Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (47 page)

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Meaning Bishop Hudal.

*
Welsermühl Verlag, Wels and Munich, 1969.

2

I
N
1966
THE
Vatican began the publication of a series of volumes under the collective title
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatif à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale.
Breaking with an age-old tradition of not making public papal documents for a hundred years, these volumes – six of which are now in print,
*
with four more to come – present, in a carefully edited form, many hundreds of reports, memoranda and letters received by and despatched from the Vatican between the years 1939 and 1945.

This project, compiled at the Vatican by four ecclesiastical historians, was obviously undertaken to counter the polemics concerning Pope Pius XII, and particularly concerning his public attitude towards the atrocities committed by the Germans against the Catholics of Eastern Europe and the Jews. Its significance lies at least as much in the
tone
of various letters, from the Pope and others, and in the
omission
of certain documents (some of which I was subsequently enabled to see, and which will be quoted in these pages), as in the material they contain.

Father Burkhart Schneider,
SJ
, with whom I had two conversations of several hours each at the Gregorian University in Rome where he lives and teaches, has been, for eight years, on the multinational team of Jesuit historians compiling these papers.

Father Schneider made no effort to minimize the importance of the documents as applying to the controversy that has raged since the end of the war about the Pope’s attitude towards the extermination of the Jews. He avoided immediate reference to the problem of Pius XII by going back to the Vatican attitude before that Pope’s election. “The Holy See,” he said, “made its position towards National Socialism clear as early as 1937. Pius XI’s encyclical,
Mit Brennender Sorge
(“With Burning Anxiety”), is part of the record. By an oversight of the Gestapo, who had been informed that it was to be read from the pulpits in German churches but didn’t believe it, this particular protest of the Pope – I assure you, only the first of many – was allowed to be made but didn’t in fact receive wide publicity in Germany. But”, he said emphatically, “I must call to your attention the fact that, although the Pope gave expression in the clearest possible terms to his profound concern, the ‘burning anxiety’ with which he had noted the frightening developments in Germany, and although the encyclical was, of course, made public all over the world, his misgivings were evidently not shared by any of the great powers, including France and Poland; they were in fact most pointedly ignored precisely by these two great Catholic nations.”

It was Pius XI who concluded the famous Concordat – negotiated by the Papal Nuncio, Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII – with Nazi Germany.

In his 1937 encyclical Pius XI did indeed express his concern about National Socialism and its “neo-paganism”, and – although in guarded, or somewhat generalized, terms – did touch on the subject of racism. “Whoever takes the race or the people,” he wrote, “or the State or the form of the State, or the repositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – all things which occupy a necessary and honourable place in the earthly order – whoever takes these notions and removes them from this scale of values, not excluding even religious values, and deifies them through an idolatrous cult, inverts and falsifies the order of things as created and ordained by God. Such a man is far removed from true belief in God and from a conception of life in keeping with that faith.…”

Nonetheless, at that point Pius XI’s burning anxiety was still mainly caused by the Nazis’ claim to total control over the education of the young, which entailed the abolition of church schools. The encyclical contained one direct reference to the Jews (50,000 of whom had already been forced to leave Germany while the outrageous “Nuremberg Laws” were being applied against those who remained
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); they were mentioned in defence of “the sacred books of the Old Testament which are revered in common with the Catholic Church”. Unfortunately the sentence ended with an unhappy phrase, in that it referred to the Jews once again as “the people who were to put Him on the cross” (a literal interpretation which, I hasten to add, is becoming less and less common in Catholic teaching).

However, the fact that the Pope, in 1937, was primarily concerned with the Nazis’ recently proclaimed educational reforms seemed perfectly legitimate, if hardly relevant in this discussion with Father Schneider to the question of the later attitude of the Holy See towards the extermination of the Jews.

Certainly, in 1937, the indications of events to come concerning the Jews were by no means clear. It has now been amply proved that at that time, and probably until at least the beginning of the war, the Nazi leadership themselves had not decided what to do about the Jewish question and certainly neither the population of Germany, nor any other, could dream of what would develop. What was then happening to the Jews within Germany was still being largely ignored by all the great powers (many of whose statesmen were to refer openly to the anti-Jewish measures of the Nazis as “growing pains”) and were not seen as fatally suspicious even by Jews outside Germany – or for that matter many within it. It would therefore have been truly extraordinary if an encyclical of 1937 had taken issue with these aspects of National Socialism.

Furthermore, it is a fact (which only recently came to public knowledge) that Pius XI – far more of a humanitarian than his successor – was to become increasingly concerned with Germany’s racist policies. On June 22, 1938 (this would have been just two months after virtually publicly rebuking Cardinal Innitzer for welcoming the Nazis into Austria), he asked the American Jesuit, Father John La Farge, to draft an encyclical, on the basis of principles he had discussed with him in a private audience, denouncing nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. Father La Farge prepared the draft in collaboration with two other Jesuits, a German, Father Gustav Grundloch, and a Frenchman, Father Gustave Desbuquois, and the paper was delivered (through the Order’s customary channels) to the Jesuit Superior General, Wladimir Ledochowski, in Rome, in September 1938. It is believed by many Jesuits that Pius XI was never shown the draft – that it was withheld by Jesuits and members of the Curia more concerned with the threat of Bolshevism than with the Nazis. Father La Farge was to be told after the death of Pius XI that he was free to publish the paper as a private Opinion, on the condition that it remained totally unconnected with the person of the deceased Pope. The paper remained unpublished.

Professor Schneider and I next discussed the public protest, in August 1941, of the Bishop of Münster, Graf Galen; first against anti-Church measures in Germany and then – with what has always been considered spectacular effect – against the Nazis’ Euthanasia Programme. But Father Schneider shrugged it off as comparatively irrelevant. “It didn’t do much,” he said, “and, in some respects anyway, they didn’t stop.”

When I suggested that, quite apart from the historical record, my own talks with some of those who had taken part in the programme appeared to indicate that the specific – although verbal, not written – Hitler order which finally stopped most of the euthanasia, did in fact result directly from public pressure after Count Galen’s sermon, Father Schneider said, “Well, it was almost finished anyway; they had more or less killed all those they had intended to kill.”

The fact that the Bishop of Münster, following his sermons, was never either arrested or even stopped from exercising his functions, has always seemed amazing – although the same applies to a number of other men of the Churches, certainly to all the Western European bishops.
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As far as Count Galen was concerned, the possibility of arresting him
was
discussed at a meeting of representatives from the Ministries of Justice, Propaganda and Churches, at Himmler’s office on October 27, 1941. The unanimous feeling of the participants was that the Bishop
should
be arrested. But while they agreed that he had laid himself open to a charge of treason, they also agreed that as such a charge would involve a formal trial, where the delicate matter of euthanasia would have to be mentioned in public, it would be preferable to send him straight to a concentration camp. The final decision, however, had to be put to Hitler. Hitler replied that he “wished to avoid all controversy with the Catholic Church and would await the end of the war to settle [his] account with the Bishop – to the last mark and pfennig”.

Albert Hartl, former chief of church information at the Reich’s Security Office, told me in addition that he had been informed that Hitler had given Cardinal Faulhaber his promise that no bishop would be arrested. “They shook hands on it,” said Herr Hartl.

Father Schneider certainly did not mention any such agreement. His argument, on the contrary, was that all the clerics, high and low – and indeed including the Pope – had been in dire peril.

“Concerning the possibility of later protests by the Pope,” he said, “people just don’t realize how isolated the Vatican was. It was merely a tiny and comparatively powerless enclave encircled by Fascists and Nazis. Even if the Pope
had
voiced his doubts and horror later on, how do you think anyone would have learned of it? The Vatican radio station was virtually unheard; certainly by the Germans whose ‘people’s radio sets’ were definitely not capable of picking up foreign stations.”

I suggested that the Allies – the
BBC
particularly – would presumably have been very willing to communicate any such protest made by the Pope to the population of Germany, many of whom, it was well known, did in fact listen to
BBC
broadcasts despite the dangers involved.

“What do you think it did to Galen’s reputation,” replied Father Schneider, “when the Allies dropped copies of his sermon together with their bombs? Would you call it psychologically apt to present the people of Rhine-Westphalia with this particular double-edged sword? Do you think it was effective? No, if the enemy had used a protest by the Holy See for their own propaganda purposes, and this could undoubtedly have happened, it would have undone any good such a protest might conceivably have done.

“But anyway, the problems the Vatican is faced with in such a situation are not sufficiently appreciated. After all, we have similar situations now, and they have existed all through history. At this moment the Vatican has to choose between condemning publicly certain governments of new nations that are quite manifestly assuming dictatorial powers, or playing along with them in the hope of maintaining sufficiently normal relations to be able to continue to help those in these countries for whom it feels itself responsible. And that was exactly the situation during the Nazi period.”

I asked Father Schneider whether the Vatican does not have the wider responsibility of representing certain moral principles before the world of Catholics and others, rather than merely that of trying to protect at any one time any one national group of Catholics.

“The Vatican”, he said, “has to be very careful. The Holy See has no bombs, no arms; no ‘power’ in that sense. If it is to remain effective as the centre and focus of the Church, it must above all remain in touch. Towards that end it must – as far as possible – go along with ruling governments. The Holy Father, Pius
XII
, wrote very openly about this in his
Letters to the German Bishops,
specifically as I recall [on April 30, 1943] to the Bishop of Berlin, when he spoke about the advisability of leaving to pastors on the spot the decision whether or not it was reasonably safe to lodge protests.”
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This often-quoted letter to the brave Bishop Preysing – the first the Pope had written to him in over a year – acknowledged a number of letters and communications the Bishop had sent, too many to enumerate here. Once again the Bishop had delivered a heroically outspoken sermon (on November 15, 1942), which once again has been “forgotten”, as far as I can discover, except for another footnote in the Vatican publication.
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It was on the equality of all souls in the eyes of God. “This Love”, he said, “cannot exclude anyone; above all because he speaks perhaps a different language, or is of foreign blood. Every man has in his soul the image of God. Every man has the right to life and love.… It is never permitted to deprive members of foreign races of human rights – the right to freedom, the right to property, the right to an insoluble marriage; never is it permitted to subject anyone to [such] cruelties.…”

The Pope thanks him for “the clear and frank words which, on various occasions, you have addressed to your congregation and therefore to the public. We have in mind, among others, your commentaries of June 28, 1942, on the Christian concept of law; of All Souls’ Sunday last November on the right of every man to life and love.…”

On March 6, 1943, Preysing wrote again to the Pope and begged him to intercede for the Jews. “Here in Berlin we are even more appalled [than about recent bombardments] by the new wave of deportations of Jews, which began just before March 1. Thousands of people, whose probable fate Your Holiness has indicated in Your Christmas message, are involved here. Amongst the deported are many Catholics. Would it not be possible that Your Holiness make another attempt to intercede for these unhappy innocents? Your intervention represents the last hope of so many and the fervent entreaty of all decent men.”

“…  it was a consolation for Us”, replied the Pope, “to learn that Catholics, notably in Berlin, had manifested great Christian charity towards the sufferings of so-called non-Aryans. And We would like, in this context, to add a special word of paternal recognition and warm sympathy to the imprisoned Monsignor Lichtenberg.…
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