Not “The Right Word”?

Michael Kißener Is “Resistance” not “the Right Word”? It would be difficult to envision a greater contrast than the one that exists between the estimation of contemporaries and large sections of modern historical scholarship regarding the question of the Catholic Church’s “resistance” in the Third Reich. After World War II, it was clear to the ma- jority of the German population, as well as to the occupying Allies, that the Catholic Church belonged to the very few major groups in society that had successfully withstood Nazi attempts at Gleichschaltung and had thereby managed something like rescuing a residual amount of the Germans’ moral substance for the post-war period. For just this reason, the Church and its representatives were in demand as the new state or- der was established; their word carried weight in the matters of dena- zification and dealing with the German populace. Authors such as the Jesuit Anton Koch in 1947 proudly offered a succinct formulation of the widespread assessment of the Catholic Church’s role in the Third Reich: “The Church and National Socialism were mutually exclusive, like light and darkness, truth and lie, life and death”.1 Today, after more than 70 years of scholarship, many historians have arrived at a very different judgment. “Resistance is not the right word”, the Bamberg church historian Georg Denzler titled his 2003 publication on “Catholic priests, bishops, and theologians in the Third Reich”, thereby establishing a common denominator for a whole series of very critical research findings. Denzler’s criticism targets, first, the “official Church”, which in his view went down a foreseeably wrong path with the Reich Concordat, reaching an accommodation with an inhuman regime and even advising the Catholic population to reconcile with Hitler. For Denzler, the congratulatory messages published in Church newspapers on the oc- casion of the “Führer’s” birthdays are especially eloquent expressions of this readiness to cooperate. Denzler argues that the Church’s role in the Third Reich should be evaluated particularly in regard to its response to the persecution of the Jews. Here, it appears that the Church – through its totally lacking advocacy for the Jews, the discernible anti-Jewish re- sentments on the part of some bishops, and the “pope’s silence” on the 1 A. Koch, “Widerstand”, 469. 170 Michael Kißener Holocaust – incurred a heavy burden of guilt. Not even the words of the Decalogue Pastoral Letter of 1943, in which the bishops spoke out against the killing of people of “foreign races and descent”, appear sufficient to Denzler because they do not explicitly name the Holocaust, which he claims was well-known. Finally, the bishops’ approval of the war, particularly their support of the fight against Soviet Bolshevism, is a clear signal for Denzler of the Catholic Church’s willingness to cooperate with the Third Reich.2 In addition to this critical evaluation of decisive stations in the bishops’ ecclesiastical politics during the Third Reich, further thought-provoking source discoveries and analyses during the last decades made any talk of the Church’s resistance appear questionable. The 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life did not meet with the bishops’ approval. To the contrary, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich was prepared to publicly oppose it, had he been asked to do so. Political resistance that went so far as to include the murder of a tyrant he did not consider justifiable.3 Those Catholics who did come to that conclusion of their own conviction seem to have gone without the support of their Church leadership, at least in some cases. For example, one of the sons of Nikolaus Groß, a leading member of the Catholic Workers’ Associations (Katholische Arbeitervereine or KAB) who was involved in the 20 July conspiracy, complained of having received no real help for his father, who was threatened with a death sen- tence and eventually executed, from the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Orsenigo, despite repeated pleas. In the case of the pacifistically oriented priest Max Josef Metzger, who sought to increase international aware- ness of the German resistance movement with his “Manifesto for a New Germany”, similar charges were raised. These held that the responsible diocesan bishop, Conrad Gröber of Freiburg, did not sufficiently help Metzger, who was sentenced to death in 1943 for preparing high treason and supporting the enemy.4 Finally, the Catholic faithful themselves have been investigated in the context of milieu studies and their general distance from the Nazi regime, which electoral research had documented for the years up to 1933, has been called into question. Individual case studies demonstrated that Na- zism was able to penetrate even these milieu organizations and that one 2 G. Denzler, Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort, 26, 28, 36, 42 f., 46. 3 H. Gruber, Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus, Nr. 249–251, 496–499. 4 Cf. the essays by R. Feneberg and J. Köhler in R. Feneberg and R. Öhlschläger, eds., Metzger. Also G. Beaugrand and H. Budde, Nikolaus Groß, 94. .

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