Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (119 page)

The idea of Jesus as Aryan and Paul as a Jewish agent who falsified Christ’s teaching and diverted Christianity down a disastrous path was by no means original. It was an amalgamation of notions long current among ethnic-chauvinist circles. Hitler seems to have adopted them less from Alfred Rosenberg’s
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
than from Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
.
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But Hitler’s relationship towards such ideas was purely opportunistic. “We do not want to battle against Christianity—on the contrary, we have to declare ourselves to be the only true Christians,” Goebbels recorded him saying. “This means that we have to throw the entire weight of the party at the saboteurs. Christianity is the slogan under which we will eradicate the preachers, just as socialism was the one under which we destroyed the Marxist bigwigs.”
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Although Hitler allowed his followers to worship him in cultish fashion, and although he enjoyed playing the high priest at the Nuremberg rallies, he consistently refused to portray himself as the founder of a religion. In a speech to the Gauleiter on 12 March 1937, he spoke out against the notion of “forming new religions,” stating that National Socialism was “still too young.” This was a clear rejection of Rosenberg’s ideas. Moreover, he still wanted to avoid an open break with the Catholic Church. “In the battle against the Churches he quotes Schlieffen: ‘victories with great dimensions or small victories,’ ” Goebbels noted. “And with good reason he does not want any ordinary victories. You can kill an adversary with silence or with blows. Onwards!”
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The next shock in this unresolved situation was the papal encyclical “With Burning Anxiety.” Faulhaber had written the first draft, which was then edited by Cardinal Pacelli and approved by Pope Pius XI. Clandestine couriers brought the document to Germany, where it was printed and read out from pulpits on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1937. The encyclical excoriated the “open and concealed violence” against the Church in Germany. The articles of the concordat were being violated, the document complained, and the pressure being applied to the faithful was “both illegal and inhuman.” The encyclical once again highlighted the incompatibility between the Christian faith and National Socialist teachings: “Whoever removes race or a people or a form of government, those who exercise power or any other basic foundations of human society…from the secular scale of values, and makes them the highest norm of religious values too, worshipping them in idolatrous fashion, is wrong and is falsifying the divinely ordained order of things.”
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The evening before the encyclical was read out, Reinhard Heydrich informed Goebbels about its existence. “It’s a provocation in the true sense of the word,” the propaganda minister noted, although he advised the head of the Gestapo to “play dead” and ignore it rather than react harshly. “Economic pressure instead of arrests,” Goebbels wrote. “Confiscation and prohibition of the Church newsletters that publish this bit of impudence. Otherwise keep your nerve and wait until the hour comes to shake off these provocateurs.”
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But ignoring the encyclical was not good enough for Hitler. In early April 1937, he phoned Goebbels from the Obersalzberg. “He wants to move against the Vatican,” Goebbels noted. “The preachers do not realise how patient and mild we’ve been. Now they’re going to become acquainted with our strictness, severity and determination.”
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On 6 April, Hitler ordered Justice Minister Gürtner to restart and prioritise the sexual abuse trials, which had been suspended the previous July.
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They were accompanied by a frenzied anti-Catholic press campaign directed by Goebbels. “Heavy artillery is being deployed,” he noted in late April. “One wink from me, and a diabolical concert has commenced. The preachers will be squirming now.”
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Once again, Hitler was satisfied with his propaganda minister’s work, and the latter registered with pleasure: “The Führer is becoming more and more radical on the Church issue…[He knows] no mercy any more…We’re going to smoke out this band of pederasts.”
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In his annual 1 May speech, Hitler also took aim squarely: “If they try to usurp rights that exclusively belong to the state with letters, encyclicals and the like, we will force them back into the spiritual and ministerial activity that is rightfully theirs.” In a reference to the pederasty trials, Hitler declared: “It is not appropriate for these quarters to criticise the morality of a state when they have more than reason enough to be concerned about their own morality.”
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The low point of the defamation campaign was a speech by Goebbels in Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle arena on 28 May. He had discussed the content of the speech for days with Hitler—indeed, the Führer even dictated several key passages himself, which was unprecedented. “Very cutting and drastic,” Goebbels confided to his diary. “I would not have gone that far.”
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The speech was broadcast on all of Germany’s radio stations, and German newspapers received the transcript an hour before Goebbels began speaking, along with instructions to print it “as prominently as possible.”
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Goebbels pulled out all the demagogic stops, referring to a “general decline in morals such as had hardly been known throughout civilised history to such a horrible and outrageous extent.” “Animalistic sexual degeneracy was widespread among the Catholic clergy,” Goebbels raged, and the entire brotherhood was covering up this “filth.” Everywhere “sex offenders in priestly robes” were pursuing their “repulsive urges.” This “sexual pestilence,” Goebbels concluded, “must be removed by the roots.”
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After the speech, which drew standing ovations from more than 20,000 party members, Goebbels hurried back to the Führer in the Chancellery. “He shook my hand,” Goebbels related. “He listened to the entire speech on the radio and told me that he couldn’t sit still for a moment.”
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In the days that followed this mass event, Hitler continued to vent his hatred to his entourage. “The Führer is raging against the preachers,” Goebbels noted.
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The propaganda minister constantly fanned the flames while the Gestapo took care to suppress any contrary opinions in the Catholic press and strictly monitored the sermons of Catholic clergymen. “In Germany, the pious Catholic is subject to emergency law,” complained the bishop of Berlin, Konrad von Preysing. “He is forced to endure mockery and scorn, constraint and pressure without being able to defend himself, while the enemies of the Church enjoy freedom of speech, the freedom to attack and the freedom to scoff.”
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But the trials ended in disappointment for the regime. In many cases, judges acquitted the defendants or only handed down light sentences. “The courts are failing to do their job,” an outraged Goebbels complained in early July 1937. “They’re only giving these preachers laughably tiny fines or a few days in jail for the worst sorts of crimes against the state. We need to take this to a special court.”
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Goebbels was able to convince Hitler of this too.
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Nonetheless, in late July, the dictator told his justice minister to suspend the trials again, and although Goebbels repeatedly lobbied for their resumption, Hitler stuck by this decision. He may have assured Goebbels in December 1937 that he was only waiting for the right moment to “reopen the spigot with the preacher trials,” but as the propaganda minister noted, “right now he wants peace and quiet on the Church issue.”
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Most likely, the change of course was related to the regime’s transition, which we will examine below, from a policy of overturning the Treaty of Versailles to one of aggressive foreign expansion. In this phase, in which Hitler decided to realise his foreign-policy ambitions, it would not have seemed advisable to further ratchet up tension with the Vatican or the Catholic clergy in Germany.
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Furthermore, Hitler had likely realised that he would not be able to subjugate the Churches to his rule in the short term. He was going to have to be patient. He described his plans for the future to a small circle after a cabinet meeting on 11 May 1937:

We will have to bend the Churches to our will and make them serve us. The vow of celibacy must be eradicated. Church assets must be confiscated, and no one should be allowed to study theology before the age of twenty-four. With that, we will rob them of their next generation. The monastic orders will have to be dissolved. In this way, and only in this way, will we be able to break them down. It will take decades. But then we will have them eating out of our hands.
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Hitler also refused to let things come to a complete head with the Protestant opposition. In late 1936, it gradually became clear that Hanns Kerrl’s experimental attempts to make peace between the German Christians and the Confessing Church had failed. In January 1937, Hitler gave him a dressing-down over lunch in the Chancellery, taking “a hard line against the Churches.” The “primacy of the state” had to be enforced “by all means,” Hitler declared, dismissing Kerrl’s policies as “too soft.”
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On 12 February, the Reich Church committee, the central body for restoring the unity of the Protestant Church, resigned en masse. Without consulting his ministerial colleagues, Kerrl therefore announced a decree that would have subjected the Church to increased state monitoring. Hitler was enraged by his underling going it alone, and refused to allow the decree to be made public. He also ordered Kerrl, Frick, Hess, Himmler, Goebbels and Deputy Interior Minister Wilhelm Stuckart to the Obersalzberg on 15 February to discuss the Church issue. “The Führer wants a clear line,” Goebbels noted. “Kerrl made a huge mistake not consulting us.”
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Goebbels travelled to the meeting by night train with Himmler and Stuckart, which gave them plenty of time to agree upon a mutual position. All three concurred that strict state regulation of the sort Kerrl envisioned would only create “martyrs.” They also emphasised a fundamental long-term difference: “Kerrl wants to preserve the Church while we want to liquidate it.”
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The conference on the Obersalzberg lasted seven full hours, which indicated the significance Hitler attached to it. He sharply criticised Kerrl’s ideas, saying that they amounted to making him a “summus episcopus” and that they could only be enforced violently. In view of the expected “great global struggle,” Germany “did not need a battle over the Churches.” After a long debate, Goebbels made a suggestion he had discussed previously with Himmler and Stuckart: “Either a separation of Church and state—for which in my opinion it is too early—or fresh elections of a constitutional synod, complete withdrawal of the party and state in this matter, entirely free proportional representation, and lucrative salaries for the synod delegates. In a year, they will come begging the state to save them from themselves.” Hitler adopted the suggestion, according to Goebbels, “eagerly.” The details were discussed, and the plan was approved by everyone present, including Kerrl. “A historic day,” Goebbels crowed. “A turning point in the Church quarrel.”
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Hitler’s decree was announced in the evening papers, where it created a stir. It read: “After the Reich Church committee failed to produce an agreement between the groups within the German Protestant Church, the Church shall now autonomously and completely freely give itself a new constitution and, with it, a new order.” The Reich Church minister was empowered “to prepare the election of a general synod for this purpose and take all necessary accompanying steps.”
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The following day, Goebbels called a press conference on the topic of “the Führer’s step towards making peace on the Church issue.”
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But any progress was mere propaganda. It soon became clear that the Church elections were only going to cause further unease instead of encouraging agreement between the opposing Protestant factions. Parts of the Confessing Church even threatened to boycott the elections, and in late 1937 preparations for them were halted. It was one of the rare occasions when a decree by Hitler simply came and went with no results.
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For a time, the dictator considered forcibly separating Church and state, an idea supported by Kerrl, who, as Goebbels put in, had undergone a “remarkable about-turn.”
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But this plan, too, was abandoned. In December 1937, Hitler expressed his concern that “Protestantism would be completely destroyed, and we would have no counterweight any more to the Vatican.”
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Fundamental decisions on the Church issue were postponed amid intensifying preparations to go to war, and Kerrl was explicitly “prohibited from instituting any reforms.”
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Nonetheless this latest volte-face did not end the persecution of prominent representatives of the Confessing Church.