Posted on 12/19/2010 4:37:25 PM PST by Brian Kopp DPM
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Two interesting maps of Germany. On the first, the black areas are those with the highest concentration of Catholics according to the 1934 census:
On the second map, the black areas show the highest concentration of Nazi votes in the 1932 election (white the lowest)
Well fancy that!
The post Catholic Church Conservation:Catholics fiercest anti-nazis in pre-war Germany has larger versions of the maps if you want to see more detail.
Very good. But people these days seem to want to claim that since he was a “catholic” that it means that... what? Well I will leave that to your imagination, as it seems to be with most who love to denigrate the Catholic faith.
Please remove “[and Protestants]” from the title of this thread, if possible, since it seems to be sidetracking some of the posters. Thanks.
Thank you. That was my point.
This is what makes men like Jim Wallis so dangerous. He equates socialism with salvation. He convinces his followers that taking from the rich to give to the poor saves everyone. In reality it dams the taker because he no longer feels a personal responsibility for his own soul.
In the end what you have is a society that feels nothing in the face of immorality because they support socialism and are therefore saved in their thinking.
Look at the years when the nazis were rising to power. There was a great deal of open immorality in Germany at that point.
Well my friend, this is not a book, it is a "thread" and it leads where it will. Sorry.
Hitler was not Catholic, that a is a fact, he hatred the Catholic Church as much as he hatred the Jews, and during the Holocaust as many Christians were murdered as Jews, and they were mostly Catholics and by the thousands clerics and religious male and female, including bishops and others members of the Church hierarchy. To deny those facts, as it was recognized by the founders of Israel, is no more, not less that ignorance or anti-Catholic bigotry.
Unfortunately, many people of good will, lacking reliable information, had fallen victims to this campaign against the Catholic Church.
Hitler, a self-proclaimed pagan, considered the Catholic Church on par with the Jews, as his mortal enemies.
It is documented that Hitler planned for the total obliteration of the Church. For Hitler Jews and Christians were the sources of every evil. “The heaviest blow to humanity” he once said, “was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of Jews.” In his diabolical mind, the extermination of the Jews would be needed for victory. Hitler designed and implemented a plan at Warthegau, in western Poland, to extirpate the Catholic and the Protestant churches from Europe. There is documentation that Count Von Galen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, who was an outspoken critic of the racial and eugenic policies of the Nazis, if it were not for the prominence and prestige of his position, would have been annihilated
In 1942, Pius XII told Fr. Paolo Dezza, rector of the Gregorian University, “They want to destroy the Church and crush it as a toad…there will be no place for the Pope in the new Europe, they say that I am going to America, I have no fear and I shall remain here.” (16) Among the many ideological fundaments shared by the Nazis and the Communist was the hatred for religion, specially the Catholic Church. The only form of worship allowed was the cult to the leader of the totalitarian state. Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty went from a Nazi jail to a Communist jail after the war. There was no respite for Catholics after the War; in fact, the persecution of Catholics increased in the Soviet occupied countries.
In occupied Poland, Arthur Greiser was in charge of the annihilation of the Catholic Church…
Arthur Greiser was in charge of the annihilation of the Catholic Church and the creation of a national German Church loyal to the Führer in Warthegau. The final goal was the complete Germanization of that Polish region, to which end Greiser worked without respite. Bishops were driven out, priests killed or imprisoned. Within a few years one third of the pre-war 2,000 priests were dead and 700 imprisoned; seminaries were closed, the Catholic press and voluntary associations suppressed. The Holy See found itself desperately fighting in two fronts, for the survival of the Jews and for the survival of his own flock. The Church in a beleaguered Poland was being bled to death by the two great scourges of humanity, the Nazis and Communists. In Poland three million Catholics went to their death along with three million Jews at the Nazi’s concentration camps in addition to the millions murdered by the Soviets.
It is documented that, according to Robert M.W. Kempner, former U.S. Deputy Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, among the measures scheduled to follow upon Hitler’s victory were the following: “every Catholic State must select its own Pope”…(and) “the Bishop of Muenster will go before the firing squad one day.” Every propaganda move by the Catholic Church against Hitler’s Reich would have been not only “provoking suicide”, but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and Priests. These and similar threats appeared in the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, the nazi theoretician of racial purity, and in Hitler’s Table Talk.
Millions of Catholics were victims first of the Nazis and later of the Communists.
Most Catholics were anti-Nazi and anti-Communist. We should not forget “the fact that hundreds of thousands of anti-Nazis from communist occupied territories as Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia, were sent by Moscow to German concentration camps, while hundreds of thousands of anti-Stalinists refugees living in Nazis territories were sent by Berlin to the Soviet concentration camps” as part of the Stalin / Hitler’s diabolical pact. Shamefully, the Western democracies did the same after WWII; thousands of anti-Communists who fled the Soviet Union during the war were forcedly deported to the Soviet concentration camps, the dreadful gulags. Entire families opted for suicide rather than deportation.
THE FORGOTTEN VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST. The persecution of Catholics.
Without belittling the unspeakable horrors suffered by Jews, we should not ignore the fact that millions of Catholics were also victims of the Holocaust, as were gypsies, homosexuals, and in much less scale, Orthodox and Protestants. Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe and was the only country where there was a mandatory death penalty for those hiding Jews. Many, who were caught sheltering Jews, were killed in a gruesome manner, such as being publicly burned as a warning to others.
Although not every Catholic was a victim of the Nazis, it is certain that all the Jews were victims of Hitler’s hatred. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was targeted to the total extermination of the Jewish race-an abhorrent and unforgivable crime against humanity.
We should keep in mind the prevailing situation of complete despair throughout Europe at the beginning of the forties. The Germans already occupied Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Norway; and the invasion of the Soviet Union was going on while England was being bombed daily in preparation for the eventual invasion. The United States stayed out of the war until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American naval base in Pearl Harbor. The neutral nations, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden and the Vatican, were the only temporarily remaining free territories. Without any military force, all the Pope had was his powerful moral pulpit to encounter the all powerful and victorious German troops. Although the Vatican was neutral, The Church and its flock were being brutally attacked and decimated in the Nazi’s occupied countries.
According to historian William J. O’Malley, S.J., “to the genocide of six millions Jews we have to add nine to ten millions Slavic victims (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs) who were eliminated-not in war, not as saboteurs, not as guerrillas, but sorely because they were Slavic.” The Nazi’s genocide, based on race, should also include half a million gypsies who, just as the Slavs, were executed because they were not member of the superior race, the Aryans. The Nazis in Poland alone murdered more than 3 million Catholics together with over 3 million Jews. (13)
About 2,800 clergymen were interned between 1940 and 1945, at Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Among them, 2,579 were Catholic clergymen, 109 Protestants, 30 orthodox and two Moslem clergymen. The Catholics came from 38 nations; 1,780 were Polish, 447 German and Austrian, 109 Czech and Slovaks, 50 Yugoslavs, 156 French, 63 Dutch. The auxiliary Polish Bishop of Wladislava died of typhus while imprisoned at Dachau. At least 1034 died in the camp, some victims of medical experimentation by the infamous Dr. Rascher. In 1940, 800 priests died in Buchenwald, 1,200 in 1942 and 3,000 in 1943. And that was just in Buchenwald.
As O’Malley, pointed out, “That figure, surprising as it might be, does not include the clergy or nuns who were shot, beheaded or tortured to death in squares and alleys and jails all over Europe…In France, in February 1944, the Gestapo had arrested 162 priests, of whom 123 were shot or decapitated before ever reaching any camp. According to the International Tribunal at Nuremburg, 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen and 300 at Sachsenhausen, and there were hundreds of other camps in the network. Nor does the total figure of 2,771 take into consideration that one-quarter to one-third of those shipped to any camps often arrived dead.” (14)
Polish Cardinal Stephan Wyszynski, in his prison memoirs, notes that he was the only member of his ordination class who escaped the concentration camps; seven died in Dachau; of the six who survived the concentrations camps, several soon died as the result of torture and medical experimentation. It is estimated that the Nazis imprisoned half of the Polish clergy.
The Pope not only had to answer to the pleas from the Jews, but also to those from his own flock. Quite an extraordinary burden to bear. In March 1942 a shattering letter from the Polish Archbishop Sapieha arrived to the Vatican: “Our condition is in truth most tragic, he wrote to the Pope, deprived of almost all human rights, delivered to the cruelty of men lacking for the most part any human sentiment, we live continuously under horrible terror in constant danger of losing everything, either by trying to escape or by deportation, or incarceration in the so-called concentration camps, from which few come out alive. In these camps thousands and thousands of our brothers are held, without any judicial trial, people wholly innocent. Among them there are many priests, secular and religious…to these things the typhus is now added spreading more and more daily.” (15)
Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage.
Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage. When Msgr. Andrew Szeptyckyi was consecrated as Archbishop of Lwow of the Ruthenians, he asked the Pope during the ceremony, an explicit vocation for martyrdom. With that idea he approached Himmler personally on behalf of the Jews; their fate rent his noble spirit. There were many Catholics such as Oskar Schindler and St. Maximilian Kolbe who in brotherly love risked and even offered their own lives in behalf of the Jews.
The relationship of trust and collaboration during WW II between the Holy See, the Jewish organizations, the Allies’ intelligence services and their governments, including the anti-Nazi German Generals, is well proven and documented. However, there is not the slightest thread of evidence to substantiate the preposterous and vicious allegations raised against Pius XII and the Catholic Church of collaboration or sympathizing with the Nazis.
Did the Church do enough to save the Jews? As usual those who do the less complain the most and those who do the most always think they could have done even more. When Michael O’Carroll, author of the scholar book “Pius XII: Greatness Dishonoured” related in the Foreword that in 1957 he met Dr. Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel, and he told him with emotion of an audience he had with the Pope and how they discussed the prophet Ezechiel. “My blessing to him” said the saintly old man, and O’Carroll promised to be the bearer of the message of his goodwill. When O’Carroll gave the message to Pius XII he added “I think Jews everywhere are grateful for what you did for them during the war.” “I wish I could have done more” was the Pope’s reply.
On February 28, 1945, the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent a letter of gratitude to the
Apostolic Nuncio in Rumania, Msgr. Andrea Cassulo, stating that: “The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living prove of divine Providence in this world.” (31)
Rabbi Herzog’s heartfelt words should suffice to forever end the slanderous attacks to the memory of the great protector of the Jews, Pius XII and the Catholic Church.
Those testimonies aforementioned, as powerful as they might be, are just a few samples of the hundreds of messages of gratitude sent to Pius XII by Jews from around the world. There are at least 4 to 5 million descendants of those 860,000 Jews around the world whose lives were saved by Pius XII and the Catholic Church. They should be able to bring to light much more valuable documentation if they were to delve into their family’s historical records, the Israeli’s archives, and so many other serious, unbiased, Jewish scholarly research in this matter.
In Pius XII’s own words in an address given on June 13, 1943, he said: “Our speeches and messages will not be able to be crossed out or run down by anyone, neither in their intentions nor essence. Everyone has been able to hear them as words of truth and peace…The Church is not afraid of the light of truth, neither of the past, the present, nor the future.” (32)
To those seeking the truth, what a better witness than the testimony of Albert Einstein, the great Jewish physicist, who had first hand experience of the horrors of Nazism? In 1944 he said: “Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers…they too were mute. Only the Church,” Einstein concluded, “stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth…I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration…and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.”(33)
Just as the evils of the Holocaust must never be forgotten, neither should the kindness of those spiritual brothers from another faith who tried to help the Jews, at the risk of their own lives, under the most enormously dangerous travails be forgotten. The truth will prevail and with it, a greater understanding and brotherhood among Jews and Catholics.
It pays to READ TITLES on these threads sometimes. Not always but sometimes.
Demonic and fetid rot affects those separated from God. Have pity on them and pray for them.
1. “Woman, behold your Son!” (Jn 19:26).
As we near the end of this Jubilee Year,
when you, O Mother, have offered us Jesus anew,
the blessed fruit of your womb most pure,
the Word made flesh, the world’s Redeemer,
we hear more clearly the sweet echo of his words
entrusting us to you, making you our Mother:
“Woman, behold your Son!”
When he entrusted to you the Apostle John,
and with him the children of the Church and all people,
Christ did not diminish but affirmed anew
the role which is his alone as the Saviour of the world.
You are the splendour which in no way dims the light of
Christ,
for you exist in him and through him.
Everything in you is fiat: you are the Immaculate One,
through you there shines the fullness of grace.
Here, then, are your children, gathered before you
at the dawn of the new millennium.
The Church today, through the voice of the Successor of
Peter,
in union with so many Pastors assembled here
from every corner of the world,
seeks refuge in your motherly protection
and trustingly begs your intercession
as she faces the challenges which lie hidden in the
future.
2. In this year of grace, countless people have known
the overflowing joy of the mercy
which the Father has given us in Christ.
In the particular Churches throughout the world,
and still more in this centre of Christianity,
the widest array of people have accepted this gift.
Here the enthusiasm of the young rang out,
here the sick have lifted up their prayer.
Here have gathered priests and religious,
artists and journalists,
workers and people of learning,
children and adults,
and all have acknowledged in your beloved Son
the Word of God made flesh in your womb.
O Mother, intercede for us,
that the fruits of this Year will not be lost
and that the seeds of grace will grow
to the full measure of the holiness
to which we are all called.
3. Today we wish to entrust to you the future that awaits
us,
and we ask you to be with us on our way.
We are the men and women of an extraordinary time,
exhilarating yet full of contradictions.
Humanity now has instruments of unprecedented power:
we can turn this world into a garden,
or reduce it to a pile of rubble.
We have devised the astounding capacity
to intervene in the very well-springs of life:
man can use this power for good, within the bounds of the
moral law,
or he can succumb to the short-sighted pride
of a science which accepts no limits,
but tramples on the respect due to every human being.
Today as never before in the past,
humanity stands at a crossroads.
And once again, O Virgin Most Holy,
salvation lies fully and uniquely in Jesus, your Son.
4. Therefore, O Mother, like the Apostle John,
we wish to take you into our home (cf. Jn 19:27),
that we may learn from you to become like your Son.
“Woman, behold your son!”
Here we stand before you
to entrust to your maternal care
ourselves, the Church, the entire world.
Plead for us with your beloved Son
that he may give us in abundance the Holy Spirit,
the Spirit of truth which is the fountain of life.
Receive the Spirit for us and with us,
as happened in the first community gathered round you
in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost (cf. Acts 1:14).
May the Spirit open our hearts to justice and love,
and guide people and nations to mutual understanding
and a firm desire for peace.
We entrust to you all people, beginning with the weakest:
the babies yet unborn,
and those born into poverty and suffering,
the young in search of meaning,
the unemployed,
and those suffering hunger and disease.
We entrust to you all troubled families,
the elderly with no one to help them,
and all who are alone and without hope.
5. O Mother, you know the sufferings
and hopes of the Church and the world:
come to the aid of your children in the daily trials
which life brings to each one,
and grant that, thanks to the efforts of all,
the darkness will not prevail over the light.
To you, Dawn of Salvation, we commit
our journey through the new Millennium,
so that with you as guide
all people may know Christ,
the light of the world and its only Saviour,
who reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit
for ever and ever.
Amen.
Just an anecdote. A friend of mine went to Germany a couple of decades ago to research his ancestors. He had no trouble getting info on his Protestant side, but had no success with the Catholics. This is because Catholic pastors were destroying their Church Baptismal records so that the Nazis couldn’t find possible Jewish ancestry.
My guess is that Nazis targeted catholic records because of the the catholic church’s age old propensity for bureaucracy. But that doesn’t mean that the the church proactively cooperated with the nazis.
In the future say so ~ but this thread is about Protestantism, not Catholicism. Read the title ~ look at the maps. See who’s getting the jackboot in the face next time.
I never realized that ad hominem and personal attacks were part of Christian dogma. I’d have thought that would be more associated with atheists, Satanists and Mohammedans. Then again, I guess they are.
His secretary attempted to hide that from the Nazis by signing him up as a member in every Nazi front organization that could be found.
It worked ~ but worse it got his uncle onto a list of probable war criminals.
If you want to research Jewish ancestry you pretty much have to research Russian and Ukrainian records or the genealogies in Cincinnati.
“Germany” as a nation is a fairly modern phenomenon, as you attempted to point out. Ancient divisions then held a fair amount of sway, also as you attempted to point out. Still do, to some degree.
Even the people themselves can be quite different in some instances, from one region to the next, from appearance to social interaction. Bavarians are a distinct people. I have quite a bit of ancestry from the many predecessor states along the Rhine such as Pfalz, some later joined in “Germany” and some German-speaking ones becoming part of France such as Alsace; they extended practically to Lyons after all.
Write off the past, never understand the present, imho. There was more to it than Roman Catholic or Protestant. I look at that map and think that those who knew him best, better understood what he was. But, that’s just me I guess.
It would be more accurate to describe Hitler as a bitter and vindictive ex-Catholic.
As such he had great appeal to the traditional anti-Catholicism of the Prussian northeast and limited appeal to the Catholic south.
No, actually, that is NOT what this thread is about. This thread was an attempt to lay to rest the urban legend that Catholics supported the Nazi regime.
Because of your sensitivities, I have requested the Religion Moderator edit the thread title.
Good luck on that one
Thanks for adding these facts. Do you have any links regarding the Los Von Rom Bewegung?
Truth, hurts. Sadly.
I love the excuses, excuses, excuses in this thread.
Hitler was a charming and a charismatic leader. That protestants as a whole formed the core of his support necessary for him to get into power is a historical fact.
No sense in denial. A fact is a fact.
The whole point of the maps is to denigrate all Protestants, including Mennonites, Baptists and Dunkards ~ it's kind of like attacking the Catholics with the Hindus because "they worship statues" ~ which leads to an equally absurd debate.
The title provided by Br'r Kopp conveys more of the sense of this Ying/Yang political attack on religious people ~ so if you change the title we need to revise our arguments. Oh, yes, and delete the provocatively misleading maps.
The homosexual Ernst Rohm’s SA actually helped Hitler get into power more than any other thing.
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