Jesuits, Jews, and Communists: Portrayals of Jesuits and Other Catholic Religious in Nazi Newspapers During the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39

JESUITS, JEWS, AND COMMUNISTS: PORTRAYALS OF JESUITS AND OTHER CATHOLIC RELIGIOUS IN NAZI NEWSPAPERS DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, 1936–39 Beth Griech-Polelle Bolshevism, therefore, is the result of the transference of Jesuit maxims to revolutionary tactics; its spirit is the same as that of the ecclesia militans of Ignatius Loyola. In both we find the principle that the end justifies the means … Man, therefore, if he is to be happy in the Bolshevik sense, must obey not the inner truth of conscience, but the commands of a number of authorities who claim to be able, as being cleverer, to weigh soberly what is best and most useful for the community.1 Introduction On the night of 17 July 1936, approximately half of the Spanish military, including General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, began an armed upris- ing in Spanish Morocco. Almost immediately the world press began to present this complex civil war in fairly black and white terms: General Franco’s combined forces of conservative nationalists and Falangists were pitted against liberal, democratic (and sometimes Bolshevik) Spanish Republicans. In Nazi newspaper reports, General Franco and his allies were represented as waging a battle to save Spain from a Jewish– Bolshevik conspiracy which threatened to spill over into the rest of Europe, if not the entire world. Nazi propaganda helped to contribute to an atmosphere which asserted that “Jewish–Communist influence” had to be contained, that Jews had to be restricted in their social, political, and economic life, and in which contempt or indifference to Jewish persecu- tion was entirely acceptable.2 Nazi propaganda in Der Sturmer and Das Schwarze Korps used the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War to under- mine the power and authority of the episcopacy of the Catholic church, 1 Rene Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (Knopf: New York, 1929), 186–88. Also cited in Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics—From the Great War to the War on Terror (HarperCollins: New York, 2007), 75. 2 See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2006), esp. 49. <UN> <UN> 162 beth griech-polelle attempting to sway readers into believing that Catholicism had become “infected” with “Judeo-Bolshevik ideology.” For many leaders in the German Catholic church, supporting General Franco’s forces seemed to be the only possible choice because the Republic’s side, for many of them, was composed of “Jewish Bolsheviks and Liberals,” who were portrayed as out to control the world, working to destroy Christianity in the process. What seemed like a perfect opportu- nity for the Catholic church to draw itself closer to an alliance with Hitler’s regime, turned out to be quite challenging, for the church would find itself working to prove to Hitler that Catholics had always fought against Bolshevism, while simultaneously experiencing attacks by the Nazi regime which argued that Catholic church religious leaders, including the Jesuits, were in fact linked with, and supportive of, that same “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.” In this chapter I examine two leading Nazi newspapers, Der Stürmer (DS), edited by Julius Streicher, and Das Schwarzes Korps (DSK), published by the SS leadership (but available to the general reading public as well). Der Stürmer was reportedly one of the most widely circulated papers in Nazi Germany, and Hitler himself claimed that it was the only paper he read from cover to cover.3 Both of these Nazi publications used the Spanish Civil War to reinforce their government’s propaganda message that, if General Franco’s forces were defeated, then Spain would fall into the hands of a Jewish–Bolshevik gang of thugs who would eradicate Western Christian civilization: “In Spain, as in Russia of 1917, and in all other countries, it is the unpatriotic and Jewish wire-pullers who cause and lead Bolshevist revolts. If they are non-Jews, they have completely lost their feeling of patriotism.”4 Connecting this message with Nazism’s claims to protect “positive Christianity,” Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels asserted: On this spot last year I gave an exact account of how many clergymen had been murdered in Russia and pointed to the danger of such a procedure being repeated in other countries. But even ecclesiastical circles in outside countries poo-poohed this warning. They expressed the naïve view that Bolshevism had changed and that in the future it would guarantee freedom 3 Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper, Der Stürmer (Cooper Square Press: New York, 1983), 1–2. 4 See in particular Joseph Goebbels, Bolshevism in Theory and Practice, a speech deliv- ered at the Nuremberg Party Rally, 10 September 1936, 28–32 (http://archive.org/stream/ BolshevismInTheoryAndPractice1936Ocr/JosephGoebbels-BolshevismInTheoryAnd Practice1936#page/n0/mode/2up). Direct quote is from p. 33. <UN> <UN>.

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