Alois Hudal - Biography - "Good" and "bad" National Socialism

"Good" and "bad" National Socialism

Hudal is said to have received a Golden Nazi Party membership badge, but the fact is disputed. In 1937, in Vienna, Hudal published a book entitled The Foundations of National Socialism, with an imprimatur from Archbishop Innitzer, which was an enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler. Hudal sent Hitler a copy with a handwritten dedication praising him as "the new Siegfried of Germany's greatness". Nevertheless, the book was not allowed to circulate freely in Germany by the Nazis — who generally heavily disliked the Roman Catholic Church and did not wish church officials to "clericalize" their ranks — though the book was not officially banned. During the Nuremberg trials, Franz von Papen declared that, at first, Hudal's book had "very much impressed" Hitler, whose "anti-Christian advisers" were allegedly to blame for not allowing a free German edition. "All I could obtain was permission to print 2,000 copies, which Hitler wanted to distribute among leading Party members for a study of the problem", Von Papen said.

Hudal was highly critical of the works of several Nazi ideologues, like Alfred Rosenberg or Ernst Bergmann, who publicly despised Christianity and considered it "alien to Germanic genius". The condemnation in 1934 by the Holy Office of Reich secretary Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century and, shortly thereafter, of Ernst Bergmann's The German National Church had in fact been based on Hudal's secret assessment of both works In his own 1937 book, Alois Hudal proposed a reconciliation and a pragmatic compromise between Nazism and Christianity, leaving the education of the youth to the Churches, while the latter would leave politics entirely to National Socialism. This had been the line followed by prominent German Catholic politician and former Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen too. In the autumn of 1934, Hudal had already explained this strategy to Pius XI, who received him in audience: the "good" ought to be separated from the "bad" in Nazism. The bad - that is Rosenberg, Bergmann, Himmler and others - according to Hudal represented the "left wing" of the Nazi party. The "conservatives" - headed, he believed, by Hitler - should be redirected toward Rome, Christianized and used against the Communists and the Eastern danger. Hitler's book, Mein Kampf was never put on the Index by Rome, as censors continually postponed and eventually terminated its examination, balking at taking on the chancellor of Germany.

By 1935, Alois Hudal, however, had become influential in creating a proposed list of "errors and heresies" of the "era", containing several racist errors of Nazi politicians, the Nuremberg laws, but also condemning several quotes directly taken from Mein Kampf; this list was accepted by Pope Pius XI as an adequate condemnation, but he wanted an encyclical rather than a mere syllabus. Three years later, in June 1938, the Pope ordered American Jesuit John La Farge to prepare an encyclical condemning antisemitism, racism and the persecution of Jews, which he did together with German Jesuit Gustav Gundlach and French Jesuit Gustave Desbuquois, resulting in the famous Humani Generis Unitas which was on Pius XI's desk when he died, but was never promulgated by Pius XII.

The reaction of Rosenberg to Hudal's ideas was violent, and eventually the circulation of the Foundations of National Socialism was restricted in Germany. "We do not allow the fundaments of the Movement to be analyzed and criticized by a Roman Bishop" - said Rosenberg. In 1935, even before he wrote the Foundations of National Socialism Hudal had said about Rosenberg: "If National Socialism wants to replace Christianity by the notions of race and blood, we will have to face the greatest heresy of the twentieth century. It must be rejected by the Church as decisively as, if not more severely than the Action Française, with which it shares some errors. But Rosenberg's doctrine is more imbued with negation and creates, above all in the youth, a hatred against Christianity greater than that of Nietzsche".

Despite the restrictions imposed on his book, and despite National Socialist restrictions against German monasteries and parishes, and attempts by the Nazi government to forbid Catholic education at schools, going as far as banning the crucifix in schools and other public areas (see the Oldenburg crucifix struggle of November 1936), and despite the Nazi dissolution and confiscation of Austrian monasteries and the official banning of Catholic newspapers and associations in annexed Austria ("Ostmark"), Bishop Hudal remained close to some of the Nazi regime's officials, as he was convinced that the Nazi new order would nevertheless prevail in Europe due to its "force". Hudal was particularly close to Franz von Papen, who as the Reich's ambassador in Vienna prepared the German-Austrian agreement of 11 July 1936, which some claim paved the way for the Anschluss. This agreement was enthusiastically backed by Hudal in the Austrian press, against the position of several Austrian Bishops. The former Centre politician Von Papen, who was considered dangerous and disliked by the Nazis for his Catholicism, was later on sent to the German Embassy in Ankara.