Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (117 page)

The conclusion of Nazi Germany’s first international treaty gave the regime legitimacy and represented a personal triumph for Hitler. The fact that agreement with the Curia had been reached so much more quickly than even he himself had thought possible on 30 January, Hitler told his cabinet on 14 July 1933, was “such an indescribable success that all critical objections must be withdrawn in the face of it.” Hitler also saw the agreement as “creating a chance and a sphere of trust that will be particularly significant in the more important fight against international Jewry.”
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Letters of gratitude from Catholic clergymen poured into the Chancellery. Munich’s Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, for instance, was fulsome in his praise of Hitler. “What the old parliaments and parties failed to achieve in sixty years, your statesman’s foresight has turned into reality, to the benefit of world history, in six months,” the cardinal wrote on 24 July. “For Germany’s reputation in East and West and before the entire world, this handshake with the Pope, the greatest moral authority in world history, is a gigantic achievement and an immeasurable blessing.” Nonetheless, Faulhaber did not neglect to insist “that the articles of the concordat must go beyond just words on paper” and that subordinated religious authorities not be relegated “too much in the shadow of the statesmanlike greatness of the Führer.”
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The bishops were to be sorely disappointed on precisely this score. The concordat had barely been signed when violations of its spirit and letter started occurring. In many places in Germany, party functionaries and police began targeting Catholic associations. There were bans and attempts to intimidate the Catholic press. Catholic civil servants were fired, and Catholic youth organisations were disbanded and their assets confiscated. Complaints and protests were slow to materialise. Neither Cardinal Pacelli nor the German episcopate wanted to endanger the agreement reached with the Nazi regime.
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Nonetheless, Cardinal Faulhaber did voice disappointment in his sermons between the first Advent weekend and New Year’s Eve. He rejected the Nazis’ contempt for the Old Testament and distanced himself from their racist beliefs. “We should never forget that we were not saved by German blood,” he preached. “We were saved thanks to the precious blood of our crucified Lord.”
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Such sentiments did not go unnoticed among the Nazi leadership. “The preachers are trying to stir people up against us!” Goebbels noted in late December 1933. “Beware!”
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Catholic dignitaries were put on high alert in late January 1934, when Hitler charged Rosenberg with “monitoring all aspects of ideological training and education by the party and Nazified associations.” The author of
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
was considered the embodiment of all the NSDAP’s anti-clerical tendencies. In February, the Vatican blacklisted that book, and in the pastoral letters of Easter 1934 the faithful were urged to fight against the “new paganism.”
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Yet the debate about Rosenberg’s anti-Christian theses had an unwelcome side effect for the Catholic clergy. Interest in the book rose, and it became the second-biggest bestseller in the Third Reich after
Mein Kampf
. “Rosenberg’s ‘Myth’ is doing brisk business,” complained Goebbels, who deeply hated the editor in chief of the
Völkischer Beobachter
. “The Churches are creating propaganda for it.”
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Among the casualties of the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934 were two prominent Catholics: Erich Klausener, the director of Catholic Action, one of the most important Catholic lay organisations, and Fritz Gerlich, the publisher of the Catholic weekly
Der gerade Weg
(The Straight and Narrow). In July 1932, the latter had subjected Hitler’s movement to a scathing analysis in an article under the headline “National Socialism is a Plague.” Gerlich had written:

National Socialism…means hostility towards our foreign neighbours, a reign of terror domestically, civil war and wars between peoples. National Socialism means lies, hatred, fratricide and boundless misery. Adolf Hitler is preaching the legitimacy of lying. It is time for those of you who have fallen for the swindle of this power-mad individual to wake up!
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Hitler’s thugs took brutal revenge for these courageous words, and the Catholic bishops held their tongues. In fact, along with Protestant leaders and a large section of the public, they were relieved that Hitler had seemingly reined in the radicals in the SA.
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Hitler’s dealings with the Protestant Church seem to have been relatively easy right from the start. Prior to 1933, the NSDAP had been most popular and celebrated their biggest electoral triumphs in the Protestant sections of Germany. The receptivity of nationalist Protestants to Hitler’s ethnic-popular agenda was particularly evident in the “Faith Movement of German Christians.” In June 1932, this organisation publicly demanded that the structure of the Church “be adapted to the natural conditions ordained by God and…still recognisable today…in ethnic identity and race.” The German Christians added: “On the basis of this insight, we call for a battle to create a truly German Church. Only genuine German Christians belong to its community. Every German by blood belongs to it…but baptised Jews do not.” In the spirit of “positive Christianity,” the German Christians proclaimed their belief in “an affirmative, racially appropriate faith in Christ that accords with the German spirit of Luther and his heroic piety.”
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In Church elections in Prussia in November 1932, these “brown Christians,” who occasionally referred to themselves as “Jesus Christ’s SA,” won a third of all seats. In some regions of East Prussia and Pomerania they took almost 50 per cent of the vote.
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Thus it comes as no great surprise that the vast majority of Protestant leaders welcomed the political caesura of early 1933. In his Easter missive, the senior diocesan administrator in Prussia proclaimed himself in agreement with all his Protestant brethren in his “joy at the uprising of the most profound strengths of our nation to patriotic awareness, true ethnic community and religious renewal.”
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Few within the Protestant camp refused to be blinded in this fashion. One of them was the historian Friedrich Thimme, who in a letter from mid-February 1933 demonstrated rare prescience about the true nature of Hitler and his henchmen: “To my mind, everyone who believes in their grand promises and indeed their Christian beliefs is a fool. You should recognise them by the fruit of their deeds, and those fruits are murder, manslaughter, violence of every sort and ruthless careerism.” In the same breath, Thimme branded the attitude of the Protestant Church “towards this organised hatred, murder and forced expulsion” as “simply shameful.”
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“How can God’s blessing be upon a movement that is a slap in the face to the simplest and clearest tenets of Christianity?” he asked in May 1933. “The Church has an absolute duty to repeatedly raise a voice of caution and warning about all the injustice coming down from above.”
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And in November 1934, Thimme wrote to the British historian George Peabody Gooch: “I cannot approve in any way of raising the purported Aryan race to the status of an idol and driving Jews, among whom I have many highly intelligent friends, from all positions of authority, making life in Germany almost impossible for them.”
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But Thimme’s voice was an exception to the rule among Protestants. Typical was the general superintendent of Kurmark, Otto Dibelius, who wrote in a church newsletter about the anti-Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933 that the Reich government “had admitted that in the stormy first days of the great transformation there has also been transgression. Things like this can and will happen in such times.”
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Hitler wanted to amalgamate the twenty-eight regional Protestant Churches into a single Reich Church that could serve as a counterweight to the Catholic Church. For this aim, he could count on the support of the German Christians. On 25 April 1933, he appointed the sycophantic Königsberg military chaplain Ludwig Müller as his “representative on matters concerning the Protestant Church” and charged him with finishing plans for the Reich Church as soon as possible.
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On 11 July, the new Church constitution was signed by the chosen representatives of the regional Protestant Churches, and on 14 July, it was approved by Hitler’s cabinet. It proclaimed the amalgamation of all regional Churches into a “unified German Protestant Church” headed by a Reich bishop to be named by a national synod. New elections for the Church bodies were scheduled for 23 July.
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The German Christians enjoyed massive help from the regime in the run-up to this election. On the eve of the vote, in an address from Bayreuth broadcast on all German radio stations, Hitler came out in clear support of the religious movement. Under these circumstances it is hardly astonishing that the Protestant Church elections were a huge triumph for the German Christians, who ended up winning around 70 per cent of the vote.
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Müller’s election as Reich bishop at the first national synod in Luther’s home city of Wittenberg on 27 September was a mere formality: he had achieved all his goals. As his post-war biographer has noted: “As Prussian state bishop and German Reich bishop, he was undoubtedly the most important figure in the Church hierarchy of German Protestantism.”
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But before the synod could meet, resistance began to form. The impetus was provided by the Berlin pastor Martin Niemöller, a former U-boat commander and Freikorps paramilitary, who initially had high hopes for Hitler and the new regime but quickly grew disenchanted. On 21 September 1933, he sent a letter to pastors throughout Germany, calling on them to join together to form a “Pastors’ Emergency League.” The basic principles articulated in the letter included the duty to “perform one’s pastoral duties solely according to the Holy Scripture and the creeds of the Reformation as the correct interpretation of Scripture.” It also clearly rejected the “application of the Aryan paragraphs within the Church of Jesus Christ.” By the end of the year, 6,000 pastors had pledged their support. For that reason, the historian James Bentley has rightly argued that Niemöller laid the cornerstone for Church opposition to Hitler.
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The Pastors’ Emergency League gained valuable momentum after a mass event held by the German Christians in Berlin’s Sportpalast on 13 November turned into a “fiasco beyond compare.”
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To the frenetic applause of an audience of 20,000, the evening’s main speaker, Berlin Gau church administrator Reinhold Krause, demanded nothing less than “the completion of Martin Luther’s ethnic-popular mission with a second German reformation.” This “new ethnic Church” would create space for the entire breadth of ‘racially appropriate spiritual life.” The first step was the “liberation of Church services and confessional matter from everything un-Germanic,” including the Old Testament with its “Jewish profit morality” and its “stories of livestock traders and pimps.” Having picked up a head of steam, Krause went on to insist that the New Testament be cleansed of “all obviously distorted and superstitious anecdotes” and that the faithful reject “the whole scapegoat and inferiority theology of the rabbi Paul.”
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Such ideas barely differed from Rosenberg’s notion of a racial religion, and there was immediate resistance not only from the circles associated with the Emergency League but from moderate German Christians as well. Reich Bishop Müller was forced to remove Krause from his Church office and suspend the implementation of the Aryan paragraph.
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Hitler was extremely irritated at the conflicts following the Sportpalast event, interpreting Müller’s response as a sign of weakness. At a reception on 29 November, the Führer informed Müller that he did not intend to intervene in the Church quarrel: the Reich bishop would have to solve his difficulties on his own.
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It was the first step towards Hitler distancing himself from his former protégé, whom he saw as increasingly ill-suited for achieving the ultimate aim of a unified Protestant Church strictly loyal to the regime. Hitler left no doubt as to where his true sympathies lay at lunch in the Chancellery in early December 1933, where according to Goebbels he “really laid into” the Churches. He said he “now saw through the pasty-faced preachers and Reich Bishop Müller. The most upstanding of the lot is Krause, who at least does not conceal his disgust at the Jewish swindle that is the Old Testament.”
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Müller used draconian methods to defend himself against his critics. In early January 1934, he proclaimed an “Ordinance Concerning the Restoration of Orderly Relations in the German Protestant Church,” which prohibited any mention of conflicts and announcements on political matters pertaining to the Church during religious services. This gagging order was the least-effective means imaginable of silencing dissenting clergymen. Instead, it provoked further passionate protest. The Reich bishop, his detractors claimed, was threatening to bring down violence upon everyone “who for the sake of their conscience and their congregations was unable to keep silent about what the Church is going through at present.”
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