Iron Curtain (48 page)

In Hungary, the party also tried to appear accommodating, though the word “appear” must be stressed. In November 1945, Mátyás Rákosi told a Central Committee meeting dedicated to church matters that “We have to work carefully, we have to see how and in which form we attack.”
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“Working carefully,” at least in the early days, meant that Hungarian communists never assaulted the church openly and that communist brigades helped restore bomb-damaged churches, for which they were publicly praised.
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Yet at the same time, church leaders were portrayed in the official media as corrupt “reactionaries” seeking to restore the Horthy regime.

Attacks on the churches were also carried out under the guise of other programs. During land reform, the Hungarian state deliberately deprived the Roman Catholic Church of more than three-quarters of its land and the Protestant churches of nearly half.
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In public, the authorities described this confiscation of church property as a legitimate by-product of economic reform rather than an open attack on religion. No compensation was paid. Priests and other church functionaries assumed the dubious status of state employees as religious organizations became completely dependent on state subsidies for the first time.

But by the end of 1947, most of the region’s communist parties, knowing they remained unpopular, prepared to abandon any remaining nuances. Young people were taking too long to become enthusiastic communists, and religious people were not dying out fast enough. In September, József Révai, at the time responsible for ideology, had already begun to speak of “terminating the clerical reaction.”
²⁸
In October, the regional Polish secret police bosses gathered in Warsaw to hear
Julia Brystiger, head of Department V, the secret police department responsible for the clergy, declare that “the battle against the enemy activity of the clerics is without a doubt one of the most difficult tasks in front of us.” Brystiger, one of a handful of deeply loathed secret policewomen, laid out several new methods of attack, ranging from a “systematic” investigation and penetration of the church in the provinces to the recruitment of clergy as informers and the use of “youth activists” to monitor the religiosity of teachers and educators.
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In due course, these tactics became standard practice across the bloc.

In East
Germany, both the secret police and the ordinary police force, the Volkspolizei (People’s Police), wasted little time in refocusing attention on “enemies” in the
religious youth groups. By December 1949, the Volkspolizei’s general inspector had already identified what remained of the Junge Gemeinde, the Protestant youth movement, as a hostile organization whose central goal was the destruction of the
Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ). In an exchange with the FDJ leadership, the inspector declared that “If criminals meet under the cover of a religious cult, we will of course decisively lash out against them with all legal means.”
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Rapidly, the language grew even harsher. Walter Ulbricht called the Junge Gemeinde an “agents’ center” that is “in touch with the so-called youth groups” in West Berlin. In
East Berlin, administrators received a special directive to “thwart and destroy the work being carried out by reactionary groups within the church and the Junge Gemeinde, on behalf of foreign imperialists, to damage socialist construction, to sabotage the struggle for peace, and to prevent Germany unity.”
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Before 1949, harassment had been focused on a handful of influential Christian youth leaders. But now antichurch propaganda became more blatant. The regime banned the
Kreuz auf der Weltkugel
—a cross atop a circle, symbolizing the globe—the Junge Gemeinde’s symbol. FDJ gangs appeared at church meetings and heckled those inside. (One FDJ report describes with satisfaction a “steeplechase of motorcycles” that had been organized around one Christian group meeting.
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) The FDJ also organized meetings in high schools designed to “protest against fascist terror in West Germany” and to “uncover and dismiss hostile elements” from the premises, which meant Catholic and Protestant students. School “tribunals” interrogated children suspected of having religious leanings. These were huge, public occasions and often very dramatic. One such spectacle took place in a school theater in
Wittenberg: students who refused to join the FDJ or insisted upon going to church were named, condemned, and expelled one by one, before the whole school. Many left the stage weeping.
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In 1954, the state would even introduce the
Jugendweihe
, a secular alternative to Protestant confirmation services, a ceremony that was supposed to impart to young people “useful knowledge in basic questions of the scientific world-view and socialist morality … raising them in the spirit of socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, and helping them to prepare themselves for active participation in the construction of developed socialist
society and the creation of the basic preconditions for the gradual transition to communism.” Pastors protested, but although only about a sixth of young people participated at first, by the 1960s more than 90 percent would take part in this ceremony.
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Many children were expelled from school for refusing to publicly renounce religion—estimates vary from 300 to 3,000—and far more were expelled from universities. Some made their way to West Germany or West Berlin, where the West German Interior Ministry arranged tuition and accommodation for those forced to flee school, a policy that naturally increased the paranoia in the eastern half of the country.
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Others from religious famlies simply never tried to attend a university at all. Having refused to join the FDJ in school,
Ulrich Fest, the
Wittenberg shopkeeper, knew he and his friends weren’t ever going to qualify for higher education: “We were a very small group that somehow mutually thought, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ ”
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Events followed a similar pattern in Hungary: first dark talk of espionage, then harassment, bans, and arrests. Rákosi kicked off 1948 by agreeing with Révai “by the end of this year we have to terminate the clerical reaction.”
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Hundreds of church schools were nationalized within months, sometimes in the face of bitter objections. In an infamous incident in the village of Pócspetri, locals gathered to protest at the loss of their school and the police attacked them with clubs. A gun went off, killing one of the policemen. Afterward, a local notary and a priest were arrested, and the notary was subsequently sentenced to death and executed. Suspicions (for which there is now some documentary support) that the entire incident had been provoked and organized by the political police have hung over the case ever since. At the time, the incident was used in the propaganda war against church schools. In June, more than 6,500 of them were forced to relinquish their religious identity and become state schools.
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The closure of monasteries followed soon afterward. Nuns in the city of Győr were given six hours to pack up and leave. In southern Hungary, 800 monks and some 700 nuns were removed from monasteries in the middle of the night, told they could take 25 kilos of books and clothing, placed into transport trucks, and removed by force. Across the country, some 800 nuns were told they could no longer work in hospitals—a decree that forced many of these hospitals to cut services. Some nuns were subsequently sent back to their families or to work in factories, others were eventually deported to
the Soviet Union.
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Sándor Keresztes, a former Catholic politician who was himself under constant police surveillance—he had eight children, which was itself considered suspicious—quietly hired a group of nuns and set them to work repairing nylon stockings, in order to enable them to stay together and not starve.
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In Poland, the party’s change of tactics in 1948 coincided with the death of the Catholic primate
August Hlond. With his passing, the widespread conviction among clergy that the regime would soon fail, and that the Western powers would have to force the USSR out of Eastern Europe, began to fade.
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The church was further demoralized by the arrests of priests, by edicts forbidding the teaching of catechism in any schools, and by the shuttering of seminaries. Catholic hospitals and nursing homes were also closed, along with any remaining charitable organizations. At the beginning of 1950, a new taboo was breached when the regime launched an attack on
Caritas, the most important Catholic charity. Caritas operated 4,500 orphanages, looked after 166,700 orphans, maintained 241 soup kitchens, and distributed
aid from abroad, mostly from the United States, which had helped reconstruct churches, schools, and convents. In the months after the war’s end, Caritas had been one of the few sources of medicine in Poland. But its power, prestige, and independence meant that the party’s attack was especially harsh. In January 1950, the Polish press agency announced that Caritas had fallen under the control of “aristocrats” and Nazi sympathizers, and that most of its leaders were under investigation for misappropriation of funds. Caritas was immediately placed under state administration and its leadership was removed. In effect, the charity was nationalized. Stunned, the Polish episcopate jointly denied all of the charges against Caritas and denounced the attack:

Priests who protested against the nationalization of Caritas were punished severely. One priest who read a protest aloud to his congregation was fined 75,000 zlotys, a fortune at the time.
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After a group of parents in
Katowice wrote a letter opposing the closure of the local Catholic school, priests in the area were repeatedly hauled into the local offices of the secret police. One internal church report noted, “It would be hard to find in the Katowice diocese a priest who had not been called in, and not once but two, three, four, and more times to the State Security, where, after long, sometimes five- or six-hour interrogations, they were forced to sign various protocols and statements.”
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After that, the church leadership discouraged others from staging similar protests. By 1954 there were only eight Catholic elementary schools left in the country, of which six were closing down their operations. The remaining two stayed open only because there were no local alternatives. Catholic hospitals and nursing schools had also been eliminated, along with the last independent religious groups, among them Bratni Pomoc (
Brotherly Aid) the oldest student charitable organization in the country. Some monasteries and convents remained open, but they too were under pressure. Nuns were no longer allowed to study in nursing schools that had formerly belonged to their orders, and the remaining monks were carefully watched. Uniquely in Eastern Europe, the
Catholic University of Lublin did remain open. But its rector was under arrest for blocking the Union of Polish Youth’s organizations on campus, and the faculty was under heavy pressure to conform.
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Across the bloc, priests were arrested in almost arbitrary waves—by 1953 about a thousand were behind bars in Poland—and they were watched with acute suspicion. A parish priest in
Krotoszyn was investigated as a “definite enemy of the current reality, which he reveals in sermons with double meanings, individual conversations, and confessions.”
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An informer in Budapest heard “careful, well-measured,” but nevertheless clear evidence of counter-revolutionary sentiment in a sermon on the heroic behavior of Saint Paul. He also found it suspicious that a church choir performed a “little-known song full of complaints and desperate prayers.”
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Among those incarcerated in Germany were several priests, including
Johannes Hamel in Halle and
Deacon Herbert Dost in Leipzig, both of whom had large youth followings, as
well as lay leaders such as
Erich Schumann, who was charged with violating the German constitution.
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Campaigns to discredit the church were discussed at the highest levels. In Hungary, the Politburo agreed that factory managers should “organize seminars on the role of the church as the main support of capitalism,” and that secret police should launch “whispering campaigns” in workplaces and residential areas that would place the blame for unmet production targets on clerical sabotage.
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But the most terrifying assaults were not those carried out in secret. By the end of the 1940s, the most senior church leaders in the region were also under open attack. In the winter of 1952–53, senior figures in the Archdiocese of Kraków underwent a macabre trial, featuring fabricated evidence, invisible ink, and forged documents.
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The investigation into Archbishop
József Grősz, the second-highest ranking Catholic clergyman in Hungary, also led to arrests of priests and laymen for “armed conspiracy” and terrorist plots.
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Earlier attacks had smeared a Hungarian Calvinist bishop, László Ravasz, and a Lutheran bishop,
Lajos Ordass. The latter was arrested in August 1947 and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of illegally trafficking in foreign currencies.
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Of all of these “criminal” cases, however, two stood out for the obsessiveness and single-mindedness with which they were pursued. These were the attacks on Eastern Europe’s two most important Catholic leaders: Cardinal József Mindszenty, appointed Hungarian primate by the
Vatican in 1945, and
Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, his Polish counterpart, appointed in October 1948.