For lovers of history only (part one)
A while ago, a person with whom I no longer correspond discussed with me the role of the Church in the history of Nazi Germany. Her views led me to write a whole essay, which I think contains some good things, and I have decided to publish it. The first paragraph contains my opponent's views; the rest, mine. Because of its size, I have been forced to cut it in two parts; bear in mind that the next post on this LJ contains the second part.
- perhaps you overestimate the intention of fascism to destroy church hierarchy - I would agree, of course, that ultimately they sought for an abolition of all churches in general (being rival organisations to the omnipresent party regime), but in that it wasn’t targeting Catholicism specifically (and why would it? Hitler, for example, won the acquiescence of the Vatican with the Reichskonkordat in 1933, although it meant the political wing of German Catholicism stopped its resistance, while the Lutheran church had fancied the national socialists actively for quite some time before. Still, fascism was directed predominantly against Jews (in Germany), against communists (generally), Sinti/Roma, homosexuals, the trade unions and social democratic organisations, and there is no even remotely comparable similar degree of hostility directed against the clergy (again, notable individuals engaged in resistance and/or protest notwithstanding).
Perhaps I did. Perhaps every other historian did. Perhaps we are all fools together. Line up, all you other fools!
William L.Shirer, The rise and fall of the Third Reich, 292:
“The [Concordat], signed on behalf of Germany by Papen and of the Holy See by… Monsignor Pacelli… was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi government… [Ten days after the signing], the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. During the next years, thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped-up charges of “immorality” or of “smuggling foreign currency”. Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, was… murdered in the June 1934 Purge [as were two associates of Papen, who barely escaped with his life, and the priest who had revised the first edition of Mein Kampf]. Scores of Catholic publications were suppressed, and even the sanctity of the confessional was violated by Gestapo agents…”
ibid. 298:
“Some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the [breakaway Lutheran] Confessional Church were arrested in 1937…”
ibid. 429, note:
“…on October 8 [1938], the Cardinal [Archbishop Innitzer of Vienna]’s palace opposite St. Stephen’s Cathedral was sacked by Nazi hooligans…”
Richard Overy, Why the Allies won, 284:
“…six thousand [Catholic priests and Protestant ministers] died in concentration camps or in prison…” [Note that this only includes Church leaders, and not the tens of thousands of people who died without any Church position - except, in God’s eye, the crown of martyr and the title of Saint. Nor does it include the untold number of others who died outside the camps, in prison torture rooms or simply vanished into Nacht und Nebel.]
Alan Bullock [Lord Bullock], Hitler: a study in tyranny, 388-9:
“Hitler had been brought up a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church. Its hierarchical structure, its skill at dealing with human nature, and the unalterable character of its Creed, were all features from which he claimed to have learned. For the Protestant clergy he felt only contempt: “They are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them. They have neither a religion they can take seriously nor a great position to defend like Rome.” It was the “great position” of the Church that he respected, the fact that it had lasted for so many centuries; towards its teaching he showed the sharpest hostility. In Hitler’s eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection of the fittest. “Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” From political considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the danger of strengthening the Church by persecution. For this reason he was more circumspect than some of his followers, like Rosenberg and Bormann, in attacking the Church publicly. But once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches. “The evil that is gnawing at our vitals,” he declared in February 1942, “is our priests, of both creeds. I can’t at present give them the answer they’ve been asking for, but…it’s all written down in my big book. The time will come when I will settle my account with them… they shall hear from me all right. I shan’t let myself be hampered with judicial samples.” [underline mine.]
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 429-430
[After reprinting the previous passage virtually intact, Bullock adds the important qualification, the reason why Hitler wanted an end to Christianity.] “Hitler declared conscience to be a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcision…” [He does not develop the point further, going on instead to his two-faced attitude towards homosexuals and thieves, whom he tolerated as long as they were loyal Party comrades.]
And that Hitler was not joking when he said that he intended to up the pressure on the Churches until their influence was quite broken (as if we ever could imagine Hitler to joke on matters of murder or oppression) is shown by the fact that, according to Helmut Krausnick and Martin Broszat, Anatomy of the SS state (English translation of Anatomie des SS-Staates), 214-215:
“The war was used to embark on a new stage of the National Socialist revolution… It was [therefore] significant that immediately after the start of the war, police activity against the Churches and their representatives increased substantially. Heydrich and above all the Stableiter of the Führer’s deputy, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann (from 1941 chief of the Parteikanzlei) thought that the opportunity had come to reopen the fight against the Churches in a more radical form. In a memorandum to Hitler “on the present political attitude of the Churches and sects” which Heydrich sent to the head of the Reichskanzlei on 20 October 1939, he said that the Catholic clergy in particular were “sworn enemies of the State” and he recommended ruthless intervention of the Gestapo… In 1940-1, the number of arrests of Catholic and Protestant clergy and Bishops reached a new peak.” (Italics mine.) On the next page, a table of arrests for the single month of October 1941 shows 12 Protestant “movement leaders” and 80 Catholic ditto arrested in Germany/Austria, and no less than 336 in occupied Poland.
The use of the war to radicalise political action and incidentally turn the screw against the Churches is also described in detail by Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol.2, ch.6, which includes a detailed assessment of the euthanasia campaign and Bishop von Galen’s famous sermon, of which more later.
Ann and John Tusa, Nuremberg, 377:
“[American assistant prosecutor Thomas] Dodd… reminded [Hitlerjugend leader Baldur von] Schirach… of words from the official [Hitlerjugend] songbook: “We are the soldiers of the future, everything which opposes us will fall before our fists” and “We want to kill the priest, out with your spears” and “Rabbi and Pope shall yeld”.” The Hitlerjugend, as you know, conscribed all German boys from six to eighteen; and this is what they were being taught.
Ibid., 392:
“Since Papen had prided himself on being a good Catholic and opponent of Nazi atheism, he was shown the protests from the Vatican about the persecution of Catholics.” In other words, there was persecution of Catholics - and there were Vatican protests, in the plural.
I could go on…
I have something approaching a blood feud with Fascism and Nazism. A man of my own blood, my father’s uncle, was murdered in Dachau: a trauma that echoed in my father’s family down the years, affecting us as children even though we knew nothing of it. It is only very recently that I came to understand its ramifications, because it is only recently that my father, who was seven in 1945, could bring himself to speak of it.
It baffles me that you can list various specific targets of Nazi massacre and simply deny that the Church - or, for that matter, the valiant Confessional Lutherans - were targets. You honestly seem to know nothing about the Church except where it features as an oppressor. I am tempted to ask you whether you even heard of the Kulturkampf, of the Combes laws, or of Plutarco Calles: whether you know what is meant by the Patriotic Catholic Association; or why the identity of one of the current College of Cardinals is a deep dark secret. I am tempted to ask you whether you know how many priests were martyred last year alone - a year with no particular persecutions; or whether you are aware of what is going on in India currently; or that there is a whole underground in the Muslim world of Christian converts who do not dare to speak their faith for fear of having their throats cut; whether you know, in short, among the majority of the human race today (Muslim countries+India+China and other Communist countries) Christianity is regularly and murderously persecuted. Do you know what is being done to the Catholic Montagnards in Vietnam, or to the Protestant Karen in Burma/Myanmar? I am astonished that you have arrived at your level of maturity with such views: the stuff of mediocre lower high school lessons by opinionated left-wing schoolmasters. Have you never had to consider the Catholic Church in any serious way before we met?
I also have to say that your remarks about Jews, Roma/Sinti, etc., did not please me. First, they amount to teaching your grandmother to suck eggs - since, as you will have now realized, I am not altogether ignorant of these things. Second, they are off the point; the issue is whether there was a systematic persecution of the Catholic Church. Third, I had in fact never said anything else. What I actually said was that he Catholic Church was the one ground where the murderousness of the various different kinds of twentieth-century oppressors met: that, with the few and comparatively insignificant exceptions of tyrants who were Catholics themselves - and even the most notable of these, Franco, was a very dwarf of evil when compared with Hitler or Lenin or Mao - murdering Catholics was the one thing they all had in common. I quote myself: Communists may show no great taste for the blood of Jews, Nazis may not think that the bourgeoisie deserves mass slaughter, but both are united in their resolution to rid their countries of Catholic priestcraft. Catholics are butchered in Nazi death camps and in Communist gulags, tortured in Japanese Fascist jails, murdered in Spain and in Mexico, driven underground in Communist China with the loss of God (literally) only knows how many martyrs; and so on. Does that, in English, mean that I was denying that Nazis murdered Jews? Does that exclude Gypsies, trades unionists, homosexuals, Communists, or indeed my grand-uncle? (I was, anyway, much too kind on the Communists, who did butcher Jews in large numbers in Russia, especially towards the end of Stalin’s reign.) I am certainly not claiming an exclusivity for martyrdom for our people. But such people as St.Maximilian Kolbe and St.Edith Stein were not in the death camps by chance or because they had taken a wrong turn on the highway.
Mussolini is a partial exception; but that is not because he was not hostile to the Church. To the end of his life, however many times he might have betrayed the Socialist ideals of his youth, he remained constant on one point - he remained anti-clerical and anti-Catholic. His famous Reconciliation of 1929 was a purely pragmatic gesture, preceded, accompanied and followed by the suppression of independent Catholic life in the country, and dictated not only by internal consideration but also by the appearance on the international stage of the new phenomenon of Catholic Fascism, the Dollfuss-Franco kind, which he hoped to exploit. Its interest to him waned with the rise of the decidedly anti-Catholic Fascism of Hitler (who was himself anything but unwilling to exploit tyrannical Catholics such as Franco and Monsignor Tiso, even while he butchered their coreligionists) and the Church found itself increasingly shoved to the margins and into outright opposition, even before the war.
(The first major clash came with the introduction of the anti-Jewish Race Laws of 1938. and the attack was led on the Catholic side by the Jesuit periodical Civiltà Cattolica, which has a semi-official status as the Pope’s mouthpiece, and which had previously published anti-Hebraic material. Even before the race laws were passed, Enrico Rosa SJ, who had previously written against Hebraism himself, wrote a scathing, even contemptuous attack on Nazi racism and anti-Judaism, describing race theories as no better than delirium - infatuazione o follia collettiva - raising la stirpe o la razza germanica (notice how, by simply joining la stripe, the descent, and la razza, the race, with a dubitative “or”, Rosa places a justified sense of doubt about the intellectual and defining content of the notion of race) al di sopra di tutte le altre, come la più perfetta . Laddove tutte le altre stirpi del genere umano sarebbero ad essa inferiori, tutte da posporsi o asservirsi alla "grande Germania", ovvero anche da sterminarsi, come l'ebraica. A literal translation: …collective lunacy…[seeing] the German breed or race as above all others, as the most perfect. Whereby all other descents in mankind are supposed to be lower than it, all of them to be placed behind [=below] it, or to be enslaved to “Grand Germany”, or even, as in the case of the Jewish, to be exterminated. I do not think you can say this Jesuit was speaking softly or hiding his meaning; and the perspective of the extermination of the Jews was perfectly clear to him - four years before the Wannsee conference. A few months later, Civiltà Cattolica thundered against the introduction of the race laws - including one against mixed marriages which was a direct violation of the Concordat - and was, as a result, threatened with closure. Relations between State and Church went, from then on, from bad to worse; the introduction of racism in Italy being the defining moment. The same is true, by the way, of the relations between the Church and the Vichy State in France.)
The fact is that, unlike most of his fellow Fascists (and unlike his particular object of admiration, Lenin), Mussolini was not particularly into mass murder, and group exclusion was not originally the message of his movement. (A partial exception is his colonial policy, as the Senussis of Libya and the Ethiopians could tell you.) He was a thug and a bully (and a rapist), but not a mass murderer by temperament. He murdered plenty of individuals, especially in the early days, including several priests and Catholic laymen such as Dom Minzoni; but he did not single out whole groups until the itch struck him, in 1938, to imitate Hitler. The Fascist regime of northern Italy, 1943-45, which had done away with all the alliances that supported them in the great days and reverted to the violence and intolerance of their youths a generation earlier, persecuted the Church, and regarded it as their greatest enemy.
Finally, there are well authenticated rumours that, in early 1944, Hitler had to be talked out of abducting and/or murdering the Pope - yes, that very Pius XII who, according to the lies of a couple of media-promoted propagandist scumbags whom I refuse to name, was “Hitler’s Pope!”
It is even possible that you may be wrong in your mention of the few “notable individuals” who resisted or denounced Nazism - unless I miss my guess that at the back of your mind was the best-known clash between Hitler and the Church, when a famous sermon by the heroic Bishop of Münster, Clemens A. Graf von Galen, later Cardinal actually forced Hitler to back down over his euthanasia campaign. In my view, this episode is not at all significant. And the reason why it is not significant is that the Nazi eugenics policy was not, except for its thoroughness, different from that of contemporary democratic states. The account in Stephen Jay Gould’s The mismeasure of man, though thunderous in its scientific refutation and utterly convincing in its moral passion, is thoroughly inadequate to the spread of the problem; he restricts it to America and to certain specific scholars, but as Gould himself says elsewhere, “Supporters of eugenics formed a diverse and powerful movement during the early years” of the twentieth century (Does the stoneless plum instruct the thinking reed?, in Dinosaur in a Haystack). They formed more than a movement; they formed a consensus as universal as the contemporary one for abortion, and, indeed, motivated by many of the same arguments (e.g. the supposed duty not to give birth to children whose life was going to be unhappy). Ann and John Tusa (Nuremberg, 327) report that Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi minister of the interior, once sent to his former employee Robert Kempner, who had left Germany for the U.S. and was eventually to become a prosecutor at Nuremberg, a detailed account of Nazi eugenics politics, which he was peculiarly well placed to describe. Not being familiar with 20s and 30s history of ideas, the Tusas miss the point: it was almost certainly a sort of olive branch, an attempt to find common ground, in an area where the United States were no less committed than Germany itself. Kempner was, in effect, being told: see, your new country and we believe in the same principles! And they did: sterilization was endorsed by the Supreme Court with one of the most famous judicial epigrams of all time - “Three generations of morons are enough”. Only, it turns out, there were no such generations, and the woman who suffered from forced sterilization was not even below average: the whole case was based on lies and misrepresentations, gleefully accepted by the Supreme Court justices (dear me, how unlike Wade vs. Roe!) - Carrie Buck’s daughter, in Stephen Jay Gould, The flamingo’s smile. Scandals about utterly practical sterilization and euthanasia projects still regularly explode; one came out in Sweden a couple of years ago; and the sterilization of the “unfit”, it turns out, was practiced in France until 1972. In 1921, long before Hitler was heard from, the British government passed a particularly savage internment-of-the-unfit bill with no opposition, both major parties agreeing.
Now which do you think was the only important body of opinion to make a fuss? Dear me, however did you guess? Of course it was the Church. Pope Pius XI denounced eugenics in the Encyclical Casti Connubii, and was echoed by many Catholic writers, of whom the finest may well be Chesterton in his devastating 1921 essay Eugenics and other evils. (I will send an e-copy to anyone who asks, with one or two annotations of my own). You simply do not catch the atmosphere of the twenties unless you understand that the great Catholic polemist had intended his title to be shocking, starting from the perception that, to the average British reader of his time, eugenics was a good thing.
In other words, when Bishop von Galen denounced the eugenics programme, he was simply acting as hundreds of Church leaders, writers and polemists throughout the western world had been doing, for more than one generation, against governments of any stripe and colour; and the only major difference between Hitler and his democratic enemies in the matter is that Hitler, for a while, backed down. Von Galen’s specific action (though in fact von Galen was an implacable opponent of the Nazis from beginning to end and at the risk of his life) is irrelevant: there is nothing in it which is specific to the situation in Germany in 1941. Therefore, if you had von Galen in mind when you spoke of “individuals”, you were calling on the wrong instance. Von Galen would have spoken in the same terms if he were a suffragan American bishop in New York, or an apostolic vicar in Sweden; the difference being only that the public power would have been much less likely to pay any attention. Democratic politicians are so much better at dealing with any principled opposition to their crimes than tyrannies, which, as a rule, tend to show the tenderer conscience. Habitual criminals such as Blair and Berlusconi are the product of democratic politics.
You speak as though the Church had committed some especial treason or done Hitler some especial favour by ceasing its overt opposition to the regime after its triumph. This is really speaking outside any sense of reality. What could the Church do? Let us invent an AU with a Church that demands a revolt against the illegalities of the new government. With no support from army or police, and the large armed force of the SA against it, any Catholic resistance would have lasted weeks rather than months. Catholics would have been butchered in the streets. The majority of the public would have supported the new government; indeed, it might have gained in popularity. Goebbels’ propaganda machine would have branded the stigma of treason and anti-national behaviour on the forehead of the Church. There would have been an exodus of patriotic or simply frightened Catholics, either to the official Lutheran Church, or to the ever-serviceable Old Catholics (born to serve Bismarck’s Reich during the Kulturkampf), or to agnosticism and atheism. The Bishops would have been forced to flee, and then replaced either by schismatic creatures of the regime or simply by nothing, allowing Church structures to decay and show, by their very decay and desertion, the defeat of the Roman enemy. And people like you - I am sorry, but this has to be said - would have risen up in wrath all around the world, declaring that a reactionary and power-thirsty Vatican had tried to start a civil war against a democratically elected and perfectly legitimate German government.
You may say that you were not speaking about instigating insurrection. Well, given your hostile attitude to the Church in general, what else would have satisfied? What other position could the Church have taken which you - let us be honest here - would not interpret as selling out? Any attempt at coming to any kind of accommodation, on whatever grounds, would be read by you as complicity; by you, and by millions of people of your kind throughout the world.
Your lack of a sense of reality in Church affairs, however, may simply mean that you have no clear idea of what you would have asked the Church at the time; only that, as being a moral leader, the Church should somehow have resisted the immoral leadership. To which I answer that there is an expression in Italian for this kind of attitude: Armiamoci e partite - “let’s all get ready for war, then you can go to the Front.” What you are saying is that the Catholics of Germany should have committed themselves to martyrdom when the rest of German society did not seem to have the least interest in the idea, and that the Catholic leadership should have made them if they were unwilling; all this from a professed non-Catholic.
But it is not only because the Church would certainly have lost that it had no business stirring up opposition to the Nazis on its own, but, more fundamentally, because the Church is not a political leadership and cannot replace one. Give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s. It is not the Church’s business to lead political resistance, though laymen may do it in the name of the Church’s principles; much less is the Church’s business to replace the civil, political, economic and military leaderships when these fail in their obvious duty. And it was all these leaderships - it was the whole of German society - that had surrendered to Hitler in the fateful six months from January to June 1933. Germany had decided to accept Hitler; a decision made no less by his opponents than by followers and neutrals. When someone like Karl Severing, the leader of the strongest single opposition party, who still commanded the loyalty of the notoriously socialist police force of Land Preussen (the second strongest armed force in the country after the Wehrmacht, and certainly capable of resisting an usurping government), did nothing more dramatic, when the new government was busy destroying every aspect of democracy, than to go home and retire to private life, then it is clear that the whole political leadership of the former Republic had simply given up. Indeed, its collapse had begun years before, with the minority Brüning government, which emptied out democracy from the inside through its rule by Presidential decree (and incidentally adopted an extreme nationalist pose that made ultra-nationalism respectable again), and had all but been completed by von Papen’s failed attempt at a non-Nazi dictatorship. Interestingly, both Brüning and von Papen were Catholics, and, though Brüning was as much an honest man as von Papen was an unmitigated scoundrel, both might be seen as members of that rising tide of Catholic Fascism that was, at the same time, conquering Austria in the person of Dollfuss. Dollfuss, like Brüning, was universally regarded as a man of integrity; and like both Brüning and von Papen, was a former parliamentary politician who had abandoned parliamentary legality.
What this means is that, by 1932, the political leadership, no less Catholic than non-Catholic, had completely abandoned the Parliamentary idea. Not everyone thought of a dictatorship; most people thought either of an “American” solution with a strong executive President independent of Parliament, or of restoring some sort of version of the class-based electoral system of the old Prussian Reich (cf. Edgar Mowrer, Germany turns the clock back, London 1937); but the Weimar Republic was dead, and had been dead for a year or two before Hitler came even close to the Chancellorship. Nobody would lift a finger to defend it; that was the real meaning of such thing as Severing’s retirement into private life. Nazi government was the worst possible solution; but it was a solution, and the fact that change of one sort or another had been in the air for years means that the whole of German society accepted it as it came, supposing it to be the thing for which they had been waiting.
(Nor should we forget the influence of historicistic philosophies including but not limited to Marxism, which were absolutely all-pervasive in pre-Nazi Germany, indeed in most of Europe, before Popper’s withering assault forced attention on their weaknesses. Their cumulative effect was to bless any historical change whatever with the chrism of Historical Inevitability, indeed to suppose that it was the contemporary aspect of the self-manifestation of the Spirit - that wonderfully German Geist which is not exactly Holy and not always very spiritual - in contingent history. Certainly the Nazis made massive use of historicistic ideas.)
In view of this, not only is any criticism of the Church really outside reality, but it also bears an unpleasant taste of scapegoating. The German governing class surrenders to the Nazis; so, of course, you blame… the Church. I know that in a certain kind of mythology the Church is this ogre greedy for political and economic power; believe me when I tell you that it does not bear the slightest resemblance to reality. If the Church has a fault in politics, it is in accepting existing realities too meekly, even when they are based on persecution: a classic case being the Ostpolitik of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, which achieved practically nothing for the persecuted Catholics of the East and must be accounted one of the great and ignominious failures of Church history.
Again and again, you speak like someone with no idea of Church history or law. You mention the Reichskonkordat in German, as if it were something special; showing no notion, if you have it, that a Concordat is simply the formal treaty that regulates the legal relationship between the Church and a State. (The word is English and French as well as German, and can be found as Concordato in Italian with a slightly different meaning, that of a treaty between any religious body and the Italian state; there are, for instance, Concordati between the Italian Republic and major Protestant denominations.) Famous ones include that with Napoleon in 1802 and with Mussolini in 1929 - both signed with tyrants who oppressed the Church. Conversely, there is no Concordat in existence with, say, Britain or the United States; which suggests that the Church finds suggestion of a Concordat most welcome when the political power is alien or hostile. The reason is obvious: being that the piece of paper may act as some sort of restraint upon the signer, and therefore particularly useful in cases where the Church is in immediate danger of persecution. Napoleon, Mussolini and Hitler all broke the terms of their Concordats practically as soon as they had signed them, which suggests that the hope that tyrants may be restrained by their own word and signature is a pious hope; but then, the Church is supposed to be pious.
That is not altogether a joke. My point is that the Church is under an obligation to take any approach seriously; to believe in the honesty of any word given. It is part of her statute: “Love believes all things.” That Chamberlain could, as late as 1938, still believe in Hitler’s word, is a mystery; that the Church should welcome, in 1933, an approach from Hitler - for it was the new government that made the approach - is simply natural. So, of course, she is blamed for it. It is important to have reasons to blame the Church; so important, that they are felt to be there even when they aren’t.
The amount of unexamined and mistaken assumptions in your paragraph does not end with the mere fact of Nazi persecution of the Church. The notion of a natural opposition of Fascism and homosexuality, for instance, is the very reverse of the truth. The male separatism and idolatry of male strength which are at the heart of most of historical Fascism - think of Mussolini and his cult of the Will, and of the brutal Italian attitudes of his squads, with their boasted virility and their phallic manganelli or bludgeons - would in any case be sympathetic to the growth of male homosexuality. So would the programmatic immoralism typical of all these movements, which were all opposed to the legal notion of marriage in the name of a cult of unrestricted Life and instinct; Fascism was consistently rooted in the “progressive” culture of the turn of the century. But in Germany, it is simply a historical fact, and not a little-known one either, that not only homosexual practice, but homosexualist theorizing, had been among the fairies presiding at the cradle of the infant German Fascism. Before Hitler was anything but a local agitator in Munich, the best-known and most influential group on the German hard right was the famous circle of the poet Stefan George, which several contemporary sources name as the leading influence in favour of Fascism in Germany in the twenties. (Thomas Mann included in Doktor Faustus what seems to me a savage caricature of George, or at least of his poetry, in the character of Daniel zur Höhe.) The George-Kreis was notoriously and unashamedly homosexual; one of his leading members was an aggressive theorist of male love with several publications under his belt. His name, I seem to remember, was Blüher (at least, Bl-something - I have lost my copy of Aurel Kolnai’s The war against the West, which was my reference for the whole German hard right of the twenties and thirties). Of course, George and his followers despised Hitler for a half-educated vulgarian - indeed, Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the hero of July 20, was an old favourite and probably boyfriend of George’s - but they were part of the same world of ideas.
- perhaps you overestimate the intention of fascism to destroy church hierarchy - I would agree, of course, that ultimately they sought for an abolition of all churches in general (being rival organisations to the omnipresent party regime), but in that it wasn’t targeting Catholicism specifically (and why would it? Hitler, for example, won the acquiescence of the Vatican with the Reichskonkordat in 1933, although it meant the political wing of German Catholicism stopped its resistance, while the Lutheran church had fancied the national socialists actively for quite some time before. Still, fascism was directed predominantly against Jews (in Germany), against communists (generally), Sinti/Roma, homosexuals, the trade unions and social democratic organisations, and there is no even remotely comparable similar degree of hostility directed against the clergy (again, notable individuals engaged in resistance and/or protest notwithstanding).
Perhaps I did. Perhaps every other historian did. Perhaps we are all fools together. Line up, all you other fools!
William L.Shirer, The rise and fall of the Third Reich, 292:
“The [Concordat], signed on behalf of Germany by Papen and of the Holy See by… Monsignor Pacelli… was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi government… [Ten days after the signing], the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. During the next years, thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped-up charges of “immorality” or of “smuggling foreign currency”. Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, was… murdered in the June 1934 Purge [as were two associates of Papen, who barely escaped with his life, and the priest who had revised the first edition of Mein Kampf]. Scores of Catholic publications were suppressed, and even the sanctity of the confessional was violated by Gestapo agents…”
ibid. 298:
“Some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the [breakaway Lutheran] Confessional Church were arrested in 1937…”
ibid. 429, note:
“…on October 8 [1938], the Cardinal [Archbishop Innitzer of Vienna]’s palace opposite St. Stephen’s Cathedral was sacked by Nazi hooligans…”
Richard Overy, Why the Allies won, 284:
“…six thousand [Catholic priests and Protestant ministers] died in concentration camps or in prison…” [Note that this only includes Church leaders, and not the tens of thousands of people who died without any Church position - except, in God’s eye, the crown of martyr and the title of Saint. Nor does it include the untold number of others who died outside the camps, in prison torture rooms or simply vanished into Nacht und Nebel.]
Alan Bullock [Lord Bullock], Hitler: a study in tyranny, 388-9:
“Hitler had been brought up a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church. Its hierarchical structure, its skill at dealing with human nature, and the unalterable character of its Creed, were all features from which he claimed to have learned. For the Protestant clergy he felt only contempt: “They are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them. They have neither a religion they can take seriously nor a great position to defend like Rome.” It was the “great position” of the Church that he respected, the fact that it had lasted for so many centuries; towards its teaching he showed the sharpest hostility. In Hitler’s eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection of the fittest. “Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” From political considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the danger of strengthening the Church by persecution. For this reason he was more circumspect than some of his followers, like Rosenberg and Bormann, in attacking the Church publicly. But once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches. “The evil that is gnawing at our vitals,” he declared in February 1942, “is our priests, of both creeds. I can’t at present give them the answer they’ve been asking for, but…it’s all written down in my big book. The time will come when I will settle my account with them… they shall hear from me all right. I shan’t let myself be hampered with judicial samples.” [underline mine.]
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 429-430
[After reprinting the previous passage virtually intact, Bullock adds the important qualification, the reason why Hitler wanted an end to Christianity.] “Hitler declared conscience to be a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcision…” [He does not develop the point further, going on instead to his two-faced attitude towards homosexuals and thieves, whom he tolerated as long as they were loyal Party comrades.]
And that Hitler was not joking when he said that he intended to up the pressure on the Churches until their influence was quite broken (as if we ever could imagine Hitler to joke on matters of murder or oppression) is shown by the fact that, according to Helmut Krausnick and Martin Broszat, Anatomy of the SS state (English translation of Anatomie des SS-Staates), 214-215:
“The war was used to embark on a new stage of the National Socialist revolution… It was [therefore] significant that immediately after the start of the war, police activity against the Churches and their representatives increased substantially. Heydrich and above all the Stableiter of the Führer’s deputy, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann (from 1941 chief of the Parteikanzlei) thought that the opportunity had come to reopen the fight against the Churches in a more radical form. In a memorandum to Hitler “on the present political attitude of the Churches and sects” which Heydrich sent to the head of the Reichskanzlei on 20 October 1939, he said that the Catholic clergy in particular were “sworn enemies of the State” and he recommended ruthless intervention of the Gestapo… In 1940-1, the number of arrests of Catholic and Protestant clergy and Bishops reached a new peak.” (Italics mine.) On the next page, a table of arrests for the single month of October 1941 shows 12 Protestant “movement leaders” and 80 Catholic ditto arrested in Germany/Austria, and no less than 336 in occupied Poland.
The use of the war to radicalise political action and incidentally turn the screw against the Churches is also described in detail by Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol.2, ch.6, which includes a detailed assessment of the euthanasia campaign and Bishop von Galen’s famous sermon, of which more later.
Ann and John Tusa, Nuremberg, 377:
“[American assistant prosecutor Thomas] Dodd… reminded [Hitlerjugend leader Baldur von] Schirach… of words from the official [Hitlerjugend] songbook: “We are the soldiers of the future, everything which opposes us will fall before our fists” and “We want to kill the priest, out with your spears” and “Rabbi and Pope shall yeld”.” The Hitlerjugend, as you know, conscribed all German boys from six to eighteen; and this is what they were being taught.
Ibid., 392:
“Since Papen had prided himself on being a good Catholic and opponent of Nazi atheism, he was shown the protests from the Vatican about the persecution of Catholics.” In other words, there was persecution of Catholics - and there were Vatican protests, in the plural.
I could go on…
I have something approaching a blood feud with Fascism and Nazism. A man of my own blood, my father’s uncle, was murdered in Dachau: a trauma that echoed in my father’s family down the years, affecting us as children even though we knew nothing of it. It is only very recently that I came to understand its ramifications, because it is only recently that my father, who was seven in 1945, could bring himself to speak of it.
It baffles me that you can list various specific targets of Nazi massacre and simply deny that the Church - or, for that matter, the valiant Confessional Lutherans - were targets. You honestly seem to know nothing about the Church except where it features as an oppressor. I am tempted to ask you whether you even heard of the Kulturkampf, of the Combes laws, or of Plutarco Calles: whether you know what is meant by the Patriotic Catholic Association; or why the identity of one of the current College of Cardinals is a deep dark secret. I am tempted to ask you whether you know how many priests were martyred last year alone - a year with no particular persecutions; or whether you are aware of what is going on in India currently; or that there is a whole underground in the Muslim world of Christian converts who do not dare to speak their faith for fear of having their throats cut; whether you know, in short, among the majority of the human race today (Muslim countries+India+China and other Communist countries) Christianity is regularly and murderously persecuted. Do you know what is being done to the Catholic Montagnards in Vietnam, or to the Protestant Karen in Burma/Myanmar? I am astonished that you have arrived at your level of maturity with such views: the stuff of mediocre lower high school lessons by opinionated left-wing schoolmasters. Have you never had to consider the Catholic Church in any serious way before we met?
I also have to say that your remarks about Jews, Roma/Sinti, etc., did not please me. First, they amount to teaching your grandmother to suck eggs - since, as you will have now realized, I am not altogether ignorant of these things. Second, they are off the point; the issue is whether there was a systematic persecution of the Catholic Church. Third, I had in fact never said anything else. What I actually said was that he Catholic Church was the one ground where the murderousness of the various different kinds of twentieth-century oppressors met: that, with the few and comparatively insignificant exceptions of tyrants who were Catholics themselves - and even the most notable of these, Franco, was a very dwarf of evil when compared with Hitler or Lenin or Mao - murdering Catholics was the one thing they all had in common. I quote myself: Communists may show no great taste for the blood of Jews, Nazis may not think that the bourgeoisie deserves mass slaughter, but both are united in their resolution to rid their countries of Catholic priestcraft. Catholics are butchered in Nazi death camps and in Communist gulags, tortured in Japanese Fascist jails, murdered in Spain and in Mexico, driven underground in Communist China with the loss of God (literally) only knows how many martyrs; and so on. Does that, in English, mean that I was denying that Nazis murdered Jews? Does that exclude Gypsies, trades unionists, homosexuals, Communists, or indeed my grand-uncle? (I was, anyway, much too kind on the Communists, who did butcher Jews in large numbers in Russia, especially towards the end of Stalin’s reign.) I am certainly not claiming an exclusivity for martyrdom for our people. But such people as St.Maximilian Kolbe and St.Edith Stein were not in the death camps by chance or because they had taken a wrong turn on the highway.
Mussolini is a partial exception; but that is not because he was not hostile to the Church. To the end of his life, however many times he might have betrayed the Socialist ideals of his youth, he remained constant on one point - he remained anti-clerical and anti-Catholic. His famous Reconciliation of 1929 was a purely pragmatic gesture, preceded, accompanied and followed by the suppression of independent Catholic life in the country, and dictated not only by internal consideration but also by the appearance on the international stage of the new phenomenon of Catholic Fascism, the Dollfuss-Franco kind, which he hoped to exploit. Its interest to him waned with the rise of the decidedly anti-Catholic Fascism of Hitler (who was himself anything but unwilling to exploit tyrannical Catholics such as Franco and Monsignor Tiso, even while he butchered their coreligionists) and the Church found itself increasingly shoved to the margins and into outright opposition, even before the war.
(The first major clash came with the introduction of the anti-Jewish Race Laws of 1938. and the attack was led on the Catholic side by the Jesuit periodical Civiltà Cattolica, which has a semi-official status as the Pope’s mouthpiece, and which had previously published anti-Hebraic material. Even before the race laws were passed, Enrico Rosa SJ, who had previously written against Hebraism himself, wrote a scathing, even contemptuous attack on Nazi racism and anti-Judaism, describing race theories as no better than delirium - infatuazione o follia collettiva - raising la stirpe o la razza germanica (notice how, by simply joining la stripe, the descent, and la razza, the race, with a dubitative “or”, Rosa places a justified sense of doubt about the intellectual and defining content of the notion of race) al di sopra di tutte le altre, come la più perfetta . Laddove tutte le altre stirpi del genere umano sarebbero ad essa inferiori, tutte da posporsi o asservirsi alla "grande Germania", ovvero anche da sterminarsi, come l'ebraica. A literal translation: …collective lunacy…[seeing] the German breed or race as above all others, as the most perfect. Whereby all other descents in mankind are supposed to be lower than it, all of them to be placed behind [=below] it, or to be enslaved to “Grand Germany”, or even, as in the case of the Jewish, to be exterminated. I do not think you can say this Jesuit was speaking softly or hiding his meaning; and the perspective of the extermination of the Jews was perfectly clear to him - four years before the Wannsee conference. A few months later, Civiltà Cattolica thundered against the introduction of the race laws - including one against mixed marriages which was a direct violation of the Concordat - and was, as a result, threatened with closure. Relations between State and Church went, from then on, from bad to worse; the introduction of racism in Italy being the defining moment. The same is true, by the way, of the relations between the Church and the Vichy State in France.)
The fact is that, unlike most of his fellow Fascists (and unlike his particular object of admiration, Lenin), Mussolini was not particularly into mass murder, and group exclusion was not originally the message of his movement. (A partial exception is his colonial policy, as the Senussis of Libya and the Ethiopians could tell you.) He was a thug and a bully (and a rapist), but not a mass murderer by temperament. He murdered plenty of individuals, especially in the early days, including several priests and Catholic laymen such as Dom Minzoni; but he did not single out whole groups until the itch struck him, in 1938, to imitate Hitler. The Fascist regime of northern Italy, 1943-45, which had done away with all the alliances that supported them in the great days and reverted to the violence and intolerance of their youths a generation earlier, persecuted the Church, and regarded it as their greatest enemy.
Finally, there are well authenticated rumours that, in early 1944, Hitler had to be talked out of abducting and/or murdering the Pope - yes, that very Pius XII who, according to the lies of a couple of media-promoted propagandist scumbags whom I refuse to name, was “Hitler’s Pope!”
It is even possible that you may be wrong in your mention of the few “notable individuals” who resisted or denounced Nazism - unless I miss my guess that at the back of your mind was the best-known clash between Hitler and the Church, when a famous sermon by the heroic Bishop of Münster, Clemens A. Graf von Galen, later Cardinal actually forced Hitler to back down over his euthanasia campaign. In my view, this episode is not at all significant. And the reason why it is not significant is that the Nazi eugenics policy was not, except for its thoroughness, different from that of contemporary democratic states. The account in Stephen Jay Gould’s The mismeasure of man, though thunderous in its scientific refutation and utterly convincing in its moral passion, is thoroughly inadequate to the spread of the problem; he restricts it to America and to certain specific scholars, but as Gould himself says elsewhere, “Supporters of eugenics formed a diverse and powerful movement during the early years” of the twentieth century (Does the stoneless plum instruct the thinking reed?, in Dinosaur in a Haystack). They formed more than a movement; they formed a consensus as universal as the contemporary one for abortion, and, indeed, motivated by many of the same arguments (e.g. the supposed duty not to give birth to children whose life was going to be unhappy). Ann and John Tusa (Nuremberg, 327) report that Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi minister of the interior, once sent to his former employee Robert Kempner, who had left Germany for the U.S. and was eventually to become a prosecutor at Nuremberg, a detailed account of Nazi eugenics politics, which he was peculiarly well placed to describe. Not being familiar with 20s and 30s history of ideas, the Tusas miss the point: it was almost certainly a sort of olive branch, an attempt to find common ground, in an area where the United States were no less committed than Germany itself. Kempner was, in effect, being told: see, your new country and we believe in the same principles! And they did: sterilization was endorsed by the Supreme Court with one of the most famous judicial epigrams of all time - “Three generations of morons are enough”. Only, it turns out, there were no such generations, and the woman who suffered from forced sterilization was not even below average: the whole case was based on lies and misrepresentations, gleefully accepted by the Supreme Court justices (dear me, how unlike Wade vs. Roe!) - Carrie Buck’s daughter, in Stephen Jay Gould, The flamingo’s smile. Scandals about utterly practical sterilization and euthanasia projects still regularly explode; one came out in Sweden a couple of years ago; and the sterilization of the “unfit”, it turns out, was practiced in France until 1972. In 1921, long before Hitler was heard from, the British government passed a particularly savage internment-of-the-unfit bill with no opposition, both major parties agreeing.
Now which do you think was the only important body of opinion to make a fuss? Dear me, however did you guess? Of course it was the Church. Pope Pius XI denounced eugenics in the Encyclical Casti Connubii, and was echoed by many Catholic writers, of whom the finest may well be Chesterton in his devastating 1921 essay Eugenics and other evils. (I will send an e-copy to anyone who asks, with one or two annotations of my own). You simply do not catch the atmosphere of the twenties unless you understand that the great Catholic polemist had intended his title to be shocking, starting from the perception that, to the average British reader of his time, eugenics was a good thing.
In other words, when Bishop von Galen denounced the eugenics programme, he was simply acting as hundreds of Church leaders, writers and polemists throughout the western world had been doing, for more than one generation, against governments of any stripe and colour; and the only major difference between Hitler and his democratic enemies in the matter is that Hitler, for a while, backed down. Von Galen’s specific action (though in fact von Galen was an implacable opponent of the Nazis from beginning to end and at the risk of his life) is irrelevant: there is nothing in it which is specific to the situation in Germany in 1941. Therefore, if you had von Galen in mind when you spoke of “individuals”, you were calling on the wrong instance. Von Galen would have spoken in the same terms if he were a suffragan American bishop in New York, or an apostolic vicar in Sweden; the difference being only that the public power would have been much less likely to pay any attention. Democratic politicians are so much better at dealing with any principled opposition to their crimes than tyrannies, which, as a rule, tend to show the tenderer conscience. Habitual criminals such as Blair and Berlusconi are the product of democratic politics.
You speak as though the Church had committed some especial treason or done Hitler some especial favour by ceasing its overt opposition to the regime after its triumph. This is really speaking outside any sense of reality. What could the Church do? Let us invent an AU with a Church that demands a revolt against the illegalities of the new government. With no support from army or police, and the large armed force of the SA against it, any Catholic resistance would have lasted weeks rather than months. Catholics would have been butchered in the streets. The majority of the public would have supported the new government; indeed, it might have gained in popularity. Goebbels’ propaganda machine would have branded the stigma of treason and anti-national behaviour on the forehead of the Church. There would have been an exodus of patriotic or simply frightened Catholics, either to the official Lutheran Church, or to the ever-serviceable Old Catholics (born to serve Bismarck’s Reich during the Kulturkampf), or to agnosticism and atheism. The Bishops would have been forced to flee, and then replaced either by schismatic creatures of the regime or simply by nothing, allowing Church structures to decay and show, by their very decay and desertion, the defeat of the Roman enemy. And people like you - I am sorry, but this has to be said - would have risen up in wrath all around the world, declaring that a reactionary and power-thirsty Vatican had tried to start a civil war against a democratically elected and perfectly legitimate German government.
You may say that you were not speaking about instigating insurrection. Well, given your hostile attitude to the Church in general, what else would have satisfied? What other position could the Church have taken which you - let us be honest here - would not interpret as selling out? Any attempt at coming to any kind of accommodation, on whatever grounds, would be read by you as complicity; by you, and by millions of people of your kind throughout the world.
Your lack of a sense of reality in Church affairs, however, may simply mean that you have no clear idea of what you would have asked the Church at the time; only that, as being a moral leader, the Church should somehow have resisted the immoral leadership. To which I answer that there is an expression in Italian for this kind of attitude: Armiamoci e partite - “let’s all get ready for war, then you can go to the Front.” What you are saying is that the Catholics of Germany should have committed themselves to martyrdom when the rest of German society did not seem to have the least interest in the idea, and that the Catholic leadership should have made them if they were unwilling; all this from a professed non-Catholic.
But it is not only because the Church would certainly have lost that it had no business stirring up opposition to the Nazis on its own, but, more fundamentally, because the Church is not a political leadership and cannot replace one. Give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s. It is not the Church’s business to lead political resistance, though laymen may do it in the name of the Church’s principles; much less is the Church’s business to replace the civil, political, economic and military leaderships when these fail in their obvious duty. And it was all these leaderships - it was the whole of German society - that had surrendered to Hitler in the fateful six months from January to June 1933. Germany had decided to accept Hitler; a decision made no less by his opponents than by followers and neutrals. When someone like Karl Severing, the leader of the strongest single opposition party, who still commanded the loyalty of the notoriously socialist police force of Land Preussen (the second strongest armed force in the country after the Wehrmacht, and certainly capable of resisting an usurping government), did nothing more dramatic, when the new government was busy destroying every aspect of democracy, than to go home and retire to private life, then it is clear that the whole political leadership of the former Republic had simply given up. Indeed, its collapse had begun years before, with the minority Brüning government, which emptied out democracy from the inside through its rule by Presidential decree (and incidentally adopted an extreme nationalist pose that made ultra-nationalism respectable again), and had all but been completed by von Papen’s failed attempt at a non-Nazi dictatorship. Interestingly, both Brüning and von Papen were Catholics, and, though Brüning was as much an honest man as von Papen was an unmitigated scoundrel, both might be seen as members of that rising tide of Catholic Fascism that was, at the same time, conquering Austria in the person of Dollfuss. Dollfuss, like Brüning, was universally regarded as a man of integrity; and like both Brüning and von Papen, was a former parliamentary politician who had abandoned parliamentary legality.
What this means is that, by 1932, the political leadership, no less Catholic than non-Catholic, had completely abandoned the Parliamentary idea. Not everyone thought of a dictatorship; most people thought either of an “American” solution with a strong executive President independent of Parliament, or of restoring some sort of version of the class-based electoral system of the old Prussian Reich (cf. Edgar Mowrer, Germany turns the clock back, London 1937); but the Weimar Republic was dead, and had been dead for a year or two before Hitler came even close to the Chancellorship. Nobody would lift a finger to defend it; that was the real meaning of such thing as Severing’s retirement into private life. Nazi government was the worst possible solution; but it was a solution, and the fact that change of one sort or another had been in the air for years means that the whole of German society accepted it as it came, supposing it to be the thing for which they had been waiting.
(Nor should we forget the influence of historicistic philosophies including but not limited to Marxism, which were absolutely all-pervasive in pre-Nazi Germany, indeed in most of Europe, before Popper’s withering assault forced attention on their weaknesses. Their cumulative effect was to bless any historical change whatever with the chrism of Historical Inevitability, indeed to suppose that it was the contemporary aspect of the self-manifestation of the Spirit - that wonderfully German Geist which is not exactly Holy and not always very spiritual - in contingent history. Certainly the Nazis made massive use of historicistic ideas.)
In view of this, not only is any criticism of the Church really outside reality, but it also bears an unpleasant taste of scapegoating. The German governing class surrenders to the Nazis; so, of course, you blame… the Church. I know that in a certain kind of mythology the Church is this ogre greedy for political and economic power; believe me when I tell you that it does not bear the slightest resemblance to reality. If the Church has a fault in politics, it is in accepting existing realities too meekly, even when they are based on persecution: a classic case being the Ostpolitik of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, which achieved practically nothing for the persecuted Catholics of the East and must be accounted one of the great and ignominious failures of Church history.
Again and again, you speak like someone with no idea of Church history or law. You mention the Reichskonkordat in German, as if it were something special; showing no notion, if you have it, that a Concordat is simply the formal treaty that regulates the legal relationship between the Church and a State. (The word is English and French as well as German, and can be found as Concordato in Italian with a slightly different meaning, that of a treaty between any religious body and the Italian state; there are, for instance, Concordati between the Italian Republic and major Protestant denominations.) Famous ones include that with Napoleon in 1802 and with Mussolini in 1929 - both signed with tyrants who oppressed the Church. Conversely, there is no Concordat in existence with, say, Britain or the United States; which suggests that the Church finds suggestion of a Concordat most welcome when the political power is alien or hostile. The reason is obvious: being that the piece of paper may act as some sort of restraint upon the signer, and therefore particularly useful in cases where the Church is in immediate danger of persecution. Napoleon, Mussolini and Hitler all broke the terms of their Concordats practically as soon as they had signed them, which suggests that the hope that tyrants may be restrained by their own word and signature is a pious hope; but then, the Church is supposed to be pious.
That is not altogether a joke. My point is that the Church is under an obligation to take any approach seriously; to believe in the honesty of any word given. It is part of her statute: “Love believes all things.” That Chamberlain could, as late as 1938, still believe in Hitler’s word, is a mystery; that the Church should welcome, in 1933, an approach from Hitler - for it was the new government that made the approach - is simply natural. So, of course, she is blamed for it. It is important to have reasons to blame the Church; so important, that they are felt to be there even when they aren’t.
The amount of unexamined and mistaken assumptions in your paragraph does not end with the mere fact of Nazi persecution of the Church. The notion of a natural opposition of Fascism and homosexuality, for instance, is the very reverse of the truth. The male separatism and idolatry of male strength which are at the heart of most of historical Fascism - think of Mussolini and his cult of the Will, and of the brutal Italian attitudes of his squads, with their boasted virility and their phallic manganelli or bludgeons - would in any case be sympathetic to the growth of male homosexuality. So would the programmatic immoralism typical of all these movements, which were all opposed to the legal notion of marriage in the name of a cult of unrestricted Life and instinct; Fascism was consistently rooted in the “progressive” culture of the turn of the century. But in Germany, it is simply a historical fact, and not a little-known one either, that not only homosexual practice, but homosexualist theorizing, had been among the fairies presiding at the cradle of the infant German Fascism. Before Hitler was anything but a local agitator in Munich, the best-known and most influential group on the German hard right was the famous circle of the poet Stefan George, which several contemporary sources name as the leading influence in favour of Fascism in Germany in the twenties. (Thomas Mann included in Doktor Faustus what seems to me a savage caricature of George, or at least of his poetry, in the character of Daniel zur Höhe.) The George-Kreis was notoriously and unashamedly homosexual; one of his leading members was an aggressive theorist of male love with several publications under his belt. His name, I seem to remember, was Blüher (at least, Bl-something - I have lost my copy of Aurel Kolnai’s The war against the West, which was my reference for the whole German hard right of the twenties and thirties). Of course, George and his followers despised Hitler for a half-educated vulgarian - indeed, Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the hero of July 20, was an old favourite and probably boyfriend of George’s - but they were part of the same world of ideas.