I have dealt with this miserable propaganda lie before. But...

[fpb]

...some new and interesting evidence turned up

Comments

[johncwright]

Thank you for speaking out. I also am outraged at the "Hitler's Pope" narrative that seems to be a commonplace in some circles.

And why is the Catholic Church singled out for allegations of collaboration? i seem to recall that the German Lutherans did not exactly cover themselves in glory during the Hitler years, but cooperated enthusiastically with the fascist enemy of religion.

I have heard rumors of some Protestant groups in Germany defying Hitler on religious grounds, but they are usually small denominations, the last ones anyone would expect to defy the giant, stupid, terrible power of fascism, Mormons or Christian Scientists.

[fpb]

Well, the majority of Lutherans were decidedly aligned with the Nazi state, but that was in great part to do with their tradition as a state church. It does not mean that they aligned their teachings, and in fact Hitler intended to "deal with them" along with the other churches, very thoroughly, after the war. On the other hand, a large minority of Lutherans broke away to found the "Confessing Church" in the name of freedom of conscience. Among their leaders was the WWI war hero Martin Niemoeller (author of the famous quotation: ~"When they came for the Communists, I was silent because I was not a Communist. When they came for the Jews..." etc). Another leader was the legendary theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in early 1945 because the order was that he was by no means to survive the war. However, the "Confessing Church", like many other decent old-fashioned Germans, had underrated the willingness of the Nazis to stoop to any means and use any instruments against anyone they perceived as an enemy. They were

[stigandnasty919]

There is a strange irony to this comment. You are outraged and deplore the "Hitler's Pope" meme and yet are prepared to accuse Lutherans of enthusiastic cooperation with the Nazi's?

But what interests me most is the final sentence, where you write of the power of The Mormens and the Christian Scientists. I've read a lot about the Mormons, including the bizarre Book of Mormon itself, but know nothing of the Christian Scientists. I'd be interested in finding out more, including something about the power their wield. Do you have a link or a recommendation for a starting point?

[fpb]

My dear man, the cooperation of the official Lutheran church with the Nazi regime is a fact, and you will find it so described in all the history books. In fact, I made excuses for it - I said that it was not enthusiastic, that it came from a long tradition of being a State church (same reason why a lot of Russian Orthodox were willing to be loyal to the Soviet state), and that a large minority - the "confessing Church" - tried to escape state control, only to be crushed by the most ruthless means and to experience martyrdom. If I had wanted to be nasty, I would have underlined that while the Catholics who became notorious for collaborating included no Church leaders and no first-class writers or thinkers, some leading Lutherans, including the famous theologians Stapel and Gogarten, were decidedly Hitlerite, and so was Heidegger, who claimed to see himself as a Lutheran theologian. I suggest you go see what Karl Barth, who was no Catholic, had to say about his fellow German Protestants.

[fpb]

And you have misread John's last sentence. He meant that the few Mormons and Christian Scientists to be found in Germany were among those who did most to resist against "the giant, stupid power" of the State.

[stigandnasty919]

You are quite right, I had misread John's final sentence. I suppose because, in my mind and however inaccurately, I would not have included Mormons or Christian Scientists in the set of protestant denominations. I don't know enough about the Christian Scientists to comment but I had always considered that the addition of a new Holy Text took the Mormons into another classification

[fpb]

Quite right. And yes, I do not consider the Mormons to be Christians - although I have one or two Mormons on my f-list who insist to the contrary. But the Catholic Church holds that the Mormon concept of God is so different from that of historic Christianity that their Baptism cannot be regarded as equal to the Christian one (whereas, as you may know, most Christian denominatios recognize each other's baptism).

[fpb]

A summary of the performance of the Churches under Nazism would be as follows: Nazism, in spite of originating largely in the Catholic areas of Germany, became a mass movement and a governing party in the Lutheran north, whereas they never cracked the Catholic vote until they outlawed the Catholic Centrum party. The Centrum not only held back Nazism in Bavaria and the Rhineland, it even established its own party militia when that became necessary - and its 100,000 stout young men actually forced the SA and SS to keep a low profile until the Nazis became the national government. A few Bishops had actually ordered that no Nazi should be buried in consecrated ground. Altogether, the Church and its political emanations had proved among the most dedicated enemies of Nazism so long as Nazism was not in power. The Lutheran churches, by contrast, were generally identified with the conservative right and looked on the new movement with a kind of fearful fascination

continued...

[fpb]

The most visible and successful leader of resistance against Hitler in Germany was a Catholic bishop, Count Clemens von Galen of Munster. This man was an old-fashioned German patriot and conservative, and had not left a great impression as priest. His promotion to a smallish episcopate in mostly Lutheran Lower Saxony was not regarded with great expectation by anyone; the general feeling seems to have been that he was advanced faute de mieux, and because of his illustrious forebears. But from the moment he became a Bishop, he stared down courageously and tirelessly all the criminals in the Reich Government, discouraged ministers from even visiting his city, and denounced every crime he could hear of. A giant of a man, six foot four and with the manner of a sergeant-major, he had a faith as simple and firm as all his other principles, and while he would probably have volunteered to go as the humblest of chaplains to serve the German army, he hated like poison the whole Nazi world of political immoralism and pantheist fraud. The

A significant though short passage from Pope Pius XI's <i>MIt Brennender Sorge</i>

[fpb]

7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.
8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly