Hitler and the Church: Where was God?

Europe and North America in 1939 were very religious continents. People in general looked for divine answers to world affairs and natural phenomena. But it was a much different type of religious landscape than today. Most denominations in Europe and America in 1939 were subject to hellfire-and-brimstone preaching bursting with anti-Semitic piffle. Today, most churches, especially non-denominational mega churches in North America, preach the prosperity gospel (the Protestant movement in Europe right now is largely dead). Most of these churches are pro-Israel for questionable reasons of their own and donate millions to this cause, which is dramatically different than the churches of pre-WWII Europe. The Catholic Church in 1939 preached the doctrine of damnation, exclusivity and Jew-hatred, especially since it had not yet gone through the reformations of Vatican II in the 1960’s. Today, the Catholic Church is being led by Pope Francis who mostly preaches love and acceptance. Since Vatican II, the Church has often met with Jewish leaders, and Pope Francis, who counts an Argentine rabbi as among his closest friends, made a special trip to Israel in 2014 expressing friendship and peace. As a result, many today conflate current attitudes by Protestants and Catholics with how they behaved in the past. They assume that these religious groups in Europe in 1939 should have been fighting the Nazis and helping Jews. The reality was unfortunately the opposite in most cases. This is an important fact to acknowledge because without knowing what the religious climate was like in Europe during WWII, one cannot truly understand why Christians in general and the Catholic Church and Protestant movements in particular were incapable or unwilling to stop Adolf Hitler—in fact, most German Catholics and Protestants supported the Nazi dictator.

When giving lectures on my book “The Rabbi Saved by Hitler’s Soldiers,” people often ask why Jews didn’t go to the Catholic Church or a powerful Protestant denomination for help against the Nazis. The answer quite simply was that the vast majority of Christian leaders would not have been sympathetic to the Jews and would not have troubled themselves to effectuate their rescue. And with the storm brewing in Europe in the 1930s, many religious leaders were doing all they could to take care of their own flocks, the majority of whom were scared by world events and concerned about their family’s safety. People were suffering from the lingering effects of WWI and the Great Depression, so many looked to their religious leaders for guidance for their own problems as the world spun out of control. Some in America thought they had entered the End Times and that the Second Coming was imminent. Many claimed Hitler was the anti-Christ. However, in Germany and Italy, many felt God was on their side and that the Lord was blessing them with an empire and riches. Germany was grabbing land all over Europe and Italy had succeeded in taking over Ethiopia.

The invasion of Poland in 1939 met with the enthusiastic approbation of the German population, which was strongly Christian. The Evangelical Church in Germany issued an official appeal the day after the attack “for Germans to support the invasion to ‘recover German blood’ for the fatherland.” The Catholic hierarchy, whose flock made up about a third of Germany’s population, encouraged and admonished “Catholic soldiers, in obedience to the Führer, to do their duty and to be ready to sacrifice their lives.” Why was the Catholic Church inside Germany so supportive of Hitler? Well, in short, the Church had had a history of supporting fascist regimes.

Pope Pius XI, an autocrat in his own right who was plagued by scandals involving pedophile priests as close advisors, had actively backed Benito Mussolini and his fascists in taking over the Italian government in 1922 and in maintaining power in Italy. David Kertzer wrote that the fascist movement became a “cleric-Fascist revolution.” The Pope felt confident that the fascists would restore privileges and powers the Church had lost under the democratic government. He hated the Protestants’ “individual rights and religious freedom,” and felt Mussolini would support him in suppressing these movements. He desired to bring about the “Kingdom of Christ on earth,” and Mussolini would be a tool in his strategy. At rallies, priests would sing praises to il Duce as the “Savior of our land.” Any priest vaguely critical of Mussolini, for example, Giovanni Montini who later became Pope Paul VI, was reported to Vatican authorities and disciplined. The Church and the Italian population cast Mussolini as a “Christ-like figure,” and children in Catholic schools recited prayers daily that said: “I believe in the high Duce—maker of the Black Shirts—And in Jesus Christ his only protector.” The Church hierarchy was just as supportive of Hitler as it was of Mussolini.

When Nazi Germany forcibly annexed Austria in 1938, Vienna’s Cardinal Theodor Innitzer met with Hitler. Cardinal Innitzer supported the Nazi takeover in a statement he had read in church and had church bells rung and swastikas displayed in celebration and greeting of the German army. “Those who are entrusted with souls of the faithful will unconditionally support the great German State and the Führer… obviously accompanied by the blessings of Providence.” The statement ended with “Heil Hitler.” The archbishops of Salzburg and Graz followed the Cardinal’s lead.

This did not stop the Nazis from confiscating church property, closing Catholic organizations, and sending a number of priests to Dachau concentration camp. “Pius XI was surprised, appalled and embarrassed by Mussolini’s meek acceptance of the Nazi takeover.” Furthermore, he was also “furious” at Cardinal Innitzer who seemed to be acting on his own without asking for Papal approval. While the Vatican daily newspaper and radio criticized the statements of the archbishops, Vatican State Secretary Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) told the German ambassador that the criticism was not official and the Pope knew nothing about it. In other words, Pacelli encouraged Hitler to act with a free hand.

As time passed, Pope Pius XI became more uneasy with Mussolini, and he had a much more critical view of Hitler with whom he passed a controversial and often violated Concordat in 1933. One could argue that his understanding of Mussolini and Hitler came way too late—he should have seen their evil before supporting them for years. But by the time the Germans invaded Poland, Pope Pius XI was dead and Pope Pius XII, who as Papal Nuncio in Germany actually negotiated the Concordat in 1933, was in power, and he was a supporter of Hitler. He had gotten to know the Nazis well during his stay in Berlin.

Therefore, the Catholic Church did not protest the invasion of Poland, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. Instead, it reaffirmed the Pope’s encyclical Summi Pontificatus from October 1939 that adopted a strict neutrality in the face of the violence spreading across the European continent. Inside Germany, religious newspapers, both Protestant and Catholic, claimed that Germans were fighting for essential Lebensraum. A very religious nation, most Germans felt God was on their side.

This religious support for Hitler should not be surprising. Most religious leaders inside the Reich supported Hitler and felt God had blessed him. Lutheran Bishop Hans Meiser prayed in 1937, “We thank you Lord, for every success… you have so far granted [Hitler] for the good of our people.” Many churches extolled Hitler as the defender of Germany and, by extension, “Christianity from godless Bolshevism.” The Roman Catholic dioceses had Church bells “rung as a joyful salute on Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1939 with prayers for the Führer to be said at the following Sunday mass.” The Catholic primate, Cardinal Adolf Bertram, sent him a personal greetings telegram.

Leading Protestant church scholars and leaders including Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emmanuel Hirsch supported Hitler and felt that God stood behind him. Hitler had carefully groomed many of these leaders from the beginning of his rule when he appealed to God in a nationwide broadcast in 1933 that the rebirth of Germany would be founded on Christianity. Hanns Kerrl, Reichsminister of Protestant Church Affairs, was a Nazi party member since 1923 and offered to donate all church property to the State, “and make Hitler its ‘supreme head’ and Summus Episcopus.” There were a few brave dissenting Protestant leaders, like Martin Niem?ller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the Confessing Church, who did resist the Nazis, but unfortunately, they were a tiny minority. And many of them, at first, did not see the danger. Pastor Niem?ller was initially a Nazi Party member and supporter of Hitler. After a few years of Nazi rule, he saw how dangerous Hitler was and changed his mind, but he was a member of a small group who did so. Quite simply put, most Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, in Germany supported Hitler and his regime. Moreover, many Christian Germans felt that God had sent the Nazis to provide Germany protection from Bolshevism and to reclaim lands lost to nations viewed as illegitimate, such as Poland.

When Hitler conquered Poland, why did the Pope Pius XII not condemn Hitler’s invasion? Pius XII was elected Pope in March 1939, and he supported much of what Hitler had been doing. “Believers are supposed to hold that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They of course are free to believe this, and to believe that God decides when to end the tenure of one Pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another.” This belief would indicate that it was God’s will that a few months before the invasion of 1939, a pro-fascist but anti-Nazi Pope, Pius XI, died with an unsigned Encyclical condemning racism on his nightstand and was replaced by more pro-Nazi pope, Pius XII. What was God telling Catholics in this moment?

Also a good percentage (25 percent) of the SS who persecuted Poles so extensively were practicing Catholics and the rest were largely Protestant. Most of the SS leadership was Catholic. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, who led the SS, were both Catholics. The brutal commandant of Auschwitz SS—Obersturmbannführer Rudolf H?ss—was raised in a strong Catholic family. In the end, “Catholics engaged in the extermination processes were never told specifically by their clergy that they were doing wrong.”

And not only practicing Catholics were part of these horrible movements, but priests also pursued power, implemented Nazi policies and created fascist governments. For example, the head of the Nazi Puppet State of Slovakia was a fascist in holy orders, Father Jozef Tiso. No Catholic has ever been “threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes” according to journalist Christopher Hitchens. Hitler proudly told his army adjutant Gerhard Engel, “I shall remain a Catholic forever.” Since the Catholic Church has still not excommunicated him, maybe he was right (the Church could retrospectively declare that Hitler should have incurred excommunication during his lifetime, but it has not done so). Interestingly enough, after Hitler’s conquest of Austria in 1938, Mussolini, who was still feeling somewhat uneasy at Hitler’s growing power although allied with him, told a confidential Vatican go-between that the one man who could stop Hitler was the Pope. “By excommunicating Hitler, he could isolate the Führer and cripple the Nazis… [T]he Pope never seriously considered following the suggestion.” As Paul Johnson tragically notes: “The Church excommunicated Catholics who laid down in their wills that they wished to be cremated… but it did not forbid them to work in concentration or death camps.”

Besides Catholics making up the majority of SS and Nazi leadership, one needs to observe that most fascist totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were led by Catholic men like Hitler, Mussolini, Spain’s Francisco Franco, Portugal’s António Salazar and Croatia’s Ante Paveli?. They enjoyed support from the Church and derived much of their childhood education from the Church. “As for the Jews,” Hitler told Catholic Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, “I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic Church had adopted for 1,500 years.” “At no point were Catholics given, either by their own hierarchy or by Rome, the relaxation from their moral obligation to obey the legitimate authority of the Nazi rulers, which had been imposed on them by the 1933 directives of the hierarchy. Nor did the bishops ever tell them officially that the regime was evil, or even mistaken” according to historian Paul Johnson.

In the context of WWII, when one asks why so many Catholics were involved with the killing of Jews and why the Church in Rome did hardly anything to help the Jews or protest the German invasion of the Catholic country Poland, one can simply reply that this was its modus operandi during this time. One might point to their education and religious practices as causing much of the foundational conditioning of society that gave birth to genocidal maniacs in Germany. And it was unfortunately not only Catholics, but also many Protestants who had picked up much of their antisemitism from their religious traditions. “There was no explaining away,” Donald L. Niewyk writes, “the contributions made by Christian antisemitism to the climate of opinion that made the genocide of the Jews possible in the European heartland of ostensibly Christian Western civilization.”

By way of illustration, reforming the church doctrine to end liturgy and teachings, which for centuries had created a powerful religious justification and incitement in the minds of millions of Catholics for prejudice against and persecution of their Jewish neighbors, did not come until Vatican II Council (1962-65) long after WWII. It finally declared that the “death of Christ cannot be charged against all the Jews then alive, without distinction, nor against the Jews of today.” It reasoned that “Christ died for our sins” and the crucifixion was salvation, it is human sin that is responsible for the crucifixion. Without sin there would be no need for sacrificial atonement. It continued saying “the Gospel’s spiritual love decries hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” One could argue that this pronouncement was 2,000 years late, especially since the Church holds itself out as infallible.

It was disappointing, but not surprising that the Catholic Church and most Protestants not only turned a blind eye to Hitler’s gruesome crimes, but also had clergy who openly supported Hitler’s regime. The Vatican was the first sovereign to sign a treaty (Reichskonkordat) with the Nazis, which served to legitimize their rule in the eyes of other nations and of Catholics everywhere, just as Vatican approval and the Lateran Accords had done for Mussolini. It “ensured that Nazism could rise unopposed by the most powerful Catholic community in the world [Germany’s].” It also encouraged Hitler that he could act “against international Jewry.” So, keeping in line with a history of support of atrocities and/or unwillingness to speak out against crimes, the Pope remained silent during Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. One would think the Pope would have at least revoked the treaty the Church had negotiated with Hitler in 1933, but he did not.

Cardinal Eugène Tisserant witnessed Pope Pius XII’s weak behavior up close in Rome at the time and then commented: “I fear that history will reproach the Holy See with having practiced a policy of selfish convenience and not much else!” And not only Catholic, but Protestant leaders seemed to support or turn a blind eye to what Hitler was doing in general. Christian leaders’ behavior during the Holocaust and Second World War, especially with Germany’s invasion of Poland: “exposed the emptiness of the churches in Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, and the cowardice and selfishness of the Holy See” according to Paul Johnson. Is it any wonder that Jews and other victims of the Nazis felt they had no allies in European Christians?

For more information on these topics, please see “The Rabbi Saved by Hitler’s Soldiers” https://www.amazon.com/.../070062.../ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0...