The Third Reich at War (91 page)

The protesters’ success was evidence of the depth of their convictions. It was also a product of the piecemeal nature of the measures. Had Wagner implemented them in a concerted overnight action they might have stood a better chance of success. Hitler, Goebbels and even Bormann now realized that the final solution of the Church question would have to wait until the war was over. It was simply too distracting and too damaging to national unity and morale to launch such attacks, especially after the war began going badly. By 1942, Protestant church visitation reports in Franconia were saying that all was quiet once more.
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Pressure on active Party members to leave the Church was continuing, but few were heeding the call. On the other hand, the deteriorating situation of Germany during the war did not seem to cause many people to rediscover religion. ‘The seriousness of the times,’ according to the same report, ‘has led only a few isolated members of the parish who have stayed remote from the Church to return to church services. In general, one can observe only a general apathy in most of the population . . . Regrettably, there is a considerable inclination amongst young people to regard the Church as a
quantite’ ne’gligeable.
’
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This suggested that Hitler had some reason to suppose that Christianity would wither away if the Third Reich lasted long enough into the future. Nazi education and indoctrination were taking the younger generation away from it.

Persecution, as experienced above all in 1941, made the Catholic Church hierarchy extremely wary of engaging in public protests against the regime. Those bishops who were concerned about matters such as the ‘Jewish question, treatment of the Russian prisoners of war, atrocities of the SS in Russia etc.’, as an unsigned memorandum discovered later in Cardinal Faulhaber’s files put it, decided to approach the Nazi leadership with their concerns only in private, confining themselves in public to protesting in general terms about the persecution of the Church and the regime’s attacks on the basic rights, the property, the freedom and the lives of German citizens. A public protest to this effect, dated 15 November 1941, was, however, suppressed on the orders of the senior Catholic cleric in Germany, Cardinal Bertram.
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Bertram was more concerned to keep his head down than most, but throughout the war years, Catholic bishops showed little concern publicly for the mass murder of Jews or Soviet prisoners of war. Even Clemens von Galen remained silent. In his famous sermon of 3 August 1941 condemning the euthanasia campaign he had also referred to the Jews, but only by asking rhetorically whether Jesus had only wept over Jerusalem, or whether he wept over the land of Westphalia as well. It was absurd to think, he implied, that Jesus wept only over the people ‘that rejected God’s truth, that threw off God’s law and so condemned itself to ruin’.
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Even though he was indeed approached by at least one Jew in the hope that he would do something to help the Jews, he did and said nothing, not even in private.
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Conrad, Count Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, was perhaps the most persistent advocate within the Catholic Church of a policy of openly condemning the regime’s maltreatment of the Jews. In August 1943 he had a petition to the regime drawn up which he hoped all the Catholic bishops in Germany would sign. Condemning the brutal evacuation of the Jews from Germany, it did not, however, mention their extermination, and only asked for the deportations to be carried out in a manner that respected the human rights of the deportees. But the Catholic bishops rejected the petition, opting instead for a pastoral letter that asked their flock to respect the right to life of people of other races. Preysing approached the Papal Nuncio, only to be told: ‘It is all well and good to love thy neighbour, but the greatest neighbourly love consists in avoiding making any difficulties for the Church.’
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The relative silence of the Catholic Church in Germany reflected not least the growing concern of Pope Pius XII about the threat of Communism, a concern that became greater as the German forces got into difficulties on the Eastern Front and the Red Army began to advance. The Pope had never forgotten his experiences as Papal Nuncio in Munich during the Communist and anarchist revolutions in 1919, events to which he referred when receiving the new German Ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsäcker, in July 1943. As the war went on, Pius XII came to regard the German Reich as Europe’s only defence against Communism, especially after the overthrow of Mussolini and in view of the growing strength of Communist partisan groups in northern and central Italy, and he privately condemned the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. He directed his efforts at using the internationally neutral status of the Vatican to work for a compromise peace that would leave an anti-Communist Germany intact. In pursuit of this goal, he considered it best not to raise his voice against the extermination of the Jews, for fear of compromising the Vatican’s neutrality. Yet this did not prevent him from issuing a series of sharp condemnations of the ‘euthanasia’ programme in letters sent to his bishops in Germany; nor did it stop him from issuing in May and June 1943 public statements of his sympathy with the sufferings of the Polish people, as he had already done in December 1939.
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As he wrote to Preysing in April 1943, the Pope feared that public protests would lead to renewed persecution of the Church in Germany. He was not willing to intervene to help the Jews. A public stance against the killings would not stop them, he thought, and indeed might simply speed them up. With the Germans in Rome, too, open criticism might bring German troops into the Vatican. The most he could do, he told Preysing, was to pray for the ‘non-Aryan or half-Aryan Catholics . . . in the collapse of their external existence and in their spiritual need’. Contrary to what some of his critics have claimed, there is no convincing evidence that Pius XII was an antisemite, or that he had concluded from his experience in Munich in 1919 that Communism was part of a world Jewish conspiracy.
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But on the other hand, he was fully aware by April 1943 that the Jews, including Catholics of Jewish origin, were not just suffering in spiritual and material terms, but were being murdered in vast numbers by the Germans. Pius XII knew, of course, that many Catholic priests in Italy, including some in the Vatican City, were giving refuge to Jews as the Germans began to threaten their existence from the autumn of 1943 onwards. He did nothing to stop such actions, but he took no part in them himself, nor did he utter a single word that might have encouraged priests to undertake them. Ever the cautious career diplomat, Pius XII did what he thought best in the interests of the Catholic Church both in Italy and elsewhere.
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Things were only a little different among German Protestants. On 4 April 1939 the German Christians issued a declaration in Bad Godesberg that affirmed the Church’s ‘responsibility for keeping our people racially pure’ and insisted that there was ‘no sharper contradiction’ than that between Judaism and Christianity. The following month, the Confessing Church replied with a similar document agreeing that ‘the preservation of the purity of our people demands an earnest and responsible racial policy’. Few will have noticed much difference between the two.
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On occasion the Confessing Church did raise its voice in protest. When the Church Chancellery, formally the leading body of the Evangelical Church, together with three bishops, issued an open letter demanding ‘that baptized Non-Aryans stay away from the Church activities of the German congregation’, the leadership of the Confessing Church asked pointedly whether in that case Christ and the Apostles would have been ejected from the Church on racial grounds had they lived in the Third Reich. And as persecution turned to mass murder, one leading Protestant tried to stop the persecution of the Jews. Bishop Theophil Wurm wrote to Goebbels in November 1941, warning him that the campaign against the Jews was helping enemy propaganda. Goebbels threw the letter into his wastepaper basket. Another letter, which Wurm attempted to have passed to Hitler by a senior civil servant, made a similar point in respect of what he called ‘the growing harshness of the treatment of Non-Aryans’.
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On 16 July 1943 Wurm tried again. By this time, as he noted, he had lost both his son and his son-in-law on the Eastern Front. Writing personally to Hitler, he declared that the ‘measures of annihilation’ directed against ‘Non-Aryans’ stood ‘in the sharpest contradiction to God’s Commandment and violate the basis of all Western life and thought: people’s God-given, fundamental right to life and human dignity in general’. Although it was ostensibly a private letter, Wurm had it copied and distributed within the Church. On 20 December 1943 Wurm repeated its main points in a letter to Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery. ‘I hereby caution you emphatically,’ Lammers replied, ‘and request you in future to be most punctilious in remaining within the bounds of your profession.’ Politics were not the bishop’s business. Nobody apart from Wurm attempted such an intervention, and shortly after his protest, he was banned from writing or speaking in public for the rest of the war, though he contined to preach and take services despite the ban.
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III

If the Churches did not openly condemn the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or undertake anything to try to stop it, then what was the attitude of the mass of ordinary Germans in this respect? Finding out about the killings was not difficult. Obviously, news travelled fast to the few Jews who remained in Germany.
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In January 1942 Victor Klemperer was reporting rumours that ‘evacuated Jews were
shot
in Riga, in groups, as they left the train’.
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On 16 March 1942 his diary mentioned for the first time ‘Auschwitz (or something like it), near Königshütte in Upper Silesia, mentioned as the most dreadful concentration camp’.
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By October 1942 he was referring to it as a ‘swift-working slaughterhouse’.
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‘The will to extermination is growing all the time,’ he noted at the end of August 1942.
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The mass murders in Auschwitz and elsewhere had, he noted, ‘now been reported too frequently, and by too many consistent Aryan sources, for it to be a legend’.
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As this suggests, knowledge of the mass killings of Jews, Poles and others in the east was not hard to come by. It could be obtained from a variety of sources. The Security Service of the SS reported in March 1942 that soldiers returning from Poland were talking openly about how the Jews were being killed there in large numbers.
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The Nazi Party Chancellery complained on 9 October 1942 that ‘discussions’ about ‘ “very harsh measures” against the Jews, particularly in the Eastern Territories’ were ‘being spread by men on leave from the various units deployed in the east, who have themselves had the opportunity to observe such measures’.
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Civil servants at many levels of the central Reich administration read the Task Force reports or were in contact with administrators in the east.
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Railway timetable clerks, engine drivers and train drivers and other staff on stations and in goods yards could all identify the trains and knew where they were going. Policemen rounding up the Jews or dealing with their files or their property knew as well. Housing officials who reassigned the Jews’ dwellings to Germans, administrators who dealt with the Jews’ property - the list was almost endless.

Some Germans reacted with open enthusiasm to discrimination against the Jews. After putting on his yellow star, Victor Klemperer experienced for the first time being shouted at in the streets by young members of the Hitler Youth.
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In his minutely detailed account of everyday life as a Jew in Nazi Germany during the war, Klemperer recorded a wide variety of reactions by ordinary Germans on the street as they encountered him wearing the star. While one asked him brusquely ‘why are you still alive, you rogue?’, others, complete strangers, would come up to him and shake him by the hand, whispering ‘you know why!’, before passing quickly on.
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Such encounters became more dangerous after late October 1941, when the Reich Security Head Office ordered the arrest of any German who demonstrated any kind of friendliness towards a Jew in public, along with the arrest and incarceration in a concentration camp of the Jew in question.
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Some persisted, however. Sometimes Klemperer was able to identify friendly workers as ‘old SPD men at least, probably old KPD men’, but he received abuse from other workers too.
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On a visit to the Health Insurance Office Klemperer noticed a worker catching sight of his Jewish star and saying, ‘They should give them an injection. Then that would be the end of them!’
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By contrast, in April 1943 a worker removing the effects of an ‘evacuee’ from the Jews’ House in Dresden where Victor Klemperer lived murmured to him, ‘These damned swine - the things they’re doing - in Poland - they drive me into a rage too.’
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Jewish rations were worse than inadequate, but, while some shopkeepers stuck stony-faced to the rules, others showed some willingness to bend them.
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