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Germany’s Catholics: neither cowed nor craven
Francis Phillips hails a stunning study of Catholic resistance to National Socialism

16 October 2009

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted Nazism to the death

The Cross and the Third Reich
By John Frain
Family Publications, £19.95

John Frain subtitles this book, Catholic Resistance in the Nazi Era and at first glance it might seem a well-trodden path, adding little to what is already known. For instance, negative publicity given to the alleged “silence” of Pope Pius XII during the War has led to a succession of scholarly studies of his attitude and behaviour towards Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. But Frain’s terms of reference are wider than this; he examines every level of Catholic opposition to Hitler, particularly in Germany: the electorate, the bishops, courageous individuals, as well as Vatican diplomatic initiatives.

The author, who modestly describes himself as “neither historian nor theologian”, simply a Catholic layman, has done the common reader like me a great service. I must confess that in my laziness and ignorance I had assumed that, with the exception of a few brave souls such as Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Münster, most German Catholics were cowed and craven before and during the War; indeed, so anti-Communist as to be warily sympathetic to the Nazis.

With his mastery of the facts, the result of painstaking and careful research, Frain completely demolishes this assumption. Beginning with the question, “Why did one of the most intellectually gifted and industrious nations in the world become subjugated to an indolent, argumentative, autocratic, tedious habitué of a Viennese doss-house?” he provides a brief introduction to the state of Germany after the First World War. Then asking a related question: “What did the Church actually do?” During the period under scrutiny, he makes the interesting discovery that it did a great deal, even well before Hitler came to power in 1933.

Between 1920 and 1933 the German bishops regularly warned their flocks (a third of the population) that the National Socialists (Nazis) were “totalitarian, racist, pagan and anti-Christian”. This view was reflected in the 1933 elections; the Nazi vote in the heavily Catholic areas of the Rhineland and Bavaria was significantly lower than in the (Protestant) north and east. However, discussing Protestant support for Hitler, Frain is careful to distinguish between the powerful and dangerous German Christian movement, with its 600,000 members, its anti-Semitism and its advocacy of a “Reichskirche”, and the Confessing Church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, which was implacably opposed to this.

It hardly needs to be said that there was no Catholic equivalent of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement.

Looking at the record of the Church’s pastors during this time the author states that in 1932 there were 21,000 Catholic priests in Germany, that over 8,000 of these openly clashed with the Reich, that several hundred were documented as having died at Nazi hands, and that there were many more, undocumented, whose heroic resistance is known only to God. It is in this context that the much-criticised Concordat of 1933 between the Vatican and Nazi Germany must be seen; among other things it did save Catholic clergy “from the moral dilemma of serving a regime hostile to the Church and often barbaric in countries where it invaded”; it also exempted Catholic doctors and nurses from forced participation in the sterilisation programmes.

Frain also explains why the view of Pius XII as either “Hitler’s Pope”, or at the least a moral coward, is utterly baseless. Learning from his bishops that his public utterances, and the Vatican Radio broadcasts, were causing savage Nazi reprisals against the very people he was trying to protect, the Pope was forced to act largely through secret diplomatic channels involving his nuncios. Many references from Jewish historians and Allied diplomats are cited in evidence here. Yet the Vatican also acted swiftly when necessary, silencing Theodor Innitzer, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, when he publicly supported the Nazi annexation of Austria. Again, in Slovakia there were no deportations of Jews between October 1942 and September 1944 because of Vatican efforts.

Having examined the conduct of the Church as a whole, the author describes the lives of some individual Catholics who were prepared to die rather than surrender to the Nazi ideology. Several of these men and women, like Bishop von Galen, Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan; Edith Stein, philosopher and later Carmelite; or Franz Jägerstatter, the Austrian farmer, are already familiar figures: others, like Fr Jacques Bunel, Sister Restituta Kafka, Marcel Callo, Karl Leisner and Alfred Delp SJ, are less well-known. Reading Frain’s brief yet compelling account of these models of heroic virtue is an inspiring testimony of courage and the cross. Fr Bunel’s story has been told in the film Au Revoir Les Enfants by Louis Malle, a former pupil at his school. Restituta Kafka, nun and nurse, was imprisoned and then guillotined simply for praying with dying patients and putting crucifixes in every room of the Mödling hospital, south of Vienna, where she worked; her surgeon, a Nazi, informed on her.

Dr Frain has had a distinguished career in industry and education. In retirement he has put his gifts at the service of the Church in this robust and readable study. Making use of the works of secular historians such as Michael Burleigh, Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir John Keegan, as well as Church archives, his book is measured and objective rather than defensive in tone. It is a work of imagination as well as scholarship; the author well evokes the atmosphere of fear, making pilgrimages to several haunting arenas of death and tramping the entire perimeter of the Birkenau concentration camp, commenting: “Its vastness is terrifying. This site alone could well have become the killing ground for all Hitler’s victims.” He read Mein Kampf, finding it a “turgid tome” written in a “slovenly, illogical and pretentious style”. His own writing is clear, muscular and free from cliché.

My only (reluctant) criticism is that he has not quite mastered the intricacies of compiling an index; for instance, Michael Burleigh is puzzlingly given only two page references; I added, in pencil, a further 13.