Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (87 page)

The significance of the mostly hidden struggles in the districts around Trier would become quite apparent in 1935 when Hitler abruptly re-claimed control of the Rhineland for Germany. Though a first step toward war, his move was widely supported in the region because his local allies had helped prepare the people for it. One of those allies was Bishop Bornewasser, who himself marked the distance German Catholics had come from the day when his predecessor, Bishop Eberhard, had suffered an imprisonment that probably killed him. That is why Bornewasser's support of the Nazi slate in the March 1933 election—again, opposing the Catholic Center Party—was so important. Once Hitler came fully into power that spring, however, Bornewasser's support, among Catholics, would become far from unique. In the Trier Cathedral, before a congregation of Catholic youth, the bishop declared that "with raised heads and firm step we have entered the new Reich and we are prepared to serve it with all the might of our body and soul."
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This is the context in which to understand how the impulse of Bishop Korum, who in 1891 brought German Catholics to Trier to celebrate the Church's victory over and against the government, could be reversed in a generation by Bishop Bornewasser's invitation to Catholics to come and celebrate the Church's alliance with the government. The bishop gave ultimate expression to his enthusiasm by inviting Hitler himself to come to Trier for the solemn exhibition of the Seamless Robe. On July 20, the very day the
Reichskonkordat
was signed in Rome, Hitler sent his regrets.
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Ironically, his declining to join the celebration probably had to do with his reluctance to be too closely identified with the Catholic Church, which, after all, had unsuccessfully lobbied for just such a concordat throughout the thirteen years of the Weimar Republic. German Catholics, aware of Hitler's own Catholic roots, had reason to take the treaty as a signal that their long ordeal of second-class citizenship, dating to the Kulturkampf, was coming to an end.

In Trier, Catholics were disappointed that Hitler would not attend. In his place, however, he sent the Catholic favorite, the man who had negotiated the
Reichskonkordat.
"Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen was among the pilgrims to the Cathedral of Trier," a contemporary account reports, "where the holy vestments of the Savior were exhibited late in July in the presence of 25,000 other pilgrims from all parts of the country. Colonel von Papen officially represented President von Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler at Trier."
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Bishop Bornewasser and Papen together sent a telegram to Hitler on July 24 reconfirming their "steadfast participation in the work of resurrecting the German Reich."
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The concordat's significance to Hitler at that crucial moment is hard to overemphasize. "The long drive against the alleged atheistic tendencies of our Party is now silenced by Church authority," one Nazi Party organ crowed. "This represents an enormous strengthening of the National Socialist government."
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We saw that
L'Osservatore Romano
had refuted the claim that the concordat meant Church approval of Nazism, but the German bishops made it seem otherwise. The full import of the Vatican agreement with the Third Reich was perhaps best described by a later dispatch from those same bishops. They sent it from their formal meeting at Fulda two eventful years later. On August 20, 1935, the prelates defended Pius XI (1922–1939) by presuming to remind Hitler that His Holiness had "exchanged the handshake of trust with you through the concordat—the first foreign sovereign to do so ... Pope Pius XI spoke high praise of you ... Millions in foreign countries, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have overcome their original mistrust because of this expression of papal trust, and have placed their trust in your regime."
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Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, in a sermon in 1937, declared, "At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat, expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."
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Hitler had other reasons for welcoming the concordat, one to do with his plans for the army, and the other with his plans for the Jews. A "secret annex"
¹⁴
to the treaty, finalized some months after the promulgation and not publicized, granted Catholic clergy an exemption from any conscription imposed on German males in the event of universal military service. Since Germany was still expressly forbidden by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to raise a large army, Hitler could regard this provision as the Vatican's tacit acquiescence before a campaign of German rearmament. As Papen wrote to Hitler at the time, this provision was important for Germany less "for the content of the regulation than for the fact that here the Holy See is already reaching a treaty agreement with us for the event of general military service."
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Papen concluded his brief on the secret annex with a note of smug ingratiation. "I hope this agreement will therefore be pleasing to you."
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We noted earlier that an article in the July 2, 1933, issue of
L'Osservatore Romano
had insisted that no Vatican endorsement of Nazi teachings should be inferred from the concordat,
¹⁷
but Hitler himself saw it otherwise. The treaty with the Holy See had both spiritual resonance and political implication, for it was a world-stage rebuttal to those who accused him of being antireligious, and it established diplomatic recognition from the famously neutral Vatican at a time when other powers were still eyeing him with suspicion.
¹⁸

Especially in hindsight, defenders of the Vatican's readiness to enter into such a treaty with Hitler insist that it was nothing more than realpolitik diplomacy designed to safeguard the political and social rights of Catholics in a hostile climate, a way in which the Church hoped to temper Nazi extremes to the benefit of all concerned. In this view, Pacelli's own wariness at the time of the treaty is emphasized. But is it conceivable that Pacelli would have negotiated any such agreement with the Bolsheviks in Moscow? Gordon Zahn, the American scholar of Hiderera German Catholicism, reports that Cardinal Faulhaber and other bishops dismissed such a notion, and in the act defined the concordat as a Church endorsement of the Nazi regime.
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Pacelli's defenders say he wanted the treaty as a basis for future protests against Nazi excesses, and indeed the Church would use it as such. But to Catholics in Germany at that pivotal time, including leaders like Bornewasser, the concordat was, and would remain, the soul of a compliant Catholic conscience that saw the way clear to support Hitler and his program. Even after the true nature of that program was laid bare, and after numerous provisions of the treaty had been violated, the Vatican would never repudiate the concordat. Many bishops and priests, even through the paroxysms of the war, cited the intact Vatican treaty as a sign of the Third Reich's ongoing legitimacy, allowing—no, requiring—German Catholics to carry out its orders.

Despite the contrasts with the city's earlier prelates, it is probably no surprise that one of Hitler's most enthusiastic backers in 1933 should have been the bishop of Trier. Taking the long view, many Catholics saw the Vatican-Berlin agreement as promising a return to the Sacrum Imperium
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that had been given its first expression by Trier's own Constantine, and that had reached its apogee under the Holy Roman Emperor, whom Trier served as an elector. The shadow of Constantine had never fully lifted from Trier. The
Aula Palatina,
the enormous throne hall of his otherwise ruined palace, had been restored, as we saw, and transformed by the Prussians into a Lutheran church. The golden cross that hung in the vast imperial basilica had never seemed more full of implication.
In hoc signo:
Constantine's vision had changed the religious and martial imaginations forever.

Cross and Eagle, about which we will see more, was the name of the Catholic group—consisting of bishops, priests, theologians, and politicians, including Papen—that saw the advent of the Third Reich as a way to restore the medieval ideal of a united throne and altar. That ideal had been lost to the hated forces of Enlightenment liberalism, which, as Catholics told themselves, invariably led to godless Bolshevism. If Hitler was anything, wasn't he the enemy of that?

So Catholic euphoria was widespread in the summer of the concordat. The Te Deum was sung in Catholic churches across the country.
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Once the treaty was formally ratified by both governments in September, a pontifical Mass was celebrated by the papal nuncio in an overflowing cathedral in Berlin. Above the worshipers, flags emblazoned with the papal colors and the swastika hung side by side. It was a long way—although a short time—from the prohibition of the Nazis' wheel of a broken cross in Church. The preacher at the Berlin Cathedral that day praised Hitler as "a man marked by his devotion to God, and sincerely concerned for the well-being of the German people."
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At least one bishop enlisted in the SS.

Obviously, these churchmen had been deluded by Hitler, and they had deluded themselves. Soon enough, Hitler's pressure on Catholic youth groups, his assault on confessional schools, and his curtailment of Church prerogatives theoretically protected by the concordat would prompt criticism from a minority of bishops, including Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, who delivered a series of Advent sermons rebutting Nazi assaults on "Jewish Scriptures."
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A number of heroic priests, like Alfred Delp and Bernhard Lichtenberg, would boldly challenge Nazi policies: Delp was hanged in Berlin, and Lichtenberg "died en route to Dachau."
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But in the end, a very small percentage—1.5 percent—of German priests were imprisoned during the war.
²⁵
About a thousand priests died in Dachau, but of those nearly nine hundred were Poles,
²⁶
almost certainly interned not for protests but as part of the Nazi campaign against the Polish intelligentsia. Where nine of twelve bishops of Prussia alone had been exiled in the Kulturkampf, the total number of Catholic bishops driven from their seats during the twelve years of the Nazi onslaught was three.
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The spirit of resistance that had given rise to the fervor around the apparitions at Marpingen would even be rekindled when Catholics began to feel Hitler's vise closing on them, too, with Catholic pilgrims returning to the village, but not in anything like the original numbers.
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Ultimately, with the 1937 encyclical
Mit Brennender Sorge
("With Burning Sadness"), the Nazi regime would draw chastisement from Pope Pius XI himself, a rebuke the news of which Hitler tried to keep from Germans, perhaps especially Catholics. The encyclical complains primarily about Hitler's violations of the concordat.
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Only in hindsight is it possible to grasp the truly demonic character of Hitler's ambition, and it is possible to see early Church support for him as an attempt, however naive, to influence the course of his movement. But it is important to acknowledge that the real nature of Hitler's purpose in one regard was evident at the start—his purpose with regard to Jews. His declaration of war on "non-Aryans" was blatant. Not only was the rhetoric of his earliest writings and speeches built around attacks on Jews, but the very first organized action of the National Socialist government, on April 1, 1933—less than a month after the election and little more than a week before the Enabling Act exempted it from all constitutional restraints—was an open assault on Jews everywhere in Germany. An apparently random Nazi brutality had been demonstrated before, especially by the party's private armies, the SA and the SS, but now the so-called boycott of Jewish businesses was launched across the nation. Jewish establishments and individual Jews were subjected to cruel and often violent pressures. The Nazis, that is, celebrated the final unification of the party and the state by going after Jews. Shops were not just boycotted but burned. Jews were not just shunned but attacked. It was a "dress rehearsal," to use Arendt's phrase, for the awful assault of Kristallnacht five years later.

The Catholic Church's response to this display of government-sanctioned Nazi brutality consisted of a foreboding silence and of an effort to protect Catholics, particularly Catholic converts from Judaism, at the expense of Jews. One cardinal, defending his refusal to condemn the April 1 boycott, declared that it was "a matter of economics, of measures directed against an interest group which has no very close bond with the Church."
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Nor was there any recorded Church protest against the next large spectacle of anti-Jewish violence, which took place a month later, while the concordat negotiations were in their final stage. As the regime moved to control every aspect of life in Germany—the policy of "coordination,"
Gleichschaltung
"
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—the works of non-Aryan writers, however loosely defined, were quickly targeted. Jewish authors—Brecht, Kafka, Heine, Hesse, and dozens of others—were declared "degenerate." In early May, books were burned by the cartload, as copies of the Talmud had been over the centuries, in city squares across Germany.
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The burning in Cologne occurred on May 5, in Berlin on May 12. Huge rallies accompanied the orgiastic destruction, with professors joining brownshirts to denounce the authors. Some ordinary Germans protested these actions. They were arrested. Within weeks of the end of that summer of the concordat, more than twenty-six thousand "police prisoners" were being held in cellars, pens, and the first rudimentary concentration camps, which were hovels surrounded by stretches of mud and barbed wire.
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