An Honourable Defeat (9 page)

The advantage for the Catholic Church was that, under the terms of the agreement, the State would leave it alone. The advantage for Hitler was that he gained the support of the Catholic political parties (for the brief period that he needed it — ironically the Concordat was signed just after the abolition of all parties in Germany save the National Socialists). With his usual irresistible bullying technique, Hitler then proceeded to take a mile where he had been given an inch. Exploiting the imprecisions in the agreement, he proceeded to close down all Catholic organisations whose functions were not strictly religious, and it quickly became clear that he intended to imprison the Catholics, as it were, in their own churches. They could celebrate mass and retain their ritual as much as they liked, but they could have nothing at all to do with German society otherwise. Catholic schools and newspapers were closed, and a propaganda campaign against the Catholics was launched.

Naturally the Catholic Church objected. Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, one of the most prominent opponents of the regime, spoke out from his pulpit late in 1933 in a series of sermons in which he also defended the Old Testament against its attack from the Brown Synod. Early in 1934 the Vatican placed
The
Myth
of
the
Twentieth
Century
on the Index. (A pseudo-scientific/philosophical work by the Nazis’ spiritual ideologue’ Alfred Rosenberg, the book sought to prove the racial purity and cultural superiority of the Nordic races.) Faulhaber was left alone because Hitler was never strong enough to remove senior clerics — though as we have seen he imprisoned priests, monks and nuns in their hundreds. As for the reproof to Rosenberg, it did not hurt the Führer: Rosenberg was already losing ground in the internal Nazi political dogfight, and his book had never been officially sanctioned by the Party. Among the few other Catholic voices raised in protest were those of the Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer (shortly afterwards dismissed and imprisoned), and the Catholic trade union leader Bernhard Letterhaus. A leading member of the Resistance, Letterhaus later used his position as a captain in the Oberkommando Wehrmacht to gather information. He was arrested in the purge following the failure of the 20 July 1944 Plot and was executed later that year.

Hitler gave ground a little, but essentially pressed on with his programme. Early opponents wavered. Cardinal Bertram of Breslau even came to an accommodation with the Nazis. The National Boycott Day aimed at the Jews evoked no unanimous Catholic condemnation, though as the year progressed consistent critics and opponents of the regime emerged.

The first martyr was Erich Klausener, a middle-aged civil servant who ran the police affairs department in the Prussian Interior Ministry and was also leader of Berlin’s Catholic Action movement. Klausener organised the Catholic conventions in Berlin in both 1933 and 1934. The second, held at the Hoppegarten racecourse, attracted 60,000 people. They celebrated mass together, and Klausener spoke against political oppression. Not a swastika was to be seen. Six days later Klausener was shot dead in his office.

As I have said, no major voice was raised at this outrage, but the Catholic masses were not cowed. More than anyone else the Catholics showed their disapproval of the regime by huge gatherings, and this was the only collective Resistance the Catholics showed. Every seven years a pilgrimage centred on Aachen. In 1937, at least 800,000 people attended — a massive demonstration by the standards of the day. In the same year in Bamberg, a conservative Catholic town in Franconia, 60,000 people gathered in the cathedral square to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the founding of the bishopric there. Sixty thousand was about equal to the city’s entire population.

1937 also saw a firm reaction to Hitler’s activities from Rome. On Passion Sunday, 14 March, Pius XI issued an encyclical ‘With Great Anxiety’ (‘
Mit
Brennender
Sorge’
) on the state of the Catholic Church in the German Reich. It expressed the Pope’s deep concern at Hitler’s flouting of the terms of the Concordat, at his treatment of Catholics and his abuse of Christian values. While not mentioning the fate of the Jews specifically, it asserts the inviolability of basic human rights, makes a specific appeal to youth, and ends with a call for constancy and loyalty. The text was smuggled into Germany and secretly printed and distributed. Hitler was beside himself with rage. Twelve presses were seized, and hundreds of people sent either to prison or the camps. It is significant that these events took place before the demonstrations I have already described.

Among the Catholic bishops who took a firm and consistent stance against Hitler, two stand out. Konrad Graf von Preysing became Bishop of Berlin in 1935. Never a friend of the Nazis, he sought to work against them through every means at his disposal, from sermons to argument at bishops’ conferences. He worked closely with the civilian conspirators Carl Goerdeler and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. He was an adviser on the 1937 Papal Encyclical, opposed to the closure of Catholic schools, and tried to thwart the arrest of Church officials on trumped-up charges. He opposed Cardinal Bertram’s appeasing, even servile, approach to Hiltler. His Pastoral Letters for Advent of 1942 (on the nature of human rights) and 1943 reflect the spirit of the Barmen Declaration. The text of the first was leaked to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) which broadcast it in their German Service. Preysing’s reaction to hearing that they had done so was to remark, ‘That will make them build my gallows even higher,’ though Hitler never dared touch him. In spring 1944 he met and gave his personal blessing to Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who made the last and most famous attempt on Hitler’s life soon afterwards. Naturally Preysing had not been made party to the plans, but he had talked with Stauffenberg about whether the need for radical change to the benefit of all could justify tyrannicide, and he knew perfectly well what was afoot.

In one among the constant flow of letters to his wife, dated 6 September 1941, von Moltke wrote:

I asked him [Preysing] about Galen. He assured me that Galen was a perfectly average type with little spiritual depth, who had therefore only very recently perceived how things were going and hence had always been prepared to compromise. So it is all the more impressive that the Holy Ghost has now filled and enlightened him.

Clemens August Graf von Galen was Preysing’s cousin, and Bishop of Münster. He was a member of one of Germany’s oldest families; one with a tradition of sending its sons into the Church. Preysing’s view of his cousin is not absolutely fair, as Galen had been aware of the totalitarian nature of the regime, and its injustices, from the first. Though he had pledged his loyalty to Hitler early, he too had worked on the Encyclical. He had criticised Nazi racial policy in a sermon given in January 1934. He objected to unquestioning obedience to the Reich in another, calling it ‘slavery’, and he spoke out against Hitler’s theory of the ‘purity’ of German blood. His own line went back to the beginning of the thirteenth century, so he was able to dispute Hitler’s personal claim that ‘German blood spoke from him’ with some authority.

But it took the discovery of Nazi atrocities on his doorstep — in his own diocese — to spur him into his most famous action. Then, he earned his nickname of ‘The Lion of Münster’.

On 14 and 21 July, and 3 August 1941, he delivered three powerful sermons — the third is the most important — attacking the Nazi euthanasia programme. Killing-centres disguised as sanatoria had been set up for the disposal — usually at this period by lethal injection, though gas chambers were in the experimental stage — of all those whom the Reich deemed useless to society: the mentally disabled and ill, epileptics, cripples, children with Down’s Syndrome, the senile, and others similarly afflicted. The Evangelical Bishop Theophil Wurm had already protested vigorously about them, but Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state. He also attacked the Gestapo habit of seizing Church buildings and converting them to their own uses — which included cinemas and even brothels. The sermons were illegally printed and distributed throughout Germany and also abroad for years after he had preached them.

So blistering was the assault that Hitler considered Galen’s removal, but Goebbels dissuaded him, telling him that if he arrested the Bishop, he could write off the loyalty of all of Westphalia. Yet remarkably, after this tremendous warning, the Lion did not roar again. He had not stopped the euthanasia programme, though he did succeed in halting it in its tracks. Later it continued in conditions of greater secrecy. It is possible that Galen considered that he had done enough; yet in view of his outrage it seems extraordinary that within a month of his sermons he stated publicly that ‘We Christians do not make revolution’. Perhaps again we are dealing with someone who was too much the prisoner of his traditions and his upbringing. Even Ludwig Beck, as late as 1938, observed that ‘Mutiny and revolution are words not to be found in a German officer’s vocabulary’. In 1938 Beck was fifty-eight. In 1941 Galen was sixty-three. It is hard to break the habits of a lifetime.

Men like Preysing and Galen, however courageous, were protected from Nazi retaliation by their position. Bernhard Lichtenberg, priest at St Hedwig’s cathedral in Berlin, was a confidant of Bishop Preysing, but that was not enough to save him in the end. His story must serve for many brave individuals.

Lichtenberg came to St Hedwig’s in 1932, and was well-enough known to the Gestapo to have his flat searched as early as 1933. He ran the aid unit of the diocesan authority for Preysing — an organisation which clandestinely gave help and advice to those persecuted by the regime — and from 1938 conducted public prayers of intercession for the Jews, ‘the poor inmates of the concentration camps, and my fellow priests there’. He preached consistently against official Party propaganda, and wrote a courageous letter to the State Medical Director, Dr Conti, on 28 August 1941, endorsing the sentiments of Galen’s sermons, pointing out the precise laws under the Constitution in which euthanasia was unequivocally defined as an act of murder. By that action he finally pushed the authorities too far. He was arrested and tried by a special court which sentenced him to two years’ penal servitude. When these were completed he was rearrested by the Gestapo (a not uncommon occurrence) and sent to Dachau. Already ill, he died on the way there, at Hof, in November 1943, aged sixty-eight.

‘Ein’ feste
Burg
ist
unser
Gott
,
’
wrote Luther: a fortress strong is God our Lord. Despite the great bravery of such individuals as Lichtenberg, Niemöller, Galen, Preysing and Bonhoeffer, the Church in Germany was no such fortress in the face of the Nazi menace. But then the Church is human. Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘The exceptional necessity calls for freedom of responsibility. There is no law here behind which personal responsibility can seek shelter. Hence there is no law to compel the person responsible...’ The loneliness implicit in that conclusion was something which every member of the Resistance had to accept.

Chapter Four – Lost Illusions

As the Nazis built up their strength, so the illusion that their regime would not last long faded. Once political opposition was gone, and with Hitler applauded abroad — despite the loud protests of Germans already in exile — the Party dug in and the task of dislodging it became much harder. The Party swastika flag became the National flag; the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ became obligatory, not only as the way of signing off a letter, but also replacing ‘Good day’. The salute spread — there was even a Nazi etiquette booklet which instructed one when and how far to stretch out one’s arm, and when it was permissible to use the left arm. The salute spread everywhere: only a handful of Army officers didn’t use it. Although the brownshirts of the SA became less common (the SA was relegated to the position of an auxiliary political police force), the black uniforms of the SS were seen more and more frequently. SS units were garrisoned all over Germany, as ready to protect Hitler against his own people as against foreign attackers. It became less and less possible to ignore the threat of war.

Still nothing happened. The question why is hard to answer. The Nazis had made no secret of their plans. Even before Hitler became Chancellor there had been the Potempa incident, and a year before that secret Nazi documents were discovered at Boxheim, which gave details of an administration that proposed the death sentence for practically every offence against the State, and rationing measures that effectively deprived the Jews of food. They had been drawn up by Werner Best, later Hitler’s Commissioner for Occupied Denmark. They presented the State with a
prima
facie
case for high treason. Nothing was done. The mood of the period — indeed of any similar period, before, since or to come — is perfectly expressed in Martin Niemöller’s bitter poem:

When the Nazis came for the Communists

I was silent.

I wasn’t a Communist.

When the Nazis came for the Social Democrats

I was silent.

I wasn’t a Social Democrat.

When the Nazis came for the Trade Unionists

I was silent.

I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.

When the Nazis came for the Jews

I was silent.

I wasn’t a Jew.

When the Nazis came for me

There was no one left

To protest.

Hitler took advantage of chaos and uncertainty, and by encapsulating the hopes and fears of the little man — and all his resultant and attendant prejudices — by exploiting and personifying them, and by making as much noise as possible of any political success he had, he bullied and pushed his way to power. True, the soil he grew in was fertile, but he would never have succeeded if he had not been allowed to. He gives us the impression of being an irresistible force: but he was not. He was on thin enough ice in the early thirties not to have withstood Resistance from within Germany, and up until 1938 from outside. He was a terrible accident of history: the wrong man at the right time; if there is no unified protest against such people, they win. In the case of Germany, a combined Social Democrat/Communist stand would have crushed him; but that could not happen. The Weimar Republic governments, heavily chained by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, were usually liberal and usually weak. The few strong statesmen they threw up died young. Meanwhile Imperial Germany cast a long shadow, and Hitler stepped out of it.

But one must not present Hitler merely as a demon who somehow seduced the German people into mass insanity. The working classes found themselves briefly with a better standard of living and greater possibilities for work. What they did not realise was that Hitler was building an economic miracle on sand: it was a short-term device. Ordinary people were in any case more concerned with their jobs and families than with politics, and they were pleased to see Germany’s status raised among the nations again. If they were not Jewish and could prove that back as far as all their grandparents, if they were not married to Jews, if they closed their minds to the racist and warmongering aspects of Party propaganda, they could relax. There would be nothing in the newspapers or on the new, widely available and carefully controlled wireless to disturb them.
[30]

At the outset virtually all those who joined the Regular Army during its development were loyal to Hitler. The reintroduction of conscription in March 1935 was popular with the Army top brass. In September of that year, the infamous Nuremberg Laws directed against the Jews were promulgated in the face of very little protest within Germany. As always, the Nazis introduced the new measures gradually, but most were in place within two years, and they covered everything from various degrees of ‘Jewishness’ — dependent on how many Jewish grandparents one had — to control of work (Jewish doctors were demoted to ‘medical practitioners’, for example, and only allowed to treat fellow Jews), restriction of shopping hours, use of parks, swimming pools, cinemas and other public places, the banning of wireless sets and, most cruelly, the forbidding of pets to Jews. In November there were mass trials of Communists and Social Democrats, just as the Communists and Social Democrats in exile in Paris were discussing the possibility of working together.

Hitler was on the crest of a wave and he was not going to pause at this point. In March 1936 he sent the Army into the demilitarised Rhineland. This was a crucial action, and definitive proof of Hitler’s gambler tactics. In ordering the occupation, he went against his military advisers, who feared a confrontation with France at which Germany would have to step down. This would have been the case in fact, and the German Forces’ commanders had sealed orders to do so if it came to it. But the French government was weak and about to fall, and it lost precious time by consulting Britain. For its part, Britain, under its Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, was inclined to be sympathetic to Germany’s right to ‘go into her own back garden’.

In Germany, it was a hugely popular move, particularly among those industrialists who had backed Hitler and now saw their investment paid off. A plebiscite three weeks later gave Hitler (officially at least) 99 per cent of the public’s backing. Meanwhile, sales of
Mein
Kampf
had outstripped those of any other book and made him a rich man. By 1940, nine million copies had been printed.

In August, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin — a venue decided on before Hitler came to power. The capital was redecorated for the occasion, and except for huge swastika banners everywhere the Nazis kept the profiles of their military and racist ambitions low. The red glass-fronted boxes in which copies of the violently anti-Semitic magazine
Der
Stürmer
were displayed disappeared from street corners, as did all public notices directed against Jews. No country boycotted the Games, though there were mutterings on the American Olympic Committee, and, as they were magnificently organised, they were a great success and provided another feather in Hitler’s cap. His famous show of ill-temper at Jesse Owens’ success raised fewer eyebrows then than it would now, and any protestors (for there were some) who attempted to convey the truth of what was really going on to the foreign athletes or the press were quickly tidied up by the Gestapo.

The last athlete had barely boarded his train home before the anti-Semitic laws were back in force. In September, Hitler concluded his Axis Treaty with Italy, and a month later the Anti-Comintern Pact was signed with Japan.

There was a strike at the Auto Union works in Berlin during the Games, which, though it was quickly suppressed by the authorities, showed that there was more than a spark of Resistance still in the parties of the far Left. Various cells were set up, mainly to write and distribute anti-Fascist propaganda, and though their average life was three months, there were always new ones to replace those exposed by the Gestapo. Gradually political bickering between the Social Democrats and the Communists petered out, at least within Germany, but it never disappeared completely, and rarely did the two groups mingle and work as one. Finance was another problem, solved partially by the revenue from vegetarian restaurants run by the underground. The table-legs of one in Frankfurt were hollow, to contain secret distribution lists. Newspapers and magazines produced to a professional standard, like
The
Young
Guard
and
The
Workers’
Illustrated
— the latter frequently carrying the anti-Fascist collages of the Communist artist and illustrator John Heartfield — were smuggled in successfully until the war closed the frontiers. Railway workers made especially good smugglers of illegal material, but were susceptible to infiltration by the Security Service.

Meeting places had to be chosen carefully — graveyards and the lobbies of good, busy hotels were preferred. Organisation was something which plagued the Resistance at all levels, since telephones and the post could not be trusted. Nevertheless, the working-class Resistance continued to carry out graffiti, leaflet and poster campaigns well into wartime. Although the official Communist Party was hamstrung by Moscow directives, particularly during the period of the Russian-German alliance between 1939 and 1941, splinter groups working primarily for their country and secondarily for the good of the international workers’ cause had no such inhibition. The KPO — the Opposition Communists — were even opposed to Stalinism and social Fascism.

The principal problem facing Communist and Social Democrat Resistance cells was lack of leadership. The most prominent functionaries of both parties were either in exile or in prison, and those who were released and returned to underground work were quickly picked up again, for the Gestapo never let them out of their sight. Small, isolated groups could do little that was effective, and were always a prey to prying neighbours, police infiltration and the part-time informer. Most superintendents of blocks of flats, for example, were paid stool-pigeons. In political terms, whether the Resistance was inspired by right- or left-wing politics, only courageous lonely voices loudly raised were heard — and then not widely or for long.

On the Left, the earliest such opponent was the lifelong Com-munist Ernst Niekisch, who founded his magazine
Resistance
in 1926 as a ‘journal for socialist and national-revolutionary ideology’. He campaigned against Hitler vigorously well after the Nazi takeover, and yet his magazine was not closed down until November 1934. Niekisch was not arrested until 1937. He remained in prison until 1945.

Resistance made for strange bedfellows. Niekisch had engaged the services, as an intermediary between himself and the official Communist Party, of Josef ‘Beppo’ Römer, a former member of the right-wing Freikorps who had subsequently become a Communist. Römer himself was later involved in a plot to kill Hitler planned by the lawyer and industrialist Nikolaus von Halem and the Legation Secretary Herbert Mumm von Schwarzenstein — all three were executed by the Gestapo as a result.

As the Nazi net closed round him, Niekisch sought contacts beyond his own political associates, and as he was interested in the particular problems of the agrarian eastern part of the country he made the acquaintance of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin.
[31]
Politically, Kleist was as far to the Right as Niekisch was to the Left. He was a monarchist and a landowner. But he was a fellow magazine editor — of the
Information
Journal
of
the
Central
Conservative
Association
, a periodical banned by the Nazis in 1933. Kleist and Niekisch became early if unlikely allies in the fight against Hitler, and Kleist visited Niekisch whenever he came to Berlin. They also became friends, respecting each other’s views and learning from them, for neither was a bigot. Both independently published booklets that warned against and condemned Nazism; and even the titles were similar: Niekisch’s was called ‘Hitler: a German Fate’, and Kleist’s ‘National Socialism: a Danger’. Kleist was outspoken in his condemnation of the spinelessness of the military leadership, and wrote: ‘In future the word will be: “As characterless as a German official, as godless as a Protestant pastor, as unprincipled as a Prussian officer”.’
[32]

Von Kleist had refused to fly the swastika flag from the roof of his country house, and he had refused to give a penny to Party funds. Many aristocrats and landowners paid up for the sake of peace and quiet — some even joined the Party — but Kleist would not even compromise to the extent of paying a token ten pfennigs, which the local Party leader had suggested as a means of satisfying everyone without losing face. The Security Service put his name on the list of those to be liquidated on 30 June 1934, but friends forewarned him, and he fled to Berlin, where Niekisch sheltered and protected him. For a time they shared a flat, and each invited his own political friends for discussions, sometimes at the same time, the ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ meetings being held in different rooms.

This friendship demonstrates that National Socialism was not a political party like any other. It was a danger to all free expression, and, further, a threat to humanity. Those who perceived this menace closed ranks; but there was never enough unity to defeat it from within: the Nazi system itself made sure of that. In the meantime, Niekisch’s humane act meant that Kleist survived to fight another day — a fight which he continued until he, too, was executed.