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In recent decades much has been said about the relations between the Third Reich and Pius XII. In fact, the publication of a part of the Vatican archive of the Nazi period ordered by Pope Francis this week, and a new book have once again reopened the debate on the supposed silence of the first Pontiff who has always been reproached for not condemning the Holocaust. . For some he was the ‘Hitler’s Pope’, as he has been nicknamed, and for others he was a saint who did everything he could in the devastating war that he lived through.
The new book of David I. Kertzer‘Pope at war’, which will be published in Spain at the end of the year and which is already a ‘best seller’ in the United States, has raised eyebrows in the Vatican.
The documents consulted by the American historian and exposed in his work reveal intense searches for baptismal documents, lists of names of converts given by the Holy See to the German ambassador during World War II, and desperate calls from Catholics to the Pontiff to find a Jewish descendants.
Kertzer’s essay, as well as the immediate critical reaction of the Vatican to his information, is one more example that the study of the different German churches and their relationship with the Third Reich has generally focused on the figure of Pius XII. It is as if before his controversial papacy, which began only six months before the start of the war, there had been no problem when it came to confessions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler had already been in power for 12 years and Nazism had already expressed its own ideas about religion in Germany since 1920.
In article 24 of its statutes, published on February 24 of that same year, the party already charged against the Jews, even though they represented less than 1% of the German population at that time. And yet, they showed respect for the other confessions: “We demand the freedom of all religious creeds in the State, as long as they do not endanger the existence of the State or conflict with the culture and moral beliefs of the race.” Germanic. The party as such abides by the standpoint of a positive Christianity without confessionally binding itself to any particular creed. It combats the Jewish materialistic spirit on a national and international level.”
“National Socialism is my gospel”
All that soon changed, and leading Nazis began to talk of creating their own creed that would transcend the political realm. This is how Joseph Goebbels explains it in his diary on July 23, 1926: «National Socialism is a religion. The only thing missing is the religious genius that breaks the old formulas and creates new ones. We lack the ritual. National Socialism has to become the official religion of the Germans. My party is my church and I believe that the best way to serve the Lord is to fulfill his will and free the oppressed people from their slave chains. This is my gospel.”
In August 1933, a few months after being appointed Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels made the objective of the Third Reich even more concrete in this regard: «You have to be tough against the churches. We ourselves will become one.” The road was not going to be easy, because beyond that 1% of Jews, the truth is that practically all of the 60 million inhabitants that Germany had at that time were Christians, who were divided into 20 million Catholics and 40 Protestants.
Within the Protestants arose the movement of the so-called ‘German Christians’, who embraced many of the racial and nationalistic aspects of Nazi ideology. Their conviction was such that, when Hitler came to power, they tried to create a ‘Reich Church’ that would spread a Nazified version of Christianity. This drift did not please the Protestants who opposed this twisted version of their religion, to the point that they created the so-called ‘Confessing Church’, in whose founding document, which they called the ‘Barmen’s Profession of Faith’, declared that the church owed fidelity to God and not to the ‘Führer’.
Its most famous members were the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the pastor Martin Niemöller, whom Hitler quickly got rid of: the former was executed on charges of having participated in the conspiracy to overthrow his regime and the latter spent seven years in various concentration camps. This repression, however, did not end the confrontation and a religious war broke out between these two factions, with the aim of seizing power within the Evangelical Church. And among these a third neutral current arose, whose priority was to avoid a schism and any conflict with the Reich.
The encyclical of Pius XII
Although the concern of many of these Protestants was that the Government did not interfere in religious matters, it was practically impossible that this did not happen, according to the declarations made previously by the main Nazi leaders. In fact, one of the first struggles of the Third Reich was to establish a pre-Christian Germanic cult in the schools where the future Nazi leadership cadres were trained and in which Christianity was considered as a Jewish branch enemy of the State.
The ‘Führer’ wanted his own Church and began to pressure the different faiths to get out of his way. In 1935 he arrested seven hundred confessional pastors who had criticized from their pulpits the drift of the Government regarding religions. Two years later, when the Vatican openly condemned National Socialism in Pius XI’s encyclical ‘With Burning Concern’, the Gestapo confiscated almost all copies. And, once World War II began, the dictator went further and ordered that a ‘Nazi Bible’ be written, entitled ‘The Germans with God. A German Book of Faith’, which was to remove any reference to Christianity and Judaism.
100,000 copies were printed in which entire passages were rewritten in an anti-Semitic key. “It is believed that most of them were destroyed by the faithful, who preferred the original version of the Holy Book. We must not forget that the Christians constituted a sector of passive resistance to the Nazi regime and that Hitler failed to integrate them into his totalitarian system, an objective that he perhaps intended to achieve with the publication of this work. Those who chose to keep it probably got rid of the compromising text after the fall of the Third Reich. At present, only one copy is kept in a church in Hamburg”, explains Jesús Hernández in ‘100 secret stories of the Second World War’ (Tempus, 2009).
“The National Church”
In December 1939, Goebbels wrote in his diary: “Hitler knows that he cannot escape the struggle between the State and the Church.” In July of the following year, Nazi leader of the region of East Bavaria, Fritz Wächtler, declared: «After the victory over England there will be a reorganization of the Reich. There will be profound changes. The Church, in its current form, has to disappear. Then there will be only one church, the national church. For those who do not join this, we already have a place prepared for them.
A year later, when Germany had already invaded France, Greece, the Netherlands and many other countries, the head of the Nazi Party in Munich expressed the same idea, but with much more violence and vision of the future: «We, who live now, Hitler and his old guard, we must destroy the Church completely. Let it not be thought that it is enough that the youth of Germany grow up without a Church. The successor of the ‘Führer’ could be more benign, have compassion and the focus of pus would burst again. Nazism is to Christian confessions what water is to fire.
The war was getting more complicated for the Third Reich and, although we still find statements about it by leaders as important as Martin Bormann, one of Hitler’s trusted men – “we must never allow the [otras] churches once again have influence over the leadership of the people”, he said in 1941–, this objective was gradually passing into the background or third place behind the military problems. “The hardest blow to humanity is Christianity, communism is the son of Christianity, they are all inventions of the Jews,” the ‘Führer’ declared three years later, but his dream of being God had already faded little by little little by little
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