the world, visiting 129 countries and making 2500 speeches. His would be a more low-key modest reign, similar to his personal disposition. Where John Paul had sought to bring the Church to the world in large-scale personal appearances, Benedict would concentrate on the message, on the need to return to the essential revitalization of what is intrinsic to the Church’s commission, to the way Christ intended the Church to be.

Of course Benedict was well enough aware that he would be obliged to deal with a whole range of problems left over from the previous reign. John Paul’s well-publicized appeals against exploitation, oppression and poverty had brought headlines, but little obedience from even the faithful. And, on a number of important questions regarding the future of the world, the Catholic Church seemed to have missed the boat. Particularly on such issues as abortion, the rights of women in the Church, or the prohibition of contraception and euthanasia, the Church’s stance was horribly compromised by the seemingly unstoppable scandals of clerical sexual aberrations in different parts of the Catholic world, including Canada. People’s confidence in the institutional Church was waning year after year, when such matters seemed to be pushed under the rug. Even more damaging was the unverified rumour that Benedict and his advisors downplayed these scandals by implying that they were being drummed up by sensational journalists or greedy lawyers.

On the other hand, Benedict took office with certain clear advantages. His unusually long term of service at the highest rank of the Vatican bureaucracy meant that he was thoroughly familiar with the problems to be faced. He was better known to the five thousand bishops of the world church than any of his predecessors, and they in turn understood his theological authority and the directions he would give them in church politics. He had had years of pondering the great issues of faith and reason, or the ethical limits of modern science. His calm, persistent and logical way of working meant that he had thought out the implications of decisions in advance. He knew what was required, and if necessary could launch the kind of steps to deal with situations. Above all, he knew what it meant to be a Pope and what is expected of him. Thus although many observers wrote him off as another elderly interim Pope, Benedict XVI was ready to take up the reins of office, and give effect to his long-held convictions.

Benedict’s elevation to the Papal throne necessarily meant that he left the prefecture of the Doctrine of the Faith. The result was an almost visible lightening of his personality. Instead of the harsh disciplinarian, he now appeared as a more gentle and approachable leader. And it was notable that the criticisms of the media became more tolerant. Whereas for years the prevalent ideology had poured scorn on everything to do with Christian belief, Benedict’s thoughtful pronouncements of the subject of faith and reason recreated a new dialogue between culture and religion, which has helped many to recognize the validity of his arguments. His papacy has shown that his challenge has been understood, and he has succeeded in upholding an alternative model of Christian existence which rejects the individualism and relativism so widespread in late 20th century cultures. In this role, Benedict became a voice of conscience, summoning the faithful to be obedient to their traditions and loyal to their ideals. The predictions of some hostile critics that this aged, scholarly, conservative, uncharismatic Bavarian would only hasten the dechristianization of Europe have been confounded. Moreover, thanks to his highly efficient use of his time, he has been able to turn back to his first love – biblical studies. His recently published three volumes on Jesus are a valuable summary of other men’s researches, but capped with the authority of someone who had reflected on these issues for many decades.

Speculating about the Conclave and the choice to be made by the 117 Cardinals entitled to vote would be risky. But, just because Benedict’s resignation was so unexpected, even by his closest colleagues in the Vatican, so there was none of the usual speculation about the succession, as happened last time during the long-drawn-out decline of Pope John Paul II. Just for that reason, virtually nothing is known about the most likely candidates, whose biographies will now have to be rapidly researched. More significantly, the choice will surely rest on other factors, even if the traditional Catholic belief is that the Holy Spirit will make the decision. For one thing, will there be pressure to revert to an Italian Pope? Or alternatively has the time come for a non-European candidate to be selected? Equally important is the question of qualifications. Many Popes have served in the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the Curia, often with distinction in high office, though few have been so enduring as Benedict with his nearly 24 years at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The alternative would be to select a man who had held pastoral office as Archbishop or Cardinal in some distant See. In fact, we can discern a pattern here. Over the past fifty years, Pius XII was a Curial diplomat, but John XXIII a well-beloved pastor. Paul VI had also served in the Vatican’s State Department, but neither John Paul I nor II had any such experience. Following Benedict’s tight control from the centre, perhaps the time has come to choose an outsider, with a different perspective, even from a different continent.

When the Conclave is summoned, the cardinals will have to hurry to Rome , presumably this time by air, along with their attendants, and will be suitably housed for the duration. All will agree that it would be unseemly for the Conclave to be still continuing by the time Holy Week begins, i.e. on March 24th, so that the newly-elected Pope can preside over the Church’s most solemn and significant rituals culminating with Good Friday’s Three Hour penitential Mass, and the triumphant Resurrection service on Easter morning. The Cardinals’ deliberations will therefore have not to be too long drawn out. But the preliminary meetings with their colleagues over dinners, the late-hour chats, the consultations in the various national colleges or with friends in high offices, are all part of the process to determine who is the most suitable choice. Many of the Cardinals will arrive with their own strong ideas about the future of the church, but will have to adjust these in order to reach a consensus on a single candidate. The secrecy with which the whole procedure is surrounded means that we may never know the exact reasons why the next Pope is chosen. And we would do well to be sceptical about the large number of Pope-watchers who are even now flocking to Rome to offer the public throughout the world their unrivalled but uniformed guesses.

Pope Benedict’s legacy will certainly be disputed in the years ahead. His critics, especially in the United States, will lay stress on the shortcomings of his failure to deal more trenchantly with the sex scandals affecting priests and bishops, or the seeming insensitivity towards their victims. Other critics, more aptly, point to Benedict’s rigid stance against all proposals for change as refusing to recognize the need for internal reform in order to pave the way for true renewal. As Cardinal Avery Dulles pointed out, such an attitude turns the church into an obstacle rather than an inspiration to faith. Benedict’s admirers, on the other hand, will point to his years of devoted service in an office which he held with great dignity, insight and perseverance. His example of a teaching papacy, and his legacy of theological writings, will be long remembered. His eight years as Supreme Pontiff were short and lacking in any historic turning points. But he can surely be given credit for the manner in which he broke the tradition of centuries and decided to retire. It will be a pity if Benedict’s pontificate becomes best remembered for his manner of leaving it. Yet, we have no reason to suspect that this Pope emeritus in his retirement will seek to exercise power or influence from behind the scenes. Instead we can wish him a peaceful and fruitful period when he may be able to enrich us with further insights into the rich heritage of Christian thought, of which he was for so many years the guardian and expositor.

 

 

 

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Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

Plenary Session: Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness, 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

From the mid-1930s to the early 1980s Martin Niemöller was a cause célèbre in the United States. He is best known in America as the pugnacious Prussian minister who Hitler imprisoned in a concentration camp for eight years and after his liberation made the famous postwar confession:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

From 1946 until his death in 1984 Niemöller visited the United States regularly. None of his visits was as wrought with controversy as his very first. Niemöller first set foot in the U.S. in late 1946 to embark on a speaking tour sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). For the next five months his every move was followed closely in the local and national media including the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine as well as in religious publications like The Christian Century. The average American was more likely to know more about Martin Niemöller than about any other German living in the immediate postwar era. When Hitler locked him up in the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938 as his own private prisoner, churches across America and the world prayed for his release. When he toured the United States after gaining his freedom, many American Protestants greeted him like a rock star. Tens of thousands of enraptured fans attended his addresses and listen to him on the radio. But many other Americans, including some very prominent ones, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Stephen Wise, called into question Niemöller’s resistance credentials and voiced their adamant opposition to his visit.

In the1930s Niemöller became a hero in the U.S. almost overnight as word spread about his leadership of the Confessing Church and his defiance of Hitler. Under sensational headlines declaring “Protestants Push Fight Upon the Nazis” and “Insurgent Pastors Disobey the Reich Bishop’s Orders” the print media followed the dramatic events of the German Church Struggle and its increasingly famous personality. Although much of the early reporting was misinformed and often hagiographic, Americans were inundated with news about Niemöller’s plight and the Church’s “resistance.”

On July 1, 1937 the Gestapo arrested Niemöller and held him for eight months in Moabit prison. He was tried in early 1938 for “causing unrest among the people” among other things. Although exonerated of the charges later that month, Hitler ordered him re-arrested in March 1938 and imprisoned him in Sachsenhausen as his own private prisoner. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ reacted to Niemöller’s imprisonment by calling on the churches of America to hold special prayer vigils and ring the church bells. Throughout his years of captivity American Protestants commemorated various Niemöller anniversaries: his birthday, the original date of his arrest, the day Hitler declared that Niemöller was his private prisoner, etc.  Henry Smith Leiper, executive secretary for church relations in the FCC, exhorted Protestant ministers to “preach sermons on the modern Luther.”[2] On Sunday March 5, 1939, the second anniversary of Niemöller’s imprisonment in Sachsenhausen, Presbyterian Rev. John Paul Jones of the Union Church in Bay Ridge Brooklyn took it one step further by re-enacting Niemöller’s arrest. When pastor Jones mounted his pulpit that Sunday morning he appeared to be seized and dragged away by two men wearing Nazi uniforms. He then proceeded to give his sermon from behind a replica of a prison door with a barred window and “Sachsenhausen” inscribed over the door.[3]

Although there seemed to be no limit to the exaltation bestowed on Niemöller’s acts of defiance, there were, to be sure, some critics who pointed to his ardent love for his Fatherland and his enthusiastic participation in the unrestricted submarine warfare in World War One, for which he received an Iron Cross. Samuel Volkman, a rabbi in Chicago, however, took aim at Niemöller’s antisemitism, a topic rarely discussed in the American press. In a letter to The Christian Century Rabbi Volkman wrote:

I note from your issue of March 1, 1939, that the Federal Council of Churches is inviting the churches across America to give special recognition to Pastor Martin Niemöller and the cause for which he stands. As a rabbi, nothing would give the writer greater pleasure than to join Christian brethren in honoring one of the few exemplars of true religious heroism in our day. But in thumbing through the sermons of Niemöller [collected in the book Here I Stand], I came upon this passage “We speak of the ‘eternal Jew’ and conjure up the picture of a restless wanderer who has no home and can find no peace. We find a highly gifted people which produces idea after idea for the benefit of the world, but whatever it takes up becomes poisoned, and all that it ever reaps is contempt and hatred because ever and anon the world notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way.” (Here I Stand, p. 195) . . . [Rabbi Volkman then goes on to ask] Is the spiritual heritage of Israel a well of poison? . . . Who but the bigot will deny that [this] is as malevolent as it is unjust? Nor is this the only passage of its kind in the book. It is hoped that when the churches of America unite to do honor to the spirit of Niemöller, they will dissociate themselves from what can be regarded as nothing less than a particularly obnoxious kind of sanctimonious froth.[4]

What many Americans found more distressing than Niemöller’s antisemitism was his decision at the outbreak of the Second World War to volunteer his services to the German Navy to fight for his Fatherland. The editors of The Christian Century and Karl Barth in The Watchman Examiner tried to explain to their readers that Niemöller was, in fact, not an out-and-out anti-Nazi but rather a critic of Hitler’s church policy and that his offer to enlist in the Navy was simply proof of this.

If the American public was troubled by Niemöller’s “latest adventure,” as Karl Barth put it, it didn’t seem to dampen their overall enthusiasm for him. On December 23, 1940, Niemöller’s image appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline: “Martyr of 1940: In Germany only the cross has not bowed to the swastika.” The accompanying article quoted Niemöller’s famous challenge to Hitler, ”Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer.”

A flurry of books on Niemöller appeared in U.S. bookstores in the early 1940s. Popular biographies such as Basil Miller’s Martin Niemoeller: Hero of the Concentration Camp (1942) and Leo Stein’s fabrication I Was in Hell with Martin Niemoeller (1942) exalted his piety and courage. “Hitler may break his body, but never his soul,” Miller proclaimed to her enthusiastic readers. Ads appeared in newspapers proclaiming: “He Wouldn’t ‘Heil Hitler’ so Rev. Martin Niemoller begins his 7th year in a German Prison Camp – Remember Martin Niemoller!!” Films, such as Pastor Hall, and plays, such as God is my Fuehrer depicted his heroic struggle.

Churches across America breathed a collective sigh of relief when they learned that Niemöller had survived Dachau and had been taken into American custody after nearly being executed by the SS in northern Italy. The Washington Post reported that “When Americans read that their own troops . . . had found the celebrated Pastor Martin Niemöller, it was as though a grave had opened.” The Post predicted Niemöller would become “the advocate of his people in their hour of disillusion and despair, a witness to the world that, if German human nature is capable of the most bestial evil, it is also capable of great moral heroism.”[5]

On June 5, 1945 Niemöller granted an interview to dozens of British and American war correspondents gathered at a hotel in Naples, Italy, where Niemöller was awaiting authorization by the Americans to return to his family in Germany. In the interview he acknowledged that prior to the Nazis coming to power he “had nourished the hope that National Socialism, if it had gone the right way, might have developed into a system for creating good for the German people.”[6] He told the reporters that Hitler had deceived him. He insisted that most Germans, including himself, were ignorant of the scale of the atrocities that the Nazis had carried out and shocked by what they saw when the Allies liberated the camps. And because most Germans were ignorant of the atrocities, Niemöller explained, they don’t feel guilty. He declared that his own objections to Nazism were religious and not political. He claimed that he was not interested in politics but opposed the state’s encroachment in the affairs of the church. He admitted that from his cell in Dachau he offered his services to the German Navy when the war began. “If there is a war,” Niemöller declared, “a German doesn’t ask is it just or unjust, but he feels bound to join the ranks.” He claimed that the German people were ill suited to live under a Western form of democracy and even suggested that Germans preferred authoritarian rule. And finally, he said that what Germans needed now was help, not punishment, and that he hoped to visit England and the United States to enlist Brits and Americans in his efforts to secure food and proper clothing for Germans. He concluded, “The world will be astonished when it sees how many good people are left in Germany.”[7]

Although many of Niemöller’s devotees remained faithful to him despite the interview, the new Niemöller had his share of critics now, and some in very influential positions. Marshall Knappen, Director of the Education & Religious Affairs Branch of the American Occupation Forces, had a sit down with Niemöller on June 18 and concluded that “Niemöller, the religious leader and Confessional martyr is to be clearly distinguished from Niemöller the politically-minded retired naval officer. The one is to be accorded the freedom and respect which is due. The other . . . is to be watched carefully.”[8] Sylvester C. Michelfelder, President of the Council of Lutheran Churches in the United States, recorded in his diary on July 26, 1945, “Niemöller has come into disfavor pretty much because of his unfortunate interview with the Press in Italy. There he said, ‘My Soul belongs to God but my body to the State.’ This in America and Britain has caused much offense.”[9] General Lucius Clay, the American military governor, expressed reservations in September 1945 about Niemöller’s politics, stating: “While permitting Niemöller to take active leadership in religious affairs, we have not felt it is advisable to utilize his services in other fields as yet. While his anti-Nazi stand was demonstrated fully by his own actions, it is still too early to predict as to his wholehearted rejection of the militaristic and nationalistic concepts of the former German state.”[10]

Ewart E. Turner, an American Methodist pastor who had served as minister of the American Church in Berlin from 1930-34, visited the Niemöllers in Germany after the interview and found him to be deeply depressed. His wife, Else, said that “He sees everything black.”[11] There were several reasons for his despair, including the harsh treatment of the U.S. Occupational Forces, the unrepentant nature of the clergy and the German population in general, the death of one son and the unknown status of another in a Soviet POW camp.

The reaction of the American was scathing. The debacle of Naples interview severely tarnished Niemöller’s reputation and led some to conclude, along with the New York Times, that he was not suited “to be a leader in the moral reconstruction of his country.”[12] His assertion that Germany was unsuited for democracy caused the greatest concern. “If a democratic system cannot be erected in Germany Europe will be right back where it started from, and Germany must be continuously policed or periodically chastened by war.”[13] He was, as the New York Times article concluded, a hero but “a hero with limitations.”[14] Time magazine opened its article on the interview with the following: “Pastor Martin Niemöller, the one German whom Christians everywhere had respected, shocked a lot of people last week” (emphasis added). The editors of the San Jose News concluded, “We think that Rev. Niemöller is correct in saying that the Germans are not repentant and have learned little or nothing from their defeat. He may be correct in saying they are incapable of democracy. If they are thus unrepentant and incapable of democracy, then it is up to the Allies to provide them for a long time with the authority and leadership for which Rev. Niemöller says they yearn-an authority and leadership that will keep them out of further mischief.”[15] Niemöller’s disastrous interview led many Americans to conclude that if Niemöller was the best that Germany had to offer then a long and severe occupation of the country would be necessary.

Eleanor Roosevelt went so far as to describe Niemöller’s statements as “almost like a speech by Mr. Hitler.” And she went on to say, “Pastor Niemöller sounds to me like a gentleman who believes in the German doctrine of the superiority of race.”[16]

Amid the controversy over the interview, Niemöller and his wife accepted an invitation to visit the United States in late 1946 and early 1947 under the auspices of the Federal Council of Churches. During the lecture tour the Niemöllers spoke to enraptured church groups in more than a dozen states from the Northwest to the Southeast. Ewart E. Turner accompanied the Niemöllers on their American tour and described the Niemöller’s visit as “a spiritual atomic eruption.” Turner advised local church leaders scheduled to host a Niemöller visit, “Don’t let this spirit of Pentecost take you by surprise. Prepare for it with all the traditional ingenuity and foresight of American church life at its best.”[17]

Although the Federal Council of Churches received hundreds of requests for Niemöller to speak in various cities and churches across the United States, the visit was laden with controversy. Even before he arrived, opinion about his impending visit was polarized. Despite the flood of protests received by the Secretary of State, the Niemöllers were the first German civilians to be allowed entrance into the U.S. under auspices other than U.S. Armed Forces. Niemöller came to the United States as the vice-president of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and the head of its department for relations with foreign churches. The stated purpose was to thank American churches for their support and assistance during Hitler’s reign and in the immediate postwar years. But attacks by such prominent figures as Eleanor Roosevelt resulted in a widely publicized debate over Niemöller and the purpose of his trip. On the day of Niemöller’s first public address in the U.S. Mrs. Roosevelt again raised her voice in protest. “One may applaud his bravery and his devotion to his church, but one can hardly applaud his attitude on the Nazi politics, and I cannot quite see why we should be asked to listen to his lectures. I am sure he is a good man according to his lights, but his lights are not those of the people of the United States who did not like the Hitler political doctrines.”[18]

Abundantly aware of the need to win over the American people, Niemöller did his best to avoid the mistakes he made in Naples. First, he refused to partake in any impromptu interviews where he might go off message. Second, all of his lectures and sermons were written down in advance and read virtually verbatim rather than ad-libbed. And finally, in the dozens of lectures, speeches, and sermons he gave in cities across the United States he continually returned to several themes that American churchgoers would likely find reassuring. That is not to say that his addresses lacked any fire or controversy, but rather that he tried to steer clear of any overtly political message that might offend his audience.

So what did Niemöller say to his American audiences? From his very first address at the biennial meeting of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in early December 1946 to his last in May 1947, he typically began by thanking Americans for their prayers of support during his period of imprisonment and thanking the FCC for inviting him to United States. He emphasized that it was a combination of the prayers from abroad and his faith in God that sustained him during his years of imprisonment. He described how Hitler’s persecution of the German churches sparked an opposition movement within the churches and a new sense of faith in the Word of God. He highlighted the resistance mounted by the Confessing Church against the Nazi state while acknowledging that it was a minority of pastors and congregations that took part in the opposition; he drew attention to the 1934 Barmen Declaration and its proclamation of the absolute sovereignty of Christ as the backbone of the Confessing Church. He often told audiences of his own personal acts of defiance like preaching the Word of God to fellow inmates in the concentration camps or how he directly confronted Hitler at a 1934 meeting, telling him, “Mr. Chancellor, God himself has entrusted us with the responsibility for our nation, and no power and no authority in the world is entitled to take it from us.”[19] To his audience in Davenport Iowa he declared that despite Hitler’s attempt to destroy the churches, “the Word of God can’t be bound and can’t be murdered.”[20]

Although he devoted greater space to the Church opposition than to its complicity in Nazism, he frequently acknowledged his share of guilt and the guilt of his church and the German nation for the devastation in Europe; he pointed to the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 as evidence that the leaders of the Protestant Church recognized their share of guilt. He emphasized the importance of reconciliation between God and man, between nations that had recently been at war, and between German and foreign churches. One important reason for his trip to the United States was to demonstrate that “God’s plan for Christian brotherhood doesn’t stop short at the boundaries of nations nor at the borders of continents.”[21] In addition to the ecumenical vitality of the universal church, he commended the non-denominational character of the Confessing Church and criticized the barriers set up that divide denominations.

When he met with groups of pastors or other churchmen and women, a prominent message was the need for the church to play a role in public affairs. Over and over he lamented that since the French Revolution religion had become a private affair resulting in an absence of moral and ethical responsibility in public matters. The absence of the commandments in public life, Niemöller explained, left people without any sense of direction leading them to embrace demagogues, who seemed to have all the answers. In his address to pastors in Rochester, N.Y. on February 25, 1947, he exclaimed that, “Because the commandments, the moral commandments and ethical commandments of God, were no longer acknowledged as valid for public life, humanity tried in a last decisive step to establish a new moral basis for public life in installing one person, Adolph Hitler.” The church, he went on, was particularly to blame for allowing this state of affairs to develop. Christianity, he insisted, was responsible for the disaster in central Europe because it did not carry out its duties to remind the world about the commandments.[22]

Niemöller tried to reassure his audiences that the German churches – at least those associated with the Confessing Church – had learned this lesson but he was worried about whether or not the average German was really learning any lessons from the past. The reason for this concern was that Germans were suffering horribly and that the danger existed that in their wretchedness they might easily fall pray to this or that ideology or person who claimed to have easy solutions to their problems. Or they may simply lose all hope and fall into despair. They wanted food on their plates and coal to heat their apartment. The church, however, could not offer easy solutions to their empty cupboards and unheated homes and so he worried about the appeal of the churches over time. He urged his American audiences to help mitigate this situation and to show Germans that Christians abroad cared about their plight by sending relief packages. And he urged American pastors to consider travelling to Germany to see for themselves the situation and to preach in a German church.[23]

On some occasions Niemöller would briefly address Nazi racial persecution and the state sponsored mass murder of Jews. He usually presented the church (and sometimes the German people) as opposed to the Nazis’ racial program. For instance, in a radio address over WMCA in New York in January 1947, he said, “When Hitler tried to extinguish the Jews, the Church had to pronounce and proclaim, ‘Thou shalt not Kill.’” In a speech delivered in New York, Niemöller reassured his audience that antisemitism was at its end in Germany and would never recur. On another occasion he described German suffering in the immediate postwar years as revenge for Jewish suffering. In his address to the FCC he exclaimed, “We saw guilt accumulate through twelve years [of Nazi rule] and culminate in the planned murder of millions of Jews – a guilt now being revenged according to the rule of human punishment “eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

So how did Americans, especially his critics, respond to his speaking tour and his multi-faceted message?  The outgoing president of the FCC, Bishop Oxnam, with the unanimous and enthusiastic support of the FCC, sent a telegram to Mrs. Roosevelt the day after Niemöller’s first address. The telegram stated that the FCC deeply regretted her remarks that Niemöller’s opposition to the Nazis was not political. “The record clearly shows,” the telegram read, “that he repeatedly spoke against political aims of the Nazis as early as 1933. He was forbidden to preach as [a] result of his speaking against Hitler’s racialistic program.”[24] The FCC went on to urge Mrs. Roosevelt to correct the erroneous impression of Niemöller she had created. The telegram as well as a subsequent letter from Bishop Oxnam did not sway Mrs. Roosevelt. She wrote back that bringing Niemöller to the United States and allowing him to speak to huge audiences would only create sympathy for Germany and mask the threat that Germany poses to world peace. She concluded her letter to Oxnam stating, “I want us to be vividly aware of the fact that the German people are to blame, that they committed horrible crimes. Therefore, I think you are doing something which is stupid beyond words in bringing this gentleman here and having him touring the country, no matter how much you like him.”[25]

Mrs. Roosevelt was not alone in holding these views. Several prominent rabbis voiced similar concerns. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of The Temple in Cleveland, Ohio, and a key figure in the mobilization of American support for the founding of the State of Israel, called Niemöller unfit to lead postwar Germany because he did not oppose Nazi racism but only the Nazi persecution of the church. He agreed with Mrs. Roosevelt that Niemöller’s speaking tour “may be used to allay the fears held by many American people that Germany will be rebuilt without a real moral regeneration of the German people.”[26]

Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, told the FCC that he deplored its sponsorship of Niemöller’s speaking tour and considered it a great disservice to the country. Rabbi Wise criticized Niemöller’s “lamentable past of unequivocal support of Hitler until his own church was hurt. … The record is that neither before nor during his incarceration in a concentration camp did Niemöller speak one word of protest against one of the foulest crimes in history.” He expressed concern that Niemöller’s visit would only lead to a further softening of American occupation policy and that Germans would regard this as a sign of forgiveness and acceptance of their anti-democratic and antisemitic outlook.[27]

Responses to these and similar criticisms by leading representatives of the FCC such as Dr. Samuel McCrea Cavert, Dr. Henry Smith Leiper, Bishop Oxnam and others did not always fall on deaf ears. Estelle Sternberger, a well-known radio commentator in NYC and outspoken critic of the Niemöller visit, changed her mind about Niemöller after she was inundated with materials from the FCC providing “proof” of Niemöller’s anti-Nazi credentials. She went on the airwaves to tell her listeners about the abundant evidence “that the German pastor did do whatever he could to mobilize public opinion against the racial policies of the Nazis.”[28]

Although there most certainly were others like Sternberger who changed their minds, Niemöller’s visit seems to have done very little to overcome the disputed memories of complicity and righteousness. Both sides in this dispute inflated and distorted their evidence. Niemöller’s support for the Nazis in the 1924 and 1933 elections was inflated by his critics to the accusation that he had been a member of the Nazi Party and an unequivocal supporter of Hitler and his racial policy. Likewise, that Niemöller defied Hitler, opposed the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the Church, and was imprisoned by Hitler was inflated by his supporters to suggest that Niemöller opposed not just Hitler’s church policy but also his political and racial policies from day one. These misconceptions and misrepresentations of Niemöller can be traced to the dual lgacy of the Church Struggle – a legacy that included both courageous opposition to the Nazi assault on the churches and the attempt to Nazify all facets of German society, and at the same time an acceptance of aspects of the Nazi political and racial program.

Niemöller’s subsequent visits to the United States were less fraught with controversy. But Niemöller still managed to stimulate lively debate through his criticisms of American occupation policy in Germany and the rearmament of West Germany under the pro-American Adenauer government. Charges and counter-charges were made that he was an unrepentant ultra-nationalist on the one hand and a communist sympathizer on the other. His advocacy of a “third way” during the Cold War led the U.S. State Department to consider him a man to be watched. Later he would support the civil rights movement in the U.S. and would meet with Ho Chi Mihn in North Vietnam to express his opposition to the war and Western imperialism. In the 1970s and 80s he was a leading voice in the nuclear disarmament movement. Long after Niemöller died, his name and, in particular, his poetic confession “First they came for” has been appropriated by American activists of every political persuasion for just about every political cause.

[1] This is the version insisted upon by Sybil Niemöller von Sell, Martin Niemöller’s wife.

[2] “Niemoeller of I,” Time (July 10, 1939).

[3] “For Niemoller,” Time (March 20, 1939).

[4] “Letters,” The Christian Century (March 15, 1939), 355.

[5] “Niemoeller,” The Washington Post (May 13, 1945), B4.

[6] George Palmer, “Niemoeller Tried to Join the Navy in 1939,” The Lewiston Daily Sun (June 6, 1945), 9.

[7] “For What I am,” Time (June 18, 1945).

[8] Clemens Vollnhals, Die evangelische Kirche nach dem Zusammenbruch: Berichte ausländischer Beobachter aus dem Jahre 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 21.

[9] Vollnhals, XXV.

[10] Vollnhals, XXVI.

[11] Ewart Turner, Christian Century (April 25, 1984), 445.

[12] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[13] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[14] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[15] San Jose Times (June 11, 1945), 12.

[16] Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (August 7, 1945).

[17] Ewart Turner, WCC Archives WWII Era.

[18] Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (December 4, 1946).

[19] Martin Niemöller, radio address, Seattle, (Dec. 5, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[20] Martin Niemöller, address in Davenport, Iowa, (Dec. 22, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[21] Martin Niemöller, address to FCC in Seattle (Dec. 5, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[22] Martin Niemöller, address in Rochester (Feb. 25, 1947) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[23] Martin Niemöller, address in Rochester (Feb. 25, 1947) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[24] “Message Sent on Niemoeller,” New York Times (Dec. 6, 1946).

[25] Eleanor Roosevelt to Bishop Oxnam in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers edited by Allida M. Black (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), 419.

[26] “Niemoeller Called ‘Unfit’ as a Leader,” New York Times (Feb, 3, 1947).

[27] “Rabbi Wise Deplores Niemoeller Favor,” New York Post (Jan. 25, 1947).

[28] “Sternberger Reverses Position on Niemoeller in Light of Evidence” in WCC Archives WWII Era.

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Article Reprint: Björn Krondorfer, “Review of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Article Reprint: Björn Krondorfer, “Review of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.”

By Dr. Björn Krondorfer, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

(This slightly corrected review appeared first in theologie.geschichte 4 (2009), http://aps.sulb.uni-saarland.de/theologie.geschichte/inhalt/2009/126.html, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.)

Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, 384 p., U$ 29,95, ISBN: 978-0-691-12531-2.

Just recently, Germany celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which brought to an end the GDR (East German government) and began the unification of Germany. This momentous political change quickly turned into debates about judicial and moral responsibility and the roles of history and memory—discursive ingredients quite familiar to postwar German attempts at coming to terms with the past. But from now on (1989 onwards) one could no longer talk about Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the singular but in the plural: making sense of the past now referred both to Nazism/Shoah as well to the dictatorial regime of the GDR.

For historians, the opening of the Wall translated into archival access not only to the staggering number of files bearing witness to the surveillance apparatus of the Stasi but also to documents related to the Nazi past in the neue Bundesländer (Eastern regional states) that had hitherto been stashed away. The old East German propagandistic argument that the Nazi past was a problem only in the capitalist West crumbled in light of the evidence of the popularity of Nazism in those Eastern regions in the 1930s and 1940s. For church historians, the states of Saxony and Thuringia became of special interest since these regional churches had propagated theologies that blended völkisch-nationalist inspirations with racist-antisemitic ideologies. Back then, theologians and men of the church had weighed in heavily in support of the National Socialist regime. After 1989, it became inevitable that a new chapter on contemporary German church history would be written: it would reassess the degree of complicity of the churches with völkisch ideologies—a project undertaken by a number of German researches on the history of church and theology on local and regional levels.

In the United States, theologians and religious studies scholars have had a long-standing interest in questions of ideological complicity of the German churches in the Nazi regime, not least spurred by Robert Ericksen’s Theologians under Hitler (1985). In 1996, historian Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross expanded the research to a social and gendered analysis of the movement of “German Christians” (pro-Nazi faction of Protestant churches). In the last ten years, a new generation of American historians (not theologians!)–among them Matthew Hockenos, Kevin Spicer, Beth Griech-Pollele, Richard Steigmann-Gall, and James McNutt —has further probed the infiltration of Nazism into church and religion and investigated the continuing effects of antisemitism on postwar Germany theology.

With Susannah Heschel’s 2008 publication, The Aryan Jesus, the scholarship will yet again move a significant step forward. Heschel, who is professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, synthesizes the various strands of scholarly approaches by looking at a specific group of “theologians under Hitler” within their historical embeddedness in the Nazi regime and the German university system. Her research does not stop in the year 1945 but also traces the postwar careers in West and East Germany of the men who had espoused antisemitic and völkisch theologies. In the sense that The Aryan Jesus could not have been written earlier, it is a groundbreaking work and a culmination of Heschel’s long research (which she started in 1991). The book is also the result of political changes that gave access to secreted-away church documents in the GDR as well as of new scholarly developments in the United States that created fresh conceptual frameworks for the assessment of historical material.

In her previous work, Heschel has repeatedly called attention to the many instances of theological and moral failure of German theologians during the rise of National Socialism. Rather than providing a bulwark against ideologies of hatred and exclusion—ideologies that were eventually translated into a genocidal program—churches and theologians frequently participated in and contributed to ruthlessly exclusionary systems of thought and action. Heschel frequently inserts a passionate voice into her meticulous research, which is also discernible in The Aryan Jesus. Here, she hones in on the complicity of a group of Protestant theologians who were instrumental in the creation and operation of the Entjudungsinstitut inJena, the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence of German Church Life” (from now on “Institute”). Under the political/organizational leadership of pastor Siegfried Leffler and the academic/theological leadership of Walter Grundmann, the Institute was the product of a concerted effort to unite the “German Christians” of Saxony and Thuringia and, beyond this regional goal, to “forge an alliance [with] the larger world of academic scholarship in the field of theology” (201). The Institute became, in today’s language, a kind of think-tank for articulating a theology that aimed at reconciling Christianity with the racist-völkisch agenda of Nazism. Furthermore, it provided scholarly credentials to the efforts of dejudaizing Christianity, thus legitimizing the removal of Jews from German society.

Heschel’s archival research is placed alongside a conceptual grid of race theory and of modernizing trends that advance antisemitic research agendas. This makes for engaging reading. What emerges is a dense and fascinating portrait of a segment of Nazi Germany about which, until recently, not much had been known. Rich in detail about the lives of individual theologians and the institutional work of an organization, The Aryan Jesus also provides conceptual perspectives for understanding the historical narrative in a larger frame. Overall, these two strands (archival research/conceptual grid) complement each other well, but at times the book suffers from interpretive claims that sweep aside a more careful look at the historical data. It is at these junctures that Heschel’s passionate voice seems to get the better of her scholarly prose.


Historical Narrative

The primary substance of The Aryan Jesus rests on two pillars: the work of the Institute as well as its academic director, Walter Grundmann.

Grundmann, professor of New Testament inJena, who had completed his dissertation under Gerhard Kittel, was a prolific writer who wanted to prove the non-Jewish identity of Jesus and the pro-völkisch nature of Christianity. No other theologian better exemplifies the personal involvement in the ideological enterprise of dejudaizing German Christianity. Grundmann was actively engaged in formulating a völkisch theology and in widening the Institute’s political reach, eager to make Christianity palatable to a Nazi leadership—even when the Nazi elite increasingly distanced itself from the Institute’s work. After 1945, Grundmann portrayed himself as a victim of Nazism and, surprisingly, managed to regain respectable positions in the Thuringian church—a fact that demonstrates the successful reintegration of compromised men in the GDR. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Grundmann became an informer for the Stasi, partly because of his continued animosity toward former Confessing Church members. His successful postwar rehabilitation also sheds light on the continuity of anti-Jewish thought patterns in postwar German theology–albeit now cleansed from any overt racist and antisemitic attitudes.

As important as Grundmann’s role had been in the work of the Institute, he was not the only influential figure in its creation. Conservative pastors, some of whom had been members of the paramilitary Free Corps and later became spokespeople for various nationalist causes, were instrumental in the establishment of the Institute. Foremost among them were Siegfried Leffler and, earlier, Julius Leutheuser; both men knew that they could count on the support of people in the church hierarchy, among them Martin Sasse, bishop of Thuringia. Once established, the Institute drew on the wide support of academic theologians across Germany, among them the more notorious theologians Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Walter Birnbaum, Heinz Erich Eisenhuth, and Heinz Hunger as well as people like Johannes Leipoldt (New Testament) and Johannes Hempel (Old Testament). A younger cohort of theologians did their academic work under the mentorship of these men, like Hans-Joachim Thilo, doctoral student of Grundmann and Eisenhuth, who later made a name for himself as practical theologian and therapist in Hamburg. In Heschel’s words, these theologians “represented a spectrum of generational and demographic patterns as well as areas of research within theology” (166). Much of the information on the careers and attitudes of individual theologians is contained in Chapter 4, where Heschel introduces a host of theologians compromised by National Socialism beyond the Institute itself (including Grundmann’s teachers Adolf Schlatter and Gerhard Kittel). Chapter 5 looks at the faculty of Jena where the Institute had found its home, and Chapter 6 describes the reintegration efforts of many of the compromised theologians in East and West Germany.

The second pillar of Heschel’s archival research is the Institute itself: how it came into being, what function it had, and what role it aspired to assume within National Socialism. Chapter 3 describes the multiple projects that the Institute staff initiated and oversaw. It was a huge operation of cleansing and purging: it encompassed the Gospels, prayers, hymnals, catechism, liturgy, and Sunday school materials. References to Judaism and Jews were expunged or exchanged for a new nationalist-völkisch language. Words like Zion, Hosanna, or Jerusalem became victims of the obsessively anti-Judaic and antisemitic censors, indicating how wide a net the Institute tried to cast in its efforts to dejudaize Christianity, far beyond mere academic theologizing.

Heschel mentions the important elements of the Institute’s work, and her research might be detailed enough for an English-speaking audience to understand the extent of the Institute’s ambitions without getting lost in the complexity of local and regional proceedings. Indeed, the English language reviews of The Aryan Jesus that have appeared so far repeatedly praise the thoroughness of her research and frequently provide content summaries of the book’s findings (most extensively in Kevin Madigan’s review in JAAR 77/3 [September 2009], but also in Paula Fredriksen [www.tabletmag.com] and Daniel Harrington [America Magazine, Feb. 16, 2009]).

It may be helpful to know that during the same year as the publication of The Aryan Jesus, another comprehensive study on Grundmann and the “Entjudungsinstitut” was completed. This study relied on the same archival sources and was conducted during the same time period as Heschel’s work. In 2008, Oliver Arnhold, who had first reported on his findings in a 1994 Examensarbeit, submitted his dissertation on the subject at Paderborn University. The 800-page manuscript, to be published in two volumes in the series of “Studien zu Kirche und Israel,” is entitled Die Entjudung des religiösen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscher Theologie und Kirche: Die Thüringer “Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen” und das “Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben” (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 2010). Arnhold, like Heschel, introduces the lives and careers of important figures within the inner and outer circles of the Institute, studies their internal differences and spheres of influence, and traces some of their postwar fates.

At the core of Arnhold’s thesis—and here it differs from The Aryan Jesus—is the organizational structure of the Institute. Arnhold reconstructs in minute detail the Institute’s various branches and projects, its financial structure and internal hierarchy, the infightings and rivalries. Saturated with quotes and footnotes, the picture that emerges in Arnhold’s thesis is far more complex than that of The Aryan Jesus. Although the details sometimes make for tiring reading, the attention given to the various factions and rivalries within the German Christian movement and among the political and spiritual founders of the Institute disallow for the same linear and unifying narrative that Heschel presents. Three valuable appendices complete Arnhold’s study: one lists the names of the Institute staff (according to Arnhold, about 180 people worked at one time or another for the Institute); a second contains short biographies of people relevant to the German Christian movement and those within the Institute’s reach; and the third provides a systematic overview of the Institute’s research projects, committees, and work groups. Arnhold’s work will be another indispensable source for understanding the place and influence of the Entjudungsinstitut.

Conceptual Grid

Besides the difference in emphasis—with Heschel widening the lens to take in the larger landscape of Nazi-infested theologies, and Arnhold focusing the lens on the Institute’s organizational structure and micro-historical development—the two authors differ in yet another way. Whereas Arnhold keeps his study very much within the limits of the history of the “Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen” (the branch of German Christians in Thuringia), Heschel reads the theological debates as part of a modernization effort, arguing that German Protestant theologians under Hitler used racial thinking as a way to stay relevant for “the new political and cultural atmosphere of the Third Reich” (26).

Two strategies, according to Heschel, were operative in the theological battle for recognition: First, Protestant theologians racialized Christianity and, second, aryanized Jesus. This is the conceptual grid laid out for the reader in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Aryan Jesus. Heschel locates the crucial role of the Institute within this grid. “The theology of the Institute,” she writes, “[took] over elements of Nazi racial ideology to bolster and redefine the Christian message” (8), while a non-Jewish Jesus became the “anchor of the Christian identity of Germans, and as Aryan, of the Germanic identity of Christianity” (65). Thus, the “Institute theologians” were able to legitimate “the Nazi conscience through Jesus” (66).

By conceptualizing the issues beyond the pale of a narrow church study, Heschel can apply to her archival materials theoretical frameworks sensitive to gender issues and (post)colonialism. The aryanization of Jesus, for example, is read within a history that began with German romanticism in the nineteenth century, rendering Jesus increasingly nationalist and masculinist over against a stereotyping of a disloyal, feminized Judaism. Keeping this context in mind, the racial construction of a Jesus devoid of Jewishness, which Grundmann and others proclaimed, must be seen less as a Nazi invention but, rather, as a radicalization and racialization of anti-Jewish ideas already present in German culture. “Nazi ideology,” Heschel writes, was itself a “form of supersessionism, a usurpation and colonization of Christian theology, especially its antisemitism, for its own purpose. The theology of the Institute was a similar effort at supersessionism in reverse” (8).

These are helpful suggestions for thinking through the bizarre maze of theological thought that strikes today’s readers as fanciful aberrations and lethal fantasies. It is altogether plausible to regard modernity’s antisemitism as a secular version of supersessionism: the theological supersessionism of old was replaced by racial supersessionism that emerged in the nineteenth century. Under Nazism, in turn, racial supersessionism was retranslated into theological paradigms, seeking removal of the Jewish “stain” from its traditions. For German theologians who bought into and promoted such a racialized Christianity, there was little left that would have enabled them to oppose or resist a program that eventually called for the physical annihilation of Jews.

Limitations

The explanatory power of Heschel’s conceptual grid, however, has limits due to her occasional circular reasoning and a tendency to make sweeping claims. For example, Heschel argues that Nazism is an inverse form of Christian theological supersessionism (“Nazism itself sought a supersessionist position in relation to Christianity”; 23), while also asserting that racialized Christianity is an inverse form of Nazi racial supersessionism. The inherent circularity of such argumentation recalls the irresolvable chicken-or-egg question (what came first: Nazi racialism or theological antisemitism?). Such indeterminacy permits Heschel to allude to the Institute’s and its theologians’ implication in the Holocaust without backing it up with more documentary evidence. On the one hand, the author suggests that the Institute’s influence was instrumental in the implementation of the genocidal program. She writes: “the Institute statements regarding Jews and Judaism were mirrors, in Christianized language, of the official propaganda issued by the Reich during the course of the Holocaust” and they had a “far deeper resonance than that spoken by a politician or journalist.” On the other hand, she inserts disclaimers about any direct linkage, cautioning the reader that “one cannot prove that the Institute’s propaganda helped cause the Holocaust” (14-16). Such rhetorical wavering remains on the suggestive level; it also results in an overestimation of the political effectiveness of the Institute. Readers need to keep in mind that despite the radicalization of the rhetoric coming out of the Institute after 1940, it increasingly became politically ineffective during the war years. German historian Manfred Gailus writes in his review of The Aryan Jesus (H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net [Sept. 2009]) that Heschel’s conclusion about the Institute is not sustainable: It did not, as Heschel argues, reach its “zenith of influence and power” (282) during the war—despite the fact that its staff, and Grundmann among them, mightily vied for such influence. The German Christian movement, within which the Institute must be seen, had passed its peak by the time the war started. What Heschel and Arnhold successfully point out, however, is that the German Christian movement did not simply fade away after 1936 (as it sometimes is assumed), but remained a strong and organized force throughout the Nazi regime.

On other occasions, one senses the author’s moral impatience with the material. When, for example, she quotes Siegfried Leffler—a dangerously ideological and unsympathetic figure—she jumps to a conclusion that seems to be driven more by her passionate dislike of Nazi theologians than by her discernible eye as a scholar of the history of theology. At a meeting of theologians in Dresden in 1936, Leffler—one of the driving forces behind the Institute and the Thuringia German Christians–voiced his opinion that, as a Christian, one might have to kill Jews. The attending theologians (Paul Althaus among them) apparently did not take Leffler to task and, as far as the documents reveal, remained silent. Such silence is, in hindsight, a troubling moral failure. But does it support Heschel’s judgment when she writes that this “lack of outrage is evidence that ridding Germany of Jews had become an acceptable point of discussion among theologians, even when murder was proposed as a technique for achieving it” (10)? Does a non-response to an outrageous opinion already prove acceptance of such a position? Does it really make sense to claim that Protestant theologians already considered the murder of Jews five years before the Nazi leadership decided on the Endlösung, their final genocidal program? Most theologians under Hitler–despite their racism and antisemitism and their wish to dejudaize Christianity and, concomitantly, remove Jews from Germany—usually shied away from articulating support for the physical murder of Jews. It does not diminish the outrage we should feel today about Leffler’s homicidal imagination (and, perhaps, intent), but it does not yet prove genocidal consent. Similarly, a sentence like “the Nuremberg Laws could easily be read as upholding classical Christian values” is prone to too many misunderstandings to be helpful, especially since the author does not elucidate this sweeping claim. In my own work on German theologians, I know of the temptation to disrupt with moral disapproval the callousness that speaks through historical documents of this time, so I understand how such statements can enter into scholarly prose. Yet as scholars we need to indicate when we assess a situation historically and when we insert our personal judgment.

The different conceptual frameworks in the studies of Heschel and Arnhold lead the authors toward drawing different conclusions even when they arrive at a similar analysis. Both studies make clear that it is no longer viable to portray the Protestant German church struggle in terms of starkly opposing groups—here the steadfast Confessing Church, there the corrupted German Christian, and in the middle the non-committal “intact churches.” Both Heschel and Arnhold agree that the study of the archival materials on the Institute and Grundmann demonstrates how deeply antisemitic thought had penetrated German regional churches and academic theologies. The question of whether the Institute played a key role in Nazism or whether its radicalization of a völkisch-antisemitic theology had limited political impact may not be fully answerable yet. But, as Arnhold points out, we know now that the Institute enjoyed the initial support of eleven (!) regional churches.

Arnhold and Heschel generally agree on the fact that multiple layers of antisemitic, völkisch, nationalist, and racist thought had affected to some degree most German theologians, bishops, pastors, and lay people during the Third Reich. This mixture of poisonous discourse was, to use Heschel’s phrase, the “lingua franca of the Nazi era” (7) and it was employed across a wide spectrum of people, even those who opposed Hitler. Arnhold and Heschel, however, interpret the function and role of this “lingua franca” differently. While Arnhold uses the widespread employment of a racist-völkisch-antisemitic language to emphasize the rivalries between different factions of the German Christians, Heschel uses it to argue for the unifying power of such discourse. According to Heschel, the importance of the “lingua franca” was its exclusionary function: by removing Jews and dejudaizing Christianity, German Christians succeeded in proclaiming unity with their own national community. “Antisemitism,” she writes, “was the glue that joined the various theological method and impulses and also brought passion to religion” (66).  Though Heschel occasionally concedes that antisemitism was also used as a “tactic in the rhetorical battles among the different Christian factions” (7), she really emphasizes the unifying effect of the theologians’ racialized discourse. In the Third Reich, theologians “translated the often inchoate meaning of Nazism into a substantive discourse on Christian ritual and theology, giving Nazism religious and moral authority” (16).

Arnhold, on the other hand, does not see so much unity as disunity at work. Although his study is not sufficiently deliberate in teasing out this issue in theoretical terms, throughout he points to the multiple differences among the various völkisch-racist-nationalist positions. Theologians across a broad spectrum referred to a lingua franca which–however appallingly similar and bizarre to modern ears–was then understood in its nuances to stake out competing theological and political claims. The Institute was not free from such competition: it was not an exemplary place for völkisch unity but was steaming with political conflicts and personal rivalries. Arnhold emphasizes—more pronouncedly than Heschel—that the Institute was eventually neglected by the Nazi leadership. The more the Institute was ignored, the more its founders and theologians radicalized their thinking in the hope that, one day, they would regain favor in the eyes of the party. The firmer the secularized Nazi leaders proceeded with the implementation of the genocidal program, the less relevant church and theologians became in their eyes.

Together with previously published studies on aspects of Grundmann and the Entjudungsinstitut (by scholars like Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Roland Deines, Peter von der Osten Sacken), both Heschel’s and Arnhold’s important works contribute to a fuller understanding of German church history in general and of the Nazi-infested German Christian movement in particular. The special merit of Heschel’s book, in addition to her historical research, lies in the broadening of the issues, whether these concern patterns of antisemitism in modernity, race and colonialism, and the gendered dynamics hidden away in the formation of national and religious identities. Future research on the effects of genocidal and totalitarian mentalities on theology and the church cannot sidestep The Aryan Jesus.

 

 

 

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Article Reprint: Iael Nidam-Orvieto, “New Research: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Article Reprint: Iael Nidam-Orvieto, “New Research: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem Jerusalem Quarterly Magazine, Vol. 56, Tevet 5770, January 2010.

After the long-standing hostility displayed by various Israeli and Jewish authorities towards Pope Pius XII, the following article written by Dr Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Director of the Department of the Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, and printed in its January 2010 quarterly magazine, is notable:

Dilemmas, silence, active rescue, passivity. These words are often mentioned when dealing with the controversial figure of Pius XII and his papacy during WWII. The debate over his attitude and actions regarding the persecuted Jews of Europe began during the 1960s following the release of the play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, and continues even today, splitting public opinion as well as generations of scholars.

The critics emphasize that Pius’ main failing was his silence – his lack of a clear and direct condemnation of the annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany. Backing up this opinion is his famous radio speech of Christmas 1942, in which the Pope failed to mention the Jews or the Germans, referring more generally to the demise of hundreds of thousands of people “who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or descent, have been consigned to death or to slow decline.”

Scholars bring many explanations for this public silence: political, ideological or even personal. Some claim that Pius was pro-Nazi or antisemitic, even calling him “Hitler’s Pope.” They emphasize the failure of the Pontiff to fulfill his moral duty officially to denounce the Holocaust, or to remind the Catholic community of its ethical responsibilities.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that Pius’ speeches clearly referred to the Jews and their suffering, and claim that the varied rescue activities carried out by Catholic clergy throughout Europe is clear proof of the inspiration they received from the Pope. These defenders maintain that the lack of a direct confrontation with the Nazi regime was a strategic choice meant to avoid worse catastrophe and enable further clandestine rescue activity.

As much of the relevant source material remains unavailable to historians – the archives of the Vatican for the period of WWII have yet to be opened – explanations on both sides are often based on assumptions or unsystematic documentation. However, over the last few years, certain archives containing relevant material have been opened, leading to an increased interest in the topic. For example, the archive of Pius XI’s papacy has been recently opened to the public, enabling research that sheds new light, among other things, on the policy of the Holy See during the 1930s and on Eugenio Pacelli’s (later Pope Pius XII) operations as Vatican Secretary of State. Documentation revealed in other archives across the world has led to the publication of new books on the topic, as well as important new insights into the existing historiography.

In March 2009, the International Institute for Holocaust Research and the Salesian Theological Institute of Saints Peter and Paul in Jerusalem organized a scholarly workshop at Yad Vashem to discuss the current state of research on Pius XII and the Holocaust.

The academic discussion was based on specific questions presented to specialized scholars from around the world expressing the range of opinions on Pius XII. The closed forum enabled a dynamic and open discussion, soon to be released as a pathbreaking publication on the topic.

One of the most innovative pieces of research presented at the workshop dealt with the rescue of Jews in Italy, especially in Rome. Thanks to vast material recently opened to some researchers, new insights were presented as to refuge activities of the “religious houses,” suggesting a more direct involvement of the Holy See, albeit one that also aided evacuees, orphans, partisans and soldiers of all nationalities, in the name of Christian charity.

A topic that revealed the gap between the participants concerned converted Jews who, as is shown in published documentation, were afforded much help by the Vatican. Since the Nazis considered them still Jewish, should the help given to those who converted be considered as aiding Jews? Or must one claim that this assistance is dubious, considering that those Jews who chose not to abandon their faith were less likely to receive the help of the Vatican?

Another debate was whether Pius XII was responsible for actions taken by clerics, both in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust and in its aftermath, during the escape of Nazi criminals from Europe along the so-called “ratlines.” If Pius XII was involved in, encouraged or even initiated one activity, does that mean that he had equal involvement in the other?

What is undeniable is that the new documentation enables scholars to better understand the Pope’s background and opinions vis-à-vis Nazism and antisemitism. Much clearer is his aversion to National Socialism, which he considered one of the worst heresies of the modern age. While his upbringing was rooted in traditional anti-Judaism, his branding as an antisemite must be called into question.

Several scholars have suggested a new approach, one that views the complexity of the responses and how the Pope’s operations were understood and accepted by his followers and his contemporaries – both the Allied and Axis powers. The workshop was certainly the first step towards more open and sincere academic collaboration on the topic, albeit many questions remain unresolved and his legacy controversial. Only the full opening of the Vatican Archives and continued cooperation among the scholarly community will enable a more comprehensive understanding of Pius XII and the Holocaust.

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