Protest Against The Nazis
In January 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he showed his true face and began to close church-affiliated schools and started a campaign to defame the religious orders in Germany. Fr. Mayer spoke out against this persecution from the pulpit of St. Michael's in downtown Munich and because he was a powerful influence in the city, the Nazis could not tolerate such a force to oppose them. On 16 May 1937, the Gestapo to ordered Fr. Mayer to stop speaking in public which he obeyed, but he continued to preach in church. Fr. Rupert Mayer spoke out against anti-Catholic baiting campaigns and fought against Nazi church policy. He preached that Man must obey God more than men. His protests against the Nazis landed him several times in Landsberg prison (the same jail in which Hitler spent almost 6 months after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1924), and in Sachsenhausen concentration camp under the Kanzelparagraphen, a series of 19th-century laws that forbade the clergy to make political. From late 1940, he was interned in Ettal Monastery, mainly because the Nazis were afraid that he would die in the concentration camp, and thereby become a martyr.
Fr. Rupert Mayer resolutely spoke out against the Nazi régime's evil in his lectures and sermons. Before the Sondergericht – one of Hitler's "special courts" – he declared Despite the speaking ban imposed on me, I shall preach further, even if the state authorities deem my pulpit speeches to be punishable acts and a misuse of the pulpit. His time in prison and the concentration camp had taken its toll, as had the enforced inactivity while under house arrest at Ettal.
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