German Resistance - Catholic Resistance

Catholic Resistance

The outbreak of war served to rally the German people around the Hitler regime, and the sweeping early successes of the German Army – occupying Poland in 1939, Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and swiftly defeating France in May and June 1940, stilled virtually all opposition to the regime. The opposition to Hitler within the Army was left isolated and apparently discredited, since the much-feared war with the western powers had apparently been won by Germany within a year and at little cost. This mood continued well into 1941, although beneath the surface popular discontent at mounting economic hardship was apparent.

Even at the height of Hitler’s popularity, however, one issue unexpectedly provoked powerful and successful resistance to his regime. This was the program of so-called “euthanasia” – in fact a campaign of mass murder – directed at people with mental illness and/or severe physical disabilities which had begun in 1939 under the code name T4. By 1941 more than 70,000 people had been killed under this program, many by gassing, and their bodies incinerated.

This policy aroused strong opposition across German society, and especially among Catholics. Opposition to the policy sharpened after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that these men would also be subject to “euthanasia,” although no such plans existed.

Catholic anger was further fuelled by actions of the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, a militantly anti-Catholic Nazi, who in June 1941 ordered the removal of crucifixes from all schools in his Gau. This attack on Catholicism provoked the first public demonstrations against government policy since the Nazis had come to power, and the mass signing of petitions, including by Catholic soldiers serving at the front. When Hitler heard of this he ordered Wagner to rescind his decree, but the damage had been done – German Catholics had learned that the regime could be successfully opposed. This led to more outspoken protests against the “euthanasia” program.

In July the Bishop of Münster in Westphalia, Clemens August Graf von Galen (an old aristocratic conservative, like many of the anti-Hitler Army officers), publicly denounced the “euthanasia” program in a sermon, and telegrammed his text to Hitler, calling on “the Führer to defend the people against the Gestapo.” Another Bishop, Franz Bornewasser of Trier, also sent protests to Hitler, though not in public. On 3 August von Galen was even more outspoken, broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution of religious orders and the closing of Catholic institutions. Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested, but Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels told Hitler that if this happened there would be an open revolt in Westphalia.

By August, the protests had spread to Bavaria. Hitler was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof, near Nuremberg – the only time he was opposed to his face in public during his 12 years of rule. Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life-and-death two-front war. (It needs to be remembered that following the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland, nearly half of all Germans were Catholic.) On 24 August he ordered the cancellation of the T4 program and issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters that there were to be no further provocations of the churches during the war.

However, the deportation of Polish and Dutch priests by the occupying Nazis by 1942 — after Polish resistance acts and the Dutch Catholic bishops' conference's official condemnation of anti-Semitic persecutions and deportations of Jews by the Nazis — also terrified ethnic German clergy in Germany itself, some of whom would come to share the same fate because of their resistance against the Nazi government in racial and social aspects, among them Fr. Bernhard Lichtenberg. Himmler's 1941 Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Attack-the-Monastery) had also helped to spread fear among regime-critical Catholic clergy.