The Two-Thousand Year Road to the Holocaust Session 11: Christianity and the Holocaust

Session 11: Christians and the Holocaust (1938-1945) “…Christians need to remember that studying the Shoah is not simply reading about what happened to the Jews, but what some Christians…did to the Jews. The Shoah is part of Christian history….Not only do we study what happened to them but what happened to us Christians.” Michael McGarry “Christianity was not a sufficient condition for the Holocaust; nevertheless, it was a necessary condition for that disaster.” John K. Roth Jesus said: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” Matthew 7:21

Session 11 A: Roman Catholics and the Holocaust (1938-1945) Anthony J. Sciolino I. Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) “Pius XII and the Jews…The whole thing is too sad and too serious for bitterness… a silence which is deeply and completely in complicity with all the forces which carry out oppression, injustice, aggression, exploitation, war.” Thomas Merton Background: Eugenio Pacelli was a scholarly figure who critics contend feared Bolshevism more than Nazism. One of the important goals of Pacelli's ecclesial career, both as Vatican secretary of state and then as Pope Pius XII, like his predecessors, was to preserve and extend church authority. One way he sought to do this was through a series of Vatican concordats with national governments, including the fascist regimes of Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. The basis for these treaties was canon law, which he in his early career helped codify. As fascism extended it influence in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s, the Vatican, by and large, remained aloof, occasionally challenging fascist ideology when it impinged on important matters of doctrine or on its institutional prerogatives, but unwilling to interfere with what it considered secular concerns. The Vatican found most aspects of right-wing regimes agreeable, appreciating their patronage of the Church, their challenge to Marxism and their frequent championing of a conservative social vision. Despite numerous appeals to do so, Pius XII refused to issue explicit denunciations of the murder of Jews or to call directly upon the Nazis to stop the killing. He steadfastly maintained the Vatican’s position of neutrality and declined to associate himself with Allied declarations against Nazi war crimes. The most he would do, critics contend, was to issue vague appeals against the Sciolino and Weeden

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oppression of unnamed racial and religious groups and try to ease the plight of Jewish converts caught up in Nazi persecution. And with a few notable exceptions, members of the Vatican diplomatic corps did little better. After extensive research, Susan Zuccotti, author of Under His Very Windows, concludes that although some Catholic clergy, nuns and laity attempted to help Italian Jews avoid deportation to Auschwitz and some even took heroic measures to save Jewish lives, there is no evidence of the Pope’s guiding hand. Pius XII’s alleged silence in response to the Holocaust has been the subject of heated controversy since the play, “Der Stellvertreter,” (The Deputy) by Rolf Hochhuth, first staged on Broadway in1963, made that provocative charge. “Deputy” evokes the papal title -- “Vicar of Christ,” implying that by not publicly challenging the Nazis and their racist policies, Pius failed in Christ’s prophetic role as exemplar of ethical behavior. Critics have accused him of everything from anti-Semitism to collusion with the Nazi regime, one, English historian, John Cornwell, even branding him “Hitler’s Pope.” His defenders, among them, David G. Dalin, Pierre Blet S.J., Sr. Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Pinchas Lapide, Ronald J. Rychlak and Jose M. Sanchez, on the other hand, argue that his behind the scenes diplomacy saved hundreds of thousands of Jews and other innocent victims, preventing greater catastrophe. In their view, Pius’ failures, whatever they might have been, were those of a holy man with human shortcomings who was compelled to act in particularly tragic circumstances. Critics charge that Pius’ tepid response to the Holocaust was influenced more by politics than conscience; that Pius was a consummate diplomat at a time when the Church needed a prophet. There is currently a movement among conservatives within the Vatican curia, spearheaded by Pope Benedict XVI himself, to have Pius XII canonized a saint, which is fueling the controversy initiated by The Deputy. St. Peter the Apostle, by tradition the Church’s first pope, died a martyr’s death by crucifixion in the 1st century on the Vatican Hill in Rome. Pius XII, his 260th successor, died of natural causes in 1958 on the same Vatican Hill nineteen centuries later in the papal apartments attached to St. Peter’s Basilica. 1. Shaping the Pope a. Eugenio Pacelli was born in Rome in 1876, the year after Pius IX’s encyclical letter challenging Bismarck’s attempt to limit Church influence in newly unified Germany. Pacelli, raised in a family with close ties to the Vatican, was steeped in the Church’s long tradition of papal authoritarianism, anti-Judaism (hostility toward Jews based on religion), and opposition to “modernity,” His seminary education concentrated on canon law, not theology. Like most of his religious contemporaries, he distrusted Western democracy and equated Judaism with atheistic communism, both of which were viewed as mortal enemies of the Church. b. He was ordained a priest in 1899, the year after Leo XIII condemned the heresy of “Americanism.” In 1901 with little or no pastoral experience, he entered the Vatican Secretariat of State. One of his first assignments was to help redraft the Church’s Code of Canon Law, a task which took him and another priest more than 10 years to accomplish. The new Code was published in 1917. Canon 218 defined the pope’s authority as “the supreme and most complete jurisdiction throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and in those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the world.” c. Distinguishing himself as a canon lawyer and diplomat, he was elevated to the rank of cardinal in 1929 and appointed Vatican secretary of state in 1930. Pacelli lived in Germany from 1917, the year he was appointed Papal Nuncio to Munich, until 1929. John Cornwell, author of Hitler’s Pope writes (Pacelli’s) “principle task in Germany was…the imposition, through the 1917 Code of Canon Law, of supreme papal authority over … Catholic bishops, clergy, and faithful.” Sciolino and Weeden

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d. Knowledgeable about Nazi ideology, Pacelli spoke little before becoming pope about Hitler’s racist theories. He did, however, in a 1935 speech, two years after Hitler became chancellor, describe Nazis as “miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel.” Pacelli added, “It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of the social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” e. As secretary of state, the Vatican’s second most powerful position, Pacelli assisted in writing and editing Mit brennender Sorge ("With burning Concern,")*, an encyclical of his immediate predecessor Pope Pius XI, published on March 10, 1937. The encyclical dealt with the condition of the Church in Germany and criticized Nazism. It objected in clear and ringing language to violations of the Reich Concordat (see infra). Addressed to German bishops, it was read in all parish churches of Germany. * The encyclical asserted that Hitler was deceiving Germans and the international community. It affirmed that the Nazi leader was “perfidious, untrustworthy, dangerous and determined to take the place of God” and condemned, in particular, the paganism of the national-socialism ideology, the myth of race and blood, and the fallacy of their conception of God. Mit brennender Sorge, however, never directly mentioned Nazi racial policies toward Jews. f. In 1938 at an International Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest while the Hungarian legislature was promulgating anti-Jewish legislation, Pacelli, addressed the congress making reference to Jews “whose lips curse (Christ) and whose hearts reject him even today.” He was elected Pope in 1939, choosing the name Pius XII. g. Although informed of massive Nazi attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany and Austria on November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht,* “the Night of the Broken Glass,” historical starting point of the Holocaust, neither Pacelli, then secretary of state, nor Pius IX issued any public criticism. * One critic charges that the Church's response to Kristallnacht, the display of governmentsanctioned Nazi brutality, consisted of foreboding silence and an effort to protect Catholics, particularly Catholic converts from Judaism, at the expense of Jews. Defending his refusal to condemn the April 1, 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, declared that it was "a matter of economics, of measures directed against an interest group which has no very close bond with the Church.” In a letter addressed ... to then Vatican secretary of state Pacelli, , Faulhaber wrote: “We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows.” h. According to Garry Wills, author Papal Sin, Pacelli was a leading proponent of the prevailing view that Bolshevism posed the gravest threat to the Church in the modern world. Nazis might try to manipulate the churches, but they, at least, let them exist. Bolshevism, on the other hand, abolished them altogether. Even when Nazism began to look evil, it remained not only the lesser of two evils but a bulwark against the greater one, which, Wills contends, explains why when the Church criticized the Nazi regime, its language was “cautious and negotiatory.” i. Upon taking the papal office, Pius XII had to make a momentous decision about what to do with Pius XI’s draft encyclical, Humani Generis Unitas.* The decision was momentous because the encyclical would finally, and publicly, have the Church defend the Jewish people, by explicitly Sciolino and Weeden

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condemning Nazi anti-Semitism and calling for the cessation of German persecution of Jews. Pius XII decided to bury the encyclical, now known as the Hidden Encyclical, in the Vatican archives. Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning, p.39-40. *The encyclical reads in pertinent part: “It becomes clear that the struggle of racial purity ends by being uniquely the struggle against the Jews. Save for its systematic cruelty, this struggle is no different in true motives and methods from persecutions everywhere carried out against the Jews since antiquity.” j.. Pius XII, in his own first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus of October 20, 1939, warned against theories which denied the unity of the human race and against the deification of the State, all of which he saw as leading to a real "hour of darkness." It did not, however, condemn Nazi anti-Semitism, call for the cessation of German persecution of Jews, nor even specifically mention Jews. k. The only time Pius spoke out explicitly against Hitler was during a speech to the College of Cardinals, one month after World War II ended. 2. The Reich Concordat a. One of his objectives as secretary of state was to negotiate a concordat that would define Church-State relations in Nazi Germany. Hitler assumed power on January 30, 1933. On July 20 of that same year, Pacelli and Vice Chancellor Von Papen signed the Reich Concordat which granted freedom of religious practice to the Church in Germany, including, among other things, a free hand in administering Catholic schools. In return, the Church agreed to separate religion from politics, in effect, banning Catholic political activity in the Third Reich. As a consequence, Catholics were told they were free to cooperate with the new regime and even join the Nazi party.* *Before Hitler became chancellor in 1933, most German Catholic bishops warned the faithful about Nazi racism. In some dioceses it was not even allowed for Catholics to join the National Socialist party because of the problem of racism. These warnings proved effective because few Catholics voted for Hitler or the National Socialists during the elections between 1930 and 1933. John Cornwell describes the effect of the Concordat’s signing: Eventually only the Catholic Center Party stood in his (Hitler’s) way to absolute power. Here Pacelli was very helpful. Seeking a concordat between the Reich and the Vatican, Pacelli betrayed the millions of Catholic supporters of the Catholic Center Party by signing an agreement with Hitler that resulted in a ban on political activity by members of the church. It was the only democratic party left in Germany. With its disbanding, Hitler became the supreme leader of the country. Nothing stood in his way. The Vatican had even become the first state to recognize his odious regime, giving it tacit approval by its "Reich Concordat." Pacelli, Cornwell concludes, was primarily interested in advancing Catholicism in general and enhancing papal power in particular. b. On September 2, 1933 Cardinal Adolf Bertram, Archbishop of Breslau, Germany, wrote to Pacelli, "Will it be possible for the Holy See to put in a warm-hearted word for those who have been converted from Judaism to the Christian religion, since either they themselves, or their children or grandchildren, are now facing a wretched fate because of their lack of Aryan descent?" Pacelli agreed with Bertram's concern and raised the issue with German authorities. His note in defense of "non-Aryan Catholics" was careful to acknowledge that the Vatican's concern was not with the fate of other "non-Aryans." The note began, "The Holy See [has] no intention of

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interfering in Germany's internal affairs." That is to say, the Holy See recognizes that the fate of non-Aryans is a matter outside the circle of Vatican concern, with one exception. "The Holy See takes this occasion," Pacelli wrote, "to add a word in behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion, or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith, and who, for reasons known to the Reich government, are likewise suffering from social and economic difficulties.” c. Pursuant to the Reich Concordat, the Vatican’s agreed to cease all Catholic political activity in Germany, specifically disbanding the Catholic Center Party (founded in 1870), which had functioned as a democratic counterweight to the rise of Nazi fascism. Some historians speculate that had Pacelli not allowed the Catholic Center Party to go out of existence, Hitler's rise to absolute power might not have occurred. According to John Cornwell, see supra, Pacelli’s action ensured that whatever Catholic resistance to Nazi fascism arose would be “isolated and impotent.”* The way was clearer for the Nazi regime to pursue its genocidal racist policy and the virtual conquest of Europe. The Reich Concordat, first treaty to be concluded with a sovereign state, lent legitimacy to the new regime and was generally viewed as a diplomatic victory for Hitler. It made him, in the colorful German saying, salonfahig (“fit for association with decent people.”) *Until the signing of the Concordat, some German bishops refused church rites to Nazi officials. Most resistance to Nazi ideology and political force came from Catholics. Many German bishops were not even aware that negotiations were occurring until the Concordat’s signing was announced. Nationalism, along with the Concordat, constrained German bishops from speaking out against the Holocaust, see infra. Hitler, speaking to Cardinal Faulhaber in Munich on November 4, 1936 said: “…think, my Lord Cardinal…and discuss with other church leaders how you want to support the great task of National Socialism…and how you want to establish friendly relations with the state. Either National Socialism and the Church will win together or they will both go under.” d. Forbidding German Catholics to engage in political activity also resulted in diminishing the influence of Catholic labor unions and other Catholic grass roots organizations. James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews, terms the Vatican’s pact with Hitler a “foundation stone of the Shoah.” The Church, he argues, was capable of resisting state power in Germany, as it had done successfully sixty years earlier under Bismarck's Kulturkampf (18711878). At that time with its institutional interests challenged by anti-Catholic legislation, Pius IX used the considerable powers of the papacy to force Bismarck to back down. Among other things, Carroll contends, Pius IX urged Germans to “passively resist” the offending laws and threatened excommunication of any priest who cooperated with the new regime. The Church, as a consequence, not only survived, but prospered. Pius XII, on the other hand, according to Carroll, capitulated to Hitler, and by so doing ensured that Nazism could rise unopposed by “the most powerful Catholic community in the world.” Carroll argues that in negotiating the Reich Concordat, the future Pius XII was “elevating Catholic institutional self-interest above Catholic conscience,” acting more like a politician than a prophet. e. Both the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches remained official state churches throughout the Nazi regime, which meant that the Reich collected a church tax and funded church expenses. Religious education remained part of the state education system, chaplains served in the military, and theological faculties remained funded and active within the state universities. Sciolino and Weeden

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Article 24 in the Nazi Party Program professed "positive Christianity" as the foundation of the German state. f. Heinrich Brüning, German chancellor (1930-32) said: “All success (Pacelli believed) could only be attained by papal diplomacy. The system of concordats led him and the Vatican to despise democracy and the parliamentary system…Rigid governments, rigid centralization, and rigid treaties were supposed to introduce an era of stable order, an era of peace and quiet.” 3. Religious Affiliation in the Third Reich a. According to 1939 census figures, forty percent of Germans were Roman Catholics and fifty four percent were Protestants. Organized into 25 dioceses, the Church by the end of the 1920’s numbered over 20,000 priests for 20 million Catholics, as against 16,000 pastors for 40 million Protestants. (Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p.4) b. Hitler and many in his leadership cadre like Heinrich Himmler (SS chief and overseer of death camps in the East), Joseph Goebbels (Nazi propaganda chief), Reinhard Heydrich (principle planner of the Final Solution) and Rudolf Hoess (architect and SS Commandant of Auschwitz), were baptized Catholics, as were large numbers of his security forces, armed services, and concentration camp personnel. Those who were not Catholic were Protestant.

c. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has charged: “For almost twenty centuries…the church was the archenemy of the Jews – our most powerful and relentless oppressor and the worlds’ greatest force for the dissemination of anti-Semitic beliefs and the instigation of the acts of hatred. Many of the same people who operated the gas chambers worshiped in Christian churches on Sundays…The question of the complicity of the church in the murder of the Jews is a living one. We must understand the truths of history.” 4. Papal Power a. As Pope, Pius XII held three official positions. He was supreme pontiff, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, a supra-national power in Europe for centuries, with a network of bishops, priests, and other religious men and women throughout the world, all loyal to him. He was chief of state of Vatican City, a sovereign state, with his own diplomatic corps, newspaper and radio station. He was Bishop of Rome, the Eternal City, symbolic seat of Christianity. b. His views, cloaked in divine authority, including “infallibility” on matters of faith and morals, could influence 400 million Roman Catholics worldwide, including those in all the occupied eastern territories - Poles, Croatians, and Slovaks. Moreover, as spiritual leader* of the world’s largest religion, his views could influence non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians as well. *Leadership principle….”A good leader is proactive; is a role model; sets standards of excellence for others to follow; inspires and motivates.” c. Among his powers were: access to the mass media, including the Catholic press, and to a worldwide audience; influence over an extensive international Catholic education system ranging from elementary schools to universities; excommunication (denial of the sacraments); ability to write encyclicals; ability to place books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (a list of books forbidden to Catholics). Sciolino and Weeden

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d. From his papal “bully pulpit,” he could have urged Catholics and all people of conscience to passively resist Germany’s (and Italy’s) unjust race laws, as his predecessor Pius IX had done when the Church’s institutional interests were threatened in Germany during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf campaign. Specifically, for example, he could have forbidden priests to allow church records to be accessed by Nazis who used them to identify Jews from Catholics. Although briefed regularly about details of the death camps, he never informed the world that mass murder was taking place in Europe, mostly in Poland, which would have given every person of conscience the objective and hard facts necessary to make an informed moral judgment about how to respond. e. Pius XII never excommunicated a single Nazi nor threatened to do so. He did, however, excommunicate some German Catholics who supported cremation as an alternative to burial. And during post war Italy, he threatened to excommunicate any Italian who joined the Communist Party or voted for its candidates. He did not place Mein Kampf,* first published in 1925, a book in which Hitler set forth his racist agenda, on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, nor did he publicly urge passive resistance to Hitler’s or Mussolini’s race laws, nor did he write an encyclical specifically condemning Nazi racial policy. * Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany since 1945. f. According to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of A Mortal Reckoning and Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Pius XII never privately instructed European cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns and lay Catholics to do whatever they could to save Jews. He did not protest publicly or explicitly instruct others to hide Jews when the Germans deported them from Italy or from any other country, including from his own city of Rome. Goldhagen charges that “Had Pius XI and Pius XII, the Church leaders and lower clergy used their pulpits and their enormous number of newspapers and diocesan publications with their huge, faithful readerships in Germany and around Europe to declare anti-Semitism a vicious delusion and to denounce the persecution of the Jews as a grievous crime and sin, then the political history of Europe would have been different, and the fate of the Jews much better. Goldhagen, A Moral Awakening, p.44. 5. Pleas for Help a. Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII received pleas for help on behalf of Jews. In the spring of 1940, for example, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. Herzog later made a similar request for Lithuanian Jews. Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d'affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps. In each instance, Pius XII apparently did nothing. b. In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked Pius to condemn Nazi atrocities. The response came that the Holy See would remain "neutral," and that condemning atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in Nazi occupied lands. c. In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been exterminated, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as “a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the

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Bolsheviks”. The Pope replied by quoting verses from the psalms and advising Septyckyj to "bear adversity with serene patience." d. On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, "The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms." Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, Secretary of State Maglione responded on the Pope's behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews. e. Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, a priest of the Servite Order and president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi atrocities. Bishop Konrad Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII failed to respond publicly. f. The Vatican did protest to both Hitler and Mussolini about certain racial issues, but not out of concern for the welfare of Jews. Throughout this period the Vatican seldom opposed Jewish mistreatment and rarely denounced discriminatory practices taking place in Europe; when it did so, it usually admonished governments to act with “justice and charity,” disapproving only of violent excesses of the most extravagant forms of oppression. g. “Silence gives consent.” Pope BonifaceVIII (1012-24) h. “All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” Burke

Edmund

i. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King Jr. 6. Neutrality a. In December 1942, Pius officially explained his refusal to make public statements against the Nazis. The Allied governments issued a declaration, "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race," declaring that perpetrators of Jewish murders would be brought to justice after the war. When U.S delegate to the Vatican Harold Tittman asked Secretary of State Maglione if the Pope could issue a similar proclamation, Maglione replied that the Pope was "unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities." Because Pius believed he could not specifically denounce Nazis without denouncing Russian communists as well; he would only condemn atrocities in general. Critics charge that as an anti-modernist who distrusted Western democracy and as a staunch anti-communist, Pius feared Bolshevism more than Nazism. b. After Germany invaded Poland in September,1939 and the Nazis began terrorizing the Poles, English minister to the Vatican, Francis Osborne said: “The Holy Father appears to be…adopting an ostrich-like policy toward these notorious atrocities. It is felt that as a consequence of this exasperating attitude, the great moral authority enjoyed by the Papacy throughout the world under Pius IX has today been notably diminished.” c. The Pope did speak generally against the extermination campaign. On January 18, 1940, after the death toll of Polish civilians was estimated at 15,000, the Pope said in a radio broadcast, "The horror and inexcusable excesses committed on a helpless and a homeless people have been established by the unimpeachable testimony of eye-witnesses." During his Christmas Eve radio broadcast in 1942, he referred to the "hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction." However, he did not mention Jews by name. Sciolino and Weeden

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d. In 1941, after being asked by Marshal Petain* of occupied Vichy France if the Vatican would object to French anti-Jewish laws, Pius answered that the Church condemned racism, but did not repudiate every rule against Jews. When Petain's puppet government introduced "Jewish statutes," the Vichy ambassador to the Holy See informed Petain that the Vatican did not consider the legislation in conflict with Catholic teachings, as long as they were carried out with "charity" and "justice." *Petain was convicted of war crimes after the war. e. In a September 1940 broadcast, Pius termed Vatican policy towards the Nazi regime "neutrality,"* but stated in the same broadcast that where morality was involved, no neutrality was possible. (Taken at face value that statement would seem to imply that a national policy of genocide was not a moral issue… surely an absurd conclusion!) *One critic explains why the Vatican maintained a policy of reserve and conciliation: “The goal was to limit the global conflict where possible and to protect the influence and standing of the Church as an independent voice. Continually apprehensive of schisms within the Church, Pius strove to maintain the allegiance of Catholics in Germany, in Poland and elsewhere. Fearful too of threats to the Church from the outside, he believed that he dared not confront the Nazi or Italian fascists directly.” f. Despite numerous appeals, Pius refused to issue explicit denunciations of mass murder of Jews or call upon the Nazis directly to stop the killing. He maintained his posture of neutrality and declined to associate himself with Allied declarations against Nazi war crimes. The most he would do was to encourage humanitarian aid by subordinates within the Church, issue vague appeals against oppression of unnamed racial and religious groups, and try to ease the lot of Catholic converts of Jewish origin caught up in Nazi persecution. g. “The hottest places in hell are reserved to those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” Dante h. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Bishop Desmond Tutu 7. Italy’s Jews a. Before 1938, Mussolini’s fascist regime had not joined Nazi Germany, its Axis ally, in persecuting Jews. Italian Jews had resided in Rome for over 2000 years, since before the time of the apostles Peter and Paul, and were well assimilated into society. It was not uncommon for Italian Jews to marry Italian Catholics. In general, Italians considered Jews to be friends and neighbors. Some Jews even joined the Fascist Party out of patriotism. b. In 1938, however, Mussolini initiated an anti-Jewish campaign entitled Manifesto of Italian Racism which declared Italians to be part of the pure race along with Aryans. Race laws, similar to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, were enacted in Italy forbidding Jews to marry Christians (miscegenation); barring them from attending or teaching in public schools; prohibiting them from serving in the military or holding certain jobs; and depriving them of property. Foreign Jews living as refugees in Italy were rounded up and confined in internment camps. c. The situation for Italian Jews took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1943 when Mussolini was overthrown and imprisoned. Pietro Badoglio assumed the Prime Minister's post and immediately began negotiating a ceasefire with the Allies. Enraged, Hitler used force in an attempt to bring Italy back into the Axis fold. Despite the increasingly desperate situation on the Sciolino and Weeden

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Eastern Front, he sent troops to occupy northern and central Italy. SS troops, along with the most zealous of Mussolini's supporters, began rounding up Jews in Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Trieste, and other northern cities. d. In September, 1943, Nazi troops occupied Rome. Pius XII became aware that Jewish deportations from Italy were impending and what fate awaited the deportees. Publicly, the Pope remained silent. Privately, he instructed Catholic institutions to provide refuge to Jews. The Vatican itself hid 477 Jews and another 4,238 Jews were protected in Roman monasteries and convents.* *40,000 Italian Jews survived the Holocaust because of the refusal of ordinary Italians, as well as lower-level Italian government, military and church officials, to cooperate with the Nazis. In many instances, Italians assisted Jews by obstructing or not cooperating with deportations, or helped them escape to unoccupied southern Italy. e. On October 16, 1943, the Nazis rounded up 1,007 Roman Jews, the majority of whom were women and children, and amassed them in a piazza within walking distance of the papal apartments in St. Peter’s Square. Ironically, the piazza, located within the historic Jewish ghetto, first built in Rome by decree of Pope IV in 1555, contained one of Rome’s many churches, Santa Maria del Pianto. A convoy of trucks, taking a route that passed in front of St. Peter’s Square, conveyed the deportees to a railway terminal. From that terminal the Jews were transported to Auschwitz, where 811 were gassed soon after their arrival. Of those sent to Auschwitz, only 16 survived.* *In total about 8,000 Jews were deported from Italy to Nazi death camps during the occupation. Most perished. Thankfully, however, 80% of Italian Jews survived the Holocaust; while elsewhere in Europe, only 10% of Lithuania and Latvian Jews survived. In total, 67% of European Jewry was annihilated. f. John Cornwell contends that because most Italians were sympathetic to Rome’s Jews, the Nazi occupiers, fearing public disorder, did not want to carry out the deportation order. Pius refused to intervene, however, according to Cornwell, despite being urged by the occupation leadership to protest publicly and register objection with Berlin. Susan Zuccotti adds that claims by Pius defender Pinchas Lapide that Pius was behind rescue efforts of Jews in Italy are unsubstantiated, without foundation and is, in fact, contradicted by credible evidence. "Pius XII personally seems to have made no contacts and no appeal to the Italians for the Jews. Likewise, he seems never to have appealed personally to any German officials. At the very least, he might have asked that Italian Jews might be allowed to remain in internment on Italian soil. He did not do so" (Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, p. 294). g. In Act III of The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, as Roman Jews are being rounded up for deportation, Fr. Riccardo (who later dies at Auschwitz) declares …”doing nothing is as bad as taking part (…)God can forgive a hangman for such work, but not a priest, not the Pope!” 8. Papal Responses a. As Vatican secretary of state in 1938, Pacelli spoke out against Italy’s racial laws under Mussolini, Manifesto of Italian Racism, but only against select parts that dealt with religiously mixed marriages and children of those marriages. He said nothing about restrictions imposed on the civil rights of Italian Jews. Moreover, as noted previously, he, as Vatican secretary of state, issued no condemnation of Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) which occurred on November 9, 1938.

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b. In March of 1939, the month he was elected Pope, he approved 3,000 visas to enter Brazil for European Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Two-thirds of these were later revoked, however, because of "improper conduct," presumably meaning that converted Jews reverted to practicing Judaism. c. Pius XII, on occasion, did act positively on behalf of Jews, albeit behind the scenes. During the German occupation of Hungry, for example, he, along with the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta, advised the Hungarian government to be moderate in its plans concerning their treatment. Pius protested against the deportation of Hungarian Jews and, when his protests were not heeded, he cabled repeatedly. His protests, combined with those from the King of Sweden, the International Red Cross, Great Britain and the United States convinced the Hungarian regent to cease deportations on July 8, 1944, evidencing, contrary to claims of Pius’ defenders, that papal intervention could, in fact, achieve favorable results without risking greater catastrophe d. In the later stages of the war, Pius XII appealed to several Latin American governments to accept “emergency passports” obtained by several thousand Jews. Through his efforts with cooperation of the U.S. State Department, 13 Latin American countries decided to honor these documents, despite Nazi threats to deport the passport holders. e. The Vatican answered a plea to save 6,000 Jewish children in Bulgaria by helping to them flee to Palestine. At the same time, however, Cardinal Maglione wrote to the apostolic delegate in Washington, A.G. Cicognani, noting this assistance did not mean the Pope supported Zionism. 9. Politics behind Papal Policy a. Concordats negotiated with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, as noted previously, called for church neutrality on “political” issues, and, therefore, Vatican protests against Mussolini and Hitler were constrained by a strict and literal observance of the respective concordats. b. His critics argue that one reason for Pius’ policy of neutrality despite escalating Nazi atrocities was his desire to broker the peace treaty ending the World War II.* After U.S. officials advised him in 1942 that the allies would accept nothing less than total surrender and an allied victory appeared likely, Pius increased his efforts on behalf of Jews. Late in 1942, for example, he began to advise German and Hungarian bishops that it would be to their ultimate advantage to go on record as speaking out against the massacre of the Jews. This, critics claim, demonstrates that the real motive for papal intervention after 1942 was based more on political than moral inclination. *In The Deputy, Rolf Hochhuth’s pope says: “Secretly…silently, cunning as serpents – that is how the SS must be met.” But Pius’ advisor, Fr. Fontana says: “Your Holiness, may I ask in all humility: Warn Hitler that you will compel five hundred million Catholics to make Christian protest if he goes on with these mass killings!” To which the pope replies, “Fontana! An advisor of your insight! How bitter that you too misunderstand Us. Do you not see that disaster looms for Christian Europe unless God makes Us, the Holy See, the mediator?” c. Guenter Lewy, author of The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany writes: “…the Vatican’s interest in a strong Germany as a bulwark against Russian Communism played in the development of (its) policy toward the Nazi regime.” d. His defenders argue that Pius believed that speaking out would cause Jews even more harm than they were already suffering. Jose M. Sanchez, author of Pius XII and the Holocaust, for

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example, points out that after Catholic leaders in the Netherlands protested Jewish deportations, the Nazis began rounding up Jewish converts to Catholicism as well. Although Sanchez points out that a similar negative response did not take place after French Catholic bishops protested Nazi treatment of Jews, he does not discuss how Danish Catholics were able to successfully protect nearly all the Jews in their country, nor why Protestants in Norway as well as Eastern Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria were able to protect Jews in their countries without provoking Nazi reprisals. e. “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also what you do not say.” Martin Luther 10. Recently Uncovered Evidence a. The International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (ICJHC), a group comprised of three Jewish and three Catholic scholars, was appointed in 1999 by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. In October of 2000, the group of scholars finished their review of archive material released by the Vatican, and submitted their preliminary findings to the Commission's then-President, Cardinal Edward Cassidy. Their report, entitled "The Vatican and the Holocaust," refuted several defenses for Pius’ alleged silence. b. The claim, for example, that Pius was unaware of the seriousness of the situation of European Jewry during the war was determined to be inaccurate. Numerous documents demonstrated he was well-informed about the full extent of Nazi anti-Semitic practices. A letter from Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, caught the particular attention of the commission. In that letter dated January, 1941, Preysing confirms that "Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and the neighboring countries. I wish to mention that I have been asked both from the Catholic and Protestant side if the Holy See could not do something on this subject...in favor of these unfortunates." The letter, which was a direct appeal to the Pope himself, without intermediaries, as noted supra, provoked no response. In 1942, an even more compelling eyewitness account of the mass-murder of Jews in Lwow was sent to the Pope by an archbishop. This, too, yielded no apparent response. c. The Commission also discovered several documents that refuted the claim that the Vatican did everything possible to facilitate emigration of Jews out of Europe. Internal memoranda confirmed Vatican opposition to Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine. "The Holy See has never approved of the project of making Palestine a Jewish home... [Because] Palestine is by now holier for Catholics than for Jews." Some in the hierarchy, however, ignored this policy by assisting Jews to emigrate there. d. The claim that the Vatican needed to remain neutral has also been challenged. In January of 2001, a document was discovered in which Monsignor Giovanni Montini, Pius XII's Secretary of State, detailed and denounced several abuses committed by the Soviet Army against German residents in the Soviet Union. The report was viewed as evidence that the Vatican had no compunction about speaking out against atrocities committed by Russian communists, even when doing so violated its official policy of neutrality. e. In 2004, news was disclosed of a diary kept by James McDonald, the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees coming from Germany. In 1933, McDonald raised the issue of Jewish mistreatment with Vatican secretary of state Pacelli. McDonald was specifically interested in helping a group of Jewish refugees in the Saar region. The Pope’s defenders cite his intercession on behalf these refugees as evidence of his sympathy for persecuted Jews. According to Sciolino and Weeden

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McDonald, however, when he discussed the matter with Pacelli, “The response was noncommittal, but left me with the definite impression that no vigorous cooperation could be expected.” Pacelli did intercede in January 1935 to offer help, but only after McDonald agreed that American Jews would use their influence in Washington to protect church properties that were being threatened by the Mexican government. f. In 2006, an Israeli scholar, Dina Porat, discovered correspondence between Haim Barlas, an emissary of the Jewish Agency sent to Europe to save Jews in the 1940s, and Angelo Roncalli, the papal representative in Paris (and future Pope John XXIII) in which Roncalli criticized Vatican silence regarding the Holocaust during the war. In June 1944, Barlas sent Roncalli a copy of a report compiled by two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz documenting the mass murder at the camp. Roncalli forwarded the report to the Vatican, which had claimed it did not know about the report until October. Earlier, Roncalli had written to the president of Slovakia at the behest of Barlas asking him to stop the Nazi deportations of Jews. g. In 2005, the Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, discovered a letter dated November 20, 1946, showing that Pius XII ordered Jewish babies baptized by Catholics during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents. 11. “Ratlines” a. At the end of World War II, the Vatican aided the escape of hundreds of Nazis from Europe by issuing them false Red Cross passports. The so-called “rat line,” see infra, involved a network of European monasteries used to harbor war criminals. These were spirited out of Germany and the former Nazi occupied territories to Latin America. Mass murderers like Klaus Barbie and Ante Pavelic (of Croatia) were delivered to the port of Buenos Aires disguised as priests. As in the case of Barbie, some went on to become expert advisers to Latin American dictatorships in techniques of repression and torture perfected by the Third Reich. b. Bishop Alois Hudal was rector of the Pontificio Istituto Teutonico Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, a seminary for Austrian and German priests, and "Spiritual Director of the German People resident in Italy". After the end of the war in Italy, Hudal became active in ministering to German-speaking P.O.W’s and internees then held in camps throughout Italy. In December 1944 the Vatican Secretariat of State received permission to appoint a representative to "visit the German-speaking civil internees in Italy", a job assigned to Hudal.* *Hudal used this position to aid the escape of Nazi war criminals, including Franz Stangl, commanding officer of Treblinka, Gustav Wagner, commanding officer of Soribor, Alois Brunner, responsible for the Drancy internment camp near Paris and in charge of deportations in Slovakia to German concentration camps, and Adolf Eichmann sometimes referred to as "the architect of the Holocaust". Some of these wanted men were being held in internment camps: generally without identity papers, they would be enrolled in camp registers under false names. Other Nazis hiding in Italy sought out Hudal as his role in assisting escapes became known on the Nazi grapevine In his memoirs Hudal wrote: “I thank God that He [allowed me] to visit and comfort many victims in their prisons and concentration camps and to help them escape with false identity papers.”

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12. Sainthood for Pius XII? a. Members of the Vatican Congregation for Saints' Causes met on May 8, 2007 to consider the cause of sainthood for Pope Pius XII and voted to recommend that Pope Benedict XVI* formally declare Pius “venerable,” a preliminary step in the canonization process. * Benedict XVI subsequently declared, in one of the most forceful defenses by a pope to date, that Pius had done all he could—and more than most—to stop the Holocaust. "Wherever possible, he spared no effort in intervening in [Jews'] favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church." The pontiff insisted that Pius' wartime interventions were "made secretly and silently precisely because, given the concrete situation of that difficult historical moment, only in this way was it possible to avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews." Celebrating in 2008 a mass commemorating the 50th anniversary of Pius' death, Benedict reiterated: "In light of the concrete situations of that complex historical moment, he (Pius) sensed that this was the only way to avoid the worst and save the greatest possible number of Jews." Benedict then indicated that he prayed the process of beatification "can proceed happily." b. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, urged Pope Benedict to suspend indefinitely the canonization process for Pope Pius until secret World War II Vatican archives are declassified and fully examined "so that the full record of the pope's actions during the Holocaust may finally be known." c. Fr. Peter Gumpel, S.J., relator in the cause of Pius XII’s canonization has said: “The cause of the beatification and canonization of Pope Pius XII, who is rightly venerated by millions of Catholics, will not be stopped or delayed by the unjustifiable and calumnious attacks against this great and saintly man.” d. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King. Jr. e. “The principle that governs the biblical vision of society is, ‘Thou shall not stand idly by when your fellow man is hurting, suffering, or being victimized.’ It is because that injunction was ignored or violated that the catastrophe involving such multitudes occurred.” Elie Wiesel, death camp survivor. f. “Who is a saint in the time of evil?... The question is not whether the Pope was evil, but: was he a saint? I must ask the Church to re-assess its conscience. Does not ‘sainthood’ indicate a superhuman effort? And if the Church wants to be a teaching testimony to everyone, should it not take extra care, even if it leaves the establishment of those days less than perfect?” Albert H. Friedlander 13. What Might Have Been a. Pius XII’s response to the Shoah (Hebrew word for “catastrophe”) was complex and inconsistent. Neither a demon nor an angel, he reigned as pope during arguably the most demonic and most destructively evil period in human history. At times, he tried to help Jews and was successful, which leads to legitimate speculation about what additional success he might have had, if, he had done more. One can only imagine, for example, what might have been if, as “Vicar of Christ,” he had threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who joined the Nazi party or who cooperated with its racist policies; or if he had excommunicated Adolph Hitler or Sciolino and Weeden

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any other Nazi. Or if, as a respected worldwide voice of conscience and the world’s most influential religious figure, he had publicly condemned Nazi atrocities or urged passive resistance to anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. b. Pius’ critics focus on the particular evil that Nazism presented during the Holocaust and charge that a religious leader of his high rank and moral authority was duty bound to be clear, forthright and outspoken in condemning such egregious injustice. If racial terrorism had been explicitly condemned by him, Roman Catholics and others might have been inspired to do more to rescue victims of the Holocaust; victims who, at least, would have had the comfort of knowing the world was not indifferent to their plight. One can only speculate how many more people of conscience might have acted responsibly, even heroically, before and during the Holocaust, if Pius, had been an exemplar of ethical behavior. c. No one can know for certain what difference a public stand by the pope would have made, but here is what Guenter Lewy says, quoted by John Cornwell: "A public denunciation of the mass murders by Pius XII, broadcast widely over the Vatican radio and read from the pulpits by the bishops, would have revealed to Jews and Christians alike what deportation to the East entailed. The pope would have been believed, whereas the broadcasts of the Allies were often shrugged off as war propaganda." d. No one can know for certain what motivated Pius. His critics offer various explanations: antiSemitism; pursuit and preservation of papal authority; fear of Nazi reprisals; fixation with diplomacy; duty to preserve the institutional church; belief that private interventions would be more productive than public ones; fear of alienating German Catholics and causing schism; preference for Nazism over Bolshevism as the “lesser of two evils. Whatever his motives, however, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he, like so many others in positions of influence, could have done more to avert the Shoah, a human catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude.. d. For David Kerzter, author of The Popes Against the Jews, the real scandal lies not in the fact that Pius XII remained silent, but in "the role his predecessors played over the previous (centuries) in dehumanizing the Jews, [and] in encouraging large numbers of Europeans to view them as evil and dangerous." Here’s what others say: f. “Nazi anti-Judaism was the work of godless, anti-Christian criminals. But it would not have been possible without the almost two thousand years’ prehistory of ‘Christian’ anti-Judaism.” Hans Kung g. “Christianity in Germany bears a greater responsibility before God than the National Socialists, the SS and the Gestapo. We ought to have recognized the Lord Jesus in the brother who suffered and was persecuted despite him being a communist or Jew.” Martin Niemöller h. “We must continue to remind ourselves that, in a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible.” Abraham Joshua Heschel i. “It is true that each must finally answer personally for the condition of his own conscience. It is also true that when the flock drifts far astray and wanders into mortal danger the shepherds are uniquely guilty.” Franklin H. Littell

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j. “Religion must be prepared to suffer: it cannot always be diplomatic.” Albert H. Friedlander k. “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” Book of Deuteronomy l. “Love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus of Nazareth

II. Roman Catholics in Germany (1938-45) “Christianity in Germany bears a greater responsibility before God than the National Socialists, the SS and the Gestapo. We ought to have recognized the Lord Jesus in the brother who suffered and was persecuted despite him being a communist or Jew.” Martin Niemöller Key Point: While tens of thousands of Christians in Germany and Europe during the Holocaust acted humanely toward Jews, even heroically; sadly many, many more did neither. Some were perpetrators, some collaborators, some sympathizers and the vast majority were bystanders who either looked the other way or pretended not to know what was going on. For the most part church leaders were passive, sometimes complicit. A few church leaders even participated as collaborators and perpetrators. All too seldom did Christians follow the example of Jesus and reach out with loving kindness to victims. What Christians did and failed to do continues to haunt and challenge the Christian world. Scope: While the role of the Vatican during the Holocaust is an area of on-going research, the fundamental facts of history are clear. Throughout the Nazi era popes failed, directly or explicitly, to counteract or attack the policies of Hitler and the Nazis. Additionally the Vatican failed to withdraw official support for traditionally anti-Judaic teachings about the Jews, e.g. their “collective guilt for the death of Jesus.” The same can be said of most Protestant leaders. Admittedly over the 2000 years of Church history, some popes and others made efforts to support and protect Jews, but, for the most part, church leaders at all levels were at the forefront of antiJewish activities, e.g. the Crusades, the injustice of the Holy Inquisition, the lies of blood libel etc. The truth must stand on its own no matter how painful that truth may be. Roman Catholic and Protestant behavior in Germany during the Holocaust was influenced by a variety of factors. Bishops, clergy, religious, and laity, for example, shared in the pride of German patriotism/nationalism and respect for authority. Extreme patriotism and excessive respect for authority, however, often became an excuse for blind obedience to state policies, even morally indefensible ones like genocide. During the Nuremburg trials (1945-46), for example, an all too commonly heard refrain in defense of war crime charges was “I was only following orders.” In determining how to respond to Nazi racist policies, most Germans placed a Christian’s duty of obey secular authority higher than a Christian’s duty to obey conscience. Jesus taught his followers to “render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” (Matthew 22:21) Too many Christians in Germany and Europe, however, ignored the distinction and rendered all to the Nazi “Caesar.” Moreover, a significant number of church leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, metaphorically speaking, the “shepherds of the flock” failed to provide the flock with moral leadership; i.e.; failed to set a prophetic example of what Jesus would expect his followers to do under conditions of such egregious injustice -- injustice directed against targeted minorities, including his own Jewish people.

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Gordon C. Zahn, author of German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, after studying Roman Catholic leadership during WWII, concludes: “…the German Catholic who looked to his religious superiors for spiritual guidance and direction regarding service in Hitler’s wars received virtually the same answers he would have received from the Nazi ruler himself.” Zahn, p. 17. Zahn further concludes: “To the extent that the Church does accommodate itself to a secular regime, it becomes, in effect, an agent of that regime, supplementing the secular controls with those of the spiritual order.” Ibid, p.216. German Christians, who comprised 94% of the population, generally agreed with Nazi goals. For example, they welcomed the regime’s goal of stamping out communism to counter liberal, anticlerical and atheistic currents within the Weimar Republic. They were attracted by National Socialism’s advocacy for a strong state, a strong leader, a new Reich that, following Germany’s humiliating defeat in WWI, would once again rise to be a world power. They applauded Germany’s improving economic and social conditions under Hitler. As happened so many times before throughout history, Jews were once again scapegoated for catastrophic events, i.e. for Germany’s loss of WWI; the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty; and the unfavorable social and economic conditions of the Weimar Republic. And, sadly, because German Catholics and Protestants were conditioned by centuries of church taught anti-Judaism, Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, aimed at “dehumanizing” Jews, resonated within many of them. According to 1939 census figures, religious affiliation in Germany was 54% Protestant and 40% Roman Catholic. Organized into 25 dioceses, each with at least one bishop appointed by the pope, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany numbered over 20,000 priests for 20 million Catholics. There were 16,000 pastors for 40 million Protestants. As Germany was the birthplace of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, Lutherans were particularly numerous and influential there. Most historians agree that part of reason for Hitler’s rise to power can be attributed to Martin Luther. Luther, the great church reformer, helped create the German nation, stimulate German nationalism and advance the German language. In the process, however, he developed a virulent, anti-Semitic blind spot. Initially sympathetic to Jews, he invited them to convert to Christianity, but when they failed to do so, he turned on them. His rhetoric against them became decidedly hostile. Jews, he contended, were evil by nature; they lacked any redeeming value. Railing against them publicly and privately, Luther claimed that by their very being, Jews were a demonic people who had forfeited their right to live. The world would be better off without them. His rhetoric blended easily into the regime’s pervasive and effective propaganda campaign against Jews. Lutherans, in effect, were given permission by their religion’s founder to hate Jews and so felt free to act out their anti-Semitism, Not only Lutherans but most Protestants within Germany accommodated themselves to the Nazi agenda. Those who spoke out were so few that their names are easily remembered: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. Liberal Protestant pastors, founders of the German Christian Movement in 1932, for example, soon after Hitler came to power, decided to create a “Reich” church that all German Protestants could rally around. The movement’s symbol was the Christian cross with a swastika in the middle. These pastors, harkening back to the discredited teachings of Marcion in the 3rd century, sought to eliminate Old Testament readings from their worship services, even eliminating all references to Jews in the New Testament. They, in effect, “Aryanized” Jesus. Like Luther, they viewed Jews as “demons;” “a cancer to be excised.” Point nine of the German Christian Movement’s platform stated: In the mission to the Jews we see a serious threat to our Volkstrum (race). That mission is an entryway for foreign blood into the body of our Volk. . . We reject missions to the Jews [because of ] . . . the danger of fraud and bastardization [of the German race].

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Adolph Hitler and many of his top henchmen like Heinrich Himmler (SS chief and overseer of death camps), Joseph Goebbels (Nazi propaganda chief), Reinhard Heydrich (principle planner of the “Final Solution”) and Rudolf Hoess (architect and SS Commandant of Auschwitz), were baptized Catholics, as were large numbers of the Third Reich’s security forces, military, civil servants, judiciary, concentration camp personnel and ordinary citizens. Roman Catholics comprised at least a third of Nazi Germany's army, police, public servants, railway workers and prison guards. The balance were Protestants. In Hitler’s view, genocide of the Jewish people was a “sacred” mission. In Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), his autobiography first published in 1925, written while serving a prison term for treason in Bavaria, he wrote: “Today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” The diabolical Fuhrer and his insidiously effective Nazi propaganda campaign effortlessly tapped into the poisonous groundwater of centuries long Christian anti-Judaism and created a most virulent and lethal form of modern anti-Semitism. Catholic and Protestant churches were the official state churches of Nazi Germany, which meant the state collected a church tax and funded church expenses. Religious education was included in the state education system; chaplains served in the military providing spiritual guidance to German soldiers; and theological faculties were active within state universities. Article 24 in the Nazi Party Program professed "positive Christianity" as the foundation of the German state. Revisionist historians claim that extreme racial prejudice against Jews was limited to Nazi Germany and did not affect the rest of the Christian world. The facts, however, do not support such a conclusion. The governments of Great Britain, Canada and the United States, for example, had knowledge of what was happening in Nazi Germany well before WWII began, yet none of them attempted to bring pressure on Germany, either diplomatically or politically, to halt the violence. Though requested to do so, the Allies did not attempt military measures, such as bombing rail lines to the extermination camps, which would have disrupted the industrialized killing operation. Most national governments even refused to allow persecuted German or Polish Jews to enter their territorial boundaries as political refugees. Anti-Semitism was strong enough in each of these countries that most politicians were unwilling to be perceived as pro-Jewish or pro-Zionist (i.e. in favor of a Jewish homeland/state in Palestine). Prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh, Fr. Charles Coughlin,* and Henry Ford were all anti-Semites. Christian complicity in the Holocaust, therefore, extended beyond Western and Eastern Europe. *Fr. Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and avowed Nazi sympathizer, during the 1930s used the radio to reach a mass audience in the U.S. Fond of quoting propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Coughlin said during one of his radio broadcast: “When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” Europeans outside Germany, like those within, were generally apathetic about Jewish persecution. They too had been conditioned by centuries of Christian anti-Judaic sentiment which numbed their consciences to Jewish mistreatment. Thus desensitized, a significant number of non-German Christians were amenable to Nazi anti-Jewish policies, even willing to take part in the killing. After Hitler’s armed forces invaded their countries, resident collaborators, including clerics in the Ukraine, Lithuania, Yugoslavia (Croatia), Poland and Hungary, were particularly helpful. In Vichy France, Nazi leaders were surprised by the eagerness some French citizens displayed in trying to please their occupiers. Clearly, not all Christians were guilty of the Holocaust. There were Christians throughout Europe who behaved humanely toward Jews, even to the point of risking their lives in rescue and resistance, but their number was small in comparison to those who participated or did nothing. Sadly, acts of courage and conscience were the exception, not the rule.

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The difference in Jewish survival rates varied greatly in the twenty one countries of Western and Eastern Europe, ranging from 95% surviving in Denmark to 10% surviving in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Irving Greenberg, member of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, explains the variation in Jewish survival rates this way: “Clearly the difference lay not in Jewish behavior, neither passive nor armed resistance. Armed resistance was a decision how to die, not how to live. Nor was it Nazi behavior that made the crucial difference, because it was murderous everywhere. The single critical difference was the behavior of bystanders. The more bystanders there were who resisted, the greater... the chance that Jews would survive.” Six million Jews, 1.5 million children, were murdered during the Holocaust -- 67% of European Jewry! But the magnitude of the tragedy does not end there. The Nazi reign of terror brought suffering and death to another five million non-Jewish victims, -- Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with mental or physical disabilities, homosexuals, Slavs, Poles, Russian POWs, Communists, Socialists and trade unionists. In sum, anyone who opposed the Nazi regime or anyone deemed unfit to live in the Third Reich, envisioned to encompass all of Europe, was targeted for elimination. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, charges that totalitarian terrorism was not what brought about the complicity of ordinary Germans in the mass murder of Jews; rather their long history of Jew hatred led them willingly to assent to ''eliminationist antiSemitism.'' Goldhagen further charges that deep traditions of anti-Jewish thought and action in the Church led it to a morally afflicted choice during World War II, namely ''that allowing or abetting the Germans' and their helpers' persecution of the Jews and even letting the Jews die was preferable to intervening on their behalf.'' James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews, adds: “The German Catholic hierarchy and clergy, in particular were guilty of a grievous moral failure.” Most of the Holocaust’s victims lived in countries dominated by Roman Catholic populations and/or heads of state, i.e. Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Spain, France, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Hungary and Croatia. Religious affiliation in the 21 countries of Europe, as in Germany, was overwhelmingly Christian. Accordingly, the conclusion is inescapable -- the Holocaust was the work of Christians, ostensible followers of Jesus of Nazareth, himself a Jew, who preached a Gospel of love and non-violence. 1. The Reich Concordat a. Before the signing of the Reich Concordat in 1933, many German bishops refused Catholic rites to Nazi officials and warned the faithful about National Socialism’s racist policies. Until then, major Christian resistance to Hitler came from Catholics, primarily through membership in the Catholic Center Party*, founded in 1870 as a counterforce to anti-Catholic sentiment during Bismarck’s Second Reich. Relatively few Catholics voted for Hitler or Nazi party candidates during elections between 1930 and 1933. As a result of the Church’s agreement in the Concordat to disband the Center Party, church sanctioned Catholic political activity in Germany ended. The German Catholic Church, thereafter, specifically the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, withdrew its earlier prohibition against Catholic membership in the Nazi party and urged the faithful to be loyal and obedient to the new regime. *Members of the Center Party held the chancellorship in eight of the fourteen cabinets between 1918 and 1933. In 1931 Karl Bachem, historian of the Center Party, noted with pride, “Never yet has a Catholic country possessed such a developed system of all conceivable Catholic associations as today's Catholic Germany.”

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b. Defining church-state relations as it did, the Reich Concordat, in effect, hamstrung Catholics whenever Nazis took action against Jews. Under its terms, the Church agreed not “interfere” in state matters. As the Nazis became ever more radical in their treatment of Jews, Catholic clergy, for the most part, believed they had to remain silent or forfeit church prerogatives “guaranteed” by the Concordat. Although the Concordat “guaranteed” freedom from state interference in religious matters, the regime, nonetheless, routinely violated its terms, for example, by harassing the Church, arresting Catholics on trumped-up morals charges, removing crucifixes from schools, closing down Catholic presses and restricting church welfare programs to the racially “fit.” The regime, moreover, routinely ignored church pleas made on behalf of Jewish converts to Catholicism. c. In a 1937 homily/sermon Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber boasted about how much the Church with its Concordat had legitimized and buttressed Nazism: “At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the government abroad.” d. At the heart of the German Catholic Church’s failure to speak out “prophetically,” before and during the Holocaust, was the notion that as an institution it was compelled to act in its own narrowly defined “best” interests. There was little desire in Germany at the time for heroism or self-sacrifice, but great emphasis on “pragmatic” and “strategic” measures to protect the Church’s institutional autonomy without provoking schism among Catholics or antagonizing the Nazis. Institutional inaction* by the Vatican and German Catholic Church, sadly, gave clergy and laity an excuse for passivity in the face of human suffering, both of Jews and of other targeted minorities. *”The Church is legitimized as a moral institution, and its failings are defended by appealing to the constraints, real, or invented, that it faced as a political institution.” Goldhagen, A Moral Awakening, p.87 2. Nationalism/ Patriotism a. Nationalism/patriotism,* coupled with the Reich Concordat’s restriction on political interference by the Church, the Vatican’s policy of neutrality, and a citizen’s duty to obey state authority, constrained German Catholics from protesting against the regime’s racist policies. * In September, 1939, following the invasion of Poland and beginning of WWII, German Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter stating, in pertinent part: "In this decisive hour we admonish our Catholic soldiers to do their duty in obedience to the Fuehrer and be ready to sacrifice their whole individuality. We appeal to the faithful to join ardent prayers that the divine Providence of God Almighty may lead this war to blessed success and peace for our fatherland and nation." b. In 1936, when the Nazi Party demanded that the swastika be removed from church newspapers and altars, there were loud protests from some clergy. Catholic and Protestant pastors who had placed the swastika on the altar, next to the cross, and on the masthead of their church newspapers claimed the swastika was a key element in the religious life of their congregants.

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c. Cardinal Faulhaber declared in October 1943 that “nobody in his heart can possibly wish an unsuccessful outcome of the war. Every reasonable person knows that in such a case the State and the Church, and organized society altogether, would be overturned by the Russian chaos.” d. Guenter Lewy concludes that with the exception of Bishop Konrad Preysing, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, “all German bishops until the very last days of the conflict called on the faithful to do their patriotic duty. This position, we may assume, represented sincerely felt loyalty to their country. The fact that Germany was ruled by the Nazis who harassed and persecuted the Church and were guilty of untold other crimes, made no difference.” Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p.232. e. Gordon Zahn adds: “In World War II the leading spokesmen of the Catholic Church in Germany did become channels of Nazi control over their followers, whether by their exhortations to loyal obedience to legitimate authority, or by their even more direct efforts to rally those followers to the defense of Volk, Vaterland, and Heimat as a Christian duty.” Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, p. 203. 3. Bishops a. Disagreement existed within the German Bishops’ Conference regarding how to respond to Nazi racial policies. Most bishops were aware that atrocities were taking place against Jews almost as soon as they began. They also knew the extent of Hitler’s eliminationist plan by the end of 1942 when a large scale “industrialized” killing operation began, primarily in Poland. During and after the War some bishops, however, including Cardinal Adolf Bertram,* and Archbishop Konrad Grober, denied knowing about the Holocaust. To lend credence to his claimed ignorance, Cardinal Bertram cut off contact with people connected with the Jewish community. The Church, in Cardinal Bertram’s view, had to exercise restraint to avoid jeopardizing national unity and in order to fulfill its central role of administering the sacraments. Other bishops, not wanting to be branded disloyal, avoided contact with members of the resistance. “No German bishop,” said Archbishop Grober, “would want to bring harm to the “beloved Volk and Fatherland.” * When Cardinal Bertram of Breslau addressed some 30,000 German Catholics of his diocese in 1938, he invoked Scripture on behalf of Hitler's regime: "There is no need to urge you to give respect and obedience to the new authorities of the German state. You all know the words of the apostle: ‘Let every man be subject to the powers placed over him.’" In 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, Cardinal Bertram ordered that a solemn requiem mass be held in commemoration of the Fuehrer. At least two bishops spoke out explicitly against the Holocaust. Bishop Konrad von Preysing* of Berlin headed a group calling for vigorous opposition, including public protests, to the regime’s anti-Semitic policies. In November 1942, Bishop Preysing preached a homily on the right of all people to life, which the Gestapo termed an “attack” on the State. The following month Bishop Josef Frings of Cologne wrote a pastoral letter, read at Sunday masses throughout his diocese, cautioning the faithful not to violate the inherent rights of others. Speaking at the Cologne cathedral, he said,: …“No one may take the property or life of an innocent person just because he is a member of a foreign race.” This and similar statements resulted in his harassment by the Gestapo. *In June 1940, after Cardinal Bertram had sent Hitler a letter of birthday congratulations assuring Hitler of the sincere good wishes of his Catholic subjects, Preysing informed Pius XII of his inclination to resign as bishop. “Pius XII, exhibiting the diplomatic skill for which he was known, did his best to conciliate all parties to the dispute. He resolutely rejected the idea of Preysing’s resignation, reassuring him of his full support, while at the same time he praised the

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leadership of Cardinal Bertram.” (Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, Introduction, p.xx) b. In August, 1943, members of the Kreisau Circle, Berlin’s Catholic resistance group, drafted a letter regarding Jewish deportation, they intended to send to Hitler under the signatures of all bishops. It read, in pertinent part: “With deepest sorrow – yes, even with holy indignation- have we German bishops learned of the deportation of non-Aryans in a manner that is scornful of human rights. It is our holy duty to defend the unalienable rights of all men guaranteed by natural law…. Shocking reports reach us regarding the awful, gruesome fate of the deported…” The draft letter made specific requests that included: humane living and working conditions for those deported; access to contact with friends and relatives; admission of chaplains into settlements and camps; admission of a visitation committee to settlements and camps; a list of the whereabouts of all deported people; a list of all evacuated from the camps and an accounting of their whereabouts. The letter, however, was never sent. It was rejected in favor of “small successes,” i.e. it was feared that taking public action would make it more difficult for rescuers who were hiding Jews. 4. Priests a. In Nazi Germany priests were not only clerics subject to their diocesan bishop, but also civil servants subject to state regulation. Consequently when the state mandated in July 1933 that civil servants had to offer the “Heil Hitler” salute, priests were compelled to comply. There were various levels of acceptance and rejection of the Nazi regime’s policies among the German Catholic clergy: 

A few priests challenged National Socialism and its anti-Semitic ideology (and paid with their lives).



Some, approximately 140 priests, however, remained in the priesthood and promoted National Socialism (“brown priests”* – brown was the official color of the Nazi movement). These priests embraced Hitler’s policies and his Weltanschauung (worldview).

*One of them, Fr. Richard Kleine, said: “Since I was a child a burning love for my German Volk and fatherland has been part of me… the relationship between the church and Germany has been especially important to me. I am one of those who firmly believed that the National Socialist movement stood for the national and social future of my Volk and was altogether the superior alternative to the Communist-Bolshevist ideology. I trusted… that Christian presence and cooperation in this movement could enhance Christian thought.” b. Catholic priests were among the chaplains assigned to minister to the spiritual needs of German soldiers. Here’s what one critic has to say about the practice:* *"What about the hundreds of German priests serving the German army and occupation forces in eastern Europe, who were in the thick of killing operations, holding services for and hearing the confessions of the killers? Did they see Jews as innocent and the mass slaughtering of Jews as wrong? Did the priests tell the many Catholics among the hundreds of thousands of Germans participating in the mass annihilation that they were sinning? The evidence strongly suggests that they did not. If they had viewed the killing of the Jews as a crime and a sin, then we would in all likelihood know Sciolino and Weeden

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about such a view and of their initiatives among the perpetrators, because it has been the practice of the Church to put forward any evidence that would cast a favorable light upon itself. The testimony that does exist is not heartening. Of an estimated one thousand Catholic and Protestant clergy serving as military chaplains, fewer than ten cases (most are Catholic priests) have come to light - some of which are dubious - where it can be said that the chaplains conveyed disapproval of or urged resistance to the mass murder. . . That Catholic priests in the thick of the mass murder greeted the annihilation of the Jews with silence or worse should come as no surprise, since the Catholic military bishop, Franz Justus Rarkowski, the spiritual leader of the priests assigned to the Wehrmacht, was deeply Nazified." ( Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning, pp.62-63) c. The lingering effects of Kulturkampf under Bismarck caused Catholics to question their place in German society and caused priests and bishops, in particular, to view with suspicion any challenge leveled by the regime against the Church. Many clerics feared the threat Bolshevism posed to the Church’s existence. Hitler’s promise to eradicate this threat won their trust. As many Jews were communists or communist sympathizers, this provided another excuse for mistrusting them. d. From April, 1933, only those who could prove their Aryan lineage back at least two generations could work in Nazi controlled jobs. In most instances this required documentation based on church records. "The Church co-operated as a matter of course, complaining only that priests already overburdened with work were not receiving compensation for this special service to the state. The very question of whether the Church should lend its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish descent was never debated. . . And the co-operation of the Church in this matter continued right through the war years, i.e. from 1933 through 1945, when the price of being Jewish was no longer dismissal from a government job and loss of livelihood, but deportation and outright physical destruction." (Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p. 282) e. The “Klerusblatt,” official publication of the Bavarian priests’ association, declared in January 1936 that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were “essential” for the well-being of the German people. Priests across Germany, with some exceptions, supplied genealogical (baptismal) records, making implementation of the Nuremberg Laws possible. 5. Laity a. The Church’s anti-Judaic tradition was a powerful influence on the attitude of German Catholics toward Jews. Since childhood, for example, they had been exposed to the lie* that Jews killed Jesus and were theologically contaminated. Lack of theological empathy caused many Christians to view Jews as incorrigible non-believers, too alien and obstinate to be included in Jesus’ command to “love neighbor.” Add to that, Nazi racist claims that Jews were sub-human polluters of the Aryan race who threatened the destiny of the fatherland; mix with the Church’s teaching that faithful Catholics should to be obedient to church and state; season with lack of moral leadership from church leaders …the concoction proved lethal. * the deicide libel against Jews was officially repudiated by Vatican II in 1965 b. Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, asserted: “I personally arranged on orders from Himmler in May 1941, the gassing of two million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943.” In his autobiography, Hoess, a baptized Catholic, wrote of his religious upbringing, of his intent to become a priest. Repeatedly he referred to his duty to obey orders, to carry out commands without question. “I can still remember how my father, who on account of his

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fervent Catholicism was a determined opponent of the Reich government and its policy, never ceased to remind his friends that, however strong one’s opposition might be, the laws and decrees of the state had to be obeyed unconditionally.”* *Jesus taught his disciples to love unconditionally! c. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda chief, opined: “Christ is the genius of love, as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate. The Jew is a non-race among the races of the earth.... Christ is the first great enemy of the Jews.... that is why Judaism had to get rid of him. For he was shaking the very foundations of its future international power. The Jew is the lie personified. When he crucified Christ, he crucified everlasting truth for the first time in history.” 6. The “Final Solution” a. The Final Solution, Nazi German’s plan for the systematic genocide of all of European Jewry, began the final and most deadly phase of the Holocaust (Shoah). Heinrich Himmler (a Catholic) was chief architect of the plan, which Hitler (a Catholic) termed: "the final solution of the Jewish question" When the Final Solution was fully implemented in late 1942, with death camps in place mostly in Poland, “industrialized” mass murder of Jews began in earnest. The official decision to systematically eliminate the Jews of Europe was made at the Wannsee conference in early 1942. The conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich (a Catholic), acting under the authority given him by Reichsmarshall Göring (a Protestant) in a letter dated July 31, 1941. Göring instructed Heydrich to settle "...the solution of the Jewish problem..." During the conference, there was discussion held by the group of Nazi officials on how best to handle the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". A surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in 1947, too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trials. By the summer of 1942, “Operation Reinhard” began the intensified extermination process, notwithstanding that hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed by death squads, mobile killing vans, Einsatzgruppen, and in mass pogroms. In a speech at the Posen Conference on October 6, 1943, Himmler, publicly and succinctly explained what the "Final Solution" entailed.

III. Roman Catholics outside Germany Scope: During their campaign to “eliminate” European Jewry, the Nazis found thousands of willing accomplices among the Christian populations of Western and Eastern Europe. These accomplices included lay Catholics and clergy. Indigenous police forces in France and the Netherlands participated in roundups of targeted victims. Hungarian troops and fascist extremists joined the hunt and helped slaughter thousands of Jews. Slovakia's Hlinka Guard, modeled on Nazi Storm Troopers, attacked Jews while local police organized deportations. The Ustasa --a Croatian nationalist organization--tortured and murdered Jews with axes and hammers. In Croatia, not only were Jews murdered, but so too were Orthodox Catholic Serbs and Gypsies. In Poland, where most of the death camps were located, 90% of Polish Jews were murdered, but so too were 3 million Polish Christians, mostly Catholics. In Romania and the Crimea, the “enthusiasm” of volunteer ethnic German and Romanian army units which took part in mass shootings surprised even the SS.

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When the mobile killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen swept into the Soviet Union, their comparatively thin ranks were augmented by auxiliary troops of native Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The Omakaitse, Estonian police collaborators, rounded up the Jews of Tallinn and helped the Nazis shoot hundreds. Selbstschutz, Latvian police, assisted in the killing of thousands in Riga. Lithuanian police seized and executed Jews, while Lithuanian nationalists killed thousands in pogroms. The particularly brutal Hilfspolizei, Ukrainian auxiliary police, hunted down Jews escaping from ghettos and killed thousands. Without the willing participation of non-German sympathizers, lay Catholics and members of the clergy, including Fr.Jozef Tiso, fascist leader of the Slovak Republic, and Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, Primate of Croatia, both of whom were convicted of war crimes after the War (Tiso was executed), the Holocaust could not have happened with such chilling effectiveness on such a large scale. It happened, unfortunately, because the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants living in Europe allowed it to happen. 1. Roman Catholics in Yugoslavia (Croatia) Clerics as Willing Accomplices a. Incredibly, clerics of the Croatian Roman Catholic Church, from priests to a cardinal, were among the willing accomplices of mass murder of, not only Jews, but Serbs (Orthodox Catholics), and Gypsies (Roma) in Yugoslavia. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust,* killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens - 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Gypsies. In these crimes, the Ustasha, Croatia’s radical fascist movement, was openly supported by Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb. * Soon after the new fascist state of Croatia was created in May 1941, Pavelic’s reign of terror began. John Cornwell describes what took place: "(It was) an act of 'ethnic cleansing' before that hideous term came into vogue, it was an attempt to create a 'pure' Catholic Croatia by enforced conversions, deportations, and mass exterminations. So dreadful were the acts of torture and murder that even hardened German troops registered their horror. Even by comparison with the recent bloodshed in Yugoslavia at the time of writing (1999), Pavelic's onslaught against the Orthodox Serbs remains one of the most appalling civilian massacres known to history" (Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, p 249) b. Many victims of the Pavelic regime in Croatia were killed in one of Europe’s largest death camps, Jasenovac, where over 200,000 people - mainly Orthodox Catholic Serbs met their deaths. Several members of the clergy were involved in the genocide at Jasenovac – notably Fr. Miroslav Filipovic, a Franciscan priest and one of the commandants of the camp. Some 240,000 people were "rebaptized" into the Catholic faith by fundamentalist clerics in "the Catholic Kingdom of Croatia" as part of the Pavelic regime’s policy to "kill a third, deport a third, convert a third" (of Serbs, Jews and Roma in Bosnia and Croatia). c. When the Nazis installed the puppet Ustashi government in May 1941, Cardinal Stepinac offered congratulations to Pavelic and held a banquet to celebrate the new regime. Following the inaugural session of the Ustasha parliament, Pavelic attended Mass in Zagreb’s cathedral, where Cardinal Stepinac offered special prayers for the fascist leader and ordered that a solemn "Te Deum" to be sung in thanksgiving for the Pavelic regime. In May 1941, while Pavelic was in Rome to sign a treaty with Mussolini, Cardinal Stepinac arranged to have Pavelic received personally by Pius XII. Stepinac then issued a pastoral letter ordering Croatian clergy to support the new Ustasha State. In the same year, Stepinac declared:

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"God, who directs the destiny of nations and controls the hearts of Kings, has given us Ante Pavelic and moved the leader of a friendly and allied people, Adolf Hitler, to use his victorious troops to disperse our oppressors... Glory be to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler and loyalty to Ante Pavelic." d. Vatican appointed primate, Cardinal Stepinac, maintained that Jews and Orthodox Catholic Serbs, should be removed from Croatian society. He charged that Jews were pornographers; and that their doctors were the primary perpetrators of the “evil” of abortion. His colleague, Bishop Ivan Saric of Sarajevo, at least in so far as Jews were concerned, concurred. In May 1941, Bishop Saric’s diocesan newspaper published an article entitled “Why Are the Jews Persecuted?” It explained: “The descendants of those who hated Jesus, persecuted him to death, crucified him and persecuted his disciples, are guilty of sins greater than (those of) their forebears. Jewish greed increases. The Jews have led Europe and the world towards disaster—moral and economic disaster. Their appetite grows till only domination of the world will satisfy it…Satan aided them in the invention of Socialism and Communism. There is a limit to love. The movement of liberation of the world from the Jews is a movement for the renewal of human dignity. Omniscient and omnipotent God stands behind this movement.” e. Catholic clergy involvement in the Holocaust either in active participation or in blessing the Ustashi, is well-documented.* Stepinac himself headed the committee which was responsible for forcible "conversions" of Orthodox Catholic Serbs to Roman Catholicism under threat of death, and was also the Supreme Military Apostolic Vicar of the Ustashi Army, which slaughtered those who refused to convert. Cardinal Stepinac, known as 'Father Confessor' of the Ustashi, continually bestowed the Church’s blessing upon Ustashi members. *John Cornwell charges that from the beginning of the Pavelic regime, the Vatican knew what was happening in Croatia. In May 1941, Pius XII greeted Pavelic during a "devotional" audience in Rome. At that time, de-facto recognition of fascist Croatia was granted, as a "bastion against communism" - despite the fact that the Vatican still had diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia. Cornwell observes that from the start it was known that Pavelic was a "totalitarian dictator;" a "puppet of Hitler and Mussolini;" that he promulgated racist and anti-Semitic legislation, and that he was "bent on enforced conversions from Orthodox to Catholic Christianity." f. The Vatican helped Nazi war criminals escape prosecution at the end of the War, including Ante Pavelic and two hundred of his advisors, who fled to Argentina via "ratlines," or safe-flight routes, see supra. Escapees frequently hid during flight in church cloisters, often disguised as Franciscan monks. Pavelic himself escaped disguised as a Catholic priest. Cardinal Stepinac convicted of War Crimes g. After the War, Cardinal Stepinac was arrested by order of the postwar communist government of Yugoslavia, convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for war crimes. Prosecution witnesses at his trial in Zagreb testified in October, 1946, that Catholic priests armed with pistols went out to convert or massacre Orthodox Catholic Serbs. One witness testified that 650 Serbs were taken into a church and then stabbed or beaten to death by Ustashi members. Stepinac was convicted of aiding Pavelic (collaboration), and of glorifying the Ustashi in the Catholic press, pastoral letters, and speeches. Stepinac died under house arrest in 1960

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2. Roman Catholics in Slovakia Fr. Josef Tiso executed for War Crimes a. Fr. Jozef Tiso, priest and fascist leader of the Slovak Republic, was convicted and hanged as a war criminal after the War. Tiso maintained it was “a Christian act to expel Jews so that Slovakia could free itself of ‘its pests.’” Monsignor Domenico Tardini, one of two undersecretaries in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, knowing the situation in Slovakia, warned in an internal Vatican memo of April 7, 1943, that if the Church did not do something to disassociate itself from the mass murder happening in Slovakia for over a year, it might not be able to avoid being blamed for it. In Slovakia Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter justifying the deportation of Jews. They declared that “the influence of the Jews (has) been pernicious. In a short time they have taken control of almost all the economic and financial life of the country. Not only economically, but also in the cultural and moral spheres, they have harmed our people. The Church cannot be opposed, therefore, if the state with legal regulations hinders the dangerous influence of the Jews.” According to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Slovakia and Croatia are the “most striking cases of Catholic bishops and priests lending a hand to mass murder.” Goldhagen charges, “A priest was the country’s president. An avowedly Catholic party governed the country, seeking to mold it according to Catholic principles. Many priests served in the country’s legislature, which voted, as did all its legislator priests, to deport the country’s Jews to their deaths. The Slovakian clergy, like other clergy, were under the discipline of the Pope. He had absolute authority over them. He could have commanded them to desist from acting in ways that violated the Church’s doctrine and practices. Yet he did not command them not to deport their country’s Jews to their deaths.” Goldhagen, A Moral Awaking, pp 159-60) Slovakia – first Axis partner to consent to Deportations b. Slovakia was the first Axis partner to consent to the deportation of its Jewish citizens. According to a 1940 census, there were approximately 88,950 Slovak Jews. In March 1942, President Tiso signed an agreement with Nazi Germany that permitted their deportation to death camps. Between March and October 1942, Slovak police, assisted by Slovak military personnel, units of the fascist Slovak People's Party's paramilitary organization, the Hlinka Guard, and members of the Slovak ethnic German paramilitary formation Freiwillige Schutzstaffel turned over some 57,000 Slovak Jews to the Nazis who then proceeded to transport them to the death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor. Approximately 300 Jews survived the war. Among them were Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg (alias Rudolf Vrba), who escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and compiled the first detailed report on operations there for general dissemination in the West. Between September to December 1944, another approximately 12,600 Slovak Jews were deported, most of them to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. German and Hlinka Guard units killed a few thousand Jews caught in hiding or fighting with the partisans in Slovakia. Only 50% of Jews deported from Slovakia during and just after the uprising which ended in October 1944 survived. Thousands of Jews remained in hiding. In all, German and Slovak authorities deported more than 70,000 Jews from Slovakia; more than 60,000 of them, 86%, were murdered.

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3. Roman Catholics in Poland Poland – the biggest “killing field” a. In 1939, of all European countries, Poland had the highest concentration of Jews, approximately 10% of the population. As the largest community of Jews in Europe, Polish Jews were also the least assimilated. In Warsaw, the nation’s capital, about 65 per cent of Communist Party membership was Jewish. Over 90% of Poles were Roman Catholics. The Warsaw Ghetto was established in October, 1940 with a residency of 400,000 Jews. About 30 percent of Warsaw’s population was forced to live in deplorable conditions in about 2.4% percent of the city’s land space. The invasion of Poland* by Nazi Germany in September, 1939 marked the beginning of WWII. * In a speech delivered on the eve of the invasion, Hitler reputedly said: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" He was referring to the genocide that began in 1915, where 1.5 million Armenians were killed during deportations from Turkey. Today, Turkey’s national government denies what happened to the Armenians was genocide. Cardinal August Hlond b. Anti-Semitism in the 1930s permeated all levels of the Polish Catholic Church, as exhibited in a 1936 pastoral letter of Cardinal August Hlond who urged Catholics to boycott Jewish businesses: “…It is a fact that Jews oppose the Catholic Church, are steeped in free-thinking, and represent the avant-garde of the atheist movement, the Bolshevik movement, and subversive action. The Jews have a disastrous effect on morality and their publishing-houses dispense pornography. It is true that Jews commit fraud, usury, and are involved in trade in human beings. It is also true that the influence of Jewish young people on their Catholic peers is generally, on the religious and ethical level, a negative one. But we must be fair. Not all Jews are like this. There are very many Jewish faithful who are honest, just, compassionate, and charitable.” Also in 1936, Cardinal Hlond opined: 'There will be the Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain." (…”which some people understood to mean "unless and until the Jews are eliminated".) Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, p. 280 Polish Collaborators and Rescuers c. Poles witnessed the Holocaust up close and personal. The death camps were mostly on Polish soil and the largest concentration of Jews was in Poland. Many Poles were indifferent to Jewish mistreatment; many others commiserated with them, caring somewhat, but not enough to do anything about it. There were numerous Polish collaborators, people who turned Jews into the Gestapo or even took part in the killing process. Many Jews, on the other hand, were helped by Poles “of conscience.”* This help ranged from acts of heroism to simple acts of kindness by hundreds of thousands of Catholics who often acted anonymously. This “righteous” behavior is remarkable because ethnic Poles themselves were subjected to Nazi persecution. And help of any kind offered to a Jew was punishable by death. * One example of a Polish woman “of conscience” and a “Righteous Gentile,” see infra, is Irena Sendler. During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a “plumbing/sewer specialist.” She had an 'ulterior motive' ... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews. She smuggled Jewish infants out of the ghetto in the bottom of the tool box she carried and employed a burlap sack for larger children. She also brought along in her truck a dog Sciolino and Weeden

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that she trained to bark when Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers wanted nothing to do with the dog and its barking masked the children/infant noises.. During her employ, she managed to smuggle out and save approximately 2500. Eventually, she was caught. The Nazi's broke both her legs and arms during a vicious beating. Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she smuggled out of the ghetto keeping it in a glass jar buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate parents who might have survived, attempting to reunite children with their families. Most parents, however, had been gassed. Irene helped in getting orphans placed with foster families so they could be adopted. Relations between Poles and Jews during World War II represent one of the paradoxes of the Holocaust. Only 10 % of Polish Jews survived, yet, Poland accounts for over 5,900 Righteous Gentiles, see infra. The Yad Vashem museum in Israel honors the "Righteous Among the Nations," and Poland ranks first among 40 countries, almost one-third of the total, for men and women of "compassion, courage and morality" and who "risked their lives to save the lives of Jews." d. Like Irena Sendler, Polish nuns were especially active in the rescue of Jewish children, allowing them to hide in their convents and blend into their schools with Catholic students. A group of Catholic activists, moreover, was instrumental in establishing Zegota, the only organization formed in Nazi-occupied Europe for the specific purpose of Jewish rescue. Courageous members of Zegota, despite facing death for assisting Jews, placed about 2,500 youngsters in homes, convents, and orphanages in the Warsaw area alone. The clergy of Cracow provided assistance to Jewish converts, and Archbishop Adam Sapieha of Lvov intervened on their behalf, but, unfortunately, did little to help non-converted Jews. The Archbishop did, however, provide baptismal certificates to priests who were hiding Jews. Polish Bishops, for the most part, remained passive during the Holocaust. Three councils of Polish bishops took place during the German occupation, for example and none of them issued statements even mentioning the mass murder taking place on Polish soil. Archival correspondence between Polish bishops and the Vatican contain little expression of concern for the plight of Jews. e. About 3 million Polish Jews were murdered, mostly in Poland (especially at Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor and Auschwitz). Many Jews perished from starvation and disease in overcrowded Polish ghettos. However, the total number of Jews killed in Poland was higher as Jews were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps from countries outside Poland. In particular, Jews from France, Greece, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany were killed at Auschwitz. This raises the overall total to over 4 million killed in Poland, the country with the Nazis’ biggest killing field. 90% of Polish Jews perished. It is important to note that a total of six million Polish citizens were murdered, 20% of its population: three million Jews and three million Christians, mostly Catholics. 4. Roman Catholics in Lithuania a. In Nazi-occupied Lithuania, the Holocaust resulted in the near total destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. Of approximately 210,000 Jews, 195,000 perished—90%! One important factor that contributed to this enormous tragedy was significant popular support for that nation’s policy of "de-Jewification." In Lithuania, a predominately Roman Catholic country, local Lithuanian auxiliaries of the Nazi occupation regime carried out executions of Jews under Nazi direction. Groups of local partisans initiated contact with the Germans as soon as they entered Lithuanian territory. A rogue unit of insurgents headed by Algirdas Klimaitis instigated anti-Jewish Sciolino and Weeden

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pogroms in Kaunas (Kovno) in June, 1941. Over a thousand Jews perished in what was the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The Lithuanian Security Police was involved in various anti-Jewish actions. Nazi commanders filed glowing reports noting that the “zeal of the Lithuanian police battalions surpassed their own.” The most notorious Lithuanian unit was the Sonderkommando, a squad from the Vilnius area which killed tens of thousands of Jews, Poles and others. b. A combination of factors influenced Lithuanian participation in Nazi genocidal policy, including national tradition, anti-Semitism, and a prevailing desire for a "pure" Lithuanian nation-state that excluded Jews, who were hated for, among other reasons, having supported the Russian Soviet regime in Lithuania during 1940-1941. Moreover, as had happened so many times before in European history, Lithuanians scapegoated Jews for virtually every misfortune that had befallen their country. As in other occupied and Axis allied countries, not all Lithuanians supported the regime’s genocidal policy. Out of a population of approximately 3,000,000 (80% ethnic Lithuanians), only a few thousand took an active role in the Holocaust, while many hundreds risked their lives to shelter Jews. 723 Lithuanians have been recognized as Righteous Persons, see infra. Moreover, many of Lithuania’s Polish minority community also engaged in Jewish rescue. 5. Roman Catholics in France a. Before WWII, France was one of the more liberal nations in opening its doors to Jewish refugees from Poland, Romania, and Germany. In 1939, however, the puppet Vichy government imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration and set up internment camps for refugees. When Germany defeated France in June 1940, there were approximately 350,000 Jews in France, more than half of them German refugees. The French government signed an armistice with Germany in June 1940. Under the armistice, northern France came under German occupation; the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed to Germany. Southern France remained “unoccupied” and was governed by a French administration under the leadership of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain.* The Petain regime, its capital in the town of Vichy, declared itself to be “neutral,” but, in reality, it collaborated closely with Nazi Germany. *After the war, Petain was tried and convicted of war crimes b. Following France’s defeat in 1940, the Vichy government promulgated anti-Semitic legislation, the “Statut des Juifs,” patterned after the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. The legislation excluded Jews from public life; required their dismissal from positions in the civil service, the army, commerce, and industry; and barred them from participation in the professions, including medicine, law, and education. The French Catholic Church hierarchy issued no protest. In July 1941, the Vichy government inaugurated an extensive program of "Aryanization," confiscating Jewish-owned property. Many Jews were left destitute. Foreign Jews were particularly vulnerable. Thousands of Jews were sent to “internment” camps, such as Gurs near the Spanish border, where many died. The Nazis also deported 4,000 Jews from Gurs to Auschwitz. Elsewhere in France, other major camps in which (mostly foreign) Jews were interned included Saint-Cyprien, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, and Les Milles. There were many smaller camps as well.

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Bishop Delay of Marseilles demonstrated his hostility toward Jews when he said: “We do not ignore the fact that the Jewish question poses difficult national and international problems. We are well aware that our country has the right to take all appropriate steps to defend itself against those who, especially in recent years, have done her so much harm and to punish those who abuse the hospitality that has so liberally been extended to them.” d. Preparations began in early 1942 for including Jews of western Europe in the Final Solution. Deportations from France began that summer. French police rounded up Jews, mainly those without French citizenship, in both occupied and unoccupied (Vichy) zones. In mid-July 1942, 13,000 Jews were seized in Paris and interned for several days in the Velodrome d'Hiver sports arena. They were held there without food or water until their deportation to Auschwitz. Throughout France, Jews were assembled in camps, loaded onto cattle cars, and sent to the Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris. More than 60 separate transports left Drancy during 1942. Most of these transports went to Auschwitz. Drancy served as the last stop before the journey to their death for at least 62,000 Jews deported from France. Thousands of Jews fled to the southeast corner of France after Mussolini’s army occupied territory east of the Rhone River in late 1942. Italian authorities refused to hand over Jews to the Germans, despite repeated demands. While many Jews in the Italian zone were rounded up by the Germans after September 1943, thousands managed to hide or to escape to Switzerland. e. The last deportation from France to Auschwitz took place in August 1944. During the war, over 77,000 Jews deported from France were murdered in Nazi camps. Of these, one-third were French citizens and over 8,000 were children under the age of 13. More than three-quarters of the Jews who resided or had found refuge in France in 1939 managed to survive. This high survival rate was due to many factors, including dispersal of Jews in many localities, minimal German police presence, and assistance from Christians. The Allied landing in Normandy in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, began the liberation of France. f. On February 17, 2009, France's highest court issued a ruling recognizing the French state's responsibility in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during WW II. Citing "mistakes" made by the collaborationist Vichy regime, the court said the government's share of blame was clear in acts which had not been forced on it by the occupiers and which "allowed or facilitated the deportation from France of victims of anti-Semitism". The ruling marks the first time any French judicial body has acknowledged the government's role in Nazi-era atrocities. Calling for a "formal admission of the state's responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered", the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government's guilt. It added "As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state ... became its responsibility,"*. *"It is a decision with which I am content," Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told a reporter from Le Figaro. "France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s." For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François

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Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France "was never involved" in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Mitterand’s successor, Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France's "inescapable guilt." g. Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic philosopher, after the war tried unsuccessfully to have Pius XII speak out the issue of anti-Semitism and the evils of the Holocaust. Maritain resigned his post as French ambassador to the Vatican over what he regarded as Pius’s “inaction” on the issue of German guilt. 6. Roman Catholics in Hungary a. The destruction of Hungarian Jewry is one of the saddest chapters in the story of the Holocaust. At a time when German armies were being routed in the East and the ultimate fate of the Nazis was being sealed by the successful Allied invasion of France on D Day, June 6, 1944; when much of European Jewry had already been destroyed; and when world leaders had clear knowledge of what was happening, 500,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated in a “killing frenzy that kept Auschwitz’s crematoria burning night and day.” Jews in Hungary had been spared from the Holocaust by a national government that allied itself with Germany against the Soviet Union, but which, like Italy under Mussolini, resisted Nazi pressure to deport Jews. When Germany invaded and occupied Hungary in March 1944, however, Jews were left unprotected, easy prey for the “killing machine” operated by Adolf Eichmann. The killing began in midMay 1944 and two months later in July, it was over. Priests and Laity b. One reason, not surprisingly, mass killing occurred with little or no public outcry in Hungary was deep-rooted anti-Semitism. 66% of Hungarians were Roman Catholic. In the first six weeks following German occupation, Hungarians made some 35,000 “denouncements” against Jews. Popular hostility toward Jews had been encouraged for years by priests from the pulpit and in the Catholic and secular press. In an editorial published in a January 1939 edition of the local fascist party newspaper the “Arrow-Cross,” for example, a priest expressed his view of Jews in this way: “In places where priests are murdered, the educated are slaughtered, and churches are burnt— that’s where the Jew is to be found. Even if no Jew is actually there in a physical sense, his presence is represented there by his venomous literary works. Like naked spirits they drift all over the world, and by means of their filthy moral concepts, their distorted philosophy, and their base artistic schools, they spread their revolting ideas. Their sullied views corrupt the world.” Another priest, writing at the height of the mass killing, wrote that “Ever since the Jews crucified Jesus, they have been the foes of Christianity. May the Jews be expelled from Hungary, and then the Church, too, will be able to breathe more freely” Christians in Hungary, as in other European countries, understood their anti-Jewish hostility in terms of church teaching demonizing Jews. On the day of the first deportation in May, Hungarian undersecretary of state, Laszlo Endre, declared in a speech: “The popes, as well as our own ancient and saintly kings, legislated draconian laws and imposed severe decrees upon this parasitic race. Thus, no one can complain that we are not acting in accordance with the spirit of Christianity when we enact draconian regulations against the Jews so as to protect our nation” In the town of Veszprem, after the deportations to Auschwitz had begun, an article in the “Arrow Cross” newspaper announced a thanksgiving prayer service:

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“With the help of Divine Providence our ancient city and province have been liberated from that Judaism which sullied our nation. In our thousand-year, this is not the first time we have been freed from some scourge which had befallen us. However no previous event can compare in its importance to this event, for no previous foe threatening us, whether by force or by a political takeover, had ever succeeded in overcoming us to the extend that the Jews have succeeded, with the aid of their poisoned roots which penetrated our national body and took hold of it. We are following in the footsteps of our fathers in coming to express our thanks to our God who waves us whenever we are in distress. Come and gather for the thanksgiving service which will take place on June 25 at 11:30 A.M. at the Franciscan Church.” Bishops c. Anti-Jewish hostility was not limited to priests and laity alone. When the Hungarian government began promulgating anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s, Cardinal Justinian Seredi, the Hungarian primate, voiced no objection and when the deportations were taking place in 1944, his only concern was for Jewish converts to Catholicism. Michael Phayer, author of The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, characterizes the cardinal as “callously anti-Semitic.” Cardinal Seredi was not alone, as most Hungarian bishops were hostile or indifferent to the fate of the Jews. When Cardinal Seredi considered making a statement about deportations, Archbishop Gyula Czapik of Eger, reflecting the views of other church leaders, advised against making a strong statement. He counseled bishops to remain silent about was happening to Hungarian Jews because many of them “sinned against Christianity while none of their community ever reprimanded them for this.” Archbishop Czapik maintained that Jews were receiving appropriate punishment for their past misdeeds; and that the Church should not endanger its good relations with the government by speaking out on their behalf. A watered-down statement was produced but ended up not being read from pulpits. “Righteous” Catholics d. There were “righteous” lay Catholics in Hungary like Augusta Gervay, who helped scores of Jews survive the Holocaust. There were “righteous” religious such as Sister Margit Slachta, who instructed convents of her order and other institutions to shelter Jewish refugees; and Brother Albert Pfleger, a French-born monk of the Marist order, who opened the Champagnat monastery in Budapest to 65-70 Jewish families and, even, vacated his own room for seven refugees when numbers strained the monastery’s space capacity. There were “righteous” priests, such as Fr. Emilian Novak, who helped run a workshop that turned out fake baptismal certificates for Jews. And there was even a “righteous” bishop, Baron Vilmos Apor of Gyor, who implored Cardinal Seredi on several occasions to try to stop the deportations. The sad truth is, however, that during the attempted annihilation of Hungarian Jewry, the vast majority of Hungarian Christians, including clergy at all levels, did little or nothing to stop it. e. Hungarian bishops in a 1994 statement declared that perpetrators were not the only ones responsible for the Holocaust. Catholics who “through fear, cowardice, or opportunism, failed to raise their voices against the mass humiliation, deportation, and murder of their Jewish neighbors must also be held responsible, and before God we now ask forgiveness for this failure.”

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7. Roman Catholics in Italy Tolerance and Assimilation a. The Italian record on the Holocaust, though by no means unblemished, is more positive than that of most of the rest of Europe. Italian Catholics, in general, did not share Nazism’s genocidal zeal. Before 1938, Italy’s fascist government had not joined Germany, its Axis ally, in persecuting Jews. Jews made up about 0.1% of the population and were well assimilated into Italian society. It was not uncommon for Italian Jews to marry Italian Catholics. The average Italian, in general, considered Jews to be friends and neighbors (paesani). Jews even felt comfortable joining the Fascist Party for patriotic reasons. Mussolini falls in line with Hitler b. In 1938, however, the situation for Italian Jews deteriorated. Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader, initiated a comprehensive anti-Semitic campaign at Hitler’s urging, including Race laws patterned after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. The Manifesto of Italian Racism* declared Italians to be part of the pure race along with Aryans. Jews were forbidden to marry Catholics (miscegenation); they were barred from attending or teaching in public schools; prohibited from serving in the military or holding certain jobs; and deprived of the right to own real property. Foreign Jews living as refugees in Italy were rounded up and confined in internment camps. These camps, however, resembled Japanese-American internment camps rather than Nazi concentration camps. *In January 1939 (two months after Kristallnacht), following passage of Manifesto of Italian Racism, “L’Osservatore Romano,” the Vatican newspaper, published a long homily from a Catholic bishop stating that many church officials approved of the new legislation: “The Church has always regarded living side by side with Jews, as long as they remain Jews, as dangerous to the faith and tranquility of Christian people. It is for this reason that you find an old and long tradition of ecclesiastical legislation and discipline intended to brake and limit the action and influence of the Jews in the midst of Christians, and the contact of Christians with them, isolating the Jews and not allowing them the exercise of those offices and professions in which they could dominate or influence the spirit, the education, the customs of Christians. Notwithstanding passage of Manifesto of Italian Racism in1938, thousands of Jews sought refuge in Italy and Italian-occupied territories believing they were more likely to be protected than persecuted. In general, Italians did not obey Mussolini’s anti-Jewish policies, although, admittedly, Italian intellectuals and church leaders, for the most part, remained “silent” regarding the regime’s racist policies. In 1939, Roberto Farinacci, a member of Mussolini’s Fascist Grand Council, while speaking on “The Church and the Jews” said: “We fascist Catholics consider the Jewish problem from a strictly political point of view…But it comforts our souls to know that if, as Catholics, we became anti-Semites, we owe it to the teachings that the Church has promulgated over the past twenty centuries.” Nazi Germany intervenes c. The situation for Italian Jews took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1943 when Mussolini was overthrown and imprisoned. Gen. Pietro Badoglio assumed the Prime Minister's post and immediately began negotiating a ceasefire with the Allies. Enraged, Hitler used force in an Sciolino and Weeden

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attempt to bring Italy back into the Axis fold as well as to teach Italians a lesson. Despite the increasingly desperate situation on the Eastern Front, Hitler sent troops to occupy northern and central Italy, an unfortunate occurrence for Italian Jews since most of them lived in the northern regions. SS troops, along with the most zealous of Mussolini's fascisti, began rounding up Jews in Rome, see supra, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Trieste, and other northern cities. Two internment camps were built from which the Nazis occasionally transferred Jews to Auschwitz. In total about 8,000 Jews were deported to Nazi death camps during the occupation. About 95% of them perished there. The remaining 40,000 Jews in Italy survived because ordinary Italians, including lower-level government officials, military, clergy and religious refused to obey Nazi deportation orders. In many instances, Italians actively assisted Jews by obstructing deportation efforts, helping them escape to unoccupied southern Italy. 80% of Italian Jews survived the Holocaust, while elsewhere in Europe, for example, as few as 10% of Lithuanian Jews survived. Vatican Controversy d. The Vatican, as previously noted, has a controversial history regarding the Holocaust. Whether Pius XII, the world’s most influential religious leader at the time did enough in response to it is still open for debate today -- over seventy years later. Pius wrote in his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, at the beginning of WWII (October 20, 1939); “We feel We owe no greater debt to Our office and to Our time than to testify to the truth with Apostolic Firmness: to give testimony to the truth. …In the fulfillment of this, Our duty, we shall not let Ourselves be influenced by earthly considerations…” The jury is still out on whether he successfully “testified to the truth” and resisted being “influenced by earthly considerations.” Prior to the war the Vatican appeared to respond more or less appropriately to the Nazi threat. In 1938, for example, Pius XI spoke out against Hitler’s racial policies and against Mussolini’s willingness to follow in Hitler's footsteps. Pius XI, for the most part, was considered to be a critic of fascism, asserting, for example, that a person could not be both Catholic and fascist. Greeting a group of Belgian pilgrims in Rome, he tearfully exclaimed: "Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are all spiritually Semites." But David Kertzer, author of The Popes against the Jews, points out a number of instances where Pius IX exhibited hostility toward Jews. Pius XI died in 1939, six months before the beginning of WWII. Eugenio Pacelli, his secretary of state, succeeded him as Pius XII. Critics contrast Pius XII’s “inaction” in relation to Nazism with his forthright condemnation of communism, including in 1949 his excommunicating, “at a stroke,” Communist Party members everywhere in the world. Critics point out, on the other hand, that Pius did not excommunicate Hitler or, for that matter, any other Nazi. This is not to say that Pius XII did nothing to help Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His defenders,* among them, David G. Dalin, Pierre Blet S.J., Sr. Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Pinchas Lapide, Ronald J. Rychlak and Jose Sanchez vigorously support him, maintaining that he did his best under extremely difficult circumstances and worked “quietly behind the scenes” to save Jews, fearing that public opposition to the Nazis would only make things worse. His defenders also give him credit for both the general resistance of Italians to Nazi persecution of Jews, as well as heroic actions of church officials who engaged in rescue and refuge. It is true that the Vatican sheltered about 470 Jews behind its walls following the German occupation, while another 4200 were protected in Roman monasteries and convents. After the war, the Chief Rabbi in Rome as well as various Italian Jewish communities praised Pius XII for his support during the Holocaust. Sciolino and Weeden

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*Some of his defenders, however, tend to question the motives of Pius’ critics, attacking them rather than addressing their arguments. Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, in a May 2001 New York Times article asserted that those who use the phrase “silence of the Pope,” engage in “bigotry” and are motivated by “anti-Catholicism.” One of Pius’ defenders, Rabbi David G. Dalin suggests that Yad Vashem should honor Pope Pius XII as a "Righteous Gentile," see infra, and asserts that Pius was praised by leading Jews of his day for his role in saving “more Jews than Oskar Schindler.” Pius's admirers, Dalin contends, included Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog of the Palestinian Mandate and Israel, Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, and Israel's first president Chaim Weizmann. Dalin writes: "anti-papal polemics of ex-seminarians like Garry Willis and John Cornwell, of ex-priests like James Carroll, and of other lapsed or angry liberal Catholics exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church.” Another of his defenders, Sr. Margherita Marchione has written several books on Pope Pius XII and World War II, defending his sanctity, advocating his canonization to sainthood and likewise urging that he be declared a “Righteous Gentile.” Sr. Margherita has said: "Pius XII strongly condemned the anti-Semitic persecutions, the oppression of invaded lands and the inhuman conduct of the Nazis. He urged the Christian restoration of family life and education, the reconstruction of society, the equality of nations, the suppression of hate propaganda and the formation of an international organization for disarmament and maintenance of peace. He was a champion of peace, freedom, human dignity. He encouraged Catholics to look on Christians and Jews as their brothers and sisters, all children of a common Father. Pope John Paul II consistently praised Pius XII. This generation should be talking about the debt of gratitude it owes the saintly Pope Pius XII, not maligning him! I challenge you to help me spread the truth and obtain justice." Fr. Pierre Blet, a Catholic scholar who spent 15 years examining Vatican archival documents relating to the period, maintains that "(Pius’) public silence was the cover for a secret activity through Vatican embassies and bishoprics to try to stop the deportations." Blet admits Pius "liked Germans" but objects to the suggestion he was a Nazi sympathizer. Pius’ defenders, in short, claim his policy of realpolitik was a strategy aimed at keeping the Church’s hands free to help the Jews and other victims of the Nazis. His critics claim that is silence and maneuvering behind the scenes amounted to impotence in the face of real danger to the European people. “Righteous” Catholics e. The most notable example of clergy attempts to save Jews occurred in Assisi. Shortly after the Germans began rounding up Italian Jews, Fr. Ruffino Niccacci of the Monastery of St. Damiano was asked by his diocesan bishop to find homes and hiding places for more than 300 Jews just arrived from Trieste. Fr. Niccacci managed to have many of the refugees sheltered in buildings on the monastery grounds, having them dressed as monks and nuns to hide their true identities. Others were placed

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in parishioners’ homes and blended into the community. Not a single refugee was captured while staying at Assisi. Since WWII f. Italy, along with Britain, Sweden and Germany, observed the first annual Holocaust Memorial Day on January 28, 2001, the 56th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Primo Levi is perhaps the most famous Italian Jew associated with the Holocaust. The wellknown author was sent to Auschwitz and survived only because he contracted scarlet fever shortly before the Germans abandoned the camp as Allied troops advanced. Levi was left for dead by the fleeing Nazis but survived and went on to write several books. "Survival in Auschwitz" is the book that most directly touches on his experiences as a death camp inmate. Primo Levi once said: “the victims of the Nazis, exterminated in the camps, did not vanish forever in the smoke of the ovens. They have a grave, but it is a fragile one: our memory.” IV. “Righteous Persons” “In remembering the Holocaust we must not be numbed by the magnitude of its horrors. We must allow ourselves to be moved by the humanity the victims succeeded in preserving at all times. And we must humbly and gratefully look at these few individuals who, out of their religious beliefs or their humanistic education, with a simple gesture, often acting on impulse, became our protectors – better yet: our allies and friends. Each and every one of them is a reminder of what so many others could have done, of what so many others did not do.” Elie Wiesel Jesus said: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” Matthew 7:21 “You are my witnesses.” Isaiah 43:10 Key Point: Despite fear of reprisals, tens of thousands of Christians helped protect Jews from harm; some even risked their lives and have been officially recognized for heroism by the State of Israel. Background: Of 8.86 million Jews who lived in Europe before the Holocaust, six million perished in the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of others would have perished too were it not for the courageous intervention of a few world leaders and thousands of individual Christians who risked their lives to save Jews from annihilation. Many of these men and women paid with their lives for their heroic efforts. The Gestapo routinely offered a bounty for those who turned in Jews who were hiding. This bounty consisted of a quart of liquor, four pounds of sugar, a carton of cigarettes, or, at times, small cash payments. For many civilians, such commodities were unobtainable through normal channels, and thus these civilians were provided with a powerful incentive to cooperate with the Gestapo apart from any hatred they may have harbored toward Jews. Those who resisted the Gestapo and hid Jews did so at grave personal peril. Any person caught hiding a Jew was immediately shot on the spot or taken out to be publicly hanged. At a time when

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living space, food, sanitation facilities, and medicine were in short supply, those who hid Jews from the Nazis sacrificed a great deal in addition to risking their lives. Non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews became known as the “Righteous Persons” (or sometimes Righteous Gentiles). The Hasidei Umot HaOlam, “Righteous Among the Nations of the World” are genuine heroes worthy of commemoration because they are examples of followers of Jesus who lived their faith in the prophetic tradition. There are thousands of stories of great valor and, no doubt, even more stories of simple acts of kindness which will never be told because either the Nazis executed the people of conscience who behaved humanely or these good people acted anonymously with fanfare. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, has written; “Let us not forget that there is a moment when the moral choice is made. Often because of one story or one book or one person, we are able to make a different choice, a choice for humanity, for life. And so we must know these good people who helped Jews during the Holocaust. We must learn from them, and in gratitude and hope, we must remember them.”

1. Examples of “Righteous Persons” a. Raoul Wallenberg — He was a Swedish diplomat who made it a special, personal mission to help save the Jews of Hungary. More than 30,000 Jews received special Swedish passports from Wallenberg. He set up "safe houses," distributed food and medical supplies, and virtually singlehandedly set up a bureaucracy in Budapest, Hungary's capital, designed to protect Jews. More than 90,000 Budapest Jews were deported to the death camps and murdered, and Wallenberg's efforts may have reduced the number of those murdered by half. As a diplomat, he successfully confronted the Nazis at great risk to his own safety. Following the "liberation" of Budapest by the Soviets, he was arrested by them, thrown in prison, and never heard from again. Reports often surface, unconfirmed, that he is still alive, although the Soviets announced his death two years after his arrest. b. Oskar Schindler -- a German businessman, immortalized in the multi-award-winning movie by Steven Spielberg, "Schindler's List". He proved how much a single person with imagination and courage could accomplish when possessed of genuine love of neighbor. c. Dr. Jan Karshi — He was the contact between the Polish resistance and the Polish government in exile. He was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto to observe what was occurring there. Asked to tell what he witnessed, he reported to world leaders, including President Roosevelt. d. Cardinal Archbishop of Lwow (Count Andreas Szeptycki) — Leader of the Polish Catholic Church, he ordered clergy of his archdiocese to save Jews. f. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski — He was a founder of the Polish resistance movement, comprised mostly of Catholics. He worked to provide false documents to Jews living outside the Warsaw ghetto. In the fall of 1942, he helped found an organization (Council for Aid to Jews) which successfully saved many Jews from the gas chambers. g. Pastor Andre Trocme and Daniel Trocme — Pastor Trocme was the religious leader of the Huguenot village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, which hid and saved 5,000 Jews.

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Teacher Daniel Trocme was deported with his students in the only successful Gestapo raid and died in Maidanek. h. Irena Sendlar, see supra. 2. Yad Vashem a. Yad Vashem is a museum in Jerusalem devoted exclusively to the history of the Holocaust. The walkway which terminates at the museum entrance is lined with carob trees, each dedicated to the memory of a “Righteous Person” Now, because of lack of space, Righteous Persons have their names inscribed on a the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous, instead of having a tree planted in their honor. To date, nearly 20,000 people have been recognized as Righteous Persons. b. A special committee considers proposals for additions to the commemoration list. There are currently more than 2,000 proposals pending. Those who are added to the list receive a certificate and a medal (or the presentation is made to that person's representative) with the Talmudic inscription "Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he had saved the entire world." See on-line: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/righteous.html c. Controversial Caption* with photo of Pope Pius XII at Yad Vashem: “In 1933, when he was Secretary of the Vatican State, he was active in obtaining a Concordat with the German regime to preserve the Church's rights in Germany, even if this meant recognizing the Nazi racist regime. When he was elected Pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-Semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing. In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene. The Pope maintained his neutral position throughout the war, with the exception of appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia towards its end. His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged Churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react.” *The Vatican has protested this caption as being historically inaccurate. On his May 2009 visit to Jerusalem, Pope Benedict XVI declined to tour the Holocaust Memorial Museum where the photo and caption are located, visiting instead another memorial on the grounds. 3. “Nostra Aetate” a. On April 8th, 1965 the Vatican Council II published its 16th document entitled Nostra Aetate, “In our age.” With that act the Church turned it back on 1900 hundred years of official and unofficial anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic teachings and practices. The document directly repudiates and reverses the Church’s age-old teachings of anti-Judaism. It declares that “mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the gospel’s spiritual love and by no political considerations, it deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and from any source.” b. Nostra Aetate specifically states: 1. No collective guilt can be attributed to Jews, past or present, for the death of Jesus.

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2. God’s covenant with the Jewish People is valid and not revoked. 3. The Jews are not forsaken or condemned by God. 4. Anti-Semitism is a sin and has no place in Christianity. 4. Concluding Thoughts “Those comparatively few Christians who maintained their integrity during the Holocaust did in fact challenge the dominant culture, some perished. A good many more suffered persecution as a counterculture to totalitarian creeds and systems. But that does not excuse the rest of us, who wittingly or unwittingly accommodated; certainly it does not cover the apostasy of the millions who collaborated. The majority of those who suffered martyrdom as witnesses to the truth of God in the twentieth century were Jews.” Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews, p.4. “In the Christian world…erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relative to the Jewish people and their presumed guilt circulated for too long, engendering sentiments of hostility toward this people. That contributed to a lulling of many consciences, so that – when Europe was swept by the wave of persecutions inspired by a pagan anti-Semitism that in its essence was equally anti-Christian – alongside those Christians who did everything to save those who were persecuted, even to the point of risking their own lives, the spiritual resistance of many was not what humanity expected of Christ’s disciples.” Pope John Paul II, “The Roots of Anti-Judaism,” p.365 Sources On-line: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html Blet, Pierre, S.J., Pius XII and the Second World War, Mahwah, N.J. Paulist Press, 1991 Bokenkotter, Thomas, A Concise History of the Catholic Church, N.Y., Image Books Doubleday, 1990 Carroll, James, Constantine's Sword, the Church and the Jews, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, A Warner Book, 2002 Cornwell, John, Hitler's Pope, The Secret History of Pius XII, London, Penguin Books, 1999 Dalin, David G., The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, A Moral Reckoning, The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, N.Y., Random House, 2002 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1996. Hochhuth, Roth, The Deputy, Grove Press, 1964.

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John Paul II, Vatican Symposium “The Roots of Anti-Judaism, published in “Origins, CNS documentary service,” November 13, 1997, Vol.27: No. 22. Kertzer, David I., The Popes Against the Jews, The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern AntiSemitism, New York, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 2002. Krieg, Robert. Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany, Continuum. 2004. Lapide, Pinchas, Three Popes and the Jews, Hawthorn Books, Inc, N.Y. 1967 Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, U.S.A., First Da Capo Press Edition, 2000. Littell, Franklin H., The Crucifixion of the Jews, Mercer University Press, Macon, Ga., 1986. Marchione, Margherita, Did Pope Pius XII Help the Jews? Paulist Press, Mahwah, N.J., 2007. McInerny, Ralph, Defamation of Pius XII, St. Augustine Press, 2001. Noble, Thomas F.X., Popes and the Papacy: A History, The Teaching Company Course Guidebook, 2006. Phayer, Michael, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Indiana University Press, 2000. Ritter, Carol; Myers, Sandra, editors, The Courage to Care, Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, N.Y. University Press, N.Y, 1986. Ritter, Carol; Smith, Stephen D.; Steinfedt, Irena, editors, The Holocaust and the Christian World, Continuum Press, N.Y., 2000. Rychlak, Ronald J., Hitler, the War and the Pope, Genesis Press, Columbus, MS, 2000. Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, A Touchstone Book, Simon & Shuster, Inc, 1990. Spicer, Kevin. Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, Northern Illinois University Press. 2008. Wills, Garry. Papal Sin, Structures of Deceit, Image Books; Doubleday, New York, 2000. Zahn, Gordon C., Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, Sheed & Ward, N.Y., 1962. Zuccotti, Susan, Under His Very Window, The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, New Haven Conn. Yale University Press, 2000.

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Session XI B: Christianity and the Holocaust The Protestant Responses: Courageous and Compliant Theodore J. Weeden, Sr. Introduction: Overview What follows is an account of German Protestantism’s response to the Holocaust. The predominant Protestant response was to comply with the Nazi’s persecution of Jews, particularly from the early to the mid-years of the Third Reich. Some German Protestants even applauded Adolf Hitler as the savior of the German nation and its Aryan culture, and thus triumphantly acclaimed and actively supported the anti-Semitism of National Socialism. There were, on the other hand, a significant number of courageous Protestants, who at the risk of their own lives, spoke out against the Nazi atrocities against the Jews—particularly Jews who had converted to Christianity—and actively interceded on behalf of the beleaguered Jews, supplying their needs for mere survival, offering them safe hiding, or assisting them in escaping from Germany and extermination by the Nazis. To understand why German Protestants were so anti-Semitic we must go back four hundred years to Martin Luther, the father of the German Protestant Church. It is Luther’s antiSemitic views and his conviction that state government is ordained by God that best accounts for German Protestantism’s own anti-Semitic mind-set and its failure to rise up against the Nazi government. We begin then with a look at Luther’s anti-Semitism and his reasoning for believing God ordained secular government and citizens’ obedience to civil authority. Source of information cited in the course of the essay is provided in parentheses by an author’s name and relevant page number in his work. Title of the author’s work can be found in “Works Consulted” at end of the essay. I. Martin Luther and German Protestants’ Views on Jews and Authority of Government A. Martin Luther, Father of Protestantism Martin Luther (1483-1546) is the father of German Protestantism, as well as father of Protestantism itself. A monk of the Augustinian Order and ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, Luther decried the Church’s abuse of indulgences, posting in a demonstrative act of protest his Ninety-Five Theses against the Church to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church on October 31, 1517. Subsequently, he broke with the Church and the Church’s teaching on authority, biblical interpretation, sacraments, etc, and was declared a heretic. With Luther’s rejection of fundamental doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation was born in Germany. To fast-forward to the Nazi Germany: two of Luther’s publications in which he set forth his views on Jews, on the one hand, and the authority of government, on the other, serve as defining documents for the way, in theological conformity with Luther, the German Protestant Church chose, for the most part, to respond to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. B. Martin Luther’s Condemnation of the Jews. 1. The Evolution of Luther’s Views on Jews Perhaps the most vitriolic condemnation of Jews by any Protestant, perhaps any Christian, is found in Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lives,” written in 1543, three years before his death. Luther’s excoriating castigation of the Jews in that publication represents the final Sciolino and Weeden

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evolution of his view of Jews during the course of his life. Early on (1519), Luther averred that it was God’s intent that the Jews be converted to belief in Jesus the Christ. However, if they do not respond, they are doomed to God’s wrathful judgment. At this early stage in his views, while he insisted that the Jews’ only hope was their conversion, Luther rejected Christian hatred for the Jews as he found in the Catholic doctrine Servitude Judeaorum (“Servitude of the Jews”) promulgated by Pope Justinian I (529 CE). He renounced inhuman treatment of Jews in an essay, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, which he wrote in 1523. In that essay, Luther decried Jews being derided, treated like dogs, having their property seized, and the less than cordial embrace of them by Christians when they do convert and become baptized. He argued that, with respect to lineage, they are blood relatives of Jesus Christ, whereas Gentiles are at best only Jesus’ in-laws. But then his attitude toward Jews turned decidedly sour, due apparently in part to his failure to convert them. Considering Jews hopelessly obstinate, he castigated them in his “On the Jews and Their Lives,” accusing them of “obstinate, unbridled arrogance” in claiming to be God’s holy people while rejecting God’s prophetic judgment against them. He denounced them as “miserable, blind, and senseless peoples,” shameful liars and blasphemers before God, perverting and falsifying scripture (Part 2), “a prophet-murdering people,” and stereotyped them as “a defiled bride, . . . an incorrigible whore and an evil slut with whom God ever had to wrangle, scuffle, and fight.” In “their synagogues,” Luther excoriates, “nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer selfglory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced maliciously” (Part 3). “They are steeped in greed, in usury,” Luther remonstrates, “[and] they steal and murder where they can and ever teach their children likewise” (Part 7). “[T]hey,” continuing his diatribe, “defame our Lord Jesus Christ, calling him a sorcerer and tool of the devil. . . . Then they also call Jesus a whore’s son, saying that his mother Mary was a whore, who conceived him in adultery with a blacksmith. . . . They have been bloodthirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom for more than fourteen hundred years in their intentions, and would undoubtedly prefer to be such with their deeds. Thus they have been accused of poisoning water and wells, of kidnapping children, of piercing them through with an awl, of hacking them in pieces, and in that way secretly cooling their wrath with the blood of Christians, for all of which they have often been condemned to death by fire.” Contrary to their treatment of Christians, Luther avers: “We do not curse them but wish them well, physically and spiritually. We lodge them, we let them eat and drink with us. We do not kidnap their children and pierce them through; we do not poison their wells; we do not thirst for their blood. How, then, do we incur such terrible anger, envy, and hatred on the part of such great and holy children of God? There is no other explanation for this than the one cited . . . [by Moses], that God has struck them with ‘madness and blindness and confusion of mind’ [Deuteronomy 28:18]. “What,” Luther asks in Part 11, “shall we do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews. Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming.” Luther advises seven actions to be taken against the Jews. First, . . . set fire to their synagogues or schools and . . . bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. . . . Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. . . .

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Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. . . . Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home. Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that . . . they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us [what] they possess. Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed upon the children of Adam (Gen. 3 [:19]). And Luther’s advise to political authorities: “In brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule: if my counsel does not please you, find better advice, so that you and we can all be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews.” Luther then admonishes his readers: “But if the authorities are reluctant to use force and restrain the Jews’ devilish wantonness, the latter should, as we said, be expelled from the country and be told to return to their land and their possessions in Jerusalem, where they lie, curse, blaspheme, defame, murder, steal, rob, practice usury, mock, and indulge in all those infamous abominations which they practice among us, and leave us our government, our country, our life, and our property, much more leave our Lord the Messiah, our faith, and our church undefiled and uncontaminated with their devilish tyranny and malice” (Part 11). 2. The Influence of Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lives in Nazi Germany. Luther’s views on Jews significantly shaped the attitude toward Jews in Germany and furthered the development of anti-Semitism. Luther was adopted as the authority for the national justification for attacks upon Jews. During the Nazi era, the Nazis seized upon Luther’s diatribe against Jews as kind of a scriptural playbook for their own murderous persecution of the Jews. Almost every anti-Jewish publication of the Third Reich referred to or directly quoted Luther’s anti-Semitic views. His On the Jews and Their Lives was exhibited in a glass-case display during Nuremberg rallies for National Socialism and quoted as support of the Aryan Law (see below). Bernhard Rust, Hitler’s Minister of Education, is reported to have extolled: “Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance. . . . I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together, they are of the same stamp.” Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse has been quoted as triumphantly declaring on the 1938 celebration of Luther’s birth: “On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany,” and acclaimed that Luther was “the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the

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warner of his people against the Jews.” There is no doubt that Luther’s excoriating words against Jews were mighty as the Nazi sword for their anti-Semitism. Since 1980 a number of Lutheran communions have denounced and formally repudiated Luther for his views on the Jews, and have publicly disassociated themselves from Luther’s hatred of Jews. The Lutheran World Federation declared in 1982: “We Christians must purge ourselves of any hatred of the Jews and any sort of teaching of contempt for Judaism.” The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Council declared in 1994: “We who bear his name and heritage must acknowledge with pain the anti-Judaic diatribes contained in Luther’s later writings. We reject this violent invective as did many of his companions in the sixteenth century, and we are moved to deep and abiding sorrow at its tragic effects on later generations of Jews.” C. Luther’s Views on Governmental Authority 1. The Two Kingdoms In his treatise, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, Luther averred: “God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ [the kingdom of heaven]; and the temporal [the kingdom of the world], which restrains the un-Christian and wicked so that—no thanks to them— they are obliged to keep still and to maintain an outward peace.” Luther contended that because the temporal government or kingdom of this world, is necessarily ordained by God, as the Apostle. Paul suggested (Letter to the Romans 13:1), “to preserve peace, punish sin, and restrain the wicked, the Christian submits most willingly to the rule of the sword, pays his taxes, honors those in authority, serves, helps, and does all that he can to assist the governing authority, that it may continue to function and be held in honor and fear.” Christians, according to Luther, “should esteem the sword or governmental authority as highly as the estate of marriage, or husbandry, or any other calling which God has instituted.” But what if governing authorities are tyrants? “You must know,” counsels Luther, “ that since the beginning of the world a wise prince is a mighty rare bird, and an upright prince even rarer. They [tyrants] are generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth; therefore, one must constantly expect the worst from them and look for little good, especially in divine matters which concern the salvation of souls. They are God’s executioners and hangmen; his divine wrath uses them to punish the wicked and to maintain outward peace. Our God is a great lord and ruler; that is why he must also have such noble, highborn, and rich hangmen. He desires that everyone shall copiously accord them riches, honor, and fear in abundance. It pleases his divine will that we call his hangmen gracious lords, fall at their feet, and be subject to them in all humility, so long as they do not ply their trade too far and try to become shepherds [of Christians] instead of hangmen.” If the governing authorities do tread on the spiritual world by decrees or force of action, then, Luther advises Christians “should not sanction it, or lift a finger to conform or obey.” “What if,” Luther asks, “a prince is in the wrong? Are his people bound to follow him then too? Answer: No, for it is no one’s duty to do wrong; we must obey God (who desires the right) rather than men [Acts 5:29]. What if the subjects do not know whether their prince is in the right or not? Answer: So long as they do not know, and cannot with all possible diligence find out, they may obey him without peril to their souls.” 2. The Relevance of Luther’s View on Governing Authority to Protestant Response to the Rule of the Nazis.

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Given Luther’s position on the two kingdoms which God has ordained, with the earthly kingdom being established by God to ensure peace and control, the German Protestant Church was able to interpret Luther as admonishing Christians against involving themselves in matters of state, i.e., being “political.” Therefore many German Protestants, lay and clergy, determined that God willed that they remain “apolitical” as far as Nazi rule was concern, unless Nazi rule encroached on matters spiritual, which were ordained by God to be the Church’s sovereign authority. II. German Protestantism and Its Response to Nazi Anti-Semitism, and Persecution of Jews, 1933-1938. A. The German Depressed Psyche Prior to 1933 and National Socialism’s Cure When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Germany was politically fragmented and psychically depressed. It had suffered—from the German point of view—a humiliating defeat in World War I, followed by the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. Along with a social crisis created by rapid development of urbanization and industrialization in the 1920s, Germany faced an overwhelming economic crisis fueled by hyperinflation. The world-wide Great Depression soon followed. Poverty and unemployment became so great that panic reigned in the German psyche. The Weimar Republic, an experiment in democracy, in this nation of autocratic princes, had failed (Barnett, p. 35). On top of that, there was the pestering and festering Jewish problem exacerbated by Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Germany having fled the pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine. Unlike the indigenous Jewish population in Germany prior to World War I, which were considered to be an aesthetic and urbane culture, the immigrants from Eastern Europe were viewed as uncivilized, coarse, and wayward people. The contrast between the culture of these Jewish immigrants and the native German culture was so great that they were vilified in the 1917 German press as “vermin,” “riffraff,” “depraved” non-humans, essentially animals. Even native German Jews had difficulty accepting them, and hoped that the immigration would end (Gerlach, p. 3). So intense was the German hatred of Jews at this point that German nationalists looked upon the German defeat in World War I as a victory for the Jews (Barnett, p.16). Many Germans blamed their political and economic crises on the Jews, and some even considered the Versailles Treaty that formally ended the War as “an international Jewish plot.” (Barnett, p.126). Consequently, Germans now negated or forgot all the contributions Jews had historically made to German culture in the arts, scholarship, and the German language itself (Gerlach, p. 4). Hitler’s solution to Germany’s psychic depression was to create an authoritarian rule and recover the traditional values of the German past, such as family and German culture. To help solve the Jewish problem at the outset, he initiated on April 1, 1933 a boycott of Jewish businesses, a boycott that was soon followed by his enactment of legislation in April 7, 1933 which included the so-called “Aryan Paragraph.” Defining for the first time who is a “Jew,” the Aryan Paragraph decreed that Jews must be removed from civil service and all public spheres of German life. Government employees were required to produce documents showing their pure Aryan descent. B. German Protestantism’s Response to National Socialism’s Cure. Dispirited over the national state of affairs which it attributed to the Jews, the Protestant press contended that the German peoples’ aversion to Jews was a “well-founded revulsion” (Gerlach, pp. 5f.). Under the influence of the 19th century views of the conservative theologian, Adolf Stoecher, a dedicated anti-Semite, a renewed spirit of nationalism among Protestants obtained which “viewed the Jews as the natural enemy of the national Christian tradition and held them responsible for the collapse of the Christian and monarchist order” (Gelach, p. 6; cf. p.

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2). Many Protestants saw the only hope for the future lay with the vision of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s vision attracted the support of approximately eighty percent of the Protestant clergy (Barnett, p. 41). A memorandum produced by Berlin Central Council following its April 1933 meeting, the German Evangelical Church’s highest council defended German anti-Semitism and contended that the state acted understandably in its anti-Jewish measures and characterized the April boycott of Jewish business as an indication of “German disciple” (Gerlach, p. 56). One pastor, Paul Humburg, wrote a song extolling Hitler as the savior of Germany. The second, third, and fourth verse are as follows (Gerlach, p. 8): The old order wanes, the old order wanes. From the ruins of war a new spring shines! One man breaks through treason and shame; Millions follow him full of trust. His will and word sweep us to strike and act. His will and word sweep us to strike and act. The sun rises, the sun rises at morn! We arm ourselves for battle, For sacrifice despite the enemy's hate and scorn. Come, brother, prepare; we march side by side with Adolf Hitler, Germany's truest son. with Adolf Hitler, Germany's truest son. To work, to work! Young Germany dares anew! Our call to battle: "Germany," unto the death. The Fuehrer calls; we rejoice, ever true! Before us the day! And our fortress is God. Before us the day! And our fortress is God. Afflicted with disunity among themselves, the German Protestant churches—ideologically anti-modern, opposed to democracy, and politically and socially nationalistic—tried to resolve their disunity by unifying to become a stronger Christian body. At the time the principal Protestant body of Christian churches was the German Evangelical Church, consisting of some 28 regional church jurisdiction bodies made up of the strictly conservative Lutheran Church, the more liberal Reformed Church, and the United Church, which had Lutheran and Reform elements among its membership. Within the German Evangelical Church there was a small group of Christians called “German Christians,” organized in May 1932 (Barnett, p. 27), who “fell in love” with Hitler and National Socialism’s solution to Germany’s woes. They even looked upon Nazism as an exciting spiritual experience and movement. These German Christians strongly advocated for the purity of the Aryan race in Church and State in support of the Aryan Paragraph and opposed any association with Jews, including mixed marriage. Originally the Aryan Paragraph had applied only to pastors and church leaders who under German law were considered civil servants, but the German Church now applied the paragraph to all members of the church (Barnett, pp. 128f.). Their slogan at the time of church elections in 1937 was: “We fight for the Jew-free German Evangelical Reich Church” (Gerlach, p. 113). They advocated that Jewish Christians, barred from membership in a pure Aryan church, should establish their own separate church. The German Christians solution to the “Jewish Problem” then was this: Once the Jewish Christians were removed from the Aryan Christian Church, and they formed their own Jewish Christian congregations as a result, those congregations could be permanently eliminated as a whole from the German body politic (Gerlach, p. 76).

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As small as this group of German Christians was, it wielded immense influence in 1933 and 1934 in the German Evangelical Church, and attracted the attention and support of Hitler. They even proposed the creation of a national church, the Reich Church, which Hitler wanted to unify the 28 regional churches as an instrument of National Socialism. By July 1933 the German Christians were a controlling force in most of the synods of the various regional churches and were successful in electing a Reich bishop in a synod on July 23, and also engineering application of the Aryan Paragraph upon the racial lineage of all clergy and their wives: they must be free of any “Jewish blood” (p 34). In September 1933 the German Christians were able to force through a Prussian church synod two clergy restrictions upon the church: ‘political reliability’ and the support of the “Aryan Paragraph” (Barnett, pp. 33-34; Gerlach, pp. 39f.). There were, however, a few Protestant voices which became alarmed at the increased oppression of the Jews, particularly as it affected Jews who had converted to Christianity. Not only did 75 delegates to the aforementioned July 23 synod sound an alarm by walking out in protest to the “Aryan Paragraph” respecting the racial lineage of pastors and their wives (Barnett, p. 34), but one such sounding of alarm came early on from the Regional Church Government of Kassel. In a statement sent to the German Evangelical Committee on May 5, the Kassel Protestants decried their church government for its solidarity with National Socialism in seeking the separation of Jews from Christians in church as well as state: "The Evangelical Church must be reproached strongly for not putting an end to the persecution of its own children in the faith— indeed, for giving its blessing from the pulpit to those who are working against its own children in the faith . . . and for banishing people of the same faith, with whom they joined in worship, before the church's very doors as though they were mangy dogs." In this statement, concern for Jews, as was generally the case among Protestant protesters of Jewish oppression, was narrowly focused upon baptized Jews who were members of the Church and not Jews generally (Gerlach, pp. 20f.). A noted exception to this narrow focus on the plight of Jewish members of the Church was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, concerned that the Church would limit its focus to Jews within the Church, declared at the time that the Church’s “unconditional obligation [is] to the victims of every social order, even those who do not belong to the Christian congregation’ and, further, that the Church must be called to action of “not only binding up the wounds of the victims under the wheel, but stopping the wheel itself.” On September 11, 1933 a group of Protestant clergy known as the “Rhineland Brotherhood” declared that the Aryan Paragraph and its attempt at outside control of pastoral and church civil service matters, violated what the Church stood for and demanded that the paragraph be withdrawn and promised to “reject all measures pertinent to its enforcement” (Gerlach, p. 34). In October, a group of Protestant clergy, opposed to imposition of the Aryan Paragraph upon the Church and in protest against the German Christians, organized themselves under the leadership of Martin Niemoeller as the “Pastors’ Emergency League” (PEL). On November 2 Niemoeller condemned the German Christians’ proposal that Jewish Christians establish their own church separate from an Aryan church (Gerlach, pp. 45, 48). By January the PEL consisted of over 7,000 members, with Martin Niemoeller as one of its prominent leaders. In response to opposition to the application of the Aryan Paragraph to the Church, Reinhold Krause, a Berlin regional leader of the German Christians, proclaimed at a rally of the German Christians on November 13 that Christianity was always an Aryan religion and advocated that the Christian Bible be stripped of its Jewish Old Testament, that the influence of “Rabbi” Paul be removed, and that the focus of Christianity should be upon Jesus as a model hero and not upon the crucified Jesus (Locke, pp. 51f.). A poignant and courageous indictment of the Protestant Church’s pursuance of the state’s non-Aryan policy in the Church was published in the Evangelischer Ruf, a Breslau Protestant paper on October 14, 1933 (Gerlach, p.8): Vision

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Worship service. The opening hymn has died away. The minister stands at the altar and begins: "Non-Aryans are requested to leave the church!" No one moves. "Non-Aryans are requested to leave the church!" Again, all remain still. "Non-Aryans are requested to leave the church!" Then Christ climbs down from the cross on the altar and leaves the church. C. The Barmen Declaration, May 1934 1. The Drafting of the Barmen Declaration As hostility grew between the German Christians who wanted Christianity to be a baptism of National Socialism and other Christians of the German Evangelical Christians who opposed the hegemonic implanting of Nazi ideology in the Church, a synod was called at Barmen in May 2931, 1934, at which synod the German Confessing Church was born with the issuance of the socalled “Barmen Declaration,” which became their founding document. Among its six articles, the Barmen Declaration set forth the following (Locke, p. 66): We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church apart from [its exercise of ministry], could and were permitted to give to itself, or allow to be given to it, special leaders vested with ruling powers. Affirming, with an apparent bow to Luther, that governmental authority is an instrument of God—a doctrine tenaciously subscribed to by German Protestantism—(Barnett, p. 11) the Declaration stated as such with the following: “[I]n the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace” (Locke, p. 67). Originally that section framed by the famous German theologian Karl Barth, an opponent of Nazism and the church’s compliance with it, read (Locke, p. 67): We reject the error, as though the State were the only and totalitarian order of human life. We reject the error, as though the Church had to conform to a particular form of the State in its message and form. But that wording of Barth’s draft was too strong for the delegates at the synod. For Barth’s original wording gave the appearance that the delegates were directly attacking the Nazi state, which the delegates did not want to suggest. So to gain support of the majority of the delegates Barth reworded the section to state the following (Locke, pp. 67f.): We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church's vocation as well. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State. That rewording saved the Confessing Church from in any way implying that it was challenging the authority of the state in temporal affairs, while firmly insisting that in religious matters the Church was its own sovereign authority. In effect the Barmen Declaration declared that Church and Christians by implication should refrain from being political, i.e., aligning with one political side or another in the temporal world, but rather it should restrict itself to proclaiming the gospel (Locke, pp. 68, 83; cf. Barnett, pp. 73, 133). Martin Luther must have rolled over smiling in his grave.

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2. The Response to the Barmen Declaration and the Issue of the Aryan Paragraph When the Barmen Declaration was made public it was subjected to severe criticism. Among those adamantly opposed to it were Paul Althaus, prominent German theologian at Erlangen University, and a Lutheran, who welcomed Hitler’s accession of Hitler to power in January 1933 with this declaration: “We accept the turning point of this year as mercy from God’s hand.” (Locke, p. 27). Althaus, along with Werner Elert, his colleague at Erlnagen, viewed the Barmen Declaration as a potshot at the renewal of Germany under the Nazis, and stated in defense of National Socialism, conjointly with Elert (Locke, p. 73): As Christians we honor with thanks toward God ... every authority ... as a tool of divine preservation ... In this knowledge we as believing Christians thank God that he has given to our peop1e in its time of need the Fuehrer as a ‘pious and faithful leader’ and the National Socialist political system as ‘good government,’ a government with ‘decency and honor’.” While some have viewed the Barmen Declaration—given the tyrannical character of Nazism at the time—was a courageous statement declaring the absolute sovereignty of the church over religious affairs and that the state had no right to interfere with Church affairs, it stopped short in categorically denouncing Adolf Hitler and his National Socialism for meddling in Church affairs. But more blatantly absent in the Declaration is any reference to the issue of the Aryan Paragraph as it impacted the racial character of Protestant clergy and laity, to say nothing of the paragraph’s inherent and politically aggressive anti-Semitism or, for that matter, the Church’s position on anti-Semitism itself. The failure of the Barmen Declaration to address specifically and critically the offensive Aryan Paragraph, and its disastrous implications for the well-being of Christian Jews is strange and surprising. One might argue that concern for Christian Jews as they are affected by the application of the Aryan Paragraph to the Church is implied in the Declaration by its stated opposition to the German Christians, with their Aryan ideology. The Declaration does directly refer to the fact that what the German Evangelical Churches “hold in common” is “grievously imperiled, and with it the unity of the Evangelical Church . . . is threatened by the teaching methods and actions of the ruling Church party of the ‘German Christians’ and of the Church administration carried on by them” (Locke, p. 62). Then why not address directly and specifically the issue of the Aryan Paragraph—the issue dividing the Church—as it affects the leadership and membership of baptized Jews in the Church? Why not name the offensive “beast” raising its ugly head for what it is, an abomination to the sacred and inviolate meaning of being baptized into the fellowship of the communion of Christians, regardless of ethnicity? Already a year prior some of the 75 delegates, who represented the Young Reformation Movement, protested at a national synod in September 1933 against the decision to approve the Aryan Paragraph, which required thenceforth “that pastors and their wives be free of ‘Jewish blood’,” and in protest walked out of the synod (Barnett, p. 34). And there were Protestant clergy at the time of the Barmen synod who did directly and publicly oppose the Aryan Paragraph, in contrast to the Barmen Declaration’s silence. Rudolf Bultmann, a Lutheran and the most influential New Testament theologian of the twentieth century, along with other theological faculty members at the University of Marburg published an attack upon the Aryan Paragraph, denouncing it as un-Christian (Locke, p. 79), in sharp contrast to Althaus and Elert who contended that Germany faced a Jewish problem, couched in the racial and cultural stereotypes regarding Jews as a threat to Germany, and supported the right of the Nazis to prevent Jews from exercising significant public positions, including functioning as Protestant clergy. Althaus and Elert argued that since qualifications such as age and gender had always been applied to Protestant clergy, then race should also be one such qualification for the clergy (Locke, pp. 78f.).

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There were also other Protestant voices which objected strongly to the Aryan Paragraph, Martin Niemoeller, Karl Barth, who publicly denounced National Socialism, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In Niemöeller case his objection was primarily over the issue of Church independence, and did not deal directly with the enforcement of the Aryan Paragraph against Jews who had not been baptized and admitted into church membership. Dietrich Bonhoeffer took a wider view of the matter. As early as 1933 he had tried to persuade the German Evangelical Church that it ought to be concerned not only about Jewish Christians who were being persecuted by racial laws of the Nazis but all Jews, as well as, all others being persecuted via such laws (Gerlach, pp. 25-27).. But in that early period of Nazi tyranny against the Jews there were few church leaders, aside from Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, who were willing to address anti-Semitism as it affected all Jews, much less acknowledge the problem of anti-Semitism as it directly affected Jewish Christians in the Church itself. When the majority of the Confessing Christians objected to the Aryan Paragraph, Martin Niemoeller being a case in point (Barnett, p.103), their objection was largely against the Nazis intrusion into Church affairs—which Martin Luther had declared was inviolably off-bounds to the state—and not so much a genuine concern for the impact the Paragraph would have on baptized Jews and members of the Church. Some Confessing Christians tried to achieve compromises with the Nazis. Some even belonged to the Nazi party (Barnett, p. 5). Many were strongly nationalistic, and as with nationalism in the German psyche, strongly ingrained in anti-Semitism. A number of leaders of the church, likely influenced by Luther, contended that Nazis attack upon Jews represented a defense of Christianity. The Jews, after all, had brought it all on themselves, for all the reasons conventionally and stereotypically articulated, and, in the judgment of these church leaders, the Nazi persecution was God’s instrument for punishing them. Helmut Gollwitzer, a student of Karl Barth, and part of the resistance movement, likely spoke for many Germans when he said regarding his upbringing as a son of a conservative Bavarian pastor: “I was raised to believe that, until the Jews rejected Jesus, they were loyal people, wonderful people. They were farmers and shepherds. Then God rejected them, and since that time they have been merchants, good for nothing, and they infiltrate everything, everywhere they go” (Barnett, p. 15). It took quite a while before very many Confessing Christians recognized the consequences of the historic German prejudice against the Jews (Barnett, p. 15). As far as the Nazi brutal persecution of non-Christian Jews was concerned, in Protestantism, generally, and among many in the Confessing Church, it was a non-issue. Dietrich Goldschmidt, son of a Jewish father, remonstrated on recalling later the times (Barnett, p. 20, 128; cf. pp. 138f.): [T]the idea that, from a Christian consciousness, one had to stand up for the Jews occurred to very few people . . . . The Jews were “damned.” This teaching that the Jews had condemned Jesus, the teaching that God had indeed made a covenant with the Jews but that this covenant was void after the murder of Jesus, and that that Christians are the people of the new covenant—props up even today in the heads of pastors. For the Protestants as long as the Nazi regime did not encroach upon the church’s territory, it remained apolitical and the treatment of Jews generally was not considered its responsibility (Barnett, p. 133). And even in some cases Protestants turned their heads the other way when Jewish Christian pastors were subjected to Nazi wrath, as in the case of the Jewish Christian pastor Hans Ehrenberg who incurred the wrath of the Nazis in 1937 for his making pacifist statements in 1919 and was compelled to resign his pastorate. After a plea to his fellow Confessing Church pastors for support, the only counsel he received from them was to accept his fate (Barnett, pp. 134f.)..

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There were courageous exceptions. Four women who were vicars of the church, among whom was Ina Gschloessl, were denounced in 1933 for “unseemly remarks” against Hitler and for their defense of Jews “in a manner and fashion . . . which lacks understanding for the national standpoint.” All four were immediately dismissed from their church positions. Gschloessl after 1938 devoted herself to assisting Jews, as well as Jewish Christians, illegally in Cologne (Barnett, p. 130). Another such courageous exception was Wilhelm von Pechmann, a leader in the German Evangelical Church, who wrote a letter addressed to the leadership of the church, a letter made public in April 1934, in which he declared (Gerlach, p. 76). Now as you well know, I have protested frequently and repeatedly since April of last year against the rape of the church, against its lack of strength to resist, and against its silence in the face of much injustice and in the face of all that misery and heartache that . . . has entered numerous 'non-Aryan' hearts and homes, Christian and Jewish. But, until now, I have protested only with words . . . and always utterly in vain. It is time to go one step further, that is, to protest by resigning from a church that ceases to be a church. III. German Protestantism and Its Response to Nazi Anti-Semitism, and Persecution of Jews, 1938-1945 A. The Growing Silence of the Protestant Church about Nazi Atrocities against Jews In the four years that followed the Barmen Confession, and just prior to Kristallnacht, the Confessing Church fell essentially into disarray and increasingly grew silent as far as Nazi persecution of Jews was concerned. This state of affairs, disarray and silence, was due in large part to increased tyrannical measures employed by Nazis to control the German Church, such as, notably, in the case of the Protestant Old Prussian Church and its attempted promulgation of its “Resolutions of the Confessional Synod of the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union in March 1935, a declaration of the church which basically attacked German acquiescence to Nazism as the equivalent of a “neopagan” religion. The “Resolutions” unequivocally condemned the ideology of National Socialism with these words (Gerlach, p. 80). We see our people threatened by a deadly danger. The danger exists in a new religion. . . . In it, the racist-volkisch (nationalistic) ideology becomes myth. In it, blood and race, Volkstum (nationality), honor, and freedom are turned into idols. . . . Whoever makes blood, race, and Volkstum the Creator and Lord of state authority in place of God undermines the state. To squash the reading of this declaration from the pulpits, the police quickly moved in and arrested 715 Old Prussian Church pastors and detained them for a brief period of time. Such terrorist tactics by the Nazis caused the Protestant Church to grow silent about the external affairs of state and turn inward and focused its primary effort on the Church’s selfpreservation in defense against the state, with the welfare of Jewish Christians or any responsibility to them largely neglected or ignored (Gerlach, pp. 80f., 99.). In doing so, as elucidated above, the Protestant Church, by and large—Dietrich Bonhoeffer being a noted exception—fell back upon Paul (Letter to the Romans 13:1) and Martin Luther’s views of the divinely ordained role of temporal authority, which meant that the Church must not take on the role of being public social guardian for non-Aryan Christians if assuming that role was or was

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perceived by the state to be in opposition to the laws, policies, or authority of the state. To do so would be, from the perspective of Martin Luther’s doctrinaire position, an offense to God, who established the inviolable authority of the state in temporal affairs (Gerlach, p. 82), just as God had established the sovereign authority of the Church in spiritual affairs. Thus, most German Protestants held that if the Church stayed out of the affairs of state, the state would stay out of the affairs of Church. A voice that challenged the Church’s blind obedience to the state when terrible injustices were committed against its non-Aryan members was that of Marga Muesel, who was director of welfare service for the Protestant district in Berlin-Zehlendorf. In an addendum to an original memorandum addressed to Confessing Church leaders for a synod meeting at Berlin-Stegliz in September 1935, she deplored the dire economic straits forced upon non-Aryans as a result of Nazi laws and policies, which not only threatened the deprivation of the most meager of livelihood for these persecuted people, but also appeared to be executed with the clear intent of exterminating them. In a damning indictment of the Confessing Church for its silence and inaction in the face of the abhorrent injustices to which its non-Aryans members were being subjected, Meusel in outrage cried in ringing indictment of the Church (Gerlach, pp. 85f.; cf. pp. 81-86): Why must one always be told from the ranks of non-Aryan Christians that they feel forsaken by the church and the ecumenical world? That Jewish persons and Jewish aid organizations help them, but not their church? That they would not have to worry about their Catholic members, for these would not perish, because the church cares for them, but that one can only say about the attitude of the Protestant Church: :Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do? Why does the Catholic Church employ non-Aryan doctors and nurses where it can— but the Protestant Inner Mission has the Aryan paragraph? . . . What should one say in response to all the desperate, bitter questions and accusations: Why does the church do nothing? Why does it tolerate this unspeakable injustice? How can it repeatedly make jubilant declarations to the National Socialist state, which are political declarations directed against the lives of some of its own members? Why does it not protect at least the children? Should then everything that is absolutely incompatible with the humanity so despised today be compatible with Christianity? And if the church can do nothing in many cases because of the threat to its own existence, why does it not at least admit its guilt? Why does it not pray for those who are afflicted by this undeserved suffering and persecution? Why are there not worship services of intercession, as there were for imprisoned pastors? The church makes it bitterly difficult for one to defend it. . . . Judaism believes that God is calling it back in this time. It lives from this faith and from it derives the strength for martyrdom. And we know that God is calling us back, through the judgment poured upon the church and the people. But we are seized with cold dread when there can be people in the Confessing Church who dare to believe that they are justified, even called, to proclaim to the Jews that God's judgment and grace are present in the current historical events and in the suffering that we have brought on them. Since when does the evildoer have the right to pass off his crime as the will of God? Since when is it anything other than blasphemy to assert that it is the will of God that we commit injustice? Let us take care that we do not hide the outrage of our sins behind the holy shrine of the will of God. Otherwise, it could well be that the punishment meted out to the desecrators of the Temple might befall us too,

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that we would have to hear the curse uttered by the One [Jesus] who braided the lash and drove them out [Gospel of Mark 11:15-17]. B. The Nazis Gain Control of the Protestant Church Affairs and Its Psyche German Protestantism’s hopes that the state would stay out of church affairs were dashed on September 24 by Hitler enacting the Law for the Securing of the German Evangelical Church, which sanctioned the state intervening in the Old Prussian Union churches to exercise authority over also their church administrations. That was then followed in October 1935 by Hanna Kerri, the Reich Minister of Church Affairs, convening a new state committee, the Reich Church Committee to bring order to disarray in the German Evangelical Church. That act produce the final split among the Confessing Church, with some church bodies supporting the intervention of the new Reich Church Committee in the internal affairs of the Church and others strongly opposing it. The result was that the Confessing Church, in the interest of its own survival and legitimacy never again had much interest in challenging the Nazi’s racial policies (Gerlach, pp. 100, 232f.). And the Reich Church Committee wielding the power of the state proclaimed to the German Evangelical Church: “We affirm the Nationalist Socialist formation of the Volk [people/nation] on the foundation of race, blood, and soil” (Gerlach, p. 103). Even some in the Confessing Church exhibited more patriotism for the war effort than compassion for those being exterminated in the prosecution of the war effort. Pastor Hanns Lilje’s in 1941 is reported to have extolled the “war as a spiritual achievement” (Gerlach, p. 234). Wolfgang Gerlach accounts for this subservience to patriotism in his description of the sad and deplorable state of affairs to which the Confessing Church had sunk (p. 234): Even the Confessing Church's publication Junge Kirche occasionally emphasized its patriotism. After the failed assassination of Hitler on 8 November 1939 in Munich, the paper gave thanks for the “extraordinary preservation of the Fuehrer.” And, in 1940, every issue contained wartime “prayers of the church.” “Bless and preserve with a strong arm our Fuehrer against all the dangers surrounding him, and give him, amidst the onslaught of our enemies, good counsel and vigorous action at the proper time.” “Commend our Fuehrer to your grace.” “Have thanks for all the successes of our weapons that you already have granted us.” After the Germans prevented the English landing in Norway Junge Kirche noted: “We gratefully cast our eyes upon the Fuehrer and his Wehrmacht [armed forces], who once again have averted danger at the proper moment.” These voices were also a part of the disharmonious chorus that had begun as the Confessing Church and attempted to stand firm in a totalitarian system. Finally in a dramatic tour de force against the German Evangelical Church, Reich Minister Kerrl, failing to bring unity to the Church—which was the Reich Church Committee’s mandate—categorically proclaimed at a regional Church assembly of church committee chairmen on February 12, 1937: “[T]he church must be purged of subjects who work against the state. The civil service laws will be applied to the pastors. Jews will no longer be pastors” (Gerlach, p. 108). There were individual voices aligned with and on behalf of the Confessing Church that did speak out against the imposition of Nazi hegemony upon the Church but they suffered severe punitive reprisals for doing so. A radical group of Confessing Christians sent a memorandum to Hitler protesting the Nazi concepts of race, blood, and nationality as “eternal values,” as well as protesting against inciting hatred of the Jews. Several of those who helped draft the memorandum were arrested. A Jewish lawyer, Friedrich Weissler, who assisted the Confessing Church was arrested and delivered to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was murdered (Gerlach, p. 107).

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By the latter part of 1937 and the early part of 1938 the Confessing Church all but ceased with making statements regarding the Jewish question. The Nazi’s terrorizing reprisals against the Church, and particularly its courageous members who did speak out, had taken their toll. Many of the voices which might have spoken out were silenced within prison cells or concentration camps, among whom were Paul Leo, Bruno Bedfey, both non-Aryan pastors, and Martin Niemoeller (Gerlach, p. 113f.). Martin Niemoeller’s arrest on July 1, 1937 shook the Confessing Church. Many Confessing Christians had assumed that the Nazis would never attack a person of Niemoeller’s fame and stature. During his trial Niemoeller was charged with “inciting unrest, provoking the state, and encouraging traitorous activities.” Commuting his sentence in lieu of his seven month imprisonment, he was required to pay a fine and then was released. When Hitler heard of the leniency of Niemoeller’s sentence, he was so enraged that he commanded the Gestapo to apprehend him as the “special prisoner” of the Fuehrer. Remanded to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and later to Dachau in 1941, Niemoeller was imprisoned until 1945, when the war ended (Barnett, p. 92). Another heroic voice against the Nazi regime was that of Kurt Scharf, a Confessing Church pastor, who, through numerous newsletters to Confessing Church pastors, spoke out against the Confessing Church’s succumbing to Nazi ideology. As early as 1934 the Berlin consistory disciplined Scharf for his outspoken views. Subsequently German Christian officials tried to have him removed from the parishes he served in Sachsenhausen and Friedrichstal and replaced by a pastor who would be more sympathetic to Nazi ideology. Then after joining in a Confessing Church liturgical service rejecting National Socialism and voicing the Church’s opposition to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia on September 30, 1938, Scharf’s church consistory suspended him from his pastoral office. Refusing to accept the suspension, Scharf was placed on trial and denounced by court verdict. Refusing to accept the court’s verdict, Scharf defiantly continued to officiate in services in his church, even when the church consistory tried to replace him with another pastor. Then when in response to his defiance his church was sealed off by the Gestapo, he and a group of church members who remained loyal to him arranged to meet elsewhere. With his parsonage only a short distance from the edge of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Scharf could observe everyday the Nazi brutality to its prisoners. On Sundays he preached sermons to his congregants about the atrocities he witnessed and reported in church services the number of persons imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen camp. Then he prayed for the “persecuted brothers and sisters of Israel.” Each evening he rang the church bells in solidarity with them. It is reported that the prisoners of Sachsenhausen, hearing the nightly ringing of the church bells, knew that they were being rung prayerfully for them. Further, when Sharf’s parishioners heard the ringing of the church bells, they knew that their pastor was ringing them in solidarity with those suffering as victims of the Nazi regime, and that by ringing the bells each evening their pastor was proclaiming to God and the world his indomitable opposition to the Nazi regime’s tyrannical crimes against its people (Barnett, p. 88-89, 100-102). C. Kristallnacht, Hitler’s Final Solution and the German Protestant Church’s Response With practically absolute freedom to pursue his anti-Semitic purpose, the assassination of the Legation Counselor to the German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath Graf Welczek, by Herschel Grynszpan in retaliation for the deportation of his Jewish parents, gave Hitler the excuse to launch his final solution to the “Jewish Problem.” On the night of November 9, 1938, ever since known as Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) Nazi forces went on a devastating and murderous rampage, torching or completely demolishing over 100 synagogues, plundering 7,500

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Jewish businesses, and arresting and transporting some 26,000 to 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. And adding insult to injury the Nazis’ forced the rest of the Jews to clean up the damage to apartment houses and businesses caused by the Nazi rampage (Gerlach, p. 142f.). News of the Kristallnacht savagery shocked and shook many in the Confessing church, but the reaction against the pogrom was decidedly muted. Recalls one Confessing Church vicar after the war (Barnett, p. 140): At the time I was in a parish in the countryside. . . . Why it somehow didn’t upset me inwardly I can explain only in retrospect: the range of vision was too narrow. We stood under observation. . . . I frankly admit to you that sometimes you had to push yourself not to be a coward. . . . I had married in 1936, and then, perhaps, one isn’t so—I’m speaking unguardedly here, but I’d rather say it that way than weigh every word on a scale. When you have a child, then you’re not as courageous as the Catholic priests, with their light baggage.. The Confessing Church’s silence in the days that followed Kristallnacht was even more dumbfounding. There was virtually nothing mentioned in the churches the Sunday afterwards or on the following Wednesday, November 16, the annual observance of the German Church’s Repentance Day. Few pastors addressed the devastating Nazi pogrom in sermons. Two pastors that did were Helmut Gollwitzer and Julius von Jan. In Helmut Gollwitzer’s sermon he, in an act of confession, bemoaned to his congregation what he was convinced was Christian guilt for the Kristallnacht pogrom (Gerlach, p. 146): Today we are acquainted enough with the self-loathing we feel where Evil is not just evil, but is repulsively disguised as morality; where base instincts, hatred, and vindictiveness conduct themselves as something great and good . . . . All of us together are burdened by guilt. . . . We are all participants in this, the one through cowardliness, the other through the indolence that steers clear of everything, through the silent ignorance, the silence, the closing of the eyes, the inertia of the heart that becomes aware of anguish only when it can be seen clearly. . . . Our own complicity is evident, as human beings who love their own lives and themselves, and have just enough love left over for God and their neighbor as can be dispensed without effort and bother. . . . Open your mouth for the speechless (Prov. 31:8) and for the cause of all who are forsaken. . . . . God wants to see deeds . . . precisely from those who have escaped with the aid of Christ. . . . Our neighbor now waits outside, destitute, unprotected, without honor; hungry, hunted, and harried by fears for his naked existence, he waits to see whether the Christian community has really celebrated a day of penitence today. Jesus Christ is waiting for this! The most famous sermon delivered that Repentance Day was preached by Julius . In that sermon he declared with the pogrom clearly in mind (Gerlach, pp. 144f.).: Here we have been repaid for the widespread break away from God and Christ, for this organized anti-Christianity. Passions are unleashed; God's commandments are despised; houses of worship that were holy for others have been burned down with impunity; the property of strangers robbed or destroyed. Men who served our German people faithfully and performed their duty conscientiously were thrown into concentration camps simply because they belonged to another race.

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This injustice may not be acknowledged from above—but the sound common sense of the people feels it distinctly, even if no one dares to speak about it. And we, as Christians, see how this injustice incriminates our people before God and must bring new punishments upon Germany. . . . What a person sows, so he will reap! Indeed, it is a dreadful seed of hatred that is now being sown. What a dreadful harvest will grow from it, if God does not grant us and our people the grace for honest repentance. Shortly after preaching that sermon, thugs beat up von Jan, he was arrested and spent four months in jail (Barnett, p. 142). When Otto Moerike, a Confessing Church pastor and outspoken critic of Nazism, appealed to Bishop Theophilus Wurm of Wuerttemberg to send reprints of von Jan’s sermon to every pastor, he declined. However, he did write Justice Minister Guertner and protested the Kristallnacht pogrom, although the bishop qualified that protest by assuring Guertner in a statement Martin Luther would no doubt have signed off on (Gerlach, p. 149; cf. Barnett, p,142): “I contest with no word the right of the State to fight Judaism as a dangerous element. Since my youth, I have held the judgment of men such as Heinrich von Treitschke and Adolf Stoecker on the corruptive effect of Jewry in the religious, moral, literary, economic, and political spheres to be correct.” Later Bishop Wurm wrote that he subsequently “bitterly regretted” those words “to the end of his life” (Gerlach, p. 149; Barnett, p. 142). The Confessing Church’s official journal, Junge Kirche (Young Church), failed to make any mention of Kristallnacht. The newspaper of the German Christians, by contrast, not only featured Kristallnacht but also proceeded to justify the pogrom and its inhuman, terrorizing acts as entirely consistent with Hitler’s policies to solve the Jewish problem. A month following the Kristallnacht pogrom Wilhelm Jannasch, the Berlin Confessing Church pastor tried to get the Confessing Church gathered at an Advent Conference to issue a declaration condemning the Nazis for their persecution of Jews. But the conference refused to issue such a declaration (Gerlach, p. 151). On December 10-12, 1938 the Confessing Church in a national meeting, Kirchetag (Church Day), the participants drafted a declaration of concern “for our Christian comrades in faith among the Jews,” but no mention was made of non-Christian Jews, thereby limiting the Church’s concern narrowly to those Jews of the Christian faith (Gerlach, p. 150; Barnett, p. 150). Five months after Kristallnacht, in April 1939, the German Christians, in concert with other Protestant clergy and laity produced the Godesberg Declaration which adamantly declared (Gerlach, p.179): What is the relationship between Judaism and Christianity? Did Christianity develop from Judaism and thus become its continuation and fulfillment, or does Christianity stand in opposition to Judaism? To this question, we reply: The Christian faith is the insurmountable religious antithesis to Judaism.” That proclamation was followed almost immediately on April 4, 1939 with a German Christians’ proposal for the “establishment of an institute for the investigation and elimination of the Jewish influence upon the ecclesiastical life of the German people.. That was followed by a pronouncement by German Evangelical Church on May 26, 1939 (Gerlach, p. 182): National Socialist ideology struggles with all possible ruthlessness against the political and spiritual influence of the Jewish race on the life of our people. In obedience to the divine order of creation, the Evangelical Church affirms its responsibility to maintain the purity of our people and traditions. Beyond this, there is no sharper contrast in the

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sphere of faith than that between the message of Jesus Christ and the Jewish religion of legalism and political hope in the Messiah. The Confessing Church divided now as it was in its response to the Nazi tyranny against the Jews became incapable as a body to stand up against Nazi pogroms with either statement or action. But in this vacuum of Christian moral conscience and fearless righteous nerve some of the Confessing Church’s pastors and laity took it upon themselves to act individually and independently of their parent church body and came to the aid of the besieged Jews by offering them asylum in their basement, attics, cabinets, and closets, along with other acts of merciful aid, often at considerable risk to their own lives. In this regard the actions of certain women pastors, Charlotte Friedenthal, Maria Gerhard, Klara Hunsche, Helene Jacobs, Marga Meusel (mentioned earlier), Dr. Hilde Schaeder, Gertrude Staewen, Kathie Staritz, Elsie Steck, and Melanie Steinmetz are particularly noteworthy (Gerlach, pp. 160ff.).. Helene Jacobs, an adamant opponent of National Socialism, along with others, got an artist, whom she had hidden in her apartment, to forge passports for Jews. Gertrude Staewen gathered “Mother’s Crosses,” which the Nazis gave as gifts to women who bore many children. Staewen gave the crosses to Jewish women to wear when they tried to flee Germany with forged passports so that the border guards, in observing them wearing the Nazi’s distinctive and honored symbol of woman’s achievement, would not become suspicious of the forged legal papers they were carrying (Barnett, p. 150). Kaethe Staritz, as a vicar in Breslau, worked secretly with the Confessing Church pastor Heinrich Grueber, who helped Jews and Jewish Christians to emigrate, and openly defended the Jewish Christians’ right to participate in church services. For that she was arrested and delivered to a concentration camp, without any protest on her behalf voiced by church officials (Barnett, p. 152; cf. pp.144-146). In contrast to these women in their support and aid to Jews, along with others such as Franz Kauffmann who tried to rescue Jews by bribing the Gestapo (Barnett, p. 151), officials of Anhalt, Luebeck, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Scheswig-Holstein on December 17, 1941 took this position on Jewish Christians: “The severest measures [are] to be taken against the Jews, . . . [They are] to be expelled from Germany. . . . Racially Jewish Christians have no place and no right in [the church]” (Gerlach, p.194). With the early Nazi military success in the war, Hitler became emboldened and moved ruthlessly to squash the little opposition within the Church that remained. There were increasing numbers of Confessing Church pastors and other leaders arrested for their anti-Nazi sentiments or failure to support the Nazi cause. Resistance to the Nazi tyranny was drastically reduced. In 1980 Gollwitzer, reflecting back upon that time, recalled that it soon became dangerous to know anything about the persecution of the Jews. When he would raise the issue of the tyrannical persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, people would say to him: “Please, don’t tell me anything! I don’t want to know.” “Simply knowing,” Gollwitzer submitted, “was dangerous. One could betray oneself; one might express, without stopping to think, one’s horror. That’s why a great proportion of the people held this knowledge away from themselves. And after 1945, they could, in a subjective sense, correctly say: ‘We didn’t know.’ Because they didn’t want to know,” so terrified were they of the Nazis (Barnett, p. 148). In Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s, a general sense of helplessness hung like a cloud over those Protestants who opposed the Nazi tyranny. Few Protestants were willing to risk opposing Hitler’s final solution to the “Jewish Problem” for any reason, or even acknowledging guilt over their complicity. There were a few rare exceptions. In August 1943 delegates at a Confessing Church Synod did express guilt over their silence in the face of the injustices Jews suffered. In the fall the Confessing Church Prussian Synod protested Jewish Christians being excluded from participation in the Church (Barnett, p. 152). Otherwise leaders and members of the Confessing Church felt there were but two effective options open to them: (1) play it safe and

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“keep their “heads in the sand,” as indicated in Gollwitzer’s anecdote, or (2) choose death as the instrument of resistance. The latter was the option chosen by the Confessing Church leader and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer came to the belief that the only faithful response a Christian could make in the face of the Nazi atrocities to the Jews and to Christians who opposed, for the sake of the Jews, the Nazi final solution was to join with others in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer came to the conviction that resisting the Nazi tyranny and its murderous atrocities against the Jews required a Christian to risk everything in obedience to Jesus and his life and death as the model to be emulated. Bonhoeffer wrote at one point: “When Christ calls a man, he calls him to come and die” As early as 1933, in his essay, “Die Kirche vor der Judenfrage” (“The Church and the Jewish Question”), Bonhoeffer had seen that the Church had three options for addressing the Nazi antSemitic policies: (1) to remind the government that it has specific legitimate authority and responsibilities, (2) to aid the victim’s of the government, and (3) “to fall in the spokes of the wheel itself,” i.e., to halt the wheel in its tyrannical path through resistance, the option Bonhoeffer chose for himself. In April 1943, he was arrested and imprisoned when money he had given to Jews to escape from Germany to Switzerland was linked to him. On April 19, 1945 he was executed, along with co-conspirators against Hitler, by torturous hanging, apparently for being an accomplice in the plot to kill Hitler, a plot which ultimately failed on July 20, 1944 when Hitler escaped from the explosion of a bomb which was intended to eliminate him (Barnett, pp. 182-184; 199-202f., 207f..) IV. Protestant Declarations of Blame and Confessions of Guilt The end of the war brought upon German Protestants of the Confessing Church a quickening recognition of blame and guilt of the state and Church for the Holocaust and the failure of the Church to save the Jews from Hitler’s final solution. The eight declarations of blame and/or confessions of guilt that follow are representative of the soul searching that took place among Protestants in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust (see Gerlach, pp. 223-230) A. Eight Declarations of Blame and Confessions of Guilt 1. May 8, 1945: Statement by Bishop Wurm On May 8, 1945, two days following the Nazi’s surrender to the Allied Armies, Bishop Theophilus Wurm, bishop of the Wuerttemberg Protestant Church and spokesperson for the whole Confessing Church, ended his sermon by addressing these words to the people: How much distress and suffering could have been avoided if those who had held leadership in Germany had used their power conscientiously, justly, prudently. From the side of the two Christian churches, there was no shortage of attempts to remind the rulers of their responsibility to God and to human beings. But these admonitions either were not noted or were rejected as interference in state affairs. 2. August 15, 1945: Statement by Bishop Marahrens On August 15, 1945, in a letter to his congregations Bishop August Marahrens, bishop of the regional church of Hannover shared with his flock the burdens on his conscience: It weighs particularly heavily upon me—I have already said this several times— that the church did not find the redemptive word in the first storm that broke

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over the Jews of Germany. However divided from the Jews we may be in our beliefs and although a number of them may have brought severe harm upon our people, they ought not to have been attacked in an inhuman fashion. . . . Were we struck dumb by our initial astonishment at the ominous impending conflict, or did we not see the true facts clearly enough? In any case, it becomes evident that guilt lies upon our path and that we cannot perform our work without living our lives on the basis of forgiveness. 3. August 21-24, 1945: Statement by the Reich Council of Brethren On August 21-24, 1945 the Reich Council of Brethren held a conference and issued this statement to pastors: Moral standards do not suffice to measure the magnitude of the guilt that our people has brought upon itself. Newer and newer deeds of inhumanity become known. Many people still cannot believe that all of this is supposed to be true. In this abyss of our guilt, the body and soul of our people are mortally threatened. We confess our guilt and submit ourselves to the burden of its consequences. 4. August 27-30, 1945: Statement by the German Protestant Church Conference at Treysa On August 27-30, 1945 at Treysa a German Protestant Church Conference was held and was attended by representatives of various Protestant communions nationwide. Martin Niemoeller, as spokesperson for the Reich Council of the Brethren, addressed the conference with these words: I must strike a note here that undoubtedly has been neglected in all that we have heard up to now. Certainly, we stand before a state of chaos and, in many cases, we are already in the middle of it. But we must ask what has brought us to this. Our distress is not due to the fact that we have lost the war. . . . Nor is our situation today primarily the fault of our people and of the Nazis; how could they have followed a path that they did not know; they simply believed, after all, that they were on the right path!—No, the real guilt rests with the church, for it alone knew that the path being taken would lead to ruin, and it did not warn our people; it did not expose the injustice that occurred, or did so only when it was too late. And here the Confessing Church bears a particularly large measure of guilt, for it saw most clearly what was developing; it even spoke about it, and then became tired and feared men more than the living God. And so the catastrophe has broken over us all and drawn us, with everyone else, into its turbulence. But we, the church, must beat our breast and confess: my guilt, my guilt, my enormous guilt!—This is what we must say today to our people and to Christendom, that we do not stand before them and approach them as the pious and just; on the contrary, we are guilty, and want to try in the future to recognize our duty correctly and to carry it out faithfully. . . . What is at issue is not just that we, as a church, have done this or that wrongly in the past . . . but that, through disobedience, we fundamentally neglected the office with which we were charged and with that have become guilty. Subsequently the Treysa conference issued “Word to the Congregations,” in which was stated:

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Amidst the failures of the church and the people, God granted men and women of al! confessions, classes, and parties the power to rise up against injustice and arbitrariness, to suffer and to die. Where the church took its responsibility seriously, it summoned human beings to observe the commandments of God, addressed breaches of law and wickedness, the guilt in the concentration camps, the mistreatment and murder of Jews and the sick, and sought to prevent the seduction of the young. But it was driven back into the realm of the church, as into a prison. Our people were separated from the church. The public was no longer allowed to hear its word; no one heard what it proclaimed. And then came the wrath of God. It took from us what human beings wanted to save. 5. October 18-19, 1945: Statement by the Council of the Evangelical Church of Germany On October 18-19, 1945 the Council of the Evangelical Church of Germany met at Stuttgart, with a number of ecumenical representatives from outside Germany in attendance. From that ecumenical gathering emerged the Stuttgart Confession, in which the German Protestants present made a point of informing their foreign guests that they had “often testified to [their] congregations” regarding great endeavors to oppose National Socialism’s evil spirit. In that document they went on to state, with their guests clearly in view: We are all the more thankful for this visit because we know ourselves to be not only in a great community of suffering with our people, but also in solidarity of guilt. With great anguish, we say: Through us, infinite sorrow has been brought upon many peoples and countries. What we have often testified to our congregations we express now in the name of the entire church: To be sure, we have fought in the name of Jesus Christ through many long years against the spirit that found its terrible expression in the brutal government of the National Socialists; but we accuse ourselves that we did not confess more courageously, did not pray more faithfully, did not believe more joyously, and did not love more passionately. During the course of the Stuttgart conference Martin Niemoeller also addressed the gathered delegates and declared: We know that we, with our people, have followed a false path that has implicated us, as a church, in the fate of the entire world. We ask that God might forgive us this guilt and, by forgiving, might let this guilt become a new motor for the entire world. He can forgive all guilt that is confessed to Him, and He forgives it in such a way that this forgiven guilt becomes a source of new power. . . . We will bear this guilt for a long time to come. Nor do we want to minimize it, but help us so that the blessing is not lost because Christians throughout the world perhaps believe: your confession of guilt cannot be taken very seriously. The men who are in the leadership of the church desire that under no circumstances should the blessing of a confession and the blessing of forgiveness be lost to our people and to the community of nations. Likewise, English Bishop George Bell of Chichester, one of the ecumenical representatives spoke prophetically to the gathering, when he recognized the failure of the participants to clearly and specifically identify the Jews, along with others, as victims of the Nazi’s brutal, inhuman crimes. Speaking forthrightly, directly and explicitly to the specificity being avoided, Bishop Bell declared:

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“No human being can close his mind to the enormous amount of cruelty that was done to the Jews, the displaced persons, and the political persons, the well-nigh millions of slaves.” 6. April 9, 1946: Statement by the Ecclesiastical-Theological Society of Wuerttemberg On April 9, 1946, the Ecclesiastical-Theological Society of Wuerttemberg issued this confession: We succumbed despondently and idly as the members of the people of Israel among us were dishonored, robbed, tormented, and killed. We allowed the exclusion of our fellow Christians who originated from Israel ... from the offices of the church, even permitting the church to deny the baptism of Jews. We did not contest the prohibition of the mission to the Jews. We encouraged racial arrogance indirectly by issuing innumerable certificates of Aryan descent, and thus impaired our service to the Word of the Gospel. 7. July 1946: Statement by the Westphalian Provincial Synod In July 1946, the Westphalian Provincial Synod meeting for the first time since the end of the war declared: We did not raise our voice loudly enough against the extermination of the Jews and other ostracized people. 8. April 23-27, 1950: Statement by the Evangelical Church’s General Synod On April 23-27, 1950, the Evangelical Church’s General Synod issue a statement which included the following: We believe in the Lord and Savior who, as a man, is descended from the people of Israel. We profess the church that is joined together into one body made from Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, and whose peace is Jesus We believe that God's promise regarding Israel, his chosen people, has remained in effect even after the crucifixion of. Jesus Christ. We state the fact that, through neglect and silence before the God of compassion, we have become guilty of complicity in the crime that has been committed by persons from among our people against the Jews. We warn all Christians against desiring to set God's judgment upon us Germans over against that which we have done to the Jews; for in judgment, God’s grace seeks the one who is repentant. We ask all Christians to abjure every kind of anti-Semitism and to resist it with all earnestness where it makes itself felt, and to meet Jews and Jewish Christians in a spirit of fellowship. B. The Inadequacies of the Declarations of Blame and Confessions of Guilt

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There are significant inadequacies in all of the eight declarations of blame and confessions of guilt as they relate to the cause of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Aside from the failure of a number of the statements to identify specifically the horrifying inhuman crimes against the Jews (the Treysa Conference’s “Word to the Congregation” is a noted exception, # 4) and the failure in several of the statements to even mention the Jews by name as the victims of the crimes, the statements fail to address adequately the root causes of the Holocaust which were endemic to German Protestantism of the time and still persist today in much of Protestantism and Christianity worldwide. The problems are Protestantism and Christianity’s historic and inherent racial, religious, moral, and redemptive prejudice and arrogance. 1. The Problem of Racial Prejudice and Arrogance within the Church By racial prejudice is meant, with respect to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism. This essay has well documented the history of German Protestant anti-Semitism with its roots in Martin Luther’s doctrinaire anti-Semitism. Luther’s anti-Semitic position helped inculcate in the German psyche the superiority of the Aryan race and the denigration of the Jewish ethnicity. Only two of the statements above address the issue of racial arrogance (the Ecclesiastical-Theological Society statement, #6) and anti-Semitism (the Evangelical Church General Synod’s statement, #8) as an evil, racism that must be rooted. The others ignore any guilt on the German Protestant Church’s part for anti-Semitism. 2. The Problem of Religious Prejudice and Arrogance within the Church By religious prejudice and arrogance is meant in the context of the Holocaust the claim of Christianity that it is the only one true faith, the only road to salvation and acceptance by God. Inherent in German Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity’s history, identified in part in the Evangelical Church’s General Synod’s statement (#8) and implied in Bishop Marahren’s statement (#2), is that, while the Jews were at one time God’s chosen people, they lost and forfeited that divine election by their rejection and condemnation of Jesus, followed by their turning him over to Pilate to be crucified. In effect, according to the Orthodox Christian view, the Jews killed Jesus. Therefore, the Jews have been punished and continue to deserve punishment by God for their crime against Jesus. Thus, implicit in this view is not just anti-Semitism, racial condemnation, but anti-Judaism, religious condemnation. The only hope now for the condemned Jews, per the arrogance of Christianity, is to repent of their sin against Jesus, believe in Jesus as their savior and Lord and be baptized into God’s new elect people—the height of Christian religious arrogance and hubris. All of these statements still presuppose this route of deliverance for the Jews. 3. The Problem of Moral Prejudice and Arrogance within the Church By moral prejudice and arrogance is meant the German Protestantism’s (and Orthodox Christianity’s, as well) presupposition that, since it is now God’s chosen people by virtue of its belief in Jesus Christ, it has squatters’ rights to the moral high ground. It knows how to adjudicate between what is just and unjust, what is right and wrong in Church and society. So, for example, Bishop Wurm in his statement (# 1) claims that the Church was right in its approach to the state of affairs in Germany during the Third Reich. It was the state that was wrong in not listening to the Church. Therefore, since the Church did not do anything wrong, it is not to blame for what happened to the Jews. Thus the Church has no guilt to confess. This from the same Bishop Wurm who effectively silenced his own clergyman von Jan from speaking out against Nazi persecution of the Jews by refusing to allow his sermon to be printed and distributed to pastors? This from the same Bishop Wurm who in deference to the Nazi official assured him: “I contest with no word the right of the State to fight Judaism as a dangerous element”? 4. The Problem of Redemptive Prejudice and Arrogance within the Church

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By redemptive prejudice and arrogance is meant the German Protestant and Christianity’s claim that when Christians or the Church is guilty of sin, it is assured of forgiveness, with the assumption that, having repented and been forgiven, it is fully restored in favor with God: its sins are washed away. The problem with that position is not that forgiveness is always a divinely proffered gift, but the assumption that forgiveness wipes out any responsibility for retribution for the consequences of the sin. Such an assumption is the basis of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” i.e., ask forgiveness, be assured of receiving forgiveness, and that is all there is to it (see Bishop Marahren’s statement, #2). There is no action required to atone for the consequences of the sin. With the exception of the Brethren’s statement (#3), that seems to be the implicit, if not the explicit, presupposition behind the confessions of guilt in the statements cited: confess honestly our guilt for the Holocaust, and we are assured of forgiveness. That’s it. Nothing else is required. No reparations need to be paid to the victims of our sinfulness. Of course, the Germans after the war did pay material reparations to the Jews via the 1953 reparations act, in which the State of Israel received reparation payment for the suffering Jews experienced under the Nazis (Barnett, p. 230). But more than material reparations is required to atone for the Christian sins of the Holocaust. What is required upon the part of Christians is moral and spiritual reparations, the renouncing of not only anti-Semitism, but also anti-Judaism. Even more to the point, what is required of the Church is its renunciation of the claim that Christianity is the only true faith and that no other religion can serve as a route to oneness with God, or the way to bring peace, goodness and harmony in the world. Such moral and spiritual reparations would require courageous action upon the part of Christians, even liferisking action, to oppose every semblance of tyranny, whether religious, cultural or political, that would rob any human being of his or her inherent dignity and rights to the equal privileges of full membership, unprejudiced by race, religion, class, sexual orientation or whatever, in the human family—inherent dignity and rights intrinsically derived by virtue of the fact that she or he is born a precious and sacred gift of God into the human family of God. V. Works Consulted Barnett, Victoria, J. For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. On-Line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich Bonhoeffer Ellis, Eliahu and Shmuel Silinsky. “Kristallnacht.” Holocaust Studies. On-line: http://www.aish.com/holocaust/overview/Kristallnacht.asp. Gerlach, Wolfgang, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews. Trans. Victoria J. Barnett. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. “July 20 Plot.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. On-Line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_20_Plot “Kristallnacht.” On-Line: http://www://mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies. Trans. Martin H. Bertram. On-Line: http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronology/document/luther-jews.htm Luther, Martin. “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, pp. 655-703. Ed. Timothy F. Lull. Minneapolis:

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Fortress Press, 1989. The Church Confronts the Nazis: Barmen Then and Now. Ed. Hubert G. Locke. Toronto Studies in Theology, Vol. 6. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984.

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