Hitler had achieved his first goal that very day: to be appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg to lead the government. As Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his Cabinet minister Hermann Goering acknowledged the cheers of the massed citizenry. Hitler was well aware that the victory was only a partial one. The Nazis were still a minority in a fragile coalition. Hitler had, in fact, warned earlier that day in a statement released to the world’s press: “The Nazi Party has at last broken through to the government. I am determined to continue the struggle as fiercely within government as we fought outside it.” A major part of what Hitler saw as his forthcoming struggle was targeting, isolating and destroying millions of enemies in the way of his total mastery of Germany.

 There were the Jews, the Communists, the Social Democrats with their entrenched electoral support, the Catholic Center Party, and the Roman Catholic Church. All were enemies, each to be dealt with as quickly as circumstances would allow. Though Hitler felt a particular urgency about dealing with the Jews and Communists, and the neutralizing of other political parties, he saw the Church as a pernicious opponent, a deeply-entrenched threat that must be immediately controlled and eventually uprooted in order to establish his Thousand-Year Reich. To help eliminate Catholic influence, he turned to Alfred Rosenberg, arch-ideologue and convinced Nazi, who despised Christianity. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg formulated a “scientific” theory of racism.

For him, the supreme human value was that of race: individual races possessed their own collective soul, a mystical “power of the blood and soil.” Each race also possessed a religious impulse (in the case of the Aryan Germans, this was the pagan cult of Wotan, King of the Gods). Christianity, for Rosenberg, was the distorted product of Semitic tribes who had tricked the Aryans into jettisoning their pagan truth. The Catholic Church, the prime mover in this spiritual “swindle,” was singled out for sustained attack as the promoter of “prodigious, conscious and unconscious falsifications.” All during the 1930s, Rosenberg poured scorn on the Church. The clergy, hierarchy and Vatican were vilified as poisoners of German blood, race-death merchants, race-swamp promoters, race contaminators, race-chaos merchants, obscurantists or “men of shadows,” sorcerers of Rome, and, referring to the Jewish roots of Christianity, as advocates of perverted “Orientalism.” Jesus Christ was singled out not only by Rosenberg, but by numerous lesser Nazis hired to slant the Savior’s message toward Rosenberg’s race theories. Christ, they claimed, was an unwitting tool of Jewish world conspirators, active as early as the first century AD. Or, alternatively, Christ was not a Jew at all, but a prototype Aryan, son of a Roman soldier stationed in Palestine. Throughout Rosenberg’s career, up to the gallows at Nuremberg, he promoted these twisted theories in pamphlets, speeches, and training courses for Nazi leaders on the perfect “Nordic race.” Typical of the initial troubles between Nazism and the Church was a February 1933 confrontation following the death of a Catholic policeman, Sergeant Zauritz, killed in a riot between Communists and Nazis in Berlin.

 At his funeral in his Silesian hometown, the priest deplored the many violent deaths being suffered, saying how terrible was the maxim: “If they disobey us, their heads will roll.” This was a clear reference to a speech by Hitler. The many storm troopers in the congregation began coughing to drown out the words of the priest. Undeterred, he shouted: “Cough all you like, but you will not cough me from telling the truth!” That same month, Goering banned all Catholic newspapers in Cologne. Responding to protests, he denied that this was part of a deliberate campaign against Catholics: the government, he said, would “seal its own doom” with “such a policy.” Though the ban was later lifted, it had sent a warning tremor through the largely Catholic Rhineland, and it would be only a short time before the Catholic press throughout Germany would be taken over by the Nazis. Later that month, Hitler gave another signal when brown shirt SA gangs broke up meetings of Christian trade unions and the Catholic Center Party.

The Manchester Guardian reported one such incident on February 22, 1933. A prominent Catholic politician, Adam Stegerwald, was attacked on the platform in Krefeld and a number of priests were hurt. There was a brief lull in Hitler’s persecution of the Church when the Fuehrer turned to achieving some kind of national unity in order to face potential enemies at home and abroad. He cleverly made a public appeal for the Church “to negotiate.” Almost from the outset, however, discussions took place against a drumbeat of threats that the Church would be destroyed if agreement was not quickly reached. In spite of many misgivings, Pope Pius XI and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli — the future Pius XII — realized they could not refuse to talk with a legitimately established government. Also, if they refused, Hitler would publicize his apparently peaceful terms and claim that Catholics were obstructionists. Any written agreement, Pacelli reasoned, would offer a better basis for temporary coexistence than no legal arrangement at all. Lutherans already had similar safeguards. In fact, mass arrests were already taking place — thousands of Catholic Center Party supporters were in concentration camps by the end of June.

 Although well aware of the real situation, government negotiator Franz von Papen, himself a Catholic, told journalists that relations between the Vatican and Reich were “so friendly” that it took only eight days to agree on the main details of the proposed Concordat. In July 1933, a Concordat was signed which specified that certain activities — education, youth associations, meetings organized by the Church — were legally guaranteed by the Reich. In return, the Church’s support for the Catholic Center and the Bavarian People’s Parties would be withdrawn. Actually the Center Party, under relentless Nazi pressure, had already voted itself out of existence even before the Concordat was signed, a fact which Pacelli lamented because it handicapped him during the negotiations. Pacelli would always argue that the Church had to accept the lesser of two evils. Without the agreement, Catholics would have been left at the mercy of SA, SS and Gestapo hit squads. With the agreement, they at least had legal grounds on which they could protest injustices.

 In July 1933, he remarked to a British Embassy official, that while the attacks on Catholics would not cease, “they will hardly break all the articles at the same time.” Nevertheless, the Nazis very soon began breaking them, and continued to break every article when they wanted to. An “Editors Law” was passed in December 1933, forcing all editors to become members of the “Literary Chamber of the Reich” and to obey whatever directives might follow. This law made it an offense to give detailed accounts of pilgrimages, print liturgical calendars or even announce meetings of local Catholic clubs. In its definition of what constituted anti-State propaganda, the “Editors Law” was a death sentence for the large and thriving Catholic press. Censorship tightened. Even individual typewriters were impounded on the whim of the authorities, and a partial blackout fell on what was going on inside Germany. The Vatican, anxious for as accurate a picture as possible, found helpers in unusual quarters. A large and unrecognized army of witnesses, watching for the State agent who might be lurking nearby, passed along secret reports and documents.

 This ad hoc Catholic intelligence grapevine had a genuine hero as one of its leaders: Dr. Joseph Mueller, the chief “runner.” Mueller was an anti-Nazi lawyer from Munich, known for his coolness and dependability. As an officer in the Abwehr (Military Counterintelligence), he was able to move freely between Munich, Berlin and Rome. In his Abwehr bag, immune to the random searches and prying eyes of Gestapo, he carried sheaves of documents giving a detailed account of the campaign waged against the Roman Catholics of Germany and Austria. When Vatican Radio broadcast extracts from Mueller’s bulging files, the Gestapo reacted with wrath and began searching vigorously for the “mole.” Mueller’s documentation established a clear progression of anti-Catholic measures between 1933 and 1939, ordered by a State determined to force young Catholics into the ranks of the Hitler Youth.

Catholic schools and trade unions were dismantled and clergy targeted for prosecution and imprisonment. Clergy were humiliated and punished in “Currency” and “Immorality” show trials throughout 1935 and 1936. (Laws had been passed from 1933 onwards to regulate the import and export of currency. Exporting currency was made “high treason” and “economic sabotage.” These were familiar principles to those used to a totalitarian economic system, but the Catholic clergy were not.) Hundreds of prosecutions were carried out in an 18-month period, almost all resulting in lengthy terms of imprisonment and hefty fines. In one example, that of a Redemptorist, Father Aigner, the defense counsel complained that he was given only three hours to talk with his client and that all the documentation relating to the alleged crime had been seized by the police.

Father Aigner, whose memory alone could not supply the lawyer with information, was so confused and frightened by his arrest and his four months already in prison, that he could not defend himself. The solicitor argued that Father Aigner could no more offer accurate testimony without records than the chief cashier of a bank would be able to testify about accounts without access to bank files. Confiscation of accounts was a standard procedure used by police searchers who were often brutal in their methods. In May 1935 at the Convent of St. Charles Borromeo in Trebnitz, Saxony, two nuns died of shock when the Mother Superior and others were arrested on the charge of exporting money to a sister convent in Czechoslovakia. The Sisters argued that it was an absurdity to expect monks and nuns to possess advanced degrees in accounting when they spent their lives in charitable work. “It was common knowledge that even judges and State attorneys had fallen into error in matters of Currency Law,” said a lawyer in Munster on July 22, 1935. The immorality trials sought to destroy the reputations of Catholic religious. Priests, monks and nuns were accused of “perverted and immoral” lifestyles. The secret police set innumerable traps. The New York Times carried a report in May 1936 describing priests who had been summoned on sick calls to hotel rooms.

Waiting in the rooms would be photographers. When the priest entered, the “caller” would turn out to be a prostitute, planted by the Gestapo. Photographs would later be produced in court as irrefutable evidence of corruption. One notorious trial in 1936 concerned the Franciscans of the Rhineland town of Waldbreitbach. This trial was widely publicized and parents were warned in sanctimoniously penned editorials not to allow their children to enter Catholic schools. Even children themselves were encouraged to read the lurid trial accounts. In several cities, newspaper stands were purposely lowered so youngsters could read salacious and pornographic stories accompanied by cartoons in the pages of Der Sturmer (the newspaper controlled by Julius Streicher, notorious anti-Semite and anti-Catholic). Witness statements from children were produced in court by secret police, whose testimony was not allowed to be challenged.

 Threats, bribes, brutal nighttime interrogations, and nervous breakdowns were reported. In the US, protest meetings and marches began as news of the trials spread. In June 1936, a petition was signed by 48 U.S. clergymen, “We lodge a solemn protest against the almost unique brutality of the attacks launched by the German government charging Catholic clergy with gross immorality,” they wrote. “The good name of the Catholic priesthood is to be defamed, in the hope that the ultimate suppression of all Jewish and Christian beliefs by the totalitarian state can be effected.” Rabbis Samuel Abrams of Boston, Philip Bernstein of Rochester and Philip Bookstaber of Harrisburg, and 18 other Rabbis and 27 Protestant clergymen signed the protest. The New York Times reported that Christmas 1937 would see “more than a hundred Protestant pastors and several thousand Catholic clergymen in prison.” Legal moves against the clergy were accompanied by violent attacks in the streets, presbyteries and at frontier posts. Church services were disrupted, processions broken up and even individual Catholics assaulted. In the middle of one particularly vicious outbreak of violence by young Nazis in 1935, a large notice appeared on the police headquarters in Essen which read: “The Police Stand By The Hitler Youth!”

When a police inspector was asked to investigate near-fatal assaults by Hitler Youth on Catholic teenagers in Limburg in February 1935, he dismissed the complaint by saying: “We used to have fights now and again when we were boys.” That Easter, pilgrims returning to Germany from Pius XII’s blessing in Rome were punished at border checkpoints by Gestapo and SS units. They were put out of their trains and kept waiting for seven hours in pouring rain, while suitcases were ripped open and the contents scattered. Anything belonging to a “denominational organization” — flags, banners, books, tents, even knives and forks — was confiscated. Insults were hurled at the pilgrims: “So these are the Papists, the people who stabbed Germany in the back in 1918! They ought to be beaten and sent to a concentration camp… cutting their throats would be the best thing.” In the teeth of outraged protests, the local police merely said they had been searching for illegal uniforms. At the time of the Reichstag election of 1938, priests and laity were attacked after polling had finished. In Fellbach, near Stuttgart, Father Sturm, the parish priest, was surrounded by a group of some 25 SA and SS men demanding to know whom he had voted for. After ransacking his presbytery, the gang forced him to run the gauntlet of kicks, spitting and jeers: “There’s the traitor. Father Sturm.” After some two hours of abuse, he was taken to the mayor who lectured him about the Fuehrer’s beliefs and his personal views on the duties of a parish priest in the new Germany.

At midnight Fr. Sturm was released. Although roving SA and Hitler Youth gangs had been warned against turning any senior clergy into martyrs, terrorizing priests was a common occurrence. Many priests were roughed up — one thrown out of a window had both legs broken. Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich was shot at, and Cardinal Innitzer’s residence in Vienna ransacked in October 1938. There was a notorious incident that month when Bishop Sproll of Rottenburg was manhandled. He later received this anonymous letter of apology from an SA man, forced to take part in the riot: “I have always been proud of my country, but last Saturday I was, for the first time, ashamed to call myself a German.” Songs, films, speeches by party members, poster campaigns, and theater productions cruelly satirized clergy in the late 1930s. Anderl Kern’s anti-clerical play, pointedly titled The Last Peasant, was performed all over Germany to almost universal critical acclaim. Characters included a parish priest with an illegitimate child, an eye for the opposite sex and easy money; a young seminarian who arrives home, announcing he has lost his vocation: and a mother who attempts to murder a maidservant with rosary beads in one hand and a dagger in the other. At the end of the play, the ex-seminarian emerges as “the true German hero,” having renounced the priesthood and promised to father a large family for the security and future of the Aryan race.

The Nazi strategy was, essentially, to destroy Catholicism by eliminating all organizations supported by the Church, from schools and children’s groups to Catholic trade unions. By 1939, Catholic schools and trade unions were virtually destroyed. Replacing them were National Socialist Schools, the Nazi Labor Front and the Hitler Youth with its female counterpart, The German Girls League. The initial attack on Catholic schools in Munich reduced the percentage of students from 84% in 1934 to 65% percent in 1935. In 1937, parents were forced to choose their child’s school in front of two witnesses, usually storm troopers in full uniform. These witnesses warned of future trouble and loss of employment. The children themselves would also suffer. There would be no primary school prizes for them; prizes were funded only in State schools. Parents still in favor of Catholic schools might be told that, “your little ones will have to go to a school on the outskirts, miles away.” Meetings were regularly held to vote on the issue of Catholic or “Community” schools. In Speyer, a town of some 40,000 inhabitants situated on the Rhine, one working man gave his bishop details of how his “vote” had been obtained in 1937: “I was told to go to the Parish Council offices. On arriving there I declared, I want the Roman Catholic school’ and prepared to leave.

The local Nazi cell-leader held me back and wrote a note to my firm stating that because of my declaration I would be dismissed from my job. A police constable then told me if I didn’t change my mind I would never obtain public work again.” The government in Germany funded all schools, Catholic and State. A councilor of the Bavarian Ministry of Education announced that in 1936 alone, of 1,600 teaching posts formerly awarded to nuns, 600 would be taken away from them and transferred to secular staff. The councilor did not bother to explain what would happen to the unfortunate 600. The economic effects of such enforced layoffs forced many religious houses to close. Nuns were driven into subsistence jobs. Some had to return to their parents or move in with sympathetic relatives. Yet others applied for jobs in industry. In Baden, in the summer of 1938, there were 41 nuns working in one textile factory, all former teachers. The government then announced that all nuns renouncing vows would be automatically entitled to State employment!

 Thus, on October 27, 1938, Adolf Wagner, Bavarian Minister of the Interior stated with pride: “The denominational schools throughout the whole of Bavaria have now been transformed into Community schools.” By January 1939, more than 10,000 Catholic schools had been suppressed in Germany, and by the end of April that year, the Catholic Herald (London) reported that a further 3,300 schools had been abolished by decree in what was described as “A Black Day for the Catholic Rhineland.” Catholic youth associations, with a collective membership in the hundreds of thousands, were attacked for being “un-German.” Teachers were reminded that as employees of the State, they had a duty to encourage their pupils to join the Hitler Youth or German Girls League (GGL). One teacher told her girls: “Join the German Girls League. When you leave school you’ll be wanting a boy friend and if you’ve not been in the GGL you won’t get one. And then, when you get married, your husband will lose his job the second they find out you haven’t been a member of the GGL.” Thousands of Catholic employees were threatened with disciplinary measures or dismissal unless they ensured their children were enrolled in the Hitler Youth or German Girls League. Training guilds, such as the Prussian Master-Craftsman Association, began announcing from 1935 onwards that only those enrolled in Nazi Party organizations would be accepted as apprentices.

German Railways, employing hundreds of thousands, passed a similar ordinance the same year. Even farmers began issuing notices to the same effect, with shops advertising part-time jobs following suit. The New York Times on June 1, 1937 reported a Hitler speech stating: “We will take away their children. They shall not escape us.” With censorship silencing radio and press, the local Church was often the only place where the Catholic population would hear a protesting voice. It was exceedingly dangerous for priests to speak out, though some, such as Father Rupert Mayer of Munich, were prepared to risk imprisonment. Priests were all too aware that Nazi stooges were likely to be in the congregation listening to their sermons. Senior clerics who challenged the Third Reich in its racist and anti-Christian policies included Bishop Clemens Count von Galen of Munster, Archbishop von Preysing of Berlin, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, Cardinal Schulte of Cologne and possibly the most famous of all, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich. His series of Advent sermons, preached from the pulpit of St. Michael’s Church aroused national and international interest.

They became so popular that thousands listened, some even in the streets outside. In the first of the sermons, preached on December 3, 1933, Faulhaber defended Christianity by defending the people from whom it had sprung: the Jews. He reminded them that Christianity made no racial distinction between Jew and Gentile, but asked only that its adherents should possess faith. The next month shots shattered the windows of his first floor study. In March 1934, the published edition of his sermons, “Judaism, Christianity and Germanism” was banned for its “slanderous views on the State.” Faulhaber continued his denunciations of Nazi policy on Catholic schools, youth organizations, rigged elections, sterilization laws, attacks on the Pope, and attempts to replace Christianity with what he called “fake” religion. The Nazis maintained their propaganda campaign against Faulhaber relentlessly. Faulhaber played a considerable role in the writing of the great anti-Nazi encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”) issued in March 1937. It denounced repeated attacks on the faith, the breaking of almost every article of the Concordat, and Nazi ideological and political theories.

 The encyclical was smuggled into Germany under the eyes of Gestapo agents who had been warned beforehand to expect some kind of protest from Rome. Copies were printed secretly in various parts of the country and the underground Catholic network was engaged to distribute it to parishes throughout Germany. Hundreds of helpers, in cars, on motorbikes and bicycles, handed copies secretly to clergy. According to the Daily Telegraph (London) of March 22, 1937: “the encyclical stated the Nazis had made it plain, that they were waging a ‘war of extermination’ against the Church, and after countless rebuffs the Pope had decided to make a final stand.” The reaction to the encyclical’s publication was immediate. The German regime sent a formal protest to Rome; it was swiftly rejected by Cardinal Pacelli. An enraged Hitler and Goebbels gave orders to bring to trial dozens of clerics on charges of immorality and “slanders against the State.” Gestapo and SS squads were dispatched to find which presses had produced the encyclical: 12 were confiscated and editors rounded up. In one parish, Essen in the diocese of Oldenburg, seven girls were arrested inside a church as they handed out copies after the Palm Sunday service.

 The death of Pope Pius XI in February 1939 and the election of his successor, Cardinal Pacelli, drew sneers from Das Schwarze Korps (“The Black Corps”), house magazine of the SS and mouthpiece of Heinrich Himmler. It referred to Pius XI as the “Chief Rabbi of the Christians, boss of the firm of Judah-Rome.” Cardinal Pacelli had already been labeled in the paper as an ally of Jews and Communists in a series of cartoons and articles published at the time of his official visit to France in 1937. Sometimes new Nazi policies would be imposed from above, sometimes they would be rescinded as the dictates of political events changed or new strategies were adopted by Berlin. Harassment could be disguised or even halted. In August 1936, for example, when the Olympic Games were taking place in Berlin, orders were given to stop persecution against Jews, Catholics and Protestants and to hide show trials from the eyes of foreign journalists. The machinery of persecution roared into action again as soon as the correspondents left. With the coming of war in 1939, Hitler favored postponing the total destruction of Christianity to more effectively prosecute the war. Others in the party, however, thought it a mistake to slow the Kirchenkampf, the battle against the Church. Martin Bormann reminded SS leader Himmler in 1941 that, “the influence of the Church must be entirely eliminated.” There was little division of opinion among top Nazis regarding the persecution of the Jews. The war gave Hitler new opportunities to purify Europe of non-Aryans. Slavs were to be enslaved or killed, the Jewish people exterminated throughout Europe.

With the closing of Germany’s borders and the extension of its power deep into Russia, Nazi capacities to kill reached unimaginable levels. Though the scale of Christian persecution cannot be compared to the Jewish Holocaust, except perhaps in Poland, the two persecutions are part of that single horror that was Nazism. What Hitler did and intended for Christians is an essential part of the cataclysm that was the immense tragedy of World War II and the unprecedented slaughter of the Jewish people. Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, was fond of addressing mass meetings of his followers with a motto: “We are a Youth that believes in God, because we serve the Divine Law that is called Germany.” We must not forget that blasphemous conception of the Divine Law led, by ten thousand crooked paths, to catastrophic suffering, war, pillage, and to the ovens of death. Karol Jozef Gajewski, of Sandbach, Cheshire, England, is a teacher and scholar of European History.

http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=2857&CFID=711449&CFTOKEN=11698683

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH The Catholic Center party was a pillar of the Weimar Republic. It had in general resisted the Nazi rise to power, although the right wing of the party was led by politicians at least willing to tolerate a Hitler government. Once Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the Center party supported measures giving him dictatorial power. On July 5, 1933, the Center party–under intense Nazi pressure–dissolved itself (the other remaining political parties had been banned earlier that spring and summer). The Catholic church in Germany was controlled by the Vatican, under the leadership of Pope Pius XI, and signed a Concordat (Treaty) with the German Reich 15 days later. The Concordat confirmed the dissolution of German Catholicism’s trade unions and political organizations, but guaranteed the church traditional rights to cultivate and promote the practice of the Catholic rite, to maintain Catholic schools, and to appoint Catholic clergy. Many provisions of the agreement were promptly violated, however, as the Nazis persecuted Jesuits, Catholic Action (a religious and social movement), and various other Catholic organizations.

After enduring anti-church actions for several years, in 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern). In the encyclical, Pius XI criticized Nazi philosophy and warned the German government to fulfill the terms of the Concordat. The Nazis responded with a wave of priest trials–prosecutions of clergy for various alleged infractions. THE PROTESTANT CHURCH In a further attempt to synchronize religious thought with state policy, the Nazis sought, unsuccessfully, to establish a unified national church. Hitler appointed a Reich Bishop, Ludwig Mueller, who led a “German Christian” movement within the church. Mueller sought to synthesize Nazi ideology and Protestant tradition and to agitate for a “people’s church” based on “good Aryan blood.” This movement had gained 600,000 adherents by the mid-1930s. The Nazi government also attempted to supplant Christian worship with secular Nazi party celebrations which adopted many symbols of religious ritual but instead glorified the party and the Fuehrer.

Efforts were also made to dilute clerical influence on religious instruction in the public schools, as well as to curb the activities and influence the curricula of religious schools. In 1933, a small group of Protestant clergy formed the Pastors’ Emergency League. Founded by Martin Niemöller, the league took a stand against Nazi domination of the church. In 1934, the League’s leaders founded the Confessing Church, representing a minority of all Protestant pastors in Germany. Its ideology was to resist Nazi coercion and to expose the moral hollowness of the pro-Nazi “German Christian” movement. The Confessing Church did not, however, protest Nazi racial or social policies. Although a very small number of individual German theologians–such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer–opposed the regime, throughout the Nazi era the vast majority of the Protestant church leadership did not challenge the state’s discriminatory legislation and actions. Both the Catholic and Protestant churches did speak up on behalf of Jews who had converted to Christianity or for Jews married to members of their churches, and thereby saved some lives. In addition, the churches protested strongly against the Nazi Euthanasia Program and succeeded in limiting its scope. While the Nazi regime subsequently halted the visible element of this program, it continued in secret.

 Nevertheless, the action of the churches on this issue proved that protest could make an impact on Nazi policy. Nonetheless, neither the Catholic leadership nor the Protestant clerical hierarchy officially protested the persecution of Jews or the horrors of the “Final Solution.” OTHER CHRISTIAN SECTS Sectarian groups were considered politically dangerous because of their adventist, millennial, and international tendencies. Some were banned by the Nazi government and most were subject to constant surveillance by the secret police. The sects were an easier target for the government than the major churches. Nazi policy varied by sect. Some, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses (banned in Prussia in 1933) were persecuted and many adherents were incarcerated in concentration camps. Others, such as New Apostolics, Christian Scientists (banned in 1941), and Seventh Day Adventists, experienced intermittent harassment. Finally, some groups, such as the Mormons, were ignored or even viewed with some favor. Virtually all Christian sects were at some point accused of harboring Marxists or other “enemies of Germany.”

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005206

Source:  Erich Ludendorff, Kriegführung und Politik (Berlin, 1922),  pp. 332-42.  Translated by Richard S. Levy.]

“In place of the masses organized to disrespect state authority we need a social construct  based on the spirit of true comradeship and on a personal sense of responsibility for each other and for the German people and Fatherland.   In our national economy we need a feeling for the Nation; we need to take steps to elevate and ennoble agricultural production, to settle broad sectors of the people on their own land and in their own dwellings, to preserve the foundation of both the family and the state.”

http://www.h-net.org/~german/gtext/kaiserreich/ludendorff.html

September 16, 1919
“Dear Herr Gemlich,

The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual Jew leaves–almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles, or Jewish Americans but always as German, Polish, or American Jews. Jews have never yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman. It’s the same with the Jew who lives among us and is forced to make use of the German language. He does not thereby become a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important for the survival of this race, settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or non-Jew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion.

Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding, Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived. And thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non- German, alien race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving. Nevertheless, it possesses all the political rights we do. If the ethos of the Jews is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.

The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money.

The loftiness of a nation is no longer to be measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual powers, but rather by the wealth of its material possessions.

This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the Jew who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of “His Majesty” and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the “majesty of the people,” and recognizes only the majesty of money.

He destroys the character of princes with byzantine flattery, national pride (the strength of a people), with ridicule and shameless breeding to depravity. His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.

In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.

The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combatting and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.

For both these ends a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.

The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great portion of our people recognizes that a changed state-form cannot in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation.

And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities with an inner sense of responsibility.

But these facts deny to the Republic the essential inner support of the nation’s spiritual forces. And thus today’s state leaders are compelled to seek support among those who draw the exclusive benefits of the new formation of German conditions, and who for this reason were the driving force behind the revolution–the Jews. Even though (as various statements of the leading personalities reveal) today’s leaders fully realized the danger of Jewry, they (seeking their own advantage) accepted the readily proffered support of the Jews and also returned the favor. And this pay-off consisted not only in every possible favoring of Jewry, but above all in the hindrance of the struggle of the betrayed people against its defrauders, that is in the repression of the antisemitic movement.

Respectfully,
Adolf Hitler “

http://www.h-net.org/~german/gtext/kaiserreich/hitler2.html

MENDEN-BARGE, Germany, October 5, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The mass grave of 22 children and 29 adults thought to have been victims of the Nazi government’s Euthanasia program, has been discovered in the cemetery of a Catholic church in the village of Menden-Barge.

BBC news reports that state prosecutor Ulrich Maass said the authorities are looking for evidence and witnesses but it would be difficult to prosecute anyone 61 years after the war.

The grave site is near a hospital once run by Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, who headed Action T-4, the Nazi state euthanasia program that “compassionately” murdered hospitalized handicapped infants, children, elderly and mentally ill people and even veterans before it was ordered stopped.

The T-4 program allowed the Nazi’s to develop the gas chamber technology that was used on a large scale in the death camps such as Auschwitz. The excavation of the Menden-Barge cemetery is still under way.

“We assume that these were victims of the Nazi regime,” said Maass who confirmed that the children’s’ bodies, three of which showed signs of having had physical handicaps, had been thrown haphazardly into the grave without coffins.

Reuters interviewed local church historian Theo Ostermann who said that the people in the village had known that euthanasia was being practiced at the local clinic.

Although modern euthanasia promoters naturally shun the comparison, US scholar Henry Friedlander in his landmark book, “The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from Euthanasia to the Final Solution,” chronicled the progress of the eugenics philosophy from sterilization of the “unfit” to the T-4 program to the Holocaust.

Friedlander shows in his book how widely accepted the euthanasia ideologies were among the scientific and academic elite. The same elite now again pushing for a new euthanasia movement is supported by some of the scientific world’s most famous names, including Princeton University’s bioethics guru, Peter Singer and James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of DNA.

The current eugenics movement is working around the world to bring in laws to allow the killing of handicapped children and sick people.

Currently Belgium, the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon have laws allowing physicians either to kill patients directly or prescribe lethal doses of medication. Other jurisdictions, such as Switzerland, have legal loopholes that allow passive or active euthanasia and Britain has a powerful euthanasia lobby working through the House of Lords towards legalization.

Fellow Christians! In the pastoral letter of the German bishops of June 26, 1941, which was read out in all the Catholic churches in Germany on July 6, 1941, it states among other things: It is true that there are definite commandments in Catholic moral doctrine which are no longer applicable if their fulfillment involves too many difficulties.

However, there are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from war and legitimate self-defense. On July 6, I already had cause to add to the pastoral letter the following explanation: for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called ‘worthless life,’ that is, kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state.

I am reliably informed that lists are also being drawn up in the asylums of the province of Westphalia as well of those patients who are to be taken away as so-called ‘unproductive national comrades’ and shortly to be killed. The first transport left the Marienthal institution near Münster during this past week.

German men and women, section 211 of the Reich Penal Code is still valid. It states: ‘He who deliberately kills another person will be punished by death for murder if the killing is premeditated.’

Those patients who are destined to be killed are transported away from home to a distant asylum presumably in order to protect those who deliberately kill those poor people, members of our families, from this legal punishment. Some illness is then given as the cause of death. Since the corpse has been burnt straight away, the relatives and also the criminal police are unable to establish whether the illness really occurred and what the cause of death was.

However, I have been assured that the Reich Interior Ministry and the office of the Reich Doctors’ Leader, Dr. Conti, make no bones about the fact that in reality a large number of mentally ill people in Germany have been deliberately killed and more will be killed in the future.

The Penal Code lays down in section 139: ‘He who receives credible information concerning the intention to commit a crime against life and neglects to alert the authorities or the person who is threatened in time…will be punished.’

When I learned of the intention to transport patients from Marienthal in order to kill them, I brought a formal charge at the State Court in Munster and with the Police President in Munster by means of a registered letter which read as follows: “According to information which I have received, in the course of this week a large number of patients from the Marienthal Provincial Asylum near Munster are to be transported to the Eichberg asylum as so-called ‘unproductive national comrades’ and will then soon be deliberately killed, as is generally believed has occurred with such transports from other asylums. Since such an action is not only contrary to the moral laws of God and Nature but also is punishable with death as murder under section 211 of the Penal Code, I hereby bring a charge in accordance with my duty under section 139 of the Penal Code, and request you to provide immediate protection for the national comrades threatened in this way by taking action against those agencies who are intending their removal and murder, and that you inform me of the steps that have been taken.”

I have received no news concerning intervention by the Prosecutor’s Office or by the police…Thus we must assume that the poor helpless patients will soon be killed.

For what reason?

Not because they have committed a crime worthy of death. Not because they attacked their nurses or orderlies so that the latter had no other choice but to use legitimate force to defend their lives against their attackers. Those are cases where, in addition to the killing of an armed enemy in a just war, the use of force to the point of killing is allowed and is often required.

No, it is not for such reasons that these unfortunate patients must die but rather because, in the opinion of some department, on the testimony of some commission, they have become ‘worthless life’ because according to this testimony they are ‘unproductive national comrades.’ The argument goes: they can no longer produce commodities, they are like an old machine that no longer works, they are like an old horse which has become incurably lame, they are like a cow which no longer gives milk.

What does one do with such an old machine? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What does one do with a lame horse, with such an unproductive cow?

No, I do not want to continue the comparison to the end–however fearful the justification for it and the symbolic force of it are. We are not dealing with machines, horses and cows whose only function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for man. One may smash them, one may slaughter them as soon as they no longer fulfil this function.

No, we are dealing with human beings, our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters. With poor people, sick people, if you like unproductive people.

But have they for that reason forfeited the right to life?

Have you, have I the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognized by others as productive?

If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill ‘unproductive’ fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! If one is allowed to kill the unproductive people then woe betide the invalids who have used up, sacrificed and lost their health and strength in the productive process. If one is allowed forcibly to remove one’s unproductive fellow human beings then woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids. If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill ‘unproductive’ fellow humans–and even if initially it only affects the poor defenseless mentally ill–then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people, in other words for the incurably sick, the people who have become invalids through labor and war, for us all when we become old, frail and therefore unproductive.

Then, it is only necessary for some secret edict to order that the method developed for the mentally ill should be extended to other ‘unproductive’ people, that it should be applied to those suffering from incurable lung disease, to the elderly who are frail or invalids, to the severely disabled soldiers. Then none of our lives will be safe any more. Some commission can put us on the list of the ‘unproductive,’ who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves.

Who will be able to trust his doctor any more?

He may report his patient as ‘unproductive’ and receive instructions to kill him. It is impossible to imagine the degree of moral depravity, of general mistrust that would then spread even through families if this dreadful doctrine is tolerated, accepted and followed.

Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God’s Holy Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ which God proclaimed on Mount Sinai amidst thunder and lightning, which God our Creator inscribed in the conscience of mankind from the very beginning, is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated and permitted to go unpunished.

Cardinal Clemens von Galen – August 3, 1941

The Catholic Church continues to act in a dastardly way. A number of pastoral letters have been laid before me which are so unrealistic and treacherous that nothing need be added. Nevertheless we shall not proceed against them. Let the “skypilots” [pfaffen] have their say: we’ll present our bill to them after the war. “

March 26, 1942, p. 146

It’s a dirty low thing for the Catholic Church to continue its subversive activity in every way possible and now even to extend its propaganda to Protestant children evacuated from regions threatened by air raids. Next to the Jews these politico-divines are about the most loathsome riff-raff that we are still sheltering in the Reich. The time will come after the war for an over-all solution of this problem. Only one can be the master in the state, either the Church of the state itself. National Socialism is faced with the task of establishing supremacy uncompromisingly over the political claims of the Church.

April, 16 1943, p. 331

“In St. Hedwig’s Hospital I have been able once again to observe the excellent order and splendid management of such a denominational hospital. I am very glad I forbade the closing of denominational hospitals in Berlin. They are very serviceable. The nuns should be allowed to continue their nursing. Here they can’t do any harm; on the contrary, they are true benefactors of suffering humanity.”

[It is interesting to note that Goebbels, when his personal health is involved, does not go to a Nazi hospital, with the so-called "Brown Sisters" in charge, but to a Catholic institution.]

 May 12, 1943, p. 375

“The Fuehrer spoke very derogatorily about the arrogance of the higher and lower clergy. The insanity of the Christian doctrine of redemption really doesn’t fit at all in our time. Nevertheless there are learned, educated men, occupying high positions in public life, who cling to it with the faith of a child. It is simply incomprehensible how anybody can consider the Christian doctrine of redemption as a guide for the difficult life of today. “

“February 14, 1942,
World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe at the same time as Bolshevism. The Fuehrer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness. “

http://www.discussanything.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-22942.html

March 27, 1942, p. 147

“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not be describe here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to liquidate whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.

The former Gauleiter for Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. A judgement is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophesy which the Fuehrer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. ON e must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life and death struggle and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution of this of this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitate by condition and therefore inexorable. Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.

The ghettos that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government will now be refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich. This process is to be repeated from time to time. There is nothing funny in it for the Jews, and the fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe — and that’s only right.”

December 11, 1941.

Source:
Department of State Bulletin, December 13, 1941.
Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, 1941