One of the many cherished myths of the Left is that the Catholic Church in Germany, and indeed overall, was sympathetic to the Nazis. This is sometimes related to the fact that Hitler was born into a Catholic family.
Nazism, as an ideology, was hostile towards Christianity although the Party did attempt – as did the Soviets during World War II and as the Chinese have done more recently – to establish an official church, the Reich Protestant Church in the German case, under its control. Hitler himself was an atheist; declaring in 1941 that “the dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science.”
The second most popular book to Mein Kampf was Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century which is relentlessly anti-Christian and condemned Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life as a barrier to racial eugenics based on selection, abortion and extermination. “We thus reject Roman thought as unnatural and hostile to life.”
A Hiter Youth song, sung at the Nuremberg Rally of 1934 contained the following verse:
Whatever the Papist priests might try,
We’re Hitler’s children until we die;
We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and holy water vessel!
In power, one of the main targets of the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 was the Catholic conservative Centre Party. Catholic trade unions were forcibly amalgamated into the Labour Front and Catholic activists were sent to prison, the camps and executed. Somewhere in the region of 6,000 clergy were imprisoned and interned.
Interestingly, one of the key tactics in the Nazi attack on the Church were allegations of sexual abuse. Of course, some of these were true but as historian Richard Evans states in his The Third Reich in Power, “blowing it up out of all proportion in the service of a political aim had little or nothing to do with the cases at issue.”
In response to the regime’s repression and ideology, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in March 1937. The Pope condemned Nazi racial theories and its idolatry of the State. He upheld the Kantian view of human beings as of value in themselves, rather than as means within a dehumanised collectivity. That teaching applies as much to Communism as it does to its totalitarian twin.
One of the reasons why the Left, and not just the Stalinist or neo-Stalinist left, is so insistent on lying about the Catholic Church’s attitude to the Nazis is that the Communists were in alliance with the Nazis for a period of two years during the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Two years between August 1939 and June 1941 during which the Nazis and reds partitioned Poland; and during which time the German armies came within an ace of victory in Europe.
The Stalinists had also been happy enough to see the Brownshirts beat up their social democratic rivals in the years leading to the Nazi victory in 1932, and ironically then found themselves in the same prisons and camps and facing the same torturers and executioners as did all of their former enemies on the left and the right.
That period of repression is the subject of a short book by Peadar Laighléis, editor of the Catholic journal Brandsma Review. The book is titled Lights in a Dark Night and is an account of the background to the lives and deaths of “10 martyrs of the Third Reich and their Allies.” All of them met their fate due to their courage in resisting the totalitarian tyranny as priests, nuns, trade unionists and a member of the White Rose student resistance.
I have chosen just three of the ten; Blessed Titus Brandsma, Blessed Georg Hafner, and Blessed Karl Leisner. The reason I have chosen them is because they were all held at Dachau as were over 2,500 priests, most of whom I think were from Poland. I visited Dachau with my daughter in 2000.
We made the error of joining a group which had a tour guide who happened to be Irish. During one peroration he declared to the mostly Australian and American tourists that Ireland had what he described as an “anti-Semitic constitution” during the 1930s. He was of course referring to Article 44 of the 1937 document which had recognised the “special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,” but which also guaranteed the place and protection of the various Protestant denominations and the Jewish Congregation. The Article was deleted by referendum in 1972.
Presumably, this is what the bould tour guide was referring to and I put my hand up and corrected him on that point. This upset him greatly and he launched into a tirade about “Fenians” and somesuch, much to the bemusement of the audience although most of them were looking at me as though I had ruined their visit to history.
An elderly English lady and her daughter were our only allies. “Such piffle,” she declared. “And what a terrible thing to say about his own country.” The daughter told us that they had asked him about Fr. Albert Durand and some RAF men who had been held there. Apparently, he pleaded ignorance of any such men having been at Dachau. Upon reflection, it’s questionable if this was actually ignorance.
Fr. Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite priest who had spent time in Kinsale and in Whitefriars Street, Dublin, one of my Grandmother’s favourite churches at Christmas or indeed any other time, being a Liberties woman. Brandsma was arrested as part of the fallout from the Dutch Church having excommunicated any Catholics who were members of the Dutch collaborationist Nazi party, the NSB.
He was sent to Dachau where he made a great impression both on the other prisoners and on some of the camp guards who he attempted to persuade of the error of their ways. When he became ill he was transferred to the prison hospital where patients were subjected to sometimes horrific medical experimentation by the SS. He was murdered by lethal injection in June 1942. He was canonised by the Catholic Church in 2022.
Blessed Georg Hafner was a priest who had come to the unfavourable attention of the Nazis over his refusal to give the Hitler salute or to take the oath. He was also involved in secretly instructing children for Communion and Confirmation. When he was reported for performing the last rites and funeral for a reformed Party member, he was arrested and sent to Dachau in December 1941 and he died there from malnutrition in August 1942.
Fr. Karl Leisner was a novitiate when he was arrested and sent to Dachau, He was secretly ordained in the camp and only said one Mass there, on St; Stephen’s Day, 1944. It was forbidden to say Mass but other non Catholic prisoners kept the guards distracted while the ceremony took place. Leisner did live to be liberated in April 1945 but the results of his ill treatment at Dachau led to his death in August that year. He was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1996.
Peadar Laighléis’ book is not only very interesting, but serves as a useful antidote to the mistruths about the role of the Catholic Church during that dark period. Peadar is currently conducting further research with a view to expanding the current book, which he hopes to publish more widely in the near future.
He may be contacted about this, and where you may access a copy of the book, at brandsmareview@gmail.com