I'm sure glad you don't love me that much.
"I want to give you an example of what is actually happening now.
At Marienthal there was a man about fifty-five years old, a peasant from a country parish near Munster—I could give you his name—who for some years had been suffering from some mental disease and has been cared for in the provincial clinic of Marienthal. He was not completely mad, he could receive visitors and was always pleased when his family came to see him.
About a fortnight ago, he had a visit from his wife and one of his sons, a soldier at the front, who was home on leave. The son was very devoted to his sick father. Their parting was not easy, for who could know if they would see each other again, for the son might well fall on the field of battle, fighting for his countrymen.
This son, this soldier, will never see his father again in this world because he has been put on the list of “unproductives”; one of the members of his family who went to see the father at Marienthal was refused admission and was told that by order of the Council of Ministers of National Defence the patient had been removed elsewhere, but no one knew where. An official notice would be sent to the family in a few day’s time.
What will this notice contain? Will it be like other, similar notices, that the man has died, that the body has been cremated, and that the ashes will be handed over on the receipt of money to cover expenses?
And so the son who is now at the front, risking his life for his German countrymen, will never see his father again because these same German countrymen have put him to his death.
The facts I have told you are absolutely true."
(from a homily by Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Munster, given August 3, 1941, at his parish church of St. Lambert’s)