The German War (26 page)

Detailing the first transport of patients from the Marienthal asylum near Münster, Galen read out the letter he had sent the local police president warning of the intended murders and citing his duty as a citizen, under Article 139 of the Criminal Code, to inform the authorities of ‘the intention to commit a crime against life’. Galen then turned to the central ethical issue at stake, warning what would happen to the old, the frail, and wounded war veterans ‘if you establish and apply the principle that you can kill “unproductive” human beings’. Galen’s sermon made a significant local impression. It was read out in diocesan churches in the Münsterland and circulated widely in clerical circles in Cologne.
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Many of the rumours about medical killing originated in the decentralised, provincial health bureaucracy itself: administrators had to sanction payments for patients in state care and so were able to follow the flow of money towards the killing centres; they also picked up and passed on information from colleagues. This knowledge, some of it detailed, some fragmentary, had circulated in private until Galen decided to use the Church’s independence to give it a public platform. His sermon, with its demagogic directness, flung down an open challenge.
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The reflex reaction of the Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, the Party Secretary, Martin Bormann, and the local Gauleiter, Alfred Meyer, was that Galen should be repressed. Was it better to put him on trial and execute him for treason as a public example, quietly arrest him and send him to a concentration camp, or merely prohibit him from preaching? Local Party activists and functionaries in the Münsterland were outraged, denouncing Galen as a British agent. Goebbels and Hitler were equally incensed by this public attack but, as lapsed Catholics themselves, were also far more aware of the dangers of a hasty response: ‘If any action were taken against the bishop,’ Goebbels apparently said, ‘the population of Münster, and for that matter the whole of Westphalia, could be written off for the duration of the war.’ Hitler agreed that inaction was the wisest course too, although he privately vowed to have Galen’s head once the war was won.
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Through the late summer and autumn of 1941, the Catholic bishops continued to exert pressure. Antonius Hilfrich, Bishop of Limburg, was kept well informed by the clergy at Hadamar, a mere 8 kilometres away, and he joined the Archbishop of Cologne and the Bishop of Paderborn in writing collectively to the Ministers of the Interior, Justice and Church Affairs at the end of August: ‘We consider ourselves obliged to take a public stand against it [medical killing] for the education and enlightenment of the Catholic people, so that our people are not confused about the basis of true morality.’ Three days later, Bishop Bornewasser of Trier followed Galen’s example and preached a sermon in his cathedral against the killing of patients. He returned to the theme a fortnight later, on 14 September, asking, rhetorically, whether paragraph 211 of the Criminal Code was still being enforced in Germany. Galen himself wrote to the clergy in Oldenburg to have his sermon read out there, and in October and November the RAF dropped leaflets with excerpts from it. Bishop Albert Stohr of Mainz used the festival of Christ the King at the end of October to preach to a packed cathedral. On the eve of All Souls, Preysing returned to the theme at St Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, denouncing the big-budget feature film
I Accuse
as a crude piece of propaganda, and drawing a direct link between the box-office hit of the summer and the killing of psychiatric patients.
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The film, directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, dealt with the assisted suicide of a woman who was dying slowly and painfully from multiple sclerosis. The audience found itself alternately placed in the position of the doctor trying to find a cure for her and the jurors in court judging his decision to help her die with dignity. Goebbels had reviewed and rejected all the drafts for crude propaganda films on the subject, settling for this ‘soft sell’ approach. His choice of medium showed that the Propaganda Minister did not think the German people ‘unsentimental’ enough to be told the truth about ‘euthanasia’; they would have to be prepared for it gently. The professional elites involved in the programme saw themselves as simply extending an extreme utilitarianism to the right to life: readiness to work had long been the key criterion influencing judgements on ‘asocials’, ‘wayward’ teenagers, the ‘work-shy’ and other recipients of the attention of welfare authorities and police. But, however great the stigma associated with mental or physical disability, German society was not ready to impose the same sanctions on those who could not work as on those who would not. There was all the world of difference between the lazy and the disabled. Galen’s most potent example was the threat that gravely wounded soldiers might be put to death. When his sermon was read out in the local church at Appelhülsen on 11 August 1941 the women in the congregation began to weep aloud, believing that their sons at the front were now threatened with ‘euthanasia’.
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I Accuse
came out just before Galen preached his devastating sermon, and it reached a national audience. By January 1945, 15.3 million people had gone to see it, but not all necessarily connected the intimate drama revolving around the dilemma of a patient’s choice with the wholesale killing actually under way in the wards of Germany’s asylums. Where people did make the connection, particularly in the Münsterland and Passau, the film flopped. But the fact that it was otherwise very successful indicates that Germany was not fully focused on the reality of medical killing. Both knowledge and protests remained patchy.
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In some places the Security Service did observe a severe collapse of confidence in the public health authorities, especially in Swabia, with ‘many national comrades refusing to take part in the X-ray tests, because they feared that they would be disposed of (euthanasia) as “unproductive” people following the scaremongering sermons of the Bishops of Münster and Trier’. Among Protestants, too, there was considerable disquiet and Galen’s sermon was admired by some members of the Confessing Church. Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg had lodged private protests in July 1940 with the ministers of Church Affairs and the Interior as well as with Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, but no Protestant objected in public. Moreover, apart from one or two cases where Protestant and Catholic directors of psychiatric asylums tipped each other off about imminent visits by ‘T-4’ commissions, the rival Christian confessions did not draw closer together in the face of this challenge.
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In August 1941, Hitler ordered a halt to T-4 killing of adult asylum patients. Yet the Church protests continued because the order could not be made public: after all, the programme of murder itself was a state secret. Prelates had their own reasons for keeping up pressure on the issue at this time. Their principal concern in the summer of 1941 was to defend Church houses and lands. As Alsace and Luxembourg joined the western Polish provinces as areas annexed to the Reich, the government decided that the provisions of the 1933 Concordat with the Church did not apply to these territories. The Gestapo and Party bosses lost no time in falling on the spoils, and during 1940 and 1941 over 300 monasteries and other religious lands and buildings were expropriated. As the practice spread back to the ‘Old Reich’, it provoked strong local protests. In Württemberg, the monasteries at Untermarchtal and Kellenried and their lands were seized. In Bavaria, where seven more foundations were closed, farmers armed with pitchforks turned out to defend the Benedictine Abbey at Münsterschwarzach, whose church had only just been completed. Such direct action remained the exception. Galen decided to speak out when the expropriation of Church property reached his own diocese. In Lüdinghausen, a convent was turned into a state boarding school and ten of the nuns were forced to stay on as cooks, cleaners and laundresses while the others were expelled. The Münster Jesuits were forced to move diocese, and finally monastic property in the town itself was seized in July.
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Galen’s great sermon of 3 August in which he preached against medical killing was the third of three attacking radical Nazi policies: the first two, on 13 and 20 July, were wholly taken up with defending the religious orders from the despoliation of their houses by a secular authority which had abandoned any pretence of obeying the rule of law. Referring to the 161 members of religious orders serving ‘as German soldiers in the field, some of them in the front lines’, he decried the fact that their ‘Heimat is being taken away from them, the convent that is their home is destroyed – ruthlessly and without any justification’. Other bishops openly linked these attacks on the Church with the massacre of the innocent in Germany’s asylums.
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That summer, the conflict between Church and Party ran out of control in Bavaria, almost entirely thanks to the efforts of Adolf Wagner, the Bavarian Minister for Education and Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria. Here the state takeover of Church lands and buildings disturbed an intense, local sense of sacred landscape and inherited order. Next Catholic journals, nurseries and, above all, education became targets for secularisation. Things came to a head when Wagner issued a decree that crucifixes and Christian pictures be removed from schools during the summer holidays. For hardliners like Wagner, it was time to complete the unfinished business of driving the Church out of education. Although Hitler had forbidden the Party from taking measures against the Protestant or Catholic churches for the war’s duration, Wagner could take some comfort from a circular sent by Bormann in June 1941, encouraging the Gauleiter to break the power of the Church. Despite warnings about the unpopularity of the measure from different branches of government as well as ordinary Party members, during the summer and early autumn 389 primary schools in Upper Bavaria lost their crucifixes.
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As opposition mounted, Wagner was forced to rescind the order on 28 August, but in many places local and district Party leaders decided to continue as a matter of prestige and conviction, which led to a series of confrontations with angry crowds in small towns and villages. In the Upper Palatinate town of Velburg, they pushed into the house of the mayor after Sunday Mass on 21 September, holding him down when he reached for his pistol. His wife then handed over the keys to the school so that the protesters could put back the crucifixes. Elsewhere, moderate Party members and local officials frequently added their names to petitions, joined demonstrations and sent in their own reports of events to higher authority. In many towns and villages, mothers organised school strikes or collected money to buy new crucifixes; in a number of cases, they were symbolically installed in the classrooms by soldiers on leave after they had attended a memorial Mass for their dead comrades.
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For Michael Faulhaber, the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich and Freising, the Bavarian crucifix struggle was a perfect opportunity to regain lost ground. In his pastoral letter of 17 August 1941, he contrasted the removal of the crosses from the schools with those planted on the graves of the military dead. Four weeks later, on 14 September, the letter was due to be read again in churches on the Feast Day of the Elevation of the Holy Cross. The threat was enough. Wagner instructed the Education Ministry to climb down and fifty-nine priests who had been arrested for participating in the protests were released. Hitler also intervened, warning Wagner, hitherto one of his most trusted Gauleiters, that he would put him in Dachau if he ever did anything so stupid again. In the months that followed, Wagner lost ground to his political rivals in Bavaria, and in June 1942 he suffered a major stroke; he died two years later. The Nazi radicals within the Party or the SS did not dare initiate an open conflict with the Church again during the war.

Amongst Catholics in the Rhineland and Ruhr, the conflict provoked divided responses. On 2 August, the day before Galen’s momentous sermon on euthanasia, fly-posters went up in Werl, south of Hamm, demanding to know, ‘Why are the German Bolsheviks not being fought? Do our soldiers at the front know nothing of them?’ and calling for ‘Catholics [to] remain united!’ Wives of active Party members complained at the barrage of criticism they endured when they went into shops and businesses. Many saw it as a rehearsal for a full-scale, post-war showdown between the Party and the Church. In mid-September, a comrade passed on a copy of the sermon delivered by the Bishop of Trier to Hans Albring. Like many Catholics, he was moved to compare the threat at home with the satanic foe abroad. After the Church’s previous silence, the bishop’s call had the impact of a ‘letter from the Apostles’, Albring assured his friend, Eugen Altrogge: ‘Believe me, you can’t remain silent about such things any more . . . What these barbarians want to destroy is not just the Church but the spirit of Christianity and German history and culture in general.’
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Both at home and at the front, there was also a significant strand of Catholic opinion which opposed the bishops. Even in the rural district of Tecklenburg in Westphalia, Gestapo informants reported that anti-clerical Catholics considered it ‘quite right’ that monks and nuns ‘should finally be brought into the labour process’. ‘Today,’ they opined, ‘it is the duty of every German to fight and work for victory.’ In the far more secular population of the big cities, Galen was criticised for undermining the unity of the home front, with people asking ‘was it necessary during the war?’ Accusations of betrayal multiplied as the bishops continued their protests through the autumn of 1941, especially after the RAF started dropping thousands of copies of Galen’s sermon over Germany. One Hadamar resident was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp for six months for possessing a copy. When she returned home, she found that she had not only lost her job but that the townspeople shunned her. A number of Catholic soldiers even compared their bishops’ ‘treasonous’ action to a renewed ‘stab in the back’. In a letter to their parish priest on 1 September, three soldiers raged that ‘with your damned smear campaign, you are trying to shatter that home front just like in 1918’. One devout Catholic and Nazi soldier was horrified to pick up a rumour that a monastery in Bochum had hidden a radio to communicate with the British, but he did not think it unlikely. Others declared that they would have nothing more to do with a Church leadership so stubbornly reactionary and unwilling to commit fully to the war effort.
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