Maria Laach Abbey - Controversial Relations With The Nazi Regime

Controversial Relations With The Nazi Regime

The Maria Laach Abbey has been at the center of a controversy over its relations with the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. In particular Heinrich Böll, depicting in Billiards at Half-past Nine a Benedictine monastery whose monks actively and voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis, is generally considered to have had Maria Laach in mind.

In 2004 researcher Marcel Albert published Die Benediktinerabtei Maria Laach und der Nationalsozialismus ("The Maria Laach Bendicitine Abbey and National Socialism") . In reviewing the book, Dr. Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University wrote:

The Benedictine abbey, Maria Laach, poses a number of interpretative challenges for historians writing on Roman Catholicism during the Third Reich. This influential monastery in the Eifel became known as a center for right-wing Catholicism already during the Weimar Republic. Its leaders enthusiastically greeted the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

It was the only Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland not to be confiscated by the Nazi regime, even if part of the facility was converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Yet at the same time, it provided a sanctuary for Konrad Adenauer in 1934, who had been unceremoniously removed from his position as mayor of Cologne. In addition, its leaders became the target of numerous Gestapo interrogations, even as rumors spread that the monastery was to be appropriated by the state(...).

Marcel Albert's book (...) relies heavily on the unpublished memoirs of Ildefons Herwegen, a conservative monarchist who served as abbot of Maria Laach until his death in 1946. At times self-serving, these memoirs provide the narrative thread for this book.

Albert quotes extensively from these, all the while commenting on the accuracy and reliability of Herwegen's account. He also makes extensive use of the archival holdings of the monastery itself, supplementing these with official state and police reports (...).

Maria Laach became a focal point in the Weimar Republic for those right-wing Catholics disillusioned by the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and outraged at the Catholic Centre Party's coalitions with the Social Democrats (SPD). The monks, politicians, businessmen, theologians and students who gathered there were strongly influenced by the idea of a coming "Reich," hoping to build a third Holy Roman Empire.

Such promionent conservatives as Emil Ritter, Carl Schmitt - later to gain notoriety as the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich" - and Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, renegade member of the British aristocracy, all participated in events sponsored by the monastery. (...) The Benedictines here attracted members of the Catholic aristocracy, those who were more receptive to the right-wing nationalist movements of the time.

Not surprisingly, both Herwegen and many others at Maria Laach embraced Hitler's regime and even chided other Catholics for failing to work with the new state. "Blood, soil and fate are the appropriate expressions for the fundamental powers of the time," Herwegen avowed. The rise of the Third Reich was part of the workings and designs of God. Hitler's promise to build Germany on a Christian foundation on March 21, 1933 led several monks to hang a picture of Hitler in the abbey and to unfurl the black white red flag of the bygone Kaiserreich.

As late as 1939, one of the members of the abbey, an artist who had converted to Catholicism, P. Theodor Bogler, published a "Briefe an einen jungen Soldaten," (Letters to a young soldier) in which he let loose a virulently anti-Jewish polemic.

This openness to National Socialism by many at Maria Laach did not go unnoticed by the Nazi press. Robert Ley's Westdeutsche Beobachter reported that "one knows that the spirititual-religious educational work of the Benedictines of Maria-Laach for years has increasingly viewed itself responsible for all of the duties to renew the national conscience."

Yet the Nazis did not always reciprocate the embrace of the monks. Instead, the Gestapo began to interrogate the monks, arresting one monk on charges of homosexuality. The printing of Alfred Rosenberg's "Myth of the 20th Century" (advocating Positive Christianity, which was actually based on pantheistic pagan nature worship and Teutonic Gods), as well as the political demotion of Franz von Papen, forced Herwegen already in 1934 to temper his hopes of exerting a Christian influence on the new state.

Although the monastery was not closed down, as were all other Benedictine abbeys in the area, its members had become a regular target of state attacks. Albert makes it clear, however, that it was only the Nazi persecution of the churches, and not the attacks on the Jews or Nazi military aggression, that forced Herwegen to see the regime in a new light.

Similarly, Herwegen housed Adenauer for almost a year in his abbey not necessarily because he agreed with the Center Party politician's Weltanschauung, but because Adenauer was a childhood friend from his days at school (...).

In its closing chapters, the book shows that the abbey cultivated a positive relationship to Adenauer and the CDU after 1945, but retained its monarchist beliefs. However, the post-war parts of the book are less extensive, and this part of the monastery's history seems to await further research.