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Into the Ecclesiastical Abyss: The Catholic Church

I dealt with the Evangelical Church the previous time. Now we must concern ourselves with the Catholic Church. I put the Evan­gelical Church first, not only because it is numerically the larger but because there was a methodological reason. The methodolog­ical reason is that under the Evangelical Church’s conditions of freedom of speech and free interpretation of Scripture, and so on, the debate on basic questions is much more differentiated, and a wide spectrum of attitudes, from the spiritually most decadent to the spiritually highest, becomes public. As a result, the inner tensions that exist in German Christianity, and which probably exist just as much in the Catholic Church too, are much more clearly expressed in the Evangelical than under the conditions of the Catholic Church, which, by virtue of its inner discipline, does not allow these tensions to become publicized as much.

I have already drawn your attention to the fact that in the episco­pate during the Third Reich there were very considerable tensions between personalities of higher rank, such as Preysing and Galen,1 on the one hand, and the rest of the episcopate on the other. How­ever, these tensions were never openly expressed, because the inner discipline prevented such a break between the bishops becoming public. But there are still other very remarkable differences between the two churches. Because of the freedom of interpretation in the Evangelical Church, there is a very free theology, in the sense of not being bound to a tradition of dogmatic doctrines.

This very high degree of freedom in practice expresses itself in the fact that the investigations into sacred scripture can be scientifically treated much further, and that a freer scientific atmosphere in the secular sense exists. To this freer scientific atmosphere in the secular sense, however, there was not a corresponding theoretic-philosophic pen­etration of the material at the same level. The theoretic-philosophic penetration in the Catholic literature is very much higher because of the patristic and scholastic tradition that has entered into the formulation of doctrinal pronouncements. So, on the Catholic side, we have a higher philosophic level; on the Evangelical side, a higher level of secular science. That then has its further consequences for the forms in which the clerical dignitaries of the Evangelical and the Catholic Church express an opinion regarding these questions.

The Shallow Opposition of the Church

In the expressions of the Catholic episcopate we cannot find these individual nuances we found in the Evangelical bishops and theologians. Rather, here the analysis must focus more on the pragmatic attitude, because whatever the real attitude of the men who spoke was, it remains opaque behind a cliché language that comes from tradition and yet has a relatively high philosophical level. So, in the Catholic Church we can observe, for example, the following curiosities.

While in the Evangelical Church there was a whole series of figures who later played an important role, and who already in the Weimar republic cheerfully voted for Hitler (for example, the famous Pastor Niemoller), such a phenomenon did not occur in the Catholic Church. Before Hitler’s seizure of power we have documents firmly condemning National Socialism as an ideology incompatible with the Christian attitude. Condemnations of such a radical kind do not exist on the Evangelical side.

It is all the more remarkable that these Catholic condemnations of a radical kind before 1933 clearly had no spiritual or intellectual depth. For immediately after the seizure of power, in March 1933, there begins the great political turnaround, when the Catholic Church, speaking through the episcopate, expressed its support for Hitler and enjoined all Catholic Christians to be fine, true, and obedient citizens under him and to be at his disposal in every way. However, that is also only a phase, which was influenced by the conclusion of the concordat.

I will not deal further with the history of the concordat. It is not yet fully clarified in every point. Who the people involved were is still a rather doubtful matter. Again, only in the last few days the Osservatore Romano has published a whole series of documents concerning the attitude of the pope to the German question, where it is affirmed that those really to blame for the catastrophe were the German bishops and that the Vatican only complied and accorded with their suggestions and advice. Thus that discussion will con­tinue for a long time, until all the details are clear. So let us leave it aside.

How the Church Lost its Freedom

But closely connected with the negotiations for the concordat was this sudden compliance and the willingness to cooperate. This attitude, however, experienced its first setback immediately after the conclusion of the concordat, when the National Socialists’ systematic struggle against all Catholic organizations began, not indeed as a breach of the concordat, but by exploiting the par­ticular provisions that had obviously not been read properly by the episcopate’s jurists before the concordat was concluded.

For it was provided in the concordat that the church’s position would be protected in every way, but always with the proviso “within the framework of the law.” And then laws were passed that simply abolished all that had been expected to be guaranteed. Then there was a longer period for seeking compensation and for resistance in particular cases. Parallel to this period, however, is another, which takes up again what had already caused opposition against National Socialism before 1932, that is, the continued existence of the ideology represented particularly by Rosenberg’s Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts.

The Nazis Aren’t the Government?

With regard to this ideology, the episcopate presented the view that neopaganism, as this phenomenon was called, was not iden­tical with the regime. The regime was delighted to encourage this misunderstanding–if it was a misunderstanding–in order to divert the opposition to figures like Rosenberg, who allegedly had nothing to do with National Socialism as a form of government, and to distinguish him from the Hitler regime itself as the government of the German Reich. So, under the pretext that the church was against neopaganism but had really no objection to an authoritarian regime, the matter dragged on for some time.

We can then distinguish a further phase, where the entry of the church into the language and ideology of National Socialism be­came so deep that the Gestapo got angry. We have Gestapo reports from the time of the mid- and later 1930s, where the Reich govern­ment is warned that the Catholic Church now sought what it had already sought in other cultures, to adapt itself to the outer forms and thus to use camouflage to work its way in. It is specifically mentioned that the clergy had now gone on to speak of Jesus as the Führer, and that “Heil Bishop” had been introduced as a form of greeting, and that that was perhaps going a bit too far and one had to pay attention to it.2

The Austrian Variation

And we have then from this period, 1937, studies of Austrian Catholicism, which at that time had still greater freedom, and the formula had come about from the Catholic side that it “could with justice display the sign, ‘We carry all the items that are sold by the competition [that is: National Socialism], only in better quality.'”3 That was the judgment of the Austrian Catholic paper, the Christliche Ständestaat, in 1937. Then the matter became serious. We have to observe again the same phenomenon we also find in the Evangelical Church and with the generals, the same as in all the various other so-called resisters. First, everyone joins in. Then when it affects their own affairs, they become angry. So when it came to the immediate interests of the church as an organization, such as the question of sterilization, the question of euthanasia, the question of baptized Jews, and the like, then the clergy began to offer resistance, even if not in a very intense form. And that not very intense form of resistance dragged on until the end of the war.

The Dehumanized Response of the Catholic Church

Such an overall survey is however completely inadequate for the actual situation. We must now return to the basic question of these lectures, the problem of dehumanization. In the case of the churches as well as of other organizations we have already dis­cussed, it is the problem that man becomes completely insignif­icant in comparison to his membership in an interest group. That is to say, as long as those in the interest group, whether Czechs or Poles, German Evangelicals or Catholics, are not themselves immediately affected in their interests, they do not have a word to say about it if their fellow citizens are killed, taken to concen­tration camps, mistreated there, or finally, if they are gassed in Auschwitz–not a word against all these crimes against humanity.

Please note that, and that nothing was done at certain critical, decisive points!

Another such critical point, about which a public expression would have been desired, was the events of June 30, 1934. In re­sponse to these, again there was complete silence in public. It was only behind the scenes that complaints were made, even though a whole series of Catholic figures was involved, like Klausener, the head of Catholic Action in Berlin; the Catholic youth leader Adalbert Probst; a Dr. Fritz Gehrlich, the former editor of Der Gerade Weg; and others, who were murdered. A whole series of Catholic figures was murdered, and the clergy, represented by the episcopate, did not say a word. Naturally that aroused enormous surprise, especially among Catholics abroad, and this surprise was further increased by the behavior with regard to the question of the concentration camps, about which nothing was said either.4

For the peculiar attitude of the Catholic Church toward the race question, I will read out a few sources, since they are indeed not known in Germany because of systematic suppression and the methodical falsification of the sources. I quote from the article “Race,” in the manual edited by Archbishop Gröber.5 The attitude to race is formulated in the following manner:

“Every people bears itself the responsibility for its successful exis­tence, and the intake of entirely foreign blood will always represent a risk for a nationality that has proven its historic worth. Hence no people may be denied the right to maintain undisturbed its previous racial stock and to enact safeguards for this purpose. The Christian religion merely demands that the means used do not offend against the moral law and natural justice.”6

The saving clause always conies at the end; you will notice that also in other, similar documents, which I still have to read out. For the German citizens of the Catholic confession–the same holds, of course, for the Evangelicals–who read that, this is naturally the carte blanche for mass anti-Semitism. In his celebrated Advent sermons of 1933 Cardinal Faulhaber ob­served that the Church did not have “any objection to the endeavor to keep the national characteristics of a people as far as possible pure and unadulterated, and to foster their national spirit by emphasis upon the common ties of blood which unite them.”7

Cardinal Faulhaber

That was 1933, at the time Karl Kraus wrote Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht. Cardinal Faulhaber’s remarkable behavior in 1933 and 1934, his Advent sermons and the events that followed them, belongs to this context of the question of the Jews.8 Let me just give the facts. Faulhaber’s Advent sermons of 1933 have become famous especially because of their defense of the sacred character of the Old Testament. But he went beyond that to make it clear to those listening that when he defended the Old Testament, he did not defend his Jewish contemporaries:

“We must distinguish, he told the faithful, between the people of Israel before the death of Christ, who were vehicles of divine revelation, and the Jews after the death of Christ, who have become restless wanderers over the earth.”

“But even the Jewish people of ancient times could not justly claim credit for the wisdom of the Old Testament. So unique were these laws that one was bound to say: ‘People of Israel, this did not grow in your own garden of your own planting. This condemnation of usurious land-grabbing, this war against the oppression of the farmer by debt, this prohibition of usury, is not the product of your spirit.'”

[Lewy adds:] “It, therefore, is little short of falsification of history when Faulhaber’s sermons in 1933 are hailed by one recent Catholic writer as a “condemnation of the persecution of the Jews.”9

That relates to the writing bearing the title Die Katholische Kirche und die Rassenfrage (The Catholic Church and the Race Question), published at Recklinghausen in 1961, by a man called Congar, who is a priest belonging to a religious order.10 So, still the systematic falsification. If his position seemed still in any way ambiguous, Cardinal Faulhaber endeavored to dispel this ambiguity. And now comes the following rather amusing episode:

“In the summer of 1934 a Social-Democratic newspaper in Prague published a sermon against race-hatred which Faulhaber had allegedly preached. The Basel National-Zeitung . . . reprinted excerpts from this sermon, and the World Jewish Congress at a meeting in Geneva praised the Cardinal’s courageous stand.”

“But the sermon turned out to be a fabrication, and Faulhaber had his secretary write a widely-publicized letter to the Jewish organization protesting against “the use of his name by a conference that demands the commercial boycott of Germany, that is, economic war.” The Cardinal, the letter continued, “in his Advent sermons of the previous year has defended the Old Testament of the Children of Israel, but not taken a position with regard to the Jewish question of today.”11

Now that is all ambiguous and could possibly also be just the expres­sion of a wise reserve, but these manifestations have consequences. Just as in the case of Archbishop Gröber:

“lesser Church dignitaries quite naturally took the cue from their Archbishop. An article written by a canon of the cathedral chapter of Regensburg, and published in Klerusblatt, the organ of the Bavarian Priests’ Association, advised Catholic teachers to point out to pupils that the sacred books of the Old Testament were not only beyond the Jewish mentality, but in direct conflict with it. ‘The greatest miracle of the Bible is that the true religion could hold its own and maintain itself against the voice of the Semitic blood.'”12

I would like you again to note that it needs American scholars to bring all this out. No German moves a finger to bring something like this to light.

The Inconvenience of Jesus’ Jewishness

It was painful for the Catholic clergy, just as for the Protestant clergy of Niemoller’s type, that Jesus was a Jew. How does one deal with this inconvenience? The embarrassing fact that Jesus had been a Jew was handled in a similar manner. In a pastoral letter of 1939 Archbishop Gröber conceded [1939–please note the date!] that Jesus Christ could not be made into an Aryan, but the Son of God had been fundamentally different from the Jews of his time–so much so that they had hated him and demanded his crucifixion, and “their murderous hatred has continued in later centuries”:

“Jesus had been a Jew, admitted Bishop Hilfrich of Limburg in his pastoral letter for Lent 1939 [again as late as this] but “the Christian religion has not grown out of the nature of this people, that is, is not influenced by their racial characteristics.” . . . Christianity . . . was therefore not to be regarded as a product of the Jews; it was not a foreign doctrine or un-German. “Once accepted by our ancestors, it finds itself in the most intimate union with the Germanic spirit.”13

I ask you to read the whole book. It’s a treasure trove of this material. I am only picking out a few short passages.

Helping to Identify Jews

Another interesting problem that confronted the Catholic just as much as the Protestant Church was the problem of research into ancestry, which was decreed to establish who was of Jewish origin. Now in the period before the introduction of a state register, the registers of births were kept by the churches. One could have expected that–since the establishment of Jewish origin had the aim of inflicting harm on those German citizens concerned, of delivering them to concentration camps, of mistreating them, of massacring them, and, finally, of gassing them–that perhaps the episcopate of both churches would have refused to make the ecclesiastical records available for picking out who the Jews were. In fact, neither of the churches refused to cooperate in the establishment of who was of Jewish origin so that they could later be killed.

Kristallnacht

Another similar critical point was the so-called Kristallnacht of 1938. Nothing, no official statement. Only isolated statements. Cardinal Faulhaber is said to have provided a truck for the Chief Rabbi of Munich so that he could save some of the religious objects from his synagogue before it was completely demolished. [So, private, individ­ual actions. That is Faulhaber.] Provost Lichtenberg14 in Berlin prayed for the persecuted non-Aryan Christians and Jews on the morning after the pogrom, and added: “What took place yesterday, we know; what will be tomorrow, we do not know; but what happens today that we have witnessed; outside [it was exactly opposite the church] the synagogue is burning, and that also is a house of God.” Lichtenberg’s protest remained a solitary act of witness. His bishops remained silent in the face of the burning temples and the first round-up of the Jews [for annihilation. Not a word!].15

Conscientious Objection

Further, there is the interesting question of conscientious objection. On this there is Zahn’s investigation, which established that in the whole of Germany there were only seven Catholics who refused military service.16 That should not be seen as a prejudice against Catholics in favor of Protestants. I do not know how it was with them; there are still no investigations of that. It is just by chance that the matter has been investigated from the side of the Catholic Church–probably it would look even worse on the Protestant side.

Seven refused war service. Six of those who refused were executed; the seventh survived because he was declared to be insane. In almost all of these cases, the Church brought its pressure to bear on these conscientious objectors to bring them into conformity with the official line. After his arrest, the Pallotine priest Franz Reinisch had to suffer being denied communion by the Catholic prison chaplain, because by his refusal he had failed in his Christian duty to take the military oath of loyalty to Hitler.17

Josef Fleischer, a layman, remembered that in prison he was visited by a high Church dignitary who tried to persuade him to give up his refusal of war service and who, when he did not go along with that, left him with an outburst of anger and declared that people like Fleischer deserved to be made shorter by a head.18 The name of this man, who has the rank of bishop, cannot be given, because he is still a bishop and disputes that this is what happened. That, then, was the problem of the refusal of war service.

Love of Volk, Fatherland, and Führer

On principle, regarding the question of revolt, could one rebel against the Nazi regime? Lewy, summarizing the question of revolt and its treatment by the church, remarks: “Catholics who actively fought against the Hitler regime were rebels not only against the state, but against their ecclesiastical authorities as well.”19

An example from the year 1936 – when a Swiss Catholic in June 1936 was reported to have asked children to pray for Hitler’s death, and the German press thereupon accused all Catholics of being in sympathy with sedition, Cardinal Faulhaber declared in a sermon:

“A lunatic abroad has had an attack of madness–does this justify wholesale suspicion of the German Catholics? You all are witnesses for the fact that on all Sundays and holidays at the main service we pray in all churches for the Führer as we have promised in the concordat. And now one can read in big headlines of the papers at the street corners, ‘They pray for Hitler’s death!’ We feel offended on account of this questioning of our loyalty to the state. We will today give an answer, a Christian answer [he is speaking to the Christians in the church]: Catholic men, we will now pray together a paternoster for the life of the Führer. This is our answer.”20

Very much later, in 1941, Bishop Galen:

“We Christians make no revolution. We will continue to do our duty in obedience to God, out of love for Volk and fatherland. Our soldiers will fight and die for Germany, but not for those who . . . disgrace the German name before God and man. [So, he was already somewhat more courageous.]. . .[A]gainst the enemy in our midst [this can only refer to National Socialism] who tortures and beats us, we cannot fight with arms and there remains only one weapon: strong tenacious, obstinate perseverance.”21

Now, please note that Galen here was one of the most qualified spiritual figures of the German episcopate. He had dared at least to distinguish between the external enemy and the internal enemy and knew who the internal enemy was; but if we come again to the political, human level: Offer resistance? Not at any price! We Christians make no revolution.

A Bishop Visits a Concentration Camp

From this enumeration of critical situations, in terms of which the behavior of the church can be examined, I previously omitted the question of the concentration camps, saying only that there are no official statements of the church about them and the shameful events occurring there. But there is one, which I will now report on:

“In June 1936, Bishop Berning of Osnabrück,22 member of the Prus­sian State Council [appointed by Göring], visited a number of con­centration camps in his diocese. The Kölnische Volkszeitung reported that the Bishop had commended the furnishings of the camps visited. Addressing the inmates in the camp Aschendorfer Moor, Berning reminded them of the duty of obedience and fidelity towards Volk and state that was demanded by their religious faith. In a talk to the guards the Bishop was reported to have praised their work in the camp, and to have ended with three Sieg Heil for Führer and fatherland.”23

That is the only statement of the Catholic Church at the episcopal level on the concentration camps. It evoked horror throughout the world. . . . .

Alfred Delp: Catholic Resistance to Dehumanization

. . . From these depths of moral degeneration, which we have had to deal with, some personalities stand out on the Evangelical as well as on the Catholic side. The last time, I referred to Evangelical personalities like Bonhoeffer, and now I would like to speak of Father Delp. Delp was embroiled in 1944 in the resistance affair of July 20, but he had not participated in it, was not a part of the conspiracy. He was also not consulted about it. It was more an accidental matter, because some of the members of this circle of conspirators, including Count Helmuth von Moltke, had requested the Jesuit order to place a sociological expert at their disposal. This was to advise them what should be set up after the collapse, which already could be foreseen at that time. And in this capacity Father Delp spoke with members of the circle from time to time.

In the trial before the People’s Court, presided over by Roland Freisler, he was then sentenced on the specific ground, not of participating in the conspiracy, but of, in general, entertaining and expressing the thought that the war could be lost. That is the high treason for which he was executed. He was hanged on February 2, 1945. On the third of February, a bomb fell on the People’s Court in Berlin, and Freisler was buried under its rubble. April 30 of the same year was Hitler’s end.

Delp was a young man. When he was executed he was in his thirtieth year. And so there are young people [who resisted], and it is one of the frightful catastrophes of Germany that people like that were murdered. To preserve the order of a people one doesn’t need all that many. Now, he has something to say about this Church problematic that sounds different from what we hear from the episcopate. I will read out to you some passages from Delp’s work, so that you see where the problems are.

He says:

“That is indeed one of our great difficulties, the silence of the cre­ative powers, which, in possession and power of the whole, grasp the situation spiritually and religiously. And because we have no great theology and no great leading ideas, the minor ‘theologies,’ the solutions stemming from a limited but totalized approach, spring up like mushrooms . . . . We are somehow lacking the great courage that comes, not from hot blood and youthfulness nor unbroken vitality, but from the possession of the Spirit and the consciousness of the blessing we have received. And so we are anxious and go on the run.”

“We flee to Christian antiq­uity, we flee to other periods of the Christian past–as if we could ever expect an answer and an instruction from the past, and as if we were not given a mission up to the end of the day and thus possess a genuine promise for each day. These ‘continuous renaissances’ are signs more of weakness than of life. A similar manifestation of an anxiety of life and of responsibility is indicated by the ever repeated and recurring restriction to religious and “essentially ecclesiastical” concerns. And thus is overlooked that what is at stake here is the fundamental–and even for the continued existence of religion more important–reality of man in general.”26

Modern Man the Expert

This is one of the few cases in the Catholic literature, and equally in the Evangelical literature by the way, that the word “man” occurs, and not “member of a church”:

“[H]as the church forgotten man and his fundamental rights? How will the Church save the Christian, if it leaves the creature who should become Christian, in the lurch? [A question that no bishop ever asked, at least not officially.] That . . . these questions . . . will be asked must make us thoughtful. Thoughtful, not for the sake of the approving word of men, but before the sovereign God, who has entrusted to us his creatures.”27

A very rare evidence that a man of spiritual rank in the church is conscious of why he is there. Another quotation:

“With man dies the Christian . . . . [T]he struggle for the freedom and spirituality of man, the struggle for a genuine, decent culture, are not only possible concerns of the Church, but fundamental rights and duties. Not only of the people in the Church, but also of the Church institutions.”28

That is from the decline of the spirit in the Church. Then there is also a volume of notes from the prison cell shortly before the execution, from which I would also like to read a few.29

“Modern man is sick . . . . Modern man has become an expert in many departments of life–his range of power is enormous . . . . [T]hat worldly wise person who thinks he knows all the answers, is ex­tremely sensitive to any form of presumption, real or imagined. And the precision which the scientific age imposes on many people makes them highly critical of the slovenliness and sloppiness with which we churchmen often perform our duty in the widest sense of the word.”29

Later, I will give you, in the example of the idea of the Church, which I still have to develop, instances of this slovenliness and sloppiness:

“Most men of the ordained in the official Church must realize for themselves that at present the Church is a misunderstood–and in­comprehensible–reality to contemporary man and must be aware how disturbing, threatening and dangerous a state of affairs this is [which burdens their life] . . . . Nowadays, personal regeneration and revitalization is far more important than even the most comprehen­sive, factual knowledge. [So, the matter isn’t ended with theological exactness and reading Denzinger;31 one must also be a decent man.] In sober honesty we must face the fact that the Church today is no longer one of the controlling powers in human affairs [that is required].”32

Delp there has pointed to a big historical problem that holds for both churches, that is to say, their loss of contact with the intellectual developments and secular science that have occurred since the Renaissance.

Insofar as philosophy in general is done in the Church, it is clinging to a fading echo of scholastic or patristic philosophy. There is no revival of philosophizing in the Church. When one attempts to modernize, in order to adapt to the time, there always arises the evil situation of compromising where one should not compromise. That means that this or that well-intentioned cleric or religious is taken in by positivistic sociology or psychoanalysis or existentialism. The Church cannot be brought into intellectual order again in this way. Now, we want to remember this Father Delp, especially in view of July 20, which will soon come again, and you should think about it if you hear the profiteers of the resistance make their speeches on this occasion, making a mockery of the sacrifice of a man like Delp.

 

Notes

1. Clemens August, Graf von Galen (1878-1946), was bishop of Münster in 1933 and created cardinal in 1946. He delivered outspoken sermons in July and August 1941 criticizing the Nazi euthanasia murders.

2. See Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 165 f.

3. Ibid., 166.

4. Ibid., 169-71.

5. Konrad Gröber (1872-1948) was bishop of Meißen in 1931, archbishop of Freiburg, 1932-48.

6. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 275.

7. Ibid., 275.

8. Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952) was professor of theology in Strasbourg in 1903; bishop of Speyer, 1911; archbishop of Munich-Freising, 1917; and created cardinal, 1921.

9. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 276.

10. Ibid., 395 n. 30.

11. Ibid., 276.

12. Ibid., 276-77. Voegelin notes in his lecture that “the man is called Scherm, and the article is entitled ‘Der alt-testamentliche Bibelunterricht, Planungen und Wegweisungen’ [‘The Old Testament Bible Lesson: Planning and Direction’], Klerus­blatt 20 (1939): 225.” (See Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 395 n. 3.)

13. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 277.

14. Bernhard Lichtenberg (1875-1943), provost of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral, Ber­lin, and collaborator with Bishop Preysing of Berlin, was held in custody, 1941-43, and died en route to Dachau concentration camp, 1943. He was beatified in 1996.

15. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 284.

16. Gordon C. Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 80 n.

17. Ibid., 24 n.

18. Ibid., 219 n.

19. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 309.

20. Ibid., 310.

21. Ibid., 311.

22. Wilhelm Berning (1877-1955) was bishop of Osnabrück in 1914 and was named titular archbishop in 1949.

23. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 172-73.

24. An early nineteenth-century folksong of a soldier killed in battle.

25. Karl Kraus, Dritte Walpurgisnacht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 210-14. These pages of Dritte Walpurgisnacht have been translated in Harry Zohn, ed., In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), 110-12, and Zohn’s translation is used here with some changes.

26. Alfred Delp, Zwischen Welt und Gott, ed. Paul Bolkovac (Frankfurt: Verlag Josef Knecht, 1957), 96.

27. Ibid., 97.

28. Ibid., 101.

29. Alfred Delp, Im Angesicht des Todes: Geschrieben zwischen Verhaftung und Hinrichtung, 1944-1945 (Frankfurt: Verlag Josef Knecht, 1963). Translated as The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963).

30. Delp, Prison Meditations, 115, slightly modifying the translation.

31. Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum is the standard collection of official Catholic Church documents on matters of faith and morals.

32. Delp, Prison Meditations, 117.

 

This excerpt is from Hitler and the Germans (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 31) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was a German-born American Political Philosopher. He was born in Cologne and educated in Political Science at the University of Vienna, at which he became Associate Professor of Political Science. In 1938 he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna and emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Notre Dame, Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. More information about him can be found under the Eric Voegelin tab on this website.

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